Well, we’ve come to the end. It took a while to truly digest last year’s output (of records, movies, feelings…ya know), so the relative tardiness of this final ‘summation’ feels kinda appropriate. Yup, that’s the justification I’m going for, at the moment, so please: derive whatever enjoyment you may from my thoughts on these records, listen to them, get real, and I’ll see you in a few.
Before proceeding, I want to give propers to the records that were truly unbelievable but for whatever reason weren’t quite resonant enough for this list as it exists today, so shouts-out to: Main Attrakionz, Zola Jesus, Whatever Brains, A$AP Rocky, Mr. Dream, PJ Harvey, Terrible Feelings, Mr. Terius Nash, St. Vincent and Swearin’. If I had to redo this in a month or so, any of you could’ve made it. Keep the faith!
4. Waxahatchee, American Weekend
This technically, ‘officially’ came out this January, but for some reason I happened to be trawling the depths of the internet during the couple weeks last summer when it was up for download on a donation basis, and was fortunate enough to ‘cop’ it then. Thank god for that, really, because the longer you have with this record the better. It is the first solo release of Katie Crutchfield – of the Alabama Crutchfields – primary vocalist for the now-defunct indie-punk outfit P.S. Eliot. It’s worth mentioning, if only to express my sheer awe at the depth of talent in this one family, that some combination of Katie and her twin sister Allison were responsible for at least four excellent releases this calendar year: the Bad Banana EP (both sisters), the final P.S. Eliot LP Sadie (ditto), the Swearin’ demo (Allison) and now this. But I’m not writing about those at the moment; I may in the future, and they’re all excellent in their own idiosyncratic and special ways (indeed, “Crosseyed” from Sadie and “What a Dump” by Swearin’ are both strong Song of the Year candidates). American Weekend, for one reason or another, grabbed me the hardest, and that’s what earned it this slot.
And I think I know why. It’s rare that the skills that make one an excellent punk songwriter translate to a different idiom, but this represents not just a successful genre repositioning but actually a huge leap forward in Crutchfield’s craft. I’m a huge P.S. Eliot fan, but I think even their most ardent admirer would have to admit that there are moments when the lyrics feel a bit too, say, enamored of their own wordiness. Here, on the contrary, starkness is everything – most of the numbers are just an acoustic guitar strummed as few times as possible, backing up Crutchfield’s next-level amazing voice – and the lyrics reflect this renewed focus, picking out memorable details and perfect turns of phrase: “I tell you not to love me,” Crutchfield sings on standout track “Bathtub,” “but I still kiss you when I want to.” Nothing too showy about that there, but it perfectly captures, in an inventive way and without any excess, a complicated sentiment. And that’s ultimately what makes American Weekend special: lean and literate pop songwriting with a tinge of despair, equally at home on porches in the summer and in basements in the winter.
3. The Coathangers, Larceny & Old Lace
I mentioned some months ago that this might be the album of the year; any other year, it probably would’ve been. I mean this in both the banal way – that is, had it not had to compete with the two exceptional releases that happened to finish ahead of it – but also in another way: that, while this is most certainly the best example released in 2011 of the kind of music I have loved for the longest, listen to most often, and, not incidentally, make, it caught me at a moment where I spent more time listening to the kinds of things I don’t usually listen to.
I hope this isn’t underselling the record, though, because what a record this is, my friends: a monument to the most perfect negotiation of the method/madness relation. If pressed, I would describe The Coathangers as a ‘southern-fried Mika Miko’, but that would be sort of reductive, and wouldn’t do near enough justice to this Atlanta band’s command of aesthetic variation on top of an underlying coherence of vision. This is a fucking album, written and released at a time where most punk bands couldn’t be bothered to even attempt such a thing. It’s not that punk bands don’t release LPs; they do, and constantly. Rather, most punk records longer than 15 minutes feel more like collections of whatever songs the band happened to have finished at the time, whereas Larceny & Old Lace feels more deliberate than all that. Starting with the best opening cut of the year, “Hurricane” – a song that, thankfully, some genius lit up the dancefloor with at the second-to-last Queers Beers ‘n’ Rears party – it is exactly as long as an album should be: 11 songs, 30 minutes, with hooks, stompers, ballads and outright threats to your wellbeing (seriously: hearing two singers screech and growl the lines “Yeah, you’re gonna pray and pray/You’re gonna go to hell anyway!” is one of my favorite recorded moments in a long while). Do not sleep on this.
2. Adele, 21
It pains me to slot this anywhere but first, but alas, after weeks of arguing with myself, this is where I think it has to go. And really, that seems fitting. As important as this record has been for me these past months, it would feel wrong to let the depth of hurt it ultimately embodies define what music meant for me in 2011. Still, it has to be up here. Indeed, in discussing this list with a friend who also made one of his own, he remarked on the somewhat transparently autobiographical gesture of placing this record so near the top. And I’m fine with that too, insofar as I think I’ve previously made clear that I have no particular interest in things like ‘taste’ or ‘aesthetic criteria’; in putting this text together, I might as well go for broke in the subjective bias department. But as true as that is, I can’t seem to let that feeling COMPLETELY win out, so there it is.
Remarks on Adele’s ubiquity this year have by now themselves become ubiquitous – and to add to that, she just deservedly owned the Grammys – but to throw one more iron on the fire, I will say that this album represents the kind of mass experience we rarely luck onto these days: a real-live, four-quadrant monster hit that snaked its way into the lives of people from all kinds of sectors. Further, what is less remarked upon is that this pervasiveness was actually earned; this was an album that deserved to sell six million and however many copies. Every single one of these numbers is a perfectly constructed, hook-filled wallow through the darkest of places. There’s more despair in these 48 minutes than in all the black metal in the Norwegian Library of Congress,* and each moment seems fundamentally non-substitutable. Even those tracks set upon by the critical establishment – I’m thinking primarily of “Set Fire to the Rain” and the Cure cover “Lovesong” – for their manifest absurdity represent perfectly irreplaceable moments of the grieving process. The former makes the best case for the sense of non-sense I’ve ever heard, taking the torch song’s chest-thumping hyperbole to heights previously unseen. Who cares if it is literally contrary to the laws of physics for rain to catch fire? That’s the kind of impossible gesture being broken-hearted inspires one to hope for! The latter, on the other hand, in spite of its Lite FM arrangement originally intened for no less a hack than Celine Fucking Dion, represents the album’s slyest move: it is as if Adele is saying to us, “You want the depths of sorrow? How ‘bout I cover The Fucking Cure?!?!?!?“
That momentary defiance crumbles, of course, on album closer “Someone Like You,” a song so affecting that the FDA should seriously look into classifying it as a controlled substance; play it in a public place and just watch the parade of wistful expressions and welled-up eyeballs. It’s exactly the right note to end on, insofar as it is a song about moving on that can’t, in fact, move on. “Never mind, I’ll find” someone else, Adele sings…but, someone just like that person she’s trying to move on from. She can’t reach escape velocity, can’t break the orbit despite having just detailed an album’s worth of scorn and hurt. But she wants to, and that’s something.
