There’s nothing written on your fingernails.
Today would have been the birthday of Broadcast singer/songwriter/visionary/Omnichordist extraordinaire Trish Keenan, so I’m sharing one of my contributions to a “favorite songs” zine from 2015, a short piece on a great track from the Tender Buttons album. Broadcast were a singular band even as their reputation straddled that ’90s revivalism for Les Baxter dream-sequence harp runs and Claudine Longet cooed melancholia, and the more niche 2000s trendlets of Tumblr-kid liminality and the utopian vibrations calling out from thicc Microgramma fonts on long-remaindered language-arts textbooks. True enough, but very few artists in Broadcast’s domain had that balance of scholarship and sincerity, a knack for being fully and brazenly referential without being camp or winking knowingly at an in-group. The easy-listening alto and big-room Hal Blaine drums, the Czech horror, the Gertrude Stein, is all a light to be bathed in, a sun ray on a napping Cheshire cat in a digressive, discursive poppy field. Feeling as praxis. But here’s one where they maybe were taking the piss a little bit!
Musicians have ragged on their own insider-outsider culture since Talking Heads deemed Mudd Club and CBGB less immediate than whatever crisis they wrote “Life During Wartime” about, since The Television Personalities’ “Part Time Punks,” since Bob McFadden & Dor’s bongo-skewering “The Beat Generation,” since Harry Gibson’s ambivalent boogie-woogie treatises on jive-talking white jazzers (on “Handsome Harry, the Hipster,” he implicates himself). Examples must abound in vaudeville, blues, and early popular song as well.
Broadcast’s 2005 “Michael a Grammar” came one year after X1’s “New York is So Cool,” three years after LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge,” and five years after the Dandy Warhols’ “Bohemian Like You,” situating it in a kind of micro-trend as the smallness of internet worlds made many of the “alternative” kids (thanks, ’90s) realize they weren’t especially special.
When Trish Keenan entreats the titular Michael to “let go,” yes, there’s a bit of dance-music abandon packed into the meaning (with the playful beat as arm candy), but it’s also a purposeful rejection of the anxiety of the ultramodern. Letting go means letting yourself go: not watching the cholesterol as much, dressing for comfort rather than high style, a resignation to dull grind instead of assaultive novelty. Keenan frames this resignation as freeing, though. In their career, Broadcast used the recent past as a palette of art materials. But artists fear surrender to their media; it’s a rabbit hole they either scramble to avoid or are lured into with attractive carrots despite their cooler-headed intentions.
It’s within this context that Keenan lures herself, and Michael, to the Brutalist postwar tower blocks of that recent past, away from the sawtooth wave of being a young person in a deep-rooted city, toward the endless static of the vaguely ahistorical but dated new town. “The old high-rise is coming down”; how’s that for the day’s excitement? Well, it’s not the chicly tedious party of “Come on Let’s Go” but it does promise a certain thrill (from a distance); public-policy failures make for gripping research. And it will remain research for these characters, because it’s too hard to stop dancing. What’s the point in wasting time on people that you’ll never know?
