Ellen Page's unstardom stardom; image courtesy of girlfriendisahomo.com
I wrote up a piece on Ellen Page for my friend Annie’s blog. You can read it here.
As her blog is on my blogroll, I highly recommend you check it out if you haven’t already. For starters, might I recommend Annie’s piece on Megan Fox? Or this one on Nikki Finke? Or this one on the season’s starless summer?
How about guest columnist Courtney’s piece on Meryl Streep? And check out guest columnist Kristen’s piece on (the lack of) black star power. So many tasty treats.
Just wanted to re-tag Audra Schroeder’s awesome piece about Austin-based female MCs if you didn’t see this week’s cover story in The Austin Chronicle. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know any of these artists, but I’m definitely checking them out and thinking about adding them to the music history curriculum for GRCA. Because if I’m excited that KB the Boo Bonic describes herself as “a little Pimp C and a little Cyndi Lauper,” maybe other girls will be too.
Note: The following post is about a scene in season three of Mad Men. I know that some readers have not gotten this far in the series, or have begun watching it. As a result, I’ve tried not to include spoilers in my analysis of a scene in last Sunday’s episode. However, the scene involves the film version of Bye Bye Birdie, which does indicate where the show is in terms of its historical time line.
As you may have been able to glean from a previous post about Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon, I follow Mad Men, AMC’s original series about advertisers who work at Sterling Cooper, a Manhattan-based agency, and the people who try to love them in the 1960s.
I’m not a super-fan, but the show does make for chewy television. The 1960s is one of my favorite periods in American history and they plumb its depths and margins. Thus, I keep waiting for a phone call at work from some beleaguered production assistant to the LBJ Library. The acting is great, the visual style is sumptuous, the writing is sharp and often surprisingly funny, and the writing staff (despite creator-show runner Matthew Weiner’s authorial presence) has a considerable female personnel. And though sometimes Mad Men can be heavy-handed, it tends to balance these moments with subtle, at times shocking period details or character developments. Also, I really appreciate that I can empathize with almost any character.
One character who I whole-heartedly empathize with is Peggy Olson, a young steno turned copy writer who, unlike many of the women at Sterling Cooper so far, seems more interested in a corner office than an engagement ring. Actress Elisabeth Moss has said that Olson is a feminist and I concur. I love her refreshing lack of sentimentality, her toughness, and her persistence in sticking up for herself, which is hard to do when your male co-workers are looking for dollies when you think of women and girls as real people.
I always root for Peggy Olson; image courtesy of examiner.com
This brings us to last week’s episode, wherein Olson is trying to create a campaign for Patio, Pepsi’s prototypical diet soda. The folks at Pepsi want to latch on to the popularity of the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie, which stars the exuberant sex-bomb-in-the-making Ann-Margret. Basically, Pepsi envisions ripping off the movie’s opening sequence (which you can watch below, along with the reprise).
This campaign is something the boys are all too happy to help cast. Her boss, Don Draper, thinks it’s a no-brainer because men want her so women want to be her (I suspect Draper is phoning it in here because he doesn’t like the product, its ridiculous name, and doubts the future of a company he helped build, but I will refrain from commenting further).
Peggy objects to this direction, decrying the planned campaign (and Ann-Margret’s performance) as phony. Peggy wants to tap into why women and girls would like this product, while most of her male contemporaries seem to want to project how they feel about women onto female consumers.
And then things get interesting. At home, Peggy launches into her own impromptu performance in front of her mirror while getting ready for bed. It’s a TV moment so delicious, awkward, and fraught with ideological tension that it makes me impatient for the day I can play the clip in a lecture or a conference presentation. Slate’s TV Club has evaluated the scene with many other journalists and bloggers, along with some problematic character developments that I won’t comment on at this time (though, if you know what I’m talking about, I like Amy Benfer’s read on it). Here’s my take about why I love this particular scene.
1. Yes, there is an element of aspiration to Peggy’s performance. While others have commented on this, I don’t think Peggy necessarily wants to be Ann-Margret so much as figure out the mechanics of her performance and why men seem to want women and girls to be like Ann-Margret. She wants to work through it. And while she’s not a convincing Ann-Margret (in fact, she’s a terrible Ann-Margret), I don’t think she wants to be.
2. This disassociation with Ann-Margret seems further evident in the sarcasm in Peggy’s performance. While at times she tries to genuinely play Ann-Margret, much of her performance seems to mock the original. Once again, I think Peggy’s saying that she doesn’t want to be Ann-Margret and commenting on the performance’s artificiality. In others words, she seems to be taking the piss.
