07 March 2007
GUEST REFF WEDNESDAYS: JEREMY REFF
Grizzly Bear, Beach House, Papercuts
Bowery Ballroom
March 6
from: Jeremy Reff
to: Riff Market
date: Mar 7, 2007 9:34 AM
subject: reverb, black voiceover
so i was kidding, but i also wasn't kidding.
Reverb (not pop reverb, but submerged psych-genre reverb) is like one part Rhodes organ, one part stolen Robert Johnson riff. It's this time machine, offering murky authenticity and meaning, but it can come off super-fake (reverse-hybrid fake?), covering tired voices and phoned-in-efforts. Like the character I'll call Stephen (Spike Lee calls this character the "helpful negro"), reverb adds structure, familiarity, history, a mystic overlay to the proceedings, but also is used by people like Jerry Bruckheimer and Stephen King to mkae crap seem shiny: a pyrite prism of faux-minstrel fantasia. True fact: Song of the South would have used reverb on Zip a Dee Doo Dah had reverb been available.
Now, since I think GB is working on a project continuing from the late 60s and pretending that a lot of intervening space didn't happen, it works for them. (And I would love to hear them do an entire set full of wonderfully weird soul covers - (post-Motown!, wouldn't that be funny?). When they rock out, it sounds very distant from either a) consciously rocking out (hey look, I'm S/K and Jumpers is so Zep), or b) consciously not wanting to sound rockist while rocking out, or even c) parodically noting the awareness of rocking out by rocking out with hyperintentionality (note that c) also covers bands not smart/good enough to realize that they are self-parody: Jet/Louis XIV). And reverb helps GB in the same way that a low-talker you like can create intimacy; it defamiliarizes (whoa, shit, sorry Shlovsky) so that the re-entrance to the trope doesn't smell like kitsch.
Points other: Beach House definitely doing b) above, anyway, which is irritating. Also pulling a King to use the effect to hide narrative/technical flaws. Not that I didn't think they were fine. They were fine.
half-a-riff.
91 RIFFS
// posted by NBS @ 9:34 AM 
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I'd just like to note that Phil Spector produced Bobb B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans' #8 hit, "Zip A Dee Doo Dah," with full Wall of Sound reverb, for his Philles label only a year after releasing He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss) with The Crystals, a song that Grizzly Bear covered last night. That's some weird wonderful circularity. It suggests that someone more serious should, you know, write an essay on reverb, and masking, and technical/formal ways that effects both cancel the original signifier (Dylan, boring essay, already written), or alter it through a process of cryptic disguise (Boym, better essay on Nabokov, already written), with maybe particular focus paid to authenticity, sampling, and hip-hop (many things already written, none of them satisfying).
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