Post by Katrina on Feb 28, 2004 15:57:34 GMT -5
Xiu Xiu
Words | Julianne Shepherd
To posit about emotional devastation: At the absolute lowest points in a person’s life, hope is enshrouded in caution and fear, and sometimes even bitterness. This is possibly because, at times such as those, hope represents that all goodness topples at some point or another- the danger of believing in something. But in the midst of drowning in depression, there is often a time when sadness emerges into beauty. It’s the unequaled oasis of all that is bittersweet, the feeling that the melancholia can be a warm place, at least for a while. It’s the feeling of hitting the bottom and realizing that it just became possible to find the top. Total emotional wreckage is a strange place to be, indeed.
This is also the warm place where Xiu Xiu’s music resides, at the exact cusp between euphoria and devastation. You can hear it in their lyrics, but we’ll get to that later. The way Xiu Xiu fills space- with beats like hearts thumping, tic, exotic clangs of bells and percussion, a blanket of piano, synths, bass, guitar, and the expressive, emotive vocals of Jamie Stewart is encompassed by a profound empathy, and it’s beautiful and terrible damaging and terrifying and put together like nothing you’ve ever heard. Their music transcends their music; it conveys emotion so effectively, it becomes an entity unto itself, its own shattered, cut-apart and pieced together thing comprised of music, feelings, and humanness. This all may sound very and/or hyperbolic, but it’s all true and there’s no other way to put it. Xiu Xiu, the band including Stewart, Lauren Andrews, Yvonne Chen, and Cory McCulloch taps into the intangible workings of human nature with a raw, whole honesty.
It is a concerted effort for Xiu Xiu, who jail from San Jose, California, to be emotionally bare in their music. Explains Jamie Stewart, “For awhile, my dad was a super big league record producer. He never showed me how to p lay, but he talked to me about what ideas make music. I guess something that he always would instill in me is deciding what the song’s about, and attaching meaning into it. Hopefully we support the emotional feelings with sounds that are relevant to it.”
To increase the impact of the emotions they spill, Xiu Xiu makes noises that are both literal-such as the shatter of glass breaking, or the whistle sound of a train and interpretive sounds that merely imply emotions or situation, through echo-y keyboard samples, or by creating a faraway, percussive clatter that’s representational of isolation or loneliness. In this sense, Xiu Xiu draws from modern classical music. “One of the things that we want to is what every egocentric guitar player always says, that they don’t want to limit themselves. I feel sort of like an asshole saying that, but it is important to do something that we haven’t tried before…other people have tried it before, but we haven’t. I guess it’s just important to us to sort of add to music, as opposed to trying to fit into a little niche that makes it easy for us to repeat ourselves. At the same that that is important to us, there are very specific aspects of music for Xiu Xiu that we’re trying to combine: modern classic from 1950 on, with a few exceptions. It’s not that we want to copy what they’ve done. There’s just a spirit or feeling they’ve created we find really important. We also try to take the feeling and the same idea from really depressing pop music, like The Smiths or Joy Division or New Order or Galaxie500 because, for the most part, maybe 80% of our music is arranged like pop songs with choruses with death-obsessed ‘80s British electropop,” says Jamie.
Xiu Xiu actually draws inspiration from three, rather than two, main prongs of musical styles: modern classic; sad pop music; and, of course…house. Yes, house music—that thumpy, flashy dance music with sweeping diva choruses that’s played in clubs all over the world. It’s odd in theory, but the weight the beats add to the music works wonderfully with Xiu Xiu, and to Jamie, it makes perfect sense. “All the big, high-energy labels are in San Jose, and there are tons of pirate radio stations that play house and dance music. So there are like a trillion house clubs, which is pretty fun, and it was sort of one of the things that got the band started.
This is so fucking melodramatic: I’m a really bad dancer, but I have a good time and I like to go to clubs with friends. So you go to a dance club and drink a lot of drinks and there are hot people there that maybe you would talk to or take home for the night, and that’s okay when you’re with friends; but if you show up at a club like that by yourself, you seem creepy or like a loser, or it would make me feel like a loser. It is the combination of feeling like an idiot with this house beat that is inherently really happy. Freestyle and house songs are about really simply and directly illustrated lost love… like having your heart totally broken and wanting to be on the dance floor. People make fun of it, which is kind of understandable because it really simple, but there’s something about it that’s so direct. You hear that beat everywhere in the world; everybody uses that beat and it seems to appeal to so many different kinds of people. I just think that beat is beautiful, because you can’t help be affected by it physically, and there isn’t really a pretense behind it,” he says.
