Brow Beat: Slate's Culture Blog

Track of the Week: Taylor Swift, "Today Was a Fairytale"

Jody Rosen: Hey, Jonah. Our Track of the Week is Taylor Swift's "Today Was a Fairytale," from the soundtrack of the forthcoming Valentine's Day. Last week, "Today Was a Fairytale" was downloaded 325,000 times, a new record for weekly paid download sales by a female artist. The song will debut on the Billboard Hot 100 at No.2, just one notch behind "Tik Tok," the megahit by that anti-Taylor Swift, Ke$ha. (Goody Two Shoes in this corner, Bad Girl in that corner ... fight!)

Someday Swift's vision of romance may move beyond costume drama. (Maybe when she turns 21?) For now, though—she's strictly Merchant-Ivory. Her great 2008 hit "Love Story" was a Romeo and Juliet tale; the video found Swift in Regency-era togs, batting her eyes at a pretty frat boy stuffed into a Fitzwilliam Darcy outfit. The new song begins like this: "Today was a fairytale/ You were the prince/ I used to be a damsel in distress." This is a girl who likes playing dress-up.

But in Swift's songs all the ball gowns and unicorns have a different effect than you'd expect. They make her songs more emotionally vivid—they sharpen the focus instead of softening it. It's a cliché to describe Swift's lyrics as journal entries, but that's what they feel like; the period-dress scenes are her dreamy little drawings in the diary margins. And in the new single, the fairy-princess talk gets thrown into relief by everyday 21^st-century details:

Today was a fairytale
I wore a dress

You wore a dark gray t-shirt

You told me I was pretty when I looked like a mess
Today was a fairytale

Where she really excels is in the tunes. Am I wrong, Jonah, or is "Today Was a Fairytale" one of the catchiest Taylor Swift songs yet? I love the way the melody climbs in the chorus, especially over that one brooding minor chord: "It must have been the way you kissed me."

Also noteworthy: With the possible exception of that woodsy acoustic guitar picking in the song's opening bars, I don't hear any country gestures here. No fiddle, no lap steel, nothing. Taylor's vowels have gotten flattened and Yankee-ified. (Compare her accent in "Today Was a Fairytale" with the twangful "Our Song," from 2007.) See ya, Nashville!

Jonah Weiner: Hi Jody. There's the faintest trace of countryish fingerpicking here, but yes, one of the first things that struck me about "Today Was a Fairytale" is how nominal-to-the-point-of-nonexistent its claims to Nashville citizenship are. But we've seen this coming for a while now, right? Haven't the country gestures always been largely nominal with Taylor Swift? Isn't a large part of her success and savvy that she can take a Kelly Clarkson-esque power ballad, smear just a bit of lap steel on the margins, and thereby court audiences north and south of the Mason-Dixon without alienating either?

Music-wise, this is one of my favorite Swift songs. And you're right, that "kissed meeee" scythes through you like a warm pink laser beam. This is a marvel of pop-craft—we've heard the song's anxious pre-chorus, swooning/pining hook, and eleventh-hour drop-everything-but-the-sighing-vocals-and-acoustic-guitar parlor trick a thousand times before, and yet it all thrills.

Taylor Swift seems like the kind of girl you go over the moon for (unless you're one of the unfortunate BFs legendarily disemboweled on her debut). But I'm not so over the moon that I quite buy your case for the lyrics here. They're OK. The hook is my biggest problem: The fairytale refrain strikes me as so blandly corny that it snaps me out of the fantasy. Swift is capable of the sharp detail you credit her with—the image (and unheard squeak and slam) of the "screen door" on "Our Song" sticks with you as much as anything in the melody—but I don't see that at work here. The gray T-shirt doesn't do much of anything for me, nor does the generous compliment that the hottie wearing it offers our insecure Goldilocks. It's an overly familiar Mr. Right trope that he will find us beautiful when we are suffering a bad-hair day/have morning breath/haven't yet been attended to by our team of stylists. Swift doesn't do much but invoke the cliché and hope it does her heavy lifting for her. (Ditto "Everything you say is right," "Time slows down whenever you're around," etc.) I do like "you picked me up at six"—it's a nice intrusion of the quotidian into the enchanted forest, and also, what a chaste time to start a date!—but I feel that Taylor is being a little disingenuous: She's not wishing for ponies and pixie dust, exactly, but there's a whiff of her reinforcing a brand on this song: selling a product (The Taylor Swift Princess Castle by Hasbro®, Recommended Ages: 8-15, maybe?) rather than painting a picture. And I don't mind pop selling me product, but I need a better pitch than this. In the case of this song, it's the tunes doing the hustling. 

J.R.: Jonah, you're right: The lyrics here are just so-so. The song's a bit lazy, really. In "Love Story," Swift has that neat third-verse narrative twist, which puts the final chorus in the voice of her beau. That's classic high Nashville craftsmanship. Here she's complacent; you're right that on its own the "fairytale" business doesn't do much.

But I'm impressed by what Swift gets away with. Her tunes are so strong they elevate her doggerel, or render it irrelevant: I can feel the emotions even when they're insipidly expressed. (Of course, in Swift's best stuff—"Our Song," "Fifteen," "You Belong with Me"—the lyric writing is pretty tight.) Also, Taylor Swift songs have this weird, ineffable, intimate quality; the clichés just seem personal. The combination of ninja-like melodic craft and gauche lyrics give songs like "Today Was a Fairytale" a rough-hewn quality that sets them apart from, for instance, Kelly Clarkson. This song is sonically airbrushed and pitch-corrected and buffed to a hi-gloss shine—and yet it feels handmade. It's Etsy-pop.

J.W.: If Taylor Swift were an Etsy product, would she be these "Let's Make Out/Let's Be Friends" throw pillows? I could see two characters holding these babies aloft in a Swift video, communicating their adolescent longing/ambivalence between adjacent suburban bedroom windows. 

Anyway, this song is a funny mix: some of her tightest songwriting to date, but some of her laziest lyrics. I'll reserve final judgment until I see it in the context of Valentine's Day—the scene in which her beau turns into a werewolf and passionately humps Topher Grace's leg is supposed to be a real heartbreaker.

Click here to comment on this post.

Track of the Week: M.I.A.'s "Space Odyssey"

Jonah Weiner: Hello again, Jody. Today we're talking about a new song from M.I.A. called "Space Odyssey." It comes to us via M.I.A.'s Twitter—she filmed a cheapo video for the song, uploaded it to TwitVid, and posted the link to her feed. She has described "Space Odyssey" as a protest song (the video arrived amid a bunch of angry tweets about a recent New York Times Travel piece that declared the ethnic combat in her native Sri Lanka "over" and then gushed about the country's scenic beauty), but that's interesting since a) the phrase protest music could be, in some form or other, applied to most of her music and b) this is a mellow track, the most prominent lyrical theme of which is total disengagement. "My lines are down, you can't call me/ As I float around in space odyssey," she sings (only the faintest hint of rapping here). The music, courtesy of the U.K. dubstep producer Rusko, is lush, languid, and squishy, punctuated here and there by deep burps of bass and a synth squeal that suggests an air-raid siren. Call me crazy, but it reminds me of the "Reading Rainbow" theme. Her longtime collaborator and ex-boyfriend Diplo said last fall that the music on her next album would resemble a combination of Animal Collective and Gucci Mane, and Rusko's bass-heavy psychedelia seems more or less of a piece with that unlikely description.

