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Friday, November 28, 2003
Uh, zing, Close to Home.
Take that, Ebert! posted by Mike B. at 11:53 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
I haven't been keeping up on the blogs so well lately, but I did notice somedisco Scott mention Stellastar in passing and I'm curious how people are regarding them. I sorta-kinda know them, and at any rate saw 'em in a number of small clubs in Brooklyn a year or more ago and am on the mailing list, etc., but feel utterly unmotivated to buy the album now. But I do know they're on a major label and all, but are they being fellated by the UK press or anything?
The problem with knowing a band before other people notice them is that it's hard to get a good sense of how well-known they are, since you naturally tend to pay attention to any small mention of them, whereas with a band you were otherwise unfamiliar with, it would take a greater number of mentions to start to build up a recognition... (Incidentally, here is a good somedisco post on the Pixies.) posted by Mike B. at 11:19 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Really, I think one of my primary goals in life is to get myself in a situation where I can play whatever music I want, whenever I want, as loud as I want.
In related news, apparently my stereo system is so good that I can actually play Lightning Bolt on it and make it louder than a Lightning Bolt show. Man, I gotta get me a soundproof room or something. posted by Mike B. at 10:39 PM 0 comments
One of the reasons I like putting CDs in binders (although I mainly don't anymore) is that sometimes you'll see a CD and forget what the hell it is. This happened the other night whilst flipping through one of my binders (looking for Blur's 13, as it happens, which it appears I've lost--damnit!), and I put the mystery CD in my changer to listen to later. I just put it on tonight and it turned out to be Gavin Friday's "Shag Tobacco."
And--oh my god--what a fucking great record. It's like a whole disc of b-sides for Pulp's This is Hardcore, sorta--dark grooves and sex and lots of bass, while still being very English and theatrical and like that. The AMG review pegs it as an early trip-hop thing, predating Mezzanine but still having a remarkably Massive Attack-ish single called "Angel." This is from '96, y'all. It's also interesting to hear because it sounds like a strain of our musical past (relatively speaking) that remains almost entirely unre-explored. You hear it, too, in Scott Walker, but what Friday's doing lyrically is very different from, say, Portishead, and musically it's way different from what we hear today. Sure, people are doing the cabaret-pop thing, but they're almost always doing it with much more of a wink and a nod than you see here--Momus and Stephen Merrit come close, but they both have too much of a tendency towards dittyism to qualify, and we won't even get into the way that electroclash vocalists have totally misinterpreted the point of cabaret. Dan Bejar comes really close, but he's never seen fit to go whole-hog with arrangements the way Friday does here; certainly you'll never hear something like "Mr. Pussy," which starts off with a oom-pah band before a full, huge string section swoops in for a minute or so before ducking back out for a spoken-word interlude. Tom Waits does the Weill thing well, but there's always seemed to be almost no sex in his worldview. (If there is sex, it's only there as a blink between arguments or the more interesting, to Waits, bits of pickups or passed-out nights or freakshows, etc.) Of course, it's also interesting because, while I never listened to the album very much, one song on it has a very strong resonance for me. The second track, "Caruso," had a favored place on one of the first mix tapes my friend Vanessa Floyd made for me, and it was pretty much those mix tapes that introduced me to the wider world of music. (I lied, Vanessa--I didn't own Parklife at the time...) If I recall correctly, Vanessa liked that song so much that she wrote her college entrance essay on it, which yes, is pretty much the coolest thing I can think of. It still sounds amazing today--it's just a plain old great song. So is "You, Me, and World War III," if you're P2Ping for tracks. I kind of miss Vanessa--I think she more or less permanently abandoned our hometown, and I haven't heard from her in quite some time. If you happen to read this Ms. Floyd, drop me a line--I owe you a mix CD or two... So anyway, I think I'll be putting this disc into regular rotation, and maybe I'll have a thing or two additionally to say in the coming days. We shall see... posted by Mike B. at 10:07 PM 0 comments
It's not actually Dale Peck, but it's pretty close. Read about him reviewing his day and giggle. posted by Mike B. at 12:23 PM 0 comments
Conversation overheard between two old music-biz hounds, Danny Goldberg and Joe...
