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The Avocado

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Click Ryan to buy, buy, buy! Bandcamp moonerband.com Facebook Twitter Email YouTube Mooner sub-Reddit Hello, respected fans. Firstly, let's get this out of the way: Lee and John will be playing an acoustic set at a brand new DIY venue called The Avocado. It's technically a garden apartment but you will be surrounded by rare cassette tapes, singles and other collectibles so we're pretending it's our first ever record store show. We'll be playing a lot of new, unreleased songs. One of my favorite bands in Chicago, Shiloh will be playing a set after us. There are only about 25 seats available. Email us to get one!

MOONER / SHILOH

The Avocado

(moonerband@gmail.com for the address)

Saturday, July 12th

FREE | 8pm | All Ages

FACEBOOK The Avocado(moonerband@gmail.com for the address)Saturday, July 12thFREE | 8pm | All Ages In 2012, a Nashville-based independent record label sold 3,107,000 copies of Red, the fourth album from singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. So far, Red's seven singles have charted on Billboard, it has gone platinum in eight countries and it was the second top-selling album of 2012.



Why did this happen? How did Swift manage to squeeze water from the rocks of the record buying public? What is all this hoopla about her boyfriends and how she hates them all? Is she a salve for authenticity craving audiences everywhere or is she a highly calculated automaton birthed by some brutal capitalist from New York? I don't know, man, but read this anyway, I put a lot of time into it.

It's Mooner Record Club Vol. 11

featuring Taylor Swift's Red I started listening to Taylor Swift last year, not long after my college friend Mike posted an alarming picture to his Facebook page. Mike is 28, lives by himself in suburban Kansas, and, as far as I know, listens primarily to avant-garde electronic pop and hip hop music. He is a passionate defender of nearly every outsider artist I can name. When he and I visited Austin, TX, he was the guy who would take four mile walks to fluorescent-lit industrial districts to see semi-famous Internet musicians blast dissonant static through Marshall halfstacks for small audiences of contemplative stoners. So when he posted a picture that he took of what appeared to be a spotlight-drenched Taylor Swift performing mere feet from him--accompanied by the caption: "It was amazing."--my sense of balance in the universe was sent reeling. Mike had just publicly outed himself: he was a Swifty and apparently had been for some time. What does a guy whose idol is Weird Al see in one of the Top Selling Musicians of All Time? To find out, I decided to put on some Red. Taylor Swift - Red Based on Mike's tastes, I assumed I would be jumping into Taylor Swift's "experimental" period, something I have a habit of doing with pop artists. If there was one Swift song that made a fan of Mike it must have been an ambient instrumental track or some fourth wall-breaking skit a la The Marshall Mathers LP. Unsurprisingly, there's nothing like that within Swift's output. Red is truly and thoroughly a pop album and it serves as an oversized monument to it's creator: a very gifted songwriter operating at the peak of her powers. (I say oversized only because I don't think there should have been 16 songs on this thing but that's really my only complaint about this overall very good album.) In Red, Swift devotes her formidable talent to expanding her sound and to taking some risks and, to me, that makes the album worth looking at.



One of the things that really grinds my gears about critics of Swift is their tendency to reduce her to The Songwriter of Young, Idealistic Women Everywhere or as the emobodiment of the "shadowy area between teenager and womanhood." Her songwriting accomplishments, however impressive, always seem to be discolored by insularity. Her 2006 debut is admittedly mostly about football games and making out in trucks but even as her songwriting has progressed beyond her high school years she has never fully shed the first impressions made by doe-eyed ballads like "Love Story." I think that Swift is more potent and accessible than even her own audience has indicated and Red is as close as she got to owning up to this and redefining her career. At some point after her smash 2010 album Fearless, she clearly was fed up with the well meaning but condescending critical consensus, niche marketing campaigns and Tim McGraw opening slots. Two years later, she decided to take a big step toward her ultimate goal: total pop domination. Taylor Swift - We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together The song that first alerted the universe that Taylor had "Gone Pop" is the single "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together." First and foremost about this: if anyone insists to you that "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" is not one of the greatest pop songs of the last ten years I want you to immediately stare back at them with unbearable intensity, draw your index finger slowly across your neck and quietly mouth "I don't know you." "We Are Never..." is a pants-shitting pop masterpiece. Penned by Swift and accompanied by Max Martin's strikingly minimalist arrangement the song is one whopping shot of acoustic singer-songwriter confessional couched within a pristine electro-country rock dance number. It's highly fussed over, Frankenstein'd from multiple of-the-moment pop influences and has some cringeworthy spoken-word stuff. But it's also got the one thing that that any mega-hit absolutely has to have: it's catchier than the catchiest thing that you have ever thought in your life.



As for the lyrics, I don't want to hear a word about how it's a "charming ode to breaking up" or how it's some sort of feminist-lite empowerment schlock. The simple fact that Swift is writing about a breakup from the female perspective instead of the male doesn't suddenly make the song exceptional and, despite assurance from popular criticism, it isn't the thing that makes Swift unique as a songwriter. What makes her special is the same thing that makes Bono, Fiona Apple, Stevie Wonder and Bruno fucking Mars special: she can take a specific and personal moment and instantly connect with a big audience without losing much nuance or detail. She has written her "The Sweetest Thing", "Gimme Shelter" or "Pastime Paradise." These songs aren't still around just because they had mass appeal for a minute a few decades ago. Thousands of people still remember them because they tap into the few commonalities between people and filter them through a personal experience causing a contradictory connection between strangers that is both intimate and general. These songs about specific moments in the personal life of the writer--e.g. protesting war, upsetting one's spouse, American race relations in the mid-70s--are successful in finding an audience because they invite listeners to project onto them images of their own personal lives. "We Are Never..." is ostensibly about a breakup, but it could be about leaving your job, moving to a new city or any other declaratory change in your life. It's a concept that transcends gender, age and contextual barriers and it's what makes a bedrock for any pop song. You might think that the songs I mentioned are pandering or obnoxious but they're also as rare as unicorns and that makes them special. I think that Stevie Nicks nailed it when she said that Swift writes "songs that make the whole world sing, like Neil Diamond or Elton John." While I wouldn't toss her up next to Rocket Man in the pantheon of great populist songwriters, she clearly has Elton-esque visions of pop ubiquity in mind and I think she has the talent and brains to distill the Big Topics into universally-affecting chart-toppers, not just quaint "For Girls, By Girls" novelty songs. Red was Taylor's shot at expanding her fan base from a niche to a whole world of moms, dads, siblings and pretentious dudes like me. For an album that so harshly deals with messy internal conflict--desire vs. needs, confidence vs. vulnerability, fear of transition-- it's kind of amazing that it found a home with over 3 million listeners. The feel-good album of the year this wasn't, yet it was still blasted from every car stereo at the same frequency that Adele's 21 appeared in one's solitary earbuds or in tearful Grey's Anatomy death sequences or some other hoo-hah.



And I guess that what Mike likes about Taylor, too? I'm still not sure, Mike really is a bit of an enigma.



-Lee