One thing I like to stress when I’m co-teaching music history workshops to girls is that anything can be an instrument. Furthermore, anyone can be in a band. I think band geeks in particular should be in bands. After all, your friends probably need your musical expertise. So don’t be discouraged if you can’t shred on guitar, especially if you can wail on a saxophone. And before you throw Kenny G. in my face, let’s remember that Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen clearly believe that the sax is a rock instrument.
But few people made the saxophone as punk as Lora Logic (born Susan Whitby). Have you ever listened to X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!”? Can’t call that easy listening.
When people talk about X-Ray Spex, they tend to focus on Poly Styrene, the band’s lead singer. And, to be fair, there’s a lot to talk about. Marian Said is of Somalian descent, the daughter of a diplomat, and later became a Krishna. When she fronted this band, she was a girl who still had baby fat, wore braces, and screeched songs about environmentalism, consumerism, conformity, and turning plastic and day-glo. Believe the hype.
But Logic deserves praise too. Though she wasn’t in the band for very long — she was out of the group before their debut, Germ Free Adolescents was released — she helped define their sound. Rather than shaping her instrument’s tone into lite jazz’s smooth lines, she squealed and skronked with it, breaking melodies apart with destructive glee. In my book, you can’t get more punk than turning unexpected instrumentation into something seemingly unmusical, then turning that into music.
Lora Logic and Poly Styrene; image courtesy of freewebs.com
Of course, other musicians of this period were approaching the saxophone in this manner — no wave pioneer James Chance of The Contortions chief among them. Many of these musicians were also influenced by free jazz legend Ornette Coleman, who began revolutionizing the genre during the 1950s. But there’s something distinct about Logic’s sound — reckless, bright, unpredictable, and pleasantly surprised by and content with the mess she’s making. This sensibility is evident in the work she did with Essential Logic, the group she formed with Phil Legg after leaving X-Ray Spex. It’s a sensibility I hope gets passed on to future generations of girls hoping to make a horrible, beautiful noise.
Patti Smith with Steve Sebring; image courtesy of gerryco23.wordpress.com
Before I went on vacation, Kristen at Act Your Age told me that PBS was going to show Dream of Life, a 2008 documentary by Steven Sebring about Patti Smith. Then yesterday, as I was sorting out my house, my friends Jacob and Melissa reminded me that it was going to be on later that night. It should be noted that I received reminder messages from them within the span of five minutes. I’m fine with being the music geek friends send these sorts of notices to. Thanks, everyone.
First, a disclaimer. I’m not a Patti Smith fan. What I mean by that is, I don’t know Smith’s music very well. Several of my friends got to know her through her music, perhaps developing their feminist and/or queer identities as a result. I’m sure the same could be said for readers of this blog I don’t know personally. This isn’t to say I’m not open to listening to her work. I’m just not very familiar with it. If there is interest in subsequent posts wherein I listen to her albums in chronological order and document my thoughts about it like Carrie Brownstein did with Phish earlier this year, show me the way.
Next, a confession. I haven’t until recently been interested in listening to Patti Smith’s music. While I haven’t listened to Horses in its entirety, I am familiar with her, and the ways in which I’m familiar with her give me pause. Here is why.
1. Each time I see a documentary where she is discussed, the opening chords to “Gloria” fade in and a bunch of musicians wax pretentious about how her music melded the sacred with the profane, or that she was not a musician but a poet and I get pissy. Not because of the song, but because of the purple prose being recited over it. I actually hadn’t heard the song in full until I was well into college.
2. With some exception, these superlatives tend to come from men: Glenn Branca, Thurston Moore, Legs McNeil, Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, Richard Hell, Bruce Springsteen, Bono, and Michael Stipe are but a few names. I remember Alice Bag talks about her influence in the supplemental feature about women in punk in Don Letts’s Punk: Attitude and I know riot grrrl pioneers like Kathleen Hanna were inspired by her, but the praise mainly comes from the men. Established or well-regarded rock and roll dudes. Legends, if you will.
3. In some of the things I have read on Smith, she wasn’t very kind to the women and girls around her. Blondie’s Debbie Harry talks about how dismissive and unfriendly she was during their CBGB’s days in Please Kill Me, an oral history on New York punk collected by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. It was also reported in Mark Spitz and the late Brendan Mullen’s L.A. punk oral history We Got the Neutron Bomb that Smith was nasty to The Runaways after they tried to visit her backstage after a concert, leaving a baby Joan Jett particularly crushed. Now, oral histories are tenuous at best and Smith is not asked to comment about any of this. Also, Bebe Buell speaks favorably of Smith in Please Kill Me. Kim Gordon has a prolonged friendship with her as well. But this, coupled with the fact that she doesn’t identify as a feminist makes me feel weird about her status as a feminist rock icon.
4. Add to this the very apparent sense of malecentric hero worship Smith evinces and I feel really weird about her. While I like that she likes Maria Callas, The Ronettes, and Christina Aguilera, I don’t get the sense that she had much use for women. She cut her hair to look like Keith Richards. She learned to hail a cab by watching Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back, a man who would later tune her guitar. That same guitar was a gift from Sam Shepard. Tom Verlaine apparently has the most beautiful neck in rock music, though her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith of MC5 possessed something altogether else. Pablo Picasso made inimitable art until Jackson Pollack created paintings out of the drippings from Picasso’s Guernica. Willem de Kooning’s paintings made her want to touch the art in museums, an “offense” she gleefully committed on more than one occasion.
