Insidious Lassitude

…Anybody who writes a song with a title like that probably does care what you think of them. They’re probably just pretending that they don’t. It’s premised on the understanding that the singer and the imagined audience both know that the opposite is true; that the meaning and the singer’s feeling stand in opposition to the words that are sung. Therein lies the tension that gives the song its power. The song goes on: ‘Sometimes the rain tastes so sweet . . . Tell me what I’m gonna do if I should fall in love with you’.

The song is by Ryan Adams, and is one of the 24 previously unreleased cuts included on the ‘Deluxe Edition’ of ‘Strangers Alamanac’ by Adams’ former band, Whiskeytown. (Though for Adams geeks like me there is a better, more yearning, version of the song on a bootleg – the erroneously titled ‘Heartbreaker Demos’.)

A quick précis: Whiskeytown released three records, of which ‘Strangers . . .’ is the penultimate, and the final to be released while the band were still together. A third, ‘Pneumonia’, was released after the band had disbanded and Adams had begun a solo career. Since 2000 he has released – counting on my fingers – nine solo albums that are ’wildly erratic and of scattershot quality’ (I’m quoting an imaginary composite review; its source is any review or interview or passing mention of Adams’ circa the last eight years).

‘Strangers’ has been one of my favourite records since it was released in ‘97. His first couple of solo records are two of my favourites too, particularly the first, ‘Heartbreaker’. His releases around the turn of the century are about as good as records get – up there with yer ‘Blood on the Tracks’, yer ‘Grace’, yer ‘Hounds of Love’, yer ‘London Calling’, and whatever else you’re inclined to mention. I like Adams’ turn-of-the-century records better than those, but it’s all a matter of taste, so let’s not argue…

Since then I’ve liked all Adams’ output – yes, even the slew of tracks that surfaced from the slough inhabited by his hip-hop alter-ego ’DJ Reggie’. And I even occasionally smirked at the odd tune by ‘WereWolph’, his tongue-in-cheek (pray God) screamo-thrash band. He lost me a little with the proselytising about Mariah Carey though. I go and hide behind the sofa when he does that. He has at least (presumably under the direction of his record company, or some grown ups) kept this larking about off his official records and confined it to the internet where - since the cyber world is bankfull-to-overflowing with inane clowning about – it goes relatively unnoticed. Still, since those first couple of solo records and the Whiskeytown records before them, there has – at least to my tastes – been something missing from his official records. Something that was there is not quite there anymore. Something is intermittent. 

I’ve enjoyed all the records tremendously, and there’s definitely been some great songs strewn through them. But there remains in me a nagging feeling that the great songs really are strewn these days. They’re haphazardly scattered through his oeuvre like someone has ransacked his house and tossed everything out the window. From the detritus sometimes a great song will blow away and catch on tree or eddy in a street corner. Ryan’ll find it one morning and whatever tush the wind has cast next to it will be the rest of the record. Adams is a preternaturally talented songwriter; and his output his legendarily – or notoriously – prodigious. But listening to this new souped-up release of ‘Strangers’ in the context of his subsequent work, I feel like a little of the magic-dust has been lost; scattered on stony ground and fallen through the cracks or pecked at by pesky birds.

Amongst the puppet-shows (we can see your hands, Ry) and pictures of Knut the orphaned polar bear (aww; all the blogosphere go ‘aww…’), his blog has recently been detailing the writing and demoing of his next record. In what some would say is a rare display of self-awareness, Adams’ has been rifling around under the bonnet of his mojo and trying to figure out how the thing works. With an overall full of wrenches and books about Katherine Hepburn, he popped his oil-splashed face above the parapet last week and said:

I am going to write some more tunes tonight but I wrote one today called “Crossed-Out Name”. Man, it might be the best song I ever wrote. I can’t believe it. I re-listened to all the songs people love most. You know, even the songs people liked from my old band and I was just thinking about WHAT what WHAT made them connect to them the most . . . And what I think I felt was, they were the ones where I was not posturing, not stylizing, not projecting, but just being the moment and being real honest.

