Month: November 2024

By Jack Fry

On my final evening in New York, I surfaced from Broadway subway station into the sticky humidity of a summer night in the city and walked the 200 or so yards to Clockwork bar, the archetype of an American dive bar. Having just swerved around a recurring character from “BRAT Summer,” Addison Rae, on the street, wearing a sparkly pink vest and flip-flops and sipping from a straw, I entered and ordered a Budweiser and a well shot of tequila. The bar was unassuming and poorly lit with walls painted black and graffiti scrawled across any and every surface and the speakers blasted the kind of music that you might find on an “indie sleaze” Spotify playlist. My plans for the night consisted of catching a set from two buzzy NYC artists who would most likely feature on said playlist; The Dare at a bar round the corner and Been Stellar at their album release show over in Brooklyn. Two artists who, if you are fan of Lena Dunham’s Girls, could very well have played at the Bushwick party in the episode ‘the crackcident’. After drinks, I joined a group of NYU students who I’d shared a cigarette with to head to Home Sweet Home where The Dare has accrued a cult following for his DJ sets that he of course calls “freakquencies”. 

The Dare, aka Harrison Patrick Smith, is a DJ and producer who emerged post-pandemic out of a supposed downtown scene that centred around so-called “Dimes Square” in Chinatown. You most likely recognise him from the Charli xcx and Billie Eilish remix of ‘Guess’. He has cultivated an image that is both striking and immediately recognisable: a uniform of a skinny Celine suit, sharp mod cut and dark wayfarers all worn with a careless affectation a la Bret Easton Ellis. The character created by The Dare is a nihilistic, horny, self obsessed, drug taking 20 something who lives to party – a kind of modern-day Dionysus. The music and his persona are as brazenly sex obsessed as Tom Ford-era Gucci (G shaped pubic hair and all). He is obsessed with both who he desires (everyone) and being desired. Consequently, much of the lyrical content could have been drawn from Superbad film dialogue. He has resuscitated polarising sonic influences from the electroclash era and injected a smuttiness. Thus his music was bound to be marmite and this is as he intends. He recently stated to the New York Times: “I just like music that rubs people one way or the other”.

The Dare’s music draws unquestionable inspiration from New York’s music of the noughties. His music is a pastiche of bands and projects such as The Rapture, Fischerspooner and LCD SoundSystem, mixing electronic dance music with indie rock and sing shout vocals. On his new album What’s wrong with New York? The Dare brings together his host of influences to make an evocative party record that is both intoxicating and jarring. Whilst electroclash is often cited as a reference point, I’m reminded of the dance and pop music that emerged in the early 2010s. His music, lyrically, is a parody of a lot of recession era pop. Think Ke$ha – when pop music was wholly concerned with “tonight” and the charged mythical promise that it held. The obsession with hedonism in pop music, while not new, was perhaps exacerbated post-financial crash as a form of escapism for Millennials. For Gen Z, the popularity of The Dare’s club-centred music and its inane lyrical content may stem from a similarly cynical mindset. For a generation that has grown up amid the existential threats of climate change and a global pandemic, the attraction to a narcissistic and fatalist debauchery seems apt.

The Dare’s remarkable production ability and DIY attitude have created a characteristic sound where synths resemble computer game samples, beats feel like those of preprogrammed keyboard tracks and his basses sound as if they are buzzing through a blown out speaker. On Perfume the chorus in both cadence and crudeness is reminiscent of ‘I’m too sexy’ by Right Said Fred and LMFAO’s 2010 hit ‘I’m sexy and I know it’. ‘You’re Invited’ invokes the funk warped cyber vocals of Chromeo and the hook in the bridge sounds uncannily like the Duck Sauce hit, ‘Barbara Streisand’. ‘All night’s’ production calls to mind ‘love in stereo’ a track from another indie sleaze icon Sky Ferreira. However, it’s not just electroclash and recession pop he’s drawing from; he is also combining the brash beats of on trend pc pop with the twinkly synths of the eighties.

