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

Are You Restless?

Author: DC

Word count: 1322

We’ve all had the conversation. Every person who has at some point realised that they aren’t just “into” music but are completely smitten with it has. It’s usually with someone older, but occasionally can be with someone your junior, but wise beyond their years. They tell you that you’ll grow out of “it”, “it” being your musical obsession. That as you get older and develop other worldly concerns, and take on more responsibilities, it’ll somehow come to mean less to you. That it will be able to do less for you, to be less transformative of your moods, to contribute less to your overall sense of psychic wellbeing. I have always wondered whether those people would come to be proven right, to have been talking sense based in experience. I have always hoped that those people are wrong, and never more so than now.

I don’t want to hash over how tough times are for many people at the moment, or how pressing and overwhelming the burdens of adulthood and responsibility in the modern world can be. We are all experiencing these things, or are discovering them, or are observing others go through them. However immediate or distant they may feel, we are all operating with them as the giant, foreboding backdrop behind us. We have talked in this space before about how music has been hugely consequential to some of us while we have been trying to work out how to deal with and how to survive these things, about how music can, on some level, ‘save us’ when things get really tough. We have shared how music has helped us an individuals, how it has affected each of us personally. Somehow, however, our discussion was limited because our experiences were just that – personal. They were so specific to us that it’s often hard to explain to others how much they meant to us, or to share some of the magic of the moment with people who weren’t there, and as a result our friends and families often can’t draw anything from them. Most of the time that’s enough, most of the time it is sufficient that that something has meant so much even if only to one person.

There’s just one problem – now isn’t most of the time. Now isn’t typical. These times are something else entirely. They aren’t historically unique, but for those of us who grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s they are something very different. Recent statistics suggest that rates of depression are rising, that people’s self-reported levels of satisfaction with their lives are falling, that we are losing our collective ability to turn our backs on the bad stuff and just keep moving along. This, to me, suggests that many people out there haven’t fully realised and explored the uplifting, redemptive power of music – this may be a hopelessly naïve, romanticised view of the power of art, but I genuinely believe that hearing a good song played by a great band at the right time can change our outlook on everything else that is happening in our lives. Based on what you have shared with us before, I think that some of you feel the same way, and as fans and believers in this power I think it’s time that we tried to use it as a force for good. We must begin to export our music-derived joy. We must become evangelists for the feelings and transformation that can be created by some guys[1], some Fender guitars and some drums. And maybe a piano[2].

We must each develop new ways of curing what ails our fellow men, new prescriptions and cures. Here and now I will humbly offer one idea, to get things started. Find one, or ideally several of your blue, downcast, moping friends. Give them a couple of drinks[3]. And take them to see Against Me!!![4] I have written about these guys a ton before so I will only repeat the headline facts – punk band, Floridians, folk-tinged beginnings but with an increasingly anthemic leaning, political but not in a tedious way, love/hate relationship with the traditional punk community, overall pretty fantastic. The live show that they put on is a thrilling, loud, life-affirming mood turnaround plan. During their frenetic 90-minute sets they offer a remedy for anyone with a negative outlook, a salve for the sprit that is applied in three stages:

1) Empathy. Think about it – when you’re bummed out, do you want a shiny happy person to tell you how lovely everything really is, if only you could get over yourself and experience it? No, that would just piss you off further, and convince you that your well-wisher didn’t really understand your situation. Instead you want some empathy, some indication that they get where you are coming from. So Against Me!!! Start with that, outlining commonality of experience with songs that ask questions like “are you restless like me?” and “do you share the same sense of defeat?”, as they acknowledge that hard times can make even “open minds clog up with cynicism”. They feel your frustration; they share your sense of dread.