J: What did you used to call the Artist Formerly Known as Prince? D: Hey, how ya doin'? J: What would you call him? D: That's what I'd call him. I'd see him in the hall and just say, "Hey, how ya doin'?" He's going by Prince again now, but back then his office would call and say, "The Artist wants to talk to you," and he'd get on the line and I'd say, "Hey, how ya doin'?" It seemed to work. posted by Mike B. at 12:02 PM 0 comments
Monday, November 24, 2003
So, uh, this looks weird. I only recognize one person each from the 80's and 90's night (the awesomeness of seeing the King Missle guy speak aside), although I suppose that's sort of to be expected from a young'un like myself. Would be nice if there was more of a paper section to the event.
Speaking of which--if they have that music crit conference at EMP, why isn't there one in NYC? You'd save a bundle on transportation and hotel costs, after all, since about 50% of well-known music critics seem to be NYC-based. Anyone want to organize one? We could maybe do it at The Tank, or Columbia Journalism School, or...? posted by Mike B. at 1:43 PM 0 comments
Friday, November 21, 2003
Walking to work from the subway this morning, I was listening to Jay-Z's "What More Is There To Say" while passing a garbage truck that was beeping in such a way that it matched up perfectly with the beat and pitch of the pre-chorus. Ah yes, I thought, sometimes you forget that that's what modern music is built from. The harmony of garbage trucks... posted by Mike B. at 6:02 PM 0 comments
Gabba is back up, FYI. posted by Mike B. at 2:54 PM 0 comments
Check out the track list for Tricky's "Back To Mine." Made me slap my head and go, "Of course he likes Morphine!" posted by Mike B. at 1:49 PM 0 comments
Listening to the Unicorns right now, and boy oh boy am I pissed the fuck off.
Hey, so remember that Pitchfork review? It's totally wrong. Totally. Let's see, where to begin... 1) "what truly sets Who Will Cut Our Hair apart is the near total absence of traditional verse/chorus/verse framework in their songs" This is true only if you are a half-deaf 3rd-grader with tintinitus who is currently being fellated by one of the band members. I don't really know how to refute this, since I don't know how you can honestly listen to this album and not hear verse-chorus-verse structures in the songs. I can diagram it for Eric if he wants, I guess. Like, let's try "Les Os,": Intro->hook->verse->hook->verse->hook->bridge->solo->bridge (in which he quotes the Flaming Lips--I shit you not!) Is this "I Wanna Be Sedated?" No, but it's hardly Shoenberg, or even Deerhoof. It's definitely not formless. The only defenses here would be "Well, I don't hear a structure," or "Well, the band members didn't intend for there to be a structure," both of which are so lame that I don't really need to bother, do I? Intentionality is a fallacy, y'all... Anyway, as a supposedly "formless pop song," it doesn't come close to, say, Beyonce's "Yes." A 50 BPM freeform pop slow-jam? Oh yeah. But Beyonce is successful and mainstream and on a major label, whereas the Unicorns are unknown and Canadian and on Alien8, so we know without even listening which one's experimental, right? 2) "Songs shift effortlessly from moment to moment, never once relying upon the crutch of repetitive composition to create the illusion of a powerful hook." Again, I'm not entirely sure how to refute this except to say: listen to the damn album, willya?! Take just the first track: there's a keyboard part that comes in at 0:17 that lasts through the rest of the song; the vocal line that comes in with the keys takes a break for a chorus and then repeats at 0:39, followed by another chorus, and the chorus comes back at 1:39, and all of these sections have basically the same bass and drums part behind them. There are lots of hooks, and they're often repeated, both continually and at different points in the song. 3) "These days, when "epic" describes a line at the bank, it doesn't seem adequate to describe the scope of some of these tunes..." It's not adequate because it's not accurate. The longest song is 5:30. Having lots of hooks does not make a song "epic." There's nothing that sounds remotely like a Who song or a Queen song or "November Rain," which are pretty much my standards for "epic but conceivably able to be played on the radio." (When I really think of "epic" I think of MBV and Mogwai and like that, generally.) Fair enough, there are a lot of different bits, but they mostly add up to fragments and sketches, due to...well, not very good songwriting, really. 