3. Yet, she’s also a little sad that she can’t be Ann-Margret. There have been other moments in the show where her colleagues have made fun of her for seeming harsh and mannish and, therefore, not sexy. Sometimes, she swallows their barbs. Other times, she spars. Sometimes, at other women’s urgings, she dresses or behaves in a more conventionally feminine manner. But I think her inability to channel Ann-Margret doesn’t suggest that she’s not sexy so much as comment on the limitations of this notion of female sexiness, as well as its lack of attainability (possibly even for the actresses who seem to possess it). Because, to me, Peggy is sexy, especially when she takes control, makes a transgression, declines a compromised offer, or bucks the established order of things. Thus, she suggests sexiness is elastic (something Ann-Margret herself would do at the end of the decade with a beguiling, damaged performance in Carnal Knowledge).
4. I love how arrhythmic and unnatural this scene is. I love that we see Olson stop mid-song, forget the words, re-remember dance moves, squint to study her performance, and then finish the song abruptly so she can finish brushing her hair.
5. Finally, Moss’s performance adds an additional layer of delightful inquiry. I’m always fascinated by scenes where great actors play characters who are bad actors (for an terrific example, see Julianne Moore’s performance as Amber Waves acting with Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights). It may look easy for actors to deliberately act badly, but assuredly it isn’t. It seems even more difficult to convince an audience that the character is doing the bad acting and not the actor. That it’s a woman playing a character she inhabits fully playing a character she can’t inhabit fully because she recognizes that it’s a deceitful, potentially damaging construct makes for very chewy television indeed.
So, I started reading Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema. It’sa slim collection of essays edited by Matthew Caley and Steve Lannin that focus on individual movie scenes and song selection. The argument seems to be that the scenes in question and the songs that accompany them define or transform the movie (i.e., the movie would not be the same without these cinematic and musical moments).
In its way, this exercise reminds me of “Scenic Routes,” a new series Mike D’Angelo is doing for The Onion that focuses on a particular scene in a movie (I especially liked his first entry on the Rahad Jackson scene in Boogie Nights).
Of course, I think about this with an awareness of how music videos might factor into this discussion. There’s the necessity to acknowledge the traditional film score scholar perspective that using popular music to narrate a scene creates hollow “MTV moments,” a concept loaded with class-based derisiveness that Miguel Mera rejects in his excellent analysis of the overdose scene in Trainspotting, which employs Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.”
And then there’s also consideration that must paid to instances when songs that are used in movies have their own accompanying music videos. This is something I wish David Toop brought into his discussion of Massive Attack’s “Karmacoma” and how Wong Kar-Wai used a different version of the song for Fallen Angels. I haven’t seen Fallen Angels, but Jonathan Glazer’s unsettling music video for the single left an indelible impression on me. For that matter, Wong Kar-Wai left his mark on me as a music video director well before I was aware of his film work, thanks to his clip for DJ Shadow’s “Six Days.”
So, much like I do with music videos, I thought I’d post a key scene(s) in a movie that I believe aligns with the intent of this blog. Tonight, I present the “Magic Man” scene and the “Crazy On You” scene in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, both accompanied by Heart. To borrow from Robynn Stilwell’s essay “Vinyl Communion: The Record as Ritual Object in Girls’ Rites-of-Passage Films,” these scenes consider female objectification of the male form and female sexual autonomy and subjectivity.
Discuss, discuss! Also, feel free to contribute other scene suggestions for future posts (especially if they come from movies I haven’t seen).
Ellie Greenwich at the piano; image courtesy of urbanhonking.com
Brill Building pioneer songwriter Ellie Greenwich died of a heart attack yesterday after complications with pneumonia. She was 68.
Greenwich was most famous for the songs she wrote for girl groups. She rose to success with her husband Jeff Barry with smash hits like The Ronnettes’ “Be My Baby” and The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron.”
She also penned or helped write songs like The Exciters’ “He’s Got The Power,” The Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love,” and The Shangri-Las’ tragic “Leader of the Pack.”
It should be mentioned that she started making a name for herself in the early 1960s, a time when women’s “proper” full-time job was as wife and mother. Instead, she slogged it out, working with male producers like svengali Phil Spector as well as her male colleagues at the Brill Building, including her husband. As I mentioned in a review of Charlotte Greig’s Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, Greenwich also had to negotiate the pressures of being a professional woman with being a traditional wife, opting for the former over the latter when she and Barry divorced.
