“Get a drink, have a good time now. Welcome to paradise.”
-
“Since
I Left You”
Way back in the day, Harper’s magazine ran a long-form
article about the existential horror of cruises. As I don’t know how to swim
and am so terrified of the ocean that I can hardly bear to look directly at it,
I’ve never been on one, but the article portrays it as a world unto itself,
where you have so little to attend to that the mind naturally turns toward
despair. Everything is so bright and airy that one naturally suspects deception
and two-facedness on a massive scale. As
The Undisputed Truth so classically put it, “Smiling faces, sometimes/They
don’t tell the truth”.
This is a rough approximation of how I feel about clubs,
bubblegum pop, and most dogs (except Shiba Inus, which look too much like
Muppets to be remotely suspicious). As I’ve mentioned before, when the topic of
clubbing comes up I’m more likely to imagine “Initiation” than “Last Friday
Night”, and after I hit my late-teens it became impossible to take the perfectly
combed/messy hair and shiny teeth of boy bands at face value. My mind grew
suspicious and cold.
There are, of course, things to be suspicious of behind the
airbrushed photos that help advertise the newest and brightest of pop stars,
but not everyone likes to hear me explain how pop superstars like Justin
Bieber, Jason Mraz, or Justin Timberlake probably have more than a few
skeletons in their closets. Once their careers begin to fade the stories will
begin to come out, just like with every other pop band or star in our tabloid
history.
Images of perfection are always manufactured; it’s gotten to
the point where artists are deliberately invoking that idea in order to express
a point. This was my theory as to what 808s And Heartbreaks was
expressing, and a variation on that idea could be applied to this week’s album,
Since I Left You, which builds note/rhythm-perfect dance music entirely
from sampled music ranging from jazz to educational.
The use of sampling in modern music ranges, but it’s
typically constrained to hooks and asides. Enter The Wu-Tang is the most
obvious example of that style, with the frequent samples of martial arts movies
being used almost as lyrics. On the other end of the scale, hip-hop mix-tapes
usually sample backing tracks from other rap songs wholesale.
The usage of building the vocals of a song off of samples
doesn’t end with rap. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…. consistently uses
samples to provide vocals, and even melodies in a few places. Play, by
Moby, is a similar example, with ‘Run On” consisting almost entirely of a
sampled vocal (it’s more of a cover than an original, something Moby took
considerable flack for). Fatboy Slim, who enjoyed a brief burst of popularity
in the late-90s thanks to “The Rockafeller Skank” and “Praise You”, also used
the vocal style of those artists.
The Avalanches use that model, but they also combine it with
the traditional backing track style of classic rap, which tended to use either
a few samples from disco and soul tracks (“Rapper’s Delight”) or produced a
virtual collage of sounds from a vast range of sources (Paul’s Boutique
and It Takes A Nation Of Millions). Tighter control over sampling has
nearly killed this tradition, but Kanye West is one example of an artist who
has continued to use creative samples to make backing tracks, with “Otis”
possibly being his crowning achievement. More eclectically, Matthew Herbert has
built entire albums around sets of idiosyncratic samples, ranging from bodily
noises (Bodily Functions) to the life and death of a pig (One Pig).
Taken together, this album represents a much more ambitious
approach to sampling; not a single thing heard on Since I Left You is
original aside from the editing and what I think is post-production on a few
tracks (I could be wrong). Every vocal, every beat, and every tiny snatch of
melody was ripped from a vinyl in what I can only assume to be the world’s most
bizarre and expansive record collection.
This approach is roughly similar to the turntablism style
seen on Endtroducing…. (another strong album), but the overall feel of Since
I Left You couldn’t be more different. While DJ Shadow lives up to his name
by producing dark, almost somnambulistic music, The Avalanches are unabashedly
in a poppy dance mood. Only “Etoh” even vaguely resembles the laid-back feeling
of Shadow’s work; the rest is devoted to fulfilling the quote at the top of the
page.