In addition, Smith’s most well-known for covering songs by men, reclaiming Them’s “Gloria,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” and Nirvana’s “About A Girl.” Of course, she redefined those songs by singing them as a man without changing the male-female pronouns or amending them to be about Patty Hearst or Kurt Cobain. And, as I’m sure my friend Curran would be quick to point out, Smith often aligns herself with queer men like Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Mapplethorpe, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Michael Stipe. Curran may also posit that this makes Smith more closely as a transgendered person, which makes sense given Smith’s commitment to androgyny and sexual ambiguity.
However, I’ve always felt that Smith’s indebtedness to men has aligned herself at with a more liberal feminist, at times heterosexist view of how women play the game of rock (i.e., play the man’s game). While I get how others believe that she’s expanded how women can look and sound in rock, to me it still feels more like she’s abiding by male definitions of performance and sound rather than redefining it for female artists, a group she may not in fact feel that she is a part of.
To be clear, I don’t need her to be feminine. I’d like it if she were a feminist, but I’d be happier if it just seemed like femaleness wasn’t so burdensome or powerless or safe to her. However, this is how it’s often seemed to me that Smith views or once viewed my sex category, and with it my gender, and this has always been our wedge. I’ll let her state her case.
Of course, this outlook may evince some potential transphobia on my part. I also might be privileging binaristic norms around gender and sexuality instead of championing fluidity. This nagging feeling keeps me coming back to Smith as an idea. But maybe I should get to know her better. And with that, the documentary.
I’ll be blunt again. For the most part, I found this documentary to be indulgent yet slight. Smith of course is the subject, but I was disheartened by how much she seemed to dictate the narrative (I find it just as frustrating when men do this, though I did like when Smith ordered filming to cease backstage before a performance). I would have liked more context.
I also would’ve liked to have been surprised by it more. I didn’t learn much about the artist or the person behind her mythology. I also didn’t get much of a sense of time and place. I could deduce the passing of time by watching her children mature. I understood when we were watching her tour the Trampin’ album because she was speaking out against the Iraq War and the Bush administration. I gather that dancing on the beach in Coney Island with Lenny Kaye was fun, but don’t know why it needed to be shown in slow motion. I know that losing her husband and her friend and long-time collaborator was traumatic because she said so. I don’t know how she felt about the loss of her parents during the 2000s. I saw that she loved playing with her guitarist son Jackson, who toured with her, but I know very little about her daughter Jesse past a gender-bending pubescent trip to the bathroom and, later, a carriage ride with her mother. And past some previously captured interview footage of Smith, I don’t know why she left mundane New Jersey to become a punk poet in New York, though I think I can imagine why.
That said, there were little snatches of Patti Smith the daughter and the artsy gender rebel that I enjoyed and did help me get to know her better. Seeing her eat hamburgers at her parents’ time-warp home. Seeming both proud and embarrassed when her father admits that he can’t go to his daughter’s concerts anymore because he lost his hearing at the earlier gigs he did attend while wearing one of her concert t-shirts. Trading chords with Shepard. Reminiscing about eating hot dogs in Coney Island with Maplethorpe. Holding up her children’s baby clothes and proudly declaring their cleanliness and her refusal to use bleach. Talking about how wanting to touch original paintings in museums is easily satisfied by making your own art. Playing woodwinds with Flea on the beach and swapping stories about how expertly both musicians can pee into bottles while traveling. And seeing her performances and hearing her words, her songs. I wish I was given a timeline to find out when all of these works were created, but I’m content to find out for myself. Let’s start by revisiting ”Redondo Beach.”
Cover of Mama's Gun, released on Motown/Puppy Love; image courtesy of dallassouthblog.com
Originally, I was going to write about Mama’s Gun, Erykah Badu’s second full-length album, in tandem with PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. The reason for this was two-fold: for one, I got the two albums within a week of one another my senior year as Christmas presents (one of the few perks of having divorced parents) and, for another, both albums are turn-of-the-century declaratives about the complexities and contradictions of women being in and out of love, sometimes thrillingly occupying both positions at once. I also thought, as a neat aside, that it might be useful to think about contemporary female artists’ work across racial and/or generic boundaries.
However, I worry that I’d be doing a disservice to those particularities by glossing over them in what would inevitably be an overgrown post. Furthermore, there are some jarring differences between the two albums that I cannot yet resolve in thinking about them together. Harvey’s ”happy” album is largely believed to be about her by-now defunct relationship with hipster auteur and New York die-hard Vincent Gallo; Badu’s “game-changing” album is conclusively about the end of her relationship with OutKast’s André 3000 and possibly the beginning of another one with Common. Harvey’s album finds her brightening her sound after her more experimental, less well-received Is This Desire? (which absolutely will be discussed as a record that made me a feminist once I start recounting my college years). Badu’s album finds her expanding her sound (and perhaps the sound associated with “neo-soul,” however silly a term that became), a project she would continue to do with last year’s mind-blowing, radically political, and tremendously funky, New Amerykah, Pt. 1: 4th World War.
