Julian Casablancas and Passive-Aggressive Dick Moves

What can I say about an album by a band whose members admit they didn’t have fun recording it? Strokes guitarist Nick Valensi publicly declared that the process of recording Angles was “just awful.” I guess Valensi wasn’t a fan of vocalist Julian Casablancas’s emailing in his vocal tracks. Literally. Casablancas, who comes off as one of the most smug pricks in all of modern music in every interview I’ve ever read with him, claims that he remained deliberately distant in order to “force the initiative,” whatever the fuck that means. Casablancas, in an epic-level act of passive aggression, called this tactic “Operation Make Everyone Satisfied” and if that’s the way he likes to satisfy people, I sure as shit hope he never gets married.

So I’m not gonna mince words, kids: Angles sucks. It is, by a wide margin, the worst Strokes album and Julian Casablancas’s vocals are easily the weakest link on it. No one can blame the Strokes for wanting to expand beyond the sound of their first two albums (although I was listening to Is This It? and Room On Fire the other day and they’re both quite good, in my humble opinion), but when Casablancas reaches for the rafters vocally, as he does all over Angles, he becomes strident and irritating, a tone that he usually reserves for interviews.

It’s telling to me that the best (read: “only remotely listenable”) tracks on Angles would fit in just fine on the first two Strokes records (I find two songs on the album to be kind of okay: “Taken for a Fool” and the Billy Joel cover “Gratisfaction.”). But then I don’t think the Strokes were ever going to succeed at pushing their sound. The most notable thing about what Pitchfork calls That Strokes Sound to me is that they always sounded like they didn’t give a shit, and you don’t change that just by nicking some pseudo-reggae licks for horrible songs like “Machu Picchu.” The sonic textures are different, but it seems to me that the Strokes – especially Casablancas – have never cared less about what they’re doing.

Some of the songs have good bits (like the harmonies on “Under Cover of Darkness”), but most of them are shanked in the kidneys by Casablancas’s bloody terrible singing. “You’re So Right” is possibly the worst Strokes song ever and it doesn’t even have the most annoying vocal take on Angles. That dubious honor should probably go to “Two Kinds of Happiness” or “Games.” Casablancas is so wildly inconsistent on this album, that he manages to fuck up a lot of otherwise promising songs (the guitar on “Two Kinds of Happiness” is kind of like what the Edge would sound like if he were a guitar player and not a computer programmer).

Valensi has already said that the Strokes have a better album in them, but he’s also said he won’t do another album if the process is the same as it was for Angles. Honestly, I don’t know how he (and the rest of the band) didn’t just beat the living shit out of Julian Casablancas. Casablancas would have you believe that he was trying to democratize the process by keeping his distance; he was apparently worried that his radiant presence in the studio would lead the others to “wait for me to say something.” But he also says that Angles contains “a bunch of stuff I wouldn’t have done.” Look here, you spoiled, arrogant little shit: if you’re in a band, you’re in the fucking band. Your name is on the album and you’re part of what people are spending their goddamn money to hear. So you can try to let yourself off the hook by saying there’s stuff on this album that you “wouldn’t have done” but the fact remains that it is wall-to-wall stuff you definitely did fucking do. Asshole.

If I seem like I’m being a little hard on Julian Casablancas, it’s because I think he committed an all-time Dick Move in his approach to making Angles. If he really thought the other band members where ceding too much control to him in the studio, he should have fucking shown up and said so. If you can’t look your bandmates in the eyes and say, “Guys, I want you to have more input,” then you should tear your spine out and donate it to a needy child, because you’re better off being a jellyfish. Casablancas, whatever his motive, did the twenty-first century equivalent of literally phoning in his job. For those of you keeping score at home, his job is being a singer in an immensely popular rock band.

Imagine if I took the Casablancas Approach to my job working with people with disabilities. I would send a vaguely worded email to my boss saying something to the effect of “If I show up to work tomorrow, you’ll just expect me to push your wheelchair around and feed you and do all the stuff I normally do. You know, for my job. But I want our work together to be more democratic, so you push your chair a bit and I’ll just email you every so often to see how things are going. You’re welcome.” I’d be fired. And rightfully so.

