Sinister: Lloyd Cole & Belle and Sebastian

[Youn J. Noh]

Hi,

I haven't read the article on the Creative Noise site, but I don't intend
for this to be a reply to it.  

Some have accused Lloyd Cole of name-dropping, but I think he has been
misunderstood.  I consider the allusions to literature and film in his
songs as a part of the story, the characters, the atmosphere in which they
live.  Think of Charles Ryder before he met Sebastian.  Think of the
discussions in your western civ course freshman year.  It's embarrassing
but also refreshing to recall the earnestness of those years, when you
thought you were free of the doggedness and tedium of high school, not yet
aware of the careerism and feudalism within the university system, when
you believed socio-economic status had no bearing on membership in an
intellectual elite.  If it's overly literary, it's because it's in the
characters.  And sometimes it's obvious enough to make you aware of the
posturing, as in the end rhymes in "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?".

I think of Lloyd Cole as very American.  There's the rootsy, blues element
in his music, the tales of cosmopolitan sophisticates with roots in
some midwestern town (I'm making this up, but it seems at least partially
true of "Four Flights Up" and "Why I Love Country Music"), the
out-of-place narrator in "Speedboat" (my feeling, based on stereotype, is
that if he were British, then he wouldn't be there, or he would be openly
antagonistic).   So maybe that's another reason not to take Lloyd Cole's
literariness at face value.  

Although he went to the University of Glasgow, Lloyd Cole is supposed to
be from Derbyshire and Sheffield, according to Peter Miller.  Someone in
B&S  mentioned that they held the press conference in London cos
Glaswegians don't go for that sort of thing.  Now I can hardly imagine
Lloyd Cole coming from such an environment or recognize any sign of its
influence on him.  Not with all those pin ups.  If there's anything for
which he should be criticized, it's for being too eager to please, too
available.  I can see why a friend of mind doesn't like the way he sings
in "Her Last Fling"; it's great to me, but for some, it might lack
restraint.  The exact opposite is true of B&S: the way Stuart sings, the
way they dealt with the press, etc.

I read that "Rattlesnakes" was influenced by Joan Didion, the song itself
by _Play It As It Lays_.  Somewhere on his web site (lloydcole.com), he
writes that "Easy Pieces" was influenced by Raymond Carver.  These writers
and others cited in his lyrics are mostly American.  Whereas B&S seem
particularly British in outlook (why they could be loosely compared to
the Smiths but LC couldn't; why LC couldn't completely carry off a song
like "James"), that is, when they aren't netherworldly (there's something
holy about Stuart). I don't think the mention of American writers in
"Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie" is meant to be sympathetic, as those of Sid
James and Paula Wilcox are.  There's a level at which the speaker
identifies with the (anti-)heroine, but another at which he's mocking her
for putting on bourgeois airs, alone in her bedroom with the sort of
books young people read before going off to college.  

A common link might be the French New Wave, but I think of that more as
Isobel's pet interest.

Yours,
Youn

  


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