When we roll up to 2300 Jackson, it’s almost 11 p.m., maybe seven hours since the news hit. Slow-cruising cars blare different eras of MJ as two thick cops parked on ATVs shine their headlights on the crowd milling in the yard. This is not so much a gathering as a looky-loo, a chance to observe the coterie of stuffed animals and notebook-paper tributes. A Gary Fire Department shirt on a hanger clings to the front window’s security bars with a note taped to it: “Goodbye Michael J5 forever.” There’s not a lot of talking up by the actual shrine and its safety candles: Everyone just snaps pictures with their cell phones and slaps at mosquitoes. Some people are crying.
Back at the edge of the yard, locals trade stories, theories and firsthand reminiscences: Michael’s appearance at a Gary high school in 2003, older siblings who went to high school with Tito, guesses of what will become of the house. Everyone weighs in on where he’ll be buried: Everyone hopes for Gary, thinks it should be Gary—maybe even right here in the backyard. I imagine the tiny, fenced-in lot overtaken by a mausoleum, ringed with teddy bears and white gloves.
The next day, Mayor Rudy Clay talks of turning the house, which would take four minutes (max) to thoroughly examine, into a Graceland. Grim as it is, Jackson’s death could mean new life for Gary. A stretch of downtown is set to be razed in the next year: No doubt an MJ shrine will be its star attraction. Interviewing residents a few years back, the idea that Michael could return and somehow save their seemingly unsaveable city was a collectively-held notion. Some held his abandonment against him and considered such a return his duty as a native son, while others were sympathetic—why would the King of Pop ever want to come back to Gary? Few had guessed that this is how it might happen.
The mosquitoes are getting to us, and we’ve taken all the pictures we can of the memorial heap of mini-mart roses and stuffed animals. Across the street, a man affixes a flashlight to a lawnmower, fires it up, and starts cutting the grass. We get back in the car. On our way out, we stop and take pictures of the long-abandoned Palace Theatre’s marquee. Since Donald Trump had the place spruced up for the 2002 Miss USA pageant, it has read “Jackson Five Tonite”—another fantasy future for the Magic City, come and gone.
SUPERCHUNK: I HATE MUSIC
SPIN magazine, August 2013
Death is everywhere on I Hate Music, Superchunk’s 10th studio album. Sidling right beside us, doing air-guitar windmills on his scythe, from album opener “Overflows” (where “dead” is the third word frontman Mac McCaughan sings) all the way to bittersweet-ever-after closer “What Can We Do.” This is a record of grief, bristling with the anguish of what it means to survive, to re-evaluate your life after someone else’s death: “Everything is different / Everything is the same.”
As if that wasn’t quite brutal enough, McCaughan also dredges up a rhetorical question from that emotional swampland of punk-after-35: What does music mean in the face of mortality? “I hate music / What is it worth?” goes the opening salvo to “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo.” “Can’t bring anyone back to this earth.” It’s a line that pulls you up short—after decades of insisting this song or that album “saved your life,” you’re suddenly confronted with the fact that it actually won’t. It can’t.
It’s a line that leaves you embarrassed in your vulnerability; to have ever asserted otherwise seems like a denial of life’s terms. When you are past that youthful period when your whole identity is tied up in a faith affirmed by music, when the mortal aspects of life start to catch up with you—how do you orient yourself? The small god who lives in a perfect beat or solo, in the raw, chest-beating howl of some puerile punk… Is that the same god we curse out and bargain with when we are trying to keep the people we love here with us? On this album, McCaughan reckons with this belief system that has informed so much of his life. Yet the idea that music is everything is rather naive on this side of 40, and saying music is nothing is too hopeless, too cynical, it disorients the past. What to cling to?
I Hate Music is crushing in its poignancy, its ruthless weighing of what this whole mess adds up to (or doesn’t). “Put up your feet on the dash,” McCaughan cheers; he’s doing the math on life’s beauty to agony ratio, reasoning with memories from before his friend’s death and after. I Hate Music acknowledges music’s power to bless us with meaningful distraction. It can distract us from our mourning, too, though that’s all it can do; grief and music both have the power to distort reality as much as they cut through the bullshit of it all. Title aside, I Hate Music eventually (thankfully) comes down on the “everything” side of the argument.
