Now with the release of his newest album, “Figure Eight” (his second on DreamWorks),
Smith has no need of a blinding spotlight courtesy of the academy. Full of catchy
hooks and bittersweet choruses, his songs have entered the well-tread realm of pop,
but the vulnerability of his distinctive voice still comes through the layers of sound as
clearly as it did in his lo-fi past. Smith has, almost despite himself, become one of
those rare stars you root for simply because they have shown you a bit of their soul.

You’ve lived in Nebraska, Texas, Oregon, New York and now Los Angeles. Do you
think that these landscapes have integrated themselves into your music and lent
themselves to the way your music sounds and feels?

I think they must have some. But honestly, in a way, it’s kind of unknown to me. I
only know what I’m talking about less than half the time when I’m making something
up. It’s kind of like writing down a dream I had last night. It’s only after a while that I
can get ideas of what, if anything, a song is about. I don’t know. Sometimes things
pop up that seem like New York, sometimes things pop up that feel like Portland
[Ore.], where I also lived. On the new album there’s even a song called “L.A.,” so it
must have something to do with it.

Do you feel like you really need time and a certain amount of distance and
objectivity in order to fully understand what you write?

Definitely. In a year I’ll have a much clearer idea of whether I even like this record or
not. It doesn’t seem to help to police yourself too much when you’re making
something. To be constantly thinking, Is this good or bad? It’s better for me to just
do a bunch of stuff and then see if I like any of it later.

That seems a very honest, sort of “gut instinct” way to write. Where it’s coming
from a place in you and you don’t try to censor it. Do you feel if there’s too much
analysis, it loses something?

It becomes sort of strategy. You begin to present some picture of yourself. There’s a
part of songs that are always personal, but I’m not particularly interested in concocting
some picture of myself.

What are you interested in your songs doing, ideally?

I just like it better when the songs seem like little movies, maybe not even coherent
ones, but sometimes they can be pretty direct. Lately, I like them if they’re not even
very storylike and if they are just more descriptive of some situation. I want them to
create a situation or a mood where you or I can add our imagination and it would have
some room to move around and see what’s going on in the song. It doesn’t matter
very much whether it’s something about me or about some imaginary character. It’s a
combination of feelings about things. I don’t cannibalize my friends to make songs.
There’s a part of it all that has to do with me, but it’s more like I’m an actor in some
of the little movies, but not all of them.

Well, I think your music has an honesty that makes some people uncomfortable. I
think there’s a tendency for artists to hide behind irony, which is not something that
you do.

Nobody wants to be pinned down and commit to somebody’s interpretation of them.
Oftentimes people are doing lyrics, but there is so much irony involved that it makes
the whole thing so slippery I can’t really feel anything in connection to it. There’s
certainly a place for irony, but it seems like it’s really moved up the priority list for a lot
of people and it’s not one of my favorite parts of music. I’m not really into seeing a
jokey band or a particularly ironic one. Just because something is witty and ironic
doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good any more than something being a sickly sweet
confessional makes it any good either. That sort of contrived personality doesn’t work
either way.

Do you find it hard not to use those protective devices?

It’s become pretty apparent that no matter what I really do or say, there are certain
ways that people are going to perceive me. And it’s just gotten to the point where I
can’t do anything about it, so I don’t worry about it that much. I just make up songs
that to me feel human. And they’re bound to be seen by some people as confessional
or depressing, some sort of real one-way assessment that is not how they are to me. I
don’t worry as much as I did before. There’s no point in me trying to control stuff like
that.

To be able to not worry about that must be incredibly liberating.

Yeah. And it’s really easy not to worry about all that, except for the persistent
questions that come up. Maybe not in this interview, but in a lot of them. “Why are you
so sad?”

Well, I think that’s also a result of sincerity making people uncomfortable. They
struggle for a way to label things, especially things that really maybe touch them.
There’s a fear of someone who has allowed himself to convey feelings that may feel
too intimate to some people.