It’s hard (read: “impossible”) for me to see what Casablancas thought he was going to accomplish here. If there’s a bunch of stuff on Angles that he wouldn’t have done, was his goal to let the other Strokes run buck-wild in the studio and churn out a shitty record so that they’d return to him, prodigal son style, and beg him to start calling all the shots again? And if that was his goal, doesn’t that make him a massive dickhole? Or does he think that, now that he did as little as he could to help them (short of not singing at all), he can return to the studio for Strokes Album Number Five and find a warm, democratic environment wherein he and his fellow Strokes can really work on songs as a single unit, politely debating the merits of every single song? Because it makes total sense that the other members of his band would understand fully and even pardon his near-nonparticipation in Angles if he just thought he was doing what was best for them. You know, so they could really grow together. that would still make him a massive dickhole.

As I usually do when writing about albums, I’ve read some of the other reviews of Angles and, while very few are gushy (this review tries way too hard to justify this album’s existence, but the writer is clearly a bigger Strokes fan than I am), I haven’t seen any yet that take as dim a view of the album as I do. Obviously, the Casablancas Approach to vocal recording galls me to no end, but the music matters the most to me and Angles is so infuriatingly inconsistent (nearly every good bit, save for two songs, is subverted by a shitty bit) that it’s impossible for me to recommend it. The band’s (and especially Casablancas’s) ambivalence toward the music is clearly evident and while their lead singer’s inherent dickishness might be to blame for that, we can blame the entire band for expecting us to pay for music about which they themselves don’t give much of a shit.

The Case Against Green Day

It’s actually pretty hard to describe how much I dislike Green Day. I’m serious – this is the fourth draft of this post that I’ve started because it’s also really hard to decide where to start discussing all the things I don’t like about them. Do I start with all the better bands they’re ripping off? Do I start with the black-dominated wardrobes and guyliner? Do I start with some of the laziest, most cringe-inducing songwriting I’ve ever heard? Do I start with the fact that they’re considered by some people who may or may not have cognitive disabilities (including themselves) to be a punk band?

Maybe I’ll start there, because that bugs the living shit out of me (and because I have a lot of love for good punk music. A lot of love). When I think of punk bands, I think of (who doesn’t?) the Clash, the Stooges, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedys, the Jim Carroll Band, early Bad Religion, and – for some current reference – the Thermals, the Old Haunts, Titus Andronicus, and the Future of the Left. Green Day is, at best – at best – a dull, lifeless distillation of the style of music those awesome (and vastly superior) bands play(ed). The Clash gave us, “Let fury have the hour/ anger can be power”; Green Day’s “Know Your Enemy” (one of the most repetitive, godawful songs I’ve heard all year. Billy Joe Armstrong knows one word that rhymes with enemy: “enemy.” Oh wait. That’s the same word. I hate this band) literally waters that down to “Violence is an energy” and “Bringing on the fury” and maybe I’m paranoid, but that seems a little close to be coincidence. Am I accusing Green Day of callously ripping of their betters? You bet your ass I am. And even their peers – one of 21st Century Breakdown‘s many awful tracks is “East Jesus Nowhere” which features a guitar riff eerily similar to (and by “eerily similar to”, I mean “shamelessly ripped off from”) Marilyn Manson’s “Disposable Teens.” Have you left no sense of decency, Green Day? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

