The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (26 page)

All but a couple of the album’s 12 songs are connected to its basic theme of relationships between the sexes, and half are diaristic synopses of actual dates Smith went on with men she met at Lavalife.com. She’s a sharp, literate lyricist, prosaic rather than melodic—right now she’s at work on her fourth novel—and her attention to detail and detached, acerbic tone make
The Observer
a particularly apt title. Though each diary song is a separate scene, with each man allowed his own particulars, they’re unified by Smith’s blunt portrayal of herself—we learn about her as a date, not just an artist, and she makes a messy, inconsistent impression, veering from cynical and judgmental to petulant and needy.

On the album’s centerpiece, the 12-minute “Fallen Skier,” she skips between snippets of dinner conversation and an internal monologue about her date, a 47-year-old student and recovering addict who describes himself as a “fallen waiter/ski bum/party guy.” From the moment she says “guy,” drawing it out and accenting the word, you can tell she’s mocking him. She repeats his story without sympathy, sounding frustrated, almost disgusted: “I feel I’m with a boy, a very young boy / He’s only been away from home for 27 years / Only 27 summers, 27 winters / Partying and skiing / I guess that’s why he hasn’t gotten anything together yet / I don’t think he realizes it, but his life has gotten away from him.” When he seems concerned that her band might play hardcore punk, she makes a half-indignant aside that lightens the mood: “I stand, a middle-aged woman in a fantastically subtle silk jacket / Hush Puppies / Curly hair blowing in the wind / And this guy’s fretting over the possibility / That I’m actually Henry Rollins.” But almost immediately her complaints begin to boomerang, telling us as much about her as they do about him. “He never asked the name of my band,” she says, “never tried to touch me.” Suddenly she sounds vulnerable, even wounded; though her date’s clearly wrong for her, she can’t keep herself from wanting to be interesting and desirable to him. When she hugs him good-bye at the end of their chemistry-free evening, it’s unclear which one of them she’s trying to console.

The Observer
is a harsh toke, but it’s compelling on all fronts—Smith’s lyrics force you to think about loneliness, need and bad dates, but the songs are as engrossing as they are exhausting. Her voice flits and dips like a plastic bag in the wind, moving from a moany sort of sung-speech to a deep, silky quaver to a thick, shrill trilling, and she often drawls out her words like she’s trying to fill the room with distended consonant sounds. The self-explanatory album opener, “I’m Not Into Being the Woman You’re With While You’re Looking for the Woman You Want,” is a glowing example of the interplay between her vocals and Lester’s guitar, which is equally distinctive and powerful. On “To Avoid Pain” the duo toys with early-’60s pop country as Smith hee-haws like a half-drunk Brenda Lee, trying to talk herself down on the way to a first-time hookup: “Take a city bus / To a downtown hotel / I don’t feel weird / I don’t feel weird / Ask me / Ask me / Ask me if I do.” Then, as a dark, discordant synth tone rises out of the music, she eagerly proclaims a dubious victory over her own unease: “Soon enough it’s true-ooo!”

On “I’ll Call You,” Lester’s buzz-saw guitar gallops around Smith as she reads a fake personal ad—her version of what a truthful guy would say—that sounds like it was placed by a member of the Duke lacrosse team. “Attraction Is Ephemeral,” which provides the most complete picture of Smith and what she’s about—the way she begins to doubt her own doubts, wondering if she’d be able to spot genuineness in a man even if it were there—is also the most musically moving track on the album. It’s the most romantic, too, or rather, it’s most explicitly about romance and the yearning for it; though, in typical Mecca Normal fashion, it does so while addressing gender and class inequality, patriarchy, and how they can really ruin a date.

In press releases and online materials, Smith provides links to photos she’s used in her dating profile, including shots where she’s posing in her underwear and others where she’s wearing nothing but the ribbon in her hair. But given how unpleasant
The Observer
makes her dating life out to be, it’s hard to argue that the pictures are just convenient exhibitionism—if you’re gonna use sex to sell records, you don’t usually linger on the vulnerability that intimacy requires.

