Willie, Tyler, and The Promise of the Real

Recently, my friend Mary and I agreed to become the new editor and associate editor of the IASPM journal – the International Association of the Study of Popular Music – and practically our first move in our new role was to become the only two people on earth to have seen shows by Tyler, the Creator and Willie Nelson in the same 24 hour period.  At 9:30 pm, just as Willie was leaving the stage of Frost Amphitheater in Palo Alto, we noted to one another that Tyler was just about to take the stage in the nearby town of Fresno. At that moment, it felt like the two of us had our finger on the pulse not just of the Bay Area, but of the entire world of popular music.

Willie and Lukas Nelson

Of course ‘the world of popular music’ is a large and variegated place. But if there is a spectrum, then Tyler and Willie stand on the exact furthest ends of it. On our left, we have a 28 year old rap star who’s rise to fame rests on the following key points: member of a talented and forward-thinking rap collective whose music eschews normal musical pathways and is disseminated on platforms like soundcloud and YouTube; owner of a trendy clothing brand called Golf, a conflicted relationship to his own homosexuality, and a guy who assumes a bizarre persona by wearing a blond wig as a nod to Andy Warhol. Or maybe Sia. Or maybe Donald Trump. On our right, we have an 86-year old country star with a vast catalog of songs centered on male dominance and heteronormative love whose career has spanned the entire media history of the 20^th century. And who, incidentally, may also be wearing a wig – or a hairpiece, in the form of two long hippie braids.



 But maybe there is more in common than the wigs. In my course on race and ethnicity I sometimes teach a unit on ‘why country music sounds white.’ The argument is that country music isn’t naturally a white idiom, but that it calls out to white audiences because both its musical tropes (old timey, acoustic instruments, drawl, twang and 4/4 time) and its lyrical ones (patriotism, Christianity, alcohol, dogs, trucks, trains, and death) deify the values of the past. That is, they romanticize a past where being conventional white and male is natural, powerful, and right. People are often sad in country songs, but only because things were better ‘back then.’

By contrast, rap music sees the past as a place of pain and devastation: rappers tend to write more about the future as a place where the songwriter will achieve success, revenge, or happiness – and they often do that by depicting themselves as standing outside of society, as a lawbreaker. Rap music also sonically transforms old instruments and makes them sound new: technology is its ally, not its downfall. In that sense, the two genres are opposites, but they also have commonalities; in many ways they are in some ways two sides of the same coin. As Joshua Clover, writing about Lil Nas X’s astonishingly big hit “Old Town Road” in Commune magazine recently, put it:



Country and hip-hop are the last two indigenously American genres standing. No cultural tradition is purely indigenous, and elements of each can be traced back to Africa, to Scotland, to the Caribbean, and so on, but the claim is clear enough. The syntheses happened in the United States, and both genres in different ways signify “America.” Not only do they retain their vitality, they have for some time existed in parallel, best enemies buoyed and constrained by authenticity, selling in similar volume and, most importantly, retaining the kind of committed audiences that have allowed them to weather the digital storms and market restructurings—not unaffected, not unchanged, but more or less intact.



Nelson features prominently in the recent 8 episode documentary by Ken Burns entitled “Country Music,” which traces the history of the genre from the turn of the century onward, from its roots in  hillbilly and folk music and its prominence on radio stations in the 30s and 40s, to its heyday on television, on records, and in Nashville and beyond. As the documentary makes clear, Willie Nelson’s oeuvre is predicated on authenticity and musicality, and at Frost both these aspects of his work were completely evident. His voice sounded great and his band was the apex of pristine musicality. Because of his age his set was, inevitably, a little on the short side, augmented by a lengthy set from his son’s band, The Promise of the Real. Everything you need to know about that band is embedded in its name, which is akin the President’s wretched promise to build a wall on the Mexican border, or Andrew Yang’s to give everyone a thousand bucks a month. It’s a promise, not a commitment, and it’s especially weird coming from the mouth of the son of someone who is, without a doubt, “The Real.”

