ROMY: revamping the vamp

Lou Reed did it and many fans still haven’t forgiven him. Marc Bolan did, too, and it cemented his place on golden oldie radio forever. Jewel and Mandy Moore both did it, in opposing directions with opposing commercial results. So did The Killers and, in Australia, Evermore on their last album, those occasions acting like fingers down the throat of the media, eliciting equal measures of critical spew and praise for their ‘hot new look’.

The practice of ‘reinvention’ is often pinned in music press to pop artists whose latest music and visual style change is viewed as akin to Domino's injecting yet another layer of quadruple-fat cheese into their bulging crusts – it’s there to get us salivating at the counter but, three minutes later, we’ve forgotten what it was we just rammed inelegantly into our gobs. Or we’re left regretting the empty pleasure and wiping the stain off our pants.

It’s an act often seen as a cynical marketing ploy, only acceptable when the product is transparently there to be sold as instant-gratifier – ie. the so-called ‘queen of reinvention’, Madonna – and derided when its undertaken by, primarily, bands whose ‘credibility’, and therefore the credibility of their audience, is at stake.

The truth is, of course, that nearly every artist reinvents at some point in their career (even if it’s a reinvention into a silent, inactive artist – every action has an impact on the assessment of an artist’s work). Some people simply call it having new ideas, or moving on. Something M.I.A said to US Rolling Stone recently, however, has had me thinking about the role and perception of reinvention in popular culture. “I just want to be real, whatever that is,” she said of her work on her upcoming third album. “Even if my songs are shit, and if I have flaws and if I’m confused, if I offend people or if I don’t offend people, I might try to work it out in public, just so you know that it’s OK to think, that thinking’s not a dirty word.”

There is, as M.I.A alluded, this idea that reinvention must be done out of the sightline of the audience. When an artist goes into hiding, escapes our memories and emerges a changed entity, it’s as if the mystery of their inspiration adds some level of genius – not like a magician performing a trick, but like a ditzy high-school graduate going off to university and returning with a new vocabulary and a wiser take on life. We assume a level of ‘authenticity’. If we could see the work that went into it, it might not be so incredible an act. For M.I.A, however, the ‘realness’, as she puts it, might be elevated if the invention or reinvention is done in front of the audience; the authenticity brought about by a visible ownership of the ideas.

One artist whose new output disputes this is ROMY. Previously – or otherwise – known as Melbourne rapper Macromantics, the moniker under which she signed to cerebrally advanced US label Kill Rock Stars and released her Moments In Movement album in 2006, Romy Hoffman has ‘reinvented’ with an extremely well realised and heartening take on fantasy-riding dance pop. Her first single as ROMY, out the first week in February but already able to be heard on her MySpace – myspace.com/rahromyruckus – is Sleep, a smart dancefloor banger with enough trance keys and threateningly buzzing beats to throw it so far into ‘now’ we’ll all be catching up for some time.

The Hoffman ‘revamp’ (as she calls it on MySpace) also includes introducing her as a singer. A sneak preview of more tracks to come produces endlessly catchy vocal hooks, more moving (in both senses) beats and some intriguing influences. Not to mention an imaginative, fashion-forward new image. OK, it’s a hot new look, but at least, unlike The Killers, it’s actually hot.

Like M.I.A, Hoffman has always been an artist who shows it’s OK to think, yet they’ve taken different approaches to what they’ve allowed the public to see of their latest ‘reinventions’. Does it matter? It doesn’t seem to. For all this talk of ‘authenticity’ and ‘changed entities’, what really matters is the quality of the end work. As Avril Lavigne discovered when she slipped on a hot-pink mini and broke into sadly choreographed cheer-dancing a couple of years back, if you haven’t got the goods it doesn’t matter what you’re reinventing yourself as.

Jay Reatard: a self-penned tragedy in the blogging age?

“All is lost, there is no hope/All is lost, you can go home/All is lost, there is no hope for me.”

Those are the last lines of Jay Reatard’s last single, It Ain’t Gonna Save Me, and this is, no doubt, not the last time they’ll be printed. Jay Reatard’s death at age 29 yesterday may not have made headlines on major news services around the world, but there can be no mistaking that it was to rock music history what the passing of a musician embraced more widely by media and audiences, such as Amy Winehouse, would be to pop music history.

Jimmy Lindsey Jr’s was arguably the first music life played out in the blogging age. His every move was monitored by rock tabloid sites such as Brooklyn Vegan, Pitchfork and Exclaim! (whose last entry on Reatard, dated 12 January, the day before his death, is a ‘news’ piece based on Reatard’s own last Twitter post from the day before, of his “beef” with New Jersey band Liquor Store, which read: “I will give anyone a hundred bucks per tire that they pop on the band liquor stores van ! Yes I'm serious”); by promoters eager to get their side of the story out on Reatard’s contract-warring penchant for a little stage destruction; and by audience members with camera phones. The last was to the point where, as identified in an article in Self-Titled magazine and reprinted in the Best Music Writing 2009 compendium (available through Da Capo Press), there was a time when the first clip on YouTube of Reatard that came up was titled “Jay Reatard punching kid at the Silver Dollar”, a clip of Reatard hitting a stage invader shot from the crowd.