In the band bio, Smith notes her reluctance to make an album about dating—as evidenced by the fallout late last year over the book
Are Men Necessary?
by
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd, romance is a loaded topic among the feminist cognoscenti, perhaps because it’s considered unseemly for a feminist to openly admit to wanting something from men (or caring enough to be disappointed with them). Dowd claims that successful men don’t want competition from their partners, and thus tend to date or marry down, choosing women who are younger, less educated and less accomplished. Though she makes her argument largely with generalizations, as opposed to Smith’s nuanced particulars, both writers are suggesting the same thing—independent women wind up alone.

Smith is forthcoming about the concessions she makes for intimacy. While she holds to her standards with men who aren’t good enough, she swallows her pride and sells herself out to others who don’t have much idea who she is or much interest in finding out. But her artistic integrity never wavers, and throughout it’s clear she knows herself and understands the choices she’s making. It’s a brave act for her to admit that she quietly shushes the “difficult” parts of herself in order to connect with men: she is airing a common secret of women’s lives.

SHOUTING OUT LOUD: THE RAINCOATS

Portland Mercury,
October 2009

These days, The Raincoats legacy is most often defined by
who
remembered them. In 1992, Kurt Cobain recalled in his
Incestide
liner notes that the British post-punk girl band’s debut album had served him as a life-saving device, a reprieve from his depression and boredom; something cool he wished in on. The plaintive mash notes of punk’s living Jesus revivified The Raincoats at the time when we needed it most, amid the grunge boom. Underground, there was riot-grrrl salvation and Fugazi, sure, but up top,
cool
was Pearl Jam (not yet sanctified, or anything more than macho qua rebellious) and the best-selling album of the year was Whitney’s last stand,
The Bodyguard
soundtrack.

In 1994, when DGC re-issued the trio of records that constituted The Raincoats’ discography, the band needed someone to co-sign their artistry. (We can forgive the too-typical fact that the rock star boy’s stamp of approval was necessary to accept the genius girl’s work.) Cobain was
the
acceptable boy bridge to girl culture, he was part of popping the escape hatch to a better world, his endorsement served as a kind of atonement for the crush of corpogrunge that Nirvana’s success accidentally seeded. Then, as now, we needed The Raincoats, to stave off the boredom and depression because there was
still
no other band quite like them.

This week Kill Rock Stars has re-issued The Raincoats’ self-titled 1979 debut album on vinyl and the timing couldn’t be more perfect. As we are mired in an epic wave of aesthetics-first, and the post-ironic post-punk era hath wrought an inscrutable wave of bands utterly resistant to meaning (swastikas as album “decoration”/neon hippie bullshit, et al.)—
The Raincoats
serves up a reminder that discernible earnestness doesn’t automatically signify emo, and having meaning doesn’t mean the work isn’t open to dynamic interpretation. People keep tending to The Raincoats’ legacy with good reason. They were special, yet absolute everygirls, making music that was/is personal, expressive, artful and is full of joy.

Cobain’s notes imagined the band perhaps making him a cup of tea, which would be very polite and grandmotherly (though maybe the offer of a spot of tea is what all people expect of British women) coming from a trenchant band. Maybe it’s because on the opening track, “Fairytale in the Supermarket,” Ana da Silva sings about cups of tea marking time, right after she shouts outs in a derailing, winding, defiant yelp, “No one teaches you how to live!”—she sounds like she figured it out anyhow. She sounds like the kind of woman no one teaches anything.

Listening to the self-titled debut, it’s easy to see why they were imagined polite, kind or even doting; rising up from the gnashing pit of punk’s nihilism,
The Raincoats
has more PMA than H.R./Bad Brains ever did. They are sunny without being pop, and while they were as rudimentarily skilled as their string-bashing punk peers, there was a sense of a cohesion, another vision of the world—they were outpunking punk, defying its leather/spitting/anarchy trope with art school playfulness and absurdity, down to the sunny, pink drawing of a children’s choir right on the cover. They liberated the ultimate girl instrument—the violin—from its school orchestra realm.

