Video
May 30, 2013

If you’ve spent your post-college years, as I have, engaged in an elliptical, mistrustful relationship with rock music, then The Men present a great argument against deferring to experience. Here’s a band that operates firmly in well-trodden territory in terms of instrumentation and song structure, seems to enjoy (sub)genre-hopping, and are the proud bearers of a name that evokes archetypical masculinity as much as anonymity. On paper, I wouldn’t see what’s so special about them. And that might lead me to assume that, like some of their peers, they have more to offer those who actively participate in a subculture built around cross-pollinating live shows and clearly defined ideals. In practice, however, I like just about everything they’ve done, even as they swing closer to a well-trodden traditionalist path.

New Moon, their album from earlier this year, is as guileless as rock music comes these days. Everything from the song titles (“Open the Door,” “I Saw Her Face,” “The Brass”) to the sludgy mix of piano, harmonica, and percussion, to the shared vocal duties seems deliberately candid. Mid-album ode “I Saw Her Face” is a mild-mannered onslaught of nostalgic references—it’s hard not hear a distorted echo of John Lennon’s “Oh Yoko” in the words “In the middle of a dream…I saw her face.” Or to think of Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” during that slightly garbled bridge on “Freaky.”

This tendency to search for neat reference points is the reason I don’t trust myself to make judgments on a piece of music until I’ve shaken off my literal tendencies by listening a few times. The problem is that straightforward “rock” music often sounds boring to me in the initial phase, to the extent that I can’t separate it from an overarching tradition, (a tradition that I’ve found more and more difficult to enjoy as I’ve learned to recognize its exclusionary foundations.) The Men somehow tap into my desire for musical touch points while also retaining an interesting identity.

I think this is due to the fact that the references are not implied, but are rather explicit, and are based on tune fragments and lyrical generalities— the things that are gateways to the listening experience (this reminds me of an essay I read about David Cronenberg wherein the author basically claimed that because the misogyny in his films is obvious, it’s not damaging.) Their songs are also well-constructed enough that several of them sound like country standards. Those characteristics make their music an explicit invitation to interpret. Nobody comes to the listening experience totally clean, so why not let your listeners revel in their own sullied, biased hearing?

With that technique in mind, it’s to their credit that The Men’s third album is a pretty uncool move in musical terms. See for instance the charmingly back porch pronunciation of “GI-TAR” in “Open the Door”, which kicks off the album. But then comes the road-stomping follow-up, “Half Angel Half Light,” and the Meat Puppets-like “Without a Face.” This mix of abrupt moments of stylistic contrast into an album with such a strong overarching tonal character indicates an amusing self-awareness. Repeated listens reveal existential complexity beneath the alliterative imagery. A current of disillusionment runs parallel to the flow of the songs (“The rape of time, shifting the seeds of my mind”), but somehow the music is cut with enough passion that it retains its essential feeling of faith. New Moon deliberately reverses the effect of including “Country Song” and “Candy” on their previous album, Open Your Heart.

So, yes, part of the appeal is that New Moon sounds like The Men are acknowledging a relationship with musicians that came before them. When I first heard “I Saw Her Face,” I thought it sounded like Neil Young and Crazy Horse, a classic country tune fed through Weld’s looming amplifiers. There’s probably no better musical Virgil than Young to help you sort through layers of nostalgia. He was responsible for both lyrical vagaries and homages to rural life with folk rock groups Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and his later solo career has wavered between messy guitar rock, aggressive message music, and periodic revivals of his folk-country roots. Sometimes those traditions were harshly abrupt: Tonight’s the Night’s sprawled-open visceral jam sessions followed closely on the heels of the spacious, enigmatic On the Beach (and who could forget the deliberately out-of-place Everybody’s Rockin’?) And Young himself once beautifully interpreted that pristine example of country-pop longing, “Oh, Lonesome Me.”

Music functions differently when it’s new to you and when you know what’s coming. Then there’s the after-echo that comes when you’re not actively listening to the music, sometimes a significant experience in itself. These iterations of the experience make listening emotionally complex. It’s possible also (and I think it’s true for me) that when music snakes its way into multiple aspects of the consumption experience it leaves the listener increasingly vulnerable to emotional dissonance.

In reality, music that is functionally abrasive often creates an aesthetically democratizing experience. Turn the sound up loud enough and you can more or less assume that everyone in the room is feeling the same thing. But I think there’s also a physical response that comes from mixing noisy elements with familiar song structure or harmonies— a kind of nagging desire for the fulfillment of overwhelming noise, constantly struck down by the specificity of personal associations. Neil Young and Crazy Horse were the first band to give me that kind of experience, which may be the main reason I think of them when I listen to New Moon. It’s something you often feel at live shows when a band will string along a four minute song into 10 or 20 minutes of distortion. And it’s something that’s present in a strangely concrete form in the music of The Men, where they waver between plaintive country songwriting, blaring guitar noise, and ragged but impassioned harmonies. Though their newest album engages most straightforwardly with nostalgia, there’s an even stronger implication that what you hear is always a mixture of what the music does to you and what you are doing to the music. New Moon’s construction seems to acknowledge that fact, even invite it, and it gives their every-man music a strange power of clarity through flexibility.

(Source: Spotify)

Tags: The Men Neil Young and Crazy Horse New Moon nostalgia listening

Video
May 15, 2013
2 notes

In his “Collaborators” interview about his role in the recording of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, Chilly Gonzales states that “harmony is still an underused musical weapon these days in the pop landscape.” He’s correct in observing that pop today tends to place a previously unheard of amount of attention on timbre and texture. In its most simplified form this is the justification for recycling older hits into new  confections that maintain the harmonics but none of the surface quality or emotional content of their progenitors. But I do take issue with his use of the word “still,” which glosses over the fact that harmony and melody were the primary factors in the composition of hundreds of years of classical music, were explored incessantly by most of the pop music of the 20th century, and remain the building blocks for the Western concept of ”songwriting”. 

Today’s pop music is deep in the process of freeing itself from those constraints, and reorganizing the priorities that go into the mass production of music, which feeds that powerful, uninterrupted stream of noise that comes from radio, television, and various other unavoidable outlets. Youtube plays a large role in mass media delivery but also in guiding attention towards different aspects of sound and emotive communication. It seems unfair to imply that there is some sort of uninterrupted neglect of a musical concept when to me it looks more like the internet is just starting to loosen the grip that our musical past has on us. I’d be inclined to argue that we gain more by pushing beyond those traditional frameworks than by trying to re-orient them as the central concern of popular music.

