Notes for 3/8/07
- Twoheadedboy makes some great points about the Arcade Fire and their public reception:Also, at the end (and more importantly): "taking the Arcade Fire to task for aestheticizing politics." This is really smart.And what of the Arcade Fire's purported sincerity? Their heart-on-sleeve
emotionalism? Should we be touched, moved? When every song recruits a gargantan church organ to swell Win Butler's high school poetry to apocalyptic proportions
(“mirror, mirror / on the wall / show me where the / bombs will fall”)? I say,
stop touching me.
I'm still trying to figure out why musicians' clumsy attempts at political gestures bug me so much, beyond, you know, "they're stupid." I hadn't really considered this one, though, and I think it's getting close to the heart of the matter, although I would phrase it more like "imposing lame indie aesthetics on politics, which already has its own aesthetics." The lyrics quoted above are a 1:1 equivalency of John Ashcroft singing "Let The Eagle Soar." Just because you're singing something over a piano part doesn't mean it's a good song, and just because you say something about bombs doesn't make it a meaningful political statement, and when people think otherwise, that just indicates that they don't really know what they're talking about when it comes to songs or politics. Oh sure, sure; everyone's entitled to their opinion, and god forbid we "supress dissent" by telling someone they're being shallow, but if you think Ashcroft's song is lame, well. Aesthetics matter.
- As suspected, the House episode this week was practically a religious experience. I think I might be mentioning it again in the near future, so I won't say too much now, but seriously, episode of the year or something.
- As Frank pointed out and Dave responded to, there's been surprisingly little chatter in pop-nerd circles about Britney shaving her head, aside from the requisite "OMG she's bald" reactions. There's been a quote going around attributed to Courtney Love that I can't find an original source for (it might be on a google-proofed page like a message board), but it certainly sounds like her:
she?s insane! I love it! I?m sad about what she?s ingesting, and the bad man who got her started on that shit.But she?s made herself a true outsider under the influence or not- which in itself is not a crime, she?s expressed what she?s feeling inside on the outside an dyes its the result of a psychotic break due to uh?ingestion of a very very very evil substance. and i know what I know because I know, the people who know- she cried for a long tome before she did it and her bodyguards were all that was with herhow the ultimate insider the person whose almost directly responsible for ruining guitar rock ended up shaving her head is an ultimate irony and the fact that she shaved her head hell if i did it no one would blink butt hats cos I?ve always been an outsider even when I?m an insider- but ths is breaking news due to that fact that this was the lolita fuck up fantasy doll jonbenet nightmare- i remember the first time i saw a little thing on her in spin I seriously very seriously thought it was a parody like an snl skit and when it became real I worried and it affected everyone, in my world in the world of rock n roll and this may as well be death in some ways- she wasn?t sober when she did it - i wish she had been because then id be able to really kind of get behind it and just say- fuck yeah express yourself- do it= you don?t feel pretty on ths inside anymore show it man, but it s happened and its legendary, this is going to be legendary.Is she going to join mercury rev? Start hanging at space land?i doubts he even understands that world but no decent punk at heart can begrudge the once totally self an dmommy sexualised ?virgin? for shaving g her dammed head, i love it and I?m sad for her at he same time.I?m sure she?s clueless to how brilliant this was, how in some ways anarchic an feminist it was- but she still needs to go back to rehab.That my two cents.I like this, but I would. Maybe another productive avenue to go down would be comparing it with the "makeover" episode on America's Next Top Model. It's at, what, the seventh time around now? Eighth? And every "cycle" (ugh, sorry) there's the makeover episode, and every makeover episode, they chop off a bunch of the girls' hair. And there's always lots of crying. It doesn't make sense--the contestants have clearly watched the show before, they know this is coming, and yet, every time, "OMG I can't believe they cut off my hair!" Really? Well, yeah. It's notable in comparison to another ANTM pattern: the nude shoot. Every season, usually after the makeover episode, there's a shoot where the girls have to be either nude, near-nude, or looking as if they are nude, and for the first few seasons, this would always knock at least one contestant out, because they would refuse on moral grounds to be nude and my body is a temple etc. etc. OH MY GOD GIRL YOU'RE TRYING TO BE A MODEL TAKE YOUR DAMN CLOTHES OFF ALREADY.
Um. Anyway, point is that this happened for the first few seasons, but then it stopped; there's still always a nude shoot, but people seem to have finally learned not to apply to the show if they don't want to get nudies. But they do still apply to the show even though they don't want to get their hair cut. It's still that unbelievable that someone would do that to them, I think, that you go ahead anyway.
