Thursday, July 03, 2003
OK, just one more:
I'm sitting on the couch watching Dr. Phil, and he has this woman on who is obviously obsessive-compulsive. Like: she cleans every Saturday and has to vaccuum in a certain order, has a place for her purse and it has to be there, counts syllables in other people's speech and if it doesn't come out "right" she has to rephrase it in her head. I mean, she is fucking textbook. And now her 2-year-old daughter's doing it, sorting her clothes by color, cleaning voluntarily, etc., so it's clearly hereditary. So we go through all this and it's like, duh, OCD.
But Dr. Phil goes on and on for a while about...well, at first he's got the OCD question, i.e. "What do you think would happen if you didn't follow these rituals?" But then just on and on about anxiety and relaxing and taking walks and fingerpainting, and that's fine, but it's clear that this woman has a nearly debilitating case of OCD that demands treatment. But he doesn't even say OCD, let alone mention possible medication.
And I'm just thinking: why? Why the hell would you do this? And then I remember that it's entertainment, and I remember who the audience is, and I think that maybe the mainstream has, shall we say, a bit of a bias towards the organic (psychological) rather than biologic (medical) interpretation of mental illness.
Remember when Prozak became widespread and there were all these weird reactions against it in pop culture? They amounted to, you know, you're taking these happy pills to make everything OK and you can't face reality, man. God forbid they understand the history of medication for debilitating depression (i.e., "Here's some tranquilizers!") and know how big of a breakthrough Prozak was for people who've been dealing with this illness for years and years. God forbid they have something that helps them live their lives.
It's just such a strange thing, especially given how widespread use of psychotropics is. But people seem to want these stories, these narratives that explain their essentially unexplainable and illogical condition, stories with root causes ("She does X because she was abused, he does X because of his mother...") and with redemption narratives that spring from the self rather than from science, from a pill. But sometimes the process of getting treated is reasonably triumphant in and of itself, and a lot of times medical treatment (in addition to therapy) allows you to get on with your life a lot better. It's less self-indulgant. The bias sucks, if you ask me.
Well, my girlfriend is yelling at me to go and watch more Dr. Phil, so off I go.
posted by Mike B. at 3:43 PM
0 comments
Well, the wind just got taken out of my sails for reasons I'd rather not get into, but before I go, I'd like to point you to one last place.
Over the past few months, David Neiwert has been conducting a very interesting investigation on his blog. It's about facism, and you can see the links to the whole series in the left-hand side of his front page. He discusses the various scholarly interpretations of what facism is, and finds out how difficult it is to define something that is primarily reactionary. But he does come up with a pretty good working definition, and from there he links it to the ideology of the American white supremicist / militia movement, and traces the way threads of that thought have made their way into the mainstream of conservatism.
Anyone who's read this blog for a while knows how hesitant I would be about posting a link that even appeared to make this charge ("Bush is a Nazi!" blah blah blah), but Neiwert is pretty ambiguous about it, and the info he gives is very useful, so I think it's an essential read.
I won't lie: I get a fascist vibe from Grover Nordquist. Anyone who's that passionate about drowning the government (through statist means no less!)...well, it just worries me, that's all. Here's hoping I'm wrong.
posted by Mike B. at 12:51 PM
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For the record: this blog is not pro-Dean, as some might assume.
I definitely don't agree with another annoying MWO post ("Disperse the Circular Firing Squad") saying, basically, that we shouldn't criticize Dean because he could be the nominee. This is stupid; it's like saying, "Don't conduct a primary campaign." Certainly nothing leveled at Dean so far by the left has been particularly harsh, i.e. on the damage level of Buchannan-Bush. The worst, which MWO quotes, is basically that he's unelectable because he's too far to the left. But the point of "unelectable" is that it's an argument that's really only valid in the primary season, and the fact that he's too far left (I mean, the man supports gay marriage--I do too, but, well, the rest of America feels a bit differently) is a great argument for why you shouldn't vote for him. We've done this before, and it's called McGovern-Nixon.
Anyway, Dean sure did raise himself a lot of money, so good for him; it'll at least provide a good model for future candidates. I just get this vision of him in a tank, with a ridiculous helmet on, throwing a thumbs-up...
posted by Mike B. at 12:31 PM
0 comments
All right, I have to respond to a post on Media Whores Online entitled "Americans Lag in Holding Corrupt Leaders Accountable." (No permalink; just scroll down.) After quoting a poll wherein 56% of Britons find Blair "untrustworthy" and only 36% "trustworthy," he comments:
So why are polls here not yet reflecting a similar, wise public evaluation of the duplicitous fraud currently occupying the people's White House?
