Deep Cuts, page 23
I started by going around the table for introductions, asking each for their name, job, hobbies, and favorite bands playing CMJ. Everyone was obsessed with the Decemberists, whose showcase had already become an impossible ticket, along with several smaller bands whose names I pretended to recognize. The server moved smoothly behind the trendsetters, delighting them one by one with their choice of red or white. Kyle reentered the room wearing an ill-fitting East Village NYC sweatshirt and leaned against the credenza next to the insights guy.
“Nobody’s mentioned Girl Talk, who played yesterday,” I said, holding up the mash-up artist’s CD. “Any thoughts?”
The trendsetters fell over each other to answer:
“I was there! It was the best!”
“He ended up practically naked, we were all dancing onstage!”
“Sampling is so exciting, so democratic!”
“Plus it’s all hooks, you’re never bored!”
I took notes on a yellow legal pad. Songs aren’t supposed to be all hooks, I wanted to say, and for a moment I felt old. “What about Beach House, who we’re going to see tonight?”
“Magical,” chirped two in confident unison, and another elaborated: “That’s the opposite of Girl Talk. Beach House is closer to the Decemberists—otherworldly.”
“What’s appealing about otherworldliness?” I asked, knowing full well what was appealing about Beach House’s mystical, mind-expanding sound.
They explained enthusiastically. Only one stayed quiet: a boy I’d plucked from the deep center of a warehouse dance floor largely for his striking resemblance to Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, except younger and with hair. He was sitting directly to my left. He’d already finished his glass of wine and was looking around for a refill.
“What about you?” I asked him. “Any thoughts on Beach House?”
“Eh,” he said. “I’m sick of all that whiny shit—it all feels very post-9/11 to me, very soon-to-be dated. I just want to party, man. Give me Girl Talk any day.”
“What about last year’s CMJ breakout, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah?” I asked. “That’s very danceable.”
He made a face. “Dance music for whiners,” he said, which drew a laugh from the credenza. The server refilled the boy’s chardonnay and he gulped it like lemonade. “My favorite thing about CMJ isn’t the shows, actually, but just the energy of the week, how there are so many people in town, musicians everywhere. You know that band Caroline?”
Something wild reared up in me, about to buck—it felt violating, that word in this context—but before I could react, his gaze slid off me and onto the trendsetter who was nodding the hardest, a blond girl seated across from him. “They were at this party I was at last night,” he told the blonde. “Some other band was playing, then the Caroline guy got up, totally wasted, and sang a Fleetwood Mac deep cut. It was amazing.” He turned back to me. “That’s the kind of stuff that happens during CMJ.”
“The lead singer of Caroline,” I confirmed. “Interesting. Which Fleetwood Mac song?” I held my pen poised above the paper. I could feel my heart in my fingers.
“I dunno. Lots of drums.”
“Mmm.” I nodded. “A faithful cover? Or did he add his own spin?”
The clients bent heads, whispered. Billy Corgan looked at me like I was insane. “It was a party,” he said.
Kyle pushed himself off the credenza and held forth a tall, square-shouldered bottle. “Who wants to try some rum?”
* * *
—
After dinner our whole motley crew walked to Cake Shop, the venue for the show I’d chosen, Beach House. The clients were happy because the trendsetters had been universally effusive about the rum (not exactly shocking given that they’d been warmed up with wine, food, and a glowing backstory from Kyle about the organically farmed sugarcane used to make the base—he may as well have kept his vest on). And Cake Shop won me extra points for authenticity, with its sweaty, airless venue hidden underneath a bakery. “Put pictures of this in your report,” the insights guy whispered as we descended the stairs. I dutifully snapped a pic of the crowd with my digital camera.