I should say that I don’t deny the value of focusing on one particular aspect of music—I actually think it’s crucial to innovation, and if I had to pick an element that moves me most directly, it would surely be harmony. It just seems limiting to describe popular music as a culture in terms of what it isn’t, rather than what it is and has been (or what it could become!) Musical culture overall will inevitably move beyond a particular mindset, whether it comes from a writer, a musician, or a fan.

On the other hand, creating sound with a reductive approach can be truly rewarding, as I’m sure fans of Gonzales’ work would attest. One artist who stays focused on exploring harmony in a way that I find truly pushes my ear is Panda Bear, whose complex manipulation of chord structure and meter on his album Tomboy was both emotional and mathematical in the way that Gonzales describes. You can hear this very clearly in the track above, “Friendship Bracelet,” which draws out a chain of chord changes as long as harmonically possible. His appearance on the Daft Punk album is probably my favorite after the first few listens. Interestingly, in his interview he didn’t really talk about harmony at all, instead mentioning rhythm and “the actual sounds themselves” as the things that draw people in.

(Source: Spotify)

Tags: Daft Punk Chilly Gonzales Panda Bear Tomboy Random Access Memories

Text
May 10, 2013
1 note

Michael Haneke’s Amour

After seeing Yves Montmayeur’s documentary Michael H—Profession: Director at Tribeca Film Festival a few weeks ago, I’ve been considering what I now know about Haneke as a person in relation to Amour, undoubtedly one of the most brutally direct films of the last year. Haneke’s interview style both confirms and complicates the viewpoint conveyed in the film. His blithe comments on violence (“In real life, animals die, children die”)* are sometimes punctuated with a smile or a spontaneous giggle. Meanwhile he acknowledges, at times explicitly, that the greatest act of cruelty is wielded by him, the director, against his audience.

Nobody does soul-crushing as well as Michael Haneke, which is why the title of the New Yorker’s 2009 profile, “Happy Haneke”, was both hilarious and, as the piece revealed, apt. Although it hides a demanding personality, Haneke has an outwardly pleasant demeanor that stands in contrast to his dour subject matter. Similarly, while his visual sense is undeniably clear and beautiful, he uses it to frame narratively opaque films. This contrast between content and delivery allows Haneke to both present starkly undisguised philosophical statements and to insist convincingly that he has no single agenda. It’s hard to know what to make of such a person. As a human being and as a director he is somehow both passionate and coldly clinical. But really, why wouldn’t someone like Haneke be happy? He’s an avid participant in the meritocratic rat race, who also engages wholeheartedly in the aesthetic destruction of institutions. In that sense he occupies a uniquely comfortable position of truly having it both ways.

Haneke’s style of directing is shown in Michael H. to be alternately nurturing and antagonistic. Many of his actors express how taxing it is to work under a leader with such boundless energy and ruthlessly precise visions. Emmanuelle Riva is shown in between takes during the filming of Amour, fully made up as the mentally regressing invalid she portrays, and practically groaning with real physical and emotional exhaustion. In another scene, we see Haneke exuberantly leading a group of University aged theater actors through a scene from Chekhov. Later, Haneke orchestrates a scene from The White Ribbon in which a father beats his child, demonstrating the younger actor’s cowering movements with both precision and a certain amount of relish.

Coming from this man, Amour is a punishing offering that in its plausibility is also something of a conciliatory gesture. Many of Haneke’s other films carry a kind of detachment in their distant settings (the dim past of pre-war Austria, a post-apocalyptic future) or their impossibly perfect progressions (the interweaving stories in Code Unknown, the steady march toward death in Funny Games.) Amour instead places us calmly in the center of the stable, settled lifestyle of an elderly couple, Anne and Georges, and then lets time contort it into layers of suffering. Haneke himself is 71 and married. He states plainly in one interview that he fears suffering more than anything else in the world. Amour then may have the distinction of being as much a punishment of himself as his audience.

In the film we are treated to certain details: Anne’s former career as a piano teacher, the couple’s love of books, a successful and emotionally distant daughter, etc. But the characters have hardly passed prototypical status before the intimate surroundings become a kind of pressure cooker, forcing the swift evolution of these persons, demonstrated to be “civilized” and “cultured”, into monsters. Haneke’s motivating force seems to be a disgust with the human need for order, and the perversity of bourgeois pleasures. In this context, professionalized society takes on echoes of Fascism, and the ties of modern comforts to the dehumanizing aging process are more or less direct.

Haneke was born in Munich during WWII, and raised in the placid outer realms of post-war Vienna. His worldview conveys a kind of strident, blanket social condemnation that goes far deeper than the surface shock value of his most “memorable” scenes. In fact, one thing I disliked about the documentary was its rigid dedication to showing clips of sudden violence, which did a disservice to Haneke’s skill in creating an unsettled atmosphere that can’t be explained by one event (Cache scared me out of my mind even though almost nothing happens in the first hour.)

Amour achieves this feeling of terror by marring its calm surface with disfiguring elements. These range from the desperate disruption of social conventions, like family and responsibility, to the visual style itself, which selects tropes from the horror genre to pervert this seemingly safe space. Accordingly, a rare scene in which Georges emerges from the apartment is in the form of a dream sequence impersonating a horror film. It’s a pretty fertile setup: the nice old couple down the hall, normal to all appearances, are actually engulfed in a scene of unimaginably grotesque conditions behind the door of their apartment.

In Haneke’s version, the apartment remains a kind of idyll, though a crumbling, contorted one.  As Anne devolves further into a childlike mental state, her descent is ragged and inelegant, the inverse of an infant’s wonder at the world. Her monstrosity becomes a condemnation, and Georges’ devotion takes on a note of abuse. The few outside intrusions come from the couple’s daughter, whose frightful fits of emotion in the film’s second half clatter hypocritically against her earlier cold surface, and the mercenary nurse who Georges disposes of capably. These two minor characters seem to be deliberately similar, creating a parallel between an inability to provide appropriate care and an inability to appropriately feel. As the family’s emotions are outsourced and professionalized to the same degree as home care, an impossible snarl is created, the only outcome of which is aggression.

When I think back to the film I remember two shots: the moment when Georges slaps his wife, a savage instinct overtaking him as he tries to coax life-sustaining food into her mouth, and the curiously long shot of him stripping the petals from a bunch of flowers that he will use to decorate Anne’s deathbed. Rituals, it seems, do not keep us from being animals. In fact, Anne’s entire decline is dependent on the conditions we cultivate every day—the tidy apartments, clean water and available food, the luxuries of pupils, legacies, physical and emotional warmth. Haneke’s version of the surreal draws from the same pool of experience we feed in our daily lives, and so it feels real and inevitable.

