Among the greatest love songs...

...there's this gem by The Replacements:



...and this ballad by Bonnie "Prince" Billy:



...and this dreamy number by Beach House:



...and how could I forget Chad VanGaalen, who has at least half a dozen beauties per album:

Fiona Apple and a pathology called "love"

Last week, a friend's passing reference to Fiona Apple as one of Lana Del Rey's predecessors got me up in arms. I've been listening to Apple's 2005 album, Extraordinary Machine, a lot lately, and rumors about her long-awaited follow-up, which could be released a few months from now, have also just begun to circulate.Valentine's Day seems like the right occasion to rehash some of the reasons why I find her music so interesting, and why I go on the defensive when I hear her get linked to other popular female singer-songwriters.

"Not About Love" - Jon Brion's unreleased version: 

The controversy surrounding Extraordinary Machine's release is a bit muddy, but it'll help to explain why I felt it necessary to post two very different versions of the same song above. Originally thought to be delayed because Apple's label, Sony, doubted its commercial viability, the long awaited album had fans writing letters and mailing apples to label execs as part of the "Free Fiona" campaign (my roommate at the time was peripherally involved through his Fiona Apple message board--we even had a "Free Fiona" poster on the door of our dorm room). As it turns out, there was an original version, produced by Jon Brion, that was shelved because Apple wasn't happy with it; she then reworked most of the songs with a different producer (Mike Elizondo) and released the album.

Elizondo's finished product was still a good collection of songs, but the unreleased version with arrangements by Jon Brion (the demos of which had leaked several months before the official version came out) was, at least in my eyes, clearly superior. Apple felt that Brion's instrumentation had nearly taken over her songs: as such, they represented his musical taste more than they did her artistic identity (The two versions of "Not About Love," posted above, are a great example of this). But, for me, Brion's production accented the strangeness of Apple's romantic vision. What ended up sounding like sugary pop on the Sony's official release had a much darker, perverse quality to it when accompanied with Brion's string arrangements. The songs on his version of Extraordinary Machine nearly collapse under their own weight. If it's really "not about love" for Apple, it's because it's impossible for her to align herself with the security of conventional romance: instead, the kind of consuming love she articulates is pathological ("Get Him Back"), at times violent ("Window"), and often turns out to be solipsistic ("Better Version of Me"). Here's what's probably the best example of what I'm trying to get at.

And, naturally, with all this talk of psychosis, and narcissism, I think of Zizek, whose Lacanian remarks on love are, I think, realized in some of Fiona Apple's more compelling songs:

More generally, when one is passionately in love and, after not seeing the beloved for a long time, asks her for a photo to keep in mind her features, the true aim of this request is not to check if the properties of the beloved still fits the criteria of my live, but, on the contrary, to learn (again) what these criteria are. I am in love absolutely, and the photo a priori CANNOT be a disappointment - I need it just so that it will tell me WHAT I love... What this means is that true love is performative in the sense that it CHANGES its object - not in the sense of idealization, but in the sense of opening up a gap in it, a gap between the object's positive properties and the agalma, the mysterious core of the beloved (which is why I do not love you because of your properties which are worthy of love: on the contrary, it is only because of my love for you that your features appear to me as worthy of love). It is for this reason that finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent, traumatic even: being loved makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me which causes love. Everyone knows Lacan's definition of love ("Love is giving something one doesn't have..."); what one often forgets is to add the other half which completes the sentence: "... to someone who doesn't want it." And is this not confirmed by our most elementary experience when somebody unexpectedly declared passionate love to us - is not the first reaction, preceding the possible positive reply, that something obscene, intrusive, is being forced upon us?

In a kind of Hegelian twist, love does not simply open itself up for the unfathomable abyss in the beloved object; what is in the beloved "more than him/herself," the presupposed excess of/in the beloved, is reflexively posited by love itself. Which is why true love is far from the openness to the "transcendent mystery of the beloved Other": true love is well aware that, as Hegel would have put it, the excess of the beloved, what, in the beloved, eludes my grasp, is the very place of the inscription of my own desire into the beloved object - transcendence is the form of appearance of immanence. As the melodramatic wisdom puts it, it is love itself, the fact of being loved, that ultimately makes the beloved beautiful.

 From With or Without Passion: What's Wrong with Fundamentalism. Part 1.

valentine

On a day dedicated to last-minute gifts and forced romance, Siamese Dream, the 1994 album by my beloved Smashing Pumpkins, does the martyred saint (Valentine) a small degree of justice. Not only does it capture the band (well, its cheif songwriter, anyway) at their best; it's features all the best parts of the early nineties grunge aesthetic (musically, visually, etc.). Siamese Dream surges with antagonism and resentment (after all this is the early nineties), but, like Gish before it and Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness after it, Siamese Dream ends with a schmaltzy doozy of lovesong: "Luna," comes after almost sixty minutes of emotional turmoil, existential uncertainty, and full-on rage.

