A Review of Patti Smith’s Just Kids
In the early days of their life together, she cries so much he calls her Soakie, but not yet. First she has to make her way out of a strapped New Jersey town on a one-way ticket to New York.
Amidst the Great Blizzard of 1946, a taxi shuttles through Chicago’s North Side and Patti Smith arrives “a long, skinny thing with bronchial pneumonia,” saved by her father holding her over the steam of a hot bath.
She grows up taken with words—first the ones she recites in her prayers at night, Mom smoking a cigarette at her bedside, then the ones she reads in books—a fascination heightened by the feverish days she spent laid up with childhood illnesses like the measles and chicken pox. Daydreaming lands her in the corner at school.
Following an eviction, the family moves to a rural town in southern New Jersey, and Patti mourns their old home and a time when her mother didn’t demand she put a shirt on. Repulsed by 1950s femininity, she imagines herself the independent Jo from Little Women and begins crafting stories. A family excursion to the Museum of Art in Philadelphia leaves her breathless about the possibility of being “called” to art. “A skinny loser” by 14, Smith seeks refuge from high school ridicule in rock ‘n’ roll and spends her time drawing, dancing, and writing poems. For her 16th birthday, her mother gives her The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera. When she takes a job at a nonunion factory inspecting tricycle handlebars, she escapes by imagining herself “as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker.”
That year, at a Philadelphia bookstall, enthralled by the look on a young man’s face, she pockets a copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Later, her coworkers at the factory catch her reading a book written in French and corner her, calling her a communist and demanding she rebuke him. She refuses.
By 1966, Patti Smith is putting herself through Glassboro State Teachers College when she “[falls] into trouble” with a boy.
For a young woman who never imagined herself a girl, who held no ill will toward her parents, who fell in love with far-away poets rather than real-life Jersey boys, the pregnancy is an unexpected, awkward thing. Dismissed from college, she moves in with some friends closer to the sea than the city and gravitates to a nearby coffee shop—tall, isolated, suddenly exposed. In April of 1967, under a full moon and amid a choir of boys singing a cappella songs in the street below her hospital window, she gives birth, handing the child over to a family wanting one.
Weeks later, she takes a Memorial Day trip to Philadelphia’s Joan of Arc statue, promising to make something of herself.
In Brooklyn, crouched over two drawings he titled Destruction of the universe. May 30 ’67, Robert Mapplethorpe was dropping acid.
At some point in the middle of reading Just Kids, it occurs to me to wonder if I’m the one who came from Patti Smith. I flip a few pages back and find it: 1967. The math isn’t even close. Still, like the child she gave up, I grew up without Patti Smith, and pages into her memoir, I feel a range of emotions that must echo those of an adopted New Jersey Taurus: I didn’t get to board the bus to New York, fall in love with Robert Mapplethorpe, and emerge a rock-n-roll priestess or the daughter of one either.
But I have to shake that off right away because most of us didn’t. Only a handful did. Still, inexplicably, it hurts not to have been that bold.
And, anyway, her life feels familiar, too. To a girl who never thought of herself as one, who’s been exposed as bad, who falls hardest for out-of-reach poets and takes refuge in symbols of irreverence like rock ‘n’ roll and Rimbaud, Patti Smith’s story, about finding her own, feels like coming home.
For the ones still out of place, how is going to matter.
Distilled, it looks like this: Picasso, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, and Illuminations.
As plot points, the works mark the story’s first lesson, or a knot of them. Coming to art is a derailment: Patti’s from New Jersey factories, a teacher’s college, and single-motherhood; Robert’s from an ROTC uniform and altar boy robes. And the derailing is a kind of collision based in an early, accidental apprenticeship. You have to veer off course, but you have to collide with something, too.
It’s also a compulsion to reach. Living vicariously can last as long as it takes to read a book, but at some point you have to put the book down and live for yourself.
Laid off from a Philadelphia textbook factory job and on the waiting list at the Columbia Records pressing plant in Pitman and the Campbell Soup Company in Camden, twenty-year-old Patti Smith stood at the bus terminal faced with her first setback: bus fair had doubled. She couldn’t swing it.
Dressed in a black turtleneck and gray raincoat and carrying a small plaid suitcase full of drawing pencils, a notebook, and her stolen copy of Illuminations, she stepped into a phone booth to think. There, atop a phonebook, she found an abandoned white patent purse with thirty-two dollars in it, nearly a week’s pay at her factory job. Grateful, she took the cash, bought her ticket, and boarded the bus. It was July 3, 1967—“a Monday,” Smith recalls, adding “It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
And that’s the next lesson: you have to have the guts to think you can make it, but you have to get lucky, too, or prescient enough to know where and when to be.
What follows is part history, part coming of age, part love story.
She sleeps in Central Park and leaves applications at the shops along Fifth Avenue, eating lettuce and bread from the brown bags cooks slip to a young transient she befriends. Days later, her friend gone, John Coltrane dies. She walks down Second Avenue under the pink lights of the setting sun, thinking of the eulogy Frank O’Hara would have written had he still been alive.
If she’s worried about the city crushing her, it doesn’t show. The skyscrapers were “beautiful,” not “mere corporate shells,” but “monuments to the arrogant yet philanthropic spirit of America.” It was still 1960s New York. Hungry, jobless, in love with poetry, Patti isn’t running from a failed childhood or abusive parents. She’s feeling her way into a world not yet willing to swallow its young.
Soon, she’s hired at the uptown branch of Brentano’s bookstore, where she rings up sales of Berber bracelets and jewel-encrusted Buddhas, but the job is barely enough to feed her. For a week, she sleeps in the store bathroom at night and cries when she realizes her first paycheck will be delayed another week.