Tyler the Creator

By contrast, Tyler, the Creator doesn’t even promise. He is deliberately, maybe even ideologically, anti-authenticity. Instead of the ‘real’, he depicts himself as a chimera, a trickster, brand, and a persona. Tyler’s music isn’t played on any radio station, but he is an incredible success: in San Francisco, he sold out two nights at the 9000 seat Bill Graham Civic; prior to the show they had set up merch stands in Civic Center Plaza and were doing a brisk business in deliberately hideous $60 Golf t shirts and replica blond wigs.  Musicianship is not a big feature of his performance, though he did play piano at one point. His show consisted of him alone on stage singing, and sometimes, not even singing, along to recordings. At both shows, Willie’s and Tyler’s, the audience sang along to all the music. But at Nelson’s show, the audience sang on top of his voice, while at Tyler’s show, the audience’s singing was often the entire vocal track, replacing him as singer. In this way, the artist and the audience became co-creators – and co-consumers. And while I think this is partly the point of Tyler, the Creator, and I understand that it is how contemporary popular music works, I wasn’t that into it. I did like a few songs, like “Earfquake.” But nothing really stood out to me. The next day I asked one of my students what he loves about Tyler so much and all he could state was that he’d seen him six times, the first time at Coachella.

This isn’t meant as a dis of my student, or of Tyler. It just struck me that its harder to write, or think, about music today than it was in mine. I’d have had a hard time reviewing that show, beyond saying the names of the songs (which, unlike in my day, I can easily find out on Songkick). That’s probably why there isn’t really a job like the one I used to do now – no one reviews live shows anymore, and maybe no one should. If you want to know what happened at Tyler, The Creator’s show – or at Willie Nelson’s – you can go look it up on YouTube. As to the value of seeing both these artists on essentially the same day, all it did was remind me that the musical universe is wide and welcoming place.

All You Need

The movie “Yesterday” has gotten a decidedly mixed reception on my Facebook page, i.e. amongst people of the age to have lived through the Beatles hey-day, a la Richard Curtis, the film’s script writer. I am not sure why so many people claim to have loathed it, and I’m even more confused as to why I didn’t too, since I hate almost everything fictional committed to film. I am especially wary of movies set in the here and now, movies about rock bands, and rom coms – romantic comedies – i.e. the very three things that “Yesterday” mashes up into a hot stew of my possible hatred. And yet, against all odds, I really liked “Yesterday.” Unlike most movies, this film's premise acknowledges that the world of film is imaginary right at the very start. And yet ironically, despite the absurdity of the world it depicts, the more normal it seemed to me.

Rom-coms irk me most of all because they are invariably about people living on a planet I have never met or been on. So it might be that I liked “Yesterday” because it told of things I have so much experience in: things like fandom, and festivals, and the music business. The movie bills itself as a fantasy on those fronts, but is it really? Have you ever considered what actually occurs when you write the best album in the world? It so happens I was present when that exact thing befell some people I knew, and it didn’t go so very differently from what we see in the film. Really not. Even the vile agent/manager character Deborah, played by Kate McKinnon in "Yesterday," though a caricature, isn’t far off reality.

“Yesterday”’s simple premise – what would the world be like if the Beatles music had never existed? – is the kind of ridiculous high concept thought experiment that you could picture someone writing on a napkin at a restaurant during a drunken revel: watching it then put into action, with all its attendant nonsense, is an exercise in clever film-making. You wouldn’t want to put too much pressure on the idea itself, and the love story is silly. But “Yesterday” suggests that we think about several important ideas about the place of popular music in our lives. Those who disliked it may have seen it as a movie about the Beatles, in which case maybe it’s a fail. But actually it’s about something larger: the collateral damage of fandom, the role music plays in our imaginations, and finally, whether music itself is a human right or a commodity – that is, whether it should be sold and if so, how.

The way the movie initially puts this is that music isn’t just something we want, it’s something that we deserve – that is, we all deserve to hear the Beatles, and our lives would be poorer without them, and frankly, I buy that.  But just asking that question requires exploring what it means to sell music, and how people go about doing that. This process is shown in depth in “Yesterday,” as the lead character, Jack Malick (Himesh Patel), having mysteriously become the only person on earth who remembers the Beatles repertoire, records (or rather, re-records) their music at a friend’s house, gives it away for free at his job, and goes on a local television show to promote it. There, it’s heard by the detestable Ed Sheeran, who recognizes it as the genius it is.

