Author Archives: daisyhellcakes

Hipster Douchebag Book Recommendation of the Year: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Posted on by

(Note: I will attempt to get through this post without using the words “patriarchy” or “privilege” but make no promises.)

We don’t usually write about books here on Shades of Caruso (well, okay, we did once. Where the hell is our movie, Peter Jackson? I know you have two hundred hours of The Hobbit: Parts 1 to 24, Appendices I-VIII, and the Quenta Silmarillion to get through, but come on). That’s because reading is for squares. We tend to stick to more highbrow entertainment like Michael Bay and Glee. You might think this is ironic considering one of us works in publishing and both of us are aspiring authors, and you would be right.

The sad fact is, I don’t read much fiction outside of my day job. It’s a combination of things, really – professional envy, lack of time, burnout from reading books all day, inability to turn off editing brain, addiction to Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, fuming over imagined slights on Twitter, professional jealousy, too many episodes of Friends to rewatch in case I don’t have a line or two memorized, professional bitterness, etc (including, you know, writing my own stuff occasionally). But Gone Girl broke the streak.

I’m just going to pause here to rant a little about literary fiction. Gone Girl is considered a crime novel, which makes it “genre,” which means people generally don’t take it seriously, or at least not as seriously as literary fiction (although there are happy exceptions, of course, and the book has gotten great reviews—but it is also a bestseller, so expect a backlash imminently). I’ve heard it called a beach read: a book you burn through in a day on vacation and that drops out of your head the next. This annoys me. Yes, it is a propulsive book, but just because a book is genre does not mean it lacks depth.* Folks tend to assume literary fiction is worth analysis because that’s what they were taught in school, but I’d argue this book can stand up to a close reading just as well as anything by Jonathan Franzen. (Funnily enough, one of the book’s protagonists has a rant about this very topic: “She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I didn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog.”)

*And once books or authors are considered good or worthy (Tana French, Kate Atkinson, etc), they tend to get called “genre-straddling,” or something else that implies they have risen above their niche. I think it happens like this: 1. People are snobbish about genre books, because they think they are not as good (or not perceived to be as good) as literary books. 2. Authors write excellent genre books. 3. People read them and like them, and then either feel guilty because they like genre books, or feel that because they like this book, it could not be a genre book. 4. People, feeling uncomfortable with the cognitive dissonance this creates, decide to classify them as something different than—better than—genre books. I could write a thesis about this.

Don’t get me wrong, I (mostly) love J-Fran’s books. But literary fiction is a genre with its own tropes just like every other (if you don’t believe me, read this. Or this). People think of it as different and better than genre fiction—more worthy—because it deals with “real life”: various domestic issues like crumbling marriages, the ennui that married people feel, and sad people trapped in loveless marriages. Intricate plots are derided as pedestrian, the province of plebs who read James Patterson and love his tales of milky bum snakes (I guess feeling compelled to continue a story means it isn’t serious enough? PS Don’t click on that link if you don’t want to go blind). It often has prose overworked to the point of parody, in which each sentence had been buffed and honed as if it were a prize jewel, not in service of the narrative but for its own sake—it glitters in a way that seems to call attention to the author rather than the story. This is what puts me off much of literary fiction—I find the construction of a series of precise, arid, perfect moments, delicate and sterile behind glass, all building up to a climax that feels like a wheezy puff of asthmatic breath, much less compelling than a well-told story full of (literal or metaphorical) blood and guts and bone. That said, a lot of genre fiction suffers from its own problems—tired plots, pedestrian prose that’s full of clichés, lackluster characters.* I have to admit, I like style too—I like verve, and sharp, imaginative language. I like a plot, yes, but not one that rattles along a well-worn path. I want the best of both worlds.

*I hasten to add, this is not because it’s genre fiction. It’s simply because there’s a lot of crap out there, in every genre, including literary fiction.

So, we arrive at Gone Girl, which I read in two days. I can’t tell you how rare this is for me; usually I limp through fifty pages of a book and eventually crawl to a stop because there’s no narrative engine that’s pushing me forward. With too many books I’m not engaged with the characters; I’m not drawn to keep reading; I can predict, depressingly, how it’s going to turn out. Sure, this is the way it is with most forms of entertainment, but they don’t require as much effort or time from the person consuming them. I tend to be harder on books than any other form of media—probably because of the jealousy, rage, bitterness, etc mentioned previously—but when I find a book I love, I love it wholeheartedly.

Gone Girl is about a crime, yes, but it’s also about a crumbling marriage (one for the lit-fic fans out there). One that goes very, very wrong indeed. But this one has a plot, as well as that most scorned of genre conventions, a twist. When Nick and Amy meet, they understand each other immediately—they think of themselves as soul mates. But by the day of their fifth anniversary, things have gone to ruin, and when Nick sees Amy that morning, cooking him crepes, he feels “bile and dread inch up [his] throat.” Later that day, Amy goes missing. It only gets worse from there.

First to the prose style. I found a terrible discussion of the book on Jezebel (I know, my first mistake) in which the leader of the debate accused it of being badly written, and I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s plain crazy. On a sentence-by-sentence level, the writing pops—just in the first chapter, we have these descriptions:

  • “sitting on the dock, her body slouched over like an old pillow”
  • “Amy would dissect the conversations for days after—‘And what did she mean by…’—as if my mother were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn’t on offer”
  • “hank of ponytail swinging cheerful as a jumprope”
  • “the edges [of the floor] turned up like burnt toast”

To me those are vivid, unusual images that snap with life and imagination—they linger in your mind because Gillian Flynn captured something true in a fresh and accurate way. To blast through this book without noticing the prose is, I think, a big disservice to Flynn’s talent. Those words were chosen carefully, and her prose is better than that of most of the literary novelists I’ve read—much less affected; concerned with shading in plot and character and bringing important details to vivid life.

But onto that rollicking plot. [DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT THE ENTIRE PLOT SPOILED—IT’S REALLY GOOD SO GO AWAY AND READ IT AND THEN COME BACK AND WE’LL TALK OKAY BYE] Nick and Amy take turns narrating the novel; we hear from Nick directly, but in the first half of the book we learn about Amy through her diary. In the second half we get the “real” Amy, who is a twist darker than her constructed diary self, but recognizably on the same spectrum as the “fake” Amy. How much of Diary Amy is true and how much is false is a matter of debate, but personally I think Amy contains all of her personas—she tries them on like outfits, keeping and discarding as necessary. At first she is the Cool Girl, then the harpy wife, then the missing blonde, beautiful saint (the Gone Girl), and finally the Psycho Bitch (the woman who has terrifying power because she does not play by the rules). Ultimately none of these reductive ideas of what women are fit her. She is a full human being (and, uh, psychopath) with contradictions and weaknesses.

We learn early on that Amy grew up under the shadow of her child-psychologist parents and the books they wrote about her fictional counterpart, the long-running series Amazing Amy. Amazing Amy always does the right thing, but Diary Amy “can’t fail to notice that whenever [she] screw[s] something up, Amy does it right.” Almost from birth she was being forced into a part—the Good Girl who always made the right choice. (Nick later tells us that “Amy is always right, in every story. (Don’t think I haven’t brought this up in my arguments with my real Amy, because I have, more than once.)” This proves prophetic—the real Amy makes sure she is always right in this very story, whether by manipulating the situation, constructing it to her advantage, or outright lying.) When Amy grows up, she writes quizzes for women’s magazines—the kind that tell you whether you’re a good girlfriend or not. She always knows what the correct choice is, the kind of woman society expects you to be.

Amy’s thread runs alongside Nick’s feelings during the case that he is in a movie, playing a part—when he discovers Amy is missing, he is aware a neighbor is watching him and becomes the “Concerned Husband” who runs through their house and bellows Amy’s name in panic. We never know if that panic is real or if he’s faking it. When the police interrogate him he can’t remember if what he’s saying is what he wants to say or what he thinks he should say. Both Nick and Amy enter their marriage playing parts—they like how their spouse sees them and expect each other to keep up the lie of who they’ve pretended to be. It’s when their “true” selves begin to bleed through that their marriage starts falling apart. “I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage,” says Nick. “What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?”

