My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

lindsayzoladz:

The Dismemberment Plan’s Change is one of my favorite records of all time. It would come with me on the desert island, and I would spend weeks listening to nothing else I’m sure, so if this particular desert island hadn’t yet gone digital then I’d probably ask whoever’s in charge if I was allowed to bring two copies in case I wore one of them out; I sweat this record that hard. Last night I had a dream about the closing track, “Ellen and Ben,” which for my money is one of the best songs the Plan ever wrote. You might think, “Oh that’s nice, sometimes I have dreams about my favorite songs too.” But no, let me tell you why this dream was some gravely important, conspiracy-busting, National Treasure 2 type shit.

From 2009 to 2011, I wrote about music for the webzine Cokemachineglow. There were some wonderful writers there who had a lot of differing opinions and tastes, but one of the only things that (almost) everyone on staff agreed was that the Dismemberment Plan was a great band. Now, between members of the staff there was this heated, ongoing argument — it had started long before I came aboard, and I’m sure it rages still — about what “Ellen and Ben” was really about. There’s a pretty clear narrative on the surface of the song, chronicling the unceremonious beginning (“They met at someone’s housewarming party, they didn’t like each other at first”), middle (“SoCo in bed, a sunny Sunday watching John McLaughlin and having sex again and again”) and end (“I heard they broke up loudly at a wedding and never saw each other again”) of the title characters’ relationship, as seen through the eyes of a narrator who seems to be a casual friend. But when you listen close the song has a mysterious distance and ambiguity about it too, especially when the narrator suddenly starts singing about himself and his childhood memories in the bridge. “Ellen and Ben” is loose enough that I’m sure everybody who knows the song has a slightly different reading of it, but the CMG staff was essentially split into two opposing parties: 1) the people who believed Ellen and the narrator were just friends 2) the people who believed that Ellen and the narrator had some sort of romantic history (the extremist view was that he was still in love with her, or even that something had happened between them — maybe the bridge was this coy sort of old-Hollywood-style cutaway, then — and that it’d been the reason Ellen and Ben broke up), and that the last verse of the song (which switches, without explanation, to second person pronouns) was a direct address to her. Now, I stand proudly and firmly in Camp #1, and I will explain why in a second. The #2s were really the conspiracy theorists in my opinion, and they thought their big trump card was to say to us, presumably in the Kevin-Costner-JFK voice, “BUT WHY DID SHE HAVE HIS COPY OF NEBRASKA IN THE FIRST PLACE?” To which we #1s would be like, “Oh come on.” 

And yet, the play’s the thing. Like anybody who comes up with theoretical conspiracy theories about Dismemberment Plan songs and writes lengthy rants about music for a webzine in their early twenties, I was actively, anxiously avoiding grad school at this time of my life, but also looking for some way to do the kind of critical thinking and writing I no longer had an outlet for. I’d spent the entire previous year researching and writing a senior thesis about Ophelia, in which I’d argued that the narrative logic of Hamlet hinges upon the audience never knowing for sure whether or not Hamlet and Ophelia had slept together. So, naturally, the “Ellen and Ben” debate was right up my alley.

Change is a record about the burdens and the limits of empathy: about the weirdness of an existence in which we can feel a visceral connection to the pain of strangers (“Superpowers”) and at the same time can feel that the people we love the most don’t know anything about us at all (“The Other Side”). Change is also a record about surrendering to uncertainty, about accepting all the things we can’t control or even know for sure. The opening synth line and gently crashing rhythm of “Ellen and Ben” has always sounded to me like being inside of a pinball machine; Morrison sings in this acquiescent tone, not like he’s the fingers on the buttons but like he has resigned himself to a life as the pinging silver ball.

