Somehow We Missed Out

Last year Eric over at Marathonpacks wrote a post about Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa." It was a good piece, but it had a weird effect on me: it made me hate a song I had, until reading the piece, pretty much liked. This is neither because his post was criticizing the song--quite the opposite--or because the post itself was bad. The problem is, in a nutshell, that Eric's right. He focused on one particular line: "this feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel too." Now, for those unfamiliar with the song, it borrows heavily from Afropop, a genre that, to be extremely and unfairly reductionary, exists in the same general ballpark as the production on Peter Gabriel's "Biko" and Paul Simon's Graceland. So when I first heard the song, the line popped out, as lines with proper nouns always do, and I liked that it seemed to be making a self-deprecating comment about the song in progress, admitting its derivative nature.

But I never much listened to the rest of the lyrics, and given that Eric did, I'm going to go with his interpretation. He argues--convincingly, I think--that it wasn't just a self-conscious admission of derivativeness, but a way of beating critics to the punch, not about being derivative, but about appropriating. The song contained its own prediction about reaction to the song, and the assumed reaction went like this: critic hears song, critic recognizes debt to Afropop, critic looks at demographic characteristics of band members (as well as the first two words of the song's title), and critic roundly decries band for stealing the sound of third-world artists.

The first problem with this: I remain unconvinced that anyone would have actually had the above reaction, absent that particular line. Afropop, after all, clearly borrows from Western music, so it seems like cultural fair trade to me; theoretically, it's more troublesome for a band to appropriate, say, gamelan music than it is to borrow a sound that's already half-rock. In effect, the line created the controversy, making their musical choices into a problematic move that needed to be defended, and once it needed to be defended, then it could be attacked. While I can like the band for this, given that the song is effectively trying to bait me when all I wanted to do was play it in my car to remind me of summer...well, that makes it way less enjoyable.

But the other problem, and the more important problem, is that it's dealing with this issue in an incredibly clumsy way. Eric brought up Sasha Frere-Jones' piece on indie rock's whiteness, and while I hesitate to once again assult a practically mummified corpse, it's worth reiterating my initial response: that though its reasoning may be flawed, it makes a good point. His argument has been reduced in the popular consciousness to essentially "indie rockers are racist lol," but what's lost is the idea that indie used to be much more comfortable incorporating influences outside itself. At the end of the day, this isn't a point about race but about the idea of "appropriation." Eric also invokes Carl Wilson's response, which pegs it as a class issue, and that's certainly relevent with Vampire Weekend, but again, I'm not sure how much of this is something that would've actually been an issue unless it was being foregrounded so aggressively, to the point of being almost self-flagellating. It was a criticism in the air far before Carl brought it up, precisely because of the bands Eric lists as sonic cousins to Vampire Weekend: the Strokes and the Walkmen. At the end of the day, the Peter Gabriel line seems more defensive than insistent, and the issues of race and class are canards papering over the broader artistic issue of appropriation.

So let's talk about appropriation for a minute, and let's try and talk about it free of these other issues. And yes, I think that's a valid thing to do. At the moment of creation, art is like sex: when the lights are out, it doesn't matter who you're with, as long as it feels right. If, for whatever reason, a style or a sound or a technique or an idea meshes with what you're trying to do as an artist, you use it. That's one of the reasons art exists: to make other art possible. I sincerely think that anyone who has enough love of art to become a critic or a fan should agree that anyone can take from anything. And unless you're a folk artist, you're going to have to take from other things, because all art is, at least partially, appropriation.

What matters, then, is not what you're appropriating from, but how you do it. If you properly acknowledge your influence, and perhaps give some sort of help to the artists being appropriated from, there's really no problem, at least morally. (Artistically, it can be really lazy, but that's for another post.) This is why that line bugs me so much now: I didn't have any problems with an indie band sounding like Afropop (it's a great idea, actually), so to be essentially told by the song itself that I should have a problem seems incredibly dishonest, and not a little cowardly. In its attempt to dictate the terms of my response, Vampire Weekend is expressing fear that their art will be taken in the wrong way. But good art is always free to be taken the wrong way, because good art can be taken in many different ways, and once it's released to the public, the artist really doesn't have any control over that. The band's gotten themselves so worked up about people possibly calling them colonialists or what-fucking-ever that they come across as insecure and unwilling to stand behind what they've made. I don't have much interest in people who aren't willing to let their work stand on its own.

