Rare Candy Magazine

Rare Candy Magazine
Winter Issue, 2015
Table of Contents
Freelove Fenner: “Do Not Affect in a Breezy Manner”
by Mark Brathwaite
……….3
Telstar Drugs: “Pressed”
by Caleb Oldham
……….5
Alex Calder at Potluck House
by Graham Johnson
……….6
Porya Hatami: “The Garden”
by Jesse Silbert
……….10
DIANA: “Perpetual Surrender (Four Tet Remix)”
by Michael Getzler
……….12
Interview with Neoseeker
by Maurice Marion, Mark Brathwaite
……....13
Plums: “Jen”
by Caleb Oldham
……….17
Oh Boy: On Girls, Headspace, and Artistic Irony
by Graham Johnson
……….18
Contributors & Staff
……….21
Freelove Fenner: “Do Not Affect a
Breezy Manner”
February 2015
Structurally familiar as it may be, the melancholia-tinged
analog pop of Montréal duo Freelove Fenner (Peter
Woodford and Caitlin Loney, plus drummer Michael
Wright) truly escapes easy classification. Often toeing the
line of 70s psychedelia, the band’s referential hues are
mostly an accident of their particular equipment; the duo
records straight-to-tape out of an extensively stocked
analog recording studio (The Bottle Garden) housed in
their Mile-End basement. This, in tandem with tight and
effective songwriting, breeds in Freelove Fenner a musical
character that perdures like a moth encased in amber: an
eerily natural and present object that is indelibly tinged
with traces of some dead and spectral (and pre-digital)
era.
Freelove Fenner's debut LP, ​
Do Not Affect a Breezy
Manne​
r, comprises eighteen short but intentionally
crafted aural vignettes. Though certain stylistic tropes
--the bone-dry tone, angular bass melodies, disorienting
phrasing-- persist throughout the record, each track shifts
specific idiosyncrasies into focus. Album opener “In the
Sound” tugs the listener along with its elbowy melody and
well integrated percussion, while others, like title track
“Do Not Affect A Breezy Manner,” tether shoegaze-y
spaciousness to a shuffling and shifting drum beat.
DNABM ​
showcases vocal contributions from both
Woodford and Loney, which match well with the
enigmatic and often bizarre subject matter of the lyrics.
“Sad Emporia” offers a stream of consciousness
conception of stock tips as received from a psychic.
“Indoor Cat” counts the trials and tribulations of life as a
domesticated feline. The songwriting is playful but never
banal, and adds a thick layer of compassion for the
listener to tracks that may otherwise seem dreary and
aloof.
As the album title suggests, Rule 9 is in strict
observation on this record; the musical
composition itself is endearingly concise and
literal, and never feels indulgent or
self-directed. Still, each song makes full use of
its dynamic space, and is packed with subtleties
and melodies that uncover themselves to the
listener with each consecutive playback. Even
the album’s more avant-garde efforts sit
comfortably within the tracklist. The 40-second
“JoJo’s Xtal Set”, a coupling of lunar howls with
rugged modulated bass frequencies, effectively
splits the album between sides A and B, while
album closer “Fire One” stays true to the
esoteric and morbid humor of the records,
looping a woman’s laugh in heavy reverb. While
this debut album has been over half a decade in
the making, Freelove Fenner's painstakingly
deliberate process of redrafting and fine-tuning
has crystallized into a cohesive and
self-sustaining sonic aesthetic.
by Mark Brathwaite
Telstar Drugs: "Pressed"
January 2015
Faced with the void you are powerless. All you have is a
heartbeat and a head full of fleeting thoughts. Some songs
take on the void. Your heartbeat becomes a rhythm, your
mental meanderings bent notes jutting out from the dark.
"Time, impossible" sings Telstar Drugs in "Pressed", a
song that looks straight into the oblivion and defiantly
hums out this tune.
The drums in the Velvet Underground classic "Heroin"
always sounded like a ticking clock to me, more a
measure of sanity than a rhythmic instrument. Telstar
Drugs seem to be taking cues from the VU as well as
fellow Canadian rockers such as Women and Alex Calder.
The rhythm guitar strums a familiar sounding chord
progression while the lead guitar plucks a psych-pop icing
on top.
It's sometimes hard to make out what the singer is saying.
He seems indifferent but stubborn. He doesn't try to hide
his shortcomings with a lot of reverb and echo, but rather,
sounds like a genuine slacker of the 21st century
shrugging his shoulders.
by Caleb Oldham
Alex Calder at Potluck House
February 2015
There are no basements in California.
