Here's a transcription of my interview with RockCritics.com that I've been plugging away at on and off for a week or so (it was weirdly a nice way to decompress from my other transcription work!). I've included pertinent and sometimes contextual or clarifying links throughout, with a list of sources at the end.
Thanks again to Scott Woods and RockCritics.com for the opportunity to spill my guts!
PART I
SCOTT
All right it's Dec. 4 2009, Scott Woods from RockCritics.com[1] – I'm chatting with one of my favorite critics to emerge in the last couple of years, David Cooper Moore, whose various blogs and Tumblrs and web pages and Twitter feeds etc. is really essential reading for people interested in rock criticism and pop music in general. So thanks for doing this, Dave. How's it going?
DAVE
Thank you! I don't think I can live up to that now.
SCOTT
So this is the second time I've interviewed you, sort of – you actually did partake a few years back in the RockCritics.com symposium about blogging, and that was fun.[2] That was in the form of an email questionnaire, so there wasn't a lot of space to converse and chat. So I wanted to follow up because I've been reading your stuff a lot more lately and really getting into it. A lot of your tastes intersect with mine, and you diverge in some key areas as well.
Before we get into the questions I'm just kind of curious—what have you been listening to in the last 24 hours?
DAVE
[to Emily]
Emily, what have I been listening to in the past 24 hours? We listened to The-Dream together. In fact I just wrote a thing on The-Dream, comparing his song “Fancy” to Animal Collective's “My Girls.”[3]
SCOTT
Did you put that up today?
DAVE:
Yeah, a few hours ago.
SCOTT
I love the song “Fancy,” by the way.
DAVE
Yeah, “Fancy”'s great! So I was playing that song and we listened to the album three times in a row or something.
SCOTT
So I forgot to mention, so your wife Emily's there with you, right?
DAVE
Oh yeah she's just hanging out on the laptop here.
SCOTT
So are you allowed to talk about her and stuff?
DAVE
I think so! Yeah, she's giving me permission to talk about her. She's just here to stop me when I start getting a little too pretentious.
SCOTT:
She could even join in the interview at some point. She's a writer but you say she's not really a writer per se? You sent me a blog post where you were talking about the Black Eyed Peas, so I guess you were chatting.[4]
DAVE:
That was a back and forth conversation I was furiously transcribing in real time about “My Humps.” She does creative writing – graphic novels mostly. Comics, sorry, she doesn't like calling them “graphic novels.” So she's a comics artist and we've worked together on a couple of things.
SCOTT
Cool. And is she into music as you are?
DAVE
She's definitely into music, but probably not as much as me, and I think that's a good thing for our relationship. I think our tastes intersected nicely from whatever taste changes happened in the period between 19 and your mid-twenties.
SCOTT
I definitely want to get into that point specifically with you. But before we get into that, give me a little biographical synopsis—I know you almost exclusively through your opinions on music. And I don't really know – like, before we started taping I had to ask you where you're from. You're from Philadelphia, right?
DAVE
Yes.
SCOTT
So just tell whatever facts are relevant. I'm kind of curious—I think when you started blogging you were still in college at that point.
DAVE
Yeah, I was in my junior year of undergraduate college when I started blogging. I was at Ithaca College in upstate New York, and I transitioned between blogs. I kind of crashed into the rock critic scene—intentionally, but I didn't think it would take. But I got a couple of writing gigs basically through college writing I was doing, which you could still do at that time. I got a job at Pitchfork and I wrote there for about six months.[5] And then I kind of stopped because it was too much work. And then I resurfaced about a year later with the blog you're probably going to ask me more about, The Cure for Bedbugs.[6] At that point I'd graduated from undergraduate and moved to Philadelphia almost on a whim, and I'm in graduate school now.
SCOTT
What are you studying?
DAVE
I study film, actually. I do documentary interviews for a living. So if you need any transcriptions of this I'll send you my rates.
SCOTT
So do you actually go out and interview people?
DAVE
I do a lot of educational work and industrial work for what I “do,” and my personal work is all over the place. Depends on what I happen to be doing the past three months – it changes a lot.
SCOTT
So tell me more about the Pitchfork gig – why was it too much work?
DAVE
Oh, it was hard! How many reviews—I think you had to write two reviews a week. And I had gotten into music about three years before I got the job at Pitchfork, which at that time was to me the top of what I saw that I could get with my actual abilities to write. They were kind of the top of the indie/online music scene. They're probably a lot bigger than that now. It was two reviews a week and I was a full-time student, it was...I was staying up really late! So I kind of cut back. I was also doing a disservice to a lot of the albums I was reviewing. I just feel like I didn't quite have the chops yet. So I stopped.
SCOTT
You mean a disservice in a sense of the writing itself, or because it wasn't really your music?
DAVE
It's a little bit of both. The bottom line is I would take on reviews of albums I didn't know very well and I wasn't putting in the effort to get to know very well. And it's not like these were great albums, but I still feel like I wasn't doing what I needed to be doing. I wasn't doing my job very well.
NATASHA BEDINGFIELD – “UNWRITTEN”
SCOTT
So The Cure for Bedbugs was your first actual blog, I assume?
DAVE
Yeah. Well...no, I have another blog. I don't publicize it, but if you check my Blogger history you'll find it. That was my first blog.
SCOTT
What's that one called?
DAVE
It's called Dave's Totally Boss Musings.[7] It was a totally personal thing – I had never written anything about music before. Emily encouraged me to start writing it because I'd talk about [music] so much. She'd say, “why don't you write this down somewhere so that you don't bother me so much?” I started writing there, working out my various critical poses. And then this parlayed into writing at school, and I turned that into a makeshift webzine called Basshead Media.[8] It's kind of like in a Cary Grant movie, where he goes to see the consulate and then when he goes back the next day it's totally emptied out, and it turns out it was a front organization. That was my website—a front organization for promos.
No, we did good work, I'm being facetious. It was a school thing, me and my friends just wrote about albums and interviewed some artists. That was enough to get my foot in the door; Pitchfork was looking for new writers, so I sent them my stuff and they said, “oh yeah, you had a comment war with one of our writers!” They knew me because I'd gotten into a fight with one of their writers about something that he'd written. So they gave me a trial period and then brought me on.
SCOTT
So that's interesting-- whoever was at Pitchfork recognized you from getting into a comments battle with someone else?
DAVE
Yeah it was six comments—I don't remember what it was about. That was enough to get me in the door. I'm not sure the same would be true in 2009; I think the volume of comment wars is probably too great at this point. This is like Indiana Jones going through the bottom of the door and grabbing his hat before it closes. I plan on making many more terrible metaphors in the course of this interview.
SCOTT
All movie related.
DAVE
Probably. I sent them a couple of samples and they gave me and a couple of people a trial run. Some of them are still there—Marc Hogan was in that batch.[9] And they brought a couple of us on. It kind of went really quickly from there. I worked my way up to lead reviews in two months and then I freaked out and...a little too much too soon.
[“Don't Let the Bedbugs Bite,” excerpt]
SCOTT
So eventually you did—you got the Cure for Bedbugs. Which is your primary blog. But you've also got the Tumblr [Cr4Bdbgs].[10] I'm still not fully understanding what's the difference between the two? The Tumblr allows
for more conversation between people or something?
