REVIEW: Music For Strippers, Hookers and the Odd On-Looker

KRISTEENYOUNG – Music For Strippers, Hookers and the Odd On-Looker (2009)

1. You are either going to love it or hate it. That’s how it is with Young’s voice, so this is not going to be a review so much as notes on a record I’ve loved since 2007, when “Depression Contest,” “Protestant,” “He’s Sickened By My Crude Emotion” and others began to surface in their live set.

2. It’s the album of the decade, though, and I actually mean that. My decade, anyway. Meet Miss Young and Her All Boy Band is a huge young voice learning that it’s capable of anything; The Orphans is a string of great singles-that-never-were mixed with a string of great b-sides-that-never-were, but Music For Strippers is the voice of Kristeen Young’s maturity, God help us all.

3. The sound is…really good. I don’t know how else to put it. They haven’t made a giant stylistic change -Young’s banging, internally warring, multilayered chords, accompanied by Jef White’s inspired drum parts, are always immediately recognizable- but Strippers‘ mixes just seem to have all the right ratios. There’s so much going on below the voice on almost every track, layers of piano and synth; a lot of this could be very interesting as an album of instrumentals.

4. The singing is mutating and alive, and Tony Visconti records the vocals beautifully. The album does not have the vocal variety of some of their prior ones, but we have the prior ones for that, and what it lacks in broad-ranging experimentalism it makes up in wit and complexity of delivery. These vocals seem very fresh; nothing about them is mannered.

5. I do really love the lyrics. They’ve evolved to a point where the mix of very bald and very subtle stuff is incendiary. “Protestant” is a statement of faith (not much of it Protestantism) which makes great use of her never-gimmicky gift for stripping the sensual mystique from sex but lavishing it on everything else; “The Depression Contest” boasts that Young’s tears are “more nuanced -na na- and deeper than yours” and invites you to pity her harder and faster; “Keyboard Like A Gun” mocks narcissistic Internet culture from a position just inside it.

6. [SCENE MISSING; don't want to mess up the order, but I don't like the point I had at #6.]

7. If you are a fan, you can make a solid guess at the identities of a couple of the people she’s singing about.

8. But a biographical reading is even less interesting than usual. This is an elliptical, referential album, whose central metaphor -the business transaction of stripping and watching, as it applies to various characters in various orders- is always present but never explicit.

9. This may make it sound florid and inexact, which it isn’t. The writing is precise and without pretension. But trying to read it biographically will make it seem like a riddle -deliberately obscure- and that’s not the point; it’s actually just deliberately elusive, I think. Which is very different. An obscure thing hides; an elusive thing is always visible, but can’t be caught and dissected.

10. Really good records always humanize the artist rather than the other way around; sometimes (though not with this one) it’s the only way you can actually tell they’re really good. In this case, I really felt as if these shattering troubles didn’t go away after they were made into art, and that’s a surprisingly unique emotion. The temptation to make it all bitterly triumphant seems to have been avoided.

11. This album perfects Young’s aesthetic. It doesn’t cancel out her previous writing, but what’s new is a terrifying consistency and connected feeling and, along the way, it’s very technically exacting. It’s a near-perfect album from a band who’ve already come close to perfection a few times. I hope I don’t turn everyone off with my “album of the decade” talk, but for me, I can’t call it anything else.

Hear samples on MySpace.

Buy the thing on Emusic.

Or buy a hardcopy from her.

Or you could even buy it on .

I don’t know what to believe anymore.

Google Image Search, page 1:

(This actually is Google Images, “Fiona Apple,” page 1, row 2, and they were next to each other at WordPress time, though they no longer are.)

Hunting of the Snark

I can’t stand the Internet practice of mocking celebrity style, even as I’m obviously attracted to it enough to be familiar with it.

My problem is not that these blogs treat celebrity culture with irreverence. Debunking celebrity is great. Fame hurts art and people, and the more we debunk it the happier we will be.

My objection is that this kind of writing encourages a numbing aesthetic conservatism, though not on the part of its subjects. I doubt they care, unless they see the coverage as positive. Mockery has never been very good at keeping people in line.

It’s excellent, however, at policing the tastes of its writers and followers. Mockery creates a sense of easily punctured superiority. Lines must be drawn to keep you on the right side of the dreaded fence. You have to use stricter and stricter language to keep down the idea that these people might conceivably look good; you have to explain that she looks like a household object, that he has no idea what to wear, that she doesn’t know how to flatter her coloring and body, or, if you’re going to admit you like the look, the classic “she’s crazy but I love it.”

And anyway, how are you going to draw a line between the “attention whores” and the arty kids, between Katy Perry and Bjork? Both of them want to be seen; part of art is being seen, even if in the mirror. Both of them want to express themselves, even if their chosen form is the tabloid. The arty kids are smarter; they tend to look a lot better and have higher levels of style, but if you’re going to make fun of one, you always end up making fun of the other, because they’re different varieties of the same human impulse. And then you start to dismiss both, or tag the arty kids with the approving “crazy,” which is a similar dismissal: I’m not like that, but I like that. And then your whole sense of beauty changes just a little bit. Maybe it changes for the worse.

