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Beating As One
Yo La Tengo Make Their Love Album
Somehow I felt that before I could write about Yo La Tengo's terrific
new Summer Sun I needed an at-home with Ira Kaplan and Georgia
Hubley. After all, I almost knew them, and not only as
friend-of-friends like everybody else in the general vicinity of
indie-rock. I'd edited a Soft Boys piece by Ira for this newspaper,
and, well, had melted to Georgia's toddler drawl in her parents'
Oscar-winning Moonbirds when I was just 16. Or so I thought
till I learned that Georgia was John and Faith's post-Moonbirds
kid. She's 43 now, Ira's 46. Married 15 years and together 22, they're
an iconic couple who get better press than Mother Teresa. Yet they're
reticent about private things, which makes me one of the few reporters
ever to see their pad. I'm honored.
It's a modest third-floor condo in Hoboken, theirs for 10 years now:
big L-shaped living-dining-cooking area, big bedroom with big TV and
the bed made for my visit, and smaller, well, junk room. If these
lifers haven't solved the storage problem, there's no hope for the
rest of us, but facts are facts. What should have been the dining-room
table was covered with piles of CDs that Georgia says were even higher
before the couple got back from a European trip. For Georgia's
birthday, Ira had arranged to have new hardwood flooring installed
while they were gone. All their stuff had to be removed and put back,
and though some of the vinyl is now out of order, sparing Georgia (and
himself) that domestic ordeal was genius.
That's the only kind of genius Ira pretends to. Congeniality is more
his thing. Yet he can be a cantankerous interview. Over the 10 years
since he or Georgia worked for anyone else (as freelance copy editors,
mostly), he's come to dislike the term "day job." After all, Georgia
goes so far as to keep the books for the band-owned corporation that
pays their salaries, so as he puts it: "We have a day job right
now--we manage our band." Although he made his living writing about
music in the early '80s, Ira also resists the tendency to slot Yo La
as a critic's band--he believes he uses his encyclopedic knowledge of
pop history like a fan. So when I brought up bohemia, he naturally
thought the concept sounded too self-congratulatory: "I don't feel
very bohemian. I feel we're more middle-class," he said. "We watch too
much TV to be bohemian," Georgia chimed in.
The day job and rock critic points Ira can have, but marginality is
too central to brush aside like that--especially since it's the rare
bohemian who identifies with or even knows much about the bohemian
tradition, which like any other social construct has evolved plenty
over two centuries. For instance, just as there have always been
bohemians who held jobs (not every non-rentier is willing to starve),
there have always been bohemians who ran their own businesses, usually
in and around the arts--going back to Henri Murger's Scenès de la
Vie Bohème, often the popular and/or performing arts. What's
changed is how the market for their products shifted as elements of an
expanding middle class rejected conformism--today's freelance
impresarios depend less on épater-le-bourgeois and more on fellow
spirits in related lines of work. The viability of an alt-rock
subculture that picks up young recruits as it retains a modicum of
old-timers is a perfect example. Many of them watch too much TV.
Similarly, there have always been married bohemians. These can be more
or less conventional, more or less ardent, and also more or less
stable--in rock, certainly, often less. From X and the Human
Switchboard breaking up in public to Quasi and the White Stripes
raking over their passions, there seem to be as many divorces in
Alternia as in Hollywood, or Darien. But New York has long been home
to alt-rock's two most conspicuous conjugal success stories: Kim and
Thurston, Georgia and Ira. So with Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo, the
relationships inevitably become part of the artistic creation. Like
teenpoppers parsing Justin and Britney, the habitués of gossip-prone,
human-scale Alternia can't and shouldn't resist conflating music and
biography. Which means the warm Summer Sun can be fairly
construed as an answer record to Sonic Youth's distinctly autumnal
A Thousand Leaves. Anyone naive enough to believe happy
marriages are all alike should ponder how different these two are--or
more precisely, this being art, seem to be.
