The most important thing to know is that American Apparel is the new Abercrombie & Fitch. Which is to say, all of a sudden even the popular kids are dressing like hipsters. I'm not just saying this because I recently started spending most of my time in the vicinity of 12th and Broadway. I see the change just as much in mass culture, particularly in certain music videos for songs by artists who could not be more mainstream: Katy Perry, Usher, and Taio Cruz. About five years ago hipsterdom started riding a dialectical whiplash headed straight for the dead center of the mainstream. The period of 2004-2005 was the breaking point, the era of "Float On" and the Postal Service and Franz Ferdinand and the soundtrack to Garden State. The last six months or so were the Age of Gaga, which is now on hold until she releases her new album. With Gaga momentarily back-burnered, the air that has rushed in to fill her void is all hipster-inflected. Alternative is truly the new normal.
That poor girl who fell out of a 25th-floor window her first night (or thereabouts) at the Parsons School of Design was, judging from the few pictures I've seen of her, a patron of American Apparel or some analogous brand. The police found a small camera next to her body, and speculated that she may have climbed outside the window to take a picture--presumably, a picture to post on her "online diary." Hipsterdom has spread via the Internet.
The "Teenage Dream" video was shot to look like a Facebook photo album come to life. This shows us beyond a doubt that this abrupt change is because people now spend more time on Facebook than they do looking at professional photography. Mark Zuckerberg had no idea what an all-devouring monster he was unleashing on the world.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
Far East Movement: "Like a G6"
I kind of like this song, or at least the opening chorus.
"Poppin' bottles in the ice...like a blizzard/When we drink, we do it right, gettin' slizzered/sippin' sizzurp in my ride, in my ride, like three-six/Now I'm feelin' so fly, like a G6."
That's not bad, although I doubt anyone in the video is sippin' sizzurp in anyone's ride, unless by "sizzurp" you mean "Malibu" and by "ride" you mean "drunk driving is dangerous." And admittedly the thing goes from decent to horrible as soon as those scrubby dudes show up and start rapping. But these days, 38 seconds of decent music should be enough for anyone.
"Poppin' bottles in the ice...like a blizzard/When we drink, we do it right, gettin' slizzered/sippin' sizzurp in my ride, in my ride, like three-six/Now I'm feelin' so fly, like a G6."
That's not bad, although I doubt anyone in the video is sippin' sizzurp in anyone's ride, unless by "sizzurp" you mean "Malibu" and by "ride" you mean "drunk driving is dangerous." And admittedly the thing goes from decent to horrible as soon as those scrubby dudes show up and start rapping. But these days, 38 seconds of decent music should be enough for anyone.
"Telephone"
I just watched the "Telephone" video again for the first time in a while, and I was struck by how well it schematizes the difference between Gaga and Beyonce. To wit: Beyonce just wants to kill her boyfriend; Gaga wants to kill everyone.
Brendan James
More mainstream hipsterdom: skinny jeans, skinny tie, plaid flannel, stubble, discreet tattoo, army jacket, hat with brim, horizontal stripes, etc.
Why People Like Katy Perry
The people who like Katy Perry like her because she reminds them of them. To wit, she is the poster girl for popular kids who dress like hipsters.
Look at the video for the piece-of-shit song "Teenage Dream," the second single and title track off Perry's new album.
We begin with Katy Perry sitting in the passenger's seat of a beat-up BMW drop-top, with her flowing black bangs falling over her Ray-Bans. She's wearing a bunch of mildly exotic-looking jewelery; her tank top is full of strategically-placed holes; she has something in Sanskrit tattooed on the underside of her arm. The guy driving is wearing a faded white t-shirt, old leather boots and a trucker hat, possibly from Urban Outfitters, with something written on the front. Their jeans are both fashionably ripped. Speeding down the highway, they pass other similarly cool and offbeat-looking "emerging adults," who point and wave excitedly: two guys in a rusty red pickup, one wearing big glasses and black-and-blue plaid; and a whole little quirky posse, yellow shades and Indian headdresses and all, in a white convertible. In the remainder of the video, we see lots of horizontal-striped t-shirts, more ripped pants, shaggy long hair, leather jackets, and so on. The party at the end is full of hot white people pairing off, along with one slightly dark-skinned guy and one quirky-looking fat girl to set the mood.
American Apparel has become the new Abercrombie & Fitch. Which is to say, hipsterdom is living out its pathetic final years--its "Vegas years," if you will--among the kids in high school who throw parties every weekend and don't invite you. All they do is look at each other on Facebook all day, and look at themselves, and you want to be one of them.
Look at the video for the piece-of-shit song "Teenage Dream," the second single and title track off Perry's new album.
