The Cure for Bedbugs

2012

2012-01-13T13:34:00.000-08:00

The Year Everything Stayed the Same

Sameless (YAY)
Escort - s/t
Rick Ross - Rich Forever mixtape

Samey (OK+)
Yo Gotti - Live from the Kitchen
T-Pain - rEVOLVEr

Same (OK)

Unsamely (BOO)

Unequaled
Cassie - Ventura Blvd.
The Beaties - SHGR N UR SYSTM
Blue Ivy Carter - Pampered
Rihanna - Another Album She Made in a Weekend
Taylor Swift - Vampires and Shit
Willow Smith - Will2k12ow
Hilary Duff - Metropolis, Bitch
Keke Palmer - Cool 'Un

2005: The Year I Broke

2011-08-06T09:50:00.001-07:00

Nothing like going off to England and taking two classes that each met once a week (on the same day!) to clear your head, right? So I took off, threw the shackles of dormdom and music criticdom and other -doms aside and shared a dingy flat in Bayswater with friends of friends (who became just friends) and drank a bunch of tea from an electric kettle and went to Fopp a lot. Five pounds, in retrospect, wasn't great given the conversion rates (round about $9.99 a pop), but it felt nice, and I eventually paid my parents back for the staggering debt I accrued. Sorry, Dad!

Emily was in Italy via a Jesuit program in Rome, and we were in closer proximity in Europe than we ever were in the States. EasyJet was usually cheaper than Amtrak fare. We met on weekends, taking lightning tours through Rome and eating at the Via Doria market and navigating Trastevere and sipping under- and overpriced cappuccino indiscriminately I wrote about our misadventures here (fluffy) and here (emo).

It was a blast! I was a wreck! I hate traveling, but was able to do more of it in that brief period than I may have done since, purely out of necessity and buoyed by the novelty of the sights. Drinking age had been lowered, so my 21st birthday was a bit of a non-starter. I attempted to kick some deep-seated paranoia, occasionally relapsing to peek at old online music haunts or self-Google, listening to drips and drops of new music but (for the most part) relegating listening habits to (on one hand) a kind of austere repetition, listening to the same songs and albums over and over, ten times, twenty times ("Billy S." and Billy Bragg, Basement Jaxx and Alan Braxe); or (on the other) I'd just put my old 30 gig iPod on shuffle and go for a long walk. I put together three "iGod mixes" culled from these shuffle sessions (rules: could re-order the songs minimally for flow and could only delete one song in twenty consecutive plays) and lost all of them before giving them to their intended recipients (sorry Becki, Matt, and Emily G.). Fooled around with some DJ software and made my first continuous mix (of sorts) for Emily, the "Robot Mix," which I've also since lost: Max Tundra, Wagonchrist, Out Hud...who else?

Names that flutter into mind from that period seem arbitrary and frequently obscure: What does Cass McCombs sound like again? Have I listened to Busdriver since then (I almost don't want to)? Was Datarock really that good (yes)? Who the hell is Gustav?

I read a lot of old I Love Music threads absentmindedly as my insomnia grew to absurd proportions. I was better able to keep up with my US friends' evening schedules to chat than my London friends' daytime schedules. My flatmates and I rearranged "Happy Birthday" letters again and again to spell cryptic phrases. I had what I now recognize as my first anxiety attacks walking through Piccadilly Circus. Vividly remember seeing The Sea Inside, though I don't remember if I liked it (I was moved by it, anyway). Was chided by a film appreciation professor when I kept wanting to jump to the ending of the films we watched: "Always going right to the end -- I wonder what your girlfriend must think!" Imported pseudo-kosher foods from various shops to put on a rag-tag Passover seder with Emily and my generous, curious roommate (we slept about a foot and a half apart, which for some reason didn't strike me as a big deal at the time). Drank too much port (not a good substitute for Manischewitz, it turns out) and lied to Emily about how long she'd been throwing up.

And then we were in Paris and Prague and Berlin, getting bedbugs somewhere -- pretty sure it was the $5 Hostel in Prague, where we saw a little pest scurrying across our dinosaur sheets on the mattress on the ground -- trying to enjoy ourselves but being acutely aware of how much it was all costing, now that it was coming to an end. Tourist sites, little nooks and corners, beige flats, creating a well-trodden path in a new place over the course of a few months. Enjoying the gray weather.

I'd resigned from writing for Pitchfork on Christmas eve after doing my first and last interview with whatshisname from Bloc Party. Just a brief email exchange: I asked stupid questions, he provided snappy answers. I figured I could go back to writing on the website I'd started with friends, but that wasn't in the cards.

I got back and I'd started thinking about sorting things out more personal-like. I'd referenced my music career for the first time in a bizarre essay I filed from abroad on Skye Sweetnam, which reads as incoherent to me now. When I returned, I got into the habit of compulsively buying CDs for .99 or less (usually a penny plus the $3 shipping and handling) from various online stores. I went to libraries and ripped their Jessica Simpson albums. I read Metal Mike Saunders on Radio Disney and B*Witched and Lindsay Lohan (prior to her debut album, when her stuff was appearing on soundtracks) and Ruby Blue. I lurked on ILM threads about Ashlee Simpson (Emo or Oh No!) and read the essays in the Voice that emerged from some strands of those conversations. I had the odd desire to pitch something to the Voice just to be a part of that conversation, though I hadn't really written much about music yet. Maybe I could do a Radio Disney update or something?

Oh man, that Ashlee album (I Am Me; hadn't yet heard Autobiography) was awesome! It was like actually good! A wrongheaded approach as I started to figure this stuff out -- I felt the need to qualify the "actually," the implicit message being "despite what I should think," even though I couldn't very well articulate what exactly it was I was supposed to be thinking. All I knew of Ashlee was that she got "caught" lip syncing on Saturday Night Live. But I'd never consciously listened to her before.

Now I'm living with Emily in Boston for the summer working for a documentary production company, and my listening takes a turn for the spare. I listen to one of three albums every day on a long walk to and from work -- Discovery by Daft Punk, The Upper Cuts by Alan Braxe and "Friends," or Minimum-Maximum, the live Kraftwerk album. Later the Mountain Goats album, which ended up on top of my first of six Pazz and Jop ballots as an out-of-work music critic. That's all I can remember from the summer, anyway, needing a way to yoke my body's energy to a beat (or, with MG and I think the Hold Steady album, a story) but not wanting anything too outside of a comfort zone (again my anxiety is rumbling without me realizing it -- at its peak, I would listen to Pantha du Prince's This Bliss every day to try to stop panic attacks walking four blocks to and from work each way).

There was something unsettling bubbling up from the depths, a kind of restlessness that doesn't strike me as entirely healthy (I'd attributed it to some basic creative drive or something -- c'mon, I was in art school!). Insomnia, acute chest pains. Awful blood sugars. An utter refusal to drive anywhere, ever, for any reason. "I don't feel comfortable driving in Boston -- the drivers here are crazy!" Yeah. I figured my time abroad would be something like convalescence from a world out to get me, but it turns out that the paranoia and discomfort I'd been attributing to this thing or that person or anything but me was, probably the whole time, just me and a bundle of nerves. (There was that one nightmare about an unruly mob murdering me after an Arcade Fire concert -- but I wouldn't read too much into it.)

Top Ten+ of 2005

Teenpop Lock and Drop Vol. 1

2011-06-09T06:59:00.000-07:00

Thanks so much to Flavorpill's Tumblr, Vulture, VH1, MTV's Tumblr, Buzzfeed, and the Stranger's LineOut for reblogging my first eva full mixtape-type-thingy, the high/low-concept "Teenpop Lock and Drop."

Wrote a bit of context here and stream it here on Tumblr.

For anyone who finds this blog through the mix, I'll just note that the non-Tumblr Cure for Bedbugs blog, now rarely updated, focuses almost exclusively on teenpop from 1998 thru c. 2007 or so (post-Spice Girls, pre-Bieber). I've written about this stuff a lot for the (sadly) retired Stylus Magazine in my Sugar Shock columns. My most extensive write-up was in their Bluffer's Guide to post-2000 teenpop.

And for the best day-to-day coverage/criticism of current pop (the place I go to find a lot of the contemporary stuff I used), check out the Singles Jukebox.

Here's the official tracklist:

01. An Introduction from Britney Spears
Britney Spears, "The Beat Goes On" + "bonus track" from ...One More Time (1999)
vs. Huey, "Pop Lock and Drop It" from Notebook Paper (2006)

02. No Chains
Dream, "He Loves U Not" from It Was All a Dream (2001)
vs. Waka Flocka Flame f. Wale and Roscoe Dash, "No Hands" from Flockaveli (2010)

03. Black Genie in a Yellow Bottle
Christina Aguilera, "Genie in a Bottle" from Christina Aguilera (1999)
vs. Wiz Khalifa f. Snoop Dogg, Juicy J, and T-Pain, "Black and Yellow (remix)," original from Rolling Papers (2011)

04. Light Up When the Lights Go Out
5ive, "When the Lights Go Out" from 5ive (1998)
vs. Method Man and Redman, "Part II" from How High (2001)

05. Twerk That Max
Britney Spears, "Lucky" from Oops! ...I Did It Again (2000)
vs. Juicy J f. Project Pat, "Twerk That" (2009)

06. Backstreet Boy Wasted
Backstreet Boys, "Larger than Life" from Millenium (1999)
vs. Yung Gwapa f. Waka Flocka Flame, "White Boy Wasted" (2010)

07. Can the Robyn Get Some
Robyn, "Do You Know (What It Takes)" from Robyn (1995, single released in U.S. 1997)
vs. Travis Barker f. Swizz Beatz, Game, Lil' Wayne, and Rick Ross, "Can the Drummer Get Some" from Give the Drummer Some (2011)

08. Did It On *N
*NSync, "It's Gonna Be Me" from No Strings Attached (2000)
vs. Nicki Minaj, "Did It On Em" from Pink Friday (2010)

09. Case of the Maxi Pad
Mya, "Case of the Ex" from Fear of Flying (2000)
vs. Keak da Sneak, "Maxi Pads" from The Tonite Show (2011)

10. Steal That Tree
Len, "Steal My Sunshine" from Len (1999)
vs. Snoop Dogg f. Kid Cudi, "That Tree" from More Malice (2010)

11. Candybugg
Mandy Moore, "Candy" from So Real (1999)
vs. Big Boi f. Cutty, "Shutterbugg" from Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty (2010)

12. The Boy Is Feeling Himself
Monica f. Brandy, "The Boy Is Mine" from The Boy Is Mine (1998)
vs. Nipsey Hussle, "Feelin' Myself" from South Central State of Mind (2010)

13. Some People Say I Look Like Me Dev
B*Witched, "C'est La Vie" from B*Witched (1998)
vs. Dev f. Cataracs, "Bass Down Low" from The Night the Sun Came Up (2011)

14. Over the World
ATC, "Around the World (La La La La La)" from Planet Pop (2000)
vs. Drake, "Over" from Thank Me Later (2010)

15. ...To the Booty
A*Teens, "...To the Music" from Teen Spirit (2000)
vs. Jamie Drastik f. Fabolous, "B.O.B." (2009)

16. Gotta Get Thru This Trap
Daniel Bedingfield, "Gotta Get Thru This" from Gotta Get Thru This (2002)
vs. OJ Da Juiceman f. Gucci Mane, "Make the Trap Say Aye" from The Otha Side of the Trap (2009)

17. Young Money Cash Minogue
Kylie Minogue, "Can't Get You Out of My Head" from Fever (2000)
vs. Birdman f. Kevin Rudolf and Lil' Wayne, "I Want It All" from Priceless (2009)

18. Smile, Chalie
Vitamin C, "Smile" from Vitamin C (1999)
vs. Chalie Boy, "Look Like Money (Smell Like Dollaz)" from I'm Here (2009)

19. Swagger Girls
LFO, "Summer Girls" from LFO (1999)
vs. Soulja Boy, "Pretty Boy Swag" from The DeAndre Way (2010)

Thanks for listening!

2004: The Year Everything Broke

2011-02-20T09:29:00.000-08:00

I suppose, what with the Arcade Fire winning a Grammy for Best Album (and a hearty whatevs to all y'all contrarian-types who claim this isn't important or "important" or Important -- have you looked at the history of previous best album Grammy winners lately?), I should resume my long-gestating, unsatisfying 2004 recap so I can move on with my life (to 2005).

I wrote a sarcastic acrostic to Mike Barthel in response to the Grammy news: "No, I'm Not Even Pontificating On It. Not Totally Surprised. Engages Vanity -- Ever the Narcissist!" But actually, my reaction, in skimming the history of the Grammys, is just to note without further elaboration that the one-two punch of Taylor Swift in 2010 and the Arcade Fire in 2011 does seem to mean something to me in a way that the last 10 years worth of Grammy wins haven't, regardless of whether or not I liked them. Compare to the hoary and/or polite picks of the previous decade -- Alison Krauss joining forces with Robert Plant, Herbie Hancock honoring Joni Mitchell, Ray Charles and the Superfriends. Dixie Chicks, Outkast, and U2 honored too late for just-OK albums (U2 won for Joshua Tree anyway, so really it just signals that U2 is closer to Robert Plant than...y'know, Dixie Chicks or Outkast). And then there's boomery Steely Dan and Santana, and something like neo-boomer wins for the O Brother soundtrack and Norah Jones. What a boring list for an exciting decade! The last relevant win was Lauryn Hill all the way back in 1999 -- and I don't mean "relevant for my small little circle of internet cultural commentary," I mean relevant, the kind of thing that makes you, whoever you are, wanna say something about something, even if it's just "WHO IS [INSERT BAND]?"

You know my development through the early 00's -- spark of curiosity begets obsession, obsession begets deeper obsession, deeper obsession begets a few poses I hadn't tried out yet (I was posing and a poseur, but one wasn't necessarily synonymous with the other). For the most part I was having fun, not really making "my story" fit to any particular zeitgeist or Narrative of Now -- I was working out the Narrative of Then, c. 1950-2000.

2004 was the year that, in hindsight, everything sort of "happened" for me in a way that does have an impact on the current moment (mine, anyway). The most significant thing about it was the narrative that it established for me, one that would repeat itself, in some variation, several times over, year after year, and as we speak has followed me into a new career path (I'm disconcerted, if excited, to find myself at square one all over again). The narrative starts with promise and confidence, turns, usually through a combination of luck and initiative (but mostly luck) into an opportunity, gets bigger, goes slightly awry (real or imagined, sometimes imagined -- paranoid -- sometimes real -- disappointment), and I retreat, regroup, think of the next move.

To some extent this is a self-fulfilling prophecy; success itself is what leads me to suspect there's something awry -- maybe a variation on "I don't want to be part of any club that would have me as a member," but really more like "I don't want to assume that a club's having me as a member means it's a club worth being in [the problem is the world], or that my involvement in a club necessarily improves it [the problem is me]."

So it's January 2004, I'm in my second semester as a sophomore in college. I've just gotten through a difficult first semester in which my isolation was starting to drive me nuts -- so I move on, get a roommate (my friend Ian, who was in this period like Nic Cage in Bringing Out the Dead, suffering pretentious innernet-music-speak and frightening diabetic episodes) surround myself with friends, start writing about music on a small blog a few friends read occasionally, start lurking on message boards. Emily and I are long distance and at the beginning of our relationship; I talk to her just about every day but we're both going through our own separate issues, figuring out how to console and compromise over the phone (which is a bad way to console or compromise). I'm taking a Marxist-bent film class in which the primary text is a Foucault reader; I'm doing some personal and documentary film work that seems to be an improvement from the adolescent stylistic exercises that I was disappointed with (but had a blast making) so far. I'm immersed in politics in the run up to the 2004 election and have an unorthodox teaching assistant job for a few intro politics classes, a fringe benefit of being on the Model United Nations team (whut).

By the spring of 2004, I've endeared and cajoled and otherwise forced my way into some campus writing gigs -- expanding on the school alternative magazine's entertainment section, I start Basshead Media, a sticks-and-twine website where my friends and I have more space to write about music, hence can get more promos out of my growing list of record label contacts. My first promo was Iron & Wine's Our Endless Numbered Days, which, as was the style at the time, I predicted would get an 8.4 on Pitchfork. (It got an 8.6.)

At some point a friend of mine posts to the I Love Music message board a rant I have about dance-punk, in reaction to a middling review on Pitchfork of the second !!! album (which my friends and I love). I'm totally mortified and respond (I think) -- luckily the thread's big enough that any involvement I have in it is quickly swallowed. I don't venture back there for a while. But it's enough for Dominique Leone to leave a comment (since eaten by blogspot) on the post, and we have a two- or three-post back and forth.

Summertime -- things are going well with Emily now that we can see each other more frequently. I've got an internship on a PBS documentary and am living in New York. I'm still getting promos and I'm going out to some shows and otherwise soaking in a summer in the city. Pitchfork is hiring, so I apply for the second time (the first was in January with a "sample review" in which I mindlessly snark at John Mayer -- opinion since revised). I link a couple of college reviews and Pfork contacts me saying that they "know" me from the mild spat with Leone back in the spring. I get a five-review trial, at which point they'll decide whether or not I'm fit to join the staff.

At this point in their history, Pitchfork was rapidly getting their shit together. When I joined them in August of 2004, they were in the process of getting some real advertising money and remodeling the website -- they didn't yet have a particularly regular way of paying anyone. Trial reviewers were unpaid until they'd written for six months, which was a practice they stopped soon after I left; the turnover rate in 2004 was insane and they were getting by on an odd patchwork of regular contributors and newbies like myself, also Marc Hogan and a few others I can't remember now. When I left, I think they were already planning for their first festival, another big business leap forward.

So I got in somewhat under the radar, through basically the same systems people had gotten gigs there since c. 2000 -- relatively informal ones. Ryan Schreiber liked my reviews, though I thought I was trying too hard, and I was reacting with acute paranoia to any and all hate mail. I fed trolls and shut down constructive criticism. School started back up and I made writing reviews a priority over my work; I stayed up too late and missed classes and started off the semester poorly even considering I'd consciously lightened my course load for junior year. I was having interminably long, simpering conversations with Emily on the phone in which I'd express my paranoia and second-guess my qualifications for the job, to which she'd eventually reply, exasperated and past the point of feeling listened to (she wasn't being listened to) "why don't you just quit then?" (this was impossible, for reasons I did not fully understand except that it felt like...admitting defeat?). I followed quasi-religiously the worst (and often dumbest) criticism of the site online -- of which there was a ton, several sites devoted exclusively to tearing apart daily reviews. I googled myself constantly looking for the next take-down. And through it all I kept writing reviews, some bad, some inconsequential, some actually pretty good (I tended to write better about albums no one was likely to care or read about).

Around the time I began reviewing, and upon returning to school, my friend Steve asked me whether or not I'd heard the new Arcade Fire album. The name didn't inspire confidence and knowing Steve's taste I figured it was some math-rock band I wouldn't like much. So I requested the promo from Merge and received it in a small cardboard sleeve, no artwork or liner notes, with a press sheet that compared the band to a bunch of animals but provided no particularly useful information. Exclaim magazine had done an extensive profile on the band that for some reason I didn't read, or didn't read carefully enough. Which is also to say, I was a guy who liked writing about music and didn't fact-check my shit -- a recurrent problem that I'm constantly re-confronting. This, incidentally, is how I got the band's "hometown" wrong (months later it was quietly edited to say "adopted hometown" at my repeated, embarrassed insistence) and made more than one leap of the imagination into ascribing intentions to the band out of a sense of needing to either buy in to or spin an appropriately sobering origin story. (I don't regret that impulse; mythologizing is fun and occasionally useful -- see The Social Network, also a 2004 origin story. I just regret what it looked like in practice.)

I'm surprised in hindsight that I even got the review, but I pretty much begged for it, and Pitchfork then (and presumably now) basically worked on a "dibs" system. There was steam building for the album on the editorial end -- as I recall at the start of September the editorial favorites were Arcade Fire, Annie, and the Go! Team. I was assigned the review very late, the Thursday or Friday before the Monday the review was slated to run (a day prior to the album's release). I can sort of remember writing it over the course of two late nights, biting my nails and chugging diet soda and playing the record over and over and over again. Ten times, twenty times. And yet I had no lyrics sheet and was totally winging the background. I didn't know where to get the stuff -- they had album art in Chicago but I had a piece of cardboard. I felt it was my duty to somehow find everything I needed from the music alone, including biographies. I got lyrics wrong, I got facts wrong.

I think I had an idea from reading the site for a year or so of what a Big Review That Is Published on Pitchfork is supposed to read like, what emotions it's supposed to trigger: a sense of importance, of wiping the slate blank and starting boldly again. A sense of weight, a sense of capital-M meaning to a particular audience, a particular "we," which I used liberally despite being forbidden to do so in my academic writing. A sense of innovation -- which I wasn't finding in the music, mind (damn that music was hard to describe -- most music is, but I wasn't finding the right RIYLs. I do maintain that I was one of the few people who correctly identified their mallet instrument as a glockenspiel (metal) and not a xylophone (wood) -- small consolation, I guess). A sense of breathlessness.

This thing was a 10! The editor said so, my friends were saying so, my gut was saying so. The review was saying so. Some time later someone wrote a blog post, I can't find it now (the site may have been deleted) that compared my prose to "religious oratory." That was appropriate -- there was a hint of church in the thing. I was quoted sarcastically, random internet people (RIP?) claimed the band hated the review, the score -- a 9.7 -- became its own punchline. I was told stories about audiences chanting the score before the band took the stage. A few months later, as my diabetes control spiraled to its worst in my life, my doctor informed me my A1C level was a 9.7 (bad enough for him to threaten that I wasn't exhibiting enough control on my insulin pump, which I gave up voluntarily three years later anyway), and I laughed and laughed. My explanation garnered a quizzical look ("who is the Arcade Fire?") and then we changed the subject.

Toward the end of the year, NPR called and arranged an interview about the band; they wanted a quote from me. So I took a cab to a dinky recording studio in Ithaca and spilled my guts to a complete stranger, half therapy and half interview. I told him about Canadian collectives and the science behind numerical values, but what's in a numerical value, life's not a numerical value, is it? He pulled the one even-handed thing I said; in the end I thankfully didn't sound like that much of a self-obsessed idiot. I was convinced that everyone was out to make fun of me (even though I was also convinced that no one knew or cared who I was).

I was given the review of the second Interpol album, and I managed my oddest metaphor in print to date -- at the end the band takes a dive from a great height and lands gently several stories below. Because that happens.

I went to a sold-out Arcade Fire show a month or so later at Cornell, set to do an interview with the band for the school paper (or something), paranoid and uncomfortable as my friends teased me about the review. After the show I went backstage to find Richard Perry in his underwear ("turn around for a sec") and we awkwardly exchanged hellos. I'd brought a digital video camera with me, my only recording equipment, and I'd forgotten somehow that the thing hadn't worked in about two years. But the band didn't have time for the interview anyway. I seem to recall briefly trying to help them find a place to sleep that night but they made other plans. I saw them at an after party at Cornell -- they came into the house stomping in unison, marching through the crowd to the back. I had a nervous conversation with Win Butler about topics I've forgotten.

Three months or so later at Christmas an old recording by the band surfaced, a collection of Christmas novelties they'd recorded as a joke. I was asked to "review" it, and I did. The band posted a response that basically noted that it was a joke (and that the band members were incorrectly identified), and we had a brief but not unpleasant email back and forth. And that was the last contact I ever really had with them; it was pretty much the last contact I had with any musicians, or regular music reviewing, ever -- just before the new year.

Recalling this story gives me a certain fondness for the smallness of it all, and noticing (again) what an obvious blip it was on whatever radar screen it appeared on. My part of it was mostly coincidental, and if I hadn't written what I'd written, I imagine some other review in its place would have accomplished the same thing (though it probably wouldn't have reached my level of religious oratory -- but other reviews were about as fawning, and as strange, in other venues). As I write this, 2004 is receding from the intense scrutiny of Taylor Time goggles and I can laugh about how absurd it was to go from having no writing experience whatsoever to being part of the hype cycle (from sermon to tabloid-blogging) that, I guess, culminated with a Grammy.

But I think it's more accurate to say that 2011 isn't exactly a culmination of what was happening in 2004 -- what happened that year was its own culmination, the emergence of a certain kind of institution and a certain kind of music as having power in a certain kind of space. In the next three or four years, the ground continued shifting remarkably quickly in industry, in distribution, in internet culture -- so that whatever the Arcade Fire represents in 2011 isn't exactly what they meant in 2004; the institutions and spaces mutated and don't really resemble what they did (to me, at least) then. At some point the band and the site uprooted from the zeitgeist that launched both of them, to some extent yoked together, from a smaller corner of the world to a bigger corner, and the story of the next zeitgeist -- one that has no easy personal entry point and no "corners," or all corners, depending on your point of view -- is the one that I'm more interested in talking about.

EDIT: I posted a few other random observations from the year here. A few months ago Robert Christgau interviewed me briefly for some context re: a piece he was writing about The Suburbs; that appeared here. As I told him at the time, I forget whose actual final decision it was to go with 9.7, but I supplied the compromise, i.e. it wasn't "rated for me" by the editors, nor did they prime me to review the album. In fact, I recently found on a presumed-dead hard drive the I.M. chat from 2004 in which I was assigned the review. I can pull one sentence to illustrate/indulge some decimal-point nerdery: "10's need to be reserved for retrospective analysis in my book. Even conservatively it could make a 9.2 or a 9.3. I would knock it up to 9.5...9.4 is the standard "essential of the year" rating. A notch above means something a bit loftier." So there you have it -- loft.

I Think UR a Contrarian: The 21 Most Controversial Songs of 2010

2011-01-15T05:05:00.000-08:00

I Think UR a Contrarian by cureforbedbugs

DOWNLOAD

I've been plastering this thing all over the interweb, so I figured I should actually explain what it is to you non-Jukebox people (all two of you).

Basically, I've become obsessed with tracking the most controversial tracks -- those with the most polarized scores -- on The Singles Jukebox. It's a simple average deviation formula that tweaks for number of contributors (twenty people violently disagreeing is obviously more controversial than six people violently disagreeing).

So I thought, what would do justice to these tracks? Just sticking them on a CD compilation is no good -- yer guaranteed to hate half! So instead I made sure you could really hate everything, by mixing it all together in a big controversy stew. I'm not much of a DJ -- I do this stuff intuitively using a manual BPM counter and a math formula I teach to students to get 'em jazzed about cross-multiply-and-divide (that's basically all beat-matching is), and then chop it together on Final Cut, the only editing software I really know how to use.

Accordingly, this is a pretty cerebral mix, though I don't think it's particularly unlistenable. But definitely fits the genre category "Music to Blog By."

Here is the Controversy List in its entirety. In the future I'll update these in a Google spreadsheet.

Why does this list go to 21, you might ask? Well, I'll tell you. There was not a single country song in the Top Twenty! That is a travesty. Also, I got to the last part of the mix ("Toot It and Boot It") and had nothing that fit. That's when Jesus took the wheel and, via Jonathan Bogart's 2010 mix, tossed Carrie Underwood into my lap. Er, figuratively speaking. The result is one of my favorites on here, "Toot It and Undo It," an answer track to YG -- "You stole my happy! You made me cry! Took the lonely, and took me for a ride!" ("And you love the way I ride it!").

Also on this mix: The Ke$ha 0pera, the only usable five seconds of Everything Everything's "MY KZ, UR BF" (when the remixes of your song are successful mostly to the extent that they completely scrape away every existing element of the original, you should rethink your band strategy).

As soon as I uploaded this thing I noticed all kinds of little errors, but true to the nature of this project, I will not actually fix them.

And now! COMMENTARY! Please note that a lot of the original Jukebox entries have great comment threads. In fact, the only piece from the Jukebox to be published elsewhere is a comment by Erika Villani on "Empire State of Mind"!

1. Cannibalizing of Pigeons (Ke$ha, The Knife, and M.I.A.)

Ke$ha: The 0p Opera will one day be truly glorious. I have the sense that Ke$ha has no long-term future whatsoever in the music industry (and I really like Ke$ha) which means that the time for revisionist high-art reconsideration is nigh. I also stuck M.I.A. on here because fuuuuuuuck "Born Free" is hard to mix with anything else. I'm still not sure whether I like the song (my blurb was a cop out) but it's one of the few 2010 albums I've kept in my iTunes to digest.

Ke$ha (#1):

"I’m puzzled, though not the least bit entertained." (Jer Fairall)

"I’m amazed." (Frank Kogan)

The Knife (#5):

"The part of me that thinks of the Jukebox as a proving ground for pop suggests that this doesn’t deserve a good mark for violating those tenets, no matter how good it is, but you know what? Screw it." (Ian Mathers)

"This evokes grown men and women wearing contorted masks and squeezing strange noises out of their throats, to the accompaniment of exotic gewgaws. Not terrible." (Alfred Soto)

M.I.A. (#6):

"But provocation is her gift, and that’s what she spends most of the song doing: I just wonder if 'All those imitators, stick it' is aimed at Santigold." (Michelangelo Matos)

"Provocateur? Commentator? Even remotely coherent? No, jumped-up art student throwing signifiers together without any skill, who has ideas above her station and songs beneath listenability. Telling imitators to stick it is pretty big for someone who hasn’t had an original musical idea in her life, frankly." (Edward Oculicz)

2. Go Do Yourself (Cee-Lo Green, Jonsi)

There's something perversely satisfying about stretching the Cee-Lo vocal out like taffy -- and using a tinny DIY acapella (thanks, anonymous internet person!). The pop-cultural baggage of "Fuck You" neither excites nor enrages me, but there's something about the song's solidness that bothers me a little -- its meticulousness suggests a big ol' stick up its butt (hmmm, does Cee-Lo ever turn around in the video? He certainly looks uncomfortable in his pimp suit). Meanwhile Jonsi is a very different sort of meticulous -- the kind that you have to peck apart and stitch together in little snippets. He's like what Owl City would sound like if it were actually fronted by owls (i.e., much better).

Cee-Lo Green (#13):

"How much fun is this song?" (Rebecca Toennessen)

"I think the adjective you really want to use is ‘virulent’.” (Al Shipley, quoting David Raposa discussing Neon Trees)

Jonsi (#16):

"Olivier Messiaen’s music was always marred by his assumption that an audience could find God passively, just by sitting back and opening itself up to various sounds. Like Messiaen, Jónsi uses elements of birdsong (echoed in the video treatment) and unconventional rhythms to blur the distinction between the mundane and the spiritual. Yet 'Go Do' strikes me as anti-Messiaen in the most important respects." (Martin Kavka)

"Kind of crazy how singers like this so often tend to make my jaw and fists clench as soon as they begin. Totally involuntary reflex, too, I think; I promise to get it checked sometime. Anyway, here it’s a shame, since those electronic noises at the start were rather nifty for five seconds." (Chuck Eddy)

3. Your Motherfucking Lovebot (Nicki Minaj, Robyn)

Two ladies about whom I had stronger feelings yesteryear. I guess I can go ahead and partake in some convenient revisionism about how much enthusiasm I really had for Robyn's first ("indie") album -- looking at year-ends, my favorite song was good for 8th best of 2005 and the album never placed on one of my lists. But I never took to anything off of Body Talk; especially not "Fembot," which I actively loathed in real time (here I semi-lazily swiped the most recognizable bit, canned the embarrassing rapping, and called it a hook). As for Nicki, I get why someone might love or hate Pink Friday depending on what you like in her -- I like her in both her R&B and hip-hop incarnation (it's not like there's a huge glut of great female R&B vocalists on the charts these days, and Nicki is doing things backwards, using hip-hop to break into R&B rather than vice versa, which I kinda dig on principle) I just don't like the experience of turning that switch back and forth. Missy Elliott's Under Construction does a similar trick, but it's much more "business up front party in the back" (yes, I just compared Missy Elliott to a mullet; and no, I'm not sure if actually that phrase should be reversed -- "Work It" is certainly fun, but it's also not fooling around about tomfoolery; it's an unstoppable single [maybe "block party" in the back is the phrase?]). I cheated here and swapped Nicki's "Monster" verse in for the weak if serviceable "Your Love" rap.

Nicki Minaj (#2):

"You get into a stage in relationships where the other person can do no wrong, and you love everything they do. I suspect I’m in that with Nicki Minaj." (Martin Skidmore)

"As little use as I have for Nicki’s schtick, I do on some level respect her for sticking to her guns with relentlessly schticky stuff like 'Massive Attack' and many of her hit collaborations. This song proves she’s as willing as anyone to sand down whatever rough edges she does have for the most insipid possible radio jam, though." (Al Shipley)

Robyn - Fembot (#14):

"It’s a cliché of a meme that was dull to begin with atop a beat that sets new lows in weediness." (Alex Macpherson)

"Man, the future sounds amazing." (Doug Robertson)

4. Infinity Guitar Paving Company (Sleigh Bells, Joanna Newsom)

Two albums I never really "made it through" for opposite reasons -- the Sleigh Bells album is over before I've figured out how I feel about it, all eight or nine times I listened to it. Joanna I can't get past c. track three. Both have a lead singer problem -- I have a nagging feeling that I'm listening to their music in "theory," which is how I imagine some people think I probably listen to the music they can't stand. But no, to really enjoy something thoughtfully-not-viscerally I need to be closer to its thoughts, and I imagine that Joanna Newsom and Alexis Krauss think more similarly to me than Ke$ha. But I'd still rather be listening to the latter. I separate out what the two of them get really, really right -- STOMP STOMP CLAP (the consciously blown-out aesthetic feels a little wax museum-ish to me; I appreciate this song's more transparent approach to bleacher-stomping) and a pleasant melody. So no guitars for Sleigh Bells (save the trademark rhythmic doodly-doo at the end of the phrase) and no words for Joanna -- they have infinity of these things but they're not what I was looking for.

Sleigh Bells (#8):

"We’re at a time when children’s culture, and girl culture specifically, is hyper-marketed. Hannah Montana’s its own institution, flanked by the Bratz and Cliques and Gossip Girls and whatever else finances people’s solid gold Ferraris. But there’s also an incredible amount of nostalgia for what preceded it, for the stuff and milieu girls grew up with and loved. Sleigh Bells tap right into that vein; they’re up there with Tuscadero and Shampoo and the whole poppified post-riot-grrl lot. I’m shouting right along with them." (Katherine St. Asaph)

"Sleigh Bells use pointless abrasion to cover up the fact that no actual musical event will occur during the course of your listening experience." (Mallory O'Donnell)

Joanna Newsom (#4):

"Every layer of this has contours to delve into – Joanna twists and winds her way around the instruments, around your ears and your brain and your heart. At seven minutes in length, I’ve probably spent a couple of hours of my life in 2010 listening to this, and I pick up on more nuances every single time." (Alex Ostroff)

"The lyrics are new age twaddle, her voice is the helium bunny gone weird, and the production is filled to the gills with sheer pretension. Can she go away soon?" (Anthony Easton)

5. King of Drunk Girls (LCD Soundsystem, The Tallest Man on Earth)

The music in "Drunk Girls" has grown on me, though I still think the lyrics are reaching for more off-the-wall wackiness than they get and that it gets old after a minute. "King of Spain," on the other hand, gets old in about twenty seconds. So the obvious choice here was to gut the LCD song and childishly mock The Tallest Man on Earth w/ chipmunkery. I think that "I never knew I was a lover / And I wear my boots of Spanish leather" might be the beginning of an OK Velvet Underground homage.

LCD Soundsystem (#15):

"James Murphy clearly thinks that bellowing the title in the manner of a football fan vomiting over our shoes isn’t enough for us to get it, so the music mimics the clumsy, graceless motion of a beer-sodden tramp lurching along the pavement." (Alex Macpherson)

"Admittedly, this is somewhat awkward and kind of obnoxious. But so is being incredibly drunk. And much like being incredibly drunk, this song is also a great deal of fun, and compels you to dance in an uncoordinated and unself-conscious manner, regardless of who might see you." (Alex Ostroff)

The Tallest Man on Earth (#3):

"Kristian Matsson’s Dylanisms are not about affecting a nasal rasp or perfecting a troubadour posture, but rather — like the year’s wisest and most resonant pop homages, from “Fuck You” to “Tightrope” — about taking what you’ve learned from history to tell your own stories with that much more evocative force." (Jer Fairall)

"I thought only that douche from Counting Crows wanted to be Bob Dylan." (Tal Rosenberg)

6. Statistics (Peer-Reviewed) (Lyfe Jennings)

Am I alone in thinking that computer-speak voices are really funny? (Crickets.) Uh, OK. Anyway, I had a lot of fun taking apart "Statistics" for its accuracy this year. To recap: if 80% of men are undateable, as Lyfe suggests, and 10% of the remaining 20% are gay, then that means that a remaining 2% are undateable, hence 18% are still OK. And that doesn't even account for overlapping qualities -- are we really to believe that a separate 25% of men who can't be faithful have zero overlap with the 25% of men that are unstable? Isn't infidelity, in Lyfe's view here, a kind of instability? Anyway. I decided that someone should follow up Anthony Easton's question of whether or not these statistics were peer-reviewed. I give Lyfe a C- in Applied Statistics, since you have to give some credit for the novelty of his experiment.

Lyfe Jennings (#20):

"I’m not really sure what to make of this lecture on the fickleness of males and the necessity of not taking your clothes off unless (and I suspect this is key) the man you’re taking them off in front of is Lyfe Jennings."(Hazel Robinson)

"Shit, can I marry him?" (Michelangelo Matos)

7. Sex Is a Standard Deviation (Lyfe Jennings, Ciara f. Ludacris)

Now we reach the point of the mix where I accidentally find two songs that work pretty well together and, accordingly, let Ciara ride the beat a while. I'm a firm "6" on the Ciara track with its original backing but the smoother beat here makes me like it a lot more, and I now find myself relistening to the original a lot. I like that Ludacris is still technically featured in his screwed intro but doesn't get a chance to hashtag it up.

Ciara f. Ludacris (#10):

"Ciara commandeers a beat that creeps and stomps in a manner so tightly coiled that it feels one second away from busting, while singing about doing exactly that." (Jordan Sargeant)

"Her personality is as blank and paper-thin as her voice, and the chest-thumping bravado strains credulity worse than that attempt at a melismatic vamp at the end." (Al Shipley)

8. Fuck, "Flash Delirium" Is, Like, the Coolest Song I've Ever Heard in My Whole Life (Die Antwoord, MGMT)

Never got around to listening to $0$ -- it didn't strike me as particularly interesting or particularly WTF at the time (it seemed too obviously an "avant" semi-parody) and I didn't care to get into the speculation game. That said, "Enter the Ninja" is certainly memorable, and not bad as a song (the trick is to realize how close to credible the female vocals in it are -- here I've slowed/pitched it down slightly and it's not too far from icy indie bliss-out). MGMT on the other hand I just couldn't get a handle on -- too disjointed, too incompetent, too much like a third-rate Super Furry Animals trying to soundtrack an iPod commercial (on "Flash Delirium" anyway). And yet the sample from "Kids" helped me kinda sorta like a Chiddy Bang song! I took what I thought was the dumbest part of "Flash Delirium" (also the part I liked the best, go fig -- Kat Stevens refers to it as the "shambolic flute break") and paired it with Ninja expounding on its coolness. MGMT are nothing if not all up in the interweb.

