Tag Archives: music

Pop Metal for the Treadmill

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This first appeared on Splice Today. It’s part of a week long Metal Apocalypse.
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Metal has always been an uneasy critical sell. Too uptight to be rootsy, too formulaic to be arty, too earnest to be clever, and too remorselessly sexless to be sexy, metal has droned, trudged, and howled its own way between rockists and poptimists, occasionally hailed by one or the other, but never exactly embraced by either.

So it makes perfect sense that High on Fire is the critically validated metal It band of the moment—since, in most ways that matter, the group isn’t really a metal outfit at all. Oh, sure, High on Fire has many metal trappings. The songs are long, loud, and prog-inflected. The vocalist growls as much as sings. There are guitar solos.

But despite all that, High on Fire’s energy is not metal. It’s punk. More specifically, it’s metal-tinged pop punk, in the vein of Guns N’Roses or Nirvana or all those grunge bands that critics loved because beneath the thin metal veneer they were actually trying to be rootsy, or arty, or clever, or sexy, or some combination thereof.

You can hear High on Fire’s actual sympathies in the opening title tune, with the repetitive, fist-shaking chorus (“Rise up! Fall down!”) that gets lodged in your brainstem like an overcarbonated bleacher cheer. You can hear it in the emotive sincerity with which Matt Pike emotes like a cross between Eddie Vedder and a constipated pachyderm on “Bastard Samurai.” And you can read it in that damn name: High on Fire. That’s an inspirational slogan for your mildly edgy corporate event, damn it—it’s not a metal band.

Metal is about being ground into anonymity beneath a giant iron heel. Punk’s about raging against the machine. The latter is in general the option more likely to wow a cultural arbiter, since people, or at least critics, like to feel that they’re fighting the power rather than being devoured by it. And, you know, if you’re creative, smart, and funny—like the Dead Kennedys, or Motorhead, or even Nirvana—fighting the power can be really entertaining and worthwhile. High on Fire, though, has neither the wit of great punk nor the remorselessness of great metal. Instead it’s just lumberingly literal adrenal rush; music by which to run on your treadmill or invade a sovereign nation, or shout “Shit yeah!” while drinking yourself into a stupor.

Which is fine, I guess. But I wish they wouldn’t call it metal.
 

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.

The Mysterious Joy of Kpop

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14 year-old me would likely arrange to have present-day me quietly thrown into a gorge. My brittle teenage mind that had just begun to cultivate a personality oscillating between discomfort and revulsion with American consumer culture as experienced by my fellow upper middle-classmates didn’t have the mental tools to process the idea of an adult me who would get true happiness from mass-produced consumer pop music. From Korea.

It took almost a year after my boyfriend first showed me a music video, “Nobody” by Wonder Girls, before I took the bait. I was a serious person, after all, with serious taste in designer earhole stimulants. Fast-forward to me trawling the Gaon top 30 every week and spreading the gospel of Girls Generation (make you feel the heat) to my friends. While I’ve been haunting the periphery of the American fandom devoted to Japanese comics, cartoons, food, history, toys, etc. I haven’t found a scene of any analogous size and scope for Korean culture. What a shame! I admit to a touch of troubling exoticism in my enthusiasm. When I use the power of the internet to ask them, plenty of Koreans have told me they find K-pop just as annoying as the Backstreet Boys. I am a white American fan who speaks maybe six words of Korean and can’t decipher Hangul yet, so I don’t understand any of the lyrics as they are sung to me (I’m also a death metal fan, so this is not unusual). I do get a funny feeling when I hear those ebullient diphthongs “niga dagaogi maneul barae / eoseo naege / wa nal deryeo ga jebal (wishing that you would come close / come to me now / please take me with you)*.”

