Dramatic pop songwriting

Glasvegas, “Daddy’s Gone” (2008 ) (official video):

It’s astounding how sentimental this song is and how completely the band have got away with it. This is the great loophole of punklike music: put a boy in a motorcycle jacket, and he can be as maudlin as he likes with no public outcry.

I keep trying to call Glasvegas a punk band, not because of the jackets or because they seem particularly to identify as such, but because James Allan has a basic dignified sadness like the very first UK punk frontmen. I always thought Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer were basically sad performers at the start, even though they were also very witty and very aware of what they were up to, and the importance of replicating it exactly each night.

As with Robyn Hitchcock and the Decemberists, I think I will end up treasuring the tremendous liveness of this band a lot more than I treasure their album. It’s not because they lack irony, though.

KRISTEENYOUNG feat. Patrick Stump, “That’s What It Takes, Dear” (2009) (fan YouTubing)

This has been back in my mind because I found the lyrics on a fan board. (They’re down under the cut if you want them.)

I particularly liked the first line of Stump’s part (“Half sound, half drowned/the only movements toward the ground”), whose singsong meter is stretched into an alien shape by the melody. It seems to lurch close to bad drama, but it’s really almost clinical. (If you take the puns one way: “The subject’s living portion was entirely auditory. The subject’s only movements were downward.”) Specificity is so often the difference between good and bad drama – “Life’s been choked, so I broke three thousand throats” might be abstract, but it’s not vague; it’s an explanation of a symptom in a dream.

“I’ll be your statesman, your guru, your mobile home.”

As I mentioned last week, I have synesthesia; sound has inherent color to me, and abstract ideas inherent shapes. I’ve always been this way, and I only recently learned that it’s uncommon. Most people I know, when asked specific things (most often about how they visualize time), seem to reveal a touch of synesthetic thinking, so I think it’s more of a spectrum or style of thought than a distinct thing.

Kristeen Young’s voice is always quite complicated in its shading, and most of the tones are cool. The whole of Enemy is blue and purple. X is ice-blue. The track “Devil Girl” is a rich violet; “This Is the Dawn Of My D-Day” (2008), is pink, red and gold, and has a metallic gleam.

I’m writing about it today for no good reason, except that I love it; she doesn’t write a lot of straightforward love songs, and this one’s soaring giggle is pretty unique. It also has a really good central metaphor. Young has occasionally covered Hazel O’Connor, and I wonder if this song, in addition to love-as-allied-invasion, doesn’t reference O’Connor’s “D Days (Decadent Days);” no relation in tone or subject matter, but the association gives it a sense of outlawry.

The lyric is both strange and strict. It enforces internal rhymes across both verses, periodically dips up into a trilling “like…doo, doo, doo” which euphemizes nothing, and the imagery -mostly of a car/lover, the sequel to the television/lover of “My TV”- seems almost horrific until it snaps together.

Coinage 2.

Two portmanteau words I recently invented, through failed attempts to say one or the other.

Awsul. “Awesome” and “awful.”

Terrible in a way that inspires positive awe.

Boignant: “Buoyant” and “poignant.”

The bittersweet feeling of knowing something very pleasing will not be repeated.

That big Irish face

There’s a breathtaking Morrissey impersonator who lives up in Portland. His resemblance is extraordinary, and he replicates the exact physical presence, movements, style of dress; his quiff is either graying in the same pattern or, perhaps -and I’d prefer this- he has it professionally grayed.

He doesn’t perform conventionally, so far as I know. His artform is coming to shows in character. I’ve seen him previously, but it was at a Morrissey concert, where nobody was fooled, for obvious reasons. I knew from gossip that I might see him again in this area, but when I did, at Glasvegas, it was eerie and somewhat terrifying. Because, honestly, how do you know? Are you making a fool of yourself by nodding wisely, saying after all that the real Morrissey would never half-hug a stranger like that as she leaned in to talk to him, or that the real Morrissey doesn’t pee?

