Popcorn Noises

“What Cue?…”

“…’Faye Dunaway’ take two,” mumbles Justin Moyer in a terse moment of verité that kicks off First Reflections, the otherwise spotty and confounding 2001 debut of his Edie Sedgwick project. It’s been a different ‘band’ every album, but in the beginning it was a bass-and-drums duo of Moyer and Ryan Hicks, both stalwarts of the DC Dischord scene. The blurb-able headline here, though, is the post-ironic (or maybe pre-ironic?) concept of half-intellectualized celebrity worship that serves as Moyer’s prime directive. Hence christening every song after a famous actor—Sean Connery, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep to name a few—and flying it all under the banner of Andy Warhol’s most renowned starlet. It’s not quite the famous-for-being-famous vibe of your Hiltons and your Kardashians, but it’s in a similar vein: stardom as both a flimsy construction and a cultural end in itself. The band may’ve argued that it was all a sincere form of avant-garde adulation, but the album’s not so convincing.

Why talk about it at all, then? I only bothered to hear a few tracks from the subsequent Edie Sedgwick albums (including the electroclash drag show of Her Love is Real…But She is Not!, arguably the project’s artistic peak) and the pretense is questionable at best. Yet First Reflections—and “Faye Dunaway” in particular—have stuck with me ever since I first heard it almost nine years ago. People don’t often talk about how an experimental piece of music fits into their lives because they’re too focused on what it means in a super-social context. Pop songs can speak to you, for you, and about you, but a noodly, abstract, honking 2-minute jazz-punk screed about Winona Ryder speaks over you. It’s condescending. You’re not supposed to relate to it. But this record is great in the way that its rubbery, immaculate minimalism—clean, undistorted bass guitar and perfectly-recorded drums—creates a sense of openness. That’s why Moyer’s album-starting aside is so important: it reminds us that, in the end, this is just the sound of two guys jamming in a room. He shouts his beat-poet lyrics above the din as if they weren’t the whole point of the band to begin with. For someone like 17-year-old me, such comfortable sonic looseness paired with the wiggling, hyperactive groove of “Dunaway” could be all you needed to forge a new experimental definition of rock music in your head.

At least that’s how it felt back then. This was toward the end of the Epitonic era—remember?—before free mp3s came packaged with six press photos, a Vimeo link, and aspirations of ‘grassroots’ viral buzz. For me it ended up working out as a kind of free-associative exercise in music discovery, where Edie Sedgwick got lumped in under the general banner of indie with, like, TV on the Radio’s early stuff. I heard Daniel Johnston for the first time on an internet radio station labeled “Alternative,” sandwiched between the Elephant 6 free-jazz group Bablicon and, I think, The Crystal Method. It was a strange time in my life. I was hungry for all things unknown and unusual, trying to skew my musical vocabulary toward the underground largely without the aid of critics, record store clerks, cool older friends, or any of the traditional pre-net gatekeepers. I would get into all of that soon after I graduated high school, but for a brief moment I was out there on my own, listening to whatever bits came along and biding my time until I could get the hell out of Orlando and grow up already. I wish I could remember more of it.

“Faye Dunaway” feels representative of that time, though, and (perhaps not-coincidentally) also of the sorta-unrealized goals of the band. Moyer zeroes in on Dunaway’s famous legs, but he adopts the prima donna attitude traced most directly to the 1987 drama Barfly (Mickey Rourke plays Charles Bukowski—yeah, I know…) in which a camera tilt over her legs that wasn’t in the script was added at her insistence. “These legs are guns—you get the good side!” Moyer snarls, casting his muse as a ominous weapon both on screen and off. Dunaway threatens with her legs and Moyer threatens with her. That’s why it’s hard to buy the deflection of post-irony: Moyer sounds too vertiginous, too snotty, and too eager to prove a point here (too “punk,” in other words). It would take another album and a reinvention of identity for him to get it right. Here he seems much more interested in drawing out the depths of dead-eyed stardom, even using the obvious metaphor of makeup for his opening call to arms, “Come rouge! Come blush!” All across the album’s lean 27 minutes he can never bring himself to put it bluntly. I get why—“celebrities are shallow” would make for a pretty boring lyric sheet—but just as Moyer makes like it’s easy to see through the stars he’s memorializing, we as listeners will probably find it easy to se through him.

I keep coming back to this record, though, and I’m finding it hard to be satisfied with “I heard it when I was a teenager” as a suitable explanation. I mean, there’s a case to be made that biography is responsible for all tastes, however indirectly, but I hear something in First Reflections that I don’t hear anywhere else, not even in my all-time favorite albums: the willingness to not matter followed up by actually not mattering. I believe this is one of the most important functions of indie rock as a musical subculture—to produce works that go deservedly nowhere, which indulge in irredeemable pretension or numbing facileness, and which are still out there floating around in the back bins of record stores or the deep corners of the internet for some kid to stumble upon and make his/her own. No one in their right mind would burn this album onto CDs, print up little jewel case inserts, and slap a $15 price tag on it thinking that it would sell, right? And even the most blasé or die-hard punk critics would hesitate to give it five stars, right? It’s not ugly or unlistenable like so much other failed avant rock, but it has no lasting pop acumen. It interacts with culture—painfully so, sometimes—but it doesn’t position itself within the history of music. There’s no creep of nostalgia or tribute to beloved records here. There’s no reverb. In many ways it’s the opposite of what the indie rock landscape (which I still love) looks like today—a farm system for internet-tier pop stars—so it feels like just what the doctor ordered. Please continue to ignore it so I can keep it for myself.