So compare that to Britney: this is seen as a form of self-mutilation, evidenced by the fact that a few days later, people thought it credible that she attempted suicide. And so, hair: it's an unacknowledged but potent symbol in pop, and maybe the seemingly superficial things we see female popstars do with their hair are worthy of a closer look: P!nk, Ashlee going brunette, etc. I don't really know what this would yield, but if I did, it would be a post rather than a note.
Labels: aesthetics, arcade fire, britney, courtney love, House, john ashcroft, notes, politics, pop, teenpop
posted by Mike B. @ 12:01 AM
8 Comments:
i haven't read the link yet but picking on that "Black Mirror" line seems like a weird choice. i'm really not a fan of the most politicised moments on Neon Bible ("Windowsill"? argh), but to me "Black Mirror" is not one of these overt attacks. i think the "bombs" line is a pretty good lyric, and i don't think it's meant to be overtly political. it's a song about scary-random shit happening in a scary-random world, and feeling lost and up against the sublime. not about, uh, iraq!
Ah, OK, that line is much better if it's not specifically political. Do you think a sizable portion of the audience might read it as an Iraq/war on terror reference, though?
I definitely didn't agree with everything in the piece, but I thought it was interesting in terms of the way an audience reacts to intimations of political speech in music.
really, to be totally honest, no! while there's one song on Neon Bible ("Windowsill") that is clearly a critique of america, the album as a whole (and even individual songs) present a context of personal, or maybe spiritual, crisis, totally decoupled from activist or explicit politics. the visual imagery of the liner notes - oldtime 20s filmclips, flickerings, neon, - it's very much urban ennui not progressive criticism. i mean five years ago Win was borderline republican - i think the political moments on the album are moments when he wants to be like Bruce Springsteen, not when he wants to capture the same politics as Bruce Springsteen.
when i interviewed them in the fall they talked about one song, "the well and the lighthouse", and about how it's inspired by La Fontaine's fables. one of the things Win liked about those fables is that they weren't veiled attacks: they were unveiled. at the time, the metaphors of the stories (fox=king, stork=proles, etc) were totally transparent. everyone knew EXACTLY what lafontaine was getting at. and he liked this. if you were going to be political in art, don't be hidden or cute about it. just say the thing.
anyway, all this to say that when the Arcade Fire's making a direct critique, it tends to be pretty clear. (eg: Joe Simpson is the Antichrist. Or "I don't want to live in AMerica no more".) i think it's a mistake to throw them in the same boat as Bright Eyes or REM or any of those artists who are regularly recording overt political songs. There's only one AF tune that I think is like that ("Windowsill"), and the rest is genuinely about a grander politics of despair/hope/god/sin etc. which may be no less annoying, but is worth distinguishing!
Thanks for the kind words! I think you made my remarks sound a lot more coherent than they actually were.
My problem with Neon Bible wasn't so much that it's political (or hamfisted when it is), but that I found its climate of angsty apocalypticism really tasteless and hokey. I think the real problem with its politics is that, even while it tries to address life in a paranoid society, it works on the same level as the media it implicitly critiques. The operative terms are "individual" versus "scary-random world" and the mode they use to deal with this problem is primarily the individual's appeal to the sublime (i.e. faith). I think this just reinforces the dominant rhetoric that people ought to be scared of ill-defined threats and appeal to God about their worries, rather than point fingers at the people that are actually telling them to be afraid, and why. It also reinforces a mode of engagement with the world that's either "individual vs. big, scary, vague world" or "mob bound together by rapture" (i.e. the audience at an AF show) -- one solipsistic, the other hysterical, both easily controlled by dominant discourse. In other words, dumbed-down emoting moves more units than asking people to think about things in a properly self-reflexive way. Moreover, the aesthetic results are embarassing. Don't even get me started on using churchiness in pursuit of respectability. All this is to say that AF's political paradigm is not to call bullshit on bullshit, but to take that BS for granted as "what the world is like now" and use it as an image-repertoire to move people in a way that ultimately motivates them to nothing more considerable than buying AF merchandise.
Aestheticized politics...Arcade Fire = fascists? (Actually, my problem with the "political" stuff on the album is that it just kinda hangs out in the open, they don't pretty it up at all! Anyway, getting disgruntled about Joe Simpson and MTV and...vacuum cleaner salesmen or something?...isn't really my idea of a cogent political platform. They sound like a buncha coots who wanna live in the mountains, but at least they used to have some fun up there!)
Re: Ashlee brunette to blonde, I investigated this and revealed a likeness to before/after pics of Kim Novak in Vertigo.
Re: Ashlee brunette to blonde, I investigated this and revealed a likeness to before/after pics of Kim Novak in Vertigo.
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