Lay Down Thy Raincoat And Groove
Look, I read about them a year ago and yes I was leery about them and yes I acidly declared to nobody in particular that I’d sooner blow my brains out than listen to them. I held out. I didn’t believe the hype. I swear.

Sooner or later, though, the best pop music slices right through your prejudices and leaves you helplessly euphoric. So it is with these guys.



I don’t think I can even begin to find words to describe the joy Vampire Weekend’s music brings me. I don’t think I can do that because all I want to do is sing along to the melodies and tap out the beats on any and all flat surfaces within my reach. Peter Hook once said his ultimate criterion for judging music was whether or not he could hum the tune in question while working on his bike. I don’t own a bike but I would gladly buy a Harley just to hum Vampire Weekend while working on it.

I went back in the Google time machine to relive the debates surrounding the release of their album a year ago. Boy, were there some extreme reactions. The Village Voice took a blowtorch to the band while Simon Reynolds (unimpeachable as always) recently called their debut the album of the year. I can’t resist commenting on some of the criticisms I’ve read:

The furor over their alleged preppie pretensions is easy for me to shrug off because most of the social circles here on the East Coast have always seemed a bit strange in my view. At my giant, deracinated state school in sunny southern California it was a sign of stuffiness to wear long pants, so why should I care about WASPy references to Oxford commas and Cape Cod? Similarly, is name-checking Washington Heights any different to me than lines about cheerless flats in Salford?

I can happily aver that I have no problem listening to a band influenced by Paul Simon’s “Graceland” because a hoary 45-year old rock star raiding African music to resuscitate a flagging career is a world or six apart from four kids playing a mash-up of whatever styles of music they had on their iPods in a given semester. “Graceland” sounded toxic to so many of us because Simon was obviously fishing for credibility. Vampire Weekend don’t sound like upper class snots ripping off “World Music”. They sound like a campus party band along the lines of Camper Van Beethoven. Do they not get a pass because they went to Columbia instead of UC Santa Cruz? Isn’t that kind of dumb?

Lastly—and this is the main point, I think—the current state of music doesn’t really allow for denouncing certain artists as elitist, pretentious, fake, featherweight, shameless thieves, etc. I’ll only discuss why they’re doing it the wrong way if someone can show me an example of another artist doing it the right way. To wit: the other night on the street I was surprised to turn a corner and hear M.I.A. going on about “lethal poison for the system”. The song was bumping from inside an Applebee’s.

So even if Vampire Weekend represent a problem, and I don’t think they do, there are bigger issues to address. No matter what form it takes, in 2009 going puritanical in the name of authenticity is an arbitrary and pointless act. Cue Martin Sheen’s voiceover: “It was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500”.

I’m just sorry I waited a whole damn year.
Posted: 6/22/2009
Take The Skinheads Bowling
Camper Van Beethoven.
In 1996, apparently tired of veiling his sentiments in too-clever-by-half indie cuteness, David Lowery announced that he hated his generation. Mind you, this was in Cracker, his more accessible outfit; he gave to his screed the conciliatory title "I Hate My Generation". But for contempt for his contemporaries Lowery retired the cup on Camper Van Beethoven's Telephone Free Landslide Victory with the two-and-a-half minute non-sequiter "Take The Skinheads Bowling". There has been no more definitive statement of college rock's abysmal failure as an "intelligent" offshoot of its neanderthal parent than this jaunty cult hit from 1985. Over artless suburban guitars and a metronomic beat Lowery intones lyrics of pure nonsense, cutting in with that famous Pythonesque chorus which makes fun of skinheads while subtly lampooning the tendency of glib anti-racists to make bold statements that actually mean nothing.