4) "When it's so easy for bands to stay behind the indie-pop curve that you'd think someone's handing out ice cream back there, The Unicorns are ahead. In fact, they're so far ahead that superficial distinction becomes virtually unnecessary; they're striking at the most fundamental structure of the pop song itself." You can't "strike" at a "fundamental structure" when it's abstract. You can play with it, change it for your own uses, sure, even invent a new structure. But strike at it? Hardly. And they're not even changing much. Let's not even get into "subversion" issues or I'll start pounding the table with my shoe... The sad part about all this is that the Unicorns are an okay band that could have a good follow-up if they buckled down and tightened up their songwriting a bit. And I would totally be fine with someone liking them and writing a positive review of the album, even if I wouldn't. It's OK indie-pop. But it's sad if the only way you can allow yourself to like something like this is by convincing yourself that it's "experimental." Sure, the band gives off all the necessary signs--token pop act on an avant label, lo-fi production, wonky keyboards--but that doesn't mean you should go for it. Maybe they just didn't have a lot of money, you know? But I think it's these signs, coupled with their poor songwriting skills, that are leading folks to label them as experimental. But if this is experimental, then so are the New Pornographers, Jay-Z, XTC, etc., etc. These folks are just better songwriters and are adept at using their weirdness and their playing with forms as keys to better songs. Tons of NP songs end with extended codas/bridges, which is essentially what the Unicorns do that gets them labeled "formless," except the Unicorns' endings are kind of misplaced, whereas the NPs' are brilliant blasts of pop. They're not experimental--they're just not good songwriters yet. That said, I did really like one song on the disc, "I Was Born (A Unicorn)." Track this one down if you can. If I just heard that posted somewhere, I'd be excited for the whole disc, and hey, I'm willing to admit that maybe I'd have a different opinion about it than if my first exposure to them had been the PF review. (I'm willing to be persuaded...) It starts off with this great, rockin' drumbeat, drops in a perfect major-key guitar riff that I'll be humming all day, and then rides the riff well into the verse. The little two-string riff that goes under the vocals is perfect, as is the half-step vamp that closes it off. The singing on the chorus is kind of annoying, but it's also pretty funny, so it's OK. And then there's a break with handclaps! Yeah! This is one of the few places on the disc where the refusal to repeat riffs pays off. Also, I love bands' theme songs. (Like the All Girl Summer Fun Band's--man, is that good, and it does a similar thing.) Gotta say something about the lyrics, though. PF says they're "sometimes smarmy," but they're really almost always smarmy, and worse, the disc leads off with a big dose of smarm. Maybe not even smarm: a smirk, a leer, a joke to make themselves seem smarter, which is the worst kind of joke there is. Guys, lay off it. Maybe you need to listen to Wayne Coyne a little more on this one. posted by Mike B. at 12:28 PM 0 comments
Thursday, November 20, 2003
New York can actually be quite lovely in November sometimes, if it is clear and not too cold. If you are crossing Broadway at 23rd street, for instance, there is a pleasant busy-but-not-too-busy buzz to the area, and although it being dark at 5 might not be ideal, everything looks very well-defined, and lights from blocks away shine brightly (as do the intrusive LCD video ads above subway entrances). The wind blows and maybe you didn't dress quite warmly enough that morning, but it's still very--pleasant.
