Michael Jackson’s recording career came to a sad conclusion on October 30, 2001. He should have released Invincible in September, when it would have only been the second greatest tragedy of the month.
It’s not an album, it’s a PR statement: “don’t listen to what everyone’s saying about me. I’m a normal guy!” By 2000 Jacko’s public image was absolutely out of control and he’d had two options: either rebrand himself as a Howard Hughes-type freakshow, or tamp down the weirdness somehow.
He made the boring choice, or perhaps Sony made it for him. The label had a lot invested both in Invincible’s success (its thirty million dollar production cost remains an industry record, though Michael demanded still more money and accused CEO Tommy Mottola of racism when he wouldn’t pay), and in its main star not appearing like a total lunatic. Before anything else, this album tries to not rock the boat, and unfortunately it succeeds.
Invincible wants to be vapid millennial R&B and follows a formula. Ballads, soft strings, “edgy” songs containing glitched-up funk beats and rapping, guest spots by normal wholesome dudes (ie, R Kelly), lyrics spat out by a Platitude Bot 2000, and when ideas run out (almost immediately) still more ballads. Most albums are accidentally forgettable. Not so here. Invincible was conceived and executed with that goal in mind.
The biggest problem with Invincible – aside from the fact that there’s nothing creepier than a man loudly insisting that he’s normal – is that it’s extremely dull. Who wants to hear a former titan ripping off people who were ripping him off to begin with? The lyrics (aside from “Privacy” and the nauseating “The Lost Children”) are just all about love and romance, and the music just blurs into Boyz II Men (emphasis on the boys, I guess).
Sony was heavily invested, but the same can’t be said for Michael. He barely seems to be in the studio, and he projects not an iota of coolness or attitude into these songs (which aren’t worthy of them in any event). He moon-shuffles. He’s a Smooth Criminal whose offense is an unpaid parking ticket, a Speed Demon doing 62 in a 60 zone. I aspire to someday be this indifferent to thirty million dollars landing in my checking account.
Needless to say, he didn’t tour off Invincible, sparing us the comedy of seeing “You Rock My World” on a setlist with “Don’t Stop ‘Till You Get Enough”. He made a few media appearances. For example, in 2003 the deputies of Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Dept got a unique meet-and-greet photo session when Mr Normal was charged with seven counts of child sexual abuse.
His songwriting talent had already started to crumble on HIStory and here it’s completely gone. Sixteen bad songs. No good ones. If you want to hear music like “Billie Jean”, you’re in luck. In 1982 Michael Jackson released an album called Thriller, and by sheer coincidence it has a song that sounds exactly like “Billie Jean”! It even has the same title! Don’t listen to this album, though. It’s shit.
I am sorry if I seem to dislike Michael personally. I actually don’t understand him at all. The more I learn and read and expose myself to his personality, the more my noncomprehension deepens. There’s something alien and unreachable about him. But I am repulsed by the parts I see: the glimpses of squirming tentacles behind an impenetrable shell.
I am strongly persuaded that he molested children. This casts much of his character (his philanthropy, his generosity) in a different light: the deeds of a manipulator trying to escape consequences. It makes his war against the paparazzi far less sympathetic. I hear “You keep on stalking me, invading my privacy. Won’t you just let me be.“, remember Robson’s story about finding bloodstains in his underwear, and accept that maybe Michael’s privacy should, in fact, have been invaded. The paranoid tenor of his later work seems less fanciful: it was no delusion, because Michael actually had everything to hide.
His fans are awful. He was incredibly talented as a musician, but in the 90s this talent was eclipsed by a different skill: building and leading a kind of cult. He is a fascinating example of a secular religious icon, and to this day, living Thriller zombies haunt Twitter and Tiktok, circulating his apologetics. The basic thrust is that everything that went wrong for Michael – his finances, his appearance, his death – was someone else’s fault.
There’s a grain of truth to this. Michael Jackson never had a chance at living a normal life. But his fans ignore Michael’s agency (and four hundred million records sold buys a lot of agency), objectifying him to the level of a puppet.
Did Conrad Murray cause his death? Yes, the Jackobots say. He gave him surgical anesthetic as a sleeping aid! Bad doctor! They don’t ask the next question: who hired Conrad Murray to do this? Answer: Michael. They also don’t ask what would have happened if Murray had refused this stupid and insane order. Answer: Michael would have fired him, and found a different doctor.
The same can be said for the ruin of Michael’s face, his oversized chin implant, the nose whittled away like a blade, etc. Unneeded operations. But what would be the point of a plastic surgeon refusing to perform them? Michael had endless money to indulge his body dysmorphia. He would just go to someone else. The problem was always Michael. His story is one of tragedy, victimization, and self-destruction.
But self-destructive people can make fascinating art, and this was Michael’s saving grace. I’d like to pretend his recording career ended with HIStory. That album, like the one before, was a paranoid, sweaty jumble of blame-laying and resentment. Disturbing though it was, it made for compelling listening. You felt you were getting ringside seats for a man’s breakdown, and you got some strong songs, too: “Scream” and “Stranger in Moscow” kick the shit out of everything on this album. There’s a class of words in English better known by their opposites (gruntled, hinged, domitable, and so on). Michael Jackson’s last album is very vincible indeed.
