Encounterculture

#9: Large



It’s getting to be really difficult to be hardcore these days. More and more, I find myself bitching and moaning about the lack of a soundtrack suitable for my waxing libido (this is why the Strokes exist, kids), and yet I can’t seem to put down Anniemal. It’s just too much damn fun.

“It”, I hasten to add, isn’t so much the songs – I’ve settled nicely into a listening pattern with it where I skip over roughly half the album – but rather the one-two punch of the sweet narcotic rush of unadulterated pop music (one) and the giddy, reckless delight that you only get when you catch yourself enjoying something that you know you shouldn’t (two). And really, if you want to get that even closer to the truth, it’s the second part of that equation that really makes the sale. As long as we’ve had pop music – and I mean pop music in the broad overarching sense of Popular Music, not just in the “Hey, thirteen-year-old girls like music too!” sense – there’s always been that undercurrent of You Should Not Be Here; it just used to be about showing The Man what the back of your middle finger looked like. Now it’s about kicking your friends in the dick when they make fun of you for knowing all the words to “Chewing Gum”.

Well, fuck ‘em. There are few albums this year which offer up as many chances to make a jackass of yourself in front of your friends as Anniemal. It’s not just that it’s an album full of disco whistles and warm synth pads and breathy backing tracks – it’s all that stuff pushed way past the logical conclusion. I still remember being about seven or eight and visiting my cousin who introduced me to Guns ‘n Roses; I think it may have even been the first time I’d ever heard “Sweet Child O’ Mine” when he asked me whether I liked that or the New Kids on the Block with more than a little trepidation. Of course I chose G’n’F’n’R – how could you not? It was just so gigantic that you couldn’t deny it, right? How do you possibly choose thin-ass late 80s pop music over THAT, right?

Okay, try to visualize two things: First, that most of the music on Anniemal is just as gigantic as Appetite – it just gravitates around the precise opposite musical pole. And second, if the New Kids had had music as active and animated as Anniemal does – well, my family might be even more suspicious of me. But god, who am I to argue with Those Drums on “Heartbeat” or all those hilarious disco sirens on “Come Together” or all that ice-cold synth punctuation all over the title track Or Or Or. There’s just stuff going on here; lots of stuff, good stuff, and stuff being put forward within the rubric of pop music (and now I am limiting myself to the thirteen-year-old-girl mode of pop music). This stuff sounds light and unthreatening because dammit, it’s built to sound light and unthreatening.

I suppose it’s worth making the point that it’s totally reasonable to look at Anniemal as an album of substance as well. Death, to take the most obvious example, has a way of showing up on this album, specifically the death of Annie’s deceased friend DJ Erot, who plays the dual roles of guest vocalist on “The Greatest Hit” and subject of “My Best Friend”, the album’s curious closing song. It’s actually a pretty clever trick if you think about it, and more to the point it’s certainly not the kind of trick you’d expect to find attempted on a bid for Britneydom. And yet that almost seems to miss the point. What makes Anniemal a great pop album isn’t that it deals with big things like death; it’s that it’s a monster of a record made compelling by the fact that it’s precisely the kind of thing that you’ve been brought up to write off. Put it this way: I have total confidence that Lester Bangs would have loved it.