Sufjan Stevens, Illinois (2005)

Talkdemonic, Beat Romantic (2006)

Victory at Sea, All Your Things Are Gone (2005)

Young People, All at Once (2006)

First off, I should say that this post is several years past its expiration date. It’s like I see a requiem for indie rock in some magazine or another every year, so I shouldn’t annoy anyone by adding my voice to the chorus now. But the sheer mediocrity of three of my recent CD orders left me with no other way to review them than by clustering them into a eulogy. And I threw in Sufjan Stevens for good measure.

So what is “indie rock”? I’ll assign Sufjan Stevens, Talkdemonic, Victory at Sea, and Young People to that genre because they’re all vaguely poppish (which is almost like being rock) and they’re all on indie labels. But stylistically, I don’t think “indie rock” means anything anymore; at this point it designates only a mode of distribution. The underground network of independent labels and distributors, which used to deliver specifically non-commercial rock, has (with the help of online music retailing) stepped into the void created by the major music conglomerates’ continual swallowing of smaller labels. Signing to an independent label is no longer a statement of musical ideals: it’s a viable career move. You won’t have a #1 album, but you can still get your music to the masses.

Which is a shame, because the perpetrators of these albums really don’t need to be heard. Take Talkdemonic. The duo comprises a fiddler, Lisa Molinaro, and a multi-instrumentalist mastermind, Kevin O’Connor. Beat Romantic, the liner notes helpfully tell me, is “the second Talkdemonic record.” Released on the ironically named Arena Rock label, it features lovely cover art of white-barked birch trunks in a row under a canopy of green leaves. And the music sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom with a Starbucks latte at hand. It’s offensively inoffensive. A reviewer might refer to “delicately plucked acoustic guitar,” “whispers of organ,” “reedy violin.” I might put this on in the background while I’m surfing the Internet, then get frustrated halfway through and exchange the CD for something else. The only one of these sixteen instrumental tracks I could identify after it has passed is “White Gymnasium,” thanks to the nautical flute line that graces it. The album is very polished and very pretty, and I mean that in the worst way possible.

For something equally low in energy, trying Young People’s All at Once. After about five listens, I finally cottoned on to who Young People sounds like: Cat Power. Katie isn’t as good a singer as Chan Marshall, but she does offer the same wispy, alcoholic vocal haze; I don’t think she delivers a single song in full voice. It makes me tune out, so I’m not sure I can remember any of the lyrics. These might be lines from “Slow-Moving Storm”: “Angel bright and fair / Take me to your care.” Or they might not be. It’s her voice that mires All at Once in the realm of passionless music I don’t care about. They have some interesting musical ideas, like the distortion-drowned piano riff of “Reapers,” but too many of those ideas meander into collapse. They sound like they got bored while recording; why should I be interested while listening?

I think Victory at Sea’s album, All Your Things Are Gone, is the clearest sign that anything underground about the indie world has long since been abolished. The band starts off with some trendy angular post-punk (“No Reason to Stay,” “Cecille”) before moving into strange storytelling (“The Letter”), but finally softens to reveal itself as a purveyor of Carole King adult-contemporary piano pop (“Turn It Around” onward: six songs out of ten). This kind of music isn’t in vogue right now, but there’s no stylistic weirdness that would prevent Victory at Sea from having a hit single. All Your Things Are Gone is a 2005 release, so it’s past its sell-by date already, but may I suggest “Bored Otherwise” as the potential hit that could have led listeners to this filler-packed extravaganza?

Speaking of hits, filler, and piano pop: Sufjan Stevens. I’m not as in touch with indie politics as I used to be—blame the dullness of the music—so I might be wrong about this, but I think Stevens is today’s biggest indie star. He got enough press on what was probably an off-the-cuff comment about making an album for each of the fifty states that he decided to follow his love letter to Michigan with 2005’s study of Illinois. Even the outtakes got great reviews.