One of Flynn’s most brilliant inventions is the treasure hunt Amy sets out for Nick every year on their anniversary. “It was what her dad always did for her mom on their anniversary,” Nick says, “and don’t think I don’t see the gender roles here, that I don’t get the hint.” Amy gives him riddles about their life together, which he’s hardly ever able to figure out, and the hunts always end in a fight, and “a genuine tradition [is] born, one I’d never forget: Amy always going overboard, me never, ever worthy of the effort.” Amy sees it as a testament to how much he loves her—she hopes it will show that he has paid attention to her thoughts and feelings and remembers (what she thinks of as) important moments from their previous year together. He sees it as a test he will inevitably fail. By their fifth anniversary, it is multivalent—it is all these things, plus an ironic reminder of how Nick has failed her and also her subtle way of getting revenge. At first he thinks Amy is trying to reconcile with him by telling him how brilliant and witty and warm he is. But in fact, Amy has discovered Nick was cheating on her and the clues are designed to lead the cops to evidence that will incriminate him. The poems he thought related to him and Amy actually relate to him and his mistress, Andie. Amy has flattered him with the image of himself he wants to believe—a ruse they both fall for over and over again.

When Amy leaves, her anger at Nick takes a typically feminine form: it’s the ultimate passive-aggressive move, homicidal rage turned inward. Women are not allowed to kill, so Amy enacts psychological warfare. She will look like a saint and Nick will be branded a murderer. She cuts her own body in order to implicate Nick, and later bruises and mutilates herself to “prove” she has been raped. She even contemplates killing herself (Freud might have something to say about this) so that a body will be found. When Nick realizes he has been played, his aggression turns outward, like a man’s is allowed to—he has obsessive thoughts about getting Amy back just so he can kill her. Is this fantasy of murder more acceptable than Amy’s? Sure, he feels betrayed, but so does Amy. Do we simply find Nick’s transgressions more acceptable because we expect that men will cheat and lie?

Just as important to the story is the way we construct our identities, and the way we talk about ourselves in order to create a story about who we are. In the first half of the book we read a version of Amy that she has literally created about herself, but that doesn’t mean that Nick’s version of the truth is any less constructed and managed. He lies, and he leaves things out. Amy’s diary claims that Nick shoved her, and when we find out that the diary is false, we assume this must be too, but later, in a reverie of hatred, he says: “I saw her again at the stove, licking powdered sugar off her thumb, humming to herself, and I pictured me, walking over to her and shaking her until—” Is this a memory or a fantasy? Both Amy and Nick address the reader directly—they are very aware of their audience. They both want us on their side, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get us there.

I read a lot of reviews of the book that claimed they hated the twist—they stopped enjoying the story when it turned out Amy was a psychopath and Nick was “just” a misunderstood good guy. I think this interpretation does a great disservice to Flynn. Who ever says Nick is a good guy? He certainly wants us to think that, but is it true? It turns out that he is as skillful a manipulator as Amy—he manages to woo her back by playing the part she desperately wants him to play: the man who loves her to the exclusion of everyone else, who understands her better than anyone, who realizes how special and unique she is (for Amy, this means recognizing her fiendish brilliance). And to some extent that becomes true: “‘You were the best man you’ve ever been with me,’” Amy tells him. “‘The only time in your life you’ve ever liked yourself was pretending to be someone I might like. Without me? You’re just your dad.’” (It’s worth noting that Nick tries to kill her when she says this. And minutes later he thinks that a normal woman wouldn’t murder for him or frame him; she “could never possibly care that much.” In fact, he says, “the indulged mama’s boy in me wouldn’t be able to find peace with [a] normal woman, and pretty soon she wouldn’t just be normal, she’d be substandard, and then my father’s voice—dumb bitch—would rise up and take it from there.”)

Flynn’s stroke of genius is in making Amy a psychopath. She is already a sharp critic of mainstream femininity—she notes acidly that all the commercials on TV aimed at women are about tampons and detergent, that the constant, droning message to women is “clean and bleed. Clean and bleed.” She has contempt for ugly women because for women, sex is power, and Amy can’t stand people who don’t have any power. Amy is terrifying because she represents our deepest fears about femininity—that women really do just want to steal power from men (by using their very femininity to do it! “Crying” rape, manipulating men with their beauty, getting pregnant to trap a man into staying with them). She is blonde, beautiful, thin, and apparently saintlike—and there is nothing more terrifying than the idea that someone who represents everything our society values as “good” turns out to have traded on that power and turned it against us. She is the nightmare of what happens when female power is limited to sexuality. By the end of the book she has taken life, and in her ultimate power-move, she one-ups Nick by creating it (the only thing he can create is a book, which he deletes). Their power battle continues until the last sentence of the book—Nick damns her by saying she has to wake up every day and be her, and Amy, clearly troubled by his assessment, says, “I don’t have anything else to add. I just wanted to make sure I had the last word. I think I’ve earned that.”

Gone Girl is a satire of marriage, a gleeful black comedy. Nick and Amy are the logical extremes of masculinity and femininity—Nick just wants his wife to leave him alone, let him be free, and Amy just wants them to be close. More than anything, they both want to be understood. Who hasn’t experienced those feelings in a relationship? Who hasn’t heard jokes about the old ball and chain, about nagging wives and insensitive doofus husbands? Flynn pushes these stereotypes until they snap.

Nick, so laid-back and likable, a sensitive “new man,” becomes, when enraged, a parody of patriarchy (whoops). All he can think when he’s mad at Amy is “kill the bitch” or “I’ll murder that cunt.” He runs through lists of the women in his life, hoping he doesn’t hate them all but finding that he does. He despises feminine weakness—he was furious whenever Amy cried and can’t shed a tear himself. His Alzheimer’s-riddled father shows up at his house at random like a specter of masculinity itself, chanting how he hates the bitch, he’ll kill her. The most damning thing Amy says about Nick is that he doesn’t want a real, complicated human woman but the Cool Girl she presents herself as, a fantasy of femininity in which the woman never tests him, never complains, never has her own will or desires. This is the Amy he falls in love with—a mirage. When the mirage is challenged, he responds with fury, just as men do when their privilege (damn) is denied. (He does this again with his mistress, Andie. He thinks he loves her until she becomes a real person with her own needs and desires—then, again, he is furious.) This attitude of his was passed down from his father, just as it is passed to men from generation to generation: a historical sense of entitlement, and rage when that entitlement is taken away.

By the end of the book, though, Nick and Amy deserve each other. For a story in which they both have revelations about how little they knew their spouse, it turns out they, in fact, know each other better than anyone else possibly could. And in the end, they both get what they wanted. Nick is finally a match for Amy: he says he can “feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I’m the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It’s a story I can live with.” (Let’s keep in mind, though, that it is just that—a story.) Amy gets her wish too—her deepest desire was always for Nick to pay attention to her, and because he feels he must stay to protect his baby (boy!), to “unhook, unlatch, debarb, undo everything that Amy [does],” she literally forces him to learn everything about her, to pay attention to her at all times, to never turn his back on her, because if he does, she might kill him.

Man, I’m worried about that baby. “I [will] raise my son to be a good man,” Nick says. Do you trust Nick to know what a good man is? Yeah, neither do I.

Sequel?

Hipster Douchebag Music Recommendation Of The Week: "Momma’s Boy" by Chromeo

Posted on by

As one of the tail-end of the iPod generation, albums aren’t my strong suit, and most of my recommendations are from music that came out a year or two ago, so I’ll stick with these recommendations rather than subjecting you to another series of arbitrary lists. So on with my arbitrary song!

Chromeo is yet another band we first heard on Conan’s show — then investigated and found two albums’ worth of funny, spacey, slightly retro-sounding tracks. Electrofunk is not exactly my specialty — I’m not even sure “electrofunk” is an entirely real category of music, much like “shoegaze” and “slowcore” (don’t even get me started on how much I hate descriptions of music as “[blah]core”. Can we not stop this madness? Aren’t we better than this as a people?) — but these guys are too charming to resist.

