I think Nick is
right about "Killing in the Name," which I don't think I've heard since I played it by request at a dance at nerd camp and all the little nerdling boys went spazzy-crazy on the coffeeshop dancefloor. So I found it and listened to it and yeah, it's a really great song. When we all first heard it, the thing works so well that it's easy to miss the multiple leaps of faith that make it work, and given Rage's current (or, I guess, pre-Coachella) critical reputation--and by "critical" here I don't mean "just critics" but, like, everybody everywhere--it's easy to revisionistly see the particulars of those leaps/moves as odious, overdone, played-out. Crass. Distasteful. Cheesy. Embarassing. My my my, once bitten, you know.
Hearing it fresh, though, it's a shock to the system, because it's an inventively and masterfully constructed rock song. The structure can be found in other songs but none of those are mosh anthems, as it's like one of those giant pirate ship rides that, at the peak of its second swing, busts a bearing and goes tumbling down a hill, only to find a vacant pirate-swing-ride-chassis at the bottom and latch onto that. A straight intro goes into a syncopated hook, then back into a syncopated version of the intro (the pirate ship gets going), then a straight verse that busts into a chorus and that great "now you do what they told you" stomp-swing that itself busts into a louder, wider part. And then back to the straight verse, repeating the whole process, which can be either seen as verse-chorus-bridge1-bridge2 or just one long build that suddenly resets itself and goes entirely back to the beginning. What it's all building to, of course, is the big bust-out section with the screamy swear words[1], a moment rivaled in its awesomeness in the 90s maybe only by "March of the Pigs," which does its own interesting series of moves that we won't get into now.[2] And then it happens, and then there's that syncopated intro again, just once, and we're out.
It's a hell of a structure, and worth noting, because that repetition, despite being more or less identical to the first runthrough, is so unexpected that it doesn't register as repetition. There've been too many shifts by that point for it to come across as just a end-of-chorus-back-to-verse change, and there's no real dynamic indication at the end of that first repetition that it's going to drop off in volume/intensity, and when it does, it happens instintaneously, almost like an edit (which maybe it was). So that surprise functions as a further tension-builder, the novelty of the structure working as a disruption and, even though it turns out things are going to proceed as before, you're not expecting it to do so, as you would be in a normal verse-chorus-verse structure. There's a dropoff in energy, but not necessarily in tension, with that disruption allowing it to build far further than it would have with just the one repetition, so when the crest hits, it hits really hard, and it's one of the most cathartic releases, as I say, in all of the 90s canon, one filled with nothing if not cathartic releases.
All in all, the structure is far less that of a rock song than it is of a dance track. There's no key shifts and no change in the melody, but there is a lot of changes in texture: whether the guitar's muted or not, how open the hi-hat is, whether there's a crash going, how high the pitch is, etc. The whole thing centers not around the development of a melody or the delivery of a lyric, but the building and release of tension, which it does very effectively, and though screaming "FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME" is not as subtle as it could be, it is an effective and wholly accurate translation into language of the musical vocabulary being used at the high point of a DJ set. Which is why, as Nick says, the remix is kinda stupid: it leaves out the best part, and the part that's most dancey! Presumably because it's too embarassing/cheesy/tasteless.
(Of course, from an abstract point of view, the best part of the song is right before the FU section, where they go all Sonic Youth and build tension via free-jazz, or at least free-jazz drums, as everything else is keeping the voice while the drums flail around until they hit the beat hard right before they come back in again full. Awesome!)
This is all especially interesting in light of this
Esquire article. If you don't want to click through, it sarcastically congratulates Zach delarocha for not releasing music while Bush was President, which the writer thinks is hypocritical because Rage / Zach were/are "political." Certainly the course RATM took as a band was disappointing, but it's interesting that the writer (Jason Notte, in case he's auto-googling--I see I'm about to join his alma mater) identifies exactly the opposite of why that's so. He complains that '"fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" has become the mantra of suburban teens who don't want to do homework or leave the mall early.' Thing is, that's exactly what the damn words were always destined to mean, how they were received, and how they work best. As political speech it's fucking worthless, but as teenage enhancement--as
rocking (see footnote 4
here) it's the best shit ever. The problem with RATM and Zach is that they took themselves far too seriously. What difference would it have made for good ol' Zach to be yelling about imperialism publicly for the last 6 years? It's not like other people weren't (despite what people would like to retroactively think) and it's not like it would've mattered much anyway. The political stuff was what made Rage, tragically,
respectable, at least in the most obvious way, whereas their actual respect derived from their music, and their ability to fuse a bunch of different ideas and sounds in potent ways.
