Photoshoppe: The saga of Johnny Marr, Smiths guitarist.
In 1987, the Smiths broke up. In 1989, I started a dance duo with Bernard Sumner.
Later, I had a solo project called the Healers, in which I played and sang a superb cover of Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right."
Later still, I decided to join Modest Mouse. I probably had legitimate musical reasons, but secretly you imagine that I did it just to fuck with everybody. The group which had made me famous was arty, removed, with its eye always apparently on some Mercurian height; we wrote songs about cruelty and meat set to jangly pop tunes. This new group was noisy, muscular and slightly frattish, and, while arty, did it in a completely different way that involved fewer flowers in our pants and more putting on goggles and dressing up like fish.
Eventually, I also joined the Cribs, which was the beginning of my Dada phase. What can I possibly have to do with these three brothers? Can my writing with them mesh as well as my epic collaboration with Morrissey, or my inexplicably simpatico, equally skillful one with Isaac Brock? What will 2009 bring? The only answer I have for you is the sound of a seagull in guitar form. Good night.
Holiday melancholy
Judy Garland – “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (1944)
From Meet Me In St. Louis. Yes, I’m putting this up for Kristeen Young reasons.
Sleeve does what a sleeve should
The album’s hanging on till spring, but the cover is out, and I love it:
It’s a video in one frame. You can read all you’d like into the photo -pin-up coyness, regality, a clogged depression- but it never repeats itself from glance to glance; the classical quietness of the image hushes the heavily armed title, and her gaze meets yours.
And it’s beautiful design. The fonts match well and pick up the lines from the keyboard and sheet, and the touch of ice-blue makes the title rise. The photo layout is perfect, with every vertical and diagonal traveling directly to Young’s face. Her left foot rests firmly on the bottom of the frame; her right trails off into the dark.
And the disc design parodied the Sacajawea dollar.
This is really the first KRISTEENYOUNG sleeve I’ve loved, though The Orphans had an overcrowded, hell-yeah kind of charm which accurately reflects much of the interior.
Previous to that lies the Land of Sleeves Upon Which I Have No Opinion. I’m still trying to grasp Breasticles‘ footlocker theme. But this last one is perfect, looking precisely like the album sounds so far; loaded without being bludgeoning.
The Years of Refusal sleeve
It seems to bother a lot of his fans, but a lot of things do, and I’m not sure I read a big enough sample.
I think its only real offense is a general lack of years – both in the slick facemask he’s been given via Photoshop, and the eye-misleading positioning of the title.
But it seems in keeping with the post-Maladjusted sleeve theme: highly stylized poses, inexplicable props, vintage fonts – all of it not entirely coming off, but it costs you nothing to be generous to the possibility that this sleeve isn’t meant to come off. I think that’s what the past three have aimed for. They’re trying to strike an uncomfortable, does-he-mean-this balance between agonizing high camp and genuine star quality, like “First of the Gang to Die.”
Granted, only Ringleader of the Tormentors, with its implicitly shouted title and slathering of very, very almost-convincing faux-very-high-class-indeed patina, actually got there for me:
Say what you want. I think that’s a beautiful goddamn piece of design.
But Years of Refusal isn’t bad either, despite the Photoshop and a certain weirdness around the proportions and cropping which I assume is not part of the point. I like the blankness of what’s left of Morrissey’s expression, and the way it contrasts with the extremely personable baby.
Look at that baby. That’s a sassy baby. I think he’s saying, “you should get to know your town, just like I know mine.”
Inadapté
Michael Bracewell said (ages ago, not sure where) that the official line on what humans want has changed from money to mental health. I think it’s made another turn, though a very slight one – we’re not meant to want mental health now, but well-adjustedness.
Well-adjustedness is as classic as the New Look, but only recently has it become our primary imagined goal, the thing that reviewers and writers assume all artists are trying to reach. It has something to do with a hard-ass, macho backlash against the antidepressant revolution which changed the winds toward idealizing mental health in the first place, and it also has something to do with early reality TV – nobody wants to be like the people on American Idol who feel great about themselves, but don’t understand the role in the fame system which is so clear to everyone else.
This has had an unpleasant effect on the level of allowance people will give artists who, in the first place, caught a lot of flak for being dramatic or unhappy or camp. The crucial possibility that their work is tempered with humor is just not considered anymore, even though it’s currently in vogue again for serious music to have jokes.
I wonder what ideal will be next, after well-adjustedness; maybe the economic crisis will cycle it back to money again.
Kristeen Young performing in Detroit
Out of costume, and in a rock venue that’s also a vintage store. The things I miss in life.
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