The gem off their second album, Fancy Footwork, is the one they played on Conan’s show — a funny, weirdly sweet song about incestuous desires. It’s got a cool video, too, which thankfully appears to be incest-free:

The lighthearted hooks and equally funny lyrics make the song instantly catchy — I especially like the little riff that sounds like the theme song to an 80s sitcom that never existed but should have. It’s an endearingly lo-fi effort — like two kids who are messing around in their parents’ basement with a Casio keyboard.

In fact, the band’s two members, Dave 1 and P-Thugg (real names David Macklovitch and Patrick Gemayel) have been friends since they were kids, and describe themselves as “the only successful Arab/Jewish collaboration since the beginning of time.” Delightfully, Dave 1 is getting his PhD in French literature from Columbia so he can teach, and P-Thugg is a trained accountant. Knowing this makes their performance, complete with bling and disembodied drum-beating women’s legs (they look awfully fra-gile-ay) of the title track off Fancy Footwork on Jimmy Kimmel’s show all the more entertaining:

But the best part about Chromeo is that they’re willing to take chances on reinterpreting their songs. When they performed on Conan’s show, they ditched the lo-fi approach and, somewhat bizarrely, brought in a string section. Have I mentioned lately that I love string sections? The result is beautiful, touching, funny, and kind of creepy. (Watch out for Dave singing “We’re just Obama’s boys” and grinning hugely as the audience cheers.)

Shameful Admission of the Week:

“Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” by Sasha Fierce Beyonce

It’s not quite as good as “Crazy In Love,” which may end up being the highlight of Beyonce’s career, but this single is infectiously catchy, as evidenced by its ubiquity. Though Admiral Neck is an unrepentant music snob (FACT!), he’s the one who showed me this video awhile ago — and I’m sure it was in no way influenced by the fact that Beyonce is on his List (or used to be, until he saw her on Punk’d and decided she was a heartless automaton).

It’s an entrancing, hypnotic video, and not just because Beyonce is thrusting her groin at the camera at regular intervals. It’s just three women dancing in black and white, but it’s beautifully choreographed, with the kind of energetic thigh-shaking that is Beyonce’s specialty and a stripped-down set that puts the focus squarely on our singer, who is a magnetic presence to begin with (though that may have something to do with her bionical arm) and becomes impossible to take your eyes off here. My favorite part of the video is when they run up a ramp at the side of the room for a few seconds — it’s not a big effect or anything, but it gives the video a sense of giddiness and hyperreality.

It turns out that Beyonce rejiggered this concept from somebody who dubbed the Unk song “Walk It Out” over a Bob Fosse dance routine of Gwen Verdon and two other women dancing to “Mexican Breakfast.” The slightly creepy original is here, and the terrifying mash-up/remix/unholy hybrid is here. Some YouTube commenters are apparently horrified by Beyonce “stealing” the idea. Hold the phone! An R&B artist using sampling for her song??? Where are my pearls, I must clutch them! Anyway, it’s a great idea and Beyonce’s updating of it works brilliantly — not least because it helps scrub the image of Gwen Verdon high-kicking in bell-bottomed sailor pants out of my horrified brain.

The song itself is a rump-shaking, hand-clapping barn-stormer, and as the thumping bass digs in and the mechanical whirring mimics the melody, it’s impossible not to want to get up and swing your cyborg arms along with it. The synthesizer that rises up during the chorus gives the song an almost epic, slightly menacing feel, which I think is appropriate for a song in which spurning your boyfriend’s love apparently turns you into a man-eating dance robot. It’s another feminism-lite track from Beyonce, an ode to female empowerment via, um, withholding sex until your boyfriend agrees to marry you. Hm. Well, hey, it’s got style and sass and ladies in skimpy outfits parading around with attitude, and that pretty much constitutes most feminism these days. Where are my bras, I must burn them!

Of course I’ve gotten in on this phenomenon just a bit late; I suppose it’s a testament to the power of the video that it’s imprinted itself on the national consciousness this way. We’ve already had the guy who does the choreography in his bedroom (he’s great, but I have to admit that his abs creep me out a little. There’s so many of them!), the Gwen Verdon version, and, of course, the SNL parody with Justin Timberlake, which was hilarious but did not feature nearly enough dancing from Paul Rudd. And then there’s the rest of them. Have a good time having the next nine hours of your life sucked away. Sasha Fierce will own you too!

Hipster Douchebag Music Recommendation Of The Week: "Get Better" by Mates of State

Posted on by

Well, it looks like I’ve left this so long that Masticator has subverted the formula, leaving the douchebags among us out in the cold. So typical of corporate types like him: stealing our ideas and squashing all the soul out of them for mainstream palatability. And since this week’s band is slowly leaking hipster cred by the day, much like a tipping can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the slackening hand of a passed-out, cardigan-wearing skinny teenager, it seemed time I got back to the job.


So anyway, this week’s month’s quarter’s entry is yet another band we discovered through The A.V. Club. No, wait — we actually saw them first on Conan’s show, which tends to have the most unusual music of all the late-night talk shows (Okkervil River were on the show awhile ago, and Conan seemed genuinely shocked at how good they were). They were playing the first single from their latest album, and when I went to The A.V. Club to see if they’d reviewed it, I found this. I was a bit surprised and disappointed to see such a negative review when I’d enjoyed the song so much, but I downloaded procured legally purchased the album anyway on the strength of the single. Turns out that the writer was just some freelancer they’d gotten in, who’s apparently gone through a bad breakup recently, given his seeming hatred of happily married life. At any rate, the rest of the A.V. Club permanent staff absolutely loves the album, and many of them are planning to put it on their end-of-year best-of lists. Sucks to you, freelance reviewer who probably just wanted a paycheck and may have some lingering problems with his parents’ divorce!

The two band members, Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel, are indeed married, which gives the band a nice hook for feature writers, but it’s not like we’re dealing with Raffi-level sentimentality here. Their sound was a little bit spikier on previous albums, but it’s still much the same: lots of harmonies, disjointed melodies, and pop songcraft. Take my favorite song off the album, the first single “Get Better”:

Yes, there are people dressed as animals, but they’re more reminiscent of the bunny from Donnie Darko that freaked me the fuck out than anything boringly suburban (even though the video does have a bit of an Ice Storm vibe). It’s not a hard-driving song, but the clarity of the piano, the thump of the drums, and the gorgeous swell of the string section (have I mentioned that I’m a sucker for a string section?) all blend with the counterpointed vocals to create something beautiful, lighthearted, and yet a little bit creepy (maybe I’m just flashing back to Frank here). And yeah, the lyrics “Forget your politics for awhile / Let the color schemes arrive” are a bit hippie-ish, but it feels like a joyful song to me — not a song cloistered in middle-aged smug, boring contentment but a paean to wary hopefulness (“everything’s gonna get lighter, even if it never gets better”). Or at least a very good potential song for an AT&T commercial.

As for my other favorite song off the album, “The Rearranger,” it’s not available as a video on the intertubes except as a live version, which makes it at least 78% less awesome, because much of its beauty comes from its meticulous, heavily layered production. Thus, I instruct you, loyal reader(s), to go here and listen to the audio alone. The first few seconds should hook you in, as the horns seep in like an aural sunrise (ah yes, I’m a sucker for horns too); after that the harmonies come in, and then come the weird tempo shifts, and then the bursting sun of the chorus, where all the elements come together beautifully, as sunny as a Californian summer day (to drag this dead metaphor a little further).

As usual, the band is starting to get more recognition just after I find out about them — unfortunate, since I should have written about them months ago when I first heard their albums — and now they’ve got a song on an Ugly Betty episode. Is this the end of their hipster coolness? Or was it the AT&T commercial that did them in? Or is it cool to sell out now? The backlash begins. Time to put on my trucker hat and wade in.

And now that I’ve profiled some good music, it’s time for my…

Shameful Non-Hipster Possibly Douchebag Admission of the Week:

This is a new addition in which I admit my not-so-secret, undying love for cheesy pop tunes, thus undermining all the careful hipster-image-building I’ve done in the previous paragraphs. I’m going to do it quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid (“Right off!”).

