Over Analysis: Nostalgia for a "Younger Us"

One of the problems facing a band whose first release receives quite a bit of hype is how to keep that buzz buzzing, how to create brand loyalty and keep customers returning for that ninety-first frappuccino. For too many bands, the answer is to release the second album as soon as possible to try to keep the hypemachine hyping. This leads to many obviously rushed follow-ups that kill the band’s or artist’s sales (see: Cross, Christopher; Daddy, Puff; Doctors, Spin) and street cred (see: Ferdinand, Franz; Strokes, the; Yeahs, Yeah Yeah).

This was the problem facing Japandroids, whose 2009 full-length debut, Post-Nothing, received universal acclaim and found a spot on many year-end lists. How to follow this success? Japandroids’ hectic tour schedule—seriously, the only time these guys take a break from the road is when one of them is hospitalized—kept them from the studio, which saved them, for the time being, from the half-assed, rush-job, sophomore slump.

Japandroids instead opted for the buy-ninety-frappuccinos-receive-one-free-valium-prescription punchcard method, keeping their fans’ loyalty whetted by nonstop touring and one-off releases. The first such release, No Singles, a compilation of the band’s first two self-released EPs, dropped in May 2010. The Vancouver duo followed this with a truly brilliant stroke of marketing—a series of (ahem) singles. Throughout 2010, Polyvinyl will release five Japandroids 7” singles, all limited edition, all on clear vinyl. Each single includes an original song written during the Post-Nothing sessions, and a b-side cover of bands like X and Big Black.

The second installment in this series, “Younger Us” b/w “Sex & Dying in High Society,” is set to drop on 16 July, though “Younger Us” has been making the rounds on the Internet and satellite radio for a few weeks. In terms of sound, “Younger Us” represents something of a departure from the successful formula of Post-Nothing. As one reviewer from another little music blog put it, “Younger Us” shows “this band has more to offer than the angular, fuzzed-out frenzy that we already know they do so well.”

That something more Japandroids has to offer is equal parts power pop, garage rock, and—dare I say it—emo. While the guitars and vocals are still heavily fuzzed-out, the song structure seems more straightforward than much of their previous releases, with a melody more clear and catchy, and replete with “whoa-oh” backing harmonies. As my fellow PoMo Jukeboxer James Brubaker so succinctly put it after hearing this song, “Japandroids are emo for grownups who came of age listening to emo.”

This description is all the more apt when we consider the song’s theme, which is feeling nostalgic for “the good ole days” when you’re still too young to feel true nostalgia. In a sense, we have a speaker looking forward in time to a period when he’ll be able to look back on these youthful exploits and reminisce about his younger self. In a similar case of prolepsis, the speaker of Robert Frost’s most famous—and most grossly misunderstood—poem says he “shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” So too will the speaker of “Younger Us,” though his sigh, unlike the ambiguous sigh of Frost’s speaker, will most certainly be one of wistful pining.

Structurally, the lyrics of “Younger Us” are divided into two sections. In the first, the speaker asks an unnamed comrade to “remember” the glory days had by their younger selves. “Remember when we had them all on the run,” Brian King sings, “and the night we saw the midnight sun.” These first two events show that giddy energy of youth, the feeling of being indestructible. In this same vein, the speaker then asks his compatriot to remember, “saying things like ‘we’ll sleep when we’re dead.’” In addition to reminiscing for the good times of non-stop partying, this line reveals the naivety that accompanies youthful abandon, which is reinforced when the speaker reminisces for “thinking this feeling was never going to end.” While the “younger us” could be naïve enough to think the good times would never end, the “older us” have realized that they must.

After this first verse repeats, we have the song’s chorus, or the closest thing to a traditional chorus. Here, the speaker asks his friend to “remember that night you were already in bed / said fuck it, got up to drink with me instead.” These lines are central to the song’s thematic meaning, representing the difference between youth and maturity. The speaker’s friend had gone to bed, presumably because of the next morning’s responsibilities, something like work or school for which he would need to wake early enough to disallow drinking the night away. But while maturity would consider the responsibilities and remain in bed, here the youthful friend says, “fuck it” and gets up to drink with the speaker. This devil-may-care attitude toward responsibility is what the speaker asks his friend to recall with him.