The reason is that because of our failed national media, there is now a significantly greater proportion of Moron-Americans here than Moron-Brits there.
Oh yeah, that's it. It must be the extremely reputable UK media. It must be that the American public is just dummer, and the wily supervillains in the press have abandoned their great white burden to edumacate them and have instead pursued a certain insidious agenda. Is this starting to sound familiar? Like, say, check this stuff out:
By casting Junior as "honest and trustworthy" - despite that the characterization has has never been supported by a single piece of evidence - the media whores intended to create a stark contrast to their other, equally unsupported invention: "pathological liars" Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
Sound familiar yet? How about when, two paragraphs down, he actually uses the phrase "right-wing media" to mean the entire media? Yep, you got it: he sounds like the right during the Clinton impeachment. We're all starting to sound a bit like that on the left. "Why don't the American people agree with me, me being, obviously, totally correct? Aha, it must be the media obscuring the truth! The horrible, biased media!" Gee guys, I dunno. I guess we can "play to the refs" like the right does if we want, but try not to make me want to punch me while you're doing it, OK? And what the hell is that with saying there's no "evidence" for Bush being honest and/or trustworthy? What the hell constitutes evidence for that, exactly?
I don't think you can really blame the media for this particular fact, because, d00d, they're two different countries. It makes a difference, for instance, that way more people opposed the war in Briton. ("But that was the media's fault!") It makes a difference that it was clearly America's war, and so Americans have way more invested in trusting the reasons behind it. It makes a difference that Blair has been in office for, what, a decade now, and has been duplicitous on, shall we say, a few other occasions.
Look, guys--all y'all on the left--I like the Guardian, too, but honestly, the NYT is just as good. Sure, you'll get more stories about how America is bad from the Beeb, but that's less a reflection of honesty and more a reflection of a bias just as insidious as the US media's. That bias actually leads the UK press to overcompensate with their anti-Americanism sometimes, and while it's a great source of some of the stuff that doesn't get play in America, you have to take it all with a grain of salt. And since both sets of (ahem) "whores" are acting on biases, I'm not sure I see the problem. Journalists are going to be a wee bit nationalist at times, for reasons of source access if nothing else.
Blech. Some of the rhetoric on that site just does not make me feel well.
posted by Mike B. at 12:17 PM
0 comments
So I'm going home for the hols tonight and will probably not be blogging over the weekend, as we're celebrating my birthday early. Wahoo! I will try and put a few things up here before I go, though.
Sorry about the post-void yesterday--it's been a weird two days.
posted by Mike B. at 11:26 AM
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Look a little closer at this error message.
posted by Mike B. at 11:14 AM
0 comments
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Robert Christgau actually manages to stay coherant for a good 3/4 of his Radiohead review, although he loses it at the end. (Sample bit: "This is for the better if you believe songs should stand there hand on hips and demand you stop and listen—that in music, construction-shaped classical cogitation is the model of effective thought. It isn't for the better if you prefer that listeners absorb disturbing information on their feet—if you believe rhythm implies a healthier future than harmony." WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?) This is probably aided by the fact that we actually know what he thinks about the damn thing due to saying at the beginning that he doesn't like Radiohead.
Fair enough. What's less fair is the by-now fifthand brush he tries to use to tar Thom: "he's too sad." He goes off on this a lot, and it's almost not worth responding to, the suggestion being so hackneyed. Briefly, though: Radiohead can be a bit off-putting, and this hostile front is admirable in an indie-rock kind of way, but once you're in, it's pretty warm and welcoming and joyous and beautiful, to not a few people. HTTT might be a rainy-day album, but that doesn't mean it's sad necessarily; like the good album it is, it has a number of different moods, although it is certainly more subdued than, say, The Bends.
The new charge about Thom, though, is that he's too white. Whoa. Check it out:
While stray suggestions that Yorke's vocal equipment is operatic overstate a power and range dwarfed by Jeff Buckley's as well as Pavarotti's, they certainly get at what people love about him—a pained, transported intensity, pure up top with hints of hysterical grit below, that has as little Africa in it as a voice with those qualities can. Fraught and self-involved with no time for jokes, not asexual but otherwise occupied, and never ever common, this is the idealized voice of a pretentious college boy.