“Spiralling” by Keane

I’m not proud of it, but come on, it’s catchy, right? That retro synthesizer hook, the bizarre football-crowd-witnessing-a-nasty-tackle “Oh!”s in the background, the irresistible chorus, and…the, um, video:

Okay, I don’t know what’s going on with the aerobicizing “Video Killed the Radio Star” robots, and nothing says high production values like Windows Media Player visualizations, but obviously the director is a very smart man — namely because he’s kept lead singer Tom Chaplin’s horrifying visage out of the video as much as possible, and when he’s been absolutely forced to show it, he’s masked it in so many layers of Photoshop effects and shadows that Chaplin looks more like Mr. Stay Puft than a recognizable human (though actually, this is what he normally looks like — as brilliant Never Mind the Buzzcocks host Simon Amstell put it, he’s a skinny man with the face of a chubby toddler).

But my favorite thing about this song is the lyrics in the chorus:

When we fall in love
We’re just falling
In love with ourselves
We’re spiralling

Looks like someone’s really proud of paying attention in his Intro to Psychology class. Or was this song his end-of-term assignment? I’m really looking forward to the next single, “Cathect My Heart, Mother (Or I Will Project My Neuroses Onto My Lover).”

And with that admission, I take off my trucker hat and slowly back away.

Hipster Douchebag Music Recommendation Of The Week: "When You Were Young" by The Killers

Posted on by

So this month’s week’s recommendation isn’t exactly a sensitive, mopey up-and-coming indie outfit, I admit. I think you lose claim to that label when you’re signed to Island in the US (though, admittedly, signed to an indie label in the UK), your albums have sold 12 million copies worldwide, and one of your songs has been lip-synched by Justin Timberlake in a mind-bendingly awful movie by a hipster director. And while the band may be too big to be liked by hipster douchebags anymore, they certainly are hipster douchebags — Brandon Flowers (the lead singer) in particular. Though he’s apparently a devout Mormon, he’s got a tendency to boast, and the jury’s out whether he’s an asshole or not. Though Rufus Wainwright mentioned how much he loves him at the concert we went to last year (and even wrote “Tulsa” about him — apparently he tastes like potato chips in the morning. Mm, potato chips), so he’s already close to having a free pass. And he’s right about Fall Out Boy. Fucking Fall Out Boy. Thanks for ruining that episode of The Simpsons for the rest of us, Wentz.


But really, none of that matters. I love The Killers. Many have pegged them as just another trendy It Band like the Arctic Monkeys or the Kaiser Chiefs (sorry, Masticator), but they are at least a step (perhaps half a flight, give or take) above their cohorts. (It’s interesting to note that most of their sonic influences are British — in fact for awhile I had a vague idea they were British — but the band’s actually from Vegas.)

The difference with the Killers is that they aren’t all pose and flash, and their music isn’t just of the era. They have a gift for melody — what initially may tick along like a standard rock track suddenly swells into an irresistibly catchy, hummable tune with a hook that won’t leave your brain for days. “Bones,” from their second album, Sam’s Town, is a kind of 80s synth-pop tune, complete with reverb-y vocals and grinding guitars, but it’s the brass section’s repeating arpeggio that wriggles into your mind like an earwig. “Change Your Mind,” off Hot Fuss, begins with a sing-songy guitar hook that never lets up and backing vocals that push the song into a beautiful, ecstatic climax. What makes the song for me, though, is the moment 2 minutes and 46 seconds in, when Flowers’ voice goes up on the word “no,” and for that second the song is absolutely sublime. Sometimes it’s enough for one note to make an entire song, and if I had any shred of musical knowledge, I would praise that note now. “Mr. Brightside” is a riff on the kind of glam-rock nonsense I hate, but the gorgeous hook of the chorus transcends the same-y muddiness of the genre and becomes something both propulsive and beautiful.

I’m hard-pressed to find much filler on either album. “Why Do I Keep Counting” is a bit of a silly one-off — it’s apparently about Flowers’ fear of flying — but for a throwaway song it is quirky but also big and anthemic and feels serious and playful at the same time. “This River Is Wild,” besides being (I like to imagine) an homage to a movie I secretly love, starts out fairly conventional but becomes more lighthearted as it develops (particularly with Flowers’ delivery of lines like “Sometimes I’m nervous / when I talk I shake a little”). With most albums, even if I really like the band, I usually only love about 3 or 4 songs. With The Killers, I love or at least really like at least 6 or 7 songs on both albums, which is a testament to how catchy most of them are.

One of the Killers’ biggest hits has been the silly gender-bending tale “Somebody Told Me,” which is one of their more conventional-sounding songs, but it’s a good example of a tune that will most likely grab your internal iPod and set it to “endless repeat,” at least until a Moonpig ad comes on TV. (Warning: I do not take responsibility for any lasting after-effects of Moonpig ads. Do not hold sharp instruments while watching.) “Smile Like You Mean It” is quite nice as well — again, the “da-DAH-dah” through the chorus is musical heroin — though it doesn’t get really interesting until the last 20 seconds or so, with the funky drum-and-guitar thing that’s over way too soon.

But to me, their best tracks are two of their biggest hits — “All These Things That I’ve Done” and “When You Were Young.” I’m surprising exactly no one with this analysis, and I’m not even championing songs that weren’t released as singles. Everyone’s heard these two songs. But that doesn’t lessen their power one jot, and it provides a useful platform for the difference between the two albums.

Hot Fuss, as I mentioned, was The Killers’ debut album, and critics fell over each other attempting to be the first to throw accolades at the hot new band and crown them the new kings of indie rock. Their take on glam-rock and 80s and 90s British sounds was a brilliant debut; I certainly won’t dispute that. As I said, they’re a cut above many other bands with a similar sound. But I can’t help feeling that the fact that that sound is trendy is the reason they became critics’ darlings in the first place. They did that sound, and they did it well, but deviation was not allowed. When Sam’s Town came out two years later, suddenly critics were declaring a sophomore slump. The band had — gasp! — changed their sound so that they could grow musically. My God what did those little punks think they were playing at? They didn’t even ask for permission! And who were they moving towards sonically? Bruce Springsteen! The nerve! Didn’t they get the memo? Arcade Fire and The Hold Steady were already filling that slot! How dare The Killers move out of their allotted indie ghetto?

It really puzzles me why The Killers got so much shit for sounding more like intelligent arena rock when other bands were being slavishly praised for sounding like intelligent arena rock. Ugh. Well, if this flaw is what’s keeping me away from reading more Pitchfork, then really it’s a virtue in disguise.

All right, enough preamble. On to the good stuff. Amazingly, I managed to miss “When You Were Young”‘s chart dominance, and I only noticed it because it was a song on Guitar Hero III. Obviously this means it’s a rock classic already and doesn’t need any defense from me, but I loved it so much that I kept playing it over and over, even though the song’s pretty easy and I’d already gotten five stars on the first try (okay, on Medium, not Expert). Meet me after the somewhat bizarre video and I’ll explain why.

The appeal of the shimmering guitar is obvious in the first few seconds — and the first progression up the scale after the first verse is one of the most addictive hooks I’ve ever heard. I can’t describe how satisfying it is to actually feel like you’re playing those notes in the game, to feel as if you actually have a part in creating this stunning piece of pop perfection. The song’s lyrics are full of sadness and longing, but it fills you with such joy that it’s hard not to want to simply get lost in the music.

The song is definitely reminiscent of Springsteen, but for all the right reasons — the propulsive, driving guitars, the swelling anthemic chorus, the emotional vocals, the shimmering little bells you can hear at the very top of the song that make the whole thing, make it feel big and magical and epic. Lines like “We’re burning down the highway skyline on the back of a hurricane / that started turning when you were young” are very Springsteen-esque (Springsteinian?), but that’s no flaw — they too make the song feel epic and grand. They make the lives of a few small, ordinary people feel like the grand sweep of tragic and beautiful Americana.

It’s a coin toss whether I prefer this one to “All These Things That I’ve Done” — right now I think the latter is winning, but only because I haven’t listened to it quite as much and I think it’s a little fresher in my mind. But ask me another day and I’ll have reconsidered. At any rate, here’s the UK video, which was made earlier (the US one is here; it can’t be embedded because of evil corporate grumblegrumble).

