Faking It

What Avril Did Next . . .

In the book I mentioned how Avril Lavigne progressed from her breakthrough material (“Complicated,” “Sk8ter Boi,” etc.), which owed a lot to professional songwriters such as the Matrix, to writing her own rather dour material for the second album, presumably in an attempt to “keep it real.”

One of the problems of publishing a book is that real life doesn’t stand still--and now Avril has done her best to make the argument more, er . . . complicated . . . by bouncing back to the opposite extreme for her next move. “Girlfriend,” her new single, is bubblegum par excellence, ticking every box of “fakery” it can. Professional songwriting involvement from pop svengali Dr. Luke, a production that owes more to Toni Basil’s “Mickey” than any kind of punk or grunge, a chorus recorded in eight different languages (here’s the Mandarin version) to appeal to the global audience, and above all an extraordinary confection of crass singalong riffs and choruses. What the hell is going on?

From reading the Internet chatter, the single seems to have created some consternation among her fanbase, although it also looks set to be a massive hit. The video doesn’t help. Avril, previously prone to dressing as an angsty goth-skate punker, is now in full Valley-Girl mode--a blonde cheerleader, mini-skirted and leading a heavily choreographed dance routine. She ends up stealing the boyfriend of a nerdy bookish girl, having subjected her to a series of bullying indignities. It is quite disconcerting, as though the follow-up to Heathers had cast Winona Ryder’s previously “wrong side of the tracks” character as the scheming prom queen bitch. But Avril actually plays all three roles--the cheerleader, the nerdy redhead, and the brunette who steals the nerd’s boyfriend--and each of these could be taken to represent stages of her career path. The message is complex, but we’re still left feeling that present-day Avril has given the old Avril a beating.

Is the whole thing ironic? Has Avril just decided that authenticity is a waste of time and she’ll have more fun following up the bubblegum parts of her career than trying to be worthy and serious? Is it a great pop song or a farrago of puerile nonsense? Is she selling out, or just recognising that there was nothing to ‘sell out’ in the first place?

Or am I just taking it all a bit too seriously?

- Hugh

Autobiographical Blues

Blues is said to be a very personal music. There’s certainly some truth to this view--blues songs of the first half of the twentieth century were generally more personal than other songs, and early autobiographical songs were almost always blues or blues-related. Yet it would be a mistake to view the blues as primarily a confessional mode.

On the one hand, many blues singers were social outcasts--respectable folks wanted to have nothing to do with them. And social outcasts have nothing to lose. Far less invested in their reputations than are their peers, they can afford to be forthcoming about their sins, hard times, and sensual joys. Blues thus lends itself very well to gritty first-person narrative, narrative that purports to be autobiographical. And the large majority of blues songs fit this mold.

But on the other hand, those narratives usually either were fiction (Blind Willie McTell’s “Writing Paper Blues” is one of the best storytelling blues songs ever, but McTell couldn’t write), were too vague to be strictly personal (Robert Johnson’s songs sound personal, but he doesn’t give away enough details or string together a rich enough story), or concerned an event in which the singer was only a peripheral figure (Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere” concerns a flood, Lonnie Johnson’s “Life Saver Blues” a shipwreck). Autobiography certainly wasn’t out of the question, but it was relatively rare: I would estimate that only about one to three percent of pre-war blues songs could be called autobiographical (by which I mean that they relate a detailed story about the singer). In general, as noted in my previous post on blindness, blues songs tended to be about situations to which listeners could relate, rather than situations peculiar to the singer.

Truly autobiographical blues songs tend to stand out because of their uncommonness. In 1930 Charlie Jackson sang a compelling account of performing at a dance and being arrested and jailed; apparently it was so unusual to write autobiography that the song was entitled simply “Self Experience.” In 1940 Booker White, prompted by a recording director who was dissatisfied with the repertoire of standards he had brought to the studio, recorded “When Can I Change My Clothes?” But this song, like the other prison songs recorded at the same session, was composed on the spot, which indicates that White didn’t commonly perform material of this nature.

The Memphis Jug Band’s 1930 “Meningitis Blues,” written and sung by Memphis Minnie, is not only a moving and very personal account of a near-fatal illness, it tells a truly autobiographical story--a fact she seemed to acknowledge when she retitled it a few days later, on a second recording, as “Memphis Minnie-Jitis Blues.” It begins with an extraordinarily personal verse--“I come in home one Saturday night, pull off my clothes and I lie down.” It is as if she were pulling the listener right into her life--and her suffering. In my opinion, this is the pinnacle of autobiographical blues--I can think of no other pre-war blues song that says more about a singer’s real life.

- Yuval

Songs about Writer's Block

Fatlip, “Writer's Block”

Natasha Bedingfield, “These Words”

Gillian Welch, “One Little Song”

MercyMe, “3:42 AM”

If you’re a songwriter with writer’s block, I guess one thing you can do is write a song about it. Here are the four best songs I’ve heard about the subject, all recent ones (“3:42 AM” is from 2006, “Writer’s Block” is from 2005, and the other two are from 2004). “These Words” was a number-one hit in a lot of countries, including the UK, but it never caught on the U.S.; “3:42 AM” is from Coming Up to Breathe, which made number-one in the U.S., but only on the Christian charts; and the other two tracks are far more obscure.

These songs are all so catchy, brilliant, and perverse that when I tried to write about them, I got writer’s block.

Now if your writer’s block is so bad that you can’t even write about writer’s block, here’s a passage from Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory that might help.

“If you think of something new to say, if a cyclone comes, or a flood wrecks the country, or a bus load of school children freeze to death along the road, if a big ship goes down, and an airplane falls in your neighborhood, an outlaw shoots it out with the deputies, or the working people go out to win a war, yes, you’ll find a train load of things you can set down and make up a song about.”

Good advice, no? It goes back to that local news entry I posted. But personally, I’d like to hear a few more riffs on having writer’s block, so scribble away.

P.S. I wrote this a while back, and now I’ve thought of something to say. I’m fascinated by songs that talk about the process of their own creation, and all four of these songs take this to some sort of extreme. If you take a certain aesthetic of authenticity--tell the truth about the immediate moment you’re in--to its logical extreme, what else is there to write a song about than writing a song? Now writing a song about writing that same song can’t be easy. So how about writing a song about how hard it is to write a song? Now that’s even more honest, right? All these performers, in my opinion, take their honesty about their shortcomings as songwriters to an absolutely embarrassing pitch--Fatlip blames the failure of his entire career on writer’s block while delivering the most perceptive thoughts on hip-hop authenticity I've heard from a hip-hop artist; MercyMe gets frustrated because the Lord Himself isn’t talking to the songwriter like He apparently usually does; Natasha Bedingfield evokes Byron, Shelley, and Keats in one line and then pronounces hyperbole as “hyper-bowl” in another; and Gillian Welch gets totally honest about how frustratingly unoriginal most of her songs actually are, and starts repeating herself simply because there’s nothing else to say. And what makes this even more fascinating is that you can tell that not one of these artists were actually suffering from writer’s block when they wrote these dazzlingly writerly numbers, thus rendering their apparent naked honesty about the process completely false.

- Yuval