But Beach House was the wrong choice, too mellow and far too beautiful for the crass context of our evening. They put the audience under a hushed, introspective spell. Both clients French-exited almost immediately, which I tried not to take as an insult—they probably had trains to catch, kids up at six. As soon as they were gone my work persona slipped from my body, and the suddenness of the evacuation left me feeling wrung out. I couldn’t stop thinking about Fleetwood Mac. Every tall, curly-haired dude looked like Joe until he didn’t, until a quarter turn of the head revealed him to be a pale simulacrum, weak in the jaw, tight in the smile. Had he really been wasted? Joe could put back the beer, but he always stopped before his gait started to stagger like his dad’s. Had he been depressed about Caroline’s low profile at CMJ, their decidedly un-buzzy afternoon set? “Britpop Night” had faded quickly from dance floors with the end of summer, and album sales were slumping. Was he okay?
The boy with the Billy Corgan face stood alone at the edge of the crowd sipping the client’s rum neat—they were all ordering it, unbelievably, with their own money—his nose aloft like a dog on the scent of a better scene. I wanted to corner him with all the questions in my head. Who else was at the party with Caroline? And what did he mean by wasted? But of course young Billy didn’t know any of this; he just wanted to party, man.
I slipped up the back stairs, spun my iPod wheel to Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, and carved a jagged route back to my hotel room. And then, with my laptop on my lap in an uncomfortable chaise overlooking Lower Manhattan, I wrote my strangest blog post yet.
What Makes You Think You’re the One
The Drummer bangs hard on the snare to kick it off—one, two, three, four, one. The Singer receives each snare hit like bullets to his torso, staggering, arms draping off an invisible crucifix. And then he sings.
She isn’t here, the girl who thinks she’s the one. But with his eyes closed, in the carousel of his drunken mind, the Singer sees her face vividly, prismatically. It slides into focus at the end of every measure and then it spins away again. It’s a face he hasn’t seen in a while; the song has conjured it.
What makes her think she’s the one? He shouts the line with a level of indignance he dimly acknowledges as wrong for the setting, which is just a party, after all. But it’s a punk song, practically; it’s Lindsey Buckingham raging harder at Stevie Nicks than he ever had before, the kind of rage that comes only when you know you’re guilty too. It’s Mick Fleetwood fully unleashed. It’s a lyric that must be spit, that must be spat, a lyric aimed at shoving someone out of her own head, hard.
He opens his eyes and oh look, he owns them all—even the dudes have arrested their beers mid-raise, mouths hanging, though it’s the girls who look like they’re on the verge of melting into their cans of Sparks. He can tell they haven’t heard the song before. Rumours and “Rhiannon,” that’s as far as they ever went on the Mac. Fair enough. He’s no deep-cut snob. Neither is the girl who isn’t here; it’s something they’ve always had in common.
But the truth is, she’s just as bad as the rest of them. He shuts his eyes again, sings menacingly at her careening face. See, she used to get those same melty eyes when he sang. It wasn’t until he got good—until she looked around at his shows and saw other girls with that same dumb look—that she started going cold. Now, no matter how much she smiles or claps, her eyes harden when he sings. She wants to be the only one. She wants him as her deep cut, a B-side unearthed from a rarities bin, proof of her own specialness because she’s the one who discovered it, because she doesn’t know how to sing her own damn song.
When I woke the next morning, the post had earned only a handful of likes, along with a smattering of confused and occasionally hateful comments. My beloved Alma had written, somewhat hilariously, I do not know these people? I deleted it instantly, mortified, even as I hoped, with some small piece of my pathetic heart, that Joe had seen it, and that he’d received it as I’d intended—as an apology.
Someone Great
Skinner’s album was released in early 2007 to a full-throated pan on Pitchfork—2.3 out of 10!—that unceremoniously dumped all of Luke Skinner’s dreams into an industrial-strength incinerator. “Least Worst Night” had been given prime track four placement on the album at the last minute, but who cared after that review. The night it posted, Zoe and Melissa banged on my bedroom door with a bottle of tequila and a rented High Fidelity DVD to cheer me up, but I felt oddly fine. There was justice in that 2.3, proof that labels couldn’t turn shit into money through force alone, which pleased me even though that shit had my name on it.
