So hey. Let's talk about MIA's "MIA" (or "POP"), shall we? For the purposes of this entry, I'm going to deal with the version that appears as a bonus track on Arular.

First off, here are the lyrics:

You can watch TV and watch the media
President Bush doing takeover
Kate Moss in ads for mascara
All my youth the young offender
The bill payers, the drug dealers
Girls who are magazine covers
The part-time jobbers at the call center
No career plans cause you won't go far
Put away change for Ibiza and
Check your credit on your new Nokia

You can be a follower but who's your leader?
Break the cycle or it will kill ya (X2)
You leader, you lead, uh, do what you do
What really good's gonna happen to you? (X2)

Your prime minister to your employer
Ego lovers need more power
Trendsetters make things better
Don't sell out to be product pushers
The gyro casher and baby makers
Try something new cause it ain't over
All poor people from all over
Lottery's got a rollover

You can be a follower but who's your leader?
Break the cycle or it will kill ya (X2)

Cherokee Indian, Iraqi and Indians
Girls and me girls when they come to the fellas and
Japanese, Moroccan, Caribbean, African
That's your life but who the fuck's your president?
You don't get my life cause I don't have a side and I
Spread dat boy 'im a mile wide and I
Got brown skin, I'm a west Londoner
Educated, but a refugee, still.
You wanna boy, you're old, you go
You wanna fight, you suck, you blow

(thanks go to Joe for extensive help on these, as well as Matthew for his contributions and for originally posting the song; I'm still not entirely clear on some of these words, but I'll try and avoid putting too much importance on those, alright?)

Let's just knock down one little critical garden gnome straight out of the gate: there is nothing, zero, nada here about the Tamil Tigers or terrorism or Sri Lanka, unless of course you want to count the single word "Indians," which, you know, I don't. The closest she gets is "educated, but a refugee still," and I don't know how you can read that as anything but a reference to the particularly British political issue of refugee status.

That said, let's delve into the music. It has basically the same structure as "Galang," a hook proceeding to 2 verse/chorus pairs followed by a longish bridge that ends the song, except in this case it transitions back into the hook and ends with a minute-long instrumental section. The hook itself is formed by cut-up bits of MIA's voice (cue Prefuse comparisons), quite possibly played on a sampler to form a riff later doubled by the bass, consisting of one measure staying on the tonic followed by half a measure dropping a whole step to a diminished (?) seventh and another half-measure that goes minor third up, back down to dim 7, then up to minor second, which ends the riff and sends us down a half-step to the tonic, which means it's in some minor mode I'm not qualified to name.

For our purposes, it's mainly important to note the way the vocals follow that progression, which is basically four beats of middle, two beats of lower and two beats of higher before coming back to the middle, if that makes sense. It's also important to note on which side of that golden ratio'd divide individual lines fall, as in the verses they're all pretty carefully divided up into halves, and when there's carryover, it's from the high to the middle rather than middle to low, as at that point there's almost always a clean vocal break. That middle-lower-upper thing isn't merely a musical conceit but a lyrical one as well, with both working in tandem. The halves and the halve-nots.

One of the things that strikes me about MIA's stuff is the almost infinite mutability of her vocals, which wouldn't be notable if she were straight-up rapping, but there's at least a semblance of singing at most times there. But still, her vocals sound great over this backing, but sounded great over the PFT backing too, and I can easily hear then over any number of different beats. Whether this is a positive thing or not is up to you, but I think it's a testament to the strength of her vocals. The strongest parallel I see between her stuff and dancehall lies here, as a sort of inversion of the riddim concept: same vocals changed by different backing music, adaptable without changes to a whole different sound.

