Last Tuesday, I caught Passion (Bab al-Makam) as part of the Austin Film Society’s Essential Cinema series on Middle Eastern films. If you have the means, get your local theater to screen it or find a copy.
Imane (Salwa Jamil) may be looking outward, but she's searching inward; image courtesy of originalalamo.com
Mohamed Malas’ haunting 2003 feature is set ten years ago, just before the United States invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban. It focuses on Imane (Salwa Jamil), a 30-year-old Syrian wife and mother who is transformed by her love for Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, after her husband, Adnan (Oussama Sayed Youssef), plays a tape for her. Unfortunately, Imane’s male relatives grow suspicious of how the singer’s music changes her. She becomes more independent and headstrong, most demonstrably through singing. Convinced that a singing woman is flaunting adulterous behavior, they begin to monitor and police her actions, with damning consequences.
As I tend to spoil a movie when I write about it because it’s hard to write criticism without parsing out major plot points, I’ll reveal now that Imane is ultimately silenced by an honor killing while looking after her children and niece when Adnan is away at a rally protesting U.S. occupation. It’s especially cruel that her uncle and cousins stab her to death while she and her charges are singing while cavorting around the house. I have heard that the film received some criticism for the ways in which patriarchy is represented in Arab Muslim society, suggesting the film prescribes to the ugly American racist essentialism that all Muslim men are misogynist pigs. I would hedge these comments by pointing out that these men are depicted as conflicted and deeply troubled by what they perceive their culture to expect of them as men.
Furthermore, Adnan’s gentle presence complicates this reading. He’s a kindhearted cab driver who cares very deeply for his family. Moreover, he’s delighted by how Kulthum’s music inspires his wife to sing. In bed one night, he reveals that he wasn’t especially fond of Kulthum until he heard her songs reinterpreted by Imane. He then requests that she sing for him, and goes down on her as she offers an incantation. It’s a sexy scene, particularly because the camera focuses on her face as she reacts to the pleasure she’s receiving from her lover as much as from her own voice.
What I find especially interesting about Passion is Imane’s reconciliation of the sacred with the sensual. This territory is well-traveled, whether we’re talking about the Song of Solomon or Prince’s and Tori Amos’ oeuvre. However, I’m not as aware of texts concerned with Muslim women making these connections and using their corporeality to do it. Granted, Kulthum’s music may be something of an easy entry point for many Western viewers (like me) who may not be particularly aware of Middle Eastern media culture but learned about her music from fans like Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley, or NPR.
However, Kulthum’s fame (at least in some circles) also makes her a symbol for Muslim female (and possibly feminist) identification. Kulthum’s music conceptualized the spiritual realm and the secular flesh coming together in the service of Allah. She also enjoyed tremendous success in Egypt from the 1930s until her death in 1975, ostensibly serving as the voice of the Middle East. The entire nation watched her concerts on their televisions with rapt attention for decades.
Umm Kulthum; image courtesy of wikimedia.org
There’s also something inherently queer about Imane’s identification with Kulthum. Perhaps this bond scares her male relatives the most, as there are few things terrifying to some men as an autonomous woman evolving. Imane nearly articulates the Sapphic dimensions of her love for Kulthum at one point, lolling on the floor and dazed by the power of Kulthum’s music. Entranced by the singer’s powerful voice, Imane proclaims that her music has transformed her from within. At the risk of cheapening the scene, Jamil plays this moment as if the post-coital cigarette is just out of frame. Imane may not desire Kulthum physically, but the homosocial exchange between musician and fan is undeniably charged with sexual electricity. Lest we forget that the most powerful erogenous zone is the brain. The ears and voice work with it, receiving sound and repurposing it. It’s congress however you puzzle it out.
Most importantly, Imane passes on the power of her voice to younger members of her family. While she may be left for dead by some members of her family, her niece and children take to the streets to protest her killing. Assuredly Adnan will join in once he hears the news of the tragedy. More importantly, she’s taught them Kulthum’s music, who will assuredly shape how they understand the value of raising their own voices. The promise to overthrow patriarchy’s stranglehold in this region blooms within them.
