Song Of The Week - "Let's Go" - Matt & Kim

Confession: I never made it all the way through Matt & Kim’s 2010 album Sidewalks. Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure I even made it past the third track. Anyways, the point is that whatever I did make it through, I don’t remember all that well. The general impression I retain is that the whole album felt over-produced—too slick to have come from the DIY dance punk duo from Grand Street, whose sophomore album was full of exuberant, lo-fi pop music.

Unfortunately, “Let’s Go,” the first single off Matt & Kim’s fourth album Lightning, to be released at some point this fall, does not represent a return to their cruder, more diverting days. It’s a little more spry-sounding than their last effort, but it still lacks the vital punch of “Daylight” or “Good Ol’ Fashioned Nightmare.” Those songs both had hooks to kill for and were—let’s be honest—the saving grace of an album that might otherwise have been considered a little forgettable. In the years since the release of that album, I’ve had several conversations about how good “Daylight” is, one or two about “Good Ol’ Fashioned Nightmare,” and exactly zero about anything else on the album. Regrettably, I can barely comment on any other track save for Kim’s frenetic drum hits on “Lesson Learned.”

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It doesn’t help the case for "Let's Go" that the main vocal hook is ripped straight out of the Earth, Wind, and Fire songbook. Never mind that dozens of other artists have taken stabs at rewriting that famous “oohing” section—the song practically begs for emulation—but I can’t but help have the feeling that other artists have done it better. (See Jenny Owen Youngs’s song “Already Gone” on her latest album An Unwavering Bend Of Light [hint: it comes in the chorus].) For Matt & Kim, it's just a clunky reference—my brother made a case for cryptomnesia on Matt & Kim’s part, but how could a Williamsburg-based hipster duo pass up the ironic funk reference?—that comes off sounding less like emulation and more like parasitism.

And what about the lyrics? In terms of “Daylight,” I found the nonsense lyrics generally charming. I’ve heard stories that Matt constructs lyrics based on a journal of scribblings kept by Kim—most of it nonsense to begin with, which he then wraps in even more nonsense by tossing odd bits and pieces incongruously together. Not only does that explanation make perfect sense, it adds a silly, sophomoric jubilation to the lyrics:

And in the daylight we can hitchhike to Maine.

I hope that someday I’ll see without these frames.

And in the daylight I don’t pick up my phone,

because in the daylight anywhere feels like home.

The lines reference Maine, hitchhiking, the wearing of glasses, ignoring phone calls, and the lazy problem of daylight. While it might be fun and most certainly is silly, I'm not sure it means anything. I’m tempted to make some sort of post-lyric, collagist attempt at justifying the inane lyrics, but it wouldn’t amount to much. There’s a way to read the lyrics as a reflection of a weird kind of cuddly, Brooklyn-based domesticity, but that’s about all I can get from it.

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The problem is that these kind of lyrics are a one-trick-pony kind of deal. They pulled it off once—memorably, absurdly, catching-ly—with “Daylight,” but part of me can’t allow them a second go-round. Or a third. Or a fourth. Let’s have a look at the second verse of “Let’s Go”:

I bought a megaphone

to use inside your home,

forgot the batteries,

but that’s the old me.

It’s a hideously composed thought. What is Matt/Kim trying to say? ('Does it have to say anything?' I hear the peanut gallery whispering.) I dare you to read something into this (comment below…). Later on, in the outro section of the song, Matt repeats the same lines over and over again:

Say what you wanna say,

make it mean everything.

Oh, Matt…dreaming of the impossible. There are some people who make a convincing argument for language to supersede meaning and mean everything, but I’m not ready to cede that power to an indie-pop darling. (Maybe Thom Yorke could make me feel that way?) Sorry, Matt—if you want to win, your words should at least mean something. 

The Intouchables Touches Down In The U.S.

