TALKING POINTS
The plugged-in world of Amanda Palmer and her Grand Theft Orchestra
by Matt Ashare |
Posted February271, 2013
It
came as a fairly palpable shock to an already shaken system when, in 2007, the
much lauded British band Radiohead bypassed the standard music business model
and released their 7th disc, In Rainbows, as a Internet-only,
pay-what-you-will download. If an entity as successful as Radiohead could
effectively operate outside the purview of a major label and, worse yet, do so
by without imposing a definitive value on a product, then, surely, all bets were
off. Or, maybe not. In Rainbows might have felt like a game changer at
the time. Indeed, all the chatter about the method of the album's release
threatened to drown out the actual sound of the music. But, in retrospect, it
was a really more of an outlier, an unruly anomaly that merely pointed toward
one of any number of possible futures, while also raising a fundamental
postmodern dilemma: When the medium becomes the message, what happens to all
the other stuff, like, for example, the ten moody, electro-organic songs that
comprised the online edition of In Rainbows?
That question was at the heart of some of
the issues Amanda Palmer, a musician/provocateur whose resume includes
recording seven Radiohead numbers for the wryly titled 2010 EP Amanda Palmer
Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele, was
wrestling with back on January 13. In a rambling yet incisive blog post, under
the heading, "how the hell am I going to delivery this TED talk?
help.," Palmer wrote, "i know basically what I want to talk about. i
mean, it's obvious. something about me, and probably me as a street performer,
and about you, and about crowdfunding, and about love, and about how there's a
new currency of connection and type of exchange on the net that could revolutionize
the way we make and support art on the internet and in the world."
At the same time, she wondered if her
message might be better served by a medium other than the lecture format
favored by TED: "maybe i could sing my thesis to the tune of wagner’s
'ring cycle,' crowd-source some local strings and horns, bring them onstage
and, wearing a lab-coat and wielding a smoking beaker and a slide-rule,
illustrate the emotional mathematical quantitative difference between a beer, a
hug, a high-five, and a dollar. . ."
So, a little background. TED — short for
"Technology, Entertainment, and Design" — got its start as a Silicon
Valley information-sharing forum in 1984. It grew into an annual event in 1990,
and has since become a wide-ranging, international multi-media franchise that
operates year round with dozens of events and permanent presence on the web.
Joining Palmer on the roster for "TED 2013: The Young, The Wise, The
Undiscovered" (Feb. 24-Mar. 1 in Long Beach, CA) are archery bow designer
Dong Woo Jang, a yo-yo champion named BLACK, and a musician/activist who goes
by Bono. Oh, and on the day after Palmer, who's listed as a musician/blogger,
delivers her talk (Wednesday, Feb. 27, at 8:30 a.m., PST), Peter Gabriel,
another musician/activist, is also scheduled to speak.
How'd Palmer end up on the TED radar?
Here's a hint: It wasn't entirely due music. No, the big story surrounding the
release of third full-length solo album in September of last year was that
she'd financed the entire venture via the online fundraising site Kickstarter,
which is mostly used to fund relatively modest projects. In fact, having
cultivated a remarkably intense relationship with fans through her candid blog
and a Twitter feed that boasts over 800,000 followers, Palmer set a new
Kickstarter record by raising nearly $1.2 million to record the self-released Theatre
Is Evil, an impressive feat with ramifications that go far beyond whatever
threat Radiohead's In Rainbows might have posed to the status quo. But,
much like In Rainbows, Theatre Is Evil, the album, was
overshadowed for a time by Theatre Is Evil, the event.
Fortunately, Palmer's an artist who
understands the performative nature of spectacle. She's also perfectly
comfortable living out loud. She came to music with a background in stage
acting/directing and, beginning in 2000, put that experience to good use in the
Dresden Dolls, a deceptively muscular, highly stylized, Boston-based
cabaret-rock duo that featured Palmer, often in little more than a skimpy
negligee and gartered stockings, sparring on piano with drummer Brian Viglione.
With a taste for taught, angular songs that played on Palmer's flair for the
dramatic, the Dresden Dolls were brainy and bawdy, sophisticated and naughty.
(I once heard someone refer to Palmer, in her Dresden Dolls guise, as
"Tori Amos times ten," which isn't particularly fair to her or Amos,
although it's not exactly wrong.)
An array of costumed street performers —
fire-breathers, stilt walkers, and the like — became part of the Dresden Dolls
carnival as the band grew in stature.