Yoinks. Hate a band because of its fans much? Christgau's losing me here--I never thought that "the idealized voice of a pretentious college boy" was at the helm of one of the biggest rock bands in the world; I thought it'd be more, say, a character in a Cassavettes film, or Kenneth Tynan or something. Anyway, what a sad misunderstanding of Thom's skillz. After all, HTTT is a good rainy-day album because it's comforting ("There There"), a warm blanket whose warmest bit (aside from the drums sometimes) is Thom's enveloping voice, and you and I both know that it warn't so warm round 'bout two albums ago. This album is a lot of "The Tourist"'s pat-pat warnings, politics as motherly concern rather than rants or apocolyptic warnings, because Thom is ambiguous enough about all this to know that even if you don't get on the anti-globalization bandwagon, going your own way is more important. It's not tragic, really, and it's not all that self-involved--he reasonably makes the point that one of his biggest reactions to "Creep" was to turn his concern outward, and I think he does that successfully here, where so many of the tracks are concered with a "you" or a "we" and with warnings and comfort and concern. And "no time for jokes"? Hippie, please. Check out "Wolf at the Door," which sounds, as Christgau says, fraught and self-involved and harrowing at first, but then read the lyrics and you see stuff like "get the flan in the face." Now if that ain't a joke, I don't know what is.
It's weird, here: Christgau says that Radiohead's music requires close listening and rewards examination, but he seems unwilling to examine it and floats along the surface instead, complaing about dourness and Thom's voice. Like, super fuckin' yawn. C'mon Robert--gimme something I can't whack down here. Something beyond "there's no Africa in it," because if you think that's a valid criticism ("white boy ain't black enough, for some reason!") then I'm not really interested in debating.
posted by Mike B. at 12:59 PM
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Anybody wanna buy a plush crying Bible named Psalty?
posted by Mike B. at 11:49 AM
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there’s no better way to "out" the enemy than to depict it on a deck of cards
Got the following bit of spam from Newsmax (all [sic]):
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Yeah, good luck there, kids. With luck, one day we will capture all 52 Hillary clones and throw them in prison and interrogate them for information about weapons of mass destruction.
Oh wait...
posted by Mike B. at 11:39 AM
0 comments
Continuing the great chain of being, PF replies to my reponse to their response to my response to their Liz Phair review. I don't think I'll reply (if only to avoid having to paste in all those links again) but the bit at the end of the third paragraph about taking away attention from other people blah blah blah (more likely taking away attention from Beyonce than Khante if you ask me) is pretty questionable, as is the by-now stock critical move of responding to my semi-articulate questions with "Well, I was trying to..." Good for you. You didn't.
No letters from me printed in PF today, of course.
The stuff at the end is interesting, I guess, even if commenting on current pop singles is not exactly a new idea.
Oh, and QV points us to a positive Liz Phair review.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hey Mike, thanks for writing back. The yuppie thing was a bit of a stretch,
I guess I was just trying to say that I don't necessarily think that going
all-out commercial is a spectacularly "admirable" thing to do. The yuppie
analogy was misleading in its negativity -- I don't think there's anything
wrong with liking $300 dinners and working for them, but I don't think it's
particularly "admirable" either. I definitely got more than a little bit
confused there.
Pitchfork isn't completely anti-mainstream, we like Radiohead, we like the
Stokes, we like the White Stripes -- I suppose you could say that these are
all "mainstream bands that the indie kids still care about," but a LOT of
indie kids I know still care about Liz Phair. Hell, I cared enough to
sincerely hope that the album would be good, even after I heard about the
Matrix collaboration. I can't speak for Brent's Metallica review, but I
know some people who were seriously wondering about the new Liz Phair album,
and I didn't write the review just for the sake of picking the album apart.
I tried to make it clear that the 0.0 rating meant that, to me, the album
offered absolutely nothing unique or interesting. I even tried to stay away
from gratuitously equating "mainstream" with "bad," because I certainly
don't think that's true.