It’s an accurate representation of the progression of a typical Saturday night in London, albeit with 50% less stabbing. It was obviously made on the cheap, and is meant to make the band seem like hip indie kids who are too cool to make a real video. Or it’s incredibly lazy, as it was clearly made in a couple of hours before a concert. (I must mention, though, how nice it is to be writing about a band that’s actually popular enough to have videos. The way forward.)

The standout section of this song is obvious — the repetition of the line “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier” has already become iconic, and deservedly so. It’s so iconic that, as I mentioned, Justin Timberlake somewhat creepily lip-synchs it here. I don’t know whether to be impressed with Richard Kelly for such a bold move or disgusted with him for appropriating a popular song in a bizarre context — but then I haven’t seen what by all accounts is a hot mess of a movie, so I shouldn’t judge (yet). [The lipsynch scene is the non-Rock highlight of that awful awful awful awful awful movie, but it's little more than a video slotted into the movie for no reason. - Neck] I am, however, pissed off with the crappy TV series Jericho for using this song over the first few minutes of its first episode, thus making me like it instantly, then hate it even more in subsequent minutes when I realized that The Killers were by far the best writers on the show.

The Hot Fuss post-punk glam-rock sound is evident in this track as it starts, with a wash of guitars and cymbals and distorted vocals. I love the initial lolloping flow of the lyrics — the quick rhymes of “Another head aches / another heart breaks / I’m so / much ol / der than I can take” (I love the way Flowers places an odd emphasis on every other word — “so” and “older,” sliding the latter from one line to the next with an oddly syncopated rhythm), and then the relief of the chorus, with more odd rhythm in the line “Don’t you put me on the back burner.”

Then we have the bridge, which just begs to be sung by thousands of people yelling their lungs out in a concert. It’s one of those electrifying moments that gives you chills when you’re listening to it alone (it’s one of my favorite songs to listen to as I’m walking around London) but would be absolutely transcendent when sung in a chorus with thousands of other people. This, I think, is the Killers’ real talent — creating songs that are at once personal and anthemic, songs that are just as much fun to listen to by yourself, even as they have such scope and power that you know seeing them performed live would be like seeing them achieve the musical equivalent of self-actualization.

I find it hard to believe that anyone could not like this song, though I’m sure there are plenty out there who can’t stand it. But it’s a galvanizing tune, and it’s irresistibly danceable — I defy you not to start dancing a little in your chair as you listen. The Killers are playing in England soon, but unfortunately only in festivals in Reading and Leeds and not in London (as much as I like the idea of hearing The Killers in concert, festivals are not my bag, baby). But I’m sure they’ll be around soon enough, and then my hipster douchebag fantasies will be complete.

Hipster Douchebag Music Recommendation Of The Week: "Drink Deep" by Laura Veirs

Posted on by

Since these posts have become a bit of a sausage fest, time for a recommendation for a female singer-songwriter. Most of my music collection is full of men (not actual little men skittering around with miniature violins and guitars, though that would be way cooler than what I have, which is a bunch of broken, empty CD cases and stacks of random, sticky CDs that never seem to match together), and I’m not sure why. It’s just happenstance, I guess, since hipsterism is just as much a female affliction, but it’s probably time to give in and finally listen to Lucinda Williams and Sleater-Kinney. (But not New Young Pony Club. They know why.)

So here’s Laura Veirs, a wonderful musician I heard on BBC Radio Six, which is an equally wonderful radio station that I don’t listen to nearly enough. I got in the habit when I was doing freelance work at home for a couple of months, and nearly every hour I’d hear an amazing song that got me into a new band, especially since they play so much music uninterrupted — a very rare feat nowadays. Most of their DJs are good, though (“Smerch” is one of them now, as are Adam and Joe), and it’s no hardship to listen to people who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about music. Plus, the station streams online, which would be great if people at my job would leave me alone long enough so I could wear headphones. ::mutters, shakes cane::

One day while I was listening, Laura Veirs’ album Saltbreakers was the album of the day (week? Something like that), and they played the eponymous single from it, which was enough to convince me to buy the album — something I hardly ever do anymore now that I have the much more tempting option of stealing. It was worth it, though; the album is full of gems. But the best song by far is “Drink Deep,” which Admiral Neck has kindly provided another video for. Watch! And Be Amazed!

If the little piano riff doesn’t hook you a few seconds in, soon there’s the pipe (or keyboard that sounds like a pipe?), and then the gradual flooding of sound that, yes, does sound like waves of water rushing over you as you listen, a theme that runs through the album. It’s a quiet song but it’s full of power — restrained in its sound but urgent in its lyrics. And I love the lyrics: they are somewhat opaque — which, as I said a few weeks ago, is sometimes a cover for faux-profundity — but Veirs has a way with allusive metaphors that inspire thought instead of dampening it. I especially love the chorus, with the repeated lyric “Drink deep, my love, for the water is gasping for your mouth,” which turns an accepted idiom on its head. And the vision of the natural world the song presents — a place full of danger and passion and beauty — is deeply alluring but frightening as well. It’s a masterful song.

Apparently, however, even hipster douchebags can’t agree on Laura Veirs. That nexus of douchebags itself, Pitchfork, dismissed Veirs’ albums as a mediocre imitation of Sufjan Stevens and Colin Meloy. First of all, Pitchfork, Colin Meloy is a pretentious wanker whose pseudointellectualism matches your own, so I suppose I can see where you get your affinity for him. Secondly, he could be accused of just as much imitation as you see in Veirs — but at least Veirs knows her way around a melody. Thirdly, “To The Country” is awesome, and I have no idea why you think it’s even trying to imitate, as you call him, Sufjan Stevebs, but whatever it’s trying for, it succeeds admirably. We are so over, Pitchfork. At least until you praise something I like.

At any rate, there’s the song (I would put up “To The Country” as well so anyone who reads this could sadly shake their head at the Pitchfork reviewer’s tin ears, but we’ve been having continuing computer problems and I don’t have the patience or the ability to not throw the computer at the wall in anger). Oh, and before I go, I keep forgetting to mention: we got our own T-shirt! Display your douchebaggery with pride.

Hipster Douchebag Music Recommendation Of The Week: "Slow Show" by The National

Posted on by

Actually that headline should probably read “Of The Fortnight”, considering how I only got three weeks in before missing a week. Oops. Listen, I’m busy reading Zadie Smith and going to lectures by Elizabeth Wurtzel and then hanging out in coffee shops eating tiramisu; I don’t always have time to sit here and post while redoing my dreads. (Actually I’m confusing myself with Ellen Page’s character in Hard Candy, which we just watched. It was ball-slicingly brilliant!)

This week’s selection is “Slow Show” by The National. Any of you Chuck or One Tree Hill watchers out there have probably already heard this song, as apparently it’s been on both shows (as well as being used incessantly by the BBC promo department), which pisses me off a bit. Not because I don’t like the shows (okay, not just because — I know Chuck is bad by firsthand knowledge; One Tree Hill is just bad by reputation) but because this always happens to me. I seem to have an uncanny ability to hear of a singer or band just before the producers of TV shows and commercials do, and for maybe a few months I think I’m relatively alone in knowing the music, but my illusions are soon shattered when I hear the songs on CSI: Miami commercials (Antony and the Johnsons’ heartbreakingly beautiful song “Hope There’s Someone” was played over images of our redheaded hero saving children from terrorist Nazi clowns or whatever the hell was going on that week, and oh god I hope Antony Hegarty feels good about himself).

I don’t know whether to be depressed at the way corporations co-opt “cool” bands to get themselves a bit of credibility (not that all TV shows are about corporate interests — but in the case of the above TV shows, they were certainly trying to appear “down with the kids” and “jiggy wit’ it” and “hep to that style, daddio”), or whether it’s good that bands that are probably struggling financially get themselves more exposure and more fans. A bit of both, I suppose. I suppose it also means that the music the bands are making is more appealing to the masses than people assume, which can only be a good thing, really. I absolutely love a lot of mindless Top 40 pop music — I’ll confess here that a few years ago I could not stop playing Hilary Duff’s “So Yesterday”, which probably disqualifies me from douchebaggery entirely — but it’s really good to see when actually properly thoughtful and complex music gets popular. Of course, anything that is critically respected at first usually ends up suffering a massive backlash (see: Coldplay), but them’s the breaks, I guess.

