Portugal. The Man
The Satanic Satanist
Approaching AIRballoons
By Jose Fritz
It was very late at night and the fireworks were over literally and figuratively. I was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike and playing The Satanic Satanist on the car stereo. My girlfriend was asleep in the passenger seat. She woke up to say ‘What the fuck is this? Jason Mraz?” I knew I had some explaining to do.
Pop music is the devil, simple as that. It’s been said before, but it bears repeating. In naming their record The Satanic Satanist, the band knew full well it was a redundancy and a warning. They are not practicing self-deceit. They know it’s a pop record. That’s the elephant in the room.
In the past they’ve lived in the lair of the darkest avant-pop. Devil Say I, I Say Air was dark, disturbing and brief. Church Mouth, Waiter:You Vultures, and It’s Complicated Being a Wizard each picked at the walls inside that prison. The scraped their nails on the floors, chewed on the bars and scraped holes in the masonry with a spoon. Their labors were for nothing, for in escaping their bonds all they found was a bigger box: the greater more elaborate prison of commercial pop music.
The horror now in playing that field finding that they are now being compared in the Trouser Press Record Guide to The Fray, Daughtry, or Jack Johnson, instead of Led Zeppelin and The White Stripes. But Jason Mraz has a place in the forever culturally. Mraz has had not one but two platinum records. To paraphrase Clive Davis: 2,500,000 people can’t be wrong. Pop is not purgatory, there are greater victories to be had in pop than there are in our dingy dispossessed music underground. It’s just sad to see them go so soon.
It would be a mistake to think of them as lost. Pop is no separate world from all things indie. It is not even terra continens. Even the most astringent of independent bands have accidentally stumbled backwards drunkenly into singles and even multi-platinum records. Christ, the Butthole Surfers even managed to cut a Billboard single.
Bands are always free to make these radical stylistic changes. They will lose some old fans and always gain some new ones. These are turning points, and they can mark the end of a career or the start of a band’s ascendance. So in the end, the question from the special prosecutor should not be “Is it too poppy?” The real question should be “Is it any good?” To that I can answer honestly with a resolute “Yes.”
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