I did a remix for Chicago band Canasta, and it reminded me of Faith No More for some reason, so I titled it "The Claps' You Want It All But You Can't Have It Remix." It's the first track here if you're interested in hearing what I came up with. It doesn't really sound like Faith No More. (What do YOU think it sounds like?)
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.
Hey Jon Pareles: look at the two groups you've created here of drug casualties. One one side are rockstars from the past who "dosed themselves...behind closed doors" and, consequently, were free from the slings and arrows of public disapproval during their time. This group includes Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Gram Parsons, Sid Vicious, and Jerry Garcia. The other group you identify is those present day musicians who we can "watch...self-destruct in real time" via the internet. In this group you put Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse. Do you notice any difference between these two groups besides time period? Do you think that difference might be a better explanation for why people are "cruelly iconoclasic" toward them than, you know, the internet? Or at least a contributing factor?
(That said, how depressing is it that "Rehab," a single from last year, got #1 on P&J? Or that of the top 10 singles only three and a half were actual pop hits?)
Film your video at a high school gym and you're doing something very particular--you're trying to emphasize the teenage-ness of the music, whether ironically or sincerely, successfully or un. Here are some attempts, all linked by gyms, even if the music doesn't suggest any link at all.
Wheatus - "Teenage Dirtbag"
PJ Soles - "Rock 'n' Roll High School" (one of the greatest scenes in all of American cinema, for my money)
High School Musical - "We're All in This Together"
Rihanna's "Umbrella" doesn't seem unusual at first, just unusually good, a series of four-bar melodic lines that perform small swoops in the air before settling down with a reassuring pressure, all over a loud acoustic drum loop and a watery synth in the chorus. These things are not out of character for recent R&B, and the song's status as the jam of late spring (which is the summer of the 00s) feels, if not preordained--the song's not as brash as other car-stereo conquerors, with its mood of weirdly banal affection (i.e. "when shit goes bad I'll take care of you") taking the place of others' evocations of ecstacy, revelry, or craziness--at least like it fits the color scheme, sonically and lyrically.
But the most interesting thing about this otherwise uninteresting (but still great!) song is the thing that makes it different from its peers: there is almost no harmony in it. In contrast not only to female R&B singers like Mariah or Beyonce or Ciara but also male-sung hits like "Crazy" and "Hey Ya" and "Yeah," "Umbrella" consists of an uninterrupted melodic line, unharmonized. Some may crop up in the chorus, but that also may be pitchy double-tracking creating the illusion of harmony. There aren't any secondary vocals doing counterpoint parts (i.e. singing the same words but with a different rhythm) or backup parts (i.e. totally different words, "shoop shoop shoop shoop" while the lead singer goes on with her lyrics and melody), nor are there harmonized lines, even where the melody would seem to scream out for them, like at the beginning of the chorus.
This wouldn't be unusual in most genres, but in R&B, it's like having a rock song without guitars: you can pull it off without people noticing, but it's quite a trick. (It's arguably a similar move, musically and semantically, to Prince's eschewing bass in some of his biggest hits, which we'll get to later.) Of course, it's a little different in the present context, since Rihanna was originally a dancehall artist, and that genre has little use for R&B's trademark delicate, pitch-sensitive voices puffing out tone clouds. Dancehall's vocalists are expected to be powerful rather than pretty, and Rihanna makes a striking contrast with the breathy voices that have dominated female R&B. You hear it not only in the lack of harmony, but in the tough inflection that allows her to rhyme "together" with "umbrella."
It's also what makes the song so effective. The track isn't lush, with a lone synth line making up the high point of its wall of sound, and the verse is mainly vocals and drums, which are themselves playing an uncluttered beat with no real polyrhythm to speak of, so the lone melody line becomes the focus. Without a dense instrumental backing, it doesn't need harmony to stand out. But this simplicity isn't reflective of simple creativity, as it requires quite a leap of faith to put out such an unadorned song. You have to be really confident in your melody line to make it the only hook in the song, and it pays off.
Still, just as Price's breaktaking removal of bass left him open to charges that he was abandoning his roots and watering down his sound for mass consumption, the popularity of "Umbrella" among pop nerds--i.e., people who don't pay attention generally to R&B--could make one a bit suspicious about this lack of harmony. R&B has made a real study of harmony in recent years, and arguably its sophisticated use of multitracked vocals is what defines it in an era when hip-hop and R&B sound more and more alike. But this also tend to complicate songs, and to bury the melody into a dense vocal texture, which, as is the case with most genre signifiers, can make songs difficult to differentiate for dilettantes. It's notable that she's merged two genres, dancehall and R&B, by taking out the most problematic elements of each: patois and provincialism for dancehall, dense vocals for R&B. If it weren't so hard to do effectively, it'd be worrisome, but it's unlikely to spawn a trend.
