You know, I used to have sort of nebulous reasons for wanting to seek public office--a desire to help people, to make the world better, you know, that sort of thing. But now I have a very specific reason for wanting to enter electoral politics.

So I can erect a plaque at the Union Square Wendy's reading: "Courtney Love got her right tit sucked here."

There's just so much going on here that it's hard to know where to start. The whole incident just seems so weird and significant, even for Courtney, but of course the fact that it took place in the midst of a rampage that saw her get arrested and play one of the weirdest concerts I've ever been to tends to obscure it somehow. But now outside of the maelstrom, and with some prompting, let's try and unpack this shit a bit.

Now, I'll admit up front that I can't help but wonder if part of the reason why it strikes me as significant is that, well, I eat at that Wendy's a lot.[1] It's a pretty good Wendy's, long wait times sometimes, and a weirdly over-enthusiastic dude working the garbage detail (I started going to an obscure trash can just to avoid him after a while), but there's a nice little section near the front doors where you can look out the front window, and that's where I usually sit. Seeing Courtney up-close and in person was weird enough; having her in a fast food location I frequent is just getting way too close to breaking the barrier between her and me, and as I said before, one's enjoyment of Courtney Love is wholly dependent on being able to see her as an abstraction, not a reality.

But no, this isn't just me. It's because it's fucking Wendy's.

See, Courtney's had her certain share of escapades before, but these can be roughly broken down into two categories: Pretty on the Inside ones and Celebrity Skin ones. The POTI incidents, roughly all the pre-Kurt stories, embody the POV on that album, are sort of archetypically sleazy and degrading, sort of a cross between Bukowski's and Axl Rose's worlds.[2][2.1] The CS incidents embody that world and Courney's place in it, all of them basically involving her misbehaving in these sort of elite locations: breaking the window in Beverly Hills, crashing the MTV interview, taunting (ironically enough) Axl Rose at an awards ceremony, going wasted on radio shows, and, of course, the main precursor of her NYC rampage, the Q Magazine chronicled London rampage involving anus waxing, naked flights down a street, and so forth. These were, in one way or another, all kind of chi-chi, with Courtney wrecking things in a very controlled environment that doesn't expect anyone to actually act like that.

But the Wendy's is very different; it's really neither classically sleazy nor celeb-friendly. They have a security guard, but businessfolk eat there, and college students. People come in asking for change, and the bathroom's an utter wreck, but everything's still pretty shiny and bright and plastic. Just the thought of it is jarring. Like the CS stories, Courtney's doing something pretty much no one else has been known to do, but like the POTI incidents it's sort of sleazy. But at the same time, it's really not. It's in a Wendy's, and it's not really debauched, just kind of weird and insane. The combination of the two worlds, and the very concrete setting, make the whole thing just utterly banal, like Wendy's itself. Ask any New Yorker: we wouldn't necessarily expect someone to flash their tits outside Wendy's and invite someone to suck on 'em, but, you know, we wouldn't be overly surprised either. You walk around and the energy in the air tells you, more than most places, that something like that could happen at any moment. It's sort of fun.

The fact that it's at a fast-food restaurant, though, is what makes it so perversely wonderful. Rockers are either supposed to eat at trashy diners or five-star hotels, and if they do eat fast food, they're supposed to be sort of humbled by it. But Courtney doesn't care[2.2]--she just treats it like it's the Whiskey or something, being a bad girl in a place where that permissiveness doesn't exist, because everything is expected.[2.3] Can you transgress? Sort of. Sort of not. But that's what I've always loved about fast food places: that they're these perfectly sculpted temples of whatever you want them to be. They are undeniably beautiful, expected to be beautiful and clean and neat, but with every surface available to be hosed off just in case something happens. What Courtney did was what some homeless woman could have done at any time.

And speaking of homeless people...well, let's go to the picture. Then let's go to Page Six:

SKANKS for the mammaries, Courtney Love! The mystery man photographed suckling Love's breast outside Wendy's in Union Square last week wants to milk his moment of media infamy for everything it's worth.

Kofi Asare, 23, tells PAGE SIX he hopes to print the infamous image on T-shirts, and use it to further his dreams of becoming an actor or model. "First there was Justin and Janet, and now there's Kofi and Courtney," Asare crows. "It's great exposure for me. I look at the picture and I think, 'Wow, that's a classic shot.' It's controversial, but it's all in good fun."

The photo - which shows a grinning Love pulling down her top while Asare suckles her like a newborn baby - has been burning up the Internet and is rumored to have been bought by the National Enquirer.

Asare says he was heading into Wendy's around 8 p.m. last Wednesday when he saw Love flashing her breasts at paparazzi outside. "All I wanted was some chicken nuggets," Asare says. "I saw Miss Love flashing everyone. I had to push the envelope.[2.5] I figured, 'This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.' She flashed me so I was like, 'May I?' She was cool with it. It wasn't like I was trying to do anything to degrade her."

"I just said, 'Thank you,' and she got into her vehicle with some people she was with. They sped off and the paparazzi sped off after them." Love was arrested hours later after she allegedly hit a fan with a microphone stand while performing at Plaid.

Asare, who is black, said he was offended after some identified him as "homeless" when describing the photo. "I didn't appreciate being vilified like that," said Asare, a reservations agent for a limousine company who lives with his parents in Morningside Heights. "It was an assassination of my character. I'm not homeless. I graduated from SUNY-New Paltz last year. I majored in public relations."[2.6]

And yes, chicken nuggets and "Miss Love" and "thank you." Wow.

Geez, where to start with this one? Well, let's take the "homeless" thing first here. He's not just making this up: I distinctly remember reading Kofi referred to as such, although I can't find the link anymore. (Maybe it's been corrected.) Now, to give everyone the benefit of the doubt here, there are a lot of definitely homeless people on that stretch of 14th street, for some reason, but on the other hand not a lot of homeless people are carrying around unread copies of the New York Press. Ah, fuck it, let's be honest, it was just a stupid thing to say.

