JAKE CLELAND

52 Albums: #15

At a swanky club in 1972 London, Bryan Ferry, melancholy musician, sips from a mug of gin at the bar. As he brings the cup to his mouth, he gets a glimpse of his unfortunate appearance reflected in the drink, and his ennui worsens. He finishes the drink, his shoulders drop, and his face sags even lower. A glass smashes up the bar, startling him, and as he looks up he hears “Soz babes,” as a Stranger orders another drink for the stunning woman he’d just upset. The Stranger approaches Bryan, swaggering but more like staggering up to the bar and takes a seat. “Sorry to bother you dude, but you look like a fucking wreck and you’re kinda killing the vibe,” he says. 

“Sorry,” Bryan replies. “I’m about to leave anyway.”

“No no no, you don’t understand! You don’t have to leave! But let’s take care of that bad vibe. Have you heard of The Strand?”

“Is that a new movie?”

“I don’t know! Maybe! I’m not really from around here. But what I’m referring to is the dance, you’ve never done it?”

“No, sorry.”

“Oh Bryan, yes I know your name Bryan, haven’t you heard?” The Stranger stands up. “It’s a new sensation.” He leaps back, knocking over a couple but catching them before they hit the ground. “A fabulous creation.” Their faces light up with recognition as The Stranger climbs onto a rotating dais. “A danceable solution.” Now they’re all singing. “A teenage revolution.” The club is enthralled, and Bryan slides off his seat and begins moving towards The Stranger. “Do The Strand, love!” Bryan climbs up onto the dais. “When you FEEL love!” The crowd lifts their arms in the air, worshipping Ferry and his enigmatic companion. The Strand infects everybody present, their bodies bending and waving to the energy of this revelation. They continue singing and dancing, and The Stranger turns to Bryan. “Are you ready to find out what it all means?”

“I… yes, of course. But can I bring a friend?” Bryan asks, turning to a stout gremlin.

“Bleep bloop bleep,” it begs.

“Alright Eno, you can come too.”

The trio set off on a journey so incredibly fantastical that to recount it would take six times the length of Homer’s Illiad and make Odysseus look like a John Cusack character. Through the Land of Dreams and the Grey Lagoons, Ferry and Eno follow their guide with eager fealty, confronting every aspect of their own identities and existence until only one question remains. Their journey ends in the autumnal valley of the Beauty Queen, where The Stranger announces that it is time for him to return home. On the final night, Bryan comes to their guide and reflects on all they’ve experienced, all the excitement, the danger, the trials and victories, and asks the final question. “Why was life created?”

“Bryan, for the past hour you’ve sat here telling me about how kick ass our adventure has been. You’ve answered your own question, don’t you see? Life was created… for your pleasure.” Bryan sits quietly for a moment, digesting, realising that he’d finally found his purpose. He stands up and looks confidently at his friend. “Now it’s my turn to bring out the pleasure in everybody else.”

“That’s it man, you got it. Good luck.”

“But wait, you never told us what your name was!”

The Stranger stands up and dusts off his formerly shiny leggings. “It’s Jake, I can’t believe I never told you, how rude. Now go make that album so I’ve got something to write about in April several decades from now.” He begins to fade away.

“For all you’ve done for me, Jake, it’s the least I could do.” Brian goes to find Eno, and takes his gnarled hand. “Come on old friend, time to go home.”

 

And that’s the truthful history behind For Your Pleasure.

How To Be A Dude In Any Girls’ Club.

douglasmartini:

I’m not necessarily trying to earn brownie points for my interest in feminism and my willingness to judge a band regardless of gender […] You are absolutely right, most male music writers aren’t particularly feminist, which makes it more important to recognize the few that are.

[…]

But there are some of us trying to do the best we can to make sure female musicians don’t have to deal with what is called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. I know there are a lot of men (a lot of men, some of which I probably know personally) that do this. This is not about me, it’s about acknowledging that there are a few rare good eggs. Gender stereotyping— or any sort of stereotyping— is socially reductive. By all means, call a spade a spade, but there are hearts, clubs, and diamonds, too.

