33 rebellions per minute
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
1991
Paula Abdul, SPELLBOUND
There's something about meeting half my potential friends at indie-rock concerts or mailing-lists that makes taste camoflage very tempting. I mean yeah, the fact that I love Thought Industry and Non Credo and Amy X Neuberg and ESCALATOR OVER THE HILL by Carla Bley should adequately keep friends from charging me with being (gasp) a target market, but they've never _heard_ of those artists, so what does that do for me? What they can do, and seem unnecessarily compelled to do, is count how many Pavement and Sonic Youth and Nick Cave and Hole and Neil Young albums I own. And when my summed ownership there is found to currently match, 3 to 3, the size of my Paula Abdul collection, I'm never convinced responses like "Bite me you ignorant fuck!!" are as smiley-faced as they're presented as. So it's easy for me to dismiss my Abdul fandom on the grounds that did, in fact, start it: that I'm simply impressed by how much better she is than she has to be. That is, she's sexy, she's a talented choreographer, and she plays a very mainstream R+B/dance style: the fact that her melodies (well, the ones penned for her) sometimes turn in unexpected directions, and that her songs all have distinctive bridges, _in and of itself_ makes her albums overachievements, achieving musical goals that could not possibly have positive commercial impact on the audience she aims for: namely, the millions who aren't bright enough to have yet noticed that the proper way to experience female beauty is not, in fact, through audio technology.
But the more I listen, the more I catch new reasons to be impressed. SPELLBOUND, for example, has both standard-model excellent pacing (how "Rush Rush", a somewhat cringeworthy power ballad when heard on soft-rock radio, works as an elegantly melodic set-up for the 184 bpm wham of "Spellbound", say) and such weirdly handled segues as from "U" to "My Foolish Heart", where one unnervingly realizes four or five bars in "this is a totally different song now, right?". "Will You Marry Me?", the song that triggered my first Abdul purchase after I heard it a few times in Music Theory class (yes, really), smoothly pairs a piano-ballad verse to a chorus that has no business being in the same song, interrupts said chorus for a couple of abrupt, beat-ruining "Willya willya willya willya"s, and closes with jazzy disjunct piano. Paula's voice, however limited, is used nicely, from a squeakily tuneful front for some nicely arranged backup vocalists to some brief asides that lack the rhythmic drive to be rap but do add some nice dramatic heft, as long as you have my skill at not making out the words anyway. And the drum programming revels in its non-obligation to sound anything like real drums, and is stronger for it--- I especially like how "To You" sounds like a re-imaging of the concept of work-song for a factory where gleaming machines co-designed by George Lucas and Rube Goldberg handle all the tasks while the workforce is paid to watch and celebrate (political question of the day: why _hasn't_ technology's implementation been guided in that direction, huh? Have you one _good_ reason?).
If you'd be comfier with some philosohical defense of this, I'll provide one: the central saving theme here is inauthenticity. It's supposed to be R+B, and "Vibeology" is as successful at that as you could hope, but all these Thompson Twins or Public Enemy or bloody Whitesnake elements keep wandering in, drunk and staring blankly, making an interesting and original muck of things. "Alright Tonight" (a John Hiatt song, cred fans!) is trying to be African but only on the apparent basis of having heard GRACELAND in the background of a real busy party or two. Some musicians create art by trying to create art; but some create it on the sly, falsifying their reports, leaving their happiest clueless inspirations on the mastertapes while officially devoted entirely to the careful construction of $11.99 worth of quantized teenage lust fuel. And SPELLBOUND is, in fact, fine fuel. That you can listen to it, as well, is the happy result of a few over-theorized engineers and their hubris, and also, I'd guess from the increasing riskiness of her albums, of Paula Abdul herself. I for one shall say 3 Hail Courtneys, 2 Crooked Rains, and feel cleansed to give thanks.
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