The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (25 page)

Audiences want confessional bits from rock icons, and expect them from female singer-songwriters. Clark doesn’t give them up easily, but
Strange Mercy
is being called “candid.” The singer is still cagey, though there is discernibly more of her on here. Was it intentional?

“Was I trying to be candid? Hmm.” She munches an apple and considers what to say. “I want to give you answers, but I am also aware this is to be printed in a magazine, so I’m at a bit of an impasse. But I don’t want to give you a rote answer, though that rote answer is quite true. There are songs here that are very, actually, candid. But I won’t say which those are.”

Although she hemmed over making her art more personal, the candor came naturally, which she characterizes as scary. She didn’t have as much time or ability to dress up or intellectualize what was coming out of her, so some songs remained as visceral as they were when initially written. “2010 was a rough year. Tough stuff. Rough time. When life was actually hard, I had less time to wring my hands about music. It got to be what it should be, a great thing—a replenishing thing.” She adds, apologetically, “Not to use a spa word.”

Much has been made of the album closer, “Chloe in the Afternoon,” which is somewhere between “Afternoon Delight” and Anaïs Nin, lyrically; it depicts soft sadism with a girl in a hotel room. Is Clark put off by how this one song has resulted in people calling
Strange Mercy
“sexual”? “It’s not like I should have called the record ‘
Get Down to Fuckin,’
” she laughs. “I think people focus on something like that because it’s titillating.” Given that female performers often have their work sexualized, regardless of whether their work is sexual or not, was she hesitant to make a song so blatantly erotic? “I was more reluctant to write a song about that power/sex/domination trifecta, that murky water where it all swims around together,” she says. “That felt more complicated than it being about something sexual.”

If there is a theme to be found on
Strange Mercy
, it involves dissolving an identity, or another person’s idea of that identity. Clark’s modesty is belied by her awareness of and use of her own image—as a beautiful woman, as a gossamer shredder of skill and confidence, as a woman in charge of her career, as a popular singer of pop songs. She knows what she is working with. She understands the machinations of fame, of why her audience likes (and loves) her; she is careful but solicitous enough with the press that pokes at her. “I have one answer for you if the tape recorder is on, and another if it’s off,” she says when asked about her awareness of her own image. “That’s my answer there.”

Still, Clark says she feels like a fraud much of the time. “It’s complicated to exist in the world—everyone feels that, whether or not you have a modest amount of notoriety,” she says. “I was reading this Miranda July piece in
The New Yorker
, and it ends with a line about how feeling like an adult also means feeling like a fraud. I think if anyone has any kind of self-awareness, they’ve felt like a fraud—with other people or in relationships. I feel that way. And maybe it’s more powerful to put that out there. To just own that, then to keep being, like, ‘Watch me sing and dance, I’ve got all the bases covered, don’t worry.’”

The singer’s measured control seems to keep her from truly letting it all (or, even, some of it) hang out. She credits her politeness to her mother, whom she describes as a saint, and to her cultural inheritance as a Texan. She says she learned the value of professionalism from her aunt and uncle, the folk duo Tuck & Patti, whom she toured with as a teen. “It’s not the ‘80s or the ‘90s anymore; it’s not a gravy train,” she says of the music business. “If you want to have a career for a long time, you need to act right. I know it’s counterintuitive to the whole rock ‘n’ roll thing, but I have never acted like I was a person who was so unimpeachably great that I could afford to be an asshole to people, nor would I want to be. I take it seriously.”

To be a rock star involves more than just charisma, or good songs, or talent (talent usually least of all). One must be a capable player and have an appealing image—and, perhaps, most of all, a clear confidence that one deserves to be in front of an audience. In that regard, Annie Clark is a natural-born rock star; she just happens to be working below the arena radar. She doesn’t disagree. “There are plenty of things I am not confident about, but
this
I can do.”

CAT POWER:
SUN

SPIN
magazine, September 2012

Chan Marshall insists that her ninth album isn’t political, but in America in 2012, what’s more politicized than the right to live as you please?
Sun
is hardly sloganeering, but its Power to the People ruminations are more potent and topical than you’d expect from a pop record—and certainly one made by Cat Power.

