Pulling a Mandy

Last week I went to Carnegie Hall to see a David Byrne-curated night of freak-folk, and it was both better and worse than you'd expect. Some were merely boring; some showed promise but didn't quite get there; and Vashti Bunyan was an unexpected delight, less a hippie than a mom with a great voice and instinct for arrangements. Then there was Devendra Banhart. I made a sign in my notebook reading "I HATE YOU" but realized he wouldn't have been able to see it. He actually said "psychedelic" more than once, he had a line that was "I believe the need for peace comes from within," and at the end he transitioned into this thing that sounded exactly like bad stoner Zeppelin. And he thought he was fantastic. This is notable because instead of running away from the stereotypes he ran towards them.[1] He's self-aware enough to allow people to like him without liking jambands, whereas there are actually jambands much better than him.At one point I felt the strong urge to yell, something, anything. I have yelled like this at shows before, and in truth I almost like it--it forces "rebellious" performers to deal with it, and they usually can't. It throws them off and then they ignore it. But last night I was at Carnegie Hall. If I'm at a rock club, no one's going to throw me out for yelling nonsense words, but if I'm at Carnegie Hall, there are ushers who very much will. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe they wouldn't have, but I'd be shocked if I started yelling yet was left alone by the people in matching outfits. So, in essence, the performers were being officially protected from disruption. Usually it's just through custom, but now there were actually walking enforcers of expectation. They were there, they were going to play, and we were going to watch. This emphasized just how respectable this group of artists has become.

It's hard to think of a style that's strived more single-mindedly for respectability than freakfolk. It went from small pressings of indie albums to Carnegie Hall in four years, and despite its experimental pretensions, which were little in evidence at the show, it's managed to find not only acceptance but respectability in record time. This is partially because, of course, it's consciously drawing from a number of hyper-respectable but relatively unmined sources--uncorrupted 60s folk, quiet electro-acoustic avant-gardeism--and melds them to two super-unrespectable styles, singer/songwriter and hippie-rock. They manage to not seem like they're being "stylish" while making a barefaced grab for cred. After the show, I heard someone say about Vashti, "She's wonderful, but they're so exploiting her." This is probably a little unkind--certainly she's getting something out of the bargain--but it is true that they seem to be hitching their wagons to all sorts of signifiers of taste in order to get to do what they want to do.This is all fine, but it's been commented on before. (In fact, Jesse did so about another of Byrne's Carnegie shows.) What's interesting to me, in light of all this, is that Lindsay Lohan had a crush on Devendra Banhart.

This is well documented. This was all commented on at the time, but seemed to be processed as just a WTF fact rather than a revelation. Then there is the interview. In April 2006, Lindsay Lohan interviewed Devendra Banhart for Interview magazine, and you can read it here. It's a fascinating document, but if you don't want feel like clicking through, allow me to point out some of the more interesting features before we move on to the deeper sociological implications:

- Devendra makes Lindsay a mix. Her reaction is that she likes Led Zeppelin and Devendra's handwriting. Later, he says that after she's listened to the mix, they will have a follow-up conversation about Caetano Veloso. Her response to this is to point out that Devendra is smoking indoors.

- Devendra says he wants to be inclusive, that it's not a cult, although, he implies, some people have thought it is, and consequently shown up at his house. He supposes Lindsay has had to deal with this "ten-thousand-fold." Her response to this is to ask him what was the first album he bought.

- (EMF.)

- (But that was only because they didn't have very good records in Venezuela. Once he got to America, he bought Neil Young or This Local LA Band You Wouldn't Have Heard Of.)

- After 9/11, Devendra enjoyed going to airports in a turban and acting Islamic. He was thrown into jail. Lindsay asks why, he says he doesn't want to get into it. Then he does; it involves a hut with a bar in it, somehow. He also says the cops wanted to beat him up because he looks like John Walker Lindh. This is like saying the cops wanted to beat you up because you are Irish and the cops were sick of that goddamn leprachaun always trying to take their Lucky Charms.

- This made him realize that, as a white male, he enjoys privilege.

- He lived in Morocco for a while and people would freak out because he was American, but then he would say something in Arabic and they would be cool.

- He considers the President to be "like a child."

- At the end of the interview, he once again mentions the mix, and that he is excited to hear which songs she likes. She points out that she hasn't actually looked at the tracklist yet, and may well already know the songs on it.

- He then says Lindsay has sparkly skin.