Hey, I was at this show!; image courtesy of pitchfork.com
I was surprised to discover that I haven’t mentioned Julianna Barwick much beyond a brief SXSW recommendation, because I’ve been into her for a while now. If you ever see me in the Asthmatic Kitty t-shirt I inherited from a clothing swap a few years back, she’s the artist I’m representing (no hard feelings, Sufjan). Credit of my awareness goes to my partner, who forwarded this Dusted piece because of my known fondness for female voices and loops. NPR is streaming her forthcoming album The Magic Placeuntil its release on the 22nd, and I recommend you check out this beautiful record.
When talking about Barwick as a musician, I should really be talking about vocals. Her music is predominantly vocal-based, and gestures toward the formative years she spent in church choir. However, I find it especially interesting how she conceptualizes and manipulates her voice as an electronic instrument, potentially making her a good addition to Tara Rodgers’ great book Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound. For one, she eschews traditional lyrics and tends toward mouth-singing and abstract syllables. For another, she threads her voice through an effects pedal and a looper. This distorts the sonic and tonal quality of her voice and allows her to build her voice into a choir, as well as embellish upon several passages that coalesce into fully-realized pieces of music. Given the spare set-up, it’s remarkable how lush and expansive her songs are. I caught Barwick during last year’s SXSW and was surprised that these songs, which don’t lend themselves to rock venue performances, could still teleport me to some place outside myself. As someone who believes in some semblance of a spiritual realm and the transformative power of community but has little regard for organized religion, I appreciate how her music gestures toward the sacred without tying itself to a particular deity or dogma.
Some people may dismiss Barwick for creating yoga music for hipsters. Frankly, I’d prefer it to the new age soundtrack on my yoga DVD, though it is uniform with its out-of-time production aesthetic. I certainly understand if some people only hear layered gibberish with little variance between songs. But what I get from Barwick’s work isn’t a set of songs so much as a healing musical experience that gives my head the space to wander, collect, and recharge. That the opportunity for such restoration is generated through electronic equipment and her being makes it all the more exceptional.
Cover of Björk's Homogenic (One Little Indian, 1997); image courtesy of slantmagazine.com
Cover for Björk's Vespertine (One Little Indian, 2001); image courtesy of harmony-korine.com
When I began conceptualizing this blog in the ol’ brainspace, one of the first sections I came up with was “Records That Made Me a Feminist.” I knew Björk was going to get at least one entry. Homogenic and Vespertine each played a vital part of shaping my politics. So, I figured out I’d probably have to write about them together.
Pairing albums for this section of the blog is something I originally wanted to do this when covering Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, which I started listening to around the same time as PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. I liked the idea of dialoguing seemingly dissimilar work by female artists with one another, but I feared covering those two albums together would short-shrift the artists who made them. However, talking about two distinct pieces of work by one woman seemed easier. And essential. So here we go.
I must admit that covering Björk’s 1997 and 2000 full-length releases present its own political challenges that makes me think critically about how I understand and practice feminism. Both of these albums made me a feminist largely because of the boys I was preoccupied with at the time.
But while my initial reception and resulting connections to them were tied up with potentially normative feelings around romantic angst and heterosexual coupling, I feel the albums speak to my development at the time as well as transcend it. In other words, Homogenic and Vespertine may remind me of boys I used to date, but they speak to larger, more overtly feminist issues as well.
Of course, being a feminist doesn’t mean you can’t like boys or be hung up on them from time to time, so long as you don’t let them run your life. Which I don’t think Björk endorses in either of these records, even though she herself has an ambivalent relationship with feminism (though not with calling out the music industry’s sexist practices of attributing male engineers and instrumental songwriters).
Importantly, as both albums were prescient to my development, they also went over my head when I first listened to them. Debut and Post were more accessible and, as a result, I liked them almost immediately. It was hard for 10-year-old me not to fall for the girl dancing through New York City on a flatbed in the music video for “Big Time Sensuality.”