Some people are afraid that if they don’t seem like some sort of perpetual winner all
the time, if they don’t make a lot of money and wear expensive cologne and go to all the
right places, that then people are going to think that they’re some sort of loser. But
just because people have a range of emotions and thoughts which can coexist at the
same time and at times sometimes they get ecstatically happy about something and
at others times ridiculously depressed, doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with
them when they’re sad and that they are only successful, good Americans when they’re
happy, when everything’s going right for them. The media is always telling people to
look better and go shopping more and present an image of prosperity and you can
only do that so much before you’re presenting that even to yourself all the time. So if
you do go see a movie and the ending isn’t happy, it may be a great movie, but you
end up feeling inordinately depressed because you’ve been blocking out your own
feelings. There must be some reason why I always get these questions, which to me
seem like totally surface things about my music. There’s a lot in my music that I find
happy and optimistic, in both the melody and the lyrics.

I think it has elements of both happiness and sadness, which to me is part of that
honesty. If you were happy all the time or sad all the time —

It would be boring! There’s a few bands that just do one thing all the time, that I like.
Like the Ramones. You know how they do that thing? And it’s really cool. But for me
the more emotions you can put on a record, without making it such a weird roller
coaster that it’s hard to listen to, the better.

You haven’t filmed many videos at all, but you just completed one for the new
album. In your analogy you referred to your songs as films. How was it translating
music into image?

The first thing I noticed was that it’s a lot more fun when there’s not some big, pushy
production company getting in the director’s way, trying to dumb it down so that it is as
much like already existing videos as possible. It was mainly just fun for me to run
around. And there was a tiny little aspect of acting in it that I really enjoyed. There’s a
story in the video that Autumn De Wilde (the video’s director) made up, that I really
like. It’s almost like her interpretation of the song was better than mine. Sometimes it
seems like because I’m the one that made it up, it makes me kind of a bad person to
ask what the songs are about. But the video has some happiness and sadness and
some comical aspects, too. The only video that wasn’t fun was “Ms. Misery,” and that
was because there was a team of people who really couldn’t give a shit that it was my
song. It was just kind of negative. It was being directed by a friend of mine and they
ended up just stepping on his toes all the way through it and the result was that it
satisfied no one. Videos can be pretty cool, but most of the time, it’s just an ad.

Have you ever thought of making films yourself?

No, not really. I kind of feel like I’m doing pretty good to have whatever
get-up-and-go I have for music. I also have the energy to be interested in other
things beside music, but I don’t know if I have enough energy on a day-to-day basis
to launch into a whole sort of complicated project. It seems like there’s so many more
people involved. I can’t marshal a whole group of people.

What are those other things you’re interested in?

I like to read when there’s windows of time that I can actually concentrate. Which
usually goes on for several months and then I find that I can’t focus on anything for a
month or more. Those times usually coincide with the least interesting parts of my life,
when I’m feeling like time isn’t moving, I’m not getting any new things to think about.
Like when I’m playing my songs over and over again on tour. I love playing music, but
it’s not healthy to have what you’re doing for months at a time revolve around …
yourself. It gets really weird. People have different reactions to it. Some people really
like it. It feeds some sort of need in them to really get a lot of attention all the time.
They can become addicted to it and when it goes away they become all bummed out.
For some people the experience freaks them out so much, they get drug problems to
just dull everything out, so they don’t feel anything. For me, it’s kind of in between
those things. I get tired of hearing my voice all the time, I wish I could sing in different
ways. But in general I like it. At this point I have enough songs to choose from, so I
don’t have to play the ones I’m sick of.

Do you think you’ll ever get to the point where you may not want to play music
anymore?

I feel like if it got to the point where I didn’t want to play music anymore, or couldn’t,
that would signify that something had just sort of gone irreparably wrong and I
probably wouldn’t be able to do anything creative. But I don’t see that happening.
There’s a million songs to make up, even though people who don’t write songs say,
“It’s all been done before.” They’re so wrong! There’s just millions of things to do,
particularly lyrically. For a long time there’s been more people interested in the musical
side of things and less people who think it’s fun and interesting to play around with
words and be imaginative with them. I think there’s a lot of lyrical things that haven’t
really been touched on.

When you tour, I imagine the best times are when you are connecting to the audience,
speaking to them not just lyrically, but through the music. But I’m not sure if there’s
any way of making sure that happens.

