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strangledeggs · 4 months

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Has Remix Culture Run Out Of Steam?

The short answer is "no". The long answer is...

A couple days ago, I was talking with @philippesaner about the failures of postmodern critical theory to come up with a viable alternative to liberal-democratic politics given all its critiques of the latter (this subject seems to inevitably come up at least once every time we meet in real life). The famous article he brought up that the title of my current essay here is referencing is of course Bruno Latour's "Has Critique Run Out Of Steam?" which if you haven't read and are at all mystified by why we would be discussing something like this in the first place, I'd recommend reading.

Anyway, around the same time (maybe it was even the same day?), my sister happened to show me Youtube music critic Toddintheshadows' 10 worst songs of the year list for 2023. A notable entry on the list that I hadn't heard prior to seeing the video was a song that was essentially a cover of Haddaway's "What Is Love?", kind of like that previous Bebe Rexha basically-a-cover "remix" of Eiffel 65's "I'm Blue".

That struck me as interesting, given that both songs seem exemplary of a current trend that takes the very simple approach of reviving an old song that was already a "proven" high-charting hit by doing the bare minimum work on it to get it considered a "new" song, then re-releasing it and watching it climb the charts again on the power of nostalgia alone. If it seems like I'm making this out to be a more deliberate process than you'd think it might be (instead of just a coincidence born of nostalgia for the 90s/2000s), that's because I have good reason to believe it is. This Pitchfork article from a few years ago pretty much predicted this exact phenomenon, as it details how venture capitalists started buying up the song catalogues of major songwriters with specifically the intention of marketing new songs based on the licensing of older, already well-known songs.

What does this have to do with Bruno Latour? Well, many of you may not remember this, but pop music (pop culture in general, I would argue, as we'll see through some other examples) went through its own moment of "postmodern theory" not long after the political theory took off mid-20th century. There were many different ideas tossed around for a while, some of them conflicting, but most of them centered on the deconstruction of the individual artist as a singular creative originator of things, much like certified post-structuralist Barthes' "death of the author" (actually, you could argue that Barthes' original essay was the first shot in this assault on the cult of the pop-star-as-creative-genius). This culminated in a fierce debate over what started happening with the birth of hip-hop in the late 70s, but especially the 80s and 90s. Early hip-hop was often heavily dependent on the DJ's use of "samples" of already-recorded music. This sparked accusations from more traditionalist musicians (nowadays we tend to call these "rockists", which isn't entirely fair because there are many rock musicians that appreciate the nuances of this debate and many outside the genre that don't) that hip-hop was a fundamentally unoriginal genre because it relied on playing "other people's music".

At the same time that early sample-based hip-hop was emerging, a new form of recording started to be sold, first in conjunction with hip-hop DJ culture but quickly expanding beyond these bounds. This was the format of the "remixed" song, which I won't bother to explain here because I'm pretty sure everyone is familiar with it at this point. Between the growing popularity of remixes and hip-hop, many of the traditionalists seemed to feel that we were heading towards a future in music where no one would bother to create new music again because we'd just plunder the same songs from the past forever, leading us into a creative dead end that would constitute the much-threatened, long-dreaded "death of music".

This is where the postmodern streak in pop music comes in. Speaking in response to these accusations of creative bankruptcy, the postmodernists pointed out that actually, all of music had been nothing but "remixes" from the start, since no one has a truly "original" idea and all new music can be traced back through the music that influenced it in a chain that only ends at our recorded history of music. This is obvious enough from genres like rock (which used the basic structures of the blues as its jumping-off point) and jazz (which often featured artists "quoting" other songs by playing their melodies mid-solo, a kind of proto-sampling when you think about it), but it could even be observed in how classical composers would take musical themes from popular folk songs and imitate each others' compositional structures.

The point of music, the postmodernists went on to argue, isn't to create something totally "original" anyway, since that's basically impossible. It's instead to simply create something "new", and "new doesn't have to mean that it isn't built on the back of some older work; "newness", in fact, comes from the new combination of older elements, which, placed in a new context, will now seem unfamiliar as a whole even if the individual parts are familiar. As Buck 65 says, and then re-constructs through a sample of someone saying the same thing at the end of his song "Leftfielder", "And you never heard it like this before".

The postmodernists were, I think, indisputably right, and for a while it looked like they had won this particular culture war. Hip-hop went on to experience a golden age of creativity through sampling and remixes (something reflected in reference-heavy lyrics too, as any hip-hop listener will notice). Pop music in general got a lot more explicitly self-conscious and self-referential. It was (and continues to be - we're not out of this era yet, despite what I might be implicitly foreshadowing here!) an interesting time for people like me who enjoy nerding out over "spot-the-reference" games, as well as debates over the relationship between form, content and historical placement of music.

But there is a dark side to the arguments the postmodernists made. If there is truly, as an ancient source claims, "nothing new under the sun", then maybe the answer to this is not to try and create new things (since this would be a waste of time) but to stick as close as possible to those things from past times that we know have already worked. This is an argument for aesthetic conservativism, which claims on some level that there are actually a finite number of "good" art pieces (songs, stories, poems, etc.) that we can create, and if we try and deviate from these, we will either end up accidentally reproducing a worse version of one of those "originary" pieces anyway, or produce utter nonsense that will be of interest to no one.

How deep this theory goes depends on who you ask. I would argue that the originator of this argument is as far back as Plato, who claimed that there were metaphysical "forms" constituting the "real" existences of all things in the world that were, in themselves, just defective imitations of those forms. This kind of thinking is reflected in psychoanalyst Jung's idea of "archetypes", different kinds of narratives that exist eternally in all human minds which can be seen as the blueprints for all other stories we tell each other. And this idea would be highly influential on comparative mythology scholars like Joseph Campbell, whose own book "Hero With A Thousand Face", which argued that there is only one real story humanity has ever told known as the "monomyth", in turn influenced George Lucas in the writing of Star Wars.

But it doesn't have to get that deep. To many who espouse some version of this view, aesthetic conservativism is simply a shorthand for commitment to "formula" in the arts. Many of these people wouldn't even go so far as to completely deny the possibility of entirely original art - they just think it's usually a waste of time, and that 99% of what's worth making is made by the use of a "proven formula" that works because we have evidence of it already working in the past. It's a kind of bastardized "scientific" approach to creating art, where you claim to create through "evidence-based" methods, but you only ever draw your evidence from historical data and ignore the possibility of current tastes changing. It's the approach of any screenwriter who's told you about how "Save The Cat" changed their life. What's kind of funny with these types is how many of them worship George Lucas; after all, they tend to value what's successful on the market over all else, and Star Wars is nothing if not that. So the ghost of Plato (and Jung, and Campbell) lives on in these "formulaic conservatives" even if most of them never get around to thinking that much about it.

Anyway, for the record, I think this philosophy of aesthetic conservativism is completely full of shit. I'll keep my own beef with Plato for the separate essay it deserves, but I will make my case for the pop postmodernists on this issue here: just because you can retroactively identify patterns of things that "work", doesn't mean those will be the only things that will ever function as art. For one thing, canonical tastes change over time, and what we considered to be a masterpiece 100 years ago isn't always the same as what we consider to be a masterpiece today. Further, I would accuse some of these aesthetic conservatives of a kind of reverse "forest-for-the-trees" view: they can't see the uniqueness of individual trees because they're too focused on the forest as a whole! While you can point out the similarities among different works across time, you can also point out their differences, which frequently lie in their specific details - combinations of which, I might add, come from the distinct circumstances of a sum of past influences that result in an ever-new "remixed" cultural product over time. You can, in fact, just produce minor variations on the same thing and end up with wildly different results as long as you know what to focus on. Case in point: though "Cool Hand Luke" might feature a similar story to that of Jesus in the Bible, no one would ever mistake it for the Gospels, and we certainly don't view those two things as equivalent.

