Burning Man goggles and transition lenses

 It probably shouldn’t really come as a surprise that, at the end of the decade (or the beginning, depending on how much you adhere to calendar law), we’re in a phase of hyper musical transition. Previous decade-turns have shown it’s the way things go; that there’s often a period of some years in which ‘artists’ search for what is most relevant to the ‘new time’, as if ‘the world’ is ready to tuck the old decade’s ideas tightly into the sheets and sneak out the door in the hope/expectation of finding something new. This observation may be based on coincidence or gross generalisation, of course, but there’s been something to the long, decade-turning transitions from tiring new wave pop to R&B and hardcore to grunge, or pop punk to ‘retro rock’ and group-pop to rap-pop, that suggests it’s a concept worth exploring. Particularly as, at this point in 2010, there’s an overwhelming sense that both ‘popular’ and ‘underground’ musics have retracted into some sort of cultural cocoon, and that those who are releasing albums are either standing alone, are drawing on flash-in-the-pan ideas or, in the case of many ‘established’ acts, are just failing to connect with listeners.

In pop, there’s no doubt that Kanye West’s performance of his new song Runaway at the MTV Video Music Awards (pictured above) earlier this month was a precursor to a major shift; a hard left away from the drawn-out flogging of AutoTune (long after it was declared ‘dead’ by West himself, then everyone else) and the slew of not-much hits by rappers and singers hastily incorporating ideas and guests from other genres (B.o.B featuring Hayley Williams of Paramore; Bruno Mars riding on ‘ethereal’ indie dance synth sounds) towards, perhaps, a back-to-basics (back to ‘real’ talent?) approach. It wouldn’t be the first time West has directed a change in this kind of ‘chart music’ and, in fact, despite his public fumblings, he’s showing himself to be one of few with ongoing influence.

Another is My Chemical Romance, whose last aesthetic switch from the afterlife-military imagery of The Black Parade to Brit-punk-leaning apocalyptic rock, albeit brief and with no full album attached, marked a huge shift in the kind of rock culture they ‘exist’ in. (Just take a look outside.) An online video teaser of their fourth album, Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys (out next week through Warner; still from the video above), suggests an altered angle on that; an updating of 1990s apocalypse and industrial styles, complete with Burning Man goggles. And yet, this idea, too, may not take in a way that impacts the zeitgeist significantly. (On this: this ‘overlording musical shift’ talk is problematic, I understand, and for many also not particularly appealing, but there’s much to suggest we’re still, as a whole, enduring mass western cultural waves – hell, maybe more than ever – so I’m going to push on without many apologies.)

Perhaps one of the biggest signs of transition is the state of the ‘dance’ genres, undergoing, all at once, a massive appropriation into pop (particularly in the US, where ‘dance’ has long been held back from ‘mainstream’ audiences), a retraction of ‘midlevel’ sounds in order to experiment and undergo some sort of metamorphosis, and a wide welcoming (again) into band culture to the point where the term ‘crossover’ is no longer even relevant. While much can be said of the kind of colourful eclecticism turned out by, for instance, the Animal Collective associate Prince Rama (whose Shadow Temple has just been released through Mistletone) or LA orch-dance woman Glasser (whose Ring is out through Remote Control; pictured above), there’s a sense that these washy, droning, largely anonymous sounds are a footnote to ‘psychedelic’ movements already explored (most notably by Animal Collective themselves) and whatever will be next. The number of little-known acts cluttering up the upcoming festival bills, amongst bigger names with small recent success such as Kelis, Kele Okereke and Groove Armada, go some way in showing just where we’re at this year.

None of this goes any way in addressing how the change in the ‘industry’ side of things is affecting how transitions take place, of course. In one part of the half-hour online promotional video for Belle & Sebastian’s new album, Write About Love (out next Friday through Remote Control), Stuart Murdoch conducts a genuine self-help session made up of members of various UK ‘indie’ bands discussing the place of musicians post major labels and in relation to new technologies. Transitional therapy. Sounds glorious.    

    

Down Sounds: September 2010

Four weeks in which the season finally (kind of) changed, the Pluto inner-cleaning (gross) retrograde ended and many people attempted to hide from Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream and failed (to which I say: go with it; it’s not all that often the writer-producer team of Max Martin and Luke Gottwald take over the world and when they do it’s far less psychologically straining to just get your skank on, learn the words and ride it out. Their songs are far too strong for our feeble minds to fight, as previously proven with The Veronicas’ 4ever, Pink’s U + Ur Hand, Kelly Clarkson’s My Life Would Suck Without You, etc. And, yes, all those songs are the same song rewritten, but I’m pretty sure market research has declared that no one cares, so who are you to argue?). There have also been a few rather excellent releases otherwise. 

