The Giraffe of Rock Records

August 2010

Author: DC

Word count: 880

During the last couple of weeks I have been reading one of Henry Rollin’s journals about his travels and career, the excellently-named “Smile, You’re Travelling”. During 1997 he took a trip to Kenya and Madagascar, and as part of that he went on a safari. Rollins writes wonderfully about being a product of sprawling American cities, of Washington DC and Los Angeles, transplanted to the wilds of the world.

In particular, he talks about being completely astonished by the animals that he saw, and how he found each one more amazing and wondrous than the last. First he saw monkeys with “blue balls”, then baboons with their amazing twisted bodies and protruding backsides, then majestic lions. All of these creatures blow him away but to a degree at least he felt that he know what to think of them, that he had a frame of reference for their looks, their behaviour, their size. Then, however, he sees a giraffe, and has what he would call a “holy shit” moment. It’s not that any of the individual elements of a giraffe were necessarily shocking to him: in isolation he could handle the long legs, the horsey face, the yellowish skin. But put together they made the giraffe totally incredible to him, a creature that took recognizable parts but put them together in a completely different way to anything that he had seen before.

The way we react to records can be a bit like the experience that Rollins describes. You have your monkey records, those that are of a really high quality but are absolutely of their type and somehow how familiar, as if you’ve hard many things similar to them before. You have your red-assed baboon records, which are still somehow comprehensible but add an exciting new twist to the things you have heard before. Then, just occasionally, you have a giraffe record. It’s not totally alien as you can pick out recognizable component parts – guitar riffs, drum lines, vocals, keys, handclaps. But somehow the way that the elements are welded together is surprising and fresh.

While this year has, in my humble opinion, been a genuinely excellent one for music so far, until recently all of my favorite records of the year had been monkeys or baboons. Wonderful, aggressive or romantic, sweeping or claustrophobic records, but all within the realm of what I think I understand. Recently though, I found my giraffe record. I don’t know if it will still astonish me in a few months time, or whether the shock of the new will gradually wear off, just as a giraffe would somehow become more ordinary if you were to see it a hundred times. But for now, it’s all I want to listen to.

That record is "Treats", by Sleigh Bells. It's a deeply strange record in many ways, and not least because it's the product of a hardcore guitarist and a singer who sounds like she's most inspired by the vocal stylings of Gwen Stefani or a “Mickey”-era Toni Basil. Ex-Poison The Well axeman Derek Miller writes the music, which broadly speaking is huge guitar riffs layered over dancey, drum machine boom-bap beats. New Yorker Alexis Krauss sing-chants in a Hollaback Girl fashion over the top.

So far, “Treats” must sound relatively normal, yet another hipster rock-dance crossover record – not even a monkey but a horse, if you will. But then Miller extends its neck by making the record, to put it simply, noisy as fuck. Every guitar tone is overdriven and distorted, every beat hit fuzzy and boomy, the whole production echoey and indistinct. The only thing that comes through clearly is the pseudo-click track of fingersnaps that serves to keep time for the songs. Krauss's vocals aren't pop-crystal-clear either. They swoop into and out of focus in the mix, are equally distorted in recording, and she doesn't really enunciate at all. As a result the vocals almost become another element of the rhythm, rather than the driver of the melody.

That's not to say that there's no variation here - some songs are funloud, others tenderloud, others brutaloud, and some just ecstaticdanceyadrenalinerushloud. But it’s not a record for the faint of heart. And that's perhaps what's so exciting about it - when many rockers seem to be trying to shorten their necks and scrape off their yellow skin to fit in with the horses that get airplay on modern rock radio, Sleigh Bells add more weirdness. More distortion. More noise. And more fun.

The song that steals the deal for me is the album recording of "Crown On The Ground", a song that has been floating around in demo / lo-fi form for a while. Simply put, despite being hopelessly static-ridden, lyrically impenetrable and, yes, loud, it's the most purely fun, exhilarating song I've heard all year. It's more pop fun than every chart number one this year put together. It's more likely to get you dancing than a million Tiesto mixes. And once you've heard it once, it will be the only song you'll want to hear at one in the morning when you're at a club, nicely drunk, and waiting for that one euphoric jam to blow the roof off the place. It's a giraffe in a sea of monkeys.

