ANOHNI, Carly Rae Jepsen, The Knife
Pitchfork #48 - 46
#48 ANOHNI, Hopelessness (2016)
Rating: 2
For the last several years I’ve been asking myself, where did the protest music go? Pick your social movement, your revolution, your “resistance” from any historical moment and there’s always been a musical accompaniment, a critical mass around some genre of explicit protest.
I’d like to believe that conscious rap of the ‘90s wasn’t the swan song. Protest music is surely always out there, it’s just more fragmented now maybe? Or more specific? Or more oblique, like The College Dropout? I know, I’m overthinking, oversimplifying, I’m being sheltered. But still…
In any case, this ANOHNI album is clearly protest music. You’ll never hear more explicit grievance about specific topics and trends. This time, though, it’s not a hard rain’s gonna fall, it’s WE’RE F*CKED. Hopelessness sounds so hopeless that it’s sarcastically resigned.
First track and probably the most popular, “Drone Bomb Me,” is about a little girl asking to get bombed, by us, in Afghanistan
Drone bomb me
Blow me from the mountains and into the sea
Blow me from the side of the mountain
Blow my head off, explode my crystal guts
Lay my purple on the grass
Track two, “4 Degrees,” is about wishing for devastating climate change
I wanna hear the dogs crying for water
I wanna see the fish go belly-up in the sea
And all those lemurs and all those tiny creatures
I wanna see them burn, it’s only 4 degrees
Track three, “Watch Me,” is about asking for paternalistic surveillance of her personal life:
Watch me in my hotel room
Watch my outline as I move from city to city
Watch me watching pornography
Watch me talking to my friends and my family
I know you love me, Daddy / Cause you’re always watching me, Daddy
And it goes on - the song “Execution” reminds us that we're in league with the Saudis and North Korea. “Obama” is about our disappointment after the initial Obama Hope - she sings a refrain that sounds like “Ohhhh Bummer” “Violent Men” is about…guess what.
The album isn’t the type of protest music that says “hey, go do this now.” It’s more like “hey, you see this too and feel bad, right?”
Anohni was born in UK, lived in Amsterdam for a while, then moved to the Bay Area at the age of 10. She moved to New York in 1990 and established a legendary career in music and performance art, founding a drag-spirited performance art collective called Blacklips, where for years she was able to hone a particular brand of “chamber” music and a performance that transcends, not bends, gender, with nightly shows.
This is her first solo album under the name Ahnoni. She says it’s “as different as can be from my previous work,” and it’s produced by Daniel Lopatin, a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never (at #49) and hip-hop / trap artist Hudson Mohawk, best known for his Kanye collaborations.
Anohni is authentic and very present. She has a unique and prominent voice, a bit of a gender-transcendent lounge voice with timbre and vibrato. I kept suspecting she was digitally manipulating it, but she wasn’t. The music is sort of ambient and has a super-easy flow. It has a cinematic quality to it, oddly reminding me of Thomas Newman’s American Beauty score.
She says that Boy George was a huge influence on her as a child. She makes an astute observation about how that whole Culture Club persona was experienced and received in the 1980s, vs. today. We really didn’t talk about Boy George’s sexuality. It was like a transmission on a secret frequency to the right people.
"Now a presentation like that would be inextricably linked to a dialogue about sexual orientation, or gender orientation, whereas then it could still fall under the umbrella of 'plumage. People could perceive it as wacky performing -- the way they received Little Richard or Liberace." - Anohni
Anonhi is doing no such thing. She says she’s not upset about anyone’s gender, just upset about the very concept of it. And her art clearly conveys a message on a non-secret frequency. Here’s a trailer for a film about her show TURNING that will give you an idea of her art, her presence…and that she’s very tall!
Pitchfork writers:
Hopelessness is a tremendous, terrifying reflection on the perils of drone warfare, our digital panopticon, the continued degradation of the planet Earth, and patriarchal violence. In these horrifying, beautiful songs, ANOHNI presses crisis to flesh—and as this decade wore on, they became more and more relevant. — Sheldon Pearce
#47 Carly Rae Jepsen, E*MO*TION (2015)
Rating: 2
The story of this album is the story of Carly Rae Jepsen’s pop music career.
Jepsen grew up near Vancouver, BC and went to a performing arts school there. After graduating, she worked as a barista while working on her music. She placed third in Canada’s version of American Idol in 2007 and signed a contract.