It’s incredibly self-aggrandizing for any dude to believe they deserve recognition simply for not being a misogynist, and it also puts them in the crosshairs of the bigotry of low expectations; Simply because they’re not completely oblivious they deserve a pat on the back? No. Talking about the feminism of men is fine, because to say men can’t be feminists is unnecessarily divisive, part of the reason - but not the only reason, of course - “feminism” is such a dirty word in boys clubs, and assumes men are incapable of sympathy and compassion. HOWEVER, conspicuous male feminism is symptomatic of the Nice Guy and is some seriously condescending bullshit. 

Molly Lambert:

Of course you can join, but you have to shut up. I mean, you can talk, obviously. But you have to realize and recognize that traditional male privilege becomes your liability in these situations. The same thing that puts you at the top of the pecking order in most social situations (glass elevator) puts you at the bottom of this one. Get used tobottoming. Realize it can be the best. Think about how intense it is to be a woman. If anybody makes fun of straight dudes and the lame bonehead things they sometimes do, you are not allowed to get defensive and say that you never do any of those things. Relax, we’re aren’t talking about you. We’re just talking about privilege denying dudes in general, and admitting that they exist is not the same as being one. 

I get what you’re saying MD, it stings when it feels like you’re being unfairly called out for being part of the male-chauvinist majority when you try very hard not to be. Let it go. They aren’t talking to you. Nobody that makes generalisations like “all male rock writers are misogynists” actually believes that that is 100% the case. Fall back, young’un, focus on being the best writer you can be and discussing feminism that way. You want more feminist writers? Show them how legit feminist writers are first, because complaining that we don’t get enough recognition is just making us look bad. Let’s talk about getting women thought of as equals in society rather than men thought of as equals among feminists.

The Best Singles Jukebox Roundup To Date.

Katherine St Asaph:

Fuck you, Katy Perry. You know exactly what your song is doing. No? Let’s break it down. You get Kanye West to guest on your song. Kanye West is still remembered for that little incident with Taylor Swift. You know, the one where the public, even when they weren’t pasting up blatantly racist memes, portrayed West as the scary, uncouth minority guy who encroached upon Swift’s glowy whiteness. You know exactly what happened there. Then you start singing lyrics about wanting to be with an alien, a time-tested metaphor for race even if you hadn’t clarified that he was “foreign.” And then you sing about wanting to be a victim and being abducted. In other words, you’re spouting some really fucking racist bullshit, Katy Perry. And it’s all played for titillation, of course, because that’s what you do. And you know what’s nearly as bad? This is one of your best-sounding songs! You’re not yarling nearly as much as you used to, although in the bridge you still affect that hollow, breathy voice people use when just starting lessons. And even if your song kinda bites “All the Things You Said” and “Gravity of Love” (it’s the “When the Levee Breaks” drums), it still sounds pretty good! And then you had to go ruin it, just like you did with “I Kissed a Girl” and “Hot N Cold” and “Teenage Dream” and all the rest, only this time you ruined it so much it’s completely unlistenable. FUCK YOU, KATY PERRY. I’m gonna go listen to Tanya Donelly’s “The Bright Light” now, and again and again, until you just fucking disappear already.
[0]

Word.

Teenage Dream is the most offensive pop album I’ve ever heard. Not to keep harping on about this but HTLTM tweeted a good point; Why Jessie J and not Katy Perry, P4K?  The worst that can be said about the former is that she’s an unnecessary addition to a saturated market, but at least her pop fare is relatively harmless compared to Perry’s ignorantly racist, sexist, infantilizing, derivative puddle of vomit, a review of which has the potential to say things far more important and interesting than “[x] is surplus to demand.” 

Anyway, we off that. Actually I have to get something off my chest with regards to this video, why is she the alien/”ET” while singing about how she wants an alien to abduct her? And what’s with the weird Fallout homage at the start? Okay, done. Hopefully Katy Perry will fade away now that she’s found her very own exotic abductor and she can spare me the skyrocketing blood pressure by keeping her egregious anthems to herself. 

The Academy Is A Fucking Animal.

