of Montreal featuring Solange “Sex Karma”

Kevin Barnes is typically bipolar on his albums, shifting back and forth between declarations of love and lust and bitter, cruel condemnations. He’s very good at expressing both extremes, but on the whole, I prefer the songs that convey genuine sweetness and desire if just because those are more scarce in modern pop. “Sex Karma” is very much one of those. It’s flirty and light, a head rush of infatuation and fascination that feels almost as good as the real thing. It’s not overly serious either. It’s playful and goofy, the lyrics put it in the terms of child-like wonder, enthusiasm, and exploration. I love that Barnes has Solange sing “you are my only luxury item, if anyone tries to steal you, I’ll fight ‘em.” For one thing, it just comes out sounding adorable, but in terms of pop music subtext, it’s a total flip on the usual dynamics of the lyrics in her famous sister’s hit singles. Instead of putting attraction and relationships in terms of accruing power and riches, this is simple and not at all crass: You’re what matters to me, everything else is just stuff.

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Destroyer “Sick Priest Learns To Last Forever”

Here’s a fun thing to think about: Imagine that Dan Bejar has been commissioned to record a cover version of John Williams’ score for the Star Wars movies in the style of Destroyer. Not instrumental, by the way — he is expected to sing the entire thing, and reinterpret the films’ story in his lyrics. I can conjure this music in my mind, but only up to a point. I can get the sound of it, but I’m not nearly clever enough to translate Star Wars into Bejar-ese, though I can definitely get a sense of where he’d go with it, especially in terms of Princess Leia’s sexuality and royal privilege. Daughter of the evil king! Romantically pursued by her brother and a scoundrel! That sounds like the makings of a Destroyer song to me.

There is something in Dan Bejar’s voice that makes it impossible to tell the difference between artsy seriousness and intellectual campiness. It’s all a blur, intentions are always tangled, and mixed up in base urges. Through Bejar, all of life is droll comedy, and all of civilization is just endless posturing and pageantry. “Sick Priest Learns To Last Forever” may be my favorite Destroyer song, and I think it captures the essence of the band, or at least what is most appealing to me. All of Destroyer’s Rubies sounds like it is set deeper and deeper into the night, but “Sick Priest” sounds as far into the night as you can go before tripping into the dawn. It sounds like the part of night that most feels like a secret, the bit most everyone sleeps through, but there you are stumbling through it, and somehow reaching an understanding that you’ll just forget by the time you finally pass out. Bejar is typically obscure on the verses, but as he leans into the refrain, he’s reassuring: “That’s okay, yes, it’s fine…” You just take his word for it.

Buy it from Amazon.

Kanye West featuring Nicki Minaj, Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Bon Iver, and Benjamin Bronfman “Monster” (Uncensored)

There’s a lot of guys rapping and singing on this track, but all of that is a warm up for Nicki Minaj’s performance in the second half of the song. It’s a true tour de force, one of the most impressive, exciting, and distinct rap verses in a long time. Minaj has been building her reputation as a song-stealer for the past two years, dropping inventive, wildly charismatic verses on a string of hits, but “Monster” is a clear tipping point. It’s the culmination of everything she’s done to date; the place where she totally upstages two of the biggest rappers in pop music; the song that announces her as a STAR and not just a promising rapper or a great guest.

One of the great things about Nicki Minaj is that she fully embraces camp. This is most apparent in how she presents herself visually — she’s a “Harajuku Barbie;” she’s the heir of Missy Elliott’s avant garde video style; she’s the African American answer to Lady Gaga. Her campiness is more exciting on record, though. She’s not afraid to go way over the top, and her voice bounces around between cartoonish extremes with incredible ease. She seems most comfortable playing dress-up and make believe, transforming herself into something larger than life. She creates an image, an armor, a voice, and runs loose inside it — in a lot of ways, she’s like a drag queen! It’s a natural fit, really — why wouldn’t that kind of flamboyant character and self-made ego fit naturally in the context of rap? It makes you wonder what rap could become if more MCs took cues from stuff like Ru Paul’s Drag Race and Paris Is Burning.

Minaj’s tics and funny voices may grate on some listeners, but they give her a dynamic, often totally unpredictable presence on tracks. She gives you bits to listen for, little moments that are exciting and interesting and make you want to rewind over and over. That bit in “Lil Freak” where she goes “they wetter than the RAIN THEN / Usher, buzz me in / everybody loves RAAAYMOND!” is a prime example. Typing that out barely hints at the subtle strangeness of her inflection, the tiny bits of personality that come through to make it so sticky and silly.