In addition, she wrote so many monster hits, primarily for women and girls, many of whom were girls of color and were also finding access to careers beyond the clerical field and service industry during the time of this nation’s (on-going) integration. And she continued as a writer even after the girl group era, penning her autobiography, a musical, and songs for folks like Cyndi Lauper, who recorded “Right Track Wrong Train” as the b-side to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” In recognition of their contributions to popular music, she and Barry were inducted into the Songwriter Hall of Fame in 1991.
I’d also add that Greenwich’s songs were tremendously informative on punk and indie rock. Bands like The Velvet Underground and The Ramones took to the Brill Building’s hollow sound and economical, riff-based songwriting, a legacy to which Greenwich contributed (of course, VU singer and guitarist Lou Reed got his start as a hack songwriter for Pickwick Records). Indeed, it doesn’t take much to turn the Brill Building’s assembly line style into a commentary and joyful celebration of consumer culture and America’s odd normality, something Parenthetical Girls seem to be doing here.
And her songs continue to be covered extensively. Every holiday season, you assuredly hear this song if you’re at the mall, which Barry and Greenwich wrote together.
I’ve also heard local or less-established bands who are heavily influenced by girl groups cover Greenwich’s work. Take “Then He Kissed Me.” The Crystals recorded it in 1963. Yet bands still cover it. I remember it being a setlist staple for The Carrots, a local band heavily influenced by the girl group, when they started out.
The Carrots; image courtesy of pukekos.org
So, Greenwich will be missed, but her memory will live on as long as her records keep spinning. I think I’ll go throw one on right now.
Two movies are coming out that feature, to varying degrees of prominence, girl musicians. The first is Bandslam, a movie that opened earlier this month and Nikki Finke noted is plagued with misguided marketing decisions. While the material’s quirky charm seems to line up more closely with Juno, the movie is being marketed as an extension of the Disney machine.
No doubt this is cruel irony for leads Vanessa Hudgens and Aly Michalka who, along with Demi Lovato, are trying to distance themselves from the mouse as they get older. I’m not bowled over by the trailer, but am interested in it and hope it finds an audience despite its botched marketing campaign. I saw Juno with a lot of 13-year-olds. I think they’d see this movie too.
Next up, we have An Education, which is British novelist Nick Horby’s first screenplay about a cello-playing British schoolgirl falling for an older man in the Swingin’ Sixties. While I wouldn’t necessarily take a junior high kid to this movie, I know I would’ve loved this movie in high school and made my girlfriends go with me to see it.
In fact, 26-year-old me is still plenty interested, despite a very “for your consideration” trailer that brings to mind The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a stodgy coming-of-age British drama from the 1960s that was saved for me only by Maggie Smith’s performance and wardrobe. To review.
1. Cello-playing precocious schoolgirl, played by Carey Mulligan.
2. Peter Sarsgaard being in the movie (though I have more of a couple crush on him and his wife Maggie Gyllenhaal than a stand-alone crush).
3. A bunch of bad-ass British actresses (Emma Thompson, Olivia Williams, Cara Seymour, Sally Hawkins) are together in one movie based on a woman’s memoirs and directed by a lady, ya’ll.
4. Many of the aforementioned British actresses are playing characters who don’t want the girl with potential to give up herself for a dude. Some may be worried about scandal, but others (like Williams, who is also smashing on Dollhouse) are hoping she chooses her talents and goals over his interests.
Most importantly, I wanna see how music figures into these girls’ lives, as musicians and as fans.
There are few things more soothing and logical to me than spinning around a color wheel. It may be a strange assertion, born of growing up with parents who ran a graphic design company during my childhood. It most certainly comes from seeing Philip Glass’s “Geometry of Circles” on Sesame Street.
As I got older, I took to Heathers for similar reasons. You can apply color theory to the semiological associations the girls have with colors. Ringleader Heather Chandler is always wearing red, a primary color that connotes dominance, dynamism, and power. She is constantly followed by Heather Duke, whose signature color is green — a color associated with sickness (she has bulimia) as well as envy (she wants to be Heather Chandler). Green is also a secondary color that complements red.
