Do I Like HAIM? An Investigation

A lot of the time this blog doesn't have a lot of similarity or crossover with my actual real life. It's not that most of this is a lie* or that what I'm doing here is fundamentally insincere,** it's just that the animating spirit of this project is expression rather than reflection. It's impractical in the extreme, an outlet for the sake of letting out. If I've ever figured anything out in this forum, it's always been either a) a complete freakish accident or b) a means to some other stupid end, usually just to add some verisimilitude to ground a dumb joke.

For the first time in the 15 or so years I've been doing this, I'm bringing to it all the earnest sincerity that Generation X is famously allergic to, with an actual question I've asked people in my life, whom I know personally by their actual names, some of whom have allowed me into their homes and vice versa. I'm talking physical humans, made of matter and hair and phlegm, just like you probably are, just not to me (mostly). It's hard to think of a good metaphor to explain exactly what I mean, but I guess: you know how you know your mom? It's like that. These are people I could, like, touch if I wanted to. You know, back before touching became primarily a means of plague-cootie-transmission.

I think I gave it away maybe in the title, but the question is: do I like HAIM?

It's a band, in case you weren't sure.

And also to be absolutely one hundred percent clear, this is NOT a rhetorical question or a kicking-off point for a mental exercise or some kind of exegesis about the state of popular music and the various niches this particular three-piece slots into. I am literally asking if I like this or not because I've been at it for a while and I genuinely can't tell. Seriously.

Let's start with the basics. The group is three sisters, all of whom have the same last name, which is Haim. This is good. Family bands are already a good story, a nice way in to know and understand something new to you on a narrative level, not like trying to understand four random posturing douche-bros using music as a nozzle to spray testosterone and insipid metaphors all along the street-facing wall of popular culture.

But then I found out the a-i-m is pronounced like "I'm" not "aim," as in the beginning of the phrase "high-minded hootenanny pop," not the start of the question "hey, man, is this any good?"

Also: not pronounced the same as late actor Corey Haim. So demerits right out of the gate.

Plus it's one of those stylized band names, HAIM, all caps, like that. I find this approach to be pretentious and pushy, like hey, just let me get past the band name and get to the part where I can get my ass shakin'. But no, I gotta stop and make sure I'm conforming to the brand stylebook, like adidas or something. It also makes me think of other bands with stylized names, like Mötley Crüe, which is automatically bad. Diaeresis? More like diarrhea, am I right? I'm right. So far this is trending in the wrong direction.

Now I'm comfortable with everyone liking whatever they like, that's not for me to police... anymore. If you would have asked me in my 20s or even a goodly chunk of my 30s to talk about music, it would have been less a conversation and more me finding opportunities to be demonstrably disapproving of groups/acts I wanted to be absolutely sure I was never even accidentally associated with. Once you have a mortgage, however, it starts to become WAY less important to conceal your secret affection for a boy band song here and there. A bop is a bop and there's no two ways about it. And we both get to decide what that means, independently.

So the goal here is not to convince you of anything, but rather just for me to find some kind of peace with this question that has become sort of central to understanding myself on an existential level. "OK, but hey," you're definitely thinking, "are you sure this isn't a side-effect of being locked in your own house for three months abusing your poor pancreas with a diet of only carbohydrates and corn syrup?" And I'm like "well, the joke's on you because I can obviously read the thoughts inside your brain, I guess all those Oreos finally made me psychic." Point for me.

In reading some stuff about this band, I have to say the most common comparison they get is with Fleetwood Mac. I know for most people that's an immediate eyebrow-raiser as Fleetwood Mac is a monster in terms of critical and commercial success, not to mention just general cultural impact. Already it can go both ways by setting the bar too unfairly high on one hand, but maybe goosing their reputation by association at all on the other. For me, and I recognize this is a quirk of my own personality, it's a problem because I hate just about all 1970s music. Like all of it.*** I hate Zeppelin, I hate Pink Floyd, I don't like Paul Simon or Rod Stewart, I'm not here for Three Dog Night, I find James Taylor to be unlistenable, corny trash and literally all of disco can choke to death on a sequin. Queen is OK and there are like one or two Elton John songs, but THAT IS IT. As far as I'm concerned, all of my musical tastes were forged in the Second British Invasion.

