I visited SFMOMA with a friend last week; both of us were seriously impressed by the exhibition on the top floor of work by Wangechi Mutu, a young (early 30s) New York artist born in Nairobi. Ten of her pieces are here.

Gender! Collage and installation art! Incorporation of/response to Surrealist representation of the body! I guess it’s not surprising I like (what I’ve seen of) Mutu’s work. I’m reminded of how much it amazed me to realize how collage art had been radical and new a century ago when the modern print industry made it possible.

Why does the ICA have to be so tiny? I wish I knew more about current art.

From tiny samples you’d call this shoegazer or generic British Next Big Thing guitar rock, but somehow the genre touches all flatten out in a very excellent way: the strings aren’t sappy, the inevitable jump in pitch on the chorus doesn’t make anything ’soar’, the guitars do not rock, the doubled vocal lines do not underscore anything.

So the plentiful affect all has to get past stern gatekeepers like rhythm and melody, as if the later Comsat Angels hired one of those producers who earned their stripes jamming the eighteenth irrelevant flourish into a Britney single without making it ‘cluttered’.

A much better comparison than the Comsats is at the back of my mind, and I can’t come up with it. U2? That seems unlikely, but it might be.

I am very curious to find out whether people who like musicals, broadly construed, like the singing on this record. Me, I can’t stand it– the careful enunciation and character voices mask out any potential feeling, not that the lyrics (mostly prim/witty) suggest they were meant to have the emotional weight of a Magnetic Fields song anyway. It seems like a medium that wants all words to be intelligible to me the first time I hear a song results in music I would rather listen to zero times. I should admit the possibility that this just isn’t meant for me. But that claim’s implications about Stephin Merritt might be more damning than anything I would write about not, as it happens, enjoying this. [Out March 14.]

Cobra Verde - “Terrorist” (mp3)

Much as I hate to apologize for this song– Cobra Verde’s appeal depends on their manifest harmlessness winning out over the tough-guy snarling and rowdy guitars– I should point out that it appeared in 1997, when talking about terrorism wasn’t necessarily defiant or pointed or anything. John Petkovic just likes singing the word “blood”.

(On the other hand, they did include a re-recorded version of the song on 2003’s Easy Listening without apparent qualms. Good album, but “Terrorist” itself sounded far better in this version, from a split 7″ with Guided By Voices.)

Guided By Voices - “My Impression Now” (mp3)
Guided By Voices - “My Impression Now (acoustic)” (mp3)

This song made such an impression on me toward the beginning of my Guided By Voices fandom that I never quite realized it wasn’t on any of their core albums. In fact, even the studio version, taken from Fast Japanese Spin Cycle, sounds wrong to me with its irregular drum rolls. I must have entirely learned it from the delicate acoustic version that the band did in 1997 on “KitKat Acoustic Break”, a (fortunately) ill-fated attempt at advertainment mailed out to college radio stations, featuring Pat DiNizio of the Smithereens schmoozing with ‘alternative’ bands.

After playing this more or less non-stop for four days, my heart sank when I read some of the words online. I don’t even know where to start.

Amanda Palmer puts together great lyrics, line by line; it’s her larger ideas that get depressingly insipid. Girls want emotion and boys want sex, and that’s just the way things have always been. You are being manipulated by corporations. Expressing yourself is good! People who stay in abusive relationships are stupid and crazy. People who criticize her music are just stupid. People who are too jaded about the music industry to think she’ll be succesful– shallow, vain, lazy, and probably stupid.

But that’s not fair of me; the last bit is informed by an online interview in which Palmer reveals that “Backstabber”, which already seemed self-absorbedly bilious and petty when all I had to go on was its own lyrics, is actually about someone who likes the band but displayed insufficient optimism about their major-label prospects. The punishment for neutrality: “You’re a fucking backstabber / Hope-grabber / Greedy little fit-haver / God, I feel for you– fool! / Shit-lover / Off-brusher…”

For that matter, maybe “Delilah” (the abusive-boyfriend song) doesn’t mean to criticize everyone whose life matches the scenario, just one particular friend of Palmer’s. Would that make it better? Easier for me to overlook, at least?

I would love some excuses for overlooking Yes, Virginia’s flaws, since almost everything not awful helped impel my weekend-long spree. And this despite not liking the first album, if that helps you decide whether to care.

If this is Brecht, where’s the distancing device? I only see one real candidate: the “missed” notes that punctuate Palmer’s vocal gymnastics. It worked on me, anyway. At the same time, I have trouble hearing several of these songs as anything but unmediatedly maudlin; album closer “Sing”, for example. Sing! Sing out! Don’t let them tell you not to! Be yourself, man!

Good advice, sure. But badly put (in the song, not just my paraphrase), and if it’s inside some Brechtian theatrical frame, I have no idea what the real intent is.

(Oh– I can also see how Palmer’s occasional self-referential lyrics serve to remind the listener that none of this is spontaneous or ‘natural’. Writing songs addressed to real-world acquaintances kind of spikes that strategy, though.)

Okay… what else? “My Alcoholic Friends”, very good. “Dirty Business”, very good. “Shores Of California”, fantastic except that the title is a cheat. “Sex Changes”, great. Last year around this time, I complained that Bloc Party combined amazing music with penny-ante lyrics; in the end, the music won me over. If it doesn’t happen again, my loss. [Out sometime in April.]