Lip-Syncing and Musical Authenticity

It's not the sort of thing I talk about with you guys, but for the last three seasons, I have watched American Idol. This week was "Rock Week," but we can talk about "Whole Lotta Love" another time. What I'll talk about now is Paula Abdul's turn on the stage during tonight's elimiation show, performing a song called, "I'm Only Here for the Music." If you can YouTube it—well—I still couldn't really recommend it, but what you will see is a fairly intense dance number coupled with barely half-hearted lip-syncing. It's bad enough to make you wonder why she bothered moving her lips at all, when it was clear that the dancing, not the singing, was the focal point of the show. I got to wondering just that.

Why do artists lip-sync? Let's break lip-syncing down into it's two, even simpler components. Lip-syncing consists of: (1) not singing, but (2) appearing to sing.

There are perfectly good reasons why an artist might choose not to sing at his "live" performances. He might be sick. He might not actually be a very good singer. The choreography that the show demands might overtax his respiration, precluding vocalization. If you were a fan of a certain kind of music, and of the stage show that most often accompanies it, this last justification would be particularly forceful. Think about Britney Spears and her "Circus Tour" stage show.

But what purpose is served by appearing to sing? To the pop music concertgoer, is your enjoyment of the dance numbers augmented by the fact that the artist's lips are moving? To the afficionado of musical authenticity, would your opinion of Milli Vanilli be diminished if, instead of dancing and pretending to sing, they had just danced?

After Abdul's performance, No Doubt performed "Just a Girl," and Gwen Stefani was awkwardly as frenetic as she was in 1996: leaping, writhing like a tsunami was running up her spine, maybe almost actually throwing elbows at the audience as she made her way back up on stage after jumping down among them. Her painfully live vocals were not at all spot-on, but I can't help but feel like a part of her energy was inspired by the impossible-to-the-point-of absurdity "vocal" performance that Abdul had just given. It was a fuck-you. She was saying, "Here's what it really sounds like when you dance while singing."

My Chemical Romance Covers Dylan: I Have an Opinion About That, and It's Not (Exactly) What You Think

I think it was Monday evening when Katy came home and told me that My Chemical Romance was contributing a cover of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" to the soundtrack of the upcoming film, Watchmen. Before even hearing the song, I was nonplussed, and remained so afterwards. They tossed some verses, sped it up, applied their traveling circus style of buzzsaw guitar, lifted a riff straight out of Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me," and got it down to 3 minutes. And they missed the boat entirely.

I should probably start by saying that although not my cup of tea, the problem is not that My Chemical Romance is contributing the cover. Katy owns two of their albums, I've listened to them, and I don't hate them as much as I'd expected that I would. At their best, they sort of succeed as a dark-ish party band; in some places they actually sound like a successor to Twisted Sister, not great praise necessarily, but not all bad either. My biggest complaint with them is that it seems to me that their lyrics could benefit from another several drafts before hitting the CD press.

My problem is also not the problem that a Dylan purist might have. That is, I think that most Dylan songs can and should be covered. In fact, off the top of my head I can name several covers of his songs that kick his album versions in the teeth and don't quit.

Anyway, those paragraphs were tangents. My problem is not with My Chemical Romance, and my problem is not that the Dylanography is inherently untouchable. My problem is with the choice of song itself; I propose that "Desolation Row" belongs in a class of songs which I will denote "Uncoverable."

In fairness, it was practically inevitable that any attempt to film Watchmen would involve a cover of "Desolation Row," since the graphic novel actually quotes the song. In that connection, I can't help but be reminded of the making-of previews for Watchmen, in which the director says, more or less, "A lot of people think of Watchmen as the unfilmable graphic novel." It just strikes me as interesting that in order to film the unfilmable graphic novel, you have to cover the uncoverable song. Poetic, kinda.

I've heard the concept of uncoverability floating around before. On Last.fm, I remember someone complaining about Johnny Cash's cover of U2's "One," saying effectively that the song was so personal to Bono that any attempt to cover it becomes automatically crass. That's not precisely what I have in mind. I think that a song is uncoverable when the original recorded performance is so radically idiosyncratic that it forces the potential cover artist into a catch-22: either he copies the idiosyncrasy, in which case it swallows up his own contribution to the project, making the cover redundant, or he ditches the idiosyncrasy, in which case everyone wonders what was the point of performing a song whose most interesting aspect has been extracted.