But I must say, I’m not impressed. First of all, Illinois doesn’t have any moves on it that weren’t already in display on Michigan—I suppose Stevens has his Beatles-style “Revolution” with the electrified Superman song, whose title I will not exhaust my fingers by typing, but Stevens’s distorted guitar work only reminds me of the excruciating, incomprehensibly reissued A Sun Came! Otherwise, there’s a lot of the Charlie-Brown-soundtrack piano, orchestral instrumentation, softly sung melodies, and pensive lyrics that have long stocked Stevens’s releases. The musicianship has come a long way since Michigan, in that there’s no spit-filled trumpet here, but then the bedroom-recording aesthetic was part of the charm of early Sufjan (and if Talkdemonic had left some rough edges unsanded, their bland instrumental pop might have had more character).

The word I want to use to describe Illinois is “professional.” And that’s part of the problem. “Professional” implies a received standard, an external framework of values. “Professional” demands a pre-established sound and promises a primarily financial reward. So here’s a word to describe Stevens: “accomplished.” As in “mission.” He found a career path and he’s treading it to the usual terminus.

This is why indie isn’t indie anymore. Underground rock was supposed to be about finding your own voice, about making your own noise. Early indie bands (I’m thinking of those profiled in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Black Flag, Minutemen, Mission of Burma) went independent because they had to—major labels weren’t willing to take a chance on their weird music. There’s no reason a major label wouldn’t want to take a chance on Stevens. He’s cute, friendly, low-budget, and has already proven himself. Stevens may decide he wants to stick with Asthmatic Kitty, but that doesn’t mean he’s underground. If you need proof, just get The Avalanche (outtakes from Illinois). I haven’t heard it and I’m not going to, but: recording 150 minutes of music for a single album and then releasing the outtakes separately, as if even your rejects are gems? Smells like Fleetwood Mac to me.

It’s a pirate movie, and that’s it.  Anything you saw in Pirates of the Caribbean, you could pretty much see here first.  But despite its lack of ambition, Cutthroat Island is nowhere near bad enough that it should have ended Geena Davis’s career.  It keeps its feet firmly planted in B-Movie Land, whether with the incongruously lipsticked British governor-general or with the immortal line of Marion-Berry-esque dialogue, “Bitch stole my map!”  Which is delivered with a perfect poker face by Frank Langella, who doesn’t seem to care that he’s in B-Movie Land. 

Davis, by contrast, doesn’t seem to notice that she’s in B-Movie Land, at least not until the climactic put-down that explains the reason behind the name of Langella’s arch-pirate:  “Bad Dawg!”  But if she’s not exactly the most watchable B-actress—odd for someone who starred in Earth Girls Are Easy—she doesn’t send the thing down the drain, either.  Maybe that’s because this isn’t the kind of movie that relies on finely tuned thespianism (the accents don’t even seem to originate on the same continent).  Basically, what’s great about Cutthroat Island is that it knows it’s a cheesy historical action movie and doesn’t demand an Academy Award anyway, RUSSELL “MAXIMUS” CROWE.

Because just because he’s dead doesn’t mean he deserves a movie.  And just because he got a movie anyway doesn’t mean it’s good.  As the steadily balding and steadfastly boring cinematic pope, Thomas Kretschmann treads water for a while until a tidal wave of the usual biopic suspects (temporal fragmentation, indifference to characterization or theme, dialogue bound for Barlett’s Familiar Quotations) drags him under.

O mighty Python, O mighty Boa!
One moved fast, the other no slowah…

Hunters and agents were on your tails,
and perky blondes with skin so pale.

Boa Vs Python, Brother versus Brother;
both hunting, both hunted, pitted against the other.

Alas! I knew only one could prevail
but what if that train had derailed?
Would you still be battling, great serpent gods?
Would I still be taking midnight odds?

All I know is now it’s done,
but Komodo Vs Cobra is on at one.

I sure didn’t add this to my Netflix queue for its plot. Here’s the synopsis: “While she spends her days filing papers as a harried office temp, Myra returns home each evening to an even more chaotic world, where her eccentric younger brother, Ludlow, staves off manic episodes through his art. But when Myra opens her heart to a shy but endearing co-worker, her love for her brother finds a rival…and Ludlow fights back for her affection.” Meaningless jobs? Shy people with problems? Mental illness? Bonding against all odds? Stinks of Eau d’Generic Indie to me.

