I’m sitting in my bedroom and I can hear muffled music from somewhere outside, and just this bass throb and something else low mixed in, with a little sparkle to it, and I think, “That’s Stevie Nicks. That’s the Dance album.” So I open the window, and yeah, it’s “Dreams.” So now I’m sitting here with the window open, because it’s kind of nicer than just pulling out the CD and listening to it myself.
Some girl started following me on here, so I went to her page, and she has a post where she’s all “Gross. Fleetwood Mac.”
Honey, I am not someone you’d be interested in.
Chuck Klosterman (via straypaper) (via fuckyeahstevienicks)
I mean, yes, but also: Chuck Klosterman managed to get six books published without knowing that “labyrinthine” is not a noun?
I had a dream last night where Stevie Nicks was singing a slightly slowed-down version of “Dreams” live, backed by like, all the chicks from Lilith Fair and a gospel choir.
If my brain were made of Venn diagrams, the place where Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night, Stevie Nicks’ The Wild Heart, and that whole genre of fantasy/spooky children’s films from the ’80s that encompasses everything from The Neverending Story to Little Monsters to The Secret of NIMH and always seemed to be playing on some cable channel on rainy Sunday afternoons overlap would be Florence + the Machine’s Lungs.
And except for a brief mention of T-Pain and early Kanye, he doesn’t even get into how this is being done not just in the subterranean microgenres of the Internet, but right out in the open on pop radio and #1 records: Ke$ha, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Gaga, the Black-Eyed Peas and late-period Kanye don’t just use manipulated vocals as a gloss, they predicate their music on them. Enrique Iglesias has had an unlikely return to the US Pop chart because he’s AutoTuning his vocals. Nobody* wants to hear the plain unadorned human voice anymore, just as nobody* lives life unmediated through electronics anymore: we are all robots.
*For New York Times Style Section values of “nobody”
Thoughts prompted by this that I am probably never going to pull together into a coherent post:
1. I wasn’t going to actually buy the Annie Lennox Christmas album (in fact, I bootlegged her last album! Even though I loved it! And talked shit about people who dismissed the commercial and/or creative power of older female artists vis à vis her! Mostly because I tried to buy it, from Barnes & Noble because they had a limited-edition version that came with a disc of acoustic tracks or something, and then I had to return it because the one I bought was accidentally packaged with two of the bonus disc, and the store I went to return it to was out of the limited-edition version, and at that point I was just like, “Fine, fuck it, give me my money back and I’ll buy another one online,” but then when I went home I just ripped the entire album off of some website that was streaming it, because I wanted to hear the thing already, and then I realized that if I ever bought a real version of it, it wouldn’t have the false start on “Smithereens” caused by my having to press pause and start it again in the middle of the rip, which I think actually made it a more interesting song, so I just stuck with what I had! Which isn’t an excuse, just a reason.) until I came across the following in the AllMusic review of it: “it does engender a minor complaint: why on earth would a vocalist of Lennox’s caliber use Auto-Tune even momentarily?” My immediate reaction was not word, or even fair point, but oh shit I need to hear that immediately.
2. A few months ago, I went on a date with a 42-year-old guy. I was trying to explain to him why I was so into Sleigh Bells, and why I thought so many other people were into Sleigh Bells, and what they sounded like. And apparently he used to be a bootlegger back in the early ’80s, and so eventually I just started talking about how, when I was a in high school, I fell in love with Fleetwood Mac, and I became a part of this network of people who were ripping and collecting all the old live bootlegs and rarities to MP3, and this was right when MP3s were starting to happen, and a lot of people didn’t understand lossy or how the software worked, and so sometimes you’d get these really low-quality, like 24kbps rips, or rips of rips, and you’d listen to them and be like, “Man, this is such a rockin’ track,” and then a couple years later somebody would be like, “Hey! Someone just ripped a 320kbps MP3 from a pristine first-generation cassette! Here!” and you’d be all excited and press play, and…it would suck. Like, without the fuzz and the distortion and the tape crackling, it would suck. It would seem so sterile, and calm, where before it had been violent and daring. And I was like, “The thing about Sleigh Bells is they sound like the rips you had before you had the good rips.”
Matthew on Sleigh Bells’ Treats:
To some extent, it’s a meta conceit not unlike the way lo-fi and chillwave artists present their songs with a deliberate patina of age and grit intended evoke the aesthetics of recording and playback devices of the past. The obvious difference is that …
I like Matthew’s take on Sleigh Bells a lot. It sort of reminds me - perhaps cos I just got reminded of this elsewhere! - of Jonathan Bogart’s idea of autotune as generational dividing line.
Yesss this is what I was getting at with my “the rips you had before you had the good rips” thing (which, incidentally, was a response to one of J. Bogart’s comments on Autotune). Sleigh Bells takes all these things we talk about as flaws — the loudness, the compression, the distortion of ripped and re-ripped lossy files, the way things sound coming out of little cellphone speakers on the back of the bus or half-obscured by background noise because you’re listening to it with earbuds while walking down to the subway — and treats them as exciting embellishments.
This is great just on its own — sometimes songs do sound better when they’re all fucked up! Sometimes those flaws become a part of a song to the point where it sounds wrong when you get a “good” version! There’s no objective reason why we should think of these things as flaws!
But this is also great because my theory is that Treats is about the experience being in your early teens, as filtered through the experience of being in your late twenties. The album places you in the position of being one of those kids, stomping and screaming and giggling and getting straight A’s and talking about best friends, and also in the position of someone older, judging them and thinking they’re superficial or weak — sometimes simultaneously, you find yourself standing in these spots. Everything happens in first-person plural, and it’s the pack mentality of adolescence, but it’s also aligning you as an older person with these kids. You’re one of them, but you’re not one of them. You feel what they feel, you understand the confusion and the anger and the way they’re trapped, but you hate them. Because of the power they wield, the freedom, the intensity, the loyalty, the stupidity. The fact that they hold these things that were so recently yours.