Time for you to learn something new about some bands you never wanted to hear. Back in them days what Cat Stevens so mellifluously mourns, when I was still finding music to like from Electronic Arts’ soundtracks and the going-nowheres I worked retail with, I was well into these kids called The Academy Is… Nowadays I find band names with unusual formatting obnoxious (!!!, tUnE-YaRdS, et al.) but at the time I wasn’t writing about anything more than how shit the Cold War Kids were and was content to let what I liked go unexamined. I’m sure there was some point where I felt like their lyrics were MY LIFE - indeed for my adoration to become notorious among friends they must have at least secured a Facebook status update - but the main draw was William Beckett’s voice. It paddled around in the emo end of the pool for the first LP but became far more expressive on their later records when they embraced their own silliness, evident in the TAITV video podcasts, and dove into poppier territory. Beckett’s a charismatic performer; He has a messy, waifish handsomeness and his dark, beady eyes that pull in the audience like the ultra-dense center of a black hole explain the throngs of teen girls that pack their shows. As he hops and wriggles on-stage he enraptures everyone in sight, at times writhing around like a young Mick Jagger and eye-fucking the crowd. Okay that’s weird, he’s much older than most of the audience, but who HASN’T had a pubescent fantasy about a very post-pubescent performer? Mine was Kate Hudson, thought you knew.

It’s unfortunate that, like all the Decaydance cru, The Academy Is were overshadowed by Fall Out Boy even when by each band’s third album they could’ve happily co-existed, as their sounds had diverged so much from their pop-punk similarities. It’s even more unfortunate though that they predicted the worst Australian band ever in our country’s short history. And just a little disrespect to Gabe Saporta - who respectably did his time in the underrated Midtown - but the only reason Cobra Starship (remember when Maura was reppin’ “Guilty Pleasure”?) took off was by trading their goofy synth-rock for some weak, tinny shit and a Leighton Meester cameo. “Hey baby, don’t you know we’re all whores” - Gabe, before the release of Snakes on a Plane. Maybe I’m wrong, I mean if featuring their songs on The Hills wasn’t enough to push The Academy Is into the hearts of America, maybe they just weren’t MEANT for everlasting stardom. Faced with the prospect of them never making another album, what with the trends having moved on and Beckett having a child to take care of, I am not particularly dismayed. Two and a half solid full-lengths puts ‘em up on swaths of would-be successors, and while we’ve still got iTunes and YouTube, Beckett’s voice will be heard.

New Zealand steps in.

Scribbling in the Margins.

Reading a blog cover-to-cover seems weird in that I don’t hear people ever doing it but I’m sure it’s happening and has happened a lot. Maybe it’s because there’s so much new stuff being written, new features and profiles on current affairs which makes reading about the recent past seem redundant, even more so when the things people read about now were probably directly descendant of things they read about months ago so the topic is still relevant, but now it’s updated. The experience is like reading a book bought from the only second-hand store in a giant city. All these people I know, some of which I bump into occasionally and some I’m actually friends with, have left their little notches on the posts like annotations. These tiny insights into why everybody else interacted with the same things I do are fascinating to me.

52 Albums: #14

Talking about influences seems like a bad deal to me. Like if I told you that right now I’m working with some melting pot of Cohen, Shapiro, Bangs (inevitably) and - keep this on the down low - Carles, you could probably spot those hallmarks with relative ease. As well, just by virtue of them being influences I’ve depreciated the value of my work to anyone who’s a fan of one or more of those writers because I’ve tacitly confessed they’re better writers than I am. So I start off by being a third-rate Cohen, a third-rate Shapiro, a third-rate Bangs, a third-rate Carles, but then the goal is to transcend those influences by conflating them with something new which I guess you’d call “character.” Or maybe just grammatical acuity. In the case of The Modern Lovers, Jonathan Richman’s influence by The Velvet Underground was so strong that it forms a large part of his band’s mythology, so talking about it seems worthwhile.

