Thursday, May 10, 2007
This:
Yes, Paris Hilton was there. And yes, Lovefoxx dedicated "Meeting Paris Hilton" to her. Hilton stood on a riser next to the stage and danced through most of CSS' set, which included their cover of L7's "Pretend We're Dead".
I repeat: Paris Hilton danced to CSS covering L7. You could not possibly invent a more flabbergasting third-wave feminist mindfuck. Oh wait-- apparently Courtney Love was there, too.
Plus
this:
Paris Hilton reportedly has turned to the one man she feels can keep her from serving a 45-day prison sentence: The Governator.
The Simple Life star and hotel heiress -- who was sentenced to 45 days in jail for violating her probation on a September 2006 drunken driving misdemeanor on Friday -- posted a message on her MySpace.com page on Monday that urges fans to petition California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to ask that she be pardoned.
Equals
this plus
this plus what's in the "About" box at the top-right corner of this page here. It's the moment when Paris officially becomes the Courtney Love of the 00s, which says something about the 00s, but anyway it was nice of Court to be there to pass the baton.
Paris before seemed to be actively working to draw attention to her, so that even events that would generally be considered to have originated from someone besides Paris, like the sex tape leak, were assumed to have been engineered by her in some way. But now she's hit escape velocity, overcome the static friction of fame, and so things are now drawn to her, explicitly without her having anything to do with it, and she's now able to respond to things rather than creating them in the first place, which is the more interesting place of meaning-making as I see it. Interestingly, this is because she actively courted fame; Courtney, because she was more ambivalent about it (or, rather, wanted fame on
her terms, since she distrusted her own ability to manage her fame, whereas Paris has always seemed happy to take fame as it comes), attracted independent actors much more quickly than Paris did, perhaps because her reluctance to fully embrace the spotlight indicated that she had something to hide. Paris didn't seem to hide anything.[1]
But now she's overcome that handicap, because she's entered into an arena where your participation matters little, if at all: politics! In terms of reality, she should clearly go to jail (get a driver, girl!), but in terms of, you know, art, she's getting into the spirit of the game well after a slow start, with the appeal to Arnold and all. Of course, Arnold will say no, but it's interesting that it's at least plausible, and that context has been created by Arnold himself, who was certainly in at least the same league, spoiled-celebrity-wise (his salvation coming at the hands of politics--you see?), as Paris, and so can be assumed to harbor some sort of sympathy. There's the movie paradigm of "well now she's gone and made trouble for us, how are we gonna handle this, boss?" but also the real-world context of the performance of fame and the community of celebrities that Paris has recognized Arnold straddles the line between it and politics; he's the bridge from parties to jail, and she's trying to get him to lift the drawbridge. It's a brilliant move, even, or especially, if it doesn't work, because it's saying something about the governor that we've mostly forgotten.
All in all, I think it means we have to think about Paris differently now; we can argue about whether her "handlers" (who?) are doing it or she is, but let's say Paris and whether we mean the brand or the woman, it's now a fully self-possessed force.
Oh, and the first thing is great because it contradicts my point in the CSS post. By staying true to the spirit of the original, insofar as "Meeting Paris Hilton" was true to the spirit of Paris rather than mocking her or appropriating her, ends up making
more meaning because it's attracted the presence of the original, and the original next to the cover is almost always an interesting thing. It conveys a blessing--which implies a superiority--but also shows the differences, and the proximity allows ideas to richochet off each other in a much more heated way than they could otherwise, and when you add Courtney, well, that's just about critical mass. Point taken.
[1] Even if, the more you consider her, the less sure you are about her.
Labels: convergence, courtney love, css, paris, politics
Thursday, March 8, 2007
A disappointment, but only because it sets itself up to be one. Covering the L7 hit, they get it so right in the beginning, when they (intentionally, I presume) use the same keyboard sound found on Elastica's "Connection," and then on the bridge they conjure a legitimate dance breakdown before going back into a version of the hook that utterly transforms the hard rock into synth-pop. It's brilliant, highlighting the thread that connects dour 90s indie to shiny 00s indie, the same one that turned riot grrl, the genre from which "Pretend We're Dead" originates, into Le Tigre's synth-prop, coaxing the part of grunge that danced alone in its bedroom into the light. It's really smart, and genuinely revelatory.
