April 26, 2010

on the born free video, m.i.a.

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Kick-Ass, by Peter Watkins.

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January 09, 2010

top 25 songs of 2009 in a single entry

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25) "Where I Stood," Missy Higgins. And so Chick-Alt, spun off from the Modern Rock radio format to accommodate first chick-alt performers (Alanis, Tori, Sarah) and then an an imagined audience of alt-chick consumers, has come to this: an imitation of Anna Nalick imitating Leona Naess imitating lesser Liz Phair divided by Miss McLachlan. Which is still okay with us, still better than Kate Nash, but really: at what point does the arc of decay call for another Joni Mitchell? Soon, we hope. Soon.

24) "Know Your Enemy," Green Day. If your favorite Green Day song is "Warning," you may just like this one. If you thought that Green Day's politics was ever something other than Capital D Democratic, you will perhaps feel betrayed by the posturing — which is not simply empty but can't even be bothered to pretend to radicality, and is in fact indicative of the same corporate humanism that is the default mode of the pop marketplace. Which is to say, this band could be your president. Remember Dookie? Remember the public option?

23) "Blue Jeans and a Rosary," Kid Rock. Best Elton John song in a couple decades. Full title: "Guess That's Why They Call it the Blue Jeans and a Rosary."

22) "Pony," Far. Gin-u-ine kleine nachtmusik.

21) "American Ride," Toby Keith. Truth be told, we will look back one day in the not-too-distant future and see that Toby Keith stands astride this decade like good ol' colossus, from 2000's "How Do You Like Me Now" and "Country Comes to Town" all the way through this song. We count at least 14 good singles in that span, none of them better than "I Love This Bar" except maybe for "Get Drunk and Be Somebody" or "As Good as I Once Was"; populist drinking songs that Garth Brooks abandoned offer Toby at his bestest. But of course the spiritual core of the oeuvre is the Njal's-Saga-in-a-Ford-truck revenge fantasies — "Beer for My Horses," "The Angry American," etc — to which this song serves as a sort of coda or explanation, laying out the amusement park thrill of riding our high-spirited roller coaster of contempt and hubris, charged with the promise of imminent and justified violence. The genius of this song is to persuade you, via deploying the substitute word as an off-rhyme to open the chorus, to hear the punchline as "I love this American Right, gotta love this American Right." Alt title: "Minority Report."

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20) "Boom Boom Pow," Black Eyed Peas. While we wait around for another Fergie album (and, along with M.I.A. and Robyn, Fergie is the only album sugarhigh! would actually wait for, given the fact that Lil Wayne makes sure you don't have to wait around for an album), we are more or less satisfied with her sixteen here, "I'm so three-thousand-and-eight, you so two-thousand-and-late" etc; meanwhile, we admit that supreme nitwit will.i.am is far less annoying on the jock of Cybotron as passed through nineties techno than he is on the campaign trail, and manages to come up with a very pleasing kick drum sound, dry as styrofoam and twice as heavy.

19) "Sometime Around Midnight," Airborne Toxic Event. Best band named after something in a DeLillo novel? Certainly the best pocket opera of the year, as if we could burn off all of our adolescent sentiment in five shameless minutes. If only.

18) "Outside My Window," Sarah Buxton. Such a nice melody we still don't know the words.

17) "Already Gone," Sugarland. Still not the Dixie Chicks. Still better than everybody else.

16) "Paparazzi," Lady Gaga. The Madonna comparisons are hysteria pure and simple, about as sensible as insisting that Ne-Yo is the new Michael Jackson; our friend Lady has scarcely, um, diverted the course of global culture. At the level of social performance it's more like Sigue Sigue Sputnik does Paris Hilton, a meta-riff on fame as the ironic outcome of wanting above all to be famous. Or one could narrate Gaga as a successful version of Princess Superstar, who was too scrapey and off-axis to take "Bad Babysitter" or "Jam for the Ladies" to the peaks they deserved (are you aware that Princess S has an album called Now Is the Winter of Our Discotheque? You totally should be). Or we could narrate Ms. Germanotta as a much-superior substitute for Katy Perry in the single slot set aside for white pop princesses with retarded-huge hooks, a high school theatre geek vibe writ massive, and media-machined sexual quirks. But none of these is quite right as formal comparisons go. "Eyeliner and cigarettes...this photo of us don't have a price...loving you is cherry pie." It could almost be a Duran Duran song. In fact, it could almost be "Rio": "Cherry ice cream smile...I've seen you on the beach and I've seen you on TV, two of a billion stars, it means so much to me." Funny, that. Funny because the form of the classic Gaga song, "Poker Face" or "Paparazzi" or whatever, is entirely Duran Duran: the way-underplayed verse featuring a tensely constricted affect spooled inside a set of changes anchored by minor chords (and/or sevenths), and then the obliterating major lift, basement to the heavens, pouring all the hooks into the chorus to which the song will eventually give itself entirely. That Gaga periodically dresses like Barbarella only adds to the pool of affinities — but what's finally most interesting is the way that both Gaga and Duran Duran are obsessed with looking and being looked at, with the fraught overlap between the erotic glance and celebrity, and how it carries a promise of violence, how that violence is always part of "pop" even when — especially when — it is disavowed, which is of course exactly what "Paparazzi" is about, as is the entirety of The Fame. Alt album title: Girl On Film.

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15) "Solitary Thinkin'," Lee Ann Womack. Aside from the fact of being a remarkable vocalist, Womack is distinguished for how briskly (in the relatively slow time of the genre) she has run the official country life cycle of classic sounding debut, pop crossover, lost audience, return to roots. (Okay, Dolly's already done the whole cycle twice, but she's special). To see the authority of this steel cycle, let's look at the semi-official listings. Here's wikipedia's breakdown of Lee Ann:
Music career
* 2.1 Country music stardom: 1997 — 1999
* 2.2 Pop crossover success & career decline: 2000 — 2004
* 2.3 There's More Where That Came From & hiatus: 2005 — 2007
* 2.4 Return to music: 2008 — present
Now, just for the sake of comparison, here's the other LeAnn:
Music career
* 2.1 1996: Blue
* 2.2 1997–2001: Pop crossover
* 2.3 2002–2004: Popularity decline
* 2.4 2005–2007: Return to country
* 2.5 2008-Present
Notice how Miss Rimes spends seven full years on crossover/decline, while Womack limits it to five? But what's rarest about Womack is how thoroughly she's pulled it off (the jury's still out on Rimes); she'll never hit as pure as "The Fool" again, but Call Me Crazy (released in 2008) is likely her best album. This song is rifted with beautifully-observed moments, as when she calls her ex and just listens to it ring — "a lonesome serenade." This, however, isn't even the album's best song. Hell, it isn't even its best song about hanging out at a bar at closing time and calling your ex.

14) "White Liar," Miranda Lambert. Adjacent to Womack, this comes from another disc, Revolution, that would make the sugarhigh! album charts if such a thing existed — a welcome return from the sophomore disappointment of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, albeit still suffering from an incoherent production scheme or lack thereof. The standout track is non-single "Love Song" (which along with the album's title suggests there was some unspoken contest about generic and clichéd titles), but this song manages to concretize all the album's inconsistencies into a forward-driving tension held together by the invention of the title, and ending with a slick swap of angry for exultant.

13) "Zero," Yeah Yeah Yeahs. If, back in the day of Karen O shouting "as a fuck son you sucked!" over and over, you had to guess whether she would end up eight years later as a reliable altish hitmaker with a feel for the dancefloor, or burbling annoyingly on the twee indie rock soundtrack of a movie with little purpose other than to argue that twee indie rock is too the true sound of the inner child we all deserve — would you have guessed both?

12) "Liztomania," Phoenix. Les Shins (no relation to La Chinoise), with chorus structure by Squeeze.

