Fluxblog Weekly #27: Gems + Elvis Costello, Fiona Apple, and Tricky
This has been quite a week for me and Fluxblog. The site was down for most of this week, and for a little while there, I was worried that I'd entirely lost my CMS and 13 years of archives. This is not the case, and things are back to normal now. I didn't really get a chance to write or publish anything other than one new post about Gems, which originally was posted on the Fluxtumblr when I couldn't put it on the regular site. That post is here in this week's newsletter along with a few of my favorite posts from the archives. A lot of the reason I was so scared of losing my archives is that it's the only thing I have to remind me of a lot of my life, and how I felt at particular times. Going back to what I wrote about Fiona Apple's "I Know" in the summer of 2009 doesn't exactly bring back good memories, but I'm grateful that I can check in on myself back then from time to time.
November 6th, 2015
I Fell Into A Black Hole
Gems “Soak”
It drives me a little bit crazy that we still don’t really have something to call this type of music, aside from maybe recycling the term “indie pop,” as my BuzzFeed colleague Reggie Ugwu did recently. (I don’t approve of this, as indie pop has been a specific thing for a long time, but beggars can’t be choosers.) But you know this sound — the clicking beats, the unobtrusive keyboard tones, the tasteful minimalism, the sensual vibe, the vague R&B-ness of it, the way the female and male voices hint at sexual tension but seem strangely noncommittal about it. This is the “sexy” music of many people you’d call millennials, and it sounds like the music that’d play at the “Blasé Olympics” described by Alana Massey in her excellent essay Against Chill. Gems is good at this genre, and “Soak” is a good song, but it reflects a culture that I find sad and alienating and unimaginative. The singers are describing passionate feelings, but not conveying them. What I hear is people trying to connect but holding back too much. Or maybe it’s more like they’ve chilled these fiery emotions in music that just makes them lukewarm.
Buy it from Amazon.
July 6th, 2011 1:00am
Charged With Insults And Flattery
Elvis Costello “Beyond Belief”
The lyrics of “Beyond Belief” undoubtedly rank among the finest ever penned for a rock song; Costello’s words are so finely chosen and edited that a novel’s worth of character and nuance gracefully unfold in just over a couple minutes. It’s a miracle of lyrical economy and precision. I’ve been obsessing over this song for a few weeks, replaying it incessantly and alternately dissecting lines and taking in the seedy, desperate ambiance of the music.
Costello’s pick-up artist is bereft of soul but he’s not a shallow caricature – more than anything, he seems bored senseless by the empty ritual of his predatory routine. The intensity of his self-loathing has totally soured whatever pleasure he gets from scoring with these women. The pick-up is equally ruthless and half-hearted; he’s distracted during the actual sex act.
One of the most stunning aspects of Costello’s composition is that when the sex arrives in this narrative, the pace suddenly picks up and the sound builds to a brief, frantic peak. In a clever turn, all of the singer’s metaphors contain vaginal imagery – fault lines, vaults, canals. But he’s so lost in his angst and self-awareness that he seems even more alone. His voice changes in this section: more pinched, more hollow. The treble in the arrangement surges and then climaxes: “I come to you beyond belief.” Climax, come. You get the idea.
The song shifts back into its primary mode. It’s like snapping back into reality. After that night’s “Alice” is discarded, the character takes in the scene for a moment before getting sucked back into his head. The chorus finally comes at the end and repeats into fade-out, suggesting an endless loop. That’s when you get a sense of consequence. This time the phrase “beyond belief” takes a slightly different meaning: “Once this seemed so appealing, now I am beyond belief.” It could be the low moment that inspires him to change. Or he could just loop back to the start: “History repeats the old conceits.”
Buy it from Amazon.
June 15th, 2009
Amidst This Bitterness
Fiona Apple “I Know”
“I Know” is a song about suffering through patience, and waiting, perhaps in vain, to have your love for someone validated and fully reciprocated. Its sentiment is gut-wrenching, but the lyrics and vocal performance are not particularly melodramatic. There is agony and sadness in nearly every moment, but the thinking is very pragmatic: I’ll help you out of your mess, I’ll support you, I’ll love you, I’ll swallow my pride and deal with my jealousy and stifle my desires, and….well, maybe there’s something good for me on the other side of all that.