Die Antwoord (#17):

"You’d think by now I would have stopped finding joy in the moment when everydork W.T. Jones stops the song to bask and preen with his now notorious pronouncement 'this is like… the coolest song I ever heard in my whole life,' but the truth is that I still pretty much agree with him." (John Seroff)

"Perhaps the worst record that will ever be made by anyone, ever." (Edward Oculicz)

MGMT (#11):

"What a dreadful mess. It veers between a mixed-bag of 60’s garage sounds (less Phil Spector, more Primal Scream aping the Stones) and a soggy, meandering attempt at psychedelia, like if the The Byrds had grown up in a commune made out of Weetabix on the outskirts of Luton. That shambolic flute break is one of the most half-arsed things I’ve heard this year." (Kat Stevens)

"It’s a great song, as copies of the Of Montreal sound go; and, as copies of the Of Montreal sound go, it went. Man, if MGMT keeps coming up with stuff like this I’m going to have to start paying attention to them." (Matt Cibula)

9. MY FN, YR STYL (Liz Phair, Everything Everything)

Two tough ones to mix -- Everything Everything's track hops over the place so fast that I had to edit in a single bass note to make the outro loop work, and even then it starts a little wonky. So I copped out with ethereal lyrics, which coincidentally matched the key and rhythm (more or less) of Liz Phair's prettier section of the "Bollywood" beat. I liked Liz Phair's album as a confusing mass of stuff but excerpting it doesn't really do that experience justice. So I ripped some context from NPR and let the beat rock.

Liz Phair (#8):

"What this reminds me of most is the kind of unfiltered, anything-at-the-wall approach that Christian contemporary singers, especially those who considered themselves entertainers, were taking in the late 80s and early 90s, when record labels were generous but no one had any clue what might catch on, and cool wasn’t an option in the first place." (Jonathan Bogart)

"It’s such a car crash of a record that there was clearly no expectation of it being a single, it’s like Liz wanted to make a Laurie Anderson B-Side but only had three samples and one terrible actor available." (Pete Baran)

MY KZ, UR BF (#9):

"It’s a song I quite like but haven’t managed to figure out why!" (William B. Swygart)

"You know when a song has so many things wrong with it but you LOVE it anyway? This is the opposite of that. Sorry dudes." (Kat Stevens)

10. Toot It and Undo It (YG, Carrie Underwood)

Two unexpected faves on this one -- already mentioned why I think it works conceptually above. "Toot It and Boot It" has been begging for someone to excerpt the "whoa" section (which they stupidly only let play through once before going to the next verse) and put it in a better song. This isn't that song, but it does give you a sense of what the song might have been if they'd figured out that the heart of the song is the group singing, not the chorus. Meanwhile I fell in love with "Undo It" after not paying much attention to it. I sort of like pitching Carrie down, though I think to make the keys match I fucked with it a bit too much. But I didn't want to touch the YG part.

YG (#12):

"Two things make this: the dusty turntable snippet you don’t really otherwise hear on the radio in all-electro-everything 2010, and the everyone-join-in 'whoa-oh-oh-oh' chants that, even though put to better context here, might as well come from a damned Arrested Development record. Shame about the rapping, which is at best unmemorable, charmless at worst." (Rodney J. Greene)

"As laid-back a hip hop number as I’ve heard in a while, drawled lyrics over a lazily fingersnapping backing, sounding totally stoned and fuzzily happy. Thing is, it’s about fucking a woman then throwing her out, awareness of which rather kills the relaxed, contented feeling the sound creates, for me." (Martin Skidmore)

Carrie Underwood (#21):

"This doesn’t hang together at all: no natural emotional development; feels like successive effects just thrown in our face. It does seem at one with the desperate dance-pop mess of 2010, however, and I’m hoping that crossover radio play will make this song make more sense." (Frank Kogan)

"The chorus is basically Kelly Clarkson’s 'Miss Independent' dressed in country flannel and fast-forwarded to the end of the relationship. I happen to love 'Miss Independent.'" (Katherine St. Asaph)

11. When a Woman Gives Up the Gun (Vampire Weekend, R. Kelly)

Whew, the end o' the mix -- this was an easy one; take the propulsive guitar backing and glockenspiel from Vampire Weekend and let R. Kelly do the singing. These are both albums I'm pretty lukewarm about, erring on the side of warm not luke -- a fitting spectacle from two meh-plus sources. I get a little too cheeky on this one, wobbling Kells's syllables even longer than he does (though not as much longer as you might think!), but fuck it, gotta end on a bang. I don't think I can sit through the entirety of "When a Woman Loves" if it's not a live version (ugh, canned orchestra must die) but the breakdown and ending are worth preserving.

Vampire Weekend (#18):

"The evocation of a life unlived and the pervasive sense of approaching obsolescence are masterful and affecting, like a less explicit take on LCD Soundsystem’s 'All My Friends.'" (Alex Ostroff)

"Limp US college indie, with a simpleminded tune, fussy instrumentation and terrible singing. I am entirely mystified at their success -- I can’t hear anything in them that I can imagine anyone liking at all. This seemed to drag on for hours." (Martin Skidmore)

R. Kelly (#19):

"I’m not sure anyone thought that what pop needed in 2010 was a response song to Percy Sledge’s 1966 'When A Man Loves A Woman,' sung in a variety of early-soul voices with cheap bombast and the merest hint of Autotune, but that’s R. Kelly. Identifying needs no one has and then filling them with such confidence and brio that it’s impossible not to shout thank you! right back at him." (Jonathan Bogart)

"Kells, you have money. Hire real musicians." (Katie Lewis)

That's all, folks. See you next year -- same controversial time, same controversial station!

2011

2011-01-02T09:10:00.001-08:00

2011: The Year Everyone Came Back for More

S'Mores
1. Dev - The Night the Sun Came Up
2. Sunny Sweeney - Concrete
3. Nadia Oh - Colours
4. Anthony Hamilton - Back to Love
5. Cher Lloyd - Sticks & Stones
6. V/A - Mr. Collipark Presents Can I Have the Club Back Please? mixtape
7. Miranda Lambert - Four the Record
8. Alexandra Stan - Saxobeats
9. Justin Bieber - Under the Mistletoe
10. Grace Jones - Hurricane
11. Teddybears - Devil's Music
12. Pistol Annies - Hell on Heels
13. Pitbull - Planet Pit
14. Selena Gomez and the Scene - When the Sun Goes Down
15. Emily Osment - Fight or Flight (2010)
16. Katy B - On a Mission
17. Feist - Metals
18. Britney Spears - Femme Fatale
19. Nicola Roberts - Cinderella's Eyes
20. Low - C'mon

Mores [7]
Adele - Rolling in the Deep
Araabmuzik - Electronic Dream
Arctic Monkeys - Suck It and See
Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2
Bedroom Problems - Six Songs EP
Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow
CocknBullKid - Adulthood
Das Racist - Relax
Dirtbombs - Party Store
DJ Quik - Book of David
DJ Shadow - The Less You Know, the Better
The Dø - Slippery Slope
Sky Ferriera - As If! EP
Foster the People - Torches
Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
Holy Ghost! - s/t
Wanda Jackson - The Party Ain't Over
Joker - The Vision
Keak da Sneak - Tonite Show
Lil' Wayne - The Carter IV
Little Dragon - Ritual Union
David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time
M.I.A. - Vicki Leekx mixtape
Metronomy - The English Riviera
Panic! At the Disco - Vices & Virtues
R.E.M. - Collapse into Now
Omar S - High School Graffiti
Raphael Saadiq - Stone Rollin'
Paul Simon - So Beautiful or So What
Soulja Boy - 1Up mixtape
TMBG - Join Us
Poly Styrene - Generation Indigo
tUnEyArDs - wHoKiLl
Widowspeak - s/t
Wild Flag - s/t
Wiz Khalifa - Rolling Papers
Yelle - Safari Disco Club

Mo' Nuff [6]
Battles - Gloss Drop
Beyonce - 4
Cut Copy - Zonoscope
Destroyer - Kaputt
Digitalism - I Love You, Dude
The Feelies - Here Before
David Guetta - Nothing but the Beat
Junior Boys - It's All True
Kreayshawn - Kittys and Choppas mixtape
Lady Gaga - Born This Way
Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes
Lloyd - King of Hearts
Demi Lovato - Unbroken
Frank Ocean - Nostalgia/Ultra
Parallel Dance Ensemble - Possessions and Obsessions
Radiohead - King of Limbs
The Rapture - In the Grace of Your Love
The Strokes - Angles
Robin Thicke - Love After War
Eddie Vedder - Ukulele Songs

Mo-Hum [5]
B.o.B - No Genre mixtape
Cake - Showroom of Compassion
Chipmunk - Transition
Cults - s/t
Danger Mouse and Daniele Lippi - Rome
Foo Fighters - Wasting Light
LMFAO - Sorry for Party Rocking
Jennifer Lopez - Love?
Natalia Kills - Perfectionist
Nicole Scherzinger - Killer Love
TVOTR - 9 Varieties of Worms
Wiley - 100% Publishing
Jamie Woon - Night Moves

Less
Avril Lavigne - Goodbye Lullaby
Gorillaz - The Fall

Not comparable, relatively speaking [disqualified]
Neil Diamond - The Bang Years 1966 - 1968
Diddy Dirty Money - Love Love vs. Hate Love mixtape
Emily Osment - Captain EO: The Best of Emily Osment

Unmoored
Cassie - Fearless
Yo Gotti - Live from the Kitchen

Moh No! Overlooked in 2010
Daddy Yankee - Mundial
Care Bears on Fire - Girls Like It Loud EP

I Think UR a Contrarian

2010-12-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

I'm getting pretty comfortable with my Top Twenty list for the year, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to offer some CHALLENGING OPINIONS about some of the year's best music.

KANYE v. DIDDY IN THE BATTLE FOR MEGA-LOL-MANIAC OF THE YEAR

Lex also mentioned this on ILM, but Diddy Dirty Money's Last Train to Paris is about as kaleidoscopic (and as dark) as Kanye's album and boasts a pretty impressive guest list. The difference in a nutshell is that Diddy aims for mildly eclectic competence and exceeds it, while Kanye aims for mad scientist greatness and misses it. Kanye wanted Who Framed Roger Rabbit and he got Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. This is Space Jam -- not aiming too high, but better than it has any right to be. Diddy Dirty Money hasn't impressed me much with live appearances or former glimpses, but like MBDTF this album is a little sprawling and a little "difficult." But DDM beats Kanye in the "motherfucker" contest on "Ass on the Floor," beats him in the overlong/overstuffed contest (Lil' Wayne does a VHS porno parody of Gil Scott Heron while Justin Timberlake, acting the Drake, does the hashtag-rapping on ponderous "Shades"), beats him in the robo-emo contest (which, admittedly, Kanye's basically over by now) on "Strobe Lights." And it's ten minutes shorter! And Grace Jones is on it, though I'm pretty sure she's a back-up singer! And Chris Brown and Drake's presences aren't actively offensive (in their own respective ways). Did I mention that, unlike some egomaniacs, Diddy often lets himself be a featured artist on his own album? Still, jury's out on which one I actually like more.

KELIS, KE$HA, AND MARINA VERSUS OTHER WOMEN WITH "THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THINGS"

By sheer virtue of over-saturation, my tolerance for semi-clever female singer-songwriter material with kitchen sink production was pretty low this year. Marina and the Diamonds' tactic of creating a slightly absurd but generally tasteful frame for Marina's obtuseness puts her inanity at a certain distance -- "LOOK AT YOU GURLS EATING YOUR YOGURT WHILE I EAT PIE THPTH THPTH THPTH" is pretty grating as genuine sentiment, but the band's cheesy sci-fi oompah-pah turns her into a cartoon -- as earnest as I suspect Marina is, she's drawn without nuance and our attention turns to the setting as much as the words.

She's not unlike Ke$ha in that respect, serving as trashy superhero/ringleader to a very different style of swirling production. And this sense that the cacophony is as, if not more, important in the end takes the focus off of Marina herself; her voice and her words are part of the set. Lily Allen's last album did something like this, but Lily Allen actually has a few smart things to say, and the album's unevenness was in part due to the fact that when she did say smart things (on "Chinese" and "Not Fair" and "22"), she set the bar higher for herself than for the production (better than on her first album, which is more of a set piece, having finally listened to it a few times belatedly). But Marina sets the bar low low low, so low it's just sitting there on the stage with everything else.

The trick of Kelis's album -- my #1, two spots ahead of Marina and one ahead of Ke$ha -- is that she's set the bar much higher than it appears. If you do enjoy the setting, those zeitgeisty Guettascapes and super-obvious house tracks -- which I'll admit a certain fondness for whether it's via Black Eyed Peas or the Guetta sound board for "Sexy Bitch," possibly because of how uninformed I am about dance music generally -- you slowly start to discover how sweet and thoughtful much of the album is. The secret to clicking for me, as it appeared to be for Jessica Hopper, who also votes Kelis #1, was "Song for the Baby."

DREAM IMITATORS VERSUS THE-DREAM

I was disappointed by The-Dream's third album only to the extent that my expectations for it followed loving Love vs. Money and finally "getting" Love/Hate, which I now consider to be almost as good as LvM. Love King has the same scattered genius feel of Love/Hate, but it also wants to thrill us with occasional cohesion; it's also stretched thinner, and he's done a lot of this stuff better before ("Love King" vs. "Shawty Is the Shit"; "Abyss" suite versus "Love vs. Money" suite), which isn't to say that the new stuff isn't good. Just that it's not what I needed from The-Dream this year, since I still listen to his first two albums pretty regularly.

Enter Trey Songz, who probably has his own R. Kelly fetish (eek, WORD CHOICE) but also expresses it through what The-Dream has done with his. He never really peaks on Passion, Pleasure, Pain, so he's not in the same company as The-Dream. But seen as a transparent derivative, he delivers the generic (in the genre, not pejorative, sense) goods. He rips directly -- on "Love Faces," it's the descending trademark Dream first-inversion major chord ("take 'em off, take 'em off, take 'em off"), the multitracked passion swarm ("hands around ya! hands around ya!") then imagining sweating out his lover's hair. But Trey also has a more traditional R&B crooner voice -- no other tricks than an occasional (weak) falsetto and effective vibrato. He even pays lip service to the idea of a song suite without making it explicit in content or transitions -- first four tracks go from imagined love-making to the ride home, into the garage, then (woops) "Bottoms Up," which throws the seduction totally off-track -- Trey spends the next three songs apologizing. "I know you're angry -- no, no, better yet, disappointed." And then the album gets more diffuse, with a particularly hilarious sub-Dream number, "Red Lipstick" (I guess he thought "Purple Kisses" wasn't direct enough?) and vagues out by the last couple tracks as a solid genre album should.

What I like about it is that it's not so much warts-and-all (as Love King is) as it is a couple of blemishes here and there that you could complain about but why bother? Which would explain the weird "rain on the windshield" effect on the album art, too, the closest an R&B male can get to soft focus, I guess. Some anticipated albums were a little too generic -- Jazmine Sullivan's range seems oddly limited on her new one; R. Kelly could sing the phone book reasonably well, but that doesn't mean that he should; Sharon Jones and Aloe Blacc put out dependable retro-fetishist albums that I'll listen to more frequently than their ranking on a 2010 list would suggest. Ciara's new look (with The-Dream) seems a little incongruous and I'm reminded of Mariah Carey's work with him, which wasn't bad technically speaking but something just seemed a little off. Meanwhile, Mariah's doing her best work (or at least most consistent and fitting work) by slathering on some kitsch on a Christmas album, which I bought impulsively full price at Whole Foods for some bizarre reason. In some ways Nicki Minaj's album is half of a pretty solid R&B effort, but I don't like the whiplash.

CAST OF THOUSANDS, BUT EVERYONE IS JUST KINDA STANDING AROUND

There were a ton of low-key "Producer and Friends" albums that came out this year with relatively little fanfare -- Dave Sitek's Maximum Balloon, UNKLE's Where Did the Night Fall, Massive Attack's Heligoland. Any of these would easily take a c. 15-20 spot on my list this year, and the winner goes (somewhat arbitrarily) to Maximum Balloon, probably because it's the one I'm currently listening to the most. I listened to Heligoland quite a bit at the beginning of the year and UNKLE's album quite a bit until recently. But none of these albums really stay in the memory very long -- they've got guests upon guests, some high profile. Katrina Ford appears on good tracks on two of them (MB's "Young Love" and UNKLE's "Caged Bird"). I include all of them here because I doubt anyone will remember any of them after too long.

GIRLICIOUS VERSUS RIHANNA

And finally, hoar-pop's doe-eyed Stupid Shits have recorded their second album before overseer Nicole Scherzinger has finished her first one ("Poison" is pretty great, though). And, unexpectedly, it's mostly dance melancholia in the post-Blackout vein, most obviously indebted to Rihanna. It's basically the halfway point between Rated R and Loud, in which Girlicious keep a little of the introspection while opting for dance-into-oblivion hooks. And they do some interesting stuff here, like interpolating ATC's "Around the World" (that would make them the second group I'm aware of to do it this year, after jj did it on Game/Lil Wayne semi-cover "My Life") and then basically admitting that that song's hook is better than any of theirs (something Flo Rida should have learned last year).

Anyway, it was a weird year. But I'm pretty comfortable with these 20 albums, which some last-minute attention going to These New Puritans and some reconsideration for a few "bubbling under" albums. Feel free to inquire for more opinions on other records I didn't mention here below.

1. Kelis - Flesh Tone
2. Ke$ha - Animal + Cannibal
3. Marina and the Diamonds - The Family Jewels
4. Jamey Johnson - The Guitar Song
5. Rick Ross - Teflon Don
6. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
7. Goldfrapp - Head First
8. Trey Songz - Passion, Pain, and Pleasure
9. Mose Allison - The Way of the World
=10. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
=10. Diddy Dirty Money - Last Train to Paris
12. Far East Movement - Free Wired
13. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah, Pt. 2: Return of the Ankh
14. The-Dream - Love King
15. I Blame Coco - The Constant
16. Waka Flocka Flame - Flockaveli
17. Warpaint - The Fool
18. Yelawolf- Trunk Muzik 0-60
19. Spoon - Transference
20. Maximum Balloon - s/t

Bubbling Under
Laurie Anderson - Homeland
Aloe Blacc - Good Things
Big Boi - Sir Lucious Leftfoot, Son of Chico Dusty
Delorean - Subiza
Fefe Dobson - Joy
E-40 - Revenue Retrievin' - Day Shift
E.via - Via Polar EP
Girlicious - Rebuilt
Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner
Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
HEALTH - DISCO2
Hole - Nobody's Daughter
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings - I Learned the Hard Way
Lil' Wayne - I Am Not a Human Being
Lil' Wayne - Rebirth
M.I.A. - /\/\/\Y/\
Massive Attack - Heligoland
Kylie Minogue - Aphrodite
Liz Phair - Funstyle
Princesa - Mas Fuego
Sade - Soldier of Love
Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here
UNKLE - Where Did the Night Fall
Vampire Weekend - Contra
Wallpaper. - Doodoo Face

It's Taylor Time

2010-11-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

"I just realized everything I have is someday gonna be gone."

Taylor time (n.) - The period of time which, upon reflection, causes maximum embarrassment, shame, anger, or self-loathing.

Right now my Taylor Time is c. age 20-21, though I can feel my growing nostalgia for that period already starting to color the pain of remembering those experiences with more ambivalence and a bit of sympathy. I've been writing a "2004" entry in my Decade in Music series for months now, typing a bit here, erasing a bit there. Day to day my thoughts about that year mutate. This is my Taylor Time reaching its final resting place in nostalgia, which is certainly still apt to shift over time, but will never cause quite the visceral unpleasantness it did in the past three years of my life (I'm 26 now).

As I searched the basement in my parents' new house for a few missing box sets this past weekend (found 'em!) I also uncovered some horrendous fiction writing I did at 15 that I'd forgotten about entirely. Emily insisted on reading it, and though I expressed mock outrage and disgust, I was kind of excited to read it, too. It was truly awful -- girls with eyes blue like "lagoons" (have I ever even seen a lagoon?) and tortuously recounted yet utterly banal observations on my first romantic experiences. The detail of a technical manual and the elegance of a Penthouse Forum letter.

But it was kind of funny! I can remember writing some of that stuff (not all of it) pretty well. Long nights typing away in a blank Word document, trying out my prose, writing the most moralistic/misogynistic tripe imaginable. Not that I ever intended to show too many other people, though I am a little embarrassed to think of the people who did read it at the time (sorry Joe, sorry the-other-Emily). Thank god it wasn't on the internet (TGIWOI).

When I was 20, I threw a lot of that old stuff out in disgust -- reams of poetry "inspired" by Radiohead's liner notes to OK Computer, "humor writing," nonsensical skits and half-finished plays built around dumb titles I thought up -- "Cats and Cheese," "The Banana Effect." I was suffering through Taylor Time and 20-year-old me hated 15-year-old me. Meanwhile I was, at 20, regularly publishing stuff that, as recently as a year or two ago, mortified me enough to want to throw it out forever, too. Too bad it was on the internet (TBIWOI).

For the third or so consecutive year I've felt my Taylor Time ebbing in its severity. I didn't feel as mortified about my Taylor Time at 25 (19-20) as I did about my Taylor Time at 20 (16-17); I didn't feel as mortified about my Taylor Time at 18 (14-15) as I did at 15 when I violently reacted against a "former" me that I located at 12 or 13.

So I've been following along with some interest, and some anxiety, as Taylor Swift herself deals with her Taylor Time(s) very publicly. And I empathize to some extent with the more egregious of her material on Speak Now -- which I'm sure she, the actual human being (usually I'm referring to Taylor Swift the Persona, which may include songwriters, producers, etc.), will continue to be proud of if she ever enters an "anti-Speak Now" Taylor Time IRL. The album's often moralistic and judgmental tone and inflated sense of importance isn't unlike what I was thinking and writing like around the 2004 election. It's not a totally misplaced sense of needing to put the world to rights, either; it just doesn't seem to be grounded in the kind of acute observation that makes such calls to action or judgmental pronouncements stick. And some people can make a career on such shallow pronouncements, be it as an artist or a politician or a blowhard who talks too loud in restaurants (the guy in "Mean," say).

I'm particularly interested in seeing how her teenage period -- 13, 14, 15 -- has changed in the last two albums. We have three songs that explicitly reference each age -- "The Best Day" deals with 13, "Never Grow Up," which Chuck Eddy accurately calls "The Best Day 2," deals with 14, and "Fifteen" deals with 15. But there are quite different approaches to each age, each coming at a different period of Taylor Time, which can be identified, or at least guessed at. (And again I'll note that I'm not talking about literal intentionality here, Taylor-Swift-the-actual-person, but rather the messages that come through at different points in Taylor's career. For what it's worth, though, Taylor is credited as the songwriter on all three of these songs.)

On Fearless we have a fairly poignant and sympathetic recalling of what it was like to be 13. Taylor and mom go for a drive when girls at school are tormenting her (Taylor) and end up window shopping in another town. The tone is sympathetic, even a little pitying, but fairly realistic in its portrayal of the age -- life is cruel, Taylor is a victim. "13-year-old Taylor" escapes Taylor Time and safely lands in a nostalgia zone, with some nice reflection on both what it felt like to be 13 and on how 13 becomes a more abstract marker for her relationship with her parents.

15-year-old Taylor isn't so lucky -- despite its well-crafted narrative, the song is needlessly harsh on younger-Taylor's presumptuousness and naivete. In fact, the condescending tone here is a clear template for more songs on Speak Now, which expand the overwrought "this is life before you know who you're gonna be." The idea here is a common one -- childhood and adulthood are clearly delineated periods, with adolescence getting its own special "period" devoted to the transition; hence, we don't know "who we're going to be" until we're closer to adulthood. But in fact there are aspects of ourselves at 15 -- at seven, maybe at birth -- that do suggest to us, even as we think about it at the time, what we're going to be. There is some knowledge that we have at fifteen that won't change dramatically. And there is some knowledge that we have after fifteen that will change dramatically when we're thirty or forty or fifty or seventy (I hope -- now who's being presumptuous?).

Taylor's just reacting to her Taylor Time. She's upset with the girl in fifteen; she wants to go back and tell her something, as if telling her will "solve" whatever problems need to be solved. Whereas in "Best Day" Taylor understands what the problem was and what the "solution" (such as it is) was for her as well.

And then we get to the less subtle "Never Grow Up," where Taylor is 14 and embarrassed to be seen with mom, asks to be dropped off a block from the movie theater so no one will even see the two of them together. This is one year after the window-shopping and a year before Taylor has the world all figured out (but not really! BE CAREFUL YOU'RE GONNA GET BURNED TAYLOR!).

Now something kind of radical happens -- fourteen seems infantile compared to both 13 and 15. The nostalgia is so strong -- for PJs and la-la-la -- that there doesn't seem to be any distinction between childhood and adolescence at all. Which I find interesting, since "The Best Day" is essentially marking that split, quite acutely and painfully, without harshly judging Taylor at 13 (and letting Taylor at 3 be the fuzzy stuff of home movies and its accompanying "received memory," which I'm sure Taylor doesn't distinctly recall herself without the aid of what I'd assume is a Hi-8 or VHS video camcorder -- c. 1990, right?).

So there's something like an overreaction to a Taylor Time that as recently as her last album was practically throttling Taylor-at-fifteen (on "Fifteen") and is now treating Taylor-at-fourteen as the last remaining vestige of a childhood now gone. Even though Taylor-at-thirteen was subject to random acts of cruelty and some Taylor in this age range went through many of the experiences (again not literally, but through song) of her first album.

My guess is that fame intensifies the pain of Taylor Time but also locates it fairly specifically at the moments the fame process developed. That is to say, fame creates its own sort of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood cycle that may or may not correlate to a literal developmental cycle. On Taylor Swift we don't have any real sense of that cycle (that's childhood, infancy even) and on Fearless Taylor is experiencing but not necessarily reflecting on it (that's still childhood). There's a more distinct break on Speak Now, after which everything that corresponded to something like a developmental Taylor Time -- the kind of Taylor Time that I imagine many people feel about their own childhood, adolescence, etc. -- now corresponds to a clunkier Meta Taylor Time. Or maybe Famous-Taylor-Time. So now that pain shoots back months rather than years, and new public shame and pain and anger and other accompanying feelings completely eclipse a sense of everyday experiences of embarrassment or anger or nostalgia. She's a different sort of adolescent, trying out a new identity (again).

So we get formal experiments in Quirk Pop and teenpop and Disney-Americana (a la Marit Larsen) and pop-punk etc., many of which ("Speak Now," "Story of Us," "Mean," "Better than Revenge") abstractly deal with pain but don't really locate us in a clear age or place. "Speak Now" is an imaginative, theatrical riff on the aspirational fantasy of "Love Story." "Story of Us" could as easily have been a Hilary Duff song (Hilary didn't start incorporating felt/developmental self-reflection until Dignity, with mixed results). "Mean" remains vague, its catalyst trauma elusive (could be a loud-mouth, could be abuse; I'd err more on the former than latter myself, but who knows). In "Better than Revenge" boys are toys and rival girls are whores -- it's total fluff.

I don't personally like Meta Taylor Time because I don't personally like Meta Taylor, or Celebrity Taylor. I don't care about the ravages of fame, and in the album -- on which it's really hard for me to bracket my limited knowledge of the celebrity context -- it seems merely to lessen the impact of the stories being told. That said, both the production and the context (if you're into either of those things -- a lot of music critic types are into the former not the latter, a lot of cultural commentary types are into the latter, not the former) are stronger this time out. And my sense that those new musical and celebrity contexts are something of a crutch for lacking storytelling is more of a personal preference than a useful lens through which to look at the album. It's an album about the Taylor Time that only Taylor can have. Not only because there's literally no celebrity like her in existence at the moment, but because fame narratives, unlike developmental narratives, don't happen with enough frequency to draw something more universal from them.

Which is a long-winded way, I guess, of saying that I don't personally identify with the album in the way I personally identified (a little bit -- I shouldn't overstate my former identification) with the last two (the first one being my favorite still for the way it negotiated lived experience and genre convention and production/songwriting in a more nuanced way). And personal identification rarely enters into my consideration of whether an album is any good or not; I'm just disappointed, which isn't to say that it's a bad album per se. It's just not the album I wanted.

Then again, maybe Meta Taylor Time is still Taylor Time; which would also mean that album 5 or 6 might be an interesting reflection on Speak Now. Or maybe by that time Meta Taylor Time will be finito altogether -- Taylor may be done as a pop cultural icon -- and maybe she'll find her way back into the stream of everyday life, where the rest of us have smaller and perhaps more interesting problems. That she needs big fame to deal with small problems is the paradox of this kind of songwriting, the one that ended up crushing Ashlee Simpson (for instance), who's unparalleled in autobiographical songwriting that's at once relatable and larger than (her immediate) life. And she didn't really make it past album one, so maybe I should consider myself lucky that Taylor probably has a few more chances to try to have her cake, which may or may not be shaped like a wedding dress, and eat it, too.

From Arcade to Ashlee: An Interview with David Cooper Moore [transcript]

2010-09-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a transcription of my interview with RockCritics.com that I've been plugging away at on and off for a week or so (it was weirdly a nice way to decompress from my other transcription work!). I've included pertinent and sometimes contextual or clarifying links throughout, with a list of sources at the end.

Thanks again to Scott Woods and RockCritics.com for the opportunity to spill my guts!

PART I

SCOTT
All right it's Dec. 4 2009, Scott Woods from RockCritics.com[1] – I'm chatting with one of my favorite critics to emerge in the last couple of years, David Cooper Moore, whose various blogs and Tumblrs and web pages and Twitter feeds etc. is really essential reading for people interested in rock criticism and pop music in general. So thanks for doing this, Dave. How's it going?

DAVE
Thank you! I don't think I can live up to that now.

SCOTT
So this is the second time I've interviewed you, sort of – you actually did partake a few years back in the RockCritics.com symposium about blogging, and that was fun.[2] That was in the form of an email questionnaire, so there wasn't a lot of space to converse and chat. So I wanted to follow up because I've been reading your stuff a lot more lately and really getting into it. A lot of your tastes intersect with mine, and you diverge in some key areas as well.

Before we get into the questions I'm just kind of curious—what have you been listening to in the last 24 hours?

DAVE
[to Emily]
Emily, what have I been listening to in the past 24 hours? We listened to The-Dream together. In fact I just wrote a thing on The-Dream, comparing his song “Fancy” to Animal Collective's “My Girls.”[3]

SCOTT
Did you put that up today?

DAVE:
Yeah, a few hours ago.

SCOTT
I love the song “Fancy,” by the way.

DAVE
Yeah, “Fancy”'s great! So I was playing that song and we listened to the album three times in a row or something.

SCOTT
So I forgot to mention, so your wife Emily's there with you, right?

DAVE
Oh yeah she's just hanging out on the laptop here.

SCOTT
So are you allowed to talk about her and stuff?

DAVE
I think so! Yeah, she's giving me permission to talk about her. She's just here to stop me when I start getting a little too pretentious.

SCOTT:
She could even join in the interview at some point. She's a writer but you say she's not really a writer per se? You sent me a blog post where you were talking about the Black Eyed Peas, so I guess you were chatting.[4]

DAVE:
That was a back and forth conversation I was furiously transcribing in real time about “My Humps.” She does creative writing – graphic novels mostly. Comics, sorry, she doesn't like calling them “graphic novels.” So she's a comics artist and we've worked together on a couple of things.

SCOTT
Cool. And is she into music as you are?

DAVE
She's definitely into music, but probably not as much as me, and I think that's a good thing for our relationship. I think our tastes intersected nicely from whatever taste changes happened in the period between 19 and your mid-twenties.

SCOTT
I definitely want to get into that point specifically with you. But before we get into that, give me a little biographical synopsis—I know you almost exclusively through your opinions on music. And I don't really know – like, before we started taping I had to ask you where you're from. You're from Philadelphia, right?

DAVE
Yes.

SCOTT
So just tell whatever facts are relevant. I'm kind of curious—I think when you started blogging you were still in college at that point.

DAVE
Yeah, I was in my junior year of undergraduate college when I started blogging. I was at Ithaca College in upstate New York, and I transitioned between blogs. I kind of crashed into the rock critic scene—intentionally, but I didn't think it would take. But I got a couple of writing gigs basically through college writing I was doing, which you could still do at that time. I got a job at Pitchfork and I wrote there for about six months.[5] And then I kind of stopped because it was too much work. And then I resurfaced about a year later with the blog you're probably going to ask me more about, The Cure for Bedbugs.[6] At that point I'd graduated from undergraduate and moved to Philadelphia almost on a whim, and I'm in graduate school now.

SCOTT
What are you studying?

DAVE
I study film, actually. I do documentary interviews for a living. So if you need any transcriptions of this I'll send you my rates.

SCOTT
So do you actually go out and interview people?

DAVE
I do a lot of educational work and industrial work for what I “do,” and my personal work is all over the place. Depends on what I happen to be doing the past three months – it changes a lot.

SCOTT
So tell me more about the Pitchfork gig – why was it too much work?

DAVE
Oh, it was hard! How many reviews—I think you had to write two reviews a week. And I had gotten into music about three years before I got the job at Pitchfork, which at that time was to me the top of what I saw that I could get with my actual abilities to write. They were kind of the top of the indie/online music scene. They're probably a lot bigger than that now. It was two reviews a week and I was a full-time student, it was...I was staying up really late! So I kind of cut back. I was also doing a disservice to a lot of the albums I was reviewing. I just feel like I didn't quite have the chops yet. So I stopped.

SCOTT
You mean a disservice in a sense of the writing itself, or because it wasn't really your music?

DAVE
It's a little bit of both. The bottom line is I would take on reviews of albums I didn't know very well and I wasn't putting in the effort to get to know very well. And it's not like these were great albums, but I still feel like I wasn't doing what I needed to be doing. I wasn't doing my job very well.

NATASHA BEDINGFIELD – “UNWRITTEN”

SCOTT
So The Cure for Bedbugs was your first actual blog, I assume?

DAVE
Yeah. Well...no, I have another blog. I don't publicize it, but if you check my Blogger history you'll find it. That was my first blog.

SCOTT
What's that one called?

DAVE
It's called Dave's Totally Boss Musings.[7] It was a totally personal thing – I had never written anything about music before. Emily encouraged me to start writing it because I'd talk about [music] so much. She'd say, “why don't you write this down somewhere so that you don't bother me so much?” I started writing there, working out my various critical poses. And then this parlayed into writing at school, and I turned that into a makeshift webzine called Basshead Media.[8] It's kind of like in a Cary Grant movie, where he goes to see the consulate and then when he goes back the next day it's totally emptied out, and it turns out it was a front organization. That was my website—a front organization for promos.

No, we did good work, I'm being facetious. It was a school thing, me and my friends just wrote about albums and interviewed some artists. That was enough to get my foot in the door; Pitchfork was looking for new writers, so I sent them my stuff and they said, “oh yeah, you had a comment war with one of our writers!” They knew me because I'd gotten into a fight with one of their writers about something that he'd written. So they gave me a trial period and then brought me on.

SCOTT
So that's interesting-- whoever was at Pitchfork recognized you from getting into a comments battle with someone else?

DAVE
Yeah it was six comments—I don't remember what it was about. That was enough to get me in the door. I'm not sure the same would be true in 2009; I think the volume of comment wars is probably too great at this point. This is like Indiana Jones going through the bottom of the door and grabbing his hat before it closes. I plan on making many more terrible metaphors in the course of this interview.

SCOTT
All movie related.

DAVE
Probably. I sent them a couple of samples and they gave me and a couple of people a trial run. Some of them are still there—Marc Hogan was in that batch.[9] And they brought a couple of us on. It kind of went really quickly from there. I worked my way up to lead reviews in two months and then I freaked out and...a little too much too soon.

[“Don't Let the Bedbugs Bite,” excerpt]

SCOTT
So eventually you did—you got the Cure for Bedbugs. Which is your primary blog. But you've also got the Tumblr [Cr4Bdbgs].[10] I'm still not fully understanding what's the difference between the two? The Tumblr allows
for more conversation between people or something?

DAVE
Yeah...I kind of hate Tumblr, actually. It's a very easy way to have an insular conversation with a certain group of people. I kind of hierarchize my thoughts into Big Thought, Medium Thought, and Little Thought. Medium thoughts are for Tumblr, little thoughts are...y'know, what I had for breakfast this morning. That goes on Twitter [C4BB].[11] And then if I have a big thought I can stretch it out into some multiple-thousand-word post. That's why Bedbugs posts are down to about once every two months right now—I keep writing all of these medium-sized posts.

I think that it's just the way that conversation has moved. You move to different platforms on the internet to keep up with where the conversations are moving, and sometimes you get stuck somewhere because everyone's there but there's no other alternative for it.[12] I still like writing for the regular blog, but I just don't do it as often anymore.

SCOTT
You aren't shy about jumping onto other people's sites and using their comments boxes. I have this theory that a lot of rock critics, or writers in general, do some of their best writing in comment boxes.

DAVE
Definitely. Well, if you're not writing a premeditated review where you can work out your writing as writing, you're having a conversation with somebody. And a lot of times it helps to be in somebody else's house with their rules. I break other people's rules sometimes and get into trouble by insulting them, but that said I can still, I think, carry on the conversation there in a way that's maybe more productive than trying to bring everything back to this one centralized location. The problem is that you can't keep track of that stuff very well, so read me a comment I wrote somewhere a year ago and I probably wouldn't remember writing it at all.

SCOTT
I was thinking about you writing in so many comment boxes and you have these different pages, it's something that's changed writing a lot in the last decade with the internet. It's not something that's commented on a lot, but there's no such thing as tracking what you do anymore. I mean, you can—there's one thing I like that Frank Kogan does, which is when if he comments on some sites and thinks it's substantial then he'll also post it on his LiveJournal so you can point someone to it.[13] Otherwise it'd be like, I'm an interested reader of a lot of people, but I just can't follow all the conversations. It's kind of out of hand.

DAVE
It's hard enough to follow the conversation as the person having the conversation! To be someone hanging on for the ride is that much harder. I like that idea, too, that you write something so substantial in somebody else's comment thread that you repost it somewhere else. It's almost a sort of idea publicity, you get it everywhere you can. But it always—well, sometimes—ends up getting lost.

SCOTT
So do you still agree with the RockCritics Blogger Symposium where I asked you about comment boxes and you said “there's absolutely no reason not to let the world in”?

DAVE
Oh, yeah. I totally believe that. I don't understand it—I've actually stopped reading a lot of blogs that don't have comment boxes, because I keep wanting to see what the next thing—y'know, most blog posts aren't...

SCOTT
They're not a beginning and an end.

DAVE
They're an idea you've thrown out there. And it's frustrating to see that idea thrown out there like it's the full text.

SCOTT
The finished article, yeah.

