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Great Indie Lyricists #3: Emily Haines of Metric

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This is song #3 of a playlist for my LYLAS Kat. The subject is great indie lyricists. Each week I’m focusing on the lyrics of one band and why those lyrics are worth delving into.

Hi Kat,

Since you’ve been obsessed with the Mountain Goats lately, we’ve been talking about who some of our favorite modern lyricists are. This playlist was made specifically to answer that question. Today’s band is Metric.

 

It’s no secret that Metric is one of my favorite bands of the decade. One may compare them to chick-fronted rock bands like Blondie or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But Metric wins bonus points in having captivating, socially relevant lyrics. I first got hooked on the mysterious “The Police and the Private” and became fanatic with “Patriarch on A Vespa.” I say it’s socially relevant but it’s more poetry than preaching. She’s writing about the world she sees, and as a socially aware person, this is reflected in her writing.

Take the aforementioned “Police and the Private”. She sings:

Didn’t make this up I learned, I learned it from a friend
My friend is coming clean, she told me
Keep one eye on the door, keep one eye on the bed
Never expect to be sure who you’re working for

It’s clear she’s talking about some black market world. Is it drugs? Prostitution? Does it matter which, or does it matter more that the larger point is that “the whole world wants what we’re on…the police and the private, the doctor, the lawyer, the garbage collector“? The tone is desperate and dangerous. Never once does she ask why something the whole world wants is outlawed, as that would be preaching. I liken it to the Talking Heads song “Life During Wartime,” in that capturing the dangers of the lifestyle is more telling and more interesting than a sermon about the morality of those who choose to live in the underworld. The clincher in “Police and the Private” is the last line, Got to get to you the orphanage is closing in an hour. Such a haunting line. Does the character in the song live this dangerous lifestyle in the hopes of making enough money to get her child back? It’s unclear, merely suggestive that criminals lead desperate lives because there are other more innocent lives at stake.

 

Another example is “Gold, Guns, Girls.” The lyrics All the guns, all the gold, in the world…couldn’t get you off seem to be directed at a certain president and his cabinet that were in power when she released the song in 2009. Did she sit down to write a song about a particular politician, or does her pen naturally gravitate to such subjects because they interest her? Would the song be better if she namechecked Bush or Cheney? No, the song is better because it is about a certain type of person that Cheney happens to be an example of.

Download/Listen to Metric – Gold, Guns, Girls

Full Lyrics to Gold, Guns, Girls

 

The lyrics to Patriarch On A Vespa wouldn’t be out of place in the latest urban literary magazine. I’ll print them in full so you can imagine them not in a rock song but within your favorite poetry anthology.

 

Patriarch On A Vespa

Promiscuous makes an entrance
Her mouth is full of questions
Are we all brides to be?
Are we all designed to be confined?
Buy ourselves chastity belts and lock them
Organize our lives and lose the key
Our faces all resemble dying roses
From trying to fix it
When instead we should break it
We’ve got to break it before it breaks us

Fear of pretty houses and their porches
Fear of biological wristwatches
Fear of comparison shopping
Dogs on leashes behind fences barking
Pretty little pillows on floral couches
Until our faces all resemble dying roses
Stop trying to fix it

Patriarch on a Vespa
Runs a red and ends up
Crushed under the wheel

 

I can imagine this getting high marks at the next Berkeley poetry slam, can’t you? But on the contrary, she sings this while playing the keyboard solo and kicking her legs in the air in total bad-ass fashion. The “it” she refers to I presume to be bullshit suburbia and when she shouts “Stop trying to fix it…we should break it” she has created a couplet not matched in the history of rocking out since The Who first shouted  “Meet the new boss! Same as the old boss!” If this song had been popular enough to hit heavy rotation on corporate radio, surely it would have inspired some chair throwing and bra burning.

 

Download/Listen to Patriarch On A Vespa

 

If you want to see some chill-inspiring rockage, check out the thrills she throws down at 1:40. It will give you a sense of why Emily Haines is one of the goddesses of indie rock:

 

Bonus: If this rocks a little hard for you, check out Emily Haines solo career with her backing band The Soft Skeleton. Or if you just can’t get enough, she’s also a sometimes-singer for Broken Social Scene.

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What is Pop Music?