There are certain things you can do to make that more likely to happen. Certain kinds
of bullshit you can avoid. That’s what’s so great about touring. Sometimes it’s like,
“Tonight is going to be amazing and I’m going to remember how lucky I am to be
doing this.” But it can also be, “Tonight is gonna suck and I’m going to wonder why I’m
doing this. I’m not cut out for this!” But I guess, like we said earlier, it would get boring
if it was one way all the time. I do think people can go a long way on the moments of
pure happiness in their lives. It’s like getting a big shot of vitamins — you don’t get
sick again for weeks!

Tonight’s episode of “Duets” then, in which the rules are largely, if not entirely explained, effectively works as a do-over. Each week, the performances are graded — anonymously — by the superstars, and it is their feedback that determines the amateurs’ chart standings. (There is a moment in tonight’s episode when the first performer of the night is told her place on the chart. Anti-climactically, it’s the top one, because she is the only person yet to have sung. “Duets” is still working out its showmanship kinks.) Starting next week, the two contestants at the bottom of the chart will have to face-off in an a cappella duel (no trapeze sadly), and the loser will be kicked off the show. In six weeks’ time, “Duets” will go live and the audience will begin to vote on the outcome of each episode. (As to how the victor of the duel will be determined or what the ultimate winner will win, see the “not entirely explained” clause above.)

When written out, these rules may sound boring enough to seem like the sort of yawn-inducing information a TV show could reasonably hope to spare its audience. But they matter. On all the other major singing competitions, after the winnowing down of the audition rounds — those dark weeks when it becomes clear that America lacks for neither competent singers capable of melisma or the disturbed and delusional — it’s the audience that decides who stays and who goes. On “Duets,” for the next six weeks four relatively articulate performing professionals will be the deciders. “Duets” is temporarily putting off the rowdy, democratic voting process, and its tendency to favor sleepy-eyed white boys, to practice the more aristocratic style of expert judgment found on Bravo’s competition shows. “Duets” may be ABC’s answer to “Idol” and “X Factor,” but in rare moments, it’s also the singing version of “Project Runway.”

Though the four judges are too nice (they start and finish each comment with something like, “I love you,” or “you’re great”) they are also informed. They give feedback — the singing is pitchy, too perfect, too scared, the mic is too close, the dancing is bad. “Duets” does not embrace the sort of serious crit sessions seen on “Runway,” “Top Chef” or “Work of Art,” and it would be much better if it did. The judges seem up to it — not only does Kelly Clarkson effortlessly remain more likeable than anyone who has ever appeared on reality TV, I suspect that there is a Nina Garcia lurking inside of John Legend, whose high standards and perfectionism are belied only by the goofy, childish, wide-eyed expression he gets whenever he is watching a performance he enjoys. Real criticism would also rescue the show from its current in-between state, in which it drags on like any bloated musical performance show, but without the energy or stakes of one since, thus far, “Duets” is pre-taped.

The judges’ participation adds a nice new wrinkle to the format. Though it may mean that we will never get to know the amateur contestants well (this show could be called “Singing with the Stars,” despite the reversal of expertise), it should fuel some future sharp exchanges. Kelly Clarkson may not want to lay in to a reality TV contestant, but she can feel no such compunction about digging in to the over-confident Robin Thicke.

That the judges are performers delivers the same message –albeit at a much softer, less-compelling volume — as those Bravo shows: Talent is great, but greatness is hard, hard work. Robin Thicke may seem most concerned with making himself appear sexy, and Jennifer Nettles may not be able to contain her inner cheeseball, but they, like Legend and Clarkson, are professionals in the most complimentary sense of the word: reliable, knowledgeable, focused, dedicated. What they demand of their duet partners is surely nothing compared to what they demand of themselves. Clarkson, especially, is the embodiment of this. Exactly a decade ago she won the first season of “American Idol,” and she is now back on reality TV mentoring the two least polished, most insecure contestants on “Duets.” She chose them, she says, because they both reminded her of herself. She may be right, but they have lots and lots of work to do before before I see it.

