A couple of days ago Alyson Camus gave a glowing review to the preteen duo Pretty Little Demons performance at Amoeba , Sunday March 3rd. So I checked out their EP Flower and was quite impressed with Lydia Night's vocals, which both sound their age and jump through age barriers to suggest a timeless rockers husk, like Courtney Love with out the hard drugs.
And it all works very well when they are covering Tom Waits age appropriate "I Don't Want To Grow Up" but in other songs the question of precocity raises its head and never more so than in Courtney Love's classic story of love manipulated through sex,"Violet". I don't want to get into what Love was writing about directly because it is ancient history (and easy enough to research). I saw her twice on the Live Through This tour, including the ultra intimidate BAM gig recorded for Hole Unplugged. a great performance, and she didn't didn't perform"Violet either time.
This was about the last time I took Courtney Love, and the reason why I took her seriously then and never again was because of Kurt of course. There is a Cobain interview somewhere with Kurt hiding in a wardrobe working on a song because he didn't want Love stealing another one from him and no one can listen to Hole's Live Through This without wondering how Love managed to follow it with the terrible Celebrity Skin. It's like her gift died, maybe it did.
"Violet" is a poetic monster of stunted revenge. It is a nightmare love song and the question is, what has that got to do with Pretty Little Demons? Most of this should have them wondering what the hell? Or most of this should have them re-thinking the song, reinterpret the words and recase from nother angle, a different music. And that's what they do. Not musically, musically it is a very straightforward cover with a good drummer and a voice that is simply very young. I am discussing how this effects the songs meaning.
Courtney's version is ABOUT the violet sky and the violet more violence. But Pretty Little Demons aren't going there. Their "Violet" is a fairy tale, with the twist at the conclusion providing the happy ending. It is a journey in fear, "and the sky was made of amethyst, and all the stars were just like little fish", is the begriming of a tale, and a child's tale, comparing the stars to little fish isn't simply a juvenile poetic, it is a girl poetic. Yeah, I know, Billy Corgan Pisces Iscariot blah blah but I don't care about Love, I care about PLD. And for them, for young girls, the liquid image is primal and like a Brother Grimm Tale, it is mythic in nature.
But then what?
Then take away the romantic complication in the use of the word love, make it platonic, and a different world comes up and what you have is two young girls being pressured everywhere by everyone, "love is forever" could apply to parents, to siblings and friends, managers. It is a story of tremendous pressure, a world is pressing down from the sky on the singer, in this fairy tale. Like Grimm Brothers (like Hans Christian Anderssen actually), bad things happy to people but they are metamorphosed into good things by the end. Like the Ugly Duckling who becomes a swan. In "Violet" a world of pressure from all angles is crushing down and even the sky itself seems violet and violent, but in the end, the girls have taken control of the situation. Like all the bests stories, they have a happy ending: "I told you from the start just how this would end, when I get what I want and i never want it again". From the openning of the fish sky and the amethyst through a quest for a violet jewel, till the end of all of the worries of responsibility for themselves, for their parents, to a demanding world, the trip takes them through music to a place where they can change it all back..
So "Violet", which was once a tangled story of revenge becomes a fairy tale for girls about overcoming the pressure of life and emerging the hero of your own story. About making yourself powerful.