Perhaps the biggest online monitor of Reatard’s actions, however, was Reatard himself. A serial blogger and ‘tweeter’, Reatard could often be easily quoted in reports on fan run-ins, gig troubles and band bust-ups (all of which were frequent and many) via his own online rants and retaliations.

It’s this last fact that should be remembered when the story of Reatard is told. Because it will be, and it will no doubt be a story heavy on tragedy and irony – the artist who built himself up from a working-class Memphis background; whose prolificness seemed to counter his commercial success; whose lyrics were admittedly often founded in revenge; whose last album was his first on Matador, titled Watch Me Fall; who left those final lines with that final single; whose temperament, at least in the press, appeared to be calming with his new band; who, in that same Self-Titled article, said of his future recorded output: “I’m getting introspective… I’m starting to figure out how I fit in. I feel like I’m part of a bigger picture.” More to the point, however, the artist who struggled with and derided the constant stream of attention and criticism he received.

In a documentary titled Waiting For Something, released on the internet in August 2009, the owners of Shangri-La Records in Memphis, Reatard’s local record store, recalled Reatard as a teenager whose desire for attention far outweighed his musical ability. In the film, Reatard also admitted he sent money home to his family, saying, “I have to keep working for a lot of other people’s sake than mine.” Yet, the documentary also includes a snippet of an interview with French press in which Reatard expresses his anger at having to answer the journalist’s (excruciatingly dumb but fairly benign) questions.

Elsewhere, it was reported that a team of staff from Matador worked closely with Reatard to choose the tracks for Watch Me Fall; this following years of loose-leaf releases of almost everything he wrote. There’s little doubt Reatard welcomed and was even chasing success, if only to create some monetary stability. It may be this that explains why, even as they appeared to be self-sabotaging, the blogs and ‘tweets’ ran on, not only feeding the media attachment that caused him grief but acting as his own media attachment, run by his own hand.

Reatard’s death is tragic, but if that tragedy is to be the tale of Reatard’s life, then it should be noted that Reatard was, largely, its storyteller. He lived but also painted his own tragedy, an act no less – and perhaps even more – significant than his musical output.

From January 2010

Ke$ha: the fine art of selling trailers

We’re already halfway through the first month of the next first year of the next decade, which means not a lot except that if you haven’t seen Avatar yet then you’re pretty much screwed for conversation for the rest of your life. It’s also the time when magazine editors get to stroke their egos and spill who they think will be the biggest acts of the year to come. This year, however, while holidaying editors where erecting their lists in preparation, something happened. Something kinda big, really. The world welcomed its first major pop star of the year and, well, while we’re here, of the decade in a 22-year-old Los Angeles singer/rapper named (sorta) Ke$ha.

Keisha Sebert’s debut album, Animal, was released in the US on 5 January and in Australia three days later, but she didn’t even have to wait for her New Year comedown to subside to find herself breaking chart records. In the States, her tech-nerd-cum-tween-cum-ironic-hipster-internet-speak-titled TiK ToK single, which first topped the singles chart in New Zealand and then Australia, entered 2010 at number one and also broke the record for the biggest track sales week by a female artist in history (why the gender distinction has to be made is uncertain – are there questions about vaginas altering sales figures?) when it received 610,069 downloads. For the record, she also features on the record holder for highest track sales week, Flo Rida’s Right Round.

Needless to say, her record company, RCA Records, who signed Ke$ha in February 2009, is viewing her as a high priority act on their roster. It might sound like the usual record label story, but there are some things worthy of noting about Sebert as New Pop Cultural Signifier.

First is her style of highly produced, synth-heavy rap pop, which she’s calling “electro pop” but could actually be seen as the next extension of smoothed over ‘crunk punk’ being made increasingly popular by the new ‘boy bands’ (a different topic) like Cobra Starship and 3OH!3.

Then is her place in the line of recent female singer/rappers, the line that jumped the Atlantic to bound between Lily Allen and Katy Perry and only relates to the pop charts seeing as females were singing and rapping about such ‘controversial’ things as having orgasms and getting drunk long before it became the greatest new change in music. Sebert, who is reportedly friends with Perry, does tote the same (gender non-specific) arrogance in her lyrics as Perry, but her marketed style has far more in common with Allen’s – that of the ‘lower-class’ assault on the wealthy world of celebrity singers and producers. When Allen emerged, she was heralded as the voice of the ‘average’ English slapper, before it was slowly revealed that she came from an upper-middle-class, well-connected family and she altered her image to that of ‘straight-talking’ socialite.

