BEN LEE DOES NOT HEART POP

Ben Lee - I Love Pop Music


I love pop music, more and more every day this year in fact. 2009 is my very own Year of Pop. But it's not going to be trumpeted by this utter douchebag's apparent 'tribute' to that genre, nay MODERN PHENOMENON, that we call pop. Because there are about a million reasons why Ben Lee has it all wrong, why he neither understands nor loves pop music:

Pop, despite what some might think, is not so fucking obvious as this song. This song thinks it can perfunctorily summarise the entire genre whilst simultaneously operating in it's register. Observe:

I love pop music, this is how we do it
It’s politics you can romance to
I love pop music, sprinkle sugar through it,
Philosophy that you can dance to

(Started listening to the actual song to transcribe those lyrics, found an almost primal reflex within myself to instantly hit 'STOP' and was thankfully saved having to live out any more than the first line again by the joy that is Metro Lyrics)

THIS IS NOT HOW WE DO IT (this, however, is) - what the fuck does dude think he is doing reducing the utter complexity that is pop to this pithy little couplet? I can imagine Ben sitting there in his studio, writing that one down - I dunno, maybe it came to him in an epiphany whilst 'jamming' - and thinking to himself how supasmart he is, "Well done Ben," he says to himself (classic narcissist, we all remember), "you've cracked the code!!!"

Like, fuck, no way, pop music can hold in tension seemingly contradictory positions/affects?! Wow. Now I know that that's something I've banged on about here, but where Ben makes the obvious fuck up is that he thinks it's that fucking simple. That that's all there is to it. Tellingly, for him its a zero sum game; his lyric posits a kind of mutually exclusive equation - it's political and after that you can romance to it, as if there was no politics to the romancing itself, or no romancing to the politics, etc etc. But that's not even the half of it.

Coz like I said, the worst part is that he thinks he can get away with revelation of pop within pop - just not possible dude. The whole reason pop can work in paradox is because it is entirely surface but with a second side, like a surface that conceals another surface that is its mirror. I have no idea if that makes sense, but think of like looking down from a still boat at the sea, then looking up from under the water at that same spot. Kind of like that. So it's meanings are simultaneously clear and yet always completely hidden. It's like it's depth works through its shallowness, so some throwaway lyric about Kissing A Girl is politicised just as it is seemingly only romantic. But Katy Perry certainly didn't sing - "This is a song about ambivalent sexuality / Even though I sound like I'm kind of tolerant and/or experimental re lesbianism / I'm actually just a hetero scab / That cares more about turning on my boyfriend". NO ONE SINGS WHAT THEY'RE SINGING ABOUT IN POP. That's just not its mode of self-reference. This kind of shit actually nullifies its very force!!!

And where it really becomes clear (haha, like anything I write here ever is) that he has fucked things up is his fucking hubris in just casually throwing in completely fucking bare sentences like

"Our leaders have not committed to a plan of action on renewable energy
The food crisis is currently affecting a hundred million people world wide"

If pop is ever going to have political import or effect it's certainly not going to be through bashing its listeners over the head with such loaded and yet entirely boring (written like they are as gross little sound bites from some lazy left-wing politician's speech) statements as this. Because that's the entire fucking point of pop - sure it matters, its powerful and political - but it doesn't solve global hunger/warming/war, there is no material conditions to pop, it cannot propel or change these conditions, in fact it never claimed that it could or should. So why the fuck is Ben Lee singing about this stuff in a fucking pop song? And why so fucking obvious?

When it comes down to it, dude has completely and stupidly confused the politics of pop with Politics proper, and the artifice of pop with the manifestly explicit, the simple.

Listening to this song is to know what it feels like to play a song as a complete and utter document of itself - there is no depth, nothing but what it says and plays, and no conception of its own stupidity. Max aptly compared it to 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)' - and he is completely right. Both songs are so far stuck up their own completely megolomaniacal and solipsistic philosophising that they can't ever provide even a scrap of insight, all the more because they think they are peeling back the layers of the whole fucking world.

Plus you know you're fucked if Missy Higgins is on backing vox.

jedi dreams of being able

Final Fantasy, Meredith Music Festival, 13th December 2008

"[Antony Hegarty has] established himself as a purveyor of both constructed identity and heart-on-sleeve sincerity" (Joel Elliot on cokemachineglow)

The problem we face when it comes to Owen Pallett (for Final Fantasy live is just himself, a violin, keyboard, loop pedals and four or five amps to play said loops set up with the precision of roman columns behind him) is one of relating emotion through conceit and artifice. For our bleeding hearts want him to wear his own on his sleeve, to bare all rather than wrap it up. But the nature of his stage setup means that his performance is one of extreme concentration, Pallett plays with the reserve and detachment of a surgeon almost, as the orchestration of various song phrases and instruments (all evoked from just voice, violin, keyboard, itself quite amazing as he creates a miniature orchestra) overtakes any considerations of expression. The most wrenching manifestation of this was when he stopped on a pin, mid-song, to complain to the technicians about the audio onstage, in the middle of some beautiful, grand composition as if he'd just paused a video game.

