Pop Erratic

Together Alone Together

2012-02-21T11:38:00.001-08:00

The present is an age of shared solipsism. Isolation andalienation are nothing new. They have defined in large measure the personalexperience of modernity. Individualism arose in this period as an ideologicalvocabulary that helped explain that experience as something else. Rather thanfacing the routine and banality of life we turn inward, where the real me resides. The thought that peopledon’t get you because you are “too complicated” and that your occupation isonly “what you do and not who you are” are common expressions of thissentiment. Individualism, then, speaks to the adjustment that we make in orderto transform the given conditions of social life into some kind of sense ofhappiness.

But like all ideological discourses, individualism is onlymostly successful. As self-sufficient as it allows us to feel, it doesn’t quitedo away with our need for belonging. The most up to date attempt to overcomethat need is found in interwebian (I know, it’s a made up word) social networks.There the illusion of reciprocity, of interaction, of belonging, of beingembedded in actual social networks is artfully maintained. You can easilyforget that the warmth you feel is the radiant heat of electricity and not theemotional warmth that comes from human interaction. This is what I mean byshared solipsism. The interwebs make it possible for innumerable isolatedpeople to engage with one another; they allow us to be alone together.

This too, however, does not satisfy our need for real human contact.Grouplove’s “Tongue Tied” captures with aching sweetness that need, I think.Something about the very musical composition of the song suggests commonalityand collaboration. (And, like duh, the name of the band.) Itsmulti-instrumental and loose arrangement creates the sense of a bunch offriends playing together. The lyrics begin with an imperative, “Take me to yourbest friend’s house,” that transports us straight to adolescence. That was atime in which doing something meant gathering a group of friends, meant ridingin someone’s beater car to someone else’s house where the party might be. Isthis objectively true about the teen years or is it the kind of fantasy that wecreate by mixing nostalgia with wish-fulfillment? Fuck if I know. I have NEVERbeen good at making friends and if I get more than one call a week I think thatmy phone is “blowing up,” so maybe I’m not the best person to address thisquestion. Regardless, “Tongue Tied” generates the equation of youth, love,longing, and togetherness. It’s wonderful. As is the vulnerabilityexpressed in the fear of being alone, of being “kissed goodnight.” And so thesong pleads and pleads to find the right expression that will make the momentlast, to stay up through the night, to stay together. Ultimately the songreminds us that the only way to not be alone is to be with other people. Theobviousness of this observation in no way diminishes the charm and tenderness ofthe song. It begs for togetherness in a way that few of us would but that allof us in a way want to.

We Might Be Too Uptight to See It, But They Ain’t Afraid to Show It

2012-02-14T11:14:00.000-08:00

LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” must drive people who takemusic very seriously crazy. For some art is a kind of secular religion. Thisisn’t an idiosyncratic quirk on their part but rather an effect of the historyof the function of art in modern society. The belief that art must come frominside the soul and express its content is a fairly new idea. In fact, the verysense of interiority that underwrites it is itself novel. Before the modernperiod meaning and value were not confinedwithin the subject, as his or her own self-generated individual property.Pre-modern Europeans, Charles Taylor reminds us, thought that the objectiveworld contained meaning, and, therefore, ideas and valuations existed in theworld and not just within the subject. Pre-modern Europeans considered that thevery essence of their selfhoods belonged not within the person but rather in thematerial world and the corporate collectivities to which people belonged, thesewere the things that made us human. External reality, not a self-made andcarefully maintained interiority, was the location for self-knowledge in thiscultural perspective.

But this changed, obviously. Inthe long trajectory from the medieval world to capitalist modernity, Europeanthought came to imagine the subject as radically separated from the objectiveworld. After this transition, knowledge could no longer be imagined as theproperty of external reality. Rather, knowledge was seen as the product ofindividual thought processes that were now located internally within theperson. In this intellectual tradition, understanding was the work of aninterior self, which was the product of an intense project of self-reflection.Thus souls, as we understand them today, were born. And, we came to believe, that it was there, deep inour unfathomable souls that we discover or create that which makes us specialand different from others. People who take music very seriously areparticularly committed to this idea. They want songs to be like souls: unique,expressive, deep, authentic, and so on. In short, they want music to besoulful.

People who value soulfulmusic will be outraged by the relentless superficiality of “Sexy and I Knowit.” First of all, the very self-consciously somatic excess of the song mocksthe pious devotion to interiority: “When I walk in the spot this is what Isee/Everybody stops and they’re staring at me/I got passion in my pants and Iain’t afraid to show it/I’m sexy and I know it.” There really isn’t a lot tointerpret here. It’s all about visuality and surface—in particular, bulgingcrotch surfaces! Fantastic. The whole song is a well-executed joke at theexpense of artistic gravity. I LOVE that one of verses of this song is simplythe repetition of the word “wiggle,” as if it were Sesame Street song. This isa childish song with an adolescent sexual sensibility and an adult’s sense ofirony. If you care only about depth, then you will forget that sometimes wewant highly polished surfaces, if only to have something on which to checkourselves out.

Why Pop Songs Are Not Novels

2012-02-04T22:57:00.000-08:00

Although this seems self-evident it’s worth explaining. AsBakhtin long ago observed, novels are heteroglossic. That is, although oneconsciousness or voice may dominate narration, the novel is compelled by itsown philosophical-formal orientation to include other voices. I’ll mention justa couple of dimensions of that imperative here. First, novels are systems ofnarratives. Unlike short stories, which tend to focus on one event in the lifeof a character and finish at the conclusion of that event, novels are made upof many stories that while hierarchically ordered also amplify and extend theaims of the work. While it is possible to imagine a short story that is longerthan a novel, novels are almost universally longer than short stories becausestories are their building blocks. Second, novels aim to render the extensivetotality of being. They want to show what they imagine to be real people livingin their social world. That vision may seem provincial or metropolitan, shallowor profound, artificial or organic to the reader depending on his or herideological or historical relationship to the work, but the work itself is written with the belief that what it is representing is an adequaterepresentation of the world. Because they intend to represent an image of societythrough a system of stories, novels must be made up of many voices. A narrowingof that heteroglossia leads novels to navel-gazing and narcissisticabstraction at best or to motivated and misleading propaganda at worst.