This might seem like I'm nitpicking here, but taking the aesthetic conservative stance has real consequences for the kind of art that gets produced. Consider the movie industry, where this kind of thinking seems to have dominated for a long time; it feels like only now, we're coming out of a long winter of cookie-cutter superhero movies which, while certainly driven economically by IP licensing deals, were justified critically to many by the idea that they're constructed according to a certain "proven formula". It was a fundamentally backward-looking paradigm of culture, one that suggested that lazily regurgitating the same thing over and over again was not only all that was possible, it was desirable because it had already worked in the past! This is the same logic expressed in those interviews with the venture capitalists buying up song catalogues in the hopes that they can prey on people's nostalgia for already "proven" hits. And you might say they're transparently only in this for the money, so what does their logic matter anyway? But I'd argue that the financial victors of culture wars like this have a significant stake in people buying the logic of what they're doing on some level, because if everyone recognized what they were doing to be obviously bad, they'd stop consuming it and move on to something else.

I would contrast this aesthetic conservativism with a more "forward-looking" approach, one that uses the postmodernist cultural theory to look towards creating new combinations of things out of old things in ways that feel genuinely surprising. Think something like DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing.....", the first album constructed entirely out of samples, or more recently, 100 gecs bizarre genre-pastiches that leap from one sound to another with little warning. You'll note that neither of these artists sound like each other, or much else that came before them, despite taking obvious influences from the decades of music that immediately preceded them.

The change doesn't have to be that drastic, either. You could be a country-rock band playing in a 70s style, like the Drive-By Truckers, but you're experimenting with songform and subject matter for a change, or a rapper incorporating a slam-poetry influence into your flow like Noname or R.A.P. Ferreira. The point is that you can, in fact, make new music with a forward-looking approach, and there is something truly disturbing to the thought that the future of the industry might be several more years of covers of the already successful hits of yesteryear, like those of "I'm Blue" and "What Is Love?" If that's the case, then we might start to see a backlash against the postmodernist cultural theory, since those growing up in the current generation would only know it by means of this aesthetic conservativism which takes the conclusion that "everything is a remix" as a license to do the barest minimum of remixing possible for the safest return on investments. And what we might see then is a return to pre-20th century ideas of the sanctity of the individual artist's creation and "originality", which will simply throw more fuel on an already raging fire of support for devastatingly overreaching IP laws, which will ironically only make it easier for this phenomenon of re-animated Hits From The Dead to continue. Because you know who can afford to buy up that IP so that their own remixes are the only "legal" ones...

As a final note here, I wanted to bring up the original "Everything Is A Remix" guy, Kirby Ferguson, whose video essay series released under that title is still available in its original form here (it's just past the "updated 2023 edition", which I haven't watched yet). I first watched this series almost 15 years ago and I felt like the guy was basically summarizing everything I had been saying about the postmodernist theory of art at that point - nothing is truly "original", remixing isn't the same as "stealing", intellectual property law is a plague, etc. Anyway, I haven't kept up with what he's been doing these days, and taking a quick glance at the site, it looks kind of grim: he's got a dubious-looking course on using AI in art as well as several self-help-y looking ones on "unlocking your creative potential". I guess he had to make some money on his idea somehow (ironic, for a guy whose thesis kind of necessitated a destruction of the laws that allow people to profit off their ideas), but this is a bit of depressing direction to see him take. Anyway, check out the original videos if you haven't seen them, they make a compelling argument even if I think I would find it kind of oversimplified now (disclaimer: I haven't rewatched them at the time of writing this and am relying on my memory from almost 15 years ago, so I take no responsibility here if they turn out to actually kind of suck).

#Music #Music analysis #Remix culture #Aesthetics

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strangledeggs · 4 months

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The Best Albums Of 2018

If you want to see a full review of any specific album on this list, or are wondering why a particular album did or didn’t make the top 10, or are wondering why an album you like from the year in question isn’t on this list at all, send me an ask about it and I’ll try and respond!

The Top 10

Room 25 by Noname

Invasion Of Privacy by Cardi B

A Laughing Death In Meatspace by Tropical Fuck Storm

Wide Awake! by Parquet Courts

Whack World by Tierra Whack

Superorganism by Superorganism

Transangelic Exodus by Ezra Furman

Be The Cowboy by Mitski

Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides by SOPHIE

Três by Thiago Nassif

The Rest

Care For Me by Saba

Conexão EP by Amber Mark

DAYTONA by Pusha T

Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae

Ephorize by CupcakKe

Foreign Ororo by Riton + Kah-Lo

Guatemaya by Doctor Nativo

Hive Mind by The Internet

I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life by tUnE-yArDs

Interstate Gospels by The Pistol Annies

Queen by Nicki Minaj

Quite A Life by Lyrics Born

Record by Tracey Thorn

Snares Like A Haircut by No Age

Streams Of Thought Vol. 1 by Black Thought

Tantabara by Tal National

Temet by Imarhan

The Terror End Of Beauty by Harriet Tubman

DROGAS WAVE by Lupe Fiasco

There’s A Riot Going On by Yo La Tengo

Things Have Changed by Bettye LaVette

Twerp Verse by Speedy Ortiz

Twin Fantasy by Car Seat Headrest

Un Autre Blanc by Salif Keita

What A Time To Be Alive by Superchunk

What Happens When I Try To Relax by Open Mike Eagle

Your Queen Is A Reptile by Sons Of Kemet

Coming off of a previous year I described as lackluster, this is more like it. 38 albums in total, but more importantly, I had a particularly difficult time picking the top 10 for this year. The top 3-4 proved especially difficult – I was pretty certain after a while that Noname’s “Room 25”, perhaps the peak of what one can accomplish with the “personal is political” mantra, was going to take the top spot, but was I prepared to admit that Cardi B’s pop triumph “Invasion Of Privacy” was better than Parquet Courts’ best album yet? And so, apparently, was Tropical Fuck Storm’s unrelenting “A Laughing Death In Meatspace”? It hurt me to rank some of these things the way I did, but because of this, I’m fairly confident that you could pull any of the top 10 albums at random and have a great time regardless. Just make sure to watch the videos for Tierra Whack’s album, too, since they’re a whole work of art in themselves (it’s 15 minutes of your life for one of the most creative hip-hop visual spectacles of the century so far, come on, just do it).

What’s more, typing out the rest of the list made me realize what an awesome year this was simply by how many I realized I was sad to have to leave out of the top 10. Let me tell you, in any number of weaker years (like the last, or perhaps the next one, as you’ll see), contributions by Speedy Ortiz, Superchunk, Open Mike Eagle, Harriet Tubman, No Age, The Pistol Annies, Saba, Amber Mark and more would have made it into that upper tier. It’s a true testament to the strength of this year’s releases that they didn’t; I would strongly recommend checking out much of the second-tier list as well if you’re looking for the outstanding accomplishments in hip-hop, country, indie rock, desert rock and believe it or not, avant-garde jazz (Sons Of Kemet deserve a shout-out here, too, for their unique brass band approach).