When American Idiot came along back in 2004, lots of people loved it because they hated the President and all the bullshit he was up to. But what did that album really say about…well, anything? The answer is (drum roll please) fuckall. Sure, they got their best line ever on the title track (“I’m not a part of a redneck agenda”) but the rest of that album was generic suburban alienation bullshit. They spent 13 tracks saying nothing the Clash didn’t say better in “Lost in the Supermarket”.  The best moment of that album is “American Idiot” and it’s eclipsed in every way by (take your pick) “White Riot” by the Clash, “California Uber Alles” by the Dead Kennedys, “Anarchy in the U.K.” by the Sex Pistols, and even “Time for Heroes” by the Libertines*.  And Green Day’s utter lack of ability to handle anything approaching substance led them to squander a great song title in “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Any punk band worth a damn (hell, any kind of band with any kind of sense) doing a song with that title in 2004 could’ve made an awesome song about how frustrating it is, only a few years after 9/11, to be constantly reminded to “never forget.” But what does Green Day give us? “The innocent can never last.” Really? That’s all you got? And this was their Big Meaningful album, folks. Not only does that fail to scratch the surface, it fails to come anywhere near the surface. It floats around in space, consulting maps and charts in a futile attempt to determine the location of the surface. And it’s fucking banal, musically and lyrically. Especially lyrically. In the span of one song, we get that prize-winner about the innocent and “here comes the rain again/ falling from the stars/ drenched in my pain again/ becoming who we are.” That might be fine for any given 8th grader’s Live Journal entry, but it doesn’t cut it for discerning listeners of rock music (much less bands that claim to make rock music). It’s like Armstrong just pulled words from his copy of Poetic Imagery for Dummies Pretentious Assholes. And don’t even get me started on “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” By itself, that song puts Green Day at the top of the list of bands that need a serious cock-punching.

But people are buying their shit at an ungodly rate. Rolling Stone, a magazine whose irrelevance actually increases exponentially with every review, raved about 21st Century Breakdown‘s “rage filled punk anthems.” The Los Angeles Times called the album a “dazzling musical journey.” If “Know Your Enemy” and “21 Guns” are rage-filled punk anthems and/or dazzling musical journeys, we’re in trouble. You can like whatever you want, but I’m warning you: if you let bands like Green Day (or My Chemical Romance or any other band that is just dying to write the anthems of your prepubescent/adolescent/adult angst) climb to the top of the punk and/or rock heap, you’re running the risk of creating a nation of black-clad, whiny dullards who are capable of expressing their feelings/desires/politics only in the most vague and offensively bromidic terms. That’s a nation where Green Day dominates the radio, every television show and movie is about emo vampires, and people think Dane Cook is funny. Believe me, America: we can do better than that. We must do better.

*This song features the line, “Did you see the stylish kids in the riot,” which I mention only because it occurs to me that Green Day are the stylish kids in the riot (the kids who show up to say they were there, but don’t expect them to hurl any bricks, thank you very much). For the sake of contrast, Joe Strummer, who wrote “White Riot” actually participated in a riot. He and Paul Simonon attempted to set a police car on fire while the British cops beat up some black kids. I’m not advocating destroying cop cars in hilarious ways, but it’s certainly nice to know that Strummer and the Clash weren’t afraid to put their money where their mouths were.

Hommebug

It seems like just yesterday I was doggedly resisting and then falling utterly in love with the first Arctic Monkeys album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. I believe the line, “over there/ there’s broken bones/ there’s only music/ so that there’s new ring tones” is what eventually won me over. It also seems like just yesterday that I was defending Franz Ferdinand against the charge that their latest album, Tonight, was the dreaded “More of the Same.” Like the last Franz Ferdinand effort, the third album by the Arctic Monkeys, Humbug, has seen the young Brits accused of not trying to surprise us anymore. Those are, in fact, pretty much the exact words used in the Onion A.V. Club review. I guess it’s my duty as a curmudgeonly asshole to point out that bands shouldn’t make music to try to “surprise” people – they should try to make good music. I mean, it might be surprising if, in the middle of your song, you recorded yourself taking a particularly difficult shit over a drum beat, but it wouldn’t make the song good.

And Humbug, though not as immediately indelible as their debut (which is still their best album), is pretty good. It’s not a radical shift for the Arctic Monkeys but almost no band makes a radical shift, ever. People who think London Calling is a million miles away from the first Clash record need to listen to “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” and “Police and Thieves” again. On the other hand, Tom Waits shifted from being a boozed up, cabaret pianist to being the greatest folk weirdo in the history of American music. Other than that, I can’t think of a lot of really big changes any band has made between albums. Even Radiohead, despite what the P-fork cultists tell you, has made steady and not-that-surprising progress in their sound from album to album (before anyone’s ironically retro looking sweaters come all unraveled, I’m not saying Radiohead isn’t good. They’re awesome. I’m merely pointing out that the steps between Pablo Honey and In Rainbows make sense to me.). Hang on… just thought of another big shift: Chris Cornell’s Scream is a radical departure from his usual solo mediocrity to actively and impressively sucking. My point here is that maybe we could not judge a band on how much they change between albums and judge them on whether or not the music is still good (since the Radical Shift in Sound – RSS from now on – is not always a good thing. See the above poop-taking reference for just one colorful example of why).

