CroMagnonJazz » pedro

Friendly Fire– Picking the Scab

cromag — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 22:44:21 +0000

*Warning*: Inasmuch as this album/movie has a plot, this review may ruin it for you. But it doesn’t really, so don’t be such a nit.

Perhaps the most perfectly ghastly scene in Sean Lennon’s new movie, which is based on his new CD, which is based on his recent life, is in the “video” for On Again Off Again, which you can see on youtube here.

Sean, playing himself, goes to the movies (to see a movie called Friendly Fire) with his girlfriend, played by his ex-girlfriend, Bijou Phillips. They have a chat about an Avant Garde film, then Avant Garde art in general. Something is strained about the conversation—Sean seems hurt by her vague dismissal of Duchamps’ “Fountain” and counters with some weak and nerdy platitudes which visibly annoy her. A guy in line behind them says “Hey Julian, I’m a big fan!” and Sean looks crushed (so it’s clear this is no pseudonymous character).

They go in and watch a movie starring Lindsey Lohan and Jason Schwartzman. They go through an arty pantomime of a scene that just occurred in the actual movie Friendly Fire. In that scene, Sean, playing his own best friend (without spectacles so you can tell them apart…) and Bijou neck and play head games with eachother while clueless Sean waits outside ringing the buzzer. “Do you want him to come up?” she asks. “Yes,” says Sean-as-traitorous-buddy. She just stares at him, caught in a bluff, then leaves, to continue the farce of her love. Meanwhile, in the theater, as Sean watches this reenactment of his cuckolding with only mild concern, Bijou is getting phone calls from her lover, and eventually slips out to go meet him.

The real drama behind this project, as you may have heard in some reviews, is that Bijou actually did cheat on Sean in exactly this way with his best friend, who subsequently died in a motorcycle accident. But that doesn’t really tell us why Sean would make this movie so self-referential. Instead of just making an semi-autobiographical adaptation of the painful events, he examines the events, then analyses his examination, then examines the process of making art out of the analyses of the examination of the reenacted painful events. This can’t be healthy.

In fact the whole theme of this album is sickness, not redemption. It might be useful to imagine that he is ridding himself of his demons and making peace with the ghost of his unforgiven friend…the songs might have been full of answers and inspirational platitudes. Instead it’s stocked with lyrics like: “You can’t regret what you forget,” and “I don’t want to hear another word from you now… / I’d rather be wrong…” and in the most beautifully harmonious line of Headlights, “Life is only slowly dying.” In lines like “If life is just a dream …/ Which of us is dreaming / And who will wake up screaming?” Sean parodies the hippie existentialism of his father’s band—a theme that emerges again in an animated sequence where Sean and some companions fly on a Yellow Submarine-like spaceship to a mysterious other world where they are trapped in a intergalactic zoo by giant five-eyed aliens with other freaks and what appears to be Yoko Ono. Even the gorgeous guitar solo light-show at the end of the video for Headlights seems more like the paranoid hallucination of a dying man than a transcendental drug experience. The guitarist smirks—I’ll save you kid, but for what?

The songs mutter and swoop along, pretty but never uplifting. There are a lot of Elliot Smith comparisons to be made, along with Muse or Rufus Wainwright, but what makes Sean’s songs stand out from these other mopey songwriters is his plain-spoken heartbreak—not just in the lyrics but in the way his voice swoops downward unexpectedly and the chords change almost randomly in the bridges, as if he can’t stand to move forward in a normal progression…(especially in Falling Out Of Love, the last track) like a man so lost in his own head he has to keep changing the channels on his car radio to bring him back to the new moment, a new snatch of melody to keep him, momentarily, away from the emptiness and regret.

I read another review that derided this record for its sense of defeat…That to me is its greatest strength. Instead of crafting some happy ending to the horrible facts of his love disasters, it minutely details the endless and vicious cycle of loss and grief–where the final revelation of the affair is replayed again and again, in real-time and in period dress and in animal masks and acid-watercolor–and arriving at a kind of grim humor about the whole thing. It’s ridiculous, in the end: the levels upon levels of self-reference and melodrama, as meaningless as sticking your pisspot in a museum.

