Earworm of the Day: Lucinda Williams - World Without Tears

I wrote about World Without Tears, the album, once already, and anyone who reads this site on a semi-regular basis knows it's very Lucinda-friendly in here. I like to say that during the 90s, when every other girl had a Liz Phair or a Courtney Love, I had a Lucinda Williams. "World Without Tears" was actually released in 2003, and is still one of my favorite songs from the 00s, though it's overshadowed by some of her other releases like Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which nabbed her a grammy for best contemporary folk album. WWT is still up there with her best, and this version of the title song is lovely.

Although she's generally labeled a contemporary singer-songwriter, her sound is heavily steeped in country. I grew up with country music, something I'm often loathe to admit when bands take their names from the antebellum south, or that country music, in general, is thought to be the domain of the mudflaps-and-confederate-flag crowd. (There's some underlying classism in those assumptions, too, which I've already explored quite a while back.) Lucinda made it okay to like country music.

On Lana Del Rey's Now Infamous SNL Performance

I don't usually follow internet phenoms, but if Lana Del Rey's name has been unavoidable the past few months, her performance on Saturday Night Live made her infamous.

I'm not going to lie. It was... not good. I don't think it was the worst SNL performance ever (if anything, it reminded me of Marianne Faithfull's narcoleptic Saturday Night Live appearance more than thirty years ago), but critics really want it to be THE WORST.

I think lookuplookup  had one of the most nuanced takes on the whole mess, and especially the aftermath:

[...] the whole critical gaze on Lana is much heavier than it would be if she were a straight-up pop singer and I agree. It’s interesting to me that people who are usually so into “real women don’t have to be” rhetoric (WHICH IS GARBAGE ANYWAY) are really eager to police someone like Lana Del Rey & critique her for being “inauthentic” (which, like that even means anything, like being “authentic” is some category that you just get to assign to someone’s art/performance/public persona/whatever.)

Lana Del Rey has been marketed as a singer-songwriter replete with highly stylized videos and a "gangster Nancy Sinatra" image (I didn't make that up, I swear). As in all things indie, a term that''s been divorced from its original meaning for at least a decade now, she's supposed to be genuine, "the real thing," and possess "real talent." And I'm not saying she doesn't have those things even if her image is heavily manufactured --  these things aren't as mutually exclusive as some music fans would like to believe -- but I think her lackluster performance says more about pushing artists into the spotlight before they're ready, and that making a pretty good youtube video doesn't mean it can be reproduced at will. The sheen simply wore off and what we're left with is a young artist not yet ready for prime time.

That women in the music industry are under more scrutiny than men is a given. Because I am approximately 150-years-old, and having this reference at my disposal, I'm also reminded of the Replacements SNL performance in 1986, which was pretty stinky as well. Now I am a huge fan of the Replacements, but with enough historical distance, it's become part of the band's legendary pathos. I still don't image a female artists being granted the same. (See Marianne Faithfull.)

Laura Nyro, Only Woman Among 2012 Rock Hall Inductees

So, the dominant narrative in the music blogosphere is that both the Beastie Boys, Guns 'n' Roses, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers  were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Class of 2012. Also inducted (belatedly -- her first record was released in the late-60s) but mostly ignored by the media was singer-songwriter, Laura Nyro, the only woman in the class of 2012. 

Rewind: Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

I hate calling albums "life-changing." Maybe "taste-changing," or better yet, "taste-challenging" is a proper  description for those records that do alter your life in some way. Rain Dogs did that to me.

Rain Dogs is one-third of the trifecta that includes Swordfishtrombones and Frank's Wild Years, and is long-believed to be Tom Waits's strongest album. It's heavy on the experimental, but not so much that it would alienate more conservative music fans. Let's face it, Tom Waits is kind of a hard sell to those raised on top forty radio. I use the "mom" test. If my mom likes it, it can't be too off-putting. She loves it.

Admittedly, I haven't been much of a Tom Waits fan in recent years. His current output sounds a bit to much like self-parody, but I still regularly drag out Rain Dogs and remember a time when I thought it was the weirdest, wackiest record I could find that didn't bug my mom.

Female Artists and Authenticity

I've been reading a fascinating book, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, and there's a pretty meaty chapter on autobiographical songwriting. The authors, using Hank Williams as an example, state that as a confessional songwriter he had a way of "taking his own experiences and making them universal; the autobiographer, however, makes them particular."

Ignoring my usual issue with labeling anything "universal," I think this is a good way to differentiate between confessional songwriters, and autobiographical ones -- though it makes sense that the two overlap. Though a lot of songwriters today fall into the "confessional" camp, very few truly write autobiographical songs, the primary reason -- according to the book -- is autobiography's limited commercial appeal:

Simply revealing oneself in song, a goal that we now all rake for granted, is a rather recent and comparatively artificial development in the history of popular music. We now think of an autobiographical song as a natural form of expression but that anyone who has ever tried can attest, writing a song based on one's life with a verse and chorus structure, that will appeal to a mass-market audience is no simple matter. It is far easier to sing about almost anything else.

Most of the examples cited in the book were blues and country, notably Loretta Lynn's "Coal Miner's Daughter," but when I think of truly autobiographical songs, Tori Amos's "Me and a Gun" was the first one that sprang to mind:


Another more contemporary example (and yes, I realize my definition of contemporary stopped somewhere around 1998) is Lauryn Hill's songs about her song, "To Zion:"


I think both these songs easily fit the "autobiographical" template. Both are intensely personal, yet but not "universal" in the way that a standard break-up song -- even the intensely personal ones -- aren't: one is an account of a rape, and another about the birth of the songwriter's son. Also, both are generally thought to be women's experiences. I realize this is problematic in that rape doesn't happen to women exclusively happen to women, though it's often treated as a "women's issue," and both songwriters are cisgendered, hetero women. (Hence my problem with the word "universal" to describe, usually, cis, hetero experiences.) 

Although the book focuses on a lot of old blues and country, I wonder what that says that my sole examples were two contemporary female songwriters. Is confession or autobiography expected more from women than from men?