reviews
Ferreira. Despite her relative youth, Ferreira has long been
fidgeting in the metaphorical green room of pop stardom:
she began her recording career in her early teens, spurred
by an active online presence and a family connection to
Michael Jackson. Her first singles positioned her as a synthpop act with a strong alto voice and a gift for anthemic
shout-alongs. After those initial efforts failed to hit big, label
support faltered, and her album was repeatedly announced,
delayed, scrapped, and begun anew with a host of prominent collaborators. Two EPs released in the meantime suggested an artist ill at ease with how she’d been branded, and
who had broader and darker tastes than her early output
indicated. Night Time, My Time finally emerged in 2013 as
an urgent, sullen, troublesome thing, a harsh panoply of
post-punk and industrial textures bolted to a sturdy pop
frame. Among the many traces of its difficult birth, none is
more conspicuous than “I Blame Myself.”
Almost all pop songs work by couching their sentiments in general terms and avoiding narrative and biographical particulars, encouraging the audience to identify
with the singer’s ostensible circumstances. This one doesn’t.
“Is it because you know my name,” go the opening lines,
“or is it because you saw my face on the cover?” Instead of
appealing to our fantasies, “I Blame Myself ” asks us to consider what we’re actually doing while we’re doing it: listening
to a pop song. The usual scrim of fiction is absent; the singer
is addressing us directly, and the effect is unsettling, like a
safety barrier has come down. While this device has plenty
of precedents—from Sinatra telling us he did it his way to
the announcement that it’s Britney, bitch—the artists who
employ it are usually icons already. Ferreira is at the beginning of her career, holding the star-maker machinery up for
examination before it has actually made her a star.
“Either way it’s all the same,” she continues, introducing
the first of the song’s two major tropes. “It’s like talking to a
friend who’s trying to be your lover.” As context accrues, it
becomes clear that Ferreira’s use of “lover” is euphemistic.
(Significantly, “get in your pants” does not rhyme with “on
the cover.”) The comparison of song-craft to seduction is
well worn, to be sure, but here, too, something is new: the
proposition that, despite its rewards, the pop transaction
diminishes everyone who participates in it. Both singer
and audience choose to forego the chance for genuine,
song
“I BL A M E M YSE L F ”
by Sk y f e r r e i r a
Central Question: Can pop music criticize itself
and remain pop?
Sky Ferreira’s age upon signing her first
recording contract: fifteen; Ferreira’s
age when pop star Katy Perry tweeted a
photo of her holding a bottle of vodka
between her legs: seventeen; Ferreira’s age
when she wrote a song featuring the lyrics “She got a fake ID / They’ll never know
she’s seventeen”: fifteen; Representative
lyrics from “Obsession,” Ferreira’s third single, released in 2010: “This
time / don’t just want you to love me / I want to be your obsession / This time
/ want my name on the marquee”; Prominent musical act for whom Ferreira opened shows in 2013: Vampire Weekend; Prominent musical act
for whom Ferreira opened shows in 2014: Miley Cyrus
T
he figure of the hellhound enters the realm of pop
via a 1937 recording by Robert Johnson. Within the
strict confines of “Hellhound on My Trail” it is a potently
ambiguous symbol, evoking not only impending doom and
the wages of sin but also whatever self-destructive compulsion invited that doom in the first place. By its nature,
though, pop does not limit itself to strict confines, and what
Johnson’s hellhound evokes outside the song is specific and
clear: the legend that the bluesman struck a deal with Satan
for his mastery of the guitar. This sinister myth succeeded
so completely as to rearrange every other scant biographical detail; today, even people who know little else about
the blues know that Johnson sold his soul to play like no
one who came before him. Scholars who have attempted to
trace the devil story’s origins find it sufficiently widespread
among Johnson’s surviving acquaintances to conclude that
he very likely told it about himself.
The hellhound—with all the concerns it signals about
deals and debts and mythmaking—reappears in “I Blame
Myself,” a recent single from the debut album by twentyone-year-old singer, songwriter, actress, and model Sky
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enduring personal rapport in favor of more immediate and
finite gratification—the audience because it’s easy and fun,
the singer because it’s efficient and lucrative. It’s one of the
many inherent costs of becoming famous.
Established midcareer pop acts can take all this for
granted. For Ferreira, though, it’s still new, and still uncomfortable: she can’t help but evince distaste for the flat caricature of herself she’s obliged to perform, can’t help but
sense the lost potential for connection with listeners who
might have been friends instead of customers. The fact that
no one expects differently of her just makes it worse: we
can’t be held responsible for regarding her as a purely functional product, a throwaway, since she’s given us no cause to
think otherwise. “Underneath it all,” she sings, “I know it’s
not your fault / that you don’t understand / I blame myself.”