DAVE
Yeah...I kind of hate Tumblr, actually. It's a very easy way to have an insular conversation with a certain group of people. I kind of hierarchize my thoughts into Big Thought, Medium Thought, and Little Thought. Medium thoughts are for Tumblr, little thoughts are...y'know, what I had for breakfast this morning. That goes on Twitter [C4BB].[11] And then if I have a big thought I can stretch it out into some multiple-thousand-word post. That's why Bedbugs posts are down to about once every two months right now—I keep writing all of these medium-sized posts.
I think that it's just the way that conversation has moved. You move to different platforms on the internet to keep up with where the conversations are moving, and sometimes you get stuck somewhere because everyone's there but there's no other alternative for it.[12] I still like writing for the regular blog, but I just don't do it as often anymore.
SCOTT
You aren't shy about jumping onto other people's sites and using their comments boxes. I have this theory that a lot of rock critics, or writers in general, do some of their best writing in comment boxes.
DAVE
Definitely. Well, if you're not writing a premeditated review where you can work out your writing as writing, you're having a conversation with somebody. And a lot of times it helps to be in somebody else's house with their rules. I break other people's rules sometimes and get into trouble by insulting them, but that said I can still, I think, carry on the conversation there in a way that's maybe more productive than trying to bring everything back to this one centralized location. The problem is that you can't keep track of that stuff very well, so read me a comment I wrote somewhere a year ago and I probably wouldn't remember writing it at all.
SCOTT
I was thinking about you writing in so many comment boxes and you have these different pages, it's something that's changed writing a lot in the last decade with the internet. It's not something that's commented on a lot, but there's no such thing as tracking what you do anymore. I mean, you can—there's one thing I like that Frank Kogan does, which is when if he comments on some sites and thinks it's substantial then he'll also post it on his LiveJournal so you can point someone to it.[13] Otherwise it'd be like, I'm an interested reader of a lot of people, but I just can't follow all the conversations. It's kind of out of hand.
DAVE
It's hard enough to follow the conversation as the person having the conversation! To be someone hanging on for the ride is that much harder. I like that idea, too, that you write something so substantial in somebody else's comment thread that you repost it somewhere else. It's almost a sort of idea publicity, you get it everywhere you can. But it always—well, sometimes—ends up getting lost.
SCOTT
So do you still agree with the RockCritics Blogger Symposium where I asked you about comment boxes and you said “there's absolutely no reason not to let the world in”?
DAVE
Oh, yeah. I totally believe that. I don't understand it—I've actually stopped reading a lot of blogs that don't have comment boxes, because I keep wanting to see what the next thing—y'know, most blog posts aren't...
SCOTT
They're not a beginning and an end.
DAVE
They're an idea you've thrown out there. And it's frustrating to see that idea thrown out there like it's the full text.
SCOTT
The finished article, yeah.
DAVE
If I read what somebody said and I want to challenge that, I don't want to have to write it somewhere else and hope that that person just goes there or finds it. I want to be able to say it. Online versions of magazines where other critics write, those aren't the same thing as a blog, where it's really you and the author in the same room together. That's what I like, is anyone willing to get in the room with someone else that's gonna challenge them. If you're not in the room, there's no next step from there.
[Britney Spears “Piece of Me” excerpt]
SCOTT
So why do you think you gravitated toward writing rock criticism specifically?
DAVE
I wrote about this in a recent post called “2001: A Taste Odyssey.”[14] The Poptimist LiveJournal community is doing their best of the decade polls,[15] so I'm going through the songs and trying to remember what I was doing at that point.[16] It's tricky because, basically starting at the beginning of this decade is when I consciously “got into” music. There were a lot of people around me who seemed to have this idiot savant knowledge of music, this trivia overload, and I wanted to be in! I could do it with movies at that point but I couldn't do it with music. So I started listening to everything, and eventually you listen to a lot of stuff. I totally forget your question here!
SCOTT
Just why you gravitated toward rock criticism specifically.
DAVE
Oh yeah! And that seems to be what happens when you get really into music. You are a rock critic. There didn't seem to be any other narratives for me out there. I wasn't somebody who would go join a fan board for a certain artist or whatever, so for me the critical conversation was what you did if you were really into music. It just seemed to be the natural thing. I think I described it in that post as, like, it was never a rebellious thing like back when rock criticism became “a thing,” for me it was safe. The safest way to do something a little dangerous, or a little cool, or something. It was cool to have a sanctioned rebellion. At this point [rock criticism] is so entrenched, and there's so much of it. More than anything, though, I liked to read about what I was listening to. And reading about it led me to rock criticism. If you're really into movies you can go to film school, but if you're really into rock music...I mean, I guess there's technically a Rock School,[17] but there's no...
SCOTT
...No place to study.
DAVE
...No pop music in academia. Yeah, that kind of a practice. You just join the great oral tradition of rock criticism.
SCOTT
Did reading other rock critics of the time turn you into a rock critic? Anyone during that period—I mean, you mentioned Lester Bangs in that post that you did.
DAVE
Yeah, I started with Lester Bangs because, y'know, he was the guy in Almost Famous. I think that's a joke...
[Laughter]
DAVE
Lester Bangs seemed to be the “starting point.” And when you read Lester Bangs for the first time, and you don't know that much about music—I mean, the references and the prose just really jump out and punch you in the face! I mean, I would go and probably spend hours looking up the references he makes, even in an off-hand way. I've always liked critics who can do that—make me want to figure out who the hell they're talking about. Some random obscure reference that he either wrote a piece about—I have the Count Five record, obviously, because you have to have the Count Five record if you've read anything by Lester Bangs—but I also have a lot of weird stuff that I wouldn't have had if I hadn't read Lester Bangs. He makes you want to go and get that stuff. At least he did, when I was sixteen, seventeen.
Then there's kind of a blank spot, because then it moves online, and online I don't remember critical personalities as well. I didn't really delve into the big rock critic personalities—maybe Robert Christgau counts—but online it was a little more intuitive.[18] You'd be reading stuff by people who weren't big name critics, but they were still doing rock criticism. This whole patchwork of critics became my model. All Music Guide and Pitchfork and all these mega-sites.[19]
[Almost Famous excerpt]
SCOTT
You mentioned Lester Bangs and being sixteen or seventeen, and this is at the turn of the decade, right?
DAVE
Yeah.
SCOTT
I'm really curious about this because I don't really conduct a lot of conversations with people your age, frankly. Was that sort of a solitary kind of discovery for you? Did you have other friends that were into that at all?
DAVE
Not really. Just two days ago I wrote the 2002 post [“My Convent Year”]: I'm into music, I've made this decision, I'm going to try to listen to more stuff, figure out what pop music and rock music is all about.[20] And then I have what I call my convent year, which was a very isolated experience. Lots of reading, and forming these historical narratives of what happened in rock music, and building the canon in my own CD binder or whatever.
It was an extremely isolated experience. I had a little group of friends I would hang out with, and they knew a lot about things from the 80's indie scene, y'know, Pixies through Weezer, basically. I guess the Green Album had just come out around that point. So there was that conversation, but it wasn't much of a conversation—they weren't my close friends, we used the music very incidentally. We just drove around and did stupid things. It wasn't like we were sitting around having deep conversations about it.
[The-Dream “Fancy” excerpt]
PART II
SCOTT
So now let's move into what you mentioned to me. When I first asked you about doing this podcast, I said I'm interested in talking to you about their tastes, particularly the teenpop thing. You framed it sort of interestingly in this message—you said your listening this decade went from Arcade Fire to Ashlee Simpson.
