I’m jumping the gun a little bit here, but I’ve been listening to a ton of Nellie McKay the last few days, so I wanted to post while I’m in the mood.
Her 2004 album Get Away From Me was an astonishing work from someone younger than I am (she was born in 1982), merging jazz, rap, disco, funk, showtunes, and pretty much anything else you can imagine, and then topping it off with deliciously biting lyrics. Billie Holliday, Doris Day, Eminem, Kate Bush, and countless others. You like something? It’s probably here. Given the wide diversity, it’s definitely an album that deserves to be heard in its entirety, but I’ll provide two samples:
Change the WorldWaiter
A number of reviewers have complained about the lack of depth in her lyrics (or, perhaps, the lack of an emotional core), but I think that misses the point. As these songs demonstrate, it’s a record about being 21 and having no idea who you really are. “Change the World” in particular is as honest a song as you can imagine, in part because it uses ironic distance to keep itself from truly descending into the emotional abyss of selfhood. After all, isn’t that how most of us actually understand ourselves?
Songs about cosmic meaning and catharsis are all well and good, but there are surprisingly few songs about the unique brand of ironic self-depreciation that, precisely in its effort to erase the emotional core, reveals the existential zeitgeist of living in 21st century America. Simply put, lots of people can do irony, but very few can do it well. Nellie McKay is one of the few.
I wouldn’t want all of her albums to inhabit this space, as I think that she has a lot of potential for writing songs that delve into the personal, but while she wants to unleash her biting wit and storytelling ability in this direction, I say more power to her.
Her follow-up album has been done for quite some time, but she was dropped from Columbia Records over a dispute about what version to release (she wanted a 23 song/65 minute long version while the label insisted on slicing it down to 16/48). It was claimed at the time that she would release the album herself, but so far nothing has materialized.
Amazon now has a page (Pretty Little Head), saying it will be released in October on the Black Dove label. I’ve also heard it’s going to be released on SpinART, but haven’t heard anything more about that. Anyone have any more info?
Anyways, here’s one song (released almost a year ago but still not officially out) from the new disc. It’s as good as anything she’s done and has me anxiously awaiting the full release:
Despite her troubles with the Columbia label, the title is just a coincidence. In fact, the song is a scathing protest of the animal testing at Columbia University. As if I needed more reasons to love her, she is a committed animal rights activist and has been a vegetarian since she was 8. Not to start a big fight over animal rights (you can save the invective for when I do the big “songs about vegetarianism” post I’ve been thinking about for awhile), but is there anything sexier than vegetarianism? I say no.