Put nose to nose, "Paper Planes" holds its own with "Like a Virgin." It's hard to argue that the video for M.I.A.'s "Born Free," where redheaded white people are rounded up into a concentration camp, isn't as misguided and muddled an attempt to disconcert us as "Like a Prayer" once was. Maya may lack the live performance spectacle, telling Hirschberg in the interview for the New York Times exposé that she's most uncomfortable in that arena, but in every other way she's a more natural evolution of what a twenty-first century Madonna should look like than Britney or Gaga.
As a fifty-something woman trying to embody the role of sex kitten, Madonna is no longer an aspirational figure to me. In a lot of ways, I've outgrown her. When I was young I wanted to have her self-confidence. I wanted to mock everyone and rule the world while I did it. But one-time Madonna fans like me no longer need a teen idol to talk to us about sex. We have grown out of being all-consumed by the desires of youth and have graduated to the next life stage. We've mastered our sexuality. Madonna fans now have mortgages to pay, kids to raise, and the business of everyday life to get through. Our interest in her golden thrusting crotch is escapist at best and nonexistent most of the time.
According to the 2009 SoundScan figures, some of the biggest-selling albums of the year were released by Susan Boyle, Barbra Streisand, and Michael Bublé—all artists whose success was credited to an older audience, people who actually buy albums. This is not to say Madonna has to neuter herself or her sexuality to remain successful. If anything, it would be even more revolutionary if she used her station to create a new vision of what middle-aged female sexuality could look like. But she seems to be leaving that task to Jamie Lee Curtis (also born in 1958) while she sets about having enough plastic surgery and sequined costumes to outshine every Miley, Rihanna, and Swedish pop star who tries to be her. If she had simply evolved into the Next Madonna in the twenty-first century, instead of devolving into the '80s Madonna, her story would still be going on, and all these wannabe Madonnas could go dream their own little dreams of pop stardom. Madonna created the opening for a crowning of the Next Madonna herself.
THE NEXT MADONNA PLAYLIST
MADONNA, "Ray of Light"
MADONNA, "American Life"
LADY GAGA, "Telephone"
CYNDI LAUPER, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"
CYNDI LAUPER, "Time After Time"
CYNDI LAUPER, "She Bop"
MADONNA, "Like a Virgin"
MADONNA, "Material Girl"
CYNDI LAUPER, "True Colors"
MADONNA, "Like a Prayer"
BRITNEY SPEARS, "... Baby One More Time"
MADONNA, "Hollywood"
MADONNA, "Vogue"
BRITNEY SPEARS, "Gimme More"
MADONNA, "Deeper and Deeper"
MADONNA, "Rain"
MADONNA, "Bad Girl"
LADY GAGA, "Just Dance"
M.I.A., "Galang"
LADY GAGA, "Alejandro"
M.I.A., "Paper Planes"
M.I.A., "Born Free"
INTERLUDE
music blogs are just dadaist conversation
IF THE INTERNET'S an unlimited universe of knowledge, then music blogs are the little corner of that universe where people have the sort of conversations that would be unacceptable in mixed company. Not because of blue content, but because the writing is both so nerdy and so obtuse it can be difficult to wade through. Music blogs are proof that the Internet represents the ultimate democracy for information. Some of my favorite blogs are written by people I wouldn't otherwise interact with, writers from random small towns in Florida and Minnesota. And some of the most popular ones, like Stereogum, are written by people I once walked by every day: namely, my former coworker Scott Lapatine, who jettisoned his cubicle around the corner from me when his blog, Stereogum, took off. Talk about living the dream. And while some music bloggers are functional members of society whom you could easily go out and have a drink with, others are stereotypical, socially awkward geeks. There is a famous quote, often attributed to Elvis Costello, that says writing about music is like dancing about architecture. For all their differences, these music bloggers are all dancing their hearts out.