11) "Do What You Do," Marz feat. Pack and Mumiez. We are pretty sure that our reasonable and intelligent friend Alexander did not really mean to argue that 2009 was the year hip-hop died, despite making it too easy to take him as having done so. We believe that, had he a different venue and word count, he might have made the more reasonable case that hip-hop has so successfully insinuated itself into the genome of global culture that it is finally unclear as of about now what one talks about when one talks about "hip-hop." Gosh: disco is dead too, but people still go to discos in Beirut and Bayreuth and Bay Ridge and when they are there, they doth disco. Similarly, hip-hop. But the consequence of this success has been that hip-hop is less and less identifiable as the Sound of Black America (which hasn't been the main consumer of the form for a while, certainly not during this millennium). Simultaneously, or even dialectically, the main Black American forms of rap and r&b have turned away from the characteristic soundsets of hip-hop: said sounds can no longer signal cultural particularity, even as a seeming. We can't really have a world in which Miley Cyrus, Buraka Som Sistema, and K'naan set it off on the left y'all and set it off right y'all, while at the same time hip-hop still sounds like an underpass of the BQE on a Saturday night. We can however have funky funky car commercials with rodents driving around, which we take to be a shorter and funnier essay than this one about the universalization of the music. Where once were gangstas, now there be hamstas.

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10) "Shuttin' Detroit Down" John Rich. On matter of national crisis and national shame, as usual, country shoots first. That doesn't mean one likes the aim (cf. Keith comma Toby), but there's something remarkable about how quick is the draw. In mid-November of 2008, the CEOs of Chrysler and GM arrived in Washington to request bailout money — in private jets. By January, the dwarfier half of Big & Rich had recorded this song. The chord progression's pretty prêt-a-porter, but it's hard not to be captivated by a song that draws its lexicon equally from talk radio (Wall Street vs. Main Street, etc) and from political economy, from whence it conjures with impressive clarity the distance between "the real economy" and finance: "pardon me if I don't shed a tear," runs the leadup to the chorus, "they're selling make-believe, and we don't buy that here." It's a wonder he doesn't mention fictitious capital. And then the chorus:
Cause in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down
While the bossman takes his bonus pay and jets on outta town
DC's bailin' out them bankers as the farmers auction ground
Yeah while they're livin' it up on Wall Street in the New York City town,
Here in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down.

...and then it goes into the specifics of retirement accounts! Equally remarkable for its subtlety and strangeness is the transfer that goes on almost unannounced, wherein the "real economy" is equated with the farmer who works the land — a core assumption of the genre, one might say — against the fancies of New York City bankers, but the opposite of Manhattan turns out to be not some agricultural scene, rather Motown. These places turn out to be fully swappable, because they are both the negative of fictitious capital. It's like he totally gets it about where value comes from. I mean really.

9) "Summer Nights," Rascal Flatts. Every few minutes for the last decade, some person writes a review about how "country" is now basically southern rock pretending to be country music. They generally proffer Rascal Flatts as an example. Dear all those persons: you are having a problem with your standpunkt. Why would you not simply point out that southern rock was just basically country pretending to be rock music? Meanwhile, Rascal Flatts is no closer to Daughtry than Loretta Lynn was to Gene Chandler.

8) "Last Call," Lee Ann Womack. See previous entry, #15. This one's even better.

7) "Bulletproof," La Roux. More to come on La Roux. Obviously they sound sort of like Yaz but with better bass lines. Digressively: when was it that white American people first saw that the bass could be a lead instrument? We suspect it was during the good part of that movie Stop Making Sense — you know, the part with Tom Tom Club.

6) "Tik Tok," Ke$ha. Something tells us her lip gloss be poppin. Kesha's (and Lil Mama's) producer Dr. Luke had another good year, having also worked on "My Life Would Suck Without You," Flo Rida's "Right Round," and others (though we must admit, the best Luke songs — such as this one — often require the assistance of boy genius Benny Blanco). Luke seems to have worked more or less alone, however, on sugarhigh! #5 song of the year. Teaser!

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5) "Party in the USA," Miley Cyrus. A couple years back, sugarhigh! promised that Miley Cyrus would surely, sooner or later, succeed in buying a terrific song (but that in the meantime her position in the country arena had already been taken by the little-known Taylor Swift). And so, finally, she has. As mentioned earlier, this is not the first contribution to the countdown by producer/writer Doctor Luke, an American carefully trained in the ways of Swedish songcraft a la Max Martin, which is to say, hip-hop inflected synthpop for 14-year olds, a/k/a "the sound of the last 13 years since Robyn Is Here."

But this tradition and crew are not the only indications of the song's profoundly ambivalent relation to hip-hop. It's hard, no, impossible to enjoy Miley's disavowal of Jay-Z, who appears in the original lyric as the auteur of "my song." Britney plays the same role in the second verse, which Miley has seemed fine with; how could she not, given Britney's role in the Cheiron story? But Miley would claim not to have ever heard a Jay-Z song (really? really?) and shortly take to replacing "Jay-Z" with "Michael" in live performance. Like Michael the song, already a curious melange, turned white. Whatever, girl. It's a fab track, yeay you, and you are condemned to performing "Can I Get A..." as an encore for all of 2011.

Regardless, no amount of disavowal can efface the song's telltale heart. The song begins with a bright, superclean electric guitar loop with a bounce beat underneath, as Miley flies into LAX for a party, and there she is rolling through the streets singing "Welcome to the land of fame-excess." We are 18 seconds in, and a male backup singer punctuates her line with a "whoa!" It's hard to think of a single-syllable word as having a particular inflection, but it does — and if you want to hear the exact same inflection, you should listen to the "hey" that punctuates Nelly's "Ride Wit Me." It first comes rather at the 19 second mark, male backup singers punctuating the phrase "oh why do I live this way?" That song, you will recall, begins with a bright, superclean electric guitar loop with a bounce beat underneath, and involves driving around various places. And when Nelly flies into town for a party, it's in New York. Totally different.

Well, so what? The structure of a hit song is based extensively on the structure of another hit song; neither big news nor crime. And it does so while simultaneously avowing/disavowing the theft (through the displacement of Nelly onto Jay-Z, and then the banishing of same); this is interesting if you are at all like us, but scarcely front page news. If anything, it's a nice footnote for Eric Lott. But it is perhaps a useful reminder of something important about 2009, which is what "post-racial" really meant. It certainly didn't mean that structural, systemic and overt racial discrimination had come to an end — unless one ignores all data except for the outcome of a presidential election, which we admit was a popular undertaking. Black people, and other people of color, still had to bear the burden. The phrase meant that the US was post-racial for white people (to be more specific, as this must seem obvious to many, it meant that the US was post-racial for Miley's core audience). The debt for centuries of theft was finally put paid, rendered invisible. Or so was devoutly hoped, and pretended — a pretense with the power of reality.

The concept doesn't mean that Nelly is now free of any markings, but rather that Miley is, in that sense of free. This is the politics of the "death of hip-hop" — it survives but beyond politics, without the power to signal difference, marginalization, race. Or to phrase things anther way: we are post-racial to the extent that an incredibly elaborate set of determinations has got us to the place where a song can be at once entirely dipped in the language of hip-hop and come out of the river shining of country grammar.

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4) "Show Me Love (live)," Robyn. Strictly speaking, this song is at least a dozen years old, and was already a hit in the US, peaking at number seven. In its original form it bears almost the full lineage of modern Swedish pop: produced by Cheiron Studios founder Denniz Pop and his protegé Max Martin, it was written by Martin and Robyn herself, then about 17, who would be the proof of concept for arguably the most successful pseudogenre in history (especially if one uses the metric of biggest opening sales figures, where it dominates the category). Its lyrics could at times be spoken by the genre itself to its planned audience, announcing its global intentions and making its demands: "this love I got for you could take me round the world — now show me love." In short, "Show Me Love" is teenpop's DNA and battlecry both.

For all that, Robyn managed to fall into a narrative even deeper than teenpop: little girl lost a l'industrie. Her teendom timed out; purgatory followed. Failed at old sound, failed with new sound, dropped from primal teenpop label Jive in 2004. Started own label to release peculiar sweet-tart electro, started hanging out with Swedish hipster acts like Teddybears and Kleerup, recorded EP, and in 2007 got a Universal distribution deal for full-length Robyn, which would easily make the sugarhigh! Top 10 albums of the decade. It's like Bjork for music lovers. Oh snap.

What then to do about those old hits, now as old as their target audience had been? Robyn is not the first to confront this problem, though precious few return from child stardom to be thrilling artists as adults. And precious fewer take the aesthetics of youth as an explicit problem to be worked through, rather than rejected (we see that all the time, cf. Vanilla Ice's metal phase). Adult hipster Robyn is that rare bird, an intentional sublation of herself — rescuing what remained charged, and returning it as something deeply different, antagonistic exactly insofar as the earlier material has been preserved. This is a narrative of artistic development itself, of course, though rarely is it played out so clearly in a single artist. And this is what's striking about Robyn, this and the songs.

