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(04/24/18 9:28pm)
A few days before Culture Shock, I sent some questions to Melkbelly, the excellent noise-rock quartet that headlined the festival. Frontwoman and lyricist Miranda Winters wasn’t able to get back to me until a couple hours before Melkbelly’s set, during which an oval in front of the middle of Rhino’s Youth Center's stage became a mosh pit. Moshing is a complicated convention at rock performances. It shows the band that some listeners find their music conducive to catharsis, but the catharsis manifests in violence that impacts people who didn’t consent to being pushed, or being displaced to a spot it may be harder to see the musicians from. One of the downsides of moshing during a Melkbelly set, though, affected the moshers: their physical exertion temporarily prevented them from watching the physical feat that is James Wetzel’s drumming––a constant, intricate force both live and on Melkbelly’s debut album. Nothing Valley came out last year, not incidentally, on Friday the 13th. Before Miranda answered my questions (Miranda shares her last name with two of her bandmates––her husband Bart, who plays guitar, and Bart’s brother Liam, who plays bass), I might’ve thought that, were mosh pits in Nothing Valley, she would’ve meant to present them as sinister spaces. I might’ve been wrong.
Sadie Dupuis, Speedy Oritz’s frontwoman, released Nothing Valley on Wax Nine, the subsidiary of Carpark Records she runs. Besides cryptic lyrics and dissonance, what are some stylistic similarities between Speedy Ortiz and Melkbelly?
I’d say that those two things, cryptic lyrics and dissonance, really cover a lot of our sameness, but I would add that both bands like to play loud live and really enjoy guitar riffs.
Nothing Valley, if I’m not mistaken, thematizes cultish behaviors. The first chorus on the album’s closer, “Helloween,” begins, “Traditional circles in the woods.” The titular character of the preceding track, “Cawthra,” was “blindfolded and forced to stay / up late to recite some / poems.” These more outlandish scenes come after “Kid Kreative,” a song that can be interpreted as a scoff at artsy breakfast posts on Instagram, and “Twin Looking Motherfucker,” which locates some people who look and act and speak identically at festivals. What drew you to the cultish as a concept for an album? And did you want to invite your listeners to consider how the seemingly innocuous trends they follow may be sinister?
We are writing from life because being in a band is like being in a cult. Just kidding! Sort of! The way that humans function in groups is something that interests us (parties, cults, frats, bands, shows, etc.) because when you travel often and play shows, you get to see this stuff night after night, but it's never the same.
The response to your second question is its inverse. In the songs that tackle these themes more up front (like “Cawthra” and “Helloween”), I wanted listeners to see that things they might think are sinister are actually harmless. Like mall goths.
Miranda, something I’ve noticed about your singing on Nothing Valley is that you rarely give a syllable more than one note. The syllables that get more than one note are often very brief glissandos. Do you sing this way to contribute to the album’s unsettling atmosphere?
In Melkbelly there are 4 instruments doing a lot of shit that you can’t always immediately latch onto, and I suppose that’s why I attempt more even-keeled vocals; it’s something to grab onto. Also, the volume and tone of our instrumentals, loud and sharp, contrast well with dark notes and intimate levels of speaking.
“R.O.R.O.B.”’s second verse has a line in which the speaker asks to be picked up from a tide pool. Shortly after you play the second verse for the last time, guitars hold some awfully heavy chords for about a couple seconds, over and over again, in a staccato rhythm. I get the sense that it wouldn’t be easy to pull the speaker out of whatever world their head’s in. And in “Helloween,” James’s cyclic drumming literalizes a circle in the woods. When you’re writing songs, to what extent do you try to reinforce a song’s lyric with its music, or vice versa?
Fairly often––not all the time but a lot of the time. When I write a melody on the guitar, it's usually in response to a lyric or vocal melody that already exists, so the tone has been set. If I give a semi-finished piece of a song to the band, I think they hear that and write accordingly. When a song part is written by someone else, I write lyrics in response to that tone or pace or shape.
In Steven Arroyo’s review of Nothing Valley for Pitchfork, he claims “Kid Kreative” “sonically spoon-crush[es] granola into a bowl of honey.” Do you…agree?
We're a pro-cereal band so we'll take it.
Did you know “fage” is Greek for “eat”? Have you considered asking FAGE, the Greek yogurt company, if they’d like to put in a commercial the part in “Elk Mountain” that goes, “Eat / eat / eat / eat…”?
I’m into cross promotion, but I think they’d be terribly disappointed when we told them that actually it’s “Heat / heat / heat / heat.”
Do you anticipate playing “Twin Looking Motherfucker” to people who look and act and speak identically at Culture Shock and Pitchfork Music Festival? Do you have an idea of how playing that song at festivals will feel?
We've played that song at tons of shows, big and small, and there's really no issue because people get the joke, you know? If you're comfortable with yourself, you can laugh about it, and if you're not laughing, then we're here to tell you we've all been there and you can hug it out with Liam.
(01/25/18 4:25pm)
The professor, trying to endear himself to the class,
told us about hearing his first kid was a boy.
Like you could know, I had just thought,
when he said it didn’t seem right––
“Babies,” to him, “are girls.”
I winced, wondering how often he infantilizes women,
and if he’s noticed Lennon and McCartney’s early habit
of turning a deaf ear to their feminine subjects’ will,
and if his hatred for Ono, to whom he assigned
the epithet “sick, twisted bitch,”
derives less from her part in the Beatles’ breakup
than from her lack of a role in disbandment.
Later he’d frame Al Franken not as a perpetrator
of sexual misconduct
but as a victim of recontextualization,
recalling the Richard Pryor joke he’d recited weeks before––
the one that’s “not very tasteful anymore”
(emphasis mine, thought both his and not),
the one where Pryor fantasizes about the effects
of axing his wife.
I fantasize about recontextualizing
the twenty hilarious tags this man has raked in
on RateMyProfessor.com,
about rendering them ironic and adverbial.
(12/31/17 11:27pm)
Sol Ramos is putting together, in his words, “a Mountain Goats fan zine by trans people about trans identity and the Mountain Goats.” The zine, White Cedar, will be available this winter. Ramos studied interdisciplinary visual arts––a degree that let him pursue LGBT art, multiculturalism, and history––at the University of North Texas, which is located in Denton, where, he says, “it’s a little weird to meet people who don’t know ‘The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton.’” His college education informed his conviction that art is a “way to reach out and see yourself reflected, to feel some kind of connection.” Bloomington, to its credit, boasts a sizable trans community. Many people who live here may see their experiences represented both in Mountain Goats lyrics, some of which Ramos discussed with me, and in White Cedar. The cisgender people of this city, Ramos hopes, will find understanding through the zine. In addition to lyrics that relate to transness, Ramos and I talked about his primary objective for White Cedar, frontman John Darnielle’s support of the project, and how trans folks can submit their work.