No, what drew me in was Alicia Goranson, better known as Roseanne’s Original Becky. I hadn’t seen her in anything since Boys Don’t Cry, so I thought she might have sacked acting for, I don’t know, data entry. My Netflix search turned this up, I popped it in, and surprise! She’s pretty good. As Myra, she’s able to be tough, tender, angry, sad, happy, and hopeful, often in the same scene. (Watch for the moment just after she argues Shy but Endearing Co-Worker out of her apartment.) She also has a pleasant, goofball screen presence that isn’t too polished to allow real emotion (see: Streep). I do have a hard time not hearing Becky when Goranson opens her mouth, but she pulls off a credible Brooklyn (?) accent and maintains it during her variety of moods. It’s always nice to see an old TV friend doing well for herself. Her cast bio says she’s spent a lot of time in theater; I hope that’s not because no one wants to cast her in movies, because if Jennifer Aniston gets to have a career, there’s no reason Goranson shouldn’t.

Because if your main joke is injuring your characters, then those characters had better deserve it.  And although Wayans & Co. score some points by having Dr. Phil amputate his own foot, the other actors are so boring that I can’t even muster the energy to hate them.

Because if we needed an Ordinary People for the new millennium, it wouldn’t be a pretentious indie that even Sigourney Weaver couldn’t save.

My first thought as I watched Good Night, and Good Luck was:  Did George Clooney just quit smoking?  I know people loved their cigarettes in the 1950s, and I had read many comments on the amount of smoking in the movie, but those little cancer sticks kept stealing the stage.  There’s a loving shot of a lighter.  There’s an ad for Kent.  Even the black-and-white hues suggest exhaled blue clouds.

Eventually it hit me:  Clooney uses cigarettes to make a point.  You see, back in the 1950s, people didn’t know that cigarettes caused cancer.  Or, more accurately, smokers didn’t know.  Big Tobacco knew.  But rather than acknowledging that their products killed, thereby sacrificing profits, Big Tobacco companies concealed the harmful health effects of cigarettes and instead funded biased studies claiming that cigarettes weren’t hazardous to health.  They did this in order to keep consumers smoking, and their own pockets lined with money.

If you read that paragraph and said, “Wow!  Powerful people can’t be trusted!”, then Good Night, and Good Luck is the movie for you.  If, however, you said, “Uh…I took American History, too,” then you’re probably on my page.  As a movie, Clooney’s directorial debut is a piece of political propaganda, and an irritating one at that.

Before my liberal card gets revoked, I should say that I went in with high expectations and a good feeling.  I like black-and-white.  I like politics.  I don’t like George Clooney (he can’t act), but I agree with his politics, and I liked that he didn’t take a star turn in his directorial debut.  It was good to see David Strathairn and Reed Edward Diamond, both of whom I’ve liked since I first saw them 15 years ago (…wow) in Memphis Belle.  I’ve heard good things about Patricia Clarkson, and Robert Downey was a lot of fun in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

But this is really Clooney’s movie—in addition to directing and taking a supporting role, he co-wrote the script—and he reveals that behind the camera, he’s serviceable.  That’s not a compliment.  His ear for dialogue is not natural, and his sense of pacing is not effective.  In a few scenes, he goes for a Robert Altman overlapping-dialogue feel, but he forgets to point the camera at anything interesting as people talk.  His one unconventional idea is to feature Joseph McCarthy as himself, using the wonders of archival footage.  Though it’s an interesting move, I actually think it hurts the movie:  since the primary antagonist is nothing more than a talking head, it’s hard for Clooney to create the climate of fear and destruction that ultimately leads one character to commit suicide.  I know it’s there, but I’m not feeling it.