In this sense, the new music video for Kanye West and Jay-Z’s track “No Church in the Wild” is the best actual riot porn I’ve ever seen. The video, directed by Romain Gavras, is five minutes of a graphic, fiery and entirely staged riot. It opens with a young man lighting a Molotov cocktail and lobbing it at a line of riot cops as masked comrades behind him raise their arms in support. Filmed in Prague, but presented as a non-specific yet decidedly European urban battleground, riot cops on horses violently beat the masked crowd, who fight back with fire and fists while Greco-Roman statues look on. Were it not for the surprising appearance of a chained elephant amidst the fray in the video’s final frames, the footage looks (almost) like something straight out of Athen’s Syntagma Square. Jay-Z and Kanye don’t feature in the video at all, which makes artistic sense: I’d be more surprised to see Hove in a riot than a two-tonne elephant.

So what to make of riot porn brought to you by those hip-hop moguls and emblems of excess Jay-Z and Kanye? As I noted last year when purveyors of eau-de-date-rape Axe came out with a scent called “Anarchy”, the depiction of anarchism and riotousness in commercial ventures are at least “a nod to the popularity of dissent.” Gavras, who directed the “No Church in the Wild” video, has long riffed on the idea of social upheaval and fierce state repression in his work. His short film for rapper M.I.A’s “Born Free” told the story of U.S. military forces brutally rounding up and executing ginger-haired civilians. The message was lost on no one, and the video was banned from YouTube. Gavras offers a stylized, gritty and startling depiction of social rupture; that his brutal vision of a street riot is deemed popular and consumable enough to accompany some the most mainstream of music is worth consideration. It’s not just anarchists getting off on riot porn anymore.

This isn’t entirely new: There was the Levi’s jeans commercial last year that featured a young man in Levi’s squaring up to riot cops under the tagline, “Now is our time.” The ad was pulled from British television in light of the summer riots in London. The video for Kanye and Jay-Z’s anthem with Rihanna, “Run This Town,” also featured gangs in black bandanas — but it was a far cry in terms of realism and police-on-protester brutality from the riot scenes in “No Church in the Wild.”

My friends at the New Inquiry magazine, Malcolm Harris and Max Fox, have argued that riot imagery and revolutionary calls in products can serve as genuine threats to capitalism, even though they may be expensive ad campaigns or music videos. In a published dialogue between the two (which is well worth reading in its entirety) Fox and Harris agree that subway ads and select lyrics from pop songs are ample materials for would-be rioters. So, while some might see the depiction and glorification of rioters in a hip-hop video as exemplifying capitalist recuperation (even Molotov cocktails can help sell records now!), Harris and Fox suggest that these images can be reappropriated by anti-capitalists — after all, the accessibility of a music video featuring a riot suggests, at the very least, that this sort of dissent resonates. Indeed, Harris quipped on Twitter today, linking to the Jay-Z and Kanye video, “Oh hey, capital, are you sure that’s such a good idea?” and continued to joke about whether the hip-hop artists endorsed black bloc anarchism. We don’t need to make new anti-capitalist propaganda; Kanye and Jay-Z can have Romain Gavras do it while they accidentally offer up revolutionary slogans in their otherwise problematic lyrics. The bridge for “No Church in the Wild”, sung by Frank Ocean, is an insurrectionist two-liner: “I live by you, desire; I stand by you, walk through the fire.”

Of course, none of this is to say Kanye or Jay-Z should be praised as agents for revolutionary change. Jay-Z, aside from celebrating a life of unadulterated excess, is a key voice behind developer Bruce Ratner’s controversial Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, which has been widely criticized for pushing people out of their homes and failing to provide affordable housing and jobs. Meanwhile, Kanye is a famous jerk; he walked by Zuccotti Park once to check out Occupy Wall Street last year, but, again, he is mainly a jerk.

And, it’s worth noting, that the way in which the rioters are glorified in the music video is problematic. I question Gavras’s decision to only feature male rioters. It’s a common criticism of black bloc tactics that they alienate women and perpetuate a masculinist expression of anarchist street actions. Problems of patriarchy in radical scenes certainly abound — indeed it’s an issue too huge to really address here. Suffice to say, however, women across the world who have fought riot police in the streets might take issue with Gavras’s ubiquitously male scene.