But, like so much of what I talk about, stupid but interesting. Because I think there's no question from Courtney's expression that race is undeniably playing a role in that picture. There's the context, of course, that Courtney doesn't seem to have a whole lot of black fans, and I suspect the half-hearted hip-hop dis in the "Mono" video didn't help matters any. But you look at the way she's grinning there, that toothy, lip-biting smirk, and you know that's not just "lookit me getting my tit sucked" but "lookit me getting my tit sucked by a black man!"

There's just so much tied up in that photo. There's her as the blonde searching for a kind of sexual perfection, with a hand around her from her guitarist who she constantly introduces as a fellow teenage prostitute, and the dude on her plastic surgery'ed-up tit there. Is this a prostitution kind of image being played out here? Is it more of a black guy / white woman / interracial fears thing? Is it just a reversion to the POTI image of sleaziness for its own sake, like old-skool punk degradation? Or is it, in fact, more of a nod to precisely the sexist gangsta rap videos she's trying to shoot down?[2.7]

I think you have to see it as a specifically kind of racial provocation. What's unique about it is that the only contact you see her having with African-Americans is a) sexual, and b) in the context of her going crazy. The only way she's going to actually interact with a black person is when she's out of her gourd and looking to push some buttons. But then again, it's not like she chose him particularly, it's mostly at random. And it's not like she chose her audience, either, or the almost totally white composition of the world she inhabits. It's just the way it is.

It's a breaking of the barrier, too, in that particular interaction with a disinterested stranger. Her usual antics are always her fucking around with people who are there just for her, with her sort of exploiting that relationship and testing its limits. But here, the guy's just walking down the street and someone[2.8] offers him a tit. And that's why it's an inversion of the usual relationship Courtney assumes in such situations. She's only partially in control here: the transgression comes not against the agent she's involved with, but against the viewer. And given that, you can't help but consider the picture's very constructed nature, the way it's so well-framed for an illicit snap, and the definitely posed parties, the way not only Courtney but Kofi, too, are looking at the camera, very much looking not only at it but at the future viewers.[3]

The sudden intrusion of race into the walking piece of cultural criticism that is Courtney Love is particularly jarring because it's not something she's dealt with before, and this is jarring because she has spent so much time dealing with gender issues.[4] But, unless I'm misremembering, there's really zero interest in racial issues for ol' Courtney, especially in her music. Not that this is bad, necessarily--I think she's addressed certain things in much more interesting and intelligent ways than most people in the public eye have, and just because race is not one of those things doesn't mean she's unconcerned about it; it just means she doesn't have anything to say about it. And that's cool, too.

But what about what she has talked about? If you can't ignore the race of the sucker, you can neither ignore what's being sucked, i.e. the breasts in question.

As should be clear from the Q pics, C-Lo is not a woman who's shy about her body. Indeed, in addition to having what can be best described as the body issues of a 15-year-old girl[5], which of course is no small part of her appeal to said demographic[6], she seems to use nudity as less of a sales tool (i.e. like your basic teenybopper) and more as the equivalent of gobbing, a kind of provocation or straight annoyance. People think they're being critical by saying that she's done it so many times that it's just sad, but that's sort of the point: she clearly wants to totally de-mystify her body as an object (while also looking fabulous, or like a gross parody of fabulous), and she'd done nothing if not succeeded. "My Body The Hand Grenade," you know, except less a hand grenade and more a guided tour of a slaughterhouse. "Here's how the food's made--still want to eat it?"[7]

But in NYC this time, there seemed to a very specific agenda to the tit-flashing[8]: it was a reaction to nipplegate. So this wasn't just some drunk girl at Mardi Gras thinking she was being naughty; I think there was a very specific message of "So you're going to drop Howard Stern and cut out shots of an old lady's breast because people are all nervous? OK. I'm going to go on Letterman and flash my breasts repeatedly. What are you going to do about it? Fine me? I don't care! I just lost custody of my daughter! What the fuck do I care about a fine?"

The way she was doing it, too, was very specific, since sometimes she would almost do it, but not in a teasing way--more of a threatening way, and it's impressive that someone can flash their breasts in a threatening way, isn't it? It was traditionally feminist in part, of course, being unashamed of one's body and using your feminine power aggressively instead of in service of male desire, but also very much in line with Courtney's recent project of media and otherwise criticism-by-act. Again, this might be me, since I've not been beyond threatening to flash my own private parts in the past (to some effect, as it happens), but the sort of fearless and very clear way she was going about it was spellbinding.

OK. I think that's everything I have to say. Let's see...yep, that's it.