Alex Calder’s music is sometimes hard to get a grip on. His music can sound like something
that would do well paired with grainy footage of sunsoaked Santa Monica on an early July
afternoon, but the singer-songwriter is based in Montreal and keeps to a nocturnal sleep cycle.
Night is when he works best – he confided to Dots and Dashes in a recent interview: “I don’t
really go to bed at night. I do everything then – all my recording, and stuff – so I guess when
I’m in that headspace all is very mellow and quiet.”
His nocturnal lifestyle has come up before in conversations. In November, he ended up having
to cancel an interview with one of our writers in Montreal because of it. But now, here he is in
New York City – our turf – after a Boston blizzard forced a venue’s promoter to cancel his gig
there. It’ll be the first show of his tour through the Northeast and down to Indianapolis.
Everything has been thrown together at the last minute – Rare Candy has scrambled to book a
space to host Calder and his band, and word has been spread across social media as quickly as
possible.
When he arrives, someone offers him a spliff, but Calder doesn’t smoke. It makes him too
introverted, too inside himself he says. Not conducive for a show. When the spliff-offerer asks
him “Does it bother you that all your fans think you smoke a shit-ton of weed?” he seems
genuinely surprised. Do people think that? he asks.
And so here he is, a nocturnal non-smoker who makes psychedelic sunshine music, setting up
equipment on a makeshift stage in the basement of a brownstone. The venue has been
crowded all night – people snake up staircases and squeeze in through the entrance of an
adjacent room. Two bands – The Clues and Liberty Styles – have opened the show. One of The
Clues’ singers will come up during Calder’s set to join in on vocals later in the night.
In the Northeast, basements have long been built into houses because of the cold. A house’s
foundation must go beneath the frostline – the lowest depth that the ground will freeze to in
winter – to prevent the building from shifting its place in the soil. Preventing pipes from
freezing and bursting is an added incentive.
In most parts of California however, the temperatures never drop low enough to be a
significant issue, and the homes are more modern and recently built. There are, therefore, no
basements in California.
Shows like this one, with Calder and Styles and The Clues, don’t happen as much on the West
Coast. Basements are naturally soundproofed enough to prevent neighbors from calling noise
complaints, and usually don’t have expensive furniture to be ruined by spilt beer, enthusiastic
punks, and clumsy audience members. In fact, a lot of the reason why Philadelphia and DC
have such infamous punk and DIY scenes is because of their basements. It’s funny how
something completely unrelated to music, dreamt up by architects centuries earlier to
counteract the cold, can end up having massive ramifications for an entire music genre.
Like the punks, Calder is a lover of lo-fi, albeit a very different brand. His “Light Leave Your
Eyes” video featured washed-out, distorted footage of the songwriter shirtless against a white
wall and drinking a canned domestic. His recent signing to Captured Tracks came with
compromises then. Much of the music featured on his newest record, January 20th’s ​
Strange
Dreams​
, had already been released in previous years; an earlier version of the title track itself
was released under his alias Mold Boy in 2013. In interviews, he’s repeatedly echoed a
sentiment felt by many musicians: “[Re-recording a song] kills it. The first take on anything is
so much better.” And he notes that he’s always more excited by new songs and their potential
than any of his old material. Re-releasing material then, especially with an expectation (and
result) of higher fidelity, must have been difficult. Not just that, but Captured Tracks is very
much a Brooklyn label, and Calder acknowledges that he feels the strain of the distance
though it could be much worse. He told Dots and Dashes that he still feels at least some
geographic connection to an East Coast label: “I’m … not that far away – Montréal’s only, like,
five hours away from where they are. I think I’d feel weird were I halfway across the country
somewhere.”
Regional allegiance and geographic settings are slippery concepts with Calder though. The
Beach Boys seem to count as a stronger influence on his music than any Canadian – a
humorous disconnect only compounded by Brian Wilson’s own removal from surf culture and
the daydreamy Hawaii of their records.
