Regina Spektor: "Laughing With"

Well, I guess it’s inevitable. Even the fiercest artists turn to the profound, like a slow pitch to the listener, when the pressure is on for a breakthrough. Now Spektor herself, whom I admire for managing the admiration of a New York scene she once mercilessly interrogated, has resorted to an equivalent of Joan Osbourne’s “If God Was One of Us” with a song that seems tailor made to play during the climactic outro to a television show that, in its most significant moment, also treats you like an idiot.

The premise of “Laughing With” is that you won’t find yourself mocking the immortal or the concept of fate or whatever when something unspeakably horrifying happens to you, and it evokes Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” in that it repeats scenario after scenario that renders us, universally, humble. It’s patterned to sound important, a sort of insipid, condescending insistence that there’s more that unites us than divides us, treating us as if we’re too stupid to navigate worlds of difference and diversity that more closely resemble our everyday lives. This is gimmicky at best, anesthetic at worst. Scratch that: exploitative at worst. I can’t imagine how someone who might have found themselves in one of the scenarios described in this song might react to hearing Spektor telling them how they feel as a result, especially in what sounds like a cash-in radio single. “Laughing With” sounds as if she’s bent on making it big at any cost.

Spektor does her semi-scat vocals and hits all the pleasure points for her fans, preserving those things that Sire thinks distinguishes her from the dozens of other singer-songstresses on its roster. But where she once drove the listener to downright uncomfortable places—where she was ruthlessly exploratory—she instead sounds resigned to sloganeering and gestures better left to the Kelly Clarksons of the world. This song belongs with all the others about bad days and maintaining hope; all the songs like posters on your cubicle wall that tell you to hold on until the weekend; all the songs that tell you that bad things happen for a reason but don’t think you’re smart enough to understand what those reasons are. “Laughing With” is Spektor making some shit up that digs at your deepest fears to make a buck.