DAVE
If I read what somebody said and I want to challenge that, I don't want to have to write it somewhere else and hope that that person just goes there or finds it. I want to be able to say it. Online versions of magazines where other critics write, those aren't the same thing as a blog, where it's really you and the author in the same room together. That's what I like, is anyone willing to get in the room with someone else that's gonna challenge them. If you're not in the room, there's no next step from there.

[Britney Spears “Piece of Me” excerpt]

SCOTT
So why do you think you gravitated toward writing rock criticism specifically?

DAVE
I wrote about this in a recent post called “2001: A Taste Odyssey.”[14] The Poptimist LiveJournal community is doing their best of the decade polls,[15] so I'm going through the songs and trying to remember what I was doing at that point.[16] It's tricky because, basically starting at the beginning of this decade is when I consciously “got into” music. There were a lot of people around me who seemed to have this idiot savant knowledge of music, this trivia overload, and I wanted to be in! I could do it with movies at that point but I couldn't do it with music. So I started listening to everything, and eventually you listen to a lot of stuff. I totally forget your question here!

SCOTT
Just why you gravitated toward rock criticism specifically.

DAVE
Oh yeah! And that seems to be what happens when you get really into music. You are a rock critic. There didn't seem to be any other narratives for me out there. I wasn't somebody who would go join a fan board for a certain artist or whatever, so for me the critical conversation was what you did if you were really into music. It just seemed to be the natural thing. I think I described it in that post as, like, it was never a rebellious thing like back when rock criticism became “a thing,” for me it was safe. The safest way to do something a little dangerous, or a little cool, or something. It was cool to have a sanctioned rebellion. At this point [rock criticism] is so entrenched, and there's so much of it. More than anything, though, I liked to read about what I was listening to. And reading about it led me to rock criticism. If you're really into movies you can go to film school, but if you're really into rock music...I mean, I guess there's technically a Rock School,[17] but there's no...

SCOTT
...No place to study.

DAVE
...No pop music in academia. Yeah, that kind of a practice. You just join the great oral tradition of rock criticism.

SCOTT
Did reading other rock critics of the time turn you into a rock critic? Anyone during that period—I mean, you mentioned Lester Bangs in that post that you did.

DAVE
Yeah, I started with Lester Bangs because, y'know, he was the guy in Almost Famous. I think that's a joke...

[Laughter]

DAVE
Lester Bangs seemed to be the “starting point.” And when you read Lester Bangs for the first time, and you don't know that much about music—I mean, the references and the prose just really jump out and punch you in the face! I mean, I would go and probably spend hours looking up the references he makes, even in an off-hand way. I've always liked critics who can do that—make me want to figure out who the hell they're talking about. Some random obscure reference that he either wrote a piece about—I have the Count Five record, obviously, because you have to have the Count Five record if you've read anything by Lester Bangs—but I also have a lot of weird stuff that I wouldn't have had if I hadn't read Lester Bangs. He makes you want to go and get that stuff. At least he did, when I was sixteen, seventeen.

Then there's kind of a blank spot, because then it moves online, and online I don't remember critical personalities as well. I didn't really delve into the big rock critic personalities—maybe Robert Christgau counts—but online it was a little more intuitive.[18] You'd be reading stuff by people who weren't big name critics, but they were still doing rock criticism. This whole patchwork of critics became my model. All Music Guide and Pitchfork and all these mega-sites.[19]

[Almost Famous excerpt]

SCOTT
You mentioned Lester Bangs and being sixteen or seventeen, and this is at the turn of the decade, right?

DAVE
Yeah.

SCOTT
I'm really curious about this because I don't really conduct a lot of conversations with people your age, frankly. Was that sort of a solitary kind of discovery for you? Did you have other friends that were into that at all?

DAVE
Not really. Just two days ago I wrote the 2002 post [“My Convent Year”]: I'm into music, I've made this decision, I'm going to try to listen to more stuff, figure out what pop music and rock music is all about.[20] And then I have what I call my convent year, which was a very isolated experience. Lots of reading, and forming these historical narratives of what happened in rock music, and building the canon in my own CD binder or whatever.

It was an extremely isolated experience. I had a little group of friends I would hang out with, and they knew a lot about things from the 80's indie scene, y'know, Pixies through Weezer, basically. I guess the Green Album had just come out around that point. So there was that conversation, but it wasn't much of a conversation—they weren't my close friends, we used the music very incidentally. We just drove around and did stupid things. It wasn't like we were sitting around having deep conversations about it.

[The-Dream “Fancy” excerpt]

PART II

SCOTT
So now let's move into what you mentioned to me. When I first asked you about doing this podcast, I said I'm interested in talking to you about their tastes, particularly the teenpop thing. You framed it sort of interestingly in this message—you said your listening this decade went from Arcade Fire to Ashlee Simpson.

DAVE
It was funny, actually, in 2000...what year did the second Arcade Fire album come out? 2006, maybe, Nick Sylvester wrote a review of the second Arcade Fire album [Neon Bible] which he loved, and he said, “I finally understand why I don't like the first Arcade Fire album—because the first Arcade Fire album is teenpop!”[21] So he made this nice little backward connection that a lot of the stuff I was finding in indie music I sort of transferred over to getting into this confessional teenpop.

But the taste transfer was both obviously event-driven and also a very natural evolution. I wrote this review of the Arcade Fire album [Funeral] that's been called, somewhat derisively—y'know, even though you don't know my name, you might know the score I gave this album [on Pitchfork].[22] Which kind of hurts to read, but it's true.[23] I lived through it, I know it's true.

At that point—not immediately after the review, but through the whole process of feeling like I wasn't cutting it as a music critic—I kind of took a break. I found this Word document on my old hard drive, and I was writing what kind of looks like the lost first Bedbugs post: “I can't listen to any music. There's no music that I really want to listen to right now.” And I'm walking around, looking for something else, and I'm not able to find it anywhere. Which is kind of what was leading me to re-start a new way of thinking about writing.

But the taste thing was kind of accidental. Some Pitchfork staffer uploaded the Skye Sweetnam album [Noise from the Basement] to their...I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but, uh...anyway, I found this Skye Sweetnam album. It fell into my lap, y'know, through my own completely individual choices to download music off the internet. Uh, I don't blame any other institution for that.

[Scott laughs]

DAVE
Anyway. So I get this Skye Sweetnam album, and I'm listening to the big single off that, which was “Billy S.,” and something was going on but I didn't know what going on. I thought “Avril Lavigne,” but really I didn't know any Avril Lavigne except for “Complicated,” or “Sk8er Boi,” maybe. But I never thought about her twice. And I say, oh, I got it—it's the ironic Avril Lavigne! And I'm not sure what I meant by that, but it really interested me.[24]

So I got totally obsessed with this song, and with Skye Sweetnam, so I started looking for that online, the same way I'd look for Velvet Underground when I was seventeen, and I came across new critics. I came across Metal Mike Saunders[25] who'd written about Skye Sweetnam,[26] and Chuck Eddy who'd written about her,[27] and so this led me to a couple of new articles that nudged me in this weird direction unintentionally.[28]

But I was also in England at the time, and I think there's just something about going to England that gets you a little more into pop! There's just something in the water there, y'know? I was listening to Kylie Minogue more because Emily loved Kylie Minogue. And I started listening to Daft Punk a lot.

[Lily Allen “LDN” excerpt]

SCOTT
So before this stumbling onto this stuff, did you at any point further back—you haven't really talked about if you're into any music at like age 12 or 13 or something, but did you go through any inevitable phase—I think it's an inevitable phase, though some people maybe skip it—where you kind of didn't want anything to do with bubblegum or teenpop, or any of those kinds of music?

DAVID
I don't know. I don't think so—I think I've unwittingly written knee-jerk anti-bubblegum whatever stuff in my life, or said it. But not passionately or anything. When I was a kid I had three sisters, two through through a remarriage. And an older step-brother who'd listen to Metallica—that was like my ur-text. But I grew up listening to Paula Abdul and New Kids on the Block.[29] And when I listened to music it was Kris Kross, whatever the teenpop was then. Some of the teenpop was hard-edged enough that you could kind of like it when you were an eight or nine-year-old boy. You could listen to Kris Kross, that was kind of cool.

[Kris Kross “Jump” excerpt]

DAVE
I can't remember ever having an explicit stance against it. What got me into it eventually was that there was a more interesting conversation happening about it. I didn't have anything to say about the stuff I was reading or listening to, but this stuff I had something to say about it. It wasn't very good at first, but it was getting me back into wanting to listen to more music. I call it throwing myself back into the trees after pretending I was “above” the trees for a while. The “I can survey the forest” thing. I'm gonna throw myself back into the trees here and see what happens.

It was also cheap! Archaeology of the recent past—you go buy these CDs they mass-produced in 2000 and you can get 'em all for like a quarter! You can get a whole ton of albums that way. I couldn't get promos anymore because I wasn't a rock critic anymore, I wasn't writing anywhere. So yeah, I loaded up with this stuff and started listening to it. Slowly my tastes kind of changed, but really the way I was talking about the music also changed. I was more willing to challenge myself and not accept what I felt I was “supposed” to think about it as the final say. I'm not sure if that was as true before. I was very beholden to the accepted narratives of what you're allowed to say about this band, or what you can say about this kind of music.

SCOTT
Right, and that ties in to what you're saying a few minutes ago, that it was the conversation itself that led you into it. So what made that particular conversation or those conversations a little more interesting? I have this thing about teenpop or bubblegum that anyone who writes about those things seriously is almost out of necessity, even if you kinda don't want to, you're almost forced in a way to defend yourself a little bit. So it produces a kind of passion in your writing, which...I don't want to make a ridiculous blanket statement. But if you're writing about the most accepted indie band or something—not going to say Animal Collective because they're really divisive. Like, Radiohead 8 years ago—you don't have to spend three words defending that you're writing about Radiohead. It's just expected that your'e going to write about Radiohead because you're a rock critic. Whereas if you're writing about Ashlee Simpson, you're kind of writing from the assumption that some people are going to get their back up about writing about this stuff.

DAVE
Yeah, and I think over time that's become more frustrating than it is empowering. At the time it was great. I was like a kid in a candy shop; everything I say is controversial now, great! It led to a lot of really bad writing. Luckily I didn't write a lot of it, it was sort my last gasp of college writing. It was, “ooh, look at me, listening to bubblegum music!!” Which is weird, because I understood that the people who were writing about this stuff that I liked weren't writing about it this way, exactly, but I was.

SCOTT
Say that again?

DAVE
Reading critics that take bubblegum seriously—I mean, not “take it seriously,” like we're all sitting around furrowing our brows...

SCOTT
...Right, just treat it as serious as you'd treat any other pop music.

DAVE
Right, y'know, they aren't gleeful about doing it, they're just doing it, and they're writing great stuff about it. I was still posturing a little bit. You always have to posture a little bit, but I was posturing too much. So I would write about someone like Skye Sweetnam and I would say something like, “Oh, it's fake rebellion for tweens and duh-duh-duh!” And how do I know that? I mean, yes, I've heard people use those stock phrases before, but why did I choose to say that at this point? Because honestly that's not really what she's about at all! The song I was writing about, “Billy S,” is a song she scribbled on notebook paper in eighth grade and she thought it was hilarious. Which is the other thing about bubblegum music—it's really funny! I grew up with Dr. Demento tapes; I like listening to some really stupid shit.

SCOTT
Stupid in the most enjoyable...

DAVE
...With the two “o's.”

[Laughter]

DAVE
Eventually I ended up even more earnest than I was the first time around, I think. I got into teen confessional music, which is very different. It really hits its stride closer to the middle of the decade. It starts off earlier, I'd say maybe Avril, but...Avril's a cartoon, you know? She never did what other people were claiming she did; she allowed the artists who followed her to do it. They bring some seriousness into the bubblegum factory. Around 2004 you have Kelly Clarkson's Breakaway album and Ashlee Simpson's first album [Autobiography], and this stuff that is very earnest and you can't treat it like bubblegum.

SCOTT
Tell me about a few of the teenpop artists who have most interested you in the last decade. You've mentioned Skye Sweetnam, one of the turning point artists, Avril...

DAVE
Skye Sweetnam is kind of a catalyst, but she's also very workmanlike. She had a really, really solid pop-punk album, all killer no filler, bubblegummy, even the stuff that's “serious” isn't that serious. The stuff that I really got into was basically from M2M, Marit Larsen and Marion Raven, onward. The devastation of being a teenager. Which I think is aligned with a lot of rock'n'roll from the 60's but done by teen girls and high-end producers. You can't really make that argument as easily in some places. But they're singing about how their lives are hard because they're teenagers. Or in Ashlee Simpson or Kelly Clarkson's case, they're twentysomethings singing about being twentysomethings.

There's this assumption, a pretty widely-held assumption, that you have to be, like, sixteen or younger – the magic age seems to be a sixteen-year-old – to really love Ashlee Simpson. But I relate more to Ashlee in my mid-twenties than I think I would have if I were in her audience as a sixteen-year-old. Because she's singing about this weird limbo where you're not tied to your family anymore and you're not really tied to the adult world yet, and you're kind of figuring out what that's all about. Which, y'know...it's a very borderline adult thing. Being on the verge of being an adult.

[Ashlee Simpson “Better Off” excerpt]

DAVE
That spoke to me. Ashlee Simpson does it, Kelly Clarkson does—it's getting into R&B. I'm listening to more and more R&B and there's so much of this questioning that is...I'm sure it was always there. I don't want to say “it was only there starting in 2005” or something I'll regret saying. Like, Rihanna does it. It seems to be completely in the DNA of pop music, this earnest, confessional, “I'm growing up and I'm basically an adult but I'm not sure what I'm doing” attitude.

SCOTT
It's funny because the word “confessional” was always associated with real drippy folk music or something and confessional was a bad word in some ways.

DAVE
I think it still is. But there's always gonna be a market for people pouring their heart out. I think there's a certain intersection right now of how music is listened to and how it engages with this idea of a public persona in a way that to me seems more down-to-earth than it might have been in the past. I can't really speak to this, because my life has been all about growing up into this mode of weirdly, intimately knowing about a lot of performers, in a way that I have a hard time believing was the norm before. So at the same time [these artists] are weaving My Life as a Performer into their songs, even if they're Rihanna, or...who else can I use as an example of where this has gone into? I mean, I can also use the anti-examples of Leona Lewis, who I listen to, and it's just like she's trying to be in the nineties. She doesn't sound very “in the now.” She sounds like she's really going for this 90's zeitgeist thing. And I don't get a sense of her as a person in her music.

[Addams Family Values excerpt]

SCOTT
Dave, what do you think are some of the dumbest or most refutable misconceptions or assumptions about teenpop?

DAVE
Well, there are a lot of different kinds of teenpop. Usually the assumptions are about the audience, and the problem with them is that the people using them don't really give a shit about the audience.[30] They're not interested in what the audience thinks; they're using the audience as a stick to beat down the music. I approach it this opposite way, where I listen and I don't really care what a fifteen-year-old girl thinks—I mean, it's interesting to me, but I'm actually figuring this stuff out for me. Admitting when I like it and understanding that you can tell the difference between a song that you do like and don't like within a certain mode of presentation. So I can hate Avril Lavigne and love Ashlee Simpson and be totally fine with that. And I could probably write a better anti-Avril piece knowing her better than somebody who's like, “oh yeah, Avril Lavigne! Teenybopper whatever, but pretty good tunes!”

I have a better understanding, but it's because some people aren't actually interested in the audience or in the music. They're just using it as a way to distance themselves. Which is fine, but if you're gonna go to such efforts to distance yourself I don't understand why you write about it in the first place! Like, fine, distance yourself from it, but y'know, don't then turn around and say because you're so distanced from it you know what's what. Because I don't believe you.

PART III

SCOTT
I find it really interesting, that one really long comments thread.[30-A] Don't feel obliged to talk about any specific writers. But you had the one post where you and...

DAVE
Imon-Say Eynolds-Ray.

SCOTT
...Simon Reynolds...what? Oh yeah, Eynolds-Ray and Ex-Lay went at it for 120 posts or something like that. So summarize for someone who doesn't know anything about what the hell that was about what it was about. Did you guys get anywhere with that conversation?

DAVE
Not really. Well, OK. Once upon a time there was a girl named Paris Hilton who grew up to have a lot of money she was born with and she decided to put out a pop album. And nobody really wanted to listen to it, but everyone wanted to talk about it. So this poses a problem, sometimes, when more people want to talk than want to listen. There were a handful of critics who listened to it and they thought it was a really good dance-pop album. And this statement of opinion, of critical analysis, whatever, gets turned into, “you're defending what Paris Hilton is! You're defending this culture! You're defending a terrible person!” Everything except what we were really saying, which is that the music is really good.

So I got interested in trying to figure out what people thought Paris Hilton was.[31] This was about the time she got sent to jail, and it was really disturbing, you know? As far as I can tell—most people mention this sex tape or whatever, and I look at this and think, oh, so she was the victim of a sex crime, and basically your whole thing about her was that it's her fault? “She's the victim of a sex crime and I can't believe she's famous from that!” If they phrased it that way it wouldn't sound quite as silly and funny to read on the internet.

Anyway, I'm getting off-track here. So I finally get into this and I basically realize that people were talking about talking about the album, but they weren't talking about the album. And plenty of people didn't like the album and wrote perfectly good explanations as to why, but these fights we were getting in weren't about the album. They were about this idea of Paris Hilton being this thing. It just didn't seem to stick. It certainly didn't stick to the album, but it also didn't seem to stick to her. It seemed like she was being used as this figurehead for a lot of really weird assumptions about things like how pop production works, or what the agency of a teenpop starlet, or whatever you want to call it, is. But these arguments don't hold water and it has nothing to do with Paris Hilton, it has to do with these arguments.

She has complete executive production control over the album, because it's a vanity project, but she has no creative control over it, because she's Paris Hilton. Clearly. She had all of the control over the album and none of the control over the album. This is just the “pure” version of a lot of assumptions that get made, mostly by people who don't listen to and don't care about mainstream pop music, and get pinned to lots of performers. Not just somebody who's as obviously icky as Paris Hilton. So that was interesting to me.

I have no interest in Paris Hilton particularly as a human being, but I am interested in what people are saying about her because a lot of it seems kind of sinister. And I think this is maybe on the wane. I think we hit some kind of bottoming out point with Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan—let's gawk at their mental breakdowns—around 2007.[32] I think that we've kind of rebounded from that a little bit. But Paris was definitely right in there.

SCOTT
I think that the great piece you wrote on her was “Paris and the Pop Star Terrorist Fun House.”[33]

DAVE
That was a first listen.

SCOTT
That's great. What I like is that it is your first listen, and you're writing very casually, and that's the voice that comes through, a very casual sort of experience. And a little bit on the nonchalant side. Like, “this is OK, it's pretty good.” But at the same time it comes out as a bit of a passionate defense of her. It's really good writing for that reason—I think it's one of the best things on Paris Hilton that I've read, because you're trying to sort of delve into the tunes and figure out if you like them, not being totally convinced, yet it's quite passionate in parts. It's an odd sort of position.

DAVE
Do you have a passionate quote? I don't remember any passion from it! I remember the nonchalant part, but not the passion.

SCOTT
Passion is maybe a slightly weird term, but you go quite into depth about things like talking about the vocal technique, and how much the sound is really moving you in a way. But the point I'm making is you're really delving into it and listening to it, and it's a really neat position you're in there. You're not trying really hard to convince anyone that it's really great, and you're not—you're going into the Stylus review, it's in part a response to the Stylus review, which was a real lame diatribe...[34]

DAVE
That's where the “army of producers” comes out, this sort of army of pop generals. I imagine them all like these ghost World War I Germans, with the pointy helmets, kaisers, whatever. They're all coming out and ready to do battle.

SCOTT
Right. That's the great part, at one point in the review you're talking about her vocals, the technique of stacking the vocals, and you call it an “army of vapidity.” And yet you mean it as a compliment, and it totally made sense to me! I think by army of vapidity you're saying there's a weightlessness to it, not that it's stupid. People are correct technically when they say Paris isn't a good singer—she's not a great singer, let's put it that way—but she uses her voice, or her voice is used, it could be a bit of both, in a way that is really effective and really interesting.

DAVE
It's funny, sometimes they use so many overdubs it's like they're doing an avant-garde experiment in vocal manipulation, but they're not—they're just using more and more of these weaker voices.

[Paris Hilton “I Want You” excerpt]

DAVE
You could never do that with someone like Kelly Clarkson or Beyonce—they're voices can't be stacked together like that. You put two Kelly Clarksons together on the track...

SCOTT
It'd kill ya.

DAVE
That's some heavy-duty beltage right there. And that's if she's singing quiet. But with Paris you can put a hundred Parises together and you can reconfigure them and make 'em do weird harmonies, and it kind of works! I think there are other kinds of music where no one bats an eyelash at that kind of application of the human voice, where it's not meant to be front and center. But the issue is that people want to blame Paris Hilton for something, so if it's because she can't sing then so be it. The technical ability to sing—see, this is my big Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera thing. Christina Aguilera can blare a little louder than Britney can, but Britney has always had better songs than Christina Aguilera.

SCOTT
I agree.

DAVE
Almost song for song.

SCOTT
I can't stand “Ain't No Other Man.” I think in some ways it's one of the worst singles of the decade.

DAVE
Oh that's a whole other issue, this sort of, “let's go back to what I believe the 1930's might have been like...”

SCOTT
This fake soul thing.

DAVE
Just awful. “I watch a lot of TV and have this idea of a whole decade I'm going to...” I dunno.

SCOTT
Let's go back to Paris just a minute. It's funny to do this interview and to talk so much about Paris Hilton because it's not something people talk about so much nowadays, but I think it's one of the most intriguing stories of the decade. And I really like the album. It's funny, because the thing that a lot of the Paris haters...a lot of the things they would say that a lot of the people who like the album are guilty of, some of them I would actually say, “yeah! If that means I'm guilty I am!”

I like the fact that it's a bit of a “fuck you” move in some ways for a critic to do that. And the fact that it is Paris Hilton, and how outrageous that someone like Paris Hilton has put out a good record. For me that does become part of what I like about it. I wasn't looking for it initially, but then when I did start to like the record, thinking about it more, I did kind of glom on to that angle a little bit, too. The risk of trying to make that part of your reasoning. You'd never make it the full reasoning, that's where you'd kind of fall apart and sound ridiculous. You kind of risk playing into the hands of what the haters are saying.

DAVE
A lot of times—and I hate to use the word “haters”—a lot of anti-Paris people who second-guessed any legitimate enjoyment that is possible with that album also projected some crazy shit onto what the people who liked the album. Frank Kogan wrote about how the contrarian critical stance is intertwined with his own sense of politics; he talked about being vaguely for the Vietnam War as a kid, and then seeing people who were protesting it getting rocks thrown at them, which made him identify with the people getting rocks thrown at them.[35] And this somehow got turned into, in various venues, the argument that Paris Hilton, and the debate about the Paris Hilton album, is analogous to the debate about Vietnam.[36] [37]

I was just like, what planet are you people on? It's interesting, because the whole point of that is that sometimes when somebody seems to be maligned unfairly it gives you a weird reason to want to invest something in them, even if it doesn't pan out eventually. Y'know, I listened to the Kevin Federline album and I still think he's a huge douche!

SCOTT
The what album?

DAVE
The Kevin Federline album [Playing with Fire]. Y'know, Britney's husband, K-Fed, same year as the Paris Hilton album. And in every single song, or most of the songs, he's just saying “I'm rich! I'm Britney Spears's husband!” Yeah, and you're kind of a jerk and the song isn't very good! Paris Hilton could have made that album, but she didn't. She made the album with “Nothing in This World” on it, which is a really good smooth dance-pop version of the Max Martin “Since U Been Gone” thing. They mixed “Since U Been Gone” and a Kylie Minogue song or something. And “Not Leaving Without You,” which a friend of mine—Ross Hoffman, who probably wrote the best thing I've ever read on Paris Hilton. He went through and discussed how there is a character on the album and he doesn't care if it connects back to the real Paris Hilton. Just describing this character over on his blog, Mincetapes.[38]

He said that he would program this song, “Not Leaving Without You,” on his DJ mixes and nobody knew it was Paris Hilton and everybody thought it was fine. He thought he'd have some sort of social experiment—I don't think it ever panned out. I don't think anyone ever came and tried to kill him for dancing to a Paris Hilton song. But it's interesting, because these are just good dance-pop songs. I'm really fascinated in what people want the conversation of the people who like this album to have been about, because it says a lot about poor thinking about how pop production happens, or the role of co-writing.

I read something that said, “she didn't write it and you won't even care.”[39] I think that was the Pitchfork song review. She did write it! She has a co-writing credit! I mean, you can do some research and see if performers who have co-writing credits, that's really a sham so they can just get a bigger cut of the money. But frankly I believe it when they put a co-writing credit on. Why should it be any less true for Paris Hilton for this song than it is for Rihanna, who remade a song by a male singer [James Fauntleroy], added a bridge to it—she had a co-writing credit and the bridge completely transforms the song. That's an important writing addition.

SCOTT
What song is that?

DAVE
It's called “Te Amo,” it's on her new album.[40] It's been described variously as a “lesbian farce”[41] and something about dancehall's value system,[42] which I assume is a reference to at least mild homophobia. I mean, I don't know that there's any dancehall value system that's that welcoming of alternative lifestyles.

SCOTT
Wow, this is a new thing to me. Holy cow.

DAVE
It's a great song. A male songwriter wrote this song about this really beautiful Latin woman comes up to him and starts dancing with him in the club, but then she puts his arms around him and says, “te amo,” and it's too much, no no no! And he says, “te amo—doesn't that mean I love you?” Like, yeah, right, you don't know what “te amo” means.

But when Rihanna does it, it's still a woman that's putting her arms around [Rihanna], and it becomes this lesbian dance, and a lot of people stop there. But what happens is that Rihanna adds this bridge into the song where they go out onto the beach together and dance together under the moonlight. And she says, “we can't touch but I want you to watch me dance.” Just...what the fuck was that? It completely changes the song! So this whole idea of “te amo, don't it mean I love you,” it's not this stupid “you don't know what it means” question—[Rihanna] doesn't understand what it means for this woman to be in love with another woman, and there's something sad about that, that she doesn't understand. The music is really bittersweet, kind of haunting.

So there's something really interesting going on in this song, but part of it has to do with the fact that Rihanna's a co-writer, I think. Again, I don't really want to go into the studio and make sure that she wrote that down on a piece of paper, but she does seem to have had a major input, however actively, on this song being transformed into something bigger.

[Rihanna “Te Amo” excerpt]

DAVE
Co-writing became the teenpop paradigm in this decade, around the middle of the decade.[43] Co-writing became the norm. So you see professional songwriters like Kara DioGuardi and Linda Perry, who would have these very high-profile collaborations with the artists. And I feel that there's a general disdain for the idea that anything could come out of this that is really a combination of the two voices—really it's just the professional; it couldn't possibly be the performer. But I just feel like I trust my ears on this one. I hear something different when Kara DioGuardi works with different singers—I was about to say actresses, hm—and that has to have something to do with the singer. I don't believe that there's just this pop factory that's churning out all these songs and sometimes they go to this singer and sometimes they go to that singer.

There really does seem to be a major difference and it's bringing this confessional co-writing element, where two people go shoot the shit in the studio and Kara DioGuardi has a couple of really good lines, and Ashlee Simpson has a couple of ideas about feelings that she's had about something, and they become a new song. That's gotta be a valid form of collaboration.

SCOTT
And even if you do do a sort of decade comparison, or compare it back to teenpop or bubblegum from earlier decades—I like a lot of bubblegum throughout the whole pop history—but there wasn't as much urgency in many ways to earlier teenpop than what you got following Kelly Clarkson, maybe Ashlee Simpson.

DAVE
Well jeez, I mean Kelly Clarkson, “because of you I'm afraid, mom.” Just, jeez. She's completely destroyed for life in making any kind of serious intimate connection with another human being and she's blaming her parents. In fact she's blaming her mother for not being able to stand up to her abusive father—that's what seems to be happening in the song. You're not going to get that—I mean, first of all you're not going to get that on Radio Disney before 2004 because they won't allow it past the censors. They wouldn't allow a song about divorce on—“Let's Stay Together for the Kids” by I think Everclear...well no, Everclear had the one song and then “Let's Stay Together for the Kids” was Blink-182. But the point is, the gatekeepers for the “pure” teenybopper audience on Radio Disney would never let that through. But by 2004, they're playing “Because of You” on heavy rotation, and there's a lot of really devastating stuff in that song. But there's a lot of devastating stuff in most of the confessional teenpop—not all of it hits you over the head quite as hard as “Because of You” does.

I'm interested in “Because of You” because it became, like, a karaoke staple. And I'm like—do people go up in karaoke bars and sing that song and not realize what this is about? I guess it's as true of any other song that's about a subject you don't think about twice, but in this one it seems really explicit. It sounds like a song that's devastating, it is a song that's devastating, the lyrics are devastating. It's not like “Afternoon Delight,” everyone knows it's about sex. This is serious...this is some serious stuff.

SCOTT
You pay pretty close attention to lyrics. Do you write a fair bit about lyrics?

DAVE
I do. I feel like that's actually—not a failing, but it can sometimes, you can sometimes take your eye off the ball. I was writing about this Animal Collective song “My Girls,” and I was obsessing—these lyrics are so terrible! And then I listened to the song again and though, you know, you really can't hear the lyrics. If I wasn't reading the lyric sheet right now, I would absolutely never have that reaction that I have to it. And frankly, whether the lyrics are bad or not, they're different when you hear them than when you read them on a piece of paper. I think that sometimes being overly sensitive to lyrical construction can be a problem.

At the same time, I do tend to like, especially in teenpop, the people who write really good lyrics. The key difference between Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson and Ashlee Simpson—they may all use similar guitar sounds or whatever—Kelly Clarkson and Avril Lavigne more obviously share Clif Magness, he's like the Dark Guitar Sound of Avril Lavigne. They may share the sounds but their words are completely different. Avril Lavigne has never had a deep thought in a song ever. And she's had a lot of different songwriters and a lot of different songs—I'm probably doing her a disservice, I know there are a couple of interesting songs on, like, her second album—she has a couple of good songs. But the fact is, Ashlee Simpson has good lyrics almost always. And really good lyrics.

“It's been three days / You come around here like you know me / Your stuff, my place / Next thing you know you'll be using my toothpaste.”

This is the first verse of a song, and you have an immediate understanding of exactly what just happened. My friend Erika Villani,[44] who writes for the Singles Jukebox,[45] pointed out,[46] look at how well this character is defined in the first half of the first verse! Immediately! It's got a sort of internal rhythm, but the words are much more evocative than “you're a jerk.” “You suck.” “I can't believe I was with you for so long.” Well, great, thanks. That's revelatory, really.

[Ashlee Simpson “Love Me for Me” excerpt]

PART IV

SCOTT
So is Ashlee Simpson probably your favorite artist of the decade?

DAVE
Oh yeah, definitely. Up there. I give Arcade Fire the co-mantle.

SCOTT
So I was gonna ask, what happened with your Arcade Fire...so are you still into them?

DAVE
I was just listening to them. I'm past whatever agitation I had in 2004, 2005. I gotta be honest, when you're 20 years old and you write a review that actually seems to have made an impact and you get made fun of a lot, y'know, that doesn't feel great for your ego. But I got over it, y'know. And looking at their songs again I realize that there's a lot of humor in this really obviously earnest heart-on-sleeve emo whatever sentiment. Emo has changed since 2004—a lot—so when I say that now I can't say it the same way I could then. But they also had this weird, giddy sense of humor in it that made the difference. And I'm listening to their next album [Neon Bible], and it just seems very dour. I kind of want the vampires—the cops show up at the end of the song, “Neighborhood #2,” and the sirens are flashing and they turn into disco lights and everybody starts dancing in the street. They don't have anything like that on their second album.

SCOTT
You and Frank Kogan probably are the only two critics I know of who placed Ashlee Simpson.

DAVE
There's a lot of critics, actually, who are on board with Ashlee Simpson. Some of them are in the same orbit—Chuck Eddy and Frank Kogan placed I Am Me on their Pazz and Jop ballots in 2005 and so had I, so I clicked my name and it's Frank Kogan and Chuck Eddy and...David Moore. I'm like, oh that doesn't look right...this is weird. Here's Frank Kogan, here's Chuck Eddy and here's this dude.

And there's guys like Australian critic Tim Finney,[47] who's written some great stuff about Ashlee Simpson's lyrics. It is hard to write about Ashlee's music—I think Chuck Eddy's better, probably, at getting across a sense of what that music is like. But there's a bunch of us, I think. I don't think there's any plan to start evangelizing for Ashlee Simpson at all, I think Frank Kogan's gotten a couple of subtle things in. He got Ashlee Simpson into his greatest songwriter of all time blurb about Bob Dylan in Paste Magazine, the critical feat of the decade.[48] And without comment! Like, “Bob Dylan, like Ashlee Simpson now...” doesn't even bat an eyelash. I'm glad that got through.

I think this is something that I was talking to someone today or yesterday about—I don't ever expect anybody to necessarily see what I'm seeing in this music. But I do kind of expect them, if they're going to write about it anyway, to take some time to figure out what's going on. I remember a friend of mine in college, really sweet guy, hated Ashlee Simpson. And I told him this is a great album, and he went and listened to the whole damn thing! He came back and said, “you know, I listened to it and a really didn't like it.” I'm like, jesus, thank you for listening to this album! Usually I get into a shouting match about why—I seem to remember getting into a shouting match with someone in college. I think we both were not, uh, toxicated. Anyway, for him to go out and listen to this thing was enough for me. I don't need him to love the album.

But there're a lot of people who've found something in it, and they tend to be people who have surveyed the field Ashlee Simpson is in somewhat internally and understand the differences between what Ashlee Simpson is doing and what people who are also doing something similar to Ashlee Simpson are doing not well. Or not as well. You listen to P!nk. You listen to Avril Lavigne. You listen to Kelly Clarkson, to the entire scope of people who most people will lump together as a homogenous group of performers—I don't want to say “most people,” but plenty of cultural commentators I've read. And it's like a taste test. They found the difference between Coke and Pepsi.

But I don't necessarily expect someone to come to that conclusion. So you can take that for what it's worth.

SCOTT
How closely do you follow producers? Producers and songwriters obviously are an integral part of all pop music, obviously, but they have a different type of prominence, maybe, within the teenpop world. There is a lot of interchangeability—you'll have, what's his name, Doctor Luke?

DAVE
Dr. Luke—“Lakare Lukacz!”

SCOTT
So his name will be stamped on, it seems like it's on hundreds of records.

DAVE
He's on everything! You can do the auteur reading of Max Martin and Dr. Luke. I once did it by notes—you start off with the climactic note, in “since you been gone” it's the “since you been.” That's the climactic note, and those increase over the course of different performers, until by the time you get to the Veronicas' [“4Ever”] they're doing like nine. So you could do stuff like that.

But you know, I take the producer in, but I've always been drawn to the face of the music. And sometimes the face is the producer. But even when Alison Iraheta—don't even know how to pronounce...some of these names I read on the internet all day and I may have just mispronounced every name. Wait, it's Kelly Clay-erkson? Uh, that's a joke.

So Alison...Eye-raheta, Ee-raheta, comes out with the bog standard Max Martin cheerleader stomp thing...

SCOTT
Where is this, on Jukebox?

DAVE
It's a song called “Friday I'll Be Over U.”[49] We reviewed it on the Singles Jukebox and it's floating around out there. And even though I'm seeing this as a Max Martin or Dr. Luke—I forget who it was –one of their productions, I'm still interested in this performer and what kind of career she's developing through these producers. It may just be a personal taste thing. I don't follow the producers as closely as I follow the careers of the artists.

SCOTT
The singers themselves, yeah.

DAVE
I don't know why. I guess I just like that all of these people work together to create this thing. This is the face of it. You're not supposed to know what Max Martin looks like.

[New York Dolls “Looking for a Kiss” excerpt into Kelly Clarkson “Since U Been Gone” excerpt]

SCOTT
I think it was Sasha Frere-Jones, probably in 2004 or 2005, I think it was him who claimed that “Since U Been Gone” was a genre.[50] Is that right?

DAVE
Yeah, it definitely became—or a subgenre, maybe. But you know, when you say that, though, most of those songs were written by Max Martin. I would bet that that genre of songs, he was a producer on every single one of those things. I can name a million of them and a lot of them are by him. I think, “what's the male 'Since U Been Gone'?” Well, you've got Ashley Parker Angel and you've got Backstreet Boys.

SCOTT
So Max Martin is the genre.

DAVE
Max Martin might be a genre. Which makes sense, I guess. There are signature producers—Timbaland, The-Dream now has a pretty signature sound. You can usually tell. Not just The-Dream, it's also Tricky Stewart and Los de Maestro. Again, names I've never pronounced.

SCOTT
I know you're doing your yearly “taste odyssey” type of pieces, but are you doing any decade-end thing? There's the yearly list you sent.

DAVE
There's not much I can add. What can I add? The second Cansei de Ser Sexy album was underrated—it's called Donkey—and Keke Palmer is awesome. Beyond that you probably know everything else. I got my three artists that nobody paid attention to. I'm actually more interested in trying to take a look at where I was—this was my first adult decade! The first decade where I can not talk about it like, “this is the year I learned to read!” It's interesting to track that kind of development. I'm still pretty young for an autobiography or something but it helps to keep trying to re-figure out how the personal development happened along with the music.

Part of what I think I lost in those beginning stages through my first experiences writing was that I wasn't putting myself as much into the writing I was doing. I was trying to keep myself at a distance, because I was a little vulnerable. You don't just come out in a record review and say “I don't know very much about this music but I am writing a record review about it, so I better figure that out now.” Whereas I actually would feel more comfortable writing a review like that now. Which would probably make it a much better review than me trying to get up on stage, flail around, and hope everybody thinks it's dancing. Just be a little more honest.

As far as trends in the decade, I dunno. I feel like...I'll probably have something to say about it, I just don't know if I'll have something to say the five minutes before the ball drops.

SCOTT
What are some of your favorites of the last year, 2009?

DAVE
It was a weird year. This was a year I had no idea where I was gonna like something. The-Dream [Love vs. Money] is my #1. I think it's pretty much set in stone. I've got Shakira's album [She-Wolf] on there. It's a very slight album, nine tracks plus Spanish versions, and there's even a song I kind of hate, and it's still my #2 album. Rihanna's album [Rated R] is on there now. Sometimes you talk about an album so much it feels wrong not to give it a place somewhere. There are so many albums like that, especially in that period of 2006 to present, where I was talking about a lot of albums that I didn't necessarily like as much as I liked talking about. Paris Hilton was actually not one of those. I'm thinking of stuff like the Veronicas' first album [Secret Life Of...], a very uneven album that I put at #5 on one of my top ten lists, and I don't even like that album very much. But I talked about it so much...how am I gonna ignore something that took up half a year?

SCOTT
And talking about it is partly the point.