The way in which The Avalanches go about fulfilling that
pledge is what makes the album so fascinating. This is the logical conclusion
of the pop/dance trend of sampling and altering vocals: a completely artificial
mish-mash of music spanning several decades and innumerable genres. The variety
erases the original context of each individual sample; it reminds me of a
foreign artist sampling bits and pieces of English, or just inserting random
phrases into their lyrics. The effect is transformative. The sources of the
samples are made irrelevant by the casual treatment The Avalanches give them;
it’s the polar opposite from Moby’s sampling of Lomax’s field recordings.
In other words, there is no deception. This album is as
purely artificial, and therefore as purely poppy, as I can imagine, erasing the
uncanny duplicity I inevitably observe whenever I listen to most pop music. At
no point does the album attempt to be humanistic or disguise the fact that it’s
built from a collage of samples. It is precisely what it is (there’s that
authenticity point that keeps cropping up….). In that respect, this album is
similar to albums like Holy Ghost! and Kaputt from previous
weeks, in that the poppiness of the album doesn’t detract from the product
simply because it was the goal all along.
The pop-dance feel of the album is also present in the way
the album is sequenced. Most dance songs, I’ve found, have structures that can
best be described as quite odd. Rather than classic pop structures like
verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, dance songs tend to resemble the codas
of old club mixes, where the ending of a song becomes an almost raga-esque
beast, intended to keep a club going for long swaths of time while DJs were
otherwise occupied. The motto of all clubs, after all, is “don’t stop the
music”; DJs are prized based on their ability to segue between songs, keeping
people moving for as long as possible.
Since I Left You follows that idea to the letter,
with each song seamlessly transitioning into one another to such an extent that
The Avalanches had trouble issuing singles. It’s almost best to think of the
album as an hour-long club mix; the less pauses you take the better it all
works. Ironically, I imagine it’s a nightmare to sequence into a mix; could you
imagine trying to slot “Two Hearts In ¾ Time” in with… whatever it is they play
in clubs (I’ll happily admit my ignorance)?
The border between this album and that very same club music
I salivate over mocking and crucifying is narrow, and really only exists to
people like me who actively search for it. On the surface, even the enormous
production effort that went into this album isn’t that unusual for pop music.
The idea that pop music requires time and energy comparable to more artistic
music is the backbone of the poptimist argument towards those two types of
music being considered equal. The only thing that really separates this album
is the aforementioned collage pop approach, as well as the complete lack of
real comprehensibility. I’ve talked about nonsensical lyrics before, but “Frontier
Psychiatrist” is so absurd it almost sounds like a Frank Zappa song.
So let’s call this the pinnacle of artificial pop.
Everything on the album is manufactured, arranged, and produced for maximum
impact. Each song is designed to provoke dancing, smiles, and/or a few laughs;
there’re no deep emotional messages that I can pick up on. No politics and a
new lovely voice every few minutes. Yeah, it’s paradise all right.
If that’s really the case here, maybe what artificial pop
needs is to stop pretending there’s real people involved with it. Have 20
different teenagers record the same song and mix the takes together to get the
perfect collage of talent, and then do the same thing with the video. No need
for artist names, since they’ll get their checks even without having their name
on iTunes.
Or why not go the Japan route and just create pop stars on
the computer? If we’re already using technology to change peoples’ voices, why
not simply construct the voices wholesale? There’s no real difference in my
mind. Producers need to stop pretending that they care about the image of the
artist when they already work so hard to obscure it behind a thousand different
lenses and airbrushes.
Long story short, if pop wants to move from art into the construction
business, they’ll have to work for quite some time to match what The Avalanches
built here. This is a house for the ages where the party’s never going to stop
and you never have to think about where, exactly, this music is coming from or
who’s playing it. The DJ is as invisible as his equipment. Just relax. Welcome
to paradise, friends.
Cheers all. See you next week.
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