I’m assuming that everyone who regularly follows this blog is by now aware of two musical projects involving members of Sleater-Kinney. One is Wild Flag, an indie rock supergroup comprised of guitarist Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss, as well as Mary Timony and The Minders’ Rebecca Cole. The other is the Corin Tucker Band, whose 1,000 Years, which Kill Rock Stars will officially release on Tuesday that I listened to via NPR’s First Listen series.
In my world, Wild Flag coexists with . . . ; image courtesy of pitchfork.com
. . . Corin Tucker Band; image courtesy of undertheradarmag.com
I’m excited about these developments for a few reasons. I regret missing an opportunity to see Sleater-Kinney despite having heard recordings that confirm their reputation as one of the most formidable live rock acts in recent memory. But I’m pleased that the trio is attempting to make new music rather than take the more lucrative but potentially less creatively ambitious route of reuniting. Several peer acts choose the latter. While I don’t want to assume that Pavement, Slint, Guided By Voices, and others are merely cashing in on fans and interlopers’ nostalgic itch, there’s something unfulfilling to me about fashioning a simulacra of past concert experiences for a present-day audience. It’s not gonna feel like 1995, yo.
Thus, I think it’s braver to make new music within a different context, especially when female artists often have more abbreviated periods of cultural relevance than their male counterparts. I also think its empowering for veteran female musicians to come together to produce new work, as Tucker is doing with Unwound’s Sara Lund alongside her former band members efforts. In Brownstein’s case, I’m also energized by her ability to pursue multiple interests across media platforms, including music, blogging, and adapting a successful Web-based comedy series into a television program.
I have an investment in the music as well. Tucker’s 1,000 Years is a strong release with a particularly haunting first half that has Tucker exploring a myriad of musical influences beyond Sleater-Kinney’s feminist musical reinterpretations of Led Zeppelin. And while I didn’t catch the Shells, Brownstein and Timony’s past project that some friends found underwhelming, nor am I a Quasi fan, I am invigorated by the merging of Timony and Weiss’ uncontested instrumental profficiency.
Make no mistake. I’d absolutely attend a Sleater-Kinney reunion gig. I just find these developments far more interesting.
A portrait of the artist as a young dyke; image courtesy of austinchronicle.com
I finished Ariel Schrag’s Likewise earlier last week and finally stole some time to write about it. Though denser and more structurally complicated than the three previous titles of her high school comic series, this one may be my favorite. Oh, who are we kidding? It’s in part because of those things that I liked it best.
Taking her cues from James Joyce’s Ulysses, Schrag attempts her most ambitious work with Likewise, incorporating a stream-of-conscious approach to storytelling and a panoply of writing and visual styles to document her senior year. I was especially interested in this, as I was always jealous of my high school friends a year ahead of me who got to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in senior AP English and write their autobiographies in a Joycean style. By the time I started senior year, the book had been taken out of the curriculum. Since then, I haven’t made time to read any Joyce. Having read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and heard Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, which “likewise” (har har) share Ulysses as an influence, I best get on this.
Fun Home (Mariner Books, 2006); image courtesy of wordbrooklyn.com
Hounds of Love (EMI, 1985); image courtesy of wikimedia.org
In Likewise, Schrag incorporates Joyce’s challenging writing style into the graphic novel, using images as a means to anchor the content. Sometimes, events are presented in a straightforward fashion. Some events — particularly mundane occurrences — are retold in painstaking detail, as is the case with the 30 pages used to recount a circular conversation with friends about the elusive “It” factor. Other times, remembered dialogue inspires the narrator to free associate or drifts her off on tangents. Panels may include carefully typed, detailed exposition or notecards scrawled in haste or pictures without captions.
Many of these images are startling, both in the graphic nature of their content and in their matter-of-fact depictions. Recalling Schrag’s rendering of menstruation colliding with virginity loss in Potential, several panels focus on the protagonist’s reflections and engagements with penetration, cunnilingus, masturbation, and bathroom time. Schrag also doesn’t shy from revealing deep feelings, no matter how contradictory or unflattering. For a piece some detractors dismissed as an indulgent vanity project, Schrag isn’t too preoccupied with looking good.
