Where has my love for singer-songwriters gone? (long time passing)

My only mp3 player these days is my phone, which it doesn't have that much room for music on it, so what gets put on there is a pretty good snapshot what's in heavy rotation for me at the moment. I was at the gym today with all the songs on shuffle and realised that, of the 21 albums on my phone, not a single one of them belongs the category that once defined my music taste: guitar-centric folk/rock with a heavy emphasis on the lyrical articulation of complex emotions. I tend to think of this as singer-songwriter music even when it includes bands like Mumford and Sons.

Not only do I no longer keep up with this music, I actually seem to have developed something verging on an antipathy to it. I have scoffed my way through various people's attempts to get me to the appreciate the likes of Iron and Wine, that other one I confuse with Iron and Wine (maybe it's the one you went to see that had suddenly included a horn section? or was that actually Iron and Wine), the National, Kurt Vile, you name it. I swear I look at the beard-y faces of these guys and I just...can't. Even when I can't see their faces--even if they don't have facial hair!--I feel like I can hear the beards.

Probably my problem has something to do with the earnestness, the sincere-but-ironic-but-sincere thing that Gen Y has made its signature, but honestly with the exception of the ever-brilliant James McMurtry I can't really stand much of this sort of thing from people Gen X or older either. I would crawl through glass (ok, just figuratively) if someone told me that on the other side was the music of a woman as brilliant and edgy and musically inventive as PJ Harvey or Liz Phair in their prime, but no one like that has come down the pike in quite some time. (Laura Marling and Martha Wainwright are probably the closest in recent years, but neither has quite the teeth of PJ or Liz for me.)

So yeah, it's kind of a gender problem. But it's a gender problem because it's an identification problem. I don't feel engaged by the feelings being conveyed, and to me that's what singer-songwriter music is all about. I can't find the women who would speak to me, and these days the men really don't. (I have no such problem with Elliott Smith, who I love unequivocally; I still haven't quite worked that one out.)

As this state of affairs has gone on longer and longer, I've grown to dislike even the signature sound of singer-songwriter-y music: the unprocessed voice, the bright, right-in-your-ear guitar strumming, the unmistakeable sound of yearning. Give me something so glossy that discerning sincerity in it is actually work (the Beyonce tracks I linked to before).

Or something harsh and performative and slick:

or humming with affects that are compelling because they are not identifiable:

or with its emotion couched in music so dark that its delivers its feelings with a be-careful-what-you-wish-for smirk:

or that's an express refusal of all emotion:

All these songs are, not incidentally, from albums that would easily make my top ten or 20 of 2013. Their gender politics are no better--and in some cases they are much, much worse--than the Iron and Wines of this world, but I guess the difference is that I'm not expecting to identify. I don't feel as if the point of the music is to present me with a set of feelings that I can recognise as sincere and embrace accordingly. At this point in my life, I can deal with Kanye's straight-up misogyny better than I can the introspective musings of a sincere guy I'm supposed to like but can't.

My embrace of emotional distance in music probably explains why the first-person songwriting I've enjoyed the most in the last five or so years has come more out of hiphop than folk traditions. It has as much of an individual perspective and distinctive musical signature as what would usually be classed as singer-songwriter stuff: the feeling of another person there, thinking aloud, in a personal musical style. But the generic difference makes a difference. I think it's because the conventions of hiphop are all about how specific and in some way unknowable the life being described is. This track by Skinnyman is so brilliant because he tells us all the reasons why it's so hard to understand his world, but then manages to deliver a slice of it anyway.

Tilted, Woozy

Ten days ago, on New Year's Eve, XXYYXX released a new album via his bandcamp. This album, his third, followed up his self-titled debut which came out almost two years ago, and Mystify, which followed shortly afterwards. This new album, though, was released under his own name, Marcel Everett; entitled (II), it signals a change in musical direction for the artist, shifting slightly away from the warped and twisted sonic textures of his first two albums, towards more experimental soundscapes. 2014 is certain to be a big year for Everett, not least because he'll graduate from high school and head off to college.

I think it's easy to get side-tracked by his astonishing precocity when discussing his music: frankly, his debut album would have been amazing from any musician, let alone a sixteen year old kid who made it in his bedroom. I fucking loved the album opener, 'About You', so hard back in 2012; putting together this post, I was amazed that it has a scarcely credible 13 million views on the youtubes, something surely related to the video's crazed 420 aesthetic, because that's a mind-poppingly high number for such a baroque, weirdly tilted and woozy tune, no matter how brilliant (or, alternatively, there are a lot more people with a lot better taste out there than I imagine).

Another favourite from the first album was 'Good Enough', which, when the sample reveals itself for the first time, surely provokes an exclamation of pure joy from the listener.