I think this is why I liked his 2009 film The White Ribbon so much. An austere fable about inhumanity, it managed to darken the idyllic haze of pre-war Austria enough to convey the inevitability of the Great War, that defining event of mass disillusionment, in the aftermath of which Freud wrote: “the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it wants to monopolize it.”* The White Ribbon seemed to explain the root of mistrust in the rest of Haneke’s work. The other horrors he’s created reinforce the idea that social order is an illusion, and conventions nothing but a comfortable structure for moral degradation.

On a fundamental level it is terrifying to see your darkest conclusions illuminated onscreen. But if you carry a certain kind of fear around with you, the experience can also be rather satisfying. Haneke claims the right to resist interpreting his own work (in one of the documentary’s most memorable segments he repeatedly refuses, with growing agitation, to answer the interviewer’s carefully reworded questions). But I think he is very shrewd about the way it will be interpreted by his audience. So Amour gives us none of the gratification of a brutal spectacle and all of its pain, because Georges and Anne are sympathetic, because they are old, and because this isn’t the way we are used to seeing violence portrayed on a screen.

Seeing people hug each other, cry, and shuffle out the door miserably after Amour ended, I felt a mix of anger and fascination at Haneke’s willingness to exploit his audience’s emotions and natural need for closure. But maybe that’s where you can find the one shred of hope that Haneke offers us, that might explain his disconcerting laughter. I suspect that what makes Haneke’s work watchable at all is that there is a strange sense of wonder to it. His specialty is examining ritual—be it self-mutilation, surveillance, or suicide—with a closeness that borders on loving. And in particular, his careful attention to the visual product implies a certain deference, a power in the beholder. At the end of Amour, Georges follows a vision of Anne out the door, grabbing his coat along the way. Maybe Haneke is more generous than we think: why be a victim of an imposed reality, when there’s a view of the way out?

 

*Quoting from memory here, so this is approximate.

*Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915)

Video
May 06, 2013
5 notes

One of the reasons Hip Hop is so compelling is its fundamental investment in the idea that identity is a performance. It accommodates the possibilities of self-definition with a flexibility that is immensely powerful. This album brought that concept into conversation for me more clearly than most I’ve heard; at the same time it related the conflict between what’s “real” and what’s “created” to daily life with unusual detail.

Arguably the Internet has made identity performance more obvious and more mutable all at once. That foot-in-two-realities feeling is replicated over and over in good kid, m.A.A.d. city (“Back to reality we poor, ya bish”). There’s also the sense that looking for a pure experience is a tempting but ultimately hollow pursuit, only achievable through some sort of altered state and an implied dishonesty with one’s self (as heard on “Swimming Pools (Drank)”).  In that sense, even though the album speaks to a very particular experience, it also speaks to the wider experience of possessing a fragmented sense of self. Amazingly, Kendrick Lamar does this by repeatedly tearing down the ideal version of his “performing” identity. 

When I’m listening to Lamar’s lyrics I often hear a refusal to let perfection stand for very long. Dreams are pure but also described with sarcasm, euphoria is coupled with alienation, and youthful hubris hinges on luck. These lyrics represent an interesting kind of self-sacrifice. They also make the yearning for perfection the domain of both the performer and the listener. The effect is that there’s something in the music always nudging, tempting, dragging you on, and in the absence of any final conclusion you end up cycling back…as evidenced by the fact that I’m still wondering at it however many months later.

(Source: Spotify)

Tags: Kendrick Lamar Money Trees Good Kid M.A.A.D. City

Quote
October 23, 2012
2 notes
"Magic expresses itself above all in shape-shifting and metamorphosis; and in mythology and fairytales, the quest for love entails a quest for recognition of the self which challenges the barriers of conventional expectation. As such, transformations comment on the oppressive narrowness of the prevailing canon of beauty…
…Kobena Mercer’s perceptive analysis of Thriller (1991, 300-16) discusses the two principle metamorphoses— the werewolf and the zombie— which, it is argued, evidence the horror fascination with sexuality whereby gender identity is codified in terms that revolve around the symbolic presence of the monster."

—

(Excerpted from Sheila Whiteley’s discussion of Michael Jackson’s complicated childhood and public image, in her book Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age, and Gender.)

When I read this, I was immediately reminded of a boy I knew in elementary school, partly because of the werewolf motif but also because of the connection to escapism, the childish love of dressing up in costumes, and the conflict of individual sexuality and gender identity with social constrictions. Mike moved to our school partway through the year in 4th grade. I’ll never forget how on his first day, he asked to introduce himself by getting up in front of the class and singing along with great gusto to The Lion King’s “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.” My teacher, who ran the spring Operetta (a glorified sing-along that was nevertheless an extremely popular program) was thrilled to let him do this. But the kids in the class immediately branded him a weirdo.

Actually, the song was well-suited to his voice, which was high and strong, and he kind of had a Jonathan Taylor Thomas cuteness about him, although he was taller and thinner. His hair was blonde and looked styled, where most kids in my grade either had buzz cuts or (I think this started around this time) those frosted, gelled spikes. Basically, he was weirdly self-possessed for a 9-year-old, and he was immediately seen as threatening. My classmates latched onto his perceived flamboyance and talked about him meanly at recess.

I wish I could remember exactly how these conversations went. I just remember that it was generally accepted that he was weird, in a very particular way. And most of the shit-talking related to how he was too “girly.” Mike’s treatment is the most glaring, uncomfortable example in my memory of how homophobia was rampant, even at that early age, as a defense against any behavior that was seen as aberrational. I don’t think, and really hope I’m right, that Mike was ever physically harmed, because most of my classmates were too intimidated by his brassy personality to really start anything, but verbal conflicts certainly occurred.

To his endless credit, Mike completely played into his outsider status, with the aplomb of a much older person. One of the most daring ways he did this was to tell anyone who would listen that he and his father were both wolves, and lived at Valley Falls, one of the town’s public parks. According to him, they took their true forms at night and hunted together for deer. A few kids in particular got very angry at this, because even though they knew it was impossible, there was simply no way to prove that it was untrue. I was fascinated: here was somebody who had come up with what I saw as a very childish fantasy, fit for 4 or 5 year olds, not us 4th graders, and was insisting on its truth even as he was roughly challenged by his peers.

Mike’s divisive storytelling distracted from the fact that none of us really knew anything about his home life, other than that he lived with his dad and his mom didn’t seem to be in the picture. I didn’t know anyone who had been to his house or maintained a strong friendship with him. Eventually, he moved away, I think after 5th grade.