You’d think a polemic dispatch from the thick of Koch Brothers-fuelled culture war might result Cat Power hitting new depths of emotional dispossession, but lo! Marshall instead loses some of her famous ethereal malaise and conjures vampy disdain. There is a power to it; it is empowered. Which pushes
Sun
away from the rest of her discography (
Moon Pix
, for example), in that Marshall now sounds engaged with the pain of the world, no longer a mere interpreter of (her own) malady. Even her most joyous album,
The Greatest
, seemed to amount to stylized pain with the doomed singer as a medium, a conduit harmed by all that she was divining. No one expected valedictory rebirth—’specially her, as she implies on opener “Cherokee,” that if her time here is cut short, it will be by her own hand, given her request to be buried upside-down—an 18th-century practice to prevent suicides from haunting the earth. Touching on her own mortality before she hits her album’s second verse is the only predictable Cat Power move Marshall makes here.

But that life-or-death bit isn’t morbidity so much as candor.
Sun
sheds the myopia inherent in depression; Marshall repeatedly insists that she’s here, with us, and it feels like a revelation. It’s a Mary J. Blige power position, self-assured and strong (the first line of “Cherokee” quotes the Missy Elliott-penned “Never Been,” from Blige’s
No More Drama
). What we get is not so much a new Cat Power as the true Cat Power: She’s been to the brink and emerged on the other side to share her testimony. Akin to her profligate Miami neighbor Rick Ross on his own latest, Marshall is showing us her consciousness, her empathy—if her tears are there, they’re on the inside.

This record is more about “you” and the collective “we,” and on “Human Being,” she attempts to shred the distance between “them” and “us”: “See the people on TV / Get shot in their very own street / People just like you, people just like me.” The album’s denouement, “Nothin But Time,” opens with a similar I-feel-you salvo:

I see you, kid, you got the weight on your mind
I see you’re just trying to get by

Heart-heavy but with her hope still afloat, she affirms and names the kid’s pain; it’s a different kind of vulnerability than what we’re used to from her. Later, she sings, “Never never give up what you always wanted / Never ever give in,” and the
you
’s turn to
I
’s. She caps the song ecstatically, bellowing “I wanna live!” alongside Iggy Pop, but nine songs in, she’d already disabused us of any doubt.

Musically,
Sun
is a new trick for Marshall as well. A tribute to her belief that contemporary R&B has the power to salve, the self-produced album’s sound is closer to the street and further from the bedroom. There is still some guitar (Marshall’s lead on “Cherokee”, the Judah Bauer-sampling “Ruin”), but the record is driven by synths-and-drums slinkiness, Marshall’s attempt to mimic the contemporary Top 40 hip-hop and soul records she loves. And though it’s still probably best qualified as “indie”—as it is not crystalline and Katy Perry-fied—it possesses none of the sonic modesty that tag usually shorthands. It’s closer to Gaga than Grimes, but no less for it’s allegiances. “Ruin” builds on a house-y piano 8, and then explodes into a disco-Stones vamp. Finally, a Cat Power song you can dance to.

Elsewhere,
Sun
’s title track could work as the plot synopsis for Lars von Trier’s
Melancholia
; on “Ruin,” she “wants out / Want on my own,” and follows that up with “Always on My Own,” which is more a dirge-y interlude than a song, the titular sentiment delivered more as a statement of fact than a complaint. The album’s one throwaway is “3,6,9,” notable for its Ying Yang Twins quotation: The lyrical “monkey on my back” cliché is beneath her, and anyway, fans tend to over-marvel whenever an indie darling even acknowledges hip-hop, though Marshall’s been a vocal proponent for years. (She’s probably listening to some lesser DJ Khaled posse cut as you read this.)