I did have a point with the rhyming thing, though -- I think that there IS a
difference between rhyming lyrics and lyrics that are strung together for
the sole purpose of constituting a viable rhyme scheme. I mean, to use the
most obvious example... does love really come from above? Also, I didn't
want Liz Phair to feel bad for making a record I don't like. I wanted her
to show some sign of actual engagement, either musically or lyrically, and I
don't think she did. But hey, it's a subjective thing, and we obviously
disagree about "Rock Me" and, in turn, about a certain type of music in
general. You really love Britney and Christina, as well as Liz? That's
great! I wasn't expecting you to say that you do. There exists, and I
think/hope you'll know what I'm talking about, a faction of people who LOVE
Liz Phair's new album, but hate all the music it resembles... talk about a
lack of consistency! I was just trying to point out that, while Liz Phair
may be "going for it, all-out," there are countless other groups who've been
going for it all along and don't have the resources or media frenzy of Liz
Phair... but by now I'm pretty sure you agree with me on that one.
Speaking of consistency, aside from some muddled rambling in the response I
sent you, I think I've been pretty consistent. I was assigned an album to
review. I reviewed the music, and it seemed to me that the album offered
nothing that was unique or interesting. If this album were to have been
made by either a pop star or a complete unknown, it still would've gotten
the 0.0 -- I wasn't trying to make a pointed statement about "selling out."
There are definitely mainstream albums I enjoy, but music like Liz Phair's
latest doesn't do it for me in any way. You hear a retro-chic treatment of
a current sound, I hear a listless attempt to approximate the current sound
as faithfully as possible. More to the point, you like that particular
sound and I don't. I completely agree with you about "if the song is
good..." I think we just disagree about whether or not this particular song
is good.
Also, just so you know, Pitchfork is planning on extending our coverage of
pop music, taking on the singles charts and trying to muster some fair and
balanced criticism. The staff has more eclectic tastes than you might
think, and between the 20 or so of us currently writing, there's a lot of
pop music love. I'm looking forward to all of us, myself included, having a
more expanded medium through which to express it.
Best,
Matt
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE: Oh yeah, forgot about the "we like the White Stripes" claim. You do? Huh. Well, that wasn't the impression I got from the review...
posted by Mike B. at 11:34 AM
0 comments
Monday, June 30, 2003
John Mellencamp was always one of those guys who I'd never turn off if he came on the radio, but I'd never say I liked, and if you asked me why I could never get enough of "Jack and Diane," well, I wouldn't be able to tell you. But then I was in a bar in Indiana when "Little Pink Houses" came on, and I started to think differently. And I really liked some of the bits from his interview in Salon:
Your parents were Democratic Party activists in Indiana, weren't they?
Oh, they were active locally, in our county. My mother campaigned for Bobby Kennedy. I was surrounded by Democrats. And I don't understand, in this day and age -- most people who are Republicans, they're not rich enough to be Republicans! I don't get it. My best friend is a Republican. He and I vowed a couple months ago never to talk about politics again. He's just a normal guy with a normal job and I've known him since I was 5 years old. But I just said to him, "Man, you don't have enough money to be a Republican. How can you afford this?"
This has always confused me--why would you be Republican if you're not rich?
[The record label didn't like the song "Beautiful World"] because of the content? The lyrics?
Yeah, because it was about racism. And it mentioned being politically correct. They had a long laundry list of problems. Their complaint was, "You have this beautiful chorus ['Come on baby take a ride with me/ I'm up from Indiana down to Tennessee'], why do you have to fill the song with these things that will agitate people?" Well, that's what the song is.
Very nice. And I think the label was wrong--with a chorus like that, fuck it, you can say whatever you want.
You've always been pretty upfront about the fact that you were playing this game to be on Top-40 radio, to have hits. Meaning if you're going to put time into a project, you might as well have as many people hear it as possible.
You're right. I always said there's no reason to make these records if nobody's going to hear them. What's the point, unless you can do something positive with the song, or entertain people? These things are too hard to make, they take too long, they cost too much money and there's no reason to make them unless the record company is going to support you and try to sell the fucking thing.
Yar.
So you've had a good time?
Did I have fun in the music business? Are you kidding me? More fun than most guys deserve to have in their life. I have laughed so hard at myself that I couldn't get up off the floor.
I like that a lot.
posted by Mike B. at 4:46 PM
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The promised (see below) response. Also, Rob points us to a thread in which some non-believers recant. Sort of.
--------------------------------
Hey Matt-
Thanks for replying. I gotta say, though, I'm looking for a little bit of critical consistency here.
