Things happened fast for your ol’ buddy Keith in 1998. Three months after moving jobless to Minneapolis, I was freelancing regularly for City Pages. By April I was sober. And before the end of the year I was the music editor of a scrappy little weekly that positioned itself as an alternative to the big, bad, “corporate” CP, Pulse of the Twin Cities. (The name was a little confusing to Tower Records shoppers.)
I recall that I was paid $150 a week, a sum so low even for 1998 that I doubt my memory. (That’s how I justified continuing to freelance for City Pages.) I don’t know that Pulse was looking for someone to write 1000 words on a new qawwali album or Nicole’s Make It Hot, or run reported pieces from Lifter Puller’s Dan Monick about going to the mall with his friends, but I’ve always been one to abuse my freedom.
It was a silly, exciting time. I got taken off the guest list for an Elliott Smith show at the 400 Bar for writing an unimpressed review of XO. (“I stopped expecting that music would give me a reason to live years ago, but that doesn’t mean I’ll cheer when it gives me reasons not to live.”) I had a freelancer who worked at Cheapo Records and gave me the store’s top price ($4.50!) for every promo CD I brought in till she got fired. I got fired myself for refusing to help my hippie publisher with his public access show. (Actually, he claimed I was laid off at the time, but reported to the state that I was canned so he wouldn’t have to pay me unemployment.)
And I also wrote the four pieces below. Without the steadying hand of my friend and editor at City Pages, Jon Dolan, I was free to ramble and editorialize a bit more than was good for me. But Pulse’s style was zine-ier, shaggier, maybe sloppier than CP’s, which made for a fun change of pace. For a while.
The Beauty Myth: Hole’s Celebrity Skin
Pulse of the Twin Cities, September 16, 1998
Three deceptively simple half-truths to introduce a deceptively complex half-lie of an album. When Courtney Love falls in love she sees stars. When Courtney Love sees stars she falls in love. And when stars fall for Courtney Love, she sees right through them. And her lips are never sealed.
If Hole’s new punky pop record is messier than Hole’s old poppy punk record, well, 1994 was a simpler time to be complicated. Love’s grand fakery was a challenge at the moment underground music navigated newfound commercial appeal, clutching its sincerity. Here was a woman who acknowledged the allure of the crass careerism and glamor that indie-turned-alt kids purportedly despised. The more Live Though This sneered at its own untrustworthiness, the more visceral the music grew. Courtney gnawed the ripe fruit of punk authenticity down to the pulpy deceit at its Rotten core.
Celebrity Skin may be Hole’s “California” album, from the Stevie Nicks burr of “Malibu” to a dedication “to the stolen water of Los Angeles,” to Michael Beinhorn’s glossy, layered production.. But it works best when it sounds like nowhere, or everywhere, when the stereo across your bedroom sounds like someone else’s car radio. The punchy chords of the title track are processed to such perfection someone may have pressed the “punk rock” button on their synth. Calculated and off-the-cuff, disposable and necessary, hinting coyly at deeper truths while expressing its essence on the surface, the song is all an excuse for Love to pun off the word “make.” Shadowboxing with cliches, dodging, feinting, swaggering, staggering, rocking, and reeling so fake she is beyond real, Courtney turns cheap tricks into expensive hooks.
And for four wonderful songs the feat continues. “Awful” glistens like Belinda Carlisle singing the Bikini Kill songbook, sketching a rough parallel between the corporate assimilation of punk and the disillusioning end of girlhood, alternately insisting “If the world is so wrong/You can take it all with one song” and “Oh, just shut up, you’re only 16.” Hole then cruises on past the starry-eyed “Hit So Hard” (he kissed her and it felt like a slap) and down to “Malibu,” where pretty boy pinheads dance among the waves like strange angels.
And then Courtney pines for “Reasons to Be Beautiful,” flaunting the exquisite poor taste to go for the easy pun “Love hates you,” and a hint of the old rage scratches up through her throat. She genuinely wants to polish pop’s tawdry trinkets into objects of lustrous permanence. Yet once she promises to let us under her “miles and miles of perfect skin” to expose her “miles and miles of perfect sin,” the shimmer becomes a sheen. The more she insists that the hollowness at the core of celebrity can be plumbed for meaning, the more the music evaporates, like the lover who’s “so candy” he “melts in my mouth, till he’s nothing at all.”
