chan marshall wtf?

I saw her (with band) in Seattle this year, she played for an hour and a half (45 mins of that was solo, however), and she even used the "f" word* -- which, taken together, shocked the hell out of me.

*fun.

see theres a problem with being overly personal in songwriting sometimes. i mean the reality of most peoples lives are too boring for other people to have to listen to. i want something i can relate to, and that often requires some acting, some artistry. and i like a good show on stage too. so its ok to be yourself i guess, but on stage you gotta be more than just a normal person, you gotta keep a crowd enraptured. i think with a band she might be able to put on an actual "show", something i can relate to and experience. chan on record is good precisely because its got that artistry, shes clearly created her best records with the intention of other people being able to relate to them, and you can relate to it on a personal level. on stage solo though, she just seemed lost in her own little world, and i got little out of it.

WAYWARD GIRL
by HILTON ALS
Cat Power demands attention, then resists it.
Issue of 2003-08-18 and 25
Posted 2003-08-11
Near dusk one evening a few weeks ago, the thirty-one-year-old singer and songwriter Chan Marshall, who performs and records under the name Cat Power, made an appearance with her backup band at Castle Clinton, in Battery Park. Built in 1811, Castle Clinton is a squat red sandstone fort that has been an aquarium, an immigration center, and an opera house, and its history is almost as jumpy as the performance style of Chan Marshall herself. Jumpy and perverse, excruciating, and ultimately beautiful.

It is foolhardy to describe a Cat Power event as a concert. A concert involves the playing of music or songs in some kind of order, with short breaks and maybe a little patter in between. The form works: it allows the entertainer some distance, so that she can perform without becoming too involved in the audience’s response. At Castle Clinton, Marshall reversed that order. The set lasted approximately an hour and ten minutes, during which time she talked to a friend’s baby from the stage; asked no one in particular if the photographer Mark Borthwick was in the house; talked about her friends who had brought the baby; directed a fair amount of bemused antagonism toward a particularly ardent fan; asked someone offstage how many minutes were left in the set; sang a bit of rap from “The Teaches of Peaches,” an album that was an underground hit last summer; smoked a couple of cigarettes; played with her hair; took her large sunglasses on and off; indulged in rambling confessions; and complained about the length of one tune from her current album, “You Are Free,” before singing an abbreviated version of it.

Her backup band did not help matters. Collegiate and smug, her associates—Will Fratesi on drums, Matt Hartman on guitar, and Margaret White on violin, bass guitar, and keyboard—seemed to get off on the star’s aura, but they treated her power ironically, so as not to appear to be what they are: sycophants disguised as musicians. Their smirking, knowing glances in Marshall’s direction didn’t lift her up, spiritually or otherwise, or induce her to act in a manner that the audience could consider generous.

The audience, for its part, was made up largely of young women and their admirers, who hooted or applauded or sat mesmerized as the delay tactics stretched to at least a third of the evening. They seemed to love Marshall as much for the drift of her mind as for the drift of her songs.

Born in Atlanta in 1972, Marshall had a peripatetic childhood, but she considers the South her home. Her father was a blues musician, her mother a hippie. Charlyn (later shortened to Chan and pronounced “Shawn”) Marshall sang with a number of pickup bands in Georgia and elsewhere—“down there,” as she has called it—before moving to New York, eleven years ago. In 1994, a friend invited her to open for Liz Phair. In 1996, she released her first long-playing album on Matador, “What Would the Community Think.” This year’s strange and powerful “You Are Free” is her fourth album for Matador, and her most fully realized work. In between, Marshall produced the extraordinary “The Covers Record” (2000), which features her versions of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Sea of Love,” and “Wild Is the Wind.” She still does not have a manager.

On each new album, Marshall has more firmly established her haunting musical persona: that of a Southern belle in bluejeans, a trashed Faulkner heroine whose arias of disillusionment, hope, fantasy, bitterness, and understanding are played out in 4/4 time and in a distinctly American syntax. In “Fool,” a track on “You Are Free,” she describes what Americanness feels like far from home: “Apartment in New York, London and Paris / Where will we rest / we’re all livin’ on top of it / it’s all that we have / the USA is our daily bread / and no one is willing to share it.”

