Cap'n Crunch and Ginsu Knives

DC

December 2009

1,229 words

Call me jaded, but I dislike most lovesongs. There, I said it. Now, some explanation is required before I am engulfed in a tidal wave of angry emails from the Michael Buble fan club. I don’t hate the notion of a song being about love, I’m just not keen on the way that most of them are written and performed. In particular, the thing that puts me off is that the majority of the lovesongs that I have ever heard are too sweeping and general. Their authors attempt to capture the hugeness of the concept of love and its ability to totally knock you sideways by resorting to grandeur and epic scale. Guitars chime, strings swell, sometimes horns even blare, and a singer goes on about “love lifting you up where you belong” or how someone “can sweep you off your feet, by being the wind beneath you wings and the smile in your empty soul”.

While that may work for some people, it’s not how I think about love at all. It’s not even how I think about friendship. When I’m trying to work out why a friend has come to mean so much to me, I don’t think in abstract concepts or grandiose metaphors. Instead, things get very specific – for me, friendship is best imagined as a bond built on a foundation of all of the hundreds of tiny interactions that you have ever had with a person, all the things you have ever done for each other, and all of the habits and behaviours that they demonstrate that you have come to admire. This is especially true when it comes to people that I am romantically attached to. If you were to ask me why I love someone, I wouldn’t be able to give you one overarching reason. I would be able to give you four hundred little reasons, tiny brushstrokes that in my head come together to paint a wonderful picture[1]. Sure, sometimes the it’s-all-bigger-than-me nature of love takes me over, but the majority of the time I just don’t think about things on that level.

Given this, I had given up on finding a lovesong that really, truly captures the way I feel about love and romance. This in turn explains why I was so happy to discover a song called Antonia by a wonderful band from Minneapolis, Minnesota. In my opinion, Antonia might be the perfect, most wonderfully constructed modern love song that I have ever heard. In a very short space of time it has become a song that, if you will, would soundtrack the love montage in a movie of my life, and that I would very much like to be played at my wedding, if and when I have one.

On one level, “Antonia” does the same things that the songs I have just spent two paragraphs expressing my dislike for do. It acknowledges those moments when love seems to take on a life of its own, to be a distinct third being in the room with you and your loved one. Singer Justin Pierre notes ruefully how he has come to rely on his lady, that “without her in my life I would be doomed”, and is willing to tug heartstrings to create effect. The chorus of the song has him repeating that “it’s so cold when she’s not around / I wait for her to come and tell me I’ll be fine”, a classic summary of a man feeling overwhelmed and scared by the strength and power of his love. However, this is far as Motion City Soundtrack allows the song to stray into “wind beneath my wings” territory.

Pierre spends the rest of the song rooting his romantic feelings in the everyday, by documenting some of those hundreds of cute little things that your special someone does, those tiny things that melt your heart just a little each time. On the face of it these don’t appear to be things that are “significant”. In fact, the majority of the time it would probably seem crazy if you tried to explain to a stranger why you felt so strongly about them. But when taken cumulatively, they go a long way to explaining why we feel the way we do about people, and what we would miss the most if they weren’t around. Pierre loves his lady not because of something big and obvious, but because “she shaves her legs with ginsu knives / she quotes a lot of Annie Hall”. He likes her because “she’s always eating Cap’n Crunch / she sings a lot of Ben Folds Five”. Some of the things he picks out are hugely funny in their peculiarity – if you are a girl from Minnesota, why on earth would you be “scared to death of cobra snakes / just like Indiana Jones[2]” – but aren’t there things about the people that you have been in love with that seem just as strange, and yet just made you love them all the more? Pierre even finds endearing traits which in someone else could be irritating or frustrating, but that can somehow become loveable in a partner: “she never orders takeout food before ten o’clock at night / she drinks a lot of Chardonnay”.

Crucially, the band get the ending right too. Pierre lists the things he adores, letting them mount up cumulatively, and the end result, the composite picture, is… well, true love. When he puts all of the pieces together, he can only conclude by giving his partner one of the highest compliments that we as humans have to offer – that he wants everyone else to be just like her. In this case, Pierre goes as far as to say that he wants his own child to have the same traits as his partner, when he says that “our baby girl is due this May / and when the little lady grows up / I hope that she will be / just like her mother”. “Just like” isn’t something grand. “Just like” can’t be summed up in a sentence. “Just like” is Cap’n Crunch plus Chardonnay plus fear of snakes with legs shaved by ginsu knives, set to the music of Ben Folds.