The best relatively contemporary example that I'm coming up with is Bush's "Glycerine." Uncoverable I say. Why? Because the arrangement is completely anomalous, and yet it works so well that a casual listener could hear the song a hundred times and never notice what it is that makes the music so haunting: no percussion. Only vocals, fuzzed-out electric guitar, and a string section. If you were inclined to cover "Glycerine," what would you do? Jettison the attributes that make it sui generis, by incorporating drums? Or play it straight, omit the percussion, and allow the song itself and its history to overpower your performance of it? (The tragic choice might be avoided through schtick, say, by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, but I have in mind serious covers, and not parodies).

So what is the radical idiosyncrasy of "Desolation Row"? I suggest you download it from iTunes and see for yourself, but failing that, read on:

First, at 11 minutes, 20 seconds, it is a radically long song, even for Dylan. The first 9 minutes or so are comprised of a sequence of verses featuring characters from and allusions to various works of art, literature, fairy tale, mythology, scripture, and history. Cameos are made by Romeo and Juliet, Cain and Abel, Cinderella, Casanova, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the Phantom of the Opera, among others. Neither the melody nor the arrangement changes appreciably during this section, though changes in diction and emphasis will help to keep you interested. Each verse is essentially self-contained and unrelated to the others.

The other thing worth pointing out is that, while there are emotionally touching standouts (like the Ophelia verse), between one-quarter and one-third of the verses are absolute garbage from the perspective of being well-written or interesting or insightful. In particular I'm thinking of the verses beginning "Einstein disguised as Robin Hood..." and "At midnight, all the agents..." (Interestingly, that latter verse is the one quoted in Watchmen). It's perplexing then, at first, that those verses are there at all, since the song is already too long, and nobody would miss them if they'd been omitted, since they bear no real relation to the other parts.

Then, after all these verses, there is a harmonica interlude, and after it, a final verse, wherein we learn that the foregoing verses were all contained in a letter received by the speaker. The final verse is the speaker's response, and he's having none of it; in fact, he's bored, effectively mocking the audience for any enjoyment it might have derived in the previous ten minutes:

All these people that you mentioned,
Yes I know them—they're quite lame.
I had to rearrange their faces,
And give them all another name.
Right now I can't read too good.
Don't send me no more letters, no,
Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row.

And that's when it hits you that the radical idiosyncrasies at work in this song are the peculiar chutzpah that it must take for an artist to pull this sort of time-wasting, tear-jerking prank on his audience, and the charisma it takes to make them feel satisfied even after the rug has been pulled neatly out from under them. Dylan knows that he can string you along until the end, maybe move you to the brink of tears, or convince you to sing along, just by employing that timeless, nasal/gravel/gargle he calls a voice (maybe the closest we modern English speakers can come to hearing Beowulf sung), sprinkling some good lines and verses in among the bad ones, and mostly by appealing to the audience's ego: "I've heard of Ophelia!" It's Menippean satire meets the Shaggy Dog Story. It's the take that makes you love getting took.

And that's why it can't be covered. Now that "Desolation Row" is a classic, chutzpah and charisma are no longer required in order to get away with it. But it's the chutzpah and charisma that made it a classic in the first place. The reasons that undergird your desire to cover it are the very reasons why you'll never be able to bring anything to it that is new or interesting or relevant or really very good at all. You shouldn't bother trying.

Aesthetic Experiences for Artists

Sean,

I think you put your finger on something interesting where you suggest that it's easier to admire a work of art when one's own fingerprints are not the only ones on it. I think you're right that Vinnie might have an easier time admiring Less Than Jake's output as a result of its collaborative nature. But more on that in a second.

Likewise, I accept your correction regarding the chronological perspectives (short versus long term) from which Vinnie and Joey, respectively, were speaking. As I was wrapping up my last post in this thread, I think I had come to the conclusion that, really, that distinction was less important than the one between Joey speaking as an artist and Vinnie speaking as a promoter, but I never got around to saying so.