It’s the hope that makes the song so devastating, and the way she clings to her faith that it will all be worth it in the end. But she can’t know what will happen, and the doubt drags her deep into misery. She feels a bit used, and she struggles to understand why he can’t just be straight with her.
The ending is brutal: “If it gets too late for me to wait for you to find you love me and tell me so, it’s okay, you don’t need to say it…” The title is implied but never uttered, and the song concludes on the equivalent of her casting her head down, and slowly walking off in the opposite direction, crestfallen and totally defeated.
Buy it from Amazon.
August 9th, 2007 2:24pm
Different Levels Of The Devil’s Company
Tricky "Ponderosa"
Though it’s not exactly rare for couples to collaborate on music together, nearly all of the tracks produced by Tricky featuring Martina Topley-Bird on vocals foreground what would normally be subtext to the point that the sexual tension present in their work seems overwhelming and contagious. Some of this is due to the contrasting character of their voices — Tricky has a thick, creepy rasp that implies a seductive sort of alien otherness, and Martina is elegant, coy, and slightly demure in a way that suggests that she’s an innocent young girl who is slowly being corrupted by his unapologetic decadence. Though Tricky has worked with other female vocalists with a similar vocal range and timbre, none of them can come close to replicating their unique chemistry, or mimicking the subtleties of her phrasing. For example, there’s a dark, flirtatious wit in her performance on “Ponderosa” that twists a song that might otherwise be taken a self-pitying lament about one’s vices into something that underlines the pleasures of self-medication and self-destruction. Her presence on the track opens up the song’s interior monologue just enough to make it a shared experience, shifting its “I” to an exclusive “we” cut off from the outside world.
“Ponderosa” is a perfect early example of one of Tricky’s most common approaches to presenting vocals: As Martina sings a fairly conventional lead part, he shadows and/or anticipates her words with scratchy, rhythmic whispers. There’s a few different ways to interpret this style, and they aren’t the least bit mutually exclusive:
1) He’s placing a spotlight on his role as a svengali type who is putting his words into the mouth of his beautiful, young female protege. In calling attention to this, he is highlighting a sort of artifice or vocal inadequacy that can be perceived as a flaw while also arrogantly making sure that the listener is aware of his authorship.
2) He’s creating a dynamic between the male and female voices that lends a richer subtext to the work. Her vocal part can be understood as an act of submission to his will, but the result is invariably a track in which the female voice sounds confident and fully expressive, and the male voice seems sickly and weak. Tricky plays up his masculinity, but he almost always seems repulsed by it on some level, and so puts himself in the context of a gorgeous female voice in order to both highlight his flaws, and compensate for them. The women in his songs are placed on a pedestal — even when he’s cursing them out, his self-loathing trumps his persecution complex.
3) He’s splitting the song into two interlocking perspectives. Both of the characters are thinking the same thing, and on some level, one is most certainly parroting the other but is either unaware, or simply unsure where they end and the other person begins. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)
Tricky "Vent"
On Maxinquaye, “Suffocated Love” was a metaphor, but the opening track of Pre-Millenium Tension takes that phrase very, very literally with its lyrics about a woman who hides her lover’s asthma medication as a sadistic ploy to gain the upper hand in their relationship and/or profit from his demise. The song is sung from both perspectives, so the track alternates between Tricky’s paranoid delusion and Martina’s bitter revenge fantasy. The track is dense and claustrophobic, with its smothering beats implying the couple’s stifling proximity to one another, and its anguished, heavily distorted guitar noise standing in for Tricky’s muted screams. It’s worth noting that the song inverts the usual Tricky formula, and Martina speaks her words just before singing them, as though to clarify that she’s taking full credit for her actions. The result is very chilling, but also sexy in a very intense and unnerving sort of way. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)