On
October 1st of this year, having decided that I'd gone long enough
without listening to any new music, I plugged my iPod into my car stereo,
dialed up American Music Club's The Golden Age, and broke my embargo. Why AMC? Because
they're one of my all-time favorite bands, and because I'd had The Golden Age sitting on my shelf for
almost a full year, unlistened-to—which seemed an unnecessarily cruel
price to pay for musical chastity. Also, after a year of listening to my
collection in alphabetical order, I found the habit hard to break.
Other
habits proved equally stubborn. For the past year I've been listening to
roughly 700 to 1000 songs a week for Popless, and plowing through that field
has necessitated a lot of skimming. (Hey, I've heard Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland"
probably 100 times… I don't need to spend another 10 minutes with it to know
that I'm not going to delete it from my hard drive.) So when I listened to The Golden Age for the first time, I quickly
grew impatient. The
Golden Age is
a decent record. It's not American Music Club's best work, and coming on the
heels of 2004's welcome comeback Love Songs For Patriots, it's hardly revelatory. But
the songs are reasonably catchy and pleasant, with some typically witty
wordplay and earnest sentiment courtesy of bandleader Mark Eitzel. There's just
nothing—how can I put this delicately?—essential about it.
After
a year spent sorting and culling, I've gotten my music collection—the
portion on my hard drive at least—pared down to about 80% all-time
favorites, and 20% music set aside for further research. And having spent a
year listening mostly to those favorites, it's awfully hard to stop weighing
all new inputs against the music I'm planning to enjoy for the rest of my life.
When a song sounds merely adequate, my first impulse these days is to hit the
skip button. And then, ultimately, the delete button.
I
know some people can't condone that. Yes, cutting tracks from an album destroys
the integrity of the album itself, and yes, maybe I'd come to like a song more
if I give it time. I'm aware of all those arguments. But after a year of
Popless, one question has begun to dominate my consideration of all music, new
and old:
Do
I need this?
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When
I initiated the Popless project a year ago, I had several goals in mind, but
perhaps the most important was to stem the tide of the unwanted. As part of the
process of determining what's review-worthy, I'd been spending the majority of
my music-listening time sorting through bands and albums that I didn't much
like. And along with my dampening enthusiasm, I was beginning to wonder if
wading through slop ultimately impedes a critic's ability to
recognize—and properly dismiss—mediocrity.
A
few interesting blog-essays have recently considered why it is that book
reviews and record
reviews are so much more generally positive than movie reviews and TV
reviews. The obvious conclusion? It's much harder to cover the waterfront with
books and music than it is with TV and movies. Outside of the big titles that
demand to be reviewed—which may well suck, and thus get properly
panned—the bulk of book and CD reviews are written by reviewers who do a
certain amount of pre-selecting, and tend to gravitate to what they know
they'll like.
But
there's another reason for the broadly boosterish tone: We critics have to
write about something. And after listening to 10
middling CDs in a row, when we come across an album that sounds adventurous, or
tuneful, or even just competent, we run the risk of
overrating it. This has happened to me personally just over the last couple of
months, as I've returned to listening to new music. I'd been slogging through
the key 2008 releases suggested by friends and colleagues, and after
registering my immediate impressions and doing a lot of pruning, I came up with
about 500 songs (from about 75 records) that I considered "keepers." Then I
made an iPod playlist of those songs, put it on shuffle, and was startled by
how weak and pointless so much of it sounded. Some perfectly fine songs by,
say, Headlights or The Low Anthem, may have seemed like new classics in the
context of the albums they came from, but heard immediately after Constantines
or Gnarls Barkley, they were so, so very skippable.
************************
So…
What do I need?
As
I've been catching up with the music of 2008, I've noticed that a lot of my
favorite acts—such as Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Deerhoof, Lambchop and Eric
Matthews—have been recording albums that stay well inside their comfort
zones. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Critics write the same things over and over
again—using words like "jangly" and "jagged" to describe abstractions
like sound and emotion—so why shouldn't a singer slip back into a
familiar cadence, or a guitarist retreat to the same three chords? What some
call hackery, I'm perfectly willing to call liturgy. We repeat ourselves
because sometimes that's how we most effectively make ourselves understood.
