View of Manhattan. Detail from a hotel advertisement, 1989.
It seems to me—and I could be alone in this—that the last time locality seemed to mean much to American pop music was sometime soon after the summer of 2005. Soon thereafter the Internet visited upon the traditions of music in U.S. cities an incredibly swift conversion to internationality, to the conditions of mass-response. Simon Reynolds has called this the “Ibizification” of pop, but the comparison is made fragile by the historical reality of the Ibiza phenomenon. But the fact that Drake, a Canadian child television star, should be the leading man in American hip-hop seems like it would be inconceivable in any era when New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, or Chicago had anything to say in the matter.
The three convergences that strike me as being relevant are: the collapse of well-structured R&B music that occurred in the nineties (epitomized, or transcended, by R. Kelly), the cross-breeding of Top-40 pop with rap (that Biggie, as central as he was to rap, predestined), and the ascendency of European dance music (through, for one, Madonna’s stewardship—and bleeding through the spectrum for example in the production collaborations of Bjork—and the crash of Daft Punk upon America). It is true that hip-hop has been, since the mid-1990s, weaning itself off songs that speak primarily to individuals—rather, it seems to have approximated focus group response, it’s successfully conformed to the marketplace. But even in late-era Lil Jon club-bangers and the DayQuil sunset of Screwed Up Click in 2006–2007, underneath the strings and echo, I feel like I could make out the outline of Atlanta or Houston; the local traditions in the form still, on some level, seemed to dictate the tonality of the approach.
Meanwhile, underground hip-hop has returned from its retreat in social-consciousness and artificial, overwritten “alternative” but found itself as a denatured, Internet-era artform, where Diplo and mixtapes dictate history. And at the other end, Rihanna and Drake have found that origins are something to be invented, not built upon. Today no ramshackle Southern studio (or Williams/Hugo) personality stands a chance of coloring the American landscape. Sometimes it seems like there is no specifically American landscape left.
In this post over at The Paris Review Daily I describe a recent solo piano performance by Jason Moran at A Gathering of Tribes. One of the things I didn’t have the chance to discuss in the piece is what makes Moran such an important figure in jazz. That would probably take a book. But if you listen to a song like “Refraction 2” you’ll see how Moran, like all great jazz artists before him, has mastered the tradition and absorbed the popular idioms of his time. Anyone who listens to contemporary jazz will quickly see that the overwhelming majority of artists, both “avant-garde” and “mainstream,” work within a paradigm that is fifty years old, some of them, such as Wynton Marsalis, with remarkable skill. I enjoy Marsalis, but offhand I can’t think of a single composition of his that sounds like it could have only been made during his particular active years. As with most of Moran’s music, “Refraction 2” sounds completely contemporary. It isn’t hard bop or free. It isn’t soul jazz or post-bop. There’s no name for it really, but I think what distinguishes it, in part, from earlier jazz is how Moran draws so naturally from hip-hop. He shows an understanding of how both forms operate. Jazz, particularly hard bop, which originated in New York City, predates what you might call “Cadillac music.” Most hard bop is busy, even when its funky. Rap music, as it has evolved from the disco-derived music of late ’70s NYC, has become increasingly about repose, grooves. You ride to it. These are two different, though not necessarily incompatible, paradigms. Moran has successfully integrated them (with elements of free jazz and post-bop, of course), and you’ll notice that the result is something new: jazz for our time.
But the really strange thing is that there are lots of tunes lodged in this record. The tracks seem to have hidden reserves, pockets within pockets; they develop hooks in weird places. Sweetness suddenly emerges out of fuzzy slime, and startling emotions rise from merely cool ones. — Ben Ratliff, The New York Times (1 May 2011)
A nice write-up of my homeboy James Pants in the Arts and Leisure section of today’s Times. It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since we were cutting up in the lunchroom at the Mac and rocking off of DAT cassettes and turntables at The Mercury, Flamingo Cantina, Empanada Parlor, The Back Room, The Electric Lounge, Velvet Patio, and other hole-in-the-wall spots in our native burg. People sometimes seem bemused by my enduring love for Austin, a sentiment that has everything to do with those adolescent adventures in the local music scene. As teenagers James and I roamed the city, hanging out at nightclubs, underground radio stations, house parties, and record stores. We crossed paths with a vaudevillian assortment of slackers and scenesters and amateur musicians. This was the city’s bohemia, a romanticized version of which surely lives on in my memory and, for better or worse, colors my outlook on contemporary New York, among other places.