DAVE
It was funny, actually, in 2000...what year did the second Arcade Fire album come out? 2006, maybe, Nick Sylvester wrote a review of the second Arcade Fire album [Neon Bible] which he loved, and he said, “I finally understand why I don't like the first Arcade Fire album—because the first Arcade Fire album is teenpop!”[21] So he made this nice little backward connection that a lot of the stuff I was finding in indie music I sort of transferred over to getting into this confessional teenpop.
But the taste transfer was both obviously event-driven and also a very natural evolution. I wrote this review of the Arcade Fire album [Funeral] that's been called, somewhat derisively—y'know, even though you don't know my name, you might know the score I gave this album [on Pitchfork].[22] Which kind of hurts to read, but it's true.[23] I lived through it, I know it's true.
At that point—not immediately after the review, but through the whole process of feeling like I wasn't cutting it as a music critic—I kind of took a break. I found this Word document on my old hard drive, and I was writing what kind of looks like the lost first Bedbugs post: “I can't listen to any music. There's no music that I really want to listen to right now.” And I'm walking around, looking for something else, and I'm not able to find it anywhere. Which is kind of what was leading me to re-start a new way of thinking about writing.
But the taste thing was kind of accidental. Some Pitchfork staffer uploaded the Skye Sweetnam album [Noise from the Basement] to their...I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but, uh...anyway, I found this Skye Sweetnam album. It fell into my lap, y'know, through my own completely individual choices to download music off the internet. Uh, I don't blame any other institution for that.
[Scott laughs]
DAVE
Anyway. So I get this Skye Sweetnam album, and I'm listening to the big single off that, which was “Billy S.,” and something was going on but I didn't know what going on. I thought “Avril Lavigne,” but really I didn't know any Avril Lavigne except for “Complicated,” or “Sk8er Boi,” maybe. But I never thought about her twice. And I say, oh, I got it—it's the ironic Avril Lavigne! And I'm not sure what I meant by that, but it really interested me.[24]
So I got totally obsessed with this song, and with Skye Sweetnam, so I started looking for that online, the same way I'd look for Velvet Underground when I was seventeen, and I came across new critics. I came across Metal Mike Saunders[25] who'd written about Skye Sweetnam,[26] and Chuck Eddy who'd written about her,[27] and so this led me to a couple of new articles that nudged me in this weird direction unintentionally.[28]
But I was also in England at the time, and I think there's just something about going to England that gets you a little more into pop! There's just something in the water there, y'know? I was listening to Kylie Minogue more because Emily loved Kylie Minogue. And I started listening to Daft Punk a lot.
[Lily Allen “LDN” excerpt]
SCOTT
So before this stumbling onto this stuff, did you at any point further back—you haven't really talked about if you're into any music at like age 12 or 13 or something, but did you go through any inevitable phase—I think it's an inevitable phase, though some people maybe skip it—where you kind of didn't want anything to do with bubblegum or teenpop, or any of those kinds of music?
DAVID
I don't know. I don't think so—I think I've unwittingly written knee-jerk anti-bubblegum whatever stuff in my life, or said it. But not passionately or anything. When I was a kid I had three sisters, two through through a remarriage. And an older step-brother who'd listen to Metallica—that was like my ur-text. But I grew up listening to Paula Abdul and New Kids on the Block.[29] And when I listened to music it was Kris Kross, whatever the teenpop was then. Some of the teenpop was hard-edged enough that you could kind of like it when you were an eight or nine-year-old boy. You could listen to Kris Kross, that was kind of cool.
[Kris Kross “Jump” excerpt]
DAVE
I can't remember ever having an explicit stance against it. What got me into it eventually was that there was a more interesting conversation happening about it. I didn't have anything to say about the stuff I was reading or listening to, but this stuff I had something to say about it. It wasn't very good at first, but it was getting me back into wanting to listen to more music. I call it throwing myself back into the trees after pretending I was “above” the trees for a while. The “I can survey the forest” thing. I'm gonna throw myself back into the trees here and see what happens.
It was also cheap! Archaeology of the recent past—you go buy these CDs they mass-produced in 2000 and you can get 'em all for like a quarter! You can get a whole ton of albums that way. I couldn't get promos anymore because I wasn't a rock critic anymore, I wasn't writing anywhere. So yeah, I loaded up with this stuff and started listening to it. Slowly my tastes kind of changed, but really the way I was talking about the music also changed. I was more willing to challenge myself and not accept what I felt I was “supposed” to think about it as the final say. I'm not sure if that was as true before. I was very beholden to the accepted narratives of what you're allowed to say about this band, or what you can say about this kind of music.
SCOTT
Right, and that ties in to what you're saying a few minutes ago, that it was the conversation itself that led you into it. So what made that particular conversation or those conversations a little more interesting? I have this thing about teenpop or bubblegum that anyone who writes about those things seriously is almost out of necessity, even if you kinda don't want to, you're almost forced in a way to defend yourself a little bit. So it produces a kind of passion in your writing, which...I don't want to make a ridiculous blanket statement. But if you're writing about the most accepted indie band or something—not going to say Animal Collective because they're really divisive. Like, Radiohead 8 years ago—you don't have to spend three words defending that you're writing about Radiohead. It's just expected that your'e going to write about Radiohead because you're a rock critic. Whereas if you're writing about Ashlee Simpson, you're kind of writing from the assumption that some people are going to get their back up about writing about this stuff.
DAVE
Yeah, and I think over time that's become more frustrating than it is empowering. At the time it was great. I was like a kid in a candy shop; everything I say is controversial now, great! It led to a lot of really bad writing. Luckily I didn't write a lot of it, it was sort my last gasp of college writing. It was, “ooh, look at me, listening to bubblegum music!!” Which is weird, because I understood that the people who were writing about this stuff that I liked weren't writing about it this way, exactly, but I was.
SCOTT
Say that again?
DAVE
Reading critics that take bubblegum seriously—I mean, not “take it seriously,” like we're all sitting around furrowing our brows...
SCOTT
...Right, just treat it as serious as you'd treat any other pop music.
DAVE
Right, y'know, they aren't gleeful about doing it, they're just doing it, and they're writing great stuff about it. I was still posturing a little bit. You always have to posture a little bit, but I was posturing too much. So I would write about someone like Skye Sweetnam and I would say something like, “Oh, it's fake rebellion for tweens and duh-duh-duh!” And how do I know that? I mean, yes, I've heard people use those stock phrases before, but why did I choose to say that at this point? Because honestly that's not really what she's about at all! The song I was writing about, “Billy S,” is a song she scribbled on notebook paper in eighth grade and she thought it was hilarious. Which is the other thing about bubblegum music—it's really funny! I grew up with Dr. Demento tapes; I like listening to some really stupid shit.
SCOTT
Stupid in the most enjoyable...
DAVE
...With the two “o's.”
[Laughter]
DAVE
Eventually I ended up even more earnest than I was the first time around, I think. I got into teen confessional music, which is very different. It really hits its stride closer to the middle of the decade. It starts off earlier, I'd say maybe Avril, but...Avril's a cartoon, you know? She never did what other people were claiming she did; she allowed the artists who followed her to do it. They bring some seriousness into the bubblegum factory. Around 2004 you have Kelly Clarkson's Breakaway album and Ashlee Simpson's first album [Autobiography], and this stuff that is very earnest and you can't treat it like bubblegum.
