Joanna Newsom - Divers (clusterfuck topic tbd)

haha, i'm done on this thread, i swear. enjoy your cat lady, you guys! i just had to get that out of my system...

(i tried to play the new JN song for my wife last night and she had to leave the room. true love!!!)

voice is like a cat-lady's, which is embarrassing because it's basic-level sexist. xxxp oh look a not-apology

the quaint thing about this thread so far is it's 100% dudes either "loving" or "not loving" a woman's music. except for la lechera calling out the jizz joke.

i'm not even much of a JN fan (yet?) and the zings are tired itt

there's something much worse than "not loving" going on here

i misread, he did say "old lady cat voice" which is just kind of whatever so i take back my risibleness

it was a play on old man hat voice. the yin to JN's yang.

I can't speak for every troll, but there's no misogyny in my JN hatred. What hearing her voice brings out of me is the same intense revulsion I get when Dan Bejar or Antony Hegarty sings, because none of them make music that is good enough for me to get past what they sound like when they sing (although JN has the added layer of being very "ren faire" and playing a harp, so she's going to get 3 times the trolling).

it makes me cringe. what can i say. the only part i dug from the new song was the frippertronic kate bush part at the end.

except for la lechera calling out the jizz joke.

― e-bouquet (mattresslessness), Tuesday, August 11, 2015 8:16 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thing is there's a JN lyric apparently about semen and it requires a syllogism to get to that conclusion and too much coffee

Is the title meant as like Olympic divers or deep sea divers or divers as in the olde tyme way of saying "diverse"

the normal response to revulsion is just to stay away.

http://image4.spreadshirtmedia.com/image-server/v1/products/111488380/views/1,width=235,height=235,appearanceId=1/Why-Be-Normal-.png

there's really no extracting joanna newsom-hate from our misogynist culture - it informs all of our tastes and word choice. it's quite possible my desire to verbally snicker-snag when asked to earnestly engage with what sounds like someone playing a fubar-scratched CD of The Kick Inside is nothing but a macho defense mechanism that has to be transcended if we're ever to achieve true understanding and mutual respect. i will fully admit that.

I guess there's a good chance this song (recorded live 2012) will be on the album (maybe as track 7 "Divers")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuN-4gykysU

Keep Austin ilxor.com Weird offended.

I've never got into JN as much as I should. A friend gave me a mix CD with "Book of Right On" on it back when Milk Eyed Mender came out. Loved the song, but never checked out the album. Then Ys was just too much. I don't think I was ready for 15 minute harp epics or whatever. So I skipped HOOM after that. I really like this track though.

Again, my previously-uninformed opinion of JN was infected by many of the same (un-/underinformed) prejudices expressed by the haters itt. The type of music she makes is not the type of music I typically enjoy. But I engaged with her music after a stretch of being put off by the descriptors and the ambience suggested by those descriptors and I'm really glad that I did. She's responsible some of my favorite music from the last ten years.

90% of the objectionable voice stuff (arguably objectionable, as I came to enjoy the way it harkened back to early-20th C. Ozark folk recordings) is from her first album, btw. She's done a lot of work on her voice and it's really quite lovely now.

She's done a lot of work on her voice and it's really quite lovely now.

If I hadn't already listened to "Sapokanikan," I might believe you.

Ys is my least favorite of the three, btw. Still good but easily the least accessible. Interested newbies should listen to HOOM first, I'd argue.

xxxp check out 'en gallop'. I think you'd like all of Milk Eyed Mender if you liked "Book of Right On".

Cool.

I disagree newbies should go to HOOM. Maybe if we're looking for individual album tracks. Ys has the majestic melodies circling around each other and the feel of coherence over the other albums.

admittedly i havent spent very much time listening to her but easily found tracks on HOOM to be the more accessible than anything on ys or milk-eyed

i didn't particularly enjoy this new track

right now i kind of just more admire her than enjoy her, that might change though

Ys is the one that got me hooked. I still think it's her most powerful.

huh i thought jc loves chachi was a legit newsom hater, yr troll game is solid.

no, I loved MEM - like, deeply - wasn't super-sold on Ys and thought HOOM was pretty lol

reeeeeeeeasonably certain giving shit to people who make records is a big part of this board crossing all gender et al lines. however, it's true that JN's an easy target and that issues of the constructed "feminine" etc come into play here. be that as it may, the countermove -- "there's no way your clowning is in earnest, it has to be about something deeper otherwise why didn't you clown [other artist who didn't inspire the same revulsion]" is really infantile discourse imo. it's also basically the entire internet right now so w/e

would be interested to know what was lol about HOOM to a MEM-lover

i dunno, you could ask yourself, are you adding anything of value to this thread, or are you detracting from its value

how the fuck can they afford that house

it was only $6.25 million, obviously a shit load of money but less than i would've thought for that house

samberg prob makes a ton of money?

newsom is also a fairly successful musician but i don't really know what someone at her level makes

Haven't we had this conversation already?