One strange quirk I’ve noticed about this year is that it features several artists who seem either to have peaked here, releasing a lesser follow-up in the next few years, or who have yet to release a follow-up at all. Parquet Courts, No Age, Noname, Nicki Minaj, Pusha T, The Internet, Cardi B, Tierra Whack, Mitski, Superorganism and sadly even Tropical Fuck Storm and the aforementioned Sons Of Kemet all fall into these categories to varying extents. Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong in some way on at least a few of those soon, but even if they don’t bounce back, many of those artists can rest easy knowing they’ve created at least one masterpiece, which is more than most can say.

Speaking specifically to a few trends I noticed from the previous year, I will acknowledge that “mainstream”-leaning pop remains under-represented here, though I think this may just be my general bias as a critic to ignore most of it or even to recognize that the stuff that makes it on to my radar as interesting enough to write about is still too inconsistent to make a year-end list in terms of quality. Then again, I put Cardi B, breakout pop-star of the year, at #2, so you can’t complain too much there. Second, I should clarify that while I said in the previous year’s essay that I was ready to re-listen to Mount Eerie’s follow-up grieving-process album “Now Only”, I ultimately felt that it couldn’t hold its own against the other albums I selected for this year’s list. Which, again, is just an indication of how good 2018 was; nothing against “Now Only”, it’s still a very good album and you should listen to it if you...enjoyed(?) “A Crow Looked At Me”.

Finally, I’m glad to see a bit more music from outside the “western” pop sphere sneaking onto this year’s list as well. Thiago Nassif’s Tom Zé-like “Três” made the very end of the top 10, but you’ll find Guatemala’s Doctor Nativo, Nigeria’s Kah-Lo, Niger’s Tal National, Algeria’s Imarhan and Mali’s Salif Keita elsewhere on the list, each of which is worth checking out and each of which brings their own unique sound to the table. And on a sadder note, it’s still hard for me to believe SOPHIE is no longer with us after releasing such a final masterwork as “Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides”. We truly lost a once-in-a-generation talent with her.

#Music Criticism #Music #2018 #Best of project #Albums #Pop Music #Albums of the year #Best of 2018

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strangledeggs · 10 months

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The Best Albums Of 2017

(A note that extends to all of these lists which I will attach to the top of each: if you want to see a full review of any specific album on this list, or are wondering why a particular album did or didn’t make the top 10, or are wondering why an album you like from the year in question isn’t on this list at all, send me an ask about it and I’ll try and respond!)

The Top 10

DAMN by Kendrick Lamar

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream by Open Mike Eagle

Describes Things As They Are by Beauty Pill

Antisocialites by Alvvays

A Crow Looked At Me by Mount Eerie

4:44 by Jay-Z

Oversleepers International by Emperor X

who told you to think??!!?!?!?! by milo

Talk Tight by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever

Sleep Well Beast by The National

The Rest

Whiteout Conditions by The New Pornographers

Out In The Storm by Waxahatchee

Playboi Carti by Playboi Carti

Triple Fat Lice by Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman

The Underside Of Power by Algiers

République Amazone by Les Amazones d’Afrique

Resolution by The Perceptionists

The Official Body by Shopping

Drool by Nnamdi Ogbonnaya

Fin by SYD

Harry Styles by Harry Styles

Laila’s Wisdom by Rapsody

Life Will See You Now by Jens Lekman

Life Without Sound by Cloud Nothings

American Teen by Khalid

Dakhla Sahara Session by Cheveu And Group Doueh

Big Fish Theory by Vince Staples

1992 Deluxe by Princess Nokia

Veins by Homeboy Sandman

A somewhat weak year, if my (still-forming) shortlists for the years to follow are any indication – only 29 albums made the cut here. Some of the top 10 were surefire picks: “DAMN”, though not my favourite Kendrick (which remains To Pimp A Butterfly), has grown on me a lot to the point that I now see it as one of the year’s greatest achievements – a surprisingly coherent collection of solid-to-excellent songs with only the loosest of threads connecting them all in some kind of “concept”; “Antisocialites” is a beautifully-produced nonstop hook-fest of an indie rock album; “Describes Things As They Are” deserves a special mention for bringing one of the year’s most unique sounds to the table, even as it traces its clear influences back to artists as diverse as The Dismemberment Plan and Arto Lindsay (great “Prize” cover in there). Others I had to think harder on, and I switched out “Sleep Well Beast” for “Whiteout Conditions” at the last minute here, my main justification being that on revisiting each, it seemed to me that The National had never sounded better than on their moody, murmuring 2017 album, while The New Pornographers, despite delivering another worthy entry to their now-formidable discography, had.

In retrospect, this was an interesting year for hip-hop (though when isn’t it these days?) beyond “DAMN”: it marks the breakthrough success of Open Mike Eagle, the triumphant return of Jay-Z (but hold the antisemitism next time, OK?), the introduction of the chaotic Playboi Carti and the album that might stand as Princess Nokia’s most definitive statement so far. It also saw the final entry of Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman’s enjoyable “Lice” trilogy of EPs, a fascinating experimental effort by Nnamdi that still stands as one of the most distinct-sounding (if not necessarily consistent) hip-hop albums I’ve heard in recent memory, and the first albums by Rapsody and Vince Staples to truly impress me.

Though it might be hard to say exactly when “poptimism” broke critical establishment mainstream at this point (and I’ll probably write more on that later), this year also strikes me as notable for not including a whole lot of representative entries that would appeal to that crowd’s sensibilities – at least not on my list, meaning I didn’t see many capital-P Pop albums worth mentioning here. That being said, the top 40 stuff gets a couple victories here in the form of the two depressive-leaning albums by Harry Styles and Khalid (Khalid’s is the better one, if you’re curious).

Speaking of depressive (though the word actually feels inadequate to describe this one), “A Crow Looked At Me” gets a last word in here for being the most anomalous album on this list – I didn’t think I’d even like it until I tried it, upon which I found less of an album than a powerful, personal meditation on death and loss that somehow achieved poetry by constantly trying to avoid it. After listening to it the first time, I thought I’d never want to hear anything like it again – that is until I heard its follow-up from the next year.

#Music criticism #Music #2017 #Best of project #albums #Pop music #Albums of the year #Best of 2017

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strangledeggs · 10 months

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The Best Albums Of 2017-2022

Well look what we have here, it’s your annual “This Blog’s Not Dead!” reminder post - only this time I’ve actually got a plan for more than one other post coming your way at some point. You see, some time at the end of the last year, I realized how behind I was in attentive listening to music of the last 5-ish years, so I decided to start a project whereby I would determine a list of my favourite albums of each year from 2017 until 2022 (I know that’s 6 years with 2022 inclusive, but there were a lot of good ones last year I wanted to cover) and then post it with a highlighted top 10, commentary on that, and extended list to follow. I’ve finished the 2017 list already, so you can hopefully expect a post on that year soon, and the 2018 list is nearing completion as well. Criteria for gathering the candidates for the lists was simply “Is the album from [X year] and do I have it in my library?”; criteria for forming the lists was basically “Does this album hold its own against most of the other albums on the list?” and the top-10 qualification was “Does this album sound a cut above most others on the list?”, ranking then accordingly by how I felt they compared in quality to each other (the “rest of the best” list that follows will be unranked and in arbitrary order).

#Music criticism #Best of project

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strangledeggs · 1 year

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strangledeggs · 1 year

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spotify is so cruel to music. songs want to live inside a little file in yourcomputer not inside of spotify

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strangledeggs · 1 year

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Thanks for this, it’s actually a really interesting addition to what I’ve said, here! Though I don’t agree with all of it.