2) Stoking the fires. Having established some common ground, Against Me!!! then remind us that we all, regardless of how worn down we may feel, have some fire left within us, some reserves of spirit and courage to draw on. That we all have the potential to do something, to change something, even if it’s only our perception and our behaviour. They stoke this fire gently, before getting to the point – that it’s pretty much a human crime not to draw on that energy, and that once you’ve drawn on it it’s a terrible waste not to use it positively. The way out isn’t to direct your energy aimlessly, it’s not about “how to fuck things up”, but about how to focus it, to harness it, to “fuck things up right”.

3) Reinforcing. Against Me!!! then really drive things home, and make sure that your gloomy cohort don’t backslide as soon as they leave your venue of choice. Just as it’s easier to swear off alcohol in a safe room full of supportive twelve-steppers than it is to resist the bottle of JD waiting for you in the lonely confines of your home, the flashing-light crowd-adulation “nothing can stop us” vibe in a rock club can induce an artificial sense of positively that can easily be eroded when you return to the wet and cold world outside. And the band realise that they can’t be with your friends every step of the way; like a good therapist they must empower so that you people can go the final, hard yards by themselves. So they preach self-empowerment (“this night is gonna end / when we’re damn well ready for it to be over”) and seek to neutralise the voices of those who would seek to bring about recidivism (“they don’t know nothing about redemption / and they don’t know nothing about recovery”).

The wonderful thing about Against Me!!! is that none of what they say is cheesy or fake in the way that a lot of ‘guidance’ is. And that’s because the songs weren’t written as self-help primers – they were written by a confused singer searching for his own answers, by a man trying to balance out the darkness that he seems around him with a realistic awareness of the power of human positivity. It just so happens that some of his answers seem relatively universal, that he can communicate some of his personal experiences in a general way, which we couldn’t.

If all of this doesn’t work, or if the temporary optimism shot in the arm only lasts a few days, then there is one simple solution – repeat. Find another band, another show, and another, and another, until the person you are taking has a magic moment of their own.

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[1] Or girls!

[2] No flutes though. Sorry, prog fans.

[3] Or, for you non-drinkers, some of your favorite mood-enhancing substance. Even if that is soy milk, straight-edgers.

[4] Yes, their name really does include all of those exclamation marks. It’s not just that I’m really excited about the band. Well, I am, but you’ll have to take my word for it when I say that I’m not a three-exclamation-mark kind of dude.

The Darker Half

DC, November 2009, 1,225 words

Last weekend I went up to the north of England to see two married friends of mine called Olly and Charlie, who recently moved up there to a city called Sheffield. I have written about both of them before, they are two of my best friends in the world, and something we’ve always had in common is a love of Halloween. This festival hasn’t traditionally been celebrated in England but we’ve always loved it, and have tried to ensure that whatever we are doing we celebrate it together every year. For Charlie, Halloween is doubly important as it coincides with what is for her a major religious festival. She is a very spiritual person but not one who feels comfortable with any of the major modern religions, so she pursues her own brand of neopaganism, choosing to glorify ancestors and the power of nature and the Earth. In her system, the end of October marks the festival of Samhain, or “summer’s end”. Samhain marks the passage from summer (or the “lighter half” of the year) to autumn and winter.

While I was with them, I was fortunate enough to be allowed to sit on a small ceremony that Charlie was having to mark Samhain. As part of this, Charlie asked us to write down on a piece of paper one thing that we wish to continue doing in the following part of the year, and one thing that we would like to “leave behind” as the seasons change. We then rolled the papers up and burned them in a candle flame, with the burning formally marking the transition from one stage of life to the next. This seemed to perfectly capture the sense that many of us get at this time of year, as the leaves fall from the trees and the days get darker for winter – that just as nature is changing, somehow so are we.

