Adrift in the '90s
Nobody knew where music was going as the year 2000 approached, and that was part of the fun.
The most fun time to be a music critic is always when the industry is at its most confused. That’s the when honorable and shifty hustlers alike get away with shit no one would throw money at in saner times, and reviewers give second listens to music they’d ordinarily brush past. I started writing regularly at just such a time. Alt-rock, always an unstable compound, had split atomically into heavy guitars purged of pop and sugary new wave approximations.
Reading back over these pieces, I feel like I was often looking the wrong way, expecting yesterday’s heroes to carry us to the new millennium. But we were all disoriented. Some expected electronic dance music to become the new rock; instead it conquered the world one party at a time. Scouting for indie-rock scenes, we overlooked how emo and pop-punk were already dominating the tastes of kids not much younger than us. Even those of us who loved Britney and Backstreet weren’t expecting what we still called teenpop to become the dominant hegemonic style of the 21st century. The only sure bet was hip-hop—but that doesn’t mean we were ready for nu metal.
The Harder They Come: Pulp’s This Is Hardcore
City Pages, April 15, 1998
If there's one thing the British have, it's class. No, not style, class--the clear delineation of socioeconomic strata that our Great American Experiment supposedly eradicated through Gallup-driven democracy and extended credit limits.
On Pulp's 1996 breakthrough, Different Class, plebian frontman Jarvis Cocker caught the eye of a posh college bird slumming for some lowlife action. She: “I want to sleep with common people like you.” He: “I'll see what I can do.” “Common People,” Cocker's bitchy denunciation of “tourists” from a higher caste who “think that poor is cool,” whirled upward to a gleeful peak of chintzy synth, la-la-la's--and #2 on the U.K. charts. In the U.S. its class-consciousness was as indecipherably exotic as Tuvan throat-singing and a third as successful. After all, such an encounter could never happen here. Right?
Throughout Different Class, Cocker spiked glib bedroom farces with embittered class envy, rooting classically lusty pop superstructures in a material base. Broke but no bloke, vulgar but no Marxist, Cocker cherished the old motto that '”nothing's too good for the working class.” And to prove the point, he appropriated Brian Ferry's aristocratic croon, a string of satisfied bedmates, and the genteel conjunction “whilst” from his social betters. Cocker desired the expensive sheets in which he lolled as much as he did the expensive wives therein, and he was convinced that his cleverness and fashion sense entitled him to both.
Never one to feel sympathetic for a pathetic simp, I take little comfort from Morrissey's music-hall histrionics. But Cocker seems to understand the difference between affection and affectation. On This Is Hardcore he's determined to act his age. At 34, Cocker yearns to be a dirty old man, recasting the U.K. charity slogan “Help the Aged” into a touchingly desperate come-on. Mick Jagger should have the guts to implore, “It's time you took an older lover, bay-bay,” or, better yet, stutter, “You can't get away from your s-s-s-s-s-self” in such a yearning, hopeless falsetto. But the shift in Cocker's objects of desire from the wealthy to the young strips his hooks of their most enticing bait.
Since sex remains a spectator sport to Cocker, his idea of hardcore ain't no Ian MacKaye tribute. But his exhibitionist cravings now require the overworked trope of camera-as-voyeur. The porny title track is sensual enough to earn its “Bolero” rip, but Cocker's icky self-deprecation ('I can't believe it took me this long') is an unappealing sexual position for this accomplished tumbler. Once ominously seductive, Cocker's creamy baritone curdles into an stylized rumble, sloshing through dubious intonation on the anti-fun manifesto “Party Hard.” Yet, the song's dour put-down of girls who frequent discos (this from a man who once cheerily pillaged a riff from Laura Branigan's “Gloria”) might seem less puritanical if you could dance to its Zooropean churn.
“The Fear'”fares better, at least as camp, with Cocker making a grandiose psychic abyss out of an unwelcome bout with celibacy. Horrorshow tremolo, trilled guitar, high-strung symphonics, and disembodied chorales add up to the orchestral maneuvers of a dork who believes “the end is near” because he “can't get anyone to come in the sack.” As if that isn't silly enough, Cocker crooks his finger menacingly our way. “Now you know the words to our song,”he whispers. “Pretty soon you'll all be singing along.” Yikes! It's a post-apocalyptic future where no one gets laid!
