The Tris McCall Report

Notes From The Front, August 26, 1999

Labor day is almost here, and I'm still waiting for the second Backstreet Boys single to drop, having played out "I Want It That Way". Despite constant rotation, they haven't been the presence I thought they'd be this summer -- probably because they chose to open their tour in Europe. Still, that sticks us with 98 Degrees's "I Do (Cherish You)", which is certainly a nice song, but none of those guys are Brian Littrell...Incidentally, for those of you who were wondering, here's how "The Hardest Thing" works: the junior high school girl listening to the song is asked to identify with the addressee; thereby making her feel better when the little boyfriend who's giving her trouble is being uncommunicative. She can then imagine that he is secretly roiling with emotion for her, when he's probably just worried about his model rocket collection... The latest TLC single is the poster child for gruesome, plastic digital sound... Was I the only one who found Alanis Morissette's "Unsent" sonically and formally innovative? Now, it's not an innovation that i'm hoping will catch on, but it was some of the only new ground broken in confessional singing since the early Seventies, and that should count for plenty... The great Latin crossover will not be compete until we hear an entire song sung in Spanish on Z100. Who will be the artist ballsy and charismatic enough to regain the ground lost when Ricardo Valenzuela took "La Bamba" down with him? Not assimilation master Ricky Martin, that's for sure; anybody who feels a need to translate "la vida loca" in the verse, just in case any farmboys in utah didn't catch its meaning, probably is too intent on moving product to take that step. Christina Aguilera feels too steeped in the disco tradition, and Gloria Estefan, having tried a few years back with Mi Tierra, is now cutting lukewarm records with N' Sync. My money is on Jennifer Lopez, whose winsomely inept singing on "If You Had My Love" warms up what otherwise would have been generic digital studio pop a la Mariah Carey. But you don't get the full force of the track, or of Lopez' personality, unless you see the video -- which suddenly cuts to an electrifying salsa dance segment. Yes. there is wild desire to represent la calle behind that mannered groove, I just know it. perhaps I am just projecting, and perhaps I place too much faith in cutie pies...

In retrospect, it is now clear to me that the whole dopey ska/neo-big band movement was necessary to prepare us for the Latin crossover -- we had to get re-acclimated to horn sections, complex arrangements, and male singers who didn't sound like they were trying to dislodge a chicken bone stuck in their throat. If the price we had to pay for the move away from grunge aesthetics was a few Reel Big Fish singles, and the Save Ferris cover of "Come On Eileen", I will take it...

TLC officially opened the complaint season on hit radio with the very overrated "No Scrubs", and since then, the Top Forty has been dominated by tales, sung by girls or girl groups, of particularized male wrongdoing against women. Since most of these songs have been written by guys, it's no surprise that they articulate the flip-side of the notorious "gold-digging ho" paradigm. Our current number one, Destiny's Child's "Bills, Bills, Bills" is probably the most egregious example, but "No Scrubs" articulates a position that seems to me no less retrograde. It's unfortunate, but not unusual. But what has been remarkable is the extreme particularity and specificity of the complaints: Whitney Houston wailing about the area code on her boyfriend's pager in "It's Not Right (But It's Okay)", 702's litany of offenses in "Where My Girls At", etc. It's pretty clear why male writers would want to get girl singers to participate in the discourse which imagines women as money-obsessed, but I haven't yet riddled out the popular move toward minute detail. It flies in the face of everything we're supposed to believe about identification and representation in successful pop songs... Mind you, I'm not complaining. I'm happy, because it seems to be a trend imported from hip-hop. If pop singers and writers want to get wordier, that's wonderful; we can leave the generalized anthems to the alternacrowd. Hip-hop influenced radio popsters like Len, LFO, and Citizen King seem more than willing to draw on rap tropes when writing lyrics, and if their meandering results don't flow with the ease of a verse by Posdnuos, they're still a hell of a lot more compelling to follow than "I wish you would step back off that ledge my friend". For the record, I think that "Summergirls" is a beautiful song, with a kind of boardwalk longing that Sugar Ray and Cornershop can't pretend to, but "Chinese food makes me sick/ New Kids On The Block had a lotta hits" is exactly the sort of couplet which gives credence to Kari Orr's complaint that white emcees don't feel that it's necessary to stay on topic. Beck, king of the non-sequitur, is at least partially to blame for this trend... Speaking of Len, did you know these guys are from freaking Halifax? Long Island's wilding, again, I suppose. Hey, I dig "If You Steal My Sunshine", too, but there are seven thousand bands in every town in America that do the sort of thing that Len and Citizen King do. MTV had better get on the stick and replace some of their asinine programming with rock videos, because that god-damned maple leaf video network keeps proving that this Canadian invasion we're currently stuck in hasn't reached its saturation point. We need to fight back, people. If Soul Coughing had had the good fortune to have been from Winnipeg, Much Music would have made them multiplatinum by now...

