There's Nothing Ironic About Glee Club

It's been a weird last half of the decade, though maybe "weird" doesn't cover it--awful and dark and mean and petty would be better, probably. And yet most of our popular art has not really dealt with modern culture in any significant way over the past five years. This was not the case of the first half of the decade, when popular culture, and particularly music, seemed caught up in an eternal present tense. The iconic pop of that period, along with major TV shows like Sex and the City and The Sopranos, relentlessly engaged with the now. The moment might have been created by a SATC episode or a Destiny's Child video, commented on by Britney or David Chase, and pushed forward by Justin Timberlake or Survivor.

But somewhere around 2004, the present tense became too fraught, too full of importance and horrors, for pop to find any way in. In a political moment when change was largely decentered, with one-party rule requiring us to wait for a self-hoisting even once the petard was clearly visible, pop could play no leadership or rally role even if it wanted to, and was left instead with a moment it had a hard time figuring out what to do with. To ignore it, as most pop did, simply made you look out-of-touch and past your prime, but short of the kind of direct engagement with current that allowed some of the decade's most significant artistic products (e.g. The Colbert Report) to flourish, it was hard to deal with our particular times in any real way.
Those aside, what we got mainly looked backward, whether for comfort and resonance with the present, like Amy Winehouse and Mad Men, or entered innovative continuations in established realms, like Gossip Girl and 30 Rock and, uh, pretty much everything else in pop music that wasn't Amy Winehouse. Those things that did offer something new, like Lost, didn't seem to have any necessary connection to outside events, but registered instead as regular old artistic innovation, not in dialogue with anything but itself.

And so it's nice that we've had such a clear historic and chronological break here. The election of Obama and the economic crisis, which are essentially simultaneous in the longview, make it very hard to continue as we were before. So much of the culture of the 00s was and is tied up with the particular kind of economic prosperity that we can now mark as part of the past, and while the destruction of that culture does not negate the good things that came out of it, such desctruction does make it very hard for pop creators to regard it as normal. Almost every single significant piece of pop culture from the previous part of this decade would, if it were created today, either look very different or much less relevent. Almost everyone on television was affluent--not even middle class, but affluent--and the shiny bliss that 00s pop does so well reeks, as it was intended to do, of money money money. While there are undeniably artistic creations that were forward-looking enough to see this coming, it's likely that there's a slow but major change coming, and it would be really great if we could finish off the decade with a little bit of forward-looking pop.

Which is why I liked the first episode of Glee so much: it is the first TV series that's about this decade rather than a part of this decade. How the rest of the series will go remains to be seen, but for now it has definitively staked out its position on the 00s truth and reconciliation committee. For one thing, it's the first show I can think of to draw from a form firmly situated in the current decade, rather than drawing from 80s and 90s forms as even the best current series do (with, again, the exception of brand new things). Bring It On came out in 2000, and the show is clearly working in the tradition of that movie (and maybe 1999's Election as well), a form old enough now that the Wayans brothers have gotten around to parodying it. The genre is obviously indebted to some old forms (sports movies, 80s b-movie ensemble comedies) but makes something new by taking a minor thing and portraying it in precisely the terms its most dedicated participants see it in. This shit was serious, and because image was serious to the participants, the movies took image seriously, too. This did all sorts of good things for a visual form that ultimately requires you to believe things that aren't true anyway, and Glee plays that forward.

The characters, too, are products of the decade. Rachel, the main female singer, is essentially a fameball, which is not something we're used to seeing. Usually, the pretty girl who wants to be famous is either hilariously untalented or actually destined for stardom. But Rachel doesn't seem to be either. She's good at singing, but not great, and her personality is too self-conscious to take her to easy success. She's a scrabbler and a striver, ambitious for the sake of being ambitious, trying and trying without really having a project to tie it to. She uses modern technology just because it seems to be what the kids to or as a way of furthering the plot, but as an integral part of her personality: she puts herself out to the world beyond her peer group through digital media as a way of seizing success. Mercedes, meanwhile (who I hope gets developed more!), is the daughter of ANTM, embracing that weird Beyonce feminism that I guess is what Girl Power turned into. And, of course, the girlfriend of Finn, the main male singer, is the head of the celebacy club, and as such the representative of cultural conservativism, another high point of the decade. She's an obvious one, but Rachel and Mercedes strike me as believable characters that I know lots of in real life but would not expect to see on TV, and kudos to the show's creators for catching that.

But this isn't just Bring It On: The Series. A key moment in the pilot is where Finn confronts his fellow football players and gives a great little speech which starts like this: "We're all losers. Everyone in this school. Hell, everyone in this town. Out of all the kids that graduate from this school, maybe half will graduate college and two will leave the state to do it." This is true, but it would have been unthinkable to express such a thing earlier in the decade. It would have violated the ethos of total committment that dominated the 00s--one which produced some great results for pop, if not so much for government. While the glee club is maybe just another competitive activity, the show is clear that it's a pretty stupid one, and all the characters except Rachel seem to know that. They do it, then, because they like it, because they get something out of it. It's smaller than cheerleading but bigger than just being a quiet nerd trying not to be noticed. I like that, even without the football player, the characters aren't just a clique to themselves, but are individuals from different circumstances doing something for the pleasure of it. What the show endorses, then, is not victory or social stasis but mastery. When Mr. Schuester takes over, his goal is for the club to win a championship, but that motivation on its own fails to sustain the club's momentum. What propels them to some kind of unitity is, rather, a committment to excellence, to artistic acheivement beyond the validation of others but simply to know for yourself that you and others have done something good, and the moment at the end of the episode captures precisely that. And it captures, moreover, joy, the other thing Mr. Schuester says he was interested in. While that emotion was certainly conjured by many of this decade's best pop products, it's hard to say it was a concern of them. Success always seemed to matter more than happiness. Glee seems interested in asking what it would be like if that evaluation was reversed.

Then, of course, there is "Don't Stop Believin'," the song that the group sings at the end. My thoughts went not to the finale of the aforementioned Sopranos, which also ended with that song, but to the pilot of Freaks and Geeks, which ended with "Come Sail Away" by Styx. The final moment of The Sopranos struck me as being essentially the same as the final moment of Seinfeld, and its use of the Journey song had less to do with pop music than with TV and with audience expectations, a sort of forced "let's go out on a high note!" kind of thing. But in Freaks and Geeks, it was all about the song and its resonance to the particular characters. That's sort of the mirror image of what's happening in Glee. Here, Journey is being celebrated for its universal appeal, for the freakish and essentially inexplicable ability of that song to appeal to everyone everywhere at least a little bit, and the metaphor being drawn is not the any of the characters' situations but to the enterprise on which they have mutually embarked. The experience of pop is an unavoidably collective one, made eternally in the context of others, and while that opens up all kinds of great possibilities, it also means you have to go wherever pop goes, and you might not always like it. When you find yourself in that situation, the trick may be to find that one sweet spot, the thing that everyone can agree on that turns the momentum back toward you, tacking the ship gradually back to the course you would prefer. Glee is most certainly a part of that effort, and I am excited to see where it goes.

Labels: 00s, glee, pop, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 8:08 PM 6 Comments

Just Say Yes

I'm sure everyone's discussed this already, but I'm just now hearing Taylor Swift's "Love Story," which is absolutely fantastic. And, of course, there is the twist ending: Romeo and Juliet live! And this was intentional:

I used to be in high school where you see [a boyfriend] every day. Then I was in a situation where it wasn't so easy for me, and I wrote this song because I could relate to the whole Romeo and Juliet thing. I was really inspired by that story. Except for the ending. I feel like they had such promise and they were so crazy for each other. And if that had just gone a little bit differently, it could have been the best love story ever told. And it is one of the best love stories ever told, but it's a tragedy. I thought, why can't you . . . make it a happy ending and put a key change in the song and turn it into a marriage proposal?

I love this, of course, but it also sounded weirdly familiar. And then I remembered that it's sorta how I ended my piece on Hamlet 2. To quote myself, if I may:

That idea of a "parody of a tragedy" points toward the play's ultimate character arc. Marschz's idea for a sequel to Hamlet is to have Hamlet travel back in time in order to stop all the tragedy from happening, ending it not with a bloodbath but with a marriage. He has, in short, turned a tragedy into a comedy. In the process, Marschz does the same thing to his life. But that doesn't happen through him becoming a better person--he does not change at all. What changes is the play. Hamlet starts as sadness and dissolusion and becomes happiness and connectedness. In our traditional understanding of art, that itself should be a tragedy: a great work of meaningful-core should be ruined by the inclusion of happiness. That it's not is an argument for comedy itself.

It seems disrespectful to make a sad ending happy. But if art is really important to you, if you really love it, then it should feel real to you, it should feel like it's part of your life, because you are so intimately engaged with it. Part of the power of these made-up stories is that they seem believable, and when weighted with the kind of aesthetic power that a great artist can conjure, they take on the feeling of prophecy. Change the story and change your destiny, or that's how it feels. And it feels that way because the tragedy of the situation speaks to you a little too strongly. That Steve Coogan's character in Hamlet 2 was able to change his life is the happy ending, but the sad part is that he identified with Hamlet in the first place, in all his emotionally disturbed, hallucinatory, father-issue-having glory. Sure, he was eventually redeemed, but that's just a story too. When you get to that key change at the end of "Love Story" it really does kill; as manipulative and base a move as it is, it really fucking tugs at something. And when it's over, and you look back, you have to think about why Swift is identifying with Romeo and Juliet at all. It's not actually that great of a love story; it's much more a story of infatuation and manufactured drama. But that's what feels real to teenagers. By enacting a happy version of the play, Swift is admitting her own enmeshment in the original Romeo and Juliet story, and that's sad, in a way.

These sort of fantasies are all over pop (see also Twilight), and they tend to get dismissed as escapist or illusory. That seems unfair to teenagers. Few, if any, really think they live in these worlds pop creates, and while I'll certainly admit there's danger in their very real assimilation of some of that world's attitudes (see also Twilight), I think there's also value in the way they actually use them. Life for teenagers already is a Shakespearean tragedy, at least to them, and to pursue art that took on that worldview would simply be to strengthen their own self-image in a not particularly salutary way. If a kid can do this--can take something that reflects their life and reimagine it into something good--that seems like a remarkable act. Just as we have fantasies of the bright-eyed kids turning dark, it seems worth wondering what would happen if an angsty teen (and no teen worth knowing isn't angsty) were able to imagine transcendence.

The thing is: there's an angsty teenager inside all of us, a grumbling undercurrent insisting that the world is shitty and we are all diseased and there's no one you can trust. To that inner goth, pop screeches and wails with dissonance. But it doesn't have to. Cultural critics worry that things distract us from reality, help us avoid reality, obscure reality. But sometimes reality, as they say, bites, and to take that tragedy and turn it into a comedy would not be the worst thing. Pop's power is, in no small part, its ability to imagine a world much like this one, but shinier--and to make it, whether you submit to its charms or not, believable.

Labels: hamlet 2, pop, taylor swift

posted by Mike B. @ 9:18 PM 3 Comments

The BoingBoing Effect

I wrote a post for Idolator this week about "the BoingBoing effect." It attracted some attention and caused a bit of a kerfuffle[1], but the post didn't really get across the theory so well, so let me take to this wonderful place of no word limits and indulgent readers to try and hash it out a little better.

First off, I like BoingBoing. It's a great place to kill time, because they're very good at what they (mainly) do, which is finding "wonderful things."[2] But I've seen this happen to people. They already have tastes and opinions that are somewhat similar to BB's. (So do I, for that matter.) They start reading BB, and because it aligns so strongly with their tastes--and because it's updated so frequently--it becomes one of their primary internet sources. Once your primary filter of information becomes a group of people who mainly agree on things, you start to pick up on what they think. Now, again, these people (and, again, me for that matter) already have somewhat similar opinions to those of BB's writers, particularly the main writers, Cory Doctorow[3] and Xeni Jardin, so it's not like the site is magically inculcating a worldview in people who have no exposure to it otherwise. But when you mainly get the world through people who share your filter, it strengthens and hardens. Heavy BB readers become much more sure of their anti-copyright opinions and think they are much more important. And they become much less tolerant of opposing opinions, because so is BB.

(I want to make clear here that I'm not exempting myself from this phenomenon. I have most certainly had my nascent opinions confirmed, strengthened, and made shrill by my reading habits in the past, whether it be my opinions about music, or politics, or...I dunno, TV? This just hasn't happened with me and BB, for reasons that will be clear shortly.)

This is a somewhat different phenomenon than we've become familiar with on the internet in general. People like Cass Sunstein talk about the problem the internet being so filtered that you can go just to the sites that agree with you for news. This is something slightly different. People don't go to BB to have their opinions about copyright confirmed. Most likely, they go because someone's sent them a link about a robot made of Legos that eats cheese or something. People aren't going to BB, or sites like it, for a filtered set of opinions, but a filtered set of tastes. And that kind of filtering is absolutely crucial to the internet. But when a taste-filtering site gains enough authority and cohesion for its overall message to seem convincing to its readers, it can become the other kind of site. I'd argue this happened with a lot of the liberal politics blogs. I used to be able to read Daily Kos, for instance, because it was a good source of news that I might not find otherwise, especially during the first term of the current administration. And their takes on these stories seemed somewhat reasonable and obvious. But over time, as they gathered together a certain argument about politics, everything they posted tended to be interpreted through that particular filter. And this itself acted as a sorting device: it drove out people like me, who had different opinions, but it drew in more extreme people, who liked (as Sunstein has warned of) seeing their opinion confirmed. And by banding these people together, and giving them comment boxes and diaries to write to each other in, it made them feel not only that their opinions were right, but that their opinions were important.

And that's really the problem with all this. You will get absolutely no argument from me that the DMCA is a horrible piece of policy and bad law, and I've studied it enough (I actually read the damn thing) to tell you why and how. I absolutely think it should be overturned. But you know what? I also think there are way more pressing problems, and when copyfighters like BB couch their arguments in the apocalyptic terms that a self-selected ideologically focused userbase breeds, it makes them seem ridiculous, and it makes the whole argument less effective. The DMCA and associated rulings and laws are bad because a) they contradict existing copyright law, b) they have no relation to the realities of technology as they currently exist, and c) they stop people from doing stuff that there's no reason for them not to be doing. Those are three fantastic reasons to overturn a law. But BB--like a lot of monomaniacal (holla!) sites--have taken their legitimate arguments and turned it into an all-encompassing worldview. Somehow this is all tied up with "corporate culture" and people making art and all like that. None of which most people care about. People barely care about copyright issues in the first place; bringing up street artists and fucking Burning Man only makes the issue seem less relevant. Nerds (again, which includes me) have a real problem with thinking that they, and people who think like them, are right about everything, and everyone else is wrong. The reality of BB is that nerds are an interest group like any other interest group, and their interests are probably less important to the health of our democracy right now than a long list of other policy issues. That may seem unjust somehow, but it's simply a reality that you have to accept. That's not to say that they shouldn't keep working to overturn the DMCA or bringing to light the many negative consequences of the law. But you have to stop painting this as somehow a failure of American society and culture. It's not. It's just that no one cares, and rightfully so. We're going to work on the economy and health care first, if that's all right with you guys. Talk to us in six years.

And then, of course, there is their stance on the music business.

As happens a lot with my writing, when I criticize something, this tends to get taken as an endorsement of what the people I'm criticizing see as the opposite side. (Criticize liberal bloggers, for instance, and it's assumed you're either a Republican or a Clintonian shill.) So when I ragged on copyfighters, this was seen by certain commenters as an endorsement of the major labels and the RIAA and so forth and so on. This has happened a few times now, and well, I'm kinda sick of it. I do have a take on the whole end-of-the-music-biz issue, but it's too complex to fit in most posts. Here, though, I can go nuts. So if you'll indulge me.

The bottom line of all this is that everyone is going to have to accept that things are going to get a little worse. Everyone--the music biz, music listeners, and musicians. The music biz is going to have to accept, just as the copyfighters say, that their practices are driving away consumers. They are also going to have to accept--and this may be the real problem--that the glamorous good times of the music biz are at an end, maybe forever. No more parties in sex clubs. No more expensing cocaine. No more being a "cool" marketing executive. The industry is going to have to become a lot more financially efficient. This is, of course, already the case for the workers in the trenches, who are doubling up on duties and getting laid off and receiving no raises for years on end. The people that are going to have to accept this, unfortunately, are the executives. And they have no real reason to except the survival of their business. Compared to free cocaine, keeping your company profitable seems less important.

Bands have probably made the adjustment already. Sure, they get rockstar perks if they can, but the fact that there are so many songs about acting like a rockstar means that most people aren't living like rockstars anymore. Bands know what's up, and while they don't like it, they've largely learned to live with it. They've cut costs, become more efficient, and downgraded their expectations. They've had to in order to survive.

Listeners, though, need to make an adjustment too. They have to--have to--accept that they can't not pay for music and expect it to still be around, at least not in the same form. We have to remember that the current situation has only arisen in the last few years. That means that there's still funding out there, that bands are still hoping things will blow over. But if the music biz continues to be unprofitable, then companies simply won't be able to get funding or credit anymore, which means they won't be able to pay for the things necessary to distribute even free music, like mastering, server space, bandwidth, and so forth. And while bands never expect to make a living making music, if it becomes clear that making music is becoming a hobby--something you put lots of your own money into without any hope of return--then a lot fewer people are going to be able to make music at all. Just like with the music biz, it's not in the self-interest of individual listeners to accept this. Indeed, it's a fantastic example of the tragedy of the commons. Which means, duh, that government's going to have to step in and do something about it. The DMCA isn't working because it's unreasonable. So someone will have to convince them and help them to craft a common-sense solution that fucks over everyone a little so the whole thing can keep rolling. And the shrill BB ideologues aren't helping with that.[4]

The people in this debate need to recognize that the people in the middle, ultimately, are the bands. People in bands want to make money from music, but they also want to get music for free, because they like music and are broke. Musicians are the ones actively navigating this landscape every day. The other two sides are pulling from opposite sides of the spectrum, and that makes them extremists. Yes, record companies use over-the-top language, unfairly recruit the government for their side, and are clinging desperately to something that's slipping away from their grasp. But copyfighters are also using over-the-top language, recruit the masses of self-interested listeners for their side, and are clinging desperately to something that I think they know, in their heart of hearts, fundamentally isn't sustainable.

BoingBoing's music coverage consists almost entirely of articles about how musicians that are giving their music away for free are still successful. What they don't cover are the many musicians who give their music away for free that aren't successful, or how much less money musicians that give their music away for free are making than they would have otherwise, which seems a little unfair given that they were the ones who put in the labor to make the product in the first place, not to get all Marxist or anything. The idea is constantly brought up that you don't need money to make music anymore, that it's not costing anyone anything, and so why shouldn't it be free? To which I say: bullshit.

I suspect that the people promoting this idea are mainly writers, since writers are one of the few groups who can make art without any up-front money.[5] But almost every other artistic genre requires money to do, from a little to a lot. Visual art is fundamentally impossible without money, since you have to buy materials. Movies are impossible without money, at least if you want to make a good movie and have lighting and sets and like that. Classical music and opera are certainly impossible without money, at least if you want to actually perform them. And dancers need costumes!

The key caveat here is "if you want to make a good" whatever. It is possible to make music totally for free (assuming you are middle-class and have a computer already). But it's very limiting in terms of what you're going to do. Maybe one of the key problems with music no longer coming to listeners as a physical object is that they tend to think the production of the music involved no physical objects either. But most music does, at least if it's going to be good, and physical objects, regrettably, cost a lot. Sure, Girl Talk's music can be made with nothing but a laptop. But do we really want all our music to sound like Girl Talk?

Look, as I hope I've made clear here, record companies are odious, odious things, and I've worked for them; I've had enough friends summarily fired by major labels to not have a particularly bright view of them, either. But one of the harsh realities of art is that bad people and things can create great art as well as good people and things. This applies to major labels as surely as it does to alcoholics. Major labels, for all their flaws, are very good at giving artists money to make art (even if they're bad at giving artists money they are owed after they make the art). The vast majority of great pop music was made under the auspices of major labels, and that's not an accident. Money is necessary for music to sound good. Artistic visions should not have to be cheap to be realized. We would be much poorer off as a culture if that were the case.

So what are we going to do about all this? Nothing, I suspect. Everything will implode in a few years, and everyone will freak out and finally come to a solution. It would be better for everyone if that didn't happen, because it's going to make pop music a much different beast than it is now. But hey, what can you do? In the meantime, there are always pictures of inflatable yetis.

[1] Ending, as these things always do, with me telling someone they look like a douchebag.
[2] I don't get the whole pro-Disney obsession, especially given their stance on corporate culture otherwise--it seems really contradictory, but whatever.
[3] If your first exposure to the site is through this post, this might seem slightly off, since Doctorow no longer contributes too much content. But he was, and is, a guiding force. Check out the archives for 2006 and before if you're curious.
[4] I mean, for fuck's sake, this is industry regulation at this point. It's like mining policy. Who cares if you're not a miner?
[5] Aside from the money it takes to feed and house them while they're writing, but that doesn't count, I guess.

Labels: boingboing, pop, the biz

posted by Mike B. @ 8:47 PM 13 Comments

Strikeouts are boring

“I think we live our lives the best we can,” Kevin said. “We’ve grown up with the idea that even when you’re at the top, act like you’re at the bottom. We’re growing and learning together, and it is important for us to stay true to the family that we are.”

- Kevin Jonas

This quote, from one of the Jonas Brothers (a pop-rock band that's been shot to success by the Disney machine), would seem to be fodder for people who want to dismiss commercial pop music, especially that music that can be accurately described as the product of a machine. It's a horrifying combination of banal and cliché, so inconsequential that your eyes can pass over it multiple times without really catching the meaning. It would seem to reveal its speaker as someone who does not think very deeply about things and who is terminally lacking in personality. Compare it to a quote from Dylan or Lennon and it's like a rice puff. Whoever said this does not match up with our idea of what a musician is supposed to be.

On the other hand, if an athlete said it, it would sound perfectly normal. In fact, it falls right in line with Kevin Costner's advice to Tim Robbins in Bull Durham:

Costner: You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: "We gotta play it one day at a time."
Robbins: Got to play... it's pretty boring.
Costner: 'Course it's boring, that's the point. Write it down.

Say nothing, in other words, and it doesn't hurt you. Say something interesting and it's only going to cause trouble.

The difficult thing for critics dealing with commercial pop stars is precisely this kind of advice. Underground musicians get publicity for saying crazy things to the underground press; commercial pop artists, especially those with a young audience, can only lose sales from saying interesting things. So they're media-trained into oblivion, and come out with the kind of meaningless quotes you see above. For an athlete, that would be fine. Ultimately, we get our ideas of their personalities from their performances; the things that create meaning are their actions on the field. But for a musician, it's a hard thing to get around.

Musicians are not athletes because they are not creatures of action. Words and voices are a big part of their chosen profession. And so, when we're trying to make sense of musicians, we tend to regard speaking in interviews as a kind of extension of singing in songs. When we create our impressions of a musician's personality from their performances, this involves listening to what comes out of their mouths. If what they say in interviews is part of this, and what they say in interviews is boring, then they themselves must be shallow.

This causes a few problems. First, as various folks have pointed out, it leads to critics overvaluing "eccentric" pop stars. We might not pay attention to someone with a bucketful of hits until they give a wacky interview or take on an unhinged public persona. Objectively, regular mainstream pop music is no less worthy of our attention than any other genre, so we shouldn't require pop stars to act like eccentric geniuses before we pay attention to them.