The first sequence in the movie (part of which was adapted into the commercially released video for Dead Meat but is fully replayed here)
perfectly balances the earth-shaking opera-sized tension with Sean’s bitter self-deprecation at his own pretension. He plays some kind of Spanish musketeer in a crumbling Mexican castle who comes to play cards with the evil cowboys that run the place (or something). He cheats (poorly) and is caught. Instead of running, he challenges the badass boss to a duel, they fence in a pretty decent action sequence as some John Brion flutes toodle and he falsettos thinly above them. He is stabbed and dies. The camera swings around and there is a TV screen showing a grey sky and a field. At the end of the movie, the last video is set in that field, as Sean’s fencer dies in the arms of his lady. Again the camera swings around and we see the TV screen. On it is Sean (in the same set as at the beginning of this video) sitting, writing what will presumably become this album, starting the whole mess over again. Like that video for Spectacle makes clear, his fantasies about triumph, revenge, and reconciliation are just scab-picking…in fact, the production of a record and movie like this is akin to tearing open a wound and stuffing it full of dirt to see what pretty colors the infection might bring.

In my opinion, with this CD/DVD combo, Lennon has brought the role of a recording artist to a higher level…and of course made a morose and beautiful record.

Preview with scenes from the whole movie
Listen to a live concert by him:
All the videos from the new record:
Rolling Stone likes it:
Interview with the Vampire

House Warming Party

cromag — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 16:04:37 +0000

Some friends in college got screwed over by their landlord. They were told they had to vacate their house in like May and most were going out of town and had already signed a lease for the fall. So they were evicted with little notice because the owner wanted to sell the place, they were pissed, they decided to take revenge.

The night they moved their stuff out, they turned over the keys but left a window open. At midnight a bunch of people showed up with five 30 packs of highlife and a thirst for destruction. We started out just having a wicked party. A couple of homeless guys wandered by and we called them over and gave them beer. One tried to sleep but the other joined us, laughing in confusion as we went around writing on the walls with magic markers and poking holes in the drywall. I think he almost bolted when we threw the fridge out the window.

It went downhill from there…soon I was watching sweet well-behaved straight-A college girls standing on chairs in the upstairs bedroom screaming like banshees as they tore long strips of brass piping out of the ceiling and bent it into pretzels…Andrew WK’s first album was blaring from a tinny boombox on repeat as supposedly civilized young scholars swung hammers rhythmically into the walls to spell out I HART COCK or smashed windows by taking doors off the hinges and trying to fit them through the frames lengthwise.

When we set off fireworks in the kitchen, the cops showed up. Some of the wussier chicks and the homeless guys ran, but one rich kid who was famous for being so ironic and blasé that he was basically a vampire went out front, showed them his license with that current address and promised to be quieter, all while covered in beer and woodchips. Of course as soon as they were around the corner we started hitting grapefruit with baseball bats through the screen on the back porch. The party went on for a few hours more, until the place was almost gutted and tagged and smashed. We listened to Hatebreeders over and over and over and shotgunned beers until we couldn’t stand.

The homeless guys came back and we told them to spend a few days there and then cleared off, hoping that the destruction would be blamed on them (sorry guys!). Nobody bought that, though. My friends were being investigated and threatened with litigation up until graduation, but somehow the landlord never checked to see if the cops were called that night, and no-one was prosecuted.

Music doesn’t bring violence out of people, but it doesn’t just express the natural bestial nature of man either. If we had no stereo, or only Silver Jews records, or something, we wouldn’t have gone insane like that…of course the same goes for pot vs beer. Music, art, whatever… it’s a drug– take it at your own risk, and don’t underestimate the shit it can do to your brain and soul.

PS No homeless guys were harmed in the making of this post.

PPS: Many homeless guys will be harmed in the process of making this place work.

El Scorcho

elpedro — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 19:31:52 +0000

I want to think about Weezer as if they all died in a fiery car wreck in 1999. Let’s start with Pinkerton, partially because it’s so accessible, but also because it was so universally panned at the time that it drove Rivers Cuomo out of music for years. It was a colossal failure. Rolling Stone rated it the 2nd worst album of the year (god only know what got first place…hopefully not Harmacy! [haha like Rolling Stone reviewed Harmacy…]) But wait…this wasn’t a dumbass Techno-freebasing critic who gave them that rating…that was from a Reader’s Poll!Why did this record turn fans off the first time they heard it?

This phenomenon isn’t limited to its time of release, either. This from an amazon review: “So I finally went to the store and bought this album because I always had heard that it’s their best album from all the people on the .com boards. So, I pop in the CD and listen to the first few tracks, and thought to myself, this was a waste of money. So I didn’t listen to it again until the next day and after listening to the entire album a couple of times, it dawned on me: This album is quite possibly the greatest album I have ever heard.”