For Humbug, the Arctic Monkeys drafted (or he volunteered? I really don’t know) the king of the Queens of the Stone Age, Josh Homme (rhymes with “Tommy”) to produce. Mr. Rhymes-with -Tommy definitely left his mark on the record, pulling out murkier and heavier sounds than the Arctic Monkeys have made on their previous albums. Alex Turner still delivers his vocal lines with a cocky sneer (which helps when he’s delivering babble like the bulk of “Crying Lightning”, which is a catchy song with nonsensical lyrics. Note that nonsense lyrics are not necessarily a point against you – Bowie spouted nonsense through much of the 1970s and I will fight anyone who thinks Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust are anything less than genius. Including you, Glenn Beck) and Matt Helders still pounds the hell out of the drums, but Homme’s musical aesthetic is all over Humbug. Guitars squall up out of the musical murk on the slower songs and they sound a lot like they’d sound on a Queens of the Stone Age album. This is hardly a bad thing, as the Arctic Monkeys are exceedingly capable musicians and it’s nice to hear them play out a little more (the songs on Humbug tend to be around four minutes, as opposed to the previous two albums which kept everything around two or three minutes).

Humbug is, to my mind, the biggest grower album of 2009 so far. The first time I heard it, I was bored stiff. This doesn’t (obviously) guarantee that I’m going to hate an album, but it doesn’t bode well either. The curious thing is that I still wanted to listen to it after I’d been bored stiff by it. I can’t really explain that, but there was something in there that was grabbing onto me and I only just now realized (literally as I’m typing this – I had no idea how this sentence was gonna end, but now I do. Bully for me) what it is: it’s gonna sound daffy at first, but I think the Arctic Monkeys have picked up the ball that Elvis Costello mostly dropped in the early 80s (sometime after Armed Forces). Think about it: Elvis Costello was annoying, brash, and completely didn’t give a fuck for his first three glorious albums (to be sure, My Aim is True, This Year’s Model, and Armed Forces form a mighty triumvirate). He took some of the worst excesses of the 70s, like the electronic organ, and turned them into things like “Pump it Up” and the intro to “Radio, Radio” (which is still one of the most awesome songs ever). On Humbug, the Arctic Monkeys engage in some of the habits of music’s most annoying artists – pointless tempo shifts, nonsense lyrics, and spelling in song (seriously, nothing pisses me off more than spelling words out in a song and Fergie is mostly to blame for this) – and it still comes out okay in the end. The spelling song in question is “Dangerous Animals” in which (you guessed it) Turner spells out the two titular words as if doing that somehow makes a chorus.  I hated “Dangerous Animals” the first time I heard it, but now I kind of like it. Why? For the same reason I imagine a friend of mine made fun of Elvis Costello’s “Alibi” (which is not from the Holy Trinity of early Elvis albums but is on 2002′s stellar When I Was Cruel) the first time he heard it and then, about two months later, asked me to burn it onto a mixed CD for him. I don’t know if this is a British thing or not, but it seems that Elvis Costello (when he wants to) and the Arctic Monkeys share an ability to subvert the tactics and tropes of far worse musicians (not to suggest that she is a musician, but Fergie misspells “tasty” in a song about how great she is. I’m positive I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: Fergie should be locked in a room somewhere and given a crash course in the English fucking language. Or maybe she should just be locked in a room somewhere) and spin them into gold.

Humbug is probably not going to win many screaming teenagers to the Arctic Monkeys’ shows, but they may not want it to (who the fuck would?). Maybe, after all the hype that their first album received (some of it deserved), they just want NME to back the fuck up a minute and let the music speak for itself. Either way, there’s a dearth of really clever, true rock bands out there (since the Libertines are no more) and it’s nice to see the Arctic Monkeys asserting their place in the pack, especially when the rest of the U.K. seems to want to ride Franz Ferdinand’s coattails wherever they may go.