Cover for New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) (Universal Motown, Puppy Love Entertainment, Control Freaq; 2008), image courtesy of dallasobserver.com
Most importantly, for my purposes, while the former speaks more specifically to love’s ability to project, the latter speaks to the embodied, conflicting feelings of a female place in a relationship.
Badu and I had met previously. Baduizm came out in 1997 and I found out about it thanks to Kurt Loder and the good people of MTV News who proclaimed that I would, in fact, hear it from them first. I bought it that summer for my birthday (for what it’s worth, I bought it with Ben Folds Five’s Whatever and Ever Amen — happy birthday to 14-year-old me!). She also made appearances on One Life To Live as herself, and acted in Blues Brothers 2000 and Cider House Rules (which I still have not seen in its entirety, but I know that she does a good job playing a tragic character in what I thought was an otherwise totally boring movie). But I treasured my copy of Baduizm, marvelling that someone could make vintage jazz, R&B, and funk sound so refreshingly hip and contemporary. She had such an interesting and beautiful voice. I loved that the music was coming out of a Texas girl who also spelled her name with a “y” (albeit for far more politically motivated reasons than me; Erykah Badu changed her name to be closer to her Ghanan roots while I became ”Alyx” because we were studying Egypt in sixth grade social studies and I thought the spelling looked — ugh, white girl fail – more hieroglyphic).
But this album, which came out during my senior year hit me like a soft, sexy bomb (an apt reappropriation of Tom Breihan’s assessment of D’Angelo’s Voodoo, another pioneer 2000 release that, for some reason, I don’t own. I have, of course, seen the delightfully NSFW video for “Untitled“). I actually heard “Didn’t Ya Know” for the first time at a movie theater in West Palm Beach visiting my dad on Christmas vacation (I think it played before a screening of Cast Away). The Spice Girls’ “Holla” played some time after that, but as J. Dilla’s warm, soulful production wrapped around me and Badu’s at-times wrenching and at-times assured vocal delivery let me know what I’d be spending that Sam Goody gift certificate on.
Speaking of J. Dilla, Badu’s collaborative spirit was also something of an inspiration to me, especially since was able to work with men. Like Björk, who has worked extensively with like-minded dudes like directors Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, as well as producers like Matmos, Mark Bell, and Nellee Hooper, Badu was always able to forge creative spaces with men while still standing her own ground. With The Roots or producer J. Dilla (and later Madlib and 9th Wonder), she was still fully able to articulate her artistic imperatives. When she duets with Stephen Marley on “In Love With You,” she seems to be coming at the song (and its subject matter) as an equal. It should also be noted that she’s got room for the ladies too, working with women like Jill Scott and, on this album, Betty Wright.
One thing I’ve always felt Badu doesn’t get enough credit for as a musician is her loopy yet razor-sharp sense of humor. Anyone who follows fatbellybella on Twitter can tell you Badu is hilarious. But her humor is also evident in her songwriting, which while often confessional will often diffuse potentially maudlin moments with daffy yet incredibly perceptive asides (the bridge to ”…& On” recounts memorable moments – in loose rhyme – going with her mom to the laundromat, her first period, learning about oppression at school, watery cereal, hearing herself on the radio, and wearing head wraps). Her self-awareness is also evident — “…& On” makes several direct references to Baduizm‘s breakout hit “On and On,” and “Cleva” mediatates on how she uses her brains and wit to compensate for self-perceived physical deficits, lamenting that her breasts sag when she’s not wearing a bra, bragging that her thrift-store togs look awesome, and stating, upfront, that this is what she looks like without makeup.
Her humor is also in her voice. People tend to focus more on her voice’s supposed “jazziness,” especially early on in her career when critics were clamoring to figure out how most subtly to compare her timbre and tone to the tragic Billie Holiday’s. And while Holiday’s humor also gets obscured from this discussion, if we have to compare Badu’s voice to someone else, I actually think Badu is closer to Blossom Dearie, the recently deceased singer who used her high-pitched coo to utilize a myriad of possibilities, whether it be taking pot-shots at hipsters or singing about unpacking adjectives. I could hear Badu doing both, maybe even in the same song.
What makes Badu’s approach to songwriting interesting is that her sense of humor can turn a song whose subject matter seems silly or inconsequential or rote on the surface into something surprisingly more progressive. Take “Booty,” for example. The song originally seems to be a a diss song directed at a woman whose man has turned his attentions toward Badu. While the woman has a PhD, is more conventionally attractive, is a better cook, boasts a fast-tracked career, and is more financially stable than Badu (at least in this song, as college-educated Erica Wright went to Grambling), Badu still has to fight off her partner’s advances. At first, when Badu says “I don’t want him,” it seems to suggest that this man (and, by association, this woman) are beneath her. Yet, in the bridge (the song has no verses), Badu reveals that her intentions speak toward a kind of female solidarity, albeit one strained by classed circumstantial differences. She doesn’t want this man, not because she has designs on someone else, but because he doesn’t respect his current relationship enough to be honest and make arrangements with his partner. In essence, Badu believes both women need to cut this man loose because they can do better.