[1] Although obviously not enough!
[2] There's also the Kurt incidents, but those are Kurt incidents, and let's not blame her too much for those right now, mainly because it'll fuck up my taxonomy.
[2.1] I.e., half fresh-off-the-bus-from-the-Midwest-girls-getting-exploited-but-kind-of-liking-it stuff, and half old-crusty-Los-Angelenos-wallowing-in-their-own-filth.
[2.2] I think what I'm trying to get at here is that rock stars are supposed to be either working class or noveau riche, but hers was actually a very middle-class kind of act, and the middle-class is banned from youth culture.
[2.3] I was eating in the Union Square McDonald's[2.4] last week and the manager and security guard had to chase these kids down because they tried to steal one of the plants from the staircase. Upon re-entering, the manager was heard to say, "Now who steals a McDonald's plant?" Good question.
[2.4] Yes, I eat a lot of fast food.
[2.5] !
[2.6] It's like this guy stepped out of a Don DeLillo novel or something.
[2.7] OK, I guess the whole thing is like out of a Don DeLillo novel.
[2.8] Interesting question: did he know it was Courtney Love before someone told him who it was? I mean, he probably did, but if not...
[3] There's also the issue of Kofi's weird attempts to exploit the incident, to bank on it in the same way that C-Lo banks on her misbehavior, but in a way that seems doomed to fail. And so Courtney retains the upper hand, still.
[4] Unlike, maybe, PJ Harvey, whose "Meet Ze Monsta" seems like one big ode to Big Black Cocks, going, if I recall correctly, "Big black monsoon / take me with you." And Tori Amos, but let's not go crazy here.
[5] I.e., '"Do you think I look good for my age?" the 38-year-old asked the assembled group of PRs and assistants,' a question that was asked a few times in slightly different forms during her NYC rampage, if I recall correctly.[5.1]
[5.1] At the Bowery show, I believe she said, "I hate to be unfeminist, but could I have a skirt? I feel fat." Um, this being while she was wearing a see-through full-body lace lyotard. No, seriously.
[6] I.e. people with the body issues of a 15-year-old girl, which crosses a lot of group lines.
[7] Does this make any sense? I think it does. Keep in mind that I've visited slaughterhouses and still avidly consume meat.
[8] Which there was a lot of.
posted by Mike B. at 6:25 PM 2 comments

From the Scissor Sisters newsletter:

In addition, we've just booked a new hometown show in NYC at the Bowery Ballroom on May 22nd. Tickets go on sale Wednesday 24th at www.ticketweb.com. It won't be announced until next week, but we wanted to give you guys a heads up as last time it sold out and we don't want our fans to be left out. It's gonna be a great party! Expect a surprise or 3. This will be followed by a major city US tour in early June and late July, and the release of our record in the U.S. On July 27th! (....aaaaat laaaast!)

Bowery. May 22. And, naturally, I'll be out of town. Siiiiiiigh. Well, the rest of you are goddamn going.

posted by Mike B. at 10:29 AM 0 comments

Friday, March 19, 2004

New Magnetic Fields song over at STG. (Can we call it that?) It's very pretty.

Off for the weekend. Bye.

posted by Mike B. at 6:47 PM 0 comments

Speaking of Tori Amos: I Totally Did Tori Amos Last Night.

I'm reading a lot of Haypenny today.

posted by Mike B. at 2:22 PM 0 comments

Incidentally, there's a great little entry on that Klosterman column in this month's Black List.

posted by Mike B. at 12:51 PM 0 comments

Wow! This could be cool. Good for Adam!

And good for the Daily Show guy, too. I'm, um, kind of looking forward to a Broadway musical now.

Of course, Cry-Baby kicks ass. Maybe they can get Iggy Pop to reprise his role. If not, maybe they can get a rotating cast of those crusty old punk guys who still hang around the village working.

posted by Mike B. at 11:14 AM 0 comments

Just got back from seeing Courtney.

Um. Whoa.

First off: if you think Courtney is insane--and she is--her fans are in. fucking. sane. Like, in that bad way. In that really bad way. Seeing a girl who previously told me that she wrote her art history thesis (?!) on Courtney (and asked me if Courtney would think this was "psycho"--I didn't know quite what to say) stroking her hair in a way reminiscent of the scene in Hard Day's Night where they're playing in the train and that blonde mod girl keeps sort of darting her hand out at one Beatle's hair. Real star worship stuff, but from someone who's not playing with it. This is someone who kind of gives back as much as her fans want to give, and while in a way that's pretty cool, in a way it inspires some pretty insane, charismatic devotion. I mean, there were no ethics there, no morals, no sense of decency that you might find at a regular show where we understand that we're sort of all in it together; these people just wanted to get as close as possible to her, to touch her, and didn't even notice if you were in the way. And yes, I know that happens at shows, but it was different here. (And also yes, I myself touched her. It was fine.)

She went on around 12:20, which is 2:20 later than she was supposed to, but to be fair, the first band did go on 45 minutes late themselves. (About whom, more later.) The crowd was a weird mix of old people, subculturey girls, and gay men, which I wasn't expecting, I guess. There was a pretty small hipster quotient, and the two we were standing next to were some of the saner, and nicer, people there. (Although I never did get to read the whole tattoo on the girl's neck. It looked interesting.) The place got fairly packed, and there was a lot of security. (About whom, again, more later.)

Courtney led off with "Mono" and "Hold On To Me," I'm pretty sure, but what happened was that her voice was pretty much shot by the end of "Mono." In "Hold" she was really only able to get out about two lines before deep-breathing through the next two. After "Mono" she told us about the vocal troubles, which despite my doubts seemed genuine, and noted that she'd have to modify the setlist (I'm paraphrasing, of course) and kept conferring with the rest of the band about what to play next. She just couldn't sing "Hold," and the band was kind of powering through the ballad a bit more than they should; I was disappointed, even when she started interacting with the crowd. But at the end of the song, she did one of those things that Courtney does sometimes which totally makes everything else worthwhile: the rest of the band stopped, totally silent, and the crowd was totally silent, too, and she just kept singing, and singing, and singing, croaking it out, rasping it out, crouching on the stage and clutching her microphone in a pose that can seem affected, but with her for some reason just seemed totally, totally natural. She crouched there on the stage, out of sight of most of the band, and blasted her way through her voice, through the lyrics, I don't even remember what she was singing, if it was an ad-lib or the chorus or whatever, but it was perfect, so perfect, and I admit that I shuddered and teared up a little. It was worth waiting for, worth all the rest of it: it was what music can be, and yes, it was that good.