Let Radiohead's confused jeremiads bewail a dehumanized technocracy from which only costly effects pedals can preserve us. Both warmer and more genuinely frightened, Cocker invites the world to snuggle in his “stagnant water bed” and share a good cry. And Hardcore works best when it cuts its clever gloom with this kind of outreach. An ode to doing “Dishes” follows up its arch opening line—”I am not Jesus, but I have the same initials”—by imagining a cozy foundation of mundane domesticity. “I'm not worried that I will never touch the stars,” Cocker sighs, ''cause stars belong up in heaven and the earth is where we are.” It's unsettling to hear him settle for so little. But when he sings, “Aren't you happy just to be alive?” it's near as luverly as the Kinks' “Waterloo Sunset.” You'd almost think he formerly enlisted in the class wars because (sniff) no one ever really loved him.
And why shouldn't Jarvis Cocker want to be loved? He is just a pop star, no more obligated to puzzle the dialectic between sex and commerce than the Spice Girls. But he is obligated to craft a persona that does justice to his wit, and a cunning lad screwing his way into the upper echelon is simply more entertaining than a middle-aged orgasm addict whose right knee jerks toward sarcasm while his left bends toward sentimentality.
I'm hoping Cocker will outgrow his maturity. But for now he’s learned his lessons: Aging is tragic, compromise is inevitable, sex is sordid. And class is dismissed.
Men Out of Time: Woody Guthrie’s Asch Recordings/Billy Bragg & Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue
City Pages, June 24, 1998
In early May, 1941, Woody Guthrie loaded a rickety Pontiac with wife, children, and possessions, his desperate mind fixing on a tentative job prospect and a new beginning. Though his situation resembled that of the confused, battered people that populated his songs, Woody Guthrie was no overmortgaged Okie migrant. He was a nationally recognized troubadour and former New York radio star. It wasn't the dusty old dust that had driven him to desperation, but his depleted imagination, drained by the demands for “authenticity” and “American originality” placed on it by a slew of radio sponsors, leftist folk epicures, and his own expectations. Yet Guthrie wasn't even leaving showbiz altogether; he was on his way to make a movie in Oregon.
The bit of celluloid propaganda for which the Guthries straggled North, a patriotic documentary of the construction of the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams, was never filmed; its funding was siphoned into the U.S. war chest as American involvement overseas became inevitable. But Woody found more pity among the dam builders than the Okies ever got in California, and the Bonneville Power Authority hired him as a day laborer for $266.66 a month. As he spent a month surveying the construction, 26 songs gushed forth from Woody's pen, songs drunk with hope for the possibilities of collective creation.
Among the giddiest was “Talking Columbia.” A pumping harmonica launches into a tune, a talking blues whose roots have been traced back to the days of minstrelsy. But the imagery is wildly expansive, more like Whitman kicked into overdrive than any folk blues or country ballad.
Before this public works project, he sings, the Columbia was “a river that was going to waste.” But Woody glimpsed hints of a future socialism in this massive federal labor initiative. Not only would the dam provide irrigation for struggling farmers, it would yoke previously uncontrolled natural forces to their proper task—to produce stuff for people, products ranging from “fertilizer to sewing machines to atomic bedrooms and plastic.” At this point, Guthrie cuts short and strums on, building suspense. Finally he bursts out with an epochal aside: “Everything's gonna be plastic!” Guthrie crows, launching into a list of soon-to-be-met needs, a list that might have continued indefinitely if he weren't so impatient to proclaim the coda: “Of course, I don't like dictators none myself, but I think the whole country oughta be run by...
e-lec-tricity!”
The irony here is that for GUthrie the world was already plastic—a malleable hunk of raw material waiting to be synthesized into meaning by any man who wasn't afraid of hard work. Not just the woods and the water and the land (which, as he sang, were “made for you and me”). Historical events and musical tradition were to be bent to meet immediate needs. The tune for “So Long It's Been Good to Know You” was adapted from the '20s folk song “Billy the Kid.” Early on, the lyrics mutated to describe an apocalyptic dust storm; later they rallied behind the war effort; and, during a radio performance on Model Tobacco's Pipe Smoking Time, they even shilled for his corporate sponsors.
