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
- 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