This plays out similarly with Veronica Sawyer, the rebellious non-Heather who is part of the clique nonetheless. She is associated with black and blue. Blue is a primary color associated with melancholy and, wouldn’t you know it, her nerdy childhood friend Betty Finn likes to wear orange, a secondary color that is blue’s complement. Heather McNamara, a cowardly sort, is associated with yellow and pointedly doesn’t have an underling who wears purple. Who knew colors could suggest teenage girl social hierarchies?
"I'm always red," Heather Chandler reminds her minions; image courtesy of denofgeek.com
Anyway, with this spirit in mind, I thought I’d post a couple of music videos that play with color. You don’t have to wax semiological to enjoy them. Since they can’t be embedded, I’ll take a note from my friend Caitlin and post a picture of the artist that you can click on.
Cover of I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me single; image courtesy of nogoodadviceblog.blogspot.com
Cover of Say My Name single; image courtesy of urgh.wordpress.com
Cover for Creep single; image courtesy of b-and-e-rapshit.blogspot.com
So, after writing about my nostalgia last week, I thought I’d reflect on truly borrowed nostalgia: the music of my mother’s generation. I’m specifically thinking about the emergence of the female singer-songwriter, who came into vogue in the mid-1960s New York-based folk scene and became a cultural juggernaut by the end of the decade and into the mid-1070s with women like Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon, for whom Sheila Weller wrote a toothsome, comprehensive biography last year called Girls Like Us.
Cover of Girls Like Us; image courtesy of popculturemadness.com
The women’s sound(s), look(s), and message(s) would help destigmatize (if only for a moment) the feminist movement (if still largely configured to be a straight, middle-class, white woman’s struggle). They also helped pave the way for a revival of female singer-songwriters in the 1990s, helping result in the established careers of Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, and Björk, as well as the launch of festivals like Lilith Fair (which is rumored to make a return in 2010).
Photo from a Q Magazine cover shoot; image courtesy of mybandrocks.com
Joan Osbourne, Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, and Fiona Apple represent Lilith Fair for Entertainment Weekly; image courtesy of coverbrowser.com
And, though perhaps a stretch, I kept thinking about these three women in relation to Betty Draper, Joan Holloway, and Peggy Olsen on Mad Men, three very different women beginning to weather and confront seismic shifts in gender and sexual politics at the beginning of the 1960s that the three artists featured in this book would at times undo, surrender to, and be blocked by at the end of the decade and into the 1970s.
Having read this book, I wonder if any of the women of Mad Men became fans of these artists. Would any of these women help make Tapestry one of the best-selling albums of all time? Betty and Joan may be a little too old, but I think they’d respectively empathize with Joni’s mother’s need to have a perfect Norwegian beauty for a daughter and Carly’s conflicting feelings about her sex-bomb identity. Peggy seems just the right age to follow these women, as she does accompany a co-worker to see Bob Dylan in season two. Personally, I think she’d be a huge Carole King fan. Two tough Brooklynite professionals with a knack for commercial pop art? Yeah, I think they’d find one another.
Peggy Olson is going to need her own office; image courtesy of amctv.com
The key thing I appreciated about Girls Like Us, which does an exhaustive job documenting these three women’s personal and professional lives, is its committment to dialoging the artists with one another. Often, when attempts of this sort are made, it results in playing women off each other or reducing them to one singular entity (in this case, chick singer-songwriter seems the most apt dismissive). Weller does an admirable job individuating them (further enforced by using a different font for each woman), while at the same time highlighting where they overlap or interact and putting them in a gendered generational context of women and girls coming into their own particular feminist awakenings.
Notably, these women were all self-made. Carole Klein and Canadian-born Roberta Joan Anderson became Carole King and Joni Mitchell, toiling for years in the Brill Building and the coffeehouse circuit before becoming legendary. And Carly Simon, born into the New York elite as the third child of the Simon family (yes, of Simon & Schuster), had to start from scratch after years of following artist boyfriends, watching her sisters get married, and working odd jobs before landing a career. They also established themselves as icons at the same time. 1971 would be the year that King released her second solo album, Tapestry, culminating in one of the few Grammy wins for Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Album of the Year for a female artist. That same year, Mitchell would release Blue, a huge artistic breakthrough. And in 1972, alongside King’s sweep, Simon would win her Grammy for Best New Artist for her self-titled debut.
