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Jun. 24th, 2007 10:38 am"There's something puzzling about the way Def Jam has pulled out all the stops to anoint Rihanna as the world's newest pop superstar and to position Good Girl Gone Bad as its blockbuster summer tentpole. The chief characteristic of Rihanna's voice, after all, is a sort of knife-edged emptiness, a mechanistic precision that rarely makes room for actual feelings to bulldoze their way through. And that blankness, coupled with Rihanna's glaring lack of technical vocal skill, serve to make her a truly unlikely pop star."
Pitchfork
Tom Breihan, June 15, 200
Yes. Thank you. Rihanna's ubiquitous "Umbrella" is another in a long line of catchy pop songs where the production outshines the painfully bland vocal delivery. So much so that you have to wonder why they even bother to hype up the singers. Why not just go the house route, where singers are reduced (in terms of packaging and promotion) to interchangeable vocal ornamentation? Rihanna's personality can so far be best described as slim to none (though you can never tell when they're going to go off message and pull a Britney). It's the producers and even video directors who've got all the virtuosity in this equation.
And also - ow. Rihanna's nasal, mechanistic delivery is awesome on a track like "Pon De Replay", a droning dance anthem, but it's completely out place on tracks that require humanity.
In other music news: Oh holy god whose existence I reject, "Icky Thump" (eponymous track from the new White Stripes disc) is the best distortion-worshiping denunciation of US immigration policy evah. Rob Mitchum agrees:
"Icky Thump re-assembles most of the scrap-heap elements that characterized the White Stripes' pre-fame trilogy: grimy garage-blues, a left-field cover, bizarre spoken-word bits, and shameless Zeppelin and Dylan cues. The most obvious breaking development is White's instrument sound-- its tones are so aggressively tweaked that it's hard to tell whether he's playing a guitar that sounds like a keyboard or a keyboard being played like a guitar (prediction for the next White Stripes album gimmick: keytar).
The leadoff title track declares this territory nicely, alternating an overdriven, tortured organ with savage guitar jabs, and already proving a better integration of keys and frets than Satan's marimba experiments."
Pitchfork
Rob Mitchum, June 18, 2007
Here, have some samples.
By putting these reviews together, I'm not intentionally making a comparison between Rihanna and The White Stripes (these were just the two albums I looked up today). But let's go there anyway.
So why is it ok for Meg White to suck but not Rihanna?
One of the chief attractions of Rihanna's voice is it's near total lack of human emotion - it's an instrument that the producers can use however they like. Their performance and their manipulation of her performance is what counts on a Rihanna track, far more than her own. (For a very different, and far more equal pop production relationship see Aliyaah, Timbaland and Missy Elliot). Rihanna's is the inverse of say, Mariah Carrey's career, where no matter how much the producer brings to the table, she will always be the more important partner. But the fact that Rihanna is both technically incapable and emotionally incapable, makes her, as Mitchum points out "a truly unlikely pop star". We have to ask ourselves, what then, does Rihanna offer? What is it (other than Def Jam marketing) that makes her worthy of our attention?
Meg White's drumming, on the other hand, is deliberately raw, technically poor and very emotionally capable. Jack himself has said that the attraction of working with Meg is that she brings a singularly un-technical wild honesty to the table. There's something in Meg White (and the White Stripes as a band) that takes you out of yourself - her drumming is this brain-scrambling, gut-churning, unrelentingly primal, rhythmic call. I don't mean to suggest that technical skill and 'it' can't co-exist (because there are so many artists that prove this wrong), but rather that in the case of the White Stripes, the rejection of technique - in the rhythm section - is an attempt to get at something pre-technical and utterly, basically human. That Meg White can, and must 'suck' in order to achieve the kind of essentialism the Stripes are after. (Tangentially, Jack White does possess tremendous technical skill with which he engages Meg's drumming to produce a kind of constant aesthetic competition and exchange).
Meg White's suckiness is an aesthetic choice, while Rihanna's is just unfortunate. *g*
Speaking of unfortunate suckage, I haven't seen Evan Almighty and probably never will, but I read the reviews anyway. Here are two:
"Did anyone involved with Evan Almighty actually read the Noah story? You know, the part when God drowns the entire world, when "all in whose nostrils was the merest breath of life, all that was on dry land, died. All existence on earth was blotted out, man, cattle, creeping things, and birds of the sky; they were blotted from the earth." Now, I'm no great religious scholar, but it doesn't take Pope Benedict to see that the Noah story is not a charming little tale about familial love, but a terrifying lesson about our dependence on God: a warning that we are alone in the world and always at the mercy of a wrathful and demanding Lord."
Slate
David Plotz , June 22, 2007
"Like the modern-day ark that its hero risks his job, his family, and his reputation to build, Evan Almighty feels like a vast, ponderous folly. It's a deeply strange movie—in part because it's so conventional. Fans of the perverse Steve Carell found in The Office, The Daily Show, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin–the Steve Carell who, as Seth Rogen observed in that movie, is so nice he just has to be a serial killer—will be disappointed to find here a Carell who's just nice. Evan Baxter, the workaholic Congressman-turned-latter-day-Noah, is a character that could just as easily have been played by Steve Martin (in his current, family-friendly incarnation) or, God forbid, Tim Allen."