Perhaps this is the point of Lowery's putative "dream", teasing lyrics that come to sound like a mild repudiation of the use the politically correct make of Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech. In the first verse he sings "Had a dream last night but I forget what it was", a slacker Nebuchadnezzar. In the second he tells us more about this dream. Or maybe not:
Had a dream last night about you my friend
Had a dream I wanted to sleep next to plastic
Had a dream I wanted to lick your knees
Had a dream-- it was about nothing.
This was American college rock facing itself squarely in the mirror for one short but blissful moment. 'Skinheads' reads like an oblique confession that this sort of music in fact offered no transcendence, no escape, no higher meaning, nothing more than backing music for dorm room bacchanalia. The song's catchiness makes its irony all the crueller. Camper Van Beethoven, formed at UC Santa Cruz, became known as part of the original wave of bands linked together, fairly or not, because they combined smart, sarcastic, bookish lyrics-- oh, what quirkiness they had!-- with genre-twisting tunes as indebted to burlesque as they were to rock and roll; the subgenre included the Violent Femmes (on the punk tip) and They Might Be Giants (catering to nerds) and if you liked them you were probably a student.

Lowery's razor-sharp anger sets his songs apart from these acts. As arch as any of his peers, Lowery's songs also had an admirable streak of unalloyed meanness to them. "I Hate My Generation" merely puts in blunter terms the satiric observation in "Tania" (from Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, 1988), "Our lives have no meaning/And we want to be on television". But 'Skinheads', his first swipe, says it best because it says nothing at all. The song is a bland denial of meaning, humming along harmlessly with its tales of bowling skinheads and absurd dreams. I always think of the song as a knockout counterpunch to Sonic Youth's "Teenage Riot", Thurston Moore's inspiring but tellingly murky mythologizing of youth rock culture. For one brief moment Lowery sneakily showed the scene-- "college rock" in the States, "indie rock" in England-- how useless and impotent it really was. The salt in the wound is that he served up his doubts, as expressed in 'Skinheads', utterly without anxiety. Lowery understood that for his contemporaries the vacuousness of their dreams didn't matter to them then and probably never would. So far they haven't proved him wrong.
Posted: 10/30/2007
This charming man.
The effervescent "This Charming Man", the most well-known and anthologized Smiths track aside from "How Soon Is Now?", involves an erotic, albeit platonic, exchange between an older, more experienced man and a younger, impressionable boy who falls under his spell, the sort of relationship between two males in which an older or perhaps just wiser man urges self-sufficiency on another man. It's men more or less declaring independence from women (Morrissey referred to "male liberation" in early interviews), and so of course at times it's tinged with homoeroticism.

The lyric "He said, 'Return the ring'/He knows so much about these things" is along the same lines as "William, It Was Really Nothing", where the song encourages escape from a death sentence in the form of a woman who wants to become a wife in a humdrum town. The song gets to the heart of Morrissey's appeal because he himself is both a charming man whose advice we want and the kid with the punctured bicycle to whose woeful trials we can relate. The majority of his songs create a relationship between Morrissey and his listeners that mimics the relationship in "This Charming Man". There's something intensely and uniquely male about Morrissey's lyrics-- complemented by the imagery he chose for himself and his records-- that transmits the same message: male liberation from social straitjackets (possibly, but by no means necessarily, involving a turn toward homosexuality). As a listener you're constantly being told, in many ways in many songs, to forget everything you've been told to do to become a man.

I'd never for a moment claim that women can't fully enjoy and identify with his lyrics, but it's clear that, despite his claims to being genderless, there's a masculine core to Morrissey's writing. Again, not that it excludes women, but it's a useful observation to explain his popularity among young men, especially straight young men. Morrissey embodies handsomeness, wit, glamour, and sex while administering an often bitter dose of truth applicable to both sexes, but he's also giving male advice on how to be man. He's the older, more experienced, more charming man who takes on the role of a father, an uncle, or an older brother-- and like the "jumped up pantry boy" possibly a seducer. A fascinating relationship for a singer to have with his fans, unexampled in pop music. Other artists have shown how to shatter categories of maleness (like David Bowie for starters) but nobody else has pointed the way toward such a wide spectrum of male possibilities, from boxers and hooligans to effete bookworms and vicars in tutus.

