Too cool to be cool

[imomus]

Last summer my friend Suzy, writer for an 'edgy style mag' in London, gave me an advance copy of Adam Green's second solo album, Friends of Mine (Rough Trade). I ripped it for mp3s. Later I played a show at Spaceland with Kimya Dawson, who was Adam's songwriting partner in the Moldy Peaches, and bought her album My Cute Friend Sweet Princess. I'd seen the Moldy Peaches live in New York while they were still together, and really enjoyed their show, which had a kind of Robin Hood-joins-the-Velvet Underground feel. Later I read some pretty stupid dismissals of the band from the NME, which said they were all about irony and making grad students laugh and smirk and feel superior. The NME swung its support behind the White Stripes and the Strokes and the Von Bondies, those, like, cool bands with their fresh sound, and the Moldy Peaches quietly split up.

But the rather disquieting originality and playfulness of the Peaches, instead of fading off the face of the planet, multiplied in the form of lots of solo albums from Adam and Kimya. Kimya's show with me at Spaceland last year was great, and I'll forever associate her odd, surreal, deadpan lyrics with the boulevards of Los Angeles. Now Ayako, my flatmate here in Berlin, is listening to the Adam Green album a lot. In fact, Adam just played Berlin, and although we missed his show, we caught his interview with Charlotte Roche on Viva 2.



Charlotte and Adam are two of the sexiest people in the world, in a kind of weird, autistic, burikko way. Adam, who's just 22, comes over like a sweeter version of Bob Dylan in 'Don't Look Back'; a mixture of shyness, naivete, charm and fuck-you nihilism. (Click the picture to see a 9MB video of Charlotte and Adam's moment.) I'm currently very enchanted with Green's work, which is supposed to be part of the 'antifolk' movement but strikes me as falling into an interesting Jewish popular music tradition I'm tempted to call the 'too cool to be cool' school.

When I listen to Green I think mainly of 1960s Jewish singers: Tony Newley, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed. Think of how amazingly straight these guys sounded. You could hear their voices clearly above the music. They were always calm and measured, literary yet also rather cabaret. They used sort of lame-beautiful cabaret arrangements, with strummy guitars and strings. Although capable of the usual gestures of 'cool' and 'rebellion' (Reed in the VU being loud and feedbacky), they were also capable of a very different kind of mood, a much more affecting and disturbing one: a combination of simplicity and strangeness. You could never quite work out if they were being straight with you or pulling your leg. They said terrible or hilarious things with a quiet voice. They messed with your head and did funny stuff with narrative. The sense of unease you got as they fucked with you so insouciently made you realise that they were either psychopaths or just tremendously, uncoolly, cool. The 'rebels' were, in Susan Sontag's phrase, 'aggressively normal'. These guys gently took you to a place as funny as it was threatening.



'Too cool to be cool' songs sound like out-takes from Broadway musicals. And yet there's something really hard and wise and subversive and subcultural and even nihilistic in their words. They take big risks, even while the backing track wears kitten mittens. Think of Cohen's 'You Know Who I Am', so soft and gooey, yet hard and terrifying: 'I need you to carry my children in, and I need you to kill a child... You know who I am, you've stared at the sun...' Think of Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side', with its jazzy lounge backing and those terrifically daring, non-judgemental lyrics about gender-op fuck-ups and other 'superstars'. Adam Green's songs feel like that to me: stupidly wise in the style of Syd Barrett, complicatedly simple in the manner of Daniel Johnson. His songs share something with the work of David Bowie's most under-rated period, his early Decca-Deram vaudeville songs about misfits and losers, uncool yet well-told, odd and evocative narratives full of whimsical character sketches: 'Uncle Arthur', 'When I'm Five', 'The Gospel According To Tony Day'. It's the mixture of menace and a childlike, weird simplicity reminiscent of Edward Lear and William Blake that gets me in the end. When Green croons (in 'Jessica'):

Tommorrow gets closer
A purple bulldozer
Is calling you on the phone
Your love life precedes you
Your son-in-law feeds you
Injections of cortizone

it has something of the same feel of sinister whimsy, the same delight in writing, the same mischievous headfuckery, the same scary dispassionate nihilism, the same avoidance of cheap Hallmark emotion, that Leonard Cohen demonstrated in 'One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong':

An Eskimo showed me a movie
He'd recently taken of you
The poor man could hardly stop shivering,
His lips and his fingers were blue...