Light It Up or Shut It Down

Author: DC

Word count: 1024

The majority of albums that top the charts now, as has always been the case, are relatively straightforward affairs. They are, for the most part, fairly down-the-line representations of one of the major musical genres – mainstream rock, country, pop and hip hop / r’n b. Since record sales have declined and thus the number of albums you need to shift to number 1 has dropped off precipitously (if you’d suggested four years ago that you’d have number one albums selling fewer than 100,000 copies the execs of Behemoth Recording Industries would have laughed you out of their lavishly-decorated boardroom), you now get the occasionally strange pick. An indie rock upstart getting their die-hard fans out in week one. A comeback album by an ageing nostalgia act. But for the most part the rule still applies.

The rule seems to operate within genres as well, as most notably within hip-hop. In the last 10 years, with the exception of some of Kanye West’s more experimental moments and some of the early-90s blockbusters that managed to combine huge sales with quirky creative statements (listen to Illmatic now, and you’ll be surprised by how odd it is), the hip-hop records that have sold huge have conformed to a formula. A mix of hood tracks and party beats, one huge pop jam, repeat to finish. Look at the failure of many of the backpackers or underground kings to penetrate the higher reaches of the charts. The reliance on using existing beats to test lyrics via freestyling, and the periodic dominance of top producers with their own styles have made it hard for original sounds to break through.

That’s what makes it so unusual that hot property Drake saw his debut full-length major label LP go straight into the charts at number one, before he was unseated in his second week by sales titan Eminem. Drake and his producers have curated a vibe that, while drawing on recent touchstones like Kanye West’s “808s and Heartbreak”, is unique and distinctive. A minimalist sonic palate, 808 rattles, dreamy synth washes drawn from indie rock and a reliance on singing and talk-rapping rather than all-out flowing mark him out. What’s even more surprising is that he seemed to arrive at this sound early on in his career, that it seems fully formed even in the pinnacle tracks of his early releases (listen to “Houstatlantavegas” and “Baby, You’re The Best” from his So Far Gone EP). Even his limitations as a lyricist and his as yet relatively underdeveloped rhythmic sense marked him out as something a bit different from the polished wit-slinging wordsmiths in the T.I. vein that have come to the fore in hip-hop.

However, this originality could be a double-edged sword for the man who, regrettably, really really wants us to call him ‘Drizzy’. While listening to a few songs in his style sound originally, too many in that style put together tend to underwhelm, regardless of how good the individual tracks are. 5 minutes of minimalism is a refreshing palate cleanser after you’ve feasted on big beats, but 30 minutes tends to have a soporific effect on you. The key thing that Drake will have to master, as most other innovative creators have, is how to take your basic sound and build on it, innovate around it, so that you retain the distinctive core but retain interest.

You can see this very clearly on Drake’s chart-topping new record “Thank Me Later”. The album is a genuine mixed bag, with some fantastic high points and a reasonable amount of filler. The songs broadly fall into 3 categories. There are some very good songs in what we can now legitimately start to call the characteristic Drake style. The album opener “Fireworks” and another early track “The Resistance” just flat out work, they throw in all the usual Drake ingredients but still sound fresh. Then you have the filler tracks that repeat the formula of the more winning numbers but somehow fall flat due to weaker hooks, less interest textures or simply a lack of that magic hook or perfect one-liner that lodges in your head. Tracks like “Show Me A Good Time” and even the Lil’ Wayne-starring “Miss Me” fall into this category, coming and going unmemorably.

If they were the only styles of track on the album you’d be a bit concerned about the potential longevity of the Drizzy career. However, most intriguingly and promisingly for the Canadian, there are some tracks that have something a little extra. Tracks that throw in new ingredients while still being recognizably the work of the particular artists, and it is these tracks that elevate the album from merely acceptable to very good. The best song is the long r ‘n b jam “Shut It Down”, a genuine duet with ferociously hot soul man The-Dream. The song takes the standard orchestration of almost every Drake song but smartly and deftly layers on new elements like electric piano, some slashing electric guitar, and towards the end of the song a digital bitstorm of backing vocals, synth strings and effects. It all sounds organic and complementary, not over-egged but more substantial that his usual. Lyrically and vocally The-Dream challenges Drake as well, forcing him to push the limits of his singing voice, and encouraging him to concentrate his raps into brief bursts, mitigating Drake’s tendency to ramble rather than be concise.

