Re: Generational irony and cover cheeze
Lance says: If there was one thing that I do see a bit differently is the idea of irony as a '90's development (of course, if you weren't suggesting that, Carl, please call me out). In point of fact, irony seemed to be a fundamental part of punk the moment rock came down with its case of arena-goggles. Oh, no, this is exactly what I was trying to address, Lance. My point was that irony worked as a counter-strategy in the late 70s and then became pervasive in the 80s. There are myriad examples but Letterman to me is the clearest marker of the shift - started off doing what seemed (when I was 12) almost like punk-rock television and then quickly became the most mainstream of forces. Spy magazine had a good piece about "The Irony Epidemic" in about 1989 that talked about the retro-kitsch and scare-quotes culture of urban hipsters of the era, and I think there was a confluence of the yuppie and the punk attitudes in all this. (Think of the emblematic young adult of the 80s as someone in a Hawaiian shirt, a house decorated with Flintstones memorabilia, working in advertising - and listening to the Cramps.) As David Thomas of Pere Ubu now argues, the weird thing about punk rock is that from a certain point of view, punk "won". (Only a certain element of punk but the dumb-is-smart part, for sure.) Thomas argues that Everything Is Punk now - politics included - and commercials being the best place to look. Nirvana's ascendance, though deeply well-deserved and also a complex cultural phenomenon, cemented the victory. My personal sum-up of Cobain's suicide is that the resulting paradox was unlivable for him, and I sympathize; one of the disturbing things about his death was that it seemed so logical, so much the inevitable outcome of the narrative. Which led precisely to this: sincerity had become the new alternative, and into that vacuum stepped alt.country. And that doesn't just apply to music. The younger folks I know have none of the same conflicts about all this that I do - the sorts of conflicts expressed in Jake's essay. They have so highly developed a sense of irony that it is useless to them - and as a result they have a lot more energy about just moving ahead and trying to find something meaningful to them despite how fucked-up they know the world is. There's an ingrown surrender to that attitude: mostly they don't see any point in opposing or rebelling against anything, and just want to pursue their own passions. "Selling out" is hardly an issue anymore. Which disturbs me, but since it's the same point I've come to after some 15 years of punk-rock-style anger, far-left politics and irony debilitation, I can hardly blame them. I almost envy them. And the drift of my musical tastes as I neared 30, toward "purer" forms - pop, country, experimental composition, jazz - and away from punk-based music was a fairly dramatic indicator of that sad, but necessary and liberating, attitude adjustment. carl w.
Generational irony and cover cheeze
I thought it interesting that Jake preceded his piece by saying that he thought Fulks's "Jet" cover was what put the "alt" in his alt-country, as well as Dina's comment about how covers are received from alt-country artists as compared to those of New Country singers. It resonated, of course, but what struck me is that the cheeze-cover syndrome is actually not endemic to alt-country the way it was to post-punk and grunge. What's actually more representative is covering classic folk and country songs, a practice that begins with the 80s roots-punk groups (tho in cowpunk it tended much more to the sarcastic brand of irony rather than the with-a-twist irony of, say, The Pogues, and nineties alt-country) but certainly made its most influential emergence with Uncle Tupelo's version of No Depression and on the March 11-20 album. With the perhaps-exception of Warfare (more a wonky misstep than a deliberately sarcastic cover, in my opinion), the Tupelo covers are definitely tributes, and also attempts to reclaim the material of these old songs as relevant to the post-industrial scene the group grew up and lived in. Likewise with other cases - when Neko Case covers a Loretta Lynn song, or Freakwater does One Big Union, is there anyone who thinks there's any element of mockery there at all? There is irony, but it's irony in this sense: "Ironically, though I'm a young hipster in 1990s America, these defiantly unmodern old songs speak more to my heart and my experience than the glitzy music being produced for the radio in my own time." It's a bittersweet irony at most. Now, I'd say the reason for the contradiction (dare I say irony) that Dina pointed out is fairly simple: while Garth and Robbie Fulks might both love a Paul McCartney song equally well, the context is very different. For Fulks to assert that he's playing "Jet" for the love of it is to make an intervention in the whole alternaworld narrative of irony, not to destroy the irony but to put it behind him, to say, "yes, I know what the cultural war we've been through was, but now I'd like to reclaim something from it." It is, to use an unfortunate term, post-irony. It's to grasp that, as a character in Todd Solonz's Happiness says of New Jersey, we've grown up "living in a state of irony" -- for all the reasons Jake so smartly elucidated in his essay -- and we can only transcend it, not escape. On the other hand, the (very country-traditional) emotional positioning