Speaking of which...

This isn't a view I've really seen expressed much in the blogosphere, so I'm just going to spit it out: I really like Evanescence.

Of course, by "I like Evanescence," I mean what 99% of people mean when they say this phrase: I like their two big singles, "Bring Me to Life" and "Going Under." I've tried to listen to the rest of the album, and it's OK, but I haven't really had time to really get into it yet.

But those two songs: holy crap! It's like a depressed Andrew WK! OK, that sounds weird, so let's go with AWK meets the Cure. But anyway: rargh! Those two songs are just these wonderful little overproduced nuggets, hyperpop in a slightly different form than we're used to, but far closer in kin to Basement Jaxx than Limp Bizkit, albeit not quite as good as the best stuff from the Jaxx. But this is an unfair comparison. Let's try this: those two songs are far better pop than almost any other rock record this year. Yeah, it's easy to be put off by the sound; they're not doing the shambling indie thing nor the recognizably retro thing, and they sound wholly like they come from the '00s, albeit with a good bit of 80's and 90's influences (the aforementioned Cure, Nine Inch Nails, maybe some Cult, maybe some Corrosion of Conformity), and I certainly understand how similarity to the really quite putrid and boring rap-metal dynasty can be off-putting. But if anyone's done that sound well, it's Evanescence. For one thing, those two singles contain a mind-boggling number of Matrixy ProTools tricks that serves as hooks (like the stuttering guitars after the first chorus and the stuttering synths before the second chorus in "Bring Me," for instance, or the great mishmash of vocal processings that happens around 2:55 in the bridge), in addition to all the lines that are, you know, actual hooks. It sounds like what would happen if a pop diva went all-out and made an actual hard-rock record: all the signs and sections and structures for a Now-pop song are there, but the drums are real, mostly, and the synths are bass-heavy guitars. And then there are more synths! Yeah!

I guess the other ideological problem is that, well, it's not even remotely happy music. No two ways about it: this is music to make your bad mood feel awesome and smooth, to make you scowl as you walk down the street. But here it's OK. Their AMG bio contains two great explanations for why that is.

First: a whole bunch of Tori Amos comparisons. Now, Tori and Amy Lee seem to my ears to have quite different vocal styles; Amy's got none of the breathiness or melisma-madness that Tori goes for. She's got a hell of a lot of power, but she pretty much goes directly at the notes and words, which is not something we'd really accuse our dear Ms. Amos of doing. Now, I like Tori, a lot; she somehow makes the drama OK in a way a whole lot of other singers and composers don't. She makes it warm, and that's what Amy does on those two tracks. It's downbeat, but it's not really hopeless or angry. You want to save her, and then kiss her, or at least I do. It's like how you walk out of a Tori concert and just want to go run around a field or something. (Not in a hippie way, just, you know, I seem to have a lot of energy.)

The other clue, of course, is in how the male half, Ben Moody, hooked up with Amy. "I heard Amy playing Meat Loaf's 'I'd Do Anything for Love' at the piano. So I went over to meet her, and she started singing for me." OK, first off, why the hell hasn't Tori covered Meat Loaf yet? And secondly: yeah, there it is. Again, Meat Loaf is someone who, at his best, can take the overblown and make it personal and concise enough to be effecting. Evanescence are, after all, sort of a Christian-rock band, although they were musically excommunicated for swearing in interviews. And there's definitely something Biblical about them, something old-school Christian. Besides of course the general ideological differences, the problem a lot of music fans (i.e. young people, i.e. liberals--let's be honest) seem to have with contemporary American Evangelical Christianity, manifested most directly in Christian Rock, is that it's so commercialized, so banal, so boring and normal. I think there's the assumption at the back of music fans' heads that Christianity at its best is beautiful cathedrals or gritty Baptist churches, full of passion and truth--you know, Al Green, Johnny Cash, etc. But there's no magic in modern-day evangelical Christianity, and the sacred seems to be used mainly to influence buying decisions. That's reflected in the music, which seems just creepily lacking in any kind of passion and commitment, certainly much different from the fiery faith that seemed to inform Christian musicians like Bach. But Evanescence--certainly more Bachian than Stoogian in their song construction, meticulous and perfectionist--seem to have that sort of irrational fire in those two songs, which express not really earthly problems but something grand and inflated to the degree that it's clearly not asking you to take it seriously. But it's not particularly funny, either--though it is comic--and that somehow lets you settle back and enjoy the song. I'm no great fan of unspecificity, but here it really does speak in a vocal piece to the kind of nameless torment, great or small, that Bach's instrumentals did. I guess the best way to describe it would be operatic: big, grand, theatrical, and totally unselfconscious. It's not little or personal, but sometimes music doesn't need to be little and personal. Sometimes it's at its best when it's the hugest thing ever.

