I think I just found it.
I'll just let it speak for itself:
Artist: Animal Collective
Album: Water Curses
Label:
Domino
Review date: May. 2, 2008
Whether it was economic necessity that led to the release of Water Curses or a sincere desire to share some songs that didn??t fit on (ugh) Strawberry Jam
is a question that can be pushed aside for the moment. While aesthetically Animal Collective may be doing some interesting things with their music, expanding
the boundaries of pop etc., etc., they certainly are keeping with the status quo when it comes to the business side of the equation. That isn??t necessarily
to fault them. As Chomsky said in a
2007 interview on responsibility and guilt,
??[Y]ou really can??t blame people very severely for carrying out the orders that they??re told to carry out when there??s nothing in the culture that tells
them there??s anything wrong with it. I mean, you have to be kind of like a moral hero to perceive it, to break out of the cultural framework and say, ??Look,
what I??m doing is wrong.?? Like somebody who deserts from the army because they think the war is wrong. That??s not the place to assign guilt, I think.?
This is in no way meant to link releasing an EP to committing a war crime, but the general principle stands: if there??s nothing in the culture to tell
you any different, then how could you possibly think outside the bounds of what is offered to you? Should Animal Collective martyr itself on the fiscal
cross because the economic practices of independent music merely ape the structures of the mainstream music industry? Does aesthetic experimentation lead
to cultural and symbolic experimentation? Of course not.
Besides having this question in the back of one??s mind though, there are deeper issues to explore when listening to Curses. There??s a central conflict burrowed
deep within the furrows of Animal Collective, one that isn??t confined to the current EP, but since that??s the object d??art in front of us, it will do as
our entryway into the discussion. The problematic is this: what is genuinely interesting about Animal Collective, the fact that they write striking melodies
and the fact that they genuinely are interested in experimenting with the format of the pop song ?? pushing it into non-repeating areas, for example ?? obscures
some deeper concerns with certain racist and classist ideas (all unintentional, I would believe) that their music raises.
Although Kandia Crazy Horse??s prose is a bit purple, her article
??Race, Rock and the New Weird America?
leveled a fantastic race critique at the whole freak-folk movement (the label, of course, after-the-fact, combining such disparate musicians as Joanna Newsom,
Devandra Banhart, Animal Collective, the Brattleboro crew and others that otherwise had nothing to do with each other). Her argument draws on two major
strands of hidden racism within New Weird America. The first, important in terms of evaluating the way in which the contribution of black musicians has
been minimized by institutionalized racism (and to think this is any different because the aesthetic happens to be that of the indie set is to either be
naïve or be willfully ignorant ?? see above), explains how the freak folkies follow in the tradition of white musicians that minimize or ignore the black
roots of the music they play while elevating white musicians in their tradition to prominent places. This is devastating in its own right as the lily-white
face of much of the indie and experimental scenes further perpetuates racist norms, as a number of wealthy or at least well-off white kids use their privilege
to borrow freely from other cultures, fetishizing and colonializing other forms of music in a way that cannot be reciprocated (e.g. Vampire Weekend), but
I think Crazy Horse??s second critique is deeper and cuts right to the heart of the hidden racism specifically within the music.
There is a tendency in a number of these musicians, Animal Collective being at the forefront, to fetishize nature in the way that, say, Devandra Banhart
fetishizes Karen Dalton, saying of her, as Crazy Horse quotes, "...she's got the most far-out, fucked up, amazing soul. She's the most soulful singer in
the universe." In other words, her music and the way she sings cannot just be a natural function of her life or her cultural or historic context, but somehow
surpasses that, takes on a mystical quality, becomes unnatural and in doing so, transgresses the boundaries, becomes something strange or alien, wholly
Other. In doing this, Dalton is fetishized for who she is, and the agency for creating her art is taken away from her, replaced instead with this ??far-out,
fucked up? quality.
In a number of way, I see the role of nature in Animal Collective??s music, in the Water Curses EP especially ?? as well as a number of these other musicians
?? as taking on an analogous quality. Nature becomes fetishized as a pure state, as the state of savages or the opposite of civilization, as wilderness,
and in creating nature in such a way, it becomes something other than what humans are. It??s an escape, but an escape for a particular class of people.
As environmental historian
William Cronon
wrote in his essay ??The Trouble with Wilderness,? ??The mythic frontier individualist was almost always masculine in gender: here, in the wilderness, a man
could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity. ? More often than not,
men who felt this way came ? from elite class backgrounds. The curious result was that frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a
peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism. The very men who most benefited from urban-industrial capitalism were among those who believed they must escape
its debilitating effects.?
The way nature is portrayed in Animal Collective??s music is strongly tied to this bourgeois antimodernity and because they have such influence within the
American underground (that phrase is perhaps tongue-in-cheek), it further reinforces the idea of Nature-as-other, as something different than human, a
conception that has contributed greatly to the current environmental crisis. Is this to blame Animal Collective for the conception? Hardly. Is it to call
them racist for the depiction of Nature-as-pure and by extension, the original native population (Here Comes the Indian?), thereby continuing the fetishization
and deepening the gap between humans and the environment, or between whites and other ethnicities/races? Not really, or at least not overtly. However,
it is to criticize them for picking up these ideas and running with them without giving them a second thought. It is to criticize them for using their
economic privilege (I have no idea about their specific circumstances, but they all grew up together in
Roland Park,
home to a number of very elite private schools, and having the distinction of being partly designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted was one of the architects
of constructed nature in the United States, manufacturing such landscapes as Yosemite National Park. In a Hegelian mood, we can see this spirit carry over
into Animal Collective??s music (for more on Olmstead, see Anne Spirn??s wonderful essay ??Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted?), and
for using that economic privilege to merely colonize rather than to critically reflect and create positively.
To return to the beginning, this isn??t to call out Animal Collective, or the latest manifestation of the concealed bourgeois conception of nature, Water
Curses. There??s nothing in culture ?? indie or mainstream (the lines between the two are incredibly blurred anyway) ?? that points to this being wrong anyway.
I do, however, think that, while aesthetically they are rather progressive (in indie rock or pop terms), conceptually and symbolically there is a lot lacking,
and that this conflict drives a lot of what is interesting in their music.
By Andrew Beckerman
http://dustedmagazine.com/reviews/4276 P.S. This guy called Flight of the Conchords racist in a review of their album last week, too.
