Harvilla's Paradox

Originally posted Friday, February 2, 2007

Rob Harvilla had a great piece in the Village Voice a couple weeks back on Say Anything – a band that’s never interested me much, since, regardless of its m.o. to document the rather unusual train wrecks of the lead singer’s personal life, the music has always seemed like pretty standard-issue power-pop. But Harvilla buys the bleeding-all-over-liner-notes schtick, and his column, “Every Molly Has an Emo Album” (http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0704,harvilla,75602,22.html), is an ode to the pleasures and discomforts of loving an album against your better judgment. “This is an interesting paradox,” Harvilla writes. “The more brazenly self-involved and solipsistic an album tends to be, the more ardently its fans identify with it, the more it appears to speak to you and only you, and the more communal and almost religiously reverent the concerts become.” That insight extends beyond the orchestral, (to my mind) overwrought creations of emo bands like Say Anything. It applies at least as strongly, for instance, to lo-fi artists (at least the ones who take the recording style as a "genre", not just as a means to quick and dirty releases). A certain sort of murky, white-noise heavy recording serves two contradictory purposes. It alienates the listener, who has every reason to be turned off by bad sound quality and the implication that the artist doesn’t care if you get it or not (compare the emo bands howling conviction that no one will ever understand me creating in a certain kind of listener the equally strong conviction that she does). But lo-fi recording, well-handled, can do something else – it can create an illusion of intimacy, a belief that the bad, home-made tape is an indication not of distance from the artist, but of an almost uncomfortable proximity, the listener being privy to something that a stranger never hears.