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Lady Lamb the Beekeeper

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Lady Lamb the Beekeeper

There are some really good reasons to hate Cher’s “Believe.”

For starters, it’s everywhere. It’s about as “pop” as pop music gets, nestled just a few spots above the “Macarena” and a few below “Y.M.C.A.” on the list of best selling singles of all time. These are songs that people living in the mountainous provinces of Kyrgyzstan probably know (hate) just as well (passionately) as the rest of us. You simply can’t escape them. I heard “Believe” at Kroger this past Sunday after having already decided to write this post. I’m not kidding.

There’s also the whole “ringing in the era of autotune” thing. To those who consider the effect to be a plague upon the musical landscape, “Believe” is patient zero. The parent of pitch correction. The regent of robotic singing. The viceroy of the vocoder. (Sorry, I couldn’t stop myself.) As the first popular song to autotune the life out of a human voice, it’s not unreasonable to pin a degree of responsibility for the broader phenomenon on “Believe.” In fact, Cher fought her record company to keep the effect in the final version of her song. I wonder if she had any clue how sweeping the effects of that decision would be. 

So it’s ubiquitous and notorious… are you ready for one last swig of Haterade? Just look at how the song came into existence. Six people contributed to the writing of “Believe.” A half dozen people. And that doesn’t even count the song’s two producers, the executive producer, the executive cat herder and the partridge in a pear tree. OK, so those last two were made up but the first 9 weren’t. Nothing kills an aural appetite faster than writing credits that are nearly as long as the lyrics of the song itself. Gross.

Alright. Now that we’ve established that “Believe” is thoroughly detestable, I have an important question to ask you…

Do you believe in life after hate?

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Youth Lagoon

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Youth Lagoon

Until now, I’ve associated Youth Lagoon with time.

One of the first things I learned about Trevor Powers was that he was young — 22 when I started listening to him in September of 2011. There was also his debut album’s title — The Year of Hibernation. And then there was the fact that, despite his youngness (sorry, I can’t type “youth” and let you all think I’m the kind of person who would make that pun), it was clear that Powers’ songs looked backward in time, with nostalgic glances toward “fireworks on the 4th of July” and his ’96 Buick. In fact, “nostalgia” became something of a buzzword for the album. A sticky descriptor. A consensus adjective. Here was this 22-year-old pining for the past, while so many of us sit around pining for our early 20’s. (The idea certainly drew me in.)

I don’t mean to suggest that this analysis wasn’t/isn’t apt. Powers himself has said that the name of his project is based on feelings of nostalgia. But I wonder if his years, or relative lack of them, caused this one quality to loom overly large in people’s minds. There was more to The Year of Hibernation than longing for the past. There were brilliant dynamic relationships… memorable melodies… uplifting builds… Besides, nostalgia, by nature, isn’t totally positive. It’s unavoidable — enjoyable on some levels — but it’s also passive. It’s ineffectual. You can’t travel back in time, and there’s nothing sadder than people who are incapable of coming to terms with that reality.

That’s why I was so thrilled when I started making my way through the NPR First Listen of Powers’ follow-up, Wondrous Bughouse. Whereas everything to date has felt like it was related to time, these songs, to me, are all about space.

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Elle Varner

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I love our first lady.

She can Dougie. She can Oscar. She listens to Frank Ocean. And that’s just what we learned about her this past weekend.

It all started on Friday night, when she appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Not only did Mrs. Obama participate in an “Evolution of Mom Dancing” skit with Fallon, demonstrating how hard it is for people who can dance well to act like they can’t (and how oddly convincing Jimmy Fallon looks in drag), she also sat for an interview and talked about the music that the first family’s been listening to lately. Two of the names she mentioned — Frank Ocean and Beyoncé — were familiar, but she mentioned another, less-familiar artist — Elle Varner.

The context in which Varner’s name came up is my favorite part.

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Bonnie Raitt

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Bonnie Raitt

Before I start evangelizing, let me acknowledge one thing: collecting vinyl ain’t always cheap. Record stores turn into self-control battlegrounds, and you never know when you’re going to fall in love with the $40 imported pressing of some album you already own and don’t actually listen to all that often. Add in the cost of a turntable, maintenance, a receiver, speakers… you get the idea. Things can get out of hand. Wallets can suffer.

BUT…

Collecting vinyl can also be unconscionably cost effective.

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Max Richter

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Max Richter

A few days ago, one of my favorite music writers, Jeremy Larson, posted the following thought to Tumblr:

Jeremy Larson

His short post — the screenshot above comprises the whole enchilada — hit me in two waves.

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Beyoncé

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Beyonce

We now know, for real, that Beyoncé lip-synced her way through the national anthem at President Obama’s second inauguration.

This makes me sad.

During the course of last two weeks, we’ve seen/heard a range of reactions to the suggestion that her outstanding performance was pre-taped, from witch-hunty Fox News coverage to the dug-in defense that even if she did fake it, it doesn’t matter, because her recorded rendition was so good that it’s still worth celebrating. While I think there’s some validity to the latter – it’s a damn good rendition, after all – I think the truth does matter in this case.

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ZZ Ward

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ZZ Ward

Polygamy is creepy. Everyone knows that, even — or especially — fans of Big Love. (I can’t vouch for people who watch Sister Wives. Frankly, I can’t believe that’s actually a thing.) That said, there’s one arena in which polygamy is a good thing…

Public radio!

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David Bowie

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David Bowie

The 2012 installment of the Pazz & Jop critics poll hit the interweb this week, and to the surprise of no one, especially not Robert Christgau, Frank Ocean’s breakout effort came out on top. I mention Christgau not because of his 33-year tenure organizing the Pazz & Jop poll, which invites hundreds of critics to assign point values to their top 10 albums, but because he published this preactionary piece, correctly guessing which 3 albums  would sit atop the list and examining the consensus that sucked the suspense out of those top 3 spots.

I’m a fan of the piece he wrote for a few different reasons. His admiration for Todd Snider’s Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables is one; Snider struck me as a cross between a savant and a messiah when I saw him open for Justin Townes Earle in May, but I’m ashamed to say that a lack of external validation eroded my enthusiasm. It’s like Christgau’s words gave me an opportunity to say “I told you so” to myself, if that makes any sense. Felt good.

One part of Christgau’s piece struck me as especially thought provoking — the part in which he talks about the role his age may be playing in his lack of esteem for 2012’s anointed triumvirate:

If twentysomethings want to like Kendrick Lamar’s album more than Loudon Wainwright’s, I say more power to them. The Cloud Nothings’, even — there’s an imagined future there that neither Loudon Wainwright or I will ever know firsthand again, and why shouldn’t someone whose life stretches ahead cherish that? But it bums me that it doesn’t go the other way — that the residual formal mastery of someone like Wainwright seems incapable of touching musical aesthetes of a certain age…

He makes an excellent point, though I think there’s more at work here than just age (of the listener or of the artist’s recording career). I think the “mastery” itself deserves some of the blame.

I’m not a critic, and I certainly didn’t have a Pazz & Jop ballot to fill out, but I do know that writing about music that approaches perfection is difficult. When everything’s done well — great composition, great backing band, great performances, great recording — it’s hard to zoom in on what makes the song or album special, which I’d imagine would be frustrating if your livelihood depended on coming up with an angle that the rest of the Internet hadn’t already chewed up and spit out. It’s hard for me to believe that wouldn’t affect your enjoyment of a recording, or at the very least incentivize pumping up something that’s also brilliant but contains charming or revelatory flaws.

I felt this effect as recently as last week.

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