MUSIC: Tyler the Creator is an Idiot

http://www.avclub.com/articles/today-in-tyler-the-creator-tyler-the-creator-respo,56143/

As a rule, I don't like the idea of telling people what they can and can't say, but Ms. Quin makes a really good point. If Tyler, the Creator was spitting racist shit in the same way the he's spewing misogynistic shit he'd never, ever, ever get away with it.

I know some really liberal, sensitive people who don't bat an eye at the rampant misogyny in hip-hop which seems to me to be a very special kind of racism. The kind that somehow thinks black artists are so special and so genius that the normal rules for how to conduct themselves as human beings don't apply.

"If Tegan and Sara need some hard dick, hit me up." That's his fucking response. The only bigger idiot could be the person following him like the pied piper, calling his shit brilliant. How brilliant could he possibly be with that "hard dick" comment? I'm gonna try not to get fooled again

MUSIC: Eisley - Valleys

I always wonder why critics reacted to Fleetwood Mac so harshly back in the halcyon days of FM radio in the 70s. Even if as the soft-rock will-they-or-won't they aesthetic might have rubbed some the wrong way as trifle and licentious I wonder how they could have missed - what sounded to my ear today anyway - a sound so sophisticated. Those subdued harmonies, the sad/major chord progressions, the never-overwhelming but still affecting mix of all the instruments: it must have been incredibly difficult to achieve and it always surprises me that the critics back then couldn't hear that. You can string a thin thread from those albums to what Eisley is trying to do today with Valleys. But while the trifle persists from the 70s, the sophistication never really materializes, particularly in the pastel-colored first half.

The voices lilt and ooh in satisfying ways but the unbroken, fluent connection between how proximately pretty and ultimately vapid the proceedings are prevents any real enjoyment.

When the target is "plaintive" the execution is usually something more like "exasperated." Similarly, "joyful" begets "saccharine." Every emotion is scrambled to the point that an album that's ostensibly aimed at adult listener never comes across in the manner intended.  Everything lacks subtext, nuance or anything that feels grown-up.  It's not unlike a teenager demanding a curfew change by throwing a hissy-fit.  The content doesn't match the execution.

By the time "Better Love" arrives midway through achieving a pleasingly solid execution of what can only presume was the intent all along, the die has already been cast. This is, at its core, a pretty lightweight album. Lightweight doesn't have to be a bad thing, female fronted indie acts superficially similar to Eisley have made some of the best pop in recent years without trying to shoot the moon thematically: Tegan & Sara, Camera Obscura, Imogen Heap; but there's an atmosphere of grandiosity that implies Eisely was gunning for more. To hear this distinction embodied, take "Mr. Moon," which begins with a lush and very sad verse building genuine stakes only to let all fall away into a nothing of a chorus.

There could have been something here but Eisley squandered any possible goodwill by mixing in pretensions (delusions) of Important Things with a swill of too-sugary soft rock radio.

MUSIC: Best Albums of 2010

1 - Ali & Toumani - Ali Farka Toure
No record before has ever captured the sound of death - beautiful, haunting and easily accessed, even by my ruined pop-music-loving, American ears.

2 - High Violet - The National
More about mood than it was about great song-writing, but what a mood! The National does dark better and easier more than any band save maybe Radiohead.

3 - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West
Overwrought, over-the-top and even downright silly at times. In a lot of ways, it's Use Your Illusion for the rap world. I haven't actually said anything good about yet: the work of a Beethoven-esque genius or Brian Wilson-esque madman, but we'll still be listening to this album in 20 years.

4 - The Lady Killer - Cee-Lo Green
Cee-lo seems to be a one man standard-bearer keeping Motown and first-wave soul alive for pop music audiences. A valuable endeavor, indeed.

5 - The Guitar Song - Jamey Johnson
I'm not going to act like an expert about country but to my ears, it has all the usual heart and expressive storytelling while really minimizing the cornpone corniness that comes with your average middle-of-the-road Nashville release.

6 - Shadows - Teenage Fanclub
Pop music, simple, pure and a delight through and through. The Fanclub still, pound for pound writes the best love song going right now.

7 - Apollo Kids - Ghostface Killah
With all the usual Wu-Tang alums making an appearance, I'm surprised the best guest turn of the year on any record was Black Thought. Ghost's best and most energetic since Fishscale

8 - Spiral Shadow - Kylesa
It's easy to miss with Dillinger Escape Plan, Future of the Left and many others, metal is in sort of a little niche golden age right now with some of the most creative releases every year coming from that milieu

9 - Swanlights - Antony & the Johnsons
A lot has been written about Antony and his ghoulish, vibrato-laden tenor. You love it or you hate it and I fall squarely in the former category.