To me, much of Kpop resembles an off-kilter version of music I rejected in the early 2000s, maybe what could have been. Korean music was mostly either traditional or Trot until 1992 when Seo Taiji Boys puzzled a panel of judges on a televised talent program with the concepts of hip hop and the boy band. Much of K-pop today is performed by large prefabricated groups of sometimes more than a dozen fussily styled members. Often one of them is designated to contribute various rap breakdowns scattered throughout each song. Difficult choreographed dancing is a really, really, big deal. Music videos always look very expensive and involve rapid costume changes in a weird empty white room, or rapid costume changes in a multi-colored Missy Elliot-style nightmarish puzzle dimension. Not every member is chosen for their singing ability, and people are refreshingly candid about this.

Like I said, this all sounds like a twisted throwback to the boy and girl groups no one in their heart of hearts truly misses. The thing is, Kpop is blowing up. It’s a global phenomenon, and Korean producers like JY Park (Wonder Girls, Miss A) are taking bold aim at insular American pop charts. The Wonder Girls’ “Nobody” was the first Korean single to crack the Billboard top 100 ever, bolstered by their opening slot on a Jonas Bros. tour in 2009. They have their own made for TV movie on Teen Nick. Competing powerhouse Girls’ Generation, who have two American members, recently performed on Letterman promoting their new single with (asinine) English lyrics.  There’s no telling whether American audiences will bite in large numbers.

In speculating about Korean music’s prospects in the US, I wrestle with my hip instinct to crow about how I knew about all of this K-pop business before it was on the tastemaker blogs’ radar. Also present and accounted for is the urge to contrast Korean aspirations  with those of the Japanese, whose biggest hit in the American market was Kyu Sakamoto’s “Ue O Muite Aruko” at a fluke #1 for three weeks in 1963. I’m not remotely qualified to comment with authority on any of the above. I will briefly note that Korean groups are working with Diplo (the producer miraculously capable of coaxing good music out of Usher), while a new sensation in Japan is Hatsune Miku, a holographic projection, which I should have seen coming a mile away (let’s be honest, I did see it coming. I first saw Macross Plus a decade ago, but that was cartoons, people). If different markets ask different things from their pop performers, or their pop moe holograms then it’s not my place to pass judgment.

Korean producers have proven rapidly adaptable in appropriating the bells and whistles of American and European pop music – autotune, dubstep-style bass drops, that stupid chirping square-wave noise LMFAO has been using – into their artists’ repertoire. The tone of the charts ricochets between hyper-cutesy bubblegum, hard-edge sex danger and syrupy ballads. Lots and lots and lots of goddamned ballads.

I’ve fallen hard for the boisterously feminine groove of Girls’ Generation’s “Gee” and the demented tonal shifts wedged into Davichi’s “8282” and “Time Please Stop.” IU is capable of twee grandeur. 2NE1 provided the anthem for my inner bad bitch. Boyfriend is cute. Super Junior is hot. Wonder Girls’ “Be my Baby” is pure, unrestrained bliss. The music triggers involuntary nostalgia and packages familiar hip hop and R&B melodies to a sophisticated, hopped-up electronic dance beat, but still the music is fresh, playful, at a slight remove from dreary American pop, which prattles on about the club, invoking an hour-long line for the washroom.

K-pop artists go through rigorous training for years while I mime along to the dancing at home in my spare time. The cadence of Korean is pleasant and unfamiliar, but most of all, so is the world of these confident, insanely stylish, physically fit performers. There is a transparent element of escapism in my appreciation for the dancing, which is more often than not stunning. Sometimes I want to watch a group dance, other times I want to be the one dancing like that. Am I going through some creepy quarter-life crisis, reliving my teen years as if I were worshiping Miss A instead of the devil? Loving K-pop is helping me sort out how I experience my own gender queering, and I’m healthier and happier now than I ever was before I tried the green eggs. It’s a dismal world that asks people to logically explain why a certain music makes them feel good. There’s just something special about it. Probably the visors.

 

 

*That translation/romanization comes from youtube users Ffusionnz and TheKpopSubber3.