Before he left, though, he made sure to cement his reputation. Because he had immediately become one of my teacher’s favorites with that first day performance, Mike got a plum role when the Spring Operetta finally rolled around. The show was made up of standards and show tunes, and Mike was the only student who got a solo number— he performed “Once in Love With Amy,” complete with a top hat and cane, and to say that he killed it would be an understatement. He was just so far beyond the level of showmanship that anyone expected from us. If he didn’t eventually go into show business, it would be a damn shame. All the parents were extremely impressed and gave him a standing ovation. I had this very clear sense that my peers didn’t know a goddamn thing after all. Most of us hadn’t even known that he was rehearsing the number.

At that age, I was so painfully shy that the amount I participated in any sort of peer interaction was probably pretty limited. I spent most of my recesses writing and acting out an elaborate parody of the movie Clue that involved aliens and intergalactic warfare with two friends who also liked that kind of thing. I wish I could remember being nice to him, but I don’t remember talking to him at all, and it makes me sad to think about this kid being alone, nobly scorning his bullies with his fantasies and his preternatural charisma. And the worst thing about it is that Mike’s character traits were a short step away from what it would take to achieve godlike popularity. But normalization is as harsh and fierce in this young age group as it is in adolescence, and deviations automatically assume a sense of perversion. It’s a different kind of reaction than the self-conscious whispering that generates from kids collectively handling puberty. It scares me that I remember that gender-normative pressure so clearly, yet I don’t understand exactly where it came from, why it was so fundamentally accepted, and why our teachers seemed to have no awareness of it.

Now that I’ve rambled through this story and away from the quote that originally spurred it, I’ll just say that as a figure Mike had a lot in common with Michael Jackson, even if it was within a tiny microcosmic setting. I felt the same sense of distrust towards the way the world treated Michael Jackson in his last years as I did towards the way my elementary school treated Mike. But I know enough now to admire him and to be totally thankful that if the true, evil nature of group mentality had to be revealed, I also got to see how a creative individualist could defang it by being better and bolder than anyone else.

Photo
October 11, 2012
79 notes
This is quickly becoming one of my favorite videos of the past few months, as well as one of my favorite songs. It was directed by Melina Matsoukas, who apparently can’t miss lately— she directed the videos for Solange’s excellent “Losing You,” Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” and Beyonce’s cafeteria dance-along “Move Your Body,” (she’s also developed a playful aesthetic in classics like “Upgrade U”/”Why Don’t You Love Me,” Lily Allen’s “Not Fair,” and Rihanna’s “Rude Boy” that incorporates bemused images of wealth and class in its colorful kitschiness.) Matsoukas has proven to be not only an extremely capable director of big personalities, but also someone who’s aware of how visual tastes change collectively. She’s a good match for Christina Aguilera, an artist who’s undergone several image changes since the beginning of her career and was due for some kind of statement. “Your Body” is a tribute to nameless, loveless sex cranked up to its most rewarding potential. Aguilera hasn’t come out with a single this aggressive since “Dirrty,” but while that song was belligerent it was also a little self-conscious, and “Your Body” is thankfully free of any coquetry. Max Martin, who also penned many of the tracks for Britney Spears’ recent comeback, has created an overblown (in a good way) track with beautiful production, and Aguilera’s powerful voice gives a weight to this sound that even Katy Perry hasn’t achieved. The whole thing adds up to what might simply be raunch-pop in less skillful hands, but here becomes a really direct expression of self-love—even more evident in Matsoukas/Aguilera’s embracing of her now ample curves in skintight, eye-popping colors. But, interestingly, the internet on the whole seems to be finding this video to be very funny, and I don’t agree. Sure, there’s humor in the trailer-park-vixen-turned-serial-killer concept, but to me it’s more arch than actually laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Theodor Adorno wrote something about how kitsch is a parody of the catharsis that comes from high art, and the explosions of blue paint and pink glitter that stand in for blood and guts here are a pretty clever turn on that idea. Maybe there’s something more to Christina’s defiant everywoman-ness than hard work and sex positivity. She’s been through a lot and she still has no problem talking up even the points in her career that are generally seen as low ones (i.e. Bionic.) She’s never had any issues with her body, generally stating her love for any change it’s undergone in a very public way. Aguilera has a very deliberate strategy of not letting herself be misunderstood. And this is someone who’s making good on the promise of an entire career flirting with the boundaries of good taste in both a clean/dirty sense and an inspired/pandering sense (she was as committed to selling the heartfelt “Beautiful” as she is to judging on The Voice.) Underneath everything, Aguilera is nothing if not a professional. So this video has none of the winking “I’m in on the joke too” ploys that Spears has been forced to use in the past couple of years. To me, delighting in how “ridiculous” this video looks is just a way to avoid giving credit to someone who’s creating mainstream art in an effective and intelligent way. Possibly, we’re just suspicious because this strikes such a perfect tone for her, it seems like it must be the result of some kind of fakery. But I really believe in Christina Aguilera. I’m hoping that her new album will turn out to be as good as this song, but even if it doesn’t, there will still be that amazing bridge: “I think you already know my name.” It’s a line that laughs off the idea of mistakes, either past or future. When you know exactly who you are, just being it is enough to carry you forward.

This is quickly becoming one of my favorite videos of the past few months, as well as one of my favorite songs. It was directed by Melina Matsoukas, who apparently can’t miss lately— she directed the videos for Solange’s excellent “Losing You,” Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” and Beyonce’s cafeteria dance-along “Move Your Body,” (she’s also developed a playful aesthetic in classics like “Upgrade U”/”Why Don’t You Love Me,” Lily Allen’s “Not Fair,” and Rihanna’s “Rude Boy” that incorporates bemused images of wealth and class in its colorful kitschiness.) Matsoukas has proven to be not only an extremely capable director of big personalities, but also someone who’s aware of how visual tastes change collectively.

She’s a good match for Christina Aguilera, an artist who’s undergone several image changes since the beginning of her career and was due for some kind of statement. “Your Body” is a tribute to nameless, loveless sex cranked up to its most rewarding potential. Aguilera hasn’t come out with a single this aggressive since “Dirrty,” but while that song was belligerent it was also a little self-conscious, and “Your Body” is thankfully free of any coquetry. Max Martin, who also penned many of the tracks for Britney Spears’ recent comeback, has created an overblown (in a good way) track with beautiful production, and Aguilera’s powerful voice gives a weight to this sound that even Katy Perry hasn’t achieved. The whole thing adds up to what might simply be raunch-pop in less skillful hands, but here becomes a really direct expression of self-love—even more evident in Matsoukas/Aguilera’s embracing of her now ample curves in skintight, eye-popping colors.

