Stephin Merritt and the intertwined legacies of Wilde, Proust, and Phil Spector
Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt is the mordant svengali of indie-pop, an openly gay maestro of New Wave synths, acerbic and hilarious lyrics, and moving melodies that might as well be viruses. This Tuesday the low-tech multi-instrumentalist released 69 Love Songs, a work that consists of 69 love songs. Despite whatever images that particular numeral conjures in your brain, the songs of these three CDs — sung by Merritt and four other singers — don’t traffic in sex much past bunny rabbits and “the wild thing.” Instead, Merritt sinks his teeth into myriad facets of love, and he does so with the wit of a Wilde, the exhaustive eye of a Proust and the clever empathy of a Phil Spector.
Genre meltdowns are de rigeur these days, especially in the wake of what Merritt calls Beck’s “genre primal ooze.” But in Merritt’s hands, this postmodern strategy is pared with an old-school appreciation of pop forms and the feelings they spark. Like a Brill Building Frankenstein, Merritt is a master alchemist of pop tropes and lyrical juxtapositions (“A pretty girl is like a violent crime / If you do it wrong you could do time”). “It’s like Legos,” Merritt told Feed from his New York apartment. “Every Lego block is stupid, but what you can build with them is wonderful and exciting, figurative or abstract, normal or weird. But the Legos themselves are all boring pieces of plastic — clichés.” Perhaps this is why the clichés of country — which match the regrets, recriminations, and grit Merritt finds so perversely appealing – breeze through his albums like tumbleweeds. “It’s the only genre you can get away with a line like ‘I could have killed you with my drinking ,'” he says. But Country also insists on the difference between singer and songwriter, a dichotomy that once ruled American popular music but which has largely given way to rock’s Romantic bid for self and authenticity.
Merritt has no interest in such authenticity. Carrying forward gay culture’s celebration of masks, Merritt writes imagined vignettes, thoroughly mixes up genders, and farms out his tunes to singers he picks for their refusal to emote. In an age of the confessional, this is a deeply refreshing move, especially because Merritt’s detachment goes beyond easy irony into a timeless, almost Platonic appreciation for the forms of pop emotion. Even lyrics, Merritt told Feed, “can’t really talk about life. They’re off in their own little worlds.”
In one of these little worlds, Merritt would sell his fantastic tunes to unimaginative pop stars, hole up in his home studio, and make the kind of electronic experimental music he’d produce if he didn’t care about having an audience. In our world, however, Merritt puts out a mad, unwieldy project like 69 Love Songs partly as a publicity stunt. And who can blame him? There are tons of people outside his cult who would like his records if they heard them, and they’d probably include your mom and next-door neighbor. As Merritt says, “All you need to appreciate the Magnetic Fields is a sense of humor, a little knowledge of music history, and a high school education.” And perhaps a willingness to explore emotions again once you’ve reached the far side of irony—a trick that Merritt has achieved with wit and humor, and one that many musical sophisticates of his generation desperately need to learn.