Green's song Bluebirds has this cheery 60s arrangement, wholesome, pretty and jaunty with its smooth pop-folk string arrangement, and over the top Green is crooning (and his voice is very good, very relaxing and confidence-inspiring, he enunciates clearly):

Bluebirds are so natural
I wanna buy them for my friends
Bluebirds are so dismal
And I want to trade mine in

And I don't go out for brunch
And I don't go out for cunts
And I don't go out for months
Without my Barnes and Noble credit card

The strangeness, the gestalt clash, is something you're more likely to find in art than popular music. Beck, with his lazy rush of surreal imagery, never told stories like this, never tapped into the directness of children's tales or fables or fairy tales, and never used irony to so aggressive an end. The kind of territory this takes me to belongs to much bigger, more disturbing figures: people like Matthew Barney and David Lynch.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Kimya is on livejournal. I think her name is Kimya_Dawson or something close to that. I love her.

[peacockpunk.livejournal.com]

I've seen the Moldy Peaches five times, each occasion more magical and emotional than the last. The Adam Green album (and indeed his previous one) are genius but barely anyone listens to me when I tell them. We met them backstage in Manchester and stole their beer and crisps. I wanna marry Kimya. And Adam.

Saw Hammell On Trial last week - sweaty, sweaty manic Lenny Bruce storytelling 1930s vintage electro-wired acoustic New York preacher. You don't get Ed Hammell in the NME either.

[oola.livejournal.com]

charlotte rche sings on a new Superpitcher track.

it's the loveliest.

[(Anonymous)]

In the beginning there was the word, and the word was 'the Jews', and the word was with the Jews.

C.

[burgertime.livejournal.com]

adam used to work at the vintage store rags-a-gogo on 8th street near A (i think it was) and when i first moved to new york i would pop in there all the time and talk to him, who was my age and i thought was cute in a beckish way but really geeky... i guess they go hand in hand. one day he gave me this cdr he had burned with a xeroxed cover and said, "you should listen to me sing. i'm going to be famous some day" and i just laughed at him in that "oh adam you are so deluded" way and put it on in my dorm room and thought it was the worst thing i'd heard in my life. so bad i sorta loved it and would listen to it on repeat with my goth roommate and jump around. it was a guilty pleasure. so bad i put it on my answering machine and emailed him asking him to call me and accidentally hear himself singing some song about dicks and chickens. he played a nyu art show that i had work in and there were four kids there milling about completely confused by his set and the bad abstract art on the walls. it makes me happy that he proved himself right. funny how he was so cocky about it though.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, do you know Simon Finn's Pass The Distance? Sounds a lot like the type of thing you're talking about. Recorded 1970 or thereabouts, folky in a Syd Barrett way, but makes Syd sound as normal as a bank teller. The album was produced by David Toop I think.

H.

[(Anonymous)]

okay Kimya's username is Kimya_Dawson_ Everyone go read it! She's really cute. and Beautiful. I want a carbon copy of her in my basement.

[defenderofpants.livejournal.com]

i saw a purple bulldozer once. it was the strangest thing.
i think i wrote a short story about it. huh,

momus, i know this sounds like a strange question

[peteya.livejournal.com]

and it's probably an odd reply to your ode to the moldy peaches (just heard some today and i'm fantasizing about going to the music store), but are you into Fitzgerald and are you a medievalist?

Re: momus, i know this sounds like a strange question

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I've read 'The Great Gatsby' if that's the Fitzgerald you mean, but I wouldn't say it left any profound tire-tracks through my soul. Am I a medievalist? Yes, to some extent. I love medieval music. But I won't have flying buttresses anywhere near my house.

flying buttresses?

[peteya.livejournal.com]

Haha, I'd forgotten I asked this. The reason I had asked is because I had been reading another F. Scott Fitzgerald book, Tender is the Night, and the name Momus was mentioned in passing (as a name on a guestlist...). But later I found out that this is actually the name of a Greek god (found out via Godchecker.com), a much more apt explanation for your choice of moniker. I had also read another thing about the two different types of people in the world. One of those people was a medievelist, somebody who liked to categorize and put things under labels. I felt like you enjoyed making theories and creating new categories for things. I also figured medievel music fit your tastes. But most importantly, you liked categories. So, no, it didn't have to do with architecture or music, but rather with an attitude.

That was one of those ridiculous moments when I thought, in my own small world, that everything seemed to converge. Like when the psychic gives a vague and general prognostication and it applies in an individual way.

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

Ahoy Momus. I'm also a fan of this tradition of Jewish popular music. Based in German lieder, excessive bookishness, and the measured, sonorous method of singing we learn as children for the incantation of Hebrew prayers, I call it Jewish Soul (Jew-eyed Soul?). Now, take these artists you mentioned--Cohen, Reed, et al; keep the strummy guitars and strings, remove the edge of urbane nihilism, the surreality, remove the sinister from the whimsy, and you end up with Neil Diamond!