"Everything is over." - Teenage Bottlerocket, "Another Way"
At the beginning of "Grown Folks Business," on The Copyrights' split 7" with the Dopamines Songs About Fucking Up, Adam Fletcher sings:
"How many times can I write the same song / About my sick life and my shit job / I'm getting old and burned out / Putting the same words to the same sounds / You've gotta pick up the slack here / Cause I'm all out of ideas "
In pop punk circles, there's a common saying: "Pop Punk Is Dead". The days of Green Day and Blink on the radio are over. But the buck does not stop at pop punk. The Copyrights understand that in the 21st century you will never not sound like someone else. It's easy to sing about the oncoming apocalypse over the sound of thrash guitars or fucking authority with a double kick behind you; it's easy to sell records when you're singing about a fantasy and transporting somewhere else, saying that everything is going to shit or one day it's going to be better. The world-weariness of The Copyrights' lyrics is a perfect match for their heard-it-before pop punk guitars; both of them suggest that things might stay just the way that they are, and, further than that, that it's a mistake to think that things haven't always been this way. They play music you've heard before, not because they are not smart enough to be "avant-garde", but because they recognize the dishonesty and the redundancy of doing anything else. Music has ceased being "world-disclosing" in Habermasian terms, in no small part because we have disclosed the world plenty enough already. The problem is that, after every story has already been told, so many people are still trying to find a way out. Today, the extreme of utopianism on both the left and the right is just to hope or fear at all.
Fletcher echoes exactly this sentiment on "Holidays" when he sings:
"We all know much too well/There's no heaven, there's no hell/But we can dream/We can dream/That the calendar is full of holidays instead of numbers/Instead of work weeks/Instead of deadlines"
The Copyrights recognize that there's no transcendence on this world or the next. The utopia that they dream up isn't even the Marxist utopia of an unrealized freedom in solidarity. It's a negative statement; they just don't want to work. When everything speculative has been stripped away, the best we can do is celebrate every birthday at the bar. The holiday utopia is the best we can hope for exactly because it's a negative utopia. Things will be the same as they are now, just without all of the boring parts. We've exhausted every other hope that we had. It's all tied up and accounted for.
This isn't just about politics, it's also about personal aspiration. On "The World Is Such a Drag" Fletcher sings:
"Running after carrots on a stick / One day you'll finally catch up to it / And it tastes just like a carrot/Supposedly they help you see/But you don't wanna see that clearly/Better off in a world blurred slightly"
It's a familiar cycle. Whenever you get what you want, it's exactly what it was all along, and the thing that you wanted reveals itself as just a dream. Providing a twist on the beloved Louis CK bit "Everything is amazing, but no one is happy", "The World Is Such A Drag" suggests that nobody is happy because everything is amazing. If you get everything you ever wanted, you don't live happily ever after. You get miserable. You taste the carrot and realize that it's just a carrot. The rest of it is a pack of lies, and while you might need a lie to get you through the day, a lie won't save you.
What happens when you stop chasing the carrot? The other possibility is spelled out quite explicitly. On the record Dream Homes by Dear Landlord, which shares multiple band members with The Copyrights, the lyrics read:
"We're both sort of right / I don't have much to sell / I'll die penniless, alone / I'll do what I like, you'll do what you know / That's just the way of things I suppose"
You can spend your life hoping that things will be better, or worry your whole life that things are going to be worse. You can chase the carrot. But Fletcher and his friends will still be drinking in the basement when you've hit your highest heights and lowest lows. The transition is from Kant's "What can I hope?" to "How can I run out the clock?" Beyond the apparent cynicism of this sort of thinking is a hungover-and-dead-sober humanism. It's a humanism that holds that we'll all be better off if we stop mistaking the lies we tell ourselves and one another for reality.
The chorus to "I Live In Hell" from Dream Homes goes:
"What does your dream home look like?/It'll take you years to even tell/And I'll be sleeping well/Here in Hell."
Showing posts with label Pop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pop. Show all posts
Saturday, November 29, 2014
Monday, April 22, 2013
Modernism and Pop Music: The Wrap-Up
This is my fourth and final post on modernism and pop music. Check out the other posts in the series here, here, and here.