At any rate, here’s the best video I could find — set to Jean-Luc Godard’s “Masculine-Feminine” because…well, just read the poster’s description. The song starts about 30 seconds in.

I really like the rest of the album (Boxer), though I don’t love it completely, and I haven’t had the opportunity to listen to the rest of The National’s output. But I adore this song. There’s something addictive about the way it builds — becoming (slightly) faster and peppier as the initially morose lyrics give way to cautious optimism (or is it?? Yes, it probably is).

Matt Berninger’s voice would make the aforementioned “So Yesterday” sound like a funeral dirge, I have to admit, but the song has a self-deprecating quality even as it becomes more hopeful. (I think comparisons to Stuart Staples of the Tindersticks are quite apt — the bands are even on the same label — but I think Berninger has a bit less of a muffled subway announcer’s drone. Though I may just feel this way because I had to sit through a Tindersticks concert of an album I didn’t like one song on. Damn you, Admiral!!) [Again with the Tindersticks hatred? I'm cut to the core of my flamenco-tinged fandom. Excuse me while I depart in sadness, and walk through the rain to the nearest sleazy bar, where I will smoke a cigarette, dolefully drink whiskey, and stare in heartbreak at a picture of Jacques Brel behind the bar - Neck] It starts out with the words that probably go through every introvert’s brain at a party:

Standing at the punch table swallowing punch
can’t pay attention to the sound of anyone
a little more stupid, a little more scared
every minute more unprepared

I made a mistake in my life today
everything I love gets lost in drawers
I want to start over, I want to be winning
way out of sync from the beginning

But as soon as we think that the singer’s going to become more depressed as the song goes on, berating himself more and more, we get this sudden ray of hope for the chorus:

I wanna hurry home to you
put on a slow, dumb show for you
and crack you up
so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain
god I’m very, very frightening
I’ll overdo it

There’s such self-hatred in the lyrics that they’re hard to hear — he thinks he’ll even disappoint the person who loves him — but there’s hope and relief in them, too, at the knowledge that this person, at least, will give him some comfort. (Or there’s cowardly wish to escape, but I prefer the former.) The second verse is more self-recrimination, and the second chorus more wishing that he were at home with his lover, but this time a little faster and lighter.

Then the song shifts, and we hear the mournful yet weirdly hopeful sound of an accordion — which to me is the hook of the song — and then a piano riff that will make you instantly recognize the song the next time you hear it, and some even more poignant lyrics:

You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you
You know I dreamed about you
I missed you for
for twenty-nine years

Which pretty much breaks your heart. It’s a love song about depression, or perhaps even about someone who’s loved unrequitedly for years. Either way it’s simultaneously depressing and hopeful (have I said that already?), and that’s all you can really ask for in a song. I’ll be listening to this one for years.

Hipster Douchebag Music Recommendation Of The Week: "And I Remember Every Kiss" by Jens Lekman

Posted on by

This week’s somewhat-late recommendation was made possible by the letters A and N (with a little help from a music-software program). Admiral Neck found a program that would allow us to make “videos” of all the songs that don’t already have entries on YouTube. They’re a bit like those educational “videos” you watched in middle school where the people behind it were too cheap to actually film their script, so they’d simply take a handful of still photos of kids with bowl haircuts and bell-bottoms acting out a morality play and run a soundtrack of dialogue over them. Think of these videos as our homemade version of What’s Harry Got In His Mouth?

So, this week’s selection is a song by Jens Lekman, otherwise known as the Swedish Stephin Merritt. If you don’t know who Stephin Merritt is, you must this minute beg/borrow/download (i.e., steal) 69 Love Songs, his magnum opus (with one of his many bands, The Magnetic Fields). Or perhaps you are a hipster douchebag too, and know that 69 Love Songs is one of the essential albums required for membership. And that if “Grand Canyon” and “The Book of Love” don’t break your heart, you probably don’t have one. So there.


As I’ve mentioned before, Stephin Merritt is one of my all-time favorite lyricists; his lyrics are intelligent and clever and witty and occasionally incredibly sad. His arrangements are almost as interesting; his songs range over almost every conceivable genre, sometimes in loving tribute and sometimes in acid parody. They are sometimes a bit precious, but they are always knowing, willing to puncture their own importance.

Jens Lekman is very much in this mold — intelligent, hyperliterate, and best of all, funny. Most songwriters can string together some decent-enough lyrics — or at least make their lyrics so incomprehensible that people assume they must be deep (I’m looking at you, Michael Stipe, you jive-dancing, perpetually-terminally-ill-looking star). But Lekman is one of the few who make close attention worthwhile, and one of the even fewer who actually do it with humor. I could count on one hand the number of musicians who write (intentionally) funny lyrics (I’m avoiding your needy gaze, Weird Al Yankovic); it seems odd that there are so few lyricists that bother to try being funny, given that most other forms of entertainment, even dramatic or tragic ones, usually contain elements of humor.

Perhaps it’s because most songs catch your attention with their melody (still my first requirement; a song could be a mind-bendingly brilliant poem set to music and I wouldn’t care unless I liked the sound of it), and you often don’t especially notice the lyrics until you’ve had a few listens. Maybe it’s just harder to fit humor into music without sounding like a novelty act. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen managed it, but their kind of talent is pretty rare. Or maybe it’s because so many musicians are self-important douchebags who can’t conceive of putting humor in their Art.


I’ve only listened to one of Lekman’s albums so far — Night Falls Over Kortedala — but only because of our hard drive failure and the fact that iTunes is a shitty program that won’t pull songs off my iPhone unless I’ve purchased them through iTunes and that won’t let me put any new songs on my iPhone now without wiping my current songs off it because it thinks I’m synced to a different library and I can fix all this but it’s incredibly time-consuming and annoying and arrggghhhhhhh I hate you Steve Jobs for making me love your product and then attempting to destroy that love at every turn!!!

Night Falls Over Kortedala is a good place to start, though — it’s Lekman’s second full-length album, and nearly every song on it is a gem. I’m not going to do a close reading of the song this week, since Lekman’s lyrics are so straightforward and front-and-center that there’s not much point, but I think it’s pretty obvious what’s appealing about this song. Lekman’s voice is Merrittian in its deep, resonant delivery, and the contrast of his throaty bass with the furious wind-up and clash of the orchestra creates a song of thrilling power. It’s called “And I Remember Every Kiss”, and it perfectly captures the feeling of a first kiss — the incredible build-up, the choral explosions, the naming of deadly weapons after a beloved. The following video, I remind you, was made by Admiral Neck. See if you can spot any tell-tale signs.

The song is drenched in emotion but still has an appealing wry detachment — “Your Arms Around Me” (the Admiral’s favorite song on the album) is much the same, making a trip to the emergency room into a bittersweet love ballad. Oh, and I can’t forget to mention my favorite Lekman pronunciation — in this case, his pronunciation of “soldier”. Most of the time you can’t even hear his accent, and I find it strangely endearing when it comes through on certain words.

Super-special bonus Jens!! Here’s the hilarious and touching retro-sounding “A Postcard to Nina”. Any song that can fit in the lyric “I send back Out of Office Auto-Replies” is a classic in my book (especially since the laugh is one of guilty recognition). I hope Nina and her girlfriend had a happy ending.

ETA: Canyon posts this and The A.V. Club goes and interviews him! I truly believe they did this because of us. – AN

Hipster Douchebag Music Recommendation Of The Week: "Made Up Love Song #43" by the Guillemots

Posted on by

This wasn’t really the second song I wanted to feature, since we heard about the Guillemots a couple years ago and the thrill of discovery has worn off a bit. They’re pretty well-known in hipster douchebag circles — at least UK-based hipster douchebag circles (er, roundabouts?) — since they were nominated for the Brit Awards and the Mercury Music prize, and their album got pretty high in the charts. But as far as I can tell, they’re virtually unknown in the US, so my douchebag cred can remain intact in at least one English-speaking country.

