Tagged: Bollywood
Liz Phair’s (no)Funstyle
Funstyle (s-r; 2010); image courtesy of latimesblogs.latimes.com
Earlier this year, I wrote an entry for Bitch that considered Liz Phair’s burgeoning career as a TV composer. In that piece, I speculated that she started working in television for financial reasons, as she’d discussed elsewhere how indie cred doesn’t always pay your bills. This was confirmed in “Bollywood,” the first single of Phair’s sixth album Funstyle, which she released on her Web site last week. According to the message left on Phair’s Web site, we weren’t supposed to hear it and was responsible for her loss of management. I’m sure Funstyle‘s detractors can make hay of this.
Many have typed about “Bollywood” in the week since. After my friend Erik alerted me of the track, I checked in with Chriso at I Fry Mine in Butter who provided scathing commentary and linked Phair’s output to the law of diminishing returns. A contact of mine at Bitch believed it was decent enough as a bonus track, but a bad lead single. Veteran music critics like Ann Powers and Douglas Wolk evaluated the album in full. Powers defended Phair’s artistic merit, referencing Dr. Demento while believing the work to be insightful, funny, and political. Wolk hoped it was a palette cleanser following the artist’s disappointing attempts at commercial success in the 2000s.
As for me? I’m certainly not going to begrudge Phair the opportunity to release new material. Record ’til you run out of songs, Liz. And in truth, I’ll probably always give anything you make at least one listen, because I try to give all female artists that courtesy. We can discuss the systemic failures that force a single mom to take jobs she may not otherwise consider and attempt at corporate solvency in order to provide for her family. We can debate whether breaking from Capitol Records and releasing the album to an unsuspecting public was a smart move when listening to “And He Slayed Her” (a dig on Capitol exec Andy Slater). We can encourage her to be critical about the music industry and how short a shelf life many female musicians have in it, as “Smoke” alludes to. I support her on all counts.
But if we’re purely talking about the album as a listening experience, I hardly enjoyed it. “U Hate It,” Phair assumes in the opening track. Well, I certainly don’t love it. When it didn’t make my ears bleed, it bored me.
Much of what I didn’t like about the album was evident in “Bollywood”: Phair’s thoughtless racial appropriation. This is evident in the “ethnic” voice and grammar she employs while rapping, the broad humor she uses to cast evil record label execs as Noo Yawkahs (re: Jewish people), and her use of musical tokenism. It’s also evident in the title, whose only direct meaning is that the Hindi-language film industry (or ugly Americans’ notions of it) isn’t like the American culture industry that resides in a first-world cut-throat city posing as an idyll with which it rhymes. If you thought you wuz in the Bollywood, you wuzn’t. Let’s get real, Liz. You grew up in Winnetka as a member of a white upper-middle class family and went to Oberlin. You wuz never in the Bollywood and your conception of it and willingness to funnel it into a pop song is offensive.
Her tone-deaf racial ideations seem analogous to the condescending familial racial politics she offered on whitechocolatespaceegg‘s “Uncle Alvarez,” which told the story of a relative’s closeted Native American heritage. Though in fairness, Phair’s an equal-opportunity offender here. Suburban Midwestern housewives are her target in “Beat Is Up”. They sure talk funny when they offer hollow platitudes and mispronounce words while being cuckolded by their husbands and white-flight privilege, doncha know. But they’re such an easy target. Also, given how Phair is culturally insensitive in other ways, it seems like she may have more in common with these silly women than she may realize.
My disdain for Phair’s comedic sensibilities has deeper roots. She’s always entertained a broad sensibility that has gone largely undetected by her deadpan delivery. It’s most evident in her willingness to do voices, which goes at least as far back as “Why I Left California”.