First off, I think he’s pretty much right about Pitchfork having shifted to focusing on music-as-discourse rather than music-as-music, and this being an effect of (what I would call a misguided interpretation of) “poptimism”. I would add, however, that it’s not just critics that do this - I feel like in speaking to the average listener over the last decade, I’ve noticed a growing trend among them to also think of music in these terms. This is obviously purely anecdotal observation, but I think it’s not far-fetched to suggest that music critics and the listening public exist in a dialectic with each other, and people will change the way they think according to what they’ve read. I think it’s really interesting (and to me, disturbing) how some of this “discourse-based” music talk has led to some really mind-warping logic that people will turn to in order to “justify” their enjoyment of a particular kind of music. The primary case I’ve seen of this is a renewed interest in pop-punk as a genre; the genre itself was originally dominated (and I suspect still is) by white cis men, but because a lot of women happened to like these bands, pop-punk is now considered an “overlooked” genre in criticism (but not commercially! Those bands were really successful) and deserving of a closer look because it was previously “feminized” and therefore unfairly dismissed. This feels like a lot of twisty rhetoric deployed simply to say that you think the critics who dismissed pop-punk were wrong, and I would argue it misses a lot of the real reasons why those critics dismissed it in the first place (not going to get into those here, that is a whole other massive article series I’m hoping to write someday, which I think I referenced in my first response here).

I love deBoer’s Carly Rae Jepsen example partially because I think there isn’t even much objectionable about her music, but he is spot-on in how absurdly “in-depth” people think they’re able to go with music that is almost shallow by design (though not as conceptually shallow to the point that it becomes artistically interesting, like, say, SOPHIE’s debut). I think the nadir of Hanif Abdurraqib’s music writing comes from a piece on Carly Rae Jepsen that tried to pull off something like this, and it’s part of what made me doubt him as an authority on music.

This being said, I think that my stance differs a bit from deBoer’s in that I think that music (especially pop music), like most art, has always been a sort of mesh of discourse and form. I might prefer to talk and think about the formal elements, but I’m not opposed to trying to tackle the discourse where it seems appropriate, and I think that is often linked to the form itself. I wish more critics would attempt this synthesis, but I get that it’s difficult to do, so I’ll settle even for someone who is wiling to talk about one, then the other, as long as both are acknowledged where they need to be (for what it’s worth, I think last year’s Beyoncé was the perfect opportunity for a lot of critics to do just this). I also think some music lends itself more to the discursive side of things, while other music could be more purely formal, and critics should consider engaging with these different kinds appropriately - if you find yourself writing a long piece about racial justice on a densely complicated jazz album without having mentioned the actual music, you’ve probably taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Two last nitpicky things I disagree with deBoer more strongly on: first, he seems to imply that Pitchfork is so entirely “poptimist” now that it won’t give the time of day to anything that falls outside the mainstream, particularly “NYC indie bands”. I could find any number of examples from the past few years that contradict this - Pitchfork does still have a very vested interest in not appearing to be completely out of touch with the “alternative” music sphere, and this does extend to sometimes giving positive reviews and not just trashing false alternatives like Måneskin. If anything, I sometimes think Pitchfork is a little too accepting of some of the worst, most noodly/proggy/indulgent tendencies of the current avant-garde, and I would even suspect that some of this comes from a misguided focus on that music as discursive rather than musical.

Finally, while I get that he’s using the Pitchfork Liz Phair regrading as an example of their inability to properly assess something as music, I would like to point out that many other critics would argue that deBoer is still getting that album wrong on a musical level if he maintains its supposed awfulness, and they don’t all use “freshman Women’s Studies paper”-level rhetoric to do so. Sometimes crassly commercial pop music can still be good pop music!

Not to be the guy who reviews Pitchfork reviews, but...

This Pitchfork review of that Måneskin album is pretty funny - I haven’t listened to it in-depth, but from what I heard of it playing in another room at one point, it sounds pretty bad!

That being said, this following snippet bothers me greatly because of its extreme inattention to history:

The issue is that, about a decade ago, around the dawn of the streaming era, “alternative” as we knew it went extinct. Consuming music on streaming services made music a multiversal event, a mass conversion of listening to everything, everywhere, all at once. Genres became siloed, withering on the outside and thriving on the inside. Måneskin’s “Beggin’” ascending the upper reaches of the Billboard charts was not a cultural reaction to anything, it was just an anomaly. It is content without meaning.

On what authority does the writer claim this? Because almost all of it seems simply false. Let’s break down the claims:

1. “Alternative music” no longer exists as a coherent label.

2. The historical reason behind this former claim is due to the advent of streaming, which meant that people started listening to music outside of the bounds of genres they had previously liked in the past.

3. Måneskin’s success is not a reaction to anything cultural and cannot be compared to the way that the “true, original alternative music” was a reaction to mainstream culture.

All three of these are blatantly untrue and should be obviously so if you 1) lived through the time period the writer notes in the past and 2) are still paying attention to popular tastes. For those who don’t fit those former descriptors, I’ll try and give a brief refutation of the claims here:

Keep reading

#Freddie deBoer #Music criticism #Pitchfork #Pop music #Liz Phair #Carly Rae Jepsen #Måneskin #Poptimism

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strangledeggs · 1 year

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Not to be the guy who reviews Pitchfork reviews, but...

This Pitchfork review of that Måneskin album is pretty funny - I haven’t listened to it in-depth, but from what I heard of it playing in another room at one point, it sounds pretty bad!

That being said, this following snippet bothers me greatly because of its extreme inattention to history:

On what authority does the writer claim this? Because almost all of it seems simply false. Let’s break down the claims:

1. “Alternative music” no longer exists as a coherent label.

3. Måneskin’s success is not a reaction to anything cultural and cannot be compared to the way that the “true, original alternative music” was a reaction to mainstream culture.

1. Alternative music has never really existed as a coherent label! This is because alternative music is a weirdly contextual thing - it is defined by anything that actively pushes against “mainstream” tastes in some way, and that is a dynamic that’s ever-changing. Case in point: at one time, R.E.M. and Nirvana were “alternative” rock because they sounded unlike anything that was played on rock radio at that point and their sounds were different forms of reactions against that mainstream radio-rock; nowadays, Nirvana and R.E.M. are some of the most influential bands of the 90s and there are whole radio stations that play nothing but other bands that sound like those bands. What was once “alternative” is now a part of the mainstream.

This, then, means that there’s no reason why “alternative” music couldn’t continue to exist today - it would just sound entirely different from the alternative music that was around a decade or more ago. And alternative music does continue to exist today; in fact, some of the stuff that existed in the original “alternative” scene never got fully incorporated into the mainstream and is therefore still “alternative” (consider hardcore punk and harsh noise music). Though you might disagree with that if you believe...

2. ...that the advent of streaming caused everyone to start listening to “everything, everywhere, all at once”. As much as I appreciate the movie reference, however, this might be the most dubious claim of the three. I think we can say for a fact that the vast majority of people did not start listening to “every” genre outside the box they would have stayed within before. Have there been more crossover hits? Sure! But Lil Nas X having a country hit with a hybrid hip-hop song does not mean that everyone is now listening to Throbbing Gristle along with their Britney Spears.

