The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (24 page)

Turcotte explains it this way: “You can be very successful being a small band that has control of its destiny versus a bigger band that has to answer to a [record label].” Compared with record deals, which have become insidious and vast as labels seek greater dominion in order to profit, licensing a song for a beer commercial is practically free money. It’s a choice at a time where options are rare. “When we started, you could control where your music was or wasn’t,” says Quin, “but now that feels impossible.”

In recent years, as bands and managers have seen that ads can be a proven method of discovery for new artists, it’s become much easier for Turcotte to get songs. “I’m seeing baby bands talk about advertising the way that baby bands used to talk about getting signed, which is very interesting to me,” he says. “It’s like the in-house music producers are the new A&R guys, and the bands want an ad, just the way they wanted a record deal. That’s what they aspire to have. And that’s something I could have never expected because I never thought that it would have that much power.”

The evolution has also happened within the business itself. A song can put nuance to a brand identity; an artist’s identity—what their art has made us believe about them and why—can be just as easily loomed to a product. That has long been understood, but perhaps what has evolved since “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” went from soda-pop jingle to
Billboard
Top 10 pop single is just how much meaning a band, a song and their fan base can impart in this co-signing.

Johnson admits that while syncs are how Matt and Kim make their living now, he is mindful of corporate credibility—the duo recently turned down a spot for a breakfast product (the spot ran with a song composed to sound nearly identical) as well as spots that a friend’s band later said yes to. What won’t they do? “Yogurt,” says Johnson. “Cheesy commercials with the mom—it’s not artistic. We’d have a hard time keeping our edge as a band.”

Almost a year after Tegan and Sara played their Leo Burnett lunchroom gig, they’ve finally landed their first national spot—stemming from a different agency gig they did this past summer, placing “Shock to Your System” in a JBL campaign that begins in November. Some within their promotions team are worried that after all this effort, a commercial spot that introduces an album track won’t be the thing that seals the deal. Says Quin, “If people can’t connect that song to you—your name, your face—then it’s all for naught.”

Still, McDonough is emphatic that even a saturated market is better than nearly any option an artist could have: “Ads are not the answer; it’s just a piece of the puzzle.” Now that so many bands are trying to get their piece of it, the value on sync licenses have come down. (“
Way
down,” he clarifies.) The trend is away from original compositions and toward existing tracks, which are always cheaper. “Two decades ago, there was crazy money,” McDonough says. “The money now is not life-changing for anyone.”

For all the freedom and choices an infusion of ad money can provide, or the signal boost a well-placed spot can provide, it comes at a cost. Success can change things, just as sure as a platinum record once did, and access to lump sums can affect which direction a band is facing as a corporate client becomes the only paying audience they have.

While advertising cannot save or replace the music industry, there is one undeniable fact, says McDonough: “These big companies are the last people paying musicians what they are worth.”

NOT LOLLAPALOOZA: ROLLIN HUNT, SCREAMING FEMALES & ABE VIGODA

Chicago Reader
, August 2007

This weekend the throngs will decamp for Lollapalooza to experience a vertiginous array of mediocre-to-terrible bands (and a couple good ones) in the company of tens of thousands of half-drunk strangers. Seeing a show outside in the Chicago summer dusk is a welcome reprieve from standing around in a smoky club, but the idea that mega-festivals somehow create ad hoc communities out of their mega-crowds—a meme we probably owe to Woodstock—is ridiculous. The only thing everybody at Lollapalooza has in common is the willingness to be painfully gouged for a ticket. Even crowds that might seem a bit more like-minded (say, at Pitchfork) make for a grim and dystopian scene: mini mountains of litter, security guards, sun-baked Porta-Johns. And when you see bands from hundreds of feet away, they seem unreal—specks on the horizon, or larger-than-life cartoons rendered in Jumbotron pixels and playing hard to the cameraman.

As much as I love being able to eat funnel cake and watch M.I.A. at the same time, it can’t make up for all the things about festivals that are fundamentally wack. This summer I’ve made it my mission to forsake the colossus for basement shows, hoping to find exciting new bands and join their tiny fan base.

