Targets of scorn accorded their place

Carl Wilson:

In recent years, most people, and critics in particular, have become more live-and-let-live about one another’s varying musical tastes. Teen-pop, dance music, metal, and even Phil Collins, to name a few frequent targets of scorn, are all accorded their place. Dump on Kanye or Ke$ha or Justin Bieber and watch how quickly we critics will come back at you. This may represent a swing of the pendulum back to pop writing’s roots in questioning the divide between high art and supposed trash. Or it may be because of MP3s and YouTube exposing us all to more material, or something more socially complex.

Free stuff has a leveling effect on taste, I’ll grant, but Wilson’s second sentence does not prove the first. My generation now rules the rock-strewn, desolate land of rockcrit. We grew up not taking Phil Collins for granted. It does not mean, however, that Phil Collins, New Order, and Robbie Nevil are equal. If “poptimism” exists, it does not dispense value like fliers after church. Instead, it grapples with the implications of smashing together two words: it is optimistic about pop.

As for The National, I like them more than Wilson. My SPIN review of Trouble Will Fine Me.

The pleasure of hate, pt #456

Oh I long for the days when Rolling Stone ran long reviews of terrible albums by good bands:

Blondie’s Autoamerican is a terrible album, but it’s bad in such an arcane, high-toned way that listening to it is perversely fascinating. After Parallel Lines gave Chris Stein a carte blanche, it was only a matter of time until he started living out his fantasies of himself as a deep thinker. Since he could always be counted on to hedge his bets, however, he cannily managed to sustain the illusion that he still cared about rock & roll on Eat to the Beat. That illusion is surely dead now. And Stein is no longer depriving the world of his “genius,” because Autoamerican is his LP all the way. Indeed, it’s such an anthology of intellectual onanism that it’s almost the rock equivalent of a godawful Ken Russell movie.

And Carson got away with “onanism.”

I’m your dog but not your pet: Parallel Lines

Clem Burke’s drumming on Parallel Lines by itself affirms the nullity of the tagline “Blondie is a Band.” The fills in “Heart of Glass” (when I decide not to change the station it’s thanks to those fills), the fervid pounding accompanying the lead keyboard in “11:59,” the flourishes in “Just Go Away.” Blondie is a Band. How could they be anything else? What on earth could they have been? Along with Everything But The Girl’s Walking Wounded and Prince’s Dirty Mind, the cassette of Parallel Lines never left my car in the summer of ’96. I wrote a short story keyed to a lyric in “Will Anything Happen?” I puzzled over Debbie Harry’s performance in “11:59″ — is she subject or object? There was the camping in the Bowery boys chorus of “Just Go Away,” the Chris Stein and Frank Infante’s twin-guitar attack in “I Know But I Don’t Know, and in “Heart of Glass” a Harry upper register that like Donna Summer’s in the previous year’s “I Feel Love” conjures a passion so strong that it’s clothed in detachment. For a few weeks music got no better than this.

Marcello Carlin does a illuminating job, as usual, of connecting the, well, lines:

Finally, though not the last track on the album, is its most disquieting track; “Fade Away And Radiate.” Even at a time when the word “radiate” had far more sinister connotations than it would now, this remains an exceptional and disturbing piece of work, and an unexpected blood-sister to Walker’s “The Electrician” and direct precedent to Harry’s own performance in Videodrome (as well as less obvious successors like Royksopp’s “The Girl And The Robot”); Burke’s drums sound like the loudest heartbeat ever recorded, while Debbie – there she is, watching her Other (but not “watching you shower” as she does for an hour on “Picture This”) sit there, mindlessly watching television, until eventually, like the girl in Bowie’s “TVC15,” he becomes the television (“Beams become my dream/My dream is on the screen” – and David Thomson this week reminds us that the word “screen” can have two meanings; to show something to us, or to hide something from us). The music is slow, jittery and mournful (even the bizarre closing voyage into cod-reggae cannot dispel the uneasiness) and meanwhile Robert Fripp’s guitar is like the poltergeist on the other side of the screen, trying its best to come through, to be heard, to be noticed (this in turn ties the record in with things like Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs and Fripp’s own Exposure – both 1979, neither a record you would want to listen to in a dark not of your own making). “Dusty frames that sill arrive/Die in 1955,” sings a numbed Harry – the year James Dean died, but also the year when television made it into the majority of homes, as though these filaments are still transmitting pictures, thoughts and people from the time Harry was ten into a 1979 “now.” The lines merge into closedown, the lights go out, and they tell us something we knew all along.

