The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (17 page)

The songs meandered and circled back on themselves, picking up and shedding new instrumental layers as they went and almost never doing the same thing twice—sometimes they threatened to get away from the band entirely. But Jones was the real show. She nearly yelled the words to “It Hurts,” giving voice to the loneliness of the A.D. world—”It hurts / To be here / When you’re gone.” The song could be a love letter from Mary Magdalene to an absent Jesus or a prayer from a disappointed disciple. “My only precious thing I had / Has been broken.” But as electric guitar arced and receded and furious strumming and choral ahhhs welled up around Jones, as she squeezed her eyes shut and bent in half, pulling the mic down with her, as her agony turned to ecstasy and her accusing wail turned triumphant, it became clear what we were hearing—it was a redemption song.

WHY MICHAEL JACKSON’S PAST MIGHT BE GARY, INDIANA’S ONLY FUTURE

Village Voice
, July 2009

The first thing I noticed was that Michael Jackson was gone. Downtown Gary, Indiana’s main drag hosted a wide-scale mural project in 2002, fantastic possible futures for the city’s boarded-up buildings painted directly onto the boards, with an MJ adorning the old record store, symbolically turning his back on Gary, three digits of his bejeweled glove-hand blotted out with graffiti, as if he were giving his birthplace the finger. It was an odd touch of realism amid the mis-scaled office scenes of ferns and giant computers; Michael had been painted with care and detail. Now, much of downtown has been re-boarded, and he has disappeared again.

I’d been driving from downstate all day, with news reports of his death getting more and more detailed as time passed. Shortly after arriving home, a friend texted what I was already thinking: “We should go to Gary.” Hitting one of Chicago’s impromptu MJ-tribute nights didn’t seem right—
Thriller
had taught me what it meant to have music be your whole life, to be a devoted fan;
Thriller
was the first album that was all mine, not my parents’—and so, a vigil seemed more appropriate than a dance party. Gary is where it began, and it was only 33 miles from my house. The toll booths on I-90 West pumped
Off the Wall
in every lane.

The Jackson family home is about a mile off an unlit freeway exit. You pass the bank, the only one in town. When I did a travel piece on Gary a few years ago for the
Chicago Reader
, people were quick to brag about how things were looking up: They had a bank again, after several years without one. Its gleam stands in sharp contrast to a downtown filled with stately, half-burned buildings with saplings growing from rooftops and terraces. A fire took much of the area in a single night in 1997: what survived still stands. Boarded-up stores are emblazoned with fancy, loping mid-century fonts; there are signs for chains that haven’t existed for decades. It’s strange, impossible, and beautiful, the Pompeii of the Midwest, a rotting monument to industrialization, an apocalypse fueled by plant-closings, white flight and arson.

The Jacksons left Gary in 1968, right before the Steel City began its freefall: Between 1960 and 2000, the city’s population was nearly halved. Their house shows no mark of its former occupants’ success, save for the renamed streets—it sits at the corner of Jackson Street and Jackson Family Boulevard. It’s incredible to imagine that a family of 11 once lived in the tiny two-bedroom bungalow. There is no garage. Maybe there was, once. Maybe they just practiced in the yard, though dancing in the grass is hard. Maybe there’s a basement we don’t know about.

When we roll up to 2300 Jackson, it’s almost 11 p.m., maybe seven hours since the news hit. Slow-cruising cars blare different eras of MJ as two thick cops parked on ATVs shine their headlights on the crowd milling in the yard. This is not so much a gathering as a looky-loo, a chance to observe the coterie of stuffed animals and notebook-paper tributes. A Gary Fire Department shirt on a hanger clings to the front window’s security bars with a note taped to it: “Goodbye Michael J5 forever.” There’s not a lot of talking up by the actual shrine and its safety candles: Everyone just snaps pictures with their cell phones and slaps at mosquitoes. Some people are crying.

Back at the edge of the yard, locals trade stories, theories and firsthand reminiscences: Michael’s appearance at a Gary high school in 2003, older siblings who went to high school with Tito, guesses of what will become of the house. Everyone weighs in on where he’ll be buried: Everyone hopes for Gary, thinks it should be Gary—maybe even right here in the backyard. I imagine the tiny, fenced-in lot overtaken by a mausoleum, ringed with teddy bears and white gloves.