Despite its stylistic departure, Likewise is in many ways a continuation of Potential. The tome to her junior year is released during Schrag’s senior year. As the pressure of its success looms over her, attention is paid toward it in Likewise. She is also dealing with the aftermath of her parents’ divorce, her parents’ struggle to fund her college education upon early admittance to Barnard, her mother’s noncommital hippie boyfriend, and her unresolved feelings for erstwhile paramour Sally Jults, who is ostensibly straight and attending Reed College.
As with Definition and Potential, Schrag lets us in on experiences meant to bolster her writing process, which involves recording friends’ conversations, get stoned with her mother and kid sister, taking head shots of characters, heart-to-heart conversations with mentor teacher Ms. Salt, remembering and forgetting and misremembering Jults, fooling around, entertaining publication interviews, working part-time at a movie theater, going to friends’ concerts, accompanying friend Zally to a strip club for “research,” and jilling off.
She also includes negative opinions toward her work, recounting her father and some peers’ less-favorable attitudes toward the seemingly uneventful (and unabashedly queer) Potential. She herself bristles at the mistakes she finds when revisiting Awkward and Definition, but marvels at her rapid artistic and personal maturation in the two-year interval. While I treasured all of these moments, my favorite might be her stumbling upon the name of her final installment. As a fellow writer, I can relate to the pleasure of accomplishment that comes with settling on the perfect title.
I find it particularly interesting that Schrag continues to question her sexuality in Likewise, noting some of the latent homophobia she may share with Jults. She also grapples with feeling conventionally masculine within a cisgender female body, at times seemingly imagining herself having sex with women as a man. She fools around with a few boys in Likewise, most notably Zally and co-worker Darrek. This doesn’t detract from her attraction in women, however, nor does it build up her tolerance for listening to boys prattle. Toward the end of Likewise, Schrag attempts to document Darrek and another male co-worker discuss why they like Helium’s Mary Timony but makes them stop out of boredom.
My only quibble with Likewise is the omniscience of Schrag’s guitar. Recalling the function of Chekhov’s gun, I waited for the protagonist to pick it up but she never does. I have no problem with how Schrag chose to spend her teenage years — in fact, I marvel at how she used her artistic inclinations toward published manifestations of personal expression. But if she’s not playing it, I know a certain blogger who’d be happy to document putting it to use.
Just got back from teaching music history workshops with Kristen at Act Your Age for Girls Rock Camp Austin, which “rocked.” I will post about what I learned from the experience tomorrow, but I kinda need to recover and eat some dinner. I happened to have a review of Helium’s 1997 album The Magic City in the pocket. I was obsessed with the album a couple of months ago after I snagged a used copy signed by leader Mary Timony during a rediscovery period prompted by the 120 Minutes Archive. So let’s talk about why Helium was an awesome band and why this album exemplifies that. Because, if indeed this decade will revive music from the 90s, I hope those who rediscover indie rock stalwarts like Pavement pay equal consideration to fellow Matador act Helium.
Helium's The Magic City (Matador, 1997); image courtesy of amazon.com
As a proper follow-up to their debut, The Dirt of Luck, and a sonic and conceptual expansion of their murky sound, 1997’s The Magic City tends to be overlooked despite being well-regarded in its time. However, the band’s prog-influenced sophomore (and final) effort is often cited as a fan favorite, perhaps prompting artists like Ben Gibbard to name-check singer/guitarist Timony in Death Cab for Cutie’s “Your Bruise.” The band’s legacy lives in contemporary acts like Austin’s YellowFever. Furthermore, Timony is still active. It may make more sense to revisit The Dirt of Luck, particularly for the inclusion of breakthrough single “Pat’s Trick” and its accompanying music video. But The Magic City is a clear artistic achievement that deserves further consideration.
Prog evokes ideations of the concept album. Yet it’s hard to ascertain what this sophomore effort is about. Some may think the album is about Timony’s then-boyfriend Ash Bowie. Others may consider her lyrics as evidence of Timony’s affinity toward hippie spiritualism, nature’s ephemera, space, Christian and Pagan iconography, and stoner poetry.