Pop songs are deeply monological. That feature only assertsitself, however, when one is confronted with songs that take up a dialogue, forexample Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The song begins with a moody,sparse, yet playful instrumental section seemingly taken from the Tom Waitssongbook. It moves from there to a terse recounting of nostalgia, resentment,and bitterness regarding a past relationship. Good stuff! It reminds me that Ilook forward to being unhappy in another relationship someday. The songcontinues in a minimalist vein, creating a kind of empty sonic space in whichthe tortured words of the singer resonate. Then some weird shit happens.Someone else starts singing and what she’s singing offers a counterpoint to theearlier claims. It’s jarring because a dialogue is so unusual in pop music. I’msure there are more examples but I can only think of two off the top of myhead: The Postal Service’s “Nothing’s Better” and The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me Baby.” These songs are very different from traditional duets, whichdespite the presence of two voices only offer one narrative. Compare Gotye’ssong to Matt Nathenson and Sugarland’s “Run,” another song currently onrotation on commercial radio. The two voices in the second song are workingtogether to explain one emotion. This isn’t a dialogue; it’s a soliloquy in twovoices. So why are pop songs primarily monological? Probably for the same reason thatthey succeed in ways that novels can’t: music can convey emotion in a much moreimmediate way than novels and what it loses in its social vision it gains inthe instant and deeply personal contact it can make with listeners. We likemonological music because we want to be alone with songs and we want them to be alone with us.

Train and the Work of Stupidity

2012-01-28T23:29:00.000-08:00

The guys of Train are the undisputed kings of mellifluoushorseshit. Their singles are joyously happy and catchy; they are underwrittenby an unshakeable sing-a-long quality; and they are deeply stupid. When happilysinging along to a Train song alone in the car you will inevitably come to thatmoment of consciousness when you realize what you are actually singing andyou’ll think, “Jesus, what is this shit?” I had that moment today whilesinging the chorus to their new single “Drive By.”

“Oh I swear to ya/I’ll be there for ya/This is not a driveby-y-y-y-y/Just a shy guy/looking for a two-ply/Hefty bag to hold my-y-y-y-y-y-ylove.” There it is in all its silliness. The first three phrases make sense.They prepare the explanation for why the protagonist of the song vanished afterthe one night he spent with the object of his desire. Then it gets baffling.I’m shy, he claims, and I need a container for all of this love. Huh? How doesit follow from your shyness that you won’t see someone until you have the rightcontainer for the love you feel? Frankly, this is the kind of crap you tellsomeone you never intend to see again after your one night stand: “really,baby, I love you too much to ruin what just happened by seeing you again.” Butit’s the metaphor itself more than its lack of logic that is appalling. I thinkthat name-brand, two-ply garbage bags don’t belong in romantic art, and I doubtthat this will become a common metaphor for explaining the depth of one’s love.These guys have a history of choosing strangely banal figures forillustrating love. In “Drops of Jupiter” the singer asks his loved one toimagine the delights that await their romance. He sings: “Can you imagineno/First dance, freeze-dried romance/Five hour conversation/The best soy lattethat you ever had/and me.” The best soy latte, for reals? These guys must writesongs like Brick Tamland talks about love: just mention the first thing you see.I love lamp!

To be fair to Train, however, nowhere does it say in thepopular music handbook that pop songs are supposed to make sense or not soundstupid. If that were the case, considerably less music would exist. Even aperfect song like Chuck Berry’s “Let It Rock,” for example, is mostlyfree-association gibberish. The Stooges’ “No Fun” is a self-aware explorationinto the sense of self of someone who does very little thinking beyond theirown immediate sensations and desires. That is, it’s a song about a dummy.Lastly, there are song like The Cramps’ “Human Fly” (which begins with theseextraordinary verses: “Well I’m a human fly/I-I spell f-l-y/I-I say buzz, buzz,buzz/and it’s just because”) that make it impossible for the listener to decidewhether they are stupid songs or songs about stupidity. In short, pop music hasalways had plenty of room for idiots.

Yet one gets the sense thatthe Train guys don't see themselves as idiots. Their songs are dumb by accident. Sohow do we explain their success other than by assuming that the peoplewho buy their records must also be stupid? The large share of the explanationis that their songs are just musically very accessible and catchy. But theunsophisticated quality of the lyrics is also part of their appeal in as muchas they provide a very unthreatening and distracting version of art. Sometimeswe want art to raise us above the mire of the everyday by confronting us with difficult truths and sometimes we want it to divert our attention bypainting the dirt. Train are doing the latter even if they probably imaginethat they are doing something else.

Martian Genres

2012-01-22T23:14:00.000-08:00

When I hear Bruno Mars sing I picture him leading Journeythrough a particularly soulful version of “Separate Ways.” The timbre in hisvoice seems so well suited for Journey’s catalogue that it feels like he andSteve Perry were cut from the same sweetly melodramatic cloth. Both of theirvoices manage to be appealing even when singing the most conventional or lugubrious lyrics. BrunoMars, unlike Perry however, is associated with “Urban” music, which is a politeway of saying black music.

Associated but he doesn’t quite seem to fit. He has sungcatchy choruses in successful R&B and hip hop singles by B.O.B., Travis McCoy, Eminem, Lil’ Wayne, and Snoop Dog and Wiz Khalifa (see below). Despitethis visibility though, you can’t say that his solo music sits comfortably in thosetraditionally African-American genres. His singles are oddly unclassifiablecrooner tunes that would seem out of place if not for the universality of theirsentimentalism or the production value that makes them sound completely up todate even if to people with a sense of music history they sound like they’refrom an earlier era of pop.