Is it legal for Ed to be dressed like this in front of Bey?

From then on, the movie unspools in a rather typical rags to riches to rags fashion, i.e. money can’t buy you love and so on and so forth. At this point, one's delight in the film may depend on one's love of the Beatles, but another of its smaller pleasures is thinking about old music being disseminated in new ways, and the weird anachronisms that color that bands repertoire (the USSR, darning socks, etc. etc.) The movie does a good job of resetting an old music biz story in the new music biz market, complete with YouTube, social media campaigns, and live-streamed concerts.

"Yesterday" has a lot of other fun moments, such as Ed Sheeran getting slapped down for trying to rap, one-off mentions Neutral Milk Hotel and Pussy Riot, and a truly terrible set at Latitude Festival, to name but a few. But the thing I liked best about the movie was something that I can’t really say without spoiling one of its key plot points. Suffice to say that “Yesterday” questions whether rock ‘n’ roll success is worth having, or if it would be better for those who love music to maybe play it in private and pursue happiness in other ways. What it doesn’t mention, but a fact that is always with me, is that in real life, those who drink from “the poison chalice of money and fame,” as Kate McKinnon’s character puts it, are courting violence, murder, insanity, and actual death. “Yesterday” suggests that, minus the music industry, there could be a world where that specific violence – and certain people’s specific deaths — didn’t happen. And that, my friends, is a world I would like to live in.

What We Do Is Secret

When I walked into the Sweetwater Music Club to see the Meat Puppets perform the other night, the opening act was telling a joke.

“Why did Eric Clapton walk around with a jar full of semen in December of 1968?” he said. 

Silence.

“Because he was out of Cream!”

The audience booed, but I thought it was funny. It reminded me of my very first assignment as a rock critic at the San Jose Mercury News, in which I opined that pundits around London must have misread the graffiti that peppered London at the time: “Clapton isn’t God,” I wrote. “He’s just good.”

It was the mid-1980s, and so appalling was this pronouncement that the next morning, the local shock jocks called me up to heckle me about my dastardly opinion on their idiotic morning radio show. “So who do you think is a better guitar player than Eric Clapton,” one of them sneered.

Me, my voice slanting upward like a baby, the way it always did back then until I trained myself not to do that: “Um? Curt Kirkwood?”

Needless to say, the offensive jocks had not heard that name before and used both it and the band’s name to relentlessly harangue me (Meat Puppet? What’s a Meat Puppet? Hey, want to see my Meat Puppet! etc etc etc). But forty years later, here in Mill Valley, it looked like everyone in the audience had somehow come around to my opinion. The venue seethed with men in their 60s, talking about Huevos and wearing Black Flag t shirts, but mixed among them, judging by their conversations, were the grown-up versions of those shock jock’s listeners, by which I mean, Eric Clapton fans, or worse: Dead Heads. 

The Sweetwater is the kind of place where locals will go see whomever is playing, which may explain why the gig was sold out. Or, I don’t know, maybe the Meat Puppets had a bigger following than I imagine. There was that time Kurt Cobain covered one of their songs on MTV Unplugged, after all. That was a good gig for them, but what was a good gig for ME was all the other times, oh so many times, when I went to see them and they burned through their repertoire. I can see them now, three beautiful boys, heads bowed over their instruments, their music wandering crisply through the valley of the shadow of songs. It wasn’t death rock, though; quite the opposite, some kind of louder, golden, version of metal. In those days the moniker ‘punk rock’ had a much wider meaning, and a band like the Meat Puppets were welcome in its embrace, despite playing music that sounded like an arid cross between REM and ZZ Top.

It was perhaps an acquired taste though? I didn’t really know anyone who would want to go with me to this show, not at a venue up a wooded glen on a week night, but as I sat quietly in a nearby café staring at my phone while waiting for the show to begin, I saw a message on my Facebook page from someone who was in SF on a business trip and was looking for something to do for just one night.