The only way to find your way among the boiling tar pits of information that are music blogs is to jump in face first. Finding music via blogs is advanced music searching that caters to niche audiences. There are blogs dedicated to specific cities, specific decades, specific sub-sub-subgenres of music. A handful of blogs whose taste matches your own can become one of the most useful tools for finding new music, but they tend to come and go quickly. I can't give you a list of my favorite music blogs, because by the time you read this book they may be abandoned, start to suck, or be bought and "renovated" by a corporation. Blog culture, however, is here for the long haul. If you haven't been out there finding your blogs of choice already, now is the time.
Often the way bloggers describe music will make no sense, as they attempt to contextualize music in a seemingly Dadaist stream of words. These brave souls have taken on a challenge by starting music blogs. Very few of them have any professional experience writing about music. They are making it up as they go, so many blog writers will hit you with a blurry picture of a half-naked person or a cloudy sky and then follow it with a nonsensical verbal spew about the time a storm hit the Carolina coast and how this song reminds them of the swirling trash on the beach. It's very much about their experience and won't necessarily make any sense to you at all. A person could lose her mind—and her way—in this mess. If you want to really delve deep into the musical blogosphere, there are three proven ways you can penetrate this world without going completely insane, while increasing your collection of free and semi-legal music.
OPTION 1: BE METHODICAL IN SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT BLOGS
There is no shortcut to finding music blogs you like. You're going to have to sit down and read a bunch. Most discerning people start by going to the one or two music blogs they trust and checking out the blog roll—it will include both bloggers they are friends with (because in blog culture, cred is all about who you know) and, more important, people who write about similar music. If you're starting fresh, with no music blog experience at all (who are you and what do you do with your time on the Internet?), start by visiting a site called Hype Machine and searching for the names of a few of your favorite bands. It will return a list of blogs that have featured whatever band you searched for. Read the ones whose names sound most interesting to you. Yes, this is sort of like picking a bottle of wine based on the label. Wine snobs will find that annoying, but for the novice, it's as good a method as anything. After reading a few dozen and listening to the MP3s they've posted, you'll come across the right blogs for you. Eventually it will become just like reading the daily news or your Twitter feed—you'll have an order, a method to your blog madness. Keep in mind that you may have to rely on some obtuse descriptions by bloggers whose writing abilities are questionable at best in order to get a sense of what you're downloading. You'll find the pattern that suits you best, whether you read them once a week or every day, and then you'll find all the tracks you can handle. And you'll do it with all killer, no filler.
OPTION 2: FIND EVERYTHING.
If you're the sort who's afraid to miss anything, someone who is so trend-centric that you'd actually consider rocking acid-washed denim if it rolled down the runway in a Marc Jacobs show, then you'll want to set up an RSS feed and put every single music blog you can find on it. And I mean everything: the good, the bad, the really terrible. Then download every single track that every one of them posts (obviously excepting repetitions of tracks posted on more than one blog, but certainly not excepting all remixes of a song). The biggest hassle with having it all is finding the time to listen to it. Putting aside an hour a day or several hours on the weekend will allow you all the time you can bear to listen to your new music. On the plus side, there's no need to try and read what any bloggers are writing because you're going to download everything you find anyway. You can com
pletely skip trying to decode what someone else thinks it sounds like and just figure it out for yourself.
OPTION 3: HIT THE HEADLINES.
You only read CNN. In fact, you actually only read CNN's Breaking News feed in your Twitter stream, because they're your trusted news source but you don't want all the pratter of the less-important CNN stories. All you need are the top five most-popular music blogs. Make your list, download everything they post, listen if and when you feel like it. Your slightly ignorant bliss will be the envy of all your overachieving friends.
