Cat Power - Jukebox

Jukebox

Cat Power

Matador, 2008

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In the middle of Cat Power’s new album of mostly other people’s songs, there are two dedicated to great performers, one she didn't write and the other she did. The one she didn’t write, “Aretha Sing One For Me” (original by George Jackson) Aretha Franklin treats the woman as a household saint—as a woman who when she sings, will repair any of the breakdowns in communication, fix the fights that lovers have, his mere presence at one of Ms Franklin's concerts will “touch his heart, make him sorry, that we are apart”

The one she wrote was about her history with Bob Dylan. It is more intimate, sung in a small drawl---and it is about her love for Dylan, how Dylan will save her music, and by extension her soul. The way she sings about her first Dylan concert, at “15 or 16 maybe” or how she got a call from “his New York City office” is clever because it assumes what is a love song is an ode to her professionalism. It points out how important being the next Dylan is to people who just sing and play the guitar. Power recently covered "Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again", on the sound track to Todd Haynes’ I'm Not There, but ironically the vocal ticks, guitar splits, and percussion as punctuation suggest with much more strength the spirit of Dylan then that too fastidious cover.

Those two songs, hidden amongst the middle, not book ending, and not beginning, suggest the core of this album. The Aretha song make the soul that she has found since her 2006 album The Greatest as life saving…like how she prayed through Al Green on that album, she evokes Franklin's name, for some kind of plenary indulgence. She is looking towards the future, for happiness and some kind of joy. The Dylan song talks about her past, both literally, as a travelogue (i.e. “Another time I was in South Carolina”; “phone call from your New York City office”; “I was only just four hundred miles away”; “I was in DC”; “In the middle of a stadium in Paris, France”) and as a psychological diversion about her health and her sadness.

The two together, the cryptic and often misogynist desires of Dylan and the loud, diva theatrics of Franklin, function together as a kind of Janus mask, one looking backwards and one looking forwards. The albums I love by Marshall are the albums that function like this, because a cover of a cover of a cover becomes almost too difficult to maintain, and she lets the artifice drop. She doesn’t quite become earnest, the slippages between the fucked up little girl strung out on booze and the woman making noise to keep the ghosts away are still extant, but they become less important. She is a good-to-great interpretive singer, because she takes her baggage, and hitches it to the (sub/para)text of the song in question. The songs here are about how Power intersects with the spirit of American music, so Franklin/Dylan become the most ready lenses to view what she thinks of the canon.

The aesthetics of song choice become interesting then. Her version of Frank Sinatra’s “New York” is louche but not quite as decadent as the Chairman of the Board—but the drums purpose in an almost four-four beat, and it sounds optimistic without being a Broadway belter of urban jingoism. Her cover of Hank William’s “Rambling Man”, now switched to Rambling (Wo)man maintains the almost miraculous tonal variations, the half shrugged apology, the refusal to settle into the domesticity expected, which kind of means more coming from a woman. It becomes feminist, in a round about way, and there are winds that whistle—it sounds like a western, but one of those nasty, brutish and short ones that are deconstructed into violence and ennui.

That feminist energy, or at least female centric discussion of pain and loneliness, is central, it comes through when she sings about how Dylan doesn’t love her, and how Franklin may not be able to save her. She sings Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell and Patsy Cline—three more obvious variations on the theme are hard to imagine. (The Cline is the most faithful to the original and has a lovely false fronted bravado, her cover of Mitchell’s “Blue” has a rushed and dangerous reading of the line “everyone is saying hell’s the hippest place to go out” which actually gets to the core of Joni, the Joplin cover is unremarkable)

 It might be the most obvious on her version of “Lord, Help the Poor and Needy”, here credited to Jesse Hemphill, lacks the radical pull of Nina Simone, who also covered it. The thing is, it could have been like the Feist cover of “Sea Line Woman”: anemic, embarrassing, with a lack of understanding of the gifts of her voice, and the importance of the text. Very few people should cover anything that Simone has touched.  But Cat Power does it. She pulls it down low, quiet, extends the undertones, and the line about all dying together seems less about judgment day, and more about the desperation of too few choices and too many dependents. It is a radical reinvention, but an obvious one—one that we expect Power to commit to, just as there is little surprise in how obsessively she loves both Franklin and Dylan.

All the tricks are here, the statements about sadness, the mewling voice, the almost minimal arrangements, and the clever dictation of other people’s emotions. The interesting thing, is that no matter how exquisitely, or artificially crafted the work is, how much it works as a text of supreme pop artifice, it is also an album of narcissism and fantastic sadness. The impossibility is to separate those instincts with Power…and I wonder if they can be separated at all. There is discussion about whether all that she reveals is a put-on, a construction that sells records as much as Ashlee Simpson’s daddy issues.

I think that this album makes two points simultaneously. That what moves one to real emotions does not have to be real for the artist in question, and that works of personae and canon building, can be baroque in their intentions and still worth participating in. Aretha’s studied black church background and Dylan’s jester-like shifts in personae are functional lessons in how to interpret and how to preserve. Power has picked them up exquisitely.

Anthony Easton

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