But Björk’s next two albums took more time to process. Both albums mark advances in the artist’s production sensibilities, approaches to music-making, and interest in electronic instrumentation. Thus, just as Björk had to evolve as a musician before creating these albums, I had to mature a bit as a person before liking them as a fan.
So, Homogenic came out just as I was starting high school. I don’t exactly remember when I bought it, but I think it was sometime toward the end of junior year. I completely ignored it at the time. Or rather, I listened to it once, went “ooh, so angry!” and put Post back on.
The particulars I’ll keep to myself for the sake of decorum. Suffice it to say that I dated someone for a little while, fell in love, we broke up, and I spent a little over a year trying to get us back together. It didn’t work out. Eventually I got over him and whatever I thought we were, but not without some pain and denial and then serious personal re-evaluation. The healing process involved some righteous anger, loud parties, several bottles of wine and other goodies, and burgeoning feminist development. After a rough start, 19 turned out to be a pretty okay year. Homogenic was its soundtrack.
Now, I have no problem acknowledging that this guy was a total jerk to me. But feminism isn’t only about recognizing and calling out chauvinistic bullshit. It’s also about self-empowerment, personal accountability, and un-learning heteronormativity and patriarchal co-dependence. It isn’t always just the guy’s fault, even when it is.
Thus, I also have to own up to being really needy and delusional at the time. I pinned my worth on whoever I was dating without questioning whether being with them was actually good for me. So I projected my own big feelings and insecurities on someone who clearly didn’t want to be with me. I was ignoring the reality of the situation and, as a result, my own well-being. I finally recognized what I was doing when confronted with the lyric “How could I be so immature to think he could replace the missing elements in me — how extremely lazy of me.”
Kinda appropriate that a break-up record got me over mine, no? Apparently, Björk made the album after breaking up with drum’n'bass musician Goldie while they were working on their own project. Hence lines like “So you left me on my own to complete the mission, but now I’m leaving it all behind.” But it pretty much hit all the right notes of melancholy, indignation, rage, and feisty recovery for me. I’m a quarter Norwegian on my mother’s side, so even the line ”I thought I could organize freedom — how Scandinavian of me” in “Hunter” applied.
Attention must be paid to the album’s sound and how it marked a musical departure for Björk. Post was an eclectic mix that boasted songs like “Army of Me,” “Enjoy,” and “Headphones,” that opened up her sound to include state-of-the-art aggressive digital distortion and serene electronic minimalism.
While this was evident in the production work Tricky and 808 State’s Graham Massey did on Post, it wasn’t the focus. It would come to define the artistic work she began doing with producers like Mark Bell on Homogenic and would continue to do with Matmos on Vespertine. But I’d hedge that most casual listeners just remember Post‘s ”It’s Oh So Quiet,” which was produced by Björk’s then-mainstay, Nellee Hooper, the man responsible for all the production on her breakthrough Debut. He was also responsible for “Hyperballad,” which I’d argue suggests the artist’s shift, which is fully evident on her next album.
Man, I wish I could post the music video, but WMG has apparently disabled the audio. All the more reason to check out Michel Gondry’s Directors Label DVD, or any of the other myriad DVD titles that have documented her videography.
So Homogenic marks a transition from being a pop star to an artist who challenges her listeners’ ears and expectations with each release. By 1997, we also heard alternative pop stars like Beck and Radiohead establish themselves similarly with Odelay and OK Computer. We would hear Radiohead do it again in 2000 with the mind-blowing Kid A, where they really demonstrated their love for electronic instrumentation and experimental production techniques.
Björk was already on this path in 1997, but while Radiohead looked outward toward the fallabilities of modern life, Björk looked inward at the seductive pleasures and wobbly peculiarities of domestic life and partnership on her next record, rapturing at her voice’s clicks and finding percussive possibilities out of shuffled decks of cards. I don’t think these innovations went unnoticed when Radiohead went to work on In Rainbows. To me, Vespertine‘s influence is all over a song like “Nude,” which was originally an outtake from OK Computer. This is further confirmed by the band’s rendition of Homogenic‘s ”Unravel” as a tip of the hat. As if lead singer Thom Yorke’s backing vocals on “Náttúra” aren’t enough.