So with HAIM, I'm already skeptical out of the gate.

Do they write their own music? Yeah, mostly. Some producer guys parachute in and get writing credit on tracks.

Do they play their own instruments? Yeah, and pretty fucking well. Danielle (if you don't know which is which, she's usually the one in the middle) Haim made her bones as a touring guitarist and they all seem to be multi-instrumentalists, which is always impressive.

Do they have an inordinate number of unsurprisingly cinematic videos directed by Paul Thomas Anderson? Inexplicably, they do as well!

The confusing swirl comes with the music itself. I mean, it's competent, well-produced, expertly played, but is it... good?

A lot of it I listen to and I really want to like it. It's definitely likeable, which is maybe the issue. My 2020 tastes are pop-oriented, normally small-batch acts either outside the mainstream or mainstream-adjacent. I like hooks and four-chord progressions, I like verse-chorus-verse structures, I like a nice middle-eight built around a minor chord, I like expressive vocals, I like a lot of words, not a lot of noodling or solo-ing... all of those things are there! So where am I getting twisted?

Competence is hard to deny entirely. I've never heard a HAIM song and said "ugh, this is shit." But is "If I Could Change Your Mind" any good? No, it really isn't. And the video is this dreadful fight between them being a teenaged girl group and a pulsating four-piece pop-rock combo (some token dude behind a drum kit). And the song itself is washed-out generic dance music devoid of a personality stamp.

Normally with bands, the line is "yeah, I like them, but mostly their old stuff." But it's possible they're working in reverse. "The Wire" is good and you can see the roots of where it could go. And now we're in the middle of a blitz of new videos and YouTube clips for an album that doesn't come out until the end of June this year, so a re-evaluation generally is appropriate. Overall, they seem to be getting better?

Some of it is cheating because a lot of the songs I first hear in videos and a lot of the videos are them walking through some part of Southern California (seriously it's like half their videos), which is a way to make me like a thing without trying. The older I get the more the streets and venues of my native space are an albatross of nostalgia around my neck I don't really have a lot of interest in being rid of. More of a pet than a curse. That doesn't mean "Summer Girl" isn't a kind of unfocused damp squib built around a forgettable beat and cursed with the unforgivable sin of using a saxophone in pop music.

Kinda same for "I Know Alone" which sounds like something someone hummed and liked, but forgot to make into a whole song, and also manages to electronify to death all the musical proficiency involved, a common theme in all this. The whole experience is frustrating.

"Want You Back" is pleasant enough. I give the verses some credit for leaning in a more 80s direction, but really it's just a different kind of cheese, more Bonnie Tyler than Bonnie Raitt, even if the simple but perfect chorus almost saves the whole thing.

"Don't Wanna" is definitely a turn more in the Raitt direction and way more showcases instruments over sonic whirs and belches they could squeeze out of Pro Tools or whatever.

I guess that's where I'm at with it: frustrating, a lot of it. I can listen to it, but at the end I find myself pacing and muttering a bit, trying to grapple with... something. I definitely don't get that when I'm listening to Chvrches, which is saying something considering how they spell THEIR name.

I will not doubt that HAIM can bring it, though. Listen to the urgency and the build they get out of two chords (eventually all of four total I think) played very simply and a brazenly straightforward chorus in "Now I'm In It", the kind of song on its own that can justify a whole album.

And "The Steps" probably sounds most like a song played by three talented musicians doing good stuff, built around a simple, fun guitar riff. It's also got one of the best videos I've ever seen (the one for "Now I'm In It" is up there as well, just rare, stellar stuff in 2020), building to an explosive, cathartic punishment of a drum kit by Danielle in the last 20 seconds or so. If I'd listened to it without seeing the video, would I have liked it as much? Are the country overtones in the verses more than I would normally tolerate in a pop song?

I don't know. I genuinely don't. If I did I suppose I would have gotten less than however many hundreds of words I've put into this so far. If you know the answer, please feel free to comment or email. If it makes it any easier for you, please keep in mind that there's literally nothing riding on the answer.

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*It is.

**It totally is.

***I know the category is fuzzy since not all these bands started in the 70s and stopped in the 80s, but you know what I mean by 70s music. Normally by the way it sounds bad.