- The Popovy Sisters
- The Popovy Sisters
- The Popovy Sisters
Images: Lena & Katya Popovy
Studio Photography: Panos Damaskinidis
Interview: Antonio Celotto + Emma de Clercq
Xgau Sez: September, 2020
Several 30 seconds of greatness, formalists formally considered, Ray Davies informally considered, list-making explained, hip-hop unexplained, and the "The Harry Smith B-Sides" expurgated
Robert Christgau
I’ve been beguiled by your use of the term “formalism” in reference to bands and artists. In a general sense I can grok what you are saying but am wondering does the use of the descriptor formalist connote a sense of stylistic predictability or derivativeness? [he even vocabularizes like Christgau ed.]
Is there an antonym in your critical arsenal for music that is the antithesis of formalistic? Below are a couple of abridged examples. It appears so often, and isn’t necessarily correlated with whether you find something pedestrian or worthwhile. —Martin Cassidy, NashvilleVan Halen: Van Halen II [Warner Bros, 1979] So how come formalists don’t love the shit out of these guys? Not because they’re into dominating women, I’m sure. C+
R.E.M.: Fables of the Reconstruction [I.R.S., 1985] But as formalists they valorize the past by definition, and if their latest title means anything it's that they're slipping inexorably into the vague comforts of regret, mythos, and nostalgia. B+
Let me note to begin that the “they” in the Van Halen needs a clearer referent, a fuckup on my part—no telling whether it indicates the band or the formalists.
I meant the band, thus suggesting that formalists may be clever, aesthetically sophisticated fellows, but they’re probably just as sexist as the metal clods they disdain.
And that’s a start: formalists are aesthetes who may well be jerks in other respects and often lack the idiosyncrasy that makes pop music feel special.
What do Van Halen and R.E.M. share?
Both are technically brilliant bands that delight in recapitulating the musical essentials of their chosen genres, metal and folk-rock/indie-rock. That much only a bigger clod would deny.
In Van Halen both Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth take their respective roles to new levels, just like R.E.M.’s guitar polymath Peter Buck and charismatically elusive Michael Stipe, whose early refusal to pronounce the band’s lyrics said so much it didn’t actually come out and say—that their collegiate following didn’t actually care what the songs were “about” because the songs’ sound was all that mattered to them.
Preferring R.E.M.’s materials to Van Halen’s and noting both that I warmed briefly to Van Halen when 1984 led with the great single “Jump” and that Stipe soon abandoned his mush-mouthed shtick, which in retrospect was what it was. But this isn’t to say formalists can’t be fun.
My favorite example is Zion, Illinois’s Shoes, who I don’t recall even touring (though they did release a live EP). Basically, they just made records. And you could make a case that the Ramones were the greatest formalists in rock history. But after venturing that in relatively modern pop music it’s a special province of power pop I’ll say sayanora to a question best answered by a book no sufficiently smart person is likely to write.
Robert Christgau -