Rules of the Game #11: Toothpaste and Coffee

[koganbot]

More Ashlee. I try to do right by the craftsmanship and the poetry. (Thanks to Nia for inspiration.) I also pose a question that I suppose is really "Why do we care about artistry?" Any thoughts?

The Rules of the Game No. 11: Toothpaste and Coffee

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

(I meant to say the following in reply to last week's discussion but here will do just as well.) Myself and Rick got very drunk the other day, and were discussing the thread and why I don't respond to lyrics in the same way that you and most other folk seem to. Rick asked me the crucial question: did I ever listen to songs 'in the first person'? And my answer was no.

I'm always on the outside, looking in. When Kylie sings 'I need your love, like night needs morning', I never think of it as ME needing someone's love. I think of Kylie needing someone's love (and weep at how lovely that is). Even with No Doubt's 'Just A Girl' (a song I loved as a teenager), whilst listening I always mentally pictured some random teenager being oppressed by her parents rather than thinking about my own life. Of course I loved the song as I realised wasn't the only person who was experiencing those sort of feelings and identified strongly with the imaginary girl. But I couldn't imagine myself in her shoes *when I was listening to the song*, because the song was about HER, not me!

Rick seemed to think this fact was very important, but like I said, we were pretty drunk.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I'm the opposite: whenever I sing along (or more commonly imagine myself in the music video) it's always 'me' singing, even if it's not always me, Lex. The identification has to be there but it's usually more subtle than just my feelings correlating with the singer's - I can identify with the emotion of a song even if I have never felt that emotion (sometimes BECAUSE I have never, and don't see myself ever, feeling it, eg Lauryn Hill's 'To Zion' which is about her kid). I guess it's about potential feeling, the way in which a feeling is articulated rather than what the feeling actually is.

Which is why 'Say It Right' is such an important song for me b/c it's all about potentially feeling something indefinable.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Why can't I write like that when I am commissioned to do so.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Just a thought, but next time you have an assignment and you're stuck, you should try starting up a convo, grammar and main point etc. be damned, with someone and literally editing the responses together, then using it as a rough draft (at least then you'll have words on a page).

That's apparently how Xhuxk stitched together a few of Metal Mike Saunders' best pieces, like his great Britney one "Dear Diary" -- about half off-the-cuff emails and half "this is my Britney piece for the Voice."

[koganbot]

I think Xhuxk even went and found some old messageboard postings (though maybe not; I think Mike tries to avoid message boards).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

If you can follow where he posts on MySpace (which is basically at random), you can find some really great stuff. But it's impossible to track.

[koganbot]

Yeah, what Dave said. Most of this Ashlee piece was cut and pasted and revised from several emails, a long one to Edd Hurt and a couple of shorter ones to my editor Scott Dickensheets. I feel the piece came out too stilted anyway, but it got some good ideas on the page and I don't know how anyone with a brain could read it and not realize that Ashlee (or Evil Corporation That Uses Ashlee As A Front) produces words that matter and poetry to fall in love with.

Still haven't found my way into a good finger-snapping, toe-tapping voice in my column, and I'm disappointed that I didn't make the best of my opportunity to produce My Great Ashlee Piece; but I think the second half of last week's column hits the home run (er, what do they do in cricket?), finds its way into the brains and guts of the music (even while not really discussing the sound). And so now in the public prints I've got a couple of pieces that deliver Ashlee to some people beyond our little group. And this makes up for the one previous piece I did about her, a review of I Am Me that's well-written and smart (and favorable) but seems beside the point now.

So, if you have a piece to write, get us arguing about the subject matter, and join in.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yes this is a good idea - a lot of pieces I've actually managed to write were based on going back to things I wrote off the cuff. The danger of course is that as the conversation takes shape it will be other people's paragraphs I will want to use rather than my own.

[koganbot]

Actually, I'm all over the place in how I use and think about lyrics, and it's shocking how often I don't pay attention to them. I've loved Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" for 35 years and I can even sing along with the lyrics when it's playing and I still have no idea what they are really, or what they're about. And maybe I'd learn something interesting if I tried to find out.

But one thing, when lyrics do "take" me, as it were, I don't say to myself, "These are song lyrics, so I will treat them in a special way; as opposed to if they were words on a shopping list or part of a monograph on social categories in high schools." That is, I don't have a "song-lyric" way of analyzing song lyrics. I just analyze them as I would any words, which is to say I find out what they're doing and how I relate to them and use them rather than have a set model in advance. Which isn't to say that I don't have expectations and that I don't take into account what previous similar songs (or shopping lists or monographs) have done, but that each song and I set up our own relationship, as it were.