This all raises the question: what if Zach DLR had, instead of taking himself seriously as an ersatz radical gifted by minority birth with unflaggable lefty cred, developed the skill he shows in "Killing in the Name," where he uses his voice not as a vehicle for championing obvious causes, but to shape and enhance the musical arc of a song? What if Rage's ability to construct a song had been emphasized? Well, problem is, that happened. It's called Audioslave and it sucked. So that's that question answered, more or less. So this suggests, at least to me, that maybe we just have to accept that Rage was a band with fantastic but limited ideas, and if that first album (and parts of the second, maybe) are so much better than the rest of their various output, it's not because their course could have been different-better, but because that was the best they could do, and they did it. Maybe one of the problems with the 90s--or, maybe, with rock--is that it did encourage people to develop as artists, even when that was a bad thing for them to do. Or maybe Zach de la Rocha is just a twat. Either way.
[1] Yay!
[2] Skipped beats as thrash!
Labels: aesthetics, blogtalk, pop, ratm, rock, value added
Or, Small Stakes Ensure You There Will be Fast Food on the Moon
One way[1] of thinking about cuisine (cooking? food? eating? gastronomy?) is as French v. Japanese. French cooking, in an absurdly reductionist and outdated version, but what are metaphors for anyway--French cooking centers around sauces, which are a whole bunch of different ingredients mixed together into a whole that more or less subsumes them, bringing the many together into one undifferentiated whole. Japanese cooking, on the other hand, presents a small number of ingredients simply and distinctly, with sushi being the definitive version, but with even soups being just a simple broth of two or three ingredients and a few fresh ingredients dropped in whole at the last minute. French cooking, in other words, is orchestration, whereas Japanese cooking is selection.
If there's any contemporary musician making French cuisine, it's most certainly Tori Amos. Not only does she play a piano and produce music that's literally orchestrated, with all sorts of layers relying on their place in the whole for their effect (try listening to a Steve Caton guitar part by itself, if you want to pretend you're at sound check at a bar in 1987), but each new artistic product is accompanied by a whole host of garnishes and condiments: theoretical constructs, costumes, references to pagan traditions, Big Themes. For this one, there's something or other about singing as different mythological figures with corresponding outfits and color-coded lyrics. Maybe. Because I didn't get the promo version but instead went and actually bought a copy at the mall, I was spared the press pack, and so don't even have to think about these things when I'm listening to
American Doll Posse.
I was not so lucky with her last album,
The Beekeeper, and wrote
a fairly nasty review of it for the Voice. The album itself wasn't so bad, but I had the misfortune of reviewing it along with Tori's autobiography, which came out at the same time, co-authored by Ann Powers (who I uh assume is responsible for all the good parts, like when she's sitting in meetings for the book and sees posters for
The Da Vinci Code and talks about Elaine Pagels). I am a longtime and, at points, totally hardcore Tori fan, but this was just too flaky, and seeing just what Tori thought (or said she thought) she was doing compared with what actually resulted made it impossible to like the album.
But here I am, liking the album, despite knowing again what she says she's trying to do (rescue the feminine, channel the goddesses, bake me some pie[2]) and despite there being another horrendously flaky pseudo-spiritual concept to contend with.[3] Why do I like it? Well, for one thing, it's much, much better than
The Beekeeper--partially because the production has gotten interesting again, and partially because Tori mainly uses her tics for good rather than evil--but also because I have chosen not to care what Tori says the album is doing. More specifically, it's because of what Alex Macpherson
points out she's doing: "I love how obvious it is that Tori Amos's latest babblings about archetypes of feminity are just an excuse for her dress up in pretty frocks and wear ugly wigs and look fabulous." In other words, it's Cher! (Or Kylie, or Britney, or whatever, take your pick.) And in other other words, it's spectacle. And I love me some Cher and some spectacle!
Of course, I also loved me some Cher and some spectacle back when
The Beekeeper came out. Why was I then so unable to appreciate these aspects back then? Well, I think it comes down to the fact that I was a longtime-and-at-times-hardcore Tori fan, because I was such a thing when I was a teenager, and the music we like as a teenager we like because it means something. We may not know what it means, exactly, but certainly something; it is serious music with a serious purpose, whether that purpose be expressing certain eternal truths or creating beauty or just rocking.[4] And we not only continue to like this music when we stop being teenagers, but we continue to want music to be serious and important. Those who know my proclivities might expect me to deplore this, but it makes sense. If music doesn't matter, then what's the point of it? Why not do something you're supposed to being doing--that you have to do--if what you're listening to is shallow, or trivial, or wrong?