And just because she’s deadpan doesn’t mean she’s always funny or insightful. On “U Hate It,” she admonishes music industry brass for being a “penius . . . colada that is.” This kind of faux-witty childish raunch didn’t curry favor with me when I watched Cougar Town or during the 45 minutes I could stomach of The Sweetest Thing. Phair is no exception. Frankly, I could draw a line between it and the awful “Polyester Bride” which boasts shallow lyrics about marked-down alligator boots and flirtatious bartenders as vessels for female empowerment. This doesn’t even get us into “H.W.C.” territory because . . . well, c’mon. You go girl. Or something.
When Funstyle didn’t make me wince with embarrassment, it left me with nothing else. The remainder of the album plays like the handful of unremarkable tracks on the sporadically great but overlong whitechocolatespaceegg or the majority of predecessor Somebody’s Miracle. Songs like “Satisfied,” “Miss September,” and “You Should Know Me” play like adult-contemporary album filler. It’s sad to me that Phair can’t provide interest for these songs, as I’m okay with “Why Can’t I” and “Soak Up the Sun,” a Sheryl Crow track she guested on. They weren’t favorites of mine, but I didn’t begrudge them their MOR success. She does take some other musical risks apart from rapping. This is most evident on “Oh, Bangaladesh” and “Bang! Bang!,” though only the latter urged me to listen again, as the former was another pan-Middle Eastern infused mess.
Maybe Phair is just being herself here, sending us postcards from some journey she’s on. I just wish I enjoyed reading her correspondence.
“Changing Tunes” for changing seasons
Cover of Changing Tunes; image courtesy of musicweb-international.com
Since a lot of folks (including many friends) are back in school, I thought I’d do another book report. Tonight, I’ll jot down my notes on Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film. Just as my friend Kit pointed me in the direction of this useful, diverse anthology, I thought I’d do the same, especially for any other burgeoning feminist soundtrack/score enthusiasts there may be. Term paper deadlines will come closer than you think.
As Robynn Stilwell was one of the co-editors of the collection who penned the particular essay Kit recommended to me, what better place to start? After all, her piece is called “Vinyl Communion: The Record as Ritual Object in Girls’ Rites-of-Passage Films.” Here, Stilwell looks at four movies featuring girl protagonists and preoccupied with such themes, two of which I’ve yet to see (Little Voice and Heavenly Creatures) and two of which are all-time favorites (Ghost World and The Virgin Suicides). As Stilwell’s reading of Little Voice aligns with Pamela Robertson’s, I will refer you to a previous entry where Robertson’s essay is discussed. And while I would’ve liked more development of each text (hell, I could read a whole book on each of these movies) and would have appreciated some movies that consider the mediated representations of vinyl practices from girls of color, I still found Stilwell’s insights valueable. And obviously, I’m going to need to watch all these movies.
To Stilwell, Ghost World‘s Enid believes that vinyl, and its technological apparatus, has no instrinsic value as an object. In one scene, she pretends to break her record collector friend Seymour’s vintage LP. She also has no interest in creating an authentic listening experience, playing old vinyl releases on a 33 1/3 record player that were meant to be played on a 78. Instead, Enid turns to record-playing for its transportive and transformative qualities. She wants a form of escape from her suburban SoCal surroundings, trying on punk, retro, and gothic fashions and turning to Bollywood, Indian rock music, and blues singer Skip James’s hauntingly androgynous tenor in “Devil Got My Woman.”
With Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, itself based on the Pauline Parker-Juliet Hulme murder, the schoolgirls’ fandom for tenor Mario Lanza serves as a buffer for true homosexual feelings, a development that Stilwell explains by using late theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick‘s notion of the homosocial triangle.
Thus, in order to own those feelings, Pauline and Juliet must disavow themselves from Lanza, burning their records to aver these feelings in the process.