But let me go back to what you said about it being easier to appreciate other people's work than one's own. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it's even possible to have an aesthetic experience of one's own work. I mean, I can talk about liking or not liking "Beer Goggles" using the same language that Joey Cape can. But if I say that I don't like it, do I mean the same thing that he means when he says that he doesn't like it? I don't think so.

It seems to me that as a listener, when determining whether I like a song, I determine how much awe it puts me in. (Of course, I'm using that word to cover more ground than it ordinarily would). But as a writer of music, if I ask myself whether I like a song I've written, I determine how much pride it induces in me. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems to me that there is a qualitative difference between pride and awe; that is, a difference other than whether the emotion is self- or other-directed.

To put it in particulars, to the extent that I admire a poem that I've written, I don't think that my emotions are so much different from those of a contractor who admires the building he's just erected, or of a mechanic who admires his handiwork in repairing a broken engine. With respect to my own work, I can't get past the pre-aesthetic level: the level of craftsmanship. My emotions when reading my own work bear no resemblance to my emotions when I read Tennyson's "Ulysses" or Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium"; those works elicit a tingle in me that my own do not, and I don't think it's only because they are much, much better than mine.

The Vinnie Paradox

Sean,

Speaking from my own experience writing music, poetry, and prose, I can say that if I work at it for a sufficient amount of time, I can come up with something that I love. On the other hand, virtually without fail, if I come back to that same work a year or two later, its flaws are obvious to me, and I'm embarrassed to have ever loved it, and I hate it a little for not being as good as I remember.

I think something like that could account in part for the difference between Joey Cape's opinion of his work, and Vinnie's of his own. Joey Cape was clearly taking a long-haul perspective, whereas Vinnie was talking about an album that was still fresh and new to him. The two are apples and oranges.

At the same time though, I won't fault you for feeling that Vinnie's extollation of the new album was a turnoff. Vinnie is in a tough spot, because he has always taken such an enthusiastic approach to promoting LTJ and all the bands on Fueled by Ramen. Back when the albums were unmitigated triumphs (like Losing Streak and Hello Rockview), his enthusiasm felt warranted. But as the quality of the music has steadily declined, Vinnie's rhetoric hasn't changed a bit, and as a result, he's started to sound shrill and hucksterish. When he says the new album is great, I have a hard time thinking anything except, "That's what you said last time."

The problem for Vinnie has got to be that he's taken it upon himself to be the band's biggest promoter, and that fact clouds his view of what he's accomplished (or failed to accomplish) as an artist. I don't think we'll ever hear him say that in retrospect Anthem and In With the Out Crowd disappoint him artistically, because he spilled so much ink telling us how great they were during their promotional phases. He may be so far gone at this point that he could never even imagine the albums being anything less than superlative, the dual roles of artist and promoter having become so intertwined. And even if he can bring himself to think it, he certainly can't say it, because it would look like he had been lying to the fans in the first instance. Still, I think that if we could retroactively split those two roles, and somehow talk to just Vinnie the artist (not Vinnie the promoter), he'd sound a lot more like Joey Cape does in the interview you quoted.

I'll add that I think there's something really embarrassing and gauche and tasteless about writing to one's fans that you've been driving around Gainesville listening to your new album and LOVING IT. It's always been sort of an awkward question—do bands listen to their own albums recreationally?—and the affirmative response is just so ridiculously and needlessly narcissistic that I really feel like a person ought to be too embarrassed to admit it even if it's true. To me, it would be like saying, "I love how I sound on voicemail."

But really that's all about comportment; it's not about how the artist feels, but rather what he says about how he feels. So I'll respond directly to the question you posed: should an artist love what he makes?

I do think that, at least in the short run, an artist ought to love the things he creates. In the long run, it's important to see where you could have done better, and inevitably that probably means falling out of love with your old work. But it's the pleasure of putting the pieces together and making them work, even when they don't perfectly instantiate your vision, that keeps you coming back to the drawing board. Of course you have to work and improve, but nobody works to improve skills whose exercise doesn't bring pleasure in the interim. Again, I don't think this view puts me at odds with what Joey Cape was saying; I just think that in responding to the question he was asked, he had the long view firmly in mind.