His set at Freakquencies was filled with a large chunk of people who were probably using fake IDs to get in. The dance floor, although small, was packed with sweaty people jostling under the shattered glare of a disco ball and on the tables of the neighbouring booths. Despite the optics, it all felt rather affected or tame – almost like an attempt at recapturing the reckless abandon of previous generations, a parody of itself. There was a poise that British crowds tend to lack. Maybe it was too early on in the night but everyone seemed, like The Dare, aware and careful of how they appeared. It was almost like they expected to end up on Cobra Snake’s website the next day, caught wide eyed in the white flash, a Cory Kennedy look alike. I left after an hour but not because his set was lacklustre. Criminally, the bar didn’t have a smoking area and they refused re-entry if you stepped outside for a smoke. Much like the man we’d come to see, the scene is a projection, yet evidently it emits a rather seductive light. As I wandered to the subway I passed nearly two blocks worth of people still queuing to get in.

As I waited for the train, rats ran across the tracks strewn with detritus: a Mexican coke bottle, a watermelon vape, a shredded gig poster. I took the J train, rattling across the Williamsburg bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn, peeking at the skyline through the iron lattice. I walked under the screeching tracks until I reached Baby’s All Right where the pink glow of its neon sign illuminated the gathering crowd outside. I had arrived at the release gig for Scream from New York, the debut album by Been Stellar—a quintet from NYU and the latest group to attempt a rock revival in New York. Having already played storied venues like the Mercury Lounge and been on the cover of the NME, this attempt seems to be genuinely promising. 

Been Stellar clearly draws from the same time period as The Dare although they’re reaching into a different bag of sonic influences. Their rock harks back to both the garage era of the Strokes, incorporating shoegaze-y walls of noise, while the production of certain tracks is reminiscent of the post punk of Fontaine’s DC and their debut album Dogrel. Their music, coincidentally produced by the Irish band’s frequent collaborator, Dan Carey, has a fuzzy and gravelly texture that recreates the inescapable white noise of city traffic and construction. This dissonant wash of sound, coupled with a gnawing delivery by slocum in his at times Lou Reed like nasal drawl, gives the music an evocative sense of place. Every so often, however, the distinctiveness between tracks is lost in the slowed tempo guitar noise which drowns out the lyrics and melodies. 

Much like the bands who emerged in post 9/11 New York, Been Stellar have evolved out of their own generational defining crisis and in their songs they vividly portray images of mid and post pandemic in the city. On the titular track with a sound that is reaching for the anthemic, they attempt to tackle a subject beyond Manhattan itself seeking to capture a national mood. Frontman, Sam Slocum sings “It’s the end of the world and I feel fine” embodying a generation, who have become so accustomed to crisis they’ve grown apathetic to it “the people didn’t make a sound”. And so whilst he sings “I just don’t have the words they don’t make words for this” the music begins to take over for them. The guitars ring out like sirens, nervy and unavoidable, as if, through sheer force of vibration they could, at the very least, make you physically feel something. Crack the glass and break through the numbness and malaise.

Whilst The Dare is disinterested and that’s part of his charm, Been Stellar plays with a fervour and earnestness that lurks behind the former’s bravado. Amongst statements as expansive as the title track are moments that divulge a longing for intimacy. The band writes of the miscommunications and confusion that can characterise youthful romance across the album on tracks such as ‘Takedown’, ‘Pumpkin’ and album highlight ‘Sweet’. On ‘Sweet’, a song reminiscent of ‘The Rat’ by The Walkmen in its urgency of feeling (not a comparison that I make lightly), they also demonstrate a knack for an emotionally potent couplet: “It won’t always be this way, I know the tide.” 

