Category Archives: Series

Pagan Death Cult

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A version of this essay appeared in The Chicago Reader. This is part of a weeklong Metal Apocalypse.
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To most civilian bystanders, there could hardly be two less simpatico white pop genres than metal and folk. On the one hand you’ve got fascist Vikings grunting gutterally about blood, Satan, and Leatherface; on the other you’ve got tree-smooching hippies warbling about peace, love, and gently blissed-out mammals. Short of some scene of hideous pillage, it’s pretty difficult to imagine any intercourse between them. “Welcome, corpse-painted stranger! A flower for your gard….eeeeearrrrgh!”

And yet, intercourse there has always been. Led Zeppelin was as much a folk band as a metal one, and that tradition is carried on by horror-movie-at-the-Renaissance-Faire outfits like folk metal band Finntroll. Genre designations are, of course, notoriously slipshod, and it’s true that a joke horror outfit like, say, Venom doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the earnest protest music of, say, Pete Seeger. But if by folk you mean acoustic music with medieval English roots, and if by metal you mean thrash, death, doom, and especially black, then there’s a lot of common ground. It’s no accident that Forest is the name of both a black metal band and a 60s British folk outfit, for about both thundering metal orcs and tinkling elvish folk lingers the spirit of Tolkein and the distinctive scent of weed. If folk and metal are opposites, it’s not because they have nothing to do with each other, but because they’re mirror images — different takes on the same pagan Northern-European obsessions.

The two latest offerings on that unholy altar are the best releases of the summer: Karen Dalton’s Green Rocky Road and Pyha’s The Haunted House. Both document almost-lost recordings created in virtual isolation by eccentric quasi-legends. Dalton was an almost-famous Village folkie from the ’60s. Her musical legacy for the most part consists of ingratiating, bluesy guitar tracks in which she sings like an improbably docile Billie Holiday. This disc of recently unearthed home recordings from 1962, mostly on banjo, is the first record of a starker musical personae. Pyha is even more obscure. A native of South Korea, he recorded The Haunted House , his sole black metal opus, by himself in 2001 when he was 14 years old. Circulated on CD-R in Korea, it fell into the hands of the metal aficionados at tUMULT, who managed to track down the perpetrator. It had its official release, with extra tracks, in July.

Sonically, the two records couldn’t be more different. Rocky Road is so bare-bones it makes Alan Lomax’s field recordings sound polished. Even to call the two-track record “produced” seems a stretch. “Katie Cruel” is interrupted by a telephone ringing; part of the beginning of “Nottingham Town” is erased. Even without such cock-ups, Dalton’s voice and banjo-playing are incredibly harsh; each phrase and plunk seems to come scraping out of some abandoned hollow.

The Haunted House, on the other hand, is a dense, claustrophobic landslide of sound. The record’s signature noise is burst out static; the sound of recording technology dying in agony. Slabs of sound lurch into each other like lumbering tectonic zombies. In “Tale From The Haunted House Part 1” the background hiss and wail just…stops, to be replaced by whispering over a ghostly synthesized chorus, which in turn cuts back to giant distorted screaming and a mid-tempo drum beat that goes on and on, mindlessly repeating. Throughout the record, each of black metal’s requisite layers of sound (guitars, drums, synths, shrieks) seem manually lifted and dropped, one on the other. This sense of grinding effort reaches its peak on “Song of Oldman,” where the buzzing static actually seems to overwhelm the mics, cutting in and out in random, painful bursts, while the wailing, almost human synths distort into a horrible scraping noise, like a metal bar being dragged across your teeth.

Yet, for all their differences, Green Rocky Road’s empty space and The Haunted House’s dense maelstrom meet on the same bleak wasteland; bleached skulls calling hopelessly to each other in dry, mutually incomprehensible tongues. Given too much space or not enough, the songs and, indeed, the singers seem lost, abandoned, dead. Tempos on both albums stutter and grind down almost to paralysis. Pyha’s music is leaden enough to almost qualify as doom — on “Tale From The Haunted House Part 3” the drum machine is positively stoned, thudding down just behind the beat so the track sounds like it’s slowing down all through its 4 1/2 minute length. Dalton’s album is similarly stupefied. The banjo line on “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo” turns the familiar lyrical melody into a wavering slog, unrecognizable until Dalton’s voice comes in, off the beat and even off-key. On the endless “Nottingham Town” her picking and singing have even less to do with each other; the banjo speeds up, stretches out, trips over itself, and plunks notes so far out of tune that you’d swear the tape speed was screwy. She sounds like the Shaggs on a serious downer.

Nottingham Town” is an eerie, traditional tune with intimations of loneliness and the grave, and Dalton’s broken attack intensifies the uncanny sense of isolation and despair. In contrast, the last track of The Haunted House, “Wanderer Death March”, is not unpredictable, but insescapable. Anchored to repetitive, buzzing cymbals, increasingly strained synth washes, and throat-shredding howls, the song is a soundtrack for armageddon — a slow camera pan across clashing armies being devoured alive by mechanical insects. It, and the rest of the record, are intended as an anti-war statement, but this isn’t any kind of hopeful, or even outraged protest. Instead, it’s a vivid, bitter surrender before the crushing power of violence. Pyha seems pulverized by hate and terror; Dalton collapses in aphasia — for both, in different ways, individuality and artifice seem to disintegrate in agonizing slow-motion, falling to dust as the apocalypse approaches.

