I usually enjoy reading articles by Chuck Klosterman. In fact he was a big reason why I read Spin
magazine for a while. He has started
writing books now, instead of collecting his previously published essays in
book form like he has in the past, so it is much harder to find articles written
between books. I’ve found a few that
were new to me or that I found particularly interesting and I’ve compiled them
here for your enjoyment since Klosterman is too busy being a “novelist” to
write articles and essays anymore.
(Although I have enjoyed the books, for the most part.)
Give Me Centrism or Give Me Death!
(By Chuck Klosterman, Spin Magazine)
If you are the kind of person who talks
about music too much, there are two words that undoubtedly play an integral
role in your workaday lexicon: “overrated” and “underrated.” This is because
those two sentiments pop up in 90 percent of all musical discussions. What’s interesting about this phenomenon is
that no one uses the same criteria when applying either of those terms. For
example, bands can be overrated because certain rock critics like them too much
(Sonic Youth, Wilco, Yo La Tengo), or underrated if they sell a lot of records
but aren’t widely regarded as brilliant (Thin Lizzy, Duran Duran), or
underrated because barely anyone seems to know who they are (Tortoise, Sloan,
Lifter Puller). Bands can be overrated because they’re good-looking (the
Lemonheads in 1992), or they can be underrated because they’re good-looking
(the Lemonheads in 1994). Some groups can be overrated and underrated at the
same time (Radiohead). Some groups seem overrated on purpose (Oasis). Some
groups seem eternally underrated because—no matter how hard they try—they’re
just not as interesting as groups who are overrated on purpose (Blur). It is
very easy to be underrated, because all you need to do is nothing. Everyone
wants to be underrated. It’s harder to become overrated, because that means
people had to think you were awesome before they thought you sucked. Nobody
wants to be overrated, except for people who like to live in big houses. However, I am not interested in overrated and
underrated bands. It’s too easy, and all
it means is that somebody else was wrong. I’m obsessed with bands that are
rated as accurately as possible—in other words, nobody thinks they’re better
than they are, and nobody thinks they’re worse. They have the acceptable level
of popularity, they have attained the critical acclaim their artistry merits,
and no one is confused about their cultural significance. They are, in fact...
THE TEN MOST ACCURATELY RATED ARTISTS IN ROCK HISTORY!
10. The Black Crowes: Their first album sold more than five million
copies, which is precisely the right number. Stoned people like this band,
drunk people think they’re okay, and sober people hate the overwhelming
majority of their catalog. This all makes perfect sense.
9. Madness: This is one of only two ska bands admired by people
who hate ska (the other being the Specials, who are somewhat overrated). No one
disputes this admiration. “Our House” was a pretty great single, but it’s
nobody’s favorite song. Nobody seems to dispute that assertion, either.
8. Triumph: Always associated with Rush and/or the nation of
Canada, but not as good as either.
7. Tone Loc: Nobody really takes Tone Loc seriously, except for
frivolous pop historians who like to credit him for making suburban white kids
listen to rap music that was made by black people (as opposed to the Beastie
Boys, who made white suburban kids listen to rap music that was made by other
white people). This lukewarm historical significance strikes me as sensible.
Neither of Mr. Loc’s hits are timeless, although “Wild Thing” samples Van
Halen’s “Jamie’s Cryin’” (which I like to imagine is about M*A*S*H star Jamie
Farr, had Corporal Klinger pursued sexual--reassignment surgery in an attempt
to get a Section 8) and “Funky Cold Medina” samples “Christine Sixteen” (at a
time when Kiss were making records like Hot in the Shade and nobody in America
thought they were cool except for me and Rivers Cuomo). Those two songs were
actually cowritten with Young MC, whose single “Bust a Move” is con-fusing for
the following reason: Its last verse states, “Your best friend Harry / Has a
brother Larry / In five days from now he’s gonna marry / He’s hopin’ you can
make it there if you can / Cuz in the ceremony you’ll be the best man.” Now,
why would anybody possibly be the best man in a wedding where the groom is
their best friend’s brother? Why isn’t your best friend the best man in this
ceremony? And who asks someone to be their best man a scant five days before
they get married? This song is flawed. And while I realize the incongruities of
“Bust a Move” have absolutely nothing to do with Tone Loc, the song somehow
seems more central to Tone Loc’s iconography than his role in the movie Posse,
which was the best movie about black cowboys I saw during the grunge era.
6. My Bloody Valentine: On the surface, My Bloody Valentine should be
underrated, but they’re not; everyone who aggressively cares about alt guitar
music considers Loveless to be a modern classic, and everyone who is wont to
mention “swirling guitars” during casual conversation always references this
specific album. Loveless sold about 200,000 copies. This is the correct number
of people on earth who should be invested in the concept of swirling guitars.
5. Matthew Sweet: Every Matthew Sweet album has only one good song,
and this good song is inevitably the first single, and this single is always
utterly perfect (“Sick of Myself” off 100% Fun, “Where You Get Love” off Blue
Sky on Mars, “Girlfriend” off Girlfriend, etc.). He sells enough albums to live
comfortably, and that seems reasonable.
4. The Beatles: The Beatles are generally seen as the single most
important rock band of all time, because they wrote all the best songs. Since
both of these facts are true, the Beatles are rated properly.
3. Blue Öyster Cult: The BÖC song everyone pays attention to is the
suicide anthem “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” However, that song is stupid and
doesn’t use enough cowbell. The BÖC song almost no one pays attention to is the
pro-monster plod-athon “Godzilla,” and that song is spine- crushingly great.
So, in the final analysis, Blue Öyster Cult is accurately rated—by accident.
This happens on occasion; look at Scottie Pippen.
2. New Radicals: There are only five facts publicly known about this
entity. The first is that 1998’s “You Get What You Give” is an almost flawless
Todd Rundgren–like masterwork that makes any right-thinking American want to
run through a Wal-Mart semi-naked. The second is that nobody can remember the
singer’s name. The third is that the singer often wore a profoundly idiotic
hat. The fourth is that if this anonymous, poorly hatted singer had made a
follow-up album, it would have somehow made his first record seem worse. The
fifth is that his album didn’t quite deserve to go gold, and it didn’t.
1. Van Halen: This band should have been the biggest arena act of
the early 1980s, and they were. They had the greatest guitar player of the
1980s, and everyone (except possibly Yngwie Malmsteen) seems to agree. They
switched singers and became semi-crappy, and nobody aggressively disputes that
fact. They also recorded the most average song in rock history: “And the Cradle
Will Rock.” What this means is that any song better than “And the Cradle Will
Rock” is good, and any song worse than “And the Cradle Will Rock” is bad. If we
were to rank every rock song (in sequential order) from best to worst, “And the
Cradle Will Rock” would be right in the fucking middle. And that is exactly what I want.
The Rock Lexicon
(By Chuck Klosterman, Spin Magazine)
Difficult-to-define musical genres
explained in a concise and accessible way for the curious yet inexpert
listener. “I don’t read your magazine
anymore,” says my 36-year-old sister as we ride in a rental car. “I don’t read
it because all you guys ever write about is emo, and I don’t get it.” Now, for a moment, I find myself very
interested in what my sister is saying. I absolutely cannot fathom what she could
possibly hate about emo, and (I suspect) this subject might create an
interesting ten minutes of rental-car discussion. Does she find emo too
phallocentric? Do the simplistic chord progressions strike her as derivative?
Why can’t she relate to emo? I ask her these questions, and I await her answer.
But her answer is not what I expect.
“No, no,” she says. “When I say I don’t get emo, I mean I literally
don’t know what it is. The word may as well be Latin. But I keep seeing jokes
about emo in your magazine, and they’re never funny, because I have no idea
what’s supposed to be funny about something I’ve never heard of.” This, of course, leads to a spirited dialogue
in which I say things like “‘Emo’ is short for emotional,” and she says things
like “But all pop music is about emotions,” and I respond by saying, “It’s
technically a style of punk rock, but it’s actually more of a personal,
introspective attitude,” and she counters with “That sounds boring,” and then I
mention Andy Greenwald (author of Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, &
Emo), and she asks, “Wasn’t he a defensive end for the Pittsburgh Steelers in
the late ’70s?” and I say, “No, that was L.C. Greenwood, and I’m pretty sure he
doesn’t know any of the members of Senses Fail.” But anyway, I learned something important
from this discussion: that reading rock magazines must be very confusing to
people who only listen to rock music casually. Whenever journalists write about
music, we always operate under the assumption that certain genres are
self-evident and that placing a given band into one of those categories serves
an expository purpose. Just as often, an artist will be described as a
synthesis of two equally obscure subgenres, and we’re all supposed to do the
sonic math ourselves. How-ever, this
only helps the informed; that kind of description is useful to those who have
already conquered the rock lexicon. What we need is a glossary of terms so we
can all share an equal playing field. I
will do my best.
DISCO METAL: This is up-tempo, semi-heavy guitar rock that
someone (usually a stripper) could feasibly dance to. White Zombie made a lot
of songs in this style. Weirdly, it does not seem to apply to straightforward
metal bands (Kiss, Van Halen) who overtly write disco songs (“I Was Made for
Lovin’ You,” “Dance the Night Away”). No one knows why.
SHOEGAZE:Music by artists who stare at their feet while
performing—presumably because they are ashamed to be playing such shambolic
music to an audience of weirdos.
POST-ROCK: This is when a group of rock musicians employ
traditional rock instrumentation to perform music for people who traditionally
listen to rock—except these musicians don’t play rock and the songs don’t have
any vocals. I don’t get it either. The premier band of this genre is Tortoise,
and the kind of people who like post-rock are the same kind of people who think
it’s a good idea to name a band Tortoise.
PSYCH: (as in “psychedelic”) The modifier psychhas only
recently come back in vogue, which is interesting. You have possibly heard the
terms “psych folk” (sometimes applied to artists in the vein of Devendra
Banhart) or “psych country” (which is vaguely similar to what used to be called
“outlaw country”) or “psych rock” (which is what Courtney Taylor of the Dandy
Warhols calls his band’s sound in the documentary DIG!). I’ve made a great
effort to try to find the unifying principle among these permutations of psych
music, and the answer is probably what’d you expect: This is music for drug
addicts, made by drug addicts. If you are in a Tejano quartet and all four of you
start taking mescaline (and if all the kids who come to your shows drop acid in
the parking lot before entering the venue), you now play “psych Tejano.” That’s
the whole equation.
GRIME: Almost two years ago, I asked two learned people at
Spinto explain to me what grime is. They both said, “Don’t worry about it. You
will never need to know. It’s completely unnecessary knowledge.” Then, over the
next few weeks, grime came up in conversation on three separate occasions. And
it would always come up in the same manner: Someone would mention either Dizzee
Rascal or the Streets, refer to them as grim artists, and immediately be told,
“Those aren’t real grime artists. That’s not real grime.” As such, this is all
I know about grime—it’s British rap (but not really) that is kind of “like
garage and 2-step” (but the word garage is pronounced like marriage), and it’s
supposedly a reflection of life in lower-class London neighborhoods like
Brixton. If anyone out there knows what grime is, e-mail me at cklosterman@spin.com.
But make sure you write “This is about grime” in the subject line so I will
know to ignore it completely.