A comparison might help here. In my piece on LCD Soundsystem's "North American Scum," I said that certain lines function as "establishing credentials," which is another way of saying that James Murphy is insisting on his right to say what he's about to say. This is a cousin to Vampire Weekend's technique, but instead of pre-emption, James Murphy's trying to move beyond the basic terms of a debate to a larger point that he'd like to make. Unlike Vampire Weekend, he's not justifying his basic right to artistic expression, which for him goes without saying[1]. This sort of self-consciousness is endemic to LCD Soundsystem's whole aesthetic, of course--even in their first song, "Losing My Edge," the narrator was careful to establish his credentials as an elder statesman before making his critique, and you could write a good piece cataloguing the little self-conscious nods all over Sound of Silver (say, in the title track itself). So where Vampire Weekend's nod is defensive, an attempt at cutting off debate (that of course really serves to cause a debate, albeit one that they themselves view as illegitimate), Murphy's self-consciousness is a bit more heroic, a way of driving things forward, to more complexity and more appropriation, not less. But at the end of the day, of course, it's still self-consciousness.

If we really want to see why Vampire Weekend's defensiveness--a defensiveness that is, I think, endemic to modern pop[2]--is so problematic, let's look at the Scissor Sisters. Specifically, let's look at their song "Mary." "Mary" is an Elton John/Billy Joel piano ballad. I don't think Jake Shears or Babydaddy would deny that. But there's nothing in that song to acknowledge the fact that they're appropriating from this debased source, no "this feels so familiar / Bernie Taupin too." Jake Shears gets up there and sings a sincere set of lyrics about someone he sincerely loves, and he sings them with absolute conviction. And as such, it works in the exact same way as an Elton John / Billy Joel piano ballad does.

This is no small feat. You can dislike the song--you should dislike the song--but "Candle in the Wind" sold how many fucking copies? It's reasonable to think people responded so strongly to that song because it powerfully expressed a particular emotion that they related to. And "Mary," again, functions in exactly this same way. What this means is that by appropriating something without apologizing for it or being defensive about it, the Scissor Sisters were able to engage with it not as sonic wallpaper but as a full phenomenon, as something that not only sounds a certain way and comes with certain connotations but that also expresses an emotional truth and artistic beauty. Doesn't that seem like a richer and more rewarding way of doing things?

But of course, then there's the how. Keeping in mind, as always, that the Scissor Sisters began as an electroclash band (e.g. irony taken to infinity), I think we can say that their use of the piano ballad derives strongly from camp, an ideology that makes explicit the claim that anything can be appropriated. Practicioners of camp might appreciate things in different ways than the object's primary audience does, but the appreciation is rooted in a true affection, not in derision, condescension, or exoticism. Basically, camp appropriates what it thinks is awesome.

How is it able to do this? Well, camp comes from a gay perspective, and it's fair to say that it generally appropriated mass culture artifacts aimed at a heterosexual audience. Camp was able to borrow because camp's practicioners were in a subordinate cultural position to the things it was appropriating. The "how" is determined by power relations.

So maybe Carl's right--maybe this does come down to class. After all, indie rockers never feel like they come from a subordinate cultural position, even when they do[3], and so from that perspective, there's nothing they can appropriate except things created by other indie rockers. Right?

Let me suggest another model.



The first thing you'll notice about the above scene, the finale of the pilot episode of Paul Feig's Freaks and Geeks, is the soundtrack: "Come Sail Away," by Styx. It may be impossible to find a more culturally debased song, one steeped more heavily in irony, condescension, and derision, than "Come Sail Away." For fuck's sake, it popped up on the cultural radar recently because it was covered by South Park's Eric Cartman as a horrible song he was unable to stop singing. So if you saw this scene out of context, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was an ironic use intended to make fun of the ridiculousness of school dances during that particular time period. The present-day meaning of "Come Sail Away" is akin to bell-bottoms or shoebox-sized portable phones.