I also take issue with snark on unflattering clothes.  It’s much more reasonable to complain that an outfit hides a person’s beauty, but this presupposes that the only possible point is the person looking beautiful.

I’ve always liked Wilde’s inevitable epigram that “one must either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” One of its interpretations is that it’s possible to differentiate between your clothes and yourself. Beauty can be achieved either looking beautiful or simply by wearing something beautiful (or something ugly but inspiring). The latter will give you aesthetic pleasure whether it flatters your face or not; there’s no reason why this way should improve a room any less.

Flattery isn’t a bad ideal. I’m just saying there could be others, and they might contradict it without invalidating either. There’s so little beauty in the world sometimes; I think we should give a fighting chance to any possibility of it.

Credits: Katy Perry shot by Gareth Cattermole for Getty Images. Bjork shot by unknown.

Bubble bobble

1. Kristeen Young, 2007:

2. Lady Gaga, 2009:

3. Wow.

4. Actually, it’s probably coincidence. Young’s dress got a lot of exposure, comparatively, since she wore it on Letterman with Morrissey as well as on the tour. But they’re probably just both riffing on the same Spring ‘07 Hussein Chalayan creation.

(Update: it turned out Young was not. Maybe Gaga was, though.)

5. And their takes are quite different. DIY vs. sleekness; dress vs. accessory.

6. Still, considering where my admiration lies, seeing paeans go to Gaga is extremely exasperating.

This is how it goes. Your favorite singer is a cult act with a peculiar trash-glamor aesthetic. One of her costumes is particularly definitive; like most of what she makes, it has distorted proportions, original details, and looks like it was made at home with a glue gun over many painstaking hours. She’s obviously proud of it and wears it on television. You get used to describing her style by describing this dress, since it epitomizes both what she’s doing now and her earlier, more punkish phase of decking herself out in discarded bread bags and miscellaneous wires.

Then a star does the same dress. She does it quite differently, and the look reflects her image as a leotard-packing disco queen, but it’s similar enough that, to any neutral parties who see the photo, the idea belongs to her, and all previous uses (Young’s and Chalayan’s both) are re-cast in her light. This is a hazard of the fame system: it re-rewards achievements according to the status of one’s career. What a cult artist wears is always vulnerable. What a star wears is hers.

7.  I’m also annoyed at the general comment-response to posts about Gaga’s attire, though. It’s not that I like the woman; so long as our culture continues to give pretty youths whatever they want, there will be sentences like Gaga’s description of her Warholian Factory: “Everyone is under 26, and we do everything together.”

Under 26! They sound wonderful.

But out on the comment front, the ratio of pleasure to stale negativity (“Desperate to provoke Trying too hard Crazy Silly Doesn’t seem to understand how to be cool” – or, in the best-case scenario, “like Bjork”) was depressing. Sometimes a woman will wear a dress because it suits her aesthetic, not because it was engineered for maximum quiet flattery by two hundred clones of Christian Dior who live in a secret underground base. Especially if she is performing music on stage.

(Photo credits: Kristeen Young shot by Michael Alan Goldberg; Lady Gaga shot by unknown, photo from Flash via Jezebel.)

Doherty und Barat

I don’t know what it is about Carl Barat. He was one of the sleeker live performers I’ve seen -very nice, very cool, very famous- not that that detracted from the joy of seeing him, but I’ve never seen a more together person. But when it comes to photographs, he’s a lurking cynical hairball, these subtle observant expressions – it’s as if the normal poles are reversed with him: spontaneity in the face of permanent recording, and total professionalism in person. I stress that I’m talking about an unusual aspect of his art, rather than judging him as a man. It’s “Carl Barat, you know how and when to channel yourself,” not “Carl Barat, you are a fuzzy little fake.”

Anyway, this photo of Barat and Doherty at (how did you guess?) the latest NME awards captures something about how they always look together – this complicated, resigned exchanged glance (of course they’ll exchange a glance when the cameras are there) which is both public and genuinely intimate. You know you’re being played to, but the plot of the play is “fuck this for a situation where we feel we have to play to people;” the glance is an invitation to pretend you’re part of their frustration with the observing mob, rather than part of the observing mob. Under the circumstances, that’s very generous.

I was enjoying some Fall Out Boy Trail today, marveling at FOB’s world-takeover ability to simultaneously disgust and please -they make product placement a punk pose; they released a deliberately unwinnable parody 16-bit game where you can heal your party with Vitamin Water and somehow it’s cheeky- but I prefer the weary striptease of the Libertines’ 4-years-and-counting breakup, if we’re going to pit PR-as-art against PR-as-art, and we are.