“And where do you look for this hope that yer seekin'
Where do you look for this lamp that's a-burnin'”
-Dylan on Guthrie*
Certain people react together like chemical fireworks. Sometimes, it’s a surface level heat rash, when one element causes the other to break into irrational, babbling fits of Crocodile Dundee-style incapacitation. Other times, the two combine together so intensely that a new amalgamation of both is created, often accompanied by screams then later by diaper rash. My own reactivity levels are quite mellow; never quite able to ‘bring the heat’ as hydrogen did, but too chummy for the ice-man act of carbon, I become the equivalent of the art gallery compound agent: mixing slightly, cheese and crackers at hand, then suddenly out the door and forgotten, the rare Dupont phantom for whom M and M remain candy pieces, not I saw U’s.
Occasionally, the flint strikes with success. One colleague, in particular, has an uncanny way of lighting me up. The setting, more often than not, is the metro carriage. When the two of us are placed within speaking distance of one another, other passengers (read: audience members, a.k.a. the Grand Jury) soon take notice. He and I (let him be ‘He’, let I be ‘I’) may begin with small talk, but invariably find ourselves engaged in vigorous debate on rather serious, weighty issues. Social democracy. Institutional reorganization. That thing they call Capitalism. As hand gestures broaden, the tone acquires furious animation and my eyes begin to resemble molten volcanoes. He, being of Eri-opian (Eritrean and Ethiopian, or Half-and-Half) heritage but also having grown up in Baltimore city, is not nearly as prone to public theatre, relying more upon understatement and partial concession.
Our most recent topic, Microfinance, actually drew the participation of a middle-aged African-American who belongs to a microcredit group at the Washington hospital he works at. He caught a portion of my spark - I could see it in the way he nodded approvingly in rhythm to my raking rhetoric. But even my new partner element’s own testimony to the practical benefits of this modern economic aberration had little effect upon He, who appears convinced that resource scarcity and conglomeration are the only inevitability.
To such argument I chided (glaringly short of authenticity): “Lost child…you need to rediscover the teachings of your Black soul!”
He responded in his usual slightly less bombastic fashion: “Let’s just say you are slightly more ‘free spirited’ than I.”
As per usual, a nuisance dead rut had thwarted any rational conclusion to the discussion. He didn’t believe microfinance can work, and that didn’t sit well with me at all.
I could see that the night’s white coat experiment, as much exertion as might be committed to task, would end only in mutual negation, but for the addition of a secret biological mixture we shall refer to only as ‘K.’ Equipped with the sort of firebrand passion and a mind-warping conversational style that relegates others to the outskirts of the Personality Table, she happens to possess what I believed could be the magic that would transform the stonewalled heart of He into something that much more closely resembles…well, me. This magic, otherwise described as “being Black,” could be the ingredient our colorful but otherwise fruitless debates have been missing. And more straightforwardly, after some softening up (at least by our politics-as-sweet-talk standards) with happy hour banter about ordering clothes from Africa and Oromo separatism, He appeared sufficiently warmed up.
Tryst was the setting; B52 (house coffee/baileys concoction) the catalytic potion. As K locked our target rogue realist down, leaning forward far enough in her chair to square him off, their faces barely a foot apart, I leaned back smugly against another colleague. The process of conversion, or at the very least, reconsideration, had begun for He the Hapless. We chatted idly about our love lives, Snoop Dogg and nutella, vacantly watching the currents flow on the other side of the table. If I had a watch, I would have checked it. Being a tired drunk, I probably yawned instead. A snapshot of city opportunism we were: three children of Abyssinia and one trans-generational nomad of Hainan Island and Guangzhou, all children of Maryland’s public high school system, four tiny atoms of margarita-electrolysised idealism in a city of power-wielding deal-makers.
Magic potions, scientific formulae and disarming Black beauty combined, however, were not up to the challenge of evangelical lefty-moralist conversion that night. After efforts to raise the realization (and roof) through melodramatic mime acting were to no avail, I finally conceded that the fireworks had not resolved the argument’s fire just yet. I suppose there’s always the next Red Line train in two weeks to continue that. And besides, these are the kinds of conversations that should be flowing across the lips of conscious young students in lounges throughout our rainy, café tabled cities. At the close of the night, He and I lay slung against car windows, arguments forgotten, explosions momentarily extinguished, leaving only K, who was softly singing to an audience of two:
“Got a mind, That lends me a strength, So I ain’t afraid to stand/Got a love, So deep in me, Can’t be stopped by any man”**
-------------
*Bob Dylan - "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie"
**Amel Larrieux - "All I've Got"
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Specters
From a Moving Train
Being a college student brings with it a number of freedoms. Such freedoms, however, often find their boundaries in the form of severe economic limitation, you know…being broke. Such a predicament lands the university Young in the nervous space between Urban Professional and Urban Poor. We may dress in J Crew and pretend that our PDA fiddling is really important, but our cheque books and ATM cards are not replenished nearly as well as our white collar buddies. In fact, in your average working week, the Spanish-speaking lady behind the counter has added more to the national GDP than most of us. And so it is that somewhere along the short-track to the chunky paycheck and all the right professional circles, the DC student reluctantly meets the backroom crowd behind the show-curtains of the city.
A casual visitor might be slightly curious as to why her late-night fellow train-carriage passengers look so very different compared to those power-stepping suits she spent the day people-watching with fascination. But more often than now, she won’t be. Rather, she’ll dismiss their weary, furrowed brows for that of TV President Martin Sheen on “West Wing” marathons back at her room. Or for the picture of the Capitol building which caught the pigeon, just as it flew off!, offering a satisfying action shot for her amateur flickr album her friends will eye at work. Nobody takes pictures on the metro. That is, except for artsy blurred shots of the approaching train, or when “I was, like…sooo wasted.” And yet the metro is perhaps the last remaining major point of contact between the owner class and the owner-servicing. These are the specters Marx once wrote of, haunting the City of Grey Suits through long graveyard shifts and bleary-eyed commutes.
It’s always struck me as ironic how people bicker about what’s going on “over there” (by which I mean on CNN), and how the Bruckheimer school of movie-making always involves protagonists resolving their problems by making the big, aerial-pan-over the-Capitol shot –worthy trip to DC. All the while, the majority of Washingtonians: Black, struggling, neglected – remain essentially invisible to the world at large. While streams of well maintained, over-committed professionals enter the Northwest quadrant between mid-morning and have fled for the comforts of over-priced condominiums by six, this hidden service class operate on a less traditional schedule.
If one pays close enough attention, the soul of the DC specter reveals itself on weekday evenings, becoming increasingly tangible as the period between trains lengthens. For 12-minute spans, it is present, if still largely hidden, as if the quiet giant of power-wielding Washington, whom almost all of them serve, may suddenly turn angry. At 16 minutes, the specter fleshes out, and at 20 minutes plus, it’s unveiled in the dangerous open, letting down its ever-present guard as midnight approaches. Scanning the carriage, one begins to see further into the wells of despondent, vacant eyes, normally so closed off and resilient. We see through ragged uniforms and unwashed faced, into the struggles of the silenced.
One look is a window into a world many of us have never known. There are 70-hour weeks, children with worrisomely weak immune systems, drug-infestations and incarceration. In two laborer’s eyes I taste the hollow hunger of economic pittance. They eye other passengers with a gaze filled with a thousand moments of glass ceiling taps, heard by no one, from phone calls home to tumultuous Salvadoran towns, they whistle the tune of millions of fringe-dwelling star-chasers.
They depart at their inner-suburb stations, flickering images becoming transparent once more. Before tomorrow’s rush, other shadows shall slide slowly through the aisles of each carriage, mopping spills, trashing newspapers.
