The Songs of the Magnetic Fields, one at a time.
…a melody. As someone who loves hooks, I don’t care if they’re the dumbest in the world, and what could be a better way for the way a lover exposes themselves or a hook emerges on our sensoral periphery than “to unfurl”.
To have such wittily Wildeïan similes and to conclude simply that
a pretty girl is like…a pretty girl
says a lot about the power of the subject over the singer.
I really have nothing to say about the Superchunk cover, they just wanted you to know that they had a sweet record collection. You can here it at somebody else’s blog, though. Also, I found someone claiming that it actually by Superchunk and that it doesn’t make any sense “with all the angst taken out”.
This would be as good a time as any to talk about covering Magnetic Fields songs. I have a problem with people who have a quote-earnest-endquote commitment to weakly-defined aesthetics like indie rock. The clothes people wear cannot define a genre of art. I remember searching YouTube for covers of MagFields songs a few months prior, and the only thing that was consistent was a fetish for young nubile female vocalists and ridiculous fashion.
Anyways, this song is gorgeous. I think we all know that. The best I can make of it is it’s about being so in love as to be frightened, and to “turn up the tone” of a guitar being a metaphor for going beyond one’s comfort zone. Like a lot of songs that really capture the feeling of young love, and of a lover’s dispute, it pulls in extraneous detail. Another classic example is Kylie Minogue’s Love At First Sight; the way the music that was playing at the moment of her meeting her lover keeps coming up in the prechorus reflects this sort of flashbulb memory. In the same ways, a dispute reminds us of all the other things at issue (a move to NYC?). For some this is a time when music is irrelevant, for others it’s key, as it is for our mandolinist.
Now some meta. Sorry I’ve been away for a bit. However, I’m happy to inform you all that Ian Mathers of Low catablog Too many words, too many words will be providing us all with a guest post on a Magnetic Fields song, and in exchange, I’ll be writing about one Low song that caught my fancy. As mentioned earlier, he pre-empted me with a Low catablog. Oeuvreblogswapping is the new oeuvreblogging.
The thing about i is that the arrangements are actually pretty good, in a chamber-poppy way. A lot of bands who weren’t really bands have felt the desire to make a band album, and i is a great example. Really we aren’t free of any track without ukelele, cello, banjo, Claudia’s vocals, etc. Merritt also sticks to his range and achieves a really nice sotto voce throughout.
The sad-clown image is a classic allusion though (I don’t mean to make this a blog about Fellini, but La Strada, anyone?), but Merritt imagines a twisted sort of apotheosis for the clown, floating into the air via helium balloon.
Now some meta:
The graphic is based off of the marquee at the Village Vanguard.
Coltrane and Dolphy played there, and it’s in the Village, where Stephin Merritt lives.
Earlier I was talking about multiple independent discoveries (sorry, that Wikipedia page was lousy. Get on it, Wicc-asperager-pedians!). Did I mention that the idea of MIDs has been discovered several times through out history too?
My friend Rob has never heard the Magnetic Fields. But he and Heather make music that has a lot in common. Rob mostly listens to exciting independent (they called it alternative then) music from the ’90s, and has basically internalized the aesthetic of controlled angst. He doesn’t really dig on so-called “witty” music that he doesn’t make. He doesn’t think girls are funny either. At least not intentionally.
You should listen to Rob and Heather’s music. You can do so here. Rob says you should keep your hands busy when you’re listening to it. I drink beer and play Go. Rob smokes cancer sticks he buys from Canada too. I want to live forever, though.
Rob also creates CDs that are just loops of great hooks from other songs. Rob and I agree that hooks are really important and sometimes listen to songs for just the hook. “Famous” is mostly just a hook; there’s a bit of harmony there to remind you.
Here’s what I think about famous people:
Famous people are not very good at being famous. They tend to be embarrassing. I’d like to be famous. I’d be good at it. I haven’t fallen down at a large party in years. I have interesting things to say and a strong palette. I also can bike over 26 miles in one hour. That’s near the record.
