Van Dyke Parks – Song Cycle

Song Cycle

Van Dyke Parks – Song Cycle Warner Bros. WS 1727 (1967)

Van Dyke Parks is a notable fringe figure to fans of oddball pop music.  He was associated with a number of popular and notable artists, like The Beach Boys, Harry Nilsson, Frank Sinatra, Ringo Starr, John Cale, Joanna Newsom, etc.  He works out of Los Angeles, and in that barren wasteland of serious culture, he was always an eccentric standout.  He never really had any widespread popularity as a solo artist, but his contributions to popular works by others (The Beach Boys and Joanna Newsom loom large here) are probably why most who have heard of him know about him at all.

Song Cycle is less a work of popular music than it is composed “classical” music in the spirit of Charles Ives, who blended Euro-classical, hymns, folk, pop and more into idiosyncratic and innovative compositions.  Parks simply updates the pop culture reference points — somewhat.  He also draws from Tim Pan Alley, ragtime, vaudeville, bluegrass, marches, and an assortment of old-timey musical forms long since passed from popular favor.  There is particular emphasis on the music of the Great Depression era, and all things uniquely American, especially Californian.  This was an anti-Anglophile stance in the midst of the so-called “British Invasion” period.  It also took high-brow forms of composition and places them into service of more low-brow forms.  It was a serious approach to un-serious music.  Parks adopts cliché/kitsch but re-contextualizes it, in an approach highly similar (in form, though not in substance) to that of the tropicalistas in Brazil around the same time.  It is something of a natural — if impertinent — way to try to break out of imposed restrictions.

The characteristic Parks song jumps from one style to the next, emphasizing the cuts, contrasts and juxtapositions as much as any of the disparate styles he adopts.  Any one approach hardly lasts more than a few seconds, before there is some kind of transition to something else.  But as to those styles, there are many, and he’s obviously a good student of all of them.  He’s even better at deftly making the transitions between the varied passages into something that doesn’t seem completely unnerving — a little perhaps, but that is entirely intentional and necessary, even, to giving this an impact.  Yet for all the formal objectives and technical aptitude, Parks saves plenty of room for humor.  Usually that gets lost in a work this complex and difficult to execute.

This was a lavishly produced album — the budget was more than three times what was typically allotted to a pop album at the time.  Though it sat for about a year before the record label released it, and then commercially it was a flop.  Many listeners fault Parks’ vocals, which aren’t much of an attraction but also aren’t entirely bad.  The other frequent complaints would be coyness, lack of prettiness, willful over-complexity, ostentatious-ness, impenetrability, messiness, … this list goes on.  Song Cycle may well be all those things.  But it also is a very bold in its experimentation and earnest in its admiration for its sources of influence, trying to accomplish a lot without becoming arrogant.  As Parks later said in an interview, “You can exalt what is humble.”

For sheer daring ambition, there aren’t all that many albums of the era (or any others) quite like this.  In fact, probably the most inspiring thing about the album is how absolutely unlikely and improbable it was and is.  It would be wrong to call this a perfect album.  But, looking back, it is one that was headed in a good direction, even if few followed along.

Silver Apples – Silver Apples

Silver Apples

Silver Apples – Silver Apples Kapp KS-3562 (1968)

Few electronic music groups were as innovative and ahead of their time as Silver Apples.  The German Studio für elektronische Musik (WDR) was a a state-of-the-art facility that made music with electronic equipment starting in the 1950s.  But such a facility wasn’t exactly accessible for most ordinary working musicians.  So Silver Apples built their own “Simeon,” described as “a homemade synthesizer consisting of 12 oscillators and an assortment of sound filters, telegraph keys, radio parts, lab gear and a variety of second hand electronic junk.”  There was a U-shaped wooden box structure with a plywood top in which most of the equipment was mounted, with the performer (Simeon) positioned inside the U-shaped part as if in a cockpit.