Describe your relationship to the Mountain Goats.
In the fall of 2013, I was studying abroad in Morocco, and I had The Life of the World to Come and I think Heretic Pride in heavy rotation. That was definitely a time when I was feeling really lonely and isolated, and the music was just kind of a lifeline. My relationship to them is pretty based in that connection.
Have you edited and/or contributed to other zines?
Yeah, I’ve been contributing to zines since early college to probably 2010 or 2011. The first zine I ever contributed to was called Hissy Fit. It was compiled by a college feminist organization I was a part of, and it covered the topics of LGBT rights, reproductive rights, things like that. So more political-oriented zines were the ones I really got started with––things like gender equality, environmentalism. And then I did start to get involved in more just art-themed zines.
Would you say your art-themed zines are still political to some extent?
I would say so because it’s very hard to detach a lot of things that I write from my transness, my queerness, my being a person of color. Those identities are so politicized in our world, you really can’t detach them. Even when I try to get away from politics, even actively, it kinda sneaks in.
In a tweet calling for submissions for White Cedar, you wrote: “Many of the Mountain Goats' lyrics speak to a turbulent and tenuous relationship with one’s body and sense of identity, which are topics that heavily resonate with the trans community.” Can you point to some of the lyrics you had in mind?
I think most of this niche trans following I talk about agrees that Transcendental Youth is the most trans album. It hits so many notes of those topics. And then Life of the World to Come, for me, is so focused on the physical aspects of having a body.
The first lines that come to mind are from “Isaiah 45:23” off of Life of the World to Come: “And I won’t get better / but someday I’ll be free / ‘cause I am not this body / that imprisons me.” I feel like that pierces right to the heart of the idea of having a body that’s not normative, that’s not understood.
Another song: “Deuteronomy 2:10” from Life of the World to Come. It’s almost like a lore. There are biblical references and mythological references that really conjure up powerful images. The song describes a maybe endangered creature that’s in captivity. I think that’s very powerful and very universal. A lot of people, I think, have felt like that. It speaks to the experience of having a body that you might not necessarily feel the best connection to––or of feeling that your interpretation of your own body is misunderstood, of that isolation.
How does Life of the World to Come manage to not be interpreted as cisnormative?
I feel like there isn’t anything specifically gendered in a lot of the songs. There aren’t a lot of pronouns used that often, I’ve noticed.
John Darnielle shared your call for submissions and added: “Deeply honored by this. Thank you all.” How did you react when you saw his response?
At first I was pretty stunned. I really wasn’t expecting any kind of reaction or anything to it. I’m pretty shy when it comes to other creatives, people I really admire or whose work I respect. I’ve gotten in contact a couple times with different comic book artists on Twitter, and I was shocked when I got something back. I was really excited about it because it was like this wall was brought down. That’s something I love about zines: they break down barriers between those considered successful and people who are maybe less known.
[Darnielle’s tweet] got me excited, creatively. And I felt a sense of compassion towards the trans community and an eagerness to help.
Were you heartened by the replies to his tweet?
Definitely! I really didn’t see anything negative. Everyone was super supportive and excited about the project. A lot of people were saying either that they had thought of this before and would love to contribute or that they hadn’t thought of it and now realize the connections they want to make.
Why do you think the Mountain Goats have attracted such supportive people?
I’m actually a part of a few Facebook groups related to the Mountain Goats. One is trans-specific. It’s really what made me realize that this following did exist. I had my own interpersonal relationships, but I didn’t realize there was up to like at least a hundred people out there who had made this connection.
Part of the reasoning, I have to say, is John himself, the persona that comes with a lot of his beliefs, which I think he’s not shy about sharing––support for women’s rights, reproductive rights, LGBT rights. I think it would be very difficult to be a fan of the Mountain Goats and not share those beliefs. A lot of it comes through within the music.
Darnielle is a notable figure in part because he often shares these progressive beliefs through the lens of his Christianity. Do any of the Mountain Goats lyrics that pertain to transness also pertain to Christianity?
Absolutely. All of the song titles on Life of the World to Come are Bible verses, and there’s religious imagery throughout the album. Which I personally love, and I think a lot of Mountain Goats fans connect to that imagery. I think a lot of us were raised religiously, for better or worse, and it’s just another point of connection.
And The Sunset Tree, I’m sure you’re aware, deals heavily with an abusive stepfather. That’s something I personally relate to. I know a lot of trans people, statistically, also relate to it. That album, when it looks at things through the lens of Christianity, can explore some of the positives but also the abuses that can come with being under someone utilizing a faith in a way that can be repressive.
What do you make of “Pale Green Things” as the closer to The Sunset Tree?
It’s definitely a song that, for me, can be hard to listen to. Forgiveness, and finding solace in understanding a person and their flaws, can be very hard. A lot of times you might feel––or, I’m trying to use “I” statements; you can tell I’ve been in a lot of trans support groups. I definitely feel that righteous anger and knowing that someone has hurt you can be very powerful. They can help in the short term. I don’t want to knock that. But I think that finding solace in understanding a person’s flaws and seeing them as a whole person and knowing why they got to their actions can be healing for a lot of trans people.
In the first episode of the podcast I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, John Green––I don’t know what you think of John Green or his work, but I like this quote––said that the Mountain Goats’ music has helped him “imagine the lives of people who are distant from [his life], or feel distant from [his life].” Are you hoping that White Cedar will do for its readers what the Mountain Goats’ music has done for John Green?
I’m not that familiar with John Green, but I really appreciate that quote. My #1 goal is finding a way to connect trans people with each other because, honestly, I think the sense of isolation is key in what is frankly our extermination. For people trying to get rid of trans people, I think the most powerful tool is our sense of isolation. When you don’t have any kind of representation of yourself or a sense that you’re not alone, it’s very easy to succumb to your own demise. So this is my number one goal: connect trans people with other trans people.
But I’m aware that a lot of cis people are going to read the zine. I do think it would be really important for them to have that bridge to the other side and understand where we might be coming from, what our struggle might look like. And then hopefully, in a very politicized way, I would hope they’d feel galvanized to take action in their daily lives, if they’re not already, to combat transphobia––whether that be by voting on legislation, or [by talking] with relatives and friends who might have transphobic views.