Kim and Thurston long ago set themselves up in loco parentis. They're
scene-shaping guardians of new talent, role models from
above--sexy-cool, nice but also fierce--and musically, even their
lyrical late albums are edged with coldness and intellection. Though
only a few years their junior, Georgia and Ira are shy kids by
comparison--friendly, fuzzy, cuddly, affectionate. They sound like
they want to be your pals, with Ira always gabbing--on the new album,
he offers "to take questions for you"--and Georgia laid back. Their
use of postpunk noise, which goes back to mid-'80s beginnings that
also just barely postdate Sonic Youth's, verges on decorative; for
them it's a way to fend off ineptitude, not to naturalize highbrow
tuning ideas. Their lyricism too is simpler, prettier, easier--my
selection from Ira's pop encyclopedia is a lovely Gary Lewis & the
Playboys title I didn't know I owned till he did it solo acoustic at
an Alan Betrock memorial. All of which finds a correlative in the
vocal style Georgia and Ira share, a style nobody else gets right:
over on the spoken side of singing, they murmur rather than whisper,
betraying not the slightest exertion as they follow the gentle
contours of the tunes they pull out of their asses.
In other words, Georgia and Ira are the rare citizens of Alternia, an
imaginary nation-community that prizes intimacy, who have made
intimacy signify--not just with their couplehood putting flesh on the
illusion, but with the hard-earned skills of hobbyists turned
pro. They were so well-liked that early on they could coast as the pet
band of the New York scene. But they were in it for love and in love
for life, and they kept getting better. The turning point, although
hardly the first positive sign, was 1993's Painful--they
haven't made anything approaching a duff album since. And 1993 is key
for another reason: it's when Georgia and Ira hooked up with a
permanent bassist, the decade-younger James McNew. Without McNew,
would Ira have become the true postpunk Neil Young in a domain teeming
with pretenders to that rude wooden throne? Would Georgia have become
a forceful then subtle drummer, a charming then thoughtful singer?
Probably, but you might not have noticed. As they coalesced into a
full-fledged band their formal command crystallized as well.
In 1997, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One--a title that
evokes couple and band simultaneously--managed to say everything they
had to say in 78 minutes or less: rock riffs, pop rips, organ trips,
impossibly pretty tunes they might have made up themselves,
doo-doo-doos by the number, ambient miasma, McNew's gorgeous Neil
ballad "Stockholm Syndrome," and loads of love love love. It's no
challenge or insult to state categorically that they'll never top
it. A career album is the musical version of eternal life, not a death
sentence. But though I didn't ask and doubt they'd agree, the dilemma
of not topping it may be why they proceeded to 2000's rather
beautiful, very slow And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out,
the lounged-up mood of which reflects both McNew's omnivorous
contemporary CD consumption and Georgia's lifelong involvement with
soundtracks.
Summer Sun starts off from the same lovely place, with the
trumpet-flecked atmospherics of "Beach Party Tonight," then picks up
the tempo with the first of three songs that define the
album. Georgia's "Little Eyes" longs to share her insomniac
wanderings; Ira's "Don't Have to Be So Sad" tells her how much he
loves her while she sleeps unhearing; Ira's "Nothing but You and Me"
prays she wake up to make up. All are solidly hooked at a decent
speed, all suggest discontents that may be literal autobiography or
apt poetry, and all take off from a paradigmatic marriage state
unfamiliar to newer, younger couples--the state where one partner is
conscious and the other isn't. On this record where McNew is totally
present and totally backgrounded, the way longtime lovers are always
there to remind each other isn't just a theme. It's bedrock. Even the
instrumental track that kicks off the second half, a Medeski Martin &
Wood-for-Dummies organ-funk thing that's the most striking by far of
the band's many attempts to create a theoretical lounge number to go
with all their theoretical pop ditties, is entitled "Georgia vs. Yo La
Tengo." You wonder whether that's her on bongos, on piano. But you
know she's always there.
Happiness shape-shifts and no bohemia is forever--our president's
political and economic policies are designed among other things to
destroy all the alternacomforts we've learned to take for granted. So
Georgia and Ira aren't some ideal to emulate, and wouldn't claim to
be. Me, I like Kim and Thurston's sharpness, and in addition, they're
real-life as well as symbolic parents--only childless couples enjoy
the kind of slack that accrues to shy kids with a junk room. But I
also like Georgia and Ira's kindness, steadiness, supportiveness. I
feel them as secret sharers, fellow spirits, symbolic pals. And I'm
grateful Yo La Tengo left this emotional record while the emotions
were good.
Village Voice, Apr. 15, 2003
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