We begin with Katy Perry sitting in the passenger's seat of a beat-up BMW drop-top, with her flowing black bangs falling over her Ray-Bans. She's wearing a bunch of mildly exotic-looking jewelery; her tank top is full of strategically-placed holes; she has something in Sanskrit tattooed on the underside of her arm. The guy driving is wearing a faded white t-shirt, old leather boots and a trucker hat, possibly from Urban Outfitters, with something written on the front. Their jeans are both fashionably ripped. Speeding down the highway, they pass other similarly cool and offbeat-looking "emerging adults," who point and wave excitedly: two guys in a rusty red pickup, one wearing big glasses and black-and-blue plaid; and a whole little quirky posse, yellow shades and Indian headdresses and all, in a white convertible. In the remainder of the video, we see lots of horizontal-striped t-shirts, more ripped pants, shaggy long hair, leather jackets, and so on. The party at the end is full of hot white people pairing off, along with one slightly dark-skinned guy and one quirky-looking fat girl to set the mood.
American Apparel has become the new Abercrombie & Fitch. Which is to say, hipsterdom is living out its pathetic final years--its "Vegas years," if you will--among the kids in high school who throw parties every weekend and don't invite you. All they do is look at each other on Facebook all day, and look at themselves, and you want to be one of them.
Jessie James
Sunday, August 29, 2010
The Band Perry
(No relation to Katy Perry.) They sound like Taylor Swift; they look like a cross between Interpol and the Decemberists; they write lyrics like Evanescence; they are shaped like Cripple Creek. They are a girl singing and her two brothers playing guitar or bass or mandolin or accordion.
You do realize, of course, that "If I Die Young" means "If I Die A Virgin." If you disagree, you clearly haven't listened to the lyrics: "I've never felt the love of a man/but it sure felt nice when he was holdin' my hand." And this is right after "I'll be wearin' white/when I come into Your kingdom."
Maybe you should read the previous paragraph again, and spend some time thinking about how fucked-up this song is. The song is about dying a virgin. This is a song for girls who would rather die than have sex, or maybe for parents and brothers who would rather see their little girl dead than in the carnal embrace of a man, as long as she dies quietly and leaves behind a peaceful-looking corpse. No one even seems that upset. They're just relieved that she never had to lose her virginity. "I had just enough time," she says. Maybe you should read that lyric again.
You might read the end as a reenactment of the Resurrection, but this band is Christian in rhetoric only, and the miraculous reversal at the end is just a typical Hollywood ending. The lyrics express nothing more than a desperate reluctance to relinquish childhood innocence. Christian kids these days seem especially slow to put away childish things, maybe because they get their Christianity from C.S. Lewis instead of St. Paul.
Note as well that, when her loyal brothers send her pretend-dead body Boromir-style into the river, instead of a sword she is clasping to her bosom book whose cover reads: "POETRY: TENNYSON." This is the band for quiet, literary, Christian girls. That demographic was previously only tapped indirectly by Taylor Swift, who clearly paid good attention in 9th grade English class; now it has been colonized.
(addendum: At first I said Taylor Swift, but I actually think they sound more like Alison Krauss.)
Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook is about to be mythologized in a big way. Mark Zuckerberg is being groomed as a generational hero. We are entering the age of megalomania, which is better than an age of narcissism. But narcissism often follows in the footsteps of megalomania, destroying in time all we have built. Praise leads to narcissism, the most pernicious of all destroyers of talent. Megalomaniacs ought to cultivate, from an early age, a distaste for praise.
Justin Moore: "How I Got To Be This Way"
My favorite part is when the camera shifts focus between Justin Moore today and pictures of Justin Moore as a kid, as though he hadn't made his point clearly enough in the lyrics.
(addendum: The law of ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny is deep-rooted enough in the essential tendencies of mind to let us imagine that this song might possibly convert a few creationists.)
(addendum: The law of ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny is deep-rooted enough in the essential tendencies of mind to let us imagine that this song might possibly convert a few creationists.)
New Katy Perry: "Not Like The Movies"
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Katy Perry: Saying My Peace
Katy Perry's new album came out today. To mark the occasion, I would like to say my peace.
"I Kissed A Girl" is a great song, and not just in a theoretical, queer-studies sort of way. It's not ironic or camp; on the contrary, it's a great song precisely because it feels genuinely naughty. Perry was raised in a conservative Christian family, and started out a gospel singer. "I Kissed A Girl" is a great song because of the way it captures the exhilaration of a wholesome Christian girl's tentative first shuffles into the profane world.
But I know a one-hit wonder when I see one. Before "California Gurls" dropped, I hadn't heard her name in months, and I figured she was over.