So what exactly do I like about these songs? Well, I like the melody. The lines Lee plucks out of the one-note chug of the verse of "Going Under" are just mind-boggling. They sound like something I've wanted to hear for a long time, something I've been listening for ever since I heard a hardcore or death metal song and thought, "Those guitars sound fantastic, but could that asshole stop screaming and fucking sing something?" (A perfect, soaring vocal line always seemed far more powerful than even the loudest scream to me.) I love the way Amy seems to be fighting back that fucking dumb-ass rap-rocker and winning, the way putting those vocals next to his make his sound just childish; the fact that she dominates the song, not him, seems like a kind of fuck-you on behalf of every great female singer who's been relegated to the hook of a hip-hop single. And I really do love that mess of processing at the end of the bridge: in headphones, it's like there's already a great conversation going on and then suddenly people are whispering in your ears and you don't quite know what they're saying but you do anyway.

I love the piano intro to "Bring Me" and the way the strings come in for two bars and then the guitars and drums crash in. I love the way the chorus in "Going Under" gets foreshadowed at the midpoint of the first verse processed all Swedish-style. I love the chorus of "Going Under." I love the fact that you can dance to it, and that I can actually visualize the kind of people I see at goth nights dancing to it in the same way that they dance to Sisters of Mercy. I love the way the one-note vocal line leads out of the bridge of "Bring Me" into the chord change of the final chorus. I love the IDM-y snare rolls that come in under the quiet bits of "Going Under."

Yeah, I just like the songs. I like 'em like I like Christiana or Britney or Justin, and that's cool too.

ADDENDUM: Maybe "My Bloody Valentine with the reverb and delay turned off and the vocals mixed higher" is the comparison I was searching for. Writing this entry made me want to listen to Loveless.
posted by Mike B. at 2:17 PM 0 comments

"But this is really Brodie Dalle's show; her razor-cut cords are the bastard product of Mike Ness and Exene Cervenka, and from the sound of things, they could possibly go on to rule the world if sufficiently provoked. Anyone who lifted a hand to champion Karen O as some symbol of modern empowerment in rock music, take note, because Dalle is everything Karen isn't: an impassioned, powerful frontwoman, the legitimate heart of her band, and probably the most dominating female presence-at-large (read: receiving M2 rotation) in rock right now."

Uh...how about Amy Lee? She seems a wee bit more ubiquitous than Ms. Dalle. (This is ignoring the random Karen O potshots.)

posted by Mike B. at 12:08 PM 0 comments

I'm not going to post my year-end list of anything because it's not very interesting, as Sasha intimates in his Menand response. (About which I would have the brief comment that having more artifacts of culture to examine makes for cultural producers with many more influences, and I certainly like that.) I always enjoy reading Simon's year-end lists because there's so much stuff I haven't heard about; needless to say, this is not the case with mine, so it will remain in the metaphorical lockbox. Maybe I'll link to the ballot when it's up and post the comments I made, but eh, maybe not. Hopefully they'll print the one where I express a desire to knee Ryan Schrieber in the gonads. Nothing like a feud to increase sales.

Incidentally, I was listening to the dance station here in NYC (103.5) yesterday when I heard a remix of "Cry Me a River" that sounded like it would be comfortable on an R&B-heavy oldies station, like it's from the late 70's or early 80's. Some funk guitar, a pretty constant organic beat. Ring any bells? I kind of liked it--it made the structure of the song much more transparent.

