Ali Listens: Against Me!

"I want you to want me"

That's not a line that appears on Against Me!'s album Transgender Dysphoria Blues, but it might as well be on every record, more honest than a PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker, and practically stamped on the forehead of every person on the face of the earth. It's a universal feeling, and people do crazy things to satisfy that need.

I have a friend who feels compelled to buy a new outfit in advance of every public appearance. To that no one will notice what she's wearing, is to learn the meaning of "stink-eye". But there it is. Unless you're Beyoncé, no one cares (And if you are Beyoncé, thank you for visiting my blog).

Great music can force us to reckon with the emotions and hardships of those whose reality is radically, but not completely, different from our own. Transgender Dysphoria Blues is one of those miracles that puts you in the shoes of a person you mightn't think you had anything in common with at all, by using these universal experiences to put us in the shoes of a Trans Woman (specifically frontwoman Laura Jane Grace, who came out in 2012)


If "I want  you to want me" is the premise of life as we know it, the refrain to True Trans Soul Rebel is its natural nexus: "Who's gonna take you home tonight?"

Against Me! taps into the great fear of modern times: that you are not just unloved, but unwantable. That the things you do to distinguish yourself will never be noticed, only the ways you fall short: "You want them to notice the ragged ends of your summer dress ...they just see a faggot", and in so doing performs two miracles:

1) Helps you see eye to eye with an outsider
2) Heals that outside status. Misery loves company. Reality loves sanctification. And that's what great music is, it turns something mundane or painful into something sacred and transcended.

This my longwinded way of recommending "True Trans Soul Rebel" and "Talking Transgender Dysphoria Blues to whoever wants to listen:

Okay, if you need it poppy, here they are performing with Miley Cyrus,

 

Overlooked Gem: Here With Me

The Killers are the last Great American Rock Band. Or they were. There are no Great American Rock Bands anymore. There are bands making great rock music, but they lack the cultural cachet that for decades defined the term "Rock Star". The Killers have been the last band to enjoy this success. They were enjoying Rock's last gasp around the same time The Kings of Leon rocketed to fame, but The Kings didn't have quite the staying power, while the Killers had three mega successful albums, enough to be among the defining voices of the decade when I came of age.

And then, nothing.

Their fourth album, "Battle Born" was, by my estimation, their best, with ready made singles and eye popping videos that nonetheless failed to capture the popular imagination in the way they deserved. Was it just the decline of Rock? The Killers were pretty pop to begin with.

For whatever reason, this beautiful song, with its beautiful video directed by Tim Burton, failed to gain any traction - it didn't even make it onto their greatest hits compilation, which is a sin, because its a gorgeous song, and the video is Burton's best work in a decade. For it to have less than a tenth of the views that Katy Perry regularly merits is a sin. Watch and listen, you're welcome:

The Century Trend

The first thing I have to say is everything is going to be all right. It just might take a history lesson to convince you.

Feminists have worked themselves into a lather over the Era of the Asses - From Miley to Minaj to Kim "breaking the internet", all the way to the absolute nadir of modern pop music, Jason Derulo's rancid "Wiggle." Kim Kardashian was modelling everything but clothing in her cover story for Love Magazine's February 2015 issue. Prada sunglasses and a Miu Miu bag couldn't compete with the tits and slit in that stairwell photo, but I'm not worried.

I am, after all, a scholar of fashion, so I know that whenever women's rights take a step forward in the real world, fashion and pop culture icons tend to swing the other way, if only for a while. It's a trend that began in the 1920s after women got the right to vote. No, really. To us in the 21st century, the iconic "flapper" of the twenties looks like a glimpse of joyful rebellion - alongside the ramping up of first wave feminism, the skirts and hair for rebellious young women got shorter, who traded in their corsets for shapeless dresses that were easy to dance in.

But flappers were not vanguards of the suffrage movement. They were notoriously oblivious to social causes and mostly in it for the attention (sound familiar?). To people from that place and time, what they most resembled were little boys. To reiterate, once women were allowed to vote, fashion started dressing them as children. I'm not saying this so that we can get angry at people who lived ninety years ago, but to point out a trend that's still going on. As much as we like to think of fashion and pop culture as being cutting edge, it more often represents a refuge for old ways of thinking to act like everything is normal - are women getting uppity and demanding a vote? Don't worry, they're just rambunctious little children.

