I'm beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for radical gestures is the imagination. —David Wojnarowicz, 1989
beginning in 1991, butch vig produced three major albums in three years: nirvana's nevermind, sonic youth's dirty, and the smashing pumpkins' siamese dream. depending on who you ask, all are classics, or all are big sellout travesties. but those three records undeniably did more than any three records by a single producer to shape the guitar rock of the last fifteen years.
let's start with nevermind, which owns significant real estate in my heart as my first love. but the years have not been kind to nevermind. part of this is because those songs, especially "smells like teen spirit," have been overplayed to the point of having lost all meaning. but butch's production does these songs no favours.
for this exercise, i pulled out my "smells like teen spirit" 12" 33RPM single. it starts off promisingly: the first guitar strums with the gain turned up, then dave's first thumpa-thumpa drum fill, then the fuzzbox. that, combined with the image of a tapping chuck taylor, changed the way soulless corporations sold things to young people in the 90s. but i never liked how "stadium" dave's drums sound, and the moody jangle of kurt's guitar—they say that "come as you are" stole from killing joke's "eighties" and it surely did, but the "hello hello" part of "teen spirit" was basically kurt pointing at "eighties" and saying, "butch, dude, this, yeah."
but the whole thing just sounds so sterile. yeah, the guitar is fuzzy, but the separation between the guitar, drums, and bass is so clean that you don't feel like this is a real performance. and the echo on kurt's voice makes him sound like an alien. actually, a constipated alien.
nevermind had some great songs and nirvana was a fantastic live band. krist and dave were such a tight rhythm section and kurt's guitar playing and singing was so sloppy that there was this great tension in their sound, kurt kicking and screaming while krist and dave drag him along. but you don't get any of that on nevermind. the album practically screams out for jack endino production. take a song like "lounge act," which is a song that basically performs the drama of nirvana. krist's circular bassline carries the song while kurt plays a rudimentary guitar riff over and over again while singing in short bursts, only at the end of every vocal phrase carries into the next.
kurt wants to stop, he wants it to fall apart, but the rhythm section won't let him; without krist and dave, this could be a vaselines song. but even when he screams the last verse and chorus, it doesn't sound sloppy or passionate or real or anything, really. compare this to "sliver" (a jack endino production), which is a very similar song, though not as formally accomplished as "lounge act." the raincoats-esque sloppiness of kurt's playing (especially in the verse), plus the way his voice sounds like a human being and the way the band sounds like a real, actual band and not three guys in separate studios playing along to metronomes, that could have been nevermind. this one is a butch fail. even "endless nameless," with its left/right/left crossfades, sounds canned.
then we have dirty, released in 1992 when sonic youth was only one album removed from the epochal album that many people consider to have changed "indie rock" forever. unlike nevermind, it's hard to imagine what this album would sound like without butch vig. sonic youth were going "alternative" and that meant fuzzboxes and reverb. all of the jagged edges are smoothed over and sound warm, and that's what they wanted. you can't really say butch ruined this album like he did nevermind, but you can't say he made it either.
for what it wants to be, dirty sounds pretty great. if you compare it to sister, well of course it sucks. on sister, you can feel steve hitting his toms like they're in the room, you can hear the noise from the amps bouncing off the wall of the space where they recorded (or at least it sounds that way), you can hear thurston's voice crack, kim's croak, and the gurgle in lee's throat. that said, dirty doesn't sound sterile the way nevermind does. there's too much echo on the vocals and drums, to be sure, but it doesn't kill the album like on nevermind.
dirty was not a butch fail. the successes of the album, of which there were several, come into focus when you compare it to the 1994 vig-produced album experimental, jet set, trash, and no star. experimental was completely flat (just listen to "self-obsessed and sexxee"). there are dynamics on dirty, but these dynamics also reveal the limitations of vig production. he saturates the mix with overdrive so the guitars are pushed to the front, and the only parts that aren't an indistinct blur are when the band isn't playing chords. the song "theresa's sound world" is instructive: the arpeggiated chords transition into the patented vig guitar onslaught, which takes the wholly different sonic youth wall of guitar and turns it into a homogeneous wall of thick fuzz. all of the noisy textures that usually mark sonic youth's sound turn into a warm, indistinct pile of goo.
butch vig, you need to know, has two loves: my bloody valentine's loveless and the pixies. nowhere is this more evident than siamese dream. "today" is him asking "what would it sound like if my bloody valentine did what nirvana, radiohead, and weezer did and tried to make a pixies album?" but if nevermind was a fail and dirty was just kind of okay, siamese dream is probably the best record it could have been. billy corgan always sounded like an alien, and butch's production made his aero-zeppelin guitar licks sound fresh.