Likewise, much in Ke$ha’s early press has been made of her years living with her struggling songwriter mother in Nashville, even though a lot of it comes from the time before Sebert was four and her mother picked up a publishing deal. (Sebert’s mother also shares writing credits on her album.) As in TiK ToK, Sebert affects ‘hood’ slang, using words in her songs and blogs like “po po” and “fronting”. In 2005, her family was even one of the ‘regular trashy’ families featured on Paris Hilton’s reality show The Simple Life. The Guardian has called her “trailer trashy to the max – only it's so full-on it's almost like some postmodern arthouse joke”.

What isn’t as widely publicised but Sebert has acknowledged in interviews is that, by 2005, when Sebert was 17, she was already dropping out of an International Baccalaureate with intentions to study psychology at Columbia University. The years between 2005 and 2009 are also little documented, though there are the credits to help fill them in – the backup vocals on tracks ‘by’ Britney Spears, the writing credits for The Veronicas (she co-wrote This Love) and Miley Cyrus, the string of tracks synched to television shows, all, assumingly, while trying to land or negotiating a record deal. But if there’s any doubt, there’s always the tour with Mickey Avalon to press the fact that Ke$ha is the new smack-talking voice of the trailer park, which is also currently one of the most popular voices in the western world.

Welcome to the decade.

From January 2010

Billy Corgan and the lost smack pub

There’s a pub across the road from my house. When I moved in, this information brought with it some excitement and agony over the future of my working life. Excitement because the thought of taking my laptop over in the afternoons and writing with a pint sitting next to me was, somewhat, appealing. Agony because the thought of taking my laptop over in the afternoons and writing with five empty pint glasses sitting next to me was, somewhat, concerning, no doubt not least of all to my editors. My editors and my liver (well, it’s all relative) were saved, however, when I made my first visit to the pub and discovered that this was not the kind of pub you settled in with your wireless notebook, gazing off into the distance, deliberating whether to use the word ‘deliberating’ or ‘considering’ and what the real difference is between the two. This was the kind of pub where you sat gazing into the distance when your last hit had kicked in and you couldn’t quite manage to lift your hand to wipe the drool from your chin.

This was the kind of pub where the woman behind the bar, once given her order, turned around to the fridge, paused for a moment, and turned back around to ask you what you wanted. Even upon telling her your order the second time, you were only likely to receive the first half and would then, so as not to embarrass the old girl, have to pay for and deliver the anorexic tray of drinks to your mates before sending one of them back over to order the second half – twice.

When you were at the bar, you’d have to endure being ogled and hit on by the row of craggy old dudes dripping from their bar stools who couldn’t tell and didn’t particularly care whether you were male or female, seeing as the only other people they saw socially were the other craggy old dudes. On one of my first visits, one of the old dudes did ask me whether I was a man or a woman, and upon discovering that I am, in fact, just your run-of-the-mill effeminate boot-wearing type, said, “Oh, I thought you was a chick and I was gonna give yer a crack.” Then he paused for a moment, looked into the bottom of his glass, looked at me again and added, “I’d probably go you anyway.” I nearly wept from the sheer romance of it all.

There was a pool table and a Big Buck Hunter arcade game in the corner, which, after one visit, featured all my mates’ names in the ‘top shooters’ list, I’m almost certain because no one had ever played it before, even though it looked like it had been sitting there since 1985. But there was also a jukebox attached to the wall, and it was this under-appreciated piece of pop-culture gadgetry that would keep me coming back. For $4, you could choose ten songs from the reels of albums contained within, from Janis Joplin and The Doors to Talking Heads and REM. It was the selection of ‘90s and early 2000s albums, however, that was the real prize find, an authentic recent relic not yet ‘in vogue’ in other beer traps. Where else could you play a game of pool while listening to the Cyprus Hill, Deadstar, Smashing Pumpkins, Gin Blossoms, Sneaker Pimps, Coolio, Alayna Myles (even if Black Velvet does remind me of sitting in the car waiting for my mother to come out of the supermarket and needing to pee so bad I was this close to going in my school bag) and Meat Puppets. It was like my childhood dream of being one of the flannel’d members of Citizen Dick in Singles was coming true, and I didn’t even have to hang out with Eddie Vedder.

There was an entire section devoted to Big Day Out compilations, the ones I never bought because they always seemed like such surface-level skimmings of the popular Triple J acts of the time and held little interest other than meaning I might hear the occasional song I liked when I was at an extended-family function – because everyone owned them, regardless of their taste in music. (There was at least one occasion in 2003 when I realised the influence of the BDO compilations, in which, at my aunty’s birthday party, Neil Diamond was followed by Green Velvet’s La La Land and my uncle started gyrating his hips in the middle of the room. I think that’s when I decided LA was clearly not for me.) Now those compilations are like time capsules of sunburnt days wandering around with a rainbow slushie, pining for the Hole/Marilyn Manson awesomeness that was the 1999 line-up. Even Skulker can bring on nostalgia if the beer tap has been left on long enough.