I listened to the new album a couple of times on train journeys since it was released. Its ambitiously experimental; he's a long way from the dancefloor here, and there's even something here of Holly Herndon's cerebral stylings. I seriously like it.

Probably the artist XXYYXX reminds me of the most, especially in his handling of a sample, is Jacques Greene. I was first aware of him even before I heard his music or knew his name, because he was the cute guy in the glasses that Azealia Banks was shouting at deliciously in the '212' video.

I gather he's something of a superstar DJ, in demand behind the wheels of steel these days, but he's been fairly consistently releasing EPs over the last couple of years. Insanely good was the track 'Another Girl', which again has an astonishingly dexterous treatment of its main sample, toying with the listener through the syntax of the song, just playing with the looping repeated phrases until eventually all becomes clear.

Last year saw him release 'On Your Side', a tune in collaboration with How To Dress Well. Now I'm not bashful in saying that Tom Krell is hands down my favourite musician working at the moment, and as far as I'm concerned the man walks on fucking water, but I really struggled to like 'On Your Side' (and am still struggling: still, no-one bats 1.000, right?). Much better was the last track on that EP, 'Quicksand'. At any rate, they're both pushing beyond whatever the hell 'chillstep' was supposed to be two years ago, and the woozy aesthetic they inhabit is something I hope they both forge on with, because I love it.

Epicshimmerpop

Another case of me randomly making up genre names here, but there's a kind of circle of stuff I've been listening to lately that I think of as 'epic shimmer-pop'. There's invention, looking back at old Slowdive shoegaze through a filter of more recent Beach House-type dream pop, but adding a kind of soaring aesthetic that made Funeral Arcade Fire's only good album (there: I said it!). Money, in particular, have absolutely aced this sound: they've made it oddly sparse, detached, icy, but with so much heart. Alongside Rhye's Woman, their album Shadow of Heaven  was my favourite debut of 2013. Somehow they've allowed their admiration for 'I Wanna Be Adored' and 'Waterfall' be a license to make music that sounds brilliant, rather than an excuse to make music that sounds shit, as so many other bands have done in the past.

One of the best bands I saw live last year was G R E A T W A V E S, supporting How To Dress Well at the Whitworth in Manchester. They played an absolutely incredible set filled with audio-visual soundscapes, blowing me away. There's more blissed-out ambience here than in the Money album, but I simply cannot wait for more releases from them. 

Also ambient, and also Manchester-based in as far as I can make out, is whoever is releasing as transmission13. It's instrumental, much quieter than the other two, but still haunting and shimmering. 

Lastly, I'll put in a word for Lanterns On The Lake. I hate the video for this, because it pulls perilously close to horrid Wes Anderson-esque twee (but just about gets out of jail because I think it reminds me of a Smashing Pumpkins video, but which one I can't remember). Anyway, it's easily the most radio-friendly tune here, but their album still has something of the shimmering soar about it, despite its more obviously commercial hooks.

Our Doom

Problematically, because I read almost no music journalism at all, I frequently have no idea what the music I'm listening to is called. Or rather, I have no idea about the terminology other people commonly use to use to describe the genre-maps of contemporary music. Sometimes I find out belatedly, inadvertently, and it makes the music better (I was glad to find out that the oOoOO stuff I'd been listening to was called 'Witch House': that name suited it). Other times I end up making up my own names and labels that I stick on stuff. I hear genealogies that possibly don't exist, or at least only do in my own ears. A lot of what I've been listening to lately I call 'Doom'; I'm quite sure that's not what it's meant to be called, but there mustn't be a huge degree of consensus anyway because lots of different words seem to crop up on the internets: drone, glitch, industrial, dark-ambient (it's definitely not hauntology: I want to write more about Ghost Box in a later post). Anyway, quite frankly, a lot of it scares the shit out of me and I love it. In retrospect, the gateways into this were probably Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972 album and some Demdike Stare tunes from back in 2009. Recently I've been listening to stuff that's been even more laced with doom and anxiety. The Haxan Cloak's second album Excavation came out in the spring: a less likely time of year to release it I cannot imagine. It featured one of the most memorable cover images I can recall, it opened with the sound of sheer terror, and it went onwards from there to a brutal finale. 

More recently, the brutalism of Vatican Shadow has been entrancing. His famously enigmatic song titles, subtitles culled from the past decade's newspaper articles, capture a sense of mounting dread and discomfort: electronic ghosts of the future dead.

Lastly, I've been exploring some of the output of a "Finnish death dub technician" (hell, if one of the upsides to be being an artist is that you get to write your own job-title, then why not make it sound totally awesome) named Grmmsk. It's plenty startling.
I think there's real fear here, although I'm not certain of what exactly: the ever-present fear of mortality just given a new articulation, or a newer fear of collapse (twelve years since the endless war began, five years since the economy exploded, and only a generation until human society itself melts down across the entire face of the globe). Whatever eschaton is being invoked, this is the sound of that rough beast slouching towards its incarnation.