Folk and metal — and, indeed, the cold northern European culture that they epitomize — share a particular fascination with death, and, as a result, a particular take on authenticity and art. Punk tends to equate realness and sloppy incompetence; jazz, and hip hop link cred to invention and élan; blues and gospel tie it to personal emotional expression. As a celebration of the performer’s skill (or lack therof) the music is about individuality, and so about life. In folk and metal, on the other hand, the demands of the form tend to obliterate personality. In the true mountain tradition, Dalton’s singing is without affect; when she says “they call me Katie Cruel” her lack of inflection lets you know beyond a doubt that she is as heartless as she claims. Similarly, Pyha is swallowed in his own effects — snippets of taped ephemera, muffled bellowing, some poor soul gasping its last in the midst of a crackling fire — his own voice is everywhere and nowhere, neutered in its multiplicity. To be authentic is, for both, Dalton and Pyha, to be depersonalized; to be real is to be nobody. You show your commitment to the material by letting it bury you. When there is individuality, it comes across as weakness, stuttering — a falling away from the perfection of oblivion. Folk and metal are about being crushed by death — about the cold joy in self-immolation which links Protestants, and Norsemen alike.

Neither the American Dalton nor the Korean Pyha actually come from Northern Europe, of course. But their distance is, itself, part of the point. The form is as implacable as it is imperial; death doesn’t care if you’re folk, volk or other. Whether you’re cavorting with the fairies in Stonehenge, torching churches in Norway, or wandering somewhat further afield, a dirge is a dirge for everyone. Dalton’s keening and Pyha’s buzz are part of the same sexless drone, swallowing hippie and Viking alike in the abject ecstasy of annihilation.

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle: Latest DC Idiocy Edition

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Kelly Thompson had a piece a couple weeks back about Brian Azzarello’s decision to make Wonder Woman’s Amazons into lying child-murdering rapists. She points out that this is maybe possibly problematic.

Anyway, I haven’t read the issues in question, but I left a couple of comments about Marston/Peter because I can’t help myself. I thought I’d reprint them below, because, what the hell, it’s my blog. So here you go.

First comment here.

“The Amazons may not have been created originally to be such a thing,”

AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry. Deep breaths…..

William Marston, who created Wonder Woman, was a passionate, ideologically committed feminist. He believed women were better than men in just about every way — smarter, stronger, more compassionate, more fitted to rule.

The Amazons were absolutely, uncontestably, intentionally meant as feminist icons. They were meant to be feminist examples for girls and *for boys.* It is impossible to read Marston’s Wonder Woman stories and doubt this; it’s impossible to read what he wrote about the character and doubt it. There simply is no doubt. The Amazons are feminist icons now because they were meant to be feminist icons by their creator. From the very first Wonder Woman story, they were established as feminist icons.

You know how horrified you are by castrating, evil, violent Amazons preying on men? Double that. Then double it again. Then, what the hey, double it a third time. That’s how absolutely, down to his socks horrified Wiliam Marston would be to see his beloved creations used in this manner. It is a deliberate, misogynist, betrayal of his vision. Azzarello might as well dig up the man’s corpse and defecate on it.

The fact that no one — not even committed Wonder Woman fans — knows about Marston or what he wanted for his creation is yet another sign of DC’s contempt for creator’s rights. (Which is in addition to their contempt for women, of course.)

Okay…sorry. End of rant.

And a second comment.

Wow…just skimmed through this.

I think for me the point is that Wonder Woman was very consciously created as a feminist statement. You can argue about the parameters of that statement (the swimsuit? amazons on a pedestal?) and certainly it wasn’t perfect in every way (though Marston and Peter are actually pretty thoughtful and complicated — they’re take on issues of war and peace, for example, is a lot more subtle than some folks here seem to think.) But be that as it way, Wonder Woman is decidedly, definitively a feminist vision for girls *and* for boys.

That was, and remains, extremely unusual for pop culture — or, for that matter, for any culture. You just don’t see a whole lot of movies, or books, much less comics, in which (a) the woman is the hero, (b) female friendships are central to her heroism, (c) feminism is explicitly, repeatedly, and ideologically presented as the basis for her heroism.

Since Marston and Peter, there have been a lot of creators who have, in one way or another, decided that the thing to do with the character is jettison the feminism. It’s important to realize that when they do that, they betray the original vision of the character in a way which is really, to my mind, fairly despicable. If you care about creator’s rights at all, what Azzarello is doing is really problematic.

Beyond that, though, to take a character who is originally, definitively intended to be feminist, and make her ideologically anti-feminist, is a really aggressive ideological act. One of the things Marston was doing was taking a negative mythological portrayal (the Amazons) and turning it into a feminist vision. Azzarello is turning that around and changing it back into a misogynist vision. Marston did what he did because he was a committed feminist. Azzarello is doing what he is doing…because he’s a committed misogynist? Because he’s not really thinking that hard about what he’s doing? Because he’s just getting his kicks? Whatever the reason, it is, as I said, a very definite decision with very definite ideological ramifications, and he deserves to be called on them.

Best Online Comics Criticism 2012 – 1st Quarter Nominations

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(Honoring online comics criticism written or published in 2012. A call for nominations and submissions.)

