St. Vincent – Digital Witness

What a place to work.

the idler wheel is wiser than the driver of the screw and whipping cords will serve you more than ropes will ever do.

I heart Fiona Apple and her distinctive brand of lyrical jazz melancholy. Her new album is out on 19th of June and here is the first single, Every Single Night. Here also, is the creepy as fuck album artwork, which looks like it was scrawled by Ralph Steadman on the back of a beer mat. Enjoy!

Subversion as Progression.

Antony and the Johnsons' 2004 self-titled album subverts concepts of masculinity (to a degree).

Ever since writing that article two posts down about rebelling, I have been thinking a lot about subversion in contemporary music, and why it is essential.

Firstly, pop/rock/R'n'B/electro are types of music that now reach billions of people across the Globe. We have all heard figures and boasts about how Lady Gaga has become the most widely watched video on Youtube with over a billion views, become the most downloaded artist ever and so on. And it is evident that in any media form, expanding as they are, pop culture is ubiquitous. Even if we don't watch X Factor and despise the concept, we still know that Frankie Cocozza recently got the boot for being too rock and roll (apparently).

I think it would be lovely if poetry or prose touched the hearts and minds of the global masses in the same way as pop, but, unfortunately, this is just not the case. As outlined in this exemplary article on music criticism, Charlie Bertsch points out that part of this is to do with the form of each discipline and its ability to be experienced many times. For example, we might read a book or a poem we especially love a couple or several times, but this is an exception. A pop song we can easily listen to dozens, if not hundreds of times. Indeed, we invariably do, as we cannot escape it in our vast media society. We memorise the words and tap our toes to the beat without even realising it.

Thus, pop has an incredible power that surpasses any other genre of art on a mass scale. All the more important then, to keep it evolving in order to keep challenging perceptions in a way that is not alienating. My love/hate relationship with pop is itself in constant flux. I suppose this depends on the parameters of 'pop music' and how you want to define them.

In essence: pop has greater importance than we want to admit. It can change attitudes towards so many things - make the weird or unpleasant normal and even desirable. It is interesting to note that trends that start off in a minority group previously deemed undesirable can, when filtered through the pop speaker (and lens), become essential to the hipster. We see this constantly in fashion, vocabulary and of course in musical trends.

But more than that, pop, when played around with in the mind of the artist and their team, can ask questions to many that otherwise might never have been asked. Such gender issues as those that concern and populate the music of Antony and the Johnsons might never have received such a wide audience willing to understand without the medium of pop.

Below are a few artists who I feel have had an important affect on culture through their music in either pop or R'n'B. It is through the questions they pose (especially when they first appear to be distasteful questions), that advances our understanding of music, and more widely of art, culture and ourselves.

Janelle Monae - Live At Glastonbury 2011 (Part I) from Dupree Meares on Vimeo.

And the epic conclusion:

David Lynch meets Karen O on a highway somewhere way-out West

Album artwork to David Lynch's recent debut album Crazy Clown Time.
Never was there a more apt title for an album.
Here's the first track:

It's out today.
Also - THIS may be of interest to you.

In Praise of the Ephemeral

What the hell is this shit you’re listening to? Is something I regularly get asked when my headphones are snatched from my ears or a friend wanders into my bedroom without knocking - although, in this case, the revelations could be worse, obviously. Usually I do not feel the urge to defend the evident lack of artistry in something like Lady Gaga – the Remixes, because in stating that I like it brings me down to the level of the standard of the album in the eyes of the onlooker. This is something we generally want to avoid, a topic I covered in another post a while ago, the scapegoat of the Guilty Pleasure. We want people to think that we are interesting, considered, fashionable individuals, who came to our conclusions on our own about music and culture – conclusions that represent us, so they have to be good.

However, I think it’s time we get off our high horses about music, art and so on, and see it for what it is, or rather, what function it performs, and then view it from that angle. In the wide spectrum of music Pop gets a fairly rough deal. Its lyrics don’t stand up to much past telling someone you love them, fancy them, want to dance with them, while displaying tokens of how cool you are, how flexible you are in as little clothing as possible or how many honeys you can pay to cluster around your sagging, Swarovski crystal-encrusted crotch. It’s image is also as such – over-sexed, talentless wailers, levelled out by autotune and a gang of record-label stylists and PR team, just to make sure you appeal to the audience that will like you enough to part with their cash to prove it.