In The SPIN Alternative Record Guide (also known as The Big Orange SPIN Book) Rob Sheffield called the “Dusty frames” verses the greatest in rock ever. Get in queue behind “leaning in your corner like a candidate for wax” in Jimmy Destri’s “11:59,” buddy.

That was your first mistake?

“If you’re going to be eccentric, for goodness sake don’t be pretentious about it,” growled Robert Christgau in 1971. He’s right about “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” my vote for worst song ever released by a Beatle, beating impressive competition from a couple George songs because “Uncle Albert” was actually a number one hit and still gets airplay. The other ringer, “The Back Seat of My Car,” takes five-plus minutes, watery guitar, and strings to describe a lover’s lane grope. This isn’t tantric sex — this is staring stoned at a birthmark on Linda’s shoulder while she impatiently calls his name. Worse, it seems to have inspired Eric Carmen’s early solo career.

The rest of Ram is good, although no masterpiece. Paul McCartney never made a solo masterpiece. I wish critics would stop acting like he did or why it matters (we know why it mattered in 1971 but we outgrew flares too). Like I wrote recently, his best solo record consists of however many tracks you can fit in a CD-R or iTunes playlist. Ram isn’t as good as Band on the Run, Venus and Mars, Flowers in the Dirt, or even my beloved Press to Play, but it’s not much worse, which is the key to understanding Paul’s solo years. It has one great track whose maneuvering between the ephemeral and the essential is so sly that I’m tempted to overrate its creator: “Eat at Home,” a gnarly, surly, ecstatic ode to cunnilingus that also doubles as an affirmation of domesticity. The guitars — by Hugh McCracken and Paul himself — sound fabulous. Linda’s addled harmonies, as usual, are crucial. The other keeper is “Dear Boy,” in whose Paul falsetto and basic piano chords a rebuke transforms into the gentlest of finger wagging without softening its pain.

The rest have tricks you’ve heard before and will again. “Smile Away” and “Monkberry Moon Delight” boast a lot of yelling to signify Paul’s spontaneity. A sequel to “Another Day” if he’d written about the contours of the rest of his working day, “The Heart of the Country” is concise as “The Back Seat of My Car” is bloated. “Too Many People,” Ram‘s barmiest moment, is a riot. Although it’s supposed to be “about” John and Yoko because we’ve read all the biographies, a stoned-to-the-gills Paul just sounds paranoid, decrying people going underground and reaching for pieces of cake over a magnificent loping bass line. No one in 1971 had the imagination in 1971 to sound this functionally illiterate. “Let Me In,” “I’m Carrying,” and a series of doodles about dragonflies and mud on Red Rose Speedway would follow.

Criticism, etc

A response to Katherine, Frank, Dave, Chuck, et al.:

ERNEST. But is Criticism really a creative art?

GILBERT. Why should it not be? It works with materials, and puts them into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can one say of poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer and Aeschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already added. Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is never trammeled by any shackles of verisimilitude. No ignoble considerations of probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever. One may appeal from fiction unto fact. But from the soul there is no appeal.

Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” has served as a touchstone since my early twenties; I’m taken with the notion that criticism is “the only civilized version of autobiography.” In an age of Rotten Tomatoes aggregates and atomized audiences but one in which I still stumble across amazing pieces in the most unexpected places, it’s as edifying to discover the pleasure of paradox as drinking a gin and lime juice on a May afternoon.

Last thoughts…

Rather than yield to the temptation of posting resolutions for which I’ll be accountable in public, and inspired by Mark Richardson and Eric Harvey‘s own remarks about originality and its discontents let me add a shibboleth to the short list couple of points I made a few months ago: confusing press releases for criticism, or more generally, confusing description for criticism.