1. EMA, Past Life Martyred Saints
“Fuck California, you made me boring.” Those are the first words I’m sure most of us heard out of Erika M. Anderson this year, and they are the absolute models of what a lyric should be: direct, slightly opaque, more than a little cracked – and yet, still immediately accessible. Come to think of it, that seemingly untenable combination of descriptors could characterize the whole of Past Life Martyred Saints quite well. I’ve been listening to it for six months, and I still have no idea what exactly to make of it. It is, I can say, the strangest thing I’ve heard in years, and demands one’s attention as a result – and further demands that I proclaim it the Best Record of 2011. And not “strange” in the sense of “Hey, nerds! Look how atonal/yelpy/perverse I can be!” Those impulses aren’t particularly strange; there’s nothing surprising about being an avant-garde artist making avant-gard music. What is truly, defiantly weird is the attempt to have this many hooks and to be such a thoughtful freakazoid about them.
Further, Anderson has a voice of absolutely singular expressivity and power. The really great vocalizers are the ones that can get across diametrically opposed emotional qualities in the same breath, and there is never a moment on this album where Anderson is not doing exactly that: sustaining dread and desire in “Marked,” indifference and sympathy in “Butterfly Knife,” pleasure and pain in “Milkman.”
As I said, I don’t pretend to know what to do with this record – indeed, who would want to subject it to that kind of finality? – but there is one thing I insist upon, an aspect of its effectiveness that, even as the album has generated praise, has gone completely ignored (perhaps because it may be, I admit, more than a little in my own head): this is a PUNK record. That kind of assignation can be woefully misguided, I know – think of the idiots who used it to describe the ‘button-pushing’ of OFWGKTA – but I mean it in a richer sense. This album is far too dirty and synthetic to be a singer/songwriter record, far too dark to be an ‘indie’ record; no song has more than a few chords. Some described Anderson’s previous band Gowns as ‘drone-folk’, which I guess I can see, but this is a slightly different beast. It is, I think, the delivery on The Flaming Lips’ promise that ‘finally the punk rockers are taking acid’. And we are all the richer for it.
It turns out, however, that this might not be entirely of my own invention. In an article from earlier this year that recently came to my attention, Anderson crafts a mixtape that includes, among others exemplary aesthetic choices, tracks by Blatz and (Young) Pioneers. The choice of these two artists seems significant to me, not only because they are personal favorites of mine, but also because they represent the ideal approach to punk rock songwriting: you hear something in your influences that challenges you to do them one better, not by replicating their previous choices, but by taking the genre – so full of subversive possibility and yet so often content with mere facsimile – and doing something defiantly odd with it. Past Life Martyred Saints, then, would be the next step after that: learning the lessons of those who have tried to stretch punk rock to its limits and then pushing that much further, while taking care that one is still, you know, writing songs.
So, really, it comes down to this: fuck the Refused reunion, because THIS, my lovelies, is the shape of punk to come. This is an ultimatum, a gauntlet thrown down. Your silly little band was immediately not good enough the moment this album entered the world. We of the record-making persuasion now owe Anderson a commensurate response.
Thanks for listening. We will love harder in 2012.
This is all for Whitney. I will miss having your voice in this world forever.
-M
*I don’t really know if Norway has its own version of the Library of Congress, but surely if they did, what they would be most concerned with preserving is black metal albums, right? I don’t really understand black metal.
Oh, what a week it’s been. It seems as if no matter what schedule I set for myself, sticking to it just isn’t in the cards. So, maybe if I say that the third and final part of this super-sized post will be up before next Monday, you’ll all (anyone?) be pleasantly surprised.
This post is dedicated to the 2011 San Francisco 49ers.
7. How to Dress Well, Just Once
Full Disclosure: Tom is a friend, so feel free to be wary of whatever I say here. However, I think his output this year deserves a little ‘ink’, and not just because he brought SpaceGhostPurrp into my life. But, if I can at least try to convince you of my quasi-objectivity, I will freely admit that I didn’t really understand what Tom was doing the first time I heard 2010’s Love Remains; my ears were too cluttered with presuppositions (most of them structured by a drunken argument we once had, in which he kept trying to put on Merriweather Post Pavilion and I kept insisting that music should have stopped after Black Flag; needless to say, we are both a little hyperbolic and stubborn) which have since fallen away. Plus, I’m a partisan of the school of thought that everything has a time and a place, and in the dark of last winter I was gripped by a powerful dissatisfaction with channeling emotional sentiments, as I most often have, through neat and articulate little rock couplets. Rather, I wanted, longed for something warm and deep, something ultimately more vulnerable to just bathe in, and that’s exactly the kind of aural experience HTDW provides.
This EP – shown too little love in the year-end listomania – takes that game to the next level, and in two ways. First, in rearranging songs from LR for orchestra, without the gurgle and fuzz of the original laptop compositions, Tom proves to be a master of all different kinds of atmospherics: the dirty and the clean, the minimal and the soaring. Further, the lush arrangements and pristine recording on Just Once out Tom as what even his most effusive backers don’t give him near enough credit for being: a songwriter. That is, the sometimes inarticulate emotionality he is so good at getting across actually has damn good lyrics to back it up, and their directness lands all the more effectively for having emerged from such an all-encompassing pool of sound. This isn’t an argument, as some have made, against the ‘lo-fi’ aspects of LR; those choices were important for what that project was. It’s merely to say that one shouldn’t let those trappings trip you up in listening. HTDW already has LP number two in the can, and if this is any indication of where we’re about to be taken, get stoked.
6. Dum Dum Girls, Only in Dreams
Just this week, we received confirmation of a dispiriting fact that most of us already basically knew at heart: that Lookout! Records was dead – not on life-support, not dormant, not about to come roaring back, but completely, utterly without a pulse. I bring this up not to eulogize, but rather to provide what I think has been conspicuously absent context for this, the second LP by Dum Dum Girls. You see, in the absence of any new releases from Lookout! in recent years – or, we might say, in the presence of some of the truly unfortunate final records to which it signed its name – one hears less about what was, in the late ’90s, immediately identifiable as a “Lookout! Sound”: Ramones-influenced punk rock made primarily by smart, irreverent people (Ben Weasel and Joe Queer notwithstanding). Because of this bit of amnesia, most reviews of Dum Dum Girls seem to circle around to the same three bases of comparison: Vivian Girls, Best Coast and Frankie Rose. Which, OK, granted: there’s some member cross-pollination, and one could make an argument that this is what, say, Best Coast would sound like under the influence of something other than kittens and stinky, stinky weed (that’s not a knock; I think Best Coast are great!).
But really, a combination of factors working in the Dum Dum Girls’ favor – an allergy to their peers’ more psychedelic tendencies, the sharpness and precision of the lyrics, the aura of leather-jacketed toughness, the fact that the singer is named FUCKING DEE DEE – point, to these ears, in only one direction: this is the lost Lookout! release, the one we deserved somewhere after Hearts of Oak but not the one the label itself apparently thought we needed (shout-out to Commissioner Gordon). In actual fact, it does that aesthetic one better, eschewing the gimmicks (sorry Groovie Ghoulies), occasionally excessive cleverness (sorry MTX) and overarching meaninglessness (sorry…well, most of their other bands I guess). Only in Dreams is the sound of Ramones-punk coming of age in a way that it really couldn’t in the freewheeling ’90s; it’s sober, poignant even, and demands its own coterie of a dozen or so bands doing exactly this to maybe ensure that this generation will get a “Lookout! Sound” all its own.