Hmmm. Maybe at some point, I’ll consider Yorke’s duets with Björk and PJ Harvey. Yorke is one of my favorite vocalists, a fact confirmed by a recent revisit of Hail to the Thief.If one of my friends ran a blog on male masculinity and music culture, I’d pen a guest entry in a second.
But I was afflicted with a troubled mind when Vespertine first came out. In addition to boy heartache, I was going through some considerable familial strife. I was also starting my first semester of college, so a tackier person might blame 9/11.
After seeing the music video for “Hidden Place,” I dutifully bought the album, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, another at-the-time inscrutable release, at the Tower Records by campus. I listened to the album a few times, but my head was not in the right place for it. It was too contented and quiet. I couldn’t hear it. And then for a little while all I could hear was Homogenic at full volume.
Stills from the video that convinced me to buy "Vespertine"; image courtesy of unit.bjork.com
To be blunt, Vespertine didn’t really make sense to me until I started having sex. Critics like Ryan Dombal would seem to concur. I remember seeing her performance of ”Cocoon” on Jay Leno and thinking that it was really quiet, but totally not getting how micro-embodied intimacy is the song’s entire purpose. While I had a good understanding of mechanics and had engaged in related activities before going into my first listen, I don’t think a song like “Cocoon” makes sense to a person unless they’ve experienced it, to speak euphemistically, in a corporeal sense.
BTW, yes that is Bill O’Reilly adjusting his tie. If he was actually listening to the song, I’m sure he’d be appalled by how delightfully, defiantly sexual this song is and that it was performed uncensored on network television. Watching it now, I can’t believe I wasn’t really listening. Maybe I should have been leaning into the television.
Again, the particulars here aren’t really important. I was a week or so into being 20 and, frankly, didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. The guy was someone willing, it was fun, and didn’t last very long.
In short, the romanticism and emotional connectedness that is often built into such an experience was not there, nor do I regret that it wasn’t. I would find that later, which would make my understanding of those aspects of Vespertine more profound and further develop my feminist principles.
I bring sex into the discussion because I, to borrow briefly from Arrested Development‘s George Michael Bluth, find Vespertine‘s complex eroticism one of its most key contributions to what made me a feminist. Though perhaps a stretch and certainly not without its own distinctions, I tend to think of this album in accord with Audre Lorde’s wonderful essay “Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power.”
And while I don’t know if this entry’s subject has read the essay, something tells me that the same woman who identifies as bisexual and recognizes the erotic potential in mundane activities would concur with much of the theorist’s thesis.
Of course, feminists must also have the wherewithal to recognize that eroticism, even ephemeral evidence like orgasms, are luxuries to some women and girls. Not everyone is given a space, a country, or a political system that allows them the safety and freedom to enjoy and explore these possibilities.
But eroticism isn’t about cataloging who did what to whom for Björk. As David Fricke gestured toward in his review of the album for Rolling Stone, it might be everywhere, at once tangible and theoretical.
This is where I think it’s important to consider the album’s production sensibilities and Björk’s particular uses of her voice. In addition to non-conventional practices like sampling and turning seemingly non-musical domestic items into instruments, the singer’s voice is the album’s real focus. Because of how closely she’s miked, you can hear every tic, breath, whispered turn of phrase, and any other sound coming out of her mouth. As a result, her voice becomes a varied and vital instrument, an idea she has continued to develop and that has continued to stay with me.
Tracy + the Plastics; image courtesy of criticalmiami.com
My friend Morgan is taking a grad seminar on divas through UT’s Theatre and Dance department. Kinda amazing, right? Makes you wish you were in school, talking about Mariah Carey and getting college credit, doesn’t it? Me too. I always remember this when someone posts a horror story on Facebook about admission cutbacks, hiring freezes, and when you’re supposed to make babies.