So it's only right that in performance starting with the recent tour (sugarhigh! concert of the year 2008) Robyn would return to "Show Me Love," not as a joke and not as a concession to her audience, which doesn't actually require that of her. But return to it changed, as if stripped clean by the sandstorm of a dozen years: just a minimalist series videogame series of bleeps with a hint of steel drum to the intonation, and an unadorned direct vocal style — all of which renders the song "more serious," sure, but also brings forward without apology the brilliance of the writing, the nuanced torque which interlocks the verse and chorus: an arrangement that shows the song doesn't need an arrangement, doesn't need orchestration and dance and etc, that it is a beautiful and delicate love song after all, that it was always the real it was faking, and thusly do the years yawn and collapse.

There are several live recordings of reasonable character — though the best of them, on AOL Sessions, is not always available. A hi-rez version was finally included on the U.K. version of Robyn last year; Amazon actually blocks US residents from downloading it, even if you'll pay! Friend-of-the-blog Rob White downloaded it for us, at cost of 99 pence, and sent it along. That was in early 2009, hence the song's appearance here.

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3) "Battlefield," Jordin Sparks. Perhaps its deadening to try to show rigorously how a song pulls of its non-rigorous effects, but this song sure does a lot of heavy lifting in a compact space, and the trick it uses its pretty neat. Here "heavy lifting" is twice-meant: in the three minutes of main action, there are an implausible number of lifts. This is achieved largely within the confines of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus; indeed, it's exactly because the song offers itself as the most familiar version of American Song Form, the one we know in our marrow, that it's hard at first to notice its eccentricities, and for the same reason its variations are so so effective.

The first variation is the length the prechorus, the passage that repeats itself as each verse leads into the chorus. The prechorus is longer than the uneven quatrain it follows, and in fact has two parts, lifting first from the verse at Both hands tied behind my back for nothing... and then again at I never meant to start a war — so the ascent to Why does love always feel like a battlefield, a battlefield, a battlefield? (x 2) is actually the third ratcheting-up of melodic intensity. So: four melodic parts, in a systematic climb. That's not including the quatrain of bridge in its familiar spot in place of the third verse, ("We could pretend that we are friends tonight...").

This fills the three minutes before codas and fade. Well, not quite, and that's the drama part. There is yet another part packed in there, an extension of the second and third choruses; call it the postchorus. It's brief, but it allows yet another lift, queued by a dramatic shift to a capella and an obvious multiplying of the vocal. Four climbs while maintaining the lineaments of the American Song Form is really extraordinary , and gives the song its powerful sense of surfeit, which is itself in tension with the martially regulated beat that always registers a little weird in love songs anyway (cf. Alicia Keys, "No One," itself a rendition of Whitney's "Your Love Is My Love"). The rhythm and the basic shape say control, structure, limits; the sheer number of ascents and the surplus of hooks signal excess, profligacy, unconstraint.

Of course this wouldn't matter so much if they weren't good hooks, but they are, and the songwriters (a combine called "The Runaways" plus the OneRepublic frontman) must have known it; you don't waste that many hooks unless you know the song is a killer. And of course it wants marking that the postchorus, the moment of excess that marks and makes the song, is the only moment Sparks throws down, the song's moment of truth which obliterates the apologetic and regretful disavowal of remainder: better go and get your armor.

As if anything could stand against a song with enough hooks to batter down all Chinese walls.

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2) "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues," Handsome Furs. It would be Number One with a bullet if this list were for Clash ripoffs — or really Joe Strummer circa Trash City with a little less swing and a little more taut clarity: the band, after all, is two people (the husband on leave from Wolf Parade) and the sound is pretty much all scaffold and no building.

But the story concerns a building, or a few. Sugarhigh! caught the song for the first time at the end of this short film (which reminds us that in some regard the finest musical moment of the Fall of Occupations was this one, not for the song but for its performance: the mind boggles at such revolutionary cuteness, enough to make one want to live).

So it is something like contingency that sends the song this high on the countdown, as it just happens to turn its attentions to the significant activities of the year. It takes five seconds: eight quick kicks with accompanying claps, and then we were standing in the center of the occupation. OMG, so were we! And then it says, caught between the ground and the great gray sky. If you were there on November 20, it's just sort of weird — the sibylline accuracy.

This all serves as a salutary reminder that in the Top 25, context is the 26th tune, and can make all the difference. But it can't make a song out of nothing, and "Arbat Blues" makes the most of its formal clarity to reach after rhetorical simplicity as well: I don't know but I've been told, every little thing's been bought and sold, the chorus repeats and repeats.

It's stupid and true just like a pop song should be, and it's our stupid and true, and while we're waiting around for the next Coup record, we'll take it. Loud, please.

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1) "I'm Not Your Toy," La Roux. So melodies this good come along a lot less than once a year, which doesn't entirely get at what's so compelling about the song (though it goes a long way).

There's something seductive about how easily it wears its borrowed clothes, like the Oscar Wilde reference that Chryssie Hynde quoted long ago but which returns here changed, the scene moved from a gutter to a rooftop, the stars now just sky — the distances are a bit closer, but the chasm no less grand. Indeed, the opening simile is supernally romantic: "love, love is like a stubborn youth that you'd rather just deny." But it doesn't overplay the gesture: one doesn't quite notice the song's lace shirtcuffs at first, peeking out from beneath its angular jacket.

Meanwhile the skipping electropop track contrives any number of dry sounds without sounding the least bit dry overall; indeed, it seems like a sort of experiment in how much romantic effulgence one can suggest in such spare quarters.

The voice is the special effect, finally: for all of the music's plonking itself down in generic (albeit superb) Eighties British synthpop with indications tilting toward Yazoo, Elly Jackson has little of Alison Moyet's belt. It's perhaps even a little vexatious how assertively she sounds like Jimmy Somerville of Bronski Beat and Communards, one of the divine voices of the Eighties, great enough that he eventually had to challenge himself with Sylvester covers. There's something...off...about a woman capturing male falsetto, even when the woman has committed herself to an androgynous Tilda Swinton-plays-Tin Tin kind of look. It lacks the abandonment, the distortion and simulation — finally, Jackson's quite remarkable voice can't lay claim to the queer pathos of Somerville, of "Smalltown Boy" or "Don't Leave Me This Way."

But then, what did it mean for Somerville to cover that song, bringing forth the longstanding gay iconicity of Diana Ross? It may be that La Roux stands on the far side of that precise act of revelation — not restraightening it, but trying to recapture the particular and fierce vulnerability of late disco. For beneath the bubbly motion of the song and beyond its historical fillips is a kind of vulnerability that has few points of comparison in the current pop landscape, but seems exactly right for the moment: humanly, economically, politically. New Romanticism and queer pathos as precarité you can dance to, that's it. But it is not a maudlin vulnerability, puddling on the floor. Something like a warning, a broken rooftop dance party in preparation for a struggle to come. This year's gonna be like that. Better go and get your armor.

January 08, 2010

top 25 songs of 2009: song 1

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"I'm Not Your Toy," La Roux. So melodies this good come along a lot less than once a year, which doesn't entirely get at what's so compelling about the song (though it goes a long way).

There's something seductive about how easily it wears its borrowed clothes, like the Oscar Wilde reference that Chryssie Hynde quoted long ago but which returns here changed, the scene moved from a gutter to a rooftop, the stars now just sky — the distances are a bit closer, but the chasm no less grand. Indeed, the opening simile is supernally romantic: "love, love is like a stubborn youth that you'd rather just deny." But it doesn't overplay the gesture: one doesn't quite notice the song's lace shirtcuffs at first, peeking out from beneath its angular jacket.

Meanwhile the skipping electropop track contrives any number of dry sounds without sounding the least bit dry overall; indeed, it seems like a sort of experiment in how much romantic effulgence one can suggest in such spare quarters.