Pop music is a probabilistic phenomenon. For many media corporations, selling music comes down to a careful management of resources: gather up the most promising "talent", maximize their marketing, and then hammer the target audience. But there's a final element that needs to be considered before these corporations restart the process: see what sticks.
Marketing dollars fail, scandals arise, and tastes change. Corporations are forced to take a diversified approach because even with advanced metrics you can't always control taste. So while what makes it to us from our friends at Universal and Sony has been selected and filtered, it still retains a modicum of differentiation.
The three acts that I've discussed in this series have each had different experiences with major labels. The Weeknd is currently on the way up with a Universal contract. Death Grips were thrown out of their deal with Sony for conduct not befitting of employees. DEP has remained ardently independent. All three remain nebulous figures to the people making decisions because while they are producing something that doesn't appeal to large swathes of a popular audience, each also has a direct relationship to an ardent fanbase. This fanbase has been established largely because of the internet. This fanbase doesn't care what label they're on or how the music is being made. This fanbase only cares how they can get their hands on it.
This situation of pop music is emblematic of the crisis of the newest breed of modernism that pervades our lives. As anyone on the street can tell you, the first world is replete with choices, especially when it comes to media. And this is especially true of music. As recording technology becomes continuously cheaper and more mobile, the barrier for entry into the aural marketplace becomes nearly negligible. Your "distributor" is Bandcamp and your "marketing" is Twitter. The music industry has been forced into a conservative position; in order to hold on to the market, Viacom and friends have to resist or channel this decentralization. Holding "competitions" and insisting that their artists have made it to the big leagues are familiar tactics from this playbook. This strategy works, for the most part. Ms. Minaj and Mr. Bieber have safe careers. The industry may be dwindling, but it isn't going away. Nobody is holding their breath for musical anarchy.
But the issue that I am highlighting here isn't really about the success of the music industry in this conflict. It's about what this conflict represents. Distributive technologies, the latest being 3D printers, lead to decentralization, for better or for worse. And industries that depend on the control of ideas are forced to adapt.
One way of thinking about epochs is as ways of defining limits. Each era has a set of limitations that present it with a set of questions that it can answer. One aspect of Modernism is that it is an experimental epoch; instead of setting a limitation that allows us to ask a question, Modernism makes its limitation into a question. Just how much decentralization can we stand before we hit the hard limit of nonsense?
It's easy to dismiss this as blandly theoretical, but consider the full context. Each of the artists that I've written about here are themselves decentralized. The Weeknd tries to express the Jungian shadow of modern R&B. Death Grips gets their energy from the nihilist void at the center of mainstream hip-hop. DEP pushes the virtuosity of metal and then find themselves in jazz. They all reproduce the larger movement of the industry within their own expressions. And the industry has to confront the question of decentralization every day.
And so the industry at times acts uncomfortable because it recognizes that as an aggregate entity it's having to stretch into something it doesn't recognize. It's having to embrace things that it can't deal with in order to keep up. When Death Grips gets corporate money in order to waste it in self-sabotage, they have found a real limit, for better or worse. After all, one of the problems of modern markets (and modern institutions) in today's context is that they have problems protecting themselves from things (and people) that are willing to destroy themselves.
We're fated to live in interesting times, and the music industry is an expression of that. If you keep your eye on them, you'll probably have a pretty good idea of where the rest of us are going, and how we're going to get there.
Pop music is a probabilistic phenomenon. For many media corporations, selling music comes down to a careful management of resources: gather up the most promising "talent", maximize their marketing, and then hammer the target audience. But there's a final element that needs to be considered before these corporations restart the process: see what sticks.
Marketing dollars fail, scandals arise, and tastes change. Corporations are forced to take a diversified approach because even with advanced metrics you can't always control taste. So while what makes it to us from our friends at Universal and Sony has been selected and filtered, it still retains a modicum of differentiation.
The three acts that I've discussed in this series have each had different experiences with major labels. The Weeknd is currently on the way up with a Universal contract. Death Grips were thrown out of their deal with Sony for conduct not befitting of employees. DEP has remained ardently independent. All three remain nebulous figures to the people making decisions because while they are producing something that doesn't appeal to large swathes of a popular audience, each also has a direct relationship to an ardent fanbase. This fanbase has been established largely because of the internet. This fanbase doesn't care what label they're on or how the music is being made. This fanbase only cares how they can get their hands on it.
