Here's a scenario: You come home for Christmas, call up your old punk
rock buddies, and find out they're really into hip-hop and dance music
now. Catching up, you pretend to understand words like "chillwave" and
"dubstep," taking their word for it that those are, in fact, real
things.
That's what's going on right now with Seattle's Sub Pop
Records, known for bringing fringe rock music to the masses for over
20 years.
The label kicked off grunge in the '90s, signing
Seattle bands Nirvana and Soundgarden before anyone outside the city
knew about them and followed that by popularizing indie rock in the
aughts, developing the genre from snarky and gnarly in the '90s to soft
and smart today, where it sits as one of the dominant sounds on pop
radio.
Opposed to genre-reliable labels like Daptone Records or
Hyperdub, where you know you're going to get revival-style soul music
or electronic underground sounds, Sub Pop has a history of flipping
the script. For example, it followed a string of indie rock hits with a
flurry of records by comedy acts, including Flight of the Conchords
and David Cross.
But Sub Pop's musical releases have always
leaned toward rock which made it surprising that they spent 2011
putting out rap and dance music by Shabazz Palaces, Niki & the
Dove and Washed Out. The trend will continue in 2012. In March, the
label will release outre hip-hop albums from new signees
THEESatisfaction (
Awe Naturale) and Spoek Mathambo (
Father Creeper).
The old Sub Pop was about guitars and amps. The new one is about samplers and software.
What's the deal?
The short answer is the new music is good. Shabazz Palaces lit up critics' best of 2011 lists with its far-out album
Black Up.
To get the long answer, I spoke with Tony Kiewel, head of the label's
A&R department (artists and repertoire, which signs new bands) and
vice president Megan Jasper.
Kiewel sits in on the third floor
of the downtown Seattle building where Sub Pop is located, his
cubicle walls thumb-tacked with a personal photo of Elliott Smith and a
sign that says "must be interesting / must not be a dick."
Asked
about other A&R prejudices besides those two, he says homophobia
is a staff-wide turn-off, as are bands who feel like trend-followers
or "are doing it to get paid or get free drinks."
"And we tend
to skew toward things with strong lyrics. The Postal Service, the
Shins, Fleet Foxes, Iron & Wine all great lyricists, in my
opinion."
Around the corner in a glass-walled office, Jasper
says Kiewel has a gift for knowing what's "next" in music. He joined
Sub Pop in 2000 and his first big success story was the duo Postal
Service indie rock singer Ben Gibbard and electronic producer Dntel
whose crossover sound is still being copied by major label acts like
Owl City.
One imagines A&Rs lurking in nightclubs like
baseball scouts at ball fields, but they mainly surf the Internet,
discovering music by the 21st century version of word of mouth. Kiewel
has a list of music blogs bookmarked in his web browser. One of his
favorites is
ravensingstheblues.blogspot.com, focusing on psychedelic and garage rock styles which Sub Pop employees generally love, if the staff top ten lists on
subpop.com are any indication.
Kiewel
learned about his most recent signee South African rapper/DJ/graphic
artist Spoek Mathambo last year through a semi-private email list
which includes the general manager of Domino Records and several music
writers, based out of New York City.
Kiewel leads an
eight-person A&R team at Sub Pop, but new acts are chosen by
committee. Per the politics of the office, ownership is out. Nobody is
allowed to refer to an act as "my artist."
If Kiewel's personal
tastes are leaning a little "poppier" these days, so are Sue Busch
and Stuart Meyer's A&R team members responsible for bringing in
Fleet Foxes (whose neo-folk album "Helplessness Blues" was Sub Pop's
biggest record this year, and one of the year's highest-selling vinyl
releases in any genre), Niki & the Dove and Washed Out. Kiewel
thinks the A&R team might lean a little more pop than it used to
because it is operating without Andy Kotowicz, a "deep reservoir of
cultural knowledge" and Sub Pop pillar who died last year in a freak
car accident. Kotowicz championed Seattle's Shabazz Palaces, whose
"Black Up" can be described as "a difficult listen," as well as noisy
bands like Wolf Eyes.
Kiewel has a loose definition of "pop,"
describing Swedish electro-goth act Niki & the Dove like a
sommelier: "super poppy, which I love, and I also get a huge Kate Bush
hit."
Another thing informing Kiewel's A&R decisions: he
wants to see more intelligent political discourse in the world. That's
why he brought in the comedy albums by Cross, who raged against the
Bush II era, and partly what piques his interest in Shabazz Palaces and
fellow Seattle act THEESatisfaction, who address race and identity
politics in their music. Kiewel was listening a lot to '60s/'70s
protest singer Phil Ochs when he found out about Mathambo, and heard
something of Ochs' spirit in Mathambo's raps criticizing Boer culture
and the African National Congress in South Africa.
As far as
predicting the "now" in pop music, Sub Pop was on the money with Fleet
Foxes, whose folk-pop sound is popular in the underground and
mainstream. Shabazz Palaces was a win, too and characteristically and
weirdly enough, both acts are from Sub Pop's backyard in Seattle.