Record burning is considered in a much different context in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, instead constructed as authoritative punishment rather than a declaration of one’s identity. The Lisbon girls, a mysterious and cloistered quintet, consider records to be a form of communication between one another and to the neighbor boys with whom they’ve been forbidden to interact with by their parents. Songs like Heart’s “Magic Man” and “Crazy on You” speak on their behalf, conveying the lust and sexual agency that girls feel and Lux Lisbon acts upon for high school heartthrob Trip Fontaine. Thus, mother Lisbon’s command that Lux burn her rock records after Trip Fontaine sleeps with and abandons her on the football field after the Homecoming game suggests a tragic loss of voice, demanding that she align with soft rock male singer-songwriters like Gilbert O’Sullivan and Todd Rundgren instead of continuing to listen to libidinous cock rock bands like Aerosmith.
With Vanessa Knights ‘ “Queer Pleasures: The Bolero, Camp, and Almodóvar,” we have a consideration of how Pedro Almodóvar asserted a queer identity in his earlier films, utilizing the campy potential of bolero, as well as acknowledging the contributions bolero singers like La Lupe have given to queer fan culture, particularly among gay men.
While Almodóvar may have more often utilized Cuban musicians’ contributions to movies made within a strictly Spanish context, Phil Powrie’s “The Fabulous Destiny of the Accordion in French Cinema” considers the accordian, originally an Italian musical instrument, as a French national symbol. He considers the accordian’s heroic period between 1930 and 1960 and how the instrument was used as an audiovisual marker of utopian community in movies like René Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris. While Powrie does not make it clear, I hazard to guess that there may be some connection, however tenuous, between this period and the chanteuse réaliste movies Kelley Conway has discussed elsewhere.
By 1949, Powrie notes that movies like Jacques Tati’s Jour de Fête were commenting on the decline of the accordian’s ubiquity in French culture as the country shifted from a working-class country with a strong sense of history to a modern society with tremendous interest in other cultures and a particular interest in American life. This is a point Powrie argues that Tati makes aurally, as Jo Lefevre’s accordian opens and closes a film about a character who tries to emulate American customs, cued through the film’s use of swing music.
The move away from the accordian’s aural connotation of national identity is evident in 80s French cinema. The accordian instead becomes a visual, unheard marker of community demise in movies like Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva. From the 1990s on, the accordian has become a post-modern instrument for French cinema to Powrie, suggesting both a utopian ideal and evident of self-aware nostalgia, most evident in Yann Tiersen’s score for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie.
And finally, we have Ronald Rodman’s “The Popular Song as Leitmotif in 1990s Film,” which considers how the use of theme music written for specific characters in classical music and film can be translated into contemporary film’s use of popular music and how leitmotif is used as a connotative signifier. This seems like a tremendously useful exercise that I’ll make sure to remember when I get to be a boss professor lady.
Rodman considers Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting, two successful movies made noteworthy, in part, because of their exclusive use of popular music. With Pulp Fiction, protagonist hit man Vince Vega becomes associated with surf rock and Elvis as a means of connoting his class and white ethnic cultural positioning as an Italian American with a working-class background. In Trainspotting, Scottish heroin addict Mark Renton is associated with art-damaged, anti-establishment classic rockers like Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie, before getting clean and making his classed ascent into the bourgeoisie, which is highlighted by his musical association with Brit pop and popular techno.
While I appreciate Rodman’s argument for Trainspotting, I do wonder what he’d make of the wave of regional pictures in the UK during the 1990s and early 2000s. Just as Trainspotting focuses on Edinburgh, so to did 24-Hour Party People depicted Manchester’s singularity. That said, I do value Rodman’s effort to reconsider how popular music functions similarly to classical music in movies, and look forward to reading more on the interplay from similarly-invested scholars. Please feed me titles if you’re so inclined.
Read “Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music”
Cover to Soundtrack Available; image courtesy of t.douban.com
I knew the trip from Austin to Traverse City would be lengthy, so I packed this 2001 anthology, edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight. Vanguard film music scholar Claudia Gorbman called it “muscular, theoretically informed, historically textured, and full of exciting discoveries for all interested in the confluence of pop music, film, and identity.” Strong words.