I remember the first time I heard songs off of Pinkerton. I had only just realized that the Blue album was Punk Rock. At the time, if something wasn’t Punk Rock, then it was probably Indie Rock and good only for pussies in sweaters with thumbholes and little chick backpacks, and possibly chicks who wouldn’t talk to you with the same sweaters/backpacks. I was in the process of dropping out of college and spent most of my time flipping between Nick at Night and MTV in the basement of my dorm at 3 am while smoking USA cigarettes and steadfastly not drinking. I had dismissed Weezer previously because of the Sweater song, though I had a secret crush on “Buddy Holly,” but when one of my less bigoted punk friends played me “Surf-Wax America” I realized that they were more like the Descendents than Pavement. So when I saw that the video for El Scorcho was coming out I was siked.The video features the slackers sitting around a theatre, miming at playing their instruments (often not very convincingly, in the style of In Bloom—sometimes just waving the drumsticks mockingly or pretending to tune instead…) in which lights flash and jumpcuts jump…lots of bright colors on the band and in the set, but all the corners of the theatre are in shadows.

It begins on a close-up of Uncle Sam from the I WANT YOU poster…(ggirls, he’s single!) The song is clearly supposed to be a sweater-song knockoff, but there are some major differences. The music is jaunty, but a little off kilter…the guitar is thin and screechy, with the last note of the riff sometimes spiking up past the right note into a kind of squeal…it sounds like a DJ scratching a turntable almost. The beat is loping along, sort of funky, but in a really silly way, like parody of a parody of a rap song…white guys making fun of white guys trying to rap. The lyrics rhyme– a lot (“the redhead said you shred the cello/ And I’m jello, baby…”). Internal, half-rhyme, but not always…some lines that function wholly rhythmically (“Why you wanna go and do me like that?”) are paired with lines that have zero rhythm and don’t rhyme with anything: “Come down on the street and dance with me!”

The chorus is hooky in that sweater-way, but with so little complexity (1-4-1-5 1-45-1, I think, chord-progression-wise) that the sweet runs to treacle. The facial expressions don’t help…it’s like a pop song in a movie about aliens who pretend to be rock stars in order to take over the earth, but it’s a funny movie, and maybe the aliens just secretly want to get laid by hot earthgirls, but wait—at the end of the movie they really do conquer the earth.

As for the lyrics…The very first line says it all. “Goddamn you half Japanese girls…” I’m not going to get into too much detailed lyric analysis (cuz this is Punk Rock, after all) but right off the bat, he sounds pissed rather than seductive. God damn you. Why Half-Japanese? The short answer should be—it sounds more real that way, it sounds like a real girl…a Harvard chick, where Rivers was going to school… (The long answer involves the background of the song… that it was originally part of a rock opera based on Madame Butterfly—whose main character is Cio-Cio San the geisha— that was supposed to be their second album, called Songs from the Black Hole. OK more on that later…) But nevermind…and nevermind the band Half-Japanese, because what the hell would he mean by that? We get the point of the song easily, it’s not too obscure…there’s this chick who won’t hook up with Rivs, and he’s like, WTF? He’s not truly trying to get her in the sack, in fact, he sounds kinda desperate. It’s possible she may not even know who he is…?The only part that is truly indecipherable is the second verse…

I asked her to go to the Green Day concert

(Why Green Day? They started out as a underground punk bank, made a few identical records on an respected indie label, then sold out cheerfully and made just about the same record on a major and became bazillionaires. Their response to fame was to make Insomniac, their darkest most buzzed-out rock and roll album, with a cover stolen from the Dead Kennedys, and song titles stolen from their idols, Op Ivy. Plus, right as Rivers was writing these lyrics, Green Day was canceling their European tour because of “exhaustion”…the same exhaustion Weezer was feeling about the non-stop insanity of touring/drugs/chicks/critics possibly. Or maybe he hates Green Day and thinks they’re sellouts? Either way.)

You said you’d never heard of them how cool is that?
(Not very cool? Is this the same girl who does drugs and has tattoos in No Other One? Nope, this is the cello-playing good girl…the Harvard genius who’s going be successful, not some groupie…this kind of chick is just as inaccessible to Rivers as she is to me, or her husband. So it is kinda cool, in a non-cool way…maybe because Green Day kinda sucks anyways.)

So I went to your room and read your diary
(Her dorm room? Say It Ain’t So!)

