Better off Dead vs. Suicide Club

Technology is just plain stupid. As in stupid fresh. As in crooked bananurrs; as in, even my tonsils are sweating technology right now. I do not know if I have ever loved anything like I currently love my teeni tooni lil’ PINK MINI iPOD. Even mean Ezra’s knowing admonishment that “it’s a better deal to get the middle-sized iPod” could not squelch the flutter of my heart, the blowing of my mind, the braining of my brain, the complete and somewhat painful (but ultimately triumphant) update to OS X. I am generally a foe of raving materialism and product-worship, but this… it weighs like 1/4 oz.! I can run on the treadmill with it, unburdened by the imposing bulk of CD walkmen. I am no longer subjected to my gym’s heavy rotation of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” vs. “Who Doesn’t Love an Ocarina?” mixtape soundclash! I promise to never let this Steve Jobs 666 stuff pass me by again!
I’m supposed to be doing the intro skit for my place of employment’s screening of the John Cusack suicide/redemption classic “Better Off Dead,” but my boss didn’t like my idea for a dialogue-free, performance art interpretation of the film (it would have involved darkness, me suspended upside down by an extension cord a la The Hanged Man, and my friend/coworker Aaron Beam playing a solo on his saxophone). My intro skit/brilliant idea got replaced with a cartoon, where a bunch of little furry animals get their eyes poked out.
Instead, I’ll meet you at Suicide Club*, wherein Young Nathan HowTheHell spins everything Neptunes ever did, whilst donning a white bandanna, riding that ass like a Technics horsey.
(*Note: Suicide Club has no formal connections to Suicide Girls. Apologies to Jazzbo, and everyone else.)
Brace and the cast of Suicide Club can ride Pharrell’s ass all they want tonight and I’m cool with it, but by decree of myself and the genius R. Kidwell, Bloodshy & Avant are the sound of the summer; they are definitely responsible for my favorite song at the moment–the song that, I NEED, to hear, RIGHT NOW, on MY super-hot, pink mini iPOD. NOW. Britney, herself, can take credit for the boom-sha-lok-lok punch of “Toxic”‘s chorus, and its slippery coy interludes, even in her flim-flamputated helium/ nighttime-stuffy-sniffy-sneezy voice. B&A give her Alfred Hitchcock disco strings and a surf solo teleported in from Joey Santiago (but not Dick Dale). (The only bad part being that terrible, flange-drowned vocoder breakdown. That part is indeed bad enough to transport us back to the Britney-must-appeal-to-LCD real world. That part is a direct flight back from fantasy island, where the opaquest teen pop star-turned- like, chainsmoker, is purveying a number packed with the most intriguing production currently on the FM outside the V-Beach tirumvirate.) (No snap on J. Timberlake.)
And speaking of suicide, according to the employah of our own J. Patel, Britney [‘s people] has removed the suicide plot from the video for “Everytime.”
Videos are the new album art in the era of the iPod. Someone has probably said this but I recently figured it out, having only just now entered the new world order of iPod-dom; please give me space for my baby skin to thicken. It’s not too shocking that Brit put in the suicide theme, nor is it surprising that she folded under the potential for PR bloodbath. Its inappropriateness for the MTV only underscores those who are in the habit of broaching the subject. For instance: Jamie Stewart. On the new Xiu Xiu record, Fabulous Muscles.
We are afflicted youth. It seems important that Kanye admits his insecurities not just because he’s unique among his rapping peers; it’s also because mental unhealth can be an accepted state of being; it goes unquestioned, unmentioned. And so, when people like Jamie Stewart write songs without any semblance of flinch–songs eyeing the truth of a situation like a starving person eyes a poison meal, songs about abuse, neglect and sexual violence in the tradition of Lynda Barry Cruddy and Karen Finley before her… it’s disorienting, unsettling, unexpected and uncomfortable.
It can also come off like pain on a pedestal.
Can it? I know Jamie has said, to myself and to others, that every situation he writes about in his songs is based on some reality, either his own or his friends’. I do not believe he is lying. I believe he knows about misery. We once traded books; I sent him the collected works of Martha Gellhorn, and he gave me… he gave me a book on the Khmer Rouge, and another called My War Gone By, I Miss It So. It is a memoir about a photojournalist whose only reprieve from his heroin addiction was the constant violence and fear of Bosnia and Serbia.
What happens when an artistic truth is “I can’t wait to tell you I punched your mommy in the chest in front of her new friends”? What happens when emotional/revealing Xiu Xiu songs, about deep sexual transgression, are in the same artistic landscape/MARKET as “emotional”/”revealing” Dashboard songs, about getting dumped and Damn That Sucks? (You Bitch!) Is authenticity more of an issue? Does any emotion on any emo album ever hit heavy, hit hard, ever again, after the lyric “kneeling down before the now familiar flesh of your deformed penis” has been written? Still, I really feel there should be more context for his lyrics–
Well, I mean, I guess one context is that Jamie Stewart promotes the integration of gamelan, new wave and house musics, and cites Henry Cowell as a major influence.
Did this come up when Finley wrote her prose about abuse?
I’m going dancing now.