Nick Cave Teaches You How To Overcome Your Privileged Upbringing And Fucking Express Thyself.
Nick Cave is the best rock star, and Ian Johnston’s Bad Seed is the definitive record of why. It feels pessimistic to say “the author portrayed Cave like this and that” because even though they were interpreted by a second hand, the facts of Cave’s life speak for themselves, don’t they? Bad Seed is an incredible story and important for the way it (and by extension Cave himself, obviously) challenges the notions of what it takes to be a brilliant artist, but part of what made it so compelling to me early on was the portrayal of what it was like to be a young Australian in the seventies. Australia’s history is a yawn - First Fleet, giving polio blankets to the indigenous, Ned Kelly, gold rush, Gallipoli and the White Australia Policy, that’s about it - but reading about Cave’s adventures as a grammar school miscreant in Melbourne made me nostalgic for something unremembered, though something I conceivably could’ve experienced. This is a trait of good storytelling, I think; The intertwining of your own remembered history with what’s on the page, putting you in the stolen car’s driver’s seat without diminishing the character.
“During his last two terms at Caulfield Tech in 1977 the impulse to irritate his teacher had become all-encompassing and his work became progressively more infantile. By the end of the second year, he began painting over the same canvas again and again, primarily because he had become so disenchanted with the school and its teachers that he could not be bothered to stretch new canvases. ‘I think it was my two very unrewarding years at art college that were my training in hatred for all critics,’ he would recall in 1987.”
For most of the book though, it’s written from the perspective of the people around Cave, the most informative bits of which come from Mick Harvey’s accounts of The Birthday Party - Cave/Harvey’s band before The Bad Seeds - on tour. He paints a grim but sympathetic picture of Cave, who was just totally losing his shit on drugs and misery, and the distance from Cave isolates him from the story in tangent with how he was isolated from the band. After leaving Melbourne for London with the hope of expanding their audience and finding themselves almost entirely ignored, they begin a pretty meager, nomadic existence. By this point in the story we’re thoroughly endeared to Cave, so reading about his self-torture is concerning.
“‘There’s a line in a Neil Young song, “I need a crowd of people, but I can’t stand them day to day”. Key artists understand that line straightaway,’ says Chris Carr. ‘Nick needs people but he allows his mind to think in its own time, rather than being pressured. Nick looks a lot, observes and lives in a different frame of mind to most people. There’s the sense of the loner there. He doesn’t just drift from place to place, he does it for a purpose. He needed to take his art further. He started to get consumed by the book and very few people had time for it. He was able to withstand great physical pain as well as great mental torment but in the end he needed help. His relationships and his art were tormenting him.’”
The pervasive theme of the book as well as a lot of Cave’s music is alienation; Everywhere he escaped to he found solace for varying lengths of time, but inevitably the same feelings of oppression and exasperation at both his environment and himself would take hold. Some of the book is spent explicating the tormented, parasitic relationship he had with Anita Lane, but the most tormented relationship he had was clearly with himself and his art. Cave HAD to express himself, it was imperative, but it seemed like what he found in these expressions disgusted him, though he’d then become content with that self-disgust as it formed part of his persona; If he was to be seen as this hideous creature, then he would embody it as fully as possible. It was a complicated, self-loathing relationship with his own identity, and whether he tried to escape via international flight or drug abuse, whenever he came down he found the same person.
“Cohen would mix tracks at maximum volume because he was partially deaf and could no longer hear certain frequencies. He would always endeavour to make the guitar sound as distorted and abrasive as possible. ‘We made a tunnel out of corrugated iron around an amp and put mikes on the iron itself,’ he relates with evident glee. ‘The noise was so bad it made the fillings pop out of your mouth! A really vicious sound, which was perfect for the metallic sound we were after. We mistreated things very seriously. We put contact mikes on symbols. The things only last for three minutes before they’re blasted to bits because it’s so loud.’”
I don’t really care for The Birthday Party but I do love recording session anecdotes, and the best of these came from The Birthday Party’s rigorous adherence to making what they wanted most and what the audience wanted least. I’m not a gearhead or an audiophile but hearing the way some musicians pervert convention to achieve certain sounds is fascinating. It gives me far more respect for a band to hear they recorded the drums from the other end of a hallway to create a reverb because the technology to do that automatically didn’t exist than if they just plugged in and played. It’s a credibility thing. I don’t like The Birthday Party because they sound terrible pressed onto an album, they were too ferocious to be contained by the quality of the medium at that point. I know this is true because the songs sound small on record but look and sound fucking terrifying live.
“The story of ‘Christina The Astonishing’ was taken directly from Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints, first published in 1756. At the age of twenty-two Christina was assumed dead but during the Agnus Dei soared to the roof of the church in Liege, Belgium, to escape the smell of sinful human bodies. For the rest of her life she would flee to remote places ‘to escape the stench of human corruption’. Cave would later assert that the song was in fact personal: ‘I don’t know if it’s a metaphor for anything. I don’t know how many thousands of saints you could choose from to write a song about, and obviously that one related to me in some way or I wouldn’t have chosen it. She was actually physically repulsed by the smell of people, which she thought of as their mortal sin. I found that pretty interesting.”
Cave’s been banging on for almost twice as long as I’ve been alive but all my favorite albums of his came out in the last twenty five years. Let’s assume those are his best albums for a minute, that my taste is so refined that I’m most attuned to the apex of his artistic output. That’s at least thirteen years of learning to get to that point. During The Birthday Party he was sort of a dumb punk pushing the envelope in the same way as they all were back then, but the older he got the better his music became and the more he held on. Think about how unique that makes him in contrast with millions of other musicians who disbanded after just a couple records, maybe a spectacular debut and an underwhelming follow-up. This persistence was not an opportunity blessed by record company money; Cave fought through years of poverty - at one point he was stealing bikes in London to pay rent so he could stay in a filthy apartment and write songs - and a pretty scant lifestyle so he could do what he wanted. He pursued what he wanted to pursue even in the shittiest of circumstances with a conviction rarely matched in the history of rock music. He earned his success by having remarkable constitution, fighting and working for it every single day.
“When Cave received [James] Ellroy’s novel he was thrilled when he read the author’s dedication: ‘Nick, feel those evil rock’n’roll chords of doom. That song in Until the End of the World really kicked my ass!’ In subsequent interviews Cave would proudly display Ellroy’s inscription at every available opportunity. ‘Now, that to me, when someone you admire compliments you, that means far more than getting a good review, to be honest,’ he said.”
