When quantity means quality: The prolific genius of Kevin Barnes
Kevin Barnes performing. Photo by Peter Hutchins.
10:44 am Sep. 16, 2010
It's so easy—and gratifying!—to disparage the wildly prolific.
Because we are, the rest of us try to assure ourselves, sniveling snobs and moralizing aesthetes: slaving hundreds of man-hours, and thousands of hands of solitaire, over our own middling and erratic output, we can’t help but regard the well-oiled clockwork release of new novels and sculptures, screenplays and PowerPoints, as somehow deviances from a basic professional–confessional code. Artists and consultants and hedge-fund managers prove their worth in the unseen struggle, the editing and fine-tuning, in as much as what they don’t give their publics and their clients as what they do, etc., etc.
Of course, the truly prolific of the last decade or so—it doesn’t help that they’re stern, hyper-competent father figures like Philip Roth (six novels in six years), Clint Eastwood (nine films in eight years), and Beyoncé Knowles (nine singles, 104 concerts, six continents in barely two years)—expose this high-minded prudery to be the self-flattery it is: our affliction isn’t snobbery or moralism; it’s malingering and truancy. The Übermenschen reveal tortured reflection and drawn-out reinvention—how long does the costume change to Zuckerman or Sasha Fierce take them?—as simply the most self-righteous mode of procrastination, and that’s why we hate them even as we jostle behind them.
Kevin Barnes, the slinking mastermind behind the indie-pop outfit known as Of Montreal, doesn’t immediately strike one as among the culture’s defining workaholics, which must make his tossed-off efficiency all the more bracing for indie youngsters laboring over scene-shattering statements that never seem to reach a satisfying semicolon, let alone period. Since 1997, we’ve only once been more than 18 months without a new Of Montreal full-length, and the pace—along with the music—has only seemed to grow more frenzied since 2007’s wonderful Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, home of pop pleasures as diverse and instantly anthemic as “Suffer for Fashion” (“we’ve got to keep it physical”) and “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” (“I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met / who could appreciate Georges Bataille”). Eight L.P.s into his career, and a rock-star geriatric 33 years into his life, Barnes scored his first US charting L.P. with Hissing Fauna (No. 72), started regularly and aggressively disrobing on stage, and hasn’t looked back since. (Though generally less well received, 2008’s Skeletal Lamping reached No. 38.)
In support of their latest, False Priest, the band that rose in the 1990s with Neutral Milk Hotel and the folk revivalism of Athens, Ga.'s Elephant 6 collective is touring with sound-of-now soul fireplug Janelle Monáe, and the association couldn’t seem more natural. Monáe guests on two tracks on Priest to great effect; “Our Riotous Defects” especially is a charging funk stunner that alternates between classical yelping (“you are just a crazy girl / a crazy gir-ir-ir-ir-irl”) and Barnes’s trademark spoken-word deadpan (“when I first met you at the Al-Anon meeting … I was amazed at how husky your singing voice was”).
Solange Knowles—Beyoncé’s more sonically, if less professionally, ambitious sister—appears on “Sex Karma,” a strange, swelling space oddity of a single (“we’re not slaves to physical matter”) whose new video features both vocalists naked and floating in life-size beakers.
Do the cameos suggest a novel direction, or programmatic departure, for Barnes? Not really. The vocal soul may be amped up, but then so is everything else—what might be particularly galling about recent Of Montreal is its uncanny ability to make the hard work of reasoned eclecticism sound like hardly working. Thus False Priest also has Barnes, in “Coquet Coquette,” interpolating his corn-syrup falsetto into a ragged rock number that starts with the same riff as the White Stripes’ “I Think I Smell a Rat.”
"Famine Affair” is lovely, shimmering New Wave, even as Cure-like platitudes (“I don’t want you anymore / I don’t love you any more / Go away, go’way, away, away”) give way to more properly Montrealer sentiments (“you destroy my head / you uncalibrate my skull”).
Barnes’ voodoo as a lyricist remains his signal talent, and the anchor that keeps all the exuberant experimentation in familiarly strange waters. He lifts heavy diction and twists corkscrew meter like few others in pop—you try building a Prince-like piece of funk-rawk around the admonishment “Don’t treat my like a tourist / let’s stay home” and the nasty charge “You fetishize the archetype!” (“Like a Tourist”).
As in the past, the effortlessness of Barnes’s irony and economy of his prosody can imply the wall-to-wall cleverness on False Priest as somehow glib or unearned. And, as in the past, this is more our pathology than his.
For the savants and adepts truly good at something, however niche or narrow, adding to the quantity just means multiplying the quality. Even if it hurts our feelings.