I would not have handled it so well if it weren’t for the fact that “Bay Window” had just been released as a belated second single on Strong & Wrong and was enjoying a slow, halting ascent up the alternative charts. Shortly after the Skinner release, it was featured in the pivotal love scene of a lauded indie film—Joe and the Curlers’ bassist were photographed on a red carpet at its Sundance premiere, arm in arm in long, expensive-looking coats—at which point it leaped twenty points up the alternative charts and into the Hot 100.
Two weeks later, Joe sang it alone at a white grand piano on a late-night talk show. It was a particularly arresting rendition, complete with a sudden if brief appearance of tears on the line “the phone rings, but it’s always for her”—tears I knew were for his dad, not me, though the audience probably thought otherwise. Zoe and I both teared up too, watching it—how could we not? How could anyone not? Sure enough, the internet started talking. The clip enjoyed a second life online, passed around among friends and then embedded into Tumblrs and cultural roundups.
I was not chill about it. I read everything, every post, every comment. This was my favorite, on a big music blog:
Song of the Year Contender: “Bay Window,” Caroline
Caroline’s Joe Morrow seems at times more like a pop star than an indie front man, and this isn’t a slag. “Pop” is a complicated word. Morrow crosses over not when making his audience dance, as on the impossibly catchy yet decidedly still indie “Britpop Night,” but when he makes them gasp, as on the late-breaking follow-up single “Bay Window.” The way he croons about watching the Twin Towers fall on TV with a love interest, it feels too universal to be anything but pop. Especially when, in the bridge, he shoves her into the friend zone. Ugh, how it hurts this listener, every time. Why does he do it? Because he’s scared shitless, and that’s what we do when we’re scared shitless. We run. “Bay Window” will never be soundtracked to 9/11 anniversary specials because it’s not how we want to see ourselves behaving in the event of tragedy. It’s about how we actually behave. How we turn the tragedy inward and make it our own.
“Actually he did it because he’d only slept with a lesbian and I’m a pain in the ass,” I said to the screen, but I bookmarked it and emailed it to my mom, and then, I couldn’t help it, I sent it to Joe. I was starting to think of us as a divorced couple with a successful grown child—shouldn’t we experience that success together, in some small way? I left the email empty beyond the link, no pleasantries, hoping the subtext was clear: You won, I don’t care, this is fucking cool. But Joe never responded. I tried not to obsess about it this time, but his silence felt like a hard punch on a still-tender bruise. He didn’t need to celebrate with me; he had a girlfriend, a bed full of guitars. After that, I kept the links to a bookmark folder.
Video: Caroline Live on Late Night
Caroline’s first late-night appearance last summer went as expected: they played their new album’s obvious single, “Britpop Night”; the band sounded great; lead singer Joe Morrow oozed his usual talent and charm. The song was a critical darling and a feel-good hit of the summer in certain scenester circles. But nobody expected Caroline to be back again on TV many months later singing a tearjerker ballad your mom would love, nor that said tearjerker would outpace the success of “Britpop Night.” Watch Morrow sing the shit out of “Bay Window,” and grab the Kleenex…and your mom.
I knew Joe wouldn’t mind being labeled pop, but I did start to worry a bit when the commentary took this “your mom” slant. Was this my influence? Oh, how they’d mocked me at Amoeba for my love of k.d. lang.
I was right: from “your mom,” it was a quick line to backlash. From one of the bloggers in my network:
RIP Caroline. Funny Strange remains one of my favorite albums of the decade, but they are jumping a big fat shark right now. Strong & Wrong was nowhere near as good, and now they’re everywhere doing this sentimental snoozefest about 9/11? You’re eating black beans, congratulations dude. Their lyrics used to be way cleverer. Pass.
