Winter Wonderland

So, I've been spending a lot of time indoors. As I write this, the third Blizzacane of Feb '10 is brewing overhead -- or so say our trusty weather tellers. It's poised to dump a foot or two on our heads and keep us inside for a little longer.1

I'd been spending some of this time bemoaning the fact that I haven't been hearing any good new music... I even found myself spending about half an hour with American Idol, which I can say is exactly the opposite thing someone looking for interesting new music should do. [Note to AI producers: ban the acoustic guitars. The show is already a bad karaoke parody; why make it a coffeehouse farce on top of that?]

So I had time to be a little adventurous... and to watch videos.

OK Go: Of The Blue Colour of the Sky

The first video was by an L.A. band that I've heard about but never found all that exciting: The OK Go. The OK Go are a power pop band who became famous for a youtube video that featured the band members dancing a choreographed routine on treadmills. The video was neat, but the band was not amazing. Just enjoyable pop (not that there's anything wrong with that).

So when the band's new album -- Of The Blue Colour of the Sky -- came out this past January, I didn't run out to get it. But as I was perusing some of the new music videos on demand, I came across this one for the new single, "This Too Shall Pass." I thought immediately that the video was just aonther gimmick, but they actually re-recorded a live marching band doing the song. The all-in-one-shot video is also brilliant. I had to hear the album. I did. And it is very good.

For this record, OK Go brought in Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann and the sound is a quantum leap from Ok GO of old. Imagine the Lips, Prince and Beck getting together to cut an album and you'll get the idea behind Of The Blue Colour of the Sky. Some of the material, particularly "End Love" and "White Knuckles," sounds so much like vintage Prince, I think it would fool nearly anybody in a blind listen. And it's not just the music. Frontman Damian Kulash's falsetto and regular singing voice here is a dead ringer for Prince in the New Revolution era.

The key to this album is this: The band, particularly in their videos, come off a little too hip --perhaps even making an album of Prince-like dance party music is nothing more than an ironic goof off. But I don't get that feel. The material here sounds sincere. And the sounds Fridmann gets from the band are awesome. The music is dance, but the arrangements and sounds are not conventional. This is not another rock band pulling a Maroon 5 makeover for record sales. This is neat, at times challenging music that also happens to be danceable.

Next time I throw a dance party in my living room, I'm just going to put on Of The Blue Colour of the Sky.

Hot Chip: One Life Stand

The other band I found is Hot Chip. I'm really late to this UK dance electro group, which has had a string of top-10 singles and a Mercury nomination for its 2006 album The Warning. But dance electro is not something I usually go for (Though I liked Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers during the 6 months that electronica was popular).

Last weekend, I stumbled across a 16-minute clip of the band playing its hits since The Warning on the concert.tv on demand channel. My first impression of the band -- five guys who look like extras from Napoleon Dynamite in a line and all but one behind a a small keyboard or drum machine stand (one guy had a keyboard, but also had a Fender Telecaster strapped to his chest) -- was that the whole thing had to be a joke.

As the band launched into their first song -- the ridiculously catchy "Over and Over" from The Warning -- all five members started jerking to the thumping rhythm, as if only the necessity playing their keys and twiddling their knobs was keeping them from breaking out in a full-on display of hedonism. It was a really wierd thing to see. Did you really need five guys to make this music? But the more I listened, and watched, the more I became fascinated. This band was really something. And unlike a lot of duos and other electro acts, these five guys really were collaborating.