Ill fitting music this, not beyond genre but not in iteither. Much like Bruno Mars himself. He is ethnically ambiguous: neitherblack, white, Latino, or Asian but also all of them at once. He is ahalf-Puerto Rican, half-Filipino, Hawaiian-born former Elvis impersonator. Ihave no way of quantifying this but it seems to me that somehow his racialambiguity makes his generic ambiguity more palatable. Because we can’t placehim racially, it makes it easier to accept his generic indeterminacy.

I’m not sure how deep the connection is in popular musicbetween racial fluidity and generic fluidity. But it certainly speaks to theunspoken racial boundaries that make up our world. Lenny Kravitz, for example,is a commercially successful artist although he is known for performing in amusical genre not traditionally associated with African-American performers,guitar driven rock. But clearly Lenny Kravitz is mixed-race. Even in our one-dropsociety, his phenotypic appearance suggests racial intermixture. More than thatis his name,“Lenny Kravitz,” which suggests less a decadent rock star thanit does a wise-cracking comic from the Borscht Belt. This stands to reason,of course, because he was named after the brother of his Russian Jewish father.This is all speculation and conjecture but I doubt that Lenny Kravitz would beas acceptable a rock star with a more “traditional” African-American name.

We shouldn’t take this too far, however. Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Bad Brains, TV on the Radio, Robin Thicke, and many otherperformers have straddled the racial/generic divide. Nonetheless, the slighthitch that we feel when confronted with the discrepancy between how a performerlooks and the music s/he is performing is eased some by racialconfusion.

A caveat: rap metal. No matter who performs rap metal orwhat kinds of racial and generic boundaries it challenges, I feel about it theway most people feel about genocide: I don’t understand why a good and lovingGod would allow something like that to happen. Just the worst, most terrible musicever made, rap metal. Nothing justifies or forgives it.

M83 and Familiar Sonic Spaces

2012-01-18T14:35:00.000-08:00

You don’t need to knowSpanish in order to understand the core of Bebo Y Cigala’s seminal rendition of“Lágrimas Negras,” that old Cuban Standard. Bebo’s singing is so deeply embeddedin the Flamenco tradition that he does not bother to adapt his vocal rhythms tothe song, which is a Cuban Son; instead, he makes the Son fit his way ofsinging. Cigala too changes nothing. It does not matter that he is playing apopular tune or that he is singing with a Flamenco singer, his part is renderedin the uncompromising Afro-Cuban jazz playing for which he is famous. Theprimary reason the song works is of course musical: these masters makeFlamenco, Son, and Afro-Cuban jazz harmonize perfectly.

But history plays its part. Flamenco developed in the latemedieval period in southern Spain as a hybrid form that blended local musicalstyles with the imported patterns of Muslim, Jewish, and Gypsy (Roma) origin.The Muslim influence is so heavy in Flamenco, it forms part of a continuum with traditional Arab music, it seems to me. Along with musical styles, Spainalso learned plantation agriculture from their former Moorish masters.Slave-driven cotton and sugar plantations were first developed in Africa byMuslim traders. Spain exported both the techniques of plantation economy and the work force fromAfrica to the Americas. Slaves and theirdescendants in Cuba created Son, as well as other popular styles like the rumba, danzon, boléro, and cha-cha-cha. Jazz was an expressive form of slave culture in the U.S.and it ultimately proved compatible with Cuban music. So to return to the question implicit in the earlier paragraph, why do Bevoand Cigala’s styles go so well with each other despite the fact that neithertries to adapt to the other? Because "Lágrimas Negras" as a whole reflects the transatlanticworld of racialized slavery and the expressive cultures to which it gave birth. The triangularflows between Spain, Africa, and the Americas that constituted the slaveeconomy are concretely represented in this song. It’s the sense of what Gilroycalls the Black Atlantic that we feel in this song even if we don’t understand aword of it.

(By the way, for some reasonmiddle-class white people love this song and music like it, but they are generallyless enthusiastic about contemporary popular genres. Celso Piña’s “Cumbia Sobre el Río” is everybit as ambitious a song as “Lágrimas Negras.” Piña’s song tries to fuse many recentpopular (cumbia, reggaeton, dancehall, Hip Hop) styles into one whole. It islargely successful, I think, but middle-class white people are not so down withit. I don’t have the space here to speculate on the reasons for why this is.)

This was a long preamble to the topic I wanted to discuss, M83's "Midnight City." Language in this song like in "Lágrimas Negras" is not necessary to understanding its effects. I've read that it's about Los Angeles but I don't think you would know it from listening to it. Rather than a evoking a physical geography, this song creates a kind of emotional topography. The song's very deliberate layering of elliptical synthesized sounds generates this sense. Each layer evokes diffused types of affect: melancholy, ennui, nostalgia, longing, the bittersweet, aching, wistfulness, and joy. You feel this song. It's meaning does not travel through your rational consciousness, and the voice in it, the lyrics, is not the privileged site of meaning-making. Instead it forms another dimension in its atmosphere. M83 foregrounds the secondary role that language plays in music, but what the band is doing is fundamentally true of all music.

The Sample

2012-01-15T00:09:00.000-08:00

Jameson is right: we live in an age that has forgotten howto think historically. Yet history registers in many of our everyday things.This makes sense since the structures of everyday life are expressiveof the slow moving currents that have made us who we are. We are embedded inhistory but we find it nearly impossible to locate ourselves in that embedding.We have been taught to believe that our world was made by us as the product ofour longing and desire. Thus we struggle to think of ourselves as the objectsof history and not only its subjects. The closest we seem to get to ahistorical sense is the reference. We invoke the past as a kind of affectation,a superficial and empty gesture. The past serves mostly as an index ofcool, a catalogue of trends and styles, a graveyard for the social pressuresthat generated the artistic expressions that we have reduced it to. We haveturned the past into a sample, as it were, and it is for this reason that FloRida’s “Good Feeling” and Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “Otis” are so interesting tome. Both these songs sample important artists in the annals of black music inAmerica. In sampling the past these songs raise the specter of history, whichmakes claims on them and the listener even if we choose to ignore those claims.

