twitch and giggle

            “Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd,” observed scraggly-locked Soul Asylum front man Dave Pirner in “Black Gold,” maybe round about 1992. I left my apartment this morning in 2012 to see what all the hoopla was about, maneuvering myself into one of those real sidewalk cloggers that seem to spontaneously converge out of nowhere on every like fourth block in lower Manhattan. Twelve people or so congregated around a street corner. But when I broke the semicircle, I found just a bunch of people. I mean a bunch of apparent strangers just standing around. Not communicating, not gawking, not praying or freestyle rapping, not doing any discernable thing that might necessitate a circular ensemble. Twiddling on phones and rummaging through purses. A truly self-perpetuating crowd, and now it had me.

          Incidentally, I imagine this is pretty similar to the experience of your average awards show audience. A collective of media people all gussied up in unnecessarily formal wear, kind of just sitting there, kind of just waiting for something to happen. Aside from the regular interjection of a few theme parkish FX-heavy performances (e.g. performances inducing that glazed over stupor yours truly always gets when too many pyrotechnics are involved) this seemed to be the general consensus at the 54th Grammy Awards. Turn head toward loudest/brightest thing. Clap.

            But we who deal in precious cultural capital have known this for a while, right? When I say that awards shows are inconsequential industry indulgences mostly for the purpose of selling stuff, I’m just being cliché or extremely slow on the uptake.

            Still, even the indie-est among us could appreciate the endearing charms of a few of this year’s performances. Frankly bowtied Bruno Mars swinging it like a little Ritchie Valens had me nostalging all over the place, ditto Taylor Swift pretending to be a barefoot bumpkin in what felt like some old timey incarnation of the Opry or a Cracker Barrel restaurant.

         There were the questionable acts. I’m not sure why Katy Perry was dressed like a Power Rangers villain, for one. I don’t know very much at all about the events surrounding Nicki Minaj and that priest, but I’m still too riddled with residual embarrassment to ask. What I do know, however, is that there was no need for this.

            Now if you haven’t spent an extended amount of time in an elite east coast borrough (e.g. Brooklyn, about two blocks flanking the Penn campus in Philly, pretty much all of Metro Boston) then you might not have picked up on the subtle condescension fest happening somewhere between the tie clip and comb over.

            I like Bon Iver. I think his goopy heartfelt singer-songwriter stuff is swell. But what’s upsetting about his remarks concerning how “hard” it was to accept the Best New Artist award and the other artists who “will never be there” is not that they are critical, or even that they are hypocritical. It’s that they are accusatory in a really unverifiable way.

They suggest a certain superiority of spirit or purity of intent associated with small label musicians vs. commercial musicians. Which, let’s face it, is probably true. When a mammoth production conglomerate isn’t bribing you with the greens, yeah, integrity comes a lot easier.

But it’s not necessarily true, is the point. We all traffic in something. Whether it’s cold cash or cultural savvy, ulterior motives of varying insidiousness can infect artists at either pole of the production scale. Listen to the juvenile—I’ll call them—sounds of Animal Collective’s appraised Merriweather Post Pavillion or the almost practiced peasant humility of Fleet Foxes’ outrageously pastoral debut. Making art for the purpose of being avant garde—for the purpose of being an artist, is no better than making for the purpose of getting paid.  It’s just harder to pin down than Nicki Minaj during an exorcism.

Heather Baysa

  

Sex, God, and Katy Perry

It’s the title of a Rolling Stone cover story that I never bothered to read. However, I did discuss it at length. It happened at one of those NYU parties where conversation picks up a near competitive edge to vomit forth (figuratively and literally) the single most calculated and alienating cultural reference there is. For some reason an emerald bottle of Midori was the only drink available. Not in the mood for the circle jerk (only figuratively this time) of deliberate musical obscurity that was quickly turning ugly as it moved toward a heated discussion of new wave Brit electro-acoustic folk, I downed a saccharine shot, turned to my friend, and started to talk about the first thing in my line of hazy vision: “Huh, check out at that story! Couldn’t you think of so many great subtitles for that?” Here is what two desperate aficionados of low culture came up with.

Sex, God, and Katy Perry: Things that have disappointed us.

There’s a reason Katy Perry looks familiar, and it’s not just the freakish Zooey Deschanel doppelganger thing, either. From the time when she engaged in that lingerie-clad pillow fight at Escort Service Barbie’s dream house, or wherever 2008’s “I Kissed a Girl” video is supposed to take place (which does not, incidentally, include any kissing of any girls) to when she staged that heroic reconnaissance mission to save her candy-coated gal pals from evil Snoop Dog in last June’s “California Girlz,” two things are for sure: the Hasbro company loves her more than you ever will, and you’ve seen her somewhere before. And that place, of course, is everywhere.

