Is Rilo Kiley’s New Album Supposed To Be A Joke?

This post arrives somewhere that I didn’t anticipate when I began it. Hopefully that justifies the fact that I’m blogging about an album I don’t even like instead of finishing Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter.

Just my first time through “Under the Blacklight,” giving it an obligatory one listen despite bad impressions of the two tracks I’ve heard (“Moneymaker” and “Silver Lining”). So far, all polish and nothing worth listening to a second time. The sell-out factor was unmistakable as soon as I heard “Moneymaker,” as was the irony:

You’ve got the money maker
They showed the money to you
You showed them what you can do

…though it’s pretty easy to dismiss as an unfortunate coincidence – the joke’s on Rilo Kiley, who maybe doesn’t realize how bad this album sounds. But it’s hard to believe they’re not in on the joke when you start listening to, really, every song.

From the start, “Silver Lining” situates the album in the band’s catalogue:

And I’m not going back
Into rags or in the hole
And our bruises are coming
But we will never fold

And I was your silver lining
As the story goes
I was your silver lining
But now I’m gold

Hooray hooray
I’m your silver lining
Hooray hooray
But now I’m gold

Couldn’t have said it better. Rilo Kiley was nothing if not a silver lining, searching for the good that wouldn’t come out of them, striving in the mire of “Paints Peeling” and “The Execution of All Things” to be better sons and daughters and to cross that 16 miles to the promised land of “With Arms Outstretched,” finding not despair but comfort in the absence of God. But now they’ve made it to the majors. No more selling baseball cards just to pay the rent. They’re maxing out the new gold card on overproduction, and that “hooray hooray” couldn’t sound less enthusiastic. Though it scans as an act of self-possession (I was your silver lining, now I’m [my own] gold), Jenny Lewis nonetheless sounds almost guilty, if not nostalgic, as if trying to convince herself rather than her addressee that she had to move on, that it wasn’t enough for her to be someone else’s silver lining. Nevermind that, if this record sells despite its flaws, she’ll be someone else’s (Warner Brothers’) gold. Nevermind also how badly the song mixes metaphor… (“rags,” “in the hole,” “fold” in the first verse – someone must have forgotten the poker chips, I guess we’ll have to play with…rare metals?)

The breakup metaphor shows up again on track 4, “Breakin’ Up,” whose chorus asks “Am I breaking up? Are we breaking up?” It ponders the separation of Rilo Kiley from whoever Jenny Lewis has been singing to, and also the internal disolution of something that keeps calling itself by the same name: even if “we” aren’t breaking up, even if Rilo Kiley isn’t breaking up, “I” am breaking up, I am no longer myself, Rilo Kiley is no longer what it was. As track 2, “Close Call,” knows all too well the “Funny thing about money for sex: you might get rich but you die by it.” Is there any doubt that Rilo Kiley know exactly what they’ve committed themselves to here?

The verse of “Breakin’ Up” is fairly prophetic:

Here’s to all the pretty words
We will never speak
Here’s to all the pretty girls
You’re gonna meet

A fitting toast. Someone else will write the lyrics that Jenny Lewis isn’t delivering on this album.

But then, that’s the thing, if they’re in on the joke, the lyrics are somewhat brilliant. It’s nearly impossible to imagine that the mediocrity of this album on both the lyrical and musical level could be a sustained joke (I mean, seriously, they’re going to have to play these songs in concert again and again), but it’s equally hard to deny the guilty conscience that overdetermines everything on this album. The “I” breaking up here is also a sort of split consciousness. If it’s not conscious, sustained irony, maybe it’s at least a subtle dig at a studio that perhaps restrained the band’s creativity, or even an apology for being unable to resist the money. If you’ve heard the album: Are you picking this up? How are you reading it? And has anyone actually enjoyed the album?

The promised arrival is that, as I finish this post, I am reminded of previous effort to recuperate bad art on the basis of its self-consciousness of its failure. See my reading of 300 below (plus there’s that Matrix III reading I allude to in that post, but trust me, you really don’t want to hear it). I could also potentially connect that compulsion I feel towards bad jokes, as well as perhaps a reading of the avant-garde that I’ve yet to articulate. Such efforts seem indicative of a desire to subordinate aesthetics to hermeneutics, privileging the hard-won formal unity of the text over technical mastery or subjective reception. In lay terms, I don’t care how an album sounds if it seems smart to me. But this amounts to a certain re-aestheticization of formal perfection (which is, after all, tied to beauty in Kant). A work that re-inscribes its own failure achieves something almost like a beauty which is not unlike the silver lining the Rilo Kiley was on “Execution of All Things.” This perhaps justifies the repetition of “I was your silver lining” in the present tense in the “hooray” part of the chorus.

I’m somewhat disturbed by the fact that I’ve just confessed in a single breath to being both an aesthete and a hermeneut, but rather than write my way through that problem, I’m just gonna go ahead and hit “publish” and worry about it later.

~ by Matt on September 23, 2007.