One day, she’s behind the counter when a boy appears with a credit slip from the downtown Brentano’s. He is beyond beautiful, the kind of boy behind longing, a face that, on a woman, would make all the literary heroines of an era the story of a single, tormented artist, told and retold from the perspectives of men who’d loved her.
When he chooses a Persian necklace that Patti sometimes takes out of its case to stare at and trace the pattern of, she tells him, “Don’t give it to any other girl but me.”
“I won’t.”
The next time she sees him, she is on a date with a dubious older suitor, a writer more like “an actor playing a writer” who buys her dinner and asks her up to his place for a drink. Hungry, she agrees to have dinner with him, but she doesn’t understand why he wants to pay for her meal. This is the man women are warned about, she thinks. She looks around, wanting out. Then, she spots a young man approaching and “It was as if a small portal of future opened and out stepped the boy from Brooklyn who had chosen the Persian necklace.”
She runs over to him.
“Do you remember me?”
“Of course I do.”
“Will you pretend to be my boyfriend?” She asks him.
“Sure.”
It is the beginning of their underground love affair. Soon, they are living together, posing as husband and wife on a visit to his strict Catholic parents, foraging for work, food, and art supplies, leaning on one another over the course of their ascent into one of the most coveted art scenes in American history—an era whose space/time continuum is achingly small compared to the largesse of its characters and their collective impact on the American psyche.
The bond is a confused and contradictory mix, simultaneously magnetic and unlikely. Patti is sober, Robert isn’t. His demons drive him to work maniacally without questioning his place in the world or the role of the artist. Hers drive her to tears sometimes, but she stops to ruminate about the point of making art. He cares about appearances. Patti doesn’t have the patience or reverence to care. Robert’s fears seem to manifest as superficial concerns for social niceties like the dress and manner in which he presents himself when he leaves his work to step outside. Patti’s appear to coalesce around a deeper concern for that which is customary, manifesting as anxiety about how far Robert will go with his hustling, sexuality, and art. From the start, she imagines him turning to dust before her. She’s not wrong.
In the meantime, he tells her, “There will always be you and me.”
Smith manages an autobiographical portrait of two artists’ coming of age story graciously, modestly—somehow making Robert Mapplethorpe the star, despite her clear resolve to background Robert and approach his story gently, offering a picture of the young artist while leaving him just out of reach.
It’s Robert you fall in love with.
Because she tells him stories of her childhood, Smith’s memory of even her earliest rebellions is linked to her memories of Robert. When she recalls swiping a pin from a childhood playmate, she remembers them laughing about Patti being a bad girl trying to be good and Robert being a good boy trying to be bad.
From Smith’s account, readers might glean that these two really are “just kids,” as an older man responds when his wife asks her husband to take their picture. The couple are passerby, but Patti Smith’s account of herself suggests she is pedestrian in a world of gargantuan, fresh-faced boy talents the likes of Michelangelo, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan—and Robert Mapplethorpe.
There’s a moment or two when Patti comes first and you suddenly see deep inside her—like the time when she’s at a Door’s concert and feels ashamed of the way she watches Jim Morrison, confident she could do that. She’s ashamed of her thinking, but you love her for it. The moment comes years before she’ll take the stage, but it’s a minute the woman who is capable of being Patti Smith reveals herself. In the book’s more cryptic moments, a similar exposure is at work, her reticence hinting at emotions too painful to clarify, like her remorse at not being better equipped to accept Robert’s love for men. These are the moments you really love her—when you sense her feeling inadequate and want to protect her from the pain that must be, get her back up on the stage.
For the most part, though, you see Robert—or at least Patti orbiting around him. He’s full and voracious, beautiful and vulnerable, possessed and dispossessed, sometimes cool and sometimes stricken, but always calling her back.
“Patty,” he writes in one of his letters to her. “Wanted to cry so bad, but my tears are inside. A blindfold keeps them there. I can’t see today. Patti—I don’t know anything.”
You love him so much you can’t read the last few pages, or even glance at them, without crying. By the end of it, you wonder why she wants you to fall in love with Robert, her Robert.
There’s her humility, for one. Smith lacks the self-obsessed narcissism of the artists she loves, an absence that explains the quality of her writing, the triumph of her sobriety, her early embrace of androgyny—which she wonderfully once thought meant ugly and beautiful—her lack of interest in styling herself as a fashion icon, and, ultimately, her ability to prevail in New York’s revolving-door art world populated by beautiful losers of the sort Ginsberg commemorates in “Howl,” when he speaks of the best minds of his generation “destroyed by madness.” Somehow, amidst the madness, Smith is sound. Capable of giving. Capable of writing memoir as a gift, as the fulfillment of a promise she made to Robert to tell their story.
Then there’s Robert. It’s not Patti asking the reader to love him. Patti just channels him. It’s Robert who wants to be fallen for, as though we are gripped by desire beyond even the grave.
Does desire not die with us? Is it part of the same field for which there is an equal and opposite reaction for every action?
At the end of his life, dying of AIDS, Mapplethorpe asks her if it was the art that destroyed them.
“I don’t know,” she answers, thinking that if it was, being destroyed by art is not such a bad thing.
In its context, the question seems a little out of touch. Robert is dying, but Patti has just given birth. It’s a testament to Robert’s beautiful narcissism that he mistakes his plight for theirs—just as the photos he takes of Patti remind their friends of Robert.
In 1967, the year Patti Smith moved to New York, Joan Didion wrote in “Goodbye to All That,” “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” Like Patti Smith, Joan Didion was 20 when she first arrived in New York in the summertime. Years later, she was trying to pinpoint the moment when New York ended for her, but couldn’t “lay [her] finger upon” it, couldn’t “cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was” (225). For Patti, whose brother was about to ship off to Vietnam, watching her father plant a weeping willow in his backyard was the kind of moment that marked an end.