With the New York City streets still covered in snow and a blizzard in Boston, Calder and his
band are a temporary respite of warmth to an audience tired of winter. The photographer
assigned to cover it has had to leave to attend some sort of urgent matter, which leaves me
holding a DSLR I only vaguely know how to operate. Definitely not in this kind of dim
lighting. They play through pieces from both his ​
Time EP and his most recent record. “Strange
Dreams” gets a substantial makeover from its studio version, as do most of the songs, which
feature fewer slick surf sounds and more raunch, a change especially suitable for this kind of
house show. As much as he is grouped in with Mac DeMarco (partly unfairly, due to his being
DeMarco’s bandmate in Makeout Videotape; partly fairly, due to some stylistic overlap in their
music), Calder’s recent output has earned him consideration as a serious and original
musician in his own right. His live approach and sound only make me more sure that such
consideration is deserved. This is not Mac DeMarco’s bassist in front of me – this is Alex
Calder and his Band, capital B. They play tightly and well, even though they could easily have
chosen to instead play sloppily and half-assed given the nature of the show. As the set finishes
and the crowd demands an encore, Calder initially protests “We don’t know anymore songs”
before kicking off the infamous riff of Pink Floyd’s “Money.” “Someone come sing this for us
because none of us know the words,” he says.
The singer from The Clues, unrecognizable to the audience in a massive coat and pair of huge
round glasses, separates the crowd and works her way behind the microphone. When she
comes in, she belts, like nobody’s business. It isn’t “Money” she’s singing - no one knows
exactly what it is. But it’s loud, assured, and beautiful. Calder’s eyes widen in surprised
appreciation every fifth note she hits, and the moshcrowd assembled around them are a
euphoric mix of excitement, bewilderment, and exhilaration which accompanies successful
spontaneity. It’s as if she’s a plant.
I pack up my notebook and jacket after the show. I don’t know what kind of meaningful
conclusions to draw from all of Calder’s seeming contradictions. I think it’s admirable that his
music can survive and thrive with such an inherent cognitive dissonance to it all, and I think
that proclaiming this dissonance as evidence of inauthenticity in Alex’s music would be
missing the point. Maybe this kind of identity dissonance is what the 21st Century is all about.
Balancing, juggling, sharing, and embodying multiple contradictory identities. Subverting
traditional representations. Playing with ideas of Self and Other in an irreverent way. It seems
as good a way as any to view sadboys, normcore, PC Music, (Partywave), hipsterdom, and
healthgoth, all of the re-combinings and re-purposings, appropriations and re-appropriations,
claimings and re-claimings. I remember reading something Calder said in Interview Magazine
about being “very into classic rock and hippie culture, very long hair and polyester shirts and
cord bellbottoms, and cowboy boots,” how it was just a “big… fashion phase” to be treated
lightly, playfully. There’s a willingness among Calder and his generational peers to treat
culture this way – as something to be toyed with and explored, rather than viewed reverently
as an awe-inducing monolith. It might just be helping to drive innovation and expression. This
is all speculation though, and I’ve digressed off the point. What I’m trying to say is this: see
Calder’s show live, and see it fast.
by Graham Johnson
Porya Hatami: “The Garden”
March 2015
Sound environments are constructed like complex physical systems –
cars, footsteps, industrial hum. Different moving parts live out separate
melodies and rhythms but manage to synchronize into a single, cohesive
soundscape. What distinguishes these naturally-occurring soundscapes
from an orchestra is the latter’s deliberate construction and composition
by the human hand. In his 2014 record ​
The Garden​
, Iranian
experimental sound artist Porya Hatami attempts to manipulate
“found,” or naturally occurring sounds in the same way that a traditional
composer brings together the brass with the woodwinds and the strings.
There are three distinct elements that make up Hatami’s intricate
soundscapes: raw field recordings, processed audio, and synthesized
electronics. The juxtaposition that he creates is like a jigsaw puzzle.
Upon close examination, pieces become distinct, but when seen in their
totality, they seamlessly transition into a fluid unified image.
Opener “Firefly” has blips and bells that flow seamlessly into collective
swells of sound that shift and transform. Its consistent yet amorphous
quality allows the listener to settle into the ambient tone without being
able to anticipate what’s coming next. It’s largely for this reason that
Hatami’s sonic environments come so vividly to life — think not of a still
photograph of a forest, nor of a dynamic video moving quickly through
the trees, but rather, a film with one, long and stationary shot of a
wooded area. Similarly to how Hatami’s music explores complex yet
subtle changes in an environment, the film would follow the wind
rustling the leaves or the sunlight moving across the ground.