This situation of pop music is emblematic of the crisis of the newest breed of modernism that pervades our lives. As anyone on the street can tell you, the first world is replete with choices, especially when it comes to media. And this is especially true of music. As recording technology becomes continuously cheaper and more mobile, the barrier for entry into the aural marketplace becomes nearly negligible. Your "distributor" is Bandcamp and your "marketing" is Twitter. The music industry has been forced into a conservative position; in order to hold on to the market, Viacom and friends have to resist or channel this decentralization. Holding "competitions" and insisting that their artists have made it to the big leagues are familiar tactics from this playbook. This strategy works, for the most part. Ms. Minaj and Mr. Bieber have safe careers. The industry may be dwindling, but it isn't going away. Nobody is holding their breath for musical anarchy.
But the issue that I am highlighting here isn't really about the success of the music industry in this conflict. It's about what this conflict represents. Distributive technologies, the latest being 3D printers, lead to decentralization, for better or for worse. And industries that depend on the control of ideas are forced to adapt.
One way of thinking about epochs is as ways of defining limits. Each era has a set of limitations that present it with a set of questions that it can answer. One aspect of Modernism is that it is an experimental epoch; instead of setting a limitation that allows us to ask a question, Modernism makes its limitation into a question. Just how much decentralization can we stand before we hit the hard limit of nonsense?
It's easy to dismiss this as blandly theoretical, but consider the full context. Each of the artists that I've written about here are themselves decentralized. The Weeknd tries to express the Jungian shadow of modern R&B. Death Grips gets their energy from the nihilist void at the center of mainstream hip-hop. DEP pushes the virtuosity of metal and then find themselves in jazz. They all reproduce the larger movement of the industry within their own expressions. And the industry has to confront the question of decentralization every day.
And so the industry at times acts uncomfortable because it recognizes that as an aggregate entity it's having to stretch into something it doesn't recognize. It's having to embrace things that it can't deal with in order to keep up. When Death Grips gets corporate money in order to waste it in self-sabotage, they have found a real limit, for better or worse. After all, one of the problems of modern markets (and modern institutions) in today's context is that they have problems protecting themselves from things (and people) that are willing to destroy themselves.
We're fated to live in interesting times, and the music industry is an expression of that. If you keep your eye on them, you'll probably have a pretty good idea of where the rest of us are going, and how we're going to get there.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Melt Sounds: Miss Machine and Impersonal Construction (Modernism and Pop Music 3)
DESTROYER, THERE'LL BE ANOTHER JUST LIKE YOU
- The Dillinger Escape Plan, "Sunshine the Werewolf"
This is my third post on modernism and pop music. Check out the first two posts in the series here and here.
I stumbled upon The Dillinger Escape Plan when I was getting into metal in middle school and Between the Buried and Me's The Silent World was the heaviest record that I had ever heard. Miss Machine had just come out and I was immediately interested when I saw reviews touting it as the brutal end of the genre. I bought the record and immediately fell in love with it, but I was never impressed by it musically. I was struck by it as a statement. Fair warning: if you had a hard time listening to Death Grips, it doesn't get any easier here.
In the original post that inspired me to write this series, I described Dillinger Escape Plan as an exploratory band. But it's not easy being truly experimental in metal. They have choppy waters to navigate. The metal world, despite its increasing diversification, has often been slave to various images of inane masculinity. From the moronic "virility" of the eighties to the tortured "pathos" of the aughts, the melodrama of metal through the ages is not hard to document. Metal has also been a platform for every conceivable political perspective. The genre is full of skinny metalcore guys that read Noam Chomsky's political writings alongside Game of Thrones, bizarro-country reactionaries, and unrepentant European neo-fascists. But DEP manages to deftly avoid these genre cliches and move toward something different. Alongside their mathcore contemporaries The Locust and Daughters, DEP embrace the raw complexity of metal while eschewing the Power Rangers guitar heroics of acts like Dragonforce. They embrace the intensity of metal while moving beyond the adolescent sentiments of their grindcore forebears. In this respect, Miss Machine-era DEP fits cleanly into the constellation of other acts that we've covered in this series; like The Weeknd and Death Grips, they distill undertones of a genre into a well-formed and groundbreaking modern statement.