The teaching philosophy of the nineties was that we’re special, that we can do anything, as if all we needed to survive was the talent we ostensibly had in abundance. In hindsight it’s obviously totally pernicious. In reality, it’s okay to really suck at some things initially because you can get better with hard work and persistence, it’s a demonstrable fact. Artistic ability especially is not wholly innate, and the greatest lie we were told growing up was that it doesn’t take thousands of hours to achieve aspirations. Maybe if we’d learned that earlier we could’ve burned up a few of those hours before we even had to worry about stealing bikes to pay rent, or at least learned how to form realistic expectations.
“‘In many ways Nick is still very insecure and yet, I think this is really important, he’s never doubted his vision. In that respect he’s still self-confident. If you have that you continue to produce and you don’t get bound up with the fans, and you don’t get caught up in creating what you think other people will be impressed by. You know what you want to say and you continue to say it. His insecurities are part of his greatest weaknesses and his greatest strength because I think that is where his genuine humility comes from. He doubts and he worries about everything, that’s why he works so hard, he’s a perfectionist. Sometimes it’s like he works on things too much but through all that, and through his problems with drugs and so on, he’s never lost that clarity of vision.’”
The book’s final pages describe the 1993 recording sessions at the now-closed Metropolis studios in the city where it all began. Cave works with exuberance surrounded by friends and collaborators, in stark contrast to the self-imposed seclusion while writing earlier records. He bounces ideas off the people around him, putting them on “thesaurus duty” to find better words for certain lyrics and demands that everybody floating around the sessions contributes in some way to the record. The result was aptly titled Let Love In, which not to be treacly but is finally what he was doing. Finding a woman he really loved and having a son had apparently been the shift he needed to adjust his emotional state. He was 36, nearly a decade older than Jim Morrisson, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin et al. were at their deaths, and having quit drugs and found a family he’d created his most commercially successful album to date. Cave frequently noted his fear that without drugs and turmoil, without the epic romance of self-destruction that spanned continents, burned bridges and various run-ins with the boys in blue he’d suffer impenetrable writer’s block, yet here he was in a time of relative contentment making his best work yet. Bad Seed distinguishes Nick Cave from the other self-loathing poets of his time by dispelling the idea that perpetual destruction is a prerequisite for brilliant work. That the romantic ideal is not only unsustainable but really just damn stupid. That in fact you can live and work and grow up and still say something. You can still express yourself.
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”
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.
How Are You, Gentlemen?
Alice, cat lady, has asked me to elaborate on my thoughts regarding cats numerous times. Cats have become unofficial mascots of the internet, iconic in their playful ignorance and grammatically-incorrect expressions of desire for fast food. They’ve become a shortcut expression for something that lacks thought; they stand symbolically opposed to erudite deconstructions of pop songs, for example. The irony of this is that it isn’t cats that’re particularly moronic, they’ve simply become an extension of the retardation of people that participate in the cats-as-meme phenomenon. Cats in and of themselves are content to carry out their very cat-like existence without regard for the internet, but they’ve become a victim of the virulent need for icons the social web has perpetuated. This has led to the mistaken belief that cats, conceptually, are immune to thought, when that is simply not the case. Just look at notorious CLOT (Cat Lady of Tumblr) Choire Sicha and his cat, Cat.
Here we see Cat standing on a bench. We can’t see Cat’s back, but from the shadow we can tell it’s clearly arched. Cat is responding to the lens with hostility, which we can also see in Cat’s almond-shaped and colored eyes. This hostility contrasts with the neutrality of its setting created by the powder blue and fading wood of the bench and, as such, amplifies the power of Cat’s agitation.
The caption for this photo is “I think my new year’s resolution is to learn how to do this,” which is not an uncommon aspiration. Men will always face the curiosity of what it’d be like to be flexible enough, and some people have even (erroneously) been reported to have gone to extreme lengths, even though people who HAVE accomplished said acrobatic feat found it to not quite meet the level of sexual nirvana they expected. Kids, don’t try this at home. The pattern on that couch is almost identical to the one on my duvet cover.
Sgt. Boardwalk isn’t quite as cute as Cat, and lacks Cat’s soft, glossy mane which shows that Choire is a more than adequate caretaker. However, Sarge does have an appealing roughness evoked by its cold stare, dark fur, and tiger-like stripes. Sgt. Boardwalk is the Kiefer Sutherland to Cat’s Wil Wheaton, or at least the Nikki Reed to Cat’s Evan Rachel Wood. There are probably vials of crack in Sgt. Boardwalk’s litter box.
This is the hot dude from Vampire Diaries (fuck you, Stefan looks like a gargoyle) holding a cat. Choire already unpacked this one pretty thoroughly. http://choiresicha.com/post/1275776348/cuteboyswithcats-ian-somerhalder-and-his
This is a papier mache cat Choire’s colleagues got for him. Ostensibly a gift, the fact that it’s black suggests it’s actually an omen of death. OR SUICIDE: Just sayin’.
Finally, we have Cat’s birthday. Obviously it’s Cat’s birthday because there is a giant cake that Cat is staring at and no knife in sight. Conclusion: Cat has taken the first bite. And what a bite! Well done, Cat. There’s a faceless man in the background, undoubtedly Cat’s servant. As the prissy-yet-dominant lifeform of the household, Cat has to maintain a certain quality of appearance which cake crumbs would damage, so Cat employs a number of men-folk to assist. Choire was presumably part of this prestigious staff but he was let go for spending too much time on the clock plotting the destruction of Summer of Megadeth [citation needed.]
Pets are tragic figures. Their simple, domesticated brains allow for uncomplicated affection that humans, with their self-consciousness and jealous idiot monkey brains, simply aren’t capable of, but their short life spans mean that affection is inevitably cut way, way short. You can definitely develop the same degree of attachment to an animal as you can a person, though that’s still not enough to make me stop eating their dead, deep-fried bodies. Mmm. The question we need to ask ourselves now, the scenario we have to brace ourselves for, is thus: When Choire tumbls his cat’s funeral, will you “Like” it? Will you then clarify in a reply that it’s a Sympathy Like and not a morbid Like? Or will you simply leave an Ask message of condolence? Rarely in life do you find yourself in a position to plan for how to deal with a specific faux pas, so you’d be wise to devote some time to this. Oh, and hug your pets.