DAVE
Rihanna's album is kind of like that, though I really like listening to the album. I like the Lily Allen album [It's Not Me, It's You], it's flawed but I like it.[51] I like the Lonely Island [Incredibad], the Saturday Night Live parody band. They're on my top ten list—they won't get out of the top ten! I guess they're just in the top ten, this novelty album. I was kind of expecting something to take its place, but that's fine, if that's where it ends up. To me that seems like the measuring stick—if the Lonely Island cannot get out of my top ten then either I haven't heard enough music or there's something weird about 2009.

SCOTT
Do you know what your favorite single of the year is?

DAVE
It's not a single, it's a song that was supposed to I guess kind of supposed to be a single off the new Dr. Dre album with T.I., it's a song called “Shit Popped Off.” IT's like the nostalgia song for 90's Dr. Dre. They're standing in the club and nobody's dancing, and then T.I. comes in and puts on “California Love” and everybody starts dancing. What I love is that it's like a middle school dance, because all the guys are on one side and all the girls are on the other side and nobody's dancing with each other. So I love that T.I. went to this club that was a middle school dance until he put on some Dr. Dre on. It's a song about how T.I. got dressed and went to a party. There's just something about it that I haven't been able to stop listening to.

[T.I. “Shit Popped Off” excerpt]

DAVE
So that's my symbolic #1—this is the new age where a “single” doesn't mean anything anymore, so it's very hard to keep track of what is a single. This one certainly is not a single, but it is my #1.

[Almost Famous excerpt]

SCOTT
So Dave is there anything you're dying for me to ask you that I didn't?

DAVE
Dying for you to ask me?

SCOTT
“Oh I hope he asks me that about that!” Obviously there wasn't!

DAVE
“Where can I send your check?”

[Laughter]

SCOTT
I don't think you'd have to think about the answer if that was the case.

DAVE
Maybe I'll go on the record as saying that I think I've made, in my entire professional music career, I've made $170.

SCOTT
That's not bad!

DAVE
In six years of writing. That's my advice to the young folks—you can hope to make about $190 in six years.

SCOTT
That's pretty realistic now, I think.

DAVE
It's just funny.

SCOTT
Would you want to write regularly for a real magazine, whatever a real magazine is now?

DAVE
At this point I probably would.

SCOTT
But would you like to organize your writing in such a way—I'm not implying the your writing now that you put on Cure for Bedbugs isn't...

DAVE
You mean would I be willing to tone down the bile that drips out of my...

SCOTT
No, I mean would you be willing to work within more defined word counts and all that stuff?

DAVE
I love word counts. I liked writing for Stylus Magazine a lot because I had a deadline and I had a word count. It's online, so it's not that strict, but I had to think about how to approach writing something much differently. I think my prose was a little stilted, I was still working on my “official voice” or whatever the hell it was. But I liked that exercise. And I don't think I would want a regular reviewing or music writing career, because it's not where my professional interests lie—in what I want to do to be paid. To provide the four walls and adobe slats for my girls. I wanna do something else to do that, to get my social stats up. But I would love the opportunity to write somewhere more formally. I think it ultimately improves my writing. And it also gets me to write something that's coherent and not expect the comments to do the heavy lifting for me.

SCOTT
So what's Emily saying right now?

DAVE
Oh, she's asleep, long asleep.

SCOTT
So she wasn't enthralled...

DAVE
She was enthralled for a time, and then she was tired. I think she's heard most of this before.

SCOTT
Alright. Well that's awesome, Dave, I appreciate you taking the time. I had a lot of fun, that was great.

DAVE
Alright, see ya.

[Fergie “Glamorous” excerpt]

SOURCES and REFERENCES

1: Rockcritics.com, http://rockcritics.com
2: Rockcritics.com Music Blogger Symposium, Oct. 3, 2007.
3: “The-Dream - “Fancy” and Animal Collective – 'My Girls'” Cr4Bdbgs, Dec. 4, 2009.
4: “Hump Day,” Cure for Bedbugs, May 30, 2007.
5: Pitchfork.com, http://pitchfork.com, Aug. 15, 2004 – January 25, 2005
6: The Cure for Bedbugs, http://www.cureforbedbugs.com
7: Dave's Totally Boss Musings, http://bossflicksnpicks.blogspot.com/
8: Basshead Media Archives, http://bassheadarchives.blogspot.com/ [bassheadmedia.com is now defunct]
9: Marc Hogan, Des Noise, http://www.desnoise.com/
10: Cr4Bdbgs, http://cureforbedbugs.tumblr.com
11: C4BB, http://twitter.com/cureforbedbugs
12: Tom Ewing, “Chartopia,” Poptimist #23. Pitchfork, July 10, 2009.
13: Koganbot Livejournal, http://koganbot.livejournal.com
14: “2001: A Taste Odyssey.” Cure for Bedbugs, Sep. 27, 2009.
15: Poptimists Livejournal Community, http://community.livejournal.com/poptimists
16: Cure for Bedbugs, History of Jop tag (notes on 1986 - 2003), http://www.cureforbedbugs.com/search/label/History%20of%20Jop
17: School of Rock, http://www.schoolofrock.com/index.php
18: Robert Christgau.com, http://www.robertchirstgau.com
19: All Music Guide, http://allmusic.com/
20: Cure for Bedbugs, “My Convent Year,” Dec. 2, 2009
21: Nick Sylvester, “The Down Side.” The Boston Phoenix, March 6, 2007.
22: “Arcade Fire – Funeral,” Pitchfork, Sep. 12, 2004.
23: Michelangelo Matos, “Inside Music: Arcade Fire.” MSN.com, March 6, 2007.
24: “Irony, Honesty, and the Like-Like,” Stylus Magazine, May 23, 2007.
25: Angry Samoans MySpace, http://www.myspace.com/theangrysamoans
26: Various, “Skye Sweetnam Is the Worst Thing to Happen to Popular Music in 2004.” I Love Music message board.
27: Metal Mike Saunders, “All Ears: Disney Dreams Up the Best Radio Station in 30 Years.” Village Voice, March 14, 2000.
28: “All Ears After All These Years: Tracking Radio Disney Through Its Terrible Tweens.” Buzzsaw Haircut, April, 2006.
29: “Boyz II Men Changed My Life (and I didn't even notice),” Cure for Bedbugs, Oct. 19, 2006.
30: “Outside Looking In,” Stylus Magazine, Feb. 21, 2007.
30-A: “G-Rack Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry,” Cure for Bedbugs, June 13, 2007.
31: “What Has She Done?” Stylus Magazine, Sep. 21, 2006.
32: “The Tween Trap,” Stylus Magazine, Jan. 24, 2007.
33: “Paris and the Pop Star Terrorist Funhouse,” Cure for Bedbugs, Aug. 21, 2006.
34: Jayson Greene, “Paris Hilton – Paris.” Stylus Magazine, Aug. 21, 2006.
35: Frank Kogan, “Paris Is Our Vietnam.” Las Vegas Weekly, June 29, 2007.
36: K-Punk, “Choose Your Weapons.” k-punk, Aug. 12, 2007.
37: Anwyn Crawford, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun?” Loops Journal, July, 2009.
38: Ross Hoffman, “heiress to the throne: dancing in the royal suite,” Oct. 11, 2006.
39: Sean Fennessey, “Track Review: Paris Hilton - “Turn It Up,” Pitchfork [online source missing].
40: “Just to be clear, pt. 2...” Skyecaptain's Journal, Nov. 19, 2009.
41: Ryan Dombal, “Rihanna – Rated R.” Pitchfork, Dec. 2, 2009.
42: Ann Powers, “Rihanna's 'Rated R.'” Los Angeles Times Blog, Nov. 23, 2009.
43: Frank Kogan, “The teens are cool but they burn out.” Las Vegas Weekly, Aug. 2, 2007.
44: Erika Villani, Pop/Culture, http://girlboymusic.tumblr.com
45: The Singles Jukebox, http://thesinglesjukebox.com
46: Various [comment thread], “Embracing the Ashlee Whirlpool.” Koganbot's Journal, Aug. 9, 2007.
47: Tim Finney, various posts, “Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread.”
48: Frank Kogan, “#1: Bob Dylan.” Paste Magazine, July 10, 2006.
49: Various, “Alison Iraheta – Friday I'll Be Over You.” The Singles Jukebox, Nov. 20, 2009.
50: Sasha Frere-Jones, “Chemistry.” S/FJ, June 29, 2006.
51: Various, “Lily Allen – 'Not Fair.'” The Singles Jukebox, March 27, 2009.

Quirky Girl Glut

2010-08-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

GURLS OH GUH-HURLS.

Katie Melua, Lissie, Ellie Goulding, Laura Marling, Kate Nash, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Janelle Monae, Robyn, Sia -- you all are different artists with a Different Sound. Different Sounds from one another, even. I understand this.

But you gotta know that the dumbest one in the whole damn lot -- MARINA SHE OF THE DIAMONDS -- has out-quirked every quirk, out-sneered every sneer, out-sung every sing.

Her only competition is Ke$ha, really. There's something a little disappointing about that! Ke$ha isn't even the whole POINT of Ke$ha!

Anyway, I've given up on the lot of you. YOU ALL GET A 6.5 OK LET'S CALL IT A 7 HAPPY GREAT NOW NEVER SPEAK TO ME AGAIN. (Marina, come up and get yr consolation prize -- a spot on a year-end list! Space is limited! My wife thinks you're super annoying so hurry up, because I'll never be able to play you around the house once I've deleted yer alb from my hard drive!!)

Somewhat but not really related -- so is Nicki Minaj going to release an album at some point, or is she just going to keep appearing on magazine covers until something else happens?

Hey, looking that up on Wikipedia right quick to see that Pink Friday [no, no, no: PINK BULLDOZER!] comes out at the end of November(?), I learned for the first time (omg) that Nicki Minaj's real name (wait for it) is ONIKA MARAJ. THAT'S A NAME THAT EXISTS, ON A BIRTH CERTIFICATE, AND WAS NEVER USED FOR A POP CAREER. WTF, Cookie.

News at eleven

2010-06-29T17:15:00.000-07:00

THINGS THAT DO NOT SURPRISE ME:

--Lucy Woodward's long-awaited "tasteful" album -- she's been hinting at the cabaret retro bull for years on her MySpace -- is basically Nellie McKay's Doris Day album without the conceit or charm or tunes (not that there aren't tunes, they just aren't that good). [EDIT: Ha, in getting the link for her new album I see that not only did she record the first "tasteful album" in 2007 but that I listened to it and forgot about it already.]

--Scissor Sisters album is super annoying to me, the guy who usually thinks Scissor Sisters are super annoying. Mike has written a piece defending it that I haven't read yet; I'm afraid I will need to continue mentally fist-bumping Mike for his political observations while politely avoiding conversations about the music he likes (though his reasons for liking it are usually awesome, so he gets the points where they count most for me. And I don't think we've ever had great taste overlap per se, more conversational and idea overlap, which is better in the long run anyway).

--New Kylie album is a low-flier but consistently enjoyable. I am a bit surprised by how much I seem to be enjoying it -- as Anthony Easton said of the (inexplicable) first single here the whole album hits the kind of slow-cooking goodness of "I Believe in You." So maybe Scissor Sisters:"proper pop" :: Jonas Brothers:"teenpop"? OMG the Scissor-Jonas Brother-Sisters could be a Thing, serious.

--New Dream album is easily his weakest. I've enjoyed it on listens three to whatever after figuring out that it's essentially an odds 'n' sods collection. Each song seems to have its stronger counterpart, which doesn't make any one of them BAD but doesn't make them stick, either. He even kind of admits the obvious resemblance on "Falsetto" rip "Turnt Out," but it feels more like xerox than homage this time out. It even does the jazz re-release trick of putting two versions of one song (the OK-not-great "Sex Intelligent") back to back. The highlight so far is the totally retarded "Florida University" (F U! F U! FLORIDA UNIVERSITY! The line, "What rhymes with asshole? ASSHOLE!" suggests I should make an Asshole Mix, which off the top of my head will just include Lillix's "Donut." What else?), which really belonged on some kind of unreleased tracks compilation for completists. But shit, at this point I am kind of a Dream completist, so the album is good enough to barely crack my (weak) Top Ten right now.

--New Drake album is SERIOUSLY BORING AS ALL FUCK. I mean, just...I will not talk about this guy. Dude sounds like he's singing to himself in the shower after snickering at some dumbass line he thinks is clever. And even worse, I tried to find one song that was age-appropriate for grade schoolers and he basically ensured it was impossible. EVEN WHEN I'M BEING NICE TO YOU, DRAKE, AND LISTENING TO YOUR ALBUM -- SCOURING THE MOTHERFUCKER -- LIKE FIVE TIMES, YOU STILL CAN'T GET IT TOGETHER ENOUGH TO NOT FUCK UP FOR THREE MINUTES. Seriously, dude.

--Kelis album is absolutely album of the year. I have a lot more to write about it, but when I do I'll talk about the various shades of love on display, the interesting, quasi-narrative flow between romantic and devotional love. What's great is how she reserves devotional for her baby, letting the man "settle" for romantic with the understanding that it's not even in the same ballpark of the baby love. On ILM I was tempted to respond to a sorta feminist critique that suggests that this album fits into a narrative in which women are given (essentially) no option but to define themselves through parenthood by saying that there's a very specific story being told here that (I think) begins to move most of the songs out of the "representative of a mindset" category and put it more into a confessional realm. That is to say, Kelis is, when you dig into it, pretty explicit about the particular circumstances through which parenthood offered her a kind of spiritual awakening, and it isn't just because parenthood does that. She felt empty for a number of reasons and the baby filled the void -- but just as interesting as how that baby fills the void is how the void manifested itself to begin with. We get hints in the last section of the album that Kelis is somewhat unsure of herself as a mother despite the joys it brings her -- she depends on the advice of her own mother to work out how to even approach motherhood herself: "So I'm writing this letter just like my mother told me..." a whole world of a story in that first line, in the album's best song, "Song for the Baby").

When I began working on my undergraduate thesis film -- an installation in part about how my mother's death affected the bonds between me, my father, and my sister -- I was really comforted in the insecurity my mother expressed in her baby journals from 1982, the year my sister was born. It's this sense of humanity through vulnerability that keeps it from just being a rah-rah parenthood album. What Kelis is saying is far more complicated: "I am weak -- I depended on you for strength and you failed me, which made me even weaker, but this baby has given me strength you couldn't." There's a certain admission here that one reason we turn to devotional strength is that we're weaker when we're alone -- this isn't really a "parenthood" thing but a human thing, and something that doesn't apply to everyone equally. I'm particularly drawn to the sentiment though -- I do feel stranded alone; I also imagine that being a father will offer me (more) strength and assurance than I can have alone. And I also recognize the potential weakness in this, and in the possibility that not functioning well alone may do me more harm than good should, god forbid, anything get in the way of plans. Kelis is essentially saying that plans didn't work out (we get the sense that the baby was an "accident") but that she found strength anyway, and all without ever actually mentioning God. Which is to say there's more God on this album than any I can think of (including Christian ones!) in recent memory, and I really love it for that.

Also, the tunes are killer.

Keke and the Flesh-Tones

2010-06-05T07:41:00.000-07:00

If "The Beaties" doesn't work out as a name for my diabetic girl group, I suppose I can settle for current second place: Frankie and the Key-Tones.

So hey, two new albums (sort of three) on the top ten! Both doing something...I dunno, not similar exactly, but not unrelated.

Kelis's album is a sorta techno/house thang with Kelis's distinctive warble over top -- probably anathema to plenty of people but I'm genuinely affected, especially now that I can map the last two songs ("Braver" and "Song for the Baby") onto the rest of it as a BABY NARRATIVE. She's stupid in love, makes some mistakes, follows her heart, realizes she's got nuthin' but hey wait, this baby saves her! And there's this oddly intimate feeling, like in Talking Heads "Up All Night" or flashes of "Isn't She Lovely," just Kelis and baby hanging out. People hanging out with their babies while producing club music in their basement is, it turns out, a BIG WIN for me in 2010. Might overtake Ke$ha if she continues to fade (which would just make Animal even more like Secret Life of the Veronicas than it feels already).

A-Trak's new Dirty South Dance mix isn't an obvious classic I lurve but I dig the way that A-Trak finds just the right melodies for unexpectedly melodic southern hip-hop of recent years (not just Autotuned, also poorly sung a la Soulja Boy). He brings out the beauty again this time out, but in a way that I'm finding more sophisticated, produces a bit more admiration than the last one, whose cheap thrills ultimately endeared it more to me (and my wife -- it's a must-have on most car trips).

Anyway, there's something about that unexpected melodic connection -- and in a way this is what I'm getting from Goldfrapp and Marina and the Diamonds, too. Subject for a future essay, maybe...

The old comments are back

2010-05-11T17:09:00.001-07:00

Sorry to say that it was just easier in the end to stick with JS-Kit (booooo) than to try to transfer everything over to Disqus. Apologies to anyone who finds the new format annoying, but the old comment threads are too important not to display, especially for anyone coming to the site for the first time.

GUESS WHAT? I AM NOT A ROADBLOCK.

2010-05-07T11:33:00.001-07:00

Well, well, well, well, welly welly well, looks like I'm inching painfully toward a top ten WOO HOO in a year that's felt...uh, decent-ish? I dunno, nothing has grabbed me by the throat yet, except maybe Ke$ha, whose throat-grabbing is sloppy and unfocused save for clutch (pun intended) moments.

I've settled into Animal as the skankier, wonkier, funkier (as in "what is that funk growing in my refrigerator and can I still eat the cheese beneath it?") Secret Life of the Veronicas. I think it was Jonathan Bogart who called Ke$ha a bratty superhero, and I think the album hits hardest when she's somewhere between that and my image of her as a two-faced carnival barker a la the Mayor from Nightmare Before Christmas. Except on the frowny side she's also vomiting. And on the happy side she's also vomiting.

Speaking of vomit, my initial guess after like twenty listens without really being able to figure out is that Marina of the Diamonds is an utter dumbass who also happens to write skull-burrowing melodies. I didn't think it would be possible to like a denser Lily Allen (and hey, Lily's outsmarted me more than once, so who's the real dumbass? Not that it's a mutually exclusive distinction). Marina's social commentary is about as deep as Sagat ("Why is it that girls are expected to be skinny and eat yogurt and count calories? Man, FUNK DAT.") and I sometimes get the sense that she types her lyrics all caps into MySpace comment boxes before thinking of a killer tune for 'em. But I'm pretty sure I can hum every damn song on the album, and it's a frontrunner for the top 5.

Speaking of Top 5's, also digging the eminently comfortable Mose Allison album, his first in a while, which is exactly the same as every other Mose Allison album except the percussion is a little more thoughtful sometimes. It'll get by on nostalgia easy, and some of the songs are starting to grow on me, like in the one where not killing himself in his hotel room is a good day (and he's still flossing, so life can't be that bad). At eighty-something I can't help but read the song not as post-breakup, but post-widower, despite this explicitly not being the case in the song. I dunno, it just resonates more that way -- "I can't believe you left me" as frustration with death of a loved one with the down-to-earth hair-pulling usually reserved for "I can't believe you left me for him." And there's plenty overreaching social commentary stuff, like the less-than-thoughtful Maher-pop of "Modest Proposal," in which he wants Allah to buzz off so the Muslim ladies in burqas can develop their fashion sense.

Speaking of fashion sense, Golfrapp's uber-tasteful 80s/ABBA/[insert inappropriate point of comparison that means "upbeat melodic synth-pop thingy"] Head First is sleek and lovely. I do wish that "I Wanna Life," one of my favorites, was actually called "I Wanna Laugh," since it wouldn't be such an obvious dour counterpoint to the nimble hooks. It sounds like she wants to LAUGH, anyway -- and it would be nice if somewhere on the album she could actually do that, since "oh, I've got a rocket / oh, you're going on it" is a nice Looney Tunes false start to a sense of humor she doesn't really seem to have. But I'll take it.

Speaking of taking it, I've had a couple of pretty awesome job opportunities lately, and I have taken them. This partially explains my internet silence -- the other explanation is, as you will see below the masthead, I tend to post more in other places. Ever since my comments were eaten (they still exist and I've plugged a few back in but I'm still struggling to fix the problem) I've kind of lost some of my energy to post here. But there is a massive 2004 post in my drafts that I haven't looked at in a month that I'll try to finish at some point. It was a big year for me.

My Tasteful Year?

2010-02-16T05:49:00.000-08:00

I'm being bowled over by taste this year. Well, not bowled over -- my knees are buckling a bit. Anyway, can't really put my finger on why, but all I want to listen to so far this year is that Spoon album, Gil Scott-Heron, and the new Massive Attack record. Oh, and occasionally Peter effing Gabriel.

Not sure what's going on; may just be a slow start to the year (none of these albums have a crack at my Top Ten). On the other end of the TASTE spectrum, the only stuff that piques my interest on the new R&B comp from Tapemasters is no-chaser Super Cheeze, like "Blame It"- and Dream-derivative (mostly for the "ooh-ooh-ooh" hook -- "we in the club like ooh!" hmmm) "In the Club Like" by RL (who?) and Black Dada's race-Flo-Rida-to-the-bottom (<--pun! Hahaha BOTTOM!) "Round Round" ("she makes that booty go..."). Both unknowns to me, both will either be non-starters or #1 on Billboard for twelve weeks, as is now customary. (BTW, I'm guessing that's "Dada" like daddy not Dali? Also, I think I'm going to pronounce RL like "Karl.")

Quite enjoying the "Get Ya Money Up" remix with Nicki Minaj who has been on 100% fire for...what, about two years now? BIG BALL DADDY NO ELPHANTIASUS.

I like that Lloyd ("Get a Room") is slowly turning into a cartoon character. And I don't mean in the way that R. Kelly is a caricature of himself, I mean like a Tex Avery character. Rolling tongue on the floor, eyes popping out. Promising development; I need to give him a little reevaluation. He's the only good thing about "BedRock" -- though conceptually I like Gudda Gudda trying to do the worst rap verse ever. I have high (low) hopes for him!

I talked about my two taste(ful) extremes with Scott Woods -- teenpop is a good barometer for this sorta thing; I have separate compartments of my brain for straight bubblegum (A*Teens) and what is, essentially, fairly tasteful stuff (much of the confessional oeuvre). And now I think after crystallizing in one genre it's starting to spread out to new pastures. Teenpop itself [of the bubblegum variety, anyway] seems a bit dried up -- or it may be that its little niche heated up just enough to bleed into main-er streams, so that I'm picking the teenpop and confessional etc. bits out of other musics without finding an obvious source. Perhaps it has something to do with TRL going off the air, I dunno.

Nicheification goes both ways -- as much as it seems that "we" are retreating to our corners, what may once have been corners are also bleeding into the center, so it's simultaneously harder to find the center and track the niche. I love it -- you know what strands you're looking for and read them out of a giant knot. But I think that it's possible that song-listening and track-keeping has become somewhat exhausting, and I'm falling back on some pretty boring stuff as my standards for long-play listening.

Hey, speaking of song-listening, EVERYONE SHOULD BE PARTICIPATING IN THE POP WORLD CUP. Don't have much to say yet, been following along fairly passively thus far, but it's great fun as always.

Remembrance of Zings Past

2010-01-15T15:14:00.000-08:00

Looking over all of my unedited Singles Jukebox blurbs for last year and I realize that with a little effort I could be the third-rate Yogi Berra of music criticism! I'm a sucker for a good (read: awful) one-liner and/or super-convoluted metaphor, tho.

On Phoenix: "They have a bright future behind them."

On Kelly Clarkson: "On her last album she cast herself as Jesus Christ on the cross; this is a huge step down...er, figuratively speaking."

On Jeremih: "I think I need a new music box -- when I wind this one up it just plays a retarded The-Dream knock-off." [After a year of radio saturation to make me think I was wrong on this one, I realize now that I was right the first time. Whew!]

On Demi Lovato: "The song's underlying sweetness remains unmoved amid the chug, like a sapling surviving a brief hurricane in the middle of a shopping mall."

On Dirty Projectors "Stillness Is the Move": "A third of this song is a pleasant surprise."

On Eminem's "3AM": "This is really bad even by 'free movie made exclusively for the Comcast OnDemand FEAR channel' standards. For those of you not familiar with Comcast's OnDemand FEAR channel, those standards are low, even by low-standards standards."

On YYY's "Heads Will Roll": "Megalomaniacal crossover appeal."

Hey, here's an interesting one -- review of Daisy Dares You seems to be turning out pretty accurately so far! Ahem:

"Sorta dreamy, sorta dark three-chord power-pop is likeable enough but super gimmicky and ultimately forgettable, which means that Daisy, whoever she is, will probably start tearin' up the British charts and be hailed in the UK music press as the savior of a new generation of women rockers any time now. Y'all are weird."

And thus it was:

Daisy Dares You is the stage name used by Daisy Coburn, a 16 year old pop artist from Essex. She has not yet released an album, but she is already garnering much media attention, and she has been profiled by The Times, the BBC and The Guardian as a young artist to watch for 2010

On Rihanna's "Russian Roulette": "What hath Heath Ledger wrought?"

2010

2010-01-01T11:47:00.000-08:00

2010: The Year Everyone Ate More Fruit [FINAL FOR PAZZ AND JOP BALLOT]

1. Kelis - Flesh Tone
2. Ke$ha - Animal + Cannibal (Deluxe Edition)
3. Marina and the Diamonds - The Family Jewels
4. Jamey Johnson - The Guitar Song
5. Rick Ross - Teflon Don
6. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
7. Goldfrapp - Head First
8. Mose Allison - The Way of the World
9. Diddy Dirty Money - Last Train to Paris
10. Trey Songz - Passion, Pain, and Pleasure
11. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
12. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah, Pt. 2: Return of the Ankh
13. Far East Movement - Free Wired
14. I Blame Coco - The Constant
15. The-Dream - Love King
16. Waka Flocka Flame - Flockaveli
17. Warpaint - The Fool
18. Yelawolf- Trunk Muzik 0-60
19. Spoon - Transference
20. Maximum Balloon - s/t

SINGLES [FINAL P&J]

1. Alicia Keys - Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart
2. Far East Movement - Like a G6
3. Justin Bieber f. Ludacris - Baby
4. Sade - Soldier of Love
5. DJ Zinc f. Ms. Dynamite - Wile Out
6. Kylie Minogue - Get Outta My Way
7. Nas f. Damian Marley - As We Enter
8. Waka Flocka Flame - Hard in Da Paint
9. Wiley and Chew Fu - Take That
10. YG - Toot It and Boot It

Hardcore (Bananas) [7ish-8] [A-/B+] [Three monkey poos]
Laurie Anderson - Homeland
Aloe Blacc - Good Things
Big Boi - Sir Lucious Leftfoot, Son of Chico Dusty
Delorean - Subiza
Fefe Dobson - Joy
E-40 - Revenue Retrievin' - Day Shift
E.via - Via Polar EP
Girlicious - Rebuilt
Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner
Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
HEALTH - DISCO2
Hole - Nobody's Daughter
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings - I Learned the Hard Way
Lil' Wayne - I Am Not a Human Being
Lil' Wayne - Rebirth
M.I.A. - /\/\/\Y/\
Massive Attack - Heligoland
Kylie Minogue - Aphrodite
Liz Phair - Funstyle
Princesa - Mas Fuego
Sade - Soldier of Love
Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here
UNKLE - Where Did the Night Fall
Vampire Weekend - Contra
Wallpaper. - Doodoo Face

Mediumcore (Ananas) [6ish-7] [B] [Two monkey poos]
!!! - Strange Weather, Isn't It?
Black Mountain - Wilderness Heart
Celph Titled & Buckwild - Nineteen Ninety Now
Chemical Brothers - Further
Court Yard Hounds - s/t
Das Racist - Shut Up, Dude mixtape
Dead Weather - Sea of Cowards
The Drums - s/t
Electric Six - Zodiac
Peter Gabriel - Scratch My Back
Charlotte Gainsbourg - IRM
Holy Ghost! - Static on the Wire EP
Juan Maclean - DJ-Kicks
LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening
Ted Leo - The Brutalist Bricks
Lindstrom & Christabelle - Real Life Is No Cool
Omar Rodriguez Lopez - Tychozorente
Love Is All - Two Thousand & Ten Injuries
Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can
Javiera Mena - Mena
Nneka - Concrete Jungle
Pantha du Prince - Black Noise
Mike Patton - Mondo Cane
Quasi - American Gong
Robyn - Bodytalk
Jazmine Sullivan - Love Me Back
Taylor Swift - Speak Now
Young Money - We Are Young Money

Softcore (Mehs) [5ish-6] [B-/C+] [One monkey poo]
Apples in Stereo - Travellers in Space and Time
Justin Bieber - My World 2.0
Black Eyed Peas - The Beginning
B.o.B - Presents the Adventures of Bobby Ray
Cee-Lo Green - Ladykiller
Chromeo - Business Casual
Ciara - Basic Instinct
Fantasia - Back to Me
Ellie Goulding - Lights
Hot Chip - One Life Stand
jj - no3
The Knux - Fuck You EP
Lady Antebellum - Need You Now
Lali Puna - Our Inventions
Jerry Lee Lewis - Mean Old Man
Les Savy Fav - Root for Ruin
Jamie Lidell - Compass
Lloyd - The Young Goldie EP [2009]
Ida Maria - Katla
Maroon 5 - Hands All Over
Bruno Mars - Doo-Wops and Hooligans
Katie Melua - This House
Melvins - The Bride Screamed Murder
Method Man, Ghostface, Raekwon - Wu Massacre
Nicki Minaj - Pink Friday
Janelle Monae - The ArchAndroid
My Chemical Romance - Danger Days
Kate Nash - My Best Friend Is You
Ne-Yo - Libra Scale
Owen Pallett - Heartland
Pipettes - Earth vs. the Pipettes
Rihanna - Loud
Mark Ronson and Business Internat'l - Record Collection
Jay Sean - All or Nothing [2009]
Shabazz Palaces - EPs
Sia - We Are Born
Sleigh Bells - Treats
Sufjan Stevens - Age of Adz
Superchunk - Majesty Shredding
Titus Andronicus - The Monitor
KT Tunstall - Tiger Suit
Twista - The Perfect Storm
Walkmen - Lisbon

Nocore Whatsoever (Nahs) [C/D/F] [Zero monkey poos]
Broken Bells - s/t
Nadine Coyle - Insatiable
Simon Curtis - 8-Bit Heart
Daft Punk - Tron Legacy OST
Drake - Thank Me Later
Eminem - Recovery
Futureheads - The Chaos
Girl Talk - All Day
Katy Perry - Teenage Dream
The Knife - Tomorrow, In a Year
Liars - Sisterworld
Lil' Jon - Crunk Rock
Lillix - Tigerlily
Little Big Town - The Reason Why
Katharine McPhee - Unbroken
OK Go - Of the Blue Colour of the Sky
Omarion - Ollusion
The Pipettes - Earth vs. the Pipettes
The Roots - How I Got Over
Scissor Sisters - Night Work
Scouting for Girls - Everybody Wants to Be on TV
Weezer - Hurley
Yeasayer - Odd Blood

Technically not a fruit (Disqualified)
A-Trak - Dirty South Dance 2
Sunny Sweeney - Heartbreakers Hall of Fame [2008]
Vistoso Bosses - The World Would Suck Without Girls mixtape

Processing
Mariah Carey - Merry Christmas II You
Joanna Newsom - Have One on Me

Un-cored
Elizabeth Cook - Welder
Patty Griffin - Downtown Church
Marion Raven - Nevermore (LOL)
Blake Shelton - Hillbilly Bone & [Other EP, forget the title]
Sunny Sweeney - Fearless

COR, OVERLOOKED IN 2009
Dam-Funk - Toeachizown

More Updates

2009-12-27T19:01:00.000-08:00

I'm still working on the commenting situation -- Disqus is still in place for comments and I'm working with them to re-thread all of my old posts. I'll keep y'all posted, but again: all comments have been preserved, they just aren't in the proper threads.

Meanwhile, I've decided to get rid of the superfluous "extra blog" for yearly lists and will instead continue to update yearly lists on the main site -- each relevant post (from 2005-present) is on the side bar under "Ongoing Yearly Lists."

I'm working on a big (final?) teenpop project for what will basically be my only decade commentary -- more details as events warrant.

I do think I'll cull my Best Albums That No One Else Has Mentioned and post that some time in the new year. Also forthcoming is a hugely insanely massive post on 2004.

They're not dead, they're just hiding

2009-12-23T10:33:00.000-08:00

One of the lovely side effects of rushing into changing my commenting system to ~~THE DEVIL~~ Echo/JS-Kit is that it appears that I've lost all past comments.

I haven't actually lost the comments -- they're all archived at my new DISQUS commenting system, but for some reason when exporting the comments from JS-Kit/Haloscan, everything went into ONE folder (the "Bedbugs Comments" folder) so that comments don't appear in their respective threads.

I'm considering ways of remedying this (if anyone has dealt with this problem in the past let me know!) the least drastic being figuring out a way to get an XML file that Disqus recognizes as having individual thread information for each comment, the most drastic being uploading BY HAND every single effing comment that's ever been made on the blog. Which I'll do if I need to but it's an absolute last resort.

In the meantime, I have the old Blogger format -- with terrible JS-Kit commenting system -- intact (that will still provide access to every old Haloscan thread in its proper blog post). I can switch back and forth between the two at any time and I imagine fixing the problem will likely require me to do this. So please bear with me for all remaining technical difficulties.

For now, I'm keeping the Disqus system -- Disqus still isn't as easy as Haloscan was, but it's a huge improvement over the super-clunky JS-Kit, so for now you'll be able to comment through Disqus ~~but you will NOT see any old comments~~. I'll keep you posted.

EDIT: EUREKA! I was finally able to find the old Haloscan (not JS-Kit) XML files after all. Hurrah! However, not all comments have been re-aligned with their threads for some reason, so I'll likely be troubleshooting for a while longer.

EDIT 2: My EUREKA was premature (of course, of course), but I'm still working on it. Any help would be super-appreciated.

Technical Difficulties

2009-12-19T09:49:00.001-08:00

Haloscan has finally decided to ~~destroy the world~~ sell itself out to the Echo commenting platform. As far as I can tell, I have successfully migrated all comments over to the new platform, but the system ALSO required a Blogger layout update, hence the semi-wonky appearance. I'm working on tweaking it back to where it used to be.

In the meantime, I'm using this thread to make sure that the Recent Comments feature is still alive and well, as it's an invaluable resource. I'll also be repopulating the links in my sidebar, which needed a refresh anyway.

EDIT: I'm officially not the world's biggest Echo fan -- the commenting is a bit cumbersome and not HTML-friendly. But it was the only way to preserve Haloscan comments without disabling Haloscan from the site completely. The only real difference in the archived comments is that all links to websites etc. are gone.

To comment, for some reason you need to click through twice, once for the individual post and again to comment. BOO. Let me know if you have any problems without being an Echo member, but comments should still be open to everyone without moderation.

2003: Cooler Kids

2009-12-15T10:05:00.000-08:00

2003 was the year I met Emily and the year I started undergraduate college. It was also technically the year in which I wrote my first piece of music criticism, some kinda reaction to various 2003 year-end lists (hence the "technically" qualifier). What I remember most about it was about how good I felt, how confident I was. It was, for the most part, my first application of totally trivial knowledge to actual social interaction, and if I was faking it no one else seemed to notice. There were plenty of people who could indulge my tastes and share theirs with me (black metal, Mike Patton, Gogol Bordello, jam bands, the Boredoms, Dan the Automator...) and I just kind of soaked it in. At this point I'd developed my pattern of "checking my stories"; it was the difference between studying for a history test and reading the newspaper every day. I could keep abreast of what was going on in music contemporaneously while listening to it, argue with people about albums that had come out later than thirty years ago, make sweeping pronouncements on...y'know, the impact of Radiohead or something.

Freshman year of college seems now like it was a one-off opportunity to dabble in new identities, new ideas, new ill-conceived bits of mischief and mayhem. The world didn't open up so much as become a comfortable little low-stakes bubble, in which just about everything was permissible but nothing was that big of a deal, either -- for someone coming out of advanced high school classes that were routinely not only difficult but out of my academic comfort zones, classes themselves were a breeze going on a joke -- I was a film student, for one thing, and had bypassed most of my core requirements in advanced high school classes. So for a year, school was more of a summer camp -- and frankly intellectually/emotionally I hadn't progressed all that far from my junior year when I got the bug to delve into music more seriously.

When I think of 2003, I think of huddling -- cramped rooms with too many people in them in which nothing was really happening for hours at a time. So a lot of music happened this way. I remember a friend who knew "Work It" by Missy Elliott so well that he could record himself singing the backwards part, then reverse it on his computer so we'd hear his voice unnaturally saying "put my thang down flip it and reverse it." I remember thrashing around to a particular section of the Boredoms' "Cheeba." I remember conversations about Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life and seeing bad and/or competent student bands (usually in cramped rooms with too many people in them). I remember forming a band with my friend Sean, keyboard guitar and bongos, and covering Ween's "Push th' Little Daisies." I wrote two songs this year -- one of them was called "Maybe It's Love" and sounded not unlike the Dr. Mario music, which we broke into at the bridge, the other was a Hot Hot Heat-ish number called "70 Virgins" which was sort of a mock emo song. "It would take 70 virgins, 70 virgins, to fly me where you are / Girl it's true / It would take 70 virgins to fly me home to you." Haw, haw.

I met Emily that summer through a mutual friend in Maryland while Emily was visiting from New Jersey. My friend and I hatched up a scheme to visit her in New Jersey -- this was the Beck and Radiohead concert that was scheduled at Giants stadium and was temporarily canceled due to an endangered species of birds nesting on the field. This worked out perfectly -- though I would have liked to see the bands there, my interest was Emily, not Beck, so when the event was canceled we decided not to purchase the new tickets with a smaller line-up. That was the first to a bunch of trips to New Jersey that summer -- Emily and I hit it off and talked all the time, I sent her pompous declarations of love and the first mix CD I'd ever made, which looked like this:

1. Blur - Girls & Boys [2003, IIRC, is the year that I re-watched High Fidelity and realized that I knew just about every single music reference. By comparison, when I watched it the year it came out, I knew none. I considered this to be a major accomplishment at the time.]

2. Hot Hot Heat - No Not Now [Hot Hot Heat is a good lightning rod band separating the dorks-at-heart from the cool-at-heart in this period of time in the indie world, and I fall pretty squarely into the dork camp, though I never liked much of what they did after this album. Which is super dorky.]

3. Esquivel - Mucha Muchacha [I didn't want to use the obvious one, the Big Lebowski song, since it wouldn't really prove that I knew Esquivel, which for some reason felt like an achievement.]

4. TMBG - Birdhouse in Your Soul [They Might Be Giants is one of the few bands that I knew before I "knew" them, largely through Tiny Toons but also because this was one of those random albums that you might just own and be obsessed with even if you had nothing to do with music otherwise. If I'd actually owned the album I may have been a TMBG fanatic, joined a fan board c. 2000, and then none of you would be reading this right now!]