There's a bigger issue, too. As much as I like the star system, as much as I think it's valuable and sit is awe of its ability to create meaning, it's just one way that meaning is created. There's no reason that we can't judge musicians in the same way that we judge athletes: look at their performances alone and marvel. Musicians don't have to create a persona, and they don't have to embody a social force. We can appreciate them as machines of grace, admiring the ease with which they produce beauty. It's certainly not the way I always want to approach music. But if a musician seems off-putting, it's one way to be able to appreciate the music they make regardless.

Labels: jonas brothers, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 4:13 PM 4 Comments

Punk Grammar

We are all afraid of turning into our parents. It may be a short-lived fear, and it may turn out that we like turning into our parents, but there's an inevitable anxiety there. It's a way of transmuting the unavoidable change of aging into something we can control. Time marches on, but we can remain cavalier about certain social niceties, keep our sense of adventure paramount over our sense of safety, and avoid wearing slacks. These aspects of personality seem like something we have control over. The biggest thing, maybe, is that we don't want to lose touch with that art that was important to us as youths. We want to stay relevant, up-to-date, and so forth and so on, but at the same time our tastes are mostly fixed somewhere in the past. The music that mattered to us as youths dictates what matters to us as adults, but because music keeps changing, our efforts to keep up inevitably result in us being out-of-date.

The problem with my generation, the generation that grew up with grunge and became indie, embraces a somewhat different consideration. It's not the anxiety of influence so much as it is anxiety about influence. When we were growing up, the biggest thing we had to fight against musically was the influence of our parents' generation. The idea that the music of the 60s is the only music that matters is pervasive and incredibly powerful to a general audience. Worse, kids like me tended to approach adult music through boomer bands like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Doors, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Marley. Thus attempts to come into our own understanding of music inevitably demanded a rejection of that whole canon, while at the same time, again, our tastes were formed in that context, and so those standards never really go away. The music that resulted rejected certain tenets--social relevance, poetic lyrics, melody, careful production--while keeping others, like authenticity, sincerity, and an emphasis on guitars. What resulted certainly sounded, at times, like boomer music, and even had some explicit connections; most notably, Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo was (0r is, perhaps) a Deadhead.

In the end, it's probably safe to say that we failed. Most younger listeners in the indie-rock demographic still come to adult music through boomer staples, and many stay there. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and countless artists derived thereof dominate musical tastes across all ages. The question, then, is whether we should try and shape the tastes of the younger generation(s) in the same way the boomers did. Surely kids need to get out from under this myth of the 60s just as much as we did, and the music of the 90s offers a viable, yet complementary, alternative. There already is a myth of the 90s, that has been muted somewhat, but is still going strong, at least if sales of Nirvana t-shirts are anything to go by. But if we do that--if we impress our tastes on the young--does that make us as bad as the boomers?

Which brings us, of course, to No Age.

No Age is a two-man band from Los Angeles who have just released their second record, Nouns, on Sub Pop, the Seattle label that was responsible for much of the grunge boom. Though their name is a reference to the hardcore punk label SST, they sound like an amalgam of noisy indie bands like Built to Spill and Sonic Youth (who, in fairness, did release an album on SST). More importantly, at least for the sake of this post, they emerged from a scene centered around a club called The Smell, an all-ages venue that serves vegan snacks and offers $5 haircuts; a picture of the club serves as the cover of No Age's first album. Its communitarian spirit recalls the hardcore ethos of the 90s, and it has spawned various other noisy bands like the Wives and Mika Miko. Sasha Frere-Jones wrote an article for the New Yorker that spelled out the club's mythos explicitly, making sure to mention that it lends out books and zines. Though the band's connection to the club is interesting, it's not a necessary factor for embracing their music, which works within an established genre and would make sense to fans of similar bands.

It's interesting, then, to read the band's two Pitchfork reviews, one for the new album and one for their first album, Weirdo Rippers. The first review, by Brandon Stousy, places the band precisely within this genre, throwing out references to Harry Pussy, Lync, and Kicking Giant, none of which I've ever heard of before. (Nor do I feel particularly bad about this.) It pinpoints their appeal more broadly, however: "No Age bring back the DIY energy of Kicking Giant and Lync and '90s zines and, importantly, a life away from computer screens." There's a clear broadening of scope there: few can relate to Kicking Giant and Lync, but the appeal of "'90s zines" has only increased since we no longer have to read them, and we can all feel a certain longing for the pre-internet days, I guess. (Can we?)

In contrast to the first review's focus on sounds and influences, the second review frames the band entirely in terms of their scene, mentioning The Smell in the first sentence and through the two opening paragraphs before returning to it again in the final paragraph. Only two paragraphs of the review deal exclusively with the band. Despite having a different author, the second review (written by Amanda Petrusich) echoes the appeal the first review invoked: "regional culture has been fractured and marginalized by the internet," Petrusich writes, and though "being too focused on anything local-- except produce, maybe-- feels depressingly provincial in 2008," she still finds it "thrilling that a community-sponsored, community-supported art space can attract (and sustain) such a horde of admirable bands."

Thus, it's not only that the band's success beyond the noise/ex-hardcore community is being explained in these terms of being a throwback to a 90s social context, but that the case for its continued success is being made in these terms as well. The reviewing inducting the band into Pitchfork's "Best New Music" category begins and ends with a discussion of The Smell and the way it resembles the lost utopia of zines, community centers, and vegans.

I'm not sure if this is necessarily a good thing. For one thing, the best and more enduring American indie bands of the 90s, if they were part of a scene at all, existed on the outskirts of that scene: Nirvana, Yo La Tengo, Slint, Pavement, GBV. You wouldn't put any of these at the center of an artistic community like you would No Age, and it's hard to see how any of them would have been diminished by having the internet exist. The two exceptions would be Sleater-Kinney and Neutral Milk Hotel, neither of whom I like, so maybe this is just a matter of taste.

Then again, maybe it's not. Unless we're going to make an argument that there was something unique about that social environment that made bands different--a charge it would seem hard to sustain given that most of this decade's successful indie bands have sounded like variations on indie bands from the previous two decades--then the reason to hail a return of hardcore flair would be that the experience itself is worth preserving. Moreover, at least in the case of No Age, a band's association with that experience would have to say something about their artistic worth. There's a weird dance going on in that last part of the equation: the extrinsic narrative is being brought in as part of the artistic experience, and while I think that's a good thing to do--it's why I love pop, in part--I'm not sure how it squares with the expectation of authenticity that goes hand-in-hand with the valuation of this sort of music. Once we start valuing process over product, I'm not sure that we've having an artistic discussion anymore. Sure, I wish music now was more aware of, say, sexism, but would a return of "community-sponsored, community-supported art space[s]" really make that happen?

The first part of the equation, though, is where this whole thing gets tricky, and where the problem of anxiety about influence comes in. If we think that this was a valuable experience to have, and if we think opportunities to have this experience no longer abound, it should follow that we want to encourage what few there are so that kids these days can be fortunate enough to have the same kind of adolescences we did. Putting it that way is stacking the deck a bit, so I don't want to lean on this too heavily. Certainly the present decade has all sorts of problems, and there are many aspects of "the 90s" that I wouldn't mind seeing return. If there's anything that argues against merely accepting the social environment as it is, it's that it changes every seven years or so.

But ultimately, the things I want changed aren't specifics, but generalities. I would like to see more awareness of sexism, but I don't necessarily think that it needs to come via take back the night marches. Requiring that a new generation deal with the same issues in the same ways seems like Boomeritis. "Political problems? Well then, by gum, you need protest singers and protest marches! If you're not doing that, well then, you're not really dealing with the problem, and you don't really care! Unlike us! We cared, man!" Replace "protest singers and protest marches" with "hardcore music and community centers" and you have the critical discourse surrounding No Age.

What exactly is so bad about the internet, though? I no longer live in the kind of major urban area where community centers allowed great bands to flourish; I'm back where I grew up, in upstate New York, where there are no great bands (though there are community centers). The internet is now doing what it did for me as a teenager: allowing me access to this wider world and informing me about what's going on. For kids in Baltimore or LA, that information was available within driving distance, or from their friends; I had--and have--to go out and find it. You know what the big bands play in my current town, people? Ska. If I don't have the internet, that's what I'm into.

And it goes beyond that. If you want to see what it looks like when we become our parents, check out the idea that the internet is getting in the way of kids these days having an authentic indie-rock experience. That's only true if the internet is somehow inauthentic, e.g. not a culture of its own, and I think refusing to acknowledge that is much more evidence of being out-of-touch than not liking emo. Lord knows I'm no internet utopian, but it seems strange to deny that there are real communities online. They may not be able to give each other haircuts or provide venues for bands to play, but none of that is necessary for vital art to happen. There can still be the kind of encouragement, critique, and one-upmanship that we associate with productive artistic communities. When CSS first emerged, they made a good case for being a product of internet music culture, having gotten many of their influences from MP3blogs like Matthew's (if I'm remembering correctly). I think because the idea of online music is so debased for critics and musicians, bands may be reluctant to acknowledge these sorts of influences. But they're undeniably there.

I'm not sure indie is going to do itself any favors, ultimately, by clinging to the processes of the past. Certainly a longing for paradise lost is fine, and there's nothing wrong with reverence for the past. But indie was birthed out of the idea that new technologies (like 4-tracks, cassettes, and photocopying) could change the way music is made. Once new technology comes, that should change it again, at least if it wants to remain a vital form. Ultimately, we may end up no different from previous generations, soft and happy at middle age, listening to the music of our youth and thinking it the pinnacle of human achievement. That's fine, and good; no one's going to stand up for the music of an era except those who lived through it. But that doesn't mean we have to impose an arrested development on those who come after us in the same way the baby boomers tried to, and continue to try to. Let's not become exactly like our parents.

Labels: baby boomers, indie rock, no age, pop

posted by Mike B. @ 10:32 AM 0 Comments

So Very Special

Let's get something straight here: Prince is not covering Radiohead here. He is, rather, making "Creep" a Prince song, which is to say he is bringing it within the Prince scheme of rhetoric. This is not merely an instrumental thing, nor even a stage gesture thing, though the gesturing offstage is pretty great. The particular moment it happens is at the end of the second verse.

Recall: here, Thom Yorke usually says "You're so fucking special." That "fucking" is key, because it's supposed to sound snide. It's an insult. Prince, on the other hand, does not say "fucking." And not just because he doesn't swear anymore; he could have said what Thom goes with in the radio edit, which is "very." Instead, he changes the entire line, and in doing, he changes the entire meaning of the line. Prince says: "I think that you're special."

This is probably the best distillation of Prince's verbal seduction technique anyone's ever conjured. That Prince is awesome and desirable goes without saying. Prince's argument for why you should sleep with him takes that for granted. Of course you want to sleep with Prince; everybody wants to sleep with Prince. But it's also true that Prince probably wants to sleep with everyone, too. Prince desiring you is not news. Prince walks around desiring things. That's what he does.

Prince's argument for why you should sleep with him, then, is that you guys could do something really special together.  Prince wants to sleep with you because he thinks you're amazing.  You are his equal, and being the equal of Prince is pretty special.  It's all over his stuff, but maybe best expressed in "Gett Off": "twenty-two positions in a one-night stand / I'll only call you after if I say you can," and, of course, "tonight you're a star / and I'm the big dipper."  Prince does not think that you're hot, or that he's good in bed; Prince thinks that you are the awesomest thing ever.  That you are, in other words, special.

Labels: covers, pop, prince, radiohead

posted by Mike B. @ 11:12 AM 16 Comments

Four Minutes (To Save the World)

I haven't said anything about the EMP conference here because I've had something of a hard time figuring out how to organize my thoughts. While there were excellent presentations, particularly J.D. Considine's and Todd Burns', I came away with a general sense of unease, but without anything specific to hang it on. Specifically, I was uneasy about many presenters' understanding of the conference's theme: politics.

Now, though, I think I've found a good example of what troubled me in a post by a conference attendee, Carl Wilson. I don't want to seem like I'm picking on Carl here--I really am just trying to get at a persistent point of view that irks me. Most critics who espouse that point of view are unreadable, at least by me, and so I wouldn't be able to find an example in their work because I don't read them. Carl, on the other hand, I am happy to read, and consistently do. He is a very good writer who occasionally wades into this stuff and makes me cringe. I don't think it makes other people cringe, though. So that's what I'm trying to get at here: the source of the cringe.

Carl's post is not about the conference itself, but about Barack Obama's recent "bitter" gaffe. Nevertheless, I think it gets at something fundamental about how many cultural critics think about politics. Carl talks about how the gaffe reflects a problem the left has with understanding where people's beliefs come from and how valid those beliefs are.[1] He compares it to Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?, with its theory that working-class small-town Americans had been duped by the right into giving up their economic self-interest in favor of socially conservative politics that did them no good, and to his own pre-book attitude toward Celine Dion. To quote:

I thought a lot about these questions with regard to Celine Dion. There was a time when I would have figured that listening to Celine, like going to big blockbuster Hollywood movies, was a kind of false consciousness - being seduced by a materialistic Disneyland escapism that says nothing about real people's lives. I could have written a "What's the Matter with Celine Dion?" critique parallel to Frank's, claiming that people were being duped into listening to fairy-tale fantasy music sold to them by the very people who were strip-malling and outsourcing their communities' cultures out of existence.

But when I listened to Celine's music more and talked to her fans, I realized that she did, in fact, reflect her audience's values and concerns back to them in complicated ways - how to be at once strong, modern and feminine, for example, or the fate of tradition and family and community in an era of globalization and mass media - and that the more "rebellious" music that I used to think superior to the mainstream is often indifferent or hostile to those values and concerns. So why should they want it?

I came to think that everybody has a "false consciousness" of one kind or another, because everybody's cultural tastes are the product of their social experiences and position (including critics and rebels and radicals, seeking affirmation in the beliefs and culture they approve). Which is the same thing as saying no one has false consciousness. It's not that all beliefs are equally valid, but you won't get anywhere by assuming or claiming that other peoples' beliefs are inauthentic...

If we want to assert the importance of multiculturalism, adventurous art, minority cultures, reproductive freedom, then we have to recognize that some other people are equally attached to and serious about their religions, their social values, their leisure activities, their "American" culture.

Coming from my particular cultural viewpoint and set of beliefs, to conflate "adventurous art" and "reproductive freedom" is ludicrous. In the sense that they are both things that people can have different beliefs about, they're in entirely different categories. Disagreeing about reproductive freedom is a matter of ethics and practicality. We can argue about whether the rights of a fetus are more important than the rights of a woman. We can argue about adoption, poverty, rape, or, if you want to be really tolerant toward the conservative viewpoint, "post-abortion syndrome." Such an argument can proceed from a well-structured ethical system to factual discussion about the practical consequences of different policies toward reproductive freedom.

Disagreeing about adventurous art, on the other hand, is a matter of taste. And while taste is important, the arguments you can have about it are based in nothingness. You can never really "win" an argument about the avant-garde. You can win an argument about abortion. And that's as it should be, because abortion policy has real, demonstrable consequences. I can acknowledge and respect your viewpoint on adventurous art because, if it's different than mine, it has no consequences for me. This is not the case for actual matters of politics, for matters of policy. If a lot of people dislike gay marriage, that means a bunch of my friends can't get married. If a lot of people like Celine Dion, I occasionally get annoyed while in a department store. That's not just a difference of degree, but a difference of kind.

Unless, of course, you really do think that cultural disagreements have substantial practical consequences. Carl does, I think. When he says that Celine represents people who are "strip-malling and outsourcing their communities' cultures out of existence,"[2] that's not just department-store annoyance. That is a sort of cultural genocide, and in that case, you can have a ethical argument about cultural issues.

Which, again, seems crazy to me. But there is an entire field of study devoted to just such an idea. They've constructed a complicated--some might say a bit conspiracy-esque--theory on how cultural actions have an impact on power relations and social structure as great as, or even greater than, economic interests or public policy. You can string it together from Habermas to Zizek to various other people, all working under the assumption that culture maintains the power relations in society by distributing the ruling class' dominant messages to the public and inclucating hegemony, the new word for "false consciousness." (Note: this is the only time I will say stuff like that in this post, I promise.) And the perspective came up again and again at the conference that cultural actions--which is to say, artistic actions--had real and substantial (and almost always negative) effects on entire communities. This seems plausible when it comes to individuals, and certainly the role of culture in shaping people's identities is undeniable. But that's not what people were saying. Their arguments ran more along Carl's lines, that a strip mall eradicates the culture of a community. Moreover, there was a creepy strain of intentionality going on there, that zoning boards let strip malls in precisely so that they could accrue the benefits of destroying a community's culture. Over and over again, the most misused word in academia was invoked as shorthand for "corporations and governments are trying to destroy cultures because that is beneficial for their nefarious interests": neo-liberalism. One guy even used it to describe Ronald Reagan's foreign policy, which there may be some sort of literature on, but which from a political perspective seemed as sensible as calling Jerry Falwell a socialist.

I don't want to bite off more than I can chew here; this is a big, big argument, and at the heart of it is a basic disagreement about how the world works. A cultural disagreement, I guess. So I'm just giving my own particular viewpoint here. Carl points out, rightly and usefully, that lefties have their own sort of "false consciousness" where they're always seeking out things that reinforce their beliefs. I think the perspective I'm highlighting here is a symptom of that. At a certain gut level, it feels right to dislike strip malls and Disney stores and multimational corporations. But which came first here? Does the elaborate theoretical framework exist, in part, to justify these beliefs? And if so, are these beliefs rational, or are they...taste? Is opposing Disney Stores merely a matter of aesthetics? From that same rationalist perspective (which, I understand, the Zizek dude dislikes?), the negative consequences of a Disney Store opening seem hard to pin down, and though we might all agree that they're distasteful, it's hard to compare it to, say, the closing of an abortion clinic, or a change in the gas tax, or welfare reform. Which actually has an effect?

So let's focus on culture for a second, to get out of this comparison. I don't think that the only problem here is the conflation of art and politics. There's also, and more immediately relevently, the consistent attempt to apply ethical standards of judgment to cultural matters. I'm happy Carl points out that we need to respect where other peoples' tastes come from. But I'm not sure you get a cookie for that. Being curious and respectful of what other people like isn't the goal of criticism, but the base standard for responsible criticism. I'm aware that this is not necessarily a consensus view, and I've heard many people say their minds were opened by Carl's book on Celine, which made a great argument for the value of understanding why people like things we dislike. And lord knows I sit around and bitch about bands I think are shit. But I recognize that this is play--that bitching about shitty art is part of art. It's how more art gets made, for one thing.

I don't think that people at the conference really acknowledged this distinction. They seemed very serious about the evils they were cataloguing. They were making ethical arguments. But as I said above, the only way you can make ethical arguments about cultural matters is to assume that not following proper ethical standards has some sort of practical effect on the culture itself. In Carl's formulation, "communities' cultures" are being driven "out of existence"--are being destroyed. But this argument springs from a not entirely convincing vision of what culture is and how it works. In this vision, culture is a single, unchangable thing, that is how it has always been, and when it interacts with changing conditions, it doesn't change, but is, instead, destroyed. Here is the local culture, a pure and unmediated thing; here is the strip mall coming in; and there goes the local culture, which no longer exists, replaced with corporate culture. Different culture are, here, like salmon roe: distinct, unchanging elements that don't interact with each other but merely wait to be consumed, and, once they come into contact with a larger element, are obliterated.

To my way of thinking, though, culture is more like a sourdough starter. It's a basis from which other things spring, that people can take from without destroying, and which reacts to the infusion of new elements by changing, not by ceasing to exist; in fact, we have to "feed it" in order to keep it alive. Any culture, no matter how "traditional" it might seem to us, is historically contingent, socially constructed, and contested. Rewind a few hundred years, or even a couple of decades, and it will look very different. Cultures have always come into contact with new things and changed, always been up for debate. By the terms we use for talking about art, almost any local culture is inauthentic. And that's how it should be. Culture doesn't thrive by standing still, it thrives through play and debate and negotiation and change. This is not to say that any change is positive--I'm happy to talk about positive and negative cultural changes. But to say that negative changes aren't changes but destructions reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of culture itself.

To bring it back to where we began: the problem isn't that we think people's beliefs are inauthentic, it's that we think their culture is authentic. The only authentic cultures are dead ones, certified and frozen by the museum treatment. Any culture worth worrying about is inauthentic as hell, and if it can't take a damn Disney Store, it's hard to see how it would've lasted very long at any point in history.

This taking of culture at face value is persistent, and, I think, unhelpful in our attempts to understand art, pop, and all the rest. To frame these debates in ethical terms is to attempt an impossible argument--to transmute taste to policy. It doesn't work. If we're going to talk about art, for god's sake, let's do it on its own terms. Let's not try and justify our tastes by making the tastes of others seem evil; let's try and figure out what's going on with those tastes in the first place, and what they have to say about the society they're situated within.

[1] Though he doesn't seem to acknowledge the contextual information about the quote that's come out, which makes clear that Obama was not so much espousing his own views as--to steal Carl's excellent language--reflecting the likely views of a potential volunteer in San Francisco in such a way as to help the volunteer be more tolerant toward the Pennsylvania voters they were going to be canvassing. Obama has stuck to his statement for political reasons--saying it was a gaffe would be a sign of weakness, and he's done very well so far with embracing his embarassments--but I think what it reflects is less Obama's own intolerance (though, let's be honest here, a black man might be forgiven for being a little intolerant toward rural Pennsylvanians) and more his continuing effort to try and get the left to think abut things in a moderate way while not necessarily giving up their actual beliefs. Maybe the difficulty he's run into reflects his occasional clumsiness at doing that, or maybe it reflects the problem with local primaries becoming national news.
[2] While this is in the context of discussing his old position, the only thing he reverses about that position is that the people who like Celine have been duped--he still believes that their communities' cultures are being etc.

Labels: carl wilson, emp, politics, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 9:12 AM 15 Comments

Do You Know What That Means?

Webbie - "Independent"

The obvious reference here is Destiny's Child, not just to the two "Independent Woman"s, but to "Bills Bills Bills." But instead of being a response song, this is more of an...agreement song? It recasts professional women in the hip-hop ideal: rich, hard-working, ambitious, and only needing the opposite sex for, well, sex. And it does so, somehow, almost entirely approvingly. These are good things for women to be.

The video undermines this a little at the beginning with its scantily-clad female students, but then actually goes beyond what the song itself claims. "Female Doctor Wins Nobel Prize," reads a fake newspaper headline, hilariously but accurately, and as the video ends, an impeached white male president has been replaced with a black female president. (With, awesomely, a full contingent of hot female Secret Service agents.) You could talk about that one for days in the current political context (the dream Democratic ticket!), and it'll probably be even more notable as a historical document a few years down the line.

What I like about this is not just that it's feminist--which it is--but that it's a specific kind of feminist. Rather than being a sex-positive feminism like you might be able to claim, were you drunk enough, that Li'l Kim espouses, or a third-wave feminism of Beyonce, the song is straightforwardly endorsing a traditional 60s, women's lib, second-wave kinda feminism. The idea of women assuming traditional male roles and becoming powerful and independent is straight outa Ms. magazine. I don't want to give the impression here that I'm saying this is unusual for hip-hop: this is unusual for any pop music, especially in the present decade, where we're lucky to get a little post-feminism thrown our way. Moreover, it's coming from men. Not only is it praising the idea of an independent woman, but it's making fun of men for opposing it.