I got copies of The Warning and the new album One Life Stand, also released last month. Both are really pretty enjoyable. Hot Chip has an antiquated sound. The blips and chirps and Casio tones of the band recall Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, New Order and any other number of '80s electro bands. The synths sound like synths. The drum machine like a drum machine. Even the guitar is processed and digitized. The overall experience is at once timeless and contemporary. This is a new band doing things you haven't quite heard before but in ways that are familiar (if that's possible).2

After listening to both, and comparing the two, One Life Stand seems constrained. The single, "One Life Stand," like "Over and Over" is a great song, a pulsing rhythm with a very memorable chorus. It's dance pop excellence. It's the kind of thing that Hot Chip seems to excel at: The undeniably hooky song that you can't get out of your head -- the kind of thing you'd love to hear at a dance club.3 The album opener, "Thieves in the Night" is a real standout, too. In ten years, these guys will have an amazing greatest hits collection.

But as a whole, the album doesn't seem to hold together quite as well. At times the tracks are too slow or too long, the beats not quite killer or plaintive, high crooning of singer Alexis Taylor is too strained, too like a choir boy. In the end, there just isn't the energy of performance that seemed so apparent on the collection of performances from The Jools Holland show.

Still, this is an album is worth having, and I suspect it might grow on me with more listens. This is a band doing really interesting things -- taking a rock combo aesthetic towards electro dance music and coming up with really compelling music that requires closer listening than the average booty shaker. This is a band, after all, that can do this kind of music live, and do so in a way that is really exciting, mixing things up, improvising... the kind of thing that this sort of music so often lacks. Hot Chip is likely to give us more in years to come.

Footnotes:

1. 24 hours later as I finish this, the Blizzacane has mostly fizzled.

2. Since the '90s, the trend in guitars has been for the vintage 60s Fenders and Gibsons with little room for else. The sound of those instruments, the pure tone of the '60s were (are) musts. The pointy Japanese guitars that everybody played in the '80s were relegated to heavy metal and little more. Like the Old fenders, I suspect that the synth gear used by Hot Chip has a vintage value. The sounds are certainly vintage. The '80s were, after all, 30 years ago now.

3. There's always been an imaginary dance club in my head that plays stuff like Hot Chip, Chemical Brothers, Modest Mouse and Franz Ferdinand. I've never been to one like it.

The ascent of Taylor Swift: the rise of safe sex, country style

I was going to contemplate the Who's Super Bowl appearance in a post titled "The Who & The Super Bowl: Perfect Together," but I realized the sentence said all I needed. What more is there to write about the perfect combination of a juggernaut arena sport and the biggest, loudest arena band of all time? Column done.

Instead, I thought I'd explore something completely different: The dazzling super-fame and success of Taylor Swift.

I'm late to this party. And I have to admit that I have been exposed to virtually none of Taylor Swift's music before I set out to write this. In fact, I went on a brief listening bender of Swift to get a feel for her oeuvre (That's a line that would make Beavis snicker for sure). But, the thing that's interesting about Taylor Swift to me is that I suspect -- in fact I'm pretty sure -- that her music has virtually nothing to do with her success of the last year in which she's won more major music awards in a shorter period than any artist, ever.1

First, let's just assume for the sake of argument that in the world of country music Taylor Swift is really that good. I went and did a Youtube tour of Swift's hits and can find nothing remarkable about the music at all. It sounds like all of contemporary country, which is to say it is a music drained of anything compelling. There is no danger, no sex, no violence. There is no emotion more complicated than teen-aged longing.2 But let's just assume that Swift is the best of this sexless lot.

But that doesn't change the wonder of Swift's domination of all of popular music. Why Taylor Swift? Why has a country artist been lauded with Album of the Year and Best Video awards, muscling aside big hip hop, rock and R&B acts like Beyonce, Green Day, Lil Wayne and/or Jay Z?

Perhaps it's sales. If music awards truly were a popularity contest, then Swift deserved all her awards. Her Fearless was the top selling album of all of 2009. It is currently number 13 on the Billboard charts after 64 weeks. Cultural elites love to sniff at sales as obviously void of serious significance.3 But hey, a lot of people clearly like Swift. And a lot of people like Swift more than anyone else. That's gotta count for something, right?

Well I think it's a clue. The fact that Swift's album is the best selling record of 2009 means that she is liked by a very wide margin. She's sold more than 5 million albums in an era when people no longer buy albums. This is significant.