Tsushima

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Even if rock’s triumphal-film-score concept-album crescendos are generally dedicated to narrating combat of the mythic mock medieval variety, rather than documented events, heroic ballads set against sweeping historical vistas have made a few appearances in rock-opera prog, such as Triumvirat’s Spartacus, and in the occasional power metal suite, like Iced Earth’s The Glorious Burden. But despite not knowing more than a few erratically memorable examples, I doubt that any prog or power “history album” quite compares to Arriver’s long-awaited epic, Tsushima.

Primarily from the viewpoint of the defeated Russian Admiral Rozhestvensky, the album tells the story of the Battle of Tsushima, a landmark 1905 naval encounter in the Russo-Japanese War. Wikipedia describes it as a turning point in modern warfare, as it was the first battle in which wireless electronic communication played a central role and the last in which one fleet surrendered to another. The album opens with “Winter Palace War Council,” a mournful accordion overture interrupted by a vicious staccato assault, in which, although “The Dowager Empress warned us/ Eastern entanglements shall fail,” the vocals growl defiantly states, “We will all die, but we will never surrender!” After balefully adopting the voice of Japan’s victorious Admiral Togo, in the menacing trudge “Togo, Son of a Samurai,” the story resumes in the Russian perspective with “Dogger Bank,” a high-speed stuttering Deicide-esque dirge conjuring the shadow of defeat to the distant conflict in the North Sea. “Our anchorage will be refused in every neutral port of call/ You may turn your backs on us,” the guttural snarl testifies, “but we alone are standing tall!”

In the album’s centerpiece, “Around the Cape,” a fierce, lumbering riff accompanies the background of total collapse, the defeated Russian fleet at Port Arthur and peasant revolts at the Tsar’s palace: “Crocodile hunting and French whores,” shouts the disembodied chorus in the face of their annihilation, “they only serve to slowly weaken our resolve.” A brief, precisely shifting thrash piece, “Dark Clouds Above the Fleet,” evokes mechanized perfection while prophesying the inevitable end: “Misery is all we know/ No solace found in place of sorrow/ Ignore your orders, lashing follows.’ In reverberating harmonic chords, and some actual Russian-language re-enactment, “Singapore” describes Rozhestvensky’s Ahab-like hubris in the face of the looming conflict. A massive swaggering rocker chopped into odd sections by tempo shifts, percussive artillery, bewildering time switches, and ornate finger-picking figures, “Tsushima Trilogy” churns like huge icy waves; in the suite’s last section “The Boiling Sea,” the Admiral exhorts his men to “never lower the flag,” until the battle ends in a whiteout of seasick feedback and the gasping sputter of a dying engine. The devastation is summarized in bleak harmonies over a rumbling funeral march in “Quadrology:” “21 vessels sunk by dawn/ 4000 Russian sailors drowned/ The Tsar’s last armada is lost and with it the war.”

While many loud rock bands deliver arrangements founded on the alternation of chugging riffs and blasts of fury, with Arriver the shifts are more elegant than startling, with dramatic grandeur favored over shock and awe. More classical than fanatical, their chords never simply evoke Satanic massacre or chivalric soundtrack. The uncomfortable relationship between punk and metal is foregrounded with a band such as Arriver– their sophisticated long-form arrangements don’t fail to sound like the French black metal band Deathspell Omega, but without any hint of histrionic horror or the perversion of nature. Or I might think of the melodic arpeggios, whiplash tempo changes, and layered chords of Between the Buried and Me, or the furious mathiness of Converge or Dillinger Escape Plan, but not of those bands’ crisply gated production values, which seem to only make use of death metal tropes in the service of reinventing angsty Gothy industrial music. Arriver’s old-school chops may even occasionally be reminiscent of Vader, but the former’s symphonic nuance is incompatible with the latter’s straight-ahead brutality. Arriver’s warm, tactile sound, both in performance and production, is most comparable with more melancholy exponents of the ‘90s post-hardcore indie-rock spectrum, like Bitch Magnet, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, or Unwound. But, putting the sound aside, the music is convincingly metal.