Yet, for all of this,
The Raincoats
is often referred to as a harsh, clanging album, the party line usually framing their genius as accidental: girls in the wilderness of their own stuttering hands. The implication being they couldn’t have been serious or intentional, sounding as excited and rough and kooky as they did. Punk was full of amateurs, as was post punk (which was more their scene), but girls were always the exception. But as Brilliant Amateurs, they fared a bit better than their compatriots, The Slits, who were so amateur they routinely got compared to wild animals.

Revisiting this album, it’s nothing like harsh or shrill. It’s filled with space, grace and living. “I am the music inside,” they sing on “No Side to Fall In.” They knew what they were disregarding and regarding; they were absolutely following their own cues. They sha-la-la’d about their minds, and thinking (“The Void”)—they made a record about being real girls knee-deep in the adventure of their young lives. We don’t get a love song until deep into side two, “You’re a Million,” and it’s vague at that, a “lover” here and an “I’m yours” pledge and that’s about it.

They understood the meaning of covering The Kinks’ “Lola” and keeping in all the female gender pronouns. Just the year before, The Pretenders made their debut with a totally straight (in every way) take on another Kinks song, “Stop Your Sobbing.” These girls’ “Lola” was less about The Kinks, or homage, and more about exploding all that rock ‘n’ roll boy seriousness.

The particular amateurishness, the special quality of
The Raincoats
, was willful and girly: it flaunted its gentleness, its otherness, its disregard for virtuosity. They were not naive.
The Raincoats were reactive
. In BBC concert footage from 1980 (YouTube it), singer Ana da Silva sings about the sad dating life of a girl with bad skin, how the world judges and values women—the song does not rock, it trembles—while she clunks two woodblocks together like she’s fighting rhythm, resisting the linear path and letting the song disintegrate. Like most of their songs, the bass carries the melody and there is a sing-song to their singing, something is chirping, thudding or skronking in lieu of a solo—none of it obscuring the importance of the words, of what the band really have to say.

The Raincoats are the sound of learning and having fun and making it up as you go along; may they be revivified, rediscovered and reissued infinitely.

MAKING POP FOR CAPITALIST PIGS:
M.I.A.’S
/\/\ /\ Y /\

Chicago Reader
, July 2010

M.I.A.’s third album,
/\/\ /\
Y 
/\
, arrives piled high with the preconceptions of its audience. But let’s set aside Lynn Hirschberg’s
New York Times Magazine
profile/takedown and those infamous truffle fries. Let’s forget about whatever meaning we extracted (or didn’t) from M.I.A.’s “Born Free” video, with its simulated land mines launching little-boy legs sky-high in a cloud of vague polemics and CGI. Let’s pretend for a bit we can separate her from her own image, even though in many ways that image is her real art, the daily emanation of a Warholian figure ghost-riding the zeitgeist. Let us simply talk about the thing that made us so interested in Maya Arulpragasam in the first place—her music.

/\/\ /\
Y 
/\
is a transmission from the ultra now—an e-mailed camera-phone video compressed till it’s cruddy and degenerated, a live-tweeting of capitalist culture’s foreclosure proceedings on the tar-blotched shores of American apocalyptica. This is not pleasure pop—it’s an allergic reaction to it, an involuntary spasm full of exploding, hissing and banging, all uncomfortably close. For most of its duration,
/\/\ /\
Y 
/\
is a barrage, mimicking modern information overload. But its crowded, ugly sounds are broken up by scary expanses of what-if—a sort of creepy, hookless drift that gets at her dystopian vision from the opposite angle.

The album starts with the clicking of fingernails on a keyboard, but in lieu of the modem handshake that would follow if this were the ‘90s, we get drilling and clanging—the sound of something mechanical being pieced together. The first track, “The Message,” is less than a minute long, a stage-setting vignette that touches on a topic she’s been rolling out in recent interviews, like the cover story of the current
Nylon
—the claim that the CIA monitors, or even invented, Google. Here, as there, she doesn’t elaborate much, instead just laying it out as nursery-rhymed fact: “iPhone connects to the Internet, connects to the Google, connects to the government.” It’s less a well-argued thesis and more the sort of conspiracy theory you might hear in a dorm room after someone’s had a few bong rips.