I also heard "Yeah" on 91.1, which was weird but nice. Much nicer than driving a moving van from 181st street to 35th street on Broadway, let me tell you.

posted by Mike B. at 11:48 AM 0 comments

Ryan Adams leaves a message on Jim DeRogatis' answering machine in response to DeRo's review of Adams' recent Chicago show. An ILM thread discussing the message includes a response from Adams to the message's public posting (about 2/3 down the page currently).

I'm no particular Adams fan, but I sort of respect the crowd-baiting he displays in DeRogatis' review (to say nothing of the gleeful Replacements-bashing at the Minneapolis show), and I very much like "Buy me a video camera so I can make a movie called 'I Am Trying to Bore You to Death.'" Matter of fact, and maybe it's the late hour, but it sort of makes me think back to that "Summer of '69" thing and kind of respect it. Yeah, when some unoriginal dumbass heckler is annoying everyone, call him on his shit. Maybe it'll make other people think twice about doing it next time.

Or even better--and are you listening here, people?--maybe it'll encourage people to show up to Ryan Adams shows and interact with him as equals, as co-participants in this weird living theater psychodrama he's going for, and really talk back, really grab the mic and destroy that artist shit. It's theater, and that's kind of cool.

Plus, it's hard for me to argue with some of the points raised in that answering machine message. I mean, yeah, someone who's riding Jeff Tweedy's jock probably has basic critical problems beyond "contrived" stage antics. Adams is right--if DeRogatis is admitting in his own review that the fans really liked what Adams is doing, and the only real objection you can have to Adams' onstage antics is that they're disrespectful to fans, where exactly is the problem?

Pity I can't stand his music.

Oh yes, and I'm still oddly allergic to ILM, but "If Ryan Adams ever got mad about anything I'd written about him I'd just ask if he wanted to start a band with me." is pretty funny.

UPDATE: Fluxblog today has an MP3 version of the phonecall for those of you that aren't RealPlayer fans. Matthew titles said file "Ryan Adams Whining Into Jim DeRogatis' Answering Machine," which is a fair cop. I still think that both Jim and Ryan are getting fucked with / are fucking with here, though. Nothing like a feud to increase sales.

posted by Mike B. at 1:18 AM 0 comments

Monday, January 05, 2004

Addendum to the below.

The shorter version: music criticism that ignores the music is just literary criticism, and literary criticism of pop lyrics is just no good. Trust me on this one, kids. Sure, some pull it off well (I'm a big fan of Meltzer's stuff, which is basically really good literary criticism) but you can't have a whole profession-slash-genre based on that. Rock crit as we know it wouldn't even be possible without the development of semiotics and cultural criticism, which has allowed us to talk about the context and "message" of a song instead of its actual content. And this is OK--it's produced some awesome stuff--but people have been analyzing music for thousands of years without the benefit of cultural analysis, and so it's weird now that people are analyzing music without the benefit of musical analysis, you know? There seemed to be some effort at doing so when people first started taking pop seriously, like with that famous Beatles review talking about the modalities of their vocal harmonies, but that was quickly subsumed to the more vital, and more rockin', criticism of Bangs-Christgau-Marcus.

The main reason for this, aside from most critics not being musicians (if you're a musician you sort of learn it by feel and can at least describe it from that perspective), is that we lack the terms. It's perfectly acceptable for a rock critic to throw in a term like "funky keyboard riff" but no student of classical music would think of saying "that Bachy ending," since there's a term for that. ("Cadence," I think.) And it really is perfectly acceptable to say "funky keyboard riff" since I mostly know what that means. But it could be far more specific. We could, for instance, get inside said riff, look at the structure of it, and compare it to other funky keyboard riffs--or non-funky keyboard riffs, or funky bass riffs, or whatever. I understand the difficulty of that, since so much of classical musical analysis relies on notation and there's almost no notation for pop. Plus, there's not only the notes and the rhythms, but the swing of the rhythms, the performance of it. And, of course, the prevalence of the beat. Instead of the tempo changes you see in classical, directed by a conductor or ensemble, we have a constant tempo with lots of little variations inside that, and, again, current terms of musical analysis are unequipped to deal with that. But that doesn't change the fact that there's a lot more we can do with the framework we're given, and without asking the music to change into something else.