Given how powerful this feeling can be, it’s not surprising that many artists have chosen to incorporate it into their work. There are myriad paintings and photographs that try to capture the tipping point between the lighter and dark halves, and many songs have been written about it. Some of them are quite literal, attempting simply to capture the beautiful yet haunting quality of this particular time and the feelings that it engenders. However, others use the changing seasons as a metaphor that allows them explore issues of change in life and sentiment. There have been two examples of this in 2009, with the onset of autumn explored both by 1990s rock survivors Third Eye Blind (3EB) and spiky post-pop-punkers Taking Back Sunday (TBS). The songs are fascinating to listen to together as they capture perfectly the different ways in which we can be impacted by nature and the Earth.

3EB, in their song Summer Town, have written an elegy to times past, and to things swept away as the clock rolls forward. The central theme of the song is our frequent quest to hang onto the those times in our lives that we come to identify as perfect, or as close to perfection as we get – times that inevitably have a limited lifespan. Singer Stephan Jenkins talks fondly of an “old beach house, where we stood outside and sang out loud”, and how he “remembers the time that we drew a crowd and / I told you everything I knew in a manic rushing line”. Most of all, he wants the audience for his narration to know that “you gave me more than you took from me” – but therein is the problem. Whatever time he is recalling it is firmly in the past tense, with time having moved on since. Indeed, he records what changes have happened in detail, ranging from wistful remembrance (“Hey! Where did everybody go? / Everyone I know has blown the coast”) to desperate sadness (“’cause after Halloween / everything starts fading / I’m losing everyone / I go down like the sun”). However, Jenkins is not so self-absorbed as to assume that he’s the only one who feels this way, noting repeatedly that “you know what I mean”, and proposing a joint way forward, suggesting that “last summer is done / can we find another one? / Find another one?”.

In contrast, TBS very much pick up on the other side of the Samhain feeling, the desire to leave things in the past and move on, to put distance between yourself and difficult or troubling times. In contrast to the more reflective, nostalgic vibe of “Summer Town”, their own “Summer, Man” is a spiteful kiss-off to a season and all it brought. The specific object of the venom is never made explicit (though speculation has suggested that it could be about lead singer Adam Lazarra’s ex-wife, or the former TBS guitarist Fred “The Colour Fred” Mascherino), but that doesn’t matter – we can all identify regardless. We have all been through times or met people that we’d rather forget. “Summer, Man” seems to be trying to fast forward time rather than rewind it, to skip “June until September, three months to December”. Not only does the song express no nostalgia for the past, it actively denies that any such feeling should be reflected on a hard time, with Lazarra noting sarcastically that “let’s have a talk about the good times / oh boy, you were always giving in”. Any distance that can be put between present and past is encouraged, with Lazarra stating with a sense of relief that “the summer is over and I doubt / I doubt I’ll be seeing you around” – indeed, the past has already begun to fade from a vivid experience to a “black and white type” about which much is indistinct but the venom remains vivid.

The differing thematic content of the songs is embodied in the music as well as the lyrics. To support their narrative 3EB opted for quite a laid-back strummed tune with a campfire-singalong vibe. This low-fi sound complements the imagery of the song perfectly – you can almost hear the floorboards creaking when Stephan Jenkins songs about the “old beach house”. When taken together the music and lyrics transport you to your own version of the place that Jenkins has in his mind, and you come away knowing and understanding exactly what he went through. At the opposite end of the spectrum, TBS go hard on “Summer, Man”, which is a real turned-up-to-11 jam. The song passes in a headlong rush forward, as if the band is trying to accelerate time. The drums clatter round and over each other and guitars jab and spar, until the end of the song. Suddenly, just as things are drawing to a close, all of the instruments lock into a chugging rhythm, creating a sense that life is returning to normal after the chaos of the preceding season.

In a way, it’s nice to have another reminder that artists have the same preoccupations that we do, that they also struggle with the adjustment from the lighter half to the darker half. It’s no stretch to imagine that there are singers and songwriters, artists and directors, people of all kinds sitting in their living rooms and studies, thinking about the coming of winter and, just maybe, burning their own rolled-up papers in a Samhain flame.

