Indefinite hiatus

I actually got to meet Corin Tucker once. Her hair was indeterminately red or brown or blonde, but like any woman these days, it's probably been definitively all of those colors at some point. Her face is still as beautiful as it always was, but it would never qualify as conventionally beautiful - a little pouty and suspicious, always seeming to be angry with you in whatever picture of her is available. At the Sleater-Kinney concer att he Gothic Theather in Denver (or, Englewood) in September of last year, I went to buy a t-shirt (true to their activist ways, their t-shirts are only manufactured by American Apparrel), and I ordered one without looking, trying to find my credit card in my wallet. I looked up and was speechless - there she was, a satisfied smirk on her face, flowing purple top, breasts smaller in actual life than I would have guessed. Me, mumbling, or baffled, or simply trying to determine what method to approach the situation, only mustered saying, "You're Corin Tucker!" I said I was a huge fan, I pointed to a laminated LP of The Woods glued to the merchandise counter and told them the new album was amazing. I mentioned that once I wrote a ten page essay about wandering around Copenhagen and listening to One Beat constantly.

This was all I could really say about my relationship to Sleater-Kinney at the time. I could have also told Corin (one of its two lead-singer/ guitarists, along with Carrie Brownstein) I caught them on tour in 2000 in support of All Hands For The Bad One, that their albums seem to consistently mark changes in my life, but that may simply be my own inability to ever turn them off. I could have said I was once so obsessed with the band that I tracked down old demos of Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17 (Tucker and Brownstein's Riot Grrrl bands before forming S-K), but that would not have been particularly original.

Sleater-Kinney announced a couple of weeks back that they were going on "indefinite hiatus." This cannot be too surprising, in any scenario; while making The Woods, the band - Tucker and Brownstein, and also drummer Janet Weiss since 1997 - went into couple's therapy, and came out of those sessions so angry, they made The Woods, an album for which adjectives like "loud" and "angry" were invented. An album that recalled, at any given moment, the most firey moments of Jimi Hendrix or The Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth or Jefferson Airplane or even The Who. An album I was alone in naming the best album of last year.

I will start with, and perhaps only talk about, The Woods. Not 1997's Dig Me Out, a 90's post-punk classic, and an indie icon. Not 1999's The Hot Rock and 2000's Bad One, fine albums, but mostly irrelevant. Not 2002's One Beat, a vituperative political record that is the culmination of all of their efforts as indie superstars, and another album I named the best of its year.

The reason I want to talk about The Woods some 14 months after its release is because I believe it to be not simply the type of album that bands spend their entire career working up to, but the type of album all of rock music seems to have been leading up to. This is only talking about its music, of course - The Woods was not particularly successful and is also not particularly popular. In fact, a friend of mine who worked forever at Albums On The Hill in Boulder told me I'm the only person he knows that even likes the thing (not entirely surprising - most fans of any art do not appreciate their artists abruptly changing their defined style and doing something different. These are the artists I appreciate most). He gave me a poster that's like a more cinematic rendering of its cover - a painted field of trees on a wood floor behind a parted red curtain.

Start with "The Fox." If you hear this song, I can guarantee you what your initial physical response to this song will be: you will turn down the volume on your stereo. A screech of feedback begins it, as though a warning of the ferocity to come. The guitars chug at such a volume you swear you hear planes taking off in the background, but would not be allowed to hear such things. Janet Weiss's drums are rifle-like, fast, and overwhelming. There is more to it of course - a weird morality tale of a duck and fox, spotting each other on the day of the duck's birth, but it is about the biggest jolt to the system a song can provide: Corin Tucker, whose shriek helped define the Riot Grrrls of the early 90's, is louder, more pleasing, and more precise than it's been before (a product, the band says, of forcing Tucker to sing in tones she hadn't tried before, pissing her off and confusing her to no end). In the song's scorching bridge, she's screaming some incomprehensible words at the top of her lungs.