In May, after listening to "California Gurls" for the first time, I was certain she was over. That song, I thought, was the most lifeless, insipid, uninspired garbage I had ever heard in my entire life. It sounded like a copy, almost note-for-note, of Ke$ha's "TiK ToK," except with everything that made "TiK ToK" such irrepressible fun--the dirty synths, the spunky white-girl rapping, the eye for slice-of-life detail--taken out and replaced with Wonder Bread and styrofoam. The lyrics sound like they were written by someone who hasn't been within a thousand miles of either coast, and Perry sings them like she's doing a homework assignment.
It made sense. Her one great song was fueled by the energy released, as in nuclear fission, when the hard shell of her Christian upbringing broke open and her repressed desires rushed out. But an atom only splits once. One burst of lightly transgressive fun, and she was depleted. The song would come out, no one would care, and that would be the end of Katy Perry.
Imagine my surprise when "California Gurls" became the #1 party jam of the summer. People loved it. It was the most popular song on iTunes for weeks and weeks. I didn't get it. My best theory was that California girls, especially those born in California but living elsewhere, like it because it's about them. I imagined them screaming and throwing up their hands when Perry says "West Coast represent." It was a summer fad, I figured; it would pass. Californians have short attention spans.
But as time passed, and "California Gurls" started playing on the radio constantly even here on the East Coast, I began to see the awful truth: Katy Perry is here to stay. People don't just like her songs; people like her, as a star. She has earned a reputation as a reliable, respectable purveyor of shallow, lighthearted, catchy pop, as a less serious and more normal counteragent to Gaga's quasi-artsy excesses. People like her; people think she's good.
Well, let me say my peace. Katy Perry sucks. Her songs are passionless, unoriginal, and barely enjoyable; what little pleasure they yield is pure Pavlov. Her supposedly "raunchy" image is tepid and utterly craven. And worst of all, she has that desperate look in her eyes, the look of someone who knows she doesn't deserve to be famous and is terrified that someone will figure it out. She shouldn't worry: for now, she has everyone fooled except for me.
Gaga is a fearless artist and a superb songwriter with a heart of infinite generosity and a sharp satirical eye; she's the real deal, no matter what anyone is saying right now. Even Ke$ha, one-hit-wonder though she may have been, still has as much organic spontaneity and rock 'n' roll swagger as anyone in pop music today. Katy Perry is nothing next to either of them, and even so people love her. Right now I need to go to sleep; my theory on why people love her I will save for next time.
"I Kissed A Girl" is a great song, and not just in a theoretical, queer-studies sort of way. It's not ironic or camp; on the contrary, it's a great song precisely because it feels genuinely naughty. Perry was raised in a conservative Christian family, and started out a gospel singer. "I Kissed A Girl" is a great song because of the way it captures the exhilaration of a wholesome Christian girl's tentative first shuffles into the profane world.
But I know a one-hit wonder when I see one. Before "California Gurls" dropped, I hadn't heard her name in months, and I figured she was over.
In May, after listening to "California Gurls" for the first time, I was certain she was over. That song, I thought, was the most lifeless, insipid, uninspired garbage I had ever heard in my entire life. It sounded like a copy, almost note-for-note, of Ke$ha's "TiK ToK," except with everything that made "TiK ToK" such irrepressible fun--the dirty synths, the spunky white-girl rapping, the eye for slice-of-life detail--taken out and replaced with Wonder Bread and styrofoam. The lyrics sound like they were written by someone who hasn't been within a thousand miles of either coast, and Perry sings them like she's doing a homework assignment.
It made sense. Her one great song was fueled by the energy released, as in nuclear fission, when the hard shell of her Christian upbringing broke open and her repressed desires rushed out. But an atom only splits once. One burst of lightly transgressive fun, and she was depleted. The song would come out, no one would care, and that would be the end of Katy Perry.
Imagine my surprise when "California Gurls" became the #1 party jam of the summer. People loved it. It was the most popular song on iTunes for weeks and weeks. I didn't get it. My best theory was that California girls, especially those born in California but living elsewhere, like it because it's about them. I imagined them screaming and throwing up their hands when Perry says "West Coast represent." It was a summer fad, I figured; it would pass. Californians have short attention spans.
But as time passed, and "California Gurls" started playing on the radio constantly even here on the East Coast, I began to see the awful truth: Katy Perry is here to stay. People don't just like her songs; people like her, as a star. She has earned a reputation as a reliable, respectable purveyor of shallow, lighthearted, catchy pop, as a less serious and more normal counteragent to Gaga's quasi-artsy excesses. People like her; people think she's good.