This is a lovely film. By turns, it manages humor, sadness, reflection, and humanity…and then cycles back through those elements over and over again. The Intouchables presents the story of an unlikely relationship between wealthy tetraplegic Phillipe (François Cluzet) and his inexperienced, convict caretaker (Omar Sy). Fraught with far less dramatic tension than you might think from that description, the film derives all its power from the lead performances of Sy and Cluzet. Their relationship is a wonderful thing to behold over the course of the film; there are tears, laughs, car chases, paragliding, and dancing. There are lots of silly montages that I would scoff at in other films. But not in this one. I allow this film as many montages as it wants. It’s that kind of film.

A still from The Intouchables, with Omar Sy (left) and François Cluzet (right); via nytimes.com

There’s a weird irony in that the three great French film imports to the U.S. since the beginning of the new millennium have been consumed more like pastries than fine French reds. Sorry, that’s a bad metaphor. What I mean to say is that, once upon a time, the French imports—À bout de souffle and The 400 Blows among them—were more like cultural revolutions in their impact on the landscape of American film. They changed Hollywood forever; these three films—Amélie, The Artist, and (soon) The Intouchables—are light and easy on the mind. While some people (I mean me) are of a mind that a lingering darkness intrude on Amélie’s world, many viewers are of the mind that it’s just sunny entertainment. And, setting aside the question of whether or not it deserved all those Oscars, who didn’t enjoy The Artist? It was one of those films that went down easy. The same thing might be said of The Intouchables, which, while it ponders some deep, dark questions, skips light-heartedly down the road to comedy once it arrives at the proverbial tragic-comic fork in the road. Which is okay with me! Just not with some people…

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*Some spoilers follow. There are always naysayers. In the case of The Intouchables, Variety’s film critic Jay Weissberg stepped up to the plate to cut down the film’s buoyant feel-goodness to size. The film, he argues, engages in “the kind of Uncle Tom racism one hopes has permanently exited American screens.” He jokingly speculates that executives at Weinstein, who bought the American rights to the film, would have to endure some serious rewriting for the film to work for American moviegoers. He finds Phillipe’s birthday party scene particularly hard to stomach. Driss, who has just been subjected to a survey of the standard classical music repertoire by Phillips, trots out an .mp3 player with speakers and promptly plays Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland.” That moment of cultural collision, according to Weissberg, places Driss in a “role barely removed from the jolly house slave of yore, entertaining the master while embodying all the usual stereotypes about class and race.”

But what Weissberg overlooks is the abundantly clear problem of ethnocentrism. It’s especially easy when it comes to the film world to assume that the U.S. (indeed, Hollywood) is the center of everything. But that’s simply not the case. People make films from across the world and they do not always conform to our cultural expectations. If someone made an American version of The Intouchables, based in, for example, New York City, then it would certainly come across as having some racist undertones. However, wrapped up in Weissberg’s assessment that Weinstein will “need to commission a massive rewrite to make palatable this cringe-worthy comedy” is the stinging assumption that Americans are somehow ‘fairer’ and, indeed, less racist than our neighbors across the Atlantic.

The situation calls for an application of what cultural critic Edward Said termed “contrapuntal reading.” Though it complicates the viewing/reading/listening experience in a myriad of ways, Said offered a method of engaging with artwork not only on our own terms, but also on the perceived terms of other cultures. It’s a complicated system and Said explains it better than me. (Learn more about it from a clever English student here.) The lesion is that we need to look at The Intouchables not as a film in U.S. theaters, but as a French film in U.S. theaters. This is a crucial difference.

Personally, I’m not familiar with issues of race and ethnic identity in Paris and France, so I feel uncomfortable commenting on how The Intouchables stands with regard to social issues on the other side of the pond. All I can safely say is that the film certainly makes no comment on race and ethnic identity in the U.S.; the background of slavery and the civil rights movement are not parts of Driss's character. Weissberg is free to point out that the film may well not succeed in American theaters and that moviegoers may overlook the nuances of ethnocentrism and proclaim it as racist spectacle, but the film’s intent remains far away from anything American.