We *all* play synth

Stocktaking part two. Last week I was watching some youtube montage video I can no longer find called something like 'This Was 1994' which collated pop culture debitage alongside fragments of that year's notable tunes. Despite the fact that probably the most important album in my teenage music education was released that year, I ended up entranced by how absurdly colourful all the clothes were. I didn't have a mustard-coloured shirt, did I? Oh god, I did. And curtains. Anyway, that's enough bollocks reminiscing. I got to wondering how, nineteen years from now, I'll remember what 2013 sounded like. Three mainstream debut albums from this year seemed to somehow capture the soundgeist of the zeit (ugh): The Bones Of What You Believe, If You Wait, and Pure Heroine. In many ways three very different albums, variously channelling a wide rage of influences and cutting different new turf, but I think there's some overlap, especially in the production values: a lot of the percussion relies on artificial hi-hat, the synth lines (...we all play synth...) sound like the keyboardist of The Human League having an on stage mid-gig panic attack, reverb on the vocals, and the aforementioned attention on the spaces between the notes as much as the notes themselves. I love all three albums, but I'm still playing the CHVCHES one especially hard at the moment.  

The London Grammar album somehow managed to remind me of Massive Attack without sounding anything like them. I have no idea what's up with that. Their cover of Kavinsky's 'Nightcall' was justly celebrated over the year, although I heard several pretty dreadful remixes of it. 

 

And Lorde of course gave us the undisputed single of the year. I note the youtube stats for the various iterations of this tune are now up to something like 150 million, which is both mind-boggling and delightful: if you build it, they will come.

 

Yeah, I got the Beyoncé album

And I do think there's something behind the hype. I've never heard Beyoncé sing in any way that felt personal before, and it's arresting on multiple levels. Even on 'Survivor', arguably the best breakup-defiance song ever written, the song is so much about her ability to maintain strength and be a consummate grownup and professional that it doesn't seem to get behind her persona so much as celebrate it.

The new album feels intimate. And not just because of how sexy it is. It is steamy, but it feels that way largely because the sexy stuff seems personal, rather than generic. Whether or not its true, Beyoncé delivers these songs in a way that convinces you she is singing about her own actual sex life. And when she talks about getting on her knees in the back of the limo and getting 'Monica Lewinsky'd all down her gown', in 'Partition' she gives you the sense that she's talking about something that actually happened. (The passage I referenced starts at about 2:12.) 

I think people are freaking out (in a nice way) about how some of these songs are making their figurative ears burn because it seems like we're getting access to something maybe we shouldn't. I can't think of another recent pop or hiphop album that delivers sex in so personal a way that, instead of wondering jadedly when underwear became the standard clothing for women (a la Miley Cyrus), you feel that you are seeing something genuinely private. Only a pop star who has been as professionally perfect and personally opaque as Beyoncé even has that distance to cross. And it feels simultaneously wrong, hot and astonishing.

I could say a lot as well about the way the album feels in the ears. It has this rich, wall-of-sound quality that I'm itching to try to pin down. But I'll end instead by saying that, unlike most other girl-power nonsense we've had pedalled to us since the late 1990s--some of which Beyoncé was at the forefront of--the feminism in this album feels personal as well. The in-your-face submission of 'Partition' is defended, I kid you not, with what seems to be a French translation of Julianne Moore's defence of sexual pleasure as a feminist goal in the Big Lebowski! And then there is the critique of the beauty myth and beauty industry in 'Pretty Hurts'. People are already arguing that the song is hypocritical when Beyoncé makes her money in part off of being beautiful, which seems to me to restate the point of the song while missing it entirely. For the time being at least, you can watch the full video here, and it's worth it for its small touches.

And although there's (of course, it being pop music and capitalism etc etc) lots to critique in the album's messages, I can't think of any other pop song like Flawless that actually includes the word feminism, much less a sensible definition of it, much less one by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a black woman novelist from the third world! The Guardian has a fairly good account of the song, but the part of her talk Beyoncé excerpted is this: 

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller

We say to girls: “You can have ambition, but not too much

You should aim to be successful, but not too successful

Otherwise, you will threaten the man.”

Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage

I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is most important

Now, marriage can be a source of joy and low and mutual support

But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same?

We raise girls to see each other as competitors

Not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing

But for the attention of men

We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are

Feminist: a person who believes in the social,
Political, and economic equality of the sexes

Maybe having Beyoncé remind people, via Adiche, what feminism actually means and why it's important will have zero positive effects. But I really don't hate that an album with this speech in it is No.1 around the world. 

Rap God

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