The Trouble with Lana

I have a bit of a confession to make, and I feel a bit weird, almost guilty saying this: I kind of like Lana Del Rey. Kind of. I've felt this way for a while now, and despite my normal sense of comfort with my own tastes, I have made an actual effort to keep this fact hidden. I only listen to her when I'm alone, I feign ignorance when she's mentioned in conversation, the very few people I've admitted this to I've sworn to secrecy. For the first time, possibly ever, I have felt a certain amount of embarrassment for liking something. This feeling is new to me.

You can probably tell.

But the fact of the matter is, I can't help it. I like her music, whether I mean to or not, and the sooner I come to grips with this fact the better it will be in the long run. However, that doesn't mean I don't have a few problems with how she does things. After all, the reason I'm embarrassed is because I actually recognize why so many other people dislike her. With all the hate coming her way, I totally get where it's coming from. So what is the problem?

In a nutshell, it's her image. Everything wrong with her career just sort of revolves around her image, but it's not so much what that image is, it's that it's so central to her.

No, really, I just listen to her for the songs.  I swear.

Think about it; despite the fact that she's got a song about how she's on the radio now, I have not actually heard her on the radio. The first most people heard of her is what they saw at the same time in her music video to Video Games. And what they saw was exceedingly obvious hipster bait. From the get go of her career, she was attempting to attract a key demographic through means other than her music. And by the beginning of her career, I'm talking about the album she released, then rescinded, under the name Lizzy Grant. It was available briefly before she bought the rights back, and she has refused to re-release it since. While there's probably a good reason or two out there to explain a move like this, the most obvious possibility is that she was giving hipsters an opportunity to do what they do best: brag about being into something before anyone else. It's just that it's so obvious she was doing it. Throw in her (often sung about) time spent living in a trailer park (after she signed a recording contract for $10,000) and the fact that she's a little white girl from New York going by an artificially exotic name, and you've got all the markings of a singer trying to influence her way into a position of fame and adoration.

But she made a couple major mistakes. One, she estimated her intended audience wrong. She's relied on her image way, way too much, and while it's true that musicians make careers out of good looks or image alone all the time (see American Idol, seasons 1 through 11) it doesn't work quite so well when you want to be taken seriously as a musician. Lana wants to be loved and respected as an artist, and image based careers only work to this degree on pop music audiences. I mean, pop audiences adore Katy Perry and Justin Bieber enough to go to movies about them, they're not overly concerned with quality. She tried to illicit that same level of devotion starting with a core audience of underground music snobs and spread out from there, but she was so obvious about it that even hipsters recognized they were being manipulated. So they turned on her.

Her other problem is in her sexiness. Currently, audiences are completely fine with strong women who are comfortable in their own sexuality (Pink!), which can be empowering, and with women who use their sexuality in a way to attract a male audience (Katy Perry) and exert some level of control over them, which can be a kind of empowerment. Audiences are even fine with whatever Nicki Minaj counts as, and while not necessarily empowering, that certain counts as some kind of kind of self confidence. Lana Del Rey's approach to using her sex appeal consists of a creepily subservient “I exist only for your pleasure” image that I can't quite tell if it's for real or not. On the one hand, I'm not convinced it isn't just a satirical look at the image, on the other hand, she awkwardly flaunts it in ways that prevent me from being convinced that it is.

You see, this. This? This is exactly what I'm talking about.

She might be trying to show how dull and lifeless women are when seen as mere sex objects, or she might just be a sex object who's not all that into it. It's hard to tell. She makes it hard to tell.

Lastly, there's her SNL performance. Yeah, it was just really bad. There's not some greater issue with her persona or business tactics here, it's just that it really was bad. Like, probably not “worst ever” bad, but maybe within the bottom 25.

And all of this is a shame, because beneath the awkward sexuality, the fake name, the obvious manipulation, and the focus on her image and persona over her music, there is a talented musician with good music to perform. I don't care if some of her lyrics seem disingenuous; I only care if she feels the need to make us think they are genuine because then she'd be missing the point. I don't care if she wants to change names or labels; I only care if it starts to affect the availability of her music or if that music is sacrificed for (or worse, created as) a publicity stunt. I don't care if she isn't as good live; as long as what she puts to recording is listenable and good, I'll be listening and good.

Property Claims

I want to ask a question here, and I hope I don’t end up sounding like a bigot; how come gay men can claim heterosexual women as their representatives? I’ve recently become a big fan of Wonder Woman comics, and while my reasons for enjoying them stem from their propensity towards superpowers, sword fighting, beautiful and ageless warrior women, and mythological creatures, I’ve found out that Wonder Woman is also considered a gay man’s superhero.