Are they demanding equal pay for equal work? Nonsense, they just want to be your little baby doll.

Do I exaggerate?

Every major social achievement for women in the last hundred years has been marked by a regression in fashion. That's twiggy up there, premiere model of the nineteen sixties, a time when Gloria Steinem and the pill gave women a freedom they'd never enjoyed before. There were feminist sit ins at Newsweek and the Ladies Home Journal. Radicals threw maxipads into a trash can at the America pageant beneath a banner proclaiming "Women's Liberation". Mad Men fans know the fights they went through in the workplace, and anyone into fashion also remembers how short the skirts got toward the end of the decade, once they started winning.

High fashion and pop culture have never been a marker for the world we live in, but the world we wished we lived in - or rather, the world that specific tastemakers wished we lived in. While second wave feminism was scaring men and women alike, grown women were once again infantilized by clothing fit for a child. We have twiggy to thank for models who today are so thin they're practically invisible, because when some women started demanding equal work opportunities, the old guard no doubt wished they would disappear altogether.

But women bought those clothes! you might exclaim. That's because feminism scared women too. Having a voice, standing up to men you had always been taught to respect - even today most of us would rather crawl back into our daddy's arms than accuse our boss of sexual harassment, even if deep inside we knew it's our right. I never saw Gloria Steinem in a miniskirt, and in the end it was women like her who made the difference.

So maybe the age of the ass isn't as bad as we think.

Kim Kardashian, Nicki Minaj, and the vastly out of her league Miley Cyrus are delivering a crass form of sexualisation, mistakenly labelled as feminist by people who don't know any better ("It's my body, I should be able to show it off how I like - and if 'how I like' is just a manifestation of ingrained patriarchy,--then screw you for using such big words!"), but in the real world where (most) people live and breathe, things are getting better.

Women still make less than 80 cents on the dollar compared to men, but it's something we're talking about more openly than ever before. The internet may have given a voice to both the best and worst in society, but cyber bullying and sexual abuse of young girls are now less likely to be swept under the rug, largely because of online activism. When Emma Watson made an empowering speech to the United Nations last year, some hackers may have threatened to release nude photos of the actress in retaliation, but the internet as a whole was overwhelmingly on her side. Last year, when Cee Lo Green tweeted, "women who have really been raped REMEMBER" it was met with the proper level of disgust and him being dropped from festival appearances. Twenty years ago, that would never have happened, and not just because there was no twitter - if you want proof of that, consider the decades it took the allegations against Bill Cosby to be taken seriously.

What this all means is that, by and large, women are growing their voices in the digital age, and the haters are becoming more and more of a minority. Knowing that, it was about time that our cultural icons regressed to reassure the masses who aren't quite sure about all this female empowerment going on. The popularity of the Kim Kardashian model of "fashion" - that is, less clothes more attention - is hopefully the last gasp of something ugly, rather than a marker for where society is headed. To the remaining men who live in fear of being called on their leering sexism (and the women who have yet to realize that such leering sexism is a problem), Kim's giant greased up ass, offered forth like a baboon who's presenting, is a symbol of a simpler time, of a femininity that doesn't think, doesn't demand answers, and might as well be made of porcelain, just like Twiggy and the flappers before her.

What, did you think she was a rebel?

Ali LIstens: Back to the Future



When I was younger, a hundred self important VH1 specials told me that music represented our culture in ways that no other artistic medium could. They lied.

Culture has changed a lot in my lifetime. Music has not. As I write the most popular song in the country is "Uptown Funk", a lovely little ditty cobbled together from thirty year old classics like "Jungle Love" and "Give it to me Baby" (Say Whaaaaat?), like the wet dream of an A&R guy from 1985: "Like Prince, but safer." The last few years also gave us "All About That Base", "Blurred Lines" and "Get Lucky", and a bunch more Bruno Mars to help us live in the past.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of pop history or mass culture should know something's askew right now. Pop music as we know it has a pretty short history. It's new enough that some of our grandparents remember its infancy, from Fred Astaire to Elvis Presley to the Beatles and Beyond. Through the decades pop has had two key tenets: It's youth oriented, and its all about novelty.