 

It’s been a few days since he said that, so ‘Crossed-out Name’ will probably have been superseded several times over, and a song that he wrote this morning will now be the best he’s ever written. In the liner notes to the new ‘Strangers . . .’ Jim Scott (who produced it) says: ‘Every song he writes is way better than the one he wrote five minutes ago . . . He wants to record the new one right now because . . . “Oh, those are old, I wrote that yesterday, that’s old. The one I just wrote down at the bar is unbelievable, you gotta hear it.”’   

 

So, we can take the usual braggadocio with a pinch of salt, but seemingly Adams himself feels that his recent records have not been quite up to the same standard as his earlier releases. Or at least he knows that there are plenty of people in his audience who feel that, even if he himself might not (and my feeling is that he does, even if he won’t admit it publically). And as previously discussed, Ryan does care what people think of him. That’s why he’s sitting around listening to his old recordings and trying to find the reasons that made them great. So, what are the reasons? I think there are several that are worth considering, and the answer is ultimately probably a combination of them. Here are some ideas:

 

It is quite reasonable to think that in the view of a lot of people the work he makes is devalued by the huge amount of it that he releases. Precious things are scarce. This perception may be indicative of a general problem with the role of art in society that may be worth me exploring a little. The marketplace laws of supply and demand pervade the judgement of art, and the mythology of art tends toward the same implication too. That is: something which is ‘good’ can’t be easily made; things which are created quickly are stripped of their quasi-otherworldly mystique – the very quality that gives them value as art; the characteristic that elevates them from the mundane. This, of course, is a fallacy. There are many examples of acclaimed artworks which were conceived and executed quickly, that were made effortlessly and painlessly by artists who weren’t alone in a darkened room wrestling with ennui and demonic hallucinations. Almost all photographs, for example, have been made without a tortuous gestation period. One need only think of Henri Cartier-Bresson and his decisive moment to know that.

 

Of course, different art forms have different scales by which their validity is measured and assessed. But for performing arts – like music, dance, theatre, or comedy – a similar rationale applies as does to other arts: judge something not by its theory, but by its praxis. To appraise art on a scale that has on any axis  ‘productivity’ or ‘rarity’ or suchlike, is to align art solecistically with commercial enterprise. Paradoxically that’s the very thing that recognising art’s indefinable ‘other’ – or valorising and preserving its incongruity - ought to make incompatible. Instead, its ‘other’ has been displaced – or eroded – as there has been an attempt to assimilate into the commercial world. It is now subject to the same judgement criterion as, say, petrol, but it retains something intangible which doesn’t allow it to integrate fully with such as system. It exists in an enclave, half-naturalised, but with elements that resist full integration. It is a bit like a kind of mixed-race child, forever on the periphery of the commercial-centric world, on the hinterlands of a society it isn’t indigenous to, but being subject to that society’s practices and infrastructure and tradition.

 

Having said all that – and to get back to the point – in the case of Ryan Adams, there are other, more profound, ways in which his prolificacy has impacted on the reception of his work. Art acquires meaning from its context. And, in this age of image-saturation and shallow engagement with art – or as people struggle to find a role for art and a scale to judge it by in an economic-centric world - the context is often delineated by personality and biography, fame or notoriety. Consequently, for Adams, the context for a record like ‘Love is Hell’ (sample lyric: ‘Come on forever/I’m tired and I want to sleep’) is determined by the brash slapstick DJ Reggie persona, Adams’ Hollywood actress-squiring lifestyle, his love of 80s hair-metal, or his fondness for comics. These are things which are external to the record, but proclivities which were (roughly) contemporary to it and thus informed appreciation of it – and probably militated against the serious-as-your-life, broken-down and morbid aesthetic of ‘Love is Hell’.