Melbourne’s Heirs (above) released their second album, Fowl (Denovali), and it’s a sublime seven tracks of metallic-Swansian grind-and-release playing. Cloudy, layered guitars and synths get ripped apart by unrelenting riffs and fall into spiralling, captivating effects and elegant rhythms. That all sounds like a load of ‘music writer’ wank, but it all sort of adds up to being the 2010 version of industrial rock, which might sound oxymoronic but I’m having a hard time describing this so just go and listen to it because it’s really very, very good.  

Sydney duo Kyű last week released their self-titled debut album through Popfenzy just in time for some sunning and giving us the most intriguing psych pop record since Flying Scribble’s album of last month. Yes, this year is turning out to be the culmination of whatever bizzaro theatrical bent pop-making Australian kids have been on of late. In Kyű’s case that means ‘tribal’ rhythms used to remarkable effect, piercing vocal harmonies and arse-shaking-and-shimmying melodies (even though there’s something about using the words ‘arse-shaking’ that seems very wrong in this context).  

The most common thing that has been said to me about the new Blonde Redhead album, Penny Sparkle (4AD/Remote Control) is that it doesn’t sound like Blonde Redhead, which is usually spoken with a satisfied grin and pisses me off because I always liked them, but is also reasonably fair. Blue-toned keys and sparse beats build subtle pop melodies, shone down on with ghostly effects to sort of add up to being the 2010 version of French electronic pop. Except they aren’t French. Wow, I’m really using my words today. Anyway, it’s very good.

Probably the biggest surprise to me personally has been the new track from My Disco (above), Turn, from their upcoming Little Joy album (out 15 October through Shock). The word ‘minimal’ has always been used to describe the Melbourne trio – indeed at times to be ‘made for them’ – but there’s something about Turn that’s very un-minimal without being at all bordering on maximal (again with the excellent word-using today, sorry). Almost tinny, again ‘tribal’ drumming, a lack of the usual unrelenting rhythmic guitar jabs and softer vocals make it an unassumingly danceable affair. By god, it’s almost tropical. 

Into what the blogs have been talking about: a band from London called The Vaccines have been getting talked up after posting their first demo and homemade clip for a track called If You Wanna, which takes the kick-drum-riding and wang-out guitar strums of the UK nu-gaze set and adds them to jangly ‘60s pop sensibilities, slotting in with the whole ‘chillwave’ aesthetic but creating something entirely different and much more of their nation. You can download it free from their Facebook page.   

Brooklyn’s How To Dress Well is still the most over-written-about man in the western blog world, creating something of an interesting on-minute discussion about why people like him so much or whether all the praise is ‘justified’ but not giving much of a chance for anything other than an online moment to really happen for the ‘post-chillwave’ ‘chill-scape’ dude. 

Finally, Adelaide’s Fake Tan (below) are three newbies giving their own angle to all the ‘60s thing, making nagging and completely loveable pop songs for slackers that’ll get yer heart racing in yer skin-tight jeans. 

Yale, the Aztecs and the Illuminated night

“You ready?”

“Huh? No. For what?”

“C’mon, we gotta go before the others catch up.”

“I still have some beer left.”

“So drink it!”

“What’s the rush?”

“C’mon, you know.”

“All right. Huh? Watch this.”

The glass is emptied and I follow him (let’s call him Yale, seeing as at some point of the drinking I’m pretty sure there’d been talk of ‘skull and bones’ tattoos) quickly through the front bar, around the woodcutters and the Aztecs posing near the DJ booth and the pooling lost marbles near the door, Yale looking back frequently with giddy thrill and tipsy paranoia in his eyes. I make mental calculations of the cash in my wallet as the ATM, like a roadside pokie machine, is seen, halted at in blind confusion and bypassed: I think I had a 20, but then I bought that pint – no, two , or was it three? – and there were definitely a few dollar coins, so I have a dollar, or I might be out completely. “The calculations of a lost cause,” I think. “Leave it to the gods.” But the Aztecs are long gone as we dive, hand in hand, past the grisly-looking doorman into the street and the rain. 

“Hate to run into him in the dark,” Yale calls from in front.

“That would be now.”

 “Hate to run into him in the light, then.”

With a hood on and a hand to guide you, it all becomes about the split-second decisions made about the placement of your feet: road, road, road, puddle skip, cobblestone gutter leap, road, stranger foot sideways step and hope for the best. There are other things, though, too, in fairness: the merry-go-round of reflections on the ground that make your brain want to play ‘Name Your Location’ and the whir of sound you think is air but realise is traffic once you get into the backstreets. 