The other stand-out song is another collaboration, the smouldering “Light Up” with Brooklyn kingpin Jay-Z. The song is almost exactly the opposite of “Shut It Down”. It is lean and spare where that song is ornate, menacing and terrifying where “Shut It Down” is enticingly sexual. The staccato flows of the two rappers reverb around with an echo chamber effect, lending the song a street-corner-at-2am vibe that is hard to capture and unforgettable once you’ve heard it. It’s a diversion, but still somehow bears the Drake trademark – and that’s what is most encouraging about it. It’s what is most encouraging about Drake’s album as a whole – that it contains these moments of relative experimental exploration, while still establishing a core sound that Drake can build on .

To Grind Or Not To Grind, That Is The Question

Author: DC

Word Count: 1,761

For as long as human beings have been making artistic creations, be they paintings or musical compositions or documents, there has been debate about whether artistic greatness is the result of effort and toil, or simply springs from an indefinable “creative genius”. In short, some believe that certain individuals are simply blessed with a unique creative talent which they can then channel into their work – a sort of divine inspiration, if you will, that separates a Shakespeare from a Stephanie Mayer. Other thinkers, while accepting that levels of talent vary from person to person, place more emphasis on the development of skill and creative understanding via hard work and repeated activity. The most sophisticated analyses of the backgrounds of our great artists, such as that conducted by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers”, have concluded that, unsurprisingly, the real answer lies somewhere between those two polarised views. Some people are simply more talented than others, and of those people who are talented the men and women who apply time and effort to their chosen field tend to achieve greater things than those who coast.

This evaluation of talent and effort isn’t just an abstract intellectual exercise, however, as the beliefs of particular artists in relation to this issue seem to have very marked consequences for the ways in which those artists practice their craft. This can clearly be seen in relation to the modern music industry, in which the effort / inspiration debate is shaping the way in which music is created, presented and sold. The debate is also moulding the development of the music industry, whether artists fully realise this or not.

In rap music, the notion that artistic success is a direct function of effort and toil has become a dominant, broadly-accepted construct that very few artists, producers or label executives disagree with. It has become axiomatic that rappers who work hard and fully commit to a ‘life in the industry’ are more likely to become successful than those who don’t, and that having artistic talent is no substitute for some bleeding-knuckle effort. Work is valued so highly in the hip-hop community that a complex vocabulary has emerged to describe the application of effort to the craft. The recording studio has become “the lab”, rappers are no longer creating songs but “building something”, and most notably recent years have seen the characterisation of the creative and commercial process that a rapper must go through to make and sell records as “the grind”. In fact, a whole family of grind-related words has evolved; “the grind” is the day-to-day struggle of being a rapper, you can “grind” or “be on your grind” (work hard to get what you want), you can hire a “grinder” (someone who will work hard at promotion or sales on your behalf), and you can also use a “grinder” to separate your weed before smoking it. Oh no, hold on, that’s something different[1].

So many chart and underground rap songs of the last few years have talked about the grind that it has started to fall into non hip-hop usage (the New York Times recently quoted a Senatorial candidate as saying that he “has been grinding hard, trying to drum up support”). Most recently the latest single by Asher Roth is actually called “G.R.I.N.D.”[2] During the song Roth lays out a positive social message that he hopes to promote by successfully making uplifting music – and why is he confident that he will achieve this? Because “I work real hard and all for every little bit that I get”. It’s the work that results in great music, it’s the work that will lead to his success. Roth admits that this can make things difficult and tiring, and that it would easier if simply having talent was a guarantee of good fortune, as he notes that “I… I’ve been on my grind / I can only grind / for so long”. In fact, if you listen to what rappers are saying, work has become almost the only thing that’s perceived to result in record deals, the creation of hot beats and strong rhymes, and ultimately in record sales. Having good luck is said to help, but the possession of actual artistic inspiration is some way down the list of prerequisites.

In contrast, you don’t hear very many rock stars talking in a similar fashion. Occasionally a band will stress the importance of effort and time in their creative process, as anyone who has read one of the recent flood of interviews with Brooklyn group The National can attest to. However, their statements aren’t exactly the same as those made by their rap counterparts, as in the eyes of The National the work on its own didn’t make successful creation more likely. Instead, the application of effort was necessary simply because the five members of the band and their musical associates had very different musical tastes and inspirations, and it was hard to combine them all into coherent compositions. Most of the time, however, rock stars seem to ascribe to the view that they, when writing and recording music, are tapping into a pure vein of artistic creativity that exists within their souls. Sometimes it may take months for genius to strike and no amount of hard work can force it, on occasion you may strike gold on the first take and that’s that, but regardless of timelines the concept of ‘inspiration’ guides them. In the recent documentary “Stones In Exile”, Rolling Stones producer Jimmy Miller describes how the band, while recording “Exile On Main Street”, spent the vast majority of the time being unfocussed. They didn’t work hard or knuckle down, they just came and went as they pleased until, just occasionally, “inspiration struck, and Bill looked at Charlie, and then it was on”.

