The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (5 page)

There were tapes on the street. And I had heard of another video tape with a girl who was part of an ongoing relationship. This is the girl who was in the tape that was in the lawsuit.

And some 40 people testified that it was her?

Yeah. Coaches, best friend’s parents, pastor, half the family, grandmother, aunt—but the mother and father never testified, the girl never testified. When we wrote our story about the tape, the girl and mother and father took a six-month vacation to the south of France. We’d been to the house several times. We’d rung the doorbell. This was an aluminum-siding, lower-middle-class house on the South Side, with a station wagon which is 13 years old—you know what I mean? And now they’re in the south of France. And one time the dad got a credit as a bass player on an R. Kelly album. He didn’t play bass.

The situations are incredibly complicated, and sometimes there is an element of, “We’re gonna exploit this situation for our favor.” That doesn’t mean that it’s legal or it’s right or that girl wasn’t harmed. It tore that family apart.

How many people do you think you’ve interviewed? How many people came
forward?

I think in the end there were two dozen women with various level of details. Obviously the women who were part of the hundreds of pages of lawsuits—hell of a lot of details. There were girls who just told one simple story, and there were a lot of girls who told stories that lasted hours which still make me sick to my stomach. It never was one girl on one tape. Or one girl and Aaliyah.

The other thing, the thing that people seem to not know: She was fresh out of eighth grade in this tape.

Fourteen or 15. That puts a perspective on it. She’s not sophisticated enough to know what her kinks are.

Let’s talk about what it is, aside from not just having reportorial chops, that might hold somebody back. I feel that a lot of younger journalists came up through blogs, not journalism school. They are fearful to write about it because they don’t know what they can say, what language they can use, if they can be sued for even acknowledging charges.

You may not know how to report, but you should know how to read. The
Sun-Times
was never sued for the hundreds of thousands of words that it wrote about R. Kelly. You cannot be sued for repeating anything that is in a lawsuit. You cannot be sued for repeating anything that was said during the six- or seven-week trial. It’s in his record, and then there’s Kelly’s own words. Then read [Kelly’s biography]
Soulacoaster
. It was not a pleasant experience for me to read
Soulacoaster
! But read it, and read what he says in his own book! Do your goddamn homework!

What are the other factors?

Here’s the most sinister. This deeply troubles me: There’s a very—I don’t know what the percentage is—some percentage of fans are liking Kelly’s music because they know. And that’s really troublesome to me. There is some sort of—and this is tied up to complicated questions of racism and sexism—there is some sort of vicarious thrill to seeing this guy play this character in these songs and knowing that it’s not just a character.

Songs like “Sexasaurus” make it novel. The ironic, jokey
Trapped in the Closet
series airs on the Independent Film Channel and features Will Oldham—that has these other hallmarks of “art” that read to a white, hipster, indie-rock audience.

It puts it in the realm of camp or kitsch. If you have an emotional reaction to a work of art and you use all your skills as a critic to back it up with evidence and context, that’s all we can ask of anybody. We’re all viewing art differently. The joy is in the conversation. Pitchfork is the premier critical organ in the United States for smart discussion of music, books, and artists, but it doesn’t have this discussion. The site reviews his records but doesn’t have the conversation about, “What does it say for us to like his music?”

I think, again, everybody has to individually answer. I can still listen to Led Zeppelin and take joy in Led Zeppelin or James Brown. I condemn the things they did. I’m not reminded constantly in the art, because the art is not about it. But if you’re listening to “I want to marry you, pussy,” and not realizing that he said that to Aaliyah, who was 14, and making an album he named
Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number
—I had Aaliyah’s mother cry on my shoulder and say her daughter’s life was ruined, Aaliyah’s life was never the same after that. That’s not an experience you’ve had. I’m not expecting you to feel the same way I do. But you can look at this body of evidence. “You” meaning everybody who cares.

You told me about the night after your critical review of R. Kelly’s performance at Pitchfork ran, one of these women called you at 2 a.m.