 

Obviously the context of the artist’s other work still plays a large role in the way any particular piece is apprehended. And in this case too, it is doubtful whether the presence of WereWolph’s ‘ Throw up on the Moon’ engenders a more sympathetic response to, say, a bare and heartfelt acoustic number called ‘Please do not let me go’. Songs like that are based on the audience committing to the sentiment; of feeling that this is entirely authentic. It must appear absolutely sincere; any doubt to that smudges the sentiment and makes it illegible. More than any other genre of music, the listener’s relationship the ’singer-songwriter’ demands intimacy, empathy, and connection. ‘The lone balladeer’; ‘the troubled troubadour’: these are personas that we buy into; feeling a kinship with the artist. The empathy wanes, and the kinship is estranged – or is at least potentially compromised or threatened – by the proximity of DJ Reggie and his obtuse comic skits about Kevin Costner, Bruce Willis and Cybil Sheppard.

 

As well as that, the context of each song on a record has an immediate impact on the way in which they’re apprehended. ‘Strangers’ has 13 songs; ‘Heartbreaker’ 14; and ‘Gold’ 16 – or 21 if you include the ‘bonus disc’ included with early pressings. None of these records feel overly-long. And none of them have any slack in them – there’s not a duff track amongst them, and every song works to drive the record as a whole. The structure and emotional coherence is one of the particular qualities of these records. Although they’re all relatively long records in terms of the number of songs, nothing is superfluous; every song is pared down and delivered with a precise economy. Here Adams stakes down everything with a meticulous rigour and makes records with an unusually cogency, intensity, and sustained mood. These records are a study in emotional literacy. After ‘Heartbreaker’ Adams gave an interview in which he talked about how making a record isn’t about choosing the best songs per sé, but choosing songs which will drive a record and give it a musical, lyrical, and emotional intelligibility. A listen to the outtakes from any of these three records confirms just how ruthless Adams was in his desire to make great records. This self-awareness, vision, focus, and objective-judgement was a hallmark of Adams circa the turn of the century.

 

Sometime after ‘Gold’ though, Adams seemed to abandon this ethos in favour of a kind of all-you-can-eat buffet style of record making. Don’t like piano ballads? Have a fairy cake instead. Rockabilly get on your nerves? Take the sting out of it with some finger food. Not keen on sparse country songs? There’s some cheese and crackers just down the table. Consequently the post-Gold records have lacked this cogency, this urgency, this emotional coherence.

 

They’re not, by any means, bad records. But the decision to work fast and loose and let the audience sort the wheat from the chaff has ramifications for how even individual songs are perceived. A song like ‘Anybody wanna take me Home’ would arguably sound even stronger if wasn’t stranded alone on an island of great songwriting surrounded by the sneering Kurt Cobain-channelling, Oasis hat-doffs, Husker Dü nods and Joy Division winks of the ‘Rock n Roll’ album. Stick a version of it on ‘Heartbreaker’ and it would be received in an entirely different context. A context that would probably be more in keeping with the content and scope of the song, and which would allow it to resonate like Adams likely intended it. Simply put, it would be a context that would do the songwriting justice. As the frequency of the releases increased, so too did the quick ‘n’ easy style of the buffet. Where Adams once seemed intent on using his capacious stock of ingredients and talent to deliver a Michelin chef of a multiple-course banquet; he now seems to toss a few things together as quickly as possible so he can rush out of the kitchen before anyone else grabs the Karaoke mic and gets Dokken cued up.

 

It’s not necessarily a problem caused by stylistic variation. The songs on ‘Gold’ for instance, were rendered with a pretty expansive palette – albeit most colours on that palette came from paint tubes marked ‘The 1970s’. But there was a unification of the writing, and a consonance of delivery that transcended the way in which the songs were dressed up. Fundamentally perhaps, it is the difference between style and substance. Certainly on ‘Rock n Roll’ the emphasis was entirely on the ‘posturing, stylizing, and projecting’ that Adams talks about on his blog. The one track on the record where that isn’t the case is ‘Anybody wanna take me Home’. And the reason it’s not the case on that song is principally because the posturing, stylizing and projection has – largely – been shorn from the songwriting; it’s still there in the rainswept vaguely-Smiths-esque 80s English clothing the song is draped in.

