Thus far the Record Desk has mostly been splashing about in the shallow end of the pool – I haven’t really taken on an album universally considered to one of the all-time, all-time greats. I suppose that it is often very hard to get inside a “great” record and illuminate it from within. Many times these are albums that come to us second- or even third-hand as recommendations from friends who embraced the record after some critic hyped it based on some other alpha critic’s review. Such has been my experience with Loveless. It’s one of those albums that you hear about more than you actually hear. It’s widely considered a left-of-the-dial classic – one that set the bar for inventive, non-cheesy guitar sounds.
If you throw a rock at bunch of shaggy kids in American Apparel gear, you’ll likely hit someone whose band *totally* has an ambient My Bloody Valentine thing going on. Of course, this claim is likely complete bullshit – this kid’s band probably sounds like U2 or the Cure. However, My Bloody Valentine is a much more acceptable band to talk about as an influence. They signify a certain kind of cool – cool that is decadent and European and detached from issues of pop and commerce. In short, invoking My Bloody Valentine means that you have the *right* idea of what is cool. Your sensibilities are in order. You are not some kind of “rawk” obsessed meathead. Basically, name dropping My Bloody Valentine proves that you are the sort of person who should be forming a band.
Some bands (like My Bloody Valentine, Television, the Fall, and even the Velvet Underground) provide a shorthand for musicians who want to discuss aesthetics and rule out the wrong kind of collaborators, but who don’t wish to appear snooty or discriminatory. And because fans of and dabblers in popular music are pack animals, pretty soon everyone learns the new codes and starts prattling on about how Loveless and Marquee Moon changed their lives – giving rise to a process of I’m calling inflation of influence.
For instance, a 13-year-old kid in 1993 might have bought a guitar because he was really into Siamese Dream. However, by 2002 this kid is out in the great wide hip world telling everyone how he wants to form a band that sounds just like Loveless. He doesn’t want to fess up that it was the wholly cornball Smashing Pumpkins who rocked his world. Instead, he uses his influences’ influence as a cover. Our imaginary kid doesn’t want folks to know that he once got his kicks from the corporate FM radio monster – an admission that might peg him as some kind of possible Nickleback sympathizer. So, our imaginary kid bites his lip and pretends to worship Kevin Shields instead of uncool Billy Corgan.
I’m not saying that no one loves Loveless or Hex Induction Hour based on first-hand experience. I’m just saying that most people lie about how much they love these sorts of records. I know because *I’ve* lied about loving these sorts of records. I mean, I like Loveless and I actually really do love Marquee Moon, but not in that crazy, bloodied teenage way that you *really* love your favorite albums. These smartipance albums are a fine diversion after you’ve memorized every blip of “Baba O’Riley” and every squawk of “Heart Shaped Box,” but they aren’t the sort of things that you love deep down in the your adolescent gut-pit. Loveless and other “important” records like it present interesting ideas and new twists on the possibilities lurking about the fringes rock and roll.
Of course, I too am using Loveless as shorthand – in this case for a certain kind of album that everyone has decided to treat as a classic despite the fact that it was never super popular or embraced on a massive scale. I’m not saying that it isn’t an interesting or, hell, even an enjoyable album. I’m simply admitting that I almost never listen to it, and I almost never hear anyone else listening to it either. Loveless strikes me as a piece of “required listening,” not too different from so-called “classics” that you are expected to read in literature class.
Which brings us to our thrilling conclusion – I’m not sure if high school literature class is the best model for pop music appreciation. The wrong teacher or the wrong syllabus can ruin reading for many people. By extension, the wrong tastes or the wrong standards being forced on pop listeners and pop participants can kind of make pop music less fun and more like a never-ending struggle to keep up with what sorts of things make for proper listening.
One of the reasons that the Record Desk exists is to honestly assess my relationship with my big, stupid collection of tapes, CDs, and LPs – to come to terms with what pop music means to me and how I might mean in relation to it. I figured that my plan to write about EVERYTHING I own would force me to acknowledge the “uncool” corners of my listening habits. Under this premise, I wouldn’t be able to hide behind the internet and pretend that my life plays out to a continuous soundtrack of Zen Arcade and Here Come the Warm Jets. In time, I must come to terms with that Bryan Adams’ greatest hits record and my old copy of They Might Be Giants’ Flood.
So, where does this leave us with Loveless? I suppose I just don’t like it that much. It’s okay, but I seem to go years without listening to it. I think I may have bought it just so I’d seem like the sort of person whose band might be inspired by My Bloody Valentine. It’s a pretty record in its way. But I actually enjoy listening to Siamese Dream more. So that’s it – my confession. I don’t really love My Bloody Valentine. I probably only pretended to be into them so that I’d seem cool. I have absolutely no memories or ideas or concerns tied up with Loveless. It’s simply something I know about. It exists merely as rock and roll homework. Having listened to it several times in preparation for this entry, I found neither fresh insight nor newly compelling bit of sound – just that same old wonderful guitar woosh and several washes of sound masquerading as songs.