The voice is the special effect, finally: for all of the music's plonking itself down in generic (albeit superb) Eighties British synthpop with indications tilting toward Yazoo, Elly Jackson has little of Alison Moyet's belt. It's perhaps even a little vexatious how assertively she sounds like Jimmy Somerville of Bronski Beat and Communards, one of the divine voices of the Eighties, great enough that he eventually had to challenge himself with Sylvester covers. There's something...off...about a woman capturing male falsetto, even when the woman has committed herself to an androgynous Tilda Swinton-plays-Tin Tin kind of look. It lacks the abandonment, the distortion and simulation — finally, Jackson's quite remarkable voice can't lay claim to the queer pathos of Somerville, of "Smalltown Boy" or "Don't Leave Me This Way."

But then, what did it mean for Somerville to cover that song, bringing forth the longstanding gay iconicity of Diana Ross? It may be that La Roux stands on the far side of that precise act of revelation — not restraightening it, but trying to recapture the particular and fierce vulnerability of late disco. For beneath the bubbly motion of the song and beyond its historical fillips is a kind of vulnerability that has few points of comparison in the current pop landscape, but seems exactly right for the moment: humanly, economically, politically. New Romanticism and queer pathos as precarité you can dance to, that's it. But it is not a maudlin vulnerability, puddling on the floor. Something like a warning, a broken rooftop dance party in preparation for a struggle to come. This year's gonna be like that. Better go and get your armor.

January 07, 2010

top 25 songs of 2009: song 2

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"Talking Hotel Arbat Blues," Handsome Furs. It would be Number One with a bullet if this list were for Clash ripoffs — or really Joe Strummer circa Trash City with a little less swing and a little more taut clarity: the band, after all, is two people (the husband on leave from Wolf Parade) and the sound is pretty much all scaffold and no building.

But the story concerns a building, or a few. Sugarhigh! caught the song for the first time at the end of this short film (which reminds us that in some regard the finest musical moment of the Fall of Occupations was this one, not for the song but for its performance: the mind boggles at such revolutionary cuteness, enough to make one want to live).

So it is something like contingency that sends the song this high on the countdown, as it just happens to turn its attentions to the significant activities of the year. It takes five seconds: eight quick kicks with accompanying claps, and then we were standing in the center of the occupation. OMG, so were we! And then it says, caught between the ground and the great gray sky. If you were there on November 20, it's just sort of weird — the sibylline accuracy.

This all serves as a salutary reminder that in the Top 25, context is the 26th tune, and can make all the difference. But it can't make a song out of nothing, and "Arbat Blues" makes the most of its formal clarity to reach after rhetorical simplicity as well: I don't know but I've been told, every little thing's been bought and sold, the chorus repeats and repeats.

It's stupid and true just like a pop song should be, and it's our stupid and true, and while we're waiting around for the next Coup record, we'll take it. Loud, please.

January 06, 2010

top 25 songs of 2009: song 3

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"Battlefield," Jordin Sparks. Perhaps its deadening to try to show rigorously how a song pulls of its non-rigorous effects, but this song sure does a lot of heavy lifting in a compact space, and the trick it uses its pretty neat. Here "heavy lifting" is twice-meant: in the three minutes of main action, there are an implausible number of lifts. This is achieved largely within the confines of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus; indeed, it's exactly because the song offers itself as the most familiar version of American Song Form, the one we know in our marrow, that it's hard at first to notice its eccentricities, and for the same reason its variations are so so effective.

The first variation is the length the prechorus, the passage that repeats itself as each verse leads into the chorus. The prechorus is longer than the uneven quatrain it follows, and in fact has two parts, lifting first from the verse at Both hands tied behind my back for nothing... and then again at I never meant to start a war — so the ascent to Why does love always feel like a battlefield, a battlefield, a battlefield? (x 2) is actually the third ratcheting-up of melodic intensity. So: four melodic parts, in a systematic climb. That's not including the quatrain of bridge in its familiar spot in place of the third verse, ("We could pretend that we are friends tonight...").

This fills the three minutes before codas and fade. Well, not quite, and that's the drama part. There is yet another part packed in there, an extension of the second and third choruses; call it the postchorus. It's brief, but it allows yet another lift, queued by a dramatic shift to a capella and an obvious multiplying of the vocal. Four climbs while maintaining the lineaments of the American Song Form is really extraordinary , and gives the song its powerful sense of surfeit, which is itself in tension with the martially regulated beat that always registers a little weird in love songs anyway (cf. Alicia Keys, "No One," itself a rendition of Whitney's "Your Love Is My Love"). The rhythm and the basic shape say control, structure, limits; the sheer number of ascents and the surplus of hooks signal excess, profligacy, unconstraint.

Of course this wouldn't matter so much if they weren't good hooks, but they are, and the songwriters (a combine called "The Runaways" plus the OneRepublic frontman) must have known it; you don't waste that many hooks unless you know the song is a killer. And of course it wants marking that the postchorus, the moment of excess that marks and makes the song, is the only moment Sparks throws down, the song's moment of truth which obliterates the apologetic and regretful disavowal of remainder: better go and get your armor.

As if anything could stand against a song with enough hooks to batter down all Chinese walls.

January 04, 2010

top 25 songs of 2009: song 4

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"Show Me Love (live)," Robyn. Strictly speaking, this song is at least a dozen years old, and was already a hit in the US, peaking at number seven. In its original form it bears almost the full lineage of modern Swedish pop: produced by Cheiron Studios founder Denniz Pop and his protegé Max Martin, it was written by Martin and Robyn herself, then about 17, who would be the proof of concept for arguably the most successful pseudogenre in history (especially if one uses the metric of biggest opening sales figures, where it dominates the category). Its lyrics could at times be spoken by the genre itself to its planned audience, announcing its global intentions and making its demands: "this love I got for you could take me round the world — now show me love." In short, "Show Me Love" is teenpop's DNA and battlecry both.

For all that, Robyn managed to fall into a narrative even deeper than teenpop: little girl lost a l'industrie. Her teendom timed out; purgatory followed. Failed at old sound, failed with new sound, dropped from primal teenpop label Jive in 2004. Started own label to release peculiar sweet-tart electro, started hanging out with Swedish hipster acts like Teddybears and Kleerup, recorded EP, and in 2007 got a Universal distribution deal for full-length Robyn, which would easily make the sugarhigh! Top 10 albums of the decade. It's like Bjork for music lovers. Oh snap.

What then to do about those old hits, now as old as their target audience had been? Robyn is not the first to confront this problem, though precious few return from child stardom to be thrilling artists as adults. And precious fewer take the aesthetics of youth as an explicit problem to be worked through, rather than rejected (we see that all the time, cf. Vanilla Ice's metal phase). Adult hipster Robyn is that rare bird, an intentional sublation of herself — rescuing what remained charged, and returning it as something deeply different, antagonistic exactly insofar as the earlier material has been preserved. This is a narrative of artistic development itself, of course, though rarely is it played out so clearly in a single artist. And this is what's striking about Robyn, this and the songs.

So it's only right that in performance starting with the recent tour (sugarhigh! concert of the year 2008) Robyn would return to "Show Me Love," not as a joke and not as a concession to her audience, which doesn't actually require that of her. But return to it changed, as if stripped clean by the sandstorm of a dozen years: just a minimalist series videogame series of bleeps with a hint of steel drum to the intonation, and an unadorned direct vocal style — all of which renders the song "more serious," sure, but also brings forward without apology the brilliance of the writing, the nuanced torque which interlocks the verse and chorus: an arrangement that shows the song doesn't need an arrangement, doesn't need orchestration and dance and etc, that it is a beautiful and delicate love song after all, that it was always the real it was faking, and thusly do the years yawn and collapse.

There are several live recordings of reasonable character — though the best of them, on AOL Sessions, is not always available. A hi-rez version was finally included on the U.K. version of Robyn last year; Amazon actually blocks US residents from downloading it, even if you'll pay! Friend-of-the-blog Rob White downloaded it for us, at cost of 99 pence, and sent it along. That was in early 2009, hence the song's appearance here.

top 25 songs of 2009: a five-paragraph essay on song 5

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"Party in the USA," Miley Cyrus. A couple years back, sugarhigh! promised that Miley Cyrus would surely, sooner or later, succeed in buying a terrific song (but that in the meantime her position in the country arena had already been taken by the little-known Taylor Swift). And so, finally, she has. As mentioned earlier, this is not the first contribution to the countdown by producer/writer Doctor Luke, an American carefully trained in the ways of Swedish songcraft a la Max Martin, which is to say, hip-hop inflected synthpop for 14-year olds, a/k/a "the sound of the last 13 years since Robyn Is Here."