But what strikes me the most, and what might make a lot of anarchists and other proponents of street confrontation feel pretty smug, is that Kanye and Jay-Z have the resources to produce pretty much any kind of spectacular music video imaginable. And they opted for riot porn.

Watch the “No Church in the Wild” video below:

What I remember is when my parents bought that brand-new album “Abbey Road” and played this LP on their brand-new faux-antique console hi-fi, right about when they were separating. That had some impact. I can remember feeling like “Golden Slumbers,” McCartney’s brief, melancholy lullaby from that Beatles album, was a lullaby for me in a time when I could have used one.

Well, now I am a dad myself, and I don’t want to make my daughter have to listen to stuff she doesn’t want to listen to (though, in fact, I have tried to sneak Sun Ra onto the stereo in her presence). I don’t want her to feel that music is an intergenerational chore. I would do almost anything to make sure that music, for her, is something to love.

And yet: Nothing makes me happier than when my daughter does take to a particular piece of music on her own. Recently, e.g., she became obsessed with a very excellent tune by the Pogues. It was “If I Should Fall From Grace With God,” which my daughter refers to as the loud-and-fast song. As in: Papa, play the loud-and-fast song. No delight is more delightful than dancing to the loud-and-fast song with a 3-year-old specialist in the pogo.

And yet, sometimes, it must be observed, the sadder songs are the more genuine songs, or: there are times when the sadder songs come into focus, or: perhaps affirmation in a song is a thing of which one should always be suspect. And so there was a day recently that I was spending the day with my daughter, just me and her, and after all the usual pastimes had been exhausted I said, at last, falling into the trap of so many dads, We still have a few hours here, how about we listen to some music?

I put on “Let It Be.” By the Beatles. In fact, I put on the song “Let It Be.” And I’m talking about the version from “Let It Be,” the Phil Spector production, not the George Martin-produced single that you can find easily, not the “Let It Be … Naked” version, which I actually love, too, because I like hearing how guitarist George Harrison thought about what he did on the various recordings. I played my daughter the “Let It Be” I knew best, and which had bludgeoned me much as “Golden Slumbers” had, back in the day, when things at home were coming unglued.

I played the song for her while I was making her a sandwich. It’s really unusual for a 3-year-old to stop moving, unless she’s asleep, and my daughter was not asleep. But she was pretty still. She was transported by the song. Look, you have heard this song 10,000 times, I have heard this song 10,000 times, we are somewhat impervious to the charms of this song, even though it’s a very beautiful song, but when you play it for someone else, in this case someone else who has never heard the song at all, you get back something lost, the original emotional freight of the thing. And with “Let It Be,” which is apparently about a dream Paul had about his dead mother, and, self-evidently, also about the Beatles breaking up, it is hard not to feel that the title, the refrain, is sung with real insight, a real understanding about what it feels like to need the sentiment expressed therein. There really is a lot of misunderstanding and disagreement and dispute in the world, all of it essentially pointless, our time here is so brief, and it would be better if we could all just …

Now, when you’re 3, a sentiment of this kind has maximum impact when repeated, but it’s repeated a lot here, in the song, over and over, and my daughter picked it up quick, the theme, but not so quick that she didn’t want to hear the song again, and so I played the song again, and finished making the sandwich, and then she wanted to hear it again, and I played it again, and then again, and on the third or fourth repetition, that plaintive, moving quality had begun to empty out again, and I was just hearing the song I had heard 10,000 times, and then my daughter asked for it a few more times. We played it six times. That first day. And we have played it more times since. Papa, play that “Let It Be” song.

What’s it like to have resounding success in the dad-playing-music-for-the-kid sweepstakes? I am not sure I want my daughter feeling like she has to like something just because I played it for her. I would like to provide an opportunity, make the music available, then step out of the process, so that she’s absolutely liberated, so that she has self-determination in the matter of her musical interests. That way she can die for Uncle Rock or Dan Zanes if that is what she wants. But I can’t deny, and especially not here, the sense of pride that I feel when she likes something that I too liked, once upon a time in the suburbs. I hope she can do the same when she’s a parent. Maybe one day she’ll share with me things she likes with the same enthusiasm. And maybe one day I can sell her on Sun Ra.