This antipathy to effort and reliance upon the creative muse has become such a part of the rock and roll psyche that we are now suspicious of any act who releases more than one record a year, on the grounds that producing that much material so quickly must be ‘forcing things’. The dominant ethos in rock and roll is that the avoidance of steady work is the surest way to ensure a consistent idea flow, and that placing restrictions on anything can lead to stifled creative potential. This partly explains why rock bands are obsessed with shutting themselves away for months to write, and recording in expensive studios in Malibu mansions. It’s all about putting as much distance as possible between the artists and any obligation to do anything.

Neither of these constructs, expressed in terms this strict, are a correct identification of the ideal creative and commercial process. Artists are individuals and will respond to different creative environments, and while some are suited to writing frequently others genuinely have to contemplate the songs that they are creating for months before they take shape. Undoubtedly, having a focus on these approaches can be unhelpful in certain situations – there are many rappers who would benefit from grinding slightly less and instead taking time to actually write half-decent rhymes (2009/10 Lil’ Wayne, here’s looking at you!) and some rockers would be more productive and less self-indulgent if challenged slightly more about their process. In music as anywhere else, the Gladwell maxim about needing a balance of talent and effort may well be true.

What the constructs have done, however, is served to shape the modern commercial landscape of the music industry. In the hip-hop field, volume of material produced is now perceived to be everything. Artists are flooding the market with studio albums, mixtapes and freestyles. Around this they are trying to find time to undertake waves of touring and promotion, as well as opportunities simply to “be on the street” and connect with fans simply by physical presence in their communities. All of this effort is thought to be required simply to develop or sustain a successful commercial position, and very few rappers are ever perceived to have become such big stars that they no longer need to jump through these hoops (recently, only Eminem comes to mind). And this serves a purpose, as having a constant presence raises profile and keeps an artist fresh in the mind of the customer. However, as we have said, it can be a double-edged sword that leads artists to rush out half-baked material, and can lead to the saturation of fans to the point that they become overwhelmed with output. In rock, in contrast, artists undoubtedly feel that they have more room to breathe and focus on developing high-quality material, without the same pressure to release records on tight, regular schedules. However, this makes rock acts more difficult to manage for record labels, as it is challenging to maintain interest in artists who only release a record every three years – in three years an entire generation of fans can have grown up and moved along, depriving artists of their core fans.

The upshot of all of this may be that we need a new set of directives for our artists, to maximise their commercial potential and the quality of their releases. Rappers, it’s okay to grind slightly less hard than you have been. Even God rested on Sunday, so feel free to spend one day a week sitting on your porch / diamond-encrusted throne, just musing. Honestly, we can go one day without hearing your third freestyle over “Wipe Me Down”. Rockers, get out of the hammock and put down the pina colada, your month of beach-lounging and waitress-seducing in Hawaii is not a key part of your creative process. Maybe rappers and rockers have something to learn from each other, to their mutual benefit. Just please don’t bring back rock-metal, we don’t need another Limp Bizkit…

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[1] “Grinding” should also never be confused, especially in conversation, with the type of dance also known as grinding, which is hilariously described by UrbanDictionary as “A form of the most horny dancing imaginable. Guys looking for ass will grind profusely with random girls in order to persuade them to come home and get some bun action. Involves pushing the male genitalia up the [censored]”. Telling your friends that “me and my brother were grinding last night” could lead them to make some false assumptions about your lifestyle, for example.

[2] Apparently this stands for “Get Ready, It’s A New Day” – perhaps a day when Mr Roth hopes that people will talk about him for his rapping skills, and not just for how annoying “I Love College” was after a few listens

Montag Music

Author: DC

Word count: 700

The modern musical world is all about perfection. Sonically, singers, bands and engineers have fallen in love with advanced studio technology and are using it to create evermore polished and note-perfect songs, and we are buying them. The charts have become dominated by songs that are as immaculately arranged and styled as Mitt Romney’s hairdo – and that’s not always a bad thing. Some bands have used Pro Tools tweaks and cutting-edge systems to create sounds that are new and exciting, and that push what bands are capable of compositionally to new levels (if further proof of this is needed, listen to the new Foals and Ratatat records).