That’s why I love this lovesong. That’s why it moves me in a way that a thousand plaintive ballads have not. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we have to be able to relate to the specific specifics that Justin Pierre sings about. My special someone doesn’t like Cap’n Crunch at all, and if she tried to shave with knives the only outcome would be a trip to Accident and Emergency. But what I am saying is that, for me at least, it was hugely important to realise that love isn’t necessarily something huge and abstract that you have to chase – it can be as simple as the effect created by another person doing something tiny and subconscious, something that they aren’t even aware of doing. In my case, I love the way that my lady can take 5 minutes to eat a single chocolate button. I love the way that she carries more in her handbag than most people would pack in a suitcase. I adore her ability to get drunk on half a cocktail, and then spend the next three days telling everyone “how much she drank”. And, when you add these things together, I love her.

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[1] Yes, I probably just stole that metaphor from one of the very lovesongs that I am complaining about. I am aware of the irony of this.

[2] I am 99% certain that someone is now going to email in to tell me that you do, in fact, get many breeds of especially venomous cobra in the Minneapolis and Saint Paul metro areas.

Don't Stop

DC

1, 576 words

November / December 200

In a little less that a month I will be shutting up my flat, packing a bag and leaving the big city for a Christmas break. As ever, I will be heading off to be with my parents and my little brother for a week or so. This year we will be in Oxford, England, where my parents have now settled after stints in Geneva, Washington DC and other places around the world. Recently, however, the exact destination hasn’t mattered as I have found the same things wherever we have been – decorations, laughter, good food, long conversations about the year past and the one to come, love and warmth. We have become a close family, and Christmas has become the focal point of our year – but it hasn’t always been like this.

I have been friends and gotten on well with my Dad for as long as I can remember. This is mostly thanks to him, when I was a moody, rebellious teenager he was such a kind and genial man that I couldn’t not want to spend time with him. Sure, we had some difficulties during those years. Dad is traditional, even a touch-old fashioned, and as such we both found it hard to understand the other during my metal-listening, black-wearing stage. I sometimes felt that he was overly disapproving of me, and I’m sure he was disappointed that I didn’t modify my behavior in the light of his disapproval. In the long run, however, these were very small, age specific problems and soon we figured out how to respect each other while still acting independently and following our own paths.

Things went the same way with my little brother. When we were young, Adam and I fought. Of course we did. We were born three years apart, and as such wanted everything the other had, be it our parents attention or a Sega MegaDrive or to have our friends over. Most of the time our fighting consisted of passive-aggressive sniping, sometimes we tried vainly to beat each other up in the hilarious way that only uncoordinated white boys with little physical strength can. But we never held a grudge for more than 24 hours and by the time I was 11 and he was about 8 that all faded away: we have been great friends ever since. One of the best things to happen to me during the last few years has been Ad finishing university and moving to London, where he now lives less than 20 minutes from my flat.

Things were different with my Mum. While Dad was warm and frankly played the good cop when it came to discipline and other parental duties, Ma was the bad cop. This seemed to suit her perfectly as she was a tough customer due to temperament and environment. When it comes down to it, Ma is a perfectionist who demands very high standards from those around her, be they colleagues or family members. This behavior was reinforced by the situation in which she found herself – she was a classic first-wave 1960s and 1970s feminist who had had to make her way in the stuffy, male-dominated world of the British Civil Service while also trying to start a family. She saw no reason why she couldn’t have both professional success and personal satisfaction and fought tooth and nail to make that happen in an age and with circumstances that wasn’t conducive to such fulfillment. However, to the teenage me it seemed that all that fighting, all of the struggle, had made her a little tough and a little cold. Sometimes I felt that we, her children and husband, were treated in the same way that an out-of-line colleague might be. The result of all of this was a lack of connection between us, a slight distance that wasn’t conductive to harmonious family relations.

Fast forward ten years, and we get on much better now. I can say wholeheartedly that I now regard my Ma as a great friend, a wonderful parent and someone who I feel no distance from at all. Getting to this point was a gradual process, things happened in fits and starts, but I can remember the turning point, the moment at which I began to perceive her not as a pure authoritarian but as a real flesh and blood person. When I was 15 Ma gave me a copy of the Rolling Stones Greatest Hits. I think it was intended as a kind gesture – she knew I loved music, and thought I might enjoy the record – but there was an ulterior motive here too: Ma wanted to find someone to go to Stones concerts with as Dad didn’t really enjoy rock and roll! At first, it didn’t connect with me at all. In fact, it seemed to reinforce the distance between us. Why was she giving me a CD by some old band who weren’t anything like the groups I listened to? As you may have guessed, the CD disappeared somewhere into my bedroom and didn’t get listened to for a few weeks.

I really can’t remember why I decided to put it in my Discman and give the Stones a try, but at some point I did. Honestly, I was amazed. I was amazed by how good the songs were, how immediate the sound was, how modern everything sounded. Some of the songs absolutely sounded like the bands I listened to and others were different but in a really good way, in a way that I loved. What surprised me most were the two songs that Ma had picked out as her particular favorites when she gave me the album, two of the slower songs in the Stones catalogue. I listened to them once each, and then in wonder. I skipped between them for the next two hours, repeating each about a dozen times as I tried to grasp the lyrics and the intricate guitar lines.