She performs a similar feat with “Bag Lady,” which at first seems to be an indictment about women who enter into relationships with too much baggage. What it ends up becoming is an anthem about personal freedom and empowerment, with Badu encouraging the woman to break free from her self-imposed shackles, stressing that self-love will make it better while being backed by a euphoric women’s chorus.
Many would argue that “Green Eyes,” a ten-minute suite that stands as the album’s final song, is its centerpiece. I’d be one to agree, and find it especially astonishing that OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson,” which tells André 3000′s side of their break-up was released but a few months before Mama’s Gun came out (Badu also makes a cameo on the album, singing with her former partner about broken dreams in the chorus of “Humble Mumble”). As Touré discusses in his Rolling Stone review of Mama’s Gun, it’s hard not to read into these musicians’ personal moments that then get projected into their work, with the audience knowing who’s singing (or rapping) to who. You could easily do it with Beyoncé singing about being ”Crazy in Love” with Jay-Z, who would then reply that he’s got hip hop and R&B’s ”number one girl . . . wearing (his) chain” in “Dirt Off Your Shoulder.” You could also easily do it with Badu’s appearance in the music video for Common’s “The Light,” a song the rapper wrote for her about their (now-defunct) relationship, strengthening the musical association by having J. Dilla steer the production.
But on its own, “Green Eyes” is an epic, discursive, devastating break-up anthem whose power few since have touched (though I think Aeroplane and Kathy Diamond’s ”Whispers” comes the closest). It begins with a flirtatious, jazzy lilt wherein Badu claims that her eyes are green, not because she’s jealous that her former lover now has a new partner. Instead, she unconvincingly lies, her eyes are green because she eats a lot of vegetables. After claiming “it don’t have nahhhh-thing to do with your . . . friend,” the music becomes slower and more dirge-like. Her voice and lyrics also become less certain, shakier. She doesn’t know if she loves him anymore, but thinks she might, and is clearly frustrated how love is putting in her in such a tether. From here, she pushes her lover further away in one phrase, claiming to do fine and realizing how angry she is at him for not recognizing her worth, while a few lines later asks if they can make love one last time. Her humor is still there, at times helping her sell the lie of her feelings, while other times confronting her with the truth. She calls herself silly at the thought of her lover being true, stating that she should change her name to ”Silly E. Badu.” It’s a joke, but no one — least of all her — is laughing. You know she’ll get through it eventually, but she has to work through her hurt before she moves forward. I know it was a song that helped me work through a broken heart, even if I had to lie face down and sob into the carpet to do it.
But there is plenty of love and lust on this album, acknowledging that women can turn art out of being happy and healthy. “Orange Moon” begins as a stately, romantic ballad to finding someone helped her believe in love, only to erupt into pure, unadulterated about how good/God her lover is (the “God” reference potentially serving as a Five Percenter allusion). “Kiss Me On My Neck (Hesi)” focuses its attentions instead on the more immediate nature of necessary gratification. The inclusion of these songs evince that for women, love and sex are neither mutual nor exclusive concepts. They can be both.
The album also allowed me to think outside of love (and thus myself) to start questioning more political matters and begin to want for more radical action. While Badu may be charming and funny, she’s also a fine, agitated mind. The song that accomplished this most specifically for me was “A.D. 2000,” a song about Amadou Diallo and his brutal murder at the hands of a quartet of trigger-happy police officers. Excepting the Rodney King beating and subsequent hearing, this was the first time I really thought about police brutality (note: Bruce Springsteen also addressed this horrible tragedy in song, to some controversy).
A year later, I would read about Mumia Abu-Jamal. Two and a half years after that, I would start dating a person who got pulled over by a cop for driving the speed limit with the headlights on in a residential area at 10 p.m. while listening to GZA’s Legend of the Liquid Sword. Eight months after that, I would read Assata Shakur‘s profound autobiography. About a year after that, I would read Angela Davis‘s autobiography, stunned that this intelligent, sensitive individual was the same person Ronald Reagan swore would never teach in California. Two years after that, I would get accosted by a cop for jay-walking through a red light at 3 a.m. when it was clear that the officer was more concerned by the nervous young college student of either Middle Eastern or South Asian descent walking three steps in front of me. In all this time in between, I would come to know several people who shared similar stories or worse, whether they were arrested for “obstructing a passageway” during protests or were accosted with racial profiling. I would also read about similar reported items in the news, always sad and horrified and sick and helpless that these kinds of actions still go on.
Badu would continue to be concerned with political issues like religious freedom, institutional racism, the drug trade, poverty, and sexism, and incorporate these matters into her music, which became increasingly more experimental as she matured as an artist. But with the political she always intersected personal issues, whether it was remembering growing up on hip hop records, motherhood, reconciling the fact that she had three babies with as many men, growing older, working within the mainstream, looking for ways to work outside of it, and always thinking about the ways that she fit (or chose not to fit) within it. This album was the start of thinking through these issues for me. I look forward to what Ms. Badu has to say next.
NPR posted Marianne Faithfull’s session for her new covers record today. In celebration of rock’s grand dame, I thought I’d post some live clips of covers from artists I enjoy. Let it be assumed that some delightful gender fuckery goes on below, whether it be the singer, the performance, or how those pesky gendered pronouns get played with. Enjoy!
