The promised (see below) response. Also, Rob points us to a thread in which some non-believers recant. Sort of.

--------------------------------

Hey Matt-

Thanks for replying. I gotta say, though, I'm looking for a little bit of critical consistency here.

For instance, you say I shouldn't consider the lines I quote from "Rock Me" good because they're only good in relation to Phair's biography, but the whole context of the original review was how Exile in Guyville used to be great and how Liz did this and Liz did that. Now you say you don't care about an artist's motives. (Although you do use the opportunity to tell me about her motives some more.) Fine, but maybe that should've been reflected in the original piece. Me, I think that context is the rock-crit game, and that's great, but let's get on with it, shall we? If the only reason it's being covered by PF is because she's Liz Phair, then that just plain ol' matters, and I stand firm in my contention that were it almost anyone else and were you folks to deign to review them, they would have deserved, oh, at least a tenth of a point there rather than the 0.0 it got hammered with, and that, like with the Sonic Youth review, the rating (and the review in general) was done to make a certain reactive point. At any rate, the only pieces of Liz's biography you'd need to make my interpretation is that she's in her 30s. And even if you don't use that it's still, IMHO, a great song. Speaking of which:

You said in the original piece that you wanted to see some self-doubt or reflection. I showed that there was some. You reply by saying that you don't care if she's angsty, but I think you miss my point: since there is self-doubt there, I think you want a bit of that angst; you want her to feel really bad about making this piece of crap, and if that was in there, if there was some of the indie impulse to self-sabotage your best efforts at acceptance, then it would be better. Because there is self-doubt there, if you want it to be: you just don't want it to be, since you think that the only uses the lines I quote from the bridge because they rhyme. To which I gotta say: huh? Did she only say "It's harder to be friends than lovers and you shoudn't try to mix the two / but if you do it and you're still unhappy then you know that the problem is you" in "Divorce Song" because "you" and "two" rhyme? I'm open to a different interpretation of the line, Matt, but using the fact that it rhymes as evidence that it doesn't mean ANYTHING is unlikely to win me over.

And speaking of critical consistency: where the hell did that "yuppie" thing come from? First off, I don't know what's wrong with track lighting or $300 dinners in and of themselves, unless you're going to use the "that money should go to poor people" argument, in which case I'll happily inquire why you're writing record reviews and not working in a soup kitchen full-time; indeed, the only thing wrong with them is that I don't have them, and I would like to have them. Some people, when faced with this situation, think that the people with track lighting and $300 dinners should at least have the decency not to enjoy them, at which point I gotta say: well, then what's the point? I'm glad Liz likes her album. It would be weird if she made it and DIDN'T like it, don't you think? As for the SUV's, I'm definitely confused as to how a radio-friendly album is analogous to a machine that spews pollution and smashes smaller cars, but maybe that's because I like $300 dinners. (Mmmm.)

And incidentally, although this may not have come through clearly in the original message, I was making the point that Liz WASN'T being retro, but was instead applying a kind of retro-chic treatment to the current sound, recycling it in real time and thus participating in popular culture. But.

You did get two things right, though: I do really like Xtina and Britney (although not Creed, as they are too dour and rockist for me) because, like I say about the Liz album, there are some really, really fucking good songs there, just like how I like early Beatles stuff even though they sing stuff with dumb lyrics like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" (by the by, if you're looking for a good parallel for the "ironic line surrounded by meaningless sincerity" thing you don't see in "Rock Me," try the first verse of "I Saw Her Standing There"). If the song is good, fuck it: I don't give a shit about the rest, and I especially love the way that the producers of those songs have, as I say, fucking gone for it and just thrown everything at it. Love it love it love it. Unabashedly.

The other thing would be about Pitchfork's not covering an album like this if it wasn't Liz Phair. Yeah, that's true. And maybe that's a problem. Yes, yes, I know you're not the editor, but we did both CC Catherine on this one, so maybe it'll get in the mailbag and spark some kind of useful dialogue. (And what the hell, I'll cc Ryan too.) And who knows--maybe you'll get assigned something mainstream in the future, and it'll change your thinking a bit. At any rate, Pitchfork seems to have assumed its editorial mission, from what I've gathered from newswire and mailbag stuff, is to both cover "underground" music, and to expose people to good music they wouldn't have heard otherwise. Both admirable goals. But you guys have also covered a decent number of mainstream products of late, and when you do so, it only seems to be to trash them. So if the first part of the mission has been compromised a bit, it would seem to make sense to sublimate it to the second, very positive, goal, and expose indie-rock kids who normally scorn the mainstream to mass-market stuff that's good but that they might otherwise overlook. This was the point, for instance, I think a lot of the letter-writers were trying to make about your Metallica review--that if you're going to address something indie kids left for dead long ago, then why not do so to say something good about it and expose them to good music? (And before you say, "Well you should bring that up with the other writers"--oh believe me, I have.)

