This is old news, but I felt a need to comment on the piece Billboard ran on The Wanted a couple of weeks back. I have no doubt that The Wanted are a real story; their single (which I’ll get around to reviewing soon), is moving quickly up the charts, and the reaction from the (carefully planted) crowd on the clip from Ellen below suggests that they could be as big as Billboard claims they’ll be.
But calling it the start of a new British Invasion can only be done if you ignore all the other British acts that have been washing up on the charts the last two or three years. At Billboard, apparently, a true invasion can only involve cute white boys. If you’re female, like Adele, whose teenage fans are far more dedicated than The Wanted’s will ever be, or if you’re black, like Taio Cruz, whose sound The Wanted blatantly draw from, you don’t count. Hell, even prog rockers like Coldplay and Muse don’t count. Those four, along with Amy Winehouse, Estelle, Jay Sean, Natasha Bedingfield, Florence + The Machine, even Jessie J (whose single, “Domino”, is inexplicably number 8 on the Hot 100 this week), were apparently nothing but scouting parties, drawing fire and preparing the beaches for the troops who really count. Go get ‘em, boys.
It is the right, it may even be a requirement, of every generation to revise, or even reverse, the work of the generation before it, either through intention or misunderstanding. On those grounds I have no problem with Ke$ha’s version of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”. If she wants to turn a sarcastic kiss-off song into an ironic (in the Alanis Morisette definition of the word) “suicide note”, she’s free to do so with no complaint, no matter how mistaken it may seem to me and many others. I am free, however, to complain about the performance itself, which seems to me to wallow in just about every artistic fallacy that pop music is prone to, the least of which is accepting Alanis Morisette’s definition of irony and acting as if it made sense.
Anybody who writes seriously about pop music long ago resigned themselves to the fact that most performers define art as self-expression, and that, for them, self-expression generally means vomiting forth your emotions in a public arena and seeing what sticks. If something does, rinse and repeat. Most of the time this idea is underplayed and can be tolerated, especially if it comes with a good beat, but occasionally a performer will double down on this doubled fallacy and come up with something that is, if you sympathize with the performer’s situation, emotionally affecting; yet at the same time, whatever your feelings, it’s impossible to listen to.
According to Ke$ha, this recording came about because, while tracking the vocal for what she thought would be an entirely different version, she found herself connecting with the lyrics, as she interpreted them, far more strongly than she had anticipated, and she began to cry. Instead of cutting the take short, she soldiered on, and reworked the arrangement to fit the vocal track. It’s a sweet, touching story, if true, but it doesn’t excuse the result. It makes sense that Ke$ha’s version would be slower, but the irregular tempo here is so slow that the melody almost disappears, along with any sense of emotional dynamics, tension, or variation. Dylan’s version bounces back and forth between lyrical regret and deep sarcasm. Ke$ha’s starts at a single emotional pitch and stays there for the entire song. It could almost be described as emotional minimalism if it wasn’t for the constant, over the top sound of Ke$ha sobbing, snuffling, and sniffling, sounds as irritating to me as distorted electroclash synth bursts are to those who hate her pop records.
According to Popdust’s Katherine St. Asalph, many people, when they heard Ke$ha was recording this song, expected the worst: a bitchy, discoey version full of random electronic effects and Ke$ha’s sarcastic, braying vocals. If only. That would not only have been a closer fit to the song Dylan wrote, but would have been far better musically than what has appeared. I can already hear those who will say that Ke$ha is finally revealing her true self, that after bathing in artifice the last two years she has finally decided to be “authentic” (no doubt at least one of them will cite the influence of Adele). Let’s just hope that Ke$ha herself doesn’t buy into that idea. My belief is that she was overawed by the idea of recording a Dylan song (and on such a high profile project) and thought she had to do something serious and “different”, both from the original and from her own records. A temporary and understandable lapse. Fortunately, she has simultaneously released the latest remix (with Andre 3000, Lil Wayne, T.I., and Wiz Khalifa) of my favorite of her songs, “Sleazy”, which is joyfully inauthentic (whatever that may mean) and therefore closer to the truth. Long may she bray.
If you’re looking for a good summary of the musical landscape over the last year, at least from an indie-centric but pop-loving point of view, you could do a lot worse than Matthew Perpetua’s Fluxblog 2011 Survey mix: 183 songs, almost 13 hours, and it hits just about every high point you can think of. Some of the choices are questionable, of course, and like most indie-centric mixes it’s a little weak on rap and even weaker on country, picking the most obvious names from each, but for the most part it’s a solid, worthwhile overview. Just listening to the first CD I’ve discovered a gem that I’d somehow missed: Britney Spears’s “How I Roll”, a perfect piece of modernized girl group fluff.
Great piece by Mike Barthel on the Miley Cyrus/Rockmafia video in support of Occupy Wall Street, which makes use of a remixed version of Cyrus’s “Liberty Walk”. Barthel is right in noting that’s there’s no reason for people to be surprised at this, or think that Cyrus is only cashing in. Cyrus may have played an innocent goodie-goodie on The Disney Channel, but that never meant she was one; most likely it was the opposite. Pop is so invested in generating personae, and reinforcing those personae through public events and appearances, press releases, video, and now tweets, that people are shocked when an artist breaks out and demonstrates other aspects of personality. If Lady GaGa were to appear in public in a demure dress, no hat, no wig, and average heels, people would be just as shocked as they are at Cyrus now.