In this seduction, the come-ons are all hers: her hype-propagated name, her face on the album cover.
Which brings us to the song’s other major trope. “How
could you know what it feels like / to fight the hounds of
hell?” Ferreira sings at the top of the chorus. “You think you
know me so well.” This is Johnson’s hellhound come to collect debts, to mete out the downside of compromises made
for fame. The cost of everyone knowing who you are is, of
course, ceasing to be who you are. “How could you know
what it feels like / to be outside yourself?” she asks, before
finishing the thought she began earlier: “I just want you to
realize / I blame myself / for my reputation.”
In a cultural marketplace where attention is the coin of
the realm, a reputation of any kind is a peculiar thing for an
ascendant star to blame herself for having. Ferreira’s complaint
earns its weight and force by coming from entirely within
the realm of commercial pop and not pretending otherwise.
While her song indicts pop music’s intrinsic dishonesty, no
one is more deeply implicated by it than she is. Embracing a
public persona as an up-and-coming wild child, Ferreira has
concluded, beats being ignored, just as being remembered as
a hell-haunted lingerer at the crossroads beats being forgotten. Like Johnson, Ferreira owns her choices.
About that album cover, since Ferreira brought it up:
it does indeed depict her face, peering wetly from inside
a shower stall. (The photo’s bottom edge will be cropped
according to the intended retailer’s tolerance for nudity.)
On it Ferreira is very literally exposed, but her expression
is difficult to read: irritated, wary, or simply weary, ready
to be off the stage. We view her through the shower’s glass
door, at the top of which a few drops of water are beaded;
the rest have been wiped away from the inside. Ferreira
looks out at us and we look back at her, both of us awkwardly balanced on the semi-visible fulcrum of whatever
it is we think we want.
—Martin Seay
album
L i v e from t h e
black mou n tai n
t h eat r e , i n
h a r la n, kY
by j e sse a n d t h e r e v e l at or
Central Question: Love or revolution?
Not to be confused with: “John the Revelator” (song), Time (The Revelator) (album), Jon-Rae and the River (band), Jesse
and the Rippers (fictional band); Instruments used: guitar, melodica, oboe, organ,
ukulele, vocals; Media sampled: Badlands;
Harlan County, USA; To Kill a Mockingbird; “The Scarlet Ibis”; WYMT-TV 57;
Historical figures mentioned: Maximilien de Robespierre, Tony Boyle, Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, Lawrence Jones, Don Blankenship, J. H. Blair; Representative realism: “Of course I know we deserve that higher wage / Of course
I can imagine riding in that safer cage / If I could tell the truth I’d say I’m just
plain old afraid / to bite the hand that sees every Friday that I’m paid”; Representative idealism: “A man who never organizes becomes a mob.”
“T
he best folk music released in 2013 was, almost
without exception, of the intensely personal variety.” That’s NPR introducing its list of “The Top 10 Folk
and Americana Albums of 2013.” The formulation, however breezy, handily captures our expectations of current
Americana heroes (Sarah Jarosz, Jason Isbell), folk and
anti-folk troubadours (Iron and Wine, Kimya Dawson),
and practiced singer-songwriters (Bill Callahan, Mark
Kozelek): a focus on the individual performer and on
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quasi-autobiographical content. The same bias has been
reinforced by reissues (Richard and Linda Thompson)
and fictionalizations (Crazy Heart, Inside Llewyn Davis).
Even the “indie-folk” acts who have tried to elude the predominance of the personal have done so almost exclusively through recourse to bucolic soundscapes, lush
harmonies, and woodsy imagery (Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes,
Phosphorescent).
In this context, it’s refreshing to encounter a folk band
interested less in getting intensely personal than in getting
intensely political. Jesse and the Revelator, a male-female
duo based in Kentucky, take on social life, small towns,
and labor struggles with a combination of wit, artifice,
and aggression. The setting of their self-produced and
self-released debut album, Live from the Black Mountain
Theatre, in Harlan, KY, conjures a place where song and
organized protest have been entwined since at least 1931,
when Florence Reece’s classic “Which Side Are You On?”
articulated the stakes of the bloody wars between coal
operators and unionized miners. Thick with historical allusions but grounded in the present day, Live from the Black
Mountain Theatre draws its relevance from recent union
battles in Wisconsin, Chicago, and elsewhere, while offering a reminder of the overtly left-wing commitments of the
American folk revival’s first wave in the 1940s.