10 - Special Moves/Burning - Mogwai
If The National does dark the best, then Mogwai does dreamy as well as anyone.


P.S. A little late, I know

MUSIC: ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Tao of the Dead

Deep, analogue bass pulse through and around your inner ear. At the same time, a half spoken/half sung monologue conjures cosmic imagery in a low whisper before the guitar crackles like an old photograph lit on fire descending into a pink nose reminiscent of the ending of "Karma Police." Before long, the noise stands aside for a bright acoustic guitar confidently strumming sunny chords before they themselves are standing aside for a blast of thick, forward-leaning distortion.

If all that sounds like an exhilarating experience, it often is and you should sprint to your local record store and pick up Tao of the Dead. And if you think that sounds like a formless, chaotic mess, well, it's that too and you and I should totally party because we think a lot alike.

Even by the ADD addled, too-many-studio-toys Pro Tools-modern standards, this is a restless album. It's progressive to be sure, but that's not especially new. That's  a direction Trail of Dead has been heading for some time. The music is joyous first and sort of pointlessly fidgety second. There seems to be little agenda from moment to moment (the demarkations of the songs themselves aren't exactly arbitrary, but they're close) other than to do something different because they did the same thing for too long consecutively.

It seems it's not enough to move to a B section with a new melody or arrangement. Why not just announce it with an unexpected blast of feedback and an enormous slow-down in tempo? Ideas are never bad in that it's always better to have too many than not enough but when you try to do everything you're not really doing anything and frankly, Trail of Dead spend a good portion of the Tao of the Dead trying to do everything with a playbook that's actually pretty limited. After the 5th sudden breakdown into crashes on every downbeat and the 4th descent into electronic pads and beeps it gets a touch wearying.

Ironically, for such a self-consciously 2011 album, the big choruses, when they do come occasionally, have a very 90s alt-nation vibe - Smashing Pumpkins with a slight Jane's Addiction flavoring. But that's part of the grandiose charm.  It IS joyous and that makes it much pleasurable an experience than it would have been had they used the same tactics to make a dark or muddy record. Tao of the Dead is never, ever muddy; it's clean in it's production. Maybe pathologically so... clinical, even, like an early Minus the Bear effort.

I'm at once having a hard time finding a kind word to say about the emo-elderstatesman's effort. but at the same time, I can't say I didn't enjoy it and maybe that's the lesson to be taken away: If you do something and don't succeed but do it enthusiastically and joyfully it will make for a pleasurable experience.

But it won't necessarily be good art.

MUSIC: What does Joe Jackson's "Look Sharp" Know About Alex Chilton?

I remember listening to an old interview of Alex Chilton that aired on the radio shortly after he passed away and more than anything else I was struck by the diffidence and blasé attitude he seemed to have about his own place in the history of pop:

“I guess in the late '70s. I spent some time in New York, and it seemed like everybody I ran into there, you know, claimed to be a fan of the Big Star albums, and that sort of stuff. And so, you know, I guess it was around then that I began to see that even though we hadn't sold any records or made any money out of the albums, that they were still some kind of success in a way, you know.”

It wasn’t quite stunning but I’d always heard Chilton spoken of in the most reverent terms; he was a man who had more credibility with indie pop hipsters than the Pope has with Catholics and he spoke of his own brilliant musical career like a dentist discussing his unsuccessful private practice at a holiday party.

The fact is, when it came down it, he lived a modest middle class life, he played golden oldies at state fairs because the money was good and the sets were short and he died in large part because he put off going to the doctor for days because he didn’t have health insurance. It’s an obvious point but it’s one that isn’t made very often: you can’t pay your damn bills with credibility.

The way the word “pop” was applied with reverence to Chilton long after the last Big Star record was released, “pop” has been used as a baton to beat Joe Jackson repeatedly about the head. To wit, you won’t find many descriptions of Jackson’s early work that doesn’t use the word in the first couple sentences and its used with some measure of distaste.

For both men, though, pop music seemed to be more a means to an end – just what you did because that’s how you made music. Jackson says in his own autobiography: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around does it make a sound? Or: Does music even exist, if no one's listening?” Both Jackson and Chilton seem to have a workmanlike attitude toward their own music. Sure, follow your muse, make music you can be proud of, but why even bother if no one’s going to listen? Making pop music wasn’t a conscious choice any more than it was a conscious choice to make music at all. It’s just what you do.