But, interestingly, the internet on the whole seems to be finding this video to be very funny, and I don’t agree. Sure, there’s humor in the trailer-park-vixen-turned-serial-killer concept, but to me it’s more arch than actually laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Theodor Adorno wrote something about how kitsch is a parody of the catharsis that comes from high art, and the explosions of blue paint and pink glitter that stand in for blood and guts here are a pretty clever turn on that idea. Maybe there’s something more to Christina’s defiant everywoman-ness than hard work and sex positivity. She’s been through a lot and she still has no problem talking up even the points in her career that are generally seen as low ones (i.e. Bionic.) She’s never had any issues with her body, generally stating her love for any change it’s undergone in a very public way. Aguilera has a very deliberate strategy of not letting herself be misunderstood.

And this is someone who’s making good on the promise of an entire career flirting with the boundaries of good taste in both a clean/dirty sense and an inspired/pandering sense (she was as committed to selling the heartfelt “Beautiful” as she is to judging on The Voice.) Underneath everything, Aguilera is nothing if not a professional. So this video has none of the winking “I’m in on the joke too” ploys that Spears has been forced to use in the past couple of years. To me, delighting in how “ridiculous” this video looks is just a way to avoid giving credit to someone who’s creating mainstream art in an effective and intelligent way. Possibly, we’re just suspicious because this strikes such a perfect tone for her, it seems like it must be the result of some kind of fakery.

But I really believe in Christina Aguilera. I’m hoping that her new album will turn out to be as good as this song, but even if it doesn’t, there will still be that amazing bridge: “I think you already know my name.” It’s a line that laughs off the idea of mistakes, either past or future. When you know exactly who you are, just being it is enough to carry you forward.

Tags: Christina Aguilera Your Body

Video
October 08, 2012
1 note

Flying Lotus, Until the Quiet Comes

I don’t remember where I read it, but apparently Steve Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, was recently reading a book by Michael Talbot. It makes perfect sense, since Talbot’s work posited a connection between mysticism and the basic elements of the universe. Ellison has cultivated a similar approach since he started making music, and Until the Quiet Comes, which was released on October 1st, shows that his ideas have become less bombastic as they’ve gotten more refined. A recurring question has been whether the new material is a large departure from his previous work, particularly in relation to 2010’s groundbreaking Cosmogramma. In some ways, it sounds vastly different, and in some it sounds like it’s circling back to earlier efforts. But more than anything, it sounds like the feeling you get from turning the volume down and putting your ear very, very close to the speaker.

Considering the articulate nature of his albums, a visual catalogue is sort of besides the point. But the often druggy imagery of his album covers are available as the short version of Ellison’s shifting sense of scale. 1983’s nebula was neatly recalled/repurposed by Los Angeles’ close-up of melted metal veins, and now it’s morphed into UTQC’s body in a free-floating costume, shot by experienced underwater photographer Dan Kitchens. That last image is redolent of a shift in approach that, while still founded on texture, recognizes how sound can be detailed without being sharp, and relatable without being overly specific.

I have a great deal of respect for this careful intimacy. Cosmogramma was like a finely detailed Nintendo picaresque, with its protagonist reeling through a microcosmos of splashy color and unclear borders. Wildly diverse compositions asserted themselves as supporting characters that each toted their own history. And everything was densely packed with sounds, so that even a potential lull like “MmmHmm” layered shuffling and whooping thickly over Thundercat’s bass scaffolding. Tracks like “Table Tennis” made use of novelty sound bites, in that case a smattering of ping-pong sounds, that outlined explicit intentions for the listener. The luminescent “Galaxy in Janaki,” the album’s ecstatic final track, looked upward and outward, like there was no telling where Ellison might go next. So maybe it’s surprising that he ended up returning to a real, human-sized Los Angeles, but it’s a testament to his skill that the transition sounds natural.

There are several familiar collaborators along for the ride (Erykah Badu, Thom Yorke, and Thundercat, who must qualify as Ellison’s spirit animal at this point.) Laura Darlington has been around longer than anyone, since first appearing on 1983’s waltzing “Unexpected Delight.” With her soothing choirgirl intonation (she sounds something like a diffused Alison Statton) she has been instrumental in shaping the unassuming tone of FlyLo’s oeuvre. She reappears here on the appropriately named “Phantasm,” a track that utilizes a characteristic rippling effect but replaces driving beats with impressionistic drabs of percussion. “All that we feel is virtually real,” Darlington’s voice imparts, a statement reflected in the hypnotic short film by Kahlil Joseph that predated the album’s release.

Many of Flying Lotus’ compositions feel like they are reaching back into a mystical past while subtle threads continue to tie them to the current zeitgest. “Getting There,  (feat. Niki Randa,)” with its subtle invocation of Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You,” unfolds from a foundation of soul and jazz traditions and promises (“getting there, getting there”) a leisurely journey through its creator’s musical consciousness. After less than two minutes, it segues neatly into the woodpecker beat that pushes “Until the Colours Come,” (itself a burbling soundscape that hints at Ellison’s possible influence on something like Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids.”*) If you listen closely, you can hear Ellison echoing himself: the same way “Parisian Goldfish” prefigured “Computer Face/Pure Being,” “Recoiled” and “Do the Astral Plane” prefigured the bouncing “The Nightcaller”. Similarly, themes from the beginning of the album ripple outward through the rest of it.“ Sultan’s Request”/”Putty Boy Strut” are a one-two punch that are most in tune with what’s currently happening in Hip Hop and Dance music, but even those have a fine complexity that stamp them unmistakably as totems in Ellison’s LA rather than references to the outside.

If Ellison has been something of a music-scene lurker in the past, tuned in but not necessarily directly involved, it’s because he’s so focused on crafting his own take on things. His hard work has reaped an entire arsenal of precise textures and arrangements that can be re-purposed, repackaged, and still evoke a strong sense of his unique character (Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear/ Department of Eagles is another contemporary musician who possesses this backlog of musical signatures.) Until the Quiet Comes is a work of alchemy that comes from years of tightly observed experimentation and a tireless sense of wonder at the possibilities of coaxing sound elements into cooperation with one another.

Mixed in with all of the colorful synapse-firing are drawn-out moments of intimacy. It’s one more way that the new album differs from Cosmogramma, which was littered with interstitial pieces of orchestration that stretched it into a sweeping suite with classical undertones. Instead, on UTQC we get a dense concoction with most tracks receiving equal weight. Its shifts in tone are committed gestures: it’s easy to list pleasurably along to the album’s light apex, “DMT,” but also easy to overlook that its certainty is rooted in real wisdom. You may find yourself humming the simplistic refrain but the whole album is weighted by the song’s less obvious closing line, “I belong where I’m at.”