(Actually, I know he pees. I’ve seen him run offstage after saying so, though, yes, if we’re going to get down to it, I didn’t actually witness the act. I think he’s saving the onstage whizz for a special occasion.)

Anyway, it didn’t help that the real Carl Barat was wandering around too, looking sad and clear-skinned after his opening set, and occasionally signing an autograph. A troupe of young British women were at the show, delighted with the nearness afforded by his American obscurity. I admired them.

“I’ve tried so hard to keep myself from falling back to my bad old ways.”

After two band changes and many setbacks, I’m finally going to see one of the Libertines in person – Carl Barat. (I was always a Barat fan; adjust your opinion of my character accordingly.) As such, I’m trying to recapture how I felt about the group in 2006. It’s not easy. Drama is a necessity for art, but it eventually kills all life on earth. This is mostly Doherty’s fault, it’s true, not Barat’s; if I’ve read one story about Doherty spraying someone with blood, I’ve read them all, and I’m not even English.

Let’s start by remembering that they were tragic, which is hard, and very nearly a stated goal. They got handed the tragic entertainment story, thwarted cleverness – the specific kind where someone is playing, brilliantly, with the idea of Crazy Fame when it obligingly reaches up and swallows them into its damp leather gullet. This is a one-way process with no room for nostalgia. When someone’s both dancing with and joking about Crazy Fame, it is exciting and a bit retro and dangerous; when they’re done -when it gets them- the story instantly becomes sad and boring, and suddenly it always has been.

And the Libertines were messing with all sorts of other dangerous things – the aforementioned high tragedy, and an outmoded but surprisingly compliant outlaw romance, and the kind of nationalist nostalgia which you can embrace only so long as everyone has a completely unspoken agreement to look at it apolitically.  All of these things really come down to playing with nostalgia, and yet also taking it immensely seriously – a gorgeous disconnect that drove everything they did.

“The Good Old Days” is my favorite of their songs (please excuse misuse of a random fan’s personal video; there’s no other studio recording on YouTube):

The song is a nostalgic vision (Queen Boadicea’s spirit living on in her descendents; vague ideals of “love and music,” the Albion sailing on with “twelve rude boys on the oars”) but every other line is a denial – some false ideal which the narrator wants to make a note of excluding from his official portrait, whether it’s childhood or punk. (“It’s not about tenements and needles,” runs the bridge, “and all the evils in their eyes and the backs of their minds/daisy chains and schoolyard games and lists of things we said we’d do tomorrow”).

“The Good Old Days” is clear-headed, and knows that vanished things are not automatically good. Nonetheless, it longs for them with every faculty it has, and its elegant frustrations coincide with the various impossibilities of this situation – most of all, the lack of a human ability to realize nostalgic dreams in the present. This is, obviously, a foot-stampingly paradoxical desire, but that’s why they’re a rock band and not a doctor of philosophy.

Hence, I guess, my unhappy claim that you can’t be nostalgic for them. You can’t appreciate a group whose whole aesthetic was founded on a complicated love/hate relationship with nostalgia if you can’t have a complicated nostalgic feeling about them, and what with four years of tabloid coverage of the ex-group’s baser moments, that’s impossible. To feel nostalgic, you’d have to feel even remotely that this music belongs to you, or has really gone away, and tabloid celebrities don’t really belong to anyone nor do they ever go away.

I do feel a bit bouncier now that I’ve said this, though. Drama, just like radioactivity, presumably dissipates eventually, and even at the start of the post I was excited enough to see Barat live – all the Libertines (even the other two) are mobile emergency charisma and intelligence units. It was nice to remember how intelligently “The Good Old Days” reacts to and rewrites “The Queen is Dead” (which in turn I always thought was partly a thoughtful response to the Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”). I’m over this band. I’m a thousand kinds of over them, but there’s some residue remaining, obviously.

I wonder how Barat will come off in a small venue, in an opening slot; can “The Saga” (as, at one point, the Libertines actually called a song) even fit in there? I hope not.