You spend so much time in one area in New York, if you have a steady job--a caveat I regrettably feel it necessary to add in these depressed days--that you have to work sometimes to make it feel foreign, because there are times when foreign feels nice. If you have been compelled to move to a big city, it almost goes without saying that you feel this way. If you want consistency and slow change, it's possible to find this within a city if you limit yourself to an unchanging 4-block area, but you're much better off moving 200 miles away to eastern Long Island or Connecticut or above Albany or maybe even Vermont. (Slow change and consistency pretty much being Vermont's state motto.) But in a city, sometimes you'll want it to feel new again, want to break that routine, and so you can just cross the street, or walk past where you'd normally stop a few blocks uptown, or visit the park at a different time of day. And everything looks a little different, even though you've only moved to a miniscule degree. Maybe it's the light, but maybe it's the Christmas decorations. But it's nice. It slows you down, and it brings you out of the crowd sometimes. It is also nice to walk alone, and without any destination. It is nice to, say, notice new shops, or stop and read menus at places with names that you're fairly certain translate as "Flower of Salt" and to wonder exactly what that means or is supposed to convey, and what exactly "tastings" are and if you could do that because it sounds just fabulous. You notice the vacant storefronts filled with temporary fly-by-nights selling ornaments and coats out of boxes, notice furniture stores with interior design services and interiors on sort of a loft model which looks charming, notice different delis and oddly appealing awnings and men walking behind you with coats and microphone stores and billiard halls. It is nice, as I say, to be alone--or to feel alone, anyway, aloneness being a highly relative concept in areas such as this. It's nice to walk with your hands in your pockets and not worry about how you look or what you should be doing, or even how fast you're walking and whether anyone is annoyed at you. It's nice to think about being alone, to be free of expectations and other people's schedules and all of that. And you think it might be nice to see a movie alone, which you haven't done in quite a while, and if that movie could maybe be about dragons somehow. Dragons or cars. Or car-driving dragons. You think a little about how important aloneness used to be to you--how loneliness got to be oppressive at times, but how good it also felt to walk calmly like that, unencumbered, and see a movie, or browse through the bookstore, or sit and drink tea. How important that was to your creative process--how many ideas you used to get while out walking, how that feeling of the wind on your skin seemed to encourage you to think in words or melodies or rhythms instead of goals and processes and concerns. How maybe--or maybe not--that's affecting you. The not-having-aloneness thing. It is nice to be alone after spending so much time, so much time, 9 hours a day, in an office. Nice to be alone--or feeling alone--and very nice to be outside, silly as that may be. How outside can it be in a place like this? But it is, technically or otherwise, outside. There's the breeze, and the expanse of sounds, and no goddamn fluorescent lights. (Swear to God those are going to make your head explode.) Because OK, sure, it's not a park, and you wonder if anyone would tell you if the trees didn't actually turn colors this year, but it's outside. Outside enough. All you need is an open space, and you seek them out in the city: areas where the canyons of buildings--doesn't matter the height, even the three-floor factories in your neighborhood are bad--breaks up for a half-acre or so and you can get a real sense of space, of sunlight. Intersections are urban fields, and the one at 23rd and Broadway is a great one, multi-tiered, as Broadway is actually crossing 5th here, with a park on one side and a nice broad sidewalk on the three others. You can cross and turn your head to the sky and stop in the middle of the crosswalk (though not too long, it's a short light) and look up and down the great broad avenues. You can take a deep breath and feel quickly what it would be like to be abandoned and depopulated, but also feel what it's like to be here at foreign times. You can see all the lights, see the buildings up on 34th street, see the Empire State (which you love with a quiet passion that you never quite feel comfortable sharing with anyone) and see the mist shrouding its spire and wonder what it feels like up there, way up high, maybe leaning out a window or just sticking your hand out and flying it in the high winds which your father (or a friend of your father's) has assured you proliferate there, way up high. And eventually you get back to the office and are weirdly calm and maybe a little sad but maybe a little more at peace, too, like you've been grieving, or, I suppose, like a kind of shock, of numbness. But it's a good numbness. It's a transferral of body parts, a shifting of priorities and nerve endings, of thoughts and all that bullshit. And you put on music when you get back, a CD instead of your normal MP3 playlist, because you want something that's going to sustain a mood. And you sit a while, and you think. posted by Mike B. at 6:14 PM 0 comments
Jesse scores the top story on Salon today with a piece on Berkeley Breathed that is well worth reading. posted by Mike B. at 4:41 PM 0 comments
It's weird--despite this whole "community" thing, I really feel pretty separate in the blogosphere. I guess I was more part of it back in the Justin/Dizzee era (ah the glory days of four months ago), and maybe it's because I refuse to post on ILM, but this kind of stuff kind of weirds me out. I'm one of the biggest referrers to NYLPM? Really? (And Matt's Fluxblog is one of the biggest music blogs? But I'm going drinking with him on Saturday!) And Luke only gets 50 hits a day more than me? Weird.
