The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (18 page)

On the other three tracks, she’s don’t-give-a-fuck, she’s crazy, she’s partying, she’s doing her bitch-bad thing. It’s all very familiar-sounding-and-feeling, and it should be: “Wrecking Ball” gives co-writing credit to Sasha Karbeck, who helped pen “Born to Die” and “Paradise” for Lana Del Rey; also credited are Dr. Luke and Cirkut, the team behind (most recently) Katy Perry’s “Roar.”
Bangerz
is a precise album that flits between bombastic and turgid; it is not very fun.

It’s strange to think that anyone could find this record offensive or controversial. What are we even to extract from
Bangerz
about the interior life of someone who reported her true liberation was driving an Explorer down Philly’s South Street, a cheap chain standing in for her zipless fuck—a glance into a fantasy life unlived? Is her woman-spurned exultation as powerful as the version Katy Perry sells to us? Is her pathos as grand as Rihanna’s? Her pleasure as real?

Though Cyrus has a lovely, albeit generic voice, singing is not her truest gift; instead, it’s the sheer quality of her mirroring, the way she gives us exactly what we want in lethal doses, grinding against our most American horror. As Pharrell himself says in the new MTV doc
Miley Cyrus: The Movement
, “Why is she doing this? Because she’s a product of America.” She’s playing it like a rebel, but she’s simply being who we’ve goaded her to be.

NU AGE: ANIMAL COLLECTIVE AND BELL ORCHESTRE

Chicago Reader,
November 2005

To invoke the Minutemen:
Do you want new wave or do you want the truth?
Here we are, 20 years later, and the new wave sounds more and more like old New Age. We’re dealing with a fresh crop of musicians who pass off extreme indulgence as experimentalism and neck beards as a sign of higher consciousness. They cite barely Googleable influences so we won’t notice the similarities between them and, say, any popular jam band or latter-day solo album by a member of Tangerine Dream. There are a bunch of names floating around for this stuff—nu-folk, freak-folk, New Weird America—but I have my own: new-jack hippy-wave (when I am feeling gracious) or downtown bullshit city (the rest of the time). Why, you may ask, am I hating on both the player and the game? Simple: I do not like being lied to. And the truth is there is no new in this new.

Bell Orchestre, the all-instrumental chamber orchestra side project of Arcade Fire members Richard Reed Parry and Sarah Neufeld, might sell a gazillion copies of their debut,
Recording a Tape the Color of Light
(Rough Trade), based on association alone. It’s the sort of thing that might appeal to anyone looking for a more “sophisticated” variation on the irresistible pop drama we’ve come to expect from their other band. Though I hate to dash the hopes a 7.9 rating from
Pitchfork
instills, unless some consensual, messy frottage between Mike Oldfield and Jean-Luc Ponty is what you’re scouring the bins for, consider your parade urinated upon.

The bio that came with the BO record cites the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet, and Arvo Part as influences, which is not only wishful thinking but perhaps a touch perverted, even by the standards of publicist-spun hyperbole. Bell Orchestre has all the ingredients for classical gas—French horn, upright bass, violin and trumpet—but none of the dexterity or seriousness. They’re content with pomp and cheeze, the sort of ham-fisted slop best suited to close-ups of a windswept Leonardo DiCaprio on the deck of the Titanic or a 2006 off-road vehicle taking the corners of a majestic mountainside in a commercial. Sure: if you’re 19 and “House of Jealous Lovers” is your “Houses of the Holy,” then some dog-food-grade violin compositions kicked “disco” with brass and a 4/4 hi-hat beat might sound light years ahead as they pop out of your computer speakers. But let’s not sully the work of a 70-year-old Estonian composer known for his subtle dissonance by connecting it to some Suzuki-method yo-yos from Montreal.