FASHION ROCK: The concept of fashion rock revolves around (a)
appearing to be impoverished while (b) spending whatever little money you possess
on stylish clothing (and possibly cocaine). In short, fashion rockers aspire to
look like superfancy hobos, which is obviously nothing new (this look was
called “gutter glam” by L.A. hair bands in the 1980s and “mod” by British
goofballs in the late 1960s). What’s curious, however, is that fashion
rock—though defined by clothing—does seem to have an identifiable sound, which
is a kind of self-conscious sloppiness that translates as a British version of
the Strokes (this is best illustrated by the Libertines, but even more
successfully by the Killers, possibly because they are not even British).
RAWK: This is how
people who start bands in order to meet porn stars spell rock. It is also
applied to long-haired guitar players who can’t play solos.
PROG: There was a time when “progressive rock” was easy to
define, and everybody knew who played it—Jethro Tull, ELP, Yes, and other
peculiar, bombastic men who owned an inordinate number of Moog synthesizers
during the mid-1970s. This was an extremely amusing era for rock; the single
best example from the period was King Crimson’s 1969 song “21st Century
Schizoid Man,” a track built on a spooky two-pronged premise: What would it be
like to encounter a fellow who was not only from the distant future, but also
suffering from an untreated mental illness? At the time, “21st Century Schizoid
Man” was the definition of progginess. However, just about anything qualifies
as prog in 2005. An artist can be referred to as “kind of proggy” if he or she
does at least two of the following things: writes long songs, writes songs with
solos, writes songs about mythical creatures, writes songs that girls hate,
grows a beard, consistently declines interview requests, mentions Dream Theater
as an influence, claims to be working on a double album, claims to be working
on a rock opera, claims to have already released a rock opera, appears to be
making heavy metal for people who don’t like heavy metal, refuses to appear in
his or her own videos, makes trippy music without the use of drugs, uses laser
technology in any capacity, knows who Dream Theater is.
MUSK OX ROCK: Combining woolly ’90s grunge with the ephemeral
elasticity of Icelandic artists like Björk and Sigur Rós, so-called oxenheads
deliver thick, nurturing power riffs that replicate the experience of melting
glaciers, troll attacks, and political alienation. The genre includes bands
like Switchfoot, Radiohead, and Bettie Serveert.
IDM: This is an
acronym for “Intelligent Dance Music.” Really. No, really. I’m serious. This is
what they call it. Really.
Chuck Klosterman Repeats The Beatles
(By Chuck Klosterman, A.V. Club website, September 8,
2009)
Like
most people, I was initially confused by EMI’s decision to release remastered
versions of all 13 albums by the Liverpool pop group Beatles, a 1960s band so
obscure that their music is not even available on iTunes. The entire
proposition seems like a boondoggle. I mean, who is interested in old music?
And who would want to listen to anything so inconveniently delivered on
massive four-inch metal discs with sharp, dangerous edges? The answer: no one.
When the box arrived in the mail, I briefly considered smashing the entire
unopened collection with a ball-peen hammer and throwing it into the mouth of a
lion. But then, against my better judgment, I arbitrarily decided to give this
hippie shit an informal listen. And I gotta admit—I’m impressed. This band was
mad prolific.
It is not easy to categorize
the Beatles’ music; more than any other group, their sound can be described as
“Beatlesque.” It’s akin to a combination of Badfinger, Oasis, Corner Shop, and
every other rock band that’s ever existed. The clandestine power derived from
the autonomy of the group’s composition—each Beatle has his own distinct
persona, even though their given names are almost impossible to remember. There
was John Lennon (the mean one), Paul Stereo version McCartney (the hummus
eater), George Harrison (the best dancer), and drummer Ringo Starr (The Cat).
Even the most casual consumers will be overwhelmed by the level of invention
and the degree of change displayed over their scant eight-year recording
career, a span complicated by McCartney’s tragic 1966 death and the 1968
addition of Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono, a woman so beloved by the band that they
requested her physical presence in the studio during the making of Let It Be.
There are 217 songs on this
anthology, many of which seem like snippets of conversation between teenagers
who spend an inordinate amount of time at the post office. The Beatles’ “long
play” debut, Please Please Me, came in 1963, opening with a few
rudimentary remarks from Mr. McCartney: “Well, she was just 17 / If you know
what I mean.” If this is supposed to indicate that the female in question was
born in 1946, then yes, we know exactly what you mean, Paul. If it means
something else, I remain in the dark. These young, sensitive,
genteel-yet-stalkerish Beatles sure did spend a lot of time thinking about
girls. Virtually every song they wrote during this period focuses on the
establishment and recognition of consensual romance, often through paper and
quill (“P.S. I Love You”), sometimes by means of monosyllabic nonsense (“Love
Me Do”), and occasionally through oral sex (“Please Please Me”). The intensely
private Mr. Harrison asks a few coquettish questions two-thirds of the way
through the opus (“Do You Want To Know A Secret”) before Mr. Lennon obliterates
the back door with the greatest rock voice of all time, accidentally inventing
Matthew Broderick’s career. There are a few bricks hither and yon (thanks for
wasting 123 seconds of my precious life, Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow) but on
balance, I have to give Please Please Me an A, despite the fact
that it doesn’t really have a proper single.
Things get more interesting on With
The Beatles, particularly for audiences who feel the hi-hat should be
the dominant musical instrument on all musical recordings. Only one track lasts
longer than three minutes, but structurally, it would appear that the Beatles
were more musical than any songwriters who had ever come before them, even when
performing material that had been conceived for The Music Man. It’s hard
to understand why the rock press wasn’t covering the Beatles during this
stretch of their career; one can only assume that the band members’ lack of
charisma and uneasy rapport made them unappealing to the mainstream media.
Still, the music itself has verve - With The Beatles earns another A.
A Hard Day’s Night provided the soundtrack for a 1964 British movie of
the same name, a film mostly remembered for its subtle advocacy of euthanasia.
The album initiates like the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man,” and never gets any
worse. These Beatles were doomed to a career in the cut-out bin of record
stores, but they were clearly learning lessons about life: Though they’d
covered “Money (That’s What I Want)” just one year before, they had now reached
the conclusion (Mono version) that money cannot purchase love. It was a period
of inner growth and introspection—they wanted to know why people cry and why
people lie, and they embraced the impermanent pleasure of dance. They also
experimented with the harmonica, but that turned out okay. I was originally
going to give Hard Day’s Night an A-, but then I heard the middle eighth
from “You Can’t Do That” (“Ev’rybody’s greeeeeen / ’Cause I’m the one
who won your love”), so I’m changing my grade to A. I assume the
accompanying movie is on hulu or something, but I don’t feel like searching for
it.
The Beatles get darker and (I
guess) cheaper on Beatles For Sale, now fixating on their
insecurities (“I’m A Loser”) and how difficult it is to waltz a girl into bed
when her ex is a corpse (“Baby’s In Black”). There are a bunch of unexpected
covers on this album, so it’s kind of like Van Halen’s Diver Down. It
only warrants a B, despite the tear-generating mondo-pleasure of “I’ll
Follow The Sun.” More importantly, Beatles For Sale nicely sets the
supper table for Help!, a mesmerizing combination of who the
Beatles used to be and who they were about to become. The signature track is
“Yesterday” (the last song Mr. McCartney recorded before his death in an
early-morning car accident), but the best cut is “You’re Going To Lose That
Girl,” a song that oozes with moral ambiguity. Is “You’re Going To Lose That
Girl” an example of Mr. McCartney’s fresh-faced enlightenment (in that he
threatens to punish some dude for being an unresponsive boyfriend), or an
illustration of Mr. Lennon’s quiet misogyny (in that he views women as empty,
non-specific possessions that can be pillaged from male rivals)? Each
possibility seems both plausible and impossible. What makes Beatles lyrics so
wonderful is not that they can be interpreted to mean whatever the listener
wants; what makes them wonderful is the way they seamlessly adopt contradictory
(yet equally valid) interpretations as the listener matures. It’s unfathomable
how a couple of going-nowhere guys in their early 20s could be this emotively
sophisticated, but that’s why the little-known Help! gets an A.
After Mr. McCartney was buried
near Beaconsfield Road in Liverpool, Beatles bass-playing duties were secretly
assigned to William Campbell, a McCartney sound-alike and an NBA-caliber
smokehound. This lineup change resulted in the companion albums Rubber
Soul and Revolver, both of which are okay. Despite its
commercial failure, Rubber Soul allegedly caused half-deaf Brian Wilson
to make Pet Sounds. (I assume this is also why EMI released a mono
version of the catalogue—it allows consumers to experience this album the same
way Wilson did.) If you like harmonies or guitar overdubs or the sun or
Norwegian lesbians or taking drugs during funerals, you will probably sleep
with these records on the first date. Rubber Soul gets an A-
because I don’t speak French. Revolver gets an A+, mostly because
of “She Said She Said” and “For No One,” but partially because I hate filing my
taxes.
1967 proved to be a turning
point for the Beatles—the overwhelming lack of public interest made touring a
fiscal impossibility, subsequently forcing them to focus exclusively on studio
recordings. Spearheaded by the increasingly mustachioed Fake Paul, the four
Beatles donned comedic Technicolor dreamcoats, consumed 700 sheets of mediocre
acid on the roof of the studio, and proceeded to make Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band, a groundbreaking album no one actually likes.
A concept album about finding a halfway decent song for Ringo, Sgt. Pepper
has a few satisfactory moments (“Lovely Rita” totally nails the experience of
almost having sex with a city employee), but this is only B+ work. It
mostly seems like a slightly superior incarnation of The Rolling Stones’ Their
Satanic Majesties Request, a record that (ironically) came out seven months
after this one. Pop archivists might be intrigued by this strange parallel
between the Beatles and the Stones catalogue—it often seems as if every
interesting thing The Rolling Stones ever did was directly preceded by
something the Beatles had already accomplished, and it almost feels like the
Stones completely stopped evolving once the Beatles broke up in 1970. But this,
of course, is simply a coincidence. I mean, what kind of bozo would compare the
Beatles to The Rolling Stones?
After the humiliating public
failure of Pepper, the Beatles returned to form with Magical
Mystery Tour, an unsubtle compilation of the trippiest (“Blue Jay Way”)
and kid-friendliest (“Your Mother Should Know”) material they ever made. “I Am
The Walrus” seems like sarcasm, but “Penny Lane” makes me want to purchase a
digital camera and apply to barber college. Will history ultimately validate Magical
Mystery Tour as the band’s signature work? Only time will tell. A.
Now hitting on all 16 cylinders, the Beatles bolted back to the woodshed for The
Beatles, a blandly designed masterwork that could inspire any
reasonable citizen of California to launch a race war. To this day, we don’t
know much about the four men who comprised the Beatles, but listening to this
exceedingly non-black album makes one detail totally clear—these guys truly
loved each other. How else could they make such wonderful music? In fact, they
adored and trusted each other so much that they didn’t even feel the need to
perform some of the songs together. It must have been a great era to be in this
band. Amazingly, they even wrangled a cameo from noted blues musician Eric
Clapton (still best known for his contributions to John Mayhall’s
Bluesbreakers). The Beatles is almost beyond an A+; in
retrospect, they probably should have made this a triple album. If nothing
else, they could have simply included the five Pepper-y songs from Yellow
Submarine (C-), which I think might have been a Halloween
record.