To be perfectly honest, I really don’t like Flo Rida’s song.And I don’t like it because of the Etta James’ sample that serves as itsrecurring phrase. I can’t change the station fast enough when the song startsplaying. Flo Rida has reduced Etta James’ swinging, lusty “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” to a cloying, repetitive hook. The past is put in service of thepresent in this song in a way that means to contain and discipline it. Unfortunately,it’s mostly effective, I think, and the song suffers artistically because itdoes not open itself more fully to the past.

“Otis” is a different case. The whole song is structuredaround the concluding bars of Otis Redding’s slow-burning masterpiece “Try a Little Tenderness.” Redding’s plaintive, pleading voice serves as the songsintroduction. As the tempo and the intensity of the original pick up Jay-Zasks: “Sounds so soulful, don’t you agree?” And after that we’re off. The restof the song is the usual Hip Hop self-indulgent bullshit delivered with Jay-Z’svirtuosity and Kanye West’s verve. (A brief opinionated and probably incorrect aside:I’ve never quite gotten why these two love performing together. Or maybe Idon’t get why West likes performing with Jay-Z since it always highlights theformer’s limitations as an MC.) Although Redding’s delivery seems to drive therappers' song, this isn’t exclusively the case. Just as significant is the music playingbehind Redding, the distinctive sound of the greatest house band ever in all of American popular music, Booker T. and the MGs. The MGs defined the Stax sound and we heartheir playing behind Rufus Thomas, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Otis Redding among others,that is, behind some of the most iconic performers in the history of black music--which means that although Steve Cropper and Donald "Duck" Dunn of the MGs are white, in my mind they still belong in the history of black music. Through "Otis" Jay-Z and Kanye West connect directly to that history. This song bothsamples the past and tries to find its relationship to it. Whether listenerswill hear that attempt or not is a different issue.

The Loneliness of Drake

2012-01-11T11:33:00.000-08:00

Hip Hop is often in the business of compensatory fantasiesof wealth and power. The money, the jewels, the clothes, the cars, the houses,the stacks of bills, and the sexual partners that rappers go on about areintended to be signs of the poverty and marginalization that they have overcome.“But look at me now,” they tell their listeners. This can take on cartoonishproportions. Rick Ross, for instance, asks in DJ Khaled’s “I’m On One,” “Evermade love to the woman of your dreams/In a room full of money out in London andshe screams”? Well, no, and forreals though, who the fuck has? The verse is supposed to be an affirmation ofhis wealth and virility but it is nonetheless complicated by its lack ofimmediacy. In other words, if that situation did actually occur to Rick Rosshis rapping about it is a testament to its symbolic and not its real nature. Heraps about it because it illustrates how far he has come. He is not wealthy andvirile necessarily; instead the situation proves that he has become wealthy andvirile.

Psychosexual fantasies of affluence and privilege spun byonce impoverished young people who render these things in illusory ways, thatis much of the thematics of Hip Hop. Although he also raps in “I’m On One,” thereis something else at work in Drake’s music. “H.Y.F.R.”, like many of his songs,is driven by conflicting impulses. The bravado of Hip Hop echoes in Drake’smusic but so too does the feeling that what fame has brought him does not fillthe need of what life has taken away. If so much of Hip Hop sounds like ahollow boast then Drake’s music examines the hollowness of the boast while atthe same time still boasting.

“H.Y.F.R” centers on his unresolved relationship with anex-girlfriend. He presents the background in an unromantic light. But thecoldness of the past is a ruse. She remains a part of him even if now “we don’ttalk too much” “just only ‘hello’ or ‘happy belated.'” He claims he loves fameand all that it brings yet it does not give him the happiness to let go of thepast or of her. He raps: “Even thoughit’s fucked up, girl, I’m still fucking wit ya/Damn, is it the fall/Time for meto revisit the past/It’s women to call/There’s albums to drop, there’s liquorinvolved.” His moment of triumph—the albums to drop—is also a moment of boozy,sad introspection. Drake here sounds isolated and empty. The present drives himinto the past before fame, a past no happier than the present but at leastno sadder.

But this is Hip Hop!He cannot remain in despairing self-examination. That is a theme for othergenres, like the classic country that the first line of his song references. Thereis also space in rock and roll to dwell on the loss that a rock and roll life brings.Drake is further opening that space in Hip Hop but he still feels compelled to affirm the slogans. An imaginary interviewer asks him: “Do you love thisshit?” Although his verses show us nothing if not his ambivalence toward fameand the emptiness that fame cannot fill, he nonetheless answers at the end of the song: “Hellyeah/Hell yeah, hell yeah/Fuckin’ right/Fuckin’ right, all right.”

Death and The Band Perry

2012-01-07T23:07:00.000-08:00

This song! I was under the impression that our societylooked down on encouraging teen suicide, but The Band Perry’s “If I Die Young” has disabused me of that notion. We usually think of the death of ayoung person as a tragic waste. This song, however, frames the early, virginaldeath of its protagonist as a deeply meaningful and affirming act. So goahead, kill yourself!

The song begins with a romantic portrayal of a burial scene.“If I die young, burry me in satin/Lay me down on a bed of roses/Sink me in theriver at dawn/Send me away with the words of a love song,” she sings. Thesadness of the protagonist’s mother is ameliorated through her dead daughter’slingering presence: “Lord make me a rainbow, I’ll shine down on mymother/She’ll know I’m safe when she stands under my colors.” And although shedoes not yet know “the loving of a man,” there is nonetheless a boy in town whosays he will love her forever and of course her death turns his promise into afact for her.