First up, two hymn-like adaptations of “Crazy in Love” and “I’m On Fire,” by Antony Hegarty and Bat for Lashes.
And then some campy renditions of “Rocket Man” and “I Will Always Love You” from Kate Bush and The Gossip. Thank you, SparkleBliss, for hipping me to Beth Ditto in Dolly drag. My life is changed for the better.
Note: The following post about (500) Days of Summer and why I was not charmed by it contains spoilers. I will also adhere to a list-like format for the sake of brevity. However, if you wanna read it as some dig against the sleeper rom-com’s indexical use of number-play, texts are bendy.
It was hard to go into the screening for this movie objectively. I had some misgivings about this movie that I catalogued prior to attending a Saturday matinee screening. They are as follows:
1. The preview is really fucking twee.
2. The oft-mentioned post-coital musical number, complete with marching band, animated bird, and ironic use of Hall and Oates’s great but over-used “Dreams Come True.”
Still from the dance sequence; image courtesy of paisleypetunia.com
3. A friend mentioned that Gordon-Levitt’s character moves on from Summer with a girl named Autumn. Seriously.
4. Same friend made quite the indictment on race and whiteness.
5. The “vintage” clothes — while Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt are in adorable outfits, they seem less vintage than Anthropologie‘s upper-middle-class version of vintage. Everything is so tidy and worn once and unlived in. It just made me miss my friend Kit, who almost exclusively wears amazing thrift-store dresses (many of which I know she’s worn multiple times). Her look is much more comfort-based and much less polished. I think I would’ve responded to the outfits if there were at least one loose thread or frayed cuff, especially since Summer is probably not cashing fat checks as a personal assistant to the head of a greeting card company. Sigh. I know; it’s a movie.
1. Gordon-Levitt wears the “Love Will Tear Us Apart” Joy Division t-shirt in one scene. GET IT? Ugh. Such an obvious visual joke. I think if there’s gonna be a music geek dramatic irony t-shirt joke, maybe having him wear a My Bloody Valentine t-shirt would have been better. But is there really a need?
Still of Gordon-Levitt wearing an in-joke
2. A friend said that Summer quotes a Belle and Sebastian song in her high school yearbook. Blech.
3. When they break up, Summer casts her and Tom as Sid and Nancy, respectively. Ain’t nothin’ skid row about these two.
In addition, I tend to have misgivings about movies and TV shows that make music geekery — and its quirky application — so central to informing characterization and narrative (see also Juno, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and Flight of the Conchords). It might be contrarian, but I feel instantly resistant to these kinds of texts because I feel like I’m supposed to like them because of the music geekery. But I need more than that. While I enjoy movies like Adventurelandand High Fidelity (among others like Velvet Goldmine, Times Square, Dazed and Confused, and recently Hedwig and the Angry Inch), the music geekery is actually most interesting in the peripheral.
As an aside: it seems the people of my acquaintance who have the most vitriol toward this movie are also the most personally invested in music culture. They’re also pretty cool, but wouldn’t describe themselves as such. This perhaps gestures toward how pejorative and subjective the word “hipster” has become within my generation.
To stay positive, three things about the movie made me hopeful anyway:
1. The leads are appealing.
2. Summer doesn’t want to be in a relationship.
3. Apparently director Marc Webb made iPod playlists for the leads for each scene to help get them into character. This is interesting to me, especially read alongside playlist auteurs like Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Wes Anderson, who use music to create scenes and develop characters.
With that said, I hated this movie. So much so that I was relieved that I saw it for free.
I was pretty turned off from the start. Principally because the trailer and the opening sequence stress that this is not a love story. But that’s a lie. It’s completely a love story. It’s just not between Gordon-Levitt’s Tom and Deschanel’s Summer. It’s between first-time feature director Webb and first-time screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber and how goddamn clever they can be. Just how goddamn clever?
1. There is a marching band and a girl named Autumn.
2. There is a black and white French film that plays in the middle of the movie that turns into Tom’s life story as he sees it. I think they’re going for Godard here, but in my limited knowledge of Godard, this seems too cheap for him. He seems like the type who’d have celebrity culture gatecrash into real life, not have real life imitate a French film.
3. Summer and Tom like to have dates in Ikea, playing house in the showrooms. I will overread this as a Pavement reference.
And then there’s icky touches of whimsy that feel forced and disingenuous. Being cute and fanciful is tricky business, mainly because being charming on camera has to seem effortless. The exemplar for me is Jack Lemmon straining pasta with a tennis racket in The Apartment. Here are a few examples that miss the mark:
1. This movie has a narrator (who, as my friend Karin astutely pointed out, is far from omniscient or objective — he’s basically there to align the audience to Tom). In general, I hate movie narration. It reminds me of what I learned from “Charlie Kaufman” in Adaptation. With some exceptions, narration is profoundly lazy storytelling and filmmaking.
2. Tom has a blackboard covering an entire wall of his bedroom. So he can be close to his true passion. Drawing buildings.
3. Summer is so much a fan of artist René Magritte that she’s actually arranged a bowler hat and an apple on her coffee table.
Magritte's "The Son of Man"
4. Tom wants to be an architect, but is somehow saddled with a job at a greeting card company. To convince Tom of his true passion, Summer has him draw a landscape on her arm.