Granted, more people are than before streaming. But again, against this claim, I would argue that this has almost nothing to do with streaming itself and more to do with a particular cultural moment in the early 2010s that actually started prior to streaming. This was the moment of “poptimism”, in which vast swarthes of internet critics, fearing their reputations for being “pretentious” and “no fun”, suddenly embraced pop music as a serious art form more intensely than ever before, taking Taylor Swift just as seriously as Nick Cave. There were other factors at work here, no small part of which involved the feminist revival movement, but to go in-depth on this part would require a whole other article (which I will hopefully write someday). Mainly, my point is that the cultural momentum of poptimism did actually mean that certain groups of listeners started broadening their horizons, coincidentally just as streaming was starting to take off. But this is not because of streaming; it was instead due to the cultural zeitgeist, and there was only ever a small minority following that zeitgeist in the face of millions who would still never touch an album by Sonic Youth (even if they own a “Goo” parody T-shirt). Popular tastes, contrary to popular belief, continues to have limits, and you’ll find that you can’t just walk into any party and switch seamlessly from Post Malone to Pere Ubu - though maybe if you’re a post-poptimist music critic who only talks to other music critics, you might get this false impression.

3. I may be putting words in the critic’s mouth here, but their phrasing does imply the existence of a former time where there was “true” alternative music, unlike the “fake” alternative music Måneskin plays. Ignoring the fact that I already disproved the existence of any coherent, “true” alternative music in my first point, let’s focus on the other part of the claim, that Måneskin’s music “isn’t a reaction to anything”. On one hand, this is kind of true - we should remember that the band got their biggest initial boost through competing in Eurovision, which is probably one of the least counter-cultural things you can do if you’re European. On the other hand, the band’s success speaks to a different kind of cultural reaction - one that stems mainly from their audience, and one that Måneskin is (unfortunately) just smart enough to play into as a marketing tactic.

Why does the Pitchfork reviewer think Måneskin is writing lyrics like those in “Kool Kids”? While it may be true that the band is unlikely to sincerely mean them (and I don’t doubt that for a second), that doesn’t mean that their millions of fans don’t believe in these sentiments. The reviewer seems to be forgetting something important about the relativity of being “alternative” - the fact that there remains a large part of the population that, however “mainstream” their tastes in the genre might be, still identify significantly more with rock as a genre than anything else. My guess is they forgot due to the very assumptions they made about the aforementioned “post-streaming monoculture” we’re supposedly currently living in, but I am fairly confident that it is this very crowd that sees themselves as “alternative” in relation to the non-rock “mainstream” (see: largely any successful music by women or black people of the last couple decades, but that’s another conversation). And from their standpoint, they are correct: in a culture that spent a lot of the last couple decades marginalizing “rock” as an “aging white man’s genre”, if it wasn’t trying to reinvent the genre by ripping apart everything recognizable about it and starting again, this audience’s hunger for more of the same bland stuff does make them “alternative” in a relative way. And Måneskin delivers by catering to that very notion; yes, it’s cold, it’s calculated and it’s far more commercial than any of the fans would probably like to admit, but it’s also exactly the fantasy they want to be sold. And it is a reactionary fantasy, one in which Max Martin and hip-hop never conquered the charts and pop-punk just became the common parlance of the day (actually, there is a sense in which even that is becoming a quasi-reality in itself, but that is once again a topic for another incredibly long essay I hope someday to write).

So you think Måneskin isn’t a “reaction” to anything like punk or grunge were? Aside from their “memeability” (something I haven’t discussed because it’s near-impossible to measure, but is also definitely a factor in their overnight success), I’d say that’s one of the only reasons they’ve reached such a large audience - by providing the safest “alternative” possible to an audience that doesn’t feel like putting in the effort to keep up with the speed of modern pop discourse.

#Music criticism #Pitchfork #Måneskin #Rock #Alternative rock #Streaming

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strangledeggs · 1 year

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Sorry to come back to this blog for my first post of the new year like this, but I have to say that this quote from PinkPantheress on the early 2000s sounds absolutely out of touch with reality to me:

“[M]usic was so unpolished and cool because I feel like people weren’t afraid of being a little bit cringe”

...music of the 2000s? Unpolished? Are you fucking kidding me? Have you...listened to it?

#Anyway hopefully I'll write something longer and more substantial this year #But for now make do with my gawking incredulously at this bizarre take

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strangledeggs · 2 years

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#If I ever get my long multi-part essay off the ground I will have a lot more to say about this

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strangledeggs · 2 years

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strangledeggs · 2 years

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I wonder what it would be like if people had the intellectual honesty to admit that experiencing art is neither a passive and literal absorption nor a completely irrelevant series of images without impact. Art is a conversation between many voices, from the artist and the audience in that moment to the views and other arts travelling with them, to future iterations of all involved, potentially for the duration of the audience’s life. To say that interacting with a piece of media is a simple and passive act of the creator’s viewpoint being poured into the audience’s empty little skull and accepted wholly literally is absurd, as anyone who has shared a favourite work with a friend, only to have that friend take away something entirely different, or be simply unmoved, must know.

Conversely, the appalling claim (made by people who surely know better!) that art cannot have any effect on someone, that nobody can be harmed by a book, baffles me. How on earth anyone who claims to have a desire to make transgressive art, or art of any kind can claim that either art does nothing to anyone is beyond me. Like it’s all dentist’s lobby watercolour or somehow can only affect positively? What are you bothering with all the trouble of making it for, then?

While of course propaganda and work that advances cultural norms in a didactic way clearly exists, it’s likewise equally clear that it does not affect everyone equally, the existence of people who resist those norms being proof that audiences are not simply little meatbots awaiting input. Art affects erratically and unpredictably and in complicated ways, and neither treating it (rather ironically given everything) like one has adopted Lovecraft’s thesis of a text that corrupts irreparably merely by a glance at a page nor like irrelevant fluff beneath awareness are particularly good stances to have!

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strangledeggs · 2 years

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I suspect the line most people remember best from Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue” is “Not all good things come to an end, no it is only a chosen few.”

...which is a great line! But what he might actually be most proud of (or maybe what he should be most proud of) is how he managed to get the unwieldy and decidedly un-poetic next line “I have seen such an unhappy couple” to scan in the song’s meter.

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strangledeggs · 2 years

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Certain older musical artists who were extremely status quo in their time age improbably well among generations that didn’t grow up with them simply because what they do has been so long out of fashion, no young listener can imagine anyone doing it because they think it’s cool and therefore can only interpret it as 1) some kind of outsider art oblivious to trends, 2) something done with high-concept ironic intent, or 3) something rebellious that defies the changing times. But the thing you must understand is that in 99% of these cases, the artist was definitely doing things that way because people though it was cool at the time.

It is kind of cool how the context of changing fashions will completely re-shape new listener response like that, though.

#This also isn't exclusive to musical artists obviously

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strangledeggs · 2 years

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Every once in a while I remember the time in high school that I showed a scene guy “Isolation” by Joy Division and he told me it sound “very alternative”...

#I will actually be writing a long-form thing on this kind of cultural divide at some point in the future here #I promise

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strangledeggs · 2 years

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Black Hole Sun, Pt. 2

In the first part, I focused mainly on semantic emptiness in the lyrics of two of the most immediately recognizable grunge bands, Nirvana and Soundgarden. These are also the two bands in which I find the theme most prevalent. Here, I’d like to take the opportunity to seek out examples of the same phenomenon recurring within grunge bands that are both lesser-known or more preoccupied with other specified subject matter in their lyrics.

