More A-Cappella Nerds Hate Themselves

So if you recall a few months ago, I talked a little bit about an upcoming book by GQ editor Mickey Rapkin on collegiate a-cappella. I haven't been back in the country yet to get a copy, but so far I've found out that at least two people have read it: Bill Hare, producer extraordinaire; and Nina Shen Rastogi, yep, you guessed it, a writer from Slate.com.

Nina's piece from Slate touches on that strange self-denial that apparently lots of people go through from being part of a collegiate a-cappella group, woven into her criticisms of Rapkin's book. Nina admits begrudgingly that she "snapped [her] fingers on the downbeat" with Yale's Mixed Company. By the by, the RARB review for Mixed Company's 2000 album "Change of Plans" is still one of my all-time favorites for RARB snarkiness.

But Nina picks up what does suck about collegiate a-cappella: "Perhaps most damning of all is the fact that a cappella is so painfully earnest, so distressingly eager to please" As I've mentioned before, collegiate a-cappella's song selection shows us how terrible our taste in music is (Guster about a billion times, Staind?) But Mixed Company, by way of a relevant example, expects people to pay $20 for a concert recording (and a recent one, at that) of such overdone songs as "One Fine Day" and "Walking In Memphis" (which the CoCoBeaux deemed so good nearly 10 years after it debut for them, they sang it in their first losing appearance at ICCAs). In other words, the vast majority of collegiate a-cappella doesn't take musical risks -- unless I'm missing some sort of dangerous experimental arrangement of "Just Once" -- and when it does (Staind), it just pales in comparison to the original song. Then you have your "supergroups" who can do basically just about anything, because they define the genre for its purists, for lack of a better term, but for the most part can be shrugged off by lots of groups since "we want to sound pure" (i.e. suck). But why?

To the extent that Nina admits the suckiness of a-cappella as a genre ("The bands most frequently covered on the circuit are uniformly schlocky: Coldplay, Maroon 5, Billy Joel, Journey"), she suggests that what Rapkin sorely misses is a-cappella as camaraderie: that as a nerd from the suburbs who didn't know all the New Yorker bylines (now that she works for Slate -- the idiot's guide to being too cool for school -- I bet she knows all of them now), she basically felt a-cappella was a cushion for middle-class people moving into the rarefied air of elite Yale. Is the short life of being an "a-cappella singer" determined by its nerdiness or by how your particular group related to class distinctions in the school as a whole? Mixed Company proudly touts itself as a feeder group to more prestigious ones. Once you "get it" -- that is, you've figured out how to maneuver among elites -- why recall your rise to the top? This is collegiate a-cappella we're talking about here, not professional; the dynamics of class (and race and gender) are still completely ignored.

Now that's a little brutal, but why not be subversive? Why not join a group to say "fuck you" from the inside? Why aren't their politically-themed groups, other than the ones who emphasize particular cultural or religious traditions -- do Christian a-cappella groups sing pro-life songs (I'm guessing no). How many groups sing Rage Against the Machine? How many groups sing poorly on purpose (at least I hope so...)? The point is, if you're in a group to say "fuck you" in some way, shape or form, I think you might have a better recounting of your a-cappella days than if you were part of one that proudly displays its inferiority non-ironically. If you've joined a group to fit in, then maybe we've lost you to Slate already (which I read...)

But the point of denying collegiate a-cappella, I think, is to show how you've "come so far," that beyond maturing, you've figured out a certain degree of comfort with the habits of social class, which all those goddamn wine-and-cheeses and free trips to Japan can do to you. It's an interesting filtering mechanism, if we look at it this way.

So, of course I assume that my experience with Vox was a big enough "fuck you" to warrant my continued interest in its welfare. Indeed it has. Though on the class side, I did manage to learn how to read music, and have achieved the greatest of the great Bourdieusian scams -- convincing people I have a "natural" talent for things musical, when seriously dudes, I don't. Such is how I both proudly display my Vox colors and helped me move up in social class.