To me, “Ellen and Ben” is about trying to make sense of other people’s love from the outside, and finally accepting that you can’t, that there will always be a logic between two people that a third won’t be able to decipher. The meaning of the song is evasive and debate-worthy because nobody really writes songs about this. Nobody really admits that they do this either, create narratives and mythologies about other people’s relationships that they can only ever observe from a distance. I remember listening to “Ellen and Ben” a couple years ago, right after I heard that two of my friends who’d made up this real power couple for a few years had broken up. I plugged their names into the song and hummed it to myself; the syllables were the same. A few days later, a friend and I tried to make sense of it on the phone, and when we couldn’t decode the reasons we spoke selfishly — Things will never be the same for us, because we can never be equally close with both of them now, we’ll have to choose. Or of course, If “Ellen” & “Ben” couldn’t keep it together, where’s the hope for the rest of us? (“It seems kinda weird, they made each other feel like they could die but they couldn’t stay the slightest of friends.”) But, as the shrugging tone of the last verse suggests, things change. What you learn from other people is not the logic of connections but the rhythm of moving on. You put another coin in the machine. You try again.

Or maybe that’s not what it’s about to you at all. I remember this thing that Morrison said in a piece my friend Aaron Leitko wrote about the Plan two years ago. He said his big regret when he thought back on the band was that he wishes he’d been able to write lyrics that weren’t so straightforward. “You know on ‘Once in a Lifetime,’ where David Byrne is singing, ‘There is water at the bottom of the ocean,’ and you’re like, ‘Why is he saying that?’” Morrison said. “There aren’t a lot of those moments [in the Dismemberment Plan catalogue].” I think he’s wrong. There are lines like that all over Change. Back to my dream about “Ellen and Ben” — I dreamt I’d discovered this demo with an extra verse at the end that cleared up all the ambiguity and that I couldn’t wait to tell people at CMG. I tried to hold onto every word, chanting them in the dream like you’d repeat the license plate of a car that hit you until you could find a piece of paper to jot it down. When I woke up, of course, I couldn’t remember a single word, and I was relieved. I wouldn’t have wanted to know.

rachael-maddux:

I kinda love this song in spite of or perhaps because of its preposterously overt date-rapeyness, and this is one of my recent favorite versions, but it really seems like a wasted opportunity to have not switched up the parts with these two particular singers. For some reason I really enjoy imagining Sharon trying to lure Rufus to stay overnight and Rufus feebly (roofily? rufily?!) refusing.

I was just discussing this song and its supposed date rapeyness, and I was surprised to find that, line for line, it’s a lot more innocuous than I’d thought. Maybe I’d just heard too many creepy renditions where the singers portray the “wolf” and “mouse” too broadly as predator and prey (not the case with Wainwright and Van Etten, who make it sound like the heat went out hours ago, there’s no booze, and neither party’s too interested in a cuddle on the couch, much less anything beyond that).

The “mouse” spends the song stalling exclusively in the interest of propriety; practically all of her refusals are along the lines of “what will the neighbors/my family say?” As for “Say, what’s in this drink?”, it’s all in the delivery, isn’t it? Play it as suspicious, and that extra something might be a roofy; play it as curious, and it might just be a heavy (and fully appreciated) hand with the whiskey. There’s a strategy being worked out here, and it’s not exclusively on the guy’s end: “I ought to say no, no, no, sir / At least I’m gonna say that I tried.”

In giving the date rape interpretation too much weight, we may just be looking at the wrong power imbalance. Assuming the “mouse” is fully interested in the “wolf” (again, perhaps a matter of context and performance) and her refusals are concessions to propriety, it’s not too far-fetched to say it’s about a woman’s process of taking charge of her sexuality in light of possible slut shaming from her family and neighbors. They’re both conspiring against a sexually repressed society!

But it’s probably all about the delivery. I don’t think Wainwright and Van Etten sell it on any level (a bummer, since Wainwright’s a proven talent on Christmas tunes), but a gender-swap probably would have helped it along.

(Source: Spotify)

imathers:

abloodymess:

capybaracommando:

onesongonesite:

This Heat—”S.P.Q.R.”