A Thing About Ego and Lester Bangs.
Most of the quotes that’ve stuck with me w/r/t how to effectively critique have had some relation to ego. Whether that’s just because it’s a particular issue for me or because it’s an issue for writers in general I’m not sure, but as far as egotism is concerned, I know the most egotistic thing I’ve ever done is operate under the assumption that someone famous was reading. This is, as Admiral Ackbar and Fictional Lester Bangs will tell you, a trap. I only suffered this delusion for a little while, maybe two weeks at the most, but there are people out there, actual people I know, who don’t have the humility to realise how stupid it is. I mean, when you find yourself at a bar agonizing to your friends that you’re SURE [redacted] read that snarky thing you wrote, you’re bringing unnecessary stress on yourself. In the era of Google Alerts and hyper-sensitivity and Post-New-Niceness, it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that person could conceivably have read that thing! But they probably didn’t, so shut up.
“It is unfair to criticize something you don’t understand.” - Martin
It’s a trap because once you think you have a duty to the artist, you can’t fairly evaluate the art. It’s up to each writer to decide who they’re writing for, I suppose, but if you’re writing for the artist you might as well join a brothel because you’d make a lot more jerking people off there than at whatever magazine you write for. Lester Bangs’ expressed this sentiment as “A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.” Rock crit 101: You are the enemy.
“It’s easier to write about why you hate something than why you love it.” - Clem
Here is my problem with that theory: Lester Bangs was pessimistic about the cult of rock’n’roll which led to his infamous iconoclasm (or was a product of it, but probably both), but where his revelation led to him being more of an asshole to musicians to combat the obsequious press, it makes me want to be less of an asshole. There’s no fear in tearing down a “thing”, some cultural commodity, but I find it much more difficult to be critical to a living, thinking human. Musicians - and famous people in general - are just people too - which sounds obvious but it’s easy to forget - and no matter how surreal their lifestyle is, it’s still their job. This is why I feel bad about what happened with Tinie Tempah last week.
“The best criticism, I have found, is not mean-spirited or obsessed with its own cleverness. I think the (maybe dim) hope of your critical writing should be to engage your subject and meanness only provokes defensiveness, and then forget about real communication. So the criticism has to be, to a certain extent, not about you or your good, but about communicating the problem with a blog entry or article to both the author and your shared audience. This doesn’t mean watering down strong positions; it just means not sticking a shiv in someone’s side to serve your ego.” - Regina
So, it’s not necessary to be an asshole to be discerning in your critique, and actually I think Lester Bangs was far less spiteful in his iconoclasm than, like, Hunter S. Thompson who seemed to actively despise celebrity, and that Bangs comes from a place of artistic appreciation (if skeptical) makes him a much more likable icon of journalism. Great! Except, dang, it’s so easy to be an asshole, because the sentences you can write using mean words have far greater emotional impact than using affirmative words. This is why it was so stupid in Inception when Cobb overruled whoever by stating that a positive emotion was much more compelling than a negative one. Some truly inspiring stuff, and some truly terrifying stuff too, has been created under the influence of negative emotion, and the epistles you can vomit out can feature turns-of-phrase and acerbic screeds that’ll have you reaching for the literary tissues. Unfortunately, if you’re doing this, you’re kind of missing the point, and instead of trying to understand the work of art you’re supposed to be servicing, all you’re doing is serving your own ego. By which I mean all I’m doing, obviously.
A Comparison Of Lady Gaga’s “Monster” and Kanye West’s “Monster.”
Both Gaga and Kanye have songs called “Monster” - this is the most exciting realisation I’ve had recently. The two artists ostensibly couldn’t be any more different, and casually listening to the two songs probably wouldn’t change your view on that. One’s loud, buzzy hip-hop and the other is synth-pop and whoa-ohs, and you really don’t have to look any further than that. However, the term “monster” is applied pretty broadly in pop culture and brings up a ton of images in a vast range of contexts, so what do the differences in use by two of the most talked about musicians say about them?
First of all, Kanye’s “Monster” is beyond overrated, but I reluctantly see the cleverness in it; it’s the quintessential brag song in every regard. Unfortunately, I’m pretty much done with vague descriptions of greatness in hip hop, which is a totally retarded thing for someone who’s been listening to hip hop for no more than a year to say, but I find it shallow and mostly pretty boring. Jay-Z can get away with it because he’s like the Beatles of rap, and I hate to use Beatles comparisons ever but I’d argue there’s nobody in contemporary hip-hop who hasn’t been influenced by him to some extent. Kanye’s verse is uninteresting boilerplate rap that tells us nothing about anything except that he really fucking sucks at naming cocktails (Grey Goose + Malibu = “Malibooya”.) His allusions to violent sex are pretty poignant as far as the monster angle goes, but they pepper the album, and the fact that the only demons Ye has to exorcise are how he fucked up Amber Rose is disappointing. Not to depreciate the importance of domestic abuse (don’t hit your ladies, dudes, that is not fine) but he really mined the shit out of that.
Jay’s verse starts off a little better than Yeezy’s because in place of his little brother’s “Haah?”s abrasively punctuating the lines, it namechecks a bunch of famous movie monsters. Great! Except “a zombie with no conscience” is not a flattering comparison. Sasquatch, Godzilla, King Kong, Loch Ness, Goblin, and Ghoul are all intriguing: the mythology of the sasquatch and Loch Ness monster, the brute strength of King Kong, the fear-inspiring Godzilla, the mischievous goblin and the heart-stopping ghoul are all desirable traits for someone representing themselves as a monster. Conversely, zombies are known for their aimless wandering, constant moaning and general lack of hygiene. They’re effective metaphorical devices, but not all that scary. And “Everybody knows I’m a motherfuckin’ monster” is not an answer to “What do these things all have in common?” The rest of his verse is pretty good, though alluding to “rape and pillage” is… questionable. Obviously I’m a huge pussy so I prefer my rappers to engage in strictly consensual intercourse rather than abusing women, but like the “faggots” line in “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)” I can move past it.