Some of the better-known underground groups have taken steps forward this year. I know nobody's trying to hear this, but most of them have done it by cleaning up their sound, and getting a little better at recording. Olivia Tremor Control's Black Foliage improves on Dusk At Cubist Castle mostly through self-reflexivity (the songs interact with each other intelligently) and a thicker, more visceral sound. Don't believe the hype about the album's impenetrability -- aside from a thirteen-minute ambient piece, most of the tracks are catchy, straightforward verse-chorus-verse pop songs, albeit ones recorded under odd conditions. Formally and compositionally, they aren't much more experimental than Jay-Z... The Apples In Stereo also boosted production values for Her Wallpaper Reverie, and it sounds almost as good as a Robyn Hitchcock joint (I said almost). I'd list highlights, but I'd probably have to mention every track... moreover, sensitive Scottish jerk-offs B&S finally got on the stick and re-released Tigermilk. Those of us who only knew the limited issue debut album from scratchy dubbed cassette copies can now fully experience the magic of compact disc remastering -- it's like getting an entirely new album, and it makes one forget, a little, about the horror that was The Boy With The Arab Strap. By the way, I finally saw a snapshot of Stuart Murdoch, and I now fully understand his reluctance to send out publicity photos. Fans of Belle and Sebastian can send their hate mail to me at this address, or, better yet, they can just write peevishly in their journals... Murdoch might attempt to sound like Nick Drake channeled through morrissey, and Apples frontman Robert Schneider might be trying to work out a Brian Wilson fixation, but if you really want a letter-perfect throwback sound, you need Kurt Heasley and Lilys. Hell, you need the Lilys anyway; The Three-Way feels beyond a doubt like the year's best album. Heasley gets knocked for indulging in a Kinks nostalgia trip, but Ray Davies never built pop songs as complex as these -- for the Lilys, only the idiom is derivative; the songwriting, lyrical sensibility, and guitar style are wholly characteristic and unique. Not that I really care; if anybody was ever really derivative of Nick Drake (and that wasn't just something that evil p.r. people stuck in press releases to get gullible rock critics to spin their joints), I'd be down at the record store faster than you can say "At The Chime Of A City Clock"...

Latin crossover was only one of the two trends I predicted for '99 (not that i hadn't been calling for latin crossover since about '92), the other, if I remember correctly, was bad music. Two-thirds of the way through the year, I am pleased to say I was wrong... The only song that makes me get up and change the channel on the radio is Pearl Jam's gruelling "Last Kiss"; hell, I can even sit through "I Will Remember You" by Sarah McLachlan... Sixpence None The Richer doesn't even make me leave the room (as I know it probably does for many of you), but it does make me feel oddly violent; kind of like the aggressive rush you get from listening to "Gangsta Gangsta"... The year's most aggravating trend has been vocalists who cross over into two or three notes of lethal falsetto on the choruses of their songs; you can hear it, most notoriously, on Blessed Union Of Souls's irritating "Hey Leonardo" and Tal Bachman's "She's So High". Damn, I hate that. Sing out, ya morons... Madonna takes the prize, once again, for the worst lyrics, with the dunderheaded "Beautiful Stranger". "To love you/is to be part of you", indeed. A thoughtful rewrite or two, is that too much to ask?... Steven Matrick might claim Smash Mouth's amiable "All-Star" as the year's most overexposed song, but any Yankee fan has had to sit through Lenny Kravitz "wan-ting to get a-waaaay" in a truck commercial played, seemingly, after each half inning... Guilty pleasures: April March, everything by the Goo Goo Dolls, especially "Black Balloon", "David Duchovny" by Bree Sharp. Let me know if you pick up a copy of that album; I sure as hell ain't gonna do it...

From the incredible disappearing genre department: anybody seen or heard from "electronica" lately? Those European beats got digested and spit back out by the Miami bounce producers and the man from the big VA., so now that the psychic and aesthetic connection between Roni Size and Luther Campbell has pretty much been established, we're still waiting for the beef. The only electronica influence on American pop music trends that I can see from this vantage is Timbaland's groundbreaking production sound on "Are You That Somebody?", and a general speeding-up of the backbeat. That's it. The electronica singles which have made a mark in America in '99 sound, to my ears, much more retro than, say, The Black Crowes; most notably "Let Forever Be", by the Chemical Brothers, a straight-up rewrite of "Tomorrow Never Knows" complete with backward guitar and doors-of-perception lyrics. They even pulled in Noel Gallagher to sing the thing... The other new music crossover hit, Fatboy Slim's "Praise You", sounds like an old disco record with tighter synth programming. I like both of these songs; as a matter of fact, I'd dance to either of them, which is more than I can say for most of the big-beat singles I've heard over the past year. But the idea that either of them sound new, or cutting edge, or genuinely distinguished from generic guitar and piano-based dance rock, is pretty ridiculous... In an effort to sell stateside, these artists have probably decided to make music that sounds so much like modern rock that it might as well relinquish all claims to any other generic status. doesn't bug me a bit. attention has shifted from European sonic choices to Latin American ones, and that's quite a relief, that's the way it should be...

I give Puffy mad love and props for putting out "P.E. 2000"; I can't even think of a classier or smarter move he could have made at this time. The fact that his rhymes are somewhat tepid doesn't diminish my admiration for the project at all; I'm just glad he didn't try to do a straight up cover. That would have been plain embarrassing for everybody... Eminem must have pissed off somebody at his label, because for a few months there, he was getting pushed like a joy buzzer, and now you hardly ever hear his songs. To me, he's a vocal dead ringer for Imani from the Pharcyde; he's a decent lyricist, maybe a bit too clever, and he represents neither the end of hip-hop as we know it nor the aesthetic ascendance of the white emcee... I had been telling anybody who'd listen that all Lauryn Hill needed to do to cement her place as the most important figure in American pop music was produce for another artist, but I was unprepared for the power and sheer sonic intelligence of Mary J. Blige's latest single, written and produced by Hill... It's true that I caught only the tail end of Macy Gray's concert, but I was more impressed with her backing vocalists than I was with her. That's usually a bad sign. Gray seems like less of a complete singer and more a vocal sound and collection of affects, but I suppose you could level the same criticism at guys like Elliott Smith and Stuart Murdoch... It's nice to see Naughty By Nature back on the charts, but perhaps Treach could consult a wardrobe designer? "Ooh, I'm a bad guy, look at my sinister suspenders"...

Artists and groups who have had shorter careers than Weird Al Yankovic: REM, Run-DMC, Public Enemy, Whitney Houston, The Replacements, The Beatles.

If somehow you knew that your love would be untrue, would you lie to me?