“The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” by R. Crumb

Well now. I’m not sure what relation they bear to one another but this post groups together two very awesome things.

one day i will own this LP

This post is awesome because 1. This Heat 2. probably my favourite This Heat song 3. that R. Crumb comic (I’d heard the story before, but hadn’t seen the comic) 4. the connection is that Philip K. Dick said/believed that “the [Roman] Empire never ended,” which actually means a whole bunch of things, and

WE ARE ALL ROMANS, UNCONSCIOUS COLLECTIVE 
WE ARE ALL ROMANS, WE LIVE TO REGRET IT
WE ARE ALL ROMANS AND WE KNOW ALL ABOUT STRAIGHT ROADS
EVERY STRAIGHT ROAD LEADS HOME, HOME TO ROME

TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FOUR
FOUR PLUS FOUR EQUALS EIGHT 

I own this album and knew about Dick’s visions, and I’d still never caught this before! But I had caught this. Looks like This Heat got to PKD just before Mission of Burma did (and then Sonic Youth, etc.).

(Source: )

How the Government Stuck It to Music Fans Today - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic (via infoneer-pulse)

(via infoneer-pulse)

screwrocknroll:

The best ever death metal band in Dillon?

When not busy fulfilling my duties on Team Skinny Pete, I’m Team Landry all the way. Even in light of the Strange and Noteworthy Season 2 Incident That Was Never Spoken of Again.

Mr. Harrell is Mr. Bieber’s vocal producer, filling a many-layered and amorphous job: part vocal coach, part cheerleader, part sound engineer, part therapist. At this studio he’s a star, too: the nameplate on a kick scooter at the front desk just says, “KUK.”

Pop music’s universe of celebrities has widened in recent years to include producers and songwriters; they’re as crucial to what you hear on the radio as the stars, and increasingly known to the public. But there are deeper levels of highly specialized talent, just as integral, that often go unrecognized.

Mr. Harrell, 47, is one of those figures, shaping the sound of radio from the shadows. His client roster also includes Jennifer Lopez and Rihanna, and his job is to make sure that the star’s vocal is as powerful and flawless as it can be.

That happens in parts. In the studio, rarely, if ever, does a star sing a song the whole way through. Instead Mr. Harrell builds a gleaming whole from granular bits. A singer working with Mr. Harrell covers a few bars — a line or two, maybe four — over and over, with different emphases and inflections, until Mr. Harrell hears what he wants. The process repeats for each section. Only later, after the singer is gone, does Mr. Harrell stitch the best pieces together, Frankenstein-like, into the song you hear.

My first reaction to this was, “This is news?” Producers and artists have stitched vocal (and instrumental) takes together since technology made it feasible. The element of editing is the chief reason why recorded pop music is more akin to filmmaking than live performance.

I guess the change here is that producers are now expected to outsource (or perhaps are forced to outsource based on label or artist request) the vocal production, specifically? Naturally, the voice is privileged in pop music, so I get why we’re so concerned about representing it as “powerful and flawless,” but I can’t get past my instrumentalist pride. If you think assembling a seamless Frankensteined vocal track is tricky, consider how hard it is to stitch together multiple takes on (for instance) a drum part that doesn’t have any convenient pauses for punching in/merging tracks*. Do these “vocal producers” have specialized knowledge that your run-of-the-mill producer wouldn’t have already developed over the course of a career? It reads to me like a gesture toward the cult of the celebrity vocalist rather than an essential part of the process, but what the hell do I know?

* Not that I’d *ahem* know anything about that, because naturally I’ve always nailed everything in a single take.

