Let's face it -- breaking up sucks, no matter how much you despise the person. You just can't shake that "what if" feeling that inevitably creeps up after any major decision; you just can't get the person out of your mind. "What the hell am I doing with my life?" you ask yourself on many a sleepless night. But we should take a queue from breakups. More so than in all of life's other trying situations, during breakups we look towards music to save us. Whilst deep in the throes of one of those self-loathing sessions of sorrow and solidarity, there is nothing like a powerful, uplifting tune to pull our spirits up, to give us hope for the vague and idealistic future. "O, but what is a song?" you might ask. "A three- to six-minute recording of some scattered thoughts, some whimsical product of an artistic fantasy -- how could it possibly help me?" But then you find yourself listening to the damn thing on repeat.
Here is my appeal -- take what you learn from a breakup and use music to help get you through other shitty situations! Below you'll find a few shameless guilty pleasures that are probably breakups songs, but can really be applied with a healthy glob of neosporin to all of life's trials, large and small. Enjoy --
Doesn't sound very happy at first...but it is just listen to it!
I suppose that with a band name like Girls, I really shouldn't have been caught too off guard when a male voice opens the album with the lyric "Oo I wish I had a boyfriend!" And seriously, how P-in-C to be caught off guard, right? It's a moot point anyway, cause check this, he's not talking about a GAY boyfriend, bro, he just means, like, a boy that's a friend. That's not a bad summary of the entire album: leadman Christopher Owens, suppressed as a child growing up in the Children of God cult, is really just looking for somebody -- any gender, race, sexual identity, etc -- to be "friends forever" with.
But before I get ahead of myself. This album was getting some convincing reviews, each and every one harping Owens' endearing personal story, so I decided it would be worth checking out. I found it difficult to classify. It's big these days, since being retro is all the shit, to talk about influences -- but Girls seem to have no influences. Either that, or they're a master collage of the last half-century of music. You'll probably hear the usual Pet Sounds callouts thrown into reviews, but it's kind of a load of crap -- I mean, people have been peddling that comparison since Sgt. Pepper's. Let's see, where to start? The vocals are a goofy combination of Bryan Ferry and pre-White Album George Harrison, the lyrics are loose caricatures of middle-market Morrissey poetics, the music is a song I made up on my guitar last weekend. The latter point should be highlighted -- when you listen to 'em real good, when you really turn them inside-out, these songs are nothing earth-shatteringly innovating. It's kind of one of those things where they are just novel because Girls came up with them first, and everyone else slaps their heads and says, "duh." It seems so obvious when you hear it. But see, Album is all of what I just said in a good way. It's the kind of stuff you listen to and try to declare predictable, until you realize that it was only predictable in hindsight, which makes it not predictable at all.
All that nonsense aside, this is a very solid album, and a very palatable artistic effort. In order to be successful, a piece of art must fall somewhere in a specific region on the grand spectrum of substance of content and aesthetic of presentation. Listening to Album has helped me to solidify -- and it thus makes an excellent example of -- my theory of Substance vs. Aesthetic. Turn your attention to the graph at right: you'll notice we've plotted the two-dimensional relationship between the aforementioned qualities. As you can see, there is a critical boundary (blue arc) in the planar relationship past which artists must attain in order for consumers to classify their efforts as "that fresh shit" (or similarly laudatory phrases). Note that the arc-edness of the boundary allows for achievement of fresh shit without much of one of the two qualities -- providing that the other proliferates in the work. But as you sacrifice bits of the proliferous quality, you must compensate with disproportionate additions of the other in order to maintain freshness.
The crux of this model is that when an artist does reach one of those extremes, the excessive quality in fact becomes, in part, the other -- extremely poignant substance of content becomes the aesthetic of presentation; most beauteously crafted presentation aesthetics become the substance. I couldn't figure out the best way to demonstrate that graphically, but you get the idea. What Girls have done is taken such crude, pristine emotion, and thrown it straight at us, without subjecting it to the industrial refinement of said emotion known as, well, artistic expression. Christopher Owens' confused and simplistic complaints, as if coming from a little kid who doesn't understand why none of the other kids want to play with him, move you to simultaneous sympathy and delight. It is pure, unadulterated substance. And in its disregard for the esoterics of subtlety it achieves the aesthetic of presentation required of all art that is captivating and pleasuring.
And it's a veritable exercise in androgyny, which, if you haven't heard, is the new black.
"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new."
-Anton Ego, from Disney's Ratatouille (2007)