But this tradition and crew are not the only indications of the song's profoundly ambivalent relation to hip-hop. It's hard, no, impossible to enjoy Miley's disavowal of Jay-Z, who appears in the original lyric as the auteur of "my song." Britney plays the same role in the second verse, which Miley has seemed fine with; how could she not, given Britney's role in the Cheiron story? But Miley would claim not to have ever heard a Jay-Z song (really? really?) and shortly take to replacing "Jay-Z" with "Michael" in live performance. Like Michael the song, already a curious melange, turned white. Whatever, girl. It's a fab track, yeay you, and you are condemned to performing "Can I Get A..." as an encore for all of 2011.

Regardless, no amount of disavowal can efface the song's telltale heart. The song begins with a bright, superclean electric guitar loop with a bounce beat underneath, as Miley flies into LAX for a party, and there she is rolling through the streets singing "Welcome to the land of fame-excess." We are 18 seconds in, and a male backup singer punctuates her line with a "whoa!" It's hard to think of a single-syllable word as having a particular inflection, but it does — and if you want to hear the exact same inflection, you should listen to the "hey" that punctuates Nelly's "Ride Wit Me." It first comes rather at the 19 second mark, male backup singers punctuating the phrase "oh why do I live this way?" That song, you will recall, begins with a bright, superclean electric guitar loop with a bounce beat underneath, and involves driving around various places. And when Nelly flies into town for a party, it's in New York. Totally different.

Well, so what? The structure of a hit song is based extensively on the structure of another hit song; neither big news nor crime. And it does so while simultaneously avowing/disavowing the theft (through the displacement of Nelly onto Jay-Z, and then the banishing of same); this is interesting if you are at all like us, but scarcely front page news. If anything, it's a nice footnote for Eric Lott. But it is perhaps a useful reminder of something important about 2009, which is what "post-racial" really meant. It certainly didn't mean that structural, systemic and overt racial discrimination had come to an end — unless one ignores all data except for the outcome of a presidential election, which we admit was a popular undertaking. Black people, and other people of color, still had to bear the burden. The phrase meant that the US was post-racial for white people (to be more specific, as this must seem obvious to many, it meant that the US was post-racial for Miley's core audience). The debt for centuries of theft was finally put paid, rendered invisible. Or so was devoutly hoped, and pretended — a pretense with the power of reality.

The concept doesn't mean that Nelly is now free of any markings, but rather that Miley is, in that sense of free. This is the politics of the "death of hip-hop" — it survives but beyond politics, without the power to signal difference, marginalization, race. Or to phrase things anther way: we are post-racial to the extent that an incredibly elaborate set of determinations has got us to the place where a song can be at once entirely dipped in the language of hip-hop and come out of the river shining of country grammar.

January 03, 2010

top 25 songs of 2009: 6-10

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10) "Shuttin' Detroit Down" John Rich. On matter of national crisis and national shame, as usual, country shoots first. That doesn't mean one likes the aim (cf. Keith comma Toby), but there's something remarkable about how quick is the draw. In mid-November of 2008, the CEOs of Chrysler and GM arrived in Washington to request bailout money — in private jets. By January, the dwarfier half of Big & Rich had recorded this song. The chord progression's pretty prêt-a-porter, but it's hard not to be captivated by a song that draws its lexicon equally from talk radio (Wall Street vs. Main Street, etc) and from political economy, from whence it conjures with impressive clarity the distance between "the real economy" and finance: "pardon me if I don't shed a tear," runs the leadup to the chorus, "they're selling make-believe, and we don't buy that here." It's a wonder he doesn't mention fictitious capital. And then the chorus:
Cause in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down
While the bossman takes his bonus pay and jets on outta town
DC's bailin' out them bankers as the farmers auction ground
Yeah while they're livin' it up on Wall Street in the New York City town,
Here in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down.

...and then it goes into the specifics of retirement accounts! Equally remarkable for its subtlety and strangeness is the transfer that goes on almost unannounced, wherein the "real economy" is equated with the farmer who works the land — a core assumption of the genre, one might say — against the fancies of New York City bankers, but the opposite of Manhattan turns out to be not some agricultural scene, rather Motown. These places turn out to be fully swappable, because they are both the negative of fictitious capital. It's like he totally gets it about where value comes from. I mean really.

9) "Summer Nights," Rascal Flatts. Every few minutes for the last decade, some person writes a review about how "country" is now basically southern rock pretending to be country music. They generally proffer Rascal Flatts as an example. Dear all those persons: you are having a problem with your standpunkt. Why would you not simply point out that southern rock was just basically country pretending to be rock music? Meanwhile, Rascal Flatts is no closer to Daughtry than Loretta Lynn was to Gene Chandler.

8) "Last Call," Lee Ann Womack. See previous entry, #15. This one's even better.

7) "Bulletproof," La Roux. More to come on La Roux. Obviously they sound sort of like Yaz but with better bass lines. Digressively: when was it that white American people first saw that the bass could be a lead instrument? We suspect it was during the good part of that movie Stop Making Sense — you know, the part with Tom Tom Club.

6) "Tik Tok," Ke$ha. Something tells us her lip gloss be poppin. Kesha's (and Lil Mama's) producer Dr. Luke had another good year, having also worked on "My Life Would Suck Without You," Flo Rida's "Right Round," and others (though we must admit, the best Luke songs — such as this one — often require the assistance of boy genius Benny Blanco). Luke seems to have worked more or less alone, however, on sugarhigh! #5 song of the year. Teaser!

January 02, 2010

top 25 songs of 2009: 11-15

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15) "Solitary Thinkin'," Lee Ann Womack. Aside from the fact of being a remarkable vocalist, Womack is distinguished for how briskly (in the relatively slow time of the genre) she has run the official country life cycle of classic sounding debut, pop crossover, lost audience, return to roots. (Okay, Dolly's already done the whole cycle twice, but she's special). To see the authority of this steel cycle, let's look at the semi-official listings. Here's wikipedia's breakdown of Lee Ann:
Music career
* 2.1 Country music stardom: 1997 — 1999
* 2.2 Pop crossover success & career decline: 2000 — 2004
* 2.3 There's More Where That Came From & hiatus: 2005 — 2007
* 2.4 Return to music: 2008 — present
Now, just for the sake of comparison, here's the other LeAnn:
Music career
* 2.1 1996: Blue
* 2.2 1997–2001: Pop crossover
* 2.3 2002–2004: Popularity decline
* 2.4 2005–2007: Return to country
* 2.5 2008-Present
Notice how Miss Rimes spends seven full years on crossover/decline, while Womack limits it to five? But what's rarest about Womack is how thoroughly she's pulled it off (the jury's still out on Rimes); she'll never hit as pure as "The Fool" again, but Call Me Crazy (released in 2008) is likely her best album. This song is rifted with beautifully-observed moments, as when she calls her ex and just listens to it ring — "a lonesome serenade." This, however, isn't even the album's best song. Hell, it isn't even its best song about hanging out at a bar at closing time and calling your ex.

14) "White Liar," Miranda Lambert. Adjacent to Womack, this comes from another disc, Revolution, that would make the sugarhigh! album charts if such a thing existed — a welcome return from the sophomore disappointment of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, albeit still suffering from an incoherent production scheme or lack thereof. The standout track is non-single "Love Song" (which along with the album's title suggests there was some unspoken contest about generic and clichéd titles), but this song manages to concretize all the album's inconsistencies into a forward-driving tension held together by the invention of the title, and ending with a slick swap of angry for exultant.

13) "Zero," Yeah Yeah Yeahs. If, back in the day of Karen O shouting "as a fuck son you sucked!" over and over, you had to guess whether she would end up eight years later as a reliable altish hitmaker with a feel for the dancefloor, or burbling annoyingly on the twee indie rock soundtrack of a movie with little purpose other than to argue that twee indie rock is too the true sound of the inner child we all deserve — would you have guessed both?

12) "Liztomania," Phoenix. Les Shins (no relation to La Chinoise), with chorus structure by Squeeze.

