Too cool to be cool

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.