#tom ewing

My favourite album: Introspective by Pet Shop Boys

by Tom Ewing

As Neil Tennant has helpfully pointed out, this album is called Introspective because all its songs are introspective. Truthfully, this isn't saying much – introspection is what Pet Shop Boys do. After all, their signature hit starts "When I look back upon my life …" and most of their great records involve a certain amount of self-reflection, which they frame with glorious disco-inspired pop. The resulting distance – the horribly familiar inability to stop questioning yourself, even in the middle of joy – used to be misread as irony. Then in 1990 the band made Behaviour, where Tennant sounded more honest and vulnerable than he ever had, and people called it their first great album. It is a great album – but for me the six long tracks of Introspective from 1988 are more rewarding.

You could hear the album as a journey away from distance. It starts with Left to My Own Devices, pop's greatest celebration of ambivalence. On the rest of side one we experience the downside of autonomy – a lonely Tennant conceding the need for companionship on I Want a Dog, then failing to connect to a lover on Domino Dancing. On side two he's redeemed – pledging himself on I'm Not Scared, admitting his faults on Always on My Mind, and finally opening out to the world on It's Alright. In the end, Introspective rejects its title.

That's why I still love it, but not why I fell for the album in the first place. I was 15, awkward, mistrustful of dance music, adrift from pop. Introspective changed that – it's a collection of extended mixes for songs that mostly weren't yet singles, and these longer versions are the definitive ones. I know now that a lot of this album draws inspiration from years of fabulous, opulent disco mixes. But at 15 it was a beautiful education in what you could do with pop given space and ideas. Left to My Own Devices inverts itself, scrambles its earlier verses and takes off to a private, string-soaked dream world. I Want a Dog turns from a squib into something profoundly sad. The Sterling Void cover It's Alright is a nine-minute love letter to house music.

Yes, I’m still alive. I had to come back to share some thoughts for Blackout’s 10th anniversary because nothing is more Tumblr than sharing tons of thoughts about Blackout on its 10th anniversary:

You have to understand. There aren't many things I've held onto, pondered, or cherished for ten full years. My Facebook account is one of them. The others are Britney Spears' album Blackout, and the essay "Britney in the Dark Lodge" by @tomewing. For a decade I have remembered them constantly, or maybe it's better to say they haven't let me go. They've stayed tangled in me; they've yielded to however my life has bent, folded, and stretched since then. And thank god—what's better suited to the pleasures of overreading?

Tom's essay wonders at Blackout's main problem. How do you praise an album made by, or on behalf of, an almost-debilitated pop star. To this day, Britney is under a conservatorship. How much more so in 2007 (or less so, which is maybe the problem), when I, having listened to nothing but Christian and classical music for a whole childhood, watched that year's VMAs in my high school dorm room only to find that mainstream pop music was actually as alien as I'd thought? Here was a woman at the degree-zero of performance presence. I couldn't look away. I was fascinated.

That's not even mentioning the suffocating sense that something needed to change. That's not even noting feeling trapped in ballet, classical music, church—all the things that were supposed to be who I was (that is, all the things that were failing me, were not made for me). That's not even mentioning my then-nascent gayness. From beginning to end, Blackout is one long lesson in mediation. What you see, what's supposed to be the case, cannot in fact be trusted; fakery is the truest thing of all. The music thrills because it keeps erupting past its own surface. Like Tom Ewing says, autotune and other effects make this an album that can't ever be reproduced live. It exists most fully as a manufactured thing. Think of all the songs we have now with choruses that can only be sung by samplers and software. I think Blackout was the first time I realized I was haunted by the meaning of medium: what the form and surface of a thing seem to say, what they conceal, and how much an artist allows themselves to revel in artificiality, or not. (This lure is, by the way, how I eventually realized my enjoyment of Bruno Mars' music in particular is incredibly fraught. Why is he protecting himself.)

Eventually there was the question of, Why white girls, and What do they mean to me (thanks Hilton Als). Which was not separate from, What does it even mean for me to be a (black gay) man who enjoys and sometimes even mocks, for fun, the efforts of a subjugated woman as such. Which is not separate from, How could I have been so drawn to Justin Timberlake and his music, if he committed the first of many public violences waged against Britney. But then there was a friend on a long car trip: something like, "Sorry, could we not listen to his music?" (I'd taken control of the aux cord.) "I can't stand what he did to Janet." Because of course, his slandering of Britney holds no candle to his eventual denigration of Janet Jackson, rendering (white) woman as refuse and black woman as even less than. (The country doesn't deserve any other Super Bowl halftime act.) All this, as Britney's whole schtick—feeling overprotected, using synths and sex as pop-starlet strength and accession to adulthood, making her voice heard (literally, by puncturing the surface of the album to speak to listeners as a person, and not a studio product)—issues straight from Janet's mouth. All this, as JT continues to seize and starch the legacy of one of the world's queerblackest artists: a man who also figures as achingly, distractingly bright surface. Because you can't talk about Britney without talking about Justin, and you can't talk about either without talking about Janet and Michael. Because if Tom Ewing is to be believed—if Blackout is, at its core, a "black hole" (so common a phrase, but so appropriate!), a wound—then the Jacksons are its depth.

