Cartoon Blood

Here at Neon Hustle, we like music. We also like television. Living back in a house with the latter, I bring you the following exploration of that once bold attempt to join the two media. But this ain't yo' momma's MTV. No, this is FNMTV: A liveblog on cartoon blood, one man's immovable hair, and the ethical-cum-aesthetic low point of summer songs.

0:04 - I forgot that Pete Wentz hosts this show. He's wearing a sleeveless hoodie and just introduced a ten second clip of LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out." This is already seeming like a very bad idea.

0:05 - They're running a clip wherein LL Cool J is talking about going to the market as a kid. "I can't work the register, ma!" The message for today's youth: Work might be good for some people, but not if you want to be a star. He's bagging groceries now as a photo op and asking where to put things. If he were a candidate, his questions would be the equivalent of Kerry asking for Swiss on a Philly Cheesesteak. We'll accept elitism from our celebrities, but not from our leaders.

0:09 - Run DMC "Rock Box" Clip. LL Cool J is talking about how rap was blowing up at the time of this clip and how he was partying with Russel Simmons and Madonna when it came out. "Rock Box" was released in 1984. LL Cool J released Radio in 1985.

0:10 - The crowd is cheering for a clip of Pete Wentz stuffing his face with spaghetti in an homage to "Doin' It." So far my enjoyment of this show is directly correlated to the dude's screen time.

0:11 - Video Premiere! It's hard to say what the most distracting part of this experience is: there's the video effect that makes me feel like I'm constantly engaging hyperdrive and the "your baby" being looped through the chorus. The worst is probably the crowd noise randomly piped in during the track. Having come of age in the midst of TRL, I keep thinking the producers are about to cut to the studio. No such luck.

0:15 - They've got a skybox? Tim Kash, the British accented VJ, sits with The Game and James Montgomery, a "music journalist" who resembles Craig Finn, sans 20 years and 60 pounds. And Montgomery just dissed the track! "I didn't see that drive there, I want to see the hunger from the kid who wanted to get out of the supermarket." While it sounds disturbingly like commentary on a basketall halftime show, he's got a point. The crowd booed, and the VJ advised him to watch his back. They're about to cut to commercials, a phrase I use loosely since they just spent thirty seconds talking about how you could use Verizon to be a better MTV consumer, but not before letting us know that She & Him will be coming up soon. Did you know Zooey Deschanel is an actress!



00:20 - Last week, Rihanna played with Maroon 5. Apparently she has a song other than "Umbrella" and justice still hasn't been served on their career.

00:21 - "You may know her from a movie called "Almost Famous." And he is almost famous. Please welcome She & Him." I wonder if Wentz writes his own material. Oh, he's asking her about the actress/singer transition, and him about getting involved with someone making the actress/singer transition... He probably does. Next question is an homage to Almost Famous because, get this, she was in that movie! "Is there a record that did set you free, or that is so influential to you?" If you were wondering, she said Revolver.

The video is unbelievably, adorably, and wonderfully twee. Which makes it all the better when they turn to The Game for the first word: "I just like all the cartoon blood. I figured out a way to get blood into my videos without MTV blurring it out, ya gotta make it cartoon." Montgomery makes the Scar-Jo comparisons and then the VJ continues sucking up to The Game. The dude's got a Dodgers tattoo on right cheek, clearly way cooler than the journo.

It's worth saying that, even beyond the catchy single, great video, and adorable singer/actress, the She & Him record really is quite good. The songwriting is strong, and it's a refreshing throwback in sound and sensibility. Her voice, while far from perfect, is strong when it needs to be and vulnerable in just the way that her songs ask. It's a shame that she's unable to escape the actress narrative, when the more apt comparisons may be to 1920's revivalists The Ditty Bops or still-learing-the-vocals Kaki King.



0:31 - Dark Knight Returns clip instead of immediately bringing out Daughtry. I'm really quite ok with this. Though the clip isn't all that interesting. Heath Ledger shoots some guns and Batman stoically rams a garbage truck. Wentz: "I want to see the Game driving the Batmobile." Ok, the sucking up to the Game is getting a bit much.

0:33 - Fuck, they're rolling the Daughtry clip. The phrase "American Idol" isn't mentioned, but the blue-collar family man makes good is laid on thicker than Pete Wentz's product. Seriously, I don't think I've seen his hair move - it's like Trump Hair or something.

0:35 - Watching Pete Wentz's hair for movement is more interesting than this interview. Daughtry observes: "We can say anything and [the crowd would] be all, "WOOO!"" He's painfully right.

00:39 - Blurring the line between the show and the advertisements. Pete Wentz drives a smart car to go pick up The Game and his entourage. They kick him out, and two guys sit on the gate of the trunk as they drive into the distance. Wentz forlornly asks a local for directions. If this is an ad, it sucks as much as the Daughtry clip. Pete Wentz just claimed Ryan Seacrest as a friend. I don't think Ryan Seacrest would admit to having Ryan Seacrest as a friend.