5. After Summer breaks up with Tom, he quits his job at the greeting card company after a rousing boardroom speech about how the industry feeds lies about romance to mankind. When he storms out, his wiseacre friend does the slow clap. (Aside: I actually predicted this by starting my own clap about five seconds before actor Geoffrey Arend did it on screen – gold star for me!)
And then there are things that make no sense:
1. Summer and Tom first get to know each other at a karaoke bar. Summer does “Sugartime,” a delightful little tune from the late 1950s. Apparently she wanted to do “Born to Run,” but they didn’t have it. Then Tom does a rendition of “Here Comes Your Man” by The Pixies. What karaoke bar has The Pixies but doesn’t have any Bruce on hand? The Boss is who drunk people turn to when they don’t wanna sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” again.
2. It takes Tom twenty days or so to work toward his dream of becoming an architect. Primarily because he starts drawing and making lists on his blackboard and reading books at coffee shops.
3. Tom rags on Summer for liking Ringo best. Who doesn’t like Ringo?
4. This movie takes place in Los Angeles? Really? Locals and natives, help me out. I’ve been to your fine, sunny city several times. I’ve even been in the vicinity of where some scenes were shot. It never looked like New York to me.
And finally, there were four things that I found interesting, but did not think were well-executed. As they were related to issues of gender and age, these missed opportunities made me the saddest.
1. Summer really doesn’t want a relationship with Tom and stresses that from the very beginning. There’s mention of her parents divorcing when she was young, but I think she just wants to be alone and be independent and figure out what she wants in life (both maybe explain why she cries at the end of The Graduate before breaking up with Tom). I thought this was awesome. . . . At least I thought this until she gets married to some guy at the end for some reason.
2. The movie seems invested in making a commentary on how men objectify women, how movies abet that process, and how it results in men not really knowing the women they claim to love (I think Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep was trying to make a similar statement, and failed in my estimation for similar reasons). Tom’s “expectations vs. reality” split-screen sequence is made all the more poignant after the scenes where Tom (along with the camera and the editor) have cut Summer into fragments (her smile, her hair, her laugh, her eyes, her knees, etc.). Because, for all his obsession, Tom never really knows Summer. He may think he sees her everywhere, but he never really sees her. Instead, he sees creepy images like this one.
Summer through Tom's eyes; image courtesy of 500days.com
3. Tom has a wise-beyond-her-years kid sister. Too bad she’s not really a person. A good precocious girl is my kryptonite (I love you, Linda Manz).
4. Summer isn’t really a person either. That’s too bad because I think Deschanel could have easily made her one and does fine with what she’s given (as does Gordon-Levitt). I also think this movie would have been more interesting if this sort of character was the protagonist.
Again, I think Summer’s lack of embodiment is part of the point — Tom wants Summer to be a manic pixie dream girl that can save him from his mediocre, humdrum existence, but she never performs as he thinks she should. Thus, Tom becomes obsessed with a woman he never actually knows.
But we, the audience, never really get to know her either, in part because the production personnel seem similarly vexed by her (as I think Tom is really just a stand-in for one of the screenwriters), but mainly because they are so bewitched by their words and camera tricks to give their characters any genuine motive or meaning.
Cover of Sleep It Off; released on ZE in 1984, reissued in 2004
I know it’s poor sport to frame comparisons of artists as “better than worse than” and that this exercise can take on sexist dimensions, especially when talking about women, but I strongly believe that I’d like Lady Gaga better if she was a little bit more like Cristina. Specifically because fewer dance pop artists have been more critical of the wealth and fame machine in recent memory than Ms. Monet-Palaci.
Now, it’s possible that you don’t know who Cristina is. I didn’t know myself until ZE Records reissued her two full-length albums and Pitchfork wrote about them. To be brief, Cristina was a darling of the New York mutant disco scene in the early 1980s and was primed to be the queen of pop before another one-named club denizen took the title. A former Harvard student born from well-to-do parents, she dropped out, started working at The Village Voice, got involved with and later married a British retail heir and ZE Records co-founder Michael Zilkha, and did what any bored society girl might try to do. Start a recording career.
Her sound was at first lush and funky but became more harsh and angular. It was weird and gallery-friendly and oh-so-of-the-moment (in no small part due to producer Don Was). She even got a young Kevin Kline to do a duet with her (1978′s ”Disco Clone”). It was a fun and bubbly time. If you pair anything off either Cristina album with, say, something off Garçons’ Divorce or Queen Samantha’s The Letter, you’ve got a naughty party coming your way.
(Note: Garçons’ Divorce is hard to come by — twice out of print. Maybe this is why I’ve never heard their song “French Boy” at a gay bar, because I totally should. ZE Records has included many of their songs on their Mutant Disco compilations.)
Now, before you yell “class warfare!” and tune out, let me explain what Cristina did with her clearly classed position and what it contributed to her recording career. Rather than dismiss her upbringing, she made it the point of critical inquiry of her songs, especially in her second album, which is the focus of this post.
Rather than Madonna and Lady Gaga, who came from outsider perspectives that were trying to get inside, Cristina took her position as an insider to write about how the double-dealing, drug addictions, loveless marriages, closeted homosexuality, not-so-closeted homophobia, compromised affairs, high-life careers, elitist education, corporate greed, and luxe trappings (which, by 1984, formed in the wake of considerable gentrification in New York) were empty, cruel, predictable, and stifling to gender and class relations.
