The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic

by Jessica Hopper

  To be a rock star involves more than just charisma, or good songs, or talent (talent usually least of all). One must be a capable player and have an appealing image—and, perhaps, most of all, a clear confidence that one deserves to be in front of an audience. In that regard, Annie Clark is a natural-born rock star; she just happens to be working below the arena radar. She doesn’t disagree. “There are plenty of things I am not confident about, but this I can do.”

  CAT POWER: SUN

  SPIN magazine, September 2012

  Chan Marshall insists that her ninth album isn’t political, but in America in 2012, what’s more politicized than the right to live as you please? Sun is hardly sloganeering, but its Power to the People ruminations are more potent and topical than you’d expect from a pop record—and certainly one made by Cat Power.

  You’d think a polemic dispatch from the thick of Koch Brothers-fuelled culture war might result Cat Power hitting new depths of emotional dispossession, but lo! Marshall instead loses some of her famous ethereal malaise and conjures vampy disdain. There is a power to it; it is empowered. Which pushes Sun away from the rest of her discography (Moon Pix, for example), in that Marshall now sounds engaged with the pain of the world, no longer a mere interpreter of (her own) malady. Even her most joyous album, The Greatest, seemed to amount to stylized pain with the doomed singer as a medium, a conduit harmed by all that she was divining. No one expected valedictory rebirth—’specially her, as she implies on opener “Cherokee,” that if her time here is cut short, it will be by her own hand, given her request to be buried upside-down—an 18th-century practice to prevent suicides from haunting the earth. Touching on her own mortality before she hits her album’s second verse is the only predictable Cat Power move Marshall makes here.

  But that life-or-death bit isn’t morbidity so much as candor. Sun sheds the myopia inherent in depression; Marshall repeatedly insists that she’s here, with us, and it feels like a revelation. It’s a Mary J. Blige power position, self-assured and strong (the first line of “Cherokee” quotes the Missy Elliott-penned “Never Been,” from Blige’s No More Drama). What we get is not so much a new Cat Power as the true Cat Power: She’s been to the brink and emerged on the other side to share her testimony. Akin to her profligate Miami neighbor Rick Ross on his own latest, Marshall is showing us her consciousness, her empathy—if her tears are there, they’re on the inside.

  This record is more about “you” and the collective “we,” and on “Human Being,” she attempts to shred the distance between “them” and “us”: “See the people on TV / Get shot in their very own street / People just like you, people just like me.” The album’s denouement, “Nothin But Time,” opens with a similar I-feel-you salvo:

  I see you, kid, you got the weight on your mind

  I see you’re just trying to get by

  Heart-heavy but with her hope still afloat, she affirms and names the kid’s pain; it’s a different kind of vulnerability than what we’re used to from her. Later, she sings, “Never never give up what you always wanted / Never ever give in,” and the you’s turn to I’s. She caps the song ecstatically, bellowing “I wanna live!” alongside Iggy Pop, but nine songs in, she’d already disabused us of any doubt.

  Musically, Sun is a new trick for Marshall as well. A tribute to her belief that contemporary R&B has the power to salve, the self-produced album’s sound is closer to the street and further from the bedroom. There is still some guitar (Marshall’s lead on “Cherokee”, the Judah Bauer-sampling “Ruin”), but the record is driven by synths-and-drums slinkiness, Marshall’s attempt to mimic the contemporary Top 40 hip-hop and soul records she loves. And though it’s still probably best qualified as “indie”—as it is not crystalline and Katy Perry-fied—it possesses none of the sonic modesty that tag usually shorthands. It’s closer to Gaga than Grimes, but no less for it’s allegiances. “Ruin” builds on a house-y piano 8, and then explodes into a disco-Stones vamp. Finally, a Cat Power song you can dance to.