5. Talking Heads - Who Is It? [Ohhhhh baby it's you.]

6. Beta Band - Dry the Rain [Did I mention High Fidelity? Emily and I still listen to Three EPs all the time, actually, though never anything after that.]

7. Pere Ubu - ~~Day at the Beach~~ On the Surface [This was a gamble at the time, but Emily loved this song more than most of the ones on here, which meant a lot at the time as I recall.]

8. Modest Mouse - Heart Cooks Brain [Emily's favorite Modest Mouse song -- she knew them much better than I did at this point.]

9. Self - Dead Man [DAMN I loved this album. Still do -- the "toy album," Gizmodgery. This used to be a song that I held in my head as a mixtape secret weapon, to be deployed with extreme prejudice in the event of a mix lag. I planned out way more mixtapes than I made, of course -- with a few exceptions I've never made a mix for anyone but Emily]

10. Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea [This is the first sign of a legit taste change; this song grates on me in a way it didn't in 2003, but I heard it for the first time on that first drive up to New Jersey and it had sentimental value. I do think this is one of the better stand-alone tracks from this album.]

11. Incubus - Summer Love Song (Anti-Gravity) [This was a backfire -- I thought Emily might like the early Incubus stuff more than I did (relisten to it, though, it's pretty good!) but she actually liked it less. Via this mix, I've grown to love this song, but I think Emily always skips it.]

12. The Clash - Train in Vain [This was the last song I stuck on here -- I still hadn't quite figured out the balance between how a song sounds and what the song's "about" as far as a mix is concerned -- I don't care so much about content these days and mix almost purely sonically, but in 2003 I agonized about whether or not I would send the wrong messages with a song with lines like "you didn't stand by me / no not at all / you didn't stand by me / no way." Anyone else get paranoid about lyrical content on a mix being taken the wrong way?]

13. White Stripes - Little Room [Emily wanted "Fell in Love with a Girl" and got this, which was merely a transition track. I think I thought "Fell in Love with a Girl" was too "obvious" or something, but I quickly learned that what I thought was not the be-all and end-all of considerations when it came to thinking about someone who is not actually me.]

14. Dismemberment Plan - Girl O' Clock [Hyuck-hyuck, date rape song as "I miss you babe" track! This should give you a sense of some of the more unpleasant side effects of my sense of humor at this period. Great song though, and it's not as obviously "about date rape" as I seemed to think it was at the time. People can talk shit about Brent D.'s Kid A review all they want but if he hadn't written about Emergency and I the way he did I probably wouldn't have bought it. Funnily enough at college I had a friend from the D.C. area who actually went to, like, shows and loved D-Plan because he'd seen them live so many times, which made car trips from upstate NY to Maryland with him infinitely easier to deal with.]

15. Weezer - Across the Sea [Seriously, why didn't I agonize about the lyrics to THESE songs? If I'd written this song and then had to live with a bunch of fans (like me) who wanted more of this sorta honesty even when I was like 30 I'd start writing some really stupid shit to get them off my back, too.]

16. Elvis Costello - Alison [Didn't realize it at the time, but Emily not liking this song very much was a good sign, too. What a smug bastid. But hey, I thought it was the cleverest thang ever, so what does that say about me?]

17. Radiohead - Just [Emily's favorite Radiohead song. See, she's got some taste, that Emily. Radiohead is effing impossible to put on a mix, btw, they suck all the air out of the room almost without fail. And I love Radiohead. I saw them perform in Maryland on their Hail to the Thief tour and called Emily when they unexpectedly played this as an encore.]

18. Super Furry Animals - Demons [Another pain in the ass band to put on mixes, though I used "Juxtapozed with U" and "Golden Retriever" on subsequent mixes. This one just felt nice after the Radiohead track, sort of a cool-down before my traditional "penultimate/'final'/post-script" sequence that I usually use on these mixes.]

19. Beatles - Got to Get You Into My Life [Emily's favorite band by...what's more than a country mile? A continent mile? Beatles are in the very fabric of her childhood -- from lullabyes ("Golden Slumbers") to the father/daughter dance at our wedding ("In My Life") -- and frankly putting the Beatles on a mix is a daunting prospect when most of their songs have such a historical weight to them. I didn't know the early Beatles at this time, having bought into the "Rubber Soul --> Abbey Road = real Beatles" myth that gets bandied about so often.]

20. R.E.M. - Nightswimming [Ha, this probably wouldn't stand a [cold thing]'s chance in [hot place] of hitting a mix outside of 2003. It is pretty, though it's probably the track on here that I've had the closest thing to a 180 on since then.]

21. Shelley Duval - He Needs Me (Jon Brion remix) [Punch-Drunk Love was a pretty big deal for me and my friends in 2003, the movie that allowed Adam Sandler fans who'd gone more pretentious since childhood/teenagehood to "understand the subtle genius" of his manchild persona or something. But this song is really sweet and the remix is better than the mixes you'll find from the original soundtrack anyway.]

So hey, I was on top of the world, man, new girlfriend, new friends, new confidence, though in hindsight I think I was actually more juvenile in my first year of college than in my last two years of high school. (Points to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for nailing this transition PERFECTLY, albeit not 100% intentionally, in its fourth season.) Emily encouraged me to write a blog, which led to my first attempts at organizing my thoughts in words. The only thing that technically makes the time cut-off for this year was something I wrote on, like, Dec. 30th on the year in music. It included sentences like this:

"the teenyboppers’ post-Backstreet Boys output is kind of like that Britney/Madonna kiss—awesome in theory, vaguely disappointing when you really see it."

I still feel this way about Justin Timberlake, actually! I was crazy underrating the Britney album, which of course I'd never listened to.

"In the world of hip-hop, which seems to be the only hope for even remotely original music in a popular format in the immediate future, the industry is content to let a few ingenious talents (Missy Elliot, the Neptunes, Outkast) define any kind of sonic change in mainstream rap."

The first part of this sentence is probably true, though I didn't know enough about hip-hop to speak to the second part. 'Course, I was defining "sonic change" as "whatever Outkast and Missy Elliott happen to be doing," so perhaps this observation was more a self-fulfilling prophecy than accurate assessment.

"singles have unquestionably dominated the American musical consciousness with a force they haven’t had since...well, before any of us were alive, to be sure."

Who's "we," white man? Anyway, I was just parroting received wisdom here -- wasn't the "artist of the year" in some major magazine poll (Time?) "your hard drive"?

"Indie rock is wiggling and giggling but not really giving us anything to throw in Evanescence’s ugly face."

Dear past me who had only heard like ONE Evanescence song, Evanescence is awesome. Signed, smarter future me who has heard at least three Evanescence songs. (I should probably listen to that album at some point, what with the Hodges/Clarkson connection.)

Anyway, this could quickly devolve into an exercise in masochism, so I'll stop there. My early music writing is extremely defensive, and I'm overcompensating for not bothering to do the work of listening to stuff before making pronouncements about it. I was, to be blunt, a hack, but you have to start somewhere. Think of it like a sculpture -- you can't start perfecting the nose, gotta deal with those big chunks first. So hacking it, as a transitional tool, can often be a useful way to get where you're going.

I have more thoughts on this early stage of music writing in my interview with Scott Woods over at rockcritics.com if you have an hour or so to spare to hear me ramble on about things.

Just to take a step back here, I think that in 2009 I'm probably a little too willing to be harsh on me in 2003, as he's the guy I've most tried to get away from in recent history (just as in 2003 the 13-to-14-year-old me was probably the guy I was trying to get away from). Until recently, my life has often about being comfortable with who I am now by knocking down who I was yesterday, and I think that the period between 2006 and now is the first time that I haven't had an often overly negative second-guessing of what I was doing c. 2 years prior. This might be a sign of adulthood, the extension of time between which you're willing to undergo a personality overhaul -- all I know is that I feel almost exactly as comfortable reading things I wrote three years ago as I do reading things I wrote recently, which I can't say for my writing career before that point. I think this is a sign of growing up, or something.

Assorted thoughts in the lead up to the last critics poll in the last full decade before everything melts and we have to forage for stuff!

2009-12-10T17:56:00.001-08:00

Decided to count Taylor (#4) and Kutiman (#6) on my year-end list after all, unfortunately knocking out UGK and more-fortunately knocking out Ida, who feels like an "11" to me. (I miiiiight still knock off one of the two I added for UGK anyway.)

Finally listened to "Black Diamond" -- quite enjoyed it, but it will need more time to soak in and probably won't crack the top ten. Gucci's last "official" album was better than his most recent one, but I still think I'd prefer a fairly inchoate mixtape of random tracks to any album OR mixtape he's put out. Will give a listen to Robin Thicke's new one (is it technically a '10 release? Wow, that felt weird to write...) since I underrated Something Else, though I did call it my #1 album of the year to listen to on a yacht. I'M ON A YACHT MOTHERFUCKER DON'T YOU EVER FORGET.

R. Kelly...ehhhh, will listen, I s'pose. "Double Up" was a close as I got to considering him for a Top Ten, and that was a belated acknowledgment of basically his entire career -- "12 Play Fourth Quarter" was for the most part a rubberneck experience, though I think Anthony Easton was right about the magnificence of "Son of a Bitch."

Adam Lambert put up a good fight, but then I remembered that I usually don't like all the stuff I compared him to and there's also more mainstream pop cast-off in his sound than I was willing to hear on the first two or three listens. Will return to it some other time.

Alison Iraheta...I mean, wow. There's gotta be at least one gem I'm overlooking on her, but talk about a wall of sound! She's cranked up to twelve. I kind of hate it! (Odd feature: she mentions text messaging in the first line of two songs in a row. This pissed me off for some reason -- I thought about the lyrics to "Better Off" and realized something about Ashlee: almost all of her songs [on her first album, anyway, and many on her second 'n' third] could have been written in any decade this century. TIMELESSNESS.)

Favorite new listen of the moment is the Nirvana Live at Reading album. For one thing, the lyrics are clearer on this live album than they are on their records! This is not in and of itself a good thing, but there's something about this observation that points to what I like about it, somehow raw and slick simultaneously, a bit of a mess that still seems to have a pretty clear set structure, energy-wise. As well-paced as any of their studio albums and some lovely sarcastic guitar lines thrown in to fuck up the intros to famous songs (before playing the rest flawlessly).

Fuuuuuck, I'm still underrating Otis Taylor's Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs, tasteful blues with real grit, but it just isn't "me," y'know?

Listened to more than many 2009 albums -- the Sesame Street disco albums! They're quite good, and provide evidence to Ned Raggett's assertion that Disco Tex sounds like the Muppets band doing disco. Latest obsession: finding a Muppets performance covering or featuring Minnie Riperton.

Why do people like the Knife?

Why do I like VV Brown so much?

2002: My Convent Year

2009-12-02T06:30:00.000-08:00

Being a newly-obsessed music fan at 16 with no income but a bit of a comfort zone from a blandish middle-class existence fostered an odd asceticism in me. I started forgoing lunch, or secretly packing away a sandwich while accepting two dollars lunch money, to reach that magical $7.99 that would buy me most any on-sale CD over at the Borders, which was the closest thing I had to a music store. I seem to recall buying most of the Talking Heads albums this way.

My downloading slowed to a relative crawl as I found it too tedious, and somehow "cheating," to keep filling up CD spindles and a few outrageously overpriced binders full of uniform white discs. Instead I became a makeshift collector, averaging about two CDs a week -- I would exchange clothes I received for Christmas and use the money to buy an album, would surreptitiously charge the odd CD to my dad's Amazon account every so often (sorry, Dad!), started asking for gift cards or box sets in lieu of anything else for holidays and birthdays.

And I sat in my basement and listened to music. I had a girlfriend at the time with whom I spent most of my time, but late evenings and nights I would just sit and listen, connecting with music while mindlessly going through the motions in various videogames. (I seem to remember "clicking" with Loveless while playing the Nintendo 64 Zelda game.) I found it impossible to drive, even for five minutes, without music playing.

But mostly I read about music while I was listening to it. Read everything I could find, which wasn't much -- scoured the Xgau archives, familiarized myself with the Pitchfork archives and made lists of their lists, which led to odd purchases like Eccsame the Photon Band by Lilys, which I don't remember listening to except that it sounded nothing like the blurb made it out to sound like, or a fucking Walt Mink record. The adolescent prose experiments reminded me of the stuff I'd begun writing, long pretentious novels about people I didn't know very well and "free verse" poetry that I was so embarrassed by I threw it away two years later (wish I hadn't done that now, but it was that embarrassing). At 17, everything that "Pitchfork writing," in the most derogatory use of the word, stood for reminded me an awful lot of myself. But more importantly it had those LISTS, organizing decades for me, providing me a simpler teleological explanation of the recent past than more intuitive canon-building provided.

I read Lester Bangs and was floored by the sheer force of his words -- I glommed on to every offhand reference and tried to figure out who he was talking about, though I wasn't quite ready to figure out what he was talking about (truthfully I never really returned to his writing as writing, merely as a sort of record guide). Again his narrative exercises suggested some connection I could relate to; I think I could tell even at the time that most of them weren't quite working (I couldn't imagine how me might develop them into a novel) but took heart in that.

Thing is, I don't remember any of this stuff in any sort of chronology, because it was an isolated experience. Memories of the music rush together -- I feel sorry for my older brother as I remember in a rush the number of smug assertions of trufax I subjected him to late at night as he returned from work, working out whatever critical pose I was developing but having no one else to talk to about it. "See, Tribe Called Quest really meant something, y'know..." "Turns out Husker Du did everything in one take..." blah blah blah. I had no one else to turn to with it -- most of my friends didn't know or care much.

I had a few friends who were into music; we alternated between Pixies and Weezer in the car. We collaborated on a mock "Behind the Music" documentary -- still pretty funny! -- about a karaoke singer gone singer-songwriter and then gangsta rapper (his sidekick is Skittles). They invited me to play in their band, a decent classic rock band, and I faked my way through a few basic piano parts but always thought that piano made everything sound too cheesy, though I liked playing the organ parts. At some point I saved up for a cheap bass guitar and tried to play along to the Misfits, as I'd read somewhere that it was a good way to learn the bass. But that never really panned out.

So the year goes by, a year probably full of more new music (since I hadn't heard much music at all in the scheme of things) than any other year of my life -- but the trade-off, I suppose, is that the year wasn't very memorable. My senior year of high school and most of what I remember from it are the odd flashes of recognition from first listens to canon albums -- oh hey, yeah, Kind of Blue, Pet Sounds, Radiohead, Velvet Underground, London Calling, the bread and butter of prior knowledge in the music writing that I was reading. I really can't remember how the hell I heard and absorbed so much of it, how many hours I must have spent by myself studying it, but I did, because by 2003 I'd already written my first piece of music criticism.

Subjects for Future Posts

2009-12-01T01:09:00.001-08:00

* Semiotics of the "full house" -- affluence in classical and neoclassical sitcoms fudged by number of people living under one roof, study particular resurgence in the 1990s ("Full House," "Step by Step," "Family Matters," "Fresh Prince of Bel Air," etc.) and relative decline (among similar demographics) in the 2000's at Disney. Network TV enters a "post-full" phase ("Malcolm in the Middle," "Arrested Development") while on, e.g., Disney Channel signifiers of middle-classness get bumped up to flat-out RICHIE RICHNESS ("High School Musical," "Hannah Montana") while the spaces themselves get more spare -- Zac Efron's high school coach dad has a mansion, the Wildcats' hallways are eerily spare, as though borrowed from a Kubrick set.

* Second-level "media illiteracy" is still media illiteracy -- treating failures in basic reading comprehension that may be the result of immediate "higher-level" analysis (e.g. you can point to the heteronormative hegemonic etc. but can't actually tell me what happened) on the same level as the opposite problem, as usually evidenced in e.g. overly literal plot interpretation by children that can't accommodate abstract thinking. How do you re-teach the fundamentals to someone who is savvy but would fail a plot summary assignment?

* More about Keke Palmer, cuz she's great.

* A sustained effort to pull together my thoughts on Rihanna's "Te Amo," which will probably make my Top 50 Songs That Were Not Singles But Changed My Life Anyway of the 00's.

* Create aforementioned list.

Rihanna: A Word

2009-11-25T13:01:00.000-08:00

I'm utterly overwhelmed with the glut of good Rihanna commentary -- not least from Rihanna herself! -- so instead I will post a poem of some of the most frequently uttered words and phrases on the new Rihanna album. Ahem.

Oh...come on in.
Your turn, play. Wait...
Ah, so hard, so hard. Won't let up.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Not stupid. Stupid.
I told ya. (Uh oh.) Oh, baby. I'm a...
Gun. Heart. You can see.
Fire. Lovers. Brakes. Fire. Can't wait.
Want want want. Want want want. Tonight. Take it. Love me.
Shoulda been, coulda been. All I've got. Nothing.
Sweet, lick, bang. I'm with you. Down for life.
Te amo. Hands, eyes, waist. Dance. She. No. I love you.
Cold. Crime. Outlines. Love. Wake me up when it's over.
The last song, the last song you'll ever hear. Perfect. Oh...

WTFatigue

2009-11-03T07:07:00.000-08:00

Thankfully, Shakira has put out the #2 album of the year easy, thus saving me the effort of trying to wade through a wash o' winks coming from the general direction of The-Dream (my #1).

To recap its awesomeness:

♥ The batty lyrics to "She Wolf" are actually restrained compared to the Spanish-language version, which looks like this according to Alex O. at the Jukebox:

Who has never desired a werewolf goddess in the ardour of a romantic night? My howls are the call – I want a domesticated wolf. Finally, I have found a perfect solution to erase the guilt. I do not think I will stay by your side, watching TV and listening to excuses. Life has given me a voracious hunger, and you only give me candy. I am going out, with my legs and my youth, even if jealousy kills you.

There’s a she-wolf in the closet, and she wants to get out. Let her devour the neighbourhood before you go to sleep.

I have magnetic stillettos to drive the herd crazy. The moon, full like a fruit, neither gives advice nor listens to it. I bring with me a special radar to locate bachelors, and in case I get in a jam, I have the firemen’s phone number. Neither prettyboys, nor Divos, nor rich kids. I know what I want – to have fun and behave badly in the arms of a gentleman.

When it is almost 1 AM, the she-wolf, in heat, greets the moon, unsure whether to go down the street, or enter a bar to try her luck. She’s already sat down at a table and is has sight of her prey. Poor guy, caught off guard and not expecting something like this.

♥ Obsession with legs continues on "Long Time," in which Shakira grows longer legs to fasten to your body and travel with you everywhere. The accompaniment is fairytale reggaeton w/ clarinet + two-tone whistle solo.

♥ The strings on this album are just unstoppable. Run the gamut from slick indie disco in the Matthew Herbert vein (maybe? Don't know Herbert very well actually) to total Eurodisco chintz. Didn't take Wyclef for, um, relevant at all, but his collab is a giddy little thing of joy, Shakira approximating a trumpet stuck in her nose, subtle string-stabs and the occasional chromatic flourish giving the whole thing a gauziness to temper the goof. Listen here.

♥ Quite enjoy her "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone" rewrite, which includes a notably Ashlee-esque line of ambiguous self-questioning rubbing up against super-D-U-M "Matt Damon's not meant for me" as repeated hook: "Where are all the men in this town? What's a girl supposed to do? Did they all run off when they knew that I was coming 'round?" And then she's so fresh so clean, got the looks and the skin and the thing.

♥ Not sure what Shakira's history with confessionality is (Frank Kogan from 2001: "As is true with most lyricists, she's better frustrated than fulfilled. In the song where she's perpetually chasing the soles of the guy's shoes (and thus eating dirt, she implies), she says, 'God resigned, from hearing my old story.' This is the one line on the album that hits me emotionally"). I know just about jack squat about the rest of Shakira's oeuvre, but I imagine this particular album is similar, fascinatin' frustrations surfacing from general (often endearing and/or oddly resonant) WTFness and cliche. Difference seems to be that this album is a low-flier, no big singles and a noticeable steady groove established right at track two, which begins like you've been thrown into track 6 of the album or something. ("Spy" could have been a good track 2, come to think of it, but I like the sequencing as is.)

♥ Did I mention the strings?

♥ Hey remember when Patrick Wolf's lycanthropy was a thing? THIS IS A HUNDRED TIMES BETTER. (Did he ever say the word "lycanthropy"? Because she does and it's totally not a big deal at all.)

♥ Yeah, that's right, "Why Wait" modified "Gimme More" just enough to avoid a lawsuit. And you know what? That's "Why Wait"'s prerogative and if you try to stop it it will devour everyone in your neighborhood. No idea what the hell Pharrell/Neptunes' game-plan for this album was, and don't care. The production cruises along unassumingly, allowing its Toto homage (sounds like it anyway, on "Good Stuff") and accordions and clarinets and whatever else it wants to wander in to the party without needless red carpet treatment. Oh, hey, what's up transparently-jacked "ey, ey, ey" hook, have a seat.

♥ Maybe every Shakira album IS like this -- I'll find out soon enough as I listen to all of them, I'm guessing. But this album is perfect for a year in which most of my pleasures have been fairly modest: on-par stuff from a consistently great-not-bestest artist would kind of be what I'm expecting (not "looking for," but I have no idea what the hell I'm looking for anymore -- I mean, the Saturdays gave me a real kick in the gut for a half day back there, and I'm feeling Nellie McKay's Doris Day album and rocking out to the least assuming ever(?) Jack White side project and Gorilla Zoe has a spot in my heart after several rap albums that are "better" but not as good, y'know, have passed me by without comment, what's up with all that?).

♥ Oh shit, so if you've been looking for a half-way decent sell-out Interpol song in the past, what, five years?...you'd probably have to buy the NEW SHAKIRA ALBUM. For "Mon Amour." Which kills. "Passengers with destinations to hell, please proceed to your gate. We are ready to board now." And yeah, I think that's Regine Chassagne from the Arcade Fire doing the "oooh-oooh's," pasting "In the Backseat" to close out the album in the overwrought indie stylee. Before the Spanish-version stuff, that is, which is also essential.

♥ So should I learn Spanish and listen to all her Spanish songs and get whole new levels of awesome out of this stuff or what? I mean, I should probably be learning Spanish anyway. Just out of courtesy to the United States.

♥ Oh man, this just blows every other WTFer out of the water this year, because she's not trying too hard for it. I don't even feel totally comfortable quoting her WTF lines, because they are like RAW WTF. "I'm feeling abused like a coffee machine in an office." If The-Dream got within ten feet of that line he'd wink it into oblivion, and Mariah Carey would giggle in the background. And I love The-Dream! But hands off my Shakira simple plezures, please.

MASH IT LIKE A...er, mashed potato? Ahem.

2009-10-27T23:46:00.001-07:00

Yo, suicide might be painless but a bad mash-up HURTS LIKE HELL. So I've made two of them.

Miley Cyrus vs. Reel Big Fish - 7 Horny Things

Download

Britney Spears vs. M.3. Hammer - 3 Can Touch This

Download

Since mash-ups can serve as a form of music criticism in and of themselves, I won't comment further. Also I'm really tired and just spent like two hours photoshopping an effing trumpet onto Miley Cyrus's hand. (See, it's the sheet music!)

2001: A Taste Odyssey

2009-09-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

I recognize now how bizarre the three years following my last Naive Listener (TM) period (this isn't an accurate term, but comparatively it feels right-ish) were -- in retrospect it felt like cramming for a test I ultimately bullshitted (well enough) through, learning the ropes as quickly and thoroughly as possible in various strands of music and rockwrite history and faking my way to the "top" -- which is to say that some guy you've probably heard of said that I, some guy you probably haven't heard of, wrote the "most influential review of the decade," proceeding to explain exactly why this was such a dubious distinction. I'll get to that in 2004, though.

When I interviewed Brie Larson in 2007, she expressed misgivings about her own trajectory to fame, calling it a "slip and slide" ("except there's no water on it so you get rug burn"). I sympathize with her; I can remember the exact moment I decided to get "into" music, and can chart the early history of this period of my life fairly well (much as she pinpointed the exact moment she had her "break," essentially at random), but it amazes me now to think that in a little under three years I'd somehow parlayed this genuine impulse into a reasonably well-read regular publishing gig. I wasn't ready for it (rug burn), though now I'm mostly glad I had the opportunity at all -- it didn't seem quite as obvious to me then just how drastically public opportunities to write with any authority or audience would shrivel, even between then (c. 2004) and now. I can't imagine a venue or audience for my writing now when I feel most comfortable actually doing it, and my interests in writing have largely mutated from the original path I saw -- not just for myself, but for anyone who loved listening to and writing about music -- into an almost exclusively personal drive, and an increasingly insular series of conversations. I have real trouble imagining anything bigger.

But let's go back to 2001: I'm at a summer camp with other kids, they're into movies I like, but occasionally they wander off topic and get into conversations about bands -- the Beatles, Weezer, U2. I remember feeling particularly excluded from a conversation about U2's Joshua Tree and resolving to listen to the thing. Listen to ALL the things. Listen to everything. Just listen, figure things out, if only to be able to participate in conversation. As was then my habit, I began hoarding, listing, scouring the earth for details upon details, biographies, discographies, many of these coming from All Music Guide, which at the time was pretty much unparalleled for substantial history/criticism of what felt like any album you could imagine. I burned CD after CD after CD, all the same white discs from an enormous spindle, marked in red permanent marker -- compilations at first, "Doors #1," "Doors #2," then albums (usually two per disc). I ripped them from my friends at camp, but also spent an absurd amount of time navigating the blue vistas of Audiogalaxy, then a more reliable spot than Napster, for each individual track from a given album. I would get obsessed at times finding an inconsequential track that for whatever reason was the only one missing from a given album. I spent hours and hours, mostly at night (my insomnia toward the middle to end of the camp was bad, and I was lonely and homesick), reading and listening and downloading, repeat, repeat, repeat.

I had a friend, Gordon, who was at that time probably the ideal Pitchfork writer -- at about 16 he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the same corner of music, beginning at Mission of Burma and the "Our Band Could Be Your Life" bands and ending at the new Weezer album, which was (apparently) devastating but still essential. I had a teacher at the summer camp, a director, an avid Zappa fan whose life dream was to stage a version of Joe's Garage; he emailed me a list of about 500 artists he "liked," no further commentary, and I added names to my 10-pt font alphabetically ordered list, "Albums to Get," arbitrarily. Duke Ellington, Dinosaur Jr., Low, Tribe Called Quest, Lilys, Ani DiFranco, The Clash, Portishead...no real rhyme or reason to any of it, just an ever-expanding list. I lost it long ago, but it'd be interesting to see who I never got around to actually hearing -- who's on there I don't even recognize now. I'm sure there are dozens.

I would lie on my back and "get moved" -- I honestly hadn't listened closely to pop music like this, in what I would call dorm fashion, tired, inert, just listening carefully for sounds and words, letting the music act not as soundtrack but as appreciation object. I don't listen quite like that anymore, either -- too many forced "revelations," too much effort transforming mere boredom into something more thoughtful. It was like a performance for myself: I am going to listen to this to really HEAR something. I think it was helpful -- I was quick to notice structure and attitude and feeling I may not have heard otherwise -- but there was something mildly phony about it, as though I was as busy convincing myself of the music's importance as I was understanding why I genuinely liked it. And I did genuinely like it -- loved the post-Rubber Soul Beatles records particularly, all of which I bought that summer, loved just about everything I listened to, really -- but I was also fitting it into an ambiguous narrative I saw for the music, something that set me apart from others in understanding not just why the music was good, but why the music mattered.

But figuring out why music matters isn't as simple as checking things off of a list, regardless of how extensive that list is, and what I hadn't done yet is give any reasons for WHY I liked this stuff, or why I was even interested in "being into" music, aside from the fact that (1) I just was, and (2) it gave me a conversational tool with which I could get closer to my peers. And this is a crucial reason to listen to music, but at the same time there's something that in retrospect feels wrong -- the same anxiety that Brie was addressing, of taking shortcuts and failing to pay your dues. With some perspective I recognize that shortcuts are part of life, and (e.g.) Brie's shortcuts were the only thing that allowed her to have a career at all; you can't just work your way up from a coffeehouse when you're 14 years old. Similarly, just because my appreciation was forced doesn't mean it wasn't genuine, or that I wasn't learning a lot. But still, at a personal level, something in it feels like cheating.

With hindsight, there was no other way for this to happen -- I grew up largely without a network of people who were "into music" in the way that the writers I grew to admire in this period were, and had no access to such a network even if I was looking for it. This is one thing the internet has changed, I suppose, but there's also the fact that learning about a ton of music history is hard, and such a concerted effort was something I wouldn't have been able to undertake until about the age I did anyway. I was a bright kid, but I excelled in sanctioned activities -- classical piano and English classes, say -- and was generally a teacher's pet. Rock music, far from offering rebellion, merely offered me a sanctioned way to excel in slightly edgier activities. Getting into music the way I did was safe; it was a school subject I loved. But I wasn't really challenging myself, was learning trivia but wasn't thinking critically. And part of me wonders if this was a path I could have stayed on, always meeting the lower expectations of cleverness well enough to avoid the challenge of pushing myself out of that comfortable territory, into the space where pop music can completely uproot or make irrelevant those reliable paths, taking you into the social wilderness that, I learned much later, is what truly makes it worth doing in the first place.

This is why, I think, I've distanced myself from this incarnation of my musical taste -- in many ways the most formative years of my life as a critical listener -- and rediscovered the messier paths to value and epiphany I found before I was "into" music. Because at that time, before I found the convenient and enormous but ultimately circumscribed maps (All Music Guide was a big map, the biggest map, but in its own uniquely pointillistic way it was still a very specific map charting a very specific and very narrow social territory), I was really INTO music, in the thick of it, letting it weave itself into my life and change me in ways that were surprising. When I used a map whose comfortably interconnected points led me to that odd sense of contrived but powerful clarity in seeing how various sites form a cogent path, as in a tourist's guide, I failed to put any of my discoveries at risk. It was the homework guide in the back of the book, and I took the answers' correctness for granted.

None of this is to say that I didn't genuinely like the stuff I liked. Far from it -- I count many of my earliest discoveries among my most cherished and (now) deeply nostalgic pieces of music, ones I return to and can feel the excitement of hearing it for the first time even as I shudder at how pretentious or clumsy it may be; comfort food is comfort food. But as an intellectual process of discovery the endeavors, however thorough they may have been, were fundamentally shallow. Without this process I don't think I could have begun to recognize what it meant to get "deep," what it meant to really get back into music, as one gets back into a forest after observing the landscape from a higher vantage, or perhaps with a tour guide. But there were growing pains, difficult ones, when I had to come to grips with just how poorly sketched out the seemingly vast world I was transcribing into my brain really was, and how ultimately unhappy and anxious I was merely expanding the range of my knowledge without really learning anything.

The 00's Novelty Problem

2009-08-30T18:23:00.000-07:00

No pants, no inclusion.

There weren't a whole lot of tectonic shifts in the aesthetic movement of pop in the 00's (there were plenty of shifts, they just didn't feel tectonic from where I was standing), but there were structural shifts in how it was consumed, processed, paid for. And there was also a shift in how novelty got to flaunt its stuff on the charts, I think, perhaps collateral damage of the Ceiling Falling in the latter half of the decade. With fewer enormous record-smashing (in any meaningful way) successes, it became harder to tell exactly how to distinguish between what might feel like novelties and what undeniably WERE novelties.

It's interesting to compare from one side of the decade to the other. In 2000, Dynamite Hack were acoustic schlubbers doing (ambiguously condescending) gangsta rap, "Boyz in the Hood," and it was (to my 14-year-old-ish brain) kind of a big deal. It came naturally from the kinds of parody songs they did a lot on the radio at that time, like Bill Clinton singing something about blowjobs over "Sex and Candy." By the end of the decade, there seem to be acts whose raison d'etre seem to be doing ambiguously condescending gangsta shtick, from cover versions to Brokencyde. And I would really hesitate to call any of it novelty, precisely because there's so much fucking context for it.

In 2000 we had "Because I Got High," an utterly retarded minimalist near-rap singalong, and by 2004 we had, e.g., "Laffy Taffy" on top of the charts, and now we have "Turn My Swag On," an even less self-aware totally retarded near-rap singalong (with better production and more style) and there's no question that the latter isn't novelty. The former gets a tick in my book, only because it still sounds to me like the weirdest number 1 of the decade.

In 2000 we had a kiddie niche, and its nichedom in part reflected how novelty it may have been -- Britney Spears could email her heart without it being novelty, but Aaron Carter couldn't get away with beating Shaq without the label. And there's a seemingly crystal-clear difference between Britney's emails and Brittney's (Cleary, later "Nikki" of "Summertime Guys" semi-fame) I.M.'s in "I.M. Me" from 2001.

But how about the modified Kelly C. Dr. Luke-isms of Avril's "Girlfriend" or Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" or "Hot and Cold"? Or P!nk's "So What"? All practically waterboarding you with F-U-N, a not-uncommon feature of plenty of novelty songs, and none of them feel "novelty," or novel. Lady Gaga's disco sticks have to compete with Pussycat Dolls and R. Kellyisms and lord knows what else; I'd say tentatively that the 2000 "Thong Song" actually suffers a similar dilemma, but its novelty inclusion feels a lot safer than "LoveGame" or "Birthday Sex" or "Ignition."

A definition of novelty might be appropriate here. Roughly I'd say that novelty songs create their own context, either by aesthetically standing resolutely outside of their time (think Napoleon XIV or "Transfusion" or "Fish Heads") or by shamelessly reveling in its time's shallowest fads and tropes (direct parodies fall in this category, as do Disco Ducks).

And neither definition seems right. Are the Three Little Fishies in the Itty Bitty Poo "shamefully reveling in their time" or "standing resolutely outside of it?" Er, both. Neither. Whatever, it's funny, right? But that doesn't necessarily make it novelty, either.

So novelty, instead, is much like other genre work, ruling through exceptions and mutations and accidents what fits into the category in an ad hoc way; conventions change over time (when Christina Aguilera does 40's novelty, it becomes dead-in-the-water pastiche; when indie does knowing disco somehow blunts any sense of surprise). For the most part you can't play by the same rules twice, but even that's not strictly true. See: Brown, Julie or Six, Electric.

There's a specific strand of Novelty Music, that, like other capitalized versions of common phenomena, has its preservation benefits and rut-heavy pitfalls. The Dr. Demento strand of an archeology and historicization of novelty music as a Proper Thing offers both a safe haven for undeniable novelties (Weird Als and Fish Heads and Head Cheeses and Little Bitty Poos) but also to some extent puts a damper on the novel effect of it. What happens to "outsider" music when we listen to it as "insiders"? Or pretend that Star Trek jokes have a shelf life? It's a mixed bag, on the whole a good thing (in part because Demento always had a soft spot for self-made, no-budget songs, the equivalent of a MySpace trawler of the 80's in many ways) but not really a tenable definition for 00's novelty. The stuff that fits most cleanly into Demento's novelty world -- Weird Al, Jesus H. Christ -- also feel like safe choices.

In part this is because much of the best novelty of the decade was absolutely fucking filthy. When hoar-pop and strip club rap is a normative style, you have to do something really nasty, really weird, or really disturbing to stand out. "Wait (The Whisper Song)" makes it, even though it couldn't help but usher in a legit snap subgenre, Eamon's "Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back)" makes it because no one took up his call to curse out an ex via smoove R&B stylings (on the other hand, Jeremih is a testament to how nasty you could come ON to a girl in smoove R&B stylings without it seeming particularly abnormal). Tila Tequila's presence, paired with the over-the-top mock outrage of "I Love U," qualifies her for inclusion, though neither the song nor the personality alone would necessarily qualify her. Heidi Montag is just as 15-minutes (and just as despised) but her music simply isn't "novelty" by any stretch of the imagination.

I've decided to put together a 50-to-100-track compilation of novelty songs, and I find it harder to sort as I get further along in the decade. "Lip Gloss" yes, "Vans" no? Or vice versa? Or both? Do I pick a hyphy track? (Jonathan Bradley says no, and especially not "Ghost Ride It" -- I say yes, and especially "Ghost Ride It": Ghostbusters sample, self-reference of fad, description of illicit activity as instruction manual. And yet...he's right, which hyphy songs DON'T include some approximate version of that stuff?)

Which tracks do I pick by which comedy artists, whose work has never really had a rise-to-the-top consensus favorite (Flight of the Conchords, say, or Lonely Island)? I'm just choosing the ones I think are best, whereas I wouldn't necessarily choose a Julie Brown track over "Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" even if I liked it more.

Which one-hit-wonders do I pick? Which dance crazes? "Soulja Boy (Crank Dat)" somehow doesn't feel right, yet I'm picking "Da Stanky Legg"? Do I need a jerkin' track? A snap track (I have one anyway)? How do I deal with Internet memes? Why doesn't it feel right to include "Chocolate Rain" but it feels imperative to include the "Numa Numa" song? Am I wrong, or is it getting a lot harder to figure out what novelty actually means? Is the world getting smaller or am I just casting a wider net?

List your theories, contradictions, and favorites below...

Oh, Songs: The-Dream - "I Luv Your Girl"

2009-08-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

The following is part of an imminently abandoned series in which I devote thousands of words to songs in my decade list.

Wife-beater with the denim.

I came to R&B as an active follower late, but, as Tom pointed out today, you didn't really have to be a "follower" to keep abreast of R&B's movers and shakers until relatively recently. All of the touchstones that went underappreciated by me in the first half of the decade were certainly appreciated, as in I had at least heard them, often endlessly, in the course of my day to day life. In fact, the only time I lost the basic thread of R&B was in the mid-00's when R&B was transitioning and combining more and more with hip-hop and I was in more of a cave, musically. (We're all in caves now, but the communication between caves seems to have gotten better, so it's OK!)

So when I think of the early 00's R&B hallmarks and landmarks and lovemarks, they're wrapped up in my social use of them at the time -- in cars, in malls, in restaurants, in friends' basements, on MTV, etc. etc. etc. There was a culture for it, and as much as I'd like to read esoterically or "get inside" into the trees, I still see the forest. Aaliyah, J-Lo, Blu Cantrell, "Peaches and Cream," Dream (not The-)...all names that have come up recently through Poptimists polling, and all that I can pin to a time and a place.

Not so with The-Dream, a presence who entered the game late and entered my critical lens even later -- and was better for it, removed (just slightly) from release date zeitgeist, regardless of how meaningful that even is these days, and just laid bare for appreciation, slightly out of time, and standing without proper context not because I don't know it but because I do know it; it's either a rarefied, music-geek-intensive context (specific genre etc. conversations, tracking his production history and that of his collaborators) or (more broadly) it's not much of a context. The-Dream's album didn't break down doors, and this single, when it was a single, was both cluttered up (with a totally unnecessary and detrimental Young Jeezy guest verse before the melody even starts) and completely neutered ("fuuuuuuck that niggaaaaaa," the strained falsetto melody more than the words, is a non-negotiable part of the song, even though that means it's kind of, er, difficult for me to sing it to myself).

So I've been sitting here, marinating in this perfect little song (and it is a little song -- a wispy, insubstantial low-flier) for about a year, beginning just after its commercial sell-by date. And the more I listen to it, the more I'm convinced that something important happens in it, but I can't really tie this into a This Is Important meta-post any more than I could say that any music is capable of being That Important these days.