Another thing that strikes me about MIA is how much room her productions leave for her voice, and the degree to which the tracks hang on the voice. (Which must make for some interesting challenges in performance, but that's for another time.) This is not what I hear in baile funk, which fills in many more beats. Even when, as in the verses of "MIA," the backing is mainly just a bass drum, there are simply more beats in baile funk per measure. Partially this is due to the way MIA structures things; as mentioned, the riff here spreads itself over two bars, and so the little accent noises that traditionally come at the end of a pattern and carry over into the next repetition here have an extra four beats in the middle, which allows them to dissipate. But it's also due to the particular sounds she uses, which are much tighter. There's no reverb, there's a much shorter sustain and release time, and there are legitimate bare spaces at times.

If there's a particular antecedent for MIA's backing-tracks-as-backing-tracks, it's clearly Timbaland, who's similarly careful to leave spaces, and similarly varies things up at irregular intervals. But he operates on a bar-by-bar basis, and so his sounds are even tighter than MIA's, with less beats and even shorter trails on his samples. Timbaland's trick is often to have half the bar consist of very low sounds and half of very high sounds with little overlap; MIA's has overlap but more actual emptiness. Her beats are cheaper, and so they can't be fine-tuned the way his are, but she solves that dilemma by giving herself more room to work. Fundamentally, Timbaland's beats are more manic than MIA's. He sometimes has the hip-shake, but never that lovely, slinky, catlike sexual menace we see here, that seductive creep.

And so we are free to compare it to a whole raft of different musical genres with which it shares a kinship, beyond the perhaps too-obvious ones it's already been likened to. It's sort of folk music with beats instead of acoustic guitars, spare and plain, the music sitting as an anchor to focus on the words and the voice. It's synthesized James Brown funk, landing on the 8 and the 1 and letting the drummer work in the middle. It's Now! pop with a Jamaican accent. It's something that could have always been created and which could be created again, a music always being created: an individual sitting down with a music-maker and creating something that simply sounds good to her, that reflects what she wants to hear without necessarily being part of a particular genre or scene.

So what do we hear? We hear, first of all, that voice, with subbass swoops behind, followed by a beat settling in, a variant on the "Red Alert" riddim kinda, dotted-eighth-dotted-eighth on kick and an eighth on snare. The bass comes in over this, a trebly distortion or a saw wave-derived tone, largely following the kick. Buzzes fly over this. Halfway through the first verse, a sampled one-note guitar riff triggers from time to time, extended via a one-rep delay. When the chorus hits, the only thing that changes at first is the incursion of sixteenth-note synth-handclaps that are unconstant and lack any particular pattern, but which seem to hold things down nevertheless. Halfway through the chorus the subbass swoop comes back in, and when the chorus ends everything cuts out for a beat or two, leaving the vocals exposed there at the beginning of the second verse. There's a bit more going on here, the occasional hi-hat hit, but it's shorter than the first verse, and proceeds pretty quickly into the chorus, which is half of what it was before, and when that ends we're back into the minimal backing and vocal sample of the intro. When the vocals start for the bridge, the backing is just the bass and the kick for the first two reps, after which we get snare and hi-hats for another rep, then the sampled guitar, then a little bit with filtered vocals, then an instrumental break focusing heavily on the subbass swoop, and the whole thing ends with the chorus backing music over the intro vocal sample pattern, with an additional vocal sample working its way in: "London," which gets an exposed solo briefly just before the end.

What's most notable here is, I think, how well the song works despite there not being anything particularly distinctive about it in the abstract. Standard beat, standard structure. What makes this song great is all in the details: the way she varies the kick hits, the three (!) different kick noises she uses, the totally counterintuitive times she puts in that subbass swoop, that great little guitar riff that, along with the two or three different buzzes she also uses, the extremely sparse hat, and the less sparse snare and claps, constitute the entirety of the non-bass noises in the song, which, again, leaves a lot of room for her voice. The number of times you could listen to the chorus without being able to clap along with the actual claps. It's a constantly mutating song that still manages to hold down a consistent groove; it is "POP" as the former title had it. Consistently mutating songs aren't anything inventive at this point, but the particular execution here is mind-bending. (It's also that it's slower but not like CoFlo molasses-slow, just a bit slower than other distorto-mutato stuff.) But what's more mind-bending is what she does with this.