The first time I saw local songwriter Rollin Hunt, he was wowing a crowd of a dozen or so at Ronny’s, trembling before the mic with his eyelids squeezed shut. “Wow. He’s really special,” I whispered to my friend. “Yes,” she said. “Very.” Hunt was in the middle of a song about going out for a walk and spying on a couple getting hot and heavy in their bedroom. And antelopes.

Onstage, Hunt is terminally shy, like he’s cowering from his own voice—it seems like he’s used to doing this sort of thing in private. His small, crackly vocals and the songs’ ramshackle instrumentation constantly get away from each other. For me, the mystery of Rollin Hunt is whether he’s oblivious to how wide off the mark he’s gone. Is he on this strange path by conscious choice, or did he simply pursue his love for the Beach Boys and ‘60s girl groups and just happen to produce his savant-garde doo-wop? His work is so beautifully awkward that it’s hard to believe it’s all part of a deliberately-crafted persona.

Hunt’s self-released ten-song demo,
Dearly Honorable Listener
, is closer to outsider art than lo-fi indie rock. It’s a marvel of rawness, recorded so poorly that you have to turn your stereo almost all the way up to hear what’s going on—you get about 60 percent background hiss and 40 percent music. Live, Hunt is often accompanied by a shambling little backup band, but on disc it’s just him, his not-quite-in-tune guitar, and sometimes a drum machine. (At least I think it’s a drum machine—often it sounds like someone throwing rocks into a bucket.) The songs begin and end in strange places, like he either ran out of tape or started playing without telling whoever was supposed to press the record button. He has a hard time keeping up with the drum machine, which sometimes drops in jarringly in the middle of a verse, and he multitracks vocal harmonies through what sounds like a baby monitor.

Hunt’s ambition as a performer nearly destroys his sweet, fragile little tunes, mostly because it completely outstrips his basic competence—but they end up amazing anyway. His lyrics are crowded with small scenes and unpredictable tangents: one song is about “juice in the air,” another about “George who runs the Holiday Inn.” His genius turn is “Pamphlet,” where he proposes a solution to his relationship problems in a romantic ditty that sounds like a cross between early Smog and a truly touched Frankie Lymon: “I need to make you / A pamphlet / That tells you everything you need to know / About my feelings.” It’s clunky, unpolished, and intimate, and that’s what gives it its magic.

When Screaming Females hit Ronny’s in mid-July, they had a paying crowd of six. I’m not counting the people in the other band or the sound guy, who was playing Tetris on his cell phone. They were halfway through a two-and-a-half-month U.S. tour with stops at plenty of basements and punk spaces—a few days earlier they’d played a house show in Elgin. But though these three under-20 kids from New Jersey are almost entirely unknown, word is spreading fast. Frontwoman Marissa Paternoster is the teenage girl-guitarist messiah, and miracles and conversions come with the territory—show by show, she’s turning the uninitiated, myself included, into true believers.

We may be witnessing the dawn of a new age of femme shredders (Marnie Stern, Aimée Argote of Des Ark), but Paternoster isn’t waiting around to see if anyone else is following her. On a defiant, punk-fast version of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer,” she carved into the song until practically the whole thing was a solo. Screaming Females have just self-released their second album,
What If Someone Is Watching Their TV?
, and it can match any (decent) Dinosaur Jr. record, pound for pound, in teen malaise and ripping solos. Paternoster’s got some blues boogie in her riffing, a little Billy Gibbons in her muscular punk. She’s a deft songwriter, but she doesn’t like to let more than a minute or two go by without stepping on a stomp box and firing one off. She ended the set in a cloud of screeching feedback, hunched over her guitar and pounding on her pedals with her fists. I don’t think anything like her has happened to punk before, and I’m glad it finally has.