Don’t get me wrong: Bell Orchestre has dynamics. Strings purr against some really funky chimes, then build, get quiet—and build again! And there’s unsubtle discord in the horn arrangements: the trumpet-French horn duel that drops like a wet turd from the sky a minute and four seconds into “Les Lumieres Pt. 2” sounds like a death match between first chairs in a high school band. It’ll make you wish they’d quit the song after Pt. 1. Recording melds the push-button dynamics and overwrought gesticulation of a
Billboard
-charting emo band with the edginess of a Windham Hill sampler, and if you’re thinking it doesn’t get much worse than that, rest assured: you are correct.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Brooklyn sits poor Animal Collective, a group whose best intentions have clearly curdled. Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist and Deakin issued four albums before their breakthrough 2004 release
Sung Tongs
. Their fresh dispatch,
Feels
(Fat Cat), is a muddled mess, and does the freak-folk ho show with which the band is associated no favors. Perhaps Geologist and Deakin—who didn’t participate on
Sung Tongs
but are now back in the mix—are to blame.

Feels fails in all the ways that
Sung Tongs
worked: Where their layered sound-on-sound psych-out was once deep and expansive, now it’s sloppy and impenetrable. These are hookless songs buried under a landslide of trebly collage. And with seven of the nine tracks running in excess of five minutes, it’s apparent that AC lacks not only any clue of how to build songs, but also the ability to control them.

Boring is one thing; trying to pass off massage music as experimental is another.
Feels
is the sort of album meant to be augmented by the sound of a $39 feng shui fountain percolating in the background, because nothing goes with a gurgling plug-in waterspout like songs with copious amounts of zither.

The only things keeping Animal Collective from losing their way in the mist are a couple of up-tempo tracks—”Did You See the Words” and “The Purple Bottle”—and the lyrics, which had me recalling (not so fondly) the first time I took acid, in ninth grade, and spent two hours dealing with a talking enchilada entrée. One minute they’re singing about staring into a mirror naked and the next they’re screaming about a hot tub: it’s like some Bret Easton Ellis nightmare starring Jim Morrison. Also, a note to whichever member is responsible for the eleventy-hundred tracks of piano on this album: dude, it’s cool to lay off the sustain pedal sometimes, nothing bad will happen. Especially when you’re already dealing with endless tracks of tape delay, loops of percolating bong hits, men imitating roosters, real birds chirping, dulcimer, pennywhistle, and a quartet of aesthetes channeling their spirit animals while a bell chimes in the distance.

Don’t be fooled into thinking Animal Collective’s recent collaboration with neofolk icon Vashti Bunyan is a sign of their psych authority—if
Feels
is to be taken at face value, they’ll be foisting Andreas Vollenweider on us next.

TYLER, THE CREATOR:
WOLF

SPIN
magazine, April 2005

It’s easy to understand why the Internet swooned so hard when Tyler, The Creator first floated along and pricked our bubble. In 2010, hip-hop was mostly a bunch of old, rich dudes resting hard on their old, rich-dude laurels; Odd Future were all manner of teenage lewdness, Fuck You heroes, too much talent and no dough. They were the punkest thing to happen to hip-hop since Jesus was a boy. At their molten center, Tyler emerged as a roach-swallowing
emcee terrible
, a seething-in-self-loathing, Eminem-weaned skate rat doling harsh tokes just for the delight of seeing olds squirm. He wasn’t interested in being hip-hop’s messiah as much as its smirking antichrist.

Last year, in these very pages, Tyler prepped us for the evolution we should expect on
Wolf
—now that he’s found success, he’s gotta rap about what he’s reaping; it would be disingenuous to front like he’s still sleeping on a couch. A quick inventory of what
Goblin
-success wrought: a four-story house, European model pussy, QT with Bieber. He fessed that he’d grown weary of that imma-rape-you steez, so there’s none of that here (it’s cool brah, Rick Ross got you covered). Tyler’s created tangible distance from the bratty rage of, say,
Bastard
’s “AssMilk,”—the girls on
Wolf
are all alive and willing.

The album loosely follows a discursive story involving Tyler’s alter-ego, Wolf, and his id, Sam, and a shared love interest, Salem. The story occupies maybe half the album—it’s sometimes hard to parse the characters, aside from that Sam is a bit of a
Bastard
throw-back, with his murderous bent and punctuating lines with “faggot.” The stories sparking point, “Awkward,” is one of
Wolf
’s highlights. An epigrammatic love story born of a mall date, Tyler’s voice pitch-shifted down to his Wolf-growl, he gets goofy on a girl whose eyes are the color of weed and makes entreaties for hand holding over analog synth ambience. “You’re my girl, whether you like it or not,” he pouts.
Wolf, what have you done with our beloved brat, Tyler?