What she does is different than what we're used to hearing above this sort of beat: she sings like it's a regular R&B track, a trick which of course enhances the mashup-ready feel of it all. It's neither rapping nor the kind of random shouting that you'd hear were this an electroclash song (which it could be with 35 more bpm and a more constant kick and, obviously, a different singer) but a confident, strongly delivered melodic line that doesn't rely much on anything around it but creates its own logic that the rest of the song somehow follows: like the vocals, it doesn't do too much, but it works wonders with what it's got.

This is all to say (kinda) that the music, vocals, and lyrics are all basically doing the same thing: reflecting a personal sensibility rather than any particular collective set of expectations. It is a private self that does not seek to express itself by performing the impossible task of filtering all outside influences, but instead accepts the world, all of it, as part of its makeup and then attempts to produce what would please this makeup most. And this pleasure also includes the pleasure of pleasing other people with what it is doing. Get it?

What strikes me most about the lyrics is the way that political figures are addressed as social or cultural figures--more actors in pop culture, in other words. Bush and Blair appear, but as figures far less distinct than everyone else here, as background noise, undeniably part of the fabric of our daily lives, but not as primary players, just basically the same as the person who gives you your food or the girl on the cover of a magazine: unreal, separate, but still actually, y'know, real. If this was a video that I directed, it would be MIA walking around the streets of London, fixing her gaze on different people and getting an accelerated glimpse into their lives, which would be revealed as a move projected through their forehead and shot from the size so you could see the beam. A projection and a narrative. Which is, of course, how the whole thing starts: "You can watch TV and watch the media." This is a representation.

But ultimately MIA does not remain the watcher. The reason I have this vision for the song is because she refuses to remain separate from what she's describing. She rolls her sleeves up and plunges into the fray, positioning herself not as an observer but a part of this: not different, but exactly the same, on a certain level, as everything she's presenting to you, which in turns is an attempt to implicate the listener of the song in what's being described, to take all watchers and make them walkers. But this applies to everyone in the song, from Bush to unemployed Londoners to Iraqis. It's an attempt to find a leveled space where everyone can speak as equals, a perfect plan, perfectly plain: pop.

She has been building the case for this since before Arular. She's insisted from the beginning on situating herself within mass culture. On Piracy Funds Terrorism, she managed to narrow the difference between herself, the Diplomats, and baile funk to almost nothing. It is a quite intentional rejection of the provincialization of subculutral scenes. "I'm a west Londoner...but a refugee still." Both and therefore neither. "I don't have a side." If it's all pop, it's not all music, and so everything is like everything else: Kate Moss is a political figure and Bush is a fashion model. Both are salespeople.

But how can she not have a side? Aren't there intentional slogans in there? Sure. But that doesn't necessarily mean she's the one spouting them if everything else in the song is observation. You can evoke globalization without passing judgment on it because it's a part of our lives when we live in cities just as much as magazine ads or the search for employment. The very unoriginality of the slogans points to the fact that they're not in the authorial voice but are more description of the cultural landscape. It all exists outside here, outside all of us--and it all reverts, ultimately, to playground taunts. Adolescence is love is sex is politics is war is culture is adolescence. Nyah nyah nyah nyah! Remind you of any critics you've read lately? (Me?)

This does not only apply to globalization. It also applies to the big MIA bugaboo, terrorism. Terrorism is a part of her life, but not in the same way (note I'm not making a value judgment here, just a statement of difference) as when American politicians say terrorism is a part of our lives, or even when victims of terrorism say terrorism is a part of their lives. Both of these are true statements. But we can all agree that MIA had, as the evangelicals say, a personal relationship with terrorism, from her father to the fact that significant areas of the country she grew up in are controlled by terrorists, to the degree that they basically feature terrorist-run civil governments. In Sri Lanka--and not a few other places--terrorism is politics, and politics, as we've demonstrated above, is culture. And culture is pop. It's more landscape description.