He Did It All For The Tony

DC, 29^th October 2009, 1,575 words including footnotes

The fact that a theatrical musical is being written about the lives and careers of Run-DMC will probably only appeal to three types of people: serious hip-hop heads, the conspiracy theorists who think that Jam Master Jay was killed by the FBI, and serious potheads. I’m not sure which of those camps I fall into, but I found this news totally fascinating. During the past few years I have been vaguely aware of the trend of turning the back catalogues of musical acts into stage shows. In London, where I live, we have been offered the chance to see “songbook shows” about Abba (“Mamma Mia”), Queen (“We Will Rock You”), Blondie (“Desperately Seeking Susan”) and many others. However, these shows all seemed aimed at an older generation of music fans, and as such didn’t hold much interest for me. Plus, by all accounts the majority of them were awful - but when I read about the Run-DMC plans my immediate reactions were “that would be awesome” and “I really think that their songs and story might work as a musical”. This got me thinking… what is it that makes a songbook show successful and satisfying? And why do some shows fail despite boasting fantastic bodies of song, while others get by despite the underlying music being inherently sketchy[1]?

After a very serious scientific investigation consisting of me chatting with friends, watching the first 10 minutes of “Mamma Mia” before being overcome with concern about the future of the human race, and pondering the aforementioned Jam Master Jay death mystery, I think I’ve come up with three broad rules. Follow these, and your songbook show will at least draw a crowd proportional in size to the popularity of the band that you base it on[2]. Fail to observe them, and your all-singing, all-dancing mash-up of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the musical stylings of Vanilla Ice will probably never make it to Broadway…

Rule 1: The group you select must actually have good songs. Obvious, but we all have a band that on a rational level we know really sucks, but are inexplicably attached to anyway. So while a Run-DMC show might work, a Cobra Starship one probably won’t. You don’t want to hire a 50-person chorus just to have them sing that weird backing vocal from “Good Girls Go Bad”.

Rule 2: The artist should have songs that vary in mood and tone. A good musical has to have different types of song if it is to work – the crowd-pleasing hands in the air numbers, the ballads, the introspective jams. With all due respect to Soulja Boy, an entire show of party jams or braggadocious bitches n’ bling tunes would get boring pretty quickly[3].

Rule 3: In an ideal world, the career of the artist or the content of their songs should provide a ready-made narrative arc for the show. So Run-DMC might work as they had such an incredible career journey. Bruce Springsteen would work, as you could easily construct an everyman character would could sing all of his songs and have them sound personal. This isn’t as absolute a rule as the others – “We Will Rock You” set the songs of Queen in an absolutely ludicrous futuristic narrative about oppression and… well, sexual conquest in space[4].

Based on these rules, we can begin to sift through all of the musical acts dwelling in the dark corners of your record collection to identify those that might be most suitable for Broadwayisation. Surprisingly, some musical heavyweights can be ruled out quite quickly:

• The Rolling Stones, for example, just wouldn’t work, unless you think that people will flock to see a musical about an intrepid hero spouting off about the power of the blues for two hours, while having vaguely racist intercourse with “brown sugar” ladies. The lyrical content of their songs is just so all over the place as to be impossible to shoehorn into a coherent structure, though they certainly nail the “tonal range” criterion.
• Prince would also not work, regardless of how much my friend Roni would like to protest otherwise. For a start, all of his songs are too similar in mood to really suit the format. You want to take people through towering highs and crushing lows, whereas the journey of Prince would start, proceed and end with a mood of “pleasant funkiness”. You can’t bring people to tears while a guy molests a wah-wah pedal. The other problem with Prince is that, for a crucial period in his life, he set his own music aside and instead focused on raising the profile of the bands signed to his label. This is a problem for us as budding Broadway producers, as am fairly sure that you could be charged with war crimes for forcing a paying audience to sit through Morris Day and The Time songs[5].
• Poison. As much as I love these 80s metal legends, their career is just not suitable for stage translation. For it to accurately reflect their story, the actors would have to simulate sex 4,232 times a night – and as it has been proven by European Union physicists and Ross from Friends that you can’t take off tight leather trousers in less than 18 minutes, the show faces an insurmountable technical barrier[6].