Ultimately, I guess, we'll have to agree to disagree, because obviously you can't bring yourself to like radio-friendly pop / rock, and I can't help but like it. I would suggest, though, that if you can't bring yourself to like this kind of music (the hated Britney, Xtina, etc.) and you love music as much as someone who writes for PF obviously does, then maybe you should give it more of a chance--as should Pitchfork.


posted by Mike B. at 3:40 PM 0 comments

So it's confession time: I actually sent my response to Pitchfork's Liz Phair review into Pitchfork, and I got a reply from the author, which I'm printing below. My response will follow in a bit, but I figured I'd throw it on here now for it to be chewed over. The bit at the end where he hopes to shame me with the spectre of Britney is especially good.

Incidentally, on their letters page today they print three letters in response to the Phair review, none of which are mine, and the two negative ones are, IMHO, way less coherant than mine. But, I guess, that's why I'm trying not to write in much anymore.

At any rate, here's the letter.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Hey Mike, thanks for writing.

For the record, the stuff on the front page isn't written by me, it's added
by the editor.

As for the lyric in "Rock Me" -- would you read that self-doubt into that
line if you weren't familiar with Phair's biography? The music itself never
sounds anything less than mercilessly upbeat, and the lyrics surrounding
that one particular line are anything but reflective. I don't care if she's
angsty or not -- I think the "tortured" schtick gets old very, very fast,
and I also think Liz is saying "You think I'm a genius / think I'm cool"
because "cool" rhymes with "rule." Just like she rhymes "if it's alright /
rock me all night," even though the gentleman in question is obviously quite
alright with rocking her.

I don't think "Rock Me" is an amazing song -- in fact, I think that if it
were made by somebody other than Liz Phair, it probably wouldn't have been
covered by Pitchfork at all, let alone given a 5+ rating. "Rock Me" doesn't
play with convention -- it is convention manifest.

What retro sound is Phair touching on? I don't think the album sounds retro
at all. In fact, I think that its endless drive to be comercially viable in
the present is going to result in it sounding ridiculously dated a few years
down the road.

You know, I have nothing against an artist who wants to make money from his
or her music. In fact, I don't really have anything against an artist like
Liz Phair, who junks a whole album when she's told by her label that it's
only going to go gold. But I don't think it's anything to be admired, any
more than it's admirable when some yuppie jackass rattles on about how he
LIKES his goddamned SUV's, track-lit apartment, and $300 meals. How could
she have "pussied out?" By making a half-assed pop album like
Whitechocolatespacegg? I don't care what an artist's motives are, my job is
to comment on the music. I never claimed to be a "true" fan, nor do I think
that such a concept is even remotely viable. If you enjoy the new album,
I'm happy for you -- I'm just curious as to whether or not you're a fan of
the hundreds upon hundreds of pop acts who've had the conviction to go "full
fuckin' force" as something other than a calculated style change, and
without the safety net of an established fanbase. By your reasoning,
Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Creed should've won your ass over
ages ago.

Best,
Matt

posted by Mike B. at 1:06 PM 0 comments

rocking me
So today's gonna be Liz Phair day here at claps blog, with a bunch of stuff brewing.

First off is the letter Liz wrote to the Times in response to their scathing review. The general consensus has been that the letter is "crazy" (c.f. Gawker and the Velvet Rope) and I'll grant that halfway--certainly the letter starts out kind of crazy, and her refusal to telegraph the meaning behind the "Chicken Little" metaphor I'm sure confused some people. I mean, hell, I was pretty confused at first. But then I hit the end, and it, quite honestly, is one of the most moving and quietly beautiful love-letters to pop music I've ever read:

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Chicken Little screeched, terrified they would not heed her and would be found the next morning, buried among the intellectual debris. She pecked and pecked at them with her sharp little beak until they finally agreed to be awakened. The three readers rose up and shuffled outside to be greeted by a warm, summer rain falling steady as a heartbeat, wondrous and quiet as unexpected relief from pain. "Why, Chicken Little," said one reader, "it's only a summer shower come to feed the land. It feels great!" Chicken Little cowered in the corner as a fork of lightning licked the trees. "It's dangerous!" she cried, "you could slip on the wetness! You could catch a nasty cold! You could get electrocuted!" The three readers laughed, and went back out to experience the mystery of the storm, without thinking, without deconstructing, without checking what the other would do first. "Listen to me! Listen to me!" cried Chicken Little, as she watched their backs turn. The three readers stopped at the door and called out before leaving: "C'mon, Chicken Little. Hurry up, you're gonna miss it!"
LIZ PHAIR
Manhattan Beach, Calif.

