Skye Sweetnam is Amazing!
By Dave Moore
Well, now I’m confused. I thought I had this whole post-irony pose all figured out, what with the shadow of 9/11 and the death and rebirth of “emotion” in music and babies in Iran and the end of the world and the Arcade Fire (even as the Powers That Be do everything in their power to bury the hype—they’ve outlasted the Unicorns, anyway, which I suppose is as good as Montreal is going to get).
Anyway. I was starting to come to grips with this tricky little devil “irony,” listening to Van Morrison more frequently and avoiding the Fiery Furnaces like the plague and trying to feel at museums and starting to wipe out that eternal smirk that I never wore very well to begin with. And it worked for a while in salvaging my musical tastes from the depths of snarky scenester poseurdom.
But all of that has changed, my friends. And now I’m halfway across the globe and I’m lonely and confused and I can’t listen to anything but Skye Sweetnam.
Skye Sweetnam is from Canada, and she’s amazing. Some would call her the Canadian Avril Lavigne, and they’d be wrong because (1) Avril Lavigne is from Canada already (whoops!) and (2) Skye Sweetnam is the greatest thing to happen to popular music since the Arcade Fire, who in the scheme of things aren’t very “popular” anyway, and decidedly less “emotional” these days, as aren’t we all?
You might recognize Skye Sweetnam’s work from a Mandy Moore film soundtrack (How to Deal, unseen by me), which itself is ironic enough, I suppose—out with the old, in with the new. She sang a song called “Billy S,” which contains lines like:
“Wake up tired Monday mornings suck/ Way too early to catch a bus/ Why conform without a fuss?/ Daddy, Daddy, no! I don’t wanna go to school!”
And the immortal chorus:
“I don’t need to read Billy Shakespeare/ Meet Juliet or Malvolio/ Gonna feel what it’s like to rebel now/ Gotta break out, let’s go!” (Exclamation points mine.)
Oh, I scoffed at first. But honest to God I just wrote those lyrics from memory. I’ve listened to this tinny MP3 copy of “Noise from the Basement” in its entirety many times in the past three months. And at some point in my initially jaded saturation with what would seem on cursory listens to be some fairly vapid stuff, I grew to, like, like it. Like, “like” like.
In part it’s because a song like “Billy S,” and by extension Skye’s persona, isn’t really meant to be “ironic.” My original assumption that it should be enjoyed in such a fashion certainly made me feel smiley smug, but it wasn’t valid analytically. Of course, I could point to aspects of Skye’s marketing strategy that perhaps suggest a certain cynicism—urging “rebellion” against mainstream “conformity” via ‘tween-geared feature-length sitcoms, for instance.
But one thing this music isn’t is intentionally ironic, and to be quite honest, this stuff sounds better, er, honestly. Stripping a pop song of an external (and patronizing, and ultimately false) layer of irony doesn’t necessarily strip it of its musical value. In the Internet world, “they” call that sort of talk Rockism, and I’ve come to agree with “them,” sort of.
Allow me to pare Rockism down to a slightly misrepresentative nub with a case study: Good Charlotte has released a single. No wait, it gets better. The song is called “I Just Want to Live,” and it sounds like a spotless, silly, mechanical pop number. Many people would write the new single off as rubbish because it’s overtly and unapologetically POP, whereas the band’s former material, while still essentially pop, at least sounded like bad rock music. The hatred in this case is directed not at the music itself, but solely at the idea of a sonic shift.
Long story short, Rockism is the institutional exclusion of unapologetic pop from a broader discourse on “popular” music regardless of aesthetic merit, an exclusion that denies musical fluidity and an active questioning of the canon in favor of adherence to baseless traditions that confer immediate validation upon any group of white men who take themselves too seriously whilst strumming phalluses and grimacing.
But Skye Sweetnam does question the canon (both musical and literary), and her modus operandi is “authentic” enough to win over even the staunchest Rockist—this is a young woman who writes, sings, and produces her own songs (many from her actual basement, hence her album title)and plays her own instruments. Yes, Skye wants to be Britney Spears, but only in terms of success: She makes no concessions to Britney’s aesthetic. In fact, Sweetnam’s music is closer to rock music sonically than much of the solipsistic sludge still festering on “alternative” rock radio.
So what if Skye is peddling Disney-chic social revolution to a demographic whose only actual means of active protest against whatever we’re calling the Machine these days is to wake their older siblings up on Election Day? It’s good singing and solid songwriting and it usually clocks in at just over two minutes. And, perhaps most importantly, Skye Sweetnam is responsible for penning the world’s greatest pop interlude:
“To skip or not to skip; that is the question.”
Yeah. No further questions.