Merely an agglomeration of tropes, there is no nugget that makes metal metal. But metal fans might concur that, as stridently humorless as metal may be, its lack of irony keeps it blissfully free of sincerity. Metal is not personal but completely internal, not interpersonal but utterly public, magical rather than political, and thus always, in its way, religious. The nature of history as a diverse collectivity of experiences may seem more suited to punk. Still, Tsushima rides the fence admirably, in its unselfconscious apprehension of a totality whose only unifying element is anguish, becoming perhaps less of a “history album” and more of a “war album.”

Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad presents war not as a transcendent individual experience, but an unstoppable gluttonous inertia of force before which conquerors and victims are equally powerless. Weil defines “force” as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” “A man stands disarmed and naked with a spear pointing at him;” she says, “this person becomes a corpse before anybody or anything touches him.” As in Weil’s description of the Homeric epic, the chief tone of Tsushima is bitterness. “The dissonance introduced in the overture, “The Winter Palace,”introduces a dread that lingers throughout the action of the musical narrative”, grimly relating episodes in the admiral’s reflections upon the battle, before, during, and after, with the delusional yet fatalistic determination of Custer at Little Big Horn. “The cold brutality of the deeds of war is left undisguised;” rhapsodizes Weil, “neither victors nor vanquished are admired, scorned, or hated.” On a more modest scale, the same sentiment could be applied to Tsushima.

Glory in struggle, a subtext of all loud white music, is subtly tweaked in the fearful feedback, deformed rhythms, and ominous harmonies that counterpoint Tsushima’s thrashy gallops, surgical barrages, and martial marches, somehow mingling the mournful solemnity of patriotic Russian choral anthems with Fugazi’s insurgent insouciance to create a result that is neither reverent nor skeptical. Almost a straight-faced echo of the miniature Stonehenge proffered by Spinal Tap, the mightiest works and most sublime cataclysms of man are seen in their true ephemeral puniness. Rather than a bestowal of posthumous heroic laurels, the abject defeat of arrogant power seems to be the moral of the story, summed up in the chant that closes the album: “Day by day, like links in a chain, darkness spreads at the edge of the empire.” The torch of triumph and the flame of the fallen warrior must dispel in smoke for any hope to stay kindled.
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Arriver’s website with info about the album is here.

The Groove That Ended

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This first appeared in The Chicago Reader.
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Today fabulous divas and thuggy rappers use the same producers. They sing about the same things—mainly clubbin’ and sex. They date each other. And they appear not just on the same radio stations but on the same tracks. For all practical purposes, hip-hop and R&B have merged into a single commercial juggernaut.

Ashanti, who’s been out of circulation for four years, has already proven herself a diva, but her big comeback, The Declaration, is also her attempt to fully and finally embrace radio reality. It’s the album where she shakes off the influence of label owner Irv Gotti and hooks up with a bunch of megaproducers to prove she can rock the dance floors of the late aughts even harder than she rocked the bedrooms of 12-year-old girls in 2002.

That was the plan, anyway. But The Declaration is completely anonymous. It feels like it could’ve been put together by any second- or third-rate R&B diva—Christina Milian, say, or Lumidee. It’s not terrible, and there are some nice moments—the piano loop on the lead single, “The Way That I Love You,” works well, and “In These Streets” gets lodged in your head in that pleasurable/painful way certain pop songs do—but the moments of inspiration are fleeting. Even Rodney Jerkins, who’s been on fire these past couple of years, seems to be sleepwalking; his production job on “So Over You” sounds like he unearthed a duff Brandy track from ten years ago and remixed it while doing his taxes. “Girlfriend” is a dreary knock-off of Ciara’s “Promises.” And Akon’s contribution to “Body on Me” is just like every other one of his wack misogynist whines—the man is a one-trick blight.