I wanted to talk about "Space Odyssey" because anything from M.I.A. is worth excitement and because I think it's hauntingly lovely. That said, I'm not sure whether it's that the song's unfinished (the vocal line could stand some variation) or just that the audio quality is so poor, but this one feels a bit undercooked, doesn't it? It sounds a like a demo played on a stereo in a room and recorded by a computer microphone, which may be exactly what it is. Which is fine, except we're missing a lot of musical detail—all these little ambient squiggles and sighs and moans—and a lot of bass, especially in the glitchy breakdown that comes at around 3:10. What I should have written above is that the song is almost lush.

Jody Rosen: Jonah, I love M.I.A., but "undercooked" is generous. "Space Odyssey" stinks. What we have here is a single, gratingly monotonous melody line, repeated more or less continuously for four minutes. (It feels like 25 minutes.) The effect is not unlike "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall," although that song holds far more melodic and harmonic interest than M.I.A.'s. The various gurgles and bird twitters are, I guess, intended to distract our attention from the droning saminess of it all; but they're window-dressing. There's something almost offensive about the slapdashness of the method, here: disgorge a rudimentary tune, toss some sound effects at it, throw the word "space" in the title, and, presto!—it's psychedelic, man. But good psychedelia takes work. The best "space" songs are even more meticulously worked-over than "straight" songs. But "Space Odyssey" isn't languid. It's lazy.

Or maybe just rushed? I think what we're hearing here is one of the pitfalls of the brave new pop world. It's neat that M.I.A. can cobble together a song and blast it out on the Internet in just 24 hours. But what's being lost? A bit of rigor, I'd say. As for M.I.A.'s claim that this is a protest song: Isn't coherence a protest-song prerequisite?

J.W.: Maybe the "protest song" tag is something of a red herring—it's twice removed from M.I.A., after all, synthesized by a Fader reporter from a publicist's statement. But, anyway: You do not like this one. I think we've discovered by now that I'm a bit more content than you are to splash around in mood and texture and that I'm a bit more willing to take or leave "song craft"—or maybe I just have a loose, degenerate definition of the term! You say the gurgles and pitch-corrected moans and such are here on "Space Odyssey" to disguise some deeper lack. I'm with you that something else needs to happen (I wouldn't say the song feels like it's 25 minutes long but I'll give you, oh, seven), but for me, the ambient bits aren't ornamental elements so much as the perfectly engrossing main event, weaving and floating and humming and buzzing vertiginously through the mix. They don't smack you across the face the way the drums on "Bird Flu" do, say, and this would be an odd choice for a single, but I find the steady, thwacking beat and electronic flotsam, if not hypnotic, then pleasantly lulling and even a bit poignant. I could see "Space Odyssey" re-emerging—in CD quality, and hopefully with the melody changed up—as a quiet kind of knockout.

J.R. Just for the record, I don't have a problem with mood and texture, per se. I'm on record as a Four Tet fan. I just think the mood and texture in this song is awfully sloppy. Nothing that grabs my ear or grabs anything else. Feels like rush job-underthunk and underfelt. But, anyway. I reserve the right to be blown away by the upgraded album version of this thing, if and when it surfaces. Here's hoping.

In the meantime, one more gripe. The video is godawful. I wish M.I.A. had just leaked the MP3, sans alleged video. Or at least set her space odyssey to some stray Sagan footage!

Click here to comment on this post.

Track of the Week: Dirty Projectors' "Ascending Melody"

Jody Rosen: Unlike nearly every other youngish white inhabitant of the gentrified New Brooklyn, it took me a while to warm up to Dirty Projectors. In fact, I'm still only lukewarm. I respect them, I'm mildly awed by them, but I don't quite love them. It's my fault, not theirs. In general, I have a hard time with art rock, and the DP's tricky, showy songs are very arty indeed: trompes l'oeil—or trompes l'oreille—whose meaning and purpose, concealed beneath disorienting blasts of rhythm and melody, emerge only after a lot of close listening. But at his best, songwriter-guitarist-frontman Dave Longstreth has something of Thelonious Monk in him, an off-kilter sense of musical time and space that seems to be saying something about, well, space-time, life, the universe-musical jokes that grade into cosmic, metaphysical jokes. Plus, the vocal parts Longstreth writes for backing vocalists Amber Coffman, Haley Dekle, Angel Deradoorian—the Acid Andrews Sisters—are truly awesome.

Which brings me to "Ascending Melody," a new, nonalbum single, released as a free MP3. (You can download the song here.) As usual, it'll take me a while to really wrap my ears around this song. Here are some things I like. I like the gangly funkiness of the lead guitar figure. I especially like the swank smooth jazz-feel of the acoustic guitar noodling that darts in and out in the song's opening minute. I love the way those gals sing. And I like the moment, around the 3:00 mark, when the song grinds to a halt and stays there for far too long. Nearly a full minute by my count, without much going on at all. There's something kind of gangsta about that.

Here's what I don't like: Longstreth's voice. The guy sings the emasculated warble that's the default style of seemingly all male indie rockers these days: a wimped-out version of David Byrne's yelp. This sound just gets on my nerves. Also, the lyrics. "Reciprocity for hungry souls/ Go away hungry." Huh? What? Help me, Jonah: what are these young people talking about?

Jonah Weiner: I didn't think I minded Longstreth's voice, but now that you mention it, my heart sank a quarter-inch or so when he started singing here, after the ladies had been going for the first minute. (Not sure whether they're all singing on "Ascending Melody.") The effect of his arrival was sort of like when Charlie Rose is interviewing someone you really want to hear talk and he keeps interrupting them. Somebody turn this guy's mic off! Longstreth can sing, but he's a less interesting—and in the indie-rock context at least, more conventional—singer than the girls. As you said, his gifts lie elsewhere, as a songwriter and arranger.

I tend to agree with you: I'm impressed by this band, but I don't enjoy listening to them, exactly. The big exception to that is no big surprise: "Stillness is the Move," the "breakout" single off Bitte Orca. In-the-pocket clatter, nagging guitar drone, Longstreth-free vocals, and Coffman doing a spry, note-vaulting, tricky-cadenced, Destiny's Child/Aaliyah impression. One of my favorite pieces of rock criticism last year was Solange Knowles' smart, lush "Stillness" cover, which made the song's R & B connection explicit. Between the Xx's "Hot Like Fire"  and tUnE-YarDs' "Real Live Flesh," it's a good time for R & B-inflected art-rock.

That gangly funk riff that starts off the song contains a near-direct Talking Heads quote, doesn't it? That fraying flourish at the end? I just skipped through Remain in Light to try and find it but came up empty-handed. Help me, Jody: What ye olde cultural artifact am I talking about?

J.R.: I just zipped through a couple of Talking Heads albums and I couldn't find the bit, either. We may need to turn to "The Fray"—the Slate message board, not the band—for guidance on this.