So if you’re a young teenage girl redefining yourrelationship to your mother but still need her love and affection, or perhapsyou are going through your first painful love and wish that the feeling wouldlast forever, this song has great advice for you: Kill yourself. Your death,this song maintains, would be the best expression of all those things that youwanted to say but were unable to say or that you felt went unheard. “Funny whenyou’re dead how people start listening,” the song claims. And besides, the songrepeats in its melodic refrain, you may have not lived long but you’ve had“just enough time.”

It’s an outrageous song, as far as I’m concerned, andwhenever it comes on I’m still kind of shocked to hear it. It would be likehearing The Cramps’ “New Kind of Kick” on Top 40 radio. That song thumbs itsnose at bourgeois philistine complacency: “Life is short/Filled withstuff/Don’t know what for/I ain’t had enough.” Ultimately, what the singer sayshe wants and needs is drugs, more of them and different kinds. Everything wouldbe better with lots and lots of drugs. There is nothing wrong with recommendingheavy drug use or suggesting suicide to young people as such, but these are notsentiments I expect to hear on commercial radio.

What makes these songs different and why one is on the radioand the other one isn’t is only partially explained by their different musicalqualities. Both songs address a lack, the feeling of incompleteness, offragmentariness that sits at the back of our minds. We have a need to feel thatour lives are adding up to the kind of narrative that we would want to read ora film that we would want to see. Instead, we often experience life as a seriesof disconnected and meaningless episodes. The Cramps have no answers for you.They just tell you that drugs will help you deal with it. The Band Perry havefaith that our deaths will make our lives meaningful in the way that livingthem didn’t. Many of us want to believe them.

Working at Cross Purposes: Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa

2012-01-03T12:24:00.000-08:00

Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa’s “Young, Wild, and Free”celebrates the hedonism of youth. Its pace is so mellow—which corresponds toits stoner ethos—that you can’t quite call it an anthem. Nonetheless itcontains a distinctly anthemic quality: this is a song that will be sung outloud by buzzed young people and embarrassingly drunk older people at partiesfor some time, I imagine. But even as it celebrates irresponsible celebrating,the song is weighed down by a sad undercurrent that it can’t quite smoke away.

Inconsistency in popular music, as in any art, is not aproblem. We live in a contradictory world so we should expect ourrepresentational forms, if they are going to be faithful to life, to embody itscontradictoriness. Art is not identical with politics or philosophy. We shouldnot expect ideological purity or logical consistency from it. Indeed, whatmakes art so compelling sometimes are its contradictions.

Take Black Sabbath’s “Lord of this World,” for example. Thesong is supposed to make you repentyour evil ways and rethink your relationship to God. “Your world was made foryou by someone above/But you choose evil ways instead of love,” the song warnsus. But of course the song has the exact opposite effect. Its menacing and abstractheaviness and Ozzy’s almost demonic voice make most listeners want to embracethe darkness that the song ostensibly rejects. The song, like Black Sabbath asa whole, aestheticizes darkness, makes it desirable in its sinister beauty.Thus rather than turning its listeners more godly, “Lord of this World” has insteadcreated legions of Satanists.

There are similar contradictions in “Young, Wild, and Free.”The song’s philosophy as a whole is contained in its chorus: “So what we getdrunk/So what we smoke weed/We’re just having fun/We don’t care who sees.” SnoopDogg and Wiz Khalifa then take turns delivering verses that deal mostly withdifferent manner of getting high and enjoying being high. The song revels inthe spontaneity and liberty of youth. Youthful dissipation is transformed by itinto the only product of a good life. But everything is not so simple. First ofall, Snoop Dogg is older than I am. So his take on youth is delivered in the keyof nostalgia. “It’s like I’m 17 again,” he raps. But as William S. Burroughsonce observed, “in order to feel something, you have to be there. You have to be18.” Snoop Dogg might be wild and free, who knows, but he is certainly notyoung so there is something insincere about his lauding of youth. And as forWiz Khalifa, he sings repeatedly in quieter voice near the end of the song“When you live like this you’re supposed to party.” So instead of theaffirmation of freedom, partying becomes at the song’s conclusion a necessary convention.That is, he parties not because he wants to party but because he is supposed to party. So this joyful songabout spontaneous youthful excess is also about old men missing their youth andabout young men who feel obligated to party. Enjoy!

Kelly Clarkson and the Threatened Self

2012-01-01T18:57:00.000-08:00

Maybe its because I’m an unbearable pedantic know-it-all,but Kelly Clarkson’s “Mr. Know It All” strikes a chord with me. The protagonistof the song defends herself from someone who tries to corner her figuratively byfixing her identity. If he knows who she is then she cannot figure out forherself who she might be or might become. But she will not let that happen, andhe should know that she will “lead, not follow.”

This is the second song in recent memory to dramatize afemale protagonist rebelling against an asymmetrical relationship in which sheis the subject of someone else’s assumptions. Sara Bareilles’ “King of Anything” covered similar ground. In that song, the singer lashes out in an actof almost petulant defiance: “Who cares if you disagree/You are not me/Who madeyou king of anything.” The song ends in a ridiculing gesture—“Let me hold yourcrown, babe”—that suggests that she is free from her antagonist.

The theme of rebelling against expectations is an old one inpop music. “It Ain’t Me” by Bob Dylan comes quickly to mind. But that theme isreworked in these songs with more current cultural anxieties. First, as acontemporary audience, we are more predisposed to side with the heroines ofthese songs. There can’t be too many people around that want to see women livingunder the heels of their overbearing boyfriends—that is, these songs give us avery safe version of feminism that allows us all to see ourselves as gender progressive.

