Extolling the Many Virtues of the Orange Popsicle: Jill Cunniff's City Beach
Written: Jun 07 '07 (Updated Apr 16 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Orange popsicles are sweet!
Cons: But they also raise our blood sugar for little to no nutritional benefit.
The Bottom Line: In which the author went to New York City and all he got was a great big orange popsicle (and a lot of beer).
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| plorentz's Full Review: City Beach by Jill Cunniff |
Silver Lake Park couldn't be called a city beach, located as it is, deep in the woodsy middle of Kenosha County, but, as a kid, it was my favorite summer destination. Even though it was only about 4 miles from our home, there was something a little rare about going. For one thing, because it was a county park, it required my parents to purchase a sticker to get in. One of my most vivid memories of the dinosaurish, yellow (with faux wood trim) AMC station wagon we drove back then is of a short column of Kenosha County Park stickers running up the driver's side edge of the windshield: '79, '80, '81, '82... Most of the time we were stuck going to one of the various Paddock Lake beaches that we could walk to. Just down the street from us wasn't really a beach, but a shore, which housed a giant teal-green machine we called the seaweed eater (which, in fact, it was). But Paddock Lake was kind of small and dirty, and the real, swimming beaches where we most often went swimming were small and dirty too.
But Silver Lake Park Beach was another thing altogether. The fine, white-ish sand (a terrific contrast from the gritty brown sandbox sand of Paddock Lake), burning hot from the sun, advanced onto the shore for hundreds of feet, and the beach itself felt like it was a mile wide, and when you finally reached the water of Silver Lake, you discovered (happily!) that it was so shallow that you could go so far out into the lake that your parents would be mere specks - specks among a never-ending, Brueghelesque panorama of multi-colored specks - and still be standing on your feet without the water ever reaching your chest. There were trails through the woods around the beach, and a huge (to my young eyes) concession stand, and in various random clearings in the otherwise thickly wooded park, you'd stumble into a magical little playground, a kid's oasis is a bright, green, sunwashed clearing, with people-sized hamster wheels, and the tallest swingsets I'd ever seen, and gigantic hills (sledding hills in the winter) that you could roll down like a log with only a 78% chance of, like, crashing into something.
But the beach. Oh, the beach. It just went on forever, and those once-or-twice-a-year Saturdays we would spend there seemed a little bit like forever too. And what you could see, what you could hear, what you could smell, what you could do - it all seemed so infinite, random, and surprising, and a walk down the beach could be the sensory equivalent of scanning an FM radio dial. And, on the best of days, a walk among the beach's population, among the many colored blankets, and spreads, the smells of concession stand hot dogs and grilled bratwurst and cocoa butter suntan lotion, and the smell of the water itself, the way the bright June sun would glint off the water and make the day feel as overexposed as a power-pop music video, literally was like turning the radio tuning nob as you approached and passed one boombox after another, here the Go-Gos, there AC/DC, there REO Speedwagon, there Ray Parker Jr. I remember these days in soft-focus, kaleidoscopic color and sound. This wasn't just a beach. It was a dazzlement.
My first trip to New York City a couple months ago was a similarly dazzling experience. It was an exceedingly gorgeous day in the city, maybe the first really gorgeous day of the spring - like a mid-June day that missed its exit and ended up in mid-March. And I spent most of that afternoon on what was essentially a whirlwind walking tour of Middle Manhattan, seeing lots of everything, but almost too dazzled by all that everything to actually stop and do (or even eat) anything (except catching a $87 matinee of The Drowsy Chaperone, and gorging myself on the best damn corn dog of my whole life from a Papaya Dog stand) - a tour which culminated when I met up with the nicest guy I know in NYC, who bought me dinner, watched me drink a small assortment of crafted beers, listened to me ramble on about every last little thing, and then gave me a bunch of CDs, y'know, just because. We should all be so lucky to have a friend like this.