Surprisingly, she took all of this toxic material and made it humorous and fun to dance to. Yet at the same time, her music has a pessimistic, sinister edge, nulling any potential lyrical comparison to, say, Vampire Weekend. Much of this is in Cristina’s vocal delivery, which evokes Maude Lebowski‘s deadpan, arched New England finishing school accent. When she sings “I watch my friends decay around me and I view them with distaste” in Sleep It Off‘s opener “What’s a Girl to Do?,” I can’t help but wonder if she just slipped arsenic into the Dom Pérignon and is watching them die in the corner, burning their wallets with a lighter.
So, yeah. This was pop music. But it wasn’t going to get her on the pop charts. Sleep It Off tanked, perhaps in part because 1984 proved to be such a big year for Madonna, Prince, and Bruce Springsteen. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Texas. After divorcing Zilkha in 1990, she moved back to New York and occasionally writes literary essays. I haven’t read them, but I’m interested. If she fashioned herself as a sort of art-pop Dorothy Parker, her subsequent literary work has gotta be interesting.
But Cristina should also get a little credit for being game about distorting or manipulating her body for artistic purposes and self-reflexive effect (so should Lady Gaga, who often takes couture to cold and weird extremes). In her time, Cristina never did anything wth her look that’s akin to Lady Gaga — perhaps because no one outside the New York art scene was paying much attention, perhaps because she would’ve thought wearing a Kermit the Frog jacket was ridiculous — but she, along with graphic designer Jean-Paul Goude, cooked up the disturbingly beautiful, deliberately strange, and inherently constructed image for her second and final album. Perhaps Goude was really pleased with the look of Sleep It Off, because he did a similar design for Grace Jones the following year.
Cover of Slave to the Rhythm, released in 1985 on Island Records
Cristina’s album cover takes a lovely, modelesque profile shot of the singer and stretches her neck to graceful but useless grotesquery. A long neck on a woman is often remarked upon as an asset, especially for models. It’s also a home for the singer’s instrument. But this neck? And how about the cuts and ridges and hastily applied tape? Whereas Jones’s cover distorts her image in a smoother, more seamless manner, Cristina’s cover is rough, cut-up, and damaged.
Thus, this cover reflects Cristina’s key message — that which is beautiful and idealized in our culture is flawed, and the deception of its perfection is just at the surface.
From left; John Cusack as Rob and Iben Hjejle as Laura
I kinda got wound down with some respiratory thing late Saturday night (after an awesome GRCA showcase, during a friend’s at-home screening of another John Cusack movie, The Thin Red Line). I slept a bit yesterday, but still felt wobbly. So I figured what better day than today to trundle out Stephen Frears’s 2000 movie High Fidelity, one of my favorites. And forgive me, but I haven’t had time to revisit Nick Horby’s book yet, so my recollections of the book are a bit foggy.
Back in college when I was developing friend groups in accordance with my feminist beliefs, I would make a mental note of what dudes thought about the end of the movie High Fidelity. If they thought Rob’s girlfriend Laura was a bitch and were sad that they got back together at the story’s end, then I knew we could never really be cool. We could maybe have casual conversation at parties, but that would be the extent of our familiarity. To me, not getting Laura meant that they didn’t understand the purpose of the story (man-child learns how to be good enough for his girlfriend) and didn’t get me. They’d also probably be the kind of dudes who’d get sidelined by women like Laura in ten years time.
That is to say, then, that I don’t think of High Fidelity as a guy’s movie. For one, I don’t really believe in gendering any kind of cultural text, genre, or mode in such broad terms — seems as sure a way to uphold gender binaries and essentialized notions of masculinity and femininity as ever. For another, while I know that it is a movie about guys — music nerds and their fetishes, phobias, class anxieties, sexual insecurities, and the lives they try to live both within and outside these markers — I’ve always related to Rob and his fellow shop-keeps Dick and Barry (played expertly by Todd Louiso and Jack Black, in his break-out role). As Rob says about his customers, I’d feel bad about the male characters in the movie if I wasn’t, you know, kind of one of them.
I’m definitely one of them, and my ability to relate to Rob has only strengthened as I’ve gotten older. I’m definitely neurotic and worried about the future (sometimes to the point of paralysis, though I think much more temporarily than Rob). I compare myself to others. I have big class anxieties that seem to deepen as I age, the more aware I become of some of my peers’ classed origins, and the more I worry about my financial modesty in comparison to some of my friends with “careers” (or at least nicer jobs that afford them time and resources for creative projects). I also think about and discuss records. A lot. Sometimes turning them in to labor-intensive mix CDs or compartmentalizing my thoughts in list form, as this blog evinces.
Rob does have a one-up on me. He owns a record store, something he often takes for granted (even forgetting to include it in a list of dream jobs that Laura is quick to amend). I could totally live in Championship Vinyl. I’d totally have a record store if I had the scratch (if in Chicago, so much the better). My go-to name is “Discourses” and I’d imagine also having a small bookstore, self-defense workshop classes, local benefit showcases, and after-hours, female-only “drop the needle” sessions where ladies could listen to Can’s Tago Mago without having some dude drone on to them about why it’s important and how they couldn’t believe they haven’t heard the album before.