Furthermore, we live in an age in which constructing andmaintaining our own unique identity is our most important life project. Welive in a period that places an ever-increasing burden on people to define theirindividuality from an ever-increasing field of choices. The self-reflexiveproject of creating one’s individual identity, of cultivating one’s interiorityhas developed alongside a growing fear that we might make the wrongchoice or that we might indeed fail in creating an identity that is fullyexpressive of our individuality. In this context, the idea that someone “knows” us better thanwe know ourselves doesn’t give us comfort, doesn’t give us the peace of mindthat someone really understands us. Rather, it becomes a threat to our abilityto be fully self-expressive.

There is also a strong current of anti-intellectualism thatruns through these songs. Clarkson sprinkles homey “ain’ts” liberally in hersong and Barielles’s song is marked by its mocking tone. This too is a symptom ofour social imaginary. If we level all ideas to the status of opinions thenthere is indeed no difference between one claim and another. In such arhetorical position, no one can know more than you because everyone’s knowledgeis a matter of opinion. You have nothing to learn from anyone because they havenothing to teach you besides their own opinions. Opinions you can discard ifyou don’t agree with them. You and you alone are responsible for the knowledgeof who you are. In other words, our age has turned solitude and isolation intoa social virtue.

Adele and Katy Perry: Ironic and Historical Variations on a Theme

2011-12-30T00:32:00.000-08:00

Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain” and Katy Perry’s “The One That Got Away” address longing, loss, and memory. They are hits by singers in fullcontrol of their abilities and who are clear about their aesthetic sensibilities.The songs also point to how complicated and expansive a field popular music can be because, no matter their superficial similarities, thesetwo songs are profoundly different from one another, and they point to the gulfin artistic ability that separates these two talented performers.

Katy Perry is all winks and nods. She makes incrediblyaccessible music that nonetheless references the history of “serious” popularmusic that probably goes over the heads of many of her target audience. It’shard to believe that her hardcore fans would love Radiohead as much thecharacters in her song did, let alone understand its reference to June and Johnny Cash. Those references are there as an ironic gesture to listeners who thinkthemselves too sophisticated to like her uncritically but who “get” her musicnonetheless. Just like the nostalgia of the song is tempered by anunobjectifiable irony, so too is most of her music delivered with a tongue-in-cheeksensibility that allows uptight listeners to enjoy it as the delightfully sweetfoamy froth it’s supposed to be. She also always seems to be working at theedge of her talent and the lack of seriousness also betrays a lack of faith onthe part of the singer to deliver something straight. There’s probably a goodreason for that. Those moments in which she opens up her throat and reallysings, like when she repeatedly yodels “the one” in this single, are really theworst part of her music. The strength of her work lies not in her technicalmastery; rather it lies in the lightness of her touch, which allows us to loveher music without ever taking it seriously.

You have to take “Set Fire to the Rain” seriously. This songdoes not invoke the history of popular music, it makes itself at home in it. Thisis music that would make Dusty Springfield happy and jealous. Adele does notwork in nods or references. There is something very sincere and vulnerable in hermusic. Her imagery is dark and anguished. She sings: “I set fire to therain/And I threw us into the flames/When we fell, something died/’Cause I knewthat that was the last time, the last time.” The pain feels immediate andrecent, and yet we are at the same time raised by it. It’s paradoxical but thepain that the song expresses fills you with joy because of its expression. Thissongs makes the emotional tourism of emo music into a mass experience: it makes us all happy to be sad. But it does this while still holding something inreserve. Surely it paints its picture in broad strokes but it does so withoutquite reaching the level of melodrama. This has to do with the texture ofAdele’s voice, I think. She can convey the subtlety of emotion with understatedphrases. She keeps from using the full strength of her voice in order to draw afuller emotional picture. This is ultimately what separates her from KatyPerry: even while holding something back for the sake of her music, Adelecan climb heights impossible for Perry.

Gavin DeGraw and the Temptation of Flattery

2011-12-28T16:26:00.000-08:00

To be perfectly honest, Gavin DeGraw’s “Not Over You” soundslike a song that a college guy would play on the piano in the student union in order to show off to girls. The songmakes the singer sound kind of vulnerable, capable of deep loving, and in needof some emotional healing. “Dreams,” he sings, “that’s where I have to go/tosee your beautiful face anymore/I stare at a picture of you and listen to theradio.” I think the appropriate emotional response is supposed to be a sort ofinternal and dramatic “aw!” But also while the song predisposes you to like thesentimental boy who sings it, it’s also supposed to make you want to be theobject of that intense devotion. Who doesn’t want someone to keep holding thetorch for you?

It strikes me as purely performative, though. Guys who dothat stuff in real life seem like real dickheads. Surely, dudes playing guitar inpublic are the devil’s work. They seem to perform sensitivity in order to getattention and that attention they hope becomes the entryway to the ladies. GavinDeGraw did not invent this persona nor is he currently the most successful ofthese figures, John Mayer is.

I’m also pretty sure that most women see through thischarade as well. So why does it work? Why is popular music so full of patently disingenuous sentimental singers? Before I address that question, though, aquick aside. I’m not sure where the boundary lies between what I consider theperformative sentimentality of “Not Over You” and the real sentiment of a songlike “Johnsburg, Illinois” by Tom Waits. I don’t think I can explain thedifference between these songs but I feel it nonetheless.

To return to the question of why false sentimentality works,the answer I think is rooted in our own unshakeable vanity. To have people inthe thrall of your performance no matter how insincere is at the heart of all desireto be before a crowd. Regardless of how much I look down my nose at those goofballsplaying guitar in public, a small part of me wishes that it was me that wasgetting the attention. Deep down we realize that even if all they’re singingabout is trivial insincerities, musicians will always get more attention thanmost of us, and thus, despite ourselves, we wind up identifying in some smallway with the singer. A similar thought probably occurs to the listener: evenwhen you know you’re listening to conventional commonplaces about love anddesire, you still wish they were directed toward you, that is, you identify insome small way with the object of the singer’s affection. We all want to besung to even if there is little new or sincere in the emotions expressed by thesong. Most of us are vain, vain people, and that vanity ensures that there willalways be people in need of attention on either side of the microphone.