This trope of asking the comrade to reminisce makes up the song’s first section. In the second, the speaker now asks not for remembrance, but for those “good ole days” to be given back to him. The speaker asks to be given, in turn: “that naked new skin rush” that comes from youthful merrymaking; “that you & me to the grave trust,” or the ability to trust one’s friends implicitly; his “girls learning love, wild and free”; and “swimming through the streets” with his boys. In each of these lines, the speaker asks to recapture these great times. Each line is followed by the request, “give me younger us,” which suggests it is the compatriot, and not the speaker, who has matured beyond the abandon of the “younger us.”

This movement from requests to remember, to requests for return represents the movement from reminiscence to true nostalgia, which always contains the bittersweet longing to recapture or reenact one’s memories. We see this transition still clearer in the repetition of the chorus, when the speaker asks his comrade not to remember, but instead to give him “that night you were already in bed / said fuck it, got up to drink with me instead.” The speaker is asking his audience to become the person he once was.

In this nostalgia for the good times experienced by a “younger us,” here we have a young adult, likely in his late 20s or early 30s, longing for the freedom and exuberance of youth. If, as Jay-Z, in his infinite wisdom, once said, 30 is the new 20, then here the speaker really has nothing to be nostalgic for, still being “younger” enough to say “fuck it” and get up and drink. However, the difference is that he’s old enough now to realize that the good feeling will end eventually. Nothing, especially thrills, can last. This naïve ignorance is what the speaker misses here, causing this premature sense of nostalgia. While “Younger Us” may differ sonically from earlier Japandroids songs, this prolepsistic nostalgia for the whimsies of youth are something we’ve heard them do so well on other great tracks like “Young Hearts Spark Fire” and “Sovereignty,” which suggests Japandroids are the quintessential quarter-life-crisis band.

Polyvinyl will officially release "Younger Us" on 16 July. You can pre-order the 7" single here. (I received my copy in the mail yesterday, so there are definite advantages to pre-ordering.) The release is limited to 2500 copies, so you better hurry.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Michael Sembello's "Maniac"

Dancing is our greatest form of cultural expression, without a doubt. For, as Neil Young duly notes, "When you dance," you can, indeed, "really love." This is most definitely a fact, because when I think of dancing, Neil Young is the first person that comes to mind. The popularity of musical theater, Dancing With the Stars, the Riverdance, and Michael Jackson's video for "Thriller" quantifiably prove my thesis. If this weren't proof enough, highly-trained biologists, several of whom have respectable college degrees, have noted that dancing is humanity's primary embodiment of the mating rituals of the animal kingdom, and that the way a person dances provides plenty of information to a prospective suitor about how they, ahem, mate. But is it possible to dance too hard? Can one dance so hard that they neglect their duties as a human and become a detriment to society? Well, yes, if we are to believe--and we should--Michael Sembello's legendary new wave dance epic "Maniac."

In 1983, when "Maniac" was released on the soundtrack album to the classic Adrian Lyne film Flashdance, most listeners had fairly preconceived notions about what a maniac was. Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, or that kid down the street who blew his summer savings playing the Tron video game at the nearby gas station for three straight days in a effort to get inside the game like they do in the movie ... these were maniacs. Michael Sembello changed all this with "Maniac." Previously a session guitar genius who made substantial contributions to Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, Sembello summoned all of his dynamic powers into the brutal force of nature that is "Maniac," including pulsating synths, decisive beats, and a searing guitar solo that would make Eddie Van Halen jealous, to communicate the tale of the lyric's female protagonist.

