Thursday, July 15, 2010

meaningless? you mean it's all been meaningless?


My best friend in elementary school was Matt McAnnally, and our friendship was, like those of many children our age, rooted in a mutual appreciation of Tekken and Animorphs.  In spite of those time-tested foundations, however, our relationship flagged and sputtered once we went to middle school.  One day, sitting on the opposite side of the bus from Matt, an older kid sat down next to me and said, “So, you guys aren’t friends anymore?  He’s acting too cool for you now, I guess, hanging out with other kids.”

I was awestruck.  This person, a complete stranger, had diagnosed the unspoken seed of discontent nestled in the heart of my friendship with Matt.  I was impressed not only with his perspicacity but also with the fact that, upon reflection, maybe my experience wasn’t unique, wasn’t special.  Maybe our story was just like everyone else’s.

Listening to 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields—the concept album brainchild of songwriter Stephin Merritt—gave me that same feeling, making me wonder if there was an emotion that couldn’t be encapsulated in a three-minute pop song.  The titular love songs are really songs about love songs, about the craft and inherent dishonesty involved in trying to write a love song for mass digestion.  There are a few you can point to that might be sincere, but by and large they’re clever, irreverent, funny metafiction. 


The best song on the album, “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure,” works as a bit of a thesis statement for the other 68 songs.  A hack songwriter runs into Ferdinand de Saussure (a philosopher of linguistics and semiotics), and, infuriated by the intellectual’s challenge to his facile understanding of love, shoots him dead.  The narrator says it’s for Holland-Dozier-Holland, the songwriting trio behind Motown such hits as “Stop! In the Name of Love” and “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)”.  Merritt’s point is clear:  the mass-produced ditties of Motown (and pop in general), even those of its greatest practitioners, can’t afford to be complex, thoughtful, or even sincere.

And he presents the rest of the album as evidence.  It dissects songs about all different types of love, from the ideal to the passionate to the erotic, throwing in easy rhymes and clever twists to show that Merritt both understands and deliberately challenges the conventions of the songs he’s imitating.  Although most of the album is snide, Merritt is even more caustic when he takes on the conventions of particular genres:  reggae, soul, and (most hilariously, in my view) musicals are all mocked outright (along with plenty of others I couldn't find YouTube videos for).  The album covers every crooked offshoot of pop music outside of hip-hop, while occasionally alluding to specific artists (New Order, Elton John, and Sonny and Cher, for instance) to demonstrate just how easy it is to recreate an ostensibly unique sound.

69 Love Songs raises important philosophical questions that generally aren't asked in pop culture.  Are our feelings unique?  Is it smart to get emotionally attached to songs that are, by design, generic enough for everyone to relate to?  Does it matter that so much of what we listen to is as phony as horoscopes and cold reading, or do we transcend that insincerity by attaching our emotions and personal histories to those songs?  

These are important questions to ponder, and they're unavoidable on songs as self-consciously playful and twisted as Merritt's.  Even without its deeper metafictional aspects, however, this is a highly enjoyable album of immaculately crafted and produced pop music.  I can't think of a single song in the bunch that's a total throwaway, but the unfortunate flip side of that is that there are only a couple of truly great songs.  The project is ambitious and the concept it's tackling novel and complex, but 69 Love Songs is one of the most consistently successful concept albums you're liable to ever hear.

Grade:  A-

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