Having revisited Joanna Newsom’s auspicious sophomore full-length Ys, which is also heavily shrouded in symbolic language, it’s still a jolt when she makes mention of an “awfully real gun” amidst the romantic turmoil of “Only Skin.” Similarly, it’s shocking how often the real world intrudes in Timony’s lyrics. Opening track “Vibrations” opines about astrology while reminding the listener that she’s always available for a chat on the phone. Single “Leon’s Space Song” finds her telling an adversary that her Los Angeles friends like her better. “Aging Astronauts” includes weary mention of perennial air travel. “Ancient Crymes” reveals how Timony finds power in being rude and that she’s down for a party. That Timony is able to incorporate the spiritual realm into the mundane is no small feat. She conveys this in large part through the evasive yet surprisingly expressive qualities of her deadpan alto.
The Magic City also reveals itself to be a relic of the album’s cultural wane. Though some carry the mantle of the full-length, less care has been given to sequencing and cohesion. This cannot be said of this album. There’s a concerted effort to project grandeur, primarily through Timony’s virtuosic guitar playing on songs like the 8-minute opus “Revolution of Hearts Parts 1 and 2.” It repeats musical themes and returns to certain lyrical images while subtly suggesting variance with a diverse assemblage of instruments and compositional stylings, indicating the era’s interest in hybridity.
Mary Timony, I love you and want your guitar; image courtesy of brooklynvegan.com
Instrumentals like “Medieval People” also suggests the band had more in common with agit-pop acts like Brainiac (another band in need of a revival) than Yes. However, I’d like to think one of Helium’s key contributions to indie rock in their brief career was that these acts could co-exist on one beguiling album.
The ArchAndroid (Wondaland Arts Society/Bad Boy, 2010); image courtesy of wikimedia.org
A lot of people have been talking about Janelle Monáe, myself included. I wrote about her look and sound here and here, as well as her music video for “Tightrope” during my recent stint at Bitch. Her album, TheArchAndroid Suites II and III, was released last month and many wonder if she represents the future of pop music. Showcasing an eclectic blend of genres and references to tell the story of a futuristic messianic figure named Cindy Mayweather, Monáe channels her love of science fiction to create music that’s entrenched in the past, yet remains fresh and singular. Not since perhaps David Bowie’s incarnation as Ziggy Stardust has high-concept pop music sounded so fun.
Do Ziggy Stardust and Cindy Mayweather live in the same galaxy?; image courtesy of guardian.co.uk
Some critics note Monáe’s indebtedness to a myriad of popular influences. In a recent Culture Gabfest podcast, Jody Rosen rattled off seemingly disparate folks who inform her sound like Fela Kuti (evident on songs like “Dance Or Die”), jump blues pioneer Louis Jordan (“Faster,” “Come Alive,” “Tightrope”), 60s British psych folk (the verses to “Oh, Maker”), and 80s punk and new wave (“Come Alive”). Obviously James Brown factors prominently here as well.
I point him toward the artists I mapped out in my Bitch entry and raise him Astrud Gilberto (“Sir Greendown”), Simon and Garfunkel (“57821″), Wendy and Lisa (“Wondaland”), and Prince’s psychedelic inclinations (“Mushrooms & Roses”). There are notable pairings with Saul Williams in “Dance or Die” and Of Montreal on “Make the Bus.” There are even direct references to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Rodgers and Hart’s “With a Song In My Heart”, and Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune.
The emphasis on musical reference and hybridity also links The ArchAndroid to artists like Beck, Cornershop, and mentors’ OutKast who anticipated the iPod on shuffle approach ubiquitous to pop music during the 90s. I detect kinship between Monáe and Gnarls Barkley in “Cold War.” In its embrace of concept and musical extravagance, I note a tenuous connection with Gorillaz and Bat for Lashes as well. And strangely enough, I also sense an unexpected affinity between The ArchAndroid and Helium’s The Magic City, the sophomore release of an indie rock band whose leader Mary Timony wanted to channel her love of prog rock into an album full of varied sonic atmospheres and rich storytelling. In short, there’s a city’s worth of ideas in Monáe’s head, as the album cover suggests.
