So Cow — “Moon Geun Young”
So Cow is an Irish guy, who’s spent a bit of time in South Korea, who makes guitar-pop, who has a new record coming out this month, who I find really charming. I don’t always find it easy to articulate why. A lot of the obvious descriptions just involve pointing out that I’m in his target market. This guy’s music is all indie(pop) classicism — hooky, ramshackle tunes that sound like the British Isles around the time “punk” faded and “indie” began. Like the Television Personalities, or Jilted John, or maybe Swell Maps. Maybe a little more bedroomy.
“But he’s really good at it?” Well, yes, but let’s say something else first. A lot of American bands, these days, are getting all back-to-basics — playing scrappy, rickety, and lo-fi. A lot of them feel like they’re digging bunkers, though, playing it deliberately obscure, shrouding themselves in hip noise. So Cow’s kind of the opposite. His songwriting is ambitious and flexible: he seems to take a bunch of joy in adding things like harmonized guitar leads, haphazard harmonies, changes that require actual counting. And his recording isn’t really lo-fi: it’s quite crisp, well-mixed, and realistic, actually. It just happens to be a realistic capturing of what playing like this actually sounds like. Everything about him is the opposite of obscure, right down to the rather formal metaphors in the lyrics, which mostly involve being clever about pretty traditional “indie” experiences — as you can imagine, there’s a lot about pining and dating and getting dumped, a lot of good jokes, a little brattiness. “Sounds homemade without being insular” — that’s how Marc Hogan described it at Pitchfork, which I think gets at something.
But again, that just tells you what he’s different from. What can be said about him? “He’s good at it?” “The songs are fun?” “There’s this shaggy line-in guitar sound on ‘Casablanca’ that reminds me of my four-track?”
I can’t come up with much beyond words like “fun” and “joy” and “charm,” by which I think I mean: he sounds like he’s enjoying himself. In a generous way. You can hear that he loves playing guitar leads and rolling drum fills. He seems like he loves organizing his vocals — check out the backing parts on the verses of this song, or the slack pop trick he pulls out of the word “shoulder.” He doesn’t sound like he’s ramshackle out of ineptitude; he sounds like he’s ramshackle out of exuberance and good priorities.
I’m hoping this new release will be even better than his last collection, which — despite a noticeable hit-or-miss gulf — I’m extremely fond of. “Moon Geun Young” wasn’t one of my first favorites, but it’s so nicely balanced that it’s stuck with me. It’s named after a Korean star thought of as “the nation’s little sister” — who just happens to be looking down from an ad while the singer gets dumped at a bus stop. Indie, right?
bossa nova class & politics fight!!!
Last week I wrote a bit about the cosmopolitanism of a lot of old Afro-pop — the way some of it came from a modern, urbane, aspirational sensibility as much as anything “traditional.” I also mentioned, in passing, that Brazil had a similar dynamic around the same time, which sent me looking back to Ruy Castro’s detailed and wonderfully opinionated Bossa Nova to check my facts. And since I’ve been writing/talking a lot lately about the politics of music — especially in terms of class and race — I want to share a bunch of terrific quotes from the Great Bossa Nova Class/Populism/Politics Split of the mid-60s, because I can almost promise you’ll find them fascinating. Much of the history and background here is summarized from Castro (who, like I said, certainly has his own opinions here), but you’ll likely find a lot of the issues highly recognizable, even if you just skim the quotes themselves. And forgive me for not having time to reproduce all the right accents and diacritical marks on the names! (It’s Nara Leão.)
DADT, and other policies built to fail
But I’m more interested in the idea of policies that erode and critique and dismantle themselves — compromises that seem built to topple in a specific direction — and I spent part of last night trying to think of a good analog. Most of you reading this will probably know better than me: what are some other instances of policies, rulings, and compromises custom-designed to evaporate?
The current Senate health-care bill is a great example of this, if you look at it from a somewhat narrow point of view: By maintaining insurance companies as private entities (and not establishing public competition), but requiring them to do things specifically against their free-market interests (insuring people with pre-existing conditions) while at the same time ensuring their continued existence nonetheless (via the “individual mandate”), the Senate has essentially placed the current health-care insurance system on track to become, more or less, a public utility, like heating, or water.
CRS’s answer here is a lot of why I asked the question, because we’ve seen a lot of justifications of health-reform compromise that follow this kind of logic. “So long as we pass anything, the administration will have broad leeway in implementing it.” “If the public is dissatisfied with the reform, their impulse will be to improve and extend it, not reverse it.” Etc. Most of which are pretty persuasive arguments, given our relationship to a lot of policies in the past. But it also has a weird relationship with rhetoric from the right on this issue, because it lends credence to one claim (that this is the overture to some far-reaching “takeover,” and therefore cannot be compromised on) while revealing a big bankruptcy elsewhere (“we must deny you this because you will like it” — the long history of treating potential entitlements like some kind of tooth-rotting candy that has to be kept from a childish and grasping public).
Somehow the question didn’t turn on when I first posted, but any thoughts on past policies that have already toppled themselves in a preordained direction would be interesting.
reblogged from celebraterickysargulesh
per Tom, a question about viral phenomena and OK Go
So Tom’s latest Guardian column is about viral videos, and OK Go, and their difficulty in replicating the treadmill-fueled YouTube success around their last album. I’ll be saying something lengthy about OK Go in a second, but the question that always floats around this stuff, for me, tends to have to do with our sense of “viral” material as something cheap and ephemeral, a novelty plucked from a river that will flow on to something else soon enough — maybe even something that doesn’t hold up outside of its viral context. This is something I imagine Tom’s thought or written about before, maybe even in a professional capacity — the way we differentiate between something ephemeral (the nuggets of fun that keep us paying money for internet service) and something firmer (an artist we’ll follow regularly, whose next album we’ll be looking for).
