Why don't rock critics understand Adam Green?

[imomus]

When I was living in my art gallery in New York, I found myself listening to the music of David Bowie's Deram period. Songs like "Uncle Arthur" and "There Is A Happy Land" sounded good in an art gallery, and I found myself thinking the counter-intuitive, counter-canonical thought: "This is the closest David Bowie ever got to making art music." Sure, the public may prefer the vampy glam of "Ziggy Stardust" and the critics (not to mention Philip Glass, and Bowie himself) might be unanimous that it's the experimental rock of the Berlin trilogy which represents his artistic peak. But the oddness, detachment, narrative clarity, eccentricity and subtlety of the Deram material ("Silly Boy Blue" and "When I Live My Dream" are both generic yet completely defiant of genre, their arrangements full of subtle discords) marks it out as something closer to what we think of as art: something disturbing, something that throws genres into crisis rather than riding them home to the usual "triumphs", something that abjures easy power or cheap cool. The power of rock and cool is "easy power" because it's a Faustian pact, undermined by its own eternal, deadly effectiveness. In exchange for a Pied Piper-like power over the masses, rock performers give up their right to art's real strength: its detachment, its capacity to alienate and estrange experience. Rock power appeals to the adrenal glands; it's viscerally interesting but conceptually boring. What works in a stadium doesn't work in an art gallery, and vice versa. If rock is mostly recognition, art is cognition, the first encounter with something new and potentially disturbing.

Another reason it might be sensible to poke around in Bowie's cabaret period for stuff which reminds us of what we think of as art is that rock music is rooted in Romantic ideology. It cannot get away from corny Romantic-period cliches about the authenticity of the self, the vision of the artist, the struggle for passion and commitment, the capacity of art to elevate the human spirit, the individual struggling against society, and, of course, transcendence through drug experience (yes, we're back in that "stately pleasure dome" in Xanadu, doing drugs with Coleridge and Kubla Khan). Bowie bought into these values big time in the late 70s; the song "Heroes" is rotten (and resplendent) with them. The "Heroes" album, with its Egon Shielesque sleeve, updates Romanticism to the Expressionist period, Romanticism's zenith, the last time it could stand proud before Hitler—the ultimate Romantic artist, as Syberberg points out in Hitler, A Film From Germany—ruined it forever for most of us.

It may work well in arenas (and the Nietzschean, cocaine-and-Crowley-addled 70s Bowie wasn't averse to describing Hitler at Nuremburg as "the ultimate rock'n'roll showman"), but when you put rock Romanticism in an art gallery it can't help looking terribly 19th century, which damages its chances of being taken seriously as a work of contemporary art. What can work in an art gallery, though, is cabaret. Strange cabaret. Cabaret that's so whimsical and odd that it unsettles. Cabaret that's sonically incredibly tame yet conceptually or lyrically more aggressive than any screechy rock noise. Cabaret that asserts no humanist values, and wears its playful blank flatness as a badge of honour. Cabaret very much like the kind Adam Green croons his way through on his 2005 album "Gemstones".

Critics mostly hated Green's album. Q magazine gave it zero out of ten and said it was "as worthless as it's possible for music to be". "His tunes and/or jokes plop out like forced turds," said Spin, and Neumu concurred: "Gemstones is shit. It's awful. It really, really is." Neumu thought the problem was that Green was now working with "a bunch of slick session musicians, a posse of paycheck-cashing guns-for-hire... What's most noxious, though, is the way that Green sounds perfectly at home with them, his singing on "Crackhouse Blues," in particular, being just as self-conscious and soulless as the musos he's playing with." Pitchfork thought that Green failed the Jonathan Richman test because Richman "means it. With Green, that's never been clear."

There you have it, a postmodern artist being hammered through a premodern hole, being judged by the presuppositions of an essentially 19th century rockist Romantic criticism. Session musicians = money = no soul = not meaning it. The hidden inverse of those associations is pure Romanticism: amateur musicians = poor = soul = meaning it. It's a pre-Adorno vision of soul, because Adorno nailed the paradox beautifully: "in the end, soul itself is the longing of the soul-less for redemption". Romantics project authenticity onto the poor, and see it missing in situations where professionalisation and money dominate. The trouble is, that's all situations ever in popular music, a professionalised commercial venture. So why single out Adam Green for paying his musicians? Such criticism isn't postmodernist, and it isn't even modernist. It hasn't even reached the 20th century yet. It hasn't read Adorno, let alone Warhol or Derrida.

