Суббота 27 Мар 2010, 3:05

I can't find the reference, but Chuck Klosterman once made the point that teenagers are ill-served by pop music. Specifically, they are misled by the illusions that pop music constructs about the nature of romantic love. First you see her face, then you’re a believer. Your heart is, like, totally eclipsed. But then Jack slips out the back and pretty soon the sweet green icing is flowing down. (Also, beware of singing: it can kill you softly.) Of course, that general plot outline is so common it’s unremarkable, but pop music love only indicates signposts, not the day-to-day sweat equity of maintaining a relationship.

Music is not alone in this conspiracy to mislead teens about love; pop culture in general is not a terribly good guide to life. When I was a little kid, I figured that when you really fall in love with someone, you both know it immediately and you have to find a meadow full of flowers so that you can run deliriously into each others arms. As an adult, I am now deeply disappointed that this has never happened.

Obviously, it’s not just teens whose views and expectations are shaped by the weird promises of pop. Pop music trains us from an even earlier age, but it’s not all misleading or wrong; adults relate to it, so there must be some authentic stuff that might be actually useful information. In fact, once you outgrow music made specifically for kids, it’s one of the most accessible windows into what adults are like, and what being an adult is like. Not so much quotidian stuff like paying bills, more like the things adults care about, and how their emotions differ from a kid’s. Kids hear it and glean all kinds of lessons about adult life, some of which turn out to be true: lovers sometimes cheat on each other, and it hurts a lot, although it is pretty wonderful to be in love. Also, if you are ever riding through the desert on a horse with no name, you will know what to expect.

A Note About the List
This week I learned two things:

1) 3:04 is a GREAT song length. It might be the most loaded with quality since 3:40 (see the Project Index for that one). Huge at the top, and so deep that the honorable mentions could have made a fine list of their own. I'll list those after the cadre has had a chance to weigh in.

2) I have a lot more to say about Burt Bacharach than I ever expected to.

The Top Thirteen Songs at 3:04

1) Family Affair–Sly & The Family Stone
OK, three things. I learned three things this week. I didn’t know this yesterday, but “Family Affair” was the first number-one track to use a drum machine. When I was six, this was all over the radio, and I loved it for its melancholy cough syrup funk that conveyed a sense of depth, mystery, and complication. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to suggest that it was one of the texts that seemed to explain adult relationships to me—not the mechanics of them, but how they feel. And I still love it for the same reasons.

2) Dream All Day–The Posies
While working summers for International Programs at U of Delaware, I would shepherd groups of foreign students around the east coast for weeks at a time. It was the most fun job I ever had. One of the things we used to do was bbq, sit in a big circle circumscribed by mosquito torches, and sing songs of our home countries. I usually sang “Driver 8” and “Dream All Day,” because they are in my range, because their melodies stand up without accompaniment, and because they both feel “American” to me: a sense of expansiveness, I guess. Which is weird, since “Dream All Day” is about hibernating in one’s room; I guess it’s a metaphorical, interior expansiveness.

3) Frontwards–Pavement
You see? How could this possibly end up in third place? If you asked me every day for a year what is my favorite Pavement song today, at the end of the year I would have given you twenty different answers–but I would have answered "Frontwards" a lot. The characteristic Pavement sludginess of the bass and weirdly-tuned guitar are deployed to their best effect, and the oft-quoted line "so much style that it's wasted" seems to encapsulate something essential about the band.

4) Here Come the Girls–Ernie K-Doe
It starts with a martial beat, but slips smoothly into a funky pocket provided by The Meters. Everybody knows K-Doe's “Mother-in-Law,” and justifiably so, but this song’s even better.

5) It's Too Late–The Jim Carroll Band
One of the greatest punk-era basslines wraps sinuously around one of Carroll’s better lyrics. Very influenced by Some Girls-era Stones, but it’s tougher and punkier than the Stones wanted to get.

6) We Live Again–Beck
The harpsichord gives it an 18th-century costume drama quality that rubs pleasingly but unsettlingly against Beck’s vulgar poetry.

7) Sci-Fi Kid–Blitzen Trapper
Psychedelic country-rock meets twee synthpop! An unlikely combination, but it is one of the highlights of Wild Mountain Nation. Played so confidently and with such utter disregard for the risks of its stylistic bricolage, it seems to inhabit its own universe, where such music is normal.

8) I Say A Little Prayer–Dionne Warwick
The second Bacharach/David composition to make a list (“Walk on By” made it twice). Bacharach is in some ways the apotheosis of the slick pop songwriter; his best stuff sounds absolutely mainstream, but it also has a jazzy undercurrent of sophistication that never gets in the way of his work’s proletarian pop pleasures.

At the same time, Bacharach’s work is in some ways the opposite of the messy, opaque mystery of “Family Affair.” It’s a buffed and shined picture of adult life, in which life is pretty ordinary, but shot through with romantic misfortunes. There aren’t any people in Bacharach world besides the 1st person “I” and her (usually absent) lover, whose absence is met with either stoic sadness (if the absence is permanent or prolonged, as in “One Less Bell to Answer” or “Walk on By”) or an almost desperate, smothering desire to never be parted (“I Say a Little Prayer” or “Close to You”). But because the music is so smooth and untroubled, it never sounds desperate, and that contrast is pretty interesting, especially in comparison to the typically more one-dimensional “soft rock”/ “adult contemporary” fare that Bacharach often gets lumped in with.

9) Palimend–Benoît Pioulard
Pioulard uses a lot of tape tricks and found sound in little fluttery dryleaf layers, but at his best, the unadorned songs underneath the sonic filigree sound like Simon & Garfunkel. Good lyrics, too: "Oh smokepure strain of meeknesses & deathly-bound allying / Too many little sweetnesses, so much life in denying."

10) Deceptacon–Le Tigre
“Let me see you depoliticize my rhyme” says Kathleen Hanna, and then she proceeds to (almost) do just that all by herself with an insanely fun dancefloor stomper. It's about beat, it's about motion, and I bet the clueless guy she’s eviscerating enjoys the hell out of it.

11) These Few Presidents–Why?
Because it’s on Anticon, it’s often classified as experimental hip-hop, but it’s more accurately described as wordy, nerdy indie pop. And when the words are this good, nerdy wordiness is welcome. It’s hard to top an openhearted and poignant expression of regret like, “even though I haven't seen you in years, yours is a funeral I'd fly to from anywhere.”

12) Like That–Mr. Airplane Man
There is never enough music like this: two women, a guitar, an amp, a mic, and a drum kit; equal parts Howlin’ Wolf, The Lyres, and The Stooges. One of the many discoveries I’ve gotten to know from googrit’s radio station, which is a candyland of garage rock.

13) Guitars, Cadillacs–Dwight Yoakam
Western swing by way of L.A., sung by an expatriate missing the titular trappings of home. It’s L.A. in the 20th century, though, so such trappings are readily available and to some degree in style. I don’t know what Hank would have made of that.

When you were a kid, did popular music lead you astray, or give you badly-needed information, or both?