Katy Perry: Ripoff Artist

Katy Perry.  What is there to say?  That she’s the culmination of trends going on in the past 15 years of women in rock music?  That she’s a dreadful representation of what happens when the mainstream co-opts powerful women singers?  That she’s a symbol of “do-me” feminism/postfeminism/Girlie Feminism gone wrong (even if she doesn’t quite identify with those groups)?  That she rips off other women artists?  That she ends up being kinda homophobic and kinda pruriently bicurious–but for a male audience–at the same time?  That she titled her album One of the Boys, which is just irksome and implies a calculated bid for a male audience? That she seems to justify critics such as Ariel Levy, who say that Third Wave feminism has led to women being completely superficial about their sexuality?

How about all of the above?

For those of you who may not be familiar with the off-key singer, here’s a little background.  She grew up the daughter of two preachers, released a Christian rock album, and then decided to switch to the pop realm with big producers.  So far, no problems: Aretha Franklin, after all, moved from gospel to soul by first making a seven-year detour into pop music.

But Aretha’s path to success wasn’t, in fact, in that carefully crafted genre, but instead in soul, where she could use her immense vocal talents.  Perry, on the other hand, has used pop connections to place herself in the same category as women with a lot more talent.  She also used pop connections that worked well for other women who had significant success:  Like Avril Lavigne, Liz Phair, and Britney Spears, Perry worked with record production team The Matrix; she also worked with Glen Ballard (producer for Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill) on her debut album.  Less related to production, but just as calculated, she recently appeared to make a bid for some semblance of subcultural authenticity by appearing on the Van’s Warped Tour, hardly a girlie-pop venue.

Her major success came this summer, when the song “I Kissed a Girl” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and her album One of the Boys was released in late June (so far, only reaching number 9 in the charts). “I Kissed a Girl” is everywhere, and so is Perry, gleefully talking up her tomboy-but-girlie personality, dressing like a cleaner, more stable Amy Winehouse, and promoting, promoting, promoting her songs as not at all political but just so fun, tee hee.

Perry’s sudden success seems cooly calculated and calibrated, reliant upon several trends in the representation of women in pop music that walk the line between sensationalistic and supposedly “owning” your own sexuality.  While I could write an essay on how much “I Kissed a Girl” is a vain attempt at drawing male attention in a Girls Gone Wild world, the blog Feministe has already done a nice job of that.  Instead, I parse below some of the influences that Katy Perry so freely pulls from in a grab-bag fashion.

1. Jill Sobule: Does no one remember that singer-songwriter Sobule had a hit with her song “I Kissed a Girl” in 1995?  Critically acclaimed Sobule, whose brief fame was encapsulated within the moment of the resurgence of the female singer-songwriter in the mid-1990s, wrote a song with exactly the same title, only for an opposite effect.  Whereas Perry’s song features a girl telling a guy about her exploits with girls, Sobule’s tale has the protagonist bonding with her friend about their mutually lame boyfriends, and then making out.  Instead of being for the dudes, it’s kept secret from them; instead of being an end to attract a man, it’s perhaps a beginning of something new.  We don’t know, because the songwriter is smart enough to leave that out.  Also ripped off beyond the idea, lyrics such as “her lips were sweet”–yeah, a cliche, I know–also appear in Katy Perry’s song.

2. Alanis Morissette:  Morissette walked the line between being one of the angry girls of “alternative” rock and recalling a peace-loving singer-songwriter of the 1970s.  Undeniably, however, she was able to tap into the zeitgeist of 1990s pop music, and Jagged Little Pill sold a proverbial shitton of copies.  This may have been strategic; it may have just been who Morissette was as an artist at the time. But without a doubt, Morissette forged a difficult link between alternative and girl-pop worlds.  Perry, by working with Glen Ballard, and by presenting her undeniably produced pop on the Warped tour, is trying to find that same level of success.  And one more thing: Morissette’s first single was as directly sexual as Perry’s.

