Kara Walker at work; image courtesy of walkerart.org
Destroyer’s Kaputt came out last Tuesday. As a longtime fan of Dan Bejar’s main project, I’ve been pretty taken with it since tracks started filtering out late last year. My line about Destroyer is that it’s what English majors should be listening to instead of the Decemberists. That’s as much a glib comparison as it is a cheap shot against a band I actively dislike, especially since they have very little in common besides being led by a nasal-voiced front man with a love for big words. I will allow, however, that I’ve never understood the point of Colin Meloy’s lyrics. To my ears, it exists for its own sake and since I maintain that Meloy rivals Jay Leno as the public figure in possession of the most punchable jaw, I’ll interpret that sake as personal edification. Bejar could be accused of similar things, though his elliptical lyrics and prismatic compositions transfix me. Notice how vast “Rubies” is in its first half, only to drop into disarming intimacy. A symphony folds into a four-track recording. Staggering.
I’m interested in Bejar’s artistic evolution, particularly after Your Blues. Derided in some circles as “the MIDI album”–a reference to the antiquated musical interface used to provide much of the album’s background music–many found this stylistic departure from his guitar-based compositions disconcerting. The rockist panic informing such aversion is pretty funny to me. Your Blues ranks among my favorite Destroyer records and warrants rediscovery. It’s clear with subsequent releases that while he may not have been using successive albums to respond to previous ones, he was building on certain ideas. Your Blues hardly sounds like a departure in context. The most reductive connection between Your Blues and Kaputt is that he’s channeling another outdated era of pop music production–one Mark Richardson places between 1977 and 1984, at the height of soft rock, smooth jazz, and new romantic pop. But Bejar’s always been interested in toying with outre musical ideas. Destroyer’s shimmering guitar lines recall 70s AOR staples like Bread and America, so his attempts at something we might call ambient yacht rock shouldn’t come as any surprise. Also, as an Electronic fan, I’m tickled that the New Order/Pet Shop Boys/Smiths’ side project is one of the album’s main musical reference points.
But what does come as something of a (pleasant) surprise to me is artist Kara Walker‘s presence on Kaputt. I had the privilege of seeing her My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love exhibit in 2008 at the Modern in Fort Worth. It remains my most disquieting spectatorial experience. Walker is best known for recasting Antebellum-era silhouette cutouts in cinematic tableaux to reinterpret America’s ongoing racist history (she also gets a shout-out in Le Tigre’s “Hot Topic”). Nightmarish visions of sexual violence and abjection twine with surrealist and sensual imagery that sneak up on you once you look past cultural associations with silhouette portraiture’s feminized gentility. That I saw this after looking at an Impressionist exhibit–and walking through the gift shop–at the nearby Kimbell Museum only put the vitality of the exhibit in sharper relief. There’s no way one of her murals could make it onto an umbrella.
Kara Walker's "Endless Conundrum, An African Anonymous Adventuress" (2001); image courtesy of walkerart.org
Perhaps related to serving as a curator for Merge Records’ retrospective, Walker contributed lyrics to “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker,” so named as a reference to the proto-punk duo. She wrote several charged phrases onto cue cards and Bejar sang them, rearranging and embellishing some passages. It’s easily my favorite song on the record, though I’m disquieted as to why. Ann Powers recently offered some insights into their collaborative effort, noting their shared interest in appropriation. Bejar has been compared to Leonard Cohen, particularly his detached narration of hedonistic tales. Soft rock’s seductive qualities–the backlit production, the reliance on 7th chords–disquiet in their efforts to soothe and drip sophistication, especially when Bejar whispers lines like “New York City just wants to see you naked and they will,” “wise, old, black, and dead in the snow,” “All that slender-wristed, white, translucent business passes for love these days,” and “Don’t talk about the South, she said.” Kaputt also prominently features vocalist Sibel Thrasher. In the context of this song, her presence calls into question the role many black female vocalists held as background singers for artists like Simply Red.
