D.C. Citizens March Against Pepco

This article originally appeared in OpEd News on 6/22/2012.

Several of us were drawn to the office windows beyond cubicles overlooking the intersection of 14^th Street and H Street Northwest in downtown Washington D.C.  On June 12, 2012, more than a hundred D.C. residents had marched down the street in a New Orleans funeral-style protest organized by non-profit group OurDC the mission of which is to “ensure that every city resident has a Good paying job, a Good benefits package, and Good working conditions so that all District families can live Good successful lives” (http://thisisourdc.org/).  The procession was complete with masks, jazz music, dancing, a woman on stilts, and a grim coffin to symbolize the hopeful burial of Pepco’s $42.5 million energy rate hike (1).

The Corporation, Pepco

Pepco, the Potomac Electric Power Company, is the principal supplier of electric energy in the District.  In a recent stockholder’s meeting report issued to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company revealed that CEO compensation increased from $3.6 million to $7.2 million from 2010 to 2011.  The total compensation for the top executives in 2011 exceeded $18 million (2).

These figures would suggest straightforward growth for the company, but the matter is complicated in light of the headline of a recent Associated Press release which reads “Pepco 1Q profit rises 6 percent, but revenue falls.”  Indeed, lower taxes allowed the company to recover from a 21% drop in revenue ($1.63bil to $1.29bil) attributed to mild winter weather causing a decline in electricity usage.  In just one year, the company’s tax expenses fell from $34 million to $14 million (3).

These figures seem really quite silly for a company that was named America’s most hated company by Business Insider almost a year ago.  It beat out Delta Air Line, Facebook, and UnitedHealth which is an impressive feat for a regional outfit that affects only Washington D.C. and nearby Maryland communities.  It’s a reasonable distinction, however, given that a nationwide survey revealed that Pepco’s service caused 70% more power outages than equivalents in other big cities.  Furthermore, the outages lasted more than twice as long.

To be sure, the consequences can be severe.  Norma Jackson, a 76-year-old resident of a retirement community in Silver Spring, MD, almost died during a winter outage that lasted more than three days.  She was hospitalized for over a month and subsequently required dialysis treatments three times per week.

 The great need for infrastructural improvements is readily apparent.  Pepco’s poor quality alarmed Maryland governor Martin O’Malley so much that he felt compelled to publicly condemn Pepco in 2010 and describe the situation as “totally unacceptable.”  He called for an investigation into Pepco’s response times and noted that “power stays on more consistently in many developing nations than it does now in the communities surrounding our nation’s capital” (4).

Pepco has consistently blamed trees as the primary cause of power line disruption.  However, a Washington Post analysis revealed that equipment failures were far more frequently to blame than tree fall.  And indeed, Bill Gausman, the senior VP for strategic initiatives for Pepco Holdings Inc., acknowledged in 2010 the need to spend more money.  However, he asserted that “Ultimately, the public will have to pay for these improvements” (5).

  The Public, Washington D.C.

Sure enough, two years later in 2012, Pepco is attempting to have the public foot the bill for a $42.5 million rate hike.  D.C. residents have taken to the streets continually ever since with the most recent occasion taking place on June 12 by OurDC.  Their mission against Pepco has clear parallels with the general ethos of the Occupy movement and it’s undeniable that they have benefited from the expansion of public consciousness brought about by OWS.

James Adams, a leading organizer for OurDC, acknowledged previous collaborations with the Occupy movement and common perspectives regarding the “fractured morality of the corporate boardroom.”  The two groups temporarily consolidated during a November 2011 march on Francis Scott Key Bridge in a brilliant display of solidarity and organization.  The purpose of the protest was to “call on Congress to create jobs, stop cuts, and make Wall Street banks pay,” according to the OccupyDC website.

However, according to Adams, OurDC membership demographics exclude it from employing the same tactics as Occupy.  The supporters are unemployed, but with families.  As such, there’s no option to partake in park campouts or face imprisonment.  Nonetheless, given the recession-era burdens of unemployment, the protestors cannot afford to take on the burden of a $42.5 million rate hike while Pepco’s top executives are experiencing similar scale pay increases.

While conservatives celebrate the corporation as the center of job creation, Pepco cut its workforce by 40% over the past decade which no doubt contributed to D.C. unemployment.  And of course, any company that can cut labor expenditures while maintaining profit margins will attract investors regardless of product/service quality.  The only sector left to provide work is the local government which ends up offering tax relief to Pepco and thus drains the revenue well that could be used to  create jobs.