3. Liz Phair:  Another woman who places a focus on the critique of male behavior in her songs (e.g. 6′1″) as well as explicit sexuality (e.g. “Flower”, with the lyric, “I wanna be your blow job queen”), Phair was, for many women, a rare voice of female desire in a rock realm.  However, Phair’s public image soon shifted from being a female subject with her own wants and desires to that of a pure object.  Her appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1993, for example, flipped the strong-but-sexy image into its negative: the doe-eyed, vulnerable nymphet.  (For a great discussion of Phair’s impact on music, sexuality, and Third Wave feminism, click this link.)  Perry seems to be drawing on Phair’s ability to attract female audiences, through lyrics about douchy guys, and to attract the male gaze, through her big-eyed sexpot look and lyrics about kissing a girl but returning home to her man, a suggestion of a future threesome if I ever heard one.

4. Avril Lavigne:  Ah, the similarities with this one!  Levigne pioneered the punk-lite teen scene, toting a guitar with her and acting like “one of the boys,” even when you can’t hear her guitar playing in the mix and she’s tarted up in a skirt and heels.  Lavigne’s songs, like “Sk8er Boi,” acknowledges skater subculture in the same way that Perry’s “Ur So Gay” places an “H&M scarf” as a resonant indie-rock image.  But the greatest similarity lies in both women tapping the songwriting efforts of The Matrix: while Lavigne made the trio somewhat famous (at least as far as songwriters go), they were the first people that Perry turned to in her quest for fame.  Perry recorded an album with The Matrix in 2004, but it was shelved weeks before its release.  Still, their influence lingers on in Perry’s coy posing and cutesy musical styling.

5. South Park: This one may more of a stretch than the others, but it’s definitely there.  South Park was one of the first venues to regularly have its characters say, “Dude, that’s so gay!” as an insult.  But while having cartoon eight-year-olds insult each other with the term “gay” in a show that often layers satire upon satire undoubtedly causes some cognitive dissonance in those of us who think it’s funny but aren’t into homophobia, Perry’s song “Ur so gay!” is about on that eight-year-old level and somehow more disturbingly homophobic.  On the one hand, it’s smart in the verses, describing a vain, self-involved, indie rock boy, one whom her female listeners probably identify as that guy who they wasted too much time on once upon a time.  But it’s not really that logical, lyrically, to move from the fairly descriptive verse to saying “Ur so gay/and you don’t even like boys.”  In fact, any critique of the self-involved dude then becomes lost in the juvenile chorus.  Ohhhkay, we’re supposed to think that being gay is the ultimate insult for douchebaggy behavior?  That’s a little bit Cartman of Perry, don’t you think?

In uniting all these elements, Perry seems to proclaim that she is a unique and substantial individual: not just a “female-singer-songwriter,” because she is “one of the boys;” not just bubblegum teen radio fare, because she’s “edgy” in her lyrics; not just pop, because she’s on tour with a bunch of bands with street cred.  But the real fact is, there’s nothing original about Perry, just a lot of heavily vetted pop tactics on parade.

Review: Black Kids’ “I’m Not Gonna Teach Him How to Dance With You”

Ah, yes, this song’s been floating around for a while now, and former Columbia ethnomusicology student Christian Hoard pegged the band as “one to watch” last November.  But this week “I’m Not Gonna Teach Him How to Dance With You” is the FREE single on Apple’s iTunes (Secret reason I reviewed Jaguar Love’s EP and not the whole album? It was $1.99 in the used bin), and I’m sick and can’t bother with much more than a review of a single.

The obvious touchstone for the Black Kids is the Cure–from the fondness for the vocable “do” to the airy, heavily layered, symphonic synthesizers to the slightly morose lyrics about unhappiness with a girl to the Robert-Smith-esque timbral qualities of Reggie Youngblood’s voice.  We all know this (though apparently the kids reviewing it on iTunes don’t–out of the 500 or so reviews, only about ten seemed to recognize the Cure.  Others listed Arcade Fire, The Hives, The Killers, Gwen Stefani, and Bloc Party as reference points.  Learn your rock history, kids!).

However, I’m irritated with the constant assertion that the Black Kids are another “retro ’80s” band.  The musical style that the band apes dates from the Cure’s height of popularity, which was not in the 1980s but in the early 1990s.  In particular, the Black Kids draw on the sounds of the Cure’s 1992 album, Wish, which contains some of the bands poppiest, as well as most depressing, songs (Anyone else notice that the protagonist of “Friday, I’m in Love” is miserable six days a week?).