I could say that my response to noisy music is unique, but to an extent, it's the only way to really approach the more ferocious emotions of rock music. That can be said of Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth, bands who trafficked in noise. Noise distances the listeners, but it also speaks to a general sense of feeling askew, of defiance, of working against an instruments' supposed purpose. It also speaks to the eventual indistinguishable nature of guitar riffs or guitar solos - sometimes noise is the only way to make any sort of notice in music.

But that's much too cerebral. I respond to noise. I walk easier when hearing it. I feel better listening to it, because at its core it means that the rules of guitar and of music are as made up as the ones in life. I find the notion of all things being made up about as comforting as any other.

The politics begin in track 2, "Wilderness," an allegory of a couple going nowhere and bickering the entire way - "It's a family feud/ the red and the blue now/ a two-headed brat/ tied to the other for life," Brownstein characterizes a country stagnant and whiny about it as Weiss's drums shoot away. In track 3, "What's Mine Is Yours," the one with a screeching minute-long solo that destroys and rebuilds the song, Tucker's voice has never sounded sexier. And by track 4, "Jumpers," - an eerie and explosive song about the thoughts of those leaping from the Golden Gate bridge - it should be clear that you may have never heard an album of such ferocity, an album of such well-ordered noise and defiance, and it makes sense to feel that way - these girls wear their influences on their sleeve, but the combined passion of these three influence sounds like nothing else.

In fact it occurs to me that there can be no slacking on the part of any of the three women for this type of thing to work - as Tucker wails differently now, Brownstein's typically-deadpan second vocals are now as empassioned as Tuckers, but directand cutting where Tucker's are high and elusive. David Browne in his review said he thought Weiss had spent the 3-year break between albums, "listening to nothing but Keith Moon recordings." Her drums are about as loud and fast and invigorating as anyone's since Moon died.

There are three songs on the second half of the record that are about as exciting as any I've heard. "Let's Call It Love," the 11-minute opus that defines the record, a song of exploding sexuality, and perhaps the only song on the record whose noise dominates the song structure, one that doesn't wind up coming back to a central refrain. It takes the gimmick of its noise and allows it to run free, experience all of the "love" emotions the writing speaks of - "A woman is not a girl/ I could show you a thing or two," Tucker sings, and damned if she doesn't show you a thing or two. It segues immediately into "Night Light," a three minute anthem that speaks of the forces of life and death, if not the ultimate conflict of all things. Tucker looks up to the sky and asks, "how do you do it/ with visions of worse to come/ live in the present/ and spin off the rays of the sun?"

But mostly there's "Entertain." I think this song will, amongst the few of us that knew of their existence, define Sleater-Kinney until the end of time. The drums pound in its opening seconds in a manner that subdues the listener, and Brownstein launches into "So you're here 'cause you want to be entertained/ please look away/ we're not here 'cause we want to entertain." This, of course, cannot be true of any band - after all, if you didn't want to entertain, why go on tour? Why release records? Why write, in 2000, a song about whiny boy rockers called "You're No Rock N' Roll Fun"?

However that thought will not arrive when listening to "Entertain." No thoughts will, really, besides those ones that keep us going, those thoughts that make us want to accomplish anything, those thoughts about not dying slowly, not giving into to the forces that oppress, the ones that keep all people from living their lives, from trying to find truth, from doing anything really. "Entertain," with its rallying cry of "Don't tread me down, I'm not falling down," is about the most exhilerating recording I've ever heard. It's a song of such ferocity that after the guitar and drums stop abruptly in its 6th minute, the recording lingers on a clank of the amps recovering, the equipment itself responding to the galvanic intensity of their own creation.

I wish I could have said that to Corin Tucker. That with The Woods, Sleater-Kinney made the type of album that inspires on the deepest of sensory level, but these things do not mean much when said, so I simply told her the album was "amazing." It speaks to the ongoing irrelevance of music critics everywhere that most of them named albums like Kanye West's Late Registration or Sufjan Stevens' Illinois or The New Pornographers' Twin Cinema as the album of the year. I like all of those albums, but they are, despite their various accomplishments, simply records. The Woods is not.

