Indie Trends: Wavering Androgyny (April 2011)
By Chris Polley
There was once a time in which it was cool to be androgynous. It was a time when greed and excess ruled globe, but particularly our fine country of America, in which over privileged boys and girls wore tight clothing and lived aimlessly in large metropolises on mommy and daddy’s credit, drunk on bohemian power and cheap liquor. Music with androgynous vocals, hyper-stylized production values, and a wry sense of indicting humor (often of its own audience) frequently went over the heads of these youths, though it really didn’t matter, as they were too busy sculpting ridiculous haircuts and pontificating on soapboxes to deaf ears about nothing to worry about their nihilistic way of living. Actually, this scenario happened twice. The first time around it was Roxy Music ruling headphones in the 80s; the second time it was a one Antony Hegarty circa 2005.
Panda Bear “Alsatian Darn” Tomboy [Paw Tracks]
Well now we’re six years removed from the encore presentation of the me-generation, a crippling economic crisis (and trust me, it pains me to write the phrase in a music column as much as it pains you to read it in a music column, so don’t worry, I will make sure we escape to the land of art criticism soon), and an entire population of lost doe-eyed upper-middle class teens and twenty-somethings (not to mention some of them ever so quickly becoming thirty-somethings) struggling for the umpteenth time to find their identity. And because gender is often the default area of discourse for the classic-to-the-point-of-parody question “who am I?”, we are once again faced with the task of embracing or tossing aside vocal musicians that oscillate between traditionally masculine and feminine features in their singing techniques. This seems especially poignant nowadays in comparison to the 80s because while much of the gay rights movement (for example) centered then around publicly coming out and admitting one’s own identity, today’s various subcultures and minorities gladly admit to their differences to the “mainstream other”, but have trouble in taking ownership over these differences and translating them into something productive and genuinely progressive. Consider the fact that thirty-odd years later after gay rights became a movement we have yet to see an end-all be-all leader of that faction emerge to finally take worldwide discrimination head-on.
Something similarly ambivalent is happening in the indie music scene lately, and while the lines aren’t as clearly drawn between parties as they would be in any given ongoing political catfight, such as the one outlined above, it’s still a meandering (and almost defiantly so) journey between the artist trying to evade classification and the artist still not willing to commit to a wildly polarizing persona. Since gender (not to be confused with sex or sexual orientation, as I hope need not even be mentioned) is at the center of a lot of identity issues in our culture, even just in the conventional “male” versus “female” roles ascribed to us by society since birth, I ask that we pay particular attention to the voice as it pertains to this discussion in each of the albums highlighted here and in the blogosphere this month. I ask this not because it’s an arbitrary reference point (though it could certainly be read that way, as your author is also a member of the audience in question at the outset of this article), but because the human voice is, for better or worse, what defines who we are to the outside listener.
tUnE-yArDs “Gangsta” w h o k I l l [4AD]
You could go on and on about how Panda Bear’s cloudy looping and forest-like beats help give him his signature tones and what-nots, but whether we like it or not, we know Panda Bear is Panda Bear because of that incorrigible wavering croon, smothered in reverb and reticence like no one else in the history of music. There, I said it. Animal Collective is one of a kind. This doesn’t mean I’ve ever fallen deeply for much of anything they’ve done. I’ve been titillated by it, for sure. I’ve been hypnotized by it even, of course. It’s freaking strange and alluring at once, but at least in my opinion, never for more than an hour or so. It doesn’t stick with me or haunt me, even though its evocative atmospheres often seem to beg for it. I can’t help but blame much of this on the fact that Mr. Bear’s almost manic fluctuations between low and high pitches, chiefly on his latest attempt to expand his sound on the sophomore solo full-length Tomboy, never allow for anything than a mellowed roller coaster ride of musical flirtations. He refuses to commit to his androgyny and he wouldn’t be caught dead doing a hollowed-out Leonard Cohen impression, because dammit, he’s going to be different.
Where does all of this “hating” (as the kids say, those that are so beaten over the head with irony and post-irony that they can’t help but admit that the haters are going to hate, even as they hate them for hating as they post memes declaring their ambivalence to said haters – you follow me?) of an artist I actually quite respect stem from? The answer to this interminably rhetorical question can be found in the latest album by the frustratingly (understatement of the year) named tUnE-yArDs’ latest record, w h o k i l l. Here’s a talented female musician by the name of Merrill Garbus with a gift for melody who not only wants to challenge us with her throaty concoctions (remember the back-and-forth between you and your friends regarding The Dirty Projectors a few years back?), but also often subvert pop expectations for the sake of tricking or baiting her listener. Now I’m in no way suggesting Garbus is doing this kind of dog and pony show featuring her fragmented and boisterously apathetic compositions with any malicious intent. She wants to dazzle – I can sense it through the ups and downs of the notes she ululates throughout the record. But she doesn’t want to make it easy or palatable. This is one step up from Panda Bear’s lost puppy dog routine, but she’s equally as impossible to dissect if only because she constantly teases us with a protagonist that could be sympathetic, if only she dedicated herself to it rather than worried about jumping up, down, left, right, and back again.
Cass McCombs “County Line” WIT’S END [Domino]
Take away the jitters, though, and take away the crick in the neck of both of these artists, and you’ll end up with a different kind of gender-confused mastery. Unfortunately, no one told singer-songwriter Cass McCombs that just because you want to streamline the androgynous voice doesn’t mean you also have to sedate it. I love the flamboyance of tUnE-yArDs, but I just wish it wasn’t so frenetic and impossible to pin down. I love the patience of Panda Bear, but I just wish that patience was focused and, if it’s not too much to ask for, as catchy as “We Tigers” or even “The Purple Bottle”. It sounds like McCombs was listening to my pleas when he constructed the positively spellbinding opening track “County Line”, but then as his newest album WIT’S END (if anyone would read it, I’d do an entire post on capitalization and the lack thereof in indie music song/record titles) trudges on he just takes the bottom out completely and decides to let his voice speak for itself. It’s a bold move to be sure, but all of these artists with broken identities do it at some point, even if they don’t ever let their instrumentation get as minimal as McCombs’. His voice, while magnetic at times without an otherwise-needed percussive element or roaming bass line, just doesn’t hold up for an entire LP because it renders itself limp without any bite.
And this is exactly what the new masters of unconventional vocal delivery need in order to turn a trend into a mainstay – bite. They all do it at times, in fits and starts amongst the beautiful mess, but temporary critical acclaim, even when consistent within a single decade, won’t be quite enough to inspire change in the rest of the world (whether that’s even possible with music is a debate without a winner, to be sure). We need movers, shakers, and heartbreakers that catch our ears and make us stand up and shout, not sit down and whimper because we’re writhing in the crap we’ve made for ourselves.