Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Crushing On

#MusicMonday: Madonna – Give Me All Your Luvin’

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The other night I drunk-dialed Madonna.

Sortof.

I was drunk (a rarity!) and riding SEPTA (never gets old!), and I decided it was time to lose my virginity in the mobile song downloads realm, because I really needed to hear the new Madonna single on repeat that very minute. So I bought it right there on my phone.

I’ll concede, it was very liberating.

I recall the anticipation of every Madonna album from Like a Prayer to present day. That’s 10 studio albums of anticipation over a span of more than 20 years. In each instance, I can almost viscerally recall my first listen to her lead singles. Some have been the best cut on the album (“Like a Prayer,” “Hung Up”), while others were something subtler meant to keep the full LP a surprise (“Erotica,” “Frozen”).

I am having trouble placing MDNA‘s lead single “Give Me All Your Luvin’” in the wider Parthenon of Madonna. The first time I heard it, I thought, “YES! This is a Madonna single for the new millennium. Sign me up!” However, in my tipsy relisten on Friday evening the song’s myriad faults became obvious – because the faults and the highlights are one and the same.

Good. The live-in a room cheerleader chants calling back to “Mickey” and melodic nods to an era of “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “Leader of the Pack”

Bad. Madonna’s singing. It isn’t the weirdly hollowed-out death rattle that plagued Hard Candy, but it’s unsupported and not very in tune. Female singers who haven’t abused their voices find amazing resonance in their 40s and 50s, yet here Madonna seems to have regressed to the teeny-voiced delivery of Like a Virgin with none of the charm of her young vibrato. Why is she phoning it in?

Good. The live-sampled drums that kick off the song and the relentless handclap beat driven by simple guitar and drum hooks – leading to an awesome heavy-stomp bridge, totally unlike any that come to mind outside of Ray of Light.

Bad. Neither the bass or the guitar are a real bass or guitar – both are clearly synth. Why? Though Gaga has been scoring hits on synth pastiche, female-fronted crossover hits in the past few years have not been shy about tangible moments of rock (Gaga included!). The choruses and bridge have an especially cheap plastic sound. I get that is part of the conceit of the song, but that doesn’t made it any good. Is Madonna so terrified of a retread of American Life that she can’t allow an electric guitar to stick out on a song?

Good. Fun, relevent guest-performers drop verses that do not feel entirely shoe-horned into the song. I don’t feel like it warrants a “no-rap” edit.

Bad. Minaj and MIA are wasted entirely here. Minaj partially because Madonna doesn’t have the time for her to drop a totally insane verse, but also because she is a great singer and could have piled on manic harmony anywhere here. MIA is more of a cipher – her allure is in production as much as what she spits, so why not let that sneak into the flavor the bridge more?

Good. The lyrics. They don’t try too hard, keeping the song relateable for a young radio audience, even when delivered by one of the most famous women in the world.

Bad. After a cute reference to “Lucky Star” (if you didn’t know how much Madge references her songs within her songs you haven’t been paying much attention) the second verse is non-existent. “We can drink some wine, burgundy is fine, let’s drink the bottle every drop.” These are placeholder lyrics that should have been supplanted by anything more relevant to the song. Also, maybe I’m over-analyzing here, but I don’t like the casual drunkenness here. Madonna has certainly had her moments of singing about getting messed up, but this tossed off reference bugs.

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All of these issues? Fixable. Especially when you are Madonna. Yet, the same issues felled Hard Candy, the worst album of her career by a country mile after a major highlight on Confessions on a Dancefloor – at once adventurous and a return-to-form.

Am I excited for MDNA? I’m not sure. After an incomparable run from Ray of Light to Confessions (yes, I LOVE American Life) I feel as though Madge is second-guessing herself in an attempt to stay hip and relevant. Yet, her special power has always been effortless trend-setting (even if the lack of effort is completely contrived).

What happens when Madonna lets us see the strain, the strings and gears behind what should be an effortless hit? We get “Give Me All Your Luvin'” – catchy, enjoyable, but forgettable.

Let’s hope I won’t feel the same way about the LP as a whole.

#MusicMonday: “Trip To Your Heart” – Britney Spears

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This is a little embarrassing. Let me try to explain.