For instance, you say I shouldn't consider the lines I quote from "Rock Me" good because they're only good in relation to Phair's biography, but the whole context of the original review was how Exile in Guyville used to be great and how Liz did this and Liz did that. Now you say you don't care about an artist's motives. (Although you do use the opportunity to tell me about her motives some more.) Fine, but maybe that should've been reflected in the original piece. Me, I think that context is the rock-crit game, and that's great, but let's get on with it, shall we? If the only reason it's being covered by PF is because she's Liz Phair, then that just plain ol' matters, and I stand firm in my contention that were it almost anyone else and were you folks to deign to review them, they would have deserved, oh, at least a tenth of a point there rather than the 0.0 it got hammered with, and that, like with the Sonic Youth review, the rating (and the review in general) was done to make a certain reactive point. At any rate, the only pieces of Liz's biography you'd need to make my interpretation is that she's in her 30s. And even if you don't use that it's still, IMHO, a great song. Speaking of which:
You said in the original piece that you wanted to see some self-doubt or reflection. I showed that there was some. You reply by saying that you don't care if she's angsty, but I think you miss my point: since there is self-doubt there, I think you want a bit of that angst; you want her to feel really bad about making this piece of crap, and if that was in there, if there was some of the indie impulse to self-sabotage your best efforts at acceptance, then it would be better. Because there is self-doubt there, if you want it to be: you just don't want it to be, since you think that the only uses the lines I quote from the bridge because they rhyme. To which I gotta say: huh? Did she only say "It's harder to be friends than lovers and you shoudn't try to mix the two / but if you do it and you're still unhappy then you know that the problem is you" in "Divorce Song" because "you" and "two" rhyme? I'm open to a different interpretation of the line, Matt, but using the fact that it rhymes as evidence that it doesn't mean ANYTHING is unlikely to win me over.
And speaking of critical consistency: where the hell did that "yuppie" thing come from? First off, I don't know what's wrong with track lighting or $300 dinners in and of themselves, unless you're going to use the "that money should go to poor people" argument, in which case I'll happily inquire why you're writing record reviews and not working in a soup kitchen full-time; indeed, the only thing wrong with them is that I don't have them, and I would like to have them. Some people, when faced with this situation, think that the people with track lighting and $300 dinners should at least have the decency not to enjoy them, at which point I gotta say: well, then what's the point? I'm glad Liz likes her album. It would be weird if she made it and DIDN'T like it, don't you think? As for the SUV's, I'm definitely confused as to how a radio-friendly album is analogous to a machine that spews pollution and smashes smaller cars, but maybe that's because I like $300 dinners. (Mmmm.)
And incidentally, although this may not have come through clearly in the original message, I was making the point that Liz WASN'T being retro, but was instead applying a kind of retro-chic treatment to the current sound, recycling it in real time and thus participating in popular culture. But.
You did get two things right, though: I do really like Xtina and Britney (although not Creed, as they are too dour and rockist for me) because, like I say about the Liz album, there are some really, really fucking good songs there, just like how I like early Beatles stuff even though they sing stuff with dumb lyrics like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" (by the by, if you're looking for a good parallel for the "ironic line surrounded by meaningless sincerity" thing you don't see in "Rock Me," try the first verse of "I Saw Her Standing There"). If the song is good, fuck it: I don't give a shit about the rest, and I especially love the way that the producers of those songs have, as I say, fucking gone for it and just thrown everything at it. Love it love it love it. Unabashedly.
The other thing would be about Pitchfork's not covering an album like this if it wasn't Liz Phair. Yeah, that's true. And maybe that's a problem. Yes, yes, I know you're not the editor, but we did both CC Catherine on this one, so maybe it'll get in the mailbag and spark some kind of useful dialogue. (And what the hell, I'll cc Ryan too.) And who knows--maybe you'll get assigned something mainstream in the future, and it'll change your thinking a bit. At any rate, Pitchfork seems to have assumed its editorial mission, from what I've gathered from newswire and mailbag stuff, is to both cover "underground" music, and to expose people to good music they wouldn't have heard otherwise. Both admirable goals. But you guys have also covered a decent number of mainstream products of late, and when you do so, it only seems to be to trash them. So if the first part of the mission has been compromised a bit, it would seem to make sense to sublimate it to the second, very positive, goal, and expose indie-rock kids who normally scorn the mainstream to mass-market stuff that's good but that they might otherwise overlook. This was the point, for instance, I think a lot of the letter-writers were trying to make about your Metallica review--that if you're going to address something indie kids left for dead long ago, then why not do so to say something good about it and expose them to good music? (And before you say, "Well you should bring that up with the other writers"--oh believe me, I have.)