Harmony is perhaps so prevalent in R&B because it signifies a particular kind of sexiness, and sex is what modern R&B is mainly concerned with. Consequently, it's developed a way of using harmony that depicts a sort of mysterious sensuality, one that lets every kind of power dynamic feel included. The massive multitracking puts the singer in multiple locations and at multiple timestamps, taking them out of the realm of the real or even the representational and making them a sort of ghost on the track, an unreal, fantas(y)tic presence. At the same time, harmony demands an obvious level of technical prowess that's part and parcel of the performance itself, which signifies control: the listener sits at the center, and the singer moves around, with total power over what she's going to do (it's almost always a she), as well as over what the listener hears. And so it offers an entry point for everyone: as an idealized sexual being with total control, or as the sole consumer of an unreal fantasy object able to do anything.
Unfortunately, and I say this as one of the aforementioned pop nerds, this is frequently not very interesting; as God-Man reminds us, total control is boring over the long run, and while it's very pretty, modern R&B's use of harmony to fill in the gaps also takes away a lot of the tension that drives great songs. It's no accident that a lot of songs have been trying out more direct melody lines lately, like "Ring the Alarm."
But there's also been people pushing toward other ways of using harmony, and there's no better example of this than Amerie's new album, Because I Love It. It's the best album of at least the last three months, due almost entirely to Amerie's voice and the incredible variety of things she does with it. There's belting, there's breathy, there's talk-singing, and then there are the background vocals, so varied that you lose track. It's a bravura performance over the course of the album, and it throws the gauntlet in a much different direction than Rihanna does.
In retrospect, this should be obvious. Amerie's breakthrough hit, "1 Thing," was, like "Umbrella," a spare track with slightly off-kilter live drums, but Amerie managed to attack the vocal line with a real fierceness while also stirring in a surprising amount of harmony, which colored the chorus in a way that upped the tension dramatically. Interestingly, the first instance of harmony in the opening track comes on the word "rain," and the usage nicely sets up the way harmony will be used in the rest of the album: deliberately and with a clear purpose. Here, it both eases the transition into the chorus and, with its mournful cast, emphasizes the singer's view on rain (negative!). When it's followed with a certain amount of standard R&B harmony-clouds, again, there's a reason: those clouds are raining. It's even out of time when it repeats, producing a veritable April shower of vocals.
The harmony serves a totally different purpose on the first freestyle track, "Some Like It." It's a barren track at first, and then some backing vocals crop up, but seemingly more in tribute to its musical inspiration. As the track progresses, though, and the backing vocals develop, you realize that they're not really backing vocals as they'd conventionally be used. Instead, Amerie is actually singing horn lines. Take a listen, and then try and imagine the exact same parts played by a horn section. Those little bursts in the verses and the quarter-note descension in the breakdown: if this was a different track, you'd hear sax and trumpet there, but because Amerie's able to work her voice like this, the backing can stay spare (drum machine, keyboard-bass, and piano) while still delivering the impact of a fully-arranged track. But of course, this way she can put words to the horn parts, and the backup vocals end up functioning as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action as a wise aggregate.
Harmony really becomes a central character in "Take Control" and "Gotta Work." (Although it pops up most explicitly later in the album, in "When Loving You Was Easy," when she belts, "And I didn't need to bring my choir to let you know you were wrong!" The choir appreciates the acknowledgement, one imagines.) In both of these songs, the lead vocal is singing, in part, about the backing vocals, the melody serenading the harmony.
