Posts tagged pazz & jop
Feelingz
A blabberblog
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What’s that about? What’s that about?
In addition to my lovely wife, there are a couple other good bits already on the internet about how Mr. Klosterman completely mis-represents and doesn’t bother to get at why people have responded to tUnE-yArDs. I think this is probably the best, and the Village Voice’s Supplemental Reading Suggestions would probably have made for better reading in advance of Chuck’s piece than her Wikipedia page.
This side of the internet has agreed that casually tossing personal insults at tUnE-yArDs is dumb. And we should be able to agree that Chucky’s piece was more than a little tossed off, and ended up being about the last thing that Klosterman actually meant to discuss
Because Chuck Klosterman doesn’t really care about tUnE-yArDs, w h o k i l l, why his wife might like it so much, or whether or not she is androgynous or asexual (the difference between the two).
It is difficult to tell that this is what the essay is about, because Klosterman buries his thesis in his second footnote:
It now seems super-funny that so many people once believed Arrested Development was among the most important bands of the early 1990s. The idea of anyone advocating the merits of Fischerspooner now seems totally ridiculous. It somehow seems crazy that Cornershop was previously viewed as luminous, even though their songs still sound good to me. It’s just an impossible problem: We always want to reward art for being innovative, but most artistic innovations are not designed to hold up over time. They exist as temporary reactions to other things happening within the culture. And that means they will seem goofy and dated when the culture changes again.
What he wants to talk about is the weird critical revisionism that takes place as things become canonized—the phenomenon that leads us to giggle when we remember that Spin Magazine named Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque the #1 album of 1991, then called Nevermind (also released in ‘91) the best album of the 90s (If my memory serves, Bandwagonesque did not appear on that list). Or, to pick on Spin again, that OK Computer was not even the highest-scoring album in the issue where they ran that review—that distinction belongs to the Geraldine Fibbers’ Butch. Both albums would eventually lose out on the Album of the Year to Cornershop’s When I Was Born for the 7th Time.
[note: I would rather listen to Bandwagonesque than Nevermind, but I have never been able to get much of a rise out of listening to Butch.]
What I think Klosterman wants to talk about is what happens to a Teenage Fanclub, or a Geraldine Fibbers (or an Arrested Development) after that moment has passed? Talking to one of the guys from Teenage Fanclub or Cornershop actually would have offered some perspective (or context) for the “doom” he’s predicting for Merrill. Cornershop even placed an album at #258 on Pazz & Jop last year! It would have been a timely contrast, especially since Cornershop are a serious artifact of the 90’s We Forgot that I wrote about the last time I dug into tUnE-yArDs.
But, Klosterman being Klosterman, he was both too lazy to explore that curiosity, AND he so thoroughly beat the article up with his schtick stick that all most readers focused on was “asexual,” “puppeteer,” “I’ve barely listened to w h o k i l l” and “Cop Rock.” And all of those things should be rebutted. He says at the beginning:
The album w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs was just named record of the year by voters in the 2011 Pazz & Jop poll.
I’m guessing this doesn’t mean much to more than (maybe) 10,000 people in the entire country. In fact, if you effortlessly understood 100 percent of this article’s opening sentence, you can probably skip the rest of the piece.
BUT CHUCK, YOU KNOW NO ONE WILL.
Also, I didn’t have room for this in the rest of this piece, but I 100% agree with Klosterman on one thing: It took me a LOT longer to listen to a critically-acclaimed album called w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs than it would have to listen to a critically-acclaimed album called Whokill by Tune-Yards.
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Maybe you already have, but read this Chuck Klosterman piece on tUnE-yArDs.
Then, compare it to this Andy Rooney segment on fruit.
Jen Girdish » Blog Archive » Is Chuck Klosterman the Next Andy Rooney?
My lovely wife has a nice rant over on her site about the ol’ Klosterman dust-up. I offered her the line “Andy Rooney sticks up for lemons the way Chuck Klosterman sticks up for Ratt.”, but she decided to go another way.
I also have a few Feelingz about this skirmish (and the P&J poll in general), but mine have less redeeming social value than Jen’s. So read hers first and then come back and maybe I’ll have felt my Feelingz up here by then.
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Tune-Yards & the 90's we forgot
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.