A class on divas fascinates me. If I were taking this class, I’d have so many questions. Who is a diva? What makes a diva? Does a diva have to be glamourous? Does a diva have to be campy? Is performance inherrent to being a diva and, if so, can anti-performance fit into this construction? Does being a diva mean vocal virtuosity? Is being a diva about turning spectacle into art, or deriving art out of spectacle? How do the interstices of identity play into the construction of a diva’s persona(e) and fan base? Can a diva be male, despite diva Beyoncé’s assertion that a diva is a female version of a hustler?
I think that last one is totally rhetorical. Guys can totally be divas. And as I support being flexible with language to include female contributions, I also endorse that we not masculinize originally female-gendered terminology when applying it to boys and men. I’ll not stand for this “divo” business — Kanye is a diva. A diva can also clearly be trans or intersex.
I think we can also agree on performance being intrinsic to the diva. But is there a specific way that performance has to be packaged? Does a diva have to make a scene at the Grammys or can s/he do it in some rundown cabaret or house party?
These questions lead me toward an issue I’m not so sure about, and am going to take this blog as a forum to play with. Does a diva require or need to project a lavish lifestyle, and thus tied to capital? I have a few ladies in mind to complicate the classed notions of the diva. Admittedly, they’re kinda art-fuck suggestions meant to subvert the normative positionings of this cultural figure. They’re also adult, white, and biologically female, perhaps causing them to abide by aforementioned norms. So if you’re like “what about _______?,” feel free to share.
For my first post on divas, I offer up the now-defunct solo project Tracy + the Plastics for consideration. Does Wynne Greenwood’s use of elliptical song structures, graphically candid confessionals, antiquated electronic instruments, and video installations to play with identity, gender, sexuality, and performance make her a diva? Why or why not?
Max screams; image courtesy of cherryhill.injersey.com
I saw Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are this past Saturday. At the Imax, dudes. With actual children, no less. And then I had a lovely dinner for four that two friends cooked. Austin is a town full of hospitable folk doing their part to drive the long-anticipated feature to the number one draw at the box office. Y’all come.
Now, I’ve been waiting for Jonze’s third feature, based on the classic Maurice Sendak children’s book, to come out for years (I guess on the heels of his video for Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights,” the duo have released We Were Once a Fairytale – thanks for the update, Annie).And while the $600 playsuit threatened to put a damper on the proceedings, dammit if I didn’t choke up every time I saw the trailer. In short, my expectations were susceptible to being dashed.
So I was pleasantly surprised that they pretty much weren’t. My only real complaint is that I actually think the script Jonze and Dave Eggers put together could have been less conventional. That said, the movie does a commendable job bridging a fantastical island of wild things from the protagonist Max’s imagination into some place at once real and unreal — the wild things are faithfully rendered from the book, yet have names like Carol and Alexander. It also does a good job capturing the loose pacing and the seemingly nonsensical ideas that come to life from creative processes. Carol, the leader of the wild things, builds a miniature world that contains all his friends and idealized notions of life with them in a manner at once so precise and makeshift that I couldn’t help but wonder if the diarama was Jonze’s tip of the hat to buddy Michel Gondry. Max orders the wild things to build a fortress that seems impossible to build, until it materializes before our eyes.
Oh, and I can’t believe I saw a big-budget mainstream motion picture where all of the studio logos were defaced by children’s doodlings.
There are startling moments of realism in Max’s fantasy world, as when a real raccoon appears in a wild thing’s belly named Richard or when another wild thing rescues a housecat. There’s also shocking moments of aural and physical violence, both in Max’s real and imagined worlds. A wild thing rips a limb off another, teenage boys dive into the igloo Max lovingly built out of snow in his front yard, Max tells his mother (played by the superlative Catherine Keener) a story about a vampire who loses his fangs while trying to bite through a castle’s walls. Nothing is more violent than our emotions, however, especially when they materialize as shouts of joy and squishy snot pools of angst.
