You don’t intend to watch American Idol,
really
you don’t, but like millions of your lumpen brethren, you
find yourself prostrate on the couch every week, gawking at the
televised trainwreck. Simon, Paula, and Randy make their
predictable assessments, but it’s the viewers who decide, by
way of telephone and text messaging, the outcome of the
competition. Call it mob rule or pure democracy or the hegemony of
gay men and prepubescent girls, but it’s as fair an
indication as any of our middlebrow, middle-American preferences.
We want our idols to scrunch up their faces as they struggle to
express their supersized emotions. We want our idols to cram in as
many notes as the melody can sustain, to execute tricky trills and
complicated runs, to overwhelm us with virtuosity. Subtlety,
restraint, and ambiguity are hallmarks of the also-ran; American
idols apotheosize the obvious.
Those in need of an antidote to Idol
mania are advised
to seek out Nolita,
the latest album by Keren Ann Zeidel, a Frenchwoman of
Javanese-Dutch-Russian-Israeli descent who performs under just her
first and middle names. Where AI
contestants bellow and caterwaul, Zeidel
simply sings. Her voice is small and lithe and perfectly imperfect,
a deadpan alto that cracks a little at the margins of its
unexceptional range.
Nolita is
Zeidel’s fourth full-length but only the second to be
distributed in this country. Her previous album, Not Going Anywhere,
was her
first English-language venture and wasn’t even intended for
official release, either here or in France, where Zeidel is
semifamous. She changed her mind, and American critics contracted a
serious case of amour fou.
A gushing profile in the New Yorker
followed a
series of live shows in New York City; soon thereafter, Zeidel
rented an apartment in Nolita, a neighborhood north of Little
Italy, and began dividing her time between Paris and New York.
Nolita was
recorded in both cities and bears their traces. Sung half in French
and half in English, it’s the work of a committed expat, a
dreamy, liminal space that’s always already elsewhere.
“Utopia,” after all, means “no place,” and
Nolita is more of a concept than a place anyway, a neighborhood
carved from older, more established districts and distinguished
(cynics might say “branded”) by a snazzy name. In an
interview with the French-language edition of Elle,
Zeidel explains
that the album title is also meant to evoke the non-Lolita, or the
transition from muse to artist, which she defines as “one who
observes.” It’s a telling distinction, one that neatly
encapsulates her songwriting ethos. Zeidel’s lyrics are both
commonplace and enigmatic, a series of ordinary observations that
accumulate meaning obliquely, transparent layer by transparent
layer, like a Rembrandt painting or a Raymond Carver story.
The best songs on Nolita
are about New York
— or, more precisely, New York as described by a stranger
infatuated with its polyglot magic and palimpsest past. With its
harmonica and scraping violin, “Chelsea Burns” evokes
the Velvet Underground’s New York — its grimy glamour
reconstructed by someone born after Edie Sedgwick overdosed, after
the billionaires chased the bohos to Brooklyn and points beyond,
after the famous fire that still burns under the narrator’s
feet. The seven-minute title track is at once narcotic and urgent,
a concatenation of delicate guitar arpeggios and wistful strings.
As the song builds, you begin to discern Zeidel’s breathing,
so faint and regular at first that it dissolves into the programmed
percussion. By the end of the song, she’s clearly panting;
whether it’s meant to suggest pursuit or escape, desire or
exhaustion, is unclear, and it probably doesn’t matter.
She’s still not going anywhere, but you’d be a fool not
to follow.
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2005.