DADT, and other policies built to fail
It’s always interesting to watch traces of internetty derision work their way into august print institutions, and this running commentary on a Bill Kristol piece, from the Economist online, is no exception: there really is no better response to Kristol’s position than eye-rolling, head-shaking, disdain, and snarky use of strikethrough tags. And this is partly because what Kristol’s arguing for — the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy — is not really much of a principle to defend. It’s a compromise, and it’s one that was built to self-destruct. How righteously can a person argue for the grand tradition of an odd, abstracted compromise, struck when he was already middle-aged? There just isn’t much there to stand on.
"it's complicated"
Speaking of British Columbia and earnestness: I spent part of this morning doing an interview for a CBC Radio 3 program — about class, race, indie music, appropriation, and Vampire Weekend, which I guess has accidentally become my signature topic for the winter. (If you’re sick of reading my writing on the topic, good news: soon you may be able to hear me ramble inconclusively about it via headphones.) Immediately after hanging up the phone, I had yet another strong realization of how boring I have the potential to be, and why: I’m a little afraid the thing will consist almost entirely of an interviewer attempting to agree with me, and getting a string of responses along the lines of “I wouldn’t quite put it that way” or “well I do understand that impulse” or “well this is where it gets complicated.”
I’m working on reminding myself that art criticism is probably one sphere of life where it’s not such a bad thing to equivocate.
in which I realize I'm sort of a believer in the Olympic spirit, actually
I wrote a while back about cliches: how we’re suspicious of them, how we have good reason to be, and how we still come to points in our lives where we uncover the point of them for ourselves. (You could read at least a few hundred pages of David Foster Wallace on this and related points.) Well: the Olympics are one such cliche, no question. And right now, especially Canada-wise, you can read plenty of meaningful debate about how they’re run, who they benefit, and whether or not the whole thing is kind of just a capitalistic scam.
Weirdly enough, the Olympics were one of the things I had in mind when talking about cliches the first time — though not so much the winter ones, which involve far too much equipment and landscaping to work right. (You could practically describe “winter” as a Eurocentric concept.)
lineara asked: Why are you trying to stifle discussion on class and race in music? Inventing this straw man argument that anyone who brings up race or class is arguing in bad faith for their own personal gain is disgusting, and doesn't help any side of the debate. In spite of your attempt to shift the debate away from VW, the facts remain that 1) the members of the band do not belong to the cultures they are appropriating, and that needs to be discussed publicly. And 2) people from privilege making art about how great it is to be privileged is tacky. (There are many more subtleties that should be discussed, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)
Looking forward to your response.
I’m genuinely sorry to have disgusted you. I think that if you look carefully at everything I said, it should be abundantly clear that I’m not “trying to stifle discussion on class and race in music.” I enjoy discussion of class and race in music, and spend way too much of my time following it. I enjoy the discussion so much, in fact, that I like it to be good. By “good” I mean: curious, nuanced, complex, thoughtful, engaged. And when we lean a little too far in the direction of knee-jerking or point-scoring, we’re no longer having a good conversation — we’re inhibiting that conversation, and replacing it with something less productive. You may not think this happens all that often, but it’s my personal opinion that it does. Not because of “bad faith” or for anyone’s personal gain, but because our conversation isn’t always the healthiest, and bad habits can be hard for all of us to break, self included.
(For instance, when you say I’m not helping “any side of the debate,” I can’t help wondering what debate we’re talking about, and what the sides are. I’m not sure a healthy discussion of class and race in music should have “sides.”)
Of the two points you listed, the first of them is precisely the sort of thing we should probably be talking about with nuance and curiosity, right down to basic questions like “what does it mean to ‘belong’ to a musical culture?” and “what do we mean by ‘appropriating?’” As for the second of them, I can only say that I’m definitely not alone in disagreeing with you that these songs are “about how great it is to be privileged.” Not unless Goodbye, Columbus is about how fun it is to be Jewish.
on the elite cosmopolitanism of a lot of old African pop
I’m far from knowledgeable about west-African music, and I promise I’ll never tell you any different without a whole lot of learning in between. Still, I’ve found myself dwelling on this weird statement from last week’s conversation about A Certain Popular Indie Band — one that described west-African pop as “the culture of impoverished black Africans.” There’s some level on which this might be factually accurate: yeah, plenty of impoverished black Africans have surely enjoyed the stuff. But then there’s another level on which it’s rather misleading. Plus a whole lot of levels on which, like most things in the world, it’s complex, nuanced, and fascinating. There’s not much I can tell you about this topic that’s not totally remedial, vague, Wikipedia-level knowledge, but can we talk about it anyway?
Zadie Smith -- "Changing My Mind"
Just finished up with Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith’s collection of “occasional essays.” These days I can’t believe there was a point where I actually worried about Smith. Her first novel was messy, awkward, and destined to be faintly embarrassing, sure, but there was this amazing energy to it, a sense of the author’s pure joy in creating something — it read like some treasure a great young friend might pull out of a drawer and drop in your lap. But after it made its great splash, it seemed for a moment like Smith was changing. Having been taken seriously, she seemed to be trying to live up to that perception. Even her author photo went from hair, freckles, and a western shirt to something glamorous, sedate, and adult. And as the middling reviews of her second novel came around, I actually did worry: was she just going to blend in now? Strive, along with everyone else, to be adequately serious? This seemed disappointing.
