"Damien Rice is a pussy." And I love him for it.
It's getting towards the end of summer, and the weather's been reflecting that. Before I sat down to write this, I was standing at the window looking out, and it was raining, but now it has stopped. It'll start again soon, and even if it doesn't, it'll stay cloudy.
Inside my room, at 2 PM on a dreary afternoon, I'm listening to the first Damien Rice album, "O". It's fitting for the weather, but that's not why. The reason is that I'm a contrary motherfucker with unsophisticated tastes that tend toward the maudlin and overly vulnerable. Or so might say some of the people I interact with on message boards--the ones who make fun of me about Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance on a regular basis. See, this morning, someone on a message board where I post brought up Damien Rice, and mentioned that she was listening to "O" for the first time in a few years. She then began to complain about how she could ever have liked the album, and started talking about how a friend of hers always told her that Damien Rice was "a pussy", and that she'd never seen it until now. This led to a bunch of posts in which people called the guy "pussy", "faggot", "nancy", and other demeaning terms for someone who isn't properly manly, I suppose.
Now, when I was younger, I used to freak out over pejorative terms like this. I hated the sexism and homophobia that were embedded in these and so many other insults that my friends and peers tossed around like they meant nothing. However, as I've gotten older, I've gotten burned out on giving a shit. It's too much work for too little reward. Most people, regardless of whether they understand your complaint about the history of oppression they're carrying forward by using such insults, don't care whether it's true or not. They want to toss around offensive words and they don't want to think about whether they should or not. So OK, I've come to accept that people are going to call people they don't respect "pussy" or "faggot" or whatever. And 9 times out of 10 it doesn't bother me.
The reason this Damien Rice discussion was the 10th time has less to do with the words "pussy" and "faggot" themselves than what I saw as a deeper meaning behind what these people were saying. Before I go on, let me explain something about Damien Rice's music. It's acoustically-based, and generally quiet. Damien's lyrics tend to be about love and loss, and he sings them in an emotional tenor that sometimes seems like it's close to cracking. He never veers into the tear-stained warbling that is Conor Oberst's home territory, and I think this is a lot of why I like his music even though I hate most of Oberst's work. Well, that and the fact that Conor's musical backing is substantially inferior to the music that backs Damien Rice. It's close enough, though, to be the sort of music that a depressed teenager or twentysomething might listen to when they're feeling at their lowest. And I think this is why, five years on from the release of "O", it's no surprise that there's a backlash from some former fans. It's no surprise that some people are naturally inclined to throw around terms like "pussy" and "faggot". Because, see, Damien Rice's music has become tied in their mind to a period when they were feeling terrible, when their emotions were a huge mess and they were full of turmoil and suffering. Since they don't feel the way they once felt when they listened to Damien Rice, the tendency is to say, "What was I thinking?", and to write off his music as crap.
I've talked plenty of times on this blog about the way a severe emotional response to music is seen as inherently teenaged, and that there's a widespread belief in our culture that, as we get older, our emotions settle down and we become adults who don't feel things with the sort of intensity we felt them as teenagers. I've also talked plenty of times about how I feel that this is a convenient falsehood perpetrated by adults who want to explain away their own growth into the sort of emotionless suburban adults that they once swore they'd never resemble. And really, the truth is probably a little of both, and the reason it doesn't seem that way to me is probably because I've chosen a lifestyle that leaves me living like a starving artist long after such a lifestyle is accepted and endorsed by society. The deadline on that social endorsement, by the way, is 25, as far as I can tell. After that, if you're not trying to go work in an office, move to the suburbs, and raise a family, society tells you that you're stuck in a period of arrested development.