The racial implications of such revenue drain are devastating, but not unexpected.  A recent NY Times article noted that Blacks are hit the hardest by job reductions in the public sector given that one in five black workers have public sector jobs (6).  The article highlighted the illusory nature of the American dream.  Since the decline of manufacturing in America and the dramatic rise of black incarceration as a function of disastrous drug policy since the 1970s, the public sector has been the principal means to a decent middle class life for African-Americans.  The immediate effects of its decline are predictable.

Furthermore, it’s had an extreme racial component particularly in D.C. where the Pepco protests are taking place.  Research from the Economic Policy Institute revealed that the 2011 4^th quarter unemployment rate in D.C. was 20.3% for Blacks and 3.3% for Whites.  Unfortunately, this sort of inequality is a dramatic example of a national trend that is bound to reinforce itself due to the personal consequences of class warfare that don’t even involve race.

“Pepco earns millions of dollars and pays its shareholders big checks while asking me, an unemployed mother who’s looking for work to pay more to keep my lights on,” laments Pepco customer Ashley Howard.  “I feel like Pepco’s on welfare and I’m paying to put food on a millionaire’s table.  It’s greed.”

Notes.

(1) http://www.wtop.com/109/2898599/Protesters-take-cues-from-New-Orleans

(2) http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1135971/000119312512137709/d317477ddef14a.htm#toc317477_13

(3) http://news.yahoo.com/pepco-1q-profit-rises-6-percent-revenue-falls-200616839–finance.html

(4) http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/capital-land/2010/08/o%E2%80%99malley-compares-pepco-service-developing-nation/131427

(5) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/04/AR2010120403721_4.html

(6) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/us/as-public-sector-sheds-jobs-black-americans-are-hit-hard.html

In Defense of Best Coast

This article originally appeared in OpEd News on 6/11/2012.

When Crazy For You was released by the indie-pop duo, Best Coast, in the summer of 2010, the response was overwhelmingly positive.  The blogosphere instantly fell in love with the lo-fi beach melodies that evoked Phil Spector’s work with the 1960s vocal acts such as The Crystals and The Ronettes.  Indie mandarins adored the fuzzy guitars, the humid reverbs, and the sun-soaked ennui of lead singer Bethany Cosentino’s amateur reflections.  The record is a perfect soundtrack to the kind of lazy summer most people stop having around the age of 18 when financial and materialistic concerns become more prominent in their lives.

What distinguished Best Coast from dream-surf contemporaries such as The Drums, Beach Fossils, Wavves, and Tame Impala was the potent nostalgia of youth carried in Cosentino’s soaring vocal melodies and lovelorn obsessions.  She, herself, commented in an interview that “nothing makes [me] happier” than “playing to two rows of 16-year-old girls that are all singing every single lyric to her song” (1).   And in that capacity, the debut LP received high praise from major reviewers including  The Los Angeles Times  (3.5/4) , Pitchfork  (8.4/10 BNM), and Robert Christgau, the dean himself, who gave it an A- (2) (3) (4).

Because the band was categorized with outfits like The Drums and Wavves, her ostensibly bratty, shallow, and simple lyrics were well-received and added to the band’s appeal because they resonated so well with the surf-pop and youthful nostalgia narratives.  However, that kind of appreciation is predictably unsustainable.  Like a comic-book superhero movie,  Crazy For You  was basically deemed a thoroughly enjoyable seasonal release, albeit perfectly forgettable and unsuited for deeper literary or acoustical investigation.

It was within this context that Best Coast’s follow up,  The Only Place , was received in mid-May.  For this go-around, the band hired producer Jon Brion to advance their sound to the next level.  He is known for his production work with Kanye West and his graceful soundtrack work on  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind .  This effort found the band dropping the damp, lo-fi sound for a cleaner and more polished sound that puts more focus on tempo, instrumental precision, and Cosentino’s absolutely stunning vocal talent.  Indeed, the production upgrade allows the listener to fully acknowledge her song contributions that were somewhat stifled in  Crazy For You .

The reaction has been expectedly lackluster.  With a 2/5 score in the Guardian, the reviewer laments that the lyrics “about being bored and lazy become cloudingly familiar,” and that the record “needs more sunshine” (5).  Similarly, a 6.2/10 review by Pitchfork opined that the departure of the original summer haziness emphasized the “weakest quality” of Best Coast: the lyrics (6).

Unfortunately, the duo was pretty much doomed from the release of the first LP.  They suffered from a grave miscategorization of which the band itself was likely unaware. Though Cosentino’s simplistic declaratives and yearning melodies were understood as enhancements of the overall beachy lo-fi vibe, they were not correctly recognized as the principally redeeming aspects of the band’s work.  The first record was great not because it was a solid addition to the surf and dream pop catalog of Wild Nothings and The Drums, but because Cosentino achieved something extraordinarily intelligent and creative.  While evoking the sound of 1960′s era girl groups and rock bands, she simultaneously explored themes of postmodern feminism, rebellion, and adolescence that did not exist for the Shangri-Las.