There are a string of them in her retelling of the times, but no collapse as big as the one those living with the era’s contradictions anticipated. The nation’s changes came in swift, successive blows too shocking to shake anyone up. Patti was a “gangly” twenty-two-year-old book clerk bumping into Jimmy Hendrix and Grace Slick at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel when Charles Manson killed Sharon Tate. The Chelsea was changing, too. Soon after she and Robert left their room there, they lost Jimmy Hendrix, followed by Janis Joplin and Edie Sedgwick and scores of others who had not managed to make a name for themselves before they were gone.
Just Kids is an important missing link, documenting the first days of tomorrow’s sound and image makers and the last days of magic before the turbulent flight into post-innocence when the center did not hold, Martin Luther King was gunned down at the Lorraine hotel in Memphis, Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol, and Robert F. Kennedy was killed—an epoch filtered through the lens of an American artist living in one of the era’s most famed shelters of voluptuous wayward youth, the Chelsea Hotel, “a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe.”
As much as it recalls a specific history, the book transcends the era, too, telling the timeless story of a person given over to art, of art’s outside, its outlaw mentors and muses, and the compulsive pursuit of kin. This story is not unlike history. It’s a better history, one that puts all good things in one place for a minute, the artist at its center a kind of glorious time machine with the power to raise the dead so she won’t have to live without them. The artist’s passion—her adulation, affection, longing—brings the dead back to life.
In her modesty, though, Patti Smith doesn’t see it that way. She ends the book with a question: “Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit burns most deeply.”
She has, though. Robert’s gone, but she can stir the rest of us.
We have to live our own lives, of course, but we need a reference point to know how. No one’s going to regret living vicariously long enough to read Just Kids.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Monday, March 29, 2010
Giving Voice: Boy Bands, Female Vocalists, and the Man Behind the Woman
[N]either kindness nor cruelty by themselves, independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves […] the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion […] We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other. --Edward Albee, “A Zoo Story”
The Kills are touring with the Raconteurs when Jack White loses his voice and asks Alison Mosshart to fill in for him on “Steady As She Goes.”
“So you could still get paid—without doing the work,” Mosshart jokes in the self-released video of the group interviewing itself.
Later, Mosshart visits the newly constructed Nashville branch of White’s recording studio Third Man Records. Dean Fertita and Jack Lawrence are around, and they start jamming. A ten-hour session gleans a smatter of songs.
When the four hear the session, they consider spinning the recordings into a 7-inch. The project morphs into an album instead and, retroactively, a band—not just any band, but the blues-infused rock quartet “supergroup” The Dead Weather, whose combined talents boast of bands as big as The White Stripes, the Raconteurs, Queens of the Stone Age, the Greenhornes, and The Kills and features rock priests Jack Black, Dean Fertita, and Jack Lawrence as well as the indie-punk queen Alison Mosshart. Their first album, Horehound, recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, over three weeks in January 2009 and released on vinyl April 18th, debuted at #6 on the U.S. Billboard 200 Album Charts.
Founder of the Raconteurs, Jack White is most popularly known as lead guitarist and front man for The White Stripes, a rock duo with drummer Meg White, whose name White took in an early and brief marriage the two notoriously tried to hide so as to keep attention focused on the music. When their 1997-formed band became huge in 2002, criticism of Meg’s drumming style suggested The White Stripes was more of a solo project than a duo, but Jack shoots the theory down, saying
It's kind of funny: When people critique hip-hop, they're scared to open up, for fear of being called racist. But they're not scared to open up on female musicians, out of pure sexism. Meg is the best part of this band. It never would have worked with anybody else, because it would have been too complicated... It was my doorway to playing the blues.
White’s claim that Meg is “the best part” of their two-person band is elucidated in Meg’s reflection on her role. Admitting the criticism sometimes gets to her, Meg says,
But then I think about it, and I realize that this is what is really needed for this band. And I just try to have as much fun with it as possible... I just know the way [Jack] plays so well at this point that I always know kind of what he's going to do. I can always sense where he's going with things just by the mood he's in or the attitude or how the song is going. Once in a while, he throws me for a loop, but I can usually keep him where I want him.
Meg’s confession that she “can usually keep [him] where [she wants] him” suggests her sit-down role in The White Stripes is actually the best seat from which to manage the band’s sound, a view that might help illuminate Jack’s sense that "When she started to play drums with me, just on a lark, it felt liberating and refreshing. There was something in it that opened me up."
As his defense of Meg’s drumming style and criticism of the “pure sexism” indicates, Jack White’s record for supporting women in the music industry is solid: in 2001, he produced Loretta Lynn’s comeback album Van Lear Rose, winner the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Country Album, which Loretta Lynn described as “as country as [she is].” Since his partnership with Meg White and Loretta Lynn, Jack White has promoted female rockers like Tegan and Sara and Holly Golightly, covering songs like “Walking With a Ghost” and “It’s True that We Love One Another.” And, now, with The Dead Weather, White does it again, this time taking on Meg White’s role as drummer and fronting Alison Mosshart.
From the perspective of Mosshart fans, in taking a backseat—literally, at the drums—to Mosshart, White’s debut of The Dead Weather launches The Alison Mosshart Band, lending his bandmates, megastar status, and studio to the Florida native and other half of the British rock duo The Kills, who becomes the band’s front-person, writing, singing, and performing eight of the album’s ten songs. To front a band is to speak for it—literally, as vocalist and often, figuratively, as lyricist. My question is how does Mosshart speak for White even as he hands over the reigns?