Do you plan to include in the zine specific recommendations for how cis people can fight transphobia?
I thought about that. I didn’t know how political I wanted to go with it. Personally, I am a very politically active person, but I know not everyone is necessarily looking for that. The idea behind it is not to be politicized because it can be taxing to always be in a political space as a trans person. So I’m not sure that I would have a step-by-step like “This Is How You Should Tell Your Grandma to Stop Being Transphobic at Christmas Dinner.” But maybe I’ll open the floor to people thinking about it. I do want to have some kind of forward––a message that says, “Hey, this is going to cover things that we’re going through. If you feel compelled by any of these words, that’s great.”
What are some of your other goals for the zine?
I’m focused on the artistic aspect as well. The draw to zines as an art form is that it breaks down barriers not only in access––who gets to put work in and whose work gets to be seen––but also in quality of work. The truthfulness of what’s coming through in a piece can supersede how well done people think a work is. This is really my goal: to have trans people, a lot of whom are poor and can’t afford to go to art school.
What forms of artwork would you accept?
My motto for zines is anything that can print. Really, there’s no piece of art that I can’t imagine putting into a zine. It could be collages, photography, comics––I love comics; I’m a big fan of comics––and of course writing. I’d print any kind of reflection on personal experiences with lyrics, or maybe anecdotes about trans identity, poems.
How should people submit?
I can always be reached for submissions through my email, which is jnramos.art@gmail.com.
I also have a Facebook page for Caribou Orca Zines, and that’s where I post updates on the zine’s process.
And how will people be able to buy White Cedar?
I have an Etsy page.
(10/30/17 4:49pm)
Maybe the spookiest thing about Speedy Ortiz’s “Casper (1995),” off the indie rock band’s debut album Major Arcana, is its lyric’s inscrutability.
Many questions are left unanswered, including this bizarre one: what’s the speaker planning on doing with the plasma he has "coming through"? I use “he” without being sure of the speaker’s gender.)\ If you take the lyric literally, the speaker at some point trained to be a police officer, and in the narrative present the speaker stalks a witch “through the dark forest.” Shooting guns and stalking women are stereotypically masculine activities, so assuming the speaker’s a man is understandable––but Sadie Dupuis, who refers to herself as Speedy Ortiz’s “frontdemon,” was obviously interested in subverting listeners’ expectations when she wrote the lyric for “Casper.” And anyway it could be that the speaker has never touched a gun: “Magnetism,” Dupuis sings in the first verse, “my lone rifle.” And also is the speaker really stalking the witch, considering he’s (they’re?) hiding from her? The song’s coda, with its fluid, oscillating melody, suggests levitation. You can picture the witch hovering over the speaker on her broom, rendering their hiding pointless. Or you can think the speaker––whose only rifle is magnetism, “magnetism” perhaps denoting the ability to charm people––is the witch, is looking for herself and not liking whom she’s finding.
It’s unclear who the once-wanted “you” in the chorus is, and what happened to that person, and why the speaker performs or undergoes an exorcism, and what exactly the kids desiring horniness have to do with anything else going/not going/potentially going on. Here’s something I'm able to say with certainty: “Casper (1995),” a lyrically and sonically unsettling track, is, for me at least, an awful lot of fun to think about.
(12/29/16 2:24am)
Stephen Deusner is a music critic who lives here in Bloomington. He’s written for Pitchfork, Salon, and Stereogum–to name just a few. We met at Hopscotch Coffee on a Saturday afternoon and ended up talking for nearly two hours. Not all of our conversation is below, as the unabridged transcription is over 7,000 words long. I’ve left out the part where he says Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo is one of the best songwriters working today, and also the part where he confesses to being weirdly invested in Matt Berninger and Carin Besser’s marriage. But okay. Here you go.
You’ve sort of signed up to spend a lot of time thinking about music. Is there a way for you to explain why you’ve let music take up this place in your life?
I think partly ‘cause I’m not qualified to do much else. I’m not good at a whole lot, but I think I’m good at listening. I’m pretty obsessed with it. And I find that that obsession is fairly all-consuming because there’s never an end to it. I mean, even with a single artist, you can always dig deeper and further into their catalogue, so you’re never finished. And so their stories are never completed. Their stories are ongoing. And I think, like a lot of people, I want to know how these stories end. So I think that’s part of it. There’s also the reality of being married to an academic. My wife teaches art history, and because of that field, we’ve moved around a lot. We’ve lived in a lot of different places, and we would live in them for like a year. We lived in New York for just a year. It’s hard to find a job–like a real job–for that short a time. So it was easier for me to concentrate on this. I could make some money and I could sort of entertain this obsession. And I could kind of get around having to keep applying for real jobs every year or two.
Nice. One artist it was evident to me you got deep into is Elliott Smith, with that review you wrote of the new tribute record. In it you claim that “Pictures of Me” speaks for Amanda Palmer, and then you imply that maybe one reason everyone listens to music is to find songs that speak for us. Do you think music is a particularly useful medium for understanding and expressing ourselves?
Most definitely. Most definitely. And I think that works for listeners maybe even more than for artists. I’m always fascinated by when a song gets out into the world, and it can open up and mean something different to everybody. And it means different things at different times. You know, somebody might hear an Elliott Smith song to be about fame, or somebody could also hear it to be about a break-up. It can mean all these different things. So yeah, I would definitely say that listening becomes a very expressive thing. And that maybe isn’t consistent among every art form, but I could be wrong on that. I’d have to think about that some more.
What are some functions of music criticism?
Get me paid. I think that’s a good one. No, um… There are a lot, I guess. There’s the gate-keeper function. So, you know, we’re at a time when almost every song ever created is accessible through streaming services, downloads, and various forms. And even for somebody like me, that’s daunting. Where do you start? Where do you go? What are the directions? What are the pathways? And I think criticism does a good job of directing people, or providing useful maps so that people can direct themselves. I think you can read, say, Pitchfork a lot. You’re going to have a roadmap to what is going to be worthwhile to listen to and expose yourself to. And the more places you read, the more criticism you read, the more detailed that map becomes, I guess? The bigger it becomes as well. And then I think there’s also sort of–this is not my term; I can’t remember who came up with it–cultural narration. Like, all of this culture is happening, and I think criticism allows us to narrate it and tell a larger story and sort of make it something that is, um, at least somewhat organized? I think it’s also got a kind of preservative quality. I love going back and reading stuff from the ‘90s and ‘80s, older criticism that has such a different attitude or different approach to certain artists or certain trends or whatever.
How is the attitude different?