OUR SONG, YOUR SONG, MY SONG
MY COLLEGE BOYFRIEND, Charlie, had an outstanding record collection. It was top-notch beyond my comprehension at the time, heavy on jazz and swirling psychedelic rock. I had never heard 90 percent of it. In the years since we were together, as I've learned more about obscure and cult music, I've gained a keen appreciation for his records. They reflected both his taste and the massive amounts of pot he smoked. Charlie was the first person to get me to listen to experimental Brian Eno records, the first to play me John Coltrane, and the first to introduce me to Mercury Rev.
By default, Charlie almost always dictated what music we listened to because we spent most of our time at his apartment in the presence of his substantial collection. Based on the "my house, my records" rule (always fair, I say), we would listen to whatever he had pulled out that day. When we were driving somewhere, he would pick four or five CDs for the trip, even if we were just going a few blocks to Whataburger. He was trying to expose me to music that he thought was better than the second-rate music I was listening to, but we had very different taste, so it was an uphill battle. He enjoyed telling and retelling the story of an old girlfriend who got him into the Velvet Underground, whose album White Light/White Heat inspired him to join his first band. It's worth noting that almost every single one of the miniscule number of people who actually listen to Velvet Underground records, from the Pixies to at least one random dude you've dated, will tell you that exact same story. I don't remember the first time he played me Mercury Rev, but the first time I noticed was in the car when he put on track 99 of Mercury Rev's 1991 debut album, Yerself Is Steam, and smirked at me.
If you don't know this particular Mercury Rev album already, let me explain: There's left of the dial, and to the left of that is where you'll find Yerself Is Steam. Historically, it is filed by music critics under the shoegaze genre. I suppose this is because the band used a lot of the same guitar tones as shoegaze outfits from the same time, but it was really a bit too psychedelic to fit the genre. It's not easily accessible if your ears are more attuned to the pop end of the spectrum, where most shoegaze lives. Mercury Rev is clever, but they avoided writing hooks or melodies on this album. Except for the hidden bonus track 99, "Car Wash Hair." Charlie might have played me every song on that album dozens of times, but the only one I remember is "Car Wash Hair." He played it repeatedly. Every time we were in the car. Every time I went over to his apartment. He put it on with no commentary, aside from a smirk, until I finally acknowledged his little musical joke about my car-wash hair.
Before continuing, I should tell you that I have naturally curly hair that gets very poofy in humidity. Exploding-off-my-head poofy. Needless to say, humidity is a fact of life in Texas, which led to some very big-hair days while I was growing up. I should also tell you that the chorus of "Car Wash Hair" goes: "Wanna ask but I just stare / Can I run my hands through your car wash hair?" It's lovely, poetic, charming, sexy—in short, nothing like the rest of the song, which tells the story of a man riding in the back of a band's decrepit tour van. While the chorus was about me and my hair, I always thought the rest of the song was about Charlie, who was a member of several bands about town. In fact, we met because I had been writing terrible things about the Houston music scene that summer for MTV's now-defunct local website. He sent me an e-mail to take issue with my proclamations that Houston was a cesspool devoid of decent entertainment, and he included lists of bands he thought I should be listening to. We ended up hanging out so he could play me records. Next thing you know, we were dating. I still think he was wrong about the music in Houston. Nothing I saw that summer was particularly impressive, with the exception of a band called the Fatal Flying Guilloteens, who all dressed like the Lone Ranger and put on aggressive punk shows to captive audiences of fifteen people.
Back to the point: "Car Wash Hair" got played a lot that summer, and I started thinking of it as Our Song. Although I am absolutely certain Charlie started playing it to tease me, the song touched on truisms about both of us. For the rest of my life, hearing that song will always take me right back to being silly with Charlie in the summer of 1997. Other guys have, amazingly, tried to play this particular song for me since, and I always stop them and explain that Charlie beat them to it. It's already my song with him. Recycling it would be creepy and wrong.
What I took away from this experience with Charlie was that it's really easy to turn something into an Our Song. It can happen accidentally or romantically, or it can spring from an inside joke. Making an Our Song happen is an incredibly powerful thing, though, so I would advise using this power carefully. Songs may be sullied forever if things go badly.