There’s no reason Cyrus can’t be a democrat—jingoistic jinglemeister Toby Keith is—or even a progressive, and there’s no reason to believe that she doesn’t know what those words mean. The same can be said of many others. Nickelback has released a single that seems to be in support of Occupy, though by their music you would assume them to be the worst sort of redneck (Canadian division) reactionaries. Enrique Iglesius’s latest single mixes his usual lustful yearning with references to the It Gets Better project; does that mean we should question his Latin lover persona, at least in terms of which gender he directs his ardor towards? Why should we? It isn’t that difficult to believe that there are some things that are bigger than pop; why is it so hard to believe that even pop stars are aware of it?
Rock and roll is now country.
Trad-country and alt-country are now Americana.
Euro-disco is now hip-hop.
Hip-hop is now R&B.
R&B is now retro-soul.
Electro is now disco.
Dubstep may be heavy metal.
House is and always will be house.
Pop is now punk, except when it’s post-punk.
Punk is now Occupy.
My pal Mackro has put together a list of 10 reasons why Rebecca Black is not only cooler than you think she is, but probably cooler than you are yourself. Giving the profits of “Friday” to her school and Japan relief is good enough, but the fact that she seems so levelheaded about the whole thing is another major point in her favor. She probably knows the lyrics are dumb, too, but what the hell, she was just having fun with her friends and her parents’ $2,000.
Mackro still doesn’t think much of the record, and though I find it hard to disagree with him, there’s still something strangely appealing about it. Black’s innocence, though she doesn’t sound naïve, strikes me as real enough. The beats are weaker than anything this side of Glee, and the lyrics seem to have been written by someone for whom English is not a first language, possibly not even a second—they make early ABBA sound like Walt Whitman.
Maybe that’s why, the second time I watched the video, I found myself thinking of Elton John’s “Solar Prestige A Gammon”, a track from his 1974 album Caribou. The melody, like so many of John’s in this period, is irresistibly catchy, but the lyrics, which fit the tune to perfection, are utter nonsense:
Solar prestige a gammon
Kool kar kyrie kay salmon
Hair ring molasses abounding
Common lap kitch sardine a poor floundin
As Robert Christgau pointed out at the time, it was a record that proved how unimportant lyrics could be in pop music—as long as you give the audience something they can hum along with.
“Friday” isn’t nearly as good, of course. Not just because Black and her producers aren’t Elton John, but because “Friday” tries too hard, in its own way, to be sensible. That makes the record funnier in an ironic way, but I don’t think there’s anything intentionally ironic about this song. There’s nothing particularly earnest about it, either: it’s a vanity record made to order by a vanity record company. Black probably wanted nothing more than to make herself look like a star and impress her friends and create a family keepsake. I doubt if she saw it as a shortcut to fame, even if that’s what it turned out to be. And I bet $2000 is less than some people spend on their failed auditions for American Idol.
What I can’t help but wonder is, if this hadn’t become a viral sensation, and if some indie geek happened upon it in a couple of years and spread the word, would it have been hailed as a masterpiece of “outsider” music? In an era of instant hits, is there any reason why we can’t have instant Shaggs?
I know there’s a precedent—XTC chose their name partly because they thought it would make it easier to spot references to them in the press—but this is ridiculous.
I’ve never been terribly impressed by David Hajdu’s writing. His book Positively Fourth Street, about Dylan, Baez, Richard Farina, and Greenwich Village in the early sixties wasn’t bad, and had some great anecdotes, but his last book, The Ten-Cent Plague, about the comic book scare of the early ’50s, managed to take a fascinating story full of brilliant eccentrics and make it as dull as a high school social studies text. Now Hajdu has a regular column in The New Republic on music, a subject about which he seems to possess a great deal of information but next to zero knowledge.
His latest column, on Randy Newman’s Oscar win for “We Belong Together” from Toy Story 3, may be his worst yet. To suggest that a man who has been scoring motion pictures for over thirty years, who in doing so continues a family tradition (three of Newman’s uncles worked as composers in Hollywood), is somehow trapped and forced into a business that belittles his artistry is so insulting as to be beyond belief. Newman himself would no doubt shrug a comment like this off; he’s heard it all before, and worse. Of course he’s written bad scores, and scored bad movies (one of which, Leatherheads, I saw just the other night—Newman even makes an appearance as a speakeasy piano player), and he would be the first to admit that his Hollywood songwriting isn’t his best. But Newman, who is notorious for his long spells of writer’s block, has often pointed out that he loves the work, and that if it wasn’t for Hollywood he might not be writing music at all.
Hajdu is one those cultural leftovers who still believes that all pop art is based on trash (as opposed to merely containing trash, which can be said of work at any levels) and that any actual value it may possess is an accident, like a child babbling nonsense who suddenly says something beyond its years. Trying to prove his point, he fudges the lyrics to “We Belong Together”. Trying to prove how pedestrian they are, he quotes “Sincerely, from the bottom of my heart/I just can’t take it/When we’re apart … The day I met you/Was the luckiest day of my life/And I bet you feel the same…”
Banal enough, to be sure, but Hajdu makes it seem even worse by leaving off the final throwaway line, uttered by Newman with a perfect tone of ironic self-doubt: “At least, I hope you do”. It’s a trick Newman has pulled many times before, but it works, and no one but Newman would dare to put a line like that in a feel-good buddy song (and just about no company but Pixar would allow him to do it). At times it seems as if Newman is the last in a tradition of sophisticated, witty Hollywood songwriters (if only Newman was as prolific). A group who often, as Hajdu points out, wrote trash themselves. Hajdu seems to think he’s doing Newman a favor, but all he does is condescend.
