Rather, melodrama is a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action. It is the foundation of the classic Hollywood movie … If emotional and moral registers are sounded, if a work invites us to feel sympathy for the virtues of beset victims, if the narrative trajectory is ultimately more concerned with a retrieval and staging of innocence than with the psychological causes of motives and action, then the operative mode is melodrama.

Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History (1998)

I wasn’t going to talk about Lana Del Rey, because after Rob Harvilla, what more can you say? — but I think this, her affinity for melodrama, is the missing link connecting her love of classic Hollywood, her indulgent pathos, and her deployment of the iconography of Americana.

Ah, which I see I sort of hinted at in my original “Video Games” review anyway.

This relates to Tom saying that he likes Born to Die because he is “a sucker for someone turning up with a well-worked-through aesthetic.” I appreciated, say, Everclear, or Placebo, for the same reason. Here’s something I wrote about Everclear a few years back that applies to LDR when her songs work:

To say that [Art] Alexakis romanticized these characters and glorified their lifestyles isn’t a criticism; his pulpy, luridly exploitive treatment is exactly why these albums are so enjoyable.

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music america movies
Jan 31

As a result, melodrama is structured upon the “dual recognition” of how things are and how they should be. In melodrama there is a moral, wish-fulfilling impulse towards the achievement of justice that gives American popular culture its strengths and appeal as the powerless yet virtuous seek to return to the “innocence” of their origins.

Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History (1998)

Melodrama as the quintessential American style. America is a modernist nation, and it reads its own history in terms of narrative. Williams refers to melodrama’s ability to “reconcile the irreconcilable” — which sounds a lot like the never ending American quest to reconcile its irreconcilable founding mission: to “create a more perfect union.” Nostalgia for the Founding Fathers is the nation’s melodramatic urge to return to the “innocence” of its origins, which paradoxically works in accordance, not in opposition, with its forward-thinking narrative of national progress, i.e. the pursuit of the “more perfect.”

Related: 

It is often said that Americans aren’t interested in history, but I think it’s more accurate to say that people — in general — aren’t interested in history that makes them feel bad. We surely are interested in those points of history from which we are able to extract an easy national glory — our achievement of independence from the British, the battle of Gettysburg, our fight against Hitler, and even the campaign of nonviolence waged by Martin Luther King. For different reasons, each of these episodes can be fitted for digestibility. More importantly that can be easily deployed in service our various national uses. Thus it is not so much that we are against history, as we are in favor of a selective history. The fact is that Martin Luther King is useful to us, in a way that Bayard Rustin is not (yet.)

What TNC is describing here is America’s tendency to read its history as a melodramatic narrative: the “powerless yet virtuous” achieving justice through their fealty to the nation’s founding principles.

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america culture movies history
Jan 31

Lol-na Del Rey: Boopie doopie doop boop sex. 

Lol-na Del Rey: Boopie doopie doop boop sex. 

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music television community
Jan 31

Other things I’ve written lately.

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ya boy ussc The Singles Jukebox
Jan 31

The six things Mitt Romney should never have said

Here’s my latest American Review column. It’s all about Mitt “Corporations Are People” Romney’s talent for saying stuff that make him sound like C. Montgomery Burns on a particularly bad day:

Every politician says silly things from time to time. What’s remarkable about Romney is that he has established a pattern of spouting tone deaf catchphrases that reinforce voters’ worst fears about him. Many of these are entirely innocuous in context, and it would be unfair for opponents to use them against him. But they will, and it’s astonishing that Romney has offered them so much ammunition. Following is a selection of his most egregious goofs…

The rest.

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america politics ussc
Jan 31

To-newt, so bright! (via Zaius Nation) 

To-newt, so bright! (via Zaius Nation) 

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america politics '90s music
Jan 31

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

edwardok:

So I was watching a certain TV show last week and this seemed like the most natural thing to do from this clip (listen before watching, though!)

It’d be great if someone did this properly, syncing it to video or something.

This is an exceedingly important Parks & Rec related thing that you need to listen to.

45 plays
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music parks and rec television
Jan 29

You guys don’t know how much self-control it takes for me not to spam my dashboard with a dozen videos from each new “My Little Pony” episode after it airs. But this Friendship Report from Applejack deserves to be showcased here.

Last night’s episode was awesome, and about economics — specifically, the competitive advantages of vertical integration. What with last month’s political science-themed episode, all I really need now is for them to do a show about rap music. (Wu-Tang Pony is a decent substitute, admittedly.)

Also, the Internets have matched the Pony homage to The Music Man up with The Simpsons’ homage to The Music Man, which I feel is important work.

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television mlpfim economics the simpsons
Jan 29

Iggy Azalea, “My World,” Ignorant Art (2011)

Man, I dunno. The beat’s cold, and she’s not embarrassing on the mic, unless you know where she’s coming from. And that’s where it gets a bit complicated.