Those rules apply to almost all mass-consumed products in the 20th century. Novelty is the reason the iPad 2 was offered in different colours, with little else to distinguish it from the previous model. Novelty is the cornerstone of consumerism. And young people are almost always on the receiving end of the these gimmicks, because they have disposable income and no better way to spend their time.

This is the way its supposed to be, the way it has been for most of my life, and my parents' too. Young people feel like they own pop culture, like their parents are squares and their tunes are the music of revolution. Then you hit your mid twenties and realize Barbra Streisand can sing like a motherfucker and maybe mom had okay taste after all.

The wheel goes round and round: Elvis scandalized parents with his fabulous hips, the Beatles made them uncomfortable with their long hair, Zeppelin and the Stones scared them to death with sex, drugs and Satanism. Madonna was a hussy, Rappers were cop killers and the wheels on the bus went round and round. "Parents just don't understand" has been the unwritten rule of popular music for ages.

And yet...

When was the last time anything was truly shocking? The Wrecking Ball video? Anaconda? They're all pretty tame compared to what Prince and Madonna were doing decades ago (okay, fine I'll link to a sexy video if you promise to come right back) , to say nothing of the truly revolutionary spirit of acts like Neil Young or Public Enemy.

Kids these days may loathe the idea of "old" singers staying too long in the spotlight, but they're hypocritical in a way their parents were not:

Elvis sounded nothing like Fred Astaire.
Zeppelin sounded nothing like Frank Sinatra
N.W.A sounded nothing like Marvin Gaye

But

Lady Gaga looks and sounds an awful lot like Madonna, but tamer
Bruno Mars sounds a lot like Prince / Michael / Morris / Rick / insert-funk-legend-here, but more accessible.
Pharell Williams is paying seven million dollars because "Blurred Lines" - the song of the summer of 2013 - sounds virtually indistinguishable from Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give it Up"

But the hate lobbed in the direction of legacy acts (one legacy act in particular) is shockingly wrong footed. Madonna is told to leave the playground she built, because of her age, but to make room for who? Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Miley...all acts that owe her a huge debt and have no interest in building on her legacy, merely reducing it to its simplest moving parts (Sex! Shock! Girlpower!). I'm a millennial with a middle-aged soul, so forgive me for saying anyone who was shocked by Miley's twerking, three decades after Prince sang that he wants to "fuck the taste out of your mouth"  is damn soft.

But its not just music where we see this trend, which points to something much bigger. The rush to reappropriate old properties--from comic books, to movies to television and back again--is running rampant through this culture. Plenty of people complain about how Hollywood isn't offering anything new, but the truth is, these movies, these shows, this music, all of it gets made because the masses are buying them.

You'll hear theorists say that "People like what's familiar". Since when? Wasn't novelty the order of the day for the last five decades? The short answer is to that question is "yes". The long answer involves explaining the rise and fall of the Ford Motor company in the early 20th century, and since you don't really care about that stuff, you just have to trust me.

Speaking of films, what's the first hint that a movie is set in a particular decade? The clothing.
Now can you name any two years separated by two decades whose clothing was so utterly indistinguishable as 2015 and 1995? Bet you a nickel that you can't. 1960s fashion looks nothing like the 1940s or the 1980s. The 1950s are similarly indistinguishable from the 1970s, as the 70's are from the 90's, but that's when it stops. Chunky heels may be out, but I guarantee someone looking through Vogue twenty years from now wouldn't be able to guess for certain what decade we're in.  What has changed, fashion wise, are all throwbacks. "That's so Mad Men" you might say about a new dress, or "So eighties!"

This is a culture curiously divorced from our own moment in time, like none has been in recent memory.

Why?

Because we are afraid.

I may have lied at the top of this article. I said that music didn't reflect culture anymore, what I meant was that music never reflects culture, but cultural fixations. Why are we so obsessed with the past?