All this is a heavier orbit than the usual “Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old” sentiment of post-punk forty-somethings singing of their disenfranchisement from the scene they built. Chalk it up to the liberation of middle age or the certainty of an audience that has held fast (and aged with them), but the band clearly feels no compulsion to keep it light; they trust their music to hold up under all the heaviness of such examinations and trust us to be able to handle it as well.
All the frustration and anger at play on I Hate Music energizes songs like “Staying Home,” wherein the Hüsker Dü echoes that have trailed McCaughan since 1991’s “Cast Iron” have never been louder (the last thing you expect 10 albums in are Superchunk breaknecking like it’s Land Speed Record or bust). Ironically, it’s an anthem about not going out—the ultimate geezer cop-out—set to hardcore, the very sound of youthful vigor. Out of step, indeed. Other songs sit in awe of death, alive in the fresh hell of it, McCaughan’s eager-teen squeak of a voice still stretching toward those high notes. His voice is full of love and restless sadness, which tells as much of a story as the lyrics do, atop heartbreaking lines like “Oh, what I’d do / To waste an afternoon with you.”
It’s a perfect place for Superchunk to wind up, given this is a band that initially wooed us 25 years ago with “Slack Motherfucker,” indie rock’s quintessential bratty-kid anthem. Now, just as confidently, they have given us songs that map adult life, even if these anthems are more a mortality blues. But with I Hate Music, Superchunk prove that it wasn’t naive to believe in what music could do.
BETWEEN THE VIADUCT OF YOUR DREAMS:
ON VAN MORRISON
TINYLUCKYGENIUS, July 2008
When the chasm of human experience feels unbridgeable, and the past is keeping you like the stocks, and there is no absolution to be had, no forgiveness to salve you, and the world feels too much in its infinite newness and it’s midnight and people are screaming and feeding babies ranch-flavor chicken fingers from a bucket, when all you see is difference and a long string of your own unqualified failures, there is Van singing, “Lay me down…to be born again.” There is so much wanting in “Astral Weeks,” but it’s not desperation, it’s all vessel; it’s faith enough to cover us all. He waits until 4:55 to slip the big one, “I’m nothin but a stranger in this world”—after he’s sung all this future-hope, he’s just fucking untangled joy over pipping flutes—here, he flashes his wretch-like-me makings, and dovetails his abyss with deliverance—there is something beyond this—he sounds like he’s about to giggle he’s so delighted, he’s so sure. It’s fine, fixed sureness, an easy sureness when he repeats it this last time, in this final, ecclesiastic glee coda. He has all the reasons not to believe, but he does. The Buddhists say hope is a trap, it’s a set up for suffering, but the hope in this song, it is free, it drags nothing with, it is only onward, onward in love and frailty.
PART SIX: BAD REVIEWS
MILEY CYRUS / BANGERZ
SPIN magazine, October 2013
What is there to “review” when it comes to a Miley Cyrus album? Her singing, affected and perfected by software? How her powerless pop makes you feel, deep down in your quivering soul? How to rate this latest iteration of her personae—code name: “strategic hot mess”—to address these complex matters of cultural ownership with a post-teen girl who has belonged to the public her whole life, a simulacrum of girlhood turned into one of the
great products of our age, a bigger emblem of the empire than Mickey Mouse himself? What else could she do but nuke it, saturate herself in our greedy gaze until she dissolves, give it all away, turn herself out until our knowledge of her is borderline gynecological? Is there a part of Miley that remains unknown? Did you really expect an album called Bangerz to reveal anything to you?
In knowing everything, we find we know nothing. The entertainment value of Cyrus’ work is more than simply typical pop pleasure: It is the slow-motion horror of watching toxic sleaze replace toxic purity (cf. Dave Hickey). At her extremes, she firmly engaged our most puritanical mores—from saccharine virgin to knowingly fellating a sledgehammer—Cyrus is, at once, both banal and pernicious.