But the subject here is not terror, is it commercial. And, again, it can contain a critique of commercialism without necessarily endorsing that critique, in exactly the same way it can contain Kate Moss but not endorse her. (Cor, I'd like to endorse her, if you know what I mean! Uh, sorry.) Being the kind of person MIA is--an artist, a musician--concerns about commercialism are part of her daily discussions. The criticisms sitting side-by-side with the endorsements are there to serve as contrast, an intentional balancing act. Is it worse to "sell out" or be unemployed? Who's the offender, Kate Moss or the bill payers or the drug dealers? These contradictions absolutely define the modern world, and that's what this song is concerned with.

Even when she seems to be sending a coherent message, something intrudes. The first half of the bridge, which seems to be trying to paint some sort of inclusive portrait of oppressed peoples, is sung to the tune of "Here Comes Santa Claus," which as any Jewish-American can tell you, is not a particularly inclusive thing for a large portion of the world's population. This is significant. It's very pessimistic about the chances for any kind of unity because of the basic cultural differences between us, while at the same time holding fast to that vision, to that possibility.

There's another very significant contradiction in the second verse, with the line: "Trendsetters make things better / Don't sell out to be product pushers." Now, the first half of that is very interesting, and is not a view often expressed outside of celebrity journalism. Generally, we are supposed to have naught but scorn for trendsetters, because they are vapid hipsters. But she's recognizing their positive effects, and she's not even including the word "can" to suggest that they could be doing better. But then this is followed by basically a negation of the first half, because how can you be a trendsetter without basically being a product pusher? That's what you do. (That's what we do, fellow critics!) We're supposed to dislike them because they sold out. But look where it falls, vocally: the first half in the middle, the second half, the supposed negation, oscillating between low and high. She knows the beginning is the sensible and probably correct view, but she can't stop herself from thinking the negation sometimes. We're not consistent in our worldviews, because we'd be miserable. To ask for cultural consistency is to basically insist on separitism.

"How can she not have a side?" you ask. "These are all sides!" Ah, well then. Let me tip my hand before we roll onto the conclusion: her side is herself. This is inevitably your side when you enter into mass culture. But this is not necessarily apolitical or even conservative: Rawls' theory of justice is basically predicated on everyone vigorously expressing their self-interest. Enlightenment liberalism is founded in part on individualism, and is distrustful of authority. As is this song.

At first blush, the song appears to be a kind of rallying cry for people to rise up. Except let's examine those cries. First we have the chorus, "You can be a follower but who's your leader?" And then we have, in the bridge, "That's your life but who the fuck's your President?" Both of these posit both a sort of vacuum of leadership but do not necessarily present seizing the reins as a valid solution to this. The first statement smacks of car ad slogans, but where those would say something along the lines of "Lead, don't follow," this just says, "Don't follow!" And if you don't have followers, well, what kind of movement do you have? If you don't have a leader, what then?

As for the second statement, it's one everyone sort of asks. While it's certainly an evocation of the undue influence American foreign policy has on the domestic politics of other countries, it's also the inversion of something Americans themselves say (inaccurately) when the candidate they didn't vote for is in office, as well as something people in parliamentary systems can say (accurately) in the same situation: "he's not my President/Prime Minister!" It's politics at a remove, something you can say when the head of government's proclamations don't have much effect on your daily lives. But just as politics is culture, so is some culture more immediate, more present in your life: you're a follower of certain trends or styles, but who exactly is leading them? Who's making those decisions? Everyone and no one, in a way. And the closer you are to a certain form of culture or politics, the less of a follower you are, and the more everyone becomes an equal participant.