There isn't a finer embodiment of this amazing triumph of Morrissey's than "This Charming Man". He rapidly sketches out the character of a lovelorn and confused young man enthralled by an older, stylish man who represents many kinds of freedom. "This charming man" has broken out of his given economic class, learned to accept himself, unshackled himself from the obligatory bonds of marriage, and evaded the frustratingly limited category of maleness to which the teenaged boy, in his bewilderment, finds himself about to be caught as he steps into the beartrap of adulthood.

"This Charming Man" also showcases not only Morrissey's conceptual brilliance but the greatness of Marr, Rourke and Joyce, too. The song is The Smiths in a nutshell: freedom from class, sex, and traditional male-female relationships, all of which Morrissey evokes, but-- perhaps most importantly of all-- it's freedom found by thinking less, by caring less, by simply surrendering to the erotic smoothness of a leather car seat and the charms of an older man-- or by extension a pop singer with gladioli coming out his backside-- all in an infectiously danceable two minutes, forty-seven seconds.

This is the kind of synergy that transcends Morrissey and Marr as separate artists. The music, written and played by a tight, three-piece unit, punctuates Morrissey's lyrics in an incredibly effective way, just as Morrissey's words add dimensions to the playing. The lyrics argue that one shouldn't get hung up on social orthodoxies ("see how your rules spoil the game" as he put it later) but the solution, as I said above, is not an argument at all but the mind's taking a back seat (in this case literally) to the senses, a surrender to the seductiveness of car-seats, pop music, clothes, handsomeness.

A writer can put those themes on paper, but they will quickly sink unless pushed along by wave after wave of deeply affecting rock and roll. The imperative is aesthetic rather than intellectual. It's "just" pop music-- but what power pop music has in this case! Morrissey and The Smiths expanded pop music not by trying to get beyond it but seizing and transforming all its rules. All its rules, that is, except the most crucial one of all. That rule, In the most basic terms, states that whatever lessons you might draw from the lyrics, you can also listen to the song at a show or a club and-- to put this scientifically-- shake your ass. You can do that with "This Charming Man". You can also tap your pencil, change the oil in your car, or cartwheel across the village green to its voluptuous bounce and crackle.

As distinguished as Morrissey's solo career has been, he's had fewer songs of that kind than he had with The Smiths. The difference between Morrissey solo and The Smiths can be heard in songs like "This Charming Man", but also between the many solo songs that have the same blissful chemistry between singer and musicians, like "Everyday Is Like Sunday", "I've Changed My Plea To Guilty", "Tomorrow", or "Irish Blood, English Heart", and those that don't. When they work, they work because they are complete pop songs, and their greatness gives the lie to the notion that Morrissey is really a man of letters slumming in a "lower" medium whose words and voice alone can instantly spiff up any old backing track into a rousing song. Sadly there are times when Morrissey seems to have forgotten this rule.
Posted: 7/10/2006
Morrissey's Politics
"Rhyming Social Critiques"?
[In response to critic Armond White's Slate article about "Ringleader Of The Tormentors" and Morrissey's politics. White's thesis is that the record is a richly observed document of the political atmosphere in America under Bush, and that Morrissey's political views, expressed in songs like "I Will See You In Far Off Places" and in the inner sleeve photograph of Morrissey posing next to "Smash Bush" graffitti in Rome, was a tour de force of self-conscious irony meant to bolster liberal politics. The article is here.]

"Smash Bush" is absolutely transparent. It means exactly what it appears to mean. There is nothing "sly" or "clever" about this image or Morrissey's political statements in general. Given the depth and nuances of his lyrics as a whole, it is possible for such "found" sloganeering (posing next to graffitti) to afford different interpretations, but the gesture itself is pure, insoluble, and resists easy synthesis with the rest of his work.

