Magnanimous Bard: Listening to Other People's Love Songs (Part One)

Oh yeah um Happy New Year! Okay so. Corey Dargel's got another big show this week, a revival of his piece Removable Parts at HERE Arts Space in NYC (Jan 7-11, $20, tix here), so let's take this opportunity for a nice hard look at his latest record, Other People's Love Songs, which you've already heard me going on about plenty, but humor me. And before I forget, subscribe to this podcast! Free Dargel mp3s, including his new Christmas song for Time Out New York. It's not a project totally without precedent. There's that Momus album, Stars Forever, where he accepted commissions from people like Jeff Koons and Cornelius to write a synth-pop song about each of them. And of course there's Stephin Merritt's livre of love songs. These aren't a terrifically useful comparisons, I know, since aren't those guys's pop songs (not to put them down) way simpler, way catchier—but I think the fact that Dargel's music has an indie-rock niche ready to slip into, this niche of overenunciating white boys unafraid of synth presets, may have something to do with why I find it so satisfying. He's written here about the advantages of writing, setting, singing, and performing one's own songs—advantages which might seem obvious to lovers of indie rock and other singer/songwriter-driven musics, but which sometimes have to be explained slowly and clearly to visitors from Planet Classical—so instead of talking about how these advantages work for him, let's talk about something just as important, namely the way he makes his project's disadvantages work for him. Disadvantage #1: He is not a highly trained singer. I don't mean that he isn't skilled, or well-practiced, I just meant that he's not going to tear the roof off with gospel melisma or hit a high C in full voice. His range is limited, he probably couldn't (consistently) project to the back of a concert hall without a mike, and he probably couldn't navigate rapid shifts in pitch or color or dynamics the way that a trained singer could. But for the audience he's reaching out to, these skills aren't all that important. Quite the opposite: virtuosity, a highly polished singing style, are marks of insincerity to the indie-rock crowd. Just as the current generation of composers grew up listening to pieces like In C or Clapping Music that could be played by anybody, many of today's most celebrated pop singers grew up listening to artists with seemingly ordinary voices, and rejecting the spectacular displays of R&B and classic-rock vocalists. Bands inspired by Death Cab for Cutie or Neutral Milk Hotel are all about putting the text across clearly, not about showing off or milking each syllable for maximum expressive value. I'm not saying their values are somehow preferable to the values of singers inspired by Mariah Carey, I'm just saying that Dargel's is not only a worthwhile aesthetic, but one that, unlike that of most "accessible" composers, actually does click with what the kids today are listening to. On their crazy "i-Pod" machines. Disadvantage #2: If you're gonna do everything yourself, you're gonna have to rely on technology to play anything you can't play with your own two hands. And up to a certain point, the closer you come with any kind of synthesizer to actually simulating the sound of a musical instrument, the more your audience is reminded that they are listening to something inhuman. In robotics, this is known as the paradox of the "uncanny valley"; here's a handy musical illustration I posted to this blog a while back. Even if you have the resources of time, technology, and $$$ to really pull off a one-man MIDI Symphony, you're just as likely to weird your audience out. Fortunately, Dargel does "weird" and "alienating" very, very well. The sensations of estrangement and alienation are his bread and/or butter. Accordingly, his instrumental patches actually aim towards the false, the cheap, the mechanical, as if attempting to pre-empt accusations of same—while also hedging against sentimentality. A charming melody on a tinny synth patch puts finger-quotes around its designs on your feelings; in the same way, a patently counterfeit "rock beat" programmed into a computer ironizes said beat's designs upon your booty. Here again, he locks into recent trends in rock and, even more, in dance/hip-hop, in which the attempt is not to escape the constraints of dated technology in favor of sampling that sounds "fresh" or "live," but to foreground the falseness of the electronically generated material. Like, you've heard this Postal Service song, right?It's just like that. There's no attempt to conceal the fact that this is basically a record that two dudes made (with a lady singer also), using the resources at hand, without even having to be in the same room together. Yes, the beat makes you wanna get up and dance, but it makes you wanna get up and dance in the brightly-colored costumes of an imaginary 1985. Note Ben (Death Cab) Gibbard's vocals too—text first, "emoting" a distant second. And finally, Dargel's use of electronics dodges this bullet:

One big thing is the drum set right now. There are a lot of composers who are trying to incorporate the drum set into classical arrangements. It’s really hard to do that and make a synthesis that makes sense, because people have been using drum sets for a long time. The drum set is a totally oral instrument and everyone has their own feel to it and if you try writing it down it’s very difficult to do and have it make sense. I feel like there are so many concert pieces that have a drum set in it and the drum set sounds so stupid.

That's Ted Hearne, interviewed here (hattip DJA) Good lord, there is nothing worse than a composer trying to hip shit up by dragging a drummer onstage. STAY AWAY. By rejecting both the hi-tech and the "rockin'," Dargel neatly avoids the risk of trying to sound hip, even as he taps straight into actual, vital pop culture trends. Okay, there's obviously a lot more to say about this album, but why don't I post this right now so that the mention of this week's concerts might actually do somebody good, and then I'll write the rest later. Alrighty? (Image ganked from an old CRACKED Magazine, via Cartoon Brew via Boing Boing. I swear I only found the pic after I had already written the line about "i-Pod machines.")