Even after ruling out such luminaries, there are still many bands left that could be contenders for memorialisation in musical form. I’d love to hear your suggestions (other than you Roni – Morris Day is out. Really.), but here are some of mine to get the ball rolling:

• Jay-Z. One of the great musical stories, a classic meth-to-millions tale that has all the ingredients we need. There’s a built-in audience for the show among the millions of fans who revere him as the “God MC”, and his songs capture a huge range of moods and meanings. Just think of this: after a gritty early years Act soundtracked by “Blue Magic” and “Dead Presidents II”, can you imagine how good it would feel to hear “Empire State Of Mind” or “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” marking the start of the ‘we made it’ era? The only problem with this scenario is that it would be difficult to find a performer to play Jay-Z who had the charisma, charm and energy of the man himself.
• The Flaming Lips. What a show this would be, as their music is highly theatrical to start with, there’s a huge contrast between their more reflective, low-key songs (like “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots”) and the uptempo tracks, and there are semi-coherent sci-fi storylines already built into their lyrics. Again, there’s only one problem, and that is that their incendiary live shows are theatrical enough as it is, reducing the need for a stage adaptation. Plus, their giant hamster ball probably wouldn’t please the haute-coutured theatregoing crowd as it rolled over their heads.
• Limp Bizkit. Imagine this with me – a moving tale following Fred Durst as he escapes his life as a humble tattoo artist in Southern Florida, eventually becoming a multi-platinum recording artist, film director and misogynist[7]. The song titles already capture the essential elements of the arc. Fred just wants “My Generation” to “Take A Look Around”, realise that society just “Eats you Alive”, fight to learn “The Truth”, join forces and get “N 2 Gether Now”, begin a revolt and “Break Stuff”, before realising that you just want to be loved as you softly weep “Behind Blue Eyes”. Most of all, however, Fred wants you to know one thing: he did it all for the nookie. The nookie. The nookie. Such things Tony Awards are made of, people.

I’m sure you agree that all of those scenarios would be far better than sitting through a performance of Mamma Mia, but are they the best we can do? What are your ideas? Emails to the usual address, remember the rules, and above all else… no Morris Day.

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[1] Seriously, a two and a half hour musical entirely consisting of ABBA songs? I challenge anyone to say that they truly dig “Honey, Honey” or “When I Kissed The Teacher” from “More Abba Gold”

[2] Let’s face it, no-one is coming to see a musical about that one band who were signed to Equal Vision Records in 1999 that you really dug, but who got dropped before their second album

[3] For the Soulja Boy fan reading this: “Kiss Me Thru The Phone” does not count as an introspective song. Unless your show is entirely written from the perspective of the phone.

[4] Even the “simplified summary” of We Will Rock You begins by describing a key plot development thus: “The two heroes, Galileo and Scaramouche, discover musical instruments buried in rock, which they use to vaporise the head of the corporation (The Killer Queen), and send the Power Of Rock around the world to free the masses”. Perfectly logical, am sure.

[5] So as not to destroy a friendship, I have to stress that this view of Morris Day is that of the author alone, and not shared by his co-conspirators. Roni has frequently declared her love for Mr Day, his jheri curls and his “coked-up dance steps”.

[6] If technology ever advances to the point where this is not a problem, count me in. Who wouldn’t pay to go and see a Poison-themed show called “Lovin’ You’s A Dirty Job”?

[7] This footnote was originally going to include the lyrics to a particularly “interesting” Bizkit song about women, but there’s no way we could have published it. So instead, I leave you with this inspirational gem from the mind of the Durst: “may the bed bugs shrivel and die before they make it into your sheets to eat you alive”.