Because of the irony in Morrissey's lyrics, record sleeves, concerts, and indeed his entire public persona, getting a firm grasp of who he is and what he's trying to say is often difficult. White correctly notes that he is a man of contradictions, but the review doesn't grant these contradictions to exist as such. He seems to believe there is some riddle to puzzle out, the answer (to which he never really arrives) passed off as Morrissey's intelligent manipulation of words and images to bring a sense of self-conscious ambivalence to politics.

In fact, White's misreading of "Smash Bush" sinks his thesis. No deeper understanding of Morrissey's political views is granted to anyone who cannot accept that Morrissey loves agitprop. Graffitti on a wall is central to his "method" and always has been, starting with "Meat Is Murder". His politics are marked by intransigence and crudeness-- and sometimes irrationality and petulance-- even when they come across as cheeky or whimsical. If his support for animal rights groups is any indication, his view of politics comes from a deep, intense well of emotions, and it's a view which proudly defies critical exegesis. I say "proudly" because on these points-- politics and vegetarianism, namely-- Morrissey intentionally cracks us on the head and then lets them decide how the bump on our crown matches up with this charming man.

Recommending Morrissey as a politically astute artist to any audience is thus a tricky proposition, and even more so to a savvy audience like Slate's. I imagine a few readers will remember that Morrissey said, on the occasion of Ronald Reagan's death, that he'd wished it had been Bush instead. Or they might have read somewhere that Morrissey has likened Bush and Tony Blair to terrorists, and released a statement backing John Kerry in 2004. Or they might have recalled some obscure bit on the web about how Morrissey gave explicit support to extremist animal rights groups in their tactical use of blackmail and violence. I agree with White that Morrissey's politics aren't as simple as they seem-- in the wider context of Morrissey's records, all of these positions are mitigated by opposing ones-- but the contradictions themselves can't be written away so easily.

Better instead to talk up these contradictions as evidence of Morrissey's real claim to greatness: his ascendancy to the true royalty of our popular entertainers. While I would take issue with the notion that Morrissey has been the most influential pop star of the last 20 years, I would readily agree that he is one of the few, and maybe the only, genuine pop star-- in the classical Elvis/Beatles sense-- to have graced our headphones in that span of time. And like the greatest of our pop heroes, his genius thwarts and frustrates our attempts to make sense of him. With someone like Morrissey, critics can run in circles all day if they like, discussing this or that facet of his art, but ultimately they won't get any closer to cracking the vault. As tiresome and self-defeating as it might be for a critic, there's really only one question to answer about an album like "Ringleader Of The Tormentors": will we hum it in the shower?
Posted: 5/4/2006
Morrissey and Godard
Jean-Luc Godard.
A track on Morrissey's new LP, "Ringleader of The Tormentors", includes in interesting link to Jean-Luc Godard. "At Last I Am Born" features the line "Look at me now/From difficult child to spectral hand to Claude Brasseur". The 70-year old actor was recently spotted at a Morrissey concert in Paris, whether out of admiration for the singer (unlikely) or simple curiosity (probably) I cannot say. Brasseur, of course, starred with Anna Karina and Sami Frey in "Bande A Part", and while the link is tangential, the mention of Brasseur, along with the iconic Alain Delon image on "The Queen Is Dead", invites us to imagine a keen interest in French cinema on Morrissey's part. So I'm guessing Morrissey knows Godard's work: if you're an English or American obsessed with pop culture in general, and films in particular, then for all intents and purposes Jean-Luc Godard is French cinema.

This is surprising, because Godard's work has little in common with Morrissey's. Even in his first "commercial" phase, when his movies were just difficult and not completely undigestible, Godard pushed narrative filmmaking to its limits, becoming more and more experimental, especially with sound and imagery, throughout the Sixties. Arriving about halfway between "Breathless", his most "conventional" film (ha!), and the prohibitively experimental Maoist films of the early Seventies, "Bande A Part" (1964) is one of the handful of movies he made that strikes a nice balance between electrifying homages to American pop culture and the arid hinterlands of avant garde cinema theory. It was the first Godard film I saw, and I fell in love with it and Godard's entire aesthetic-- not immediately, but once I figured out what he was doing about 30 minutes into the movie. Still, as much as Godard's earlier forays into groundbreaking cinema were full of humor, sex, and love of pop culture, they generally sacrifice warmth for intellect after the Brechtian tactics he admired.