Meanwhile, I managed to find the "Ascending Melody" lyrics here. It's not a pretty picture, I'm afraid. Here is the song, in full:

Two businessmen corralling life
Restrain yourself, you both must hunger properly
Unfathomable enigma
Repine unfathomable enigma

[CHORUS]
Ascending melody, rise above
Ascending melody, stronger than all concern

Are you happy to repeat yourself
For a minute then, I thought I was someone else
Ask the world for the right release
Reciprocity, the hungry souls go away from greed

[REPEAT CHORUS]

Is it wrong of me to hate these lyrics as much as I do—to want Dirty Projectors to make sense, or at least to be less pretentious about their nonsense? The band is lavishly interesting, musically; I know that should be enough. But as with Radiohead, I can't ignore the doggerel. "Repine unfathomable enigma"! Bob Dylan used the word "repine" in a song once, but he's Bob Dylan. No one else should go near that word. Ever. Also, can we call for a moratorium on Williamsburg hipsters giving snotty life-advice to "businessmen"?

One thought: Maybe the DP's should go completely lyric-less—just have those women sing lots of long vowel sounds? Or maybe they should croon the word "Deradoorian" for four minutes?

J.W.: Those words are bad, although I don't totally trust that lyrics site—I had it as "two businessmen quarrelling," and "unfathomably angry." But, either way, the fact that there's some ambiguity about the words they're singing is an asset. A word like repine shouldn't be front-and-center in any song that's not about evergreen reforestation, and, thankfully, it's not front-and-center here. I like your vision of Dirty Projectors doing away with words for phonemes. I sort of listen to them (and most Radiohead songs, though I find Yorke's lyrics more effective and evocative than you do) that way already. I bet a big part of the reason we prefer the ladies to Longstreth is because we can make out much more clearly what he's saying. Nice to do this again, Jody. I'm going to go type the word "Deradoorian" for four minutes.

Correction, Jan. 15, 2010: This post originally stated that Angel Deradoorian sings lead on "Stillness is the Move." Amber Coffman does. 

Click here to comment on this post.

Track of the Week: Alicia Keys' "Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart"

Jonah Weiner: Jody, I don't think I ever told you about my ill-fated winter fling with Alicia Keys. The place was Copenhagen, the time was early 2008, and the occasion was a magazine profile. She was enchanting and sweet (she even offered me a pair of designer women's sunglasses she'd been sent as swag—unfortunately, not quite my style), and she gave me a candid interview. I repaid her kindness by printing her hastily phrased but ultimately reasonable quotes about the politicized (mis)uses of the phrase "gangsta rap," and, pairing these quotes with others about Keys' (also reasonable) fondness for Black Panther writings, I occasioned a P.R. shitstorm that almost cost her some fat endorsements and necessitated some official statement of clarification on her part. I don't think she ever claimed I'd taken her out of context—that old line!—but said simply that she'd misspoken, or that I'd misinterpreted, or both. It's one of my regrets that I helped open her up to ridiculous charges of "reverse racism," though I'm not sure what I really could have done differently.    

Which is all to say that, whenever I hear a bittersweet Alicia Keys song, there's a little bit of poignant, unprocessed personal biography inflecting my response to it. And almost all her big songs are bittersweet. Since her 2001 debut, she's located her best music at the spot where a crush totters between schoolgirl-giddy and destructively all-consuming. Her last album included two weepy greats: the choked, deceptively dinky "No One," the Princely "Like You'll Never See Me Again." She's in a similar mode on the more muscular "Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart," the second single from her newest record. It was produced with the help of Jeff Bhasker—who co-produced on Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak—and it pairs plush, cosmic-synth bedding with fat drums that tap a rock energy reminiscent of Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Leona Lewis's "Bleeding Love." Alicia, if you're reading Brow Beat today, I'm sorry about how it turned out, and I really like this one!

Jody Rosen: Wow, no, you never had told me that story before. What endorsements did Alicia lose, thanks to you? How much money do you owe her exactly? A couple mill?

My affection for Keys has grown as her career has progressed. Her debut album, for all of its obvious craft, was a pretty generic neosoul record, and Keys exuded that neosoul smugness: I am real musician who plays a real instrument, I have many Marvin Gaye albums in my collection, etc. She hasn't exactly loosened up over the years—she's a meticulous classicist and still one of the worst oversingers in pop. But her songs can be pretty undeniable. I adore "No One," a perfect junior-high prom ballad. "Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart" isn't quite as catchy, but I like the sweet turn the melody takes in the chorus, and the song conjures a kind of teenybopper melodrama that I'm a sucker for: "Have you ever tried sleeping with a broken heart?/ Well you could try sleeping in my bed."

The main pleasure here is sonic. I'm a big fan of the rock-inflected R & B sound that you rightly trace to "Umbrella" and "Bleeding Love." Ne-Yo and the Norwegian songwriting-production duo Stargate, the team behind Beyoncé's great "Irreplaceable," are also key figures in this movement—a shift from stark, rhythmic-centric hip-hop R & B to more Europeanized, harmonically-richer songs, full of drums and synths that clatter and boom. It's a big sound; for whatever reason, bombast is in. For me, the ne plus ultra example is Jordin Sparks' "Battlefield"—despite and because of a video in which Sparks sings while asphyxiating on cannon smoke.

Speaking of videos, what is up with the "Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart" clip? Did my eyes deceive me, or does Alicia Keys revive a dead puppy dog with a Christ-like laying-on-of-hands? Also: Keys' purple spandex onesie? Discuss.

J.W.: Oof, the video's pretty hokey! If I read all of its references correctly, she's a crack veterinarian via Jesus Christ via Neo from The Matrix, with a little Rogue from X-Men tossed in. Rogue is the mutant who can't touch people without sucking out their life force, and in a less charitable moment, I'd say this video sucks some of the life force out of the song. Or maybe it just runs, goofily, hand-in-hand with the melodrama. I do like the fact that Keys, a child of New York's Hell's Kitchen in the '80s, almost always situates her videos in the same sorts of places that rappers like Nas and Mobb Deep used to—outer-borough housing projects and similar locales figure often into her videography, and not in a bogus "Jenny from the Block"-type way. That said, Mobb Deep never had BMW motorcycles that shot lasers from their exhaust pipes. That's what that American Express plug at the top of the video helped pay for, presumably. Clearly I didn't cost her that many millions!

J.R.: You're right about Keys' downmarket tendencies—they're part of her charm. She can't quite decide what kind of a star she wants to be. Is she a bohemian neosoul chick, with incense burning on the windowsill and a bell hooks book on the nightstand? Or is she a competitor in the diva stakes, ready to jump into her Maybach mix it up with Beyoncé and Rihanna? By disposition she's the former; her success has made her the latter. So in the "Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart" video she sort of splits the difference: It starts with Keys in homegirl mode, ambling past brownstones, and ends with her drop-kicking kryptonite off of a rooftop in a superhero costume. (Or something like that.) The schizophrenia is endearing. In any case, nice song.

Click here to comment on this post.   