Nothing says male homosexuality like a hot chick punching demons at the Lincoln Memorial.

I don’t understand this, for the same reason I don’t understand why that demographic is so attached to Judy Garland and Julie Newmar. I suppose Garland I can kind of get, what with “Over the Rainbow”. It’s a bit of a stretch, almost a pun, like when Stephenie Meyer used Arcade Fire’s “My Body is a Cage” for her book about Bodysnatcher aliens. It’s a tenuous connection, but I suppose it’s there. But really, how do you make the leap from the hottest Catwoman ever (no offence to Eartha Kitt, Lee Meriwether, Michelle Pfeiffer, Halle Berry, and Anne Hathaway), to movies about men in drag? Same goes for Wonder Woman. I’m honestly at a loss at to where the logic lies in making the leap from a superhero clad in the American flag who represents a pinnacle of the perfect womanly behaviors of peacemaking and nurturing to male homosexuality. If Wonder Woman has to be used as a representative for one specific demographic, I’d just as soon assume the obvious one: women.

But really, this is a wider phenomenon. How can any one demographic really lay claim to one particular character or celebrity? Sometimes it seems simple and makes sense. John Wayne, Jackie Chan, and Bruce Willis are seen as men’s kind of actors, and that makes sense: they specialize in cool and manly things like shooting people, kicking people, and blowing people up (in some cases, all of the above). But when you really stop to think about it, couldn’t they just as easily be women’s kind of actors? Aren’t they physically attractive to women? (I’m honestly asking here, because I’ve come to realize I really don’t know. I just found out that the three closest women to me at work all think Nicolas Cage is, quote, “Hot!”, so my world view has been turned entirely upside down and I don’t know who to trust anymore.)

Sexy!

Gone With the Wind gets a rap as a women’s movie, but why? At it’s core it’s about war and the Confederacy; you don’t get much more manly than that. I’m pretty certain you’d be hard pressed to find a man who didn’t find Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, and Minnie Driver attractive, and yet ohmygodtheyreallinthesamemovie and it’s considered only for women.

Sometimes the ones who get claimed by one group or another don’t make any sense between the two of them; Samus Aran, interstellar bounty hunter in a robo suit and one of the first female video game heroes is played mainly by boys it seems, yet Lara Croft, reigning queen of polygon assets, is a feminist icon.

From left to right: chick with a gun, chick with guns

Now, sometimes a celebrity is particularly outspoken for a certain demographic, so I can understand when Buddhists claim Shirley McClain, or blue collar workers with fancy cars claim Bruce Springsteen. But I don’t think that any person or piece of fiction should belong to any one race or religion or gender or creed. I don’t have to work at an automobile factory in Michigan to jam to “Thunder Road”, nor should I have to.

I have a dream. I dream of a world where men can enjoy Wonder Woman and women can enjoy Power Girl; where chicks can play video games and dudes can enjoy baking; where white people can love watermelon and fried chicken and black people can eat mayonnaise and free range brown eggs; where Americans can appreciate soccer while baseball and apple pie are products of the world instead of one country; where you don’t have to be a poindexter to like edutainment and you’re never to old to watch a Saturday morning cartoon. If we as a people can learn to see ourselves beyond social labels with preset lists of allowable likes and dislikes, then we can finally learn to like all things indiscriminately. This, this is my dream.

Pandora's Box

I like to stay abreast with the times, and technology, as fast as it advances, is one of those things that it’s healthy to have a decent understanding of. Now, given that I am a very nerdy young man, one might assume that I have an unquenchable affinity for technological gadgetry and the like, and you would be wrong. I am developing a pointed mistrust of technology, to the point of outright paranoia, and if you had my experiences with the latest gadgets and internet toys as I’ve had, you would be paranoid too.

Take for instance my encounter the other day with Pandora Radio. For those not in the know, it’s a website that allows you to input music you like and using a sophisticated algorithm and musical feature tag system it will play more music that it thinks you will like. Now, anyone who’s read my stuff for a while knows I pride myself on my choice of music, and rightly so: I am awesome. I am an undisputed champion of making musical playlists, and if I deem a song, album, or band worthy of time taste, then you’d better start listening to them too because (and I say this with the utmost humility) I am the greatest music listener on the face of this otherwise tone deaf planet. I need not embellish on how good of a thing it would be to have at my fingertips an intelligent, learning system that would introduce new music I hadn’t heard of before that was on par with my previous lofty choices.