One unfortunate commonality all three women share is a need to make men happy, almost always the wrong man or the undeserving man. This is a lesson I saw many of my mother’s generation learn the hard way, and fear it will continue to play out with other women and girls, but hope we’ll learn from history. For Carole, this meant four marriages — first to her Brill Building lyricist Gerry Goffin (who would father singer Earl-Jean McCrae’s daughter Dawn while still married to King), then to bassist Charles Larkey, then to two chauvinist mountain men named Rick. For Joni, this meant marrying a man named Chuck Mitchell who (in her account) forced her to give up an infant daughter (her pregnancy, and giving up a daughter, would haunt Mitchell for years until she was reuinted with Kilauren in the late 1990s). For Carly, this meant using her sexual wiles to snare a man at all costs, a lesson she learned from her mother Andrea, before casting her lot with a man that would remain a drug addict for the majority of their marriage before unceremoniously dumping her.
Both Carole and Carly suffered considerable heartache, though Joni, perhaps a typical only child, often would cut and run, preferring solitude and creative freedom to being tied down, a lesson she learned by following Crosby, Stills, and Nash while living with Graham Nash. The woman who wrote “Woodstock” would not be cast as another man’s groupie.
As Carly’s man was James Taylor, it seems important to point out that all three of these women had some connection with Sweet Baby James. As James (along with almost all male rock stars of the era) was in awe of Carole King’s legacy as a Brill Building composer, he often covered her work extensively, most notably “You’ve Got a Friend.”
King nursed an unrequited crush, though her songwriter Toni Stern wrote “It’s Too Late” after the end of her affair with Taylor.
Joni dated James for a while. It ended, but at least she and Carly became friendly later in life.
And Carly presumably expedited the matrimonial process by writing “You’re So Vain” and getting one of her rumored paramours, Mick Jagger, to contribute back-up vocals. Taylor proposed shortly thereafter, creating the first rock star marriage. However, he would often get sidelined by his ongoing battle with heroin, as well as his wife’s meteoric rise to pop stardom. She would often worry herself sick and modify her behavior for Taylor, a symptom Weller believes is linked to wanting to please her disengaged father.
Yet, I don’t want to suggest these women are patriarchy’s tragic casualties. I certainly don’t think they would. Carole continued a long professional partnership with Goffin, and also accepted Dawn, Goffin’s daughter with McRae, as one of her own children, something her biological children did as well. In addition, she became very politically active, lobbying hard for environmental issues, particularly working to preserve Idaho’s wildlife after falling in love with its woodlands.
Joni kept pushing herself further artistically, regardless of whether or not she was met with critical acclaim. She most notably began incorporating jazz elements into her music, hiring reputable session musicians and expanding her sonic and lyrical styles (though also began playing with race and lauding “natural” blackness, which Weller takes to task, specifically when talking about Mitchell’s black alter ego Art Nouveau, which she poses as in blackface for the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter).
And Carly was most prominent in the mainstreaming of feminism (though not without its own issues — in the 1970s, feminism was often a Seven Sisters game and Simon, a Sarah Lawrence dropout born from a wealthy family, fit right in). She also promoted the celebration of female sexual agency and autonomy, complicating the widely-held belief that all second wavers were man-haters waging a war on sex. She also had a liberated attitude toward sex, which Weller supports with conjectures that “You’re So Vain” is actually about multiple men. In addition, Simon has alluded to having an open marriage and being bisexual, as well as being an advocate for LGBT rights.
In short, these women mattered. They shaped the perspectives and actions of millions of women and girls of my mother’s generation. They proved that female artists could garner a huge mainstream audience (a lesson that needed to be reminded to A&R folks, concert promoters, and radio programmers in the 1990s, resulting in countercultural movements like riot grrrl and mainstream enterprises like Lilith Fair). And they continue to influence female recording artists and their listeners. And, most importantly, they continue to work, just as their male counterparts do, regardless of whether or not they are deemed culturally relevant. Let their voices be heard.
Thanks to my friend Evan, who alerted me on Monday that some serious Aughties musical canonization was going down this week, I’ve been following Pitchfork’s unveiling of the Top 500 tracks of the decade. As it may be of interest, I thought I’d share my feelings.
In subsequent posts, I may comment on their impending coverage of the decade’s best music videos and albums, as well as their formulations on the reclamation of pop, the exploration of noise, and the mainstreaming of indie rock. I won’t devote posts to it, though, because there’s a fine line between providing useful commentary and hearing yourself type. And my hunch is that discussing the singles list will suffice, as it presents, by microcosm, a general set of criticisms I’ve long held about the “tastemaker” e-zine.
