RIFF MARKET

Riff Market: Sufjan Stevens Update



The obvious angle being 'down w/irony', as in Xmas is definitely not down with irony or popular misconceptions of the word, nor is SS, but mind if I say something different, America? After hearing all these carols again, several of them "jazzed up" enough for me to break my own "the phrase 'jazzed up'" moratorium--and I should say that this involved me like sitting on my bed listening to all five EPs in some sort of undivided attention-type situation--after I listened to all five discs, I'm thinking maybe it's OK to say that I'm bored by Christmas caroles I've heard a billion times. I don't find them stirring, not even when performed by little children from the South who sing "silent night" as "sah-lent naht," which I merely find hilarious. Is that OK that I find boring songs boring? Or does that mean I'm secretly self-loathing. That I'm not man enough to like the Sufjan Stevens Christmas boxset. More and more I feel like that's the self-reflexive message to a lot of the people pretending to write criticism about this boxset, that implicitly, they are man enough to drop the guard and like Christmas caroles, and haters aren't. That, basically, since we can't get away from irony--it's a fact, deal with it--that even me saying that must reflect some sort of self-loathing, i.e. I can't believe anybody would actually like Christmas caroles. Can we at least agree that we all had at least one misguided friend who thought it would be funny to sing "We Three Kings (Of Orient Are)" while pulling is eyes slanty in the style of (in his mind) a king from the orient? Merry Christmas, John Hunsicker.

Which is infuriating anyway because (a) Sufjan's originals are all pretty fantastic, and (b) the monkish project of trying to rejuvenate musical cliche e.g. Christmas caroles is maybe Sufjan's most Sufjanic exercise in songwriting/arranging/etc.-- that it sums up so many of the demons he deals with musically, his concerns about his balance of musical complexity and pop's directness, his music tempering his beliefs and vice versa, I mean it's all there, five discs of it, which is why I'm going to keep listening, despite mah humbug.

69 RIFFS [thx Peter]