Friday, May 21, 2004
Of all of Tom's Britney posts this week, I most like this one, I think--but maybe I just like the apparent conclusion of a continuing investigation of just what makes Brit Brit herself, the description of a creature that most people don't think exists.
posted by Mike B. at 12:08 PM
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While I of course eagerly await Sasha's take on it, I have to say that I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the Nick Hornby piece in the Times today. Well, to be more precise, like his assessment of the "rock is for the young and not to be listened to be the old" statement, I think the premise is OK but the conclusion is half-batty. Quite honestly, I agree with the stuff on the first page about "the energy, the wistful yearning, the inexplicable exhilaration, the sporadic sense of invincibility, the hope that stings like chlorine." (Even if the last phrase is clunky and awkward, lacking in lyricism and chained to the ground by self-consciousness.) I talk about that kind of stuff too as both necessary for and encouraged by music, except I'm talking about pop and he's talking about rock. So will I sound like Hornby in 25 years? Eh, maybe. But again, I think the problem is less that he's wishing for these things than that he's looking so narrowly, and that seems less cause for anger than invitation to a pat on the head. I agree with him, obviously, on the stuff about good rock songwriters needing to be less scared of the mainstream, but I also just as obviously disagree that there's not great middlebrow (yay!) stuff in the mainstream right now. Just as rock has certainly seemed to become miserabilist, pop has become joyous and unrestrained, and even kinda smart half the time. And the stuff about how the influences of most modern groups don't stretch back very far--blech! When has this not been true? Not to mention decrying self-important music and self-effacing music in the same paragraph. You don't think Bruce Springsteen's got just as much artfulness as the White Stripes? Hmm...
As for Marah, I can attest that their rock spectacles are only kinda OK, nothing on a lot of other acts I've seen, although there are a lot of people at a certain record label that, like Hornby, are still shocked they didn't make it big. I can make a good guess why they failed, though.
posted by Mike B. at 11:22 AM
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Thursday, May 20, 2004
So wait, I'm confused: Scott P.'s review was supposed to be...er, imitating me? I'm confused.
Here's the rundown: Scott Plagenhoef's review of the new Magnetic Fields album was conceptually supposed to be a blog entry that quoted (fake) reviews of the album from the Guardian, Slate, Pitchfork, etc., and then decried their negativity. I "got it," but I didn't actually get it--so what was the point? Then comes an update of the letters column, and he explains:
The review was meant to parody the reaction/critical hypocrisy surrounding last year's Liz Phair record, which I mistakenly believed would be apparent due to the number of references and parallels to that LP which was included in the piece. I had also assumed that including a quote from Pitchfork itself would indicate that all of the "excerpts" were phony, but to many readers that seems to have done little to prevent confusion. I had hoped readers would recognize that the critical comments were meant to be ridiculous and groundless attempts at skewering the work of Mr. Merritt (and, by extension, Ms. Phair), an artist whom I deeply respect and whose music I have loved for years.
Ooooooh. OK. Well, obviously I'm not going to complain about another shot fired on Liz's behalf, but I can see why the comparison was hard to get: they're very different animals, i and Liz Phair. Merritt's production hasn't actually changed any since 69 Love Songs, aside from dropping the synths: he's still recording at home, except for the drums, which he did in a $40/hour Chelsea studio. It's still low-rent, and hammer dulcimer solos are a whole long way from the Matrix's guitar crunch, or even Michael Mann's FX'ed electrics. Much as I would like to point out an incongruity in the different treatment of these two albums, I don't think there is one. I disagree with the standards, but, right or not, they are being consistently applied, at least in this case.
Scott P's a good guy, incidentally--I think he even posted to Fluxblog once--but he does seem to have a hard time actually influencing PF editorial policy much. And that's OK, too.
