Daily Archives: April 19, 2017

As mainstream pop continues to shift and distort, turning its ravenous gaze towards the more obscure forms of dancefloor music often with remarkable results that seduce teenyboppers and hardened, cynical alternative journos alike the zeitgeist shifts that surround such movement still find ways to startle. Im going to come clean and admit to being something of a dumbass, because when I first heard The xxs debut album back in 2009, it didnt to me sound like the work of a band that would soon sweep the airwaves, crop up in TV commercials or cross over, Mercury Prize in hand, to widespread success. To me the album sounded too introverted, ephemeral and spectral; but if Vks debut album Figure is anything to go by, the zeitgeist has well and truly shifted into inward-looking and moody territory, the likes of which we possibly havent seen since the new wave/goth heyday of the eighties or that brief period when shoegaze captured the imagination of more than few whimsical young people.

There are no two ways about it: Figure would not exist without The xx. Its all in there: the muted take on bass-heavy dance music, the forlorn and romantic lyrics, the jangly guitar lines. A percussive line might be more beat-heavy here or there, but only to the same degree as The xx themselves have done on their recent I See You in an attempt to escape the straightjacket that was looming their way. The main difference, however, is that Vk have a solitary vocalist, Margrt Rn, and her airy soprano is, in fairness, very different to Romy Madley Crofts. Rns delivery is pristine, her high-pitched vocals soaring from muted whimper to keening wail, sometimes in the same line. But what she gains in intensity she loses in intimacy and sensuality compared to Croft, apart from on the odd occasion when she sounds eerily close to a Cooly G or Roseau.

I suppose Rns vocals will suffice to ensure Vks fans (and, to their credit, the numbers are growing) that Im full of shit and that the comparison doesnt stand. In answer, Id point to BTO, which follows the brooding dark ambient shuffle of opener Breaking Bones with an insistent backbeat and lush bursts of synth bliss. Its hook-laden and is sure to be a hit somewhere, but has The xx written all over it. Thats of course not a bad thing, in many ways BTO is what Dangerous might have sounded like without Jamie xxs overbearing production flourishes but it doesnt break new ground. When youre going out of your way, Rn moans, do you think about us? The romanticism is potent, but a little cloying, and the production, for all its timely swoops, handclaps and dreamy atmospherics, the production fundamentally lacks any of the unpredictability The xx often inject into their songs. Same goes for the futuristic, guitar-driven Figure, which sounds so much like the UK band I imagine some will assume its one of their outtakes until Rns admittedly awesome vocal kicks in and sweeps away that possibility.

Elsewhere, The xx influences dissipate somewhat as the album progresses, to be replaced with slower, less rhythmic textures. Vk cite Portishead and Massive Attack as influences, and that slowly becomes apparent on tracks like Floating, which carries a very portentous atmosphere. The problem is that a lot of the latter tracks on Figure are over quite quickly without making the kind of uneasy mark on the listener that the two Bristolian acts were so adept at. Margrt Rn certainly sounds at times vaguely like Beth Orton, but is often let down by a disappointingly slight production (Dont Let Me Go, Show Me). The album concludes with a trio of ambient pieces on which rhythm is stripped down to its bare bones and space is handed mostly to the vocals. By closer Hiding this becomes a bit soporific and not even interjections on sax or piano really distract from the fact that the second half of the album feels a tad unfinished.

In many ways, Figure sounds like the work of a band that was inspired by The xxs game-changing moment but too late realised that such change was ephemeral. The xx themselves are still wrestling with where to go next after their debut, so its hardly unexpected that other acts will find it a tough act to follow. On the more upbeat tunes, especially BTO and Figure, Vk show a real ear for melody and Rns vocals are generally effective. But as they try to negotiate new avenues, the quartet loses focus and fails to land any original blows. I imagine there are a plethora of similar acts out there trying to guide the zeitgeist in ways that will pay off, but Figure shows thats a lot harder than we might think.

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Vk - The Quietus

You dont often expect to get much juice out of a documentary focused on subjects like architectural modernism and city planning. But Matt Tyrnauers argumentative film is the cinematic equivalent of a particularly caffeinated op-ed about how to fix whats wrong with the modern city. As the films myriad urbanists and architectural experts opine at the start, given the seismic shift in urbanizing populations, there arent many greater problems to be wrestled with.

At the risk of oversimplifying the debate, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City divides the participants into two camps: the top-down city planners and the bottom-up activists. To illustrate that divide, Tyrnauer handily reaches back to the most famous urbanist debate of the 20th century: the fight between New York planning czar Robert Moses and journalist-turned-activist Jane Jacobs. The struggle wasnt always easily understood, but the stakes were for the future of the city itself.