Track of the Week: John Mayer "Who Says"

And so we turn to "Who Says," the first single from Mayer's fourth album, Battle Studies. It's lovely little folk-pop soft-shoe, very catchy and, at just 2 minutes 56 seconds long, compact. It's the confession of a dope-smoking roué: "Who says I can't get stoned?/ Call up a girl that I used to know/ Fake love for an hour or so/ Who says I can't get stoned?"

What I love about this song is the way it both epitomizes and subverts its genre. In musical terms, it's the supreme example of the John Mayer/Dave Matthews/Jack Johnson/Jason Mraz frat-dude romantic balladeering style—what Elvis Costello once called the "Fuck me, I'm sensitive" school of seduction. It's all there: the sing-songy limpidness of the melody, the gently brushed acoustic guitar chords, the slightly husky man-child vocals. By the time Mayer hits the first chorus, you can hear the sound of white girls falling out of their clothes on campuses across the country. But in "Who Says," Mayer pulls back the curtain—moves "Fuck me, I'm sensitive" from subtext to text, and cops to being a cad. "I don't remember you looking any better," Mayer coos, "But then again, I don't remember you."

That's a very funny line. Which makes sense: Mayer's a funny guy. (Do some Googling: check out Mayer horsing around with Kanye West in the recording studio, and modeling Borat's onesie swimsuit.) Sadly, Mayer almost never brings his sense of humor into the recording studio. So we're left with a bunch of solemn songs about "love" and "politics" and lots of virtuoso guitar noodling. Take a gander at the Battle Studies cover photo, with Mayer bundled up against the cold, gazing grimly into the middle distance. This is the death-haunted look of a man doomed to shoulder the "serious pop" legacy of Sting and Mark Knopfler. What a pity—when he sings about smoking grass and shagging groupies, he's good!

Jonah Weiner: I'll grant that this is the first time I've seen Mayer inject his sense of humor—on delightful display over the years at his blog, in his Esquire column, on his Twitter feed, and, indeed, in his Borat onesie—into his music. I haven't listened closely to anything but his singles, and even then, not always that closely, but he's always seemed much smarter, funnier and cheekier than his music lets on. This song brings the two personalities together in a way that, as you say, has a subversive effect.

Let's make that borderline subversive, though. If you want to see the "Fuck Me, I'm Sensitive" school of balladeers torpedoed, you should dial up Cock Lorge's "Cock in the Pussy," which would be vile if it didn't function as a giant wink/sneer at songs like "Your Body Is a Wonderland." It's affectingly hushed, gently strummed, deeply felt—it just so happens that the refrain goes, "My cock's in your pussy, my cock's in your pussy, baby." (There's also a killer synthesized steel-drum solo.)

Mayer pulls back a curtain here, but I don't love what's on the other side of it any more than I love Asher Roth's "I Love College" or LMFAO's "Shots"—which is to say, just 'cause someone's more up front about his douchebaggery doesn't mean he's any less douchely.

Also, you can't judge a song by its video, but the clip for "Who Says" irritates me precisely because it offsets scenes of Blue Ribbon-munching, 1Oak (or wherever) dancing, high-heels-in-the-swimming-pool debauchery with shots of bleary-eyed, just-a-guy-and-his-guitar, early-morning reckoning. Puh-leeze. In a way, the video doubles down on the douche, pulling the curtain back to reveal another curtain. Am I being too crotchety?

J.R.: Gosh, Jonah, I never took you for a playa hater.

First of all, there's a world of difference between "Who Says" and "Shots." Mayer's being wry, here. There's wit in his song, not to mention some self-deprecation, even if that self-deprecation is a hustle—a pickup line masquerading as modesty.

As for the cheesy video: I kind of like it. Look, the guy is flossing. "Who Says" is Mayer's version of every hip-hop video ever made—the model chicks, the booze flowing, the nightclub, the swimming pool. Because he's John Mayer and not T.I., it's a slightly more "tasteful," down-market vision. (Fewer rims.) The moody, bleary-eyed stuff is merely a genre convention, no more or less intrinsically lame than the morning-after tableaux in a thousand R & B videos: brooding Lothario, strewn silk sheets, empty champagne bottles. So why are you being extra hard on Mayer? Is it because his posse looks slightly more like yours than T.I.'s does—because you've sat at that same corner table at Blue Ribbon?

I'm not singling you out, by the way. It strikes me that Mayer and his ilk get an especially tough time from critics. Sensitive white boy singer-songwriters with easy-listening proclivities and Berklee College of Music-honed chops—they're not exactly rock critic bait. Even in these poptimistic times, it's still socially acceptable to reflexively dismiss the Mayers of the world. So I'll say one more nice thing about him: the guy can write some tunes.

J.W.: Sorry, can't load those links right now, the WiFi in this private lounge on the fourth-floor of the Spotted Pig is really dodgy.

Hmm. Why am I harder on Mayer than his bon-vivant hip-hop equivalent? I'll think aloud. For one thing, I'm of course capable of reactions other than pure vicarious glee when it comes to blinged-out hip-hop and R & B video conventions. (I think the Kanye/Spike Jonze short film is a haunting critique of same). Beyond that, my instinct is to question the possibility of a true hip-hop equivalent for Mayer—I want to argue that a make-it-rain celebration in a T.I. song/video (however problematically women often figure into such fantasies) speaks from a different, more sympathetic, more interesting place than a me-and-my-Zegna-rocking-bros-getting-our-haute-bro-on celebration in a John Mayer video. Club scenes in hip-hop videos are, among other things, fantasies of power and privilege, and I guess—very broadly speaking—that I prefer to watch a former Atlanta drug dealer and his pals fantasize about power and privilege than Mayer and his dude-crew celebrating theirs.

But maybe you're right, and this distinction I'm drawing is ultimately unfair and insupportable—maybe if I tried to chase it down and get my arms around it I'd come up empty. I do know that I don't want to go out a playa hater. Floss and floss alike, I guess!

Click here to comment on this post.

Track of the Week: Jamie Foxx ft. Gucci Mane, "Speak French"

Jonah Weiner: Hi, Jody. I'll start this week's chat with a confession. Or maybe it's a brag about my advanced teenage tastes. Sixteen-year-old Jonah loved him some Jamie Foxx Show, the WB sitcom that ran from 1996 to 2001. Before he was an Oscar winner and R & B superstar, after all, Foxx was a B-list comedian. Okay, my love was fleeting, because, thinking back, I can only remember one episode: He married an axe murderer or something, she ties him to a bed on their honeymoon, busts out her weapon, and says, "First I'm going to chop off your feet!" And Foxx goes: "But if you cut off my feet, how we gonna kick it?"

"Speak French," a tie-your-lover-to-the-bed-type slow jam, has a similar appeal to me: It's faintly menacing and totally ridiculous. One thing I love about the song is that it doesn't really have a center: just different, oblong parts that sort of fall into place next to each other. So many R&B singers promise to take you to a pleasure/comfort zone, but this song is severely off-balance. Foxx's singing is as restrained as it gets—the best thing he does might be his moaning when the girl is repeating the daffy, daffy refrain: "I don't speak French but I'll tongue ya down."