11) "Do What You Do," Marz feat. Pack and Mumiez. We are pretty sure that our reasonable and intelligent friend Alexander did not really mean to argue that 2009 was the year hip-hop died, despite making it too easy to take him as having done so. We believe that, had he a different venue and word count, he might have made the more reasonable case that hip-hop has so successfully insinuated itself into the genome of global culture that it is finally unclear as of about now what one talks about when one talks about "hip-hop." Gosh: disco is dead too, but people still go to discos in Beirut and Bayreuth and Bay Ridge and when they are there, they doth disco. Similarly, hip-hop. But the consequence of this success has been that hip-hop is less and less identifiable as the Sound of Black America (which hasn't been the main consumer of the form for a while, certainly not during this millennium). Simultaneously, or even dialectically, the main Black American forms of rap and r&b have turned away from the characteristic soundsets of hip-hop: said sounds can no longer signal cultural particularity, even as a seeming. We can't really have a world in which Miley Cyrus, Buraka Som Sistema, and K'naan set it off on the left y'all and set it off right y'all, while at the same time hip-hop still sounds like an underpass of the BQE on a Saturday night. We can however have funky funky car commercials with rodents driving around, which we take to be a shorter and funnier essay than this one about the universalization of the music. Where once were gangstas, now there be hamstas.

January 01, 2010

top 25 songs of 2009: 16-20

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20) "Boom Boom Pow," Black Eyed Peas. While we wait around for another Fergie album (and, along with M.I.A. and Robyn, Fergie is the only album sugarhigh! would actually wait for, given the fact that Lil Wayne makes sure you don't have to wait around for an album), we are more or less satisfied with her sixteen here, "I'm so three-thousand-and-eight, you so two-thousand-and-late" etc; meanwhile, we admit that supreme nitwit will.i.am is far less annoying on the jock of Cybotron as passed through nineties techno than he is on the campaign trail, and manages to come up with a very pleasing kick drum sound, dry as styrofoam and twice as heavy.

19) "Sometime Around Midnight," Airborne Toxic Event. Best band named after something in a DeLillo novel? Certainly the best pocket opera of the year, as if we could burn off all of our adolescent sentiment in five shameless minutes. If only.

18) "Outside My Window," Sarah Buxton. Such a nice melody we still don't know the words.

17) "Already Gone," Sugarland. Still not the Dixie Chicks. Still better than everybody else.

16) "Paparazzi," Lady Gaga. The Madonna comparisons are hysteria pure and simple, about as sensible as insisting that Ne-Yo is the new Michael Jackson; our friend Lady has scarcely, um, diverted the course of global culture. At the level of social performance it's more like Sigue Sigue Sputnik does Paris Hilton, a meta-riff on fame as the ironic outcome of wanting above all to be famous. Or one could narrate Gaga as a successful version of Princess Superstar, who was too scrapey and off-axis to take "Bad Babysitter" or "Jam for the Ladies" to the peaks they deserved (are you aware that Princess S has an album called Now Is the Winter of Our Discotheque? You totally should be). Or we could narrate Ms. Germanotta as a much-superior substitute for Katy Perry in the single slot set aside for white pop princesses with retarded-huge hooks, a high school theatre geek vibe writ massive, and media-machined sexual quirks. But none of these is quite right as formal comparisons go. "Eyeliner and cigarettes...this photo of us don't have a price...loving you is cherry pie." It could almost be a Duran Duran song. In fact, it could almost be "Rio": "Cherry ice cream smile...I've seen you on the beach and I've seen you on TV, two of a billion stars, it means so much to me." Funny, that. Funny because the form of the classic Gaga song, "Poker Face" or "Paparazzi" or whatever, is entirely Duran Duran: the way-underplayed verse featuring a tensely constricted affect spooled inside a set of changes anchored by minor chords (and/or sevenths), and then the obliterating major lift, basement to the heavens, pouring all the hooks into the chorus to which the song will eventually give itself entirely. That Gaga periodically dresses like Barbarella only adds to the pool of affinities — but what's finally most interesting is the way that both Gaga and Duran Duran are obsessed with looking and being looked at, with the fraught overlap between the erotic glance and celebrity, and how it carries a promise of violence, how that violence is always part of "pop" even when — especially when — it is disavowed, which is of course exactly what "Paparazzi" is about, as is the entirety of The Fame. Alt album title: Girl On Film.

December 31, 2009

top 25 songs of 2009: 21-25

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25) "Where I Stood," Missy Higgins. And so Chick-Alt, spun off from the Modern Rock radio format to accommodate first chick-alt performers (Alanis, Tori, Sarah) and then an an imagined audience of alt-chick consumers, has come to this: an imitation of Anna Nalick imitating Leona Naess imitating lesser Liz Phair divided by Miss McLachlan. Which is still okay with us, still better than Kate Nash, but really: at what point does the arc of decay call for another Joni Mitchell? Soon, we hope. Soon.

24) "Know Your Enemy," Green Day. If your favorite Green Day song is "Warning," you may just like this one. If you thought that Green Day's politics was ever something other than Capital D Democratic, you will perhaps feel betrayed by the posturing — which is not simply empty but can't even be bothered to pretend to radicality, and is in fact indicative of the same corporate humanism that is the default mode of the pop marketplace. Which is to say, this band could be your president. Remember Dookie? Remember the public option?

23) "Blue Jeans and a Rosary," Kid Rock. Best Elton John song in a couple decades. Full title: "Guess That's Why They Call it the Blue Jeans and a Rosary."

22) "Pony," Far. Gin-u-ine kleine nachtmusik.

21) "American Ride," Toby Keith. Truth be told, we will look back one day in the not-too-distant future and see that Toby Keith stands astride this decade like good ol' colossus, from 2000's "How Do You Like Me Now" and "Country Comes to Town" all the way through this song. We count at least 14 good singles in that span, none of them better than "I Love This Bar" except maybe for "Get Drunk and Be Somebody" or "As Good as I Once Was"; populist drinking songs that Garth Brooks abandoned offer Toby at his bestest. But of course the spiritual core of the oeuvre is the Njal's-Saga-in-a-Ford-truck revenge fantasies — "Beer for My Horses," "The Angry American," etc — to which this song serves as a sort of coda or explanation, laying out the amusement park thrill of riding our high-spirited roller coaster of contempt and hubris, charged with the promise of imminent and justified violence. The genius of this song is to persuade you, via deploying the substitute word as an off-rhyme to open the chorus, to hear the punchline as "I love this American Right, gotta love this American Right." Alt title: "Minority Report."

November 23, 2009

film screening tonight at 7:00: everything belongs to everybody

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September 20, 2009

between the wars (chapter five excerpt)

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sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months; this is the last. It is now available. You can get the book here and here, and read more here.

...I was alive and I waited, waited; I was alive and I waited for this — this is pop itself singing, making its own true confession.

But that’s not quite right. It’s a kind of idealism, with pop as an autonomous actor haunting the wings until the times comes round for its aria. Why should we not think it’s empire singing, using a pop song as its prosthetic throat?

This must be part of it as well. There is not, cannot be, a belle époque for pop alone. If pop, to restate the situation, had always meant to be a triumph over time, it was bound to realize itself at this moment which had as its core meaning a triumph over time, inextricable from the collapse of historical opposition. Clocks will still run in circles, but nothing can happen — this is the sense that one returns to over and over after 1989, phrased a thousand different ways. This is the ambiguous exultation of America’s geopolitical belle époque, the seeming restoration of its glory as global hegemon, a glory greatly tarnished over the previous quarter-century. The period from 1988-1991 is, for both pop music and the United States, the emergence of this new formation. It is the antechamber of the unipolar world, of the Washington Consensus and the last Pax Americana which contains within it the spectacle of the nineties economic boom.

Even this temporary verdict on the settling of the political landscape exists mainly as a matter of convention – it takes its social force from the fact that it is believed, rather than from a clear-eyed assessment of the scene. The conflation of liberal democracy and free markets disguises the misprisions of both terms, and the conflict between the political and economic dynamics actually at play. World-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein concedes that “The destruction of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the U.S.S.R. have been celebrated as the fall of the Communisms and the collapse of Marxism-Leninism as an ideological force in the modern world. This is no doubt correct.” However, he continues by suggesting that “these same events marked even more the collapse of liberalism.” The disordered world system left by the chaotic thaw of the Cold War became a hothouse for the imposition of “overtly reactionary policies.” Writing in 1995, he asserts that “This rejection of liberal reformism is being implemented now in the United States under the label of the Contract With America, as it is being simultaneously force-fed to countries all over the world by the ministrations of the IMF.” This narrative of turbulence, force, and eventual counterforce does a better job of forecasting the post-millennial scenario of hegemony unraveling. But it is not the story that we liked to tell, liked to imagine we were living, the lullabye of the lull. The last hegemon rested, sated and righteous — a historical sleep relatively unvexed for a dozen years.

