I was raised largely on folk and jazz: those are both all about quotations; if you're listening to bebop and you don't hear the quotations, you don't get the music, you don't understand it…I don't necessarily want everyone to get all of the references and exhaust the meaning of the song – that would be, that would be horrible.
-Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields, interviewed as part of the NPR series "Creators at Carnegie," November 2005.
As a fan of The
Magnetic Fields, I am constantly at war with myself. If you were to ask me what
I thought constituted "good" music, I would probably rattle off a
too-clever-by-half list of vagaries: raw vulnerability, innovative
instrumentation, and avant-garde originality. On their face, sure, these
things could surely constitute the criteria for "good" songwriting. (Yes, they
also come close to smacking of a certain type of "indie" elitism.) However, if
you were then to ask me what I liked about The Magnetic Fields, I'd look at you
sheepishly and then cop to loving his geeky wordplay, his dry delivery, his
sappiness in spite of his dryness, his gender-bending narrators, his almost
pathological focus on love, his backward-looking referentiality, his
inward-looking self-referentiality, and his humor (I would probably mumble when
mentioning this last one: laughter is far from cool).
In my original draft of this review, the word count had reached 750 before I had even started discussing Distortion. I was attempting to address Merritt's ceaseless referencing, both to the history of popular music and, to an increasing extent, his own work. I thought this sort of approach would befit the review's appearance on PA. But then, well, I sort of wrote myself into a corner. (Whether that approach basically starts out in the corner is another matter…) So I got over myself and started over.
How, then, does
Distortion stack up? Merritt's wordplay is there in all its finest, as is his
taste for internal rhymes, impeccable arrangements, and memorable melodies. In
addition, the breadth of the music's references continues to impress: "Too
Drunk to Dream" sounds like an homage to a Buddy Holly-era break-up tune, no
matter how abject the lyrics turn; "California Girls" is a scathing, violent,
and hysterical inversion of the Beach Boys' original sentiment, and so on.
Another strategy would have been to identify each song's antecedents on prior TMF albums; with Distortion, I think Merritt has turned more inward than before. Underneath each song, I heard shades and allusions and snippets of earlier TMF tunes. Was that a bit of "Fear of Trains" in the piano run in the background of "Drive on, Driver?" Was "Xavier Says" on Distant Plastic Trees? If not, was "Please Stop Dancing" on Get Lost? Is "Mr. Mistletoe" an even-more-bitter cousin to Hyacinth & Thistle's "I've Got New York?"
What to make of all this footnoting? Does it, in the end, matter? At the end of the day, what if "Old Fools" sounds sort of like something that I'm pretty sure was on Volume 3 of 69 Love Songs? No, it does not, because the doleful observer of "Old Fools" almost makes me cry every time. And the same goes for "I'll Dream Alone," in all its melodramatic beauty. That song makes me want to get a barstool and a mic and start telling you about a girl I knew in college, which is why it's my favorite on the album. And what about the goofy-at-first-glance "The Nun's Litany?" Well, it's been a while since a song made me laugh and then want to look back on life and wonder about what could have been. And "Courtesans" – rarely has a song so successfully taken a gimlet-eyed look at an entire vocation while pulling on your heartstrings so consistently.
Also, does it matter that I've avoided the whole distortion thing on Distortion? Well, I'd argue that the distortion is sort of beside the point; it is what it is. In its weird way it's both entirely integral to the album, and yet, unnecessary, and this may be where Merritt trips himself up: his clinicism. I remember Merritt once discussing the equivalence of sounds generated by different sources; that is – permit me to butcher his point here – an electrical guitar shouldn't, on some level, be considered any differently than an acoustic guitar or a synth. All three generate waves, after all. From this point of view, experimenting with sounds becomes just that: an experiment. And so, the loud songs aren't really that loud – they're "loud." It's to Merritt's credit that he taps such a deep well of real feeling, in spite of each song being held at arm's length. Of course, it's that the songs are at war with themselves that makes me love it in the first place. It's why it's a Magnetic Fields record in the first place, and a great one at that.
I read this piece the day it first appeared, and I was always puzzled by the statement "the distortion is sort of beside the point; it is what it is". I'm still not sure what that is saying. But I bought the LP last night and am very slowly listening to it, and am naturally interested in reading and thinking about it.
A couple of initial thoughts, in dialogue with this PA piece:
1. it is presumably (characteristically) wilful and perverse of an acclaimed lyricist like Merritt to do something so ... uncharacteristic as to start the LP with what is nearly an instrumental. I was going to say he'd never done such a thing before, but then remembered the marvellous 'Dust Bowl'. btw: the opening sound on this opening track recalls the opening noise of Pixies' 'Cecilia Ann', no?
2. I like to hear Shirley Simms sing again, and there are good musical and melodic things about 'California Girls'. But the sentiment is surely terribly trite - it would be lame even on some kind of early-evening teen show, Dawson's Creek / Charmed / whatever, wouldn't it? - and I think it's a little risky to come up with something this weak when you're so self-consciously going up against an identically-titled canonical record from the 1960s.
3. I think the piece above must be right to say that the record tends to sound echoes of earlier Merritt. The first 6 notes of every verse of Simms' 'Xavier Says' are effectively identical to those of Susan Anway's reading of the chorus of 'Jeremy', what, 17 years earlier. Re. the 'Old Fools' = 69LS3 idea, I guess the writer didn't mean this that literally, but perhaps he was thinking of the echo of the speed of 'Yeah, Oh Yeah!' and - the other echo which surely resounds through this whole thing: the pseudo-live-in-studio, distorted / garage sound of 'I'm Sorry I Love You'? *That* unobtrusive track surely turns out to be the great precursor to this whole adventure.
I'm not sure I'm convinced about 'The Nun's Litany': it seems monotonous to me. But I agree about the pathos of 'Old Fools' - it's a pretty serious and real thought, especially as some of us are no longer as young as we would have liked to remain.
4. the distortion issue, though - I'm still not quite sure what MRP was saying here, but I think it might be that the distortion is an arbitrary add-on that could have been on the record or not been on it, and it wouldn't matter either way? Well, I'm sure it's true that the songs were written without all that distortion, and I gather that they've been played live without it too. And I agree that the decision to use so much distortion - like the apparent pride in making all the songs near to 3 minutes - is Merrittian formalism, just like the titular conceit of 'i'. But surely formalism is of his essence: that's what he does, and what prompts much of what he does best; to call it 'clinicism' sounds to me like making a vice of one his virtues (which is a feature that most other people in pop don't share anyway, so there is surely space for it). But beyond that: the distortion idea may be arbitrary, yes; but I am finding its effect quite profound. It surely changes quite a lot how these songs come across to us; they would sound and seem different if performed a la 'i'. It is a kind of statement in itself, and a whole added element of the listening experience (and he's obviously interested in this kind of thing: remember the talk about headphones, epilepsy etc re. 'Abigail' and 'Experimental Music Love' in the 69LS booklet?) - it does make for a quite different LP from what we would otherwise have, and as far as I can tell so far, I think it somehow makes for a better and more interesting one. And dig those drum sounds - the thumping toms and echoing hi-hat, or whatever they are - how they enhance the sonic depth and pop flavour of this record! I think I see here how the songs might be 'at war with themselves', but - unlike that JAMC protagonist whose tale John Peel and Janice Long used to play over and over c.1985 - I don't yet see that Merritt has been tripped up.
Posted by: jb | February 28, 2008 at 06:18 PM