On “Snail,” the field recordings come through a bit stronger. The listener
can distinctly hear the buzzing of insects, the calls of birds, and the
trickling of a stream. In line with Hatama’s style, however, vast and
resonant synths sustain throughout the track, evolving ever so slightly in
a studied progression. “Lady Bug” envelops the listener in a blanket of
ephemeral crackles and clean, overlapping drones that persists
throughout the entire eight minute track. The components of this song
are particularly synthetic; the sounds are chopped and shuffled around,
losing much of what would make them feel natural on their own.
However, Hatami composes these varying sounds into a structure which
breathes and manages to feel undeniably organic. Perhaps this ability
and focus is Hatami’s greatest accomplishment on ​
Garden ​
– the making
of circuitry and electronics into something refreshingly natural, wild,
and alive.
by Jesse Silbert
DIANA – “Perpetual Surrender (Four Tet Remix)”
December 2014
Few songs focus as much on the experience of listening as does this Four Tet
remix of “Perpetual Surrender,” by the Toronto synth-pop group DIANA. It
opens with a quiet drum loop that only slightly changes over the first couple
minutes of the song—an added percussion here and there, a repeated breath
coming in. A commenter on SoundCloud calls it “a drummer’s fantasy,”
understandable considering how excited a drummer must feel about a song that
opens with minutes of drum-centered music. It is as if we are being shown the
process of how the song itself is made—first the drums, then a layering of
different sounds on top, one by one. All the parts are laid out before us, letting us
focus on each sound and get a feel for it. By the time the lyrics come in at 3:28
(the duration of an average song already having gone by), the background noises
are firmly entrenched in the listener’s mind. The reference to a “road
well-traveled” in the very first line captures what a journey it has been up to that
point.
As the lyrics progress, all the sounds come together to form a mosaic,
punctuated by the occasional ladder of keys or the sax that comes in at the 5:15
mark. These can be appreciated so much more because the other sounds have
solidified themselves for the listener. Each new sound stands out more and is all
the more delectable for it. However, in direct contrast to how the song begins,
the ending could not be more abrupt. The listener, comfortable in the layering
pattern of the song, is jarred awake when, at 6:53, the music (most notably the
drums, which have been going for the entirety) is suddenly stripped down to the
vocals. A few seconds later, those are cut off in the middle of a line (“I need
saving from my–”). The song has 11 seconds of silence at the end, during which
the listener has time to recover from this sudden pulling out, and, longing to be
slowly immersed in this mosaic once again, reach for the replay button.
by Michael Getzler
Neoseeker
February 2015
Neoseeker's debut album, ​
My Hand​
, is a record inextricably linked to the geographical
context of its creators: singer/songwriter/guitarist Sebastian Choe, drummer Zachariah
Calluori, and recently added guitarist Max Lawton. Although all members contribute to the
arrangement process, the spirit of Washington's noisy, post-punk scene (think Broken Water,
Dreamdecay, Monogamy Party) is most immediate and overwhelmingly present, with a few
early grunge tropes tucked in the folds for natural good measure.
The most intriguing aspect of the album is its exploration of a very visceral sort of dynamism,
displayed both within and between each consecutive track. The verse of record opener “Spirit
95” sets screech-stop guitar riffage against choppy, frenetic percussion, a coupling which
converges and collapses into a heaving, half-timed breakdown of a chorus. The emotive peak
of the record comes through Choe’s despaired wail in “Firwood”, which punctuates the
half-repressed, tubular dread of the track’s modal body. Similarly, the interludes –
constructed of digital production elements absent from the album's primary numbers – offer a
distinct, almost alienated calm between tracks.
Rare Candy’s Maurice Marion met with Neoseeker’s Sebastian Choe to discuss influences,
concepts, and the reconstitution of his Pacific-Northwesterly musical character in New York.
Rare Candy​
: How did Neoseeker first
get started? How long has ​
My Hand
been in the works?
Choe​
: Neoseeker is the New York iteration of a band called Uda Ox that I was
in when I lived in Washington – met Zach right after moving here and we
started playing together as Neoseeker not long after. We began recording ​
My
Hand​
last December but the songs have been written for about a year. The Uda
Ox album Contact came out eighteen months ago so it is cool to be releasing
somewhat of a response to it now.
Rare Candy​
: The obligatory question: what sorts of influences went into Neoseeker’s
creation of the album?
Choe​
: I grew up attending and playing shows with a small group of dark and
heavy Pacific Northwest bands that all influenced each other’s sound a lot:
Naomi Punk, Broken Water, Weed, M. Women. This neofolk group from
Helsinki called October Falls uses very sincere interwoven guitars – they
directly inspired the song “Silver Lily”.