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att of music by josephine12cut What is Pop Music?
art of music by ~josephine12cute

There is a long-standing debate in music criticism about whether pop music should be considered worthy of review, or whether it is a guilty pleasure best left undiscussed in polite company. With limited amount of time to write and listen and limited space to post reviews, these “rocktivists” argued that we should be focusing our reviews on Serious Art. The opposing poptimist camp won, as you’d expect: In a generation where the Internet promised there will always be a surplus of reviewers and space to post their opinions, why not review everything?

The problem with this debate is few people ever bothered to define what pop music is in the first place. It used to be so simple in the days of Nirvana. Pop music was inoffensive and danceable. Rock music was brash and unpolished. But the postmodern era we live in teaches us that labels are elusive bastards that refuse to divide most things in life into tidy binaries. The underground dance movement has shown us that there’s plenty of dance music that is clearly not pop. The success of corporate rock b(r)ands that “did it all for the nookie” will get the same snub treatment from rock critics, even though they aren’t thought of as pop. And even back in the days of Nirvana, what the hell was Bjork? Where did Future Sound of London fit in?

We labeled those acts as “Alternative;” today we call them “Indie.” Even label status can be a misleading marker though. The biggest label in a small country will be perceived as independent in other countries far from where their marketing efforts can reach. This is more and more a factor in a global economy. At the other end, you have indie labels that are swallowed up by major labels. Do the bands on these labels still count as indie when their label is bought? Does it matter if the parent corporation allows the staff to continue running their company exactly as they did before the takeover? Does it matter if the label gets a bigger publicity budget? And then you’re haggling over a dollar amount to define a genre.
Many will agree that we need to stop defining indie as a genre. The same thing needs to happen with pop music.

So what is pop music?

No definition will be perfect, but here’s what I propose. Pop music is music produced by a team of people who collectively are designing a product. That product happens to be art, just as the designers who produce the sheets and lampshades at Target are also producing art. Pop music is first and foremost a money-making venture, and artistic decisions will be guided by marketing factors like target audience and branding. By this definition, Britney will be pop no matter how many giant rock guitars she locks her legs around. Weezer is an example of a rock band that became a pop band when they got rich and started making the songs they thought their audience teen wanted to hear.When you begin to think of Pop music as a product rather than a genre, the rocktivist argument makes a lot more sense. Art critics could write reviews of the output of graphic design firms, but usually they leave that task to Ad Week. From NPR’s piece on the costs of making a pop single:gr pm song cost 462 What is Pop Music?Pop music is absurd. It is absurd to pay someone who can sing fifteen grand to write a song and then have someone who isn’t a particularly good singer record that song because her face is the one you want plastered on album covers. It’s absurd that the same system that pays $78,000 to create a single pop song will ask the rock bands they woo to sell their song and soul for a dime. Pop reduces the art of music the way a butcher cuts up a piece of meat. Every aspect of the song is outsourced to different experts who turn in their perfect little cog. All these cogs are reassembled as the clockwork machination we know as the pop star. The empty smile, the calculated cleavage, the vague unreality, the overly clean, slickly produced sound—all of these are symptoms of turning music into an assembly line process.

Conversely, all the rage and hubris the rock critics have flung at the poptivists seems almost silly. The poptivists have done themselves a dis-service by asking critics to take pop music seriously. Pop music is serious business but it is not, cannot be, serious art. Serious art stands for something. Serious art reflects someone’s vision. Because it is a hodgepodge of the cogs, whatever vision the writer began with will be diluted by marketing teams who wish to promote trends or avoid offense. It’s the difference between Jill Sobule singing in favor of kissing a girl and Katy Perry the product who sells the kissed-a-girl brand.

We need to move away from thinking of pop music by the symptoms that describe it–polished, electronic, trite, overly-produced–and think instead of the machine that produces it. We need to stop thinking of pop stars as artists and think of them instead as the logos for carefully tailored marketing campaigns. These surgically perfected smiling dolls are as sad as Frankenstein’s monster, as close to music as hamburger meat is to fillet mignon. We can take pleasure in what is the fast food of the art world while seeing it for what it is, while going on to chase these monstrous stars with our pitchforks and torches. We love the monster. We hate the monster. We consume the monster. She sells art, but she is not an artist.

