Pop’s getting old. The basic styles and tropes of Western pop music, depending on how you define their origin, are around 50 years old, and unlike other artistic mediums we’ve done little to reinvent the wheel. Even Michael Jackson, the last true watershed artist for the pop world, had his grounding in the harmony-rich, rhythmically driven music of classic R&B, as did Madonna, his close successor.
As such, modern-day pop music tends to build itself as lavishly as possible, creating gothic facades over mundane, sometimes rickety foundations. Layers upon layers of synths, guitars, vocal overdubs, and general effects are used to create songs that were technologically impossible even 5 years ago. Invention over innovation; new tools created simply to be looked at and gushed over.
Not the other road of resistance is much better. Rather than paint oneself up with makeup and fancy dress, some artists chose to strip themselves down to the bones. Modern punks and the basest of garage rock revivalists revel in their ability to become walking skeletons, refusing to innovate or even invent ways to make things sound new.
As anyone who’s seen Joan Rivers knows, resisting one’s age never looks particularly pretty, and wallowing in it isn’t much better. Ironic detachment is another, more subtle form of resistance to the rigors of pop’s natural age. Here, one can excuse whatever cliché gets spilled out simply by suggesting that it’s a joke. Attributing this to Ke$ha is the only way most modern critics can bring themselves to acknowledge her, and LMFAO use it to excuse their own idiotic pop creations. Irony doesn’t change one’s product, it simply allows more people to enjoy it. After all, if “I’m Sexy And I Know It” is only pretending to be stupid, that means it’s actually clever, right? No. Wrong. It’s still moronic. The Lonely Island make jokes; artists like LMFAO just act like idiots and expect us to laugh with them instead of at them.
I may not like Katy Perry, Lily Allen, Justin Bieber, One Direction, or any number of other modern pop artists, but I can at least respect the fact that they stand by their music. They’re not casting it as some brilliant, subversive joke like LMFAO does, and I applaud their dedication. They may well write-off these albums of their very public youths in a few years (much like Alanis Morissette did) and go on to do music I can actually enjoy. Who knows. The fact that they’re owning this music in the present will make it that much easier for them to discard; bad behavior can be fixed with the benefit of hindsight, but a bad sense of humor is trickier.
The best way to confront pop’s old age is to either embrace it or ignore it entirely. Rather than try to one-up the past or beat it into submission, it’s often more productive to simply ignore how long in the tooth our modern musical tropes have become and press on regardless. The most important thing about music, as with most art, is its ability to inspire some thought or emotion in those who partake of it. You don’t need history to do that.
The trickier road is to construct one’s music in a way that acknowledges the past while also building off of it. This isn’t like the confrontation of punk or grunge, but instead more like the blues and rap traditions of re-appropriating other material, contemporary or otherwise, for one’s own ends. When done well, historical pop is both reassuring in its familiarity and interesting in its approach. Everyone has their own perspective on music, and that in and of itself can be interesting to explore.
Heaven takes a slightly different approach; this is an album explicitly about age. It has the air of majestic wistfulness that a grandfather has when he tells stories about his youth and his partner of forty-odd years. Those stories aren’t necessarily happy, nor do they often have a point or moral; what they do have is a gravity and practiced cadence that speaks for how long ago the events they describe occurred, and how often the storyteller has gone through their own past in his or her mind.
That majestic air I mentioned comes from the album’s parity; few songs on the album have solos or even musical dynamics. Nearly all of the theatrics on the album, aside from some impressive guitar licks, comes from the vocalist’s legato “oohs”, which are front-and-center on the opening track and maintain similar focus all throughout the other 12 songs.
While an emphasis on vocals isn’t unusual for Western pop (one could even call it a key characteristic), the lyrics certainly are. Like earlier albums covered in this series, The Walkmen are speaking as adults rather than teenagers or greedy children; the very first line of the album (“I was the Duke of Earl”) is in the past tense, and that sense of living in the past resonates all the way through to the last lyrics, “I left you a million times/The irony ain't lost on me”.
Unlike the gentle good humor or quiet resignation I’ve discussed before, however, Heaven blows these small moments into grand epics through the simple power of Leithuaser’s voice. Art has the power to make even the simplest of thoughts or objects seem like they’re worth the whole world, and The Walkmen manage to pull that trick with lines as conservative “Give me a life/That needs correction/Nobody loves/Loves perfection” or “Patience will keep you alive”. It’s that sense of majesty that sets the album apart; Doug Paisley sounds like he’s comfortable, The Walkmen sound like they’re… well like they’re in heaven.
Many critics have taken this general air, as well as the lyrics of some of the songs, to portray the album as a celebration of wedded bliss, but I strongly disagree with that notion. Much like people’s attempts to galvanize Blunderbuss with a single theme, narrowing Heaven down to something as specific as the joy of children requires blatantly ignoring several of the songs. Although the first few songs generally fit that mold (with the exception of “Love Is Luck”, which is a tad obtuse), “Southern Heart” seems like a turning point, considering it appears to describe falling in love with a fictional southern belle (“Life looks easy on the TV/[…]/I fill my evenings with images of hazy hereafter/I don't even know your name/It's your southern heart I'm after”). “Line By Line” is another song a tad too vague to analyze, but the chorus of “Song For Leigh”, “I sing myself sick/I sing myself sick about you” suggests longing more than contentment.
The album moves away from the vocal bliss of the first half with “Jerry Jr.’s Tune”, a bluesy lullaby that leads into the only two rock songs on the album, “The Love You Love” and the title track. The former is an embracing of illusions (“Baby, it's the love you love/Not me”) while the latter spells out the album theme of telling stories about glory days (“Our children will always hear/Romantic tales of distant years/Our gilded age may come and go/Our crooked dreams will always flow”). Both songs distance themselves from a simple theme of “married life is the tops”, but they also dodge a potentially cynical reading by virtue of Leithauser’s forthcoming signing style. If anything, they sound like pleas, especially given the plaintive chorus of “Heaven”: “Remember, remember/All we fight for”.
The other way to read these songs is as distant memories with an unspoken happy ending. If we take the album’s theme of age into account, as well as the generally majestic mood of the album, we could view songs like “The Love You Love” as an old fight being relived. “Dreamboat”, the last song of the album, could be interpreted as confirmation of this with its refrain of “I left you a million times/The irony ain't lost on me”. Couples fight and argue, but eventually make up; a more nuanced, realistic portrayal of relationships that again echoes Doug Paisley or The Tallest Man On Earth.
I can split hairs about whether the album has more specific themes, but I don’t think it’s arguable that Heaven sounds adult. It’s an album about graceful aging; not the denied form seen in recent Madonna tracks, nor the ragged skeleton invoked by albums like I’m New Here. What this album most reminds me of is the crown jewel of the New Wave movement, Roxy Music’s Avalon. Both that album and Heaven share a majestic, assured air that isn’t trying to prove any particular point, nor invoke any particular image or thought beyond an impression of grounded loveliness. Some critics have bemoaned the fact that Heaven feels insular, but I don’t think you can level that as a critique when I strongly suspect that was one of The Walkmen’s goals. An old man’s stories aren’t necessarily meant for a general audience.
No comments:
Post a Comment