Summer Songwriting 7 – Nicolas Jaar
A Song that Started Smoking Because Godard Did It – “Too Many Kids Finding Rain in the Dust”
When Space is Only Noise came out I was so enthused I swore it would be at the very top of my retrospective lists at the end of the year. Better than James Blake (more sensual). Groovier than Ricardo Villalobos (less cerebral). Way, way cooler than Jamie Woon (too well-mannered).
A few months later, the album makes me smile. It’s a nice smile. And a great album. But it’ll never match Blake’s bare pop absolute. It’ll never reach Villalobos’ mind-warping radicalism: Jaar has mastered de-structured sampling, cluster-echo handclaps, aqueous synth lines / percussions, and minimalist space, but is only what he is: a student. He’s still way, way cooler than Jamie Woon, but then who isn’t.
This sounds condescending but it’s not. Because it’s coming from a student. My smile isn’t the There-There, Good-Effort type of crap you get from your grandpa after he’s read your thesis introduction: it’s a friendly smile, and it comes with a beer and just a tiny bit of admiration.
Because in the end, there are good students and bad students, students who walk around like they own the place and those who pretend to scratch furiously at their eyebrows when you cross their paths; there are students who read the books and still don’t really get it, those who don’t even bother and make punk music; and then there are students who try, who really go for it, who read the books and ponder what the fuck it all means, even if they don’t speak up in class, who will attempt to give a girl a smile but pee their pants a little in the process, who’ll try designer drugs but secretly feel terrified and guilty, who question their background in a globalized, hyper-cultural world, who will dream of becoming writers and of making a niche for themselves in a world they want to help. Those, in other words, who are trying to find who they are.
I am one of those students, I think. And Nicolas Jaar sounds like one of them too. (He is in college somewhere in the U.S., if I’m not mistaken.) Consequently, or therefore, or thus, or hence, whatever sounds more academic, his debut sounds like an album that’s trying to be cool, going for the ambitious stuff but drawing back for fear of sounding like a douche, and dressing in the latest fashion whilst desperately hoping no one will notice just how artificial it looks.
It’s alright dude. We all do it. And fuck, man, you do it pretty well. “Too Many Kids Finding Rain in the Dust” proves it. In the end, no one really pays attention to what you wear, or to the lingering, atonal violins, and no one will see the panic in your eyes when you drop the beat too late and then don’t really do that all the way, even. As long as you project some basic level of confidence, they’ll take you in as one of their own: they’ll stop at the tight, swaying bass, a the unmistakably shoulder-rolling syncopation, they’ll snap some fingers at the the little dubby synth, and they’ll think your echo-y, smooth, Havana-smoking guitar is awesome as fuck. Cause it really is.
So like the rest of the album, “Too Many Kids…” ends up being cheesy like a “10 Things” rom-com, but, as a result, an amazing piece of pop music. It reminds me of Supermayer’s own fantastically cheesy dub forays. For some reason, it reminds me of the Argentine streets of Tetro. Or better yet, Happy Forever: like Wong Kar-Wai, Jaar can’t help but fall for the cheap, imaginary romanticism of evocative atmospheres (judging from some of the samples, he’s also a film buff), but does it with such conviction, with a mastery that stems from both passionate abandon and castrating self-consciousness, with so little distance (despite the deep-pitched, fake-crooner voice and everything), that one needs not look any deeper: the atmosphere is there, at the tip of a virtual finger, so thick and so beautifully recreated.
The trick will be to preserve that naivety, instead of falling for empty formalism (Isolée’s latest album anyone?) and/or the sirens of euro-hop-dance David Gettaism. But for now, you’re welcome to chill in my living room any time buddy.
Payola (Radio Cure) 