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Rules for Shows #3: The Front of the Pit is Over-rated

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tumblr lez5m1CEjR1qz4cuyo1 500 Rules for Shows #3: The Front of the Pit is Over rated

 

Rule #3

 

The first strings have been strummed and the singer has claimed the mic. The shovers are staking their claim in the pit. There is a rush to the stage, a general movement: the show is starting. The young and foolish punk will rush forward so they can be closer to the sweat and angst flying off the stage. It seems rational. But if you’ve taken the time to push to the front-and-center position, standing in front of the fresh mosh pit is the worst way to claim that sweet spot. Not so much because the pit is unmanageable but because the task of managing it is in the opposite direction of the band. So you can turn your back on the show and push the pit kids. Or you can watch the show and get elbowed in the face. Thus what seems initially like the center of the action turns out to be a major distraction. Just when you think you can maybe take some time to actually watch the show you paid to see, you remember the crowd surfers. They like to remind you by kicking you in the head.

If this all still seems like a great plan, then you probably have a fierce abundance of ass-kicking energy. In that case, dive into the actual pit instead of turning your back to it. Now that’s a nice view.

 

 
 

30 Years of MTV: The MTV is dead, long live the MTV

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August 1st marks 30 years since MTV went on the air. Many young people today may look at what the station has become and wonder, so what?
Every American I know who grew up in in the eighties has a little hole in their heart for what happened to MTV. It’s similar to the way one might remember a clever acquaintance who fell to addiction. They shake their heads, bite their knuckles and look wistful. Whether the thing MTV was hooked on was reality programming itself or the ratings boost it provided, I can’t say, but lost it is. I remember in my teens I would stay up late to record Matt Pinfield on 120 Minutes, because by the mid-nineties the only time they played music videos was in the middle of the night.
But in the heyday of MTV, you could watch videos any time, day or night. What was so great about it was probably all the things the executives behind the scenes hated. The VJs were unscripted; there was little product placement. I have an MTV t-shirt that my mom won from the station in the eighties, when they would do giveaways as if they were just another station on the radio. You could pick it up on your radio, too. Even as a tween I had an inkling that their slot in the TV Guide which said nothing but “Music Videos” for six hours couldn’t be a dream for the person who sells their advertising. But that authentic, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants experience was a fine fit for rock and roll: that ever changing, never planning, tumultuous beast. Rock and roll never sounded better followed by “We’ll be right back after these messages.”

Mtvmoon.png.scaled500 30 Years of MTV: The MTV is dead, long live the MTV
The funny thing is, the way people watched MTV didn’t really change. The people who watch reality shows are the types to use the telly as background noise. MTV was perfect for that: no plot, no characters that would distract you for more than four minutes. Everything they were showing would show again in several hours. It was all that made cable wonderful and terrible. With MTV on, mom could balance her checkbook and I could do my homework. Hell, MTV probably invented the idea of using the idiot box for background noise.
Thus if you ask anyone over 25 they will say that the golden age for music video was the eighties. Not because the videos were better. No, they were low-budget and jakey as hell. CG wasn’t even a word then. It was a golden age because people actually watched them. Today’s youth may share Internet memes, but back in the day if you met a kid from the other coast you could bond of your shared memories of videos. There is a whole generation of people who can’t hear “Take On Me” without thinking of a cute girl caught in a comic strip. If you’re one of those people, you might think Rick Ocasek has the body of a fly. For better or for worse, Dire Straits is more than a band. They’re also a bunch of singing, animated blue collar workers bitching about rock stars and Sting’s voice harping I want my MTV was the voice of the nation. We all saw it, we all loved it. You could not disconnect the song from the video.

 