(Source: k8inorbit)

So much to chew on in this piece but it’s 7:17 on a Friday and I have pre-trip laundry to do. SAVING IT FOR THE BUS. (via maura)

I’m a little surprised to see this article and others on the White/Lowery issue, no matter the position, consistently using the arguably ill-fitting terms “stealing” and “theft” when they mean “infringement.” I’ve been shouted down for making this distinction before (generally by people who mistake this argument as justification rather than clarification), but there are substantial physical and legal differences between theft and infringement. In the former, you’re depriving someone of something tangible—either a good or the cost of that good. One who illegally downloads an album creates an additional copy, and it can’t be assumed that the downloader would have otherwise paid for it. 

This bears out, to some extent, in U.S. law.

Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.

Dowling v. United States [1985] (the subject of which was Elvis bootleg recordings)

But even more importantly, it’s a distinction tentatively acknowledged by no less a stakeholder in infringement laws and policies than Chris Dodd, CEO of the MPAA:

We’re in a transformative period with an explosion of technology that’s going to need content… We’re going to have to be more subtle and consumer-oriented…. We’re on the wrong track if we describe this as thievery.

It’s tempting to allow for “theft” as a colloquialism for “infringement,” but there’s an awful lot of (thoroughly inaccurate) baggage that comes along with it.

(via maura)

rubyshimmer:

apoplecticskeptic:

“People like to make up genre names every once in a while. The people who make dubstep are exactly the same people who were making drum and bass — it’s just that they don’t want to call it drum and bass anymore, or jungle, the American word for drum and bass. Genre is a tyranny in music and it’s usually imposed from without.”

—

Stephin Merritt on Songwriting, Sondheim, & Katy Perry - Music - BlackBook

Funny that it’s Stephin Merritt of all people saying something very accurate about “dubstep,” i.e., that it’s essentially the same genre of electronic music that was big in the 90s with a fancy new name, whether it’s Skrillex or James Blake or Burial. And that’s great! It’s not an insult! It’s the need for rebranding that is silly, not the music itself, or its lineage.

(via perpetua)

While I’m far too old to keep up with the infinite micro-genres in electronic music, I’ve always thought it was sort of a conceit to not acknowledge the differences.  I think electronic music, more than any other form, is the most subject to evolution because it is the most reliant on technology.  I can’t think of any other genres in which the music being made today couldn’t possibly have been made a decade ago, because the technology didn’t exist to make it.

Obviously, this isn’t true of all electronic music, or even all dubstep, but it does cover a swath of the electronic genre.  Yes, the people making dubstep are probably same kind of people that were making drum and bass, but I don’t think it’s accurate to call it the same music.

(via themattsmith)

What Matt said.

I don’t think jungle is an american word for drum and bass. I’ve only heard british use that term and I thought it referred to another style of music.  Americans just call drum and bass, drum and bass.

Yeah, I don’t think the distinction is simply American terminology vs. British terminology.

My (possibly entirely ill-informed) understanding is that drum and bass was largely jungle minus the heavy reliance on the “Amen” break.  I’ll admit reading through Simon Reynolds’s various writings on the evolution of UK dance styles tends to leave my head spinning, since my actual exposure to UK dance music is limited, but he definitely sees distinctions between all of them, be it in the samples used, emphasis on vocals, or other factors.  For instance (bolding mine):

If Jungle really did stem from House, as Navigator claimed, the true continuity between the two genres is not rhythmic or textural: it’s the use of vocals (almost always absent in Techno). At a rough guesstimate, maybe two thirds of Hardcore/Jungle anthems between 1991–94 relied on sampled diva vocals as primary hooks. Producers lifted them from old House or R&B classics, or from CDs packed with a capellas recorded specifically for sampling. While there’s no diva refrain equivalent to the ubiquitous, endlessly revisited ‘Amen’ break, certain classic vocal phrases were reworked time and again, with producers using similar techniques to breakbeat manipulation: acceleration, pitchshifting, timestretching, looping, filtering, and so forth.

When techstep achieved dominance in 1996, vocal samples began to disappear from drum ’n’ bass.

