Saturday, March 27, 2004
I saw the Fiery Furnaces last night with Matthew and some other folk. Wow. The way he put it before is hard to improve upon: they just rocked, which is not really how you'd describe the album versions of the songs. I guess the clearest way to show what they were doing is to relate the simple fact that they played 22 songs in 45 minutes--and this is a band with a lot of long songs! (Also, as Matthew pointed out, they played unreleased songs not even on their unreleased second album!) It was sort of like seeing a really, really good rock band play a non-stop medley of some more gentle band's material. And make no mistake: they did not stop more than twice. Everything just flowed into each other, and they did a great job of picking out the really key, killer points of each individual song. (I especially like that they opened with "I Lost My Dog," which is a hell of a song.) Seriously, even if you haven't entirely been able to get into their studio stuff, check them out live. It's just a bit 45 minute block of non-stop awesome.
More importantly, though, it was like getting another data point that finally lets you see what's going on. Their songs are sort of hard to penetrate; since so much of what they do is fucking around with arrangements, it's hard to get a handle on where everything is going without some serious close listening. I've listened to the new album twice and like it a lot, but still feel kinda lost in it; even the first one eludes me in places. But when you see them live and they explode the existing structure, it's like seeing how a puzzle works by seeing how it can be rearranged, like seeing the faces framing the vase. Matthew said that their live show makes the albums seem more considered, but to me it just reveals how fluid it all is. They don't improvise with melodies, they improvise the structure, and besides being really hard to do, it's really interesting. A pop song (and these are certainly pop songs) is not a set, unchanging thing; a great song can be rearranged and recombined and reconsidered and made wholly new. If a song doesn't work for some reason or another, you can always change it to make it different and possibly better. This appeals to my abstract sense of theoretical aesthetics, of course, but it's also really impressive how they can take these sort of subtle, complex songs and distill them to their basic, rocking roots.
Of course, it helped that their drummer was really good.
ADDENDUM: I'm currently listening to the album version of one of my favorites from last night, "Tropical Ice-Land," and the difference is sort of stunning. The great vocal melody is still there, and the arrangement on the album fits the theme of the song, with sort of a tropicalia thing going on. But when they did it live, they just took the chords and did them bigger and louder and left out the little guitar breaks; they just charged straight through. When I was listening to it, I desperately wanted to do a recording of it with that arrangement, and with that drummer, except with some really killer hook after each chorus. When they're going full-barrel and just stop for the final "ice land" of each chorus, it's totally trad but totally killer, too.
posted by Mike B. at 3:19 PM
0 comments
Chernobyl.
posted by Mike B. at 2:51 PM
0 comments
Friday, March 26, 2004
Here's an interesting VR thread on bad mastering jobs.
And here's one on good press packs.
posted by Mike B. at 9:32 AM
0 comments
Thursday, March 25, 2004
HOLY FUCK HOW GOOD IS LIZ PHAIR'S "LOVE/HATE"?!?!?!
Uh, more later. Fuck you, Bowdens Media Monitoring Limited, I entered you as a vendor already!
posted by Mike B. at 4:38 PM
0 comments
Two songs I'm now appreciating differently:
1) "Boys Don't Cry." Heard it first in the context of the movie of the same name, and it was hard to separate from some time. But now I'm listening to it amongst other Cure songs, and all I think of is "Tears of a Clown."
2) "Beautiful Day." I guess I'm just a sucker for songs that sound like their titles, but this one really does, all of a sudden. They played it at the conclusion of a Smallville episode I saw last night, while Clark and Lana were sitting on an almost theatrically fake windmill with big blue sky spread out around them. Maybe I just miss the summer, but it really sounded good. It sounded not like a city's beautiful days, but like one in more open spaces, especially while driving. Again, I think it's the new context--the video's all airplanes and stuff, and it's very nice, but this just doesn't feel that ultra-modern to me. The electronics of the track just make it feel pop, not electronic, and pop is the soundtrack of banality, not slickness.
