theremixbaby replied to your post: Soooo…

I think your Lovage-LDR comparison is one of the most apt I’ve seen. With all due respect, I really hate Born To Die, Lovage and 90s lounge music in pretty much equal measure.

Yeah, it’s corny as shit! But there was a different cultural moment when the weird middle-ground of post-alternative, pre-indiestry (neologism?) mainstream-but-not-really-music presented these kinds of images (“are you being, like, sarcastic?”) without much comment. The culture was saturated in it. Paul Anka’s lounge album was strange when it was released because it came out too late — there were all sorts of jokesters and hucksters and ironists and not-ironists and are-they-or-aren’t-they-ironists (hello, Len!) doing this kind of stuff in the late-90s. Perhaps because there were so many, it was harder to single out one of them as representative. Or perhaps conversations weren’t as visible, and weren’t as likely to congeal around particular audience groups for whom such music was as crass and tacky as it was clearly intended to be [EDIT: and that was a BAD THING for some reason — I love tacky].

New Girl is maybe an apt comparison here. I’m three episodes in, going backwards, and I’m charmed to all get-out, but it’s a very Ally McBeal era show, the kind of muted dramedy with the stereotypes of sitcom humor given a 35mm gloss (see also: Malcolm in the Middle and a number of shows that died after The Simpsons in the late 90s/early 00s) that also confuses sarcasm and genuineness, mean-spiritedness and empathy, ironic and just-plain conventional. The difference is that, being on FOX, the kinds of audiences who would be most incensed by its existence get crowded out by numbers. New Girl has been a modest hit for FOX, and is probably generally accepted as a mainstream show that will be around for a couple of seasons easy. Once you get to that status, it gets hard to care about your special snowflake stance about why it should GTFO — the clear spirit animal is How I Met Your Mother, I think. People On The Internet (POTI) can indulge in their fandom of HIMYM, but they can’t as easily criticize the thing on a regular basis without “buying in.” You just stop watching it after a while.

In the music world, though, production doesn’t happen this way, and to acknowledge an artist — perhaps listening to a few songs, or listening through the album once — is as much buy-in as you need to participate in the conversation. So the kinds of people who would have mildly geeked out on Viva Variety and lounge covers of classic rock songs in 1999 could have their casual “like” (did anyone passionately like neo-lounge? I feel like it was created specifically for audiences to be non-committal about it!), and there was very little chance that any other group would galvanize around it. But now those other groups can galvanize pretty easily from within their own cultural stream, and their dislike investment is at least as visible as the casual like investment.

LDR strikes me as an artist who might have thrived in an environment in which the visible fans (made “visible” by counts of listeners — Soundscan, Billboard, TRL) could be relatively casual and the invisible fans (who opted, sometimes quite vocally, out of those systems) would ignore her, or at least “we,” the casual fans, would ignore them, perhaps because we didn’t know they existed. But in this case the roles have reversed somewhat — LDR instead is competing in an environment in which the formerly visible “vote with your ears” audience has given way to the formerly invisible “vote with your words” audience. (There are still plenty of audiences whose ears-audience greatly outnumbers their words-audience — Jason Aldean!)

I think it’s strange, actually, that LDR keeps getting accused of “trolling” when I have literally dozens of albums from the late-90s that I pick up from the ol’ CD shop who have quirky or distinctive or otherwise “notice me” personalities that made no meaningful impact on “rock discourse” whatsoever, and what’s more were never accused of “trying too hard” to be noticed even though they, like all performers would prefer to be noticed than not to be noticed. (The only thing worse than being talked about is not to be talked about.) They inhabited an industrial middle-ground (explored in Jennifer Trynin’s autobiography, which I have but haven’t read yet) where there was no sustainable audience for them; some of them made lots of albums, some had “one shot” and never got another one, really (Trynin). Ashlee Simpson falls into this industrial category, too, and she’s also the last person for whom “failure” on Saturday Night Live has ever been commented on, despite how terrible every single band is on SNL always. (I remember when I was about 12 Soundgarden performed on SNL and I thought they sounded terrible. It seriously damaged my perception of the band. But with no internet, I wasn’t aware whether or not there was a controversy about it — doubt it — and the only controversy was in my head. I got over it. By contrast, I didn’t get what was so terrible about the LDR performance. It sucked in a very SNL Music Sucks sorta way. And listening again now, that Soundgarden performance is OK, I guess. So was LDR. I guess.)

So yeah, it seems like LDR just wasn’t made for these times. Which makes it strange, to me, that most commentary about her connects her so acutely to the current era — its politics, its industrial practices (LDR and MGMT are like the only two bands ever who have, as Mann says, an “old school deal”!), its chatter. Makes me almost miss Viva Variety, and the days in which it could quiety suck a little and I could be OK with that. Innocence lost, y’all.