Jonathan Richman found the Velvets, much like everybody I know, during high school, and then unlike anybody I know he moved to New York, acquainted himself with the band, and even once opened for them. He then returned to Boston with the goal of forming a band in their image (the word choice here is deliberately meant to evoke Biblical terminology.) The thought of Richman running around New York on some Jay Baruchel-in-Almost Famous shit is kinda funny, if only to imagine Baruchel’s character going home after meeting Zeppelin to form, like, Black Sabbath. Despite that worship, Richman’s original Modern Lovers had enough sonic distance from his object of admiration to separate them from mere imitators. The structures of their songs are much less dynamic and feature barely any crescendos, barely any rising or falling action, which is a move I suspect formed some of the blueprint for punk’s first-to-last-note loudness. It’s also more anthemic with its lyrical repetition than any of The Velvet Underground’s work.  

The album opens with “Road Runner”, an organ-driven ode to driving around the moonlit city of Massachusetts. It’s a classic American song; No other culture has such an affinity for the ol’ automobile, and y’all Yanks have been romanticizing the car for as long as it’s been around. From Steve McQueen’s ’68 Ford Mustang GT to Tawny Kitaen on the hood of David Coverdale’s Jaguar to the imposing Escalades and Navigators in hip-hop, cars have become icons of coolness, sexiness and status in popular culture. I’m sure Greil Marcus has repped the fascination with cars in music better than I can. The point I want to make is that Richman’s entry to the oeuvre plays to the heartland of America with a juxtaposing artfulness that’s clever in its accessibility to the common person as well as the musical weirdoes, and this theme pervades the tracks, especially on the album highlight. “I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms” has the quickly-strummed guitars screeching static wails to a clap-along drum beat as Richman sings in his low croak about really NEEDING someone, practically DYING without their physical presence. The song resets itself halfway through like the nameless protagonist finally got to sleep in those arms and now they’re back out on the street feeling that yearning again. Either that or they huffed some heroin, which I often hear is like being hugged by someone who whispers reassurances into your ear and makes you feel like life is finally alright. Sounds lovely, don’t it? Love letters to cities and addiction to people. I’ll never get sick of it.

Richman did the band the ultimate disservice by disowning this record. The Modern Lovers was released after their acrimonious breakup, partially due to his wishes to play different music, so it was cobbled together from tracks and demos recorded over two sessions (half of which were produced by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale.) It’s a shame he’s not into it, because this is a hearty record. It’s loud and buzzy sometimes and it’s clang-and-crash other times, and there’s allure in its rough incompleteness. It’s pointless discussing What Could’ve Been because the band broke up over creative differences, it wasn’t yanked away from them, so Richman’s later projects were an inevitable progression. We’re always growing up, tastes change and so do muses, but those few years during that confluence of The Velvet Underground’s influence and Richman’s character produced something that transcended either alone.

A List Of “Veronica Mars” Character Names Transformed To Include Terms of Musical Relevance.

Electronica Bars

Amelia DeLongplayer

Duncan Refrain

Logan Echoes

Cassidy “Bieber” Cassetteblancas

Odd Future and Feminism.

B’s article on Odd Future last week touched on a lot of good points - FWIW it’s the best piece on the Wolf Gang I’ve read (though I’m sure B would agree it couldn’t exist without its predecessors) - and one of those is, I think, the most important in that it almost perfectly nails how I came around to the group after being adamantly opposed to it:

“It’s entirely possible that Odd Future perpetuates “nasty art” on the world to remind us of the real bleakness that confronts people of color, men and women. Their pseudo-horrorcore rap is “pseudo” only as far as it’s a flashy version of the fucking terrible life people throughout American (and the world) inhabit; the typical Odd Future song is only slightly less depressing than a real news report, but it’s a million times more interesting to listen to.”

“Almost perfectly” because I don’t give a shit if it sounds more interesting, but it is more important in the way the music makes me feel: guilty. I was talking to Nat the other day about rap writing etc. and she argued that guilt isn’t a very good motivating factor, and I argued that it’s the only motivating factor in making people stand up and do what they should be doing. And here’s the real headline: Odd Future makes me want to make the world a better place. ODD FUTURE IS HUMANITARIAN.