5. Pusha-T, Fear of God II
I listened to more hip hop in 2011 than any previous year and, while I don’t pretend to be any kind of expert on the subject and this selection perhaps reflects that, Pusha-T pretty much decimated all other comers as far as I’m concerned. Now, other records were certainly, say, ‘better’ – more promising (A$AP Rocky), more intriguingly bizarre (Lil B) – but for reasons I’ll try to outline, I think this deserves to be here more. In a way, we don’t really know who Pusha-T is as a solo artist yet. His output thus far has been limited to a few key features, an underwhelming mixtape earlier this year, and now this, which he calls an EP (though at 12 tracks and 45 minutes, this must surely be the longest EP ever conceived by man). The reason I mention this, and why I go to bat for this record, is that he already risks being written off before really arriving. Even the good reviews this did, in fact, receive are full of words like ‘listenable’ and ‘decent’, as if the conventional wisdom were that, beginning with the last Clipse LP, he’s more or less going through the motions or phoning it in, having lost the unfiltered piss ‘n’ vinegar of Hell Hath No Fury. While I agree that precious little could ever truly live up to that monster of an album, I am in the minority that actually quite enjoyed Til the Casket Drops, and as a result I perhaps hear this record with more generous ears, and encourage you to do the same, lest its actual GREATness be overlooked.
Fear of God II takes all the best cuts from the admittedly lacking Fear of God and gives them a fresh, sharper mastering job that brings out the inventiveness of the production and the ingenuity of a guest roster that uniformly brings its ‘A’ game (even 50 Cent!) – though, I must admit I actually prefer the more blown-out take on “I Still Wanna” from Part I, a blatant Lex Luger rip-off that still sounds convincingly colossal. The rest of the track listing is filled out with even stronger new songs, including the standouts “Amen,” which features the memorable Kanye West couplet, “In Egypt they fightin’ for freedom/Cop pull you over? No reason? Beat him,” and “Trouble on My Mind,” which proves that Tyler, the Creator could actually turn out to be pretty exciting if he would drop the 10th-grade ‘hate-speech-as-shock-tactic’ nonsense (which, because that has made him spectacularly famous, he probably won’t; sigh…).
Before proceeding, an apology is necessary: I’m sorry for neglecting you, my wee little sphere of internet influence. Elective writing must periodically take a backseat to obligatory writing, and it turns out that, when faced with the prospect of adequately developing something called a “workable dissertation project,” it is more difficult to eke out the time to spill 750 words on Diane Lane’s fake movie bands and the like. Happily, however, these past months of teeth-grinding and temple-graying have had a pretty fucking righteous soundtrack, and as a result I’ve got some truly wonderful gems to share with you in this here retrospective, as well as a few more posts currently percolating.
I find it appropriate that I couldn’t really get around to digesting this year’s gigantic output – most of which, for the first time in years and years, I actually heard – until most of the rest of the commentariat had already chimed in. I’m always more or less late on the zeitgeist, but then again I don’t think these choices, with a few notable exceptions, reflect anything particularly zeitgeist-y. I focus on albums rather than songs – the standard currency in the sovereign republic of The Warmest Room – because great songs are, wonderfully, everywhere. A truly great album – or EP – is something much rarer, and I want to give that all the respect in the world. I don’t have anything particularly enlightening or “meta-” to say about the activity of compiling lists of this kind; I simply really, really love doing it, and it seems a natural outgrowth of what this project was originally intended to do: get to the good stuff! Further, this year, for reasons that may become more or less clear, has, both in the living and in the retrospecting, seemed to me to have an overarching feel, vibe, ‘bag’, or whatever you want to call it, and treating it as a unit seems fair and accurate. What we have here isn’t necessarily an objective assessment, but rather a series of, say, frequencies that have sought me out in the past twelve months, in countdown-order of resonance,* broken up into three or four posts over the next few days.
Don’t pet them.
10. Jay-Z & Kanye West, Watch the Throne/Lady Gaga, Born This Way
Let’s begin with two exercises in Pure Excess. While I probably listened to these more than any other records on this list, I would never want to place them any higher than this very spot. They are, by any rubric, absolute travesties to any and every idea I have about what an ‘album’ should be. They’re overlong, indulgent, and couldn’t find coherence with a map and a flashlight. However, the good on here is weirder, bigger and better than anything else released this year, and you have to admire the ambition to SHOOT THE GODDAMN MOON, know what I mean?
On Watch the Throne I tend to revel in the ubiquitous “N****s in Paris,” the Lex Luger spazz-out “H.A.M.,” and the total-fucking-destruction-Godzilla-stomp of “Who Gon’ Stop Me,” which stand out against the lurching duds that open and close the LP (I belong to a small minority that i) finds “No Church in the Wild” interminable” and ii.) does’t quite see the point of Frank Ocean yet.) I have a more complicated relationship to Born This Way, if only because I fully expect Mr. West to always go a wee bit overboard. Gaga, on the other hand, seemed recently to be taking inspiration from the golden age of pop concision on The Fame Monster, with eight perfect tunes in a little over a half-hour, so the disappointment registers more intensely. And really, the title track here, while admirable I suppose in sentiment, is just abysmal, and “Yoü and I” seems merely average compared to Gaga’s previous piano-driven ‘Loaf-out “Speechless.” However, I am positively addicted to “Hair,” which, driven by the ontologically dubious proclamation “I am my hair,” distills teenage rebellion down to something approaching the following: Fuck-you-Mom-and-Dad-you-can’t-control-what-I-do-with-my-hair! Obviously, one sympathizes. Further, as I think I’ve mentioned previously, “The Edge of Glory” is the sort of tune words like ‘transcendent’ and ‘soaring’ were invented for, and accomplishes with almost mathematical precision Gaga’s stated purpose here: to do Springsteen for the dance floor.
So, I suppose the ultimate takeaway is that if anyone had bothered to consult me, I could’ve produced a tight, ten-song edit of either of these records that could sit proudly at the top of this list. As it is, they’re both kinda pretenders to the…oh, you get the idea.
9. Sparkleshit, Shits ‘n’ Giggles
I spend probably more time than I should – considering I do this primarily for my own amusement – thinking about what I see as an overarching complacency in punk rock, at least at the level of songwriting. Now, more often than not if someone has this thought it means exactly one thing: “Congratulations, yr fukkin’ old! You will be issued the next available Wild Flag or Fucked Up album, whichever comes first.” However, while you all have every right to be suspicious of me, I think there’s something more to this observation than mere soon-to-be-ex-punk malaise (I mean, I would think that; it’s my observation). I hear it every time a band contents itself with replicating, with disturbing exactness, the sound of, say, Discharge, Lifetime, or, god help us, the Gin Blossoms (pop-punk in particular has mined some truly dubious territory for influence of late). It’s a peculiar kind of failure of imagination, something that we cannot, should not stand for.
Thankfully, somewhere in the basements of New Brunswick, three young women are, at perhaps this very moment, making the most righteous, god-awful racket in the Tri-State Area. The seven songs on this demo – the only such release to squeak onto this list, though it received heavy competition from other gold-as-fuck demo EPs by Swearin’, Livid (2010? Eh, I heard it this year…), Sex Hair, Very Okay and Wild Assumptions – toy with blown out minimalism while never losing an attentive and inventive sense of song structure. Whether clattering like a carnival blown to bits or driving like a dirtbag disco, it all sounds, ineluctably, like Sparkleshit – and, quite welcomely, like precious little else. Having seen them a few times now, I think I can attribute this to the fact that all that all three members switch to all four instruments (guitar, bass, drums and keys) and take turns leading the vocal attack. To interpret that gesture a bit, it means that they both have a holistic sense of the music they’re making – they can all play any part at any given time on any instrument and, I would imagine, write parts for all of them – but aren’t overly beholden to that overarching vision, and can play with each individual perspective internal to the project. Or maybe, since instrument switching isn’t necessarily anything new in DIY punk, they’re just three particularly brilliant kids who happened to find each other. Whatever it is, this fucking rips and I can’t wait to see what they do next.