Somebody like Leonard Cohen. I’ve been listening to a lot of his stuff lately. I mean, his first three albums are kind of considered to be canon. They’re supposed to be like, amazing stuff. They’re a little too dire for me. I’m not a huge fan. But they’re so well-regarded. At the time, though, they were not. At the time, the New York Times had some snarky headline about: “Sad Young Man Makes Miserable Music.” Or something like that. And it sort of suggests that these things aren’t as subtle as they are now.
Are you ever concerned that someone will read a review you wrote on an album by an artist they’re already into before they’ve formed their own thoughts on the album? Are you ever concerned that you are helping people not think for themselves?
I mean, in a perfect world, I would do all the thinking for everybody.
Hmm.
I’m kidding.
I will be sure to note that you’re being serious.
I guess I don’t really care when they read it. ‘Cause on a certain level it’s a consumer guide. It’s like, with that Elliott Smith tribute album, for instance–if you read that before you put down fifteen dollars for the CD, and you can buy something else with that money, and you’re not disappointed, that’s a good thing. It’s a function of service journalism. When I write, I make the assumptions that my readers are gonna be open-minded and that they might not agree with me. In fact, I don’t want everybody to agree with me. I used to want consensus and agreement and empirical fact. But now I like the idea that people might disagree. I think that’s fun. I think that’s a useful thing. I just hope that, whenever they read it, they will be open-minded and allow a range of ideas, and maybe use what I’ve written as the foundation for deeper thinking or even more complex ideas of their own.
When did you shift from wanting consensus to maybe wanting to challenge people?
You know, I don’t know. I think it happened around the time that I realized that nobody can ever be an expert on everything that’s ever been recorded, and I stopped having hang-ups about being an authority all the time. Like, I can research and I can prepare for a review, but I don’t have to walk around town knowing every last thing. I think once I sort of let go of certain insecurities, I kind of let go of this need for empirical truth about albums. There wasn’t a eureka moment. It was just a gradual shedding of insecurities, an appreciation of the fact that there’s a lot of variety of opinion and experience. Which is something I’ve always thought in regards to society at large. I love the fact that there are so many different experiences in the world, that nobody lives life the same way. I think that’s an amazing thing. It took me a while to sort of apply that to music.
That was actually one thing I thought about when I read that line in your review of Say Yes! Something I enjoy about music is hearing other people’s experiences, not necessarily finding how theirs mirror my own.
Exactly. But yeah, I’m much more interested in how people live with songs than with how songs were created. I’m not a songwriter, and I’m not a musician. That’s how I connect–as a listener. Appreciating the experience of going back after a year or two and seeing: “Okay, does this hold up? Does this mean the same thing it meant to me when I was 21?”
Is this one reason you like [R.E.M.'s] Murmur a lot? The lyrics are so…vague, it’s easy to construct your own meaning?
Yeah? The vocals are pretty vague, too.
I actually just listened to an episode of a podcast with Michael Stipe in which he says he wasn’t confident in his voice when they recorded Murmur.
Which is weird ‘cause they had been a live band around Athens for a couple years by then. It wasn’t like they just formed a band and went into the studio the next day. I’m taking that with a grain of salt. I think he’s just being…
Modest or something?
Well, evasive. I think he’s trying to be mysterious, you know? I think he understands the attraction of mystery, especially Southern mystery.
Speaking of mysterious figures, do you think Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize is deserved?
I do. Do I think it’s more deserved than it would be for Haruki Murakami, or Philip Roth, or somebody like that? Not necessarily. But I do think that the man changed the way people write lyrics, write popular music. And in doing so, he elevated lyrics. Whether that elevation is always good is a different matter. But I think he’s had an enormous impact on literature and on words. So yeah, I think he’s definitely a worthy honoree. He’s not necessarily at the top of my list.
Are there other lyricists you would nominate for the Nobel Prize?
Maybe Michael Stipe, I guess. But then the last like twenty years of R.E.M. albums have argued against that. He became very declarative in his songwriting. Plus, you know, Dylan’s been around and active for more than fifty years. I can’t think of too many other songwriters who have that body of work. I mean, maybe Leonard Cohen? But hmm, I don’t know.
Are there artists with not such an extensive body of work whom you think maybe one day, if they continue with their current level of merit, could deserve the Nobel Prize?
I think Lori McKenna. Do you know her?
No.
She’s a country singer-songwriter. She…It’s very…Okay, so look: Springsteen. That’s who I should have said earlier. He’s deserving. McKenna writes a lot like him. Full of very vivid details and very strong storylines. Her songwriting, it just…I don’t know how she does it. She’s just one of those artists…It’s just magical. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s kind of fun to think about it like that–not as a written thing, but as a magic trick or something. I love her stuff. It’s so earthy and…In fact, I’d say my favorite song of the year is her song “Humble and Kind,” which she wrote as lessons to her kids. Tim McGraw had a hit with it at the beginning of the year, but then she released it on an album I think back in July. And her version is just like, so beautiful. It’s amazing.
Are there any other artists you want to recommend?
[Smiles] Yes. Lydia Loveless. I saw her in Los Angeles last month, and I liked her to begin with, but seeing her live knocked my socks off. Real is one of my favorite albums of the year. Just a really gutsy, bold, smart songwriter.
Have you heard of Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever?
No.
They just signed with Sub Pop. They’re an Australian band. They’re one of my favorite indie rock bands right now. They’re so much fun. They’re amazing. They’ve got a new EP coming out in March, but they’ve got an old EP that is stupendous. It’s called Talk Tight. It’s so good. It’s like that band Real Estate, but if they were more punk and catchier and had backbone.
Have you listened to LVL UP’s new album?
I haven’t.
They recently signed with Sub Pop. It sorta just makes me want to listen to Neutral Milk Hotel. It’s got that indie ‘90s thing going on, and nasal vocals. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is probably my favorite album of all time. We were talking about constructing meaning out of vague lyrics. Something that’s really fun about listening to Neutral Milk Hotel, and also Joanna Newsom, is getting very specific details and fitting them together to construct a narrative. I don’t know, there’s more collaboration in that, between the artist and the listener. It’s easier for me to develop an attachment to albums like that.
Yeah. I think that’s a really good point, especially considering the themes of that album. You almost kind of want to have not everybody in the world get it, to have like a less communal relationship with it.
I bought that album when it came out, and I liked it. It did not mean a thing to me beyond, “Oh, this is a pretty good album” until my dad died. And then it became very important to me. And I think what that album has to say about grief, and how we experience grief, and how we get over loss, is phenomenal. I mean, there’s never been anything like it in pop music that I can think of off the top of my head. I just think it’s remarkable. That whole mythology–in the music, not around the record; in the music and in the lyrics–is amazing. It’s an amazing record.