Cohen also comes to mind when we talk about reinterpretation. Many folks who’ve heard “Hallelujah” might attribute Jeff Buckley, but the song originated with Cohen (actually, Buckley’s version is a cover of a cover, as he cribbed John Cale’s reading of it). So what happens when lyrics are drafted by an African American woman whose words are then reinterpreted by a white Canadian man frolicking in the studio? Who does it belong to? Frankly, I’m not sure. I’m inclined to rule that it belongs to both of them and to the listener. What I know for certain is that this song is stuck on repeat.
Antony Hegarty in performance; image courtesy of capitalnewyork.com
I usually don’t like to begin posts by with defensive statements acknowledging relative inactivity. They tend to read or are intended to be understood as apologies, and as a woman I avoid offering concession for things that aren’t my fault. The cause of my recent lack of blog fodder is industriousness. I’ve been busy. This needs little justification. In addition to the girls’ studies conference I recently attended, I start another blog series for Bitch Magazine tomorrow. This one is called the Bechdel Test Canon and will focus on feminist responses to a selection of movies that pass the Bechdel Test. Thus, I have been marathoning a lot of features. I’m also working on a couple of other professional projects that I’d rather not elaborate upon at this juncture, but require considerable attention.
The unfortunate reality of being occupied while running a popular culture blog is that media texts generate regardless of your ability to keep up. For a little over a month, I’ve been lagging behind notable releases from Sufjan Stevens, Deerhunter, and Antony and the Johnsons. When releases are relevant, I try to link a preview like NPR’s First Listen, which usually demos a new release a week before it hits stores. However, I regrettably neglected to do so this time. This isn’t so much a concern for Stevens’ The Age of Adz, which for me recalls the petulant tone, Auto-Tune dalliances, and incoherent grandeur of Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak except that its indulgences are boring and experimentations are predictable. However, it’s certainly a concern for the Johnsons’ consistently elegiac Swanlights. Frequent commenter Kathy recently brought up Hegarty, who I have mentioned previously. Thus, a long overdue post.
I will admit considerable initial hesitancy toward Antony and the Johnsons writ large, and chanteuse Antony Hegarty in particular. The band garnered much praise with 2005′s breakthrough, I Am a Bird Now. Later that same year, Hegarty provided vocals and piano to “Beautiful Boyz,” an ode to Jean Genet on CocoRosie’s maligned sophomore release, Noah’s Ark. The singer collaborated with Björk on Volta and covered Leonard Cohen songs in the documentary I’m Your Man. Several friends championed Hegarty with breathless comparisons to Nina Simone and invocations of cabaret.
Theoretically, this should have been enough to convince me. But it wasn’t until Hegarty channeled childhood heroine Alison Moyet on Hercules and Love Affair’s 2008 debut that I was moved. My hunch as to why forces me to confront some of my latent transphobia and homophobia. Unlearn, Alyx.
To be clear, I don’t have the hang-ups about transgender people that some feminists do. To me, top surgeries and sexual reassignment procedures don’t register as misogynistic or comparable to the plastic surgery some women receive. There’s a big difference between cisgender women getting breast implants and nose jobs in the name (under the guise?) of choice and transgender men and women wanting their bodies to reflect how they conceptualize their sex. Frankly, such comparisons are reductionist and insulting.
But I was initially resistant toward Hegarty’s output because it was so ponderous and heavy with tortured import, which I do think is linked to the singer’s orientation. Wither the happy? Why is everyone dying in all of these songs? Why are emotions so intense? Why does this sometimes negatively impact phrasing, as exhibited in the leaden Hegarty-Björk duet “Dull Flame of Desire”? Hegarty’s music sounded like a black hole where the corpses of Jean Genet, Candy Darling, and Kazuo Ohno rot eternally as mourners crowd and bawl over the loss. Even though it matters that they lived and important that we reflect on how and why they died, it was too overwhelming for me.
Performance artist Candy Darling (1944-1974) on her death bed and on the cover of "I Am a Bird Now"; image courtesy of pitchfork.com
Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno (1906-2010) as cover subject for "The Crying Light"; image courtesy of pitchfork.com
Now, I tend to like my music varied and complex in emotionality and not dwell on or engineer a limited range of emotions. This isn’t to say there isn’t variance in Hegarty’s funereal music. But I think my discomfort with it most likely stemmed from being more comfortable with queer chanteuses having conga lines tail behind. This makes me wonder if I had difficulty processing the pop song as lamentation, especially from a singer who identifies as trans and gay. After I embraced Hegarty’s dancier side and noted the wrenching lyrical content it belied, I felt it my duty to revisit the Johnsons’ previous efforts. I enjoy Swanlights, even if my loyalties are still with The Crying Light. I was astonished by their powerful, austere beauty. I’ve also been able to process more recent acts like the riveting Perfume Genius.
