I Am Trying To Break Your Soul
by Josh K-sky on May.08, 2010, under music
FB coughed up this retro-soul version of Wilco’s “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” by J.C. Brooks & the Uptown Sound. Watch & let’s discuss:
In flashes, it has all the hallmarks of a great genre-crossing cover. The chorus especially has that “a-ha” ease of transfer into a soul idiom, familiar and romantic with equal heapings of pleasure and pain:
I am trying to break your heart
I am trying to break your heart
But still I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t easy
I am trying to break your heart
and some of the verses snap, too:
I want to glide through those brown eyes dreaming
Take you from the inside, baby hold on tight
You were so right when you said I’ve been drinking
What was I thinking when we said good night
Importing the middle eight from “Theologians” is a snappy move, too, since the original Wilco track doesn’t have a bridge:
I’m going away
Where you will look for me
Where I’m going you cannot comeNo one’s ever gonna take my life from me
I lay it down
A ghost is born…
The band is tight, delivering the goods of a revivalist classic soul track. But I don’t think it entirely works, starting from the beginning:
I am an American aquarium drinker
I assassin down the avenue
I’m hiding out in the big city blinkin’
What was i thinkin’ when i let go of you
For Wilco, this is not just the beginning of the song but the beginning of their 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (and one of my top three Best of the Decade). The lyrics begin around one minute in, and it’s an ambivalent beginning, backed by lazy, arrythmic drums and a pleasant pad of noise. Although many of the songs fit right into Wilco’s alt-country-roots ethos of nostalgic romance, there’s an undercurrent of unassimilable noise running through the whole project. Greil Marcus dismissed it as “sound effects apparently meant to signify the modern world” (after comparing Tweedy’s opening salvo to “I am an American, Chicago born” from The Adventures of Augie March — I love that dude) and I don’t think he’s far off. The ubiquity of static, extraneous instrumentation, and the clips from numbers stations (listen to the end of “Poor Places”) give the whole album–and by extension, the whole project of reconstructed of roots country–the sense of a natural-sounding lie disrupted by an undeniably artificial environment. The forced-surreal quality of the opening lyrics reinforces that quality — a line like “assassin down the avenue” surrenders its claim on proudly naive romanticism.
That lyrical quality stands out in the cover of “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart”. That unassimilable quality, reinforced by the sonic ideas in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, sticks out in a funk-soul jam, a machine for turning sex into music and back again. The ineluctable weirdness of the lyrics mars the thrill of hearing a favorite song transformed into a different genre.
Compare it to a track by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, the leaders of the retro-soul movement. (In addition to their own career, you heard them backing up Amy Winehouse on Back to Black.) Their cover of Kenny Rogers’ psychedelic pop hit I Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) is a favorite track, and I think it works because although psychedelica and funk-soul might come off as separated by a gulf between the cerebral and the visceral, the ego-dissolving acid trip of the Kenny Rogers song doesn’t have any of the ambivalence of the Wilco song.
I’ve used the terms “revivalist” for retro-funk and “reconstructed” for alt.country advisedly here. In Josh Glenn’s revision of American generational periodization, Jeff Tweedy, born in 1967, is one of the Reconstructionists, characterized by
a marked tendency to brood over taken-for-granted cultural, political, social, and philosophical forms and norms, not rejecting but self-consciously remixing these fragments into innovative new patterns.
while Amy Winehouse, born 1983, comes up in the revivalists. (Sharon Jones herself was born in 1956 and had to wait around for her own generation’s revival; Gabriel Roth, the Daptone impresario, appears to be born in 1974 — a Revivalist, on the cusp; I don’t know how old JC Brooks is.) Per Glenn, Revivalists are “dedicated to renewing bygone cultural forms and franchises.”
Ironic OGXers and PCers mix and match fragments of received cultural forms, which sometimes results in works of great originality, and sometimes (e.g., Ben Stiller’s brand of comedy) simply means freshening up reheated entertainments with air quotes. But members of the 1974-83 cohort simply dig the past[.]
I think there’s something to his scheme, and that’s why the Wilco cover is slightly uncomfortable — its form is that of an straightforward renewal of a bygone form, but the selected song has a certain discomfort in its own skin and doesn’t lend easily to taking on another one.
There’s reason to believe that JCB&TUS isn’t innocent of this problem. Here’s guitarist Billy Bungeroth on retro-soul:
I know too much about Joy Division and PIL to ever play my guitar right. And JC has heard too much Spearhead and PE to write lyrics about just “Baby, baby, I love you,” but we don’t want the audience to stand and watch us emote like they do in the post-punk, post-rap world.
To me, that attitude of knowing too much, having heard too much doesn’t emerge in the music — it’s deliberately tamped down to fit into the revivalist mode. I’d be interested to hear what happens when it does.
May 9th, 2010 on 9:19 am
Well, the thing is, the first two lines not only have forced surrealism in the Wilco tune, they don’t work there, either. They’re just bad lines (if they are ok it’s because Tweedy’s voice fits the sounds, not because they’re any less conducive to eye-rolling if you happen to pay attention). The next two lines, though, are perfectly at home in the cover: “I’m hiding out in the big city blinkin’ / What was i thinkin’ when i let go of you”. Sounds right to me!
