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A Girl Like That: Three Pop Divas Face Off Against Their Evil Selves

January 23, 2010 in Features | No comments

Taylor Swift, “You Belong With Me” (Fearless, 2008)

Plenty of pop videos have used the “entire teen movie in three and a half minutes” schtick, but that isn’t what makes this one seem dated. Rather, it’s the giant glasses sported by our heroine, Nerdy Taylor. I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but in Brooklyn those giant specs are so ubiquitous they barely even register as nerdy anymore.

From Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady to Rachel Leigh Cook in She’s All That, the Pretty/Ugly Girl plot arc has always been a transparent sham, but here the snake seems to be eating its tail. Nerdy Taylor, Prissy Taylor, Post-Makeover Taylor — all of them are, inescapably, Taylor Swift, who is more beautiful and popular than we will ever be (no matter how big her glasses are). Us regular slobs understand which Taylor we’re supposed to root for; we just don’t quite identify.

Avril Lavigne, “Girlfriend” (The Best Damn Thing, 2007)

I don’t mean to be down on Taylor Swift; “You Belong with Me” is actually my favorite of today’s three clips, if only because the kid really does seem to mean it. You know she’s not the frumpy band geek she claims to be, but you still want the best for her — the story traces a clear line from emotional conflict to happy ending. Not so with Avril Lavigne’s entry in the canon, which lacks even a single likable character. Who’s our champion here — the fussy, possessive ice queen; the bullying boyfriend-stealer who’s into dark eyeliner and physical assault; or the “aw, shucks” pretty boy who will flash you a grin as you tumble downhill into a pool of human excrement? To paraphrase Brad Neely, people like these are the reason that God doesn’t talk to us anymore.

Mariah Carey ft. Jay-Z, “Heartbreaker” (Rainbow, 1999)

Late-period Mariah Carey is best known for being a little unhinged, so giving her multiple personalities and having them kung-fu fight is  a pretty good fit. But her personalities seem a little crazy themselves: Good Mariah dresses like a twelve-year-old and spends the video careening through mood swings, from sad-eyed stoic to beaming bootyshaker to vengeful beeyotch. Evil Mariah powders her cleavage obsessively, yet even in a mirror, she fails to notice the clump of popcorn spot-welded to the top of her head.  And in the end, they both lose for thinking Jerry O’Connell is worth fighting over.

Homegirl sure knows how to belt it, though. Respect.

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Man! I Feel Like a Woman! Two Great Gender-Crossing Covers

November 16, 2009 in Features | No comments

Lauren Hoffman, “Of All The Gin Joints in All The World”
(Originally by Fall Out Boy)

Final Fantasy, “Fantasy”
(Originally by Mariah Carey)

Among the long list of creative projects I’ve dreamt up but never seen through is this one: contact all the people I know who make music and ask them for a home recording of a song written by somebody else. Only preexisting works would qualify; the idea isn’t to commission a bunch of new covers, but to unearth the ones that were never meant to see the light of day. The resulting pool of demos would be burned onto CDRs, outfitted with some modest cover art, and distributed to all the participants.

I still might do that someday, especially now that I’ve stumbled on this gem by Lauren Hoffman. It isn’t just that it’s such a rare oddity to hear a woman singing emo. It’s that, for all the potential humor to be mined from turning a super-produced mall-punk anthem into an acoustic ballad, there isn’t the slightest trace of irony in her delivery. That speaks to her sense of subtlety and restraint—and, dare I say it, to the strength of the source material.

Owen Pallett (a.k.a. Final Fantasy), on the other hand, is clearly having fun with his audience’s expectations when he eases, bit by bit, into this blissed-out interpretation of his namesake. Granted, there’s really no other way he could have done it—the loop-pedal procedure in his live shows necessarily makes a slow build of each song, stacking layer on layer until the arrangement is complete. But just listen to how the crowd reacts as they begin to get the joke, how their shouts of approval mount and swell until, in the chorus, they erupt into ecstatic applause. These people know Pallett is toying with them, and they love him for it.

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Don’t Change a Thing for Me: Two Songs Where the Bassist Can Relax

November 9, 2009 in Features | 1 comment

Michael Jackson, “Thriller” (Thriller, 1982)

Kings of Leon, “The Bucket” (Aha Shake Heartbreak, 2004)

Like I mentioned last week, shelling out to see the uneven but still fascinating Michael Jackson concert documentary This Is It played a big role in my decision to bring this blog back from the dead. Part of it was seeing the way MJ worked, taking a vision that was in his head and turning it, masterfully, into a gigantic spectacle, one that required endless patience and the cooperation of hundreds of people. If he could do that, I can write 300 words about my favorite songs once in a while.

The other part was “Thriller,” or rather something about it that I’d never noticed before: the bass line almost never changes. With the exception of that killer bridge and a few section breaks, the chord changes are dictated by other instruments—primarily the keyboards. It’s as though the bass finds the perfect groove in the very first bar, and  decides to just set up shop. Maybe there’s a thematic connection there; the figure could be called “zombie-like” in its relentless repetition. Or maybe it’s just a neat idea that happened to work.

In any case, the “Thriller” revelation immediately triggered another. I’m pretty indifferent to most of what Kings of Leon have released into the world, but there’s one song of theirs that slays me. “The Bucket” charms with its simplicity—both the verse melody and the main guitar riff take simple descending patterns and loop them for the song’s duration. But there’s one minimalist trick that took me months to catch: the bass line is just. one. note! Straying only in the chorus, and then just barely, bassist Jared Followill finds D-natural and then sits back and lets his brothers do the work.