And as daylight breaks, they rise with their demons already descending upon their shoulders, to greet another toil-filled day in the shadows of the visible.
Being a college student brings with it a number of freedoms. Such freedoms, however, often find their boundaries in the form of severe economic limitation, you know…being broke. Such a predicament lands the university Young in the nervous space between Urban Professional and Urban Poor. We may dress in J Crew and pretend that our PDA fiddling is really important, but our cheque books and ATM cards are not replenished nearly as well as our white collar buddies. In fact, in your average working week, the Spanish-speaking lady behind the counter has added more to the national GDP than most of us. And so it is that somewhere along the short-track to the chunky paycheck and all the right professional circles, the DC student reluctantly meets the backroom crowd behind the show-curtains of the city.
A casual visitor might be slightly curious as to why her late-night fellow train-carriage passengers look so very different compared to those power-stepping suits she spent the day people-watching with fascination. But more often than now, she won’t be. Rather, she’ll dismiss their weary, furrowed brows for that of TV President Martin Sheen on “West Wing” marathons back at her room. Or for the picture of the Capitol building which caught the pigeon, just as it flew off!, offering a satisfying action shot for her amateur flickr album her friends will eye at work. Nobody takes pictures on the metro. That is, except for artsy blurred shots of the approaching train, or when “I was, like…sooo wasted.” And yet the metro is perhaps the last remaining major point of contact between the owner class and the owner-servicing. These are the specters Marx once wrote of, haunting the City of Grey Suits through long graveyard shifts and bleary-eyed commutes.
It’s always struck me as ironic how people bicker about what’s going on “over there” (by which I mean on CNN), and how the Bruckheimer school of movie-making always involves protagonists resolving their problems by making the big, aerial-pan-over the-Capitol shot –worthy trip to DC. All the while, the majority of Washingtonians: Black, struggling, neglected – remain essentially invisible to the world at large. While streams of well maintained, over-committed professionals enter the Northwest quadrant between mid-morning and have fled for the comforts of over-priced condominiums by six, this hidden service class operate on a less traditional schedule.
If one pays close enough attention, the soul of the DC specter reveals itself on weekday evenings, becoming increasingly tangible as the period between trains lengthens. For 12-minute spans, it is present, if still largely hidden, as if the quiet giant of power-wielding Washington, whom almost all of them serve, may suddenly turn angry. At 16 minutes, the specter fleshes out, and at 20 minutes plus, it’s unveiled in the dangerous open, letting down its ever-present guard as midnight approaches. Scanning the carriage, one begins to see further into the wells of despondent, vacant eyes, normally so closed off and resilient. We see through ragged uniforms and unwashed faced, into the struggles of the silenced.
One look is a window into a world many of us have never known. There are 70-hour weeks, children with worrisomely weak immune systems, drug-infestations and incarceration. In two laborer’s eyes I taste the hollow hunger of economic pittance. They eye other passengers with a gaze filled with a thousand moments of glass ceiling taps, heard by no one, from phone calls home to tumultuous Salvadoran towns, they whistle the tune of millions of fringe-dwelling star-chasers.
They depart at their inner-suburb stations, flickering images becoming transparent once more. Before tomorrow’s rush, other shadows shall slide slowly through the aisles of each carriage, mopping spills, trashing newspapers.
And as daylight breaks, they rise with their demons already descending upon their shoulders, to greet another toil-filled day in the shadows of the visible.
Monday, September 26, 2005
Blood Rising
Blood Rising – Footy Fever in a Foreign Land
It all came down to one pack of desperate, exhausted men and an oval-shaped ball. When Leo Barry caught the football and the final siren rung out across the Melbourne Cricket Ground this past Saturday, the Australian Embassy in Washington DC roared its approval. Oversized plastic swans were bandied about, as diplomats, expats and their American tag-alongs made like they’d just won the Olympics. The Sydney Swans had defeated my beloved West Coast Eagles by a slender four points in the sacred ceremony that is the Aussie Rules Grand Final, leaving the small minority of West Australian barrackers in the house to wander home with dragging steps.
We had reached the Australian embassy, an ungainly, monochrome example of modernist architecture turned impotent, closely before the match kicked off; I, five-year landed explorer of this mid-Atlantic jungle and Juliette, month-old Melbournian exchange student. Neither of us absolute footy die-hards (a rarity in our Motherland), we had gone more for the ritual of it all, the spectacle and the heart-ache of scenes that were drenched in the sauces of our antipodean home, quietly nestled a tidy 20 hours plane time away. And besides, the Eagles were playing! Some of my fondest Ocker memories include innocent weekend afternoons, watching blue and gold gladiators like “Can’t-kick-for-shit” Peter Sumich (whose parent’s lettuce farm sales were boosted by the number of goals their son kicked the previous week) and greyhound-built wingman Peter Matera steer us to national supremacy in 1992, at age 8.
I had expected a small, perhaps even sedate, bundle of embassy employees and widely drawn nationals working temporary positions “up at corporate.” What I got was a rousing army of roughly one hundred, some even came fitted in their chosen team’s apparel. And there was tea to boot. For such a crowd, the embassy had upped the authenticity ante far beyond wheeling out a big television screen and a satellite link. That tremendous trio who go by the names Sausage Roll, Meat Pie and Pastie were there in all their flaky, chunky splendor, greeted, less surprisingly, by their well-oiled partners, Victoria Bitter and Bundaberg Rum. My stomach greeted both parties with aplomb. That night, 1601 Massachusetts Avenue had been resettled by a new, ravenous foreigner previously known only for feats of crocodile-heavy daring do and shrimped out barbies. And they had some serious business to attend to.
When we arrived, Dame Edna—a cross-dressing comedic personality whose presence on Australian TV has been consistent for several decades—was banging out a number in purple wig, truly a fitting welcome into Australiana. For Juliette, the airship pans across the MCG were a much more familiar spectacle, she’s been attendee of numerous football matches at the home ground of the sport over the years. For me, it was more of a second breath of the cleanest, more refreshing coastal wind I’ve thus far inhaled, a chance to revisit home almost exactly one month after departing Sydney on my too-short summer visit. Suddenly, I could visualize myself in a pub in Subiaco or in the living room at Bigs, Choc and Asher’s place, screaming, shaking, and refilling stubby holders. Or having a kick around out by Lake Monger, working on my wonky drop-punt with Perth’s gorgeous river skyline in the distance. This schizophrenic jumping around we label “cosmopolitanism” loses all meaning at such moments, when my generally straitjacketed yearning to move back home slinks back to the surface. “Even the Vodafone billboards make me homesick,” I told Juliette.
In their upper-thigh length shorts and spikes, with steely calves and Rambo-toned arms, the Aussie Rules footballer epitomizes the Romanesque model of Australian masculinity. Having lived in two of the world’s most sport-mad nations, I’ve reached the conclusion that no sport is more holistically physically challenging than Aussie Rules. Speed, raw strength, agility, endurance, cunning and occasionally a mean right hook are all essential tools in this game, where 18-player sides charge back and forth for 90 minutes across a large, oval-shaped field. Like all games, the purpose is misleadingly straightforward: one scores by kicking the rugby-shaped ball through two posts. But as Spike Lee once remarked, “thrown in the defense, and it’s a whole different story.”
Defense, while not generally considered the most exhilarating aspect of any game, was the dominant theme of this particular one. Vice-like tackles (where a player literally bear hugs an opponent, often leaping upon him as if to strangle or fornicate) and punishing spoils (where the defender emphatically punches the ball away as if it were his wife’s adulterous lover) offered all the answers to promising attacks again and again, leaving little work for the scorekeepers. By the end of the first half, the Eagles had scored a miserable two goals, in a sport where four times that amount is more common. One old friend in Perth sounded quite convinced of our inevitable triumph in this year’s season, and I smiled at the string of expletives he would no doubt be bellowing that very moment.
