I'll Keep My Secrets Mine

Hey, did you catch this week's NOVA?  It was offered as a complement to Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia (which I've yet to read) and featured a quartet of the usual Sacksian sad/amazing oddities:  A blind/autistic savant in his twenties who functions on a four-year-old level but can reproduce and elaborate on music after hearing just a snippet; a young man who channels the uncontrollable, random tics of extreme Tourette's into precise bursts of percussion; a woman from a musical family who suffers from amusia -- she hears it all as noise; an unmusical surgeon who, after having been struck by lightning, became obsessed with the piano (and now composes pieces that unfortunately sound saccharine).

The most interesting part comes when Sacks participates in someone else's PhD study on how parts of the brain react to music.  Studying blood flow with OMGRI scans, the same areas are excited whether processing or creating music.  They get Sacks to listen to and recall similarly metered selections by Bach (which he likes) and Beethoven (which he doesn't).  The latter leaves almost the whole noggin grey, the former causes great glowing pockets of red, engaging not only the separate parts needed to comprehend pitch, rhythm, logic, and the like, but Sacks' emotional core.  And I thought to myself, well, there is where Annie Clark's characters hide and there is where they breathe.

St. Vincent - The Strangers (mp3)(buy)

"What'll I share, what'll I keep, from all these strangers who sleep where I sleep?"

It's not a bad time for Clark to contemplate how much of herself she wants to reveal.  (It's something more people should think more often about, probably.)  Two albums into a solo career after time spent wearing the robes and enthusiasm of the Polyphonic Spree, she calls herself St. Vincent (myspace) and calls her latest Actor.  Her sad sketchbook cast has sucked themselves into shells of fear and guilt, she builds them inner landscapes of pleasant, layered sounds, frees them with short instrumental bursts.

There's no ambivalence about duality, characters consider their masks necessary; the one song that mentions acting outright does so with disdain only because a cheat is bad at it.  But they've escaped happiness by hiding from wholeness.  They're so committed to compartmentalization that the parts of themselves that lay outside their chosen box have become withered appendages, threats to their definitions are threats to their existence.  The proudly promiscuous deny their hearts, wives beg free from their lust, those who can deal with actions but not consequences run run run themselves right into the ground.  They watch birds fighting their reflections while worrying about what the neighbors would think and nuns and such.

Clark's not a theatrical singer, which is both sort of a shame and completely appropriate.  She doesn't have to affect a numbed monotone, she can give her creations her full, lovely voice without ever seeming too free or distressed.  Clark relies on the depth and contrast of her arrangements to do the dramatic work, and she's pretty fantastic at those.  The repressed bits can be lush and hollow and dark and pleasant, all at the same time, a feat; the breakouts -- Clark's real expressive voice comes from her guitar and her pedals -- can seem relatively apocalyptic.  There's plenty to involve your ear.  (Better deconstructionists can play spot the influences; I started projecting.  I found myself assuming that she liked The Fragile as much as I did, I moved into that record for a year or so, so it makes extra sense for me, here; and because it's been too long since I've listened to any American chamber music I'll just say "Copland;" and I get demented pleasure thinking that little responses in "Laughing with a Mouth Full of Blood" are a nod to "She's Leaving Home.")

Actor winds up limping toward its end.  Though it's a richer effort overall there's nothing as melodically engaging as the best stuff from her first record, Marry Me.  And goddamn some vocal splat would be nice, if just to liven things up.  Maybe it's (again) appropriate to keep the voices stifled all the way through -- the most positive thing Clark can come up with as a cure is reinvention, another round of masks -- but it's not anything more than thematically satisfying.

You know, I was wrong back there:  The best part of that NOVA episode comes at its close.  When you're introduced to all these people hopelessly trapped in their heads, by their heads, the musical expression they've found just seems like an intricate loneliness.  The brilliant pianist seems oblivious to everything but the stream of directions his brain is generating; the drummer has to tap on everything, stops as soon as his action has given him clarity.  Neither seems like they'd ever be able to do much beyond self-amusement.  But no, as the hour wraps the pianist is on stage, in a jazz club, with a band and an audience.  The drummer is sitting with a circle of others who share his affliction, is coaching them out of their individual tics into a group beat.

Shiina Ringo - Marunouchi Sadistic (EXPO Version)(mp3)(buy)

When Marry Me first came out someone suggested, "Maybe this is what Shiina Ringo would sound like if you could understand the words."  Well, yes!  And no!

They share a love of eclecticism and electronic distortion and intricacy, and who knows?  It's still so early for Annie, she's still figuring out who St. Vincent is, it's unfair to put her up against the ten billion things Shiina Ringo has become.  At this point Clark's a candle to Shiina's white hot dwarf star.