SCOTT
Tell me about a few of the teenpop artists who have most interested you in the last decade. You've mentioned Skye Sweetnam, one of the turning point artists, Avril...
DAVE
Skye Sweetnam is kind of a catalyst, but she's also very workmanlike. She had a really, really solid pop-punk album, all killer no filler, bubblegummy, even the stuff that's “serious” isn't that serious. The stuff that I really got into was basically from M2M, Marit Larsen and Marion Raven, onward. The devastation of being a teenager. Which I think is aligned with a lot of rock'n'roll from the 60's but done by teen girls and high-end producers. You can't really make that argument as easily in some places. But they're singing about how their lives are hard because they're teenagers. Or in Ashlee Simpson or Kelly Clarkson's case, they're twentysomethings singing about being twentysomethings.
There's this assumption, a pretty widely-held assumption, that you have to be, like, sixteen or younger – the magic age seems to be a sixteen-year-old – to really love Ashlee Simpson. But I relate more to Ashlee in my mid-twenties than I think I would have if I were in her audience as a sixteen-year-old. Because she's singing about this weird limbo where you're not tied to your family anymore and you're not really tied to the adult world yet, and you're kind of figuring out what that's all about. Which, y'know...it's a very borderline adult thing. Being on the verge of being an adult.
[Ashlee Simpson “Better Off” excerpt]
DAVE
That spoke to me. Ashlee Simpson does it, Kelly Clarkson does—it's getting into R&B. I'm listening to more and more R&B and there's so much of this questioning that is...I'm sure it was always there. I don't want to say “it was only there starting in 2005” or something I'll regret saying. Like, Rihanna does it. It seems to be completely in the DNA of pop music, this earnest, confessional, “I'm growing up and I'm basically an adult but I'm not sure what I'm doing” attitude.
SCOTT
It's funny because the word “confessional” was always associated with real drippy folk music or something and confessional was a bad word in some ways.
DAVE
I think it still is. But there's always gonna be a market for people pouring their heart out. I think there's a certain intersection right now of how music is listened to and how it engages with this idea of a public persona in a way that to me seems more down-to-earth than it might have been in the past. I can't really speak to this, because my life has been all about growing up into this mode of weirdly, intimately knowing about a lot of performers, in a way that I have a hard time believing was the norm before. So at the same time [these artists] are weaving My Life as a Performer into their songs, even if they're Rihanna, or...who else can I use as an example of where this has gone into? I mean, I can also use the anti-examples of Leona Lewis, who I listen to, and it's just like she's trying to be in the nineties. She doesn't sound very “in the now.” She sounds like she's really going for this 90's zeitgeist thing. And I don't get a sense of her as a person in her music.
[Addams Family Values excerpt]
SCOTT
Dave, what do you think are some of the dumbest or most refutable misconceptions or assumptions about teenpop?
DAVE
Well, there are a lot of different kinds of teenpop. Usually the assumptions are about the audience, and the problem with them is that the people using them don't really give a shit about the audience.[30] They're not interested in what the audience thinks; they're using the audience as a stick to beat down the music. I approach it this opposite way, where I listen and I don't really care what a fifteen-year-old girl thinks—I mean, it's interesting to me, but I'm actually figuring this stuff out for me. Admitting when I like it and understanding that you can tell the difference between a song that you do like and don't like within a certain mode of presentation. So I can hate Avril Lavigne and love Ashlee Simpson and be totally fine with that. And I could probably write a better anti-Avril piece knowing her better than somebody who's like, “oh yeah, Avril Lavigne! Teenybopper whatever, but pretty good tunes!”
I have a better understanding, but it's because some people aren't actually interested in the audience or in the music. They're just using it as a way to distance themselves. Which is fine, but if you're gonna go to such efforts to distance yourself I don't understand why you write about it in the first place! Like, fine, distance yourself from it, but y'know, don't then turn around and say because you're so distanced from it you know what's what. Because I don't believe you.
PART III
SCOTT
I find it really interesting, that one really long comments thread.[30-A] Don't feel obliged to talk about any specific writers. But you had the one post where you and...
DAVE
Imon-Say Eynolds-Ray.
SCOTT
...Simon Reynolds...what? Oh yeah, Eynolds-Ray and Ex-Lay went at it for 120 posts or something like that. So summarize for someone who doesn't know anything about what the hell that was about what it was about. Did you guys get anywhere with that conversation?
DAVE
Not really. Well, OK. Once upon a time there was a girl named Paris Hilton who grew up to have a lot of money she was born with and she decided to put out a pop album. And nobody really wanted to listen to it, but everyone wanted to talk about it. So this poses a problem, sometimes, when more people want to talk than want to listen. There were a handful of critics who listened to it and they thought it was a really good dance-pop album. And this statement of opinion, of critical analysis, whatever, gets turned into, “you're defending what Paris Hilton is! You're defending this culture! You're defending a terrible person!” Everything except what we were really saying, which is that the music is really good.
So I got interested in trying to figure out what people thought Paris Hilton was.[31] This was about the time she got sent to jail, and it was really disturbing, you know? As far as I can tell—most people mention this sex tape or whatever, and I look at this and think, oh, so she was the victim of a sex crime, and basically your whole thing about her was that it's her fault? “She's the victim of a sex crime and I can't believe she's famous from that!” If they phrased it that way it wouldn't sound quite as silly and funny to read on the internet.
Anyway, I'm getting off-track here. So I finally get into this and I basically realize that people were talking about talking about the album, but they weren't talking about the album. And plenty of people didn't like the album and wrote perfectly good explanations as to why, but these fights we were getting in weren't about the album. They were about this idea of Paris Hilton being this thing. It just didn't seem to stick. It certainly didn't stick to the album, but it also didn't seem to stick to her. It seemed like she was being used as this figurehead for a lot of really weird assumptions about things like how pop production works, or what the agency of a teenpop starlet, or whatever you want to call it, is. But these arguments don't hold water and it has nothing to do with Paris Hilton, it has to do with these arguments.
She has complete executive production control over the album, because it's a vanity project, but she has no creative control over it, because she's Paris Hilton. Clearly. She had all of the control over the album and none of the control over the album. This is just the “pure” version of a lot of assumptions that get made, mostly by people who don't listen to and don't care about mainstream pop music, and get pinned to lots of performers. Not just somebody who's as obviously icky as Paris Hilton. So that was interesting to me.
I have no interest in Paris Hilton particularly as a human being, but I am interested in what people are saying about her because a lot of it seems kind of sinister. And I think this is maybe on the wane. I think we hit some kind of bottoming out point with Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan—let's gawk at their mental breakdowns—around 2007.[32] I think that we've kind of rebounded from that a little bit. But Paris was definitely right in there.
SCOTT
I think that the great piece you wrote on her was “Paris and the Pop Star Terrorist Fun House.”[33]
DAVE
That was a first listen.
SCOTT
That's great. What I like is that it is your first listen, and you're writing very casually, and that's the voice that comes through, a very casual sort of experience. And a little bit on the nonchalant side. Like, “this is OK, it's pretty good.” But at the same time it comes out as a bit of a passionate defense of her. It's really good writing for that reason—I think it's one of the best things on Paris Hilton that I've read, because you're trying to sort of delve into the tunes and figure out if you like them, not being totally convinced, yet it's quite passionate in parts. It's an odd sort of position.
