Published on Saturday March 8, 2008 .
I had this weird dream last night that I was in some really horrible city. Not horrible like Norfolk is horrible, but like truly horrid– kind of post-apocalyptic and abandoned. I went into this little dive-bar.. but it was actually turned out to be a dry cleaner / laundry mat. An acquaintance from Berklee, Tom Arey, was playing drums with the organist from the band he played with back in college.
I got his attention and he stopped playing and started talking to me and I said “you guys are still playing together?” and he said that he had to because his psychiatrist said he has to play the drums 6 times a day (in retrospect I think he meant week, but in the dream it was day). We we went outside to get something out of his car and all of the houses looked like they’d been blown up.. just chunks of them missing.. not like abandoned but like destroyed. At some point I looked down and I saw a bag on the ground with body parts in it– I remember seeing a foot, and it was totally gory in a cheap horror movie kind of way– and it freaked me out and I just wanted to get to listening to the band.. I don’t remember anything else.
There will always be this element of stupid white girl music in the world and I am just going to have to deal with it. While I don’t particularly dig Sara Bareilles’ music I was sort of impressed that a “pretty, but not so pretty” girl was doing so well in the current climate of the music industry.
“Wow!” I thought, “look at that big honker on her face! Is that her gimick? Is she the girl who won’t get a nose job because she’s so above it? Is this another girl-rock marketing angle? Like Fiona was with her whole not-eating thing and being crazy at award ceremonies thing? Like Tori Amos was with her 900 songs about rape? Like when Liz Phair went mainstream and got pregnant and married and all of her fans were pissed but she did it anyway and went platinum? Like how Carol King didn’t do any of that shit and wrote some of the greatest songs ever in the world?”
Nevertheless, I was kind of excited to see a glimmer of lame 90’s Feminism make a comeback in mainstream music– shit, not even feminism, just some kind personal integrity. She’s taking a stand, right?
Wrong.
It’s not such a big deal, but it’s also not that inobvious whats going on here. The PR guys got to her.
“Yeah, Sara, WE know you’re into your nose, and of course WE love that, but what about the American public? What about Rhapsody and iTunes? We don’t want to make this record about your nose. We don’t want to make a “nose record,” Sara. This is about Sara Bareilles, The Moderately Unfortgettable Pseudo-Feminist Down-Home Pop Star. Now take this radio and cover up that schnoz.”
Then again, I might have made all of that up.