The basic format of the music features repetitive drumming on a conventional rock drum kit (by Dan Taylor), electronic sounds, plus some vocals.  The vocals are quite of a piece with late 1960s psychedelia.  But what was really unique about this band and its recordings was the juxtaposition of the syncopated yet mechanical and repetitious drumming (“Dancing Gods” is even a take on drum-laden Navajo ceremonial music).  WDR recordings tended to come from an entirely different (and rather elitist) tradition, associated with important composers.  Silver Apples made music a bit closer to popular music — yet at the same time, unlike conventional pop music of the day.

“Oscillations” is the most iconic song on the album.  The drums set out the foundation of the song.  The electronics add commentary, seemingly reacting to the percussion figures but also slashing across it and adding other rhythms.  The falsetto vocals, which are very psychedelic but also offer an odd mix of medieval folk austerity and techno-futurist poetry, provide a semblance of melody.  Mostly the song suggest repeating, cyclic vamps.  This would end up becoming a dominant form of electronic pop music decades later — take away the vocals and “Oscillations” or “Lovefingers” could pass for a new release in the 1990s or 2000s.  Yet Silver Apples were mostly an underground phenomenon.

As innovative and groundbreaking as this music was, the album Silver Apples is a little rough around the edges at times.  Some of the songs are weak (“Velvet Cave”).  That is understandable given the lack of precedent for music like this.  WDR artists would spend up to months continuously revising their works, but Silver Apples obviously had no such luxury when it came to studio time.  They still manage to find a good balance between the electronics, drums and vocals (that aspect could have gone wrong easily).  The songwriting, in general, is not much of an attraction.  The lyrics are often downright silly (“the flame is its own reflection”), merely adding a kind of mood of a psychedelic Sixties “happening”.  But what is unique about the album is the way the music sidesteps the need for great songwriting.  The static rhythms and slowly modulating electronic noises hold seemingly opposite forces together in a kind of suspended state.  Actually, it works much the way a magician does: the drumming focuses attention, almost in a hypnotic trance, and then the electronics play around the edges of perception.  This music is intriguing and surprisingly listenable even without strong melody and no harmony to speak of.  Silver Apples remains one of the more unique pop albums of its time.

Neu! – Neu! 2

Neu! 2

Neu! – Neu! 2 Brain 1028 (1973)

Neu!-beat is as distinctive as anything to emerge from the 1970s.  It also became essentially the standard for pop music decades later. Unfortunately for Neu!, their record label and most of the record-buying public didn’t care much at the time.

Neu! was a splinter faction of Kraftwerk. Their music stands entirely on its own though. Neu! is at least as important as their parent group. Their second album volleys back and forth between the influence of Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother. The tension on Neu! 2 has anarchistic rebellion matched against catchy electro-dance rhythms.

The often-told story of how the record company gave up the album and left Neu! to re-edit and remix three tracks to fill out the disc is fitting but unsurprising — even the album cover is a “remix” of sorts from their debut. It certainly didn’t help their popularity that Neu! was an instrumental band — one that maybe fell between the cracks of rock and roll and avant-garde modern classical.

“Für Immer (Forever)” begins the first of two suites. The chaos creeps in slowly. “Spitzenqualität” has swirling drums and electronic sounds to rival Karlheinz Stockhausen (most assuredly an influence). With “Lila Engel (Lilac Angel),” the processed vocals and aggressive beats channel Neu!’s angst into creative salvation.  Neu! has pulled you from a passing experience to something more total.  The duo intrigues the listener as they wear away expectations.

“Neuschnee 78” (one of the remixed songs) begins the second suite with an almost inappropriate calm. When “Neuschnee” arrives a few songs later, the second side opener suddenly seems paranoid in retrospect.  “Super” also provides the remixes “Super 16” and “Super 78.”  Each progression of remixes actually starts with the remixes and works backwards.