The distortion is as much a part of this as the pep rally rhythms and double-dutch chants and videogame guns and metal guitars — perhaps more, because this is what unites the twentysomethings and the teens, right? The Internet? Coming of age with the ability to listen to music on the Internet, to download it and carry it around with us? Except that the twentysomethings had at least a brief moment of listening to music before the Internet and iPods and laptops and cellphones, and maybe that’s why the distortions that come with those things read as wrong to us, maybe that’s why we talk about them as flaws. Maybe the teens don’t. Maybe that’s why they don’t mind listening to music on small, cheap speakers the way we do. And so the distortion accomplishes the album’s goal — it places us a generation ahead of our own, in a sound where we feel at home but we don’t feel at home, that strikes us as awesome and inferior all at the same time.
I am investigating Fleetwood Mac’s “lost years” - the bit between Peter Green leaving the group and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joining. This was the album I listened to today, mostly blogged here because of the awesome minimal-gothickal LP cover. Needless to say the actual music is not remotely like anything this cover might indicate, it is feel-good 70s soft rock with an occasional tendency to the winsome. But pretty enjoyable!
I listened to this album exactly once during my teenage Fleetwood Mac obsession. The only things I remember about it are (a) the only copy I had was vinyl, for some reason, so I had to wait until my parents finally replaced their old broken turntable to listen to it, and at some point I turned to my dad and asked what people did in the ’70s when they only wanted to listen to one song off an album. Part of this query was phrased as “How do you skip tracks?” which I remember because my parents had a hearty LOL about it and sometimes repeat it to this day, something I remain (like the time when I was seven and they laughed at me for not knowing how to read our circa-1960 thermostat) a little indignant about. How was I supposed to know? I wasn’t fucking born then! And (b) it’s super boring till the end, when some old lady starts reading a poem about gloomy weather.
This is a pretty good album. I suspect for a good chunk of its buyers back in 1973, that sleeve was as aspirational as it gets.
2000th post next! Expect me to forget.
Part 2 in a Series in Which I Reblog My Personal Experiences with Albums Tom Ewing Has Posted Pictures Of:
In my hometown, when I was a kid, there was a bootleg music shop called Abbey Road. A bootleg music shop! I suppose they sold old records and posters and stuff too, but I remember a significant portion of the store was dedicated to crudely burned CDs with laser printer inserts of the covers. I went there exactly once in my life — they closed a couple of months after, I think, the rumor going around my high school was that the FBI shut them down. But once was enough for me to find a CD of Buckingham Nicks. I may have actually screamed when I saw it — you have to understand, when I was in high school, every cell in my body gave a shit about Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. I learned to sleep on my back so I could wear headphones to bed, so I could fall asleep listening to Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would get out of bed, go into the living room, pile all the throw pillows on the floor in front of the television, and watch videos of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham with the sound down so low I could barely hear it because I didn’t want to wake my parents, and then get up and go back to bed again. If my high school self could have gotten an account on Last.fm, every song on it would have been by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Aside from a brief thing with my sophomore year English teacher, there was no one I wanted to fuck / be adopted by more than Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
Anyway, even though I knew it would have been cooler to be able to say I had an actual vinyl of the Buckingham Nicks album, I was actually always pretty pleased I had a CD — first of all, because I didn’t know how to work a record player, and second of all, because I knew how to make MP3s and therefore finally had something to lord over all the bootleggers who wouldn’t trade for just blanks and postage. “Oh, what do I have to offer? Only some MP3s of the fucking Buckingham Nicks album.” I was queen of the Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham related Internet! I was sixteen!
This is a pretty good album. I suspect for a good chunk of its buyers back in 1973, that sleeve was as aspirational as it gets.
2000th post next! Expect me to forget.
Part 2 in a Series in Which I Reblog My Personal Experiences with Albums Tom Ewing Has Posted Pictures Of: In my hometown, when I was a kid, there was a bootleg music shop called Abbey Road. A bootleg music shop! I suppose they sold old records and posters and stuff too, but I remember a significant portion of the store was dedicated to crudely burned CDs with laser printer inserts of the covers. I went there exactly once in my life — they closed a couple of months after, I think, the rumor going around my high school was that the FBI shut them down. But once was enough for me to find a CD of Buckingham Nicks. I may have actually screamed when I saw it — you have to understand, when I was in high school, every cell in my body gave a shit about Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. I learned to sleep on my back so I could wear headphones to bed, so I could fall asleep listening to Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would get out of bed, go into the living room, pile all the throw pillows on the floor in front of the television, and watch videos of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham with the sound down so low I could barely hear it because I didn’t want to wake my parents, and then get up and go back to bed again. If my high school self could have gotten an account on Last.fm, every song on it would have been by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Aside from a brief thing with my sophomore year English teacher, there was no one I wanted to fuck / be adopted by more than Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
Anyway, even though I knew it would have been cooler to be able to say I had an actual vinyl of the Buckingham Nicks album, I was actually always pretty pleased I had a CD — first of all, because I didn’t know how to work a record player, and second of all, because I knew how to make MP3s and therefore finally had something to lord over all the bootleggers who wouldn’t trade for just blanks and postage. “Oh, what do I have to offer? Only some MP3s of the fucking Buckingham Nicks album.” I was queen of the Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham related Internet! I was sixteen!I have it on vinyl! It was one of the first records I bought because I found it cheap, and I’m not (that) dumb. I’ve listened to it maybe once all the way through, though.
I WILL PAY YOU REAL MONEY.