  Elsewhere, Sun’s title track could work as the plot synopsis for Lars von Trier’s Melancholia; on “Ruin,” she “wants out / Want on my own,” and follows that up with “Always on My Own,” which is more a dirge-y interlude than a song, the titular sentiment delivered more as a statement of fact than a complaint. The album’s one throwaway is “3,6,9,” notable for its Ying Yang Twins quotation: The lyrical “monkey on my back” cliché is beneath her, and anyway, fans tend to over-marvel whenever an indie darling even acknowledges hip-hop, though Marshall’s been a vocal proponent for years. (She’s probably listening to some lesser DJ Khaled posse cut as you read this.)

  Speaking of which, album closer “Peace and Love” has the same locomotive chug as her beloved Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” but in treacle-time with minor chords, though her Hova-esque, rags-to-riches ambition suggests she’s harder than we think: “I’m a lover but I’m in it to win,” she crows, lest you mistake someone with nine albums as unmotivated. On the quite perfect single, “Ruin,” she tacitly tackles first-world privilege, quasi-rapping (!) a range of far-flung locales she’s visited—”Dhaka / Calcutta / Soweto / Mozambique / Istanbul”—over a swift 4/4 stomp, before returning to God Blessed America, where people are “bitchin’, moaning” despite the fact that “some people ain’t got shit to eat.” It’s the sort of sneering indictment you expect from M.I.A., not the woman who wrote the louche’s anthem “Lived in Bars.”

  But Sun’s absolute standout is “Manhattan,” a quiet meditation on the island’s pre-9/11 meaning, with the Statue of Liberty framed as the metaphorical woman behind a successful Man(hattan), a beacon of freedom that lures people from all over America (and the world) with the promise that you can be who you want to be here. It’s subtler than patriotism; the abstraction is a nostalgic ruing for that old-fashioned American freedom (not the 2012 GOP’s hijacked late-stage-capitalism-amok-in-your-uterus version), the sort that might entice a young girl to move up from Georgia with just a lamp, a chair and her guitar.

  This is the album’s heart, with Marshall cooing her thrall for the moon that hangs above the city over a soft, motorik beat: “Liberty in the basement light / Free speech / Lipstick in the moonlight.” It’s liberty as we learned it in school: The chance to live the life of your secret dreams, unencumbered by who you were in another town, a different life, to come to this place where freedom is so free you can take it for granted. The song is full of sweetness and a knowing sadness, and it’s one of the finest Marshall’s ever written.

  Recent Cat Power profiles and early Sun reviews take pains to mention a recent breakup with a bold name that happened three years after this self-guided, self-recorded odyssey of Marshall’s began; we’ve made assumptions, despite her insistence that Sun isn’t a breakup album. (Said assumptions are forgivable, of course: Soft agony has been her idiom since the ‘90s.) But it’s clear that her years spent bringing this record into the light—perfecting her own drumming so she could sample it, building songs bit by bit from the eagle drop on “Cherokee” to the chinging castanets on “Peace and Love”—made her vision that much stronger. Marshall has admitted she wept when someone at Matador told her the album’s early demos sounded like “old, sad Cat Power.” You can hear the fight to be understood, to show us not who she was, but who she is: a free woman in Miami, to misquote Joni Mitchell, fettered and alive. Sun is a spirited violation of what we think we know about her, content to show us a different kind of discontent.

  SWF, 45: MECCA NORMAL’S THE OBSERVER

  Chicago Reader, April 2006

  Mecca Normal’s new album, The Observer, is hard to listen to. Not for the usual reasons—it doesn’t suck. What makes it tough going is the same thing that makes it great: subtitled “A Portrait of the Artist Online Dating,” it’s so mercilessly personal it’s hard to believe it can exist in the pop-music marketplace, let alone anywhere outside of a diary. A concept album about Jean Smith’s romantic life as a single woman of 45, it develops a grim, intimate
picture of the solitary struggle for connection that doesn’t go easy on anyone—not Smith, not the men she dates and certainly not the audience.

  The pop canon is full of songs about romantic longings and failures, so that we’ve been conditioned to expect certain story arcs, delivered in each genre’s codified language—blues and its backdoor men, contemporary R&B and its baby boos, classic rock and its lonely motel rooms. There’s pleasure in having our sufferings and hopes reaffirmed, however approximately, by such archetypes. But Mecca Normal, the Vancouver duo of Smith and guitarist David Lester, have spent two decades hammering away at musical and social convention. They’re overtly political artists—anarchist-feminists both, they’ve developed a traveling workshop called “How Art and Music Can Change the World”—and their loose, abrasive, drumless songs don’t rest easily in any genre. And even coming from them, The Observer is startling.