But could I only appreciate queer excess when it wasn’t steeped in profound sadness? Does this need for keeping private feelings at bay suggest my unconscious desire to put out musicians back in the closet? May it stem from privilege, residing in a cisgender white lady’s discomfort over being uncertain if male pronouns apply when addressing the musician? May it make me uncomfortable to face that seriousness is vital when the majority of queer people are not privy to all civic rights, risk mortal danger in quotidian situations straight people don’t have to negotiate, are targets of hate crimes, and in some cases are denied medical coverage and left to die because some hospitals won’t treat them?
Addressing those injustices are worth tearful, shaky, defiant encomium. It demands complete attention and re-education. As a result, the music can be too overwhelming to make it into steady personal rotation, but I welcome it when it presses its importance upon me.
I had the pleasure of catching Dessa‘s set last Friday at Red 7. She went on second, after Astronautalis and before headliner and fellow Doomtree rapper P.O.S. Now P.O.S.’s set was electric, crackling with verve, wit, and high energy. If you haven’t listened to P.O.S.’s Never Better, it was one of the strongest releases of last year.
However, Dessa’s A Badly Broken Code is a strong contender for my album of the year, bringing continued attention to the Minneapolis-based hip hop collective and troubling the acclaim bestowed upon Spoon’s Transference and Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me. If you haven’t listened to Dessa’s first full-length, get on that. Make sure you’re sitting down when you hear it, lest her flow fly at such a clip with such a force as to knock you over. The woman born Margret Wander has a way with words.
Women in American hip hop have always been an anomaly. Unfortunately, this is just as true for independent artists as those working in the mainstream. Some of these women have yet to cut an album despite doing incredible work on other (male) MCs’ albums, though I patiently await albums from Lionesque and Joyo Velarde. That said, those who are currently working underground are amongst my favorites: Jean Grae, Psalm One, Invincible, and Dessa. I like Kid Sister fine, but I want these women to run the game.
In many ways, Dessa reminds me of Grae. Both share an assured flow, pointed elocution, a deliberately casual look, and a hard-luck attitude toward love. But Dessa also brings a jazzy alto to her work, along with a poet’s ear for meter. This is much to her background as a spoken word artist, a term with a lot of cultural baggage. It’s hard for me to hear the words “spoken word artist” and not recall two characters from Medea’s Family Reunion improvising a mixed-media piece on a date or the hacky sack scene in She’s All That. Others have lampooned spoken word and its practitioners’ tendency toward self-important hackery, like Zadie Smith did in On Beauty or Dave Chappelle did in a rejected sketch for Chappelle’s Show that combined Def Comedy Jam with Def Poetry Jam.
But Dessa, much like Sarah Jones, The Last Poets, and Gil Scott-Heron before her, pulls off spoken word by incorporating it into her sound, thus expanding its aural possibilities. Dessa trades in words, which are conceptualized by some to be masculine and in contrast to a sung melody’s feminized, abject emotionality. But the way in which those words are delivered — whether as a rap, a vocal line, a verse, or some combination of all three — allow her to manipulate time signatures and rhyme schemes, giving her greater freedom to explore sound and verse. That her songs are often wry, smart, candid inner monologues about family, childhood, addiction, and relationships make me even happier that I’m hearing a female voice articulate them. Even when she threads cover songs into her own material, as she did with Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (or perhaps Jeff Buckley covering John Cale covering Leonard Cohen), I need only hear the voice and see it coming out of the performer on stage to know where it’s really coming from.