She released an indie-folk debut album, Tug of War, with a cover photo of her sitting at dusk by a campfire with an acoustic guitar. Her first single was a cover of John Denver’s “Sunshine on My Shoulders!” She toured Canada for a couple years with some moderate success on the Canadian pop charts.
***Then KABOOM.***
In 2011 she wrote a folk song called “Call Me Maybe.” Josh Ramsey, a fellow Vancouverite and member of a band she was touring with, transformed it into a sugary pop song and recorded it with her.
Justin Bieber was in Canada and heard the song on the radio. Bieber tweeted that it’s “possibly the catchiest song I’ve ever heard” and made a viral video of himself and Selena Gomez lip-syncing to it:
In a whirlwind, Jepsen was suddenly signed to School Boy Records with Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun and was touring with Justin.
Critics called the song “perfect,” “flawless,” “ear wormy,” having “the urgency and sweep of the greatest teen pop songs ever recorded.” Here’s Chicago’s own Emily Van Zandt in RedEye:
"all I know is that I have co-dependency issues when it comes to my music. When it's sad, I'm sad. When it's angry, I'm angry. And when it's ridiculously over-produced, up-tempo bubblegum pop with terrible lyrics on a beautiful day in Chicago when I'm wearing pink pants, I just kind of want to start skipping around handing my number out to random bros, you know?” - Emily Van Zandt
She became the first Canadian woman to hit #1 on the US charts since Avril Lavigne. It was number one for nine weeks! She made her TV debut singing it on Ellen. It was the best selling single worldwide in 2012. It was nominated for two Grammy awards, Song of the Year (lost to “We Are Young” by FUN), and Best Pop Performance (lost to “Set Fire to the Rain” by Adele).
So…wow.
Now what?
Jepsen packaged the hit song as a track on her second album, Kiss. It was OK. The Toronto Star review said “It's all so bright and immediate and perfectly pleasurable, though, that you don't really realize that you've essentially just listened to the same tune eight times in a row." Rolling Stone called it “mediocre dance pop.”
After Kiss, Jepsen regrouped. In 2014, she auditioned for and earned the title role in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella. She played Cinderella for four months on Broadway. In between performances, she recorded an entire indie-folk album that she then scrapped. She said it was “weird music” she wrote as an “act of rebellion” after the sudden stardom.
She also reached out to some potential collaborators. This album E*MO*TION became an enormous project, with a list of producers and co-writers that’s hard to fathom. There are 60 producers listed in the liner notes. 80s pop influenced. She hired a Swedish pop production crew and recorded in Sweden for a month. She got help from Sia, Rostam Batmanglij from Vampire Weekend, and Blood Orange. She worked with Max Martin and Jack Antonoff. She claims to have worked on 250 songs for this.
So what was the result? The music press often called it some version of “more sophisticated pop” or an “indie” sensibility applied to shameless pop. Me? I found the production on her third album to just sound more…expensive.
If the desired goal was to break out of the “Call Me Maybe” mold, WHY was the lead single (with a slick video starring Tom Hanks) a song with the chorus:
I really, really, really, really, really, really like you
And I want you, do you want me, do you want me too?
Pitchfork laments, in a not-bad review, about her “unshakable vagueness”:
“Ultimately, you can listen to Carly Rae Jepsen for days and still have no idea who she is.” - Corban Goble, 2015
She has acquired a cult reputation that seems based on her, well, diminished popularity after “Call Me Maybe.” In 2015 the New Yorker said:
She started atop the mountain of commercial success, the uncoolest place in the world, and set about making her descent without falling to her death. She arrived at the bottom with grace, refreshed, and released a vital pop album that succeeded by many standards — Carrie Bataan
Finally - side note - you know what’s pretty damn good? And COMPLETELY different from all this stuff? Carly’s first album Tug of War.
Please give it a quick peek - check out “Money and the Ego” or “Tug of War.” Would Jepsen have made it without “Call Me Maybe?” Who knows. But I wager she would have ended up sounding a lot more like this.
Pitchfork writers:
E•MO•TION marked the end of Carly Rae Jepsen, wholesome chart-topper, and the beginning of CRJ, patron saint of just going for it. After the mind-numbing ubiquity of “Call Me Maybe,” Jepsen went in search of her own sound and, after cowriting hundreds of songs, landed on bright, bold synth-pop with a distinct ’80s sleekness. Though E•MO•TION was initially considered something of a commercial flop, it became, along with a few other LPs, emblematic of a certain 2010s trend: the rise of the mainstream pop star swerving to collect her indie cred. — Jillian Mapes
#46 The Knife, Shaking the Habitual (2013)
Rating: 3
The Knife is a Swedish duo of siblings, Olaf and Karin Dreijer. Karin is also known as Fever Ray, whose 2017 album I wrote about at #66 in this list. This was The Knife’s fourth and last studio album, released after a seven-year break for the group.