Covering Pitchfork’s appraisal of the decade in this way makes more sense to me anyway, as the 2000s marked the resurgence of the single. Our increasingly digitized media culture cultivated the need for that one song, found at the click of a mouse or the touch of an mp3 player button or phone pad. That song also tended to get posted on blogs, e-zines, and MySpace pages (however briefly) as a means to define the self or selves (this was a decade when Gnarls Barkley, Brightblack Morning Light, and Crystal Castles could potentially coexist on the same shuffle or mash-up).
So, this list is the first time I’ve seen music of my youth canonized in such a way that it now seems historical. When Pitchfork first did the list half-way through the decade, I was 22 and just out of college; an adult, but only sorta. More specifically, the songs were still new. But having graduated from college twice over and a year into my second post-college job in 2009, I can look at songs from 2000, when I was in high school, and feel my age like many folks who transitioned into adulthood in decades prior.
And now, some nostalgia. A lot of the songs on this list bring up specific memories, images, people, and feelings. I remember my friend Brooke trying to teach me a dance routine to Aaliyah’s “Try Again” for our junior prom. PJ Harvey’s “Good Fortune” reminded me of a high school boyfriend which, in hindsight, speaks to an epic love song’s power to project. I remember a classmate singing the chorus to OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson” to herself in French class. I remember hearing Jay-Z and UGK’s “Big Pimpin’” at a Claire’s somewhere in New York City on a field trip. Radiohead’s “The National Anthem” confused the hell out of me, but I kept playing it at full volume anyway. Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” was a confusing song that made perfect sense. And if Daft Punk’s “One More Time” was released when the class of 2001 voted for our song, it would’ve been my pick (I submitted U2′s “Beautiful Day” and Counting Crows’ “Hanging Around”; our song ended up being Aerosmith’s cover of The Beatles’ “Come Together” from the Armageddon soundtrack, for some reason).
Then there’s the rough transition between high school and college. Songs off Radiohead’s Amnesiac and Daft Punk’s Discovery suggest my lonely, uncertain summer before college. I started college, withdrew mid-way through my first semester, and resumed in the spring. This was a “the” time — The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Shins, The Avalanches, and the last album by The Dismemberment Plan. It was also when I started to follow Pitchfork, mostly to avoid writing term papers.
After a summer back home, I applied for a college radio show. It was here that I really started learning about music, and just how much music there was. KVRX maintains a “none of the hits all of the time” policy; if a musical act got a single or video on rotation in a commercial market, they could not be played. While I was there, we pulled The Arcade Fire and Franz Ferdinand from rotation. Some deejays would think that by pulling a musical act they liked out of rotation, we were initiating a taste-based attack on coolness (i.e., undiscovered = good, discovered = bad). While this prejudice existed (and I would certainly perpetuate it at times), pulling an artist embraced by the mainstream out of college radio rotation felt more political to me. “Spoon is on 101X? Great! They’re awesome. Now let’s shine a light on the thousands of other bands who’ll never get that kind of attention.”
Pitchfork made an effort to shine a light too, biases notwithstanding. During my tenure at KVRX, my relationship with Pitchfork became contentious. While I followed Pitchfork, I was also dismissive or derisive of the staff’s opinions (a classic push-pull for many music geeks: we are at once too cool for Pitchfork, yet check to see if we line up with their rulings). As I came into my own as a feminist, I also became more critical of what they covered, how they covered it, and what they dismissed, out of which came, among other things, this blog.
Yet, there are so many songs on this countdown that remind me of that time. I remember my first radio show, when I played Interpol’s “NYC” because I had some vague idea of who they were. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard TV on the Radio’s “Staring At the Sun” and Dizzie Rascal’s “I Luv U.” I remember seeing Spoon perform “The Way We Get By” on Conan and hoping they’d get big. I remember hearing the bass line to Broken Social Scene’s “Stars and Sons” for the first time. I remember fighting The Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers” for weeks before surrendering. I remember being unable to avoid The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights.” I remember playing Broadcast’s “Pendulum” while getting ready for parties. I remember rocking out to The Gossip’s “Standing in the Way of Control” in the deejay booth. I remember LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” being one of the go-to songs deejays would throw on for a smoke break when we weren’t quoting from it (I alluded to it in this post’s title). I remember hearing M.I.A.’s “Galang” at a party and having it blow my mind. I remember impromptu dance parties after Alliance for a Feminist Option meetings when a bunch of sweaty grrrls I still call friends would shimmy to Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” and OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” I remember skanking harder and smiling wider than I ever have with the person I built my life with to Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ “Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?”