[...] This is so great, and so central to what (for me) HU is all about, that I am going to blockquote six paragraphs of it right here, unhidden behind a jump. This much is still not quite the whole thing, so do yourself a favor and go read it all on the music blog Thirteen Birds vs. The Record Desk: If you throw a rock at bunch of shaggy kids in American Apparel gear, you’ll likely hit someone whose band *totally* has an ambient My Bloody Valentine thing going on. Of course, this claim is likely complete bullshit – this kid’s band probably sounds like U2 or the Cure. However, My Bloody Valentine is a much more acceptable band to talk about as an influence. They signify a certain kind of cool – cool that is decadent and European and detached from issues of pop and commerce. In short, invoking My Bloody Valentine means that you have the *right* idea of what is cool. Your sensibilities are in order. You are not some kind of “rawk” obsessed meathead. Basically, name dropping My Bloody Valentine proves that you are the sort of person who should be forming a band. [...]
I definitely agree with your overall point (about first-hand listening love vs. critic-mandated appreciation) but what I most definitely disagree with is this whole “Loveless is overrated” backlash deal. I mean, if you’re going to criticize the record, do so while talking about the music (how there’s almost no bass frequencies in the album, the lack of diversity in songwriting, the shitty drum sound-all this coming from a huge, HUGE fan of the album and Creation-era MBV in general) and not just about how sore you are that hipster-douchebags blather on and on about THIS album specifically and not your beloved Siamese Dream. And christ, I loved the Pumpkins and I always will be mindful of the fact that they were the first band that exposed me to what’s probably my favorite musical sub-genre, that whole shimmering big alternative sensitive guitar thing, but I must say that I remember listening to “Cherub Rock” on headphones and just thinking that there was a whole musical world whence that song came from, one where names like “Sonic Youth” are parlayed on a daily basis, and later on having my initial expectactions met and far, far surpassed by stuff like Loveless. I mean, for me the Pumpkins were more of a gateway into that world than anything else…maybe that was the case for the people you refer to in this article? There’s nothing wrong with a little retrospective reevalution, and I must say that in my personal experience, Loveless is a far more enjoyable, rewarding, mystifying, gorgeous, life-affirming, etc. record than Siamese Dream, and if I don’t play it nearly as often as I did when I was 15-16, it’s probably cause of extreme overexposure (extreme as in “playing only shallow over and over again at full volume on headphones for the first 4 hours after hearing it out of sheer awe and not beacause I so wanted to be considered cool”) in my case, just the way it works out between you and SD; just because I learned about it through all the critical hype doesn’t make it any less great for ME…oh christ now I’M the sore one…
Hmm, looking through my comment it seems as though I’m contradicting my opening statement by saying that I bought Loveless cause the critics told me to, but it wasn’t exactly like that…though i was aware of it’s critical standing (at least in the shoegaze world) it was more of an impulse buy than a premeditated, “I expect this thing to change my life” buy…which probably contributed a lot to the whole “wow where did THIS come from” aspect…ummm maybe your article would prove more sympathetic to me if it changed its tone to how critics “damn with great praise”
(setting unmeetable expectations, saying stupid shit) rather than the whole tired “Loveless is soooo overrated you’re a poser and an asshole for pretending it’s not some elitist commodity designed to inflate your intellectual standing” thing. I mean, I get exactly what you’re talking about, the exact same thing happened to me with Dylan, but some of these critically hyped records come back and bite me in the ass just when I turn my back on them (Portishead’s DUMMY comes to mind) which is always nice…sorry for ramblin’ on…I just genuinely love Loveless and don’t like to be called a douchebag for saying so…
Just a quick quibble, Mr. Ramone — I’m not really talking about “the critics” in my little essay. I’m not sure that I even mention them more than once or twice. If anything, I’m carrying on about “the audience.”
I think that “the critics” get a bad rap because they’re the ones we blame for “inconsistencies” in our musical outlook. But really, the whole Loveless *thing* was something that I got much more from musicians, music nerds, and folks at the community radio station where I deejayed. In many respects, this post is about the way people define their tastes using only the agreed-upon cool records.
As has come up before at the Record Desk, I am 30. That means that I was square in the target audience when alternative was invented. Too young and too midwestern to know about Sonic Youth and Factory Records first hand. So yes, the Pumpkins and all that were a “gateway drug” for me also — a way to bridge the gap between the classic/hard rock I was into in 7th grade and the punk rock and “indie” that I would later be into. Still, it’s records like Siamese Dream and Vitology that were the sound of my highschool parking lot. That could very well be a regional thing, too.
Anyway, no one’s saying you’re a douchebag for liking Loveless. I like it. As freely admitted, I LOVE plenty of *those* records — Marquee Moon, Raw Power, etc. I’m just saying that sometimes we give more credit to the “cool” stuff like MBV while setting aside the now unhip bands.
I mean, how many hipsters will rave about Parsons and the Flying Burrito Bros. while making Grateful Dead jokes — neverminding that American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead sound a lot like the stuff Parsons was doing?
Thanks for your comment. Thanks for your patronage.
[...] rock-crit world that they are entering. This thesis is similar to that laid out in this post on the blog Thirteen Birds vs. the Record Desk, in which it is argued that musicians signal that [...]
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Cheers! Sandra. R.
[...] July 23, 2008 Posted by jjb in analysis, blogging, my bloody valentine, siamese dream. trackback This is so great, and so central to what (for me) HU is all about, that I am going to blockquote six [...]