This song is also significant because it marks the mellow reappearance of Bangladesh, the guy who produced Lil Wayne's "A Milli." Bangladesh has had trouble replicating "A Milli"'s concrete-rumbling assault, but between this and Mario's "Break Up," he's carving out a nice niche for himself as one of the weirdest R & B producers out there. And I haven't even gotten to the Gucci Mane verse!

Jody Rosen: It's bad form to pick fights with bright-eyed boy-youths, but I'm not so sure about 16-year-old Jonah Weiner's taste. Foxx has never been my cuppa. He's a talented guy, sure, but modestly so; he seems to me totally unoriginal in all his pursuits. Plus, he's a real preener—so extravagantly pleased with himself out of all proportion to his merits. Now, being pleased with oneself isn't a problem in the R & B Casanova game. It's a prerequisite. But, sorry, Foxx is no R. Kelly. He's not even Jeremih.

That said, the guy's songs are getting better, and he's got good taste in collaborators. "Blame It" was fun in the way that all records with T-Pain on them are fun. And "Speak French" is terrific. Foxx merely has to competently execute, which he does, as you say, with admirable understatement. But the hero is Bangladesh, who stitches together three tasty musical bits—the portentous synthy bit, the rubbery bass bit, and (my favorite) the eerie piano bit—with a great feel for dynamics and drama. It's the latest example of the (very welcome) weirdification of baby-making music. The leader in the field, of course, is Kelly, who realized several years ago that the hoary girl-Imma-freak-you Love Man clichés had been abused to the point where they were no longer entertaining even as self-parody and pushed the genre completely into the realm of opéra bouffe, embracing outrageous sex farce and sonic oddity. "Speak French" is a song in this mode. Among other things, it has also almost no utilitarian value: the song's too strange, too lurching, to work as a booty-call soundtrack.

As for Gucci Mane: "I took a picture of my dick and sent it as a gift"! Chivalry's not dead, ladies!

J.W.: I'll save my "Why The Jamie Foxx Show Was the Better than The Sopranos" #slatepitch for another time. Maybe I'll rewatch it first. Perhaps it was terrible! But I clearly find Foxx more ingratiating than you, and I think he deserves a smidge more credit on this song than you're giving him. We agree he's a member of a supporting cast and that Bangladesh is the star, but I think he enhances the music's mood—the (tortured? ecstatic?) way he sings, "Take the elevator up to the 22nd level," turning it into a cryptic hook, is a slight touch, but it's marvelous.

That Gucci Mane line might be even better than you think. I hear it as: "I took a picture of my dick and sent it as a .gif!" That's right—he's rapping about file extensions! I'm still absorbing the mixtapes this Atlanta rapper has released at a Lil-Wayne-pace this year, but his immediate appeal involves his willingness to goof around. (He does something similar on "Break Up," too, which may be my favorite R & B song of the year.) He raps like Young Jeezy trying to land a Comedy Central special.

J.R.: I will say this for Foxx: the lyrics he sings, which I assume are of his creation, are really funny—intentionally, I think. Consider: "Parlez-vous français?/ That's not the language that I speak/ But your body got me sayin' some things/ That people in France don't speak." And: "Take the elevator up to the 22nd level/ That's when the violins play." And the priceless couplet: "Only red roses for you baby/ And only white roses for you baby." These are the words of a horndog trying to woo a girl with some Harlequin Romance-talk, a task that's just a bit beyond his powers as a linguist. He should take a tip from Gucci Mane. Chicks today, they don't need poems and flowers—all they want are .gifs!

Click here to comment on this post.

Track of the Week: Yeasayer's "Ambling Alp"

Jonah Weiner: Hi, Jody. In deciding the song we'd discuss this week we considered a few candidates, but "Ambling Alp" excited us most. Yeasayer is a New York band, and this is the lead single from its forthcoming 2010 album, Odd Blood. We start the song ankle-deep in noise, out of which bursts an ecstatic eighth-note clatter, snares that thwack with some serious '80s-style reverb, and a poignant hooting melody that serves as the musical and emotional anchor. (Animal Collective, to whom Yeasayer have been occasionally compared, start their great single "Grass" with a somewhat similar dynamic build, although this one opens up even bigger.) "Ambling Alp" rewards headphone listening: There are all these little sounds scurrying and rattling in the mix, including a little gasping vocal sample I only heard on my fifth spin. 

I don't mean it as an insult when I say that the song puts me in mind of a hipster Rusted Root. (Rusted Root is best known for its minor 1995 hit "Send Me On My Way," which I loathed then for its white-guys-in-dashikis vibe but have since come to enjoy, albeit suspiciously, for its unabashed corniness.) I guess I'm thinking mostly of the unabashedly corny themes of personal affirmation in Yeasayer's lyrics (the refrain goes, "Stick up for yourself, son," and the song, like Yeasayer's breakout single "2080," is about keeping your head up: "Your lows will have their complement of highs," Chris Keating assures us at one point) and the way this positivity jibes with the polychromatic, polyrhythmic music. I'm sure Yeasayer spend much more time listening to David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but it's nice to hear a band working in indie-rock/art-rock—sly, oblique genres, by and large—that is all to happy to pen a jubilant self-help anthem. Also there's a line about giving fascists hell, and who can't get behind that?

Jody Rosen: Jonah, forget Rusted Root. Try Baha Men. One of the things I love about “Ambling Alp”—and there’s lots I love about this clattery art-pop freakout—is the fact that it’s a stealth jock jam. As best I can make out, the second verse goes like this: “Oh, Max Schmeling was a formidable foe/ The Ambling Alp was too, at least that’s what I’m told/ But if you learn one thing, you’ve learned it well/ It’s true, you must give fascists hell.” The user-generated lyrics sites that I checked have a totally mangled version of the words. (“Old Man Schlemming” etc.) Evidently there’s a history-literacy problem in the hipster community.  Worse: there’s a boxing-literacy problem. See, the song’s about Joe Louis and two of his famous opponents: Primo Carnera, the pugilist-hero of Mussolini’s regime, and, of course, Hitler’s beloved Schmeling, Louis’ foe in two legendary 1930s bouts. “Ambling Alp” sounds like some “poetic” indie-rock nonsense; it was actually Carnera’s nickname. (The dude was a man-mountain.)

But, yeah: Yeasayer uses this boxing stuff as the jumping-off point for an admirably unfashionable uplift anthem. Keating sings: “And if anyone should cheat you/ Take advantage of or beat you/ Raise your head/ And wear your wounds with pride”—sentiments so insipid they could comfortably snuggle up inside a circa-1990 Whitney Houston ballad. Just what you’ve been waiting for, Williamsburg: your very own “Greatest Love of All.”