That Jamie points out the lack of pretense in such simple, driving house beats reflects the unjaded openness of Xiu Xiu’s music—unjaded because, though their lyrical content is depressing, it takes an incredible amount of courage and strength to put forth some of the situations or scenarios they write about. Their lyrics are entirely drenched in sorrow, depicting the most painfully concise, utterly depressing, moments in peoples’ lives, the lowest points of self-hate and despondency, all communicated in Jamie’s desperate, gaping wail and head-hung whisper. Because of the powerful, vivid nature of their content and execution, Xiu Xiu’s lyrics have been described as dramatic, but Jamie is quick to lay that idea to rest. He says, “I think just shy away from using the word dramatic, because it seems to imply that something is like a reenactment. I guess that’s because all the stories are actual things that have happened to real people, our friends and families and people we know; there are definitely sometimes hyperemotional accounts of things that have happened, but they are real. I understand the characterization because stuff can be over the top, but not in a bad way.”
However, though Xiu Xiu’s intentions may be misinterpreted or misconstrued, the band has a clear and definite ideal they feel they must uphold; it’s important to them to put themselves on the line by their rare forms of expression. “It’s emotionally difficult to play songs about family members that have killed themselves or died or had drug habits, or friends who have ridiculous extreme depression or people who have grown up in ridiculous situations,” explains Jamie, “So it’s difficult, but that is the sort of thing that is important to us… it’s so things like that don’t get swept under the rug.” He continues, “I cannot image the point of not putting emotional realities into a song. It is beyond an imperative, it is essential and the point of Xiu Xiu making music in the first place. A lot of really bad things have happened to the people in and around Xiu Xiu in the last year, and we do not want to ignore it or not try to be an honest part of it. So, in that sense, it is irrelevant as to whether or not it is difficult. I really do not understand the point of making music that is for fun or that is about nothing that stabs you in the heart with happiness or hideous grief. Music that is not made of emotional realities pisses me off and the emotional realities that we are dealing with right now are almost all very sad.”
Words | Julianne Shepherd
To posit about emotional devastation: At the absolute lowest points in a person’s life, hope is enshrouded in caution and fear, and sometimes even bitterness. This is possibly because, at times such as those, hope represents that all goodness topples at some point or another- the danger of believing in something. But in the midst of drowning in depression, there is often a time when sadness emerges into beauty. It’s the unequaled oasis of all that is bittersweet, the feeling that the melancholia can be a warm place, at least for a while. It’s the feeling of hitting the bottom and realizing that it just became possible to find the top. Total emotional wreckage is a strange place to be, indeed.
This is also the warm place where Xiu Xiu’s music resides, at the exact cusp between euphoria and devastation. You can hear it in their lyrics, but we’ll get to that later. The way Xiu Xiu fills space- with beats like hearts thumping, tic, exotic clangs of bells and percussion, a blanket of piano, synths, bass, guitar, and the expressive, emotive vocals of Jamie Stewart is encompassed by a profound empathy, and it’s beautiful and terrible damaging and terrifying and put together like nothing you’ve ever heard. Their music transcends their music; it conveys emotion so effectively, it becomes an entity unto itself, its own shattered, cut-apart and pieced together thing comprised of music, feelings, and humanness. This all may sound very and/or hyperbolic, but it’s all true and there’s no other way to put it. Xiu Xiu, the band including Stewart, Lauren Andrews, Yvonne Chen, and Cory McCulloch taps into the intangible workings of human nature with a raw, whole honesty.
It is a concerted effort for Xiu Xiu, who jail from San Jose, California, to be emotionally bare in their music. Explains Jamie Stewart, “For awhile, my dad was a super big league record producer. He never showed me how to p lay, but he talked to me about what ideas make music. I guess something that he always would instill in me is deciding what the song’s about, and attaching meaning into it. Hopefully we support the emotional feelings with sounds that are relevant to it.”
