The twenty-first in a series of posts where we bring to you the most interesting and stimulating music articles we found this week.
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Closed Frontier: Is Rock Over? by Sam McPheeters (Vice): Sure, there have been arguments that rock and roll is dead since (at least) 1958, but this one might just have the ring of truth. Of the touring bands that made the most money in the last decade, only the minority were anything even approaching remotely new bands, and rock music has now long been a music of tradition rather than a music of innovation. According to McPheeters,
Guitar Hero killed rock and roll off once and for all, and that the future of rock music lies in progressively more real simulacra of the experience of being a rock star. Of course, some brilliant and innovative new rock band will arrive with a bang next year just to laugh in McPheeters’ face.
“Mumble Mumble Shoulder Something”: REM, Guided By Voices, Ghostface, And The Pleasures Of Lyrical Ambiguity by Keith Phipps (The AV Club): I am someone who once exhaustively analysed every image and phrase in a song to find their possible meanings, but even I agree with Phipps: sometimes not knowing what the hell they’re singing is way better. This kind of ambiguity lets you fill in the blanks from your own experience (much like that interactive Arcade Fire video, which lets you fill in the blanks of their Suburbs with your own suburban home), which can be a very powerful thing. And sometimes people (e.g., me) put too much investment in words, and need to just listen to the sounds.
The Evolution Of The Male Falsetto by Anwyn Crawford (Frieze): The falsetto – the high male voice of a Robert Plant or Justin Bieber - has long been part of music – indeed, in the 19th century, the castrati were lauded for their operatic talent, and well, you don’t need to know Italian to know what castrati means. Crawford argues here in a paean to the falsetto voice that it can indicate the angelic or the diabolic, the hypersexual or the innocent, the masculine or the feminine.
Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin IV by Marcello Carlin (Then Play Long): Carlin’s project, started in 2008, is to review every UK #1 album in order, to try and make you want to hear something interesting in each. Here he’s up to 1971’s
Led Zeppelin IV, and reading it, he evokes the feel of the album so well, and finds enough new quirks and angles in the music, that I found myself wanting to relisten to an album I thought I knew every note of.
Divide And Conquer by Lizzy Goodman (New York Magazine): Of Montreal’s new album,
False Priest, is a giddy sexually-charged funk-filled romp with guest spots from Solange Knowles and Janelle Monae, where Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes imitates Prince one second and David Bowie the next. But how did Kevin Barnes get from the lo-fi twee Beatles-influenced stuff he started off with to a point where many of his songs are sung by his black ex-con transsexual alter-ego, Georgie Fruit?
Tour Diary Day Four: Rock And Roll Is Dead by Amy Klein (Amy Andronicus): Klein, who plays guitar in the band Titus Andronicus, blogs from the road about reading through the latest Rolling Stone magazine. The latest US edition has a naked Anna Paquin on the cover, but the only picture of a girl playing a musical instrument in the entire magazine is one of Taylor Swift playing a sparkly guitar. And sure, Rolling Stone do it that way because sex sells. But to see pictures of women rocking out in a mainstream publication like that is to provide a gateway to another world to young girls who don’t identify with the way women are portrayed in the mass media – at least, says Klein, that’s what did it for her.
Why We Fight #7 by Nitsuh Abebe (Pitchfork): In his roundabout way, Abebe is celebrating the fact that genre-bending and cross-pollination between black and white musicians seems pretty common right now, the fact that it’s not really a big deal that Danger Mouse is collaborating with the Shins’ James Mercer in their Broken Bells project. But the thing I really liked about this article was the music taste as constellations metaphor Abebe uses; he argues that a genre is a constellation, and that music critics have a tendency to see particular constellations in the sky, because they’re interested in seeing which stars are brightest. But constellations, after all, are meaningless except from the viewpoint of Earth – we group together stars seemingly randomly, some of which are hundreds of light years away, some of which are only a dozen light years away. And so, if an outsider to music criticism sees a different constellation of stars, it’s not like music critics can say they’re wrong – the constellations are in our minds, rather than in the stars.
Busby Madoff Dreams: “Fuck You” And The Gold Diggers Of 2010 by Carl Wilson (Back To The World): In the past, songs like Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-A-Ling”, often hid darker, weirder sentiments and sexual undercurrents under a joyful shiny clean surface (and it’s not a bad idea to read up on the history of ABBA to understand just how dark the undercurrents can be behind what comes across as shiny and clean). Now, songs like “Fuck You” by Cee-Lo (the current it song of the blogosphere) seem to hide a joyful shininess underneath dark, weird sentiments – for all the crude lyrics and gold-digger sentiment, “Fuck You” can’t help but be a happy, joyful song.
Tim Byron