I’ve used it now basically because I can’t find videos of the other songs I wanted to highlight, and it’ll take too much time to figure out how to make my own video to get any of those out today. Nevertheless, this is an excellent song, and just cause I’m a little inured to its loveliness, it’s certainly no knock on it. I was obsessed with it when I first heard it, and it gave me The Joy, more so than any other song in recent memory. (And I just found out through a stroll through Wikipedia that their next album is out in a few days, so hey! Relevant!)

So I was thinking I’d do kind of a close reading of these songs — specific moments that make the song for me, since it’s easy enough to say, “Oh, I love that song” but not so easy to actually explain why you love it. So here’s my best attempt:

:05 — Love the tuning up / tv coming on / distorted tape deck noises — they feel like the hesitation of someone who’s not quite ready to begin but forced to anyway.
:22 — “Love you through sparks and shining dragons I do” — dragons? They’d sold me 20 seconds in.
:25 — This simple little keyboard refrain, along with the wobbly distorted-circus sample (which metaphorically reinforces the song’s false starts), is what makes the first part of the song. We know it’s going somewhere and the lovely circular lead-up heightens the anticipation.
:3o — “Now there’s poetry in an empty Coke can” / “Now there’s majesty in a burned-out caravan” — These lines cut to the heart of what it’s like to be newly in love — the most ordinary, even depressing sights have a certain magic to them. I love that the image of an empty Coke can has made it into a love song — throughout the song, mundane images are contrasted with the operatic highs of the music.
:41 — Great little guitar/banjo/ukulele/whatever the hell that thing is riff here, as the various instruments seem to wake up to the song.
1:10 — Here the song kicks into a higher gear (and in the video, the images turn from a dingy black-and-white room to a full-color beach — obvious, maybe, but the song seems to demand it. However, the song does not demand Fyfe Dangerfield’s [!] seemingly earthquake-induced dancing. He dances like I imagine Faraday would dance). The bass and guitar take over the keyboard’s riff, pushing it to the front of the song and propelling it forward. The tension mounts through the next minute as the song builds towards its catharsis.
1:30 — “And the symmetry in your Northern grin” — this line always makes me smile, though that may just be because I understand the cultural meaning “Northern” has in England now that I’ve lived here and feel unduly proud of myself.
1:45 — Here a little barely-audible piano refrain sidles in, again propelling the song to even more tension as the tempo increases and the instruments all kick in.
1:47 — “You got me off the sofa / Just sprang out of the air / The best things come from nowhere” — Again, these are very simple, even cliched words, but in three lines Dangerfield’s able to capture the essence of falling in love — feeling like a whirlwind came from nowhere to propel you out of your ordinary life into something extraordinary (but still mundane because it’s so common).
2:00 — “I can’t believe you care” — the song reaches its catharsis here, both musically and emotionally. Where before Dangerfield sang that “I love you, I don’t think you care,” here he finally accepts it, extending the word “care” into one long, swooping, ecstatic note that is the musical equivalent of spinning around with your arms out on top of a mountain, feeling like you’re a part of the sky (or dancing like a maniac on a beach, as they do in the video). The instruments go nuts, and the chorus of backing vocals joins in. I fucking love this part, and I think it would be pretty hard not to feel uplifted by it. And though I’ve attempted to keep this pretty chaste so far, I’d be remiss in not comparing the song to a musical orgasm — the build of tension, the increasing urgency, the ecstatic release, and the dizzy, murmuring wind-down. (I don’t like thinking of Fyfe Dangerfield having an orgasm either, especially since it seems to involve screeching and copious throwing of luggage and cookie cutters.)
2:33 — And here we have the murmuring wind-down: “Yes I believe you” and “I’m in love” (I think) repeated over and over and mechanically slowed down to mimic a hazy afterglow. We could read this two ways: either Dangerfield has just convinced himself into believing the object of his love loves him back by pleasuring himself to thoughts of her, or the object of his love has just sexed him up to convince him of his/her devotion. Or I’m a sex-obsessed crazy and the song is about really appreciating your garbageman. Either way I think it works.
3:20 — We get little goodbyes from all the instruments here, winding the song down in much the way it wound up.

My only complaint about the song is that it’s not long enough — that glorious catharsis should go on longer, for two verses, though of course metaphorically it doesn’t work. We saw the Guillemots live a year or so ago, and I was looking forward to this song all the way through, but when they played it, it was a bit of a disappointment. I don’t know if it was just because the venue wasn’t big enough or they didn’t have enough instruments or what, but it just didn’t have the same joyous lunacy that the original did (their version of Sao Paulo was pretty great, though, and that’s got even more of a bonkers ending).

Now, then. Want a smoke?

Hipster Douchebag Music Recommendation Of The Week: "A Sunday Smile" by Beirut

Posted on by

In an effort to start posting again more regularly, I’ve come up with my own (most likely not-so-) weekly feature: YouTube videos of songs I like! Nobody’s done that before, right?

Admiral Neck and I both spend a good deal of time reading The AV Club, so we have more than a passing knowledge of current internet-asshole trendy insults (based on the posters in comment threads after the articles, that is; the AV Club writers seem like very nice people who would totally want to be our friends if they got to know us). The most popular insult there for awhile — so popular, in fact, that it’s now an in-joke on the site — was “hipster douchebag,” which the commenters used to insult any writer they thought was just pretending to like something to seem cool (i.e., a writer whose argument they disagreed with). Writing about music in particular seems to be a minefield — if you like a band that’s too mainstream, you’re a hipster douchebag who’s being contrary by ironically liking crap enjoyed by the masses; if you like an obscure band, you’re a hipster douchebag who’s just trying to prove how cool and edgy you are; if you like an “indie” band that’s gotten some mainstream success (or even the rather limited success of being critically adored), you’re the biggest hipster douchebag of all, because all you’re doing is trying to fit in with the cool kids.

Sigh. Can we just agree, once and for all, that everyone is a hipster douchebag in his own special way and be done with it? I’ve had to stop reading some of the threads because they piss me off so much. Once there was an entire thread insulting Sufjan Stevens, who I adore and who I thought was pretty well-loved until that moment, and I had to shut down the window in case I accidentally broke the keyboard trying to put my rage into print.

With all that in mind, I’ve self-consciously used the insult as a title for this series, because God knows I’m not going to have music choices cool enough to appease everyone. I probably fall into the last category, internet-wise, because though I probably know more “indie” bands than people who mostly listen to Top 40, I basically just know the “indie” equivalent of Top 40. (I keep putting “indie” in quotes because that’s what the genre is generally referred to as, even though a lot of the bands are on major labels. Leave me, music paranoia!!) I got a late start on my education; as a kid practically the only music I listened to was my parents’ soft-rock, so I didn’t even know who the Top 40 cool bands were (do you realize how sad it is to feel bad that you don’t know who Boyz II Men are?); in high school I managed to get a grasp of that, but not “good” music; and in college I learned the gospel of Elliot Smith and Ben Folds and all the rest, but it was only when I met Admiral Neck that I learned how much music I’d been missing out on. I’d skirted on the fringes of “good” music for awhile, but I’ve always been playing a game of catch-up and I still am.

So basically, this feature will be an ongoing collection of songs I like right now — depending on your musical knowledge, you’ll either find something new or roll your eyes at my pedestrian choices. Or both! Don’t limit yourself. (That may sound bitter but really I’m just hoping there won’t come a day when I give up any pretense of coolness and link to my favorite Phil Collins song. You may think I am kidding but oh no I am not kidding.)

Anyway, here’s my first choice: “A Sunday Smile” by Beirut. It’s not a proper video, but it’s the best version of the song I could find (other than live versions, and while those are great, they’re substantially different from the original).

This song gives me chills and makes me happy to be alive (as I find almost all good music does). I defy you not to feel your heart swell a little at those gorgeous horns, the chorus of voices, the lolloping merry-go-round rhythm, the accordion (!). Zach Condon, the one with the mournful voice and the mastermind behind Beirut, is only 22. I figure that means I just have to have a really good year this year, equaling four of his, and I’ll be caught up. I’m about to finish this post, so I’d say I’m looking pretty good right now. Pretty. Darn. Good.

And a bonus video just cause it’s equally beautiful and should also be heard by everyone: “Postcards From Italy.” This one does have a video, and a very appropriate one at that.

Not much I can improve on there. Catch ya on the flip side, daddio.