I wonder if Janelle Monáe digs on Mary Timony: Helium's The Magic City (Matador, 1997); image courtesy of matadorrecords.com
If this list suggests that the music contained within The ArchAndroid is derivative, belabored, unformed, or tedious, it’s to the album’s credit that it certainly doesn’t sound that way. In fact, save for the extraneous (“BabopbyeYa”), I marvel at how the 18-track album simultaneously works as a collection of singles and as a cohesive album with considerable buoyancy. I’d wager that one could go in without knowing about the story or any of the reference points and gladly navigate its varied pop terrain at home with headphones and on the dance floor.
Some believe Monáe’s artistic ambitions exceed her grasp. But I’ll gladly champion a young artist bored with the limitations of a genre that she’s assumed to align with because of her race. Like Gnarls Barkley, she demands to be insinuated in pop music’s cultural history in order to reclaim black people’s obscured role in the creation of the form and I applaud that.
It’ll be interesting to see how Monáe and her audience will evolve, as she captures much of the same white hipster fanbase as OutKast, Kanye West, tour mate Erykah Badu, and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. But I have no doubt she’ll negotiate it with aplomb. With her focus as forward as her trademark pompadour, she’s hardly “just another weirdo.”
120 Minutes logo; image courtesy of theredradio.typepad.com
Recently, my friend Peter (who runs Manvertised) posted a link to the 120 Minutes Archive on Facebook. Some folks, like my friend Susan and maybe you, were way ahead of me on this one. But that didn’t keep me from squealing with glee over an evolving database of the music videos featured on MTV’s indie/underground music program. And it certainly fills a void that Pre-Durst never satisfied.
My family had cable intermittently throughout my childhood. The period in my life when having cable mattered to me was between sixth and eighth grade, which was a strange but glorious end of alternative rock and the music video era. Between 1993 to 1996, Sunday night was the couch potato highlight of my week.
I learned about 120 Minutes from my stepbrothers, who were also into Yo! MTV Raps, Headbangers Ball, andAlternative Nation. Though I knew that the show’s history stretched back into the mid-1980s, I only followed MTV’s left-of-the-dial video program in the mid-1990s. I had a television in my bedroom and no siblings to fight over the remote. As I’ve outlined previously, 120 Minutes was a big part of my Sunday night music geek routine. I’d burrow deep into bed and try to stay awake so I could absorb as much as possible. Without 120 Minutes, I might never have encountered Sonic Youth’s “Little Trouble Girl” or Cibo Matto’s “Know Your Chicken.”
And while I’d be short-sighted if I failed to notice the hip musical acts the network was pushing, I also wouldn’t know about bands like Helium, L7, Luscious Jackson, that dog., Lush, and many other hallmark bands of the period, much less pledge my allegiance to college radio.
The show informed the feminist development of this music geek. For me, the program is seventh grade. Seventh grade me, like many seventh grade girls, was a disaster. I was painfully shy but wanted to be involved with theater and, briefly, cheerleading. I painted my nails black but chewed until my cuticles bled. I was chubby, but primarily ate as a defense mechanism (in high school, I ate very little so I could be “pretty”). I had a hopeless crush on a popular boy who lived in my neighborhood, and would ride my bike by his front yard when he wasn’t home. I wanted to run with the eighth grade burn-out girls, but they wouldn’t hang. I could count my friends on one hand, and was often made fun of for being a fat kid. I cried most days when I came home from school, and usually before. When 8th grade came around, I made myself into a smart overachiever with a schedule packed with extracurricular activities. I also shopped at “preppy” retailers like the County Seat and starting eating a lot less. In short, 13-year-old me vehemently denied the existence of 12-year-old me.
Of course, 12-year-old me always existed and I still carry her with me. As I grew older, I learned to accept her and, thinking about my adolescence during modern rock’s last days, I really love her now. For one, I had style. I wore tiaras, pajama bottoms, and alligator slippers to school. I dressed up as Cleopatra for the Halloween dance when everyone else wore Yaga and shuffled to Hootie. My socks never matched. I toted around a Batman lunchbox I got from a thrift shop while visiting my father in Florida the summer before I started junior high. I wore six barrettes at a time like a rainbow. I asked my friend Kyle’s dad for all of his corduroys and cut them to fit me. I paired mechanic shirts with silver platform Skechers. I got made fun of for it, but I rocked that look.
