"His 'n' Hers" at 30

Matty Pywell published a great retrospective review of Pulp's finest long player for Paste.  It's an intensely personal look back at how the album influenced his life, and I found myself relating to so many of his sentiments.  Interestingly, Pywell discovered it some twenty years after its original release, which speaks to Pulp's cross-generational staying power.  

He naturally compares Pulp with their then-contemporaries Blur and Oasis, who will be forever linked in any cursory mention of 90's Britpop even though the three bands sound nothing alike and hailed from completely different areas of Britain.  All three bands have been endlessly analyzed, but it bears repeating -- Blur were the most inauthentic of the three, as noted by Pywell, they were "a middle class band who used working class tropes in their songs".  On record, they were content to drift along as sound tourists rather than reveal who they really were, a stigma which they began to shake only around the time of "13".  At the time, I referred to Blur as the "band I liked the most without really loving them", and the standoffish duplicity of their music was the key to the problem.  Say what you will about Oasis, but this was never the issue with them -- what you saw was what you got.  But Oasis were almost a parody of a laddish band, and despite a number of great songs, they were rarely capable of that gut punch emotional rush, or anything beyond an AI-enhanced football chanting singalong.  There has been plenty of talk of an Oasis reunion yet again this year, seeing as it's the 30th anniversary of "Definitely Maybe" (Liam Gallagher plans to perform it on a solo tour), not to mention the regular Blur and Pulp comebacks over the past fifteen years.  But barring the excitement of hearing the hits from the first two Oasis albums played in a massive field by the original creators, does a prospective Oasis reunion really matter to anyone?  To revisit a phrase, was this band ever anybody's life, or is the anticipation more a sort of Knebworth revivalism than anything approaching cultural importance?

Pulp were entirely authentic and were led by the greatest visionary of the Britpop era.  In Brett Anderson's autobiography, he urged fans to not seek out early Suede recordings, insisting that there were no hidden gems in there.  Early Suede, he wrote, was the sound of a band taking the time to find themselves, stumbling their way through any number of lineup changes and recording mishaps and embarrassing gigs and awkward lyrics in order to develop their potential and eventually settle into who they envisioned themselves to be.   Pulp recorded some good songs in the mid-80's, but it took Jarvis Cocker some fifteen years to realize his vision.  Pulp had a sound that was entirely their own (part musical cabaret, part 80's new-wave discotheque) and a master communicator as their frontman and lyricist, who could encapsulate any year in your teenage life in a single line.  

Pywell writes about feeling like an outsider (a common theme in many Pulp songs), expectations of "masculinity" and how Jarvis served as a role model in that regard, and so many more themes that I entirely relate to because I also thought about them in my late teens and early twenties when I was the same as him when he discovered "His 'n' Hers".  He highlights a line from "Someone Like the Moon" (my least favorite song on the record) as the album's most heartbreaking moment, and gave me an appreciation for that song that I has never internalized before.  It shows that we still have plenty to learn about this album, although my basic opinions on it haven't changed much in thirty years:

1) "His 'n' Hers" is a musical waiting to happen, based upon the adventures of a faux-tough guy gang of high schoolers ("Joyriders") in a working class town, and their diverse cast of individual crushes, taking in every variety of uncertainty, angst, and teenage anguish along the way.

2) The high point of the album is "Pink Glove", a five minute pulverization of the heart that has rarely been equaled in terms of pure, chest-crushing emotion.  Note that Jarvis barely takes a breath throughout -- there is hardly a moment in the song without vocals.     

Klaus Mäkelä in Chicago

 This story has been making waves in the classical community, as Makela lands a job with yet another top orchestra.  For a conductor who hasn't even turned 30, the amount of praise and responsibility that has been heaped on him is nearly unprecedented.  But as Alex Ross has noted in his piece for the New Yorker, it's become all too fashionable for conductors to rack up multiple appointments -- a trend that Ross and many other critics find indulgent and counterproductive to the quality of the music.  And with conductors having to jet around the world to fulfill so many engagements, they don't have time to connect with their host cities and build connections to their communities.  That doesn't make sense socially, or financially.

David Hurwitz says that there's no way that Makela understands the music he's conducting better than the orchestras themselves.  But in every profile of Makela (the latest being a prominent feature in the NYT last week), the emphasis is on the blazing first impression he makes on every orchestra he visits.  He wins them over immediately, and the musicians enthusiastically vote to recruit him.  I have little doubt that both takes are correct, so what gives?  Why are orchestras lining up to work with someone less experienced than they are? 

I think the era of the superstar conductor is mostly over.  That is, we no longer see the larger-than-life svengali figure/strict disciplinarian/artistic prophet who molds the orchestra in his image (the use of "his" is intentional, superstar conductors in this vein from prior generations were exclusively male).  In those days, the quality of the orchestra was more closely linked to the conductor's talent and name value, and thus, the conductor was the single biggest factor in drawing money to the concerts.  Now, it's not the conductor who draws the money, it's the orchestra (and star soloists, and occasionally a name guest conductor).  In that sense, the CSO doesn't expect Makela to teach them anything profound, they simply need a conductor who has a few decent ideas about concert programming and some charismatic marketability.  And it's always nice to work with people you really like.  

Post-pandemic, I don't feel that the aging (and aged) audiences for classical music were clamoring to get back to the concert hall, much unlike other forms of entertainment.  The pandemic led to catastrophic financial losses to the industry, and many orchestras has to shut down or make severe budget cuts.  Now is the time to change the presentation of the product, it's the perfect time to take risks and give the public something new while smashing the older stereotypes.  

Or maybe it's like the situation with baseball managers, who also used to be cagey veterans who had paid their dues managing lesser clubs for decades.  They were brought in to mold the team into an extension of the manger's personality and philosophy toward the game.  These days, roster construction and organizational strategy are handled in other rungs of the management ladder, and it's quite common for teams to hire an unproven young ex-player to be their on-field manager.  That's not a knock on managers, or on Makela, it's just that they're not expected to bring the same skills and intangibles to their positions that their predecessors of a generation ago needed to bring.