The Cure’s musical style is undoubtedly ripe to be imitated: the retro ’80s post-punk movement is past its prime, Bruce Springsteen is currently en vogue, and it’s not surprising to me that the Black Kids are looking to early ’90s Cure these days.  None of this nostalgia is bad in itself, as long as it serves to push music forward while simultaneously looking back.

As for the Black Kids’ “I’m Not Gonna Teach Him How to Dance With You” itself: The song’s lyrics are slightly silly, about dancing with a girl (with Reggie Youngblood referring to himself also as having been “a little girl”) he likes and not wanting to give her boyfriend tips.  It’s cute, but hardly substantial.

But the band executes the song with such exuberance, especially through the cheerleader-esque backing vocals from Ali Youngblood and Dawn Watley, that the teen angst of the lyric seems an entirely believable situation.  A guy likes the unattainable girl and tries, like Ducky’s lip sync to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” in Pretty in Pink, to continue dancing with sweet, sweet moves though his heart is breaking and she’s probably going out with a guy named Blaine.

Though synths dominate the sound of the Black Kids, its spunky danceable quality bursts forth in the tight, machine-like pattern in the drums: crisp, clean, not much bleed in the kit, it could easily be isolated in some parts for an old-school breakbeat.  Extended remix, anyone?

And Another One Gone…

I can’t believe I’m blogging on the same topic in less than a week, but I think it’s important.

In the ongoing theme of the death of the independent record store, Kim’s Video–formerly Kim’s Music and Video–by Columbia is closing.  I wouldn’t be sad, considering that I never much liked the store, except that it provided an ease of shopping for my lifestyle: go to school, pick up an album on the way home, no trips downtown required.

No, what makes me upset is that if Kim’s, the cockroach of independent record stores, can’t survive, nothing can.  Kim’s, a long-established chain of stores in the NYC area, has survived raids for “piracy,” after all.  And it’s been in the uptown location since April 2001, hardly an auspicious economic time itself.  Though I foresee that their downtown locations might have a longer life–NYU kids are always hipper than Columbia kids–I don’t think that any of them will exist primarily as music stores for very much longer.

And here’s why: This year, the top 5 music retailers were, in order, iTunes, Walmart, Best Buy, Amazon, and Target.

Everyone thinks that digital music is responsible for the death of the independent music store.  And to an extent, it is, since we are again shifting from an album-based musical economy to one that is single-based, thanks to iTunes and Amazon (and everyone else online).  And, Columbia University, from which Kim’s uptown rents its space, is undoubtedly a hotbed of online music purchasing and, shall we say, exchanging.*

But, within those top 5 retailers, you may notice that Walmart, Best Buy, and Target are still primarily brick-and-mortar stores.   There are still a LOT of people who do not buy music online, and they could theoretically buy from independent stores.  Those people, though, are going where it’s cheaper and more convenient: all three of those stores sell new releases at a loss, or bargain with record labels to buy in such large quantities that the label gives them a greater discount.

Basically, an independent record store can’t keep up with this, no matter where it’s located.  Most major-label distribution companies sell new releases in small quantities to independent stores at about $10-12 per CD; Best Buy, Walmart, and Target sell them to customers for about $10 each.  If independents sold them at the same price, they’d lose money on every CD they sold. And, though we’d all like to think that the cool music on indie labels that the big boxes don’t sell is the bread and butter for brick-and-mortar independent stores, it just isn’t–and those stores often have the big indie releases anyway.

And now my eulogy for Kim’s Uptown:  I never liked you.  Your staff was rude, and they never wanted to answer questions.  And they often overcharged.  I’m pretty sure that I visited the store on occasions when the security staff outnumbered the folks behind the counter, making me think that you thought customers were more likely to steal music than to buy it.

Unlike your downtown locations, Uptown rarely had new releases consistently stocked, unless it was (ugh!) Vampire Weekend. How you never managed to have anything I wanted in stock, I’ll never know.

