Wow, looks like I’m going to have to be willing to kill to make sure I see Lauryn Hill when she plays in New York. I thought those Grammy voters were actually on to something this time! I saw the Fugees at South by Southwest in Austin right when The Score came out and felt similarly blown away. I always thought they were unfairly discounted by critics and purists mistaking hardness for realness. I think Lauryn Hill’s importance and brilliance can not be understated, and hence the optimism of my post-Grammy filing. I mean, here we have a woman singing, rapping, writing her own songs, producing her debut album, and becoming the first hip-hop artist to win a Grammy for album of the year. These are incredible breakthroughs for women, for African-Americans, for rappers, for musicians. Of course, Missy Elliott did it all before Lauryn–minus the Grammy. And while I think Missy is the superior producer, and more pop savvy, Lauryn’s music is message-oriented where Missy’s is good-time groovy. I’m not privileging one over the other, but it’s interesting that in this case, content beat out form for the trophy. Or maybe it was just Lauryn’s almond eyes …
“It seems as if they’re trying to keep their world sane. They stick together with a select coterie of support.” That’s akin to what I was trying to get at, that sometimes separatism is a necessary political tool–even if it comes across as indie elitism, or art rock. I think it’s interesting that many great female musicians have chosen the art-rock avenue rather than subjecting themselves to the intense pressures of the pop world: Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, now Sleater-Kinney. Of course, many men have taken the same option. Sometimes, I think we’re more critical of those women than those men: It’s okay for Television to be Television, or Nick Cave to be Nick Cave, but Sleater-Kinney and PJ Harvey have to carry some banner for the rest of us. When actually, their reasons my be more legit: The price of objectification that comes with stardom is crueler to women than men–hence all those anorexic, fake-titted, tummy-tucked, peroxided, drugged-out casualties we call icons wandering dazed around LA. That’s the great disappointment that is Courtney Love: once a finger in the face of so much fashion, now just another body in the valley of the dolls. Again, that’s why Lauryn amazes me so: all that talent, all that power, and all that beauty. And the chutzpah to wear a white muscle shirt to the Grammys–looking buff next to all those pushed-up boobs and willowy gowns. It really fucks with a lot of women’s minds to be tortured by stylists and splattered across so many magazines (just ask Debbie Harry), but it seems like Lauryn’s holding it together. Maybe there’s something to all that religious crap. …
I agree with many of your criticisms of The Hot Rock: the Sonic Youth-isms, the anti-technology cliches, etc. I do think you’ve overlooked one great song: “The Size of Our Love,” Carrie Brownstein’s heart-wrenching ballad about watching a loved one die. There’s been a bit of a critical tendency to overemphasize Corin Tucker’s role in Sleater-Kinney, when actually I think it’s the way Carrie and Corin feed each other that make this such a great band (though Corin is definitely the dominant songwriter and the amazing singer). You and I have both pointed out the importance of the way they trade vocal lines–or the way Brownstein’s guitar responds to Tucker’s call. It’s such a fascinating formal and meaningful innovation–they could do nothing more and already have their place in the pantheon, the canon, the history books.
It’s what I was referring to earlier about the way The Hot Rock taps into the late-night phone call to a girlfriend. And you’re also right: Then there can be a sudden and unexpected sexual charge that is transgressive and thrilling. I can only think of one line in their whole oeuvre–there may be more, but they are certainly rare–in which the subject of the song is identified as male, on the new album’s “One Song for You” (maybe this is the reason for the song’s title): “drop little boy crumbs you could follow back / when you get lost becoming a man.” Otherwise the songs’ “you” seems purposefully nonspecific, or probably, as on “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” female. These are women singing to other women, revealing if not shouting how passion–along with friendship, trust, competition, respect–can enter into those bonds. I think that’s a big part of the breakthrough that’s going on in music right now: Women are able to be both subject and object, artist and audience, desired and desiring. Teens and preteens look up to Brandy and Monica and Britney and, yes, the Spice Girls, and make them the dominant force in pop music right now–see the cover story of the current Entertainment Weekly. Girls actually have buying power–the industry has finally figured it out. And thanks to producers like Elliott and Hill, and label honchos like Sylvia Rhone and, yes, Madonna, the music can be largely unmediated by men. Total can look like the wet-dream girls, and men get off, but I think when they vamp around in their videos, or moan on their albums, or touch each other in photo shoots, they’re doing it for themselves, for Missy, for me. And we get off. In pop, the female ear may actually be shoving aside the male gaze.