Some tracks do leave a sweet aftertaste. The blissfully ignorant “Heaven Tonight” freezes pleasure into a tritely transcendent moment of artifice. The dreamy, doomy “Boys on the Radio” is a gorgeous elegy, though it sounds hardly applicable to contemporary modern rock. Wherever the beautiful young men that Love watches “crash and burn” may be found today, it sure ain’t on my radio. I mean, I hope nothing terrible has happened to Dave Matthews. Can someone check in on Fastball?
It’s wise of love to distrust her fascination with the superficial; it’s foolish of her to pretend the superficial conceals profundity. Celebrity Skin repeatedly wraps an empty box in a pretty package, unties the bow with a flourish, and insists that it’s prettier on the inside. But we know the box is empty, Courtney. We just want to be mesmerized by the swirling designs on the wrapping paper. By the album’s close, Love is threatening to “Tear the petals off of you/Make you tell the truth.” As if you could glean the essence of a flower by dismembering it. Forget it, Courtney. It’s Hollywood.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Alanis Morissette: Alanis Morissette, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie
Pulse of the Twin Cities, December 16, 1998
I was there, brothers and sisters, I stood alongside you on the barricades of hip, declining admittance to those prefabricated interlopers trying to cut ahead of the dues-paying alterna-worthy. I dutifully chaperoned my mainstream friends on music-shopping expeditions, nudging them away from Jagged Little Pill and down the aisle to the PJ Harvey discs. I railed at the injustice of popular taste that permitted some recovering Canadian teen star to give head on the airwaves while Liz Phair’s cannier oral fixations went comparatively unheard.
But I couldn’t hold out forever. My conversion began the afternoon that I heard a six-year-old girl, clutching a bag of Seven-Layer Burritos, warbling “I’ve got one hand in my pocket and the other is holding my Taco Bell.” Returning to my car, I heard that same unself-conscious tone in the radio hit itself and admitted defeat before the force of commerce and eager self-embarrassment that is Alanis Morissette. By the time the Usage Police cracked down on Morissette for using “ironic” to mean exactly what 99 percent of the English-speaking world says it does, she’d already won me over in spite of me, by telling the valuable pop half-truth that an open-hearted immersion in life will save you as often as it will scar you.
If now I hang my head in shame, Alanis forgives me, because listening to the radio means never having to say you’re sorry. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not embracing the reductively it’s-all-good school of pop criticism that’s emerging as an equally flawed counterbalance to hermetic snobbery. But we can’t be reminded often enough that music can be brightly—even slickly—produced, that lyrics can flirt with cliché, and yet uncover wisdom lost on more tasteful artistes.
There’s nothing slick about Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, a dense squall of confused studio funk awash in ersatz exoticism and symphonic overkill that suggests recent overexposure to Zep’s “Kashmir.” The compositions sprawl till you wonder if Alanis and producer Glen Ballard have ever even heard actual songs or understood how they’re assembled. But it’s plenty tuneful, and rather than sounding inept, this fumbling suggests a suitably awkward search for a form in which to express similarly awkward emotions. When Alanis transforms Sarah McLachlan’s Sinead-indebted ethereal lilt from a genteel swoon to a demented yodel, you can hear an uncertain but determined young woman wondering aloud what she wants, what she really, really wants.
Once you give in to Alanis, her insistence on writing lyrics of a midterm vocab list that’d make Sting blush (today’s assignment: use “unabashedly” in a hit single that demonstrates you understand its meaning), muddling the idiomatic (“fake identification” for “fake ID”), and erratically pronouncing common words (dig the soft “ch” in “chaotic”) reveals themselves as idiosyncrasies rather than shortcomings. If her lyrics never turn a phrase as pithily loaded as the album title (though keepers like “sexy treadmill capitalist” abound) she unloads so many words that specifics begin to matter less than sheer volume. For instance, “Front Row” includes what you’d take for indecipherable babble till you find it transcribed with exhaustive care in the liner notes: “I’m too tired to recount the unpleasantries one by one minute I want to banish you next I want to be on a deserted island with you along with my three favorite CDs.” Too precious? Maybe. But so are lots of diary entries.
