Just this weekend I was just listening to that song "the colors and the kids," which I'm totally crazy about, and I thought "I wonder how cat power would fare on crap/not crap."

She's faring about as well as I'd expect. There's not much of her music that I don't enjoy in some way. I dig her voice, I think she's inventive without being obtuse, I like the melancholy shit, and golly I I like that song the colors and the kids.

Was for a long time turned off by this " CAT POWER ".

Untill i actually sat down and listened to it. Simple yes, -crap, no.

-w

records: not crap
live: crap

old haircut: not crap
new haircut: crap

not crap

moon pix - not crap, but just slightly

all the rest is yawn-o-riffic.


Yawn.

Crap

I love her voice. She played here about a year ago and it was really informal. I can understand people freaking out on her live shows because she drifts from song to song and doesn't seem to care what anybody thinks. Though some people found that to be inconsiderate, I thought it was fun. She played for a long time and didn't read the newspaper.

Musically, whatever.

But as a "performance artist" she is a force to be reckoned with. Few have fooled around with all that audience / performer, expectation / obeisance stuff better than her. Not that I'm saying there's inherent value in that. I'd lost interest in her after Moon Pix or whatever, but then You Are Free came out and people started talking about her problematic “performance ethic” again. People really get offended by her and I could never understand and still can't understand it. I looked over at the forums devoted to her on the Matador page and it's some of the most impassioned, malicious stuff I've ever read. Trying to understand the hatred people have for her has made me delve into her music more than I would have otherwise.

Someone suggested listening to a live performance of hers in Paris. So I downloaded it from her web page to try to understand why people felt so disgusted and honestly, with a raptness unlike I’ve ever experienced with a live tape before, I listened to the whole thing non - stop. The pauses in the songs when you think they might abort, or when she gets frustrated about being out of tune or something--these are some of the only "natural" behaviors I've ever seen by rockstars. These moments made the performance more compelling than the simplistic music itself. I'm certainly not advocating this type of behavior as a formula--honesty or "naturalness" as a performance paradigm probably leads to much more evil than good, but who would prefer some seamless song executed as close to the recorded version as possible over someone sort of transferring their feelings to you honestly? The only thing I can't stand, the thing that disgusts me about her is when she says "I'm sorry". What is that? What the fuck is that?

I still don't think I've encountered one of these truly broken down performances that people are talking about though. There must be some validity to the critiques of her live shows because they come up so often. Gerard Cosloy even said on those Matador forums that her performances were erratic. People who have seen these breakdown performances -- what is it that makes them so bad? It's gotta be more than simply her defying expectation or not rendering songs seamlessly. Why are other performers who thwart expectations or are equally drunk so lauded? And why do French people “get” her so effortlessly while, say, Australians don’t?

[I'm going for the editing record with this post]

x.

CRAP. Sleep-inducing vagina rock. But I'll be damned if her female fans aren't painfully hot....

good for necking and getting to second and third base.
not crap. a 10 though

she really should be an actress,certainly not a musician.
what a fucking clown.
if i want to listen to a talented woman singing beautiful songs i listen to PJ Harvey,Breeders,Nina Nastasia, Kristin Hersh,Sugarcubes et coetera.
also,she seems to be very "hip" at the moment...which makes her CRAP in my own little and snubby world.