This weekend, I visited a church with a ham-fisted drummer. He played busily when the song required a skeletal beat. He ignored song structure and any notion of dynamics with a toothy grin. And just as the chorus of a beautiful hymn prepared to soar, he played an entire bar of gut-wrenching hi-hat fills.
Despite the obvious fact that he was new to the instrument, a stranger thought irked me. Something about the clumsy beats was disarming, even appealing. The drummer’s mistakes lent the entire affair a very natural, very human quality (much to the annoyance of the eight other musicians on stage) that illuminated one of the purposes of religious music: to blur the division between musician and spectator, creating a larger group of participants.
“American Idol” ratings are near their highest at the beginning of each season, when one poor sucker after another sings a wretched rendition of some pop standard and then gets verbally berated. Why do people love to watch this? Well, we’re a sadistic bunch, for starters, but also because an inept musician is just another schmuck. We savor the commonality.
More importantly, the inept musician is an icon, a frozen point in the lifetime of all musicians, who constantly struggle to reinvent themselves by mastering their instrument.
In 1962, John Lennon begged the postman for a letter from his sweetheart to the tune of four chords and the most tired drumbeat of the era. The Beatles’ “Please Mister Postman” wasn’t even written by the band. Four years later, he sung lines about ego death adapted from the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” over backwards guitars and one of the most important drumbeats of all time.
Of course, Lennon and his Liverpool pals were no hacks in the mop-top years, but their relatively derivative songs certainly weren’t pushing technical boundaries. Yet the early, rudimentary songs are the ones fans remember with fondness, the ones that granted the Beatles the funds and popularity to experiment. Ironic how the archetypal experimental rock band are so branded by their inexperienced beginnings.
Unsurprisingly, the artists that top today’s charts are largely inept. The only new aspect of Auto-Tune is that its use is more blatant than before, and popular singers were lip-synching long before Ashlee Simpson. These technologies have abolished the former standard and blurred yet another line: the one between a musician and a pretty face.
You can wince when the guitarist who fumbles around on the fret board or the singer who searches, without success, for the right pitch. But you shouldn’t laugh because, hey, at least those schmucks are trying.
Fun has just released their video for their catchy single, “All the Pretty Girls,” off of their brilliant debut album Aim & Ignite. They have been busy riding the success of their Aim & Ignite all across the country. They spent the summer with Manchester Orchestra, who also had a stellar album released earlier this year, before starting their first headlining tour earlier this fall. Right now they are on the backend of a short little stint with Taking Back Sunday and they have just announced their first batch of tour dates for 2010.
Julian Casablancas, lead singer of the Strokes and leather jacket enthusiast, lost his cool. It may have happened when his popular group splintered into a collection of guitar-focused side projects or when he married a few years ago. But Phrazes for the Young, Casablancas’ debut solo album, lacks the detached breeziness of the singer’s previous work.
This is only natural. Hip, young angst has nothing to do but cool down, from Catullus to Bob Dylan to Kanye West (impending). Hindsight strips hotshot posturing down to what it is, and Casablancas couldn’t stay mad forever.
As its title suggests, Phrazes for the Young is nothing if not self-aware. The album is literally comforting advice for young people set to upbeat music. Maybe the 31-year-old Casablancas has assumed the elder statesman role a bit prematurely, but it’s an interesting change in tone.
So Phrazes is a warning to arrogant young bucks, but more importantly, the album is an acknowledgement of weakness. “Yes, I know I’m goin’ to Hell in a leather jacket,” he sings on “Out of the Blue,” one of the album’s best songs.
The singer no longer buries his threats in distortion (“Oh, just take it or leave it,” he sneered in 2001). They’ve all been replaced with glossy self-help “phrazes” like “your faith has got to be stronger than your fear,” from lead single “11th Dimension.”
That song and most of the others buzz with clever ideas and sounds: drum machine click-pops with trumpets with outdated synthesizers with genre songwriting. Amongst it all are joyful melodies that seem to stick to the roof of your mouth.
But even at a mere eight songs, Phrazes is full of dead ends. “Ludlow St.” is a country ballad with drum machines and it’s about as successful as one would expect it to be. The real clunker is “Glass,” an overstretched and hackneyed piece of radio fodder Casablancas probably wrote in his sleep.
For this reason, Phrazes feels more like a collection of one-offs than a proper album. The singer has grown confident in his serene new worldview but struggles to sell those ideals without sounding like Dr. Phil.
If there’s a unifying theme, it’s that middle age is confusing. So is “cool.”