This might not be entirely clear, since it's being expressed in the language of pop. Indeed, you could criticize the song for contradicting itself and the video for contributing to the exploitation of women, etc. etc. But in its chosen context, this is silly. Pop has always picked surface over depth, beauty over truth, and while this does not mean there is no truth or depth (just as truth often walks hand-in-hand with beauty), you can't read those surface elements as endorsing anything but aesthetics. Feminism, on the other hand, has never been so good with aesthetics. When it does try and move towards beauty, it seems to move toward feminity-as-it-is-lived and away from justice issues. So does that mean that pop, with its emphasis on aesthetics, can't be feminist?

"Independent" says nope. Where many previous attempts to integrate feminism into pop have either been non-threatening (see The Mary Tyler Moore Show), overly serious (see riot grrl), or critical of its contradictions (see Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, ad nauseum), "Independent" really does deliver a traditional women's libber message in a forthright, positive, and unmistakable way. And it does so by presenting feminism's arguments not as arguments but as foregone conclusions--as facts. This is pop's power. By being explicitly part of the mainstream, any piece of pop implies that all it contains is within the mainstream too. Webby isn't making a case for women being independent, powerful, and professionally successful--he's saying that they are all those things already, and men should recognize and respect that, because otherwise they aren't going to get laid.

And that's why it's not a contradiction. Female doctors exist, and so do inappropriately-dressed teachers and their nubile students, at least in the realm of pop. The video is just presenting them side-by-side. By so doing, it takes feminism out of the realm of the contested. It's over; feminism won. And ain't that grand? What's not to like about independent ladies? After all, as Webby points out, they can buy their men some nice-ass Gucci hats.

Labels: feminism, pop, webby

posted by Mike B. @ 7:56 AM 0 Comments

I Will Survive

Just popping in from hell month (affectionately!) to throw a few notes your way:

1) If you liked my last EMP paper, I am going to be there again this year. Rachel Arnold and I will be presenting a paper on pop songs used as campaign songs. The paper will probably show up around these parts in the future.

2) Generally I think Stanley Fish is a tool. But apparently if you give him 40 years to think about something, he can come to a pretty reasonable conclusion on it, at least if his article about postmodernism is anything to go by. It's pretty close to what I think about all them Frenchies these days: they weren't trying to disprove rationalism or claim that physical reality doesn't exist, they were just pointing out the socially constructed nature of things and kinda leaving it at that. I don't know if that's what they were actually trying to do, but it seems like the sensible way to think about them. That said, though, there were significant differences between them, and they're important. In retrospect, we can probably call Derrida and Baudrillard the Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin of theory: provacateurs who probably didn't mean all of what they said, and don't really need to be taken seriously, even if some people do. Barthes is kinda the Robin Williams: playful and entertaining, but harmless, if occasionlly annoying in the repetativeness of his schtick. And Paul de Man is just crazy.

But--and not to be a grad student talking about Foucault here, but--Foucault is genuinely important and generally right. His histories applied the deconstructive mindset to concrete and meaningful subjects, and what he turned up helped make strange questionable truisms. In a way, what he did is basically what Gallileo did; both questioned widely-held assumptions that had a real effect on people's lives. But where Gallileo did it with geography, Foucault did it with language. And that has to be attributed, at least in some small part, to the Frenchies, or at least the environment they whipped up.

I go on about this because the rection to Fish's post is just baffling. Comment after comment complaining about postmodernism! Who knew? And this is why I point out that not all French theorists engaged in the kind of rhetoric Fish is talking about (and people are complaining about). There were some that did do legitimate work that really called into question certain things. Many people would, I suspect, agree with Foucault's take on mental illness. It's unfortunate that certain theorists have given the whole enterprise a bad name, but it's really confusing how, after Fish spends a good number of words laying out a reasonable position, people still get really worked up about deconstruction. I mean, it sucks that the one dude went to McGill and had to read Derrida, but I think most English departments these days provide ample opportunity to engage in traditional studies of literature. All the postmodernists went off and formed critical studies departments, didn't they? Oh, what do I know. Maybe Foucault isn't even part of this group.

3) I had previously posted about how much I liked the video for Mariah's "Touch My Body," but I only now realize that I really like the song too! It's dirty but assertive, the melody is really strong, and I like that Mariah's standing up for both her own sexuality and her control of the situation. The sweet way she sings "I will hunt you down" is amazing. I think it's my single of the year right now.

4) Oh yeah: thanks, Universal, for making my entire BYOP post a moot point by removing "Becky" (and two other songs) from the final version of Get Awkward. You are a bunch of enormous cameltoes.

Labels: academia, announcements, emp, notes, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 9:21 PM 6 Comments

It Could Be Dangerous Living In This Valley

If there's a contemporary band that's fallen prey to the cult of the serious, it's the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Their first EP had a song about b-movies, and their early shows generally involved lead singer Karen O getting soaked with beer, whether by her own hand or by others'. They put out an album that was mainly about fucking and being awesome. Then their second album came out and it was about loneliness and sadness and ennui and it sounded like a cut-rate Nigel Godrich (that signifier of sincerity) had been allowed to spew his seed all over the tracks. What happened?

What happened was "Maps," and more specifically what happened was people missing the point the first time around. Initial reactions to the YYYs were either predictably rapturous or skeptical, reading their exuberance as shallow, fashion-victim Brooklyn kids playing simple music for simple times. But upon the emergence of "Maps," and its ascendence to minor-hit heaven, critics changed their minds. Oh, it was said, they can be serious! How great!

And look what happened: Karen O started taking herself seriously. The songs on their debut, Fever to Tell, were made from riffs and chants and sounded amazing. The songs on their second album, Show Your Bones, sounded like songwriting. We could get songwriting anywhere. Fever to Tell sounded like experimental music (Nick Zinner's playing may have recalled tha blooze, but it also sounded like Alan Licht) that functioned as rock and pop. They had managed to be experimental (notably, "Maps" was about the lead singer of furrowed-brow noiseniks Liars) without taking it seriously. But when they got so much positive reinforcement for "Maps," it signaled that this was the direction in which they should continue. What got lost was that no one might care about the YYYs in the first place without "Art Star" and "Pin."

And so Karen O embarked on one of the most symbolic journeys a rock musician can take: she moved from New York to LA.

New York is audible in almost every song the Yeah Yeahs released before the move. Sex is a quality New York and LA share, of course, but they approach it in different ways. Where, musically speaking, New York is dirty, cheap, snotty, and brash, LA is sleazy, opulent, self-important, and emo. Both of these sets of qualities can produce great music, but the Yeah Yeah Yeahs thrived with songs that strutted--musically and lyrically--and fed off the energy of a city that's covered in grime, unforgiving, and intolerant of anyone taking themselves too seriously (unless you take yourself really seriously). Los Angeles encourages indulgence, but "Maps" was great because of its context within a set of songs that seemed to express an entirely different attitude. Its beauty and sincerity seemed to be let go reluctantly--it was buried on the b-side, after all--and so it came across as a kind of secret, a glimpse of the soft side of a strong, charismatic person. This is appealing in a way that an entire album of "Maps" is not. Because of the refusal to acknowledge the majesty of "Our Time" and "Tick," to recognize the entirely valid (and even important!) things those songs were doing, the exception got emphasized, and the context was lost.

Now, this is not to say that I entirely dislike Show Your Bones. The referentiality and undeniable strut of "Phenomenon" is great, and "Cheated Hearts" is as good as anything on Fever to Tell. But I think the Yeah Yeah Yeahs of that first EP and first album filled a void in music extremely well. They made really great, noisy, shouty music that, as I say, worked as rock or pop. Many (many!) other bands tried to do this, but the YYYs suceeded because they had the right attitude and because every member of that band is really good at what they do. With Show Your Bones, that was lost, and the void returned.

Which is all a very long way of saying that the void has been filled quite well by Be Your Own Pet.

Now, it's a little off-putting at first to hear lead singer Jemina (!) because she does sound a whole lot like Karen O. But, crucially, she sounds like the Karen O of Fever to Tell, and since the YYYs are not making that kind of music anymore, the slot is up for grabs. I'm not entirely sure they did that on their first, self-titled album, but their new one, Get Awkward, hits the mark with room to spare.

If there's an explanation for their success, it's probably their focus on youth. As Mark Richardson says, "Much has been made of the members of Be Your Own Pet's average age," but when you're face-to-face with the album, the actual hard fact of how many years they've been on earth doesn't matter all that much. What matters is that their primary subject is the actual experience of being a teenager. Anyone could write these songs, and musicians of BYOP's age can, and do, focus on more "adult" (think "serious") themes and sounds. Karen O doesn't really sing about being young very much, except for maybe on "Our Time," and Nick Zinner's guitar doesn't sound as indebted to contemporary sounds as do BYOP's riffs. BYOP's breakthrough, then, is that you can capture the Fever to Tell energy by writing punk versions of High School Musical.

The most successful song by this criteria is "Becky," a story-song (like "Down By the Water," or "Art Star") about a girl whose friend betrays her trust and who she subsequently murders. (And which you can find here, for a while, at least until the album is out and you can buy it yourself.) It works because it is the exact opposite of high school poetry: instead of translating the banal emotional crises of adolesence into the astract language of the moon and suffering and so forth, Jemina sings very matter-of-factly about what's going on: "you signed my yearbook and that was pretty rad," "I really loved going to your slumber party," "now I'm stuck in fuckin' cellblock two." (Were I to be going through such an experience as a teenager, I would've come up with something more like "lost in a black cloud" or something. Boring!) Moreover, the actual emotions aren't dramatized, so we get "you told my secrets and it caused me a lot of pain." In other words, it refuses to take itself seriously. What it is is what it is: not timeless emotion but a simple tale of betrayal and homicide. And this is great, because timeless emotion dramatized into abstract language of the moon and blood is, generally, the same everywhere, and done better by adults. But this is specific, and therefore interesting, because it's different.

What really makes it work, though, is the attitude, which is why it can lay a claim to that YYYs energy. The character's reaction to this pain and hurt is not to go off and write poetry, but to fight back. It "doesn't matter anyway," she yells in the chorus, and "we'll kick your ass, we'll wait with knives after class!" When there's not beauty, this is what you want--action, violence, attitude! Familiar situations made awesome. And when she finally does the deed, no Lars van Trier art-directed execution for her, just the workaday grind of "juvey." It's dirty, cheap, snotty, and brash.

None of this is to say that the song is one-dimensional. She's not an unstoppable badass, but a kinda crazy kid who has regrets, who's sad, but who still blames her victim for making her into a murderous felon. The heightening of an everyday situation makes it fun, but the confusion and denial make it believable. When, at the end, she declares that "I don't regret what I've done,'cuz in the end, it was fun!" it's a good motto to live by, but in the context of the song it comes off as maniacal.

The key point, though, the part that really makes this rich and complex, is the breakdown, in which the male members of the band, who had been howling "Beckyyyy!" under the chorus, chant, "We don't like Beck-y, anymore!" But who is Becky? The only other time she comes up is in the line "It was great how you made me a friendship bracelet, but I didn't know you made one for Becky's face lift!" This implies that she's the girl to whom the vicitm betrayed the narrator, the "other girl." So why don't they like her anymore? Shouldn't it be the killer they dislike? Well, no--the killer is their bandmate, so they're on her side. What this does is to bring the other girl into the story, to give her a little spotlight. In the midst of all this over-the-top killing, we get a little glimpse of the third character standing in a corner, sad and left out--her best friend killed, another girl in jail because of it, and arguably because of her, and thus made an outcast by the other kids, who blame her for the whole thing. It's like Blur's "Country House," where after a whole song of arguably simplistic stereotype-bashing, a chant emerges of "blow, blow me out, I am so sad, I don't know why," humanizing what had previously been a cipher. We see it from their perspective. This is art.

The funny thing is that there is an entire song on Get Awkward about the perils of moving to LA. It's called "The Kelly Affair," and it's available here, where you can also read Marc Hogan's take on it. Of course, it's mainly about Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, since the fake girl-band in that movie changes its name from "The Kelly Affair" to "The Carrie Nations," which is mentioned in the first line of the song, and Jemina yells a famous quote from the movie over the breakdown. ("Nothing like a Rolls!") But why does the movie resonate with BYOP enough for them to write an entire song about it? I think it's because they're from Nashville, an industry town but not for teenage punk bands, and they see moving to LA as a step toward being assimilated; it's their way of dealing with the minor fame they've built up, just as Show Your Bones was at least partially about the same thing. But where Karen O sings of alienation, Jemina makes fun of the whole idea by relating a career move to a camp classic. "It could be dangerous," she sings, and while the lyrics list pills, sex, and parties as the dangers, for a band like BYOP the danger is in losing the energy and snottiness that people have responded too--in becoming the YYYs. That, two albums in, they've managed to avoid that fate says good things about their music and their future.



(For the record: I previously worked as an accountant for the company that booked Be Your Own Pet's tours, but I no longer have any association with them. And, believe me, they book lots of bands I've bad-mouthed.)

Labels: be your own pet, pop, teenpop, yeah yeah yeahs

posted by Mike B. @ 12:30 PM 1 Comments

The Next Man on the Moon Will Be Chinese

Given that the focus of this blog is art + politics, I would be remiss if I did not direct you to Andrew WK's musical setting of an exchange from the McLaughlin Group, since it is a) amazing, and b) some sort of super-concentrated essence of that particular topic. I could go on about it for, oh, pages, but that seems silly to do for a 47-second joke, right? Let's just coronate it as the clapclap theme song and move on with our lives.

(You can also listen to a Be Your Own Pet song at that link, which will become relevent shortly.)

Labels: andrew wk, politics, pop, theme song

posted by Mike B. @ 2:06 PM 0 Comments

A Brief Point About Stupidity

This NYT article, regarding Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason, has been hanging around the "most popular" list for a few days now, and at present, it has attracted 978 comments. Soon, I hope to address why it (and grumbles like it) strike such a chord, but as for the actual content of the article, it demands a brief rejoinder.

The essential thrust of her argument, at least as it is depicted here, comes down to that evergreen canard: Americans are ('R'?) stupider than they have ever been. Often now, and exclusively in the past, that argument is made via anecdotal evidence, such as Jacoby's little parable about the two men on 9/11 who didn't know what Pearl Harbor was. This is, to say the least, inconclusive. Contemporary scolds, however, are able to draw on survey data to demonstrate just how widespread and shocking is the ignorance of Americans, and Jacoby invokes statistics on college students' shaky grasp of geography. This sort of evidence would seem to be more useful for someone looking to indict a whole culture; after all, to show that Americans are stupider now than they have ever been, they must show a) that they are stupid, and b) that they used to be less stupid. Presumably Jacoby shows a) well enough, but that leaves b). And b) is a problem.

The inconvenient thing for Jacoby's argument is that survey data have pretty much always shown that Americans are shockingly ignorant. I'm hardly an expert on the subject, but I could send you toward Philip Converse's "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" from 1964. Drawing on data from 1956-1960, he made an embarassingly convincing case that 90% of Americans had little knowledge or understanding about our political system. I don't know if Jacoby is using any similar statistics from modern times, but that sounds pretty ignorant to me, and that in the golden age of the post-war boom.

As for before the postwar era, no survey data exists, because widespread surveying of the population only began in the 40s. So could we have perhaps been smarter before then? Could that data just have gone uncaptured?

The problem with that idea is that universal compulsory education has only been in existence in America since 1918, and it seems unlikely that Americans were smarter when they did not have to attend school. The only possibility left, then, is that Americans were smarter in the 25 year (or so) period between the starts of compulsory education and surveying, and sure, it's possible. But something would've had to happen during that period to make them 90% stupid about politics by 1956. It's hard to think of what that could be; certianly Jacoby's hobgoblins, anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, were not exactly unknown in the first half of the twentieth century.

In sum: Jacoby can say that Americans are stupid. She can wonder why they continue to be stupid, and indeed, many people do. She can even say that we should be smarter. Bravo! But she can't say we're stupider, and she most certainly can't blame either pop culture or teaching about pop culture in colleges for making us stupider. It seems like what she really wants to be saying is that the educational system in America needs to be fixed--but that would be a much shorter, or at least much different, book, and would probably not appeal to quite the same audience.

The interesting suggestion about the above analysis, though, is that there might be a fairly logical reason for why Americans think so little of themelves and so much of the Americans of old: we know how stupid we are, but we don't know how stupid we used to be. And that, sad to say, is the direct fault of the national survey. It seems elitist and condescending to think of most Americans as fundamentally ignorant, but survey after survey comes out to say that we are. We want to think of our fellow citizens as decent, kind, respectful human beings, but surveys pop up to inevitably remind us that they are not. And if we are not now, it seems likely that we never were. The only evidence of our predecessors' sanctifying grace is either anecdotal, clearly unrealistic, or taken from the sullied minds of the elderly. Just like everyone everywhere, the American people are not wonderful human beings. (American culture or American ideals maybe not so, but that's a different discussion.) We have surveys to thank for that knowledge, and though what they reveal may be disheartening, it is imperitive that we resist the siren song of nostalgia, that we do not view the past through a Vaseline-smeared lens in order to make ourselves feel better about the present. We're stupid, we're mean, and we're selfish. If we want to change that, there's no backwards path, no state of grace to return to. There's only forward.

ADDENDUM: Regarding the "maps" thing brought up in comments, this guy makes a good point:

Apropos of Jacoby, the reason FDR wanted people to buy maps in World War II
is because polling showed a significant number of Americans did not know where
Germany was located on the globe, and of course, at that time, there were far
more people than today who believed the earth was not a sphere, but essentially
flat. My question to Jacoby would be "How many people really went out and bought
maps--and of those, how many were the ones who didn't know where Germany
was?"

Labels: everything that is old, notes, pop, shitty world theory

posted by Mike B. @ 5:34 PM 12 Comments

The Cult of the Serious

Maura had a good post a couple weeks back reacting to Virgina Heffernan's NYT Magazine piece lamenting the imminent passing of Friday Night Lights. Maura's conclusion:

i think what heffernan’s argument really boils down to is the fact that, generally speaking, scripted shows that are adored by self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs–from your alessandra stanleys to your twop message-board denizens–don’t really do well on a mass level in general. (the success of a show like lost is probably the exception to the rule, although that show is pretty compelling on a mass level, and it featured many shots of absolutely stunning people running around shirtless and/or in rainstorms. hello, josh holloway!) but the online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about those sorts of shows creates the illusion of greater popularity than there really may be, much like certain other phenomena that i’ve come across in the day job.

Maura's coming at this from the particular perspective of her aforementioned day job--and in this case that's probably the right perspective to come at it from, since Heffernan's trying to make this about the internet. But what she says resonated with me for another reason. Let me come at it from my particular perspective for a minute.

I don't really know why I've felt the need to be coy about this, but I'm going to the Newhouse school right now as a grad student. (Please do call me out if I'm no longer keeping it real on clapclap. The implicit prohibition on swearing and general uncomfortableness with elaborate, obscene metaphors in the academy has been hard to adjust to.) I've taken two classes so far with Bob Thompson, who's probably the most visible television scholar in America. And while it was refreshing at first just to hear someone talk seriously about television, as the classes have progressed, I've become more and more dissatisfied with his critical perspective. And while I don't want to shy away from calling him out in particular on this--I'm going to use examples from his lectures in a second--he is, ultimately, a part of the group Maura calls "self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs." And as someone who's looking to spend a lot of time studying TV, I have a few problems with them and the particular artistic values they're attempting to impose on the rest of us.

While I don't recall him necessarily ever coming out and saying so, Thompson's favorite show of all time is probably St. Elsewhere. When he first began discussing the show last year, I was happy to go along for the ride. He's watched the show very closely and even corresponded with the show's staff to clarify and confirm certain points. But his argument for the show's quality revolves around one particular assumption: that it works on multiple levels. For instance, in watching an episode where Howie Mandel goes through the afterlife, he broke down a basic scene where two characters sit in the hospital kitchen and recapitulate previous plotlines by showing how a series of lines go by that all employ condiment metaphors, that those metaphors are also dirty jokes, and that the lines sometimes alliterate. He compared this to Shakespeare, as well as to Arrested Development, the former in a positive way, the latter in a negative. He criticized Arrested Development for being overly obvious in its delivery of jokes, whereas with St. Elsewhere, you might not even notice that there was a joke.

Now, I could point out here that this is at least partially because puns on condiments aren't particularly funny, whereas Arrested Development's jokes could sometimes exhibit the kind of structural complexity that would make a grown man weep. His point was, in this and other discussions of the show's worth, that the writing was dense, complex, and worked on multiple levels, and that therefore this made St. Elsewhere a great show.

Heffernan goes on about franchising and the internet and "museum fatigue" (agh!), but what her argument ultimately comes down to is the same thing Thompson's argument ultimately comes down to: that a show's worth is directly related to how dense it is. Not only that, but that density has to be visible and deliberate. It's not enough for a show to resonate on multiple levels; we have to have evidence that the show's creators intentionally put those multiple levels of meaning in there through a heroic act of creation. The show must cater to us or challenge us, rather than expecting us to bring our own meanings to it--it cannot be, as Heffernan puts it, "art that doesn’t need us." But art that does need us sounds like, well, needy art. And since when is needy attractive?

I don't mean to sound like I'm dismissing complex art here. I think complexity, intentional or otherwise, is certainly one level on which quality and pleasure can be generated, though as I imply above, I think it's a little silly to want it to be intentional complexity all the time. But it should not and cannot be the only critereon for excellence when it comes to TV programs. Indeed, it's clear that complexity is not the only way shows can prove their worth. There are too many well-loved, straightforward shows to think otherwise.

Thompson makes the case that the new crop of "quality TV" that's emerged over the last 25 years has fulfilled the promise of television as a medium by allowing it to become a new way to tell stories. But is it really a new way? Don't we often hear The Wire compared to novels? Isn't The Sopranos, for whatever you might think about it, just as much a "middle-class form of the novel," as Heffernan so annoyingly puts it, as anything else? For that matter, isn't Battlestar Galactica? (And in terms of storytelling, haven't we seen this before everywhere from Dickens to comic books to movie serials of the 1940s and 50s?)

I'm just saying that what gets touted as "quality TV"--shows that are, as Maura points out, overwhelmingly scripted dramas--aren't the be-all and end-all of good television. The formal possibilities of TV are by no means limited to the serialized episodic structure. You can do other things on the small screen besides what Dickens did when he was getting paid by the word 150 years ago.

Again, I'm being coy, so let me just come out with it. In an overview of the first 60 years of American television, Thompson commented while watching the famous chocolate eating scene in I Love Lucy that it was not all that different, formally, from what we're still watching today. The scene, he said, would fit right into an episode of Will and Grace. On this, he is most certainly right. And it applies to almost every genre of television. Game shows (which includes reality shows), dramas, soap operas, and news have changed their formats strikingly little from the 1950s. The tone and design might be slightly different, but the essential forms have been set for a good half-century.

And then there are cartoons.



What you see above is an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and I would challenge anyone to find a show predating it with which it shares any formal qualities. Seinfeld was hailed--rightly!--for its formal innovations, and it referred to itself as a show where nothing happened. But, of course, lots of things happened in Seinfeld episodes. There were numerous conflicts which were then complicated and intertwined and eventually resolved. That complexity and manipulation was a big part of what made the show so satisfying.

In contrast, there is one episode of Space Ghost which could be summarized thusly: Thurston Moore plays the guitar for 5 minutes. Then the credits roll. Literally nothing happens. The episode above consists of 9 minutes of Space Ghost following an ant along the ground, until he encounters giant ants and is chased by them for about 10 seconds. Then the episode ends. That's it. That's the episode. It's certainly like an Andy Warhol film, except this was broadcast on national television and ends with a joke about fire ants. (Miss Clap's comment: "Wow, I can't believe they aired that.")

Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a cartoon talk show, and sometimes it was structured as such: opening with a monologue, proceeding to interviews, and the three characters would banter back and forth for a while between. But other times, the show might start in the middle of a line, or wander off to Space Ghost's apartment, or take place entirely in black & white, or be not a cartoon at all, but a re-creation of a past cartoon by human actors. A bad recreation. Long--loooooong--uncomfortable silences were a regular gag. You counted it lucky if the show made any sense whatsoever. And it was immensely enjoyable. Generally, you know what's happening on TV shows; even what counts as a surprise is really just a lesser-traveled path on the recognizably branching forks of the basic TV plotlines. But with Space Ghost, you legitimately had no idea what was happening next. Look above--don't you keep thinking something's going to happen? Don't you keep thinking that they can't possibly drag it out this long? And yet--and yet--they do.

I am happy to recognize that there is an element of taste going on here. Even if I am not as blown away by many of the dramas hailed as groundbreaking and transcendent by the TV connoisseur crowd, I certainly recognize their worth and would never try and talk other people out of liking them so much. But if there was a shift to "quality TV" in the early 1980s, then it has to be recognized that TV cartoons went through at least as sweeping and productive a change starting with Ren and Stimpy in the 90s, and that cartoons are at an entirely different level than cartoons were for the 30 or so years preceding the arrival of NickToons in 1991. Though they might not all be as widely recognized as the HBO canon or the NBC canon, I think the cartoons that have come out of that explosion constitute a canon of at least equal worth. There's a great history to be written--by me, I hope--of the post-80s cartoons, which include, besides Ren and Stimpy and Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Beavis and Butt-Head, The Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy, South Park, Metalocalypse, Animaniacs, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, and whatever your personal favorites may be. If that seems too frivolous, narrow it down to The Simpsons--soon to become the longest-running show on TV--and South Park, plus a bunch of other quality short-hops. Are they excellent in different ways than Six Feet Under and The Wire? Sure. But that's still excellence.

Again, consider not depth of theme of complexity of structure, but formal innovation. In an interview, Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small said his pitch for the show went like this:

We’ve got a TV show. It’s going to be about a metal band, like a death metal band or black metal, I’m not sure -- old-school, kind of thrash stuff. But it’s going to be about a metal band, and there’s going to be tons of murder. And we’re not interested in having anyone understand anything anyone says.

Now look, that is just not a show. Why would anyone want to watch that? And yet it is a fairly accurate description of the final product, which is eminently watchable. That's formal innovation. People are talking over each other, sometimes in unintelligible accents, people are constantly getting killed, the whole conceit revolves around an extremely obscure genre of music--it's like having a show about bluegrass musicians who converse half in Gaelic--and they have found a way not just to make it work as art, but to make it entertaining, incisive, and funny as hell. That is at least amazing as multiple-layer jokes about condiments, isn't it?

It seems fair to say that, after a long time in the wilderness, TV is finally being taken seriously as an artform in the same way that pop music and movies are. Which means that, right now, we're negotiating the consensus critical understanding of the genre. With films, that seems to have coalesced around the idea of the auteur working through the Hollywood system to make a personal statement. With pop music, that centered on the creative genius making masterpieces in the context of a genre of teenage fluff. And with TV, we're rapidly coming together around these HBO shows that, if they crack a smile, are never remembered for doing so, with their successes attributed to single creators: David Chase, Alan Ball, David Simon. But why do these have to be the shows that legitimate the genre? Why, in the context of an artform that celebrated and was built on insubstantiality more than almost any other, do we have to once again fall prey to the cult of the serious--the cult of the complex, the cult of the romantic creative, the cult of the absurdly meaningful. Can we ever sanctify a form of expression without first deeming it sufficiently serious? And do we really want TV to move solely in this direction? Do we really want the standard of worth for future creators to be just these canonized shows, when the people who made these shows grew up on a very non-canonical diet of television? I object here not just because I think shows of incredible worth are being undervalued, but because I love the medium. I love that TV now is going in so many different directions, that it's exploring possibilities rather than closing them off as gauche or critically unacceptable. It's easy to say that we're embracing the discredited simply because we're taking TV seriously. But is it really an act of daring to trumpet the quality of shows that insist so visibly on being taken seriously? Isn't it possible that there are shows out there just as full of meaning which don't try and hit you over the head with it? Why not the cartoon? Why not now? Why not, before it is too late?

Labels: academia, cartoons, metalocalypse, pop, space ghost, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 11:23 PM 11 Comments

80s ads #1

I am currently engaged in a study of 1980s television, which study also includes the commercials of the time. Since the shows are fairly familiar to most people, I thought I might post some of the notable commercials here.

First is an ad for an unfortunately-named diet pill--and yes, this is a real ad:



This is from 1983 or so, but amazingly, they kept these on the market until 1987!

Second is actually something I saw an ad for rather than the ad itself--a strange short film starring David Letterman:



And third...well, couldn't find the ad I actually saw, but this is pretty close, even if it neglects some key lines. This was actually a movie.



Along with watching the first day of MTV and (accidentally) Friday the 13th Part 2, this is all making me think about 80s aesthetics--what they were, where they came from, what they imply. It goes beyond the comedic signifiers of the period, like big hair and neon spandex, and I think it incorporates things beyond simple visuals or style. If we regard "the 80s" as a kind of individual, where did its tastes come from?

Labels: commercials, pop, style, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 12:54 PM 6 Comments

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

Find Out What It Means to Me

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?)

Labels: amy winehouse, music, nyt, p n j, pop

posted by Mike B. @ 9:55 AM 4 Comments

Making the Rules

I just read the two-chapter exerpt of Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, about the Celine Dion album, and one part kinda jumped out at me:

"[I]t’s curious how often critics’ “own enjoyment” still takes us all down similar paths at once."

This reminded me of an article I was reading last week trying to figure out why thousand of different news journalists all seem to come up with the same stories on a daily basis, and why the nightly newscasts on the different networks all lead with the same stories despite not discussing it with each other. The answer was that there are certain news rules, which can be divided up into "regulative" and "constituative" rules, the former of which decides how news is to be gathered and the letter decides what is news. So, for instance, ideas about balance and objectivity would be regulative rules, but the thousand of little signposts journalists have in their head about what exactly is a story in the first place are constituative rules. So for music critics, there are clear rules about how a review is to be set up and what processes you should go through before writing a review (even when these rules are violated, they are consciously violated, as when Meltzer writes a review without listening to the album or Pitchfork posts a YouTube video of a monkey drinking his own pee as a Vines review), but there are also a shared, constantly shifting set of guidelines about what's an important album and what's not. The records that get lots of critical notice aren't necessarily the albums individual critics love the most; they're just the albums most critics will pay attention to and write about, no matter how strong their feelings. The fact that something obscure lands near the top of a year-end list doesn't necessarily mean everyone agrees it's the best, it's just that lots of people think other people should be listening to it. The precise things that make an album attract lots of critical attention are hard to nail down and can't usually be consciously included, but once an album lands in that category, it's easy to see the signs.

The article also talked about, though, the fact that these rules aren't naturally occurring; they come from the audience that the journalists are serving. So ideas about how a review should be written come from what an audience needs from a review, and rules about what constitutes a meaningful, important album come from critics' perception of the public's need-to-know. This was, after all, why critics ultimately felt secure ignoring pop music: the public was taking care of that on their own. But just as some stories are news because the public is perceived to need the information, critics think the public needs to be informed about difficult musics. Wilson says it himself: "my usual critical leanings [are] toward knotty music like art rock, psych-folk, post-punk, free jazz or the more abstract ends of electronics and hip-hop. I write about such sounds in the belief that 'difficult' music can help shake up perceptions, push us past habitual limits." Music critics elucidate the public by picking these albums, they don't express their own tastes.

We all like to think we're unique snowflakes, of course, but music critics--and, to a certain degree, serious music fans--are also professionals. There are rules. And we do fight about them, but these fights always seem to have as one view the idea that the rules don't exist. But they do, and they come from a very particular place: the public. The article also talks about how the public's needs for news journalism are now changing, so news rules may change too. The music industry is changing, and music critics tried to change what the public wants from music criticism. It seems like they failed, though, and the old patterns are still in place, strong as ever.

(crossposted from poptimists)

Labels: carl wilson, critics, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 9:56 PM 2 Comments

How Come I Only See You On The White Train

Sasha Frere-Jones' New Yorker article about the whiteness of indie rock makes some good points, and I'm glad he wrote it. But there were a few oddities. For instance, why not mention the whole crop of dancepunk bands, who were nothing if not indie with black influences? It seems like it would've fit fairly well in the article--the fact that they ultimately lost out to coffeeshop-rock would see to bolster his point.

More importantly, though, while it's a great observation that indie's whiteness surged at the same time rap acheived true commercial dominance (in the same way art historians point out that representational painting faded when photography was invented), it's also hard to ignore the fact that there's a good ten-year difference between the indie bands he mentions who did incorporate black influences (the Clash, the Minutemen) and the ones who didn't (Pavement). That gap is no accident, and I think it gives a more pertinent explanation for why the black influence faded than what he goes with, which does sorta amount to "white guilt." Indie did continue to try and incorporate black influences after the Clash and the Minutemen, and it sounded awful. Those bands aren't in Our Band Could Be Your Life because no one wants to talk about them anymore; they've been left out of the canon. At the same time, what 90s indie was reacting against was very heavily influenced by blues and soul music: pop-metal and the other genres of rock prevelent in the 80s had a real swing to them, and were full of blues-derived solos. (Well, that and Eddie Van Halen neo-classical pull-offs, but still.) 90s indie perceived that these influences were, at least for the moment, played out, exhausted, meaningless. In the context of Pavement's emergence, choosing not to have prominent black influences was an actual choice, whereas the opposite wasn't true. Indie explored, and is still exploring, a different cultural heritage, a white one to be sure, but hey, it was a bunch of white kids, you know? A lot of good art was wrung from folk, the Beach Boys and Philip Glass.

It's also true that this is no longer the case, that these influences are as played out as black influences were at the end of the 80s. (Though, honestly, I wouldn't really want to hear Devendra Banhart try and steal from R. Kelly; R. Kelly does not need to be made more ridiculous.) That's why I like what the Fiery Furnaces do: they're trying to find new places to steal from. The admitted ones are the Who (and, now, Zeppelin), but there's a lot of other shit there, which resembles less the broad streams that SF/J's article dwells on, but very specific, minor ones that were dropped sometime in the past and never recovered.

But if there's a piece of evidence that calls into question his ultimate assessment of the situation, I can express it in two words: jam bands. There is a whole style of rock music right now that quite consciously draws from black styles, particularly funk and jazz. And it is, by and large, horrible. In a way, it proves indie's point: continuing down that road did lead to bloat, wishy-washiness, and self-parody. That indie has arrived at a place now that shares at least two of those qualities, if not all three, is not necessarily evidence that they need to sound more like soul--it just means they need to embrace that urge to incorporate and experiment which made all of the bands SF/J approvingly cited great. Did the Little Richard matter more to the Beatles than the Gershwin, or is it their wandering ear and ability to assimilate that really made the difference? I agree that indie bands seem too eager these days to stick within the culturally acceptable bounds of influences, but those bounds aren't racially defined, they're culturally defined, and they exclude lots of white stuff just as much as they exclude black stuff. Indie's stagnation seems less to do with its avoidance of black influences and more to do with its codification as a genre, as a sound, rather than as a set of moves and drives that lead to widely disparate kinds of music--the Minutemen's contemporaries and friends were, after all, Black Flag. Indie used to value weirdness and experimentation, but now it looks ascance at anything that flies too close to the sun. That seems to be far more problematic than its unwillingness to syncopate.

Labels: indie rock, pop, sasha frere-jones, The New Yorker

posted by Mike B. @ 10:24 PM 23 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

Bueller. Bueller.

Maybe I only find this indescribably hilarious because I've been reading economics theory and then watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but here's a paragraph from a story about a pro-intelligent design movie that's narrated/hosted by Ben Stein:

On a blog on the “Expelled” Web site, one writer praised Mr. Stein as “a
public-intellectual-freedom-fighter” who was taking on “a tough topic with a bit
of humor.” Others rejected the film’s arguments as “stupid,” “fallacious” or
“moronic,” or described intelligent design as the equivalent of suggesting that
the markets moved “at the whim of a monetary fairy.”

Hee hee, rationality's a bitch!

Anyway, just for fun, here's an alternate reading of Ferris Bueller. The "normal" interpretation is that Ferris is a fun guy who's got it all figured out, and the oppositional interpretation is that Ferris is a condescending, smug jerk who's expressing troubling anti-intelletual tendencies and sealing the fate of his generation just before the 1987 stock market crash. But I think the real key to the movie is in what the English teacher is saying just before the nurse comes in to get Ferris' girlfriend: "irony." There's a remarkably complex irony going on in the movie's view of Ferris. Take, for instance, his initial monologue:

I do have a test today. that wasn't bullshit. It's on European socialism. I mean, really, what's the point? I'm not European. I don't plan on being European. So who cares if they're socialists? They could be fascist anarchists. It still doesn't change the fact that I don't own a car. Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.

Traditional reading of that is either yay being anti-isms and right on that you shouldn't worry too much about tests, or just that it's funny. Oppositional reading is that this is a hollow and meaningless opinion driven by and leading to ignorance. But Matthew Broderick delivers it with a little twist, a little, well, irony. You get the sense that he knows he's just repeating hoary old cliches with the isms stuff, and the way he lands on that last line gives it a sense of self-aware false profundity. He's just justifying his desire to take a day off, a desicion he's well aware is the wrong one, with a little speech that doesn't even sound convincing to him. This is whistling past the graveyard. After all, this is a guy who occasionally talks to some sort of imagined audience. If we take Ferris as the narrator, which given his direct-address monologues he basically is, then arguably he's a very unreliable one. He's supposed to be this miracle worker, but all we ever see him actually do is be a negative leader, which is nice and all, but it's hardly the sort of thing that would inspire a town-wide "Save Ferris" campaign. Does that even actually exist? The whole premise of the film is that the three kids are taking a day off from their pressure-filled lives, but there's only one scene in the entire movie where they're actually having fun, and it has nothing to do with Ferris. Think about it: on the Sears Tower they're terrified, at the restaurant they're nervous, at the art gallery they're contemplative, and driving around Cameron is freaking out. The only scene that's any fun is the parade scene, and the only thing Ferris has to do with that is he got up on a float and lip-synched. In fact, it is a startling scene in its nearly pure expression of joy, but it only becomes so as the focus goes away from Ferris and to the crowd, with Cameron and Ferris' girlfriend walking through it. (Another way of looking at this is that the only time Cameron is happy is when Ferris isn't there.) Full credit to John Hughes and/or the city of Chicago, but even when watching the film with a gimlet eye, you can't help but be swept away by the impression that everyone really is having a good time. (The babies and toddlers help, but still.) As the fun grows, Ferris is envealoped by it and gradually disappears.

This is all a long way of saying that Ferris is mainly delusional. The incredible events of the movie don't actually happen, they're just in his inventive little head, and he's employing an entire nonsensical philosophy to justify this to himself and to "us," the imaginary audience that he's playing to, even though in the context of the film we don't atually exist. What's more, a self-awareness of his delusional state (see above) slips out in Broderick's performance just enough to let us know that Ferris is willfully choosing this delusion over the reality of his suburban life.

What exactly is he hiding from, though? Think of the two scenes where we actually hear his parents talk about business. In the scene outside the restaurant where the gang encounters Ferris' dad, the dad is unsucessfully trying to get a client to make an ad buy. In the scene where the mom picks up the sister from the police station, all she can talk about is how she blew a deal. In other words, the Bueller family is failing. It seems petty when Ferris bitches about getting a computer instead of a car, but by the mores of the Chicago suburbs, it's abnormal for Ferris not to get a car. So what's up? The house itself is considerably dumpier than the only other house we see, Cameron's, and all we know about the parents' work lives (and note that both parents have to work) is that they're failures. The dream of the suburbs is crashing down around them; Ferris' talk of college is hollow. There's nowhere for him to go.

If you don't believe me, think about the final chase scene. How does Ferris get home? He runs through the other suburban backyards, from yard to yard, making his way across the whole town, and, minus a swimsuit, that is the plot of John Cheever's "The Swimmer." A suburban man swims his way across the backyards of his friends and neighbors, stopping to have conversations and drinks, but the conversations get progressively more strained, until the ending, when the main character reaches his own house:

The place was dark. Was it so late that they had all gone to bed?...He tried the garage doors to see what cars were in but the doors were locked and rust came off the handles onto his hands...The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked up until he rememebred that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.

Of course, when Ferris gets home, the house is not dark (though it is locked--the principal has taken the key under the mat). It is full of parents who love him and a sister that finally decides to help him. But he's a kid, not a working guy; there's a whole system designed to keep him safe, no matter how crazy he gets. It doesn't change the fact that the days of that system are numbered, and Ferris knows it. Why else would he so ostentatiously and self-destructively blow off school? Why else would he have made it so easy for himself to get caught by literally parading down the street in Chicago? It's the 80s version of a punk rock attitude: "no future" with a smug grin on your face.

Looked at this way, the oppositional view is still right, but the reasons are wrong. Ferris isn't a jerk because he's priviledged, he's a jerk because his priviledge is going away, and he's using it while he still can. The film is well aware that he's being an asshole, but it's trying to make us sympathetic towards him still, as films always do, by showing us that he's not just another spoiled rich kid. His future's being taken from him, and being powerless, there's not a damn thing he can do about it but say "fuck it" and blow everything to hell. The grin that's always on Ferris' face is a conscious echo of Reagan's, that smile that persisted whether he was talking about puppies and flowers or nuclear bombs and the starving poor. It's the smile of psychosis, of a loss of emotional affect. It's the swimmer, merrily winding his way through a familiar landscape of priviledge and leisure while everyone around him tries to make him see that it's all over for him. But he does not listen, and in the case of Ferris, he will never listen.

Labels: ben stein, ferris bueller, john cheever, movies, pop

posted by Mike B. @ 8:23 AM 4 Comments

Ich bin ein whatever

Nick has a good post about Britney's VMA performance as a deliberate act, one planned by MTV to generate precisely the reactions it's been generating--they knew she would fail, and consciously chose to open with a failure. Though Britney herself wasn't in on the joke. All programming as reality programming!

Labels: britney, pop, quicklinks, reality tv

posted by Mike B. @ 10:14 PM 5 Comments

Why Don't You Come a Little Closer?

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.

Labels: Amerie, music, musicology, pop, production, Rihanna, vocals

posted by Mike B. @ 9:41 AM 7 Comments

Rage, Rage

I think Nick is right about "Killing in the Name," which I don't think I've heard since I played it by request at a dance at nerd camp and all the little nerdling boys went spazzy-crazy on the coffeeshop dancefloor. So I found it and listened to it and yeah, it's a really great song. When we all first heard it, the thing works so well that it's easy to miss the multiple leaps of faith that make it work, and given Rage's current (or, I guess, pre-Coachella) critical reputation--and by "critical" here I don't mean "just critics" but, like, everybody everywhere--it's easy to revisionistly see the particulars of those leaps/moves as odious, overdone, played-out. Crass. Distasteful. Cheesy. Embarassing. My my my, once bitten, you know.

Hearing it fresh, though, it's a shock to the system, because it's an inventively and masterfully constructed rock song. The structure can be found in other songs but none of those are mosh anthems, as it's like one of those giant pirate ship rides that, at the peak of its second swing, busts a bearing and goes tumbling down a hill, only to find a vacant pirate-swing-ride-chassis at the bottom and latch onto that. A straight intro goes into a syncopated hook, then back into a syncopated version of the intro (the pirate ship gets going), then a straight verse that busts into a chorus and that great "now you do what they told you" stomp-swing that itself busts into a louder, wider part. And then back to the straight verse, repeating the whole process, which can be either seen as verse-chorus-bridge1-bridge2 or just one long build that suddenly resets itself and goes entirely back to the beginning. What it's all building to, of course, is the big bust-out section with the screamy swear words[1], a moment rivaled in its awesomeness in the 90s maybe only by "March of the Pigs," which does its own interesting series of moves that we won't get into now.[2] And then it happens, and then there's that syncopated intro again, just once, and we're out.

It's a hell of a structure, and worth noting, because that repetition, despite being more or less identical to the first runthrough, is so unexpected that it doesn't register as repetition. There've been too many shifts by that point for it to come across as just a end-of-chorus-back-to-verse change, and there's no real dynamic indication at the end of that first repetition that it's going to drop off in volume/intensity, and when it does, it happens instintaneously, almost like an edit (which maybe it was). So that surprise functions as a further tension-builder, the novelty of the structure working as a disruption and, even though it turns out things are going to proceed as before, you're not expecting it to do so, as you would be in a normal verse-chorus-verse structure. There's a dropoff in energy, but not necessarily in tension, with that disruption allowing it to build far further than it would have with just the one repetition, so when the crest hits, it hits really hard, and it's one of the most cathartic releases, as I say, in all of the 90s canon, one filled with nothing if not cathartic releases.

All in all, the structure is far less that of a rock song than it is of a dance track. There's no key shifts and no change in the melody, but there is a lot of changes in texture: whether the guitar's muted or not, how open the hi-hat is, whether there's a crash going, how high the pitch is, etc. The whole thing centers not around the development of a melody or the delivery of a lyric, but the building and release of tension, which it does very effectively, and though screaming "FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME" is not as subtle as it could be, it is an effective and wholly accurate translation into language of the musical vocabulary being used at the high point of a DJ set. Which is why, as Nick says, the remix is kinda stupid: it leaves out the best part, and the part that's most dancey! Presumably because it's too embarassing/cheesy/tasteless.

(Of course, from an abstract point of view, the best part of the song is right before the FU section, where they go all Sonic Youth and build tension via free-jazz, or at least free-jazz drums, as everything else is keeping the voice while the drums flail around until they hit the beat hard right before they come back in again full. Awesome!)

This is all especially interesting in light of this Esquire article. If you don't want to click through, it sarcastically congratulates Zach delarocha for not releasing music while Bush was President, which the writer thinks is hypocritical because Rage / Zach were/are "political." Certainly the course RATM took as a band was disappointing, but it's interesting that the writer (Jason Notte, in case he's auto-googling--I see I'm about to join his alma mater) identifies exactly the opposite of why that's so. He complains that '"fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" has become the mantra of suburban teens who don't want to do homework or leave the mall early.' Thing is, that's exactly what the damn words were always destined to mean, how they were received, and how they work best. As political speech it's fucking worthless, but as teenage enhancement--as rocking (see footnote 4 here) it's the best shit ever. The problem with RATM and Zach is that they took themselves far too seriously. What difference would it have made for good ol' Zach to be yelling about imperialism publicly for the last 6 years? It's not like other people weren't (despite what people would like to retroactively think) and it's not like it would've mattered much anyway. The political stuff was what made Rage, tragically, respectable, at least in the most obvious way, whereas their actual respect derived from their music, and their ability to fuse a bunch of different ideas and sounds in potent ways.

This all raises the question: what if Zach DLR had, instead of taking himself seriously as an ersatz radical gifted by minority birth with unflaggable lefty cred, developed the skill he shows in "Killing in the Name," where he uses his voice not as a vehicle for championing obvious causes, but to shape and enhance the musical arc of a song? What if Rage's ability to construct a song had been emphasized? Well, problem is, that happened. It's called Audioslave and it sucked. So that's that question answered, more or less. So this suggests, at least to me, that maybe we just have to accept that Rage was a band with fantastic but limited ideas, and if that first album (and parts of the second, maybe) are so much better than the rest of their various output, it's not because their course could have been different-better, but because that was the best they could do, and they did it. Maybe one of the problems with the 90s--or, maybe, with rock--is that it did encourage people to develop as artists, even when that was a bad thing for them to do. Or maybe Zach de la Rocha is just a twat. Either way.

