Useful Noise #3
(Keith's Version)
I’ve had a few kind people ask if they can pay for their newsletter subscription. Good question. The main reason I’m not charging right now is that I can’t guarantee how long I’ll keep at this project. Life may change. Full-time work may beckon. Twitter may distract.
But writing is work, and compensation is nice, and sometimes I feel like a scab, so I’ve added some options for anybody who wants to throw a couple dollars my way. Please don’t feel obligated, especially if you’re going through tougher times than I am, or you’d rather support others who are.
I’d much rather you read me than pay me right now.
In this issue:
Reframing Britney Spears
Plus GO SLOW NO, The Uselist, and 7 Things
Britney: Made in America
Framing Britney Spears is such an effective documentary that you can occasionally forget it isn’t an especially good one—though when the Merriam-Webster definition of “conservator” flashes on the screen at the start that certainly provides fair warning. Lacking access to the star herself or the major players in her life’s drama, the latest installment of The New York Times Presents relies on (admittedly often insightful) talking heads and the nursed agendas of hangers-on and bystanders before credulously suggesting that the only people who truly understand Britney Spears are her theory-wielding fans.
Maybe someday the Britney phenomenon will get the epic O.J.: Made in America treatment, charting the many ways her celebrity bridged two centuries of U.S. mass culture. Maybe someday Britney Spears the actual human will have her say, though she might understandably rather just not. Framing ain’t either. But by simply following how the various components of the entertainment industry crushed a young woman’s life in plain sight over time, it works as an extensive “previously on pop sexism” recap.
If nothing else. Framing has sparked an overdue reckoning with a low, scummy decade when skepticism about the culture industry curdled into snark, cynical Brit lad-mag leering united with red-blooded American sexism-as-candor, and concerned-parent discourse (represented here by the odious Diane Sawyer) fostered the sanctimonious belief that the only way to “protect” your daughters is to shame their idols.
Why was Britney Spears at the center of this? As Wesley Morris points out here, her videos were demonstrations of power. So were her songs. Those early Max Martin beats bludgeoned both singer and listener in a way girlpop rarely had, making explicit the sadomasochistic pleasures of teen infatuation (and what comes next) in a way sweetly mooning about a broken heart often merely suggested. The mall, the school hallway, the TRL soundstage—all were battlefields across which Britney strode, everygirl as superhero.
But America loves a woman who can take a punch because then it won’t feel guilty about throwing another. Framing merely skims the surface of how grotesquely integrated into misogynist ideology Britney discourse was. Creepy old men didn’t fixate on her breasts solely because that’s what creepy old men do—her supposedly inauthentic body mirrored the “fakeness” of pop, both representing the trivial but seductive lie of femininity. And because her public image was sexually ambiguous—she wasn’t “not innocent,” she was “not that innocent”—asking if she was a virgin wasn’t just a way for men to assume public control over her body, but to demand a definitional conformity: Look, are you a slut or not?
Just as every little girl eventually learns to happily mutilate her Barbies, the entire pop music industry soon defined itself in opposition to Britney as a symbol of shallow blonde glitz. Framing correctly targets the sleazy finesse with which Justin Timberlake assumed the status of wronged stud to pivot to adult success. But for Pink’s “Don’t Let Me Get Me,” “damn Britney Spears” represented the phony constraints of pop stardom. Less directly, Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” preached an end to fantastical roleplay, while notable brunettes Michelle Branch and Vanessa Carlton even wrote their own songs, and what can be realer than that?
Much of what Framing revisits seemed plenty gross at the time. As with the Iraq War, the most guilty elements are now projecting a fake unanimity on the past to excuse their conduct. When reformed Us scavengers and Billy fucking Eichner sadly shake their heads about “what we didn’t know then” and regretfully admit “our” shared complicity, check your bank account to see how much you made off Britney’s public humiliation before you agree.
“The media” is not a monolith. Neither is “the public.” As the internet opened up cultural criticism to new voices, plenty of writers (mostly but not only women) pushed back. And though we sometimes underestimated the personal cost of Britneyphobia, contemporary defenders of her music did so not just because it was great (as indisputable then as now, if you were listening) but because its fans’ tastes were often belittled and underrepresented.
Yes, “things have changed” since 1998 and 2002 and 2008, but no one with internet access should step away from Framing Britney Spears with their faith in some sort of smugly Whig history of pop fandom renewed, believing we’ve evolved into wiser, kinder consumers. Not with some fans scrutinizing Instagram captions like ancient oracles reading goat entrails, others daily declaring war against dissenters on social media, and American Idol rehabilitating Kellyanne Conway as a kindly stage mother.