Minor questions: psychedelia, cerebral? Is it right to think of Wilco at YHF as still doing anything rootsy? (I don’t react at all the same way to e.g. the interference as you do, to the extent that your reaction as here given strikes me as a reading in search of an object.)
T.S. Eliot: Reconstructionist? Gotta shore up those fragments, man. That would be about a thousand times more convincing than including South Park because the animation consists of torn-up (i.e. fragmentary!!! zomg!) pieces of paper (wait until he discovers ben-day dots and the meager framerate of movies) or Wes Anderson’s sets. What about Martial—all those short little things—or Schlegel—”Many of the works of the ancients have become fragments. Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written.”?
May 9th, 2010 on 10:16 am
How do you react to the interference and noise, then? I’ve always had the feeling of contemporaneity and technology bleeding in to a faux-naive project. I don’t think it prohibits other readings, but the object’s not missing.
South Park may be a bit of a stretch but I think Eliot’s project is foreign to the perceived reconstructionist one in much the same way as Jameson describes modernism as being after the break and postmodernism as being within it.
As for psychedelica/cerebral: feed your head, head shop, Head. Compare to “Free your ass and your mind will follow.”
Anyway, how do you like the cover?
May 9th, 2010 on 11:22 am
“Free your head” doesn’t “cerebral” make, not the way, say, math-rock is cerebral. (And “You Never Blow Yr Trip Forever”, psych if anything is, even has a pretty great bassline.)
The interference and noise seems completely organic to me; the record is more or less suffused with it (not everywhere, obviously) such that it doesn’t come as a foreign element even if it does occasionally predominate. (Maybe it would be most honest to say that I react to them by saying “neat!”.) It’s artful noisepop if anything—and I don’t even see the faux-naïveté you’re talking about. Little about the record gives me that impression; “Heavy Metal Drummer” comes the closest lyrically, I guess, but even it’s ruefully looking back. We’re a long way from Uncle Tupelo and No Depression by now, already by Summerteeth, and it’s not obvious to me that UT was faux, or actually, naïve themselves. (But then I’m not sure what project Wilco is supposedly embarked on.)
There’s maybe a more convincing breakdown at the end of “War on War”, but even there, what’s supposed to be happening? A sign that the cheery fauxlksiness of the preceding song (“you have to learn how to die”) can’t be born up any longer, that it’s really a sham?
The cover comes off kind of flat to me. I think retaining so much of the original vocal melody was a mistake.
Just to be more inflammatory, lemme say that a priori all generational analyses are false and consist mostly in cherry-picking (here of a congeries that seems to have little internal unity anyway!); they are also completely unenlightening.
Why does DJ Spooky (or Shadow, or any second-gen hiphop producer) “brood”, if brood they do, over fragments, a brooding manifested in sampling? (Well, DJ Spooky probably has devoted a lot of thought to this.) Surely one can give a history here involving the origins of hiphop and turntablism, the expanded technological possibilities offered by recording studios (as compared to the live DJ scenario) and then computers, so that the predominance of sampling is entirely unsurprising—something that doesn’t really apply to Tarantino. (And unless Lethem’s early literary “mashups” are literally centos, I am entirely unconvinced there as well.)
Why, on the other hand, did Uncle Tupelo release a record named after a Carter Family tune and what were the alt-country kids who came thereafter up to? I doubt the explanation will have much in common (I also doubt that it will reveal them to have been brooding over fragments, something I suspect Joshua Glenn finds more enticing).
It’s hard to tell what this way of dividing generations up is supposed to accomplish, at least based on what you linked, since it seems to consist basically of a few sentences of description followed by a very long list. (And I had no idea that Shaq had “a marked tendency to brood over taken-for-granted cultural, political, social, and philosophical forms and norms, not rejecting but self-consciously remixing these fragments into innovative new patterns”.)
Sam Amidon (born the year before me and hence, I gather, a Revivalist) probably digs the past, or aspects of it, almost as much as all those Boomer, OGX, and Reconstructionist Morris dancers you can see in the dorkier parts of New England; why’s that, though? Well, his parents are folk musicians, for one thing, and he grew up listening to and playing folk music. (OTOH maybe he just likes folk music, which isn’t the same thing as digging the past.) A friend of mine is obsessed with old-timey music for presumably different reasons; I don’t know what they are but have no reason to think they must be different from whatever it was that motivated participants in the folk revival of the 50s and 60s.
Anyway this is becoming incoherent so I’ll stop, but this stuff strikes me as even less rigorous than “people born in 1970 drive like this; people born in 1980 drive like this”.
May 9th, 2010 on 11:41 am
(I cna’t resist, obviously: self-consciously “remixing” (puke) given forms and fragments into “innovative” (puke) new patterns/entities, is that more like Wide Sargasso Sea or more like At Swim-Two-Birds? Or A Humument? Sinfonia? Kunstmärchen? Pale Fire?) You may invoke Jameson again, which I will be powerless to resist, not knowing it.)