[1] Yay!
[2] Skipped beats as thrash!

Labels: aesthetics, blogtalk, pop, ratm, rock, value added

posted by Mike B. @ 5:11 AM 2 Comments

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

Hallelujah

Below is my EMP paper as it was originally presented, followed by a new afterwards.

"It Doesn't Matter Which You Heard": the Curious Cultural Journey of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"

by Michael Barthel

Let me take you back to the long-ago time of mid-February, 2007. Popular emo band Fall Out Boy had the number one album in the country and, being a responsible music critic, I of course illegally downloaded it. As my train crossed the Manhattan Bridge, I reached track five on the album. And I heard this:

Fall Out Boy - "Hum Hallelujah" (clip)

What they're singing there, aside from what I believe professionals call "twaddle," is the chorus of a Leonard Cohen song. This is mildly incredible. Twenty-five years ago, a character on the TV show The Young Ones named Neal--the hippie--said, "I'm beginning to feel like a Leonard Cohen record, cause nobody ever listens to me." Today, in contrast, one particular Leonard Cohen song is featured prominently in no less than three separate episodes of teen uberdrama The OC, and can be heard in at least twenty-four separate movies and TV episodes, almost always as the soundtrack to a montage of people being sad.

What I hope to show today is how, exactly, that happened to a song called "Hallelujah."

What's now considered the definitive version of this song is by dreamy, dead troubadour Jeff Buckley. (Some people are even under the impression that Buckley's cover is the original version.)

Jeff Buckley - "Hallelujah" (clip)

It's an almost unbearably sad song in this incarnation—slow, keening, and heartbroken. But originally it was something different.

Leonard Cohen - "Hallelujah (original)" (clip)

This is more like your uncle's band playing in a warehouse, assuming your uncle was weird and labored under the impression that he was a crooner. It passed into the public realm almost unnoticed, and remained that way for some time; in the major Cohen biography, published in 1996, there's no entry for the song in the index, despite the fact that the book's name is the same as the album on which "Hallelujah" originally appears.

It's a weird little song in this incarnation. Check out this sound. It's not sad--in fact, it's kinda funny. The entire performance is so hyperserious that it's almost satire. Certainly there's a healthy dose of irony here, especially in the sneeringly wry line "but you don't really care for music, do ya?" Cohen sings: "There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken Hallelujah," and the lyrics, far from being unremittingly dour, explore these different Hallelujahs—holy, broken, profane, transcendent.

On Cohen Live, an album recorded in part on a 1988 tour, Cohen radically revises the song. The tempo slows down drastically:

Leonard Cohen - "Hallelujah (live)" (clip)

More importantly, Cohen adds three new verses. Whereas the original begins with some light musician humor, the new first verse ends with the line "it's a cold and a very broken Hallelujah." Combined with the slower tempo, the overall effect is considerably sadder.

At the same time, Cohen explores even more Hallelujahs: a verse containing the line "I remember when I moved in you" is unambiguously about sex, and the final verse --also the original's final verse, and the only verse they share--is defiant, coming as close to shouting as Leonard Cohen can while declaring "Even though it all went wrong, I'll stand right here before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah."

John Cale - "Hallelujah" (clip)

John Cale's cover of "Hallelujah" for the 1991 tribute album I'm Your Fan clearly refers to this live version. Since Cale's cover dates from before the release of Cohen Live, Cale most likely saw Cohen perform this new version in person, on the 1988 tour from which that recording is taken. It's almost as radical a reworking of the song as Cohen's own.

Cale preceded the three new verses of the live version with the original first and second verses, while speeding up the tempo to the more natural andante of the original and simplifying the arrangement to just voice and piano. He also changes the last of the three new verses in small but important ways.

Where Cohen says "It's not a complaint," Cale says "it's not a cry." Cohen's "It's not the laughter of somebody who's seen the light" becomes just "It's not somebody who's seen the light." And finally, "It's a very lonely Halellujah" becomes "it's a broken Hallelujah." Where Cohen depicted bittersweet regret, Cale has utter despair: a complaint becomes a cry, laughter is gone, a shot that could miss becomes a murderous hit, and it's not just a lonely Hallelujah—it's a broken Hallelujah. Moreover, this verse now ends the song, taking the place of the I-will-survive statement Cohen used to end his versions.

And so when Jeff Buckley decided to cover "Hallelujah," he didn't really cover Cohen, he covered Cale; the form and lyrics of their versions match almost exactly, while none of the three previous versions (Cohen studio, Cohen live, Cale) match at all.

Musically, though, he slowed the tempo back down again, and let it float in a way that Cale's regular piano arpeggios didn't.

Jeff Buckley - "Hallelujah" (clip)

The effect was to flatten the song emotionally, to take out all the different Hallelujahs Cohen depicted and reduce them to one: the cold and broken, which appears here twice. Even the "you don't really care for music" dig sounds more wronged than cutting, and the sex is now the ecstasy of the brooding artiste, an image Cohen always seemed careful to subvert.

This simplification resulted in a torrent of covers. Following Buckley's version in 1994, we see a slow but steady increase, until it becomes a veritable tsunami around the turn of the century.



If Buckley was covering Cale, there's little doubt that almost all of these people were covering Buckley. And no one was really covering Cohen anymore.

It took a while longer, but Buckley's reductio ad despairium also inspired musical directors to include the songs in their filmed entertainments. Here's a list of all the usages.



And here's a graph showing the usages by year.



If we overlay that onto the graph of covers by year, we see that, while it took a while for TV and movies to catch up, they undoubtedly did.



The first significant use of the song in a soundtrack was, somewhat logically, Cale's version in Basquiat (1996), followed by, totally illogically, Cale again in Shrek (2001). While it seems clear that the gradual revision of the song is what made it appealing as a soundtrack device, it's also possible that when directors saw that the song was so potent, it could impart gravitas on a cartoon Ogre voiced by Mike Myers, it could make even the shallowest character seem tragic.

After these two uses of Cale in movies, the song, almost always Buckley's version, begins to pop up on television shows. The West Wing is the only usage in 2002, but in 2003 it was everywhere.

"Hallelujah" appeared in the fourth episode of Zach Braff's medical dramedy Scrubs, and twice in the first season of teen drama The OC, including an extremely prominent use in the finale. This established it, and it popped up regularly in every subsequent year, in numerous different versions, as artists like K.D. Lang and Rufus Wainwright recorded their own covers. (Wainwright's is nearly indistinguishable from Cale's, suggesting that perhaps Cale had begun to refuse usage requests and Wainwright was brought in as a ringer.)

Why was it used so frequently? Featurettes on the DVD sets of Scrubs and The OC talk about the music used on these shows, and the OC's creator, Josh Schwartz, says that "the music was going to be expressing the characters' inner lives." Why did they pick the music they did? Schwartz says that, for the first five or six episodes, "it was everything that was on my iPod"--echoing "Hallelujah"'s appeal as a personal discovery, a secret hidden in plain sight. Interestingly, though, they at no point in the featurette mention the song "Hallelujah," despite using it twice in the season they're ostensibly discussing, and once in the third episode, which is when Schwartz himself was soundtracking the show. Are they embarrassed about it? They shouldn't be. To say that using "Hallelujah" to express sadness is unoriginal is like saying a picture hanger using a level is unoriginal: the point is not novelty, but functionality. The damn thing just works so well, you'd be a fool not to use it.

The usage was so pervasive that, based on the numerous OC Mix CDs that were released, it seemed to inspire musicians to create their own soundalike songs, and to boost those artists who had already been working that sound. (This was the "indie rock boom" that the OC supposedly instigated, bringing sensitive-crooner bands like Death Cab For Cutie to fame and fortune.)

The most prominent example is Imogen Heap, someone who I, at least, had not heard of since a cassingle was mailed to me in 1998. But Heap's song "Hide and Seek" soundtracked the final moments of the OC's second season, the slot occupied a year before by a full rendition of Buckey's "Hallelujah." This pairing was so successful that, for the finale of season three, the final moments were accompanied, once again, by Heap, this time covering --and, to be clear, I am not shitting you--"Hallelujah." This is the point where the OC consumes itself whole, and it is a sickeningly gorgeous thing to watch.

(Incidentally, Heap is also a member of Frou Frou, a group who gained prominence by Zach Braff's including their song "Let Go" in his film Garden State, the other indie-boom instigator.)

What's fascinating about all this is not simply the song's ubiquity on TV dramas--it's that it's used in the exact same way every time. Songs can be used sincerely, ironically, as background shading, as subtle comment, as product placement. But "Hallelujah" always appears as people are being sad, quietly sitting and staring into space or ostentatiously crying, and always as a way of tying together the sadness of different characters in different places. In short, it's always used as part of a "sad montage."

Now, I could go into details about how exactly the "sad montage" is constituted, but it's more efficient and probably more effective just to show you a montage of the montages. You'll see what I mean.

"The Sad Montage, in Brief" (video, 27 megs)

The way Hallelujah is being used here is the auditory equivalent of a silent film actress pressing the back of her hand to her forehead to express despair—emotional shorthand. It's sometimes called a needledrop, and it's an element of visual grammar that signals the mood of the scene loudly and unmistakably. In the Scrubs musical featurette, creator Bill Lawrence says, "How are we gonna make a show where a lot of the comedy comes from broad, silly jokes switch gears on a dime and suddenly be dramatic? What we found is we were able to make that transition quickly if we chose the right song."

But it doesn't work if it's too explicit. That theatrical gesture of hand to forehead has no obvious connection to the emotion of despair, and neither does "Hallelujah." It gets used in scenes more obviously soundtracked with songs called, say, "We Are In a Hospital And Everyone is Dying Or Facing Difficult Choices." But that would be too explicitly about sadness, whereas the chorus of Cohen's song was designed to apply to a range of emotions—the different Hallelujahs. It can both reinforce and counterpoint.

If its use is becoming less common, that's because its overuse has erased the line-by-line, verse-by-verse meaning and replaced it with an overall feeling of sadness. You hear those opening chords now and the words hardly matter. The visual emotions it was used to counterpoint have overtaken the lyrical content. This is the nature of tools--they are imprinted by their materials--and there's nothing wrong with tools per se, but making a Matisse into a washcloth would erase some of the details, and Hallelujah's overuse has had a similar effect.

In twenty-five years, Leonard Cohen has gone from a punchline on a TV show to a sideways joke mixed with a tribute in Nirvana's "Pennyroyal Tea"--"give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld so I can sigh eternally"--to a totally serious starring role in a song by Fall Out Boy, a band not especially known for their irony. It seems like this has been accomplished by an emotional flattening--reducing a song about the varieties of grace to a mere lament. But this is not the only direction the song could have gone in. Something of Cohen's defiance, sensuality, and triumph could just as easily inform a cover. A cover such as this one:

Michael Barthel - "Hallelujah" (excerpt)

This is the beauty of the pop song: it's an artistic hooker with a heart of gold, always willing to be used. It can become a tool, but a song isn't a Matisse—if it's used as a washcloth, just wring it out and it's good as new. We may call something the "definitive version," but it's not, not really. It's just the temporary consensus, a beautiful beach house built always within reach of the next great flood. There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, and every song contains a thousand possibilities—or, at least, the great ones do. Hallelujah's place in the pantheon was assured only by the song's mutability; were it not open to change, it would have remained an ignored album cut. Instead, it went on to function as a performance standard, a perfect piece of visual grammar, and even a raw element of creation for an entirely new song. Among all those covers and all those montages, Fall Out Boy's reappropriation of Hallelujah is undoubtedly the most radical, interesting, and adventurous. It reminds us that if you disagree with the journey a song has taken, the original and all its revisions are always there, waiting to be born again.

(many, many thanks to Alta Price for helping with the video.)
-

Afterward

The above is the as-presented version of the paper, which should probably be preserved for purposes of historical veracity and so on and so forth. ("Where did the tide finally turn against the evil that is Jeff Buckley?" future historians will no doubt ask, and I want to make sure they have the answer.) But there were a few points that I wanted to expand on, and a few comments I received before and after I delivered the paper that deserve addressing.

Mainly I will be playing off two things:

1) "Hallelujah's appeal as a personal discovery, a secret hidden in plain sight."
2) "the 'indie rock boom' that the OC supposedly instigated"

Christopher Monsen left a comment on my blog that goes like this:

The influence of Buckley's version is especially strong here in Norway. Not only does buying his Grace album seem to have become some kind of rite of passage for the average University student, it also seems to be the one record that every non-record buying person owns. Last year, a group consisting of two ex-Norwegian Idol contestants, a one-time Prince-wannabe turned producer, and a fourth guy recorded a live version of 'Hallelujah' based on Buckley's - taking turns singing the verses. The subsequent record named after the song went on to become the biggest selling album in Norway last year - almost solely on the strength of 'Hallelujah.'

While, as I say above, the song's popularity as a soundtrack device seems to be winding down, the song itself is more popular than ever. Why is that?

Musically, I am almost certain I once wrote a whole dissection of the song, which I of course cannot find at the present time. Nevertheless, the gist was that Cohen et al employ a fairly classic chord progression (in my cover the bassline during the verse is meant to evoke the doo-wop songs that also used this shift), but then instead of trying to disguise it or merely riding it, Cohen calls attention to not only the chords he's using, but their very commonality: "the minor fall, the major lift." Note the definite article there--it's not just some sort of minor chord, it's the iconic minor fall, which it pretty much is; you can find this progression, in the abstract, in all sorts of pop songs. By calling it out, he both makes you aware of its pop status while simultaneously apologizing for it and mythologizing it as not just chords, but a sort of Biblical imperative. But then, when he gets to "composing," there's an atypical chord, an E major, that doesn't fit in the C major key we've been in so far, and this is the little bit of novelty that turns the song from the pop of restatement to just pop. This ability to turn the common into the timeless while leavening it with something to set it apart is a big part of the song's appeal.

The non-musical appeal of "Hallelujah," though, must be understood in the context of generations X and Y, who are the ones responsible for the song's canonization. The people for whom Cohen's song (in Buckley's version) is a generational touchstone are not the people who consider other Cohen songs, like "Suzanne" and "Bird on a Wire," generational touchstones. They're not Cohen's original audience, and are unlikely to have paid much attention to a weird synth-crooner album by an old folkie when it came out in 1985. And so for them, it was something always existing, way out there in an area they wouldn't usually venture; an object to be discovered.

However you come to the song, it's got an aura around it. If it's through Buckley, well, he's this beautiful dead boy with an apparently "ethereal" voice, and he's singing this song that sounds like a long-ago thing. Cohen himself is distant enough at this point to be symbolically equivalent to an old blues guy: mysterious, wise, world-weary. Buckley's martyrdom cleanses him of the "dude with a guitar who signed to a major label in the 90s" status, and Cohen, cheesy though he may be at times, comes from the pre-corporate past of the music industry, and is untainted by its commercialism.

This is all awfully contextual, though. What about the song itself? The religious imagery and language should be a hindrance among the sensitive college students (and, as mentioned in the quote above, the secular-humanist Europeans) who make up the song's fanbase. But, certain acquaintances' "Christians are fucking weird" attitudes to the contrary, the Bible has an enduring appeal to millions of people, for whatever reason, and no matter how sensitive a college student you are, the thing can still work its magic. (Like vegetarians really wanting a steak every once in a while--doesn't mean you’re a meat-eater again, just that people who love it aren't fools, after all, just bad people.) Shorn of the offensive trappings, old time religion looks pretty awesome, and indeed people who like Jeff Buckley also like the idea of fire-and-brimstone preachers and dilapidated churches and gospel choirs. Unfortunately, actual gospel music doesn't shed those trappings. It tends toward the cheesy rather than the "earthy," and the words seem more interested in talking about how great Jesus is than in exploring the mysteries of faith or making Moses jokes.

"Hallelujah," though, offers all those great, resonant Biblical signifiers and intense religious emotions without the proselytizing or the attempt at a modern updating. Spiritually, it keeps things at a nice distance and doesn't ask too much. In Cohen's hands, this makes sense, since it's explicitly a literary exploration into an alien culture. And for Buckley, it works as a signifier of depth, allowing him to take on the symbols of an old country preacher, in keeping with his attraction to Sufi mysticism: whirling dervishes are nothing if not pentecostal. In sum, "Hallelujah" is able to function as a kind of accessible gospel music, smart and beautiful and allusive to classic themes without demanding any kind of actual faith or any translation from evangelicalese. It presents the emotional experience of religion shorn of the cultural barriers.

And this particular--and particularly amazing--trick is a big part of why, no matter how it comes to you, "Hallelujah" always manages to seem like a discovery. It can pass through a thousand corporate paws and be marked by them all, arriving at its destination in the form of a TV show or a mass-market major-label CD or a bunch of pop idols. The song is just so strange--so alien, so smart, so densely packed with signifiers--that it doesn't seem possible that it's actually part of mainstream culture, no matter how much mainstream culture embraces it. Clive Davis himself could hand it to you, but this would just seem like evidence of Clive's human side rather than another slime-dripping part of the corrupt music industry. Its strange incursion of Biblical poetry (as well as, to be honest, Buckley's unusual guitar work, curse him) seems like nothing more than an anomaly. It's the Teflon song.

And this is why it's interesting that it popped up so many times in The OC. Once is just, as I say, a tool, something you whip out to enhance a mood, but generally you can only use it once without it ceasing to be a tool and starting to be a character, or at least a symbol of something. The fact that The OC used a song immune to the appearance of co-option so many times means something--it meant that a network TV show was trying for legitimacy. This is both unusual and seemingly nonsensical--even shows that achieved some sort of genuine subcultural capital like Saturday Night Live or David Letterman didn't feel the need to defend or generate cred, since the shows themselves were the sources of credibility--the writing and the performances, in other words, not the accoutrements. But The OC was clearly concerned with this, a fact demonstrated most ably by their apparently sincere championing of Death Cab for Cutie, who were on Sub Pop and had a ridiculous name and were thus quite credible. Much of the show concerned the awakening of Seth Cohen, an unreconstructed geek character (comic books, unpopularity, social awkwardness, intelligence, embarrassing bedroom accessories) who suddenly found himself inching towards coolness, and this was the character championing Death Cab. The use of "Hallelujah" here was like wrapping a strange new vegetable in bacon: you know this is good/true/right, so why not try what goes along with it?

The song had a different meaning every time it was used. The second and third times it was notable for the repetition and referred to all previous uses--number two (on the season 1 finale) was "OK, we have come into our own" and number three, when Marissa died at the end of season 3, was a completing-the-cycle thing--but that first usage made The OC what it was, like the thread of saffron that turns rice and seafood into paella. There's the cliché as banality, like in Scrubs, fulfilling its role precisely and simply echoing what's around it, the very heightening it performs becoming workaday in its predictability and obviousness. And then there is the cliché as element of transcendent over-the-topness, when there are so many iconic elements that the cliché makes it an identifiable context and ties everything together.

The first time "Hallelujah" appears on The OC, the situation is as follows: on his last night in town, a good-hearted but troubled wrong-side-of-the-tracks kid who's in a fish-out-of-water situation has been visited by a all-wrong-for-him skinny blonde rich girl who's defying her parents by professing her feelings for him, but he turns her down in an act of noble self-sacrifice only to have the rich-kid boyfriend pull up in a jeep and start a fight, and then the house he's in catches on fire. Through all this, "Hallelujah" plays. This willingness to go for the jugular so quickly and so shamelessly is one of the many reasons the OC was so great, and also, not coincidentally, why it wasn't so great for the next two seasons.

To put it another way, it was Casablanca, at least as Umberto Eco described it:

When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the
height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion
border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a
glimpse of the sublime. Something has spoken in place of the director. If
nothing else, it is a phenomenon worthy of awe.

What's interesting about The OC was that there was a particular specificity to some of the clichés. Seth Cohen, for instance, was both a stereotypical social outcast character and a character actually stolen, along with the actor, from another show--Adam Brody, who played Seth, played an almost identical character on the show Gilmore Girls. (There is an entire paper to be written about the Gilmore Girls teen-drama diaspora, what with all of Rory's boyfriends that have gotten their own shows.) This brings up some interesting issues about art's tendency toward referentiality also being a tendency toward clichés as building blocks, and if this might not cause us to reconsider the merits and uses of both, but more importantly it shows just how densely packed The OC was as a TV show. It was essentially an intensification and acceleration of everything about the established genre of teen dramas, and as such, it acted as a center of gravity to attract all sorts of new things, like, I suppose, Andy Warhol. (The CW = The Factory.) Like in cooking or geology, its density created something new, and novelty creates more novelty, so the things that attached themselves to the show by the time it ended earlier this year could serve as a checklist for the tenor of our times. This acceleration and concentration was, as I say, a good thing for the first season and a bad thing for the next two, when the show felt decidedly burnt out. This served as an object lesson for just why teen dramas don't go to such heights, and subsequent shows have not really approached its pace, perhaps wisely. The OC is important as social history because of its compact evocation of the decade it helped soundtrack, but important as art in the same way opera is: ridiculous in its scope and occasionally breathtaking in its beauty.

Its status as cultural big-bang helps explain why The OC served as year zero for the indie-rock boom. But it's also a big part of why it was dead in the water before it even began. The 00s indie boom and the 90s indie boom, which we also call grunge, were qualitatively different. Nirvana appeared as a separately-constituted incursion, a band of a piece making its way into the mainstream, whereas the most recent boom came through the debased form of network TV (or, to a lesser degree, movie soundtracks). Hackles were raised from the start, but the products of the boom still maintained their credibility, which raised even more hackles. The problem seemed to be that instead of having whole albums you could buy and shows you could go to and bands you could support, now there were singles you could download and soundtracks you could buy, clothes you could wear to signal your sympathy that were, unlike grunge, not really all that different from what people already seemed to be wearing. It was not an activity but an accompaniment--not something you listened to but something you watched other people listening to. In other words, it's lifestyle music.

But what's wrong with that? All sorts of styles have served as lifestyle music in the past without it debasing the styles themselves, from crooners to bebop to bossa nova to R&B to dance; hell, even Kanye West recognizes that Talib Kweli is something you play primarily to get girls to have sex with you, which is I guess the definition of lifestyle music.

Still, as I say, "Hallelujah" is a weird fucking song (and "Death Cab for Cutie" is a weird name for a band), and whether in Buckley's version or Cohen's version, it does not seem like it would function in the same way that something like, say, Johnny Mathis or Gilberto Gil does. And yet it does. How? Well, the short answer would be "the 90s," but there's also the fact that Jeff Buckley kinda sounds like Johnny Mathis, and that another name for indie is "college rock," which admits its lifestyle status right in its name. Essentially, no matter how hard it may struggle against it, any genre achieving some sort of mainstream popularity is inevitably brought to a fully commodified state, as indie clearly has become given that no one really uses the term "sellout" anymore.

But wasn't the whole point of the 90s that things shouldn't be commodified, especially culture? Wasn't the rule that you picked hot emotion over cool style, grit over lifestyle, ethics over aesthetics? How did the tide turn so completely? To put it simply, the 90s ended, and when we all looked back, we realized that we were being ridiculous. It's all style in the end; a flannel from JC Penny's is indistinguishable from a vintage flannel after a few wash cycles, and we don't therefore conclude that the style of dress doesn't matter, but that the point of origin doesn't. These songs we were being so precious about served essentially the same purpose as clothes do: to express our true inner selves. In other words, they were, like clothes, just tools of expression. We couldn't really use music to feel or seem cool, because it's just music, and instead saw it worked best as a way of quickly expressing what we are truly feeling: I am sad, so I am playing a sad song; I am horny, so here are so slow jams. And this, of course, is exactly how "Hallelujah" is used on TV. It expresses my inner life as surely as it expresses that of Seth Cohen, and that's amazing: the way art uses it is the way we use it, which is true for very few things.

