Truly The Greatest
Cat Power’s new album is a surprise, to say the least - but the surprise is a good one, and for better or worse, her fan base is about to explode.
Her last album was 2003’s
You are Free, and now she returns with a revolutionary album,
The Greatest. It is satisfying in a way that Cat Power has never been. While her previous work leaves you longing (and this is precisely why it is so
good), the effect of this album is strangely fulfilling. It’s almost…happy. The tunes are even catchy, with rocking roadhouse piano and finger-snapping accompaniments. It is less singular than her other records, but the fact that it is easier to like doesn’t detract from its soulfulness or its sincerity, if anything, it adds to its musicality.
‘True’ followers of Indie rock will no doubt be pshaw-ing when they hear it, with its wide-range potential appeal and anodyne flair. Secretly they’ll be playing it on their ipods – allowed this indiscretion (it IS still on Matador) but somehow indulging in a guilty pleasure. Sure, this album is sad and hopeless in a way that only Chan Marshall can be, but it’s not bleak, and it’s not baleful. Those indie fans not so die-hard in their singularity will be pleased to discover that her lyrics are still nearly-imperceptible, but her melodies now have a prominence. It’s hard to say how much influence her Memphis-based back-up band had, for there is a hint of this more mainstream tendency in some of her later work, especially on 2003’s
You are Free (most notably “I Don’t Blame You” and “Fool”).
Songs like “Living Proof” and “Lived in Bars” would never have been possible on a previous Cat Power album. There are no screeching guitar riffs here, no truculent melodies or atonal lyrics. These are reminiscent of swinging ‘70s southern rock songs. And the fact that her amazing voice is at the front of these songs makes them stunning. These songs are not representative of why we have come to love Cat Power, they are too easy. It has always been the hint of beauty that has kept me coming back to her, but now she allows us full exposure to her exquisite voice. It feels she’s awarded us something - the delight experienced after a prolonged exposure to dissonance.
“Empty Shell” comes closer to being a true country song than most songs that currently try to label themselves ‘country’. With its down-home violin progressions and heartbreaking lyrics it reckons back to the music your pa taught you to know and love; this isn’t a song about drinking whiskey or pick up trucks, it’s about hurt, with a surreal hopefulness that is the true medium of country.
“All that is left is an empty shell / Of my heart that is crushed / I don’t never wanna see / What my mind has seen / When you loved me / Every night every night alone with you / Every night alone now.”
It is somewhat reminiscent of 2003’s “Good Woman,” though the latter’s violin is more menacing and unpolished. But again, the tendency toward this album is evident.
“Could We” is a fun romp, its horn accompaniment reminiscent of Springsteen’s “E Street Shuffle.” Elsewhere I’ve read a lambasting of this tune, but it’s free and easy, characteristics I suppose most Cat Power fans aren’t expecting from her.
The unadulterated beauty of “Where is my Love” would be unthinkable on Cat Power albums of the past. The strings and words are evocative of an interlude in a musical, a beautiful belle staring out her window, Snow White sure that someday her prince will come. It occupies the same eccentric space as Bjork’s harp-accompanied “Like Someone in Love” off
Debut, though somehow a happy fairy-tale is more believable on a Bjork album.
“After it All” is her most successful union of southern blues and her own sound, though it tilts away from her standard toward the country. On this track, we find her lilting and singular voice, backed with fantastic blues piano.
“Hate” and “Love & Communication” are Chan Marshall as we know her. And they are a fitting ending to this wonderful album. They remind us that this apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree, despite what our own expectations may be. To me, this album feels like a more grown up Chan Marshall, one perhaps more concerned with things outside her insular world. It's looser, more accepting of fate, less hateful of circumstance. And I think that’s a fitting reminder to us all. Hopefully it will bring some of our more revolutionary indie lovers back to the basics, reminding us to like it because it’s good, not because we are different for liking it.
Dead Man
Certainly belatedly, I was first introduced to the work of Jim Jarmusch with
Broken Flowers, not even a year ago. My reaction to that film was very mixed. Add that to Netflix’s insistence on saying things like, “Only Jim Jarmusch could make a film like this,” and I was a bit skeptical when I popped
Dead Man into the DVD player last night. But
Dead Man was amazing. It certainly contained the ponderousness of
Broken Flowers, but there was a surprising drive behind
Dead Man and a message that was lacking in the former film.