Courtney Love and Amanda de Cadenet's 1995 Oscar attire was definitely a fashion inspiration for me, though I liked the tiaras more than the dresses; image courtesy of slackerchic.blogspot.com
And 12-year-old me may have run with a small group, but they were good, reliable people. Like the protagonist’s friends in Dyan Shelton’s Tall, Thin, and Blonde, they always saved a seat for me at our lunch table. And even when some of us grew apart during high school, we could still catch up whenever we saw each other. Plus, I had a cool slightly older stepbrother who’d play songs on his bass to cheer me up and make collages with me out when he’d visit. And I had a mom who gave me hugs, talked all the shit out with me, and took me to the park to scrawl out my angst on pieces of scrap paper so that I could burn them.
12-year-old me was also starting to develop good taste in music and already knew about some rad ladies. Sure it was shaped by corporate entities pushing of-the-moment artists signed to major labels and subsidiaries that took my allowance money. Rolling Stone and MTV were chief offenders. Spin was also starting to get my attention with their alternative record guide, though at this point I was unaware of college radio or downloading music and thus had to imagine what The Raincoats or Beat Happening sounded like. But I had an open mind and was learning how to record songs off the radio. Later, I’d reject nu metal on principle, have my own radio show, go to a bunch of concerts, read a lot of books, write a thesis on the Directors Label series, and put this thing together. Thanks, 120 Minutes. More importantly, thanks Alyx at 12.
As someone who works at an archive, I also appreciate the efforts independent, motivated people have made to preserve this important part of a network’s programming history and make it available to people, especially as it is now unrecognizable from its origins. The history major in me also appreciates being able to explore the rest of the series that I missed and gain a better sense of the show’s context.
There’s some stuff I miss that the archive doesn’t have. I wish the episodes were available in full, particularly the ones that featured musical guests as hosts. Things got really unpredictable and exciting when an act, or a few available band members, or two tangentally related musical artists shared space together (fans may remember Thurston Moore smashing a phone with Beck). I also liked when a band showed off their hometown, as Soul Asylum did when giving viewers a tour of Minneapolis during a 1995 taping. I liked guessing which music videos the artists’ picked out themselves and watching them grate against the latest Tripping Daisy or Frente! clip. These moments really gave viewers a larger sense of who the people were behind the records.
Most of all, I liked the show’s liveness — staged, pre-taped, or otherwise.
Because when the Johns from They Might Be Giants announced the 10th anniversary show, I felt like they were singing just to me.
And there’s plenty of other MTV programming that folks could archive. In addition to the music programming I outlined above, I’d love to see footage of Courtney Love’s 24-hour MTV2 takeover.
So while I’m happy about this archive, I’d treasure viewing fans’ VHS recordings of the show even more. As Charles R. Acland observed in his wonderful Flow column about video’s obsolescence and how media scholars must address the resultant loss of history, these tapes give us indications of a program’s text, its supertext, and the recorder’s preferences and practices. Something tells me there’s a Clearasil ad in one of those tapes and, with it, the ephemera and long-buried memories of its viewers.
Sometimes a movie just finds you right when you wanna see it. I felt this way the other night watching Alex Sichel’s only movie, 1997′s All Over Me. Five minutes into this poignant story (written by Alex’s sister Sylvia) about a young girl coming out, crushing on her friend, learning about homophobia, finding love, and thrashing on her guitar, I was hooked.
It didn’t hurt that the movie makes good use of Babes in Toyland and Sleater-Kinney.
I originally put this one in my Netflix queue because Leisha Hailey is in it. She has hot pink hair and plays in a band led by Helium’s Mary Timony called Coochie Pop. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I love her. I met her once when a friend was building her house in Marfa and she was as nice as I was paralyzed with awe. I think I was about 11 when I heard “You Suck,” a song she recorded as one-half of The Murmurs. I also really like their cover to the theme for H.R. Pufnstuf from the ultra-90s alterna compilation Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits. They were two girls with Manic Panic hair, acoustic guitars, and helium voices that swore a lot, often in harmony.
How can you not love her?; film still of Leisha Hailey's Lucy
And, then there’s all the other stuff she’s done. The Yoplait ads that a lot of people have slammed but that she and I argue are super-queer (especially this one). Her electro project Uh Huh Her (taken from the PJ Harvey album of same name). She was also consistently my favorite part of The L Word, playing sarcastic, loyal, proudly bisexual wordsmith and deejay Alice Pieszecki.