Because the present is a goddamn mystery. I'm not talking about dirty politics or poverty or racial divides or environmental destruction. You can find great, popular songs about those things from our parents' era a lot easier than you can from Beyoncé or her contemporaries.

I'm talking about how the internet, and all the technology that lives off it has completely changed the world so quickly we haven't quite adapted to it yet. Social media drives people farther apart, while online pornography is there at the click of a button (fine, here's another sexy video to reward the focus it took to read this far). Everything you ever wanted to see, and some things that you don't but will click on anyway are barking at you from the sidelines of every page you go to. Meanwhile, the things we were taught to hold dear to - friendships, a sense of belonging, even our own identity, has been untethered from reality. These tenets of humanity are strangely intangible in the age of the internet, floating in a digital realm we haven't got a grip on.

We need a sense of control, of belonging, of identity, which this new world order so insidiously inhibits. As a culture, we've gone back into the womb, like a groundhog who saw its own shadow and settled in for very long winter.

"What about the millenials?" you may ask. Most of the kids who love Uptown Funk and Born This Way are too young to be nostalgic for a time before the internet. How does this apply to them?

I'll tell you. It's a simple answer that bodes well for the future of humanity: because those are great songs. Specifically - "Jungle Love" and "Express Yourself" are great songs. And their enduring popularity shows that even as the world around us has exploded, we haven't lost that most basic human emotion that connects us to a great beat.

Ali Listens: The Best Song of 2014

So, its a little late for an entry like this, being as we are now well into 2015. However, this just needs to be said. The best song of 2014 was:

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Strand of Oaks, Goshen '97!!!!!

"What?" you may say. "Who?" "Which one's the title and which one's the artist?"
Settle down dear, all will become clear in due course.

First of all, here it is:

 

 

Do you hear the frustration? The fear? The hope? The Rock 'n' Roll?

I've been contemplating for a while what the difference is between Pop and Rock music, beyond the definitional, namely that "Pop" music is what popular and (new) Rock hasn't been popular for a very long time. I might just devote an entire post to how today's audience is determined to crawl back into the womb of "classic" sounds, but that's for another time.

The point is, Rock music isn't about what's popular. Its about what's true, or at least it should be. Rock history is littered with male power fantasy garbage (here's to you, Motley Crue), but at heart those were pop songs that were just pretending.

Real Rock'n'Roll is mired in the ugly stuff. It has its roots in pagan rituals on slave plantations. Misery is in its DNA. That's not to say that all Rock songs ought to be sad. Surely not. But they all must appreciate sadness. Happiness means nothing without the struggle from whence it is born. A great rock song doesn't have to be depressing, but it has to have the trace of a struggle in it.

Goshen '97 is the sound of a struggle. It gives no indication of where that struggle will take our protagonist - will he be victorious or will it all have been in vain? The song doesn't arrive at any destination, and it pre-empts the journey.

This song is about the moment you realize that the journey is necessary, that its possible, and that it actually started without you realizing it, while you were spinning your wheels in no particular direction.

At least that's what it means to me. Music is pretty subjective, and you can bet a song with the line "I was lonely, but I was having fun" hits all the trigger points for the person who wrote this about the emotional ravagement brought on by a Springsteen song.  At its heart, though that line represents that quintessential Rock'n'Roll pairing of regret and the joy of being alive. And speaking of joy:

"Then I found my Dad's old tape machine, that's when the magic began." I love musicians who love music. Almost as much as I love musicians who love life.  But flash forward another minute: "Before I was fat, drunk and mean, everything still lied ahead."

I would nominate that for single best line of songwriting of the year. Yes, better than "He toss my salad like his name Romaine." Better luck next year, Nicki. It's unexpected and it cuts like a knife. Likely the only time you've heard those words in life is when you're saying them to yourself, who has the courage to admit something like that out loud?

This isn't a song about facing the world, or even a song about the future. It's about the self. The conflict, the disappointment, the happy memories and the daunting next step.

Because, any contemplation of the future is ultimately a valuation of ourselves. The past - that's all about other people, circumstances that may or may not have been under our control. The present, likewise is cluttered with time and place.