Let It Be comes next (or last, depending on how you view the
universe), and it’s a wholly confusing project—it’s often difficult to tell who
is playing lead guitar, and many of the songs could either be about having sex
or dropping out of society, which might be the same thing. Fake Paul’s beard
looks tremendous, and his (increasingly less-lilting) songs are still
beautiful, but his focus feels askew; he seems like a guy who wants to make a
record with his wife (which is what Mr. Lennon was already doing, although for
totally different reasons). “I’ve Got A Feeling” is my preferred track, but
it’s also the first time I really don’t believe what these fellows are trying
to tell me. I give Let It Be a B-, although The Replacements get
an A and the cast of Sesame Street gets an B+.
Though the artwork for Abbey
Road seems eerily familiar (that’s actually my car in the photo’s
background), the music it symbolizes is vaguely alien—I don’t know why they
wrote a song about a Clue character, but that’s par for the course for
these lovemaking, chain-smoking longhairs. The opener sucks (seems as crappy as
mid-period Aerosmith), but Mr. Harrison follows with a wedding song that effortlessly
proves why people who try to quantify visceral emotion should just stop trying.
The entire band seems oddly unserious on this endeavor, but in the best
possible way—for the first time in a long time, they sound as free as they
look. That said, the audio quality is especially heavy and detailed; one
suspects most of the arduous lifting on Abbey Road fell on the shoulders
of unheralded Jeff Beck producer George Martin. Everything ends with “The End,”
but then Fake Paul decided to add a superfluous 24-second mini-song that wipes
away any historical closure Abbey Road might have otherwise achieved.
The real Mr. McCartney would have never even considered such frivolity. I give Abbey
Road an A, but begrudgingly.
I’ve noticed that this EMI box
also includes the gratuitously titled singles collection Past Masters,
but I’m not even going to play it. How could a song called “Rain” not be
boring? I feel like I’ve already heard enough. These are nice little albums,
but I can’t imagine anyone actually shelling out $260 to buy these discs.
There’s just too much great free music on the Internet, you know? You might
find the instructional, third-person perspective of “Sie Leibt Dich” charming
and snappy (particularly if you’re trying to learn German the hard way), but
first check out “myspace.org,” a popular website with a forward-thinking
musical flavor. That, my rockers, is the future. That, and videogames.
Chuck Klosterman is the
author of six books, including the 2008 novel Downtown Owl and the forthcoming collection Eating
The Dinosaur.
Beck's "Loser" Defines the
'90s
(By Chuck Klosterman, April 16, 2010)
Here's what really happened
when MTV played Beck's "Loser" for the first time, in 1994: The
culture inverted itself, weirdness was instantaneously mainstreamed, everyone
stopped combing their hair, people slept more and purchased broken turntables
at stoop sales, dirtbags began using the word art in casual conversation,
Michael Cera entered kindergarten. Here's what nobody said when
MTV played "Loser" for the first time: "Well, I guess this is
what we're doing now." Here's what everybody realized when MTV played
"Loser" for the first time: Well, I guess this is what we're doing
now.
When a collective history of
the 1990s is written (or, more likely, tweeted) in some distant future, all of
the pop historians will mention the impact of "Smells Like Teen
Spirit." That song will become the linchpin for whatever supposedly
happened in that chasm between Gordon Gekko and Mohamed Atta. Someday,
filmmakers will use the opening riff of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to
signify the '90s in the same way we use "The Entertainer" as
shorthand for the '20s.
In a hundred years, it might
be the only song from the '90s the average American will recognize; the title
and the artist will be lost, but its abstract sound will be emblematic of a
bygone era. Its caricature grungeness will survive, and all those future humans
who think about the not-so-distant past will care about that. "Smells Like
Teen Spirit" was overproduced and impenetrable, but its impact was organic
and interpretative -- it was an unanticipated watershed whose meaning changed
over time. And that makes it completely unlike "Loser," a song that
galvanized how 1994 felt in a most unnatural way.
When you listen to
"Loser" now (or, even better, if you watch the video), it seems like
an engaging, strange song. Not a truly strange song, but a conventionally
strange song. The lyrics are faux-Dylan surreal, the music is primitive, and
the hook is immediate. The images from the video are like a 16-millimeter
art-school project: stock cars from the '60s, a musician dragging a casket to
nowhere, unsexy cheerleaders, a super-rad Rastaman getting high. The experience
of watching this in 2010 is like watching Slacker on VHS -- the aesthetic has
now been duplicated so often it's impossible to remember how different it once
seemed.
It arrived in the
pre-Internet era, so deducing what Beck was saying in the chorus was borderline
impossible (many thought the Spanish phrase "soy un perdedor" was
actually "slide open the door," which made even less sense). People
wanted to figure out what "Smells Likes Teen Spirit" was supposed to
mean, but nobody tried that with "Loser." The first time you heard
it, you knew it was about nothing. Beck paradoxically fulfilled his destiny: He
sounded like an artist who was lazy on purpose. And this would not have been
important if "Loser" had merely been a novelty hit. But that's not
what it was.
The first time I heard
"Loser" was also the first time I ever heard of Beck, which isn't
unusual. Before it debuted on MTV's Alternative Nation in January 1994, the
network's flannel-clad VJs were promoting the shit out of "Loser," no
differently than if it had been the newest release from a band that was already
mega-famous. This is partly because "Loser" was already (technically)
old -- it had been released as an indie single on Bong Load Records in March
1993 (Bong Load pressed only 500 vinyl copies, and college radio stations
played it immediately). Hipster kids were already aware of who Beck was.
But most of the world is not
hip, so we found out on MTV. That alone seemed meaningful. People had been
accusing MTV of dictating public taste for years, but now it really was
happening: An unknown single by a person we'd never heard of was already famous
enough to open an episode of Alternative Nation, the less-edgy offspring of 120
Minutes. It was like waking up the morning after a coup and discovering the new
president was a hobo in a scarf.
People like to compare
"Loser" to Radiohead's "Creep," but that relationship is
bogus. There's a narrative to "Creep," and the protagonist's
self-loathing is supposed to be an authentic feeling -- when Beck asked people
to kill him, only a fool would think he was serious. The Smashing Pumpkins
followed "Loser" with the metalesque "Zero," but that was
self-loathing as bandwagon chic -- by the fall of '95, this was simply the
sentiment alt-gods were supposed to have. And "Loser" made that
happen, it was lifestyle branding. It made a vision of unspecific, apolitical
apathy appear charming and desirable. Overnight, it was so much easier for
white people to be cool. All you had to do was look weird and act weirder.
Remember those John Hughes
movies from the '80s, where guys like Andrew McCarthy and his overachieving
rich friends inevitably ran the high school? Nobody buys that anymore. It's a
distant reality that seems completely unreal. Ever since MTV decided
"Loser" was the future of middle-of-the-road coolness, the underclass
has become the overclass. The counterculture has become a product that's
available to everybody. And this didn't happen naturally; it happened because
somebody made that choice and we didn't know any better. Which, on balance, is
probably the greatest thing MTV ever did for anyone.
ON THE ROAD
(By Chuck Klosterman, from The Believer website, 2008)
What’s the difference between
a road movie and a movie that just happens to have roads in it? I drove a car across the country once. It
took three weeks and was financed by a rock magazine. Two years after the trip,
a handful of people from California with exceptionally comfortable office
chairs considered making a movie out of my experience. It was a very confusing
process. Enthusiastic strangers with German eyeglasses kept asking me how I
imagined this film would look, which I found difficult to elucidate; I assumed
it would look like the video for Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway,” partially
because of the lyrical content but mostly because I (sort of) looked Canadian
before I grew a beard. That was not the answer they were anticipating. I was
given a strong impression they were hoping I would say it would be a lot like
Trainspotting, although maybe they were just trying to figure out if I could
put them in contact with local drug dealers. They also wanted me to sign a
780-page contract that would give time control over my “life rights,” which
meant they would have been able to make me an ancillary character in You, Me
and Dupree.
My theoretical Road Movie
would not have been interesting and does not exist, although those two points
are not necessarily related. I have no doubt that it would have followed the
conventional Road Movie trajectory, which has remained intact since before The
Wizard of Oz. This trajectory is as follows: 1) A character experiences
abstract loss and attempts an exodus from normal life, 2) The character
reinvents his or her self-identity while traveling, 3) Along the way, the
character encounters iconic individuals who (usually) illustrate authenticity
and desolation, 4) Upon the recognition of seemingly self-evident realizations,
the character desires to return to the point of origin.
I assume the hypothetical
Road Movie I was not involved with would have been built on the most elementary
of Road Movie clichés: where you’re going doesn’t matter as much as how you get
there. But that philosophy raises at least three questions, some of which are
equally cliché but all of which are hard to answer: What is a Road Movie,
really? Why do so many directors (from so many different eras) long to make
them? And what makes movement any more inherently interesting than—or even all
that different from—staying in one place?
The defining domestic road
narrative is Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road, a novel that readers either
take much too seriously (at least in the opinion of dead author Truman Capote,
who didn’t even classify the prose as writing) or not seriously enough (if you
happen to be non-dead author John Leland, who just published a book titled Why
Kerouac Matters). A film adaptation of On the Road has been percolating for
years; the movie is slated to be produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed
by Walter Salles, a Brazilian-born filmmaker already known for crafting
semi-epic road pictures (most notably 2004’s Motorcycle Diaries, but also
1996’s Foreign Land and 1998’s Central Station). It was my intention to
interview Salles for this piece, but he’s currently in South America and
unwilling to chat. He did, however, email me a two-thousand-word essay[1] he
wrote for a Greek film festival, which is akin to getting an extremely long
answer to a question that was never technically asked.
The essay is (rather
straightforwardly) titled “About Road Movies.” Salles suggests that all of this
starts with The Odyssey of Homer and reflects a specific kind of human
discovery. Here are a few of his core thoughts, mostly unedited: The early road
movies were about the discovery of a new geography or about the expansion of
frontiers, like Westerns in North American cinema. They were films about a
national identity in construction. In more recent decades, road movies started
to accomplish a different task: they began to register national identities in
transformation.
This first point addresses
something almost everyone who talks about Road Movies inevitably feels
obligated to reference: the idea of moving west across the country is such a
deeply American tradition that virtually all Road Movies borrow on this motif.
This is even true when a movie consciously embraces the opposing philosophy. In
1969’s Easy Rider, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper start in California and travel
east. They’re part of the counterculture, so they move in the opposite
direction of manifest destiny. When Jack Nicholson’s character says things like
“This used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong
with it,” he is essentially suggesting a discovery of America in reverse. In terms of architecture, road movies cannot
be circumscribed to the traditional three-act structure that defines the screenplays
of so many mainstream films. Road movies are rarely guided by external
conflicts; the conflict that afflicts its characters is basically an internal
one. I have the impression that the most
interesting road movies are those in which the identity crises of its main
characters mirror the identity crisis of the culture these characters originate
from, or are going through.
Salles’s second point is
interesting because- though true- it often represents the easiest criticism of
any movie focused on characters who seem obsessed with movement for the sake of
movement alone. For example, there really is no conflict in Smokey and the
Bandit (it’s actually easier to understand the plot by listening to the
three-minute Jerry Reed song “Westbound and Down” than by watching the movie).