Temeraire and the Challenge of Ambitious Fantasy

Posted on by

We here at Shades of Caruso love dragons. We love them so much that both of us independently paid money to see Dragonheart in the theater, a movie that features Dennis Quaid playing a hero with a voice reminiscent of a man in the late stages of emphysema; a dragon played by James Bond who’s saddled with lines like “I merely chewed in self-defense, but I never swallowed”; and David Thewlis honking his way through another cringing, effeminate villain role. It might be a significantly less painful experience on mute, actually. Of course, it’s bad for lots of other reasons too: terrible writing and plotting, corny “comedy” bits, lackluster CGI, muddy production values… Sure, it’s got a talking dragon in it, but let’s face it, a dragon alone can’t save a bad plot (witness Eragon. Or don’t).

The truth is that dragon-related entertainment is hard to come by. Well, scratch that — I should say that good dragon-related entertainment is hard to come by. I have to admit that there are a lot of books about dragons out there that I haven’t read, so for all I know, there are plenty I’d love. It’s just that many of them sound so, well…silly.

I love the concept of fantasy, the incredible range of ideas it has access to. I read A Wrinkle in Time. I watched Game of Thrones like everyone else and I too want to slap Joffrey. I’ve even, God help me, listened to Yes. It’s just that the barrier to entry for fantasy is high, especially for books. Most of the covers could kindly be described as “niche.” The titles usually involve words like “untime” and “rayne.” The heroes’ names sometimes have apostrophes in them (note to fantasy authors: please stop doing this. I don’t want to read about someone named F’lar unless I’m supposed to hate him). The writing is often ponderous, and there are always twenty books in every series, and each one is a thousand pages long.

Perhaps the core audience doesn’t want publishers to pander to what’s considered acceptably mainstream, but I think a lot of genre books get unfairly ignored because non-fans see them and think, “That’s not for me.” Or worse, they’re intrigued, but they don’t know where to start. I edit children’s books for a large company, some of which are fantasy or sci-fi, so I realize the conundrum here: some stories might draw a larger audience, but they also have to appeal to the people they know are going to buy them, and be true to the stories within.

That’s where we come to Temeraire. The thing is, I don’t think I ever would have picked up these books based on the covers alone.

They look like standard-issue dragon fantasy novels. Actually, that’s what the US covers look like. The UK covers are better:

 

I like the dragon-and-boats thing — pretty accurate, and a bit more in the direction of “this might just be serious literature WITH DRAGONS IN IT OMFG” — but the paperback covers look a bit too much like Jane Austen-esque beast-friendly chick lit, which is schizophrenic and sexually confusing. I appreciate what a tough job the designers have, though – how do you make dragons look cool without also making them look defanged? How do you convey a blend of genres? How do you market a series like this? (I’m not going to answer those questions, by the way. Good writers know that asking questions rather proposing answers makes you sound much smarter.)

But I didn’t buy the books because of the covers – I found out about them because I read a review in Entertainment Weekly in which they were described as a kind of Patrick O’Brian with dragons, which, well, do you know me? Soon both my husband and I were both staying up until four a.m. to read them. The first three were published all at once, and at 300-400 pages each, they weren’t intimidatingly long. Neither was the world they described very different from our own. In fact, the only difference was that this alternate universe contained talking, intelligent dragons. Can you imagine anything more awesome? The only thing better would be if the dragons pooped Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

Novik came up with an incredibly clever, simple idea — what if dragons existed, and were used as a line of England’s military defense during the Napoleonic Wars? She also starts us out with a protagonist as green to dragons as we are — Captain Will Laurence (note lack of apostrophes), a seaman in Her Majesty’s Navy, who accidentally ends up with a very valuable Chinese dragon egg when he captures a French ship. The egg hatches some weeks later, while Laurence and his crew are still out to sea, and though Laurence knows almost nothing about dragons except that they need to be harnessed when they hatch (so that they can bond with the person who will become their captain in England’s Aerial Corps), he ends up becoming the choice of captain for the egg who hatches — the dragon he will name Temeraire.

The first book in the series largely concerns Laurence’s gradual acceptance of his new fate — he was a respected captain in a prestigious profession, happy with his life, and he is at first reluctant and resentful of his duty to Temeraire. We follow the pair as they embark on training and learn about life in the Aerial Corps, which is very different from the life Laurence knew. Aviators are the shabby black sheep of the military, treated by the rest of English society as something of a joke, their dragons feared dangerous. In fact, dragons are as intelligent as humans — they show an incredible aptitude for math and science, and Temeraire in particular is something of a savant. At first Laurence thinks his growing bond with Temeraire is unusual and that the other aviators think of their dragons as mere tools, but he soon learns that the bond between a dragon and his captain is one of the closest relationships either of them will ever experience.

When we meet Laurence he could be fairly described as a stiff; he’s full of rigid ideas about what’s right and mannerly, and it’s only when he bonds with Temeraire that he starts to relax. But it’s to Novik’s credit that she doesn’t entirely soften him — though he grows to love Temeraire, he is still concerned utmost with what is good, with being an honorable man, and, above all, with following society’s strictures. Temeraire is his foil – an intelligent innocent who is forever questioning why things are the way they are, much to Laurence’s exasperation and bafflement. This interplay is never didactic; it comes from character and not as a lecture. The push and pull runs through the series as a constant, with each party softening to the other’s argument as they grow to love and depend on each other.

Subsequent books have Laurence and Temeraire being forced to go around the world on various missions – to China, Turkey, Germany, Africa, and back to England to fight Napolean, whose ominous presence runs through the books like a harbinger of impending destruction. It’s an ingenious idea to have the pair travel, not only because there’s only so much you can write about English battles against Napolean’s army but because it allows Novik to explore how dragons are treated in other countries.

This is perhaps Novik’s cleverest invention. By far the greatest strength of genre fiction is the way it refracts all the ordinary issues of domestic drama from unusual angles. Where a straight drama would tell us a standard teenage-daughter-hates-her-mother story, The Exorcist compares puberty to demonic possession. In Ginger Snaps, a young girl getting her period for the first time realizes she is also becoming a werewolf; we watch her coming to grips with her newfound power and sexuality. Buffy, of course, worked on a throughline of a high-school-as-hell metaphor, and Battlestar Galactica got us to sympathize with Iraqi insurgents by having our colonized heroes fight back against an oppressive regime.

Temeraire explores issues of feminism (a certain breed of dragon — Longwings — only accept female captains, to Laurence’s surprise and profound comic embarrassment), racism, slavery, the question of animal intelligence, and dragons as a metaphor for how we treat outsiders and minorities, all without being moralistic. In England, dragons are kept away from society at large, and are generally treated as if they were large, winged horses. Their captains and crews love them, but they have no autonomy. Laurence and Temeraire don’t realize there’s any other way to be, until they travel to China and find out that there, dragons are independent and have their own lives and professions (ferrying people from one place to the other, performing manual labor), eat cooked meals instead of raw cows and sheep, and live in sheltered, warm pavilions instead of making their beds on the ground. And some — like Temeraire, for he is an extremely rare and special breed known as a Celestial — are revered as thinkers and scholars, and spend their time in the life of the mind instead of being forced to defend the country as an unthinking tool of war.

With each book, Temeraire grows more and more anxious about the way dragons are treated in England and feels more and more that he must do something to change it. Laurence wants only the best for Temeraire, and for dragons as a whole, but he knows the harsh reality he’s afraid to confront his friend with; he knows how unlikely the possibility of change is, especially in a time of war. We don’t need to have the point underlined — it’s there, and it shades everything we see.

The most touching thing about the books — in which much is touching, as Novik has a deft hand with melodramatic but never mawkish storylines — is the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire, but also the way Laurence is changed by his love. Temeraire is part precocious child, part confidante, part comrade and colleague — a true life partner — and he gradually opens Laurence’s tightly closed and rigid personality. For me, good drama happens when we as an audience are torn between two points of view — when both sides of an argument are presented as equally valid, and we empathize with the views of those on either side. I find nothing more riveting than this three-dimensionality of character, and good drama always has it, no matter what the genre. And in this series, Laurence and Temeraire are always fascinating, and always people we want to know.