It could be claimed that it’s unfair for Alice In Chains to have been the single grunge band to become most associated with heroin addiction; after all, the biggest star of the era, Kurt Cobain, grappled with the drug as well. Then again, Nirvana doesn’t have a song like “Junkhead”, in which the narrator takes an almost self-righteous tone in defending their drug use: “If you let yourself go and opened your mind, / I bet you’d be doing like me, and it ain’t so bad.” Needless to say, many of Alice In Chains’ lyrics don’t lend themselves towards the kind of analysis I had previously performed on the lyrics of Nirvana and Soundgarden because they tend towards specific themes and topics. If it’s not drugs, maybe it’s the PTSD flashbacks of the veteran in “Rooster”. Even some of the more enigmatic songs like “Down In A Hole” and “Them Bones” could be summarized in terms of their circling concrete themes of depression and loneliness, respectively.

But there are moments when the impulse towards emptiness takes hold of the band’s lyrics, and two examples stand out in particular: “Rain When I Die” and “Would?”. The first of these songs contains at least a few signifiers that might give it a specific object, such as a recurring “she” that suggests the song could be about the breakdown of a relationship. There is a dissonance between this, however, and the chorus, which has little to do with a relationship - is “I think it’s gonna rain when I die” some kind of metaphor, or is this a symptom of the narrator’s assertion in the first verse “I’m a riddle so strong, you can’t break me”? It’s possible this is just lyrical messiness; the song is not a particularly well-written one, considering clunky repetitions like the opening line of the third verse, “Will she keep me on the ground, trying to ground me?” But I suspect this is also representative of the aforementioned tendency towards abstraction, as is “Would?”, the final and (apparently) most well-known song on the band’s album Dirt. If “Rain When I Die” is vague about its meaning, “Would?” seems openly hostile to it. The chorus seems to embrace emptiness in its metaphors, beginning with a near-non seqiutur “Into the flood again, / Same old trip it was back then”. The cryptic verses are just as obtuse, with lines like “Drifting body, its sole desertion” (or is that “soul desertion”?). The song’s final lines “If I would, could you?” invite confusion due not only to their lack of any real object, but to the fact that the question is never even resolved, left hanging without closure.

Pearl Jam came late to the party on the whole lyrical emptiness bit. From their first album Ten, the band basically announced itself as an “issue song” band with lyrics unambiguously detailing cases of homelessness and wrongful imprisonment in a psychiatric institution. Further examples that follow include teen suicide, the depression of an artist at the end of a relationship, and uh...the Oedipus complex. There are a couple points at which the lyrics take a turn towards the more abstract, but even “Oceans” and “Release” resolve themselves into more typical meditations on relationships and death. “Porch” might be the album’s only song that fits the trends I’ve discussed so far, with a chorus that seems to undermine whatever meaning was built up through the verses: “ Hear my name, take a good look, / This could be the day, / Hold my hand, walk beside me, I just need to say” - although even this is resolved into a more concrete meaning in the song’s final lines with Vedder emoting passionately on how he’ll never “touch you, hold you, feel you” in his arms again.

It’s not until the very last song on their second album, Vs., that Pearl Jam really begin to fit into grunge’s lyrical trajectory. To close out an album that is otherwise “More Songs About Abuse, Politics And The Music Industry”, the band suddenly dials everything back for “Indifference”, which, while slow-moving and quiet, is not quite something I’m comfortable describing as a “ballad”. Part of the reason is the music, which is more ominous and bluesy than ballads tend to be, but the other part is the lyrics; sure, the song is a “lament”, a classic form for a ballad, but the subject of this lament slowly dissolves until the song succumbs to an abstract feeling of futility rather than a sadness directed at anything in particular. The narrator proceeds through a series of statements that attempt to show some kind of resilience against an oppressive force, but the force itself is vague - is it a physical aggressor, like whoever is throwing the “punches” they’re taking, or is it an event like the end of a relationship? Further, these statements begin to blur with other demonstrations that sound like the narrator testing themself against their own willpower rather than anything external; see the haunting final verse “I’ll swallow poison until I grow immune, / I will scream my lungs out until it fills this room”. Every assertion, however, is met with the same counterpoint of the chorus: “How much difference does it make?” Not only is the object of this resistance unclear, the narrator doesn’t even seem convinced that there is a point to it. Is the song about “futility”, or the feeling of it? Maybe. But maybe not - the question, as that of Alice In Chains’ “Would?” is left open. Maybe it does make a difference. The song’s focal point is really the narrator’s uncertainty and the anxiety and weariness that can bring over a long period of time. This, then, marks Pearl Jam’s first lyrical foray into the abstract emptiness that was so influential in grunge’s aesthetic.

From there, the floodgates open, and the approach has been a part of Pearl Jam’s songwriting vocabulary intermittently throughout their career (see their 2006 self-titled album for late-career evidence of this). But the strongest examples of it arrived earlier on the follow-up to Vs., Vitalogy. Arguably the band’s masterpiece, the album still contains a number of songs that are about definite subjects (”Satan’s Bed” clearly attacking the music industry’s parasitism, “Better Man” tackling abusive relationships and “Spin The Black Circle” being an ode to vinyl in the age of the CD). But these are the exceptions this time, and from the opener “Last Exit” through to more obscure cuts like the eerie “Tremor Christ” and the punk frenzy of “Whipping”, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell just what the band is so agitated about on this outing. Vedder perhaps articulates best here when he threatens “You push me, and I will resist” during a verse of “Corduroy”; the band is increasingly frustrated with a tendency to “box them in” with any particular category or movement, and this applies to their lyrical content as well.

The album’s final song (well, OK, final real song - the avant-garde pastiche that follows doesn’t count), “Immortality”, is an interesting case of a song which is widely agreed upon to have a specific meaning even though the lyrics seem to say otherwise. I’m going to go against the grain here and disagree with the legions of fans who spent so much time parsing the lyrics of the band: despite claims of it being about the death of Kurt Cobain, the song is really the pinnacle of Pearl Jam’s meaning-averse songwriting. I should point out that I actually have Eddie Vedder’s implicit support in this, as he has outright denied Cobain’s suicide being the inspiration for “Immortality”. The song is far more ambiguous than a simple tribute to a fallen peer would allow it to be: the first line practically announces it by declaring “Vacate is the word”, as if trying to exorcise any obvious metaphor that could be read into the lyrics. True, some lines make vague references to the repeated them of weariness with the music industry’s public spectacle machine, but these are almost always undermined by imagery of disorder and dissipation; consider the second verse’s complaints of “Holier than thou, how?” ending with the cryptic “Scrawl dissolved, cigar box on the floor”. The final verse is probably the most impactful and indicative of this lack of clear direction in the song’s meaning: “ I cannot stop the thought / I'm running in the dark, / Coming up a which way sign, / All good truants must decide”. The chorus, too, always points to some way out of whatever frame of interpretation one might be tempted to force the song into through its “trapdoor in the sun”.