And therein lies Alanis’s charm—she imitates the gawky soul-searching language of adolescence and extends its reach with a candor few can (or might even want to) preserve into their 20s. I’m grateful to live in a world where a popular icon capable of an epic of acceptance like “Thank U” is equally suspicious of wealthy celebrities embracing Eastern transcendentalism. (I hope Madonna doesn’t dock her paycheck.) “I have been loud and pretentious,” she blurts regretfully, but fortunately she will be that way again. Because Alanis Morissette remains uncool in the most exhilarating way imaginable: She makes mistakes sound like the point of being alive.
Eastern Bloc Super Rock: Plastic People of the Universe, 1997
Pulse of the Twin Cities, March 3, 1999
Vatislav Brabenec sighs. “It’s a hard, hard job to be touring the States.” The fiftysomething saxophonist and lyricist for the Czech dissent band Plastic People of the Universe, who boasts a criminal record and political influence that punks and rappers alike would envy, has been scuttling from show to show across America in a car with his bandmates. He’s speaking to me over the phone from a number my caller ID places somewhere in North Jersey as he recuperates from last night’s sold-out show at New York’s Knitting Factory. He sounds exhausted.
Or maybe weary is a better word. “To be a legend, that should happen after your death,” Brabenec jokes of his band’s international legacy. “Even though we are legends, we are still active a little bit. Sometimes the bands from the West will tell us how nice it was for us because we were under oppression.” Those times, if hardly better, were certainly simpler in some ways. It was the Plastic People vs. the Soviet-bolstered state.
When Brabenec and bandmate Ivan Jirous were jailed in 1976 for “organized disturbance of the peace,” the Czech underground mobilized in their support. From this moment sprang Charter 77, a declaration of rights that would eventually help inspire the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that secured Czech and Slovak independence.
“It was a fresh message, what we were doing in our country,” Brabenec explains, with an oddly fond nostalgia for that permanent state of emergency, when you knew who your enemies were. “Now we have to find something new. Something will be exactly contemporary. The situation is much different than when we were underground or countercultural.”
Brabenec’s concern with his band’s relevance is particularly admirable when you consider that very few people in the United States have even heard the Plastic People’s music, let alone seen them live. Oh, plenty have heard of them, enough to fill the clubs that the band will play over the next few months. But due to then-political, now-commercial restrictions, their recordings were never easy to come across. Not the storied bootlegs smuggled into the U.S. in the ’70s, unbeknownst to the band. Not the major label distributed discs of the late ’80s Plastics offshoot Pulnoc. Not even their live reunion disc 1997, the Globus International import that, once I was lucky enough to score it a few weeks back, became my own introduction to the music of the Plastic People of the Universe.
Like all great arrangers of chaos, the Plastic People have a solid rhythm section, anchored by the changeable but steady drumming of Jan Brabec. Milan Hlavsa’s prominent bass riffs are sometimes echoed, sometimes played against, by Brabanec’s saxophone, Joe Karatiat’s zonked bluesish guitar, and Jiri Kabes’s viola. Then, sax and guitar will spin off into a freeform squall that contrasts with the militant lockstep that preceded it. Not to get all Maximum Rocknroll about it, but 1997 fuckin’ rocks. Crank it.
As you might expect from a band that took its name from a Zappa song, there’s something prog about the Plastics. Western prog is a dodge, an elitist turn from music that engages in the everyday, whether it’s Yes championing vapid virtuosity over spirited simplicity or Radiohead weaving intricate guitar lines into barbed wire to protect their fragile eggshell minds. In Eastern Europe, where any kind of rock was a challenge to the state, and pleasure was at a premium, such a drab aesthetic was a luxury dissidents could not afford.