Rare Candy​
: Would you like to say anything about the ideas or concepts that went
behind making this album?
Choe​
: We tried to make each song as redacted and deliberate as possible – a
curated fury kind of? Conceptually there’s always been a tense longing or
violent spirituality. I think the lyrics make sense when heard in tandem with the
lyrics on Contact – they’re both sort of narrated by this sinister alter-ego. Both
album titles might be read as sensual and surface-occupied as well.
Rare Candy​
: What was it like recording at The Anacortes Unknown? How extensive
was your and Zach’s input in the mixing and mastering process?
Choe​
: Zach and I actually tracked the songs at this warehouse in New Jersey
with this rough guy who refuses to be credited for one reason or another.
Nicholas Wilbur [Mount Eerie, LAKE] and I mixed the album in this beautiful
old church in Anacortes, Washington. This is the space he runs with Phil
Elverum [Mount Eerie, The Microphones]. I feel like I always get neurotic when
it comes to mixing – my requests led us to the point where we were splicing,
panning and equalizing individual guitar and drum strikes to achieve an
industrial tone. The mastering process with Chris Hanzsek is always easy – he’s
been the wizard of slow and heavy since he produced the Melvins in ’86!
Rare Candy​
: The guitar sounds on the album are noticeably different than that of
your live shows (much less distortion, more reverb and flanger-y/phaser-y effects).
Was this a pre-planned conscious decision or did that just happen organically? What
do you see as the relationship between the sound on your record and the sound at your
live shows?
Choe​
: I don’t know if I’m a proponent of having the record be a linear
reproduction of the live sound – recordings allow the introduction of new
textures that are impossible to produce when amps are turned up in a
basement! Punk tapes with blown out guitars and squealing feedback are cool
but producing something smoother allows for a more unpredictable live set.
Rare Candy​
: Are you the main songwriter on all the songs? What sort of input do
Zach or Max have in the songwriting?
Choe​
: I wrote the songs on paper in a morse code style of dots and dashes to
feel out the velocity and rhythm of each then pasted in the notes that sounded
right on guitar. Zach is the actual trained musician: he gives important input
when I say it needs to feel more like a chain dragging through a bog or
something. He sculpts these drum parts that give the songs a surgically
syncopated feel. Max only joined Neoseeker last fall and comes from a more
heavy-handed doom background which we hope to incorporate into new songs!
Rare Candy​
: What role do you see the dreamy interludes playing in the overall
aesthetics of the album?
Choe​
: The interludes are the types of songs I made for the first Uda Ox album
called ​
Ma’acah’s Room​
when the band was still a solo project. I think featuring
a few delicate and wistful moments contextualizes the louder songs and that
both styles inform each other.
Rare Candy​
: I know you to be a lover of “early 2000’s pop princesses” like Britney,
Hilary Duff, Avril Lavigne, etc. Has that interest of yours worked its way into the
songwriting on this record or the way you produced the vocals?
Choe​
: Those inspirations are more realized in this other project I’m involved in
called Agatha Claw, but pop vocals have always been important to me especially
on songs that lack vocal harmonies but are still successful. There are moments
in the album where I’m singing three octaves or doubling tracks that were very
inspired by JoJo’s first record… “Brightest Morning Star” off Britney’s latest
record definitely informed a lot of the singing in “Rings of Saturn”.
Rare Candy​
: Can you talk some about your decision to make the second half of the
album a slowed-down version of the first half? It’s a pretty innovative idea. It seems
almost as if you had the amount of songs for an EP and then found an interesting way
of turning it into an album? Did you originally approach the project as an EP, which
then evolved into this original album idea? Were you in anyway trying to deliberately
subvert the listener's pre-existing idea of what an album is?
Choe​
: About three years ago I started making slowed down versions of songs
just for my own listening pleasure. I remember slowing down Avril’s “My
Happy Ending” for the first time and discovering this new punishing dimension
to glossy recorded music [available for listen at slowed.bandcamp.com]. Last
August I slowed down and remastered the Uda Ox album and rereleased it
because it made the songs sound more correct. This time around it just made
sense to offer that option from the start!