Turned around a bit, White’s support of women in the industry—his habit of “giving voice” to female vocalists—gestures toward the little explored question of how women might speak for men or, in this context, how male rockers might themselves feel a certain voicelessness in an industry over-invested in men. As Lisa McLaughlin observes in a 1994 article for Time Magazine, “The basic model for a rock-‘n’-roll band has always been four buddies playing guitars and drums. That all-male unit has been fundamental—rock’s version of the nuclear family.” White’s tendency to partner with women wreaks havoc on the long-standing model in which, “for most of rock’s history, women have never been full, chord-crunching, songwriting partners with men in real rock groups.” In rock-n-roll history, co-ed bands are newer than the nation’s integration of women into the Supreme Court, yet a tendency to address women’s marginalization in music and rock by fixating on the trend’s collateral damage to women can’t intelligibly respond to how the pattern stifles and misrepresents male voices.
Broadly, the rise in coed rock duos like The White Stripes and The Kills and female-fronted coed bands like the Danish band The Raveonettes and the American band Thao and the Get Down Stay Down speaks to a desire to revitalize rock by mixing things up, not just the sexes, but musical genres and old patterns, too. More specifically, though, the turnaround might speak to the liberation of men in rock.
Liberated by his partnership with The White Stripes’ Meg White by the time he holds the sticks in The Dead Weather, White is liberated again—thanks to Mosshart—from his role as front-man, vocalist, and lyricist—a “liberation” from center stage and the main mic that frees him to dismiss long-standing conventions in music history and pass on a band’s traditionally dominant role as front-man. The move to relinquish the position traditionally associated with “voice”—and here power, recognition, and message-making lets White defer to another—to back off, step down, sit down, and keep the beat, making his silence an artistic choice rather than dead air.
McLaughlin suggests new varieties of rock have helped clear the way for men to partner with women, claiming, for example, “The rise of alternative rock has also fueled the boom in coed bands” who “wearing their sensitivity on their sleeves […] are probably the least testosterone-driven rock generation ever.” It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what McLaughlin means by “testosterone-driven,” but she earlier describes the “typical all-male rock band” as a “roiling bouillabaisse of sexual competition and desire” and quotes Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley saying, “There is a different atmosphere in a coed band.” While the 1994 article intonates that the emergence of coed bands adds some kind of softening factor to hard-core caveman rock, civilizing primitive rockers, I want to explore an inversion of the theory, not to suggest coed bands don’t reflect a feminist sensibility, but to flesh out the contours of what a feminist-infused sensitivity to women might mean—for rock and for feminism.
In going co-ed, rock gets messy. There’s no softening in The Dead Weather, no big clean-up; in reviews describing The Dead Weather’s discombobulated sound, in fact, “dirt” is the dominant metaphor: Sheffield dubs the sound “Seventies dirtbag rock.” In a review for Rock & Roll Daily, Nicole Keiper calls the “bluesy blend of psych-rock guitar, alternately stark and explosive rhythms and Mosshart’s sultry to siren vocals” “sludgy”; others use words like “swampy” and “murky.” Hard beats, escalating rhythms, sudden changes, screeching bass lines, gloomy organ, aggressive vocals, and an unequivocal embrace of hard and heavy— The Dead Weather’s sound, according to one critic, is a “promiscuous blend” of musical genres, dirty the way a dollar bill is dirty, which is to say touched, fondled. Even Mosshart calls the sound “dirty and loose.”
Somehow, the filth metaphor works. This band is dirty—not just because it is living out of a tour bus (the Dead Weather’s North American tour includes shows in the U.S., Mexico, the U.K, France, Germany, and Holland) or because Mosshart, despite being touted as a fashion inspiration, usually appears on stage in the same jeans and distressed tee, but also because things circulating strike us as tinged.
That dirt and deviancy attach to almost every description of The Dead Weather’s debut album helps depict the band as the bastion of an old-style sinfulness and Horehound as a “post-apocalyptic Western.” No wonder The Dead Weather’s return to the blues is blood-drenched. Reading Mosshart as White’s new Satan, Sheffield remarks, “In the gospel according to Jack White, the devil is a woman.” For Berman, too, the band delves into the blues’ “devil’s-music deviancy” to pull off songs like its “deliciously sleazy” rendition of Dylan’s “New Pony.” Another reviewer describes Horehound as “a shootout between God and the Devil at the Ok Corall.”
Predictably, attention to The Dead Weather’s grit is overshadowed only by its focused and somewhat reductive depictions of Mosshart as a “cat-in-heat” with a “wildcat’s ferocity” or a “film-noir villainess” clutching the mic chord “like a whip poised to dominate anyone and everyone that got in her way.” In rock-n-roll, filth—sexual or otherwise—is a compliment, of course; indeed, filth is rock-n-roll. As one appreciative reviewer of Horehound acknowledges, “Rock n Roll is alive and well” in the album; for another, Jack White is “the most important person in rock today;” another credits White with carrying rock-n-roll on his back after The Dead Weather’s debut. The point is hard to argue (thanks be to Jack White), yet it misses the bigger picture, too: it misses Mosshart.
By way of comparison, in a review for The Black Table, Mike Bruno writes of Mosshart’s pre-Dead Weather rock duo, “The Kills are what wanting to fuck sounds like—sleazy, primal, and all-consuming.” Bruno goes on:
With bluesy drop-D power chords and nasty rock chick snarls, they grab you by the hair, yank you to the floor and smear attitude across your face. Life outside the sweaty confines of a Kills show ceases to exist for 45 minutes, and when you walk back out to the real world, at least for the rest of the night, other music sounds like a hollow, superfluous façade.