Still,
when listening to a song that sounds a lot like one I've already heard, the
feeling of warm familiarity eventually starts to fade, and I inevitably end up
comparing the new and the old, and wondering which I'm going to want to hear a
year from now. Because while musicians keep on writing new songs, the vast
majority of them—even by the established artists—are pretty
forgettable. That's not to say they won't do in a pinch. Even the blandest song
can approach greatness if the performance is strong, or if the song fits snugly into an album
of killer material. But as I've tried to decide what songs best represent
2008—based on my crash course, bear in mind—I've ended up
fast-forwarding restlessly through albums I initially thought I liked, because
it turns out I'd been mainly responding to atmosphere, not songwriting.
Consider
Girl Talk's Feed
The Animals,
an energetic party record assembled by Gregg Gillis with his usual mash-up
flair. I thoroughly enjoyed Girl Talk's Night Ripper, and on first pass through Feed The Animals, I thought Gillis had come up
with another winner. Then, upon listening more closely, frustration set in.
Gillis has a knack for combining hip-hop, alt-rock and kitsch-pop in such a way
that it all meshes seamlessly, but though his albums are broken up into
individual tracks, those tracks don't generally display much internal cohesion.
They flow out of what comes before and into what comes next, as Gillis adds and
drops samples with no clear pattern or purpose, beyond making listeners smile
and say, "Hey, I recognize that!" Girl Talk comes closest to making the kind of
sample-driven dance music I've always longed for, slamming together familiar
fragments of popular culture in a gleeful free-for-all. But there's something
missing here—some layer of commentary or structural brilliance that would
make Girl Talk's music endure. Like a lot of what I've heard from 2008, Feed The Animals lacks songs.
************************
For
the most part, 2008 has been a lousy year, culturally. It was a lousy year for
music, a lousy year for movies, a lousy year for the economy—just a lousy
year. Good people died, both famous (like Paul Newman) and not-so (like my
friend and fellow critic Andrew Johnston). And though a lot of us have reason
to believe that "hope" and "change" are on the way in '09, that doesn't make
looking back on '08 any more fun.
There
have been bright spots, though. Though I need to spend more time with them,
I've been impressed by the latest efforts from Deerhunter, The Hold Steady, Sun
Kil Moon, The Walkmen, Ryan Adams, Sigur Ros and R.E.M. I think that neither
Los Campesinos nor Vampire Weekend could possibly have lived up to their
initial hype, but both bands delivered debut albums that strike me as pretty
winning, and highly promising. Not enough attention has been paid this year to
The Week That Was, Langhorne Slim or The Rosebuds—three acts that
released concise, tuneful records filled with those song dealies I was pining
for a moment ago. And perhaps the best album I've heard lately is Starling
Electric's two-year-old LP Clouded Staircase, which Bar-None reissued in '08, to dispiriting
indifference.
Yet
even with this year's really good albums, I fight the impulse to delete. I
can't help but wonder if I'd be missing anything if I trimmed The Walkmen's You & Me down from 14 songs to 10. All
the songs on that record are good, but they're also all very similar, and I
don't know that 48 minutes of You & Me is necessarily any better than 35 would've been.
Some
friends contend that I'm becoming too picky in my middle age. I've always been
a fairly soft touch as a critic, and I still have a higher tolerance for some
disreputable genres and modes of popular art than a lot of my fellows. (Laugh
tracks? Procedurals? Soft rock? Prestige pictures? Daily newspaper comics? All
okay with me.) This year though,
I've been left relatively cold by a lot of movies that other critics have raved
about, like Ballast, Man On Wire and Slumdog Millionaire. And the same is true of a
lot of the music that people have been recommending to me. I can't quite
embrace Bon Iver, which sounds sweetly atmospheric but naggingly unfinished. I
like Fleet Foxes, but I keep thinking they're too much like My Morning Jacket
but without the exploratory side or the stomping rock side. Lil' Wayne is too
aimlessly raunchy for me; Santogold too shrill; Spiritualized too tuneless;
MGMT too busy. I thought I'd love She & Him, because I like M. Ward and
breathy retro-pop, but Zooey Deschanel's voice is so flat that nearly every
song on that record sounds amateurish and self-indulgent.
