Default Genders - Stop Pretending EP (self-released)
There's a good bit of background to this debut EP from Canadian electronic artist Default Genders, and it begins with Elite Gymnastics, a duo consisting of Josh Clancy and James Brooks. After receiving quite a bit of positive press for their 2011 release, Ruin, the duo tried to tour, with disastrous results. Once the tour was over, Josh Clancy left the band, and James Brooks briefly soldiered on as a solo artist, still under the name Elite Gymnastics. That brief continuation produced one new song, "Andreja 4-Ever," which had a much cleaner, poppier sound than any prior Elite Gymnastics material, and perhaps the only intelligible vocal in their entire discography. In spite of the more pronounced pop sound, though, the lyrics had a surprisingly deep meaning--on Elite Gymnastics' tumblr, Brooks explained the song as "a love ballad about how the writing of Andrea Dworkin saved my life."Dworkin, a now-deceased feminist philosopher who was part of the anti-pornography movement of the 80s and is often considered to have implied that "all heterosexual sex is rape" (though she herself denied this interpretation of her work), has a bad reputation at this point in history, but Brooks eloquently defended herin multiple postson the Elite Gymnastics tumblr. In short, with "Andreja 4-Ever"'s poppier music, clearer vocals, and more explicitly political lyrics, Brooks wasn't so much ending Elite Gymnastics as establishing a template for his next project, Default Genders.
But they weren't Default Genders yet--at first, Brooks was calling the group Dead Girlfriends. That phrase was (and still is) the name of his personal tumblr. Brooks has a very active tumblr presence, and despite "Andreja 4-Ever" being released as part of the 2012 Adult Swim singles series, Elite Gymnastics receiving some positive in-depth coverage from #1 indie tastemaker website Pitchfork, and a high-profile tour opening for indie darlings Grimes (whose leader, Claire Boucher, happens to be Brooks's girlfriend), Brooks seemed to think that he was still just another unknown bedroom-pop producer. When he released the first Dead Girlfriends EP, Stop Pretending, last month, he did so without any sort of label backing or PR campaign. Speaking to SPIN's Marc Hogan a week after the EP's release, Brooks said, "Literally all I did was make the thing, put it on Bandcamp, and tweet about it, because I had no idea what anybody was going to do with it." But then, on the very day the EP was released, Pitchfork's Jenn Pelly wrote up its final track, "On Fraternity," as a Best New Track, and all hell broke loose.
Pelly cited the song approvingly, calling it "a song about why it is worth fighting fearlessly against a patriarchal world where women are second class citizens" and referring to Brooks as "a white male artist with a direct feminist message that can speak freely with anyone." A lot of other critics disagreed. Stereogum's Claire Lobenfeld called Brooks's lyrics"mansplaining (when a man, intentionally or otherwise, uses a condescending tone to explain something to a woman that she already knows)" and said the song's "initial presentation felt like it was meant to explain to women the political reason there are certain physical discomforts that come from, essentially, being a woman in public." SPIN's Jessica Hopper convened a female critic roundtable on the song and its lyrics--which actually included a diversity of opinions, some quite positive (Chicago zine-maker Jessica Skolnik called the song "sweet and genuine"), but which also served to further stir the pot of internet outrage brewing over the song. In his interview with Marc Hogan, which took place a few days after the female critic roundtable, Brooks noted the culture of internet outrage and how it serves to intensify controversy ("a lot of people who were writing about that song and talking about the song, they were exposed to it literally in the context of somebody sending it to them and saying, like, 'Hey, have you been offended by this yet?'"), but was, on the whole, regretful. "The purpose of "On Fraternity," in the context of the EP especially, is to call out my male peers for creating a situation where other people are victimized," he explained to Hogan. "I totally failed to do that." In the days that followed, Dead Girlfriends (which turned out to be a misquote of the Andrea Dworkin passage Brooks claimed to have named the band after) became Default Genders. In the tumblr post announcing the name change, Brooks apologized to "anyone who was upset or offended or grossed out by the old name." Most media reports have attributed the name change to another band using the name, but Brooks's concern, if histumblrpostswereanyindication, lay mainly in ensuring that his attempts to be shockingly feminist were not interpreted as casual or ignorant sexism.