Even more distressing, though, is the slide in Ashanti’s singing. She’s largely abandoned the slightly nasal burr that put a poignant catch in everything she did. Gone too are the smarts, which made her one of the most underrated pop singers in the business despite her thin voice. Nothing here matches the aching pause in “I’m so… happy, baby” (from “Happy,” on her self-titled debut), the clipped, funky stutter in “Focus,” or the jazzy phrasing that swings her sublimely off the beat in “Don’t Let Them” (both from 2004’s Concrete Rose).

On The Declaration Ashanti runs through a smorgasbord of vocal styles. On “You Gonna Miss” she vacillates between a hard-edged pseudo-Beyonce and a processed pseudo-Ciara. On “Things You Make Me Do” she seems to be imitating the sensual purr of her old rival Tweet. It’s like she desperately wants to be somebody else, or anybody other than herself. On the execrable faux show tune “Shine,” Ashanti insists that “They can’t shut out your light/ No matter how hard they try.” But this record is proof that, if you give them just a little help, they can in fact smother your inner beauty under a big, fat bushel of blandness.

Of course, negative reviews of Ashanti albums are par for the course. Except for the millions of tween girls who bought her CDs in the early aughts, pretty much everyone despises Ashanti’s music. Even contrarians who laud the virtues of disposable plastic pop tend to prefer Beyonce or Kelis or Mariah Carey. Ashanti, who was briefly as big as any of them, rarely merits a mention.

Ashanti’s problems—now and then—mostly stem from being on the wrong side of the zeitgeist. Specifically, she has a very uncomfortable relationship with hip-hop. Her 2002 debut included some of the most embarrassing faux-street skits ever committed to disc, with the pitiful Gotti incongruously bellowing profanities like some sort of Tourette’s-afflicted ungulate (“I’m feeling the shit out of you, you’re feeling the shit out of me”). A remix of her big single “Foolish” featured a sexually explicit rap by the deceased Biggie Smalls, with Ashanti cooing encouragement. Instead of buying her some cred, it just made her seem cluelessly ghoulish.

The trouble is that Ashanti came on the scene just as R&B and hip-hop were fusing. In the 90s hip-hop was certainly an important influence on R&B, but there was still some distance between them. When Aaliyah sings “One in a Million,” for example, it’s emphatically R&B—the music is groove based, and the lyrics are a straightforward tribute to perfect love. Timbaland’s beats function as an insistent but separate voice, so that the track becomes almost a duet, a love song from R&B to hip-hop with Aaliyah and the breakbeats trading endearments and vows.

The two genres consummated their relationship at the end of the decade. Acts like Destiny’s Child (with producer Kevin Briggs) and Kelis (with the Neptunes) moved away from grooves and toward more complex song structures, integrating beats and multilayered vocals. Lyrics also began to adopt a much more in-your-face hip-hop attitude—instead of agonizing over the men who done them wrong, Beyonce and Kelis come across as tough and angry, chewing out stalkers, cheaters, and parasites with gleeful disdain. On songs like “Bootylicious,” Destiny’s Child even slipped seamlessly from singing to quasi-rapping while boasting about their sexual charms.

Ashanti is a different story. The music on her debut was the last, gorgeous gasp of 90s R&B. Taking his cue from Butterfly-era Mariah Carey, producer 7aurelius didn’t so much write songs as pour glittery, translucent glop over beats and vocals. The result was a syrupy, trudging, pulsing drone—doom metal by Care Bears. Ashanti and her infinitely multitracked doubles often sound buried alive, desperately emoting from inside an echoey pink plastic prison, repeating and repeating R&B signifiers (“Baby baby baby baby baby”) until all meaning is squeezed out of them and they start to register as pure sound. It’s overwhelmingly, swooningly, gooily romantic, miles away from the invulnerable iron-bitch strut of Beyonce or the true-pain confessions of neosoul artists like Keyshia Cole. In other words, it’s neither tough nor real. There’s nothing hip-hop about it.