As perhaps evidenced by the clip above, witnessing her performing this sort of word jazz live was really something to behold. Her set-up was spare — simply her microphone and deejay Plain Ole Bill‘s turntables. And yet, the minimalism showcased the immensity of her talent. She was also really funny and open on stage, which helps orient where those songs come from and only adds to her magnetic presence. I especially appreciated her recounting a story about being in the lady’s room at the gig and the lights turning off. She took pride in the other occupants checking in on each other instead of running for the exit. She has a lot of faith in women and girls’ capacity for survival should the apocalypse come. I have a lot of faith in her potential as an artist. Dessa’s mic sounds nice.
I read two books from the 33 1/3 book series last weekend, in an on-going effort to think about its approach to canon formation. Since reading the two titles in question, I’ve been sitting on my hands thinking about how to write a post about them. They were two interesting, disparate pieces written by Gillian Gaar and Daphne Brooks on albums that somehow seem linked. Gaar documents the recording process of a band’s follow-up to an album that resulted in their meteoric rise. Brooks weaves her personal history as an African American woman growing up as a member of Generation X, who was a graduate student when another artist’s only proper full-length was released.
Cover of Gillian G. Gaar's "In Utero" (Continuum Books, 2006); image courtesy of infibeam.com
Cover for Daphne Brooks's "Grace" (Continuum Books, 2005); image courtesy of funboring.com
Too bad dudes made ‘em, right? Dudes who died young and didn’t release any more albums. Dudes who were dreamy, sensitive alternative pin-ups. They probably showed up on some teenage bedroom walls. I never harbored a crush on Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, but I get the appeal. However, in the 7th grade I taped a picture of Jeff Buckley in my notebook. The crush continues.
Jeff Buckley may have hated this photo in People's 1995 Most Beautiful People issue, but it stayed in my notebook during junior high; image courtesy of people.com
The heartthrob factor has been what has kept me from writing a post. I consider this blog to be a space where issues of gender, among a multitude of oft-intersecting identity categories, are critical to how we understand music culture. As a feminist, I wanted that space to focus on female contributions. I made this decision not because I’m a misandrist but because, so often, our work is denounced or ignored. Plus, I find the efforts some feminist publications take toward acknowledging the good guys is really a way to affirm that “feminism” isn’t a euphemism for “She-Woman Man-Haters Club.” This perception is misinformed and antiquated, and I feel like we enervate feminism when magazines like Bust run a cisgender “Men We Love” issue. Do we really need to give guys the focus in our own feminist projects just to prove that we aren’t all man-haters, lesbians, or man-hating lesbians? Can’t we have anything to ourselves?
That said, I wondered if by thinking about how women view these particular male artists and considering how these men complicated issues of gender and sexuality in their own work, I could write a thoughtful entry.
I’ll address Gaar’s book first. Though her entry came out a year after Brooks’s, she’s discussing an album that predates Grace‘s arrival in the market by several months, and a band who effectively dissolved a few months after its release. We know why Nirvana disbanded, though opinion differs as to how Cobain died at 27 (most abide by his death being a suicide; there’s a faction of people, Kim Gordon among them, who believe he was murdered). Refreshingly, Gaar takes all of this as a given and decides not to dwell on the band’s superstardom or the lead singer’s untimely end. She also doesn’t comb In Utero for clues as to the lead singer’s mental state, acknowledging that a number of fans and critics have already done the forensic work to determine for themselves whether or not Nirvana’s last album is its lead singer’s suicide note.
Instead, Gaar primarily focuses on the recording and mixing of the album, and a bit of the aftermath. I really appreciate this approach. She walks the reader through the players, the jargon, and the studio process with a journalist’s eye for detail and uncluttered prose. She also weaves first-person accounts from bassist Krist Novoselic, drummer Dave Grohl, recording engineer Steve Albini, and others. In doing so, she stresses Albini’s reticence toward working with a band of such commercial stature, his dismissal of the credit “producer,” Cobain’s deliberate pace as a lyric writer, how quickly the band worked in the studio, the struggle the band faced in attempting to distance themselves from the radio-ready slickness of the Butch Vig-produced Nevermind, song selection, album art, video production, and how much of the album ended up being remixed so as to be more commercially palatable.
BTW, Albini also recorded PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me and Electrelane’s Axes. The latter will get further consideration in a future “Records That Made Me a Feminist” entry. Albini will probably record your band for a nominal fee. I looked into it when I thought I was going to Northwestern. All you need is a way to Chicago, a little bit of money, and a thick skin.
