Loser Parade

Originally posted Saturday, March 17, 2007

As a gesture of solidarity with my fellow-rejectees, I’ve posted my proposal for the Continuum 33 1/3 series - on Bright Eyes’ Fevers and Mirrors (yeah, yeah – but it was fun to write). I’m also thinking of re-working it into a pitch for a process piece, looking at how the making of a confessional album can turn ordinary, pathetic complaints that no one wants to hear in real life, into the stuff of pop myth. Help me convince my professor that, despite signs of wankery, it’s really a good idea for a capstone piece! For links to other rejected 33 1/3 proposals, go to:http://johnuhl.blogspot.com/2007/03/rejected-book-proposal-metal-machine.htmlHere’s the pitch:Dear Dr. Barker,In the 90’s, a mounting excitement about home-recording technologies, combined with unease at the way the fringe-bound angst of emo-core had been scooped up by the record companies and re-packaged as a kind of geeked-up power-pop, came together in a genre sometimes known as bedroom folk. It was in the no-fi recordings and minimalist arrangements of bedroom folk that the DIY imperative found its starkest form, coming to mean – not just fuck the record companies, the big businesses with their deep pockets and their multi-national distributors, but fuck everyone – the studio technicians, the audiences, the back-up band, anyone who might come between the singer and some private communion with his innermost soul on four-track tape. Artists like Lou Barlow, Smog and Guided By Voices embraced the availability of home recording technologies not just as a means of getting their voices out there as quickly as possible, but as a stylistic end. They developed sounds self-consciously leading back to the image of the guy alone in his room with a guitar. The buzz on a bad mike became a marker of emotion, accentuating the tremor in the singer’s voice. Ambient room sounds like feet shuffling and taps dripping, helped delineate the “acoustic space” of the bedroom album – its all-important sense of claustrophobic intimacy.Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst wasn’t the first to jump on the bedroom folk bandwagon, but his Fevers and Mirrors, released in 2000 under the still-nascent Saddle Creek imprint, was perhaps the first album to really grapple with the ideals advanced by the movement in all their perverse attractiveness. Fevers both deepened and questioned the theatre of private misery at the centre of the bedroom album, its air of incurable apart-ness as thinly-disguised plea for sympathy. Every aspect of Fevers, from static-y, “documentary-style” tape recordings, to children’s instruments (bells, keyboards), to narratives of memory and nostalgia, worked together to draw the listener ever deeper into its narrow rooms of self-reflection.The quiet centre of Fevers and Mirrors is probably “Something Vague”, a surprisingly unhysterical (for Oberst) account of chronic depression. Though it’s more than that – it is, in fact, a kind of prophecy, one that has seen and more or less discounted, in advance, the shape the singer’s life is about to take. “Something Vague” was written before more than a handful of people outside of Omaha knew anything about this young singer-songwriter with a knack for melodrama, before bloggers in Tallahassee and Long Island started putting up links to songs on their sites, and long before Spin and Rolling Stone and Magnet picked up on it, but in a funny way it’s about all those things, even as it seems to see right through them, dreaming its way clear to the end.The narrator of “Something Vague” sees himself “standing on a bridge in the town where [he] lived as a kid with [his] mom and [his] brothers”. Then, as it always does in such dreams, the bridge dissolves – the sweetness of nostalgia turns out to be unsupportable. A psychoanalyst would probably say this means a suspended transition – the dreamer unable either to return to his childhood or to pass over to the next stage. A morbid person (say, me) will tell you that he can’t make up his mind whether to cross the bridge or jump off it. Someone familiar with Bright Eyes’ later repertoire will probably assume it’s his usual navel-gazing ambivalence about fame – only, of course, no one’s actually heard of him yet, and for now he really is the kid he’s always singing about, the one who feels himself dissolving day to day under the pressure of his own invisibility and mediocrity, who has to keep writing another song just to prove his existence. And while “Something Vague” does feel, in retrospect, like an intimation of audiences and fame and fortune to come, it’s all too weightily prophetic just now, too enmeshed with any number of other abstract possibilities of transformation – too, well, vague. The metaphor can’t be cashed out, except as a complete negation of the life