The songs were “Beast of Burden” and “Don’t Stop” and… well, they were dirty! They were slinky, sexy, perfect pop songs. I hadn’t heard too much like them before, as that kind of lustful energy is in pretty short supply among hardcore and punk bands. Lyrically, the songs were fiery and filthy, bursting with sexual tension and energy. I couldn’t believe some of the things Mick Jagger came out with. In “Beast…” his opening gambit is to point out to the “pretty, pretty girl” , that is the object of his affection, that “all I want is for you to make love to me”, eventually resorting to begging “baby please, please, please”. For a shy 15 year old who had been brought up thinking that sex was a by-product of marriage and true love, it was pretty revelatory to hear Jagger singing about it in much more earthy terms, asking “Ain’t I hard enough? Ain’t I rich enough? Ain’t I rough enough?”

“Don’t Stop” was even kinkier with any pretentions of subtlety or euphemism dismissed within about 10 seconds of the jam starting. Jagger’s stunning opening lyrical gambit is to note that “Well you bit my lip and drew first blood / and warmed my cold, cold heart / And your wrote your name right on my back / Boy your nails were sharp”. As if that wasn’t clear enough, he wistfully points out that “I love your screams of passion in the long hot summer night” before imploring his companion “don’t stop, oh baby don’t stop, oh daaaaaaaaaarling”. It’s no understatement at all to say that those two songs, those messy and sexy lyrics, made me totally reconsider my Ma. I couldn’t imagine that someone as tough and clinical as I thought her to be could have those songs as her favorites, so either I was misunderstanding the songs or I had misunderstood my mother. Now, I was fairly sure that I wasn’t confused about the songs, there wasn’t exactly much ambiguity about them. Which meant that I had to be wrong about my Ma. Based on that, I started reconsidering her and trying to get to know her a bit better, and this was the start of the process that led us to where we are today.

I’m not saying that listening to two songs was a magic fix, far from it, but doing so did provide the jolt that I needed, the challenge to my assumptions. It was also yet another sign to me, as if more were needed, of the awesome power of music. Sitting here today, I don’t know if I’ll ever have children of my own. But I do have friends and family members and a girlfriend who, if things go on as they are, I might well end up marrying – and thinking about it, music has played some part in developing my relationship with all of them. We have shared favorite songs, concert-going experiences, Youtube clips of live shows, you name it. And every single time we have shared something, it has brought us a bit closer together or helped us to understand each other a little better. I’m not saying that it has to be music that has this effect, it can be generated by books or music or art or anything that is loved or admired. But, if in doubt, share something and you might be surprised where you end up. I hope that you all have a very merry Christmas wherever you spend it.

The Darker Half

DC, November 2009, 1,225 words

Last weekend I went up to the north of England to see two married friends of mine called Olly and Charlie, who recently moved up there to a city called Sheffield. I have written about both of them before, they are two of my best friends in the world, and something we’ve always had in common is a love of Halloween. This festival hasn’t traditionally been celebrated in England but we’ve always loved it, and have tried to ensure that whatever we are doing we celebrate it together every year. For Charlie, Halloween is doubly important as it coincides with what is for her a major religious festival. She is a very spiritual person but not one who feels comfortable with any of the major modern religions, so she pursues her own brand of neopaganism, choosing to glorify ancestors and the power of nature and the Earth. In her system, the end of October marks the festival of Samhain, or “summer’s end”. Samhain marks the passage from summer (or the “lighter half” of the year) to autumn and winter.

While I was with them, I was fortunate enough to be allowed to sit on a small ceremony that Charlie was having to mark Samhain. As part of this, Charlie asked us to write down on a piece of paper one thing that we wish to continue doing in the following part of the year, and one thing that we would like to “leave behind” as the seasons change. We then rolled the papers up and burned them in a candle flame, with the burning formally marking the transition from one stage of life to the next. This seemed to perfectly capture the sense that many of us get at this time of year, as the leaves fall from the trees and the days get darker for winter – that just as nature is changing, somehow so are we.

Given how powerful this feeling can be, it’s not surprising that many artists have chosen to incorporate it into their work. There are myriad paintings and photographs that try to capture the tipping point between the lighter and dark halves, and many songs have been written about it. Some of them are quite literal, attempting simply to capture the beautiful yet haunting quality of this particular time and the feelings that it engenders. However, others use the changing seasons as a metaphor that allows them explore issues of change in life and sentiment. There have been two examples of this in 2009, with the onset of autumn explored both by 1990s rock survivors Third Eye Blind (3EB) and spiky post-pop-punkers Taking Back Sunday (TBS). The songs are fascinating to listen to together as they capture perfectly the different ways in which we can be impacted by nature and the Earth.

