Oh my god pianos!

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 French cooking, in an absurdly reductionist and outdated version, but what are metaphors for anyway--French cooking centers around sauces, which are a whole bunch of different ingredients mixed together into a whole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

posted by Mike B. @ 3:57 PM 1 Comments