"Maniac" tells the tale of a "Steel Town girl on a Saturday night looking for the fight of her life." Clearly she is a maniac, because most people are simply looking for a good time on a Saturday night, not some epic battle with, like, say, the immortal, malfunctioning Mecha monster fueled by raw plutonium and the madcap ideas of competitive spirit practiced by the rogue scientist Dr. Headwound. Part of her charm is that "in the real-time world, no one sees her there." Despite being invisible to mortals, they still sense a priori that "she's crazy." So what's the source of her mania? Doy, it's the Love of the Dance! She dances so hard, in fact, that she enters a "danger zone"--and long before Kenny Loggins traveled on the highway there--where "a dancer becomes the dance." In other words, she has BECOME the dance, LITERALLY. Thank about that for a moment. What is your passion in life? Let's say, hypothetically, that it's fishing. Now imagine that you have fished the fuck out of the watering hole you are at and then you actually became a fish. At that point, not only would you be like Vardaman's mother in William Faulkner's tragicomic novel As I Lay Dying (1930), but you'd also, most definitely, be a maniac. You would also suddenly find yourself completely mesmerized by spinnerbait.

Michael Sembello's hit fundamentally reshaped our societal notions of the maniac. Where once this was the domain of serial killers, genocidal autocrats, and flesh-craving cannibals, now a veritable dance-floor of talented bodies fit comfortably into the category of the maniac. So when we say that Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Lady Gaga, Erin Andrews, and Napoleon Dynamite are maniacs, we don't mean that they are going to make human body suits out of the flesh of our siblings. We mean that they're dancing like they never danced before ...

quite possibly in a moonlighting gig at a strip club.

Here's the saucy video clip to "Maniac":

"We're Not Above Reviewing Leaks: M.I.A. - /|/|/|Y/|"

Normally, when I review a pre-release leak, I try to make sure that I'm working with a reasonably high quality specimen. Typically, if I come across a leak in a bit rate lower than 160 kbps, I'll discard it immediately, and wait for something better. I try to avoid trans-codes, radio rips, web rips, anything that could get in the way of my listening to, understanding, and internalizing a particular album. Well, with M.I.A.'s latest, the annoying to type /|/|/|Y/|, I decided to break this rule. Why did I decide to change my philosophy now? Well, because I couldn't wait to hear /|/|/|Y/|, and so when I came across a shitty leaked version, I had to check it out. Of course, that still doesn't explain why I'd want to write a pre-release review of a shitty leak*. The truth of the matter is, the shitty leak is good enough that, while I'm sure the album proper, in all of its high fidelity glory, will sound infinitely better than the shitty leak, the shitty leak still sounds remarkably good. In a moment, we'll talk about that some more, but first, let's talk about where this leak came from.

It seems appropriate, since I'm reviewing an actual shitty leak, that I provide some detail on the leaked text itself. So, this leak resulted from, what appears to be, a retail website error. If my understanding is correct, a particular website that sells songs as Mp3's, posted samples to the songs from /|/|/|Y/|. Usually, in such a scenario, the web-retail site will provide thirty second clips of an album so that listeners can get a general sense of what a song or album sounds like. If you're unclear on this, check out iTunes or Amazon--they both do the "short clip" approach. However, either by design or accident, this particular website's sampling allowed users to listen to thirty second clips, but each time a user clicked play, they got the next thirty seconds of the song. Instead of hearing the same thirty seconds over and over again, users could effectively listen to an entire song in thirty second tidbits. As the internet is full of crafty individuals, someone managed to record the entire album in thirty second snippets, piece it together, and disseminate it through whatever and wherever. I came across the file at a message board I frequent, downloaded and, and have listened to it enough to realize that, shitty quality and all--in addition to the occasional splicing flub, the Mp3's sound slightly worse than something you may have recorded off of the radio in 1986-- /|/|/|Y/| is an exceptional album.