As Bruno’s clear adulation suggests, The Dead Weather’s genre-blending instrumentals can’t really begin to touch on the group’s appeal. There’s a message here, a content not simply propped up by the band’s sound or look, and it’s Mosshart’s message, though ventriloquial in its echoes with White’s.
In the music video “Treat Me Like Your Mother,” in which Mosshart and White engage in a shoot-em-up duel at the dusty outbanks of a what appears to be a slice of suburban southern California sprawl, the two offer an unnervingly charged duet whose lyrics recall the Freudian Oedipal drama. Mosshart belts the lyrics
Stand up like a man
You better learn to shake hands
Look me in the eye now,
Treat me like your mother
C’mon look me in the eye
You want to try to tell a lie?
You can’t
You know why?
I’m just like your mother
At the end, White joins in, his reply as dark and oblique as hers:
Play dumb, play dead
Trying to manipulate
You blink when you breathe
You breathe when you lie
You blink when you lie
Who’s got it figured out?
Left right left right?
Who’s got it figured out?
Play straight
The music is intense—Mosshart recalls being so overwhelmed by the sound that she had to leave the room in the middle of it to step outside—and so is the message: here, existence is a dark thing. Signs of life—breathing, blinking—signal lies and manipulation. The shootout violently enacts the confrontation between a man and a woman who, “like your mother,” is omniscient, apparently not falling for the act. The song’s lyrical, musical, and visual intensity is so disorienting the refrain “Who’s got it figured out?” feels like metacommentary. On the one hand, the video depicts a couple at war; on the other, the lyrics suggest a disturbing power play between mother and son, confusing boundaries between the platonic and romantic and conflating power and violence while examining corrosive bonds—between lovers, men and women, and mothers and sons. While the precise topic is elusive, the message itself is pretty clear: love takes no prisoners. In “Treat Me Like Your Mother,” The Dead Weather don’t divest rock-n-roll of its primordial past, but reinvest in the primordial, indulging in and re-signifying love of violence.
The album’s first song “60 Feet Tall,” co-written by Mosshart and Fertita, announces a love so rocky it’s irresistible:
You’re so cruel and shameless
I can’t leave you be
You’re so cold and dangerous
I can’t leave you be
You got the kind of loving
I need constantly
Later, Mosshart’s voice assures us, she can handle the heartless, reckless thing: “I can take the trouble ‘cause I’m 60 feet tall.” In concert, you believe her—in part, because she stands on the speaker and towers over the audience, delivering lines like threats, throwing her head down and lifting it on beat to make eye contact with the crowd until you’re sure it’s Mosshart who’s “cruel and shameless” and “cold and dangerous.”
The theme persists in the album’s second song, “Hang You From the Heavens,” also co-written with Fertita, though Mosshart here does more dishing out than taking: “I like to grab you by the hair/And hang you up from the heavens” and sometimes, “I like to grab you by the hair/And drag you to the devil.” These songs are not about leaving, as the affirmation to stay would seem to suggest, but about going further in: “I never know why I push you/Trash you just to confuse you/I make a hole just to see how/See through clean I can cut you.” A drum solo rolls in like a thunderstorm before the guitar crashes in again. The song’s premise seems to be something akin to I love you so much I’m going to hurt you, ok?—the kind of thinking that doesn’t fly in traditional feminist circles or even in rock. Jack can’t say it, but Alison can. Here’s what Jack can say:
In “I Cut Like a Buffalo,” written and sung by White this time—but somehow invoking Mosshart with the lyrics
Well you know I look like a woman but I
Cut like a buffalo
Stand up like a tower, tall
But I fall
Just like a domino—,
White asks for a little pain-infused love:
You can hit me if you want to
Do whatever makes you happy
But don’t take it easy on me
Cause I don’t know how to take it
The theme resurfaces in Mosshart’s “So Far From Your Weapon,” a song that feels straight out of the Tarantino film files like Kill Bill. In it, Mosshart’s voice is low and tinged with something like vengeance as she talk-sings: “There’s a bullet in my pocket burning a hole/You’re so far from your weapon/And the place you were born.” The bluesy repetition of the first lines, with a variation on the last (“And the place you were born” becomes “And you want to go home”) adds depth to the imagery. You can almost see someone bent over, trying to stand, yet unable to:
I try to give you whiskey
But it never do work
Suddenly you’re begging me
To do so much worse
I knew it from the get go
The bullet was cursed
Ever since I had you
Every little thing hurts
You wanna get up? Let go?
I say no
Here, again, love hurts. And it’s forceful. Someone begs someone in pain and the one still standing refuses to let the other get up and go.
In “Bone House,” too, the theme is back.
I build a house
For your bones
I build a house
I build a home
I wrote a song
Go on and listen
That’s all you’ll hear
When I go missing
Promising to “always get the things I want,” Mosshart explains “I put your heart/In a vault/That’s how I get/The things I want.”
The love-sick, angry-blood theme coursing through Horehound is not new to Mosshart as much as it’s a sound that’s boiled over from The Kills. Songs like “I Hate the Way You Love”—of which The Kills offer two versions, fast and slow—make the band’s love-hate preoccupation overt in a declarative statement. In another song, Mosshart spins the theme into a question: “If I’m so evil, why are you satisfied?”
Horehound’s moxy draws on an attitude that runs throughout each of The Kills albums, including Keep on Your Mean Side, No Wow, and Midnight Boom, particularly songs like “Love is a Deserter” in which Mosshart sings “Get the guns out/Get the guns out/Your love is a deserter.” Here, as in “Murdermile,” love is extended as a threat: “This ain’t murdermile/That’s just the way I smile.”