I still rock out unironically to Ace of Base; why aren’t you?!

The first thing that happens on Pandora is that you pick a single song or artist, which it will by default name the new radio station after, then you start adding music you know from there. Soon, I was tossing song after song, artist after artist onto the “99 Red Balloons Station”. I pretty much just went with a large collection of my favorite songs and waited to see what would come up. But after a few songs, it started playing music far below the quality my ears are used to. Several showtunes and Hilary Duff songs later, I realized I had to destroy this station, and start anew. This time, I would have to be smarter about my first choices, and in an effort to get less girly music out of it, I went for some good old fashioned rock.

Crocodile Rock, to be precise

Sadly, this approach also ended in showtunes.

Grumbling under my breath something along the lines of, “Hey, man, what are you trying to say about me?”, I deleted yet another station and started again. This time there was no messing around. It was only the manliest of music for me, so I bunched together as much Bruce Springstein and Dire Straits as I could, and added some Tom Waits at his gravelliest for good measure. An hour later, and it had played Sally’s Song from The Nightmare Before Christmas three times.

Now, up to this point, I can just count these grievous errors off to a couple bugs in the system and try again, but then things started getting weird. As I tried to make the best of this newest station and hope that things all turned out for the best, the ads started popping up. Apparently, again based on what kinds of music you like, it will periodically play an audio advertisement that it deems to suit your preferences. When they were just telling me about the great deals on video games and local cupcake stores, that’s fine; but there comes a point when I start to cry “Subliminal Messaging”.

For me, that point is when several ads in a row for a foreign robotics company crop up. This was followed by an internet survey that asked the question “How do you feel about self awareness?”, and this might have been just me, but I think there was something funny about the “Submit Your Answer” button.

Reporting the ad to be offensive to me, I tried to push this out of my mind, and soldier on through the music. Finally they played Karma Police. Singing along loudly (and badly) as I am wont to do, I soon began to notice some inconsistencies with the lyrics, though. Last time I checked, after singing “this is what you get when you mess with us” he’s supposed to echo “for a minute there I lost myself” all Thom Yorke like for a few minutes. I’m pretty certain it doesn’t start repeating the word “OBEY!” accompanied by demonic robo-laughter. Yet that’s what all the lyrics sheets I can find online say, and that’s what it did for about 25 minutes before sparks started flying out of my disk drive. I shut down the computer as fast as I possibly could.

You know, from now on, I’m just going to pick my music manually.

The Best Things in Life are Vague

…Or in this case, songs.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have been giving this a lot of thought lately, but I have decided that unclear song lyrics really are the best. I think the reason is that you can only say so much when you do it with precision. When you repeatedly sing about something clearly and specifically, it’s only a matter of time before you realize just how much the emotions that we feel can only be expressed in song are just like everyone else’s. There’s only so many ways to sing “I love you”, “I no longer love you”, or “I’ve changed my mind, I love you again”. And seeing as how these are apparently the only regular emotions that are musically inclined, we end up with decades worth of top forty hits all expressing the same sentiments, and a future bevy of songwriters desperately trying to find new ways of saying the same things, often landing on retarded ways that irreversibly embed themselves in the popular culture.

Two words: Disco Stick.

But then there are those artists who realized that the only way to sing something different was to write lyrics that were indecipherably vague, or outright nonsensical. Growing up, They Might Be Giants were one of my favorite bands, partly because they had impossible to resist catchy music, and partly because there was no one else in history who had sung about Particle Man (particle man), doing the things a particle can. Another of my favorites was Laika and the Cosmonauts, who eschewed lyrics altogether and just used Russian surf guitar riffs. Instead of hearing how much some guy wants “you” back being expressed in the simplest terms possible (“I want you back”), I got to listen to surf guitar and picture wacky aliens doing wacky things. Which is not too hard to imagine when their album cover looks like this:

Am I just showing off how much better my musical choice as a child was then yours? Okay, yes.

Going by this logic that vagueness makes the best lyrics, I’ve decided that two of the best songwriters ever are Beck and KT Tunstall. Listen to almost any song Beck has ever done, and there will be maybe one line that sounds like it makes sense. He talks about “robots and gigolos”, “one’s got a weasel and the others got a flag”, and says he’s “wishing I was living with a hit man.” Not a one of those lines makes any more sense in context, either. It doesn’t take long to realize he’s most of the time saying absolutely nothing, but he says it so well, often, even humorously. KT Tunstall on the other hand is not too different from mainstream writers, if you only count subject matters. She’s a perfect reminder that you do sound totally original even when you sing about the same things as everyone else except that you dredge them through extended metaphors until they’re gloriously unrecognizable. I listened to her first album for a couple years, and it still took her outright saying in an interview one song is about long distance romance before I got it. Makes sense in retrospect, but I’ll be damned if I was ever going to guess something so mundane from lyrics about icebergs melting. And that, it turns out, is what she does best: bringing metaphorical imprecision to what would otherwise be mundane (she also holds the distinction of creating the only positive use of the term "banjo solo" that I can think of).