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Easy as 1-2-3: From All-Girl Psychedelic Surf Rock to Cheesy Mid-90s Eurodance in Three Easy Steps

November 6, 2009 in Features | No comments

At a Willamsburg house show last night, I learned three things. The first two are that Grass Widow is my new favorite live band, and that their drummer Lillian Maring is my new favorite drummer. That’s incidental to what I want to talk about today, but seriously, you should check them out—and if you’re  in the New York area this weekend, you should go see them play.

Grass Widow, “To Where” (Grass Widow LP, 2009)

The third thing I learned came after the live music was over, when promoter extraordinaire Todd P stepped into his secondary role: iPod DJ. Here’s what I imagine he was thinking: if you’ve got a bunch of young, beer-soaked Brooklynites in a room and they’ve just seen an incredible show, their emotions are as putty in your hands. So play Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” and they’ll be flushed with nostalgia and immediately revert to a middle school dance party-mode. Follow that up with Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” and you’ll see them turn ecstatic with local pride, wailing along with Alicia Keys on the chorus. At this point they’ll dance to whatever you want, and that’s when you whip out this classic:

Real McCoy, “Another Night” (Another Night, 1995)

Suddenly it’s not just a dance party—it’s an Ultimate Dance Party. Music, as we well know and yet so often forget, is inextricably bound to context. Walk into a bar that’s blasting Real McCoy and you might roll your eyes and flee in disgust. But when it’s the cap on an already joyous evening, you may find, to your surprise, that it makes an awful lot of sense to you.

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What Am I Here For? Two Very Generous Guest Appearances

September 14, 2009 in Features | No comments

Limp Bizkit featuring Method Man, “N 2 Gether Now”
(Significant Other, 1999)

The Reason featuring Sara Quin, “We’re So Beyond This”
(Things Couldn’t Be Better, 2007)

Dudes are just slumming it. Especially you, Sara. I’m sure Method has his reasons; most hip-hop stars worth their salt have at least one weirdo collaboration to answer for. But you? You could write circles around these assholes. I hope you at least got to keep the jacket.

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Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily: Two Spirited Rounds

September 11, 2009 in Features | No comments

Matt Pond PA, “The Party” (The Nature of Maps, 2002)

Toby Goodshank, “The Death of My Enemies” (Di Santa Ragione, 2006)

Rounds are the easiest form of part singing, and songwriters sometimes take advantage of their inherent prettiness to pen refrains that don’t mean much of anything. (When I first heard “Sons and Daughters,” the snowballing closer of The Decemberists’ The Crane Wife, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was too easy, that the four repeated lines could have been rewritten or swapped about and it would have been the same song). But when pulled off, they can be intense and magical moments that command the whole of your attention.

Such is this gem from Matt Pond PA’s 2002 The Nature of Maps; I haven’t paid much mind to their subsequent releases, but this is a song I’ll be putting on mixtapes for years to come. It starts out minimally enough, with a series of verses about the thoughts that swirl through a teenager’s mind in the course of a weekend, backed by a guitar and cello whose main purpose is to stay out of the way. But in the song’s second half, as the verses start stacking atop one another, we see that their melodies have been designed to interlock, each one occupying its own rhythmic and tonal space. It’s a neat trick, one that uses the form of the round perfectly by allowing the listener to focus at once on the whole and the parts. Toby Goodshank keeps it simple too, which is unusual—most of his songs (and there are an awful lot) are stream-of-consciousness word torrents that demand multiple listens just to catch all the puns, references, and scandalous jokes. But on “The Death of My Enemies,” he’s content to trade between two pithy declarations: a Darth Vader-evoking “I have you now,” followed by the self-satisfied addendum, “It’s amazing.”

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Break It Down and Freeze: Five Dramatic Music Video Stills

September 7, 2009 in Features | No comments

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21

What’s both great and terrible about music videos is that, perhaps more than any other kind of moving picture, they are unbound by narrative. A video can be as literal or as abstract as you want, and have nothing or everything to do with the song — the point isn’t to create a coherent story, it’s simply to create a set of images that is striking and memorable. (Okay, I guess the real point is to sell records, but an iconic image can help a lot — sometimes it can even become just as famous as the song it supports.) Below, then, are a few stills that—like the best work of Cindy Sherman or Gregory Crewdson—the mind can spin an entire movie around. I encourage you to submit your own. Or better yet, use one of these to write a short story.

Radiohead, “Karma Police”

See the full video

My Chemical Romance, “Helena”

See the full video

Guns N’ Roses, “November Rain”

See the full video

Beck, “Deadweight”

See the full video

The Dead Weather, “Treat Me Like Your Mother”

See the full video

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Now I Know How Joan of Arc Felt: The Smiths Pull a Switcheroo

June 19, 2009 in Features | No comments

The Beach Boys, “Sloop John B” (Pet Sounds, 1966)

The Smiths, “London” (Louder Than Bombs, 1987)

“London” is far from my favorite Smiths song, but I readily admit it’s probably the rockingest thing they ever recorded—brash, distorted, uncharacteristically driving, and about as long as your average Ramones song. More insolent than any of those aspects, however, is the very first note: a high C that rings just long enough for the listener to recognize it, then turns shrill and strident without warning. I’ve never heard anything to confirm that Morrissey and company were deliberately aping the beginning of the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B,” but every time I listen to it, coincidence seems a less and less plausible explanation. They wanted their first and only punk song to make an impression, and it did so by opening with a false promise of tranquility and familiarity,  making the rest of it feel that much harsher by comparison.

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