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.)
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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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.