However, Smokey and the Bandit becomes far more compelling if viewed from the
perspective that Burt Reynolds is the idealized embodiment of how a masculine,
semi-blue-collar Southern male would think about the world in 1977 (i.e., not
taking it seriously and not giving a shit about anything including things he
knows he should give a shit about such as the pugnacious optimism of Sally
Field).
Because of the necessity of
accompanying the internal transformation of its characters, road movies are not
about what can be verbalized, but about what can be felt. About the invisible
that complements the visible. In this sense, road movies contrast dramatically
with the present mainstream films, in which new actions are created every five
minutes to grab the attention of the spectator. In road movies, a moment of
silence is generally more important than the most dramatic action.
Salles’s third point is more
debatable. It speaks to the divide between people who claim they like “films”
and those who willfully insist they prefer “movies.” The true question becomes
this: are movies more interesting when something is happening, or are movies
more interesting when nothing is happening? In the case of Vincent Gallo’s
sublimely gratuitous The Brown Bunny (2003), the latter argument feels more
accurate; what makes that film hypnotizing is its ability to replicate the
focused boredom of authentic highway driving. But this is usually the
exception. There are cataclysmic, melodramatic deaths at the end of 1967’s
Bonnie and Clyde and 1991’s Thelma and Louise. My assumption is that Salles
would argue that those specific events were less important than the (mostly)
unspoken agreement of the characters’ decision to die together. But that’s not
how it seems when the movies are actively consumed, which indicates one of two
things: either Salles’s description of Road Movies is imperfect, or those two
examples aren’t Road Movies at all. Maybe they’re just movies that happen to
have roads in them.
“Going from point A to point
B is kind of the obvious criteria here.” This is Gus Van Sant, talking via
telephone. He is speaking very cautiously; the questions I’ve asked him are so
vague and abstract that I think he suspects I’m trying to trick him into saying
something he doesn’t believe. “In a movie like Gerry, the characters are
looking for a road, which really isn’t the same thing as a Road Movie. All of
this probably comes from our own history—wagon trains and literal trains and
exploring the West. But by the time we got to the 1960s, it didn’t really matter
which direction you were going. Ken Kesey had business on the East Coast, so
that required a reversal.” The reason I
am interviewing Van Sant is two-pronged, although it appears neither of my
prongs are particularly sharp. The first reason is that I was under the
impression that he’s agreed to direct an upcoming version of The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s nonfiction account of the aforementioned
Kesey’s LSD-fueled 1964 bus trip across the United States. As it turns out, Van
Sant has yet to officially sign on to this project (he said he was still in the
midst of negotiating the deal and writing the script). My second reason for
calling is that I closely associate Van Sant with the Road Movie genre, which
(in retrospect) is totally specious. A lot of his films are Road Movies in my
memory, but they weren’t when I re-watched them. As Van Sant noted, Gerry
doesn’t have a road. My Own Private Idaho starts on a highway and ends in Rome
(where all roads are said to lead), but everything in the middle seems detached
from movement. In Drugstore Cowboy (1989), the characters stay in motion and
actively take a road trip, but it’s still not a Road Movie. That said, there is something about Van
Sant’s work that (perhaps inadvertently) inhabits the relationship between
travel and life experience. His interest in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is
not surprising: besides holding a career-long cinematic interest in drug use,
Van Sant claims to have crossed the country by car at least twenty times in his
life and still drives from his home in Oregon to Los Angeles on a regular
basis.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever
shot a physical landscape through the window of a moving car, but I’ve always
thought the idea of road stories on film was the central metaphor of a beginning,
a middle, and an end,” he says, slightly challenging Salles’s notion that Road
Movies don’t operate like traditional three-act plays. “The trip creates a
natural progression through the middle of a film. I think a story like On the
Road, for example, will actually be more effective as a film than as a book.
Going from point A to point B is not what really holds a novel together. But
movement can hold a movie together.” In
the hopes of finding clarity, I ask Van Sant what he thinks a Road Movie is.
Somewhat predictably, his response makes things more confusing (and also seems
to contradict something he already said about one of his own films). “Well, if Duel isn’t a road movie, then such
a thing as Road Movies doesn’t exist,” he says. “But does there even have to be
a road at all? Is 2001: A Space Odyssey a road movie? I think that you could
argue that it was.” This, I suppose, is
true. You could argue that 2001 was a Road Movie, just as you could argue that
My Dinner with Andre is a Road Movie of the Mind. But that kind of argument
leads nowhere. The more telling detail is Van Sant’s mention of Duel, Steven
Spielberg’s 1971 made-for-TV movie about an unassuming businessman—a person
literally named “David Mann”—in a Plymouth Valiant who finds himself in an
inexplicable personal war with a flammable tank truck driven by a faceless
stranger who wants to kill him. Duel eliminates the idea of a road trip as some
sort of spiritual quest. Instead, it exclusively ties its story to the most
fundamental elements of the genre: people, vehicles, and the nonmetaphorical
physicality of the earth itself.
The six types of narrative
conflict are usually described in the following manner: Man v. Himself, Man v.
Man, Man v. Society, Man v. Nature, Man v. Machine, and Man v. God. In his
essay, Salles writes that Road Movies are usually internal conflicts, so he’d
probably see Duel as Man v. Himself; if consumed completely devoid of subtext,
the screenplay for Duel seems like an obvious Man v. Man scenario. But those would
both be attempts at simplifying what a Road Movie is about, and I’m not sure if
it’s that simple. To me, Road Movies often seem to adhere to this equation:
(MAN + MACHINE) - (GOD V.
SOCIETY) + NATURE/HIMSELF
What this means is that Road
Movies often focus on amoral humans in cars, racing against the structure of
society and the limitations of the natural world, filtered through the
perception of the characters’ life experience. For some reason, this seemed
especially common in 1971. Along with Duel, that year also saw the release of
Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop, companion films that romanticize driving
to a degree that now seems almost absurd.
Made with a budget of $1.3 million, Vanishing Point is about a 1970
Dodge Challenger, driven by Kowalski, a stoic portrayed by an actor named Barry
Newman, who spends a lot of time looking like Elliott Gould and acting like
Dustin Hoffman. (Interestingly, the director wanted the role to go to Gene
Hackman.) In order to win a meaningless bet with a Benzedrine dealer, Kowalski
attempts to drive the white Challenger from Boulder, Colorado, to San Francisco
in fifteen hours. As the trip progresses, the Challenger evolves into a sort of
memory machine that allows Kowalski to mentally replay past episodes from his
life. That’s pretty much the whole movie. Two-Lane Blacktop was made more
cheaply (for an estimated $850,000) and managed to be even more plotless: two
drag-racing slackabouts (musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson) get into a
cross-country Route 66 road race against a drifter in a GTO (Warren Oates).
This turns into a three-way sexual competition for an extremely annoying hippie
(Laurie Bird). The story is generally incomprehensible, partially because
untrained actors Taylor and Wilson tend to oscillate between acting unnaturally
stiff and supernaturally high.
Still, there are two things
that make Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop compelling, regardless of how
underwritten they feel in the present tense. The first is that both films are
relentlessly auto-centric. The audience is constantly shown images inside the
rearview mirror or over the top of the hood. The sound of the vehicle engines
is extremely high in the audio mix. You get used to seeing people gripping a
steering wheel while cocking their skull slightly to one side. “I’m gonna make
the car the star,” claimed Vanishing Point director Richard C. Sarafian, but
that’s not really what happens; in both movies, the process of driving is the
star. The other (more obvious) link between Vanishing Point and Two-Lane
Blacktop is how they conclude. In the former, Kowalski drives his Dodge into a
pair of bulldozers and explodes. Man and Car die together, and there’s no
explanation as to why. Two-Lane Blacktop ends even more abruptly: while the characters
are racing in Tennessee, the movie’s sound drops out and the celluloid film
itself burns up. If you like either or
both of these movies, you almost certainly love these particular endings and
find them “existential.” If you dislike these movies, you probably find these
finales meaningless (and not in a good way). Yet Vanishing Point and Two-Lane
Blacktop seem to solve the Road Movie Equation I mentioned a few paragraphs
earlier. It’s no longer a question of “versus.” Now the equation reads more like
this:
(MAN + MACHINE) - (GOD <
SOCIETY) + NATURE/HIMSELF
What all this boils down to
is that there are two idioms of Road Movies, and the only thing that truly
connects them is the presence of asphalt. Films in the vein of Vanishing Point
are external, aggressive, mechanically oriented abstractions where the
characters remain static (this genus also include movies like The Cannonball
Run, The Road Warrior, and the recent Quentin Tarantino project Death Proof).
In contrast, a movie like Wong Kar-wai’s recent My Blueberry Nights (or Two for
the Road, or Little Miss Sunshine) is supposed to be meandering, personal, and
transformative. Essentially, you are either (a) going nowhere fast or (b) going
somewhere slow. The fact that we all unconsciously understand those paradigms
is how Road Movies succeed.
But sometimes it’s how they
fail. The themes we all understand are
not always true. One of the best Road
Movies from recent years is Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, a minimalist indie
project set in the Pacific Northwest. The movie is about two old friends (Will
Oldham and Daniel London) who have grown apart over time but decide to take a
road trip together. Were this a conventional Road Movie, that experience would
foster rediscovery—the two friends would address their differences and bind a
new friendship. But this does not happen. They do not argue, evolve, or
suddenly recall why they originally liked each other. It’s a slow,
hyperpersonal movie that offers no transformation whatsoever.[2] The characters
have nothing profound to say to each other, and that is disenchanting. But
because they are in a car together, they can still talk. When two people are
sitting in a car, they don’t have to look at each other. They don’t have to be
interesting or funny or even themselves, because they’re not there for
entertainment; they are there to get somewhere else. That’s what makes movement
more interesting than staying in place: Road Trips exist outside of reality.
Cars are not just memory machines. Cars are avoidance machines. And we will
always watch anything that keeps us from being here, regardless of where that
is (or isn’t).
__________
1. When I initially received
this essay from Salles, it had not been published anywhere. However, it ended
up running in the November 11, 2007, issue of the New York Times Magazine.
2. My editor disagrees with
me on this point, arguing that “something” transformative happens when the two
characters go to an outdoor bathhouse. I still think that nothing happens,
which is supposed to be the point (i.e., the audience is tricked into
anticipating that this episode is going to be transformative, because movie
grammar teaches us to traditionally interpret these kinds of scenes as
metaphorically significant). I suppose this kind of disagreement is inevitable
whenever somebody makes a movie without much dialogue.
Chuck Klosterman writes for
various media outlets and is the author of four nonfiction books. His first
novel, Downtown Owl, will be released by Scribner in September.
Remember: The White Stripes By Chuck
Klosterman
(By Chuck Klosterman, Spin Magazine, 02 February 2011)
[EDITOR'S NOTE, February 2,
2010: Because the White Stripes announced today that they are officially
disbanding, we are republishing Chuck Klosterman's first interview with the
band, which originally appeared in SPIN's October 2002 issue.]