The past didn't need to be preserved. It needed to be utilized to create a future. So although the version of “Talking Columbia” included on the just-released set of 1940s Guthrie recordings, Hard Travelin', was recorded six years after it was written, Woody hesitates while singing it as if the words are just striking him. At any point during the performance, it seems as if a flash of insight or a memory lapse could force him to veer off into a new set of unexpected images. A new invocation of power.
Hard Travelin' is the third in a four-volume set of material culled from the recordings Guthrie made in New York with Folkways founder Moe Asch from 1944 to 1947. Volume 1 was a master stroke, rescuing “This Land Is Your Land” from memories of earnest grade-school sing-alongs lead by hippie-holdovers-turned-teachers.
Smithsonian archivist Jeff Place was lucky enough to discover a version of “This Land” long thought unrecorded, in which Woody roams and rambles past a sign marked “Private Property.” “But on the back side,” Guthrie notes, “it didn't say nothing.” Place and Guthrie scholar Guy Logsdon situate the anthem at the beginning, middle, and end of the album, surrounding it with “Jesus Christ” (about the radical carpenter rather than the Son of God) and 'Mr. Lindbergh' (about Lindbergh the fascist-sympathizing isolationist, not Lindbergh the transatlantic aviator). In doing so, they document the defiant socialist roots of Guthrie's populism.
But Volume 3 documents Woody's belief in the power of plasticity, the ability to bend tradition to his vision as the Bonneville harnessed the Columbia River. Most of the songs were inspired by Guthrie's ability to link two events: the proliferation of the union movement and World War II. A frequenter of union rallies, Woody adopted folk melodies so everyone could sing along with him. A patriot who despised capitalism, Woody adopted Hitler as a folk demon so everyone could hate along with him.
Guthrie expanded the definition of fascism to include anyone whose greed set up obstacles to people who wanted to work and sing together. “It's a union world I'm fighting for,” he declared, always sure not to specify whether that battle raged overseas or on picket lines against little Hitlers like scabs, bosses, and anti-labor vigilantes. As he inscribed on his guitar, “This Machine Kills Fascists.”
Some 50 years after the end of Guthrie's recording career, the dictatorship of electricity is a given. The elasticity of history allows events to be erased as easily as they occur. It's rumored that whoever eventually happened upon Woody's old guitar sanded off his legendary inscription and re-laminated the wood finish. Copyright law has fenced off the public domain through which Woody happily rambled. The only outlaw posture worth striking belongs to DJs mixing beats and breaks into a whirl of sound too committed to flux for any single meaning to hold saw. Writing songs is a nostalgic, doomed affair, if not a knee-jerk reaction, since the project of perpetual re-creation has long since been usurped by the self-conscious disposability of the latest incarnation of the Tin Pan Alley pop that Woody loathed.
At this hardly fortuitous juncture, Guthrie's legacy falls into the hands of Billy Bragg and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, two artists whose need to sift through the past hasn’t always helped them imagine the future. Mermaid Avenue (Elektra) is the result of an invitation from Guthrie's daughter Nora to page through her father's notebooks for clues to some forgotten synthesis of music and politics, folk tradition and contemporary relevance.
Rather than mythologizing Guthrie as a populist balladeer, Bragg's liner notes present him as a self-conscious, self-expressive musical poet, perhaps “the first in a long line of singer songwriters.” Placing the “real” man above his public image is usually a dubious project when dealing with popular music, where image is all we can access. But in this case, it's a brilliant, necessary misreading. Bragg uncovers the deep loneliness that Guthrie generally excluded from his canon, a profound alienation that drove him to create songs that celebrated the search for community.