Sex, God, and Katy Perry: Things tailored to sustain a cult following.

 Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, better known as Katy Perry, traffics exclusively in pop music clichés. That’s why that seemingly unfounded feeling of comfort and familiarity is so pervasive when we see our now sun-scorched darling belting belated adolescent devotion from a top-down convertible in the video for “Teenage Dreams.” The phenomenon borders on kitsch—candy as sexual innuendo, a Nicholas Sparks quality WWII romance via the “Thinking of You” video—and is always delivered with a wink and a smile. But whose wink and smile is it?

There’s no denying that Perry herself has a sense of humor. Her tongue is usually so far in her cheek that it might hemorrhage. But what’s more interesting is that we know she is self-aware because she blatantly tells us so:

 “I don’t take myself seriously,” she said on her YouTube Interview special in July, “I mean I know when to be serious, like during a serious moment like in “Thinking of You,” but in “California Girlz” it’s just a fun song with stupid purple wigs.”

Even Katy Perry’s background waxes ironic. The always-suggestive sometimes-sexually ambiguous singer was raised performing gospel music in a Santa Barbara Evangelical Christian household. But this is nothing new for a modern pop star. The difference is that while Britney would stare straight-faced into a camera and tell us that “Hit Me Baby One More Time” was about Jesus, and even a significantly feistier Christina had to fulfill her quota of genie metaphors before she could really get “Dirrty,” Katy Perry does not act oblivious to the subtext of her songs, at least not without a sly glance to let us in on the joke.

Perry doesn’t pretend because she doesn’t have to. In this way she signifies the last dying vestiges of the female pop princess illusion. With massive YouTube and social network exposure—Katy Perry is particularly active on Twitter and has openly admitted to Googling herself on regular basis—it’s almost as if she knows that if she were to pretend to be a virginal songstress, stubbornly adhering to the role as her predecessors have, no one, not even the most gullible, would buy it. So Katy Perry still plays the part with every doe-eyed bat of her unnaturally thick lashes, but manages to break the fourth wall often and with delight. Her existence is homage to the prototypical innocent girl fantasy in and of itself, whether she has constructed it to be or not.

Sex, God, and Katy Perry: Things that start wars.

It is her willing, docile adherence, I think, to following the tradition of these pop clichés that makes Katy Perry simultaneously embraced by the mainstream and reviled by critics. When you think of “branding” in terms of Katy Perry, you might sooner imagine it’s something she does with her fiancé behind closed doors (but please, let’s not). One of the main complaints about her as an artist is that she has no concrete image to set her apart from the crowd. And this is true. Katy Perry avoids extremes like the staff at Pitchfork must avoid her albums.  Music enthusiasts could easily argue that her career is of little consequence because she is not different than any other singer in any very significant way. But this sameness is exactly what makes her so important. Here’s what I mean.

Sex, God, and Katy Perry: One of these things is not like the others.

Let’s look at Lady Gaga, just briefly, or this will become a whole different essay. Gaga is extreme not only in the sense of her artistically compiled outfits and avant garde stage theatrics, but in that, unlike Perry, she will never grant us that curt nod that let’s us know it’s all a joke. Gaga would rather be enigmatic than coy. Similarly, on the other end of the spectrum, Ke$ha is so over the top as her occasionally-repulsive, second wave feminist character type that there is hardly any question at all that she must be kidding with us. Ke$ha is that annoying guy who makes the “bu-dum-chhhh” sound after someone tells a joke.

The problem with Katy Perry, then, is that she falls somewhere in the middle. She is nowhere near as serious about her persona as Gaga (as evident in her Alejandro-esque bra of whip cream ammo in the “California Girlz” video) and far more subtle (read: she actually sings) than Ke$ha and her whiskey-saturated slurs. Her outfits are crazy, but not as crazy. Her lyrics are suggestive, but not as suggestive. She is not “Hot ‘N Cold” but pretty much lukewarm, pretty much all the time.

 Katy Perry, then, is the perfect amalgamation of all these personality extremes once they have lost their shock value and become streamlined. And this makes her the ideal postmodern pop star. As a cultural artifact, she represents cheeky irony as an artistic component so commonplace and so involuntary that the artist herself might not even know that that’s what she is doing.