The Top 100 Songs Of All Time: 1. Pet Shop Boys – Always On My Mind/In My House 

by Tom Ewing

The intro: 00’00 – 00’39

In December 1987 the Pet Shop Boys released “Always On My Mind”, a cover of the song made famous by Elvis Presley and Willie Nelson. It became the Christmas Number One that year. Almost a year later, they released Introspective, their third album, whose fifth track is a nine-minute version of “Always On My Mind”, including an acid house inspired breakdown that features Neil Tennant rapping. Introspective marks, in Tennant’s words, the end of the band’s “imperial phase”, where virtually anything they tried came off and was commercially successful. It charted at number two, behind U2’s Rattle And Hum.

Sixteen years later, at the end of a Freaky Trigger pub crawl, someone said that “Always On My Mind/In My House” was the best record of all time, and around a dozen of us agreed, or at least did not disagree, and that installed it at number one on our list, a list, we promised, that we would write up for the website over the course of 2005. And so we all went home the merrier for it.

And ten years after that, here we are.

My favourite album: Introspective by Pet Shop Boys

by Tom Ewing

As Neil Tennant has helpfully pointed out, this album is called Introspective because all its songs are introspective. Truthfully, this isn't saying much – introspection is what Pet Shop Boys do. After all, their signature hit starts "When I look back upon my life …" and most of their great records involve a certain amount of self-reflection, which they frame with glorious disco-inspired pop. The resulting distance – the horribly familiar inability to stop questioning yourself, even in the middle of joy – used to be misread as irony. Then in 1990 the band made Behaviour, where Tennant sounded more honest and vulnerable than he ever had, and people called it their first great album. It is a great album – but for me the six long tracks of Introspective from 1988 are more rewarding.

You could hear the album as a journey away from distance. It starts with Left to My Own Devices, pop's greatest celebration of ambivalence. On the rest of side one we experience the downside of autonomy – a lonely Tennant conceding the need for companionship on I Want a Dog, then failing to connect to a lover on Domino Dancing. On side two he's redeemed – pledging himself on I'm Not Scared, admitting his faults on Always on My Mind, and finally opening out to the world on It's Alright. In the end, Introspective rejects its title.

That's why I still love it, but not why I fell for the album in the first place. I was 15, awkward, mistrustful of dance music, adrift from pop. Introspective changed that – it's a collection of extended mixes for songs that mostly weren't yet singles, and these longer versions are the definitive ones. I know now that a lot of this album draws inspiration from years of fabulous, opulent disco mixes. But at 15 it was a beautiful education in what you could do with pop given space and ideas. Left to My Own Devices inverts itself, scrambles its earlier verses and takes off to a private, string-soaked dream world. I Want a Dog turns from a squib into something profoundly sad. The Sterling Void cover It's Alright is a nine-minute love letter to house music.

The band members’ silhouettes are soft against Brooklyn Bazaar’s trademark stained-glass as Bodega starts their set. Madison of ONWE channels David Byrne’s hollow stare, set in concentration. Nikki Belfiglio plays a converted computer keyboard as percussion before bite-smooching frontman Ben Hozie’s cheek.

Live audio, Bodega at KEXP. Catch lyrics from Neil Young's “Harvest” and Can's “Vitamin C” from 5:30-6:15 (both of which appeared on PTA's Inherent Vice soundtrack).

Hozie’s reading from the biography of French film direct & critic Éric Rohmer: “A classicism among the ruins… The cinema is definitely invested with a redemptive mission… [empowered by] the impartiality of the movie camera and the limits it imposes on human intervention.” Consider this the band’s ethos, alongside a motto inscribed in the lyric book of 2018′s Endless Scroll: The best critique is self-critique. Bodega sees its mission as self-evaluation through documentary. When liberals got excited about self-critique post-Trump, it was usually just one more in a series of sly twists toward superiority. (The dinner party line de rigeur: It’s like, shouldn’t we have worked harder to communicate our politics in a way the masses could understand?) Bodega’s scathing inward turn is in better faith and to better results.

The irony of the Rohmer quote lies in its contrast to our present moment: no one could seriously claim the camera and the screen as “objective” or limiting “human intervention” in 2018, year of the DeepFake. Hozie knows better than to sell cinema’s impartiality with a straight face; the artificiality of naturalism-as-artistic style is a recurring theme in our pre-show conversation. Which is why, on Scroll’s closing track “Truth Is Not Punishment,” Hozie shouts out the TV as the fulfillment of writing’s “porcupine dream… / where a man and his dream, let loose on caffeine, see it only one way.” Like everyone else, Bodega’s stuck inside a perspective and ideology. The question Endless Scroll can’t stop asking is what happens when you’re aware of the stuckness? What are the limits and liberations of self-knowledge?

