Girls’ Rooms and Boys’ Rooms

Realism (2010)

The Magnetic Fields

Back When I taught comp, my last observation fell on a day for which I turned out to have assigned really boring reading. I don’t know

how many of you use the McQuades’ Seeing and Writing, but it has a little portfolio of bathroom signs from around the world that caught my eye as I was franticly scanning the pages on the subway up to campus trying to find something more interesting to talk about than what I had already assigned. After thinking about it I decided to ditch my lesson plan and instead have the class talk and write about these signs. Thankfully, it turns out that there’s a mountain of things to talk about with bathroom signs. How do we distinguish male and female bodies, for instance? How much of that is perfo

rmative, an assertion of requirements rather than description of reality? How do we communicate that this is a place to pee, etc?

The cover of the Magnetic Fields latest album, Realism (Nonesuch 2010), which sports the outline of a ladies’ room symbol on a paper bag colored background, would have been a perfect addition to that discussio

n. It is also the perfect image for this new album, which is, in a strange way, the completion of a diptych when combined with their previous album, Distortion (Nonesuch 2008), with its solid black men’s room symbol in the middle of a shocking neon pink cover

Distortion drew out the always-latent noisepop, shoegaze, Jesus and Mary Chain side to the Magnetic Fields music—classic pop buried under massive, echo-y guitar fuzz, with affectless vocals generally pretty low in the mix. Realism, on the other hand, sounds more like the band’s live shows—folksy, mostly acoustic, not so big on traditional percussion. Stephin Merritt, the dictatorially micromanaging, songwriting genius and sometimes lead singer, actually suffers from hyperacusis, a condition

that makes loud noises intolerable. Restrained as the band’s performance is, he nevertheless must wear earplugs to play live and covers his left ear whenever the audi

ence applauds. I’ve never felt more like a grown-up than when I joined the polite clapping between songs from my

comfortable seat at Town Hall at

their last New York appearance. Taken together, the two albums continue the Magnetic Fields’ decade-long practice of structuring albums around loose concepts, which began with their three-disc magnum opus, 69 Love Songs (Merge 1999) and continued with i (Nonesuch 2004), all of the songs on which started with the letter, and generally the pronoun, “I.”

This is not a review, but I do want to say here that I think this new album is incredible—among their best—and is fast becoming a nonexpendable part of my whole body, not excluding its suburbs.

Let’s go back to the two recent album covers, because I think they reveal—this is what I really want to talk about—some of the persistent characteristics that make the Magnetic Fields wonderful. As Michel de Montaigne wrote, “Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom” (I’ve also seen it translated “Even kings sit on their arses”). Realism and Distortion make this point pretty clearly—as the bathroom icons were designed to do. Dry wit: satirical, even cynical, sometimes loving, always hilarious. That’s one continuous thread running through the Magnetic Fields’ discography, and one that implicates themselves. For example, as against the hot pink, Pop Art slickness of Distortion’s cover image, Realism’s cover is a visual pun that undermines the title. Its trompe l’oiel details make the background look like parchment—a self-consciously artificial signifier of realism. Punning titles themselves are a band tradition. Does Get Lost (Merge 1995), for instance, mean Merritt & Co would rather we leave them alone, or are we supposed to read the writing on the cover straight through: “The Magnetic Fields Get Lost”? The title i is even closer to the irony of called the latest album Realism, since, as Merritt has insisted, all of his songs are sung from the point of view of characters he’s created. No direct, big-R Romantic self-expression from him!

Merritt’s songs have always seemed to enjoy moving between two poles of the same ironic spectrum: artifice and realism, dreamy enchantment and disappointed cynicism—although it’s these latter songs that often sound the most upbeat. “I Don’t Believe You,” for example, from the album i:

So you quote love unquote me.
Well, stranger things have come to be.
But let’s agree to disagree,
Cause I don’t believe you.
…
You tell me I’m not not cute.
Its truth or falsity is moot,
Cause honesty’s not your strong suit,
And I don’t believe you.
It’s an effortful cheerfulness and a hard-won freedom from expectations, as the bridge reveals.
I had a dream and you were in it.
The blue of your eyes was infinite.
You seemed to be in love with me,
Which isn’t very realistic.

Hope and hopelessness go together in these songs. Without romantic illusions, disillusionment would be neither such a dangerous wound nor such a self-preservative necessity.