Throughout
the year, I've been wondering: What is the responsibility of a critic? Is it to
respond openly and enthusiastically to whatever an artist is trying to do? Or
is it to nitpick it in the name of maintaining some authority? For most of my
career, I've leaned toward the former, but I'm starting to see the value in the
latter. Everything looks flawed to me these days—even the music, movies,
TV shows and books that I love.
When I review Mad
Men or Lost for The TV Club, I often take
pains to note the flaws even as I'm raving about what those shows do right, but
whenever I do that, I wonder if I'm unnecessarily bumming out fans who came to
The TV Club merely to celebrate the good. If I'd reviewed The Shield finale—one of the best
TV endings of all time—would I have been persnickety enough to point out
that some of the dialogue was strained and the ending rushed? If so, would that
have served a purpose? I'm honestly not sure.
So
what's my responsibility to 2008's music? Maybe it's enough just to note how it
all sounds. But is the sound of 2008 the sound of deep reverb, a la Magnetic
Fields, Spiritualized and Vivian Girls? Scuzzed-up power-pop like Jay Reatard,
Cheap Time and Gentleman Jesse? Retro-soul? Robot voices? The post-M.I.A./Go!
Team cheerleader-rock of The Ting Tings and Santogold? Maybe it's the sound of
art-rock bands like TV On The Radio and Sigur Ros taking a hard turn towards
the mainstream with albums that feature smoother surfaces and sharp hooks, or
the sound of Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes disappearing into the woods to wait for
the world to become just a little less lousy.
[pagebreak]
One
thing I've loved about doing Popless is that I've had 11 months to
contemplate—in public—what kind of music I like, and what I'm fine
leaving behind. I've discovered that I'm big into dynamics—songs that
change and have arcs and push for drama—and I'm in thrall to music that
aims for transcendence. I love complicated patterns, and albums that create
their own environment. I like the feeling of spontaneity—of a moment in
time, captured forever—but I also like music to have a guiding
intelligence nudging it along. Adulteration is okay by me. And some measure of
polish is good too.
I'm
not as wowed by indie-rock as I was a decade ago, though I'm sure that some
people would look down the list of bands I've listened to and liked in 2008 and
think that I'm protesting too much. I do still like a lot of music that most
would classify as "indie," either in the business sense or the artistic sense.
But I like my indie-rock with a modicum of ambition, competence, and personal
vision. I'm not wild about lo-fi for its own sake, or ironic kitsch, or even honest kitsch, in the form of
homage.
And
when it comes to the music I deeply love, it's almost all rock 'n' roll and vintage soul. I
like a good beat, a catchy melody, clever arrangements and open emotion. I like
musicians who play their instruments well. I shy away from abrasion, except in
special circumstances. And I've got no problem at all with music that's soft,
pretty—even wimpy. I'm a middle-aged family man. I have nothing invested
anymore in being thought of as a badass.
You
can't convince me that music is aesthetically superior if it's tough to listen
to, or if it's so true to its genre that it could be generated by a machine.
It's not automatically worse, either—but when people
run down another's musical taste based on its lack of edge, I wonder if they're
really interested in the music, or just in pushing folks around.
************************
So
much is determined by context. Last week, the
good people who write for Nerve.com's "Screengrab" blog picked their personal "guilty
pleasure" movies, and on that list were the likes of Meatballs, Big Trouble In Little
China, Rock 'N' Roll High School, Mr. Smith Goes To
Washington
and Backbeat—all movies that no one
should have any reason to feel guilty for liking, unless they're worried about
losing some hardcore cinephile cred. I don't want to pick on the
Screengrabbers, since some of them are my friends and I'm a fan of the site,
but exercises like selecting "guilty pleasures"—or determining what's "overrated"
and what's "underrated"—often say more about the audience the writers are
courting than the quality of what they're labeling. In the broader culture,
bands like The Hold Steady and Drive-By Truckers are underrated, because they
don't reach an audience as large as they deserve. But some close followers of
the alt-rock scene would argue that those two bands get way too much attention. Meanwhile, those
same scenesters might scramble to call a Coldplay or Hall & Oates CD in
their collection a "guilty pleasure" (or excuse it with a mumbled, "that
belongs to my wife"), while out in the real world, those acts are widely
beloved.