“Grab a cab over the Golden Gate and come see the Meat Puppets with me” I wrote on her thread, and to my eternal happiness, she did. Honestly, I thought I was the only person left on the planet who would arrive in a strange city and then take a lone cab a long distance to meet up with a total stranger just to see a band from our mutual past, but it turns out that there is one other woman of my age who will do that.  

Jenny and I had actually never met (although I love her old band Tsunami, and we once ran a book discussion online together), but in this situation, we may as well have been friends for our whole entire lives, because there is a very particular past experience we share which could very shortly be put as, “Going to see the Meat Puppets.” Or, Scrawl, or Helium, or Autoclave, or any of a hundred-odd other bands who you may never ever have heard of but whose gigs and music and overall outlook stitch our pasts together into one cohesive whole. It’s not something very many people have in common, especially women of our age, and those that do must now be pretty much interchangeable. 

In other words, it was like we’d known each other our whole lives. 

“Which side do you like to stand on?” Jenny asked briskly, as she went to the bar.

“Left,” I replied, and she nodded. Presently, she met me in the gap I had discovered on the left, the one that gave us the perfect sight and sound lines, and we nodded ever so slightly as an even better spot to watch from immediately yawned open for us, and we stepped into it together. And it was a little like we were children holding hands and entering a fairy tale because from then on it was magical. Every song we either knew or almost knew, every beat was syncopated in our collective heart, every remark we made to one another was either funny or sage and opened up to a new way of thinking about the experience. We speculated on why the keyboard player helped rather than hindered their formerly more sparse sound, if they were better now as a quartet than a trio, what words could be used to describe the very intense vibe that a single man and his brother and his child can conjure up when they’re playing in unison.  

Chill. Drone. Hardcore. Meandery, a word I just made up. The Meat Puppets are all of those things at the very same time, as if you crossed Tex-Mex music with Television and then added onto each song a feedback-laden finish a la My Bloody Valentine. It was a sound I hadn’t heard in ages, and that I hadn’t known I’d missed, but as good as it was to reconnect with it, what was better was that feeling of rejoining the secret world I used to live in, with Jenny by my side in real life, instead of just in my imagination. Watching the Meat Puppets play at this obscure venue up at the foot of a mountain reminded me of a recent gig I attended, by a Led Zeppelin cover band in Woodside. That band was led by a colleague of mine, who is a simply superb musician, playing and singing note for note renditions of that really difficult music, even the falsetto bits. There were about ten people in the audience, all wearing slacks and open necked polo shirts, and they were rocking out and singing along with abandon to the song “Black Dog”, which, as you may remember, goes like this: 

“Hey there child the way you shake your thing/Gonna make you burn, gonna make you sting” (only the way I’ve always heard it is as, “Gonna make you bark, Gonna make you sit”.) 

It made me giggle at the time because my friend is actually a professor of 19^th century romantic poetry, but it also reminded me of why, in the 80s, my friends and I preferred the music of the Meat Puppets, which has some sonic commonalities with the Zep but songs that go, “A long time ago/I turned to myself and said/you, you are my daughter,” or, “Holy ghosts and talk show hosts are planted in the sand/To beautify the foothills and shake the many hands.” 

 

Meat Puppets, April 4, 2018

In short, unlike Zep songs, and Clapton songs and the songs of ZZ Top, Meat Puppets songs are about nothing, but they’re also kind of about everything; the nature of evil, the banality of the working day, the landscape of the sun…you name it. Lyrically, they’re very meta, while the melodies they play are evanescent. Their work reminds me of a nice quote from Jerry Garcia, who, when asked if he minded his fans taping his shows, once said, “My responsibility to the notes is over after I’ve played them. At that point, I don’t care where they go. They’ve left home, you know?” 

I love that image, of the notes themselves being shepherded into being by bands like the Grateful Dead – or, in this case, the Meat Puppets, nurtured and created and lovingly curated, and then, leaving home to join Jenny and me, huddled together in confines of a nightclub, embanking ourselves against a cold hard world, burying ourselves, briefly, back in the past. What we do there is secret. I won’t tell if you won’t.

Going Down On The Dirt: Motley Crue before #Metoo.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was standing on the platform of at Union Station in Los Angeles waiting for a train alongside a bunch of members of L.A. hard rock bands when one of them — a rat-faced little guy with bad skin, a big shock of dyed black hair and a ton of acne and eye shadow — began to graphically demonstrate different ways he, in his own parlance, liked to “fuck Japanese girls.”