But Gaar doesn’t just talk about gear. One of In Utero‘s major themes is gestation, and Cobain’s preoccupation with pregnancy, abortion, umbilical cords, and the abject pleasures and terrors of motherhood and womanhood is of critical importance to both Gaar and myself. This was the man who wished he could be a seahorse because its the only species where male members can carry its progeny to term, even as he mocked the co-dependent relationship he had with his wife.
A young father to Frances Bean, Cobain often dressed in women’s clothing, was a supporter of riot grrrl, counted Gordon and Kathleen Hanna as close friends, believed in his wife Courtney Love’s artistic capabilities, felt empathy for troubled women like Frances Farmer, and was responsible for DGC reissuing The Raincoats’ first two albums. He also identified as bisexual at a time when grunge proved to be just another guise for rock’s machismo. If only he had lived to see his daughter grow up. I think they could have learned a lot from each other. But at least he never saw Fred Durst’s chest tattoo. In tribute, my ass. I’ll leave you to Google. I can’t in good conscience put up so grody an image. Instead, let’s look at the cover photo Cobain and Love took for Sassy.
Cobain and Love in happier times; image courtesy of huffingtonpost.com
I’ll admit that save for In Utero, Unplugged In New York, and portions of Incesticide, I was never a Nirvana devotee. Nirvana’s sound was just a bit too of its time for me: sludgy guitar, shredded vocals, marked dynamics. It also sounded too traditionally masculine to me, though songs like “Very Ape” and music videos like “In Bloom” call this reading into question.
I enjoyed Nirvana more when they alienated people with noise. Give me “Scentless Apprentice” or “tourette’s” any day. The band also worked for me when they went acoustic, as on “Something In the Way,” “All Apologies,” and the Unplugged performance of “Pennyroyal Tea.” That said, I know what the band meant and continues to mean for people. I hope Cobain’s belief in gender and sexual fluidity is an essential component to some folks’ fandom.
As Cobain left behind a wife and child, Buckley probably understood his father’s legacy from a vantage point akin to Frances Bean’s. Raised by a single mother after his singer-songwriter father Tim ran out and later died of an overdose, Buckley stressed throughout his brief career that he had no real connection to the man whose familial and musical lineage he inherited. I get what he meant, but always questioned the argument. While Tim had more of a conventionally masculine vocal register, both dudes had an affinity for atonal blends of jazz, folk, and rock music and shared a spectral falsetto. And high cheekbones.
You might gather that I have a deeper investment for one artist over the other. Cobain died before I turned 11, so I was just slightly behind the curve with Nirvana. But somehow I was right with Buckley. It helped that I had cable at the time. MTV started playing the music video for “Last Goodbye” as Houston’s alternative station put the single in rotation. The hours I spent thinking about sucking his bottom lip red and raw must have been considerable.
But imagine my surprise when I spent my allowance on Grace and discovered that instead of eight other versions of “Last Goodbye,” the album was far more complex. I devoted hours to understanding the elliptical song structures, the ornate production quality, and the vocalist’s operatic singing style. I was particularly struck by how similar our vocal ranges were.
After a little research, I noticed that Buckley covered many female artists. People can and should continue to talk about his readings of Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But Nina Simone’s “Lilac Wine” and Janet Baker’s interpretation of Benjamin Britten’s ”Corpus Christi Carol” are my favorite covers on Grace. In addition, Mahalia Jackson’s “A Satisfied Mind” and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” were in his repertoire. I also found out about Édith Piaf after reading somewhere that he covered “Je n’en connais pas la fin,” whereupon I asked my mother who this French lady was. He had a deep admiration for women like Björk and Elizabeth Fraser from The Cocteau Twins. The latter recorded a duet with him called “All Flowers In Time Bend Towards the Sun” and wrote “Rilkean Heart” for him and their relationship.
Buckley also valued the work of women like Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, and Penny Arcade. He carried these feelings into his relationships with his mother Mary Guibert and partners like musicians Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser. And while a lot of white boys, mysterious or otherwise, appropriate the work of other artists, I never felt like I was listening to someone trying something on, whether it be another person’s race, gender, or both. With Buckley, it always sounded like his voice was guiding him into a process, however brief, of personal transformation because of his musical heroes, many of whom were heroines. It never felt like thievery so much as tribute.