Well, let me say my peace. Katy Perry sucks. Her songs are passionless, unoriginal, and barely enjoyable; what little pleasure they yield is pure Pavlov. Her supposedly "raunchy" image is tepid and utterly craven. And worst of all, she has that desperate look in her eyes, the look of someone who knows she doesn't deserve to be famous and is terrified that someone will figure it out. She shouldn't worry: for now, she has everyone fooled except for me.
Gaga is a fearless artist and a superb songwriter with a heart of infinite generosity and a sharp satirical eye; she's the real deal, no matter what anyone is saying right now. Even Ke$ha, one-hit-wonder though she may have been, still has as much organic spontaneity and rock 'n' roll swagger as anyone in pop music today. Katy Perry is nothing next to either of them, and even so people love her. Right now I need to go to sleep; my theory on why people love her I will save for next time.
Friday, August 20, 2010
First Impressions of Sufjan's New EP
And you pushed yourself to the floor
And the Spirit went where it went
Hovering, discovering and covering your life on the floor
And the walls were wet with your love
For the mother is, the mother is
the glorious, victorious, the mother of the heart of the world
Don't be ashamed, don't hide from me now
For the woman is, the woman is
the glorious, victorious, the mother of the heart of the world
Djohari, Djohariah
-Sufjan Stevens, "Djohariah"
I don't recall hearing that Sufjan Stevens was coming out with a new record. I had hardly even thought about him in the past three years or so. But as of this past morning Pitchfork is streaming the 60-minute "EP" All Delighted People in its entirety. I planned to listen to the beginning of the first track before going to bed. I've now listened to it one and a half times. I could be wrong about this, but on first listen All Delighted People EP is my early pick for album of the year and maybe even one of the best albums of the decade.
He's been working on it this whole time. You could call it "chamber pop," but that would be like calling Moby-Dick a novel: the genre designation it technically fits into it simultaneously shreds into nothing. This album never stops giving. As soon as you're ready for something new to happen, something new happens--but rather than just a new idea, it's a new elaboration on the same idea, surprising but obvious in retrospect. It's always becoming new and at the same time always remaining how it was, and it keeps this up almost flawlessly for sixty minutes. Forget catharsis, forget skeletal lamping; this is musical kenosis. Like Djohariah, the single mom transfigured into "the mother of the heart of the world," like Christ on the cross, Sufjan has emptied himself. He has poured every last drop of himself into this album, and even so it somehow still sounds effortless. I feel like I know now how people must have felt the when they first put on Revolver back in 1966.
Grizzly Bear is over--they could never make something like this in a million years. The Dirty Projectors might aspire to such heights in an album or two, and I wish them success. I have faith in the xx as well, eventually. And in my wildest dreams I can imagine Kanye's new album being this good. The Arcade Fire are playing a different game now, although I still wouldn't put it past them. But for now, All Delighted People EP is the greatest record in the world--and you can download it here for $5.
And the Spirit went where it went
Hovering, discovering and covering your life on the floor
And the walls were wet with your love
For the mother is, the mother is
the glorious, victorious, the mother of the heart of the world
Don't be ashamed, don't hide from me now
For the woman is, the woman is
the glorious, victorious, the mother of the heart of the world
Djohari, Djohariah
-Sufjan Stevens, "Djohariah"
I don't recall hearing that Sufjan Stevens was coming out with a new record. I had hardly even thought about him in the past three years or so. But as of this past morning Pitchfork is streaming the 60-minute "EP" All Delighted People in its entirety. I planned to listen to the beginning of the first track before going to bed. I've now listened to it one and a half times. I could be wrong about this, but on first listen All Delighted People EP is my early pick for album of the year and maybe even one of the best albums of the decade.
He's been working on it this whole time. You could call it "chamber pop," but that would be like calling Moby-Dick a novel: the genre designation it technically fits into it simultaneously shreds into nothing. This album never stops giving. As soon as you're ready for something new to happen, something new happens--but rather than just a new idea, it's a new elaboration on the same idea, surprising but obvious in retrospect. It's always becoming new and at the same time always remaining how it was, and it keeps this up almost flawlessly for sixty minutes. Forget catharsis, forget skeletal lamping; this is musical kenosis. Like Djohariah, the single mom transfigured into "the mother of the heart of the world," like Christ on the cross, Sufjan has emptied himself. He has poured every last drop of himself into this album, and even so it somehow still sounds effortless. I feel like I know now how people must have felt the when they first put on Revolver back in 1966.
Grizzly Bear is over--they could never make something like this in a million years. The Dirty Projectors might aspire to such heights in an album or two, and I wish them success. I have faith in the xx as well, eventually. And in my wildest dreams I can imagine Kanye's new album being this good. The Arcade Fire are playing a different game now, although I still wouldn't put it past them. But for now, All Delighted People EP is the greatest record in the world--and you can download it here for $5.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)