So what makes /|/|/|Y/| so good? In a word, it's the album's raw audacity. M.I.A. has always been a big, challenging personality. From our first introduction to her on the Piracy Funds Terrorism Mixtape, she has come to represent chaos in pop music--referencing the PLO in a pop song on her proper debut, dropping the oddly controversial gunshots into "Paper Planes," rocking the Grammy's as pregnant as possible, and more recently, stirring up some ruckus in the press. What this album represents, then, is the first time that M.I.A. has been able to harness her own anarchic energy and use it as the guiding principle of an album. Arular was an exciting, and daring record, yes. And Kala was even better, blurring numerous boundaries in pop music to become some sort of Homi K. Bhabha-esque pop dream. What /|/|/|Y/| does, consistently, that neither of its predecessors could sustain, is to render genre in pop music almost utterly irrelevant. If Kala found M.I.A. blurring pop, hip hop, indie rock, and any other number of influences into a delicious pop hybrid, /|/|/|Y/| finds her pulling punk and noise into the mix to make a raw, abrasive, confrontational album that manages to walk the delicate line between pop as sex and punk as fuck. In fact, I could see some pretty strong arguments coming about that /|/|/|Y/| is the punkest album to come around in years.

I should have known it was a good sign when Diplo tweeted, a couple of weeks back, something to the effect that most of the new M.I.A. album sounded like Skinny Puppy and freaked him out. While Skinny Puppy might not be the most obvious point of reference, the wall of tech-noise aesthetic running through most of the album's songs is stunning. "Teqkilla" builds on a messy groove complete with odd sampled vocal fragments and blasts of angry, displaced tones and warped keyboards. "Lovalot," on the other hand, is a bit more straight forward, it's production consisting of minimal percussion and bass. Unlike "Teqkilla" which finds its strength in noise, "Lovalot" relies on M.I.A.'s hot, simmering intensity as she delivers the line "I fight the ones that fight me," followed by more restrained bursts of sampled mischief. Elsewhere, M.I.A. bounces over a slick reggae groove on the hopeful "It Takes a Muscle," and I'm guessing if you're reading this, you've already familiarized yourself with the Suicide sampling burst of gut-punk that is "Born Free." In a way, the more extreme production choices on /|/|/|Y/| recall some of the bolder moments of Public Enemy's Bomb Squad. That's not to say that /|/|/|Y/|'s production actually sounds like the Bomb Squad, just that these songs sometimes work on a similar principle, but up the stakes to better fuck with our contemporary sensibilities.

The only song that doesn't quite work for me--yet--is "Tell Me Why," which is easily the most straight-forward, radio friendly song, here. The song's accessibility isn't, in and of itself, though, the reason for its failure. The problem is the sense that the song is trying too hard to be accessible, to be this album's "Paper Planes." Even with this misstep, though, the album comes to a close with the lovely and weird "Space," and we realize, as the album ends, that once again, M.I.A. has upped the ante, not just for herself, but for pop music as an art form. I know that's a pretty big claim to make based on a shitty leak, and maybe I'll change my mind in a month, but right now, with the shitty leak in my iTunes, I can't help but find /|/|/|y/| absolutely stunning.

==

M.I.A.'s /|/|/|Y/| is out on July 13, on Interscope records. You can preorder the album here.

===
*Yes, I do believe that "shitty leak" is the technical term for what I'm listening to, here.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: The Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool Believes"

Traditionally, the fool is a figure of merriment, an employee of the high court hired to bring jollity and to provide satire. The most famous of these figures is Yorick in William Shakespeare's Hamlet. In the tragic play, Prince Hamlet asks Yorick's skull, "Where are your jibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?" Yorick, "a fellow of infinite jest," is the official fool in the scene. But the ahead-of-his-time Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon gives us an early look at the fool of our times, as the hot-headed Hamlet is interrogating a dead skull. What a dumbass! Today, the word means something much different. According to urbandictionary.com, a fool is "A clumsy or stupid person who is pitied by Mr. T." However, before the erstwhile B.A. Barracus was pitying fools, The Doobie Brothers established their epistemology in the 1978 smash hit "What a Fool Believes."