he’s now living. “Now I’m confused,” Oberst sings in the final verse. “Is this death really you?”He’s not thinking of shining, his private collapses cheered on by audiences of thousands; he’s thinking of having nowhere to stand anymore, of what gets lost when you become what you hoped to be, and stop being the person who hoped for it. If he’s thinking of fame at all, it’s the kind of fame Nick Drake got, and as in Drake’s own “Hanging on a Star”, he already has a clear and bitter knowledge of the lapses that come between giving and receiving light. So in a sense “Something Vague” is about how transformation can spring up from the centre of a life almost incurably insular. In a sense it is the usual myth, fairly accurate in Oberst’s case, about how personal ugliness or misery or banality, caught in the right light and reproduced for public consumption, can be transformed into something beautiful or at least useable. But it also holds, stubbornly, to the original ugliness. It says whatever change is coming, it can have nothing to do with who he is now, with the person who sings “Now and again it seems worse than it is, but mostly the view is accurate”, who has seen day after day end about the same for long enough (so he says) to know, not without a kind of grim pleasure, that this is how it’s going to be.Fevers and Mirrors changed Conor Oberst’s life, and for a songwriter unusually concerned with both telling the story of a life in music and transforming that story through the telling, that’s more than just another dispensable factoid to season the listening experience. It matters that this is the album that made everything happen, that turned the familiar story of a kid who spends a little too much time alone taking himself a little bit too seriously, into the stuff of rock star drama. Like it or not, all roads in the Bright Eyes oeuvre – and even in emo and bedroom folk in general – lead back to Fevers, to its central fable of an artist who becomes famous and beloved by performing exactly the kind of self-obsessed unhappiness that would, in the real world, keep people’s affections at bay. Oberst’s later work would surpass Fevers on every other level – musically, lyrically, conceptually – but the fans never got over the shock of seeing themselves in the kid strumming and screaming in his bedroom in Fevers – and neither did Oberst, exactly. In albums like Lifted and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn he oscillates between wanting to kill the kid he once was, and wanting to recover that person – so sincerely self-centred, so well insulated against the complications and compromises of the outside world – intact.So I want to tell the story of Fevers and Mirrors as the story of that kid, the one who finds in his self-absorption some common kernel that lets his music speak to thousands of other self-absorbed youngsters, and to tell the story of his resulting fame as, in part, an attempt to recover or understand the insular “purity” of those nights in the downtown walk-up, strumming and screaming at no one in particular. My guide here will be some of the stronger reported books in the 331/3 series – books like Ben Sisario’s Doolittle, that wed critical thinking to the nuts and bolts of biography and reporting, that try to make sense of an album’s creative impact by understanding its place in the artist’s life. But I’ll also be taking cues from what is probably my favourite 331/3 book, Franklin Bruno’s Armed Forces, which in its no-stone-unturned critical approach reminds me that criticism that takes account of the artist’s life is not the same as biography; that, for the critic, the “real story”, biographically speaking, is always secondary to the myth interwoven with the body of work.In terms of my qualifications: I’ve written music features for the online journal Popmatters, as well as profiles for alt-weeklies ranging from The Coast (Halifax, Nova Scotia) to The Villager (Manhattan, New York). In many of these pieces, I’ve focused on lo-fi, bedroom folk and confessional songwriting in general, and sometimes on Bright Eyes in particular. As a critic, I tend to approach works from the inside out, and that’s partly because I came to criticism through art, specifically poetry. For what it’s worth, my poems have been published in most of the dozen or so major Canadian literary journals (most prominently: The Malahat Review, Fiddlehead, Grain, The Antigonish Review).

Clippings linked below:
Cover story in The Coast: http://www.thecoast.ca/1editorialbody.lasso?-token.folder=2006-08-31&-token.story=147882.112113&-token.subpub=

Feature in Popmatters: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/article/9721/what-happened-to-our-voice/

Critical essay in Popmatters: http://www.popmatters.com/music/features/cutoutbin/6-brighteyes.shtml

Sincerely,
Sarah Feldman