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Weissberg’s commentary does highlight one important aspect of the film (important in both French and American terms, I mean): the play between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The soundtrack jumps from Vivaldi to Earth, Wind, and Fire without skipping a beat. Modern art is beaten down only to be built back up again (and again dismantled, of course). Weissberg makes it sound as if the confrontations between Driss and ‘high’ art (and those relatively less frequent ones between Phillipe and ‘low’ art) are somehow without any resulting value. But these confrontations (besides the hilarious opera scene) open up important avenues of inquiry: why else would Driss pick up a brush and start painting? It’s not a mocking gesture; when Driss reveals his painting to Phillipe, he is sincere in his search for acknowledgement.

But the most important scene about art occurs when Driss goes in for a job interview at a shipping company after ending his stint with Philipe. Noting Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory on the wall, he comments on it to the interviewer. The mention of the painting is like the lifting of a fog; I can find no way to explain it other than that the conversation ‘opens up’ after that. Art allowed for a dialogue; it allowed for connection. If The Intouchables has a lesson buried in it, it’s the lesson that any art—high or low, big or small—has the power to transform and change. All it takes is an observation: here we are, there is the art. Now what to make of that?

Weegee Works Wonders On The Walls

The dark stain of blood on the sidewalk. The lurid glow of water hitting a fiery building. The observers of  tragedies: faces twisted in pain, flushed with fascination. The perfectly observed object: a gun, a hat, a shoe, a DOA tag, a lamppost. Weegee—the photographic pseudonym of Arthur Fellig—was the first master of news photography. Looking at his work today, with its heightened, grainy contrast from the flash that he used, it reads as the natural precursor to Hollywood’s film noir binge of the 1940s and 1950s.

A still from John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart (center); via britannica.com

Of course, working the rough and tumble streets of New York City’s Lower East Side during the 1930s and ’40s, Weegee was less like a precursor and more like a contemporary to Hollywood cinematographers such as Arthur Edeson, who styled the rich blacks and whites of a wide body of films, including John Huston's 1941 film The Maltese Falcon. The crucial difference between Weegee and Edeson is not the subject matter (overlooking the rather large fact that Weegee’s subjects were very real and Edeson’s subjects were very…well…not), but rather the intent.

The worrisome part of Weegee’s legacy for art historians and critics is, surprisingly, not the merit of his photography or his gifted eye, but rather how his work sits on the walls of an art gallery alongside Steichen, Steiglitz, Cartier-Bresson and other recognized ‘art’ photographers. In hanging his photos on a wall, it almost feels as if we'd like to displace Weegee’s work from its original context. After all, he took photos not as a hobby or for the 'sake of itself,' but for money, for the newspapers. First and foremost, he was a journalist.

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The impressive part of the International Center of Photography Museum’s current exhibition on Weegee—Weegee: Murder Is My Business—is that the exhibition’s curators never undersell that aspect of Weegee’s work. Reminders are everywhere; supporting texts are careful to link his work back to his life—that of the photographer on the beat, combing through the lowlife of lower Manhattan, working out of the back of his car. Several of his photographs are paired with the work not only of contemporary newspaper photographers, but also the crime scene photography of police officers, pulled from New York City archives, establishing not only a critical relativity for evaluating his work, but also creating a larger context for his work.

I've found that thinking about his work as occupying the space between the newspaper and gallery wall is immensely rewarding. Photography, perhaps more than any other artistic discipline, suffers an extraordinarily large ‘gray’ area. What photographs are art? Some of the most famous photographs of all time are journalistic work, not really 'art' proper at all: Joe Rosenthal’s photograph “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” and Steve McCurry’s “Afghan Girl,” to name two examples. If “realism” is the argument here—that we appreciate the wartime spirit and the social concern captured, respectively, by these photos—I don’t buy it.