Johnny Marr sings “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want”

I don’t think I understand Johnny Marr’s accent anymore. He’s not trying to sound American, but he seems to have lost several of his vowels in an offscreen accident and replaced them with Isaac Brock’s spares.

Anyway, this is exciting contrast for the nerdy. Morrissey’s made some changes over the years, but Marr does a massive edit – turning the famous mandolin outro into a bridge, losing the repetition/no repetition tension which originally supported the two verses, and shifting the chords until they comment on the original more than reproduce it. They’ve both tweaked the song to their modern needs, and in the process, they’ve diverged completely from what they wrote together.

Marr is the only guitarist I know who plays in English. He uses chords like words; the progressions are like elegant, well-written sentences spoken in a strong voice. I could even edge out further, and say that the core sense in his Smiths songs is an ecstatic admonishment (the one he uses for Modest Mouse is more of an abstract anxious tentative joy) – though that’s no universal, and obviously I wouldn’t go so far as to say you can turn this stuff directly into words or even that directly into named emotion. I’m not trying to claim  him for the word-people so much as say that, somehow, he’s one instrumentalist word-people think we understand.

Maybe it has something to do with his synesthesia – I read an interview with Marr once where he explains (without using the word) that he has a mental cross-wiring that gives him a sort of internal Windows Media visualizer. He “sees” sounds. The Smiths look like “a circular stained-glass window;” Bob Dylan’s voice is “definitely an organic sandy wood color.” It’s a trait we share (along with Vladimir Nabokov, and -thank you, Wikipedia- Patrick Stump…) – so I know what he means, though to me Dylan sounds more of a lager brown. Anyway, perhaps this blurring of the senses relates to the verbal or visual qualities that make his playing so legible to people who, like me, aren’t native speakers of non-vocal music.

Johnny Marr – Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right (2002?)

Photoshoppe: Your plastic prison cannot hold me for long

Bad taste, class identity, Nina Hagen.

All my ideas are middle-class. You can tell because my sense of what’s great is inseparable from the illicit thrill of bad taste.

(in this case, Taste (n): The 19th-21st century, middle-class concept of the social appropriateness of a given aesthetic piece.)

Probably, this has been helpful to me. It’s important to get that good art is usually tasteless, and great art is always tasteless, and I didn’t always understand that. But, yeah, I know that point of view isn’t really a rebellion. Of course the highest artistic ideal of an intelligent middle-class person is something that’s both good and gauche; it’s the most agonizing contradiction we can think of.

For some reason, it made sense to begin a post about the great freak sirens of New Wave and early goth -Kate Bush, Hazel O’Connor, Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich, and so on down the cliff- with that little commentary. These artists have never done what you’d think for me. The explanation is very different for each, and I don’t think it’s either a lack of talent or a question of taste, though at sad moments, I worry that I’m just too damn boring to appreciate something quite as tasteless as, for example, Hagen. At these times I find myself caught between the overwhelming boredom of most music, and the sense that most music that is trying to be interesting is “a bit too out-there.”

But is it? Is this woman shocking?

I know that this song (“Naturtrane,” 1978 ) is very strange, and it gets my attention in a good way (Hagen probably comes the closest of this loose constellation of artists to working for me) but I really don’t know if it offends my taste. It offends my sense of song construction, yes, because I can’t engage with something that has no melody (and that’s not middle-class, that’s just centuries of Western music, but really, the mainstream of Western music has drifted away from melody, so let’s give the academic agony a break and just say it’s me). But the song doesn’t offend the way I want; it doesn’t injure me. I can admire this kind of cry of big modern horror, but doesn’t grasp my thought and emotion in a way that shouldn’t happen in public. It’s a highly-stylized voice moaning in a void.

I think, most of all, that I would like to hear strange music made by people with mainstream influences – strange music with the audacity to look at the mainstream, want it, and try to beat it over its own head.