Week 33: The Strokes - Is This It (2001)

I shudder to think how true audiophiles feel about lo-fi music. To the music consumer who struggles to make sure every note comes through just as recorded, lo-fidelity genres like garage rock, a genre that distorts itself as much as possible from recording to mastering to get its sound, must feel like a cruel joke. All of those lost sub-tones, microvariations, and studio noises are like a slap in the face to every $600 dollar pair of headphones and thousand-dollar-plus studio systems in the world.

Being a low-grade audiophile (my headphones are in the relatively cheap $200-400 range) myself, I’ve had my share of issues with lo-fi music for years. Even if it is a deliberate choice these days to release a mass market album that sounds like something recorded in the 40s, it still grates at me that some musicians choose to sacrifice whole aspects of their songs in pursuit of some form of “authentic sound”. The fact that this music often sounds grittier than what was made in that era is all the more irritating.

Even in standard pop, which is generally crafted to be as hi-fidelity as possible, the issues involved in the Loudness War make it more unlistenable than even the most enthusiastic of the garage rock revivalists. Between the mass compression created by increasing the volume of the music and the pervasive, much-hated effects of Auto-Tune, modern-day plastic pop comes through just as lossy as most lo-fi music. The only difference is that artists of the latter type are limiting the noises found in their music for a deliberate reason. Even if that reason is flawed, misguided, or plain old infuriating (as it so often is), it’s at least being done for reasons other than grabbing people’s attention.

Week 23: The White Stripes - White Blood Cells (2001)

“Jack told me more than once not to make it sound too good."

-       Stuart Sikes, recording engineer on White Blood Cells, “A definitive oral history: Revealing the White Stripes”

Punk tends to favor personality over talent. For a genre that treats any form of instrumental virtuosity beyond playing three chords and yelling with suspicion at best and outright hostility at worst (The Clash were pushing it with “Complete Control” already, and were essentially cast out of the clan when they released London Calling), the charisma of the performers tended to be the most important factor in the overall band’s success. Those who broke from that idea were either called The Ramones (who relied on playing great, simple pop songs really, really fast) or became the core of the New Wave and, later, New Romantic genres.

The power of personality that John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) and Joe Strummer personified had its root in the pre-Beatles pop music era. Back in the day, bands rarely had anyone capable of writing their own material, let alone at the rate needed to match the then-thriving industry of Tin Pan Alley. Buddy Holly & The Crickets were one of the first groups to manage the feat, and the British Invasion broke the industry wide open a few years later, but the 40s and 50s were dominated by songwriters who approached pop music in the same manner as blues, classical, and musical theatre: as something to be performed.

Week 17: The Avalanches - Since I Left You (2001)

“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.