Something that I love about Aeroplane is that it’s very uncool. Like, “I love you, Jesus Christ” is not a cool sentiment. I think one way the narrator’s dealing with grief is by holding Heaven as a place of reunion. It’s a source of comfort for him, I think.
Yeah. I think it is kind of a Christian album in that regard. I remember when my dad passed away, the idea that, “Oh, he’s in a better place now,” or, “You’ll see him again someday”–those kind of sentiments made me angry. Because they seemed to be dismissing the reality of my loss. But I don’t ever get that from that album. Which is odd.
I think there are so many things thrown at you, so many details, you get to pick and choose.
Yeah. But I think maybe he’s using Heaven as a destination. If you can show your work to get to Heaven, that’s one thing. But if you just start with the assumption that Heaven exists, that’s another thing. I don’t know if that makes sense even to me.
Yeah, I kind of lost you.
To put it a different way, I don’t think that album offers easy answers, or answers at all. Whereas I think the people who say, “Oh, he’s in a better place”–that’s an easy answer. That’s a pat response from people who don’t know or can’t face the magnitude of what you’re dealing with. And I think that he can face that magnitude. That’s what makes that record so amazing. This is all off the top of my head.
I think that album’s become a classic. I think it took a while to grow into that status. I remember when I was in college, there was this canon that everybody seemed to be familiar with, that you felt you needed to be able to talk about. Unfortunately, it was a lot of bullshit. A lot of Eric Clapton. And so I always wonder, like, for people like you, what are those canonical albums that you have to be familiar with? Is Aeroplane one of them? Or does it just sort of speak to you? I mean, obviously it speaks to you. I don’t know, I’m fascinated by generations, especially young generations, coming by and picking what they want out of the stuff my generation had. And I think a lot of people are insecure about that, but I love it.
Insecure about it?
I think people don’t want to admit that they don’t write the rules anymore, that they don’t determine pop culture. And so when you hear people say, “Oh, they don’t write ‘em like they used to anymore,” or, “Music’s just not as good as it used to be,” or something like that, I always think that’s bullshit. It’s just a different generation coming along and saying, “Yeah, you like this, but this doesn’t really translate.” Like Joy Division wasn’t popular. New Order was really a cult band until the ‘90s. But, you know, around the millennium, people got really into those bands and found them to be a lot more meaningful at that time than maybe they had been 30 years, 20 years earlier. Or however long, I don’t know. So I always love that. I love that process of people going back through the culture of previous generations and finding stuff that they either disregard or treasure. And I’m always kind of curious about how the people who are determining rock culture, kids in their teens and early twenties–kids to me, obviously not to you–see the music of my generation and of previous generations. There’s so much history that you have, almost too much history.
I want to ask you about something that some people think music can’t do, which is affect people’s political opinions. We had a lot of songs come out this year that are anti-groupthink, anti-Trump. Do you think it’s possible for music to reach people who don’t already agree with its message and change what they think?
Part of me just wants to say “yes,” that part of me that’s very hopeful about my profession, about the art form, about people in general, about the political sphere. But honestly right now I’m not feeling hopeful in the least. I’m feeling really really beat down. I think that it can. I think. But it seems that it would have to take new approaches. It can’t be the same approach we’ve always used. Like, Tom Morello has that Nightwatchman character, and during the Occupy Movement, he was walking through the crowd singing Woody Guthrie songs. And to me it looked like the most ineffective tool ever. I love Woody Guthrie. But I don’t know that Woody Guthrie is gonna speak to this time we’re in. I don’t think you can use the same strategies, politically, that you might have at an earlier moment. I think about somebody like Kendrick Lamar, and “Alright” being probably the most effective political song of probably my lifetime. Except for probably “We Are the World,” which is not a good song. But, you know, people were chanting, “We gon' be alright” during demonstrations. It was such a short and catchy and meaningful refrain. And that, to me, is effective. I think one of the most powerful and reassuring moments that I’ve had professionally was watching clips of demonstrators in Ferguson chanting that. It literally gave me chills. And I thought, That is something that is effective. It’s not trying to speak specifically. It’s trying to speak communally. It’s also supposed to be something that people participate in and that people shout along with and that becomes something that is not Kendrick. It’s Ferguson. Or it’s whoever is yelling it. “We gon’ be alright” is not in itself political. But as a political statement, it’s extremely powerful. So I think [these new approaches] would require people to let go of the past and let go of their heroes, especially white people’s, and to write and think about these things in different ways. 30 Days, 30 Songs–that is really preaching to the choir.
As somebody who writes a lot about country music, lately it’s been really hard to defend music that is so closely associated with an audience that right now I am extraordinarily angry with, music that I think represents values that are anathema to what I think America should be. So it’s really hard to get excited about, for instance, the new Kenny Chesney album (which is actually pretty good). I know the people who are going to buy that album. They don’t agree with me on much. And so I’ve been trying to figure out how to separate the artist and the audience, how to separate artists and the sort of cultural associations that come bundled with genres. It’s been a really intense experience. But it got me thinking about the country artists I admire, who are almost all women and who are almost all writing about issues that go against what I perceive to be the political beliefs of people who like country music. Kasey Musgraves or Miranda Lambert or the Dixie Chicks. Those people are writing about getting free of certain things, about asserting identities. And I find that very powerful. And I find that that might be a more effective political commentary than 30 songs against Trump. You know, having Death Cab for Cutie tell me that Trump’s not a good person is not effective. But having Kacey Musgraves write a country song about smoking weed or even just being gay–that to me is pretty powerful. Does that make sense?
I think it makes sense. In a time when we are so politically polarized, I think songs that are inclusive, and like you said are communal, are almost necessary.
I think that’s a very good way to put it. Obviously I’ve been thinking about this a lot. My internal monologue has turned into a rant. And occasionally it gets around to music.
Do you take issue with music that’s intended to entertain people?
No. I think escapism is a noble end goal. I listen to music all the time to escape and to be entertained. That takes a lot of craft. Have you heard of a band called Mud?
No.
They’re from the ‘70s. They should by all accounts be a horrible, horrible band. They’re sort of post-glam, pre-pub rock. They have these ridiculous choreographed routines. But man, I get so much joy out of them. If you google “Mud ‘Dynamite,’” there’s a video I’ve watched probably a hundred times in the last six months. I just get so much joy out of it. I’m starting to think that fun and joy in pop music are subversive concepts and that a little bit less self-seriousness is a good thing.