I have recently discovered a love of westerns, through films like
McCabe and Mrs. Miller and books like
Lonesome Dove, so
Dead Man seemed just a continuation in this blossoming affair. What was surprising was its seeming reluctance to make itself a western; the movie seemed to follow the trajectory of William Blake’s realization that he was acting out a western story. This was tantalizing, and it caused the viewer to discover the film seemingly along with the film itself. I think this was due at least in part to Johnny Depp’s amazing portrayal of his character. He showed the great otherness of the easterner in the west - the fact that he could not understand this culture or what it required of a man. The viewer has the same relationship with the western. It is a foreign culture that we study through these films; it is never something that we can relate to through our past experiences.
The black and white format of the film, of course, reinforced this. In certain scenes Jarmusch made the viewer acutely aware of this with camera tricks. There is an amazing scene where Blake believes he is seeing things in the dark, and three Native Americans in war paint appear to him in the shadows of the trees. Jarmusch carries this off remarkably, and the viewer’s eyes must adjust to the scene as if she too is looking for something in the dark. The characters come out of the background in the way that you find a camouflaged bug in nature movies. It was a fantastic and ingenuitive use of the medium.
The scene with the trappers, played by Billy Bob Thornton, Iggy Pop, and Jared Harris was also marvelous. The speed of the film was slowed down, jarring the viewer from her complacence in the story. The group represented a kind of deformed family unit, with Iggy Pop playing a cross-dresser who plays the female among the men. Besides being hilarious, it also showed how distant the western and its players are from contemporary American society, yet at the same time, how similar in their insistence that anything goes. This idea is reinforced by an interview with Jarmusch, by Jonathan Rosenbaum for Cineaste, (which can be viewed in its totality
here)
“Cineaste: In the Sixties and Seventies, there was an attempt at a sort of makeshift genre that might be called the Acid Western, associated with people like Monte Hellman, Dennis Hopper, Jim McBride, and Rudy Wurlitzer, as well as movies like "Greaser's Palace"; Alex Cox tapped into something similar in the Eighties with "Walker."
Jarmusch: Yeah. And I think when Blake encounters the trappers [Iggy Pop, Jared Harris and Billy Bob Thornton], it's the same thing. It' s like here is a trace element of the family unit that has gotten so perverted out here, because these guys live out in the fuckin' nowhere. Yet there's some slight thread of a family unit that they' ve adapted between themselves—which is absurd on one level, but on another level it's exactly what you're saying. They're way out there.
I don't know if you can hear it, but when Iggy's trying to load his shotgun, he's complaining, "I cooked, I cleaned. . ." Incidentally, I recently came across this interesting Sam Peckinpah quote: "The Western is a universal frame within which it's possible to comment on today." Of course, I only saw this quote after I made the film.”
In his introduction to this interview, Rosenbaum also makes a very intriguing claim about the violence in the film. He says,
“Perhaps the film's most courageous defiance of commercial conventions is a response to the current cinema of violence that is so unsettling that audiences generally can't decide whether to wince or laugh. Every time someone fires a gun at someone else in this film, the gesture is awkward, unheroic, pathetic; it's an act that leaves a mess and is deprived of any pretense at existential purity, creating a sense of embarrassment and overall discomfort in the viewer that is the reverse of what ensues from the highly estheticized forms of violence that have become de rigueur in commercial Hollywood ever since the heyday of Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah, and which have recently been revitalized by Tarantino, among others.”
I think this is spot on. This “defiance of commercial convention” draws us deeper into the film, because we can sympathize with Blake’s awkwardness with a firearm, and it’s a great commentary on the ambiguity we have with the culture of violence that most movies represents.
Lastly, Jarmusch’s choice of soundtrack was genius, and not just because I love Neil Young. The brooding electric guitar that accompanied the fade-ins and outs of each scene was haunting, and oddly appropriate. Obviously this is anachronistic, but if there is a sound created to accompany the events of this film, Neil’s guitar is it.
Kiwi the Child: The guitarist and piano player are HOT!