Unlike Cosmogramma, this album doesn’t fight against every musical structure that tries to contain it. A track like “All the Secrets” builds slowly, flickers at the top, and comes back down in a way that accurately mirrors a mature sense of enjoyment. But the notion of this sound being more mature is a limited one—the idea that something needs to be shiny and brash to tap into a childlike sense of wonder is an adult projection. When you’re a kid, everything feels like an overwhelming moment, from struggling to reach something on the kitchen counter to concentrating on a single chord change in a song on the radio that you don’t even know how to find again. For many people, childhood is the only time when the colossal magnitude of the universe syncs up with the universe of your particular creation, when you have utter faith in your own perspective. Steve Ellison knows how to return to that place and, even more impressively, has managed to reconstruct his dream so that we can experience it with him.



*Any affinity between those two goes both ways, as evidenced by Ellison’s remix of Ocean’s “Thinking About You,” which pitched up/intensified the track, while also echoing Ocean’s original release of the song by being posted hastily in an “unfinished” version and then taken down just as fast.

Tags: Flying Lotus Until the Quiet Comes Steve Ellison

Video
September 26, 2012
16 notes

Here’s a ten minute clip from Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, starring Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe. This scene is the most intimate one with Sterling Hayden’s character, Roger Wade, an alcoholic writer, semi-famous but possibly not well-respected by the literally community. We see him earlier, very drunk, at a detox clinic where he is apparently receiving little help for his ailments. But this is the only significant scene where we see him in his element, at home, and relatively clear-headed (“You’d think I was drunk already, wouldn’t you?” he says self-deprecatingly as he swigs from a mug.)

The Long Goodbye is a fine film for many reasons, not least Elliott Gould’s mumbling, charismatic performance. Although it uses the story of the book to enjoyable, noir effect, its treatment of the Roger Wade character separates it from its source material in a strange, context-dependent way.

When Chandler published the book, it was acknowledged that the character of Roger Wade was a stand-in for himself—he was a hard drinker, and was deeply insecure about his work’s place in the world of “literature.” At the time of writing he was alienated from his wife by the long illness that eventually took her life. When the film came out a good twenty years later, the character was widely interpreted as being based on Ernest Hemingway. That impression was supported by Sterling Hayden’s tall (6’5”) stature, beard, and boisterous personality. Sterling Hayden himself was a fisherman and sailor, with little respect for acting and the sort of prototypical physically anchored masculinity that came to characterize Hemingway in the media.

While updating the setting, the screenplay for Altman’s film also changed Wade’s death from a murder to a suicide. Hemingway shot himself in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961. Chandler died a lonely man in 1959 in La Jolla, California, officially of pneumonia but really from drink, having botched several attempts at taking his own life in the years previous.

Central to the film is Marlowe’s consciousness of being out of sync with current culture, and what might be seen as his noble response to that feeling of disconnect. Altman makes great use of the conflict between those archetypal views of the world nurtured by literature and its true nature: the culture of reputation that is greedy, disingenuous, and willing to exploit misunderstandings.

When Dwight Macdonald wrote an unkind essay on Hemingway’s legacy, he received a response from another journalist, George Plimpton, who knew the man well: “He didn’t dislike critics as much as you suppose. So much is made of his anti-intellectualism…You suggest that Hemingway’s lack of confidence, his inability to write, caused deep depressions which he tried to relieve with shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic…I think your fundamental error is your assumption that Hemingway’s writing, public personality, and private thoughts were all of a piece.”

In Altman’s film, Wade is at once central and peripheral. He embodies the dissociative nature of addiction and celebrity, and in another way, nostalgia. Chandler’s autobiographical elements tether him to reality, but corrupted by too much analysis, his character is hazily, painfully lost. His presence implies that maybe the moral and stoic loner, Marlowe, is less alienated than exempt. Wade, in an evasive conversation by the beach, asks: “You ever think about suicide, Marlowe?” Marlowe replies: “Me? I don’t believe in it.”

Tags: Robert Altman Raymond Chandler Elliott Gould Sterling Hayden The Long Goodbye

