I've approached this thing from about three different angles, and I'm still having trouble finding the right tone. A decade ago, I would have just ranted into the abyss about everything that bothers me about this book. I would have drawn blood, not for the sake of drawing blood, but in the hope of changing the world. A couple of years ago, I would have worked and re-worked this with a scalpel until every argument was support with ample evidence. Now, I just want to be done with it. A big part of this blog's experiment is the attempt to exploit the space created by semi-deliberate obscurity & anonymity to find a freedom in writing and thinking that I feel I've lost track of.
The more I work on this, the worse that it gets. The more examples I include, the more it comes across like I'm obsessed, when really I'm just annoyed. I think maybe I should just post what I have, the random fragments, wash my hands, and move on. To be fair, Pelly's book feels a little random-fragmented itself.
It hurts to hear the band described as "outsider artists," or Pelly using the phrase "crude musicianship." Compared to who? First off, I think Palmolive's one of the greatest drummers in the history of rock. My partner wrote an angry letter to Simon Reynolds after he made disparaging remarks in his postpunk book (the book before the one where he complained about people living in the past). Reynolds wrote back apologizing, and admitted he'd never heard any of their Peel Sessions stuff. Anyway, here's one of the greatest drumming performances in the history of rock. That's Palomolive, who was the drummer for The Raincoats album.
Second, I challenge anyone to play these songs. Third, there is nothing crude about the ability to stop and start, and speed up, in unison. If we define musicianship as the ability to listen
The book opens with Pelly asking the question, "Who gets to be a part of history and why, and in what capacity and to what extent? I guess that could be three questions, but they all go unanswered. It
I wasn't sure if I wanted to buy it. As much as I have loved and continue to love this album, as much as so many parts of the album have been a mystery to me, a mystery I've half-heartedly maintained for the most part, because I was afraid the mystery might be an essential part of the album (there are albums and song I've never learned on guitar for similar reasons--that it might shatter something intangible about the listening experience). But I was standing there in a radical-left bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina on my way to somewhere else, and I wanted to support this bookstore. So I bought it. I paid my own personal, hard-earned money, over an hour's worth of work at the dystopian low-wage job I currently do part-time while waiting (endlessly) as a book proposal winds its way through the labyrinth bureaucracy of an academic press.
I expected the book to be boring. But I expected the story to be exciting, because the story is about the first Raincoats album, and a story about the first Raincoats album could never be boring. Even if a writer tried to make it boring, they couldn't. There's too much there there. That's one of the sources of its power; it can't be turned into something else.
My expectations turned out to be true. That's not a boast. I would have liked the book to be as exciting, and anarchic, and fun, and filled with a poetry that is both direct and abstract at the same time, as the music itself. The fact that Jenn Pelly chose not to write the book, or lacked the courage, or the poetry, to write that book doesn't fill me with joy, or even a smug satisfaction. It makes me sad and angry at the world.
This disappointment is why I've never liked being called a cynic.
Pelly's book is, on the surface, a competently written book about the first album by UK band The Raincoats. It's written in the dry, informative conformist style that defines contemporary music writing. Pelly offers no opinions that she isn't already sure her target audience agrees with. The book's target audience appears to be the writers/editors/musicians she admires and/or wants to work with in the future. As such, the book risks nothing, to the point where you end up wondering if Pelly would be writing about The Raincoats (whose album, and lives at the time, risked everything) if it wasn't already a pre-approved part of the rockcrit canon in the circles where she travles. My favorite line in Pelly's book is a sentence from Caroline Coon, a punk writer at Melody Maker, who says you could write an entire history of punk and never include any men. It's provocative. It challenges conventional wisdom. It makes you think. And it is, from a certain perspective, not just true, but true in a way that makes you hear the genre differently. It is also, in all these respects, what is missing from Pelly's book.
A friend recently joked about how music writers use exclamation points all the time in their e-mails/social media/chats/etc., but never use them in their reviews, the point being that it's acceptable to show enthusiasm for one's self, but not the music--that music writing needs to be cool, distanced, calculating, dispassionate. It says a lot that Pelly's writing becomes the most excitingly unstable when she tells a story of seeing the Raincoats live and Gina Birch is wearing a pair of the pants with the title of an Angel Olsen song on it. Turns out Pelly had recommended Olsen's Burn Your Fire For No Witness to Ana da Silva when the two were visiting Rough Trade Shops.
i'm sure the band's live shows were sloppy, but the album is (to use an ugly masculine term) tight as hell. Nirvana were also known for their sloppy live show. I mean, by any standard of musicianship you want to apply--technical ability, originality, being "locked-in" or "tight," complexity--this is just out & out phenomenal.