Facile, alright. Let me elaborate: Odd Future messed with me because I’ve never had to think so hard about whether to listen to a band before. Usually the question is “Are the guitars fuzzy and the lyrics inaudible?” and if the answer is “Yes” then fuck that and fuck indie music, but this time the question was more like “Is listening to this endorsing misogynists and rapists?” And I’m not gonna break out my feminist membership card because I’d rather show than tell, even though maybe defending a group like this isn’t doing me any favors, but I love girls (“I have all their albums” (that Hank Moody line got way better when I found out Girls is a pretty good band (and I just quoted a notorious fictional misogynist, keep digging that grave Jake)), and trust that I don’t need a Horus chain because my white male guilt is enough to give me back pain. Poor me, right? Anyway, the bands you listen to reflect the kinda person you are and I wasn’t in a hurry to align myself with people who’re perpetuating the marginalization that is almost literally everything wrong in the world. Largely it seemed like Mike Barthel was right (he isn’t, sit down Mike Barthel) and that people were jumping on the bandwagon for the same reason those dumbass skate fuckers in high school were really into calling people “faggots” and writing swastikas on their exercise books. So then maybe Martin Douglas was OTM: Odd Future are punk-as-fuck, and I thought they were stupid as hell like people that think punk is do. At some point - around the same time as B, maybe - I figured ignorance wasn’t a particularly noble stance and grabbed some of their music to decide for myself. Lemme tell you, it’s not as abhorrent as they say. I mean to say it’s not like a musical snuff film, but it’s hardly The Blueprint 3 either.

Even so, at times, it’s pretty grim and violent, and this is the part worth talking about right? Just to wade through all the vague bullshit, let’s get some specific examples in here:

Earl Sweatshirt - “Blade”

“The Night Striker, I’m riding her, up-typing her. There’s nine Vicodins stuck inside of the windpipes of her. A little bit of sherm sure provokes the fucking fight in her. She started biting cause I’m giving cock like it’s advice to her.”

Earl Sweatshirt ft. Tyler, The Creator - “Orange Juice”

“Had to duct tape the mother goose, the mask was off. I stumbled down a hill then I had Jill jack me off. Harder than my dick when Taylor Swift is in my basement.”

Earl Sweatshirt - “Drop”

[Pretty much every line, look up the lyrics]

Between the run-of-the-mill “I’m the best” swagger talk, references to tying up girls (Taylor Swift gets more than one mention) and hanging out with Dahmer and Gacy pepper their lyrics. Earl’s the main offender, which could be explained by him being the youngest of the group (16 when those lyrics were put to plastic) but doesn’t excuse the fact that what he’s saying is fucked up. 

So how is that a good thing? A lot’s been said about how the group doesn’t mean what they’re saying, that they’re ironic performance artists or otherwise self-aware of the hateful shit they’re spewing, that they’re really nice guys in person, promise! which is like excusing the social worker with the nice smile even though he was in hysterics a minute too long at “What do you do when you see an Aboriginal with half a face? Stop laughing and reload.” Personally I don’t give a shit about Odd Future except for their product, and the only salient point to make about that is this: When I hear Earl shout “Eat a dick, bitch!” my first instinct is to cringe. Those lines are spat with such vigor and vitriol that they really stand out. And then I’m thinking “Why am I cringing?” Because it reminds me that there are still people, not “people out there”, those vague and intangible nemeses but people in here, around you everywhere, that still think women are inferior in the most dangerous way possible: via subtle indoctrination, brainwashed in by their environment and accepted as fact because that’s how the world is right? Sun’s yellow, water’s blue, wine is fine and women are weak. In all likelihood if you’re someone who still follows me then you’re smart enough to already know that this insidious belief is terrifying and it’s even likely you’ve been a victim of it. So if there is one benefit to derive from Odd Future, one justification, one rationalization for listening to these kids who’re by all reports talented rappers who unfortunately probably hold really pernicious convictions, it’s that the music reminds us that we still have a lot of work to do. I heard someone say “Feminism’s won” the other day. As long as there are people who actually believe that, we need an Odd Future. 

If Everything’s The Same Then Everything Is Equal.

Realised today that all white people are exactly the same. Honestly could you tell these bands apart? What about if you listened to a song from either?