Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1999
by Scott Miller

"I Want It That Way" - Backstreet Boys
Those boy singing groups were the start of a weird mutation in pop entertainment. Let's start by saying that although you didn't need better than workaday results on the music end—they were cute enough boys or they weren't, period—that didn't prevent some practitioners from rising to very respectable results like the drill-team crisp "I Want It That Way." But here's the weird part. Past generations grew out of being a teen music audience and into being an adult music audience. This generation grew out of being a teen music audience and into being teen music impresarios—witness "American Idol." The passage from a variety show world to a reality show world entails the corollary that we've entered an era where there is actually far less demand to see a top singer perform on TV than there is to see amateurs audition for a chance to participate in the star-making machinery that would theoretically result in that aforementioned TV appearance. For which there is almost no actual demand. And people wonder why the economy's collapsing.

"You Are Invited" - The Dismemberment Plan
Besides boy singing groups, 1999 was an important ascendancy year for the internet listening community—Pitchfork Media, for instance, and the Amazon.com way of buying music. Pitchfork get a reasonable amount of respect, maybe slightly more from non-musicians than musicians (e.g. there is a world of dance music that a world of musicians don't get; Pitchfork bridged that). I like the way it greatly improves in the area of one historical failing of rock criticism as opposed to, say, film criticism: telling how the music made the critic feel. In a way you have to if you're aware of competing with the everyone's-a-critic Amazon nation all telling you what real people think. A Pitchfork reviewer will say something like, "I liked this Pavement record because it was confusing." I respect that. Sure, in the worst case it skirts buying too much into B.S., especially in the eyes of a musician, but in fact it achieves truth-telling: the point goes to Pitchfork here. I would never have given Dismemberment Plan a second thought if it weren't for Pitchfork, and this is a terrific, personable little story song. It threatens from another angle to be loathed by musicians as one of those drum machine novelty numbers (compare the industry of today that is LCD Soundsystem), but with an awesome enough band-comes-in moment to win all the hearts in any room.

"Pressure Zone" - Beck
Just a bit back to hip-hop territory after the excellent alt-rock Mutations, Beck is able to incorporate a few electronica sounds into a diamond-hard groove and continually developing songwriting muscle. There are those frequently appropriated ooh-la-las that come straight out of "You Won't See Me" in there—I always consider that a good sign.

"It's Always Never" - Outrageous Cherry
Like a dream of a sixties art film whose title sequence haunts you for life, "It's Always Never" has a disorienting, echoey, nihilistic edge to it, but is melodically inspired and has a strange demimonde beauty. I'm usually impressed when I happen upon results from this group that has yet to really hit a career stride.

"Candyfloss" - Wilco
Summerteeth intensifies the challenge to respond to Wilco songs as poetry. I have to work at connecting; a line like, "I believe it's just because Daddy's payday is not enough" is very good; I don't quite know what to do with, "She begs me not to hit her." Some of my favorite art treats violence, but in art about violence, the bar is higher for being clear and careful. That's "She's a Jar," which I consider musically so-so; fortunately there's "Candyfloss," which I consider musically exceptional (and somehow old-fashioned, though I can't put my finger on which old fashion)—and, lyrically, lightweight but more obviously smart in its rendering. "I live my life like I wasn't invited" is a great one-liner.

"When My Boy Walks Down the Street" - The Magnetic Fields
69 Love Songs was an earthshaking event—the most important album release of 1999 and a few years hence. In part, its importance lies merely in its being so long yet so consistently good. I have to think it inspired other large projects, like Sufjan Stevens's U.S. states series. There's no one focus song (that would be hard with resources spread so thin), but there are probably ten other songs worthy of a best-of-year CD, and I don't recall a single outright dud. Another part of its importance is as a reasonably mainstream release that deliberately dismantles the heterosexual language convention sustained in popular song lyrics. Here Stephin wants the "boy" to be his "wife"; I detect a hint of wryness there, but it still invites the mind to run those numbers.

"The Great Beyond" - R.E.M.
Just as in "When My Boy Walks Down the Street," pianos crash in this lyric set, too; what are the odds? This and other hyperbole like "I'm bending spoons, I'm keeping flowers in full bloom" highlight a pretty good chorus that achieves excellence by building momentum over the course of the song. Elsewhere, although it seems to have an aspect of being a sequel to "Man on the Moon," I can't help but react with the thought that Stipe used to be able to do better than book one celestial romanticism like "I've watched the stars fall silent from your eyes"; but the South will rise again.