But really this is just like his recordings - for all the sense in which Final Fantasy is adherent to that expectation us indie fans have for unmediated emotional sensitivity (come on, he plays the violin - meaningfulness guaranteed with string instruments) there is just as much in which this is wrapped up in fables and fallacies of Dungeons & Dragons (he said that He Poos Clouds was originally intended as "an eight-song cycle about the eight schools of magic in Dungeons & Dragons"), fictional characters (impotent businessmen), obscure metaphors (the world's tallest tower as a monument to the dead) and history-crossing scenes (his EP Spectrum, 14th Century contains the line "I've a temper as shiny as any bling!").

And in this obscurantism, Pallett is a true romantic, at least in the way I think of romanticism. Because far from the popular idea of romantics as conveyers of direct, inherently human feeling, they were actually elevators - always looking for the nicest conceit to raise the emotionaly mundane to the transcendent, even in love it almost becomes an intellectual game.

And sitting there watching this set, I came to realise just how much this tendency informs Pallett's entire approach. It's like how his voice is so often put through an intercom mic, and sung at a kind of half-pace so that it lags behind the music, never quite fulfilling the sense of feeling that it hints at. And that way he covered Joanna Newsom's Peach, Plum, Pear - whereas Newsom made this maybe the only song where she pulls back the layers and layers of metaphor and simile for unbridled emotional expression (screaming 'I am blue' in a thousand Joannas), Pallett as it were re-Newsomifies it, singing it in an almost throwaway manner that once more covers up its emotion.

And it is in all this that Final Fantasy asks us to confront an uneasy experience, but one that I think is worthwhile: something akin to the denial of our desire just as it is being fulfilled perfectly.

more human than human

So this whole auto-tune thing is definitly something close to the heart of the (con)temporary. It's been a tendency in pop music somewhere since the eighties I'd say, the robotisation of the 'natural human voice'. But that decade's robopop was wilfully inhuman, a kind of excess of synthesisation that evidenced more just a fascination with the technology rather than expressing emotional truth, so much so that artists like Tubeway Army and Gary Numan found that technologisation of the voice and music could stand for the same social process, one of social alienation:

Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars

Whereas nineties and millenial pop was focused more thoroughly on 'perfecting' the human voice, the use of digital and manual production technologies to make the voice sound as natural as possible, catch Avril Lavigne for this. This tendency reached its exhaustion point in Cher's Believe, the first track to use Auto-Tune software as a deliberate effect rather than attempt to 'naturalise' the voice - that distinctive pitch mangling on her vocals became a highly used effect ever since.

Nowadays, it's kind of like something of a mixture of these two tendencies, an attempt to simultaneously shoot for nature and effect, that energises a lot of pop music. R&B artists like Chris Brown (see Forever) use pitch correction to excellent effect, accentuating their soulful/soulless music by stretching out modulations, or deliberately over-correcting 'hey' and 'oh' backing vocals. There is a obviousness to this practice that means they are not concerned with 'covering up' their use of corrective software, but rather become virtuouso performers of technology. The human voice is found wanting, or more a base material to be input into a system with far greater fidelity and emotional potential. Not that this hasn't been the very axiom of pop since its conception; the human voice is always object as much as subject. Anyway, in this domain, the idea is that the technologised voice is perfect, not a substitute to 'complete' the human voice, but rather in and of itself beautiful, expressive, its own apex. That we have reached this juncture in our historical ways of listening is quite interesting.

The exhaustion point of this new tendency, I think, would have to be Kanye West's Love Lockdown. This is what marathonpacks calls the "grotesque performance of prolix, technologized amateurism", but I'd re-think that first (and def last) term. It's not so much grotesque as complete - the handing over of emotion to technology. It's as if West cannot deal with the messy grief that consumes him on 808s and Heartbreak, so he relegates (or elevates) this job to technology. Machines that can cry for us.

depth that was never there [pop jamz 08]

Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened

From the moment that stick hits the snare skin, Nothing Ever Happened doesn’t let up. The thing I love about this song is that there is just no fucking around whatsoever, lockstep bass and drum lines ensure it is 100% propulsion and the lyrics are spare, repetitive and to the point – exemplifying most of (the best parts of) the work on Microcastle. But this selfsame tendency is collapsed with noodling at the back end of the song, but it somehow doesn’t feel like noodling whatsoever! What a fucking awesome concept! I’ll just put this here again to point the way forward for all music – indie, pop, hip hop, polka, whatever:

"I wanna make songs that, like, a wider, younger audience can get behind. You know? A kid who just now is getting over My Chemical Romance or something. Or like, just now thinking, like, 'I wanna hear something a little more experimental.'" (Bradford Cox)

But not too experimental!

number one champion sound [pop jamz 08]

Estelle feat. Kanye West - American Boy

Well the first thing you need to know about this song is that it’s an absolute breeze. Apart from that metallic grill synth push you hear in the chorus – perfectly embedded nonetheless, and gradually less grating – everything else in this song just flows along real nice and smooth. Of course there’s some interesting minimalist sections that keep the song interesting, like from when “He said...” rolls off Estelle’s tongue. But the guitars are almost loungey, there’s a bunch of ‘ooo’s in the background and that drum, dude it’s just a simple rock beat! And girl’s voice, real nice. Got a tiny few British pebbles in it to make its purr unique enough.

But the funniest thing is when I first heard this song – and I still think this most of the time – I thought it was actually a Kanye West song! Because no matter how nice she is, Estelle just doesn’t have the presence to fill out a song as great as this, and her main event somehow seems to take backseat to the ‘feat.’ dude and the flawless production. I guess that’s because the ‘feat.’ dude is, yeah, Kanye, and he just saunters into this whole thing all cocksure and smooth as, dripping money and self-props, even as he (as always) finds it necessary to explain himself to his detractors. But not even Ye’s sometimes suffocating self-awareness could possibly overtake this track. The whole thing just slots in behind itself, taking its own ride on a transborder flirt in such a slick and catchy way that it really does summon pop’s duality of transience and memorialisation.

on some real shit [pop jamz 08]

T.I. – Dead and Gone / Whatever You Like

I feel like I am just way underqualified to talk about r’n’b/hip hop, let alone pop rap, but damn T.I. just makes such great tunes! It’s not just in the excellent choice of Timberlake for emoting the chorus and the totally-obvious-yet-still-sweet digi-clap/HEY! moment and all the sophisto production and shit, but also it’s his really great flow. It’s just so palatable, the way it’s so structured but still flows across lines but then with tiny little punches. Like the dis/enjambment in this little bridge...

No more stress

Now I’m straight

Now I get it,

Now I take

Time to think

Before I make

Mistakes

Just for my family’s sake

... Is just great. It inputs some kind of error/flow tension into his songs that’s well appealing. And the way this flow works on Whatever You Like is funny – it’s like this metronomic, tennis-court rhyming sways back and forth between seemingly discrete lines until sex becomes money becomes possessions all wet and slippery until they all dissolve into this pop fantasy of nothing in particular or, y’know, whatever you like.

as the flames rose to around her nose [pop jamz 08]

Coldplay - 'Viva La Vida'

Imagine the tacky and yet still somehow alluring emotiveness of Coldplay multiplied to an orchestral level. That is basically 'Viva La Vida'. They are a band that never really quite knew what they were doing, that could never properly seize on their ability to conjure swelling emotion and turn into something greater than its immediate affective borders – I’m not really sure if this song changes that, but at the very least it stretches the immediacy of their appeal to such a limit that it (almost?) breaks through into something greater, something like pure pop. Rock instruments morphing past their electricity into woodwind! Ostentation becoming a universal good will! Bloated stadium rock meets artful orchestration! And it can only help that Chris Martin is uttering some utter bullshit about Joan of Arc over this sweet yet martial music, because it means you concentrate on the sound, on the highs.

from the sea [pop jamz 08]

Kings of Leon - Closer

Sex on Fire, in my opinion, actually isn't that great -not only is the chorus lyric frankly embarrassing, but the song itself seems strained and laboured, a problem the Kings have ran into a few times before. If you're looking for this band's true contribution to the year's pop scorchers, look no further than track one of Only By the Night.

Kings of Leon have always had an ability to create substance from style, but on Closer that operating principle is taken to its most majestic limit. Almost minimalistic in its composition, defined as it is by the sombre, soft, modulated guitar line and deliberate drumming, both progressing at a languid yet certain pace that, when coupled with the gaping secondary guitar, opens up into an absolutely tidal movement.

This is pure atmosphere becoming pop and returning to the ether, but not before swallowing us whole.

And it has nothing to do with poor old Caleb's tacky imagery of spooky houses and stormy oceans, though it has everything to do with his yearning delivery.

chips [pop jamz 08]

Crystal Castles - Air War

Ah, these trebling, gutted digi-shards - couldn't possibly be mistaken for pop music could they? Well, I guess there's two ways you could say they are.