Regular readers of The Hooded Utilitarian will remember a semi-annual event celebrating the best online comics criticism. Last year’s survey sank like the Titanic due to sheer lethargy on the part of all involved, most notably myself. For those of us who find it hard to get out of bed for the latest and best comics criticism, allow me to commiserate.

On previous occasions, I would ask the various judges to select quarterly nominations from which the entire group would vote at the end of the calendar year. This proved useful in the sense that it brought in nominations on topics and from sites peripheral to my usual areas of interest, but also limiting in that it was dependent on the variable submissions of the judges for that year. Even worse, when busy lives came to the fore, there were no nominations to be had. Clearly, reading comics criticism can be a tiresome business.

In order to facilitate matters, I’ve decided to take over the nomination process myself and also open it to the HU readership (which I presume is wide enough in its taste). Web editors should feel free to submit work from their own sites. I will screen these recommendations and select those which I feel are the best fit for the list. There will be no automatic inclusions based on these public submissions. Only articles published online for the first time between January 2012 and December 2012 will be considered. I have not selected any articles from the HU site for obvious reasons but invite HU readers (not contributors) to send in their recommendations.

If all goes well, we might actually have a nomination list to vote on at the end of the year. At that point, a small group of jurors will be invited to read the long list of nominees and select the eventual winners.

The following list consists of articles of note and others which I personally find uninteresting but which have attracted considerable notice online.  The object of this listing is to be inclusive without excessively compromising quality.

(1)  Robert Boyd on Kramers Ergot #8 and the Art School Generation.

(2)  Gio Claival on the art and comics of Dino Buzzati.

(3)  Craig Fischer on Jiro Taniguchi’s The Walking Man.

(4)  Edward Gauvin on David B.’s The Littlest Pirate King.

(5)  Bill Kartalopoulos on Joost Swarte’s Is That All There Is.

(6)  China Mieville on Tintin and censorship. I feel compelled to list this here to forestall any complaints of its lack of citation. Mieville’s piece is certainly criticism (about Tintin, racism, and censorship); a breezy, informative and well written article for newbies but of slightly less worth to the average person informed about such matters. In a famine, even the local burger joint looks like haute cuisine.

(7)  Amy Poodle on Superhero Horror.

(8)  Daisy Rockwell on Craig Thompson’s Habibi. (Full version available at her blog). I have reservations about recommending this review. Lord knows my feelings about Habibi. A truly remarkable review would find a way to make a strong case for the intellectual strength and positive aesthetic value of Habibi. I have yet to read such an article online.

(9)  Khursten Santos – The Tale of Three Tezuka Ladies.

(10)  Matt Seneca on Guido Crepax’s Valentina.

“There’s a fundamental problem underlying all erotic work done in the comics medium, one even more difficult to get past than the lack of audible sound and visible motion bedeviling the action-oriented material that dominates the form’s American market. How does one create art that reproduces a physical sensation created by bodily contact without being able to reach out and touch one’s audience? It’s the same problem that faces makers of pornography in any medium, but in comics it’s especially difficult.”

Even though the initial premise as stated in the opening paragraph is entirely false — if the difficulties faced by comics pornography were so dire, where would that place the reams of exalted illustrated smut over the centuries — this remains Seneca’s best piece so far this year. The usual Seneca traits of overwhelming love and earnest exaggeration (in this instance Crepax is compared favorably to Herriman, Joyce, and Picasso) are all on display but here sharpened by his obsession with Crepax’s Valentina.

(11)  Kelly Thompson (She Has No Head! – No, It’s Not Equal). I’ve put this here because it seems to have found a place in a lot of people’s hearts, not least HU’s own dictator for life. This is a creditable article on that age old issue of women in costumes but somewhat tiresome if one has spent more than a few months reading superhero criticism — the absolute nadir of that cesspit known as comics criticism. If I was judging criticism on the basis of moral virtue, this would probably get top marks but it has little to add to the current thinking about superheroes.

(12)  Kristy Valenti on Frank Miller’s Ronin.

 

(13)  At The Comics Grid:

Kathleen Dunley on Ben Katchor and What’s Left Behind.

Nicholas Labarre on Art and Illusion in Blutch’s Mitchum.

Peter Wilkins on Pluto: Robots and Aesthetic Experience

 

(14)  And at  TCJ.com:

R. C. Harvey – Johnny Hart to Appear B.C.

Jeet Heer on Gahan Wilson’s Nuts.

Ryan Holmberg on Guns and Butter.

Jog on Franz Kafka’s The Trial: A Graphic Novel.

Bob Levin on Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & the New Land.

Seth on his work on The Collected Doug Wright.

Matthias Wivel on Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes.

 

This list is limited by time and my own personal taste and habits. As such, I would encourage HU readers to submit their own recommednations in the comments section of this post.  Alternatively I can be reached at suattong at gmail dot com. The lack of manga criticism in this list is particularly telling and I would be grateful to receive potential nominations in this area — reviews or essays which go beyond mere text-image summary or even textural history and which place a work into the context of real world experience and broader aesthetics, writing which pries open the hidden depths of a work

*          *          *

If the quality of the criticism which an artform attracts provides a glimpse at its health, then surveying the landscape of comics criticism can only be a a sobering experience. The patient while not exactly pallid looks distinctly moribund; sitting idly on the couch shoveling down crisps while shouting epithets at the latest pamphlets.