Neu! 2 adds layers then strips them away.  Adding just a tiny piece to existing material puts the entire thing in a new perspective.  The duo then zooms towards what debatably is the essence of the songs. The album’s most unique feature is the way it makes these athletic transformations wholly within itself.  While precision is what makes this album what it is, at the same time the music does away with that which is formal and regulated.

Neu! was just ahead of their time.  Neu! 2 is as likable as it is cool, and it’s pretty cool.

Lucio Battisti – Anima latina

Anima latina

Lucio Battisti – Anima latina Numero Uno DZSLN 55675 (1974)

Here’s an album that seems to be an unlikely Rosetta Stone for much of European rock and pop of the 1970s.  Anima latina (“Latin Soul”) is perhaps Lucio Battisti’s most acclaimed album.  He was a big pop star in his native Italy, though internationally (especially outside Europe) he was and is less well known.  The music ranges from (symphonic) prog rock to Canterbury Sound psychedelic jazz-rock, with ambitious, arty meanderings, laced through with understated brass horn charts and diffuse synthesizer figures.  Most of the songs are over five minutes in length.  None are structured like catchy pop hits.

The opening “Abbracciala abbracciali abbracciati” sets the album off well.  This is high drama.  The effect is a bit like a darkened theater, a huge one, with an assemblage of musicians in an orchestra pit somewhere out of sight, but a lone singer in a dim spotlight delivers a searching, allusive and almost existential song in halting yet eloquently delivered statements.  There is sparse percussion.  Yet the drums are played with such pauses as to mean there is no real syncopated beat as such — duh(ch), duh, ____du-chashhh___.  Behind the drums, the song opens with a sustained but subdued synthesizer chord and a solitary trumpet (electronically processed most likely) playing long, faint notes that seem to move toward an unfinished statement, without ever realizing a melody.  There isn’t a whole lot of singing.  Battisti begins just by singing wordless sounds.  The singer isn’t so much a protagonist as someone who has stumbled into the song.  At least, every effort is made to make this the appearance.  There is never any doubt that this is a staged performance.  As the song continues, the drums and a bass provide more of a steady rhythm.  If there is a comparison for “Abbracciala abbracciali abbracciati,” it is perhaps Neil Young‘s opening to Tonight’s the Night (recorded before or at the same time but released after Anima latina), or the more frequent comparison of Robert Wyatt‘s Rock Bottom (released the same year).

The rest of the album ranges from spacey, swirling meditations to funkier tunes that get a decent groove going.  The album title alludes to a South American influence.  This is a subtle but important presence throughout the album.  The influence of samba, perhaps even tropicália, in the rhythms (“Due mondi,” “Gli uomini celesti (Ripresa),” “Macchina del tempo”) and some of the horns (“Anonimo,” which flirts with tropicália’s reverent/irreverent use of kitsch), and the burning intensity of Argentinian folk-rock (“Anima latina”), all make themselves felt.  Rather than the clinically calculated shifts in unusual time signatures and other technical feats that make a lot of prog- and jazz-rock kind of distant, even tedious, Anima latina leans on warm and organic rhythms to tie all the experiments and shifting concepts together.  That is crucial.  It lends a suppleness that gives the otherwise very arty aspirations of the album a beating heart.

If prog rock remains the core referent for the style of the album as a whole (and especially toward the end), it is worth noting that most of the guitars are acoustic.  There are no electric guitar heroes here, or flashiness of any kind really.  More than any one dazzling performance — even by Battisti — this is an album that succeeds based on its structure.  The ebb and flow of the songs, the deliberate pacing and wide open spaces emerging from the sonic fabric, anything that is the implication rather than the direct content — these are the things that make Anima latina captivating.  There isn’t one right way to hear this music.  In Criticism and Truth, Roland Barthes wrote that “a work is ‘eternal’ not because it imposes a single meaning on different men, but because it suggests different meanings to one man…”  That provides an apt reason to listen here.