Celebrity culture will never be “healthy” because it’s where we collectively explore the forbidden, where we sublimate fantasies, often violent, of power and desire, as shaped by our anxieties of life under capitalism, which then sells those fantasies back to us at a markup. If we disregard it wholly we undervalue the psychological needs it fulfills. If we accept it unconditionally we’re trapped in its destructive logic. But maybe if we can learn to experience its pleasures consciously, as a kind of lucid dreaming, it may lead to new avenues of collective imagination.
GO SLOW NO
Go Slow No is a weekly survey of new, new-to-me, and overlooked album releases. The rating system is pretty simple: GO means listen to this now, SLOW means check it out when you get a chance, and NO means run screaming from the room if you hear so much as a note of it.
Muqata'a: Kamil Manqus (Hundebiss)
The “godfather of underground Palestinian hip-hop” fashions his sound montages more for pop-up Ramallah salons than dancefloors. But whenever album five pixelates too close to the abstractly cerebral it soon snaps back into focus with the help of some tangible detail: a warm yet sinister chuckle, an instrumental run from a long ago Arab pop hit, even a straight-up breakbeat. You can hear Muqata'a’s knack for communing with the phantasms of Palestinian history even if you don’t have to grasp how he purportedly relies upon simya’—“an ancient Arabic science of combining numbers and alphabets to communicate with the unseen.” (I sure don’t!) As source materials refract like glitchy ghosts, each track struggles to manifest itself, like an act of incomplete memory.
GO
Sleaford Mods: Spare Ribs (Rough Trade)
A perennial leftist malcontent who keeps his resentment on simmer because he knows rage burns out, Jason Williamson is a top-shelf yakker whether bemoaning the lack of “Elocution” that bars him from fancier gigs, quipping that Elon Musk’s face “looks like beef,” or just spitting “You fucking class tourist” at some deserving non-entity. In addition to the stripped-down but nimbly varied musical accompaniment of one-man-Fall Andrew Fearn, the latest installment from Nottingham’s sourest leavens Wiliamson’s blokey jabber with the distinctly female voices of fellow class warriors Billy Nomates, Amy Taylor, and anarchist activist/academic Lisa McKenzie. I mean, really, what more do you want? Hooks? In this economy?
SLOW
Slowthai: Tyron (Method/AGWE/Interscope)
When a rapper’s government name becomes an album title, you know there’s some serious career-adjusting self-reflection on the agenda. That’s an understandable turn for the U.K.-famous Tyron Kaymone Frampton, whose naughty public antics had begun overshadowing his working class righteousness, though it limits the scope that distinguished Nothing Great About Britain. But if you can power through regrets-of-fame commentary like Skepta snarling “How ya gonna cancel me?” and Slowthai’s own “shit could be worse,” his raps of contrition offer a worthy showcase for the true source of his charm: a manic, rubber-moufed delivery with a ping that’s all ricochet and no gunshot.
SLOW
Nancy: The Seven Foot Tall Post-Suicidal Feel Good Blues (B3Sci)
“Don't you worry, baby, I'm alright/I used to cry but now I think it's tight,” insists a British rocker who did not snuff it but instead immersed himself in wobbly, fuzzed-out psych that’s laced with gothy jokes and marches to a glam stomp. This, like all life-affirming epiphanies, is subject to change based on future circumstances, but cuts like the jaunty “Leave Your Cares Behind,” which could have been titled “Bang a Gong (Don’t Wimoweh Be Happy),” bode well for his brain chemistry. An idiosyncratic recasting of retro eccentricity that suggests forging a path through a nightmare rather than just cozying up to yesterday for cool’s sake.
SLOW
Florida Georgia Line: Life Rolls On
Like all real Americans, Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley don’t see red or blue, just green, and here they set aside their political differences to cash in with 16 apparently new songs about the inalienable right of white people to drink in the woods. Fair to say their schtick is wearing thin; fairer yet to say that even in their prime, these guys never lived up to the fine tradition of horny lying country cornballs. At least the Bellamy Brothers were sleazy. When the best you can offer is a new truck, a Dixie cup of hooch, and a promise of “my fingers runnin' through your halo,” you better hope your angel doesn’t run into Sam Hunt at the bar one of these nights.
NO
The Uselist
Welcome to my running playlist of the year’s best songs, along with a few sentences that try to get at what makes ’em work. It’s called The Uselist, because it has to be called something, and if you can’t go high, go as low as you can.
R&B singers don’t come saner or more secure than the voice of the Internet. On this breathy lover’s goodbye about recognizing your own worth without being too bitter that someone else couldn’t, Syd lets the melody scrape the bottom of her register and swaddles herself in oscillating synths that swell to modest ostinatos on the chorus.