Mother-son fighting; image courtesy of daemonsmovies.com
For Max, almost all of these emotions and flights of fancy are the result of his parents’ recent divorce, clearly Jonze’s attempt to process his childhood and his dissolved marriage to Sofia Coppola. Some people may really hate this narrative decision, which is no where addressed in the skeletal source material. I note that Sendak intentionally left the story elliptical and thus would be heartened to see multiple adaptations of this book from a variety of directors, each with their own sense of character motivation and plot. Also, as a product of a broken home who in all likelihood was sitting in a theater with other children and adults who dealt with divorce, I found a tremendous amount of catharsis in watching this lonely boy try — and sometimes fail — to work through his feelings about what once was but can never be again. Speaking for myself, I got through this by drawing murals of mermaids that talked to me, having eight imaginary sisters named Jessica, and running in my backyard alone pretending to be a fairy. So I felt for Max.
Thinking about kids, let me give it up for the crowd with whom I saw this movie. Possibly the only screening I’ve been to where the sound of babies crying actually added to the ambiance, I’m happy to report that the theater I saw this movie in was teeming with kids. And not all white, liberal, hipster kids whose parents like movies that do well in Brooklyn. “Regular” kids, some with bowl haircuts and homemade crowns and Nike running shoes. ”Normal” kids who seemed energized by the movie afterwards (as someone who was scared of monsters, I would not have been one of those kids). And most of them seemed to be pretty on-the-ball, problematizing some of the speculations that kids won’t “get” this movie. I’d gladly point out the boy behind us who instantly figured out that two squawking owls were telling a knock-knock joke.
And speaking of on-the-ball kids, I can’t believe lead actor Max Records has only been in a few other things. With that too-cool-for-school name, I do believe that Lance Bangs (aka Lester Bangs’s son, aka Mr. Corin Tucker) discovered him. That said, there isn’t a false moment in his multi-faceted performance. Also, I feel a little weird about this, but he’s a total hottie-to-be, not unlike Emma Watson when she starred in the first few Harry Potter movies.
Hipster pre-teen idol; image courtesy of weloveyouso.com
As for the sounds, two things struck me about this movie that I haven’t fully processed but stay with me long after the initial viewing. One is the score. I’ve been thinking about Karen O and Carter Burwell’s work here for some time. I listened to the soundtrack after Stereogum posted it. On its own, it was pleasant and at times interesting, but seemingly not of a piece. With the visuals, however, the songs Karen O put together with Burwell and as one of the Kids take on new resonance. Her vocals also seem to help us orient and empathize with Max. Using a woman’s voice to identify with a boy protagonist is interesting, and certainly plays with notions of queerness, androgyny, and between-ness. This ambiguity was something that seemed possible in some of the M.I.A. songs used in portions of Slumdog Millionaire that focused on protagonist Jamal’s childhood. It is certainly evident in the construction of Max’s pre-pubescent, slightly degendered, soft boy identity here.
A final thing that interested me that I hadn’t anticipated was the use of voice actors for the wild things. Forrest Whitaker, Catherine O’Hara, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano, and James “Tony Soprano” Gandolfini lent their voices and considerable acting ability to create a whole different sense of aural corporeality and heightened realness to these otherwise fantastical monsters. When Ambrose’s KW tells Max “I’ll eat you up, I love you so” as she bids him goodbye as he returns home from his imaginary travels, I believe it and don’t forget the sound of her words.
You know what? If Kristen Chenoweth, Lea Michele, and Liza Minnelli were in the periphery of yesterday’s Scarjo post, let’s make today’s post be all about them and their awesome pipes.
Kristen Chenoweth as April, hoping for that strike; image courtesy of tvovermind.com
Lea Michele's Rachel, striking gold at the bowling alley with glee clubber Finn; image courtesy of stayinginwithvlada.com
So, if you’re watching Glee, you might have been so excited to see a TV show that closed with a rousing rendition of Queen’s “Somebody To Love,” getting at least one person closer to her goal of seeing it performed by an entire dramatic ensemble like the “Wise Up” scene in Magnolia.