In terms of the personalities of our pop artists, things have for the most part gone the same way. Many of our chart starts have been moulded into perfect, airbrushed human beings who seemingly feel only the purest of human emotions, the Disney take on life. Or they have gone the other way, albeit to another extreme of perfection – people who want to be seen as edgy or dangerous can’t just be flawed, they have to be perfectly imperfect. They can’t just be freaks but have to be superfreaks, they need to position themselves as girls so far off the rails that they’ve replaced their Colgate with Jack Daniels, or guys so corrupting that they can instantly make even the good girls go bad. It’s not really acceptable to just be human anymore, you have to be a Greek ideal of virginal, chaste behaviour or a Keith Richards harbinger of chaos.

As a result of this Heidi Montag airbrushing approach to humanity, it sometimes feels like there isn’t much in modern pop and rock for many of us to relate to. Most of us aren’t angels but we’re certainly not Slash either, we’re neither squeaky-Bieber-clean nor Ke$ha-disinfectant-dirty. WE get many things right and we fuck some things up, we mostly have good intentions but are sometimes vindictive, and we hope that our 20 minutes on the treadmill today will cancel out the beers and a slice that we wolfed down last night.

I think that this is why I haven’t been able to stop listening to Chamberlain Waits, the new album by The Menzingers, since my friend Dusty recommended it to me. There isn’t even a touch of the robot, of the studio polish, about this record. From start to finish it is 100% heart and 100% human, for all that entails. The protagonists of The Menzingers’ lyrics fall somewhere between angels and devils – they argue, fiercely, but out of belief and conviction rather than spite. Their arguments are frequently trivial but that doesn’t make them any less vital or worth waging; after all, what’s more important to argue about than music and bands (“we argued over which Bad Religion album was better / I thought No Control or Suffer”). They want to get things right (“Maybe one day I’ll mend your wounds / maybe then I can mend mine too”) but know that, like everyone else, they’ll have to overcome their self-destructive streak first before that will even be a possibility (“I’m gonna get me fighting fit / I’m gonna let my liver play offense”).

This sense of failure and aspiration extends to the way in which The Menzingers have crafted their record. One of the two singers that they band employs is sometimes struggling so hard to find the right key that even Auto-Tune couldn’t help him, but it doesn’t matter, it’s somehow masked by the way that he half-yelps his words, making the belief worth more than pitch-perfection. The other vocalist has a sweeter singing voice – but can’t force himself to sing perk-pop, instead choosing to brutally assess his own shortcomings via three-minute punk jams. The guitars twitch and roar and fuzz, the drums clatter and bathe the whole recording in cymbal-splash… and the whole thing is just so perfectly imperfect. The lack of smooth edges, the unwillingness of the band to use all of the technology that they can afford to buff their songs to a 21^st century sheen, is what makes Chamberlain Waits quite so wonderful. It’s the anti-Montag, and for that we should all be very grateful.

The Limits of Description

Author: DC

Wordcount: 976

Progressive hardcore band Crime In Stereo have called their new album “I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone”. On one level this perfectly sums up the lyrical content of the record, which is all about relationships and the difficulty humans face in ever really knowing and understanding each other. More knowingly, however, the album title is a sly nod to the fact that CIS understand that their music is not easily pigeonholed. It’s not quite hardcore, it’s not punk and it’s not post-rock. It’s all of those things fused together, and this both makes things easier for the band (as having a unique style helps you stand out from the crowd) and harder (as standing out from the crowd often means standing alone). The music that Crime In Stereo make is inventive and original, which is a rare thing in music. Many bands lay claim to originality, some deliver, but many flatter to deceive.

Crime In Stereo haven’t always pushed the boundaries in this way. Their music has always been a step ahead of their post-hardcore brethren in its scope and intelligence, but only a step. On their early records, the roots of the band in the fertile Long Island scene of the 1990s clearly showed. Their songs sounded like an amalgam of the edgy pop-punk of the Movielife, the vocal lines of Brand New and the arcing atmospherics of GlassJaw. This referencing of peers and forebears didn’t make the music that the band made derivate, as they always added a little something different. But taken as a piece, the band were solid but not exceptional. This reputation was confirmed by the live shows that the band put on, which were always raucous affairs but often featured short sets and some uneven musicianship.