The bipolar narrator in “Crazy For You” is a free and independent girl reflecting on her own irrationality and possible insanity, which is not an exaggeration.  The other verses on the record are the ramblings of an intoxicated, erratic, jealous, and bored ex-girlfriend.  However, even though she had 16-year-old girls in the front row of her shows that might relate to this identity, there’s no doubt that present, too, were males of all flavors.  There was something deeper that was more compelling than just fantasizing about boyfriends.

A little bit of contemplation makes clear that the band’s original record was more than just the soundtrack to a lazy summer.  Given the overarching themes of Cosentino’s musings and repetitions, her lyrics were far from ordinary and even farther from being the weakest quality of the album.  It is a rare postmodern exploration of ennui and the liberated mind.  Most notably, the conflict is internal to Cosentino: she’s singing to herself.  And her bipolar erraticism is not unlike Dostoyevsky’s Nastassya Filippovna from  The Idiot.   Her self-destructive nature is prominent on the first record while the compassionate and pitiful elements are explored on the follow-up.  It is only within this proper context that the follow up record can be regarded as the worthy piece of work which it represents.

The Only Place , lyrically, is the meditation of a maturing young adult.  Though it was attacked for cheaply celebrating a return to the band’s Californian roots and rehashing familiar topics of laziness and heartbrokenness, a closer listen reveals an existential sorrow that was not present on  Crazy For You .  Gone is the carefree ennui, and newly present are themes of taking responsibility and real appreciation for the familiar concept of home.  The original sun-drenched intoxication has been replaced with the quiet clarity and regret of a post-hangover reckoning.  It is not the Thom Yorke’s despair; rather, it is closer to Nicholas Cage’s character’s struggle to reconcile real life with his obsessive compulsive disorder in the 2002 film, Matchstick Men.  Indeed, some of the lyrics sound like the sober musings of the Alcoholics Anonymous variety: “I used to wake up in the morning and reach for that bottle and glass, but I don’t do that anymore…kicked my habits out the front door.”

And yes, in some ways, it is a drug-recovery record.  And in this sense her burnt out sentiments recall Iggy Pop’s Berlin-era wok.  But Cosentino succeeds by employing her incredibly emotive voice and raw honesty: “My mom was right, I don’t wanna die, I wanna live my life.”  As she repeats this refrain in a distinctive Best Coast manner, it is difficult not to be overwhelmed by sympathy and solemnity upon first listen.  It certainly was for me, so I’d suggest trying it for yourself.  It is doubly gut-wrenching when juxtaposed with the childish frivolity of some of her past lyrics: “I just want to tell you, that I’ve always missed you.  I just want to tell you, that I’ve always loved you.”  Though we may remain skeptical at her newfound seriousness, she sings confidently: “Cause you seem to think you know everything, but you don’t know why I cry.”  The complex reconciliation of two opposed personalities is food for thought.

The reality of her journey into adulthood is encapsulated in perhaps the albums strongest verse: “What a year this day has been, what a day this year has been.”  Regardless, even if the revamped lyrical context is not sufficiently convincing, the record is still redeemed by its fantastic pop-sensibilities and vocal melodies.   The delicate and gentle guitar arpeggios of “How They Want Me To Be” recall some of the finer moments of the underrated  Wincing The Night Away  by The Shins.  And the refreshing gentleness extends to pretty much every track.

As a standalone record, it most certainly holds its own.  I suspect that the negative reviews were likely the result of incorrectly evaluating the merits of the first record, for which everyone was hoping a mere extension.  Careful and sympathetic consideration, however, demonstrates that the two can be and ought to be viewed as companion pieces that color in the existential drama of the Best Coast’s young adult.  Best Coast is not a zeitgeist or an acoustic innovation, but they have certainly crafted a poignant narrative that nourishes the imagination which contemporary acts such as Frankie Rose and Real Estate do not even attempt.  It is sorrowful in a way that makes part of me wish I never heard it.

Notes.

(1)      http://vimeo.com/18442034

(2)      http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/28/entertainment/la-et-0728-albumreviews-20100728

(3)      http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14472-crazy-for-you/

(4)      http://social.entertainment.msn.com/music/blogs/expert-witness-blogpost.aspx?_p=b6f8921f-c6b6-405b-88d0-58a7c06c1000&post=b99c44b2-adbc-4ee9-9ca8-38ec70666aef&ref=bfv

(5)      http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/17/best-coast-only-place-review

(6)      http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16609-the-only-place/