Steve McCurry's "Afghan Girl" is one of the most-recognized photos of all time; via wikipedia.org

There is something that moves us in these two photographs that is more than a simple curiosity being sated. It's not the mere transmission of knowledge. When I see “Afghan Girl,” I do not think: "So that’s what an Afghan refugee looks like." The viewing experience is nothing like that. I suspect that no one—save those who know her personally—can look at that photograph and shrug it off as mere 'information.' There is identification happening when I look at her; there is a dialogue opened up between us: I see her, she seems to see me, I recognize her recognizing me. There is a pull between subject and viewer, an experience far more like staring at Lady Agnew than staring at a television screen mutely spilling out images of refugee camps in the Middle East.

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Our fascination with Weegee, I think, stems from this capacity of news photography: to make us feel, to involve us deeply in a conversation with a freeze frame of reality. Weegee is a master because of this ability to make us feel acutely and powerfully—see the photo below of a corpse with a gun lying yards away. It’s a blunt image, brisk and to the point, but its effect is powerful; in most people (I suspect that a few feel revulsion), it elicits a weird, uncomfortable fascination. Weegee’s placement of the gun in the frame is practically begging us to ask questions, but mere curiosity is not the selling point of the photograph. Rather, it is fascination, pure and simple, that brings me back to this image—not questions, but wordless wonder; I converse, however odd that sounds, with the corpse on the street. I feel a connection to the dead man and the gun that killed him. 

One of Weegee's best-known works, this photo depicts a criminal shot on the street by an off-duty cop; via tumblr.com

Weegee not only knew how to make the viewer feel acutely when it came to crimes, accidents, and general mayhem; he also knew how to show the quieter, more familiar side of life. The ICP’s exhibit digs into these lesser-known sections of his work—including photographs of people sleeping on their fire escapes during heat waves, crowds of tens of thousands of New Yorkers at Coney Island, the smiling, slightly seedy bar scene of the Lower East Side, and a few hallucinatory, beautiful photographs of people at the movie theatre. The element of connection is so powerful in some of these photographs that it seems unlikely that they could possibly have been considered photojournalism. The exhibition proves (as if anyone had their doubts) that Weegee’s work belongs on the art gallery walls the same as any art photographer’s.  

A couple kisses while a film plays (the kiss, however, was staged by Weegee); via amber-online.com

Song Of The Week - June 18

Along with Food Will Win The War, the moniker of singer-songwriter Eric Elbogen—formerly Say Hi To Your Mom, now simply Say Hi—is one of the worst band names in the business. Ever-trusty Wikipedia credits the name change to a shift in ‘aesthetics,’ but the cited website—Say Hi’s FAQ page—not longer mentions ‘aesthetics’ or any reason at all. Instead, Elbogen offers up the concise, somewhat bitter, response: “Please don’t ask about the name change, [sic] it’s been more than four years.” He’s so sick of the question that the response appears twice on the page.

Complaints with the silly name aside, Elbogen crafts some cannily simple and affecting pop songs, among which is “Dots On Maps,” off Say Hi’s 2011 album Um, Uh Oh. Part of the charm is the lo-fi production values, which are basic and uncluttered, thankfully allowing the music to breath. Like The Wooden Birds, another indie act with a similar taste for melancholic pop, Say Hi populates songs with rhythmic and lightly catchy guitar patterns that draw the listener into the song without drowning out the lyrics. After pontificating last week on Fiona Apple and the sometimes (in)significance of lyrics, I could not help but relapse to a song whose lyrics I felt were peculiarly powerful in the mere sense of meaning—not sound and rhythm as with Apple.

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I’ve already noted that Elbogen practices a particular form of ‘melancholic pop.’ You could probably add Jeff Tweedy, Adam Duritz, and Ben Gibbard to that cast of characters. Their music, if often warm and melodic, is shadowed by lyrics whose various characters and narrators aren’t exactly ever happy. The narrator of Elbogen’s unsunny road trip tune contends not only with his own troublesome thoughts, but with the impatient commentary of his unnamed road companion. The sense of frustration begins in the first verse, pouring out in the underwhelming sense of not being able to make any progress:

Remarkable as it seems

turns out the night was much shorter

than you wanted to believe.