Ultimately, I guess, we'll have to agree to disagree, because obviously you can't bring yourself to like radio-friendly pop / rock, and I can't help but like it. I would suggest, though, that if you can't bring yourself to like this kind of music (the hated Britney, Xtina, etc.) and you love music as much as someone who writes for PF obviously does, then maybe you should give it more of a chance--as should Pitchfork.
posted by Mike B. at 3:40 PM
0 comments
So it's confession time: I actually sent my response to Pitchfork's Liz Phair review into Pitchfork, and I got a reply from the author, which I'm printing below. My response will follow in a bit, but I figured I'd throw it on here now for it to be chewed over. The bit at the end where he hopes to shame me with the spectre of Britney is especially good.
Incidentally, on their letters page today they print three letters in response to the Phair review, none of which are mine, and the two negative ones are, IMHO, way less coherant than mine. But, I guess, that's why I'm trying not to write in much anymore.
At any rate, here's the letter.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Hey Mike, thanks for writing.
For the record, the stuff on the front page isn't written by me, it's added
by the editor.
As for the lyric in "Rock Me" -- would you read that self-doubt into that
line if you weren't familiar with Phair's biography? The music itself never
sounds anything less than mercilessly upbeat, and the lyrics surrounding
that one particular line are anything but reflective. I don't care if she's
angsty or not -- I think the "tortured" schtick gets old very, very fast,
and I also think Liz is saying "You think I'm a genius / think I'm cool"
because "cool" rhymes with "rule." Just like she rhymes "if it's alright /
rock me all night," even though the gentleman in question is obviously quite
alright with rocking her.
I don't think "Rock Me" is an amazing song -- in fact, I think that if it
were made by somebody other than Liz Phair, it probably wouldn't have been
covered by Pitchfork at all, let alone given a 5+ rating. "Rock Me" doesn't
play with convention -- it is convention manifest.
What retro sound is Phair touching on? I don't think the album sounds retro
at all. In fact, I think that its endless drive to be comercially viable in
the present is going to result in it sounding ridiculously dated a few years
down the road.
You know, I have nothing against an artist who wants to make money from his
or her music. In fact, I don't really have anything against an artist like
Liz Phair, who junks a whole album when she's told by her label that it's
only going to go gold. But I don't think it's anything to be admired, any
more than it's admirable when some yuppie jackass rattles on about how he
LIKES his goddamned SUV's, track-lit apartment, and $300 meals. How could
she have "pussied out?" By making a half-assed pop album like
Whitechocolatespacegg? I don't care what an artist's motives are, my job is
to comment on the music. I never claimed to be a "true" fan, nor do I think
that such a concept is even remotely viable. If you enjoy the new album,
I'm happy for you -- I'm just curious as to whether or not you're a fan of
the hundreds upon hundreds of pop acts who've had the conviction to go "full
fuckin' force" as something other than a calculated style change, and
without the safety net of an established fanbase. By your reasoning,
Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Creed should've won your ass over
ages ago.
Best,
Matt
posted by Mike B. at 1:06 PM
0 comments
rocking me
So today's gonna be Liz Phair day here at claps blog, with a bunch of stuff brewing.
First off is the letter Liz wrote to the Times in response to their scathing review. The general consensus has been that the letter is "crazy" (c.f. Gawker and the Velvet Rope) and I'll grant that halfway--certainly the letter starts out kind of crazy, and her refusal to telegraph the meaning behind the "Chicken Little" metaphor I'm sure confused some people. I mean, hell, I was pretty confused at first. But then I hit the end, and it, quite honestly, is one of the most moving and quietly beautiful love-letters to pop music I've ever read:
"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Chicken Little screeched, terrified they would not heed her and would be found the next morning, buried among the intellectual debris. She pecked and pecked at them with her sharp little beak until they finally agreed to be awakened. The three readers rose up and shuffled outside to be greeted by a warm, summer rain falling steady as a heartbeat, wondrous and quiet as unexpected relief from pain. "Why, Chicken Little," said one reader, "it's only a summer shower come to feed the land. It feels great!" Chicken Little cowered in the corner as a fork of lightning licked the trees. "It's dangerous!" she cried, "you could slip on the wetness! You could catch a nasty cold! You could get electrocuted!" The three readers laughed, and went back out to experience the mystery of the storm, without thinking, without deconstructing, without checking what the other would do first. "Listen to me! Listen to me!" cried Chicken Little, as she watched their backs turn. The three readers stopped at the door and called out before leaving: "C'mon, Chicken Little. Hurry up, you're gonna miss it!"