0:42 - This is the first time I've consciously listened to Daughtry and I'm really wishing I hadn't. This band seems to combine the self-satisfied, over-the-top vocals of Creed with the rhythm section from Nickelback. Their guitar and piano parts fall between the aforementioned and Aerosmith.

Is it wrong to hate on a band while they run a video publicizing the charity work of underappreciated groups and people from across the world? While it's been done before, there are a laundry list of groups that people might never have heard of were it not for this video. Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty Internaional, Urban Compass, Insight Prison Project, Seacology, Surfaid, Room to Read, Homeboy Industries, Keep a Child A Live...



0:49 - I'd keep listing, but the commercial break is over and Katy Perry is on talking about what might be the song of the summer, "I Kissed a Girl." Hilights of the clip, which cuts between shots of her face (cleavage and up) and her hands... on her legs.

"Girls are very girly, we have summer parties and we have choreographed dance moves in pajamas... It's kind of about that. It's like kissing your arm sometimes. We smell very good. We smell like vanilla, watermelons, strawberries. [...] Not trying to be a role model or a posterchild for anything because I'm in the business of rock and roll. I'm in the business of rock and roll... I came here to inspire people to listen to pop music again."

This is one of the worst hit songs ever. There are some that are unlistenable but inexplicably turn to pop culture earworm ("Pop" by N*Sync). There are others that are just plain bad, in the "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)" way. I'll defer on the latter to the posters and commenters at Feministe:

In popular culture, kissing a woman is only permissible and sanctioned if a woman is already an avowed heterosexual. [...] The icing on the cake comes from Perry’s own objectification of a female subject: “Just wanna try you on / I’m curious for you” and “No, I don’t even know your name / It doesn’t matter / You’re my experimental game / Just human nature”. Now we’re free to dehumanize and sexualize each other into pieces of meat to be sampled, instead of waiting around for a man to do it! [...] This attitude underscores an aggressive masculinity that runs through the song, its beat, and Perry’s singing: “and I liked it” is sung with such defiance. It poses as third-wave feminism with a “girly” but loud-and-proud protagonist, but is really just good, old-fashioned woman-using.

Back to the point, Perry's song is abysmal. It rides its sing-along chorus as far as it will go, but has little else but a story written in lyrics that don't quite scan over a marching electro-drum beat. For someone who claims to be in the business of rock and roll, she doesn't have much faith in the holy trinity of bass, drums, and guitar.

As the show draws to a close, Perry is showered in balloons.

In watching an hour of television, I saw three music videos and one live performance. If I'd gotten to hear The Game's thoughts on Katy Perry, it might have almost been worth it.

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The Big Laydown

It started in late 2006, with the curio announcement that Scarlett Johansson- yes, that Scarlett Johansson- was to make an album. What’s more, she was to make an album of Tom Waits covers. Eye rolling turned into a sustained level of interest, which was piqued with the accompanying details. Dave Sitek, musical backbone of the adored TV on the Radio, had been tapped to create a backdrop for the assuredly surreal sounds to come. Cameos and collaborators piled up with each infrequent press release, along with rumors and gossip, whisperings of Ziggy Stardust sightings in the bayou, and speculation as to whether or not Johansson could actually, you know, sing. More than a year and a half later, Anywhere I Lay My Head arrived.

The average music fan has probably heard some of mostly the same criticisms. The record certainly has its rough spots, and yeah, the lows are pretty low indeed- especially the painfully-obvious music box on “I Wish I Was in New Orleans” and the hideously juvenile dance track train-wreck that is “I Don’t Want to Grow Up.” But it is also true that the highs are actually quite close to… stunning. Sitek’s now-trademark percussive drone, highlighted by string and woodwind flourishes, pair beautifully with some of the melodic highpoints of Waits’ career, which manage yoke the sometimes meandering and abstract tendencies of Sitek’s own band to some plain perfectly-written songs. While Johansson’s immature contralto stands out repeatedly in the record as a glaring point of weakness, it is, at the very least, an interesting diversion in places and occasionally manages to reach peaks simply not suggested possible by her previous known work at the mic.

It turns out, that we could reverse the billing on the closing duet “Who Are You” and have a decent case that Tunde Adebimpe alone would have made this a terrific TVoTR release. Consider his tracks as nothing more than a collaboration between him and Sitek, and we could easily extrapolate Bowie's sample into an album we’d call at least 3.4 times better than Heathen and proceed to argue its relative merits alongside Scary Monsters as his last good albums. In all actuality, pretty much the entire first half of the album (up to and including the co-written Johansson/Sitek original) is an unqualified success. Johansson’s taste in covers material is vindicated by some long-overdue attention paid to a couple of Waits’ should-be classics. The Brooklyn all-star backing band cameos (members of TV on the Radio, Celebration and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) exceed their ill-defined expectations and produce some great instrumentals. Bowie remains convincingly Bowie-like (in shades of Lou’s “Satellite of Love” no less) and Sitek absolutely produces the shit out of everything. Then we drink some lemonade, maybe watch Manhattan again, and head home happy in the early summer night.

