Thursday, January 19, 2012

Self-Indulgent

Just heard her interviewed on NPR, thinking "what a self-indulgent young woman, thinking that the ambiguities of her shallow life are important."  Then I thought "Well, enough people listen to the ambiguities of your shallow life, and I guess it is important in some way."



A different song was featured in the interview.  Ultimately the same song, though.

Update:  Now this song is available, but no versions of the one I embedded are.  I imagine they are being pulled because it is being released.  We'll see.

6 comments:

Ben Wyman said...

This post has no content. Was there supposed to be an embedded clip, or a reference to who you're talking about?

Gringo said...

Her breathy voice irritates me.
I could take no more than 30 seconds.

Dubbahdee said...

I recognize this an example of a 'type' of singer-songwriter. They seem quite common on the local folk-music shows of certain NPR stations. I notice on our in NH for example that the regular host Kate McNalley tends to play quite a lot of this kind of music. Her substitute, Kevin Malvey, plays much less of it.

I agree with Gringo. The stuff is 3W - watery and wispy and whiny. It seems to usually come from women although I have heard more than a few men produce similar stuff. At the risk of seeming crude -- it has no balls.

I noticed this in WI. There were many times when listening to the Wisconsin public radio folk show, I simply had this urge to shoot myself because the music was so self-centered and depressing. I forget her name, but the host was a woman. I contrasted this to the music I had been listening to while living in MI for 9 years, the show hosted by Matt Watroba. A much wider variety of musical styles, much less focused on the watery-eyed female singer-songwriter type of stuff -- and a LOT more fun to listen to.

The 3W stuff has the feeling of listening to a group of ladies get together to complain to each other about their own lives. It has a specifically female tone to it, and worse, seems to tap into the worst side of the feminine heart. There is a femininity that is bold and strong - it is a she-bear femininity that bears cubs and woe to anyone who gets in the way. The 3W music feels to me like an entirely different kind of femininity that wants to shed the body and exist in the world of ectoplasm. It has no blood, nor bone and is tepid to the touch.

I heard the first parts of the same interview you heard. I quickly dismissed it as not worth listening to and went to the next room. I didn't want to feel like shooting myself.

Texan99 said...

It puts me in mind of our heroine in "Clueless" teasing her stepbrother for listening to "complaint rock" on the car radio.

It also puts me in mind of Paula Poundstone's old routine: "I imagine the wages of sin ARE death. But by the time you take out the taxes, it's just more of a tired feeling, really." This 3W music is tragedy for shrunken people.

Donna B. said...

oh boy... Dubbahdee's comment was so good, it spurred me to hook up my headphones so I could hear the song.

I thought I recognized the type from his description. One of my daughters likes a type of music that I've told her makes me want to shoot myself.

Yep, this is it.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Well, we're clearly not the intended audience over here, are we?