However, though the man-dressed-as-a-lady had sung, the fat one certainly had not. In a deliberate, steady ebb, the Eagles clawed their way back from having the Swans double their score in the first half, and at one point I sniffed victory.
“I just want a close game,” Juliette had told me earlier, and at the time I had whole-heartedly agreed.
But slowly and surely, my cheering became a little less well humored and a little more tribal. When I stood up and fist-pumped my approval at each hard-earned goal, when I bemoaned the umpires’ obviously one-sided calls and when I began to hide my face in my hands as the momentum began its final Sydney-side shift, the novelty of watching a footy match in the heart of Washington began to fade. This was a battle for the ages, and ethnic nationalism be damned, for that last half an hour I bled blue and gold. Between three and three thirty AM my time, five and five thirty PM theirs, Captain Ben Cousins and his Eagle troops had become the Anzacs in Gallipoli, the anti-Fascist forces in Civil War Spain, courageous guerilla rebels in the heart of some ignoble enemy’s fortress.
Western Australia is a resilient, isolated little chunk of the earth, and that afternoon, its two million odd inhabitants had their hearts resting delicately somewhere between their beanies and their television screens. Whereas Melbourne has countless (well, maybe 10) national teams, we have only two, and one of them—the Fremantle Dockers—doesn’t really count. And where the East Coast has more people, better coffee, the luxury of more than one actual city and countless other bourgeois airs, we in the West have only the Eagles. Since I can remember, Hungry Jacks (Burger King, randomly renamed for a nation of hungry Jacks, it appears) has been marketing it’s kids meal with the Eagle celebrity of the moment, and car rear windows have worn the classic, uncomplicated logo from time immemorial (1987, to be exact). So when that dreaded final siren sounded, as the screams of the triumphant rung out around me, I laid my head in my hands, heart pounding, throat hoarse. The boys from the west had gone down, and with them, at least for the time being, the hopes and dreams of nearly everyone in the state. And, incredibly, at the opposite end of the world, I was experiencing the exact same exhilarating pain.
Before long, we stepped out of our bizarre, antipodean outer-dimensional plane and back into the muggy DC night. I churned out hypothetical what-ifs and game analysis into an indifferent American air; again, Juliette became my confidante, just as I had been hers whilst discussing another mutual love, cricket, strolling through Adams Morgan earlier in the evening. Drew Banfield’s missed goal, the day I played footy in the Czech Republic with some Australian backpackers and tomato sauce as opposed to ketchup all faded against a mental backdrop of returning collegiate obligations. But oh, how good it did feel simply to lose.
It all came down to one pack of desperate, exhausted men and an oval-shaped ball. When Leo Barry caught the football and the final siren rung out across the Melbourne Cricket Ground this past Saturday, the Australian Embassy in Washington DC roared its approval. Oversized plastic swans were bandied about, as diplomats, expats and their American tag-alongs made like they’d just won the Olympics. The Sydney Swans had defeated my beloved West Coast Eagles by a slender four points in the sacred ceremony that is the Aussie Rules Grand Final, leaving the small minority of West Australian barrackers in the house to wander home with dragging steps.
We had reached the Australian embassy, an ungainly, monochrome example of modernist architecture turned impotent, closely before the match kicked off; I, five-year landed explorer of this mid-Atlantic jungle and Juliette, month-old Melbournian exchange student. Neither of us absolute footy die-hards (a rarity in our Motherland), we had gone more for the ritual of it all, the spectacle and the heart-ache of scenes that were drenched in the sauces of our antipodean home, quietly nestled a tidy 20 hours plane time away. And besides, the Eagles were playing! Some of my fondest Ocker memories include innocent weekend afternoons, watching blue and gold gladiators like “Can’t-kick-for-shit” Peter Sumich (whose parent’s lettuce farm sales were boosted by the number of goals their son kicked the previous week) and greyhound-built wingman Peter Matera steer us to national supremacy in 1992, at age 8.
I had expected a small, perhaps even sedate, bundle of embassy employees and widely drawn nationals working temporary positions “up at corporate.” What I got was a rousing army of roughly one hundred, some even came fitted in their chosen team’s apparel. And there was tea to boot. For such a crowd, the embassy had upped the authenticity ante far beyond wheeling out a big television screen and a satellite link. That tremendous trio who go by the names Sausage Roll, Meat Pie and Pastie were there in all their flaky, chunky splendor, greeted, less surprisingly, by their well-oiled partners, Victoria Bitter and Bundaberg Rum. My stomach greeted both parties with aplomb. That night, 1601 Massachusetts Avenue had been resettled by a new, ravenous foreigner previously known only for feats of crocodile-heavy daring do and shrimped out barbies. And they had some serious business to attend to.
When we arrived, Dame Edna—a cross-dressing comedic personality whose presence on Australian TV has been consistent for several decades—was banging out a number in purple wig, truly a fitting welcome into Australiana. For Juliette, the airship pans across the MCG were a much more familiar spectacle, she’s been attendee of numerous football matches at the home ground of the sport over the years. For me, it was more of a second breath of the cleanest, more refreshing coastal wind I’ve thus far inhaled, a chance to revisit home almost exactly one month after departing Sydney on my too-short summer visit. Suddenly, I could visualize myself in a pub in Subiaco or in the living room at Bigs, Choc and Asher’s place, screaming, shaking, and refilling stubby holders. Or having a kick around out by Lake Monger, working on my wonky drop-punt with Perth’s gorgeous river skyline in the distance. This schizophrenic jumping around we label “cosmopolitanism” loses all meaning at such moments, when my generally straitjacketed yearning to move back home slinks back to the surface. “Even the Vodafone billboards make me homesick,” I told Juliette.
In their upper-thigh length shorts and spikes, with steely calves and Rambo-toned arms, the Aussie Rules footballer epitomizes the Romanesque model of Australian masculinity. Having lived in two of the world’s most sport-mad nations, I’ve reached the conclusion that no sport is more holistically physically challenging than Aussie Rules. Speed, raw strength, agility, endurance, cunning and occasionally a mean right hook are all essential tools in this game, where 18-player sides charge back and forth for 90 minutes across a large, oval-shaped field. Like all games, the purpose is misleadingly straightforward: one scores by kicking the rugby-shaped ball through two posts. But as Spike Lee once remarked, “thrown in the defense, and it’s a whole different story.”
Defense, while not generally considered the most exhilarating aspect of any game, was the dominant theme of this particular one. Vice-like tackles (where a player literally bear hugs an opponent, often leaping upon him as if to strangle or fornicate) and punishing spoils (where the defender emphatically punches the ball away as if it were his wife’s adulterous lover) offered all the answers to promising attacks again and again, leaving little work for the scorekeepers. By the end of the first half, the Eagles had scored a miserable two goals, in a sport where four times that amount is more common. One old friend in Perth sounded quite convinced of our inevitable triumph in this year’s season, and I smiled at the string of expletives he would no doubt be bellowing that very moment.
However, though the man-dressed-as-a-lady had sung, the fat one certainly had not. In a deliberate, steady ebb, the Eagles clawed their way back from having the Swans double their score in the first half, and at one point I sniffed victory.
“I just want a close game,” Juliette had told me earlier, and at the time I had whole-heartedly agreed.
