Kitsch The Anus of the Black Cat (plus: reviews of new albums by Shrapknel, Julie Christmas, Richard Thompson, Linda Thompson, and J.R.C.G.)

We’re not living in a golden age of much. But at least the kitsch renaissance—which started too-clever-ly (by half) with cottage core, went pink ham with Biden’s Return of The New Normal (and how!), and was consecrated as actually pretty dull with algorithmically ideating nu shoegaze—is now going rococo. It’s a strange kind of kitsch, where often the trappings of irony are maintained. In the regularly portioned-out superhero movies that we consume with the weary dutifulness of the Simpson children being dragged to church every Sunday, the wry dialogue is only intended to indicate wit. Like the relatable asides of a fun priest, the “jokes” (as it were) are human gilding to a far larger and ornate earnestness. In this vein, the ironists of the right have retreated further into the Church (even as they continue to half-heartedly bitch about the Cathedral). The ironists on the left still have self-awareness to burn, but they’ve been visibly worn down. Trump and his acolytes are immune to jokes. As is Dave Portnoy. As is Israel. Which may have always been the case. But, now that the center/center left has appropriated all of the most cartoonish aspects of the supposed Bernie Bros. by screaming “If you don’t vote for this bloody plunger, you must want all women, children, and members of every boo-booed community to die by fire,” communism’s wags have pretty much been left to keening for the Arthurian return of a Chapo/Cum Town Camelot, devolved to their most singular earnest cell (posting “fuck you, dumb bitch” over pictures of Netanyahu and/or AOC), or simply reposting a cartoon squirrel that transcribes war crime exposes and Maoist talking points alike in the same heightened yippie language of a high school junior who just read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the first, second, and third time. 

What began with the understandable overuse of the previously evocative word “grifter,” in retrospect feels inevitable. The reality of our current Norman Rockwell-ization is driven home by both political parties having entered a cringe-race to the middle, with Hunter S. Thompson’s linguistic tics again being used, this time to give anachronistic force to accusations of weirdness. Neither hyperreal (this simulacrum got stakes), nor camp (none of this is so bad it’s good. It’s content to just stay bad), this era is one of hyper-sentiment, where everything is meant with an intensity which pixelates. Even applied irony fails to give the distorted image focus. Because irony requires a distance hard to achieve when you exist within the frame.

Political partisans might argue that this reign of gauche feelings-osity reached overripe fruition with the iconic photo of President Donald Trump raising his fist at God like the dirtbag hero of The Breakfast Club exulting in his brief glimpse of the popular girl’s panties and the friends he made along the way. But, while the photo of Trump pumping his stubbs (more like some bigger-titted Liberty, Leading the People to the nearest, as Robespierre would say, Homard Rouge) is certainly some pink frosted cake, it is not the commemorative plate itself. 

Nor did we reach peak hyper-sentimentality with some of the other obvious contenders, those preferred by hobbyists who insist that their microconcerns are in fact really quite macro: all those images of passing faddists (JD Vance, Charli xcx, etc) who gather in groups, with their spiritual paralysis exuding outward, waiting/begging for some cultural trainspotter to post their photo with a caption that reads “this could be a Renaissance painting.” While the overuse of the Renaissance painting meme (and the term “iconic”) deserve credit for helping to liberate us from the oppression of words having meaning and, in this, helping to make us all more like precious lil’ Keane drawings (Margaret or Bill, pick your poison), even the most iconic photographic reenactments of (in Charli’s case) 2006 VICE Magazine staff parties or (in Vance’s case) 2016 VICE Magazine HR/management meetings, barely register on the cultural kitsch-o-meter. Simultaneously too smart and too dumb, the ready-made iconic is merely exactly what it wants to be: it’s pop. It’s good for a laugh, and only matters if you’re paid (or you aspire to be paid) to think so. 