Both Been Stellar and The Dare namecheck New York in their album titles and they are also both making music with an inherent identity drawing from the city’s artists that have come before. For a band who titled their EP Manhattan Youth and had a song on it called ‘Kids 1995’ after the cult classic harmony Corine film, it’s clear that Been Stellar is set on capturing the spirit of New York for a generation obsessed with the past. By invoking these influences, they are blatantly wishing to become a part of the city’s musical canon. On ‘Manhattan youth’, an early single, Slocum sings of his peer group who are “certain of something stuck in the new” nostalgically longing for a bygone era. Perhaps Gen Z’s retrospection is borne out of our complete access to past culture in the age of the internet or maybe we have sought out the era of our childhood as a balm for the prospect of the present and the uncertain future. However, the trouble with indie sleaze or attempts to recreate it by Gen Z is that it never existed in the first place, it is a manifestation of a dream world, a self mythologised (see ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’) golden age of a scene that was arguably created in retrospect. 
Furthermore, can good taste and a sum of influences become something equal to or greater than those things being referenced, a true original? As The Dare writes on his album closer, with a winking self awareness, “sometimes I steal what others wrote”. However, despite these objections and as derivative as some of the sonic and the lyrical themes for both acts are, they are also tapping into a timelessness. Every youthful cohort has felt like this in their 20s, directionless, lonely and seeking connection or meaning in the night or a new experience. It’s almost classic. Slocum wails on the album closer “I have the answer just for a little while”. The yearning in his voice embodies the elusive coming of age clarity that we are all in pursuit of. New York has perennially been the place to be in search of this answer; it is an endless well of romanticisation and inspiration. Who can blame a few more twenty-something year-olds (myself included), however naively, for following in this tradition? To reference Hannah Horvath of Girls, Been Stellar and The Dare may not be the voices of a generation but they may well be a voice of a generation.

Cinematic realism in the ‘70s

By Prithvijeet Sinha

For those who have seen 2022’s emotionally wrenching To Leslie, toplined by Andrea Riseborough’s tour de force performance that dares to show the price of an unfulfilled life, the imminent sense of connection with the material owes its debts to the ’70s. With its unobtrusive narrative, resonant treatment of small-town America, and needle drops like Dolly Parton’s Here I Am, there is an obvious harkening to the omnibus of John Cassavetes and Robert Altman. But the credit is due to the film’s director Michael Morris and writer Ryan Binaco for not just imitating the style of naturalistic filmmaking from an era where auteurism delved into the lives of women with rare empathy and psychological unravelling. Rather, it’s their own achievements that make discerning viewers like me cite one of the most prolific periods/decades of filmmaking. As I replay the film in my mind, Andrea’s very visage is so much like Shelley Duvall’s in vintage Altman oeuvre.

Even something as recent as Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters (2024) exercises the same tone where the focus on the claustrophobia of spaces and frayed emotions is reminiscent of the filmmaking ethos that continues to remind this cinephile of its enduring influence when it comes to disseminating realism and truthful characterisations.

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The 1970s, as the advent of the real and true, is an extensive archive where filmmaking reached new heights of authenticity in terms of subject matter and execution in storytelling, extricated from the necessarily diegetic use of music and melodrama, bringing welcome relief to the internalised shades of human endeavours. 

What is particularly empowering to realise is that within the oeuvre of tentpole releases, character development was illustrated by long takes devoted to conversations between key people in the narrative, such as in Jaws (1975), Alien (1979) and even The Exorcist (1973).  Can one possibly forget the dining-room conversation between Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary and Richard Dreyfuss where an interpersonal camaraderie exists to offset the mood of danger that is organically fleshed out by director Steven Spielberg? It’s a long take where smiles and affability, with Lorraine and Dreyfuss’ wit and Scheider’s laconic, reserved charm, stand in contrast to the individual instances in the screenplay where a grieving mother slaps the sheriff (Scheider) for his lack of action – it resounds far more because of the use of pithy words telegraphing her helpless emotional state. Or when Dreyfuss and Scheider are with the formidable shark-catcher Robert Shaw on a boat and their individual stands seamlessly address the pertinence of the issue at hand. There’s no foreboding situational musical cue or acting tick to overdramatise the proceedings. This slow-burning technique is particularly creepy and issues the vulnerability of the cast-members aboard USS Nostromo in Alien. Ridley Scott and his team let sound-effects and the gadgetry of the cavernous spaceship build up levels of tension without resorting to cheap gimmickry or jump scares.