But slowly and surely, my cheering became a little less well humored and a little more tribal. When I stood up and fist-pumped my approval at each hard-earned goal, when I bemoaned the umpires’ obviously one-sided calls and when I began to hide my face in my hands as the momentum began its final Sydney-side shift, the novelty of watching a footy match in the heart of Washington began to fade. This was a battle for the ages, and ethnic nationalism be damned, for that last half an hour I bled blue and gold. Between three and three thirty AM my time, five and five thirty PM theirs, Captain Ben Cousins and his Eagle troops had become the Anzacs in Gallipoli, the anti-Fascist forces in Civil War Spain, courageous guerilla rebels in the heart of some ignoble enemy’s fortress.
Western Australia is a resilient, isolated little chunk of the earth, and that afternoon, its two million odd inhabitants had their hearts resting delicately somewhere between their beanies and their television screens. Whereas Melbourne has countless (well, maybe 10) national teams, we have only two, and one of them—the Fremantle Dockers—doesn’t really count. And where the East Coast has more people, better coffee, the luxury of more than one actual city and countless other bourgeois airs, we in the West have only the Eagles. Since I can remember, Hungry Jacks (Burger King, randomly renamed for a nation of hungry Jacks, it appears) has been marketing it’s kids meal with the Eagle celebrity of the moment, and car rear windows have worn the classic, uncomplicated logo from time immemorial (1987, to be exact). So when that dreaded final siren sounded, as the screams of the triumphant rung out around me, I laid my head in my hands, heart pounding, throat hoarse. The boys from the west had gone down, and with them, at least for the time being, the hopes and dreams of nearly everyone in the state. And, incredibly, at the opposite end of the world, I was experiencing the exact same exhilarating pain.
Before long, we stepped out of our bizarre, antipodean outer-dimensional plane and back into the muggy DC night. I churned out hypothetical what-ifs and game analysis into an indifferent American air; again, Juliette became my confidante, just as I had been hers whilst discussing another mutual love, cricket, strolling through Adams Morgan earlier in the evening. Drew Banfield’s missed goal, the day I played footy in the Czech Republic with some Australian backpackers and tomato sauce as opposed to ketchup all faded against a mental backdrop of returning collegiate obligations. But oh, how good it did feel simply to lose.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Might I Add
-What I wish I could have told M.I.A. at the show, instead of just kissing her and knocking her over-
Maya Arulpragasam has had much virtual ink spilled over her in recent months. For the uninitiated, this Sri-Lankan-born rapper/beat producer/graphic and film artist has been rapidly adopted as the darling princess of the indie and underground hip-hop scenes. Her debut album, “Arular,” is a heart-grippingly raw, complex mixture of dancehall-inflected world beats mixed with M.I.A.’s sing-songy, surprisingly dark wordplay. I absolutely adore it.
In an illuminating interview with Pitchfork*, she discusses her motivations in transitioning from visual media to making music:
“I went to hip-hop and they were going on about something and it was like, "Dude, shut up about the Rams already!" So I went to indie and they were going on about wanting to slit their wrists and I'd be like, "Aww, how could you? Why don't you just make yourself useful?" You go to any other genre, and there's shit going on. You go to world music-- not that I did-- and there's nothing going on there: There's six billion people and they're all pissed off, yet they can't pick up the fucking stick and bang out a few tunes?”
Now if she were in a Presidential debate for powerful musicians, running on a Reform-the-Left ticket, that casual statement would have secured my vote in a second. M.I.A., as many have noted, personifies the zeitgeist of the mid-decade point in post-Millennial pop art. The indie-dance-garage scene (Franz Ferdinand, et. al) has become increasingly revisionist and retroactive, adding coy, minute updates to a movement that in a contemporary context leans only toward classicist nostalgia, hardly the sort of compelling direction that its major progenitors—post-punk and new-wave—offered in their original incarnation. Hip hop continues to drift its way through the bipolar paradigm of socially-conscious glitz (see Kweli with Kanye); the comparatively youthful genre is creatively well-ahead of contemporary rock, but is being stretched far within its sonic potential. This leaves us at M.I.A., who is indeed, musically and culturally, “pushing things forward,” to quote Mike Skinner.
I’m not going to write another metanalysis of her eclectic influences, which range across a multi-continental palate of Brazilian baile funk to Baltimore club go-go and a dozen sounds in-between, or break down the PLO references and taboo motifs of her lyrics (the album is highly autobiographical, offering insight into the modern refugee plight and sex trafficking). Rather, I only wish to celebrate the great value of M.I.A.’s voice and music to the current state of art, society and politics, a value which only seems to grow with the increasing costs of the global War on Terrorism and the increasing consolidation of Western media and thinking at large.
Maya exemplifies the hodge-podge cosmopolitanism of our time. Her singer, Cherry, was raised in Saint Catherine. Her romantic interest, DJ Diplo, is a White American who (in tandem with Hollertronix) mixes obscure, international sounds together like golden twine. Maya herself is London-born. She was raised in war-ravaged Sri-Lanka then transplanted to London at age 10; thus she has experienced the teething troubles of cultural bridging: firstly, the cold (discriminatory) shoulder of the (in her case) Anglo-Saxon establishment, her immediate reactionary options toward it (assimilation and rejection) and eventually, a Hegelian/DJ-esque dialectical synthesis of contradiction, irony and empowerment. Now it’s that final, newly-adjusted stage which is of particular note. Throughout the immigrant-receiving North, a fresh-faced, well-heeled party of first-generation immigrants is providing the impetus for a paradigmatic, multi-faceted shift the world has not seen since the height of colonialism.
Sure, most Nigerian and Indian university students are studying computer science and are more interested in a high entry-level income than ragga beatcore. And there is a very natural but ultimately non-productive drive toward ethnically-centred isolationism amongst some Arab and Turkish enclaves in Paris, amongst others. But there is a fledgling crop of creative-minded artists within our ranks (I count myself as a dual immigrant, spanning both Australia and the United States), a small, globe-spanning group who are at the heart of a new musical direction.
These artists are emotionally-abundant and identity-fragmented, drawing on the untapped inspiration of the migrant experience. And though the developing world is still flooded with Top-40 radio, devoid of region-specific message or utility, the tide is starting to reverse. Popular music was born through the Blues and Gospel, both rooted in the pain of African-America. Its most successful permutation, Rock and Pop, pull their pedigree from the sexuality and nervous energy of the White middle-class. Hip Hop was a different case; beginning with both block parties (DJing) and angsty ciphers (MCing) in its earliest form, its original voice was uniquely Black and culturally subversive. M.I.A. and the Sub-continental Reformation take these characteristics, add the vitality and emancipated power of the global “Other” (Coloured, as opposed to Black) to an already broad-based artform and repackages it in LP-sized pieces for its inevitable commercial audience: suburban, predominantly-White youth.
The audience at M.I.A.’s show was as diverse as I had imagined. There were hijab-adorned young women in the front row, fey indie boys, outnumbered hip hop heads, a lot of the college downloader caste and that most trying of concert inhabitants, gangs of homoerotic high school girls. Being first in line, I found it anthropologically satisfying seeing who rocked up and in what order. My five instantly-befriended diehards who had the privilege of a pre-show chat with Maya and Cherry during sound-check included an Indian and African-American couple, young political professionals and gap yearees. Such cultural eclecticism was all the more profound, however, when peering backward across the crowd during the opening stanza of personal highlight, “10 Dollar,” where hundreds of screaming “Oh-oh-oh-oh, Hey-Hey” refrains echoed throughout the sweaty, near-riotous venue. That the joyful chaos was being led onstage by two diminutive immigrants in short shorts and high-tops made the experience that much sweeter. Rule Britannia? Maybe for my father’s generation. Last night, a more applicable phrase would have been “Rule Tamil.”