That is, listening to Ashlee sing "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep/Nobody's really seen my million subtleties" is different from listening to Chad Mitchell go "Queen Elizabeth, she fell in love with me/We were married in Milwaukee secretly/But I got tired of sugar and ran off with General Hooker/To go shootin' skeeters down in Tennessee." But they're both boasting songs and make extravagant claims. But Ashlee's commits her to the claim, puts her on the line. But Chad's commits him to his style (I'm the sort of person who has fun making this sort of claim), and actually the way it worked on record was that the other two members of the Chad Mitchell Trio were making world historical claims ("I saw Adam and Eve driven from the door/I'm the guy that picked the figleaves that they wore/And from behind the bushes peepin' saw the apple they was eatin'/And I swear that I'm the one that et the core"), Chad finally came in with a verse that was laughingly and saucily irrelevant. (Not sure if he wrote the line himself; they were doing variations on the Woody Guthrie version, I think.)

Tired of sugar?

[(Anonymous)]

Frank, I like your version, but I think that Woodie Guthrie actually wrote, "But I got tired and shook her and ran off with General Hooker..." It is amusing, perhaps, to think that QE1 was (secretly) a sugary babe, in total contrast to her public image. But I don't think Guthrie had that notion.

You might start a thread about the emotional and social significance of mis-heard lyrics, given the important role that they play on the web.

Re: Tired of sugar?

[koganbot]

Well, the version of the lyrics I saw online goes "I got tired of snooker," which is a billiards game or something, anyway didn't quite seem relevant. Also, not sure if this particular verse is in the versions that online people attribute to Guthrie. I've never heard his version. (I did about 10 minutes of research.)

[koganbot]

As for ways to identify with lyrics, I'm all over the place. I can imagine myself singing the Chad Mitchell lines, even if I don't identify with the narrator of the song, who goes off shootin' skeeters down in Tennessee. I can both identify with the lyrics of "Autobiography" - yeah, in fact I did walk a thousand miles while everyone was asleep - but they're more thrilling coming out of the mouth of a nineteen-year-old girl. They make her attractive and she makes them attractive.

But if you heard a loud noise in early December 2005, that was my jaw hitting the floor when I finally (almost a year and a half late) bought the album and first heard those words. I was hit with sudden, unexpected affinity, but also sudden recognition - damn! she's Byron, Whitman, Dylan, Eminem (and I don't know if any of those has had as good a one-liner as "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep," and it seems to be original with her*, not an old saying) - like, where'd she come from. (And that line's part of a song that seems built around the idea of a personals ad: "Got stains on my t-shirt/And I'm the biggest flirt/Right now I'm solo but that will be changing eventually.")

[koganbot]

*or John or Kara

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well, I certainly relate more to banalities than more extravagant claims, but I'm not necessarily moved more by the banalities, and can be moved by extravagant claims that contain within them a few key mundane details (Arcade Fire: "then we think of bedrooms/ yeah our parents' bedrooms/ and the bedrooms of our friends," which is a hundred times more moving than what I'd presume is supposed to be the "cathartic" part following it: "then we think of our parents/ hey what the hell ever happened to them?" My dad's probably at his guitar lesson right about now (today's Thursday, right?). So what?

But sometimes I need the stuff that doesn't work, too. And this relates a little to trust, I think, trusting failure. The film I made using my home movie footage is pretty ambiguous/open in "meaning" for the most part, lots of games with time and space, but there's one part where I force myself (at age 4) to say and spell things I wasn't actually saying, at one point spelling out "E-X-P-L-A-I-N" over two images of my mom at the beginning of her illness and end of it. (Mucking even that up in the middle spelling it backwards -- like, these are just letters.) My friend Ian told me it wasn't like me, and I said that was kind of the point; it's an incredibly immature thing to do, to just cry out like that. But it's also important to do that -- it'd be dishonest for me not to go back and mess with things, try to get some explanation out of them that I know more rationally just isn't necessarily there.

So you have your parents' bedroom, and the bedrooms of your friends, and then you have WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED. Or you have the sky falling (what the hell?), then you have the coffee. Or you have Christmas and a piano recital and a birthday cake...EXPLAIN. Can't explain, but also can't shake the feeling that there's something in there somewhere, even if maybe there isn't (but if there isn't...EXPLAIN!).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

As for point-of-view, it's hard to determine. When I'm actually listening to a song, I don't think about it the same way I do immediately afterwards. So even if I feel like I (or my roommates) might relate to an Ashlee line, it's all Ashlee when I'm listening (carefully or closely), then it's me thinking back on it. I don't usually have the "I spilled my coffee, too" revelation during the song itself. (Usually, being moved is much less definable, more visceral, until long afterwards.)