On their new record CIS have taken a leap forward and made a piece of art that, as the album title suggests, can’t easily be described using simple terms and ready references to their peers. The album is at once musically complex but simple in effect, alloying textures and sonic dazzle with clean song structures and driving focus. The song “I Am Everything I Am Not” is a perfect example of this, combining fiendishly tricksy patterned drumming and sparkling electronics with blunt-force gang vocals and a pair of simple repeated guitar lines that, in one form or another, run throughout the song. Similarly on album-opener “Queue Moderns” ghostly voices emerge from a guitar fuzz, and then the song slams into life in the style of a classical hardcore jam. Throughout the album the band throw curveballs at you, lead you down musical alleys that you don’t expect, but not in a way that feels pretentious or indirect for the sake of it. Everything feels organic, with the various song sections sympathetic and complementary to each other. Key album track “Young” is perhaps the starkest example of this, with a slow opening section with almost monastic chanted vocals suddenly exploding into frenzied wall-of-noise guitars – and even this whiplash a transition seems just right in the hands of CIS.

The same richness and sense that CIS are operating with a higher degree of skill than many other bands in the punk and hardcore scenes comes through when you read their lyrics. The majority of current bands seem to have gravitated towards lyrics that are either purely (dashboard) confessional or so opaque as to be almost impossible to parse by anyone other than the author of those lyrics. Try listening to “Daisy” by Brand New if you need proof of this. I really like that album but even after repeated listens I still have no idea what the songs are about or relate to. CIS, as scene father figures Jimmy Eat World did before them, tread a middle path, presenting a poetic take on some big themes – love, isolation, relationships and… well, police brutality – that is clear enough to understand and relate to but oblique enough to retain a real artistic force and subtlety of impact.

Now that they are touring again after something of a hiatus, the band convince even further. The dynamics of their shows are different to those of almost any other band currently touring. Hardcore bands have often used atmospheric or ultra-melodic interludes to amplify their onslaught, and poppier bands have in recent years turned to punk and hardcore sounds to add an edge to their tunes. Bands like A Day To Remember and Four Year Strong have built careers on top of exactly this sort of fusion. Frequently, however, this duality has always felt slightly bolted-together, a touch strained. This doesn’t bode well when you consider that CIS are trying to fuse together both of those two strands of modern rock, and then adding in spacey atmospherics and some grunge-esque choruses. However, based on their current performances that are managing it and then some. Their recent London show was mesmerising, with the variations in tone stunning and very moving, much more so than a hardcore show has a right to be.

I came out of that show wanting to tell you, and the friends that I go to shows with but couldn’t make it that night, what had made it so special. I wanted to take Crime In Stereo, and try to describe them to someone. I tried then, just I have tried now, during these last four paragraphs. And now, as then, I don’t feel like I have quite managed it. I have drawn out some comparisons, I have tried to pin down just what make their album and shows so special, but I haven’t succeeded. So all I will say is this: check out the new Crime In Stereo album. Go and see them live. And when you love them, pass on the message to your friends. Just don’t expect to be able to describe them to anyone.

How To Make A Great Song In America

Author: DC

Word count: 1,031

Every so often a song is written that captures the spirit and mood of a particular period of time. From “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” to “Tainted Love” to “Ice Ice Baby”[1], these tunes become cultural milestones that people refer back to when trying to understand past eras and the cultural artefacts that they produced. In general musicians have found it easier to write zeitgeist-capturing songs during good times than bad, which is perhaps unsurprising when you consider that the word “anthem” means “a song (or composition) of celebration”.

Take the happy-go-lucky years between 2000 and 2007 – this span of time produced not one but two bona fide defining anthems that, even if all other songs and photos and narratives from this period ceased to exist, would give a social historian looking back from 2150 a real sense of what things were like. M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” and MGMT’s “Time To Pretend” were irresistibly bubbly powerhouses of optimism and exuberance that perfectly documented a time in which the world seemed frothier and more replete with opportunity than it had done in decades. The fact that they made relatively little lyrical sense, and that the sugar-high sort of wore off once you’d listened to the songs a dozen or so times, further enhanced their credibility as noughties anthems, because the time period didn’t really make any sense either and the good times didn’t really last.