So, yes, I suppose there were certain valid reasons for not treating this as a revelation, but nevertheless, it does highlight some interesting things about the sort of strategy Devendra is utilizing. More specifically, it's indicative that this strategy has led him to Lindsay Lohan, and Lindsay Lohan to him.

Traditionally, artistic endeavors shun respectability. To court immediate approval is viewed with suspicion--"selling out" is the informal term--and so most creative types coming out of underground contexts, as Devendra was, will take evasive maneuvers in order not to seem too eager to please.[2] But freakfolk was warm and open, it spoke clearly, utilizing transparent indicators of mystery, and it embraced the images that were expected of it.

Pulling this trick off has afforded the freakfolk gang opportunities it would never have had otherwise--and not having-your-song-in-a-commercial opportunities, either, but really valid and rewarding experiences. Playing Carnegie Hall is awesome, producing Vashti Bunyan's album is awesome, allowing your talented friends to make a living playing music is awesome, and if I followed these guys more, I'm sure I could mention a dozen things they've done that most musicians would love to do. The rewards for "selling out," in other words, were not (just) material, but cultural, the kind of experiences people who complain about "selling out" would love to have. That this seems strange reveals what that loaded term obscures: the problem is not respectability, but what is considered respectable.

Which leads us to the other side of this particular exchange, Ms. Lohan. The subject of her music came up, and she had this to say:

"I didn't really have much to do with my first record [Speak, 2004]; the second one [A Little More Personal (Raw), Casablanca] I had more to do with. But I've been juggling everything at once. They didn't all happen on my time as much as I wanted. I'm also still finding out what I like, so it's kind of hard to incorporate things I want to listen to into my music rather than just writing a lot of hooks. I just kind of go with it."

Now, this is interesting, because her music is actually quite good, so no matter how much involvement she had in it, you'd think she'd be happy about that. Indeed, here she is talking with someone whose whole musical philosophy revolves around collaboration, so even if the music isn't purely a product of her efforts, you'd think she'd credit her collaborators and praise them, if she didn't want to take credit for the music. Instead, she did something that I'd like to call "pulling a Mandy."[3] Mandy Moore, as you may have heard, recently apologized to people who bought her albums, saying they were worthless and therefore wastes of money. Well, first off, she was wrong, but more importantly, she went farther than artists normally do in disavowing their early efforts. Radiohead may have gotten sick of "Creep" for a while there, but I don't believe they actually told people they shouldn't have bought Pablo Honey, that they had been duped, ripped-off, bamboozled. This is a level of self-abasement that in any other context would seem excessive, but with Mandy, people took it as honesty.[4] Pulling a Mandy is what you do when you want to stop successfully bucking conventional wisdom and conform to expectations precisely in order to, as the politicos say, "manage expectations." You can ease yourself into the middling success of a respectable career without looking like you failed.

But Lindsay doesn't need or want to do that, which is why she neither pulls the full Mandy nor fully embraces Devendra. Still, the flirt is there, the temptation, or at least the consideration. Why? Lindsay is already respectable in the minds of most people.[5] By the standard of your parents, she's more respectable than almost anything else, and most moms would be far more impressed and proud of you for talking with Lindsay Lohan as a peer than for playing Carnegie Hall. More importantly, she has tons of money and not a small amount of fame. The tangible blessings respectability brings are well within her reach. She could rent out Carnegie Hall. She could pluck any number of people from obscurity who would be ecstatic to have her be their producer, even if that led to musical and professional ruin. And if she wanted to sit around all day and smoke pot and play music with people, I'm sure she wouldn't have any problem making that happen. She doesn't need to jump through all of respectability's ridiculous hoops in order to fulfill her creative goals.[6] So why hang around with someone like Devendra Banhart? What's going on in this interview?

What's happening when Devendra and Lindsay meet is a transaction, plain and simple: respectability for fame.[7] Devendra's got the former, and he's trying to hustle his customer--hey, here's a mix tape, see anything you like, I could hook you up with some of these people if you want, just say the word--into trading it for some of the latter. Lindsay's just browsing, turns out, but she came into the shop in the first place because of a particular feature in our cultural economy.