And while we're talking about the Cure: specifically which song does the Rapture's "Olio" sound like? "A Forest"? Or something else?
posted by Mike B. at 3:09 PM
0 comments
ROCK AND ROLL BON MOTS, #001
"You Shook Me All Night Long" is such a great song that they can throw off a completely unrelated, unaccompanied riff in the intro that is almost as good as anything else in the rest of the song. They were that much on fire.
posted by Mike B. at 1:00 PM
0 comments
QV brings us the latest news about our good friend Kofi. Things of note:
: How he got the opportunity: "She was flashing everybody her breasts and we took a picture and I asked her, 'Courtney, one last flash.' She obliged and I just went for it."
: What he wants to call his new mix-tape: "Milk Money" or "All I Wanted Was Some Chicken Nuggets."
: His e-mail address--honestly--is kofiboob@yahoo.com. Presumably he started this one after the incident, not before; if not, well, I just like him all the more.
posted by Mike B. at 12:46 PM
0 comments
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Dudes and dudettes: if you haven't already, you should really seriously check out The Big Ticket, an MP3 blog. For one thing, they have an MP3 of that great Starlight Mints song I raptured about a while back, "Submarine #3." For another, they have the great Corn Mo song "Busey Boy," which is about being mistaken for Gary Busey, which is actually pretty plausible, given how Corn Mo looks. (Which is also up at Mo's site, but never mind.) For another thing, everything else is good, especially the Dressy Bessy. For another...what's that? You say I only like this because I like indie rock? Well, duh. But this is the creme, I think.
posted by Mike B. at 6:43 PM
0 comments
From a reader:
Um, That Klosterman piece you posted back on March 15th? Remember how he says that his archenemy is Rick Helling?
"He's a guy named Rick Helling, and he grew up in Lakota, North Dakota. Last year, Helling pitched a few innings for the Marlins in the World Series; in 1998, he won twenty games for the Rangers... Every summer, I constantly scan the sports section of USA Today, always hoping that he got shelled. This is what drives me. I cannot live in a world where Helling's career ERA hovers below 5.00, yet all I do for a living is type. As long as Rick Helling walks this earth, I shall never sleep soundly."
Well, and this is eery, it looks like Klosterman got his wish. On the 20th, Helling broke his leg, possibly ending his season (and at his age, perhaps his career)!:
"Helling, who signed a minor-league contract with the Twins this season and was expected to be their fifth starter, was hit in the lower leg by a hard liner off the bat of Philadelphia's Shawn Wooten in the fourth inning Saturday.
"Helling left the game with what he and the team believed was a bruise, but X-rays on Sunday morning revealed a fractured right fibula."
I'm gonna do my best to stay on Klosterman's good side. That's some fucked up shit!
Yoinks, me too!
(Thanks to Gooblar.)
posted by Mike B. at 3:16 PM
0 comments
PF's AP replies to this.
Thanks for your letter. You've written to Pitchfork before, right?
I'm not sure I completely understand your issues with the piece. I said everything I needed/wanted to say about Ryan Adams' music when I wrote a review of his latest record; by the time this interview began, my distaste for his music was already well-implied. Had Ryan Adams wanted for a second to argue with me about the validity of that piece, I would have (happily) backed it up point-by-point. I would have read it out loud. I would have performed a dramatic interpretation. But, as evidenced in the first question I asked ("Do you think it was unfair?"), he had very little interest in disputing it. In fact, he went on to be exceedingly dismissive of his own work, and of Rock N Roll in particular. By all means, please point me to one instance where I failed to "defend my shit." I was DYING to defend my shit.
To be honest, I'm not especially interested in celebrities acting stupid, or in celebrities in general. Adams has already been well-chastised for acting like a child; I have no interest in behaving like one myself. For me, this was a legitimate interview, it wasn't the idiotic pissing match were hoping for. And I am not a dancing monkey, dude.
Best,
Amanda
posted by Mike B. at 2:42 PM
0 comments
While I'm ranting...