Similarly to the Trump photo, nostalgics might argue that there’s no better example of our societal transformation into precious, Margaret Keane-esque urchins than the recent Nirvana exhibit at the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture, where Kurt Cobain is described as a member of the “27 Club,” who “un-alived” himself. This would certainly be a strong contender (with the 27 club nod to diner art being a nice touch), if it weren’t for the mass derision which has greeted the museum’s attempt to infantilize both the singer of “Rape Me” who shot himself and the exhibit's target audience—Nirvana fans, rockism credulists, YouTube commenters on Temple of The Dog videos, literal children of metaphorical children, young professional collectors of vintage guitars, aspiring Run For Cover Records signees, etc.—whose rockin' desire for an agreed upon lie the museum somehow managed to overestimate. Maybe if the museum had claimed that Cobain had died from (to paraphrase Nick Kent) a tumby-wumby tummy ache, we’d have gone along with it in the name of historically accurate cosplay. But, as it stands, kitsch isn’t kitsch if nobody falls for it. 

Before frustration sets in, I’ll let you in on the signpost of our current Garish Age. What is the horseman of wide-eyed kitsch—combining the totalitarian and nostalgic strains of the disease in ways we haven’t seen since shortly after the world was colorized, before John Wayne made agitprop like The Searchers, before people procreated by means other than a cutaway to an open window? If you think that such a time never existed, that’s because you’ve lived for too long outside of kitsch. Well, no more.

In 1999, on the Magnetic Fields track, “Strange Powers,” Stephin Merritt sang, “In Las Vegas where / The electric bills are staggering / The decor hog wild / And the entertainment saccharin / What a golden age / What a time of right and reason / The consumer's king / And unhappiness is treason.” The song is prescient. Except for the fact that Las Vegas is subtle in comparison to matrix-kitsch, the entertainment is willfully maudlin, the consumer is scum, and a person’s happiness or unhappiness is entirely irrelevant. Otherwise, the song’s warning holds up. Because they’re using drones instead of fireworks now, babe, and patriotism is—for all that attempted treason will get you—materially the default. 

This last 4th of July, traditional fireworks displays, spanning coast to coast, were either partially or entirely replaced with hundreds of synchronized 12” drones. Operated by companies with diet-pagan names like “Sky Elements” and “Verge Aero,” each drone bore a lightbulb payload. Collectively, like a carpet if you will, these payloads were used to blaze out pointillist bald eagles, American flags, groovy surfers, bagpipers, lady libertys, astronauts planting American flags on a writ large Kubrick soundstage, and George Washington, a hundred feet tall in a boat, never telling a lie from Orange County to the moon. All depicting the State's dream of Constitutional freedom in the most historically accurate way imaginable: self-evident for the rubes, silent in practice.  

The drone-shows’ growing popularity is supposedly not a passive aggressive snub of Song Dynasty China (and, by extension, TikTok I guess), but is instead derived from an environmentally conscious national aversion to wildfires. Ostensibly, soylently,  reasonable. Also reasonable like the patriotic passtime of clutching pearls about Michael Vick’s dogs while driving 30 minutes to buy triple wrapped pork slurry at the pork slurry dispensary, in that it’s very much in line with our national project to divorce ourselves from nature entirely. While it’s tempting to take the drone industry’s concern for the dolphins at face value, It’s also plausible  that the dronepalooza industry is pure psyop. The silence of the flying bots being a rare instance of the CIA/NWO/etc. getting something operationally right. After sixty off years of exploding cigars, Jackson Pollock, oopsie-doodle Osama funding, LSD and crack cocaine, rock and roll and the less insufferable U2, Judith Miller, Lumumba, every day of the year except 9/11 (probably), Malcolm X, MLK, Cambodia, a selection of Kennedys catching strays, and the filmography of Matthew Vaughn, the-powers-that-sometimes-be-that-way have finally learned to say the quiet part quietly. 