Then there’s Nicki’s verse which is, by all accounts, a motherfucking monster. The image of Nicki rolling up to a party in a Wonka-purple monster truck is one of the greatest things on the entire album, as is her entire verse. Her schizophrenic persona changes are captivating like a lot of the album isn’t, which makes it an even more distinctive moment. I had a shocking revelation recently that most of my favourite moments on Kanye’s albums are done by other people (J. Ivy on “Never Let Me Down”, Jigga on “Diamonds of Sierra Leone (Remix)”) and Nicki is firmly in that camp, particularly because “I think me you and Am should menage Friday” is outstanding in how subtle it’s double-entendre is. In a field dominated by not just men, but unchecked misogyny, it’s encouraging that a woman is one of the best parts of the most talked about album of the year.
Where Kanye et al. use the monster metaphor to evoke brutality and dominance, Gaga uses the term in the context of a sexual predator, not in the deviant way we commonly associate with the term but in the way modern romance is inherently predatory. The image she keeps returning to is the wolf, which she explicitly mentions in the first verse (“He’s a wolf in disguise”) and then refers to a couple times later on (“He licked his lips…”, “Boy now get your paws right off me”.) Specifically, it refers to the wolf in Red Riding Hood (“Girl you look good enough to eat”, “Uh oh, there was a monster in my bed”) which frames Gaga as the victim and makes her seem somewhat innocent and naive. Though, it’s hinted that this might be willful delusion, because when Gaga asks her friend if she knows what the dude’s deal is, she doesn’t really pay attention to what her friend says. The Fame Monster portrays Gaga two ways: powerful and in control, and fatally flawed in her attraction to less-than-idealistic romances she’s ostensibly powerless to resist. There’s always the hint that she can resist them, she’s self-aware enough to realise that she could just not make bad choices, but her masochistic tendencies make the bad decision more immediately gratifying, as they almost always are. She’ll be the first one to tell you it was a terrible decision, and the first person to tell you she’ll probably do it again. It’s a sickness made no less tragic by its commonality.
Lady Gaga’s music is far more fucked than her pop counterparts, and while Katy Perry abuses the “sex sells” adage and Ke$ha is basically DARE’s Black Swan, the way Gaga romanticizes suffering seems far more insidious. For all the swearing in Kanye’s track, it’s essentially a harmless romp through a superstar’s ego, whereas Gaga’s centers on a very alluring premise, one that the Twilight series is frequently criticized for promoting. Yet, all I see is universal praise for Lady Gaga and overwhelming mainstream distaste towards Kanye. Is it possible that we find it more ethical to glorify our own miserable experiences than to listen to a dude talk about how great he is over and over again? Of course, because in a society that condemns anything more than quiet modesty, self-deprecative wallowing is far more acceptable than self-indulgent celebration.
It’s strange to think Kanye and Lady Gaga could have anything in common other than their penchant for spectacle, but her “Monster” would be right at home on an album called My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy. The monster theme is the linchpin of the album; I mean, have you seen the album art? Why it’s the linchpin is better explored in his other songs (and even parts of 808s, which touches on this other thought I have for MBDTF: that it’s the culmination of all his previous records) but it’s undoubtedly central to the Kanye mythos. For Gaga’s part, being a monster is something she’s turned into an inevitability. She co-opted it as a noun for her fans, but in a way that indicated how normal it is to be a monster; as apt an indictment of the concept of “normal” as I’ve ever heard. This is the balancing factor against her (not unique, don’t get me wrong) romanticization of dangerous romance: the acceptance of flawed idiosyncrasies and imperfections. In this way, the Kanye West monster is exactly the monster Lady Gaga wants you to believe it’s okay to be.
An Inherently Unfair Comparison Of Two Things Linked In My Head, And Then Something About ‘Getting It,’ Which I Don’t, By The Way.
It’s funny the way you make connections between two things sometimes. Like, Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand were the same band to me for a while, I imagine because Archduke Franz Ferdinand was Austrian and Austrian rulers were called Kaisers a hundred years ago. Similarly, LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” and The Wombats’ “Let’s Dance To Joy Division” are linked because they both namecheck other culturally relevant bands. This is a shame, because LCD Soundsystem is excellent, and The Wombats are an insipid band of children who make inexplicably popular twangy British guitar pop, though those last three words should clue you in that it’s actually not inexplicable at all. Subjective! No, not really, don’t be an asshole, “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” is categorically better than “Let’s Dance To Joy Division.” COME AT ME, BRO. I wonder what Anthony would say.
Do you know The Wombats? My goodness. Not to be a rockist - haha, just kidding - but The Wombats’ fanbase have never listened to Joy Division other than when “Love Will Tear Us Apart” has been on some NME Best Songs To Buy On iTunes To Impress Your Boyfriend end-of-year list. So what? My last.fm shows I have no more than zero Joy Division plays in the past three years. Except, I don’t take over the communal iPod to jump up and down to a song that includes the arm-folding-ly bad line “Let’s dance to Joy Division and celebrate the irony.” The irony that we’re dancing to a really depressing song? Ian Curtis would vomit in his grave. If “we’re so happy,” then truly ignorance is bliss.
Do you know LCD Soundsystem? My goodness! Of course you do, because their music has been around for ages and it will likely be around for a lot longer. One of the best things about LCD Soundsystem - and I try to avoid saying “James Murphy” when speaking about the music because he isn’t the sole creative force, you guts - is that whoever you are, as long as you know the lyrics you’re in on the joke. But not really, the only people truly in on it is the band, because you’ll never know whether to take James Murphy at his word or not. If you acknowledge this, you can actually even feel superior to the people ostensibly in on the joke who’re really part of the joke, like the rich white dudes who enjoy Vampire Weekend and think boat shoes and khakis are trendy (you look like a Dad.) Consider the possibility that LCD Soundsystem is the only cultural object where admitting you ‘don’t get it’ is the only way to get it. That absolutely makes so much sense.
At the start of the video for “North American Scum,” James Murphy is standing in front of a foil-covered wall just like Warhol’s Factory. In his hands, the comparison seems less trite than it would with literally any other contemporary musician. That might be because the comparison seems absolutely ludicrous, or because it’s light-hearted and comedic rather than a less-than-tongue-in-cheek statement about ambition or popularity. While arrogance is kind of a dead scene (thanks, Kanye) and in such a saturated world everything big has blended together, maybe the only viable route for both critical and mainstream success is to Get Innocuous. Of course, you’re fucked, because James Murphy got it first. But at least you’re ahead of The Wombats.