I would recommend anyone to watch the Gemstones Promotional Film made by Adam Green (amongst others). Apart from being very funny and entertaining, it shows very clearly how absurd it is that we demand musicians to "mean it" in a world dominated by the endlessly fragemented, reflexive and artificial surfaces of television. Like Dylan in "Don't Look Back", Green is surrounded by rockist critics, the Mr Joneses of our time, who show every time they open their mouths that they don't know what is happening here. Green adopts the Warholian technique of faux-naivete, answering with a "Yes" or a "No" or an "I guess" when people ask stuff like:

Breathless Humanist Interviewer: Your previous band the Moldy Peaches had a bratty immaturity, which was fine at the time, but I think the stuff you're doing at the moment is a lot more... there's a lot more depth to it, you seem to be enjoying it more. There's a sense of wonder in the songs, and love, I guess, for a lot of things, and I think that's a lot nicer. Do you feel that you're more comfortable with music and performing and stuff nowadays, or...

Green: Yeah.

Green's music is art in the same way the Chapman Brothers' work is art: because of the utterly relentless trenchancy of his nihilism, all the more powerful for the fact that he lays it down in a crooning baritone over cabaret tracks. (The session musician thing is the whole point, Neumu!) But even his defenders don't feel free to celebrate this playful nihilism for its own sake. They try to smuggle in a bit of humanism through the back door:

"Green's warped imagery, and the way he plays everything to the hilt, cover up the fact that there's real emotions in his songs, real feelings of confusion and loneliness. Occasionally, in the middle of a song, those feelings will come across in a completely pure way, where you realize that he's not winking or joking in any way. Then a few seconds later he'll be singing about someone biting his cock." Pop Matters review.

"There’s a lot more behind the rude words to be discovered only by people with the perception and persistence to discover. So, “Carolina,” far from being a piece of scatological sniggering, is actually about coming to terms with a girlfriend’s abortion. Deeper than dirty water." Stylus review.

The thing is, this is liking Green for the wrong reasons. If you wanted deep and heartfelt stuff about abortions, I'm sure you could find more of it elsewhere. But maybe the absurdist, fuck-you nihilism of Green's shiny and bizarre cabaret music is bound to contain a repressed sincere other which is all the more powerful for being repressed. It's almost like a ghost we collectively create because we're so terrified of the idea of pure, playful nihilism, of "This means nothing at all, and it's great".

It's ironic, but when we try to claim the status of art for things that aren't automatically art, we reach for quite the wrong tools. We employ the ideologies of dead movements from long ago, like Romanticism and Renaissance Humanism. Now, you may want to accuse me of being ahistorical here. "Sure," you may say, "rock criticism draws on Romanticism when it evokes laughably retro notions of the rock artist as a lone genius struggling against, well, drug addiction or world hunger or the faceless crowd or whatever it is. And sure, that retro claim actually disqualifies rock from being taken seriously as contemporary art. But rock is a form that falls within the historical era of Postmodernism. So the Romanticism you're describing is a revival, a retro postmodern echo of the Romantic era."

I'd say you're absolutely right about that, but by the same token, that makes Rock Romanticism a form of kitsch much more egregious and corny than the kind the critics are accusing Adam Green of. So it comes back to the work's relationship with "easy power", with genre and ambivalence; its capacity to disturb us. It might turn out to be the most "kitschy" work which is the least kitschy, because when kitsch is disturbing and off-kilter it combines all the power of archetypes with all the power of defamiliarization. It stretches all the way from recognition to cognition. It becomes something very like contemporary art.

Comments

[martymartini.livejournal.com]

I loved Gemstones, it`s probably my best album of 2005. Some of the songs on it remind me of stuff you might have done around the time of Ping-Pong.

oh such a face

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

yes, reminds me also of the "I like you but I don't need you" song from that album.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

There is one minor misstep in this post. You appear to assume that postmodernism is the "only thing going on". There is more to contemporary art than the postmodern, its just that postmodernism is now such an institution that it seems to be the only thing contemporary that "makes the papers". Interesting parallels abound, my apologies for the crude explanation.

There are seeds of another large movement germinating and I see evidence of it everywhere, and yet I have no idea what to call it. Perhaps that's something for critics to invent 15 years from now and, no doubt, for people like us to implant "bio imprints" criticizing it on our "bio-hologram network nodes".

[din-din-dote.livejournal.com]

Excellent post, Momus.

[i-am-a-hot-sale.livejournal.com]

Does Adam Green understand Adam Green?

yes

[(Anonymous)]

he understands himself so well he realizes he doesnt have to understand himself. he doesnt care. he tours in europe and doesnt have to go to med school or work at starbucks. i think he's got plenty figured out.

[hornbuckle.livejournal.com]

i must say that i hate, hate, hate(d) the moldy peaches. however, i would be willing to give his newest solo album a listen after reading this..

