Peices of a Cheshire Cat

Strangely enough, this post starts out with a bagel.

It was a weekday morning, and I was hungry. So I jaunted on down to my local (er.. national) bagel shop (chain) and out of the corner of my eye, I saw many posters of Jewel in the local (really local) records shop window next door. I harrumphed (as many a San Diegan would) and continued to purchase my bagel and (ahem) schmear.

Upon consumption and exit, I got reminded of prior harrumph by again the smattering of black and white Jewel images that at this point were inescapable. I’m getting to the point, I swear. I started to think, ‘Well, maybe this new album isn’t as terrible as the last one was, but surely cannot be as affecting as her first one was.’ So I proceeded to make a mental note to Aimster or AudioGalaxy up a steaming hot plate of randomly-selected new Jewel music.

And now the point: it’s not as bad as I expected, but not nearly as good as I hoped and more than that, I noticed something in her music that I’ve noticed before in others and now is the time to explore it. What I found was that Jewel’s new album has much in common production-wise with anything Blink-182’s put out since ‘Dude Ranch.’ The songs technically aren’t bad, the songwriting is solid and the instrumentation is nice (if a little overkill sometimes), but you just want her to go off like she used to do and she just doesn’t. Everything is constrained in its nice little Tupperware(tm) container and her voice is so nicely reverbed and overdubbed it just makes you want to take a nap. Now, I realize that mentioning both Jewel and Blink-182 in the same post (let alone the same sentence) has probably turned many of you off already, and I simply don’t care. What I want to discuss is bigger than what-has-become pop music (and I mean that to be that both aforementioned musicians weren’t ‘pop’ music at one point, to me and the world in general.. you had to know what it was about to get it, and if you found someone else who liked them then you had something to talk about).

If you know any ‘punks’ then you’ll know what I’m talking about when I mention ‘sell outs.’ Someone’s always bitching about how so-and-so has ‘sold out’ and how they suck now and how they’re totally over. Now, I used to be someone who hated conversations like those, because I often found myself simultaneously feeling very strongly about both sides of the argument, and I absolutely don’t want to get into that here. I just basically want to point out a few things.. namely how Blink (how I first knew them as) and Jewel are both musicians who reached me at a young age for three reasons: Their first albums were 1. Gritty, honest albums that pretended to be nothing more than what they were and 2. Production techniques that were used were at once lower-end and low-tech but also displayed the respective music in exactly the correct way that was congruent with the musicians’ talents, audience and goals and 3. They’re both from San Diego, at the time, something that was very important to me

First of all, Jewel’s (technically from Alaska but was inspired and recorded in San Diego) first album, ‘Peices of You’ was sappy and innocecnt, yes, but also very worldly and interesting. Many songs were recorded live in coffee shops, and you could hear her almost cry during certain passages. You could feel the emotion and that was very powerful. It intrigued me to the point of adolescent crush levels and when ‘Who Will Save Your Soul?’ became very popular, I was skeptical that she would survive the pop-music scene for very long because of the typical radio-listener’s difficulty in dealing with real emotion. And then she put out the terrible second album I can’t even name off the top of my head and she blew-fucking-up.

Now, listening to the third album, I hear what I’ve heard in Blink’s new songs for 3 albums: over-production and technical wizardry that sounds great on the radio but has exactly zero affect on the listener. Blink being an entirely different story, but eventually ending up in the same spot: recording songs that make great videos. Have you ever bothered to watch Blink play a live song on SNL or TRL or the MTV music awards? They sound exactly like their first album and they don’t really seem to care, which is cool, but I could see many fans say ‘I really prefer their recorded stuff…’ because basically, it’s easier to listen to and is palatable for a much larger audience.

I mean, it really shouldn’t be a big deal that when I shouted ‘Tiltwheel’ at the first show I saw of Blink in Denver, they took notice and talked to me directly after the show. It really shouldn’t be that I’ve ‘met a rock star’ because to me I haven’t, but the average baby-doll T wearing 14 year-old would probably think different, because anyone on MTV is inherently inapproachable and she’s probably right at this point.

I guess now that I’ve rambled on and on, all I want to say is that I wish music like Blink and Jewel still affected me like they did when I was 15, but the fact that they’re now recording artists instead of bands, who now require a highly-trained sound engineer instead of a really loud amp to get their diluted point across makes me wish they had stayed local artists who I could see down at the coffee shop or hole-in-the-wall club down the street, the stage of which is basically just 6 inches higher than the floor on which you’re standing. They affected me then and the fact that I want to adopt the typical ‘selling-out’ mentality toward people, not bands or musicians, but people who I once adored makes me sad, I guess. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s apathy.

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