Garfield only has value as a deconstruction of itself. Jazz/R&B label GRP Records accidentally discovered this fundamental fact about the universe in 1991, when they released Am I Cool Or What?, the first ever Garfield concept album.
“Garfield concept album” sounds like a 4chan musical shitpost like MoonMan. Incredibly it’s a real product that was released on both cassette and CD, for a double dose of Garfield madness.
A cynical mind might suspect that the Garfield mythos cannot support a full-blown concept album. The character isn’t exactly Ziggy Stardust: Garfield is to comics what “Jim Davis” is to names, a desolate TS Eliot wasteland of unfettered blandness. I was a Garfield fan for ten seconds in 1997 because it replaced a comic I hated (Cathy) in the Sunday funnies. Then I actually read it and realized I’d cured a toenail disease with an amputation. It was the least funny thing I had ever seen. You can’t even use it as lavatory paper, because any paper containing Garfield has shit on it by definition.
Want to know why Garfield is bad? It’s often asserted that this is the all-time funniest Garfield strip…
Yes, I agree it’s funny. But it has nothing to do with Garfield. He is pointless. Not only could you cut him out with scissors without affecting the gag, he actually makes it worse by being there. (Why is he reacting in disappointment? Was he hoping to hear a long sponsored message?) It’s peabrained nonsense, even within its own universe.
The true load-bearing wall of Garfield is Jon Arbuckle, whose character trait (neurotic insecurity) at least enables things to happen. Garfield, by contrast, is a blob. Take Jon out of Garfield and the comic collapses into a black hole: take Garfield out of Garfield and it stays the same or becomes funnier.
What can you do with a character so bland? What can’t you do? GRP’s pitch meeting must have gone like this:
“Our market research team has identified four traits with the core Garfield brand: he’s lazy, he’s fat, he eats lasagne, and he hates Mondays. If we took each of those traits and wrote a song about it we’d have almost 50% of 1/2 of a real, honest to God album! Ka-ching! This is an even better idea than our Samuel ‘Screech’ Powers prog-rock suite!”
Obviously they had to pad it out some. Neither “I Love It When I’m Naughty” and “Next to You I’m Even Better” have anything to do with Garfield. I think they were included because they were written by a person called Catte Adams, by which standard Cat Stevens, Jon Bon Jovi, and One Direction should be on here. (Get it? OD? Odie? If Jim Davis could write KWALITY JOKES like that, the comic would be cooking with gas.)
I would call the music an afterthought but that would incorrectly imply that any sort of thinking was involved. It’s very cheesy and cheap, with sampled lifeless drums that sound like they’re coming off a midi keyboard. It doesn’t sound close to jazz, it’s more like New Kids On The Block or Billie Ocean or something. “Shake Your Paw” has a stuttered horn sample (think “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes) but that’s the only musical point of interest I can recall.
What’s amazing is that they recruited a stable of R&B/soul greats to make this turd. BB King. The Temptations. Natalie Cole. Just how broke were those guys by 1991? That leads to a fascinating possibility: with the demise of the music industry, there has never been a better time to recruit legendary musicians for cheap. Who’s with me? The world must hear Am I Cool Or What? II.
The Pixies are alt-rock’s dark matter: invisible, but they bend the universe around them. The 90s are inconceivable without their music. They laid the founding stones for Seattle grunge, 3rd wave punk, 90s glam revival, and indie rock, but they couldn’t lay the founding stones for their own careers. Other bands broke big. The Pixies just broke up.
“Why didn’t the Pixies become more famous?” was once a popular column brief in the alternative press. Too early? Too weird? Not enough MTV videos? Wrong place? Singer too fat? Bassist too lady? Whatever the truth, their gold and platinum certifications were awarded long after they broke up, after an unpaid PR campaign on their behalf by the likes of Kurt Cobain and David Bowie. The Pixies are to Gen X what the Velvet Underground were to baby boomers: more famous as musical corpses than they ever were as a living, active band.
On their records they merged into a wall of sound with a single performer sometimes punching through, perhaps one of Joey Santiago’s fierce, singing leads, or Black Francis squalling bloodily, like a thundercloud made of dripping meat. Their lyrics were minimalistic and filmic, owing more to visual language more than prose. Other bands wrote songs about being sad: the Pixies wrote about having a broken face. They approached subject matter obliquely and orthagonally: if they were a chess piece, it would be the knight. Some Pixies songs make you feel alienated. Others conferred a sense of cosmic understanding. Their best songs made you feel both at the same time.
In 2003, rumors started crackling that the Pixies would soon reunite. The next year, a string of sold-out shows were announced. loudQUIETloud is Matthew Galkin’s 2006 documentary of their performances and some of the circumstances leading up to it.