"Take Control"'s central riff is a guitar part that's one bar of on-beat notes and one bar of syncopated, off-beat notes. The lead vocal deals with this by being consistently straight, on-beat, but it creates a fundamental instability in the song. This could have been dealt with a number of ways. It could've been left as-is, with the resulting tension creating space for dancing. It could've been patched over with more on-beat parts, straightening the whole thing out. But instead, Amerie decides to increase the instability with backing vocals that dart in and out, tripping over themselves, changing meter, sometimes even dropping out of rhythm entirely, as they do at the song's most thrilling moment: "you're never in a rush" in the lead part is echoed by a Destiny's Child-like trio of backing vocals singing a descending motif of "never, never, never" that, in perfect synchronicity, decelerates the tempo as the rest of the track cuts out for a second. That makes sense--if you're never in a rush, why not just stop the song for a second?--and those other off-beat backing vocals make sense too, since the song itself is about Amerie being out of control. She has to be, if someone's going to take control of her, and that's exactly what those harmonies are: out of control. It's consequently the polar opposite of the very controlled way harmony is used in most modern R&B, without being ostentatious about its difference in the way that, say, "Ring the Alarm" is. There are still pretty close harmonies, but they're being used to augment a much different mood than just sexiness. (Which ends up being pretty sexy.)
"Gotta Work," in contrast, explicitly mentions being out of control: "show me somebody without a goal / show me somebody with no control," the background lyrics say, but they're not applying that to the singer. Rather, they seem to suggest that you can't find anyone like this. Everyone has a goal, everybody has some control, you just have to use that. It's an amazing song, for the lyrics if nothing else, which are a pep talk not about self-esteem or romance but ambition, just pure simple ambition, and it's incredibly effective. "Some people think I'm aggressive / cause I know what I want / but that never mattered too much to me," she sings, and it doesn't sound like what she wants is luxury goods or a guy. It sounds like she wants something bigger than that, an idea reinforced by the fact that she says "when you're feeling low / and you can't get much lower / that's when you know you're close / sometimes you gotta work hard for it." It's a marked diversion from the triumphalism that usually accompanies this kind of sentiment, not "get paid" so much as "make it happen." And then, of course, comes the key line: she yells "I do it cause I love it!" The ambition's not to be just successful or comfortable, it's to do what you love. It also helps that the track barely contains her energy and her exuberence, and the harmony here is surgical, precise, purposeful. They're there to back up the lead vocals, to serve as engines of desire, and they push it along with perfect self-assurance.
People seem to be saying with more frequency than normal that this is a bad time for music, which is probably why I'm enjoying it so much. These in-between periods are always the best, because the old formulas have failed, and everyone has to figure out their own way forward if they're going to survive. The control that typifies an established sound is loosed, and the componant parts fall to the ground, maybe to be picked up and rearranged and added to, as Amerie does, or maybe to be mostly discarded, as Rihanna does. Either way, surprise becomes a requirement again, and ambition serves a key purpose. Rihanna creates a broadly appealing sound by simplifying R&B's vocal scheme, and in the process comes up with a fantastic song. Amerie pushes against her bounderies and finds her voice's full potential, branching off in new and, in the case of freestyle, largely-forgotten old directions. It's an exciting time when things aren't going great--at least when ambition pokes its head up--and, honestly, I'll be sad to see them go.
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.
There were a number of notable deaths at the end of 2006. One was James Brown, and when his death was announced, I was at my parents' house for Christmas, far away from New York (or so it felt, anyway). I heard he was going to lie in state at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and I was sad I was going to miss it. But when I opened up the paper onboard the Amtrak returning home, I found out I had miscalculated: the date of his "appearance" would be that day, and if I hustled a bit when I got home, I could go see him--or, at least, see the people waiting for him, since it was unlikely I would actually get in. (I missed the cutoff by maybe 50 people. This was the cutoff to wait another two hours to get in, though, so it's probably for the best.)
Why go, if not to actually see him? Well, James Brown was responsible for more than one genre of pop music, embraced and enhanced an incredible number of eras and styles, and was at the time of his death unquestionably the most influential musician alive, historically speaking. More than that, though, it was for the energy, for the spectacle of the thing. Just being outside would make me and my companions part of the event, and personally, because I work in an office all day, I feel like I miss out on a lot of the events New York has to offer, and granted the reprieve of a vacation day, I couldn't think of a better way to use it. Still can't.
I found lots of people, but not many of them were white. The only caucasians I got a good look at turned out to be French, and they don't really count. (French people are the second most likely group of people to be found at James Brown's wake.) But I am a white person, and I was in fact with two other white people. One was even Canadian. (Hi, Hannah!) But how could you not go out to James Brown's wake? Was I committing some sort of racial faux pas by being there? Or was it just attributable to New Yorkers' normal instincts for avoiding crowds?
What was there, symbolically speaking, was black culture. (The lack of white people helped make this as obvious as it was, but this fact was not technically part of the symbolism.) Let's just start with the actual attraction itself: James Brown's body in a royal blue suit, inside a gold coffin, lying on the stage of a theater whose most regular occupant these days is Mo'nique. The man's body was going on tour--next stop was the James Brown Arena in his hometown of Augusta.