And yeah, that was about the high point, except for maybe when she did a similar thing at the end of Malibu, although her voice was totally fucking shot by that point and the band ended up crashing in after about a 30-second a capella repetition of the chorus. But what made those two moments so memorable wasn't the cheap a capella drama, or Courtney's performance, or anything having to do with what was going on on stage. It was perfect because the crowd was silent, and it's so much harder to get a crowd silent than loud, since we're trained to be loud. Some people (Tori Amos comes to mind, about whom...well, you know) do this by having perfect emotional control over an audience; Courtney did it by being so fucking crazy that all we could do was stand there with our mouths open and listen. And that's cool, too.

She did a lot of crowd-diving, which was nice, and pulled a lot of fans up on stage, but there were about 5 people just there to take care of her, especially these two big beefy bodyguards in suits, real Mafioso-looking types, who would come and fetch her out of the crowd. This was weird. We didn't know quite what to do with her, sometimes; she didn't know what she was doing either, I suspect. But the bodyguards and the freshly-hired Bowery security would come up and kind of shove people around and kind of try and get her back, and like that.

It was particular jarring when it first started happening, because she fell into the crowd and sang the line about getting "our punk rock back" just as this doubtless quite pricy private bodyguard dude was shoving crowd members out of the way and forming a circle of protection around his charge. (By the end of the night, they would just try and stop C-Lo from stagediving altogether.) And I had one of those moments of cynicism we're all prone to as seasoned music fans: that's not very punk rock!

But the thing was, as the night wore on it really was punk rock.[1] It was, hands down, the most unprofessional show I've ever been to, and I'm including shows I've played at here. There was no semblance of a setlist, people were just sort of running around on stage, the singer/guitarist could neither sing nor play guitar, apparently. It was utter chaos, but it had nothing to do with the other band members, consummate professionals all. This was all caused by Courtney herself, fucking everything up partially because she was trying to and partially because she couldn't help it. In many ways, it reminded me of the description of early Ramones shows in Please Kill Me, for better or for worse. There was no barrier between the audience and performer, ultimately, but there was very much a stage and a microphone: we were all focused on Courtney, and we were all supposed to be. It was religious, in a way, or charismatic, as I say: the utter devotion, the encouraging of devotion, the passing of the lifeless body over hands. At the end of the night she crowd-surfed all the way from the front of the room to the back and then back again, and it was funereal, in a way. But she made us promise not to say anything bad about the show, and I'm not: it was amazing. But disturbing. And that's OK.

There should be an axiom in the music business to the effect of "you like Courtney up until the point where you have any personal contact with her whatsoever." I've already detailed some of the reasons for that, and I don't need to get into most of the rest (suffice to say I've known 4 people who have personally worked for Ms. Love, and it's not pretty), but part of it lies in the Tori Amos comparison. As I say, both sets of fans were similar in demographic makeup--subculturey girls and gay men--and both had a similar sense of devotion. Both can put you off, quite a lot, and Tori's fans are one of the big reasons I don't have much interest in Ms. Amos anymore. But Tori doesn't encourage the devotion the way Courtney does. As much as I love her insanely beautiful and smart, smart, smart Internet posts, that kind of direct contact with fans is quite sensibly avoided by most artists, since you don't want people who already have a strong emotional connection with you that's not reciprocated get any further impression that they have a personal relationship with you. This just doesn't seem the case with Courtney. And, again, I like that, but up close and in person it's pretty disturbing. And keep in mind I was there with someone who's been a Courtney fan for almost 10 years, and she felt the same way, if not more so.

As for the opening act, the Sexy Magazines...well, all I can do is repeat the crowd gossip that they got the gig because one of their moms is Courtney's publicist.[2] They were pretty sub-Strokesy. (And I like the Strokes!) I guess my opinion might be colored by the fact that the hipster-fuck lead singer, upon trying to stage-dive, hit me in the head with his head and hit some girl in the face with his boot, making her bleed, but no, I wasn't too fond of them before anyway.

There was little applause at the end. The lights came up, and we left.

Wshew. OK. Did I hit everything? Well, I might add more later. For now, there are cheese sticks to be eaten.

ADDENDUM: VR thread on Courtney's NYC escapades.

[1] It also struck me as pretty metal, although I'd have a hard time pointing to any specific signs aside from the fucking-awesome-but-not-getting-along-with-Court-so-well drummer's DOUBLE KICK DRUM! Which was rad, even if it didn't go out over the audience on a hydrolic platform. Anyway, with the sort of speed-freaky fans, the overenthusiastic bodyguards in a venue that wouldn't seem to require them, and the general air of a fucked-up lead singer in a downward spiral, it sort of reminded me of what I imagine a pop-metal show must've been like in the early 90s.
[2] Which makes me wonder if there's more to that whole annoyingly-sedate-NYC-audience thing than just your basic cynicism. New York, like LA and Nashville, is a biz town, somewhere where acts go to get discovered, and so when someone's playing there, you can't help but think if they're really doing it for you. Are they really trying to give it all to the audience, or are they trying to give the appearence of giving it all to the audience so the three or four important people in the room will do something for them? Sure, people can get opening slots in other towns for opportunistic reasons, but it's nothing as elite as this, and even then, you can still enjoy it, because who's going to get discovered in Raleigh, or Boise, or Houston? Maybe somebody, but they're clearly mostly doing it for the love. In the biz towns, though, everything is inevitably tainted by the constant reminder of the art-as-product thing, although a) I wish it weren't, and b) NYC seems nowhere near as bad in this respect as LA.

posted by Mike B. at 2:29 AM 0 comments

Thursday, March 18, 2004

You could do a lot worse than going over to Bubblegum Machine and downloading the week 67 songs. Especially the Gore Gore Girls track, which is your basic 2:12-of-perfection pop song. Makes me want to dance!

Also, week 69 features both a great J&MC write-up (pop!) and a Giorgio Moroder song which references "Surfin' Bird" via backup singers going "pa-pa oom-maw-maw." Which is awesome.

posted by Mike B. at 11:41 AM 0 comments

This came accross on a mailing list, and it seems cool, so I'm passing it on...

