Record Review – The Pipettes, “We Are the Pipettes”

A novelty album in the worst sense of the word. All is derivative here, and, of course, that’s at least part of the point, but it’s not retro in any fun, shameless way, nor is it really ‘stylish,’ either in the sense of bearing a distinctive artistic mark or reflecting the latest trends. Really nothing on this album sounds very different from any of the post-Belle and Sebastian twee-pop coming out of England these days, nor does it sound anything like the great girl group pop of the 60s. It lacks the flare of that music, and has a totally different lyrical sensibility even than the more generic side of girl group pop as heard on Rhino’s recent One Kiss Can Lead to Another boxset. And it doesn’t even begin to stack up to the classic production and songwriting heard on Motown or Phil Spector sides.

There are some good songs here. Notably, the band’s two most recent singles “Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me,” and “Pull Shapes.” But there aren’t really any great songs, nor are there really any clever ones. But I do hear a few really dumb ones: “Judy,” for instance, trots out the well worn “what are you gonna do when you get older?” lyrical cliché, sung here by cute, hipsterish, twenty-something ladies. When they lament, “I know I’m not as hot as you,” I cringe. This isn’t the sound of teenage abjection but petty urban bitterness, really a sort of crass sexual materialism on the part of our ladies.

I find it odd that, since the Rhino hatbox, girl group pop has been resold to the public as something once maligned, once disposable. I can’t think of any serious fan of 60s pop music who has disparaged girl group pop at least since the Beatles started covering it, on their first album! Anyone that loves pop knows what Phil Spector, Motown, their groups, and their songwriters, and any number of other unsung heroes of girl group pop, did for pop music. They improved its songwriting, shaped its emotional core, and perhaps most importantly, began to use the studio as an instrument. The Pipettes don’t do anything of these things, or at least they don’t them well. And, in this sense, I think there is a clearer line to be drawn between the aesthetic sensibility of “Be My Baby” and Radiohead, or Ghostface, or J-Dilla, or the best record that has come out so far this year, Scott Walker’s The Drift, than there is between “Goin’ to the Chapel” and the Pipettes. Really, most great pop, rock, hip-hop, and dance these days draws on innovations by the best from the early girl group field.

With one glaring exception: A lot of the great music today made by women and, yeah, that’s right, GIRLS!!! There’s a reason why Bikini Kill set out to play a music that was resolutely other from this sort. And to those who would retort, yeah, but this is just good, clean fun, not politics, I say, “Yeah, so is Le Tigre,” and that’s what the Pipettes really boil down to for me, a great big backslide on a lot of the gains women have made in the rock world these last few decades, gains that actually meant something in a music industry that remains downright sexist and chauvinistic.

All this, and one other thing: When have girl groups in the classic mold ever stopped making great pop music? Why do we need the Pipettes ‘revival’ (‘revision?’) when we have had Destiny’s Child, TLC, the Spice Girls, Riot Grrrl, any number of all-girl indie bands, the Lilith Fair crowd, etc., etc. all along? I detect something distinctly lily white, ultra lipstick, anti-butch about the Pipettes repackaging. I hate to go there, I really do, but it seems too crass to ignore.

We Jam Econo (Disc 2)

More of the same on this second disc from plexidisc (all of whose DVDs I’ve been impressed with, by the way), only this time without the useless pseudo-narrative or muddled rhetorical arc of the actual “We Jam Econo” docu. Disc contains three live performances by the ‘Men, one of which is a live, in-studio, acoustic set. For me, this was the highlight of the set. The other performances, at the Starwood, L.A. and D.C.’s 9:30 Club, are fine live punk rock vids from the era. The Starwood performance even features two camera angles, high-tech, I’m impressed. Will definitely add the DVD set to my wishlist, for the performances and interviews though, not the actual doc.

DVD Review: We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen (Disc 1)

Not much of a documentary, if you ask me, but then again few docus really impress me anyway, despite or perhaps because of my passion for the genre. I will say, on behalf of the film, that the band made a great documentary subject, in this sense: Their brief song lengths leant themselves well to the documentary form as they were easy to intersperse, in their entirety, with interview and other archival footage.

Also, I will hand it to the filmmakers for getting their hands on so much great archival and interview footage. I attempted to write on the Minutemen myself during college, before Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, mind you, and came up with a serious lack of archival or critical material. I was impressed by the diversity of interview subjects in We Jam Econo, although the rote repitition of many of their opinions did become annoying after awhile. Many interviews were memorable though, particularly those with essential, but often ignored contributors to the SST sound, aesthetic, and ethos. I was glad that much maligned SST Records producer Spot, in concert with Mike Watt, had a chance to explain his and the band’s aesthetic choices on records often accused of being ‘underproduced,’ and that the documentary focused on rockwriter Richard Meltzer’s links with the band as booster and collaborator. Similarly, Wire vocalist Colin Newman’s comments struck me for their economy and historical heft as they indicated that Wire and other British ‘art-punk’ bands were aware of their influence on the more artful, political strains of American hardcore. Mutually enlightening was Mike Watt’s recognition of Wire themselves and the Pop Group as early influences.

(But what of Gang of Four? I was surprised they weren’t included in this pantheon of Minutemen influences. Especially in light of the Minutemen’s live sound as presented in this very documentary, the Gang would seem to have been an indispensible early influence. On the other hand, it intrigues me to wonder how both bands, coming at rock music armed with similar political and aesthetic principles, might have established such uniquely similar stylistic templates: loud, angular guitars and bass; lots of treble on the lead; bassy bass; heavy seperation; minimal to no effects in the production; disco, funk, and jazz-inlected drumming; sloganistic lyrics indebted to experimental, modern, postmodern, conceptual and contemporary poetry and art movements; and dedication to anarchistic and democratic modes of band discipline, management, promotion, staging, recording, touring, and distribution.

Of course, one could also look to any number of other British punk and post-punk bands for the same influence, especially PiL or the early Clash.)

Still, and I don’t think this was solely a result of financial, aesthetic, or other pressures on the filmmakers, I found the documentary, like Azerrad’s book and the efforts of other pundits to write about this band, this scene, this period in American underground music, peculiarly underwhelming. To my mind, these commentators are still missing something essential and evident about the U.S. post-punk, hardcore, indie scene (whatever you want to call it) of the early ‘80s. It is as though they see their only job as exposing these bands, not actually telling us something about them, or what they meant, might have meant. More on this later, and more of my own take on the second disc of the We Jam Econo DVD soon.