A well-connected operator who built on the Jacob Riis-fueled urban reform movement of the 1930s and its zeal for cleaning up the slums, Moses used his unprecedented power and massive amounts of federal funding to massively reshape New York. In the postwar years, Moses and his car-friendly allies in other cities tried to implement the (not always correctly interpreted) ideals of modernist architect Le Corbusier and his plans for fantasy cities of regimented apartment towers and impossibly pristine parks. To them, the seeming chaos of New Yorks polyglot tenement neighborhoods and its jam-packed streets were messy and unsightly things to be swept away.

But to the likes of Jacobs, there was invisible order in that chaos. Jacobs wrote about how neighborhoods like her beloved Greenwich Village were not just densely ordered communities with rich and economically sustaining economic and cultural lives, but also safe places to live, due to all the eyes on the street. Jacobs saw the blank tower blocks of public housing sprouting in bulldozed downtowns across America in the 1950s as crime-inviting dead zones that made it impossible for organic communities to develop. As Citizen Jane staunchly argues, America would have been better served listening to Jacobs.

Tyrnauer assembles a gold-star panel from the architectural and urbanist communities (Mike Davis to Paul Goldberger and Geoffrey West, but surprisingly, not Moses biographer Robert Caro) to hail the prophetic wisdom of Jacobs views, which were hardly commonplace when she started organizing citizen groups to stop Moses bulldozing of New York neighborhoods and the vapid vulgarity of what he wanted to replace them with. The battles to stop the demolition of both large stretches of the Village and SoHo in the 1960sthe late Ed Koch reminisces about battling Moses with Jacobs, even though he later championed many of the same inhumanly scaled developmentsare repeatedly hailed here as totemic victories against the unexamined wisdom of urban renewal.

In a sense, the clash between Jacobs and Moses was a conflict between two different types of utopians. Jacobs urban ideals, as expressed in her 1961 call to arms The Death and Life of Great American Cities, could generally only be achieved on rare occasionslike Greenwich Village just before and for a couple decades after World War IIwhen geography, economics and the cultural zeitgeist came together in just the right mixture. The ideal city for Moses wasnt even a city at all, but a latticework of bridges, parks, towers and highways that looked fantastic from the air but was soul-crushing death to live in. (Not that he cared, of course; though the film doesnt note the irony, the great city planner Moses lived for many years out on Long Island.)

It isnt hard to tell which side Tyrnauer is going to come down on. There are few fans these days for Moses bullying arrogance; also, the film isnt called Citizen Robert. Some could argue that the films heroic portrait of Jacobs doesnt allow for much nuance. But after a brief but damning section on the humanitarian catastrophe caused by Moses Cross-Bronx Expressway project, its hard to see finding much fault with the woman who simply though that cities should be about people, and not buildings or cars.

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Film Review: Citizen Jane: Battle for the City | Film Journal ... - Film Journal

In this brave new world of corrosive alterna-facts and neo-nuclear heebie-jeebies, let us give thanks for Kendrick Lamar, a rapper brave enough to mop up Americas most pungent funk and blast it back in verbal laser light, sea to shining sea.

On his extrasensory new album, DAMN., our hero outlines the ills of the nation Its murder on my street, your street, backstreets, Wall Street, corporate offices, banks, employees and bosses with homicidal thoughts then points his finger at a really bad dude: Donald Trump is in office. Hes spraying red-hot invective, but his voice is a minty cool spritz. As the world grows more disordered, his vision clears.

And who better to trust than a California dreamer who can see beyond the madness of the moment while his Reeboks are still planted in it? For all of the introspection and self-doubt that makes Lamars body of work feel so exceptional, DAMN. radiates certitude from the tracklist outward. The albums song titles are one word apiece, rendered in capital letters and stamped with a period. So yes, hes still expressing the complexity of his humanity Watch my soul speak, he instructs during the staccato chest-puffs of HUMBLE. but, this time, with machinelike mettle.

Also new: The music surrounding his voice feels uncluttered, giving Lamar the opportunity to clear a few things up, including the fact that his politics which earned him a reputation as one of popular musics premiere zeitgeist-wranglers were never a pose. Last LP, I tried to lift the black artists, he raps during the climax of ELEMENT., citing To Pimp a Butterfly, his 2015 opus which became the unofficial soundtrack of the Black Lives Matter movement, but its a difference between black artists and wack artists.

Lyrically, the album establishes an old-school, shuffle-resistant continuity that connects one song to the next. Early in the proceedings, a sample of Geraldo Rivera interrupts the propulsion of DNA., during which the somehow-still-talking head scolds Lamar for protesting police brutality: This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years. On the next track, YAH., Lamar calmly bites back, accusing Riveras network of attacking him to goose ratings: Fox News wanna use my name for percentage. On the very next cut, ELEMENT., Lamar rues the fact that all my grandmas dead, so aint nobody praying for me, then repeatedly reminds us that aint nobody praying for him on the following track, FEEL. And so on and so forth, until DAMN. begins to feel like one continuous gush of rhythmic-rhyming thought, connected to the world, but ultimately connected to itself.