Guthrie had a deep-seated hatred for “songs that made you feel low-down.” But that doesn't mean he didn't write them. He might not have hated them so if he hadn't felt the tug of those songs inside him. With a wistful sigh, Bragg plucks an acoustic dream of making love to “Ingrid Bergman” on the side of a volcano in Stromboli. Woody probably would have rollicked from the song's bashful compliments of “You're so purty” to its ejaculatory release “You make any mountain quiver/You make fire fly from the crater” with a boastful giddiness. But when Bragg sings, “This old mountain it's been waiting/For your hand to touch its hard rock”' what might have been a reference to Little Woody sounds more like a cold, cold heart.
Bragg's Cockney sniffle is similarly at home on “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key.” But if Mermaid Avenue liberates Guthrie's sadness, it also allows Bragg to relax. And he couldn't have done it without Wilco answering his call. “Last night, or the night before last,” Bragg announces to start the album, and a tuneless chorus picks up with “I don't know what night.” This boozy, indeterminate call-and-response continues until Bragg's recollection of last night's events sends him on a drunken spree that ends with his head resting on the lap of “Walt Whitman's Niece.” As he relates the tale, he sounds like the British equivalent of Woody's hobo, neither impressed nor amazed, just amused by the turn of events.
The challenge of rocking Guthrie out of the vaults doesn't faze Wilco much either. From country weeper to arena rocker, Jeff Tweedy has always possessed a healthier disregard for authenticity than your average roots farmer. But because he's wanted for a lyrical agenda, Tweedy's versatility can seem more facile than exuberant. Tweedy's vocal pliability allows him to slip into Guthrie's characters, and Wilco's lack of stylistic commitment inspires a loose-limbed abandon. On “California Stars,” he runs the line “Dream a dream of you” together until it sounds as soothing as a lullaby. “Hoodoo Voodoo” links a nonsense lyric to a giddy Blonde on Blonde organ riff, a left-handed barrelhouse piano roll straight out of Fats Domino, and a Morse-code cowbell twitch, guaranteed to make you “dance a goofy dance.”
Mermaid Avenue envisions a future more distant and tenuous than Guthrie celebrated. “Maybe we'll have all of the fascists out of the way by then,” Bragg-as-Woody sings, dreaming of a better time “10 million years from now.” Still, his tone suggests that there is a future, and Billy's no longer impatient for that great leap forward. Fact is, he's satisfied with the baby steps Guthrie described in “I Planted a Seed.” Bragg sings the now-dubious lines “Union songs/Union battles/All added up” with an unwavering confidence he rarely summons on his own records. It's as if he's telling us we can enjoy the pleasures of the moment without either demanding instant gratification or accepting defeat. And for a short moment, we do.
Please Release Me: PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire?
City Pages, October 21, 1998
Polly Jean Harvey is a tease. She knows what we want from her--what we expect--and she knows exactly how long she can toy with us before she has to deliver. When she does, we’re jolted by both the thrill of irrational desire and the terror of becoming the object of that desire. It's an effect she lands with all the subtlety of a slasher leaping out from behind the door in a horror flick. Yet the opening track of each PJ Harvey album has delayed that catharsis a bit more. First came the immediacy of “Oh My Lover,” next, the subdued jitters and merciless explosions of “Rid of Me,” and finally the stalking menace of “To Bring You My Love,” which swelled until her voice leapt that climactic octave into its gloating vibrato.
So when the lead cut on Is This Desire? (Island) opens with a gentle acoustic strum, we know better than to be lulled, right? But like its title character, “Angelene” is the “prettiest mess you've ever seen,” and the damn thing just keeps getting prettier. Pianos tinkle into place. Cymbals crash with the steady calm of distant tides. “Come to me,” Harvey moons to that unknown man “who will collect my soul,” her lips half parted with the passive sigh of a thousand Cinderellas cooing over the pop airwaves. The drama is all in the texture, the ebb and swell of the arrangement that technoid producers/accomplices Flood and Head decorate with meticulous taste. Is this desire? Or is it just art rock?