Loving You, Loving Me: Selena Gomez’ “Love You Like a Love Song”

2011-12-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

It’s always deeply unsettling for an old man like me toconsider seriously when teenagers sing “You just do to me/what you do,” whichis what Selena Gomez does in her latest single, “Love You Like a Love Song.”But there it is. That’s what she sings. Fortunately, the song as a whole ismostly outwardly oriented, toward the object of her fascination, the person sheloves like a love song. Or at least it seems that way.

The song begins in resignation. There is nothing new thatcan be said about love yet the singer must sing on if only so that the “melody”of her loved one “will play on and on.” “No one compares” to him; he “standsalone.” But even while he is the inspiration that generates the feeling, thesong is mostly about what he does for her. “You’ve saved my life”; “I’ve beenrescued”; “I’ve been set free”; “I am hypnotized”; the song keeps returning tosinger’s feelings. On the whole, the song is less about him than it is about heremotions and what she wants to say about them to him. That explains why beforeevery chorus she sings to him “I want you to know, baby,” and why in line ofthe chorus there are two “I” for every “you”: “I, I love you like a love song,baby.”

This is not a failure on the part of the song, nor is it anindictment of how self-absorbed our age is—though it is certainly that. Afantastically great song like The Cure’s Lovesong does something very similarto Selena Gomez’ song. Over and over we hear about the singer’s emotions andwhat the presence of his love one does for him. “You make me feel” is theoverwhelming refrain of that song. What these two songs and countless othersreveal is that we often lie to ourselves about love. Love is not about losingourselves in other people, about becoming selfless in our obsession withsomeone else. If anything, love often makes us much more self-absorbed. Wespend hours thinking about what we feel, how we feel, and how unlike any otheror anyone else’s our feelings are. And, God forbid, if you think you are acreative person (I count myself in this group), you then spend all kinds oftime trying to find the words to express to your loved one how they make youfeel. That is, you spend even more time being wrapped up in your own emotions.

Selena Gomez thus reminds us how insufferable love makespeople. How it makes them not care about anyone else but themselves and theirown sentiments. If you want music that is really about other people, it’s bestto turn to break up songs. You should start with Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”

Lady Antebellum and the Art of Abstinence

2011-12-25T15:00:00.000-08:00

Now that’s ideology! In “Just a Kiss” Lady Antebellumconvinces the listener that a kiss goodnight is a more powerful and satisfyingaffirmation of love than having sex. Is this objectively true? I guess it alldepends on one’s personal history, but I'm not so sure. Nonetheless, the song is sopersuasive, it’s romantic sensibility so strong that I imagine more than a fewpeople will be drawn in by it. This song is a perfect example of how ideologyworks when it’s convincing: its argument is successful not because it deniesyou something or because it demonizes something but because it presents itsposition as the most natural and appealing.

The song begins by inverting the usual gender narrative ofsexual desire. The female singer in the first verse sings: “it’s hard to fightthese feelings when it feels so hard to breathe.” The male singer in the secondverse reassures her: “We don’t need to rush this/Let’s just take it slow.” Thentogether in the chorus they both agree: “No, I don’t want to mess this thingup/ No, I don’t want to push too far.” Finally they realize the beauty of whatthey actually have, that this might be the relationship that they have beenwaiting for their whole lives and so they realize that they are “alright/ Withjust a kiss goodnight.” And what a kiss! “Just a kiss on your lips in themoonlight/Just a touch of the fire burning so bright.” Who wouldn’t want such akiss?

Sex would ruin what they are building up. The scene, thekiss, the desire, they are all so ideally right that sex would only desecrate theperfection of the moment. The kiss, the kiss, that’s what you want! There is noneed to lecture young people about what God and your family expects fromyou. There is no need to scare them about sexual diseases and unplannedpregnancies, no need for holier-than-thou preaching about saving yourself forthe right person, under the right conditions, and after you are married.Abstinence is not a sermon here.

Abstinence in this song is the most perfect medium throughwhich one can express love and desire. In other words, abstinence is the resultof true love and if you really love someone then that love would motivate youto NOT want to have sex with that person. It’s a funny refiguring of the commonplace that love leads to sex. In this song, love leads to abstinence. Willthis song keep teenagers from having sex? Who knows, but I’ll probably try toget my kids to listen to it a lot when they're teenagers.

Rihanna's Imagist Dance

2011-12-25T14:48:00.000-08:00

Rihanna’s “We Found Love” seemed very repetitive the firsttime I heard it. Or maybe I was just predisposed to dislike it because of howwretched her earlier “S&M” was. That song was all crass language passing asedgy sexuality; this was not The Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” or TheStooges’ “I Want to be Your Dog”. Perhaps Rihanna does enjoy the whips andchains she sings about but I doubt it. The attempt to get the listener to thinkof Rihanna as a sexual libertine is so obvious and superficial that it bothembarrassed and angered me. It was a kind of pantomime self-sexualization thatmade her seem desperate for the wrong kind of attention.

So I was no neutral listener when “We Found Love” came onthe radio. I mocked it aloud. But the radio is nothing if not persistent andso I began to hear it often enough that eventually I began to listen to it. Myfirst impression could not have been more wrong. The song is fantastic. Therepetition is what ultimately makes the song successful, what gives it thedesperate insistence that eventually penetrates the psyche of the listener.

The first verse of the song could have come out of H.D. orPound, it is straight up imagist poetry: “Yellow diamonds in the light/and we’restanding side by side/as your shadow crosses mine/what it takes to come alive”.The yellow diamonds, which seem to suggest the effect of electric light on theeye, of course evoke the fantasies of wealth and luxury that are so pivotal tothe Hip Hop aesthetic. But they only invoke it, nothing more. The image is notattached to any other symbolic, cultural, or narrative meanings; it is simplyimagistic. The rest of the verse works the same way: the light casts theshadows of two people standing together across one another. The image generatesemotion. The song intensifies from there.