Photo
September 24, 2012
3 notes
THE L.A. COMPLEX: IT’S BEEN UNREAL I’m not against a season 2 makeover—in fact, having been spoon-fed season to season personal style overhauls by Degrassi: The Next Generation, I kind of salivate over them. But in the case of the newer effort from Degrassi’s producers, The L.A. Complex, which ends its second season tonight, the makeover (symbolized by one character’s crossover from brunette to blonde) has been a bit of a bleach wash.Some background: Linda Schuyler and Stephen Stohn, who are real-life partners and co-produced Degrassi: The Next Generation, are executive producers along with the show’s creator, Martin Gero, who previously worked on Bored to Death and Stargate: Atlantis. Even though it takes place in Los Angeles, it’s a Canadian production (orginally broadcast on CTV/ MuchMusic and re-airing on The CW) with mostly Canadian actors and a high, though lesser, proportion of Canadian characters. After a sure-footed pilot following a pretty simple premise of “young people struggling to break into the entertainment industry,” it continued for five more episodes and ended in a melodramatic but surprisingly symmetrical finale.Gero began the second season with what appeared to be greater control, both writing and directing the first two episodes, but somehow limited the show’s vision instead. Where the first season’s arc felt spontaneous and fresh, season two feels like a cake prepared too far ahead of time. It’s confectionary, but it’s also full of stale bits and invites you to regard its pleasant-looking surface with suspicion. You could take the title in a few ways. One kind of “complex” is the one that exists in the minds of the characters—conditioned by repeated rejection, each of them is both supremely self-confident (“I’m better than any of these girls!”) and fundamentally defeatist (“But it doesn’t even matter if I’m better than them!”) Consistent application of this muddled kind of arrogance to characters with different backstories made for some very interesting stories. At its best, the first season was an ensemble-based experiment in what happens to people under the stress of specific conditions. One of the things I liked most about it was that while its protagonists were cloistered in 1) the metaphorical pursuit of their dreams and 2) the hotel complex that each of them is too poor to leave (hence the most literal interpretation of the title), the show itself had larger concerns. Selfish though their characters may be, the writers exhibited a very real sympathy for working class drudges. When Alicia, an aspiring dancer who also works at a strip club, asks her floor manager for time off to go to an audition, he pleads with her not to talk to him like he’s “somebody”— he’s just another person who’ll get fired if he breaks the rules. Later, the recurring comic relief, the hotel’s live-in super (Canadian comedian Ennis Esmer) says much the same thing when one of the tenants begs him to let her stay a few days longer rent-free. That’s where the third interpretation of the title comes in: the concept of Los Angeles as a massive industrial complex supported by interconnected streams of capital and its own shifting class system. And that’s where the show’s Canadian roots make it unique, not inauthentic— the creators are outsiders, just like the characters. Conditions are inhospitable (A telling line from Season 1 was “It’s all bad mojo here,”) and they force the city’s inhabitants into all sorts of uncomfortable, awkwardly coupled positions just to maintain a sense of self.And there’s the problem: what do you do with these kids when they’re no longer alienated? The small successes they worked for in the first season all turn into dead ends for the second. Gone are the struggling working-class types that populated the outer sphere of the show’s universe (the hotel’s super is kept on but is reduced to a goofy, partying human interface for the building.) Gone are the carefully developed relationships, sacrificed to rapid-fire hookups. Gone are two major characters, practically out of nowhere!Alicia, whose dancer/stripper-turned-sex-tape-victim story was an interesting and sad look at her struggle to maintain control over her own body, has been completely forgotten. After booking a gig on an Usher tour in the premier, she’s never once mentioned by the friends she left behind. With both Alicia and Tariq, a character who was sidelined in favor of pursuing the exploits of his violent, closeted love interest (not originally a major character), the neat hand-washing feels even more obnoxious for having been pushed into the beginning of Season 2…if you don’t plan to follow a character, why make us wait for the new season to begin before abruptly “killing them off”?Part of the problem is that initially, conflicts were driven by the characters’ overconfidence. Stand-offs between characters who aren’t telling each other everything led to escalating dialogues, often with genuinely surprising results. It was a winning formula that capitalized off of the idea that you have to be kind of delusional to commit yourself to this lifestyle. When the formula is reversed, and personality is driven by plot, most of the charm is lost.Another crucial downturn in the writing has resulted from the show’s falling victim to the cloistered nature of its self-created microcosmos. Where it was once episodic and suspenseful, it’s now repetitive and stagnant, recycling its constructions endlessly for the sake of avoiding resolution.  Some of the issues explored are still interesting—Raquel signs onto a Celebrity Rehab-like show and attempts to manipulate the other residents, while Conor becomes embroiled in a Scientology-like organization at the urging of his long-lost sister. But they’re treated with the same silliness that characterizes the campy love-triangle B plots. Without its perspective intact, the show’s well-developed cynicism constantly gets in the way of its plausibility. Ironically, the sad thing about the turn is that it leaves some very good actors laboring for little reward. Jewel Staite, who plays the former star of a wildly popular teen drama (and in real life got her start opposite Ben Foster on Disney channel’s first ever original series, Flash Forward) is always delivering lovely, subtle performances. Her 180 degree turn from coy and flirtatious to displeased battle axe in a scene where she’s unexpectedly rebuffed is lightning-quick and perfectly on point. Acting with increasing desperation, she’s the one character who wavers between several versions of herself with total, self-loathing conviction. Chelan Simmons, before she was cut out of the action, was endearingly headstrong as Alicia. And Jonathan Patrick Moore’s golden boy, Conor, displays a childlike guilelessness in both comic and serious scenes as his character spirals downhill.I’ll admit I’m excited to see just how bad Conor’s involvement with “Scienetics” gets in the season finale. As the resident stunted child and also the only character who’s been successful enough to have some disposable cash, Conor’s a perfect target for a cult. But even though it’s obviously a timely plotline, so far it’s been presented in a dreamy, not very incisive way. Instead of talking about corruption, or misuse of funds, or brainwashing, Conor googles the organization he’s just pledged $5,000 to and demands “WHO IS ZENU?” It makes sense that he views his sister’s involvement with Scienetics melodramatically, since he’s gotten no deeper interpretation from the other characters— “It’s not a religion, it’s a cult,” states the super gravely before failing to explain the difference to Conor, who is clearly completely ignorant on the matter. Still, something about the absurdity of the past few episodes has been intriguing, and I have a feeling that even though it will never strike the same tone it had in Season 1, this might be the plotline that picks up speed and helps the show take off again. If it’s not going to get deep, it’s definitely going to get campy, and arguably with The Master in theaters, there’s more of an open niche for that.

THE L.A. COMPLEX: IT’S BEEN UNREAL

I’m not against a season 2 makeover—in fact, having been spoon-fed season to season personal style overhauls by Degrassi: The Next Generation, I kind of salivate over them. But in the case of the newer effort from Degrassi’s producers, The L.A. Complex, which ends its second season tonight, the makeover (symbolized by one character’s crossover from brunette to blonde) has been a bit of a bleach wash.

Some background: Linda Schuyler and Stephen Stohn, who are real-life partners and co-produced Degrassi: The Next Generation, are executive producers along with the show’s creator, Martin Gero, who previously worked on Bored to Death and Stargate: Atlantis. Even though it takes place in Los Angeles, it’s a Canadian production (orginally broadcast on CTV/ MuchMusic and re-airing on The CW) with mostly Canadian actors and a high, though lesser, proportion of Canadian characters. After a sure-footed pilot following a pretty simple premise of “young people struggling to break into the entertainment industry,” it continued for five more episodes and ended in a melodramatic but surprisingly symmetrical finale.

Gero began the second season with what appeared to be greater control, both writing and directing the first two episodes, but somehow limited the show’s vision instead. Where the first season’s arc felt spontaneous and fresh, season two feels like a cake prepared too far ahead of time. It’s confectionary, but it’s also full of stale bits and invites you to regard its pleasant-looking surface with suspicion.

You could take the title in a few ways. One kind of “complex” is the one that exists in the minds of the characters—conditioned by repeated rejection, each of them is both supremely self-confident (“I’m better than any of these girls!”) and fundamentally defeatist (“But it doesn’t even matter if I’m better than them!”) Consistent application of this muddled kind of arrogance to characters with different backstories made for some very interesting stories. At its best, the first season was an ensemble-based experiment in what happens to people under the stress of specific conditions.

One of the things I liked most about it was that while its protagonists were cloistered in 1) the metaphorical pursuit of their dreams and 2) the hotel complex that each of them is too poor to leave (hence the most literal interpretation of the title), the show itself had larger concerns. Selfish though their characters may be, the writers exhibited a very real sympathy for working class drudges. When Alicia, an aspiring dancer who also works at a strip club, asks her floor manager for time off to go to an audition, he pleads with her not to talk to him like he’s “somebody”— he’s just another person who’ll get fired if he breaks the rules. Later, the recurring comic relief, the hotel’s live-in super (Canadian comedian Ennis Esmer) says much the same thing when one of the tenants begs him to let her stay a few days longer rent-free.