Yes, on both counts. And while her desires are consistently thwarted, her art rock impulses are rendered with uncommon agility. We should've known Harvey wouldn't be the same after she stumbled across Leiber and Stoller's “Is That All There Is?” while recording Dance Hall at Louse Point, her side-collaboration with guitarist John Parish. In the original, Peggy Lee's litany of vaulted expectations and inevitable disappointments (neither a fire that destroys her house, the garish spectacle of a circus, nor a broken heart impresses her as significant events) spins into Brecht-Weill music-hall decadence. But Harvey won't embrace such jaded pleasure: Her flat reading drove the chorus (“If that's all there is, then let's keep dancing”) a level deeper into despair.
Picking up on this futility of longing, Is This Desire? unfolds like a collection of short stories, each purporting to define a human life in a moment of bleak revelation. Pop culture is neurotically delusional with regard to this desire, centered as it is on the faith that there is an Other out there who, as Tom Cruise once explained, completes you. Until now, Harvey got off on that neurosis, on her ability to dramatize its insanity in a way that those who doggedly continue to equate sex with pleasure could understand. Her critical reviews may have read like midterm explications of Cixous, but she understood the need for climax as innately as Jerry Lee kicking home the final chorus of “Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On.”
But that knowledge has left her feeling a bit grimy, and her new obsession is with exposing the often quiet pathos of those who seek permanence in the act that Johnny Rotten disparaged as “two minutes of squelching noises.” These characters wallow in sin (a.k.a. sex) without any transgressive glee. Their desires may be the same as those of Celine Dion fans—huge swooping gusts of transcendent passion driven to heights more Wuthering than Kate Bush sprinting uphill. But Polly's princes never cum, or if they do, they wind up like the loser of “A Perfect Day Elise,” who glimpses completion in a grubby one-night stand and is haunted forevermore by his inability to recapture that moment. Turns out that Angelene is one of the fortunate ones, still able to mistake the chimera of romantic longing for genuine hope.
Harvey knows that music can create structures that recapitulate desire; her music explores tension, anticipation, release. So she sculpts electronic patterns that are as knotty and wary of resolution as her lyrics. Is This Desire? is literally hard to hear, consistently muffled beneath a layer of aural fuzz, a mix where treble is as fleeting as joy. Yet for the title (and final) track she trudges back to the folk blues she's always debased so brilliantly to give her gestures earthy resonance. Two scared prospective lovers gaze at each other with hopeful desperation. As they draw close, there's a swelling of organs (no, no—in the music). Then the guitar doubles the pace of its slide. Harvey wonders if this will be “Enough enough/To lift us higher/To life above” as the chorus wisps into a tiny post-orgasm sigh that trails off into silence. And when the music's over, our lovers roll to either side and ask themselves, “Is that all there is?”
Beck Is the Loneliest Number: Beck, Midnite Vultures
City Pages, December 8, 1999
Beck Hansen is not white like Elvis Presley. He isn't white like Bob Dylan. He isn't white like the Beastie Boys or white like the Backstreet Boys. He isn't white like Kid Rock or Eminem or Limp Bizkit. He isn't even white like Michael Jackson.
No, in Beck you behold Melville's whiteness of the whale, a whiteness that not only is a reflection of all that it beholds, but also reflects everything in the eye beholding it. Beck is the absence of all colors posing as the presence of all colors, and vice versa. He's commercially popular for all the right reasons (good songs) and critically overrated for all the wrong ones (relevance). Like Popeye and Yahweh, he am what he am: a prime little number, divisible only by himself.
It isn't Beck's artistry that's overrated, though: That's why he's such an elusive target for those few critical whalers willing to harpoon him. From the very good Mellow Gold to the very excellent Odelay to the very okay Mutations to the new, good-as-he-ever-was Midnite Vultures (Interscope), Beck's albums have been far livelier, funnier, and just plain more listenable than most objects of critical devotion are likely to be. The high-stepping horns, Steve Cropper guitar chonk, and Deliverance banjo antics of “Sexx Laws” jump-start his latest disc so that listening feels like more than cultural obligation. The deadpan robochick choruses of “Get Real Paid” and slobbery jive talk of “Hlwd. Freaks” are as gross and disorienting and funny and tawdry as George Clinton at his most sloppily cosmic.