I guess it's all pretty small anyway, so it makes sense, but it's still a bit odd. In my head it's not really personal--this ain't no party, this ain't no LiveJournal--but it's also not, I dunno, that wide either. I'm not Pitchfork, know what I mean? People aren't going to randomly notice me. Although I have gotten a few really nice little life morsels as a result of the blog--mail from some of my favorite people, mostly, and stronger connections with people I'm glad to know. But that's really it. I've gotten mentioned specifically on NYLPM a few times, but I don't think Simon ever linked directly to me, and blogs that feel like they have a "bigger influence", like Gawker and TMFTML, don't seem to acknowledge me. Which is fine--don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that given that, it seems odd to be known by other people. Really, my audience isn't bigger than three college English classes... Got this from Somedisco, which I'd been shockingly lax in checking lately, due to general business. Thanks for the link, though. I should post more. I never check referrer logs. posted by Mike B. at 4:02 PM 0 comments
One song on the album I was discussing earlier is great, actually--it's a super-poppy love song to Britney Spears! A bunch of good JT rips on there, too--"Now that your boyfriend's gone bye bye bye / He was singing my songs in the third grade..." Something along those lines. I'll post it when it gets closer to release date. posted by Mike B. at 1:10 PM 0 comments
Knifin' around. Finally. posted by Mike B. at 12:50 PM 0 comments
Limp Bizkit covers Nirvana's "You Know You're Right" and the world somehow does not collapse upon itself. Truly, we live in miraculous times. posted by Mike B. at 11:59 AM 0 comments
Just to give you an idea about what I'm up against, here would be my criticisms of the album.
When I put it on I had to check the label copy to see if it was actually mixed and mastered, which it was, but it sure didn't sound like it at points--maybe some of the mixes are still rough. The vocals just sounds really badly mixed. Sometimes under-, sometimes over-, but almost always badly processed. This would be one of those things I couldn't fix personally, as mixing vocals has always been a weak spot of mine, but my ear's good enough to tell me that there needs to be some more processing on there. The first track is good and dancey-poppy, with a bit of a salsa feel, but the backing just doesn't hit it enough. It's comparable to "Seniorita," sorta, but then, of course, it just doesn't do it as well. The beat's too constant, and the whole thing is nowhere near hyper-poppy enough. I could totally hit this shit (some guitar and loud noises would really help) but it might not be what they're looking for. But it should be. The second track starts out OK as a piano-ballad kind of thing. But then it hits the tagline, which is "L.A. Blue!", which is so fucking bad I can barely stand to type it. It's so overused, so bad, so done. I want to sit him down and say, think about this! You must live in a specific area of LA--why not use that instead? Why not think about the street you live on or the one you drive down to get to her house--what do you see there? How does that resolve? If you're leaving, what's around in the vehicle you're leaving in? Specifics! Anyway, I guess it's sort of a boring subject, but you get the idea...too many ballads overall, which seems to be symptomatic of pop, but that's not to say that the non-ballads couldn't kill. posted by Mike B. at 11:15 AM 0 comments
Today I'm going to meet a former New Kid On The Block, because he is signing to our label and I am ostensibly doing A&R for it. I think I might shit my pants.