But ultimately, like all great art, M.I.A.’s musical soul packs more punch than the actual event or the three-minute single. For every Galang-led car commercial, there’s a 13-year-old in Melbourne googling the word “Tamil Tiger” after class. A legion of young coloured girls whose eyes light up at the sight of a brown-skinned Asian on MTV instead of endless carbon-copy Kylies. A generation of fellow culture-hopping 20-somethings who hold the catharsis of childhood discrimination and assimilatory afterthoughts about our cousins back home in Malaysia clutched against our hearts. Countless young women throughout Sub-Saharan Africa contracting monogamous HIV from polygamous partners whose deaths may not be in vain. Because, M.I.A., future “Queen of pop music” or whatever hype-laced headline you want to call her, is not really all that futuristic. Our world as a whole has been consistently raping and oppressing young coloured people for a handful of centuries at the very least by this point.
As Maya herself says: “I'm chipping away! You ready for something new, hurry up.” Well keep chipping, M.I.A., knowing how many of us are behind you.
A raw, sexy, angry, cataclysmically beautiful voice is being unleashed upon an unsuspecting mass audience. And she is shouting into a microphone, over and over again, with a chorus of hundreds of passionate converts surrounding her:
“Pull up the People! Pull up the Poor!”
------------------- *http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/m/mia-05/
Maya Arulpragasam has had much virtual ink spilled over her in recent months. For the uninitiated, this Sri-Lankan-born rapper/beat producer/graphic and film artist has been rapidly adopted as the darling princess of the indie and underground hip-hop scenes. Her debut album, “Arular,” is a heart-grippingly raw, complex mixture of dancehall-inflected world beats mixed with M.I.A.’s sing-songy, surprisingly dark wordplay. I absolutely adore it.
In an illuminating interview with Pitchfork*, she discusses her motivations in transitioning from visual media to making music:
“I went to hip-hop and they were going on about something and it was like, "Dude, shut up about the Rams already!" So I went to indie and they were going on about wanting to slit their wrists and I'd be like, "Aww, how could you? Why don't you just make yourself useful?" You go to any other genre, and there's shit going on. You go to world music-- not that I did-- and there's nothing going on there: There's six billion people and they're all pissed off, yet they can't pick up the fucking stick and bang out a few tunes?”
Now if she were in a Presidential debate for powerful musicians, running on a Reform-the-Left ticket, that casual statement would have secured my vote in a second. M.I.A., as many have noted, personifies the zeitgeist of the mid-decade point in post-Millennial pop art. The indie-dance-garage scene (Franz Ferdinand, et. al) has become increasingly revisionist and retroactive, adding coy, minute updates to a movement that in a contemporary context leans only toward classicist nostalgia, hardly the sort of compelling direction that its major progenitors—post-punk and new-wave—offered in their original incarnation. Hip hop continues to drift its way through the bipolar paradigm of socially-conscious glitz (see Kweli with Kanye); the comparatively youthful genre is creatively well-ahead of contemporary rock, but is being stretched far within its sonic potential. This leaves us at M.I.A., who is indeed, musically and culturally, “pushing things forward,” to quote Mike Skinner.
I’m not going to write another metanalysis of her eclectic influences, which range across a multi-continental palate of Brazilian baile funk to Baltimore club go-go and a dozen sounds in-between, or break down the PLO references and taboo motifs of her lyrics (the album is highly autobiographical, offering insight into the modern refugee plight and sex trafficking). Rather, I only wish to celebrate the great value of M.I.A.’s voice and music to the current state of art, society and politics, a value which only seems to grow with the increasing costs of the global War on Terrorism and the increasing consolidation of Western media and thinking at large.
Maya exemplifies the hodge-podge cosmopolitanism of our time. Her singer, Cherry, was raised in Saint Catherine. Her romantic interest, DJ Diplo, is a White American who (in tandem with Hollertronix) mixes obscure, international sounds together like golden twine. Maya herself is London-born. She was raised in war-ravaged Sri-Lanka then transplanted to London at age 10; thus she has experienced the teething troubles of cultural bridging: firstly, the cold (discriminatory) shoulder of the (in her case) Anglo-Saxon establishment, her immediate reactionary options toward it (assimilation and rejection) and eventually, a Hegelian/DJ-esque dialectical synthesis of contradiction, irony and empowerment. Now it’s that final, newly-adjusted stage which is of particular note. Throughout the immigrant-receiving North, a fresh-faced, well-heeled party of first-generation immigrants is providing the impetus for a paradigmatic, multi-faceted shift the world has not seen since the height of colonialism.
Sure, most Nigerian and Indian university students are studying computer science and are more interested in a high entry-level income than ragga beatcore. And there is a very natural but ultimately non-productive drive toward ethnically-centred isolationism amongst some Arab and Turkish enclaves in Paris, amongst others. But there is a fledgling crop of creative-minded artists within our ranks (I count myself as a dual immigrant, spanning both Australia and the United States), a small, globe-spanning group who are at the heart of a new musical direction.
These artists are emotionally-abundant and identity-fragmented, drawing on the untapped inspiration of the migrant experience. And though the developing world is still flooded with Top-40 radio, devoid of region-specific message or utility, the tide is starting to reverse. Popular music was born through the Blues and Gospel, both rooted in the pain of African-America. Its most successful permutation, Rock and Pop, pull their pedigree from the sexuality and nervous energy of the White middle-class. Hip Hop was a different case; beginning with both block parties (DJing) and angsty ciphers (MCing) in its earliest form, its original voice was uniquely Black and culturally subversive. M.I.A. and the Sub-continental Reformation take these characteristics, add the vitality and emancipated power of the global “Other” (Coloured, as opposed to Black) to an already broad-based artform and repackages it in LP-sized pieces for its inevitable commercial audience: suburban, predominantly-White youth.
The audience at M.I.A.’s show was as diverse as I had imagined. There were hijab-adorned young women in the front row, fey indie boys, outnumbered hip hop heads, a lot of the college downloader caste and that most trying of concert inhabitants, gangs of homoerotic high school girls. Being first in line, I found it anthropologically satisfying seeing who rocked up and in what order. My five instantly-befriended diehards who had the privilege of a pre-show chat with Maya and Cherry during sound-check included an Indian and African-American couple, young political professionals and gap yearees. Such cultural eclecticism was all the more profound, however, when peering backward across the crowd during the opening stanza of personal highlight, “10 Dollar,” where hundreds of screaming “Oh-oh-oh-oh, Hey-Hey” refrains echoed throughout the sweaty, near-riotous venue. That the joyful chaos was being led onstage by two diminutive immigrants in short shorts and high-tops made the experience that much sweeter. Rule Britannia? Maybe for my father’s generation. Last night, a more applicable phrase would have been “Rule Tamil.”
But ultimately, like all great art, M.I.A.’s musical soul packs more punch than the actual event or the three-minute single. For every Galang-led car commercial, there’s a 13-year-old in Melbourne googling the word “Tamil Tiger” after class. A legion of young coloured girls whose eyes light up at the sight of a brown-skinned Asian on MTV instead of endless carbon-copy Kylies. A generation of fellow culture-hopping 20-somethings who hold the catharsis of childhood discrimination and assimilatory afterthoughts about our cousins back home in Malaysia clutched against our hearts. Countless young women throughout Sub-Saharan Africa contracting monogamous HIV from polygamous partners whose deaths may not be in vain. Because, M.I.A., future “Queen of pop music” or whatever hype-laced headline you want to call her, is not really all that futuristic. Our world as a whole has been consistently raping and oppressing young coloured people for a handful of centuries at the very least by this point.