Me and Joan

I've probably read close to 1000 pages of Joan Didion's nonfiction work (which, doing the math, is not a great proportion), but it was only today that I found the piece with which I most closely identified.

"On The Morning After The Sixties" ends like this: "If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending." Reading just this sentence it would be easy to assume Didion was talking about 60's foolishness, saying a giant ba-hum-bug to the 60's - or, really, the young - change-the-world mentality, but that is not the subject of Didion's essay. Instead, she's talking about the peculiar, lost mentality of a peculiar, lost generation - one nestled uncomfortably in the comfortable 50's. Without saving you the necessity of reading the essay (not to mention ease - the thing is, like much of her most stunning work, under 4 pages long), I'll say it evokes a time for her that is like its titular morning, a time of her youth in which the isolation of man's long-term situation was an assumption, a time for which the Lost Generation was a foundation of thought.

It's interesting, as a person raised in the 90's, to think that this mentality even had room to exist in the smiles-and-hair-curlers vision of the 50's we're most presented with. What I identified most closely with is something I think the people of my age identify with quite closely, and the thing that I've spent the bulk of my own writing trying to make sense of - that is, a time of vague, unoriginal, baffling thoughts, a mentality for which the only assumption we can all agree on is that things, in general, are going to spend a long time not making much sense.

So what is it of our generation? I would say I - born in 1982, raised in small town Colorado - am of a generation in which irony is our preferred coping skill - things don't have to necessarily make sense if we can mock them and, by proxy, be above them. Therefore, there is no thought left to think nowadays, it's already been thought, rejected, and turned into an ironist punchline starting with the words, "He's one of those people who..." Being "one of those people who..." is about the worst punishment one of our age can work to avoid. For example, I right now am someone placing value on writing my thoughts down in a spot which few people will read (just then I had to fight the ironist instinct to replace "thoughts" with "inane thoughts"), and those that do will most certainly be people who already know me, are mostly fond of me, and will shrug and not think much of their existence. Which is a fine reaction to have.

The first time I read Joan Didion was for an assignment in a nonfiction writing class, and of that, I'll simply say "assignment" would be a less accurate word than "gift," and that I should send Peter Michelson a candy-gram for forcing "Goodbye to All That" into my life, thereby uprooting my sense of writing. I followed that reading with a ten-page essay about Bob Dylan and my father that was syntactically identical to her essay. To say I have plagiarized her in my writings since then would not be true, but also not entirely false - I've seeped in the way Joan writes, I've taken it in via every sense, and I know think and sweat in the precise and evocative syntax she created. She's made me learn the value of a well-placed "and," made me write down seemingly irrelevant details at parties, made me find the most emotive and honest way to describe a generality when those details are unavailable.

What that is, I think, is what Joan excells at, and why I'd like to think my generation is hers, on the morning after the 60's, the endless 60's, and the endless spectre of someone else's idealism - a sense of lost sincerity. I can't stop reading her descriptions and the descriptions like hers, things respecting the quizzical aspects of human nature embedded in every experience - the every-string-of-the-tapestry-counts depiction of observations and detachments, the way they add to and complete our longterm sense of confusion, and the way that acknowledging that confusion is, somehow, party to its own dissipation.

When the rats run riot

How weasely is Rob Sheffield? The life of a music critic, even one for Rolling Stone, doesn't afford a person much personality, but Sheffield seems like the world's most eager high school journalism student, a beanpole with too many copies of Rosie O'Donnel's Kids Are Punny lining his bookshelf.

I've never liked the guy - his svelt, smug, troll-puppet face slouching in VH1 interviews making bad jokes about, say, Haddaway ("He haddaway, he got away, then he faded away!"), always seemed to me the mark of someone making an annoying and too-easy shorthand for substantive thought. But in reviewing Sonic Youth's recent release Rather Ripped, Sheffield's ascended my list of mortal critic enemies, snuggling somewhere below Rolling Stone colleague Peter Travers (he of the "This movie's got bite!" interchangeable poster-ready aphorisms) and somewhere above the first film critic to say Million Dollar Baby "Floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee!"