 

‘Rock n Roll’ isn’t a good choice to base an argument on because it is perhaps the least typical of Adams output. But it does exemplify some things, such as the ‘posturing’ that Adams talks about in his blog. And the record was such an anomaly that by making the record he may have effectively sequestered himself from his oeuvre.  

 

As the story goes, Ryan turned up at his record company with ‘Love is Hell’ and they took one listen to its sullen, murky, maudlin, distended mawk and requested he make a record they could sell. In a shop. Adams bristled at this intrusion of the indices of commerce into his art and stalked off in a huff cussing that if they wanted a commercial rock record that they could sell in Wal-Mart, then that’s exactly what he’d give them. He rolled back up at the record company offices a few days later with a new record comprising 12 entirely new songs (plus ‘Anybody . . . ‘, which he already had) of cynical rock n roll knock-offs, mock college art-rock, and alt-rock pastiche.

 

The record is, of course, brilliant. As I remember, one review said it was ‘throwaway but indispensable’. He conjured a record of such devastating conviction which was so at odds with anything he had made before (or since) that it may have been a career-defining moment. Previously his records had been founded on a clarity of sincerity, integrity and communication; this record was founded on appropriation and impersonation. By making it – and doing so with such breathtaking swagger and off-the-cuff aplomb - Adams effectively undermined the rest of his oeuvre; once he had disclosed to his audience how effortlessly he could deploy any artistic device under the rock n roll sun, then he’d opened the door to the possibility that he was merely doing that on his other records too. It could be seen as the crossing of a Rubicon. There was a sea change in critical opinion of him and he has subsequently been widely regarded with some suspicion. 

 

Perhaps too, the idiom of Adams’ recent records has caused his work to be viewed in a less sympathetic light. He has moved increasingly away from what could be called ‘country’ or ‘folk’ (Strangers and Heartbreaker), or even something which could be approximated as ‘classic rock’ (Gold), towards something which sounds a bit like ‘middle-of-the-road’ – a pigeonhole also variously labelled ‘trad-rock’, ‘dad-rock’, or ‘adult-orientated-rock’. Whatever you label them, such genres are not the places where artists are found. They’re the places where coffee is sold, and mortgages are taken out for soft-furnishings while Radio 2 simpers in the background.

 

This sort of music is more difficult to appreciate because it’s characterised by a shallow emotional involvement. Commercially-driven and creatively impoverished, this is music divested of critical engagement or artistic endeavour. Previously Adams’ music had been lent an extra gravitas because he was building upon a historical precedent of important, culturally-significant music; he was adding to a discourse or a text. The likes of ‘Heartbreaker’ or ‘Strangers’ were engendered with a sense creaftsmanship, imbued with deep cultural resonances; locked into something timelessly human. The difference is possibly a bit like the difference between being given a piece of art by someone you have a relationship with (cultural encoding; aesthetics) and buying a factory-made, shop-sold picture from Ikea. Almost by its very nature middle-of-the-road music is disposable.

 

Ok, so Adams has at no point morphed into Phil Collins, or anything remotely like that. But, there have been times (some of ‘Easy Tiger’, for instance) when, stripped of their edge and studied emotional complexity, the songs have aimlessly drifted across the carriageway with Adams apparently woozy and torpid at the wheel. No longer does he boast as he once did that if rock n roll was a car he’s in the ditch at the side of the road trying to straighten out the fender having crashed it to see what would happen. There are times now when Gawker could probably note sightings of him sedately meandering in a people carrier, lethargic from the air-con and wearily humming along to the second side of Easy Tiger as he makes his way to Ikea. Or Barneys.