One is not so much concerned by the proliferation of sites obsessed with the marketing and economics of comics, nor the innumerable sites devoted to the idolization of cartoonists .  These will always be with us and may in fact be signs of a healthy fanbase. Rather it is the stagnation of sites and writers devoted to the serious consideration of comics that should be of concern.

This may be best symbolized by the resurrection of TCJ.com – a site which is finally making an earnest attempt to emulate its illustrious print predecessor. The steady flow of interviews, reviews, and long form essays has seen the masses flocking back to the once fallen giant. This is both comforting to its old adherents and yet a standing rebuke suggesting how little has changed in comics criticism since its emergence into adolescence in the 80s and 90s.

The implication here is that the comics world is so bereft of writers of quality and of a pioneering spirit that there remains little room on the internet for more than a few sites of “serious” comics criticism, and even less that offer an alternative narrative less beholden to fandom. The hope that the internet would lead to a surge of self-publishing and hence sites consistently promulgating quality reviews and essays on comics was nothing but a pipedream. If anything, what we have is consolidation and  a return to the mean. The Comics Comics project now subsumed to the new TCJ.com. The Panelists dead and now absorbed by the same. Even Sean T. Collins, Jog, Chris Mautner, Ken Parile, and Tucker Stone are now writing a significant proportion of their long form criticism for the site. Robin McConnell of Inkstuds hosts occasional critical discussions with the usual suspects listed above. The writers of The Comics Grid continue their quiet, scholarly course. There are few other umbrella organizations of note in North America as far as serious comics criticism is concerned.

This is certainly no fault of Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler who have crafted a site which has attracted the best talents to its shores. In a field where money is of secondary concern, it is the prestige, professionalism, community, and readership (the numbers and quality) which count the most. Both Nadel and Hodler should be commended for their dedication to preserving the legacy of the print Journal (with all the longstanding deficiences intact I should add).

The one bright spot in this age of digital publication is that The Comics Journal no longer holds a monopoly on the best long form reviews available on any particular comic. This situation is certainly preferable to the one in the late 80s and  90s when The Comics Journal was virtually the only game in town. That position has since been displaced by a host of blogs and newspaper websites. Think of any of the marquee comics of the past year and one will be pleasantly surprised to find that the Journal no longer holds “exclusive rights” to serious and informed discussion of those books.

What is missing however is any concentration of this talent to rival a single website like TCJ.com. Without this, and despite the efforts of a dedicated pool of link bloggers, many of these articles will remain unread and unloved. More significantly, it suggests a level of homogeneity seldom seen in other artforms (at least at this end of the spectrum). That no other site or community of critics has come close to challenging TCJ.com in attracting writers of note is a testament to the lack of depth (in numbers and intellectual concerns), diversity, and vision of purveyors of criticism; a problem exacerbated by a shrinking or stagnant comics readership.

 

Radio Pop That Didn’t

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These reviews originally ran on Madeloud.
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Brooke Valentine
Physical Education Mix Tape

Houston native Brooke Valentine’s debut, Chain Letter, was one of the greatest R&B albums of the oughts…or of all time, for that matter. From the loping, burping strut of “Pass Us By,” to the tongue-in-cheek goth-funk of “I Want You Dead” to the aching, breathy heartbreak of “Laugh Til I Cry,” Chain Letter was all over the place stylistically, but tied together with humor, smarts, and audacity. Valentine and mad genius producer Deja were convinced down to the giant flying bat on Brooke’s half-shirt that female-helmed R&B could be every bit as bizarre and crazy as rap by the likes of Outkast and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and they were damned well going to prove it.

Musically they succeeded, and then some. Commercially…well, that’s a different story. Chain Letter had only one bona-fide hit, the funny but relatively unadventurous Lil’ Jon produced “Girlfight.” Singles released to promote her follow-up went nowhere, and after months of hemming and hawing by her distributor, Virgin, the album was shelved and she limped back to Deja’s Subliminal label.

Earlier this year, Physical Education, the album that never was, was finally released by Subliminal as a mixtape. It’s definitely a retrenchment. The flashes of bizarre wit and eclecticism are gone; there aren’t even any ballads here, much less profanity-laced tirades against valley girls. Instead, what we’ve got is track after track of deep, throbbing, ominous Houston crunk.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Valentine and Deja may be working to keep the smarts on the down-low, but try as they will, they can’t quite make a duff track. Valentine is not by any means a great singer, but throughout the album her throaty whispers and moans drip sex and insouciance. The production (I presume by Deja, though there were rumors that Valentine did some of it herself) is also stellar. Pimped Out is built around a weird synth motif that sounds almost like an electronic duck has been drafted to quack rhythmically while Chamillionaire raps along. “Make It Drop” has some of the funniest rear-obsessed lyrics this side of Sir Mixalot: “I can make that ass pop/like hydraulics on drop; I can make that ass stop/like you runnin’ from the cops.” “Gold Diggin’” starts with a wash of demi-classical synth strings and then opens out into a heavy, hesitating thump which also somehow manages to swing hard enough to lift Valentine and the uncredited guest rapper up off the backing like they’re jazz performers. “Thug Passion,” too has an impossibly hooky stuttery beat which keeps you off-balance no matter how many times it repeats.

