Antony and the Johnsons and my lousy personality.
I don’t know if this is a legitimate complaint, but I’m really troubled and tired by Antony and the Johnsons.
To get it over with, I should acknowledge that Antony Hegarty is a godly singer. His sincere, faltering falsetto is pure, and it avoids any sense of the accidentally parodic. And I enjoy his band’s sense of appearance, their sweetly dirty name (recalling 
both Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the Smiths) and their striking cover stars.
In addition, part of my dislike of the group is purely dislike of their style. Meandering, minimalist torch songs with surreal content are just not my business, and the mix doesn’t allow you to hide from the lyrics.
But from here we come to my grievance: impersonation, the idea of a New York-dwelling Englishman impersonating a transsexual, or a woman, or a dead woman, or a 1940s starlet, or Billie Holiday, or your favorite comparison. As I perhaps too-tartly said last week, I’m increasingly out of patience with male pop singers impersonating women. They take our things and play around in them, and get reputations for being wonderfully subversive for doing so, and yet when has a woman ever broken through by making the same (correct, if usually oversimplified) points about the mutability of gender and the ecstasy of being a boy-girl?
Please don’t talk to me about Patti Smith, because I have spent my whole life – I mean, because Patti Smith has remained a cult figure; there’s no need to talk to me about Courtney Love, at some point an ingenious mocker of automatic femininity, and now a universal figure of fun. I’m asking about actual worldly success.
As for the reasons why that grievance does not make me feel too good:
1. I would likely change my mind if I knew Hegarty was “legitimately” transsexual or genderqueer in his own right – which causes me some anxiety, as I’m always deeply bothered by people who demand that performers “come out” and admit to a specific identity in order to be taken seriously. (Maybe I wouldn’t, though, because my complaint is that Hegarty’s songs do seem to assert a single and highly specific identity as a significant portion of their actual point.)
2. I know at the bottom of my soul that there are lots of situations like Hegarty’s, and I don’t complain because I like their music more. (I might name someone they’re still trying to make go to rehab, for one example.)
As an aside, I’m much more pleasantly annoyed by reviews of Hegarty (and Joanna Newsom before him) that tend to mention how you have to be especially tolerant, introspective and open-minded to enjoy this kind of music. You probably do, but that only makes you virtuous, not good. Congratulations on having a well-formed personality. When combined with taste, that can aspire to predicting almost nothing about your actual decency, so there’s no need to congratulate yourself just yet, O Critic.
Addendum, 3/12: Marsha P. Johnson, of course, is the actual source of the name. I was alerted to this today, which is, I think, another indication that I am simply not the activist, trans-historically-conversant listener Antony is going for. Gender struggles are actually quite important to me but I haven’t done the reading.
Ad support conquers the earth
My friend Mielle and I wrote coincidentally/concurrently (and with not-that-eerie-really similarities in title choice) on the Gaslight Anthem last week – she calls them the Tarentinos of pop. Now her blog reminds me to talk about Killola.
Killola are a female-led DIY band who are touring with KRISTEENYOUNG this spring. They released their last record for free via direct ad support; each song begins with a brief skit or commentary by a band member, explaining that it’s sponsored by indie-related companies A and B. If you want the album without the ads, you can buy it, or go fuck yourself, I suppose, though buying it is probably easier.
I’m not particularly fascinated by the distribution and sale of music. Industry stuff is outside my limited mental jurisdiction, but this really begs my interest. The effect of the introductions is both intriguing and catastrophic. It’s impossible to cut the mental wires which would allow me to take meaning from this, a piece of art which literally can’t be separated from an ad (except via half an hour with GarageBand, but the phantom limb lingers on) – the result is a crude exposure of the label system, rather than a challenge to it.
Killola – All Of My Idols Are Dead (2008 )
Maybe it plays better to people who aren’t aging (26). I often notice that my students and I have a perception gap – they grew up in the Internet era (pervasive ads) whereas I was formed by the very end of the television era (ads and content separated) – seven years’ difference was enough for this. If Killola’s fans are even a bit younger, they might have developed the ability to ignore pervasive ads through sheer cultural evolution.
Or maybe the expectation is that people will treat the tracks as a preview, and buy the album, with the happy result of the band being paid twice – they’ll also be less likely to share it, because it’s already available for “free.” Either way, I think it’s ingenious, both as a distribution strategy and as a kind of satire. Unfortunately that insight comes at the expense of my ability to hear their music while it plays, which means my bias remains with the more traditional methods of self-distribution. I probably like Killola’s energetic guns-out garage pop, but it all has to stay provisional for the moment.
(Embarrassing that the only invisible way of acquiring music, the only one that doesn’t affect perception, involves an exchange of money or the explicit avoidance of an exchange of money.)