The suite, though, is neither a set of rally songs nor
genuinely “live.” It’s a concept album that uses dramatic
monologues and abrupt juxtapositions to bring to life
characters, stories, and headlines from the political “theatre” that was and is Harlan County. Simple vocal melodies and acoustic instrumentation are complicated, or
ironically framed, by audio clips from news broadcasts
and films, blasts of electric guitar, and quick turns to collective sing-alongs. On “I Wish My Mother’d Call Me
Rose,” for instance, a coda of electric fretting punctuated
by screams overturns the gentle minor blues that precedes
it. The coda comes on the heels of a lyric about a soothsaying “they”—“They say it’s the union made men greedy,”
they insist “you gotta wait in line”—and the jack in volume serves as an angry refutation.
Even on more reticent tracks, Jesse and the Revelator
treat the verbal precision and emotional nuance we’ve come
to expect from folk-oriented music as tools for exploring
political conviction. The opening diptych “The Dance” and
“The Walk Home” presents an apparently simple tale of
young love, replete with school dances beneath gym lights,
poignant banter (“Will you write me love songs?”), wedding plans, and visions of parenthood (“The dented wall /
the dirty carpet, a Sunoco market hot dog for the child”).
Yet the homey narrative exists entirely within the frame of
working life. A good man, by its lights, is one who will crawl
“in the dark inside a mountain” to make the wage, who will
“wake up early” and “come home surly.” As for the wedding
itself, “The coal silos is where we’ll gather.” The tight, tense
relation between the songs’ domestic concerns and their
public ones is voiced directly in a surprising question: “But
what if all the other men I might be / wake up and incite
me / to dust off Robespierre?”
Here, early into the album, revolutionary possibility is tenuous. Just a hint of its sonic equivalent appears
halfway through “The Walk Home” when the quiet duet
gives way to an ensemble hoedown that seems to promise collectivity. Later, the stunning eight-minute “Bastille
Day” goes all in on that promise. Its speaker is a convict
on parole, his addressee a beloved Irene, whose name carries with it the weight of folk tradition. The lyrics wed
poetic pith and rhyme into believable conversation, mixing domestic concerns (“Oh Irene, come to bed. / Fine.
Then go to hell instead”) with workplace complaints
(“Well, what the fuck do you do all day while I’m stocking shelves?”). As the couplets climax in a demand for
violence—“Let’s find Mr. Blankenship and drag him out
his home / roll him down the mountain; he can see the
shit he owns”—the music blooms from muted chords to
full strums to riotous hootenanny. In the last act, a sample of the false accuser from To Kill a Mockingbird—“I
got something to say!”—is drowned out by boisterously
amplified guitar, the electric wails affirming the parolee’s
imagined insurrection.
If the album loses steam on its back end, the deceptive
simplicity of its very last phrase is telling: “I’m going home,
I’m going home…” That yodeled mantra can be heard as an
admission of retreat into the personal realm of the house.
But it can also be heard as a declaration of solidarity—with
a place, with a community. Live from the Black Mountain
Theatre confronts the stakes of that difference head-on.
—Jeremy Schmidt
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thumping to a close in the late afternoon sunlight.
book
ambi E n t
pa r k i ng l ot
Ambient Parking Lot might have remained here, a witty
parlor-room drama for the experimental art set, but Lu ups
the stakes early on by forcing the pressures of our moment
into the Parkers’ aesthetic end zone. “One day, without
warning, terrorists attacked several government buildings,
including the DMV,” the Parkers report. “The injuries we
witnessed there illustrated just how easily the luxury zone
of the parking lot could be extended to slaughter.” Though
Lu does not say so explicitly, the attack clearly conjures
9/11: “Over the next eighteen months, we were flooded
with media images showing the impact of retaliatory airstrikes and a coordinated ground campaign on so-called
enemy soil.”
For all their theorizing, the Parkers aren’t equipped to
respond to the attacks or to the retaliations. But this doesn’t
stop them from trying. They quickly organize a troupe of
dancers to “stage Butoh-inflected body movements simulating the trauma of violence” in (of course) a parking lot,
while audiotapes play ambient sounds of convoy trucks.
Everything is almost par for the course until one of the
dancers takes the show further than planned, executing a
twelve-hour performance from within the wreckage of a
car. The performance shakes onlookers and participants
alike, as if they have “witnessed—in the cosmic space of
time between the onslaught of disaster and the reinstatement of the parking lot—the living performer become a
thing.”
The dancer’s invocation of death as an embodied, present reality rather than a set of “media images” brings the
political violence into uncomfortably sharp focus, provoking a crisis for the Parkers:
by pamela lu
Central Question: After satire, what next?