I mean this chick’s from Mullumbimby but she hits her vowels with a twang (“baaad bitches”) better suited to New Orleans than the north coast. (Also check her rhotic rs.) But she’s rapping in front of the Southern Cross in the opening shots of this video, and saying shit like “Aussie ho/I put my country on,” so it’s not like she’s trying to deny where she comes from.

It’s just… look, I’m not one to police accents. I know from personal experience that the way you talk can be complicated and I’m not judging anyone’s patriotism because of how they talk. Azalea’s been in L.A. for five years, since she was 16. That can do things to your accent. But this interview makes it clear that her speaking voice is distinctly Australian in a way her rapping voice is decidedly not. (Also, she says “cotton candy,” not “fairy floss,” but we’ll let that slide. You gotta change your vocab when you’re around the Americans.) Sure, she’s talking to an Aussie interviewer there, which can do weird things to your accent, but I feel pretty safe in saying that when she raps, Iggy adopts a “hip-hop accent” which she may or may not consciously realize is a parody of African American speech patterns.

I do suspect she’s a bit racially ignorant, what with her White Girl Team thing, in a way that many Australians can be ignorant of the racial dynamics of another country. (I also think a white Australian in America is subtly but decidedly distinct from a white American, and that it is important to understand Azalea as an immigrant, albeit a white immigrant.) But that doesn’t mean it isn’t kind of weird the way she fits herself into a foreign culture by transforming herself into Trina or Lil Kim, without considering how that foreign culture will read that transformation.

I don’t think artists — or people — should be bound by their background. Authenticity is bunk, and building a new persona is a creative choice anyone should have. (The hard part is filling it.) But Iggy Azalea proclaims her Australianness while seeming to erase any aural traces of it from her performance. She’s all-but-refitted herself as a white American, but hasn’t fully committed to that reinvention either. I’m not accusing her of Not Being Real, on some Officer Ricky shit, but there are some contradictions in her that I can’t reconcile without assuming of her a cynicism she hasn’t been able to successfully hide.

(The cynicism: She wants to be a big rapper in the biggest market in the world — so big that it might as well be the only market in the world — and, to do that, she has to jettison almost everything that marks her as foreign, because Americans have little interest in art that strikes them as foreign. At the same time, her backstory makes her stand out a bit — particularly since Americans tend to have vaguely positive feelings about Australians — so she keeps around a few token signifiers of her exoticness while erasing anything that would mark her as too foreign.)

(But, at the same time, I’m an Australian who has absorbed a lot of Americanness, and I don’t think I’ve diminished my Australianness by doing so. So I really don’t want to posit nationality as being an either/or quality. It’s just… Iggy Azalea strikes me as an outsider performing “American hip-hop” rather than someone explicating the contradictions inherent in being an Australian expatriate.) 

Just listened to Ignorant Art, by the way. “My World” is far and away the best thing on it.

DOWNLOAD: Ignorant Art.

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music hip-hop australia america
Jan 28

(Thank God): Question for/about the Singles Jukebox

the20000:

matthewtowles:

I’ve noticed that a large number of recent reviews (by “recent” I mean the past few weeks, but I’m sure this could be said about the past few/several months, etc.) have an aggregate score of around five (5) out of ten (10). 

My question is this: are these average scores purely the result of simple mathematics (in that any relatively large grouping of numbers would result in a theoretical “five”)? Or are these fives a sign of an overall relative blandness (or “averageness”) in today’s pop music? 

I know that each reviewer has her or his own opinions of what is and isn’t a “good” song, and I realize that these reviewers are probably not the be-all end-all of music raters. I also realize that the term “average” is also relative depending on who you’re talking to. However it is interesting to see so many songs get such “average” scores. (By the way, if this has already been addressed before or anything, let me know! I’d love to hear what people have to say!)

What do you think?

I think it’s better to think of 5 as “average,” rather than “bland”. (Especially in pop music, where bland is a cardinal sin, and is thus likelier to push a song’s score below a 5.) Plus, it’s not a very self-selected voting group. The writers’ interests lie across the musical landscape, but most of them try to get to as many songs as possible. If you contacted, say, a dozen writers at random from the Pazz & Jop electorate and asked them to score some publication’s top 20, I bet you’d see a lot of middling averages.

But “blandness” is the wrong way to think of it. You never know when a neat sound or melody or hook or personality is going to come at you, which is super exciting. (That’s not just a pop thing, of course, but when it comes to throwing stuff to see what sticks, pop traffics in the highest volume.)

Also, we are the end-all and be-all of music raters. Wanted to clear that up for everyone.

Three things:

  • There’s often a lot of variation within these “average” scores. I’ve given [8]s or [9]s to things that have ended up scoring [5.xx]s, and the middling score in those cases represented disputation among the panel, not indifference! If I give a [9] to something, it’s definitely because I think it’s great, not bland.
  • Dave keeps track of what he calls the Jukebox’s “controversy index.” He can probably talk more about which tracks get middle of the range scores because they’re controversial and which ones we just don’t give a shit about.
  •  Yeah, we actually are the be-all and end-all of music raters.
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criticism music The Singles Jukebox
Jan 26


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