One just because these, no let's take an example and say this song - Air War - is of the now; contemporaneity one of pop's hallmarks. But not in just some narrow stylistic or trend sense (although that probz applies, choppy electronic music quite popular at the mo'), moreso in how this music pathologises our current techno-cultural condition. It is as if Air War is made up of the sonic bits and bytes of our day; the sound of our text message alerts, touchpad options, voice mail hang ups, laptop battery warnings, the noise an ATM machine makes when it spits your card back out. In one sense I guess this music always then teeters on the brink of being techno-fetishist, in the sense that it aestheticises this condition, it almost earmarks itself for the soundtrack to some IT company's latest cutting-edge commercial (too late).

This is partly why it initially seems an absolute joke that the outfit has a nominal 'singer' in the form of Alice Glass, whose role in the projection of anything resembling the unmediated human voice has long since been forgotten. Instead, Glass stands in as the voice-response, automated text-to-talk fembot that populates our phones and GPS systems, that nondescript femininity (woman always vocalises the machine) but now cut up into a thousand tiny little shreds like nodes in the network.

And yet all this likely off-putting-sounding stuff - vocal and digital snatches cut up and retracked as a song - is nevertheless thoroughly massaged into what is also a pop sound (not just 'concept', like 'being trendy'). Because the interesting thing about this song is really that its bits are far more than just 8. Crystal Castles enlist a fucking terabyte of engineering and data to produce sounds as if they came off a gameboy and kids electronic piano. All the glitch is also given a nice fat, rhythmic bass as bedding. And that's this song most finds its pop mark: over-production in service of simplicity. The only difference this time is that this simplicity is not rendered silk but mutated blip and blop. Because everything still functions in this song, integrates and hooks.

This is not the aesthetics of error, then, as one might initially peg Crystal Castles as making palatable. Instead, what they do allow us to swallow is the fact that no matter how many beeping buttons we push, how many times we get cut off, flipped out, dialled away, processed, connected, reconnected, no matter how much digital shredding our bodies and voices are subjected to/authorise, there is still something working in this techno-totalised culture that is soothing, satisfying, coherent. And Glass is the flesh in the shell.

Or you could just say they're pop becoz their album is not that gr8; stick w/ well-known, catchy singles like this one and Crimewave or Alice Practice.

tricky little gun [pop jamz 08]

Jack White / Alicia Keys - Another Way to Die

Quantum of Solace is unaccountably awesome - wafer thin plot, brilliant action, a sense (but not sensibility) of emotional complexity, no real baddy. Then there's the Jack White and Alicia Keys theme, Another Way To Die.

So at the start it's all orchestral percussion section, with some far-out motorcycle-motor guitar effect, news-bulletin strings, etc etc.

But it's the subtle little things that really work this song into something great. Not the plinking piano key high notes that Alicia adds at various points throughout, though they are cool.

Nah, it's the really left-of-centre bits like the purposefully electronic-drum-kit-sounding electronic drum kit that lays down the bottom end, then the more-piano-than-piano lower notes that hang like butcher's hooks at around 0.36, then the hi-hat that sounds like the thing has had twenty cracks cut out of the metal. All of this over-produced/under-produced weirdness in the instrumentation is sweet.

But the best thing about the whole thing isn't even there yet - it's not only the fairly interesting gender tension between Jack and Alicia that gives this song a dynamic, but the fact that Jack (I'm inclined to think) has produced this thing in just the most bass-less, tinny way as possible so their voices come out as if they were gloriously untreated and without a bottom end. Like they're on one side of a concrete basement, mic at the other.

This textural quality lets itself loose across the whole song, actually, and every instrument starts to sound hollow, worn-out, ragged. Like a White Stripes song almost! But there's still the fairly controlled orchestral issues floating around the place, and a fairly rad guitar line, even some horns at some point.

Jack throws in a guitar solo quite irreverently over the top of what would normally be the 30 second highlight of this kind of song (a Bond theme song) - Alicia's wordless 'ooo bu do' female vocalist thingy, farting guitar just prickled all over it.

Quite possibly the most inspired moment, however, is the duelling, corkscrew 'o's that grate between Jack and Alicia at the song's climax (in trad narrative sense, ie, somewhere in the middle, then denouement) - it's got a bite and urgency behind it like Bond's never seen. It sucks up the whole song behind it, it's a barren desert no matter how much shit is going on.

And the lyrics, well 'another' gets trotted out like there's no tomorrow, the whole thing just piling up possibilities that can only end in the pseudo-nihilist sentiment of "It's just another way to diiiieee!" - it's more like Jack and Alicia are saying, what's this all for? It's just another way to kill and resurrect the Bond theme in a single blow. Quite suits this visceral Daniel Craig Bond, methinks.