As a lyricist, Lamars gift remains extraordinary. You know it, I know it, and he knows it, too. I dont love people enough to put my faith in men, he confesses on PRIDE., a song addressing morality, mortality, God and craft. I put my faith in these lyrics. To believe in his words is to be dazzled by them.

And if you really want to make your cranium spin, cue up FEEL. and hold on tight during the five seconds it takes for Lamar to shuffle the following 18 words: Look, I feel heartless, often off this, feeling of falling, of falling apart with darkest hours, lost it. Looks clunky on paper, but itll make your eardrums dizzy. And thats the funny thing: Hes rhyming about what it feels like to go flying off the rails with a virtuosity that suggests hes incapable of losing control.

So yeah, sure, Kendrick is the GOAT, blah-blah-blah, who cares. The perpetual conversation about whether this man is the Greatest Rapper Who Ever Crip-Walked Gods Green Earth only threatens to monopolize our attention and limit our listening. And theres always more to listen for in Lamars music especially in his voice, which often expresses his humanity as vividly as his verses do.

He deploys different tones across DAMN., establishing varying degrees of intimacy along the way, but Lamars default timbre remains that raspy half-shout, where his throat sounds dry and his mouth sounds wet. You can hear wisdom and desire in that voice, regardless of the words hes forming. Hes hoarse from rebuking the universe, but still salivating, eager to tell you more.

Lamar knows his instrument, because he knows his body, because he knows himself. The closer we listen that soul speak, the better we can each understand our own.

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Kendrick Lamar gives a 'DAMN:' Hear him out - Press of Atlantic City

Christian Schneider, Syndicated columnist 6:51 p.m. CT April 17, 2017

Christian Schneider(Photo: Eric Tadsen/USA TODAY NETWORK)

Anyone who hasnt heard pop songstress Katy Perrys recent song,Chained to the Rhythm, is missing one of the most awful pieces of music to ever be inflicted upon the American public. By the time you hear Perry warble, So comfortable, we live in a bubble, a bubble/So comfortable, we cannot see the trouble, the trouble, your ears will have filed for divorce.

Yet upon its release, this aural Antietam received positive reviewsin large part because it reflected Perrys new political activism. (Indeed, this must be true for, on her Twitter profile, Perry describes herself as an activist.)

Perrys fed up with the complacency of the capitalist entertainment culture that she has thrived off, chirped The Atlantic, comparing the songs theme to that of Sinclair Lewis classic political novel Babbitt. (Lewis novel won a Nobel Prize, though the author evidently never wore a cupcake bra.)

But rather than some foundational political anthem, Perrys song is a series of microwaved liberal bromides repackaged and sold back to liberals. Its a tried-and-true formula: Masquerade lefty culture as consciousness, and you make your terrible art critic-proof.

Recently, liberals and conservatives alike mocked an Internet adproduced by Pepsi that tried to cash in on todays left-wing protest culture. In the ad, which stars the inexplicably famous Kendall Jenner, a multicultural group of young, thin demonstrators march to demand something. (Perhaps Cokes secret recipe?)

Wielding peace signs and offers to join the conversation, the marchers stare down a line of menacing police officers until Jenner offers a cop a Pepsi, at which point he seems to say to himself, this 50-cent carbonated beverage has rendered my crowd control manual obsolete, and I, therefore, will not tear gas these morons.

Liberals recoiled at the ad, accusing it of stealing imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement and minimizing the issue of police brutality. Pepsi apologizedand pulled the ad, whatever that means it is still readily available online and also apologized to Jenner.

But Pepsis only crime is making the lame repurposing of progressivism so nakedly obvious.

Corporations always try to capture the zeitgeist and monetize it; ask any child of the grunge era who began to see ripped jeans and large flannel shirts in J.C. Penney catalogs. And when political issues bubble up, they take their place next to the Geico gecko and the Most Interesting Man in the World as tools to move product.

Take, for example, Audis embarrassing Super Bowl adthis year that tried to tangentially relate selling cars to women being paid less in the workplace. A father watches his daughter compete in a soapbox derby-type race, wondering whether he should have to tell her that no matter her qualifications, she will automatically be valued as less than every man she ever meets. The ad ends by saying Audi of America is committed to equal pay for equal work.

Evidently, no members of Audis all-maleBoard of Management are aware that the wage gap is complete nonsense, having been debunked by scoresof fact-checkers.

The Pepsi ad went too far because the caricature was too broad, but its the same idea that has saturated advertising for decades: Lefty activism is hot, so lets try to sell it to younger people who dont know better!

Naturally, theres nothing wrong with using free-market capitalism to trick liberals into buying products. Anyone who bought a Coke in 1971 because a hippie sang them a nice songwas helping the economy and creating jobs.

But the left should realize these ads are meant to trigger the same basic response in them that videos of Big Macs are supposed to trigger in hungry people. Just dont be surprised when Mayor McCheese starts wearing a pink knit hat.

Christian Schneider is a Journal Sentinel columnist and blogger.

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The selling of lefty 'consciousness' - Jackson Clarion Ledger