Incidentally, I do have more things to post, about the new Magnetic Fields even, but I am absolutely friggin' swamped and only managed to crank this out on my lunch break. More later, maybe, but also maybe not for a while.
posted by Mike B. at 2:55 PM
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Tuesday, May 18, 2004
A few titles from the best band that ever moved and didn't provide me with a forwarding address, Anal Cunt:
"Dictators Are Cool"
"Domestic Violence Is Really Really Really Funny"
"Don't Call Japanese Hardcore Japcore"
"Easy E Got AIDS From Freddy Mercury"
"Everyone In Limp Bizkit Should Be Killed"
"Limp Bizkit Thinks They're Black But They're Just Gay"
"I Got An Office Job For the Sole Purpose of Sexually Harassing Women"
"Even Though Your Culture Oppresses Women, You Still Suck You Fucking Towelhead"
"I Sent a Thank You Card to the Guy Who Raped You"
"Women, Nature's Punching Bag"
"If You Don't Like the Village People, You're Fucking Gay"
"The Word Homophobic is Gay"
"I Sent Concentration Camp Footage to America's Funniest Home Videos"
"You Converted to Judaism So a Guy Would Touch Your Dick"
and, of course, "Living Colour Is My Favorite Black Metal Band"
posted by Mike B. at 12:56 PM
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Monday, May 17, 2004
ROCK 'N' ROLL BON MOTS #011
I was getting a milkshake from the ice cream man when an Airborne Express truck totally hit a Mr. Softy truck. Dude! You can't do that! I was hoping a total gang war would break out, ice cream men throwing ninja sugar cones, razor-edge flat-rate envelopes slicing off body parts, paper cuts and lactose-intolerant reactions everywhere, the streets awash in blood and fudge. But, sadly, it didn't.
posted by Mike B. at 5:17 PM
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I hadn't really figured out how I felt about William Hung until I did karaoke in Chinatown Saturday afternoon.
Now, please don't take this to be an endorsement of the now-tired dismissal of American Idol as karaoke. Besides that not being as cutting an insult as some people seem to think it is, you have to realize something: say what you want about the later seasons, but the first season was operating under a very different set of circumstances, and to judge AI without taking the first season into account is to miss the point entirely. The perhaps unfortunate outcomes of season one aside, the actual content was a thing of beauty. Important differences include the following:
It attracted a whole different group of people. All that you were guaranteed of getting a shot at when trying out for AI the first season was a spot in a pilot episode for a show that may or may not actually end up on Fox, and, let's be honest, a more reliable way of getting on Fox would involve something like dressing up dogs like wrestlers and dropping them out of an airplane with blowtorches to see who would be the victor.[1] Once Kelly got that movie and major-label album and tour, well, the rewards were a lot more certain and palpable. So the people who showed up in the later seasons were less people who wanted to become famous singers and more just people who wanted to be famous, for whatever, and while those people might be the grease for the wheels of some of our most enjoyable reality shows, they are way less interesting than the weird and wonderful culture of fame-seeking singers. It's somehow a whole different ballgame, and while I'm not sure if I can accurately describe it here, suffice to say that one of the great things about season 1 was seeing this particular subculture[2] showcased. It wasn't like most reality shows where the idea of eating worms or vying for a man's heart as a path to stardom seemed like just a pathetic justification on the part of the participants: this really was a big shot for most of them, an alternate path toward something they'd been working for for a while, and it really mattered. That tension was much more interesting.
It adhered to an outside set of standards. In later seasons, AI has become, like many other reality shows (Survivor foremost among them) run and judged, both internally and externally, in relation to a set of standards created by previous seasons. What matters now is, in addition to talent and appeal, are considerations like in which positive and negative ways performers matter to past successes, whether or not they're entertaining to have on, and how they continue the storyline created by previous seasons. Of course, some of this mattered before, too--they weren't just looking for great singers, of course, there was an element of "casting" as well--but it was fascinating in season 1 to see these obscure but very explicit music industry standards being bandied around as if they were just as valid as semi-objective artistic considerations. I suppose in part this is only interesting if you're part of the industry, but if you were, it was wild to see what are essentially insular concerns being expressed so broadly and openly: the balance between appearance and talent, the need for a certain indefinable charisma, balancing attention-getting controversy with middle-America pleasingness[3], etc. It was like watching a network show about a packaging competition in which they talk about usability vs. presentation, edginess vs. comfort, etc.[4] You wouldn't judge someone by these standards if you saw them play in a club, and you don't get judged like this on Star Search, either--a common comparison point for AI--but the way the judges were talking was almost exactly how people talk about possible acquisitions in the industry, and, eventually, how non-executives in the industry start to talk about their peers and competitors. While there were numerous parts of the process that were still being obscured (debates over marketing strategies, manufacturing calculations, indie promo, etc.), this was a part of the underlying skeleton of the industry that was being broadly exposed. And not just exposed--celebrated! A shocking number of people have actually accepted that this is an OK way to judge talent. It's absolutely fascinating, because it wasn't just a set of rules they were making up: it was this accepted (if not actually useful or true) outside standard that was being glitzed up but was still, essentially, the same kind of "shop talk" you'd hear in any A&R office, and like with America's Next Top Model, you could appeal to those standards, still lose because there were these additional TV rules, but then succeed anyway, because you were doing something that had an appeal beyond the show.