The two tendencies, nourishing and puncturing illusions, come together most marvelously in what may be the Magnetic Fields’ most popular song—certainly the one I’ve found people who know nothing else about them generally are familiar with and enjoy—“The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side,” from part one of 69 Love Songs. The song is written to an unnamed woman (presumably), and every verse of it cheerfully enumerates the hopelessness of the singer trying to compete with all her other admirers: “Andy would bicycle across town in the rain to bring you candy, / And John would buy the gown for you to wear to the prom / With Tom the astronomer, who’d name a star for you.” But the singer has an edge: “I’ve got wheels, and you want to go for a ride.” And that’s why he’s the luckiest guy. He acknowledges all the limits and caveats on his luck—“But when the sun comes out, / and only when the sun comes out, / I’m the luckiest guy…”—but to the very end he maintains his sustaining, pathetic, undeluded but illusory joyfulness:

I know Professor Blumen makes you feel like a
woman,
But when the wind is in your hair you laugh like a
little girl.
So you share secrets with Lou, but we’ve got
secrets too.
Well, one: I only keep this heap for you.
Cause I’m the ugliest guy on the Lower East Side,
But I’ve got wheels, and you want to go for a ride.
Want to go for a ride?

The last line gets two more repetitions, with the final word drawn out longer and longer until, every time I try to sing along, I hope against hope that the sustained last note is somehow digitally manipulated.

Merritt’s lyrics never let things rest, and each of these tendencies finds itself undercut at least once in his songbook. The earnest romanticism turns out to be a sham in 69 Love Songs’ “I Think I Need a New Heart,” in which the persona singing admits that

… I always say I love you
When I mean turn out the light,
And I say let’s run away
When I just mean stay the night.

On the other hand, the character who sings “Save a Secret for the Moon” from Get Lost uses his hopelessness as a seductive lure:

I can show you sadder poetry
Than you ever thought there could be.
I know all the saddest people.
Most of them are dead now.

Let’s go back to the girls’ room/boys’ room album covers.

Talking about gender is pretty much unavoidable when talking about symbols distinguishing the gents’ from the ladies’. There’s the paranoid reading of bathroom signs—which ideally becomes the resistant, or in a slightly older vocabulary, subversive one—that sees the interpolative violence of these reductive, standard-enforcing symbols. For example, neither gender is ever represented as fat. Would it confuse the message of the sexual binary to show them as such? I drew for my class what I thought I would look like as a bathroom symbol. It turned out kind of like a silhouette of Mr. Potatohead with an extra circle on top. I guess the Mrs. version would have a bow in her hair.

But then there are more lovely relationships with bathroom signs. One of my most delightful students that semester, who had only started learning English a few years before, explained that he’d never considered what “WC” might stand for; he’d always just read it as “welcome”—“don’t worry”—“it’s going to be okay”—“here’s what you need for relief.” That’s definitely a message that any bathroom sign can communicate to me in moments of distress, no matter what my gender at the time. (That last phrase makes me sound much more interesting than I am: my gender is pretty much always masculine.)

The radical politics version of paranoia is entirely too earnest for the Magnetic Fields. These two albums’ ironic play on realism and distortion and the gender politics of the loo encapsulates much better the band’s queerness, as does Merritt’s wonderful songwriting practice of having other singers of other genders ventriloquize his personae, sometimes making the sexuality of a song impossible to untangle. Take “Come Back from San Francisco,” from the first volume of 69 Love Songs. Shirley Simms, perpetual “guest vocalist” (though I’m sure she has a much better deal than we adjuncts do), sings Merritt’s lyrics: “Should pretty boys in discos / Distract you from your novel / Remember I’m awful in love with you.” Girl singing to boy who likes boys? Boy singing through girl to—someone? Any which way, the relationships can’t be fit into categories.

Which suggests a comparison to “Girls & Boys,” the Britpop scene-maker by Blur (Parklife, Food/SBK 1994). The two songs are not kindred. Instead of a stadium new-wave-disco beat and the repeated, earnestly ironic proclamation that it “always should be someone you really love,” The Magnetic Fields here give us subtlety and artfulness:

You need me
Like the wind needs the trees
To blow in.
Like the moon needs poetry,
You need me.

Is that a compliment? Or a plea? Or a scornful warning meant to cut “you” down to size? Dry, undramatic presentation, sexual and emotional complexity, and a never-explicit undercurrent of anxiety that the San Francisco boys may be more satisfying in bed than the woman singing “kiss me, I’ve quit smoking / I miss doing the wild thing with you” are the key elements of this song. In fact, low-key delivery, nuanced emotions, dry wit, and romantic despair characterize almost every Magnetic Field song.

