[music] HAR MAR SUPERSTAR - The Handler (Warner)

[dot_fennel]

(Download "DUI" from Har Mar's website.)

One of my favorite album covers is Craig David's Born To Do It. It's basically just David in headphones, with his eyes closed. With the title, though, it's a double-entendre; he was hyped as a musical prodigy (he was 19, I think) and as a sex symbol. In the photo he's concentrating on the music, but his face has just a hint of sensual rapture on it, and his absorption is complete: he could be thinking about sex as easily as snare drums in his oddly hermetic world.

The tropes of mastery for music composition and for sex are so wildly different that the tension is always there to be played with, at least if your audience thinks-- or can be convinced-- that being a studio whiz is cool. But Sean Tillman of Har Mar Superstar has never come anywhere it before, despite being a songwriter who wants people to think he's sexy.

His other two albums (the first one on Kill Rock Stars, the second on Warner Bros.-- not a completely unprecedented sequence, but still a strange one) came off like a big joke, which is what I still assume they were: pudgy, balding, hairy little white guy plays radio-ready R&B with arrogant, shallow lyrics. Ha! I haven't listened to them much, so they could be great, but I'll stand by the perception that Tillman thought it was about as much of a joke at the time as his many critics did.

Now he seems like he's really doing it. The lyrics are still goofy, and you never get the sense when he tells the imaginary crowd to shout "Har Mar is so sexy!" that he, Sean Tillman, will take the results as a personal compliment, but he's at home enough to adorn the album with a flat, direct photo of himself leaning on a massive Rhodes keyboard, and to pick a title that's either quietly confident or unspeakably lame. (See Craig David, above.)

To like the music you have to like electronic soul, but you also have to like indie-kid vocals, oddly-square guitar solos, and all sorts of other touches that we used to think were only cool if the music that went with them was somehow individualistic or primal. This isn't, yet Tillman's half-trained voice works just fine for me anyway. No, nobody would actually mistake this record for Justin Timberlake's latest, but nobody mistook Jonathan Richman for Mick Jagger, either, and one does not look for aesthetic guidance to people who were disappointed about that.

Catchy, exuberant, consistently good, and only kind of dumb.

(Memo to Warner Brothers, though: Nobody will play your CD on the radio if it doesn't have a goddamn track listing on the outside. Putting it on a sticker outside the shrinkwrap doesn't count, because I, like many humans, throw away loose pieces of cellophane after unwrapping purchased items rather than using them to feather my nest or filing them alphabetically for future perusal.)

Comments

[piratedan.livejournal.com]

He always reminded me of nothing so much as Jay Sherman (The Critic) with an ego transfusion and a barrel of cocaine.

He had a series of funny ads for vladivar vodka last November, but they don't seem to be readily available online. I'm sure they're somewhere. My ex-girlfriend and some of her/our friends (the same people who showed me the vodka ads) saw him live last... I think it was New Year's Eve. They said he was coked out of his mind and a complete dick to the audience. They thought he crossed the line from joking-arrogance, in which the audience is in on the joke, to just plain asshole arrogance, in which he literally said things like "fuck you" to the audience. They were very disappointed with the show. But the ads were funny.

[dot_fennel]

I found the vodka ads at harmarsuperstar.com in the downloads section.

After writing that post, I found out who the guest vocalists on his album were, and I have to admit that learning they were all overhyped fake-ass losers (Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, rappers Northern State, and maybe someone else) made me feel like probably on some level I'm being duped if I like the record. But then I had "Body Request" going through my head for a whole day without getting sick of it, so I don't know.

New Year's Show

[(Anonymous)]

I was at the Empty Bottle New Year's show you speak of ... and I don't blame Har Mar for being a little petulant. It was total amateur hour. Everyone there was really young and acted like it was their first show. There were kids storing their coats on the stage and throwing drinks at him, etc ...

Ask your girlfriend if she was one of the drunken retards who apparently had never been to a show before?

As for the cocaine ... Is your lady a police dog? Seemed like Har Mar as usual to me ... It's pretty bad form to spread a rumor like that second or third-hand.

Re: New Year's Show

[dot_fennel]

Dear anonymous person who is probably Sean Tillman:

If you're Sean Tillman, sign your post so I can fawn over you.

If you're not Sean Tillman, sign your post so I don't think you're Sean Tillman.

Love,
D. Fennel

Re: New Year's Show

[piratedan.livejournal.com]

1) The description was more than just a little petulant.
2) Which, if people were doing what you said, is understandalble. Since New Year's Eve is one of the three big Amateur Nights in the U.S. (along with St. Patrick's Day and the day after Thanksgiving), it's easy to believe.
3) ex-girlfriend.
4) She's been going to shows in Chicago since like 1990.
5) Perhsaps I should have said "They thought he was coked out" instead of "They said he was coked out".
6) Other people who went with my ex- had similar things to say.
7) I have to spread rumours: Har Mar is way cooler than I, and I'm totally jealous!