But then there was the scene outside. The line to get into the Apollo Theater ran down 125th Street in Harlem and four blocks up Frederick Douglas Boulevard, past the headquarters of the Amersterdam Eagle. There were old ladies in their fancy church hats. There was a barbershop with people dancing outside. A man walked down 125th asking if anyone wanted to buy Newports. Two matching white SUVs drove slowly by with logos of what I can only assume are up-and-coming entertainment companies on the back windows. Men sold books whose titles I probably shouldn't be typing. For the first time since they went up, all the big-box stores that now populate 125th street, Old Navy and H&M and its brethren sprouting out from "Harlem USA," looked actually out of place, overwhelmed by Harlem rather than brazenly encroaching upon it.
And then there was the marquee. You've probably seen pictures of it, reading "REST IN PEACE APOLLO LEGEND / THE GODFATHER OF SOUL / JAMES BROWN / 1933-2006" But what no one seems to mention is that this was not, in fact, the only thing the marquee was saying. It's an electronic marquee, and it was cycling through not only this notice but other ones, advertising upcoming events at the Apollo, television showings of Amateur Night, and even things that had nothing to do with the Apollo whatsoever. A dead body was lying inside, and the body's host was advertising what other things would be appearing in the future where the body was now. And no one seemed at all bothered by this. James Brown was certainly one of the most revered figures in the culture, and there was no concern about this lack of reverence. It wasn't even worth remarking upon.
The cumulative effect was of all the symbols of black America, positive and negative, celebratory and damaging, signing a temporary truce so they could mingle for a day here in the cradle of African-American culture. It was a final testament to James Brown and his status as a unifying figure--possibly one of the last unifying figures black America will ever have.
*****
The above is not (or not just) a recitation of ignorant stereotypes of black people. It is the first part of a contrast. Around about the same time James Brown died, former President Gerald Ford (a man who was unifying in the sense that everyone was united in not caring about him much, unless your name was Nixon) also died, and the news stations seemed to ask themselves the question "how could you not cover his funeral nonstop?"
How indeed! Cable news offered up coffin-to-grave coverage of the ponderous ceremonies, and lordy, it was like watching paint die, er, dry. During primetime, ten channels--god bless a slow week--show us shots of a car stopping in front of some Boy Scouts, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting. And you can't say anything during all this, partially out of respect for the dead, but mainly because there isn't that much to say. But they showed us these static images anyway, encouraging us to ponder them, and in the process highlighting nothing so much as their utter blankness.
The fact that it was Ford's funeral meant that there was nothing about the man to consider, really, during all of this; you couldn't think about the absurd things people had been saying about the recently dead, as you could with Reagan, nor could you consider his impact on America, because that took about three minutes. There just wasn't that much to think about Gerald Ford, and this had the peculiar effect of forcing you to actually notice what was going on, to regard it not as mere pomp (the announcer's soothing voices droning a play-by-play only heightening the narcotic effect, customarily) but as actual concrete events. The physicality, the realness of it all stood out, for once. Ford was such an uninteresting President that it was like a spanner in the works, a disruption of the normal order of things, highlighting the absurdity of the goings-on.
And maybe you wouldn't have noticed it were it not for the recent festivities surrounding the Godfather of Soul, but the proceedings certainly were, well, white. Not only in the literal sense, with all that buffed marble, but in the "overwhelmingly caucasoid" sense as well. All this ceremony was imported directly from Western Europe, the loins of white Americans' fruit, with the strongest echoes being of British ceremony: the starkness, the regard for easy symbolism (infused with as much heavy tradition as a still-young country can muster) over aesthetics or resonance, the dryness of it all.
But it also struck you how much it was a product of the amalgamated white American culture. This culture does not seem strange, of course, because it is so familiar, but what we think of as white culture is oddly sourceless. The images Ford's funeral evoked were not those of, say, an Irish-American wake, with its comfortable materiality. They weren't those of a white Southern funeral, with its quiet beauty. They weren't even of a WASP funeral, which would have far more self-aware gentility and far less ostentatious humility. If anything, they would seem to have sprung from California, the leading candidate for the cradle of white American culture, but it seemed to lack the vague ridiculousness and crassness of a California funeral.