Anyway, Hailey’s the love interest in this one. And does she ever meet cute with the movie’s protagonist. They exchange flirtatious glances in a guitar store. Hearts.
The story itself focuses on Claude (not Claudette, even though that’s her given name), a fifteen-year-old, working class baby dyke who loves knee-length shorts, her guitar, and her best friend Ellen (played by be-credded Imitation of Christ impresario Tara Subkoff) who is in serious denial about her friend’s true feelings (and possibly her own).
All around Claude, people are correcting her, trying to convince her that she likes boys, telling her to dress more feminine, putting lipstick on her. It’s particularly hurtful that the worst enforcers of heteronormativity in her life are also the two closest female presences — Ellen and her single mother, Anne (played by Ann Dowd, who plays Cookie Kelly, a similarly unsympathetic mother, in Freaks and Geeks).
It doesn’t help matters that Claude is totally in love with her best friend, who has ambivalent feelings about their relationship. Ellen seems to be aware of Claude’s attraction, and in two instances (momentary) reciprocates physically, but quickly dismisses these moments, running away from them so as to get closer to Mark, her dangerous, homophobic, possessive, violent boyfriend who may have killed a young gay man in the neighborhood. He’s played to type by Cole Hauser, who may be a lovely individual, but has a low monotone and looks like a red-headed potato and thus seems pitch-perfect to play angry young chauvinists.
When Ellen isn’t running to Mark, she’s abusing drugs and drinking. Add to that her (anorexic?) skinniness and blondeness and you have a girl trying very hard to be rebellious and subversive but who actually plays right into staid notions of straight, white, patriarchal society. And while she always reaches out to Claude in need — notedly through music, as both girls play the guitar — she is just as quick to push her away.
Meanwhile, Claude can’t really abide by straightness or patriarchy. There’s no room for her without completely destroying her spirit. Actress Alison Folland (who I thought was heart-breaking in To Die For) makes Claude both nervous and sedate, on edge but starting to make peace and embrace her lesbianism, recognizing that a life in the closet is far graver than the initial scariness of coming out.
As a result of recognizing her burgeoning sexuality, Claude starts breaking from Ellen, making a few queer friends in the process. A pleasant surprise in the movie is the presence of Wilson Cruz. He plays Jesse, who works with Claude at the neighborhood pizza parlor. As many know, he played Ricky Vasquez on My So-Called Life, one of the first and more fully realized gay teens on television. In some ways, he’s not playing too dissimilar a character here — the gay friend — but, like Ricky, is also a quiet, pensive, damaged but resilient young man. And one key way that he is not just playing the gay friend is that he is the gay friend to a young lesbian, thus promoting the idea that members of the LGBT community can be friends and allies across orientations.
Claude also gets involved with Lucy, a local musician played by Leisha Hailey. While Lucy’s age is never explicitly stated, it is revealed that she lives at home with her dad, who is often away, implying that she’s about Claude age. Claude meets Lucy at her band’s concert, blown away by her talent. Yet, she’s able to play the chivalrous dyke and buy Lucy a drink. She then goes home with her to hang out and listen to records, while Ellen camps out with Mark in Claude’s bedroom. Claude puts on one album (presumably Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia), and has the following emotional scene.
While I have ideological problems with Patti Smith’s gender configurations and how essentializing and normativitizing (male) rock historians can be of her work (particularly Horses), I was completely moved by this scene. By my count, there’s two things going on here: Claude is in anguish over Ellen and she is starting to confront her fear and anxiety of being gay (“Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted? Should I go the length of a river?”).
Importantly, Claude isn’t galvanized after this scene or by this song (indeed, perhaps some would argue, in this movie, as she never has a big coming-out moment; the closest moments are at the end — one is implied, the other wordless). Through the rest of the movie, she struggles and evolves while learning to own and articulate her feelings for Lucy and confront the impossibly for her and Ellen to be together. Yet, Claude is becoming aware and is learning to develop and assert herself, potentially holding a guitar in one hand and Lucy’s hand in the other. No small feat for a fifteen-year-old lesbian teenager.