That said, when I guest lecture on sampling and copyright law, I do tend to draw a fairly direct line from the “Amen” break’s importance in Jungle to the types of beats used in dubstep, since the students (mostly 18-20 year olds) are slightly more up on their Skrillex than their Shy FX.  But influence and shared qualities don’t suggest outright synonymy.  Genres tend to be as narrow or as wide as you want them to be, anyway.  The Magnetic Fields and deadmau5 are both essentially “pop music,” right?

oneweekoneband:

minimoonstar:

Via various discussions on Patrick Wolf: a tool that plots the audience gender and age skews of your top Last.fm artists. Apparently it made the rounds a while back, but I totally missed it.

(Syntax example for looking at someone else’s plot: http://playground.last.fm/demo/genderplot?users=Petronia&period=overall&artists=50)

I played around with the time range options, and the only act on my list that’s skewed further female than Patrick Wolf is 2NE1. This isn’t surprising, though - for all PW’s persona is made up of facets, there’s nothing there that I can imagine striking a chord with the majority of straight indie rock dudes, even if they don’t cause outright discomfort. Like, on some level you have to be thinking “I want that,” “I am that,” or “I want to be that,” no? Or even the flip of any one of those, some kind of darkside repulsion/fear of the Jungian shadow that at least causes a response. If a given pop star and audience combination fails on all three, there’s not going to be a connection regardless of the quality of the music. Cf. me and Radiohead.**

On the other hand, what really boggles me is that Saint Etienne skews vastly male on the chart. Really? Really? Most Saint Etienne fans I know are late-twenties Asian women who shop at Banana Republic (the changing rooms play Saint Etienne incessantly alongside eg. Stars or Florence and the Machine). Is this one of those New Order/Kylie things where in the UK the audience is made out of burly truckers? (Probably.)

On the other hand, the XLR8R podcast (which I listen to regularly) skews so far male the chart had to expand to keep up with it, which… well.

** This is not completely true: I want Jonny Greenwood a little bit.

The only two artists on mine that skewed as or further young and female than Patrick were Ashlee Simpson and Taylor Swift, and, strangely, Patrick Stump. I’m not sure what it is about Patrick that draws that audience - I hadn’t thought of the want/am/want to be trifecta. It intuitively makes sense, but I don’t know if it empirically holds up re: music that I listen to.

I think I’ll actually reblog this to OWOB and see if it starts a conversation. Thoughts on Patrick Wolf and demographics? Thoughts on queerness and predominant fanbase gender? Is it purely a sexuality thing? (Cf. Rufus Wainwright, Mika, etc. Bloc Party vs. Kele solo?) What about Owen Pallett, whose audience definitely is significantly male but who is just as out and queer as Patrick?

minimoonstar:

I edited the post before I realized you’d reblogged it, with this bit re: Owen Pallett:

The more I think about it, the more I think PW’s sincerity is way more of an issue than his sexuality. Like, dude totally does not give a fuck about looking ridiculous, which if you are someone who does care about that (like most indie dudes) basically forces you to cut yourself off emotionally from what’s happening in order not to feel painful proxy embarrassment. This may not be a conscious process. Owen Pallett is again an instructive comparison, because not only does he write songs about Zelda, that mofo is a ball of acute anxiety and over-intellectualization of everything. I say this as someone who loves Owen Pallett.

Why this matters less to girls: because as a woman you are not made ridiculous by doing the sort of thing PW does - at least, not more than you are inherently made out to be ridiculous/frivolous just by being a woman.

Excellent questions here. 

I’m a straight indie rock guy, and the only Patrick Wolf I’d  listened to much before Alex’s coverage this week were The Magic Position and a few stray tracks, most of which I enjoy—I’m really liking the stuff I hadn’t heard before, incidentally, particularly Lycanthropy (from which I’d only heard “To the Lighthouse,” because I’m a sucker for lit-referencing pop music). What’s odd is that, based on the albums covered thus far (and supported by this post, I think), the material with which I’m most familiar is that which codes queerest in his catalog. It hadn’t even occurred to me that The Magic Position might have been inspired by a woman or that Wolf’s sexuality was at all ambiguous.