 

Ah yes, latter day-Adams’ pre-occupation with fashion! It might not be too fanciful to plot Adams’ artistic output (put the video camera away, Ry; I’m talking quality, not quantity) against his shopping trips. On one axis we could plot ‘Gopping Designer Fashions Sourced from Barney’s at High Cost’ and on the other something like: ‘Good Songs’. We’d probably find a direct inverse relationship: the more ridiculous PVC jackets he acquires, the less coherent his musical output is.  

 

Though, as ever Ryan does a nice line in self-effacing humour:

 

Ok, so you gotta finish off that chic new stuff with paratrooper boots. That’s how I win when fashion is napping. Oh fashion, fill my empty corrupted soul with narcissism. 

 

But as much as he mocks himself, the Harry Potter glasses, tattoos, beards, ties, and faux-nouveau-riche shirts are arguably indicative of someone grappling with a latent self-consciousness. They are perhaps the accoutrements of self-mythologisation; the manifestation of a struggle for identity that has lurched into self-pastiche. It is tempting to view them as another side to the problems indicated from his musical output. With the odd fashions he seems to be doing an artist-by-numbers impression; and with the music he seems to be trapped between arch high-jinks, and self-impersonation. Sometime around ‘Gold’ he seemed to become aware of his artistic voice, aware of the perception others had of him. Since then he has used a sort of lexicon of signifiers to communicate with his audience. The fashions are one of them – “Look, I’m a serious artist” the glasses say. “See, I’m a musician” the boots say. “I’m being ironic” snigger the shirt and ties. “I’m really troubled” sigh the cigarettes. And the musical signifiers are just as prominent – the downbeat ‘Heartbreaker’-lite ‘Suicide Handbook’ record; the snarky clever posing of the rap records and alt-rock appropriations; the repeated lyrical imagery; the bruised mid-tempo acoustic number . . . etc . . .

 

In the past he made use of these signifiers – after all, rock music is founded on the mythology connoted by many of them – but they were in addendum to the music. They were stylisations that were unobtrusive – a subtext that was sympathetic and congruent to the music; a set of signifiers that added to the music and aided its reading. The problem now is that the music plays second-fiddle to this posturing; the artist is obscured by it, his voice lost amongst the wittering of the various proclamations of the signifiers. Perhaps he has collapsed into an image of himself. Perhaps he has gone through the looking glass.   

 

Nowadays, Adams’ output arrives in quotation marks, trailed by parenthesised signifiers. The songs perpetuate an imagined-self. Possibly it could be surmised as: in the past songs begat the self; now the self begets songs. In a fact that neatly entwines the fashion and art self-signifying and self-quotation Ryan even has ‘Heartbreaker’ tattooed on his arm.

 

On ‘Anybody wanna take me Home’ Adams sings about his youth ‘disappearing like magic’. It’s a great line. The innocence of youth disappears as if by means of magic, but more so: it disappears like magic itself does when you grow up. It is perhaps this struggle with loss of innocence which is problematising Adams work. When he made ‘Strangers Almanac’ he was an artist searching for something; perhaps he was forging an identity – both artistic and personal – but he was doing it without an awareness of what he was pursuing; there was a lack of self-consciousness. He now has an artistic past and a self which is an image at least partly constructed by the perception of others – he is after all, an artist releasing art to be judged and performing in front of an audience. Like magic disappearing, like growing up, that past and that self-image are things which can’t be reversed.

 

Perhaps now he’s found that the identity he was searching for is a destination that cannot ever be reached; the illusion of a destination. Identity is in the process; unlike magic where an end result is reached without any discernable process.

 

His self-perception is inextricably linked to what his audience thinks of him. But like he himself says, it is perhaps all about ‘just being the moment’; free of the ‘posturing’ and the ‘projecting’ of a self.

 

And perhaps without the ‘stylising’ of the Harry Potter glasses too.