“Fall Out, Boy” Would Be A Great Name For A Pop-Punk-Rap Experimental Mixtape By Das Racist
As a kid I had a tendency to denounce things when I found out they weren’t cool. I distinctly remember one time I was in the car with a friend and he was telling me about the fifth Harry Potter book that was about to come out and I said “Whatever man, Harry Potter is for fucking kids, I’m bored of that shit.” Predictably I picked up a copy on the day it came out and didn’t emerge from my bedroom until I’d finished it, a ritual of isolation that’d begun with the first book that took place in the back seat of our family’s car shortly after the first book was released. That said, I’ve definitively decided not to see the new Harry Potter film (at least not in cinemas) and I think I’ve made it clear why.
I really only started dropping this habit after I was introduced to Klosterman and the farcical nature of having guilty pleasures, and I realised it was better to just own up to what you enjoy and anyone naive enough not to realise that taste is subjective wasn’t worth talking about art to anyway. Obviously I haven’t perfected this philosophy because to some extent I still do it. Even this morning I was listening to The Vasco Era and thinking “I don’t know if I can get on board with this, it’s bad enough that I get called ‘a total Melbourne kid’ by precocious fifteen year olds, I don’t want to actually become one of them, because ‘Melbourne kids’ I know are vacuous and self-involved.” But today I put on Fall Out Boy’s second album From Under The Cork Tree and remembered why of all the stuff I’d distanced myself from, Fall Out Boy was never one of them, at least not for artificial reasons anyway.
The first time I heard Fall Out Boy was around the time From Under The Cork Tree came out and every self-confessed punk kid I knew missed no opportunities to talk about how their music was whiny, moronic, emo shit and for a while I assumed they knew what they were talking about and just repeated everything they said when it came up, but at some point I figured I had to actually find out what their music sounded like to make my point stronger. Unfortunately, I really liked them! I could never relate to the lyrics but it didn’t matter because I didn’t appreciate lyricism at that point anyway, I just liked the way everything sounded. I figured out what “notch on your bed post” meant because I was familiar with how some warriors put notches on their weapons to indicate their kill count back when Men Were Men but mostly I enjoyed how it was kind of fun to listen to and wasn’t on the radio yet. My emotions were expressed more frequently by Linkin Park at the time, which I don’t think is too heinous to admit that you liked as a fifteen year old when you’re too stupid to realise that life at that moment is actually pretty sweet.
Like my park bench analogy yesterday, I think it’s pretty important to just chill out sometimes, especially when it gives you greater appreciation for whatever activity you’re doing. Last night Matt recommended me some albums after I mentioned preconceived notions resulted in me missing out on a lot of music I should’ve heard and I’ve spent today thinking about/”appreciating” them, which exerts mental energy. You can’t just sit there and play video games or engage in some other task while trying to deconstruct a record because the revelations you get from your favourite songs come from attentive listening, which is why I think it’s smart to listen to records when washing dishes or walking home or something equally repetitive and mindless (i.e. not distracting). After listening to them a few times I was getting tired and twitchy and realising it was becoming like work, so I put on From Under The Cork Tree and it was like stepping out into the cool air after being in a humid club for four hours with your best friends: you had an awesome time but every so often its good to have a break so it doesn’t lose its joy. It was nice returning to something familiar that I didn’t have to think about. I’ve listened to some of these songs over a hundred times (that’s roughly five hours of accumulated listening to single tracks) and I still love Wentz’ vague and generic lyrics. As far as park benches go that’s pretty durable.
I’m Not Going To Apologise For How Much I Write About Pitchfork Reviews Reviews
So dealwithit.gif.
I read PRR every day, even when he doesn’t post I go back and read an old entry or two between refreshing Tumblr and ONTD, and it’s really paying off. Like right now I’m listening to Fang Island’s eponymous debut (do you think if Epona from the Zelda games had its own game people would refer to it as “Eponamous”?) and thinking “Wow, I haven’t felt this moved by an album so sparse with lyrics before”. As someone who shares David’s appreciation for lyricism (tangentially: that’s obviously why I share his appreciation of King of the Beach too) I mostly find instrumental tracks boring at worst or like sitting on a park bench between running at best, and like sitting on park benches I never set out to do it, it’s only something that I do when I want a short break from engaging actively in something.
The contrast between his older writing and his new writing is stark, and I’m aware of how cliche that is obviously but as I’ve said before there are valid reasons for that inclination. When I was Liking his older posts I was mindful of the fact that I didn’t want to create any pressure to “return to his roots” or whatever because that is simply impossible and an attempt to do so would result in some horribly butchered facsimile that would be awful, and that’s not even helpful advice. I know David isn’t unaware of that perception because he keeps bringing it up and I don’t want to put too great an emphasis on it because I know there’s a chance he might read this and react adversely to the criticism (which, who wouldn’t? And also hey David), and I’d feel guilty about that because I hope I’ve made it clear that he’s one of my favourite writers.
If you look at this post where he first got invited to the Pitchfork party, he sort of reacts snarkily, which I guess is to balance or mask his excitement at being invited to the sanctum of ostensibly his favourite organisation on Earth, and that’s fine, it was actually pretty funny, but it definitely established him as having the outsider perspective.
some ideas for how i should act at the party:
1. walk up to people talking, listen to their conversations, then rate what i’ve overheard on the pitchfork 0.0-10.0 scale and also say stuff like “that’s a best new witticism right there” or “best new banter” (which i guess are respectively analagous to best new track and best new music). if somone was retelling a story someone else had told them i guess i could say “best new reissued anecdote!!” or walk up to the punch and pull someone aside and be like, “this punch isn’t as satisfying as some of their earlier punches, the strawberry topnotes are just merciless on your palate, no subtlty at all in this punch, and the coloring is just so OBVIOUS you know? like couldn’t they have gone with something beside red? plus the punch just draws from all the wrong influences like kool-aid and hi-c rather than keeping the ORIGINAL fruits it’s based on in mind, right? it doesn’t go out of its way to differentiate itself from a lot of the other punches that are coming out right now
Like you know how you “LOL” at things you read but really its just to indicate the presence of something ostensibly humorous, but then rare things make you Literally Laugh Out Loud? Well this paragraph made me LLOL, which is better than if he’d just written “PITCHFORK PARTY!!!!!!!!! SO SIKED!!!!!!!” I guess. The point I’d like to make which I’m currently failing to even remotely illustrate is that reading old Pitchfork Reviews Reviews vs reading new Pitchfork Reviews Reviews is analogous to how David wrote about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
knowing that Karen O will spit water up into the air regardless of her mood disarms the thrill of its spontaneity. i think it is supposed to seem like Karen O spits water up into the air because she just FEELS LIKE IT because she’s just that badass, and staying adequately hydrated is not a concern to a punk art star of her stature, but if she does it every night it is part of an act, which feels disingenuous given the ostensibly spontaneous free-spirited rebelliousness of spitting water up into the air
[…]
we walk back to the subway and talk about being a successful band in new york, and how when you are not yet successful and you play at shitholes and make no money, what you want to do is make money and have millions of people love you because it is not fun to toil in obscurity forever, and then once millions of people love you and you make a lot of money it must bother you that no matter how great your band still is and how hard you try every night, the coolest kids are not the ones who are coming out anymore, because they have found new cool bands or and are maybe rolling their eyes at you
and trying to get the cool kids to come back and see you because you’re playing at some random shithole in brooklyn again is like trying to get toothpaste back in the tube. but who cares because you are in wealthy and successful and in Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and in new york, wealth and fame are the ultimate last laughs, and to all the kids rolling their eyes at you, you still are “rich rich rich”, you know?