But more to the point, I’d like to engage a bit with minimoonstar’s idea:

This isn’t surprising, though - for all PW’s persona is made up of facets, there’s nothing there that I can imagine striking a chord with the majority of straight indie rock dudes, even if they don’t cause outright discomfort. Like, on some level you have to be thinking “I want that,” “I am that,” or “I want to be that,” no? Or even the flip of any one of those, some kind of darkside repulsion/fear of the Jungian shadow that at least causes a response. If a given pop star and audience combination fails on all three, there’s not going to be a connection regardless of the quality of the music.

I can only speak for myself, but I’m not sure I appreciate Wolf’s music through any of those particular interpretive filters, primarily because I don’t always consume music with much thought to overall personas.  I mean, there’s probably some level of identification insofar as anyone who’s ever been madly in love can probably find something in common with the sentiments of “The Magic Position,” but that’s a matter of the song, not necessarily the singer. 

That’s also an easy one, since the emotions in “The Magic Position” are pretty generalizable. Here’s a trickier one (using one of the other examples from the list): Rufus Wainwright’s “The Art Teacher.”  In this case, we’re talking about a song written by a gay man, told from the perspective of a middle-aged woman about an experience she had as a teenager with a (male) high school art teacher.  I wouldn’t say “I want that” about any of the entities involved—Wainwright remains in character throughout, the female narrator isn’t inviting sexualization in the least, and the art teacher is more concept than person. I also wouldn’t say “I am that” about any of these entities; Wainwright isn’t inviting identification with himself; the woman is easy to empathize with, but I can’t say I’ve ever been in a comparable situation; and the art teacher, again, is essentially objectified. Finally, I wouldn’t say “I want to be that,” because Wainwright is external to the scenario, and the narrator is in a situation few would aspire to (in a loveless marriage, fixated on the past).

Despite this, I find the “The Art Teacher” quite moving. Wainwright certainly has an overall musical persona, but engaging with it in one of those direct ways (“I am that,” “I want that,” “I want to be that”) isn’t key to appreciating his music nor does “The Art Teacher” necessarily encourage one to rethink his overall persona. There’s always the alternative of appreciating the music as narrative removed from persona.  That is, my appreciation of To the Lighthouse is not predicated on my relation to, desire to be, or desire to be with Virginia Woolf, so why should my appreciation of “To the Lighthouse” be predicated on my relation to, desire to be, or desire to be with Patrick Wolf? 

For that matter, some may simply enjoy the music qua music with little regard for lyrics or persona building. Speaking as a musician, I often find my appreciation of some artists starts with compositional and instrumental creativity and sometimes even ends there (that is, I’ve always been ambivalent-to-negative on Billy Corgan’s persona, but the musicianship on Siamese Dream blows me away; that’s aspirational, sort of—”I want to be that”—, but it’s not really persona-based).

It’s somewhat tempting to frame the “I am that/I want that/I want to be that” as specifically intrinsic to commercial pop music, in which pop personas and personal narratives are key for marketing purpose, but I’ll admit that’s probably bullshit.  Personas and narratives are just as important in contemporary classical music, jazz, more avant-garde stuff, etc.—anything that wants to reach an audience. 