How many times did we learn this year how mixtape phenom The Weeknd evokes a bad trip at a house party or being left alone at said party scratching your nose after snorting too much blow? We often appreciate a work of art for precisely these mimetic qualities, but it’s incumbent on the critic to explain the value of these qualities and why the feelings invoked by said qualities deserve a closer look. In other words: why is an album that evokes a 3 a.m. coke hangover worth listening to? The most flippant response came from another critic, who despises The Weeknd: “If the house party was bad wouldn’t you have bounced long before the end?”

The embrace of Destroyer and Bon Iver couldn’t obviate a holding-your-nose attitude towards the eighties acts to which these acts purportedly alluded. If contempt towards a precursor is going to be the line, we owe it our readers to explain how Dan Bejar and Justin Vernon transpose these influences; we must examine the paradox whereby Chicago, Bruce Hornsby, Howard Jones, and The Blow Monkeys, to name a few artists cited all year by critics (including yours truly), suck but Destroyer and Bon Iver don’t. To be honest, I don’t think anyone came close this year — including yours truly.

I’ll see you on the other side.

Like MTV never happened…?

Michaelangelo Matos’ review of Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s I Want My MTV reminded me of a truth so obvious that it risks banality: how differently the eighties would have sounded — looked! — without videos. Yet he’s alert to the other nasty truth: MTV also reinforced and perpetuated existing trends. How else explain REO Speedwagon scoring a Number One pop hit in 1985 and the way in which record company execs profited from hair metal more than they ever did from grunge?

Matos also reexamines Dave Rimmer’s spectacular Like Punk Never Happened, his 1985 booklength analysis of British New Pop and its discontents. A couple of years ago I wrote my own review. It’s reissued. Time to replace my copy.

And another thing…

I want to address two shibboleths prevalent in rock criticism, formal and informal.

1. Guilt by association. For example: “I hate Sade. Her music reminds me of yuppie wine bars.” Or: “Metal reminds me of the guys who used to beat me up in the high school parking lot.” Why blame Sade for what goes on in yuppie wine bars? What’s your problem with yuppie wine bars? What is a yuppie wine bar? If you need to examine your prejudices, try epistemology, not criticism.

2. The phenomenon known as “overthinking,” as in, to cite a recently posted line by a friend and intermittent critic about Ke$ha’s splendid “Shots On the Hood of My Car” leak: “Just don’t pretend it’s anything more than it is,” in this case a “dumb song” about “dumb people.”  Or, as another friend said about my remarks on Kanye West’s persona, I was just “projecting on [Kanye]” my feelings. Waving my fingers at the psychoanalytic cliche that is the latter point, I still admit to a stronger claim, albeit a dubious one. Criticism, Oscar Wilde wrote, is the only civilized form of autobiography. No ideal form of Kanye exists. The critic must fashion one (I suppose this is “projection”). As for my Ke$ha-hating friend, I’ll remind him: ponderousness is a sign of malnourished thought, not an abundance of it.

I will make this into a series. Please send more ideas.

Male chartpop and its discontents

Responding to Maura Johnston’s Fall Out Boy-inspired remark about the “deadliness” of “teen girl adoration” for any guy band that wants serious consideration over thirteen, Scott Woods reminds her of rock critics who:

…took for granted, mostly, not just that “teen girl adoration” was acceptable but that in many ways it was a crucial part of the story, with some critics going so far at times to even suggest that rock lost something when the Beatles “progressed” from screaming-girlism to capital-A you-know-what.

There’s a lot going on here. What does Johnston mean by “males above the age of 13″ — male fans? rock critics? male rock critics? male fans who turn into rock critics? If she wants to diagnose another case of Duran Duranitis, then it’s all of the above unless you’re Rob Sheffield. As for Scott’s observation, it matches the experience of a boy shipwrecked in marshland whose radio stations played Nolan Thomas (“Yo Little Brother“!) Noel, TKA, Stevie B, Timmy T, other first names with capitalized single letters, and Linear around the clock, and those are just the male-fronted acts; I need only mention Debbie D, E.G. Daily, Miami Sound Machine, Cover Girls, Sweet Sensation, Company B, and on into infinity, like the British royal line from 1066 onwards. We were so steeped in pop that it is entirely possible a posse of iconoclasts thought they could outdo the names listed above in rhythmic impact, vocal lunacy, and lyrical wackness.