In the decade since Marshall’s début, the female indie singer-songwriters who have survived without benefit of heavy MTV rotation—P. J. Harvey, Tori Amos, Björk—have been European (Amos, an American, did not become widely known until she moved to England, in 1991), and their fan base remains primarily European. While their music is indebted to the American blues vernacular, it also borrows from classical and electronic music. Marshall’s sound, which centers on her voice—wood-smoked and honey-basted, with Dixie-inflected vowels and consonants that trail off like half-forgotten thoughts—is a direct outgrowth of the blues, but not the blues as a declaration of anger and disaffection (as with Benjamin Smoke) or as stripped-down tempo overlaid with poetic fantasies (as with Patti Smith). Marshall doesn’t want to speed up the blues—to make it into rock and roll or anything that it isn’t. It’s as if her soft, sometimes plaintive voice and her simple arrangements—a plodding piano or a gently strummed guitar, sometimes supported by backup vocals—were a version of the production values on all those OKeh records from the twenties. (Marshall’s raw emotions are the scratches on the vinyl.) She’s a white girl sucking the sound of the Delta down her throat. Think of the stark arrangement on Al Green’s classic song “Simply Beautiful” and of Nico intoning “Deutschland Über Alles,” and you’ll have some idea of what Marshall is getting at in the recording studio.

Marshall is a storyteller, and she cares more about how she says something than about what she says. The lyrics of the songs on “You Are Free” are rudimentary—on the page. In “Good Woman,” Marshall sings, “I want to be a good woman / and I want for you to be a good man / this is why I will be leaving / this is why I can’t see you no more.” How far is this from the 1927 song “Backwater Blues”? “Backwater blues done caused me to pack my things and go / ’Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no mo’.” The intention in both lyrics is the same: a statement of fact trying to remain steady in the face of ambivalence.

As a chronicler of wayward girls in the South, sexually battered but empowered by their sexuality just the same, Marshall finds narrative cohesion in the shards of her female characters’ lives. In “Names,” on “You Are Free,” Marshall sings:

Her name was Naomi
beautiful round face so ashamed
she told me how to please a man
after school in the back of the bus
she was doin’ it every day
she was 11 years old

Rendered in Marshall’s slow, half-whispering voice, Michael Hurley’s “Werewolf” becomes the soundtrack for a horror movie, as Marshall turns the threat of impending love into something as scary and fascinating as pornography. Backed by beautifully arranged strings and a guitar, she sings, “Oh, the werewolf come stepping along / he don’t even break the branches / where he has gone . . . / and the werewolf was crying . . . / how I loved the man / as I teared off his clothes.” This could be Naomi writing a letter from home.

Onstage at Castle Clinton, Marshall was alternately shy and demanding, a solipsist; that is to say, a star. Her triumphs were as engaging as her disasters. Her long, beautiful body perfectly complemented her long, beautiful hair. (“She cut her bangs!” one young female fan exclaimed after the show.) Dressed in jeans and a brown cotton shirt with green stripes, bangles clanking on her wrists, she was at play in the fields of androgyny, impersonating a lonesome cowboy who attracts attention by seeming to spurn it. Here was a girl—“white trash”—who had found her voice in inarticulateness, the American way of speaking, and made it a powerful form of communication. Marshall’s stubborn refusal to be liked seemed to enact the frustration of many American women, who feel they have to be seen in order to be heard.

These various complications may, in the end, minimize Marshall’s audience—and her gifts. But, despite herself, Marshall let her stardom and talent win out. At the close of her set, she grabbed the mike and walked up and down the center aisle like a preacher at a revival meeting, singing, cigarette in hand, Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath.” Watching her, you tumbled down a well of longing and hope. Marshall looked as if she had been painted en plein air, a fluid version of Liberty standing guard over the Harbor. Her voice in that song was the blues sound of trouble in mind everywhere.