On the other hand, you look at something like wine criticism (which, yes, has a name, but which, no, I can't remember--some variant on "sommelier," yes?) which is routinely mocked for having a jargon specific to that discipline with things like "nose" and "body" being thrown around willy-nilly. But at the same time it makes a lot of sense. We do have very few descriptive terms for smell in our language, and only a very few more for sound. That's why we need to invent them. That's why professions develop a jargon: so members of that profession can make themselves very specifically understood.

Still, I recognize that it's precisely this lack of a jargon, and this focus on cultural rather than musical analysis, that makes music criticism, along with movie crit, somewhat widely read. People seem to be able to grasp most things rock critics throw at them just with the information they have available to them as cultural consumers. Of course, this is precisely because they use terms like "funky keyboard riff," since we've all heard a funky keyboard riff before, or "Beatlesesque songwriting," because, well, you know. In other words, the musical analysis in pop criticism currently is at the level of a game of soundslike, but this does allow people to grasp what's being said a lot easier. And it would certainly be a shame to lose that.

That said, I do think developing a true pop music vocabulary is both possible and desirable. Because--and this is important--we can do it without losing that other strain of criticism. Ideally, the analysis would exist only to feed that criticism, to make it stronger and more interesting and productive. I'd be bored to tears by criticism that simply examined the subtle modal shifts in Carlos Santana's solos. But I would be interested in criticism that could point out just how a song was similar to its predecessors, how it chose to be different, and what that difference means.

Anyway, that's a project that won't be possible for a while, but it's certainly something I've been thinking about.

posted by Mike B. at 8:00 PM 0 comments

Man, there's nothing better than a music critic missing the actual music criticism in an actual piece of music:

Is James Murphy the best music critic working these days? Via his LCD Soundsystem project, he hit the target square on with the 2002 single "Losing My Edge"/"Beat Connection", the A-side sending up the name-droppers and file-compilers while the B-side righteously lambasted the indie scene as "the saddest night out in the USA." But these tough-love tracks didn't declare a dead end for indie, instead offering a way out, infusing the snark with electro beats and announcing the arrival of (no, we don't have a better name yet) discopunk.

So, a year and a half on from that manifesto, here comes "Yeah", a sort of "Where are they now?" revisitation of the mission statement LCD Soundsystem laid out in '02. The results, according to Prof. Murphy: "Everybody keeps on talking about it/ Nobody's getting it done." Perfect, as in the interim the discopunk explosion has packed all the wallop of a snap pop, The Rapture letting their momentum erode in pursuit of the fattest contract possible, !!! taking so long to record their second LP you'd think Axl Rose was producing, and Liars letting their groove leave the band with their bassist. "Everybody keeps on listening in, nobody's listening up." Damn straight; the scene's built up around a hollow core, packs of kids ready to dance because that's what they've been told, reciting "yeah, yeah, yeah" in a zombie chorus to an empty stage.

[snip]

The track manages to shoot its warning message across indie's bow without any lyrics: We're laying down the foundation, will somebody please come and give us some competition? Murphy and Goldsworthy can't do it all alone, people. If writing about music is like dancing to architecture, what does that make dancing to writing about music?

It makes it dancing, you jackass.

Look, you can't come in at the end of an essay about a song and say that the song makes a particular point without using lyrics when the only evidence you've used to elucidate said point is quotes from the song's lyrics. The lyrics themselves are easily inconsequential--someone in the blogosphere said that it's the first LCD Soundsystem track they could love without understanding a word of the lyrics, and while I'd disagree with that ("Tribulations"[1] is much better without the lyrics to my ears), it's safe to say that the words themselves are far less vital to the song, both in terms of meaning and enjoyment. You can interpret them as a criticism of the scene Murphy's work has spawned, and while, yes, that's clearly one meaning he intends to suggest, it's hardly the narrative being told (the "master narrative" if we're gonna get nerdalicious), because it's far too specific a tale for what the song is doing. The main narrative is specifically pop (the one Rob's suggesting is more, I dunno, hip-hop) because the words and feelings are universal enough, or vague enough, to appeal to almost any consumer of pop music, the trick that I'm told is the key to any successful pop song.[2] The lyrics could be just as easily interpreted as a complaint by a corporate middle manager about his slacking underlings, or a complaint by a bandleader about his own band members, or a depressive monologue about the hopelessness of trying to achieve anything of consequence in an essentially meaningless world. It's all of these things and none of these things because it lacks a framing device or overriding narrative thread (or even a common theme aside from "things aren't as good as they could be") and lacks a character aside from what you can gleam from the speaker's vocabulary. I hear a stray "I" here and there, but it's certainly lacking the strong first-person perspective of "Losing My Edge," and there's no reason to assume that Murphy is the speaker, an assumption that would certainly eliminate some of the possible plots but an assumption we really can't make based on the available evidence. Nor is there the specific physical setting of a song like "Beat Connection," which is clearly narrated by someone at a party, whereas "Yeah" is just a series of free-floating assertions without any particular perspective. Which is OK, but certainly not what Rob's suggesting.