One of my colleagues and I are starting up a DJ 101 for Girls program in Philly. We recently got some coverage in the Philadelphia Daily News and the link is below. If you know of any women on the Philly music scene (DJs, promoters, execs, radio personalities, etc.) and you think they might be interested in coming in and talking to the girls about their experiences, please e-mail me. Also, if you know of any young women, 13-18, who attend junior high /high school in West Philly or who live in West Philly and would *love* the opportunity to learn the basics of DJing, please have them contact me as well. We are already planning our second session. Thanks!

I don't want to post her e-mail here, but drop me a line if you're interested and I'll hook you up.

posted by Mike B. at 10:44 AM 0 comments

"No one says whoooooore like I do."
-Courtney Love

Wow. And the Billboard Awards story? "See, we're Generation X...we're cooooool..." Amazing.

And I'm going to bed.

UPDATE: Whoops. Oh, take it like a man, you pussy!

The nyhappenings reaction:

#1
"I'm bringing my lawyer to every show I go to from here on out. If any of you fucks so much as breathe on me wrong, have fun in jail!"

#2
"and paying your five bucks at the door at any Todd P show henceforth implies informed consent to all flying instrument and / or pyrotechnic related injury. it's all part of the show, folks.

"next step- everybody's signing waivers and / or mandatory body armor."

#3
"SPEAK TO MY LAWYER, TODD."

UPDATE 2: The latest linkage.

Blogger recap.
Newsgroup recap.
Recap w/pictures.

UPDATE 3: More nyhappenings reaction:

"Courtney Love is a complete ass!

The cops always charge folks for heavier crimes than the ones they believe will stick. It gives them room to maneuver a plea bargain. I'm certain that, if Love was charged with assault, she will face other charges, such as negligence or reckless endangerment. Of course, in the minute she called her attorney, she did all the maneuvering she will need to get off. At the end of the day, she will probably win the criminal case and loose the civil case. Since her career is (thankfully!) waning (despite her pathetic fake boobs), she'll probably be all-too happy to have this stupid affair in the press. As for the bloke who got hit, I'm sure that he was pissed (and rightfully so) and wanted her to get her come-uppance (long time coming!)."

Fake boobs = better career? Why didn't anyone tell me!

posted by Mike B. at 12:38 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

This morning I was listening to the first Space Ghost album (this is the point where you go, "Oh, it's going to be one of those overly enthusiastic things again, huh?"), and here's the thing: Brak is exactly what I always wished punk rock was but which it never managed to be--mainly, unselfconscious. Brak is unashamedly untrained but he's not trying to use that as a selling point, to throw it in your face or something, he's just going at it with every ounce of enthusiasm he has.[1] He's enthusiastic, which punk so rarely seems to be, ultimately.[2] And he's more than willing to be silly.[3] When I think about removing professionalism, that particular decorum is what I'm thinking about, not the prohibition on being good or chipper. When I want untrained music, I want music by musicians that are untrained but are so happy to be making music that they just had to anyway, not by gruff teenage boys trying to express their anger and frustration, etc. That just seems uninteresting. Punk always seemed to me to have such promise of glorious silliness, of a tearing away of seriousness and a liberation of music's true ecstatic, teenage possibilities. But of course, it rarely acheives that, which is why I never ended up actually listening to much punk.

This is why it saddens me to see pop-punk bands running away from the pop-punk label, you see--it's even more tragic than the already partially-lost indie rockers running away from pop. Sigh. Ah well.

[1] Think the absolutely mind-bending "hey-whoa-I'm-pretty-much-just-screamin'-here" "scat solo" Brak turns in for "Down to the River," for instance.
[2] Sometimes, honestly, I get kind of sad about punk's descent into needlessly moribund post-punk of the PiL variety, although of course it's all redeemed by the dance-punk aspects thereof.
[3] One of the great acheivements on that album, for my money, is that some of the comedy is so pure that it's funny to almost anyone. "Don't Touch Me" is 50% silly voices, 25% silly noises and 25% pure genius, and I think most people would find it funny. There's no references to miss, nothing to "get," it's just silly. I always kind of wanted punk to do the musical equivalent of that.

posted by Mike B. at 6:56 PM 0 comments

A sentence I didn't know I've been waiting a long to use until just now: Esselle posts a great Biz Markie song. Go listen.

posted by Mike B. at 6:01 PM 0 comments

Thinking of picking up the new Destroyer album today, so I did some searching around, and...well, it was weird.

Doing a google search for Destroyer is pretty fun: you get, among other things, the homepage of The Destroyer!!!! Which is awesome.

But then there's the actual Destroyer bio. Check it out. Someone's humorously bitter:

Your Blues is Destroyer?s vainglorious retreat from the American rock? n roll tradition, in the wake of their bloated and oft-maligned (and oft-praised) magnum opus, This Night, which quietly assaulted the bankrupt college rock arena of 2002.

Bound to be misread as a return to the precision and economy of hooks found and praised on Destroyer?s breakthrough album, 2001?s Streethawk: A Seduction, Your Blues is more an exercise in old-world excess, exploring what Destroyer mastermind Daniel Bejar dubs ?European Blues?. This High Modernist aesthetic feasts off a "between the wars" melancholia, brushed on in the past by avant-gardist crooners (Scott Walker), scholastic-rockers (John Cale) and insane drunk actors (Richard Harris) alike. Destroyer?s take on this fucked tradition finds them conjuring up a version of revisionist nostalgia, unapologetically jumping the gun on a 20th Century Revival movement... Other things brought to mind: the evacuation of a mid-sized European capital; out of work Shakespearean extras (hanging out at the bar); lawyers screwed because they backed the wrong revolution; odes to bad statues; and a couple other themes that completely sidestep the dead-in-the-water rock ?n roll underground pulsing through the AmerIndie salons of today...