3EB, in their song Summer Town, have written an elegy to times past, and to things swept away as the clock rolls forward. The central theme of the song is our frequent quest to hang onto the those times in our lives that we come to identify as perfect, or as close to perfection as we get – times that inevitably have a limited lifespan. Singer Stephan Jenkins talks fondly of an “old beach house, where we stood outside and sang out loud”, and how he “remembers the time that we drew a crowd and / I told you everything I knew in a manic rushing line”. Most of all, he wants the audience for his narration to know that “you gave me more than you took from me” – but therein is the problem. Whatever time he is recalling it is firmly in the past tense, with time having moved on since. Indeed, he records what changes have happened in detail, ranging from wistful remembrance (“Hey! Where did everybody go? / Everyone I know has blown the coast”) to desperate sadness (“’cause after Halloween / everything starts fading / I’m losing everyone / I go down like the sun”). However, Jenkins is not so self-absorbed as to assume that he’s the only one who feels this way, noting repeatedly that “you know what I mean”, and proposing a joint way forward, suggesting that “last summer is done / can we find another one? / Find another one?”.

In contrast, TBS very much pick up on the other side of the Samhain feeling, the desire to leave things in the past and move on, to put distance between yourself and difficult or troubling times. In contrast to the more reflective, nostalgic vibe of “Summer Town”, their own “Summer, Man” is a spiteful kiss-off to a season and all it brought. The specific object of the venom is never made explicit (though speculation has suggested that it could be about lead singer Adam Lazarra’s ex-wife, or the former TBS guitarist Fred “The Colour Fred” Mascherino), but that doesn’t matter – we can all identify regardless. We have all been through times or met people that we’d rather forget. “Summer, Man” seems to be trying to fast forward time rather than rewind it, to skip “June until September, three months to December”. Not only does the song express no nostalgia for the past, it actively denies that any such feeling should be reflected on a hard time, with Lazarra noting sarcastically that “let’s have a talk about the good times / oh boy, you were always giving in”. Any distance that can be put between present and past is encouraged, with Lazarra stating with a sense of relief that “the summer is over and I doubt / I doubt I’ll be seeing you around” – indeed, the past has already begun to fade from a vivid experience to a “black and white type” about which much is indistinct but the venom remains vivid.

The differing thematic content of the songs is embodied in the music as well as the lyrics. To support their narrative 3EB opted for quite a laid-back strummed tune with a campfire-singalong vibe. This low-fi sound complements the imagery of the song perfectly – you can almost hear the floorboards creaking when Stephan Jenkins songs about the “old beach house”. When taken together the music and lyrics transport you to your own version of the place that Jenkins has in his mind, and you come away knowing and understanding exactly what he went through. At the opposite end of the spectrum, TBS go hard on “Summer, Man”, which is a real turned-up-to-11 jam. The song passes in a headlong rush forward, as if the band is trying to accelerate time. The drums clatter round and over each other and guitars jab and spar, until the end of the song. Suddenly, just as things are drawing to a close, all of the instruments lock into a chugging rhythm, creating a sense that life is returning to normal after the chaos of the preceding season.

In a way, it’s nice to have another reminder that artists have the same preoccupations that we do, that they also struggle with the adjustment from the lighter half to the darker half. It’s no stretch to imagine that there are singers and songwriters, artists and directors, people of all kinds sitting in their living rooms and studies, thinking about the coming of winter and, just maybe, burning their own rolled-up papers in a Samhain flame.

He Did It All For The Tony

DC, 29^th October 2009, 1,575 words including footnotes

The fact that a theatrical musical is being written about the lives and careers of Run-DMC will probably only appeal to three types of people: serious hip-hop heads, the conspiracy theorists who think that Jam Master Jay was killed by the FBI, and serious potheads. I’m not sure which of those camps I fall into, but I found this news totally fascinating. During the past few years I have been vaguely aware of the trend of turning the back catalogues of musical acts into stage shows. In London, where I live, we have been offered the chance to see “songbook shows” about Abba (“Mamma Mia”), Queen (“We Will Rock You”), Blondie (“Desperately Seeking Susan”) and many others. However, these shows all seemed aimed at an older generation of music fans, and as such didn’t hold much interest for me. Plus, by all accounts the majority of them were awful - but when I read about the Run-DMC plans my immediate reactions were “that would be awesome” and “I really think that their songs and story might work as a musical”. This got me thinking… what is it that makes a songbook show successful and satisfying? And why do some shows fail despite boasting fantastic bodies of song, while others get by despite the underlying music being inherently sketchy[1]?

After a very serious scientific investigation consisting of me chatting with friends, watching the first 10 minutes of “Mamma Mia” before being overcome with concern about the future of the human race, and pondering the aforementioned Jam Master Jay death mystery, I think I’ve come up with three broad rules. Follow these, and your songbook show will at least draw a crowd proportional in size to the popularity of the band that you base it on[2]. Fail to observe them, and your all-singing, all-dancing mash-up of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the musical stylings of Vanilla Ice will probably never make it to Broadway…

Rule 1: The group you select must actually have good songs. Obvious, but we all have a band that on a rational level we know really sucks, but are inexplicably attached to anyway. So while a Run-DMC show might work, a Cobra Starship one probably won’t. You don’t want to hire a 50-person chorus just to have them sing that weird backing vocal from “Good Girls Go Bad”.