Since the mortgage industry collapsed, the bond market burst into flames and we fell headlong into the current economic crisis, artists have failed to write a song that perfectly reflects the strange, possibly unique mood of these times. We’ve had attempts from country singers that are too true-blue and optimistic to ring true, from rappers that have been too focussed on how the recession will impair their ability to afford syrup and grills, and from soulful acoustic whiteboys that have been just awful. Now, however, as we appear to be entering the second phase of the “double-dip” downturn, we have our song.

The song is called “I Need A Dollar” by soul singer Aloe Blacc, as re-created and rapped over by an MC called Marky on a remix that he calls “Rasta Monsta”. The original is a fantastic horn-driven song that first attracted the notice of many when it was used as the theme for HBO’s New York-set drama “How To Make It In America”. Unusually for HBO the show has turned out to be a shallow disappointment, but its music directors found a real gem to play over the credits, and Marky has if anything improved on the original with his addition of some thoughtful rhymes.

The vibe that Blacc and Marky capture so well[2] is the creeping yet eventually all-consuming nature of the current slump. This recession, for all of the historical comparisons, was not started or fuelled by a single cataclysmic event, as the Great Depression was by the Wall Street Crash. In the financial world Meltdown 2009 was heralded by one microdrama after another, each resulting in a few bankruptcies, a tranche of redundancies, disasters on small scales. When they are taken together, however, the staggering cumulative impact of the microdramas becomes evident. This is how the recession has been felt by many of us, in increments, in stages so small as to be almost imperceptible at the time but crippling when taken together. First our jobs got less secure, then our credit limits came down, then our mortgage rates went up. If you were lucky, then you managed to contain the damage and keep the lights on. If you just couldn’t keep the pieces together then perhaps your utilities got cut off, or your house was repossessed, or you had to declare bankruptcy. That is how the story went, bit by bit, blow by blow.

This is exactly the tale told by Blacc and Marky. You go from having “big dreams / to make it to those bright screens”, from being so positive that “after graduation I was on my high horse”. Then the boss “says he ain’t got no work”. Next, with Marky showing a killer eye for salient, heartbreaking detail, “Wachovia collapsed, my account’s still in the negative / Verizon cut my 3G[3] / funny thing about it, I don’t find that shit hilarious”. Suddenly “life wakes your ass up out your narcolepsy” and, in the words of Marky, you are left with only two choices. You can “rob Ray to pay Paul just to buy shit”, or you can find a change cup and beg folk, telling them that you “need a dollar, a dollar, a dollar is what I need”.

The artists also nail the sense that this experience could be as long-term psychologically tough as it is short-term situationally horrific. Marky doesn’t see any quick solutions, he knows that the state is overwhelmed with demands for bailouts and aid, and he doesn’t expect a handout – instead he takes the weight on himself. He chooses not to be angry, although many are and we have some right to be, with the naïve and corrupt market makers that hastened our descent into difficulty. Instead, he is personally ashamed, muttering that “I think failure’s embarrassing”. Above all, isn’t that how many of us feel right now? Embarrassed that after so many years of relative prosperity we’re struggling again? Embarrassed that we need help, be it a dollar or many thousands of dollars, from wherever we can get it? Embarrassed that in a way we brought this on ourselves by buying houses that we couldn’t afford, and running up credit card debts that we knew we couldn’t pay off? Embarrassed that, although we inherently know that things go in cycles, we let ourselves believe that the good times would never end?

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[1] I am not 100% serious about this one. However, I think you could make a strong argument that Vanilla Ice was the defining cultural figure of the 1990s. More on that another time, if the editors ever let me!

[2] From now on, to avoid confusion, I am referring to the Marky “Rasta Monsta” remix of the song

[3] After all, for the modern man is a right to proper 3G reception not up there alongside life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Dixon's Girl

Author: DC

Wordcount: 1,067

My mother was born in the 1950s, grew up and grew into the 1960s, and got her first adult job in the 1970s. She used to tell me how difficult it was being a young professional woman during that time. The technical barriers that had stopped woman progressing in the workplace had been removed, there were no longer rules dictating that management had to be a boys club through-and-through… but it still was one. Ten years before women couldn’t be promoted to the top of organisations, whereas now women could be but just weren’t. Over and above the process elements of promotion and career advancement, however, women like my Ma struggled just to be female in a male-dominated environment. She found it very tough to be an individual, with women instead forced to adopt one of three roles if they were to survive and prosper:

1. the sex kitten. You could be provocative and sexual, using your femininity and allure as a tool to get to where you wanted to be.
2. the ice queen. A women could be tough and uncompromising, which would attract a lot of negative attention and allegations that you were a “bitch” but at the same time projected an air of cool professionalism
3. the tomboy. Some women got by because they presented themselves as “one of the boys”, willing to go along with whatever their male cronies were planning[1].