of Garth and most New Country artists doesn't acknowledge the ironic moment to begin with -- the act of covering a Billy Joel song has no relationship to the canonical contest that Jake described. I recently read art writer Arthur Danto saying that in the 1990s, "the art criticism is built into the art," since frequently the only way to affect a jaded viewer is to anticipate the series of historicized responses she'll have and then strategically counter or subvert them. Unlike Garth doing Billy Joel (or everyone and his mom doing the Beatles tribute album), Fulks's "Jet" cover (if it's as good as you folks say) is doing something similar, and that's what puts the alt in his country. Likewise, Tupelo was anticipating that country was not considered cool by their punk peers, and asserting back in their face that it was -- rather than cadging about behind an ironic shield and half-allowing people to think they were kidding. Again there is an irony here, a Mobius-strip half-twist, but it isn't sarcasm. It isn't like Sid Vicious singing My Way. (Incidentally I can't quite buy The Christian Life as having much to do with the kinds of covers Jake was addressing. When I asked what "the first" was, I really meant of the trend he was discussing - I thought it'd be significant to know if there were cheeze-covers that fell squarely into the same position - for instance did Iggy Pop ever sing a Carpenters song? Or what about that Banana Splits cover of the TV cartoon theme?) Now, the question in the context of Jake's essay is, why? Being a few years younger than Jake (or so I gather), my friends and I don't have the same relationship to 70s music that he describes. Yeah, it was the soundtrack to some of our teenage beer-drinking, but so was punk, ska and new wave. Our older siblings loved Emerson, Lake and Palmer; we listened to it for a couple of months, when we borrowed their years-old vinyl, then dropped it and moved on. I was not quite ten years old when punk first arrived in the nearest metropolitan centre; I could hear its faint signals by turning my transistor radio at just the right angle toward the window. Although I've experienced my fair share of feeling crowded out by baby boomers -- and still do -- the 70s were just as much a given part of the culture I came of age in as the 60s. They didn't belong to me, and I'm not especially nostalgic for them. I'm nostalgic for the Replacements. Or, to give an instance of a song a band I
Re: Generational irony and cover cheeze
I would like to make one last point about irony, because Carl sums up much of what I would certainly agree with. If there was one thing that I do see a bit differently is the idea of irony as a '90's development (of course, if you weren't suggesting that, Carl, please call me out). In point of fact, irony seemed to be a fundamental part of punk the moment rock came down with its case of arena-goggles. Developing in (self)-conscious opposition to the Bic Rock of the late 70's and 80's, punk bands like the Mats could drunkenly stumble their way through BTO and Zeppelin--and still be punk--because by reappropriating the rock from the arena, they were unconsciously (in every sense of that word with the Mats!) commenting on their own inability to have a piece of the commercial pie. (And Carl, this sounds like what you were saying.). Add to this list of commerical lepers, bands like Redd Kross, the Circle Jerks, the Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, and even early REM, all of whom were so defiantly non-mainstream, that their appropriations of the mainstream could only be seen as them laughing at themselves as well as the objects of their derision. All of these bands could be ironic AND punk because they were so far underneath mainstream's radar, their irony only served as a reflexive afterthougt. And then there was Nirvana. No longer could punk react against a mainstream to which it was now most definitely a part. Like rap (the other punk meat), the early 1990's brought with it, no simply commercial viability, but a re-evaluation of its once "sacred" values. Phrases like "sell-out" were bandied about with relative ease, and groups like Fugazi werer held up as "beacons of integrity." It was around this time that irony became a very prevalent marketing strategy of record labels (not to mention MTV). We all know that irony had become a PR staple because that music that had once been called punk had gone mainstream, and in so doing, emerged anew as: Alternative. Alternative to what? you ask. Precisely. Practically anything that didn't sound like Garth Brooks or Dr. Dre was tagged alternative, and to all of us who had been "punk" for any length of time, we felt like we had been felt up by a dirty old uncle. sincerity had become the new alternative, and into that vacuum stepped alt.country. In many ways, this music's development in opposition to the mainstream is very reminiscent of punk, and that shouldn't be surprising. Many of the rock 'n' roll elements of this "movement that dare not call itself that" have grown up as fans of Black Flag, Dinosaur, Husker Du, etc. The funny thing is, when--or if--this music breaks into the mainstream we're all gonna be humming to ourselves about the newcomers: "He's the one, who likes all them pretty songs, and he likes to sing along, but he knows not what it means." Lance . . . PS--If Nirvana's Nevermind album cover doesn't sum up this decade, brother, nothing does.
