Did You Say Popular?

Simon Reynolds on Vampire Weekend, who at this point are maybe in a phase of Backlash Backlash Backlash Backlash? (Call it dialectical careerism.) I especially like this:

Given the nature of modern media and our crazed archival culture, it's obvious that no halfway sentient band can come into being without premeditation, the meticulous marshalling and coordination of influences and reference points. Knowingness irretrievably entered the water table long ago, and Vampire Weekend simply take this foundation of modern music — the impossibility of not overthinking things, of not riddling your work with footnotes and hyperlinks — and push through to full-blown conceptualism … Pressed to distill that merger's essence to a phrase, I'd offer "form & formality."

And I'm a little uncomfortable about, but basically agree with, this:

They've merely outed the truth of indie, which was never really The People's Music for all its affected sloppiness and "beautiful loser" tropes, instead always much more of an upper-middle-class milieu, the kids recoiling from the commercial and mass-produced just like their parents did via artisanal foodstuffs and antiques.

But I really don't know about this:

How righteous that 2008 should have started with some literally African-American music to herald the election of a literally African-American president. Funny, too, how all the attributes that describe (and, in some eyes, condemn) the band — cultivated and cosmopolitan, calm and collected, cautious and clean-cut — apply so amply to Obama. It's as if history had twisted its way around to arrive at a place where the virtues in our polity are also the virtues in our pop music. Unlike sax addict Bill C. or faux-populist George W., our new prez doesn't have a rock 'n' roll bone in his body, and neither do Vampire Weekend. This year's best, their album is not Gossip Girl set to music, but a soundtrack for the liberal elite taking over.

Non est disputandum

I sometimes think, when I feel like thinking about something I can't do anything about, about the changes in the oppositional "indie rock" ethos since I was in high school, and about indie taste becoming so much more eclectic and elastic. But I hadn't thought to link these concerns in with my day-job worries about "the function of criticism." Now I don't have to; Mike Barthel puts the problem succinctly:

We all know someone who likes the things we hate, and who seems like a smart person. Similarly, most things we like are probably hated by someone else who's a reasonable and decent person. At that point, what is there to argue about? As facile as it may seem, vigorous criticism seems to require that critics divide things up into virtuous and evil, and that other critics disagree with that.

What I like about this formulation is it suggests that criticism will be most "vigorous" and useful when different kinds of people, with different tastes, are trying to get used to each other (as in times of population growth, or globalization, or adolescence) and decide whose values are right. But once they've gotten used to each other, and pluralism and catholicity are the norm, maybe there's not such a big role for critics to play — or maybe the role just has to be different.

I don't think I have anything sensible to say about all this right now, but I appreciate music journalism for occasionally raising these issues, which are among the most repressed in the academic critical field.

City Kitty (Notes on Twee #4)

Here's a little pop structuralism for you:

"…[C]ultural types which occur in very similar forms in every society, because they are constructed around very simple polarities, are used to fulfill different social functions in different communities … No doubt relationships between any two societies would be made easier if, through the use of some kind of grid, it were possible to establish a pattern of equivalences between the ways in which each society uses analogous human types to perform different social functions." (Tristes Tropiques, 25)

And:

"Travel is usually thought of as a displacement in space. This is an inadequate conception. A journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time and in the social hierarchy. Each impression can be defined only by being jointly related to these three axes… only by a miracle can it happen that a journey does not bring about some change or other in this respect." (ibid, 85-86)

Now consider the case of Dean Wareham, born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1963, exported to New York in 1977, starts Galaxie 500 in 1987. Unlike Britain, which has a long history of nancy boy sensitivity in the arts (often also associated with homosexuality and child-cult), or America, where the terms "rock" and "sexual revolution" were polysemous if not synonymous, NZ/Australia are known for a distinctly polarized sexual and musical politics. So Wareham (much like his neighboring countrymen the Go-Betweens) starts from a premise of unquestioned rock masculinity which he is able to cleanly invert, rather than subvert. There's not a trace of inner conflict in Wareham's role reversal: his sweetness is all refusal, no compromise.

Put this sensibility on a plane to America and watch what happens. In his new context, Wareham appears not as eccentric (like Jonathan Richman or Calvin Johnson) nor as effeminate (like Morrissey or Stuart Murdoch) but as a new, available archetype of heterosexual masculinity. Voilà: the rock star as knowing, narcissistic wimp.

(To be expanded.)

Nerd Alert (Notes on Twee #0)

Carl Wilson, another of my favorite living critics (and not to be confused with one of my favorite dead singers), has a great piece on Slate about the cultural politics of contemporary indie rock, written in response to Sasha Frere-Jones' provocative but less convincing New Yorker article about race and the current lack of "miscegenation" in same. The whole thing is worth reading (as is SFJ's), but here are two of the most intriguing bits, which incidentally suggest a point of departure for a socioeconomic analysis of "twee," as well as the even more visible public hegemony of "nerd" culture (watch this space):

"With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded 'creative' college towns such as Portland, Ore., [indie rock] is the music of young 'knowledge workers' in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire … This doesn't make coffeehouse-indie shallow, but it can result in something more akin to the 1960s folk revival, with fretful collegiate intellectuals in a Cuban Missile Crisis mood, seeking purity and depth in antiquarian music and escapist spirituality. Not exactly a recipe for a booty-shaking party …

"The profile of this university demographic often includes a sojourn in extended adolescence, comprising graduate degrees, internships, foreign jaunts, and so on, which easily can last until their early 30s. Unlike in the early 1990s, when this was perceived as a form of generational exclusion and protested in 'slacker'/grunge music, it's now been normalized as a passage to later-life career success. Its musical consequences might include an open but less urgent expression of sexuality, or else a leaning to the twee, sexless, childhood nostalgia that many older critics … find puzzling and irritating. Female and queer artists still have pressing sexual issues and identities to explore and celebrate, but the straight boys often seem to fall back on performing their haplessness and hyper-sensitivity. (Pity the indie-rock girlfriend.)"

I have a few problems with the last paragraph: the too-easy, meaningless side-taking with anonymous "female and queer artists" (not any female or queer artists in particular) against equally hypostasized "straight boys," and the related leap from aesthetic self-representation to social practice embodied here by "the indie-rock girlfriend." But on the whole I find it kind of a fascinating idea: that the powerlessness and smallness that twee (and, these days, indie more generally) connotes can be seen as a function of, and response to, the knowledge/power conferred on its target audience by years of academic legitimation.

And, before anybody says anything, glass houses, stones, yeah I know.