Jack White flicks his
cigarette ash into a glass of water. He and Meg White are sitting on a couch in
an überswanky hotel room in downtown Chicago, trying to explain how it feels to
be a punkish underground band -- with modest sales and an antimedia aesthetic
-- that has somehow become America's most frothed-over rock group. "We're in a weird spot right now,"
Jack says. "To be honest, I have a hard time finding a reason to be on the
cover of SPIN. It was like being on the MTV Movie Awards [where they performed
their recent single 'Fell in Love With a Girl']. You start asking yourself,
'What are we getting from this? What are we destroying by doing this? Does it
mean anything?' So you try it. You wonder if you'll end up being any different
than everyone else, and usually, the answer is no."
Actually, the answer is yes.
The White Stripes are different. If you ignored their songs, you'd assume they
were a novelty act: They wear only matching red, white, and black clothing,
they have no bassist, and they've built their public persona around a
fabricated relationship (they claim to be siblings, but they're actually an
ex-couple whose divorce was finalized in 2000; see sidebar). But there is no
punch line. Mixing junk punk and tangled roots music, singing some of the most
complex love songs since Liz Phair's heyday, the White Stripes have done what
great rock bands are supposed to do -- they've reinvented the blues with
contemporary instincts. They represent a sound (postmodern garage rock) from a
specific place (downtown Detroit), and it's a fascinating mix of sonic realness
and media boondoggle.
As we talk, guitarist Jack
speaks in full, articulate paragraphs. Drummer Meg mostly hugs a pillow and
curls her legs underneath her body, hiding feet covered by rainbow-colored
socks that resemble Fruit Stripe gum's zebra mascot. The night before, the duo
played the Metro club near Wrigley Field, and it was an acceptable 90-minute
show. However, tonight they'll play a blistering set at the Metro that won't
start until 12:55 A.M., and it will annihilate the molecules of Illinois' air:
They will do an extended version of a new song ("Ball and Biscuit")
that makes references to being a seventh son and includes a grinding guitar
solo that's shredded over the beat from Queen's "We Will Rock You."
They'll cover the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun." Everything is raw and unrehearsed and
imperfect. And that's why it's so fucking good. "We have to go back,"
Jack insists. "The last twenty years have been filled with digital,
technological crap that's taken the soul out of music. The technological
metronome of the United States is obsessed with progress, so now you have all
these gearheads who want to lay down three thousand tracks in their living
room. That wasn't the point. "The
point," says Meg, "is being a live band."
Perhaps Meg is right.
However, classifying the White Stripes as two kids in a stellar live band in no
way describes their curious career arc and often contradictory aesthetic.
Supposedly formed on Bastille Day in 1997, they got some attention for being
bass-less and dressing like pieces of candy. After they'd released two albums
(1999's eponymous debut and 2000's De Stijl, named after a Dutch art movement
that emphasized primal abstraction) and toured with Pavement and
Sleater-Kinney, there was a growing suspicion that Jack and Meg were succeeding
where Jon Spencer and his cheeky Blues Explosion had failed -- there is no
irony to what the Stripes create. "We wanted things to be as childish as
possible, but with no sense of humor," Jack explains, "because that's
how children think." Children also fib, conflating truth and fiction, real
and fake, for the mere fun of it.
Like Pavement in '92, the
Stripes brought romance and mystery to an indie underground devoid of
rock'n'roll fantasy. By the release of White Blood Cells in the summer of 2001,
they'd evolved into a cultural phenomenon. Eventually, they signed a lucrative
deal with V2 (which has since rereleased their earlier albums), had their own
Lego-centric MTV hit, and were embraced by modern-rock radio programmers
looking for a post-Bizkit hangover cure.
V2 President Andy Gershon, who reportedly signed the band for $15
million, was reluctant at first. "Your conventional wisdom is that they're
a two-piece, they need a bass player, they've got this red-and-white gimmick,
and the songs are fantastic, but they're recorded very raw...how is this going
to be on radio?" he says. "But for me, it was like, the record's
amazing."
Along with the Strokes and
the Hives, the White Stripes are part of a back-to-basics real-rock revival
awkwardly termed "neo-garage." With roots in the '60s stomp of
teenage bands responding to the British invasion, "garage rock" is
all about simple, direct catharsis. For years, the music was the province of
aging coolsters, but neo-garage infuses that old sound with glammy magic. The
White Stripes are from Southwest Detroit, more specifically from a lower-middle-class
Hispanic section uncomfortably referred to as Mexicantown. They claim to be the
youngest offspring in a family of ten children. They claim to have formed one
day when Meg wandered into their parents' attic and began playing Jack's drum
kit. This is certainly not true. This much is true: Mexicantown is where Jack
White grew up and operated an upholstery shop, and Meg is from the same ZIP
code; she once worked as a bartender at a blues bar in the trendy northern
Detroit suburb of Royal Oak. Jack is 26. Meg is 27. The White Stripes are
"Detroit people," and they are the most visible band in the Detroit
garage-rock scene, a conglomeration of pals extending far beyond the Stripes
themselves. Detroit is full of underproduced, wonderfully primitive rock bands,
all playing the same bar circuit. You could waste a weekend trying to name
every band in the 313 area code (a lot of them are on the Sympathetic Sounds of
Detroit compilation, which Jack White recorded in his living room). There are
the Von Bondies, a sloppy, MC5-ish rave-up quartet, and the Clone Defects, an
arty, quasi-metal band. Slumber Party are borderline shoegazers; the Come Ons
play trad '60s-ish pop. The Dirtbombs bridge the gap between glam, Detroit's
Motown past, and the blues-rock future. The Piranhas are a destructo-punk band,
already local legends for their "Rat Show" at a now-defunct club
called the Gold Dollar in 1999 (their singer performed with a bloody, freshly
executed rat duct-taped to his naked torso). The Detroit Cobras are the hottest
band of the moment (supposedly ignoring an avalanche of major labels trying to
sign them).
But the White Stripes are the
conflicted media darlings. Unlike most of their blue-collar peers, they have a
well-cultivated look, an artistic sensibility, and a mythology, which makes the
Stripes an idea as much as a band (almost like a garage-rock Kiss). But the
real reason they're the biggest little rock group since Sonic Youth is
impossible to quantify: Audiences hear something in their music that's so fundamental,
it almost feels alien. According to
Jack, what they're hearing is truth.
"We grew up in the late '80s and '90s, and what was good in
rock'n'roll for those 20 years? Nothing, really. I guess I liked Nirvana,"
White says. "And sometimes when you grow up around all these people who
only listen to hip-hop, something inside of you just doesn't connect with that.
Some people will just kind of fall into that culture -- you know, white people
pretending to be black people or whatever -- because they're involved in an
environment where they want to fit in and they want to have friends, so they
decide to like what everyone else likes and to dress how everyone else dresses.
Meg and I never went along with it."
I try to get Meg to comment; she defers to Jack, smiles, and looks away.
Meg seems really, really nice and really, really bored. She and Jack laugh at
each other's jokes, but they mostly behave like coworkers. I ask her how she
feels about the way people have portrayed her -- like when reporters infer profound
metaphorical insight from her unwillingness to chat.
Wendy Case is less shy than
Meg White. In fact, Wendy Case is less shy than David Lee Roth. She is the
38-year-old lead singer/guitarist for the Paybacks, a band Case describes as
"hard pop." Her hair is blonde on top and brown underneath, she
laughs like a '73 Plymouth Scamp that refuses to turn over, and she can
probably outdrink 90 percent of the men in Michigan. We are riding in her black
Cherokee down Detroit's Cass Corridor.
"If you're gonna look for one unifying force [in the Detroit
scene], the thing is that we all still drink," Case says. "You get
together and you drink beer, and you listen to music. That's pretty much the
nucleus of every social situation." The Cass Corridor is a strip of urban
wretchedness jammed between the north shadow of Detroit's skyline and Wayne
State University. It's basically a slum, filled with dive bars and homeless
people who spend afternoons having animated conversations with the heavens.
This is where Detroit's garage rock has flourished, so it's no surprise that
most of this town's bands are no-nonsense buzz saws. But the depth and
intensity of their musical knowledge is surprising. The recent Dirtbombs album,
Ultraglide in Black, is mostly covers (Stevie Wonder, Phil Lynott), and the
Detroit Cobras' Life, Love and Leaving is all covers. "We'll all sit around and listen to an
old Supremes record or a Martha Reeves and the Vandellas record and marvel at
the production level, especially considering how cheaply it was done,"
says Eddie Harsch, a guy who used to play keyboards with the Black Crowes and
currently plays bass for the Cobras. "People in Detroit know their
records."
This is true for the Stripes,
who pepper shows with Dolly Parton's "Jolene," Meg's rendition of
Loretta Lynn's "Rated X," and the menacing, tommy-gun riff of Link
Wray's "Jack the Ripper."
Explains Jack: "We've never covered a song simply because it would
be cool or because we'd seem really obscure for doing so. Certain circles of
musicians will all get involved with the same record at the same time and
suddenly it will be cool to like the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society
for a month. But why didn't people feel that way three years ago? I've always
hated the whole idea of record collectors who are obsessed with how obscure
something is. Usually when somebody brings up something obscure, I assume it's
not very good, because -- if it was -- I would have heard it already. Record
collectors are collecting. They're not really listening to music."
We talk a little longer. Then
Jack does something odd. He reaches behind his waist and rips the tag off his
black pants. It's the type of weird moment that makes the Stripes so baffling
and compelling. In and of itself, it's not mind-blowing that a guy ripped the
tag off his pants. But this small, theatrical gesture punctuates Jack's quote
better than words ever could. It looks rehearsed, even though that's impossible
(it's hard to imagine Jack buys a new pair of trousers for every interview).
Yet everything the White Stripes do raises a question. How can two media-savvy
kids posing as brother and sister, wearing Dr. Seuss clothes, represent
blood-and-bones Detroit, a city whose greatest resource is asphalt? "One time I was joking around with
Jack," recalls Detroit Cobras guitarist Maribel Restrepo, who lives ten
minutes from where Jack resides in southwest Detroit. "And I said, 'If you
tell little white lies, they'll only lead to more lies.' And he goes, You can't
even do that, because the minute you say anything, that's all people will talk
about. It gets to where you don't want to say anything.' It's not that less is more; it's that less is
everything. When Meg White hugs her pillow and tells me that people put more
thought into shyness than necessary, I want to play along with her -- even
though she's totally lying. It's as if we don't want to know the truth about
the White Stripes. The lies are so much fun.
Chuck
Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy
(by Chuck
Klosterman, A.V. Club website, 2008)
Reviewing Chinese
Democracy is not like reviewing music. It's more like reviewing a unicorn.
Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to
compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing
mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural
vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of
the animal kingdom? I've been thinking about this record for 15 years; during
that span, I've thought about this record more than I've thought about China,
and maybe as much as I've thought about the principles of democracy. This is a
little like when that grizzly bear finally ate Timothy Treadwell [in the movie
“Grizzly Man”]: Intellectually, he always knew it was coming. He had to. His
very existence was built around that conclusion. But you still can't
psychologically prepare for the bear who eats you alive, particularly if the
bear wears cornrows. Here are the simple
things about Chinese Democracy: Three of the songs are astonishing. Four
or five others are very good. The vocals are brilliantly recorded, and the
guitar playing is (generally) more interesting than the guitar playing on the Use
Your Illusion albums. Axl Rose made some curious (and absolutely
unnecessary) decisions throughout the assembly of this project, but that works
to his advantage as often as it detracts from the larger experience. So: Chinese
Democracy is good. Under any halfway normal circumstance, I would give it
an A. But nothing about these
circumstances is normal.