Many have singled Buckley out as a diva. He wanted to be considered as a chanteuse. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher scribed an argument for his transgendered vocal quality in her essay for the anthology Oh Boy!: Masculinities and Popular Music. And while he has since been lauded by rocker dudes like Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach, many people were put off by the musician’s histrionics and how they offended traditional notions of rock’s paradigmatic heterosexual masculinity. I’ve even heard an acquaintance unfavorably compare him to Mariah Carey. But upon reflection, I’m faced with a startling realization: I might celebrate Buckley’s alignment with the feminine for reasons similar to why I’ve dismissed Patti Smith’s kinship with the masculine.
Too much?; image courtesy of last.fm
Thus with Buckley, there’s a lot of contradictions. This is something that Brooks confronts in understanding her fandom and what it might suggest of her status as a black woman in the academy, growing up during the 70s and 80s and completing her graduate studies during the first half of the 1990s — a time marked by hybridization, multiculturalism, political correctness, and third-wave feminism’s embrace of conflicting gender, sexual, and racial politics. Brooks constantly dialogues her own interest with Buckley around an exhaustively researched narrative of the artist’s trajectory, spending most of her time unpacking the one album he completed before drowning at the age of 30 in the Wolf River while working on his follow-up in Memphis.
Of course, we’d do well not to overpraise musicians like Cobain and Buckley, who were imperfect and mortal despite their musical legacies. Cobain constantly had to battle stomach ailments, heroin addiction, and record executives. Buckley may have sung many women’s songs, but the argument could be made that he did it to fuck women through their own music. Of course, doing so risks presumption that women are passive and dominated in the act of fucking, which I take issue with. But unlike Patti Smith, Buckley made sure his pronouns suggested he was the man in a heterosexual relationship. Buckley may sound a bit like fellow Simone fan (and Wasser colleague) Antony Hegarty, but Hegarty kept the pronouns pure when covering “Be My Husband.” Also, Buckley’s heterosexual masculinity allowed him to hover betwixt gender’s poles in song. Hegarty lives there.
But both Cobain and Buckley also suffered loss, confusion, and mental duress. Sometimes, they put those feelings, and many others, into their music. That they identified with women is important, though in greater need of complication. It doesn’t always make them men we love, but it does make their contention with gender and sexuality worthy of feminist inquiry.
Charlotte Gainsbourg; image courtesy of loudersoft.com
A little while ago, my friend Alex forwarded me a press release from a rep at Atlantic Records for Charlotte Gainsbourg’s forthcoming album IRM. As a fan, he had wondered if I had considered writing about her, an interest apparently motivated by reading an earlier post I did on Scarlett Johansson. When we saw each other at a mutual friend’s dissertation proposal party, we talked a bit more about it, wherein he basically outlined an entry’s worth of critical inquiry.
1. Like Johansson, Gainsbourg works almost exclusively with men, whether they be film directors like Michel Gondry and Todd Haynes or music producers like Nigel Godrich. Thus, she often occupies something of a muse position for male creative types, perhaps further enforcing masculinist notions of auteurism. Gainsbourg’s previous work with Air and Jarvis Cocker from Pulp and her recent collaborations with Beck on her new album further illustrate the point.
Beck and Gainsbourg at work; image courtesy of pitchforkmedia.com
1A. Gainsbourg has occupied this role for some time, as her father is beloved French yé-yé chanteur Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she sang the controversial “Lemon Incest” in 1984 when she was about 13.
1B. Before casting Charlotte as an artistic man’s (or father’s) plaything, I’d point out that her mother British actress-model-artist Jane Birkin, who was pretty liberated in her views on gender, sexuality, and monogamy. However, she may also be cast in something of a muse position. Like her daughter, she’s also worked with Serge and Beck. And like her daughter, who will be representing bestie Nicolas Ghesquière as the spokeswoman for Balenciaga’s new fragrance next February, Birkin inspired numerous fashion trends and clothiers (why yes, she is the namesake for the famous and expensive over-sized Hermès tote.)