One of the greatest attributes of this manky den of destitution was that, regardless of what you chose from the jukebox, the bloke who owned the pub – a shy, portly guy who might actually have just been a customer because, really, I had no basis for assuming he owned the place other than that he was there all the time and wasn’t as hammered as everyone else – always commended you on your song choices and contentedly mouthed the words to each of them as they played. I liked the thought that he’d hand-picked each of the CDs in the machine so that it didn’t matter what anyone chose, they’d all be his favourites.

Now, some time after first walking through the door, the pub that says good morning to the world with smashed beer bottles paving the entrance and good night with not-so-domestic domestics happening on the footpath (and the occasional sly snog around the corner, which is always entertaining to watch from my front window if one of the snoggers’ girlfriends of boyfriends catches them in the act) has become a place of bizarre comfort, a curio of whimsical nostalgia and lost souls, but also one of the happiest places I know. I’ve never seen an episode of Cheers, but I imagine it was something like this, so long as Kirsty Alley had a smack problem and a fondness for being groped by drunk old women.

So, while others will be vomiting on each other in 4am cab lines this week, trying to get their sequined arses out of the city centre while the police do their very important job of hassling drunk people who are attempting to get home without being discriminated against or ripped off by a taxi industry in an appalling state of ill repair, I’ll be across the street. I’ll be shooting arcade deer (hey, we vegos get to have fun sometimes, too), listening to Texas and Slint and being chatted up by grandpas whose old fellas couldn’t say Happy New Year if you gave them a cocktail and a party popper. Because, sometimes, it’s in the places that are the most lost that you find a little piece of yourself you didn’t even know was there.

Happy New Year, love The Breakdown.

From end of year issues, December 30, 2009

Spinning conversations: in search of vinyl

A trip into the city at this time of year is like visiting a prison on conjugal visit day – frantic and filled with festive cream buns and custard tarts. But sometimes the season must be embraced and the city ventured into in order to buy a present or two, if only and preferably for yourself. So, the other day, I went in search of some new vinyl. Surprisingly, this time, not a new pair of chaps.

As the year’s releases thin out to an ugly Englishwoman, there’s still some very decent Australian vinyl being released. The new 7” from Melbourne’s Miniature Submarines, the duo of Mark Nelson from The Stabs and Love Of Diagrams' Monica Fikerle, is out through Sydney’s Rice In Nice Records, as is the new split 7” from Agents Of Abhorrence and Roskopp. Love Of Diagrams’ third album Forever has just been released as an LP, and there’s a 7” around from fuzzy pop-gaze group The Twerps and an new LP, Reality & Visions, from the very awesome Deaf Wish. (While we’re talking good new releases, Sydney’s Richard In Your Mind have also just put out their Summertime EP of warm, bustling experi-pop through iTunes – another Rice Is Nice release.)

With a city crammed with people and a pair of dead headphones, however, I didn’t have to wait until I got my load home to my dodgy old turntable to be reminded that the Christmas season is all about strange encounters with faulty equipment – or, rather, strange encounters with people whose brains have gone wonky from too much ‘seasonal spirit’. Well, that and listening to other people’s conversations is a dirty habit I picked up from my father, whose eyes often glaze over mid-conversation like he’s channelling the ghosts of ABC talkback radio.

It was on that bastion of defective humanity, public transport, that the first encounter took place in front of me. A university student running into an old friend: “So if I get a High Distinction, I’ve decided I’m going to reward myself with Xanax.”

His friend, who clearly hadn’t followed him down the path of prescription incentives: “Um… right.”

Student: “Have you had it? It’s really amazing.”

Friend: “No, but, er, good for you…”

Student: “Well, either that or OxyContin. Have you had OxyContin? It’s this painkiller but it gives you total hallucinations.”

Friend: “Isn’t that stuff like heroin?”

Student: “Yes! But it’s legal so it’s much better.”

Friend: “Well, it’s been short, but I have to go.”

Within minutes came another reunion of two friends, one of whom was revealing her new job in some kind of social services role (which I missed because I was staring at a billboard, trying to decipher the rationale behind the slogan for the new Coopers 62 pilsner – “You know who you are.” Are they just aiming for the wide market of those under Alzheimer’s age?).”

Woman: “So, yeah, it’s very hands-on with the public.”

Man: “So you must be a bit of a lefty these days, eh? You must hate that Tony Abbott is the leader of the opposition now. I mean, the guy’s a Nazi.”

Woman: “Well, I think being in politics is very difficult.”

Man: “What do you mean?”

Woman: “I just think politicians get a really bad rap. I’m sure Tony Abbott isn’t such a bad guy.”