"A Peculiar Noise Called 'Train Director'" - Olivia Tremor Control
I'm just fine insofar as this is Cubist Castle Part II, but the really ear-catching innovation here is the 40-second middle eastern sounding horn and woodwind section that closes out this song. That's not found art in some sense, is it? I assume they must have composed and performed it for the occasion. It's amazing.

"Count It 1 2 3" - Sesame Street
Similarly to the case of boy groups, Sesame Street songs don't require better than workaday music-making; if there are fuzzy, personable puppets who like numbers and letters, all is probably well, no? But that shouldn't preclude the music-makers getting recognition for coming up with something special. Here some crow muppets sing a song about counting (get it?); it's not only an uncommonly snappy pop vocal arrangement, but it's hard not to love the brainy precision of such absurd setups as, "We were hanging out at Hooper's Store/Staring at some salt shakers/We struck up a conversation with Mr. Hanford behind the counter/We said, 'Mr. Hanford, how many salt shakers you got?/'Cause we bet you've got a lot.'"

"Holiday" - Jason Falkner
Jason is a talented enough guy to rate endless star gigs, e.g. with Paul McCartney, as well as a post-OK Computer Nigel Godrich co-production, with an apparent bare minimum of sales or attempts to generate sales. And Can You Still Feel? is such a bizarre—yet remarkable—release. "Holiday"'s jet-setting chord changes and dive-bombing melodic arcs alone somehow achieve tone poetry for a golden child who's constantly frustrating expectations, and the lyrics, more or less, confirm.

"Thursday's Child" - David Bowie
I dithered over putting an Anton Barbeau song—that I mixed—at about this position, but in the end I decided that has to be disqualified. But it's a great song: "Third Eye"—check it out, you won't be sorry (not to toot my mixing horn; as pro work, it's barely adequate at best). Bowie's easy-listening "Thursday's Child" did nothing for me on first listen, but eventually got way under my skin. Then again, I'm one of those people who give Bowie a long leash. Like Dylan or Lennon, his later work often makes points that don't compute to listeners who don't have any interest in learning anything from a non-ascendant star, like younger hipsters and older rock critics, and I've only pretended to be an older rock critic for a short time. "Seeing my past to let it go"—is that a nothing line, or is it a pretty insightful line, and you're just not trying?

"Find Yourself Alone" - Saltine
Perhaps the last great seven inch record in the world was Saltine's "Find Yourself Alone"/"Reveal Love" (that's yet another Ken Stringfellow project, in case you don't know). These are two deeply engaging tunes—it's hard to pick the favorite—with "FYA"'s admonishment that the truth has to come in isolation from the social realm leading by a nose. "This place is dying and they've turned the lights on" is a gentle reminder that some well-being depends on the lights not being on, and this leads into the more confrontational, "Nobody wants to hear the ravings of a bad drunk/They're afraid he'll speak their minds."

"Socs Hip" [edit] - The Lilys
This is the most mind-bending song here, and that's including the Flaming Lips. I can't find lyrics on-line, but there's something like a museum's "new-found acquisition in sound," artists of troubled inspiration for whom "the queen of motivation has put out for so long," dealing with morbid obsessions ("Get off on death or don't get off at all"). As with the Kinks, there's some interesting influence here from the first half of the twentieth century—ragtime, crooner jazz, and, as the album art inscrutably proclaims, the project is "now in Abraham's service." The biblical Abraham who almost sacrificed his son as God's test? Is this the Socs (as in "Socials") gang in the vengeance saga The Outsiders? There's crazy, schizo heaviosity aplentry here. It's a whopping 7 something minutes, which I edited to about four deleting the somewhat redundant first verse, and also remastered to pump the bass and bandpass-limit a honky high-mid edge to the vocals. The song doesn't really deserve that editing by the way. It's all meat, and paced right; I'm just being radically stingy with air-time here.