Gainsbourg with husband Yvan Ittal, wearing Balenciaga to the Metropolitan Costume Ball; image courtesy of style.com
Unlike her daughter, Birkin also had a predilection for posing nude on camera, sometimes while in the act of coitus, perhaps with multiple partners. I’ll leave you to Google. I’ll also leave you to speculate if her daughter is relatively modest about her sexuality as a result of having such . . . “open” parents.
2. Thinking about our friend Annie’s post on Rachel McAdams, Gainsbourg is something of a thinking man’s pin-up, a cultural figure already saddled with normative ideals around race, class, gender, and sexuality. Given that she was recently featured with her half-sister Lou Doillon as the archetype for ”thin” in Vogue‘s size issue, I’d add body type to the list of norms she represents.
3. Gainsbourg doesn’t sing so much as talk in her songs. She intimates her way through songs in a breathy, sensual monotone, perhaps made more exotic by her British lilt or her occasional dalliances with French.
So, I’ll bring myself into the discussion. I like Gainsbourg but am probably too casual about her work be considered a fan. I’ve listened to 5:55 and IRM a bit, and have seen some of her more recent movies, in which she is often my favorite aspect. While I haven’t seen Antichrist (or any other Lars Von Trier movies) and am nervous about just how wanting it seems to be of a psychoanalytic or auteurist read, her turn as a mother rendered destructive by the death of her son has peaked my curiosity.
That poster is so NSFW; image courtesy of iwatchstuff.com
In addition, I thought her emotionally mature performance as Clair, Robbie Clark’s long-suffering ex-wife in I’m Not There deserved an Oscar nomination. I also liked her cover of “Just Like a Woman.”
I also liked her quiet, discreet turn as Stéphanie, the protagonist’s disinterested object of affection in Science of Sleep, a movie I otherwise hated. This is perhaps in part because the majority of film-goers at the screening I attended found Gael García Bernal’s Stéphane to be charming, whereas I found him infuriatingly petulant and wanted to smack him with his own disasterology calendar. But I quite liked her. The only parts of her performance that felt disingenuous were when she wears an uncharacteristically skimpy sweater dress to Stéphane’s calendar launch party (which I’m pretty sure was a figment of the protagonist’s puerile imagination) and at the end, when she’s cries about how Stéphane won’t leave her alone. He’s not worth your tears, girl.
Oh, and I enjoy her vocal cameo in Madonna’s “What It Feels Like For a Girl.” Her confrontational monologue about male gender-bending comes from The Cement Garden, a 1993 film adaptation of Ian McEwen’s 1978 novel that was directed by her uncle Andrew Birkin.
But let’s go back to her voice and problematize the idea of whether or not it’s okay for Gainsbourg to talk through her songs. Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan was really critical of 5:55 particularly for this reason, arguing that her vocal style suggests that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I’d counter with two things.
For one, is making such a display of singing really necessary? Phrasing and expressiveness are just as important as vocal range for singers, if not more so to those with more limitations. And isn’t talking through songs how Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Patti Smith developed mythic rock poet status?
Bob Dylan and Patti Smith; image courtesy of brooklynvegan.com
For another, um, you could easily make the same argument for any of Gainsbourg’s male collaborators’ work. Something tells me that Jarvis Cocker, Beck, and Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel of Air were probably all influenced by her father’s barely-sung approach to documenting his own erotic misadventures. I only hope they were just as interested working with Charlotte Gainsbourg as they were working with Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter.
That said, it might be easy to overemphasize or project notions of what French sensuality might be onto Gainsbourg and her songs (something her character in I’m Not There bristles at during her first date with her future ex-husband, as well as something Air have gotten a lot of critical mileage on from certain online publications with hipster cache until recently). While her second album was adorned with breathy vocals, acoustic instrumentation, and sumptuous production that may have lent itself well to such an essentialist reading, the lyrics to songs like “The Operation” and “Little Monsters” document both the wonder and terror of bodies and childhood, suggesting what might have drawn Von Trier to cast her in Antichrist. Her new album, which was inspired by working on her latest movie, gives way to more lyrical abstraction, while at the same time emphasizing a harder sound.
In short, Gainsbourg may make male-appointed bedroom music. But that isn’t all that’s going on, if you give a closer listen.