While DEP may indulge in some genre conventions, their particular brand of jazz-metal reveals the technically monstrous undergirding of the genre when the tradition and the histrionics are melted away. Like both The Weeknd and Death Grips, Dillinger Escape Plan modulates and contorts the human voice until it becomes profoundly impersonal. I'm reminded here of their fellow mathletes Converge, whose lyrics would fit perfectly into a particularly erudite and fatalistic high school student's poetry diary, but whose vocal approach mutilates the human voice beyond recognition. Skipping away from this sort of underlying attempt at poetics and the genocidal pretensions of bands like Dimmu Borgir, DEP's lyrics display a distinctively cryptic cynicism. Take, for example, the first lyrics of the opening track of Miss Machine, "Panasonic Youth", which reads like a mission statement for the rest of the record:
We wrote these plans, took the order, the architecture
And followed them to the end till the gears ground cold
And relentless, there was no remorse, we had none,
We kept on with no trace of a regret
Miss Machine is relevant and original because DEP realized that modern metal's narrative arc has been stuck in a rut, and conceivably entirely exhausted by the efforts of genre adventurers like Isis. Even its literary forays have been fairly unimaginative. As captured by the lyrics above, DEP turned away from the straightforward agendas of its medium brothers and embraced the idea of metal as product. Instead of sounding like organic compositions, the songs on Miss Machine sound like they were built. And they weren't built with new materials; they were made out of scrap. Any concessions to melody sound like they were cut out of another song because it was all that the bandmembers had on hand. The "music" consistently takes a backseat to a haphazard structure. Take, for example, "Set Fire to Sleeping Giants". The weakest moments of this song sound like the blandest seconds of modern metal, but they're salvaged by the incorporation of careful jazz elements and a coda of unceasing hammering:
Black metal outfits have spent countless hours trying to convince us that their picture of the evil and explicitly anti-human nature of the world around us is a dangerously close look at reality. DEP paints a much more convincing picture. They describe a world that is profoundly apersonal, consisting of melted together machines, both human and non-human. The album cover of Miss Machine is instructive here:
In "Sunshine the Werewolf", Greg Puciato yelps "We fucked like a nuclear war". In DEP's modernity, weapons, machines, and people overlap and muddle, bringing catastrophe to orgasm and vice versa. This is not to say that Miss Machine represents a clean break from every record before it. As mentioned above, DEP's originality is born from their commitment to the genre that birthed them. They managed to capture, for a moment, the ends and the limits of the genre of which they are a part.
- The Dillinger Escape Plan, "Sunshine the Werewolf"
This is my third post on modernism and pop music. Check out the first two posts in the series here and here.
I stumbled upon The Dillinger Escape Plan when I was getting into metal in middle school and Between the Buried and Me's The Silent World was the heaviest record that I had ever heard. Miss Machine had just come out and I was immediately interested when I saw reviews touting it as the brutal end of the genre. I bought the record and immediately fell in love with it, but I was never impressed by it musically. I was struck by it as a statement. Fair warning: if you had a hard time listening to Death Grips, it doesn't get any easier here.
In the original post that inspired me to write this series, I described Dillinger Escape Plan as an exploratory band. But it's not easy being truly experimental in metal. They have choppy waters to navigate. The metal world, despite its increasing diversification, has often been slave to various images of inane masculinity. From the moronic "virility" of the eighties to the tortured "pathos" of the aughts, the melodrama of metal through the ages is not hard to document. Metal has also been a platform for every conceivable political perspective. The genre is full of skinny metalcore guys that read Noam Chomsky's political writings alongside Game of Thrones, bizarro-country reactionaries, and unrepentant European neo-fascists. But DEP manages to deftly avoid these genre cliches and move toward something different. Alongside their mathcore contemporaries The Locust and Daughters, DEP embrace the raw complexity of metal while eschewing the Power Rangers guitar heroics of acts like Dragonforce. They embrace the intensity of metal while moving beyond the adolescent sentiments of their grindcore forebears. In this respect, Miss Machine-era DEP fits cleanly into the constellation of other acts that we've covered in this series; like The Weeknd and Death Grips, they distill undertones of a genre into a well-formed and groundbreaking modern statement.