DAVE
Do you have a passionate quote? I don't remember any passion from it! I remember the nonchalant part, but not the passion.
SCOTT
Passion is maybe a slightly weird term, but you go quite into depth about things like talking about the vocal technique, and how much the sound is really moving you in a way. But the point I'm making is you're really delving into it and listening to it, and it's a really neat position you're in there. You're not trying really hard to convince anyone that it's really great, and you're not—you're going into the Stylus review, it's in part a response to the Stylus review, which was a real lame diatribe...[34]
DAVE
That's where the “army of producers” comes out, this sort of army of pop generals. I imagine them all like these ghost World War I Germans, with the pointy helmets, kaisers, whatever. They're all coming out and ready to do battle.
SCOTT
Right. That's the great part, at one point in the review you're talking about her vocals, the technique of stacking the vocals, and you call it an “army of vapidity.” And yet you mean it as a compliment, and it totally made sense to me! I think by army of vapidity you're saying there's a weightlessness to it, not that it's stupid. People are correct technically when they say Paris isn't a good singer—she's not a great singer, let's put it that way—but she uses her voice, or her voice is used, it could be a bit of both, in a way that is really effective and really interesting.
DAVE
It's funny, sometimes they use so many overdubs it's like they're doing an avant-garde experiment in vocal manipulation, but they're not—they're just using more and more of these weaker voices.
[Paris Hilton “I Want You” excerpt]
DAVE
You could never do that with someone like Kelly Clarkson or Beyonce—they're voices can't be stacked together like that. You put two Kelly Clarksons together on the track...
SCOTT
It'd kill ya.
DAVE
That's some heavy-duty beltage right there. And that's if she's singing quiet. But with Paris you can put a hundred Parises together and you can reconfigure them and make 'em do weird harmonies, and it kind of works! I think there are other kinds of music where no one bats an eyelash at that kind of application of the human voice, where it's not meant to be front and center. But the issue is that people want to blame Paris Hilton for something, so if it's because she can't sing then so be it. The technical ability to sing—see, this is my big Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera thing. Christina Aguilera can blare a little louder than Britney can, but Britney has always had better songs than Christina Aguilera.
SCOTT
I agree.
DAVE
Almost song for song.
SCOTT
I can't stand “Ain't No Other Man.” I think in some ways it's one of the worst singles of the decade.
DAVE
Oh that's a whole other issue, this sort of, “let's go back to what I believe the 1930's might have been like...”
SCOTT
This fake soul thing.
DAVE
Just awful. “I watch a lot of TV and have this idea of a whole decade I'm going to...” I dunno.
SCOTT
Let's go back to Paris just a minute. It's funny to do this interview and to talk so much about Paris Hilton because it's not something people talk about so much nowadays, but I think it's one of the most intriguing stories of the decade. And I really like the album. It's funny, because the thing that a lot of the Paris haters...a lot of the things they would say that a lot of the people who like the album are guilty of, some of them I would actually say, “yeah! If that means I'm guilty I am!”
I like the fact that it's a bit of a “fuck you” move in some ways for a critic to do that. And the fact that it is Paris Hilton, and how outrageous that someone like Paris Hilton has put out a good record. For me that does become part of what I like about it. I wasn't looking for it initially, but then when I did start to like the record, thinking about it more, I did kind of glom on to that angle a little bit, too. The risk of trying to make that part of your reasoning. You'd never make it the full reasoning, that's where you'd kind of fall apart and sound ridiculous. You kind of risk playing into the hands of what the haters are saying.
DAVE
A lot of times—and I hate to use the word “haters”—a lot of anti-Paris people who second-guessed any legitimate enjoyment that is possible with that album also projected some crazy shit onto what the people who liked the album. Frank Kogan wrote about how the contrarian critical stance is intertwined with his own sense of politics; he talked about being vaguely for the Vietnam War as a kid, and then seeing people who were protesting it getting rocks thrown at them, which made him identify with the people getting rocks thrown at them.[35] And this somehow got turned into, in various venues, the argument that Paris Hilton, and the debate about the Paris Hilton album, is analogous to the debate about Vietnam.[36] [37]
I was just like, what planet are you people on? It's interesting, because the whole point of that is that sometimes when somebody seems to be maligned unfairly it gives you a weird reason to want to invest something in them, even if it doesn't pan out eventually. Y'know, I listened to the Kevin Federline album and I still think he's a huge douche!
SCOTT
The what album?
DAVE
The Kevin Federline album [Playing with Fire]. Y'know, Britney's husband, K-Fed, same year as the Paris Hilton album. And in every single song, or most of the songs, he's just saying “I'm rich! I'm Britney Spears's husband!” Yeah, and you're kind of a jerk and the song isn't very good! Paris Hilton could have made that album, but she didn't. She made the album with “Nothing in This World” on it, which is a really good smooth dance-pop version of the Max Martin “Since U Been Gone” thing. They mixed “Since U Been Gone” and a Kylie Minogue song or something. And “Not Leaving Without You,” which a friend of mine—Ross Hoffman, who probably wrote the best thing I've ever read on Paris Hilton. He went through and discussed how there is a character on the album and he doesn't care if it connects back to the real Paris Hilton. Just describing this character over on his blog, Mincetapes.[38]
He said that he would program this song, “Not Leaving Without You,” on his DJ mixes and nobody knew it was Paris Hilton and everybody thought it was fine. He thought he'd have some sort of social experiment—I don't think it ever panned out. I don't think anyone ever came and tried to kill him for dancing to a Paris Hilton song. But it's interesting, because these are just good dance-pop songs. I'm really fascinated in what people want the conversation of the people who like this album to have been about, because it says a lot about poor thinking about how pop production happens, or the role of co-writing.
I read something that said, “she didn't write it and you won't even care.”[39] I think that was the Pitchfork song review. She did write it! She has a co-writing credit! I mean, you can do some research and see if performers who have co-writing credits, that's really a sham so they can just get a bigger cut of the money. But frankly I believe it when they put a co-writing credit on. Why should it be any less true for Paris Hilton for this song than it is for Rihanna, who remade a song by a male singer [James Fauntleroy], added a bridge to it—she had a co-writing credit and the bridge completely transforms the song. That's an important writing addition.
SCOTT
What song is that?
DAVE
It's called “Te Amo,” it's on her new album.[40] It's been described variously as a “lesbian farce”[41] and something about dancehall's value system,[42] which I assume is a reference to at least mild homophobia. I mean, I don't know that there's any dancehall value system that's that welcoming of alternative lifestyles.
SCOTT
Wow, this is a new thing to me. Holy cow.
DAVE
It's a great song. A male songwriter wrote this song about this really beautiful Latin woman comes up to him and starts dancing with him in the club, but then she puts his arms around him and says, “te amo,” and it's too much, no no no! And he says, “te amo—doesn't that mean I love you?” Like, yeah, right, you don't know what “te amo” means.