I used to not eat vegetables. OK, well, I ate catsup (speaking of the differences between national cuisines), but you'd have to have Alzheimer's or something to think that was a vegetable. But then I started eating things I thought I disliked, such as vegetables, but also whole wheat, balsamic vinegar, scallops, sausage (I know!), and stinky cheese. This was about five years ago, and now I have things like salads, all the time! I actively desire salads! My parents think I'm crazy, but I don't care.
Anyway, I bring this up because my not-liking-things condition was an understandable position to be in. There are very few foods we innately like, and most food is just so conceptually weird that why would we want to eat
that? But if you actually try food you don't think you like, and more than once, you can get yourself to enjoy it, which is not a betrayal of some core truth, but simply acknowledging that people--good, honest, salt-of-the-earth people--like these things for a reason. Children need to eat something five times before they can like it, and I think we retain that characteristic for quite a while. So what I did in eating and then liking all these new foods that I previously didn't like wasn't just to simply taste them; I also had to think about food in a different way. When I encountered a food that I did not eat, I stopped thinking "I don't like that, it's bad" and began thinking "I haven't really tasted that much, I wonder what it tastes like?"
And this is how we can continue to listen to music without giving up that feeling of it being important and meaningful: we just need to shift what we think of as meaningful. The things that seem serious to us as teenagers should, if we are full, mature human beings, seem silly and very much not serious to us as adults. But now new things can seem serious, and these things can coexist with the things that we learn to appreciate by seeking it out and tasting it. Tori's ludicrous self-seriousness persists, but now that I can taste the spectacle, I can believe in her again, because I've come to appreciate spectacle, and to see it as important. There's nothing wrong with expecting our music to matter, even--or especially--if it's pop. We just need to redefine what matters.
Of course, not everyone agrees, as we can see with
this Washington Post review comparing Tori's new album, negatively, to Feist's new album. Now, there are all sorts of things to point out in this ("something Norah Jones would make, if she had better connections" omg wtf), but this isn't 2003, after all. What's mainly worth noting is the fact that there is not one single evaluative thing said about the actual music on
American Doll Posse. I understand why one can end up doing this in the course of reviewing a Tori Amos album (see above), but if we're going to compare non-musical aspects, all Feist wants to do is make a pleasant album, and maybe some cool videos. This is fine, but compared to Tori, who has grand ambitions and painstaking execution, it's small potatoes, and not really the kind of thing we should be praising, surely. It wouldn’t be so much of a problem if it didn't seem endemic--if the indie music for which Feist is now the standard-bearer didn't seem so content to make merely pleasant music, having dropped the overarching weirdness, conceptual playfulness, and artistic ambitions of its wellsprings. It's interesting that the indie kids of today seem to be drawing from the straightforward rock bands of their youth, whereas the ones that clearly latched onto fellow travelers like Tori and Courtney Love in their formative years are making pop music.
This would all be more bothersome if I hadn't recently watched a DVD by Gonzales, the Canadian/faux-French musician who arranged Feist's album. It's called
From Major to Minor, and if you're looking for conceptual weirdness and strange ambition, here it is. It focuses on his piano playing, and while there is a star-filled concert, there are also at least two other things on there that are more interesting and, I think, meaningful. It draws on things that have fallen off the radar of modern music, like Victor Borge and Leonard Bernstein's
Young People's Concerts series, as well as things that were never on pop's radar (following the split between art music and pop music after which ideas, which used to flow freely, ceased being exchanged, which coincidentally seemed to happen around the same time as indie began) like Rob Kapilow and other people making popular musical instruction into a kind of theatrical performance.
The primary example of this is a "piano masterclass," although "masterclass" is probably the wrong word for what he's doing, which is teaching people who can't play piano to do so, or at least to appreciate what other people are doing when they play. At first he brings people up from the audience, but then he brings up the Daft Punk robot to demonstrate rhythm, and sits the robot at a kick drum while he shows a video in which four mean, dressed in white shirts labeled "lento," "andante," "allegro," and "vivace" demonstrate the tempos they represent by dancing to beats coming through each of their cell phones. It's funny and informative, which sounds like "whee edutainment" but of course most edutainment is neither educational nor good entertainment. This is both, and as such it effectively blurs the line between the two. Is the point to teach you about Italian names for what we now understand to be particular beats per minute ranges, or to make some observation about tempos, or the connection between Daft Punk and classical music (Gonzales mentions to the robot that he used to make dance music, which is "very simple, music for beginners"), or the way performance conveys information, or the Platonic nature of tempo markings, or what?