Anyway, I'm sorta digressing, so let's get back to the point, which is that Damien Rice's music is every bit as emotionally exposed as the kids calling him a "pussy" said it was. They're not wrong about that, not at all. The problem I had with the things they were saying was that they were painting this sort of emotional exposure as necessarily bad. I hear this a lot, really--that art in which emotion is stripped bare is bad art, that good art must necessarily obfuscate the emotions that it depicts beneath layers of subtlety and understatement. I've been really frustrated lately with my attempts to sell short stories that I've written, primarily because, even before the rejection slips start to roll in, I can foresee them coming. It's because the things I write are filled with emotion. Everything I read that's being published by the leading purveyors of short fiction is coming from that Hemingway/Raymond Carver school of thought, in which the important parts are never shown, no one ever reveals how they're really feeling, and any emotional impact a story carries must be gleaned by reading between the lines. Everyone's rewriting "Hills Like White Elephants" and "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?", and there's no room in a zeitgeist that values stories like this for the kinds of things I write. It drives me nuts, and I'm digressing again, but really, this has a lot to do with my point, because the short story writers and publishers who don't have time for the kind of thing I do, regardless of how good it is (and by the way, I'm not saying my stuff necessarily is good, though I'd like to think so), are the same sorts of people in the musical community who don't have time for what Damien Rice does, regardless of how good it is. They'd rather hear Bill Callahan and David Berman and Will Oldham or at least people who will imitate their sensibilities, rather than some Irish guy pouring his heart out over melodies that, too them, are just too straightforward.
You know, maybe I'm the equivalent of a Starbucks housewife who loves Norah Jones, merely by virtue of the fact that I'm writing this stuff about Damien Rice. That's a bit daunting to consider, but honestly, I think I'm willing to accept that judgment. Fact is, I like this guy's music. Right now I'm listening to a song called "The Blower's Daughter", and it's a good example of what I like about Rice's songs in general, so let me try to explain why this stuff seems good to me regardless of how accessible it might be. The song begins with Rice singing over no music, and only after the first line does his softly strummed acoustic guitar come in underneath his vocals. It drops out at several different points over the course of the song, too, especially once the string section comes in at the end of the first verse. The strings are much more attuned with his vocal than his guitar playing, which is actually rather simple, consisting of only a few chords. The strings embellish the more complicated vocal melody that Rice creates as he sings the verses, telling a story of an attempt to move on from a lost love. "And so, it is just like you said it would be," he sings. "We'll both forget the breeze most of the time." The end of the relationship is something that he accepts, but the choruses make clear that he doesn't like it. "I can't take my eyes off of you," he sings, over and over. Much of the time, while singing the chorus and being backed by the string section, Rice plays guitar minimally, or even, towards the end of the song, not at all. It's as if he's so into what he's singing, and the emotion that lies behind it, that he forgets to play guitar. This is something I used to see Bob Marley do during live performances, and I always found it endearing. Even if I've never been a big Marley fan, I could respect just how into his songs he got while he was playing them. The same is true of Damien Rice, and I guess I like melodic, emotional Irish folk songs better than I like reggae, because I don't just find it endearing here, but positively fascinating. And even more fascinating for me is the point, towards the end of the song, where a female voice joins his. "Did I say that I loathe you?" she sings back to Rice. "Did I say that I want to leave it all behind?" This is a divergence from the way songs like this are often written, in which the protagonist has no sympathy for the person on the other side of the interaction, and we only hear one side of the story. Granted, the woman in the song (here played by Rice's female backup singer, Lisa Hannigan) only has a few lines, but she's at least given a chance to speak for herself, and make clear that she wasn't intending for things to end as badly as Rice has depicted them.
The most interesting part of this song comes at the very end, with less than a minute left. After the verse sung by Lisa Hannigan, Damien keeps singing the chorus lyric over and over, and as he does so, he's deserted by his backing musicians. Of course, he's long since stopped playing guitar, leaving only the cello behind him, floating a countermelody to his vocal through an empty space created by the lack of any rhythmic musical accompaniment. When the cello drops out, Damien himself quickly loses the melody line of the vocal, and is left mumbling to himself. Finally, he whispers, "Until I find somebody new..." and almost before the last word is out of his mouth, the next song, "Cannonball", starts. Now, "Blower's Daughter" is a ballad, and it's definitely accessible, which is provable by its prominent role in the movie "Closer". A lot of other Damien Rice songs have showed up on various television dramas, following the "Gray's Anatomy" modus operandi of including music in their soundtracks that is considered indie/alternative but is still very melodic and easily appreciated by the adult contemporary crowd. The same thing's been done with "Cannonball" and "Delicate", two other songs I love from this album. "Cannonball" is structured around a gorgeous acoustic lead guitar line, and "Delicate" builds from almost nothing on its verses into intense crescendos on its choruses, with Rice singing mournfully, at the top of his voice, "Why'd you sing hallelujah if it meant nothing to ya?"