Though Bangerz may seem like some sort of sudden, shocking transgression, grinding gears as Cyrus shifts from Disney World to Worldstar, 2009’s “Party in the U.S.A.” foretold it all: the wow and much-ness of fame, Jay-Z on the radio. Cyrus has touted this album as “sexy” (ehh), “believable” and “very adult.” Though only the latter rings true—in the traditional, male-fantasy-driven, pornographic sense of “adult”—her actions, and even more so her inactions, conform to the arc of most mainstream adult entertainment. Here, she’s often pliant and naive, begging to serve, or at least be noticed and deemed worthy. On the Pharell-penned “#GETITRIGHT,” she lays in bed, powerless and horny, overcome and waiting to be activated by male desire; on “My Darlin’,” she solicits the revivifying attentions of a dude who is just not that into her; on “Maybe You’re Right” and “FU,” she leaves; and on “SMS,” she alludes to taking her satisfaction into her own hands, but it’s all played for (what else?) titillation.
On the other three tracks, she’s don’t-give-a-fuck, she’s crazy, she’s partying, she’s doing her bitch-bad thing. It’s all very familiar-sounding-and-feeling, and it should be: “Wrecking Ball” gives co-writing credit to Sasha Karbeck, who helped pen “Born to Die” and “Paradise” for Lana Del Rey; also credited are Dr. Luke and Cirkut, the team behind (most recently) Katy Perry’s “Roar.” Bangerz is a precise album that flits between bombastic and turgid; it is not very fun.
It’s strange to think that anyone could find this record offensive or controversial. What are we even to extract from Bangerz about the interior life of someone who reported her true liberation was driving an Explorer down Philly’s South Street, a cheap chain standing in for her zipless fuck—a glance into a fantasy life unlived? Is her woman-spurned exultation as powerful as the version Katy Perry sells to us? Is her pathos as grand as Rihanna’s? Her pleasure as real?
Though Cyrus has a lovely, albeit generic voice, singing is not her truest gift; instead, it’s the sheer quality of her mirroring, the way she gives us exactly what we want in lethal doses, grinding against our most American horror. As Pharrell himself says in the new MTV doc Miley Cyrus: The Movement, “Why is she doing this? Because she’s a product of America.” She’s playing it like a rebel, but she’s simply being who we’ve goaded her to be.
NU AGE: ANIMAL COLLECTIVE AND BELL ORCHESTRE
Chicago Reader, November 2005
To invoke the Minutemen: Do you want new wave or do you want the truth? Here we are, 20 years later, and the new wave sounds more and more like old New Age. We’re dealing with a fresh crop of musicians who pass off extreme indulgence as experimentalism and neck beards as a sign of higher consciousness. They cite barely Googleable influences so we won’t notice the similarities between them and, say, any popular jam band or latter-day solo album by a member of Tangerine Dream. There are a bunch of names floating around for this stuff—nu-folk, freak-folk, New Weird America—but I have my own: new-jack hippy-wave (when I am feeling gracious) or downtown bullshit city (the rest of the time). Why, you may ask, am I hating on both the player and the game? Simple: I do not like being lied to. And the truth is there is no new in this new.
Bell Orchestre, the all-instrumental chamber orchestra side project of Arcade Fire members Richard Reed Parry and Sarah Neufeld, might sell a gazillion copies of their debut, Recording a Tape the Color of Light (Rough Trade), based on association alone. It’s the sort of thing that might appeal to anyone looking for a more “sophisticated” variation on the irresistible pop drama we’ve come to expect from their other band. Though I hate to dash the hopes a 7.9 rating from Pitchfork instills, unless some consensual, messy frottage between Mike Oldfield and Jean-Luc Ponty is what you’re scouring the bins for, consider your parade urinated upon.
The bio that came with the BO record cites the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet, and Arvo Part as influences, which is not only wishful thinking but perhaps a touch perverted, even by the standards of publicist-spun hyperbole. Bell Orchestre has all the ingredients for classical gas—French horn, upright bass, violin and trumpet—but none of the dexterity or seriousness. They’re content with pomp and cheeze, the sort of ham-fisted slop best suited to close-ups of a windswept Leonardo DiCaprio on the deck of the Titanic or a 2006 off-road vehicle taking the corners of a majestic mountainside in a commercial. Sure: if you’re 19 and “House of Jealous Lovers” is your “Houses of the Holy,” then some dog-food-grade violin compositions kicked “disco” with brass and a 4/4 hi-hat beat might sound light years ahead as they pop out of your computer speakers. But let’s not sully the work of a 70-year-old Estonian composer known for his subtle dissonance by connecting it to some Suzuki-method yo-yos from Montreal.
