Cat Power (22 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Goodman
From there, the album continues to display an impressive range of almost unbearably depressing songs (“Taking People,” “Water and Air”) alongside traditional tracks that sound ageless, like covers of old hymns or blues standards. On “They Tell Me,” for example, Chan sings the following lyrics with the collected sorrow of the generations of struggling Southerners who preceded her: “Maybe if I pray to the Lord above/I'll get some sleep/But the Lord don't give a shit about me.” As she had on both of her first two records, Chan also included covers on
What Would the Community Think
. She does a version of “The Fate of the Human Carbine,” an angry singsong track written by Peter Jeffries, as well as a cover of the Smog tune “Bathysphere,” which was written by reclusive folk-rock poet Bill Callahan, whom Chan met and started dating in early 1996.
The most compelling song on
What Would the Community Think
is also the most famous. “Nude as the News,” with its understated but urgent guitar sound, open, engaged vocals, and totally bizarre lyrics, became Cat Power's first hit. The song could be heard on college-radio stations nationwide, and in New York City during the late fall of 1996 it seemed like no one was playing anything else. The album was on constant rotation at Sounds and Kim's record stores on Saint Marks Place
in the East Village, vinyl copies were on the turntables at crowded loft parties in then-scary, arty Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and “Nude as the News” was the most frequently selected track on the jukebox at Lower East Side dive Max Fish. The song was released as a single (the B-side of which was a cover of Sonic Youth's “Schizophrenia” retitled “Schizophrenia's Weighted Me Down”) and was featured in Cat Power's first-ever music video.
Chan says that the phrase “nude as the news” is straightforward. “It just means reality. Like, Oops, there it is. That's all,” the singer has said. But the secret meaning behind the song has been one of the greatest mysteries to die-hard Cat Power fans. The song seems to be about everything from a hot crush (“I still have a flame gun/For the cute cute cute ones”) to ominous guys (“/ … in the cold light/There's a very big man”). For more than ten years, fans were free to speculate about the secret meaning of every line, but in an August 2007 interview with famed rock critic Greil Marcus published in
Interview
magazine, Chan confirmed that the song is really about the abortion she'd had when she was twenty and a conversation with Patti Smith.
“One song I've always wanted to ask you about is ‘Nude as the News,’” Marcus asked Chan in the piece. “There is something wonderfully psychotic about that song.” “I've never told anybody what that song's about… I wrote it when I was young,” she responded.
When I was making it up in my mind, I was feeling remorseful, I'd had an abortion when I was twenty. I felt guilt and the shame about that—which I still feel, but I've forgiven myself. I'd just seen Patti Smith perform for the first time—knowing that she had two children, her being a figure of feminine strength for me, connecting with her strength, wanting to
have it or work up to it and to fulfill my need for that strength, which I didn't have when I wrote that song. So it meant that I carry the soul of that child in me forever. I'm not real educated. There's a lot of societal anger: no education about when you get pregnant. There's self-hatred. I'm not the enemy; society didn't force me to have the abortion. But it's years of stories meshed into one triumphant one: I can carry the soul with me, hopefully, in my mind or my heart. Carry the soul with me. I've never told anybody this. So there it is, for the world to see.
In this same piece, Chan goes on to describe the two sides of herself as represented in “Nude as the News.” One side is weak and the other is strong. In Chan's mind, her weaker self is the one that felt she had no choice but to terminate her pregnancy. The strong self is the one that knew she had two options and chose the one that wouldn't turn her into a hopelessly young mom.
The protective second self… made me get the abortion, … made me get out of certain situations in my past, … helped me survive, and get away from the would-be father of the child. The first self… the child's self, the weak self, the dependent self, the naïve self, didn't have the strength.… The second self is like the stronger me, the woman me, rationalizing with human rights and women's rights, telling the child in me that it's going to be okay, having to be stronger than I am, in a way.
“Nude as the News” is the first Cat Power song that plainly reveals the deep conflict (in this case it's between strength and weakness, but
in other songs it takes different forms) at the center of Chan's music and her soul. With the release of this song, and the album on which it appears, an entirely new breed of intensely dedicated Cat Power fan emerged. They heard the conflict at the core of Chan's sound, at the core of her soul, really, and they related to it.
What Would the Community Think
is not a soothing record. It's actually Cat Power's most violent, angry work, a deranged epic filled with sadness, guilt, and defiance, a combination that worked like a salve on Chan's self-loathing teenaged fans. At first it wasn't a problem that Cat Power's new converts expected her to be at least as miserable as they were, because she was. Eventually, though, the pressure to consistently articulate
Community
levels of anguish became a problem for Chan, which was a problem for her
Community-
era fans, who needed her to be permanently sad.
Chan has never been very comfortable with the expectation of intimacy between artists and fan. It's precisely because her songs are so personal that Chan is mystified by why other people relate to them so completely. To her, the songs are intrinsically connected to memories or experiences that are so private as to be uninteresting to anyone but her. As a child, Chan's only real friends were the voices she heard coming out of her record player, but she has never been able to sense the parallel between how she felt about Billie Holiday or Smokey Robinson and how Cat Power fans feel about Chan Marshall.
Chan also thinks that her music is misinterpreted; she doesn't understand why everybody thinks her songs are so sad. “They're not sad, they're triumphant,” the singer has insisted. She will admit to
feeling
sad when writing some of the tracks on
Community
(and cites “King Rides By” as an example), but she insists that even in those moments, the song is always about accepting pain and celebrating the fact that you're strong enough to survive it. “That one's sad. Some of them are sad, but also at the same time, that one included, there's a thing about realization and acceptance, which is kind of a triumph. So they don't seem that sad. It's accepting something to yourself, and that gives you some kind of strength.”