Over time, Ma noted that some of her friends and colleagues got so used to having to act one of these three roles that they actually started to become the person that they had to pretend to be. The irony of it was that exactly the same thing happened to Ma, although she hadn’t spotted it. As she tried, successfully in the end, to develop her career and take on more responsibility she adopted an icy persona, a “you can’t bullshit a bullshitter” tough-lady character that she even started to bring home with her. While she could still be warm and loving, there were moments as I got older when I felt more like an employee and less like her son.

Many of the same issues that my Ma faced when trying to pursue her career have also been very relevant for women trying to force their way to stardom in the pop and rap music worlds. They have been forced to play particular roles in order to impress talent scouts, would-be managers, record executives, and then ultimately fans – or they feel that they are forced to. Undoubtedly, however, it’s easier to succeed in music if you are willing to play the game and adopt a pre-defined persona. Interestingly, the three roles that women in business often find themselves playing are the same as those that their musical counterparts are forced to adopt. You have you sex kittens, the Lil’ Kims and Keshas and Foxy Browns, whose material seems to range from moderately sensual to downright filthy. You have your ice queens, the Lady Gagas and Rihannas, who seek to distance themselves from us mere mortals by means of fashion and attitude. And lastly your have your Katy Perry and Pink tomboys (Perry’s last album was even called “One of The Boys”) who pride themselves on acting like guys, even down to kissing girls.

That’s what makes it so amazing to hear any album by a female artist with a truly individual voice, who hasn’t felt the need to fit into a generic mould in order to succeed. On “A Badly Broken Code”, the new album by female rapper Dessa, an affiliate of the Minneapolis-based Doomtree Collective, you get character and a hugely individual presence. It’s as if Dessa has made it her mission not to be pigeonholed, to talk about all of the different and contradictory aspects of being a girl in the modern world. Dessa and her characters are all over the place and conflicted (“she’s a latter-day saint / but she’s a Saturday sinner”), and they face and make difficult choices (“the pills keep her awake / her man can’t make her happy but he helps to still the shakes”).

This complexity is reflected in the nature of the music that Dessa makes. Her beats are intricate and varied, with smoky jazzed-up sections butting up against thumping beats and r ‘n b flourishes. Similarly entangled are her lyrics, as Dessa has no place for Trina-style sex-rap or Charlie Baltimore-esque thug posturing. Her rhymes are either oblique and literary or straightforward narratives detailing the exterior and interior lives of everyday – if artistic – people who are both noble and selfish, tormented but occasionally blissfully happy. Even her stage name clashes slightly with the tales she tells, with the lady who goes by “Dessa Darling” admitting that “I once kept an angel / in a box beneath my bed”. What a darling. Describing her words does them no justice whatsoever so instead, here’s the opening verse of the song that to date might be her best work, Mineshaft II:

“15 years from tonight, you have to make a decision,

The greatest love of your life is going to call during dinner,

From the home of the girl that he’s living with now.

And the guilt, he’ll say it’s killing him,

He’s wilted in the middle,

And he knows how bad he acted,

Knows he can’t have you back but the fact is,

You can’t be happy when you’re angry,

And you’re so angry, he’s says you’ve stayed so mad,

And he heard it on the street that you moved back in with your dad,

That you’re drinking something awful, and that makes him sad”

The greatest thing about Dessa is that while she’s a woman rapper with a distinctly female voice, she realises that to be a great female artist you have to do more than simply sing about being a woman. She defines herself primarily as a person, as a human, so her subject matter is far more universal than many female artists allow theirs to be. She and her characters are actors in a bigger drama, while at the same time being particular people facing particular problems. And writing about that, letting yourself be that, may be the way to reach and touch more people than most modern artists ever get to. As Dessa says on the gorgeous, jazz-inflected Dixon’s Girl, “it’s not much, but my money’s on you”.

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[1] Think Peggy Olsen in Mad Men during Season 2, when she starts drinking scotch and mocking the less fortunate girls of the office