Then it hit the culture warriors. From a major New York media site:
As the clip of that 9/11 torch song “Bay Window” makes the rounds, we feel compelled to point out that bay windows aren’t particularly common in New York. Or New Jersey. But you’ll find them all over the San Francisco Bay Area, including Berkeley, where the band Caroline was formed in 2001 as the college project of lead singer Joe Morrow. In the chorus, he describes himself watching “the world begin to end” (fair) and “the good give up again.” Wait, what? Is that what it looked like from the West Coast—giving up? Because our memories of NY1 that day are of firefighters running into burning buildings. Cops pulling bodies from rubble. Stories of the man in the red bandanna escorting people down the stairwell of the South Tower, or the passengers of Flight 93 fighting back against the hijackers. Are these people not “the good”? Because they sure as hell weren’t giving up. Probably Morrow is attempting some sort of anti-war message, which we support in theory, obviously. But maybe when we’re talking about a real day with real acts of unbelievable heroism, we can be inconvenienced to choose our words more carefully, or else leave it to the people who were actually there.
“The good were the people who could’ve stopped the Iraq War!” I told the screen. “Who voted for Bush’s reelection because he made them feel safe! How is that not obvious?”
But the worst was when, just a couple weeks after it had started, the backlash stopped coming. The praise stopped coming too. The internet moved on.
For weeks I felt restless, and a bit crazy, like I’d dreamed the whole thing. Every night I checked my bookmarks for reassurance, tallying up the positive mentions and the negative. How would “Bay Window” be remembered—as profound, universal pop, or problematic adult contemporary? Or would it not be remembered at all?
* * *
—
Around this time I found myself in a throng of dancing bodies at an LCD Soundsystem show. I’d come alone because Zoe and Melissa had started going to bed early in their “old age,” and because the expectation of socializing at shows had always annoyed me anyway.
It was late spring or early summer, or maybe midsummer; the days swam in San Francisco’s seasonless muck. At work I’d been given a promotion and a twenty-two-year-old girl to send crisscrossing the country in search of trendsetters, which was clearly a good thing—one more 3:00 a.m. breakdown in a hotel might’ve sent me out a city-view window—but I found myself longing for a swampy Miami cab ride or a bracing winter walk through Manhattan, anything to shock my system and mark the time.
When the dancing bodies began to tighten around me, I chastised myself for drifting so close to the stage. I started fighting my way out, my eye on the exit to a mezzanine, but then I noticed the faces of the dancers. Several local musicians I respected, one of whom had opened for Caroline on the Funny Strange tour. The owner of a legendary SF studio. An electronic artist and DJ I’d recruited as a trendsetter years earlier. I felt a hard snap of loneliness: I still wasn’t in the club.
The band started playing “Someone Great” and I decided not to fight the throng. I closed my eyes and let the sweaty flesh bounce off my own. Elbows skimmed my forearms; heels jammed my toes. After spending weeks untethered on the internet, the physicality felt good, even as it scared me a little, even as it sharpened my loneliness to a point. Luckily it was the perfect song to be lonely to.
“Someone Great” is about loss. Actually it’s about the death of James Murphy’s therapist, but we didn’t know that then, or at least I didn’t; Murphy was cagey in interviews. To me it was about how it feels when you’ve lost someone, and the one person you want to talk to about it—the one person who could help you grieve—is the person you’ve lost.
It hit me hard, as Murphy sang, how badly I wanted to talk about “Bay Window” with Joe. How cruel it was for him to deny me that.
I could feel the song’s groove in my blood, the jumpy electronic melodies that had no business being as emotional as they were. I remembered learning in school that the human heart has an electrical system: that was the sound of “Someone Great.” Each skittering beat and record-scratch squeak corresponded to the flares my heart sent up when I thought about Joe—the love, the jealousy, the anger—but they didn’t build to a crescendo. They flickered off, and on again. They kept coming.
I opened my eyes and watched Murphy onstage, singing with his chin raised, clutching the mic like a life preserver. His bandmates twisted knobs, tapped keys. Gray tufts poked out of his temples. He had lost someone great, but he was someone great too. And his pain over this loss would keep coming until the day it stopped, when someone great would be mourning him.
