The Black Keys have been pumping out well-received music for almost ten years now. Critics love it; audiences love it; and to even skim the Wikipedia entry about them made me wonder, a little, how film and TV-show soundtrack producers would have done without them in that decade.
But — true to form — I’ve always seemed to be looking in the wrong direction. When their 2010 album, Brothers, won a Grammy as best alt-rock album of the year… um, yeah… well… [whistling to fill embarrassed silence]
Their most recent, El Camino, just came out yesterday; it already seems headed for the same level of acclaim as Brothers. Metacritic puts it at a composite 84 “Metascore,” vs. 82 for the previous album. Yet reading those reviews, even just their capsule summaries, raises a weird question: have they all listened to all of the band’s music? (Some of the criticism implies that El Camino burns the bridges carefully built by earlier releases; some insists that it’s rehashing history. Go figure.)
Obviously, I’m in no position myself to judge El Camino next to The Black Keys’ other stuff. But I’ve at least listened to this one, and now I’m really embarrassed to have overlooked the band for so long. I couldn’t decide which of several tunes to include in today’s post… and then I saw the video for “Lonely Boy,” the first track: an instant classic in the get-up-and-dance genre.
[Lyrics]
Damn. They never show that guy’s feet, but he may have been told to keep them inside a two-foot-square box — and then followed the instructions.
marta says
“Psychotic Girl” was my first and my favorite Black Keys song:
About the video above…it is funny that just an hour ago I was talking to a student from Brazil about whether or not American men dance. And watching the video I kept hearing my grandmother in my head complaining that they don’t show his feet. She was a dancer and always went a little nuts when a camera didn’t show the dancer’s feet. “What else would I want to see?” she’d ask.
Also, I like the split second when someone peeks around the corner in that office. They seem slightly afraid.
John says
Then there’s always something like the film of Chicago — I think it was — in which Richard Gere showed off his dancing skills. Only thing was, although they showed his feet in something like close-up, when they showed the rest of his body they generally excluded his feet. Result: some observers had to wonder if those were really RG’s feet in close-up, or the hooves of a dancing “foot double.”
I wondered about that peeking person, too. Obviously they were determined (rightly so) to do this whole video in one take; maybe that was the only flaw in an otherwise-fine version.
“Psycho Girl” and “Lonely Boy.” What a pair of bookends that’d make!
Froog says
Thanks for that tip, Martha – it gives a good sense of how diverse the band’s output is.
With this example, I couldn’t help thinking that the video is better than the song. The song, I felt, although it has its appealing jumpy-bouncy quality, doesn’t quite develop into what you hoped it would, and started getting old – even in three minutes.
But the dancing dude is a great video concept. Where did they find him? It looks kind of like he’s a janitor working out of that little cabin at the back right of the shot.
Ah, and I have a vaguely plausible name from ReCaptcha for the first time in ages: James Noriesq
John says
The song grew on me with repeated listens. The lyrics are better than I thought they were — simultaneously a self-unaware monologue, and an ironic commentary on the monologuist. And yeah, that jumpy-bounciness you mention hooked me, I think.
You know how repeating a perfectly normal word to yourself can make it come to sound ridiculous, meaningless? Maybe listening over and over to a new song takes you through the same stages in reverse — from inattention (or worse) to acceptance to fandom. And — who knows? — maybe hearing it just a few more times starts the cycle back in the other direction. That ploy they used when they were trying to drive Noriega out of his palace in Panama in the ’80s — blasting him from outside the walled grounds with 24×7 rock music from loudspeakers (I think they used metal/death rock) — maybe for a little while in there he and his cohorts actually partied to it.
Froog says
I like the song well enough. It’s just that… well, it seemed to me a perfect two-and-half-minute song, and at three-and-a-quarter minutes, it was just starting to drag a little.
I had the same thoughts about Noriega at the time (was it my ReCaptcha ‘name’ Noriesq that brought that to mind, more than the music?). I think it was the ear-shredding volume rather than the choice of music per se that was supposed to be psychologically debilitating. But he did hold out a remarkably long time. Maybe he had a good pair of headphones.
That problem of hearing a song too much used to be a very common phenomenon back in the days when I had regular exposure to radio. I often felt that 4 or 5 weeks was quite long enough for something to be in the upper reaches of the charts, and after that you started to get a bit sick of it. Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do was No. 1 in the UK for about three months. I can’t hear even a few bars of it now without shuddering.
Mind you, I don’t suppose popular music often attains quite the same level of ubiquity in America. BBC Radio 1 completely dominates the airwaves in the UK (or used to, when I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s), and is heard everywhere; commercial radio only exists on a local basis, and tends to follow the Radio 1 playlist quite closely. So, I (and almost everyone else in the UK) probably heard Everything I Do a thousand or more times during its time in the charts, even if we were doing our best to avoid it.
Nowadays, my exposure to ‘popular’ music is almost entirely through bars. Chinese bars all tend to blare their music loudly into the streets (no noise nuisance statutes; or none that are enforced, anyway) in a misguided attempt to attract more custom, and they all tend to have very similar playlists. It’s not quite so closely contemporary as the music radio environment, of course; and that means, unfortunately, that songs don’t have such a naturally limited life cycle. I am beginning to fear that Poker Face will NEVER go away.
John says
Oh, radio used to drive me crazy in the early to mid-’80s. AM radio, anyhow. If I’d had to wake up one more morning to Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train,” I think I’d have just pulled the pillow over my face and prayed for the end. It still surprises me to see car radios equipped with both FM and AM bands.
From your mention of “Poker Face,” I gather the loud music which Chinese bars play is Western pop?
Froog says
I don’t go into that kind of bar, and don’t pay much attention to what they’re blasting out into the street. I just notice a few of the songs that are particularly common and particularly annoying.
I’d guess they probably have a mix of foreign and Chinese pop music. But most Chinese pop music is excruciatingly awful.
They do tend to get stuck in ruts, though. I did a post a few years ago on how a no-account Danish band called Michael Learns To Rock had had a huge hit here with a song called Take Me To Your Heart. It was hideous – but it was played EVERYWHERE, every day for 18 months or more. Prior to that, The Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More had been tiresomely ubiquitous for some years. More recently, we’ve had a serious overdose of Norah Jones. But more ballady stuff like this tends to be favoured by restaurants or cafe-type bars, while the more clubby places go for hip-hop, R’n’B, disco.
jules says
I love that photo you found of them.
My girls and I have been listening to this CD so much that it might be time to give it a break. I sing it in my sleep. I’ve decided there’s something about their music in general, but definitely this particular CD, that is kid-friendly, if that makes any sense. It’s the hooks, I think, in their songs. They are hook-happy. Kids like hooks.