Oh yeah, on the HOOM thread

i dunno, you could ask yourself, are you adding anything of value to this thread, or are you detracting from its value

did this math. thread is more valuable for my unicorn jokes. every time I make one the thread's value goes up

would be interested to know what was lol about HOOM to a MEM-lover

MEM has Sadie, This Side of the Blue, and Bridges & Balloons: tremendous songs despite plenty of "oof" turns lyrically to my ear

HOOM hasn't got a single song within spitting distance of those three imo

I have an impossible discussion within me regarding Joanna Newsom and how it shakes me and my own practice, and a lot of the non-cwsm artists working in this kind of post-genre indie apocalypse where any and all compositional tools are available.

I don't know if it's possible to discuss my thoughts without making statements that are enormously problematic. But I believe two things. First, that Joanna's music gets worse as she gets more ambitious, more self-aware, and more deliberately challenging with the flexing of her muscles. Second, that my feeling of "what makes her music worse" is not a misogynistic response as a listener, but rather a dislike of when a female (or queer, in my own more pertinent case) musician asserts his/her feminine/queer identity by creating art that is ambitious, self-aware, putting one's talents on a showboat so that one's art DEMANDS admiration and respect.

Considering that music criticism has always wanted to pigeonhole any sort of female musician as having zero agency either as songwriter or producer, it's only natural that a female songwriter/producer will desire to assert their authorship, either verbally in the press, or compositionally. Push their talents to the limit to demand the listener show respect. There's a fundamental need to show the world that one has chops instead of simply allowing one's chops to exist.

But it doesn't make for good music. I feel like this is why so many loud men want to shoo away the My Brightest Diamonds of the world; the music can feel demonstrative instead of being real.

Joanna is real so often, though. My favourite Joanna moments (all of MEM, "Cosmia", the shorter vignettes on HOOM) are the instances where she simply stumbles around her emotional and intellectual landscape, aided by her immense talents. When she simply exists as a writing, singing, music-making person, rather than feeling the need to impress the listener at every moment.

This feeling permeates through my taste in just about all "indie" female and queer singer-songwriters, infinitely preferring when their music is effortless (Sufjan's most recent as opposed to everything that came before, St. Vincent's first two, tUnE-yArDs' first album, Antony at his most emotionally barren, Jana Hunter as opposed to Lower Dens, this Holly Herndon over that, this Grouper over that, this Bjork over that, and so on). But it's impossible for me to extract how much of this is tied to, like, the Kristevan idea of how-to-create-good-feminist-art-in-a-culture-of-misogyny (don't think, just do), and how much is tied to my own baggage.

Forgive me if I'm way off the mark or this post poses some mega-problems, or that my queer/feminist take is not particularly well-informed.

<3 and obviously, it's the culture that is to blame here, not the creator <3

HOOM hasn't got a single song within spitting distance of those three imo

in california, does not suffice >>>>>>

but they're such different records compositionally that i get why you think that

xxxp i never had any interest in her before HOOM got good reviews and i just felt like plonking down some money for something as dumbly ambitious as a triple album

i liked most, i think, what you were getting at with the 'music-making person' aspects of the record, and i did like the harp music and found some of it interesting/affecting (a bit draggier in some places), and really liked the band she put together

but what floored me at the time, not too far through my first listen maybe, was an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, that someone could put such an overabundance of music on record, and obviously have put so much into it. it's never seemed particularly overindulgent to me because i haven't felt like it's anything i had to listen to: it just stays there, and i can always find out more about it if i want. but musicians in general had been seeming a lot less generous, a lot less giving of themselves (cast that in musical rather than personal terms, i don't feel any particularly biographical/'identifying' connection with newsom), at the time i first heard the record. so it seemed to come out of nowhere, completely gratuitous.

