Somehow We Missed Out

Last year Eric over at Marathonpacks wrote a post about Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa." It was a good piece, but it had a weird effect on me: it made me hate a song I had, until reading the piece, pretty much liked. This is neither because his post was criticizing the song--quite the opposite--or because the post itself was bad. The problem is, in a nutshell, that Eric's right. He focused on one particular line: "this feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel too." Now, for those unfamiliar with the song, it borrows heavily from Afropop, a genre that, to be extremely and unfairly reductionary, exists in the same general ballpark as the production on Peter Gabriel's "Biko" and Paul Simon's Graceland. So when I first heard the song, the line popped out, as lines with proper nouns always do, and I liked that it seemed to be making a self-deprecating comment about the song in progress, admitting its derivative nature.

But I never much listened to the rest of the lyrics, and given that Eric did, I'm going to go with his interpretation. He argues--convincingly, I think--that it wasn't just a self-conscious admission of derivativeness, but a way of beating critics to the punch, not about being derivative, but about appropriating. The song contained its own prediction about reaction to the song, and the assumed reaction went like this: critic hears song, critic recognizes debt to Afropop, critic looks at demographic characteristics of band members (as well as the first two words of the song's title), and critic roundly decries band for stealing the sound of third-world artists.

The first problem with this: I remain unconvinced that anyone would have actually had the above reaction, absent that particular line. Afropop, after all, clearly borrows from Western music, so it seems like cultural fair trade to me; theoretically, it's more troublesome for a band to appropriate, say, gamelan music than it is to borrow a sound that's already half-rock. In effect, the line created the controversy, making their musical choices into a problematic move that needed to be defended, and once it needed to be defended, then it could be attacked. While I can like the band for this, given that the song is effectively trying to bait me when all I wanted to do was play it in my car to remind me of summer...well, that makes it way less enjoyable.

But the other problem, and the more important problem, is that it's dealing with this issue in an incredibly clumsy way. Eric brought up Sasha Frere-Jones' piece on indie rock's whiteness, and while I hesitate to once again assult a practically mummified corpse, it's worth reiterating my initial response: that though its reasoning may be flawed, it makes a good point. His argument has been reduced in the popular consciousness to essentially "indie rockers are racist lol," but what's lost is the idea that indie used to be much more comfortable incorporating influences outside itself. At the end of the day, this isn't a point about race but about the idea of "appropriation." Eric also invokes Carl Wilson's response, which pegs it as a class issue, and that's certainly relevent with Vampire Weekend, but again, I'm not sure how much of this is something that would've actually been an issue unless it was being foregrounded so aggressively, to the point of being almost self-flagellating. It was a criticism in the air far before Carl brought it up, precisely because of the bands Eric lists as sonic cousins to Vampire Weekend: the Strokes and the Walkmen. At the end of the day, the Peter Gabriel line seems more defensive than insistent, and the issues of race and class are canards papering over the broader artistic issue of appropriation.

So let's talk about appropriation for a minute, and let's try and talk about it free of these other issues. And yes, I think that's a valid thing to do. At the moment of creation, art is like sex: when the lights are out, it doesn't matter who you're with, as long as it feels right. If, for whatever reason, a style or a sound or a technique or an idea meshes with what you're trying to do as an artist, you use it. That's one of the reasons art exists: to make other art possible. I sincerely think that anyone who has enough love of art to become a critic or a fan should agree that anyone can take from anything. And unless you're a folk artist, you're going to have to take from other things, because all art is, at least partially, appropriation.

What matters, then, is not what you're appropriating from, but how you do it. If you properly acknowledge your influence, and perhaps give some sort of help to the artists being appropriated from, there's really no problem, at least morally. (Artistically, it can be really lazy, but that's for another post.) This is why that line bugs me so much now: I didn't have any problems with an indie band sounding like Afropop (it's a great idea, actually), so to be essentially told by the song itself that I should have a problem seems incredibly dishonest, and not a little cowardly. In its attempt to dictate the terms of my response, Vampire Weekend is expressing fear that their art will be taken in the wrong way. But good art is always free to be taken the wrong way, because good art can be taken in many different ways, and once it's released to the public, the artist really doesn't have any control over that. The band's gotten themselves so worked up about people possibly calling them colonialists or what-fucking-ever that they come across as insecure and unwilling to stand behind what they've made. I don't have much interest in people who aren't willing to let their work stand on its own.