But what follows the two parts I've highlighted above obliterates all those new meanings, because then the guitar comes in, and the guitarist has decided to use the exact same distortion sound you'll find in the original version of the song. It runs over the more delicate synth bits and drowns them out, making the cover into karaoke, where it can't help but fail. Where once it was a reinvention, now it's merely a gesture. "Look! The 90s!"
Call it the oppression of the original. You see this all the time: bands do a cover and feel the need to be faithful, but that's only useful when you're introducing people to the original, and that's not really why any bands except for famous ones do covers. Everyone else does a cover to draw people into your show by giving the audience something recognizable, and so, the thinking goes, if you don't play a cover exactly like it was originally, no one will recognize it, and so there's no point. Bands often approach playing covers as a technical exercise, and while that can be productive--you figure out how to make your instrument sound like the one does in the original, and maybe you've never made it sound like that before; maybe you can make it sound like that on some of your own songs--technical exercises aren't really much fun to listen to. More than anything else, though, bands cover songs they like, and they think that changing the song would be disrespectful; it's OK to do that to cheesy 80s songs, but not, you know, Jawbreaker or some shit.
If I could figure out why this attitude persists (and it absolutely does--check out any tribute album you care to, and a minimum of 75% of the entries will be "respectful"), I would do a full post about it, but I can't, so I just have a catchy name for it. RIP Baudrillaud and all, but if we're going to accept that we're in an age of reproduction, surely the original shouldn't continue to have this much power. The oppression of the original persists because our assumptions about artistic production and the purity thereof persist. And yet they're breaking down. Artists own their own creations and should have a say over their use, and yet when they say that they'd rather their albums not be downloaded for free, this is counter-revolutionary. We live in the midst of an embarassment of digital riches and instead of harvesting from what's around us, we deem that inauthentic and coo over the handmade, as if hands on a metal needle really differs from hands on a plastic mouse. The cover is the place where this is most apparent, but arguably the original's hegemony is what accounts for a lot of the problems we see right now. Time to go!
Labels: css, pop, theory, value added
Thursday, February 8, 2007
- If you haven't heard the new Avril Lavigne song yet, you should. Lots of interesting voice things in there (the reverbed stutter leadin in the chorus, the differing degrees of overdubbing), and the way the production meshes with the emotional tone of the song is fantastic--check out the way the bass plays sustained notes in the prechorus that makes it drift before being caught by the riff and increased low-end in the chorus. That bottom just hits you in the chest, and it's like Avril's a ghost ninja attacking you from all directions or something.
- As a bonus, here are my comments for Pazz & Jop, partially because it just came out, but also because they involve Paris. For the record, I don't entirely feel this way anymore, at least not in the broad sense, but I do still think it's notable that the "important" albums of last year seemed to offer so little to talk about.
***************
You know it's a bad year for music when the most urgently-discussed subjects all concern the music industry: Tower going under, rap sales crashing, Disney selling (a fact noted but not really, you know, investigated), alt-weekly consolidation (hi dere!), and of course the neverending debate about MP3s, which has pretty much entered its perpetual-motion phase. This wouldn't be a problem if the connection was actually made between economic factors and the art that results, but everybody's too tied to their position right now to admit anything that might weaken it, and so of course we spiral ever-downward toward making pop music--and writing about it--a hobbyist's field.
Despite rock nation's loud insistence that they're entitled to free downloads come hell or high water, we're still told that live performance, not those unvaluable studio records, is the true metric of a band's worth. CSS, for instance, got framed as hipster poseurs led by a svengali drummer, right up until they like totally tore it up at the P-Fork fest. We are shamed into sincerity again: their clever referential humor is icky until it's drowned out by pure rockingness.