‘Watching Grunge leg drop New Jack through a presstable’
(Say WHAT? Yah Rly…Certainly the first {hopefully only} recorded nostalgic usage of the word grunge. So both these things could be the case:

A. Her diary is full of nonsense (Japanese?) and
B. There’s something in this line about the state of music in 1996, grunge is dropping [fallin off] new jack swing is over, the presstable is covered in applications for employment…) BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE: Extreme Championship Wrestling’s two most extreme wrestlers: Grunge and New Jack…Damn. So:
C. She secretly watches wrestling—how blue collar! She’s attracted to the dark and violent opera of fake blood and broken chairs…

Then my heart stopped: ‘Listening to Cio-Cio San…’ fall in love all over again(The girl is listening to Madame Butterfly, and it makes the big nerd swoon…)

So not only is this new romanticism causing the R-dog to question the life-style of a member of Weezer, it’s causing him to question Weezer-like music. He longs for an aesthetic experience that edifies rather than titillates—something sweeping and epic, like classical music…but it escapes him, like this classy smart broad who is destined to be a doctor or something, who doesn’t want anything to do with this two bit punk. He can’t even get her attention: Hello?

So then the chorus goes bling for a bit, lights flash in the video, the camera spins around the set…suddenly three things happen at once. Just as the chorus ends, there’s this microsecond pause in the music on an upbeat…there’s a medium shot of R. bringing his guitar down sharply with this expression of pure rage, his eyes wide, his mouth open with white teeth exposed…then the lights go out and in the shadows the band thrashes around playing at triple-speed. HOW STUPID IS IT? he sings and the guitars whip through the pop chords and the drums are, hey, those drums are waaay too loud. The bass drum sounds like a wet cardboard box being slapped by a flyswatter and the snare is rattling in the mike like it’s filled with gravel. How many mikes did they use to record this part: 1 & ½? “I gotta sing about it /And make a record of my heart…” he says and then we’re in a breakdown, N/Y/H/C style, the drums bashing out the beat halftime, a gigantic W appears and lights up behind them like a sun, and you have to say o fuk yeah and cock the metal horns with your hand and bang your head appreciatively like Ronnie James would recommend and when he says, “I’m falling for you…” everything slows and stops and the music goes back to normal, another verse, somehow even sillier, and then a happy singalong ending as Rivers and Matt trade overlapping lines… “I’m a lot like yoI’m a lot like yoI’m…” You and I are united, but the line ends unresolved on a third note in the scale, fading out melancholically as the camera spins around striped colorful sweaters.

So, sitting in the basement watching this…I remember being … confused mostly. As in, what the hell was THAT about? Were they being ironic? Was that a joke? Why the thrash-hardcore part? Are they making fun of rock music? Either way, the song certainly doesn’t make me want to dance, or mosh, or buy soda, or screw, or write in my gurnal. It makes me curious…I’ve got to hear the rest of that record!

El Scorcho
El scorcho, Aye Carumba

Goddamn you half Japanese girls
Do it to me every time
Oh, the redhead said you shred the cello
And I’m jello, baby
But you want talk won’t look won’t think of me
I’m the epitome, a public enemy
Why you wanna go and do me like that?
Come down on the street and dance with me

I’m a lot like you so please
Hello I’m here I’m waiting
I think I’d be good for you
And you’d be good for me

I asked you to go to the Green Day concert
You said you’d never heard of them how cool is that?
How cool is that?
So I went to your room and read your diary
‘Watching grunge leg drop new jack through a presstable’
Then my heart stopped: “Listening to Cio-Cio San…”
Fall in love all over again

I’m a lot like you so please
Hello I’m here I’m waiting
I think I’d be good for you
And you’d be good for me

How stupid is it
I can’t talk about it
I gotta sing about it
And make a record of my heart

How stupid is it
Won’t you gimme a minute
Just come up to me
And say hello my heart
How stupid is it for all I know you want me to
Or maybe you just don’t know what to do
And maybe you’re scared to say
I’m falling for you

I wish I could get my head outta the sand
‘Cause I think we’d make a good team
And you would keep my fingernails clean
But that’s just a stupid dream that I won’t realize
‘Cause I can’t even look in your eyes without shakin’
And I ain’t fakin’
I’ll bring home the turkey if you bring home the bacon
I’m a lot like you so please
Hello I’m here I’m waiting
I think I’d be good for you
And you’d be good for me

I’m a lot like you so please
I’m a lot like you so please
I’m a lot like you
I think I’d be good for you
And you’d be good for me

You can download the video on weezer.com.