Why do you think fun is subversive?
It might be rebelling against my own generation. I think Nirvana came long and sort of suggested that rock music could be this intense expression of your deepest, darkest fears. And they got really self-serious. It became something that was almost exclusively about art and self-expression. It was supposed to be anti-hair metal music, to eradicate hair metal. I go back and listen to some of that hair metal stuff, and it’s fun. People dancing in the videos and things like that, and it’s like, it looks like it’s fun to be in the crowd at a Bon Jovi concert. It looks like it’s a lot of fun. And then you get to Nirvana, and it’s just like everybody’s kind of closed off with miserable looks on their faces. It’s like, “This is my misery and my angst.” That does not look like fun at all. And I think that became the whole of pop music for a while. I think if you make something fun, it becomes more communal, I guess. I’m kind of losing the thread of the conversation as I’m saying this.
I think fun as communal, though–that gets back to the communal as necessary. Maybe fun is at least sometimes necessary.
Yeah! It can’t all be serious. It needs to be sometimes. But community as a political mission or whatever, I think that’s a worthy goal. And fun is a big part of that. I mean, if you listen to Woody Guthrie, he was a fun guy. He was writing funny songs. So yeah, I think one of the most radical songs of this decade is “Call Me Maybe.” I love that song.
It was really weird at this year’s Pitchfork Fest. It was absurd seeing people at Pitchfork singing “Call Me Maybe.”
[Laughs] That song is remarkable. It just transcends everything. I mean, it’s like, people you went to high school with who don’t know the National are singing that song. People at Pitchfork Fest are singing that song. Everybody’s singing that song. That’s great. That’s amazing. We can find common ground about that song. It’s kind of a beautiful thing.
(07/07/16 4:46pm)
Pitchfork Fest is almost here. You only have just over a week to wait until you get to stand in the heat, under-hydrated, with strangers invading your personal space, some of those strangers evidently not too keen on showering, some of them too drunk to realize they’re testing your olfactory system. Maybe this all sounds wonderful to you. Maybe you’re a masochist. Or maybe you’ve got good taste in music. Because oh golly is Pitchfork’s lineup great. Here’s a by-no-means-exhaustive list of artists you should see next weekend:
1. Car Seat Headrest
Friday–3:30, Red Stage
Car Seat Headrest’s Teens of Denial, clocking in at seventy minutes, is all hits and no misses–one of the best indie rock albums of 2016. Scheduling Car Seat Headrest’s set to be the first of the weekend is a curious decision, what with Teens of Denial’s themes of depression (“You have no right to be depressed / You haven’t tried hard enough to like it”) and self-doubt (“I find it harder to speak / when someone else is listening”) not exactly fulfilling the promise of escape that is partly what draws people to festivals. But the catchy refrain in “(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School for Using) Drugs with Friends (But Says This Isn’t a Problem)” will be a lot of fun to sing along to, and 23-year-old, prolific frontman Will Toledo is clever enough, his banter’s probably gonna be pretty good. And moreover, like “Drugs with Friends” suggests, escaping is overrated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEsItsZphwQ
2. Broken Social Scene
Friday–7:20, Red Stage
The Toronto collective has included Feist; Emily Haines and James Shaw of Metric; Torquil Campbell, Evan Cranley, Amy Millan, and Chris Seligman of Stars; and up to like a bajillion other people (eleven, to be precise). Co-founded by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, Broken Social Scene’s got so many connected projects, and altogether those projects have so many influences, it’s no wonder the band’s discography is eclectic. Their ambient debut album, Feel Good Lost would work as background music for a yoga class–it deserves more than that, of course, but it would work–whereas their self-titled’s lengthy closer “It’s All Gonna Break,” which by the way features some bitching horns, is way too chaotic for shavasana. There's these two aptly titled songs: “Blues for Uncle Gibb” and “Late Nineties Bedroom Rock for the Missionaries.” There’s also fan-favorite “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl,” which is orchestral folk. It’s hard to tell what the overall vibe of their set will be, or how many vibes there will be, and we don’t know how many members will show up, nor if whoever shows up has new stuff to play. (It’s not like they have to have new stuff to play stuff you haven’t heard, though; You Forgot It in People’s recording sessions were largely improvised, and they’ve improvised live before.) But this is not a case where you should be concerned about the unknown, no siree. Broken Social Scene's released four excellent records. Whatever their set consists of, it won't be disappointing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j0h2QkMu7k
3. Savages
Saturday–4:15, Green Stage
If you’re into post-punk, make it a point to catch Savages’ set. Just keep your phone stowed away. In 2013, on tour supporting their debut album Silence Yourself, the band posted a sign that asked concert-goers not to mess with their phones during the show. The sign read: “We believe that the use of phones to film and take pictures during a gig prevents all of us from totally immersing ourselves.” The band’s pro-immersion (check out “I Am Here,” one of the standout tracks on Silence Yourself). Frontwoman Jehnny Beth spoke to Pitchfork editor Jenn Pelly for Pitchfork’s podcast. She said the band wanted their second album to represent them–a "this is us," is how Beth put it. If we’re to take Adore Life as a representation of the London-based quartet, then Savages are badass and sincere. Rather than singing clichés ironically, Beth embraces the Truth in them. They’re a band who can put on a show far more compelling than any picture of them your iPhone can take.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKI16lYE5rA
4. Sufjan Stevens
Saturday–8:30, Green Stage
At 7:25 on Saturday night, Brian Wilson will perform 1966’s Pet Sounds, a classic album. Then at 8:30, Sufjan Stevens will play songs from heart-on-sleeve Carrie & Lowell, which, given its beauty and its ruminations on mortality, is a timeless album, one that, fifty years from now, may also be considered a classic. Bonus: you get to see Stevens play the jubilant “Chicago” at a festival–say what you will of festivals’ lack of intimacy, but festivals have more jubilation than the drunk people attending them can shake a stick at–in Chicago.