The only thing I miss here is the 2006 “D-Girl” single, with its surging keyboards and that sample from N.W.A. pattering through the tough production like a whispered, half-forgotten threat. Even with that track left off, though, this is still hands down my favorite R&B release of 2009 to date. So if you’re going to download it, be sure to pay for it, would you? I don’t want Valentine and Deja to completely run out of money before they release their next full length.
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Allure
Patiently Waiting; Time’s Up (4 stars)

Like everyone else, the vocal group Allure was pulled along in the wake of Destiny’s Child in the early 2000s, abandoning the smooth jams of the 90s for a tighter, funkier, more hip-hop friendly sound. But where Beyoncé has moved on, Allure got stuck. Their new ep (Patiently Waiting) and album (Time’s Up) both sound like they’ve dropped through a wormhole from 2001.

Which is kind of great. Nothing against today’s radio, but there was really something special about that moment a decade or so ago when R&B songwriting and production suddenly caught on fire — a mixture of newbie fumbling and professional calculation as hip hop realized that this, this right here was the way it was going to take over the world. No doubt there’ll be an uncomfortable retro-early-oughts movement any time now, but this isn’t that. Instead, Allure clearly just never got the memo that itchy/cheesy Kevin Briggs beats aren’t where the market is at.

Patiently Waiting takes that obliviousness and runs with it. From the sweeping, harmonized tough-girl-threats-with-horn-sample of “What Goes Around;” to the materialist tinny looped steel-drum reworking of “Favorite Things;” to “Treat Him Rite” with overdriven eighties video game bleeps that somehow slide right into a sexy, laid-back groove — it’s 20 perfect minutes of gloriously out-of-date pop. Hell, even the obligatory skit is great, featuring some of the most piercing shrieks I’ve ever heard outside of a Diamanda Galas album.

Twice as long, Time’s Up has a bit more filler, but it’s still plenty good. “The Other Side” is awesome faux early Timbaland, with layers of beats and squeaky vocal hiccups bounding around each other while the singers volley “you’re a no good cheater” lines back and forth between the soloist and the harmony backup. “With Out U” is a great mid-tempo disco roll — Andy Gibb for the hip hop generation. “Walk in My Shoes” is something of a rote ballad with too, too gospel vocals — but even so, the low-key guitar playing and the harmonizing makes it listenable.

It’s those harmonies that are maybe the most refreshing thing about the album. Not to take anything away from the amazing sucrose delivery system that is Danity Kane, but there’s also really something to be said for a group whose vocal arrangements are tight enough to add hooks to the song, rather than just keeping up with the production.

Even Beyonce herself has given up on the vocal group aspects of her legacy these days, so it’s up to groups like Allure and the similarly-backward-looking Cherish to keep the faith. Not a good career move, exactly — harking back a decade is no way to get radio play. In fact, both Patiently Waiting and Time’s Up are CD-Rs, burned on demand, which suggests the singers themselves don’t expect to move a ton of copies. But whether or not anyone buys it, this is still some of my favorite music of the year — even if it is the wrong one.
 

No Longer Destiny’s Child

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These reviews first ran on Splice Today here and here.

Beyonce, 4

“I Was Here” off Beyonce’s latest album, 4, is one of those songs that makes you re-evaluate an artist’s entire oeuvre in light of the capacious bucket of liquid feces that has just been upended on your noggin.

Not that Beyonce hasn’t spawned crap before… and crap of similar provenance. She’s always had a weak spot for surly self-vaunting, reaching perhaps its apex in 2001’s “Survivor,” a song devoted largely to taunting the two women she’d forced out of her band. Still, crass as it was, “Survivor” at least had a hook. “I Was Here,” on the other hand, brings all the self-absorption and none of the pop smarts. Beyonce takes a deep breath and belches out barrels of Broadway glop, enthusing over her own career success with unembarrassed egotism and Hallmark card triteness. (“I want to leave my footprints on the sands of time…want to leave something to remember so they won’t forget.”) Moving into her second decade of mega-success, Beyonce is proud to let us know that she’s got absolutely nothing to talk about except how cool it is to be mega-successful. She makes her mirror look deep.

In fairness, this has always been a big part of Beyonce’s appeal. Male rock and rap stars are notorious narcissistic assholes, but female performers, from Madonna on down, tended to seduce their listeners with at least as much vulnerability as swagger. Beyonce, though, was all about the girl power put-down; from “Bills, Bills, Bills” through “Irreplaceable” through “Single Ladies,” Ms. Knowles never pleads when she can sneer instead. Her message isn’t so much “I Will Survive” as it is “Fuck. You.”

As rock and rap have shown, “fuck you” is a pretty popular slogan, and Beyonce has certainly opened the way for women in pop R&B to be bigger jerks. It’s hard to imagine how we would have gotten from Ashanti and early Mariah Carey to Ke$ha and Lady Gaga without Beyonce in the middle.

