Hardy Har Mar

In the opening cut of Kill the Moonlight, the latest celebrated release by the bracing minimalist rock group Spoon, singer Britt Daniel unreels the album's central theme by describing a life lived for "Small Stakes." It could be about any wage slave who "feels all right from Friday night to Sunday" while trying to avoid getting "taken and used." But in the middle of the song, Daniel yanks the line to hook one particular species of small fry: "Small-time danger in your midsize car," he sings. "I don't dig the Stripes, but I'll go for Har Mar."

To knowing rock critics, the couplet seems to make perfect sense. The Stripes are the White Stripes, another bracing minimalist rock act -- one whose image and lyrics hint at a buried musical and sexual history far too complex for anyone committed to Daniel's small stakes to mess with. Har Mar, on the other hand, is Har Mar Superstar, a one-man band out of St. Paul, Minnesota, that plays more than just R&B. The car's driver chooses the latter, it seems, because Har Mar readily provides the kind of simple smirk that helps indie rock kids settle for less.

"I don't know why they wrote any song," Har Mar says with a pout from a tour stop in Detroit. "I don't care. There's not really much that you could ask me that I wouldn't say 'I don't care' to, because I really don't give a fuck. I'm just having a good time. That's pretty much the whole gist of it."

Of course, not giving a fuck has been the gist of much great rock and roll. But unlike punk rockers and new wavers gone by, Har Mar doesn't belie his anomie with burning rage or freeze-dry it into an android stance. Instead, to quote "No Chorus," from his latest, You Can Feel Me, he "taps that healthy round ass," smugly playing a "playa" who's befuddled by the difference between sexy and sexist (just like Spinal Tap). On the phone, Har Mar bristles at the suggestion that his act might be a joke: "I don't know where having a good time has to be a parody. Is that what you're getting at?"

For the most part, that seems to be what Har Mar himself is getting at. Built around squiggly electro-beats that lie halfway between the hard new wave thump of Miss Kittin and company and the jittery futuristic funk of the Neptunes, Har Mar's two albums seem primed to exploit a dance revival that connects everyone from underground clubhoppers to TRL viewers. Yet the R&B lingo ("Sexy lady, dis the haters / Cuz they ain't no players"), the ribald sex jokes ("Deeper, deeper / I can feel your beeper") and fake African-American delivery are so blatantly overdone that they come off like the latest product of alt-rock's perpetual-irony machine. Mystikal or R. Kelly might be equally lascivious -- or, for that matter, equally absurd -- but their outrageousness works on a whole different level.

"Is that because they're black?" Har Mar asks. "I don't know why everyone thinks I'm making fun of something that I can do better than they can. Whatever. I listen to more R&B than anybody you know -- and that's what I make. I make that music because I like to, and I don't understand why people automatically think that I must be kidding."

In the end, as is the case with so many indie ironists, Har Mar's shtick suggests that both he and his critics are right: He does and doesn't "mean it." Even so, there are moments when the stance seems powered by far uglier forces than the spinning magnets of homage and parody. That's especially true on Har Mar's eponymous 2000 debut for Kill Rock Stars, on which one lyric disses a girl's Tommy gear and another lets a lover know "Girl, You're Stupid." Two years later, however, Har Mar has toned down the ugliness for You Can Feel Me.

"I don't know [if it's] tamer, but I think it's more of a pop record. I made [it] before I was on any major label. I guess I do want to reach a larger audience. There are about 200 indie kids that are dying off in every major city, and I don't want to depend on them to pay my rent."