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
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.
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[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
