[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.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)