To increase the impact of the emotions they spill, Xiu Xiu makes noises that are both literal-such as the shatter of glass breaking, or the whistle sound of a train and interpretive sounds that merely imply emotions or situation, through echo-y keyboard samples, or by creating a faraway, percussive clatter that’s representational of isolation or loneliness. In this sense, Xiu Xiu draws from modern classical music. “One of the things that we want to is what every egocentric guitar player always says, that they don’t want to limit themselves. I feel sort of like an asshole saying that, but it is important to do something that we haven’t tried before…other people have tried it before, but we haven’t. I guess it’s just important to us to sort of add to music, as opposed to trying to fit into a little niche that makes it easy for us to repeat ourselves. At the same that that is important to us, there are very specific aspects of music for Xiu Xiu that we’re trying to combine: modern classic from 1950 on, with a few exceptions. It’s not that we want to copy what they’ve done. There’s just a spirit or feeling they’ve created we find really important. We also try to take the feeling and the same idea from really depressing pop music, like The Smiths or Joy Division or New Order or Galaxie500 because, for the most part, maybe 80% of our music is arranged like pop songs with choruses with death-obsessed ‘80s British electropop,” says Jamie.
Xiu Xiu actually draws inspiration from three, rather than two, main prongs of musical styles: modern classic; sad pop music; and, of course…house. Yes, house music—that thumpy, flashy dance music with sweeping diva choruses that’s played in clubs all over the world. It’s odd in theory, but the weight the beats add to the music works wonderfully with Xiu Xiu, and to Jamie, it makes perfect sense. “All the big, high-energy labels are in San Jose, and there are tons of pirate radio stations that play house and dance music. So there are like a trillion house clubs, which is pretty fun, and it was sort of one of the things that got the band started.
This is so fucking melodramatic: I’m a really bad dancer, but I have a good time and I like to go to clubs with friends. So you go to a dance club and drink a lot of drinks and there are hot people there that maybe you would talk to or take home for the night, and that’s okay when you’re with friends; but if you show up at a club like that by yourself, you seem creepy or like a loser, or it would make me feel like a loser. It is the combination of feeling like an idiot with this house beat that is inherently really happy. Freestyle and house songs are about really simply and directly illustrated lost love… like having your heart totally broken and wanting to be on the dance floor. People make fun of it, which is kind of understandable because it really simple, but there’s something about it that’s so direct. You hear that beat everywhere in the world; everybody uses that beat and it seems to appeal to so many different kinds of people. I just think that beat is beautiful, because you can’t help be affected by it physically, and there isn’t really a pretense behind it,” he says.
That Jamie points out the lack of pretense in such simple, driving house beats reflects the unjaded openness of Xiu Xiu’s music—unjaded because, though their lyrical content is depressing, it takes an incredible amount of courage and strength to put forth some of the situations or scenarios they write about. Their lyrics are entirely drenched in sorrow, depicting the most painfully concise, utterly depressing, moments in peoples’ lives, the lowest points of self-hate and despondency, all communicated in Jamie’s desperate, gaping wail and head-hung whisper. Because of the powerful, vivid nature of their content and execution, Xiu Xiu’s lyrics have been described as dramatic, but Jamie is quick to lay that idea to rest. He says, “I think just shy away from using the word dramatic, because it seems to imply that something is like a reenactment. I guess that’s because all the stories are actual things that have happened to real people, our friends and families and people we know; there are definitely sometimes hyperemotional accounts of things that have happened, but they are real. I understand the characterization because stuff can be over the top, but not in a bad way.”
However, though Xiu Xiu’s intentions may be misinterpreted or misconstrued, the band has a clear and definite ideal they feel they must uphold; it’s important to them to put themselves on the line by their rare forms of expression. “It’s emotionally difficult to play songs about family members that have killed themselves or died or had drug habits, or friends who have ridiculous extreme depression or people who have grown up in ridiculous situations,” explains Jamie, “So it’s difficult, but that is the sort of thing that is important to us… it’s so things like that don’t get swept under the rug.” He continues, “I cannot image the point of not putting emotional realities into a song. It is beyond an imperative, it is essential and the point of Xiu Xiu making music in the first place. A lot of really bad things have happened to the people in and around Xiu Xiu in the last year, and we do not want to ignore it or not try to be an honest part of it. So, in that sense, it is irrelevant as to whether or not it is difficult. I really do not understand the point of making music that is for fun or that is about nothing that stabs you in the heart with happiness or hideous grief. Music that is not made of emotional realities pisses me off and the emotional realities that we are dealing with right now are almost all very sad.”
but thank you very much. the article was fabulous.