I’ve been really into synthesizer pop lately, because Studio Krisis has come into possession of a new synth and it’s not a language I speak fluently.

I am also working my way through roughly 1,700 songs from 2011 that I acquired in December.

Okay, enough excuses: this post is really about a Britney Spears song. I think it is awesome.

There, I’ve said it.

Two weeks ago E and I were lounging in our hotel room in Las Vegas between adventures when this came on my iPod. I looked up from my book. “This is really good,” I said. E nodded behind her book. When the song began to wind down I reached beside me and clicked back to the beginning without looking at the title or artist.

After two listens I picked up my iPod, curious to know who the singer was. It had a sort of UK pop sound to it, but also reminded me of the electric lounge of The Bird and The Bee or even The Cardigans.

Imagine my surprise to discover the singer: Britney Spears.

Let’s be clear here – I love pop music, but I do not like Britney Spears. In fact, 2011’s Femme Fatale is the only LP of hers I even own (mostly because we dance to a couple of the songs in Zumba).

This is mostly because she generally does not sing very well on record, and if you don’t sing well and you don’t write your own songs I don’t really get the point of you existing as an artist. At that point your face is just an ad campaign for someone else’s beats.

“Trip To Your Heart” disproves that theory, to a degree. She sounds lovely on it in a higher register I didn’t even know she had. Sure, she probably has a super-computer’s worth of digital processing tuning her up. She always has that, yet many of her other vocals still sound like hell.

Britney or not, if you like dreamy synth-pop with a good beat, this song is for you.

#MusicMonday: “Safe & Sound” – Taylor Swift and The Civil Wars

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This weekend I was up late writing, and turned on the film of A Hard Day’s Night in the background to keep me awake and alert.

It kept me more than that. It’s a funny movie that unleashes a stone cold classic Beatles song every six or seven minutes.

Beatles or Bieber?

As my gaze drifted up to the screen again and again I noticed the fans. The film is full of them. While everyone from businessmen to make-up artists treat the fab four as a commodity, the fans who are screaming their heads off are invariably teens of both ages, and slightly older young women.

I think about today, and who that same demographic of fans is screaming for. I’m sure a few artists come to mind, yes? I’ve sampled them all, but I wondered – would I be willing or able to recognize if they were producing music even a fraction as beautiful and groundbreaking as The Beatles’?

I think so.

Case and point, I typically assume Taylor Swift songs are going to be fizzy pop affairs with obscenely catchy chorus hooks. Not that there is anything wrong with that – hell, I aspire to it. I listened to “Safe & Sound” from The Hunger Games soundtrack expecting more of the same. I got something other than I was expecting. I’m certainly not comparing it to The Beatles, but “Safe & Sound” is an amazing song. Fitting, that it comes from the movie of a book I nearly wrote off as Popular YA Fluff and wound up devouring.

The song is so beautifully organic, with production that makes it sound as though Taylor and The Civil Wars are sitting right beside you as it plays. Notice the imperfect guitar plucking, sometimes evoking buzz from the edge of a fret.

There are a couple of bits of pure magic here. The endlessly-repeated, never-resolved simple melody hook, that turns into a canon in the middle of the song. The eerie, almost spooky underneath harmony from The Civil Wars. How the song hints heavily at an impending major crescendo with an increasing artillery of percussion and then never actually arrives there. As Jacob pointed out to me, how the menace of the arrangement belies the title. And, finally, how it absolutely sounds as though it could come from within the world of The Hunger Games.

It’s a great song, and I hope you still gave it a chance after you saw it was by Taylor Swift.

(Thanks to Jacob, my personal hero of snark, for turning me on to this song!)

Crushing On: Okabashi Shoes

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When I joined a gym early in 2011 I had one major concern.

Okay, two, but everyone looks silly at points while doing yoga, so I got over that one pretty fast.

No, my major worry was the showers. Really it was an array of several related worries. A bouquet, if you will.

Meet my new gym enablers. I love them.

After a year of gym-going I was able to sublimate OCD Godzilla for long enough to be seen mostly nude by other human beings not on the internet, use gym-supplied towels without breaking into hives, and bypass my typically lengthy shampoo regimen while still feeling clean. Yet, nothing can disengage my genetic heritage of being skeeved out by stuff, and there is nothing more skeevy than the floor of a four-by-four square stall that has sweaty naked men coming and going from it all day.