I don’t think we are trying to subvert the concept of “album”; we had a handful
of songs that we saw a way to get more mileage out of. The slowed half makes it
easier to deconstruct the songs’ elements and just communicates this
otherworldly vibe. Will be cool to hear whether people like to listen to it in full,
prefer the slow half when they’re sad, etc.
by Maurice Marion and Mark Brathwaite
Plums: “Jen”
February 2015
What sounds do we choose to return to? What music manages to stay relevant? What makes a
song timeless?
There are, of course, two kinds of classics: those we embrace culturally and those we embrace
personally. The former consists of modern pop music’s foundations and pillars – artists who
no one will let die. Critics who missed their genius at the time or deliberately dissented from
their growing acclaim are made fools by history. When someone makes a bold statement
against them, eyebrows are raised and proverbial pots stirred – one only needs to look how
much press Lou Reed's recently uncovered comment on The Beatles is getting.
And then there are the records that we personally hold dear. A friend of mine listens to My
Bloody Valentine’s ​
Loveless ​
every day. It has affected the way he listens to music, seeped into
the way he writes. To him, My Bloody Valentine is timeless: it doesn't bring him back to a
certain era as much as it touches all eras of his life. The kinds of sounds we as individuals
choose to return to, regardless of their cultural value, can take on a deep level of importance in
our day-to-day.
It shouldn't be hard to justify these personal classics, but it can feel like writing a love song to
someone you're actually in love with, too often coming out clichéd and disappointing.
Moreover, infatuation often withers rather than germinates - you can never really tell how a
collection of songs will age. But ​
Jen​
, a recent release by the Sudbury, Massachusetts quartet
that calls themselves Plums, sounds like something I'll be coming back to for a while.
Put together in "bedrooms and basements," the record is the result of four longtime friends
who ended up in different colleges. Bridging geography through sound, the album has a
striking unity to it. It sighs and swings as one cohesive dreamy-eyed whole, trying to create a
sonic homecoming for its scattered members. Perhaps part of this effect comes from the
record’s warm production techniques, which favor layered vocals and Fender jaguars, a thick
bass and dampened drums.
Jen ​
is not a winter album. Even though it came out a week ago, and the lethargic, shuffling
tone of tracks like "Julia Gloria" seems to harmonize with a certain fuzzy winter
disorientation, Jen is a starry-eyed summer love story of a "bent out boy" and a "glitter girl."
"Fine Madeline," the record's lead single, bounces and swells over two and a half minutes of
catchy jangle pop. Where it lacks in subtlety, it delights in its own cheerful exuberance. Winter
is not so much ignored as it is willfully dispelled.
Arguably, the difference between a cultural classic and a personal one is investment – of time,
energy and by necessity, money. Plums is a band that deserves all three, but at the very least,
they're worth your time.
by Caleb Oldham
Oh Boy: Christopher Owens, Headspace, and the Benefits of Artistic Irony
January 2015
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about two songs in my record collection. One is Jimmie Rodgers’
“TB Blues,” considered by some musicologists (most notably Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor)
to be one of the first popular autobiographical songs. Rodgers made a career out of singing
songs about other people – miners, gamblers, gunslingers, jailbirds. But in 1931, the
tuberculosis he contracted at 27 years old started getting the better of him, and he became
increasingly aware of his own mortality. As a result, he put out a song littered with darker
themes about the loneliness of the grave and how his bones rattled like trains down the
Southern Pacific. Whereas before, he might have used fictional characters to covertly portray
and express his own personal tragedies and obstacles, here he puts up no fronts, speaking
plainly in the first person: “When it rained down sorrow it rained all over me.”
The other song is “Oh Boy” by the band Girls, who broke up a few years ago. It’s a b-side to
their early single “Laura,” and never appeared on a full album release. The subject of “Oh Boy”
isn’t nearly as grim as “T.B. Blues”. It’s just about a girl and wishing you were someone else.
But the emotions – the intense loneliness and isolation, desperation and surrender – are the
same. This is the sort of output that has led lead singer Christopher Owens to, on occasion, be
counted among Bob Dylan and Nick Drake as an intensely personal, authentic songwriter.
(Dylan’s inclusion in this group in the popular mindset is especially problematic, but that’s a
separate issue in itself.)
Rodgers and Owens don’t get the stamp of authenticity just because they appear to be honest
with their respective audiences. It’s not a label we would often assign, for instance, artists that
sing about easy-going activities or who convey optimistic outlooks. Emotional pain, often
rooted in personal failings, is a prerequisite to authenticity, and it takes an enormous amount
of vulnerability and courage to express. I wonder if that’s part of the reason that male
singer-songwriters resonate with me more than their female counterparts. I feel like the same
burdensome expectations of masculine strength and emotion-masking that bear down on me
are placed on them, and I can admire their vulnerability all the more for it.
