Sunday, February 10th, 2008 // Paperhouse
There are several good reasons to write about the song “No Pussy Blues” from punk band Grinderman’s self-titled debut, one of the foremost being to get the word “pussy” into a campus newspaper. This is one of last year’s best and bluntest songs; hopefully this essay will be seen by those who missed this gem of a song because of the FCC-unfriendly lyrics.
NPB’s qualities exceed its naughtiness. Though the song appears on a debut album, the songwriter is not a crude young man; he is a crude old man, a veteran of 25 years in music, as Grinderman is a side project of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, around since the ’80s. Heard through your stereo, Cave is a strong and bitter voice that speaks with archetypal authority. And what is he saying? That he cannot get any.
In the monologue that makes up most of the song, Cave describes how he approached a girl in the crowd at one of his shows, courted her in a variety of ways, and was constantly, repeatedly rejected because “she just didn’t want to.” We don’t know why, but the notable thing is that all tactics fail. Cave cannot clean himself up for her, cannot read poetry to her, cannot buy her presents, cannot talk sweetly to her, and cannot talk dirty to her: “She just didn’t want to” becomes an endless, frustrated refrain that drives the music forward.
Most rock songs are about sex. This is a fact; the name of the genre is itself a euphemism for the act. Yet there is a long history of rock songs featuring depressed young men who are afraid to ask a girl out, are left by a girl and can do nothing, or just don’t know how to love at all. Recently, emo has become famous for these fragile self-haters, but you can’t ignore Belle & Sebastian, Death Cab for Cutie, or Weezer, or most break-up songs. Are these bands and songs any less about sex? Absolutely not — they just choose to dodge or sugar-coat the issue.
Nick Cave despises himself as much as any emo naïf; at the opening of NPB he proclaims, “I must above all things love myself — I must above all things love myself!” He then launches into a description of how he fails to do so — and of how it felt to be broken by this anonymous woman. But instead of pushing the sex out of the picture, Cave shoves it to the forefront. His overtures, sweet and harsh, all fail.
The song, mostly consisting of a fast drum/hi-hat rhythm and low, distorted bass, bursts into pulsing squeals on the two choruses, creating an oozy, thrashing scream that is hard to imagine coming from a guitar. Cave yells over this, “I’ve got the no pussy blues!” along with “Woo!” and “Damn!” It’s this amazing release, this sexual burst that is the ultimate response to anyone who thinks that being rejected means wrapping up in a blanket and listening to The Softies. Cave has returned to the song’s premise. He has learned he doesn’t need her, that he must above all things love himself, and, looking down at his guitar, he has realized that he has all he’ll ever need right in his hand.
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 // Paperhouse
Nick Drake’s “Know” is two minutes and 25 seconds long, falling right on the boundary for average song length on the artist’s landmark album Pink Moon, and yet it is Spartan compared to everything else on the record. The guitar provides only the rhythm, a repeated slapping twang as Drake croons wordlessly over it. And then, at the one-minute, thirteen-second mark, he comes out with: “Know that I love you/Know I don’t care/Know that I see you/Know I’m not there.”
And that’s it. A small wordless coda over the guitar and the song is over. Consider just what is packed into that set of words, the multitude of ways in which they can be parsed. The simple fact is that the phrases are so resilient, so vague and yet also approachable, that any interpretation I could provide here would quite possibly differ completely from the meaning that you yourself pull from the text. So I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to provide a diagram.
Person A: [I know/You know/Know] that I love you[!/?/.] Person [A/B] :[I know/You know/Know/No,] I don’t care[!/?/.] Person [A/B] :[I know/You know/Know] that I see you[!/?/.] Person [A/B]: [I know/You know/Know/No,] I’m not there[!/?/.]
The diagram is dense, but it shows how, based on the dithering of a few variables, you can generate at least a dozen messages about apathy and love. (Here’s a hint: The “!” indicates the imperative form of the sentence.)
Now, I’m not saying that these meanings are all markedly different; four commands telling someone that you love them, don’t care about them, can see them, and are absent are hardly different from four factual statements about the same thing. But at the extreme ends, an interpretation can run the gamut from Drake’s take on God to a dialogue between stalker and stalked to the mumblings of the schoolboy who sits all day alone in his room. Clusters of similar readings are scattered across the same barren waste of sadness, some observations at the microscopic level and others at the macro, some magnified versions of others, and some completely unique.
Many songs have a limited ability to be generalized. I have no doubt that someone, somewhere in the world can convincingly argue that the ideas present in “Baby Got Back” can be metaphorically applied to aspects of one’s relationships with friends, lovers, humanity, and the divine (this is perhaps the most depressing thing you will read all day) so claiming that “Know” can be interpreted on many different levels is not novel. But “Know” isn’t some kind of verbose musical praise to someone’s booty. It’s sparse. It’s nothing. All the scaling that you choose to apply to the song is upward, to more extreme, more potent meanings than the acoustic guitar suggests. Forget hooks; in four lines “Know” is a small constellation of thoughts, and I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine the one that is best.
Sunday, January 27th, 2008 // Paperhouse
The process of writing about music is harder than most people realize. Many of my friends and I make fun of the fact that reviewers have said that bands possess an “angular” guitar sound so many times that it’s now a completely meaningless term, but what we often forget is this problem: How the hell do you actually say what it is a guitar sounds like? When a writer sits down to describe an album, how does he do it?
The downfall of writing about rock bands is twofold. Certain descriptions, like “twangy guitars,” have almost lost their meaning because so many bands can be described that way. On the other hand, when discussing experimental music, it’s accurate to say, “microsound, square waves between 20 and 200 Hz,” but that doesn’t mean anything to most readers. Experimental sounds are heard less often than “twangy guitars,” and the connections between the terminology and the visceral feelings that listening elicits are less internalized. Often the writer seems to just give up, resulting in trash like Pitchfork’s infamous review of Autechre’s Draft 7.30; possibly the worst music writing I’ve ever read, the review is a dramatic dialogue in the style of (read: ripping off) Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, offering absolutely no information about the release itself. In either case, there’s obviously a problem.
Retrospective of his long career, Japanese noise artist Merzbow released a 50-CD box set called The Merzbox. Not many people are interested in more than two days of music primarily composed of harsh noise (his album 1930, for example, sounds a lot like amplified wiping of sweaty hands on cellophane as some jackhammers tear apart a sidewalk), but the people who are interested are, as a rule, very interested. So, even though reviewing this behemoth is an undertaking, several serialized reviews of the whole box set were published shortly after its release. I recently read them. Many began timidly and with honest effort, but by the set’s last 15 albums, the reviews turned into diaries, rants, and personal stories — no longer about the music. Is this appropriate? Is that really music journalism?
I think that Merzbow was aware of the kind of reviews The Merzbox would receive; he may have made it as it is in order to elicit these kinds of questions. He is quite aware of the critical attention devoted to his music, often enclosing little manifestos in his albums (usually about animal cruelty or bondage techniques, two of his favorite topics), which many reviews devote at least as much attention to as the music itself.
The question is, what is the role of music journalism? When writing about music, what information is important? Currently, a music review can be anything from a pure description of the sound to the author’s analysis of how the release fits into its context or even a diary entry for the reviewer. Unless more writers are able to find some sort of middle ground, the question remains as to whether music journalism is even a meaningful enterprise.