For his part, the line on Joe Jackson in the early days was that he married an acerbic wit with a decidedly pop aesthetic. He was too poppy for the punk-rock kids but too smart for the room; that’s the reputation anyway but I think that misses the mark pretty substantially on both accounts.

Take as a case study Jackson’s debut Look Sharp! Which has a great share of both pop craftsmanship as evidenced by the smash hit “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” and sharp wit with lines like “If you want to know about the gay politician / if you want to know how to drive a car / If you want to know about the new sex position” from the trade winds groove of “Sunday Papers.”

But the reason I say any focus on the pop aspects of or the clever wit of Look Sharp! Misses the point is because, this is an angry and if you can pardon the buzzword, edgy album and more to the point, it possesses the unsubtle obtuseness one would expect from an angry record. More often than not Look Sharp! Is not particularly incisive, nor is particularly polished.

Take for example, the little bit of rock n’ roll perfection that opens Look Sharp, “One More Time:”

“One More Time” is angular and open and incredibly fresh sounding even 30 years after the fact. It’s not that Jackson isn’t working within the pop milieu, it’s that the label is being applied in a more specific and pejorative sense. Sure, there’s a verse-chorus structure but is it really that much easier to swallow than “Radio, Radio” or “Kick Out the Jams?”

In a backwards way, I think critics like to reference Jackson’s wit almost as a way of punishing him. Eventually, he followed his muse out of rock into low-middlebrow forays into the worlds of jazz trios and classical. In the end, he was a quick-hipped dilettante with one eye toward the door and the scions of rock and new wave hated him for it. In other words, we were almost threatened by Jackson and it was easier to just toss a pithy reference to his wit or intelligence and dismiss him. He wants to leave? Fine, fuck him. Mr. Big Shot.

But again, I think this misses the point and in a strange way gives him too much credit. Take “Fools in Love” which I can only guess was received as a little too clever for the charts when it was released as a single with its mellow ska upstrokes set against an evisceration of modern love. I mean, I guess but there simply isn’t the poetry to back it up:

“Fools in love they think they’re heroes / ’cause they get to feel no pain / I say fools in love are zeros / I should know, I should know / Because this fool’s in love again.” Nothing about rhyming “zeroes” with “heroes” strikes me as interesting poetry.

The fact of the matter is the “clever diatribe” is a difficult thing to pull off without sounding affected (just ask Dennis Miller). Either Jackson was a painfully obvious lyricist with little sense of nuance, or he was, as we all were, angry in his early years and struggled, as we all did, to convey that anger in a logically cogent way.

Labels are a tricky thing, and the stickiness of “pop” when it comes to Joe Jackson is a sort of interesting exemplar of the arbitrariness behind how we raise up some men and sort of relegate others to certain purgatories. In a way, Jackson was always treated as a sort of craftsman first, as if we were being sold a bill of goods by a cynic. I don’t hear much evidence that there is any less sincere emotion to Look Sharp! than any of his peers and more importantly, Look Sharp! from a qualitative perspective stands up nicely against This Year’s Model as an artifact of the time.

Rolling Stone wrote of Jackson:

Ironically, the borderline-nasty wit and unchecked exuberance of these albums quickly gave way to self-seriousness and a middle-brow disdain of rock itself. Jackson turned into a bigger crank than his two old rivals parker and Costello put together - and that's saying a lot! The remainder of his in-print catalogue is marked by restless wandering from one musical genre to another. Sometimes the experiments works brilliantly; more often, they simply bewilder

I think the phrase “turned into” a crank is exactly the dismissal that drives me nuts. He didn’t “turn into” a crank, he started that way and while we were willing to follow Costello into whatever genre experiments he decided to cook up or alternatively, laud Alex Chilton for his steadfast worship of the pop gods, we didn’t give Joe Jackson the same room to operate. He was too pissy to satisfy our desire for pop music in easy to eat, bite-sized morsels and he didn’t condescend to us so we felt little danger of looking stupid if we ignored him.

You have to wonder if Jackson would trade his career for Chilton’s credibility. Or maybe, more importantly for us, the consumers of music, the critics and the scholars, what it says about us that we would give with one hand while slapping away with the other two different men, who followed the same exact impulse: to make music people would like, because that’s what you do. And since the reward for a lifetime of our admiration is dying too young because you can’t pay your bills, you have to wonder if anyone should really care what we think anyway.