More importantly, you might have been won over by Chenoweth and Michele’s duet on “Maybe This Time.” (BTW, thanks Neesha for making me think to spotlight this scene.) Followers know the cruel irony of this song’s inclusion in a series as deceptively sad and desperate as this one. Chenoweth’s April Rhodes is a washed-up former glee clubber with a surprising amount of Jerri Blank’s warped charm. Michele’s Rachel Berry is a talented, go-gettin’ ingenue who is just barely hiding how profoundly lonely she is.
You may also recognize the show’s not-so-secret gift of making the sheer cathartic power and physical release of a pop song or musical number to make both the singer and the spectator transcend to a higher plane (for a more abstract example of how the corporeality of singing can reinvigorate both parties, I’ll point you toward the Patrick Daughters-directed music video for Grizzly Bear’s “Two Weeks,” wherein the four-piece are so overjoyed by the power of singing, their heads catch on fire as I get goosepimply).
If we dig a little deeper, the Minnelli reference comes in. “Maybe This Time” was originally written for Bob Fosse’s film adaptation of Kander and Ebb’s stage musical, Cabaret, which Rachel is starring in (and a real high school would almost certainly never stage, even though I begged our choir director for us to do it). The musical, adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin, involves the doomed romance between Cliff, an American journalist, and Sally Bowles, a blindly determined British showgirl who makes the decision to stay in 1930s Berlin just as Hitler is starting to get a chokehold on Germany while her partner flees back to the states. In the movie version, Bowles is American, and played with put-upon worldliness and brittle vulnerability by Liza Minnelli, who won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance.
Admittedly, if the song Glee had chosen was “Cabaret,” which was in both the stage and film versions, Liza’s version of it would add another layer of readability, as it’s impossible for me to hear this version of the song, which is performed right at the moment when Bowles’s personal life is going to hell, and not think of Mama Judy Garland.
But I think these twin versions of “Maybe This Time” speak to a few key issues particularly poignant to women and girls’ relationship to musical theater and to the outside world: the gendered masquerade of happiness for the sake of upholding spectacle, the ability to stop time and transmorph because of the aural spectacle of your own voice, and the strength your voice has to keep you persevering. Because the push you’re looking for to get through the next set of insurmountable odds might be found by landing that high note.
Someone To Drive You Home cover, Rough Trade 2006/2007; image courtesy of pitchfork.com
Two areas I don’t recall covering in the blog so far are 1) bands whose songs focus on cinephilia and 2) female musicians who use their visual arts training in the service of their bands. Today, we can focus on both by considering The Long Blondes’ debut full-length Someone To Drive You Home and lead singer Kate Jackson’s artwork for said album.
So I’m new to this band, who I guess are no longer a band. That’s a bummer, but at least I’ve had fun pumping this album at full volume in my car this past week as the skies became increasingly overcast. And singing at full volume. As my friend Brea mentioned in her entry about records that made her a feminist, it’s important for women and girls to find singers whose vocal ranges match their own. It’s really true. Perhaps we could think of it as double-identification — being able to relate to a female singer’s persona as conveyed through her lyrics, performance style, fashion sense or whatever on one level and being able to replicate, mirror, or blend her tone, pitch, and timbre with your own. However we want to theorize it, I’m glad that my notes can work with Jackson’s strong, supple alto.
Matching a singer’s range also makes shouting easier. I love Animal Collective, but screaming along to Avey Tare doesn’t make any sense for me. We can try and make it queer or whatever, but it really just feels silly and strained to my throat and ears. Screaming “Edie Sedgwick! Anna Karina! Arlene Dahl!” along with Jackson, on the other hand, makes perfect sense.
Edie Sedgwick; image courtesy of fashionista.com
The opening track, appropriately titled “Lust In the Movies,” is a good transition into the defunct band’s cinephilic leanings. Indeed, the movies are everywhere. Specifically movies from the post-war era, a considerable amount of them of the film noir tradition or have some kind of sinister edge, while others are campy b-movies that have since cashed in on retro chic.
