…these motes that leave each thing
Diminish what they part from, but endow
With increase those to which in turn they come
- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
When you are writing music of your own, never strain to avoid the obvious.
- Nadia Boulanger
The other day I came across a thing on the internet – a Pitchfork post re-scoring 19 albums that history had given Pitchfork writers cause to re-evaluate. One of course was Born To Die, a work that critics weren’t equipped to understand in 2010, being the first expression of a New Thing; and easier to measure now that that thing is everywhere. Another was a Liz Phair album (self-titled, 2003) given a miserly 0.0 for being an attempt by an indie star to make a pop record (ironically, the more independent you were in those days, the more you’d attract critics who thought they owned you and wanted you to stay the same). Now, Liz Phair has been bumped up to 6.0 because it sounds much like Olivia Rodrigo, whose last album Guts Pitchfork rated 8.0. Maybe a change in the ethos of Pitchfork, a gradual surrender to poptimist clicks, is being measured here, but let’s hope not. The first Daft Punk album is marked up, but Daft Punk are still annoying. A Grimes album is marked down (a little). And Foxygen’s second album, We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, is demoted from 8.4 to 6.3 by Allison Hussey, who writes:
Their “peace & magic” never quite materialized, but they did press on with a strain of devotive rock that tied together hippie-dippy joie de vivre, a daisy chain of 1960s and ’70s worship, and other tricks from cherished Boomer blowhards. The band lay it on as thick as the era’s polyester double-knits, contemplating “What if someone liked the Beatles and the Rolling Stones?” without taking it much further. But their West Coast gleam gets just as sticky and restrictive, with their charm diminishing as the band continue to insist upon their own incurious allusions and swooning clichés about psychedelia.
I’ve only just started to appreciate We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic and while I can, charitably given my Boomer blowhard cred, see the point of Hussey’s snotty words, I think they’re motivated by exposure to the rest of Foxygen’s output, and not appropriate to this album, which considered by itself is quite something. Would I have given it 8.4? Maybe not – Foxygen is the home recording of vocalist Sam France and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Rado, and I find the lo fi production hard, everything is a bit muzzy and not quite as clear as it could have been1, but as an exercise in and an essay on songwriting We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic provides something special, because its allusions are more than tricks – they affect me like the result of automatic writing, subconscious processes exposing truths about art that can’t be said in other ways. And also, the lyrics are clever, full of great-sounding words that tease around meaning without settling on much.
“I met your daughter the other day, oh, that was weird
She had rhinoceros-shaped earrings in her ears.”
Which fits the melody of ‘Shuggie’, a funky song surely named after Shuggie Otis, as if born to it. There’s nothing deep in any of these lyrics, just the sense of easy come, easy go that follows from being young, good-looking, talented and charmed, but the music lends them its pre-existing sense of connection to our subconscious.
Quotation is a brave way of facing the anxiety of influence because it can look like unoriginality; who wants to be thought “derivative”, a mere copy-cat? I discussed how this plays out in reference to the highly original and much copied Fall in an earlier column. In classical music, quotation can be excused by the complexity in which it’s worked into a piece, for example as a source of original variations-on-a-theme-by, or as a small part of a complex pattern, like the multiple quotations from many other piano works stitched together by Bohuslav Martinů to create his utterly fresh-sounding 1954 piano sonata.
Any method that might seem to make Art too easy can potentially be redeemed if you put enough work into using it, time investment being a factor in Art’s value. By the 1960’s quotation, alongside pastiche, had become normalized in the work of composers like Alfred Schnittke and Bernd Zimmerman. It’s the advent in music of what we came to call post-modernism, the concept that, now culture has been done for by the working-out of the modernist impulse, and exposed as mere colonisation and construction by the gobbledegook claque, all cultural properties are therefore now Lego blocks which we can, indeed must, use to make our new works. Except those that would expose us to charges of cultural appropriation, a caveat which hobbles the concept. It’s also frowned on in some art circles to copy a quoted thing too well, with rather unfortunate results.