In addition, there was Boards of Canada, Wolf Eyes, Feist, Black Dice, Andrew Bird, Ladytron, Devendra Banhart, Destroyer, Hot Chip, The New Pornographers, Deerhoof, M. Ward, Liars, Junior Boys, The Walkmen, Manitoba (later Caribou), El-P, The Go Team, (Smog), Sufjan Stevens, RJD2, The Books, Talib Kweli, Phoenix . . . . The list goes on. If I ever had trouble keeping up with new artists after graduating in 2005, it was only because I had so many established artists to follow.
Of course, my college radio utopia didn’t last. It couldn’t. My monolithic friend group fragmented. People moved, lost touch, became casual, or just stopped being friends. Perhaps this is really when the decade became more to me than a sequence, instead an evolution of time. Late-in-the-decade offerings like LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” and Animal Collective’s “Fireworks” convey this for me.
After college, I acquired Deerhunter, CSS, Hercules and Love Affair, Santigold, Bat for Lashes, Grizzly Bear, Battles, No Age, Be Your Own Pet, Girl Talk, Magik Markers, Vampire Weekend, Vivian Girls, Women, King Khan and the Shrines, and St. Vincent.
Assuredly there will be more new artists for me (and you) to adopt. Just this week, because of the countdown, I picked up on The Knife.
There are artists whose countdown placement evinces moments when we were willing to bet the farm on an act that now seem dated (Death From Above 1979, The Streets, and Klaxons). There are also acts I didn’t “get” but sorta came around on later (hello, Joanna Newsom). There are acts I didn’t know that well in college but came to treasure later (bless you, Neko Case). There are acts I enjoy but could never fully champion (I like you fine, Belle and Sebastian). There are acts I appreciate, but kinda overwhelm me and can’t listen to all the time (Jesus, Xiu Xiu). And then there are acts for whom I just never got the fuss (Fleet Foxes and The Decemberists).
With that said, this countdown plays predictably. Accepting minor issues like what song was selected to represent an artist and where songs fell in ranking, Pitchfork got a lot right. They also got caught up with some songs that I think they’re overselling, and some things they marginalized or completely overlooked. I’ll preoccupy the rest of this post with those flaws.
For me Pitchfork’s big Achilles heel has always been hip hop, primarily because they really only cover mainstream hip hop (Lil Wayne, T.I., 50 Cent, Clipse, Eminem, Cam’ron, OutKast, Kanye West, and Jay-Z — the last three are all over this countdown). And while this isn’t a problem in its own right, it limits how hip hop is defined and what it represents, which, in a lot of commercial hip hop, that still means money, Cristal, whips, blunts, and bitches (though not in all cases). It certainly suggests that the only way for rappers to be successful and culturally relevant is to be part of a corporate mechanism. This seems like something a publication that prides itself on giving visibility to independent artists should re-evaluate. Because, in my mind, if there’s no Busdriver or Jean Grae, I question the validity of the list.
As a result, it largely eclipses underground hip hop which has seen tremendous advancements over the course of the decade, particularly in the states. Talent from labels like Stones Throw, Quannum Projects, Rhymesayers, Definitive Jux, and anticon., along with talent at labels like Plug Research, Mush, Warp, and Ubiquity have created some of the most vital and interesting work in the genre, expanding its sound and its content while working outside a corporate mechanism in the process (anticon. runs as a collective). But you’d never know that if you only read Pitchfork, who acknowledged a few efforts, primarily from white male label owners (El-P) and instrumental artists (RJD2, DJ Shadow). No female MCs were acknowledged. This may also speak to the dearth of female MCs in underground hip hop, but doesn’t excuse it (I love you, Jean Grae; I love you, Psalm One). My challenge to hip hop fans in the next decade is to try to create online resources as influential as Pitchfork to get the message out. You’ve got guaranteed spots on my blogroll.
Also, as you may have noticed if you combed through the entire list, only the top 200 songs are accompanied by blurbs from the writing staff. While I understand that writing 300 more blurbs presents its own challenges, I also think it suggests that tracks 500-301 weren’t good enough for a write-up. And this makes me especially sad when many of the women I loved in this decade – Vivian Girls, St. Vincent, Goldfrapp, Sleater-Kinney, Bat for Lashes, Björk, and The Gossip — are thrown at the end and not given any qualifying statements. This especially seems necessary for a song like The Gossip’s “Standing In the Way of Control,” which became an LGBTQI anthem this decade. That would be especially useful to read alongside #18, Hercules and Love Affair’s “Blind.” This is a great dance song that I’ve always interpreted as an anthem for coming out and living life queer. But you wouldn’t know that from Tim Finney’s write-up.
