Popcorn Noises

Glasser - Ring

Sometimes I think we treat singers too much like athletes. Nothing wrong with athletes, of course, but we have the spectatorshippy deal with both of them. [Keep in mind I’m making very broad generalizations here specifically about Americans and What Americans Are Like.] I have this notion of people not just watching football (baseball and basketball too, but football is the most convenient illustration), but soaking in the punditry and commentary with ravenous interest, interpreting it themselves, and spitting it back out in conversation. We call it being an ‘armchair quarterback,’ and when you add something like a fantasy league into it, it looks very much like music fans curating mix tapes. Now, I don’t really watch “American Idol,” but I hear about it from people who do and I get an almost identical impression of how those viewers approach the spectacle of a singing competition. I understand how one can have a ‘great voice’ and still sing awful and artless songs, but it’s sort of like a team relying on one exceptional player to carry them (I’ve experienced this the last year watching my Gators try to fill the Tim Tebow-sized hole in their offense)—even if you get results and ‘win,’ your one-dimensionalness is always threatening to pull the rug out from under you.

If in a conversation I make a disparaging remark about someone I see as a particularly cruddy artist—Christina Aguilera, let’s say—I’m always countered with “but she’s an amazing singer.” Yes, she is unnaturally gifted when it comes to range and pitch and projection and all that, but watching someone flex those muscles doesn’t excite me. I’m not arguing against pop or against traditionally talented singers; I’m arguing against an audience that holds technical and/or physical skill up as an end in itself. It seems lazy to me. We find it easier to turn something like singing (which has the power to move us and provoke us and communicate things that plain language never could) into a body-building competition or a football game so we can have winners and losers and feel like we know how to recognize the difference. Engaging with art doesn’t work that way. It’s messy and twisted and it demands things of you, like opening yourself up to be hurt or surprised or berated, and often it necessitates you learning a whole new language—the signifiers and traditions—of a medium just so you can start to grasp whatever layers of meaning there might be. Worse still is the fact that sometimes there is nothing to understand and we’re left feeling like either we’re stupid or it was a bad piece of art. As the year winds down and we start collecting our favorite works and ranking them, I’m increasingly confronted with how difficult it is to reconcile that practice with the demands of our experiences.

I visited New York City last month and the first night I was there happened to be the second night of Pitchfork’s #Offline festival. I met up with my city-dwelling friends and we chatted about life and stuff while milling around near the bar area at Brooklyn Bowl. I had been in a hurry to get there because I didn’t want to miss the 9 p.m. set by L.A.’s Glasser a.k.a. singer Cameron Miserow and her band, and once they took the stage, I barely blinked. I’d heard a few songs from Ring and I was already very into what she was doing, but I wasn’t prepared for the force of her music translated into a live setting. Glasser walks this odd line between spareness/simplicity—most songs are made out of tribal percussion loops and a few keyboard plinks—and a monolithic, elemental kind of power. A lot of her lyrics reference thunder, harsh light, roaring gales, etc. and they’re strikingly set off by the utterly spartan two-chord structures of the songs. She has a way of building melodies out of arpeggios that feel more like pentatonic scales—when you place them over a stew of organic and electronic drums, they start to sound like mystical Gregorian incantations.

Part way through that set, a friend who’d never heard Glasser before turned to me and commented, “Wow, she has an amazing voice.” She was right: Miserow’s voice is something to behold. It’s strong, flexible, and versatile but it’s also warm and full of personality. It can soar high above a song and take up so much space that you don’t even notice the gap in between. My friend probably didn’t mean it this way, but I felt a painful twinge of that “American Idol” spectatorship. I mean, here we were standing around drinking our beers in a bowling alley and this woman on stage in a bright red robe and her cooly focused compatriots were conjuring thunderstorms, shaking the very ground beneath their feet, and never once giving even the slightest indication that the song was some kind of window dressing for the central instrument. This is where a voice becomes an art, where a singer learns how to be an expressive and commanding presence while ultimately serving the song, not herself. Maybe it’s wrong of me to elevate Art to some kind of unknowable force, to discourage people who simply want to enjoy a TV show, and to draw big cross-cultural parallels over the heads of a small indie band, but in a lot of ways I can’t help it. This is part of what Ring conjures in me.