Sex, God, and Katy Perry: These are a few of my favorite things.

 This is why, I think, it is antithetical to cultural understanding to hate Katy Perry, or at least irrelevant. It’s kind of like hating Stephanie Meyer or Katherine Heigl. Their work itself is unremarkable, sure, but the mass popularity of the work is what tells us something important about our society. If it weren’t them, it would just be someone equally inane in their place. Katy Perry shows us that even post Britney, we are still not ready for realist pop hits. Her brand of escapism is at once indulgent and at the same time conspiratorial. We all—and that ‘all’ probably includes Perry’s producers—know that we are willfully engaging in the nostalgia of coyly suggested sexuality when we listen to Katy Perry or watch her videos. And perhaps this faux-innocence is comforting to people, especially now that sex is commonplace in the mainstream.

Still, Katy Perry’s custom Dr. Luke spun hits are undeniably catchy. Her voice is pleasant to listen to. She’s quite a looker. So why the critical disdain? Lack of substance? She has already told us that she is about fun, not substance. Lack of authenticity? This is the internet age of Facebook constructed self-advertising; we don’t even know what that is. But if sometimes wanting to dance along to “Waking up in Vegas,” instead of discussing the merits of  the latest experimental electro-whatever still induces a pang of shame, just take a tip from ole’ KP and pretend it’s all ironic. Top it off with a wink and a smile.

Heather Baysa

     

The Introduction. The About Me. The only self-indulgent troubled adolescent-type essay I will publish, I promise.

I guess you could say Jess Cheeseman got a good deal on her first car, all things considered. Neon flashing warning signs: the fact that she negotiated the deal entirely in novice-level Portuguese at the Brazilian car dealership, that there was a crucial five second delay on the brakes (which eventually gave her the preternatural ability to memorize the time lapse of all the local traffic lights), and possibly most hazardous of all, that there existed merely an ominous, gaping hole where we could only assume the old Camry’s radio was once fixed. A perplexing rainbow of wires protruded from the abyss, tangled and frayed at the ends. There was no way the unit was removed professionally like the salesman tried to tell us. That shit was stolen. Hastily.

 This was how I became adept at holding my big obtrusive Sony boom box on my lap in the passenger’s seat whenever my high school best friend and I drove around town. I would clumsily DJ from my mammoth black CD binder and reposition the long retractable radio antenna out of the window, which, unfortunately, had to be kept cracked at all times that snowy February just to channel the fuzziest reception. It was a makeshift solution, not to mention humiliating when Cheeseman and I passed kids from the next town over in their brand new jeeps or candy-colored VW beetles with actual working sound systems. But it was also necessary. Driving without music was boredom unthinkable. That first day with the car we rolled down all the windows—hand cranked, you know it— despite the cold and blasted The Clash’s “Brand New Cadillac”. It was bitter and sneering and perfect and relentlessly defiant. It sounded the way that town felt.

Some expressions mean different things in Riverside, New Jersey than they do anywhere else. “Doing nothing” in New York, for instance, means kicking back a few at the downstairs dive bar or ordering in some low key take-out with friends. “Doing nothing” in Garden State, Zach Braff’s grossly fetishized depiction of the good ole’ Dirty Jerz, always meant adventurous sojourns to freight yards and supreme self-actualization. But “doing nothing” in Riverside, now that was tedium of the highest order: dull, grating, and inevitable. Sitting in basements, sitting in rec rooms, sitting in garages, sitting on the smokers’ bench in the park before the township took that away, too. The curfew for anyone under 18 was 10pm most nights. A group of five or more minors seen together on the street was legally considered a gang and subject to police questioning. It was troublesome ordinances like these that accounted for at least two of my three high school arrests. But essentially Riverside was unremarkable—small and insignificant and painfully working class, just like we felt living there.

The redeeming part of that town though was the irrational loyalty it seemed to cultivate between you and the people you were friends with. We shared the same background—we had all lived there for the past 18 years—and we shared the same fears for the future—that we would all live there for the next 18 years. We liked stealing stuff and we liked drinking in public places and being loud for no good reason and food from diners after 3am. We liked each other. We liked Joe Strummer.

The Clash’s London Calling album was the soundtrack to the latter half of my high school career.  Each morning I would wake up to the title track spinning in my CD alarm clock. I’d roll into the same ripped jeans from yesterday and duct-taped together Converses before walking across town to Cheeseman’s house, bouncing along to the sound of “Hateful” or “Spanish Bombs,” two distinctly poppy tunes about two distinctly un-poppy subjects. In the Camry we would play “Clampdown” until we got to school. Then again in the parking lot. Then again through my walkman headphones in homeroom when the class stood to say the pledge of allegiance each morning. On Wednesdays, when the students in the extensive JROTC program would come to school in pressed olive green uniforms, or when the school’s resident military recruiters would approach me in the cafeteria, I would arm myself with “The Guns of Brixton,” and smolder along in general disillusionment.