And that's fitting for the song. Thoughts in no particular order:

Well, it's a story. And a specific one, a narrative -- not totally unlike the "Single Ladies" lyrics for the way it spotlights a trio in a club. This is a relatively recent phenom, I think, portraying what I'd call the "private club," as though there's an empty space, all the details intact, but with NO PEOPLE IN IT. Except for the protagonists. See it in your head: it's dark, there's a pool of spotlight, two characters dancing, one to the side, observing moodily. It's like experimental theater; they're dancing to a little microgroove that barely qualifies as having a beat -- the most memorable part of the beat itself is a delicate castanet "tick-tick" at the last possible moment in the loop.

The motion, and the beat, is all in the keyboards, two chords, spelled out backwards for you -- F minor, then a diminished E, the top half of the C7. Essentially, you could be getting a minor-key finale flourish -- i-V-i-V-i-V-i; played that way it might sound symphonic, majestic. Except Dream keeps it unresolved with the bass notes, D-flat, then C, then back to D-flat, then C. So what he's really playing is a Dbmaj7 to C7 -- VI-V-VI-V-VI. It's an anxious little chord pattern, fluttering around the fifth -- we want so badly to hit the root hard -- that F-minor chord -- but we never get there, it's just back and forth, back and forth; and he's even spelling out the chord that, with just a slightly different bass note, would give us all the resolution we want. "This is the chord you're waiting for."

The effect (to get away from some of the chord chart speak) is of him...well, kind of playing in your hair. Twisting his finger around it; you know where it's going but you'll never get there. And it's a song about anticipation and anxiety -- the moment before the decision's been made -- everyone knows what's happening but no one has really done anything about it yet. It's inevitable, so let's just dance around it for a while.

So what's happening? Easy -- The-Dream comes into the club and sees a woman there; she's wearing a wife-beater and jeans. Conceivably, everyone in this scenario might be wearing the same outfit. We start off in media res, Dream is on her, she's on "him," the boyfriend. So we open on the club, and there's a groove and a girl sandwich, everyone wearing wife-beaters and jeans -- or, perhaps, the boys are more stylish, and she's the one whose outfit codes the most masculine? Electrik Red: "Them jeans is a little too tight...that's cool, I get it, it's in fashion..." -- and the girl leaves. This means that Dream and boyfriend are alone for a sec, then she comes right back. Now it's just Dream and Girl grinding together, his thang's on her hip, and the boyfriend just watches, understanding well enough what's going on.

Thing is, this entire song is addressed to the boyfriend. There's some third-person-ish description to set the stage ("her man start muggin' he can see it in my eye") but when it counts, The-Dream looks over, and, probably disingenuously, apologizes with his eyes. Maybe a sarcastic shrug. But y'know, he's genuinely conflicted. Jeremih doesn't have an excuse for his ah-ah-ah-ing -- it's all ah-ah-ah-ah-affect -- but The-Dream does. He sees where it's going, it's getting hot, and he feels kinda bad about it but...ahh! Ah-ah-ahh! As good a verbal expression of self-induced blue-balling as I've heard in a song, really. Ah! Oh-ah! AH! What am I doing? AH! WANT! YOU! SO! BAD! In the background it becomes a kind of martial patter, ahh ah-ah-ah ah ahh ah-ah-ah. It becomes self-referential, "ah-ah eh eh eh."

The song's temporal displacement is interesting. It might be one moment, the ah(-ahh-ahh)-ha moment -- oh shit, this is actually going to happen -- or it might be the whole night, song after song, all the same song, the same beat, the same dance. When this dance is over, something will happen. We will leave the club together. Or maybe this is a tease (as is the song) and she's going right back to her boyfriend. Sure The-Dream is banking on the former, but we aren't around to see what happens. Do we trust that he's actually seducing her? He's not even addressing her. He's addressing her boyfriend. He's a passive actor -- the decision is all hers.

The "one moment" argument: "fuck...that nigga..." -- is it a fantasy or did she actually say it? He says, "Shawty you should go" and...did he hear that right? "Fuuuuck...that nigga..." His own voice approximates it, poorly, he can barely hit that high note. So many hooks, seemingly a hook for each melody line (admire the economy of the verse melody, a single note to set the scene, and then a perpetual cascade of hooks, none quite equaling a chorus) and what's arguably the most crucial one he can't quite get out without his voice cracking. And we know he really can do a pretty good falsetto -- cf. "Falsetto" -- so maybe he's projecting. Maybe she said "feelin' this song." Maybe she didn't say anything. But that phrase -- "fuck...that nigga..." -- if he heard her right, there's his invitation. Maybe. I mean, maybe she's just pissed at him tonight. Maybe he forgot it was her birthday. But this is her birthday present isn't it? Are they breaking up? "I pray that y'all ain't serious, 'cuz seriously she's on my dick." Well, yeah, you're dancing with her, Dream.

(I'll never forget the time in eighth grade when, in the center of the dance circle, in that slight silence between songs, everyone heard this from two people who'd just gone to the dance as friends:

"GET YOUR BONER OFF OF MY ASS."

Woops. I didn't venture into the inner circle myself.)

They're dancing, they're waiting. They're sort of talking, maybe, but even that's in the passive voice. "Just found out that it's her birthday." Did she tell him? The only thing we hear her say in the whole song is "fuuuck....that nigga...."

They're dancing. We hit the bridge, a bit more sumptuous, addition of strings and a slightly modified chord progression. "Walkin' out the club, shawty what's up, mmm, I want her in the worst way." Yeah, probably a fantasy, he even seems to snap out of it. How much of this is actually happening? "Part of me feels so bad but (ooh!) not that bad." Sly smile, there. He's winking at us, mocking the boyfriend. But what does she have to say about this? Did she just say what I think she said? When is this song going to be over, anyway?

Skye Friday: Helmet Hair Edition

2009-08-07T04:54:00.001-07:00

Hey, why not. (Missed the video chat...anyone else actually do it??)

Skye Friday Postponed 24 Hours.

2009-07-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

I strongly strongly strongly advise anyone who has followed this blog for the past four years to block their noon to one hour on Saturday to ask Skye Sweetnam questions. I might be there misself.

In the Year 2000

2009-07-05T00:17:00.000-07:00

2000 was the year that I "got into" movies. I was in tenth grade, had a lot of free time and insomnia on my hands, and my local videostore, which did not hire me to work there (sob) had a special where you could rent 7 Movies for 7 Dollars for 7 Days. I would say I nearly put them outta business, except that I'm guessing VHS copies of Dick Tracy, Five Easy Pieces, Citizen Ruth, Citizen Kane, Dark Cirty, All the King's Men, and Double Indemnity weren't their top sellers. DVDs were out but not hugely popular just yet (IIRC we didn't get a DVD player until 2001) and it never occurred to me to be appalled at pan-and-scan editing.

Anyway, much of this year was devoted to figuring out (1) how to date Girls and (2) how many movies I can watch in a row before they blur together into general incoherence (the answer is four, I think). This marked the first separation of my Personal Life and Intellectual Life, sectioning off areas of my brain for trivia and "homework" and leaving the rest to reality. The impetus for the movie binge itself was almost purely intellectual -- I began obsessively memorizing trivia from a huge movie guide that my parents owned, trying to figure out how the guide's tastes matched with my own. Similarly to my experience with music, my tastes in movies started to blossom only after I started to forcibly move away from initial crutches; there was real empowerment in disagreeing with the guide's 5-star distinctions, and also strange pleasures in noting that a high-ranked movie was not otherwise critically acclaimed, and thus agreeing with the guide still flew in the face of conventional wisdom.

Thing is, my whole conception of conventional wisdom was based on the guide. So what was really happening was a complex web of associations that could only be possible through over-reliance on a single source (which admittedly had multiple authors, but also had a "house tone"). The same thing would happen to my music tastes as I used the All Music Guide to develop that initial web. The webs were, on the whole, good starting points, but the downside of creating them in the first place was the kind of insulation that could lead to some serious pretension, as I then expected others to understand the particular web I was in. There's a parallel here, I think, to the general boom in online networking of independent music taste -- the insularity is similar, but the net catches more fish. There just weren't as many places to insulate yourself online in 2000, so the insulation, for better or worse (in some ways it was better -- it was easier to pull away from it when confronted with a new perspective -- in some ways worse -- it led to a lot of bizarre "conventional wisdom" that simply wasn't conventional in any meaningful way) was also isolation.

As for music, it wasn't a major force yet. I was experimenting with Napster and, I think, Audiogalaxy (oh, Audiogalaxy...), making mixes in the same ad hoc way I used to when I would compile random songs and albums onto cassette tapes as a kid (I had more than one combination "Weird" Al Yankovic and semi-obscure Metallica tape), divided into utility either randomly (Dave #1, Dave #2, etc.) or by genre. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is the "Drive Fast" mix (funny since I couldn't drive yet), which had everything from Metallica covering "So What" to Cream to "Devil Went Down to Georgia." A hodgepodge of stuff my friends listened to, stuff my siblings listened to, and stuff that had just kind of filtered into my brain naturally from the world via osmosis. What I remember most from these mixes are the strange digital artifact "blooooop blurrrpp" sound that could happen in the middle of a song, so that unless you'd listened to the whole thing it might have digital gunk all over it. I thought that Radiohead's "Optimistic" (the only Radiohead song I downloaded or knew aside from "Creep") actually had this sound added in intentionally, and the real version still sounds somewhat strange when I listen to it.

Not having capital-T Taste was a good glimpse into what being a more measured critic would be like -- essentially, the idea that, as a critic, you listen to whatever comes your way and evaluate it at least with an open mind (not without a set of prejudices and preferences, per se, but with as close to a blank slate and sympathy for context as you can muster). I could listen to Anti-Flag or NOFX and rock out with some friends, knowing that the power in the music was in the social experience of singing along but not in the words themselves -- ironically, "You've gotta die gotta die gotta die for your government, die for your country that's SHIT" was a slogan that only my least institution-antagonistic friends, who would go on to actually enlist in the military and work in government, actually liked. My sisters listened to a lot of stuff -- mainstream country, DC club music and go-go, adult-contempo pop. We might do an impromptu step routine in the kitchen or blare "Uh-huh...OK...whazzup...SHUT UP" out of the kitchen speakers in the afternoons. My brother listened to Metallica and Alice in Chains in his room in the basement. My friends liked jammier stuff. My then-girlfriend mostly listened to pop, fairly indiscriminately, and I think of "Drops of Jupiter" and "Oops! ...I Did It Again" and "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" and "Aaron's Party" when I think of 2000 with her.

So one point here is that I think that "unschooled" music tastes tend toward omnivorousness by default, because it's so hard to feel passionately about so much (I still feel this way about certain fine arts; it's very difficult for me to love or hate paintings, for instance). I certainly had my pet favorites -- Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, and the Offspring were holdovers from middle school, Metallica was a longstanding staple -- but I didn't feel strongly about much. I just kind of listened, taking in music where I found it, understanding when I liked it even if it didn't seem "for me," when I disliked it though not on principle (genuinely liked "Blue," genuinely disliked Coldplay's "Yellow," genuinely loved Fuel's "Hemorrhage in My Hands," just picking what felt like huge singles at random -- IIRC none of these even appeared on the Poptimists charts for 2000 but they were totally defining for me in a way). What hatred I had was mostly received and abstract -- I empathized, I think, with Slim Shady calling out boybands, but I didn't really have any strong opinion one way or another about them myself. I think I understood that they weren't trying to woo me, but I didn't really care about the teenyboppers they were wooing, and even by 2000 the boyband craze seemed to have peaked. But I remember watching and really liking the 2ge+her movie on MTV, for both its parody and the actual pop hooks it wasn't afraid to embrace.

If there was a defining figure in my music life at this time it was Eminem -- I listened to a dubbed tape of The Marshall Mathers LP obsessively, especially while mowing the lawn. I memorized most of it, though today I can only remember the entirety of "Real Slim Shady." What appealed to me about Eminem was somewhat ambiguous, though -- I don't think I empathized with his attitude, since I was a generally happy kid with no real authority issues (good student, relatively obedient son); I don't think I empathized with any of his social baggage, either. He said there were a million people just like him, who walked talked and acted like him, just didn't give a fuck like him, and there may have been, but I was a devoted fan and I definitely wasn't one of them. Honestly I just liked having something that was fast and heavy and smart, good for wordplay and emulating funny nasal voices and indulging in almost Tourrette's-like outbursts for the sheer joy of cursing or yelling (from "Who Knew": "f___ s___ ass b___ c___ shooby-de-doo-wop, skibbedy-be-bop, a-Christopher Reeves"). It was in many ways the logical extension of singing along to Offspring's "Bad Habit" when I was younger: "DRIVERS ARE RUDE! SUCH ATTITUDE! WHEN I SHOW MY PIECE, COMPLAINTS CEASE!"

As I look over the Poptimists lists, especially the Top 40, there are very few songs I recognize that I can remember feeling too passionately about. There's "Party Up," which was an absolutely massive single -- I remember hearing it on Saturday Night Live before hearing it much on the radio, and the performance was riveting (I usually skipped or ignored the music performances), in the way that DMX seemed to be making a special effort to include me in his aggression. Other hip-hop I enjoyed more abstractly -- when I went through a brief G-funk phase in fourth grade I didn't identify with Dr. Dre or Warren G (related more to Coolio a few years later), but in 2000 DMX and Ludacris and even some of the comeback Dre stuff struck a relatable nerve -- party rap kept some of hip-hop's hardness but got rid of some of its baggage for a safely middle class white dork, too; the hard-to-cheesy spectrum probably went something like Mystikal<--->Wyclef f. the Rock, with OutKast somewhere in the middle (at school Stankonia was probably the biggest album of that year outside of Eminem). "The Bad Touch" (just missed the Poptimists 40) was the best novelty single of the year, and I enjoyed memorizing it -- it still holds up. Other stuff was enjoyable but came and went, existing in my current mind as stronger songs than nostalgia fodder, though this obviously a bit random: Kelis, Destiny's Child, Nelly, Jay-Z, Sisqo, Mystikal, Pink, ODB f. Kelis -- all songs I can place in various settings and memories (Nelly for driving somewhere on the weekend; Kelis in the basement, staring at her crazy hair in the video; "Oops!" for silly bedroom dance numbers between my ex and her little sister; Destiny's Child everywhere.)

Oddly, I have a certain nostalgia for this period in my life, precisely because the music's stakes were so low. I'm glad that I had my music phase -- I know people who put their obsessions elsewhere and have never really dealt with music as anything but a broad social force in their lives, and I probably could have gone the same route myself -- but at the same time there was something nice about not having to think about it so much, to just let pop culture wash over you and enjoy it at your leisure. It is, after all, at least in part a leisure activity, and I've found that as I've come to think and write about music more it's been much harder to insert myself into the stream of culture and see where the tides take me. Total passivity is an obvious myth, of course, but there is a distinct difference between the way I listened then and the way I listen now, and it has something to do with what I do with my brain storage. I like to think that turning on the "music as homework" switch in 2001 (actually it was more like one of those rusty levers that Dr. Frankenstein cranks down before the flash of lightning and "IT'S ALIVE!") has had a major impact on all other parts of my brain -- that being more consciously thoughtful about music has made me more consciously thoughtful about culture at large (and I think it has -- more on that as the decade progresses), but at the same time I wonder what else I might have done with all that space. From the limited understanding I have of how brains actually work, this is a stupid way to think about one's brain, of course, but sometimes I'm exhausted with obsession, a sense of obligation to engage and absorb and analyze that I'm pretty sure I didn't have (at least not in regard to music) when I was fifteen going on sixteen. But maybe Taylor Swift is right: "when you're fifteen, feeling like there's nothing to figure out, well, count to ten, take it in -- this is life before you know who you're gonna be."

Comprehension and Analysis

2009-06-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

Interesting discussion today (for other purposes than what I usually write about here) about comprehension versus analysis. This applies (as discussed today) mostly to children in various developmental stages -- roughly kindergarten through middle school. But it also applies, I think, to us.

The way it applies, though, is somewhat counter-intuitive. When teaching children, it is usually assumed in most forms of education that analysis follows comprehension. Comprehension can loosely be described as being able to piece together given strands of information into a coherent narrative or larger idea. Analysis is in the disassembling -- re-examining those pieces for context, subtext, non-obvious meaning, etc.

We performed an interesting experiment in a higher-level issue that arises when comprehension is taken for granted, though. We listened to side one of an old children's record telling the origin story of the Lone Ranger (available here at Week 26). Afterwards, we discussed various techniques for analyzing the record, gauging it to be generally familiar (genre, characters, tropes) but unfamiliar in other ways (we weren't used to following a radio play). But something interesting happened. We were all so busy analyzing -- discussing Western expansion and ethnocentrism and stereotyping and historical aesthetic context and genre conventions -- that none of us could recall what had actually happened.

Well, I did, anyway, because I actually thought it was pretty neat, and it reminded me of listening to old radio shows with my dad on tape in the car. So I gave the synopsis -- it's the origin of the Lone Ranger, describing how he was separated from the other Texas Rangers after an ambush from the Cavendish gang -- and we relistened. My colleagues' faces lit up...oh! (During discussion, one person thought that my piecing together of the narrative was from prior knowledge of the Lone Ranger. "But they actually said that!") We had a nice discussion about what you might call inverse media literacy, which is itself a kind of media illiteracy -- privileging analysis to the detriment of comprehending the piece itself.

This pretty well articulated for me something I've been kicking around in my brain for quite a while, something I've wanted to call "second-level media illiteracy." Roughly, media literacy is the ability to ask critical questions of media (not in the sense of "criticize," but in the sense of understanding what the various messages of media are, who made it and why, whom the piece is directed to, etc.). We can assume that anyone with eyes can receive an image, but not anyone with eyes can necessarily understand what is being said in the message or how it's being said (conventions, techniques, etc.). Again, this doesn't necessarily extend just to hot-button academic issues -- ethnocentrism, chauvinism, etc. -- but basic issues that blur the line between comprehension and analysis.

Anyway, in what I've been calling second-level media illiteracy, what happens is that you're so busy reading for subtext that you start to miss the text. This is exactly what happened to us listening to the Lone Ranger -- we were obsessed with validating the system of strangeness or wrongness in which the piece was framed, but we couldn't tell you what happened. Our analysis actually destroyed our ability to comprehend the text at the most basic level. And apparently there is some literature that backs this up -- one danger of heavily analytic critical media literacy is that it actively diminishes other kinds of comprehension skills. Following a plot, understanding which character is which, etc. (Can't and won't point to a specific study for this, since I'm just floating ideas here -- let's just say this is anecdotal and base it on my own experience today.)

In many ways, savvy is the enemy of comprehension. One who understands how to access information can't necessarily handle the information themselves -- the recent gushing over the role of Twitter in the Iranian protests is a good example. I would imagine that most Western onlookers have very poor comprehension of Iranian politics -- who the major players are, why they matter, who the factions are, who Iranians are -- and so giving this person an endless stream of firsthand analysis is in many ways counter-productive. Certainly comprehension and analysis can work hand-in-hand, but I don't think this is what happened with the Iranian conflict; though it would be totally unfair to say that those who followed the insta-analysis of Twitter feeds etc. learned nothing about Iran, it's also likely that these people did not truly invest themselves in the complicated history of Iranian politics, trying to piece together political movements from at least the time of the shah. (My only firsthand experience with this kind of comprehension-building was portraying Iran on a Model UN team -- a good way to learn Iranian history, but I won't pretend it makes me even marginally competent enough to have a strong opinion on what exactly is happening there.)

The internet is full of analysis, and it's full of content, but it's not all that well equipped to provide comprehension tools. These would necessarily be instructive in nature, and are extremely difficult to achieve in isolation. Conversations are a good way to build comprehension (and a lot of my music history, for instance, has been shaped by the conversations I've had online), but often conversations are venues primarily for analysis -- you already need to know the material before you join in.

But when everyone is essentially analyzing, it's entirely possible that they are simultaneously weakening their comprehension skills. And the tenor of many internet debates in which I've been a part resemble something like this -- lots of smart people who for one reason or another refuse to truly try to understand what another person is arguing, sticking to their own primary evidence and merely attacking from different rhetorical stances. Pausing, relistening, and recalibrating an original response is not really in the vocabulary of Accepted Internet Argument Techniques. It's as true for someone dismissing Fleet Foxes for being self-evidently mediocre (and hey, I suspect Fleet Foxes are pretty mediocre, but I don't want to do the necessary comprehension building, i.e. listening to them again, to figure out why, so I should be pretty honest about that and not fling poo) as it is for someone dismissing Ashlee Simpson's "La La" for objectifying women without noticing the actual (specific) narrative that's happening in the song (she clarifies what the song's really about in the bridge -- "I feel safe with you / I can be myself tonight / It's alright with you / 'Cuz you hold my secrets tight").

So I'm beginning to wonder if my Big Concern about internet communication has been backwards the whole time -- here I am thinking that the problem is that we're not getting very good analysis, when in fact it's possibly the sheer volume of analysis that's hampering a more basic form of comprehension, of everything from policy (cf. the absurdly overwrought reaction to a justice department memo on the Defense of Marriage Act that claims "Obama" is "comparing gay marriage to incest") to music criticism*. When you de-privilege basic comprehension in favor of snap analysis, you'll inevitability degrade the analysis itself, just as our Lone Ranger conversation was essentially meaningless if we couldn't accurately recall what we had actually listened to. In effect, we had a very thoughtfully- and passionately-argued conversation about nothing. And this starts to get at my fears about the further dispersion of online chatter -- lots of (occasionally very good) analysis, but fewer centralized places in which someone might actually be challenged to listen more than once to make sure they got it right the first time.

*The Singles Jukebox is in many ways an experiment in how comprehension and analysis can go completely out of whack in a productive way, i.e. when the comment threads find a middle ground by taking in a variety of perspectives, some of which have a better idea of what's "really happening" in a given song. I think a lot of people, myself included, were a bit off on what Regina Spektor was doing in "Laughing With," but the conversation was revelatory. I note that the most recent comment has some eloquent, thoughtful analysis that once again doesn't seem to totally connect back to what the Spektor is literally saying, but there's at the very least a process to negotiate his interpretation within a group understanding of what's going on when content itself is up for debate along with a particular line of analysis.

Me: An Introduction (Noughties Edition)

2009-06-14T07:50:00.001-07:00

Wack Narcissus

[EDIT: Quick tech note, I've finally forwarded this blog to the domain name http://www.cureforbedbugs.com -- the blogspot address will still link here, but the direct link is the regular dot-com]

For the next few months, I'm going to be posting intermittent pieces about life in the 00's [how are we pronouncing this? I like "oh's"] and What It All Means, mostly as an excuse to wax nostalgic over the (so far v. exciting) Poptimists 00's Singles Poll. I may post according to heat (er, it's complicated) or just according to year, haven't decided yet. But it's all part of the History of Jop project.

So for those of you who don't know my entire life story, or weren't following along during the History of Jop roughly-sketched autobiographical stuff, my history with rock and pop music as a Thing began in earnest in 2001. I'd followed music on the radio and through a few personal influences, but it was never a major force in my life until I got it into my head that this should be something I Take Seriously. This was pretty much the peak of the Napster era -- I think in 2000-2001 I was using Audiogalaxy a lot, that bright blue beacon of mislabeled promise -- and the musical genealogy that I carved out was almost entirely internet-aided. I spent an inordinate amount of time navigating All Music Guide, obsessively marking down albums that either interested me or seemed important in a giant Word document unassumingly titled "music list," a ten-point font monstrosity that was too large even to print out. I've long since lost that list, and the countless crappy CD-Rs I burned during this period, usually cobbling together albums from track listings song by song, but it ran the gamut of rock and jazz standards.

So what did music history look like when you established it "cold" from piecemeal from internet sources? Well, the question is a touch disingenuous to begin with. No one is "cold" when it comes to pop music -- just look at a dozen or so Napster-aided mix CDs that immediately preceded my "homework period" c. 2000 and plenty of mixtapes of Metallica and Weird Al before that!) and my existing tastes and social circles largely dictated how I searched. But roughly it was, in those early days, a firmly Rolling Stone-sanctioned list -- positions I then held but have since revised: The Beatles Got Better After Rubber Soul; Rap Music Was Better When It Was "Positive"; The Pixies Are the Genesis of Contemporary Rock Music; etc. etc. I still like all of these things -- post-Rubber Soul Beatles, "positive" rap music (which I now feel totally compelled to put in scare quotes for some reason), the Pixies -- but I do like to think I've developed a bit more of a holistic understanding of music history, my own personal tastes (which have changed, though not as much as one might think), and general knowing the ropes of rock crit over the ages.

Anyway, I'll talk about this more in 2001. Just as a table of contents of sorts, here's what to look for:

ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOOL

2000: 10th grade - Pre-obsession, ear to the radio and residual adolescent RAGE!
2001: 11th grade - Obsession, doing yr homework, finding a conversation and lurking in it, constructing a history
2002: 12th grade: Connecting constructed history to contemporary history via current online sources

I LOVE COLLEGE

2003: Freshman - First forays into music criticism/synthesis of "homework"
2004: Sophomore - Early (lucky) breaking point in terms of music crit exposure -- short-lived -- newfound fear of posing, being "caught," etc. (a recurring theme)
2005: Junior - Break from exposure, return to lurk, taste realignment
2006: Senior - Re-entering the conversation (if only I knew then what I knew now)

MY TEMP YEAR

2007: Finding and trusting a voice, feeling comfortable publishing for the first time

I LOVE COLLEGE AGAIN, BUT NOT AS MUCH AS I HATED TEMPING

2008: Grad School 1: A bit of floundering, some cracks in a more assured voice, trying to take in more perspectives, more conversations (e.g. the year I went back to school)
2009: Grad School 2: Er, not sure what the Big Idea here is yet, do I? Probably has something to do with The-Dream.

I'll also be tracking my personal life through the decade. I'll be marrying Emily toward the end of this year, and we've been dating since the very first piece I ever published (on my first blog). She was the one who encouraged me to start writing in the first place.

Teenpop antiquarian enjoys company of Swedes.

2009-06-11T06:28:00.000-07:00

An album for Ashley's first nose?

So the thing about this new Ashley Tisdale album, which I've heard piecemeal about 1/2x so far, kind of shooting from the hip here, is that it hearkens back to a time when teenyboppers were secreted away to Sweden to cut a pure-pop sugar staple on the DL, only to take the world by storm and everyone's like...uh, where the hell did this come from? Well, from guys with two S's in their last name -- Persson, Larsson -- and first names with umlauts. [EDIT: I am reliably informed that Persson is in part responsible for many of Ashley's best tracks on her first alb, including "Not Like That," h/t Frank.]

Thing is, we know where Ashley came from, and that era is kind of dead. So here's Ashley Tisdale, that Girl Wot Played the Bitch in HSM, with an album that a second-to-third-tier no-name teenybopper might have cut (and sounded slightly out-of-date) c. 2004-2005, and it's standing alone, the spotlight shining on it in an uncomfortable sorta way. This album was meant to be bundled with "A" albums in shopping mall giveaways or something -- as a purportedly "A" release itself, it flounders a bit.

And yet I'm a sucker for a lot of this cheeze. She does the Kelly C. sellout moves more squeakily than Kelly does ("Erase and Rewind," "Masquerade"), does Vanessa Hudgens style fake-dance in the "Sneakernight" mode ("Crank It Up") like the Kidz Bop version of the Timbaland album. Even the ballads are terrible! Man, nostalgia. Hell, she even slightly taps into my The-Dream luv by providing an answer track of sorts in "Hair" -- "I like what you do to my hair." And this isn't an idle linkage -- Demi Lovato wants to work with The-Dream; Taylor Swift wants to work with T-Pain. The ground is shifting, folks.

Which means that this thing is a veritable relic, of someone in 2005 pretending it was 2001. Perhaps this is the Cheiron flipside to bits of Skye's Matrix album, which included some identically positioned awkward retro pop, in the form of demos that Matrix never got off the ground in 2004 (that, at the time, were trying to sound recent-past retro themselves). So yeah, it's kind of interesting. But is it good? Uh...y'know, about as good as any of those second-to-third tier efforts can be. A roughly 30-60-10 ratio of "good/competent/bad," and so many of these songs run together it's almost useless trying to parse it as anything other than an occasionally enjoyable crystallized sugar blob. (Even the DioGuardi co-penned anthem, "What If," sounds nostalgically generic, though it's still a bit of a highlight.) At the very least I can't wait to buy a one-penny (plus shipping) online copy in three months as the imminent over-pressing of the CD goes "E.T. Atari Game" and starts cluttering up a few used bins.

Countdown to July 21st

2009-06-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

h/t JMWCYL

Quick turnover, there, Demi. Advice to all readers: HOP ON THIS BANDWAGON NOW.

Broadway couldn't handle a zoom lens.

2009-06-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

Fairly disappointed in the Mamma Mia movie, even given my super-low expectations. A few thoughts on why it failed so miserably:

1. General incompetence: in singing, in choreography (holy shit the choreography -- did the choreographer basically just tell them all to go figure something out in their bedroom and then they'd rehearse it with a chorus line?), in cinematography (y'know what'll make this number pop? SPINNING THE CAMERA!), in editing (which seems to have been randomized a la the last minute of this klassik Youtube mash).

2. General incompetence: in singing. Did I mention the singing? And how bad it was?

3. Anyway. TOO MANY EFFING CLOSE-UPS. The entire film has a weirdly claustrophobic feeling, even for a flick that takes place on a small Greek island. Also, it gives us way too much intimacy with the characters, and has no sense of when to let the film pull back and let in the full (WIDE WIDE WIDE angle) scope of its improbable choruses. See: Pennies from Heaven, The Young Girls of Rochefort, and even that one doesn't quite know what to do with a slightly-too-old Gene Kelly. There's an unflattering telephoto flatness that pervades the whole thing, smooshing everyone together in space instead of giving us a sense of a big stage musical breaking out in the midst of an actually quite sad story.

4. Along those lines, the broad strokes of the story are pretty genius, the pop getting mixed up in the melodrama like the peanut butter chocolate goodness of a classic ABBA tune. But the film (maybe the show) itself doesn't really seem to fully understand how perfect the story is for the music, and falls back way too hard on camp, undercutting much of the music's sadness and occasional black humor. Most egregious example is when they reverse the meaning of "When All Is Said and Done," one of the best songs about D-I-V-O-R-C-E evah, to be a kind of "we're not too old to be together!" thing. NO!!!! It completely destroys the weirdly fragile charm of the song, in which a divorced couple reminisce with bittersweet fondness over the time they've had together, admitting they can still see each other, and other people, but just don't work together any more. So much beauty wasted. Minor offenses: changing the gender of "Does Your Mother Know" takes away much of the uneasy, sorta slimy appeal of that one, and "Lay All Your Love on Me" is demolished in context for some reason. Haven't figured out quite why, but again the gender reversal isn't doing any favors.

5. Movie's having a lot more fun than we are. Most present in the epilogue, in which Meryl Streep and co. finish a refrain of "Mamma Mia" and she kind of exasperatedly shouts out "DO YOU WANT ANOTHER ONE?!" with an odd snarl, leading into "Waterloo." It's like the whole cast is tired, as though this was a real-time documentary and we're on the final number. The whole film has an air of forced smiles to it, everyone realizing in the thick of production that what sounded like fun on paper, and looked like fun on stage, was turning out to be more of a chore as a film.

Seriously, no forgiving what they did to "When All Is Said and Done." The movie is basically to ABBA's music what "Glee" was to "Don't Stop Believin'" -- an oddly formal exercise in frivolity that seems to understand intellectually the appeal of its source without being able to actually convey it. Which, of course, is one reason why ABBA is brilliant.

HERE COMES THE LOVATO STREET TEAM IN A BULLET-PROOF VEST

2009-05-28T18:41:00.000-07:00

Yeah, TWITTER JOKES. That's what you get on this blog now. INSIDE JOKES. FROM MY TWITTER. YES. THAT'S RIGHT.

Remember back in two thousand SIX when I presciently profiled one Ms. Miley Cyrus like the week that her show debuted knowing full well she would take over the world? The write-up was enthusiastic but professional, I thought.

Anyway, it's more than three years later (wait, really?) and I totally missed the boat on Demi Lovato. It's a different time, y'know? But she's better than Miley Cyrus, no foolin', and according to her TWITTER, new alb is due in July.

MY NEW ALBUM NAME IS..........

It'll be titled after a track from the album, "Here We Go Again." Wooo hooo!!!!

I can promise this album is going to be a lot better than the last, and it's definitely more "me" :)

Comes out JULY!!!! Keep your eye out for it!!!! And this summer on tour I'll be performing so many songs from my new record... Come see me!

And no, I'm not going to provide critical commentary OR little MS Paint heart-adorned desktop wallpaper templates (I don't even own a PC anymore! THE TIMES!!!). I'm just going to reblog Demi Lovato's tweets wholesale. And now I'm going to go form a band called Lovato's Tweets. Or maybe a coffee shop. I haven't decided yet.

...Oh, OK, ONE wallpaper for old times' sake.

Pandora Finds

2009-05-27T06:24:00.000-07:00

Hey, look, Pandora still works. Haven't listened to my Teenpop Mega Hyper Sugar Set in ages! Here are the new ones, though the station is playing a TON of stuff I've already thumbs-upped. Kind of defeats the purpose of the station, doesn't it? (Pass = play but don't thumbs up.)

Expand/Hide (Part 1)

Britt Nicole - "When She Cries" (2007): Another Xtian popper with a Kelly C. chorus, a coupla strings in the background. Theory: almost every Kelly C.-inspired Christian artist carries on the Breakaway (more specifically "Since U Been Gone") tradition better than Kelly herself. Pass.

The Pretenders - "Tradition of Love" (1986): Wow, I know next to nothing about the Pretenders. Steady midtempo rock chug, Chrissy Hynde particularly tremolo on this one, not much to write the home about, except that I think she's doing an interesting melody line in the verses. Play, but borderline thumbs down.

Jesse McCartney - "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart" (2004): Sounds exactly what you think it sounds like. Skip.

Sara Bereilles - "Love Song" (2008): You've already heard this one. Better convo than I'm willing to have now here. Thumbs up.

Smashing Pumpkins - "1979" (1995): Already thumbs-upped, but let us not forget that the sound of teenpop grl-rock verses from approx. 2004-2007 was almost exclusively shaped by this song.

Selena Gomez - "Cruella De Vil" (2008): Not bad, though not as good as Skye's (or Lalaine's) version of the same song -- makes the mistake of changing the melody on a sort of made-up pop chorus, which makes the song a lot more generic. Also annoying, she pronounces it "Cruella DEE Vil." I haven't heard much Selena Gomez (she of Disney and Demi Lovato BFF fame) but I did like "Bang a Drum" from the Another Cinderella Story OST. Borderline thumbs up.

Clique Girlz - "Then I Woke Up" (2008): Never actually heard the reformed and ramped-up Clique (now Clique Girlz -- follow the continuing saga). Mediocre early Duff-rock with really nothing singing (even for Duff-rock!). Docked points: electrobeat on verses sounds like it's coming straight from the keyboard, sez "Dr. Phil won't you please help me," chorus tells us that she's a "hip-hop queen...I'm so bling bling." You are so not. Thumbs down.

Jesse McCartney - "How Do You Sleep" (2008): This one's really grown on me, ingratiating plink-hook + sweep synth and basic handclap beat, Jesse somehow maturing from teen-doing-preteen to twentysomething-doing-teen. Maybe he'll make it to early Timberlake by the time he reaches 40? Thumbs up.

Usher - "Nice and Slow" (1997): Don't know any early Usher. Pre-nastee R. Kelly moves, but a bit more babyfaced. Oh wait, this chorus sounds familiar. Have I heard it, or just a million songs that sound exactly like it that I also can't remember? Thumbs down.

The Sounds - "24 Hours" (2006): Tegan and Sara with a bit more electro underneath? Hm, I seem to remember other stuff by them on this station that I liked, so I'll let it pass. Pass.

Vicky Breecher - "Yesterday, Today, and Forever" (2006): Another Christian girl-rocker, except this time there's WAAAAAY too much Jesus. Didactic and gross. Thumbs down.

Lady Sovereign - "Love Me or Hate Me" (2006): Reminds me how good her little low-tech earworms sound with some real production muscle behind them -- it's the one thing that's missing from "I Got You Dancing," and a few others on the album ("Pennies" especially), which could stand to sound as oddly massive as this one, I think. Thumbs up.

Lady GaGa - "I Like It Rough" (2008): Totally passable electropop -- reminds me that on the whole her album is enjoyable if you just kind of tune her image out. And as I said in today's Singles Jukebox, that's actually quite easy. Likeable, and as usual I really like the synths, but still just a pass.

Jem - "Save Me" (2004): I've been casually avoiding hearing Jem because I don't want to keep getting her confused with the cartoon of the same name (her of the Holograms). Actually I've been casually avoiding it for the same reason I casually avoid everything else: I have better things to do at any given second in my life. Anyway, it's Tashbed 7.0. Ah, that wasn't so hard. Pass.

Paula Abdul - "Dance Like There's No Tomorrow" (2008): Holy shit, did Paula Abdul just dish out some beyond-decent '08 via '80s hazy Autotune bliss?? Yes. Yes she did. (What on earth did Randy Jackson do on this song? As far as I can tell there's not any bass.) Thumbs up.

Daechelle - "Fearless" (2007): OMG, the "Fearless" meme refuses to go away. That's awesome, because I plan to use it well into 2010. I'm...y'know, unafraid. Bold. Brave. Free of misgivings. A decent sub-Jojo verse gives way to less-decent aspirational soarin' chorus. The track is from the solid Bratz Movie OST, launching pad of sorts for Prima J and Clique Girlz. Pass.

Billie - "Because We Want To" (1999): Starts off promisingly with brat-rap call and response, then devolves into some middling American Idol auditioning w/ pseudo-soul Xtina growling, though interestingly it seems to slightly pre-date Xtina herself. Disappointing, but a pass.

Colbie Callait - "Feelings Show" (2007): Dear Pandora: Stop trying to make me listen to Colbie Callait. I ALREADY SAID NO. Thumbs down.

Sigh, that's enough for now -- more later perhaps.

...OK, here we go again...

Expand/Hide (Part 2)

Xscape - "Who Can I Run To" (1995): 90s R&B...that...um...hey, the song has been over for one minute and I can't remember a note of it. It was OK though! Pass.

Erykah Badu - "Next Lifetime (Live)" (1997): Interesting to compare this to her latest live album, which is excellent -- this one jams out further and...er, jammier than the new one, yet the new one feels much more intimate than this, weirder, a bit more special. Erykah's voice has weathered nicely in the interim, a more cracked, throatier delivery. This one is a bit too smoove by comparison and doesn't have any of the grit of the newer performances, from the standard syncopated bass and twinkling clav to the special (multiple) breakdowns for back-up singers...rolling plains to the new album's craggy moonscapes. Pass.

