marathonpacks:

For those of you who saw Tune-Yards’ whokill win the critics’ poll and went “ugggggghhhhh,” what is it that you don’t like about the album (or the artist)? I’m honestly not trolling here, I promise! I love the album (it was my #1), but I understand that her election as President Of Music doesn’t come with a mandate or anything. She’s still sold less than 50k, her victory was perhaps aided by vote-splitting because of the Internet’s Horn Of Plenty, and so on. But for those who hate whokill and/or Tune-Yards, what is it? Not a lot of bad stuff has been written about whokill this year. Is it:

• Her “feral and/or primal” aesthetic?
• Her unique singing voice?
• Her use of loop pedals and/or ukeleles? 
• Her political edge and/or feminism?
• Her appropriation of au courant West African musical signifiers and/or the use of “gangsta”?
• Her pre-emptive recognition of such appropriation, which she embeds into the music itself?
• UGGGGGGH INDIE?
• The fact that she doesn’t represent “2011 music” as well as _____________?
• EDIT: Her UnCoNvEnTiOnAl UsE oF OrThOgRaPhY? (thanks to Tom)

Ol’ marathonpacks is lightly trolling (Only lightly!) for objections to Tune-Yards on the occasion of her coronation atop the Pazz & Jop poll. Personally, I like Tune-Yards (Even tUnE-yArDs!) pretty well, though not with the intensity that the P&J voters seem to. I saw and enjoyed her early show at the Black Cat in DC a few months ago, and I paid money and purchased w h o k i l l on vinyl when I started buying records last year. I haven’t listened to it, but I will.

But at that Black Cat show, I had a few things about Merrill’s milieu that were actually the impetus for starting this tumblr (At the time, I said to my wife, “I have so many feeeeeeeelinggggzzzz about this” and then joked the name of this blog). I never got around to writing it because I got distracted crawling into the ol’ Lulu wormhole. So, I thought I’d take this as an opportunity to get all those feelingz back out. Here goes!

We are, allegedly, in the midst of a 90’s revival, what with the ATDI, GBV and Pavement reunions and Smashing Pumpkins reissues… Whatever. But as a wee boy in high school in the mid-to-late 90s, in addition to Wilco and Pavement and Whiskeytown and Radiohead and Pavement and Modest Mouse, alt-weekly rags and college radio were pushing another cohort of indie that had less to do with traditional ‘rock,’ but were making a form of pop music that was engaging with their Tribe Called Quest records—Soul Coughing and Morphine act as prominent examples.

Similarly, though it’s strange to remember now, but Ani DiFranco’s run from Not a Pretty Girl to Little Plastic Castle had her positioned—at least to the eyes of someone who was voraciously consuming this stuff from ‘95-‘99—to have some kind of Nirvana-esque (for lack of a better term) breakthrough. Merrill surely absorbed this, as she said she listened to a lot of that in high school (I guess we’re the sameish age?).

Soul Coughing and Ani both incorporate strains of the “performance art” that got a lot of play as identity politics came back to the foreground in the Clinton era. They used Capital-P Poetic speak-sing styles and an exploration of otherness that fits comfortably with Merrill’s “What’s that about“s. The irritating capitalization and spacing also calls to mind the glory days of Vivadixiesubmarientransmissionplot in form, if not content.

What separates w h o k i l l ’s influence-appropriation from something like, say, Yuck, is that we’ve spent a lot of time re-hashing Dinosaur Jr (who came roaring back recently) or Yo La Tengo (who haven’t been away, god bless ‘em), so the touchpoints are fresh in our minds. I don’t know of anyone in the indie blog ecosystem who’s still spending a lot of time with those late 90’s stylistic dead ends.

It’s interesting that this is coming back now, after indie rock has spent the last decade teasing out different ways to incorporate dance & spoken word to the pallatpalate, that one of the most successful entries comes so close to where we wound up in the 90s.

AND THAT’S WHAT I FEEL ABOUT TUNE-YARDS.