8. Beyoncé, 4
I consider myself a more or less vigilant observer of conventional wisdom, and it seems like most critics went through the same trajectory of being slightly nonplussed by 4 when it first came out, while slowly coming around to it by year’s end. I, on the other hand, didn’t hear the damn thing until December – primarily because I was still poring over Sasha Fierce, another recent acquisition – so I can’t really speak for how lasting my own impressions of it will be. I will say that I find the initial disappointment completely befuddling, because this is, really, a keeper, and not just because it delivers all the requisite vocal pyrotechnics and all-star songwriting we now expect. Rather, this record really is something unique: after the frustration of “If I Were a Boy” and the ensuing glee at having something special in “Halo,” this is Beyoncé taking a more sober look at that special something, and trying to figure out how to keep it. That is, this isn’t the thrill of new love, or the righteous indignation of an Independent Woman (Part 1) scorned, but rather a ballad-heavy investment in the more quotidian aspects of being boy- or girlfriended.
Critics (rightly) went apeshit over “Countdown,” which is truly delightful, but I worry that its kitchen-sink approach to club banger-dom (complete with Drake-esque hashtagging!), so impressive on the first few listens, won’t really hold up with time. For my money, the tune to savor is “Best Thing I Never Had,” in which a former lover looks, let’s say, less impressive with a little distance. I would argue that this is actually the most mature moment on the record: what we will ‘never have’ is precisely anything resembling a Best Thing. Now, that’s not to go all Louis CK on you; we will have great, amazing, life-altering loves. But to compare them to any superlative like ‘Best’ compromises the very singularity of those times; more than a mere kiss-off, “Best Thing…” reads like we’re putting to bed the very concept of an unnecessarily idealistic approach to romantic love. And that’s really something.
Finally, let the record show: I can tolerate a lot of ridiculous shit, but even I think the expression “swagu” is stupid.
No Warmest Room this week, but you can scoot on over to Verso Books to check out my short little piece on #OccupyWallStreet, which of course finds me showing some love to some killer tracks.
Plus, it links to a download of both of Allergic to Bullshit’s EPs, which is the greatest thing that’s happened in weeks.
The Warmest Room began, I’ve previously claimed, as a way to force myself to write about music regularly. But beyond that procedural concern, I was motivated by something a little more intimate and covert as well: the focus on trying to think through my reasons for loving certain songs followed directly from a worry that my engagement with music (and culture writ large at times) had turned merely negative. Put more simply, I was a hater, through and through. Now, retaining something of that impulse is definitely valuable, as some things are actually bullshit, and need to be identified as such.* But as an operating principle, it’s both aesthetically limiting and, more importantly, emotionally deadening. You invent your own conventional wisdom, and find it confirmed in everything you encounter – a pernicious tautology designed to shut down the possibility of joy.
However, even after working on this ongoing project for just a little over a month, I find myself listening differently. This shift began, to be properly genealogical, with a little experiment I conducted about a year and a half ago, in which, out of curiosity about the limits of my own reactionary commitments, I downloaded – illegally; COME ‘N’ GET ME RIAA! – the full discographies of two artists I had previously written off, and devoted some time to really listening to and engaging with their records. The first, Vampire Weekend, confirmed my initial hypothesis: fine enough songcraft and pretty smart, but doesn’t really light my fire.
The second, however, was a different story altogether. Joanna Newsom, whose albums had annoyed me to no end, I found to be utterly surprising and deeply affecting upon actual reflection. I realized, further, that I’d quite unjustly placed her in the wrong aesthetic box, based on certain names with which her own was often mentioned.** Instead of my own ‘conventional wisdom’, I started to hear strange resonances: the warped-Disney-musical quality of Jon Brion’s production work with Fiona Apple; the intricate wordiness of Bruce Springsteen’s early records. In short, I had my ears re-opened ever so slightly, and I count Ms. Newsom today among my favorite performers. Further, since starting this blog – gah, that word again! – I’ve found myself completely enamored of new records I would have never even thought to listen to otherwise: St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy, for instance, or, most recently, Dum Dum Girls’ Only in Dreams. The result is this: I want to hear everything again, with a sort of wonder, and an eye for what works in ways I might not expect, in places I had once resigned to the dustbin of Pitchfork year-end top ten lists. More succinctly: I want to ACTUALLY listen.
I indulge in such a lengthy preface in order to adequately set up what now seems to me to be a particularly intractable failure of listening: the curious case of William Patrick Corgan’s post-Smashing Pumpkins outfit, Zwan.
The thing about Zwan is that nobody likes Zwan, to the extent that I can conjure only one instance of ever hearing anyone say anything nice about them, even in passing. But it goes further than that: it is not enough that Zwan is unloved, but rather it has become a part of our conventional wisdom that the Zwan album Mary, Star of the Sea – and it’s leadoff single “Honestly,” which I will treat at some length – is a dud. I should stress, first, that this is a completely reasonable position to hold; the idea that Billy Corgan never did anything worthwhile after Adore (if you’re generous) or Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness (if you’re not) is, one might say, ‘actionable intelligence’ that would spare one from accidentally subjecting oneself to, for instance, Zeitgeist or TheFutureEmbrace, which I as a diehard would defend as Having Their Moments, but on whose wavelength the general public isn’t really going to get.
But Zwan is different, and not just because I have a fondness for, as Tyrion Lannister would have it, ‘bastards and broken things’. Its unfortunate infamy is, I think, ultimately the product of a reactionary adherence to precisely the kind of conventional wisdom, this time permeating alternative culture on the whole, that prevents one from truly listening: the ‘truism’ that Billy Corgan is someone who once might have made meaningful things but who subsists now as a kind of self-parody of self-parody.
So I encourage you, as I often do, to look again at “Honestly.” There are, perhaps, better numbers on Zwan’s only LP, but given that this was its first single, we can infer that this is how they wanted to first be heard. It remains my favorite, and worth picking over.
The first thing you notice is, of course, the flange: more flange than you’ve ever even imagined or thought reasonable, over a riff both simpler and more major (in the musical sense) than anything the Pumpkins dared attempt. And that should tell us, immediately, that the terrain has shifted. Coming out of Corgan’s better-known band’s Sabbath-tinged alternative rock with gothic performative tendencies, we have emerged into the blinding light of pure pop-rock excess. Further, this musical cue signals a thematic transition as well: while Pumpkins lyrical themes cavalierly melded depressive affect and Christian symbolism in a way many other ’90s bands would attempt to poorly imitate, Corgan here finally delivers on the promise of unadulterated rock’n’roll messianism. That is, I don’t think it’s accidental that the first words you hear out of this new Billy are, “I believe…” – he’s cranked up the positivity, the uplift, the joy. He is trying to, and this is perhaps why I treasure this record so much, get you HYPED.
Jimmy Chamberlin’s loping drums, the warm bath of more-layered-guitar-flourishes-than-should-be-legal, the accompanying video’s band hangouts and careless smiles, the shattering simplicity of what is still Corgan’s best lyric – “There’s no place that I could be without you.”: it all serves this new vision, this more or less religious desire to make you feel SOMETHING, ANYTHING, as long as it’s great and true.