But of course William Hung is not a product of the first season; he is, rather, a reject from the current season whose hilariously bad performance earned him a certain fame that then resulted in a shockingly successful debut album on, of course, a Koch imprint. The problem with Hung for people who actually appreciate him (while also laughing--don't get me wrong, the humor is a large part of the enjoyment) is that even once you're able to listen past the badness to the goodness, it still feels kind of icky. Hung himself knows very well how he's regarded: "I'm infamous, a joke. It doesn't make me feel good, because I'm a genuine person, but I don't let it get to me, because I am who I am."
In many ways, it reminds me of the dilemma of American Movie, where you weren't quite sure what side of the line of exploitation vs. appreciation it was on at any moment. Hung actually shares a lot with Mark Borchardt: both are stereotypes, i.e. the Asian Nerd and the Trailer-Park Loser, and both are trying to succeed in a field that their stereotype would not normally seem suited for. Part of the humor comes from this disconnect, of course, but we also seem to be laughing at them for, basically, conforming to their stereotypes: Borchardt does hillbilly drugs and acts stupid and goofy and fails to accomplish a lot and seems not to realize that what he's doing is cheesy, and Hung is quiet and dorky and doesn't seem to get American pop culture and, similarly, apparently doesn't to realize that what he's doing is dorky. Is it right for us to be getting pleasure from this? Are they choosing to present themselves like this, or are they being presented like this with the assistance of others? And if it's the latter, should the others be profiting from this? In other words, are they in on the joke or out of the joke? Are we laughing with them or at them?
I think it's clear, though, that it's the former, that they are very much a part of this, and that the issue of exploitation is, in many ways, separate: they are both inviting us to appreciate them. So why shouldn't we?
Well, the answer would go, because they suck--or, at least, Hung certainly sucks. He just can't sing, can he? But as I've pointed out a few times now in reaction to the whole Superstar USA idea, a lot of my favorite singers can't sing, either, and presumably if they attempted a Ricky Martin song with as much gusto as Hung, they would sound almost as bad. The particular critical standards we have, particularly for indie rock, just don't value the kind of technical skill we demand of Hung if we're using his lack of skill as an excuse to demonize those who might enjoy him. We simply can't get mad at someone for being a bad singer without looking like hypocrites. One of your friends doing a karaoke song he thinks is hilariously bad an absolutely butchering it is funny when you're drunk, even if the purists among us would be loathe to consciously endorse it, but Hung's performances are never supposed to be funny.
But let's leave funny aside, because I could go on for pages about that. Let's talk, instead, about the reasons why we find many talentless performances by our favorite musicians compelling: the delivery. It wasn't until I started thinking about karaoke that I realized how people normally approach singing songs they like if they're not the best singers. People are almost always embarrassed about their singing ability, even if they're good singers, so when they take a shot at a song they have real affection for--no matter how stupid we with Good Taste might consider it--what they generally tend to do is undersing. They respect the song, and so they duck behind it, getting close to the melody but never quite hitting it, but far quieter than they might want to, quieter than they hear themselves singing it in their heads. Even if you're covering your ears because they're singing it badly and maybe too close to the mic, you can still tell they're holding back.