Man: “Er… yeah, I guess. No, I don’t know what you mean.”

Woman: “I’m sure he’s a decent human being when he’s at home. He looks like a lovely guy.”

Man: “Hmm. So what else have you been up to?”

On the way to the record store, I passed a dishevelled old busker who wasn’t usually on that particular corner and who looked and sounded like he’d spent whatever money he’d made that morning on a cheap cask of goon to keep the ‘seasonal spirits’ up. Except he’d unfortunately had so much that he kept forgetting which of the (I’m assuming) only songs he knew that he was singing. “Ring a ring o’ roses, a pocket full of posies and all the way to town. Ring a ring o’ roses, a pocket full of my faaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiir lady!”

Something tells me the Coopers people wouldn’t value his feedback. And sometimes things are so sad you just have to laugh. And sometimes my family have to get stuff from eBay for Christmas.

From December 2009

A mouth like Pete Doherty's fly

When it comes to concerts, cinemas or, really, any situation in which you have to be in a room with a number of people you’d happily wipe off the face of the earth if it meant you could have the place to yourself, you’re either a shoosher or you’re not. There are no grey areas: you either hone in on the dude telling his mate about the hella sick subwoofer he just installed in his Commodore and attempt to silence it with an impersonation of Pete Doherty taking his first slash after a big night out, or you don’t. There might be many reasons why you don’t: you might prefer to let chaos reign – let people speak when they want to and to hell with the consequences – or, as many are, you might be too scared to have actual confrontations with people and instead prefer to quietly will them to die of syphilis them and curse under your breath about the lack of human decency. Either way, not a word or a ‘shoosh’ is ever exiting your mouth.

Until recently, I haven’t been a shoosher. Depending on the circumstance, I’m either a staunch advocate of noise or worried about incurring the wrath of someone who was brought up thinking scratching and vomiting are reasonable ways to resolve arguments, which isn’t as crazy as it sounds if you take a look around the next time you’re at Hoyts or the Big Day Out.

A trip to a small town to see a ‘vintage’ act the other weekend, however, changed all that. It was a pilgrimage organised by a group of friends who’d grown up listening to said ‘vintage’ act through their teen years. Admittedly, I hadn’t, and went along willing to be introduced to their back catalogue for the first time in person and take in the scenery of a rural venue, sip a couple Coopers Sparkings and treat the whole thing as an ethnographical experience I could later relay to those back home with some mild curiosity about what the outside of an inner city suburb looks like.

It took us nearly two hours to get there and, when we finally settled into the old hall and the ‘vintage’ act began, it soon became apparent that, a) we were the youngest there by about 30 years, which gave me less hope that we’d witness a good old-fashioned country chair-over-the-head brawl, and b) there was a group of men and women over by the bar who were smashed and weren’t going to stop loudly slurring at each other over the top of the acoustic performance any time soon, which reinstated my hope.

But instead of chairs, it was an unusually high level of passive aggression that was thrown around. The dirty looks and audible scoffs began from all corners of the room in the direction of the slurrers, and the act onstage (who was quite possibly ready for bed anyway) made a cranky though very general comment between songs about needing a certain level of quietness to concentrate.

But the slurring continued through the set, during which my friends, equally annoyed but trying to let it go, gave each other the looks of recognition that can only be elicited by shared songs from years ago, the soundtrack to some teenaged road trip or school camp or acid-laced orgy. The nodding heads, taps on the arm and smiling eyes.

It was then that the ungodly sound escaped my lips, unintentional, like the drunken, oblivious unzipping of Pete Doherty’s fly – “Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

The slurrers eventually got the hint from the crowd and left, and as we exited the venue we came across them standing around outside, another four or five pints down, slurring more wildly than before. “At leasht we can make as much noish out here without getting’ shooshed!” one of them gargled.

Part of me felt like a traitor; a Judas to all those who believe that uncivilised rackets are the saviour of our all-too-regulated souls. Now that I’d crossed the line, could I ever blurrily blag over the top of a band without some level of guilt?

I decided I must repent immediately. So I got drunk, made lots of noise and put my deviant behaviour down to the fact that quaint trips to the country to see ‘vintage’ acts are against the natural order of the planet.

From October 2009

Teen films: formulating a soundtrack

I don’t know whether it’s the Halloween paraphernalia bringing back memories of being screeched at by a god-fearing old lady during my tween days as a pioneer of trick-or-treating in our country. Maybe it’s the winding up of the school year; uni friends making desperate pleas for a road trip to the beach, the 7-Eleven, anywhere out of sight of the books they were supposed to have read throughout the semester and have just found under a pile of bottles and baggies in time for exams. Maybe it’s just my own regression brought on by being back at work following the end of an overseas trip. Whatever the reason, I’ve been compiling a teen-movie soundtrack in my head.