Two weeks ago, the posi-kidcore band Abe Vigoda brought L.A.’s Evolution Summer scene to a pair of Chicago basements: the first night they shimmified 19 stinky kids and a beer-drunk dog at a party in Pilsen, and the second they did a last-minute set at People Projects as the token dudes at a Ladyfest benefit, playing for maybe 20 people, half of them festival volunteers. In Pilsen, they kept it short and sweet, with six songs in less than 15 minutes: “We’ve gotta make it quick before the cops show back up,” explained guitarist/chatterbox Juan Velazquez. The PA kept feeding back and you couldn’t hear the singing, so the band turned off the mics and just shouted along—none of us really knew how the songs went anyway, and everyone was too busy dancing to care.

The B side of Abe Vigoda’s recent “Animal Ghosts” seven-inch, “All Night and Day,” hasn’t left my turntable since I dropped it on. Their tribal thunk and sideways funk make for a kind of dance punk nobody else has dreamed up yet. Full of jostling guitars that manage to be both precise and playful, their sound has a kind of cloistered innocence—it knows nothing of disco. Calypso would be more like it, given the deep love these guys have for the woodblock. Abe Vigoda’s antecedents are hard for me to pin down—maybe dub, maybe New Zealand pop, maybe some band they hang out with in Chino that I don’t know about—but no matter how you slice it, their show is a cynicism-destroying good time.

We’re supposed to believe that we’re enjoying some sort of meaningful collective experience at a big festival, with modern rock blaring from a bank of speakers the size of a condo complex. But such a grand scale actually tends to dissolve community—the anonymity and impersonality of an enormous event sometimes even encourages people to act shittier than they otherwise would, since they don’t feel accountable to anyone around them. At a basement show, though, where the bands aren’t whisked to the stage by golf carts to make a thousand dollars a minute, people are gonna get pissed if you leave your chewed-up corn cobs and beer cups lying around. You can smell the band. You can give them seven bucks for a T-shirt and know that the money is going to get them a tenth of the way to Iowa City. In the basement, you can feel the band’s humanity as well as your own.

PART EIGHT: FEMALES

ST. VINCENT:
STRANGE MERCY

Village Voice
, November 2011

Annie Clark is too perfect a rock star, but she will do. She has china doll features; she is put-together and glamorous; her manner is refined. She’s beautiful, and you can tell she is used to being looked at and watched, as if she has been famous since long before now.

Looking at her when she’s offstage, you imagine she should be doing something else, not staying up late with a guitar slung ‘round her back and commanding a band into loud swells of her own design. It seems like the wrong job for her hands. She seems more coquettish than rock and roll as she’s curled up on the couch backstage before her show in her emerald crepe dress.

When Annie Clark gets onstage as St. Vincent, her image is mere collateral. What fixes your gaze to her is the confidence, the ease, and the naturalness she exudes. You cannot imagine she was meant for anything else but stomping around the stage, coaxing new noise from her guitar, her eyes surveying the sold-out crowd. She solos; they scream.

“I’m not qualified to do anything else,” she says, sounding a little concerned—as if she had been browsing Craigslist ads for admin positions while casting about for a post-Berklee-dropout plan B. “I didn’t think I needed it. Which sounds insane when I say it aloud.”

It’s not. It’s only reasonable. Clark’s third record,
Strange Mercy
, is her best and most pop album. The signs of her success are ample. For one thing,
Mercy
sold 20,000 copies in its first week of release. Still, she plays modest, or at least presents as the anti-diva—“It would be interesting to know exactly how many people have heard my songs,” she says. Her guess: “Like, 100,000?” Perhaps that would be the case if everyone who’d bought a copy of her last few albums had kept them entirely for themselves, she’d never toured, filesharing didn’t exist, and her songs weren’t presently all over radio and the blogosphere.

With
Strange Mercy
, Clark moves closer to her audience, lowers the transom a bit. On her previous two albums,
Marry Me
(2007) and
Actor
(2009), it was hard to tell what, if anything, was personal. Her debut seems to be made up of vignettes and stories. She cited “Pirate Jenny” and Nick Cave as her inspirations for its theatricality. It seemed the work of someone eager to impress—to show off, even.
Actor
, purportedly a tribute to Clark’s favorite films, resulted in Clark rhapsodizing over Woody Allen’s work as much as explaining her own. She says of her progress as a songwriter since: “I care less about impressing. Well…maybe. It’s no longer about trying impress people with my wit.”