i don't have dirty on vinyl, but i did borrow my friend john's old 1993 virgin siamese dream LP. and it didn't sound nearly as good as i thought it would (until now, i had only heard it in digital formats). i was expecting the overdrive guitars to fill the room, and somehow it doesn't. it just sort of sits there in one big lump in front of you. i think the difference between siamese dream and loveless is that, on loveless, the guitars still sound like guitars, even under all of the effects. there are layers to loveless, like how you can hear the jangle in the verse of "when you sleep," or how you can hear the acoustic strumming in "sometimes." with butch vig, there are never layers. siamese dream is built around big riffs and blazing cock rock solos, so this is a good thing. sonic youth, on the other hand, is built around two guitars playing off each other, and so the gooey sameness of dirty's guitars pissed off most sonic youth fans when it came out, even if (especially because?) the band was courting a more indistinct, alterna-friendly sound.
what interests me about all of this is the influence vig had on the face of all recorded guitar-based music from the early 90s to the present. like i said, because he pushed overdriven guitars as high in the mix as they could go, the only dynamic contrast his records could have was when the guitars weren't playing chords, or when they dropped out of the mix altogether. the pixies and their trademark soft-loud-soft-loud formula set a dangerous precedent that was emulated by way too many bands after them. basically, the pixies took moody 4AD jangle-pop's idiosyncratic take on nervy, gang of four-eque post-punk and then contrasted it with loud anthemic SST hardcore. you do that once and it's powerful. you make a career of it and you become what steve albini called a "band who, at their absolute top-dollar best are blandly entertaining college rock."
vig needed the pixies' soft-loud-soft-loud formula because without it, there would be no dynamic contrast at all. but his louds were really really loud, and that was his big influence. as we know, the 90s saw every producer fighting to make his or her record the loudest, which tended to destroy all texture and dynamics. and so everybody had to do the pixies soft-loud-soft-loud, and thereafter all verses were arpeggiated and all choruses were power chords, and kids growing up these days probably can't imagine songs that aren't built on that formula, whether they associate it with the pixies, nirvana, creed and nickelback, avril lavigne, or someone else.
but what to make of all this? i have been mentioning a corrective to all of this in places: something about singers that sound like human beings, drums that sound like they're in the room, guitars where you can hear each string, etc. on loveless, you don't really hear the jangle under the fuzz, you hear a jangly guitar in the mix along with all of the other, fuzzy, overdriven guitars. what's "real" about it is an effect. just like the way i think i can hear the room some records are recorded in is also an effect by a skillful producer who knows where to put the mics and knows what echoes to use. but i think this is the point: compelling music is compelling because it activates the imagination.
on records like loveless or sister (or the big star box set that i just downloaded—oh my god), there is room for the listener to imagine the performance. you hear certain details—the echo of a snare hit, the sound of a guitar pic hitting a string—and you can imagine a band playing in front of you. and you imagine a real social context, real people listening along with you, some kind of community. you imagine people organizing a show, bands driving from minneapolis to chicago in the middle of the night, pen pals trading records in the mail. you imagine yourself making and recording music. and then you do it. great records leave you this space. but recorded music since the early 90s tries to do everything for you. it completely overdetermines your listening experience, with every element pushed as high in the mix as it can go, with as many guitars overdubs crammed in as they can get, every take so perfectly played that it's styleless, and what you have in the end is this dense rock of sound that just dumbly sits there. you can't live in a rock.
9/15/09
JESUS FREAKS OUT ON THE STREET, HANDING TICKETS OUT FOR GOD
i just listened to the new remaster of diary (the mp3 i downloaded from the internets, not the newly pressed LPs). i had forgotten how powerful the album is, really moving in a (gasp) emotional way. or at least how emotionally manipulative it is, with its moody and dynamic tempo shifts and split-second soft to loud gimmick. either way, thanks for the reminder ian.
as i said to ian when he recommended that i pick this up, i fear that i am twice as old as anyone who should rightfully be buying an emo record. but the remaster sounds great, far better than when i listened to my old c.d. copy last week after reading all the reviews and critical reappraisals.
regarding loud-soft-loud, remasters, and the early 90s, i have been revisiting butch vig's work from the period and am formulating a kind of theory of musical recording and the imagination. a post on that should be up any day now.