Beyoncé – Beyoncé

Beyoncé

Beyoncé – Beyoncé Columbia 88843032522 (2013)

This album is an excellent encapsulation of contemporary pop music.  The first thing that stands out is how capital-intensive this music is.  In other words, it takes a tremendous amount of resources (capital) to make an album this finely layered, refined and varied.  Rather than one producer crafting many of the backing tracks across the whole album, there is an army of producers, songwriters and musicians.  Most singers could never summon the resources to make an album that way (Public Enemy‘s Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp is an exception that proves the rule, fueled by artistic credibility — and associated crowdfunding — rather than the largest bank account).  The eclecticism is stunning.  Some songs are in the style of electronic dance music, others like vintage Prince, or more recent D’Angelo.

What this album stands for is the “mogul” mentality, that the world needs big-shot moguls who are better than everyone else.  In a way, this is the ultimate (and most seductive) way of promoting collaboration with or resignation to the demands of the powerful cabal that controls the major institutions of society.  No, that is not meant as some sort of conspiracy theory.  Instead it means that the society in which Beyoncé was released is very polarized and unequal, and the repeated message across the album is that if you accept the dictates of the moguls then maybe you too can become one someday — like winning the lottery, this requires that many, many others lose, and discussions about the hardships of the winners say nothing of the hardships of the losers.  In an interesting way, the repeated interludes (like Beyoncé as a kid on the “Star Search” TV show) and the “it’s hard to live up to expectations to be pretty as a woman” theme make a cynical capitulation.  Rather than reject the social demands to be “pretty”, or reject the system that creates moguls by creating dire poverty and widespread insecurity, this kind of just shrugs that off and declares there is no alternative; just develop a coping strategy to accept it and deal with it.  This expresses the “survivor” mentality of a psychotic culture.

As reviewer Andrew Johnson wrote:

“Of course, the thing about this album is that it’s the ultimate undisputed-queen-of-pop power move, released as it was with no advance press, in the middle of the night on iTunes with no one driving it but Beyonce herself (and well, obviously her husband, but we won’t begrudge her that). Beyonce is in a position now that she doesn’t need anything but herself, and the musical result is an album that feels completely liberated: ‘Yonce indulging every filthy impulse she has, adorning beats that are dark and not explicitly radio-seeking, dictating that things are going to go her way, at least for the next 67 minutes. She’s got the best producers and songwriters alive working with her here and the guest list for features is the very top tier in the hip-hop world, but no one can take the spotlight away from Bey here. She’s a big enough figure now that she can carry a top-selling album on nothing but reputation alone and if her musical accomplishments never seemed to meet that stature before, well now she’s fixing that.”

But the real trick here is that she may be “liberated” and in charge, but only because she is following the dictates of big-business entertainment and endorsing the “mogul” view of the world.  She still reiterates the precepts of reactionary “social darwinist” theory

In spite of any misgivings about the premise of the album, it is a marvel.  There is practically a flawless delivery.  The pure craftsmanship is stunning.  And the beats are absorbing.  Beyoncé is not an especially captivating singer on her own, but she more than lives up to everything these songs demand.  Certainly this is a collaborative effort, but she also emerges as someone nominally in charge of the proceedings.

I was pleasantly surprised at how good this album was.  I do retain the same general misgivings as I had for Taylor Swift‘s 1989.  Beyoncé is a more evolved album though.  It concedes something to cynicism, even as it reaffirms something very similar to what Swift promotes (with denial in place of cynicism).  But this does carry more baggage and internal contradictions than it lets on.  Still, when the beats get going this is hard to argue with.  In an effort to be open-minded, I listened to a Britney Spears best-of collection, and there the simplistic, even crude brushstrokes seemed to lack the detail and extreme talent brought to bear on Beyoncé.  Frankly, the Spears stuff was terrible.  So this is really one of the finest examples of mainstream pop music of its era.