Bodega used to be Bodega Bay, back before they broke up, played a final show to a desperate sweaty crowd, then pulled an LCD and were born again. The new record got its release on What’s Yr Rapture, the same label that put out Bodega’s post-punk peers Parquet Courts. It’s a more traditional LP than Hozie’s previous effort, thirty-three-track Our Brand Could Be Your Life (2015). But the never-say-die mode of “can’t go on, I’ll go on,” of trying to slip serious engagement into knowing snark, is standard practice for Hozie and Belfiglio, the two holdovers from Bodega’s previous incarnation. On Endless Scroll, the band combats contemporary nihilism — not to mention rockism’s aesthete tendencies — with an ethical center. Hozie makes full-length films in his free time, most recently The Lion’s Den (whose production is referenced throughout Endless Scroll). In Lion’s Den, Hozie took time out to explain Peter Singer-style utilitarianism, to examine the nuanced ethical trade-offs involved when consumption is framed as a zero-sum game: spend it on yourself, or spend it on others. Hozie’s projects have always been expositions on the hypocrisy and self-oriented pragmatism that characterize political and moral life. The message veers left, but it’s no Rococo Marxism — Endless Scroll is action-oriented and urgent, at least in affect.

2.

BODEGA exist within the global media economy, but they’ve also kept it local in holistic, farm-to-table fashion. The band’s biggest influence is, as it has been from the start, New York (“an island of blue / a nipple in water”). Wilson Ave venue Alphaville is a homebase for the group, and Hozie and Belfiglio are regulars in Bushwick’s weeknight scene. Ginsberg’s Rockland leaks through on the album’s twelfth track “Charlie”: “On that Staten Island ferry I was with you my friend / I see your face in the river / I am with you my friend.” The constant set-up and erosion of class oppositions, and the self-aware disparagement of yuppies, is vintage Whit Stillman updated for the iPhone bourgeoise.

That’s always been the conflict, right? Yuppies vs. Yuckies (aka Young Creatives). They used to fight over Downtown real estate but the suits won so the bands packed up for Brooklyn. Now the Yupsters have landed on the waterfront, set up a beachhead at the Vice Media offices and are working their way inland. It’s no coincidence that Vice is the conflict’s ultimate go-between, an intermediary agent with a history of swapping sides as is convenient. La Malinche, the Nahua translator who betrayed the Aztecs to Cortés, was a go-between who spoke both languages, after all.

Robert Sapolsky, ape researcher out of Cambridge, will tell you what Hozie and Belfiglio have learned through experience: large, concentrated populations lead to parallel status hierarchies, different but co-existing ways of gaining cultural cache. Which puts finance bros and punk rockers in the same business: cultural and social capital are capital too, these days. By the time the syllogism rolls around, the coffin’s already shut — on “Warhol” Hozie sings, “Andy said the best artist is businessman / and the best businessman is a cold blood killer / so it follows that the best artists are killers too. / If you see a man dying, note the color of his blood / and snap a picture.”

In his essay “Joe Chip, What’s On Your iPod?” Tom Ewing compares the death of rock, and the New York DIY scene by extension, to the “suspended animation state” and “shrinking reality bubble” of half-life in Philip K. Dick’s Ubik:

Within the bubble we listen to what we always did, we talk to people who listen to that stuff too, we enjoy the unspoken shared experience. But outside the bubble that experience is irrelevant or forgotten... Radio stations change format away from your music to something else; mailing lists sputter out; fellow fans move away and are not replaced.

Ben Hozie is the rocker in the bubble who’s also read all the thinkpieces written about the bubble. The political analogy is quick to hand, Bodega’s point of departure: for the man in a bubble aware of the bubble, what options are left? If you’re implicated, and you know you’re implicated, are you redeemed?

This end of garage is a cheap, quick music, made possible by low-cost music software. The delicacy of production and sophisticated rhythmic mesh of 2-step is miles away. You could master the basics of making a track in a week or two, using a pirated copy of Fruity Loops or a similar software package. If you didn’t have a PC to do that, your Playstation would do. Music 2000 – one of the last releases on the PS1 – gained notoriety and respect for how rapidly it let new producers step up. The core of So Solid’s MCs were men in their early 20s, who’d spent time hustling but now had responsibilities – most had one or two kids – and wanted better, safer ways to make their money and names. But alongside that, the shift between 2-Step and what ended up as Grime saw a rapid drop in the age of people making the music, from the DJs and producers raised on house music to kids drawing on the hard snap of drum’n’bass, the battle stances of hip-hop and videogames.