Sometimes that Austin, a world I left behind before I actually physically left the city, seems like it was just a dream. Bohemias are fleeting things and once they dissipate it’s easy (and self-indulgent) to feel like you’re the only person who remembers the way things were. Some drunken old windbag at the end of the bar always hankering to tell the newbies about the good old days. Whenever I drive around Tarrytown or North Loop, I can’t help but remember the recording sessions we did there. When I’m in the “new” East Austin around 12th street I think about the concerts at Rosewood and Givens and Doris Miller. And I can’t go to a restaurant on South 1st without pulling into the ramshackle shopping center that once housed Rome’s dance studio, the place where rappers and breakdancers used to congregate after teen night at The Realm on Riverside. It can be exhilarating to sit and reminisce. But mostly it’s just alienating. You’re a slave to nostalgia and sentimentality, trapped in the prison of your own consciousness, and in your feverish sputtering about your salad days you fail to do the whole thing justice. You cheapen your memories. “Sure,” says the rookie, classic known-nothing know-it-all buying his drink, “heard that one before.”
In short, the things I used to do I don’t do anymore, as the saying goes, and no one knows what the fuck I’m talking about anyway. Nevertheless, I’ve gone on at some length here about remote experiences, and all I meant to do was raise a glass to an old running buddy. But this occasion really just makes me wanna say: Austin, stand up!
The way you work with a 4-track is to record tracks, bounce them down on top of each other, overdub more to taste, and then the whole thing is pretty much set in stone. Once you’ve bounced down tracks you can’t rework them, and tape bleed means the elements blend into each other. But this whole mass can be worked with as malleable blob of rhythm and form, with tracks EQ’d together, and sped up or slowed down en mass. The attack of the drums, the fizz of the percussion, they can be squeezed and moulded away from the usual physical constraints of whacking real drums in a real studio. You lose all sense of actual physical scale, of large events versus small events, and it all becomes flow. When you’d expect a guitar solo, a pure ejaculation of distorted tone is all you need … All this is a way of saying that the formal flow of Ariel Pink’s older work is, for me, far more exhilarating than in his later, more hi-fi work. Tracks have rhythms that work because of the way the 4-track blends it all together – whacked biscuit-tins become huge splashes of noise, mouth sounds create intimate percussive shifts.
Yes I must admit, as superb as Before Today is—and despite the added enjoyment factor of the record as a kind of conceptual/narrative-arc/closing-of-the-circle triumph—I still prefer the Doldrums/Worn Copy/House Arrest sound. Such a cornucopia of supersaturated, distressed, irradiated textures and tones… song-fragments… strange codas… irruptions… defects and detours… The poptastic bits stick in the memory, such that you forget all the noisespace and ambient lagoons, like “Foilly Foibles/Gold”, which is coming from a Twin Infinitives type place… how much of it comes from psych and noise s well as yacht rock and Henley & Oates… and just the sheer variety… when I put on House Arrest, I’m always freshly taken by surprise by the things tucked away at the back end, like “Oceans of Weep” and the extraordinary 9 minutes of “Netherlands”…
Chris Balla and Jed Smith, friends of Ply, cover Cause Co-Motion’s 2006 single, “Only Fades Away.” With a slackened tempo and multitracked vocals, they convert the original’s neatly-machined drumming and loafing vocal into weirdly-ornate “Bells of Rhymney” grandeur. The tidy prettiness of the original is such that it resists being fleshed out beyond the two-minute mark (as the arrangement seems to want it to do); but I have a documented fascination with this variety of coup de theatre: comparing originals with covers helps cleave open the differences between what is “underlying” the performance and the song as a recorded unit. (Archival footage from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics provides a video backdrop familiar to fans of indie collagists like Army of Kids, et al.)
Still from a television advertisement for soap, 1965
Today’s transcript consists of selected outtakes of an email roundtable on Lady Gaga between Michael Hardy, Aileen Kwun, Richard Funkhouser and Zachary Sachs. A longer commentary will appear in the first issue of Ply.