[koganbot]

But once you've had the "I spilled my coffee, too" revelation, doesn't it become part of subsequent listenings of the song?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

This is true. But it can take a long time for me to even have the revelation -- I can listen to a song twenty times before even starting to understand what it's about (what's above captain, Admiral Obvious?). I do think my focus shifts while I'm actually listening to a piece of music (well, Ashlee music anyway) to think about her and what she's trying to do; knowing that I'm sort of a character by association in all of it, too, might facilitate closer attention to Ashlee in those three or so minutes, but even if I bring the revelation with me, it hangs out in the background and acts as a piece in the puzzle while I figure out what's going on with her. But maybe she's a special case. (Weirdly, I can't think of a single song that I consider "about me," that I would ever claim as my song or insert myself into. Except maybe "Lip Gloss," which Emily bought for the first time at M*A*C, btw, after kicking the song around in her head for ages. It's special non-sticky lip gloss, highly recommended -- the shade is "Lu-Be-Lu.")

Haven't tackled your question above, btw, but...why wouldn't we care about artistry? Even if a music exists to celebrate a "lack" of artistry, doesn't it become its own sort of artistry with its own conventions and standards of beauty? (One question I have re: Ashlee dismissal is usually what standards of artistry are being employed -- it seems to me that the standards are often picked AFTER the decision has been made to dismiss, as you've made clear in several of your columns.) I don't think Ashlee's artistry is questionable, but you also have to understand the terms she and her genre are setting, both of which can be a barrier for people that have never given the music a chance.

words and music

[speakerstress.livejournal.com]

Words matter to me, but most of the time it's the music that grabs my atteniton first. The voice, rhythm, melody, a particular riff, or the dynamics of the mix, etc.

It can be some key words that open me up to an otherwise non-descript song, though. Usually a
chorus, rising above the mix, or even an otherwise random phrase poking out of a verse. Like
"I've walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep," for instance. That caught my attention, too. Made me think of Hendrix swiping away mountains standing in his way. Bold as love. It's the
language, wordplay, the images or ideas or feelings lyrics evoke for me.

But that's ab as far as it goes. I already have to be crushing on a song b/f I start paying any closer attention to the way the words add up to a narrative, playing off each other in twists and turns, shading the meaning of the song in a crafty way, the way Ashlee lyrics do. What I'm trying to say is I might listen to a song for weeks before my impression of the songwriting deepens beyond a few catchphrases. This is so much the case that it's not unusual for me to eventually grow ambivalent about the lyrics of my favorite songs-- i.e., the ones I play over and over, turn up, and sing or dance to everyday for awhile.

Little Wayne's "Shooter" is a great case in point. Love it when he barks through a filter w/ the thug doo-wop harmonizing in the background. The shivery way he sing-songs the title over and over. Played that song for weeks b/f I caught the gay hating in his boasts. So now my affection for
the song is tainted.

I suppose this just means my favorite, favorite songs are the ones that stand up to my fetishizing them; I love them still after twenty listens. Be that as it may, though, there are lots and lots of songs I get excited ab, play repeatedly for weeks, that lyrically, don't add up to great songwriting craft or even a cogent theme I can identify w/.

This is where I think maybe you're putting the cart b/f the horse in spreading the word ab Ashlee's music. B/f anybody is going to study the lyrics they have to get past the faceless, generic, redundant quality of her music and song titles.

The "hard" stuff-- "La La," "Autobiography," "I am Me"-- has a glammed out grunge feel-- mall punk, sounds ab right. This would be the standard indie-rockist put down, I expect, but for me can also be a virtue b/c the songs gel, melodically cohere, and the choruses lift you up the way under-produced bands seldom do. The anthemic melodic structure of "Pieces of Me" and "La La" are definitely strengths. I love the soaring, open-throated (which sounds like open-hearted) chorus to "Pieces of Me." Also like the frenetic, whipping, rhythmic bass frission driving the chorus forward in "La La." Great fun. I like it when she growls. But, still, after giving a handful of songs a half-dozen listens one problem here might be that there are not enough signature riffs or compelling beats to pull the listener in. You do answer your "so what?" question ab Ashlee's craftmanship by comparing the artistry she achieves to Dylan and Lennon but I don't hear that kind of signature quality to her sound yet.

I'm not sure she's got enough going on in her sound to in the long-run separate herself from her competition (Avril, Pink, Lindsay?) and influences (L7, Garbage, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, even Pat Benetar). Take "I am Me," for instance. If Joan Jett did this on a new album it'd be hailed as classic traditionalism but for Ashlee, never having seen her on TV and knowing now only
a handful of her songs, this already seems redundant, no?

At this point, I'm still thinking that it's the context of opposition to Ashlee that has you identifying w/ her so strongly. Her "come alive" sexy, Tom-boy passion is appealing. The haters are idiots. Give the girl a chance. But, I dunno, she ought to listen to more Pretenders, Kimya Dawson, Little Wayne, Manu Chao, even your Teena Marie.

At any rate, I don't always identify with lyrics or project on songs to begin w/ but if they grow to mean anything to me I certainly do. Sometimes the lyrics are my life but a lot of times I'm just in there playing a mean tambourine.