Documentaries need storylines, and “legendary band reforming” has one that writes itself. Are the Pixies too old? Can lightning strike twice? Do they still have “it”? Are they still relevant in a world that’s changed beyond recognition (in 2003, “alt rock” now meant Evanescence, Linkin Park, and Nickelback)? Also, why do it at all, when there’s ample evidence that they don’t particularly want to?
It’s clear in the film’s first few minutes that the Pixies reunited because of money.
Francis’s solo act (can we admit that The Catholics was his solo act?) was stuck in a rut. Release an album on some indie label, get a 6/10 from a Pitchfork nerd who raves about how cool the Pixies were, make a pittance touring bowling alleys and phone booths, repeat. Santiago and Lowery never even had a rut to get stuck in: their faces hold the sullen desperation of Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. Kim Deal had arguably weathered the post-Pixies years the best (“Cannonball” was the crossover MTV smash her former band had never had), but she was fresh out of rehab, and also had the commercial failure of the third Breeders’ album hanging over her head. Santiago comes up with a funny name for the tour: The Pixies Sell Out. Or it would be funny if it was ironic.
Lowery is blunt about the situation. He states that although royalties from the Pixies had more or less supported him through the nineties, by 2004 this was no longer true. Four years previously the domain Napster.com was registered by a NEU student called Sean Parker, and suddenly the cool thing to do with music was not pay for it. The industry began collapsing. This is the reason why every venerable rock act was (and still is) touring like devils into their 60s and 70s. Live music became the backbone of the industry: you still can’t download a band into your living room on Napster. I regard Sean Parker, who can’t play a note, as one of the defining figures of 21st century music, scarcely less significant than Guglielmo Marconi.
Continuing the legacy of the Pixies is a daunting task on the face of things. We see Black Francis looking terrified, like a man nerving himself up for a 10,000 ft skydive. He repeats affirmations on a couch. “I can do it! People like me! I’m cute!” (Two out of three isn’t bad.) We also see Kim anxiously fretting (in multiple senses), worried that she’ll biff notes and look like an aging fraud on stage.
“Why are they back?” is one question. “Why did they split?” is another, and the film never addresses it, except at slant angles.
The breakup of the Pixies is another big mysteries. “Francis and Kim were fighting” is the usual non-explanation proffered…but why did Santiago and Lowery leave? Part of a good documentary is establishing the leads as characters. Is Black Francis a chill, laid-back teddy bear? Or a slightly sinister, controlling figure? The film never comes down on side or the other, allowing the viewer to make up their own mind. But as Francis himself said, where is my mind?
We sense the rifts between Francis and Kim, which don’t seem to have closed with time. Kim rides on a separate bus to the others, apparently working on material for a new Breeders album. There could be ample reasons for this (ranging from “her desire to stay sober” to “her commitments to her sister” to “she would rather give herself a cervical exam with a trench shovel than ride on a bus with Black Francis”) but the film doesn’t settle the issue. Will there be new Pixies music? Francis seems hostile to the idea. He’d rather talk about his next solo album. When Kim is asked the same question, she responds with “you’re demanding answers to questions that have no answers.” (Sadly, an answer finally came in 2014, when the Kimless Indie Cindy hit a remainder bin near you. It got a 2.5/10 from Pitchfork, which doesn’t even seem possible.)
The documentary’s title is a reference to the infamous loud/quiet songwriting mode of alt-rock, where a soft verse is contrasted with an explosive chorus (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” being a canonical example). But the style here is more quietQUIETquiet. It’s cleanly shot and well-directed, but you still need to listen hard to gain any insight on the Pixies…same as ever, in other words.
Mid-tour, we see Lowery going on a bizarre rant in Kim’s dressing room. Soon after, the band falls apart during “Something Against You”, with Lowery apparently having no idea what song he’s playing. He claims that he couldn’t hear the stage monitors, but Santiago believes he was on drugs. Kim and her sister are visibly having trouble themselves, with terse conversations about whether they can stay dry during a nine-day stopover in NYC.
There are very few scenes of the Pixies interacting with each other, and it always has a weird vibe. Their chemistry is awkward and full of fake laughter. They’re trying to be friends, but there was a reason this band stopped working out in 1993, and probably most of those reasons still exist. We wonder if they’d even want to be in the same room if the checks stopped clearing.
There are also happy times. Moments when the band clicks on stage. Scenes of Santiago and Francis hanging out with their families. The reactions of fans is incredible to behold – however cynical the Pixies reunion might seem – the elation it produced was real. The documentary ends with a Kim Deal superfan being inspired to pick up the bass guitar herself. The Pixies are dark matter, but there’s light matter in the universe, too.
But the stakes in this reunion seem so low. The Pixies are selling out shows…but they’re playing clubs and theaters, not arenas. Fans swarm them for autographs…but it’s ten or twenty people, max. The Pixies weren’t that big in the 80s and they’re no bigger now, even after their innovations have percolated throughout all of mainstream rock. These guys are scrapping hard, not to regain a seat on rock’s throne, but to obtain a nine-to-five income. But is there anything more quintessentially alt-rock?