But when Rihanna does it, it's still a woman that's putting her arms around [Rihanna], and it becomes this lesbian dance, and a lot of people stop there. But what happens is that Rihanna adds this bridge into the song where they go out onto the beach together and dance together under the moonlight. And she says, “we can't touch but I want you to watch me dance.” Just...what the fuck was that? It completely changes the song! So this whole idea of “te amo, don't it mean I love you,” it's not this stupid “you don't know what it means” question—[Rihanna] doesn't understand what it means for this woman to be in love with another woman, and there's something sad about that, that she doesn't understand. The music is really bittersweet, kind of haunting.
So there's something really interesting going on in this song, but part of it has to do with the fact that Rihanna's a co-writer, I think. Again, I don't really want to go into the studio and make sure that she wrote that down on a piece of paper, but she does seem to have had a major input, however actively, on this song being transformed into something bigger.
[Rihanna “Te Amo” excerpt]
DAVE
Co-writing became the teenpop paradigm in this decade, around the middle of the decade.[43] Co-writing became the norm. So you see professional songwriters like Kara DioGuardi and Linda Perry, who would have these very high-profile collaborations with the artists. And I feel that there's a general disdain for the idea that anything could come out of this that is really a combination of the two voices—really it's just the professional; it couldn't possibly be the performer. But I just feel like I trust my ears on this one. I hear something different when Kara DioGuardi works with different singers—I was about to say actresses, hm—and that has to have something to do with the singer. I don't believe that there's just this pop factory that's churning out all these songs and sometimes they go to this singer and sometimes they go to that singer.
There really does seem to be a major difference and it's bringing this confessional co-writing element, where two people go shoot the shit in the studio and Kara DioGuardi has a couple of really good lines, and Ashlee Simpson has a couple of ideas about feelings that she's had about something, and they become a new song. That's gotta be a valid form of collaboration.
SCOTT
And even if you do do a sort of decade comparison, or compare it back to teenpop or bubblegum from earlier decades—I like a lot of bubblegum throughout the whole pop history—but there wasn't as much urgency in many ways to earlier teenpop than what you got following Kelly Clarkson, maybe Ashlee Simpson.
DAVE
Well jeez, I mean Kelly Clarkson, “because of you I'm afraid, mom.” Just, jeez. She's completely destroyed for life in making any kind of serious intimate connection with another human being and she's blaming her parents. In fact she's blaming her mother for not being able to stand up to her abusive father—that's what seems to be happening in the song. You're not going to get that—I mean, first of all you're not going to get that on Radio Disney before 2004 because they won't allow it past the censors. They wouldn't allow a song about divorce on—“Let's Stay Together for the Kids” by I think Everclear...well no, Everclear had the one song and then “Let's Stay Together for the Kids” was Blink-182. But the point is, the gatekeepers for the “pure” teenybopper audience on Radio Disney would never let that through. But by 2004, they're playing “Because of You” on heavy rotation, and there's a lot of really devastating stuff in that song. But there's a lot of devastating stuff in most of the confessional teenpop—not all of it hits you over the head quite as hard as “Because of You” does.
I'm interested in “Because of You” because it became, like, a karaoke staple. And I'm like—do people go up in karaoke bars and sing that song and not realize what this is about? I guess it's as true of any other song that's about a subject you don't think about twice, but in this one it seems really explicit. It sounds like a song that's devastating, it is a song that's devastating, the lyrics are devastating. It's not like “Afternoon Delight,” everyone knows it's about sex. This is serious...this is some serious stuff.
SCOTT
You pay pretty close attention to lyrics. Do you write a fair bit about lyrics?
DAVE
I do. I feel like that's actually—not a failing, but it can sometimes, you can sometimes take your eye off the ball. I was writing about this Animal Collective song “My Girls,” and I was obsessing—these lyrics are so terrible! And then I listened to the song again and though, you know, you really can't hear the lyrics. If I wasn't reading the lyric sheet right now, I would absolutely never have that reaction that I have to it. And frankly, whether the lyrics are bad or not, they're different when you hear them than when you read them on a piece of paper. I think that sometimes being overly sensitive to lyrical construction can be a problem.
At the same time, I do tend to like, especially in teenpop, the people who write really good lyrics. The key difference between Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson and Ashlee Simpson—they may all use similar guitar sounds or whatever—Kelly Clarkson and Avril Lavigne more obviously share Clif Magness, he's like the Dark Guitar Sound of Avril Lavigne. They may share the sounds but their words are completely different. Avril Lavigne has never had a deep thought in a song ever. And she's had a lot of different songwriters and a lot of different songs—I'm probably doing her a disservice, I know there are a couple of interesting songs on, like, her second album—she has a couple of good songs. But the fact is, Ashlee Simpson has good lyrics almost always. And really good lyrics.
“It's been three days / You come around here like you know me / Your stuff, my place / Next thing you know you'll be using my toothpaste.”
This is the first verse of a song, and you have an immediate understanding of exactly what just happened. My friend Erika Villani,[44] who writes for the Singles Jukebox,[45] pointed out,[46] look at how well this character is defined in the first half of the first verse! Immediately! It's got a sort of internal rhythm, but the words are much more evocative than “you're a jerk.” “You suck.” “I can't believe I was with you for so long.” Well, great, thanks. That's revelatory, really.
[Ashlee Simpson “Love Me for Me” excerpt]
PART IV
SCOTT
So is Ashlee Simpson probably your favorite artist of the decade?
DAVE
Oh yeah, definitely. Up there. I give Arcade Fire the co-mantle.
SCOTT
So I was gonna ask, what happened with your Arcade Fire...so are you still into them?
DAVE
I was just listening to them. I'm past whatever agitation I had in 2004, 2005. I gotta be honest, when you're 20 years old and you write a review that actually seems to have made an impact and you get made fun of a lot, y'know, that doesn't feel great for your ego. But I got over it, y'know. And looking at their songs again I realize that there's a lot of humor in this really obviously earnest heart-on-sleeve emo whatever sentiment. Emo has changed since 2004—a lot—so when I say that now I can't say it the same way I could then. But they also had this weird, giddy sense of humor in it that made the difference. And I'm listening to their next album [Neon Bible], and it just seems very dour. I kind of want the vampires—the cops show up at the end of the song, “Neighborhood #2,” and the sirens are flashing and they turn into disco lights and everybody starts dancing in the street. They don't have anything like that on their second album.
SCOTT
You and Frank Kogan probably are the only two critics I know of who placed Ashlee Simpson.
DAVE
There's a lot of critics, actually, who are on board with Ashlee Simpson. Some of them are in the same orbit—Chuck Eddy and Frank Kogan placed I Am Me on their Pazz and Jop ballots in 2005 and so had I, so I clicked my name and it's Frank Kogan and Chuck Eddy and...David Moore. I'm like, oh that doesn't look right...this is weird. Here's Frank Kogan, here's Chuck Eddy and here's this dude.
And there's guys like Australian critic Tim Finney,[47] who's written some great stuff about Ashlee Simpson's lyrics. It is hard to write about Ashlee's music—I think Chuck Eddy's better, probably, at getting across a sense of what that music is like. But there's a bunch of us, I think. I don't think there's any plan to start evangelizing for Ashlee Simpson at all, I think Frank Kogan's gotten a couple of subtle things in. He got Ashlee Simpson into his greatest songwriter of all time blurb about Bob Dylan in Paste Magazine, the critical feat of the decade.[48] And without comment! Like, “Bob Dylan, like Ashlee Simpson now...” doesn't even bat an eyelash. I'm glad that got through.