There’s a cynical way to read all of this, especially in the context of an album whose song titles include “Baby Let’s Rock!” and “Yeah!” And, shit, who knows? Maybe there’s some truth to that. But there’s SOMETHING to this music, something that won’t leave me alone, that constantly seduces me into its greatness. I almost can’t describe it anymore, perhaps because I’ve been so worn down by the conventional wisdom to the contrary. But people forget that, at the time of its release, Mary, Star of the Sea was actually reasonably well-reviewed. Sure, Pitchfork snarked it to death, but that’s what they did at the time. And really, if you care what Pitchfork has to say about a Zwan album, you don’t really understand why you’re listening to a Zwan album in the first place.
I think maybe it comes down to this: Billy Corgan had to have known, after Machina, that most of the tastemakers weren’t particularly rooting for him anymore. And I’d like think that what followed from that – what I think you can actually hear in the dripping, overdriven quality of “Honestly” – was, rather than a calculated cred-grab, instead a gigantic Fuck You & Thanks. It’s as if Corgan were saying, “OK, you think I can’t be great at what I used to do? Fine, you’re right, I’ll just be GREAT AT BEING GREAT HAHAHAHAHAHA!”
And that gesture, while surely approval-seeking and occasionally manifesting itself in overly formal or rigid music, still accommodates the unexpected. That’s why, while you will never, EVER hear me praise a guitar solo, I still find Corgan’s on this track wholly essential. It’s cracked, wonky, almost completely nonsensical, and as such unearths the strangeness of the seemingly predictable or even mathematical structures surrounding it. A truly, for lack of a better word, transcendent moment.
In closing, I would like to offer an imperfect analogy for the sporting inclined: think of Billy Corgan as Matt Hasselbeck – a Pro Bowl quarterback, veteran of the playoffs, and one-time NFC champion with the Seattle Seahawks. All of those great accomplishments represent the Smashing Pumpkins first three/four LPs. Machina, then, would be the Seahawks 5-11 egg-laying in the 2009 season, and their limping gait into the following year’s playoffs with a pitiful 7-9 record. Expectations have tempered, and we know we are witnessing a ‘great’ make the painful transition into a ‘former great’. But Zwan, if you’ve followed me this far, is Corgan’s January 2011 first round playoff trouncing of the defending world champion New Orleans Saints, and “Honestly” is Marshawn Lynch’s 67-yard touchdown run.***
But the Seahawks collapsed in their next game, and to some extent the conventional wisdom about them and Hasselbeck – and Corgan too – has reasserted itself. But this is why I think there’s more to the football analogy than mere cleverness. I like very much this notion that, on Any Given Sunday, a down-trodden, past its prime team can rally spectacularly and, in beating the odds-on favorite, surprise you. This applies, I would argue, to any cultural creator, even those who seem resigned to delivering nothing but diminishing returns. And we have to be mindful of this, and keep our ears open, lest the next unexpected upsurge of greatness – wherever it may come from – get unfairly Zwan’d.
-M
*I’m looking at you, Bon Iver.
**Still got no time for that other weirdo-with-a-beardo: Devendra Banhart.
***Who’s Tavaris Jackson in this analogy? The Pains of Being Pure at Heart?
At the risk of repetition, I’d like to begin, again, in a moment of perplexity. Part of this is sheer necessity – some things one likes are self-evidently good and, ergo, not very interesting to write about. For instance, how could anything my dumb ass had to say ever do justice to how great Hickey actually are? The answer is that it really couldn’t; they just ARE that good. Further, there’s a fair bit of institutional support (i.e. like every punk ever) for making such a claim, and that kind of consensus saps the Interesting right out of aesthetic debate. There are, absolutely, strange phenomena associated with such overarching agreement that are worth exploring: why, for instance, did we all agree in the Fall of 2003, across subculture and affectation, that “Crazy in Love” was perfect? But if Beyoncé caught lightning in a bottle by releasing said perfect track, trying to identify and isolate that perfection in writing would be like lassoing that lightning and trying to ride it for eight glorious seconds in some down home Texan rodeo. That is, it’s fucking hard.
But lest you think I’m just avoiding the real work of critique by indulging my own idiosyncratic proclivities (OK, maybe a bit), allow me one rationalization more! Namely this: I would argue that if you don’t have enthusiasms you can’t quite explain and for which you can find no institutional support, if you don’t love certain things (songs, for instance) beyond all easy reasons-giving and interpretation, I begin to wonder whether or not you have ever actually loved anything. And it is precisely these instances that bear further examination, because they override all talk of criteria and activate that part of you, oft-ignored but never effaced, that just likes stuff.
That doesn’t mean, however, that talking about such instances and investigating their whys and what-fors can’t yield anything. And that’s what has me thinking, tonight, of “Dreaming of You” by Selena Quintanilla-Pérez.
I have a deep, abiding love for Selena, and this song in particular. However, unlike most of the works I blather about here – which, even if they aren’t your particular brand of whiskey, at least bear some smattering of objectively interesting musical qualities that I can try to illuminate for the sake of argument – the sad fact is that this tune is no one’s idea of great, with precious little to recommend it. The backing track is sub-Celine Dion with the occasional Tejano flourish, the lyrics contain not one original idea or interesting turn of phrase, and Selena’s voice, while exhibiting a knack for breathy, unexpected phrasing on other tracks, does nothing to distinguish itself in this performance.
Now, mere memory-saturation would seem like a reasonable explanation for my perverse attachment: I was newly ten years-old when I heard it announced, over the PA system at a San Antonio Spurs game (Robinson/Rodman era*…jealous?), that this young singer from nearby Corpus Christi with all the potential in the world had been murdered in the most Greek of tragic circumstances. With that, the song’s narrative and cultural afterlife seem wrapped-up: young girl sings of an unrequited love, dreamt about but never fulfilled due to her too-early passing, plunging the song’s relatively simple story into shadow.
And while I do think of all this when I hear it – usually late at night, when all the world is sleeping – it seems far too tidy. The thing is, I think what I love is precisely everything I just spent a paragraph claiming was so undistinguished about it: its shallowness, its not-too-uncomfortable longing and easy wish-fulfilment, its relative banality. That is, there is something about the Lite FM rendering and what I could generously call Selena’s ‘unshowy’ vocal performance that just lets those tritenesses be trite. I would further argue that only in remaining trite does the song itself actually do justice to its subject matter.
What I think I mean by this is the following: the words themselves are meaningless abstractions, but presented in such a way that there isn’t really anything grand or romantic about them, perhaps because they don’t deserve such flourishes. They express slow, achy little feelings, of which I would imagine we are usually embarrassed; so why multiply that embarrassment by ratcheting up the capital-E Emotional quality of the tune itself? That moment of the night Selena describes, saturated with a longing we don’t quite understand, causes us to pine in pat abstractions, somewhat ashamed to be ‘wishing on stars’ and the like. It’s not any shattering kind of shame, just the garden-variety blushing of liking somebody maybe a little too much for your own good with no original way of saying so. And here’s the important part: these banal abstractions, through which we might articulate such sentiments, do nothing to compromise their truth. A feeling rendered tritely is still a feeling, and these does-he/she-or-doesn’t-he/she-like-me feelings are particularly well suited to being so expressed. They are both completely run-of-the-mill and still utterly affecting, and we can’t all have our thesauruses out trying to find exactly the right word for them. Often, the most familiar word will do.