So for all you fledgling songwriters out there reading this, learn from these artists and always remember to write vague.

Perfect Driving Music... on the Roadtrip to Insanity!

You may not know this about me, but I suffer a bit from stage fright. This extends to several media in my case, like for instance, writing. While I feel I am relatively good at writing, and while I often write “to” a (non-existent) audience, I don’

t often imagine anyone actually reading the useless things I have to say. Imagine the surprise, and even the hint of panic, I felt when I was informed that someone was indeed reading this very blog. I was comfortable with the metaphorical empty theatre, as it meant I basically had the whole stage to do whatever I wanted, say whatever I wanted, use whatever shift key symbols as rudimentary euphemisms I wanted. No one would object or disagree, because I was the only one reading this, and I always agree with what I have to say.

Now, finding out that I was not alone in this imaginary theatre was not by itself enough to drive me to madness, even considering I was halfway there already. No, the real problem began when, while in this emotionally vulnerable and mentally volatil

e state, I opted so soothe my fragile nerves with the calming sounds of Radiohead.

Big mistake.

Listen up people, if you ever feel like you might be coming down with a bad case of mental disorder, do not put on Radiohead. I don’t care how much the song “Kid A” sounds like an eclectic lullabye, do not play it, and do not listen to the lyrics. The lead singer himself claims he sang them through a voice changer because they were too horrific. Do you hear me? Thom Yorke, who wrote the song is terrified by his own lyrics!

And for goodness sake, do not watch the music videos! I saw the video for “There, There” while still but on the threshold of insanity. After it was over, I threw myself bodily over the precipice, and into the dank, dark abyss. Iagne the horrifying woods scene from Snow White, except instead of the fair princess you have the homely features of Thom Yorke, the kind hearted woodland animals are joining in on the attack, and instead of being saved by dwarves, he gets turned into one of the monstrous demon trees that attack weary travelers. Is it any wonder that my hazy recollection of all the time from the moment the

video ended to about two days ago mostly resembles the results of a drunken Salvadore Dali robbing a paint store. Upon recovering my wits, I promptly set to writing this post into my notebook, only to discover all the pages filled with grisly sketches of the Kid A Bear. When I close my eyes, I can still feel it watching me. Watching…

The Trouble With GaGa

This post has been a long time coming, but I am notoriously behind on the times, so I’m just getting to it now (seriously, the last time I listened to the radio, Hanson was in style.) The point is, I’m just now finding out about this whole Lady GaGa thing. Now, I’ve heard the name get thrown around, but it took me a while to actually hear a song. Specifically, I had to look her up on YouTube once I found out she’d be on SNL. Let me just say to the uninitiated (as I was), the things I saw on the videos are currently burned into my retinas, and I’m not sure they will ever go away. But past that there was little more than repetitive techno beats with blithely nihilistic and inane lyrics. I had to listen to parts of four songs before I actually found one that had a discernable melody. It’s a sad realization that unlike the crappy pop songs from the 90’s which had memorable (albeit annoying) tunes, the crappy pop music from today has really no true tune, just a series of noises ran through digital programs that occasionally resemble words. Entirely unimpressed, I ended up watching her segments of SNL anyways out of boredom. You might understand why I’d be surprised when this happened:



Taken aback, I went to the most reliable source online to find info on what other music she’s done. After all, I hated “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree”, but love everything else KT Tunstall does. Reading her bio and musical description on Wikipedia, she apparently started singing in the womb, learned piano by 4, wrote a ballad at 12, and spent college performing piano pieces based on European philosophers. From the description of what she can do and the comparisons made, she should be making the equivalent of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” sung by Freddie Mercury and played by the love child of Billy Joel and Gershwin. But going back to reality, what we got is a bubble headed fashionista droning “muh muh muh muh”. Oh, fate is cruel.

So here it is. Lady GaGa, if you’re reading this, please, think about what you’re doing. The world has enough pop tunes with pseudo electronica beats (Madonna will only retire once she dies, and we all know that’s not going to happen.) We need real music, something you physically are capable of making. Think of the children, GaGa. Think of the children.