Despite this, I have always looked at Godard and the New Wave as having one striking similarity to the British films Morrissey loved as a child. Filmmakers on both sides of the channel, while differingly greatly in artistic method, sought to bring cinema's focus to the working classes. They all wanted to explore a more direct, human, and poetically truthful vision of life. The British films seem to be more straightforward with their narratives-- the drama itself is the innovation-- whereas the French filmmakers (Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Resnais, Chabrol and others) tinkered with the filmmaking process itself, disrupting the received aesthetics of previous filmmakers and thereby challenging the audience not only to look at things they hadn't been used to seeing in mainstream (mostly American) cinema, but also to force them to confront the idea of film itself: what it is, how it works, the joys and perils of its many tricks and deceptions.

What's wonderful about the French filmmakers is that they loved Hollywood. Many of the auteurs they lionized in Cahiers du Cinema and elsewhere were either Americans or foreigners working in Hollywood (Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles, Fuller, Ray). "Bande A Part" crackles with Hollywood cool. Less so than "Breathless" and "A Woman Is A Woman", perhaps. But Godard liked playing with plots and tropes of Hollywood genre movies, and "Bande A Part" clearly comes from a sensibility steeped in our films and our pop culture in general, which accounts for the Madison. (The film is actually based on a pulp novel called "Fool's Gold", written by American Dolores Hitchens.) It's certainly ambivalent at times-- the characters are enslaved by their infatuation with pop culture-- and clearly Godard was working to escape the tradition of American cinema. But his films are clearly stamped with his passions, and it creates an exhilirating sense of glamour-in-the-gutter that typifies Morrissey's songs, especially the early Smiths records.

Morrissey loved the British "kitchen-sink" films like "A Taste of Honey" for their unflinching portrayal of "real" working people. Likewise, Godard always tried to put "real" people onscreen, with straight, almost documentary-style shots of their lives (using real rooms, natural lighting, long takes, intentionally allowing banalities or accidents to interrupt the illusion). Yet Morrissey was an unabashed fan of the glamour of celebrities, like Wilde or Elvis or, particularly, James Dean. Godard's tastes weren't quite as glitzy, but he and Morrissey would have had much to discuss in "Rebel Without A Cause". In 1957 a young Godard wrote in Cahiers: "After seeing 'Johnny Guitar' or 'Rebel Without A Cause', one cannot but feel that here is something which exists only in the cinema, which would be nothing in a novel, the stage or anywhere else, but which becomes fantastically beautiful on the screen".

Thus, a strong interest in "life as it is lived", as Morrissey once put it, mixed with an obsessive affinity for pop culture, makes it possible to note some fascinating affinities between Morrissey and Godard. Furthermore, it is interesting to ponder, however fruitless it may be, the effect of alienation in Godard's work in relation to his passions. Whatever impulses one may detect in Godard's celebration of pop, the vapors of self-criticism-- a kind of guilt-- hang heavy over his commitment to work in a popular medium (best seen in "Masculine Feminine", which marks his slow break from "bourgeois" filmmaking into explicit Marxism). Though he must have felt himself to be working in good faith, his mission was to elevate the commercial machinery of cinema into art, implying a project of rehabilitating or reinventing the medium. Likewise, Morrissey revels in pop music, attempting to deepen and enrich the medium, but only through a fuller use of its possibilities. He never subverts it the way Godard does. The difference illustrates a simple fact, one which tells us something we already knew about Godard, and contradicts something many claim about Morrissey: Godard is an intellectual. Morrissey is not.
Posted: 4/14/2006
 
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