Ashanti’s next two albums kept the same format—lousy skits, ravishingly ethereal music—but fell off progressively from the massive commercial success of the first. Gotti’s legal troubles certainly helped sabotage 2004’s Concrete Rose, but in any case the space in R&B for artists with so little real affinity for hip-hop was shrinking. On 2005’s The Emancipation of Mimi, Mariah Carey proved she was flexible enough to adapt and still make good music, but Ashanti… well, not so much. On The Declaration, in order to fit in with the current state of R&B, she’s systematically erased all traces of her musical personality.

I’m not trying to say that everything was better back in the day. Though 90s R&B had its moments, overall I think the genre has benefited enormously from hip-hop’s influence. Still, there’s a price; pop is a zero-sum game, and when one style wins, another loses. That’s why today Ashanti’s early albums sound like a transmission from another world, a place where R&B never took that left turn but instead went straight on, stuck in one endless, shimmering groove.

It’s Nobody, Bitch

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Of all the pre-processed, artificial, talentless pop blow-up dolls, Britney Spears is quite possibly the most processed, the most artificial, and the most talentless. Beyoncé can actually sing. Lady Gaga has performance art attitude. K$sha has rock and roll attitude. Rihanna has an accent. Even the relatively anonymous Ciara can dance.

In comparison, Britney is a cipher. Over the years, she’s mimicked a range of pop styles, from the faux-Beatles psychedelia of 1999’s “The Beat Goes On,” to the 2001 faux-Prince funk of “Boys.” But you never get the sense that those styles exactly influenced her, or that she even knows who Prince or the Beatles are. Without Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake’s whole performance schtick would dissolve. Without Prince or the Beatles or even Madonna, Britney’s producers would just feed her something else. This is ludicrously illustrated in 2007’s Blackout, where whoever’s in charge decides to turn Britney into a confessional artist. On “Piece of Me” she coos and growls about her public meltdown and her kid and how unfair everyone is to her, and she sounds as engaged as if she’s reading someone else’s tax forms. When Christina Aguilera whines about her critics, she seems sincerely self-obsessed. For Britney, though, talking about her life is just another pose she can fail to carry off convincingly.

Which is absolutely not a bad thing. On the contrary, Britney’s utter lack of emotional investment in her own music has served her well throughout her career. The contrast with Xtina is instructive. Aguilera has 10 times the voice Britney does. But she also has at least that much more ambition, without any more discernible intelligence. Her increasingly desperate efforts to turn herself into something more respectable than a dumb pop singer—a classic diva! Lady Gaga! Anything! Help!—have resulted in one of the most embarrassing public careers in recent memory. For Xtina followers, her mangling of the national anthem wasn’t so much a horrible misstep as a logical culmination of her evolution as a singer. And I’m speaking as someone who liked Aguilera’s last album!

Britney’s had her own public disasters, of course. But they never seemed to touch her actual music, in large part because nothing touches her music. A Britney song has the perfect purity of an unwrapped Twinkie; it exists outside authenticity and time and art in an inviolable envelope of plastic. This has only become truer as her career as advanced. Way back on Baby, One More Time, Britney sounded almost human—on the first moans of that album she even came within a mortar shot of soul. No fear of that on the recently released Femme Fatale. Autotune was made for Britney and Britney for autotune. Her non-personality is systematically erased; she’s more herself than ever, which is to say she’s more no one.

Just because Femme Fatale is arguably Britney’s most characteristic album doesn’t necessarily mean it’s her best. The song selection overall certainly isn’t as strong as In the Zone, and I think Femme Fatale is a step down from her last effort, 2008’s Circus, as well. Still, there’s plenty to like. From the insanely catchy whistled hook of “I Wanna Go,” to the catchy and burpy low end on “Big Fat Bass,” producers Dr. Luke, Martin, Billboard and others pack the disc with enough gimmicks for an ABBA album or three. The sing-song girl-meets-bloop “How I Roll” does Robyn better than Robyn does. “I wanna go downtown where my posse’s at / got nine lives like a kitty cat,” turns streetwise posturing into music-box girl-group nonsense, an apotheosis of rapturously treacly yearning. But the highlight of studio fuckery may come on “(Drop Dead) Beautiful.” In the middle of casually objectifying some hot guy, Britney lets out a lascivious laugh which is almost instantly processed into a computerized squeal. It’s like the producers heard a flicker of sincere emotion and panicked. Drown it out! Drown it out! Where’s the confounded FX knob?