Yeah, it's true, I eat that sort of thing up. It's no different, in my mind, from what Taking Back Sunday was doing on "A Decade Under The Influence", when Adam Lazzara sang "I thought it through and my worst brings out the best in you" while Fred Mascherino sang "I've got a bad feeling about this" behind him. Intensity, desperation, emotional trauma... these are things I relate to in music. Taking Back Sunday mixes pop hooks with hardcore noise, and that appeals to me greatly, but there are other musicians, like Damien Rice, who keep it mellow and appeal to me just as much. And believe me, I'd much rather hear lyrics that make plain these emotions, and give me something to relate to, than oblique tales that contain no real emotion and leave me puzzling everything out. All that literary obfuscation is overrated. I'd rather listen to Damien Rice.
And hey, sometimes he does really interesting things with his music, things that no one could have predicted and that would never fly during an emotional closing montage on "Gray's Anatomy". "Cheers, Darlin'" is the best example of this that's present on "O". It begins with people talking in the background, as if it's recorded in the back of a restaurant or something. There are several other moments like this on "O", in fact, moments in which there is background noise unrelated to the song, such as children playing or birds chirping. This type of ambient background noise helps emphasize the space that is present in a lot of Damien Rice's music; a lot of times, it seems like the loudest thing you're hearing is not his voice or an instrument but the sound of the room, and all of the space in it that is not being taken over by the quiet music. This space is one of the most interesting elements of the entire album for me, and it's a big player in "Cheers Darlin'". The song starts out with a clarinet solo that leads into a waltz-time backbeat mostly constructed of what sounds like someone tapping on a wooden table and a pint glass. Once the backbeat has been playing for a few measures, the clarinet drops out and is replaces by a softly plucked single-note acoustic guitar line that is almost inaudible. Rice's vocal on the first verse is also restrained, as if he's speaking quietly in a somewhat crowded restaurant, and you the listener can barely hear him even though he's right across the table from you. Once the chorus rolls around, he sings a bit louder, and the soft acoustic guitar and tapping percussion are joined by a shuffling drumset and a louder lead guitar line. By the end of the chorus, a piano and string section have come in too, but they drop right back out as the chorus ends. Rice goes back to singing over chiming pint glasses and almost inaudible acoustic guitar, and by now it has become obvious that the words he's singing are a kissoff to a former lover. "Cheers, darlin', here's to you and your lover man," he says bitterly. "I'll just sit around and eat from a can." Things get more and more uncomfortable, as he declares all the things he would have done, would have said, if he'd only known how it would all end. Eventually, he's whispering almost inaudibly, biting off his words as he's speaking them: "What am I, darlin? The boy you fear? Your biggest mistake?" At this, the song's quietest point, all of the instruments suddenly come in at once, and Rice howls over them, in obvious pain. Finally, he mumbles, "I've got years to wait," and the music dies behind him, limping along for another minute or two before ending the song completely.
I don't care if message board indie rockers think Damien Rice is a "pussy" or a "faggot" or what. It's moments like this that are why I listen to music. Maybe the fact that I can't get into any but the most early Smog records makes my tastes sophomoric, and maybe the fact that I don't write like Raymond Carver makes me unsophisticated, but I don't care. I write and listen to what I like, and if I like displays of emotion that are seen as distasteful by society at large, then so be it, I guess. But if Damien Rice is what "pussy faggot nancy" singers sound like, someone should probably recommend me some more of them.
