Hamelman - All by myself: essays on the single-artist rock album

All by Myself

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hamelman, Steven L., 1952

Title: All by myself : essays on the single-artist rock album / edited by Steve Hamelman.

Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015050663 (print) | LCCN 2016002095 (ebook) | ISBN 9781442247239 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442247246 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Solo albums (Sound recordings)History and criticism. | Rock musicHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML3534 .A446 2016 (print) | LCC ML3534 (ebook) | DDC 781.66092/2dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050663

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To Phoebe and Hannah

Thanks to Jenifer Butler, Brady Cross, Bennett Graff, Molly Johnson, Thomas Kitts, Natalie Mandziuk, Monica Savaglia, and Joan Trupiano for their advice and support.

Its unfortunate that we live in an age in which for so many people the adjective/noun alpha calls up an image of either the lead male predator in a pack of wild animals on the hunt, or a brawny human male possessing an overly competitive ego and a disregard for the feelings of the females he dominates or the endeavors of men less physically, financially, or mentally endowed. Alpha, male, and the stereotypes resulting from their linkage are, for these people, indissoluble. But according to the 2013 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the original, scientific use of alpha male surfaced in 1938 in an article by J. Uhrich titled The Social Hierarchy in Albino Mice, published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology for an audience presumably without an overt sexist agenda. The epithets second, pejorative usage, where alpha is conjoined with the male human being, first appears only as recently as 1977 in a pulp Star Trek novel titled The Price of the Phoenix, which is cited: Hes an alpha male. You know the idea of ranking the dominant males in a primate group alpha beta gamma. The next entry brings us to 1991, when a writer in Discover magazine characterized financier Donald Trump as an alpha male. In the OEDs last citation, dated 2009, over-the-top actor Russell Crowe has the honor of being branded alpha.

In terms of human history, then, the conjoining of alpha with a certain type of headstrong, superconfident human male has had a singularly short existence. The OED indicates that the term alpha male is orig[inally] and chiefly zoological, and that its extended use, as their examples suggest, has humorous or depreciative connotations. If we look at it this way, theres no reason for the phrase to upset anyone. Certainly its meant to depreciate chief inspector Mikael Bellman when novelist Jo Nesb slaps it on him in his international best seller, The Leopard. The joke is on the corrupt, manipulative Bellman who, awaiting his mistress, dwells on his prowess with a vanity more comic than chilling: [S]he had chosen him. Confirmation that he was the leader of the pack, the alpha male, the male with the first claim to mate with the females. Yes, it could be articulated in such banal and vulgar terms. Being an alpha male was not something you aspired to; you were born to it.... You could not resist (355). His mistress, not at all interested in being exploited by this egomaniac, promptly spends the night with Bellmans nemesis, the books stumble-drunk hero.

As we all know, alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet, denoting an origin, the number one, a source of language itself and by implication the arts. Those of us able to dissociate alpha from its scientific and pop culture usages described above are better able to appreciate it in this Greek sense, which seems to have influenced Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Kubla Khan, where in the dreamscape around Xanadu the poet locates the sacred river Alphsacred because it is the source of primordial, creative energy. Out of it come Romantic poems such as Kubla Khan (1797) and, in the modern era, single-artist rock albums such as Oar (1969) by Alexander Skip Spence, to name just two stupefying works of art. Taking my lead from this positive meaning of alph/a, Ive coined the term AlphaSoloism, my label for a side-genre (rather than subgenre) of pop, rock, and even, as we see in chapter 11 of this collection, country music, occurring when a single artist writes, records, sings, and sometimes produces a recording all, or for the most part, by him- or herself.

A subgenrefor example, punk-rock or glam-rockdiffers from a side-genre in that a recording of the latter type sounds like any other recording from the same genre or subgenre. In other words, Paul McCartneys McCartney, an example of the AlphaSolo side-genre, is nonetheless a rock album and sounds like one. A purist might place McCartney in the more specific twee-rock category or some other subgenre of rock, but to do this would confirm the sonic neutrality of the AlphaSolo side-genre, which signifies a difference in approach to recording, not type, and this approach is best understood in the broadest terms as a combination of attitude and method. The AlphaSoloist believes that he or she is instrumentally, vocally, and compositionally capable of making an album by him- or herself (attitude) and then goes about the task with the aid of multitrack technology (method). At no point does the side-genre cancel out or replace the core features of the genre or subgenre. If a millennial listener didnt know that Skip Spence created Oar with input only from a producer, he or she would think, Hey, Ive heard this kind of thing before in the minor-key musings of Sparklehorse and Smog.

In this context, alpha is gender-neutral. Its not inherently sexist; it assumes the tone and character of the record produced through this combination of attitude and method. It has nothing to do with sociopolitical sensitivities. Because heavy metal music tends to express outsized macho poses, a heavy metal AlphaSolo album might be deemed chauvinistic, but that wouldnt be the fault of the prefix alpha. There are many fine AlphaSolo recordings by female musicians. Springing to mind are Petra Haden, Annie Clark/St. Vincent, Theresa Andersson, and Shelby Lynne, one of whom is analyzed in the pages of this book. Subgenerically, they belong to different areas of rock; side-generically, they are prime examples of AlphaSoloism, which in their four distinctive cases is no more and no less feminist for having been deployed by women making albums in whatever rock idiom they choose.