I just re-read this old e-mail from Pitchfork's Chris Ott. It was in response to a letter I wrote about two Repeat posts (remember that?) before I started this blog. You can find them here, although the link at the bottom there doesn't lead to the reviews in question anymore, I believe. (You can find them here.) At any rate, let me paste in Chris' response, which I don't think needs any context for what I'm going to address in it:
Have you ever considered that "culture" is merely a nice word for a given society's prejudices?
I don't think we see eye to eye on the utility of ironic expression; for me true irony simultaneously communicates tacit understanding of an incongruous situation and invalidates or at least undercuts the reasons for that situation via insightful contradiction. In my opinion, whites have never seen an incongruous situation, as they've made the rules since long before pop music existed.
I replied; there was no follow-up. (Upon checking my archives: whoa, I replied at length. I seriously needed a blog.) That's not that important. But rereading this now, it triggered some thoughts.
The most engaging cultural criticism, and especially arguments about cultural criticism, happen at a very low level, and about very concrete things: this album, that TV show, those incidents. It gives us something we can get a handle on, and if nothing else, we can always revert to the "I liked that / I didn't like that" kind of commentary, which is fine too. But when cultcrit ventures into more abstract, purely theoretical things, I think it's harder to capture readers, even when you do refrain from using the annoyingly distancing language that so much criticism uses these days.
I'm not really interested in decrying that phenomenon--honestly, it's quite understandable that not everyone is as grabbed by that sort of stuff, given current methods of cultural education and the generally horrible writing style that seems to inevitably accompany pureish theory. But what does seem problematic about that particular dynamic is that it's essentially masking a very important--vital, even--political argument. I think an anti-sellout argument, for instance, is essentially an anti-capitalist argument. An argument against something being "merely entertaining" is, I think, meant as an argument that it only dulls people's sense and lessens their intellect, thus reducing the possibility of mass change.
The Ott thing is more direct about this, which is why it's interesting: I made a grounded, classically liberal argument, and he's making what we'll call a classically radical argument. It engages with almost nothing of what I actually said, but simply spouts a kind of chapter and verse, referring me to something without actually telling me anything. I replied; no response was forthcoming. Why?
This phenomenon seems particularly pointed when we get to arguing what I think is the point at the heart of a lot of lefty[1] cultural criticism that irks me: the validity of revolutionary change as a method of political action. The thing that particularly saddened me about the whole kiddie-porn debacle was that not only did we not have an actual discussion about my justifications for the post, but we didn't even address the legitimate political issue that I did make a wholly unironic post about, as you can see here,[2] and the heart of that was exactly the point that hoping for revolutionary change is an invalid political philosophy.
Now, there are valid reasons for trying to sidestep this argument. Maybe it's just like religion, where you can't really resolve the disagreement, and you know that already from past experience. Maybe you can see where the argument is going, and you don't think it's productive. Maybe you don't have the energy to engage with it. Were I being ungenerous, I would suggest that when we do start arguing about the underlying issue, it's pretty much indefensible, since given the past 250 years of world history, you can't really justify a reliance on revolutionary change with anything other than blind faith unless you're a sociopath.
But I honestly don't know what the reason is, and I'm also honestly not suggesting the ungenerous interpretation. But I just as honestly think there are some pretty unjustified political opinions underlying the particular moral calculus a lot of my peers use to make their cultural judgments, and I can't help noticing that whenever I start to talk about it, I'm either ignored or referred to someone else. This is one of the things that really bugs me: so much of this stuff is referential, and always to one place. I'm not sure there's any one thinker that's wholly right, and I'm much more interested in hearing your synthesis of the various ideas out there instead of a referral to something else.[3]
What seems to happen to a lot of people I know, including myself, is that you're given this particular worldview by your parents and education, and then something comes along--Howard Zinn, Adbusters, Rage Against the Machine, whatever--and disrupts it. The problem is that we (and, again, I'm including myself here) tend to take this partial disruption as a whole one, and cling to the new doctrine wholly just as you now wholly distrust what came before. The problem is, as I say above, that no one point of view is wholly right, and if there's one thing that really pisses me off about our political educations, it's the way it produces this extremely unproductive reactionary effect in our yoot.[4]
And then, of course, it extends--people don't break out of this mindset, and it actually becomes a functioning political philosophy. But it's not, and I think the way that it seems to feed into this cultural morality is revelatory of this--it's more of an aesthetic philosophy, more of a social thing. Nowhere is this more clear than in the anti-advertising stuff:
"Down with ads!"