Rule 2: The artist should have songs that vary in mood and tone. A good musical has to have different types of song if it is to work – the crowd-pleasing hands in the air numbers, the ballads, the introspective jams. With all due respect to Soulja Boy, an entire show of party jams or braggadocious bitches n’ bling tunes would get boring pretty quickly[3].

Rule 3: In an ideal world, the career of the artist or the content of their songs should provide a ready-made narrative arc for the show. So Run-DMC might work as they had such an incredible career journey. Bruce Springsteen would work, as you could easily construct an everyman character would could sing all of his songs and have them sound personal. This isn’t as absolute a rule as the others – “We Will Rock You” set the songs of Queen in an absolutely ludicrous futuristic narrative about oppression and… well, sexual conquest in space[4].

Based on these rules, we can begin to sift through all of the musical acts dwelling in the dark corners of your record collection to identify those that might be most suitable for Broadwayisation. Surprisingly, some musical heavyweights can be ruled out quite quickly:

• The Rolling Stones, for example, just wouldn’t work, unless you think that people will flock to see a musical about an intrepid hero spouting off about the power of the blues for two hours, while having vaguely racist intercourse with “brown sugar” ladies. The lyrical content of their songs is just so all over the place as to be impossible to shoehorn into a coherent structure, though they certainly nail the “tonal range” criterion.
• Prince would also not work, regardless of how much my friend Roni would like to protest otherwise. For a start, all of his songs are too similar in mood to really suit the format. You want to take people through towering highs and crushing lows, whereas the journey of Prince would start, proceed and end with a mood of “pleasant funkiness”. You can’t bring people to tears while a guy molests a wah-wah pedal. The other problem with Prince is that, for a crucial period in his life, he set his own music aside and instead focused on raising the profile of the bands signed to his label. This is a problem for us as budding Broadway producers, as am fairly sure that you could be charged with war crimes for forcing a paying audience to sit through Morris Day and The Time songs[5].
• Poison. As much as I love these 80s metal legends, their career is just not suitable for stage translation. For it to accurately reflect their story, the actors would have to simulate sex 4,232 times a night – and as it has been proven by European Union physicists and Ross from Friends that you can’t take off tight leather trousers in less than 18 minutes, the show faces an insurmountable technical barrier[6].

Even after ruling out such luminaries, there are still many bands left that could be contenders for memorialisation in musical form. I’d love to hear your suggestions (other than you Roni – Morris Day is out. Really.), but here are some of mine to get the ball rolling:

• Jay-Z. One of the great musical stories, a classic meth-to-millions tale that has all the ingredients we need. There’s a built-in audience for the show among the millions of fans who revere him as the “God MC”, and his songs capture a huge range of moods and meanings. Just think of this: after a gritty early years Act soundtracked by “Blue Magic” and “Dead Presidents II”, can you imagine how good it would feel to hear “Empire State Of Mind” or “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” marking the start of the ‘we made it’ era? The only problem with this scenario is that it would be difficult to find a performer to play Jay-Z who had the charisma, charm and energy of the man himself.
• The Flaming Lips. What a show this would be, as their music is highly theatrical to start with, there’s a huge contrast between their more reflective, low-key songs (like “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots”) and the uptempo tracks, and there are semi-coherent sci-fi storylines already built into their lyrics. Again, there’s only one problem, and that is that their incendiary live shows are theatrical enough as it is, reducing the need for a stage adaptation. Plus, their giant hamster ball probably wouldn’t please the haute-coutured theatregoing crowd as it rolled over their heads.
• Limp Bizkit. Imagine this with me – a moving tale following Fred Durst as he escapes his life as a humble tattoo artist in Southern Florida, eventually becoming a multi-platinum recording artist, film director and misogynist[7]. The song titles already capture the essential elements of the arc. Fred just wants “My Generation” to “Take A Look Around”, realise that society just “Eats you Alive”, fight to learn “The Truth”, join forces and get “N 2 Gether Now”, begin a revolt and “Break Stuff”, before realising that you just want to be loved as you softly weep “Behind Blue Eyes”. Most of all, however, Fred wants you to know one thing: he did it all for the nookie. The nookie. The nookie. Such things Tony Awards are made of, people.

I’m sure you agree that all of those scenarios would be far better than sitting through a performance of Mamma Mia, but are they the best we can do? What are your ideas? Emails to the usual address, remember the rules, and above all else… no Morris Day.