The thing is, Yeasayer is an amazing band. I’m not as instantly smitten with this song as I was with “Sunrise” (2007), which, for me, rates as the absolute apotheosis of this decade’s bizarro Brooklyn psychedelia. (Sorry, TV on the Radio.) But I love the way the band takes what could be a fairly standard exercise in '80s revivalism—I hear more Depeche Mode here than I do Byrne/Eno, by the way—and just screws it up. Check out the little breakdown around the 2:24 mark—that freaky falsetto chorale. Also, the terrific organ solo that erupts at 3:44: a little circa-1967 garage rock plopped into the middle of 1987. All these flourishes enhance “Ambling Alp” without overstocking it. (Unlike a lot of indie arty-farties, Yeasayer are real songwriters; they take care not to disrupt their music’s momentum with too much fussiness.) Plus, the bassist is a straight ninja.

J.W.: Funny you mention Depeche Mode—listening to the rest of the album, which will be out in February, I heard singing that reminded me in places of Dave Gahan. Keating is a bit of an over-singer in a way I like—he sells his stuff. I didn't hear much Martin Gore, but then again I wasn't listening for it.

J.R.: You’re right about Keating. He knows what line of work he’s in: show business. I like that. He has a nice upper register, too, which he loves to show off. (In just about every Yeasayer song, he breaks out the falsetto by the time the bridge rolls around.) He really could be a rock star, if Yeasayer weren’t such dedicated weirdos.

But, wait, Jonah, how come you have the Yeasayer album advance and I don’t? Who’s the flak that’s servicing you with this product? What is it—do you have more indie cred or something? Aren’t you the guy who likes Creed?

Click here to comment on this post.

Track of the Week: Norah Jones' "Chasing Pirates"

Jonah Weiner: Hi Jody. In 2004, Norah Jones released her second album, Feels Like Home. It sold 1.02 million copies in its first week, putting her in the rarefied company of 50 Cent, Usher, and Lil Wayne—artists likely to go down in history as the last ones to ever muster seven-figure CD sales in seven days. Which one of these four is not like the other? Jones has something in common with Usher, I guess, in that her songs concern matters of the heart; unlike him, though, she typically sings about romance as if it's some slow-dripped brew, the sort you don't put your mouth anywhere near until it stops steaming and approaches room temperature. (Like 50 Cent and Lil Wayne she ... well ... is a carbon-based life form.)

The rap on Jones is that her music is a snooze. I agreed in the case of "Don't Know Why," her 2002 breakout hit, and disagreed (in a gentle, agreeable sort of way) when Feels Like Home's "Sunrise" came out. It's soft but propulsive, and the keening, wordless chorus is lovely. "Sunrise" made me think of some of Christine McVie's songs—genteel, swooning, suggesting that more dramatic emotions were roiling beneath the buttoned-up surface. "Chasing Pirates" is instantly grabbier than any of Jones' previous singles. It has the most pronounced rhythmic play—I like how the reverby keyboard riff, rock drums, and staccato rhythm guitar lock into sultry formation in the opening bars. And by her chaste standards, that Fender Rhodes solo later on is downright X-rated!

The lyrics seem to be about crushing on some hard-to-get bad boy. (You know the type: He has three glasses of Malbec, neglects to recycle the bottle, and then totally shows up an hour late to the next day's MoMA date.) Norah gets a text at the song's start from this guy, he says he's turning in, and the rest of "Chasing Pirates" is her wondering what's going on between them. If you're waiting for an event—a snarl of anger, a lustful moan—you're listening to the wrong song.  

Jody Rosen: Hello there, Jonah. First, let's deal with the history part. You're all mixed up about Norah's two big hits. "Don't Know Why" is the good one. For one thing, it's got the better hook. There's a touch—a touch—more swing and swerve in "Don't Know Why"; the thing's grabbier. It's also got that crucial moment of lyrical ambiguity: "Don't know why I didn't come." What, precisely, is this gorgeous young woman, this rare flower, talking about? I have my theory: I blame Ms. Jones' incompetent whelp of a boyfriend. There are certain, um, issues that can only be remedied by a man of the world, a "pirate" indeed—an aging pop music critic, say, with an air of swank dissolution about him and a dusting of gray at the temples.

But there I go again—holding others responsible for Norah's problems. I did this a couple of years ago, in my Slate review of Jones' third album, Not Too Late, arguing that she needed to jettison her poky little band (which included her then-boyfriend, Lee Alexander, on bass). Far be it for me to suggest that Norah is taking my advice ... mais voilà! She's dumped the bassist beau, dumped her band, and taken up with a bunch of ringers, including drummer Joey Waronker, guitarists Marc Ribot and Smokey Hormel, and the neosoul go-to keyboardist James Poyser, who plays with The Roots on Jimmy Fallon's show. Jones' forthcoming album The Fall has been hyped as her indie rock record, and on "Chasing Pirates" you can hear it: It's a more raggedy, nominally more "rock" sound. You're right about the rhythm. There's an interesting bassline and—who'd have thunk it?—the drumming is funky.

But guess what? The song's as boring as ever. It pains me to admit it; I'd love to say something counterintuitive. (This is Slate, after all.) But I think the problem is Norah, full stop. She can't write songs; she has poor taste in other people's songs. The songs just aren't good enough. She's got a wonderful voice, I'm crazy about it—a lovely sound that's all her own. But she has yet to put it to anything close to optimal use. I hasten to point out: I'm not saying Norah's too wimpy, too easy listening. I'm probably Sade's biggest fan. But there's a difference between soft and dull. On "Chasing Pirates" the crackerjack band merely accentuates the underlying issue: bad source material. Also, the lyric—oy, the cutesiness! "I'm having the squeams," she sings. That makes two of us.

JW: In four weeks of track-chatting, this is our first disagreement. I will mark the occasion by attempting to nap with both songs on in a repeating iTunes playlist and see which one ultimately does the trick. I didn't mention Jones' cutesiness, but I'm glad you did. For a girl with a serious, husky voice, she can be surprisingly self-infantilizing. This is typically most evident in her videos, heavy on romper-room palettes and preciously dinky sets. The "Chasing Pirates" video is no different—Jones hired a guy who worked on Pirates of the Caribbean's special effects team, apparently, so that she could pilot an apartment building through Manhattan, wide-eyed (and, I'll add, looking more beautiful than ever). It's a nice idea that goes nowhere. No cannonballs. No peglegs. This fearsome vessel runs on whimsy!

JR: My son liked the video. He's nuts about pirates, though, and the building in the video looks like ours. Also, he's 5 years old. But let's not even get started on insufferable indie-whimsy. We can save that topic for the release of the Fantastic Mr. Fox soundtrack.

I'll say one thing for Norah: Her music is more grown-up than the videos suggest. The woman is actually all about sex and drugs—I'm serious. The sex part is obvious. Her lyrics almost always concern desire, and even when they don't, there's all kinds of longing up in that plush croon of hers. (In a smart New Yorker piece a few years back, Sasha Frere-Jones called Norah's music "one big booty call.") As for the drugs: She's admitted that she smokes weed. She hangs out with Willie Nelson and has told interviewers that she's sampled his stash. People have died sampling Willie's stash. The point is, I believe I detect some 1930s "reefer song"-style lazy-haziness in her sound. Shades of Bea Foote! Maybe she has something in common with Lil Wayne after all? And maybe that's why her music's a little dullsville? You heard it here first: Norah Jones is stoned out of her gourd. Put that beauty on the cover of High Times!