i don't read that in terms of impressing or demanding respect, personally. i don't follow the lyrics too closely but i suppose the whole idea might have been at play in the record anyway, given the title.

xp i like fgti's take except imo ys is her at her most ambitious and that's why i like it the least (except for "cosmia" which is all time). have one on me wasn't a scaling back in length but imo its rhetorical and musical flourishes were more careful and subtle, which i guess is generated from being "more self-aware"

The thing about this song, I think, is that it doesn't really do all that much. There are verses and there's a chorus and then there's the long sprechstimme bit at the end with a coda. Is that really pushing things too much? There are nuances within the structure, too - the way the arrangement for the verse structure changes, the fact that the sprechstimme part blooms out into this developmental passage where she's actually singing in harmony in the end. This is all a virtuosity that I want to afford her music.

really liked the band she put together

otm

I guess what made me reel from the first listen-through of this new track was the immediate deployment of words like "Ozymandian" and the fussy piano parts. Made me think about what I love about Nina Nastasia, PJ Harvey, even Rufus, who succeeds to my ears best when he's ticking the boxes of what-makes-a-good-pop-track ("Poses") or just letting his fingers and voice fall where they will ("The Art Teacher").

@ BradNelson it's true that Ys is amazing at its best ("Emily", "Cosmia") but fussy and insufferable at its worst ("Monkey And Bear").

And the reason that I feel so uncomfortable about typing about all of this is that there's a shade of "what I want my women and queers to sound like" which is also part of the problem of misogynist listening, let everyone just follow their bliss, ideally

i guess i don't like ys the least bc it's ambitious, there's just no breathing room at all, every idea at once

Second, that my feeling of "what makes her music worse" is not a misogynistic response as a listener, but rather a dislike of when a female (or queer, in my own more pertinent case) musician asserts his/her feminine/queer identity by creating art that is ambitious, self-aware, putting one's talents on a showboat so that one's art DEMANDS admiration and respect.

TBH I am having difficulty parsing how this isn't a misogynistic response. It seems like you are saying that for women, exerting effort/control = inferior art without interrogating what "exerting effort" means, or why this is something intrinsically detrimental to female/queer artists, where the implication is that it is not intrinsically detrimental to non-female/non-queer artists. There's an undercurrent of essentialism here that I am reacting very negatively towards that runs parallel to statements like "black people are the best dancers because of their natural, effortless rhythm".

Am I misinterpreting you? xp and I see you are addressing some of this, so maybe the issue here is the definition of "exerting effort" and why that would be a negative.

There is nothing wrong with "exerting effort", obviously. But in specifically a "post-genre" genre, for lack of a better term-- I guess you could call Joni the first and best example of this style of album-making-- there is a moment when the exertion feels as if its demonstrative, trying to prove ones own agency to the audience, instead of simply allowing one's agency to serve an artistic thesis.

And also, does that agency need to be proven before both artist and listener can really relax? When Carrie And Lowell came out, I was left wondering, for example, if the record would've been as well received had Suf not already been established in most people's eyes as a heavy. Had that been his debut, how would people have taken it?

The reason why I'm speaking specifically of this nebulous "post-genre" is that if one is exerting effort toward creating great dance, pop, rap, classical or whatever, there's already a standard, a series of boxes to be ticked, one's agency is directed toward making it bang as opposed to "some other reason"

but what floored me at the time, not too far through my first listen maybe, was an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, that someone could put such an overabundance of music on record, and obviously have put so much into it. it's never seemed particularly overindulgent to me because i haven't felt like it's anything i had to listen to: it just stays there, and i can always find out more about it if i want. but musicians in general had been seeming a lot less generous, a lot less giving of themselves (cast that in musical rather than personal terms, i don't feel any particularly biographical/'identifying' connection with newsom), at the time i first heard the record. so it seemed to come out of nowhere, completely gratuitous.

wow this is right on ime.

I really don't get the implicit demand for respect that JM is supposedly making, at least not any moreso than the implicit demand for respect made by anyone who's putting their art into the public sphere.

i don't know if i agree with it but i think fgti's reason for it above could plausibly work - is it that, basically, you don't do something out-of-the-boxes unless your effort entails some kind of extra self-assertion, as well, basically?

yeah j. otm re: hoom