Not for any actual teen movie, mind you. The film I’m piecing together a soundtrack for doesn’t exist. It doesn’t have a plot, it doesn’t have any characters and it doesn’t have any expression-challenged Home And Away cast members with menacing robotic arms extending out from under their skirts*.

In truth, I’ve always been a complete sucker for teen-movie OSTs. It was my dirty little secret as a teenager. While I’d go to school and swap Lagwagon and Rancid albums with my friends, at home, buried under the pile of punk compilations, were the soundtracks to The Faculty, Scream, Go, Dazed And Confused, American Pie and The Craft. Some kids had fetish mags or Cabbage Patch doll collections; I had the Varsity Blues CD.

Some soundtracks where better than others, obviously, but all got a decent airing on my one-disc Sanyo boombox. And many, I noted, followed a similar formula: newer ‘indie’ or ‘alternative’ (as was the flavour of the day) bands followed by cutting-room-floor songs by some big-name acts, a late ‘80s metal or heavy rock track, an unknown female-singer ballad or two and a wet crooner rock song to finish.

I was always kind’ve disappointed by the soundtracks but I kept going back for more because I wanted to relive the parts in the movies where the teenagers actually had really exciting love lives and got to do heaps of cool shit like root old people or eat each other. It’s nice to know some things don’t change: this month has seen an unusual number of OK but not that inspiring sex-and-blood-lust teen-movie soundtracks appear. Well, three, but for some reason they’ve all landed on my desk at the same time so it’s like a friggin’ Passion Pop-fuelled Schoolies orgy over here.

Jennifer’s Body opens with Florence & The Machine and Panic At The Disco, runs through tracks by Dashboard Confessional and Screeching Weasel (their cover of I Can See Clearly Now, more than making up the old-dudes filler quota) to lesser-known Texas rockers The Sword and model turned singer Lissy Tullie. The Twilight Saga: New Moon starts with Death Cab For Cutie and Band Of Skulls and moves onto The Killers, Muse, California actor turned singer Anya Marina, ‘elder statesmen’ Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and emotional-flame-blowers Editors. Whip It! goes the ‘indie punk’ version of that path: Tilly & The Wall to The Ramones, The Raveonettes, Jens Lekman and Gotye (if you spot either, make ‘em buy you a drink with the royalties), The Ettes, Little Joy and the ‘revelation-dealing’ Apollo Sunshine.

So I’ve been compiling my own teen-movie soundtrack for the week in my head. One that wouldn’t totally blow but would generally stick to the tested track all teen-movies OSTs must travel. It would open with tracks from I Heart Hiroshima’s new album The Rip and Crayon Fields’ incredible All The Pleasures Of The World for plaid-and-moccasin credibility. It might move into something from Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 3 – maybe Empire State Of Mind featuring Alicia Keys or something equally suited to being played really loud from the car with the boot up in the school car park. New York’s glitchy Silk Flowers would add the atmos-dance edge. Bluebottle Kiss (Generic Teen) and Caustic Soda could have the money set aside for old bands, for no other reason than I’ve been thinking about them lately and they could probably use it. Something from Scott Matthew’s upcoming There Is An Ocean… album (already available on iTunes) would add the ‘touching moment’ and Pop Will Eat Itself’s Ich Bin Ein Auslander would finish it all off. Because I fucking can.

*This is a reference to Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, not to my own pre-prison fantasy diaries.

From October 2009

Bridges: Brooklyn's to the East

It took us three goes at asking passing cab drivers if they knew where the venue was before we decided to book a car, which is possible because we’re in New York. More specifically, we were in Brooklyn the first night of the three-week ‘holiday’ we’re currently on (‘we’ being me, the boy and an old friend) and our night-saving driver Wendy knew exactly where we were headed because, as she told us, she’d been driving around New York for ten years. We got in and, with that, it seemed we were now besties – so much that she proceeded to call her friend and tell him or her all about her kids’ problems, her money problems and that the combination of the two meant she felt helpless, all in our presence.

She gave us her number in case we needed to call her directly to come pick us up and we got out at a dead quiet industrial block somewhere between Greenpoint and Bushwick and made for the only place with noise coming out of it. It was the venue’s first night and it turned out it wasn’t really a venue as such at all, but someone’s top-level apartment with a stage built in and access to an adjoining rooftop. (And the men’s toilet was a doorway that led out to another level of the roof, which seemed somehow genius at the time, though perhaps I should have prefaced our ride with Wendy by explaining that we’d spent the previous two hours in bars around Bedford Ave, including the Greenpoint Tavern, which sells litre beers in giant Styrofoam cups.)