There's also a "piano battle," which Gonzales performs in a warmup suit and sweatbands against improviser Jean-Francois Zygel. They play lengthy solo bits, then do a round where they each play small snatches of music and hit a chess clock lying between them, at which point the other player has to continue the phrase (and, frequently, change styles, a process by which they flow logically from serialism to a dissident minimalism to ragtime to a kind of Copeland-y lyricism), and conclude by playing at the same time, promoting Gonzales to yell at the crowd, and yell at Zygel. In contrast to the usually staid and audience-averse demeanors of improvisers, Gonzales is bringing out the internal drama of two musicians and letting us see it, making the way musicians play off each other explicit and therefore both understandable and enjoyable.
To me, what's great about this is that it's recorded but still performative, and not because it's a recording of a performance. The Talking Heads' concert film,
Stop Making Sense, is indistinguishable from an album, because everything that happens was planned beforehand and executed as expected, and, notably, the audience isn't seen until the end. (Other concert films, like
The Song Remains the Same or
Live at the Isle of Wight may show the audience, but there's no audience-band interaction;
Stop Making Sense is just an extreme example of this.) There's nothing interacting with the performance. But on the Gonzales DVD, his performance is being modified and even dictated by a number of outside factors, which in turn change our perception of the performance. It takes what could have been (a piano lesson, an improvised performance) and places additional information inside it, whether it be the guy in the masterclass seemingly unable to hit a note on the piano or Zygel hitting the chess clock at a certain time. This isn't a finished work or a document; it's one set of results of an experiment, but the experiment itself, in the abstract, exists separately from the performance. There's the recipe, and the dish as you've made it, which will necessarily be different, whether because of accommodating guests' tastes, tasting it yourself and making changes, or variations in the ingredients you have.
And if the performative can exist even within the recorded, then maybe what's outside the recorded should be recognized as working on it, too. If the audience on a DVD represents us as viewers, we as viewers can also interact with the official material by bringing other things to it. And these don't have to be created: they can be interviews with the artist, or promotional photographs, or bios, or whatever. But these are Japanese meals for us, maybe not simple (depending on the artist), but a bunch of bits we can eat in any order we want, or not eat, as we choose. And the end result is the meal, even if it hits us in different parts.
Along with discovering new foods, I also started cooking much more than I had before. (Related: I was no longer in college.) Now that I'm slightly above beginner status, I can taste a sauce and know that it needs more salt, or a bay leaf, or lemon. Maybe when we start to appreciate art in different ways, it's a bit like this: at first, we just throw everything in we think is good (see: my pork chop sauce from 2002, yoinks), but as time goes by we become better at knowing what to include lots of, what to include a little of, and what to avoid altogether. And so we can construct our experience of art the same way, knowing to avoid some artists' interviews or websites or live performances, or even albums.[5] They may serve us a Japanese meal (since after all, all those interviews and websites and photos are put out by the artist), but we don't have to eat them as the chefs intend; we can add condiments or do it in a different order or just have one thing and leave the rest. Chefs may call this being picky, but we can call it trying to get the best meal we can.
[1] Which may or may not be correct, but I've heard it said somewhere.
[2] Oh, come on, you would too.
[3] Where to work this in? Oh well, here: the argument can and perhaps should be made that Tori engages in all this gilding the lily, i.e. ascribing her fairly straightforward art-pop to intense contemplation of arcane and complex subjects and a careful crafting of her message to express and venerate ancient energies and whoosits, because female artists are almost always denied full agency over their art. Even if they manage to get credit for actually writing the songs, if there's any production on their songs and a producer credited, then everything that's not the vocals and the instrument the artist is playing is almost always attributed, in the common understanding, to the producer. Tori, I suspect, wants to make damn sure we know that her music is
all her, that though men play on and engineer her albums, she has told them what to do and made all the decisions about what will and will not be on the album.
[4] I'm not trying to be Jack Black here--rocking really is, and legitimately so, a serious and important thing for music to do when you're a teenager. Because, when you're a teenager, almost
nothing rocks. Almost nothing is pure and honest and exciting, certainly not your parents or school or your job or your friends or your town. So finding something that actually fulfills your expectations is an incredible thing, and a betrayal of that promise is unforgivable.
[5] There are also times when you've put something in that you just can’t take out, things like "spoilers" but also finding out someone has horrible political views.
Labels: aesthetics, feist, gonzales, pop, tori amos
- Twoheadedboy
makes some great points about the Arcade Fire and their public reception:
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.
Also, at the end (and more importantly): "taking the Arcade Fire to task for aestheticizing politics." This is really smart.
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