I say for better or for worse, because there was a downside. I’ve often wondered if I would have liked Van Halen’s “Right Here Right Now” if it didn’t have such a kick-ass video. We got this idea that the tiny movie was somehow the musician’s vision, when really the director’s vision usually had very little to do with the conception the artist had when they created the song. The nostalgia we have for music videos is the same we feel for any song, but it’s based on something false, that little three minute story. Wyclef’s “Gone Til November” came out after MTV had fallen to disgrace, so that song will always remind me of Spring Break at Siesta Key. It’s an association I share with only a handful of people but it’s an actual memory of my life. But when we were in love with Blind Melon’s “No Rain,” who can say for sure if it was the song we loved–or the fact that it had one of the most adorable videos of all time? Who can say what that song would mean to us, if it didn’t mean dancing bees? It seems to me to be a song about individuality, but that is the message of the video not the song.
I think we may be embarking upon, if not a Golden Age, than a yet-unnamed new era for music videos.  For me it began when the site I use for radio streaming started adding Youtube videos to its search. But I think for most people the preponderance of music video has come about slowly as we have faster Internet connections. Now that two gigs of RAM is a standard, our computers are finally fast enough to manage them. A second factor is the dropping price of hard drive space. While most of us aren’t downloading the videos to keep, cheap disc space means that more video and blogging sites are willing to let us park the videos on their servers. It is easier than ever before for bloggers to post them. If the dastardly censors haven’t gotten there yet, it is often as simple as pasting a YouTube url. Finally, because Youtube is the third most popular site in the world, often when people want to find a song they go to the video site to find it. Either way, more and more people are watching them these days. Big hits like Gaga’s “Telephone” are gaining the collective association the MTV videos of yesteryear commanded.
What’s different this time is that we control the remote on what videos we see. Not only have I seen more videos this year than in the last five combined, they’re videos I would never have dreamed even existed. I would never have thought that anti-establishment punks like The (International) Noise Conspiracy and Operation Ivy made videos. I have delved into the studio recording and music videos that came before MTV. Acts like Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and Nina Simone, that I have treasured for years now, have videos online just waiting for my discovery. And of course new bands are still using them to promote their new albums. It’s come full circle, as the indie bands of today are using the same low-budget filming techniques, some for budgetary reasons and others to hearken back to the same shared nostalgia of the MTV that is dead and gone. If there had never been an MTV, there wouldn’t be a generation of musicians who think setting their songs to tiny movies is a worthwhile marketing effort. After all, video wasn’t a new idea when MTV came around. It is only because these same musicians were watching MTV while they played with Transformers and ripped the heads off their Barbie dolls that the Britneys and Kanyes create videos costing a million dollars a pop.  And the bloggers posting the low-budget masterpieces to their little blogs are like the video jockeys of yesteryear: unpolished, unprofessional. We love them because they’re fans first, in it for the love of the music. So it is that while the zombie of MTV continues to ravish the flesh of washed out celebrities in a never-ceasing voyeurism, its spirit lives on. MTV is the Phoenix, rising from the ashes as Youtube and Vimeo. MTV is the Ouroboros. She has shed her mythical skin and we have emerged, with our own cameras and our own blogs and our own video channels. We no longer need the VJs, we have become the VJs. MTV is dead, long live MTV.

 

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Some of the essential videos mentioned above after the jump. Next week I’ll be posting some of my favorite videos that I’ve discovered since the fall of MTV.

RIP Gil Scott-Heron

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gil scott heron.jpg.scaled500 RIP Gil Scott Heron

There was a time in my life when I only wanted to listen to political music. It was then that someone passed along to me a cassette of Gil Scott-Heron. This was around 1999; tape players were already hard to come by. But I managed to wear out that tape in several months.

He was more than a musician, he was a poet that happened to be a multi-instrumentalist. He was a radical agitator with piano and bongo to sweeten his message. He was a visionary, but then again, in some ways he wasn’t: It wasn’t his intention to foster the forthcoming genre of rap. He created poetry set to music, in the tradition of Bob Dylan. He created poetry infused with Jazz in the tradition of Amiri Baraka. His style was never pretensious but always bold. I couldn’t believe that this amazing and diverse poet was undiscovered by most of the people in my social circle. I tried to impose it on everyone with the fervor of a newfound love.

Well, time passes and new loves come to you.  I just found out that Gil died this week. I don’t know what to tell you except that I hope you can take some time out of your day to listen to some of his work.

I know he recently released an album but I want to share with you some of the songs that inspired me when I was a teenager. I’ve also included one of the recent songs that Kanye West sampled him on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mp3 RIP Gil Scott Heron
Gil_Scott_Heron_-_Whitey_on_the_Moon.mp3 Listen on Posterous

mp3 RIP Gil Scott Heron
Gil_Scott_Heron_-_Whitey_on_the_Moon.mp3 Listen on Posterous

mp3 RIP Gil Scott Heron
Kanye_West_-_lost_in_the_woods.mp3 Listen on Posterous

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