Equally vulnerable are the moments in The Exorcist where a phone call from an absent father, a mother-daughter pair’s intrinsic bonding while the little girl is being put to sleep, or the extended opening sequence where Max Von Sydow’s archaeologist stationed in the Far East finds the heat, atmosphere and the inkling of evil with the discovery of ancient figurines and a sense of alienation, score the brutal underpinning of something invisible that upends normal lives. All three of them hence are not only beneficiaries of the quieter side of filmmaking that helps to divine the fearful in effective ways but ensures that the humanity of their particular domiciles and concerns wrought a moral centre. It is not just about the pursuit against insurmountable odds. It is about the confidence gained by interacting with each other through believable dialogues and colloquialisms of the everyday.

An ubiquitous feature as Carrie (1976) too finds its prom scene and especially the titular protagonist’s savage humiliation soundtracked by an overhead bucket’s movement and then the slow-motion unravelling coinciding with a hall full of laughter. The beeping sound of Carrie’s telekinesis and her mother’s cry of “they’re all gonna laugh at you” repetitively ringing in her head maps her psychological condition in that mortifying moment morphing to terror and mayhem in the annals of cinema.

This freedom of realism made the era’s compact body of work attach itself to the likes of Martin Ritt’s Sounder (1972), Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970) and Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt &  Lightfoot (1974) for instance. Three works that are distinct in their respective tonal registers and personal concerns but are able to balance the dramatic and comic elements with finesse precisely because they are not reliant on grand gestures or musical cues to heighten the situation. In their brevity of shots and lucid cinematographic output, they make the interpersonal bonds build authentic tales of the inner fight against racism in the South, a modern interracial community in Harlem, New York and an unusual “bromance” spread out over wide open American country roads respectively. In Sounder especially, the Depression era set story literally finds the humidity, the call of crickets, nondescript Southern homes, and barren patches dictating the characters’ journey. Also pertinent here are the voices of these African-American folks who pine, sing, stay silent and verbally recede when negotiating with racist authorities while talking and behaving in ways true to their socio-economic stations. This leads to the classic scene where Cicely Tyson runs towards Paul Winfield as he makes his way home after a year in prison. It’s the heat, the excited bark of the titular dog and Tyson’s impassioned call of her on-screen partner’s name that packs an emotional wallop for the ages. The sweltering atmosphere and the sounds of the surroundings serve as the soundtrack to this reunion. It’s this same unobtrusive benchmark that makes Tyson’s historic Emmy winning turn in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) one of episodic gravitas and emotional resonance.  Be it in the lakeside scene where a young black man’s speech becomes a source of discomfort for white eavesdroppers or the final stretch where a century old woman walks all the way to a water fountain to mark her evolution in the Civil Rights epoch. It’s just the mouth organ and the facial terrain of resolve that punctuate this outstanding passage in cinematic history sans dialogues or narrative preliminaries.

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Taking stock of non-diegetic use of music, Leonard Cohen’s lilting,  acoustic soundtrack is a haunting presence in Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), with its meditative and realistic approach to the frontier using mostly the guitar to strip the Western genre of its grand-standing, epic vision. Take the final scene itself where the acoustic bulwark lends a poignancy to McCabe’s death in freezing snow and Mrs. Miller is physically frozen in an interior space, smoking, their individual tragedies written down in the final anonymity of their stations. Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976) similarly delves into the frontier by casting the legendary likes of Marlon Brando, Harry Dean Stanton and Jack Nicholson. The real triumph here is in letting the action subsist on anticipation and dramatic understatement. Slow burn is the mode of operation in these instances.

This intimacy of interaction between two lonely young females in Three Women (1977) by Altman also designs scenes around both their individual and collective experiences. The atonal soundtrack in some crucial junctures cracks at the deeper tides of this relationship; though it never lets us forget that the lines between social alienation and taking over someone’s personal orbit can become blurred.