This Is 40

This Is 40

This Is 40 (2012)

Universal Pictures

Director: Judd Apatow

Main Cast: Leslie Mann, Paul Rudd, Megan Fox, Jason Segel

Judd Apatow’s movies are very much within the mainstream cultural sphere, but within the necessary constraints of Hollywood, his films often explore the limits of doing what you love and how his characters can’t (or choose not to) enjoy themselves.  Put another way, the characters go through this process of trying to change their desires, to go from being, essentially, adolescent young adults, to mature adults.  C.G. Jung termed this “individuation”, the kind of “second puberty” that happens at age 35-40 (if it happens at all) where the individual is (re)integrated into a social collective — illustrated by Goethe‘s Conversations of German Refugees: Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years or The Renunciants.  (Goethe was a huge influence on Jung, inspiring many of the latter’s theories of analytic psychology).

Reviewer Onethink summarized the film this way in a review:

“Debbie and Pete (Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd) live in the American dream: they have a luxurious house, flash cars, two daughters who go to a nice middle class school, they own their own businesses – and the businesses are hip and trendy: she runs a chic fashion outlet, he runs a record company. But not everything is rosy. The businesses are failing. Debbie has deep anxieties about growing old – so she lies about her age and has a personal trainer and begins faddy eating regimes: all the things middle class Americans should do. And, typically for a male Apatow character, Pete has certain maturity issues: is his record company not so much a business as a strategy to still feel young and hip? As parents they go from the lenient to the draconian. And their fathers bring a couple of variations: both are monstrous, one clinging and dependent, a nightmare image of a ‘failed’ adult, the other aloof and distant, a nightmare image of a ‘successful’ adult.”

The parts about work are interesting.  Miya Tokumitsu wrote the most popular article ever on a magazine’s web site, and later expanded that article into a book, about the trouble with the injunction to “do what you love” for work/career.  Making much the same point more generally, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek frequently states that the injunction of contemporary ruling society is to “enjoy,” that the superego perversely demands that we enjoy that which is really our duty, traumatically and painfully depriving us of free will to choose what we enjoy at the very point a choice is seemingly offered, stigmatizing us.  The characters in This Is 40 seem to have the jobs/businesses they want, or are supposed to want.  But they are forced to make money to support an upper middle class lifestyle.  Is it that they want these jobs, specifically, or want these jobs to support the lifestyle that they really want?  Or do they want a different lifestyle altogether?  Is it that everyone around them wants them to have their lifestyle, forcing it on them?  Is it possible for them to want something apart from what those around them want them to want?

If the central parts of the film are politicized — and why not look at the film that way? — then the conservative view is to dislike the main characters Debbie and Pete, the centrist-liberal view is to sympathize with them, and the leftist view is to appreciate them as unreliable narrators of sorts.  The conservative view would be that these failing entrepreneurs are properly subject to market forces, and any of their failings in the market are their personal failings.  The film is wrong then, in a sense, in sympathizing with the ambitions of the failed businesspeople, who fail because they should — they are failures.  And the characters are unsympathetic because they turn against “traditional values.”  The centrist-liberal view is to value the many varied people in the film, to each their own (a multicultural, identity politics paradise), and the conflict of the characters not fulfilling their promise and expectations needs to be resolved.  The film is correct, therefore, to sympathize with its characters.  Everyone deserves to be happy.  The left view, however, sees the main characters as not particularly likeable, or at least as Onethink says, monstrous in their way.  These are just a bunch of stupid people, as stupid as any, and the challenge is how to educate them to accept responsibility for creating meaning in their lives — even their professed desires may be unreliable or stupid.  This reads the film to the left of the film’s ostensibly “professional” Hollywood perspective, which is centrist-liberal, by saying the main characters aren’t really as likable as they are presented to be.  While Apatow doesn’t go as far in rehabilitating antiheroes as, say, Pasolini with Accatone or Korine with Gummo, then he at least takes a Hollywood movie and cracks open the possibility for this perspective from within it (and he does so with a bit more finesse than, say, The Company Men or just about any “little” Hollywood side-project film with big-name actors but little marketing).