So it's a portrait of the modern world and a call for an embrace of its charms tempered with a strong sense of self. It's asserting the will of the individual as a primary political and cultural motor. In other words, it's what I said above about the music: an individual sitting with the tools of creation and consuming (artistically, commercially, politically) what is most appealing to her. It's a clear-eyed portrait of complexity and contradiction and an assertion that it all fits, that it all belongs, that we can throw open the doors and let it all in, because it's already been admitted. Here it is, and you are a part of it, whether you want to be or not.

ADDENDUM: Carl's got a few nice things to say, which I thank him for. Just one note, though: I wasn't actually responding to Simon's thing. This piece was more or less what I've wanted to write for weeks now, and the fact that I hadn't gotten it out was one reason why I was going on about MIA so much. This was pretty much what I wanted to say right here. So yay.
posted by Mike B. at 3:25 AM 1 comments

Monday, March 07, 2005

Incidentally, the below is an initial response to Paul Morley's Words and Music. I sat in a Turkish restaraunt in the lower east side on Friday evening and read this while I ate. I got more attention than I ever have before. Regrettably--or not--it was all from straight dudes asking me what I thought of the book. I'll have more later.

The below could also use an essay around it for explanatory/contextual purposes, etc. I may write it at some point, but if someone else wants to take a shot at it, feel free.

posted by Mike B. at 1:56 PM 0 comments

ROCK 'N' ROLL BON MOTS #031

Pop, at its pinnacle, is so transparent and so unabashed in its artiface and constructedness and calculation--its inherent unrealness--that it allows these concerns to fall away; it builds them up to such a degree that they collapse under their own weight, and finally allow us a peek at the thing inside. No genre does this better than pop does.

posted by Mike B. at 1:51 PM 0 comments

Thursday, March 03, 2005

From the frighteningly exhaustive Joy Division FAQ:

On the bootleg "Girls Don't Cry", recorded during a Cure concert on May 24 1980, Robert Smith introduces the song "Primary" by saying: "This song is dedicated...to the memory of Ian Curtis". Robert Smith said, at that time, that Ian's suicide prevented his own.

Damnit, Robert, why couldn't you have been a little bit faster then?

posted by Mike B. at 5:15 PM 0 comments

Glad as I always am to see Mommy & Daddy trashed, what the hell is "faux cowbell"? Is that like a synthesized cowbell, i.e. the cowbell sound on a drum machine or keyboard? "Faux" doesn't seem right for that, somehow. Are we just trying to emphasize the general faux-badness of the group by saying "faux" a lot? Is it a way of saying "fake" without being so obvious about it? I'm genuinely confused.

Also, am I part of "pop criticism's reigning PC police"? Awesome! I had no idea we were, like, reigning! I just thought we were having wanky little self-contained circular arguments in a small corner of the internet. Well all right then! It's a good thing the writer is oppressed, otherwise he would not feel so good about writing music reviews. Wshew!

posted by Mike B. at 3:04 PM 0 comments

Shorter version of my MIA argument: if you reduce her music to a political statement, that statement is kinda stupid, at least insofar as most people seeking to analyze music as politics are only interested in policy-position messages or general grandstanding hoo-ha and miss the more complex and interesting political messages conveyed by the music as a whole etc. oh awesome Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time" is on! What was I saying? Oh yeah.

So the problem is if you reduce MIA to a political statement, it's a stupid one, as would be the case for almost all good pop songs. But the music itself, to say nothing of the lyrics, are adamently not stupid. It's the equivalent of taking a meal, adding up how much each ingrediant cost, and assessing its worth that way, rather than by how it, y'know, tastes. And this isn't even getting into the icky idea that Arular exists to make the public aware of the situation in Sri Lanka. Save me from the horrors of pop-music-as-PSA, please. We owe it more than that.