That's not what the show's doing, though. Lindsay, here helpfully representing indie nation, has started hanging out with the cool kids and thus thinks that going to a dance is lame. Her views would most closely mirror ours: she thinks the music is bad, the social scene is fake, and the whole enterprise is a joke. She's not happy to be there, and it's hard to imagine her being happy that Styx is playing. Meanwhile, her awkward brother Sam doesn't have any particular aesthetic objection to the idea of a school dance, but is trying to work up the nerve to ask a girl to dance with him.

In the scene, three things happen. First, thinking the song is a slow dance, Sam ask the girl, and she says yes. Just as Sam awkardly extends his hands to her in a "how does this work?" kind of way, as they're about to start dancing--a moment Sam has been planning for and dreading for some time--the song kicks up into the "rock" part. Sam looks around, surprised, terrified, unsure of what to do; the girl says, "C'mon Sam," a literal invitation to the dance. And so Sam does, unsure at first of what to do, but he gets into it, happy just to be dancing with her, and as the song rises, he passes into a kind of bliss.

Second, Lindsay sees this, and so sees what the song has done for her brother, setting him free from his awkwardness and anxiety and allowing him to express his feelings for this girl in a way that a slow dance couldn't have accomplished. She spies Eli, the weird kid, standing alone across the floor, and goes over to ask him to dance. We don't actually hear her ask the question, just see her lips move as the music transitions from a flutey bridge to the final, seemingly endless, section. As the music goes nuts, they dance, the singer sings about boarding a starship and heading for the skies, and the scene ends with Lindsay and Sam both happy, lost in the music, heading for the skies.

The third thing happens not on-screen, but in our heads. When the song starts, we think, "Ha ha, Styx." As it progresses, we start to notice that it's actually a pretty good song, one that we haven't really listened to closely before. And by the end, we, too, are caught up in the music along with the characters. Like Lindsay, we see what the music is possible of doing, and we start to hear it in a different way. Essentially, the scene is a cover of the song, not only lasting exactly as long as the song, but following the precise emotional arc: slow jam to rock out to flute break to climax, uncertainty to release to exploration to escape. What the scene does isn't use the song so much as allow us to see it in context, to see it as it was originally intended, without the baggage that time has brought to it. It literally makes the song sound new, even though it's the same damn thing it's always been.

This is undeniably appropriation, and it could've been done in a way that devalued the original object. It wasn't. In addition to serving the new artwork itself, it allowed us as the audience to understand the song, contextualizing it (or, arguably, recontextualizing it) so a meaning came through that we were not willing to consider. It made it relatable.

Maybe Vampire Weekend does this for some people--maybe their use of Afropop allows some Western listeners to get the same feeling from the music that listeners do in its original context. But by apologizing in advance, by doing something the original artists never would have had to do, they make that impossile, at least for me. They make it an object of appropriation rather than a recontextualization, a borrowing, or even just an inspiration. What I've tried to suggest with these other examples is that, while there can certainly be issues with appropriation, it's pointless to even do it in the first place if you aren't willing to let the art stand on its own. If it gets criticized, then it gets criticized. But if you have so much respect for the original that you don't want people to think you're misusing it, then do something with it that helps us understand it like you understand it. If you've seen something in an object, bring that out. If it feels right to you, let it happen. I want to see it like you see it--that's why I'm consuming art in the first place--but if you are embarassed about seeing it, then I'm just not interested.

[1] Though, of course, many Murphy moves do work within the framework of justifying or perhaps enhancing his "record collector rock" by referencing things obscure enough to make the people who might criticize him feel recognized; this is an extremely cynical way of putting it, though.
[2] Indie, of course, but think of Kanye West. If he's our Prince--a producer/performer extrordinaire beloved by critics and audiences alike--then he's a remarkably defensive character. Prince exuded a relaxed sense of "I am the most awsome thing ever," an implicit claim made also by the very genius of his music. But Kanye's still got self-esteem problems, has always had self-esteem problems. In a MySpace age, that might be more appealing, but I think it's worse.
[3] There's an intereting point here about how it's not just class but intelligence that creates this feeling, which Carl alludes to when talking about indie's values being derived from a liberal arts education but puts it down as just a cultural difference.

Labels: lcd soundsystem, music, pop, sasha frere-jones, scissor sisters, TV, vampire weekend

posted by Mike B. @ 11:55 AM 7 Comments

North American Scum

Matthew's post today discusses the greatness of LCD Soundsystem's "North American Scum," which I've been meaning to write about for a while. Matthew's right--there are other great songs on the album, and there's a certain connection with them, but NAS is the song whose lyrics are truly, 100% great. It is, at its heart, a very patriotic song, especially if you take patriotism to be a love of where you're from rather than a particular set of gestures and symbols.