Prior to the hit, which was co-written by Kenny Loggins and The Doobie Brothers' own lead singer, Michael McDonald, nobody really knew what fools believed or even thought about. For psychologists during the first three quarters of the Twentieth Century, the fool represented their frontier. What did fools do? What did they eat? What kind of clothes did they wear? Did they think their Pet Rocks were actually alive? What did they do when they saw signs that read "Disneyland Left"? Fortunately, "What a Fool Believes" proved to be their manifest destiny, their Key to All Mythologies.

The Doobie Brothers were a well-respected rock group throughout most of the 1970s. In the middle of the decade, their lineup was bolstered by the addition of Steely Dan alums Jeff "Skunk" Baxter--a guitar whiz-kid--and keyboardist Michael McDonald. After they joined the group, The Doobies became an unstoppable force of nature, releasing such powerful recordings as "Takin' It to the Streets" and "Minute by Minute." On "What a Fool Believes," unquestionably their greatest contribution to musical history, Michael McDonald dazzles listeners with his wavering baritone and his oscillating falsettos, which reach up to heaven and tickle sleeping angels. The Doobies also forsake their typical rock instrumental set-up, exchanging their jazzy guitars it for saucy, state-of-the-art synthesizers to more effectively communicate the plight of the fool who is the subject of McDonald and Loggins' insightful lyric. As a result, the group never sounded more vital, or chirpy.

To make the ideology of the fool more accessible to his listeners, McDonald relates the tale of a foolish man in love with a woman who: 1) had no idea he loved her, and; 2) has absolutely no interest in the jamoke. Have you ever heard of anything so tragic? Apparently fools are self-obsessed and have delusions of grandeur, yet have a low self-image and are unable to pick up on even the most basic of social cues. Thanks to Michael McDonald and The Doobie Brothers, we now know what makes fools tick. Furthermore, the song also goes so far as to offer us a totalizing philosophy in which we are all fools. During the chorus, he sings, in a glass-shattering falsetto, "But what a fool believes, he sees / No wise man has the power / To reason away / What seems to be." Even the "wise man" is a fool for trying to "reason" with the fool, which, in fact he turns out to be. Consider your mind blown! As the old saying goes, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, blame it on Rio."

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Tag Team's "Whoomp! (There It Is)"

Tag Team's 1993 classic "Whoomp! (There It Is)" is a fantastic song because it brings together so many aspects of the human condition. First off, humans like to get the party started. And, clearly, Tag Team knows a thing or two about partying ("There's a party over here, a party over there / Wave your hands in the air"). Second, we love catchphrases. Think of all the wonderful coinages that have been inspired by "Whoomp! (There It Is)" since it burst upon the scene during the height of the grunge revolution: "Wusssssssssup!" "Who Let the Dogs Out? Woof. Woof. Woof," "I'm Rick James, Bitch," and "I can see Russia from my house," just to name a few. Lastly, the song returns us to our most basic and fundamental understanding of philosophy: what it means to be "real" and what it means "to be."

On a practical level, Tag Team's magnum opus makes one of life's most annoying events--like losing something, for instance--a cause for celebration. How many times have you lost your keys, forgot where you parked your car at the mall, or misplaced your children? After the usual retracing of steps and "looking in the last place I left them," you find them in some completely obvious place, like in your pocket or dangling off a cliff. Prior to Tag Team, recovering such things would offer us very little consolation for having been an idiot for losing them in the first place. But once the song was part of our global collective consciousness, we could sing "Whoomp! There It Is" to celebrate the rediscovery: Whoomp shakalaka-shakalaka-shakalaka-shaka!

Philosophically speaking, the assertion "Whoomp! There It Is" returns us to the pre-Socratic thinker Parmenides of Elea and his proem The Way of Truth in which he argues, "It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not." And if something "is," it is "real." Tag Team--more than any other rap group in history thus far--keeps it realer by offering us a celebration of the most basic truth about the reality of objects and thoughts, acknowledging the "is-ness" of something: Whoomp! There It Is. Furthermore, Ludwig Wittgenstein's concluding assertion in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) that "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" is verified by Tag Team. There is no song called "Whoomp! There It Isn't."