But What makes Swift so popuar?

First: Swift is irrefutably attractive. She's an ideal country crooner for 2010: tall, willowy, blond and beautiful. She favors dresses if not gowns. She's glamorous, never casual.

Second, and this might be counter intuitive in a nation that seems to be in a constant state of moral decline: Swift is very wholesome. She is not Pamela Anderson. In several videos I saw, Swift appears as a student -- an everygirl with an armload of books who has finally put the guitar down to go to class and pine for a young man, often portrayed by the kind of guy best described as an Abercrombie and Fitch model (who are not wearing cowboy hats). She has been linked to know controversy or slip of character that I can find.

Like a presidential candidate, Swift has become wildly successful by sticking to the middle of the road better than anyone else. She is inoffensive, modestly talented (or just talented enough) to sing her way to super stardom. Swift is an ideal of the middle road, an empty slate on which young and old can assign her a meaning: dream friend, dream daughter, dream girlfriend, etc. and so forth. It is easy to be infatuated with someone who has good looks and fails to offend.

What it means beyond Swift's super fame, is that country music has ascended to a remarkable position in popular American culture. This is not outlaw music anymore. Swift's mediocrity is not remarkable for the genre -- a genre in which all of the innovations have been cosmetic. Country music stars are all attractive and few traffic in the old gimmicks once expected of them (when was the last time a cowboy outfits really struck anyone as authentic?4). Swift's fame might have happened to any number of young, attractive and unoffensive songsters. What country has done is remade the classic "aw shucks" modesty into an affect that is both sexy and safe at the same time, at least when it isn't busy with boorish jingoism.

Could the trend continue? Have Americans really decided to part ways with the much more sexed and far less safe best-selling acts like Eminem, L'il Wayne and 50 Cent (see footnote 3) in favor of an idealized star, a pretty young blond from Pennsylvania preoccupied with teenage romanticism? The cynic in me believes that perhaps what country music is really offering is an alternative to white America that is free of nearly any trace of the urban, the immigrant and the brown. It's an alternative that is being gobbled up, too.5

But perhaps you don't have to be white to want your music sheltered from the underside of American culture that is so often pervasive in a lot of other forms of music, film and TV. Either way, Swift's popularity is remarkable. It marks something completely new, even if we don't understand all of it just yet.

Footnotes:
1. This is an un-researched conclusion, but its based on real numbers. Since 2006, Swift has been nominated for 86 awards and received 59 of them. In the last year she's swept the CMAs, BMIs and Billboard awards. She's won MTV awards and Grammys. She's even won an award in Thailand for international artist. By comparison, U2, the band that has won 22 Grammys -- more than any other music act ever -- has won 67 awards in 30 years of recording.

2. Is there a musical genre that has fallen farther than country? Country used to be all danger and violence. It told the story of primordial America in all its gritty horror. Don't believe me? Listen to the blind guitarist Doc Watson's Ballads from Deep Gap a collection of traditional country and blues songs full of murdered lovers, train crashes and shootouts. That, my friends, is country music.

3. This is quite true. The list of year-by-year est selling albums is a wasteland of mediocrity. In the '00s these are the best selling acts, beginning in 2000: N'Sync, Linkin Park, Eminem, 50 Cent, Usher, Maria Carey, High School Musical: the Soundtrack (!), Josh Grobin (!!!), Lil Wayne and Swift.

4. Which forces one to ponder: What the hell is wrong with Bob Dylan these days, anyway?

5. This is from Wikipedia on Country Music: While album sales of most musical genres have declined, country music experienced one of its best years in 2006, when, during the first six months, U.S. sales of country albums increased by 17.7 percent to 36 million. Moreover, country music listening nationwide has remained steady for almost a decade, reaching 77.3 million adults every week, according to the radio-ratings agency Arbitron, Inc.^[4][5]"