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[1] Seriously, a two and a half hour musical entirely consisting of ABBA songs? I challenge anyone to say that they truly dig “Honey, Honey” or “When I Kissed The Teacher” from “More Abba Gold”

[2] Let’s face it, no-one is coming to see a musical about that one band who were signed to Equal Vision Records in 1999 that you really dug, but who got dropped before their second album

[3] For the Soulja Boy fan reading this: “Kiss Me Thru The Phone” does not count as an introspective song. Unless your show is entirely written from the perspective of the phone.

[4] Even the “simplified summary” of We Will Rock You begins by describing a key plot development thus: “The two heroes, Galileo and Scaramouche, discover musical instruments buried in rock, which they use to vaporise the head of the corporation (The Killer Queen), and send the Power Of Rock around the world to free the masses”. Perfectly logical, am sure.

[5] So as not to destroy a friendship, I have to stress that this view of Morris Day is that of the author alone, and not shared by his co-conspirators. Roni has frequently declared her love for Mr Day, his jheri curls and his “coked-up dance steps”.

[6] If technology ever advances to the point where this is not a problem, count me in. Who wouldn’t pay to go and see a Poison-themed show called “Lovin’ You’s A Dirty Job”?

[7] This footnote was originally going to include the lyrics to a particularly “interesting” Bizkit song about women, but there’s no way we could have published it. So instead, I leave you with this inspirational gem from the mind of the Durst: “may the bed bugs shrivel and die before they make it into your sheets to eat you alive”.

A Warped Worldview, or To Hate Or Not To Hate?

DC 11/09/09

Word count: 1,373

The wonderful new Nick Hornby book "Juliet, Naked" is in many ways essential reading for music fanatics like us. While telling a brutal story about doomed relationships and the choices people make, Hornby touches on many of the crucial questions that music fans have been debating for years. For me the most vital and interesting is this: is music something that can be evaluated and rated in absolute terms (e.g. "this record is good, this is bad"), or is it really something subjective that can only be assessed in terms of the impact that it has on a particular listener at a particular moment. To put it simply, can you or I ever say that the Black Eyed Peas suck, based on our in-depth study of all things musical, or does the fact that a 15 year old girl really digs "I Gotta Feeling" invalidate our opinion?

In Hornby's book, one of the characters is a music enthusiast called Duncan. Duncan is an avid fan of a singer-songwriter called Tucker Crowe, and he believes that he has listened to Crowe's albums so many times, has studied their intricacies in so much detail, that he can definitively say that they are "good music". By extension, he believes that he can say with certainty that anyone who doesn't appreciate Crowe's work is an idiot, or has no taste. This reminded me of the furore that surrounded the choice of bands on this year's Warped Tour. Throughout the summer punk bands were criticising Warped founder Kevin Lyman for picking electro-pop bands Brokencyde and Millionaires for the tour, often resorting to stating that the young bands "just made bad music". Influential and respected scene figures like Anthony Ranieri from Bayside, rapper P.O.S. and even relative newcomers like Florida pop-punkers Set Your Goals were quick to declare that the bands "sucked", without so much as an "in my opinion" or a "compared to..." to soften their distaste.

Up until this episode, I'd always struggled to frame my views on this subject. When we are young we are trained to think that behaviour, art, performance can always be evaluated in absolute terms. This is necessary, I suppose, if children are ever to obey parents and teachers, and to be encouraged to avoid things that are corrosive to young minds. After this, I'd arrived at University and had Professors spend three years telling me that nothing should be examined in such a way, that everything was about interpretation and relative experience. However, the Warped episode and reading "Juliet, Naked" have helped clear up my views. My immediate reaction to reading Ranieri's comments were "wow, it's slightly ironic to hear a guy who has spent years asking people not to be judgmental about music and to think about things intelligently simply dismissing something as "bad" without even acknowledging the fact that Brokencyde perform to hundreds of kids a day, kids who seemed to be drawing real joy from their performance". I thought that Ranieri was falling into the Duncan trap of assuming that his years of experience of punk rock entitled him to declare what was good or not, what was punk or not, what was Warped Tour or not.

The problem with the absolutist argument, it now seems to me, is about the standard that you apply when evaluating something. To feel able to say definitively that something is "good" or "bad", you have to have a measure to use, a set of criteria that serve to separate things. In this case, people have suggested a number of indicators of the suckitude of the Warped bands, including:

- "they suck, because [Influential Person X] says so". Bullshit, plain and simple. Look, I will admit to having deep feelings of reverence for certain members of the punk community. If Brett Gurewitz or Tom Gabel or Dustin Kensrue says something, then I tend to view it in a positive light because of the integrity that I believe those people possess. However, I would never assume that everyone else feels the same way, or that the opinion of those individuals should automatically override the opinions of anyone else. So I'm sorry Mr Ranieri, but there are no such things as "scene points" in real life, and your word can't be taken as gospel.