Immediately following the abrasive, irritating taunt of "Sweet Sweet," (which is, of course, anything but), "Luna" is the opposite: sincere, but certainly not innocent. I'll be the first to admit that Billy Corgan has produced a massive amount unlistenable mush, but "Luna" isn't as naive or deluded as it first comes across. The popular myth surrounding the songwriting and production of Siamese Dream emphasizes Corgan's depression, which is noticeably channelled here. On any other album, a song like this might be considered overly sentimental, but on Siamese Dream it arrives quite unexpectedly--it's appearance is almost graceful--what begins like a tragedy ends as a comedy.

love is just a four letter word

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music? (from High Fidelity)

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, another stupid holiday that, like Halloween, made more sense when I was seven than it does now: handing out my cheap, superhero-themed Valentine's cards at school and carefully preparing my own special Valentine's card receptacle like the rest my classmates. I could get behind that.

These days, the obvious thing to do is make a list of my favourite break-up songs. Some are laughable, others are frightening, but all of them share the same heaping spoonful of self-pity.

1. Here - Pavement
"And I'm the only one who laughs / at your jokes when they are so bad / and your jokes are always bad / but they're not as bad as this."

2. Divorce Song - Liz Phair
"I would have stayed in your bed / For the rest of my life / Just to prove I was right / That it's harder to be friends than lovers / And you shouldn't try to mix the two / Cause if you do it and you're still unhappy / Then you know that the problem is you / And its true that I stole your lighter / And its also true that I lost the map / But when you said that I wasn't worth talking to / I had to take your word on that."

3. Nobody's Fault But My Own - Beck
"And on the day you said it's true / Some love holds, some gets used / Tried to tell you I never knew / It could be so sweet / Who could ever be so cruel, / Blame the devil for the things you do / It's such a selfish way to lose / The way you lose these wasted blues / These wasted blues."

4. I Don't Want To Get Over You - Magnetic Fields
"I could listen to my therapist, pretend you don't exist / and not have to dream of what I dream of; I could listen / to all my friends and go out again and pretend it's enough, / or I could make a career of being blue."

5. Rid of Me - PJ Harvey
"You're not rid of me . . . . Till you say don't you wish you never never met her."

6. Pink Triangle - Weezer
"When I think I've found a good old-fashioned girl / Then she put me in my place / If everyone's / a little queer / Can't she be a little straight?"

7. Damage - Yo La Tengo
"The damage is done."

8. Cato As A Pun - Of Montreal
"I can't even pretend that you are my friend / What has happened to you and I / And don't say that I have changed / 'Cause man, of course I have"

9. Get Gone - Fiona Apple
"You got your game, made your shot, and you got away / With a lot, but I'm not turned-on / So put away that meat you're selling."

10. Forever For Her (Is Over For Me) - White Stripes
"I blew it / And if I knew what to do, then I'd do it / But the point that I have, I'll get to it / And forever for her is over for me / Forever, just the word that she said that means never / To be with / another together / And with the weight of a feather it tore into me"

(Honourary Mention) An Ode To No One - Smashing Pumpkins
"I took a virgin mary axe to his sweet baby jane, / lost my innocence to a no good girl, scratch my / face with anvil hands, and coil my tongue around a bumblebee mouth /And I give it all back to you." Alright Billy. I'm sure it all makes sense in your head.

animal collective's lovers and haters

Now that the relative backlash surrounding Animal Collective's eighth studio album has subsided, let's forget about what Merriweather Post-Pavillion is or isn't and enjoy the album on its own terms. I am, of course, joking. The ship's out - there's no getting off. AC's latest may just be one of those albums that is simply impossible to listen to on it's own merits. The debate over MPP continues even now, over a month since its official release.

If Animal Collective aren't being blamed for their depoliticized suburban fantasies, they're getting knocked for their good behaviour. While I personally enjoy AC's experiments with atmosphere and expansiveness, there's still plenty of oddness to buffer the trio from unconditional praise. For every moment of elation, there are enough droning synths and washed-out vocals to dampen AC's Brian Wilson-ey euphoria. As on past releases, dub, trance, and Afro-pop figure into Merriweather Post-Pavillion's spaced-out mixture of synths and rhythmic clatter.



It's unrelenting and at times overpowering, but MPP is also the group's most accessible album to date. And that's where things begin to get a bit unpleasant. Animal Collective are crossing over. Whether it's simply a trek through moderate popularity, adulthood, or something more, I don't know. These days, Animal Collective sounds like its composite parts could be on the verge of a midlife crisis. The drugs still work, and that's part of the problem.

Depending on your outlook (and vanity), there's never been a better (or worse) time to give Animal Collective your attention.

There's been plenty of debate surrounding the album, it's reception and the "meaning" of Animal Collective as a substantial group, whose timely appeal has something to do with their brand of buzz. Plenty of observations come by way of Simon Reynolds at Blissblog, whose speculation lands soberly, right in the middle of the pile (although he's not too thrilled with negative reactions). Yes, listening to MPP is like getting sick on sugar and most reviews of the album are likely to produce a similar effect. I'm getting a little sick of MPP myself, but right now it's one of the few albums my roommate and I mutually enjoy. And if that's not worth something I don't really know what is.

It's Valentine's Day, so I had to end on a sentimental note.