Or In Love, or any of it. This album's great. It's way tighter than, say, Swell Maps, or early Pavement. It bothers me that Pelly only hears The Raincoats influence on female bands. It's the laziest, most sexist critical argument, and it should be eradicated. Or maybe I'm jut made she didn't mention Look Blue Go Purple, or Electrelane. I mean, I don't know, let's see...sloppy, wordy, alienated...Look, there's actually an interesting conversation, or chapter, to be had about what it means to be a good musician, or a "good musician," or a "good" musician, or even a good "musician." But this book doesn't really explore anything, it jumps from thing to thing without ever really coming back to the thing, to the point where you have more questions at the end than you did when you started. But as long as we're on the subject, there is a sexist, misogynist way of speaking about musicianship that needs to immediately die. It is assumed when a male band is sloppy, like say PiL or Neutral Milk Hotel or Pavement, that the band is making a deliberate choice, an artistic statement, a protest of sorts. It is assumed, when women do this, that they just couldn't be bothered to learn how to play, or at best, that they value inspiration over technique. And in the case of The Raincoats, I would just ask anyone to pick up a bass, or sit behind a drum set, and attempt to do anything that Palmolive or Gina Birch do. Their parts are complicated, challenging, and always in time. So like, I don't know, fuck of or something.
It's okay to criticize things, even if it means hurting someone's feelings. I mean, we're only criticizing a thing, an artifact of production, not the person's essence. Besides, Jenn Pelly is a product of her environment, the inevitable result of aspiring to write about music for a living (or for a slow, prolonged death--depending on your perspective) during this specific period of existence. And while she may be guilty of perpetuating a certain mindset & style that I, for one, at least, can't read without rolling my eyes and gagging down my sleeve, she sure as shit didn't create that mindset & style. And she sure as shit isn't the person profiting the most from it. So as we go through this book, a book that hedges its bets when it should aim for the stars, and engages in hyperbole when it should probably consider walking back that bold claim, a book that appears to be written with one hand patting the writer on the back and the other hand frantically waving for attention--to the point where we feel compelled to compliment Pelly on her nimble toes, or especially sharp nose, with which she used to type out the manuscript, as we (where was I, oh yeah) as we go through this book, it is important to bear in mind that the book's specific failures aren't so much the fault of Pelly as it is the fault of the economic scarcity and fierce competition that define this era of late (I fucking hope) capitalism. And while we can criticize Pelly's conformity dressed up as rebellion and brand her a coward. Life in the neoliberal era, even for a writer who grew up (I'm more than willing to bet the money I don't have) in a more privileged situation than I've ever known, makes cowards and bootlickers of us all, at least in some situations. I have written about Pelly's book, not because I have a bone to pick with her, or because she's a woman, or because she didn't grow up in an apartment complex, I've written about the book because it clearly and easily illuminates the problems/limitations of nearly all for-profit music writing today.
Here's some more random thoughts:
she constantly praises the raincoats for doing things that she herself would never do (disruption, rebellion, etc.), and be unable to recognize for herself if someone else was doing them.
There's nothing wrong with self-promotion, but the only thing Pelly's promoting here (beyond the album she's writing about) is Jenn Pelly. And while I'm sure the person, and even the writer, Jenn Pelly has potential unexplored depths that have yet to surface in her writing. What's ultimately being promoted here is conformity disguised as edginess.
the book's great for the info we get from the raincoats. I learned a lot about the band, and the album, and came away loving both more than ever.
I listened to the album today after I got home from work and was shoveling in my lunch. That band fucking shreds, and they're tight as hell.
but she asks a lot of questions that never get answered, that are easily answerable if you're willing to indict patriarchy or capitalism, etc.
and she REALLY doesn't give them their due as musicians
and she likes to talk about how they've personally affected her, but never gives any examples except for the Angel Olsen thing
also, bikini kill and the raincoats have nothing in common aside from being women (mostly women in the case of BK)
also it's obvious the only books she's read are the ones that appeared on he college syllabuses (syllabi?).
like, to me, i think of Dostoevsky and Kafka when i think of urban alienation. She thinks of Chris Krauss.
Pelly always talks about being out in the city, but my time spent living in cities felt mostly indoors, mostly isolated. It's that feeling I connected with in the Raincoats music, the loneliness of being in a city, self-conscious because everyone's looking at you, but also feeling invisible at the same time.
There isn't a single cultural reference that isn't trendy and/or popular within the white college-educated set (except for Calvin Johnson, whose penchant for underage girls, to say nothing of K records artists making more off Spotify than off their record label, makes him kinda toxic in my opinion, but maybe no one's told her). And there are a LOT of cultural references.
the book is such a work of kiss-ass that it should come with her CV attached at the end.
and fuck jenn pelly trying to pass herself off as a feminist champion while parroting the same tired sexist narrative that's plagued this band for decades.
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