As Maya herself says: “I'm chipping away! You ready for something new, hurry up.” Well keep chipping, M.I.A., knowing how many of us are behind you.
A raw, sexy, angry, cataclysmically beautiful voice is being unleashed upon an unsuspecting mass audience. And she is shouting into a microphone, over and over again, with a chorus of hundreds of passionate converts surrounding her:
“Pull up the People! Pull up the Poor!”
------------------- *http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/m/mia-05/
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Album review: Coldplay - "X and Y"
Coldplay - “X and Y”
When Parachutes was released some five years ago, few would have imagined that a mere two albums later, the four mild-mannered lads with a passion for the straight-forward would become rock’s expected heirs to U2’s throne. But, thanks to a deceptively-simple piano line that refused to vacate pop consciousness months after its expiration date and a malaise-filled crater of musical competition, Coldplay—the little train that could—has made clear its course and, with the release of their highly-anticipated third LP, world conquest is now destined to take place.
It isn’t difficult to chart where tropical monsoon music industry began its destructive course. The first time I heard “Yellow,” that ubiquitous, sun-peeks-through-clouds lovesick drop of pop heaven, I stopped whatever mundane task was occupying me in my tracks. There was something about that voice, that seductive Martin falsetto which has since claimed the hearts of millions of teenage girls (and less readily-admitting boys) which I found irresistible. Upon listening to the album in its entirety, I wasn’t unimpressed so much as unengaged. My young ears were at the time attuned to the throat-wringing guitars of RATM types, and Parachutes’ hushed, sleepy-eyed tone passed beneath me like a low tide upon sandy calves. But I was intrigued. Upon repeat listens, the nuances of the band’s playing, particularly Martin’s heavy-heart lyricism and young-Buckley vocal styling coupled with Buckland’s intelligent guitar work, held me captive. Coldplay epitomized the romance of my rainy English fantasies, where pin-striped white collar folks finish lonesome pints of ale before walking home through street-lamped winter nights. I saw many a night through to the soothing notes of that album. Coldplay were my confidantes, a quartet of thoughtful, articulate mates who offered the gift of catharsis, converting any internal, angsty personal drama of the time as epic as the chiming guitars of “Yellow.”
It took me a while to concede, but that vice-turned grip of ownership I momentarily held over the band had to be relinquished. With a number of British bands, such as the Libertines or Keane, I can maintain a certain level of existential intimacy for ranging periods of time. Some, like the Manic Street Preachers, I gleefully retain property rights to forever without fear of infringement here in the “Blur are one-hit-wonders” States. But with Coldplay, it was a landslide that I could do nothing but knowingly acknowledge. With each viewing of Martin’s goofy, raincoat-shrouded face on MTV ads gushing “And all the things that you do….” I found myself mutedly agreeing with the kid in lunch hall proclaiming “that Yellow band’s pretty fucking dope, yo!” A band of the people, they had become.
Enter college, and the first stage of the Coldplay monsoon phenomenon. Before Rush of Blood’s release, I had read a Martin interview stating that the band was planning on “going big.” Dating back to the Parachutes tour, Martin has been envisioning the band’s leap into the amplified rock leagues of their heroes, and I was saddened to hear of this change in course. If Coldplay were to continue releasing subdued, plaintive pop music for a good decade or so, I would have been perfectly content. But after “In My Place” bounded on to radio waves (“It’s just like “Yellow,” only better!”), followed by the sublime “The Scientist” (still their finest ballad to date) and the universally-revered “Clocks,” the maturation of the bar-gig college boys into a full-blown, air-boxing stadium rock band was complete. But somehow, whether through studio-engineered genius or song-writing precision I’m not sure, Rush of Blood retained the core elements of heart-felt emotion, vocal intimacy and boyish charm which made Coldplay so lovable in the first place. For every souped-up platter of strings and light show-friendly bridge, the group added Martin’s intimate lyrics and songwriting—particularly in “The Scientist,” “Green Eyes” and “Warning Sign”— as worthy counterweights. It was, as Martin had promised, indeed bigger, while being musically superior and more consistent to boot. But for the most part, Rush of Blood retained the attributes I most loved from Parachutes, making it their best work to date.
Enter Coldplay, version 3.0, replete with mathematical artwork and a studio saga even more dramatic than the last. Having risen into the major leagues with their second release, this was supposed to be the album that topples all competitors in some new rock order where benign wallflower becomes interplanetary, all-revealing sage. X and Y is an album the band has pored over with the jittery nerves and hyper-insecurity that only a perfectionist like Martin knows. In promotion interviews, he jokes that he wanted to make the “best thing anybody’s ever listened to.” Serious or not, X and Y’s overly-calculated sculpting and fine tuning is clearly evident throughout. As has been mentioned, it is more an outgrowth of Rush of Blood than a revolution, adding even more layers, more instrumentation and generally more volume to a soundscape once famous for its minimalism and space. And, false-references to Kraftwerk (“Talk” lifts the main hook from “Computer Love”) and krautrock aside, this really is space music, finely engineered to provide maximum stadium lift-off efficiency and to propel lighters into motion faster than ever before. Despite this, Coldplay, as much as they follow in the shadows of U2 and Radiohead, are neither and never shall be either of these bands. And though I genuinely enjoy their music, I must acknowledge that they are not suited to assume rock’s mantle. Bono and Bono’s ego may for now rest atop the world happily.
We begin with lead single “Speed of Sound,” the older, more filled-out musical cousin of “Clocks.” The piano hook, a class below that of its predecessor, follows the exact same A-B B-C pattern, as does the rhythm of Champion’s pounding toms. Lyrically, it’s grander in scope than “Clocks,” with Martin waxing philosophical over puzzles and wondrous worldly matter. His tone is reverential, revealing Bono’s growing influence in his geographical reference:
Ideas that you'll never find
All the inventors could never design
The buildings that you put up
Japan and China all lit up
Standing alone, “Speed of Sound” is a fine accomplishment, a majestic piece of song and studio-craft that is more rewarding in its instrumental build-up and possesses a better-developed chorus than “Clocks.” Serving as a transition point between albums, it succeeds in signaling the band’s intent to do what they did well on “Rush of Blood” even better this time around.
Likewise, “Square One,” the ominous, boldly-complex opener, successfully establishes Coldplay’s raison d’etre in a manner reminiscent of “Tourist” from OK Computer or even the band’s own “Politik.” Beginning with ambient synth organ, symbolic of the instrument’s now integral role in their sound, the group throw a bevy of hip 80s musical references across the canvas. The rhythm section has never sounded more like Unforgettable Fire-era U2, Buckland moves adeptly from post-punk staccato to Marquee Moon angular melodicism…hell, Martin even throws in a couple of soccer fan “woah-ohh” chants in the second verse. The sum of its parts is impressive, and if it the tracks which followed “Square One” built upon this arsenal of intelligently-lifted influences, X and Y would be one monster of a record. Regrettably, this is not the case, and music aside, the real disappointment of the album is Martin’s fall from grace from accomplished balladeer to ingratiating, Extreme-era lyrical schtickism.
“You're in control, is there anywhere you wanna go?” he begins, issuing perhaps the most direct call for listener participation in modern musical history. He follows by playing rock psychologist: “You just want somebody listening to what you say,” he emotes, before asking open-endedly: “Is there anybody out there who is lost and hurt and lonely too?”
It’s all a bit too much, isn’t it? The beauty of Martin’s writing, which has always been rather contrived and cliché-ridden, has been the fragmented, loosely cryptic cut of his wordplay, which allowed the singer’s confessional honesty and occasional pastoral romance to connect so satisfyingly with his listener. “I look in your direction/but you pay me no attention,” from “Shiver,” and “You said I'm gonna buy a gun and start a war/If you can tell me something worth fighting for,” from “Rush” exemplify this unusual skill.