The song’s ending should also read a little differently now. The reversal in the final verse and chorus, in which dreaming of becomes almost magically dreaming with, is so very much Not How Life Works. No one is going to realize, of their own accord, how you feel about them; we might as well wish away poverty while we’re at it. But the song has to end here, because this is how abstract tritenesses of its kind HAVE to end. I prefer to think of it not as a literal end to the story according to the lyric’s immanent temporality**, but rather as part of the dream itself, the place to which our sleep-deprived and love-besotted imagination must immediately flee. In reality, Selena still dreams in her room alone, unseen, awaiting her courage and holding tight to no one in particular.
*I should perhaps mention that my mother’s last-ditch effort to get me to take Christianity seriously as a life decision involved bringing me to see David Robinson preach at a Six Flags on the outskirts of San Antonio. It didn’t quite work, but Mom: I love you for trying.
According to my moderately-sophisticated zeitgeist-measuring instruments, Clueless should be on all of our minds right about now. As we perma-students drag ourselves back to what always seems to vaguely resemble high school no matter how advanced we get, great bands are naming themselves BRILLIANTLY after the film’s characters, and conversation after conversation comes back to Cher and her cohort. Further, this video circulated last week, featuring every outfit Ms. Horowitz donned in the film. As meme-ish clips go, it’s kind of a dud – though I do laugh, out loud, every time Cher yells, “Where’s my white collarless shirt from Fred Segal?!?!” – but it brought back to my mind the woman who was always the hero of the film for me, who is consistently neglected, and to whose defense I must always come when the conversation circles around to the pop musics.
No, not Kim Shattuck. That’s for another time. I’m talking, of course, about Jill Sobule, writer and performer of one of the most recognizable songs from Clueless’ soundtrack, “Supermodel,” and the one heard in that I-want-so-badly-to-go-viral video.
Sobule has, as far as I have been able to tell, a small and idiosyncratic fanbase – large enough for her to raise some thousands of dollars for recording on Kickstarter (before every band who needed a van was doing it), but small enough that I’ve legitimately never met anyone else who had heard anything but this song and her other minor hit “I Kissed a Girl.”* Which is really criminal, because she’s just about the cleverest, most empathetic folk-pop songwriter you’ll hear, and the self-titled album from which “Supermodel” was lifted highlights Sobule’s gifts as a shrewd observer and student of music history.** Like the rest of that LP – and most things that are good – “Supermodel” is a sugary Trojan Horse for far weirder, more complicated sentiments, but I want to address it today primarily because I find two aspects of its cultural life to be seemingly at loggerheads, and this has bewildered me for ages:
i.) The track is transparently satirical.
ii.) Everyone I know who loved it as a kid appeared to take it manifestly seriously.
It would be easy to chalk this up to a mere youthful lack of attention to detail, and there’s something surely right about this. However, to hew too closely to this line of thought would basically diagnose the tune’s mid-’90s adolescent fans, sincerely singing and dancing along, as mere idiots who missed the point of the lyric, which strikes me as very cruel indeed. It would also shut down the circuit of cultural meaning-production at its most fruitful point of convergence: that moment when appreciators get something “wrong,” but in an interesting and possibly productive way. These kids – myself included, for a moment there – made some kind of sense of “Supermodel” such that it spoke not indirectly of someone else but DIRECTLY TO THEM. And further, even through Sobule’s more biting jokes, I still hear it in much the same way I did as a “tween,” and if you’ll follow me down the rabbit hole, I’d like to try to sort out what I mean exactly.
At first listen, the track simply takes the piss out of the fashion industry’s effect on the psyches of young women, with a seemingly straightforward sarcasm that would normally flag BAD satire. It takes as its fundamental structure the kind of flip “I wanna” statements that characterize songs written by the most immature of high school punk bands (mine included) before they figure out what songs should actually be about. Hell, the entire bridge could read as one big, arguably victim-blaming anorexia joke. Not quite high comedy, and there is ample evidence for anyone looking for it that Sobule takes a merely dismissive stance toward her narrator.
And yet, and yet! The song’s “I” does have, most assuredly, a real, beating heart underneath Sobule’s detached veneer, revealed first in the opening line: “I don’t care what my teachers say.” That’s a pretty immediately accessible fuck-you-teenage-authority expression, and its presence, coupled with both the cheeky-but-kind-of-serious pop-punk bounce of the backing track and the, for lack of a better word, aspirational tone of the verses (all “I wish” and future tense) proves the depth of feeling the titular supermodel receives from Sobule. And I don’t mean ‘aspirational’ in some creepy, thinspo kind of way; I mean it merely in the sense that to some degree we all know what it’s like to not be, at the moment, quite what we’d like to be.
This is the only way I can make sense of the fact the chorus itself seems made for chanting, and that we who loved (and love) the tune sang it so proudly. I would guess that few of us wanted to literally be actual supermodels,*** but the full phrase, “I’m gonna be a supermodel” seemed to stand in for something we felt was missing from our lives, some greatness we knew was inside us but hadn’t quite tapped yet.
While that phrase also surely rings as a harbinger of certain doom, beneath all the jokes, both tasteful and tasteless, “Supermodel” is a story about wanting to do or be something for which one receives no institutional reinforcement, and the advantage that mass culture will readily take of you in the process of trying to siphon those impulses for its own ends. This obviously affects young girls and boys to unequal and disproportionate degrees, a fact that the afore-mentioned bridge seems to drive home more and more upon repeated listens, sounding less like a throwaway gag and more like a dire warning. However, Sobule is subtle enough to realize that those impulses themselves are not the problem; the desire to prove your elders wrong, to KILL IT in spite of people saying you can’t or shouldn’t is something that isn’t too hard to tap into. That’s why chanting along to the chorus still feels cathartic to me, and not just for nostalgic reasons. Sobule has granted the narrator all the goodwill in the world, making her “I” rather accessible and transferable, and our young sing-alongs slightly less misguided. The target of the more scathing condemnation, however, is the sort of society or community that would pervert those noble goals, crushing spirits and lives in the process.
It’s a delicate balancing act, a parodic feat of compassion and righteous indignation, and that, my friends, is why Jill Sobule is still smarter than all of us.
***Perhaps some did…hard to say I suppose. But then again, this isn’t some peer-reviewed sociology paper, just an attempt to make sense of “vibes” that I “felt.”
I hope it’s clear by now that there’s not exactly a ‘Warmest Room’ Sound. There IS, however, a rather particular ‘Warmest Room’ Sensibility. I’ve struggled in recent years to describe exactly what that is, what peculiar cocktail of abandon and melody, of bite and sensitivity, of irreverence and sincerity would produce the kind of record that would, like Wittgenstein’s proverbial real book of ethics, destroy all other records in the world. I raise this because I am genuinely perplexed by my own interests sometimes, and I have on occasion been accused of having Good Taste, Bad Taste, Weird Taste and No Taste. And, unless one breathes the rarefied air of the Tastemaker, I don’t think this is uncommon – that is, it is at once very personal and also gets to the heart of the fundamental strangeness of what, exactly, we enjoy when we enjoy it. I tend to think that this is the unfailing applicability of Kant’s argument in his Critique of Judgment: that in our own aesthetic experience, we undergo simultaneously a moment of modesty – this enjoyment is my own, and I surely cannot expect anyone to agree with it – AND a moment of evangelism – or, everyone in principle should be able to enjoy things this way, if I could only get them to see as I do.