If Clooney weren’t involved, Good Night, and Good Luck would have aired as a TV movie.  It’s at that level of quality.  And it’s also at that level of analysis.  That’s what frustrates me the most.  As David Strathairn, playing Edward R. Murrow, opens a banquet in his honor with a speech about the dangers of media (and citizen) passivity, I got a queasy feeling.  I finally identified it as arthurmilleritis.  There’s no point so obvious that Clooney doesn’t underscore it with a clunky line of dialogue.  (Clarkson gets most of these lines, and fails to pull them off.)  There aren’t any subtle points at all.  You see, when Big Tobacco went unquestioned, they managed to profit off a fatal product.  When McCarthy went unquestioned, he ruined innocent people with his fearmongering tactics.  Could it be that, when George W. Bush went unquestioned, he unconstitutionally spied on Americans while simultaneously torturing alleged terrorists in secret prisons around the world?

It’s not that I think the movie is wrong.  It’s that I think it’s a bumper sticker.  And as valuable as bumper stickers are, they don’t make good cinema.  Neither does George Clooney.

If I hadn’t seen Lady in the Water with Salma, I would have walked out. But since I didn’t walk out, the question is—when would I have given up hope? When Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) tells Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), “Thank you for letting me wear your beautiful shirt”? (When she could have stood to ask him for some pants, too?) When the writer (M. Night Shymalan) describes his current project as being his thoughts on “all the social problems”? (Could he maybe have named one? Poverty? Pollution?) When the crossword freak drops a meta dis on movie critics that results in the movie’s one likable, relatable character—a cantankerous movie critic played to perfection by Bob Balaban—getting eaten by a grass dog?

I think I wouldn’t have made it past the scene where M. Night finds out that through his masterwork, The Cookbook, he will exert a major influence on the world—posthumously. It’s bad enough that Night had to feature such an obvious Jesus figure. It’s worse that he had to play the Jesus figure himself. Claiming persecution is a rich move for a multihyphenate millionaire at any stage. Let’s call the celebrity’s persecution claim, be it Eminem’s “They try to shut me down on MTV” three albums into his career or Lindsey Lohan’s whining about tabloid rumors on her very first single, the jump-the-shark point of the fame trajectory. Such a claim indicates that the celebrity has officially reached critical mass and will soon become that black hole of fame, the has-been.

Besides, to paraphrase Salma, sometimes people hate a moviemaker because he makes bad movies. I can’t give a good plot summary of Lady in the Water because I’m not sure what happened. Story, a narf, lands in a pool and carves out a cave beneath it. Someone needs to see her to make something happen. Once she’s seen, she needs to leave, but she can’t do it without help. People help her. She leaves. Besides the narf and the grass dog, there’s a huge eagle, tree monkeys, and a bunch of quirky oddballs. It all goes down in an apartment complex that is simultaneously in Philadelphia and the deep forest. The movie reads like an eighties children’s-fantasy movie—The Never-Ending Story, say—only with adults. It probably would have worked better with children; it’s hard to buy that a bunch of adults would have nothing better to do with their day than help Spooky Chick fly the friendly skies. But even talented children couldn’t overcome all the self-aggrandizement Night commits to film. This and King Kong are competing for the title of worst movie I’ve seen this year—and, people, I just saw Gigli.

There are two periods in the history of hip-hop that fascinate me.  The first is the period in the late ’70s where various musical and cultural influences came together in the Bronx to create the stuff.  I read today (on Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt) that the New York blackout of ‘77 hastened the spread of hip-hop from the Bronx because of all the looting:  kids who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford the equipment were able to boost turntables, microphones, and other gear that let them start running their own street parties.  It’s a fascinating theory, even if there isn’t any proof.

The second is the shift that happened right around the time I started forming my adult musical taste, when the mainstream of hip-hop went from pop-rap (MC Hammer, LL Cool J, Young MC) to hardcore.  Suddenly the hit rap songs I was hearing about were songs my radio station wouldn’t play.  I don’t think “Nuthin’ but a G Thang” ever made it onto WCFX-FM in Mt. Pleasant.  (Maybe it hit the local college station.)  This was only a couple of years after Nirvana slaughtered Poison.  Suddenly, all music was hardcore.