More importantly than the lyrics, though: yes, the main point is being made non-lyrically, but there's nothing really done here to explain how exactly that's coming to pass aside from a half-hearted, unspecific riff on the idea that a long, gradually mutating track represents an affinity with jambands, a theory which suggests that Rob's never heard a 12" remix before. (Or a jamband, for that matter.) There are certainly very interesting things this track is saying musically, but regrettably I'm going to have to leave most of my take on that for another post, which I've been planning on doing for a while now.

The big problem, though, is that Rob gets the point wrong, a fact which is amply illustrated by that dumb final question. What's dancing to music criticism? It's just like any other dancing, and as a matter of fact almost all dancing constitutes dancing to music criticism, because almost all music is music criticism in one way or another. The idea that musicians are unaware of their art is a fantasy critics maintain to preserve their self-worth, but there are numerous songwriters and producers whose compositions place them in the upper echelons of critics if we were to regard them that way, and almost every songwriter is commenting on music at least at the level of a college newspaper's music reviewer. The reason Rob doesn't seem to be able to articulate exactly how the music constitutes criticism is that I think he's stuck, maybe only momentarily, in the idea of criticism as something critical, something that takes a yes-or-no stance on a piece of art, rather than something that extends or comments non-judgmentally on ideas proposed in other pieces of art. That consumer guide function is only a small part of what makes up criticism. It's an important part, certainly, and the most visible one, but it's one undertaken deliberately from the perspective of an outsider for other outsiders, the words of someone who can't change what he's receiving and so has to decide whether or not the unchangeable finished product is worth consuming. But this is about as far away from Murphy as you can get: not only can he change his own music based on his critical opinions and observations, but he can remix other people's music and actually effect the changes a critic might want to make on a track. He's as far from an outsider observer as you can get. So yes, "Yeah" says, as pretty much every LCD Soundsystem track has said, that people shouldn't be so afraid of combining rock and electronic, of making electronic music live and placing rock into the whole variety of available electronic song forms. But it also says that there were a lot of similarities between acid house and mutant disco. It says that the detuning of synths that, in part, makes trance tracks sound so driving and energetic can also sound great in a more lo-fi context. It says that handclaps sound great recorded in a freight elevator.

What it doesn't say is what Rob's implying: that "nobody's getting it done" except James Murphy. Instead, "Yeah" says that nobody's getting it done, up to and including Mr. Murphy, because music is never done, never finished, and it's that continual comment and incorporation and melding and reinvention and rediscovery that fuels music and makes it so damn enjoyable. If music will never be perfect, it shouldn't be, and if there's a message in that five-minute ecstatic build-and-release, it's that the process of seeking the perfect beat is what leads us to all those wonderful imperfect ones. I mean, there's two version of the damn song! How inauthoritative can you be? How can this be "getting it done" if even LCD Soundsystem themselves offer two separate attempts at it?

All I'm saying is that critics seem a little over-reliant on lyrical analysis and oppositional stances to explore music. But there are many other ways to look at a song and think about a song and hear a song. For one thing, there's the music. Maybe we could start there.

[1] I realized last week that the title of any LCD Soundsytem song is precisely the word or phrase used the most in said song, unless I'm misremembering one track or another.
[2] As my dad likes to quote, "This trick I don't know."

posted by Mike B. at 6:42 PM 0 comments