[iran-contra.livejournal.com]

Thank God Momus is here to speak for the people and SOCK IT TO those evil critics between making mediocre electronic albums.

[benchilada.livejournal.com]

"Shut up, you bitch. The internet may be a virtual place, but the people behind the screens are real. Don't be so cold-hearted, and I swear that you won't have as many things to recant on your death bed." c.f. Your Bio

[cutup.livejournal.com]

I didn't think much of Gemstones, but maybe it's worth another look. Deram era Bowie always felt like he was tapping the inner child's more gentle emotions (whereas most pop taps the inner child's extreme emotions).

[benchilada.livejournal.com]

Hey, I wore out my old cassette of Love You 'til Tuesday...

Hang on, that's not necessarily a good thing is it?
Goddamned "Rubber Band" running through my head now...

[red-scharlach.livejournal.com]

Excellent post. I wasn't very interested in The Moldy Peaches when they came on the scene, but I listened to the songs on the video page you link to and think it is time I reconsidered. I think I'll pick up Gemstones and give it some thought.

[auto-appendix.livejournal.com]

Anthony Newley

he's the brat!!

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

"beauty is evil, immaculate EVIL"

[(Anonymous)]

Isn't postmodernism just a self-conscious attempt to make some virtue out of a lack of authentic individuality? To be ironically "x", one must be lacking in genuine "y".

[besskeloid.livejournal.com]

After watching the Gemstones promo, I've genuinely warmed to Adam Green & his songs & lyrics. Thank you, Momus.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I love Bowie's Deram stuff, and find it strange that he's virtually disowned it. It's so perenially un-cool, or perhaps, a-cool. In fact, I've actually been thinking of doing an entry on the Deram stuff on my own blog for ages along similar lines.

By the way, when I heard you utter the words "very selfish", during your performance of Maf at the library, I knew that you were a fan of the Deram stuff, too. It was a great little moment.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, nice to see someone spotted my "Please Mr Gravedigger" reference!

Odder still is that Bowie decided that his early stuff was worth revisiting, about five years ago. He made an album called "Toy" which was made up of new recordings of his songs from the 1960s. But it was a time when he was having record label problems, and "Toy" never saw the light of day.

[badspelling.livejournal.com]

i don't think that Gemstones is as good as his previous album Friends of Mine. I don't know why, it just doesn't have the same song by song success rate. it's still good though.

I remember seeing adam green during his Friends of Mine period in what could be described as a redneck or low rent bar in Lower Eastside Vancouver, where all the junkie and welfare people hang out. usually the bar in the day would be full of Keno-playing hookers and grandmas and washed-up umemployed labourers watching hockey and then during the night the influx of hipsters arriving to watch the bands would drive them out. this show was so undersold that this didn't happen. only about 20 people were there to see him and the keno play continued unabated.
I remember being really worried about this crowd's reaction to a skinny white jewish boy with an acoustic guitar singing songs about fucking "a girl with no legs". But they loved it. confused at first, sure, but amused and interested definitely. they laughed in all the right places and it seemed like the perfect place to enjoy his music.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The thing is, Adam Green is now huge in Germany. He fills arenas, he gets long interviews on the music channels and in the rock magazines. He seems to tap into two very different tendencies in European culture: the fact that it's both more conservative and more radical than American culture. There's a certain Roger Whittaker element to Green, a lack of overt aggression, which lots of terribly straight and conservative young Germans are no doubt responding to the same way their parents respond to schlager. But there's also the postmodern nihilism angle, the fact that his irony, like a lot of Berlin irony, is deeply political, a form of political opposition to mainstream American culture. This links "Jessica" to something like Brecht and Weill, a trenchant spirit of deep and political, yet playful, irony.

Also, Green is treated here like a poet. Suhrkamp Verlag, a very serious and prestigious literary publisher, this year put out a slim volume called "Adam Green: Magazine", of Green's writings and drawings. It's quite similar to the way Harmony Korine was adulated in Japan even while being a complete nonentity in his homeland, completely eclipsed by his ex-girlfriend Chloe Sevigny.

[(Anonymous)]

Wonderful stuff. Why is print journalism rarely this interesting?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Because it's written by professionals for money, and we all know that amateur = poor = real = passionate = soul! (Whoops, letting my bullshit Romantic ideology peek through there!)

[ddf.livejournal.com]

Very insightful. No wonder I hate guitars so much.

[concrete-tiger.livejournal.com]

Do you hate the guitars, or do you hate the cock-rocking attitudes of some of the people who play them?