John Legend - "Green Light" (2008): Wow, they managed to pick the one John Legend song I actually like and/or remember. Like Lauryn Hill's "Lose Myself," the backing bounce provides a perpendicular complement to John Legend's silky croon. Like slathering butter all over "Hey Ya." Andre 3K, who makes a nice appearance here, isn't credited on Pandora but really helps take the track over the top. Big thumbs up (wow this should have been somewhere on my singles list last year).

Ne-Yo - "Mad" (2008): Daaaaaamn, Pandora's on a ROLL. Fave song from Year of the Gentleman except maybe the dishes one, which I like conceptually more than actually. Sigh, I do that a lot, don't I? But hey, I can admit when the tune just destroys, as it does here. His fractured harmonies come in so masterfully it's like an auto kaleidoscope effect was applied. Would that this really existed (I actually have heard this effect before, in a demo of an ungodly expensive keyboard at some kinda industrial piano/keyboard fair), and became the new Autotune craze. Thumbs up.

Keri Hilson - "Get Your Money Up" (2009): Once again picks one of my favorite songs from an album I'm still lukewarm on. Keri spits and swaggers to the digi version of the "Turnin' Me On" tubas (which is to say...uh, y'know, a low synth). In fact, this basically is the lower-rent "Turnin' Me On," but it's an efficient little below-the-radar flier, which is what I wanted more of on the album (Keri herself being a somewhat below-the-radar sneak-attack personality in the minidiva tradition). Thumbs up.

Chris Brown - "You" (2007): Amazingly, Pandora has managed to update my tastes almost exactly the amount of time I haven't been paying attention to it. "You" is pretty much the dividing line (the moment in 2007 or so when Chris Brown unquestionably became THEE uber-hip pre-teen music referent for...y'know not-white-upper-middle-class girls, as evidenced in OFFICIAL RSRCH I has done). Is neither better nor worse than any other (good) Chris Brown track. The world will miss him, that talented little piece of shit. So, uh, is country music basically like the Cayman Islands of identity reformation? Miley, Hootie, Chris Brown...

Cascada - "Truly, Madly, Deeply" (2006): AUUUUUUUUUUGGGHGHHGHGHGHGHH!!! OOM-CH-OOM-CH-OOM-CH-oom/ch/oom/ch/oom/ch/oom/ch SCOOTER.....er, CASSSSSCAAAADAAAAAAHHHHHHH! YES YES YES EYS YES YESYESYSETYESYESESTYESYESSSSSSSSSSTHUMBS UP! (Read this excellent piratemoggy post for reference.)

Basshunter - "Professional Party People" (2008): Haha when they tried to play stuff that DID NOT BOSH for three tracks, my vetoes were so swift & painful that they played this to appease me. And it worked! PS bonus points, this album is called LOL d[-_-]b. Thumbs UP UP UP.

OK, they've killed the bosh with yet another dose of Smashing Pumpkins "1979." Love this song but I'm glad that they've built in a SNOOZE button (go one month without playing it -- Pandora does get stuck in repetitive ruts pretty frequently still).

A few of these songs that I've long since thumbs-upped (esp. Mandy Moore's "Candy") reminds me that Poptimists is beginning a year-by-year BEST OF THE 00's poll pandemonium, ending (obvs.) with 2009 closer to the end of the year. 2000 Singles nominations thread here, follow along via this tag.

For my part, aside from participating I'm going to do another attempt at Year of Jop-style personal discussion to break down the decade, which was definitely the most formative of my music experiences, intellectual approach to music criticism, etc. etc. etc. So yes, IT WILL BE ABOUT TEH ME. I'll keep it under the "History of Jop" tag so'se you can get my whole makeshift musical autobiography by clicking the tag. 'Course this whole site is my music autobiography, I guess, but that stuff actually has capital-A autobiography material in it.

After the Earthquake

2009-05-26T09:18:00.000-07:00

I imagine that when the new fault lines settle on a post-Bush U.S. populace, we're going to see some major shifts, the likes of which you probably would have to go back to the 60's to see in comparable magnitude -- an expanding bubble of wealth has led to basic but profound changes in how my generation (and I'm speaking somewhat anecdotally here, but also extrapolating from various opinion polls etc.) views money and the ins-and-outs of adulthood -- everything from home ownership to credit card debt. A fundamental shift in an understood (even if you don't accept it personally) version of the American Dream. A dream not deferred, but contracted, made a bit more bite-sized. Mini-bling.

There's not a lot of Big Money to be made, nor is there a coherent culture of pride in making it (it's there, but it feels more diffuse -- just like the charts generally, there seem to be lots of smaller ways to success with fewer Big Stars). Listening to recent hip-hop, I'm struck by how out of their time most wealth boasts sound, as though they've been held over for three-plus years and are just getting first airing. The still-increasing prominence of trap-rap is a fascinating exception to this, and I'm reminded of a line on ~~Gucci Mane~~ Gorilla Zoe's [ha, listen to these back to back, but I think I prefer Zoe. The song is "Hood Clap," very good] album: "spend 200 on shoes, you ain't even pay your rent." That's hood, see, but it's also very much hand-to-mouth living, which carries over into the wealth. Make a lot of money fast, spend it. Now you have no money, make it again. Not at all the same as the entrepreneurial spirit of 90's pop-rap -- Rick Ross is the only one who's still doing the "executive" paradigm set by Puff Daddy in the 90's and he's just an opportunist who has it both ways (does trap cameos on Gorilla Zoe's album and sings about stocks and yacht's on his, a big-time major label rap throwback to the mid-to-late 90's); and when Rick says you gotta put your money in the stocks, you wonder first just how much money he lost. Cash in a sock is a better bet.

This is in response to what I believe is Mike's first post-Obama Clap Clap post about the new FOX show "Glee," which I provide incoherent commentary on there. Read that post first; this is largely a response.

My problems with "Glee" are functional, not conceptual, which means that I need to see more episodes before passing judgment. Pilots are notoriously sketchy, jamming unnecessary exposition through in ways that keeps characters thin and telegraphs stuff that will be explored deeper and better in future episodes. (An unfortunate lag between ep 1 and ep 2 if what I'm hearing about a return in the fall is correct; seems kind of like a death knell, but we'll see.) The show is almost asking us to bring our caricature knowledge of older high school comedies (notably Election and, as Mike points out, Bring It On; I'd also throw in some Christopher Guest, at least one of whose actors appears here) to the table to sell the majority of its jokes -- overly uptight wife works at a thinly disguised Linens and Things and has an addiction to Pottery Barn (no stated jokes), butchish cheerleading coach pours herself a power shake in the middle of a convo (overly stated joke), prissy former teacher gets on medicinal marijuana which he sells to other teachers (bizarre jokes). I guess we're supposed to find the idea of these things funny, but they're not in themselves presented in a very funny way.

The adult characters are woefully uncharismatic, particularly the lead, a kind of clean-cut Matthew Broderick in Election role who seems miscast, if not terrible. Problem is that Broderick, aside from having a fascinating, fully developed character, brought an immediacy to his role in our knowledge of where he'd been -- to see the Ferris spark dulled speaks volumes that the lead adult's fresher face (he looks like an older college student who just got out of Teach for America or something) just can't and won't speak until we know him better (and I doubt it will work even then, but hey it's not like I want shows to fail or something). The OCD guidance counselor(?) is over-written and over-played, the other characters are cartoons, and not even particularly GOOD cartoons. The most character I found was in the face of the memorialized glee club teacher until 1997 whose good-natured matronly appearance at least fit a cliche schema I already had in my head.

The lead teen characters are much better, but also underwritten -- the lead guy is another Election rip-off, except that this show doesn't understand the complexities of high school hierarchy like that one did. The jocks in Election are for the most part dumb but agreeable to the extent that someone doesn't get in their way. These jocks go out of their way to terrorize, putting a wheelchair-bound glee clubber in a porta potty to tip over, tossing very odd effeminate character Kurt (who sounds like he's undergoing estrogen therapy for a sex change operation) into a dumpster but respecting his wish to preserve his Marc Jacobs jacket. It wants to have its characters both ways -- both 21st century savvy AND completely beholden to creaky old high school stereotypes that were played out at least by 80's sex comedies if not...y'know, since forever.

More interesting in Mike's critique is this:

A key moment in the pilot is where Finn confronts his fellow football players and gives a great little speech which starts like this: "We're all losers. Everyone in this school. Hell, everyone in this town. Out of all the kids that graduate from this school, maybe half will graduate college and two will leave the state to do it." This is true, but it would have been unthinkable to express such a thing earlier in the decade. It would have violated the ethos of total committment that dominated the 00s--one which produced some great results for pop, if not so much for government. While the glee club is maybe just another competitive activity, the show is clear that it's a pretty stupid one, and all the characters except Rachel seem to know that. They do it, then, because they like it, because they get something out of it. It's smaller than cheerleading but bigger than just being a quiet nerd trying not to be noticed. I like that, even without the football player, the characters aren't just a clique to themselves, but are individuals from different circumstances doing something for the pleasure of it. What the show endorses, then, is not victory or social stasis but mastery.

This was an excellent line that felt out of character (Finn is so stupid that he doesn't even know that women don't have prostates, but he's well-versed in collegiate statistics of area kids?), but it's the spirit that gives me hope not necessarily for this show but for this idea of a moving on point, a major cultural breaking point that I think many of us in the obsessive pop-talk sphere have been searching for, sometimes fruitfully but usually not, for several years. It's the mini-bling of television, a post-downturn vision of big budget production that reflects its time, and perhaps provides some commentary, without feeling like a stale rehashing OR uncharted territory. As I said, as of right now it's mediocre, but it's a new kind of mediocre, and its mediocrities have everything to do with the particularities of its execution and just about nothing to do with the central premise, which I think Mike nails in his analysis.

I've been racking my brain for shows that absolutely could not have been made before this Now Moment, or rather in a moment that was not, let's say (somewhat arbitrarily), before the cultural shifts of a second Bush term. Not just post-9/11, but that moment where hope and enthusiasm (for many) were crushed by a feeling of the need for some significant soul-searching, perhaps political realignment (the continued ballooning of the progressive blogosphere), and at a more everyday level, changes in how one might even conceive of a future, let alone plan for it. And those things have changed even more since then, but entertainment that feels "true" to this sort of Now does seem rare.

Examples I can think of include:

*"Battlestar Galactica": I'll post about more later; those things are hard to write!

*"Arrested Development": despite Mike's suggestion that it's post-Seinfeld, I would argue that that before its actual airing, that sort of "aristocracy with its legs cut off" vision is more in line with, say, Latin American politics of a country like Argentina than the U.S. (it's like the American sitcom of Lucrecia Martel's La Cienaga) -- it was even, quite literally, about the imminent collapse of the housing bubble, as we stopped to consider whether or not these homes were actually going to be worth anything, and saw what happens to the wealthy whose money are tied up in rapidly deteriorating systems of what basically amounts to constant money laundering.

*"How I Met Your Mother": a traditional sitcom in the "Friends" mold that was unthinkable, even for the "lower-class" "Friends" rip-offs from the good ("Drew Carey") to the awful ("Townies"...remember "Townies"??) in the mid-90s. Two structural differences: (1) an extended set of "series arc" narrative expectations from the set-up of the show (he will eventually reveal Something Big to us, even if individual episodes are more random -- it's "leading somewhere," not struggling year to year to justify its existence) and (2) a more modern conception of courtship that starts to pull marriage down from thirtysomething to late-twentysomething, which is a small but significant shift. It's not NORMAL in this show to consider 40-year-olds who just haven't found the right person; there's a sense of importance in some kind of traditional family unit that "Friends" developed very late, mostly due to the fact that they'd run out of other ideas and twists, and that "Seinfeld," much to its credit, never adopted at all. As far as content goes, more on "HIMYM" later, we're still doing ketchup on the series, but it's pretty awesome.

*"Reno 9-11": typical of the (re?)professionalism of improv comedy in the 00's that followed a bottoming out of I-M-P-R-O-V in the late 90's/early 00's with the new "Whose Line." I would argue that "Reno" is less influential but perhaps more makeshift-canonically important than the U.S. "Office" (though not the UK "Office") in both the comparatively radical nature of its subject matter (blue collar workers whose personalities, not simple caricature types, have been long since set) and form (collapses distinction between sketch comedy and coherent episode narrative). And it has a lot of "Glee"'s own archetypes: the post-Beyonce diva, who in "Glee" actually more closely resembles Jennifer Hudson's character in Dreamgirls, Effie; more complex "butch woman" whose sexuality is kind of beside the point; ditto for "gay man" (this is one thing that "Glee" royally botches in the pilot).

There are also writing-on-the-wall shows, notably "Freaks and Geeks," which may well be the most counter-intuitively influential television show of the first half of the decade, and "Daria," which seems to lampoon the early 00's with a jaded eye backward from after the early 00's, but without a kind of cautious optimism that characterizes present work. It's a quintessential 90's show, and yet its skewering of incipient 00's culture is so astute that it resonates with me now, like a faint signal from c. 1997, anticipating that things could get much much worse, and fuck, some day you're actually going to be nostalgic for this moment, so watch your back. I kind of want to include "Malcolm in the Middle" in this category, but don't think I will.

If anyone can think of any others, feel free to float yer theories.

What we're seeing now, I think, is the fall-out of a few of these zeitgeists, and a deeper ingrained feeling of the dawn of a new era (for better or worse) in the DNA of these shows. It may be clearer in television than it is in movies -- which feel particularly dead zone in recent months, maybe years -- or in music, where the industry itself is in too much disarray to understand any smaller narratives coherently. Industrially speaking, television is probably the one media industry that can comfortably fly below the radar of economic upheaval without clinging frantically to its various channels of funding (movies just take too much damn capital up front) or diffusing beyond linear, maybe monocultural?, coherence (the music industry just takes too LITTLE capital up front).

I think the first shift I noticed was probably in children's television: there's a LOT of "High School Musical" -- the version that was as cool for teenagers as it was for their little brothers and sisters -- in "Glee," but there's also a lot of mini-bling in other children's programming. Unlike the hyper-rich parallel universes of HSM and "Hannah Montana," shows like "iCarly" and "True Jackson VP" and "Sonny with a Chance" throw legitimately middle-class characters into slightly more upscale situations. But in all three cases, the emphasis is on their demonstrable abilities over assumed abilities ("Sonny with a Chance" vs. "Hannah Montana") and their rags-to-riches success through unconvential, sometimes Internet-based, popularity mobility (as opposed to social or economic mobility, which are kind of beside the point for "SwaC" and "iCarly" from what I've seen). These shows more often rely on "doing your best" over "achieving your wildest dreams." This is a positive development in children's entertainment, and I'm not sure how much is luck of the draw (of Demi Lovato's own appeal as a post-Kelly Clarkson everywoman to Miley Cyrus's "we will launch you now!" trajectory) and how much genuinely reflects a cultural shift.

Then there's "Glee," which reminds me most not of Bring It On or Election (though there's a LOT of Election in it) but Sugar & Spice, underrated and on the whole merely good but darkly funny and genuinely smart in a distinctively 00's sorta way (for one thing, I can't imagine a subplot based on a girl's puppy crush on Conan O'Brien before the 00's). It was a bit like old stereotypes refusing to click nicely back into their sanctioned positions due to no real fault of the creators -- subtle cultural shifts altering slightly how character details could be filled in, how narratives could resolve, how dialogue could be written, in just so many little ways that it honestly felt like a whole new bag.

And I guess that's my hope and fear for "Glee" in a nutshell -- that the creators aren't so committed to the high school hierarchy cookie cutters that all of the little details that they get right almost unconsciously will eventually be smoothed out in favor of what's already safe. You can see the potential for staleness in the stereotypes that don't work (the cruel jock extras, the prissy former glee club teacher, the meathead coaches), but you can also see potential in the ways that the main characters do work, the contemporary particularities of their situations, which sometimes are painfully forced (sez the [white] lead Rachel: "my two dads, one white and one black, are gay and mixed their sperm, so I don't know which is the real father yuk yuk!"), may lead to something that can transcend the cookie cutter. But I doubt it -- most great shows don't need the cookie cutter, even as a set of training wheels.

One that does spring to mind as a show that seems to have at least found its legs is "Parks and Recreation," which absolutely could not have happened before Now -- esp. considering one of the main characters is a longtime government appointee whose sole goal is to dismantle the government, because he doesn't believe in it. That this character is so natural in our culture that it's an obvious source of parody is telling, though this guy has (appropriately) probably been there since Reagan. I'm hoping Mike writes on this one -- he probably likes it more than I do, but I think it's dealing in many of the Big Ideas he's sketching out in that piece.

Battlestar Galactica, Post 2

2009-05-19T05:49:00.000-07:00

Once again, there are TONS AND TONS AND TONS of spoilers ahead. Look away! You have been warned!

Re: webisodes -- I haven't seen any of them. I'll probably watch them at some point, but apparently they're where it becomes clear that Gaeta is gay (which is a nice touch, since I assumed it anyway) and a few things on New Caprica are elaborated. Not sure how many other webisodes there even are. But honestly knowing there are more gay characters erases the lingering issues I had with Cain's sexuality -- there are so many more important factors in that situation that sexuality is actually the least provocative thing going on, which in itself is a sort of statement, I guess. The issue with hetero dominance in the show, more later, isn't literal, anyway, it's really more about the power dynamics within given (usually hetero but not just BECAUSE they're hetero) relationships.

Be sure to continue reading the comments in the previous thread for more talk about Gaeta, the prez/Adama, Dee, and especially CAIN and her role in the series. (There's a bunch of excellent counterpoint to the original post down there from Girlboymusic and Alex.)

Anyway, onward to some of the good stuff, some of the bad stuff (ARROWS!!!!) and more disagreement (hopefully).

---------------

Cut for Spoilers: Ch-ch-ch-changes and Magic Arrows!

Before/After Changes and Why They Work

Most characters in the show split into easy before/after binaries that are nonetheless pretty complex. The revelation of the Final Five is a big one, but actually not the most interesting one (I except one character from that) -- also interesting are changes in main characters whose roles either change significantly (Lee) or whose characters themselves seem to change significantly (Adama).

Ellen Tigh: Had a long convo with Emily about this last night, and one thing that I think we agreed on is the fact that Ellen's comeback as a mastermind works, both in explaining a personality that seems to be at odds with just about everything else about the show through much of its run, and also in giving us a credible link to an important narrative element in the finale (the role of the Five). Her return on the base ship and convo with Cavil is interesting, in that almost the entire episode consists of nothing but exposition, yet it's riveting, not just because we're filling in lots of little gaps in understanding. We're literally rebooting a character, as though we're watching a progress bar and anticipating what happens when we get to 100% -- nu-Ellen is also kind of "filling in" her old character, helping to explain what the hell was going on there. New Ellen makes sense because we've been following Old Ellen, and Old Ellen makes more sense in retrospect when we know about New Ellen. In a way, Ellen is the only one of the five who really works -- the others seem either arbitrary or regrettable (just when Tigh's pirate character is getting his sea legs...)

Gaeta: I really like Gaeta. I said in the comments, in response to Nia's discussion of Dee (see those for a more sympathetic and symbolic view of her role than I give) that Gaeta is like a spine for the ship (utterly "professional," seems to know everything when other characters don't, as opposed to Dee who herself brings not her own knowledge support but a kind of facilitator role to the proceedings) but is himself spineless. Which isn't strictly true -- he's feeding the resistance info from the inside on New Caprica, sure, but what I mean is that he seems to have a certain sanctimoniousness, or maybe more reductively brattiness, that doesn't quite undercut his actions, but undercuts perception of him as a noble nerd. So that even though I buy his transformation into a sort of freedom-fighter vigilante/pompous Latin American dictator figure (discussion of the role of Latino characters versus echos of Latin American politics later) (Emily didn't like the transformation so much) I also suspect that it has as much to do with sour grapes about the leg and his general lot as it does with his actual beliefs.

And in a way, he's a good representative figure for crew morale at that point: personal bitterness conflated with pseudo-philosophy about how things should be. This points to an interesting facet of one of the show's own foremost principles, which is that personal bitterness leads to bad decision-making (the Cain Principle), and the bitterness itself tends to destroy the validity of the underlying philosophy justifying the philosophy (echos of anti-civil rights rhetoric abound once we accept the Cylons as near-human, or near enough not to matter). Which isn't strictly true -- bitterness can breed OK policy; policy is policy regardless of how you get there. Emotionally, that is -- it makes a huge difference if you decide you need to kill half the military to achieve your goals; most of the final coup is tainted philosophically from the fact that everyone turns into a fucking maniac halfway through...and hey, let's kill ALL OF THE DIPLOMATS just in case you had any lingering suspicion anyone was getting out of this one. Subtle! The important thing, though, is that shit gets done within what I'll call an imperfect but reasonable democratic framework (which is an aspect of the show I'll talk about in a bit).

Lee: The first thing I noticed about Jamie Bamber in the miniseries was that he was obviously a British person doing an American accent (IMDB corroborated my suspicion). At first I thought it was going to ruin the series for me, but it actually (very quickly) became a nice touch in his character (his accent got better as he went along, too). Lee is a pretty boy, someone who is naturally gifted but is (also) handed everything he's ever gotten. But of course we don't object to this on principle, generally speaking, on the show or for plenty of us in life -- he's basically a Kennedy. Actually, he's a bit of an amalgam of Kennedy intellectual aristocracy (his grandfather the defense lawyer) and military aristocracy, not sure what the comparison point would be. His tight-lipped, throaty American English (in a few years he could be a more foppish Hugh Laurie) is evocative of the giant pole (silver spoon?) he has up his butt at all times, one that he was born with.

This makes him a good foil for Kara because it never allows them to fall into Prince Charming mode: even if they made overtures to a sort of pseudo-empowered version of Prince Charming, it wouldn't work. Lee isn't really a man's man -- he's more of a boy's man (or a "girl's man" in the boyband sense), oddly unthreatening, no great alpha male and not even really a beta male (what comes after beta?). One reason I think he starts to find new roles on and off the ship, particularly in Season 4 (when he gives up the military altogether) but hinted at as early as becoming Roslin's military advisor, is, aside from the more obvious family drama stuff (get back at dad!!!!) because Helo is back from Old Caprica and around to fill the role Lee seemed to want to play in Season 1: the clean-cut all-American benevolent military presence. Also the guy who might conceivably fix the sink.

But there's something gentle, maybe even prissy, about Lee's general demeanor (I suspect that Kara likes him for having distinctively feminine traits while still being super-masculine, i.e. reminds her of herself) and he becomes somewhat superfluous as a military figure, or even as a meaningful authority. (He's not ready for the presidency at the time he has to inherit it, but luckily the presidency is...dissolved, I guess? I'll talk about the ending last, obvs.) Knocking him out of a uniform altogether late in the series is a huge risk that, I think, pays off from a writing perspective: it keeps his character fresh, puts him slightly out of his league, and continues a bizarre trajectory of being handed high positions almost by default without us, or the fleet, seeming to care that much. This is fairly true to the reflective nature of the show -- despite not coming from an aristocratic background (Lee claims he joined the military to put himself through college) after the attack he becomes one of the few truly aristocratic characters on the show -- that is, a class of people for whom great things are destined rather than earned, and not in a Magic Arrow sorta way.

Athena/Boomer and Six: Grace Park might be the best young(ish) actress on the whole show -- she's able to give shades of character that are fully-formed without resorting to various caricatured traits. Boomer and Athena are both our entry points into understanding the human qualities of the Cylons. And in a way, the 8 is the only character who can make the Cylon/human conflict have a tangible philosophical relevance early enough for it to really stick (though the Pegasus episode adds a new dimension to it by introducing a startling level of physical and sexual violence, a major shift from bloodless killing and the occasional ineffectual waterboarding) -- you don't ask questions about "what makes us human" etc. with any of the other Cylons, excepting a few models of Six (still, her dual [tri? quadra? quint?] role as guardian angel remains a mystery through the series, and of course she's introduced as the ultimate femme fatale robot slash random baby-killer. Though we recognize later that this was a mercy kill, or something).

I was impressed with just how different Mao/Gina Six is from Caprica, though -- when Gaius tries to sleep with Gina, I want to throttle him -- "THEY'RE NOT ALL THE SAME!" (An important moment in the show for me.) Generally the Cylon stories are given short shrift, and it's never totally clear how the Cylons work -- they can download each other's memories and effectively become the exact same as a different Cylon, but they possess some element of free will in making their own decisions and identities. They all vote in unison, except for the one time one 8 votes against the others (is it still majority rule, or does this "extra" 8 count as a whole new category of votes? My guess is the latter). Boomer/Caprica are leaders of some kinda peace movement until New Caprica, at which point they basically forget about it and enslave the human race (er, colonize; we've moved beyond mere slavery as the fulcrum of action, I guess? Does that count as progress?). Oh, and then Boomer joins up with Cavil on the Dark Side and fights to wipe everyone out again. (Wait, what?) It's messy. But the performances of our two Humany-Cylons through the whole thing is strong enough to support the flimsy exposition. I recognize, e.g., some of the original Boomer even in Evil Boomer, and the schamltzy suburban fantasy she and Chief have is genuinely affecting -- I didn't care so much about her motives for going all Superevil.

Adama: At first it seemed wrong to get to know Adama more intimately -- I think the first thing we see after the first Earth fiasco is him getting dressed and brushing his teeth, the only non-symbolic (i.e. not facial hair related) personal routine we see of him in the entire show. As we get to know him as a person, we start to lose sight of him as a Great Man: he drinks too much, he's kind of a softie, he makes a ton of small bad decisions when he's not in the CIC proclaiming "difficult but fair" decisions. But y'know what I'll talk about Adama later. Too big of a fish to fry, along with Roslin and Gaius and Tigh/Chief/Helo/everyone-else-I-missed.

-------------------

TOP ~~TEN~~ SEVEN MAGIC ARROWS!

The Magic Arrows began with an actual magic arrow -- the one that takes all of the characters to an enchanted planetarium, in which they will have to commit to memory a series of constellations that they can map into their nav systems and find a course that will lead them to the home of the original tribe of blah blah blah blah. This gets complicated.

But it's also largely a contrivance to keep the ship MOVING, to keep it going toward something resembling a Big Plot Point. Ultimately I think the Magic Arrows are the closest the show ever gets to narrative collapse, but luckily for the show the creators are (1) smart enough to know how to pick and choose their arrows sparingly (X-Files had by far more arrows for fewer mythology episodes per monster-of-the-week one-offs) and (2) they seem to have a general exit strategy, whether or not they thought so at the time. And more importantly than just having enough narrative glue to make up for the occasional ugly staple or stitch of a Magic Arrow (or Baby Blood or Warp Tune or etc. etc.), they have characters who are more important than the narrative -- in the sense that they aren't subservient to it -- but who don't also break down the usefulness of that narrative in bringing us through their journey, which would result in a kind of self-parody. But useful isn't the same as good, and I'll just say up front that there are NO GOOD MAGIC ARROWS. They always spell doom for a story line, occasionally for a character (either temporarily or in some cases permanently via DEATH SORRY), and once or twice for a season or half-season. Whatever the that 2.5 crap is all about. DAMN YOU DVD AGE.

Presented in the order I remember them. Their general worth(lessness?) isn't really calcuable (am I measuring in immediate badness or lasting impact badness?) so go to commentary for the signifance.

1. THE MAGIC ARROW (Season 1)

This one's a doozy, and kicked off the metaphor, which I inconveniently kept in my head the whole series. I've tried to keep myself from listing certain deus ex machina as Arrows (uncharacteristic character choices, convenient plot wrap-ups, etc.), since arrows are special, one-time-only Get Out of Writer's Block Free cards that allow things to move on to completely different, if not better, things.

Backstory: In a museum on Caprica there's an arrow that will do something or other according to some interpretation of scripture or something. And what with kamala turning the prez all loopy, she thinks this is a good idea, plus Starbuck is itching to get out of there right about now and test drive her cool Raider (plus she's a little religious herself, plus she's kinda guilty having left Caprica behind what with her paintings and her music and all). Sooooo go get the arrow and it will point the way to Earth!

And it does. It's stupid, but it's not too bad considering it's our first understanding of the show's mysticism-as-puzzle-film-clues. Its significance is tied in what seems to be a halfway point my and Nia's interpretation of Roslin's religious enlightenment, between what I hurriedly claimed was a temporary mystical bent of the president and what Nia more accurately claims as a major Roslin character shift -- letting her policies be driven by religious prophecy.

But the show handles this fall-out of the arrow pretty well, and they don't cheat politically -- Roslin certainly, unlike Gaius's messianic dabblings, believes in religion wholeheartedly at this point (it gives her imminent death an in-the-moment righteousness that foreseeable death from illness doesn't usually allow), but the fleet is pretty starkly split on the issue, along already-religious lines. We recognize that the prophecy stuff is good for the plot (God knows how to read ahead, I guess), but we also recognize (along with Adama, who maybe overplays his hand too quickly but hey, it's the season finale, right?) that you can't be ruled by a religious demagogue. Even one who is demonstrably calculating her potential for electoral success because of the RELIGIOUS NUTJOB VOTE (I see no contemporary parallel). This superficially makes Roslin part Bush goofball and part Rove tactician, but she's still balanced with a healthy dose of liberal pragmatis. She still wants there to be a functioning constitutional democracy and doesn't grant herself special presidential powers -- she does keep church and state separate in the rule of law. And frankly her religious visions are harmless as far as religious visions go (don't forget we had an acting president whose visions told him to wage a crusade on the Middle East). The visions just kind of point the fleet in a direction, which they would have chosen arbitrary anyway -- she's not ordering anyone to re-populate Caprica and claim it as the new Holy Land to incite the Rapture, say.

So the arrow itself is a functional little compass that, though clumsy, is almost entirely useful in simply nudging the ship in a direction. It's like the lame "encyclopedia" that explains the process of transferring consciousness in Being John Malkovich -- we don't ask too many questions of the device because we appreciate the map.

MAGIC ARROWNESS (i.e. immediate convenience to head-smack dumbness ratio): 90%
THREAT TO THE SHOW'S SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM (i.e. lasting impact): 50%

I place the threat to the basic narrative cohesion of the show at about half because the Arrow (1) sets up a really shaky second season that now has to deal with many mystical loose ends that are secondary to what we're primarily interested in (the human drama) and (2) it really really really doesn't make any sense. What was up with that planetarium?

2. BABY BLOOD! (Season 2)

Holy shit, the baby blood. THE BABY BLOOD. Backstory: Roslin's about to die of cancer. Battlestar is renewed for two seasons (I assume). Creators decide to inject her with FETAL HALF-BREED BABY BLOOD to fix what ails her. It works! ...Until they decide to throw in the towel in Season 4 and introduce the cancer again before that season gets going.

What the fuck were they thinking with the baby blood. Seriously. I mean, if they had found a magical pill floating around Planet X6432F3 in the Mixolydian Nebula that could cure cancer but could only be consumed ONCE by ONE PERSON because it was left there 2000 years ago by a now-defunct model rebel Cylon called Pookie it would make more sense.

The problem with the BABY BLOOD is that it's not something that, like a magic arrow, goes away after you use it. The baby is still there. Presumably she still has BABY BLOOD. Why the fuck couldn't they keep a vial handy for everyone else who might ever get cancer? BSG: YOU JUST CURED CANCER. Like, you found the cure. For. Cancer. And you used it one time to make sure the prez didn't die and then expected us to just forget about it?

Shoddy, shoddy planning, BSG. Here's the thing: retroactively, the baby blood almost works as a metaphor for a struggle with cancer. Cancer often does its damage for years and years, with all kinds of strange ups and downs -- regression and attack -- and in bringing Roslin back to full health from her death bed you actually strike on something deeply true about this disease (and lots of chronic and cancerous diseases), that even when the end is near it's probably not quite as near as you think. But you did it with BABY BLOOD. Cancer already has a baby blood. It's called "I don't know why, but thank the gods I'm doing a lot better this week than I was last week." SO FUCK YOU FOR USING BABY BLOOD.

This really does start to rip open a lot of stupid, avoidable holes. Like: why weren't you people doing some fucking bloodwork to figure out how to isolate whatever the hell it was that was curing the cancer? Don't you have a single scientist besides Baltar? And didn't Baltar actually figure it out -- that the shape of the red blood cells were kinda slanted or something, and that this cures cancer?

And hey, OK, maybe the fetal blood for medical gains issue is a hot topic on your planet, too. But surely you could take some blood -- like for routine purposes -- and keep it in a super-secret emergency stash, so that we'll get something like that scene in Angels in America where the guy takes all of the extra prototype AIDS meds that Al Pacino's been hoarding uselessly (except in this case it will be angry patients taking it out of Roslin's fridge). And I mean for gods' sake it's not like Roslin even needed a full infusion of baby blood -- a drop seems to cure most ailments. I bet sniffing it will clear your sinuses.

MAGIC ARROWNESS: 100%
THREAT TO SHOW: 70%

3. CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVA (Season 3)

Oh man, backstory: Ummmmm. Fuck. I don't even remember this one (do I even have the season right?). Except there's a temple and there's a supernova and Kara already drew it and maybe Hera already drew it and....oh hey, their names rhyme. Huh. And the 13th Tribe built a temple in its honor, under the guidance of the Final Five, who...documented a similar supernova happening 2000 years before it, so it will signal the supernova that will get them to look in the right place for the right nebula which will set off the right bells in the right "people" to find the ship that has the frequency that blah blah blah blah.

This one's more weird than anything else, I guess. It basically just provides a backdrop for a new planet and a few character revelations -- notably from Lucy Lawless, whose sudden religious fervor is more convincing than Kara's in Season 4 and Chief who has a nice character development moment as he comes to grips with some of his strict religious upbringing (of course we figure out he has other obvious connections to the temple later) -- and a reason to get back Gaius after his tenure as a sex slave (the first time around) and a reason to get back Hera (I think). It's a standard magic arrow, a wobbly Jenga piece that doesn't threaten to tip over too badly. And, as always, we don't care as much about the Jenga game as we care about the people playing Jenga. (At the end of Season 2 the Jenga tower tips over completely, and it's the best thing that ever happened to the series.)

ARROWNESS: 60%
THREAT TO SHOW: 10% (I mean, not much of a threat, but it does beg the question how "everything has happened before and everything will happen again" when the frakkin' SUN EXPLODED. And yes, that was a joke, and I'm aware that everything won't happen again exactly the same way it happened the first time. More on that later, too. The real problem/"threat" to the show was in getting rid of Lucy Lawless for so long. She was fun and I enjoyed her openly Australian accent.)

4. THE THING WHERE KARA DIES. (Season 3)

Oof. Just awful. Backstory: Kara dies. In an explosion. And then they take her name out of the credits for an episode and you don't really believe it, and then she's back as a (wink) SPECIAL GUEST STAR. Oh, you rascals!

Problem is, the character does die. The new Kara has almost zero of her old personality, and frankly she's kind of a bore. We get a one-dimensional Close Encounters-like paranoia but little in the way of character development. And they just let the loose end hang out there. Which would be fine -- I mean, whatever -- but stop trying to cover your tracks so hard! "It is the necrotic flesh of Kara Thrace!" Thanks, doctor, for robbing us of any mystery that it was, like, someone else's corpse or something. "OMG SHE SAID SHE WAS AN ANGEL AND THEN SHE ACTUALLY DISAPPEARED!!" Sigh, so I guess she wasn't the daughter of the Lost Cylon or whatever the hell that last-minute escape hatch was.

Look, Kara has a body with blood (not even BABY BLOOD!) in it, and there's a ship with frequencies in it, not to mention metal and tylium ore and probably a stick shift or something. You can tap it with a wrench. In fact, you can take it apart and put it back together again, which they did. So that ship CAME FROM SOMEWHERE. I'll extend my disbelief pretty damn far for sci-fi mysticism, but an unexplained appearance of physical matter from nothingness isn't one of them. When Ellen and Cavil have their Bond villain moment, they could have at LEAST thrown us a frickin' bone. The only possible logical (in the show's logic anyway) explanation is that the Cavil Cylons constructed the new ship, sent an either captured or at-some-point-dead-then-resurrected Kara to Earth, killed her (possibly for the second time), had her resurrected -- since the only possible explanation for THAT is that she is half Cylon by way of the Lost Cylon Daniel Whom We're Introduced to For About Fifteen Seconds in One Exposition-Heavy Episode (which means that half Cylons can ressurect, I guess?) -- then Cavil erased her memories (which we accept he alone can do), and sent her back to the Galactica. OK, fine...but otherwise you're asking me to believe in angels with scientifically documented corporeal presence who also happen to have an exact replica of a Viper ship with them. NO! I REFUSE. To believe in something that loony would cause me to lose my already tenuous grip on reality. Plus it really did kill Kara, so this Magic Arrow can fuck right off.

ARROWNESS: 70% (not 100 because there were a ton of ways they could have dealt with all of this, so it doesn't have the same one-time-only dumbness of BABY BLOOD BABY BLOOD BABY BLOOD)
SPACE-TIME FUCKERY: 100% -- the only unresolved thing in the series that really, really irks me as, y'know, a screenwriting professor or something.

5. THE MAGIC WARP FLUTE (Season 4)

Backstory: There's this song, right, and only Cylons can hear it, see, or the Five Cylons, right, and so when Kara -- whose father is probably a Cylon or something -- plays this song into a computer keyboard, which I guess is "timelessly" designed to be identical with a sideways piano even though to me it looked like a non-standard keyboard (so what if you're using a Mac instead of a PC, or a laptop instead of an adding machine etc. etc.?) (and how do you know which note to start on?) it magically warps you not to Earth, but to a nice inhabitable planet that we might as well call Earth, since it is Earth -- OUR Earth, the "real" one. This is the same device used in such classic sci-fi series as Mario Brothers 3 (two gay men dress up like woodland creatures, play the flute) and Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (one gay man dresses up like an elf, plays the flute).

I mean, whatever. They need to find some kinda way out of there, said the joker to Chief, so in goes the cheat code, revealed to us in the previous episode, and away they go. Tidy way to get out of a nuclear explosion.

Conspiracy theory: before I even get to the significance of Real Earth in the finale, I would float the semi-crackpot theory that the entire ending of BSG is a Taxi Driver-esque ambiguous fantasy ending, a projection of viewers' desires to see the resolution we were hoping to see earlier in the season. It's OUR Earth! Yay! And they're going to give up technology and become...what, mountain men? Maybe vaguely feudal? Are we to assume they'll build a few pyramids before they give up tech for good?

Anyway, in this theory, the admiral makes one final stand against the Cylons doing what he thinks will be the Great Battle (Last Stand) he could have had to begin with. And then someone arms their nukes and accidentally blows everything to hell. Cue "We'll Meet Again." Instead, we have a warp whistle, so here's yr "proper" send-off.

I can't say that that's true, and the ending is too important, so I'll talk about that on its own.

ARROWNESS: 100%
CONTINUUM THINGY: 0% (who gives a shit at this point, I want my tearful farewells!)

6. DANIEL (Season 4)

Backstory: During a series of Big Reveals, Ellen casually discusses with Cavil a MISSING CYLON (male) whom I presume (in a logical interpretation of Kara's continued existence) to be Kara's father, the musician, who taught her the Magic Flue Warp Song. Unfortunately he's been "permanently boxed," so we don't know anything more about him than that he was sensitive and Ellen liked him.

