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.
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.
In the midst of wading knee-deep through 'Best of 2013...' lists in a variety of journalistic outflow-pipes (brilliantly lampooned in that Vice article) I tried to do a bit of year-end stocktaking of my own. To be absolutely nakedly honest, I've felt that despite listening to a plenty of good music that I loved, 2013 seems very slightly disappointing, in so far as I feel I ended up with a cart-load of albums that I loved, but just not as hard as whatever came just before them. Maybe that's absolutely going to be always the case: you hear an album, love it because it's like nothing else you've heard or feels just new in some shiny undefinable way, and then the next album comes along and somewhere somehow, when you're expecting the band or whoever to give you the self-same music-buzz all over again, you've succeeded in jading your ear canals to their sound and you manage to sabotage their hard work and best efforts and inadvertently create a let down for yourself. So, although maybe I blame myself for this, 2013 just felt like it gave me a lot of albums that I liked but didn't love, and which caused me to go back and re-enjoy earlier work. Of all I listened to, only Mount Kimbie, John Grant, James Blake, and Phosphorescent put out albums that seemed appreciably better than earlier work. In contrast, the list of albums this year that I loved, but didn't love as much as their predecessors, is much longer: Wolf People and Wooden Shjips I mentioned in the previous post, but they were joined by Washed Out, BoC, Gold Panda, Forest Swords, Nathaniel Rateliff, Polica, and Jon Hopkins (in addition, Goldfrapp's Tales of Us was appreciably better than Head First, but still shy of Felt Mountain/Black Cherry/Seventh Tree-brilliance, and the Laura Marling album was better than the last one but not as good as the one before that). All of those albums I loved, I just didn't love them as much as I'd hoped I would: oh the joys of the relentless disappointment-engine that runs between our ears. Anyway, back to the new-music-recommendation. I had a pretty shit year, and at the darker times I spent lots of the late summer listening to the Phosphorescent album, and it made me feel like I was getting better (and, as a by-the-by, it somehow significantly contributed to the decision to grow my hair long again, whatever that means). The three tracks below from Muchacho speak of the joy of lust (Ride On / Right On), the misery of love (Song for Zula), and, I don't know, the wonderment of existence? (A Charm, A Blade).
I admit I had this mischievous idea that we'd turn the blog into a vast meta-joke where we just recommended and re-recommended 'Fortunate Son' to each other, backwards and forwards, ad infinitum. That would have been kinda funny, but it wouldn't have got either of us any new music though, so we won't do that. What I will do, though, is open up with two bands that are drinking from the well of seventies hard-riff guitar and turning it into magic rainbow-coloured music. It's sobering to think it's been seven and half years since ...Van Occupanther was released (!!???! jesusgod) and we all turned our heads back to stuff that had tunes like Mannassas-era Stephen Stills but rocked about twelve hundred times harder. And then we all looked around for something that sounded like 'Roscoe' and, uh, we came up a bit dry. And that was Midlake's great success, because back in 2006 there was flip-all else that was wearing those influences as loud and as proud, and turning it into something that still sounded all good and all now. Since then we've had Dry the River, Tame Impala, and Helplessness Blues, all of which at different points sucked up the melodic, psych, harmonising side of their influences, but less stuff that just laid it the fuck down. At the moment, though, I'm scratching that itch with huge helpings of Wooden Shjips and Wolf People; completely different sounds, completely different origins points and influences, but with beautifully similar results: heavy riffs front-and-centre and me, earphones in and eyes screwed up tight, rocking the fuck out on the bus. Oddly too, they also share something else in common: I'm listening far more to each band's last album much more than the one they released this year (Wooden Shjips West from 2011, over Back to Land; Wolf People's Steeple from 2010 over Fain). In both cases, I think they're making superb music that isn't afraid to reference either seventies hard(ish) American rock music, or British Liege and Lief-era folkrock and/or early spacerock respectively and spin it beautifully into something of both then and now.
I never would have even heard Ariana Grande except for Holy Other playing 'Honeymoon Avenue' on the amazing sound system at Corsica Studios. It sounded so good that I asked him what it was and remembered the few syllables I managed to hear well enough to google it out the next day.
I have since played that song about 500 times.
It's just an ordinary pop song. It is. Even with the imprimatur of Holy Other on it. But:
1. It's got that classic thing of a happy song about a sad thing.
2. Her voice. It is so incredibly liquid and free sounding, as if it just pours out of her body with no effort.
3. The production. I have never heard a pop song that is more conscious of itself as a pop song. It is so glossy it seems to be a comment on the idea of glossy.
And then there's the fact that every time I listen to it I picture little Holy Other bopping around his DJ booth to it like it's the best thing he's ever fucking heard. Knowing that he's inflicted this song on the uber-hip crowd of Corsica, with no perceptible irony, just because he loves Ariana fucking Grande.
I'm gonna buy the album and I don't care who knows it.