For one thing, Chinese
Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we'll ever contemplate
in this context—it's the last album that will be marketed as a collection of
autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a
static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that
will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file. This is
the end of that. But the more meaningful reason Chinese Democracy is
abnormal is because of a) the motives of its maker, and b) how those motives
embargoed what the definitive product eventually became. The explanation as to
why Chinese Democracy took so long to complete is not simply because Axl
Rose is an insecure perfectionist; it's because Axl Rose self-identifies as a
serious, unnatural artist. He can't stop himself from anticipating every
possible reaction and interpretation of his work. I suspect he cares less about
the degree to which people like his music, and more about how it is
taken, regardless of the listener's ultimate judgment. This is why he was
so paralyzed by the construction of Chinese Democracy—he can't write or
record anything without obsessing over how it will be received, both by a) the
people who think he's an unadulterated genius, and b) the people who think he's
little more than a richer, red-haired Stephen Pearcy. All of those disparate
opinions have identical value to him. So I will take Chinese Democracy as
seriously as Axl Rose would hope, and that makes it significantly less simple.
At this juncture in history, rocking is not enough.
The weirdest (yet more
predictable) aspect of Chinese Democracy is the way 60 percent of the
lyrics seem to actively comment on the process of making the album itself. The
rest of the vocal material tends to suggest some kind of abstract regret over
an undefined romantic relationship punctuated by betrayal, but that might just
be the way all hard-rock songs seem when the singer plays a lot of piano and
only uses pronouns. The craziest track, "Sorry," resembles spooky
Pink Floyd and is probably directed toward former GNR drummer Steven Adler,
although I suppose it might be about Slash or Stephanie Seymour or David Geffen.
It could even be about Jon Pareles, for all I fucking know—Axl's enemy list is
pretty Nixonian at this point. The most uplifting songs are "Street Of
Dreams" (a leaked song previously titled "The Blues") and the
exceptionally satisfying "Catcher In The Rye" (a softer, more
sophisticated re-working of "Yesterdays" that occupies a conceptual
self-awareness in the vein of Elton John or mid-period Queen). The fragile
ballad "This I Love" is sad, melodramatic, and pleasurably traditional.
There are many moments where it's impossible to tell who Axl is talking to, so
it feels like he's talking to himself (and inevitably about himself).
There's not much cogent storytelling, but it's linear and compelling. The best
description of the overall literary quality of the lyrics would probably be
"effectively narcissistic."
As for the music—well, that's
actually much better than anticipated. It doesn't sound dated or
faux-industrial, and the guitar shredding that made the final version (which
I'm assuming is still predominantly Buckethead) is alien and perverse. A song
like "Shackler's Revenge" is initially average, until you get to the
solo—then it becomes the sonic equivalent of a Russian robot wrestling a
reticulating python. Whenever people lament the dissolution of the original
Guns N' Roses, the person they always focus on is Slash, and that makes sense.
(His unrushed blues metal was the group's musical vortex.) But it's actually
better that Slash is not on this album. What's cool about Chinese Democracy is
that it truly does sound like a new enterprise, and I can't imagine that being
the case if Slash were dictating the sonic feel of every riff. The GNR members
Rose misses more are Izzy Stradlin (who effortlessly wrote or co-wrote many of
the band's most memorable tunes) and Duff McKagan, the underappreciated bassist
who made Appetite For Destruction so devastating. Because McKagan worked
in numerous Seattle-based bands before joining Guns N' Roses, he became the de
facto arranger for many of those pre-Appetite tracks, and his philosophy
was always to take the path of least resistance. He pushed the songs in
whatever direction felt most organic. But Rose is the complete opposite. He
takes the path of most resistance. Sometimes it seems like Axl believes
every single Guns N' Roses song needs to employ every single thing that Guns N'
Roses has the capacity to do—there needs to be a soft part, a hard part, a
falsetto stretch, some piano plinking, some R&B bullshit, a little Judas
Priest, subhuman sound effects, a few Robert Plant yowls, dolphin squeaks,
wind, overt sentimentality, and a caustic modernization of the blues. When he's
able to temporarily balance those qualities (which happens on the title track
and on "I.R.S.," the album's two strongest rock cuts), it's sprawling
and entertaining and profoundly impressive. The soaring vocals crush
everything. But sometimes Chinese Democracy suffers from the same
inescapable problem that paralyzed proto-epics like "Estranged" and
"November Rain": It's as if Axl is desperately trying to get some
unmakeable dream song from inside his skull onto the CD, and the result is an
overstuffed maelstrom that makes all the punk dolts scoff. His ambition is
noble, yet wildly unrealistic. It's like if Jeff Lynne tried to make Out Of
The Blue sound more like Fun House, except with jazz drumming and a
girl singer from Motown.
Throughout Chinese
Democracy, the most compelling question is never, "What was Axl doing
here?" but "What did Axl think he was doing here?" The
tune "If The World" sounds like it should be the theme to a Roger
Moore-era James Bond movie, all the way down to the title. On
"Scraped," there's a vocal bridge that sounds strikingly similar to a
vocal bridge from the 1990 Extreme song "Get The Funk Out." On the
aforementioned "Sorry," Rose suddenly sings an otherwise innocuous
line ("But I don't want to do it") in some bizarre,
quasi-Transylvanian accent, and I cannot begin to speculate as to why. I mean,
one has to assume Axl thought about all of these individual choices a minimum
of a thousand times over the past 15 years. Somewhere in Los Angles, there's
gotta be 400 hours of DAT tape with nothing on it except multiple
versions of the "Sorry" vocal. So why is this the one we finally
hear? What finally made him decide, "You know, I've weighed all my options
and all their potential consequences, and I'm going with the Mexican vampire
accent. This is the vision I will embrace. But only on that one line! The rest
of it will just be sung like a non-dead human." Often, I don't even care
if his choices work or if they fail. I just want to know what Rose hoped
they would do.
On "Madagascar," he
samples MLK (possible restitution for "One In A Million"?) and (for
the second time in his career) the movie Cool Hand Luke. Considering that
the only people who will care about Rose's preoccupation with Cool Hand Luke
are those already obsessed with his iconography, the doomed messianic message
of that film must deeply (and predictably) resonate with his very being. But
how does that contribute to "Madagascar," a meteorological metaphor
about all those unnamed people who wanted to stop him from making Chinese
Democracy in the insane manner he saw fit? Sometimes listening to this
album feels like watching the final five minutes of the Sopranos finale.
There's no acceptable answer to these types of hypotheticals. Still, I find myself impressed by how close Chinese
Democracy comes to fulfilling the absurdly impossible expectation it
self-generated, and I not-so-secretly wish this had actually been a triple
album. I've maintained a decent living by making easy jokes about Axl Rose for
the past 10 years, but what's the final truth? The final truth is this: He
makes the best songs. They sound the way I want songs to sound. A few of them
seem idiotic at the beginning, but I love the way they end. Axl Rose put so
much time and effort into proving that he was super-talented that the rest of
humanity forgot he always had been. And that will hurt him. This record may
tank commercially. Some people will slaughter Chinese Democracy, and for
all the reasons you expect. But he did a good thing here. Grade: A-
Book Excerpt: A Chapter From Chuck
Klosterman's 'I Wear The Black Hat'
(By Chuck Klosterman, Entertainment Weekly, 20 June 2013)
In his new
book, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and
Imagined) out July 9, journalist and author Chuck Klosterman explores the
nature of villainy, from O.J. Simpson’s “second-worst decision” to the
anti-heroes created in American pop culture. Check out a full chapter of the
book below, in which Klosterman deconstructs the Eagles and his other musical
dislikes. Editor’s note: Klosterman
is married to EW senior writer Melissa Maerz.
ANOTHER THING THAT INTERESTS ME ABOUT
THE EAGLES IS THAT I [AM CONTRACTUALLY OBLIGATED TO] HATE THEM
Here are the
opening lyrics to the song “Take It Easy” by the Eagles. It was the first cut
on the Eagles’ first album; written by Glenn Frey and Jackson Browne, “Take It
Easy” was released upon the world in May of 1972, one month before I was born.
The words are familiar to anyone who listens to rock on the radio, a population
that dwindles with every passing year . . .
Well, I’m running down the road
Tryin’ to loosen my load
I’ve got seven women on my mind
Four that wanna own me
Two that wanna stone me
One says she’s a friend of mine
I’d love to isolate the first time I heard these words, but
I can’t. It predates my memory. I do, however, remember the first time I
thought about these words, which didn’t happen until 2003. I was intrigued by
the math: The main character (who’s technically the creation of non-Eagle
Browne, since he wrote this particular verse) is fleeing from seven women. Four
of these females are possessive, so he finds them unappealing; two others hate
him (but don’t want to own him), which comes across as neutral; the seventh is
(I think) the one he likes, but she can’t reciprocate. It’s clearly the problem
of a young man, as no one over thirty-five could sustain interest in seven
simultaneous relationships unless they’re biracial and amazing at golf. The
four who want to own him are sympathetic; the two who want to stone him are
reasonable; the one who says she’s his friend is the O. Henry twist. Now, are
we supposed to like this philandering protagonist? Not necessarily, although I
suspect we’re supposed to see him as a realist who’s slowly realizing he’s made
his own life more complex than necessary. If we allow ourselves to project the
unknown motives of the songwriter even further, perhaps we start to think the
song is about the discomfort of romantic honesty; maybe we start to think the
verse is really about how each of these seven women has reacted to the abrupt
awareness of the other six (four increase their affection, two invert their
affection, and one slips into detachment). If you conject even further, perhaps
you can pretend the song is only about one woman (with seven different sides to
her personality), or that this is supposed to be humor, or that we’re not
supposed to think about these seven women as actual people, or that we’re not
supposed to think about these lyrics at all.
However, one detail is non-negotiable: People fucking hate
this song. Which is not to say it’s
unpopular or unpleasant or a failure, because those descriptions don’t apply.
It went to number twelve on the Billboard charts, and only an idiot would argue
that “Take It Easy” is poorly written or badly executed. When it originally hit
the radio, some guy from Rolling Stone claimed it was the best-sounding song of
1972. If we use all of America as an aesthetic gauge (and particularly its Walmarts,
gas stations, and retail yarn proprietors), this song is a classic. But pop
music — like all subcultures — has an outside culture and an inside culture.
Pop music’s exterior culture is why the Eagles are the best-selling rock band
in U.S. history; its interior culture reviles the Eagles so much that almost
nothing written about them can ignore that reality. Barney Hoskins’s 2005 book
about the Laurel Canyon scene that spawned the band takes its title from the
group’s biggest hit (“Hotel California”) but still can’t ignore how they were
perceived by their peers: “For Gram Parsons, the success of the radio-friendly
Eagles was galling.” To the Limit, a sympathetic (almost sycophantic) 1998
biography of the group, tries to spin their bad reviews into understated
masculinity: “We’d been abused by the press, so we developed a ‘fuck you’
attitude toward them,” says drummer/vocalist Don Henley. These are established
positions, understood by everyone who cares. It’s not like I’m exposing some
dark secret or pushing a false controversy: The musical reputation of the
Eagles is great and the social reputation of the Eagles is terrible. They are
the most unpopular super-popular entity ever created by California, not
counting Ronald Reagan.
