Is That That New Androgyny You've Got On?

Girls - Album

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.