(We were going to resume reblogging after the semester was over, but it’s list/thinkpiece season so we’ll keep our head down a bit longer. See you next year!)
“Maybe I’ve become so goop-averse in my battle against creeping cornballism that I’m turning cynic-not-skeptic like too many bad critics do. But that’s not how it feels to me. I have a lot of fun for someone actuaries believe should no longer be working, and working in the fun business is one reason why. Instead I’d say the fissures subsisting below the year’s provisional consensus get me down. If twentysomethings want to like Kendrick Lamar’s album more than Loudon Wainwright’s, I say more power to them. The Cloud Nothings’, even — there’s an imagined future there that neither Loudon Wainwright or I will ever know firsthand again, and why shouldn’t someone whose life stretches ahead cherish that? But it bums me that it doesn’t go the other way — that the residual formal mastery of someone like Wainwright seems incapable of touching musical aesthetes of a certain age, who as children of 9/11 know better than they’d prefer that death is in the cards for everyone. Which does in turn cut into how much possibility I can feel in that mastery.”
“If you listen for it, Iyer’s approach to leading a trio echoes Ahmad Jamal’s. Though the former’s climaxes are crowded with notes where the latter’s are spare, both styles pivot not just on thinking of the piano as an orchestra in miniature, but also on assigning orchestral roles to bass and drums as well. The breathtaker here is another spin on M.J.’s “Human Nature,” toughened and greatly expanded from the version on Iyer’s 2010 album, Solo, and building to a tremolo hailstorm.”
“It’s built to be played loud on headphones, late at night, all alone, staring at the wall and wondering when your life is going to stop feeling like imprisonment in the towers of Megadon. What are Rush but a three-headed “It Gets Better” statement for generations of messed-up adolescents, dreaming of a better world but unwilling to give up on this one?
So what will people argue about now that Rush have been voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Don’t worry – Rush fans can just move on to debating why their heroes are deprived of knighthoods or the Nobel Prize in economics. Rush fans love to argue. And Rush obviously like it that way.
”
“Her first major hit was “With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming,” but she got noticed a few years earlier in 1947 with “Confess.”
The arrangement of “Confess” required an echo effect from backup singers, but since Rael and Page were footing the bill, they decided Page would do all the voices by overdubbing.
“We would have to pay for all those expenses because Mercury felt that I had not as yet received any national recognition that would merit Mercury paying for it,” Page once said.
“Confess” was enough of a hit that Rael convinced Mercury to let Page try full four-part harmony by overdubbing. The result was “With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming.” The label read, “Vocals by Patti Page, Patti Page, Patti Page and Patti Page.”
“The original “Mother” was a stoned singalong favorite during the dropout afternoons of my own youth. Released in 1979, it was a centerpiece of The Wall, a concept album about one man’s slow death at the hands of a conformist culture that any kid who felt oppressed by school or their families or, really, anything, could embrace. Turned into a 1982 film starring the doe-eyed semi-punk Bob Geldof, The Wall gave kids like me, ready to rebel not quite certain about which specific protest movement to embrace but sure we needed to rebel, a kind of primer in what was wrong with society. “Mother” laid out the first big problem: domineering mothers.
Natalie Maines is a mother, however, and her interpretation of Roger Waters’s lyrics helps the original becomes something new — something bigger, I think. In Pink Floyd’s version, Roger Waters sings the part of the boy revealing his night terrors; David Gilmour, singing as the mother, is prissy and cruel, restricting his reach. Maines leaves the song’s vaguely misogynist lyrics intact, but her plaintive, tender reading, intertwining with Harper’s equally gentle guitar lines, reveals the terror and helpless yearning that feeds the effort to control. Freed of the male voice that made “Mother” into a diatribe against femininity, Maines’s interpretation becomes a tender acknowledgment of how fear can entrap all of us, even when we want to do nothing but love.