Where Mosshart swaggers onto stage, she brings a broad inquiry into bonding—particularly the passionate brand between lovers and friends—how it works and why, and, oftentimes, a sharply focused and convincing case that bonds forge not through some mild adherent like tape, glue, or even time (as in “Tape Song” in which “Tape ain’t gonna fix it honey/it ain’t gonna stick,” “Six kinds of glue/won’t hold you,” and “Time ain’t gonna cure you honey/Time don’t give a shit), but something still more solid—like the pain of a violent, virulent love.
Attached to Mosshart, the projects feel like sustained, unsentimental studies in the fleshy contours of romantic love—it’s push and pull, its urge to suffer, destroy, kill, and, above all, last. Fifteen years after rock goes coed, Mosshart recovers the carnality of rock, pushing it to its edge, and restoring rock’s raw insensitivity to polite society and loving love, here depicted as loveless love. Fans appreciate it. That we want the message delivered in coed rock duos or female-fronted male-backed rock bands suggests we are interested in a new kind of message, one that we may not be ready to hear from men who strike out on their own.
The Kills are touring with the Raconteurs when Jack White loses his voice and asks Alison Mosshart to fill in for him on “Steady As She Goes.”
“So you could still get paid—without doing the work,” Mosshart jokes in the self-released video of the group interviewing itself.
Later, Mosshart visits the newly constructed Nashville branch of White’s recording studio Third Man Records. Dean Fertita and Jack Lawrence are around, and they start jamming. A ten-hour session gleans a smatter of songs.
When the four hear the session, they consider spinning the recordings into a 7-inch. The project morphs into an album instead and, retroactively, a band—not just any band, but the blues-infused rock quartet “supergroup” The Dead Weather, whose combined talents boast of bands as big as The White Stripes, the Raconteurs, Queens of the Stone Age, the Greenhornes, and The Kills and features rock priests Jack Black, Dean Fertita, and Jack Lawrence as well as the indie-punk queen Alison Mosshart. Their first album, Horehound, recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, over three weeks in January 2009 and released on vinyl April 18th, debuted at #6 on the U.S. Billboard 200 Album Charts.
Founder of the Raconteurs, Jack White is most popularly known as lead guitarist and front man for The White Stripes, a rock duo with drummer Meg White, whose name White took in an early and brief marriage the two notoriously tried to hide so as to keep attention focused on the music. When their 1997-formed band became huge in 2002, criticism of Meg’s drumming style suggested The White Stripes was more of a solo project than a duo, but Jack shoots the theory down, saying
It's kind of funny: When people critique hip-hop, they're scared to open up, for fear of being called racist. But they're not scared to open up on female musicians, out of pure sexism. Meg is the best part of this band. It never would have worked with anybody else, because it would have been too complicated... It was my doorway to playing the blues.
White’s claim that Meg is “the best part” of their two-person band is elucidated in Meg’s reflection on her role. Admitting the criticism sometimes gets to her, Meg says,
But then I think about it, and I realize that this is what is really needed for this band. And I just try to have as much fun with it as possible... I just know the way [Jack] plays so well at this point that I always know kind of what he's going to do. I can always sense where he's going with things just by the mood he's in or the attitude or how the song is going. Once in a while, he throws me for a loop, but I can usually keep him where I want him.
Meg’s confession that she “can usually keep [him] where [she wants] him” suggests her sit-down role in The White Stripes is actually the best seat from which to manage the band’s sound, a view that might help illuminate Jack’s sense that "When she started to play drums with me, just on a lark, it felt liberating and refreshing. There was something in it that opened me up."
As his defense of Meg’s drumming style and criticism of the “pure sexism” indicates, Jack White’s record for supporting women in the music industry is solid: in 2001, he produced Loretta Lynn’s comeback album Van Lear Rose, winner the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Country Album, which Loretta Lynn described as “as country as [she is].” Since his partnership with Meg White and Loretta Lynn, Jack White has promoted female rockers like Tegan and Sara and Holly Golightly, covering songs like “Walking With a Ghost” and “It’s True that We Love One Another.” And, now, with The Dead Weather, White does it again, this time taking on Meg White’s role as drummer and fronting Alison Mosshart.
From the perspective of Mosshart fans, in taking a backseat—literally, at the drums—to Mosshart, White’s debut of The Dead Weather launches The Alison Mosshart Band, lending his bandmates, megastar status, and studio to the Florida native and other half of the British rock duo The Kills, who becomes the band’s front-person, writing, singing, and performing eight of the album’s ten songs. To front a band is to speak for it—literally, as vocalist and often, figuratively, as lyricist. My question is how does Mosshart speak for White even as he hands over the reigns?
Turned around a bit, White’s support of women in the industry—his habit of “giving voice” to female vocalists—gestures toward the little explored question of how women might speak for men or, in this context, how male rockers might themselves feel a certain voicelessness in an industry over-invested in men. As Lisa McLaughlin observes in a 1994 article for Time Magazine, “The basic model for a rock-‘n’-roll band has always been four buddies playing guitars and drums. That all-male unit has been fundamental—rock’s version of the nuclear family.” White’s tendency to partner with women wreaks havoc on the long-standing model in which, “for most of rock’s history, women have never been full, chord-crunching, songwriting partners with men in real rock groups.” In rock-n-roll history, co-ed bands are newer than the nation’s integration of women into the Supreme Court, yet a tendency to address women’s marginalization in music and rock by fixating on the trend’s collateral damage to women can’t intelligibly respond to how the pattern stifles and misrepresents male voices.