Finally, your coy way of categorizing music–”indie” is music from the past ten years, “establishment” meant anyone coming before that–was needlessly precious.  It appealed to people who were needlessly pretentious in their music tastes, like the person I knew who claimed never to have heard Sonic Youth because they were “too mainstream.”  That dude got lot of music at Kim’s (and Other Music, a perhaps even more irksome store).

So, goodbye, Kim’s Uptown.  I won’t miss you, but I will miss many other, more homey stores like you.

*The university certainly does not condone file sharing.  In fact, they have rather grave repercussions if students get caught file sharing with Columbia accounts.

Rock History, What I Leave Out: David Bowie

Among the folks I leave out, David Bowie ranks highest in student requests.  Once I get a few semesters under my belt, get tired of teaching the same folks, and decide to switch things up, I’m sure I’ll swap him in, like a relief pitcher.

For now, though, I have several reasons to keep David Bowie on the alternate list.  First, his musical contributions are not as significant as one might think.  I can already hear complaints to this assertion, but hear me out:  Bowie’s best works contain a pastiche of musical styles, simultaneously referencing different eras and genres.  Aside from his Berlin work with Brian Eno, which helped to establish Eno as one of the best producers ever, much of this work is distinctly retro musically, while forward-looking in lyrics and performance.

Second, His adoption of different musical styles and personae throughout the years–Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, Berlin-Brian Eno-produced Bowie, elder statesman of alternative rock–doesn’t lend itself to easy characterization at a Rock 101 level.  But, at the same time, I already cover some bands that are doing similar things at the same time, though we don’t always think of them as being in the same realm as Bowie: gender bending, genre shifting, and issues of the border between art and pop also appeared in the music and performance of Led Zeppelin; George Clinton and P-Funk adopted fully-formed crazy spacemen characters at the same time, and their characters–Funk Messiahs from outer space–come with the benefit of acting as metaphors to address race in a post-Civil Rights Movement landscape.

Third–and this is the least valid reason, but I can’t change it–the class I teach falls into the category of “Intercultural North America.”  Its description focuses on rock & roll as an American form.  Thus, though I can of course cover some non-North American acts, my geographical focus tends to be the United States.  (Oh, poor Canada and Mexico!  I neglect you, too!  For there will be no Brian Adams or Corey Hart or even Alanis Morissette* in my course.  Or Los Tigres del Norte.)

Conversely, I can make a lot of arguments for including him when I do.  Although he’s never been as famous in the United States as he has in the UK, one could argue that no one else has been a greater influence on the visual and performative in rock music–on either side of the Atlantic–since 1970. Bowie’s gender-bending, super-weirdo-to-this-day Ziggy Stardust persona reinfused the overly “authentic” rock and roll of the late 1960s and early 1970s with a sense of showmanship.

Bowie’s contribution in terms of sexuality can’t be underestimated, either.  In a time when people actually thought that Freddie Mercury was straight,** Bowie declared his bisexuality.  Whether or not he really was/is whatever, this move, like Mercury’s often-overlooked declaration, blurred the edges of sexuality in rock performance.  This not only called into question the assumed heterosexuality of rock music as a genre, but also placed focus on how the masculinity that so many bands presented as “authentic” and “natural” was just as artificial and just as much of a performance.  On that topic, alone, we could probably spend a semester.

*Alanis Morisette will be the topic of my next “Rock History, What I Leave Out,” next Tuesday!

**Though Freddie Mercury told the NME he was gay in 1974, his audience often disregarded and remained unaware of his homosexuality.  One of his more-famous, oft-repeated quotes was, “I’m as gay as a daffodil, my dear!”

Review: Jaguar Love (Jaguar Love EP) and Past Lives (Strange Symmetry EP)

The Blood Brothers always seemed to me to be the male equivalent of Sleater-Kinney.  Both bands had dueling, contrapuntal vocal parts; both knew how to turn a sung note into a scream; both turned from a more straight-ahead punk sound toward something less definable and unique as they grew as a band.

Unlike Sleater-Kinney, whose members remain unfortunately silent, when the Blood Brothers broke up late last year, they almost immediately split into two new bands, Jaguar Love (Johnny Whitney, Cody Votolato of the Blood Brothers and J Clark of Pretty Girls Make Graves) and Past Lives (Jordan Blilie, Mark Gajadhar, Morgan Henderson, and Devin Welch).