Of course, even if the Death’s Head Industrial Complex hasn’t been this slick since Teddy Rosevelt peed out “a man, a plan, a canal” into the snow of the White House lawn, we’re talking “quiet” only in the sonic sense. Everything else about the drone shows is louder than a Superbowl ad for Krakatoa. Or more for an ad for one of those other bad-luck islands. On “I Found That Essence Rare,” the Gang of Four tried to tell us that “the worst thing in 1954 was the bikini.” If we didn’t much care that we were dressed for the H-bomb, at least we eventually got “Rebel Girl” out of it. What we’ll get out of celebrating our Independence Day with drone funfare is difficult to predict. My sister-in-law’s family attended one of Orange County displays and, seeing as they are all Afghan, experienced levels of bemusement previously unknown to both man and God. As I haven’t seen a peep of choking contempt from any other corners, even those corners of the internet who collect grievances like stamps, I think we can safely assume my extended family’s discomfort was shared by a minority at best. Anyway, as a mute orchestra of glossy anti-mnemonic devices—with every lite-brite detail endeavoring to substitute the memory of some South Asian carnage we hadn’t paid much attention to in the first place—a drone 4th of July doesn’t allow for much inspiration. What it depicts is a celebration of America which literally blots out the sky. I know Milan Kundara is out of fashion these days (I don’t know why but I’m sure we have our reasons) but his definition of kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit” still bounces around in how I see the word. And what are drone fireworks but a denial of shit, and everything else too. With the only space allowed for humanity being the absence of noise. I imagine some of that absence will be filled with cheers, clapping, and the traditional chanting of “USA! USA!” favored by fascists and ironists on either end of the beer-enjoyer spectrum. I also imagine that, eventually, someone will miss the sound of shit being blown up and, one way or another, respond to the silence with exactly that. 

Anyway. Don’t worry your pretty head about it. Here’s some new music reviews!

J.R.C.G. - Grim Iconic… (Sadistic Mantra) (Sub Pop) A little known fact about Sub Pop Records is that, as part of the deal that the label founders signed with the Devil in 1990 (the contract which basically ensured that “America will have good taste for the next five years”), the label is required to sacrifice at least one excellent psych rock band per decade. Basically, in what’s known in esoteric circles as “the Love Battery clause,” the label lays out a trail of Dextromethorphan to lure flaxen haired burnouts into their ritual warehouse, then they give them cursed guitars which will only play slowed down Hawkwind riffs. Then they record the resultant songs on Mark Arm’s walkman, press a few records, throw them in sleeves made from the flayed flesh of whichever intern most recently made eye contact with Beach House, spend approximately negative fifteen dollars on marketing, and then promptly ship all the unsold copies straight to Hell, where Satan’s minions force the damned—the Hitlers, Stalins, Kissingers, Bin Ladens, Dulles bros, Netflix execs, music critics, close talkers, and golden calf appreciators, etc.—to listen to cut out bin classics like His Electro Blue Voice’s 2013 freak-grunge opus, Ruthless Sperm, at ear splitting volumes.

In a not entirely unrelated matter, the new J.R.C.G. album is simply terrific. This crew of DIY survivornauts (with ex members of literally every single good band in the Pacific Northwest) dispense with almost every single psychedelic rock trope (except the cool, crunching ones), replacing any slipstream hoo-haw with feverish pi-on-the-floor almost-funk, Hyborean chanting, and wobbly drones which telegraph Rakta 7”s straight to the pyramid’s eye. Grim Iconic… (Sadistic Mantra) sounds like a Brazilian power electronic marching band playing the 1962 soundtrack of Carnival of Souls from the sexiest room in the Tardis. Scoff all you want but that's not a hodgepodge of needlessly obscure mixed references: that’s a spell of protection. 

Shrapknel & Controller 7 - Nobody Planning to Leave (Backwoodz) Shrapknel are a slow burner both by situation and by design. I can’t be sure (I’m not privy to Backwoodz Studioz’ books), but it does feel like the Philly/NYC duo has been growing more popular. Which is nice. Because PremRock and Curly Castro have no easily serialized exoticism narrative, no inclination to play the kind of noise rap which might earn them a spot (between Dalek and JPEG) in the Bandcamp collections of the “I Don’t Usually Like Hip Hop” set, and—if a track of Pootie Tang allusions is any indication—not much chance of dying young enough to get the bump in streaming numbers America bestows upon our hip hop martyrs as compensation for their being being dead. With PremRock being an adherent to Tom Waits’ inverse-of-prosperity theology and Castro’s mother having instilled in him an aversion to victimology, the two men treat both paycheck-to-paycheck grind and literal cancer as shit-happens hassle, leaving all that trauma money on the table like they can’t help it (they can’t). Absent all these advantages, all Shrapknel can do is rap. 