I want to share a few of my own observations, but then a quick meta-tour of how their work is processed by others. I don’t usually like to make this thing a digest of other opinions, but in this case, for me, it IS the fun story
Like AHOHNI above at #48, The Knife has a clear message. But instead of communicating it with verses and choruses, they communicate it with almost everything else.
The record comes with a satirical comic book called “End Extreme Wealth.” It turns the familiar, maudlin, help-the-poor charity pitch on its head, turning decadent wealth into the social ill that must be remedied. For example, how do we build schools in wealthy areas that can teach rich people about white privilege and climate change?
They also communicate via their music structure and instrumentation. As in, who can really tell an instrument from an industrial sound or synth? Why can’t a track be over 15 minutes of droning and scraping sounds?
Then, of course, they communicate via their presence in real life. They wear masks, when they appear at all (versus, say, doing a live performance as silhouettes behind a translucent screen). They stay enigmatic but authentic, “always in drag” as queer theorist Judith Butler writes.
So bottom line, what do you get from an album that’s asked to carry so much weight and purpose in its very fiber? A record that fights what they call “the commercial homogenization” and “hierarchical structures” of the music industry?
What is an album that, genetically speaking, is actually a grad school seminar?
Well, it’s 96 minutes, 3 LPs. Five tracks are 9 minutes or more, including “Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized,” which is 19 minutes of maybe what a power transformer sounds like when you put your ear on it. And “Fracking Fluid Injection” which is 10 minutes of reverbed string bowing of, maybe, a radiator? And “A Cherry on Top,” an instrumental that’s maybe hell’s wind chimes.
There are many other modes, too. Inventive percussion in “Without You My Life Would Be Boring.” “A Tooth for an Eye” with its driving (again somewhat Peter Gabriel-ish) beat and Karin’s captivating, musically accented vocals. “Full of Fire,” a very industrial, catchy, hard-labor pound:
Of all the guys and the signori
Who will write my story
Liberals giving me a nerve itch
Liberals giving me a nerve itch
I promised that a meta-tour would be fun. I want to make clear - I LIKE this album. I’m not doing this to make fun of The Knife, sincerely. I think it’s fascinating, fearless, and thoughtful. Iconoclastic.
The feeling I share with the pro writers, though, is the paradox of writing, categorizing, and god help us, evaluating a piece of art whose appeal is explicitly designed to counter all of that. That’s the point.
See if you agree - the story seems to be something like “nobody can or should listen to this. So everyone should listen to this.” Or “it’s so hard to like…that one must try.”
Shaking the Habitual is alternately utterly gripping and unbearably boring; incredibly bold and strangely flaccid, viscerally thrilling and hopelessly over-thought…Shaking the Habitual's problem is that the Knife seem to have dismissed the idea of making your point concisely as merely another affectation of a decadent and corrupt society. — Alexis Petridis, The Guardian
(sounds precisely like a description of a graduate seminar)
It sometimes feels as if the Knife's feminist theory has an answer for everything. Don't like their new tune-free tracks? That's because you've been culturally conditioned to enjoy the decadent concept of melody — Sam Richards, The Guardian
In plenty of ways, Shaking seems to have “inaccessible” etched into every fiber of its DNA. — Lindsay Zoladz, Pitchfork
…after experiencing the whole thing, fans may not return to it often, but it's hard to deny that it's an often stunning work of art - Heather Phares, AllMusic
unnavigable and unknowable, almost impossible to write about and even harder to listen to - Hayden Woolley, Drowned in Sound
explores even wilder styles of mordantly nutso android bleat - Jon Dolan, Rolling Stone
Anyway, I enjoyed that brief ride of cultural narrative about anti-music music, while listening to the scrapes and shrieks.
Pitchfork writers:
Shaking the Habitual marked yet another radical act of self-negation. The shadowy electro provocateurs were reborn as an animalistic, post-apocalyptic industrial act making an ungodly clang from (presumably) short-circuiting synths and burnt-out oil drums bashed by human bones. Whether it’s subjecting you to pulverizing electro-punk, nauseating 19-minute ambient movements, or diseased tropical funk, Shaking the Habitual relentlessly agitates as a means to inspire resistance. - Stuart Berman [emphasis mine]