The fact that aesthetics won is indicative of how the 90s lost. By focusing their moral and political critiques on aesthetic forms, they guaranteed morality and politics would be subsumed by aesthetics. If authenticity is merely a stylistic choice, then how could it matter very much? Seriously applying political issues to music inevitably trivializes them, and indeed, here were are in the apolitical present.

Jeff Buckley had to reach back to an artist of the 60s to touch the kind of consensus that "Hallelujah" has generated and maintained; nothing escaped the 90s similarly unscathed except Sleater-Kinney and Biggie. When we demand purity of our art, all art is inevitably impure, and possibilities are closed off; when we recognize the beauty of ambiguity, as in "Hallelujah," a universe opens up.

Labels: emp, hallelujah, jeff buckley, john cale, leonard cohen, political theory, pop, scrubs, the oc, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 3:32 PM 94 Comments

Aly & AJ, Samsung Experience Store, NYC, 4/11/07

I was taking a break from work this afternoon when I realized that, at that very moment, Aly & AJ were scheduled to play at the Samsung Experience store. The Samsung Experience store, for those of you unfamiliar, is this weird thing in the TimeWarner Center, i.e. the weird mall at Columbus Circle, where you don't buy anything, you just sort of wander around and try Samsung stuff. Very conceptual. But, more importantly, very close to my job, and so since I was taking a break anyway, I figured I'd head over. Let's get the fanboy stuff out of the way first: they said they were just in NYC for a day, as they had a new album coming out July 10 (my birthday, also Jessica Simpson's, hey) and were spending all their time in LA, "playing around in the studio" and finishing it up. There was the suggestion that they were going to play new songs, but they didn't. They played "Something More," "Rush," "Into the Blue," and "Chemicals React," which got the biggest welcome from the almost entirely tween (and almost entirely white and asian) audience. It was recently one of their birthdays, and said recent birthday girl also just got her driver's license, having turned 16. There was a hand drum solo on "Into the Blue." They mentioned it was a strange show for them, and it was. I've no idea how attendence was handled (I just wandered in), but the store is fairly small, and while there was a seating section, there wasn't much overflow. There can't have been more than a couple hundred people in there, and they usually play to large crowds. Also, it was an acoustic performance--just Aly, AJ, and some other dude with a fedora, all playing acoustic guitar. This is notable because, if you were not aware, Aly & AJ are pure Disneypop, packaged and marketed and all those horrible things. So, by conventional wisdom, they should've had a hard time playing an acoustic set to a small crowd, being used to studio trickery and whizz-bang light shows etc. etc. Suffice to say they did not. Allow me to put it plainly: holy shit, they could sing. And I don't mean "sing at all," I mean "sing really fucking well." I even checked the soundboard, and nope, no Autotune, no magic gremlins or whatever the fuck it is people think pop singers have. Even if there was, there's no way it could've reproduced this sound, which was just two female voices singing like hell, really powerful and controlled. They were so strong that it made me realize how much the power of those songs, which I thought were working a Pixies/Nirvana quiet-loud-quiet thing in the arrangements, stem solely from the vocals. They hold back and sing single lines in the verses, go a little stronger in the prechoruses and bridges, and when the chorus hits they bust out with these belted harmonies that hit like hell. You can tell they're good singers from their recorded output and all, but live, they show that they're great singers, better than almost anyone else I've heard in terms of pure power and technique. More than that, though, they took that small crowd and actually worked it. They talked with the crowd, made self-depricating jokes, bantered with the crowd, complimented people on their homemade banners, the whole thing. It was a Samsung show, sure, but they could've done the same thing just as effectively (maybe more so) at a coffeeshop or a small club. They were professionals, but not in a Krusty-taping-voiceover-lines kinda way. They had the ability to hold a crowd's attention and put it at ease, letting their personalities come through and showing that their personalities were pretty damn affable. All of which put me in mind of an article in this week's New York Times Magazine about tween shows on Nickelodeon. It's a fantastic piece, and well worth a read, but here's the particular part the Aly & AJ show reminded me of:
I watched in vain for any hint of cynicism on the...set, any trace of the corporate imperative to get these kids to simulate innocence no matter how miserable they were. Schneider’s prime directive — “Kids win” — is an element not just of the fictional Nick universe but of the real one as well. Not once in three days of taping did I encounter a pushy stage mom; nowhere did anyone break out in tears for any reason at all. Even the extras exhibited none of the restlessness or aspirational smart-mouthing you might expect. The crew didn’t grumble about the kids (they were busy passing around a Super Bowl betting sheet), and the kids were undemanding pros. A live goat was present in a house-party scene, and when, inevitably, it had an accident on the set, the kids cringed and screamed, but they did not leave their marks.We forget that professionalism exists for a lot of reasons, and one of them--probably the biggest one, in practice--is to make everyone's jobs easier. Certainly there are people up there at the top slicing demographics and plotting large-scale strategy, but at the end of the day that strategy has to be executed by a number of actual human beings, the vast majority of whom share the common goal of wanting to get to the end of the day feeling OK. Professionalism exists so that, when a goat poops--and, as anyone who's worked a job can tell you, a goat always poops--everything doesn't break down. It may, arguably, function as a system of control for those under its sway, a nefarious influence that stifles creativity and encourages artificiality, but it mainly works to allow things to run smoothly. That's what I saw at the Aly & AJ show. If they weren't good singers and decent guitar players and great performers--and if they hadn't practiced a hell of a lot to become those things--the whole event would have been far less pleasant, for everyone. It doesn't really make much sense for pop stars not to be good at all aspects of what they do, because, let's be honest, there are lots of pretty people out there, but very few pretty people who can sing well. That's one of the reason Disney has been so successful with music and TV: whether you like their style or not, they insist on quality.

It also put me in mind of something I wrote a while back that I think I neglected to menion here: an article about the professionalization of indie. At the time I wrote it, I think I meant that to be an indictment (I was pretty grumpy around the new year), but: consider this. It's band camp, but for pop stars! You audition and you go and they give you "fitness training" and then maybe you can become a national recording audience! It's really amazingly fantastic, and the sort of thing you don't think could actually exist until it actually does. And far from ruining the music it's training you for, it would seem to enhance it, giving kids the technical training to do what they do, better.

So maybe a better way of thinking about it is that the professionalization of indie just makes it the same as everything else. They're all controlled industries, local economies spread out on a global scale. And if you're OK with indie, then you might as well be OK with the methods and machinery of pop. It's all the same shit; it's just that Aly & AJ are, well, better. Or they were today, at any rate.

Labels: disney, flagpole, pop, teenpop

posted by Mike B. @ 11:09 PM 2 Comments

Zombies vs. the UN

It's fair to say that certain of the current administration's positions are inexplicable, at least insofar as its proponents have refused to explain them. There are many explanations as to why they can do certain things like break international law (along with all the other stuff you can no doubt rattle off as well as I can)--parse the language in their own unique way so they can do what they want. But just because I can explain how to cause a chicken to crossbreed with a tomato doesn't mean I've explained why that's something you would want to do.[1] Most people would agree that some things the administration has done seem to violate common sense, and while you can certainly give justifications for this, you're eventually going to have to explain exactly why your idea will lead to a better outcome than the common sense option would. We can be told that doing things a certain way will protect the country or fight terrorism or make government better, but why, exactly, would it be more effective at doing these things (since no one's policies are really aimed at making the country weaker or the government worse[2]) than, say, doing what your critics think you should do.

Now that some administration cheerleaders are being cut loose, they have the leisure time to give fuller explanations of their counterintuitive acts, and last week, former "definition of a bad idea" ambassador to the UN John Bolton[3] appeared on the Daily Show and did an interview with John Stewart. Bolton, as you may recall, was a controversial choice for the position due to the fact that he once suggested the UN would be no worse off if a certain percentage of its building was blown up. Unusually, he did not try and convince us that he did actually like the UN, and that this was just constructive criticism, etc. etc. Instead he said that this was not the first time he had been in such a position--he had served as an arms control administrator and he didn't particularly believe in that, either.

Why, then, was it OK for positions to be filled with people who would seem to have fundamental differences with what the position was created to accomplish? Bolton's explanation went something like this: the purpose of the bureaucracy of the executive branch, which all these positions fell under, is to carry out the policy goals of the President. That's it. The President's policy goals involve kicking puppies, so everyone should be working toward that goal, and if you're not, the President is well within his right to replace you.

The implications of this are, ah, interesting. In Bolton's view, it would seem:

1) Ideology trumps truth. The bureaucracy doesn't implement the right or best policy, it implements the one the President tells them to. And:

2) The efforts to expand executive power at all cost are good, because this will just make the process of implementing the President's policies more efficient. There shouldn't be restraints on the President's power because the President should be able to do whatever he wants in pursuit of his policy goals.

Now, obviously this is wrong. Constitutionally, the purpose of the executive branch isn't to make policy but to implement the laws as the legislative branch has passed them, so if the bureaucracy should be working toward anyone's policy goals, it should be Congress'. And all policies aren't created equal. Sure, you're in your dorm room at 3 am, you can claim that there is no truth and all viewpoints are equally valid so whoever has the strongest ideology should just win, but there is, in fact, a way of telling what policy will be best, and it's called cost-benefit analysis. It's not the best tool for every job, but it does provide a reasonably objective view on which policy would be the best one to pursue. No ideology is always right. Even mine! As for #2, no one in their right mind thinks the executive branch has been losing power lately, shit.

Why, then, would he give us such a wrong explanation? It doesn't make sense in the context of reality, so from what point of view does it make sense? The grumpier among us would say, perhaps, postmodernism is to blame for this sort of thing--that it's the damn Frenchies' endorsement of relativism and rejection of absolute truth that has allowed people of any political persuasion to claim that facts no longer matter. But Bolton doesn't believe that there is no truth[4]--he just believes that only he, and people he agrees with, have the truth. Another way of saying this is that he's a neoconservative, and that's the context in which his claims actually line up to anything.[5]

Neoconservatism is a school of political philosophy founded by Leo Strauss, a professor at the University of Chicago. One of its primary aspects was that the classic philosophical texts, especially actual classical texts, did not actually mean what everyone thought they meant. Instead, a certain elect group of great men could see the hidden meanings behind these texts, and these hidden meanings were the real truth of the world, and, moreover, the truths by which men should govern. To put it in even less positive terms, only Leo Strauss and his acolytes knew the real truth about things, and you can't ever even hope to understand it, so you should just do what they say. Sound familiar?

Yep, that's right: they're just high-falutin' nerds! But they're nerds with power, and so it makes sense for them to believe that ideology is truth, because it's their ideology, and it flows from the hidden truths only they know, so it is really truth, we just can't understand it, so there's no point in even explaining it to us, god. And of course the President should be unfettered, because he's just implementing truth, so his path should be cleared. And despite all the rhetoric at America's inception and for the full century afterwards about not having kings and very consciously avoiding monarchical trappings, things are just more efficient when you have one, powerful elect(ed) man driving things forward. It all makes sense! It's also remarkably reminiscent of the rhetoric of prog rock fans. Politically, though, it represents an utter inability to recognize other people as independent actors with their own thoughts, which may have some value. It also gives power a bad name, as something absolute that is used always as a stick, no matter how many carrots you have lying around, or how much evidence there is that it's actually fluid and letting it work as such is far more effective. Of course, from the right's perspective, this is great--the left's distaste for power is one of the right's great advantages.

I've been making a few music jokes, but the neocon attitude is distressingly widespread in art. Everywhere are genre and style partisans who feel validated by their own marginalization, thinking it makes them brave outsiders, and vigilantly defending the borders of their own absolute truth from the corruption of outside influences, no matter how valid those influences may be. But art also shows us the way in which this sort of thing can be put to use, most recently in the case of Oprah picking Cormac McCarthy's The Road as her next book club selection.

McCarthy seems to almost entirely embody the image of neocon artist.[6] He has an incredibly dark worldview that he expresses with blunt prose in books about men doing violent things, drawing stark lines between himself and his peers, who are generally known for close observations of everyday life that veer towards the banal, or metanarrative trickery that feels untethered compared to McCarthy's earthy realism. He does not give interviews. The Road is about a man and his son traveling through a sparsely-populated postapocolyptic world, scavenging for food, carrying their possessions in a shopping cart, wrapping themselves in blankets against the cold, wearing masks to keep out the ash, building fires every night and covering themselves with a tarp when it rains. Life is reduced to a struggle to survive, the days grow darker, and the man keeps coughing up blood. It's a little dark.

Now, though, he's been selected by Oprah, whose most recent efforts involved opening a girls' school in South Africa and promoting The Secret, a DVD that rehashes the theory of "the power of positive thinking," which is almost diametrically opposed to McCarthy's book, it would seem. In other words, Oprah draws clear lines, too, and keeps herself and her audience within those. But in picking The Road, she's brought it inside those lines, and given it a new context, thus blurring all those bright divisions that McCarthy would seem to embody. In doing so, she's pointing out that this dark, dudeish novel is also very much an Oprah book. And it is: it's essentially a melodrama, albeit one that takes itself very seriously, and like the stereotypical Oprah book, it's consists mostly of suffering with a little bit of hope and redemption at the end. It's The Color Purple for men!

Here is soft power, and here is what can get done when you're able to open yourself up. I'm no Oprah-lover, but I greatly admire her as a craftsperson. She does what she does better than anyone else, to the degree that she's actually expanded her mandate. She's not just a talk show host anymore, she's like a mass-market life coach. And she's used her power to expand what being Oprahesque is, while also benefiting McCarthy and, if you're a believer in great literature being good, the new readers he'll gain. Everyone wins. Power can do this, if it wants; power can step outside of its careful lines and redefine itself to include more, and more, and more. By being open to what she believes in, she can bring more things into her purview. She got Cormac McCarthy to come on a daytime talk show and give an interview. And he will come on, and people will read The Road, and I'll tell you this: I bet it'll work out better than a lot of the things the administration's been doing.


[1] Perhaps to simplify making spicy chicken sandwiches?
[2] Well...
[3] This is probably just me, but seeing Bolton is always vaguely disorienting, because he looks remarkably like Harlan Wilson, a former professor of mine who teaches political theory and is maybe as far away belief-wise from John Bolton as it's possible to be. But then Bolton starts talking and he has nowhere near as mellifluous a voice as Harlan does.
[4] If you want to blame the pomos for something, you could try the whole "intelligent design" thing, especially the "teaching the controversy" thing. There's a great essay about this somewhere, but damned if I remember where it is.
[5] There's another thing he said that doesn't make sense in any context, but it doesn't really fit in with the themes of this post, so I'll stick it here: later, Bolton says that putting impediments (or, as the Constitution quaintly calls 'em, "checks") in the bureaucracy is anti-democratic, because it prevents the President from doing what the people elected him to do. This is only true if the President was the head of a parliamentary system, where he's presumed to be the representative of just some of the population. But he's everyone's President, and his job is to reflect everyone's interests, not just those of the people who elected him. This is to say nothing of the fact that the American people, as it's been exhaustively proven, don't vote for a set of policies when they're voting for President, they're voting for someone who'll be a good leader, someone who will take the future events we cannot forsee and make the best decision. The President doing whatever he wants regardless of what the populace thinks is a bit republican, to be sure, but certainly not democratic.
[6] Metaphorically speaking; I have no idea what McCarthy's political beliefs are. He seems like a good guy, but, like Phish and Tori Amos, his fans are a little offputting.

Labels: books, Cormac McCarthy, neoconservative, Oprah, political theory, politics, pop

posted by Mike B. @ 7:01 PM 50 Comments

Recombinant Pop

To what degree does metaphor shape reality? In 1946, ENIAC, the first modern digital computer, becomes operational; in 1953, Watson and Crick announce the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA; a few years later, transistors replace vacuum tubes as computers' primary physical component, and the digital age kicks into high gear. Before was analog, with individual elements constituting a fungible whole. Now there are bits: discrete units that are in one of two states, forming no whole, and thus able to be reordered and added to or taken away from. Part of one bit can never pass into another bit, because nothing constitutes them beyond themselves. They are discrete, interchangeable units. Early programming methods, like punch cards, emphasize this granularity.

DNA, it turns out, works in a similar way. It is built from four separate nucleotides, each occupying a place on the DNA strand, and with a matching nucleotide joining it in the other helix. They're bits, but with four states instead of two. By changing the state of a given element on the strand, you change the output. Each unit is the same; only the information it relays is different, and this is changeable.

Obviously the model of recombinant DNA suggests a certain metaphor, and that metaphor takes a different form with digital computing. Would computers have developed as rapidly as they did without the presence of this metaphor? John von Neumann says why not, but he wanted to bomb Russia before they could get the bomb themselves, so maybe he's not the guy we should be listening to. [1] Still, perhaps it's not the best example.[2]

So let's take music. And let's take ourselves. We sit around and we listen to music on computers, read about music on computers, talk about music on computers. Some of us--many of us--make music on computers, or DJ on our computers. And those of us who write about music do, as a group, like certain things you don't really find lots of other people liking, at least not as a group's canon. We like extended remixes, mixtapes, mashups, DJ sets. We like hip-hop that refers to its own history, that uses samples smartly, that's been chopped and/or screwed. We like rock music that alludes to literary or musical antecedents, and music that sounds like chart pop but isn't. We like[3] Jacques Lu Cont, Destroyer, Girl Talk, Kanye, Soulwax, the Scissor Sisters. Look at that list: dance, hip-hop, indie rock, and other. It doesn’t make any sense; surely that's not a genre. Is it?

Consider the metaphor through which all of that is viewed. Here we are at the computer, looking at pixels on a screen produced by information contained in bits, or listening to sound encoded as a series of numbers. We can take songs out of their context on an album and put them up on a blog (at this point, we're actively encouraged to do so). We can take part of one song and mix it with part of another song with the greatest of ease. We can hear lyrics and cross-reference them with other lyrics, hear a sample and look up its source, then download it. The world comes to us now in bits. So let's call it something. Let's call it recombinant pop.

Of course, this sort of thing has been going on for a long time: composers writing pieces based on themes by other composers, or quoting past works or folk tunes in their melodies; early recording artists stealing all sorts of things from their contemporaries (see below)[4]; and all sorts of things in other artforms, from portraits with another painter's work in the background to the real-life figures in the Inferno to, shit, the Book of Revelation. But where before these referential touches were largely filigrees, now they're the crossbeams. Technology has played a huge role in this, in ways so obvious that they don't really deserve explicating, but in short, music-making technology has now made it easier to use existing music to make new music than to play your own, and the internet's ability to provide almost any piece of music from the entire history of recorded sound has expanded the amount of existing music available to any individual exponentially. Whereas before, there were severe technological restrictions on reusing music[5], now there are almost limitless possibilities.

Recombinant pop, then, is a genre that's different from most other genres in that it's defined not by the set of sounds it uses, but the method by which it's made. (Kinda like 12-tone.) If a rock band plays a song that consists of four harmonicas playing an hour-long staggered drone, that's not rock music, even if they wrote the piece by getting together in a practice space with drums/guitars/bass and jamming until they came up with something cool. But if you make a song by throwing together a bunch of pre-existing sounds, it's recombinant pop. The use of identifiably pre-existing pieces of music as the elements of creation are prized rather than inspiration. Inspiration plays a part, but that presupposes originality, which is obviously a non-starter here. Craft matters--craft always matters, but here even more so, because there aren't the excuses of "energy" or heroic artistry to fall back on. What did you pick? How did you use them? How does it sound?

It's also defined, though, by how we listen to it. This isn't unusual: different people can hear Wilco as jazz or rock or indie, and they can comfortably fit into all those genres exclusively yet simultaneously. It just depends on how you hear it. So recombinant pop can be, as said above, dance, hip-hop, indie rock, and other. It can always be appreciated without knowing the referents. But once you start hearing those, and seeing their connection with each other and with what lies outside the song, it's part of this genre.

Let it not be said, however, that this isn't an aesthetic experience. One of the things recombinant pop has shown us is that aesthetics can absorb meaning. When you hear a recognizable sample in a song, your reaction to it isn't predicated on stopping and thinking about the release date and cover art of the song being sampled.[6] It's more like a joke: an unconscious reaction to something familiar being found where you didn't expect it to be. There's a bear in that closet! There's Elton John backing Biggie! That horse farted! You got Sting to willfully misinterpret his own song!

That's the recombinant part, but what about the pop? Well, one of the interesting things about this kind of music is that it's always contextual. The meanings being conveyed are necessarily of-the-moment, since meanings aren't fixed. There's a reason mashups almost always feature a current pop song as one of their elements, and it's because that frisson of combination comes from the temporary rubbing up against something that's endured.[8] (Also known as the "rappin' grandma" effect.) Similarly, referential rock or hip-hop always refers to something the intended audience will be familiar with, but this body of knowledge also changes, and so the reference is temporary, or at least floating. This quality of explicitly and self-consciously existing within a particular place in time is a big part of recombinant music's power.

But people tend to see this as a negative. Mashups, for instance, are often called too easy, or flavor-of-the-week. But this is exactly what people say about pop, and have said about pop since people were making the pop music that we regard today as fully canonized classics. (The Beatles!) Far from being a negative, though, maybe this is what recombinant pop is aiming for. It's created by people who feel alienated from or shut out of the pop mainstream, and so they create an alternate form of pop, still populist and transitory, but narrowcast enough to seem credible within the subcultures they operate, although ironically enough this credibility has the capacity to attract a wider audience.

If I sound a bit reserved in my praise, it's because the most prominent examples of this form--remixes and mashups--are still in their infancy. But we can see improvement: from "A Stroke of Genius," mashups moved through Ozymandias' fifteen-minute-long megamixes and Cex/Kid606's jamming cut-ups and beats under strung-together rap verses to Girl Talk's carefully orchestrated production of what can be legitimately called an album. Remixes, too, have begun to move from enjoyable-but-simplistic "make it dancier" exercises to true reinventions. To be pretentious, here's what I said about it in a recent review:

It would be interesting to see the remix collection taken more seriously as an
artistic form. Just as some bands have taken to covering entire albums, a
remixer could take an album and remix every track, with an eye less for their
individual impact than for their coherence and the way in which they play off
the original in productive and illuminating ways. Sure, there was that rash of
album-length mashups, but those lacked the access that a remixer has to not only
the a capellas but every individual track. It's unlikely that a band would offer
someone else that kind of freedom, and even less likely that someone else would
want to invest the time necessary to make it work. But it sure would be
interesting, no?

This is just one avenue the form could pursue, but there are many others. One of its great advantages is that it actively encourages incorporating outside influences, and so individual artists might begin to borrow from their peers, rather than keeping strictly to non-recombinant sources. It's exciting to watch.

What could kill it, though, is the law. The law has its problems, and certainly needs to be changed; since you're on the internet, you probably know the usual suspects. But what's interesting is that the law hasn't changed all that much, at least not in terms of your standard-issue we-made-some-msic-and-are-putting-it-out-on-some-sort-of-physical-object scenario. In Douglas Wolk's book on James Brown's Live at the Apollo, there are a number of songs whose history, as he recounts it, sound nothing short of criminal. People steal songwriting credit, people steal other people's riffs, people blatantly replicate a hit song and release it without any compunctions. Some of this is illegal and some of it isn't, but if an established record label today caught wind of it, this would likely be enough to halt the release, let alone if it was sampling entire verses from other songs. The reason isn't that they would get successfully sued so much as they would get threatened with a lawsuit, and dealing with that costs time and money[9], especially when you're in the kind of legal gray area that these sorts of examples represent.

