Latest Articles by Sarah Canice Funke
I've already posted these songs, but now I want to say something about them for a minute...
Lowen recommended that I listen to Grizzly Bear, and my first expectation, when I saw the band hailed from New York was, "Oh, Animal Collective's kid brother's band!" But they are less like Animal Collective than I erroneously persuaded myself to believe.
But I was listening to this song, Lullaby, and deja vu experiences of Sgt. Pepper moments sent me rustling up that album and sure enough, "Lullaby" is hauntingly reminiscent of "She's Leaving Home," down to tempo, meter, acoustic instrumentation, whispery/falsetto vocals, the prominent use of the upward leap of a sixth in the melody. There are enough differences to set the two apart as distinct songs, but listening to "She's Leaving Home" got me to thinking about the Beatles again. The inclusion of a string quartet in the album was a deliberate class statement: a particular form of music associated with High Art being incorporated into rock music at the cusp of its "legitimization" as an art form. Whether Sgt. Pepper was the album that changed rock from screaming teenager music to something with social and artistic relevance is a debatable point (what about Rubber Soul? or Pet Sounds? or Pipers at the Gates of Dawn?*), but it certainly entered the fray at a volatile time, to which Foucault might refer as a period of "discursive formation." Sgt. Pepper might have been the first rock album accepted unbegrudgedly by critics as something with artistic merit. (Causing other albums to be accepted in retrospect.) And "She's Leaving Home" now just sounds to me like a cheeky but subtly ironic joke on the whole Establishment. The very instruments that give the Beatles "credibility" are found in the songs that critique the institutions responsible for upholding that credibility: "Eleanor Rigby," "She's Leaving Home." Why buy into the establishment while you're on your way out? And yet you can't get away from it.
Anyway, here are the songs for you to enjoy on your own time.
*My personal opinion is that you can trace it all back to WWII and the transfer of the avant garde nexus from Paris to New York City and that the literal living together of rock musicians and avant garde artists brought about a sort of fusion of musical aesthetics/philosophies that then turned outward and infiltrated more "mainstream" rock discourse. But this has already been [partly] said by silly author whose book I recently found. So I have to find a more particular slant on the question. And perhaps this theory is only true of the underground rock scene in New York. I am more hazy on the high/low divisions within the UK, but it seems to me there are distinctly different cultural lines drawn over there, and so it might mess up my theory a bit if I tried to extend it overseas. Hm. And the west coast. What do I do about the West Coast. So much for trying extend theories beyond their original bounds.
Also, this is another unapologetically mercenary plea for people to click on these links. You can read them if you want, but clicking on the links is what brings me money. Clicking on the google ads brings me even more. :)