Damien Rice - The Blower's Daughter
Damien Rice - Cheers Darlin'
Inside my room, at 2 PM on a dreary afternoon, I'm listening to the first Damien Rice album, "O". It's fitting for the weather, but that's not why. The reason is that I'm a contrary motherfucker with unsophisticated tastes that tend toward the maudlin and overly vulnerable. Or so might say some of the people I interact with on message boards--the ones who make fun of me about Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance on a regular basis. See, this morning, someone on a message board where I post brought up Damien Rice, and mentioned that she was listening to "O" for the first time in a few years. She then began to complain about how she could ever have liked the album, and started talking about how a friend of hers always told her that Damien Rice was "a pussy", and that she'd never seen it until now. This led to a bunch of posts in which people called the guy "pussy", "faggot", "nancy", and other demeaning terms for someone who isn't properly manly, I suppose.
Now, when I was younger, I used to freak out over pejorative terms like this. I hated the sexism and homophobia that were embedded in these and so many other insults that my friends and peers tossed around like they meant nothing. However, as I've gotten older, I've gotten burned out on giving a shit. It's too much work for too little reward. Most people, regardless of whether they understand your complaint about the history of oppression they're carrying forward by using such insults, don't care whether it's true or not. They want to toss around offensive words and they don't want to think about whether they should or not. So OK, I've come to accept that people are going to call people they don't respect "pussy" or "faggot" or whatever. And 9 times out of 10 it doesn't bother me.
The reason this Damien Rice discussion was the 10th time has less to do with the words "pussy" and "faggot" themselves than what I saw as a deeper meaning behind what these people were saying. Before I go on, let me explain something about Damien Rice's music. It's acoustically-based, and generally quiet. Damien's lyrics tend to be about love and loss, and he sings them in an emotional tenor that sometimes seems like it's close to cracking. He never veers into the tear-stained warbling that is Conor Oberst's home territory, and I think this is a lot of why I like his music even though I hate most of Oberst's work. Well, that and the fact that Conor's musical backing is substantially inferior to the music that backs Damien Rice. It's close enough, though, to be the sort of music that a depressed teenager or twentysomething might listen to when they're feeling at their lowest. And I think this is why, five years on from the release of "O", it's no surprise that there's a backlash from some former fans. It's no surprise that some people are naturally inclined to throw around terms like "pussy" and "faggot". Because, see, Damien Rice's music has become tied in their mind to a period when they were feeling terrible, when their emotions were a huge mess and they were full of turmoil and suffering. Since they don't feel the way they once felt when they listened to Damien Rice, the tendency is to say, "What was I thinking?", and to write off his music as crap.
I've talked plenty of times on this blog about the way a severe emotional response to music is seen as inherently teenaged, and that there's a widespread belief in our culture that, as we get older, our emotions settle down and we become adults who don't feel things with the sort of intensity we felt them as teenagers. I've also talked plenty of times about how I feel that this is a convenient falsehood perpetrated by adults who want to explain away their own growth into the sort of emotionless suburban adults that they once swore they'd never resemble. And really, the truth is probably a little of both, and the reason it doesn't seem that way to me is probably because I've chosen a lifestyle that leaves me living like a starving artist long after such a lifestyle is accepted and endorsed by society. The deadline on that social endorsement, by the way, is 25, as far as I can tell. After that, if you're not trying to go work in an office, move to the suburbs, and raise a family, society tells you that you're stuck in a period of arrested development.
