Annotated SoundLeaf (pomDeter = Nine Inch Nails + Carly Rae Jepsen)

How to exploit the full potential of the mashup form.



Some context might help here.

"Head Like a Hole" surfaced nearly a quarter century ago, leading off Nine Inch Nails' now-classic album Pretty Hate Machine. NIN's industrial sound wasn't new; since the early eighties, underground groups like Ministry and Big Black had been exploring the connections between electronica and punk, experimenting with layers of abrasive synthesizers, guitars, and drum machines. But Trent Reznor, NIN's founder and sole songwriter, brought industrial rock to a mass audience.

In fact, Reznor became an icon for a certain type of disaffected teenager, the type who might enjoy shouting along with lyrics like these: "Head like a hole, / Black as your soul, / I'd rather die, / Than give you control." Over the years, Reznor's brand of melodramatic angst has proven durable; NIN still has a massive, fervid, self-reproducing following. Radiohead aside, I can't think of another contemporary band that gets taken so seriously by so many.



Enter Carly Rae Jepsen. A few years ago she placed third on Canadian Idol. She wears Zooey Deschanel bangs. She makes poppy pop records, with an extra dollop of pop. "Call Me Maybe" is the poppiest of them all, and last year, even in our fractured cultural world, it was damn near impossible to go a day without hearing those pixieish vocals, those processed strings, those shy come-ons, those precise repetitions... those pixiesh vocals, those processed strings, those shy come-ones, those... "Hey, I just met you, / And this is crazy..."



Pretty much everyone ended up annoyed.

So now, with the height of Carly Rae-mania several months behind us, a little-known DJ named pomDeter has slapped "Head Like a Hole"'s vocal track on top of "Call Me Maybe"'s instrumental track to create this brilliant mashup, "Call Me a Hole." Like much of Girl Talk's and The Hood Internet's best work, it yokes together the sacred and the profane, the hip and the unhip, the deep and the shallow, the eternal and the ephemeral - and it deconstructs the crap out of those binaries.

Trent Reznor's fans tend to think of "Head Like a Hole" as a subversive text, a middle finger to the mainstream. The same fans, especially the ones still trudging through the me-vs.-world morass of being an adolescent, are likely to view Carly Rae Jepsen as an unholy emblem of corporate pop culture. But what they forget, and what "Call Me a Hole" vividly demonstrates, is that while Reznor and Jepsen may belong to different teams, they play the same sport.

"Head Like a Hole" and "Call Me Maybe" (note the matching four-syllable titles) are both in 4/4 time, and both proceed in lockstep from verse to bridge to chorus. After the second chorus, both segue into a catchy middle eight (Reznor: "Bow down before the one you serve"; Jepsen: "Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad"). And both make the most of an exaggerated quiet-loud dynamic, introducing each chorus with a blast of instrumentation: Reznor uses guitars; Jepsen, violins.

As pomDeter himself avowed, "They went together with little effort."

In short, "Call Me a Hole" takes what appear to be disjunctures and turns them into continuities. And since a lot of people are invested in the original disjunctures - rely on them, even, to maintain a sense of superiority - pomDeter's track has caused plenty of anxiety. Amid the many compliments and expressions of joy in "Call Me a Hole"'s SoundCloud comments section, there are insults, accusations, expletives, and cries of misery, a few of which I quote here with pleasure:

• "I can't unhear this! HELP"
• "To use a NIN track and fuck it up should be against the law"
• "Call me closed-minded or whatever, but I find this a bit disrespectful [of] Trent Reznor/NIN"
• "This is evil"
• "THIS IS WRONG"
• "This gave me cancer"
• "Reznor never sounded so poppy"
• "We're all going to hell, and this is the dance track that they'll play there"
• "What an awful trend, but I'm sure all her fans are ecstatic and think they're cool now"

The last comment makes me especially happy. Too often musical taste is used as an instrument of cultural distinction and social aggression, particularly among teenagers. The NIN fans go in one cage, the Carly Rae fans in another. Now I'm not saying that "Call Me a Hole" will set anyone free, but it might remind the hip kids that their cage isn't necessarily better than the other, more crowded ones.

A wise SoundCloud commenter puts it this way: "Pop is pop is pop."

My Top 5 Songs of 2013

This post, which runs down my five favorite songs of 2012, might come as an anticlimax, given that I've spent the past month and a half intermittently, painstakingly descending from #13 to #6. (I've been busy lately.) But today is February 10, the Grammys are about to begin, and it's time to move on.

So.

#5: Killer Mike, "Reagan"

Too often, it seems to me, the rage in hip-hop is directed at rival MCs rather than, say, the War on Drugs. Or mass incarceration. Or American imperialism. Or the legacy of Reaganomics.

There's plenty of important stuff to be angry about.

Thank goodness, then, for Killer Mike, whose bracing blend of straight talk, unhinged paranoia, social analysis, and righteous anger you will not be seeing on stage at the Staples Center tonight.



"They declared a war on drugs, like a war on terror, / But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever."

#4: Chairlift, "I Belong in Your Arms"

Sweetness and sunlight, open hearts and banana splits. The aesthetic antithesis of Killer Mike's "Reagan." The aural equivalent of the film Amelie. Lyrics consisting of dadaist joy-bursts. Octave jumps! Synthesizers! The 80s! Just the slightest undercurrent of sadness!

All the girls wear polka-dot dresses, and all the boys are uninhibited by masculine norms!

I want to live in this song, even at the risk of turning into a twee lunatic.



"Because the world goes on without us, / Doesn't matter what we do-o-o. / All silhouettes with no regrets, / When I'm melting into you."

#3: Dum Dum Girls, "Lord Knows"

When music critics have no idea what's going on, they use the word "charisma." Why did the Beatles send young concert-goers into hysterics? They played with charisma. What made Michael Jackson different from every other pop star? He danced and sang more charismatically.

And why does "Lord Knows," essentially a pastiche of The Pretenders and "Crimson & Clover," seem unique? Why is it so moving? So much better than anything else by the otherwise unremarkable Dum Dum Girls?

There's something about the vocal. It's really, really....

(Charismatic.)



"I want to live a pure life, / I'd say that it's about time."

#2: Frank Ocean, "Thinkin Bout You"

Yeah, Mumford & Sons (ruthlessly inauthentic as they are) will likely win the Grammy for Best Album tonight. But Frank Ocean's channel ORANGE remains the best loved, or at least the most intensely loved, record of 2012, combining mass and critical appeal in a way that only Kanye West's finest albums have recently matched.

Lead single "Thinkin Bout You" highlights Ocean's most underrated strength: his facility with melody. Listen, for instance, to how he contrasts the circular, low-register verse with the vertical, falsetto chorus. The effect is one of a private, obsessive anxiety releasing into a straightforward ache.

And then you arrive at the bridge. 2:12. Whoa.

(The nonsensical music video I've embedded below features an alternate version of the song. It's the best I could find in the free, legal regions of the Internet.)



"We'll go down this road / Till it turns from color to black and white."

#1: Japandroids, "The House That Heaven Built"

Hey bro, you play air drums. I'll play air guitar. We'll have the BEST F#@$ING TIME EVER.



"And if they try to slow you down, / Tell 'em all to go to hell."