Which they do better than most, with a knowingness which reads as cool, absent the distance which can make cool merely detached. On Nobody Planning to Leave—their new album made in collaboration with the subtle and cinematic producer, Controller 7—Shrapknel are nothing if not in it. It’s maybe my age showing that the pair’s interplay scans heavily of ‘70s buddy films (the Paul Newman/Robert Redford flicks, M.A.S.H. minus the misogyny/cruelty. Updated later as Devil In A Blue Dress or the Pitt/Clooney flicks, minus the latter’s smugness) where the hero/anti-heroes were vaguely suave, vaguely disreputable, and less violent than charmingly born to lose. Castro has a growl that’s more of purr, a rolling rumble underneath his syllables. If the implied threat of Castro’s timbre make’s him the knife of the two, Prem plays the Easy to his partner’s Mouse; simply laying out the facts at hand, conversationally, with an almost incidental jazziness. When the two men’s voices are in unison, that’s when the two sound the most caustic. Maybe as a learned thing from their time spent within the often acidic Philadelphia group, the Wrecking Crew, and maybe as a result of Castro and PremRock being men and good pals. 

Julie Christmas - Ridiculous And Full of Blood (Red CRK) 

The mid-Aughts heavy metal band, Made Out of Babies, was notable for two things (besides just being a great band, which I suppose is pretty notable). First, the band will forever have a place in my heart for the overnight speed in which they went from being the dictionary definition of “friendship band” to being one of the best heavy bands going. Second, Made Out of Babies were one of the few bands that were directly (and unabashedly) influenced by Jesus Lizard that didn’t just recreate the Austin/Chicago band’s Betty Davis lurch and then undermine the whole endeavor having their lead singer do a pale, barking approximation of David Yow’s misanthropy. Instead, MOoB roughened and tempered the noise-funk with rhythmic patterns of a decidedly free-range variety and a prettifying amount of post-hardcore guitar. They also had a secret weapon in Julie Christmas, a front person who matched Yow’s intensity but, instead of Bukowski ashtray dirt, laid out her own guts and trauma in every song. The band put out three albums and broke up in 2008. Pretty sure that, as of this writing, most of the band members are on speaking terms. 

Which makes sense. Julie Christmas’ whole thing is not for everyone. Her stagecraft is on the Oxbow end of the spectrum, and her voice—while being as versatile as the jazz singers and/or Bjork to whom she’s most easily compared to—gives babydoll dress (in both the baby, singular, sense and Babes In Toyland sense) to an intentionally disconcerting degree. Of course if the voice of not-so-innocent little girls wasn’t a potent medium for channeling/raging against the evils of this world, Bikini Kill would have sounded like Flipper and Nick Cave would have called his band “Nick Cave and the Somethings From Some Other Movie.” As for Christmas: her performance on Ridiculous And Full of Blood shows a mature artist—backed by Johannes Persson (Cult of Luna), Chris Enriquez (post-hardcore’s representative on Earth), Andrew Schneider (PIGS, the Christmas/Schneider household), John LaMacchia (Candiria) and Tom Tierney, all thankfully playing metal that’s more “art-” than “post-”—wrestling with said world’s deficiencies by balancing a psychopath’s vigor with a dramatist's verve. While she might indeed incorporate a Curse of Millhaven/madwoman-in-the-attic whisper into nearly every song, her concerns are neither cartoon nor trope. If anything, the singer has refined a sharp/shock lyricism which, in its mix of bravado and pathos, is reminiscent of straight-ahead-but-sideways street poets like Ted Leo, Kristen Hersh, or Paul Bearer. The understated cut of  the words are at times almost at odds with the drama with which they’re conveyed. But, in that, they also exist in the very fine tradition of Diamanda Galás (whenever Galás isn’t reciting Latin). That Christmas isn’t more often compared to Galás or Hersh is probably because most metal doods mostly like gal singers who scan witchy, aryan, and/or stoner girlfriend material. 