I said I was preparing a post about why I thought Bo$$’s Born Gangstaz was such a good album.  In my brain, that post assumed dissertation status.  It involved a short history of Lichelle “Boss” Laws’s career, including her #1 rap single, “Deeper”; a breakdown of her potent rhythmic and rhyming skills; an exploration of her inversions of hip-hop’s gender tropes; a section on her use of violence as myth and reality; and a chapter on the function of her sidekick, Irene “Dee” Moore, who compared to Boss is more acutely psychotic and also more immature–Vader to Boss’s Sidious.  This is weighty stuff for a one-hit-wonder’s not-quite-gold album that in 47 minutes features 280 F-bombs, many of them on the final proper track:  “I Don’t Give a Fuck.”

I’m too lazy to write it, so I’ll get to the point:  Born Gangstaz is such a great album because it both embodies that seismic shift in hip-hop and comments on it.  Because despite Boss and Dee’s repeatedly insisting that “that’s the way the shit really is, G,” that this is “how I live,” Laws puts the lie to it herself with the intro and outro:  answering-machine messages from her parents, who object to the snippet of “I Don’t Give a Fuck” that serves as her greeting and explain exactly why.  Turns out Laws, who poses on the album art with guns a-plenty and guns down friend and foe alike over the course of 12 of the hardest raps ever, spent 12 years in Catholic school, took tap-dance lessons, and even went to college for three years.  In short:  she’s faking it.

Laws was eventually outed as a fake by that renowned bastion of street cred, the Wall Street Journal.  How exactly you out someone who’s already outed herself, I don’t know, but suddenly Boss dropped off the radar.  Born Gangstaz sold almost 400,000 copies, but her follow-up was rejected by her record label.  Read the story here for more details.

Boss is the hardest rapper I’ve ever heard.  “Catch a Bad One” ranks up there with Black Fork’s “Silicone Wetnurse” and Babes in Toyland’s “Handsome and Gretel” (obviously I’m taking a broad definition of “punk” here).  But she’s not keeping it real at all.  It’s all fake.  And when she tells you it’s all fake, she also turns her street narrative into American myth.  There are as many references on Born Gangstaz to paranoia and mental disturbance as there are to killing people or smoking chronic.  It seems entirely possible that all the murder happens only in Boss’s head–especially because, in real life, it really was all in Boss’s head.

That’s not to say there’s no reality here.  “A Blind Date with Boss” is a revenge fantasy about men who don’t give Boss and Dee their due respect, but it follows “Recipe of a Hoe,” which is a riot-grrrl-esque criticism of the sexual politics of the rap industry.  “1-800-Body-Bags” is a skit that implicates not only black gangbangers and gangsta rappers for street violence, but also the white-run entertainment industry for encouraging the thug image and profiting off it.  And as to why Boss might want to display that image, listen to her father’s comment on the outro:  “By the way, baby, thanks for the Rolex.”

There’s also the myth, which comes from the origin stories Dee drops on “Catch a Bad One,” “Born Gangsta,” and “Diary of a Mad Bitch” and Boss’s own tales of hustling, violence, and paranoia.  This is the story of American outlaws.  One of the album’s skits is even called “Thelma & Louise.”  Boss is the gunwoman, Dee the getaway driver, and not even a squad of cops can stop them.  And finally, the relentless hardness of the raps puts the album over the top into satire.  No one could be as ruthless, as violent, as unremorseful as Boss is.  She’s parodying the image of a hardcore rapper by turning it up to eleven.  She has to, since she’s faking it–she can’t allow her credentials to be questioned for a second.  But she also makes it clear that hardcore can easily cross the line into cartoonish, and that you need some depth to make it work.

It’s like she predicted the last ten years of mainstream rap.  Once the hardcore persona becomes a component of the genre, there’s no more space for imagination or criticism.  A lot of the raps and party anthems of the past few years are recycling the tired cliches that Boss was already debunking in 1993.  Maybe I’m giving her too much credit, but even if I am, Born Gangstaz is a spooky, bloody, Kill Bill Vol. 1 of an album that still deserves to be heard.