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 4 Comments

His Master's Voice

If Paris Hilton had made her album five years earlier, there seems little doubt it would have been an electroclash album.[1] But she didn't make the album five years ago. She made it now, and as a result it's an entirely different album, one that leans now toward R&B and rap, now towards dance-pop, now with guitars, now without. Why?

When you make the decision to make music that is a separate decision from what that music will sound like, and that decision consists half of biography and half of cultural cues that make certain choices far more likely than others. What music your friends are into, or what kind of music seems attractive to you from a distance, is the kind of music you're going to end up making, and influences are not shaped by happenstance. There's a clear genealogy at work, and even when it's detailed it seems insufficiently remarked upon. The social context we create with our discursive back-and-forth about music--whether in a blog post, a feature article, a review, or a message board conversation--a social context, by the way, we're always careful to brush off as trivial and inconsequential lest we be accused of taking this shit too seriously--this is why this social context matters.

Paris made the album in late 2005 and early 2006, and, not surprisingly, it sounds like the music her friends made and the music she most often heard. Given that her friends would navigate the nexus between rich and vaguely hip, and that the places she hangs out are high-end lounges, the aural environment described by this almost precisely matches the sound of the album: shiny, uncluttered beats, and smooth, somewhat dark dance music. [2] It sounds like a particularly large corner of pop from that particular time period, except with Paris singing over it, spanning a fairly decent range of styles (it seems unlikely that you would find the music for "Turn It Up," "Heartbeat," and "Screwed" on the same album by a single artist) but the one in particular I'm interested in is one of the minmalist R&B tracks, "Fightin' Over Me."

"Fightin' Over Me" is essentially a mashup. None of the elements sound original to the track in the slightest; they could all have easily been flown in from other tracks and plunked together almost at random. Were Paris not singing along with the piano, it could as easily have been a collage as a construction. There is nothing even slightly distinctive about it, and the vocals could go over almost anything. It's particularly noticeable with the two guest-raps on the track, by Fat Joe and Jadakiss: the only even vaguely unique elements, mainly certain quirks of pronunciation, can be heard in literally hundreds of other songs, and the subjects, though arguably related to what Paris is singing, can be found in literally thousands of songs. There's nothing here--not a detail, not a turn of phrase, not a trick of flow--that's new, and in being so utterly without distinctiveness, they achieve a sort of abstract quality, becoming not unique expressions of the self but densely-packed symbols for something outside the song.

All of which is another way of saying, I suppose, that the song is essentially run-of-the-mill. Cookie cutter. Same old, same old. But when you call something cookie-cutter, there is necessarily a follow-up question: is it cookie-cutter for practical or artistic reasons? There's no denying that some things sound manufactured because they have in fact been deliberately produced a certain way to meet a particular need or desire: let's make a song that sounds like X, those are selling well right now.[3] But in Paris' case--and hold your nose and tear the band-aid off fast, because this is gonna be difficult--I fear it may in fact be an artistic decision.

Now, how can making something sound ordinary be an artistic decision?[4] Well, it can if you're Paris Hilton and what you're primarily concerned with is iconization. She was quoted as saying:

"I think every decade has an iconic blonde including Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana and right now I'm that icon."

This is not tipping your hand so much as a crotch shot of intentionality. What she's going for is something fundamentally opposed to the Romantic tradition that AR (After Rock) pop music is governed by. She does not want to fully express her particular soul; she wants to be the personification of an idea. Another way of saying "personification of an idea," of course, is "brand," and Paris is most certainly concerned with the Paris brand. That's what it is legitimate to tie up everything else Paris with the album, which is after all just another arm of the brand strategy, to say nothing of the fact that she consistently references the outside mythos in the lyrics. The more Paris can be rendered as an abstraction, the more the Paris brand grows, because the more abstract something is, the more situations it can be comfortably placed in--or, rather, on.[5]

The specific locus of this abstraction in "Fightin' Over Me" is the vocals. Not the content of the vocals, but the actual sound of the vocals. Let's go back to the guest raps for a moment.[6] On the second one, the vocals have been processed so it has this very specific, physical quality about it, which is almost jarringly out of place on such a generic track. But you listen to it and it sounds exactly like he's recording the vocals in a parking garage. You can hear the texture of the concrete in that, the words bouncing off rebar and glass and chrome. This is Jadakiss, standing in a parking garage, rapping at you. The rap's an abstraction, but he's not: he's "everywhere I turn around boys" narrowed to just one, you know, for the sake of argument.

Whereas Paris, here and on the rest of the album, doesn't actually sound like Paris. The vocals are so layered that what you get is not Paris' voice, but something that instead points at Paris' voice without actually sounding like it. I'm not saying this in a "ooh fakey McFakerton" way. It's just that we know what Paris' voice sounds like: we've heard it on TV and in movies and I guess conceivably on the radio. And you can't actually pick out that voice in the voice that's on the album. It's definitely back there somewhere, but every time you feel close to catching it, you realize it's gone. Again, I don't mean this as a criticism of the album--I think the vocals sound great, they totally fit the songs, and it's clearly Paris singing there, they've just treated it, as they do for all vocals on recordings to a greater or lesser extent. But it's very much not the voice that we're so used to hearing.