This was, after all, the era where boundaries of folk, rock, blues, country, and standard Americana were being readjusted, reframed for posterity, and adapted into malleable forms to inform the soft palettes of Joni Mitchell (her iconic album Blue), James Taylor (on songs like “You’ve Got A Friend”, “Fire and Rain”, “You Can Close Your Eyes”, “Carolina on My Mind”, and “Handy Man”), Roberta Flack (“Killing Me Softly”, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”), Linda Ronstadt (“Heart Like A Wheel”, “Lose Again”, “Blue Bayou”, “Desperado”), The Eagles (“Hotel California”, “Tequila Sunrise”, “Lyin’ Eyes”), and The Carpenters.

Which is why an exemplary documentary feat like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978), a tribute to The Band’s swan-song and assortment of the biggest folk-rock artists of the time, feels so timeless in retrospect. It is about being of the moment, bringing one’s unobtrusive camera lens and love for music to a venue and preserving it for future discernment. Today, the film’s legendary status hasn’t dated one bit nor has the pioneering musical imprints of the artists in their ’70s heyday.

If music is the key then Lady Sings the Blues (1972) paints a raw, unerring portrait of the biographical picture where the soft, almost unbearably vulnerable notes of Billie Holiday’s oeuvre are given new life by megastar Diana Ross. The most affecting moments of Billie’s life are defined by music such as when she listens to Bessie Smith on the radio but nothing wipes out the circumstances of her life as an assault by a drunken man or her descent to working in a fallen place as a cleaner. Music is her key and the performances retain their emotive power here. However, the quiet coil and recoil of her trauma, dependency on drugs and mental breakdowns are all traced with the weight of a beleaguered personal history. There’s no music in these scenes, just the raw reflection of hardscrabble truths. This silence is suffocating and primal even as she’s in jail or in the hospital, battling lifelong demons.

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As we shift our gazes towards the era’s films and their relationship with action and reaction, titles like The French Connection, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Straw Dogs and of course Taxi Driver come into our view for how they treat debased corners of  human existence. The iconic car chase in The French Connection (1971) is all about the dogged pursuit of anti-social elements by Gene Hackman’s Popeye but it’s the automobile’s movements through New York City, its skidding tyres and mass of humanity in its way that finds parallels with slimy, dirty abandoned buildings and the subway. The ignominy of violence arising out of locational xenophobia and sexism bursts forth with silent backgrounds and immediacy of action in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), mirroring the final showdown in a fallen hotel in Taxi Driver (1976), the corporeality of it all reflected in the body-horror dynamics of Invasion of The Body Snatchers (1978).  The violence is unerring and the reactions spontaneous because the mid-century axis is relentlessly moving towards a brutal reckoning with the lawlessness of the world in each instance.

A more underrated counterpoint to the supposed action dynamics of a cop saga is found in Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1973). Sir Sean Connery’s verbal and mental states inform much of the film’s sense of dread. In it, a bulb in an interrogation room, or a countryside’s dark recesses invoke the loss of humanity that gets into the head of a police officer. The silence boils and tears apart all his defences when faced with a manipulative antagonist.

From Eraserhead‘s (1977) similar invocation of industrial surroundings and ominous sound effects to A Very Natural Thing‘s (1974) subdued investment in the lives of men in love with other men in ’70s New York to the realistic stakes of a divorce in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) down to Iranian classic Chess of the Wind‘s (1976) impressionistic probe into human corruption of the mind, this era mined the subconscious and psychology to blur lines within genres and styles, giving us a body of work that has stood the test of time.

From the melodrama, strings-laden excesses and mostly inert studio sets of the previous decades, the 1970s came out of the woodwork of established norms to settle for unflinching realism. Gone was the necessity of happy endings or cliches. What was begotten was the grammar for not intruding upon individual lives with appendages of sentiment alone, but approaching crises and moral dilemmas with a touch of deeper understanding about the whys and whats of fraying social lines.