Location of world’s largest parking lot: West Edmonton Mall, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Capacity of world’s largest parking lot: twenty thousand
cars, plus ten thousand in overflow lot; Person credited with coining the term ambient music: Brian
Eno, in liner notes to his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports; Challenge of “bi-musicality,” according to May 1960 issue of Ethnomusicology: “In
some instances… we might point to an interest in Western music which has
developed at the expense of indigenous music”; Relevant maxim from “On
Popular Music” by Theodor Adorno: “If one looks at the serious compositions which correspond to this category of mass listening, one finds one very
characteristic feature: that of disillusion.”
A
mbient Parking Lot chronicles the triumphs (rare)
and mishaps (frequent) of an ensemble of experimental sound artists. Blurbed as “part fiction, part earnest
mockumentary,” the book is first a comedy of manners, that
brand of satire aimed at taking down the pretentions of
a particular social group. In this case, Pamela Lu targets
art movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, gleefully eviscerating avant-garde pieties, cherished
literary truths, and pop-cultural bromides alike. And yet,
despite these satirical hijinks, Ambient Parking Lot ultimately raises questions that might apply more broadly to
those of us who enjoy taking our news and our humor in
one fell Colbertian swoop.
Speaking as a manic chorus, the Ambient Parkers zip
from one artistic stance to the next, all the while recording
album after ambient album in parking lots:
We lost faith in the radical ideals of experimental
art. Highbrow culture repulsed us, even as upper
middlebrow culture drew us like moths to a flame. In
our quest for timeless truisms in the face of mortal
suffering, we developed an unhealthy attachment to
confessional poetry.
The economy collapsed and our theory was discarded
in favor of an aesthetic of banal scarcity. Secular
pragmatism replaced the faith-based work ethic, which
had once led to the lush arpeggios of grocery bags
being loaded into single-driver vehicles and trunk lids
“Confessional poetry” might qualify as the sincerest
poetical stance of all, but Lu turns it into satirical kindling.
What meaning could we hope to find in that negligible gap
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between “highbrow” and “upper middlebrow”? The problem with sincerity, Lu suggests, is that it so easily collapses
into just another story, full of its own tropes and traps.
If sincerity is off the table, how might an artist respond
to political crises? Here, Lu vets another time-honored
tactic of the avant-garde—namely, looking to a notionally
more authentic culture as a way to critique the West. Enter
the Station Master, a radio host who writes to the Parkers
and begs them to cease pestering him with their “unsolicited stream of MP3s,” then proceeds to wax nostalgic for
his aesthetically adventurous youth, when he sought musical authenticity outside of his bankrupt North American
culture. As the trope dictates, the Station Master traveled
“all the way to the heart of Asia,” where he recorded “hoarse,
haunting folk tunes” until his fantasy fell apart: he found
Western pop culture everywhere, and even the folk songs’
“exotic vibrations” turned out to be “tourist trap fakes.”
For Lu, both sincerity and authenticity miss the point;
what becomes relevant is how our confessional poems and
fantasies of authenticity operate; how they subtly shape our
views of self and other; how they suggest courses of action,
artistic and otherwise.
What flickers below the ironic surface—call it hope or
call it grief—gathers and resurfaces with crushing impact
in the penultimate chapter. In “Death of an Automotive
Dancer,” the butoh dancer’s voice broadcasts a new tenor,
singular and direct. If the dancer doesn’t quite confess, she
at least confides and reflects on coming of age as an artist:
“it was one part productivity, three parts career climbing.”
Weary (and wary) of climbing, the dancer comes to
an existential, or maybe spiritual, turning point after the
parking lot performance, as she discloses during a radio
interview that the Parkers happen to hear:
inside the negative material, to amplify it for my audience
and draw it out into plain view.
Here lies the ars poetica of Ambient Parking Lot. Buildings,
economies, and art careers collapse, as the Parkers are adept
at pointing out, but so do selves. Neither naive in her sincerity
nor caught up in a quest for authenticity at another culture’s
expense, the dancer looks inward and outward at once, hinting at last at something like negative capability—the ability
to act (or, in this case, perform) in the absence of absolutes,
in the wake of vanishing certainties. —Amanda Davidson
For most of my adult life, I had been vaguely aware of
something unreal at the core of my persona, a faulty
premise teetering on the verge of collapse. It was
something like corruption or neglect, or some insidious
combination of these two qualities, and I shared it
in common with practically everyone I knew. This
was the essential material I was working with in my
choreographies. And although my greatest aspiration was
to someday punch through these qualities and reach their
opposites, the most I could do at the time was go deeper
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