Of course in a pop song there’s a thing called plagiarism which can get you sued if you have too great a success with a quotation - Luke Haines avoided this with ‘The Rubettes’ by crediting his source, including in the song’s title, and paying royalties up front - but I don’t think that’s the reason they’re generally avoided. If my experience is typical, always a risky prior, one writes a song with a sense of some great thing one would like to approximate a part of, and if not the chords or notes one plays at random soon come to resemble some memorable melody or change. It’s what happens next that’s decisive; one can bury the emerging resemblances and exclusively choose notes that avoid them – in rock, this tends to give a quirky, atonal no-wave effect if you push it far enough, new sounds that will sound fresh but rarely establish themselves as memorable. Or, you can change or drop some part of the sequence that memory is driving you onto the rocks of, for example invert or substitute an expected chord, and if you’re lucky you might get a passage that’s both catchy and original with enough hint-of-the-familiar to embed itself without signaling its source.2 But imagine if you just leant as far in to any such suggestion as you could without getting sued, as Foxygen do with ‘On Blue Mountain’.
In this song there’s a section that’s the main riff from The Rolling Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb’ (with the vocal taking the marimba line)
and another that’s almost the hook from Elvis Presley’s ‘Suspicious Minds’
‘No Destruction’ is a less derivate song that’s still a good approximation of the Jagger/Richards songwriting style, but notice that there’s no attempt to sound like The Stones in either of these songs. Instead, it’s a relaxed Dylanesque arrangement, with a clean lead guitar filigree rather than gritty riffing, and this country-folk-pop-rock arrangement is general to most of the tracks on We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic – the tribute, homage, allusion, reference of these songs is usually to heritage rock songwriting itself, independent of arrangement, and not just the sound of songs from the past, something that sets Foxygen apart from the practice of revival acts today, who want to you feel “Wow! That’s psych/post-punk/jangle/shoegaze, just my bag!” rather than “this song is cheekily ripping off a classic, how dare they”.
The album’s second single ‘San Fransisco’3 cleverly quotes George Harrison’s little-known Beatles’ song ‘Only A Northern Song’ but is in its feel and pacing more like one of Brigitte Bardot’s 1960’s songs (one of those not written by Serge Gainsbourg), helped along by producer Richard Swift’s glockenspiel and backing vocals from Jessie Baylin and Sarah Versprille; these are the only female voices on this album but you might not recognize this if you’re not that familiar with it because Sam France sings in a vocal range and with a soft edge to his voice that often sounds feminine, like those Velvet Underground songs where Lou Reed drops the gravelly screech and you wonder if you’re hearing Mo Tucker or a nicer Nico.
Or listen to the short instrumental ‘Bowling Trophies’. I feel like I know all these notes from somewhere. It’s so unoriginal that its very originality, its uniqueness, which threatens to become striking, consists in how unoriginal it is.
‘Oh Yeah’ digs into Marc Bolan’s lyrical flow; Foxygen as the ungrateful Children of his Revolution:
Well you could change you mind
If it makes you feel fine
You could scream and shout
If it makes you feel happy
With the album’s title track, we’re somewhere else again – the riff is Pere Ubu’s ‘The Modern Dance’, the vocal is Alan Vega, and we’re in nervous late-70’s America, at least for a while.
The final cut ‘Oh No 2’ gives us some Beatlesque chromatics – indeed this could be a Sparklehorse song. Which brings us full-circle, because track one, ‘In The Darkness’ was also a Beatles tribute, circa ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. I’m not listing all these passing trains for the sake of it, nor to show off my erudition (I’ve sure I’ve missed half the quotations, so far-reaching is Foxygen’s thievery), but to give some idea of the depth of the weave here, why it works. It works because the thievery goes all-out, and the magpie in its finery is a wondrous beast.
Next week, or the week after - my Album of the Year 2023 list of lists!
Algorithmic malady - Tom Lehrer - ‘Lobachevsky’
If there were errors making it obvious that Foxygen aren’t a band and that Rado is overdubbing every instrument, including some amazing tempo changes on the drums, I’d probably judge the mix less harshly.
There are also changes and melodies that have been used so often that they no longer resonate with any specific identity, and hewing to these will generate a work in the style known as “Americana”
There are a few uses of “San Francisco” in Foxygen lyrics and I suspect that “Sam France” is being self-referential when he mentions that city.