But while Knowles may have broadened the range of attitudes available for female pop singers, her own emotional reach has always been limited. She can be triumphant, she can be hectoring… or, yeah, she can be triumphant. It’s pretty clear at this point that she’ll never manage a song like her former bandmate Kelly Rowland’s “Still in Love With My Ex,” a rapturously heartbreaking track about betraying yourself and everyone you care about. To sing that song, Rowland had to admit to weakness, and Beyonce isn’t going to do that any more than Robert Plant or Snoop Dogg would. When Knowles talks about being hopelessly in love on “Rather Die Young,” it’s all about burning out before you get old; James Dean and gasoline and leaving a beautiful corpse. Similarly, “Start Over,” about a love she can’t leave behind, ends up as a surging future-hope anthem. Rowland’s adult despair and self-loathing—or, say, Patsy Cline’s—might as well be in another language. Beyonce’s a rock star, and rock stars kick life in the ass; life does not kick them.

Rock stars also look really stupid when they get old enough to know better… and there’s some indication that Beyonce may run into that problem as well. Her longevity has been astonishing in a genre where careers are often measured in months rather than year, but, however belatedly, her shtick is starting to fray.

“Best Thing I Never Had” is Beyonce once again kissing off some dumb dude with a mid-tempo lyricism that is much less engaging than “Irreplaceable”; “Run The World (Girls)” is a percussive girl power jam without the humor or novelty of “Single Ladies.” “Love on Top” tries to re-energize the flailing diva by reaching even further back, all the way to Destiny’s Child‘s first album and the summery, girl-group vibe of “No, No, No.” Beyonce responds with a strident, hog-calling vocal that dutifully beats the song’s would-be flirtatiousness to death and dances on its corpse.

There are a couple of bright spots on the album. “Countdown” is a bizarre, lurching mini-masterpiece; with horns, steel drums, keyboard bleeps, and a bizarrely out of sync Boyz II Men sample all bouncing around each other as Beyonce declaims and soars and even woofs like a dawg. It’s weird and sexy and hip—more like an Amerie or Robyn track than most of Beyonce’s solo work. She’s still got some fire in her, so maybe 4 is just an unfortunate detour, and she’ll figure out a way to make decent albums again. I won’t hold my breath though. Once rock stars start to suck, there’s generally no going back.
 
Kelly Rowland, Here I Am
The cover of Destiny’s Child’s 1999 mega-smash Writing’s on the Wall shows three blindingly hot women swathed in clingy white diaphanous nothings—and, Kelly Rowland. Beyonce, LaTavia, and LeToya look like they’re ready, waiting, and eager for superstardom; like they’ve spent their whole lives preparing for the moment when they could bare their shoulders and be showered with adulation and cash. Rowland, on the other hand, has a deer-in-the-headlights stare. You can almost see the cartoon thought bubble above her head, “Are we done yet? Can I put on some clothes now?”

It’s not that Rowland is particularly unattractive for a civilian. But standing next to Beyoncé Knowles, one of the more heart-stoppingly beautiful women on the planet, she does end up looking a little horse-faced—like the sit-com best-friend, carefully chosen not to upstage the star. Rowland, who lived with the Knowles’ from the time she was 14, solidified her stand-by-your-BFF cred when she remained with Beyoncé during LeToya and LaTavia’s acrimonious split from the band. On subsequent albums, Rowland did her usual thing, flanking Beyoncé and new bandmate Michelle Williams, looking hot but not too hot. A notable exception is DC’s 2001 Christian album, where the trio all wear something approaching street clothes and Rowland actually seems… comfortable.

Destiny’s Child is long gone, and Rowland has invested in breast implants—but whether she’s an A or a B-cup, in a band or out, she’s still a second stringer. Her only big hit without Beyoncé, 2002’s “Dilemma,” wasn’t a solo success, but a collaboration with Nelly. Her post-DC solo album, Ms. Kelly, didn’t do squat in terms of sales, though it was surprisingly strong musically. Its first track, “Like This,” featured Rowland’s thick Houston accent wrapping itself around a sparse head-nodding hook. The song had character and made you remember why you always liked that best friend on the sitcom better than the boring lead.

The same cannot be said for Rowland’s latest album. In some ways, this is the logical culmination of her career—a work devoid of ambition or vision, designed to underwhelm on every level. The title, Here I Am, seems to have been chosen specifically for purposes of self-refutation. The opening song, “I’m Dat Chick,” is resolutely anonymous. Rowland’s accent is obliterated in an onslaught of autotune, and Tricky Stewart provides a bland anthemic backing.

That’s how it goes throughout. Ke$ha uses autotune to give her castrating party girl persona a snotty adenoidal edge; Britney uses autotune to turn herself into a robot. Rowland, though, just uses it to rub off the edges of her personality, like she’s afraid you’ll notice that she’s singing without a real frontwoman. The obligatory guest appearances by various rappers just drive the point home more painfully. Rowland’s pro forma cooing on “Motivation” sounds lame on its own… but when you put it next to Lil Wayne’s languidly, goofily lascivious rap (“I put her on the plate/and then I do the dishes”), the putative star’s lack of star power becomes actively embarrassing.

It’s a well-known truth that pop success is far more about marketing than musical talent or genius. Lady Gaga isn’t an especially gifted musician, and she doesn’t even look like the typical pop star sex bomb—but despite all that she has charisma out the meat dress. Rowland, on the other hand, has neither sex appeal nor marketing smarts. She poses topless on Vibe, and the media reacts as if a bra fell in the forest and there was no one around to hear.