Imagined film snob boys corrupt willing schoolgirls with Russ Meyer films in “Fulwood Babylon.” Girls want to be cool enough for the movies that play in film snob boys’ heads in “Lust in the Movies.” A boy and a girl compare themselves to C.C. Baxter, The Apartment‘s love-lorn protagonist in “You Could Have Both.” Obscure references to British celebrities of the 1940s and 1950s like Hattie Jacques and Peter Rogers thread through break-up narratives like “Five Ways to End It.” Greta Garbo is looked upon with envy (and irony?) as the woman who snagged all the handsome men in “Never to Be Repeated.” “Only Lovers Left Alive” is inspired by Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity, a romantic sentiment perhaps echoed in Jackson’s sleeve art, which references Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern’s frenzied lovers in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.
As many of these movies are classic Hollywood, iconographic art house, and/or have the Criterion stamp of approval, we might call them films instead of movies, if the writer of this blog held fast to making such a distinction.
Now, we could get into a discussion of what this means in terms of preference and why more clearly feminist classics don’t get shout-outs like, say, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, or Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Maybe they haven’t seen these movies. Maybe they thought the last movie I mentioned was boring (the 200-minute running time has kept me from seeing it, though it is in my Netflix queue). However, I’d hazard to guess that the Russ Meyer reference in “Fulwood Babylon” might be done with a bit of feminist cheek, and while I have trouble reading the nuances of intentional camp in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, I’m sure my friend Curran would smile and nod in recognition of the reference.
And yet. I find how film references are used in these songs to be particularly interesting. For one, I think especially in “Lust in the Movies” and “Fulwood Babylon,” a critique is being made by Kate (and her chorus of singing fans) against the sorts of boys who live in movies (perhaps including Dorian Cox, a former Long Blonde who co-wrote the majority of the album with Jackson). These boys are too busy looking for Edie Sedgwick, Anna Karina, and Arlene Dahl to notice the real woman in front of them. Fools.
For another, I find the blurring between fantasy and reality, the projected and the lived, the fantastical and the mundane heartening and relateable. Many of these songs are not actually about being in the movies, but wishing you could be or pretending you are to get over a failed relationship, get through your boring day job, get ready for a night out, get in the car to leave town, or simply get through your 20s.
There’s some humanity in these songs, particularly between women and girls. Two lonely girls flee their humdrum lives together in “Separated By Motorways.” A spurned lover hopes her ex’s new love fares better than she did after the break-up in “Heaven Help the New Girl.” A twentysomething tells a 19-year-old girl that she doesn’t need to resort to mutilation to get through that stupid, cursed age in “Once and Never Again,” a solidarity anthem so catchy that I just requested it be added to the Karaoke Underground song list.
And while the movies being referenced aren’t explicitly feminist (or argued and/or championed as such by theoretically florid film scholars), I’d argue that there’s much going on with the female movie icons that Jackson’s and her songs’ protagonists (which may be iterations of herself) identify. Having brought up Sedgwick, Karina, Dahl, Garbo, this is where I’ll fold in Jackson’s spare, mysterious cover. The woman in the cover is recognizable to many as Bonnie Parker, as played by Faye Dunaway in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, a divisive and galvanizing movie that marked a sea change in American cinema, upped the ante for screen violence, reflected the shift in generational values, presupposed the turbulent year that would be 1968, and made thousands of women cut and straighten their hair into sleek bobs by Dunaway’s influence. It might have made them want to tote guns, fire bullets, and rob banks too. In short, this was seen as a dangerous film that still holds some influence as a countercultural text that appeals to men and women.
Some of those women may still be shuffling through their 20s, figuring it out. They might not be compelled to rob a bank, but they might be tempted to quit their job, or at least bitch about work at the local bar. Hopefully they won’t bitch about each other as much, as this cattiness is evident on the album and something I’d like us to rise above. But there’s something nice about being reassured that someone, whether a movie character or a friend, will be there to drive you home. Even if your car is riddled with bullet holes.