A comparison might help here. In my piece on LCD Soundsystem's "North American Scum," I said that certain lines function as "establishing credentials," which is another way of saying that James Murphy is insisting on his right to say what he's about to say. This is a cousin to Vampire Weekend's technique, but instead of pre-emption, James Murphy's trying to move beyond the basic terms of a debate to a larger point that he'd like to make. Unlike Vampire Weekend, he's not justifying his basic right to artistic expression, which for him goes without saying[1]. This sort of self-consciousness is endemic to LCD Soundsystem's whole aesthetic, of course--even in their first song, "Losing My Edge," the narrator was careful to establish his credentials as an elder statesman before making his critique, and you could write a good piece cataloguing the little self-conscious nods all over Sound of Silver (say, in the title track itself). So where Vampire Weekend's nod is defensive, an attempt at cutting off debate (that of course really serves to cause a debate, albeit one that they themselves view as illegitimate), Murphy's self-consciousness is a bit more heroic, a way of driving things forward, to more complexity and more appropriation, not less. But at the end of the day, of course, it's still self-consciousness.

If we really want to see why Vampire Weekend's defensiveness--a defensiveness that is, I think, endemic to modern pop[2]--is so problematic, let's look at the Scissor Sisters. Specifically, let's look at their song "Mary." "Mary" is an Elton John/Billy Joel piano ballad. I don't think Jake Shears or Babydaddy would deny that. But there's nothing in that song to acknowledge the fact that they're appropriating from this debased source, no "this feels so familiar / Bernie Taupin too." Jake Shears gets up there and sings a sincere set of lyrics about someone he sincerely loves, and he sings them with absolute conviction. And as such, it works in the exact same way as an Elton John / Billy Joel piano ballad does.

This is no small feat. You can dislike the song--you should dislike the song--but "Candle in the Wind" sold how many fucking copies? It's reasonable to think people responded so strongly to that song because it powerfully expressed a particular emotion that they related to. And "Mary," again, functions in exactly this same way. What this means is that by appropriating something without apologizing for it or being defensive about it, the Scissor Sisters were able to engage with it not as sonic wallpaper but as a full phenomenon, as something that not only sounds a certain way and comes with certain connotations but that also expresses an emotional truth and artistic beauty. Doesn't that seem like a richer and more rewarding way of doing things?

But of course, then there's the how. Keeping in mind, as always, that the Scissor Sisters began as an electroclash band (e.g. irony taken to infinity), I think we can say that their use of the piano ballad derives strongly from camp, an ideology that makes explicit the claim that anything can be appropriated. Practicioners of camp might appreciate things in different ways than the object's primary audience does, but the appreciation is rooted in a true affection, not in derision, condescension, or exoticism. Basically, camp appropriates what it thinks is awesome.

How is it able to do this? Well, camp comes from a gay perspective, and it's fair to say that it generally appropriated mass culture artifacts aimed at a heterosexual audience. Camp was able to borrow because camp's practicioners were in a subordinate cultural position to the things it was appropriating. The "how" is determined by power relations.

So maybe Carl's right--maybe this does come down to class. After all, indie rockers never feel like they come from a subordinate cultural position, even when they do[3], and so from that perspective, there's nothing they can appropriate except things created by other indie rockers. Right?

Let me suggest another model.



The first thing you'll notice about the above scene, the finale of the pilot episode of Paul Feig's Freaks and Geeks, is the soundtrack: "Come Sail Away," by Styx. It may be impossible to find a more culturally debased song, one steeped more heavily in irony, condescension, and derision, than "Come Sail Away." For fuck's sake, it popped up on the cultural radar recently because it was covered by South Park's Eric Cartman as a horrible song he was unable to stop singing. So if you saw this scene out of context, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was an ironic use intended to make fun of the ridiculousness of school dances during that particular time period. The present-day meaning of "Come Sail Away" is akin to bell-bottoms or shoebox-sized portable phones.