One
idea I've tried to explore throughout this year of Popless is that while I do
believe there are objective qualities by which we can evaluate art, ultimately
our taste is wholly subjective, influenced to some degree by
our personal experiences and memories. For example, we can judge, objectively,
whether a piece of music is in tune, or whether the production is slick. But it
won't matter so much that the vocalist is off-pitch if she's our daughter, or
if the lyrics or performance move us in some personal way. Similarly, slick
production might not bother us in if it's a song we remember hearing on the
radio that time that we drove to the beach with our friends—or even if
the song just evokes a moment like
that.
Those
biases would seem to be obvious, yet I heard from a lot of readers throughout
2008 who appreciated my being honest about what I hadn't heard before, or what
I wasn't generally wild about, or what I liked because of when and why I first
heard it. Those personal reactions—so often driven by age, region, or
social circumstance—are why it's important to think of criticism as an
ongoing conversation that as many interested parties as possible can take part
in. Because what I find dull or disposable, someone else might be able to
defend persuasively, based on profound personal experiences that I never
shared.
For
example, it's occurred to me this year that my rock-crit heroes Dave Marsh,
Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs were perhaps too engulfed in the music of the
'70s to really hear some of it. Even though they
mostly championed the right musicians, they also demonized or dismissed artists
who didn't deserve to have their particular brands of self-expression treated
with such scorn. As I've written often this year, I love to study trends in
popular music by "shadowing" the acts who last a long time and score hits in
multiple eras, while never earning much critical respect. But that kind of
study takes time and distance, and it defies the instant analyses required of
day-to-day music criticism.
That's
why you probably shouldn't take any gripes I have about the music of 2008 to
heart. Get back to me in 2018, when I've had to time to live with these albums
a little, and have heard how they sound to me after enduring another decade of
what a wise man once called "life's little ups and downs." Or better yet, check
in 20 years from now with the
future critic who's only 14 years old right now. He or she will undoubtedly
understood more about the music being made today than I ever will.
************************
I'd
be remiss in closing out this year—only one more column to go,
folks!—if I didn't thank my regular readers and commenters for making
this such a rewarding project. I've always thought of writing about music as an
act of fellowship between me and other people who listen to a lot of music. But
before I commenced Popless, I'd been feeling more and more like I was sitting
on a stage, lecturing to an audience of people who were talking amongst
themselves while occasionally nudging each other to say, "Can you believe this
idiot?"
Some
of those feeling recurred this year too. I expected some criticism of my
personal taste, but I didn't expect the occasional criticism of me, personally. Some readers
felt they got to know me better through these columns, and decided that they
don't like me much. When the comments got really rough early on, I started
thinking of ways I could bow out of the project and save some dignity. But I'm
glad I persevered, because the vast majority of you have been very kind in
responding to my personal experiences with your own, and in making suggestions
for bands I should check out.
At
the start of this project, I said I wanted to nurture an environment where
people could comment on music more as enthusiasts than scolds or snobs. I think
this has been a place where readers have felt they could leave a cogent,
heartfelt comment about Tom Petty or R.E.M. or Stephen Stills and not get
bullied for it. I received many notes from people—both publicly and
privately—who said that their music-listening experiences had been a lot
like mine, and that they appreciated having a weekly conversation about bands
they knew and loved. I haven't responded to many of those notes because it would
seem kind of self-congratulatory to do so, but I sure did appreciate them.
In
the wake of Popless, I want to keep digging into the past as often as I can.
I've started to develop an interest in the spacier side of the late-'60s
Greenwich Village and Sunset Strip folk-rock scenes, and I'd like to
investigate some of those lesser-known singer-songwriters. I've also gotten a
lot of suggestions from readers for '70s prog acts I might like; and I'm still
woefully behind on jazz and hip-hop.
One
of my favorite things about being a music fan is discovering some band that
unlocks the door to a scene I'd mostly missed. It's happened to me fairly
regularly over the years: letting The White Stripes guide me to neo-garage, for
example, or Curt Boettcher to sunshine-pop, and then spending months following
that path wherever it winds. Along the way, I encounter a lot of weeds
surrounding the flowers. And I rip them up as best I can, while trying to
remember that what may look like a weed may actually be a plant that hasn't
budded yet. It may not matter much what I like or what I don't like, or what I
praise from the heart and what I praise because it's good enough for now. What
matters is the searching, the contemplation of what's been found, and most of
all the communing with others out toiling in the fields.
This, I need.
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Next
Week: My favorite songs of 2008.