“We found love in a hopeless place,” she sings on and on.It’s a deeply sad affirmation but, because unlike “S&M” it’s not trying toconvince you of anything, it strikes the listener as true. When we get to theemotional release of the instrumental section we get the glimpse of why dancemusic can be so cathartic: we dance not to get away from the sad truths of ourlives but in order to transform them through dance itself into something else.Dance might sometimes be an escape but other times it is a coping mechanismthat makes movement an expression of a truth that we can’t quite face but fromwhich we cannot turn.

And if we can do it in a drunken delirium, all the better. Ican imagine this song setting dance floors on fire as its remorseless rhythmturns all the dancers inward. Dancing not with anyone or for any other reasonthan to turn the inexpressible and unbearable truths inside them into amovement or a gesture.

Weak Voices and Christina Perri's "A Thousand Years"

2011-12-25T14:29:00.000-08:00

Grantland loves tohate on weak voices. In recent articles, Whitney Houston’s old voice was laudedfor its power and Mariah Carrey’s was mocked precisely to the degree that itwas overshadowed by Houston’s; Zooey Deschanel was clowned for her unconvincingrendition of the national anthem; and a writer puzzled over the success ofRihanna given the limits of her voice. All of these articles assumed that vocallimits are an obstacle to an artist, that if a weak-voiced artist succeeds itis in spite of this natural limitation.

But this is not true. In popular music the very limits of avoice can be the explanation for the artistic merit of a song. ChristinaPerri’s “A Thousand Years”, for example, is artistic to the degree that Perri’svoice is in unable to soar to the romantic heights that the lyrics of her song promises.The narrow horizons of her voice give a resonance and depth to what wouldotherwise be pure wish-fulfillment.

This is an age of paradoxical reversals so let me saystraight off that I’m not trying to do something similar here. I’m not tryingto convince you that something aimed for commercial success is secretly anartistic masterpiece. I am trying toexplain that whatever artistic value resides in Perri’s song resides therebecause of her limited range. On the face of it this appears to be acontradiction in terms. We often equate art with virtuosity, that an artist’squality is equivalent to their own natural proficiency with the mechanics oftheir chosen medium.

But this is not always the case. Jackson Pollock, one of themost influential and powerfully expressive artists of the 20^thcentury, turned to his style of “action painting” because he recognized hislimitations as a figural artist. That’s right, he became a great painterbecause he was not good at drawing. Put another way, his artistic success,which is great by any account, depended on his limitations; his art wasfantastic as long as he did not try to draw.

Virtuosity in music means the ability to play instrumentswith a high level of technical mastery or, if your voice is your instrument, tosing with a full and powerful voice. But in my opinion, while musical virtuosityis crucially important in genres such as jazz, classical music, and in somemeasure in the blues, in popular music it often gets in the way of art. Onehere need only to think of the difference between Spinal Tap’s “Big Bottoms”and “Jazz Oddyssey”, one is musical stupidity and the other is stupidly musical.The joke of the first song is that they are unselfconscious idiots; the joke ofthe second is that they are very self-consciously musicians. The possibility ofJazz Oddyssey comes into play whenever musicality is foregrounded in popularmusic.

In some ways it seems that we have discarded the idea thattechnical proficiency is a requirement for great popular music, at least in thecircles of musical snobbery that is. Few there would argue that the sloppinessof Black Sabbath or The Sex Pistols in any way circumscribes their art. Fewerstill would argue that the voices of Bob Dylan or Tom Waits limits theirexpressive power. But no one would forgive any of these artists their technicallimitations if they set about to make money by writing and performing in thesafe ground of romantic sentimentality that is the natural home of commercialpopular music. There, as the Grantlandarticles suggest, if you’re going to play and sing crap music then at least youbetter do it really well.

Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years” is in some ways aperfect example of romantic sentimentality. It begins with primarily percussivepiano notes that are accompanied by evocative, impressionistic lyrics: “Heartbeats fast/colors and promises/how to be brave”. These words are given weightby the vulnerable weakness of her voice. From there the song moves to thefantasy that makes popular music popular. She sings: “how can I love when I’mafraid to fall/but watching you stand alone/all of my doubt suddenly goes awaysomehow”. The song continues in this vein. The lyrics sappily romantic and hervoice sweetly quiet.

As the song nears its conclusion the music swells and oneexpects Perri’s voice to rise with it. This is the chorus with which the songends: “And all along I believed I would find you/ time has brought your heartto me/ I have loved you for a thousand years/ I love you for a thousand more”. Atfirst there is a matching crescendo between the voice and the music but then atthe last second, on the last word, “more”, her voice gets quieter, muchquieter. At the moment when her voice should soar over the music, the music swallowsit up instead.

Her voice doesn’t tower above the music because she probablydoesn’t have the vocal strength for that. Nothing in that song, or in any of theother songs that I have heard by her, suggests she has the chops to belt it outthat way. But to see this as something that limits the song is to miss thepoint entirely. The quieting of her voice gives a final expression to a tensionthat gives her song more resonance and truth than if her voice roared over themusic.

Let me explain. This song involves conflicting impulses:earnest lyrics of sentimental desire and a voice whose weakness suggests aninability to accept the truth of that sentimental desire. Her words say thatshe will love him for a thousand years but her voice doesn’t seem so sure. Andthat conflict is taken through all the way to the end, at that last moment whenthe lack of commitment to the sentiments conveyed is ultimately expressed bythe quieting of the voice. The weak voice makes possible the ambiguity betweenearnest desire and sober assessment, between fantasy and reality that is thetrue artistic content of Perri’s song. Celine Dion’s massive voice wouldcollapse all that distance and turn the song into syrupy schlock. The old voiceof Grantland’s resident diva would dothe same. But maybe all the troubling things she’s put her voice through wouldallow Whitney Houston to achieve what Perri’s considerably inferior voice doesnaturally.