Not Hung. He holds back nothing, he loves the song rather than respects the song, and he oversings the hell out of it. And here the laughable dorkiness is actually a positive plus, something that makes his performance actually better, not just funnier. It takes a geek to get this into something that they lose their self-consciousness about it, and it takes a true dorkwad to know that you're getting laughed at for it but to continue doing it anyway because you love doing it so damn much. Hung's performance is the performance of the perfect fan, someone who really loves a song for himself.
The best evidence of this comes about 4:18 into his performance of R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly." The rest of the track seems like more or less exactly how a bad singer would cover a song, but to me at least, there was something very compelling about it. My first impulse was to think that I was drawn to it because of its contrast with the icky slickness of the original--not that I'm wholly against slickness, mind you, but I particularly loathed the sound of R.'s version. It took kind of a nice song and make it totally unpalatable, at least to me, and Hung's version redeemed it to a certain degree.
But ultimately, I think his performance does overwhelm the song in almost all cases. What he's making bears some resemblance to the composition, but it is in many ways much more a new thing than many cover versions. It sounds different, and not just because there are different notes.
What's the same, however, is the spirit, and this is where the bit at 4:18 comes in. Because where, before, it was following a pretty straight-ahead melody, it was hardly notable that he was doing a pretty similar phrasing as in the original. But when it hits that point in the track, it becomes crucial, because Hung does freakin' melismas. He dips, he rises, he almost soars, but what he really does is enthusiastically fumble around and do a really interesting imitation of a melisma, sounding sort of like he'd only heard it described in a different language. But what it actually sounds like is that he loved the song so much that he had to put those in; what's remarkable about them isn't that they're there so much as that they're also in the original. In other words, Hung loves that original song so much that he had to put those swoops, even if he can't actually sing them, because to not leave them out would violate his love for the original track. It would be a sin against the song, and that's not right. In other words, they're there and sung in that particular way because Hung is incredibly enthusiastic about the music, and the love he feels for it is a deeper and more obsessive love than we're used to seeing, I think.
And the degree to which he succeeds, despite all logical assumptions that he wouldn't, is as good an argument as I can come up with against the particular phenomenon described in footnote #3 here: the capitulation of American Idol to inoffensiveness. Now, don't get me wrong, a whole AI of nothing but shock-seekers would be even more boring than the current model. But the fact is that any executive worth his salt these days knows that, ultimately, no one actually wants to buy a new Perry Como, someone inoffensive and bland and tasteless. For all that some people see pop as being mainly Perry Comos these days, the fact is that even the most banal of music has some sort of frisson of offensiveness, no matter how fake, if it is to succeed. And the fact is, no matter how much we might genuinely like Kelly Clarkson or Ruben Stoddard (or Mr. "Vanilla Revolution" himself, Clay Aiken), that doesn't make them likely pop superstars. One of the nice things about this whole art-as-culture thing is that personality and context comes to matter, to, comes to be a booster of pleasure and interest and discourse. William Hung has done that: none of the current contestants on AI have done that in any way other than by being voted off for possibly racist reasons. But that wasn't them: that was the narrative of the show, the same thing I was talking about above as being a problem with the current evaluative criteria. Hung isn't a great singer, but is genuinely interesting, and not just because he's a bad singer: there's something about him apart from his talent (or lack thereof) that is compelling, that makes you want to know more. That's charisma, and that's something a lot of people on AI--as well as a lot of people in certain other genres I could name--are sorely lacking.
[1] Note to any network executives who might be reading this: I'll develop this idea for a 15% cut.
[2] Which is exactly what it is.
[3] This one being particularly interesting because it really seemed up for debate in season one, whereas now they seem to have institutionally come down on the side of the innocuous pleasingness, although of course the audience shift affected this, too, since advances are made based less on the edited presentation and more on outside interpretations of that, i.e. viewer votes.
[4] Incidentally, this is a show I would pay money to watch. Packaging is awesome.
posted by Mike B. at 1:13 PM
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A question for discussion: I like Nellie McKay a lot, too (and sweartagod I'll give that back to you on like Wednesday, Jesse), but how much of our--and you know what I mean by "our"--love is motivated by her prominent Bush-bashin'? I'm not saying this makes it illegitimate, but I am wondering what percentage you would give it, and how much weight that percentage has. Like, is it the 5% that pushes it from "just OK" to "great" or is it the 10% that pushes it from "I'll listen to it once" to "I'll listen to it three times"? Or is it maybe a negative percentage for some people? Oh, I'm guessing it's positive though...