The next day, Mayor Rudy Clay talks of turning the house, which would take four minutes (max) to thoroughly examine, into a Graceland. Grim as it is, Jackson’s death could mean new life for Gary. A stretch of downtown is set to be razed in the next year: No doubt an MJ shrine will be its star attraction. Interviewing residents a few years back, the idea that Michael could return and somehow save their seemingly unsaveable city was a collectively-held notion. Some held his abandonment against him and considered such a return his duty as a native son, while others were sympathetic—why would the King of Pop ever want to come back to Gary? Few had guessed that this is how it might happen.

The mosquitoes are getting to us, and we’ve taken all the pictures we can of the memorial heap of mini-mart roses and stuffed animals. Across the street, a man affixes a flashlight to a lawnmower, fires it up, and starts cutting the grass. We get back in the car. On our way out, we stop and take pictures of the long-abandoned Palace Theatre’s marquee. Since Donald Trump had the place spruced up for the 2002 Miss USA pageant, it has read “Jackson Five Tonite”—another fantasy future for the Magic City, come and gone.

SUPERCHUNK: I HATE MUSIC

SPIN
magazine, August 2013

Death is everywhere on
I Hate Music
, Superchunk’s 10th studio album. Sidling right beside us, doing air-guitar windmills on his scythe, from album opener “Overflows” (where “dead” is the third word frontman Mac McCaughan sings) all the way to bittersweet-ever-after closer “What Can We Do.” This is a record of grief, bristling with the anguish of what it means to survive, to re-evaluate your life after someone else’s death: “Everything is different / Everything is the same.”

As if that wasn’t quite brutal enough, McCaughan also dredges up a rhetorical question from that emotional swampland of punk-after-35:
What does music mean in the face of mortality?
“I hate music / What is it worth?” goes the opening salvo to “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo.” “Can’t bring anyone back to this earth.” It’s a line that pulls you up short—after decades of insisting this song or that album “saved your life,” you’re suddenly confronted with the fact that
it actually won’t
. It can’t.

It’s a line that leaves you embarrassed in your vulnerability; to have ever asserted otherwise seems like a denial of life’s terms. When you are past that youthful period when your whole identity is tied up in a faith affirmed by music, when the mortal aspects of life start to catch up with you—
how do you orient yourself?
The small god who lives in a perfect beat or solo, in the raw, chest-beating howl of some puerile punk… Is that the same god we curse out and bargain with when we are trying to keep the people we love here with us? On this album, McCaughan reckons with this belief system that has informed so much of his life. Yet the idea that
music is everything
is rather naive on this side of 40, and saying
music is nothing
is too hopeless, too cynical, it disorients the past. What to cling to?

I Hate Music
is crushing in its poignancy, its ruthless weighing of what this whole mess adds up to (or doesn’t). “Put up your feet on the dash,” McCaughan cheers; he’s doing the math on life’s beauty to agony ratio, reasoning with memories from before his friend’s death and after.
I Hate Music
acknowledges music’s power to bless us with meaningful distraction. It can distract us from our mourning, too, though that’s all it can do; grief and music both have the power to distort reality as much as they cut through the bullshit of it all. Title aside,
I Hate Music
eventually (thankfully) comes down on the “everything” side of the argument.

All this is a heavier orbit than the usual “Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old” sentiment of post-punk forty-somethings singing of their disenfranchisement from the scene they built. Chalk it up to the liberation of middle age or the certainty of an audience that has held fast (and aged with them), but the band clearly feels no compulsion to keep it light; they trust their music to hold up under all the heaviness of such examinations and trust us to be able to handle it as well.

All the frustration and anger at play on
I Hate Music
energizes songs like “Staying Home,” wherein the Hüsker Dü echoes that have trailed McCaughan since 1991’s “Cast Iron” have never been louder (the last thing you expect 10 albums in are Superchunk breaknecking like it’s
Land Speed Record
or bust). Ironically, it’s an anthem about
not
going out—the ultimate geezer cop-out—set to hardcore, the very sound of youthful vigor. Out of step, indeed. Other songs sit in awe of death, alive in the fresh hell of it, McCaughan’s eager-teen squeak of a voice still stretching toward those high notes. His voice is full of love and restless sadness, which tells as much of a story as the lyrics do, atop heartbreaking lines like “Oh, what I’d do / To waste an afternoon with you.”