It should be noted that Sufjan Stevens has, on his Tumblr, expressed his ambivalence about a typographical choice Savages made: “The awkward blatancy of an ALL CAPS manifesto (with line breaks) on [Silence Yourself’s] cover is, on one hand, a bold move (typographically), and, on the other hand, an indication of restraint and self-possession...The inherent democracy of ONE CASE (every letter equally measured) forgoes the political hierarchy of upper/lower class. Am I reading too much into this?” He goes on to describe Savages’ sound as: “Restrained Aggression. Agressive Restraint. Clean lines, crisp utility, minimalism, functionality. These are also the qualities of a good font, Helvetica being the supreme deity, and Futura Medium a minor prophet.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTeKpWp8Psw
5. Kamasi Washington
Sunday–3:20, Red Stage
So uh, I’m not going to pretend I know much about jazz. Before listening to Kamasi Washington’s magnum opus The Epic, my experience with the genre was limited to hearing it while eating at Yats or watching Louie. What I will say is that the first time I listened to The Epic, I kept thinking, Holy shit. Washington plays sax on, and conducted the strings for, To Pimp a Butterfly, and jazz-influenced Annie Clark thinks highly of him, albeit not quite as highly as Sufjan Stevens thinks of Helvetica. The guy's a big deal in the jazz sphere. If you’re a noob like me, let Washington make you agree, as I now do, with Kurt Vonnegut’s definition of jazz: “safe sex, of the highest order.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtQRBzSN9Vw
(07/05/16 5:29pm)
Mostly Hypothetical Mountains, the novella that comes with physical copies of Father John Misty’s debut album Fear Fun, is in a way another ironic joke of Josh Tillman’s. If you’re not all that familiar with Tillman, he’s given himself a moniker that, in his own words, is "like ‘Alexa Chung’ but sounds more like a Christian puppet show,” he’s released Father John Misty’s sophomore album I Love You, Honeybear on a lo-fi streaming service he invented, and he’s mocked Ryan Adams for covering Taylor Swift’s 1989 in its entirety by covering Ryan Adams’ covers of “Blank Space” and “Welcome to New York” in the style of the Velvet Underground (and then removed the songs from SoundCloud, claiming he dreamt Lou Reed, standing “on a catwalk handcuffed to supermodels who had adopted babies handcuffed to them,” told him to take ‘em down). Maybe you know “Now I’m Learning to Love the War,” one of the FJM tracks that are too country-sounding to be cool? The song gets into how the production of art necessitates the consumption of natural resources. Tillman laments “the truly staggering amount / of oil / that it takes to make a record.” So the ironic joke is that Sub Pop distributed, and continues to distribute, a record that has “Now I’m Learning to Love the War” with enough paper to fit not just the lyrics but also a novella.
During his show at the Egyptian Room last September, Tillman told the crowd his favorite author was from Indianapolis. He didn’t name the author, but, come on, he was talking about Kurt Vonnegut. MHM and Vonnegut’s seventh novel Breakfast of Champions have a few things in common. For starters, they’re both satirical. BoC addresses many issues–racism, sexism, the human-caused destruction of the environment–but one of the all-time best satirizations of capitalism is delivered in the form of a summary of a story by Kilgore Trout, the science-fiction author who wrote the book that psychologically messed with BoC’s other major character, Dwayne Hoover. The story’s set in the Hawaiian Islands. A total of forty people own all of the land, and they do NOT want folks to tresspass on their property, no siree. Rather than make the forty people grow up and share a little, the governemnt issues every landless Hawaiian a balloon. “With the help of the balloons, Hawaiians could go on inhabiting the islands without always sticking to things other people owned.”
Some characters in MHM’s video game also like to prevent other people from owning stuff. Much of MHM is the “synopsis” (it’s far from brief) of a video game thought of by a guy whose name and age are never revealed. He began writing the synopsis in a computer class at his Messianic-Jewish Pentecostal high school. There’s a scene that’s a hilarious intersection of two things going on in the game’s world: (1) an obsession with patenting, and (2) a conflation of the mental and the physical. That is, some characters believe that whatever they imagine in their heads is happening in reality. Just after Steve imagines doing dirty things to Kristen, he apologizes for doing unrequested dirty things he didn’t physically do. Later Steve pictures Kristen sleeping with other dudes and thus believes she’s actually cheating on him. (In one of a bajillion examples of Tillman’s voice slipping into what’s supposed to be the voice of the video game’s creator, the guy who wrote the synopsis narrates: “[Steve] couldn’t help but think of [Kristen] capitalizing on, what he subjectively perceived to be, her gender’s market scarcity.”) So Steve patents Kristen. This is a multifold idea, satirically. You’ve got the extreme greed and the exaggeration of insecurity, and you’ve also got the fact that Steve writes “vows” for Kristen to read at the patenting “ceremony.” The diction recalls weddings, and so the reader begins to suspect that here the verb “patents” is a dysphemism for “marries.” The patenting ceremony can be interpreted as a modern take on the feminist criticism of marraiges that claims any marriage is essentially an exchange of goods and therefore an objectification of the bride.
Part of what’s funny about both Breakfast of Champions and Mostly Hypothetical Mountains is the writing itself. Take for example this excerpt from the first chapter of BoC: “Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold on to it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn’t get their hands on doodley-squat.” Doodley-squat. Now take the opening line of a letter penned by the game’s creator and sent to a company that produces video games: “My, has it been so long since my buoyant words bobbled and wove ‘cross your rapidly dimming eyes?”
BoC and MHM are both metafictional. Vonnegut appears in BoC and acknowledges that he’s the narrator: “I had come to the Arts Festival incognito. I was there to watch a confrontation between two human beings I had created.” Tillman shows up in MHM and talks to an energy healer about his novella. He describes MHM thusly: “It’s a nonlinear, multi-format, adventure satire attempting to dismantle the infrastructure of ownership, as told by several quasi-fictional unreliable narrators.”
In one metafictional moment, either the synopsis of the game or the novella itself is referred to as a “memoir masquerading as a nonlinear satirical narrative.” Let's go with the novella. MHM is in fact autobiographical. The game’s synopsis includes an excerpt from The Prolonged Embrace of My Sexually Alarming Emergence, the memoir of a character in the game. This character writes that he has the “kind of parents who don’t bat an eye when you come home from your first day of school with tales of spiritual initiation rites into a fanatical Messianic-Jewish Pentecostal fringe cult with historically-revisionist Zionist political leanings, but who potentially could have been roused out of inaction if I had been expelled for refusing to engage in said metaphysically dubious exercises...” Josh Tillman was raised in a rather religious household. His parents spoke in tongues, and he wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music unless he could convince his folks there were spiritual undertones.