God seems to be using said Internet to drive home that our crutches of authenticity have been knocked away, but instead of embracing the new real, we ceaselessly attempt to recreate the real of the past. Dragonforce, an even more cartoonish metal act than Dethklok, stages a Guitar Hero tournament on their tour bus, and that's a far better mirror of reality than their concerts. But we cling to the NWOBHM cosplay still, auditioning for a supergroup on national TV with consultants dictating our appearance and convention dictating that we loudly insist how much we want this patently worthless prize, because we are the most dedicated to real rock. Yeah, we saw what happened to the realest person, Zayra, a Puerto Rican girl who proudly donned the most outlandish outfits those consultants could find and sung "pop (ugh)" songs with more honest passion than anyone else could manage. Zayra was seen as ridiculous, but rock is not ridiculous. Rock serious! Rock real! And so Zayra lost the battle of rock. In a genre with no future, who wants to be a loser, too?
We look at rock's bloated corpse and decide that the best thing for it is more histrionic emotion. Bernie's not dead! Look, he's vomiting onstage out of pure sadness! AP gave him 4 stars! Our choices are clear: win the battle, like whatshisface with the frosted tips, and seize a lifetime supply of guitar picks from Musician's Friend or lose the battle, like Zayra (although being a hot chick will get you through several rounds, assuming Tommy Lee is a judge and Gilby Clark doesn't remind you he used to be a feminist), and spend the war being pecked to death by defenders of the faith wearing studded armbands but resembling nothing so much as the adults in Footloose. No dancing! No playing around! No gay shit!
Given all this negativity, my list might seem odd. But all this negativity is precisely why The Rapture is there: they made the most optimistic album of 2006, sometimes arguably to the music's detriment, and I admire that level of dedication. They weren't floating the usual "everything will be alright" bullshit balloon; instead, they went with the much more difficult "everything is already alright," eschewing the former's quasi-Christian "there will be peace in the next life" excuse-mongering for an exhortation to live in the moment. It's a sentiment that shouldn't have been hard to find in pop music, but in 2006 it sure was.
Speaking of negativity, and living in the moment, let's discuss Paris Hilton. I soured on music for a while this year--though in fairness, I soured on everything for a while there this year--and so about a month ago, when I realized it was time to start wrapping the year up, I got myself all the notable albums I'd missed: TVOTR, Justin, Nelly Furtado, Joanna Newsom (which is horrible by the way--the internet owes me $13.99), etc. But the one that stuck was Paris. I understood why people would have a kneejerk reaction to her: Paris is a pretty loathsome creature, the child molestation of our cultural life. (We know it's wrong, but we just can't help it!) But the album has a few non-Disney things going for it. First it was one of the few pop albums not trying to be something else this year. I love Timbo and all but if he's going to keep melding singers to his "I am so much better than pop" beats, he needs to get someone else in to make sure half the vocals don't suck; it's no accident that when the camera pans across Prince's apartment in Purple Rain it catches SHEET MUSIC for as-yet-unrecorded songs. Gnarls Barkley had Danger Mouse being all "ooh, I'm subversive," which I think we've heard enough times now to realize it's code for "I care more about you thinking I'm cool than about making music you enjoy." Hell, even the American Idol winners were making intentionally retro albums of crooner and gospel music. But not Paris. She was extending her brand, and that worked great with pop. Paris is about pleasure, so what point would a Paris album be if it did not please you?
Plus, it was more up-front lyrically than most anything else. Where indie intentionally obfuscated its simple sentiments in order to seem more mysterious and rappers talked about living the good life in tones that suggested they weren't happy about it at all, Paris sang songs that didn't hide: this is about how Nicole is a total bitch, this is about how I enjoy sex, this is a shout-out to the people helping me make this album. Plus, when the fourth wave of ska rolls around, we'll get to hear "Stars are Blind" covered like 50,000 times.
So but does this--souring on music and missing albums, I mean, not liking Paris, although you can count that too--mean that you shouldn't trust my list? Probably. But a little critical skepticism, as opposed to critical disengagement, is good, no?
And so here we are: vaguely disgruntled, but also a little gruntled, disengaged the more we try and address specifics but more than willing to roll around in the broad strokes. We don't know where the hell we're going, and that's scary, so we try and hold the high ground or at least profess to absent ourselves from the fight. The truth will out--probably--but in the meantime, it's a little too gray for my tastes.
Labels: avril, css, notes, paris, pazz jop, pop, rapture, rock, rock star, teenpop, village voice, year-end