The point, though, is not that the law is too harsh, but maybe that the labels are too lawsuit-happy. There's a whole spiel here that I've probably written elsewhere, but suffice to say that once you're a corporation the benefits to litigation start to drastically outweigh the drawbacks. Despite all the quasi-legal/clearly illegal business that Douglas details in his book, though, it seems like the people involved didn't really sue each other. Oh sure, lots of people got really screwed, and they probably should have sued. But if they hadn't been able to release a song that had a legally questionable background, it's unclear how music would have developed. Douglas points out (I think) that James Brown basically invented funk by yelling over cover songs until the song part disappeared, and if those songs weren't there for him to yell over…who knows?

So the law needs to be changed, yes, but in the meantime there is a model to emulate. One of the benefits of grabbing from your peers is that, if they're doing the same thing, there's far less impetus to start flingin' lawyers. This sort of arrangement is already in place to a certain degree, with mixtapes and Illegal Art and unofficial remixes released online. This, too, is in its infancy, so we'll see where it goes.

The law is the ultimate example of a metaphor that's become reality. Words are written and they become actions: because someone wrote that you aren't allowed to pee in public, if you do, someone can come around and lock you up. If something takes on the designation "illegal," that changes the reality in which it operates. Meanings shift, contexts change, but law stays the same.


[1] Damn fine job with the game theory, though.
[2] Although SIGARCH did put out a paper on the double-helix model of computing in 1986, so it can't be that far off.
[3] Or liked, anyway.
[4] Unexpectedly, I'm finding myself echoing a Congressman in this. I like this a lot, mostly because when netnerds get on the subject (and boy do they ever), they come at it like it's some social justice issue, whereas it's, you know, playing a Beatles song and a Jay-Z song at the same time--not exactly gay marriage.[7] This is presenting it as a political/legal issue, which is way more interesting.
[5] Check out the specs on the old samplers--wahoo sampling and all, but you only got a few short snippets to work with on even the best equipment.
[6] By the way, Mark, if I'm a poptimist, then this is popism, OK? I'm not going to claim that particular term at this juncture, but come on. Pleasure's opposed to difficulty, not meaning. Modernism, dude!
[7] (insert your own joke here)
[8] Presumably one day people will be pairing current Swizz Beats productions with whatever pop style is popular then, which I imagine will be something along the lines of children chanting political slogans over pitch-shifted whalesong. Hott!
[9] Since the company's gone under, maybe now some of this shit can be told. Of course, this is all ALLEGEDLY ALLEGEDLY ALLEGEDLY. Remember when "The Ketchup Song" was a huge hit? The label I was working for distributed a single released by a label we had an agreement with, and this single was a blatant rip-off of "The Ketchup Song." (I think it may have even been credited to "The Catsup Girls.") Well, the problem is, the company that released the actual Ketchup Song distributed our label internationally. Who knows what happened, but suffice to say we dropped the single, and the company putting out the cash-in song sued the hell out of us. I won't say how much money it cost just to get that dismissed, but it was enough to finance the release of at least two albums.

Labels: comedy, pop, recombinant pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 10:17 PM 1 Comments

Everyone's a Cynic

It's hard to think of a show that's ever had as good a year as The Colbert Report did in 2006. It was its first year of existence, and no one was really sure it was going to make it. The Daily Show didn't really seem like something you could spin off, let alone spin off with someone whose best-known bit was "This Week in God." Good stuff, but how is that a half-hour program?

Well, suffice to say the show justified its existence. By the time it broadcast its last episode in December, one devoted entirely to a guitar duel between Colbert and one of the Decemberists, the show managed to attract both a devoted fanbase that Colbert delighted in exploiting as well as guests of increasingly high stature. And they did all this without significantly changing their approach. They just waited for people to come to them, and it worked.

What is that approach? In a nutshell: effusive cynicism. The Colbert Report is undoubtedly the most cynical show in America, and it's paid off enormously for them. You realize just how cynical it is when you compare it to its sister program. The Daily Show promotes the image of a sane oasis in a crazy world, never content simply to show you what's wrong when they can also explain why it's wrong[1], albeit sarcastically, and they even go so far as to suggest alternate policies at times, again sarcastically. But sarcasm is a language we all speak now, so much so that it no longer sounds like a foreign tongue. The most sincere among us (left-wing college students, say) routinely use sarcasm as a way of belittling our opponents, and it's worked its way into modern usage enough that we hear the sincerity simultaneously with the sarcasm. There's no translation, only synonyms. Begin a sentence with "Yes"[2] and it's as sure a reversal as slapping "ne" and "pas" around a French verb.

The main exceptions are the correspondents / "experts," of which Colbert was one before he left. They deliver their reports with a straight face, and this is a big part of the humor. But after their segments, they almost always talk with Stewart, and here the "we are sanity" feeling comes back in: they make some outrageous statement that's recognizable as an exaggeration of what someone else has said, and then Stewart plays the straight man and asks them the questions we ourselves would ask them if we didn't know they were making a joke. It's effective, but it's giving the audience an out, making the correspondent into the object of ridicule before our eyes rather than requiring the audience to make that leap.

On Colbert's show, this almost never happens. The attitude seems to be that the things they're parodying are so obviously absurd that they don't need to hold the viewers' hands. There's no critique necessary, no explanation of why the things they're saying are wrong. The correspondent stands alone, with no one to question him except his guests, who rarely succeed. This is a bleak view of society, one that simply repeats what it hears, raises its eyebrows slightly, and waits for a laugh.

The thing is, the laughs didn't really come at first. If you watch those early programs, people don't really get it: jokes fall flat, and guests seem genuinely outraged at the things Colbert is saying, even though they're on a network called "Comedy Central." No one seemed to know quite how to handle him, whether they should play along or take him at face value. It's hard to say if they'd be funnier now, if the jokes simply weren't up to snuff, but in terms of approach, it was essentially the same. Did this mean that their cynicism was unwarranted, that in fact things weren't so bad that you could offer up a simple parody in place of show-and-tell jokes?

Well, yes and no. Certainly people are actually laughing now, and comedy does require passing a certain tipping point of laughter before people really feel comfortable braying along, so maybe it's just that momentum built enough for them to cross that barrier. But the cynicism has been validated in unexpected ways. People have noted the ways in which Colbert's show has come to resemble the shows it's parodying, like The O'Reilly Factor, particularly in regards to the devoted fanbase mentioned above. Colbert has built up a cult of personality around himself, so much so that he's able to get his fans to engage in coordinated collective action, and the ability he has to control his audience, down to the second he wants them to stop cheering, is a little scary.

This isn't a criticism of the show, though--it is the final proof of its cynicism. By managing to encourage this level of devotion, they've shown just how easy it is--so easy that a comedian can do it. And the appeal of this sort of rhetoric is so strong that even when it's being used sarcastically, it's incredibly effective. Colbert's fans read through the cynicism and take the sincerity they see on the other side just as fervently as O'Reilly's fans do. If this were The Daily Show, this might be something to discourage. But the genius of Colbert's show is that it's absolutely committed to its cynicism. It's ridiculous that people will do whatever Colbert asks them to do, it's ridiculous that he could get Henry Kissinger to introduce a guitar duel and the newly-elected governor of New York to judge it. They've created such a good imitation that it functions in exactly the same way as what it's making fun of, and that's spectacular.

It's still cynical, though, and that's important to keep in mind. As effective a piece of performance art as The Colbert Report is--utilizing mixed media, enabling interaction, drawing power to itself and using that power without restraint, just as its subject would--it all springs from a fundamentally cynical point of view. This rings false: cynicism seems to encourage a disassociation with the corrupted world, so devoted to its criticism that it is unable to engage with the things it's criticizing, and when it's criticizing society, the cynic sits outside it. Colbert has shown that you can be incredibly cynical (completely aware of the ways in which the object of study fails, clear-eyed in your evaluation of its faults) and yet use that knowledge, not simply throw it out there to prove your own superiority. They've seen exactly what's wrong with these sorts of shows and gone and pranked the world, making their points but also so cynical that they don't care if they cause exactly the same ill effects as the original. Why not? Doesn't it just prove their point more? And if you don't get the point, don't you deserve what you get? That's one way in which cynicism can be a productive force.

This is sorta-kinda the subject of an essay by Geert Lovink (!) entitled "Blogging, the nihilist impulse." It's not the greatest read in the world, full of the autistic shorthand that's infested academia, and prone to statements like "there are 100 million blogs worldwide, and it is nearly impossible to make general statements about their 'nature' and divide them into proper genres. I will nonetheless attempt to do this." Don't mess with Lovink, man, that dude can do the nearly impossible!

Anyway, this is a problem for me because there's no passage I can really quote to highlight what I'm interested in without subjecting you all to sentences like "It is constituted by cold enlightenment and by confession described by Michael Foucault." So, to summarize, Lovink[3] notes that blogging came about in this millennium, and the tenor of blogs is primarily cynical. This isn't an indictment, just an observation, and the consequence has been that there aren't grand movements (which are inherently suspicious), but the aggregation of lots of individual opinions, all of which can still think they're precious unique snowflakes, into a received wisdom.

He's right, and it's useful to acknowledge the inherently cynical nature of blogs. When I try to explain that, say, the Gawker sites aren't necessarily expressing a firmly-held and well-thought-out opinion, they're just paid to mock everything, being able to cite cynicism will help. It's also a frustrating tendency of internet culture these days, one that leads to things like blogs being thought of as worthless even by their creators and so not worth the effort to make into art rather than brands, but that's for another time; for now, it's just nice to have a name.

His point about this cynicism being useful is a good one, I think. The example of The Colbert Report highlight one strategy for utilization, but might there be others? I think so. Take pop music, for example. Almost no one involved in pop isn't cynical about it, and yet it still inspires devotion. You can see the machinery behind the music--the product placement, the obvious marketing plans, the unmistakable demographic targeting, the record company's tracklist calculus, the parade of new talent--and still enjoy the music for what it is. No one doesn't become cynical about pop, so much so that this is now a standard part of the life of a pop fan, even if fans generally won't admit it. (It's understandable--part of the pleasure of rejecting pop is thinking you see what other people don't, even if millions of people have seen it before you--but it's still unfortunate.) But people still listen to pop, still like pop, still make pop out of a love for the music. You can be cynical about something without invalidating it.

This is merely cynicism counterbalanced, though. What's interesting about pop is the ways in which cynicism can actually increase your admiration for the music. Once you're aware of the way the machine works, you can follow it and use your knowledge to become a better listener, by doing things like noticing and following particular producers and songwriters. Moreover, by being aware of the commercial obstacles that pop faces on its way to a finished CD--a condition unique to pop these days, since only pop musicians need to worry about getting someone else's approval for what they release, whereas everyone else can just burn a few thousand discs in their basement--you can gain a greater appreciation for the difficulties the artists face, and this often leads to a deeper enjoyment of their music.

Lovink said something else in there, though, something else that's notably wrong. He thinks this cynicism is a post-bubble thing, a reaction to the repudiation of the net's early utopian promises and grand schemes; like an embittered failure, so burned by his unrealized hopes that he thinks the world is shit. Well, something else happened in 2001--or, rather, two something elses happened. We got a new President, and…well, you know.

An article recently mentioned the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle, and it was like suddenly remembering a dream you'd had. This used to be an inspirational moment for the left, and while I'm sure it's still an inspirational moment to some, it seems impossibly distant now. Fighting over trade policy instead of occupying armies: it's almost hard to imagine. This isn't an indictment of Seattle--far from it--but an illustration of why the mood's shifted since the end of 2000. There's no reason to think the internet couldn't have been dominated by a bunch of Googles, modest start-ups that still had a gleam in their eye, but with reduced expectations and more realistic business plans. But, as I've said elsewhere, we all went a little crazy after 9/11, on all sides, and it's produced a range of reactions. But certainly there's little choice but to react to the right's version of going crazy with cynicism; there's simply no other option, given how shameless they've become. If the tenor of our times is cynical, well, there are quite legitimate reasons for that.

Point is, we don't pick the conditions under which we make art any more than we pick our upbringing or our talents. Maybe it'd be nice to have some more non-cynical art, but that's not the reality we live in right now. Pointing out the usefulness of cynicism is really just a way of pointing out the usefulness of anything that's imposed upon us from outside, be it totalitarianism or boundless prosperity or an excess of penguins.[4] Art is creative but also reactive, and since you don't get to choose what there is to react against, it's necessary to find ways to work with anything, and those ways always exist. As long as we're going to view art through the context of its times--and that's forever--this will be a concern, and not an unimportant one, either. But as Colbert demonstrates, you need to bring yourself back into the world, to use those forces to make art within it and around it and, maybe, to contain it.


[1] There's even a common moment now where Jon Stewart turns to a particular camera and addresses a newsmaker directly, with humor but without irony.
[2] "Yes, throwing yourself off a cliff would be a great idea." "Yes, democracy certainly is on the march in the Middle East!" Tone matters, but not that much.
[3] I'm giggling every time I type that, by the way.
[4] This, obviously, leads to penguin sculptures, penguin ballets, etc.

Labels: colbert, comedy, cynicism, daily show, politics, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 12:30 AM 4 Comments

CSS, "Pretend We're Dead"

A disappointment, but only because it sets itself up to be one. Covering the L7 hit, they get it so right in the beginning, when they (intentionally, I presume) use the same keyboard sound found on Elastica's "Connection," and then on the bridge they conjure a legitimate dance breakdown before going back into a version of the hook that utterly transforms the hard rock into synth-pop. It's brilliant, highlighting the thread that connects dour 90s indie to shiny 00s indie, the same one that turned riot grrl, the genre from which "Pretend We're Dead" originates, into Le Tigre's synth-prop, coaxing the part of grunge that danced alone in its bedroom into the light. It's really smart, and genuinely revelatory.

But what follows the two parts I've highlighted above obliterates all those new meanings, because then the guitar comes in, and the guitarist has decided to use the exact same distortion sound you'll find in the original version of the song. It runs over the more delicate synth bits and drowns them out, making the cover into karaoke, where it can't help but fail. Where once it was a reinvention, now it's merely a gesture. "Look! The 90s!"

Call it the oppression of the original. You see this all the time: bands do a cover and feel the need to be faithful, but that's only useful when you're introducing people to the original, and that's not really why any bands except for famous ones do covers. Everyone else does a cover to draw people into your show by giving the audience something recognizable, and so, the thinking goes, if you don't play a cover exactly like it was originally, no one will recognize it, and so there's no point. Bands often approach playing covers as a technical exercise, and while that can be productive--you figure out how to make your instrument sound like the one does in the original, and maybe you've never made it sound like that before; maybe you can make it sound like that on some of your own songs--technical exercises aren't really much fun to listen to. More than anything else, though, bands cover songs they like, and they think that changing the song would be disrespectful; it's OK to do that to cheesy 80s songs, but not, you know, Jawbreaker or some shit.

If I could figure out why this attitude persists (and it absolutely does--check out any tribute album you care to, and a minimum of 75% of the entries will be "respectful"), I would do a full post about it, but I can't, so I just have a catchy name for it. RIP Baudrillaud and all, but if we're going to accept that we're in an age of reproduction, surely the original shouldn't continue to have this much power. The oppression of the original persists because our assumptions about artistic production and the purity thereof persist. And yet they're breaking down. Artists own their own creations and should have a say over their use, and yet when they say that they'd rather their albums not be downloaded for free, this is counter-revolutionary. We live in the midst of an embarassment of digital riches and instead of harvesting from what's around us, we deem that inauthentic and coo over the handmade, as if hands on a metal needle really differs from hands on a plastic mouse. The cover is the place where this is most apparent, but arguably the original's hegemony is what accounts for a lot of the problems we see right now. Time to go!

Labels: css, pop, theory, value added

posted by Mike B. @ 12:02 AM 3 Comments

Notes for 3/8/07

- Twoheadedboy makes some great points about the Arcade Fire and their public reception:

And what of the Arcade Fire's purported sincerity? Their heart-on-sleeve
emotionalism? Should we be touched, moved? When every song recruits a gargantan church organ to swell Win Butler's high school poetry to apocalyptic proportions
(“mirror, mirror / on the wall / show me where the / bombs will fall”)? I say,
stop touching me.

Also, at the end (and more importantly): "taking the Arcade Fire to task for aestheticizing politics." This is really smart.

I'm still trying to figure out why musicians' clumsy attempts at political gestures bug me so much, beyond, you know, "they're stupid." I hadn't really considered this one, though, and I think it's getting close to the heart of the matter, although I would phrase it more like "imposing lame indie aesthetics on politics, which already has its own aesthetics." The lyrics quoted above are a 1:1 equivalency of John Ashcroft singing "Let The Eagle Soar." Just because you're singing something over a piano part doesn't mean it's a good song, and just because you say something about bombs doesn't make it a meaningful political statement, and when people think otherwise, that just indicates that they don't really know what they're talking about when it comes to songs or politics. Oh sure, sure; everyone's entitled to their opinion, and god forbid we "supress dissent" by telling someone they're being shallow, but if you think Ashcroft's song is lame, well. Aesthetics matter.

- As suspected, the House episode this week was practically a religious experience. I think I might be mentioning it again in the near future, so I won't say too much now, but seriously, episode of the year or something.

- As Frank pointed out and Dave responded to, there's been surprisingly little chatter in pop-nerd circles about Britney shaving her head, aside from the requisite "OMG she's bald" reactions. There's been a quote going around attributed to Courtney Love that I can't find an original source for (it might be on a google-proofed page like a message board), but it certainly sounds like her:

she?s insane! I love it! I?m sad about what she?s ingesting, and the bad man who got her started on that shit.But she?s made herself a true outsider under the influence or not- which in itself is not a crime, she?s expressed what she?s feeling inside on the outside an dyes its the result of a psychotic break due to uh?ingestion of a very very very evil substance. and i know what I know because I know, the people who know- she cried for a long tome before she did it and her bodyguards were all that was with herhow the ultimate insider the person whose almost directly responsible for ruining guitar rock ended up shaving her head is an ultimate irony and the fact that she shaved her head hell if i did it no one would blink butt hats cos I?ve always been an outsider even when I?m an insider- but ths is breaking news due to that fact that this was the lolita fuck up fantasy doll jonbenet nightmare- i remember the first time i saw a little thing on her in spin I seriously very seriously thought it was a parody like an snl skit and when it became real I worried and it affected everyone, in my world in the world of rock n roll and this may as well be death in some ways- she wasn?t sober when she did it - i wish she had been because then id be able to really kind of get behind it and just say- fuck yeah express yourself- do it= you don?t feel pretty on ths inside anymore show it man, but it s happened and its legendary, this is going to be legendary.Is she going to join mercury rev? Start hanging at space land?i doubts he even understands that world but no decent punk at heart can begrudge the once totally self an dmommy sexualised ?virgin? for shaving g her dammed head, i love it and I?m sad for her at he same time.I?m sure she?s clueless to how brilliant this was, how in some ways anarchic an feminist it was- but she still needs to go back to rehab.That my two cents.

I like this, but I would. Maybe another productive avenue to go down would be comparing it with the "makeover" episode on America's Next Top Model. It's at, what, the seventh time around now? Eighth? And every "cycle" (ugh, sorry) there's the makeover episode, and every makeover episode, they chop off a bunch of the girls' hair. And there's always lots of crying. It doesn't make sense--the contestants have clearly watched the show before, they know this is coming, and yet, every time, "OMG I can't believe they cut off my hair!" Really? Well, yeah. It's notable in comparison to another ANTM pattern: the nude shoot. Every season, usually after the makeover episode, there's a shoot where the girls have to be either nude, near-nude, or looking as if they are nude, and for the first few seasons, this would always knock at least one contestant out, because they would refuse on moral grounds to be nude and my body is a temple etc. etc. OH MY GOD GIRL YOU'RE TRYING TO BE A MODEL TAKE YOUR DAMN CLOTHES OFF ALREADY.

Um. Anyway, point is that this happened for the first few seasons, but then it stopped; there's still always a nude shoot, but people seem to have finally learned not to apply to the show if they don't want to get nudies. But they do still apply to the show even though they don't want to get their hair cut. It's still that unbelievable that someone would do that to them, I think, that you go ahead anyway.

So compare that to Britney: this is seen as a form of self-mutilation, evidenced by the fact that a few days later, people thought it credible that she attempted suicide. And so, hair: it's an unacknowledged but potent symbol in pop, and maybe the seemingly superficial things we see female popstars do with their hair are worthy of a closer look: P!nk, Ashlee going brunette, etc. I don't really know what this would yield, but if I did, it would be a post rather than a note.

Labels: aesthetics, arcade fire, britney, courtney love, House, john ashcroft, notes, politics, pop, teenpop

posted by Mike B. @ 12:01 AM 8 Comments

Over and Over

Lately, people have been complaining about House. They say it's gotten formulaic, and that a half-season story arc about House being hounded by a detective for drug charges came to nothing. (For those unfamiliar with the show, it's about a diagnostician named Dr. Gregory House, who is brilliant, acerbic, and unsentimental. He has a leg injury, walks with a cane, and pops painkillers constantly. He has a team of three attractive young doctors, a best friend named Wilson, played by the guy from Dead Poets Society, and a sparring partner of a hospital administrator named Cutty. British comic actor Hugh Laurie plays House with an American accent; it's not a particularly comic show, although its comic moments are probably its best.)

The main complaint concerns the fact that every episode goes roughly the same way. A patient comes in with some mysterious disorder, the team misdiagnoses it, everything looks lost, then House has a revelation and realizes what the problem is. This is true. But if you're watching television for formal innovation, you're going to be regularly disappointed. Form must, by necessity, be formulaic for most TV shows, given uniform length restrictions and hectic production schedules that leave writers little opportunity to reinvent the wheel on a week-to-week basis. Even on shows that played with form, like Seinfeld and Arrested Development, played with form in roughly the same way each time. The pleasure in seeing multiple strands come together in Arrested Development wasn't the coming-together but the parts themselves, and admiring, once again, what a good trick the writers had pulled.

Television is like pop music in that the enjoyment comes from the execution rather than the conception. Sure, individual show concepts can be grabby, but ultimately it's just a gimmick--if the show is successful, that grabby concept is going to get ridden into the ground. What matters, then, is not the fact that a rabbit is being pulled from a hat, because we all saw that coming as soon as a hat made an appearance, but what color the hat is, what the stage patter concerns, if it's maybe a marmot instead of a rabbit. Like pop, the form is relatively fixed, because the form is nearly perfect and extraordinarily successful. What you do within those confines is what matters, and the unavoidable confines of a television show are episodes.

In this realm, House has excelled. Memorable recent episodes include one about a girl whose dwarfism turns out to be treatable and her dwarf mother has to decide whether to encourage her to be normal or let her stay within the community she's been raised in, and in the process manages to both address issues of minority rights and make a bunch of great midget jokes.[1] Another ended up essentially legitimizing the gypsy way of life as being pro-family. Another was a genuinely gripping mystery, one that I was able to watch in reruns without remembering what the solution was. And yeah, they all followed the arc described two paragraphs back, but aside from always solving the case, each did very different things. It's a frame for comedy, drama, or both, and it wraps up in 53 minutes, a tasty little one-act (in, uh, 6 acts, if you believe TV writers).