This feels particularly spackle-like, realizing that there's at least one hole that a Missing Cylon might help fill in. Another one: Leoben tells Roslyn, "Adama is a Cylon." Which he assume by the end of the series he isn't, though he does get particularly upset when, at an interview for a gov't white-collar job he is asked if he's a Cylon to test the detector. But Adama doesn't gain anything by being a Cylon and anyway, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, so it makes more sense that Leoben was lying (even though this isn't exactly what Leoben is all about -- he's more about saying cryptic shit that turns out to be sort of true-ish).

Anyway, Daniel feels more like plot hole coverage than anything else, so his impact on the series is limited. It's annoying, though -- it makes a big difference if Kara is actually half Cylon! Not that I want to know, but I don't want it teasingly suggested and then not really committed to one way or the other. The specific post-death details I get of Kara are precisely the ones that I don't actually WANT: that that is, in fact, her flesh on the dog tag (so what? Like it's impossible to get some dead flesh on there?) and the angel stuff. Oh, and the mashed-potato-carving "something out there" homing device on Earth, which I'm just including as part of the Death Arrow generally.

MAGIC ARROWNESS: 99% (leaving 1% for the convoluted "logical" approach to Kara's disappearance)
THREAT TO SERIES: 5% for annoyance.

7. THE OPERA HOUSE (Seasons 2-4)

Y'know, this is never all that satisfying -- beautifully shot and a great little visual motif, but the resolution of it only services the plot. The significance of the "abduction" of Hera is that it leads them...to the CIC. Where everyone was headed anyway. So that Gaius can give a super-lame speech about how "what if GOD is just a word for NATURE, maaaaaan." The various prophecies are broken in several ways anyway, and they hold no real power over us in terms of narrative cohesion (after the reveal of the destruction of the first Earth) so the metaphorical weight of going into the opera house is pretty much rendered moot. Well done and edited and all that. I'm not sure what message we're supposed to take away from the opera house -- it seems to just kind of exist to give us a rug-pulling A-HA! moment at the end. But of all the loose ends they need to tie up, the significance of the opera house is probably the least interesting one. Like -- KARA. FIX HER.

MAGIC ARROWNESS: 20%, not actually used as a Magic Arrow for most of the series and an evocative little dream world we're continually spending some time in.
THREAT TO SERIES: negligible -- I mean, it was cool as an a-ha moment, it's just that the show undercuts its own faith in its mysticism before we get to this resolution, so we kind of stop caring to see how prophecies unfold. Again, prophecies are just the Jenga game -- we're invested in just watching them play it.

More Magic Arrows I'm missing here? Are some of these not really Magic Arrows as I've defined them? (Does how I've defined them make sense?)

More political resonances in the next post. This one's mostly for fangirlboyish plot geekery. (I don't have many people to chat about this stuff with.)

Battlestar Galactica, Post 1 of ?

2009-05-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

A note on the first series: I've never seen the original "Battlestar Galactica" and have only moderate interest in seeing it now. As far as I'm concerned, the new series stands alone as a unique object of study and I don't have much interest in comparing and contrasting. This is in part because much of my appreciation for the "new" BSG is as a current political and social document, which makes the echo of how the 1978 version dealt with these themes interesting but beside the point.

A note on SPOILERS: I came across this line in an old Stanley Kauffman review the other day (he was writing about Easy Rider at the time of its release):

As for that ending, which I had better not reveal, it is a coup de theatre that tries to consummate the satisfaction of the two youths, but after the shock is over, it is seen as only a coup de theatre. Which is why I won't describe it. But when a critic can't describe an action for fear of spoiling it for a prospective viewer, that is a pretty fair index of the action's superficiality.

He's wrong -- there are a lot of pleasures to be had in first discovery, I think, that crucially help shape our reading of a film. (For instance, I've only seen every individual episode of "Battlestar" once, so much of my analysis is based on that "getting through the wilderness" experience of understanding it.) That last sentence is a handy aphorism to have to justify spoilers and smack down simplistic puzzle devices (and certainly one shouldn't approach Kauffman's criticism without expecting plots to be exhaustively spoiled) but the kernel of truth in it applies to BSG and Easy Rider specifically, not to criticism or movie/show-viewing generally. There is not a single device in this series, which I'll cover in my "Magic Arrows" section, that ever fundamentally adds to the social or emotional resonance of the series. Most are clunkily convenient, a few are inspired pieces of "puzzle film" mindfuckery, a few threaten to tear at the fabric of the series, though that's a resilient fucking fabric (like the ship itself), so maybe not. Point being, most of my discussions will only "ruin" the gimmicks, which in themselves are probably the least satisfying aspects of the show. However, it will also "ruin" the discoveries of relationships, character arcs, etc., that are powerful to watch for the first time cold.

Still, there are a ton of spoilers below. I'm going to be talking about the entire series, every plot twist (I can remember), every character relationship (I care to write about), every theme (I interpret or invent). Since I encourage anyone who can read, and anyone who can't, to see this show, take that as your only warning. Nothing is off-limits, though I'll start with enough generalizing that you'll probably stop reading by the time I get to the Arrows.

Cut for spoilers: Age After Bush and Character Issues

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The Wonky Space-Time Continuum in the Age of Obama

First things first: Battlestar Galactica is, like the new Star Trek movie, a parallel universe vision, but in a more serendipitous way (appropriate for the series) than the Smallville Enterprise. Instead, BSG, which began life in 2003 as a miniseries, is the only television work I can think of that has essentially sound-, vision-, and concept-tracked the Age of Obama before it happened. By Age of Obama, I really mean Age After Bush -- with the kind of defeated-but-hopeful, pragmatic-dabbling-in-mystical, progressive-yearning-to-"go-back" energy that anyone who even casually supported the Kerry campaign (or at least voted for him) understood on election night 2004.

Starting with such a specific political reference may seem to do a disservice to some of the more universal and longstanding political themes that come up in BSG, but in all of its (many) warts and all of its (many) triumphs, the exhilarated feeling that often followed a particularly good one-two punch of episodes over the course of the past few months (never three -- we did it once and it was like watching Tarkovsky) resembled nothing so much as the jumbled state of high hopes and cold realism and distaste for melodramatic manipulation and joy in at least feeling something that accompanied this period of time in my life.

BSG presages many issues that wouldn't be given a mainstream platform until after-the-fact, but were happening concurrently. In Season 3, BSG dealt with occupation, torture, and anti-colonial resistance not only better than every half-assed gesture toward these issues in post-apocalyptic movies like Children of Men, which might be the antithesis on BSG (more on that later, I hope); it dealt with it in one of the only sustained, politically relevant, and politically/dramatically satisfying ways I've ever seen, recalling Battle of Algiers more than Children of Men. Watch President Roslin recommend the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (most likely modeled on South Africa, not U.S.-sanctioned torture, but the situation on New Caprica is arguably more evocative of the latter) -- and then watch the Truth Commission never actually happen, not intentionally but simply because there were more important things to worry about(!) (to be fair, Baltar's trial addresses many of these issues more efficiently, if somewhat reductively) -- and try not to think of the show's relevance. BSG not only got the broad strokes right, it got the mess right. And that's in keeping with its value -- oftentimes its messes, occurring naturally from lack of foresight on the part of the writers and the sheer inability to juggle so many things at once, more accurately REFLECT life-as-it-is even as its idealism -- its PREDICTIVE streak -- argues the opposite or something else entirely.

Case in point: In Season 4, it even got breast cancer right, after seeming to botch it the first time around (see Magic Arrows). (Like many things BSG, the series is strong enough to prop up its weaknesses and, in this case, actually transforms a weakness into a retroactive strength.) The recurrence of the president's cancer leads to a debilitating, prolonged fight with the disease that as far as I know is unprecedented in any television show. Breast cancer, of course, could only be dealt with adequately in a longer format; half of the pain of the disease is in the watching, the waiting, the inexplicable improvements and devastating, sometimes sudden, setbacks. I'm usually hyper-conscious of how cancer survivor imagery is used in media only because I experienced it firsthand, too young to fully understand it but old enough for it to have a profound emotional and intellectual impact on my life. The show eventually gets it all right, in part simply by dint of doing it for so long. The dual purpose of prolonging the disease in the show -- to fulfill a (by Season 4 weirdly begrudging and obligatory) bit of mystical prophecy and to keep Laura Roslin alive until the final episode -- combines to really get at the actual dual purpose (not to be too presumptuous, this was my experience of it) of surviving in the first place; a desire to believe in magical things (that the disease might be miraculously cured) and a necessarily arbitrary goal (I just want to make it to Thanksgiving. I just want to make it to Christmas. I just want to make it to the new year.) It gives special resonance, for me, to the conclusion of the series, which I'll talk about more later.

So the sociopolitical lens through which to look at Battlestar is broken into two lenses mentioned above. The REFLECTIVE lens, though eerily prescient, places it within a complex web of political realities -- in its inclusions and its omissions -- that, though often weaknesses of the series, indelibly and powerfully mark it in time. Its omissions, in areas like feminism and a more enlightened view of human sexuality, are a product of its time, perhaps, but also remind us that BSG isn't "Star Trek" -- society as a whole is not more enlightened in BSG than we are (even at our best); if the political and legal policy messages are largely liberal/progressive, there are plenty of conservative, even reactionary, social messages. When the president of our own country can't bring himself to recognize gay marriage in his rhetoric (even if this doesn't reflect his politics or policies), the uncertain question of the role of gays in the military and Colony society is at least reflective, if not ideal by a long shot.

The PREDICTIVE lens almost invariably falls in the realm of policy. Orders, blanket pardons, bills we never read (dealing with abortion, "interracial" mixing), legal trial outcomes. And in this realm the show is firmly on the side of a modest progressive voice. Let's not forget that, e.g., prosecuting torture has only become (comparatively) a radical progressive measure in recent times, and that this is largely due to the further erosion of the two-party system at the hands of extremists in one party. The goal of a progressive torture policy is simply to return to a pre-Bush Geneva Convention standard of it that recognizes torture as illegal, period, with no significant semantic debate on what constitutes torture (an understanding that in matters of torture, the spirit trumps the letter). An 00s'-era progressive nostalgia, different from more longstanding conservative nostalgia, locates a return to more reasonable policies (a Reagan or pre-Reagan tax on the wealthy, a pre-Bush contraction of the powers of the president, etc.) both before (in the case of torture) and concurrent with (in the case of dealing with the economy) progressive change happening in the future.

BSG's politics are nearly identical. The short-term ideal is a status quo that existed -- even with its deep-seated problems -- just before the attack on the Colonies. And the show never gives up, until its dying breath, of the power of that system, since life without it is not a life worth living (according to our protagonists). The long-term ideals are generally progressive -- erasing hatred between the Colonies' ethnicities (dealt with clumsily but effectively in "The Woman King"), healing the wounds of economic colonization between Colonies (the tylium refinery; the prison episodes; the early role of Tom Zarek), and -- in a symbolic, touching gesture -- trying to rewrite the rules of law from essentially nothing save a few precious law books. This moment, when Lee Adama decides to aid the defense of Gaius Baltar, reminds us that laws are not an oral tradition, and the destruction of the literal stuff of law is its (potential) undoing (shades of the memory tubes in 1984, though for the most part BSG avoids easy post-Orwellian dystopianism in favor of an American liberal pragmatism). The poltically avoided ideals are largely social -- the roles of women in meaningful relationships (h/t girlboymusic), the roles of non-heterosexuals. The show has trickily erased most racial difference and instead posited a world in which location rather than phenotype causes inequality. To the extent to which we accept this somewhat similar (but fundamentally different from, e.g., historical U.S. conception of race in white/non-white binary) world of racial difference, there aren't many significant issues of "BSG race" (excluding Cylons as "race") that aren't at least perfunctorily addressed (e.g. the clumsy overt racism in "The Woman King").

The elephant in the room in terms of a sociopolitical argument is the Cylons. I constantly asked myself what political role they served in the show at any given point, and the most adequate answer I can think of is that they serve a political role when it's convenient and a narrative (plot-centered) role most of the rest of the time. Though well-acted, all of the "original" Cylons (no word on the Final 5 until later) except for Grace Park as Boomer/Athena (#8) and maybe Tricia Helfer as Caprica/Maoist (#6) primarily function as an easily externalized inhuman threat. Issues of humanity for all Cylons, not just ones with whom we've become accustomed as "human" characters, only happens when there is no reincarnation device, when death is death. And even then we still want the majority of the Cylons (the diabolical priest Cavil, the "mystic"-as-advanced-script-reader Leoben, Lenny and Carl, aka "the anonymous black and white duo" Cylons, mixed bag and before long moot point Lucy Lawless) to die and never come back (I mean maybe some of you like Leoben or something, but he doesn't serve any important role after his creepy housewife fantasy on New Caprica falls through). I'll mention the Cylons-as-humans-too stuff as the post goes on, but for the most part this doesn't interest me, and even in the show the cohabitation of Cylons and humans is treated as a bit of a footnote in the bizarre final post-script. Except in a few cases, most of the politics is with the humans reacting to external forces, and that is to a large degree my interest in the show's politics -- not what the Cylons represent, but what the humans do about it.

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The Bad, the Ugly, and the Disappointing: Characters

One of BSG's strengths is the way it deals with individual character psychology. Yet the show is surprisingly uneven with relationships between characters. Conversely, the seasons can differ wildly, from the promise:disappointment ratio of first half of season one with second half of one, and the assuredness:WTFness ratio of Season 3 versus Season 2 (all respectively). Season 3 absolutely towers over the others in terms of its depth, its consideration of bigger issues, and in some ways its character development. So here's a focus on characters with an eye for season arcs (not so much series arc, which will be later), divided into three categories: Ugly, Bad, Disappointing. I'm starting with weaknesses (1) because I'm reading Stanley Kauffman, whose reviews are fairly formulaic -- spoilers-problems-qualified praise-general assessment -- and (2) because in many ways the weaknesses, some of them very weak indeed, are important in considering why, as a whole, the show works as well as it does.

The Ugly: Stuttering, Puttering, and Planning in Season 2
Season 2 feels like pieces being put into place mixed with general casting about for an arc. It's a sophomore slump, not as bad as Mad Men's desperate search for a story, but a slump nonetheless. The deus ex machina-style jump-start of the series at the end of season 2 would, for any other series, probably derail things, but after the faltering of the second season we're, along with the shock, somewhat relieved to see ONE. YEAR. LATER. The founding of New Caprica is in itself the closest the writers themselves get to a Magic Arrow miracle, an inspired re-tooling that, given the unevenness of what precedes it, doesn't feel like cheating (or if it does, doesn't feel like a compromise) and wonderfully opens up the universe, along with effectively saving several characters. But let's start with the weakest characters, then episodes, then themes, many of which appear in Season 2.

Kat: The worst character in the series by a country mile; the writers just have no frakking clue what to do with Kat. She was even shaky in her marginal role (along with at least one other later quasi-incompetent but still grandfathered-in first season rookie, Hot Dog) as the shaky civilian recruited in an emergency to fill the pilot ranks. But she's far worse when her one-note acting is asked to stretch beyond resentment of being second-best; we're actually asked to believe that she has improved as a character, become stronger, when that note is just as grating as it's ever been. The writers see it, obviously, but they just can't bring themselves to off her in true BSG fashion -- an episode that starts giving us odd personal details of minor characters, which almost inevitably = DEATH, SORRY -- until far too late in the series. Whenever she's on screen, I'm completely ripped out of the series for basic reasons -- she's clearly out of her league actingwise, not only a weak presence in the company of strong character actors, but she's miscast. The only believable character trait that Kat has is that she sucks as a pilot but is the best that the military can do given the circumstances. This is a marginal role that could have used some developing -- how far can an incompetent person get before they're even incompetent by desperate standards? -- but instead they actually pit her head to head against Starbuck. This is like seeing someone sucker punch a bully at a local high school and putting her straight into a boxing ring. She is utterly slaughtered, the connection between her and Starbuck 100% false and her ending particularly ungraceful. (Remember what I said about getting cancer imagery right? Reverse that and condense into one episode.)

Poor casting is probably the number one sore spot in the series, even given all of its Magic Arrows and convenient wrap-ups and deus ex machina moments, as its the only thing that rots the series from the inside out. To continue the metaphor, the BSG series is very much like the ship itself -- largely decorative exterior (essentially a cross between a war movie, a special effects space movie, and a soap opera) is somehow stable and reliable when it's really in action, and getting to know the insides of it more intimately (and the people who run it) makes the disconnect all the more powerful. When we're reminded in the final season that they've essentially been flying around the universe in a mock-up of a battlestar (this is hinted at in the Pegasus subplot, which I'll get to in a second) some of the early themes stemming from the miniseries that we've forgotten about are reiterated. Everyone in power is there accidentally. It's an oddly affirming reminder; these people, past their prime or far FROM their prime, are doing their best and moderately succeeding just in surviving. (For all its mysticism, there aren't too many Star Wars-like "one shot destroys the Death Star" moments in BSG.)

Anyway, when the people inside that structure are rotten, it's the one thing that seems to significantly damage viewer morale, as it were. We want to want to spend time with these characters, the stock characters, the "deep" characters, the central characters, the minor characters. And the show is smart enough to know when a character isn't working, either retooling him/her or offing him/her. The latter is unpleasant but satisfying, like spring cleaning, and the show seems vaguely aware of its own machinations in cleaning house: "ah, yes, Billy just proposed to Dee! They're gonna kill him!"

Billy: Actually not as weak a character in retrospect, and one who had a lot of room for improvement and development. I do wonder whether or not he just wanted out. But I can imagine him getting much darker and more pessimistic as the series continued; his inclusion in "ugly" is for the typical gracelessness with which they disposed of him. Not as egregiously tacky as Kat's swift radiation-induced leukemia (it's almost like the writers resented Kat, and wanted her to go in the most gruesome possible way, as a -- shock! -- druggie who eventually, for her own hubris, is pretty much melted away in graphic detail), the stand-off that eventually takes care of Billy is arbitrary and false. The relationship between Billy and Dee hasn't had enough time to develop, and his impromptu proposal deserved a more lighthearted deflection. This also sets off the relationship between Dee and Lee, which doesn't work for a variety of reasons (some of which the show deals with with characteristic frankness) but also doesn't work for performance reasons. The actors just don't really work together very well, so we don't care to see them together. It holds none of the underlying tension of seeing, e.g., Chief and Cali or Kara and Sam together. As a catalyst, almost nothing good comes from Billy's death -- Dee/Lee, an unresolved civilian conflict, a lapse in the shows thoughtfulness in dealing with internal politics (we don't care enough about the faction civilians who end up killing Billy to care whether or not they live or die, which is rare in the series even for civilians who have done worse). And of course there's...

Tory: Tory worked well as a background character, and it was nice that she reflected a change in Roslin's personality in Season 2 rather than seeming to be the impetus for that change. Politics got dirtier, so did Roslin, so did Roslin's assistant. But there are cracks even in these early points: Tory seems to have far too much control; even if she were flat-out evil (as she becomes in a cheap attempt to deepen her character later) nothing is hidden from Laura Roslin. That's part of the genius of the president character -- she is always completely in control of everything, a political wheeler and dealer whose personality traits were forged dealing with kindergartners and whipping poor high school writing into something at least marginally competent (we presume). As a subordinate, Tory works just fine, but in keeping with the Russian roulette that helps decide which minor characters are going to be killed and which will be promoted to Major Characters, the show makes the terrible decision to give Tory more presence and more of a role in the direct development of the series to its conclusion. It doesn't work. Tory has no backstory, has no particularly interesting characteristics aside from assisting in dirty politics. Every character turn they give her is false to the character and, frankly, the actress can't handle them. She is self-satisfied and empowered after her Big Change. False -- she's a crony, she can't play self-satisfied from this character; this character is fundamentally a weasel. She is a reluctant temptress sent to cajole info out of Baltar. False -- of her many tricks, turning them isn't one of them, and aside from just functionally not being able to sell sex appeal (especially when there's a Six on the show) it feels shallow. Momentary hand-wringing about it doesn't alleviate the bitter aftertaste of the questionable plot convenience of this change. She slowly becomes pure evil. Totally false -- again, there is nothing "pure" in a weasel character. This would be like letting Baltar himself start to buy into his own messianic rhetoric completely -- indeed, his occasional buying-in and occasional buying-out is totally in line with his character: what else is a Messiah than someone who really buys his own hype?

Hot Dog and others: Oh, the pilots. So many bad (actor) pilots! And for the most part most of them are set dressing. Sometimes people die and you aren't even sure you've met them before. Which is fine -- I mean this is part snazzy effects war movie after all. I still don't remember who the main character in Black Hawk Down was (it was supposed to be Josh Hartnett, bu they ALL looked like Josh Hartnett). I won't get into nepotism of the younger Olmos having this role through the entire series, but suffice it to say that I didn't buy his magical, "natural" transition into ace fighter pilot (he scans "fresh meat" through the entire series). I didn't want to see him be the person to fly out when we're supposed to understand that no one important is going to die in a battle. When Starbuck or Lee went out in Season 1, you could cheer at the effective "invincibility shield" that their presence signalled. Not true of Hot Dog, and they have a few misplaced real-character attributes pegged to him in Seasons 3 and 4 that don't change that perception, though I do like the thought of him and Cali getting together for a tryst and winning each other over with dopey platitudes. "It's like, when I look at you, I just feel like I know you, y'know?" "Yes. I know exactly what you mean. It's like we were together in another life."

The Bad: Four Years of Mixed Bags

For the most part, bad characters are merely not as strong as other main characters but forced onto the same stage. They usually don't flounder (that would be for the ugly category) but they also peck away at credibility. Some of these pecks are resolved at some point in the series and resemble charming dents from a previous battle, some are good ideas gone awry, some are strong characters who lose their footing as the story sweeps them aside or into places they don't belong.

Ellen Tigh: When Ellen was introduced, there's a brief delight in the thought that she might be a Cylon (the episode, "Tigh Me Up Tigh Me Down," directed by Edward James Olmos, is incongruously delightful, like a particularly quirky X-Files monster-of-the-week). Then there's brief delight later when you realize she's not a Cylon and that yes, this is just a crazy trampy wifey character we're going to have to live with. And then that gets old.

...And then it gets older.

...Etc. Ellen never really worked in the series even conceptually -- Tigh doesn't make sense with his maneating wife in tow. She's largely responsible for a deterioration of his character, save for a fascinating Cheneyesque stint as commander, throughout the second season (he suggests what Cheney would look like as Obama's vice president or something). And of course there are obvious reasons Tigh gets his groove back -- loses Ellen, loses eyeball. Sea captain is a great look for Tigh through Season 3 and the first part of Season 4.

Also, there's no way to define Ellen outside of her relationship with Tigh. Sometimes this is almost comically awkward, as you wonder what the fuck it is she does on the Battlestar all day in his tiny room (aside from drink), and why they couldn't just let her live on one of the many civilian ships with better amenities. They could still fly her in at crucial superego moments but she wouldn't have to coexist with the daily routine of the ship. The acting itself is insubstantial -- I don't buy her as a seducer/manipulator, even if I do buy her as a tramp -- and even for a closet jelly-legged coward like Tigh I don't buy the power that she has over him. Ever. The "eternal romance" reveal is particularly phony: I find it really hard to believe that they weren't divorced before the attack on Caprica. In fact, their being divorced then reunited on the ship to deal with all the problems that led to the divorce could have been far, far more convincing.

Admiral Cain: Here we get into some issues of sexuality when it comes time for Razor, but suffice it to say for now that the real problem with Cain is that the actress isn't tough as nails. She plays Cain as a bitch, not as a brutal, hardened survivor; the Razor backstory is somewhat helpful in this regard, but ultimately she strikes more as a power-hungry businesswoman than a power-hungry military officer. I buy her at the head of a corporation, not a battlestar. Why couldn't they have cast an older woman whose role in the military was more of a mirror inverse of Adama -- someone for whom gender is somewhat beside the point, so that philosophy, not personality, was the driving antagonism? Cain, as played by Michelle Forbes, presents a brief inconvenience: how can we quickly dispose of her? As opposed to the harder realities of military command, which can't be so easily circumvented. The writing here is lazy and too easy. She's not just a woman commander, she's also significantly younger than the other commanders; we assume some kind of "unnatural" ascension to the top of the chain of command (not that we mind this when Lee Adama does it). She's not just "hard," she's SADISTIC, and so is her crew. When we're introduced to the chilling possibility that Cylon pain is as "human" as human pain, and that there are comparable psychological traumas (in the form of the Six that I call the Maoist, for her transformation into a Godardian heroine after being freed from the Pegasus), we get about as much subtlety in the sadism of Six's torturers as we do in Full Metal Jacket, or maybe Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.

All of these "special case" scenarios -- a commander who doesn't necessarily deserve the power she has and has a record of outright brutality (Adama at one point in Razor claims he might have made her decision to strip a civilian ship of its supplies. This is possibly the most bullshit thing his character says in the entire series, all to try to paper over the mistakes in conceiving of the Cain character this way in the first place -- Razor reads largely as an apologia for the ill-thought-out resolution of the Pegasus storyline). Her officers are either sadists (the torturer) or buffoons (her new Executive Officer, who has a central role in the hands-down worst episode of the series, "Black Market"). Her crew consists almost entirely of characters out of Starship Troopers. There is a big fat strawman moral imperative for Adama to make decisions that he never should have made in ordering her assassination (yeah right). Ultimately backing down from it doesn't fix the problem -- it's the decision that counts for Adama, not the execution, and to put Starbuck in that situation (essentially sending her to her probable death after committing the assassination) is doubly untrue to his character.

And then there's the gay thing. Cain is half-openly gay, in that the entire ship seems to know that she's in a relationship with Maoist Six in the Razor film but it's given an oddly sinister tone in how it's presented: sideways glances, an air of conspiracy. It's complicated: I mean, we know who Six is, and we know who Cain is, and they don't know the other yet. And Cain is a commanding officer carrying on an affair with one of her crew. In a show that openly dealt with sexuality, this wouldn't present a problem -- it's no different than if Adama carried on an affair with one of his crew. But it is different, because she is the only explicitly homosexual character in the entire series. Not one other homosexual relationship. IN A MILITARY SOAP OPERA. I mean come ON. The show isn't a fraction of the amount of dumb it would need to be to obviously present us with a character whose cruelty or conflict stems from the "problem" of his or her homo- or non-heterosexuality, but it doesn't really excuse the hush-hush way the show deals with non-heterosexuality in general -- presumably Cylons are inherently bisexual, to the extent that the "bi" part even matters to them, but this isn't very well explored since, e.g., Gaius is featured as the main subject of a Baltar-Caprica-Lucy Lawless love triangle -- it's more "I Kissed a Girl" (Perry) than "I Kissed a Girl" (Sobule). The relationships are uber-hetero, not just man-on-woman but REAL MEN on REAL WOMEN. Which perhaps is as it should be on the REAL MEN side (I mean jeez, they're in the military) but why aren't the women allowed to be the "men" in their relationships without consequence? Kara (I'll get to her in a moment) is continually punished in weirdly domestic and invasive ways for what appear (reductively) to be her masculine characteristics (don't want a strictly monogamous relationship? See how you like being a HOUSEWIFE SLAVE!). The one gay character coincidentally (and in this case I do allow for the chance that it was a narrative coincidence, since I'm charitable to the show) is both a Controlling Lesbian Boss and a Deeply Conflicted Single Character. (For you see, she has no time for a family, because she is a woman in a man's world. Which is actually statistically true in many fields -- just read some research on women artists [PDF] by the NEA that suggests that women are far less likely to have children than men in various artistic fields, though this is partially the result of women generally being much younger than men.)

Cali: Cali is the rare character who starts off weak and is given the most possible development within her weakness. She succeeds where Kat and Tory both fail (pretty miserably), and where Ellen, say, might have been stronger. The show seems to understand pretty well that Cali is stupid, a dim bulb. In a show that's reluctant to show dim bulbs in a non-threatening -- and perhaps even useful within the military -- way, this is a nice development. Cali is never made to appear secretly savvy about anything; she's not even a particularly good mother. She's just a below-average gal in an extraordinary situation. This isn't a possibility they allow for, e.g., Helo, whose brittle dumbness that is evident in Season 1 is turned into a kind of hardheaded moral righteousness in later seasons. I like Helo, his character works, but part of me wishes they would just let him be a little bit dumber. Other dullards are either misguided (Gaius's cult) or threatening (the Marxist Baltar supporters, the Sons of Aries) or Politically Relevant (the thinly-veiled Christian Scientist Sagittarons, the un-unionized tylium proles). But what about the good-hearted meatheads? The jocks? The peabrains? The dolts? Even Anders is given a veneer of sophistication that his character's life and series development doesn't really bear out.

But Cali deserves more pedestrian strength, like the first wife character, Arabella, in Jude the Obscure, who may not be bright but is at least "man enough" to slaughter a pig (one of the more memorable sequences I think I've ever read, actually). In this metaphor, Chief is Jude and Boomer is the unattainable (eventually attained but still remote) second wife, Sue. But Cali's weakness is weak in almost all respects; she's too forgiving, too weepy (for an actress who doesn't weep very naturally), too damn miserable. I appreciate the startling revelation that Chief makes to Adama that (IIRC) includes an outburst that Cali's breath is like cauliflower and her eyes are dead. This felt right, but it felt right from the eyes of writers shaking their heads about not being able to get rid of Cali sooner. It's unfortunate, because I like Cali's role as a plain person in an extraordinary situation: it was much like Chief's Season 1-3 arc, but...y'know, dumber.

The Defense Lawyer Guy: What was the point of this character? Played with oily charm, sure, but I half expected a Fight Club-style reveal that HE WAS ACTUALLY LEE'S BAD SIDE or something. He was good as a cartoon for one or two episodes (Baltar's trial) but he keeps coming back, they keep trying to psychologize his amorality. This is a mistake -- not everything in this series needs to be psychologized, which is perhaps one of the most annoying offshoots of the New Age of Complexity in "series-arc" shows, the obsessive need to explain everything psychologically, like the awful psychiatric explanation at the end of Psycho. Now that pseudo-psychological impulse has been so deeply ingrained into television arcs that it's getting harder to find appealing character acting (many of the Bad and Ugly candidates fall into the category of "interesting bit role trying to hold its own on the main stage"), which would greatly benefit some of the clunkier relationships and characters in the show. The Defense Lawyer Guy is the perfect example: instead of a bittersweet Usual Suspects-esque kiss farewell, he hangs around for appearances for the rest of the series as we learn about his wife who died and his cat who died and his blah blah blah. I DON'T CARE. The guy is a snake oil salesman -- I don't need to know that he was driven into the business by an overbearing patriarch or something.

Dee: A tough one, because I like Dee. Funnily enough, her suicide was the first BSG moment I ever saw, from a Youtube meme. It reiterates the idea above of superficiality in coup de theatre, but again, it's not the mere existence of coup de theatre that inherently makes it superficial -- but I knew of Dee's death the entire time I watched the series and it didn't fundamentally change my view of her throughout. Her presence in the show is too slight to merit the major character development they attempt in Season 3, and she can't really hold attention when onscreen with Lee, though the show deals with this directly. She knows the relationship is doomed and that they're essentially just having a good time (more on the counter-intuitively progressive role of marriage in the series later). At the same time, though, she seems to be telegraphing her character's weaknesses in the series itself -- "I know I'm just a bit player, but it's nice that I get to share the stage with the Starbucks and Adamas and Roslins, even for such an implausible and obviously temporary reason." Dee's problem is just that she was a good supporting character that wasn't given much to do. Even her role in the CIC seemed somewhat superfluous, and given that they could make up shit for her to do, her sitting quietly in various long shots of the action didn't give us a great opportunity to see her do much. On the Pegasus with Lee she seemed to turn into a kind of Ellen Tigh "wife pet" whose job it was to appear next to her hubby. And they essentially lose Dee long before we see her suicide "tell" -- finding the jacks on Earth.

But you know what, the suicide isn't true to her character at all. Since when is Dee all about the fantasy of settling on Earth? Is it because she's a lapsed Sagittarion and this directly contradicts her religious hopes and beliefs? (And suicide doesn't?) This is a woman who knowingly entered a temporary marriage for the hell of it, whose most salient characteristics in the show were her ability to fade into the background and diligently do whatever it is her job was (communications or something?) or to kind of roll with the narrative punches. She was pretty good at rolling with those punches, but they didn't give her enough punches. It seems more like the writers realized she was serving no useful role, aside from an almost throwaway shot-reverse glance from Gaeta that for about 10 seconds in the entire series suggests that there's a potential for a romance there (which is a shame, because otherwise I'd be more confident that Gaeta was gay).

The Disappointments: Less-Baggy Mixed Bags

Anders: What a dope. I mean, he's good as a dope. I like that Kara understands from the start that their marriage is a farce. But the show tries to have it both ways -- we want them not to be together, but we're expected to believe that Kara kinda sorta needs him. This would be a nice, and perhaps true to a messy marriage, if it were dealt with more consistently. But they keep trying to fold Sam back into the action. Most interesting development was when Kara was basically "done" with Anders but wouldn't divorce him, so he just stayed on another ship until Kara got horny. For a brief period, they gave Anders the role that Ellen Tight could have had for the bulk of the series. But once again they try to pile on Big Revelations and Big Emotional Moments. Thing is, Anders is better as a jock than he is as a "misunderstood brainy jock." He doesn't acclimate to the New Caprica revolutionary unionist storyline like Tigh or Chief; he certainly doesn't acclimate to the Big Reveal (in fact, he appears essentially unchanged, even superficially a la Tory, afterward). He doesn't even acclimate to baldness particularly well. His final send-off, about wanting to achieve "perfection" as a Pyramid player, is a last-ditch effort to slather some profoundness on his backstory, but I don't believe it. I bet he was thrilled to win a championship ring or whatever. In fact, he should have had some kind of fixation on his championship ring -- it is about winning at all costs for him; that was how we were introduced to him, wanting to take out as many Cylons as he possibly could.

Kara Thrace: No, I'm not saying Kara's a bad character. That would result in my being pretty much killed. But she's the biggest waste in the whole series, a tragic waste, and the place where the show's underlying sexism starts to show in an ugly way. Kara is developed in a high school angst protagonist role, a loner who lives for herself first and is good at whatever she does. She's from the same cloth as Princess Leia, with a bit of Ashlee Simpson folded in. But some of the abuses she goes through in this show are worthy of Kill Bill, including a hospital scene that's disturbingly reminiscent of that film's rock-bottom worst scene. BSG is smarter than Kill Bill and usually the show knows how to hedge its bets to avoid some of Tarantino's more embarrassing pitfalls, but the sentiment is there: child abuse, medical abuse, emotional abuse, domestic abuse. She gets to suffer the gamut of "woman's pain," the result of existing sexism taken to sadistic extremes. And her perseverance through these tests makes her, in many ways, the strongest character on the show. Lee can't even handle floating in outer space for a few hours without turning into a wuss with an existential crisis -- Kara's crises seem to emanate from her at all times, sometimes overpowering her ability to function but usually not. I didn't believe that she was "evenly matched" with Lee in the boxing episode (an excellent one-off that makes exposition seem fresh and has some beautifully photographed boxing scenes); interesting thing about Lee is that he's a pretty boy. He'd get his ass knocked out.

And even these weirdly psychosexual abuses I could forgive in the face of that strength, in the steady, stubborn performance of Katee Sackhoff, who seems to be unable to make herself laugh or cry on command but in a way that is suggestive of her character (Kara's laughter and tears are forced, too). But the show abandons her, just like Starbuck's dad abandoned her. She's left adrift in a convoluted series of plot machinations and they never really figure out how to bring her back. And even this is self-consciously alluded to in the failure to resolve the mystery of her crash-landing on earth, but self-consciousness doesn't ameliorate flaws, it just recognizes them. They're still flaws (as Starbuck could probably tell you). Kara's faith is compelling, but she doesn't work as a divinely inspired nutcase. Kara's return is mysterious, and I don't mind the loose ends of it, but she's not a fucking angel. She has DNA. They ran blood tests. Her ship has stuff programmed into its frequencies. You can't just let that go and pretend that Season 4 Kara just "doesn't count." But it doesn't really count -- her actions feel convenient to the churning of the plot, which was one of the nice things about Starbuck generally before then -- she always stood slightly outside the plot, even when the plot was ostensibly about her. We're never worried about whether or not she'll die, we just want to know how she'll escape. One problem is that as the show goes on, we know how to "read" a character being written out of the show, as if (as in a standard soap opera) there was a particular strain of music that might tell us in the opening sequence that a particular character was about to disappear for awhile. That gives ALL major characters Starbuck's invulnerability to suddenly disappearing. (When Starbuck does suddenly disappear, and her name is erased from the following episode's credits, it feels almost like a hoax, which it essentially is, and the other characters' grief feels put-on since we know pretty well she's coming back. Were she not to come back, it would be even more disappointing, since the "death" is so sudden and so stupid.)

Kara's a tough character to develop, since one her most salient traits is that she doesn't really "develop." She's too hard, too set in her ways, too sure of herself. The paradox is that any tampering with her feels like an act of God(s), and any major personality shift feels more like a plot device than a character development. They use Kara for plot purposes almost exclusively in Season 4, which along with the other abuses basically makes her a site for unfortunate shit to happen to. This usually works in-story (how's Kara going to get out of this one?) but extra-story (i.e. in setting up the rest of the narrative) it's destructive. They shoehorn in her "dad" (after absurdly introducing an eighth Cylon like ONE EPISODE before we're supposed to vaguely make the connection that her father is the boxed "Daniel" model...or something) and the ensuing, tacked-on (but well handled considering) piano lessons are used as a Magic Arrow. It feels like pounding in a puzzle piece until it fits instead of finding the right one. But hey, you've got like three episodes left and you can't just start making new puzzle pieces. One downfall of the puzzle structure -- you have to finish the puzzle.

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In the next post, I'll discuss the season arcs versus the series arc generally and I'll get to those pesky Magic Arrows. At some point I'll talk a bit more about some of the (somewhat conservative but also counter-intuitively progressive) social politics and try to go more into depth about what makes the politics, and the show's general -- and unique -- apocalypse allegory work (hint hint: it's because it's not actually about the apocalypse).

@skyesweetnam Rtrn SkyeFri!!!!! #skyefriday

2009-05-15T09:28:00.001-07:00

#bckBckBCK!

So for those of y'all who didn't know, I'm on Twitter now. Score another point for crtxtcism!

Also on Twitter -- Skye Sweetnam! How time flies -- I can officially buy Skye a DRANK.

She has apparently been recording noo songs in the stoodio. No further news, except that her board sez it's a "new direction." Considering she went in about twenty different directions at once last time, one new one might be a good idea.

Other notable newish tweeterers: Aly and AJ (working on new album with pop-punk peeps e.g. Rob Cavallo) and Marit Larsen. If you're not following Demi Lovato yet, do so.

Not much else to report, so here is an adorable picture of my cat.