But a flight from meaning doesn’t necessarily mean a flight from affect, and nowhere is this more apparent than between Pearl Jam’s aforementioned approach and that of the near-parody-grunge band Local H. So I’ll make an important distinction here: the kind of abstract lyrics I wanted to highlight here aren’t necessarily those I want to consider within the same breath as lyrics that are non-sensical for satirical purposes. I did, after all, describe this as a kind of “depressive” emptiness of lyrics, and it would be hard to call something like “’Cha!’ Said The Kitty” depressive, even if it does skewer its musical target expertly. Likewise, “All-Right (Oh, Yeah)” also seems a little too frivolous for consideration here. But Local H did participate in this trend in a less satirical manner, if less on their masterpiece Pack Up The Cats than on its predecessor As Good As Dead. On that 1996 album, the meaning-averse attitude is captured succinctly in the only lyrics of the two parts of “Manifest Density”: “You’re on to something good, but it can’t be all that matters”. More elaborate is the explicitly downer “Bound For The Floor”; verses hint at some kind of self-critical thought spiral the narrator could be trapped in, but this barely matters as the chorus does the heavy lifting with its mantra-like repetition: “And you just don’t get it, you keep it copacetic / And you learn to accept it and oh, you’re so pathetic”. There’s the smallest bit of winking irony in this, but the song sounds genuinely exhausted, too tired to even figure out what it’s trying to say - in other words, precisely the kind of thing I’m looking for here.

Are Smashing Pumpkins grunge? In many ways, the band has more in common with the blurry soundscapes of shoegazer bands or the dramatic excesses of 70s arena-prog. But they were “alternative rock” in the 90s, and they do play depressive songs on distorted, downt-tuned guitars, so I think they’re worthy of consideration. What’s more, Billy Corgan’s lyrics often fit the bill for the particular species of restlessness-without-referent I’m tracking. Now some of this can be attributed to the fact that Corgan’s “high-concept” lyrics are just incoherent, and I don’t plan to examine those songs; it might be nearly impossible to explain exactly what “Geek USA” or “Thru The Eyes Of Ruby” or “Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans” are “about”, but they do sound they were written with concepts in mind, and their expansive lyricism seems to invite meaning rather than resist it - they are quite possibly the opposite of what I’m looking for.

Instead, I want to focus on the more abstract moments in Smashing Pumpkins’ catalogue, such as “Galapogos”. Again, even this song is a little tricky within my analysis: “Galapogos” could be read as a strict “love song”, with its reassurance in its final moments that “if we died right now, / This fool you love somehow / Is here with you”. But I can’t help but see past these sentiments. What about the “Rescue me from me / And all that I believe” in the song’s first pre-chorus? There are constant references to some kind of self-effacing force in “Galapogos”, appearing most explicitly in the chorus: “I won’t deny the pain, / I won’t deny the change, / But should I fall from grace / Here with you, / Will you leave me too?” But the force is never identified, and we have a narrator caught in an anxiety directed at some abstraction which they cannot name.

Even more abstract is “Mayonaise” from the band’s best album, Siamese Dream. The chorus feels as willfully incomplete as the end of Alice In Chains’ “Would?”: “When I can, / I will” - five words that offer virtually no direction on how to interpret or contextualize anything surrounding them. The song’s first lines read like a kind of prophecy on the inability of Corgan to draw a coherent picture of what plagues him: “Fool enough to almost be it, / Cool enough to not quite see it, / Doomed”. Granted, some of this can come across as aimless moping, which leads to a couple truly embarrassing moments - the song climaxes musically as it bottoms out lyrically with Corgan wailing “Can anybody hear me? / I just want to beeeeeeee me”. But the song isn’t devoid of poetry in its occasionally soul-searchy meandering; my favourite part comes in the song’s early bridge with the lines “Try and ease the pain, / Somehow feel the same, well / No one knows / Where our secrets go”. This might be the true lyrical centre of the song: an admission that the unidentifiable problem appears unsolvable and the hidden answers have long been lost.

Finally, I want to turn to a band that had a bit of a hard time in the grunge scene, which no doubt affects the applicability of my analysis to their lyrics on some level. Hole have the distinction of being one of the few woman-led grunge bands that gained popularity during the 90s. The scene may not have been as hostile to women as prior rock scenes had been (with L7 as a notably all-woman band that also experienced a moment in the spotlight around the same period), but that didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty of residual misogyny, and if that weren’t enough, Courtney Love ended up in a (rather ridiculous) feud with one of the leading women in the underground riot grrrl scene of the day, Kathleen Hanna. On top of all this, she was married to Kurt Cobain, which led to all kinds of nastiness from fans making claims that he ghost-wrote the best Hole songs to others going so far as to accuse her of murdering him and covering it up as a suicide.

I mention all of this because I think it’s important context for the fact that most Hole songs certainly don’t conform to the objectless angst I’ve been writing about up to this point. It’s easy to see why: given her situation, how could Courtney Love not write primarily about the experience of being a woman in grunge (or, in broader terms, a woman in a misogynistic society)? So obviously I won’t be looking at “Jennifer’s Body” or “Plump” or “Doll Parts” here. But I do think there’s one particularly notable exception that sticks out in the Hole discography; this is the opening track of the band’s finest moment Live Through This, “Violet”. True, the song doesn’t avoid lending itself to interpretation completely - the “you should learn how to say no” and chorus of “Go on, take everything, / Take everything, I dare you to” have their feminist applications. But so much of the rest of the song veers off into semantic blind alleys that it feels worthy of discussion here. Some of the self-effacing emptiness of the aforementioned Smashing Pumpkins lyrics surface here, and I particularly like the vagueness of the pre-chorus repetition “When they get what they want, / And they never want it again”. Who are they? What did they want? And why don’t they want it again? Even from the start, the song assaults the listener with dream imagery that denies easy assimilation into what follows: “And the sky was made of amethyst, / And all the stars looked just like little fish”. Is this even meant to be taken seriously? Is it self-parody, or an attempt to connect one empty signifier with another, as in the "violet/violent” recall in the second verse? As with many of the other lyrics I have examined here, these are questions that even the songwriter may not be able to answer. Such was the power of grunge as a lyrical vehicle that it could provide an outlet for angst without any kind of identifiable object, and I here conclude my analysis.

[You might be wondering why I didn’t include the titular “Big Empty” by Stone Temple Pilots - the short answer is, I don’t care for STP as much as most of the other bands here, though I could also point out that after reading all of this, you should find it self-evident how the song fits into the picture anyway, so why bother wasting more space explaining it?]

#Music #Music analysis #Grunge #Alice In Chains #Pearl Jam #Local H #Smashing Pumpkins #Hole #Lyrics #Music criticism #Alternative rock #90s #Part 2

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strangledeggs · 3 years

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Black Hole Sun: The “Big Empty” Semantic Core Of Grunge’s Lyrical Orbit, Pt. 1

[I tend to try and analyze music at least as much as lyrics in pop songs, if not more, as I believe it to be the central reason for listening to most of it. But I stumbled on an interesting lyrical phenomenon here that I couldn’t resist taking some time to interrogate, so I’ll warn everyone of the following: the two parts of these posts are going to focus very little, if at all, on music and will instead be devoted primarily to the lyrics of the grunge boom of the 90s.]

It’s generally accepted that there are a lot of sad songs within country music. The tearjerker ballad is one of the genre’s signature archetypal songs, arguably becoming a foundational block for its entire style and various songwriters’ approaches to it. However it should be noted that these ballads tend to zero in on specific woes in their lyrics that make them so sad in the first place - hence the frequent jokes about country lyrics amounting to “my car broke down, my dog died and my wife left me”. It’s rare for a country song to try and frame sadness in a non-specific light, though when it has happened, the results can be incredibly stirring (I’m thinking here of Iris Dement’s “Easy’s Gettin’ Harder Every Day”).

This isn’t just a phenomenon unique to country music; most pop songs that try to evoke sadness will choose a specific target to center the sadness around, like the end of a relationship or a family member’s death. There have been a few notable exceptions, as evidenced by The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes”, some of Pink Floyd’s more esoterically depressive songs, or many of Bob Dylan’s ballads from his classic electric years. Punks showed signs of a capability of writing in this mode from time to time (think The Buzzcocks’ “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays”), eventually culminating in the post-punk movement that would develop the idea a little further in groups like Public Image Ltd. and Joy Division.