Aileen: see this? [Jon Caramanica in the New York Times,21 July 2010:]
It’s Halloween-costume empowerment, sure, but [Lady Gaga’s] fingerprints are all over the revised images of Christina Aguilera, Rihanna, Katy Perry and Beyoncé; and on new artists like Kesha, Janelle Monáe and Nicki Minaj. These performers might not cite Lady Gaga as a direct influence, but the work she’s done since her 2008 debut album, “The Fame,” has nudged loose conventional boundaries. The space for women in pop to try out new aesthetic identities hasn’t been this vast in some time. …. In many ways it is a bastardization of the Madonna model. From the start of her career Madonna was a savvy pop trickster, using outrageous imagery as a distraction while smuggling ideas about religion and social politics into her music. Most of the Gaga generation, however, is interested in distraction as an end in itself.
Aileen: the writer kinda does this lazy laundry list of other current female popstars and how they’re all supposedly copy gaga — but he doesn’t really connect any dots, other than to say that hey, pop is little more interesting today, at least visually. not sure if this has to do so much specifically with gaga than with the level of competition for sales and media attention… i mean aren’t there other things to attribute that to? like, the internet and a weaker monoculture in general? kind of like this conclusion though:
It’s probably the first time Lady Gaga has acknowledged that there’s a living, breathing organism beneath the hyperstylized exterior, that her flesh has any instincts of its own. Maybe she’s expended so much time and energy building up her outer shells that they’ve begun to reinforce her inner self too. This nakedness, this new assuredness — a Lilith ideal, perhaps — is a real step toward feeling. Or maybe the skin’s just another costume.
Michael: So “Madonna was a savvy pop trickster, using outrageous imagery as a distraction while smuggling ideas about religion and social politics into her music.” Could somebody remind me what these “ideas” were? The idea of Madonna as somehow more intellectual or political or engagé than Gaga is ludicrous. “post-sexual theater” seems right-on, though.
Zach: Not ludicrous, I don’t think, but certainly a stretch. “Ideas” is not quite right, but Madge was certainly angling for something; her wheeling and handling of her image brought around an overt acknowledgement of sexuality and proposed an imagining of a woman for the eighties. Certainly the power dynamics supposed in her big Prayer-era hits were a consistent, I think compelling reimagining of woman-in-pop. I don’t think this can be said for “Alejandro” and the rest. Presumably that is what the writer means. But then Germa is only on her (more or less) first record.
Richard: i think the thing is that they already matter, just not in themselves; but that there’s a tendency to think Madonna did. it’ll take a decade, if Lady Gaga ever experiences a similar canonization. but three of those miracles have to happen when you’re dead; the process isn’t self-willed. being superficially culturally relevant, the deepest impact they’re ever going to have is slow and inspirational — some thirteen-year-old now is going to listen to Alejandro and feel fine about their to-now conflicted homosexuality.
Michael: The mistake, I think, is in seeing Madonna’s outrageous imagery as a “distraction” from her true interest in Catholicism, social commentary, third wave feminism, whatever. Rather, Madonna and Gaga are only truly interested in outrageous imagery, which is itself the bearer of whatever cultural or artistic significance the two women might possess. What seems most superficial about them—their posing, preening, and peacocking—is the only thing that matters, if indeed anything about them matters (an open question).
Zach: Well you can argue it either way—imagery for distraction or distraction for imagery—but I don’t think it makes much difference. And you have a harder time saying that there’s any sort of nexus around which Gaga’s outrageous imagery congregates: I’m repeating myself, but so be it—it’s too heterogenous. Madonna doggedly did the Catholic / mores bits, so whatever the effect or lack thereof there
was at one point something, if not being driven at, at least indicated. And I think I would argue that the peacocking and that variety of cultural significance are not as extricable as you seem to want to believe.
Michael: Sure, but what was the “one point” Madonna was driving at about the Church? And even if you could identify some kind of coherent critique, which I doubt, would that really be what makes Madge important?
Zach: Yes, you’re right. The beauty of it is that the “critique” and the spectacle are the same thing, which is in its natural state neither critique nor spectacle. MY complaint is that there’s not enough contact between Gaga’s pop-symbolism and this world we actually live in, apart from that tired old Futurist line about art reflecting chaos which I never bought anyway. Madonna’s had, in my estimation, loads of contact throwing off sparks well into the 90s. That’s why she was Madonna. But then Gaga is sort of like Wallace Stevens in that respect, perhaps.
Michael: The Idea of Order at Madison Square Garden?