Anyway, I'm sorta digressing, so let's get back to the point, which is that Damien Rice's music is every bit as emotionally exposed as the kids calling him a "pussy" said it was. They're not wrong about that, not at all. The problem I had with the things they were saying was that they were painting this sort of emotional exposure as necessarily bad. I hear this a lot, really--that art in which emotion is stripped bare is bad art, that good art must necessarily obfuscate the emotions that it depicts beneath layers of subtlety and understatement. I've been really frustrated lately with my attempts to sell short stories that I've written, primarily because, even before the rejection slips start to roll in, I can foresee them coming. It's because the things I write are filled with emotion. Everything I read that's being published by the leading purveyors of short fiction is coming from that Hemingway/Raymond Carver school of thought, in which the important parts are never shown, no one ever reveals how they're really feeling, and any emotional impact a story carries must be gleaned by reading between the lines. Everyone's rewriting "Hills Like White Elephants" and "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?", and there's no room in a zeitgeist that values stories like this for the kinds of things I write. It drives me nuts, and I'm digressing again, but really, this has a lot to do with my point, because the short story writers and publishers who don't have time for the kind of thing I do, regardless of how good it is (and by the way, I'm not saying my stuff necessarily is good, though I'd like to think so), are the same sorts of people in the musical community who don't have time for what Damien Rice does, regardless of how good it is. They'd rather hear Bill Callahan and David Berman and Will Oldham or at least people who will imitate their sensibilities, rather than some Irish guy pouring his heart out over melodies that, too them, are just too straightforward.
You know, maybe I'm the equivalent of a Starbucks housewife who loves Norah Jones, merely by virtue of the fact that I'm writing this stuff about Damien Rice. That's a bit daunting to consider, but honestly, I think I'm willing to accept that judgment. Fact is, I like this guy's music. Right now I'm listening to a song called "The Blower's Daughter", and it's a good example of what I like about Rice's songs in general, so let me try to explain why this stuff seems good to me regardless of how accessible it might be. The song begins with Rice singing over no music, and only after the first line does his softly strummed acoustic guitar come in underneath his vocals. It drops out at several different points over the course of the song, too, especially once the string section comes in at the end of the first verse. The strings are much more attuned with his vocal than his guitar playing, which is actually rather simple, consisting of only a few chords. The strings embellish the more complicated vocal melody that Rice creates as he sings the verses, telling a story of an attempt to move on from a lost love. "And so, it is just like you said it would be," he sings. "We'll both forget the breeze most of the time." The end of the relationship is something that he accepts, but the choruses make clear that he doesn't like it. "I can't take my eyes off of you," he sings, over and over. Much of the time, while singing the chorus and being backed by the string section, Rice plays guitar minimally, or even, towards the end of the song, not at all. It's as if he's so into what he's singing, and the emotion that lies behind it, that he forgets to play guitar. This is something I used to see Bob Marley do during live performances, and I always found it endearing. Even if I've never been a big Marley fan, I could respect just how into his songs he got while he was playing them. The same is true of Damien Rice, and I guess I like melodic, emotional Irish folk songs better than I like reggae, because I don't just find it endearing here, but positively fascinating. And even more fascinating for me is the point, towards the end of the song, where a female voice joins his. "Did I say that I loathe you?" she sings back to Rice. "Did I say that I want to leave it all behind?" This is a divergence from the way songs like this are often written, in which the protagonist has no sympathy for the person on the other side of the interaction, and we only hear one side of the story. Granted, the woman in the song (here played by Rice's female backup singer, Lisa Hannigan) only has a few lines, but she's at least given a chance to speak for herself, and make clear that she wasn't intending for things to end as badly as Rice has depicted them.
The most interesting part of this song comes at the very end, with less than a minute left. After the verse sung by Lisa Hannigan, Damien keeps singing the chorus lyric over and over, and as he does so, he's deserted by his backing musicians. Of course, he's long since stopped playing guitar, leaving only the cello behind him, floating a countermelody to his vocal through an empty space created by the lack of any rhythmic musical accompaniment. When the cello drops out, Damien himself quickly loses the melody line of the vocal, and is left mumbling to himself. Finally, he whispers, "Until I find somebody new..." and almost before the last word is out of his mouth, the next song, "Cannonball", starts. Now, "Blower's Daughter" is a ballad, and it's definitely accessible, which is provable by its prominent role in the movie "Closer". A lot of other Damien Rice songs have showed up on various television dramas, following the "Gray's Anatomy" modus operandi of including music in their soundtracks that is considered indie/alternative but is still very melodic and easily appreciated by the adult contemporary crowd. The same thing's been done with "Cannonball" and "Delicate", two other songs I love from this album. "Cannonball" is structured around a gorgeous acoustic lead guitar line, and "Delicate" builds from almost nothing on its verses into intense crescendos on its choruses, with Rice singing mournfully, at the top of his voice, "Why'd you sing hallelujah if it meant nothing to ya?"
