The Tris McCall Report

Notes From The Front, July 20, 2002

With Pink finding her own behaviour so irr-i-TAYT-ing, Eminem suggesting we all need a little con-tro-vers-EE, and Avril Lavigne's poseur boyfriend getting her frus-TRAY-ted, we are now in the golden age of hit radio mispronunciation. Just about every song in heavy rotation on Z-100 this summer features a obvious boner or two in its chorus, and forced rhyme, awkward syllable stretches, and downright weird accents are now the rule rather than the exception. Just as Bob Dylan's mid-sixties records opened space in popular music for colloquialism, dialect, and conversational delivery, the recent spate of syntax-mangling white metal-rappers (you know who they are) have increased our collective susceptibility to lazy diction and articulation. I'm not sure it's such a terrible thing, it's kind of funny, really….

Anyway, the clouds have parted, those white metal-rappers have mostly wilted in the sunshine, and hit radio is once again an enormous pleasure to listen to. The current dominant mode in the top-40 finds young girl performer-writers like Lavigne, Michelle Branch, Ashanti, and Vanessa Carlton penning diaristic, heartfelt accounts of relationship problems, boy problems, insecurities; the usual gamut of fetching teenage concerns. It's an old formula, but it's not one we've revisited recently -- we seldom trust young girl singer-songwriters enough to give them this kind of podium. During the last summer of girl power, after all, Brandy and Monica were forced to stage a fight, and enough catcalls, misplaced nastiness, and unjustified acts of derision were heaped upon the Spice Girls to bury the careers of a truckload of divas. Popular culture has never been a friendly place for women writers, and it's inspiring to see so many decent young voices buck the odds and climb to the top of the charts…

The piano and string-driven "1000 Miles" has been a constant presence on hit radio for the past several months, and as poor Billy Joel checks himself into a rehab center, let's hope he can take some pride in how much of "Summer, Highland Falls" Carlton has opted to lift. The arrangement suggests Turnstiles or The Stranger as surely as Maxwell invokes Marvin Gaye, and in choosing an antecedent to follow, I give Carlton credit for choosing an interesting one. I've always felt that if rock history had been written by women, Joel's colorful and contoured back catalog would get more critical props than it currently does; as it is, Carlton clearly knows a goldmine of underutilized pop tropes when she hears them, and judging by the gloss and theatricality of her debut, I don't think she's too worried about needing to drop the names of any hip influences. She's an earnest and forceful singer, too -- certainly I, jaded sybarite that I am, would prefer more irony, literary or otherwise, but just as the massive sweep of the "Iris" (or "Black Balloon") justifies the singleminded intensity of the Goo Goo Dolls's sentiment, Carlton carries her grandiose production with her conviction, and, like Johnny Rzeznik, manages to communicate a human-scale believability in the teeth of blatant overproduction…

Perhaps Avril Lavigne (or AVRIL, as she now has been renamed, presumably by handlers so worshipful of conventionality that they fear the general public will be turned off by vaguely unusual consonant combinations in their artist's last name) lacks Vanessa Carlton's production budget, or maybe her taste runs more toward intimate arrangements. Certainly she's funkier -- "Complicated" features one of those stripped-down, spit-polished versions of the James Brown beat that unimaginative producers tether to less-inspired songs, like Natalie Imbruglia's infamous "Torn", or whatever Paula Cole happened to have ground out of the Lilith Fair mill that day. Lavigne's debut song doesn't really need the goosing-up, but it doesn't suffer by it, either; the selling point here, along with the singalong chorus, is the scenario. Here we have the familiar Danny Zuko story, the dickhead boyfriend who only acts nice when his friends aren't around, complete with all the great diaristic details like "preppy clothes" and "coming over unannounced". Lavigne herself sells the whole thing with a wide-eyed and occasionally snotty delivery, halfway between Carlton's tuneful earnestness and the circumscribed wackiness and stage-managed audacity of Pink's better singles….

Now I don't want to give you the wrong impression. Lavigne is not a good lyricist; not yet, anyway, and nor are any of her peers. They're good performers, good teen-culture reporters, and occasionally brave writers, but they are also much more artless, much less conscious of language, than was Alanis Morissette at a similar age. And though Morissette has proven herself a durable and consistent hit songwriter, it's not like she's ever distinguished herself as a lyricist, either. At best she's developed a confessional style where she wordily navigates her way through a litany of impressions and associations, strung together by an internal logic that she never bothers to make manifest for her listener. Some of her recent songs have been nothing but sung lists; even "Unsent", which I always defend as a genuinely innovative departure in confessional writing, is nothing if not rambling, and only a maniac, or someone with the immunity achieved by selling ten million records, would have released that to the public without a rewrite. Morissette has rarely bothered to rhyme -- like Darren Hayman from Hefner, it's a realist strategy meant to suggest that what she has to say is so urgent and burning that any attempt to shape it would only singe her hands. nonetheless, her songs are crafted, and usually contain at least one explicitly literary device. "Hands Clean" is structured as a dialogue where the boy gets the verses and the girl (presumably Morissette herself) answers back in the choruses; Elvis Costello, to give you one example, frequently uses the same template and is considered very artful because of it. as she has in every single since Jagged Little Pill, Morissette attempts to jam as many syllables into each line as she can, and she packs that suitcase until it bulges -- the verses scan as unsingable tongue-twisters. That "Hands Clean" works anyway, and works brilliantly as a radio song, is testament to Morissette's knack for foregrounding crucial moments in performance (she has always been an underrated performing singer) and her long-established ear for big, sweeping singalong melodies. i'm really not sure why "Hands Clean" wasn't the springtime blockbuster hit I thought it would be. I'm afraid it might have something to do with her use of the word "posse" in the third verse -- to these ears it sounds sarcastic, but even if it is parody, it's still awkward and forced, and takes the listener out of the reverie for a few critical seconds. True blockbuster hits ("Hand In My Pocket" comes to mind) never make that misstep; they sustain the spell, at all costs…

Send me some good advice that I just didn't take.