Until next week, Jonah: arrggh, anchors aweigh, etc.

Click here to comment on this post.

Track of the Week: Shakira Featuring Lil Wayne, "Give It Up to Me"

In a new Browbeat feature, Slate critics Jody Rosen and Jonah Weiner discuss a recent pop song that has caught their attention. This week, they take on the new single from Shakira.

Jody Rosen: Hi, Jonah. Coming to you live from a cafe in brownstone Brooklyn where, needless to say, some sad-sack indie balladeer is whimpering away on the hi-fi. Hardly optimal conditions for contemplating Shakira's gale-force pop, but I'll do my best.

I'll say right up front that I'm pretty bummed out by "Give It Up to Me," a collaboration with Timbaland, who wrote and produced, and Lil Wayne, who raps a bit. Look, the song is catchy. Nice beat—Timbaland in fine form. Wayne phones in his rhymes but is, as always, endearing.

What depresses me is how un-Shakira—almost anti-Shakira—the song is. I gather "Give It Up to Me" was cobbled together by Epic Records execs who were freaked out about the prospects of Shakira's forthcoming album after the lead single, "She Wolf," tanked. I've heard the album (also called She Wolf), and it's terrific, one of my favorite records of the year. It's Shakira's most blatant overture to Anglo-American audiences—most of the tracks were produced by the Neptunes, with their usual flair for club-pop catchiness. But Shakira co-wrote all the songs, and stamped them with her irrepressible kookiness. She's the weirdest pop diva out there. Take "She Wolf." It's a neo-disco barn-burner about a gal on the prowl at a bar: the same territory, more or less, as "Give It Up to Me." But "She Wolf" is crammed with allusions to Greek mythology and lyrics about coffee machines. Shakira howls like a werewolf; she sings the word "lycanthropy"!

Compare that wackiness with the new song. "Give It Up to Me" is drearily generic—it sounds like a Nelly Furtado song. Now, I happen to like Nelly Furtado, but personality is not her strong suit. Seems to me Timbaland (and Epic) are doing the near impossible here: making Shakira boring.

Jonah Weiner: Awooo, Jody. This song does come off as a weak follow-up to "She Wolf." Thematically, it makes for a nice counterpart, because it introduces a new ravenous appetite to match the She Wolf's: That of Lil Wayne, who has nicknamed himself not just the Rapper Eater but the Pussy Monster (in homage to the Cookie Monster)—these two are hungry. But you're right: "Give It Up To Me" isn't the feast you'd hope for. I like the Timbaland beat, even though I feel I've heard that exact drum track in another song of his. But whatever; it's a great drum track. Wayne's toss-away rhymes delight me as always—just the way he chuckles off a line like, "My flow is a dog, down boy." Remember those boom times when we could expect four Lil Wayne cameos a day?

I guess what ultimately irks me is the same thing that irks you: Shakira's idiosyncrasies, so abundant in the first single (between the odd quasi-malaprops about coffee machines and being a student of the moon) are drained here. Part-and-parcel with that, her assertiveness is drained, and the gender parity is unconvincingly askew: She sounds like the one who gets chewed up and spit out. I guess Shakira has played with themes of submissiveness before, but I suspect that if I, by some fabric-of-time-and-space-rending miracle, found myself in a bedroom with her, I'd be the one who wound up “in a cage,” as she envisions herself here.

J.R.: No offense, but I'm not sure I want to contemplate a Shakira-Weiner coupling—or the apocalyptic scenario that would produce such a coupling. I'm trying to eat breakfast here.

You're right about the drum track. Very close to "Promiscuous," is it not? Timbaland's pretty serious about this Nelly Furtado-ization program. The song does make a couple of perfunctory concessions to Shakira's musical personality, at least. I'm thinking of the orientalist turn the melody takes at the 1:48 mark ("Hey, can we go by walking/ Or do you prefer to fly/ All of the roads are open/ In your mind")—a staple of Shakira’s music. (She’s a Columbian of Lebanese extraction.) But there are 11 songs on the She Wolf album better than this one. And the She Wolf album has 12 songs.

J.W.: Right. That Eastern-scaled interlude aside (a relic of the "Get Ur Freak On" and "Big Pimpin'"-era Timbaland, in a way), the song seems a bit cynical, color-by-numbers in the appeal it’s making to the American pop market. And, to be clear: I'm sure neither of us cares if a song is color-by-numbers and cynical, so long as it still works. This one feels perfunctory, unconvincing, dull. Who could have expected that? Shakira is one weird pop diva, as you write, and she's not the only weirdo here. Both Lil Wayne and Timbaland have highly bizarre ideas about what pop can sound like. This song isn't worthy of them.

Click here to comment on this post.

Track of the Week: Bruce Springsteen's "Wrecking Ball"

Jody Rosen: Hello, Jonah. Today we'll be discussing the new Bruce Springsteen song "Wrecking Ball," which the Boss debuted during his recent five-night stand at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. The Springsteen shows were the last concerts scheduled to take place at the big colosseum in the Meadowlands prior to its demolition. (They're building a spiffy new home for the Giants and Jets next door.) I have mixed feelings about "Wrecking Ball."

Pro: The song is narrated by a football stadium. How can you not respect that? As far as I know, this is a first in the history of rock 'n' roll, possibly a first in world literature. Now, granted, the stadium sounds suspiciously like Bruce Springsteen. (It says "mister" a lot, and waxes grandiloquent about hopes and desires and rust and dust and wind.) But no matter. Also, the E Street Band just plain roars. What a group! I can feel Giants Stadium buckling and heaving through my YouTube.

Con: This wrecking ball conceit doesn't really deliver the emotional gut-punch that Springsteen wants. I get what he's going for: stadium-facing-the-wrecking ball-as-metaphor-for-60-year-old-rock-titan-staring-down-Father-Time. Bring on your wrecking ball; take your best shot, lemme see what you got, etc. I dunno—it seems too tidy. This has been a problem with a lot of recent Springsteen songs: The metaphors are either too on-the-nose or too maddeningly vague. (What, exactly, are "devils and dust"?)

Jonah Weiner: Hi, Mister! This song didn't hit me in the gut, exactly, but it did manage to stir the emotions of this patent nonwatcher of sports, not to mention noncarer about 60-year-old rock titans. I see what you mean about the metaphor being a bit too-on-the-nose—another way of saying it's obvious, right? When he delivered the line about running down the clock I groaned. But the line about Meadowlands mosquitoes, for instance, was a bit more surprising. And I think "bring on your wrecking ball" is a pretty damn good put-up-your-dukes hook—on the nose in exactly the way a wrecking ball should be! Perhaps, though, it was the anthropomorphic narrator that really got me: It reminded me a bit of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, a classic in the literature of workhorse institutions put out to pasture.

"Queen of the Supermarket," from Bruce's Working on a Dream album, struck me as dead-in-the-water working-class-fetishism—Springsteen parody at its most ridiculous. This strikes me as Springsteen parody at its most grand.
 
J.R.: I love the line about the airplane-sized Meadowlands mosquitoes. That's not poetry, by the way. That's reportage.