“Traffic is air,” he once said. “At least, it is if you grow up in the city.”

“Then how do you breath?” I’d asked.

“Like this,” he’d said, and screamed into the night.

Yale lets go as the bugs of wetness on my back slow and disappear and we walk under the shelter of ragged orphan trees squeezed into square-foot patches of dirt. 

“If more people stay home than go out, then why are the backstreets always so quiet?” 

That’s the kind of thing she’d say. There she is. Away from the illuminated lives of others, the voice you didn’t even notice had been hushed returns, which is not always good when you’ve taken the hand of a guy you’ve decided to call Yale and have made the commitment to an unrecognisable night. 

“Away from the illuminated and into the Illuminati,” I think and picture her laughing and let out a loud burst of my own. 

“You gone crazy, mate?” Yale eyes me.

“Maybe,” I laugh.

“Well, save it. You’ll need it soon.”

We stop at a gate with two gargoyle-like girls huddled together on the other side, cigarettes dripping fizzling fireworks onto the damp cement, and one of them lets out a wolf howl as Yale puts one hand to his lips and the other theatrically into his pocket like a mime and produces a key. He grins and steps inside.

“Poisons?” he curls.

 “Something fast.”

“Something big.”

“They’ll all be big,” he laughs.

The speaker backfires and starts up and the howling girl makes movements those Aztecs couldn’t imagine: wide and wild and wireless. Yale’s kept his promise. We’ll stay here and dance until the others call and we’re illuminated again.   

 

Nostaligia, I miss you

When life is changing at a pace faster than you can keep up with, sometimes the simple pleasures are the most comforting. Only, sometimes those pleasures are less simple than they seem. 

Okay, soz, I just wanted to come up with an opening line as spoken by Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years because I’ve been watching the series over and now every thought I have is narrated by a nasally man pretending to be a 12-year-old boy who stares at nothing a lot while he waits for the nasally man to do the voiceover, which is still a nice break from every thought coming in the form of a status update but less preferable than, y’know, having a sense of self. 

Anyway, as I’ve lay in bed alone watching The Wonder Years and spilling cereal on my pillow (date me!), a few things have occurred to me. One is that Paul Pfeiffer aged 14 could be in almost any current Australian ‘indie’ band and still not be the most ‘authentically dressed’ member. The second is that David Schwimmer’s only good work was the bit-part playing Karen’s boyfriend, which I realise isn’t saying a lot. The third is that that the series uses nostalgia in a way that spotlights its current misuse, or just evil use, in the lo-fi, post-chillwave, post-Arcade Fire, post-East Coast, post-‘underground dance revolution’ climate of ‘indie’.

Masked in all the things that have made it alluring, like actually good-sounding amps and Hipstamatic lenses, it’s taken a while to latch onto the realisation that nostalgia is the predominant thread that runs through the ‘blogosphere’ music culture of the last year or so. Whether it’s meta-nostalgia for the ‘current’ events of the US summer – ie. all the Super 8 videos by beachwear-clad American bands that pre-emptively long for the seaside fleeting loves and friendships that are happening right now – or it’s a darker take on the frozen-dream state of the suburbs, there has definitely been a prevailing desire to reflect on what we ‘miss’, or will miss, about simpler and ‘freer’ times. The headline of the Measure blog attached to Brooklyn street press The L Magazine summed it up recently when posting about a new Brooklyn band called Your Youth (pictured below): “Oh Good God, When Will It End? There is a Brooklyn Band Called Your Youth.” I mean, for fuck’s sake, there’s even a band now called The Wonder Years.

Of course, the blog’s frustration, and the general growing tiredness with all this dripping-wet backwards-looking, comes from the fact that the nostalgia is overplayed and related to things that never really happened or never really meant much to begin. As more bands like Your Youth inhale the zeitgeist, we’re feeling like they’re attempting to trick our real emotions into making some sort of ‘connection’ that isn’t there, or at least hasn’t been realised. In truth, I never sat around my bedroom thinking, “I wish he was my boyfriend,” like the teenage-recalling bubblegum voice of Best Coast suggests, without also thinking, “I wish I didn’t have to go to the dermatologist,” or, “I wish I could write html so I didn’t have to use Geocities.” Not romantic, and I never want to have those thoughts again.

