Pretty strong advice, regardless of gender.
Pretty strong advice, regardless of gender.
“The most interesting male phenomenon in music over the past year has been Drake, the former Degrassi star who has since become the spiritual successor to those early Kanye West records, mining the emotional depths of pop stardom with skill. But dude has been accused of making rap “soft,” a bizarre term that seems to imply a “right” way and a “wrong” way of doing rap; if you’re not going HAM, ur not doin it right. Or, to put it another way, talking about how you’re feeling with the type of honesty Drake does on Take Care is just something the rap community isn’t willing to endorse whole-heartedly.
But reconcile that with news today that dude may have convinced some girl to have sex with one of his buddies while Drake himself watched (ALLEGEDLY LOLOL). Soft on the mic, sure, but that allegation if true makes Drake seem equally as sexist as any of his “harder” peers. There was an article a few years ago about Rivers Cuomo’s narrator on Pinkerton, and how Rivers seeming like an honest, nice, not-unattractive dude made girls romanticize the rather unpleasant character Rivers portrayed on that record. This news now paints Drake in the same light; he’s always been honest about getting with random women and kind of feeling bad about it, but no one has considered in honesty the way his narrators treat women because he comes off as a nice guy (compared to, say, Tyler who comes off as an asshole and has every lyric examined microscopically). All of these forms of sexism are equally as damaging, but because the messenger has a nice smile, we as a public are sometimes too willing to ignore that fact.” - Chris Bosman (@racecarbrown)
“Sex and consequence are well-explored territory for the indie rock dude. Ben Gibbard has made his career out of feeling bad about having sex. Jeff Mangum saw mountaintops covered in semen. Rivers Cuomo got tired of it. Gareth Campesinos often synthesizes sex with death and almost everything else. It’s interesting to me, then, how very little of the music we hear from women in the indie realm tackles this same subject matter. The most notable exception for me being Exile in Guyville.
Now, I made a crack about Liz Phair on the podcast, but Exile is without a doubt one of the most frank and interesting takes on sex by any songwriter. Not only does it provide nuanced views on male/female relationships of all kinds, but it’s unafraid to throw eyebrow-raising lines like “Fuck and run/ ever since I was seventeen/ Fuck and run/ ever since I was twelve” or “Everything you say is so/obnoxious, funny, true, and mean/ I want to be your blowjob queen.”
A lot of the male take on sex lacks any amount of self-examination beyond “Why did I make that bad decision?” And it usually even refuses to answer that question. Guys tend to paint themselves as the heroes of their own interpersonal relationship stories, and self-awareness would shatter that facade. But Phair took a microscope to everyone: the male friend that secretly wants to fuck you, the frat boys treating women poorly, but mostly and most poignantly on herself. She used sex and its consequences as a window into her own insecurities, a trick very few people of any gender have the guts to attempt.” - Chris Bosman (@racecarbrown)
“I’m not afraid to call myself out. In listening back to this podcast, I realized that I didn’t touch on a very important question that I should have been asking myself: how do you justify caring about women’s rights with not being up in arms about Odd Future’s lyrical content? It’s a complex issue, and one I unwittingly avoided because sometimes I’m not very smart.
The answer isn’t an easy one, obviously. It has something to do with the idea of a “Goblin.” While it may seem as though Tyler’s one-word album titles are throw-aways, there is something about them that cuts to the heart of their intent. Bastard was full of self-loathing and outward hatred, the pain of the abandoned. Goblin, on the other hand, would only have been more accurately named “Troll.” It’s mischiveous and a little bit evil, with that evil refracted through a Lord of the Rings-size lense. For Tyler, it seemed our outrage was his Precious.
Part of my lack of outrage also involved the fact that Tyler was equal opportunity with his violence, pointing it at people of every color and creed, including a skit where he murdered his own friends. Does the fact that we picked out the violence against homosexuals and women say more about him or more about us? And how do we determine the boundaries of what’s okay to parodize and what isn’t? If Tyler was dismembering and sexually assaulting men would we care less? I don’t have the answers, but because I didn’t on the podcast, I felt it my responsbility to bring up the questions.” - Chris Bosman (@racecarbrown)
“There’s something interesting about the very nature of anticipation. On the surface, the feeling is a good one, looking forward with positivity toward something to come in the future. But there also seems to be an undercurrent of masochism there, at least for the music critics who put together these type of lists. A lot of what was on our lists were thinly veiled hopes that people would fail. We kind of like that idea, as music critics, because it’s a justification in some way of our dislike for a particular artist; when I was sixteen, I would have hollered for joy if everyone had just decided to start hating Conor Oberst as much as I did.