It’s a perfect place for Superchunk to wind up, given this is a band that initially wooed us 25 years ago with “Slack Motherfucker,” indie rock’s quintessential bratty-kid anthem. Now, just as confidently, they have given us songs that map adult life, even if these anthems are more a mortality blues. But with
I Hate Music
, Superchunk prove that it wasn’t naive to believe in what music could do.

BETWEEN THE VIADUCT OF YOUR DREAMS:
ON VAN MORRISON

TINYLUCKYGENIUS, July 2008

When the chasm of human experience feels unbridgeable, and the past is keeping you like the stocks, and there is no absolution to be had, no forgiveness to salve you, and the world feels too much in its infinite newness and it’s midnight and people are screaming and feeding babies ranch-flavor chicken fingers from a bucket, when all you see is difference and a long string of your own unqualified failures, there is Van singing, “Lay me down…to be born again.” There is so much wanting in “Astral Weeks,” but it’s not desperation, it’s all vessel; it’s faith enough to cover us all. He waits until 4:55 to slip the big one, “I’m nothin but a stranger in this world”—after he’s sung all this future-hope, he’s just fucking untangled joy over pipping flutes—here, he flashes his wretch-like-me makings, and dovetails his abyss with deliverance—there is something beyond this—he sounds like he’s about to giggle he’s so delighted, he’s so
sure
. It’s fine, fixed sureness, an easy sureness when he repeats it this last time, in this final, ecclesiastic glee coda. He has all the reasons not to believe, but he does. The Buddhists say hope is a trap, it’s a set up for suffering, but the hope in this song, it is free, it drags nothing with, it is only onward, onward in love and frailty.

PART SIX: BAD REVIEWS

MILEY CYRUS /
BANGERZ

SPIN
magazine, October 2013

What is there to “review” when it comes to a Miley Cyrus album? Her singing, affected and perfected by software? How her powerless pop makes you feel, deep down in your quivering soul? How to rate this latest iteration of her personae—code name: “strategic hot mess”—to address these complex matters of cultural ownership with a post-teen girl who has belonged to the public her whole life, a simulacrum of girlhood turned into one of the great products of our age, a bigger emblem of the empire than Mickey Mouse himself? What else could she do but nuke it, saturate herself in our greedy gaze until she dissolves, give it all away, turn herself out until our knowledge of her is borderline gynecological? Is there a part of Miley that remains unknown? Did you really expect an album called
Bangerz
to reveal anything to you?

In knowing everything, we find we know nothing. The entertainment value of Cyrus’ work is more than simply typical pop pleasure: It is the slow-motion horror of watching toxic sleaze replace toxic purity (cf. Dave Hickey). At her extremes, she firmly engaged our most puritanical mores—from saccharine virgin to knowingly fellating a sledgehammer—Cyrus is, at once, both banal and pernicious.

Though
Bangerz
may seem like some sort of sudden, shocking transgression, grinding gears as Cyrus shifts from Disney World to Worldstar, 2009’s “Party in the U.S.A.” foretold it all: the wow and much-ness of fame, Jay-Z on the radio. Cyrus has touted this album as “sexy” (ehh), “believable” and “very adult.” Though only the latter rings true—in the traditional, male-fantasy-driven, pornographic sense of “adult”—her actions, and even more so her inactions, conform to the arc of most mainstream adult entertainment. Here, she’s often pliant and naive, begging to serve, or at least be noticed and deemed worthy. On the Pharell-penned “#GETITRIGHT,” she lays in bed, powerless and horny, overcome and waiting to be activated by male desire; on “My Darlin’,” she solicits the revivifying attentions of a dude who is just not that into her; on “Maybe You’re Right” and “FU,” she leaves; and on “SMS,” she alludes to taking her satisfaction into her own hands, but it’s all played for (what else?) titillation.