"I'd Like That" - XTC
They've just stayed great. "I'd grow up really high, really high, like a really high thing, say a sunflower" shows a surprising relaxation in Andy Partridge, which becomes him more than what can occasionally come off as a somewhat uptight humanism. Relaxed, but not sloppy: every production hair is right in place on this semi-acoustic joyride through a world of supreme vocal and lyrical cleverness ("I wouldn't hector if you'd be Helen of Troy/Oh Boy").

"I Try" - Macy Gray
Co-dreamed-up as an album venture with evidently very decent producer Andy Slater in the Wallflowers era, before he was Capitol Records president, this is a labor of seventies soul love involving a big biz guy who seems to be a genuine champion of commercially non-obvious musical ventures. All this song needs is the complicated textures of Macy's voice and the perfectly direct lines, "I try to say goodbye and I choke/Try to walk away and I stumble."

"Your Redneck Past" - Ben Folds Five
It's all-brilliant writing from here on out. Mr. Folds is back up to the debut album quality here, only replacing the piano sonics with synthesizer. Wasn't everybody in the late nineties? With prog rock major sevenths meeting "Jocko Homo," "Your Redneck Past" is, from start to finish, musically inventive and satisfying as well as funny. "Desole, je suis Americain, please cook my steak again."

"Repulsion (Show Up Late For Work On Monday)" - The Negro Problem
Here Stew is steadily ramping up the fairly short distance from Post Minstrel Syndrome to being one of the very top people. So is Heidi. The first song on the wonderful Joys and Concerns is sonically uningratiating, with its lack of spatial verisimilitude (some sounds are distant, almost muddy, some sound little and right next to you), but in the end this is sure footing: the right magic for a disorienting yet enlightening mood. Stew's lyrical world addresses one of the more complicated equations of desire, and in this song, the irresistable force of a one night stand meets the immovable object of regret.

"Wise Up" - Aimee Mann
Here's one where if you've seen the film ("Magnolia"), it's hard to separate the song from its place in the movie. It's one of the most unlikely things you'll ever see on film; the cast—Tom Cruise, Jason Robards, etc.—all appear to start singing the lyrics to the song as the track with Aimee's singing plays. An austere piano accompaniment is about as pretty as possible for this glacially-paced awakening to a harder than expected reality, perhaps ostensibly of alcohol addiction. This is not to be confused with another Aimee song, "Save Me," which was the one nominated for an academy award.

"Buggin'" - The Flaming Lips
One wishes for words to fail when describing the Flaming Lips, and The Soft Bulletin is far from disappointing. "Race for the Prize" proffers an oddly trumped-up praise for competitive medical researchers. "Buggin'" is about mosquitoes biting you and getting squished on the glass surfaces of your car. Curiously, the other songs lie on some approximation of a continuum between heroic conduct and bug bites. At any rate, the real glue uniting these concepts is the most whomping, humongous drum and bass production imaginable. This is compression and distortion gone berserk, and by some miracle it's highly coherent and functional, even when supporting a vast heavens of harmonizing vocals and glistening string synths. I guess Dave Fridmann from Mercury Rev deserves at least some of the credit.

"Here Come July" - Scritti Politti
Was I the only one who had no idea Green Gartside was capable of whipping out this 7000 RPM killing machine? It reminds me a little of the Three O'Clock or the Sparks in the sense of a hissing, insinuated vocal supported by unexpected speed and drive. This is some July that's coming; it's going to "scorch the pavements of all piety and sin." The alarming formula for success in the new dispensation is: "I'll mean the world to you/Maybe I could double all the negatives we know." If you're a power pop fan and you don't know about this one, run, don't walk.

"Teenage FBI" - Guided By Voices
Ric Ocasek was an epiphany as the choice to produce the first Weezer album, and for what my two cents are worth, it's almost as symbiotic a match here. After the several high points of Mag Earwig!, a breakthrough Guided By Voices song seemed within striking distance, and to me, "Teenage FBI" is every inch that classic. It took me some introspection to realize this, given the widespread hostility to Do the Collapse. I guess it's just very easy for the story to be that GBV were put on earth to make "low-fi" home level recordings until killjoy Ric Ocasek came along with a big bag of not getting it. Or Bob had just stirred up the right amount of bad blood. But disliking "Teenage FBI" is just wrong. The musicians I know who have an opinion love it enough to cover it with enthusiasm. The point doesn't go to Pitchfork here.