[encyclops.livejournal.com]

I don't trust clever paradoxes. They seem to have their own "easy power." I had to reread Adorno's in context several times to make sure there was anything behind it.

Anyway, while I'm not too fond of 19th-century Romanticism in any art form, and while most of my favorite 20th- and 21st-century music doesn't lean heavily at all on the Real, Rootsy Rock myth, it's hard for me to really give a shit whether any of it would sound good in an art gallery or could be "taken seriously as a work of contemporary art." I respond to it in ways that have very little to do with the way I respond to contemporary art, and I think there's plenty of room for both without having to choose one to value over the other.

I'm sure you'd agree, but all the tired railing against "rockism" always comes off as establishing a hierarchy. I cringe when I see people parroting it; they sound like high school sophomores who have just discovered that American politicians sometimes lie. You mean that art isn't the same thing as reality? How then can anyone have the audacity to try and write about real emotions? All is artifice, the faker the better! Nihilism is funny because it's sophomoric.

It seems like clever-paradox, the idea that cabaret (which, depending on where you draw the line, actually is a 19th century musical form) is more contemporary than rock, invented in the mid-20th century. It seems more accurate to say that the currencies of rock (alleged realism and emotion) are less in line with the qualities you value in contemporary art than the currencies of cabaret (alleged wit and intellect).

I'm sampling Adam Green on iTunes anyway. My first reaction was "They Might Be Giants for would-be hipsters," but then I remembered, no, that would be Ween. I own records by both of them, though. How does Green distinguish himself from those two acts, in your estimation?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My first reaction was "They Might Be Giants for would-be hipsters," but then I remembered, no, that would be Ween. I own records by both of them, though. How does Green distinguish himself from those two acts, in your estimation?

Well, I compared Green to the Chapman Brothers and talked about his "fuck-you nihilism". To extend the contemporary art metaphor, They Might Be Giants would be David Shrigley—cute, twee, something you might buy your aunt as a present—and Ween would be John Currin.

As for your thing about "real emotions", well, it's my turn to accuse you of making a hierarchy. Between "real" emotions and others. Do "real" emotions have to be the same old ones we've experienced a million times? Can't we go into the emotional lab which is the recording studio and come out with some new ones for our listeners to savour? I'm thinking of something like my friend Toog's concoctions: "funny macabre" and "sinister absurd".

[alionunderaw.livejournal.com]

I think there might be some confusion on the part of listeners (I guess) that confuses 'meaning it' and taking it seriously. Isn't, say, hating anything produced by Motown because 'they didn't write their own songs' also sort of an outgrowth of what you're talking about here?

[alionunderaw.livejournal.com]

where "taking it seriously" has to do with production and construction of the actual words or music (quality, say or lack thereof) rather than being absolutely 'sincere' about every statement in the production?

[emobus.livejournal.com]

The first time I saw Adam Green solo was in NYC in 2002. It was just him and an acoustic guitar. Then, in April, I saw him in Vancouver, backed up by a full band! I've always been, for lack of a less corny-sounding adjective, enchanted by his voice and his music. Now where can I find Adam's corresponding piece about Momus?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_greengrass/]

You criticize the critics for accusing Green of selling out and hiring musicians so shortly after you accuse Bowie of selling out and getting rock and roll or romanticism or "soul". Your values seem as dogmatic as theirs, and all seem to state that making something easy invalidates it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's not exactly what I did. "Selling out" is hardly my accusation; after all, I say quite clearly that commercial situations are "all situations ever in pop music". Rather than "selling out", I say Bowie signed a "Faustian pact" when he decided to become a "Pied Piper" and use Rock Romanticism for "easy power" and stadium appeal. My criticism isn't to do with selling, but to do with genre and the erasure of doubt and ambivalence. Actually, Bowie preserved ambivalence (the transvestite look of the early 70s) and doubt ("Sense of Doubt" on the "Heroes" album) much longer and more faithfully than most rock artists. I'd say it wasn't until "Let's Dance / Serious Moonlight" that he jettisoned them. But, for someone who wanted so much to be taken seriously as an artist (http://www.imomus.com/bowieincredible.mp3), it's interesting that Bowie didn't really know how to do that. He knew how to become a Romantic or an Expressionist, but not how to become a contemporary artist.

Cabaret = easy decadence?

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

I don't know Adam Green's music, but, based on your passionate advocacy of it, I've ordered a copy of Gemstones.

Doesn't the "cabaret style" itself have easy power - easy decadence? I've heard enough music predicated on the assumption that if your music goes "oom-pah" sarcastically enough, that makes you into Bertholt Brecht (eg Tom Waits). I once found myself at a friend's house forced to sit through "Chicago". It confirmed my prejudice that - at least musically - the cabaret style is exhausted. At least let's try Grime cabaret or F***step cabaret.

