Albums of the 2010s - 2012 - Mac DeMarco's 2

There's been this big argument over "whiteness" in indie for years now - the Radiohead article I wrote about a few months back is only the latest in a long line of hand-wringing thinkpieces. Witness "The Unbearable Whiteness Of Indie", a car crash of an article where key gripes include a film set in Scotland (96% White) not casting an Aboriginal Australian actress in the lead role and the writers of "I'm At The Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" being unfairly dismissed as 'joke rap'. Or perhaps "A Paler Shade Of White" is more your speed, where the writer devotes a big chunk of time to discussing his own singing in his own band, which he could never make "black" enough to work; laments that Arcade Fire don't use polyrhythms or borrow from African or Caribbean music enough; and suggests modern bands should be more reverent to black contributions to music, like Led Zeppelin were, who made it a mission to scam old bluesmen out of their compositions. All of this is obviously stupid as hell, but the battle rages on and on. What a lot of people fail to understand is it's been won for about ten years, and Mac deMarco was the guy that won it.

Just as British indie reached its nadir in the early 2010s, North American indie hit the big leagues. The O.C. soundtrack boom of the mid-2000s proved licensing music was a viable career option for legions of almost-famous indie bands, the absolute dearth of listenable radio rock - remember the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus? me neither - made indie music an attractive alternative, and in 2009, a group of bands lovingly called the GAPDYs all released career defining albums - Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Phoenix (okay, they're French, but still), Dirty Projectors, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs - that received untold critical acclaim. Artists like Chairlift and Feist were able to parlay advert features - trust me, you know the songs - into more long-term careers, Vampire Weekend was able to turn blog buzz and a couple key music placements - "A-Punk" appeared in the Inbetweeners and Stepbrothers - into being one of the most beloved bands of the past 15 years, Beyoncé and Jay-Z hung out at Grizzly Bear concerts, David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors did some Kanye West co-writes, it was all mad. For more on this rise check out this article, which sums up the main point of this entire series - the turn-of-the-decade indie sound was adopted wholesale by the pop world, and crucially, pop stylings were adopted wholesale by indie bands. That had serious ramifications, which we'll come back to as I finally write the rest of these.

If I only wanted to write about that phenomenon, though, I wouldn't have picked Mac deMarco, I would've picked someone like Twin Shadow, who made a big push for the pop world in 2012 on Confess, Dev Hynes - a British misfit making indie-folk in Nebraska as Lightspeed Champion in 2007 and a Carly Rae Jepsen collaborator and R&B wunderkind as Blood Orange by 2015, or the aforementioned Chairlift. Mac deMarco is something altogether different.

Despite drawing from much the same well of 80s hits as everyone else, his music is ramshackle and tossed-off in a way that the polished efforts of contemporaries like Twin Shadow, Haim's first album or Vampire Weekend's second could never be. Where Blood Orange was palling around with Britney and Kylie and Dave Longstreth ended up on "FourFiveSeconds" with Kanye, Rihanna, and Paul McCartney, Mac worked on albums alone in his bedroom in Montreal. And where (okay, he/they're Australian, but very similar) Tame Impala had "The Less I Know The Better" eventually go 4x platinum, along with 3 other platinum singles, Mac has never had a song climb higher than #47 in the charts, and that was "Nobody" eight years into his career. All Mac deMarco had was a half-hour album with suprisingly smart songs and a singular sound. That worked out well enough.

A lot of artists ended up at a style similar to Mac's, through different means. Whereas deMarco is influenced by Japanese city pop and lo-fi pioneers like R. Stevie Moore, King Krule got there through Josef K and Chet Baker, and Connan Mockasin got there from Jean-Michel Jarre, Michael Jackson and Debussy, their music hits a lot of the same jazzy, "vibey" (in terms of nebulous vibe and the vibrato pedals they no doubt all own) beats. What stands out to me about this album is how solid the songwriting is. It would've been very easy to phone this kind of album in, trade on the nostalgic sounds and his good nature and just write any old shit, but these songs take all sorts of subtle harmonic twists and turns, and include some very impressive guitar work to boot - I dare you to play "Dreamin'" as effortlessly as he he does in this acoustic session. Mac is, in this regard, one of the best practitioners of sprezzatura in the modern era. Bands often strive to sound and look professional and proper, spending ages devising a look and overproducing their EPs, but deMarco wanders around in a cloud of fag smoke, sporting a gap-toothed grin, calling his music "jizz jazz", and then runs circles around the try-hards musically.

see, the blog's still technically about sprezzatura, just really, really, tangentially!