This happens a lot. If you are a good reporter, you are accessible to people and you cannot turn a story off. And that sucks! The number of times since I began this R. Kelly story that I was called in the middle of the night, was talking to someone on Christmas Eve or on New Year’s Day or Thanksgiving... Yeah, I got a call from one of the women after the Pitchfork Festival review. “I know we haven’t spoken in a long time,” and said thank you for still caring and thank you for writing this story, because nobody gives a shit.

It was a horrible day and a horrible couple of weeks when he was acquitted. The women I heard from who I’d interviewed, women I’d never interviewed who said, “I didn’t come forward, I never spoke to you before, I wish I had now that son of a bitch got off.” Jesus Christ. Rape-victim advocates—I don’t believe in god—they do God’s work. These young women who volunteer to be in the emergency room and sit with a woman throughout the horrible process, I don’t do that. I’m not saying I’m even in the same universe. But somebody calls you up and says I want to talk about this, or thank you about writing this, or, “I can’t sleep because I’m haunted, can you hear what I want to tell you?” We do that as a human being. I would like to forget about this story. I’m not saying I’m super reporter. I’m saying this was a huge story. Where was everybody else?

There is a disregard for your ongoing concern about this. “Let this go, Jim. Get over it, Jim. He was acquitted.” You have never dropped this, and your peers are pissed because it puts the rest of us over a barrel. I can speak to this, too. It’s often uncool to be the person who gives a shit.

“You’re jealous of R. Kelly, you’re trying to make your name off his career.”

Because you would love nothing more than to have to report and carry these stories of sexual assault.

It is on record. In the dozens. So stop hedging your words, and when you tell me what a brilliant ode to pussy
Black Panties
is, then realize that the next sentence should say: “This, from a man who has committed numerous rapes.” The guy was a monster! Just say it! We do have a justice system and he was acquitted. OK, fine. And these other women took the civil lawsuit route. He was tried on very narrow grounds. He was tried on a 29-minute, 36-second videotape. He was tried on trading child pornography. He was not tried for rape. He was acquitted of making child pornography. He’s never been tried in court for rape, but look at the statistics. The numbers of rapes that happened, the numbers of rapes that were reported, the numbers of rapes that make it to court and then the conviction rate.

I mean, it comes down to something minuscule. He’s never had his day in court as a rapist. It’s 15 years in the past now, but this record exists. You have to make a choice, as a listener, if music matters to you as more than mere entertainment. And you and I have spent our entire lives with that conviction. This is not just entertainment, this is our lifeblood. This matters.

PART TWO: REAL/FAKE

GAGA TAKES A TRIP

Nashville Scene
, April 2011

There’s this photo. In it, Lady Gaga is framed tight, center of the picture, shot from far away by staked-out paparazzi, perhaps hiding out behind a row of chairs or a ficus. There are blurred objects around the edges, and there are frames within the frames—distant glass security cordons. The dark, lumpy figure of a TSA agent looms to the left, hands near the star, extended rigidly, officially. Lady Gaga does not acknowledge the camera: She is not looking at it, but there is no part of her presentation that does not anticipate the camera’s gaze, and subsequently, ours as well.

Lady Gaga is taking a trip and has arrived at Los Angeles International Airport in full pop regalia. She is not like the other blond pop singers—Madonna or Jessica Simpson—who deplane in comfort sweats, their makeup-free faces looking strangely unfamiliar, a ponytail sticking out from their ball cap. Gaga does not dress like she is headed home from a yoga workshop even when flying across the continent. Gaga teases out the fan fantasy of the pop star by never dropping the act—she’s like a superhero, never appearing out of uniform. She never snaps us back to reality; we stay with her in the weird, glamorous world she has made real.

In this, she is conceding the duality of pop stardom: this is all surface and finessed-to-please presentation, an impossible manufacture. She one-ups all those who decry her work and platinum pop as not “real” music—because it’s all “fake”—by making it
the most fabulous fake that ever faking faked
. To be sure, Gaga’s “fake” is at least as real as the “real” of any self-conscious Brooklyn beardo ‘bout to be discovered by Pitchfork.

