Californian alt-rock band The Neighbourhood have always been known for a rather dandyish obsession with their image. They famously insisted on appearing in black-and-white all the time: in their music videos, in photographs for magazines, and even when performing live on Letterman (there were several missed opportunities when photographers and TV stations refused to comply with their aesthetic demands). On “Sweater Weather, their 2012 breakout single, lead vocalist Jesse Rutherford pays an unusual amount of attention to all the clothes in the equation. There’s the titular sweater, of course, but also its sleeves, its holes, a shirt, a blouse, and those breathtaking little high waisted shorts. In “R.I.P. 2 My Youth”, Rutherford demands control of his image even in death: ‘Wrap me up in Chanel inside my coffin’. These sartorial obsessions are hardly out of place in a band with a large teenage fanbase, or one that has flirted with an explicitly hip-hop aesthetic in their mixtapes.
“Born to be Blonde”, the lead single from Rutherford’s upcoming debut solo album & (Nov 10), heightens his dandy quotient while leaning heavily on a wry, ironic take on stereotypical millennial narcissism. There’s Warholian color in the music video, red lipstick, and a heavy dash of blonde ambition for the new self-obsessed generation: ‘I was born to be blonde, maybe all of us are/ If you gave it a try you would feel like a star/ I was born to be blonde and you were born to be too/ You were born to be me, I was born to be you (ooo)’. The track would not be complete without the sartorial boasts: a mother who is “a saint like Laurent” and ‘I'm Chanel winter fall, you're Michael Kors at the mall’. In the ultimate send-up of the short attention spans of the digital generation, he laments that he’s ‘gettin' bored of this song’ (possibly because of its slow tempo) and hurls his smartphone into the sea.
The album cover features eight polaroids of Rutherford against a faded pink backdrop. Judging by the bondage gear in the bottom right persona and the angsty, self-aware introspection in follow-up track “Drama”, there will definitely be a multi-faceted take on the vices, anxieties and insecurities of his generation in his debut album. Time will tell if & is monumental enough to turn him into a ‘fucking icon’.