It is doubtful that Your Blues is a 'pop' record, though at times it might appear to cash in on what the 80?s revival should?ve been all about: the perverse compositional traits found in The Blue Nile, David Sylvian stripped of his Zen jazz, some of Thomas Dolby?s more hilarious production work with Prefab Sprout, the aforementioned Scott Walker?s Climate of Hunter, and other ill-formed children of the MIDI world. Disregarding ?post-punk,? cause that would entail acknowledging ?punk? in the first place. Instead, Your Blues is a balancing act between the Adult, the Contemporary, and the Disastrous.

I particularly like this last point. The MIDI stuff I've heard on the new tracks (I've heard 2, I guess) didn't jar me, but maybe this is because I went through a surprisingly lengthy "general MIDI" phase. Boy, I did a lot with that shit. Well, anyway, the point being that Bejar is right: MIDI was just as much a part of the 80s, if not more, as analogue synths, to say nothing of DX7s. I kind of like the sudden swing from cabaret-pop to electro. Boom! Plus, those are two of my favorite genres.

If anyone's going to see Destroyer and Frog Eyes in NYC on May 10, lemme know. I'll probably be there too.

When the hell are the Danielsen Famile touring again?

posted by Mike B. at 5:52 PM 0 comments

Cocorosie have now been mentioned positively in three of my favorite blogs, and while I did post a brief response over on Fluxblog, here's a maybe fuller and fairer explanation of why I just don't want to listen to them anymore.

Partially I just don't like the style enough to see it sustained over an entire album. What it basically consists of is sort of modern home-four-tracker musical backing--cheap synth sounds, keyboard melodies, thin and oft-beatless esoteric percussion, guitar--with two sisters singing over it in Josephine Baker kind of 20's jazz-singer voices, like they're being recorded on gramophone. The "kind of" is important, after all: they have good voices, but there's not much justification for the very specific affectation; it's not like their normal voices become these wonderful tonal boxes when used in that way, and so it mainly seems to serve as a kind of distancing device, whether sincere or not: we're not two normal girls doing this, we're two weirdoes! In France! Singing weirdly! With weird percussion! The whole thing seems very self-conscious, and while that's fine sometimes, here it doesn't really work. (I hear Feist doing this vocal style in a much more restrained, melody-serving way, FWIW.)[1]

But what sends the album from neutral to horrible in my book are the lyrics. Maybe this is simply a matter of digital-age context: I assume the MP3 bloggers downloaded their albums, but I bought mine, and in the actual packaging they've made the extremely unfortunate decision to include the lyrics. It's unfortunate because they sort of work when they're being sung, but when you read what they're actually saying and then go back and listen, it's not good.

So the album starts out with "Terrible Angels," which really is a good song: the lyrics are slightly obscurist, but also specific, throwing out references to Freud, Rilke, Jim Morrison, etc. No complaints there. Indeed, I kind of like it, even if it goes on for too long.

Track 2 is "By Your Side," which is, um, a wee bit obvious in its message. To quote: "All I wanted was to be your housewife...and for a diamond ring I'll do these kinds of things / I'll scrub your floor, never be a bore / I'll tuck you in, I do not snore / I'd wear your black eyes, bake you apple pies." Now, this ain't no PJ Harvey conflicted torch song kinda "I know it's wrong but I'll give up some of my independence for you because I love you so much but that love is kind of destructive but I don't care because I'm in love" thing. Nope, there's really no ambiguity here. It's the dreaded CRUSHINGLY OBVIOUS FEMINIST IRONY. And then, later in the album, it gets even worse. The whole set of lyrics for "Not For Sale" (argh!) are: "You can leave me / where you found me / on the corner / I'm not for sale anymore."[2] Maybe this is just due to, um, personal circumstances regarding a lyricist with similar tendencies, but I'm seriously cringing here.

But then there's "Jesus Loves Me," which, again quite unfortunately, comes at track 3.[3] Here's the chorus:

Jesus loves me
But not my wife
Not my nigger friends
Or their nigger lives
But Jesus loves me
That's for sure
'Cause the Bible
Tells me so

Now look: we all know I have no problem with people using offensive language in service of some purpose or point. But gack, it's just so clumsy here, and so very, very self-conscious. It's not like "Oh my, they're really throwing that language in my face and challenging me with it!" it's more like "Oh, you're saying the n-word, sweetie, good for you." And, even worse, the point just seems to be "Christianity is stupid!" which has been done better before. It's the lyrical equivalent of a laugh track: there not to say something, but to tell us something is being said. (I.e. "this is risque!" or "this is funny!")

Maybe the PJ Harvey comparison is the most useful thing here. Half of the songs on La Maison de Mon Reve really are great. I'm totally with Matthew on "Butterscotch," and "Good Friday" and "West Side" are both very nice. I think, ultimately, this is a demo more than a proper album, and it just contains things they need to get out of their system before making a more emotionally mature work. But they're just so very grating, and the musical backing is so spotty and unrewarding in points, that it's hard to embrace. Polly Jean addresses pretty much all the same things these women do, but she was nailing 'em with a lot of complexity right out of the gate. So maybe it's just that my expectations are so high. I'm certainly engaged with them enough to be eager to check out their next album. But I think this one's going to be mix-tape fodder and not much more.

[1] And, of course, Portishead.
[2] Also, weirdly, the riff it's based around sounds a hell of a lot like the main riff for U2's "Perfect Day," but maybe that's the...point?
[3] Unfortunate because it's so damn hard to get into the rest of the album after that one; if it were buried on Side B, I'll happily admit I wouldn't have such a problem with it.

posted by Mike B. at 11:28 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 16, 2004

I swear I hadn't read K-Punk's great MBV post when I wrote that kind of embarrassing Nirvana thing, but they both managed to mention Loveless and the relation between music and the working world. So I'll use the weird coincidence to go off on the former post and maybe expand a bit on the latter...