As linked in a comment below, more on politics in art here.

posted by Mike B. at 1:19 PM 0 comments

For some reason, I've been reading old New Yorkers lately. Right now I'm working through the 5/13/02 issue, and the first TOTT piece, by Louis Menand, is called "Silly Ideas" and is about Harris Mirkin, the professor who wrote a pro-pedophilia article that resulted in the Missouri legislature pulling funding from the state university he works for. It also, in addition to being one of the most concise, smart summations of the sensible position on academic-freedom debates I've read (and thus applicable pretty much every time such an issue arises--see especially the first paragraph in regards to the recent blowup about the "little Eichmanns" dude), contains a line that should be tatooed onto every critics' forearm, as far as I'm concerned:

Subversiveness is acceptable as a by-product of scholarly inquiry; but it is unworthy as a goal.

For "scholarly inquiry," I think you can substitute "cultural production" without diminishing the accuracy of the statement.

posted by Mike B. at 10:53 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Last night's Gilmore Girls: discuss.

Did they end the breakup too soon? Will they break back up? Was the Emily thing resolved too neatly? Is the Emily thing resolved now, more or less, or am I just assuming wrongly?

Also: Lane! And more Rory hoochitude! From the preview, looks like next week she's gonna make ol' prepster jealous, which was totally unexpected from my end.

posted by Mike B. at 10:43 AM 0 comments

Every review in Flagpole this week is by someone named "Michael" or "Chad Radford." Awesome! Well, three of the ones by "Michael" are by a Michael named me: Bellafea, T.I., and Fiery Furnaces. (Thanks, Chris, for not running all my hip-hop reviews in the same issue and making me look like a dingus.)

As stated sometime previously, I love Bellafea so very very very much. You should seriously buy this EP, because you will fall in love as well, or at least enjoy yourself while listening to it.

And the Fiery Furnaces' EP I liked a lot more than I thought I would, given that I'd heard most of the songs before--damn thing's got a flow!

In the T.I. review I bring up the concept of "background crunk" and then just let it sit there. So, um, pick it up and run with it if you can.

ADDENDUM: When, in the review of EP, I write:

"if you play some of them before British pop songs, they sound the same!"

The songs I'm referring to are "Single Again" and Rachel Stevens' "Negotiate With Love," whose intros are weirdly similar in all sorts of ways. Which I won't explore, of course, because lord knows I don't like to analyze the Fiery Furances too much.

posted by Mike B. at 10:06 AM 0 comments

Two things I've learned from recent debates:

1) If you're arguing with a bunch of book lovers, don't tell them, while arguing a larger, arguably more reasonable point, that TV is a more important art form than literature. You will get called a "cocksucker."

2) If you're arguing with a bunch of rock critics, don't call them, while arguing a larger, arguably more reasonable point, essentially a bunch of narrow-minded wankers. You will get called a "cock."

This would all be different if I were trolling, but I'm not. I actually believe this crap! Well, therein lies my downfall. Also, being generally in a bad mood for some reason.

So those are my lessons learned from arguing on the internet. And we all know what that's like, don't we?

Share your message-board/mailing-list war stories, if you care to. If not, go eat some bacon. Bacon don't talk back. Bacon loves you.

posted by Mike B. at 10:00 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

ILM thread in progress about Christgau's MIA articles, which are more or less responses to the Reynolds article.

Because I respect your desire not to read ILM, here's what I wrote by way of response:

The article takes a sort of interesting "third way" approach--focusing on the authenticity/legitimacy of her political position instead of her persona, and he does actually address the album itself, albeit in a not particularly interesting way.

Still, I'm not entirely happy we're STILL focusing on the goddamned political content of the album, nor am I entirely convinced that an engagement with Sri Lankan history is necessary to fully experience Arular. Maybe this is the over-educated politics major in me talking, but it's not that hard to grasp the outlines of the conflict, and that's all that's really necessary to know what's going on, since MIA's project is broader than that one situation. But a response to Reynolds' piece was highly necessary, so yay.

I'm also not entirely convinced of the accuracy of his interpretation, but we can leave that for later.

