my power pop addiction, no. 28 (100)

Good news for the Lonely One’s still miniscule but gradually growing readership: The post I was writing at the time of the Blogger meltdown last week – the one recounting my sordid boiler room adventures to the sweet sounds of Nick Gilder’s Hot Child in the City – has been recovered and inserted in its proper place, May 11. So if you have any curiosity at all as to what I sick fuck I am, feel free to scroll down... I was talking to a good friend of mine yesterday about what a remarkable career Todd Rundgren has had, both in making his own music, from the Nazz, to his solo work, to Utopia, and in producing such a diverse cross section of artists, from the Band, to Badfinger, to Grand Funk Railroad, to the New York Dolls, to Meat Loaf, to XTC, among others. I admire the guy so much, yet I also find his body of work to be quite vexing. I’m talking here about his own material. It really has no consistency in the sense that there’s no signature Todd Rundgren sound for us to grasp onto. I want to believe that he’s first and foremost a pop guy since, for me anyway, this tends to be the stuff that resonates the most and that has a beating heart. He can be quite tender and passionate when he chooses to be, though he does so only sporadically. Part of the problem is that he’s extremely intelligent. This is admirable, of course, but thoughtfulness is not always an asset in music, unfortunately, especially if it leads to material that’s overly intellectualized and brittle sounding as a result. So much of Rundgren’s work consists of him trying to make specifically stylized albums, often very heavy handedly, and in a way that sounds mannered and cold, instead of just letting the music happen more spontaneously. Does that make sense? Even the apparent spontaneity of Something/Anything, with its mistakes, and retakes, and in-studio banter, seems contrived somehow. So we have him doing a series of pop albums, followed by proggy experimentation, followed by a Beatles album, followed by New Wave albums… A lot of this music is very good, but no stable identity emerges, and we’re left wondering just who this Todd Rundgren really is. Having said all this, I certainly adore a lot of his stuff, especially when he works in the power pop idiom. It’s just that I want to love his full body of work more than I do. I want to know Todd Rundgren and get closer to him. But he teases me and then pushes me away, only to bring me back, pleading on my hands and knees, with some perfectly realized bit of pop ecstasy. It’s so frustrating. He may be the closest thing America has to a David Bowie-type shape shifter, only even more elusive, more fragmented, more infuriatingly detached. I want so badly for him to show me some kind of sign, to reveal some enduring core, and to be warmer. But perhaps it’s his not doing these things that makes him as great as he is…