That is the full span under the sign of uncontested United States power, and the untrammeled expansion of markets. This boundlessness, this absence of barriers literal and figurative — surely “the Fall of the Wall” stands for this as much as for the specific unification of Germany, or the dropping of the iron curtain. Surely this unbounded sensation is the same as that of the sense of the end of history: a spatial version of the temporal account, a map painted in a single color to match the triumphal, monotonous unfolding of empty time.

This is the political sensation that meets itself in music determined to elaborate the unfettered feeling, the boundlessness, along a variety of axes — starting, as we have already seen, as a kind of excess which cannot be analyzed or contained, the complement of which is an inability to experience actual events. The absence of limit and ground for experience is a kind of fairytale that pop music had been recycling since its dawn, at least since the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle

September 14, 2009

feeling like you're spellbound (chapter four excerpt)

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sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September

The Swedish songcraft that would migrate toward the market’s imperial core, and eventually come to sound more American than American pop, has an elaborate genealogy flowing from the seventies and eventually becoming the cataract of what might be described as the Cheiron School of Pop which dominated the millennial moment. The most successful Swedish group in history, after ABBA, falls between those two points — and, inevitably, has their greatest success in the United States between 1989-1991, when they produced a two platinum discs and four Number One singles in the United States alone, en route to 45 million units combined sales.

If there is a pop single that in its form and content reaches jubilantly after life beyond care, beyond prohibition, beyond event — reaches after the entire congealed affect of the era — surely it is the last of these singles, which peaked in May of 1991: a kind of realization, found at the end of the time that concerns this book. Farewell to an idea, or to a few; the song is in several regards a synthesis of elements already seen, a demonstration of the ways of understanding the passage coming to an end, a nightcap for the new morning. Summoning first the light psychedelia of sixties counter-pop (especially “Magical Mystery Tour,” from the intro’s hubbub and tour guide through the video’s requisite enigmatic tour bus), the song’s milieu is regardless of its own moment — the moment of Deee-lite, the Da.I.S.Y. Age, Stone Roses’ “Fools Gold.” Per Gessle’s melody — surely having learned as much from Lennon-McCartney as any song of the period — is in turn pure 1991.

Except more so. Within 100 seconds the song has generated five or six separate melodic parts, each one a hook (Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus!, they titled one hits collection) which it proceeds to snap together in varying configurations before arriving at an instrumental break which leads into another bridge and a chorus fade — all in a bit more than four minutes. The profligacy is dizzying, perhaps even exhausting, an aerobatic inventiveness insisting that anything’s possible. The order of the parts doesn’t matter; this is the meaning of the song’s form, the endlessly reconfigurable hooks. Pleasure, mobility, infinitude. Feels like flying. The song is called “Joyride” — how could it be anything else? — and horizonless transit is everything. Cars, trains, planes, balloons, and no particular place to go, but everybody’s going there: “Hello you fool I love you: come on join the joyride.” Things get more imperative: “Be a joyrider!” Promises come easy: “I’ll take you on a sky ride, feeling like you’re spellbound.” Yes, that’s it exactly; the spell, the inexhaustible glide, “sunshine is a lady, rocks you like a baby,” whatever. There will be no coming down; the trance that never comes up hard against anything is the very sign of freedom, “it all begins where it ends” and that’s the good news, every straight line — time’s arrow, space’s borders — having been vanquished. This is Roxette’s second most historically charged song.

September 06, 2009

i don't wanna, i don't think so (chapter three excerpt)

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sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September

[....] This shift in self-awareness is captured by Sonic Youth, the film’s transitional figure (appropriately enough, as they’re a musicologically transitional figure between punk and grunge as well, in parallel to their progressive synthesis of free and out jazz, avant-garde minimalism and other more high-brow and experimental tendencies). Tied to New York’s knowing downtown intelligentsia, they’re a band in which the social antagonisms of punk are preserved and ironized at once. Their most successful single, 1990’s “Kool Thing,” dates from the moment in which grunge is at once consolidating punk’s furies while shifting their vector. Over a buzzy guitar that straddles the two genres, Kim Gordon exits the minimal melody for a spoken interlude reminiscent of Patti Smith. “Kool thing,” she wonders with her affected lack of affect, “...what are you gonna do for me? I mean, are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?” Public Enemy’s Chuck D, rejoining us from Chapter One, exhorts her, “Tell it like it is. Yeah.”

This droll residue of “Left discourse” and its imbricated political others is what grunge will finally abandon. Not every punk-inspired idiom of the era took this same turn. Tobi Vail, who passed the fated slogan [Learn not to play your instrument] on to Kurt, would take part in the refashioning and revitalizing of punk’s oppositional politics which happened in bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and other groups under the banner of “riot grrrl” — a phrase sometimes credited to Vail. The movement’s motto was REVOLUTION GIRL STYLE NOW. But this is exactly why riot grrrl was not grunge, but something else (and, arguably, why it couldn’t achieve similar levels of success even if it wished to). Grunge constituted itself by doing a very specific thing with punk’s will to confrontation: turning it inward.

Another way to pose this issue is to note that the most basic difference between the language of “NOW FORM A BAND” and “Learn not to play your instrument” will turn out to be the most decisive. If both demands are in the second person, one is addressed plurally, and the other singularly. Even more suggestively, it’s clear enough that the former is projected outward, an urgent and even confrontational challenge to anyone who might encounter it. Even the seemingly reversed position of Richard Hell’s famous t-shirt with a painted target labeled “Please Kill Me” (this is a world made entirely of imperatives) is scarcely introspective. “People had some wild ideas back then,” recounts Bob Gruen, “but for somebody to walk the streets of New York with a target on his chest, with an invitation to be killed — that’s quite a statement.” It doesn’t waver from punk’s confrontations; it simply reverses the telescope, which inevitably turns out to be a gun sight.

“Learn how to NOT play your instrument,” in Cobain’s notebook, has the force of an admonition to the mirror. It becomes immediately part of his ulcerous self-doubt, dovetailing with Mudhoney’s hyperbolic self-loathing in sound and sensibility. The motion from one of these stances to the other is central to, and inextricable from, grunge’s way of being. Among many modes, this inward turn is the mode.

August 30, 2009

the acid house revolution (chapter two excerpt)

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sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September

[....]The genre’s formation was not entirely without a process. Hard upon importation, the Balearic sound ran up against “full-on acid house,” with its cry of “acieed!” and its “Acid Teds,” the young clubbing rabble derided by the cognoscenti. The Balearic style was identified with a kind of laid-back gentility and a jet-set cosmopolitanism; acieed with a more frenzied will-to-party, and devotees more local and lower-class. The globe and the street.

This offered a miniature of London’s character as a world city Cerberus: economic capital, cultural capital, global capital. It was the mutual pressure of Balearic and early acid house that drove the development of London’s social scene, and shortly an indigenous sound for acid house parties. While “acid house” swiftly won out as the genre’s trade name, and the idea of an “acid house revolution” entrenched itself in the public imagination, still the musical double-formation of London’s rave scene shouldn’t be abandoned altogether. Within it is preserved the dialectical kernel the center of rave’s development.

In 1988, this development was swift and accelerating. Club nights blossomed in size from the hundreds to the thousands. After Shoom’s success, the London clubs opened like gates at the Epsom Downs starting bell: Spectrum, the Trip, R.I.P. This last, originally an underground club night and then a relatively aboveboard and frenetically popular venue, captured in its name another peculiarity of rave’s doubled consciousness, not musical but explicitly cultural: an identification both with the supposedly engagé counterculture of the American sixties, and with an isolationist hedonism. At the time it was commonly held that the club’s name stood for “Rave In Peace”; in point of fact, it was an acronym for “Revolution In Progress.” It remains hard to decipher whether these two slogans were congruent or contradictory; and, if the latter, which carried the day. Journalist Sheryl Garratt’s memoir frames the early London scene: “Many were using acid as well as Ecstasy. This, the longer hair, Ibiza’s hippie past and the feelings of peace and love they felt they were sharing all invited parallels with the sixties, although without the radical politics.” In Reynolds’ summary, “For all the self-conscious counterculture echoes...acid house was a curiously apolitical phenomenon.”