And true statement. This is a great book that covers so much ground. It was also a very heartening read, because identity politics, industry practices, sociohistoric context, and the myriad of ways soundtracks inform and impact movies are at the fore of this anthology, mirroring my own scholastic aspirations. And the forward (or “overture”) to this book stresses the importance of popular music to media studies, and challenges how this emphasis is lacking in the field. I only wish I had gotten to this book sooner, but it definitely gave me a sense of who to look for when I choose to reapply for PhD programs, as well as how to go about framing my interests in a statement of purpose.
Also, as a bonus, PhD students’ work is nestled alongside big names like Rick Altman. Seriously, I think I’d die if something I wrote was in an anthology with his work in it.
I had a pre-existing relationship to this book prior to flying in and out of O’Hare and road-tripping I-90. And, for my work, the two pieces that most interest feminist music geekery are chapters I’ve already read. But I never blogged about them before, so let’s pretend they’re new to all of us.
The first piece is Kelley Conway’s “Flower of the Asphalt: Chanteuse Réaliste in 1930s French Cinema,” which focuses on the working class singer in French film, whose cultural popularity reached a peak between the two World Wars and during France’s period of considerable urban restructuring and economic poverty. I first chanced upon it when doing some research on Conway (who is currently at Madison). As a big Edith Piaf fan, I was kinda irritated with myself for not knowing that the chanteuse réaliste was an important character in French cinema. In addition, Piaf wasn’t the only woman associated with the singing style and film subgenre. Conway pays more attention to lesser-known figures, like Damia and particularly the proudly full-bodied Fréhel (who you may have heard if you’re a fan of Amélie; her song “Si tu n’étais pas là” is on the soundtrack).
Fréhel, chanteuse réaliste; image courtesy of pierre-michel.fr
A key component to the chanteuse réaliste was authenticity. She had to be as hard-scrabble in life as she was on screen and in song. Often, these women played prostitutes and drug addicts — Fréhel was both. They also had to be aligned with the working class. Indeed, some of these films (particularly Coeur des Lilas), made great efforts to create a symbiotic relationship between the chanteuse and the street.
Most importantly, these women were often marked by excess, sexual agency, and delight toward transgression. Coeur des Lilas contains a musical number called “La môme caoutchouc” (French for “The Rubber Kid”) where Fréhel delights in her flexibility, sexual prowess, and ample bosom.
There are, of course, downsides to the chanteuse réaliste that Conway is quick to point out. For one, she is rarely the leading lady, usually a supporting character. And while she is decidedly working class and tends to be sexually voracious, she usually has no social mobility. She also tends to be a tragic figure; alone, unloved, and sometimes met with an untimely demise.
The other piece that I had previously read was Wojcik’s “The Girl and the Phonograph: or The Vamp and the Machine.” I drew from this piece for a recent conference paper I delivered on female deejays in horror film. Wojcik looks at the marginal but noteworthy presence phonographic technology has for girls and young women in contemporary cinema (ex: Little Voice, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Pulp Fiction, Truffaut’s La mariée était en noir), as well as teen magazines from the 1950s and 1960s. Her statement “the phonograph was something of a free-floating signifier: it is, alternately, a toy, a decorative item, a serious technology, a party machine, and a key to access a world of music” was too wonderful to ignore.
To the left; one of Holly Golightly's few pieces of furniture in her apartment was her record player
It also reminded me that I need to see Little Voice, a British film about LV, a shy girl who inherits her dead father’s record collection (which Wojcik notes that, through his fandom of Judy Garland and Shirley Bassey, alludes to his possible homosexuality). LV begins poring over them out of grief and as a means to distance herself from her sexually liberated, Tom Jones-loving mother. Through studying these records, she starts a musical act as Little Voice where she emulates these singers perfectly.
An unfortunate narrative commonality of the trope of the girl and the phonograph is that, often, in order to obtain emotional or mental maturity, they must give up phonographic technology. Also, as Wojcik notes in Diner, sometimes females’ clear interest in phonographic technology gets overshadowed while enforcing how inept and careless they are alongside traditionally defined male traits of indexical prowess.