But the future is all us. It's a question of Can? Will? Should?, and the answer always depends on how we feel about ourselves.

This singer is caught up with the past, disgusted with the present and contemplating the future based on these valuations. "I don't want to start all over again," he says. Well, that's not even an option, is it?

We don't ever go back, we just change direction. And for perfectly capturing the moment just preceding this realization, Strand of Oaks gets the humble honour of my top pick for best song of 2104.

The Power of Love: or, How I Learned to stop worrying and listen to Springsteen

 

 

My parents owned Born in the USA when I was a kid, but it was on Vinyl so I never heard it played. Our turntable was long since broken by the time I was born. When the music of Bruce Springsteen filled our halls, but it was the sound of Born to Run, Tunnel of Love and the Essential on compact disc (Born to Run had the distinction of being owned on both formats, Darkness, sadly, only vinyl).

Since then, I've been building my Springsteen library, and it wasn't until today that I heard the eighth track on Springsteen's most popular record for the first time.

And lo, came the tears from a dormant part of my brain that I had nearly forgotten existed. A vault of adolescent loneliness and abandonment was breached by a thirty year old song. Such is the power of Springsteen.

Growing up, I had three best friends: The first, was my neighbour, who didn't go to the same school as I did, didn't really have any of the same interests as I did, and whose friendship was based almost entirely on geography. The second, was my best friend from school -- Laura -- who was funny and energetic and strange in all the ways that I was. The third, and most important was my cousin, Victoria. She had a single mother, and no idea who her father was. It seems like she spent other week at my Grandma's house around the block, and consequently we were nearly sisters. There were sleepovers almost every weekend during the school year, and in summers by the lake we took joint responsibility for looking after our unruly younger boy cousins. Thick as thieves.

In high school things changed, and until yesterday I understood these changes solely in terms of how they made me feel about my friends. Best Friend #1 and I drifted apart, starting a little before high school. We never had much in common, so it wasn't really surprising, and I didn't give it much thought.

Friend #2 went to the same high school as I did, but decided early on that I was not cool enough to be her friend, which is baffling still because she was not cool. She was never cool. Our joint un-coolness was what drew us together in elementary school. But, when high school began and it was apparent that I did not represent valuable social real estate she moved on. I remember with striking clarity the day I found myself sitting alone in the cafeteria. It was the first day of a new semester, and  the handful of friends I usually sat with now had a different lunch than I. Laura approached and I, breathing a sigh of relief, waved to her. I wouldn't have to sit alone after all, thank goodness. She saw me, then pretended she didn't. I was hurt, angry and I never tried to engage her socially after that, except perhaps a little bit some mornings, when my mom drove her to school! I had all kinds of opinions about her after that.

Friend #3 --the best friend, the family, the close-in-age sister I never had, topped them all for cruelty. She'd had a difficult life, in case you didn't pick up on that in her introduction as the bastard child who spent every other week at her grandmothers. Her mother was sick a lot, and depressed. Her family moved out of the city when she was just about to hit adolescence, finding herself in a brand spanking new subdivision where every house looks alike and she had to make new friends. When she did find out who her biological father was, it was a major disappointment. Any one of those factors would be enough to make a teen act out. Together, they were an H-bomb on her self esteem, and she acted out in ways we never would have thought possible - Stealing, lying, running away - the most egregious act of betrayal was falsely accusing her loving step-father of beating her, and taking that accusation to the authorities.

I can trace the trajectory of my feelings for her, like lines on a map: from concern, to anger, to pity, to relief, and finally to forgiveness (this is over a ten year period - and I'm happy to report that all's well that ends well and I'm going to be her maid of honour next year). I can do that for friends #1 and 2 also.

But until yesterday I never gave a thought to how all of this made me feel about myself. Which is where Springsteen comes in. Bobby Jean tells the story of a boy learning his best and only friend has left town without saying goodbye. "I wish I could have called. I wish I could have talked to you, not to change your mind, just to say good bye, Bobby Jean." Listening to it was like meeting my younger self, for the first time.