Happy 40th to the woman voicing cultural pride with a husky warmth that holds my attention even while I’m trying to ID that West African (almost certainly) maybe Afrobeat? (no “s” here) or-is-it-highlife? groove that Sak Pase samples here. (Ebo Taylor, I’m told. Makes sense.) Very black, very magical.
As someone who couldn’t find his way into Richard’s knotty solo work until the comparatively untangled New Breed in 2019, I’m glad she’s coming direct here with a house track that builds incrementally to something funkier and weirder without ever losing its way. Pronounced “buss i’ fa’ me,” if you were wondering.
“Respectfully” (her word) agreeing to “get on that drill shit,” this Brooklyn bruiser rides a slightly grime-ier hi-hat skitter than is her norm, proving she can blammety-blam, blammety-blam, blammety-blam-blam with the best of ’em.
Lexii Alijai (feat. Wale), “Hoodie SZN”
What a damn loss. This St. Paul hopeful, who died at 21 a year ago, had the personality and presence to rhyme from a three-dimensional persona rap could use today—a young woman constantly recalibrating when to lower her defenses as she looks for sex and not-quite-love. You can keep your commitment for now, she’ll keep your hoodie.
7 Things
Named for a song from back when Miley Cyrus was good, 7 Things is a grab bag where I dump uncategorizable thoughts too long for a tweet and too short for an essay. (Though unlike Miley I don’t hate ’em. Well, not all of them.)
Minnesota Unemployment’s phone reps
Government services rock. Yes, the wait time sucks, and I still don’t understand why the program’s website (which could probably eliminate a hunk of incoming phone calls with a clearer FAQ) is only available during office hours. But once you get through, the representatives are incredibly patient, informative, and human—an even greater achievement when you think of the onslaught of confused and edgy callers they must have fielded this past year. And everyone I’ve spoken to has had a positive experience similar to mine. (If they’ve been dicks to you, hush—let me keep some illusions.)
“Love Story (Taylor’s Version)”
Fuck Scooter Braun, sure, but the way Swift has marketed the very ordinary, quite defensible business decision to re-record her back catalog, celebrating it as a triumph of artistic self-determination, sets my tired eyes a-rollin’. She’s got every right to secure her bag, and the muscle to pull it off, but I’m not about to strain my ears to hear artistic growth from near-duplicates cut for licensing purposes. and it’s unclear to me why any regular listener (as opposed to obsessed Swiftie) would. At least she’s not cutting tasteful middlebrow indie reinterpretations of her oldies to pander to the rock dads who only found her acceptable once she started returning Aaron Dessner’s calls. Yet.
COVID nightmares
Sober people learn to live with “using dreams,” which persist no matter how long you stay clean. They typically go like this: Everything seems casual and normal, but at some point you take a drink, and only after that do you remember you weren’t supposed to, and you panic and wake up, heart racing with guilt. I’ve had similar dreams about masking, where I’m in the middle of an ordinary social situation and suddenly notice we’re all unprotected. In a particularly horrific one last week, I went to a movie theater that was crammed full of the maskless. One person even breathed directly on me. I guess your dreams work overtime to keep your brain occupied when you essentially do the same nothing every day for a year.
Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth
Well would you look at me, enjoying well-reviewed fiction like some fancy little literary fellow, and a collection of interconnected short stories at that. Seriously though, Phillips’ stories about the everyday lives of people on the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia, all affected in some mundane or dramatic way by the kidnapping of two girls, suggest the unique grain of a place in a way that feels lived rather than researched.
Maybe he should RushLESS
I don’t mention this often, but I returned my video rental of Rushmore back in ’99, unimpressed, unfinished. Still, I was 28, an age when one is unimpressed, and Anderson’s later movies softened me up to the resonant aspects of his twee deadpan, and people loved it, so... So. I realize “I don’t like these characters” is a sad book-club-ass complaint, but will you accept “This stylized world offered me no pleasure and had no discernible relevance to the world I live in?”
RIP Prince Markie Dee
The Fat Boys self-titled 1984 debut still bangs, an album-length demonstration of how to be funny without being a joke, and may it last forever, like a Twinkie. After the Boys busted up, Mark Anthony Morales went on to a respectable studio career that included work on Mary J. Blige’s What’s the 411?. His death on the day before he turned 53 once more raises the grim question: How much of hip-hop’s founding generation won’t live to be 60? (Incidentally, a strange thing in the '90s was that Lifetime seemed to showed the Fat Boys movie Disorderlies about once a month, between, like, a Meredith Baxter Birney kidnapped daughter movie and a Days and Nights of Molly Dodd rerun.)
Sia’s Music – Songs from and Inspired by the Motion Picture
Over at Rolling Stone, I reviewed the soundtrack to a movie that probably would’ve been low on my to-see list even if the well-deserved backlash hadn’t driven me off.