Broadly, the rise in coed rock duos like The White Stripes and The Kills and female-fronted coed bands like the Danish band The Raveonettes and the American band Thao and the Get Down Stay Down speaks to a desire to revitalize rock by mixing things up, not just the sexes, but musical genres and old patterns, too. More specifically, though, the turnaround might speak to the liberation of men in rock.
Liberated by his partnership with The White Stripes’ Meg White by the time he holds the sticks in The Dead Weather, White is liberated again—thanks to Mosshart—from his role as front-man, vocalist, and lyricist—a “liberation” from center stage and the main mic that frees him to dismiss long-standing conventions in music history and pass on a band’s traditionally dominant role as front-man. The move to relinquish the position traditionally associated with “voice”—and here power, recognition, and message-making lets White defer to another—to back off, step down, sit down, and keep the beat, making his silence an artistic choice rather than dead air.
McLaughlin suggests new varieties of rock have helped clear the way for men to partner with women, claiming, for example, “The rise of alternative rock has also fueled the boom in coed bands” who “wearing their sensitivity on their sleeves […] are probably the least testosterone-driven rock generation ever.” It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what McLaughlin means by “testosterone-driven,” but she earlier describes the “typical all-male rock band” as a “roiling bouillabaisse of sexual competition and desire” and quotes Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley saying, “There is a different atmosphere in a coed band.” While the 1994 article intonates that the emergence of coed bands adds some kind of softening factor to hard-core caveman rock, civilizing primitive rockers, I want to explore an inversion of the theory, not to suggest coed bands don’t reflect a feminist sensibility, but to flesh out the contours of what a feminist-infused sensitivity to women might mean—for rock and for feminism.
In going co-ed, rock gets messy. There’s no softening in The Dead Weather, no big clean-up; in reviews describing The Dead Weather’s discombobulated sound, in fact, “dirt” is the dominant metaphor: Sheffield dubs the sound “Seventies dirtbag rock.” In a review for Rock & Roll Daily, Nicole Keiper calls the “bluesy blend of psych-rock guitar, alternately stark and explosive rhythms and Mosshart’s sultry to siren vocals” “sludgy”; others use words like “swampy” and “murky.” Hard beats, escalating rhythms, sudden changes, screeching bass lines, gloomy organ, aggressive vocals, and an unequivocal embrace of hard and heavy— The Dead Weather’s sound, according to one critic, is a “promiscuous blend” of musical genres, dirty the way a dollar bill is dirty, which is to say touched, fondled. Even Mosshart calls the sound “dirty and loose.”
Somehow, the filth metaphor works. This band is dirty—not just because it is living out of a tour bus (the Dead Weather’s North American tour includes shows in the U.S., Mexico, the U.K, France, Germany, and Holland) or because Mosshart, despite being touted as a fashion inspiration, usually appears on stage in the same jeans and distressed tee, but also because things circulating strike us as tinged.
That dirt and deviancy attach to almost every description of The Dead Weather’s debut album helps depict the band as the bastion of an old-style sinfulness and Horehound as a “post-apocalyptic Western.” No wonder The Dead Weather’s return to the blues is blood-drenched. Reading Mosshart as White’s new Satan, Sheffield remarks, “In the gospel according to Jack White, the devil is a woman.” For Berman, too, the band delves into the blues’ “devil’s-music deviancy” to pull off songs like its “deliciously sleazy” rendition of Dylan’s “New Pony.” Another reviewer describes Horehound as “a shootout between God and the Devil at the Ok Corall.”
Predictably, attention to The Dead Weather’s grit is overshadowed only by its focused and somewhat reductive depictions of Mosshart as a “cat-in-heat” with a “wildcat’s ferocity” or a “film-noir villainess” clutching the mic chord “like a whip poised to dominate anyone and everyone that got in her way.” In rock-n-roll, filth—sexual or otherwise—is a compliment, of course; indeed, filth is rock-n-roll. As one appreciative reviewer of Horehound acknowledges, “Rock n Roll is alive and well” in the album; for another, Jack White is “the most important person in rock today;” another credits White with carrying rock-n-roll on his back after The Dead Weather’s debut. The point is hard to argue (thanks be to Jack White), yet it misses the bigger picture, too: it misses Mosshart.
By way of comparison, in a review for The Black Table, Mike Bruno writes of Mosshart’s pre-Dead Weather rock duo, “The Kills are what wanting to fuck sounds like—sleazy, primal, and all-consuming.” Bruno goes on:
With bluesy drop-D power chords and nasty rock chick snarls, they grab you by the hair, yank you to the floor and smear attitude across your face. Life outside the sweaty confines of a Kills show ceases to exist for 45 minutes, and when you walk back out to the real world, at least for the rest of the night, other music sounds like a hollow, superfluous façade.
As Bruno’s clear adulation suggests, The Dead Weather’s genre-blending instrumentals can’t really begin to touch on the group’s appeal. There’s a message here, a content not simply propped up by the band’s sound or look, and it’s Mosshart’s message, though ventriloquial in its echoes with White’s.
In the music video “Treat Me Like Your Mother,” in which Mosshart and White engage in a shoot-em-up duel at the dusty outbanks of a what appears to be a slice of suburban southern California sprawl, the two offer an unnervingly charged duet whose lyrics recall the Freudian Oedipal drama. Mosshart belts the lyrics
Stand up like a man
You better learn to shake hands
Look me in the eye now,
Treat me like your mother
C’mon look me in the eye
You want to try to tell a lie?
You can’t
You know why?
I’m just like your mother
At the end, White joins in, his reply as dark and oblique as hers:
Play dumb, play dead
Trying to manipulate
You blink when you breathe
You breathe when you lie
You blink when you lie
Who’s got it figured out?
Left right left right?
Who’s got it figured out?