But nowhere can I think of a mass movement of songwriters suddenly pushing for a non-specific, abstract lyrical representation of sadness outside of the grunge explosion of the 90s. The genre that fundamentally changed the nature of rock and roll radio also brought a specific lyrical sensibility to the table, one that seemed to deliberately reject the reduction of sadness to a specific cause: the cause of grunge depression - and it was a depressive genre, even though it had its more hopeful and ecstatic moments - wasn’t a relationship, or money troubles, or addiction, or any vague evils of the world, even if all of these could be factors in the songwriters’ real lives as we know them. The lyrical centre of that depression was a deliberately obscured mystery, a path that seemed to lead everywhere and nowhere, littered with misdirections that purposefully led listeners away from any specific interpretation of it.

The obvious masters of this lyrical style (and likely its originators, given their being the first band to have actual hit songs with it) are Nirvana. The lyrics of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” say it all - that is, they say nothing at all, communicating only a vague sense of frustration, anger and depression. While you can certainly pull individual details out of particular lines and draw coherent meaning from them (”I feel stupid and contagious” speaks to a sense of social alienation in a way few others could), the sum of the lines pulls the listener away from being able to make a statement that captures the entirety of it. The ending of the chorus is particularly disjointed and hostile to interpretation; even if you draw “my libido” out as a critique of the “teen spirit” the song might be said to mock, you have to contend with its proximity to “a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito”. And the very end of the song, while it could be interpreted as “a denial” at the social level - either the rejection of the narrator by their peers or the rejection of the peers by the narrator - also seems to point towards a resistance to interpretation; it “denies” the listener’s readings no matter how fitting they might seem for a given line.

Though a few Nirvana songs take on more specific themes or scenarios (”Happy”, “Polly”, “Rape Me” and “Sliver” come to mind), the majority of their songs remain in this lyrically ambiguous territory, unwilling to give up their interpretations so easily. What is the “comfort in being sad” repeated in the chorus of “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle”? “What is wrong with me? / What do I think I think?” Cobain drones in “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter”, expressing a sentiment that others in the grunge boom will be quick to re-iterate. Even some of the songs with a more specific lyrical theme have a strange inability to pick an individual target cause of sadness: “Heart-Shaped Box” might be easily interpreted as being centered around Cobain’s relationship with Courtney Love, but what do we make of the contradictory chorus? He has “a new complaint”, but is also “forever in debt to your priceless advice” - how much of this is sarcasm? How much of it is even about Courtney Love? More vague is the incredible line arriving at the climax of “Aneurysm”: “Beat me out of me”. Does this refer to drugs? To the turbulent relationship that Cobain claims inspired the song? To his struggles with his physical and mental illnesses? It’s too vague to pin on any one of these and remains a kind of floating sign, one that evokes a deep disturbance that nevertheless cannot be articulated except perhaps by the visceral pain it begs for.

Nirvana might have been the undisputed masters of this lyrical style, but others were quick to follow. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell struggled with depression for most of his life, and this manifests itself through his lyrics in a similar manner. This article is, after all, partially named for the band’s most well-known song, with its nonsensical chorus “Black hole sun, won’t you come / And wash away the rain?” Even in its verses, the song repeatedly throws the listener off just as a relatively realistic image seems to be painted: the “boiling heat, summer stench” setting is interrupted by the jarring last line of the first verse, “Call my name through the cream / And I’ll hear you scream again”. The song also introduces another theme that will make reappearances in subsequent Soundgarden songs in its final half-verse: “Hang my head, drown my fear, / ‘Til you all just disappear”, betraying a desire not simply to retreat from the world around one, but to find some way of severing the connection to the effect that the world itself is dead to you. Hence “Down On The Upside”’s self-explanatory “Blow Up The Outside World”.

Again, however, the listener will be hard-pressed to find a specific cause for this angst. Why does Cornell seem to distrust the world around him? He might know it, but it’s not so easy to articulate in song. “The Day I Tried To Live”, perhaps one of his most specific songs on this subject, actually seems to reverse the apparent causal relation - is it the outside world that Cornell distrusts, or his own potential influence within that world? The specificity of the song doesn’t necessarily clarify the issue, and we are left in another of “Superunknown”’s songs that he simply “Fell On Black Days”, another lyrical meditation on depression with a seemingly empty core.

These inward retreats typical of Soundgarden are further complicated by the final song on “Superunknown”, and possibly one of Cornell’s best, “Like Suicide”. The song’s initial refrain at the end of each verse phrase (alternately, “Love’s like suicide” and “Just like suicide”) make it sound like a potential breakup song or doomed love song of some kind. But the lyrics open out beyond this framing very quickly, even from the first lines: “Heard it from another room, / Eyes were waking up, / Just to fall asleep”. The song continues to string together disconnected images in this manner, one of my favourites being the last true lines of the final verse, “Safe outside my gilded cage, / With an ounce of pain, / I wield a ton of rage”. As the lyrics unfold, it becomes harder and harder to interpret the song as merely being about a particular relationship. This is in spite of the fact that there seems to be another person involved as a sort of “object” of the song, with the pre-chorus refrain of “How I feel for you, / I feel for you”. But who is the “you” the song refers to? Is it the “she” of the chorus, the one who “lived like a murder. / But she died just like suicide”? Is it the “her” the narrator “finishes” constructing with the “last ditch”/”last brick”? Are these all the same person? Or are they imaginary extensions of the narrator? The focus of the song is unclear, perhaps intentionally so, obscuring any possibility of the “blame” one might expect if this were a song about a relationship, opting instead to zero in on the central tragedy expressed by the chorus. Even this is vague and unreliable: “she” dies “just like suicide” - but does she really die? Is it really suicide? The similes of the chorus imply the possibility that it is otherwise, while the tone of the song insists that it is nevertheless tragic.

So far I’ve discussed two of the most notable grunge bands’ lyrics in detail here, but I made the broader claim that this depressive non-specificity was highly impactful throughout the genre as a whole. This being said, Nirvana and Soundgarden were probably the two bands of the era that most consistently employed this lyrical mode. So if not all grunge bands wrote this way, where can we nevertheless see its influence in their works? The “big four” of grunge has typically been canonically understood to refer to Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains. Stone Temple Pilots could also be considered a minor part of this canon, and I would add the near-parodic approach to grunge of Local H. Smashing Pumpkins may not have been categorized as grunge by many, but I believe their sound is close enough to include them, and especially Billy Corgan’s lyrics lend themselves well to an analysis similar to the one we have deployed up to this point. Though Mudhoney is often considered the first grunge band, I will not be discussing them due to their tendency towards a more traditional punk approach to lyrics and songwriting. Hole is notable as being one of very few women-led grunge bands, and despite the more overt feminist themes of their lyrics that can give them a more direct meaning, I also see a tendency towards the kind of writing present in Nirvana and Soundgarden which I will draw out in further analysis. L7, however, I will exclude on similar grounds to Mudhoney.

In the second part of this article, then, I will discuss the presence of a depression with no referent as it occurs occasionally in the lyrics of the above bands, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Hole, Local H and Smashing Pumpkins.

#Music #Music criticism #Music analysis #Grunge #Nirvana #Soundgarden #Lyrics #Suicide tw #Alternative rock #90s #Part 1

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