Speaking of which, album closer “Peace and Love” has the same locomotive chug as her beloved Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” but in treacle-time with minor chords, though her Hova-esque, rags-to-riches ambition suggests she’s harder than we think: “I’m a lover but I’m in it to win,” she crows, lest you mistake someone with nine albums as unmotivated. On the quite perfect single, “Ruin,” she tacitly tackles first-world privilege, quasi-rapping (!) a range of far-flung locales she’s visited—”Dhaka / Calcutta / Soweto / Mozambique / Istanbul”—over a swift 4/4 stomp, before returning to God Blessed America, where people are “bitchin’, moaning” despite the fact that “some people ain’t got shit to eat.” It’s the sort of sneering indictment you expect from M.I.A., not the woman who wrote the louche’s anthem “Lived in Bars.”

But
Sun
’s absolute standout is “Manhattan,” a quiet meditation on the island’s pre-9/11 meaning, with the Statue of Liberty framed as the metaphorical woman behind a successful Man(hattan), a beacon of freedom that lures people from all over America (and the world) with the promise that you can be who you want to be here. It’s subtler than patriotism; the abstraction is a nostalgic ruing for that old-fashioned American freedom (not the 2012 GOP’s hijacked late-stage-capitalism-amok-in-your-uterus version), the sort that might entice a young girl to move up from Georgia with just a lamp, a chair and her guitar.

This is the album’s heart, with Marshall cooing her thrall for the moon that hangs above the city over a soft, motorik beat: “Liberty in the basement light / Free speech / Lipstick in the moonlight.” It’s liberty as we learned it in school: The chance to live the life of your secret dreams, unencumbered by who you were in another town, a different life, to come to this place where freedom is so free you can take it for granted. The song is full of sweetness and a knowing sadness, and it’s one of the finest Marshall’s ever written.

Recent Cat Power profiles and early
Sun
reviews take pains to mention a recent breakup with a bold name that happened three years after this self-guided, self-recorded odyssey of Marshall’s began; we’ve made assumptions, despite her insistence that
Sun
isn’t a breakup album. (Said assumptions are forgivable, of course: Soft agony has been her idiom since the ‘90s.) But it’s clear that her years spent bringing this record into the light—perfecting her own drumming so she could sample it, building songs bit by bit from the eagle drop on “Cherokee” to the chinging castanets on “Peace and Love”—made her vision that much stronger. Marshall has admitted she wept when someone at Matador told her the album’s early demos sounded like “old, sad Cat Power.” You can hear the fight to be understood, to show us not who she was, but who she is: a free woman in Miami, to misquote Joni Mitchell, fettered and alive.
Sun
is a spirited violation of what we think we know about her, content to show us a different kind of discontent.

SWF, 45: MECCA NORMAL’S
THE OBSERVER

Chicago Reader
, April 2006

Mecca Normal’s new album,
The Observer
, is hard to listen to. Not for the usual reasons—it doesn’t suck. What makes it tough going is the same thing that makes it great: subtitled “A Portrait of the Artist Online Dating,” it’s so mercilessly personal it’s hard to believe it can exist in the pop-music marketplace, let alone anywhere outside of a diary. A concept album about Jean Smith’s romantic life as a single woman of 45, it develops a grim, intimate picture of the solitary struggle for connection that doesn’t go easy on anyone—not Smith, not the men she dates and certainly not the audience.

The pop canon is full of songs about romantic longings and failures, so that we’ve been conditioned to expect certain story arcs, delivered in each genre’s codified language—blues and its backdoor men, contemporary R&B and its baby boos, classic rock and its lonely motel rooms. There’s pleasure in having our sufferings and hopes reaffirmed, however approximately, by such archetypes. But Mecca Normal, the Vancouver duo of Smith and guitarist David Lester, have spent two decades hammering away at musical and social convention. They’re overtly political artists—anarchist-feminists both, they’ve developed a traveling workshop called “How Art and Music Can Change the World”—and their loose, abrasive, drumless songs don’t rest easily in any genre. And even coming from them,
The Observer
is startling.

When we listen to music it’s natural to try to relate to the singer’s experience or inhabit it as our own, but getting invited along on Smith’s blind dates and hookups is discomfiting to say the least—as a storyteller, she skips the niceties and just plunks everything down on the table. “He tries to put the condom on / He curses / I try to see what he is doing,” she sings in her low, acidic croon. “But I’m pinned beneath him / I hear him stretching the condom like he’s making a balloon animal.”