Jaguar Love and Past Lives aren’t really easy bands to compare, since the shift in sound and personality for each band draws on influences that are worlds apart.  Jaguar Love takes a more straightforward indie-pop approach, while Past Lives draws heavily on the sound of Gang of Four through the use of spiky, contrapuntal guitar parts and repetitive, driving phrases.  But neither yet sounds as fully formed as the Blood Brothers circa Burn, Piano Island, Burn (2003), and singers Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney both sound like they have to get used to being the only man up front.

With both Jaguar Love and Past Lives releasing EPs this summer, the question will be who will find success after their breakup.  Initially, the short answer would seem to be Jaguar Love, who signed to indie biggie Matador almost immediately after forming.  But the focus should be on the long term—who can find the most growth out of this experience, and which band will be able to stand on its own in the end.

Jaguar Love Jaguar Love EP

Johnny Whitney sounds like a girl.  Actually, two girls: Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, of the aforementioned Sleater-Kinney. “Highways of Gold,” the opening song on the EP, and the lead single from the newly released Take Me to the Sea, opens with a verse that sounds remarkably similar to the chorus of Sleater-Kinney’s “One More Hour” in melodic contour and rhythm.  Oh, and words: both repeat “know(-oh-oh-oh-oh).”

Is sounding like a girl necessarily a bad thing?  Not really, at least not for me—I don’t give a rat’s patootie if you’re singing like your “correct” gender.  But I am bothered by how much this song draws on Sleater-Kinney’s handbag of tricks: Whitney layers his voice so that one track is overlapping with another, and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Brownstein, at one point or another, enunciate the same “Awah!” and Tucker do the “Ah-ah-ah.”  The linear guitar parts—another Sleater-Kinney favorite—and the loud, strong drumming with rapid-fire fills only add to the effect.

The other two songs on the EP, “My Organ Sounds Like…” and “Videotape Seascape” move away from the Sleater-Kinney mold and bouncy, repetitive pop toward a more layered sound and give Whitney—and his voice, take it or leave it, is most certainly the focus of this entire EP—a chance to show a more expressive range.  “My Organ Sounds Like…” allows Whitney to establish that yes, he can sing a melody, and he’s not so bad at it.  Every once in a while, too, he dips into his non-falsetto range, giving a hint of future growth (Note to Johnny Whitney:  If you can sing in a falsetto, you can embrace your lower range; falsetto is best used sparingly).

“Videotape Seascape,” the final song on the EP, best indicates the musical direction the band could take, if Johnny Whitney begins to sing in something other than his upper-upper-upper-range falsetto.  It’s not as though he’s any more understandable than on the other songs, but that he’s using his voice more like an instrument—one with a wider range of emotion, texture, and depth than earlier indicated—that fits in nicely with the repetitive guitar line beneath it.

Past Lives Strange Symmetry EP

Past Lives got the “favorite” singer for many fans, Jordan Blilie, but here the spotlight often belongs to the onetime Blood Brothers and Shoplifting guitarist, Devin Welch.  Welch’s guitar parts, whether layered or interlocking, spiky or connected, always add interest to a song; he’s basically could be the Johnny Marr of the Pacific Northwest, if Johnny Marr hadn’t gone and joined Modest Mouse.

The opening song, “Beyond Gone,” builds from the a simple, slow-tempo marimba underneath an arpeggiated guitar line.  The drums click against the rim of the snare, delicately indicating the tempo.  And then, Blilie actually sings!   The initial sparse and quiet arrangement builds through a wall of Welch’s feedback, and then, just as dramatically, goes quiet again, the song ending with just the marimba and an extended drum roll, leading straight into…

“Strange Symmetry,” the title track, where the band’s Gang of Four influences are on display in an unrelenting art-punk charge against the melodic pop world, until the last thirty seconds or so, which, quite frankly, I want to hear as an engagement with that pop world that the rest of the song eschews.