There’s also a romanticized Americana element in Owens’ music: his love of all things country,
blues, and rock and roll (essentially, the American popular canon), plus the way he comes off
is akin to Elvis Costello and Brian Wilson in a very reverent, uncynical way.
All of this combined makes Headspace’s cover of “Oh Boy” an extremely peculiar statement.
The band obviously admires Girls’ music because the track is semi-rare, a fairly buried b-side
that casual fans likely wouldn’t encounter. In addition, they’ve made a point of not only
recording a studio version, but doing multiple live performances and acoustic sessions of the
song. There’s a deep respect, it seems, for Owens’ songcraft.
But Headspace’s version undermines all the romanticizations that are so important to the
appeal of the original. It starts out with a standard rock intro that is quickly greeted by a
nasally, seemingly insincere vocal. It doesn’t carry any of the heartbreak of Owen’s track,
sounding less confessional and more Hunx and his Punx. It takes the vulnerability of the song
and disguises it in a cloak of irony, allowing Headspace’s lead singer to avoid all the messy
emotions that come went into Owens’ delivery.
This process of emotional dilution shapes many of the artistic statements nowadays; the
adolescent sarcasm of Generation X has been replaced by the arguably equally adolescent
irony of Generation Y. Everyone, on some level, has been exposed to this characteristic irony.
It’s evident to anyone that is part of this generation, and there are plenty of Salon editorials
and Guardian think-pieces to make it abundantly clear to the other generations.
The perception of what this brand of countercultural irony entails, I think, is often misguided
and misunderstood. There exists a common belief that irony is destructive because it
encourages the embracing of otherwise socially undesirable and perceived-as-worthless
cultural items: bad music, ugly clothes, terrible trends, obnoxious hashtagging. This is
somewhat true, but can be subverted by altering the emphasis of the statement, italicizing the
“socially” in “socially undesirable” and “perceived-as” in “perceived-as-worthless.” See, what
might be construed as the biggest problem with irony is, in fact, its biggest strength. It allows
people to find value in socially-rejected cultural items. It lets people off the hook for
treasuring things that they otherwise wouldn’t be allowed to treasure, without getting an
earful from friends or fans for it.
I’d even posit that, contrary to common perception, the counterculture isn’t embracing these
items on a superficial level as a means to a humorous end (though this sometimes happens);
instead, I’d argue that it’s using humor as a superficial means to legitimately embrace these
items. I’d argue that the vocalist of Headspace really believes in the power of the words he’s
singing. He’s just acutely aware that sincerity can come off as cheesy, that attempts at genuine
artistic expression can be belittled as juvenile, that self-expression can sometimes be met by
eyerolls. These reactions hurt. A snotty delivery is the perfect tool to deflect and preclude
these criticisms while still allowing him to embrace the beauty of a song like “Oh Boy.” In a
strange way, this strong self-awareness has made Generation Y the post-modern generation:
anxious about its every expression, output, and utterance, an anxiety likely due partly to social
media’s proven effect of making its users incredibly sensitive to the expectations and reactions
of their vast and diverse audience.
Of course, the tools can also be the problem. The fact that this self-awareness is social rather
than personal has obvious drawbacks. And irony, as has been pointed out by Salon, can be
used as a mask that prevents truth and communication, rather than a tool that fosters it - a
mask that works as a half-measure, a rudimentary stop gap to allow us to actually appreciate.
It can come off as cynical and disaffected, and it often prevents empathy and genuineness.
Taken to an extreme, it can terminate the tradition that originated with “T.B. Blues”. You end
up with artists printing and framing “Save Trees Lol” instead of striving hard to make sincere,
beautiful expressions (Ripp’s recent solo show at the Post Master gallery was a series of
breathtaking oil paintings which I can’t speak highly enough of, which is why I feel mostly
alright about singling out his “Save Trees” print). There’s surely a value to ironic and snotty
art that I’m not going into here, I know; art isn’t all about pursuing beauty. And all of this
sounds sentimental and wishy-washy, I know; it makes me want to put on a mask myself, to
qualify the statement or to distance myself from embracing beauty. But, I think that very fact
serves to illustrate the importance of what I’m trying to say.
by Graham Johnson
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