Slate
Dana Stevens, Friday, June 22
Pitchfork
Tom Breihan, June 15, 200
Yes. Thank you. Rihanna's ubiquitous "Umbrella" is another in a long line of catchy pop songs where the production outshines the painfully bland vocal delivery. So much so that you have to wonder why they even bother to hype up the singers. Why not just go the house route, where singers are reduced (in terms of packaging and promotion) to interchangeable vocal ornamentation? Rihanna's personality can so far be best described as slim to none (though you can never tell when they're going to go off message and pull a Britney). It's the producers and even video directors who've got all the virtuosity in this equation.
And also - ow. Rihanna's nasal, mechanistic delivery is awesome on a track like "Pon De Replay", a droning dance anthem, but it's completely out place on tracks that require humanity.
In other music news: Oh holy god whose existence I reject, "Icky Thump" (eponymous track from the new White Stripes disc) is the best distortion-worshiping denunciation of US immigration policy evah. Rob Mitchum agrees:
"Icky Thump re-assembles most of the scrap-heap elements that characterized the White Stripes' pre-fame trilogy: grimy garage-blues, a left-field cover, bizarre spoken-word bits, and shameless Zeppelin and Dylan cues. The most obvious breaking development is White's instrument sound-- its tones are so aggressively tweaked that it's hard to tell whether he's playing a guitar that sounds like a keyboard or a keyboard being played like a guitar (prediction for the next White Stripes album gimmick: keytar).
The leadoff title track declares this territory nicely, alternating an overdriven, tortured organ with savage guitar jabs, and already proving a better integration of keys and frets than Satan's marimba experiments."
Pitchfork
Rob Mitchum, June 18, 2007
Here, have some samples.
By putting these reviews together, I'm not intentionally making a comparison between Rihanna and The White Stripes (these were just the two albums I looked up today). But let's go there anyway.
So why is it ok for Meg White to suck but not Rihanna?
One of the chief attractions of Rihanna's voice is it's near total lack of human emotion - it's an instrument that the producers can use however they like. Their performance and their manipulation of her performance is what counts on a Rihanna track, far more than her own. (For a very different, and far more equal pop production relationship see Aliyaah, Timbaland and Missy Elliot). Rihanna's is the inverse of say, Mariah Carrey's career, where no matter how much the producer brings to the table, she will always be the more important partner. But the fact that Rihanna is both technically incapable and emotionally incapable, makes her, as Mitchum points out "a truly unlikely pop star". We have to ask ourselves, what then, does Rihanna offer? What is it (other than Def Jam marketing) that makes her worthy of our attention?
Meg White's drumming, on the other hand, is deliberately raw, technically poor and very emotionally capable. Jack himself has said that the attraction of working with Meg is that she brings a singularly un-technical wild honesty to the table. There's something in Meg White (and the White Stripes as a band) that takes you out of yourself - her drumming is this brain-scrambling, gut-churning, unrelentingly primal, rhythmic call. I don't mean to suggest that technical skill and 'it' can't co-exist (because there are so many artists that prove this wrong), but rather that in the case of the White Stripes, the rejection of technique - in the rhythm section - is an attempt to get at something pre-technical and utterly, basically human. That Meg White can, and must 'suck' in order to achieve the kind of essentialism the Stripes are after. (Tangentially, Jack White does possess tremendous technical skill with which he engages Meg's drumming to produce a kind of constant aesthetic competition and exchange).
Meg White's suckiness is an aesthetic choice, while Rihanna's is just unfortunate. *g*
Speaking of unfortunate suckage, I haven't seen Evan Almighty and probably never will, but I read the reviews anyway. Here are two:
"Did anyone involved with Evan Almighty actually read the Noah story? You know, the part when God drowns the entire world, when "all in whose nostrils was the merest breath of life, all that was on dry land, died. All existence on earth was blotted out, man, cattle, creeping things, and birds of the sky; they were blotted from the earth." Now, I'm no great religious scholar, but it doesn't take Pope Benedict to see that the Noah story is not a charming little tale about familial love, but a terrifying lesson about our dependence on God: a warning that we are alone in the world and always at the mercy of a wrathful and demanding Lord."
Slate
David Plotz , June 22, 2007
"Like the modern-day ark that its hero risks his job, his family, and his reputation to build, Evan Almighty feels like a vast, ponderous folly. It's a deeply strange movie—in part because it's so conventional. Fans of the perverse Steve Carell found in The Office, The Daily Show, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin–the Steve Carell who, as Seth Rogen observed in that movie, is so nice he just has to be a serial killer—will be disappointed to find here a Carell who's just nice. Evan Baxter, the workaholic Congressman-turned-latter-day-Noah, is a character that could just as easily have been played by Steve Martin (in his current, family-friendly incarnation) or, God forbid, Tim Allen."
Slate
Dana Stevens, Friday, June 22