That’s where the third interpretation of the title comes in: the concept of Los Angeles as a massive industrial complex supported by interconnected streams of capital and its own shifting class system. And that’s where the show’s Canadian roots make it unique, not inauthentic— the creators are outsiders, just like the characters. Conditions are inhospitable (A telling line from Season 1 was “It’s all bad mojo here,”) and they force the city’s inhabitants into all sorts of uncomfortable, awkwardly coupled positions just to maintain a sense of self.

And there’s the problem: what do you do with these kids when they’re no longer alienated? The small successes they worked for in the first season all turn into dead ends for the second. Gone are the struggling working-class types that populated the outer sphere of the show’s universe (the hotel’s super is kept on but is reduced to a goofy, partying human interface for the building.) Gone are the carefully developed relationships, sacrificed to rapid-fire hookups. Gone are two major characters, practically out of nowhere!

Alicia, whose dancer/stripper-turned-sex-tape-victim story was an interesting and sad look at her struggle to maintain control over her own body, has been completely forgotten. After booking a gig on an Usher tour in the premier, she’s never once mentioned by the friends she left behind. With both Alicia and Tariq, a character who was sidelined in favor of pursuing the exploits of his violent, closeted love interest (not originally a major character), the neat hand-washing feels even more obnoxious for having been pushed into the beginning of Season 2…if you don’t plan to follow a character, why make us wait for the new season to begin before abruptly “killing them off”?

Part of the problem is that initially, conflicts were driven by the characters’ overconfidence. Stand-offs between characters who aren’t telling each other everything led to escalating dialogues, often with genuinely surprising results. It was a winning formula that capitalized off of the idea that you have to be kind of delusional to commit yourself to this lifestyle. When the formula is reversed, and personality is driven by plot, most of the charm is lost.

Another crucial downturn in the writing has resulted from the show’s falling victim to the cloistered nature of its self-created microcosmos. Where it was once episodic and suspenseful, it’s now repetitive and stagnant, recycling its constructions endlessly for the sake of avoiding resolution.  Some of the issues explored are still interesting—Raquel signs onto a Celebrity Rehab-like show and attempts to manipulate the other residents, while Conor becomes embroiled in a Scientology-like organization at the urging of his long-lost sister. But they’re treated with the same silliness that characterizes the campy love-triangle B plots. Without its perspective intact, the show’s well-developed cynicism constantly gets in the way of its plausibility.

Ironically, the sad thing about the turn is that it leaves some very good actors laboring for little reward. Jewel Staite, who plays the former star of a wildly popular teen drama (and in real life got her start opposite Ben Foster on Disney channel’s first ever original series, Flash Forward) is always delivering lovely, subtle performances. Her 180 degree turn from coy and flirtatious to displeased battle axe in a scene where she’s unexpectedly rebuffed is lightning-quick and perfectly on point. Acting with increasing desperation, she’s the one character who wavers between several versions of herself with total, self-loathing conviction. Chelan Simmons, before she was cut out of the action, was endearingly headstrong as Alicia. And Jonathan Patrick Moore’s golden boy, Conor, displays a childlike guilelessness in both comic and serious scenes as his character spirals downhill.

I’ll admit I’m excited to see just how bad Conor’s involvement with “Scienetics” gets in the season finale. As the resident stunted child and also the only character who’s been successful enough to have some disposable cash, Conor’s a perfect target for a cult. But even though it’s obviously a timely plotline, so far it’s been presented in a dreamy, not very incisive way. Instead of talking about corruption, or misuse of funds, or brainwashing, Conor googles the organization he’s just pledged $5,000 to and demands “WHO IS ZENU?” It makes sense that he views his sister’s involvement with Scienetics melodramatically, since he’s gotten no deeper interpretation from the other characters— “It’s not a religion, it’s a cult,” states the super gravely before failing to explain the difference to Conor, who is clearly completely ignorant on the matter.

Still, something about the absurdity of the past few episodes has been intriguing, and I have a feeling that even though it will never strike the same tone it had in Season 1, this might be the plotline that picks up speed and helps the show take off again. If it’s not going to get deep, it’s definitely going to get campy, and arguably with The Master in theaters, there’s more of an open niche for that.

Tags: The L.A. Complex

Text
September 13, 2012
1 note

Chris Brown—what can you say about the man that he hasn’t already tattooed on his body? He made a #1 album called F.A.M.E. (left bicep), he loves Jesus (right arm) and himself (left chest), and has an affinity for skeletons (back, hands, and now, purportedly, neck.) Well, as it turns out, Brown’s body art may draw a more withering portrait of us than of him.

Take a look at the controversy surrounding Brown’s recent Rihanna-resembling neck tattoo debacle and ask yourself two questions: what does it say about Brown that the image was widely interpreted as a bizarre homage to his ex-girlfriend’s beaten face? And, more importantly, what does it say about the public that their response has followed an arc, typical now in relation to Brown’s career, of initial outrage quickly deflated by an “it’s not as bad as you thought it was” PR dodge?

Brown’s up-and-down relationship with Rihanna has been squirming along now for what feels like forever, punctuated by various media appearances in which Brown easily won the Middleweight belt in Brattiness. The image that his tattoo coincidentally evoked, a police photo of a bruised and distressed Rihanna, hangs heavy over every move. Still, he soldiers on, not unscathed but still wealthy and undeniably well connected (working with Busta Rhymes, Wayne, and Diddy; even Cheryl Cole felt the need to tweet in his defense.) Part of his continued success has been dependent on his ability to tap into the lingering idea that he himself is a victim of society’s double standards—for responsibility, for forgiveness, for public propriety.

The new tat’s appearance came burdened with all manner of unflattering suggestions: if this was some sort of penance through mutilation, then Brown deserved a hallowed spot just below that self-flagellating monk from The Da Vinci Code. If it was a challenge to consumers to continue separating his persona from his art, then this was “Lars Von Trier making Nazi-sympathizing comments at Cannes”-level provocation. (In a truly perfect middle finger to America, photos of the tattoo dropped on September 11th, as if the “any press is good press” adage reflects one possible move in a massive psychological game of Stratego.) Yes, it’s come to light that Brown’s newest tattoo is based on a skull design made for MAC Cosmetics. But whatever his intention, the sight of a woman’s mutilated face has very clear connotations, one being that all those attempts to empathize with him are not reciprocated.

In a sensible world, public perception strong enough to attach nefarious intent to an essentially meaningless ink design would actually alter its wearer’s marketability. So when will we respond to the increasingly brazen challenge that Chris Brown is asserting? If a Mayor of Casterbridge-style downfall is what he’s asking for, then we really, really ought to give it to him. In the meantime, record execs, take a look at the half-skull/half-woman on his neck and perhaps you’ll see the absurdity of a morally and logically bereft industry staring back at you.

Tags: Chris Brown tattoo Rihanna