a year ago, i was hiding in my bedroom moping while all sorts of people were gathered in my apartment for an oscar party. tonight, i'm in my bedroom, supposedly writing a rough first sketch for my dissertation prospectus, while alex, my roommate angel, and her brother john are watching downstairs. obviously, the only writing i'm actually doing is on this blog. and i'm listening to beat happening's last album, you turn me on, which is one of the truest, most honest records ever recorded. unfortunately, all i could find on youtube was the album's most unrepresentative song, but it is a great song:
i think that's what ellen page said to barbara walters about the moldy peaches. barbara walters, playing coy, was all, "i had the moldy peaches on 'the view,' and... [wry grin]... i don't get it." and ellen page was like, "it borders on novelty music, but it's so honest and true."
me, i don't like the moldy peaches one bit. there's nothing remotely honest or true about that band. for one, there's kimya dawson, who has made a shinsy, decemberistsesque career out of turning things i love into kitschy nonsense. then there's that adam green guy. i mean, i understand the genre he draws from and, to be sure, there is a lot of truth to nick lowe, who is a smart and jokey, tongue in cheek guy who shits all over the singer-songwriter genre. nick lowe, as greil marcus once wrote, cuts through all of the hippie folk singer sincerity bullshit and tells us the real truth. (in his prime, jonathan richman was much the same.)
but when adam green does it, he just comes off as a smarmy jackass, a guy who thinks he's in on the joke but who really has no idea.
but so this movie juno is supposed to be a big deal. and the movie ends with ellen page and michael cera sitting in her parents' driveway, singing this moldy peaches song while playing acoustic guitars.
and this is supposed to be true and honest. but it just seems like highly sentimentalised bullshit to me. you turn me on, on the other hand, its trueness and honesty can't really be justified by an argument, though i like to make them. really, you just have to buy the thing and listen to it. there was a haphazard childlike innocence to beat happening's early albums, but the innocence they were going for always felt intentional and calculated in spite of itself. which is not to say that those weren't great albums. their second album jamboree, for instance, was genre-defining and is one of the greatest of all time. but on you turn me on, they went for it. all of the smart pop bands they had learned from, all of the smart tricks they'd been holding back because beat happening was supposed to be about de-skilling musical performance, because beat happening was supposed to be about amateurs, about cat drawings, about the bedroom, all of those smart tricks came out. out of everyone who ever wanted to be galaxie 500 — including canonical records like yo la tengo's i can feel the heart beating as one and low's things we lost in the fire, legendary bands like sonic youth in the mid to late-90s, mo tucker's neglected classic life in exile after abdication, some of the most beloved radiohead songs — you turn me on did by far the best job. the marriage of galaxie 500 and the shaggs, particularly on "godsend," which is ten minutes and a quasi-religious experience, and on the album's stunning closer "bury the hammer," kills me. you lose yourself in the repetition, in the crackle of the guitar and the grain of the voice.
the first song, "tiger trap," the namesake of the sacramento band of the same name (i think), is calvin johnson's least affected moment ever. the song reveals calvin, the guy who wrote the so cheesy it wasn't cheesy, sentimental classic "indian summer" and the countless other coy songs that boys who wear nerd glasses love to put on mixtapes, to be a real person with real feelings. and out of the second song, "noise," came henry's dress, not to mention dear nora.
stuart moxham, of the recently reunited (!) young marble giants, produced this record. and, because he's stuart moxham and he uniquely knows how to produce a record like that, he was able to keep beat happening's signature spare sound on a record that had a lot more to do with noise than naďveté. and it made the new magnetic fields, which sounds like it had to have taken you turn me on as inspiration, sound hollow and false. and to hear beat happening at a time like this, particularly because i saw juno two days ago, makes the moldy peaches sound hollow and false.
and ellen page and michael cera, as cute as they were playing that moldy peaches song in front of that ubc-area house, were also hollow and false. there was a lot wrong with juno, but mostly it felt hollow and false because it wanted to be ghost world, which was honest and true and can really make me cry (to borrow a line from a carpenters song that's truer than you'd think). the quick-witted dialogue, the doomy teenage misanthropy, both movies' heroines have that. but in ghost world, it was real. there were parts that made you cringe, parts that made you remember that so much of this is misplaced teen angst. but the relationship between the two girls, the way they both outgrew each other, it killed me (to continue to incessantly borrow holden caulfield's turn of phrase). you know, even michael cera's other movie, superbad, was true in this way (which will lead to the inevitable accusation that i just can't relate to teen pregnancy, which i can't, obviously. but that's not why juno didn't feel true to me). but in juno, there was no justification for ellen page and michael cera's characters ending up together. it certainly wasn't love. if anything, it was settling. but too much of what came out of ellen page's mouth, cute as it all was, sounded like highly scripted wit. it didn't sound like a person, and, besides, there wasn't a person behind the punchlines. just highly staged and emotionally manipulative sentiment.
in ghost world, all but three of the characters are caricatures, stereotypes, and one-dimensional straw men. so much of what happens in the movie are set ups for thora birch's often hilariously mean-spirited observations. but the interactions between these three characters weren't sensationalised or full of clever observations or witty rejoinders, and they weren't, like so much of juno, this thick, gooey, sensationalised and heavily sentimentalised quotidian. in ghost world, it just felt like the way the honest to god sad things that happen between people manifest themselves in day to day interactions, and it was true. or maybe i'm just a sad, old, sentimental fool who gets off on being emo.
the one song i really wanted to get on it that wouldn't fit was "nothing to be done." here's a somewhat rare version of the song you may not have heard, performed by teenage fanclub with gerard love and aggi singing.
1. sambassadeur "final say," in which the cute little gainsbourg-name-checking pop band whose last e.p. featured a criminally neglected cover of the bats' "claudine" gets really awesome, echoey production.
2. the shout out louds "man on the moon," in which a middle of the road indie rock band from gothenburg adds bongos to an r.e.m. classic and — get this — pulls it off.
3. christian falk (ft. robyn and ola salo) "dream on," in which robyn is awesome.
and 4. the pičce de résistance:
in which robyn, looking like iggy on the cover of raw power in the youtube still, sings "show me love."
