I have a very grumpy review of the new Go! Team
at Flagpole. There's also
one of The Ladybug Transistor from a few weeks back. The latter asks some thinky-thinky questions regular readers might be interested in.
But to say something is cliché doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad. You can put on an old disco album today and hear all its overdone elements as glorious and electrifying, either because time allows us to appreciate the sound outside of its historical context or because it was really good all along. Could this happen with our modern indie music? Could, one day, its corduroy comfortability and its affectless pathology sound vital and important? Is the preponderance of its clichés evidence not of laziness but of quality replicating itself organically?
Labels: flagpole, go team, ladybug transistor, reviews
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Post will be up shortly--it'll be the EMP paper, but I'm working on some additions that may end up being longer than the paper itself, whoops. Stay tuned. Paper is now up, sans italicizing
and most music files, which will have to come later.
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Please see the note at the beginning of the paper--can anyone covert Quicktime files so my 1-minute clip isn't 200+meg? Lemme know and I can give you an FTP login or something, it'd be a huge help. Thanks
Eric!
- I have some review
in Flagpole this week:
The Rosebuds, and an Athens band who I love to death called
Telenovela. Here's
their MySpace if you want to check out the toonz; three of their best songs are there.
- I also had
a review of LCD Soundsystem a couple weeks back that I think I missed, talking about the album in terms of sequencing, as well as
a review of Adult.
- And yet more reviews in the new issue of
Under the Radar, though I don't entirely remember of what. Cornelius and the Danielson DVD for sure; also Bang Gang and...uh...well, I can't remember. Anyway, they're not online.
- Great, broad post about EMP at
Dial M for Musicology:
So what looks like soulless professionalism to people outside of academia
is really just a way of keeping things interesting. Still, things have gotten to
the point where aesthetic advocacy (i.e., saying something is awesome) is
considered not only unprofessional but wrong. Saying Wagner is awesome -- or,
for instance, pointing to the opening contrabassoon E-flat of Das Rheingold and
discussing how all the exfoliating little figures that grow out of that one note
create a musical image for creation itself and then saying now that's awesome --
seems politically regressive. I've written about this
suspicion of aesthetic pleasure before. But what struck me about the EMP pop
conference was how most of its participants seemed to be pretty comfortable
geeking out on their topics, and that the fanboy tone that crept into the
sessions didn't make them any less intellectually stimulating.
"Suspicion of aesthetic pleasure"? Uh oh.
Labels: academia, emp, flagpole, musicology, notes, reviews, utr
I was taking a break from work this afternoon when I realized that, at that very moment, Aly & AJ were scheduled to play at the Samsung Experience store. The Samsung Experience store, for those of you unfamiliar, is this weird thing in the TimeWarner Center, i.e. the weird mall at Columbus Circle, where you don't buy anything, you just sort of wander around and try Samsung stuff. Very conceptual. But, more importantly, very close to my job, and so since I was taking a break anyway, I figured I'd head over. Let's get the fanboy stuff out of the way first: they said they were just in NYC for a day, as they had a new album coming out July 10 (my birthday, also Jessica Simpson's, hey) and were spending all their time in LA, "playing around in the studio" and finishing it up. There was the suggestion that they were going to play new songs, but they didn't. They played "Something More," "Rush," "Into the Blue," and "Chemicals React," which got the biggest welcome from the almost entirely tween (and almost entirely white and asian) audience. It was recently one of their birthdays, and said recent birthday girl also just got her driver's license, having turned 16. There was a hand drum solo on "Into the Blue." They mentioned it was a strange show for them, and it was. I've no idea how attendence was handled (I just wandered in), but the store is fairly small, and while there was a seating section, there wasn't much overflow. There can't have been more than a couple hundred people in there, and they usually play to large crowds. Also, it was an acoustic performance--just Aly, AJ, and some other dude with a fedora, all playing acoustic guitar. This is notable because, if you were not aware, Aly & AJ are pure Disneypop, packaged and marketed and all those horrible things. So, by conventional wisdom, they should've had a hard time playing an acoustic set to a small crowd, being used to studio trickery and whizz-bang light shows etc. etc. Suffice to say they did not. Allow me to put it plainly: holy shit, they could sing. And I don't mean "sing at all," I mean "sing really fucking well." I even checked the soundboard, and nope, no Autotune, no magic gremlins or whatever the fuck it is people think pop singers have. Even if there was, there's no way it could've reproduced this sound, which was just two female voices singing like hell, really powerful and controlled. They were so strong that it made me realize how much the power of those songs, which I thought were working a Pixies/Nirvana quiet-loud-quiet thing in the arrangements, stem solely from the vocals. They hold back and sing single lines in the verses, go a little stronger in the prechoruses and bridges, and when the chorus hits they bust out with these belted harmonies that hit like hell. You can tell they're good singers from their recorded output and all, but live, they show that they're great singers, better than almost anyone else I've heard in terms of pure power and technique. More than that, though, they took that small crowd and actually worked it. They talked with the crowd, made self-depricating jokes, bantered with the crowd, complimented people on their homemade banners, the whole thing. It was a Samsung show, sure, but they could've done the same thing just as effectively (maybe more so) at a coffeeshop or a small club. They were professionals, but not in a Krusty-taping-voiceover-lines kinda way. They had the ability to hold a crowd's attention and put it at ease, letting their personalities come through and showing that their personalities were pretty damn affable. All of which put me in mind of