“Skull Lender” starts out much the same as “Strange Symmetry,” except that it’s maybe even more in the Gang of Four mold; ditto for “Reverse the Curse.”  Also, unlike the first two songs, where it was first absent and then subtle and catchy, the technique of adding both reverb and double-tracking to Jordan Blilie’s voice begins to be a little grating, like when you first realized that the Strokes’ lead singer Julian Casablancas sounded like he was singing through a megaphone for every single song on Is This It?

Thankfully, the final song, “Chrome Life,” ends the EP on a musical high point.  Beginning with some terrific, clicky drumming and textural, sustained guitar, it is driving without being repetitive, just melodic enough and still edgy enough in turn to be a wholly satisfying song.  It waxes and wanes as a song, leaving just enough in your memory to want to listen to it again.

So, the verdict:  I think it depends on a lot of “ifs.”  If Johnny Whitney can broaden his range, both in tessitura and expression, then Jaguar Love has a bright future.  (And I didn’t even mention in this review how much I really like J Clark’s drumming–is there any instrument that guy can’t play?)  If Past Lives can stop listening to the Gang of Four’s Entertainment on repeat, then so do they.

Rock History, What I Leave Out: An Introduction

In my non-blogging life, I teach a semester-long course on the history of rock & roll. Somewhere in the middle of the first semester teaching it, I realized I should have a disclaimer presented on the first day of class, written in bold letters:  While many, many bands are worth studying, they do not all fit into a semester long course.

The realization that they will not learn about their favorite band (even though they already know a lot about them) often comes as a shock to students, since what they like tends to be the center of their musical universe, not a moon circling a planet in a distant solar system in a galaxy far, far away.  What, you don’t teach about Christian metal?  No class on Jane’s Addiction?  Why can’t we learn about ‘80s hair bands, like Ratt and Poison?  That would be so cool!

But, even discounting the peripheral bands that students make the center of their lives, I inevitably have to leave important people, bands, and even entire genres out. One semester means roughly 24 classes, an hour and a half each.  If I want to make the class a rock & roll history course and connect the music to the social events of the day, i.e., why it is important to study rock & roll in the first place, then I have to talk about things other than just the music itself.  Otherwise, students make the same mistake that the Republican campaign did in 1984, overlooking the sense of bitter, bitter irony in Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”  Or they go through life not knowing who Medgar Evers or James Meredith were, and that makes me sad, because it’s pretty easy to listen to 1960s folk music in order to learn who those people were (even if some of the folk is a little overly didactic).

And, because a lot of my students don’t come to class armed with a knowledge of cultural history, I spend a lot of time on things that seem pretty simple to me, like learning that the shit economy in the early 1990s was part of seeing grunge (and Riot Grrrl, though that’s one of the things I don’t talk about) as related to Generation X.  Or that soul music is integrally connected to the Civil Rights movement.  Or that heavy metal owes a lot to the blues, but also a lot to the 1960s counterculture.  Or that punk is just one iteration of the frustration with the death of the counterculture.

Also, because many of them don’t come to class armed with a knowledge of pop music history—and that’s OK, because that’s what the class is, and I don’t expect a great background in it—I have to start with the basics.  I want everyone in my class to leave it being excited about music, but, just as importantly, able to talk intelligently about it with others, and this requires depth (and sometimes repetition).  And thus I have to leave more out.

So, as part of an ongoing series, I’m going to write about the subjects, artists, and genres I typically have to leave out.  These are all things that I consistently want to have time to teach about, but don’t get to because I want my students to have an understanding of the broad strokes of pop music writ large in history.  While the things I leave out are dessert, a tasty, valuable dessert, the things I teach are higher in nutrients—and still quite tasty.

The first artist of “Rock History, What I Leave Out” will be David Bowie.  So, come back on Tuesday to see my reasons for excluding a man I think is brilliant!

Review: Paul Weller’s 22 Dreams

Dear Paul Weller,

I was going to do a straightforward review of your album, 22 Dreams, but I just can’t.  On the one hand, I feel like my issues with the album boil down to the same problem throughout, and, on the other, the damned thing contains 22 songs.  And, while that’s a lot of songs for your buck, it doesn’t lend itself to a thorough review.  Many of them are tasty, polished, finely crafted pop songs, perhaps the best you’ve done since Stanley Road.  And for that, good on you!