And that’s what The Wonder Years got so right. The show was written with nostalgia at its core: each season predated its on-air year by exactly 20 years, beginning in 1968, airing in 1988; the man voice intends to be both Kevin as adult looking back and Kevin as inner thought; and most episodes are centred around the idea of a ‘simpler time’. But that time always turns out to be less than simple and connected to a truth. When college-aged Karen decides to move in with David Schwimmer and has a falling out with Mr Arnold over it, there’s no easy fix, just as there isn’t/wasn’t with our own parents. When Winnie Cooper decides that same season that she can’t see Kevin any more, it isn’t some flight of hormones; it’s to do with the need to let go of the past regardless of what it costs. Oh, yeah, ‘emotions’ and things. But that’s the thing about nostalgia: when it’s based on the truth, it’s usually a bit embarrassing and even sometimes hurts a little. Damn, there’s that Kevin voice again.

 

Still here, but where the fuck is that?

 

It’s quite possible Joaquin Phoenix won’t come out of this in good health. The process of moving on from his I’m Still Here actor-to-rapper project is going to prove a monumental head-fuck, if not due to his own struggle to break away from his actions of the past year and do something different (which he will because there’s no way he’s becoming a touring rapper) then due to the inevitable dissatisfaction he’s going to endure when the world finally sees the film and misinterprets the shit out of it, which is already happening based on the trailer (and those not-at-all-set-up phone-filmed viral videos).  Some news services have been gingerly calling it a documentary, others not risking their credibility and declaring it a ‘mockumentary’ (and I can’t believe no one has yet used the headline ‘You must be Joaquin’). The truth is probably both neither and somewhere between.

Scheduled for a cinema release in the US next week (at the time of writing an Aus release date could not be tracked down), I’m Still Here is looking like the next in a continuous flow of mass-media-commentating performance pieces that set out to further and further blur the lines between performer and performance. Just as many people came out of Banksy film Exit Through The Gift Shop wondering if Thierry Guetta (‘Mr Brainwash’) was real or a construction, or gullible tabloid writers wonder whether Lady Gaga’s stereotyped celebrity persona is ‘her own’, it’s likely media outlets and those who’ve closely followed Phoenix’s actions as a ‘rapper’ aren’t going to get the answer they want from watching I’m Still Here. But those calling for a definitive ‘real’ or ‘joke’ call on these projects are missing the point: it is the inseparability of performer and performance that is being pursued; the breaking down of the distinction between  ‘real’ and ‘constructed’ and the fact that, regardless of whether the projects can be placed into either category, the result is the same. Does is matter if Thierry Guetta or Lady Gaga are ‘real’ or pieces of ‘social commentary’? They have still become ‘celebrities’. 

 Two side notes here: 1) It is worrying that we’ve become collectively paranoid that people are playing ‘pranks’ on us. Being suspicious of any kind of mass-communicated device is one thing; getting angry that what we’re being shown hasn’t come with a one-sentence explanation is another (I refer to the inane entries of frustrated bloggers and news writers). Have we really become that insecure about our intellects that we can’t cope with the idea of something being up for interpretation, or the idea that our interpretation as ‘audience’ is part of the message itself? 2) On the topic of Lady Gaga, there’s some great writing on The Vigilant Citizen blog about her use of symbolic references to government mind control (such as the pic above, in which her dancer displays the 'all-seeing eye'). That said, the main problem with Gaga as performance artist is that she keeps trying to ‘expose’ herself as ‘artistic genius’ rather than sticking to her performance message. She just rly rly wants to be given the credit she deserves, which makes her performance largely redundant.  

 Perhaps the most obvious sign of what Phoenix is setting out to achieve is the title of the film, which is fairly likely a reference to the themes explored in Bob Dylan semi-biopic I’m Not There. In that film, the title referred to the transformation of something personal (Dylan’s ‘self’) into something detached from its origins (his ‘public persona’ and fame). I’m Still Here, therefore, is the inverting of that concept; the turning of an idea removed from the ‘personal’ (a ‘fictional’ character steeped in mystery) into something inseparable from its carrier, Phoenix. Phoenix has not traded his ‘self’ for a character, as actors do, but has let the character infiltrate his life and self to the point where there’s no difference, or at least one worth distinguishing. 

Of course, what most media want from the film is just to know whether they’re being ‘punk’d’ or whether Phoenix has really ‘lost it’, in which case he becomes a story worth following (because the greatest commodity a ‘celebrity’ can have now is being ‘unknowing’ of their media influence). It’s most likely the media will only get what it wants when this all blows over, however; when Phoenix actually has to pick up the pieces of his life and decide what to do with them. Let’s just hope he’s got a good therapist.