No – pop is not the prerequisite of truth and integrity. It is the drug-fuelled, perpetually horny, all singing, all repeating underclass of music, continually unaware, still pouting with a plastic smile. There are no deep emotions in pop, even the word ‘Love’ has been bleached out and turned into a rhetoric device that is really only code for ‘Shag.’ Just let me ‘Love’ you. You’re ‘Love’ is my drug.

But are we, the deriders of the artifice of Pop, really so profound in every aspect of our existence? When we shake our bodies on the dance floor after eight pints, trying to feel up whoever is next to us, are we thinking, ‘Yes, I am the paradigm of truth, I am the Human Spirit crammed into just one small body, I am dispelling all the lies that culture has built up, I am the Only, the Genuine.’ Probably not. And if you do, you’re a bit of a dick. We think about how good it feels to move our body to a repeated beat, how great it is to be in a crowd of people who think the same as you, who are as enthused about this moment right here, like you. You think how great it is to be alive. If pop is about one thing it is this - this moment, this time right now. This is its most instant appeal and its primary drawback.


Let me put it like this: We do not function on one level all the time, we flit between them. To stay on one level would be boring and tiring. If we understand the importance of these various levels at the appropriate time, then we can get the most from them. If I go into a bar and am annoyed that no one wants to talk about the finer points of Aristotle’s literary critique The Poetics with me, then I am missing the point of the level. People go to bars to chat, drink, flirt, dance and relax. I could always turn around and go to a little artsy café on the corner where chatting, drinking, flirting, dancing and relaxing might happen with an opening for Aristotle.

Basically, what I’m saying is that Pop is something to be primarily enjoyed on one level – the level it is intended to be, on a dance floor, in the background of a bar, making your toe tap on the bus, later to be forgotten. Sure, my favourite pop artists are those that try and transcend this (admittedly) limited generalisation, people like Janelle Monae, Missy Elliot, Of Montreal, Vampire Weekend, Beck, Bjork, Rufus Wainwright, Imogen Heap and Patrick Wolf. These are people who appreciate one level but see further expansion into another.


But let’s not forget the outright perpetrators of Pop, and their virtues – Britney Spears, arguably the world’s most famous pop star, sang well written and produced songs (my favourite, produced by the Neptunes, is here) lived a life-style we all envied a bit, even if we also hated the idea of it, put on a show and made millions of people across the Globe want to dance. Then she is forgotten (although, is actually bringing out a new album in March) and superseded by someone else who performs that function – Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, Kelis, The Biebe, Usher, STILL bloody Madonna, and so on. Of course there are the debates that these over-sexualised pop icons shouldn’t be directed at young teenagers and that this is distorting their perceptions of success. But I really don’t think that is down to the pop industry. I think that is down to the government and parents to provide relevant, aspirational and intelligent options for their children. Pop will remain as it has done; as something to amuse and entertain us. It has never sought to provide us with the answers and anyone who thinks it does is deaf as well as blind. But, in that moment when the lights are dim, when your vision is hazy and your body moves in time with the music, it can seem like a moment of transcendence – not that this will last, like most good things, the Pop aura fades with the rising of the sun, and you are left with ringing ears, an aching body, and the memory that you had a great time last night (providing that you didn’t over do it. That’s outsides the limit of this article I’m afraid).

Mainstream pop is something to, well, pop up and down when you want it, something to live inside for a moment or two, a dream, a bubble, a fantasy for a short period, perhaps. When I think about pop songs now, the sort with lyrics that only have relevance within the song, instead of looking down on them as shallow hedonists, I can think that maybe the beat is great, the song is catchy, I want to hum along and tap my foot, I want to be in that moment for a short while, I am in praise of the ephemeral lapses in and out of Pop.

Now, Move, move, move those hips, shake, shake, shake that ass.


Missy Elliott - Pass That Dutch
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