While all this was going on, as I say, there was this whole other story about a cop who arrested House, House was a jerk to him, now he wants to bust House for narcotics possession, etc. etc. It could have been interesting if it didn't pound quite so relentlessly on the go-to themes for the show, which have admittedly worn a bit thin by now: is House's jerkiness a bad thing (no, the patients never seem to complain), is his domineering conviction that he's always right harmful (it pretty much never is, and you'd think he'd have the track record to convince everyone of that by now), are attitudes about pain medication misguided (yes, yes), is his team loyal to him or are they disturbed enough by his erratic behavior to turn him in (once or twice, but generally, no). These all seemed settled issues, and so they were weird things to hang a continuing story around.[2] The writers clearly did so in response to concerns that the series had grown stale, and so they naturally went down the sure-fire path to critical love: the multi-episode story arc.

Taken from a distance, multi-episode story arcs are a good thing. HBO has built its brand around shows with episodes that don't describe a complete circle, instead leaving stories unfinished and placing resolution in unexpected places and with great emotional payoff. On network TV, you think, of course, of Twin Peaks, the grandaddy of them all, but also of something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, especially the season where Buffy started dating Angel only to see him turn evil once they had sex.[3] And The X-Files' overarching story of conspiracy added layers of depth and greater meaning to a show superficially one step above Alien Autopsy.[4] Today, the form flourishes, with shows like Lost, Heroes, and Veronica Mars drawing audiences and critical acclaim by drawing a story out over the course of a season.

But, although it seems daring, requiring more foresight and allowing for more thematic resonance than single-episode stories, we can clearly see it as problematic. For one thing, it's such a major investment that it can kill an otherwise-good show. Twin Peaks is the classic example of this. By tying itself to a longer story that would require changing the status quo upon its conclusion, it raised the stakes higher than was really healthy, and the focus on the longer story made people miss the great individual episodes that not only followed the murder mystery, but those that were included in it. X-Files got so tied up in a conspiracy story it couldn't actually explain, partially because they knew they might then lose their audience a la Twin Peaks and partially because they had no fucking idea what they were talking about beyond "suspiiiiiicious," that it lost the ability to tell good, self-contained stories. Buffy dedicated itself to season-long "big bad" arcs productively for a while, but by the end the stakes had been raised so high with the world almost ending and ultimate evils and so forth that another episode in which they went and killed some vampires seemed meaningless.[5]

Clearly, too, it can be a crutch. By starting a story but dealing out plot details very slowly, writers know viewers will tune in every week just to see how the longer story is advanced, and so as long as that happens (OMG they kissed, what's that thing over there, a shaky shot of someone on the telephone) the actual episode can be crap.[6]

These problems would be less severe were we operating under a different system. These models can work well under the British model because shows have much shorter seasons and definite ending points. You can raise the stakes or promise a resolution or have a plot that makes sense, because you're not going to have to draw it out for 22 episodes a year, for as many years as you can continue to make money off it. You never know when the end is coming, and so things have a tendency to peter out. Maybe we should start injuring more TV writers' knees so they can retire at their peak like football players are doing now.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Point it, we're not operating under the British system. We're operating under the American system, and hell, if it was good enough to culturally colonize the whole damn world, it should be good enough for you, buster. We just need to be a little more aware of the particular charms of episodic television.

For illustration, consider the recent clip from the Craig Ferguson show on YouTube (here). It's a 12-minute monologue explaining that he's not going to make fun of Britney Spears for shaving her head. This is because he recognizes his own 20-year-old alcoholic behavior in Britney, and so he recognizes that she needs to get help. This may sound preachy, but it practice it's remarkable, richly detailed and full of emotional twists and turns that throw you from comic to serious. In other words, it's a good story, and apparently, a shitload of people have watched it.
But before the technology changed, before YouTube and DVDs, the only people that would have seen it would be that night's viewers, and even many of these would have been making a snack, or dozing off, or having sex. They wouldn't have watched it with the attention you give to something being presented as uniquely worthy of your time, as we do every time we click a YouTube link.[7] Maybe it would've come out on a compilation 12 minutes later, or maybe it would've gotten passed around a small circle of people as a bootleg VCR tape, but probably not--it is a 12-minute monologue about Britney Spears by a late-night talk-show host. It would have gone unremembered. Before the internet and video recording, once a moment was broadcast over the air, it was more or less gone forever--or, at least, there was no reliable way for a viewer to recapture it.

The structure of the episode was television's way of dealing with the blink-and-you-missed-it conundrum. By taking those memorable moments and injecting them into multiple broadcasts, you could be reasonably sure that an audience would catch it, and thus catch on to the program. TV faced the problem of each week being a new performance that would be gone as soon as it happened, like theater, but without theater's idea of a "run." You got one shot at things, because next week you had to be on to something else. So by retaining certain elements, TV was able to be inclusive, to give everyone similar experiences even if you weren't able to make it to a particular broadcast. And by doing so, it was able to discover quite clearly what worked and what didn't, while simultaneously acclimating its viewers to the conventions of a new medium. In short, the episodic nature of television was its institutional memory. The laugh track is the old guy in the mailroom who knows what the notations on old files mean; the wacky neighbor is your great-uncle who knows the family tree by heart. It creates a throughline to the future that now extends into the past.

Of course, this sounds like a bad thing, with its repetition and its codification and its normalization. But as all commercial art does, through compromise and limits it evolved strategies to make art work under restrictive circumstances, and in doing so created a supple form. In a way, TV episodes are like little rituals. Sure, rituals can be empty, there only for the sake of convention, and even when they're meaningful they only confirm things--but they confirm different things, and sometimes a ritual, properly invoked, can cause change.[8] With the reassuring base of formula, you can say whatever you want.

[1] It also provides an interesting contrast with another show that's excelled on an episode-by-episode basis lately: Boston Legal. The actress who plays the dwarf on House, Meredith Eaton, also plays a lawyer and Shatner love interest on the legal thriller, but where House bonds with the dwarf on the basis of being an outsider, on Boston Legal she's almost aggressively sexualized, but not in an exotic way. Among tall, leggy blondes, she's the sexpot. She's the normal one.
[2] There was one interesting element: the cop put a lien on Wilson's bank account and invalidated his license to prescribe medication, thus pretty much ruining his life. But this never really paid off. The cop's megalomania went largely unexplored, and after a bitter confrontation and Wilson eventually turning House in, essentially nothing changed. They're still friends, Wilson's got his life back. This would seem to indicate that the show wasn't ready to make the kind of changes a multi-episode story arc requires be at least nominally at stake.
[3] Tell me about it!
[4] It also gave the show enough legs to allow for some truly fantastic episodes, especially the Cher one. X-Files is arguably the progenitor of the modern extended-story series: try and imagine 24 or Lost without it.
[5] You'll notice that the whole idea of "jumping the shark" doesn't have to do with a show repeating itself, but with a show changing, by altering the status quo in ways that are stupid. Call it the Poochie Principal--a show never really dies by staying the same.
[6] Sadly, at this point I think we can safely term it "Gilmore Girls syndrome."
[7] Almost always in error, but we keep trying anyway.
[8] This is how The Simpsons permanently changed TV comedy.

Labels: Boston Legal, Buffy, comedy, House, pop, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 12:39 AM 6 Comments

Pulling a Mandy

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.

Labels: celebrity, devendra banhart, freakfolk, lindsay lohan, live, music, new york, pop, teenpop

posted by Mike B. @ 1:06 AM 4 Comments

His Master's Voice

If Paris Hilton had made her album five years earlier, there seems little doubt it would have been an electroclash album.[1] But she didn't make the album five years ago. She made it now, and as a result it's an entirely different album, one that leans now toward R&B and rap, now towards dance-pop, now with guitars, now without. Why?

When you make the decision to make music that is a separate decision from what that music will sound like, and that decision consists half of biography and half of cultural cues that make certain choices far more likely than others. What music your friends are into, or what kind of music seems attractive to you from a distance, is the kind of music you're going to end up making, and influences are not shaped by happenstance. There's a clear genealogy at work, and even when it's detailed it seems insufficiently remarked upon. The social context we create with our discursive back-and-forth about music--whether in a blog post, a feature article, a review, or a message board conversation--a social context, by the way, we're always careful to brush off as trivial and inconsequential lest we be accused of taking this shit too seriously--this is why this social context matters.

Paris made the album in late 2005 and early 2006, and, not surprisingly, it sounds like the music her friends made and the music she most often heard. Given that her friends would navigate the nexus between rich and vaguely hip, and that the places she hangs out are high-end lounges, the aural environment described by this almost precisely matches the sound of the album: shiny, uncluttered beats, and smooth, somewhat dark dance music. [2] It sounds like a particularly large corner of pop from that particular time period, except with Paris singing over it, spanning a fairly decent range of styles (it seems unlikely that you would find the music for "Turn It Up," "Heartbeat," and "Screwed" on the same album by a single artist) but the one in particular I'm interested in is one of the minmalist R&B tracks, "Fightin' Over Me."

"Fightin' Over Me" is essentially a mashup. None of the elements sound original to the track in the slightest; they could all have easily been flown in from other tracks and plunked together almost at random. Were Paris not singing along with the piano, it could as easily have been a collage as a construction. There is nothing even slightly distinctive about it, and the vocals could go over almost anything. It's particularly noticeable with the two guest-raps on the track, by Fat Joe and Jadakiss: the only even vaguely unique elements, mainly certain quirks of pronunciation, can be heard in literally hundreds of other songs, and the subjects, though arguably related to what Paris is singing, can be found in literally thousands of songs. There's nothing here--not a detail, not a turn of phrase, not a trick of flow--that's new, and in being so utterly without distinctiveness, they achieve a sort of abstract quality, becoming not unique expressions of the self but densely-packed symbols for something outside the song.

All of which is another way of saying, I suppose, that the song is essentially run-of-the-mill. Cookie cutter. Same old, same old. But when you call something cookie-cutter, there is necessarily a follow-up question: is it cookie-cutter for practical or artistic reasons? There's no denying that some things sound manufactured because they have in fact been deliberately produced a certain way to meet a particular need or desire: let's make a song that sounds like X, those are selling well right now.[3] But in Paris' case--and hold your nose and tear the band-aid off fast, because this is gonna be difficult--I fear it may in fact be an artistic decision.

Now, how can making something sound ordinary be an artistic decision?[4] Well, it can if you're Paris Hilton and what you're primarily concerned with is iconization. She was quoted as saying:

"I think every decade has an iconic blonde including Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana and right now I'm that icon."

This is not tipping your hand so much as a crotch shot of intentionality. What she's going for is something fundamentally opposed to the Romantic tradition that AR (After Rock) pop music is governed by. She does not want to fully express her particular soul; she wants to be the personification of an idea. Another way of saying "personification of an idea," of course, is "brand," and Paris is most certainly concerned with the Paris brand. That's what it is legitimate to tie up everything else Paris with the album, which is after all just another arm of the brand strategy, to say nothing of the fact that she consistently references the outside mythos in the lyrics. The more Paris can be rendered as an abstraction, the more the Paris brand grows, because the more abstract something is, the more situations it can be comfortably placed in--or, rather, on.[5]

The specific locus of this abstraction in "Fightin' Over Me" is the vocals. Not the content of the vocals, but the actual sound of the vocals. Let's go back to the guest raps for a moment.[6] On the second one, the vocals have been processed so it has this very specific, physical quality about it, which is almost jarringly out of place on such a generic track. But you listen to it and it sounds exactly like he's recording the vocals in a parking garage. You can hear the texture of the concrete in that, the words bouncing off rebar and glass and chrome. This is Jadakiss, standing in a parking garage, rapping at you. The rap's an abstraction, but he's not: he's "everywhere I turn around boys" narrowed to just one, you know, for the sake of argument.

Whereas Paris, here and on the rest of the album, doesn't actually sound like Paris. The vocals are so layered that what you get is not Paris' voice, but something that instead points at Paris' voice without actually sounding like it. I'm not saying this in a "ooh fakey McFakerton" way. It's just that we know what Paris' voice sounds like: we've heard it on TV and in movies and I guess conceivably on the radio. And you can't actually pick out that voice in the voice that's on the album. It's definitely back there somewhere, but every time you feel close to catching it, you realize it's gone. Again, I don't mean this as a criticism of the album--I think the vocals sound great, they totally fit the songs, and it's clearly Paris singing there, they've just treated it, as they do for all vocals on recordings to a greater or lesser extent. But it's very much not the voice that we're so used to hearing.

Normally when you seek to render an icon you do so by reducing it: take a human and make it a black blob on a bathroom door, take metal and make it devil horns. This is normally what Paris does to create Paris. But here, we instead have abstraction created by making more. There are so many Parises that they blur into a different Paris, a more iconic one. When you're listening to music, certain decisions have already been made about what you're going to listen to, but even within those choices, you can choose to focus your ear on one particular element or other. With so many Parises, she gives you a range of options to choose from. Which Paris do you want to focus on now? The sexy one, the quiet one, the tuneful one? Paris is all these things, and more. Paris is whatever you want her to be. She is not just a dude standing in a parking garage, but is free-floating, suggestive rather than specific. She leaves it up to you.[7]

The point, as with all pop music, is not the big differentiations, which are never actually differentiations at all, but the small ones,[8] and Paris' careful devotion to a familiar sound makes these small differentiations all the more noticeable. People don't actually want to know about Paris Hilton as a human being. They enjoy her being this iconic blonde, because she makes ideas flesh, and therefore something we can incorporate into our lives more easily. We can't stand around talking about privilege and inheritance and sexuality and women in the abstract, because that is pretentious. Paris gives us all a common frame of reference in which to have these discussions. If she exhibited characteristics out of line with the iconic image of her, we would be forced to deal with her as a human being and she would thus be less useful for discussions, since there would be things outside this image we all want to argue about, complexities and ambiguities and things like that.

With her music, then, she's given us an album that sounds exactly like what you'd expect a Paris Hilton album to sound like. You settle into the songs with no particular surprises, like an old friend, and this quick acclimation (essential to good pop) allows you to immerse yourself in the details all the more easily. The songs are not mysteries. They're not cohesive wholes that seem impenetrable. There they are, Scott Storch beats and Paris singing about Paris. And so we can get into them more. They're not trying to keep us at a distance, despite their seemingly impersonal auras; they want to draw us in as quickly as possible, and they want us to get to know them. It's a flirtatious conversation at a bar with someone you've just met, quick and pleasurable and laced with exactly as much significance as you want to assign it. When you really get to know a person, you get too caught up in all the details you know about them, but when you've only had one or two fairly intense encounters with someone, the unique details tend to stick much better. Paris is pop music that's happy about being pop music; it wants to give you pleasure, and it wants you to see what's going on. No games, no lies. Or, maybe, whatever lie you want.

************

[1] And if Paris Hilton had made an electroclash album, it would have been the best fucking electroclash album ever made, because she plays for real what electroclash made merely a running gag. Was Paris Hilton imitating Miss Kitten or just tapping into the same cultural archetype? Regardless, Paris perfected the role, giving it a breadth and reach the static-plated Nicoisms of EC couldn’t touch. Marry that mastery to some great production—hook her up with the Ghostly roster, say—and you would have, as I say, the apogee of a genre, and conceivably its (sooner) salvation. Sooner because mocked though it most certainly was, the ripple effect of electroclash will be immense and much-studied some years hence.
[2] In practice this seems to entail a lot of loops of acoustic instruments, which is interesting insofar as this would normally indicate something far more respectable than Paris' album.
[3] Some things sound manufactured because people confuse something sounding like a currently popular song with something being made to sound like a currently popular song, whereas there is in fact an important difference.
[4] Well, for one thing, apparently a lot of white people are making an artistic decision to make music that sounds ordinary right now, except they phrase it as "sounding like Bruce Springsteen." I'm not being snarky here: they really are saying they want to make basic, solid rock music, no? This is ordinary, no? Just like regular folks, right?
[5] The interesting thing about the brand is that it doesn't seem to be about the money. Paris has money, lots and lots of money--that's part of the brand--so growing the brand seems to be done purely for its own sake. It's as if all the marketing-guru rhetoric about brands from the 90s finally found a pure religious vehicle, unsullied by the need to actually turn a profit.
[6] Oops, forgot to mention this earlier, but seriously, those things are practically bricolage, fuck. It's not even like you'd expect to hear on a "OK we need a rap here" verse, which would be a sort of hilarious imitation of rapping, sanitized or hopelessly out-of-it. ("Space Jam" springs to mind for some reason.) But the raps here are decidedly au courant, with all the references you'd expect to hear in a regular hip-hop track. Except it's a Paris Hilton song, which is why I get that particular flown-in quality.
[7] It's been noted before, of course, that while it's tempting to criticize or make fun of Paris, this ultimately just plays into her hands, but consider it in these terms: by talking about Paris when you don't actually know Paris, you are making her more and more an icon, more an more an untethered discourse.
[8] Ignoring this basic fact has made so many recent musical debates into pointless exercises of bluster. A particular piece of pop music, no matter how superficially new, is never more than one step removed from some other piece of pop music, so, popular rhetoric aside, the Strokes, say, weren't worthy of attention because of their unique sound--the fact that they sounded like a fairly narrow range of bands from a fairly narrow historical era wasn't what made them interesting or good, it was just what they were, and there wasn't anything wrong with that; every band sounds like other bands. What made them interesting and good was the choices they made within that sound, and if discussion had focused more on the latter than on the former, maybe music right now wouldn't feel like a series of fads with which we are expected to quickly become disgusted.

Labels: celebrity, paris, pop, production, vocals

posted by Mike B. @ 1:00 AM 2 Comments

Notes for 2/8/07

- If you haven't heard the new Avril Lavigne song yet, you should. Lots of interesting voice things in there (the reverbed stutter leadin in the chorus, the differing degrees of overdubbing), and the way the production meshes with the emotional tone of the song is fantastic--check out the way the bass plays sustained notes in the prechorus that makes it drift before being caught by the riff and increased low-end in the chorus. That bottom just hits you in the chest, and it's like Avril's a ghost ninja attacking you from all directions or something.

- As a bonus, here are my comments for Pazz & Jop, partially because it just came out, but also because they involve Paris. For the record, I don't entirely feel this way anymore, at least not in the broad sense, but I do still think it's notable that the "important" albums of last year seemed to offer so little to talk about.

***************

You know it's a bad year for music when the most urgently-discussed subjects all concern the music industry: Tower going under, rap sales crashing, Disney selling (a fact noted but not really, you know, investigated), alt-weekly consolidation (hi dere!), and of course the neverending debate about MP3s, which has pretty much entered its perpetual-motion phase. This wouldn't be a problem if the connection was actually made between economic factors and the art that results, but everybody's too tied to their position right now to admit anything that might weaken it, and so of course we spiral ever-downward toward making pop music--and writing about it--a hobbyist's field.

Despite rock nation's loud insistence that they're entitled to free downloads come hell or high water, we're still told that live performance, not those unvaluable studio records, is the true metric of a band's worth. CSS, for instance, got framed as hipster poseurs led by a svengali drummer, right up until they like totally tore it up at the P-Fork fest. We are shamed into sincerity again: their clever referential humor is icky until it's drowned out by pure rockingness.

God seems to be using said Internet to drive home that our crutches of authenticity have been knocked away, but instead of embracing the new real, we ceaselessly attempt to recreate the real of the past. Dragonforce, an even more cartoonish metal act than Dethklok, stages a Guitar Hero tournament on their tour bus, and that's a far better mirror of reality than their concerts. But we cling to the NWOBHM cosplay still, auditioning for a supergroup on national TV with consultants dictating our appearance and convention dictating that we loudly insist how much we want this patently worthless prize, because we are the most dedicated to real rock. Yeah, we saw what happened to the realest person, Zayra, a Puerto Rican girl who proudly donned the most outlandish outfits those consultants could find and sung "pop (ugh)" songs with more honest passion than anyone else could manage. Zayra was seen as ridiculous, but rock is not ridiculous. Rock serious! Rock real! And so Zayra lost the battle of rock. In a genre with no future, who wants to be a loser, too?

We look at rock's bloated corpse and decide that the best thing for it is more histrionic emotion. Bernie's not dead! Look, he's vomiting onstage out of pure sadness! AP gave him 4 stars! Our choices are clear: win the battle, like whatshisface with the frosted tips, and seize a lifetime supply of guitar picks from Musician's Friend or lose the battle, like Zayra (although being a hot chick will get you through several rounds, assuming Tommy Lee is a judge and Gilby Clark doesn't remind you he used to be a feminist), and spend the war being pecked to death by defenders of the faith wearing studded armbands but resembling nothing so much as the adults in Footloose. No dancing! No playing around! No gay shit!

Given all this negativity, my list might seem odd. But all this negativity is precisely why The Rapture is there: they made the most optimistic album of 2006, sometimes arguably to the music's detriment, and I admire that level of dedication. They weren't floating the usual "everything will be alright" bullshit balloon; instead, they went with the much more difficult "everything is already alright," eschewing the former's quasi-Christian "there will be peace in the next life" excuse-mongering for an exhortation to live in the moment. It's a sentiment that shouldn't have been hard to find in pop music, but in 2006 it sure was.

Speaking of negativity, and living in the moment, let's discuss Paris Hilton. I soured on music for a while this year--though in fairness, I soured on everything for a while there this year--and so about a month ago, when I realized it was time to start wrapping the year up, I got myself all the notable albums I'd missed: TVOTR, Justin, Nelly Furtado, Joanna Newsom (which is horrible by the way--the internet owes me $13.99), etc. But the one that stuck was Paris. I understood why people would have a kneejerk reaction to her: Paris is a pretty loathsome creature, the child molestation of our cultural life. (We know it's wrong, but we just can't help it!) But the album has a few non-Disney things going for it. First it was one of the few pop albums not trying to be something else this year. I love Timbo and all but if he's going to keep melding singers to his "I am so much better than pop" beats, he needs to get someone else in to make sure half the vocals don't suck; it's no accident that when the camera pans across Prince's apartment in Purple Rain it catches SHEET MUSIC for as-yet-unrecorded songs. Gnarls Barkley had Danger Mouse being all "ooh, I'm subversive," which I think we've heard enough times now to realize it's code for "I care more about you thinking I'm cool than about making music you enjoy." Hell, even the American Idol winners were making intentionally retro albums of crooner and gospel music. But not Paris. She was extending her brand, and that worked great with pop. Paris is about pleasure, so what point would a Paris album be if it did not please you?

Plus, it was more up-front lyrically than most anything else. Where indie intentionally obfuscated its simple sentiments in order to seem more mysterious and rappers talked about living the good life in tones that suggested they weren't happy about it at all, Paris sang songs that didn't hide: this is about how Nicole is a total bitch, this is about how I enjoy sex, this is a shout-out to the people helping me make this album. Plus, when the fourth wave of ska rolls around, we'll get to hear "Stars are Blind" covered like 50,000 times.

So but does this--souring on music and missing albums, I mean, not liking Paris, although you can count that too--mean that you shouldn't trust my list? Probably. But a little critical skepticism, as opposed to critical disengagement, is good, no?

And so here we are: vaguely disgruntled, but also a little gruntled, disengaged the more we try and address specifics but more than willing to roll around in the broad strokes. We don't know where the hell we're going, and that's scary, so we try and hold the high ground or at least profess to absent ourselves from the fight. The truth will out--probably--but in the meantime, it's a little too gray for my tastes.

Labels: avril, css, notes, paris, pazz jop, pop, rapture, rock, rock star, teenpop, village voice, year-end

posted by Mike B. @ 12:01 AM 5 Comments

Three Deaths

THREE DEATHS

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.

Labels: ford, james brown, music, new york, politics, pop

posted by Mike B. @ 12:01 AM 3 Comments