Yet although most reviewers have claimed pretenses wanting to of give the album a fair shake, everybody seems to hedge against venturing any kind of strong sentiment as to the ultimate quality of these eleven tracks. The resulting critical response has come in deceivingly mediocre ratings and disingenuously superficial assessments. No attempt is made by anybody to reconcile the phenomenon of why this album, once a nexus of fairly intense fetishism by more than a few people, has been met with such absolute indifference upon its arrival. Given the principles involved and lopsided results, it seems that there would be at least a little spirited debate about Anywhere I Lay My Head. Yet a glance around the media reveals that it’s not just that the major outlets aren’t into it, but the fact is that nobody seems to be into it, and the question of why has consumed me...

Right around the time that anticipation of the Scar-Jo record had mounted, another musical debut by an indie-crush-worthy actress arrived with little fanfare. She & Him is a collaboration between Zoey Deschanel, she of healthy filmography and radar-straddling profile, and M. Ward, he of notably consistent (and Pitchfork-approved) folk-inflected solo career. The two have produced, by all accounts a lovely little collection of songs entitled Volume One, consisting of both covers (by the likes of key Ward influences Smokey Robinson and the Beatles) and originals credited to Deschanel and produced by Ward. With a studio band assembled by Ward and featuring members of the Decemberists and Devotchka, the duo manages to recall the pop highlights of obvious idols Tammy Wynette and Patsy Cline. Despite a few missteps, like the poorly-placed slowdown of “Take it Back” and a completely useless afterthought of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” (seriously), the album is full of affecting, hook-filled songs that know when it’s better to quit than risk going too far out of their depth.

At a loss for explaining the different receptions for Johansson’s and Deschanel’s respective efforts, my mind wandered among a number of possibilities. Obviously, the subject of novelty in music has been on my mind recently. When and why a given project may be dismissed out of hand while another is celebrated for whatever reasons still evades me. What I have come to understand, in a very “hipster-bashing is a totally hipster thing to do” kind of way, is that coolness-as-commodity requires a level of sub-cultural protectionism. This is often taken (rightly or wrongly, but mostly rightly) as exclusionary and elitism by the world at large. And, for people who spend as much time listening to and thinking about music as I do, the single biggest conceit we seem to make for our obsession is the lonely life of being a definitive arbiter of our own tastes.

Of course, these standards become compounded by the fact of indie-rock being a still largely male-dominated society, begging the engagement of forces beyond rationale, and sometimes bordering on misogyny. Scarlett was everybody’s dream girl from Ghost World through Lost in Translation. Now we respond to the unmistakable signifiers of her being finally and totally co-opted by the mainstream: appearing in lousy Bruckheimer summer blockbusters, going bicoastal (and unabashedly “Hollywood”) and, most painfully of all, dating Ryan Reynolds. As such, these recent albums are more than anything a referendum on the state of the people who made them. Anywhere I Lay My Head isn’t especially bad, but the collective yawn it has elicited is our final proof that Scarlett Johansson just isn’t cool anymore. Divorcing our opinion of the woman’s work from any ability to care about it is the only mechanism we have to protect ourselves from the fact that such an undertaking high likelihood of being an abject failure. To invest ouselves now risks seeing Scarlett make a joke of herself- and, by extension, us- in the most demoralizing way possible: on the E! Network between comments about her upcoming role in yet another shitty (and profitable) movie.

It is now abundantly clear that only thing Ms. Johansson could have done to change anybody’s opinion of her record was to be less famous when she made it. In the hands of an unknown (preferably male) quantity, we’ll not only forgive such a “novelty” project, but applaud it heartily, as in the case of the Dirty Projectors, whose Rise Above was a fixture on every cool kid’s favorites of 2007 list. A collective based in the consensus Center of the Universe (Williamsburg, apparently) has every advantage to produce- without fear of reprisal- a Black Flag covers abomination that remains, nine months after its release, as flimsy and frequently unlistenable as it did the first time I ignored it.

Likewise, Deschanel gets a pass for essentially being so far out of the greater public consciousness that it doesn’t matter when she fails. And she inevitably will fail. Volume One, for all its pleasant moments isn’t exactly announcing itself as a definitive work of an assured new voice to take the medium by storm, though Deschanel’s prominent role in M. Night Shyamalan’s forthcoming The Happening promises to be a debacle enough to ensure that she’ll have the chance to produce a few more volumes of She & Him to try for something even better. And you know what? I’ll bet they’ll be pretty good, too. If only the poor movie star would be afforded the same chance.

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