For some people, a turn-on. For me, skeevy.

It came down to my feet. I am notoriously sensitive about the idea that feet are meant to touch the ground, which other stuff has touched, and thus might be dirty. I was the child that needed to be carried directly from the ocean to the beach towel, so no offensive sand could stick to my tiny toes. Wearing flip flops anywhere but the poolside was (confession: still is) absolutely verboten, less the edge of my heel slip from their rubberized surface to touch the ground in a parking lot or grocery store freezer aisle or any other location where I might catch a deadly foot plague.

Wow, who knew it would feel so good to type that all out?

Back to the gym. Even after I got over all of my other shower hangups, I could not let any part of my feel touch the shower stall. “Of course,” you say, “I wouldn’t either.” Yet, my autopodomysophobia extended to the flip flops. Would they not also become riddled with disease over time due to their contact with the shower stall floor, spreading to infect not only my feet, but my entire gym bag?

For most people this image conveys the idea of a relaxing vacation. For me, it conveys the idea of OCD heart attack. This may explain why I have not been on a beach for over 10 years.

This spawned lengthy, philosophical conversations with my co-workers about what they did with their shower shoes. No explanation was enough for me. I slowly tapered down my gym-going, as on every freshly-showered return to my desk I could do nothing but worry about my feet, which surely had contracted a fungus from my flip flops.

And chlamydia.

And the plague.

I decided I needed a pair of flip flops that could be put in the washer, or dishwasher, or microwave, or some other disinfecting appliance short of the furnace.

Enter my good (also OCD) friend Mary and her suggestion of Okabashi shoes.

These Okabashi people know all about the concept of shower OCD. Their flip flips are molded from just one or two pieces of injected molded microplast, which means there are few nooks and crannies for dirt and chlamydia to infest. They are treated with an anti-microbial agent, which means less fear today and more super-germs in our apocalyptic future. Plus, Made in the USA!

Most importantly: they are completely waterproof and dishwasher safe!

Three days and $20 later, I had a pair of Okabashi shower shoes that are completely impervious to all possibly gym shower floor related phobias and concerns. And, if I get concerned I can just spray them down or put them in the dishwasher.

Problem solved! I have literally been to the gym twice as much since I acquired the new shoes. That’s even better than a New Year’s Resolution!

(PS: The shoes run slightly small, I would consider estimating up one half size.)

#MusicMonday: “Try To Sleep” – Low

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I hear newly released music via a four-point scale of acquisition.

1. Appointment. I know I love an artist. I know their LP is coming out. I pre-order it.

2. Recognition. I’m aware of an artist, who I might even like, or I hear a song on the radio that I enjoy. I see their name on a release schedule or in a review. I pick up their newest stuff.

3. Guided. A trusted source or a plurality of untrusted sources recommend an artist or album. Alternately, I hear the song enough times to be interested (which, given my lack of radio-listening or television watching, is pretty rare).

4. Acquisition. I am looking for new music in bulk to hear/review and pick an LP based on non-arbitrary factors like reviews by people I trust, how good the third song is, and how cool the LP cover looks.

Low is an example of a band who has moved up the strata year by year. They are presently somewhere around 1.5 on the scale.

It started with Low’s album The Great Destroyer. I had vaguely heard of the band, but though they were shoegaze or slowcore or something else that bores me to tears, so had avoided them until that point (i.e., they failed the #3 test). However, The Great Destroyer had a fantastic name and album cover (#4 sometimes saves me from snobbery in #3),  so I picked it up and wound up loving it. It was a little slow and gazey, but it also featured distinct counter-melodies and witty lyrics.

Fast forward five years, a period in which I picked up no further Low releases. Midway through 2011 I saw Low’s name on the LP C’mon and picked it up purely out of curiosity. Would it sound like Destroyer, or was that merely a catchy outlier?

“Try To Sleep” is the first track and lead single from that album, and without a doubt one of my ten favorites songs of 2011.

I forget what I was doing when I first heard this song, but I remember making a mad dash for my iPod to see who was singing it so I could rate it five stars. I was surprised that it was Low – while it’s only a minor modification on their typical sparseness, it’s also incredibly pretty. [Read more…] about #MusicMonday: “Try To Sleep” – Low