But away with philosophical pretension, because the next time anyone asks me to explain myself in this regard I’m just going to sit them down and make them listen to “People Who Died” by the Jim Carroll Band.
Carroll has now, sadly, joined those titular People. I have a strange relationship to the man’s work; I’ve never read any of his writings, haven’t seen The Basketball Diaries, nothing like that. I know him first as that weird poem-reciting guy on “Junkie Man”, but then really as a songwriter, one who on a consistent basis makes exactly the kind of records that shiver these ol’ timbers. Let me try to explain why.
The first thing one notices about this track in particular is its simplicity and elegance. It is quite literally what the title promises: a list of people dear to Carroll who have passed on, and one or two (perfect, precisely observed) scene-setting details about the manner of said passing. In that sense, it takes a weighty subject and treats it with an almost hyperbolic dispassion, a theme well-supplemented by the straightforward 1-4-1-5-1 structure of the chord change, and Carroll’s own anti-melody delivery. I could not think of a more matter of fact sentiment on which to hang a chorus than, “They were all my friends, and they died.”
On paper, I will freely admit that this sounds a lot like mere monotony – especially since the song repeats itself two distinct times, as if it were one 2:30 song played twice. However, I would argue that it is this very simplicity that demands we pay closer attention to the subtle variations and heterogeneous elements that do occur. For instance, nothing about Carroll’s most emphatically emotional moment – voice cracking, proclaiming “I miss ‘em, they died!” at about 3:53 – would work without its surrounding rigidity.
But loving “People Who Died” isn’t just a matter of finding nuggets of vulnerability amidst rote recitation; far from it! Underlying that complex dance between hardened resignation and real regret, the number is catchy as all goddamned get out, with joyful, gospel-style accents on the chorus’ numerous repetitions of “DIED! DIED!” This turns the otherwise terrifyingly cold refrain into something as made for chanting along as any dunderheaded Oi! track. Carroll doesn’t just make space for sobriety, pain, and now joy, but rather rips them all apart and sets them at each other armed and dangerous, defying conventional notions of what our little hermetic feelings are supposed to look like.
As such, Carroll has produced a truer account of mourning than any I’ve heard set to music. It’s not quite wallowing, not quite the celebration of a Detective’s Wake, but something far more unsettled: an expression of actually committed ambivalence. Stoic, morbid, buoyant: we undergo them all, perhaps simultaneously, sometimes in sequence, with no real sense of finality or resolution. Death, particularly of those who leave us too soon, is so maddeningly absurd that cataloguing our sorrows in list form might seem like the only way to render it half-sensical. But it is also not so absurd that we need lose the nearness of those loved ones and the hurt their passing may cause us. Further still, that hurt is never so all encompassing that we don’t catch ourselves erupting into the (very) odd bout of song, dance, laughter. And that, I think, is the best tribute one could ever provide to those People Who Died, the one that Jim Carroll provides here: that in life and death, we giggled, reveled, sobbed, compartmentalized and tried to carry on, both with you and for you.
After my first few posts made ample use of the WABAC Machine (pronounced “Way Back,” natch), I really, truly wanted to talk about something contemporary and “now,” not least because two-thirds’ the way through the year I have somehow actually digested more than twenty real-live 2011 releases and find myself enamored of quite a few nuggets. But what to say, and about what? EMA? DuFlocka Rant? P.S. Eliot? All exciting and commendable in their own ways, but I’m either too close to these new songs (e.g. turning to jelly whenever I hear Clarence Clemons’ last sax solo on “The Edge of Glory”) or still seeing them too clinically (can’t listen to Watch the Throne without thinking about how I would edit it) to really say anything cogent or new.
Plus, I keep firing up this song instead, the closing number from the film Streets of Fire (dir. Walter Hill, 1984), starring Diane Lane as the perpetually-imperiled lead singer of the fictional band Ellen Aim & the Attackers. I won’t explain what happens in the movie, primarily because even after seeing it I have no idea what happened in it. I will say it’s a nice little artifact – a cousin of the second two Prince films – from a time in Hollywood when you could get funding to make something objectively incoherent, as long as it ROCKED. For those (over-) familiar with Twin Peaks, perhaps this will make some sense: it is the filmic equivalent of James Hurley saying, “Sometimes I think I should just get on my bike and go.”
Reflective of this is the title, “Tonight is What it Means to Be Young,” which is one of those magical turns of phrase that can somehow be self-evidently meaningless and, simultaneously, immediately comprehensible, and whose kernel of truth is worth excavating – the kind of thing the track’s composer, Jim Steinman, does best. You might know Steinman’s work as Meatloaf’s chief collaborator,* but this is by far the best tune he ever wrote – a difficult feat for the author of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” and the terribly beautiful and impossibly absurd “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
Now, it seems to be one of Newton’s laws of physics that at any given karaoke bar on any given night, you will hear “Total Eclipse” sung at least once. Not to take anything away from Bonnie Tyler’s impressive ode to lunar phenomena, but if there were any justice in the world you would hear “Tonight is What it Means to Be Young” at least as often, if not more. Further, whoever is belting the vocals on this track should’ve been a star seven times over. The internet seems to be in some disagreement as to who, exactly, that young woman was – IMDB says Laurie Sargent, Wikipedia insists it’s Holly Sherwood, and this recent article can’t decide – and this kind of obscurity would seem to be the major pitfall of those artists who provide the actual content for fake movie bands. The fact that Kay Hanley, for instance, did excellent work as the singing voice of Josie and the Pussycats didn’t exactly make a ton of folks rush out and buy Letters to Cleo’s back catalog, even though it should have. As it is, all we really have is this one outstanding vocal performance to sift through and make sense of.
And what a performance it is! It has the hugeness required to carry a track like this, but there’s something slightly off about it, befitting the batshit, time-out-of-joint world of the film itself. The singer, whoever she may be, knows just where to throw a grunt or growl, and the vibrato, usually indicative of professional polish, is instead tense and anxious, about to spin off this planet entirely but with just enough control to stay in orbit. Anyone who doubts the expressive possibilities of objectively ‘good’ or trained voices – I suppose I’m really yelling at Younger Me here – needs to let themselves be enveloped by the way she attacks the line, “AND A BOY’D BE THE NEXT BEST THIIIIING”. It’s big, but weird big.
This fundamental strangeness carries over into the arrangement, which at heart is classic ‘Loaf, but taken to its most logical and absurd extreme; I stopped counting after the third synth solo, and the overarching impression is that if you listened close enough you could hear some lowly studio musician hammering on an actual kitchen sink in the background. It strikes me that this, despite all the Springsteen comparisons proffered from reviewer-ville, is the sound Gaga was really going for on Born This Way: Springsteen, yes, but club-ready Springsteen with a taste for the theatrical, underlying some serious, unfuckwithable vocal pyrotechnics – which is really just another way of saying, “Meat Loaf”.