Here, amid her TSA-administered security screening, Gaga is looking spectacular—as in, like a spectacle, which is how we want her to be—and she is not disappointing. She is wearing perilously-tall (10-inch) Alexander McQueen snakeskin platform heels, which the designer is said to have modeled after an armadillo. Their fronts arch from the ankle in a smooth half moon that is blunted by the floor, like a toucan’s bill if it pointed down instead of out. They are leathery and gleam in the light, and they look unlike shoes anyone’s ever seen. Their protrusion is strange, but there is something natural to the line—it’s easy to think them as hooves. Gaga’s legs are covered only by what appears to be industrial-strength fishnet pantyhose that go up under her shiny black belt. Looped through the right front of the belt is a pair of metal handcuffs. Her flowing white wig cascades down to her stomach, she wears round, Lennon-style sunglasses, there is a phone in her hand. Most of her outfit is accessories, the only clothing she has on is a pair of “nude” bikini underwear and a bra, and a golden jacket, of which she is wearing only one sleeve, with the other half seemingly tucked into her back waistband—a curious slip of modesty to cover one’s ass while appearing nearly naked in public.

In this picture, we see Gaga as White Swan to out-of-control Britney Spears’ Black Swan. This outfit is similar to the one worn by Spears in summer of 2008, in one of the bleaker paparazzi shots taken during her lost years. A pale, blemished Spears is shown clad in ripped black fishnets, black cowboy boots, a black jacket, mini skirt hiked up her waist, revealing her blood-stained underwear. She wears oversized black sunglasses, and her hair is dyed black—her weave a ratted mess—and there is a phone in her hand. She is heading in to L.A. boutique Kitson for a private shopping spree at 2 a.m.

Though Gaga’s work is as platinum-perfect (perhaps even more so) as Britney’s, Gaga’s work is rife with irony and self-possession—she satisfies with a cultivated, purposeful strangeness. She should by all means be the Black Swan of the two, and as she plays with the idea of pop’s manufacture, she winks at us from atop her skyscraper heels. Being nearly nude in LAX, she obliges our most debased wish: to see celebrities naked, to ogle them, completely. She acknowledges the ironies, the ruptures, the fantasies of pop, and she abides by them as she rips them apart. In doing so, Lady Gaga shows that she understands the only real rule of popular entertainment: Give the people what they want.

DECONSTRUCTING LANA DEL REY

SPIN
magazine, January 2012

I. The Origin Story: A Star Is Born/Made

The myth, as it is presently understood: Lana Del Rey is a vanity project bankrolled by the singer’s dad and honed, over the years, by a series of lawyers and managers who’ve shaped her image and plotted her career path. She is a canvas of a girl and a willing one at that. Her real name is Lizzy Grant, “Lana Del Rey” is “fake,” as are her lips.

What we do know to be true: Lizzy Grant is indeed now Lana Del Rey. She is 25 and grew up in Lake Placid, in upstate New York. “I lived in a small town,” she told MTV, “and I just thought it was gonna be a long life.” She spent her time as a teen wandering in the woods and writing, feeling like a secret weirdo and having her first real connection to music through Biggie’s “Juicy.” Back then, she says she was something akin to trouble, and got shipped off to Kent, a private prep school in Connecticut. Her autobiography of that era can be heard on the track “This Is What Makes Us Girls.”

At 18, she moved to New York to attend Fordham University, where she studied metaphysics, looking for proof of God, and began writing songs. She stopped drinking and got sober. She played shows, performing versions of songs that now make up
Born to Die
. Just before her senior year, she found a deal with the small independent label 5 Points, through a songwriting competition. The label gave her an advance, which she used to move into a trailer park in New Jersey shortly after graduating from Fordham.

David Nichtern, who runs 5 Points, solicited producer David Kahne (who has worked with everyone from Paul McCartney to Sublime), who agreed to helm the Lizzy Grant record. “It was a bit of a coup because he is a big name, and we are a tiny record label,” says Nichtern. In the studio, Kahne saw in Del Rey a singer who was motivated and self-directed, always looking for ways to move her work forward. “What she’s doing goes against the grain of chart pop,” says Kahne. “The country is fraying at the edges; she wanted to look at that edge, at destruction and loss, and talk about it.” According to Kahne, Del Rey was “solitary” and often spent her nights riding the subway out to Coney Island, exploring.