I know this because everybody knows this, but also
because — once — I hated the Eagles, too. After spending the first twenty-five
years of my life believing they were merely boring, I suddenly decided they
were the worst band that had ever existed (or could ever exist). I’d unconsciously
internalized all the complaints that supposedly made them despicable: They were
rich hippies. They were virtuosos in an idiom that did not require virtuosity.
They were self-absorbed Hollywood liberals. They were not-so-secretly shallow.
They were uncaring womanizers and the worst kind of cokeheads. They wanted to
be seen as cowboys, but not the ones who actually rode horses. They never
rocked, even after adding Joe Walsh for that express purpose (the first
forty-five seconds of “Life in the Fast Lane” are a push). They lectured
college kids about their environmental footprint while flying around in private
jets. They literally called themselves “The Eagles.” It was easy to hate a band
who kept telling me to take it easy when I was quite obviously trying to do so
already.
And then, one day in 2003, I stopped hating them. This is not because of anything they did or
anything I did. It wasn’t due to anything except clarity. I was working at a
magazine, and Warner Bros. mailed me a promotional copy of The Very Best of the
Eagles. I slid the CD into the disk drive of my computer and waited for the
music to start. Once again, the first track was “Take It Easy.” It sounded
okay, but — then again — it had always sounded okay. I’d accidentally heard
this song hundreds of times in my life, so there wasn’t going to be any big
surprise. It was the same song it had always been, remastered but unchanged.
The only thing that was different was how I felt about the band itself:
Suddenly, I felt nothing. I did not hate them. I didn’t love them, but I
certainly didn’t view their subsistence as problematic or false or socially
sinister. They were just an old rock band who made music that was significant
and relaxing and inevitable, and who seemed to be hated (particularly by people
like myself) for reasons that were both valid and ridiculous. So I listened to
“Take It Easy” and I thought about its lyrical content, and I came to a mostly
positive — but highly uncomfortable — realization about who I was and how I
thought about art.
I no longer possessed the capacity to hate rock bands. I started caring about pop music as a fifth
grader, but it didn’t make me lose my grip on reality until the summer before
seventh grade. That was 1984. For the next twenty years, I didn’t care about
anything else with as much unbridled intensity, except for women and amateur
athletics and booze and (of course) all the self-made problems that accompany
those specific pursuits. Because I loved music so much, I hated it even
more — but my reasons for disliking music were never as valid as my reasons for
enjoying it. What follows is a chronology of every artist I most despised from
age twelve to age thirty-one, followed by a brief analysis of what I did not
like about them at the time . . .
1984 (Bruce Springsteen): There’s never been an
artist I didn’t like as much as I didn’t like Bruce Springsteen as a
twelve-year-old. I hated all his songs, including the ones I’d never heard of.
I hated music about roads and I hated his generic-yet-kinetic clothing and I
hated whoever it was I thought he represented, which I imagined to be humorless
people who wanted to vote for Gary Hart. I just thought he was so fake, which
is the most backward possible reason for hating Bruce Springsteen. But — for
me, at the time, having no idea who Holden Caulfield even was — my definition
of fakeness was fanatically nuanced. I made extremely subtle distinctions. My
favorite band was Mötley Crüe, whom I also viewed as fake — but the difference
was that Mötley Crüe did not pretend they were real (or at least not in a
convincing enough manner). Vince Neil never led me to believe that any element
about who he pretended to be was supposed to serve any purpose beyond “the act
of being the singer in Mötley Crüe.” Yet old people who read Newsweek believed
Bruce was somehow different from everyone else making music, and his
willingness to perpetuate that fallacy made me view his integrity as profoundly
compromised. It seemed like the difference between acting in a play and lying
in real life. [Obviously, time has passed and my feelings have changed. I now
view Springsteen as an upright citizen who’s recorded more good songs than the
vast majority of people who have ever tried to do so. I am his fan, sort of.
But not completely. Any time I meet someone who thinks Springsteen is overrated
or artificial, I find myself thinking, “This person is extra real.” I
immediately respect that person more. And yet I do sincerely believe
Springsteen is (on balance) a great guy. I don’t hate him at all. So why am I
still retroactively trolling him? It’s just something I can’t get over.]
1985 (Bruce Springsteen): This was an emotional
hangover from 1984. I was a grammar school red giant collapsing into a middle
school white dwarf; my anti-Boss feelings grew dense and intense (super hot and
extra useless). Why did he use the word speedball instead of fastball when
reminiscing about high school sports? Was he trying to sound dumb on purpose?
Was ESPN unavailable in New Jersey? An episode of Growing Pains was built
around on Mike Seaver (Kirk Cameron) wanting to see Springsteen in
concert — and so did his fictional father (Alan Thicke). I suppose Springsteen
was the first major artist for which this commonality was plausible: If someone
had youngish parents, it was theoretically possible for a fifteen-year-old kid
to love the same singer as his father. I found this kinship alien and
undesirable, although now it probably happens all the time (in certain Brooklyn
neighborhoods, it’s actually an ordinance). That said, I don’t remember Bruce
being popular with any of the kids at my school, even casually. The teachers
seemed to like him more than the students. He used to be so much older then;
he’s younger than that now. Springsteen used to be the same age as Steve Winwood,
but now he’s maybe six years older than Julian Casablancas.
1986 (Van Halen): This temporary distaste for VH was
solely a product of my inflexible (almost fascist) support of David Lee Roth’s
solo career and my dislike of anyone who thought 5150 was better than 1984 (an
opinion I deemed “unserious”). Hating Van Halen required an astronomical degree
of nerfherdian gymnastics, particularly since Roth essentially destroyed a band
I loved and then tried to act like he’d been unjustly fired. But I’ve always been
like this; when Mötley Crüe split up in 1991, I sided with Vince. Within any
group conflict, my loyalties inevitably rest with whichever person is most
obviously wrong. I feel like I started appreciating 5150 around the same time
Randy Moss started playing for the Minnesota Vikings, but I don’t think those
two things have any relationship outside of my personal memory and the content
of this specific sentence.
1987 (Dire Straits): My reasoning here is not
particularly reasonable. Basically, I (and everyone I trusted, which was maybe
five other people in the entire world) misinterpreted the lyrics to the song
“Money for Nothing,” which had actually been on the radio for two years before
I got around to hating it. We all thought that when Mark Knopfler sang, “That
little faggot with the earring and the makeup / Yeah, buddy, that’s his own
hair,” he was criticizing glam bands like Cinderella and Faster Pussycat. [I
now realize those lyrics were actually mimicking some random bozo who worked
inside a kitchen appliance store and liked to spew opinions about MTV during
his cigarette break. But these kinds of things were impossible to know in
1987.] I decided Mark Knopfler was a soft, anti-metal hypocrite, which makes
only slightly less sense than believing Springsteen was a fraudulent poseur.
Weirdly, I was not remotely troubled by the song’s language; being a high
school sophomore, it had not yet occurred to me that the word faggot could be
viewed as offensive to anyone who wasn’t literally gay. I stopped hating Dire
Straits around the same time I started defending H. Ross Perot, but neither
entity truly migrated into my mental universe. The fact that I insist on always
referring to Mark Knopfler as “Mark Knopfler” is probably proof: our
relationship remains formal. I dig “Sultans of Swing,” but if someone said,
“Hey Chuck — Warner Brothers has just released a DVD with some amazing footage
from the Brothers in Arms tour,” I would probably avoid watching it by
pretending I’d already seen it.
1988 (R.E.M.): I didn’t relate to the kind of person
who related to R.E.M. and I didn’t like textured, nonheavy songs that made me
feel like some dour weirdo was telling me I was living my life wrong. Over the
next twenty years, R.E.M. would become one of my favorite bands of all time,
which means a) the sixteen-year-old version of me would have hated the
thirty-six-year-old version of me, and b) I probably was living my life wrong.
1989 (Fine Young Cannibals): Though I could not name
one member of the group or one fact about their history, I didn’t like them as
people (and was annoyed that “She Drives Me Crazy” was so obviously not
terrible). Their fan base had progressive haircuts and trendy clothes,
qualities I considered unpatriotic. Everything turned around when I found out they
selected their band name by randomly opening Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. Now
I think they’re a bunch of geniuses.
1990 (R.E.M.): The use of “Stand” in the opening
credits of Get a Life galvanized my fear that I was losing an undeclared war
against reality. How could Chris Elliott support this? I decided to stop
rooting for the Georgia Bulldogs.
1991 (The Red Hot Chili Peppers): They seemed like
all the idiots at my college who were constantly starting terrible bands and
failing organic chemistry, except these idiots were famous and never wore
shirts.
1992 (The Red Hot Chili Peppers): In the video for
the proto-pussy smack ballad “Under the Bridge,” Anthony Kiedis runs along the
Los Angeles River in slow motion. His arms cross his body; he had terrible
running form. I also recall adamantly disagreeing with the assertion that
Flea’s bass playing was (in any way) comparable to that of Les Claypool from
Primus. My 1992 concerns were oblique. I purchased a kerosene lamp in order to
impress strangers who wandered into my dorm room in order to tell me I was
playing Primus too loud. It was the style of the time.
1993 (Mr. Bungle): I knew an interesting person who
believed this self-indulgent side project was way more interesting than it
actually was, thereby serving as my real-world introduction to The Problem of
Overrated Ideas. The group’s singer was improvisational and gross, musically
and otherwise. He once told a story on MTV News about how — for his own
amusement — he used to eat huge portions of instant mashed potatoes, chased
with an entire bottle of schnapps. He would then stroll into a local
laundromat, open washers and dryers at random, and vomit onto strangers’
clothes. I could not identify with this behavior, although I don’t suppose that
was his intention. Couldn’t he have just taken the L7 route and chucked bloody
tampons at teenagers? At least that sustained the cycle of life. I found
greater comfort with the singer’s other band, a more “conventionally
alternative” collective with a spattering of mainstream popularity and some
unanticipated insights into smoking angel dust and competitive pumpkin farming.
1994 (Pink Floyd): I was driving through suburban
Minneapolis at dusk when something off The Wall came on the radio, prompting me
to conclude that I was being intellectually crucified by an army of
forty-year-old library patrons who couldn’t accept that cannabis was still
illegal. I could never feel this way now, except in unconditional reverse. But
I was twenty-two, an age where the commercial past always seems to be wrecking
the limitless future; I was open- and close-minded at the same time. The Moody
Blues were another band I hated that summer — they seemed like dead people I
was supposed to learn about on PBS. Oh well. We all eventually become whatever
we pretend to hate.