  When we listen to music it’s natural to try to relate to the singer’s experience or inhabit it as our own, but getting invited along on Smith’s blind dates and hookups is discomfiting to say the least—as a storyteller, she skips the niceties and just plunks everything down on the table. “He tries to put the condom on / He curses / I try to see what he is doing,” she sings in her low, acidic croon. “But I’m pinned beneath him / I hear him stretching the condom like he’s making a balloon animal.”

  All but a couple of the album’s 12 songs are connected to its basic theme of relationships between the sexes, and half are diaristic synopses of actual dates Smith went on with men she met at Lavalife.com. She’s a sharp, literate lyricist, prosaic rather than melodic—right now she’s at work on her fourth novel—and her attention to detail and detached, acerbic tone make The Observer a particularly apt title. Though each diary song is a separate scene, with each man allowed his own particulars, they’re unified by Smith’s blunt portrayal of herself—we learn about her as a date, not just an artist, and she makes a messy, inconsistent impression, veering from cynical and judgmental to petulant and needy.

  On the album’s centerpiece, the 12-minute “Fallen Skier,” she skips between snippets of dinner conversation and an internal monologue about her date, a 47-year-old student and recovering addict who describes himself as a “fallen waiter/ski bum/party guy.” From the moment she says “guy,” drawing it out and accenting the word, you can tell she’s mocking him. She repeats his story without sympathy, sounding frustrated, almost disgusted: “I feel I’m with a boy, a very young boy / He’s only been away from home for 27 years / Only 27 summers, 27 winters / Partying and skiing / I guess that’s why he hasn’t gotten anything together yet / I don’t think he realizes it, but his life has gotten away from him.” When he seems concerned that her band might play hardcore punk, she makes a half-indignant aside that lightens the mood: “I stand, a middle-aged woman in a fantastically subtle silk jacket / Hush Puppies / Curly hair blowing in the wind / And this guy’s fretting over the possibility / That I’m actually Henry Rollins.” But almost immediately her complaints begin to boomerang, telling us as much about her as they do about him. “He never asked the name of my band,” she says, “never tried to touch me.” Suddenly she sounds vulnerable, even wounded; though her date’s clearly wrong for her, she can’t keep herself from wanting to be interesting and desirable to him. When she hugs him good-bye at the end of their chemistry-free evening, it’s unclear which one of them she’s trying to console.

  The Observer is a harsh toke, but it’s compelling on all fronts—Smith’s lyrics force you to think about loneliness, need and bad dates, but the songs are as engrossing as they are exhausting. Her voice flits and dips like a plastic bag in the wind, moving from a moany sort of sung-speech to a deep, silky quaver to a thick, shrill trilling, and she often drawls out her words like she’s trying to fill the room with distended consonant sounds. The self-explanatory album opener, “I’m Not Into Being the Woman You’re With While You’re Looking for the Woman You Want,” is a glowing example of the interplay between her vocals and Lester’s guitar, which is equally distinctive and powerful. On “To Avoid Pain” the duo toys with early-’60s pop country as Smith hee-haws like a half-drunk Brenda Lee, trying to talk herself down on the way to a first-time hookup: “Take a city bus / To a downtown hotel / I don’t feel weird / I don’t feel weird / Ask me / Ask me / Ask me if I do.” Then, as a dark, discordant synth tone rises out of the music, she eagerly proclaims a dubious victory over her own unease: “Soon enough it’s true-ooo!”

  On “I’ll Call You,” Lester’s buzz-saw guitar gallops around Smith as she reads a fake personal ad—her version of what a truthful guy would say—that sounds like it was placed by a member of the Duke lacrosse team. “Attraction Is Ephemeral,” which provides the most complete picture of Smith and what she’s about—the way she begins to doubt her own doubts, wondering if she’d be able to spot genuineness in a man even if it were there—is also the most musically moving track on the album. It’s the most romantic, too, or rather, it’s most explicitly about romance and the yearning for it; though, in typical Mecca Normal fashion, it does so while addressing gender and class inequality, patriarchy, and how they can really ruin a date.