What a flake ... but what an amazing record she just made. A paradox for sure. Very much like the Kansas City Royals!!!

(x-post)

I like Hilton Als, but the part where he compares/contrasts Marshall to PJ, Bjork, and Tori is k-sloppy.

i've seen julie doiron (once w/ 3/4ths of the wooden stars) and TJO (once solo, once with rodan) both did not seem nervous at all. JulieD was very talkative when i bought a CD off her after her show (albeit it was after the show).

One handed hirsute fetishists to thread.

Can't wait until I open my mailbox tonite!

You're right. It sounds more conventional, and finished, and there aren't as many spaces. Her voice certainly isn't as stark. But... I love this just as much as What Would The Community Think (the only other CP I own), just for entirely different reasons. I mean... I love the rawness of Chan's voice on, say, 'Good Clean Fun', but the polished harmonies on 'Speak For Me' are just as gorgeous, but in different ways. Actually, I'd say that the weak links of You Are Free are the songs which adhere too much to what she's done in the past - 'Half Of Me' for one - which don't seem to fit on the album as well.

Her version of 'Naked If I Want To' scores big w/ me in the 'unexpectedly affecting' category

ok, so we're probably confusing everybody with our chatter.

did you get my email?
m.

Gender bias? Give me a break. Chan Marshall's gender has nothing to do with her performance or the expectations that surround it.

If it is, I'm not sure I agree. Mental illness (whatever) isn't something to be hidden away, shamefacedly.

(The more I think about it, the more I don't think that's what you're saying, though.)

perhaps j0hn's diagnosis (j0hn, are you MD?) may have been hasty?

v

does this have something to do with that playboy vote thingy?
m.

The photo in the new "Harp" of Liz is good old cheese compared to this.

V

"Free" from the new record is an amazing song.

So - my radar could be wrong, of course it could. But a couple dozen accounts of her behavior, from several different sides of the equation, suggest that it isn't, and while this begs a whole bunch of different issues regarding creative effort and its relationship to mental health, I look at things largely from a nursing perspective, and it was upsetting to see somebody so clearly in need suffering there in a boiling-pot stress situation like touring.

V

Let's hear this diagnosis. No wait! Why don't you diagnose her cynical fans and record label who continue to support this behavior?

V

That's practically porn.

http://home.earthlink.net/~atticusny/Catpower.JPG

V

Actually, I thought it was pretty damn sexy. Especially considering many of her other pictures make her look like she recently crawled out of a wet gutter.

is it just because cat power is supposed to have the veneer of being an "artiste"?

you just made my week.
m.

(Compare with: http://perso.club-internet.fr/lmdp/catpower/images/catpower2.jpg
)

And I love Love Tara.

I listened to the album a little today (in between Lumidee and Chungking) and it definitely is a lot more soft-rock than Moon Pix or The Covers Record. I'm not sure I like it. There's not enough space, true. (Key to how she plays guitar = slow picked riffs + circling loops. So maybe TJO is a good comparison. Did anyone say she wasn't?)

I think Joni's overall affect is more literate (one might say precious) and certainly her compositions tend toward jazz sophistication (even in folk arrangements) not minimalist gestures. I wouldn't really put them in the same boat at all.

I don't think Allison knew who Bill was but she didn't let on, so that's cool. (Allison should totally post more; if you're reading, Allison, you should. D4rni3ll3, back me up!)

The CP pic in the New Yorker is by Richard Avedon - here's to pube power!

Minus the guitar and singing. JM's a virtuoso (though her voice is now severely damaged by years of smoking). Chan's got about an octave plus a falsetto and is a passable guitarist.

Really this is kinda like saying "Lionel Richie is like Dinu Lipati - they both play piano"

did chan appear in every magazine in 2003?? wtf?

At least by looking at all these recent publicity stunt shots, I don't have to think about her music.