Mac deMarco also, ironically enough, solves that blasted whiteness problem we were having earlier on two fronts. First, his own influences are broad. His favourite artist is Japanese pop pioneer Haruomi Hosono, and he made sure to point out that that cover up there was inspired by Hosono House, and not The River by Bruce Springsteen. This kind of repudiation of the established "white male" canon in favour of an overlooked person of colour should've been catnip for the poor misguided soul that wrote "The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie", though she probably would've called this influence cultural appropriation. Furthermore, this is probably way out of pocket, but the complex, insular funk of 2 really does remind me of pre-Revolution Prince, working pretty much alone in Minneapolis studios, bringing back the "soul" and polyrhythmic grooves that Sasha Frere-Jones was so worried about in "A Paler Shade Of White".

What is - unfairly in my opinion - less heralded is his influence on the next generation of musicians. There's a whole cohort of artists that are roughly my age where you can hear the fingerprints of Mac deMarco's chorus-laden bedroom-pop, and that cohort is remarkable diverse, both musically and in all the boring identity ways. HOMESHAKE was in Mac's touring band before striking out alone so it makes sense that they sound similar, but there's also New York's annoying-as-hell Gus Dapperton, L.A.'s Cuco (here with math-rock/pop band Polyphia), British kids like Rex Orange County, Cosmo Pyke and Alfie Templeman, Norwegian-Chilean algorithmic sensation Boy Pablo, New Zealander Benee, and Compton's Steve Lacy, who lists everyone you'd expect a funk guitarist to adore, your Thundercats, your Pharells, but makes a point of saying that Mac deMarco is a massive influence on his production as well. That's production that won Kendrick Lamar a Grammy, among other exploits for the 22-year-old.

I think the reason his music resonates and continues to resonate in a way that the crossover buzz bands of the early 2010s is it is far more reproducable than the blown out, hi-fi production of circa 2012 """""indie""""". If you have a guitar that makes noise and a chorus plugin in whichever digital audio workstation you pirated are 90% of the way there. It's similar to the easiness of Sam Halliday's anti-guitar tone from 2012 but far more distinct. In order to get 90% of the way to Beyoncé you would need to be one of the most beloved musicians of a generation. signed to a major label, armed with all the money and ghostwriters you could ever need, and a husband that just happens to be one of the most gifted rappers of his generation. Kids can't do all that shit, and so they rebel. This kind of thing happens every ten years or so; Sex Pistols tell Yes' array of keyboards and double-necked guitars to get fucked, Kurt et al tell Warrant and Mr. Big that shiny guitar sounds, big gated drums, and perfectly coiffed hair is out, the Strokes were supposed to get rid of Creed and Limp Bizkit except the nu metal bands were the ones from small towns doing it themselves whereas the Strokes met at a private school in Switzerland and had famous parents to get them ahead. Mac deMarco didn't tell anyone to fuck off, but his more lo-fi, downhome offerings provided an alternate path to teenagers wanting to express themselves without a Max Martin co-sign.

It wasn't TOO alternative a path though - the most crucial thing about the post-Mac music is it's still not that far off from what's been going on in regular pop. Pretty much everyone is still listening to the same Prince, Hall & Oates, or Depeche Mode albums, with smatterings of "Plastic Love" by Maria Takeuchi or quiet storm R&B or whichever strain of hip-hop takes the artist's fancy, there are just different ways of expressing that influence. The jizz jazz revolution is quiet and easily-digested, soft, smooth guitars rather than the all-out assault of "Public Image" or "Smells Like Teen Spirit", more bloodless Glorious Revolution than the violent founding myths of America, France or Haiti. This is a cultural appropriation hater's worst nightmare. Artists from everywhere, that kind of sound like everything at once, a musical melting pot to rival c. 1900 New York or Montreal. This is, of course, a function of how easy it is to discover vast swathes of previously obscure genres that would've been nightmares to truly get into in a world without Spotify and Allmusic as much as it is a function of 2 by Mac deMarco. Still, Mac deserves his place as spiritual father to all sorts of kids expressing themselves in all sorts of interconnected ways. Next week we'll cover these kids' mum - Lorde.