That's not what the show's doing, though. Lindsay, here helpfully representing indie nation, has started hanging out with the cool kids and thus thinks that going to a dance is lame. Her views would most closely mirror ours: she thinks the music is bad, the social scene is fake, and the whole enterprise is a joke. She's not happy to be there, and it's hard to imagine her being happy that Styx is playing. Meanwhile, her awkward brother Sam doesn't have any particular aesthetic objection to the idea of a school dance, but is trying to work up the nerve to ask a girl to dance with him.

In the scene, three things happen. First, thinking the song is a slow dance, Sam ask the girl, and she says yes. Just as Sam awkardly extends his hands to her in a "how does this work?" kind of way, as they're about to start dancing--a moment Sam has been planning for and dreading for some time--the song kicks up into the "rock" part. Sam looks around, surprised, terrified, unsure of what to do; the girl says, "C'mon Sam," a literal invitation to the dance. And so Sam does, unsure at first of what to do, but he gets into it, happy just to be dancing with her, and as the song rises, he passes into a kind of bliss.

Second, Lindsay sees this, and so sees what the song has done for her brother, setting him free from his awkwardness and anxiety and allowing him to express his feelings for this girl in a way that a slow dance couldn't have accomplished. She spies Eli, the weird kid, standing alone across the floor, and goes over to ask him to dance. We don't actually hear her ask the question, just see her lips move as the music transitions from a flutey bridge to the final, seemingly endless, section. As the music goes nuts, they dance, the singer sings about boarding a starship and heading for the skies, and the scene ends with Lindsay and Sam both happy, lost in the music, heading for the skies.

The third thing happens not on-screen, but in our heads. When the song starts, we think, "Ha ha, Styx." As it progresses, we start to notice that it's actually a pretty good song, one that we haven't really listened to closely before. And by the end, we, too, are caught up in the music along with the characters. Like Lindsay, we see what the music is possible of doing, and we start to hear it in a different way. Essentially, the scene is a cover of the song, not only lasting exactly as long as the song, but following the precise emotional arc: slow jam to rock out to flute break to climax, uncertainty to release to exploration to escape. What the scene does isn't use the song so much as allow us to see it in context, to see it as it was originally intended, without the baggage that time has brought to it. It literally makes the song sound new, even though it's the same damn thing it's always been.

This is undeniably appropriation, and it could've been done in a way that devalued the original object. It wasn't. In addition to serving the new artwork itself, it allowed us as the audience to understand the song, contextualizing it (or, arguably, recontextualizing it) so a meaning came through that we were not willing to consider. It made it relatable.

Maybe Vampire Weekend does this for some people--maybe their use of Afropop allows some Western listeners to get the same feeling from the music that listeners do in its original context. But by apologizing in advance, by doing something the original artists never would have had to do, they make that impossile, at least for me. They make it an object of appropriation rather than a recontextualization, a borrowing, or even just an inspiration. What I've tried to suggest with these other examples is that, while there can certainly be issues with appropriation, it's pointless to even do it in the first place if you aren't willing to let the art stand on its own. If it gets criticized, then it gets criticized. But if you have so much respect for the original that you don't want people to think you're misusing it, then do something with it that helps us understand it like you understand it. If you've seen something in an object, bring that out. If it feels right to you, let it happen. I want to see it like you see it--that's why I'm consuming art in the first place--but if you are embarassed about seeing it, then I'm just not interested.

[1] Though, of course, many Murphy moves do work within the framework of justifying or perhaps enhancing his "record collector rock" by referencing things obscure enough to make the people who might criticize him feel recognized; this is an extremely cynical way of putting it, though.
[2] Indie, of course, but think of Kanye West. If he's our Prince--a producer/performer extrordinaire beloved by critics and audiences alike--then he's a remarkably defensive character. Prince exuded a relaxed sense of "I am the most awsome thing ever," an implicit claim made also by the very genius of his music. But Kanye's still got self-esteem problems, has always had self-esteem problems. In a MySpace age, that might be more appealing, but I think it's worse.
[3] There's an intereting point here about how it's not just class but intelligence that creates this feeling, which Carl alludes to when talking about indie's values being derived from a liberal arts education but puts it down as just a cultural difference.

Labels: lcd soundsystem, music, pop, sasha frere-jones, scissor sisters, TV, vampire weekend

posted by Mike B. @ 11:55 AM