The sad thing about this is that with Destiny’s Child and even on her own, Rowland has been involved in making a fair amount of great music. Ms. Kelly is arguably better than any of Beyonce’s solo albums, and the harmonies of Beyonce and Kelly together with their bandmates are some of the most heavenly musical sounds of the early 2000s. On Here I Am, though, Rowland is swallowed by her own lack of wattage, trying so hard to be a diva with charisma that she sounds like any random diva, minus the charisma. It’s a reminder, maybe, of the many ways in which pop stars find themselves constrained. Everyone knows that you only get an audience if you make a certain kind of music and have a certain kind of image. But Rowland’s career suggests, too, that failing to sell your image can in certain circumstances, not only reduce your audience, but can also end up gutting your music.

Pop Ephemera

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These reviews all ran on Knoxville Metropulse
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Mariah Carey, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel

Nineteen years into her career, Mariah Carey remains almost uncannily consistent. Though she’s had her ups and downs, certainly, she is, at this stage, neither a bloated self-parody nor a longtimer settling into a comfortable groove of second-tier irrelevance. Instead, she’s what she always was — an immensely talented singer and songwriter who is also the apotheosis of MOR. So thoroughly does she embody easy-listening that she transforms everything she touches. A shout out to ODB? A handful of dancehall oh-oh-ohs? Even, believe it or not, marching band arrangements? All of it turns seamlessly to sugary smooth radio gold — “Candy Bling” as one particularly appropriate song title puts it.

Some may sneer at the plastic artificiality of it all; Jim Derogatis, for example, whined his indie-rock whine about how Mariah’s too corporate because she has Elle ads in her CD. And, yeah, it’s true — she’s not torn up over her success like Kurt was. But perhaps in part for that reason, she was able to stick around, and so we have songs like “h.a.t.e.u,” a languid break-up ballad begging for a change that never comes. “I can’t wait to hate you,” she sings in harmony with herself, hitting her inevitable whistle register notes like overdetermined cries of pain. The familiarity is comfort and ache both at once — the sadness and joy of still, still, still being yourself. Mariah really does make more sense the longer she stays at it, laying down the same surface over and over with painstaking craft, until even our shallowest dreams and hurts seem to echo with depth.
 
AmerieIn Love & War
If funk could walk, the first twelve minutes of In Love & War would be Jesse Owens. Producer Rich Harrison may be gone, but Amerie can still slam the dance floor harder than anyone since Prince — and at moments you have to wonder if even the unpronounceable glyph himself wouldn’t have to jump back and beg for mercy at the virile swagger packed into Amerie’s every devastating “ooo!” The jagged, repetitive drums and percussive horns of “Tell Me You Love Me” are (gloriously) reminiscent of Amerie’s own “1 Thing”; “Heard ‘Em All is based around a sinuous pseudo-Bollywood loop that gets worked so hard it transmutes into rasta declamation. “Dangerous” and “Higher” combine classic rock and funk into a seamless, explosive package that makes even successful fusions like P.E. or Funkadelic seem a little naïve and klutzy.

There are nine more songs here, but…well, really the less said about them the better. Amerie’s clipped, declamatory phrasing, so perfect on the funk, sounds blandly uninvolved when she slows down the tempo, and even her best ballads come nowhere near the passion or invention of Mariah Carey…or even Britney, for that matter. Someday, maybe, Amerie will recognize her strengths and make an album that kicks from start to finish — and when she does, that album will be one of the greatest funk documents of all time. In the meantime, if four perfect tracks are all I get, I’ll take them and say “thank you.”
 
Alice Keys,Element of Freedom

“I just want you to feel a sense of freedom, I want you to feel out-of-the-box, feel inspired,” Alicia Keys said about her new album on BET. And, yep, Element of Freedom sounds exactly like she wants you to feel that. There’s lots of breathing in earnestly to tell you that she’s, like; earnest; lots of inspirational lyrics about how she wants to know how it feels to fly and how she’ll be waiting through distance and time. And lots of songs which start soft and then swell up as she emotes. Earnestly.

Amidst all the classy blandness and kind-of-funky-but-oh-not-too-much hooks, the Beyonce collaboration struts in like a red hot diva determined to set someone’s dreary ass on fire. Suddenly we’re talking about texting over a beat that isn’t embarrassed to be a fucking beat, and you’ve got a vocalist singing nonsense lyrics not like she’s earnest, but like she’s going to throw you down on the ground and grind your NAACP Image Award so hard that it breaks in half.

As for the rest of the album…well, Keys’ piano-driven “Empire State of Mind” probably isn’t significantly more clichéd and/or unendurable than Billy Joel’s piano-driven “New York State Of Mind.” Faint praise, yeah, but it’s all I’ve got.

Dick, Empowered

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Over the last few months I’ve been doing an occasional series on the feminist limitations of an ideology of empowerment. My argument has been that a feminism obsessed with power is a feminism that is indistinguishable in crucial respects from patriarchy. It’s also a feminism that tends to reject parts of women’s experiences out of hand. Domesticity, children, family, peace, selflessness, love, and even sisterhood can be tossed by the wayside in the pursuit of an ideally actualized uberwoman valiantly and violently staking vampires or what have you. And as for those who are not ideally actualized — well, for them, empowerment feminism often offers little but contempt and dismissal.

I still believe all that. But…well. If anything could convince me otherwise, I think it’s Pedro Almodovar’s “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!”. Mostly because, after watching it, I would like to see a passel of empowered feminists kick the director’s sorry ass.