Hence I close this article with one of the most definitive images of the era that stands out for me. In Hal Ashby’s seminal Coming Home (1978), the journey of two individuals injured within a California military unit concludes with Tim Buckley’s beautiful ballad “Once I Was”. A montage sequence, the movements of these bodies towards liberation from constrictive ideals and personal freedom is not final but constructs their present as one of individual victory. That is how I see this whole period of cinematic canon as marking the advent of the real and true.

Image credit: online.stereosound.co.jp

By Lydia Firth

The Turner Prize is considered the most prestigious art award in Britain. In 2023, the winner was Jesse Darling, with an exhibition involving a series of erratically distorted modern objects including crowd control barriers and barbed wire. The apocalyptic scene is both disturbing and humorous; it’s almost unclear whether the humour lies in the cartoonish contortions of the objects which make them look strangely animated, or in the simplistic, haphazard, (dare I say shoddy) nature of the art – which was awarded the biggest honour in the British art world. The Turner Prize is notoriously divisive, with traditionalists scorning entries like Darling’s, reflecting on what they perceive to be the decline of art, disdaining the fact that Romantic painter JMW Turner’s name is associated with contemporary ‘nonsense’.

For many, this exhibition would prompt the reductive phrase uttered in many a modern art gallery, “I could do that”. There are several responses to this: the camp that would reply, “yeah but you didn’t” (and then slightly risk validating any art or any artist by default), and the camp that would claim “you just don’t get it”. Perhaps the latter is the case for the uninformed viewer of Darling’s work, as by reading more about his winning exhibition, I began to appreciate it a bit more. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it required much skill to assemble tattered bunting and old office files, but reading about Darling’s intentions and beliefs helped to somewhat enlighten his detritus. The arranged objects evoke themes of nationality, identity, austerity and immigration. On further examination, the objects are manipulated precisely and cleverly: the barriers are drunkenly tilted, union jack flags sag mournfully, crutches lean against the wall on standby. The Guardian’s Adrian Searle deemed it ‘a theatre of last things’. I think Darling somewhat captures the zeitgeist, which I suppose is easy, and worrying, when it can be represented by a series of broken things.

For me, it’s a fine line between defending this type of art from those who would immediately dismiss Darling’s work as clumsy and deny any validity to its political and social sentiment, but also having the integrity to question whether it is good. Of course, whether art is good or not is mainly down to the viewer, or in the Turner Prize’s case, a jury who commended Darling’s evocation of “a familiar yet delirious world invoking societal breakdown”. Conceptualising ‘good’ art raises the point that our definition of what art should do, or be, has shifted: we can surely assume the impressionists would look upon this room of fragmented debris and be utterly repulsed. Our conception of what can be defined as art has widened – now, art does not exist solely as an object of absolute aesthetic beauty, but it can also be inherently unaesthetic, political commentary, akin to Darling’s. Through championing the latter, we must not let the former slip away, or be dismissed for frivolity. What is visual art if not somewhat superficial?

Where I find most difficulty with Darling’s exhibition, and then with much of conceptual art, is that it fails to stand alone without any supplementary literature. I fear this has become a chronic issue in contemporary art. The point of visual art is that it is visual; we shouldn’t need to read to understand what the artist is trying to do, because then it is only excelling with the help of literature. It’s an all-too-familiar feeling for me, walking into an exhibition open-minded and yet still desperately looking for something to read that will enlighten the artwork. Art should stand alone without a literary crutch, and it should provoke the viewer (whether emotionally, intellectually, viscerally), not just mystify them. 

I am undecided on Darling’s landscape of broken and discarded things. I would defend it from reactionary traditionalists, highlighting the warped barriers that allude to painfully current themes such as the right to protest and political boundaries. I would also refrain from calling it excellent art. Whether this speaks to its failure, or perhaps its success, I’ll leave up to you.

Image credit: The Art Newspaper