While DEP may indulge in some genre conventions, their particular brand of jazz-metal reveals the technically monstrous undergirding of the genre when the tradition and the histrionics are melted away. Like both The Weeknd and Death Grips, Dillinger Escape Plan modulates and contorts the human voice until it becomes profoundly impersonal. I'm reminded here of their fellow mathletes Converge, whose lyrics would fit perfectly into a particularly erudite and fatalistic high school student's poetry diary, but whose vocal approach mutilates the human voice beyond recognition. Skipping away from this sort of underlying attempt at poetics and the genocidal pretensions of bands like Dimmu Borgir, DEP's lyrics display a distinctively cryptic cynicism. Take, for example, the first lyrics of the opening track of Miss Machine, "Panasonic Youth", which reads like a mission statement for the rest of the record:
We wrote these plans, took the order, the architecture
And followed them to the end till the gears ground cold
And relentless, there was no remorse, we had none,
We kept on with no trace of a regret
Miss Machine is relevant and original because DEP realized that modern metal's narrative arc has been stuck in a rut, and conceivably entirely exhausted by the efforts of genre adventurers like Isis. Even its literary forays have been fairly unimaginative. As captured by the lyrics above, DEP turned away from the straightforward agendas of its medium brothers and embraced the idea of metal as product. Instead of sounding like organic compositions, the songs on Miss Machine sound like they were built. And they weren't built with new materials; they were made out of scrap. Any concessions to melody sound like they were cut out of another song because it was all that the bandmembers had on hand. The "music" consistently takes a backseat to a haphazard structure. Take, for example, "Set Fire to Sleeping Giants". The weakest moments of this song sound like the blandest seconds of modern metal, but they're salvaged by the incorporation of careful jazz elements and a coda of unceasing hammering:
Black metal outfits have spent countless hours trying to convince us that their picture of the evil and explicitly anti-human nature of the world around us is a dangerously close look at reality. DEP paints a much more convincing picture. They describe a world that is profoundly apersonal, consisting of melted together machines, both human and non-human. The album cover of Miss Machine is instructive here:
In "Sunshine the Werewolf", Greg Puciato yelps "We fucked like a nuclear war". In DEP's modernity, weapons, machines, and people overlap and muddle, bringing catastrophe to orgasm and vice versa. This is not to say that Miss Machine represents a clean break from every record before it. As mentioned above, DEP's originality is born from their commitment to the genre that birthed them. They managed to capture, for a moment, the ends and the limits of the genre of which they are a part.
Friday, September 28, 2012
End of the Weeknd: Experiment at the Limits of Hedonism (Modernism and Pop Music 1)
WELCOME TO THE OTHER SIDE
YOU'RE LOST
BABY STEP OUTSIDE YOUR MIND
- Life of the Party, The Weeknd
This is first of a series of articles I'm planning on writing about pop music and modernism.
Art is not the first concern of pop music. That said, what is artistic in pop music is the articulation of a certain way of being. This may sound heady, but I mean that no matter its puerility, pop music expresses a certain set of experiences and a perspective on those experiences. It may simply express bald melodrama (teenage angst) or bland escapism (nonstop parties); the perspective taken may be reductive and irresponsible, but still, a life and a mood are conveyed. Much of the music on Billboard expresses something familiar to our own lives (with either this or that accented) or something familiar to our collective fantasy life (money, sex, success). For Abel Tesfaye, The Weeknd, pop music is not an expression of the familiar, but an opportunity for exploration of a set of our cultural limits.
I wrote about Drake and Young Money last year on this blog. I said that Drake (and 40) brought a wistfulness and haunting sense of loss to the now-banal "rapper lifestyle". In their music, there is a sense of trying to stay grounded while at the same time enjoying one's success. It is this tension that makes Drake more interesting and complex than say, his comrade Wayne (though both Wayne and Nicki Minaj have attempted forays into this mood, I find their attempts token and fairly adolescent). Though both the Weeknd and Drake occupy a part of the same OVOXO clique and occupy parts of a constellation of similar artists (also including the oddball Kendrick Lamar and the young romantic Frank Ocean) The Weeknd takes his music beyond the relatable themes of regret and loneliness. While his neighboring artists have developed chilly mutant strains of their R&B and left-field hip-hop genetics, Tesfaye has attempted to breed a predator.