I guess I wish that self-parody, whether ridiculous or grand, wasn't the only option left for Bruce. I'm convinced he lost his songwriting touch the day he began reading all those professors of Springsteenology and started believing that he's a littérateur. Even in this big dopey rock anthem, the poetastery creeps in: "I was raised out of steel here in the swamps of Jersey, some misty years ago." Misty years!
 
J.W.: "Misty years" is an earsore—maybe the clunky, clanging metaphor is meant to evoke the sound of steel being raised above the Jersey swamps? Yeah, listening again, a few infelicities piled up. He rhymes "balls" with "ball" in the first verse (although when Rick Ross rhymes a word with itself I love it, so, hey). In the third verse he's either mixing the stadium metaphor with a de trop "hold on to your anchor" refrain or, if I'm mishearing it that way, singing "hold on to your anger," which undercuts the bravado. And when he tells the crowd, "raise your glasses," has he forgotten where he is? To be fair, "Raise your plastic, nonweaponizable bottles of Bud Light" wouldn't have quite the same ring to it. Perhaps the most affecting part of the song is when the words stop altogether. Around the 5:40 mark, horns come in, and it sounds like the most poignant Saturday Night Live curtain call ever, with the whole group breaking into a big, fat, wordless wail.
 
But I think there are plenty of affecting lines—and, moreover, I didn't notice many of these gaffes the first few times around, probably thanks to the force of Springsteen's singing. Re: self-parody being his only option—it's funny how his would-be heirs have contributed, in a way, to this impression. When Brandon Flowers of The Killers or Win Butler of Arcade Fire pens a song about highways or the working man and calls it a Springsteen homage, is there a sense in which they rewrite/ossify him as a cliché merchant?

J.R.: Funny you should mention Springsteen's heirs. The money-shot moment you point to—"the big, fat, wordless wail" toward the end of the song—sounds to me like a straight Arcade Fire bite. The flow of influence has reversed!

Anyway, my verdict. C+ song; A- performance. Clarence Clemons' tasseled smock coat earns an A+. The Big Man's still fashion-forward, after all these years.

J.W.: The performance rocks. I wonder whether the drama the group musters at the scene of the crime will feel slight or canned if/when they record this in a studio. We agree the Clemons get-up was the real star, though—very haute Outlaw Josey Wales or something. Enjoy the rest of this misty day.

Click here to comment on this post.

Track of the Week: Vampire Weekend's "Horchata"

In a new Browbeat feature, Slate critics Jody Rosen and Jonah Weiner will discuss a recent pop song that has caught their attention. This week, they take on Vampire Weekend's "Horchata," which the band has made available for free download.

Jody Rosen: I'm predisposed to like this song because of the title. I do love horchata. Such creamy, cinnamony goodness. We should really be having this conversation at Casa Vieja in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, with bucket-size goblets of the stuff in hand. Although maybe Vampire Weekend chose that title just so they could shoehorn in some other cutesy rhymes: Balaclava, Aranciata, Masada ...

Jonah Weiner: I'll confess I've never had Casa Vieja's horchata, though I love that place. In fact, the first and only time I had horchata was 10 years ago at a tiny Mexican restaurant in Ojai, Calif., visiting a friend's fancy boarding school—a very Vampire Weekend place to drink horchata, as it happens! The sugar made my teeth scream, first in pleasure, then in pain. Balaclava, Aranciata, and Masada are cute words, and they fall into a great tradition of cute Vampire Weekend rhymes—I'm thinking of kefir-keffiyeh, Benneton-reggaeton; there are other examples. I think Ezra Koenig is pretty great at sketching his world—populated largely by the globetrotting and affluent young—with these sorts of name-drops.

J.R.: I like Koenig, too. Good songwriter. I can't quite fathom the criticism leveled at Vampire Weekend for being, you know, too Ivy League, too effete. That's the point! They're owning it. And I think there's more intentional self-parody in Vampire Weekend's songs than they're given credit for. There's an ironic distance between the well-heeled, hyper-verbal post-collegiates who populate VW songs and Koenig himself. Although, of course, he fits that description. Come to think of it, there's a bit of Whit Stillman in the posture—the lovingly detailed, amused depiction of, as the Metropolitan director would have it, the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie. In any case, what I really like about this band are the hooks and the nifty arrangements.

J.W.: I was corresponding over e-mail with Ezra recently (I've known these guys a bit since they were undergrads), and he pointed out that it's very infrequently mentioned in pieces that catalog the band's penchant for deck shoes, Cape Cod shout-outs, etc., that the chief songwriters in the group—Ezra and Rostam Batmanglij—are of Jewish and Persian descent, respectively. Gatecrashers at the blueblood boating party. He wasn't disavowing or trying to cred up the band's Ivy League provenance so much as saying what you're saying: there's distance between the band and the world it narrates. I think that distance—ironic, critical—becomes apparent on the new album in subtle but important ways, if not on this song particularly.

One last bit about the songwriting, before we talk about the nifty arrangements and hooks. Something seems new here in terms of the lyrics—the "here comes the feeling you thought you'd forgotten" refrain. Whereas the lyrics and choruses on the first album were often very specific (singing about rules of grammar here, rich girls in sweaters there), this line strikes me as painting with a broader, more "universally" evocative pop brush.

J.R.: Yeah, and that "here comes the feeling" bit is the part of the song that I like the best. (A lot more than the horchata and the balaclava.) The melody takes a lovely wistful turn there, and there's a pathos in the sentiment that grabs me, even if I'm not quite clear what, exactly, is being expressed. Then there's the bridge, which has the best lyrics that Koenig's written yet: "Years go by and hearts start to harden/ Those palms and firs that grew in your garden/ Falling down and nearing the rose beds/ The roots are shooting up through the tool shed/ Those lips and teeth that asked how my day went/ Are shouting up through cracks in the pavement." He's a poet, forsooth!

J.W.: I love those lines. And when he practically yells, later on, "You understood so you shouldn't have fought it!" it's emotive in a way their music hasn't been—at least not typically. In terms of arrangements, I love this one—the little plinking melodies (thumb piano and synth?) are more syncopated; the beat gets clattering and stompy. There's a lot more going on, but it all still feels taut and airy. (Hmm. Realizing that if there's going to be criticism of this track, it'll have to come from you—much like Bored to Death and the movies of Spike Jonze, I might be culturally programmed to enjoy this band.)

J.R.: God, I hate Bored to Death. But that's another story. Musically, "Horchata" is a kind of echt-Vampire Weekend song, isn't it—with the Afro-pop sounds and all those plinks and plonks? People get confused by the world-music flourishes, but Vampire Weekend is really a very traditional indie pop-rock group. But they're unusually skilled—excellent at slotting together pieces of rhythm and melody to build exciting arrangements. The songs are very well-calibrated little gizmos. They remind me of the Strokes in that respect. Very meticulous. And I like meticulous in my whimsical white boys.

J.W.: Yes—and I think there are even more moving parts to the gizmo this time around. This has been fun, Jody. I'm going to strap on some Top-Siders and go eat a Banh Mi. Which, if I were writing a song about my lunch, I'd rhyme with Bun-B.