Of course, there are levels to Blur’s anthemic mega-hit, too. The eurotrash synths make you think sexual fluidity is delightful. (I should say: I love listing to this song.) Turns out that it’s actually irresponsible decadence. Satire! The real problem is that there aren’t any jobs to keep these kids occupied. All they can do to fill the time is get confused about whom they’re fucking. It makes me wish American youth could just go on the dole after college.

And of course there’s simplicity to The Magnetic Fields’ song as well. Stephin Merritt keeps fanatical control over all the lyric-writing in his many bands and projects. (Others include the 6ths, the Future Bible Heroes, the Gothic Archies, and the songs for the musical adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novella Coraline.) And Merritt is gay. So, on paper, “Come Back from San Francisco” is a song written by a guy to another guy who also likes guys. And there are songs written and sung from just such a direct and uncomplicated relational position. Take for example, “When My Boy Walks down the Street” from 69 Love Songs part 3. Merritt himself sings, and the lyrics include some of my favorite love-song celebrations of a significant other: “Butterflies turn into people when my boy walks down the street,” for example, or “There are whole new kinds of weather when he walks with his new beat.” But the terms of the relationship are clear enough: “he’s going to be my wife.”

But the whole complicated spectrum of sexual subjectivities—and of fannish identification, of the needy projective and introjective love that comprises fandom—has always been an explicit mainstay of the band’s personality. “I was straight when Stephin met me, and I’m gay now, which may have been influenced by the openness of hanging around with so many gay people,” founding, full-time (tenured?) band-member Claudia Gonson said in an interview with the Advocate in 2000. “When we started Magnetic Fields we purposely had one lesbian, one gay guy, one straight woman, and one straight man. The audience could identify with whomever they wanted.”

This is not much of a surprise. Gonson has been a PhD student right here at the CUNY Graduate Center, and was dearly close to our late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose antihomophobic scholarly and personal project had at its center the goal of vastly expanding and complicating the available understandings of “sexual identity,” of multiplying and nurturing the possibilities for different, individual ways of desiring, identifying, and being in relationship. “People are different from each other” is famously the first axiom in Sedgwick’s extended introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, one of the original big bangs that generated the space for academic queer studies to come into existence.

(There’s a little shout out to academic palaver on the new album in the form of a song called “Always Already Gone.” It’s not the first. 69 Love Songs includes “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure.” Both songs are about loneliness and romantic disappointment, as most Magnetic Fields songs are. And for the avant-gardists, when Merge reissued their first two albums on one compact disc, they were separated by a track called 4’33’’, which was just that—a “cover,” so to speak, of John Cage’s famous silent composition.)

My own founding document, I think, is an essay which Sedgwick gave the witty, pop-inflected title “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay Is about You.” In it, she suggests that—in addition to the paranoid style of theory inflected criticism, which puts its faith in the transformative power of exposing the sinister workings our heterosexist, emotionally impoverishing, late-capitalist society—another perspective is both necessary and available: the reparative. Reparative criticism pays close attention to practices of art and living whose creativity is motivated by love, difference, and need. “The desire reparative impulse,” she writes “is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.”

I bring this up not just because I love and miss Eve, and I take every opportunity to quote that sentence I can, but instead because the reparative, the anti-depressant impulse at the heart of Eve’s scholarly and personal work is deeply relevant, I think, to the Magnetic Fields’ style of music. The ironic, distant, ventriloqized emotions of Merritt’s lyrics are somehow still entirely relatable and even vulnerable. His vacillation between puncturing illusions and sustaining them—so familiar to any depressive, I would imagine—resonates beautifully with Sedgwick’s observation that the most paranoid artists are also often the most wonderfully reparative ones. His campy, retro, innovative cannibalization of classic pop forms and tricks and subject matter could fit right into her list of the defining, reparative features of classic camp performance, which includes “‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, or leftover products,” “rich, highly interruptive affective variety,” and “irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation.” The Magnetic Fields do that. That’s what they do!

And, as stand-offish as they can seem—or so people tell me; I’ve never experienced them to be so—the Magnetic Fields are and have always been lovely, and loving, and deeply loved by their fans.

P.S. Now seems as good a time as any to say that the teaching observation I opened this meander with went great. It might have been crass, and a different observer might have hated it. But, as Merritt advises in the new album’s “Everything is One Big Christmas Tree,”

Why sit in your dark and lonely room?
Must your every word be sincere?
Here’s a vial of laughing gas perfume:
See that people smile when you’re near.
If they don’t like you, screw them.

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