So that about brings us up to date. Now... what about the music? Well, here's the thing--none of this internet outrage explosion would ever have happened if it weren't for the fact that Stop Pretending is legitimately one of the best records to come along this year. While there's nothing as straightforwardly beautiful as "Andreja 4-Ever" to be found here, all four songs on Stop Pretending are situated in the same musical neighborhood. Opening track "Words With Friends" is the most difficult to decipher lyrically, but musically, its combination of ambient synth hums and a multi-layered beat adds up to a sound that's simultaneously emotionally evocative and irresistibly danceable. Brooks's lyrics and vocal melodies build on the emotional aspect of the music, especially in the beatless first verse, which he ends by singing, "The way they all talk about love like it's a burden they've shrugged off... Fuck that, fuck them, fuck you, ugh, fuck my life." When the beat, which mixes sampled drums and programmed loops into a driving house groove, kicks in just as the last word ends, it powerfully underscores the point being made--and that's true even if the point itself remains difficult to decipher. The song seems to be about a dysfunctional relationship, beginning with Brooks talking about continuing to go out in public while wearing a dress his lover has ripped. He drops lyrical hints about abuse and shameful secrecy, before ending the song by saying, "I think that I get off work tonight at 8, so I guess I'll call you when I'm parked outside your place." In light of the controversy, it seems worthwhile to consider whether this is Brooks attempting to personify a woman's experience, or whether the song's narrator honestly is a man who wears dresses regularly. If you've seen photos of Brooks, though, you know this isn't as easy a question to answer as it would be about most men.
"Omerta" and "On Fraternity" come off as two sides of the same coin. The former, an ethereal instrumental consisting of tinkling piano melodies over swelling ambient hums, features a lyric-sheet explanation mentioning that "omerta," the "code of silence" widely associated with Mafia culture, has its etymological roots in the Sicilian word for "man." In turn, the latter includes the lines "Who cares if it's right as long as it's fun? So if someone gets hurt and then the cops come, then no one talks." The second repetition of this line replaces the word "fun" with "punk," and I find myself uncomfortably reminded of the dangerous mosh pits that greeted me back when I started going to hardcore shows, and the way everyone knew that there was no legal refuge for you if a bigger, tougher kid at the show decided he felt like kicking your ass. The lyrics to this track as a whole make me think of my own experiences trying to take female friends of mine to places I found less than welcoming but interesting and at least relatively safe, only to realize that those same places looked like a threatening house of horrors through their eyes. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that "On Fraternity" is a song about how different society looks when you're a man who is willing to see women as friends and not just potential sex partners, and how weird and off-putting the attitudes other men have towards women can seem, once you recognize the difference between yourself and them. I can understand why some women were put off by the lyrics, but I can also understand why Brooks wrote them.
"On Fraternity" is pretty fascinating on a musical level, too--sitting near the middle of the mix, between the foregrounded vocal and synth melodies and the quieter drumbeats, is a layer of pure white noise, its staticky screech adding the same sort of menacing crunch that punk bands generate by playing guitars through distortion pedals. It creates heaviness in an electro-pop context where heaviness seems impossible, which is kind of brilliant and certainly appropriate for the song's lyrical approach. But although "On Fraternity" has drawn all the critical attention thus far, the title track is the most noteworthy song on this EP, both musically and lyrically. Over a funky sampled drumbeat that gives "Stop Pretending" the grit of an early 90s hip hop jam, Brooks loops multiple samples of classical stringed instruments. This creates a swirling melody, which arises not from any one sample but the way all of them fit together. On the verses, Brooks expresses frustrations about feeling boxed in by traditional male gender roles. "You say you can't be soft if you want to be punk," he sings at the end of the first verse, then sardonically continues: "Fine, cool, whatever. Thanks for clearing that up." In a second of silence before the string loop kicks back in, he emits a frustrated groan. On the second verse, he expresses his contempt for the sort of obnoxious fedora-clad dudes that show up in way-too-frequent numbers in certain corners of the internet: "Tell me again about how heavy the crown is, about the weight of the burden of being white and male." Then at the end of the verse, he takes a preemptive shot at the sort of comebacks the song's lyrics can be expected to generate: "If people talk shit and say, 'You're not one of us,' I guess we can stop pretending now that I ever was." The fact that this song has the prettiest, catchiest vocal line on the entire EP only seems more appropriate for such a fervent, defiant rejection of society's definition of manliness.
I won't deny the possibility that James Brooks didn't communicate the messages he'd intended to get across on Stop Pretending as clearly as he'd hoped to. As someone who has debated him on tumblr, I can tell you that, while he's clearly brilliant, he sometimes seems a bit too excited (or a bit too stoned) to get his points across as clearly and concisely as he'd like to. I hardly think that's an unforgivable quality, though--for one thing, "over-excited" is a criticism that could have been directed towards me on at least a thousand occasions. If anything, it just proves that Brooks is human. Indeed, humanity seems to be the entire point Default Genders are trying to get at. This EP reminds me of the way that a person who seems pretty easy to figure out when you first meet them always turns out to be more complicated than you ever expected. But to reject people's complex realities in favor of a simple, socially-approved narrative about the way boys and girls should act/think/be is a coward's way out. If you're that kind of coward, you won't like this record. For your sake, I hope you're not.