Or maybe, as the meme goes,  I just made up a type of guy to get mad at. Looks like Ridiculous And Full of Blood is getting decent notices and Christmas doesn’t need me casting her as some sort of underdog or using her to channel my own grievances. In my defense, she does make being a conduit for souls being torn from bodies and our collective drowning in all the howling inequity look easy. In her fashion, she sounds like she’s having a good time. 

Richard Thmpson - Ship To Shore (New West Records) I don’t know enough words for musical notes to tell you anything about a new Richard Thompson album that you couldn’t guess. Still the best guitarist in the universe. Still wouldn’t recommend marrying him. Here’s a nice review that explains how swell the album is and also provides a bunch of background info for neophytes. A lot of the other reviews, while positive, call the album “gloomy” or trauma-fixated. I assume this is because the reviewers are either pussies or under the impression that they, and/or their loved ones, won’t ever die. I think the album is rather jolly, all things considered. I’ll only add that “The Old Pack Mule” makes a better argument (for Irish/English folk music having been, however long ago, influenced by Middle Eastern/South Asian music) than any ethnomusicologist ever could, and that “Freeze” is as good a song as Thompson has ever written; up there with the best songs on 1991’s Rumor and Sigh or his ‘70s/’80s work with Linda. 

Linda Thompson - Proxy Music (Storysound) Speaking of Linda Thompson, she also has a new album, which is as equally grand as her ex-husband’s (though with considerably fewer songs about how hot Richard Thompson’s current wife is). Having suffered from spasmodic dysphonia for decades, Linda has finally lost her ability to sing. Before the perfectly reasonable response of “that hasn’t stopped Dylan” leaves your lips, I suggest you google spasmodic dysphonia. Even if the condition did just mean Thompson could sing, but it’d sound like a bunch of wasps in a bottle of malt liquor, I doubt the singer, whose voice has historically been compared to fresh water springs and songbirds carrying silver threads, would go for it. This album of songs she’s composed makes clear that Thompson has accepted with grace and humor much of what comes with age, but there are limits. So, rather than doing an album of Motörhead covers, Thompson has enlisted a who’s who of folk royalty and/or family. 

Teddy Thompson, who regularly collaborates with one or the other of his parents, is as likable as always. Kami Thmpson (Richard and Linda’s youngest) kicks things off impressively enough that some of the others have a wee bit of trouble living up to her standard. I’ll always love Martha Wainwright for having an album called “I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too,” and I’ll always love Rufus for picking up one of my roomates at a Britpop night in the late ‘90s and bringing him back to the Chelsea Hotel to make out with a girl (the daughter of another famous folkie) who was visiting Rufus, so Rufus could get it on with his boyfriend in the next room without being a bad host. On Proxy Music, both siblings maintain their family tradition of being probably extremely impressive to folk aficionados, and good enough for the rest of us. Which might serve as needlessly dismissive but not maybe entirely inaccurate assessment of the rest of the album. John Grant, who excels at being John Grant, excels yet again on the song, “John Grant.” A song like “I Used To Be Pretty” is fucking gorgeous and perfect, in the realm of a classic Linda Thompson track like 2002’s “All I See.” But both those Linda Thompson songs are devastating because they work both in and outside of any well-maintained tradition. That’s not, I swear to Christ, an all encompassing write-off of Proxy Music. Not even in the slightest. Traditional folk music is a lovely language and I’m glad some people speak it. Something being “a bit inside baseball” is an insult, unless you happen to love baseball. In that vein, how one feels about the rest of the album depends heavily on how one feels about the Roches. 

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