Sub
Pop has long signed local bands, though its focus is worldwide, and
over the last decade, the city has changed a lot. Generally, the move
has been for the sleeker and more glossy. It's still a woodsy place,
but with more skyscrapers and sonic diversity in its underground
scene. Grunge rock was spiritually connected to the area's formerly
thriving logging industry. Shabazz Palaces and THEESatisfaction sound
like technology, like Microsoft. The label's new sound is also
influenced by the world in general, in thrall to the mega-raves of
popular DJs like Skrillex with everyone appreciating electronic-music
values more than they used to (production, engineering, sonic
sculpture), a product of the proliferation of earbuds and Apple's
model doing a decent job with low-end frequencies. Home recording
software is easy to get. Kids want to be DJs more than before. The
shape of "singer-songwriter" has changed.
"I know a lot of
people who feel like what is happening in the electronic world is far
more exciting than what's happening in the rock world," Jasper
says. "But for me, I can't say it matters one way or another or that
it even means anything. To us it's a roster, and it's music. It's not
grunge music, it's not folk music, it's not electronic music."
But
Sub Pop's interest in the genre puts it in good company with labels
around the world who are looking for the sound of tomorrow in electronic
music.
London's 4AD is known for putting out legendary, arty,
angry rock like Sub Pop. Their Nirvana would be the Pixies, for
example. But this year, 4AD got involved with acts associated with the
British dance music dubstep, signing Zomby and Joker, from London and
Bristol. By the same token, Domino Recordings, which started out in
the '90s, like Sub Pop, with a heavy rock bias, is now known for
releasing records by Animal Collective and Four Tet, acts who appeal
to an indie audience but construct songs out of repetitive rhythms and
overlayed samples.
Sometimes, the branching out can be clumsy.
In electronic music, artists develop at light speed, and the producer
you love today might make horrible music tomorrow. Many of the trends
in electronic music are based on finding new sounds or taking
something to "the next level," but those trends can turn to parody
quickly. And while rock is an album thing, electronic music has
traditionally been about 12" singles. All this was at play in the case
of Joker, who stood out in front of the pack with his early
recordings, but whose album for 4AD ended up blending in.
There
seemed to be a bit of this cultural confusion when Sub Pop signed
Washed Out, from Georgia, who helped invent the chillwave genre in the
last few years a hip-hop-y take on ambient synth grooves that scans as
indie pop to many fans. It's a genre that might have some DNA in the
Postal Service record, with its wistful moods and bedroom-produced
indie/electronic music. Ten years later, those energies swirl in Toro Y
Moi and Washed Out's tunes, which come in digital file format but often
seem to be wafting out of a cassette. Washed Out's album for Sub Pop
wasn't bad, but the hazy, slacker feel of chillwave doesn't do well
with the pressure of a full album
Within and Without is a good record caught between trying to be stoned and relaxed but also proper synth pop.
Kiewel
says every act is on Sub Pop because employees are feeling that
music, not because the label is trying to align itself with any
momentum or movement.
On the surface, an
artistically-adventurous/black-pride aesthetic ties together Shabazz
Palaces, Mathambo and THEESatisfaction. And Jasper says yes, that is
what's next for Sub Pop. But whether that's what's next for the world
outside Sub Pop, she doesn't know. It's not a movement, to her, but
individual acts with unique perspectives.
Kiewel says indie
rock is too white, and so is Sub Pop, frankly, but what can you do
about it? He insists that Sub Pop is not trying to color correct its
roster, and even with Mathambo, a South African musician who makes rap
influenced both by traditional sounds as well as dubstep and electronic
music, genres get crossed.
"His record was very dubstep and
electro, but we had a conversation that blew my mind when he said he
was recently getting turned on to Red House Painters, stuff that seemed
outside his sphere and in my sphere, and the general Sub Pop sphere.
And he was becoming really excited about stuff like the Stooges. He
was like, 'It was only a couple years ago I started getting into all
this white-people music.'"
"And I was like, 'Cool .... I don't know what that means, exactly, to you. I don't know what that means in South Africa."
Kiewel
says, "I think the public has perceived these radical shifts in sound
[at Sub Pop] which there have been. But we've always tried to
maintain a certain balance. Even in the grunge days there was [acoustic
band] the Walkabouts."
Jasper cites the same example, and
offers that pioneering indie rock band Sebadoh was not seen as
logically following Nirvana in the '90s, when Sub Pop released its
music. People get locked into their conception of Sub Pop notice
nearly every writer who touched Shabazz Palaces calls it "Sub Pop's
first hip-hop album," when in fact there was a rap group in the '90s,
The Evil Tambourines, and a distribution deal with Conception Records, a
hip-hop label, around the same time. But luckily for music in general,
its employees aren't overly attached to a certain perspective. Jasper
admits she doesn't have the gift of knowing what's next in music, and
is happy to cede control to Kiewel, with his fusion-oriented palette and
shrewdness in sourcing information. She started out as an intern and
has historically been anti- any and all genre tags, especially "grunge."
She
says the face of Sub Pop is always changing, and pet projects of its
employees seem to line up with "the economy, or politics or whatever
force is currently having an impact."
"I like to think about
[Sub Pop] like a history book, where we can document what is beginning
to happen in music. And then that is probably also a reflection of
what is happening culturally."