Most could probably let the song coast on this alone, but the surrounding decadence and ’80s movie soundtrack origin, mask the counter-intuitive underlying truth of the lyrical sentiment. After two stanzas describing her dreams of perfect angel boys, doing their angel-boy things on beaches and in forests, the singer flips the box, intoning that she doesn’t “see any angels in the city,” and that if she “can’t get an angel [she] can still get a boy, and a boy’d be the next best thing.” The second half of the verse takes this same form, until finally the vocalist admits that her dalliances with angels were “only a dream, and tonight is for real.” Thus, the strange, Jesus-by-way-of-D&D imagery of the first stanzas stands in for fantasy as such, for those visions we might carry of romantic perfection, while the rug-pull brings us back to reality – the “tonight” that is “for real” – but, and this is important, blissfully. In a wonderful and improbable marriage between lyric and vocal quality, the singer articulates those first stanzas in ominous tones, while the third (and sixth) are where the real transcendence happens, as if to be perfectly clear about the danger of living according to idealized images and the potential joy and excitement of indulging in what reality – messy, this-worldly – has to offer.
This, then, recasts the strangeness of the title itself. For, if “tonight” is “for real,” but also “what it means to be young,” then Steinman/Sherwood/Sargent seem to be arguing that the youthful impulse to indulge in the here-and-now is actually on firmer ground than whatever plans we elderly might envision for our lives. Let me see if I can spin this out a bit, according to the song’s own internal logic: seeing ‘angels’ instead of ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ is actually, it would seem, a product of age itself, which the very tonightness of tonight shakes us out of. Fantasy, rather than being the result of naïveté, is actually the leftovers of so many sedimented experiences; to “be young,” on the contrary, is to take the moment as it is, in its particularity, and to grant it significance even in the absence of any grand narrative into which it might fit.
But these three elements taken together – vocal, lyric, arrangement – give us something still stranger. That is, even in the absence of grand narratives and fantasies (‘angels’ and the like) our terrestrial, ‘tonight-bound’ experiences still lend themselves to inflated, operatic articulation in the form of seven-minute, overstuffed rock songs. And this is the truth of tunes like this, but also the best, most bombastic moments of both Meat Loaf and Springsteen: that if we disabuse ourselves of our fantasies – of a life beyond this world and these particular circumstances – we can find that the source of actual transcendence has been right here, all along, waiting for us to see it in the correct light and, more importantly, to set it to appropriately gigantic music such that it might be shared with others.
That’s what music critics always seem to me to be missing, but that the best musicians actually understand quite well: that our relationship to music isn’t just a qualitative exercise in sifting through the good and bad and likes and dislikes; on the contrary, it is one of the few remaining repositories of a very real and potent variety of wholly secularized religious experience – of, as Steinman puts it in the chorus, reveling, fire-starting and dancing not in the hopes of an afterlife, but rather in the absence of all metaphysical reassurances. It is, as the song goes, all we really got.
-M
*Or not, considering that during a recent bout of bar trivia I was shocked to be the sole individual in a room of fifty to correctly identify his role in the Bat Out of Hell trilogy. What the fuck are people listening to these days? Like, really?
[Love to Rayna Savrosa, for bringing this into my life, and for everything.]
In the early 2000s, a beloved punk band from the West Coast unexpectedly released a genre-altering, politically charged rock opera. Complete with classic musical theater moves – marching band beats, narrative-like changes in time signature, rigorous thematic consistency, instrumental interludes, and call/response vocals – the album marked a radical step forward for the artist in question, and found itself on dozens of year end top-tens at major publications.
Yes, for a moment there it seemed like everyone’s favorite album was Tragedy’s Vengeance.*
OK, now that I’ve got my lulz in, I want to be completely serious about the fact that Tragedy are seriously ridiculous, and this is exactly what makes them exceptional. Through the lens of their second LP’s opening number, “Conflicting Ideas,” I hope to convince you that: i.) crust IS theater, and ii.) Tragedy are one of the few bands to realize this.
Now, my comrade Ben Parker – who somehow writes longer blog posts than I do – takes Tragedy overVengeance, precisely because it avoids the trappings of what persists in the popular imagination as Tragedy’s signature sound, which he terms “epic crust.” But, as much as I respect Ben and enjoy reading his work, I gotta call shenanigans: Tragedy’s first LP, while I love it dearly, is really at bottom, like most crust albums, another dour record made by and for overly serious people, mistaking darkness for depth of feeling and import.**
Vengeance, on the other hand, is all jazz hands, and infinitely more exciting for it. After letting the lonely opening guitar chord of “Conflicting Ideas” ring out, the D-Beat-with-a-capital-D drums come barreling in, all hammering floor tom and slightly swingin’ kick drum – the kind of swing that makes you want to snap your fingers like it’s fucking “Sunshine, Lollipops” up in here (love you Lesley). And this happens for 20 whole seconds before the entrance of the opening riff, which the band vamps on for a FULL MINUTE before any vocals start. This is, truly, an overture if I’ve ever heard one, and carves out Tragedy’s new aesthetic territory with appropriately theatrical flair. Again, this is not a dig; from these opening seconds, you can already tell that Tragedy have dispensed, at least in part, with your run of the mill “life-is-bleak-and-England-is-rainy” crustisms, and are in the process of converting banal sincerities into high – HIGH – drama.
In that vein, when the lyric begins, we actually get a nice bit of scene-setting: vocalist Todd takes us some indeterminate number of years into the future, where more-highly-evolved scientists are trying to understand from our fossilized leftovers what the hell went wrong with us. “Will they recognize,” he asks, “our self abuse as a product of the abusive hands that molded our lives?” Apart from being an excellent justification for agreeing with straight-edgers in principle while continuing to drink, Todd actually sings this line over a couple separate vocal tracks, calling-and-responding with himself, before handing the vocals over to Billy, who counters: “Or will we remain a mystery?” It’s not uncharacteristic of heavier punk bands to distribute vocal duties among a few capable parties, but Tragedy here have actually done something a bit more impressive: in the grand tradition of classic he-said-she-said musical numbers, they’ve actually staged a frank exchange of differing opinion – the “conflicting ideas” of the title. I would argue that this conscious-or-not quoting from the trappings of dramatic performance reflects an inchoate awareness of their own performative work.
To redeem myself for the atrociousness of that last sentence, let me put it another way: while most crust bands strive for some level of sincerity or authenticity, for some way to make there be a there there – with increased volume, distortion, throat-shredding vocal work, and the like – Tragedy, by emphasizing narrative and huge, outsized musical gestures, draw our attention to crust as both genre and style, and one among many on both counts. In spirit, it’s closer to opera or stadium rock than Dis-whatever.
And that’s why it’s innovative and ultimately more honest. Crusties can keep screaming for their authentic doom until they’re hoarse in the face (is that how the expression goes?), but their aesthetic rigidity at the level of both sound and dress gives the lie to that authenticity so desperately desired. Better to ditch the in/authentic binary altogether, admit that what you do is performance and as such constitutively kind of silly, and dress it up fucking big and ludicrous. Which is why, when “Conflicting Ideas” comes to a complete stop before introducing one more, out-of-nowhere coda (around 2:53), its four-on-the-floor drumbeat cries out to me to be remixed for the club, or choreographed for some modern dance performance – which would be so much cooler than another shitty punk show.
Can someone get on that, please?
-M
*SEE WHAT I DID THERE? I’ll defend American Idiot at another time, but suffice it to say that I saw Green Day perform said album on the day of its release, and received a kind of sideways glance from Billie Joe from the stage at my Tragedy shirt, as if to ask, “Look, I like what we do, but why would anybody who likes Tragedy be at an American Idiot record release show?” While I didn’t quite realize it while writing it, this piece probably originates in that moment, and goes some length towards answering that question.
**There must be something in the air, as after typing out my introduction and doing a little more “research,” I came across some more of Ben’s writing, where he describes bits of a No Hope for the Kids tune as “musical theater.”