In addition, the following are some chapters that, while not directly applicable to feminist music geekery, I found interesting and potentially useful.
Jeff Smith’s “Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema” – This one focuses on using popular music for pun and reference, advocates fluency in song selection as an interpretive strategy to further bolster scholastic and cultural understanding of a text, and suggests the authorial power of the music supervisor. I could easily see this being useful in my work, as I always advocate further understanding of how song selection informs a movie (I don’t know how you can read Sofia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette without interrogating the Marxist values of post-punk and the pre-Revolutionary fixations of the New Romantics whose songs make up the soundtrack). However, I’d configure music supervisors as collaborative authors rather than sole authors, but I try to challenge monolithic authorship wherever possible.
It also validated my reading of the music in The Hangover. Music supervisors George Drakoulias and Randall Poster, both of whom have worked with Noah Baumbach and the latter of which is the on-call music supervisor for the indie smart wave, use the biggest, glitziest, most bombastic current and recent Top 40 hits as a means of setting up a spectacle (four white brosephs let loose in Vegas) that is never shown to the audience (pointedly, the top 40 hits basically disappear from the movie the next morning). Some more concrete examples include: Zach Galifianakis’s character asking his co-hort if they’re ready to let the dogs out in deadpan, followed by quick cuts of the group strutting down a hotel hallway to the Baja Boys’ “Who Let the Dogs Out” (this got big laughs during the screening I attended). Also, their drive to Las Vegas is underscored by Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothin'” and if anyone has seen this music video, then they were probably hoping to see Galifiankis lip-sync to the camera, if only for a moment. I know I was.
There might be something going on with Mike Tyson’s love of Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” too, but I’m not sure what. However, when be-credded musicians like Panda Bear praise a seemingly un-cool Collins, I can’t help but wonder if some kind of ironic appropriation is going on. Or maybe Tyson just likes the drums. They are pretty sweet.
In addition:
Paul B. Ramaeker’s “‘You Think They Call Us Plastic Now‘: The Monkees and Head.” Great interrogation of the teen idols’ arthouse flop, as well as how it fits into their star persona and the stylistic motivations of the show.
Neepa Majumdar’s “The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Popular Hindi Cinema.” Great piece on the role of playback artists (singers and voice actors) in Bollywood. Particular focus on Lata Mangeshkar. Made me keep thinking about the voice and disembodiedment, which I hope to extend further into a discussion of representational politics and animation at some point.
Barbara Ching’s “Sounding the American Heart: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Contemporary American Film.” Interesting piece about how country music and its politics have been framed in contemporary film (Nashville, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Tender Mercies, and Pure Country). Any piece that makes me think critically about Nashville, one of my all-time favorite movies, gets a nod.
Nabeel Zuberi’s “Documented/Documentary Asians: Gurinder Chadha’s I’m British But . . . and the Musical Mediation of Sonic and Visual Identities.” Great piece that ties the use of music to frame developing South Asian populations in Great Britain in the 1989 documentary I’m British But . . . to the marginal but emergent presence of British musicians of South Asian descent in the late 90s (ex: Cornershop). Pays particular attention to how these musicians were influenced by hip hop, soul, funk, and other musical genres associated with African Americans. Zuberi only gets to the late 1990s, but I am obviously interested in extending this discussion to people like M.I.A., who I love and have researched previously for a conference paper.
Krin Gabbard’s “Borrowing Black Masculinity: The Role of Johnny Hartman in The Bridges of Madison County. A look at how the jazz singer keeps Eastwood’s character Robert Kincaid from being emasculated in the movie. Also looks at the use of jazz music in the broader context of Eastwood’s acting and directorial work.
So yeah, read this book. I hugged it when I finished it, just like I did with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. And if you’re at UT, pick it up from the Fine Arts Library.
Feminist Music Geek 