And how appropriate that one of those CDs was a new solo disc by NYC singer-songwriter Jill Cunniff, formerly of Luscious Jackson, they of "Naked Eye" fame, a quintessential summer single that was virtually (and wonderfully) unavoidable in the long hot summer of '97 (and which I only mention here because it appears that the textual juxtaposition of the phrases "luscious jackson" and "naked eye" has, for somewhat obvious and yet truly skin-crawling reasons, proven to be exceptionally Google-icious). The disc is called City Beach, and it arrives in an unassumingly lovely cardboard tri-fold sleeve, decked out in Cunniff's colorful, wistful paintings of the New York cityscape colliding with a tropical beach, with smart metallic copper embossed print on the front cover. (Also: a portion of all sales from the CD are going to the Surfrider Foundation for the protection and preservation of oceans and beaches.)
And fittingly, it's a sort of concept record celebrating not just the beach itself, but the general vibe of a long, slow, bedazzled day like those we spent at Silver Lake Park. It's leisurely and fun, anything goes and nothing too serious where, in a song like "NYC Boy", a jazzy flute solo will flit around and about a glammy rock n' roll saxophone like a seagull teasing along the crest of a wave; where exotic electronic oscillations swell majestically under the melancholy yearning of "Apartment 3" the way the wake of a passing speedboat translates into voluptuous waves that surprise and delight us, lifting us laughingly off our feet and gently setting us back down - all in the middle of a raucous round of Marco Polo; where diverse and divergent styles and colors, sounds and visions collide, overlap, and interact in unexpected harmonies, tonal and visual, lyrical and rhythmic. A gentle funky shuffle anchors the clean, folksy guitars of the opening "Lazy Girls", giving what is essentially a tribute to the consumption of orange popsicles, the cool, lazy sweetness - the ice cream headrush - that such a song fairly begs for.
At other times, she pulls our nostalgic heartstrings with the kind of bright, rocking girl pop numbers - "Eye Candy" and "Exclusive", chief among them - that kept The Go-Go's and The Bangles in business twenty-five years ago. As with her work in Luscious Jackson, Cunniff's songwriting is more interesting from a textural, atmospheric point of view. Her melodies are rarely as memorable and the moods and good vibrations she embeds them within, or the witty sonic puns and riddles in their arrangements - and that's the primary (and certainly not insignificant) weakness of City Beach. It may give a misty-eyed feeling of breezy contentment; it may evoke all those brightly colored soft-focus memories of happy days; it may make you want to roll down that window and raise up that moonroof and turn up that volume; but even after you've bathed in the songs' light and baked yourself to a mild lobster glow, you still don't really leave the record humming any of their melodies. Few of the songs really leap out and distinguish themselves individually, and as catchy as a few of them would seem to be, none of 'em really beg you to sing along with 'em the way a good Beach Boys 45 would. That, to me, is sorta crucial.
But then, nothing's really so crucial that we can't take a refreshing dip in this album's generous vibe, or take a long romantic run along its vibrant, sun-drenched shoreline, or enjoy a Hollywood style roll on the beach among its gently rising and falling waves. In essence, City Beach is exactly the album you want to take with you to the beach... the kind of music that won't make too much of itself, and that won't demand too much of our attention while adding its own little bit of noise and vibe and melody to the ambient noise and vibe and melody of places like Riis Park and Coney Island (to name the two Cunniff herself shouts out in the liner notes), or Silver Lake Park Beach. It's one great big, sweet, melty, sticky, cool and headrushy orange popsicle itself, and seriously, who can argue with an orange popsicle?
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"City Beach" by Jill Cunniff
The Militia Group
Released
Producers: Jill Cunniff, S*A*M, Nathan Rosenberg, Dave Schommer, Danny Madorsky
43 min.
SONGS: Lazy Girls - Happy Warriors - NYC Boy - Warm Sound - Eye Candy - Apartment 3 - Love is a Luxury - Exclusive - Kaleidoscope - Future Call - Calling Me - Disconnection
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: Paul Lorentz
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