The cast of "The Dirt" or: Wigs R Us

He lifted his legs and gyrated suggestively. He got on his knees. He bent over a pretend ass and flailed at it wildly. He made high, stupid, squeaky noises in imitation of what he said they sounded like when he did this. He talked loudly about the pros and cons of cowboy and reverse cowboy, and then announced why he preferred to do these things with Asians. It was, he said, because they were “tighter.”

I want to apologize for the nasty and graphic nature of the preceding sentences which may well have made you feel just as bad reading them as I did listening to them, i.e. sick to your stomach. When I heard them, tears popped into my eyes, which I choked back. Listening to him felt like being brutally, mentally, molested. But because I was waiting for a train, I was unable to walk away; and anyway, I was working, reporting the grand opening of the Hard Rock Café Tijuana. He, and I, and everyone on that platform, had been invited by the management to go on a junket which involved a train ride down the coast and then a bus ride across the border, so all I could do was stand there and listen.

In retrospect, I realize now that the band member knew exactly how uncomfortable he was making me, and probably wouldn’t have said any of it if I hadn’t been there, but at the time, this didn’t occur to me. That was my assignment and there were rules about covering it, and the rules didn’t include describing the obscene conversations of the subjects, especially since, as the very, very rare female rock critic in that milieu, I was only allowed to do things like this on sufferance. Had I complained, I’d never have gotten another assignment.

Later on, in San Diego, as I walked down the aisle seeking a seat on the bus, he and his friends all chanted, “Show us your tits!” I flipped them off and they all laughed cheerily. They knew and I knew that we were going through the motions. They didn’t really want to see my tits at 11 o clock in the morning; it was more like we were all taking part in a weird pantomime of what hard rock bands were expected to say to any random female when found in that particular situation — i.e. going on an all-paid trip Mexico.

This incident came back to me as I watched The Dirt, the new biopic on Netflix about the band Motley Crüe. Motley Crüe were the masters of this particular form of cheery old sexism; the Tijuana-bound bands on the bus, whose names I can no longer remember, were very pale imitations of them, but they and their brethren all reveled in this kind of sexist idiocy. The Dirt tries to make a case that this sleazy ambience and objectification was some kind of rebellion against Reagan era conservatism. In the opening montage, a bunch of images of “80s evil” flash by, including bad women’s fashion, some decency crusaders and Nancy Reagan. That those things were terrible is true. That some bands — like the Weirdos and X, who are name-checked on a marquee at one point in the film — fought that through their aesthetic choices is true. What’s false is that Motley Crüe were part of that fight. Nope. They were part of the problem, pure and simple, fundamentally entwined with mainstream culture, mainstream politics, mainstream mores, mainstream sexism. Any movie that argues otherwise is telling some other band’s story, not this one.

A lot of people will enjoy it anyway, because most people love clichés and there’s a ton of female nudity in it, but objectively speaking The Dirt is a terrible movie, full of breathtakingly bad acting and extremely poor dialogue. I had a hard time watching it without fast forwarding a lot, but it did do one thing, and that is, remind me forcefully of that era. Motley Crüe walked the earth in the mid-1980s til the very early 1990s, a time when the bands I loved, like the Replacements and Hüsker Dü and REM and Nirvana, represented their exact opposite values — and a time, also, when almost all rap music was just breathtakingly fun and great, even when it wasn’t also being utterly, righteously, real. I was filled with loathing and disgust for the Crüe and their brethren, partly because their music seemed shallow and stupid by comparison but mostly because the drug and groupie scene both oppressed me personally and grossed me out.

At that time, I did not have the language or the theoretical framework to describe why their degrading use of women in all their music and imagery was so horrifying to me, because I hadn’t been to grad school yet. I just saw them as an evil force. Alas, The Dirt doesn’t quite capture that force, because like so much of history, it is revisionist, beginning with a very early party scene in which we see Tommy Lee giving head to a woman while spraying the crowd with whiskey (or something). While the mise en scene (“wild party!”) may be relatively true, the porny detail is not, simply because such an event would have been performed by two women while the men all watched.