Secondly, I didn’t have to read Pazz and Jop polls in the mid to late nineties (and didn’t; they were inaccessible until I got AOL) to write a hermaneutics of pop based on the likes of Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton Jennifer Paige, and, at the peak of the Bill Clinton economic boom, New Radicals, Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, Hanson, Christina Aguilera, and Madonna rediscovering the throwaway with “Beautiful Stranger” — the era of the diamond certification. When Napster made it easier to download these baubles, snobbery looked even more ridiculous. This was the era when you could borrow a friend’s home computer and find Diana Ross’ “Muscles” and several singles from Heart’s Bad Animals alongside tracks from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (I was downloading obscure Al Green gospel and Mick Jagger’s “Ruthless People”).

In short, I don’t know who Johnston has in mind. The only contemporary recidivists, I suppose, write for Pitchfork, and perhaps it’s a symptom of the degree to which the mag dominates rockcrit that I look to blame them without recent evidence (Beyonce and GaGa got full reviews).  On Stylus Magazine‘s message board, as lively as ever, PFM’s Ian Cohen used to shake his head with amused indignation around 2009 at our defenses of Ashlee Simpson; he thought we were joking. We weren’t and he wasn’t, but here we are, still lively, still amused.

The real answer to Maura’s question is “our friends.” You know what I mean. When asked about our favorite albums  or singles of the year and we say The Killers, Drake, or Justin Bieber, we get the is-he-kidding? smirk.

Up Chuck

Eight rock critics, including me, interview Chuck Eddy on his new book Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism. Enjoy!

Hasn’t gotten over it: Bob Mould

The Washington press called Supreme Court justices Harry Blackmun and Warren Burger the Minnesota Twins because their friendship stretched back to their kindergarten days and work as lawyers in the aforementioned state. This taxonomical distinction applies to Bob Mould and Paul Westerberg. So many times over the years have the singer-songwriters of Hüsker Dü and the Replacements respectively been the objects of partisanship. Which one you preferred depended, theoretically, on your tolerance for Westerberg’s sloppiness “versus” Mould’s tighter reins on those biographical details which endear frontmen to fans. Thanks to his self-control (which by all accounts is adamantine), he flourished in the nineties. The two studio albums, EP, and B-sides compilation he released as leader of a power trio called Sugar show no waning of creativity; he invented grunge turbulence, and, boy, does he bludgeon those young pretenders into submission (rhetorical question: did Nirvana or the Melvins record songs as brutal as “JC Auto” or “The Slim”?)

Mould’s memoir See a Little Light gets the treatment in today’s New York Times. No surprise that the critic notes Mould’s severity; the man is as volatile as Oliver Cromwell. Even when he plumbed so-called “confessional” material in “Hardly Getting Over It,” his cinder block of a voice enforced a polite distance; it’s the difference between reading journal entries and listening to the writer himself (1989′s solo Workbook came closest to Westerberg-esque catharsis, especially on tracks like “Brasilia Crossed With Trenton,” to conventional catharsis). I haven’t read the book yet, but the complaint about its lapses into therapeutic claptrap in its last third still don’t seem anomalous: Mould would put his talent into a memoir and genius into songs.

Martin Rushent – R.I.P.

 

Two projects helmed by the post-punk era’s most resourceful, adventurous producer: the Go-Go’s Talk Show, the group’s brashest recording, with a booming drum sound that might have pissed off as many Vacation fans as Marshall Crenshaw’s Field Day did; and Pete Shelley’s “Homosapien,” the first single by the Buzzcock leader and one of the first open admissions of gay lust in a pop song, with Shelley’s barely competent, wobbly vocal bouncing atop the plinketiest synth ever reminding us that he’s not an animal in the zoo (as Scott Woods wrote, it’s intense, scary, and joyous).

These are specks though, especially when I learned a few years ago, courtesy of Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start It Again, the degree to which the producer realized Human League’s Dare. Beyond mixing board competency, he taught the band chords, songwriting structure, and on his own programmed most of the drums and percussion. Why Rushent received no songwriting credit is a mystery — perhaps because the act’s debt to him was so obvious that it didn’t need mention.

For biographical and historical context, here’s Ned’s post.