Sheffield gave the album a positive review, in a way - he said the record is "One of the strongest to emerge in Sonic Youth's amazing late period." My problem is not with his opinion on the album, because, of course, criticism of any medium is based entirely on a simple and honest reaction, of which two people are bound to experience differently. I say "in a way," though, becuase his review of Rather Ripped is one of the most puzzling and vituperative "positive" reviews I've ever experienced.

Vituperative because it spends a good 60% of its text criticising the band. Puzzling because it gets most of that wrong.

Sheffield's ultimate attempt is, I think, to portray himself as unquestionable Sonic Youth authority. I may have too much of a problem handing over that title, as I think I'd find few other people able to discuss the point-by-point distinctions between, say, 1992's Dirty and 1990's similarly jangly Goo. But that is, of course, not much of an issue. Perhaps no fan is comfortable relinquishing judgmental control over artists that have been meaningful in their lives.

Sheffield offers an odd history of the band, though: "Daydream Nation [the band's seminal 1988 release] sounded like a vision of the future, yet the Youth never dared to follow it up... They marked time in the 90's with drab, quasi-heavy records, but they've been on a creative roll ever since A Thousand Leaves in 1998." I can't imagine anyone with some familiarity of Sonic Youth records would agree with that statement (and granted, most of Rolling Stone's increasingly teenage audience will not have that). Those "drab" 90's records - Goo, Dirty, Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star, and Washing Machine - were seminal alternative recordings, making the band underground heroes by, including many others, critics like Rolling Stone; describing this string of records on the release of Washing Machine, critic Tom Moon wrote, "With surgical skill and a desire to stretch if not demolish the frontier, they've developed an attack that is astonishingly intricate and jazzlike in its extreme flexibility."

Now, there is no reason Sheffield should be required to stick with this opinion, but I do think it shows his remarks as rather revisionist - Goo, the album Sonic Youth used to help usher Nirvana onto their DGC label, drab? A Thousand Leaves, the album opening with a line like "Alice, it's just a kitten, just a kiiiitten," is exhibiting a band "on a roll?" Even his details seem misplaced - Sheffield claims "embarrasing beat-poetry interludes" have marred their last albums, but this only occurred in one song ever - "Small Flowers Crack Concrete," from 2000's NYC Ghosts and Flowers, 4 albums previous. And hey, I loved that song (although, I'll admit this is probably a minority opinion, as is my worship of that supremely mournful, forgotten album). As I have loved the songs bassist/guitarist/guru Kim Gordon's made in the past decade - 2002's "Sympathy for the Strawberry" and 2004's "I Love You, Golden Blue" are amongst the best songs she's ever recorded. Sheffield claims her songs here are her first worthwhile contributions since Washing Machine (odd such a "drab" album contained such worthwhile tracks, eh?). He says the opposite about Lee Ranaldo's contribution, "Rats," ("Just OK," says Sheffield), but I thought it a terrific song, and a step back into artistic relevance for Ranaldo, whose last song, 2004's "Paper Cup Exit," was boueyed by the silly line "Skimmin' the top of tall trees/ through the clear line of free speech."

I would like to just pass Sheffield's review off as a simple cavil of quirky taste, but considering all the bizarre assertions in his review, I find it mostly indicative of the type of weasely persona Sheffield cultivates - the effete indie rocker of obscure theories and opinions. Music criticism, more than any other critical medium, is a nearly impossible place to form an honest opinion - you're swayed by loyalties to artists you respect and dislikes on principle even before you get to those pesky things like critical consensus. Rolling Stone's reviews are especially all over the map, but I think they do their magazine a disservice with writers like Sheffield, or, for that matter, writers like Travers also - people so willing to chuck whatever opinion they feel is the most quotable, "edgiest," or pretentiously thick, they all wind up sounding equally meaningless.