If you go through lots of her stuff, she doesn’t really do the same trick twice. She’s always finding a way to say something in a compelling, ear-catching way. The best rappers do this in their own way, the boring and so-so rappers, not so much. In some ways I’d compare her to Ol Dirty Bastard, in that she has that willingness to go far out to get a line across, and also this musical delivery that steps outside the boundaries of strictly rapping rhymes without actually singing. She’s not exactly inventing anything — you can trace bits of her skill set to a number of the best rappers ever — but she’s in the process of refining her persona, and mastering a lot of tricks essential to being a truly great MC. I can’t wait for her next move.

Laetitia Sadier “One Million Year Trip”

Laetitia Sadier’s previous non-Stereolab work — Monade, for the most part — sounded too much like Stereolab to fully register as something distinct. This song, from her solo debut, is a bit different. Her voice and aesthetic is too central to Stereolab to sound unlike Stereolab, but in this track, you can hear the essence of her style cut away from that of Tim Gane. “One Million Year Trip” has an intriguing shape to it, full of gentle twists and curves that contrast sharply with Gane’s taste for schematic arrangements and lateral progressions. The tonality, particularly in the guitar, has a sad, emotive quality that has been almost entirely absent from Stereolab music since the late 90s, when Gane’s music became increasingly clinical and remote to the point of negating any attempt on Sadier’s part to invest the songs with emotion, as on her numerous songs mourning the death of her bandmate Mary Hansen.

“One Million Year Trip” is another song about loss and mourning, or more specifically, accepting that someone is gone. The grief is subtle, the emphasis is placed on the process of adjusting and rationalizing: “She went on a million year trip and left everything behind.” There’s a clarity here that I find very moving, particularly as she sings about letting the pain go, acknowledging that “there is no point in holding on.” The notion of death as a voyage into the unknown is an appealing version of the afterlife. I tend to believe that death is the end of the line, but we can’t really know. If anyone would, it’d be the dead, out there on a journey through eternal oblivion.

Pre-order it from Drag City.

Scissor Sisters @ Terminal 5 8/25/2010
Night Work / Laura / Any Which Way / She’s My Man / Something Like This / Whole New Way / Tits On The Radio / Harder You Get / Running Out / Take Your Mama / Kiss You Off / I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’ / Skin Tight / Skin This Cat / Fire With Fire / Paul McCartney / Night Life // Comfortably Numb / Invisible Light / Filthy/Gorgeous

If you have only encountered the Scissor Sisters’ studio output and music videos, it would make sense if you thought Ana Matronic was just a sidekick or a back-up singer. She gets one spotlight track per album, and her personality doesn’t fully translate in the studio. On stage, it’s another story. There she’s central to the group’s appeal, and just as charismatic as Jake Shears. She’s a delight to behold — gorgeous, sassy, immensely entertaining. She’s the emcee, the hype woman, the foil. She is the woman that drag queens aspire to become. Scissor Sisters shows wouldn’t be nearly as fun without her. If only every pop band had someone like her. Bless you, Ana Matronic!

Scissor Sisters “Harder You Get”

The audience for this show was fine and fun, but it seemed as though a significant chunk of the audience wasn’t super familiar with the new material from Night Work. This is to be expected whenever a band tours shortly after releasing a record — a lot of the point of touring for an album is to introduce your fans to new tunes — but it was a little disappointing. Out of all the Night Work selections, the two that clearly connected with the crowd were “Harder You Get” and “Running Out,” which happen to be my favorites, followed closely by “Invisible Light” and “Skin This Cat.” It’s not surprising that these two rocked-up songs would get people going. They’re both just slightly off-brand enough to reveal something new about the band, and allow for a lot of physicality on stage.

“Harder You Get”, with its Judas Priest-gone-disco vibe, comes alive on the stage, and Shears revels in the opportunity to slip into domineering leather daddy mode. It’s the best example of the wonderfully sleazy, aggressively sexual place they’ve gone to on Night Work, and I’d love it if they explored this S&M quasi-metal style some more in the future. Or I could just put it on repeat, which is usually how I hear it. Which, of course, explains why when they finished performing it last night, I just wanted them to start over and play it again.

Buy it from Amazon.

Electric Six “After Hours”

The world of Electric Six is tasteless and full of preening, anxious douchebags. It’s sad and desperate and vulgar and dumb. It’s basically the culture that we are trying to escape when we embrace things like indie rock. “After Hours,” the opening number on the band’s seventh album, sounds like the theme song to an expensive, ultra-tacky Meatpacking District bar full of all those mysterious affluent people moving into all those new luxury high-rises. It’s a bad scene. The music has a frightened urgency; Dick Valentine spits out his lines with maximum venom, his voice whipping you at the end of every line — HOURS, HOURS! FIRED, FIRED! He sounds bitter and disgusted, resigned to being trapped in this stupid, stupid hell. It’s meant to be funny in a grim sort of way, but it’s getting to the point that Valentine’s deadpan satire is starting to just come across like realism. What is even exaggerated anymore? You scrape away the humorous hyperbole and the ironic distance, and it’s a scathing indictment of idiocy and excess: “That’s how organs shut down and brain cells DIE.”