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Dear Nick,

Thank you: I enjoyed your post immensely and have been stimulated by your post on (in)authenticity to write.

About authenticity and rock music: I think it is probably too easy to over-demarcate musical genres. I like your description of it as a retro-Romantic critical fabrication, but wonder how much this has to do with a mistrust of the totalitarian, monolithic claims that too often accompany the notion of "authenticity" - for instance, I am deeply suspicious of alleged indie music, a la Radiohead, Coldplay and their ilk, because it all seems so much dangerous rhetoric and maudlin nonsense that just doesn't capture the joy or approach the sublimity of musical possibility. This leads me first to think that your comment must be meant just as an over-simplified rule covering "the majority of cases (outbreaks?!) of rock music"; for instance, Man or Astroman? is clearly rock, but also obviously playful and non-serious, splicing old US sci-fi theme tunes with surf guitar and silly, naive wonder at space and the power, pathos and absurdity of human imagination in a cod-cosmic context. Or David Thomas & 2 Pale Boys - very haunting, apparently "authentic" music loosely following rock forms, but musically highly ideosyncratic and full of intertextuality and quotes of others of their songs, like they are weaving a splendid rag rug from the ruins of rock.

Secondly, I wonder how you would define "authenticity" in these days when much empirical psychological evidence points towards us all possessing multi-centred brains with multiple, changeable personalities. As I mentioned above, I share your suspicion of monolithic forms, but find a deep joy in exploring different musical styles and in encountering musicians who seem to share that wonder. It makes me wonder whether there is still a kind of authentic curiosity at work here - something more valuable than any non-budgeable ideology as it moves from "gravitational mass" to "gravitational mass" of different styles and ways of being, rather than being a weight pulling others towards it in itself. For example, here I am typing this whilst listening to Halalium by U-Cef, a lovely album inspired, so I understand, from a trip the artist made to North Africa, his ethnic "homeland" (though I believe he is a Londoner now). It has periods of Arabic classical music, radio interspertials and street recordings, drum and bass tracks, North African rap, a little acoustic "campfire" music: but in a way it is all authentic; it impressionistically captures U-Cef's seemingly great experience of Morocco, related via his own interest in modern London electronic musical forms. Yesterday, I was watching a wonderful performance of a Shostakovich symphony on a TV programme broadcasting live from the proms, then retired to my room to hera some 1960s performances of Flanders and Swann. All of these experiences, whilst collectively a coat of many musical colours, were experienced in the Romantic sense of authenticity - I put myself in each situation, experienced the emotional power of the symphony and the gentle fabulousness of Flanders & Swann's whimsical genius - but of course there was no overarching unity to my experience; each moment was a unity in itself. To link everything in this overlong paragraph together, I wonder whether being multi-centred and seeking multi-cultural experiences (but each of intrinsic interest and power, not merely extrinsic) is a new way to be authentic these days, and to authentically reflect who we biologically are as multi-centre-brained humans! So, to turn your whole argument on its head, I guess I dislike the kind of reverent-towards-its-past, very conservative rock music you seem to write about in your post because it is inauthentically reactionary.
[post cut in two as it is too long!]

Part Two of My Post!

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

To my mind, then, and to water the seeds of this aesthetic, music should be reverential in the right way, which terminologically sounds terribly Aristotelean, but all I mean is that perhaps we should use the past like Shostakovich used it, rather than Oasis: as a series of options and positions to depart from or quote from, rather than as a black-and-white, thuggish replication of a narrow range of "good" chord progressions, lyrics and sentiments and denigration of their "bad" equivalents. That is what is totalitarian, brutal and disgusting in modern music to me, whatever genre it occurs in.

Thanks once again for the inspiration to further experiment with this idea!

Re: Part Two of My Post!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I like your idea of a sort of "micro-authenticity" within each part of our fragmented experience. Things only become problematical when we splice all these fragments together: when we "relativize" U-Cef by splicing him together with Flanders and Swann, or put Shostakovich, as Neil Tennant dreamed of doing, to a disco beat. I guess that's the essence of postmodernism, really. Pomo conservatives try to keep everything in the right compartments, and maintain at least the "micro-authenticity" of each experience. Pomo radicals want more and more edits, more and more splicing, more and more mixing of incongruous elements, as if to draw our attention to, and celebrate, diversity and impurity for their own sakes. Adam Green doesn't quite fit into either category: he's not doing 90s-style Cornelius or Beck-type splicing, but sticking to a fairly narrow genre (cabaret) only to do it violence by singing absurdist or pornographic stuff over the top.