So I think this really does come down to individual modes of listening.  Even if we’re, at times, encouraged to interpret every song, every gesture as a means of getting to know an overall persona (be it Patrick Wolf, Kanye West, Liz Phair, Bruce Springsteen, or whomever) and decide whether we are that, want to be with that, or want to be that, we’re not necessarily stuck with those options. I think it’s empowering to deny that impulse a bit. Take Watch the Throne, for instance, an album by two guys with hyper-developed public personas. If we insist on interpreting it strictly through the lens of persona, there’s a lot of interesting discussion to be had about the album. So arguably, it succeeds wonderfully in terms of further defining the personas of Jay-Z and Kanye West; it may help us develop our personal notions of “are that/want to be with that/want to be that” with regard to these guys.  But that doesn’t account for all facets of the album, which I found to be pretty hit-and-miss on its other, non-persona-building levels. When we buy too heavily into the persona-building model, there’s arguably less room for us to step outside of our fandom (“we’re getting a new part of his/her personality on this album!”) and be critical (“it’s still not his/her best work!”). 

bugalu:

The Raspberries, one of the earliest power pop bands, often strike me, in their ballads, as too stiffly reverent of their forebears to be worthy of them. A song like “Let’s Pretend,” as studiedly lovely as it is, lacks the spark of invention, compelled by artistic restlessness as much as expressive need, that gives life to the Beach Boys songs it emulates. Brian Wilson wanted to write perfect 3-minute pop songs, but he also felt called to write teenage symphonies to God; Eric Carmen just wanted the perfect 3-minute pop songs. As admirable as this goal is, Carmen’s craftiness can result in songs that are a little too calculated for my liking. But then it wouldn’t be power pop if it weren’t self-conscious, second-generation stuff.

The Raspberries did stake out slightly new territory in their upbeat numbers, which often split the difference between the Beatles of “Please Please Me” and the bluesy riff rock that would come to dominate the 70s. This is certainly true of ”Go All The Way,” a song whose charm, for me, comes from the way it’s perched awkwardly between 70s raunch rock and starry-eyed 60s cooing. Coming from a meticulous formalist like Carmen, the slight stylistic disjointedness probably isn’t intentional, but it fits: the deep-fried riffs and lusty yelps of the “mama, yeah!” fanfare give the lie to the sparkly crooning of the verses, which attempt to conceal the let’s-fuck-now push of the song with dewy promises that it’ll “feel so right” like an old teen idol ballad. This kind of sexual two-facedness was hardly new when The Raspberries did it, true, but it’s still bracing from a band whose image is otherwise so squeaky clean. For a song or two at a time, The Raspberries succeed in making it the early 60s all over again, imbuing lyrics and gestures that no longer shocked in their time with a tinge of the old risqué tone.

Nicely put.

What I think Raspberries songs like “Let’s Pretend” have up on the templates that Carmen and company were working from is the slippery element—the modifier in front of the word “pop.”  Which is not to say that the Raspberries or Blue Ash are better bands overall than the Beach Boys or the Beatles, but that “power-pop” isn’t simply a term of periodization, as it’s often used; these aren’t just second-generation pop bands who worked strictly within existing guidelines. You couldn’t reasonably mistake the Raspberries for their influences (even if other early 70s bands that came to be designated as power-pop, like Badfinger and Big Star, could probably pass at times).

If the Raspberries colored within the lines drawn by their forebears, in their best moments, they used brighter, bolder crayons, which I think makes all the difference.  For my money, their worst moments weren’t when they adhered to formula, but when they self-consciously deviated from it, like in the hoedown sections of “Last Dance” (maybe a failed nod to the Byrds’ country period?).

They continued to undermine the squeaky-clean image after “Go All the Way.” Some of their later stuff’s far more sexually direct, like “Tonight.” Exactly how old is this girl who looks “too young to know about romance,” but to whom Carmen nevertheless directly poses that most subtle of come-ons, “won’t you let me sleep with you”? He can almost get away with it, too, since he sounds so young and naive; Vince Neil, whose voice radiates raunch, didn’t even attempt innocence when he tried it.

The final Raspberries album, incidentally, is substantially angrier and more cynical than the rest of their work. It’s not exactly Big Star Third, but it’s pretty jarring to hear Eric Carmen sing “I used to be so fucking optimistic / ‘Til she said goodbye.” It’s a pretty logical step from there to the snide, funny social commentary of early Cheap Trick.