And while I’m heartened by the women who did make it to the top 200, especially women like M.I.A., Beyoncé, Missy Elliott, Annie, and Karen O of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who made the top 20, I can’t help but notice that many of these women are pop artists who work extensively with predominantly male producers. I don’t want to suggest that cutting a track with Timbaland or Diplo or Pharell from The Neptunes means that women are robbed of artistic autonomy, as I wouldn’t say that for Justin Timberlake. However, I do take issue with what female artists and what songs get praise. Or even what versions of songs. While the Diplo remix of the version of M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” that features UGK is great, I wonder why her version isn’t enough.
That said, the 2000s were both a hell of an education and a hell of a time. Pitchfork knows it. I know it. Hopefully, you know it too. It was a great time to be alive. I hope the next decade is even better.
The is how Janelle does it; image courtesy of concreteloop.com
It took maintaining this blog to realize how much I love talking about hair; the more extreme or edgy the coiffure, the better (think Marie Antoinette hair stylist Odile Gilbert). This is interesting, as I’m quite the wash-and-go girl in real life. Perhaps, then, I view fantasmic hairdos, really any hairdo slightly more complicated than the ponytail, as feats of magic.
Continuing a previous discussion of what the racial and/or ethnic connotations of Rihanna’s, Cassie’s, and Amber Rose’s unusual hairstyles (which, BTW, did anyone notice how cute Cassie looked next to P. Diddy and designer Zac Posen at a recent event?), I wanted to highlight two more women of color who like to play with their hair (keeping in mind, as Cassandra astutely pointed out in a previous comment, that these ladies’ hairstyles speak to their classed positions as pop musicians).
First up, Janelle Monáe, whose style I highlighted earlier. While on tour with twee psychedelic group Of Montreal (a band for whom she is also a fan), she did a shoot and interview with PAPERMAG. I really love her self-possession and poise here. She seems totally unflappable and completely in control of who she is and what image is trying to project. Dig the way she takes the compliment when the interview mentions that others have hyped her as a 21st century Grace Jones while at the same time pointedly stating that becoming Grace is not her goal, as they are different people (subtitle reads: “Just because we’re two black female pop singers with fades doesn’t mean we’re interchangeable”).
I also find Monáe’s hair care regimen fascinating — she washes her hair with orange juice, maple syrup, and salt to form it into “a bushel of fun and elegance.” I hope my interest in how she maintains her hair and forms it into a pompadour doesn’t scream “Oh my! Look what the black woman does to her hair!” As a white woman, I don’t know how widespread these sorts of treatments are, or if they only work on certain kinds of hair. But I find the idea of using non-cosmetic products toward cosmetic ends and wonder how common and shared they are.
This is one way Shingai does it; image courtesy of contactmusic.com
The other woman I wanted to mention is Shingai Shoniwa of The Noisettes. In the music video for “Never Forget You,” a song which evinces a clear indebtedness to the girl group era, we see Shoniwa perform and preen with several different pompadours, as well as a set of Afro puffs.
(As an aside, did anyone else notice the Fabric of My Life crawl at the bottom of the screen when they watched the music video? So, that’s a way Cotton Incorporated, through DDB, are getting the message out. Interesting.)
I think the diversity of hairstyles on display suggest that women of African descent (Shoniwa is British Zimbabwean) may use their hair as a marker of identity, but how that identity is constructed is varied, discursive, and unpredictable.
Just as playing with hair could potentially challenge traditional, white beauty standards and how women of color cultivate (and control) their image, I likewise find it heartening that Shoniwa is the lead singer of a band, a mixed-race, mixed-gender band at that (it isn’t evident from the music video, but Shoniwa is also the bassist).
While I don’t think these women resolve gender, ethnic, and racial tensions intrinsic to the mechanization of the beauty and fashion industry, I do think they challenge it by daring to be themselves, whoever they feel like that may be on any given day.
.jpg "I always root for Peggy Olson; image courtesy of examiner.com")
.jpg "Cover for Creep single; image courtesy of b-and-e-rapshit.blogspot.com")