And yet. There are of course limits to my empathy for Rob and Co. For one, in an attempt at closure from his break-up with Laura, Rob decides to catch up with the women in his top-five break-up list, in effect reducing women to items on a chart (a pop chart, if we throw in the Boss as his inspiration).
Also, while I’ve always felt most comfortable gabbing about records, and a lot of times that means gabbing about records with guys, I’ve long been aware of how the conversations can point at the limitations of male-female interactions. I’m a feminist first, so whatever I may know about music will always be filtered through that lens. That can make me a buzzkill to some and a bore to others. Also, I’ve noticed that sometimes guys fear offending me, and sometimes seem to censor their opinions. And sometimes, guys just seem to talk more openly without a woman present. Lots of times, despite my shared interests and peered level of fluency, I’ve been ignored or cut out of conversations for some unknown reason, but I can’t help but wonder if being female is part of it, despite intention. This isn’t a common occurence, but it does happen and I’m sure you know how it makes me feel. I’m sure you know how it’s shaped my politics.
Also, I think Rob cannot buy the rare singles collection off the bitter, wronged divorcée of a record collector (played by Beverly D’Angelo) for gendered reasons. I totally could. I wish this scene had stayed in the movie. It’s one of my favorite parts of the book.
And sometimes, I just reach an impasse. What’s the fucking point about talking about records for hours? Where does it get us? How does it evolve us? Where do we move from it? Do we create? Do we open up another six-pack? What are we doing?
And that’s why I think I love Laura the most. Not necessarily because of who I am, but of who I’d like to be.
Laura, to be blunt, has her shit together. She’s a lawyer, so she’s established her career. I hope to do this one day as an academic. She’s also comfortable with who she is. As Rob himself notes, it’s in “how she walks around — it’s like, she doesn’t care how she looks or what she projects and it’s not that she doesn’t care it’s that she’s not affected, I guess. And that gives her grace.” She also has little interest in upholding traditional norms. While she’s not opposed to being a mother, she doesn’t have any interest in marriage. This provides me with comfort. And while she wants Rob to challenge himself (she pushes him into organizing a CD release party at the end of the story), she won’t wait forever for him to grow up.
Laura’s ultra-supportive friend Liz, played by the inimitable Joan Cusack, also provides me comfort. Liz lets Rob have it when she finds out that Rob cheated on Laura, his infidelity contributed to Laura terminating their unborn child, owes her money, and admits to Laura that he was ready to move on from her. While Rob has his side, I like that Liz doesn’t abide by his immaturity and lets him have it. My dear friend Jamie is cut from similar cloth. This also provides me comfort.
Importantly, as both characterization and the main drive of the narrative, while she has her shit together, she’s not particularly interested in waiting on someone who doesn’t. And I think this professional drive and lack of sentimentality is why some people (including an ex-boyfriend) have cast Laura as a bitch. I, of course, think that this speaks to the potential threat that a smart, capable, ambitious woman may have over some men, particularly men who know (perhaps however much they may deny) that they don’t deserve women like Laura. I think the smart men are the men who get why Rob can’t shake Laura and have to figure out a way to let her in (or accept her back into their lives, as Laura asks Rob to get back together with her).
Curiously, many of the dudes I’ve known who don’t like Laura love themselves some Caroline, the cute, bubbly rock journalist who loves Stereolab and stokes Rob’s ego with an interview for her newspaper column, prompting him to make another mix tape before wondering when he’s going to stop moving on from woman to woman, tape to tape, and commit to the person he really loves.
Now, it’s really easy to pit them against one another, if you’re so inclined to put women in competition (which, ugh, please stop). I, for one, harbor no ill will toward Caroline. I kinda feel like Caroline is on the same track as Laura (professional, if funky, adult lady who’s finding her own place in the world). I even think the movie is making this argument when they are placed in the same shot during the final scene, with Caroline in front of Laura, and Laura in front of Rob. It may be easy to read the composition as evidence that Laura “won,” but I’m more inclined to think of the two women as peers, in continuum with one another. I don’t seem to recall them talking to one another in the book, but I always hope that they got a chance to meet and talk with each other.
Caroline Fortis, played by Natasha Gregson Wagner
There are other women in Rob’s life. There’s Marie de Salle (played by Lisa Bonet), the elusive singer-songwriter with whom Rob has a one-night stand and who totally has his number (she also apparently has a song called “Eartha Kitt x 2″ about her and her ex dividing up her record collection that I wish were real). There’s Penny Hardwick (played by Joelle Carter), the movie critic Rob dated in high school who reveals some upsetting information when reminding him about who rejected who. There are also less nuanced ex-girlfriend characters — the cruel Charlie Nichols (played by Catherine Zeta Jones) and the needy Sarah Kendrew (played by Lili Taylor). And there are frequenters of the record store that I wish we knew better — like Sara Gilbert’s Annaugh Moss or the Asian American woman who asks Rob where the “Soul” section is in the store. And of course there’s Liz, Laura’s best friend, who’s willing to tell off Rob on her lunch break before striding back to the office.