"Why?"
"Because I don't like them!"
So not only do we have this fairly basic disagreement, but we then proceed not to discuss it. This is particularly a problem because it's not like disagreeing with a Republican where you're actually working toward opposing goals; with the people I'm really trying to engage with, we basically want the same things, we just disagree about how to get there. And as long as we ignore that, I think we're working at cross-purposes. When Naderites think that we can just sabotage the Democrats so that the country becomes a right-wing hell and a leftist revolution inevitably springs up, I think we're going to have a problem, you know?
And so that's all I'm saying: I'm saying let's talk about it. I might be wrong; I very possibly am. But let's at least give each other a chance to disagree about it rather than rehashing whether Liz Phair's new album is a moral wrong or not.
[1] So we don't end up going through this in comments, I'm a lefty, just not that kind of lefty.
[2] Although someone's seconding of my points here was replied to, and the thing I never caught about that was apparently folks thought I meant it as a publicity stunt. Whuzza? If I wanted a bigger readership, I would post MP3s, or have contests, or post naked pictures of Gavin Friday, or something. I'm quite happy with my readership, and I'm not sure how someone who does post his fair share of overblown, long-winded, abstract theoretical screeds, and who has largely refrained from using his stock of offensive jokes in this particular forum, can honestly be said to be doing this for publicity--thus the whole "read the rest of the damn blog" thing. What I was saying with my "no one replied to it" thing wasn't that I wanted more readers, but that I wanted comments. I wanted people to argue with me. Prove me wrong! I'd be happy to admit it! But don't just ignore it, or dismiss it as wholly invalid, as was done. I guess it was a big misunderstanding. Like a sitcom plot! Oh my god, and with hilarious consequences! Um, sort of.
[3] Incidentally, definitely do not, as Chris does, assume that I'm not familiar with this arguments or thinkers. I am. And this will get me really, really mad.
[4] Were I the radical conspiracy-theorist-type, I would suggest that this is actually a planned effect to get folks not to vote, since it "makes no difference anyway," but I'm not a radical conspiracy theorist, luckily for y'all.
posted by Mike B. at 2:27 PM
0 comments
You fucking cowards.
I was going to post just that, but eh, lemme expand a bit. Look, here's this guy, Ryan Adams, you've been ripping on, making fun of, criticizing, for years now. Just shots and shots and shots. And sorta-kinda you should--the guys a, er, turbodouche. And it's entertaining for all of us.
But then he calls you up. (Calls for a scheduled interview, no less, so it's not like you were blindsided.) And do you say anything? Do you criticize him? Do you call him on his shit? No, you fucking writer, you fucking coward, you have a nice genial chat. That's not just cowardly, that's bad writerly instincts. We the audience do not care about nice genial chats. We want conflict, we want invective, we want overbearing stupidity and hyperbole. You're dancing monkeys, fuckers, dance for us!
And, holy shit, you just validated all those cheap things musicians say about critics: that it's easy from where you're sitting, it's only 'cause you don't know me, blah blah blah. Look, if you're going to say this shit in a public situation, you're going to have to be willing to back it up and say it to the person's face. That's only fair. And, holy shit, it's Ryan Adams! Who deserves it more? He's asking for it! It's just so frustrating. You backed down, folded as soon as you're challenged to defend your shit. Maybe there was even a little star-worship tied up in it there. It's like every bad image we have of these things--the parties fight like dogs for the crowd and then go into the backroom and share a glass of brandy and a friendly chat, since it was all in fun--except you are revealing this in public. That's embarrassing, kids. The only midly critical thing you said was in the context of basically asking him for his fucking permission to say nasty things about him! Don't ask his permission, goddamnit!