I do like "All My Friends" but so many people have clutched it tight to their bosom that it almost makes me a little suspicious about the degree to which it panders to its audience. (Which is fine--I do watch the CW, after all--but it is somewhat contrary to the ideas expressed in the song.) They're much more emotional songs, certainly. But NAS is practically a Leonard Cohen song in its complexity, the twists and turns it undergoes in its verses, and the cross-talk between the verses; it manages to express an ambivalence that tends to get trampled underfoot, and to do so in a song that you perform on Letterman--and have almost no one get it--is maybe what LCD Soundsystem is ultimately all about. So let us examine.

The song can be seen as a speech divided into three sections (the three verses), all serving a central argument that goes something like this: while there are certainly objections you can make to America, the way in which it is often done, especially by Europeans, demonstrates exactly the sort of cultural ignorance of which America is being accused. The first verse establishes his credentials, the second tries to answer some of the criticisms, and the final verse forcefully makes his point, with a caveat or two.

The first verse, as I say, is about establishing his credentials, which is unsurprising for a James Murphy song, but is necessary here, since the opinion he's disputing is that Americans don't care about the rest of the world. And so he makes it very clear that he is speaking as himself, the frontman of LCD Soundsystem, not as a character, by making the "we're from England" joke, which is funny but also clearly identifies the speaker. And as the frontman of LCD Soundsystem, he has seen lots of Europe, having "been on trains...far from North America...where the buildings are old." So he knows what he's talking about; he's not being ignorantly jingoistic here, but has made a reasoned and informed decision.

But in these places where the buildings are old, he has had some frustrating conversations. "I don't know where to begin" with arguing against the things he's heard said. But the problem is, he doesn't know where to begin; in the context of a conversation, there's not time to explain all this, and since there's no commonly-held idea about there that he can refer to, he's at a disadvantage, since his conversational partner can conjure up the "ignorant American" stereotype without even thinking. And so, instead of getting into it, he "makes it go away" by pretending to agree. He "hates the feeling" but knows "we make the same mistakes all over again," and he has places to be; to make his point, it requires, well, a 5-minute song, and that's not something you can just slip into conversation.

So by the end of the first verse, he's established his credentials as someone who's very familiar with Europe, and has established the problem as people making him feel embarassed for being an American, and having no easy way to deal with that situation--thus this song.

The second verse is all about establishing differences--that America is a different place than Europe (for one thing, it's gigantic, although he doesn't say this explicitly), and that you can't then blame people for being different when they've grown up in a different environment. Specifically, it's a bit of a cultural wasteland--the kids want to be culturally vibrant, "want to make the scene," but the resources just aren't there; instead they're reduced to yearners and observers, ones who have "to read it in your magazines," i.e. European magazines. These constantly stress that Europe is important and America is not, that it's a cultural backwater, and because a sort of self-loathing has been cultivated amongst Americans of taste, there's no countervalent force to that, nothing that says that you can have a "party" anywhere. But there are strong institutional forces against it ("the cops come in and bust it up," "my parents got pretty upset"), and so Americans can't move forward, since after all "the more i do it the better it gets." This is a sort of aesthetic criticism of American culture as a whole, arguing that you have to take it on its own terms.

A word, though, on the word "party." In the context of the album, especially "New York I love you," the mentions of parties in the second verse can be seen as a complaint against New York's particular anti-party laws (the cabaret laws, noise ordinences, etc.). But in general, I think you have to read his use of "party" as not specific to parties per se, but as an invocation of an ecstatic state, one that can be found many places besides at a party, but it's a good shorthand.

It's interesting here to read it in the other sense of "party," as a political party, since a lot of anti-Americanism is premised on America's foreign policy being bad. So the second verse becomes an argument that you can't equate America and its president, that there are lots of people who want to be included, but they can't, because of the above-mentioned institutional pressures. We can't start our own party because the cops would bust it up, but just because there's no organized place for expressing our political views doesn't mean they don't exist, or that they're not significant. Being anti-American because of George Bush's policies amounts to its own cultural ignorance, because Americans aren't like that; you're working from a stereotype no more informed than the dirty Frenchman motif. And worse, it actually represents the opposite of the views of the person you're talking to, like calling an OCD man from Paris a dirty Frenchman.