Pre-order it from Amazon.

This time last year I was visiting my father at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on the Upper East Side nearly every day of the week. He had been sick for years, but had generally been living life normally until his luck started to run out somewhere around June. He was hospitalized in late July, and except for a brief stint back at home, he was there through the end of September. After that, he returned back to the house he bought in his early 20s, the house where I grew up, and he died in mid-October. I’m glad it happened there, and not at the hospital. It’s how he wanted it to be. In my mind, though, my father died at Sloan-Kettering center, and I watched it happen slowly in small installments spread out over days. Every truly painful memory is tied to that place, when he finally passed away at home, it was mercy. It was relief.

I hadn’t been in that neighborhood since then. It’s on the far eastern edge of Manhattan in the north 60s and there isn’t much reason for me to ever be around there. I recently got it in my mind that I should go back up there, walk around. Not so much in this “I need to confront something” sort of way, but more like…on some level I missed the routine of taking long walks in that area every day. I put it off for a while, in part because I knew that, yes, I was going to have to confront something, but I finally went back there last Thursday. As it turns out, there really wasn’t much to face. It was mostly a matter of retracing lines. The incredible anger, depression, and hopelessness I felt at the time when I was in that area every day — most of it to do with my dad, but certainly not all of it — was long gone. All that was there for me was nostalgia, and passing through familiar places tied to bad memories.

I mostly thought of songs. Animal Collective was a revelation to me back then. They’re about my age, they’d been through some similar things, and expressed something about those experiences in ways that resonated with me in a comforting way. There’s this patch of 68th or 69th Street near 1st Avenue that’s tied in with Liz Phair’s “Explain It To Me.” I spent most of my time with music that echoed my anger and despair. The problem was, there really wasn’t very much of it, and none of what worked for me was at all recent. The records that really did the trick for me at this point in time were Hole’s Live Through This, Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, and Nirvana’s In Utero. I feel like at some point in the mid 90s, rage and anguish became very uncool in music, and was more or less ceded to metal, emo, post-grunge, etc, and in those genres, expressing these negative feelings was often just a hollow, and in many cases very petty and whiny, ritual. I have my theories as to why this happened, but as it stands, it’s rare to find clever, tuneful musicians expressing agony and fury these days.

Hole “Violet”

It’s not like just anyone can make music like this. The pain really has to be there, and I think most of us can tell the difference between a singer who is really putting it out there vs. someone who is servicing the conventions of their chosen genre. I hate to say this, but I don’t think an artist can go to this place without a complex of mental health issues. Depression, narcissism, exhibitionism, self-destructive impulses, the works. Craft is important too — you want something with hooks, something with thoughtful dynamics, not just a bunch of formless bile. It goes deeper when it’s actually musical, when the artist really knows how to make you feel how they feel. How many people really have the combination of problems and talents necessary to produce this stuff? And the support system too! Labels simply don’t have the funds to bankroll brilliant basket cases like they did back in the boom years.

So yes, an album like Live Through This is sort of a miracle. The two songs from that record that worked for me last summer were “Softer, Softest” and “Violet.” The former tapped into my feeling of impotence and hopelessness, and I still wince every time I hear Courtney Love sing “the abyss opens up, it steals everything from me.” That image was so vivid and real to me at the time. Everything was going wrong, and I could only be passive. “Violet” expresses a painful passivity too, but it doesn’t sound like it. The chorus is all desperate surrender — “GO ON, TAKE EVERYTHING!” — but even if Courtney didn’t follow that up with a bitter “I dare you to,” it would still sound entirely defiant. The song has the dynamics of a brutal storm. You hold tight in those lulls, the chorus blasts at you like a choir of hurricanes.

Hole “Softer, Softest”

The loudness and violent dynamics in this music is the key to what makes it so therapeutic. The cathartic peaks makes it feel as though you’re fighting back. “Softer, Softest” sounds fragile for the most part, and unusually pretty for a Hole song. It’s not a song that demands for a release, but when it comes, the shift in scale is jarring. Courtney sounds small in the first two minutes, she sings about feeling powerless. When the song builds up, it’s like Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk. The tiny, wounded woman is gone, replaced by this rampaging, avenging giant: “BRING ME BACK HER HEAD!” It’s empowering. It’s not real, but that’s part of what makes it so important: It’s a clear example of art giving you something that you need that you can’t often have in reality.

Buy it from Amazon.