Play straight
The music is intense—Mosshart recalls being so overwhelmed by the sound that she had to leave the room in the middle of it to step outside—and so is the message: here, existence is a dark thing. Signs of life—breathing, blinking—signal lies and manipulation. The shootout violently enacts the confrontation between a man and a woman who, “like your mother,” is omniscient, apparently not falling for the act. The song’s lyrical, musical, and visual intensity is so disorienting the refrain “Who’s got it figured out?” feels like metacommentary. On the one hand, the video depicts a couple at war; on the other, the lyrics suggest a disturbing power play between mother and son, confusing boundaries between the platonic and romantic and conflating power and violence while examining corrosive bonds—between lovers, men and women, and mothers and sons. While the precise topic is elusive, the message itself is pretty clear: love takes no prisoners. In “Treat Me Like Your Mother,” The Dead Weather don’t divest rock-n-roll of its primordial past, but reinvest in the primordial, indulging in and re-signifying love of violence.
The album’s first song “60 Feet Tall,” co-written by Mosshart and Fertita, announces a love so rocky it’s irresistible:
You’re so cruel and shameless
I can’t leave you be
You’re so cold and dangerous
I can’t leave you be
You got the kind of loving
I need constantly
Later, Mosshart’s voice assures us, she can handle the heartless, reckless thing: “I can take the trouble ‘cause I’m 60 feet tall.” In concert, you believe her—in part, because she stands on the speaker and towers over the audience, delivering lines like threats, throwing her head down and lifting it on beat to make eye contact with the crowd until you’re sure it’s Mosshart who’s “cruel and shameless” and “cold and dangerous.”
The theme persists in the album’s second song, “Hang You From the Heavens,” also co-written with Fertita, though Mosshart here does more dishing out than taking: “I like to grab you by the hair/And hang you up from the heavens” and sometimes, “I like to grab you by the hair/And drag you to the devil.” These songs are not about leaving, as the affirmation to stay would seem to suggest, but about going further in: “I never know why I push you/Trash you just to confuse you/I make a hole just to see how/See through clean I can cut you.” A drum solo rolls in like a thunderstorm before the guitar crashes in again. The song’s premise seems to be something akin to I love you so much I’m going to hurt you, ok?—the kind of thinking that doesn’t fly in traditional feminist circles or even in rock. Jack can’t say it, but Alison can. Here’s what Jack can say:
In “I Cut Like a Buffalo,” written and sung by White this time—but somehow invoking Mosshart with the lyrics
Well you know I look like a woman but I
Cut like a buffalo
Stand up like a tower, tall
But I fall
Just like a domino—,
White asks for a little pain-infused love:
You can hit me if you want to
Do whatever makes you happy
But don’t take it easy on me
Cause I don’t know how to take it
The theme resurfaces in Mosshart’s “So Far From Your Weapon,” a song that feels straight out of the Tarantino film files like Kill Bill. In it, Mosshart’s voice is low and tinged with something like vengeance as she talk-sings: “There’s a bullet in my pocket burning a hole/You’re so far from your weapon/And the place you were born.” The bluesy repetition of the first lines, with a variation on the last (“And the place you were born” becomes “And you want to go home”) adds depth to the imagery. You can almost see someone bent over, trying to stand, yet unable to:
I try to give you whiskey
But it never do work
Suddenly you’re begging me
To do so much worse
I knew it from the get go
The bullet was cursed
Ever since I had you
Every little thing hurts
You wanna get up? Let go?
I say no
Here, again, love hurts. And it’s forceful. Someone begs someone in pain and the one still standing refuses to let the other get up and go.
In “Bone House,” too, the theme is back.
I build a house
For your bones
I build a house
I build a home
I wrote a song
Go on and listen
That’s all you’ll hear
When I go missing
Promising to “always get the things I want,” Mosshart explains “I put your heart/In a vault/That’s how I get/The things I want.”
The love-sick, angry-blood theme coursing through Horehound is not new to Mosshart as much as it’s a sound that’s boiled over from The Kills. Songs like “I Hate the Way You Love”—of which The Kills offer two versions, fast and slow—make the band’s love-hate preoccupation overt in a declarative statement. In another song, Mosshart spins the theme into a question: “If I’m so evil, why are you satisfied?”
Horehound’s moxy draws on an attitude that runs throughout each of The Kills albums, including Keep on Your Mean Side, No Wow, and Midnight Boom, particularly songs like “Love is a Deserter” in which Mosshart sings “Get the guns out/Get the guns out/Your love is a deserter.” Here, as in “Murdermile,” love is extended as a threat: “This ain’t murdermile/That’s just the way I smile.”
Where Mosshart swaggers onto stage, she brings a broad inquiry into bonding—particularly the passionate brand between lovers and friends—how it works and why, and, oftentimes, a sharply focused and convincing case that bonds forge not through some mild adherent like tape, glue, or even time (as in “Tape Song” in which “Tape ain’t gonna fix it honey/it ain’t gonna stick,” “Six kinds of glue/won’t hold you,” and “Time ain’t gonna cure you honey/Time don’t give a shit), but something still more solid—like the pain of a violent, virulent love.
Attached to Mosshart, the projects feel like sustained, unsentimental studies in the fleshy contours of romantic love—it’s push and pull, its urge to suffer, destroy, kill, and, above all, last. Fifteen years after rock goes coed, Mosshart recovers the carnality of rock, pushing it to its edge, and restoring rock’s raw insensitivity to polite society and loving love, here depicted as loveless love. Fans appreciate it. That we want the message delivered in coed rock duos or female-fronted male-backed rock bands suggests we are interested in a new kind of message, one that we may not be ready to hear from men who strike out on their own.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
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