I don’t think it’s fair to read into this as revelatory of his motivations, like by assuming that now he’s popular he doesn’t really give a shit that the cool kids are rolling their eyes at him, especially because the arbiters of those cool kids are shouting his name at festivals he’s snuck into, but at the moment I feel like he’s spitting water into the air. He’s made some trenchant points about how forcing himself to write about music when he feels he’s written as much insight as he has in him presently would be disingenuous and I know what it’s like when you try to say something without anything to say, ultimately you just end up disappointing yourself and your audience. Regardless, I will keep reading Pitchfork Reviews Reviews until topherchris switches off the light for the last time at Tumblr because even though sometimes it feels like David Shapiro is trying too hard to write like Pitchfork Reviews Reviews, he still writes with more passion for his subject than anyone else I know, and I hope he becomes ridiculously successful for it. Somebody scan his zine because I don’t think I’ll be able to get it in Australia.
Pitchfork Reviews Reviews Reviews [part one billion]
This is one of my favourite PRR pieces to date. I’ve been kinda down on PRR for the past week and a half, because I don’t find party write-ups particularly interesting (it’s totally his prerogative, but I prefer the thoroughly musical posts), but the latest post has so much fervor and passion that made me really vicariously happy. I mean, the glee from a friendly conversation with this dude who he idolises, whose site he’s been reading almost since inception, is so genuine and un-affected and a refreshing antithesis to the cool, indifferent, attempted objectivity of a lot of music writing - not that there isn’t a time and place for that, but PRR is kinda like a block of chocolate amongst a pantry of carbs. Everything in moderation.
Best New Sentence(s):
he doesn’t want to go high for some other reason that i didn’t write down, but i guess he just doesn’t want to bite the ‘fork that feeds by second-guessing them
and
i go, “i also saw that you smoked blunts — did you smoke phillies or dutches?” which, as i have heard in rap songs, are the two most prominent brands of cigars that are gutted and used to smoke marijuana with, and he tells me that he always smokes “Dutch Masters” and i say “what flavor” because at the deli i always see that they come in different flavors and he says “the Gold’n Honey ones”
I don’t read any gonzo journalism on the reg, so maybe it’s naive of me to say “It felt like I was really there!” even though it’s true. His sincerity makes it so engaging, like when he writes “i tell Mark Richardson how i sort of snuck into the venue because i want him to think i am a punk sort of, and he smiles a little but also makes a weird face to indicate i should be supporting Pitchfork,” I knew exactly how disappointing it is to put on a pose to impress someone cool and have them indicate that you’re being irresponsible.
Outside of my visceral, emotional reactions to David’s writing, what makes it the most interesting for me is how he’s escaped the pressure to be a “good” writer by just writing, which is really fucking punk. Punk was three chords, it was supposed to be raw and easy to give a voice to people who didn’t want to be virtuosos, who just wanted to say something, and that is exactly the spirit captured in David’s writing.
Unpublished Works of Genius: A review of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”
This was deemed unfit to print.
Rob Gordon, the melancholic protagonist of High Fidelity, posits in his opening monologue that the reason people are so miserable is because of countless hours spent listening to songs about heartbreak, misery and loss. Well, I don’t think exposing The Kids to barrages of bubblegum pop and candy floss dreams is any better at creating well-rounded citizens. I suppose the brand of hedonism it preaches is relatively safer than the anarchy of punk, grunge and alt-rock or the melancholy of Britpop and indie: today’s Top 40 is espousing rebellion of the socially acceptable kind. Despite all your rage, being a rat in a cage isn’t that bad when you live on candy clouds and shoot cream out of your nipples.
Teenage Dream is offensive. The problems begin with Katy Perry herself, whose lyrics are trite and boring, often exchanging an opportunity for singing with vaguely-word-sounding wailing. This is in contrast to her debut LP, which at least generated discussion (whether you feel like the controversy over some of her singles was a contrivance or not is irrelevant, the point is that you’re talking about it) and underneath the shimmery surface, there was a lot of spite being directed which made her imagery come to life fully-formed. The most trenchant lyrics come via “Circle The Drain”, which is ostensibly about ex-boyfriend Travis McCoy and his drug-induced narcolepsy, yet the sincerity still isn’t enough to produce a song worth listening to more than once. Generally, the experiences she’s lauding seem unreal, idealistic, as if conceptually she’s having fun, but really, in an Inception-esque twist, the whole album is sung from the perspective of someone aware that what they’re experiencing is merely a simulation of “fun”. That lack of depth is the crack running through the entire production.
But that’s not the offensive part. What’s so disgusting is that listening to Teenage Dream doesn’t make me excited or upbeat, it makes me depressed that this is the work of one of the most popular artists in the entire world. Meanwhile, far more talented, creative, and imaginative bands are going unnoticed, having to put down their sticks and flick off their amps to put on a tie and slump into a life of mediocrity due to the mass market’s appalling appetite for the most devastatingly uninteresting shit with the highest production value. It’s all well and good that bands have MySpace and YouTube to promote themselves on, but it’s all for nothing if the old model where A&R scouts a face for a huge label to give singing lessons to and make the Next Big Thing is still the only path to success. While people continue to allow their tastes to be dictated by committees, they’ll continue to get the most crass culture available rather than the popular culture they deserve (one could argue their apathy for media means they deserve this, but I’m considerably more optimistic.)