LIZ PHAIR
Manhattan Beach, Calif.
Now honestly, how nice is that? And true, too, I think. "Warm summer rain falling steady as a heartbeat." That's great writing, and a perfect summation of what I've been trying to show folks about this particular move on Liz's part. So let me try to, as the lit teachers say, "unpack" it a bit.
First off is the attempt to separate the critic from the listeners (and the annoying jab of "three listeners") and thereby imply that the critic doesn't get it but the "people" do. This is a technique too often used by artists who have (usually deservedly) had their work panned, and not really that valid or revelatory, so a D on that one, Liz.
Then there's the stuff about critics traveling in packs and waiting to see what the general reaction will be before jumping on the bandwagon. This is an undeniably true fact about critics, I think, but it's not really a valid argument unless you can demonstrate that they actually do like the music and are just ripping it in public to maintain their cred, whereas in this case I think both the level of hatred in the reviews and the fact that Liz admits she was making a record she knew the critics wouldn't like belie the sincerity of their reaction. So points for asessing a truism, but demerits for picking the wrong case to apply it to, and a C+ here.
But she gets the full A+ for the positive stuff, the description of the simple pleasures of pop music and of the difficulties faced by people like us--what I'll call, for lack of a better reference, Liz Phair's audience (or LPA for short)--in suddenly finding that we really like, say, the new Justin Timberlake song, or the American Idol single, because so much of our identity is tied up in music and so much of our taste tells us that the mainstream is evil and wrong and we must avoid it at all costs because it is shallow and it crushes the true innovators in the underground, etc. etc. This is about, as far as I can see, the process by which LPAs (including in this case, I think, LP herself) get over that hump and start to learn to love the bomb.
Here's the argument I think she's making. First off, I think you have to realize that the view of "listeners" here, while a bit idealized, is essentially a parody of what they seem to look like from the critic's perspective: "They played outdoors, mostly, and had very open minds." Listeners don't, of course--most people's tastes are pretty fixed--but critics need to believe this in order for their criticism to be meaningful (since very few critics are happy simply writing Papa Roach reviews for Rolling Stone and like to think of themselves as connoisseurs and dilettantes and exposers of new good things), and as a consequence, most have a strangely paternalistic attitude towards "listeners" wherein they think they're very easily influenced, mainly in a negative way, and need to be shielded from the bad shallow crushing mainstream what I mentioned earlier. And so--as, for instance, a few Pitchfork writers have admitted to me at different points--they overcompensate, making a work seem much worse than it is ("The sky is falling!") in order to scare their "stupid listeners" into not buying and thus stopping the evil, etc.
But what the metaphor is trying to point out is that listeners are a bit more adventurous in their tastes than critics give them credit for. This doesn't mean that they're open-minded, but it does mean that we seem to be able to find pleasure in music where critics cannot, or, worse, assume we shouldn't. We appreciate humor more ("it's only two squirrels chasing each other in amorous conquest, skittering over the eave of our house." "It's quite funny, actually...") and we don't expect every album to be Revolver; we are often happy with, as Phair so nicely puts it, something "wondrous and quiet as unexpected relief from pain." If that makes us shallow, so be it, but it does seem to make us more happy. The process of a LPAer becoming a pop fan is the process of maturation, I think, the process of getting tired of being so much "smarter" than everyone else that we sit alone in our room and becoming, instead, the kind of person who can look goofy and dance in the rain and listen to "Crazy in Love" and sing along, now, not when the LPAers appreciate it twenty years down the line. It's the process, in other words, of appreciating how rare and beautiful a thing happiness is, no matter how much of it you have, and seeking it out wherever you can.
It's nice that the letter doesn't close with the critic alone and rejected, but, instead, with an offer to come outside and play, because this is the eternal promise of pop music: that of inclusion. But there's a warning there too, one that I wish more critics would heed. If you keep yelling that the sky is falling when it is, in fact, only sort of rumbling, you lose your authority with the readers, and you become another instrument of what you're trying to avoid. We don't want that, because (as the last bit demonstrates) the listeners like you and value you. But we also need to know when to trust you, and to be able to go to you without you attempting to take away our simple pleasures.
So there's your crazy letter, kids. Kind of funny that it may actually have been too intelligent for most people...
posted by Mike B. at 1:00 PM
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