“A concert is not a live rendition of [an]
album. It's a theatrical event.”
“I'm so powerful on stage that I
seem to have created a monster. When I'm performing I'm an extrovert, yet
inside I'm a completely different man.”
-
Freddie Mercury, of Queen
Presentation of personality has been integral to music from
the beginning of pop. Managing that presentation is fundamental to most
musicians for two reasons: the fact that people tend to believe what people are
saying, even if the words have a melody to them; and the origin of pop music in
opera and musical theater. Unless one makes
things very explicit indeed, people assume that a singer is their
character, whether that character is a sexual
misanthrope, misogynist,
or sadsack
suicide risk; the song is projected back onto the singer, often without a
second-thought.
Starting with the second reason, the skeleton of musical
theatre and Broadway is still front-and-center in pop music’s closet: one need
look no further than Lady Gaga’s long-form music videos and play-like stage
presentation to find evidence of this. Pop music is all about carefully
developing and maintaining a public image through meticulously edited
interviews, stage performances, as well as the modern-day tools of the music
video and Twitter feed.
Social media, like Twitter, has made that kind of image
maintenance much more labor intensive (I’m sure Lady Gaga’s PR people get paid
very well), as well as far more pervasive. These artists rarely, if ever,
appear to the public out-of-character; hell, I doubt most of Lady Gaga’s fans
even know her real name. The image, the facsimile, has superseded the actual
person it was based upon; simulacra over simulation. The pop star is loved
(sometimes to frightening extremes) but the people who love them know little
except for the tidbits that careful producers throw into the water like chum
for the sharks.
What gives those tidbits power and flavor is the fact that
they’re presented as quotes; small offerings from someone that fans view as far
above them. Kanye West’s Twitter feed doesn’t get attention because of any kind
of cleverness, sincerity, or articulateness; people only read it because they
can perceive it as a connection to that guy who did “Jesus Walks” and “Power”.
Social media offers that illusion of important confession
and importance for anyone, which is the reason why managers analyze Facebook
feeds closer than they do any resume of curriculum vitae. The idea of Tweet as
press release is fundamentally flawed; people use such mediums as a way to have
casual conversations with complete strangers. The fact that such posts are
virtually immortal is lost on virtually everyone, from politicians to the hoi
poloi.
Even those who consider their social media feeds in this
light can hardly be considered as sincere. Carefully written and edited posts
can be considered sincere only in the naïve view of those who use social media
in the manner I described above. The illusion of intimacy is vitally important
and deeply misleading; as someone who uses both Twitter and Facebook
frequently, I have firsthand knowledge of the kind of forethought that goes
into each and every post. Writing something down takes more self-analysis and
focus than idle conversation by simple design, so I find it odd when someone assumes
that a Twitter feed, yet alone a blog, is an accurate depiction of the writer.
It’s only a shade, if that.
Constancy is also an issue. In 20 years, when someone from
my generation runs for President, they’ll likely be held accountable for
LiveJournal posts they made when they were 13, in spite of the fact that such
things have literally no bearing on the present day. Our past shouldn’t be
immortal; people can rise above their own history, recent or ancient.
Music is similarly susceptible to the autobiographical bias
of written statement, especially when there are few obvious differences between
the sung lyrics and the musician at the song’s heart. While pop manufactures a
full image using a variety of mediums, most other genres make little use of
such techniques. When songs begin using personal pronouns, listeners and
critics alike tend to connect those pronouns to the singer and the people in
his or her life. “You’re So Vain” and “You Oughta Know” are two of the most
obvious victims of this; the assumption that the two songs must be about people in the lives of Carly Simon and Alanis
Morissette is so strong that the possibility of the songs being simple fiction
is a distant thought at best. The first thing that crosses one’s mind on
hearing one of these songs is, inevitably, “I wonder who she’s talking about?”
A glance over reviews of Blunderbuss should let you
know how this is relevant. More than maybe any other rock musician of the
modern day, Jack White suffers from a lack of distance. Like the blues
musicians he idolizes, White presents his music as raw and unfiltered, the
exact opposite of the typical pop style of obfuscation. Unlike those blues
artists, however, White’s lyrics rarely relate to himself in a conscious
manner, and almost none fall into the boastful style so many blues artists use
when they do want to take on a persona. In this, White is a child of the 90’s;
like so many rock artists of that generation, the persons he presents to be in
his music are unsure ramblers at best.