An local band called Small Black were already playing and the name wasn’t entirely lost: kind’ve ‘80s NYC street-scene post-punk beats with a wash of reverb but all in a cleaner, minimal dance way. They were followed by a San Franciscan band called Lemonade, who played kind’ve indie jungle punk beats.By the time they’d finished, I’d run into a girl from back home who’d been living in New York the past year or so; been preached the happy-making nature of the good Lord by a girl flailing around to the music by herself on the roof; talked the finer points of burger-cooking with a guy manning a BBQ; been approached to pose for a photo shoot about redheads and had a conversation with a stranger about job loss and the recession.

The following night we were in the East Village at Mars Bar, the only of the original punk dives still standing in Manhattan and still divey to the last. Pissing on the roof was more hygienic, but they have a long bar with stool, a jukebox packed with old punk and pour extremely ‘decent’ whiskeys, so we were good for however long it took the urge for a slice of margarita to take hold. Outside, I got talking to a guy named Ryan, who couldn’t get in because he was a few months off turning 21 in a city that is surprisingly diligent about checking identification. Ryan lived in Queens and was walking around down in the East Village on a Saturday night for “something to do”. His something to do turned out to be slouching around with a few Australians outside a dive bar, soon joined by a dude from Jersey, an old rasta who sold bud for a living and a dude who was either wasted or from Ireland – either way, I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Ryan was soon telling us that he didn’t much like school, wanted to go to Berlin and that Queens was only worth visiting if you like suburban malls and wack people.

I serendipitously ran into a New Yorker I’d met once at a house party in Australia about a year ago just as we were all getting locked out of Mars at 4am who informed us of the shocking news that there’s nowhere to go in Manhttan after four thanks to “fucking Giuliani” (a phrase that was then repeated by about four of his ‘posse’). So we went and ate pierogi in a diner around the corner and took a stroll through Tompkins Square Park, the site of major demonstrations and riots dating back to its opening in 1850. It was completely empty and the irony of it occurred to me: this was the first time we’d experienced silence or vacancy since our arrival.

It’s nearly impossible to escape people in New York.It’s also not impossible to run into people you know and feel like it’s a small world in a city of eight million. And the way people who live here deal with that is by living together. Really living together. I’ve never had more personal interactions with strangers over a single weekend. Or more Brooklyn Lager, which is possibly the other way people here cope.

From September 2009

Agyness: who plays whom in the fame game?

Famous people are drawn to non-famous people who are alone. I don’t really know why, it’s just a fact. It’s like a lion spotting a lone antelope or Hugh Jackman spotting a chance to show everyone just how gay he’s not. I’m therefore a great advocate of going to the occasional gig or party or botox clinic alone. Because encounters with famous people make great stories to tell your friends when you’re drunk and you need to remind them how lucky they are to know you and that they should really offer to buy the next round. One of my favourite stories to moronically blag to people when I’ve had one too many (which isn’t right now, I swear) involves meeting Agyness Deyn in New York. It’s a winner because it includes a hot girl and New York, so all the sexualities have something to get the horn over.

I was in the Music Hall of Williamsburg, nursing my plastic pint of beer at the back and waiting for Dead Meadow to come on when a girl with short blonde hair and a bowler hat walked in the front door. She looked familiar, though I wasn’t quite sure where from, but I was getting bored, a bit drunk and had already expended my conversation points with the merch guy and the door guy. I had nothing to lose, least of all my dignity – the beauty of being in a large foreign city. I went up and stood beside her. I told her I liked her hat (yeah, great opener – thanks Budweiser). She said thank you. I asked her where her accent was from. She said Manchester. I asked her what she was doing in New York. She said she lived there. She asked me what I was doing in New York. I said wandering around by myself. She asked me if I wanted to go to a club with her and her friends. See – famous people.

Four of us got in a cab and headed for the Lower East Side – Agyness Deyn, a guy called Jackson who was in a band that was about to go on tour with Matt & Kim, a guy called Bunny who was a ‘stylist’ and another guy called something else. To be honest, I got stuck at the guy called Bunny.

We pulled up at the club, which had a line about 30 metres long out the door, and walked straight in, Agyness Deyn now on my arm and the door guy now kissing me on the cheek and welcoming me to his party. The place was full of people who looked like they were either going to a fashion shoot or thought they were at a fashion shoot and we walked to the bar, where some guy gave us all free drinks. Agyness Deyn and I went downstairs, where almost everyone said hello to her and she introduced me to them as her brother. They were American so they didn’t notice that she had a Manc accent and I had an Australian one.

We hung out by the DJ booth, where Nathan from the Gossip was playing kinda naff but fitting ‘indie hits’, and a girl with a big camera took about 50 photos of Agyness Deyn while her now much larger group of friends stood around and smoked. Barely anyone drank, which I guessed was because they all had to get up and do yoga and drink the blood of small children while their parents were asleep.

We all went back to Bunny’s apartment on St Mark’s, which I’m sure cost his parents a lot of money they didn’t seem to be missing. The décor was simple – piles of designer clothes all over the floor and that’s about it. Nathan from the Gossip and I took turns in choosing video clips on demand on TV and eventually I realised that if I didn’t go back to my junkie hostel I was soon likely to witness some small children being eaten.