Steely Dan “Peg”

As a direct result of reading Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, I’ve been thinking a lot about methods of recording, the way things sound, and the way people respond to various technological advances and the resulting aesthetic decisions. One of the aesthetics I find most interesting at the moment is the very “dry” sound that was very popular in the 70s, most especially the stuff that was recorded in California. Steely Dan is an extreme example of this style — clean to the point of being sterile; jazz/rock fusion performed with surgical precision. I get why a lot of people hate this sound. If you want guts and grit in your music, this is the radical opposite. It’s not physical, it’s not soulful. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker made ruthlessly cerebral music, and everything that made it to their records was a fully formed idea rendered as perfectly as possible. Every sound in the recordings is discrete, nothing bleeds together. It’s not meant to simulate the sound of people playing together, it’s just a pure representation of a musical arrangement.

Solos, traditionally an aspect of music that at least offers the front of being a moment of inspired expression, were auditioned. Fagen and Becker ran through seven session players before finding the ideal solo for “Peg,” a song that would become one of their most memorable and zippy productions. If you watch this video, the duo play a few of the rejected solos, and it becomes clear why they were so picky. Those solos were awful, just really tacky and lifeless. The keeper, performed by Jay Graydon, is among my favorite guitar solos ever, in part for its fantastic contrast with the rest of the composition. The center of the piece is the interplay between this exceptionally sleek keyboard part and the subtle syncopation of the drums — tightly written and performed, but it comes out sounding fluid and intuitive. When the solo comes in, this already mellow tune seems to relax and slide into this even more stylish and smooth zone. The guitar tone is astonishing — rich, but with a touch of distortion — and the notes glide along the track with an unreal grace. You could record “Peg” in other ways and the song and that solo would still be great, but think the nuances in the arrangement and performance are flattered by the understated, dry approach. Nothing is oversold, nothing is obscured.

Buy it from Amazon.

Steely Dan “Show Biz Kids”

The dry sound suited Steely Dan in part because the music itself was so cool and aloof. The lyrics have a bitter, deadpan wit; they lean hard on irony and unreliable narration. It’s cynical music about cynical people, so there’s no room for warmth. “Show Biz Kids,” from their second album, is a prime example of their fixation on shallowness and sleaze. As the title suggests, the singer is talking about hedonistic young LA creeps — it’s basically a Bret Easton Ellis novel before such a thing existed. It’s perhaps uncharacteristically judgmental, but I think we’re meant to think the narrator is an asshole too. The arrangement is brilliant. The guitar part is relatively loose and dirty for them, it’s the most dynamic presence in this piece that mostly sticks to this dead-eyed repetitive groove. The backing vocalists sound like they’re in a trance, the chorus runs even colder. It’s a grim sound — Los Angeles rendered as hell with palm trees and swimming pools.

The best part is a temporary shift out of the main groove at 3:48, as the beat is enhanced by a metallic jangle and Fagan delivers a sharp indictment: “Show business kids / making movies of themselves / you know they don’t give a fuck / about anybody else.” In context, it’s catharsis, but it’s an extremely fleeting moment that disrupts the listener’s desire to linger longer on that part. Super Furry Animals looped the last line into something more crowd pleasing; Elvis Costello’s cover version hits that part with a sputtering rage. Those interpretations have their appeal, but I prefer Becker and Fagan’s intentions — you only get to feel that muted indignation for a few seconds before you slip back into that creepy complacency.

Buy it from Amazon.

Steely Dan “Parker’s Band”

“Parker’s Band” is basically Steely Dan’s equivalent to Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” a song expressing appreciation and admiration for a jazz great. (For Stevie, it’s Duke Ellington; for the Dan, it’s Charlie Parker.) This is as earnest and effervescent as Steely Dan gets. Though they made a lot of music that errs closer to jazz than rock, this is certainly a rock song about jazz music. That’s a lot of the appeal — the rock aspect of this conveys enthusiasm and echoes wonder in the lyrics, though the jazzy touches in the syncopation of the drums lends the piece an usually breezy grace. I love the way the percussion and horns have a weightless quality in the mix, and seem to casually orbit the guitar at the center of the arrangement. It’s not as extraordinarily ecstatic as Stevie’s tune, but there’s certainly a lot of joy in this track.

Buy it from Amazon.

This is the conclusion of my interview with Rob Sheffield, author of the excellent new book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran. In this segment, we discuss the value of famous artists and famous songs, Lady Gaga’s indifference to the straight dude’s gaze, pro-girl songs, and Rob’s eternal love for Stacey Q and Scritti Politti.

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My interview with Rob Sheffield, author of the new book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, continues here. In this segment, we talk about the incredible cultural power of MTV in the 80s and 90s, the importance of pop stars, and the tacky brilliance of the cassingle.

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