1995 (Ted Nugent): This one is tricky. I’m not sure
if I decided to hate Ted Nugent because I was really into Tori Amos (which I
was) or if I was just trying to sleep with a woman who worked at a candle shop
and was really, really into Tori Amos (mixed results on this strategy). Maybe I
just thought Ted was childish and uncool, qualities I intermittently worried
about when not listening to KISS records. This aforementioned candle clerk came
over to my apartment on Halloween and we played Double Live Gonzo, just to make
condescending comments about its vagina-obsessed lyrics and retrograde aesthetic
(although I still wonder why she wasn’t more skeptical of the fact that I owned
four albums by an artist I supposedly hated). Further complicating matters was
my parallel obsession with the Replacements’ Let It Be, which suggested (at
least on “Gary’s Got a Boner”) that Bob Stinson thought the Nuge was a sonic
mastermind who should have been elected governor of Michigan.
1996 (Blur): The Oasis vs. Blur feud had actually
transpired the year before, but I was living in pre-Internet North Dakota and
received my culture news roughly nine months after the fact (which was
preferable, though I did not know this at the time). The notion of Blur
pretending it had a “rivalry” with Oasis still strikes me as comically obscene;
it would be no different than RC Cola trying to start a war with Coke. But my
larger issue was a perceived differential in class: Every time I met someone
who thought Blur was better than Oasis, it inevitably meant they thought like a
rich person (so either they were rich, or they were raised with
upper-middle-class sensibilities in a lower-class world). Blur was Britpop for
American kids who wore neckties on campus and turtlenecks to keg parties; it
was Britpop for American kids who could actually afford to spend a semester in
Britain. I’ll concede that Blur has a handful of better than decent songs — I’d
estimate around nine, plus the semi-ironic one that always gets blasted at
hockey games — but it’s hard to imagine a snootier collective. Equally
troubling was Damon Albarn’s well-publicized sex life with the striking lead
singer from Elastica, an accomplishment that made me suspect he was taunting
the proletariat with his semen.
1997 (Phish): ’Twas the apex of my deeply unoriginal
I-hate-hippies phase, which some people do not grow out of. Of course, I was
also into Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix (and Ben Harper!) at the time, so what
the fuck did I know about hippies? Did I not realize hippies could be black?
1998 (The Eagles): Here was a turning point. Many
things were happening simultaneously. One was that I had started to erroneously
believe subjective criticism was more important than objective reporting;
another was that I saw The Big Lebowski and decided the main character should
become the model for all human thought. Electronica was on MTV, so music videos
were mostly just Asian teenagers playing Ping-Pong and time-elapse photography
of melting plastic cubes. Seinfeld was going off the air, so even grandmas were
temporary postmodernists. Aspirant Urban Outfitter employees were excited about
technology and really into Neutral Milk Hotel. It was the logical time to
believe Glenn Frey was Pol Pot.
1999 (The Eagles): The Big Lebowski became available
on VHS.
2000 (U2): I borrowed the documentary Rattle and Hum
from the Akron Public Library, which would have been fine if I hadn’t
subsequently watched it. I can only assume this movie makes U2 hate U2: The
band is so consumed with their sincere adoration of southern black culture that
they somehow seem marginally racist.
2001 (Coldplay): I wrote a book in 2001 where I
claim, “Coldplay is the shittiest fucking band I’ve ever heard in my entire
fucking life.” This is possibly the most memorable thing I’ve ever written, and
arguably the stupidest. My intention (at the time) was to illustrate how people
use popular culture to explain their own lives to themselves, and that I was
hating Coldplay in order to avoid hating myself. But (of course) almost no one
who purchased this book made that inference, which (of course) is nobody’s
fault but mine. I still meet teenagers who attempt to ingratiate themselves by
telling me how much they hate Coldplay. And while I did hate the tenor of their
music (and still can’t bear listening to it, even when I’m shopping for
trousers), I regret being so profane. It was cheap. It feels like I threw a
rock at Gwyneth Paltrow’s gazebo.
2002 (Blur): I’d just moved to New York and
discovered that people were still arguing about this, except Oasis was now a
7½-point underdog. Even poor people in New York think like rich people.
2003 (Yeah Yeah Yeahs): Nobody seemed willing to
admit that this band (and particularly the guitarist) were postpunk joker
zombies who sang power ballads about cartography. I don’t enjoy music that
sounds broken on purpose; that’s supposed to happen by accident. In later
years, I would grow to appreciate the singer’s solo attempt at “Immigrant Song”
during the opening credits of that fourteen-hour movie about the Swedish tattoo
artist who murders somebody with a Xerox machine, but the YYYs will always be
fake art. They put way too much effort into acting like they were pretending to
work hard at casual brilliance. Now that I think about it, they are the
opposite of the Eagles.
There are fifteen artists on this list. Seven are already in
the (admittedly meaningless) Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and two others will
get there eventually. Twelve of them have recorded at least one song I love.
They’ve all been hugely or marginally successful, except for maybe Mr. Bungle.
But I hated them all, at least provisionally. And it wasn’t just that I didn’t
like hearing the music or seeing their faces on MTV — it had something to do
with viewing them as representations of what I wanted to be against. I didn’t
see the artists I loved as heroic, but I saw the artists I hated as villainous.
And that is a feeling I can no longer feel. Somewhere in 2003, my ability to
hate the Eagles (or Coldplay, or Dave Matthews, or Mumford and Sons, or
whoever) just evaporated. I could no longer construct antipathy for random
musicians, even if they deserved it. My personality had calcified and
emancipated itself from taste. I still cared about music, but not enough to
feel emotionally distraught over its nonmusical expansion into celebrity and
society. And this was a real problem. Being emotionally fragile is an important
part of being a successful critic; it’s an integral element to being engaged
with mainstream art, assuming you aspire to write about it in public. If you
hate everything, you’re a banal asshole . . . but if you don’t
hate anything, you’re boring. You’re useless. And you end up writing about why
you can no longer generate fake feelings that other people digest as real.
There needs to be more awareness about the cultural impact
of reverse engineering, particularly as it applies to fandom and revulsion.
It’s the most important part of describing the day-to-day import of art, which
is ultimately what criticism is supposed to do. But there are no critics who
can admit to their own reverse engineering without seeming underinformed. It’s
like arguing that the greatest Russian novel ever written happens to be the
only one you ever finished.
Still, there are examples of this everywhere. Take someone like Taylor Swift, a one-woman
“Hotel California”: When Swift’s second album came out (2008’s Fearless), she
was a regionally famous Nashville artist that most casual pop fans had never
thought much about. But Fearless crossed over, and she was suddenly being
noticed by people who traditionally ignored mainstream country. Because her
songs were excellent (and because any genre slightly different from rock feels
initially fresh to rockist ears), everyone decided that Fearless was
great — and not only great, but culturally important. Mere appreciation of the
music was not enough. This necessitated the unconscious construction of a
reality where Swift herself could be taken seriously. So how could this be
accomplished? The first step was to always mention her age as proof of
unprecedented maturity: She was sixteen when she released her first album and
eighteen for Fearless, but she seemed to handle her notoriety with unusual
deftness and professionalism (Kanye West stormed onstage while she was accepting
a trophy at the MTV Music Awards, but Swift’s response was measured and
polite). She was an adult woman inside a teenage girl, and that validated the
highbrow appreciation of a song like “You Belong with Me.” (Her fictional
depictions of teen anguish were consumed as suburban realness.)
The quality of her songs caused people to value her as a
concept. But this worked too well. Swift became so abstractly imperative that
she turned into a celebrity in the US Weekly sense: She became famous to people
who’d never heard her music. All the qualities her previous audience had once
used to justify her success as a pop star felt annoying to those who were
caring about her for the first time. To the casual observer, she seemed
unconvincingly shocked by her own success and obsessed with her market share.
Instead of coming across as mature, it scanned as calculating. And this
preexisting assumption is what new audiences injected into her third album,
2010’s Speak Now. The record was massive, but Swift got hammered for her
self-absorption and a propensity for nostalgic oversharing (two qualities
singer-songwriters are supposed to possess — but not, apparently, the young
female ones). When she wrote about a failed relationship with John Mayer (“Dear
John”), it seemed fake and exploitive, even though the love affair had actually
happened. When she made a video for a song about the cruelty of critics
(“Mean”), she literally tied herself to the railroad tracks and tried to
convince capricious fans that she still self-identified as a marginalized
victim. But that only worked on people who had never questioned her pose to
begin with.
Now, the easy explanation for this shift in perception is
“backlash.” But that’s only how it looks from the outside. What really happened
is this: People who liked Taylor Swift’s music reverse-engineered a scenario in
which they could appreciate her for nonmusical reasons; two years later,
different people who loathed that construction had to find a way to preexplain
why they weren’t going to enjoy her material (so they infused their prefab
distaste of her persona back into her work). When Swift cowrote “We Are Never
Ever Getting Back Together” with Swedish hit machine Max Martin, critics could
not deny that it was catchy and practical, so now they had to pretend it was an
empowering takedown of Donnie Darko. [The reason behind everything always has
to be something else entirely.]
How this principle applies to the Eagles is straightforward:
They seemed like counterculture figures who were against the values of the
counterculture (and it’s always the counterculture who gets to decide the
long-term likability of any rock artist). They aspired to (and achieved)
commercial hugeness; nothing about their magnitude was accidental. Soft-spoken
replacement bassist Timothy B. Schmit was the only Eagle born in the state of
California, yet they effortlessly represented what people do not like about
Malibu. They were the antithesis of The Rockford Files. While many of their
arena-rock peers were misogynist for how they physically interacted with
groupies, the Eagles directed their distaste toward the secret interior motives
all hot women allegedly possessed (“Witchy Woman” being the easiest example,
“Lyin’ Eyes” being the most direct). Basically, they just seemed mean-spirited
and wealthy. They were annoying to the type of person who is susceptible to
annoyance. Which is how many people (including myself) choose to hear their
songs. What do you make of a band that writes a disco track about how disco is
insidious? I still don’t know. I know what words I’m supposed to throw
around — “cynical,” “self-reflexive,” “clinical” — but I wonder if I’d use
those words if I didn’t know Don Henley was the man who’d written the song. I
fear I’m just describing him with those words, even though I do hear those
qualities when I listen to “The Disco Strangler.”
But here’s what changed, inside my skull: Those qualities no
longer make me hate Henley or his band. Instead, they make me appreciate the
song itself with a complexity I cannot pretend to understand. They make me
realize that I cannot be trusted about anything, and that I can’t even trust
myself.
I appreciate “The Disco Strangler” because I now realize
(and cannot unrealize) that this entire process is a closed circuit, happening
inside my false consciousness. The only outside element is the sound wave
containing the sonic signature — everything about its latent meaning and its
larger merit is being imagined and manipulated by my brain’s unwillingness to
hold an unexplained opinion. If I like a song (or if I dislike a song), I have
to explain — to myself — why that feeling exists. If I’m writing about the song
in a public forum, I have to explain it to other people. But my explanation is
never accurate unless I flatly declare, “I like this and I don’t know why” or
“I dislike this for reasons that can’t be quantified.” Every other response is
the process of taking an abstract feeling and figuring out how I can fit it
into a lexicon that matches whatever I already want to believe. My mind is not
my own. And once that realization calcifies internally, there is no going back.
Once you realize you can’t control how you feel, it’s impossible to believe any
of your own opinions. As a result, I can’t hate the Eagles. It feels impossible.
It feels stupid. The Eagles are real, but they don’t exist; they only exist as
a way to think about “the Eagles.” So
often does it happen that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know
there is no key.