Don’t get me wrong: Bell Orchestre has dynamics. Strings purr against some really funky chimes, then build, get quiet—and build again! And there’s unsubtle discord in the horn arrangements: the trumpet-French horn duel that drops like a wet turd from the sky a minute and four seconds into “Les Lumieres Pt. 2” sounds like a death match between first chairs in a high school band. It’ll make you wish they’d quit the song after Pt. 1. Recording melds the push-button dynamics and overwrought gesticulation of a Billboard-charting emo band with the edginess of a Windham Hill sampler, and if you’re thinking it doesn’t get much worse than that, rest assured: you are correct.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Brooklyn sits poor Animal Collective, a group whose best intentions have clearly curdled. Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist and Deakin issued four albums before their breakthrough 2004 release Sung Tongs. Their fresh dispatch, Feels (Fat Cat), is a muddled mess, and does the freak-folk ho show with which the band is associated no favors. Perhaps Geologist and Deakin—who didn’t participate on Sung Tongs but are now back in the mix—are to blame.
Feels fails in all the ways that Sung Tongs worked: Where their layered sound-on-sound psych-out was once deep and expansive, now it’s sloppy and impenetrable. These are hookless songs buried under a landslide of trebly collage. And with seven of the nine tracks running in excess of five minutes, it’s apparent that AC lacks not only any clue of how to build songs, but also the ability to control them.
Boring is one thing; trying to pass off massage music as experimental is another. Feels is the sort of album meant to be augmented by the sound of a $39 feng shui fountain percolating in the background, because nothing goes with a gurgling plug-in waterspout like songs with copious amounts of zither.
The only things keeping Animal Collective from losing their way in the mist are a couple of up-tempo tracks—”Did You See the Words” and “The Purple Bottle”—and the lyrics, which had me recalling (not so fondly) the first time I took acid, in ninth grade, and spent two hours dealing with a talking enchilada entrée. One minute they’re singing about staring into a mirror naked and the next they’re screaming about a hot tub: it’s like some Bret Easton Ellis nightmare starring Jim Morrison. Also, a note to whichever member is responsible for the eleventy-hundred tracks of piano on this album: dude, it’s cool to lay off the sustain pedal sometimes, nothing bad will happen. Especially when you’re already dealing with endless tracks of tape delay, loops of percolating bong hits, men imitating roosters, real birds chirping, dulcimer, pennywhistle, and a quartet of aesthetes cha
nneling their spirit animals while a bell chimes in the distance.
Don’t be fooled into thinking Animal Collective’s recent collaboration with neofolk icon Vashti Bunyan is a sign of their psych authority—if Feels is to be taken at face value, they’ll be foisting Andreas Vollenweider on us next.
TYLER, THE CREATOR: WOLF
SPIN magazine, April 2005
It’s easy to understand why the Internet swooned so hard when Tyler, The Creator first floated along and pricked our bubble. In 2010, hip-hop was mostly a bunch of old, rich dudes resting hard on their old, rich-dude laurels; Odd Future were all manner of teenage lewdness, Fuck You heroes, too much talent and no dough. They were the punkest thing to happen to hip-hop since Jesus was a boy. At their molten center, Tyler emerged as a roach-swallowing emcee terrible, a seething-in-self-loathing, Eminem-weaned skate rat doling harsh tokes just for the delight of seeing olds squirm. He wasn’t interested in being hip-hop’s messiah as much as its smirking antichrist.
Last year, in these very pages, Tyler prepped us for the evolution we should expect on Wolf—now that he’s found success, he’s gotta rap about what he’s reaping; it would be disingenuous to front like he’s still sleeping on a couch. A quick inventory of what Goblin-success wrought: a four-story house, European model pussy, QT with Bieber. He fessed that he’d grown weary of that imma-rape-you steez, so there’s none of that here (it’s cool brah, Rick Ross got you covered). Tyler’s created tangible distance from the bratty rage of, say, Bastard’s “AssMilk,”—the girls on Wolf are all alive and willing.
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic Page 13