Salon.com > Steven Hyden

Stop mocking children’s choirs

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In the thoroughly ridiculous music video for 2010’s “Radioactive,” Kings of Leon is caught in the act of flagrantly flogging one of the hoariest clichés in all of pop music. The clip captures the fashion model-handsome arena-rock band in the full bloom of clueless pomposity, as it shrugs off the messianic glow of stardom and returns to its down-home, Southern roots. And how is this revival of pre-celebrity sanctity signified? By a children’s choir, which Kings of Leon embraces like Jesus reuniting with his flock.

“From what I have read, hiring a children's choir to join your band makes your music sound 'more meaningful,'” blogger Carles dryly observed on the indie-skewering website Hipster Runoff upon seeing “Radioactive.” “It inspires some sort of euphoric, spiritual vibe, helping u to reconnect with nostalgic images of youth, or something.”

Can Lou Reed and Metallica’s collaboration be that bad?

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:00:00 +0000

If you’ve read anything at all about "Lulu" — the assaultive 10-song, 89-minute album by Lou Reed and Metallica that will officially be let loose on the listening public this Tuesday — it almost certainly concerns how horrendous it’s supposed to be. Media coverage centered on the record’s presumed awfulness almost immediately after the collaboration was announced in June, months before people actually got the chance to hear it. On music websites, message boards and Twitter, "Lulu" inspired a series of seemingly unanswerable questions: “Lou Reed and Metallica? For real? Huh? Seriously? Why?”

The defining figure of New York rock and the most successful metal band of all-time braced the world for "Lulu" in 2009, when they performed together at Madison Square Garden for the Roll and Roll Hall Of Fame’s 25th anniversary concerts. But many still found the pairing not only wrong, but a hubristic miscalculation of potentially historical proportions.

The monoculture is a myth

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Like Touré, I get nostalgic for the monoculture. It certainly seems like an alluring idea. The monoculture reinforces the belief that what we as critics spend so much time thinking about really is a central part of the way our society lives and breathes. Otherwise it might be hard to believe in the primacy of pop music when millions of people are out of work and our government is crippled by deep systemic dysfunction. But the best thing (or the worst thing, if you’re writing a think piece) about the monoculture is that it exists safely in the past, where it can live on in our imaginations as a mythical place where, as Touré recently wrote in Salon, “an album becomes so ubiquitous it seems to blast through the windows, to chase you down until it’s impossible to ignore it” — an all-powerful communal unity that comments on the shortcomings of the present.