Artists must (and should) change, but they must also sell the change. If it's not justified adequately, the audience won't accept the change and the artist will be abandoned.[8] One of the easiest and most believable justifications is "maturing." We all age, and since art comes from life (ha!), as our lives change, it is only natural that our art changes as well. But when an artist's life hasn't actually changed all that much, they must signal maturation by making more mature choices, which usually means working with older people. (This signals maturation because it recognizes that the artist sucks and should submit to the will of their elders/betters--a variant on the Mandy.) This sort of arrangement is not necessarily a Faustian bargain or even a bad idea; while there are legendary cases of such a hookup diminishing the reputations of everyone involved, it can also produce great results, since working with someone better or different than you are is generally a good idea. In the abstract, anyway. Because the question then becomes: what kind of cred-giving elder are you going to work with?

Lindsay is clearly looking to change--her music, her career, her life--and this is window shopping, or rather big-box shopping. If you need a hammer, you go to Home Depot, and see what kind of hammers people get, and maturing is the Home Depot of artistic transformations.[9] But it's distressing that this is so clearly the norm--that when she reaches for respectability, she reaches for someone like Devendra. I'm couching this in particularly mercenary terms, but changing what you do is vital to being an artist, and you need to pick up those changes from somewhere, you can't just pluck them out of the air. But no one ever matures by becoming disgraceful[10], no one ever moves from folk to pop--or when they do, like Jewel, it really is disgraceful. If the only way to legitimately change is to become respectable, and, as we see above, what respectable means is fixed, then everybody's changing the same way, and that's not good. We all mature, apparently, toward sincerity and acoustic instruments and slower tempos. This isn't true but it is. If you try and mature in a different way, you lose respectability, and that means you lose your ability to function as an artist, because the possibilities open to you before are now closed. This is bad for music, bad for art.

But what about the other side of this transaction? If Lindsay's presence signals the continuing cultural dominance of a particular set of tropes, what does Devendra's presence mean? Well, it indicates that Lindsay has more legitimacy than we might give her credit for. Devendra is ultimately concerned with legitimacy, and it's unlikely he would have let Pamela Anderson or Tyra Banks or even Ashlee Simpson interview him. Those people would have diminished his respectability. But Lindsay's presence confers on him the image of being close to the center of it all, not lurking off in the margins with a bunch of dirty hippies. She seems more complex by being relevant to Devendra's audience, and he seems more simple by being relevant to Lindsay's. This transaction wouldn't have worked if they were too far apart, and the fact that they were able to pull it off, at least a little, shows that maybe starlets and indie-rockers aren't so far apart after all.

Take that statement how you will. Me, I notice that Lindsay ultimately said no, and I think she did this because she realized that she already had what Devendra was peddling. This could mean that indie-rockers are frauds or Devendra's a sellout, but that's boring. What's interesting is that those engaged in pop--starlets, teenyboppers, actors on the WB--could have already achieved respectability, and that if they were to have the courage of their convictions, maybe they wouldn't need to mature. Maybe they're already as mature as everybody else.

[1] And if Byrne thinks he (or, for that matter, Cocorosie, another of the night's performers) aren't being ironic, as he said in his artist's statement, well, perhaps we need to have a discussion about what exactly that term means.
[2] Usually this means one of three things: being confrontational, being obtuse, or being contrary. The first is self-explanatory, the second is a synonym for "indie band" (inaudible vocals, blurry photos, etc.), and the third is a catchall term for embracing styles that are currently gauche. (The irony of the third is that it often ends up making the gauche respectable, but this is the jerky minuet of culture in action, I suppose.)
[3] I think we'll be seeing a lot more people doing it in the near future.
[4] Well, of course they did--it confirmed what they already thought, that pop is worthless and the people who make it are either mercenary or naïve. All right-thinking people would apologize for doing such a horrible thing.
[5] Or, uh, was, until she became a public cokehead.
[6] Contrast this to someone like Pink, with her whole "LA told me not to be a punk" thing. It's a fairly rarified group of people that don't need legitimacy, and even a successful singer like Pink was after her first album isn't included in that category.
[7] A microtransaction, sure--they'd each be giving up and gaining only a smidgen--but a transaction nevertheless.
[8] See Pearl Jam, kinda.
[9] Other kinds of artistic transformations:
- intense instrumental study: your local Tru-Value hardware
- going "back to your roots": general store
- buying a new keyboard: back shelf of a bodega
- painting crosses on everything: stealing from shop class
[10] OK, except Marilyn Manson.

Labels: celebrity, devendra banhart, freakfolk, lindsay lohan, live, music, new york, pop, teenpop

posted by Mike B. @ 1:06 AM