Agyness Deyn invited me to karaoke in the East Village with them all the following night, but it was expensive and I was not, so instead I met up with them afterwards. But it wasn’t the same. I now knew who Agyness Deyn was and sat around on the steps outside the karaoke joint talking to her friends, who I now also knew by name. I was no longer alone. The famous people left and I walked a couple blocks to meet real friends and tell them a fairly ordinary story involving a hot famous girl.

Tomorrow I’m going back to New York, so if you read The Breakdown in the next few weeks, I’m sorry but you’ll have to put up with more fairly pointless stories. I’ll try to get a hot girl or two in when I can.

From September 2009

Justin Bieber: are the kids alright?

It’s springtime, which means the arrival of birds, other kinds of nature and some seriously young pop entities in time for Christmas album sales. That’s if the new group of underagers who’ve divorced their parents so they can work long hours perfecting their vulnerable pouts for the cameras even get that far. Teen pop is like all pop: not everyone has what it takes to make it. Except they’re teenagers so their failures usually mean lifetimes spent going in and out of rehab between attempts to cling to whatever fickle fans they made during their time in the spotlight with self-recorded acoustic songs sold through self-run websites.

One such teen who’s just appeared in the US is 15-year-old singer Justin Bieber, a Canadian kid who was signed to Usher’s Island/Def Jam offshoot label RBMG at 13 after a ‘bidding war’ between Usher and Justin Timberlake’s Tennman Records. The label interest is being publicised as coming about after Bieber started his own YouTube channel of covers of songs by the likes of Usher and Timberlake, although there is a short bridging sentence being used to get to the actual signing part of the story – something about Bieber’s family hiring a manager who shopped him around. But it’s all about the organic growth of a real audience and the introduction of a real talent.

Bieber’s first single, One Time, not surprisingly featuring Usher in the clip, instantly evokes a “let’s watch this car veer into oblivion” reaction due to his vocal – apparently the impressive part of his talent that got everyone onside originally – being wrung through AutoTune beyond recognition. What’s left is a dorky-looking white kid wearing a baseball cap making earnest ‘yearning’ faces and hanging with his homie at Usher’s pad. Swoon.

It reminds me of a few interviews I’ve been sent to in past years, most when record labels had enough money to fly out new acts to do some pre-release promo and play radio showcases in the hope they’d pick up some business here. They’d come, they’d go, we’d never hear from them again.

I met a 17-year-old Californian named Katy Rose (well, named Kathryn Bullard, but that was never gonna fly) one afternoon in an upstairs label office. Rose was the daughter of a keyboardist who’d toured with the Grateful Dead who seemed to have been given a pop career for her Sweet 16th. She had the attitude part down, despite not yet having a hit anywhere, and lorded over the label reps in the room, perhaps thinking that commanding all the attention with loud self-importance was the marker of a real ‘star’, perhaps just doing what she did best. She was post-Avril, a ‘confessional’ waif-like dirty blonde with songs on the Thirteen and Mean Girls soundtracks. (The latter track, Overdrive, was by no means bad and featured a great line about “sitting in Jane Mansfield’s car”.) A year later, her major US label dropped her.

Rose’s current website features a bio that reads like a list of failures. A promised and undelivered album here, a short-lived connection to an independent label there. She ends a diary entry dated July 2009: “I cannot wait to get you guys my new music!!! You’re gonna love it! like I love you…”

Another young guy I met with in a restaurant some years back I can’t even remember the name of – Ryan? Rohan? Running With Publicists? He was in Australia to play support for another singer/songwriter type person, possibly Missy Higgins, and seemed to be quickly following on from Jesse McCartney as a beachy dude who played soft pop rock on an acoustic. Which obviously worked until his label realised Jesse McCartney wasn’t viable as a big mainstream artist beyond that Beautiful Soul song. I don’t know if I should feel bad that I can’t even put his name down as an almost-was – I remember he gave stock answers to stock questions, I had a Coke and the valet was real nice about parking my rusted Toyota Corona.

There are heaps of others. Leslie Carter, sister of Aaron and Nick, never even had her album released following a big campaign in the States for her Like Wow! single in 2000. Justin Timberlake’s first signing, Dutch teen Esmee Denters, has so far been a no-show is the US despite a few attempts to prime audiences for her arrival. And even with success, there’s no guarantee of not setting screwed over by the label once the cracks start showing – once teen ‘sensation’ JoJo has filed a lawsuit against Da Family Entertainment for holding her third album back and not letting her out of her contract.

It could’ve been worse for JoJo, though. Katy Rose, too. Either of them could’ve been in Interscope Records’ new and youngest ever international act, Clique Girlz.

From September 2009.