And, agreed that the quotes are very, very useful if we want to continue this discussion. Sins of the father etc.

posted by Mike B. at 5:32 PM 0 comments

So I'm not quite sure how I think about this. If you're wondering exactly what I'm wondering about, well, it's the first line:

I’m going to hell anyway, so I may as well come out and say what you’d be thinking if you sat all the way through Tori Amos’ career from Y Kant Tori Read to The Beekeeper: the only way that we’re going to get a good album from her in this day and age is if someone has the decency to abduct and kill her daughter.

Now, I've probably made some variation of this comment at some point in my life, maybe even more than once. And I recognize that it's meant in jest, and lord knows I'm OK with offensive humor. But it still rubs me the wrong way for some reason. Maybe part of it is what the author said in this ILM thread:

Q: Dom, what earthly reason do you have for starting your review like that?
A: 300% readership increase. Welcome to capitalism.

Uh, yeah dude, capitalism. I don't think that's quite the word you're looking for.

I think the issue here is not that what he said is offensive, but that it's wrong, as in inaccurate, and while I'm always OK with wrong, funny, offensive things used to make some sort of point, here the point isn't followed up on, and he's admitting that the whole thing is purely self-serving, which makes it way more icky.

The simple fact is, there are much better reasons for Tori's musical decline than a simple lack of tragedy in her life, as becomes abundantly clear from just the first few chapters of the book she just put out: the lady's insulated herself from criticism. Plus, the only good song directly influenced by a particular tragedy is "Me & A Gun"--"Spark" kinda sucks, and the two albums not directly following harrowing events are the best, Under the Pink and Boys For Pele. The problem isn't a lack of bad things happening, it's the support structure she's developed, which seems to be a wee bit too nuturing for there to be real artistic growth.

Now, you could have taken this statement--which is, indeed, an exaggerated version of what presumably more than a few Tori fans have thought in their darker moments--and, instead of simply letting it sit there as fact, pointed out the ways Tori herself invites these kind of critiques. She's built her career and public image around being a sort of arbiter and resevoir of grief. She even says in the book that she's like her preacher father, who she recalls as spending a lot of his time dealing with death, consoling loved ones, presiding over funerals, etc. She calls it "holding a space," and says, "it's one I have to find in performance, when people are bringing their grief to me in a similar way." Eww! But Tori, you're not a preacher, and it's not one-on-one. (And I've been to the motherfucking meet-and-greets. Still not one-on-one, I'm sorry.) You're a goddamned pop star.

So yes, what I'm saying is that these are expectations that Tori hasn't done anything to deflate, that she has, in fact, encouraged them by everything she's done. True, she's never talked about her miscarriages to the extent that she does in the book, but that's even worse--she just gave us a general overview, "this album was about my miscarriage," without filling in the more human details. While in the early albums there was a strength to it, an ownership to the grief, by the time Choirgirl came around it started to feel a little, well, exhibitionistic.

Now, I'm not going to put the blame for this solely on Tori. The fact is, we encourage our musicians, especially women, to be exhibitionistic about their grief, to sell it to us, to reflect our own ideas of escalated sadness. There are economic incentives to commodify your tragedy, and that Tori did it is not surprising, especially given how well she did it at first, how transcendently. But by continuing to do it, she just perpetuated this idea of suffering as artistic worth, and this is an idea that's caused all sorts of problems for all sorts of artists, successful and, worse, unsuccessful. It's one of the most repulsive things about art, to me, and it's one of the reasons I'm so anti-tragedy. (And, coincidentally, anti-Arcade Fire, but again, only one of the reasons.)

So by beginning the review in this way and by failing to follow up on it, Passantino commits essentially the same sin as Amos herself: he validates this idea of suffering-as-worth, sacrificing his good sense for purely self-interested reasons, and allows it to perpetuate rather than challenging it, putting its feet to the fire, and this, ultimately, is why I think the whole thing makes me feel icky. As one commenter said (and you have to filter out all the Tori-fan blather, you just can't help those people), it does feel a bit Pitchforky.

posted by Mike B. at 12:11 PM 0 comments