He soon reappears, unfortunately. As good as “Awkward” is, like much of the album, it feels like an audition; Tyler flaunts his range as a producer and MC, clearly vying to transcend the shock-and-awe rep that has preceded him. But for much of the rest of
Wolf
’s woefully uneven, wildly indulgent, 18-track slog, that rep drags him, and us, back down. All that is alive and compelling here (say, the RAMP-smooth soul-jazz posse cut “Rusty”) begins to dissolve as we pass the 60-minute mark. While a duet between Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Frank Ocean sounds promising on paper, it comes at the end of the nearly eight-minute song suite “PartyIsntOver/Campfire/Bimmer,” which, by the time you’ve reached the Bieber-rejected closing third, feels like it’s about 16 BPM and slowing.

There is some dexterity within
Wolf
’s production—the antic “Tamale,” is the kind of M.I.A. song M.I.A. doesn’t make anymore, “Trashwang,” is a skittering, trap-parody posse cut featuring Trash Talk that approximates the anarchy of vintage Odd Future. But cuts like “48” sound like a tribute to diminishing-returns era N*E*R*D. It’s a weird look for a kid that is supposedly hip-hop’s vanguard, to be so caught up in work that sounds like it’s sole purpose is to impress Pharrell by approximating his style. The album crests early with “Awkward,” the single “Domo23,” and “Answer,” which all run back to back, and then runs another eight songs until we can discern a pulse again on the Earl verse of “Rusty.”

While it’s inarguable that Tyler’s become more sophisticated as a producer, he’s clearly trying to prove and disprove our understanding of his image, and at a loss for how to orient himself now that he’s cosseted by a rabid fanbase and an awed, fearful industry that he’s spent the last few years flipping off. Tyler’s whole story was how this skate-rat outsider made the
Billboard
Top 10 on a record he made in a garage with his friends. Now he’s ceded all of that to become the ultimate insider—making studio albums with marquee names (Pharrell, Erykah, his Grammy-nommed homie Frank Ocean), boasting of his money and copious tour strange, whining about the burdens of fame. “Colossus,” for example, uncharitably bristles at his Stans, who sound like regular, engaged, reasonable fans, but are nonetheless dismissed here as posers and, yes, “fags.”

Which brings us to
Wolf
’s most grievous misstep, and its one true spiritual connection to the superior
Bastard
and
Goblin
: Tyler’s defiant use of the word “faggot.” As usual, he spends a ton of time here bragging about how little he cares about how the world sees him, but his reliance on the other f-bomb to keep our attention suggests otherwise. In a recent
LA Weekly
interview, he dismissed concern about the slur: “I wasn’t using ‘fag’ to refer to gay people. If I call a piece of lettuce a faggot, am I homophobic? I might be anti-lettuce, but….” Now, on “Domo23,” he brushes off the almost-protest that marred his appearance at last year’s Pitchfork Festival, holding up his proximity to queerness (scoffing at those critics “claiming I hate gays even though Frank is on 10 of my songs”) as proof he’s not a homophobe.

He may not be—and that’s the rub. Tyler’s trying to have it both ways: going for cheap shots and playing ignorant, as if a straight boy can recontextualize a slur that has been used to humiliate and dehumanize gay people for decades, despite using the word
just like the people who mean it
do. On
Wolf
, he banks on the word’s awful power to show us what a bad boy he still is, which is tantamount to saying “faggot” and actually meaning it. We showed Tyler where it hurts and so that’s where he sticks the knife. He degrades the value of his own art for the sake of seeming raw, the same old unfiltered Tyler.

That Tyler brand identity depends on outrage and rejection by scandalized adults. Odd Future has always been about exclusion, about making sure that there is a dividing line between Them and Us, and if you don’t get it, the joke is on you. But in an era where the queering of hip-hop is the genre’s biggest story (ironically, one that Odd Future’s out members Syd the Kid and Frank Ocean helped foment), Tyler’s insistence on using “fag” just to show how transgressive he is leaves him in the dust, as the real punks (Le1f, Angel Haze, Mykki Blanco, Frank, et al.) truly advance the game. Tyler’s increasing fame has made him unremarkable; his desperation to be shocking has reduced him a joke.