- "they suck, because they don't play instruments". Well, plenty of great musical performers haven't played instruments (off the top of my head, almost every top-class rapper fits this bracket). And while Mr Punk Rock might not view rappers as real musicians either, I think the Jay-Z / Noel Gallagher Glastonbury fiasco put that argument to rest once and for all.

- "they suck because they don't write their own songs". I agree that there is a genius inherent in writing a song. I admire people like Ryan Adams, who can do it seemingly at will. I think that to be seen as a truly great musician, you have to write your own material. But to be a performer, and that's all that Brokencyde claim to be and aspire to be, you just have to get on a stage and kill it. You don't need to have written what you play, you just need to play the shit out of it. And, as much as you or I (for I don't love their output, and think that songs like "Freaxxx" potentially encourage date rape, but that’s a separate issue) might not like them, they have fans who think their performances are brilliant.

There are other standards that people have tried to use, but I have similar problems with all of them. Which, again got me questioning my beliefs, and I came to this conclusion: the thing that I loved most about punk rock when I was first getting into it was that, to all intents and purposes, it was unjudgemental. Punk rock said to me, as a 16 year old who didn't quite feel like he fitted in, "you are welcome here, whatever you are into". You might like hardcore, it might be thrash that gets you off, whatever, it doesn't matter. An integral part of being a subculture is about having flexible standards - as punk rock fans we are saying to newcomers "listen, the mainstream may not seem right for you and that's fine, you have the right to be into whatever you are into". In the light of that, turning around and attempting to tell people what they should or shouldn't like seems hypocritical - if you feel angry when people tell you that your band or the music you love "sucks", why do you then perpetuate that by telling other people that what they like "sucks"? Why not accept that they aren't the same as you, that your tastes may be different, and get back to doing something positive?

Ultimately, the thing that made up my mind, the thing that convinced me that Hornby is right in advocating the relativist view, was rock and roll. Last week, I watched a video of Against Me! playing at a festival in Florida a couple of years ago (you can see it here: http://nationalunderground.org/national-underground-recordings/29-against-me-the-fest-4 The second video is particularly amazing, if only for the phenomenal runthrough of "Problems" and the stage invasion at the end of "We Laugh At Danger (And Break All The Rules)”). Their performance was just wonderful, powerful and passionate, everything I love about music. And I realised, while lost in the energy of it all, that some people would hate it. Would note that Tom Gabel can't really sing and that the guitars are slightly out of tune and that a lot of their songs sound kind of the same. And you know what? I would love to debate that with them, I would love to try to convince them to see things my way - but if at they end of the day they didn't see it I would hope that they would accept that my opinion was as valid as theirs, and that we would part as friends. That's the problem with the "they just suck argument", it robs us of both the excitement of the debate and then the camaraderie of agreeing to disagree. Losing those things... well, that would just suck.

“The Girl With The Pawprint Tattoo”

DC, 751 words.

I once went out with a girl who had a tiny tattoo on the inside of her wrist. It was a thin black ink outline of the pawprint of an animal, no more than an inch and a half long. You could go days, weeks without noticing it, even if you were spending a lot of time with her. And it was the thing that made me really want to go out with her. She was and is lovely (since then, she has gone on to become one of my best friends), pretty, funny, all the things you look for - but it was the tattoo that really drew me too her. I couldn't explain why at the time and I still can't, but there was something about that little detail that just... made a special package even more so.

I once bought a print by an artist named Jeff Soto. I love Soto's art, the way he represents modern California and wordly concerns and... well, really cute alien creatures. The print I ended up buying had all of these things, it was undeniably beautiful, but the thing that made me absolutely have to have it was smaller than any of that. In the background, almost imperceptibly, were a million tiny sketched details that Soto had added in. Minute recreations of power cables and antennae and oil drums and plants. If you were standing 10 feet away from the print you wouldn't even see them, but for me it was those easily overlooked facets that made me adore this painting.

The reason that I mention these things is that, in my opinion, it is in the details that great artists distinguish themselves from simply very good ones. It's with these details that a good work of art can be made exceptional or, more relevantly, that a good song can be given a dusting of something special that elevates it, makes it more than it should rightly be. One drumbeat. The sound of a singer breathing in. The squeak of fingers running across guitar strings. The buzz of an amplifier. Sometimes these things can be inconsequential, or even annoying. But sometimes, just occasionally, they can add something to a song that is disproportionate to the thought with which they were created, or their duration.

I thought that this would be a good topic for our new roundtable. We've talked about our favorite musical moments before, and you guys came up with some absolutely fantastic suggestions, and pointed me and am sure others towards songs that I have grown to love since. So here's a chance to do that all over again - what is your favorite detail in a song? Not your favorite song, not your favorite verse or chorus, but your favorite tiny note or beat or bang or whisper. And what do you think that detail adds to the song, why do you think it has a magical power?