I think this is something that I was talking to someone today or yesterday about—I don't ever expect anybody to necessarily see what I'm seeing in this music. But I do kind of expect them, if they're going to write about it anyway, to take some time to figure out what's going on. I remember a friend of mine in college, really sweet guy, hated Ashlee Simpson. And I told him this is a great album, and he went and listened to the whole damn thing! He came back and said, “you know, I listened to it and a really didn't like it.” I'm like, jesus, thank you for listening to this album! Usually I get into a shouting match about why—I seem to remember getting into a shouting match with someone in college. I think we both were not, uh, toxicated. Anyway, for him to go out and listen to this thing was enough for me. I don't need him to love the album.
But there're a lot of people who've found something in it, and they tend to be people who have surveyed the field Ashlee Simpson is in somewhat internally and understand the differences between what Ashlee Simpson is doing and what people who are also doing something similar to Ashlee Simpson are doing not well. Or not as well. You listen to P!nk. You listen to Avril Lavigne. You listen to Kelly Clarkson, to the entire scope of people who most people will lump together as a homogenous group of performers—I don't want to say “most people,” but plenty of cultural commentators I've read. And it's like a taste test. They found the difference between Coke and Pepsi.
But I don't necessarily expect someone to come to that conclusion. So you can take that for what it's worth.
SCOTT
How closely do you follow producers? Producers and songwriters obviously are an integral part of all pop music, obviously, but they have a different type of prominence, maybe, within the teenpop world. There is a lot of interchangeability—you'll have, what's his name, Doctor Luke?
DAVE
Dr. Luke—“Lakare Lukacz!”
SCOTT
So his name will be stamped on, it seems like it's on hundreds of records.
DAVE
He's on everything! You can do the auteur reading of Max Martin and Dr. Luke. I once did it by notes—you start off with the climactic note, in “since you been gone” it's the “since you been.” That's the climactic note, and those increase over the course of different performers, until by the time you get to the Veronicas' [“4Ever”] they're doing like nine. So you could do stuff like that.
But you know, I take the producer in, but I've always been drawn to the face of the music. And sometimes the face is the producer. But even when Alison Iraheta—don't even know how to pronounce...some of these names I read on the internet all day and I may have just mispronounced every name. Wait, it's Kelly Clay-erkson? Uh, that's a joke.
So Alison...Eye-raheta, Ee-raheta, comes out with the bog standard Max Martin cheerleader stomp thing...
SCOTT
Where is this, on Jukebox?
DAVE
It's a song called “Friday I'll Be Over U.”[49] We reviewed it on the Singles Jukebox and it's floating around out there. And even though I'm seeing this as a Max Martin or Dr. Luke—I forget who it was –one of their productions, I'm still interested in this performer and what kind of career she's developing through these producers. It may just be a personal taste thing. I don't follow the producers as closely as I follow the careers of the artists.
SCOTT
The singers themselves, yeah.
DAVE
I don't know why. I guess I just like that all of these people work together to create this thing. This is the face of it. You're not supposed to know what Max Martin looks like.
[New York Dolls “Looking for a Kiss” excerpt into Kelly Clarkson “Since U Been Gone” excerpt]
SCOTT
I think it was Sasha Frere-Jones, probably in 2004 or 2005, I think it was him who claimed that “Since U Been Gone” was a genre.[50] Is that right?
DAVE
Yeah, it definitely became—or a subgenre, maybe. But you know, when you say that, though, most of those songs were written by Max Martin. I would bet that that genre of songs, he was a producer on every single one of those things. I can name a million of them and a lot of them are by him. I think, “what's the male 'Since U Been Gone'?” Well, you've got Ashley Parker Angel and you've got Backstreet Boys.
SCOTT
So Max Martin is the genre.
DAVE
Max Martin might be a genre. Which makes sense, I guess. There are signature producers—Timbaland, The-Dream now has a pretty signature sound. You can usually tell. Not just The-Dream, it's also Tricky Stewart and Los de Maestro. Again, names I've never pronounced.
SCOTT
I know you're doing your yearly “taste odyssey” type of pieces, but are you doing any decade-end thing? There's the yearly list you sent.
DAVE
There's not much I can add. What can I add? The second Cansei de Ser Sexy album was underrated—it's called Donkey—and Keke Palmer is awesome. Beyond that you probably know everything else. I got my three artists that nobody paid attention to. I'm actually more interested in trying to take a look at where I was—this was my first adult decade! The first decade where I can not talk about it like, “this is the year I learned to read!” It's interesting to track that kind of development. I'm still pretty young for an autobiography or something but it helps to keep trying to re-figure out how the personal development happened along with the music.
Part of what I think I lost in those beginning stages through my first experiences writing was that I wasn't putting myself as much into the writing I was doing. I was trying to keep myself at a distance, because I was a little vulnerable. You don't just come out in a record review and say “I don't know very much about this music but I am writing a record review about it, so I better figure that out now.” Whereas I actually would feel more comfortable writing a review like that now. Which would probably make it a much better review than me trying to get up on stage, flail around, and hope everybody thinks it's dancing. Just be a little more honest.
As far as trends in the decade, I dunno. I feel like...I'll probably have something to say about it, I just don't know if I'll have something to say the five minutes before the ball drops.
SCOTT
What are some of your favorites of the last year, 2009?
DAVE
It was a weird year. This was a year I had no idea where I was gonna like something. The-Dream [Love vs. Money] is my #1. I think it's pretty much set in stone. I've got Shakira's album [She-Wolf] on there. It's a very slight album, nine tracks plus Spanish versions, and there's even a song I kind of hate, and it's still my #2 album. Rihanna's album [Rated R] is on there now. Sometimes you talk about an album so much it feels wrong not to give it a place somewhere. There are so many albums like that, especially in that period of 2006 to present, where I was talking about a lot of albums that I didn't necessarily like as much as I liked talking about. Paris Hilton was actually not one of those. I'm thinking of stuff like the Veronicas' first album [Secret Life Of...], a very uneven album that I put at #5 on one of my top ten lists, and I don't even like that album very much. But I talked about it so much...how am I gonna ignore something that took up half a year?
SCOTT
And talking about it is partly the point.
DAVE
Rihanna's album is kind of like that, though I really like listening to the album. I like the Lily Allen album [It's Not Me, It's You], it's flawed but I like it.[51] I like the Lonely Island [Incredibad], the Saturday Night Live parody band. They're on my top ten list—they won't get out of the top ten! I guess they're just in the top ten, this novelty album. I was kind of expecting something to take its place, but that's fine, if that's where it ends up. To me that seems like the measuring stick—if the Lonely Island cannot get out of my top ten then either I haven't heard enough music or there's something weird about 2009.
SCOTT
Do you know what your favorite single of the year is?
DAVE
It's not a single, it's a song that was supposed to I guess kind of supposed to be a single off the new Dr. Dre album with T.I., it's a song called “Shit Popped Off.” IT's like the nostalgia song for 90's Dr. Dre. They're standing in the club and nobody's dancing, and then T.I. comes in and puts on “California Love” and everybody starts dancing. What I love is that it's like a middle school dance, because all the guys are on one side and all the girls are on the other side and nobody's dancing with each other. So I love that T.I. went to this club that was a middle school dance until he put on some Dr. Dre on. It's a song about how T.I. got dressed and went to a party. There's just something about it that I haven't been able to stop listening to.