Tag Team's two brilliant MCs, DC the Brain Supreme (an apt moniker) and Steve Roll'n--like deciding to not have an abortion--celebrate life in "Whoomp! (There It Is)." By singing about life-affirming topics such as "kickin' the flow," "gettin' busy," [making] this party hype," "gettin' bent," and "mad skill flow," they remind us that "we are," and that is reason enough to have a party. Has there ever been a more positive message than this in popular music?

Here's the video:

"Picto-View!": Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today

I'd fully intended to write a "We're Not Above Reviewing Leaks" piece for this album, but due to circumstances out of my control, I didn't get the chance. Now, this stunning album has been released, reviews are rolling in, so what's left to do but represent it in pictures snagged from the internet? As usual, if any of the following pictures are yours and you'd like them removed, just holler at me and I'll get it done. Without further ado...

Concert Review: The National, with The Antlers

DAR Constitution Hall
Washington, DC
6 June 2010

In one of their many banters between songs, The National’s Matt Berninger and Aaron Dessner talked about the last time they played DC’s Constitution Hall, a 2007 show in support of the Arcade Fire. When the National opened that evening, the seats were half full. What a difference three years and two highly successful albums make. By the time the National took the stage last night, every seat in the 81-year-old concert hall was full.

Opening act the Antlers were less fortunate. When the Brooklyn three-piece took the stage, the crowd was thin, with almost as many people congregating in the lobby to sip their drinks as those gathered inside to witness the sonic experimentation. Those who cared more about their beers missed one hell of a performance.

The Antlers stuck exclusively to songs off 2009’s Hospice in their limited stage time, but they seemed to feel no pressure to stick to them faithfully. Instead, on songs like “Kettering” and “Bear,” the quiet parts were played even slower than on the album, while the louder bits got loud enough to make your ears bleed. Their moving performance of “Two” was especially poignant, but album highlight “Sylvia” was sadly missing. The Antlers played their guts out and then packed their own equipment into their small panel van that was dwarfed by the National’s mammoth tour bus and moving truck.

The National came out later and slid into “Runaway,” which seemed a strange opener since it is the slowest song on High Violet. But from there they launched straight into a rocking version of “Mistaken for Strangers.” When they played current single “Bloodbuzz Ohio” two songs later, I wondered if they would be able to maintain the crowd’s excitement, having exhausted two fan favorites in the first four songs. But I doubt many National fans walked out of Constitution Hall disappointed.

Throughout the performance, they showcased most of the songs off High Violet while managing to work in many of the great songs off Alligator and Boxer. One of the show’s highlights came from a slightly different arrangement of “Apartment Story”: The signature drumbeat did not begin until after the first chorus. By the end all six voices were singing “all things are well / we’ll be alright” in unison, and most of the crowd seemed to lend their voices to this catharsis.

On “Abel,” Berninger hopped into the orchestra seating and walked the aisles, stagehands trying desperately to unravel his microphone chord behind him. When he reached the back of the crowd, Berninger climbed on a chair and shouted the rest of the lyrics in a throng of fans. The National later closed their set with “Fake Empire,” the song that seemed to draw the most fan requests.

After a short break, the National returned for five encore songs. Bryce Dessner announced, “This is an old song we don’t play very often” before they started into a beautiful version of “Karen.” High Violet tracks “Lemon World” and “Terrible Love” framed one of the show’s best moments, a powerful performance of Alligator’s “Mr. November.” Berninger again went into the crowd, this time climbing into the balcony, and again shouted the last half of the song perched on a seat surrounded by fans.

The National’s performance in our nation’s capital confirmed what critics and Billboard sales figures have been suggesting: This is one of the most important rock bands of the day. Their level of intensity, the flawless execution of their performances, and their easy and captivating stage presence blended to create a truly remarkable concert that every fan owes it to herself to catch as soon as possible.

Click here for upcoming tour dates.