I bought Holiday a couple years ago in a record store because I saw it concluded with a song that probably involved Stephin Merritt singing about X, something which sounds great to me; I was hoping for some hooky seductful piece of pop candy to reverse the social chilling I was experiencing as I settled into college. I was surprised to find, however, that the track is in fact a song in the style of the seduction poet (I think immediately of To His Coy Mistress). Everything about this gentle but insistent track is cloying.
The track, though, borrows heavily on my favorite Pulp song, “Disco 2000″ (outstanding video here). The Pulp song details the mindset of a frustrated adolescent meeting up with his childhood playmate who has blossomed into a beautiful woman. Similarly, Merritt recalls specific details of their playtimes (take note all you who write Craigslist “missed connections” missives, don’t be this girl) as a lead-into a discussion of taking the almighty sex drug in his company. His hook, though? It’s a Romeo and Juliet situation. Maybe baby can come on over and blame the drugs for what happens?
I am willing to bet Stephin doesn’t own any Pulp records. Good things get found twice.
I decided to not save the best for last. This is conclusively my favorite Stephin Merritt song, because it’s exceptional in several ways. Of course, it’s just a very simple progression with several bits of bridge and the title is used many times as a tag-line in the Tin Pan Alley style (consider how many times you hear the name of the song in a Richard Rodgers tune; it surely exceeds the much troped-about self-referentiality in hip-hop songs). This song really makes a case for shoegaze not as a genre but rather as something you DO to a song…it is probably the closest Merritt could come to My Bloody Valentine without pissing off the neighbors in his Village studio apartment, since the creation of that effect generally depends on a maximum of volume. But, certainly, he’s captured the same woozy-feeling created by noise that made Loveless so appealing to me when I was on meds after getting my wisdom teeth out. Pianos crash together.
Of course, in trad Meritt style, we don’t hear anything concrete about the lover in the song, just metaphor, and even that doesn’t give us a feeling of who we are…we wouldn’t know the boy if we saw him. Previously, I heard the lyric as “there are whole new kinds of leather” (it’s “weather”), which led me to declare this the most effectively, comfortably gay song I knew, but without that modernism, I like to imagine the singer as, say, Nero, what with all the dramatic and spinning imagery (Busby Berkeley?), I can’t actually stop thinking of Fellini’s Satyricon, which deals with boylove in such a grand style.
Good day, all. I’ve been meaning to make a blog of all the songs of a certain band. I seriously considered Low, but someone beat me to it. I overestimated my emotional commitment to the songs of the Police, and my commitment to Pavement is just starting to mature. Frankly, the Magnetic Fields oeuvre is really varied and a lot of it hasn’t gotten the attention from me it deserves. I encountered this music when I was 17 and lusting over a charming high school girl who handed me the famed 69 Love Songs boxset and, Natalie Portman-style, told me it’d change my life. It was of course hyperbole, but I’m consistently impressed with the ability of Stephin Merritt’s work to morph, appeal to a extremely diverse crowd, and I’ve missed a large portion of the discography. I plan to fix that, starting today.
As always, credit goes to modern music’s greatest fanboy, Matthew Perpetua, curator of Fluxblog and the founder of the blog genre (“BLOGS HAVE GENRE?S!”) now being called oeuvreblogs with his Pop Songs 07, where he’s attempting to cover all the songs of R.E.M. Though “song-by-song blog” or “catablog” would have been a lot better, I think it’s a really useful tool for those who take music writing seriously. People have been talking about the death of music journalism forever, but more reasonably, it’s taken as a new mission creating discussion about music. There are of course precedents for this in the past, but I welcome the newwww style.
I’ll be covering all seven full-lengths and EPs and the box set. Cheers. And if you’re an oeuvreblogger and not on my blogroll, let me know. We gotta stick together.