Look, either music matters or it doesn't. The only justification for saying all the stupid, overheated shit Pitchfork does is because "music matters, man" and you're saying what you're saying in an effort to save it. (See my previous correspondence with PF writers about "correcting" the trend of reviews by overcompensating.) But if all this stuff you're spewing is just bullshit, just entertainment, then music clearly doesn't matter, because when given the chance to directly back up what you're saying, you don't take it. You pussy out, and the message that sends is: well, music doesn't matter that much, after all; being nice to people matters more.
Now, we all know I'm not endorsing one view or the other here; I think that Pitchfork needs to realize that music matters, but in a very different way. But from their viewpoint, those are the choices. We don't care if you're uncool, dude; we know you're uncool. Cool people don't care about shit that much. But liking the Dead (and a big ol' measure of respect to Adams for pretty sincerely repping the Winterland DVD) isn't sufficient reason for saying overly nasty things about working musicians to working music fans. Is being an asshole really justified? Apparently not; apparently having Ryan Adams be nice to you is more valuable.
So yeah, you guys are being "honest" (or "obnoxiously honest"), but way more than you're intending to be, I think. The PF project laid bare: look on it and despair, kids. Sigh.
Let's make this clear, here: you just got schooled by Ryan Adams. He handed you your critical hat. Congratufuckinglations.
posted by Mike B. at 1:03 PM
0 comments
THE SCORPIONS INDEX
Song that I figured would be good, since everyone thinks it's bad, but which is, in fact, not all that great : Rock You Like A Hurricane[1]
Song which fades into the background, much like a Luther Vandross song : Loving You Sunday Morning[2]
Song which sounds like mildly retarded kids playing AC/DC : The Zoo[3]
Song which starts, as far as I can tell, exactly like "Rock You Like a Hurricane" : No One Like You[4]
Song which sounds exactly like its title : Big City Nights[5]
Song I keep thinking is going to be on their Greatest Hits record, even though I know very well they didn't play it : We Built This City[5.1]
Song which a certain revivalist pop-metal band would seem to have almost certainly stolen a title from, except otherwise the songs share practically no similarities; they might as well not be in the same genre : Believe in Love[6]
Song which has weird resonances with a song on another album I listened to yesterday, Elvis Costello's Blood and Chocolate (two-disc expanded edition) : Rhythm of Love[7]
Song about which no more need be said besides "it's a Who cover" : Can't Explain
Song which, knowing the backstory, you can't help but listen to and think, well, every band gets one great song, and this is it; this was their gift from the music gods : Wind of Change[8]
Song whose only good part is the ultra-clichéd key change in the last chorus : Tease Me Please Me
Song which would seem to be avoiding copyright infringement in its main guitar part purely through that weedly-weedly distortion effects which piles on harmonics and makes the actual note obscured : Hit Between The Eyes
Song which I can't help but interpret as kind of a repudiation of the inclusionary rhetoric in "Wind of Change," since the alternative explanation is even more embarrassing : Alien Nation
[1] Which doesn't actually seem to rock very hard.
[2] "Loving You Sunday Morning"? It justifies the title, I guess, but what about "Easy Like Sunday Morning"? (Or whatever the fuck that song is called.) What about "Sunday Morning Coming Down"? It's an interesting intertextuality, but on the other hand, it's not. Scorpions lyrics don't seem to be intended as something you actually listen to.
[3] Five and a half minutes on like a riff and a fucking half! And not in a good way!
[4] Well, technically, its 0:00-0:20 are like "Hurricane"'s 0:20-0:40. But this song is just massively better--better recorded, better played, better arranged, etc. Plus, kind of a classic chord progression. Makes me want to clutch my fists and do that breast-shaking dance, had I breasts. Plus plus, it comes in at under 4 minutes which is good but unusual for them; the Scorps apparently had that Wagnerian maximalism impulse, at least in the context of pop-metal bands.