I'm listening to the album right now--it's been finished for a few months--and it's kind of a weird experience. It's definitely pop, and it's definitely bothering me, but it's not like I'm some snot-nosed 24-year-old indie brat who can't listen to two seconds of Z100 without barfing. I genuinely love pop, and I can clearly hear the JT and Ricky Martin and Dido and everything else in this disc, and I'm down with that. But I have some pretty clear and specific criticisms of it, and while I often do of music--I'm something like a music critic these days, after all--I can do something about this. I can address my concerns to the artist before release and he could conceivably change it before we put the disc out. But it goes even farther than that, because I'm going to get the master tapes, which means I could theoretically go home, load it into ProTools, take out the tepid backing and drop in my own from FruityLoops. Then I could give the new mixes to the label heads and the artist and see if they liked it better. But I probably won't. I try not to get too invested in this job, as it doesn't really seem worth it. (Since, you know, we sign ex-New Kids, among other problems.) But then again, I'm feeling really punchy today, so maybe I will. posted by Mike B. at 10:58 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
I think Simon over at No Rock 'n' Roll Fun is kind of letting his fandom blind him here--or something like that. What I'm trying to say is that he has a legitimate problem with the article, which was sucky (although I'm not sure how surprising it should be that articles written about pop musicians that have lasted this long--and who, admittedly, play a lot of the right middlebrow-appropriate cards--would be fairly fawning), but he transfers this sucking problem to Mr. Albarn, who doesn't seem to be particularly complicit in the adulation. Seems to me that he was being pretty honest about the whole project under discussion. Sure, there are legitimate reasons why an old-time Blur fan--which Simon strikes me as, I could be wrong--might be mad at Damon right now, but I'm not sure this is really juicy fodder. (And anyway, Bono was never the solo-album sort.)
As regards the LP in question, I think Damon has a fairly sensible attitude about it--I certainly haven't heard about it, so I'm not sure how heavily it'll be promoted (and if there are only 5k copies being made, I doubt 2k will go to promos), but it sounds like it's being pitched just right. Sure, it's not being posted for free, but on the other hand, I'm sure that given the limited availability versus the large mass of Blur fans, it'll end up getting "posted for free" anyway. And it's nice to have a physical object in your hand for this sort of thing. I'd be annoyed if this kind of thing rose to an Andy Partridge or Bob Pollard level, but one tossed-off demo disc is nothing to get too bothered about. And hey, sometimes this sort of thing can works out fantastically well. What I really like is the idea that these songs could be hit singles, but he's putting them out there in raw form. So why shouldn't someone cover them and get hit singles off 'em? If that happens, then the project really will be interesting, rather than a simple pleasantry-or-not that it stands as now. It's been interesting relistening to the old Blur stuff in the context of Graham's departure. He was gleefully fellated by the critics, so maybe this is just heightened expectations being dialed back, but I do find myself listening to the mid-period stuff and hearing the lead lines and thinking, "Wow, that is kind of wanky, huh?" I'd hate to accuse a lead guitarist of being too dissonant, having had some trouble with that myself, but it does seem clear that many times there are really nice pop songs beneath all of Graham's noises that might stand up even better without them. This is to say nothing of his role in the group's arrangement and sequencing process, which I know little about. While I disagree about 13--took a while to get going, but now pretty fantastic to my ears--it is true that I've only listened to Think Tank 5 times since purchasing it, so maybe Graham's absence is significant after all. Dunno. But I am interested to hear this new album, despite the fact that it has a title so horrendous that I refuse to reprint it... posted by Mike B. at 4:32 PM 0 comments
Proper jobs may slow us down a bit, friend, but they'll hardly stop us. posted by Mike B. at 3:30 PM 0 comments
Well, looks like Britney's gonna go gold in one week, so there should be enough momentum for at least two more singles, so even if they do a ballad next, it's "Toxic" for sure after that, which might not be a bad strategy, actually--use it to pick up flagging sales after Christmas. But what do I know? posted by Mike B. at 2:20 PM 0 comments
HIGHWAY PUDDING SPILL!