Not liking music, and being vocal of that dislike, is a part of evaluating music. Of course. So it’s hard to call the whole exercise pointless, because we’re being asked our opinions. But it’s a difficult feeling, actively thinking ill of someone because of the quality— or lack thereof— in their music. So let me change my tune on one artist who I wasn’t backing: Azealia Banks. I’m still not completely sold on here, and I’m not the biggest “212” fan in the world, but I hope that her jump to Universal nets her the mainstream success she’s looking for. Even if I don’t like your record, Azealia, I’m no longer hopefully anticipating its lack of quality.” - Chris Bosman (@racecarbrown)
“We talked a bit about the xx, and too much of it centered around Jamie xx and his role in the band and if the next xx record will sound more like his solo stuff and blah blah blah. But what I wished we had talked more about was xx itself, that debut record, and songs like “VCR”, that exemplify how masterfully this band used silence and space to heighten tension and extract emotion. It was as much what the xx doesn’t say that communicates so well.” - Chris Bosman (@racecarbrown)
“One of my favorite parts of our podcast was Storfer and I’s complete mystification about the relevance, appreciation, and cultish gravitation around meat-and-potatoes indie-rockers The Wrens. Bosman was utterly enraged while we made Maybach Music jokes. Such is life. Obviously I knew who the Wrens were, it just took me more than a second, something total taboo in Bosman’s demographic. It’s funny, we all have incredibly subjective perceptions of vitality and importance in a field as minor as independent music. Even within a cabal of similarly-minded writers. If the Wrens do finally release that long-awaited record, a lot of people will be very happy, but at such a small scale it’ll barely register a blip on the national consciousness. I suppose whether or not that’s motivation enough is up to the artist.” - Luke Winkie (@Luke_Winkie)
“You ever get that feeling that what you’ve been talking to your friends about is suddenly what everyone else is talking about? I had that moment after this episode of Aim to Misbehave, when after I talked about the possibility of Lana Del Rey bombing, she bombed on SNL. I also talked about A$AP Rocky wouldn’t have been the number one story on Pitchfork five years ago, and then there he was on Monday, as the number one story on Pitchfork.
But I’d like to amend something I said on the podcast. I said I was tentatively looking forward to the new Sleigh Bells album, not anymore: After the release of the new single, “Comeback Kid,” I’m fully on board for the return of Sleigh Bells. That song, from the cheese ball guitar riff to the ridiculous cover art, is damn near perfect.” - Andrew Winistorfer (@thestorfer)
“This past weekend was rough on things that I like. Not only did my Green Bay Packers lose in convincing fashion to the New York Giants, but Lana Del Rey— who I’ve been defending on more than a few of these podcasts, including this week’s—absolutely bombed on Saturday Night Live, in a performance that was so bad that even the most stalwart Del Rey defender could find nothing redeeming in it.
Many of the jokes lobbed in Lizzy Grant’s direction were regarding her detached demeanor during her performance, but was more bizarre to me was the headstrong insistance to sing every line of “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans” with different, inexplicable vocal affectations. Every consonant was thwapped so hard, she actually sounded like an elementary school child mocking the voices of the special education kids; when she jumped to the higher registers for “runs,” it almost seemed to be a breathy, ironic mockery; even when she managed to sing from chest voice, she left it so quickly that you couldn’t even really tell if she can sing or not. It was like schizophrenic karaoke.
More to the point, the fact that Grant keeps hiding behind these vocal gimmicks during her live performances seems to suggest that she doesn’t know how she wants to communicate these songs. An implication that suggests that she herself doesn’t know what these songs are about and, if you take it one step further, did she even really fucking write these tracks? Her inability to express even an ounce of emotional understanding of these songs seems to undercut any suggestion of her steering the ship of her own musical career.
That being said, as bad as that performance was, I’m not going to hold it against “Video Games” or “Blue Jeans.” Each of those tracks still speak to me on a gut level, enough so that even despite my lukewarm reaction to “Born to Die”, I’m interested in where her full-length goes. I’m no longer confident in it hitting #32 on Pitchfork’s 2012 list— her performance was a bit too brutal to be pushed aside so easily— but I still wouldn’t be surprised to see it on there.” - Chris Bosman (@racecarbrown)
“I mentioned this picture of mine in the podcast and, oh man, it is so completely 2004, from the MySpace ‘shooting your own picture in the mirror’ thing to the aggressively swooped bangs. But, hey, if you can’t own your past you’re doomed to repeat it.
I may not have the bangs or that awful jacket now; I’ve grown out of them. And I’ve grown out of the whiny, self-indulgent ‘no one understand me’ self-seriousness that came with. Which makes sense, as I’ve grown from the whiny self-indulgence of late-era Smashing Pumpkins to stuff like Los Campesinos! latest record, Hello Sadness, which turns those emotions on their head by both paying homage to them and taking the piss out of them, a fantastic deconstruction of why we have pictures like this, and why we stop taking them after awhile.” - Chris Bosman (@racecarbrown)
“In terms of what gave me the most joy this year, this unintentionally hilarious video for the duet between Mariah Carey and Justin Bieber of “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” I mentioned it briefly on the podcast this week, and just felt the need to share it with the world. Mariah Carey seems pretty desperate to establish herself as still being spank bank material, and Justin seems just entirely unaware, mainly because he’s nowhere near Mariah at any point in this video. By the way, I have no idea what “SuperFestive!” or “Shazam Version” mean here, which gives the whole thing a surreal quality that only makes me laugh harder.” - Chris Bosman (@racecarbrown)
We’re off for the holidays! We’ll be back come Sunday, January 7th.