And through it all, Beck's vocal mimicry encompasses a wider range than ever. The closest his over-the-top falsetto comes to tarring itself with the minstrel's brush isn't when it feints toward Phillip Bailey or Mavis Staples but on the incestuous threesome fantasy “Debra,” where it sounds like he's mocking Mick Jagger. “You mean he's toying with white images of blackness?” the grad student in me queries instinctively. No, no, no. Don't you see? He's a blank Scrabble tile—supply him with a context and he'll spell any word you want.
For example: Beck is to Spin as Springsteen was once to Rolling Stone: the media-designated center of contemporary pop culture. Discuss. Well, as the idol of those who celebrate the very lack of such a center to contemporary pop culture, Beck used Odelay to craft monumental music for self-styled bricolage vandals, cloaking high modernist importance in pomo garb. But if jungle, turntablism, and underground hip hop are the rough equivalent of punk--shards of the past haphazardly launched in a subcultural catapult--Odelay was more like Born to Run, a grand, reassuring consolidation of the past disguised as future-shock treatment.
Or maybe not. The wonder of Beck is that he shrugs a noncommittal yeah to both halves of every either/or proposition. As befits our post-humanist era, his bid for significance came when he stopped describing a recognizable bohemian milieu. Back on Mellow Gold, he shacked up with a “Nightmare Hippie Girl” and slaved reluctantly for a “Soul-Sucking Jerk.” But when the gangsta parody “Loser” was taken as a slacker anthem, he vowed never to be misinterpreted again. And so Beck rarefied and obscured himself into the ideal postmodern star: What Beck fans now identify with are the trappings of hip—not, certainly, with the human bedecked in said trappings. I mean, does anyone (can anyone?) fantasize about being Beck?
For that matter, does anyone (can anyone?) fantasize about fucking Beck? He's gorgeous but asexual. He's sexless but not virginal. Nothing in his past lyrics made him out to be the naive, pubescent manchild lazy rockcrits batted about—nothing except his wan, permanently dazed look. He opens and closes Midnite Vultures by declaring, “I'm a full-grown man and I'm not afraid to cry,” and talks various dialects of dirty betwixt. When he vows to “leave graffiti where you've never been kissed,” he voices a disembodied sex act with all fluids siphoned away (sweat most certainly included) and implicitly poses the question of whether a man can fake an orgasm.
But to extrapolate from this that his groove is too intellectualized is to force Descartes onto the dance floor, where the old mind-body split went out with the Mashed Potato. Beck's funk is just fine. His beats aren't alienating; he is. For all his vivacity and humor, his vocal persona is about as human as a voice-mail prompt, particularly when it feigns emotion. Although even the most electronically regulated pulse can seem humanized by a crowd in motion, most of us still expect recorded voices, if not to be expressive, at least to create an ironic distance between the emotive and the affectless—like, say, the Pet Shop Boys. For all of Beck's verbose dazzle, however, the spew of non sequiturs that keeps his signifiers afloat (or is that adrift?) remains so literate that a straight-ahead pun such as “I'm mixing bizness with leather” seems to flaunt not its intelligibility but the opaque humor that surrounds it.
In case you haven't guessed, Beck is so difficult on the surface because surface is all he's got to give. His closest Melville creation isn't Moby-Dick but The Confidence-Man, and his closest artistic antecedent isn't Afrika Bambaataa but fellow Hollywood-infatuated paleface Andy Warhol. Beck crafts imitation pop songs—not outright parodies, but hardly useful household objects. If ordinary pop invites consumers to project their desires onto the consumables, the high pop artist mimics such commodities as an end unto itself. Beck is like a counterfeiter who asks us to admire the artistry of his fake currency—and thenmake change for him.
Or is he like a kid at Christmas playing with the packaging instead of the toys? Beck's music may never be nearly as meaningful as, to choose an equally plastic example, Donna Summer's, because he refuses to plunge to the depths of single-minded banality that pop sentiment requires. Not that we masses aren't ourselves more blank than ever. Modern radioheads are so open-minded that any skillful deployment of popular mechanics on the airwaves will find a host of souls willing to give our bodies to its beat. Beck deserves ours as much as anyone does—I've cruised less honest one-night stands over the radio, to be sure. But don't expect me to shell out for cab fare in the morning.