Here’s a story, a legend—I’d question how true it is, but its truth may not be crucial to what it does: It’s been bequeathed to us as a creation story, something to be retold and emulated. We start with a bright world of 1950s postwar normality but with energy that this normal world can’t contain, and also dark corruption and dishonesty within this normality. So something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, but this describes the normal state not just of Denmark but of all states. Rock ’n’ roll, an unexpected blast of energy, can be the breakaway from this original corruption, or from this original lassitude, or from whatever it is that rock ’n’ roll is supposedly freeing us.
But who is this “us,” and who is telling the story? Whose lassitude or corruption is this?
Hail hail rock ’n’ roll, deliver us from days of old. But then rock ’n’ roll gets old, so who is going to deliver us from rock ’n’ roll? Rock music, this former shock to taste that eventually became the new good taste, is no longer available, now that it is the taste. It can’t be played straight up, not only because it’s wrong or corrupted, but because it’s not ours. The words feel like someone else’s, that we’ve been given, that we move our lips to. Even though the sound is our own vocal cords, we feel like we’re lip syncing.
A couple of weeks ago I described how, back in 1986 in San Francisco, my girlfriend and I deliberately tuned our guitar strings out of tune because regular pitches and chords felt constricting, a path laid out for us, a formal setting, one that made us freeze. (Why’d it make us freeze? What’s wrong with regular pitches and chords? What’s wrong with formal settings? What’s wrong with having a path laid out?)
But even as early as 1986, detuning was part of a venerable tradition of doing it wrong, choosing to play what you can’t play rather than what you can. In 1978 in downtown Manhattan people like me were doing this all the time, playing wrong notes and playing the instruments we didn’t know rather than the ones we did. Sometimes we got derided as “art rock” for it. (I wrote here about how in rock criticism “tasteful” is never used as anything but an insult. The term “art” fares a little better, but not much.)
But if rock is actually dead as a form, I have trouble explaining my two favorite albums of the year, Insomniatic by Aly & AJ and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend by Miranda Lambert, both of which are awash in rock. It might be significant that neither of those acts is defined as “rock” (Aly & AJ are teen pop, and Miranda Lambert is country), but that doesn’t negate what’s going on in the grooves.
But what are we trying to get out from under, then? Why is it that “doing it wrong” becomes a strategy, that the word “art” becomes a putdown, “tasteful” an insult? Whose taste are we trying to sidestep, and what’s wrong with that taste? Why can’t we just say that with our detunings etc. we’re not doing it wrong, we’re just doing it new, as our adventure, and why can’t we call that adventure “art,” and proclaim it as our own taste? (But if we felt we could, we would.)
The question of what we’re trying to get out from under has been hanging around this column from the get-go, half unasked. For example, back in Rules of the Game No. 7 I’d talked of a ubiquitous Hero Story, the first act being “The Hero faces a world of conformity.” But conformity to what? And why shouldn’t we conform to it (whatever “it” is)? In a piece before that (Rules of the Game No. 5) I quoted my friend Nathan recalling his school days, when the pretty girls had him in their spell, these girls who listened to “vapid, go along, get along tripe” like the New Kids on the Block. But what was it that the girls (and potentially Nathan, if he’d continued to go for them) were going along with, and why shouldn’t they go along with it? For that matter, I myself think that the indie rock that supposedly runs counter to the boyband and girl fan mainstream is go along, get along tripe, some of it, and so’s a lot of the rock criticism that extols it. But again, go along with what? And why’s that bad, to go along with it, even if it is tripe? How does liking something I happen to dislike mean that you’re going along with something, capitulating to something?
Well, I could go into detail why, and I’m sure I will someday, but what I want to sit with here is simply that the sense of trying to get out from under something is pretty widespread, almost taken for granted, the way it’s worked its way into verbal habits.
What’s crucial, at least for me, to make the story a good one, is that the person who’s telling it thinks that he’s complicit in what he’s trying to get out from under.
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I’ve been listening to Britney Spears’ Blackout for a couple of weeks now, and to leaked tracks and outtakes from it for a lot longer, and I’m still nonplussed by it. I think it’s brilliant, even where it falls over, which is only about 20 percent of the time. I’m listening to “Get Naked” right now, perhaps the oddest track. Britney seems mostly present as breaths, but those breaths give the electro noises and the supporting vocals their character. But the character of the song is narcissistically demanding rather than, say, inviting, and I’m having a Smokey Robinson reaction to a lot of this: I love it, but I don’t necessarily like it.
Dave Moore says, “Whereas before Britney was kind of a rubber stamp on top of the production, now she’s everywhere in the tracks, like power-stained in to them.” I’d say that this is because, rather than riding a melody on top of the songs, she’s down in the rhythm, her voice sometimes run through effects and weaving in and out of the beats, in concert with other singers. And it’s her voice—no matter how many filters and supporting singers—that absolutely creates the character of this album, gives it consistency from track to track, is this unsettling combination of neediness and anger and mischief. The voice on one song associates itself with the voice on the others, so the anger and danger of the first two tracks makes the bright electrosprite she’s embodying in Track Three seem wanton and scary rather than just bouncy and fun. That laugh at the start of “Gimme More” gives me the shivers, makes the whole album seem an elaboration on that laugh, even when it isn’t. (What is that laugh? It’s not joy. It’s like she’s saying “So there.” Or “So what?” Or just plain “Gimme.”) And the effect never lets up, whether a song is strong or weak. I wonder if any indie or emo boys put out an album this year that’s remotely as scrappy and scratchy and visceral as this one. (Answer: I know of at least one, A.R.E. Weapons’ Modern Mayhem, a set of ragged electro gutterpunk that’s far too inconsistent but real good when it’s good.)
By the way, on a couple of this album’s outtakes, “Mystical (State of Grace)” and “Baby Boy,” she’s warm and in full voice rather than snaking through the rhythm; I wish they’d been added at the end of the album in place of a couple of the clinkers; their steady mellow sadness would have rounded it out nicely, maybe have conveyed the message that all this chaos and sex fever is a big story but not the only story. If Britney had the slightest interest in cred, which apparently she doesn’t, these two tracks would prove that at least some of the time she’s still got vocal chops. (Or maybe they’re old recordings.)
There’s something heroic about her indifference to cred, even if I’m projecting heroism onto what’s basic dysfunction. Most other celebrity screw-ups end up clothing themselves in platitudes. In criticism there’s the phrase “guilty pleasure,” which is generally used stupidly, a conformist’s way of saying he likes something that the people around him don’t think he should respect. But this album is an uneasy pleasure in another way: It feels real, the way it captures or creates the static and pleasure-seeking of Britney Spears’ current life. This is true even if Blackout doesn’t actually represent either her life or her vision, just several music producers’ versions of it (the lines “I’m Mrs. You Wan’ A Piece O’ Me tryin an’ pissin’ me off/Well get in line with the paparazzi who’s flippin’ me off/Hopin’ I resort to some havoc, end up settlin’ in court/Now are you sure you wan’ a piece o’ me?” were written for her by some Scandinavian guys, but they happen to match up with what the public thinks it’s seen of her behavior). But that’s no problem for me. Just noting something: Her messy recalcitrance makes me feel like I’m getting out from under a lot of platitudes and fake concern and bullshit—Britney as the world’s last real rock star—but it doesn’t get her out from under her mess, which, after all, might kill her.
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