So, what makes me so reluctant to write a real review?  Well, it’s your voice, sir.  No, it hasn’t gone to the dogs.  If anything, it’s better sounding than ever—in the abstract, at least.  You’ve always had one of those voices that contains a little bit of grit, a timbral interest and depth rare in pop music, and nearly completely absent from punk music (especially the nasal pop-punk which descends, ironically, from your first two albums with The Jam).  Your expression with the Jam was spot on, even as the band moved from punk to pop and even injected a little ‘60s Motown influence: I think of “Going Underground,” one of your songs that is distinctly English in flavor, but I can still hear the soul music you love creep in as you belt out the chorus, and then return at a hushed whisper.

And, now that I think about it, it’s not actually your voice these days that bothers me, but how you use it on 22 Dreams.  On the songs that reflect your rock & roll side, like “22 Dreams,” you sound great.  But on “All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)”—which sounds a bit like “Bitterest Pill to me, sir, but the mining of your past work is another issue for another day—you have an artificial, overly heavy vibrato.   On “Have You Made Up Your Mind,” you sound like a control-freak soul singer: at once overly enunciated, vibrato heavy, and strangely clipped, but also dripping with emotive phrasings.  The incongruity of your voice pops out in contrast to the casual, almost perfect Uptown soul backing vocals.

Look, I know you’ve wanted to be a soul singer since you told that Swedish lady on TV that your influences were the Sex Pistols and Tamla-Motown.  But if you want to be a soul singer, you can’t be clipped or artificial in your performance, or else you will end up sounding like an R&B version of Rod Stewart’s American songbook.  Let go, or you’ll sound like a reserved Englishman wanting to be a Motown singer.  And though you are English, and want to be a Motown singer, you used to have a lot less reservation.

At times, this strange vocal inflection infects other styles you embrace.  “Invisible,” another song with the vocal problem, is similar to your earlier “You Do Something To Me,” crossed with Randy Newman.  I know you’d disagree with that, but, really, that’s who you sound like.  So, Rod Stewart and Randy Newman: both guys I can’t stand, and regret hearing you sound like.  The worst example of this stunted phrasing and goat-y vibrato is on the folk-inspired “Why Walk When You Can Run,” which, I’m sorry, I will not be adding to my iPod.  Oh wait: I forgot about “Where’er Ye Go,” another piano-oriented tearjerker about setting some love free and it coming back to you, or something like that.  On that one, you sound like an old man, a Polonius of pop, emoting with a bloated cliché.

This sounds very much like I hate 22 Dreams in its entirety.  Musically, however, it has some of the best songs you’ve written in years.  Even though I can hear the very clear influences of the music you love—English folk, 1960s rock, jazz, you name it—dominating song by song, it’s a pretty cohesive grouping of songs.  The instrumental “Song for Alice,” which, with its backwards-tape-sounding trumpets, brings to the table both Beatles-esque recording techniques and fine jazz touches in the drumming.  And the tiny snippet of a song, “The Dark Pages of September Lead to the New Leaves of Spring,” sounds like the outro of an excellent psychedelic folk song.

“Push It Along,” though a little silly and repetitive, is one damned catchy tune, as is “A Dream Reprise,” another horn-tastic burst with (again) ye olde backwards guitar recording.  Man, you have an affinity for that, but it’s fun—like “Music for the Last Couple,” only cuter now that you’re old.  “Night Lights,” at over six minutes, effectively layers texture upon texture in a reprisal of the vaguely Eastern-inspired sounds as “Light Nights,” the album opener.

So, here’s my suggestion for your next album: record the vocals live, in one take.  I know you’re fond of the noodly recording bits, but you’ve isolated them on 22 Dreams into parts of the song that don’t feature vocals, anyway.   If you limit the amount of vocal takes, you’ll never get them to that “just right” stage, which, in the kind of music you’ve always made, is just wrong.  (Including the Style Council, which, aside from “Shout to the Top,” consistently suffered from this problem.)

I do want to thank you for one final thing, though.  Thank you, sir, for not singing about your loins—or anyone else’s—on this album.  I’m still embarrassed for you for that misstep.