But,
it quickly became clear that Palmer's vision extended well beyond the
traditional boundaries of rock and roll. In 2006, she published The Dresden
Dolls
Companion, an elaborate and
revealing history of the duo laced with striking visual art, intimate
autobiographical sketches, and sheet music. The following year, the American
Repertory Theatre at Harvard staged The Onion Cellar, a musical
conceived by Palmer and based on a chapter from Günter Grass' The Tin Drum.
And, by that point, Palmer's "Dresden Dolls Diary" blog postings had
become an integral part of the band's appeal.
With a pocketful of tunes that apparently
didn't quite fit the Dresden Dolls mold, Palmer launched her solo career in
2008 with Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, an album produced by Ben Folds that
ventured into the realm of orchestral rock and, in case there were any doubts,
proved she could hold her own alone. More notably, the album sparked online
controversy when Palmer revealed in a blog post that Roadrunner, the label she
was signed to at the time, wanted shots of her exposed stomach edited out of a
video for the single "Leeds United" because she looked
"fat." Fans began an online protest campaign called the
"ReBellyon" (Google it), self-published their own "Belly
Book," and, after penning and performing a song title "Please Drop
Me," Palmer learned something about the power of the Internet when
Roadrunner agreed to do just that.
At some point in that amusing drama, the
line between Amanda Palmer, the person, and Amanda Palmer, the artist or brand
name, began to blur. I read a few posts about the her fondness for Australia,
but sorta missed the follow-up solo album she recorded there, 2011's Amanda
Palmer Goes Down Under. I'm pretty sure I heard more about the Tweet
announcing Palmer's marriage, two years ago, to the British writer Neil Gaiman,
a major graphic-novel dude who's probably still best known for The Sandman
series he wrote for DC's Vertigo imprint from 1989 until 1996, than I did about
Down Under. And, although I hate to admit it, I might not have gotten
around to Theatre Is Evil if news of Palmer's impending TED talk hadn't
tempted me. Okay, so I saw that on Facebook.
My bad, because Theatre of Evil
now holds the dubious distinction of being the best album I didn't bother
listening to in 2012. Outfitted with a full backing band — drummer Michael
McQuilken, guitarist/keyboardist Chad Raines, and bassist Jherek Bischoff
— and a well rounded complement of
strings, brass, and reeds, Palmer makes the most of that Kickstarter cash,
exploring pop possibilities that are both more ambitious than anything she
attempted with the Dresden Dolls, and, in a very real sense, more alluring. She
can do prickly, as she does to pointed effect in "Do It With A
Rockstar," a sinewy rocker that oscillates between orchestral dreamscapes
and staccato piano jabs that frame clenched taunts: "Do you wanna dance?/Do
you wanna fight?/Do you wanna get drunk and stay up all night?" But her
range extends to the plaintively baroque on "Trout Heart Replica," a
winding 7-plus-minute epic that twists the title of the twisted Captain
Beefheart classic Trout Mask Replica and brings to mind Fiona Apple at
her unhinged best, as Palmer cryptically works her way through a dark emotional
storm and concludes, "Killing things is not so hard/It's hurting that's
the hardest part."
Elsewhere, Palmer evokes the chilling
ache of vintage Aimee Mann in "Grown Man Cry," a cooly distilled shot
of Tears For Fears-style ’80s synth-pop. With ringing guitar and banks of
ethereal keyboards coalescing around a moody, minor-key melody, she mercilessly
picks at a fatally tangled romance: "For a while it was touching/For a
while it was challenging/Before it became typical/And now it really is not
interesting/To see a grown man cry." And, with the arresting "The Bed
Song," a track that even she singles out as one of the most fully realized
song-stories she's yet written, Palmer displays a flair for filmic detail as
she follows, in genuinely touching fashion, the downward spiral of a couple who
move from a grungy apartment to an uptown condo to their final resting place.
It's a pretty good bet that none of that will come up in
Palmer's TED talk, which will be broadcast online. She's in Long Beach to talk
about her skillful use of social networking and the transformative impact of
the Internet on the creative process, not her approach to songwriting. And
that's probably a good thing, since it's often not particularly interesting
when artists speak of their craft. I'll be tuning in, if only because Amanda
Palmer, artist and blogger, remains a provocative work-in-progress. In fact,
you can track that progress daily @amandapalmer.
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