The biggest problem Shiina has -- the retarded lack of critical attention in the Western world is our problem, not hers -- is that she created one of the decade's hands-down greatest records in 2003.  Karuki Zamen kuri no Hana, recorded after a divorce and the birth of her son, is one of those pieces of art and pop so absolute that it seems to contain the entire universe.  It's huge, it's intimate, it's a seed, it's a thousand lives.  It gets you talking stupid, which is why I can never seem to get past piling praise on it.  Every time I've put it on over the last two years -- and I have put it on a lot, multiple times a day some days, it makes listening to anything else seem silly -- I just go Wow.  Wow wow wow.

But once you create a record so definitive and complete... do you even need to keep making music?  You can scribble more words and come up with different tunes, and that's nice, but you've covered it.  Even for someone like Shiina, so restless and adept at change, you have to be conscious of redundancy.

So she stopped being Shiina Ringo, mega genius pop star, and joined a band.

The band, Tokyo Jihen, has been financially successful; they've released three albums so far, and I suspect each has outsold KZK.  Shiina still wrote the bulk of the material on the first two records, but the dynamic was different.  Something -- democracy, maybe -- made them settle into a sound.  There's some good stuff on those records, but they're also depressing for everything that's missing from them.

And suddenly there's a new Shiina Ringo record.  I don't know why (I'm avoiding any sort of press -- as if there's much of that in English, anyway).  Maybe preparing the older material for her 10th anniversary show rekindled the urge.  Maybe just because no one expected it.  Maybe because she hoped expectations would have passed by now.

They haven't!

Superficial Gossip was underwhelming at first.  It's discouraging that it starts off dabbling the same post-KZK sound Jihen dabbles in, upbeat, jazz-inflected, big band happy.  But the record's now a compulsive listen.  The first single is really dull out of context; on the record it's a bracing pause after a crack-up.  The mood is ultimately sort of sad and affirmative.  The peaks are growing higher and the valleys are shallower; there's too much to explore to make a judgment now.

It helped to get an actual CD copy -- which I just noticed is available at a very reasonable price from a third-party seller at Amazon (and is also at CD Japan) -- and it was interesting that the postdude dropped it on the doorstep the same week as Marienbad.  Not that SG's about memory or manipulation or trauma or time -- I'm really not going to know what it's about until a translation appears, and probably not even then.  But that exactitude, that glamour.  With the CD, listening through headphones, there are just so many dropped-in details, so many subtle ways the sound gets tweaked.  It helps to know that this was something she cared about.

But I'm not here to talk about Superficial Gossip!  And that track above is not meant to be representative in any way!(*)  That's a bonus track -- if it weren't it would mess up her precious symmetry.  Also, it's sort of a goof.  And sort of not!  It's in English (sort of) and it's hot and it's ridiculous and I love it.

The song, "Marunouchi Sadistic," originally appeared on her first record.  And there it was a mission statement from an upstart girl who loved her guitar (though I don't think it has any guitar in it) and meant to make some noise with it.  She reapproaches her songs constantly, but I'd like to think that returning to this one, now, means something.  Even when she does so in a Color Me Badd/Lonely Island sort of way.  Ten years later, tacked on to a record that feels like it might be a little about leaving something behind, a little about loneliness, at the end of a CD whose booklet is filled with single-entendre images of a pop star having eXistenZish intercourse with a flesh colored instrument, Shiina Ringo -- wiser, sadder, sexier, sillier -- is again a woman who loves her guitar (though, again, there's no modern guitar on the track) and means to make some noise.

(*)  So tempting to pair St. Vincent's "Actor Out of Work" with Shiina's "Mayakashi Yasaotoko (Fake Fellow)."  The latter has lines like "I'm disillusioned by your ways/Your prancing on a paper stage/The curtain call has come/Final scene, you change your act/And don a grown-up stoic mask/Too late, blow, we're done."

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I'll get to Micachu on the other side of the holiday.  Have a great one!  Blow shit up!

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New Lorrie Moore story.

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"It's Pepsi," she said. "It's for the rats. They can't pee it out. When they drink it, they explode."

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"When my friends and I left a bar on Allen street to investigate why everyone on the street was taking pictures of the sky and saw the clouds, we reached for our own cameras before realizing, wait, nevermind, it'll be all over the internet in an hour. And it was. I love that! We can just go through life, enjoying it, without feeling the burden of having to document every moment of collective awe. We enjoyed the clouds, and watching the people watching the clouds, and then went inside and finished our beers with total faith that we didn't have to do anything -- everyone else was on this... What strange times we live in, with what strange clouds!"

tags: shiina ringo  st vincent  

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