  In press releases and online materials, Smith provides links to photos she’s used in her dating profile, including shots where she’s posing in her underwear and others where she’s wearing nothing but the ribbon in her hair. But given how unpleasant The Observer makes her dating life out to be, it’s hard to argue that the pictures are just convenient exhibitionism—if you’re gonna use sex to sell records, you don’t usually linger on the vulnerability that intimacy requires.

  In the band bio, Smith notes her reluctance to make an album about dating—as evidenced by the fallout late last year over the book Are Men Necessary? by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, romance is a loaded topic among the feminist cognoscenti, perhaps because it’s considered unseemly for a feminist to openly admit to wanting something from men (or caring enough to be disappointed with them). Dowd claims that successful men don’t want competition from their partners, and thus tend to date or marry down, choosing women who are younger, less educated and less accomplished. Though she makes her argument largely with generalizations, as opposed to Smith’s nuanced particulars, both writers are suggesting the same thing—independent women wind up alone.

  Smith is forthcoming about the concessions she makes for intimacy. While she holds to her standards with men who aren’t good enough, she swallows her pride and sells herself out to others who don’t have much idea who she is or much interest in finding out. But her artistic integrity never wavers, and throughout it’s clear she knows herself and understands the choices she’s making. It’s a brave act for her to admit that she quietly shushes the “difficult” parts of herself in order to connect with men: she is airing a common secret of women’s lives.

  SHOUTING OUT LOUD: THE RAINCOATS

  Portland Mercury, October 2009

  These days, The Raincoats legacy is most often defined by who remembered them. In 1992, Kurt Cobain recalled in his Incestide liner notes that the British post-punk girl band’s debut album had served him as a life-saving device, a reprieve from his depression and boredom; something cool he wished in on. The plaintive mash notes of punk’s living Jesus revivified The Raincoats at the time when we needed it most, amid the grunge boom. Underground, there was riot-grrrl salvation and Fugazi, sure, but up top, cool was Pearl Jam (not yet sanctified, or anything more than macho qua rebellious) and the best-selling album of the year was Whitney’s last stand, The Bodyguard soundtrack.

  In 1994, when DGC re-issued the trio of records that constituted The Raincoats’ discography, the band needed someone to co-sign their artistry. (We can forgive the too-typical fact that the rock star boy’s stamp of approval was necessary to accept the genius girl’s work.) Cobain was the acceptable boy bridge to girl culture, he was part of popping the escape hatch to a better world, his endorsement served as a kind of atonement for the crush of
corpogrunge that Nirvana’s success accidentally seeded. Then, as now, we needed The Raincoats, to stave off the boredom and depression because there was still no other band quite like them.

  This week Kill Rock Stars has re-issued The Raincoats’ self-titled 1979 debut album on vinyl and the timing couldn’t be more perfect. As we are mired in an epic wave of aesthetics-first, and the post-ironic post-punk era hath wrought an inscrutable wave of bands utterly resistant to meaning (swastikas as album “decoration”/neon hippie bullshit, et al.)—The Raincoats serves up a reminder that discernible earnestness doesn’t automatically signify emo, and having meaning doesn’t mean the work isn’t open to dynamic interpretation. People keep tending to The Raincoats’ legacy with good reason. They were special, yet absolute everygirls, making music that was/is personal, expressive, artful and is full of joy.

  Cobain’s notes imagined the band perhaps making him a cup of tea, which would be very polite and grandmotherly (though maybe the offer of a spot of tea is what all people expect of British women) coming from a trenchant band. Maybe it’s because on the opening track, “Fairytale in the Supermarket,” Ana da Silva sings about cups of tea marking time, right after she shouts outs in a derailing, winding, defiant yelp, “No one teaches you how to live!”—she sounds like she figured it out anyhow. She sounds like the kind of woman no one teaches anything.