As I am not the first to notice, “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” is an intentional, sneering, anti-feminist provocation. Ostensibly, it’s a romantic comedy featuring Antonio Banderas as the adorably amoral ingenue Ricky. Ricky is released from the mental hospital at the film’s beginning, and immediately goes off to kidnap former porn star and drug addict Marina (Victoria Abril). After hitting her in the jaw, he traps her in her apartment and tells her that she is going to fall in love with him and that they’ll then go off and have lots of babies. At first she is incredulous, but then he steals painkillers for her and gets beaten up for his efforts and she realizes that he really does love her…and so she falls for him and they have fantastic sex and then they ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after. Aww.

Like I’ve said, I’ve written a lot in this series about how a feminist text does not have to present women as perfectly empowered, and about how building your life around love is a really reasonable choice. So Marina is not perfectly empowered, and she chooses love. What’s wrong with that?

What’s wrong with that, I’d argue is that I don’t believe Marina is actually choosing love. That’s first of all because I don’t believe in the love. In a good romantic comedy, you need to become a little bit infatuated — or more than a little bit infatuated — with the leads. I don’t necessarily want to marry Cary Grant’s bumbling doofus, but he’s vulnerable and, contradictorily, witty enough that I can see why Katherine Hepburn would. Darcy is almost lovable just on the strength of his having the good sense to fall in love with Elizabeth, but if that weren’t enough, his competence and determination to help not her, but her whole family, certainly seals the deal. Even that bone-headed drama-queen Edward, so desperately trying to be cool and dangerous and so obviously a raging mass of hormones and stupidity trying incompetently to impress and care for the girl he loves — I can see the appeal.

But Ricky? What is there to like about Ricky? I know Edward is supposed to be all stalkery and abusive, but Ricky is actually, literally a stalker and abuser, tracking down a woman he barely knows (they had a one night stand at some point, apparently), hitting her, and threatening to kill her. He constantly engages in petty crimes, shaking down a drug dealer or stealing a car, and while I guess that’s supposed to make him dangerous and cool, in truth it just makes him seem like an untrustworthy thug. Even his tragic backstory (he lost his parents young or some such rot) seems like rote, tedious whining. His bland confidence that he’ll get what he wants; his noxious self-pity (he constantly chastises his kidnap victim for her selfishness and for not seeing how hard things are for him; his vapid cruelty — I mean, I know he’s Antonio Banderas with movie star good looks, but come on. He’s a charmless cad.

Lots of women (and lot of men, for that matter) do in fact date charmless cads — though even the most charmless cad doesn’t generally begin the relationship with battery and kidnapping. But, in any case, I don’t believe Marina is one of those women who dates charmless cads, because, just as I don’t believe in her love, I don’t believe in her. She’s not a real woman — or even a representation of a real woman. She’s got more in common with Pussy Galore than with Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice or even with Bella. She’s an instrumental fantasy of compliance — which is why her sexual dalliance with a child’s bath toy is what passes for character development. She is there to experience a conversion rape, and the conversion rape is all she is.

Almodovar is perfectly aware of this; in fact, he smirks about it. I mentioned that Marina is a former porn actor. She left porn to star in a exploitation film directed by the great director Maximo Espejo(Franisco Rabal) — roughly translated as “maximum mirror”. Maximo is aging, wheelchair bound, and impotent — he has hired Marina, the film makes explicit (literally in a sequence where Maximo watches one of her old films) because he finds her sexually attractive. The movie doesn’t find this icky, though, Instead, we’re invited to see Maximo’s impotence as a tragedy of genius. His crude comments, directed at both Marina and her sister, are supposed to be cute, just like Ricky’s naive egocentrism and sexual brutality is supposed to be charming. For the last scene of his film, Maximo orders Marian to be tied up and dangled from a window…a motif prefiguring her “relatonship” with Ricky. Ricky, then, becomes, and none too subtly, the director’s avatar, dominating and fucking Marina as Maximo cannot. It’s all just a harmless fantasy, isn’t it? Who are we to deny a genius his stroke material?

Almodovar is gay, of course, so his exact investment in the fantasy is a little unclear. You’re supposed to see him in part as Maximo the mirror, the watcher enjoying or manipulating the tryst. But even if what we have is a coded gay parable about embracing your forbidden love by fucking Antonio Banderas, the fact remains (and is even underlined) that Marina as a woman, and Marina’s desires, are, for the film, utterly irrelevant. It’s not a question of Marina being empowered or disempowered, or even a question of Marina being a blank (as Melinda Beasi recently said of Bella in the Twilight graphic novels.) In fact, it’s not a question at all. The movie simply doesn’t give a crap about Marina. She’s a marker in someone else’s story — which is maybe why she only actually seems to come alive during the film’s much-ballyhooed sex scene. Laughing and animated, she turns over and over with her lover/cad, begging him not to let his penis fall out of her. It’s like Almodovar can only imagine her as interesting, or human, when she’s got a dick.

I did just say in that last paragraph that it’s not about being empowered or disempowered — but I think that’s probably a cop out. The film is, after all, a two-hour paen to the joys of stalking and domestic abuse. It’s a useful reminder to me, perhaps, that one reason men advocate disempowerment for women is that they get off on it. Feminists have every reason to distrust them.