I have to hand it to Dr. Luke, though. The mastermind behind some of the biggest pop hits over the last decade has pulled out all the tricks in his bag for this one, though the con to this pro is that those tricks were also used on a lot of other songs. A lot of other songs. From “E.T.”’s aural proximity t.A.T.u’s 2002 hit “All The Things She Said”, to the abuse of Toni Basil’s “Mickey” on hopefully-a-satire-about-the-transparent-innuendo-in-pop-but-probably-just-dumb “Peacock”, it pushes the boundaries of homage into unimaginative derivation. These references to pop classics need to be wielded with a light hand, a touch here and there, to evoke some context that adds to what’s already present in the song, but with little to add to, the result is an album that doesn’t sound innovative at best and sounds ripped-off at worst. It’s very vogue to play on nostalgia right now - I can’t count the number of tracks that’ve come out in the last year sampling childhood rhymes - but the throwbacks on Teenage Dream are more crutch than supplement.
Whether you classify the album as “good” is ultimately about perspective: Is the goal of a pop record to sell the most units (pessimistic), or to provide an enjoyable listening experience without challenging the listener (optimistic)? Whichever you choose, this album is undisputedly a success, and it’s unfortunate that it comes at such a cost.
Writing about writing about music.
I’ve been officially reviewing music for a month now, and I’ve been fascinated dealing with the response to my writing. From the glowing “You write reviews now? AWESOME! I really liked this review. It’s solid, especially considering its brevity. I wouldn’t change anything” - a quote which now hangs in printed form on my wall - to the merely congratulatory, not that I appreciate the support any less. Yesterday, my review of Uffie’s Sex Dreams And Denim Jeans was published, and my Mum (number two fan) was less than impressed. “I don’t think you said enough about the album itself,” she said, “I felt like I was reading her biography.”
This is something I’ve heard before, that I don’t write enough about how it sounds. In some cases, this is true, however this is basically a result of how I extrapolate value from music. There are a bunch of different ways to experience music and I don’t particularly think any one way is superior or more correct than the others, but personally I find the context of the album very important. It’s so common in music reviews to write things like “In some ways this track acts as a bridge between the band’s debut LP and its follow-up, which plunges the listener into an expansive pool of influences”, and I don’t think that informs the reader at all, especially when the reviewer fails to elaborate on what those “influences” might be, which is almost always the case. This is followed by “[Band member]’s horn arrangements add extra shine and savoir-faire throughout the album”. I admit that I didn’t know what “savoir-faire” was, so I looked it up. “The ability to do or say what is appropriate for the occasion”. That’s the quality the horn arrangements add to the album. And, oh yeah, “shine”.
It seems like I’m just taking umbrage with this review in particular, but those two quotations are good examples of what I find completely worthless. There are so many cases of unnecessary, useless language used in reviews that attempt to inform the viewer how an album sounds, but I maintain that any noise able to be accurately captured in the written word lacks the artistry to be worth writing about. What’s more important to me, as a writer, is the meaning behind the songs, the reason the album was made, and where it belongs in the annals of Art. I’m not saying that’s the right way to review records, and I’m certainly not claiming that I have it all figured out regarding music criticism, and I’m definitely not against describing how an album sounds, but I think making that the focal point of your review makes for boring reading. There’s only so many times I can read how “the tectonic guitars create a barrage of sound that shimmers through your speakers” without wanting to scrub out my ears with steel wool. At this point I’m considering writing my next review as a series of onomatopoeia. “Uffie’s Sex Dreams And Denim Jeans is dun dun dun chikachikachika bowooooow tatatatatata FCHOW!”
I do stand by my Uffie review, though. It’s poorly structured and initially a bit repetitive, but I made some trenchant points about the lyrical content and themes of the album in the third paragraph. And maybe a little biographing wasn’t such a bad thing in this case, as it’s her first album, the creation of which took place over the span of her most hectic years. It is Uffie, and I hope I shone a little light on what that actually means.
September 12th, 2001
On September 12th, I remember waking up, jumping out of bed, and going straight to the lounge room to watch cartoons. It was a routine I repeated every weekday. Digimon at 7, Pokemon at 7:30, Dragon Ball Z at 8, then off to school. I was ten years old. This time when I got to the lounge, my Dad was sitting on the couch watching some morning show, I think it was Sunrise, which I always hated because the presenters were disgustingly upbeat about everything, but it might’ve just been a news program. I asked him if we could change the channel, but it didn’t make a difference. On every channel was the same thing, a clip of a plane smashing into a giant tower I’d never seen in a city I knew nothing about. I was pissed that my cartoons had been programmed over just for some news from abroad.
It was only over the next few months that I began to develop an idea of why that morning was important. I don’t know why, but I’d assumed planes crashed into towers with some regularity, enough that it didn’t seem like an outstanding event to me at the time. I learned the word “terrorist” and for a long time it was synonymous with “Muslim”. I didn’t hate Muslims, but I certainly didn’t understand them, and the thought that all followers of a particular religion would commit atrocities against followers of another religion seemed kind of par for the historical course (I was well into the Crusades as a child). Besides, what did I care that people on one side of the world were killing people on the other side of the world?
In the following years I started growing up and became more aware of the world, and in 2006 I started becoming friends with Americans via the wonder of social networking, mostly people from San Francisco. And one day one of them told me she’d been to a benefit for Josh Wolf and spent the night chatting to Ze Frank. At some point after that, I watched this video.
It was the first time I’d felt the reality of the attack on America and the emotional toll. It’s like when one of your extended family contracts cancer. You know it’s “a thing”, conceptually you could acknowledge it, but it was never part of your experience until someone you knew as a human being said it to your face. We all have our opinions on the events following 9/11, but what is indisputable is how sad it is that people have such hatred in their hearts that they’d commit something so horrible.
My initial feeling around this time of year is dread. Everyone describes their experience, which I think is a beautiful way of commemorating what happened and eulogizing the people killed, but it’s also a bummer, and dwelling on it makes me hate everyone who talks to me. Because how could you send me the link to your fucking podcast when so many people are being killed over ideological differences? Why are you bitching at me for not washing my plate when people are being imprisoned and raped, and then killed out of shame by their families? All the harsh realities of the world are so much harder to ignore today. Today is just awful. But thankyou all for sharing your stories. It’s helped someone like me, so isolated in a relatively safe pocket of the world, understand. And I’m sorry for your loss.