[T.I. “Shit Popped Off” excerpt]
DAVE
So that's my symbolic #1—this is the new age where a “single” doesn't mean anything anymore, so it's very hard to keep track of what is a single. This one certainly is not a single, but it is my #1.
[Almost Famous excerpt]
SCOTT
So Dave is there anything you're dying for me to ask you that I didn't?
DAVE
Dying for you to ask me?
SCOTT
“Oh I hope he asks me that about that!” Obviously there wasn't!
DAVE
“Where can I send your check?”
[Laughter]
SCOTT
I don't think you'd have to think about the answer if that was the case.
DAVE
Maybe I'll go on the record as saying that I think I've made, in my entire professional music career, I've made $170.
SCOTT
That's not bad!
DAVE
In six years of writing. That's my advice to the young folks—you can hope to make about $190 in six years.
SCOTT
That's pretty realistic now, I think.
DAVE
It's just funny.
SCOTT
Would you want to write regularly for a real magazine, whatever a real magazine is now?
DAVE
At this point I probably would.
SCOTT
But would you like to organize your writing in such a way—I'm not implying the your writing now that you put on Cure for Bedbugs isn't...
DAVE
You mean would I be willing to tone down the bile that drips out of my...
SCOTT
No, I mean would you be willing to work within more defined word counts and all that stuff?
DAVE
I love word counts. I liked writing for Stylus Magazine a lot because I had a deadline and I had a word count. It's online, so it's not that strict, but I had to think about how to approach writing something much differently. I think my prose was a little stilted, I was still working on my “official voice” or whatever the hell it was. But I liked that exercise. And I don't think I would want a regular reviewing or music writing career, because it's not where my professional interests lie—in what I want to do to be paid. To provide the four walls and adobe slats for my girls. I wanna do something else to do that, to get my social stats up. But I would love the opportunity to write somewhere more formally. I think it ultimately improves my writing. And it also gets me to write something that's coherent and not expect the comments to do the heavy lifting for me.
SCOTT
So what's Emily saying right now?
DAVE
Oh, she's asleep, long asleep.
SCOTT
So she wasn't enthralled...
DAVE
She was enthralled for a time, and then she was tired. I think she's heard most of this before.
SCOTT
Alright. Well that's awesome, Dave, I appreciate you taking the time. I had a lot of fun, that was great.
DAVE
Alright, see ya.
[Fergie “Glamorous” excerpt]
SOURCES and REFERENCES
1: Rockcritics.com, http://rockcritics.com
2: Rockcritics.com Music Blogger Symposium, Oct. 3, 2007.
3: “The-Dream - “Fancy” and Animal Collective – 'My Girls'” Cr4Bdbgs, Dec. 4, 2009.
4: “Hump Day,” Cure for Bedbugs, May 30, 2007.
5: Pitchfork.com, http://pitchfork.com, Aug. 15, 2004 – January 25, 2005
6: The Cure for Bedbugs, http://www.cureforbedbugs.com
7: Dave's Totally Boss Musings, http://bossflicksnpicks.blogspot.com/
8: Basshead Media Archives, http://bassheadarchives.blogspot.com/ [bassheadmedia.com is now defunct]
9: Marc Hogan, Des Noise, http://www.desnoise.com/
10: Cr4Bdbgs, http://cureforbedbugs.tumblr.com
11: C4BB, http://twitter.com/cureforbedbugs
12: Tom Ewing, “Chartopia,” Poptimist #23. Pitchfork, July 10, 2009.
13: Koganbot Livejournal, http://koganbot.livejournal.com
14: “2001: A Taste Odyssey.” Cure for Bedbugs, Sep. 27, 2009.
15: Poptimists Livejournal Community, http://community.livejournal.com/poptimists
16: Cure for Bedbugs, History of Jop tag (notes on 1986 - 2003), http://www.cureforbedbugs.com/search/label/History%20of%20Jop
17: School of Rock, http://www.schoolofrock.com/index.php
18: Robert Christgau.com, http://www.robertchirstgau.com
19: All Music Guide, http://allmusic.com/
20: Cure for Bedbugs, “My Convent Year,” Dec. 2, 2009
21: Nick Sylvester, “The Down Side.” The Boston Phoenix, March 6, 2007.
22: “Arcade Fire – Funeral,” Pitchfork, Sep. 12, 2004.
23: Michelangelo Matos, “Inside Music: Arcade Fire.” MSN.com, March 6, 2007.
24: “Irony, Honesty, and the Like-Like,” Stylus Magazine, May 23, 2007.
25: Angry Samoans MySpace, http://www.myspace.com/theangrysamoans
26: Various, “Skye Sweetnam Is the Worst Thing to Happen to Popular Music in 2004.” I Love Music message board.
27: Metal Mike Saunders, “All Ears: Disney Dreams Up the Best Radio Station in 30 Years.” Village Voice, March 14, 2000.
28: “All Ears After All These Years: Tracking Radio Disney Through Its Terrible Tweens.” Buzzsaw Haircut, April, 2006.
29: “Boyz II Men Changed My Life (and I didn't even notice),” Cure for Bedbugs, Oct. 19, 2006.
30: “Outside Looking In,” Stylus Magazine, Feb. 21, 2007.
30-A: “G-Rack Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry,” Cure for Bedbugs, June 13, 2007.
31: “What Has She Done?” Stylus Magazine, Sep. 21, 2006.
32: “The Tween Trap,” Stylus Magazine, Jan. 24, 2007.
33: “Paris and the Pop Star Terrorist Funhouse,” Cure for Bedbugs, Aug. 21, 2006.
34: Jayson Greene, “Paris Hilton – Paris.” Stylus Magazine, Aug. 21, 2006.
35: Frank Kogan, “Paris Is Our Vietnam.” Las Vegas Weekly, June 29, 2007.
36: K-Punk, “Choose Your Weapons.” k-punk, Aug. 12, 2007.
37: Anwyn Crawford, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun?” Loops Journal, July, 2009.
38: Ross Hoffman, “heiress to the throne: dancing in the royal suite,” Oct. 11, 2006.
39: Sean Fennessey, “Track Review: Paris Hilton - “Turn It Up,” Pitchfork [online source missing].
40: “Just to be clear, pt. 2...” Skyecaptain's Journal, Nov. 19, 2009.
41: Ryan Dombal, “Rihanna – Rated R.” Pitchfork, Dec. 2, 2009.
42: Ann Powers, “Rihanna's 'Rated R.'” Los Angeles Times Blog, Nov. 23, 2009.
43: Frank Kogan, “The teens are cool but they burn out.” Las Vegas Weekly, Aug. 2, 2007.
44: Erika Villani, Pop/Culture, http://girlboymusic.tumblr.com
45: The Singles Jukebox, http://thesinglesjukebox.com
46: Various [comment thread], “Embracing the Ashlee Whirlpool.” Koganbot's Journal, Aug. 9, 2007.
47: Tim Finney, various posts, “Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread.”
48: Frank Kogan, “#1: Bob Dylan.” Paste Magazine, July 10, 2006.
49: Various, “Alison Iraheta – Friday I'll Be Over You.” The Singles Jukebox, Nov. 20, 2009.
50: Sasha Frere-Jones, “Chemistry.” S/FJ, June 29, 2006.
51: Various, “Lily Allen – 'Not Fair.'” The Singles Jukebox, March 27, 2009.
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