A consideration of the music itself. In many of his songs, Tesfaye is directly addressing a young woman. Often confused, uncomfortable, displaced, depressed, or vulnerable, these girls are wandering the party circuit where Tesfaye makes his home. He seduces them into drugs, sex, or other hinted depravities. This formula can create the disturbing sensation that one is listening to an act of predation, as in the truly disconcerting "Initiation". With its murky lyrical references to coercive group sex and hard drugs, and a musical backdrop including a distorted, alien bass thump, echoed guitar, and Tesfaye's inhuman voice, it makes a distinctly sinister impression:
The braggadacio of someone like Trey Songz is here unconstrained by the need to be MTV marketable. Where artists like Flo Rida or the Black Eyed Peas attempt an Epicurean mood (it's the weekend!), the lifestyle that Tesfaye introduces us to is wholly unsustainable. He makes no pretensions to the faith or social duress that define the other side of gangster masculinity. Tesfaye's music is excessive and makes no apologies.
This makes Tesfaye's music fairly one dimensional. At times he allows suggestions of woe or regret to creep into his lyrics, but they ring hollow. Any attempt to portray him as a "dynamic" personality is missing the interesting aspect of his music. As gestured at above, The Weeknd is a profoundly Modern reflection on our cultural fantasies. Listening to one of his mixtapes is a long look into our musical id.
Despite its flatness, the project has a special nuance; it is compelling because it doesn't rely on shock for its transgression (compare and contrast with the adolescent fuck-you attitude of early Eminem). Tesfaye takes pop narratives and soundscapes that we are by now familiar with (club life, R&B seduction, casual intoxication) a long way towards their logical conclusion without stepping into caricature.
The twist of The Weeknd is that in Tesfaye's world the "avant-garde" spirit is pop. He may not approach the explorations of someone like de Sade, but a version of the libertine spirit is present in his music, asking the same chain of questions that it has for centuries. With the excesses of art today, have we exhausted its potential? What does it mean to "transgress" in today's pop culture? In a world without God, is morality an aesthetic phenomenon? These questions are important to the Modern cultural conversation, and The Weeknd articulates them in a contemporary popular context where they are becoming increasingly insistent.
YOU'RE LOST
BABY STEP OUTSIDE YOUR MIND
- Life of the Party, The Weeknd
This is first of a series of articles I'm planning on writing about pop music and modernism.
Art is not the first concern of pop music. That said, what is artistic in pop music is the articulation of a certain way of being. This may sound heady, but I mean that no matter its puerility, pop music expresses a certain set of experiences and a perspective on those experiences. It may simply express bald melodrama (teenage angst) or bland escapism (nonstop parties); the perspective taken may be reductive and irresponsible, but still, a life and a mood are conveyed. Much of the music on Billboard expresses something familiar to our own lives (with either this or that accented) or something familiar to our collective fantasy life (money, sex, success). For Abel Tesfaye, The Weeknd, pop music is not an expression of the familiar, but an opportunity for exploration of a set of our cultural limits.
I wrote about Drake and Young Money last year on this blog. I said that Drake (and 40) brought a wistfulness and haunting sense of loss to the now-banal "rapper lifestyle". In their music, there is a sense of trying to stay grounded while at the same time enjoying one's success. It is this tension that makes Drake more interesting and complex than say, his comrade Wayne (though both Wayne and Nicki Minaj have attempted forays into this mood, I find their attempts token and fairly adolescent). Though both the Weeknd and Drake occupy a part of the same OVOXO clique and occupy parts of a constellation of similar artists (also including the oddball Kendrick Lamar and the young romantic Frank Ocean) The Weeknd takes his music beyond the relatable themes of regret and loneliness. While his neighboring artists have developed chilly mutant strains of their R&B and left-field hip-hop genetics, Tesfaye has attempted to breed a predator.