But we’re only in Dakota, dots on maps,

en route to bigger cities.

Elbogen sagely picks “Dakota” as the setting for the song—a kind of Everyman’s nowhere. He doesn’t bother specifying “North” or “South” because (well…probably because that wouldn’t fit into the line of the song) it doesn’t matter which one they’re in. Either state is a kind of ‘undesirable;’ it’s the sort of place that you would only ever pass through on your way to somewhere else. It’s a transitory place; the narrator and his companion (I assume a male narrator because of Elbogen) are “en route to bigger cities.” Additionally, it’s telling that no destination is specified; they are traveling simply to “bigger cities.” Elbogen communicates the sense that any city would be fine, so long as they can escape the doldrums of the prairie.

The second verse elaborates on the traveling situation; it moves the physical setting away from a geographical or conceptual plane—that of the two people “en route” in a car on a map—and into closer proximity with the interior of the car and the relationship between the two people. At first, the narrator focuses on the reality of the road—the “ebbs of traffic patterns reced[ing]” and playing the “only record front to back—infinity”—but he narrows in on an acutely personal thought at the end of the verse:

When it’s dark like this,

all that I can see is the whites

of her green eyes.

Not only is it an image that grabs the listener, it also provides the first concrete detail regarding the relationship between the narrator and his companion. The fact that he’s noticed this small detail implies a particular sympathy and even concern for this companion.

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What is not immediate, however, is the pronouns that Elbogen plays around with. It’s a small detail, but one worth noting. Although it’s easy to assume that the second person of the first verse—“you wanted me to believe”—is somehow the same as the woman of the third verse—“her green eyes”—there is clearly a disjunction. An explanation that might solve that conundrum is a grammatical one. Something that Elbogen is aware of, I suspect, is the non-textual reality of lyrics; they live in a world without punctuation, which allows songs a level of complexity not attained by other texts. (Poetry, of course, often sacrifices punctuation, but not so naturally as lyrics.) Perhaps the second verse ought to be transcribed as follows:

And the ebbs of traffic patterns recede

And we played our only record front to back—infinity.

(When it's dark like this

all that I can see is the whites

of her green eyes.)

The verse settles once some punctuation is introduced, once that last sentence is received as interior monologue of the narrator rather than a more general kind of narration. But that doesn’t quite square with the final pair of verses, which includes the second person thought: “But now you’re about as turned on / as a bottom feeder likes the sun”—not exactly the sentiment to be voiced out loud.

Another approach is, still viewing these instances second- and third-person as recording the same character, to view them as distinct lenses of the same person. In that sense, the second-person represents all that is uncomfortable about this relationship: the longness of this drive, the awkwardness of having grown up together, the lack of sexual chemistry in their relationship, the spirit of competition (“you suppose that ever reigning champ / eventually meets his better”). The third-person breaks through in the honest moments; when neither of them are overthinking this relationship and the commitment that they’ve made. The chorus, of course, represents the high point of honesty in the song; it presents a visceral acknowledgment of their difficult relationship, which is stuck in a stasis—in Dakota:

And she says, “Oh, tell me, this is all it’s gonna be?”

And I say, “Oh, I don't know just how it's gonna be.”

And she says, “Oh, tell me, is this all it’s gonna be?”

There’s a trigger somewhere, let's pull it.

There’s a trigger somewhere, let's pull it.

Ultimately, as we all sort of suspected, the song’s not really about a road trip across the Dakotas. It’s about, cliché though it sounds, the rocky road of life. There are Dakota stretches in life and in relationships, when people seem to fracture into different personalities. There are flashes of the person the narrator was first interested in, but more often, it’s this lingering second-person character, whom he knows perhaps better than he would like.

Ever the clever songwriter, Elbogen denies us the knowledge of which person is speaking that final, decisive line: it could be either the narrator or the woman. We can’t even be sure that that the “trigger” is a positive or negative presence; as far as the song is concerned, it simply represents a change.