Music seems to be frozen at the start of any serious self-publishing movement; punks have been doing this for decades, and yet we’re still seeing the uncertainty about prestige (Allmusic doesn’t review self-released records by anyone not previously on a major) and the freeform experimentation which characterize the earliest stages of an idea. It’s always frustrating when the Internet fails to democratize things immediately, and it shouldn’t be as surprising as it is.
“See, I was playing a show down the road when your spirit left your body.”
I thought the Counting Crows were in the most torrid throes of the ten-years-post-radio-popularity critical nadir, but here come The Gaslight Anthem, referencing “‘Round Here” with incredible blatancy (“Maria came from Nashville with a suitcase in her hand/I always kinda, sorta wished I looked like Elvis,” “High Lonesome”) - and riding critics into town as they do so. And the Springsteen; when did that become cool? After the Killers’ Sam’s Town got assaulted on those grounds for having a bit of high fast piano and a touch of the grandiose, did everyone suddenly feel safe admitting that, of all their parents’ artists, he was always their favorite?
But this is just crap; I love the Gaslight Anthem, I’m just marveling at their critical popularity because I didn’t know pastiche artists got popular in the indie era. And after Amy Winehouse last year, I shouldn’t have been surprised even on the former count. Of course direct pastiche is still popular; direct pastiche is always popular. In fact, it’s a legitimate route to legitimacy – I have in my hand (ladies and gentlemen of the Senate) a list of artists of the top rank who’ve avoided it, but to get the patina of greatness rubbed all over you, one option is certainly to adopt some major aspect of a previously successful style. Just give it a twist, for God’s sake. Appropriate someone else’s stuff when you’re a totally different race or gender or social class. Grab hold of something whose datedness has quietly expired, and use it. For one trick that’s popular and not played-out yet: be men, but take from girl groups. Surely there’s a bit left in girl groups still.
The Gaslight Anthem are pastichers of high artistry; like Glasvegas, they amuse the ironist with displays of ironylessness. But, again, this is crap. I am simply saying this because I can’t currently express my admiration of The Gaslight Anthem via a higher form than psudeo-academic language. They play very well, they have the kind of bravery that takes influence from anyone who offers it, and write a clear, faceted lyric, graceful lyric.
The way they place all the different threads around each other – the different deaths, the scene-setting and shifting, the related but dissimilar parts, so that when the sentence fits together at the end, the key turns and it repeats and repeats – it’s the second perfect lyric I heard for the first time this week (the first was Belle & Sebastian’s “We Rule The School.” I’ve been living in a bomb shelter since 1995).
The appearance of Jacob Marley’s ghost, and Marley’s chains, is also wonderful (citation: I was not the first in my immediate circle to pay attention to this). Since 2001 or so, when I first heard one, I’ve been vaguely attuned to songs that reference A Christmas Carol - here are two others:
Kristeen Young – Marley’s Ghost (1997)
Aimee Mann – Jacob Marley’s Chain (1992)
-both songs I love, Mann’s for its enigmatic dignity, and Young’s -incredibly Young, first album- for its total vocal exuberance and insanity and also my favorite “BAY-BEE!” For the image of the chained ghost, it seems appropriate that these artists wield it, examine it, and dress up as it and run screaming around the room, respectively.
Cover stars, ready to explore the stratosphere.
I love Morrissey’s design sense when he isn’t putting records on his dick. Entirely responsible for the Smiths’ LP and single covers, and still heavily involved now that the world is slicker, he has played violins, hefted guns and babies, burped and lain on railroad tracks for Art. He is also the world champion in pairs publicity shots. There is a poster of him, Marr and some daffodils which still strikes me as dangerous (not because it’s “homoerotic,” whatever that means, but because it’s a professionals’ marriage portrait), and the 2006 image of Kristeen Young displayed on his shoulders in saddle shoes is an lovably queasy evocation of Lolita, let down only by the camera’s catching everyone’s faces at a slightly inopportune moment.
But this post is primarily about those Smiths sleeves -vintage advertisements, film stills and newspaper photographs- and particularly the odd moment that recurs whenever you see something that clearly fits among them – like the image of Wiley Post in an early pressure suit (below), which I found on Boing Boing the other day. The strange business (a camera?) at crotch level, the wrapped and protected body, the caption, the sense that the context has died with the years – it could fit between “Hand In Glove” (Jim French photo of bare-assed fellow) and “This Charming Man” (Jean Marais as a Narcissus-like Orpheus, asleep by a mirroring pond – an image Young briefly glances toward in her gorgeous sleeve for Music For Strippers, Hookers and the Odd On-Looker).
The Smiths’ visuals were incredibly important in teaching me to recognize the melancholy of low camp. I know that many of them come from “high” sources, but the fact that they mix art films with Seventies soap operas is itself as camp as camp can get. It’s about the sadness of things that lack context; you can find out the source of the still, and quite often the reference is interesting, but the initial strike is all about the total isolation of the image.
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