HIGHWAY PUDDING SPILL! HIGHWAY PUDDING SPILL! I'm kinda hungry now. posted by Mike B. at 12:45 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
So "Toxic" is kinda Bollywood, huh? posted by Mike B. at 2:09 PM 0 comments
From a DeRo article on MBV:
Because of its labored creation, fans assumed Shields was a perfectionist. "That's one of the great misconceptions about this band, that everything is intellectual and there's an awful lot of time spent in the studio perfecting things," he said. "Everything you ever hear on our records, virtually all the overdubs are first-take stuff, and all the guitar parts are first or second take. It's more like capturing the moment. For me, everything hinges on one critical thing, and that's being in an inspired state of mind." Are you fucking serious? First or second take?! Well, I feel a lot better about my recording techniques now... (link via an old QV post) posted by Mike B. at 12:46 PM 0 comments
Really fucking fantastic piece on In Utero from Tim Grierson, editor of The Simon. It's a wonderful little piece of personal criticism. Check it:
In Utero powerfully made the case that he would be his own man, goddamnit, but that he wouldn't destroy his talent in the process. It was a rare show of defiance that doesn't come across as petty or smug. But, lord, is it angry. The songs are still there, and they've survived intact. But it divided people at the time, and still does. Nirvana fans who get tired of the fairweathers going on and on about Nevermind cling to In Utero as their badge of honor, as proof of their true band loyalty. I wouldn't put myself in that category of supporter, but I do prefer In Utero simply because I feel like it still isn't finished telling me things about Cobain. Nevermind feels almost too perfect: It's lovely rush of hooks and ennui can almost pass right through you, especially as the years accumulate. In Utero keeps punching people in the nose; you can't wash dishes or pay bills when it's on. You keep checking back with it to see if it's lost any of its aggression, to see if it's decided to kiss and make up. It hasn't. IU is similar to Lightning Bolt's Wonderful Rainbow in that it manages to make noisy, harsh music sound awfully tuneful and appealing. WR is noisier and IU is catchier, to be sure (seeing as how Kurt did have a bunch of actual songs in there) but I think the lesson, rarely learned, is the same: noise is easy but noisecraft is hard, and it's that noisecraft--very similar, in its own way, to songcraft--that makes for truly great music. posted by Mike B. at 12:32 PM 0 comments
A correspondant writes in, re that Unicorns/FoW thing...
Now I'm looking at the Unicorns review. Apparently songs with repeating motifs but no verse-chorus-verse alternation are "formless." Right. I guess this class I'm taking where we analyze Schoenberg, Berg and Webern -- all nonsense. Gah. Good point. posted by Mike B. at 11:06 AM 0 comments
Caught the first 15 minutes or so of the Britney ABC special last night before I had to go to practice.
The first thing they did was a performance of Toxic. With an orchestra. Now, let's just break down why that was really funny. 1) There was a live orchestra. a) The orchestra parts on the original song were almost certainly sampled. b) The orchestra was playing these sampled parts live. While, at the same time: 2) The vocals were clearly not live. So a live orchestra was playing a sampled part while the singer lip-synced to prerecorded vocals. It was perfect. Don't get me wrong--I'm not gonna get all "It's so artificial!" on your asses. It was goddamn pop music. This is what it's supposed to. Matter of fact, I really appreciated and loved the ridiculous extreme they were taking it to. (Also, I want my own orchestra.) That said, as Miss Clap observed, Britney needs to stop trying to be Madonna. It's understandably hard for someone who comes of age in the context of pop stardom to transition gracefully--in a game where three months out of the spotlight is death, taking the time necessary for real self-reflection and -development is impossible--but at the same time, she's really got one more album to find an image and sort of stick with it for a while or I'm leaving. More than anything else, I think she needs to find her sense of humor. Madonna had this, although it was clearly acheived by getting into the game later in life. Prince had it in spades--honestly, I'm insanely jealous of his ability to say hilarious things with a totally straight face. (Like, "Gett Off"? And how about "Kiss," where he manages to sell a line like "You don't have to watch Dynasty / to have an attitude" and then pull off the so-sincere-it-hurts vocalization that closes the radio edit?) So Britney needs to get a bit more of this, I think. She needs to watch the VMA performance of "Like a Virgin" and note just how friggin' funny it was. Anyway, this is all getting a little overblown and E!-ish, so I'll stop. posted by Mike B. at 11:03 AM 0 comments