Why this may be is unclear, and it’s hardly worthwhile to
think about. The old psychoanalytic ideal of analyzing a person through their
fiction is flawed for all but the least imaginative of persons. Unless a person
is truly, unforgivably boring, any story they produce will be an amalgamation
of the films they've seen, books they've read, and songs they've heard. A
certain viewpoint or style may be evident, sure, but reading too much into
details is a fool's game.
Although the two share a certain iconoclastic smugness, Jack
White is not John Lennon; the songs on Blunderbuss do not appear to
have been written as an act of exorcism or therapy, as many of Lennon’s more
personal songs were. At the same time, nothing on it suggests that White is
conjuring up emotions and characters from thin air. He uses personal pronouns;
he never speaks in the third person (with the arguable exception of "Hip
(Eponymous) Poor Boy"); and nothing on the album is particularly
unbelievable given his public image.
That would be why people are so tempted to read into Jack
White’s personality based on bitter, tainted-love songs like “Missing Pieces”
or “Freedom At 21”. This impulse is all the stronger in the modern era, where
we’re used to artists painting full-on portraits of themselves using talk
shows, tabloids, and Twitter feeds. White, however, sticks closer to the model
of Bob Dylan: prickly and aloof. Even It Might Get Loud, a documentary
that devotes a third of its run time to White, portrays him as part of a
bizarre, no doubt self-written, series of skits in which he teaches his younger
self about the blues.
In his own way, Jack White is furthering the 90s craze of
playing to teenage angst through lyrics about the impossibility of figuring
women out. It’s a problem that plagues men until their deathbed, of course, but
the older you get the more you tend to agree with Roger Sterling’s response to
the question of what women want: “Who cares?” It’s impossible to understand
much of anything about anybody, but men desire women so much that the challenge
takes on mythic proportions.
While grunge, post-grunge, and nu-metal focused more on
alienation, Jack White’s poison emotion of choice is love. Not lust, not quiet desperation,
but simple love. The defining trend in these songs is revenge taken on or taken
up by those we fall in love with. If Doug Paisley was about how love slowly
dims over the long years into a calm bitterness, Jack White is about those
early fights with violent words: the mission statement of the album, as far as
I’m concerned, comes on “Hypocritical Kiss” with, “My temper got the best of
me/And when I say that I mean/I know every single thing/That I said was true.”
To be honest, Jack White puts so much raw emotion into his
songs that I’m tempted to believe they do come out of his real experiences. “Love
Interruption” is the kind of song we’ve all tried to write turned on its head:
it’s a passive-aggressive masterpiece, with the juxtaposition of the “I won't let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me” chorus against vibrant
images like, “I want love to/Walk right up and bite me/Grab a hold of me and
fight me/Leave me dying on the ground.” It’s a song about angry anticipation
rather than miserable memories. Ditto to “I’m Shakin’” which puts Jack White’s
trademark oddness to good use in spicing up what is essentially a song about
teenaged nerves about women.
That same youthful feel, however, is what makes me think
this album is based on older memories than White’s recent divorces. If White
was really trying to channel his depression over his break-ups with Meg White
and Karen Elson, do you really think he would put songs based on more teenage
imagery like the aforementioned “I’m Shakin’”, “Sixteen Saltines” (“She's got stickers
on her locker/And the boys' numbers there in magic marker”), and “Freedom At 21”?
One could write it off as another one of White’s quirky eccentricities, but
that seems a bit willfully ignorant to me.
Even if it were all personal, these kinds of songs are
nothing more than snapshots of a complicated man, who failed to understand a
woman. Like I said before, constancy is an illusion, for songs just as much as
social media posts. Songs like “My Generation” are only a constant, unchanging
statement, when they’re looked at in isolation; the character in that song may
be young and pissed off, but Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend certainly aren’t.
Both White’s songs on Blunderbuss and classics like “My
Generation” are about expressing something in the listener rather than the
singer. It’s the reversal of the bubblegum pop formula, and it’s far more
difficult to pull off in a general way. It’s no wonder why pop has a bigger
audience; more people want to look at shiny happy people than want to listen to
something that expresses a part of their own life, which is what rock and blues
music are all about. Guess which one I prefer.
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