Yeah, it's true, I eat that sort of thing up. It's no different, in my mind, from what Taking Back Sunday was doing on "A Decade Under The Influence", when Adam Lazzara sang "I thought it through and my worst brings out the best in you" while Fred Mascherino sang "I've got a bad feeling about this" behind him. Intensity, desperation, emotional trauma... these are things I relate to in music. Taking Back Sunday mixes pop hooks with hardcore noise, and that appeals to me greatly, but there are other musicians, like Damien Rice, who keep it mellow and appeal to me just as much. And believe me, I'd much rather hear lyrics that make plain these emotions, and give me something to relate to, than oblique tales that contain no real emotion and leave me puzzling everything out. All that literary obfuscation is overrated. I'd rather listen to Damien Rice.
And hey, sometimes he does really interesting things with his music, things that no one could have predicted and that would never fly during an emotional closing montage on "Gray's Anatomy". "Cheers, Darlin'" is the best example of this that's present on "O". It begins with people talking in the background, as if it's recorded in the back of a restaurant or something. There are several other moments like this on "O", in fact, moments in which there is background noise unrelated to the song, such as children playing or birds chirping. This type of ambient background noise helps emphasize the space that is present in a lot of Damien Rice's music; a lot of times, it seems like the loudest thing you're hearing is not his voice or an instrument but the sound of the room, and all of the space in it that is not being taken over by the quiet music. This space is one of the most interesting elements of the entire album for me, and it's a big player in "Cheers Darlin'". The song starts out with a clarinet solo that leads into a waltz-time backbeat mostly constructed of what sounds like someone tapping on a wooden table and a pint glass. Once the backbeat has been playing for a few measures, the clarinet drops out and is replaces by a softly plucked single-note acoustic guitar line that is almost inaudible. Rice's vocal on the first verse is also restrained, as if he's speaking quietly in a somewhat crowded restaurant, and you the listener can barely hear him even though he's right across the table from you. Once the chorus rolls around, he sings a bit louder, and the soft acoustic guitar and tapping percussion are joined by a shuffling drumset and a louder lead guitar line. By the end of the chorus, a piano and string section have come in too, but they drop right back out as the chorus ends. Rice goes back to singing over chiming pint glasses and almost inaudible acoustic guitar, and by now it has become obvious that the words he's singing are a kissoff to a former lover. "Cheers, darlin', here's to you and your lover man," he says bitterly. "I'll just sit around and eat from a can." Things get more and more uncomfortable, as he declares all the things he would have done, would have said, if he'd only known how it would all end. Eventually, he's whispering almost inaudibly, biting off his words as he's speaking them: "What am I, darlin? The boy you fear? Your biggest mistake?" At this, the song's quietest point, all of the instruments suddenly come in at once, and Rice howls over them, in obvious pain. Finally, he mumbles, "I've got years to wait," and the music dies behind him, limping along for another minute or two before ending the song completely.
I don't care if message board indie rockers think Damien Rice is a "pussy" or a "faggot" or what. It's moments like this that are why I listen to music. Maybe the fact that I can't get into any but the most early Smog records makes my tastes sophomoric, and maybe the fact that I don't write like Raymond Carver makes me unsophisticated, but I don't care. I write and listen to what I like, and if I like displays of emotion that are seen as distasteful by society at large, then so be it, I guess. But if Damien Rice is what "pussy faggot nancy" singers sound like, someone should probably recommend me some more of them.
Damien Rice - The Blower's Daughter
Damien Rice - Cheers Darlin'
Labels: Music
posted by Andrew TSKS at 2:07 PM
1 Comments:
well, fuck i like Damien Rice. Then again i own two Justin Timberlake CD' so what do i care about manhood.
-Will
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