First off, I want to say "yar" to Luke's comment about how "if yu let yourself sink into lethargy and depression then thats like defeat and you might as well just sign up for real life." I always want to ask people making the sort of argument that Mark k-punk's making about Shields whether they've had any personal experience with mental illness, or rather with the particular form of mental illness under discussion; it just seems like such a weird thing to romanticize, like seeing the nobility in the flu or something. But it's not strictly germane, and since I imagine the answer is often "well yes I have you pompous ass" I'll just leave it there as a simple observation of the differing perspectives on mental illness, i.e. "organic" v. "biological."

What is germane is the argument being made about the difference between pop and, um, not-pop. (Ah, we're back to that problem again. Anyway.) He writes:

Now Pop is, above all, well-adjusted; it doesn't seek to transfigure the world, offers us no transports of ecstasy or escape. It's not for nothing that hip hop, with its banal ambitions and dreary aspirations, its ostensible ultrarealism, is king in Now Pop. Shields' version of Pop - aptly termed Dreampop, once, of course - dissents from this reality, not in the name of unreality or fantasy, but in the name of libido. Desire can never be persuaded to take the drab world of Work and Wealth at face value. For libido, that world is an unconvincing theatre populated by poorly animated puppets and grim effigies: an existential charade that everyone necessarily occupies only - as Jamelia's comments make clear - as impostors, as play actors. Dreampop has always robbed the World of Necessity of its claim to ontological precedence over the realm of Desire. Jamelia's observations show that Now Pop has reversed this prioritization; Pop is now a colony of the world of Work.

First off, I'm unclear how you can say necessity and desire are different; necessity is driven wholly by desire, ultimately, since you go to work not because something's forcing you but because you need the money to fulfill your desires. Shields is just lucky to have the talent and timing to be able to get most of what he wants without going to work. But maybe I'm just missing the point.

At any rate, I think the entry is clearly privileging Shield's perspective over Now Pop's, and that's what I'd like to discuss. Just as a threshold matter, it seems slightly kooky to say that Shields' work was somehow divorced from commerce--talk of money is all over that interview, and it seems like all he did for about five years was fight with record labels about money. Shields is more aware than anyone that it takes money to make music, usually other people's money, and before he got to the recluse stage I'm sure he had to deal with all the stuff starting bands deal with about finding money to tour, getting your cut from promoters, selling merch, finding money for food and gas, etc., etc. A lot of what being in a band is about before you attain self-sufficiency is money, and so if a musician has managed to convey that he is somehow divorced from that base world, it is simply an illusion. We want to privilege illusion here, but the fact is that pop's about money no more than dream-pop's about money, because even when it is about cash, cash itself is always about something else--desire, love, respect. Is hip-hop accountancy or braggadocio?

I just don't see there being much of a difference between Shield's attitude and Jamelia's. Jamelia is, like it or not, a musician; sure, for her backers and investors (second-hand or otherwise) selling more records is just about pure hard cash[1], but for musicians, the reason money matters, and the reason sales matter and tour attendance matters, is that this will allow you to continue making music. Jamelia wants to be a marketable product because then people will buy her albums and tickets, and by the rules of pop, that will then allow her to make another album. Shields is just lucky enough to be an almost universally-beloved figure in the indie world who people will invest in even without any reasonable hope of return, and arguably this is the result of the way he himself has presented his image.

Anyway, logic aside, let's talk aesthetics, bitches. I have to admit I'm sympathetic to how Mark's describing Jamelia's position and kind of annoyed by the stance being attributed to Shields, which is weird since, you know, I really like Loveless. Maybe in a way it's kind of like the debate between prose and poetry (although maybe this is just because I recently read the "Arcadia" story-arc in The Invisibles)--poets are dreamers, there to see the world as it could be, whereas other people simply see it as it is and report back. But I just don't think that's true--I think, rather, that it's a matter of specificity. Poets, like dream-pop with its intentionally indecipherable lyrics and muddled melodies, present not so much a plan of action as a general palette of emotions, a sort of set of feelings that can motivate you or, alternately, not.[2] It is intentionally unspecific, or deliberately contradictory, to allow the individual to craft their own images. But when faced with something more specific, it's presumed to be based in realism. Not so. Often (as I've said) the surest way to change something is to pretend like it's already changed. If the visions of poets and indie rockers represent a valid reality, then surely our perceptions of reality are just as valid an alternative.

And it's for this reason that the seemingly coldly specific Now Pop can be even more rapturous and ecstatic as something that seems beamed to us from some distant perspective. Sure, those vague emotions can work real well, because there's nothing to contest (really, what is there in MBV to get mad at? It's highly innocuous in its own way), but don't discount the force of familiarity and connection. Fountains of Wayne works for me, for instance, not just because of the melodies and rhythms, but in the way it very specifically evokes the NYC metro area in the summer. Why? Because I've spent a lot of time in Long Island. This is a riskier artistic strategy in a way, since you might not connect with the wide audience you'd want, but I think one of the amazing things about pop-I is in the way it manages to do this despite itself. I know banality is supposed to be bad, but I spend most of my time doing banal things, and a lot of them excite the hell out of me. (Come on, like you haven't really enjoyed using office supplies in the past?) This is rapture that is accessible, that is not a elite spiritual experience, but just something that happens to me all the time. And that's great--my life gets better and better the more of those I have. I don't want that to happen at a remove, I want that to happen right now, while I'm sitting in the office under the fluorescent lights and smelling the pickle in the trash can and feeling the out-of-position insert in my shoe. And that's one of the things that pop-I does for me.