And, of course, does this make you like her better than other artists doing similar stuff minus the Bush-bashin'? I'm honestly just curious.
posted by Mike B. at 12:46 PM
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Speaking of listening to music I like, thought I'd mention that Said the Grammaphone has been bringing me immeasurable joy lately with its picks. Often they'll take a listen or two to take hold, but just off the top of my head, I'm now fully in love with the Cat Empire, Nico, and Boy tracks. The latter's no longer downloadable, but it's fucking great, so seek it out. I may be making a trip to buy the full album at lunchtime today.
I've been meaning to post an mp3blog version of Simon's "feeling/not feeling/really feeling" lists on a semi-regular basis, but I haven't gotten round to it. Ah well. Shout-outs to the usual suspects as well, of course, you know who you are.
posted by Mike B. at 12:39 PM
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I guess I'd written before about it and been told that, basically, I'm quite obviously the exception rather than the rule, but I was still have a hard time getting my head around the new rash of postings about being overwhelmed by the amount of music to listen to. (More responses here and here.) But then I guess it clicked today when I reconsidered Jon's description of the problem as, in part, "a type of anxiety over the amount of fantastic art, music etc out there, the fact I have missed out on so much, the thought that potentialy my favourite track is only out there..."
Ah yes! I hear you now, chapperoos. I used to get this feeling a lot in my earlier years (I also used to get this feeling about girls, but I don't anymore at all, thankfully!), mainly when I suddenly came across a whole new cache of music I liked that I hadn't even known about before but that a whole lot of other people seemed to already be familiar with ("Brit wha? Indie who? Digital hard whuzza?"), and, while I still get this feeling sometimes--mainly in regards to hip-hop, actually--it's largely gone now, because, I think, it was mostly attributable to me not knowing what sources were out there to find out about new music; I started reading the NME online and, somewhat embarassingly, it was like someone let me into the VIP section. But at this point, I feel that with the blogs and the magazines and the A&R submissions and everything else, I have a pretty good shot at at least being able to sniff out profitable directions, and since I don't care about being the first to find out about something, I figure that if there's something I'd really like, someone will point it my way sooner or later. In the meantime, I can always listen to this other stuff I have that I like.
However, I now realize what feeling in me this particular anxiety perfectly mirrors: the creative process. I come up with a lot of little bits of ideas and melodies and sounds, and I get a little obsessive sometimes about documenting all of them (although I have been lax and unorganized of late, sigh). Because you never can tell with a bit, can you, if it's going to develop into something killer or not. Sure, sometimes you have a pretty good idea, and on rare occasions your feeling is correct. (Usually it's not, but in the meantime you get to be all excited about it, which is nice.) But by and large, you just need to get everything down there in case it turns out to be great. Of course, the problem is that often once the intial shock of discovery wears off, it's off into the aether, and so if you don't write it down it's not going to reappear in a garage sale crate in 20 years to give you a burst of joy.
Well, sorta. Arguably I don't need to write these things down (presumably many musicians don't) because they came from something, and that something is me; all the source elements are still there, and they could reuninte later just as easily, especially once the riff is in the fingers or the idea's in the noggin. Things come out later in different forms, even when you don't want them to ("Oh, is that just like that bit from that other song I wrote? Oops."). Maybe I shouldn't be writing all those bits down, to let them germinate more organically, man. But ah, of course, the bit itself is not so important as what it gets combined with, and this is of course the whole point of writing them down in the first place: to give them the opportunity to move beyond the original creation situation. Because what if I forget a riff but it would have been the perfect hook for this melody I came up with three weeks later? A top 10 hit is merely a college radio staple, and I'm downgraded from a Benz to a beater. Seriously, though: it is an interesting thing to do on occasion, to let a bit slide, because I'm planning on doing this sort of "creatin' stuff" thing for a long time, and I recognize that my life situation, my point of view, and my interests are going to change, so even given some of the same bits, the way I write a song or a story or an essay now would be much different if I was writing it in twenty years. You never know...
posted by Mike B. at 12:04 PM
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