an article in this week's New York Times Magazine about tween shows on Nickelodeon. It's a fantastic piece, and well worth a read, but here's the particular part the Aly & AJ show reminded me of:
I watched in vain for any hint of cynicism on the...set, any trace of the corporate imperative to get these kids to simulate innocence no matter how miserable they were. Schneider’s prime directive — “Kids win” — is an element not just of the fictional Nick universe but of the real one as well. Not once in three days of taping did I encounter a pushy stage mom; nowhere did anyone break out in tears for any reason at all. Even the extras exhibited none of the restlessness or aspirational smart-mouthing you might expect. The crew didn’t grumble about the kids (they were busy passing around a Super Bowl betting sheet), and the kids were undemanding pros. A live goat was present in a house-party scene, and when, inevitably, it had an accident on the set, the kids cringed and screamed, but they did not leave their marks.We forget that professionalism exists for a lot of reasons, and one of them--probably the biggest one, in practice--is to make everyone's jobs easier. Certainly there are people up there at the top slicing demographics and plotting large-scale strategy, but at the end of the day that strategy has to be executed by a number of actual human beings, the vast majority of whom share the common goal of wanting to get to the end of the day feeling OK. Professionalism exists so that, when a goat poops--and, as anyone who's worked a job can tell you, a goat always poops--everything doesn't break down. It may, arguably, function as a system of control for those under its sway, a nefarious influence that stifles creativity and encourages artificiality, but it mainly works to allow things to run smoothly. That's what I saw at the Aly & AJ show. If they weren't good singers and decent guitar players and great performers--and if they hadn't practiced a hell of a lot to become those things--the whole event would have been far less pleasant, for everyone. It doesn't really make much sense for pop stars not to be good at all aspects of what they do, because, let's be honest, there are lots of pretty people out there, but very few pretty people who can sing well. That's one of the reason Disney has been so successful with music and TV: whether you like their style or not, they insist on quality.
It also put me in mind of something I wrote a while back that I think I neglected to menion here:
an article about the professionalization of indie. At the time I wrote it, I think I meant that to be an indictment (I was pretty grumpy around the new year), but: consider
this. It's band camp, but for pop stars! You audition and you go and they give you "fitness training" and then maybe you can become a national recording audience! It's really amazingly fantastic, and the sort of thing you don't think could actually exist until it actually does. And far from ruining the music it's training you for, it would seem to enhance it, giving kids the technical training to do what they do, better.
So maybe a better way of thinking about it is that the professionalization of indie just makes it the same as everything else. They're all controlled industries, local economies spread out on a global scale. And if you're OK with indie, then you might as well be OK with the methods and machinery of pop. It's all the same shit; it's just that Aly & AJ are, well, better. Or they were today, at any rate.
Labels: disney, flagpole, pop, teenpop
- I have a piece in Flagpole this week
on Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! It's working similar themes as the article I linked in the post above, but maybe makes the negative points a bit more clearly and specifically. The comments I've gotten so far seem to be missing the point, which is essentially the 4th paragraph.
- The likihood of there not being a post next week is fairly high, as I will be preparing for
my EMP presentation. If you're going to be in Seattle next weekend, say hi!
Labels: emp, flagpole, notes
- Due to some, ah, internal problems at the clapclap household, the above has not been edited as well as it should, so if you're one of the early birds, you're likely to see a different version later tomorrow. I'm sure there are any number of errors both factual and grammatical in there right now, but they'll be gone soon enough. If this bothers you, click your heels together three times and say, "It's only a blog..."
- Today's post was partially a reaction to a review of
The Sarah Silverman Program by Tad Friend, in
The New Yorker. You can
read it here. As a whole, it's good, but some of the the things he says along the way are absolutely baffling. For instance, he writes:
Sarah’s crowd punishes sexual indeterminacy: when she suddenly decides that she’s a lesbian, everyone scoffs. 'As a lesbian, I resent your laughter,' Sarah says. 'And all laughter.' Is the joke about identity politics? Lesbians? Or is it on us: So you think lesbians are humorless? At times, you wonder whether you’re laughing with Silverman or at her, and then you realize that she’s laughing at you.
The last point is good, but as for what comes before: dude,
it's a joke about lesbians. Trust me on this, I went to Oberlin. I've heard that joke before.
- I have
two reviews in Flagpole this week, of local Athens bands King of Prussia and The 63 Crayons. The latter will hopefully be interesting even if you haven't heard the band, but the former is actually about music, and it's very positive. I reference the New Pornographers, and that's quite intentional; it's baffling to me why bands are imitating other indie bands but not that one. Well, King of Prussia, intentionally or not, sound like the New Pornographers, and I couldn't be happier about it. Their CD, only seven songs ong, is absolutely wonderful, and I really hope they get some wider attention.
Here is their Myspace page, where you can hear two of their best songs: "Terrarium" and "Misadventures of the Campaign Kids." If you like the New Pornographers, or good guitar-pop in general, you should really check them out. (Ha, and I see they have now changed their motto. Thanks guys!)
Labels: critics, flagpole, king of prussia, notes, reviews, The New Yorker