I spent a lot of time thinking about other people - how they were selfish, or stupid, or whatever - but I never had the perspective to see myself for what they had made me - alone. As far as I could tell, I was still the same person. It was them who had changed - who had sold out or betrayed me, who were selfish or superficial, but I never appreciated just what it did to me, how important it was to have one close friend, how empty we become when they're gone, and we're listening to the radio alone.

Something about this song took me back - A place, a time, a fully realized moment that I thought was lost to me, but got the chance to revisit. I listened to Bruce Springsteen and met myself.

This is why love music. This is why I pay money for music, and rant about how the industry has taken over the art. This is why I'm a true believer. If you're not, I feel sorry for you.

Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks.

 

You may not have realized it yet, but you're living in a bad neighbourhood.  We've turned a corner with the attack on Sony Pictures. Hacking is hitting us where we live, and that new real estate happens to be in the virtual realm.

It’s not the distopia that many a sci fi writer would have you expect. Diminishing social skills, increased anxiety and twitter may suck, but Snow Crash this ain’t. When you consider the North Korean hacking an act of terrorism – that is, an action that leverages fear to advance a political agenda, which it most definitely is – this almost seems like a step in the right direction.

There are no burning buildings, no shrapnel in the spectators. Hack attacks are real, but this is an epoch where reality can simply be turned off.

Consider, for example, the mass celebrity hacking last summer, when stars like Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton had nude photos from their phones hacked out of the cloud and displayed on the internet for all to see.

From different corners, the scandal simultaneously inspired mass outrage and apathy (after the sound of fapping had died down). Victims called it a “sex crime” (which it undoubtedly is), while the less sympathetic noted that if the best way to prevent having nude photos stolen from your phone is to simply not take nude photos with your phone. That logic is infallible, but when Ricky Gervaismade the argument he was met with cries of victim blaming. A few people on twitter went as far saying, “That’s like saying if you got raped it’s your fault for wearing a short dress.”

No. It’s more like undressing in front of an open window. There shouldn’t be anyone with their eyes pressed up to the glass, but of course there is. Now, peeping is a sex crime. It’s shameful and cruel, but it can’t give you a venereal disease, can’t get you pregnant, and most likely won’t cause P.T.S.D. Welcome to the internet. It’s a rough neighborhood, but not that rough.

By participating in online life, you are buying some shady real estate.  Think downtown Manhattan in the eighties – what you gain in convenience you sacrifice in security. Even respectable sites like facebook and ebay fall prey to hackers – the celebrity photos allegedly came from Apple’s cloud. It’s something the users of the internet have not quite been able to grasp, and it’s also an oddly unifying concept: no matter how well off we are in physical reality, we’re all more or less equally vulnerable to cyber attacks (the wealthy might actually be more at risk). This is something people are only beginning to grasp, and though I agree we should treat each other with love and respect, I can also mediate my expectations a little bit.

21^st century connectivity has thrown the best and worst kind of people into a slop and asks us to fend for ourselves. The hackers I have spoken of do not pose a credible physical threat – not even North Korea, but these days they don’t have to. It turns out smearing someone’s reputation with a cluster of embarrassing emails or a nude photo is enough to scare them off course these days. Destroying someone online is like the equivalent of destroying them in real life.

When I learned about the Amanda Todd tragedy, the uncharitable thought came to mind that she should have just deleted her facebook account. The bullying she endured was mostly online, so you’d think she could have just turned it off, tuned out and carried on. It would have been lonely being the only young person not plugged into social media, but it would still have been a life.

Yet if there's anything these hacks and the reactions to them have shown us, its that people seem oddly unable to keep perspective on their virtual world.  For now, being destroyed online is the same as being destroyed in life.

 

Snow Crash, indeed.

*Just in time for this post to go to print, Madonna blessed us all with 6 new completed songs of her new album, following another hack wherein 13 unfinished demos were leaked onto the internet. Commenting on the leak, Madonna says, “W don't put things up on servers anymore. Everything we work on, if we work on computers, we're not on WiFi, we're not on the Internet, we don't work in a way where anybody can access the information. Hard drives of music are hand-carried to people.”

There you have it. I sense the golden age of the internet is over, and the smart money is on scaling back our dependence on it. We’ll see where that takes us.