New York Music Blog

photos by Liz Clayton, via the Yo La Tengo diary

Yo La Tengo
December 21 and 22
Maxwell's

"Don't be scared!" some dude catcalled at Georgia Hubley during one of the quiet parts of the first night of Yo La Tengo's annual Hanukkah spectacular at Maxwell's. "Oh, I'm not scared," she shot back. This isn't your 40-something record dork's dimunitive Yo La Tengo, anyway. (Maybe your 30something's.) After all, their next album is called Fuckbook. Playing side-by-side all night with Quasi/Jicks drummer Janet Weiss, Hubley and company settled into the nook-like stage they've been playing since before there was grunge.

"I want my shoes. Destroy the world. Goodbye."

Photo by Chris Buck

Stephin Merritt, the musician behind ventures as diverse as the Magnetic Fields and the Lemony Snicket audiobooks, is having a good year. The Magnetic Fields' eighth studio album, Distortion, a twisted, feedback drenched homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, came out in January. More recently, Merritt's been immersed in writing the music and lyrics for a theatrical adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, timed for release at the same time as the film version, directed and animated in 3D by Nightmare Before Christmas creator Henry Selick.

We spoke on the verge of the Magnetic Fields' first full US tour for Distortion, which kicks off October 10 and lands in Jersey City, at the Loews Jersey Theatre, on October 23. In between rehearsals for Coraline and recording new Magnetic Fields material, Merritt still found the time to converse about New York's financial collapse (which his mother may or may not have predicted), the fundamental untrustworthiness of the French (and of Europeans in general), and about how everyone in Merritt's new hometown is shockingly shallow.

Lost in the hullabaloo over the French fashion label Bluedy's premiere of a Stephin Merritt-inspired line of footwear—"Stephin: The shoe drawn in homage to Stephin Merritt"—is the escalation of a long-simmering war between Merritt and the French.

Back in February, Merritt was caught up in New York's Spring Fashion sting, forced to confess his propensity to wear one color and one color alone: brown. "I have brown hair and eyes," Merritt said at the time, "and I believe in matching." What followed was this exchange:

So why didn’t you start wearing black?

Unfortunately, black at this point tends to make you look like a French tourist in Soho. It also makes me look ill. I look ill enough; I really don’t need to call attention to that.

Magnetic Fields fans will also recall Merritt's "The Death of Ferdinand De Saussure," in which Merritt was similarly blunt: "You don't know anything," he admonished the famous French-speaking, Paris-dwelling linguist. "You are nothing." Now, not only are French people producing pointy, occasionally black footwear named for the reclusive pop star—they're outfitting French tourists to look just like Merritt, too. Soon, tuxedos will be all this haunted man has left...

Despite the famously dour lyrical implication of "I Don't Want to Get Over You," Stephin Merritt does not, in fact, dress in black. Actually, he dresses almost entirely in brown, one of those terribly obvious details—like Amy Winehouse being a dead ringer for Janice from Friends—you might not notice until someone else points it out. But Google the man and you'll see, the misanthrope only wears brown. And in this week's NY Magazine, Merritt talks about why he only wears the color of dirt.