Normally when you seek to render an icon you do so by reducing it: take a human and make it a black blob on a bathroom door, take metal and make it devil horns. This is normally what Paris does to create Paris. But here, we instead have abstraction created by making more. There are so many Parises that they blur into a different Paris, a more iconic one. When you're listening to music, certain decisions have already been made about what you're going to listen to, but even within those choices, you can choose to focus your ear on one particular element or other. With so many Parises, she gives you a range of options to choose from. Which Paris do you want to focus on now? The sexy one, the quiet one, the tuneful one? Paris is all these things, and more. Paris is whatever you want her to be. She is not just a dude standing in a parking garage, but is free-floating, suggestive rather than specific. She leaves it up to you.[7]

The point, as with all pop music, is not the big differentiations, which are never actually differentiations at all, but the small ones,[8] and Paris' careful devotion to a familiar sound makes these small differentiations all the more noticeable. People don't actually want to know about Paris Hilton as a human being. They enjoy her being this iconic blonde, because she makes ideas flesh, and therefore something we can incorporate into our lives more easily. We can't stand around talking about privilege and inheritance and sexuality and women in the abstract, because that is pretentious. Paris gives us all a common frame of reference in which to have these discussions. If she exhibited characteristics out of line with the iconic image of her, we would be forced to deal with her as a human being and she would thus be less useful for discussions, since there would be things outside this image we all want to argue about, complexities and ambiguities and things like that.

With her music, then, she's given us an album that sounds exactly like what you'd expect a Paris Hilton album to sound like. You settle into the songs with no particular surprises, like an old friend, and this quick acclimation (essential to good pop) allows you to immerse yourself in the details all the more easily. The songs are not mysteries. They're not cohesive wholes that seem impenetrable. There they are, Scott Storch beats and Paris singing about Paris. And so we can get into them more. They're not trying to keep us at a distance, despite their seemingly impersonal auras; they want to draw us in as quickly as possible, and they want us to get to know them. It's a flirtatious conversation at a bar with someone you've just met, quick and pleasurable and laced with exactly as much significance as you want to assign it. When you really get to know a person, you get too caught up in all the details you know about them, but when you've only had one or two fairly intense encounters with someone, the unique details tend to stick much better. Paris is pop music that's happy about being pop music; it wants to give you pleasure, and it wants you to see what's going on. No games, no lies. Or, maybe, whatever lie you want.

************

[1] And if Paris Hilton had made an electroclash album, it would have been the best fucking electroclash album ever made, because she plays for real what electroclash made merely a running gag. Was Paris Hilton imitating Miss Kitten or just tapping into the same cultural archetype? Regardless, Paris perfected the role, giving it a breadth and reach the static-plated Nicoisms of EC couldn’t touch. Marry that mastery to some great production—hook her up with the Ghostly roster, say—and you would have, as I say, the apogee of a genre, and conceivably its (sooner) salvation. Sooner because mocked though it most certainly was, the ripple effect of electroclash will be immense and much-studied some years hence.
[2] In practice this seems to entail a lot of loops of acoustic instruments, which is interesting insofar as this would normally indicate something far more respectable than Paris' album.
[3] Some things sound manufactured because people confuse something sounding like a currently popular song with something being made to sound like a currently popular song, whereas there is in fact an important difference.
[4] Well, for one thing, apparently a lot of white people are making an artistic decision to make music that sounds ordinary right now, except they phrase it as "sounding like Bruce Springsteen." I'm not being snarky here: they really are saying they want to make basic, solid rock music, no? This is ordinary, no? Just like regular folks, right?
[5] The interesting thing about the brand is that it doesn't seem to be about the money. Paris has money, lots and lots of money--that's part of the brand--so growing the brand seems to be done purely for its own sake. It's as if all the marketing-guru rhetoric about brands from the 90s finally found a pure religious vehicle, unsullied by the need to actually turn a profit.
[6] Oops, forgot to mention this earlier, but seriously, those things are practically bricolage, fuck. It's not even like you'd expect to hear on a "OK we need a rap here" verse, which would be a sort of hilarious imitation of rapping, sanitized or hopelessly out-of-it. ("Space Jam" springs to mind for some reason.) But the raps here are decidedly au courant, with all the references you'd expect to hear in a regular hip-hop track. Except it's a Paris Hilton song, which is why I get that particular flown-in quality.
[7] It's been noted before, of course, that while it's tempting to criticize or make fun of Paris, this ultimately just plays into her hands, but consider it in these terms: by talking about Paris when you don't actually know Paris, you are making her more and more an icon, more an more an untethered discourse.
[8] Ignoring this basic fact has made so many recent musical debates into pointless exercises of bluster. A particular piece of pop music, no matter how superficially new, is never more than one step removed from some other piece of pop music, so, popular rhetoric aside, the Strokes, say, weren't worthy of attention because of their unique sound--the fact that they sounded like a fairly narrow range of bands from a fairly narrow historical era wasn't what made them interesting or good, it was just what they were, and there wasn't anything wrong with that; every band sounds like other bands. What made them interesting and good was the choices they made within that sound, and if discussion had focused more on the latter than on the former, maybe music right now wouldn't feel like a series of fads with which we are expected to quickly become disgusted.

Labels: celebrity, paris, pop, production, vocals

posted by Mike B. @ 1:00 AM 2 Comments