Yours,
Elizabeth

Another One Bites the Dust

And now, a moment of silence for The Compact Disc Store, the last independent, non-genre-specific-yet-thoroughly-satisfying-in-its-selections record store in Baton Rouge, my hometown.

The Compact Disc Store is not dead yet, exactly, so perhaps mourning it is a little bit premature.  And I hope it is.  But when my friend Jonathan and I visited it this afternoon for our semi-annual CD-splurge fiesta, a sign on the door read, “For Sale: This Store.”  And, while we were in there–the entire half hour or so that it took for us to scour the store’s used section, peruse the new releases wall, flip through the extensive vinyl section, examine the boxed sets, and run around putting back non-essential purchases–only one other person came into the store.

In the end, both of us bought probably more than we should have.  The air felt funereal, but if the store is on its way out, we weren’t going to be the reason.

About five years ago, I wrote about the death of the independent music store in my now-defunct webzine, Smarty Pants.  Back then, we were in the early years of the digital music revolution, when Napster was the Big Bad that the majors were trying to combat. Now, it’s pretty much accepted and expected that most people simply want the convenience of getting their music online, whether its purchasing obscure out-of-print CDs from Amazon’s Marketplace, throwaway singles from iTunes, or just about anything illegally downloaded from Limewire (or Bittorent).  Furthermore, CDs, unless they are the aforementioned obscure and out-of-print highly prized collectors items, are just obsolete (and pretty much second to vinyl in the obscurity category).

But the Compact Disc Store, despite its bland name, is more than just a place to buy CDs.  Like other great independents, it is a place with a well grounded, well versed staff who, despite their hipster beards, probably know that a recording of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau performing Schubert’s Winterreise is going to be just as good a listen as Billy Bragg’s latest release.  Every time I’ve purchased music there, pretty much since high school, I’ve had an interesting exchange about music with the person behind the counter (or on the phone, when I once called them while interning at a hip indie label).  No one has ever been rude or exhibited the stereotypical High Fidelity arrogant judgment.

And, like other great independent record stores, the Compact Disc Store has its own quirky character.  Employees artfully collage the promo posters on the wall: Miles Davis turns into a giant alien-esque being; Barbra Streisand’s hands are altered so that she appeared to be gleefully holding a giant po-boy sandwich.  A chubby cat and shaggy dog occasionally emerge from the back room to hang out with customers and subtly demand attention by rubbing up against your legs as you shopped.  Far Side cartoons and Bushisms adorn the empty spots on the vinyl wall.

Most importantly, though, the store has always had great selection (despite its weird blind spot to Britpop).  Today, I purchased Billy Bragg’s Mr. Love and Justice; a compilation of Tony Allen’s solo releases from the 1970s; Jaguar Love’s brand new self-titled EP (used); Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s recording of Schubert’s Winterreise (used); INXS’s Kick (used–hey, I was 11 when it came out, and it is still awesome in my eyes); the Julliard String Quartet’s recording of Shoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht (used); and Paul Weller’s Wild Wood (used).  Not a bad haul in terms of used CDs, in particular.

But the world has changed.  Despite my sadness at seeing the for sale sign, I have to admit that I buy most of my music online these days, too.  I hope someone buys the store, and that it can survive our current recession, but it is just one of many such stores stuck selling a product that most people don’t want anymore, and it doesn’t look good.

Ave vale atque, Compact Disc Store.

Pop flotsam, or why I started this blog

I’m starting a blog for my non-academic musings on popular music.  While I spend most of my time thinking and writing about music, very few people care to read dense, academic prose, and, quite frankly, I don’t blame them.  So, in order to share my wisdom (ha!), or at least my thoughts on Rick-rolling, great albums that never got the audience they deserved, and the weird encounters that I have every day with pop music, I’ve started this blog.  Because while I consistently *want* to mention that early one morning I saw a middle-aged African-American man rolling down Fordham Road in a blue minivan and singing at the top of his lungs to a remix of “Never Gonna Give You Up,” I just can’t find a place for live-action Rick-rolling in my academic work.

There’s no guarantee that this blog will find a wider audience than an academic paper does at a conference, but now I have a place for the things I think about throughout the day.