But apolitics is a politics — a fact that is always with us. Perhaps more importantly in this present case, many of the denizens of rave’s growing scene believed it had a politics, and this matters. That “Rave In Peace” and “Revolution In Progress” could be understood as something other than contradictory is a useful first judgment on rave’s social substance (and perhaps a judgment on the sixties counterculture’s as well). A peaceful revolution, revolution without conflict, might be seen as the soul of rave’s social desire.

August 23, 2009

thinkin' of a master plan (chapter one excerpt)

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sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September

....Of tanatmount importance, the project of Black self-empowerment aligns the teachings of both the Five Percenters and the Nation of Islam with rap’s early development as an art form. The material, technological conditions allowing for rap’s genesis were orchestrated by the use of consumer electronics (most famously the turntable) as tools for the production, rather than reproduction, of music. This development is of course inseparable from rap’s struggle to be recognized as a legitimate music. Such a sequence — new art made by non-professionalized performers, followed by a backlash which pretends to police not the social eruption but the terms of the aesthetic — is not a new story. In this case, the backlash has been as extended and contentious as it is racialized. Such a conflict can only be understood as an attempt to maintain the barriers of entry which this new material empowerment had battered down, effectively allowing artists from a previously excluded class and race position to produce material for mass culture (albeit still mediated by certain studio and radio demands). New form, new social access, new content.

Thus it was inevitable that the content of hip-hop would swiftly come to express the possibility, novelty and force of such self-empowerment, and so gather in the self-empowerment discourses circulating in the hip-hop and broader Black community. These discourses would equally mutate rap’s artistic structures in a way that encapsulates the dialectical development of ideology and aesthetic form — a development most apparent in formidably talented emcee Rakim (Rakim Allah, born William Michael Griffin, Jr.), who effectively reimagined the lyrical possibilities of rap on his first two albums with Eric B, Paid In Full and Follow The Leader (1987 and 1988 respectively). Stretching enjambed sentences across syncopated and densely rhymed lines, Rakim did for rap something on the order of what Bob Dylan had done for rock and roll. Beyond technical triumph, Rakim fashioned a new rhetorical machine, able to articulate extended ideas as persuasively as catchphrases. He was pleased to use both, to connect old-school hustles about moving the crowd with doctrinal rallying cries in a style that instantly rendered obsolete the end-stopped couplet and quatrain format of early rap:

From century to century you'll remember me
In history, not a mystery or a memory —
God by nature, mind raised in Asia,
Since you was tricked, I have to raise ya
From the cradle to the grave, but remember
You're not a slave
Cause we was put here to be much more than that
But we couldn't see it because our mind was trapped
But I’m here to break away the chains, take away the pains
Remake the brains, reveal my name…
Rakim’s formal revolution was thus also a revolution of ideas, or of the potential for ideas. The effect was to identify rap’s cultural power and Black Power explicitly, and to do so with a particular understanding: that the rhetoric of Black self-empowerment, now indistinguishable from eighties hip-hop, was not a bootstrapping self-determination but an oppositional stance, a Black nationalism based on a racialized theology.

August 16, 2009

what it means, how it feels (introduction excerpt)

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sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September

This is not a history book. How could it be, when history famously ended in the year in which the book is largely set? Perversely, the events which magnetize this present study — the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War for which the fall is absolute metonymy — are the very events said to have secured the end of history.

This, with a terminal but convictionless question mark (“The End of History?”) is the title of Frances Fukuyama’s essay published first in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, wherein is declared “the triumph of the West, of the Western idea.” If there was any doubt at that moment, while the Wall still stood and the border remained closed, it would not survive through the bestselling volume that followed, The End of History and the Last Man. In this account, the line from the French Revolution to the end of communism is the line from Hegel to Fukuyama himself. Hegel’s vision of the Grande Armee’s victory at Jena in 1806 as heralding “a new era of the spirit,” is realized in 1989’s global apotheosis of liberal democracy — after which, per Fukuyama, “we have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist.”

That history didn’t end is by now not worth remarking. There is nonetheless a specter of actuality in Fukuyama’s analaysis, and it wants reckoning as something more than a straw man. We have trouble imagining. The participle is everything. For if we understand Fukuyama to have been making the more modest if still tragic claim that 1989 witnessed the end of historical thought, that the public imagination of the West has abandoned a conception of ongoing historical process, of alternative arrangements of daily life — then his suggestion is considerably less laughable. If Fukuyama’s description is fixed not to historical truth but to a condition of consciousness arising in a new situation, it swiftly reveals itself as worthy of discussion.

Implicit in this is the significance of popular culture: the great marketplace of the public imagination, and indeed the place where market and imagination struggle over consciousness, over what’s thought and what’s thinkable. “Pop music” is always at least two facts: the cultural artifact of the song and all that it communicates; and its popularity, its having been claimed by enough people to enter into mass culture. A song may communicate historical experience — including the experience of the end of history — in several different ways. But pop’s thinking is always also the thought of the audience, the choice of some songs over others, of selecting this and not that by way of trying to grab hold of the moment: what it means, how it feels.

August 09, 2009

bob dylan didn't have this to sing about (chapter five excerpt)

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sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

Pax Americana proved no more pacific than any other Pax. It was a picture of the world, but one with the power of fact; the picture was hard to shake. The Gulf War (not yet “the First”) arrived in the Summer of 1990; already, it seemed part of a different reality. In the ease with which American force brought the belligerents to heel, so distinct from Vietnam, the Gulf War seemed to confirm the new situation.

As a social matter, however, this conflict was not without its mnemonic character. At the Grammy Awards on February 21, 1991 — while the military mop-up slouched toward conclusion — Bob Dylan received a Lifetime Achievement Award. It was bound to be an odd occasion, not the least because of Dylan’s well-known recalcitrance in the face of such institutions. Moreover, despite the soft-focus generalities of “Lifetime Achievement,” it was a specific occasion designed for polemic; at the same time, there was a sense of Dylan as a revenant from a different historical milieu altogether (fostered in part by his ongoing turn toward music from earlier eras, previous centuries) — as being out of time.

He sang a song from 1963, “Masters of War,” tamping the melody into the tempo and collapsing the words into a glossolalic yelp. In the description of Greil Marcus, “It was an instantly infamous performance, and one of the greatest of Dylan's career. He sang the song in disguise; at first, you couldn't tell what it was. He slurred the words as if their narrative was irrelevant and the performance had to communicate as a symbol or not at all.” An artifact of the Cold War’s avatar as ascending disaster in Southeast Asia, it’s a song of absolute antagonism directed at its titular villains: “I hope that you die, and your death will come soon.” Twenty-eight years later, the song was surely his most timely and his most out of time; it was hard to say if he was trying to make it mean again through the performance’s distortions, or burying it for good. He followed this with a gnomic acceptance speech, as uncomfortable as it was brief.

Well, my daddy, he didn't leave me much, you know he was a very simple man, and he didn’t leave me a lot but what he did tell me was this, he did say, son, he said — he said so many things, you know? — he say, you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you and if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways. Thank you.
The odd peroration (borrowed from Psalms 27:10) is as telling as the performance and Marcus’s account of it, telling about what might and might not be possible at this belated moment. It is a study in not taking the bait: scarcely a new trick for the old dog. But there is something peculiarly of the moment within it — an adaptation to new conditions, to a changed world-picture. The song cannot suddenly lack antagonism; it is nothing else. But the Real of History, the new Real in its glory, can only be approached by symbol, by affect. It’s buried deep in the performance, sublimed out of the lyrics — as if their narrative was irrelevant — and unmentioned in the speech. Like the unmentioned occasion of the Gulf War, and the larger occasion of the end of the Cold War, the antagonism is still somehow present: as context and feeling, as a ghost and an absence. It cannot be represented directly. This should by now be familiar.

August 04, 2009

under redaction

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