A consideration of the music itself. In many of his songs, Tesfaye is directly addressing a young woman. Often confused, uncomfortable, displaced, depressed, or vulnerable, these girls are wandering the party circuit where Tesfaye makes his home. He seduces them into drugs, sex, or other hinted depravities. This formula can create the disturbing sensation that one is listening to an act of predation, as in the truly disconcerting "Initiation". With its murky lyrical references to coercive group sex and hard drugs, and a musical backdrop including a distorted, alien bass thump, echoed guitar, and Tesfaye's inhuman voice, it makes a distinctly sinister impression:
The braggadacio of someone like Trey Songz is here unconstrained by the need to be MTV marketable. Where artists like Flo Rida or the Black Eyed Peas attempt an Epicurean mood (it's the weekend!), the lifestyle that Tesfaye introduces us to is wholly unsustainable. He makes no pretensions to the faith or social duress that define the other side of gangster masculinity. Tesfaye's music is excessive and makes no apologies.
This makes Tesfaye's music fairly one dimensional. At times he allows suggestions of woe or regret to creep into his lyrics, but they ring hollow. Any attempt to portray him as a "dynamic" personality is missing the interesting aspect of his music. As gestured at above, The Weeknd is a profoundly Modern reflection on our cultural fantasies. Listening to one of his mixtapes is a long look into our musical id.
Despite its flatness, the project has a special nuance; it is compelling because it doesn't rely on shock for its transgression (compare and contrast with the adolescent fuck-you attitude of early Eminem). Tesfaye takes pop narratives and soundscapes that we are by now familiar with (club life, R&B seduction, casual intoxication) a long way towards their logical conclusion without stepping into caricature.
The twist of The Weeknd is that in Tesfaye's world the "avant-garde" spirit is pop. He may not approach the explorations of someone like de Sade, but a version of the libertine spirit is present in his music, asking the same chain of questions that it has for centuries. With the excesses of art today, have we exhausted its potential? What does it mean to "transgress" in today's pop culture? In a world without God, is morality an aesthetic phenomenon? These questions are important to the Modern cultural conversation, and The Weeknd articulates them in a contemporary popular context where they are becoming increasingly insistent.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Chet Baker and the Ghost of Jazz
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
- Peter Allen
We were talking about music recently and my favorite interlocutor offhandedly brought up free jazz. I took the opportunity to consider my relationship with the style and realized I don't particularly care for it. Not because I think it's in any way inherently bad; I simply have no way to connect to its world. Admittedly I haven't tried horribly hard to access said world, but it made me think more about what jazz I did connect with and why I felt that connection was possible.
I realized in the process that the jazz artist I have listened to most consistently is Chet Baker. As per usual, I immediately tried to figure out if my taste for Mr. Baker was a product of a theoretical commitment. And, as per usual, it was.
I recently posted on Young Money as post-modern troupe. In that post, I talked about 40's beats and how ghostly they were; much of his work is made from half remembered, echoing melodies and muted bass thumps. His music, at its best, is devoid of bombast and conveys a sense of unplaceable loss.
I feel the same way about Chet Baker. Androgynous, high beyond belief, and totally alienated, Baker's take on jazz standards sound like they've been slowed down and played back through an android. Just as Wayne's unique style comes in large part from the effects of the syrup that he constantly consumes, you can hear the heroin dripping off Baker's voice into the microphone.
Imagery aside, I think that Baker resonates with me because in large part I think the time of jazz is long past. The Western musical event of the early 20th century, jazz has long been marginalized by pop music. As the latter style dominated the mainstream in the second part of the last century, jazz worked in (relative) obscurity to push all the way to the extremes available to it, including fusing with other genres. Jazz became dispersed into the bloodstream of music as improvisation and fusion became rote. As a result, I'd argue that playing jazz today is always retro, always an act of nostalgia. What used to be controversial, alternative, and sexual is now tame and routine. Jazz in the 21st century is the persistent echo of jazz in the 20th.