[5] It really does! Maybe this is because I've seen the video (one of the classic mid-80's MTV "tour diary" videos with the Scorps playing to sold-out stadiums, playing on a flatbed truck, etc.--er, although maybe I'm mixing up Scorps videos here, which you can hardly blame me for) and there are a lot of nights in big cities involved, but something about the production, or maybe the drums, just sounds like driving through somewhere big and warm in the summer at night. Like Miami, or Disney World.
[5.1] An AMG search for "We Built This City" turns up as its second choice "This Is How We Do It."
[6] It's a ballad! Pity the Darkness doesn't seem to have any good ballads. Well, maybe next album, if they're following The Pop-Metal Career Arc.
[7] "New Rhythm Method." I mean, what's the substantive difference, really? They're both just sort of bad double-entendres. Weirdly enough, the Scorpions song has a great line in the chorus that belongs in an EC song--"Got the groove that hits the bone"--while the Costello song has lyrics more suited for a Scorpions song[7.1], i.e. "I stare at you while you're asleep / And play [sic] the Lord your soul to keep / And on your cheek a kiss I peck / And pray it's just your heart I break." Uh, although maybe I'm thinking of Metallica or something.
[7.1] Elvis Costello needs to do a pop-metal album! OK, I just got really excited there. But there wasn't necessarily a real big difference in the attitude toward women in pop-metal songs and Elvis Costello songs...
[8] First off, you're going to have to go here.
Now, I haven't actually been able to find this documented anywhere, but as I understand it, the story behind "Wind of Change," which when you read the lyrics is pretty obviously about the fall of communism, is that it was written mere hours after the fall of the Berlin Wall, recorded shortly thereafter, and hit #1 across Europe mere weeks after the historic event. (I'm going to go with this, because it's neat.) And sure, you could complain that it sounds like it's practically designed to be played behind moving montage of "images of freedom" in network TV retrospectives of the 80s, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a great song, which is all the more amazing when you know that it seems to have just dropped into their laps, even if it actually didn't. It's 5:10 and justifies every single second of that, except maybe the guitar solo. There's that awesome whistle hook at the start, which actually has a great accompaniment (!), and they only reuse it twice, I think, which is again unusual for them but good. It just seems like a culmination of everything the Scorps have learned to do well; they were good at rocking out early in their careers, and there's some of that here, but as they *cough* matured they got better at ballads, and this is sort of the 80's "Bohemian Rhapsody." (Or, um, the 80's "November Rain," I guess.) It's a series of bits that all fit together really well, really flow, and there's a dramatic arc there, kind of a story. It's not just indulgent: it makes sense. And everything there works toward it: the otherwise-painful clean chorus effect on the main guitar part, the heavily reverbed toms on the drums, the reverbed and chorused acoustic guitar strumming, etc. Plus, honestly, a really good vocal melody line.
And (gulp, here we go) it really is kind of moving. I was neither greatly affected by the event at the time nor acquainted enough with pop culture to actually have heard the song upon its initial release (although maybe I should ask harm what his experience with it is; I suspect he would make fun of me), but this really carries some kind of emotional impact. The fact that it's about freedom but sounds neither celebratory nor particularly liberated goes against my instincts in some ways, but its very sadness is what really validates it. It's not taking a particularly political stance pro- or anti-communism (although the Scorps aesthetic wouldn't seem to be particularly in line with Soviet attitudes towards debauched pleasure), it's just sort of expressing how great it is that we can finally see each other again and talk to each other, while at the same time acknowledging the suffering that so many people had to get through to actually get to this point. Or, you know, the Scorps' gratitude for having an even larger audience they can sell to now, mixed with a sadness about not being able to sell to them before. But that's just cynical.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know "Where the children of tomorrow dream away / in the wind of change" is a horrendously cheesy line, and the bridge is somehow even worse (i.e. "The wind of change / Blows straight into the face of time / Like a stormwind that will ring the freedom bell / For peace of mind / Let your balalaika sing / What my guitar wants to say" into, yes, a guitar solo!!!), but the damn thing appeals to me. I don't think I could listen to it too often, though. Actually, the three times I've hit it today is already pushing it, so I'll stop now.
posted by Mike B. at 11:28 AM
0 comments
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
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
|
|