”
TAYLOR SWIFT - I KNEW YOU WERE TROUBLE.… I did a quick re-edit and Ed posted it on the main site, but the TSJ Tumblr snagged the original edit, so for the time being in case the correction doesn’t get mirrored, here’s the final version of the blurb:
[6.17]
“The dialogue is too fricking long like really the song is nice but the video bugged the crap out a me still love her though”Alex Ostroff: This is weird. My love for Taylor has always stemmed from appreciation for her craft and her writing; I most often praise her tracks that play with perspective and time and place and song structure. “I Knew You Were Trouble.” is none of these things; it’s lyrically awkward and imprecise, and often a bit too obvious, and the track privileges electronic ornamentation and the melody over Taylor’s words. But it’s also visceral, and not just in the wub-wub-wub way. RED was officially released three days before my first boyfriend broke up with me, but I spent the weeks before October 25th listening to her heartbreakwaltzes and “Stay Stay Stay” and pondering whether I actually had major relationship issues or whether I was just listening to too much Taylor Swift. (Answer: Chicken/egg.) Then I listened to “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” a bunch and remembered that the one honest moment in that song is the word “exhausting”. At any rate, after the break-up, I played “Trouble.” into the ground. Despite its shortcomings, it’s among my favourite of Taylor’s break-up tracks. She’s moved past uncomplicated laying of blame (most of these type of songs pre-Speak Now) or admissions of fault (“Back to December”). Instead, Taylor captures the messy mix of frustration and disappointment and self-recrimination and anger at your ex and at yourself (“shame on me”) for not seeing the signs sooner, for not listening to friends, for recognizing the shape and size of the problems from the beginning but getting distracted from pragmatic reality by the emotional heights to which you were flown. The second verse captures the next few ambivalent months, layering the genuine desire to move on and be fine, and — perhaps more importantly — the desire to seem to be fine (“he’ll never see you cry”) and the stiff upper lipness that accompanies it all. Most of all, there’s the utterly gross (and uncomfortably real) bridge, exposing that saddest fear that creeps under the surface of it all – that there was never any there there and that your two years were just one big notch no different from him or her or anyone or anything. But even though all of this is real, none of this is the truth. “I knew you were trouble when you walked in (shame on me)” is, in its own way, just as simple as “One of us is innocent and the other is bad.” If the end was preordained, you had no agency, and all that’s left to do is make like Natalie Imbruglia wallowing in brostep on the cold hard ground. If you emotionally Eternal Sunshine their side of relationship, they had nothing at stake and the joke was on you. It’s a copout as emotionally honest as every single Los Campesinos! song and just as ugly. Which is naturally why I love it.
“When we’re open to pop being a potential space of freedom, rebellion, and idiosyncrasy, its possibilities start to feel limitless. “A society constructed in the image of punk rock might…essentially become nothing more than a new source of authority,” says Trevor Link, who writes a thoughtful Tumblr about the revolutionary potential of pop music. “Whereas a society constructed in the image of pop… might very well be liberating in ways unimaginable within the former paradigm.” Or, as Caroline Hjelt from Icona Pop says, summing up the spectacular chaos, “You can do anything you want and call it pop!”
And yet, what does all of this mean for the average brooding high school kid? I’m not so sure. For me, one of the hardest parts of being a music critic is making sure you are not preaching to the converted. So for every time I think, “Yes! We are now free to like whatever we want and express ourselves fully without any obstacles because we have all read this very well-reasoned critical argument about why Carly Rae Jepsen is good and THIS IS UTOPIA,” I meet someone who is actually a freshman in high school, and remember that everything still sucks, and that the reason I hated 98 Degrees was that they made shitty songs with titles like “Give Me Just One Night (Una Noche)”.”
(We were going to resume reblogging after the semester was over, but it’s list/thinkpiece season so we’ll keep our head down a bit longer. See you next year!)
“It’s not that the promo around the album is slapdash—that’d be impossible for someone as famous and meticulously branded as Rihanna—but it suggests another album entirely. The title, Unapologetic, suggests a brash confidence that on record comes off entirely feigned; meanwhile, on its cover, Rihanna’s scrawled over her body words like “happy,” “fearless,” and “fun,” none of which apply to the music inside. She’s chosen the only possible lead single that could be plausibly called “happy and hippy,” and her video and performances have been similarly innocuous; unless you’re one of seven angry seapunks, it’s hard to find anything controversial about them. Her plane trick’s getting her endless positive press, most of it party-oriented. It all points to a very different album than Unapologetic, where Rihanna sounds like she checked out of the party long ago.”
“For now, you can watch the band’s beginnings, in footage of a show played in D.C. in April of 1992, months before the first record came out. (The footage is available on Bikini Kill’s YouTube channel.) A song performed at that April show called “Thurston Hearts The Who” ended up on the first EP, but the more interesting performance is of “Lil Red,” which didn’t officially come out until October of 1993, on the band’s first full-length album, “Pussy Whipped.” In the clip, Hanna strips off a white T-shirt, Sharpied with the words “RioT GrrrL,” to reveal a yellow-blue-and-white minidress over knee-high white boots. You might momentarily think, Austin Powers, but not for long. “These are my tits!” Hanna yells, and then, “This is my ass!,” as she turns to flip up her dress and quickly moon the crowd. She starts stomping in place as she yells, “And these are my legs!” She is double-daring you now to figure out what to do. She sexualizes herself before you can, dragging in one of childhood’s most sexualized characters, Little Red Riding Hood, and rewriting the wolf’s deceptive patter for this new Red: “These are my ruby red lips, the better to suck you dry. These are my long red nails, the better to scratch out your eyes.” The song, before its ninety seconds are up, mentions the “pretty girls” and their “side of things.” Like Hanna’s dress under the T-shirt, the song works as a distillation of the competition between women and the war against the familiar term “the male gaze,” which was then still gaining traction.”