Now honestly, how nice is that? And true, too, I think. "Warm summer rain falling steady as a heartbeat." That's great writing, and a perfect summation of what I've been trying to show folks about this particular move on Liz's part. So let me try to, as the lit teachers say, "unpack" it a bit.

First off is the attempt to separate the critic from the listeners (and the annoying jab of "three listeners") and thereby imply that the critic doesn't get it but the "people" do. This is a technique too often used by artists who have (usually deservedly) had their work panned, and not really that valid or revelatory, so a D on that one, Liz.

Then there's the stuff about critics traveling in packs and waiting to see what the general reaction will be before jumping on the bandwagon. This is an undeniably true fact about critics, I think, but it's not really a valid argument unless you can demonstrate that they actually do like the music and are just ripping it in public to maintain their cred, whereas in this case I think both the level of hatred in the reviews and the fact that Liz admits she was making a record she knew the critics wouldn't like belie the sincerity of their reaction. So points for asessing a truism, but demerits for picking the wrong case to apply it to, and a C+ here.

But she gets the full A+ for the positive stuff, the description of the simple pleasures of pop music and of the difficulties faced by people like us--what I'll call, for lack of a better reference, Liz Phair's audience (or LPA for short)--in suddenly finding that we really like, say, the new Justin Timberlake song, or the American Idol single, because so much of our identity is tied up in music and so much of our taste tells us that the mainstream is evil and wrong and we must avoid it at all costs because it is shallow and it crushes the true innovators in the underground, etc. etc. This is about, as far as I can see, the process by which LPAs (including in this case, I think, LP herself) get over that hump and start to learn to love the bomb.

Here's the argument I think she's making. First off, I think you have to realize that the view of "listeners" here, while a bit idealized, is essentially a parody of what they seem to look like from the critic's perspective: "They played outdoors, mostly, and had very open minds." Listeners don't, of course--most people's tastes are pretty fixed--but critics need to believe this in order for their criticism to be meaningful (since very few critics are happy simply writing Papa Roach reviews for Rolling Stone and like to think of themselves as connoisseurs and dilettantes and exposers of new good things), and as a consequence, most have a strangely paternalistic attitude towards "listeners" wherein they think they're very easily influenced, mainly in a negative way, and need to be shielded from the bad shallow crushing mainstream what I mentioned earlier. And so--as, for instance, a few Pitchfork writers have admitted to me at different points--they overcompensate, making a work seem much worse than it is ("The sky is falling!") in order to scare their "stupid listeners" into not buying and thus stopping the evil, etc.

But what the metaphor is trying to point out is that listeners are a bit more adventurous in their tastes than critics give them credit for. This doesn't mean that they're open-minded, but it does mean that we seem to be able to find pleasure in music where critics cannot, or, worse, assume we shouldn't. We appreciate humor more ("it's only two squirrels chasing each other in amorous conquest, skittering over the eave of our house." "It's quite funny, actually...") and we don't expect every album to be Revolver; we are often happy with, as Phair so nicely puts it, something "wondrous and quiet as unexpected relief from pain." If that makes us shallow, so be it, but it does seem to make us more happy. The process of a LPAer becoming a pop fan is the process of maturation, I think, the process of getting tired of being so much "smarter" than everyone else that we sit alone in our room and becoming, instead, the kind of person who can look goofy and dance in the rain and listen to "Crazy in Love" and sing along, now, not when the LPAers appreciate it twenty years down the line. It's the process, in other words, of appreciating how rare and beautiful a thing happiness is, no matter how much of it you have, and seeking it out wherever you can.

It's nice that the letter doesn't close with the critic alone and rejected, but, instead, with an offer to come outside and play, because this is the eternal promise of pop music: that of inclusion. But there's a warning there too, one that I wish more critics would heed. If you keep yelling that the sky is falling when it is, in fact, only sort of rumbling, you lose your authority with the readers, and you become another instrument of what you're trying to avoid. We don't want that, because (as the last bit demonstrates) the listeners like you and value you. But we also need to know when to trust you, and to be able to go to you without you attempting to take away our simple pleasures.

So there's your crazy letter, kids. Kind of funny that it may actually have been too intelligent for most people...

posted by Mike B. at 1:00 PM 0 comments