To kick things off, here's one I noticed recently, the cause of why I'm writing this column. Tonight I'm going to see Jack's Mannequin, the band fronted by ex-Something Corporate singer Andrew Mcmahon. The band is one of my favorites, I have written about them here, and I'm hugely excited about the show. To get ready I was listening to their albums while at work, and on came the song "Spinning", track two from their wonderful "The Glass Passenger" album. Great song, for sure - but there is a deeply special moment 34 seconds in. The first verse has passed, and the bridge is building to a crescendo. Mcmahon sings "be patient, I am getting to the point", the guitars spin on, and then there is a moment of silence... suddenly, there is a single snap on the snare drum. You notice it because it's louder, more urgent than the drumming has been on the song before. And it changes everything. It gives the song pace, momentum, and leads perfectly into the headrush that is the chorus. It musically symbolises Mcmahon "getting to the point", moving from contemplation into action, from introduction to the heart of the matter. That one stroke becomes the pivot for the whole song, the thing that draws it together, that gets the adrenaline of the listener flowing. And it is one drumbeat, out of maybe 1,000 during the song. One flick of the wrist in a studio.

I don't know how much thought went into that drumbeat. It may have been a stroke of accidental genius, though I doubt it. The beat is louder, comes after a silence, is custom-designed to be striking...and it's perfect. It is the market of a great artist – and I don’t know whether credit here should be given to Mcmahon, or his drummer, or his producer, it doesn’t matter - elevating his work from one level to the next. It's the pawprint tattoo, the sketched powerline.

A Flight and A Crash

DC 22/07/09

A Flight and A Crash

As the saying goes, sometimes bad things happen to good people. That was my immediate response to reading recent interviews in which Chino Moreno and other members of metal group Deftones discuss the car wreck that plunged their bassist Chi Cheng into a coma. The band seem like good people, who have been, as you would expect, scarred and saddened by their experience. On that personal level, this has been a tragic turn of events and clearly all sympathies should be directed to those involved.

As well as the personal issue, I think there may be a musical loss here too, which while clearly insignificant in the broader context is also a shame. The loss is this – just at the time when the band were hit with Cheng’s crash, they may have been about to push modern metal forward again.

This doesn’t mesh well with the predominant critical take on Deftones, which is that they were late-90s innovators in the hard rock field who have since settled into a boundary-respecting groove. And this is true to a point – their self-titled record did seem a little stagnant and free of new tricks. However, this view also underestimates the brilliance of their last record, the unjustly overlooked “Saturday Night Wrist”, which was packed with excitement and innovation.

“…Wrist” met the unfortunate fate that some long-gestating works of art do – it became known more in relation to the tortured process of its creation than in terms of its music. The narrative surrounding its release was that the record was the product of a band riven by personality disputes and internal conflict – and as a result of this the vast majority of reviews failed to analyse it in any depth beyond saying “holy hell, it’s amazing this disc even got made!”

That was a mistake, as “…Wrist” got closer to achieving something than almost any other hard rock record has. That something is to capture feelings of romanticism, lust, longing, eroticism and craving, within the structures of modern metal. Metal has always been a useful channel for certain emotions – anger, be it political (Rage Against The Machine) or personal (Nine Inch Nails). Aggression (take a bow, Limp Bizkit). Pure sexual lust (Motley Crue). All of these emotions are relatively easily communicated by means of crunching riffs, spiralling solos an driving drumbeats. What metal has never been good at is capturing less extreme, more heady, more complex feelings – and particularly those relating to romantic love and longing.

This was where the genius of “…Wrist” sat. It’s swirling textures and melodies, topped by the gorgeous croons and screams of Moreno, began to paint those feelings. And it did it without sacrificing heaviness – in fact, the ferocity of the delivery system was crucial to the mapping of the more conflicted parts of the heart. Every minute of this record, from Moreno’s moans on Hole In The Earth and plaintive cries of “I’ll be waving goodbye” on Xerxes to Steph Carpenter’s mating-whale guitars on Cherry Waves dripped sensuality. This was underpinned by Cheng’s flexible, keening basslines, the musical equivalent of bedroom eyes. All of this is pretty hard to pull off while also rocking a moshpit.

And that’s where the musical tragedy of all of this bites. While “…Wrist” was a brilliant record, you felt that Deftones could have taken things still further. You hoped that they would be brave enough to try, rather than turning back to the easier task of writing musical that was purely angry or heavy for heavy’s sake. And then they revealed that their 2009 album would be called “Eros”, surely a sign that the band was rising to the challenge. How could a record with a title like that not explore the finer points of love and sex?

As a result of Cheng’s crash, however, Eros has been shelved. The band made the brave choice not to release the record, as Cheng had been such an integral part of its creation that the other members didn’t feel that it was right to play the songs without him. Instead, the Deftones are writing a new record inspired by his accident. I am absolutely sure that this is the right course to take, and I look forward to the record that they do release greatly. But the fact that that record won’t be “Eros” is a minor tragedy nevertheless, set against the backdrop of a much greater one.