No, the sourceless white American culture that produces Presidential funerals is also the same culture that produces the accent of news anchors, one common across the country, whether you're a white guy in Georgia or an Asian lady in New York. It's also the same culture that determines the aesthetics of cable news: packed with information but lacking any context or deeper meaning, grasping at easy symbolism not as a means to express something deeper but merely as a way to invoke something faster, to pretend at depth. And this was why the news channels were so eager to give Ford's funeral nonstop coverage. It was white American culture--Boy Scouts and World War II[1] and landscaped trees and suits and silence and cable fucking news--coming together in the vast virtual space it always occupies to do yet another awkward dance.
And it made you wonder why this culture was still dominant. In a country where unpopular things have been falling like crazy lately, this culture, one that has been almost completely rejected by consumers, has survived as a social and political norm. Regardless of whether it's right or not, is it even Good For America? The Constitution--a legitimate source of glory white America's been milking for a long time now--is careful to protect the rights of minority populations. But what about the rights of minority cultures?
Now, when someone says something like this, it usually indicates that they are worried about the traditional practices of a tiny population that they see being eliminated by multinational pop culture. Of course, this ignores the fact that microcultures die all the time, they're just subsumed as artistic memory within the larger culture, and that generally these cultures die out because multinational pop culture is fun as fuck, one of the great achievements of our species, and forcing people to preserve their unwanted local customs so that one day they, too, can present them to bored four-year-olds and their conscientious parents at a children's museum seems like a form of sadism--well, that's not the kind of thing I'm trying to say, is the point.
What I'm saying is that just as minority groups deserve a "place at the table," in our civic life, so do minority cultures. And yet, as Ford's funeral amply demonstrates, black culture--which, let's be honest, almost everyone likes some aspect of--is almost wholly absent from those aspects of culture that constitute our civil religion. There were no ladies with fancy church hats, no brass bands, no solid-gold coffins. And yet these things would have inarguably been more American than marble columns and rotundas and a body guarded by soldiers. Black culture has been remarkably unable to infiltrate America's secular nationalist traditions. Oh sure, there's the cultural stuff--jazz, old blues musicians, Morgan Freedman--but this is all carefully walled off with the other cultural stuff that you’d never see at a governmental function. [2]
And this confusing dominance of the sourceless, amalgamated white American culture over our political and civic life has had disastrous effects. It makes mandatory the middle-class populism, false humility, and schoolmarmish morality that white America sees itself embodying, and as a result, the only people eligible for public office resemble nothing so much as news anchors. They are embodiments of company men, unable to show any character, creativity, or adventurousness (three things we could use right now, rather than carefully plotted timidity or pigheadedness masquerading as common sense), the equivalent of the droning voices of announcers that solumnulate us into not noticing the absurdities being presented to us as the status quo. It's created this strange freak class of elected officials (though not, notably, their staffs) wholly separate from the rest of us, who, it's been amply documented, have sex and do drugs and use swear words in public all the time. White culture isn't even white culture anymore.
But maybe it could be--and maybe American culture could be American culture--if we started being a little more honest about what exactly that culture is. No one wants to be part of the mainstream anymore, to the point that we've all decided that the mainstream doesn't actually exist. But it does: millions of people across all interest groups watch the same TV shows and see the same movies.[3] And it looks almost nothing like the abstracted image of mainstream culture that we've allowed to persist because we keep insisting that it's dead, that this thing before our eyes does not exist merely because it appears on a screen. Talk about a disconnect from reality! We've defined the mainstream as something it's not so we can pretend that it's dead. This image of the mainstream is fixed right before people stopped wanting to be a part of it: the 1950s, the era whose absolutely ahistorical conditions continue to be used as our political benchmarks. If we were able to embrace our pop culture as actually popular culture, one that's not uniform but certainly shared, maybe the voices that have become an inextricable part of that pop culture--black voices, female voices, Southern voices, Latino voices, the whole goddamn Burger King Kids' Club spectrum--could also become a part of our civic life. Maybe we wouldn't have to live separate lives anymore but the cultural reality of a market-driven amalgam of voices could become a social reality too. And maybe our political life could stop being a bad joke from a hack comic booed off the stage at the Apollo Amateur Night.
[1] In the abstract; c.f. Brokaw, Tom, The Greatest Generation [2] Except, of course, for when something appears specifically to represent the entirety of the separate black culture at political events, e.g. "And now, a gospel choir!" [3] I'm too close to music to be able to honestly say that anything like a mass market exists for music anymore, but that's a whole other issue.