One function in life absolutely demands an Our Song: a wedding. I am fascinated by stories of how people picked their wedding song. If you haven't stumbled across (or staged) one by the time you're engaged, it's not going to happen organically. You'll have to have a debate that will undoubtedly involve months of playing each other songs, melding your musical tastes, and generally driving each other nuts with unbearably sappy music. Charlie, the aforementioned ex from my college days, once told me a story of two friends of his who walked down the aisle to the Moody Blues' "Knights in White Satin." This song is both hilarious and corny—an epically funny choice for a wedding song. I should have asked him whether this song was something they'd chosen specifically for the wedding or whether it was a well-worn Our Song for them. Charlie tried to convince me that the selection was very romantic. All he managed to prove was that we all have our lapses in musical judgment.
One of the most fun weddings I've ever attended was my friend Josh's. It was a chance to reminisce with old friends I didn't see very often while we drank too much and danced just the right amount. Josh and his lovely bride, Connie, had their first dance to U2's "All I Want Is You." When I heard the song, I was immediately suspicious. I have never heard Connie talk about U2. I'm certain that when it comes to U2, her interest level could best be classified as ambivalent. Josh and his best man, however, were huge U2 fans. So I asked Josh what inspired him and his wife to choose that particular song for their first dance. He was quick to confirm my suspicions that his wife had little to do with it. "It was an amazing and perfect song with the perfect lyrics. It meant more to the best man and me than anyone else, I think. It was essentially for me."
What you need to know is that Josh is not a music snob or a music nerd. He is a Music Nazi. As long as I've known him—well over a decade now—he's wanted to control the music that's playing wherever he is. I can totally relate. We are Music Nazis because we believe we have better taste in music than everyone else. Letting us control what you're listening to is entirely to your benefit, and it would be great if you could just trust us about this. In addition to single-handedly picking their wedding song, Josh also picked all the music that played at the reception. I don't want to say his charming bride wouldn't have been allowed a say in the selection of the first-dance song if she'd cared to object, but Josh did tell me he picked that song when he was in high school, long before he had even met Connie.
From watching those Bridezilla-type reality shows about weddings, I've noticed that women seem to spend a lot of time trying to interest the groom in participating in the wedding decisions. Connie planned everything else, so if Josh's area of interest was the music, then, hey, that's a collaboration. Here's what strikes me as really hilarious: I asked Josh if "All I Want Is You" became a thing for them a
fter the wedding, thinking that maybe that moment gave it a sense of enduring romanticism and turned it into their song. Actually, what I asked was, "Have you ever had a romantic moment with the bride involving that U2 song? Do you ever just put it on to reminisce?" He wryly replied, "Do you see a dress on me?" Okay, point taken. Then he admitted that when the song comes on, he does mention it, but the romance is muted because Connie keeps forgetting what the wedding song was. Some songs will not be forced into being an Our Song, but I'll always think of Josh and his best man when I hear that U2 ballad. I may also imagine them slow-dancing together, for my own amusement.
That track couldn't make the jump to Our Song status for Josh and Connie because it wasn't their song. It was Josh's romantic ideal song that soundtracked his teenage dreams of love. It's charming to think he chose a grandiose love song as the representation of romantic love back when he was a kid, but a real Our Song is often much more pedestrian. U2's "All I Want Is You" is way, way too over the top for Josh and Connie to sit around listening to. It is so romantic, it might be too romantic to be anyone's Our Song.
John Sellers, author of Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life, tweeted: "'Better Man' by Pearl Jam is stuck in my head. Kill Me. Please," I wrote back that the song reminded me of boys I rejected in high school. He replied that he was glad I had rejected them. This is because Pearl Jam is a mediocre band and we both knew it, no matter how many millions of albums they sell or how many Target-commercials-turned-music-videos Cameron Crowe shoots for them.
Record Collecting for Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time Page 12