Great music can be born out of suffering, but maybe only when the musicians can envision a future where that suffering has passed. And that hardly means that great music cannot continue once a degree of liberation has been achieved. 1997 is a celebration of life that suggests, Brabanec’s worries notwithstanding, that a newfound sense of liberation has revitalized the Plastic People. Or, as he states, with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety, “Everything is possible right now.”
The Last Damn Marilyn Manson Story You’ll Ever Have to Read: Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals
Pulse of the Twin Cities, April 21, 1999
The history of popular music chock full of talented, charismatic jerk-offs unfortunately blessed with the ability to create music so undeniably gripping or inexplicably moving that we grudgingly come to listen to, accept, maybe even admire these twit auteurs. Good news: Brian Warner is not one of them.
Don’t get me wrong. “The Dope Show” may not be as sexually charged a single as “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” but the Manson single is an adequate dose of teenybop trauma, a telegraph to the soul of every suburban malcontent who believes that a dozen or so misread pages of Thus Spake Zarathustra and an inability to get laid entitle him to world domination. And “I Don’t Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)” deserves to be emblazoned provocatively on T-shirts in eighth-grade classrooms across the nation.
Manson has ascended to a level of mediocrity that seemed beyond his grasp when he was reducing the Eurythmics to haunted house music; I always wondered if his take on “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)“ was meant to sound spooky (as a banshee he’s no Annie Lennox, who at her worst at least sports better haircuts) or hilarious (as a joker he’s no “Weird” Al Yankovic, who at his worst at least writes new lyrics to his parodies).
Please excuse me for concentrating on Manson’s music for a moment—occupational hazard, but I’m always more interested in the encoded on my CDs than in the complex celebrity intertextuality that is the postmodern rock star. In its proper laser-and-flashpot arena context maybe Mechanical Animals is a bombastic delight; on my boombox, though, Manson’s belated discovery of chord changes sounds too little too late. For every slightly clever “You’re my pheno-barbie-doll” there are a dozen stinkers like “God is in your TV.” And too often, as a doomsayer, the boy confuses apocalyptic with apoplectic—tonight he’ll get all pouty like it’s 1999.
Let’s go easy on Manson’s teen fans, who’ve found a visual correlative for their escalating and freefalling moods in the ugly beauty of a garden variety pop demagogue. But it’s been a drag to watch adult critics who should know better sell themselves on the cultural significance of Mechanical Animals. Paid admirers like Neil Strauss, who ghost-scrawled Manson’s bio with his right hand while scribbling the star’s praises with his left, are one thing. But Ann Powers’s review of Mechanical Animals leads off “Marilyn Manson is a philosopher” and Joshua Clover insists in Spin that “Manson’s transmutation of New Wave decadence into Industrial creepiness defines his musical intelligence.” Both statements are true enough, I guess, except Powers and Clover mean them as compliments.
Of course, you, I, and Liz Phair all know that good reviews don’t necessarily sell records. They can, however, create the sort of charged buzz that, in this case, has inspired acquaintances (people who should also know better) to ask last summer if I’d heard Mechanical Animals yet, that they’d heard it was interesting. And can you blame them for being curious? Who wouldn’t prefer “interesting” to “boring”? (I could name the fans of certain bands here, but I’ll be good.) Well, depends on what you mean by interesting, doesn’t it? After all, if someone jumps out from behind a door and shouts at me, I’m startled. But I don’t call that art, entertainment, or fun.
This klutzy misuse of rock sensationalism is what makes Manson so tiresome. He’s currently closing his set with Patti Smith’s “Rock N Roll Nigger,” a relic of misguided, paranoid pretension also beloved by M’s former partner in grime Trent Reznor. Maybe you could argue (amongst yourselves—I’m keeping out of this one) the song makes some sense within the context of Smith’s career. But for Manson it’s an unearned shortcut to cheap, edgy offense. Oh well, Axl Rose never understood, so why should Manson? Sex can be more than porny exhibitionism. Drugs are no excuse to dope yourself into inanity. But at least Axl’s band could rock and roll.