But what does it do? That was one of the things I was trying to get at in my earlier post. Does music function like meth, as a sort of apologist/enabler/defense mechanism with the world of work? The problem with demonizing "work" is that it's not just the bad stuff--it's the good stuff, too. It's the banal stuff we have to do to get the big, transformative things done. The legwork, the phone calls, the slow transcriptions, the careful recordings. Meth, after all, has produced some pretty good music. This is what people want to ignore about creative geniuses, it seems: there's a lot of little boring things they have to do to get their vision or whaddayacallit out there. Loveless makes me not want to do office work, and maybe that's good, but it doesn't particularly make me want to work out drum parts, either. I enjoy listening to it, but it's just brain relaxation, a cleansing blast, not something that's really transformative. (Or, at any rate, no more transformative than Law and Order.) But this is different for everyone: I'm willing to accept that for some people, MBV makes them want to go out and change the world. But then, I think, that would also make them able to do mass mailings and flowcharts. Maybe I'm wrong.

But there is that bad side: it makes you accept work. Isn't that bad? Eh, I dunno. I know, I know, we're all supposed to imagine a world without work, and sure, I'd like to work less and get paid the big buxx like everyone else, but I also see a certain value in work.[3] It sort of forces you to deal with your shit, and I know a lot of people who could stand having their shit dealt with. Any setup I can envision that has eliminated work sounds either really boring or in immanent danger of robot rebellion. Again, I think a certain amount of work is good for you: it gives you the discipline to do all that busywork that being creative involves. Quite frankly, I don't quite trust musicians without day jobs (which day job can include "professional musician," i.e. songwriter-for-hire, engineer, studio musician), but that's just between you and me.

See, I like songs about work. I like them a lot. I especially like ones that try and take a more nuanced view of work, to not just use it to rail against something that they understandably dislike (but then, we used to feel the same way about homework) and against the perceived masses of people who "just accept it." Well, they don't; it's a bargain, like any other, and there are pressures and desires that make that bargain attractive. It's not a failure--just a choice. It's not pure, but pure things are boring anyway. Work limits you, but limits are good. Are we tired of this sentence construction yet?

So I dunno. I'm trying to make this argument in good faith and be honestly worried about Nirvana furthering my office work, but truth be told, I'm just not one of those people who gets concerned about art because it "placates the masses" or "fuels capitalism." If the masses are anything like me, the point where they need placating isn't a point that's going to produce any revolutionizin', and capitalism's sorta kinda OK. *duck* When managed correctly and in the context of a democracy and yes and so forth. So but OK of course this guy likes Now Pop, right? Well, I guess so. Aesthetics, bitches.

The contestation Dreampop effects has its costs, naturally. To refuse to take the world of Health and Efficiency seriously is to flirt with illness, anhedonia, agoraphobia, (living) death. The symptoms of Shields' 'condition' - getting up in the afternoon, if at all, vegetating in front of the box, doing as little as possible - are all too familiar. "I just didn't do what I didn't want to do. And I got away with it. When you keep on getting away with it year after year, you think you can just live like that. And you can. I wouldn't work. I wouldn't get up till late afternoon. I watched a lot of shit films."

I've always been mystified by the high critical valuation of mysteriousness, and I've been extremely mystified by the continued deification of people with talent and mental illness in this age of pretty down-to-earth explanations of why that shit happens. (And in most cases, you don't even need to crack the DSM-IV; a simple "they did too many goddamn drugs" will suffice.) They've got a chemical imbalance. They didn't get it because they refused to study accounting; they got it through bad wiring. Maybe they don't even want to have a chemical imbalance. Why does that make them special?

But maybe I'm being ungenerous. In thinking about this, I tried to consider it from the fan's perspective: here's this artist you feel like you have a personal relationship with who's gone off the deep end. The only problem is, you don't have a personal relationship with them, and so unlike their actual loved ones, you can't help them. You see what's going on but you can't do anything about it. And so maybe turning the negative into a positive is the best thing you can do about it.[4] You turn it into a negative attribute to deal with your own feelings of impotence about actually helping this person that you really, honestly (and not unjustly, I'm not criticizing this behavior) love.

Still, statements like Mark's kind of irk me, because as I say above, I don't think it's some mysterious connection between refusing to conform to reality and going mad; rather, it's the other way around, as Luka makes clear in the comments. You're crazy and so you're unable to do the basic, banal things that ordinary humans need to do to get through life, and would have to do no matter the setup.[5] It's absolutely tragic; my friends with mental illnesses that prevent them from holding down jobs are almost always the worst off. I honestly think it's kind of horrible to pretend like mental illness is evidence of a heroic choice; for one thing, I think that pervasive attitude is what prevents artists whose mental illness is seen as an asset, and consequently by aspiring artists who just assume their mental illness is an asset, from seeking treatment. This isn't even addressing the issue that mental illness doesn't just affect the person suffering from it, but those around them, and so in many ways a refusal to conform to reality is an extremely selfish act. And I guess artists have to be selfish, but I'm still not sure it's something we want to glorify.

At any rate, I'm almost certainly reading too much into Mark's post, so consider most of this an extension of mine, if you would be so kind.

[1] And even then not so much: like owning a sports team, investing in the music industry is usually more an act of ego than of sound financial instincts, about being "in the music industry" rather than actually making money, since you usually don't.
[2] Neither pop-I nor dream-pop is inherently transformative; that depends on the context. Certainly Shields' current condition doesn't speak well to the transformative, escapist functions of the genre he created.
[3] Which is not to say that people who don't work have no value, etc., etc., standard don't-want-to-sound-like-a-paleoconservative-here disclaimer.
[4] If I was being ungenerous I would posit that most mental illnesses look a lot more fun from a distance than they do up close, but I think in a way that's partially willed and understandable--again, a reaction to impotence.
[5] And, again, there's the defense mechanism argument--glorifying your own condition is a good way to feel OK about it.

posted by Mike B. at 6:25 PM 0 comments