Baker's music acknowledges and embraces this fact. His inverted return to the pop-jazz standards that epitomized the genre at the height of its popularity brings the place of the genre today into stark relief. The fall of the billboard pop machine due to pirating, the demise of physical music, and the corresponding rise of the internet as distribution medium has allowed for unprecendented experimentation. I would argue there are two dominant paradigms in music production today, both of which often overlap with the other. The first paradigm is the modern one, a brutal new approach to experimentation where music goes to places it simply has not before and the bounds of genre (and the category of music itself) are stretched and twisted, at times to the point of nihilism. See here Death Grips, Wolf Eyes, and/or The Dillinger Escape Plan. Many of these new experiments incorporate elements of jazz to help them get that much closer to musical oblivion. The second paradigm is the post-modern, the self-conscious remixing, reuse, cross-breeding, appropriation, or detournement of old styles and decades (at times, centuries) of music. See Lady Gaga, Bloc Party, Pac Div, and/or The Gaslight Anthem, each of which revives a set of nostalgic tricks to new effect. For an example of the fusion of this radical experimentation and self-conscious callback, I can think of no band better than Animal Collective. Anything that diverges from these agendas risks being accused of being unoriginal or worse, being boring.
In my mind, Baker performs the same revitalizing inversion for jazz, post-hoc. His versions of standards, like 40's beats, have the numbness of something long lost. And what is lost here is the entire style and history of which he is a part. In a lot of ways, Chet Baker was playing jazz's eulogy before it died.
- Peter Allen
We were talking about music recently and my favorite interlocutor offhandedly brought up free jazz. I took the opportunity to consider my relationship with the style and realized I don't particularly care for it. Not because I think it's in any way inherently bad; I simply have no way to connect to its world. Admittedly I haven't tried horribly hard to access said world, but it made me think more about what jazz I did connect with and why I felt that connection was possible.
I realized in the process that the jazz artist I have listened to most consistently is Chet Baker. As per usual, I immediately tried to figure out if my taste for Mr. Baker was a product of a theoretical commitment. And, as per usual, it was.
I recently posted on Young Money as post-modern troupe. In that post, I talked about 40's beats and how ghostly they were; much of his work is made from half remembered, echoing melodies and muted bass thumps. His music, at its best, is devoid of bombast and conveys a sense of unplaceable loss.
I feel the same way about Chet Baker. Androgynous, high beyond belief, and totally alienated, Baker's take on jazz standards sound like they've been slowed down and played back through an android. Just as Wayne's unique style comes in large part from the effects of the syrup that he constantly consumes, you can hear the heroin dripping off Baker's voice into the microphone.
Imagery aside, I think that Baker resonates with me because in large part I think the time of jazz is long past. The Western musical event of the early 20th century, jazz has long been marginalized by pop music. As the latter style dominated the mainstream in the second part of the last century, jazz worked in (relative) obscurity to push all the way to the extremes available to it, including fusing with other genres. Jazz became dispersed into the bloodstream of music as improvisation and fusion became rote. As a result, I'd argue that playing jazz today is always retro, always an act of nostalgia. What used to be controversial, alternative, and sexual is now tame and routine. Jazz in the 21st century is the persistent echo of jazz in the 20th.
Baker's music acknowledges and embraces this fact. His inverted return to the pop-jazz standards that epitomized the genre at the height of its popularity brings the place of the genre today into stark relief. The fall of the billboard pop machine due to pirating, the demise of physical music, and the corresponding rise of the internet as distribution medium has allowed for unprecendented experimentation. I would argue there are two dominant paradigms in music production today, both of which often overlap with the other. The first paradigm is the modern one, a brutal new approach to experimentation where music goes to places it simply has not before and the bounds of genre (and the category of music itself) are stretched and twisted, at times to the point of nihilism. See here Death Grips, Wolf Eyes, and/or The Dillinger Escape Plan. Many of these new experiments incorporate elements of jazz to help them get that much closer to musical oblivion. The second paradigm is the post-modern, the self-conscious remixing, reuse, cross-breeding, appropriation, or detournement of old styles and decades (at times, centuries) of music. See Lady Gaga, Bloc Party, Pac Div, and/or The Gaslight Anthem, each of which revives a set of nostalgic tricks to new effect. For an example of the fusion of this radical experimentation and self-conscious callback, I can think of no band better than Animal Collective. Anything that diverges from these agendas risks being accused of being unoriginal or worse, being boring.
In my mind, Baker performs the same revitalizing inversion for jazz, post-hoc. His versions of standards, like 40's beats, have the numbness of something long lost. And what is lost here is the entire style and history of which he is a part. In a lot of ways, Chet Baker was playing jazz's eulogy before it died.
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