The third verse is so good, and so key, I think it's best taken line-by line.

"New York's the greatest if you get someone to pay the rent." I acknowledge that there are certain class issues in elevating New York City as an argument for America's awesomeness.

"But it's the furthest you can live from the government." Nevertheless, for whatever you want to say about America, you have to acknowledge New York City's existence as a place that contradicts everything you might say about it right smack dab within its borders, a beacon for those scattered around the country who might want to escape the influence of the dominant culture. New York's policies often directly contradict those of the federal government--it welcomes immigrants, it opposes the death penalty, it has its own brand of free condoms, it provides protection for minority rights, and it celebrates the arts. It's a city where everyone is welcome, probably the most cosmopolitan city on earth, and that's a miraculous thing given its geographic distance from Washington. You can't get away from the government's policies in California, but if you're a gay Honduran abortionist who pees on the flag and calls it art, you'll be safe in New York. And New York is just the most visible manifestation of the existence of little pockets of resistence that exist everywhere, pockets that might be more aware of each other's existence if the cultural influences we look up to didn't make it look cool to be ashamed of where you're from, to pretend like you're the only one that gets it. You're not; there's a whole city that does. And you can't just ignore it.

"Some proud American Christians might disagree." I acknowledge that there are Americans who hold abhorrant beliefs, but I disagree with them as well.

"But New York's the only place we're keeping them off the street." It's strange for people who've lived in New York for any amount of time, but people are genuinely intimidated by the city, to the point where they won't even visit. It is overwhelming and confusing, and for people who think that homosexuals, atheists, and feminists live lives of filth and shame, it can be off-putting to see someone who might embody all three of those qualities pushing a double-wide stroller down tree-lined streets and saying hello to their neighbors. (Similarly, it can be off-putting for people who think that most Americans are openly intolerant idiots to engage with the rest of the country.) There are places in America where the Christian worldview dominates, but not in New York. There is a necessary cultural pluralism there, one which doesn't require everyone to be nice to each other, but which admits there are so many different sets of values here that no one set can be enforced. It's a stunning couplet, one that almost perfectly captures the feeling of being back in New York after some time away from it. New York proves that there are enough people to drown out the version of America that people find distasteful, and those people are all Ameicans, too.

"We can't have parties like in Spain where they go all night, or like Berlin where they go another night, alright!" The things you're looking for in America aren't there because it is a different place than where you're from. By looking for specific indicators of cultural vitality, you're ignoring the quality itself, which is in abundant supply. You have to take it on its own terms, just as you'd expect me to take your culture on its own terms.

"You see I love this place that I have grown to know." OK, I'll admit it--I didn't always like America so much. Once I, too, accused it of all the multifarious sins that are conjured in your head when you break out the anti-American bullshit. But now I've grown to know it; I was culturally ignorant, but of my home country. And now that I know it, I love it. American culture is what made me.

"And yeah, I know you wouldn't touch us with a ten-foot pole, 'cause we're North Americans." And fuck you, asshole. You're sitting here, listening to my music--listening to American music--and you're pretending like it's an exception to the rule, like I share your values. Well, I don't. In fact, I think you're a jackass. You make us into these second-class world citizens on the basis of things we have nothing to do with, and it's plain ignorant. You wouldn't touch us with a ten-foot pole, but here you are, listening to me. How does that make sense? Do you know anything about America? Have you been to New York? You expect me to come see your countries before I can say anything about them, and then you make these snap judgments about where I'm from without even having been there? Fuck you. New York is the greatest city in the world, the most diverse, most vibrant, and it's part of America. It's having these things to push up against that encourages us to do what we do, and it's having all these other people around us in the city that gets it done.

"North American Scum" is a burst of true patriotism (leftist patriotism, if you need it spelled out) from an unlikely place, and a potent condensation of an argument that a lot of us have wanted to make for years. It's an assertion of the vitality of American culture, and a signpost to be pointed to every time someone wants to "look at me that way." Who're you calling scum?

Labels: lcd soundsystem, new york, pop

posted by Mike B. @ 4:27 PM 11 Comments