This is not to say that The Dirt disregards that era’s obsessions with dick: there are not one, but TWO, scenes in which the band members discuss business at a table while a random woman, stuffed under it, services them with blowjobs, one by one, surpassed only by the number of scenes of sexual antics in hotel rooms. Later, Ozzy Osbourne (i.e. actor in a frightwig) gives the band some sage advice about not partying too hard and burning out — a clear, if heavy handed, foreshadowing where the film is going to go — before snorting up a column of ants and then his own, and then the band member’s piss. But…why? It’s unclear. Is it an homage to the greatness of Ozzy? Is it meant to mitigate all the scenes of them degrading (or just hitting) women by pointing out that they were out of their heads? Is it meant for shock value, like all the rest of it?

In a recent interview about the film, guitarist Nikki Sixx told Entertainment Weekly writer Katherine Turman that although they were ashamed of some of their actions, “the good news for everybody is this band never abused power, that it was definitely consensual.” In some ways, and with some exceptions — like, oh, maybe the sexual assault Sixx recounts in his book and now denies because, of course he would — I think that’s probably true. At least I hope it is. Despite many disgusting incidents like the one I witnessed at the train station, I never felt physically threatened around that band or bands like them, but only because the women they were humping in my vicinity were so clearly delineated from the likes of me. With hindsight, I understand now that those women probably truly wanted to be screwed in front of everybody by Motley Crüe; and thanks to the democratizing force of Pornhub and Tinder, the kind of debauchery once reserved solely for rock stars — gang bangs! threesomes! penetrating people with food and animals! — can be easily accessed by everyone.

A lot of other things have changed since then as well, of course, but it would be way too simple to laud this film for its depiction of the past by saying, “Those were more innocent times.” As Spencer Kornhaber points out in his article in the Atlantic, the biopic omits many real life details about what garbage people this band was made up of, including the fact that Tommy Lee went to jail for battering his then wife Pamela Anderson, Vince Neil pleaded guilty to assaulting a woman in 2016, the band had to settle a lawsuit with a security guard who alleged they said racist slurs to him, poured beer on him, and directed the crowd to attack him at a 1997 concert, and that Neil’s DUI manslaughter car crash caused two additional passengers to suffer brain damage. Without mentioning those things, The Dirt is able to sanctimoniously hawk itself under the hypocritical title of “a cautionary tale,” but in fact, it is a celebration of a lifestyle, not a condemnation of it. According to Sixx (again, speaking to Turman), ”If you’re making a movie in 2019 about the colonial period and burning witches, and society wants you to remove it because we don’t burn witches anymore, that’s not honest film making.” Fair enough, although when it comes right down to it, I’m not sure that we, as viewers, are as likely to learn something from watching an in-depth history of the depravity of Motley Crüe as we are from the history of the depravity of the Salem Witch Trials.

I see on social media that many people I know are enjoying this film because they see it as fun, corny, or that kind of bad/good hybrid that some people like to wallow in, and it’s true that its very shallowness, as well as the phony, intermittently-ironic, kitschy style, matches the shallow, phony, kitschy badness of the band itself. That can be fun to watch, if you’re not me, and didn’t have to experience some of it. It’s not hip to say so, but in addition to wishing that he’d told the real truth about this band, I also wish that the director had broken the fourth wall either more times or fewer, and had included one single female character that wasn’t either a shrill bitch, or nude, or on her knees.

Despite reminding me of those days and highlighting its ultimate meanness, The Dirt didn’t make me angry, or give me PTSD. Instead, the overwhelming feeling that wafted off it was pathos. There were a number of ways in which that kind of hair-band was pathetic in the first place, at least to me and my friends, and the great thing is, we had the absolute pleasure of watching Motley Crüe’s whole ridiculous aesthetic destroyed in months by a band called Nirvana. They were pathetic then, but how much MORE pathetic to be someone in that band now, 30 years down the road? If nothing else, The Dirt does show four absolute jackasses, and if people are laughing at Motley Crüe rather than with them, it’s understandable. Unfortunately, I know who is taking that mirth to the bank.