Many in the critical community have pinpointed “Swallowed in the Sea” as the album’s biggest red herring, and rightfully so:
And I could write it down
Or spread it all around
Get lost and then get found
And you'll come back to me
Not with blasphemes as raw as these, she won’t. Elsewhere, the digressions are only slightly more forgivable. “When you try your best but you don't succeed” is a sorry line in a children’s fable, let alone the single which is designed and will almost inevitably catapult the band into the stratosphere for summers to come (“Fix You”). And not only does “So you take a picture of something you see/In the future where will I be?” (“Talk”) not follow logically; it’s also symptomatic of an entire album’s worth of misguided vagaries and lazy rhyming couplets. At worst, Martin sounds like a second-grade teacher whose English students have rubbed off on his poems to his wife; at best like an incoherent backpacker, extolling the virtues of his stargazing worldview into awkward if well-intentioned prose.
The problem, I believe, is not Martin himself. He’s a talented songwriter, capable of writing solid hits, particularly Lennon-esque ballads which utilize his rangy, clear-throated singing voice. The real issue is that Martin, in attempting to morph Coldplay into some U2-meets-Radiohead post-Millennial behemoth has sacrificed the gift of subtlety and quietude which has always been and remains the soul of the band. Additionally, not only do his lyrics and, to a lesser degree, the songwriting fall short of expectations, but the album is caught between play-it-safe plinky piano adult pop and electronica/art rock purgatory. X and Y not only largely fails to reach the heights of Rush of Blood, but in attempting to erect a city full of skyscraper hits, only succeeds in constructing the physical shell of their original, ambitious vision.
What does such a hollowed out, metallic world sound like? Well, Prince for one thing. In the most obvious lift of the album, his classic “When Doves Cry” chorus is ripped wholesale in “White Shadows.” The two major ballads, “What If” and “Fix You,” crescendo with the string-synth power of a tidal wave, though both songs are more Carole King B-side than McCartney tunefulness. The rockers are competent if a touch generic, mid-paced and layered with Buckland’s effective guitar flourishes. He has become a force in his own right, an amalgamation of encyclopedic 80s indie and arena-rock, from Echo and the Bunnymen through to the Smiths, while the imprints of the Edge echo pervasively through every delay-channeled note he strikes. Berryman and Champion are about as visible on X and Y as they were on Rush of Blood, never close to the starry level of Radiohead’s rhythm section but close to approaching the rock-solid reliability of Clayton and Mullen. Coldplay is by now firmly established as musical peers to the greatest bands of its own generation, and if it reinvents and really unleashes itself, which it has shown clear flashes of potential to do (“Daylight,” “Square One,” the four-part harmonizing of “Fix You”), the results could be truly spectacular.
But at this point, X and Y provides empirical proof that Coldplay, in its current form, is not prepared to be the band they may one day become, such as U2’s successor. As Erlewine eloquently notes, “where U2 is big in sound, scope, ambition, and intent, Coldplay is ultimately big music about small things, and [X and Y’s] limited, narcissistic point of view is what prevents the quartet from inheriting the title of the biggest and most important band in the world.” Agreed.
“My song is love, is love unknown /And I've got to get that message home,” Martin emotes in the admittedly-moving “A Message.” And he should realize that he doesn’t have to sacrifice his motifs of love, personal examination and self-doubt in order to accomplish his goal of building the most significant rock band of his time. Bono has continued to mine such themes for much of his career. Rather, Coldplay needs to evolve as significantly as they did from Parachutes to Rush of Blood, beyond wool-sweater nicety and hummable piano balladry into an album that stands alone as truly momentous. With X and Y, Coldplay have reached for grand Joshua Tree heights, but despite Martin’s ambition and the band's ability, have only created Rush of Blood’s overwrought, studio-birthed amphetachild.
When Parachutes was released some five years ago, few would have imagined that a mere two albums later, the four mild-mannered lads with a passion for the straight-forward would become rock’s expected heirs to U2’s throne. But, thanks to a deceptively-simple piano line that refused to vacate pop consciousness months after its expiration date and a malaise-filled crater of musical competition, Coldplay—the little train that could—has made clear its course and, with the release of their highly-anticipated third LP, world conquest is now destined to take place.
It isn’t difficult to chart where tropical monsoon music industry began its destructive course. The first time I heard “Yellow,” that ubiquitous, sun-peeks-through-clouds lovesick drop of pop heaven, I stopped whatever mundane task was occupying me in my tracks. There was something about that voice, that seductive Martin falsetto which has since claimed the hearts of millions of teenage girls (and less readily-admitting boys) which I found irresistible. Upon listening to the album in its entirety, I wasn’t unimpressed so much as unengaged. My young ears were at the time attuned to the throat-wringing guitars of RATM types, and Parachutes’ hushed, sleepy-eyed tone passed beneath me like a low tide upon sandy calves. But I was intrigued. Upon repeat listens, the nuances of the band’s playing, particularly Martin’s heavy-heart lyricism and young-Buckley vocal styling coupled with Buckland’s intelligent guitar work, held me captive. Coldplay epitomized the romance of my rainy English fantasies, where pin-striped white collar folks finish lonesome pints of ale before walking home through street-lamped winter nights. I saw many a night through to the soothing notes of that album. Coldplay were my confidantes, a quartet of thoughtful, articulate mates who offered the gift of catharsis, converting any internal, angsty personal drama of the time as epic as the chiming guitars of “Yellow.”
It took me a while to concede, but that vice-turned grip of ownership I momentarily held over the band had to be relinquished. With a number of British bands, such as the Libertines or Keane, I can maintain a certain level of existential intimacy for ranging periods of time. Some, like the Manic Street Preachers, I gleefully retain property rights to forever without fear of infringement here in the “Blur are one-hit-wonders” States. But with Coldplay, it was a landslide that I could do nothing but knowingly acknowledge. With each viewing of Martin’s goofy, raincoat-shrouded face on MTV ads gushing “And all the things that you do….” I found myself mutedly agreeing with the kid in lunch hall proclaiming “that Yellow band’s pretty fucking dope, yo!” A band of the people, they had become.
Enter college, and the first stage of the Coldplay monsoon phenomenon. Before Rush of Blood’s release, I had read a Martin interview stating that the band was planning on “going big.” Dating back to the Parachutes tour, Martin has been envisioning the band’s leap into the amplified rock leagues of their heroes, and I was saddened to hear of this change in course. If Coldplay were to continue releasing subdued, plaintive pop music for a good decade or so, I would have been perfectly content. But after “In My Place” bounded on to radio waves (“It’s just like “Yellow,” only better!”), followed by the sublime “The Scientist” (still their finest ballad to date) and the universally-revered “Clocks,” the maturation of the bar-gig college boys into a full-blown, air-boxing stadium rock band was complete. But somehow, whether through studio-engineered genius or song-writing precision I’m not sure, Rush of Blood retained the core elements of heart-felt emotion, vocal intimacy and boyish charm which made Coldplay so lovable in the first place. For every souped-up platter of strings and light show-friendly bridge, the group added Martin’s intimate lyrics and songwriting—particularly in “The Scientist,” “Green Eyes” and “Warning Sign”— as worthy counterweights. It was, as Martin had promised, indeed bigger, while being musically superior and more consistent to boot. But for the most part, Rush of Blood retained the attributes I most loved from Parachutes, making it their best work to date.