If you could interview one person, who would it be?
Between episodes of Spartacus: Blood & Sand and during cups of green tea, I spent the latter half of yesterday focused on the concept of musician interviews. I’ve never given an interview to a professional musician before, and I have no idea if an interview I gave would be any good. However, I’ve developed a fairly good idea of what makes a good interview. I think a lot of the interviews I watch are bad, and this is for a number of reasons. Most predominantly, bad interviews involve some degree of uncomfortability. In a Pitchfork Reviews Reviews post from a few weeks ago, the author observes the practice of taking the artist (in this case Nathan Williams) out of an interview space to a more informal setting (in this case it was a green room so they could smoke) which makes them more comfortable, and therefore more genuine with their answers. Often in music reviews I see the author noting that when the mics are switched off, the subject is a completely different person. This is infuriating for the reader, of course, because the conclusion is that the person off the record is more desirable (due to his inaccessibility), and that the reader only gets to see the persona gives the sense of being ripped off. Whether the inclusion of that observation by whoever’s writing the article is detrimental to music journalism isn’t relevant to my point so I’ll leave it up to you to decide (or maybe I’ll say something about it later).
Chuck Klosterman is a great resource for novice interviewers. Klosterman, whose music journalism, which included some brilliant interviews, was prominent in his rise to recognition, has experienced both sides of celebrity and the interview process, first as author and then as subject. His writing on either side is incredibly illuminating and while Lester Bangs comparisons seem inevitable but essentially meaningless, I regard him as one of the best interviewers I’ve read (I’m open to suggestions on others, though). His most practical advice comes from the second episode in PopMatters’ What’s The Write Word series, where he advises “If an interview subject isn’t responding to your questions, ask them specific queries about their craft (i.e., “How did you tune your guitar to get that specific sound?,” “What is the initial step when writing a pop song?,” etc.)”.
What makes a good interview though? Some decent fucking questions, to begin with. Making an artist comfortable is a good start, but you have to capitalize on the candor it’s supposed to produce. While I imagine some interviewers feel an obligation to ask “informative” questions, this is a fundamentally useless practice. All that information is already on Wikipedia, the band’s website, and a hundred thousand fan websites. The best interviews I’ve seen/read occur when the interviewer engages the subject as an artist rather than a spokesperson. This reflects on what Chuck Klosterman was saying. Basically, I think any interview where the interviewer avoids asking “What was it like working with so and so?” or “What was it like going back into the studio after nine months of touring?”, because “What was it like…?” is not a question worth hearing the answer to. It’s a question dripping in apathy and disinterest, and inevitably you’ll receive an answer in kind, yet I hear it asked so often.
There are a lot of celebrities I’d like to know, but not many I’d like to interview. I’d really like to know Charlie Brooker, because he’s an acerbic, witty gentleman with a colossal, self-aggravating appetite for pop culture, but I think his motives and ambitions are fairly plain, so I have no interest in interviewing him.
Who I’d like to interview given the chance and why:
Russell Brand
I’d like to find out how self-aware he is, especially at this stage in his career where I don’t think he can achieve much more success than he already has. I’d like to know whether he’s oblivious to this or not.
Kanye West
Mostly for a discussion about racism and misogyny with regards to the contemporary rap scene, and pop culture in general, and how it’s changed in the past decade.
Kid Cudi
Probably to discuss the emergence of the “blipster” and how indie music is influencing rap.
Wyatt Roy
While politicians are notoriously tight-lipped, and I imagine as a 20-year-old he’s probably quite susceptible to party indoctrination, I’d still like to find out whether he’s a mouthpiece or reflective of new ideas entering a stringently conservative party.
Christopher Price
Expose on the man behind the googly eyes.
I’m Always Lazy When I Miss You
I had a dream last night that I asked this girl to be my girlfriend and she said yes, high school style. None of this courting bullshit, none of the uncertainty, just blissful sincerity. I think that might’ve been my favourite part of my formative years. You like her, she likes you, perfect. You sneak glances at each other through the chain link fence from across the playground while playing four square with your boys, and then after school you walk each other home. You make out down by the creek behind her house. You get The Scorpion King on DVD but don’t actually watch it while it’s on. Then you’d break up because you’d throw too many balls at her in dodgeball. True story.
There’s this one line on Best Coast’s “Crazy For You” that goes “I’m always lazy when I miss you” which resonated with me. When you break up with someone, people will always tell you to move on by fucking a bunch of women. And that works! But why it works is because it’s supposed to distract you from the person you’re obsessing over. One of the truest things I’ve found in my search for a formula for getting over people is that you have to distract yourself. The sooner you realise this, the sooner you’ll learn to adjust to life without them. And the happier you’ll be!
Until you’re listening to Katy Perry’s “E.T.” and realise it sounds similar to t.A.T.u.’s 2000 hit “All The Things She Said” so you watch the video clip and think “Wow, Lena is kinda hot” and then realise she has exactly the same hair as the girl you’re trying to get over. And then you watch the music video like six more times. Thank God It’s Monday.
Teenangst Dreams.
Man, it’s fucking useless asking your friends for an opinion on something that isn’t distanced from you. The people I know just have no standards for what I’m doing, so there’s this really pernicious cult of affirmation that just makes me fucking hate everyone for being liars. And it’s motivated by selfishness. Consciously they might find it altruistic, forgoing their principles in an attempt to make someone they like happy, but subconsciously, they’re just doing it because if you react poorly to criticism, you won’t like them anymore. These fucking Yes People and their fiction. You guys!
And this is what the New Niceness has done, eviscerated any inclination someone might have towards critical thinking lest it piss someone off. So you can immediately disqualify all the people that like you if you’re trying to find real talk. This leaves all the people who fucking hate you, and they’re not going to talk to you for long enough for you to get across the fact that you’re just looking for an opinion. All of this leaves me in the position of just throwing shit out there and hoping it’ll pull them out of the woodwork, but invariably any potential critics are so sick of me they can’t be bothered stringing together sentences about how I’m the bane of their existence when they could just be making a sandwich or cruising Facebook or any of the many more productive things you could be doing than talking about me on the Internet.
I’ve always held the belief that a good friend will tell you what you want to hear, but a real friend will tell you what you need to hear. Just once (twice, three times max) I’d like to hear where I’m fucking up.