The totality of the self-effacement on Britney’s albums is definitely funny, arguably disturbing—and also, I think, kind of moving. For instance, at the beginning of “Inside Out,” Britney sings “gotta look my best if we’re gonna breakup.” It’s a wry, rather sad line, and it seems true as well—you want to impress the boyfriend more when he’s on the way out, though logically you should want to less. The lyric touches on a sense of being out of control, of trying to remake yourself to no good purpose.

I don’t think this is a glimpse of the real Britney. Someone else wrote it, and her delivery certainly doesn’t suggest she thought about it too hard. Rather, the lyric resonates with the fact that there is no real Britney. And that in turn points to a sometimes-neglected truth. Pop and love and life—they’re not just about swagger and personality. They’re also about disappearing into everyone and no one; about ominous, bitter, and sometimes sweet nothings. Britney is not the pop star as genius. But there is a kind of genius in the way she incarnates the pop star as nonentity.

Too True

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My reviews for Madeloud are largely buried and unsearchable, it looks like, so I thought I’d start reprinting some of them here, starting with this one.
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I like contemporary pop. I like classic country. I should be able to reconcile myself to contemporary country pop. Right? I am trying. I’ve recently renewed my affection for George Strait, and belatedly discovered the charms of Leann Womack and Sara Evans. All those folks, though, have at least a cowboy boot and a half in the tradition; they’re neo, not new. Even their slickness ends up being charmingly corny and old-fashioned. Leann Womack looks about as dowdy as a major star can look on the cover of her first album; seated and leaning forward awkwardly on a big Sears-worthy comfy chair, big dangly cross earrings vying for attention with the big buttons on her aggressively modest black jacket.

Miranda Lambert doesn’t wear big buttons. Nor does she mess around with neo cred. She may be on the country dial, but she’s pop from her perfect toes to her exquisite collarbone — the latter of which is featured prominently on the cover of Revolution. I’ve got no objection to that — pop stars are supposed to be pretty, after all. It’s part of their appeal. And it’s not like Lambert doesn’t have anything else going for her. On the contrary, like Christina Aguilera and Beyonce, when Lambert won the genetic lottery, she didn’t do it by halves — her voice is almost as much of a marvel as her physique. Her twang is lodged in her every phrase like a burr, adding swagger to the uptempo stompers and sultry insinuation to the ballads. I’d be happy to sit back and listen to her sing the phone book, as the saying goes.

Unfortunately, she isn’t singing the phone book here. Instead, she’s singing the sort of songs you’d expect to hear on country radio — and try as I might, I just can’t hack it. “Dead Flowers,” for example, could be an affecting, vividly imagined ode to lost love — if somebody would just for God’s sake shoot the drummer, who thumps along like he’s wearing hip boots on his arms. “Heart Like Mine,” has a couple good one liners (“I heard Jesus he drank wine/ and I bet we’d get along just fine,”) more or less obscured by the music’s all-too-earnest efforts to be sweeping and inspirational in a “get your lighter out” mode. It’s almost like listening to Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” if you tried to substitute denuded country filigree for any musical ideas or actual personality.

Such is the whole album. It’s not reverent and backward-looking, like the neo-traditionalists, but it’s not gimmicky and bizarre like the best pop from Abba to Ciara. Instead, the Revolution exists in this weird aphasiac past, where retailing indifferently performed rock clichés from the seventies, eighties, and nineties is somehow supposed to be arresting or entertaining. Not everything’s a disaster — the opening song, “White Liar,” for example, is a perfectly pleasant Waylon Jennings knock-off by way of Steve Earle. “Virginia Bluebell” is a decent trudgy ballad. But country radio needs to sell out a lot more thoroughly than this if it’s ever going to win me over.