Enter Coldplay, version 3.0, replete with mathematical artwork and a studio saga even more dramatic than the last. Having risen into the major leagues with their second release, this was supposed to be the album that topples all competitors in some new rock order where benign wallflower becomes interplanetary, all-revealing sage. X and Y is an album the band has pored over with the jittery nerves and hyper-insecurity that only a perfectionist like Martin knows. In promotion interviews, he jokes that he wanted to make the “best thing anybody’s ever listened to.” Serious or not, X and Y’s overly-calculated sculpting and fine tuning is clearly evident throughout. As has been mentioned, it is more an outgrowth of Rush of Blood than a revolution, adding even more layers, more instrumentation and generally more volume to a soundscape once famous for its minimalism and space. And, false-references to Kraftwerk (“Talk” lifts the main hook from “Computer Love”) and krautrock aside, this really is space music, finely engineered to provide maximum stadium lift-off efficiency and to propel lighters into motion faster than ever before. Despite this, Coldplay, as much as they follow in the shadows of U2 and Radiohead, are neither and never shall be either of these bands. And though I genuinely enjoy their music, I must acknowledge that they are not suited to assume rock’s mantle. Bono and Bono’s ego may for now rest atop the world happily.
We begin with lead single “Speed of Sound,” the older, more filled-out musical cousin of “Clocks.” The piano hook, a class below that of its predecessor, follows the exact same A-B B-C pattern, as does the rhythm of Champion’s pounding toms. Lyrically, it’s grander in scope than “Clocks,” with Martin waxing philosophical over puzzles and wondrous worldly matter. His tone is reverential, revealing Bono’s growing influence in his geographical reference:
Ideas that you'll never find
All the inventors could never design
The buildings that you put up
Japan and China all lit up
Standing alone, “Speed of Sound” is a fine accomplishment, a majestic piece of song and studio-craft that is more rewarding in its instrumental build-up and possesses a better-developed chorus than “Clocks.” Serving as a transition point between albums, it succeeds in signaling the band’s intent to do what they did well on “Rush of Blood” even better this time around.
Likewise, “Square One,” the ominous, boldly-complex opener, successfully establishes Coldplay’s raison d’etre in a manner reminiscent of “Tourist” from OK Computer or even the band’s own “Politik.” Beginning with ambient synth organ, symbolic of the instrument’s now integral role in their sound, the group throw a bevy of hip 80s musical references across the canvas. The rhythm section has never sounded more like Unforgettable Fire-era U2, Buckland moves adeptly from post-punk staccato to Marquee Moon angular melodicism…hell, Martin even throws in a couple of soccer fan “woah-ohh” chants in the second verse. The sum of its parts is impressive, and if it the tracks which followed “Square One” built upon this arsenal of intelligently-lifted influences, X and Y would be one monster of a record. Regrettably, this is not the case, and music aside, the real disappointment of the album is Martin’s fall from grace from accomplished balladeer to ingratiating, Extreme-era lyrical schtickism.
“You're in control, is there anywhere you wanna go?” he begins, issuing perhaps the most direct call for listener participation in modern musical history. He follows by playing rock psychologist: “You just want somebody listening to what you say,” he emotes, before asking open-endedly: “Is there anybody out there who is lost and hurt and lonely too?”
It’s all a bit too much, isn’t it? The beauty of Martin’s writing, which has always been rather contrived and cliché-ridden, has been the fragmented, loosely cryptic cut of his wordplay, which allowed the singer’s confessional honesty and occasional pastoral romance to connect so satisfyingly with his listener. “I look in your direction/but you pay me no attention,” from “Shiver,” and “You said I'm gonna buy a gun and start a war/If you can tell me something worth fighting for,” from “Rush” exemplify this unusual skill.
Many in the critical community have pinpointed “Swallowed in the Sea” as the album’s biggest red herring, and rightfully so:
And I could write it down
Or spread it all around
Get lost and then get found
And you'll come back to me
Not with blasphemes as raw as these, she won’t. Elsewhere, the digressions are only slightly more forgivable. “When you try your best but you don't succeed” is a sorry line in a children’s fable, let alone the single which is designed and will almost inevitably catapult the band into the stratosphere for summers to come (“Fix You”). And not only does “So you take a picture of something you see/In the future where will I be?” (“Talk”) not follow logically; it’s also symptomatic of an entire album’s worth of misguided vagaries and lazy rhyming couplets. At worst, Martin sounds like a second-grade teacher whose English students have rubbed off on his poems to his wife; at best like an incoherent backpacker, extolling the virtues of his stargazing worldview into awkward if well-intentioned prose.
The problem, I believe, is not Martin himself. He’s a talented songwriter, capable of writing solid hits, particularly Lennon-esque ballads which utilize his rangy, clear-throated singing voice. The real issue is that Martin, in attempting to morph Coldplay into some U2-meets-Radiohead post-Millennial behemoth has sacrificed the gift of subtlety and quietude which has always been and remains the soul of the band. Additionally, not only do his lyrics and, to a lesser degree, the songwriting fall short of expectations, but the album is caught between play-it-safe plinky piano adult pop and electronica/art rock purgatory. X and Y not only largely fails to reach the heights of Rush of Blood, but in attempting to erect a city full of skyscraper hits, only succeeds in constructing the physical shell of their original, ambitious vision.
What does such a hollowed out, metallic world sound like? Well, Prince for one thing. In the most obvious lift of the album, his classic “When Doves Cry” chorus is ripped wholesale in “White Shadows.” The two major ballads, “What If” and “Fix You,” crescendo with the string-synth power of a tidal wave, though both songs are more Carole King B-side than McCartney tunefulness. The rockers are competent if a touch generic, mid-paced and layered with Buckland’s effective guitar flourishes. He has become a force in his own right, an amalgamation of encyclopedic 80s indie and arena-rock, from Echo and the Bunnymen through to the Smiths, while the imprints of the Edge echo pervasively through every delay-channeled note he strikes. Berryman and Champion are about as visible on X and Y as they were on Rush of Blood, never close to the starry level of Radiohead’s rhythm section but close to approaching the rock-solid reliability of Clayton and Mullen. Coldplay is by now firmly established as musical peers to the greatest bands of its own generation, and if it reinvents and really unleashes itself, which it has shown clear flashes of potential to do (“Daylight,” “Square One,” the four-part harmonizing of “Fix You”), the results could be truly spectacular.
But at this point, X and Y provides empirical proof that Coldplay, in its current form, is not prepared to be the band they may one day become, such as U2’s successor. As Erlewine eloquently notes, “where U2 is big in sound, scope, ambition, and intent, Coldplay is ultimately big music about small things, and [X and Y’s] limited, narcissistic point of view is what prevents the quartet from inheriting the title of the biggest and most important band in the world.” Agreed.
“My song is love, is love unknown /And I've got to get that message home,” Martin emotes in the admittedly-moving “A Message.” And he should realize that he doesn’t have to sacrifice his motifs of love, personal examination and self-doubt in order to accomplish his goal of building the most significant rock band of his time. Bono has continued to mine such themes for much of his career. Rather, Coldplay needs to evolve as significantly as they did from Parachutes to Rush of Blood, beyond wool-sweater nicety and hummable piano balladry into an album that stands alone as truly momentous. With X and Y, Coldplay have reached for grand Joshua Tree heights, but despite Martin’s ambition and the band's ability, have only created Rush of Blood’s overwrought, studio-birthed amphetachild.
Monday, July 11, 2005
Twenty One point Seven.
Being 21 has never felt so painful. I have a stiff back, a mega-cold, and nothing but Uncle Sam's lonely mug staring at me from last week's New Yorker to keep me company while my roommates are gone.
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