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

An idea about intellectual property and government surveillance

Watching this week's Frontline episode, on government surveillance, a thought occurred. The framing device of the show is that the FBI got mistaken wind of a terrorist plot to hit Las Vegas at New Year's, and so they went to all the casinos, requested via national security letter a blanket download of all the hotel's records of their current guests, and got it. One of the points made was that, while they might only need to use this data at the time, it doesn't go away after it's used. It sits in the FBI's possession for as long as, say, the CD-Rs it was transported on exist, and so that data can be used and misused far into the future.

But why can't it go away? The entertainment industry has invested a lot of time and effort into technology that makes data go away, or at least become unusable, after a particular period of time. In their case, it's media files, which lose their license at a certain point, and are thereafter (theoretically) unplayable. Why not do the same thing with data? Before private companies give the FBI digital data, they could be legally required to first pass it through a converter that would encrypt the information and put it all in a format that would require validation by an external site and would become unusable after a given, spcified period of time. If an objection is raised that putting it in a non-standard format would handicap investigations, a provision could be included that the requestee has to also provide the requestor with the immediate results of any data searches that cannot wait.

Is this a solution? Of course not. For one thing, it doesn't address the fact that the government really shouldn't be getting all this information from private companies, and as has been abundantly demonstrated, copy protection is easily breakable. But it at least requires some effort to break. Whereas, under the current system, all an agent has to do is pop the CDR back in their drive--or just do a search on a central database--now there would be some actual effort, i.e. conscious lawbreaking, in order to (mis)use private data after the initial inquiry. It has the additional advantage of using technology people are actually familiar with, and it doesn't actually prohibit government agencies from acquiring information, which is a touchy subject. It just regulates how they use it, in a way that doesn't require constant oversight.

Just a thought.

Labels: politics, value added

posted by Mike B. @ 3:29 AM 0 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