The film has very realistic main characters, and the acting is generally excellent.  Really, there are great, subtle moments from Mann and Rudd all over, helped by very strong screenwriting.  The very dull moments actually help that along — the quirks of hiding from family members in a shared house, obsessions with material things, resort to therapy/counseling techniques.  Some of the peripheral characters are a bit thin and one-dimensional, or implausibly exaggerated.  But these minor characters are mostly present to add humor to the film, setting up jokes and gags.  But this is a comedy, and it probably wouldn’t succeed as being one without those set-ups, however artificial.  And there are mostly white people in this closed universe — not to say that there is something inherently wrong with that, but the restricted experiences of white people form implicit boundaries around the film’s ambitions and perspective.  Give this credit though for a fairly balanced mix of male and female characters with substantive parts, and not just of a romantic type — these female characters engage each other without any males present.

The film’s ending is archetypical Apatow: it is a “Hollywood” ending, complete with facile, happy resolution of the major plot points and conflict, and yet, it actually is not entirely that at all.  The film ends with a bit of a “fuck it all!” attitude, but without any guilt about it.  The two main characters, at least, tentatively accept that there is no one (or no thing) that will provide meaning for their lives, or their relationship.  As their fathers (Albert Brooks and John Lithgow) loom larger in the second half of the film, the two main characters Debbie and Pete recognize that their parents can’t be faulted for failing to provide meaning for them — nothing and no one can do that.  Even the angst about selling their upscale house to make ends meet is an admission that having that particular material possession won’t validate their existence.  But rather than wallowing in existential dread, they reform and reassert their couple relationship, and their family structure.  This is what philosopher Alain Badiou calls a “two scene”: the positive existential project to see the world from the point of view of difference rather than identity, “to construct a world from a decentered point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity.”  This is basically a specific type of individuation.  The ending isn’t the film’s strongest section, but it manages to make a compromise with the happy ending in a way most Hollywood films can’t (think about how As Good As It Gets sets up a premise for an inevitable downer ending, then winds up with the usual happy one anyway).  The small kernel of radicalness in this film is that even though the married couple chooses to stay together at the end, they get there through free will.  They don’t just resign themselves to social dictates.  Instead they overcome the injunction to enjoy what they are demanded to do, and instead make their own choice, which happens to be to maintain a stable nuclear family, even if they aren’t strictly happy as a result — they end up with a space where they don’t have to enjoy their social duties.  This is in contrast to, say, the rather one-dimensional character Desi, who is totally confined to play a particular role, without free will (note how Debbie declines that lifestyle in the film).  Returning to Zizek, he says, “The problem today is not how to get rid of your inhibitions and to be able to spontaneously enjoy. The problem is how to get rid of this injunction to enjoy.”  If there is danger in seeing the film’s ending as radical (think of the questions raised about asserting that a woman shopping is a feminist act), then at least the film as a whole provides enough to make the ending a kind of vector rather than a static point, it occupies the same space as that static point but it points somewhere, from where it was to where it is going.

This is 40 is a much better and deeper film that it seems.  Definitely Apatow at his best.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Warner Bros. Pictures

Director: George Miller

Main Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult

Here’s a movie for which the glowing critical praise is perplexing.  It is a deeply hypocritical film.  For instance, it takes pains to pass the “Bechdel test” and insert feminist positions, like the female revolutionary character Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron).  And yet at the same time the film has a group of scantily clad women prancing about in what is uncomfortably close to a wet T-shirt car wash scene.  These positions are not compatible as they are portrayed, in that the film engages in the worst sort of pandering, trying to have it both ways, appealing to feminists and sexists.  This is like the worst form of facile multiculturalism.  The plot, as much as there is one (and there barely is one), is kind of inferior to Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, which already sets forth in starker terms the symbolism of pointless wars over resources (especially fossil fuels).  Still, this film has a lot of action sequences and special effects — the movie is practically one long stunt scene — and they are good, as are the costumes and other technical aspects.  But those things don’t make up for the film’s flaws.