Notes for 2/8/07

- If you haven't heard the new Avril Lavigne song yet, you should. Lots of interesting voice things in there (the reverbed stutter leadin in the chorus, the differing degrees of overdubbing), and the way the production meshes with the emotional tone of the song is fantastic--check out the way the bass plays sustained notes in the prechorus that makes it drift before being caught by the riff and increased low-end in the chorus. That bottom just hits you in the chest, and it's like Avril's a ghost ninja attacking you from all directions or something.

- As a bonus, here are my comments for Pazz & Jop, partially because it just came out, but also because they involve Paris. For the record, I don't entirely feel this way anymore, at least not in the broad sense, but I do still think it's notable that the "important" albums of last year seemed to offer so little to talk about.

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You know it's a bad year for music when the most urgently-discussed subjects all concern the music industry: Tower going under, rap sales crashing, Disney selling (a fact noted but not really, you know, investigated), alt-weekly consolidation (hi dere!), and of course the neverending debate about MP3s, which has pretty much entered its perpetual-motion phase. This wouldn't be a problem if the connection was actually made between economic factors and the art that results, but everybody's too tied to their position right now to admit anything that might weaken it, and so of course we spiral ever-downward toward making pop music--and writing about it--a hobbyist's field.

Despite rock nation's loud insistence that they're entitled to free downloads come hell or high water, we're still told that live performance, not those unvaluable studio records, is the true metric of a band's worth. CSS, for instance, got framed as hipster poseurs led by a svengali drummer, right up until they like totally tore it up at the P-Fork fest. We are shamed into sincerity again: their clever referential humor is icky until it's drowned out by pure rockingness.

God seems to be using said Internet to drive home that our crutches of authenticity have been knocked away, but instead of embracing the new real, we ceaselessly attempt to recreate the real of the past. Dragonforce, an even more cartoonish metal act than Dethklok, stages a Guitar Hero tournament on their tour bus, and that's a far better mirror of reality than their concerts. But we cling to the NWOBHM cosplay still, auditioning for a supergroup on national TV with consultants dictating our appearance and convention dictating that we loudly insist how much we want this patently worthless prize, because we are the most dedicated to real rock. Yeah, we saw what happened to the realest person, Zayra, a Puerto Rican girl who proudly donned the most outlandish outfits those consultants could find and sung "pop (ugh)" songs with more honest passion than anyone else could manage. Zayra was seen as ridiculous, but rock is not ridiculous. Rock serious! Rock real! And so Zayra lost the battle of rock. In a genre with no future, who wants to be a loser, too?

We look at rock's bloated corpse and decide that the best thing for it is more histrionic emotion. Bernie's not dead! Look, he's vomiting onstage out of pure sadness! AP gave him 4 stars! Our choices are clear: win the battle, like whatshisface with the frosted tips, and seize a lifetime supply of guitar picks from Musician's Friend or lose the battle, like Zayra (although being a hot chick will get you through several rounds, assuming Tommy Lee is a judge and Gilby Clark doesn't remind you he used to be a feminist), and spend the war being pecked to death by defenders of the faith wearing studded armbands but resembling nothing so much as the adults in Footloose. No dancing! No playing around! No gay shit!

Given all this negativity, my list might seem odd. But all this negativity is precisely why The Rapture is there: they made the most optimistic album of 2006, sometimes arguably to the music's detriment, and I admire that level of dedication. They weren't floating the usual "everything will be alright" bullshit balloon; instead, they went with the much more difficult "everything is already alright," eschewing the former's quasi-Christian "there will be peace in the next life" excuse-mongering for an exhortation to live in the moment. It's a sentiment that shouldn't have been hard to find in pop music, but in 2006 it sure was.

Speaking of negativity, and living in the moment, let's discuss Paris Hilton. I soured on music for a while this year--though in fairness, I soured on everything for a while there this year--and so about a month ago, when I realized it was time to start wrapping the year up, I got myself all the notable albums I'd missed: TVOTR, Justin, Nelly Furtado, Joanna Newsom (which is horrible by the way--the internet owes me $13.99), etc. But the one that stuck was Paris. I understood why people would have a kneejerk reaction to her: Paris is a pretty loathsome creature, the child molestation of our cultural life. (We know it's wrong, but we just can't help it!) But the album has a few non-Disney things going for it. First it was one of the few pop albums not trying to be something else this year. I love Timbo and all but if he's going to keep melding singers to his "I am so much better than pop" beats, he needs to get someone else in to make sure half the vocals don't suck; it's no accident that when the camera pans across Prince's apartment in Purple Rain it catches SHEET MUSIC for as-yet-unrecorded songs. Gnarls Barkley had Danger Mouse being all "ooh, I'm subversive," which I think we've heard enough times now to realize it's code for "I care more about you thinking I'm cool than about making music you enjoy." Hell, even the American Idol winners were making intentionally retro albums of crooner and gospel music. But not Paris. She was extending her brand, and that worked great with pop. Paris is about pleasure, so what point would a Paris album be if it did not please you?

Plus, it was more up-front lyrically than most anything else. Where indie intentionally obfuscated its simple sentiments in order to seem more mysterious and rappers talked about living the good life in tones that suggested they weren't happy about it at all, Paris sang songs that didn't hide: this is about how Nicole is a total bitch, this is about how I enjoy sex, this is a shout-out to the people helping me make this album. Plus, when the fourth wave of ska rolls around, we'll get to hear "Stars are Blind" covered like 50,000 times.

So but does this--souring on music and missing albums, I mean, not liking Paris, although you can count that too--mean that you shouldn't trust my list? Probably. But a little critical skepticism, as opposed to critical disengagement, is good, no?

And so here we are: vaguely disgruntled, but also a little gruntled, disengaged the more we try and address specifics but more than willing to roll around in the broad strokes. We don't know where the hell we're going, and that's scary, so we try and hold the high ground or at least profess to absent ourselves from the fight. The truth will out--probably--but in the meantime, it's a little too gray for my tastes.

Labels: avril, css, notes, paris, pazz jop, pop, rapture, rock, rock star, teenpop, village voice, year-end

posted by Mike B. @ 12:01 AM