“Why don’t you just join JROTC?,” someone once asked me. The glorified basic training program thrived on making recruiters out of otherwise nice normal public school slackers. “There’s no service requirement, and you get to skip gym class.”

That question provided the only opportunity I’ve ever had to quote my then-favorite lyric from the album.

“Well, you know what they say Ryan, ‘He who fucks nuns will later join the church.’”  I got written-up (To this day I don’t know what exactly the implications of being “written-up” were) when a teacher overheard, though at least I felt like I had done Joe proud.

But all nun fucking aside, The Clash had become the solid foundation of my melodic, British, alarmingly pugnacious ideology. It was a sure departure from what many of the other people in my high school were listening to, which seemed to be a Fergalicious era amalgamation of top 40 hip-hop, universally inoffensive oldies (“American Pie” was for some reason a staple of school dances) with occasional patches of commercial metal fans and dedicated Juggalos. The songs on London Calling were big and bombastic and melodramatic. And yes, I was aware that they represented a certain indisputable cliché, especially for suburban teenage listeners. But then and there, they were this vehicle of validation like my friends and I had never had before. They told us that you didn’t have to be rich or important to change things, and more so, that you didn’t have to accept circumstances just because you were born into them.

“Rebellion” in most American suburbs means a t-shirt with some vaguely socialist slogan, the occasional studded belt, vegetarianism, and an unironic tear or two shed during a Michael Moore film. “Rebellion” in Riverside meant good grades, college ambitions, and most importantly, Getting-Out-Of-New-Jersey. At some point my friends and I realized we had to be both the scholar and the degenerate if escape was at all possible, or rather, that willfully cultivating intellect was as sure a signifier of dissent as anything. Our underground novel and album trading were more alarming than any sort of drug ring could ever be. The kids doing drugs stayed quiet and stayed in their basements. The kids reading books started asking questions. Even worse, we started to become restless in Riverside. There’s something magnetic about the town. The same last names have cycled through its records since the early 1800’s. In short, people have a habit of staying for a few years, then a few decades, then a few generations. Horrifyingly, the bulk of the 100 students in my graduating class were varying degrees of cousins with someone else in the class.

I remember clutching my WaWa Coffee (Kudos if you can vouch for that South Jersey institution and verify that I’m not just making up words) while my mom drove me to another high school three towns over to take the SATs. I listened to “Rudie Can’t Fail” on repeat, a song both invigorating and calming for its meshing of punk and reggae, caffeine tremors causing me to tap my foot from the first to last riff. The only mantra that ever mattered to me back then repeated religiously in my head. Got to do this, got to get out.

 In the end, Cheeseman and I were two of the five graduating seniors in our class to attend a four year college, two of the three to go out of state, and possibly the single most despised salutatorian/valedictorian combo in the history of the school. I got a lot of people earnestly asking me “New York University? What part of Jersey is that in?”  Cheese got a lot of people asking her why she thought she was too good to stay in Riverside and go to the community college like her brothers. Normally she would respond by spitting in their general direction, and I by laughing audibly at the whole absurd scene (we spent a lot of Saturday detentions together), but there were more than a few times when the chastisement and resulting alienation would eventually get to both of us. One night in May we blasted “I’m Not Down” from the new speakers that our friend Dave had set up on the roof of his apartment while he mixed us grossly disproportional Jack and Cokes. He had paid for both the speakers and the whiskey by selling cigarettes to middle school kids out front of the deli, which he cringingly called his “after school job”. Dave was probably not the most ethical of people, but that night he might as well have been a saint. He also strongly resembled Jesus, which probably helped.

The three of us sat in lawn chairs drinking and staring at the old water tower, the only discernable feature of the skyline. It was blazoned with foot-high letters spelling RIVERSIDE, in the way all small towns like to broadcast their name on something big. Joe Strummer wailed about Judgement Day in the background. The Clash seemed to impart a sheer sheen of glory on ordinary life in our excruciatingly ordinary America. Their music made it feel epic for a little while, when of course it never was and was never meant to be. In Riverside, escapism meant something different than it does in other places. It tended to be much more literal.

Heather Baysa