Another character Tillman may identify with: the Devil. Satan, while getting demoted from running Hell’s blood business (which involves selling the blood of newly arrived residents of Hell) to just managing Hell’s Hell-themed restaurant (inspired by Rainforest Café, a franchise for which Josh Tillman used to work), the Devil “tremble[s] sarcastically to mask his sincere trembling” and “mockingly [weeps] to mask his literal sorrow.” At Father John Misty concerts, Josh Tillman makes a show of embodying the flamboyant rock star. He sashays around the stage. The affectation, like most affectations, can come across as a defense mechanism. I Love You, Honeybear is a blatantly autobiographical album about Tillman falling in love with his wife Emma and subsequently–the album can be interpreted as arguing not just subsequently but consequently–confronting his inner asshole. Live, though, it’s easier to sing, “I’ve said awful things, such awful things” (“The Ideal Husband”) if you distance yourself from the words, if rather than own the admission, you mask your self-criticism with the rock-star archetype.
In the penultimate verse of “Now I’m Learning to Love the War,” Tillman criticizes contemporary culture for wasting resources on things as silly as “15-year-olds / made from dinosaur bones / singing “Oh, yeah!” So there’s a subtext to the song: if art’s of merit, consuming resources on it is at least not as bad as consuming resources on vapid art. Mostly Hypothetical Mountains is hardly useless. Odds are you’ll laugh out loud at it at least once. And the Vonnegut influence is notable in part because Kurt Vonnegut’s among the greats. People don't compare George Saunders and Paul Beatty to Vonnegut just for funzies; the comparison is usually a recommendation. If you buy Fear Fun from your local record store, you will be perpetuating the practice of killing trees, but, hey, Mostly Hypothetical Mountains was printed on paper that could’ve been spent on something much, much worse.
(04/01/16 9:22pm)
Aaron Dessner, best known as a co-producer of Mumford & Sons’ latest album, and his twin brother Bryce have curated a roughly-five-hours-long Grateful Dead tribute compilation. Day of the Dead features over sixty artists, including the Flaming Lips, Wilco, and that band Justin Vernon was in before he lived in the woods for a bit.
This morning 4AD announced that the Day of the Dead limited edition vinyl box set will come with an equally long supplemental compilation–one in which the artists who covered the Grateful Dead cover each other. The 24xLP box set will still be affordable to the substantial number of Deadheads who make over 100k a year.
According to 4AD, Perfume Genius–who collaborated with Sharon Van Etten on a cover of Dead’s “To Lay Me Down”–has done his own thing with the National's "Demons." That is, Mike Hadreas probably turned “Demons” into a pretty piano-pop track in which he sings, ever so delicately, “When I walk into a room / I do not light it up / Fuck.” Jenny Lewis, having admitted to releasing almost stream-of-consciousness songs that aren’t so good, has tried not to botch an actual stream-of-consciousness song that's very good: "Avant Gardener" by Courtney Barnett.
All profits will go to the Red Hot Organization, a 501(c)(3) that provides sunburned, attractive people with boxes of Red Hots.
(11/30/15 1:35am)
Portlandia, the Emmy-nominated sketch comedy show that elevated Carrie Brownstein to a household name, is mentioned once in her memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl–in the epilogue. The title of the book refers to the fifth track on The Woods, the seventh album from Brownstein’s band Sleater-Kinney and the trio’s last record before their decade-long hiatus. Brownstein had her pick between “hunger makes me a modern girl” and “anger makes me a modern girl.” Either line fits her youth.
Within thirty pages we learn that Carrie was fourteen when her mother Linda sought treatment for her anorexia, rendering Carrie motherless for a month. The first time Carrie, her younger sister Stacey, and her father Kenny visited Linda in the eating disorder unit at Ballard Medical Plaza in Seattle, Linda’s clothes looked “hardly different on her than [they] would on a wire hanger.” Linda returned home, which was in Redmond, Washington–but not for long. She left for good less than a year after her stay at Ballard.
Mr. Brownstein wasn’t entirely there, either. He “wasn’t just taciturn–it was like he didn’t want to be heard... Perhaps his reticence came from not being able to name what or who he was, or what he felt. So he stayed quiet, and he waited for the words to find him.”
The words never quite found him, though. He forced them when Carrie was in her early twenties: “So I guess I’m coming out to you.”
His admission shook Carrie. “If he wasn’t himself during my childhood, then what was my childhood?” she wondered. “What was I?”
Contemporary memoirs often read like lengthy boasts, narratives over which the world ought not lose ink. Carrie Brownstein, however, endured an extraordinarily arduous adolescence, became a co-guitarist, -lyricist, and -vocalist for a critically acclaimed band (sharing those roles with frontwoman Corin Tucker), and rather than succumb to hubris, she divulges moments she clearly regrets, such as the time she yelled, “Fu*k you!” at Toni Gogin–whom Janet Weiss would later and not incidentally replace–for botching a drumroll on tour.
After the release of their sophomore album Call the Doctor, S-K wanted to switch from Chainsaw Records to a larger label. They set up a meeting with Matador Records in New York City, and Brownstein walked in forty-five minutes late. “I might as well have been wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sucking my thumb,” she so candidly reflects. (They ended up signing with Olympia-based Kill Rock Stars, a label that had Elliott Smith on its roster at the time.)
Brownstein praises other musicians way more than she compliments herself. She says Jack White has “that star quality of simultaneously sucking the air out of a space and giving it life.” And surely by now Kathleen Hanna has grinned with pride at the fact that a fellow riot grrl artist calls Bikini Kill’s music “a revelation.”
Even when she writes about music journalist Greil Marcus deeming Sleater-Kinney the best American rock band in 2000, Brownstein avoids complacency: “‘Best Band in America’ and my back is about to go out again because I’m carrying a sixty-pound amp into a practice space the size of a pantry in which Janet’s aged marmalade cat has sprayed multiple times. It smelled like piss and dryer sheets. This was us having ‘made it!’ We never stopped working.”
Feline urine aside, the prose is stunning. Take for example this description of an indoor swimming pool Brownstein frequented as a kid: “I loved the echo in the cavernous room, the way the sounds and voices melded into each other, gurgling, muted, watercolors for the ears.”
The diction is colloquial but never to a condescending extent, and, given that Brownstein studied sociolinguistics at Evergreen State College, one is driven to think the colloquialisms indicate not a poor lexical repertoire but an intention to build and maintain intimacy between author and reader. (“We never had groupies. Writing that sad little sentence, I wish we had, just so instead I could have written, ‘Yes, of course we had groupies! Endless, countless numbers of groupies. A cornucopia of groupies, groupies coming out of my ears, groupies for days.’”)
Because she achieves this friend-talking-to-a-friend tone, cliffhangers at the end of a few chapters can be annoying, sorta like your gal pal is teasing you with an intriguing bit of a story and making you wait to hear the full version. But music’s effect on Carrie Brownstein–the hungers of hers it has sated, hungers for love, attention, self-respect–is a story worthy of your patience.