Monday, November 17, 2003
Kind of disconcerting to hear Gillian Welch's "Look At Miss Ohio" when Utne puts you on hold right after it comes up on your Winamp playlist. How much of a random selection is pop music, anyway? When you think about it abstractly (i.e. without the real-world experience that of necessity must inform any criticism of the genre), given the massive number of songs that have been written and recorded in the last 80 years, what are the chances that the exact same one would come to my ears from two sources at once, both unbidden by my hand? If you could load every single one of those songs produced by everyone, from major-label artists to obscure hand-cranked acetate 78s from the 30s to 4-trackers to bedroom MCs to living room organists, what would it sound like on random play? What if, instead of playing whole songs, it simply played randomly selected 2-second bits of songs? Is there a way to program a MP3 player to randomly select not only between tracks but between parts of tracks? And if you loaded a statistically significant sampling of pop music's history in there, what would it sound like, in general? Since recording equipment became cheaper and more widely available in the last 10 years, would the sounds from that time period dominate, or would there be a slow enough sense of stylistic change in earlier eras to overcome that? When you chopped it up all fine and threw it back together without a guiding hand or principle, is music actually abstract enough that it would form some sort of coherent song or musical statement? You can, for instance, arrange thousands of small pictures to form one larger picture, like with, say, the posters in which a bunch of film stills from Star Wars are arranged to look like Vader's face when you back up enough. This conscious arrangement is necessary in a visual medium (and in a language-based one too, honestly) because we prefer to see recognizable forms. But isn't music abstract enough that any arrangement of any tones--even atonal tones--will sound, if not good, at least recognizably like something else? Or is music really not that abstract after all? ("Music sounds better as you," as Sasha puts it.) But since this is built from 99% tonal music, won't it imitate "real" music anyway? Is there a way to cut it that it sounds like beats anyway? Or is repetition such an ingrained part of our musical acclimation that its removal will confuse us utterly? This would be, of course, not only removal of repeated riffs or melody or chord structures or even rhythms, but also the removal of repeated sounds, tones, timbres, etc. Guitar on "Kashmir" sounds different from guitar on "Johnny B Goode" sounds different from guitar on "Sweet Child O' Mine" sounds different from guitar on "Purple Rain" sounds different from guitar on...
How do we trick our ears? How do we break out of what is expected? Well, the second answer is easy: do something different. And there's lots of stuff you can do that's different. But most of it we don't want to do because it doesn't sound good, doesn't sound like what we expect. This is why I say, for example, that innovation is easy but quality is hard, and that maybe all qualities are mostly equal. But that's not even the point of this entry. What is? posted by Mike B. at 1:14 PM 0 comments
QV points us to some articles on Vincent Gallo.
My attitude towards Gallo has been, basically, to steer clear: kind of like when you see a guy stumbling onto a subway train, looking for a fight, you just try and stick to the corners while the almost-as-drunk guy starts putting his finger in his chest, and while the results are sometimes enjoyable to watch, I'd rather not get involved, thank you. So no Buffalo 66, no Brown Bunny, none of his albums or art projects or interviews or whatever. Thing is, I get the joke. I totally do. Knowing your audience and saying things that members of that audience wouldn't normally say, while continuing to engage with said audience. Great. Fantastic. I get it. (The kids at Vice do, too, clearly. They really, really, really, really get it.) Eminem does it way better and more interestingly because he's managed to bring in not only people who disagree with him but people who agree, too, and then tweaking the expectations of both those groups, but that's OK. It doesn't mean he doesn't pull of the joke well. But I just don't care. I've done that and I'm kind of beyond it. Pissing off liberals and indie-movie fans is like, well, like pissing off students: easy and kind of unfair and boring after a while. And kind of dishonorable, like an able-bodied man kicking a cripple, making it look like the able-bodied fellow is actually profoundly fucked up. But anyway, yeah, it's fun for a while, but to keep going? It's just weird. For one thing, he doesn't let anyone in on the joke. It's just him, and you're not really even sure if it's a joke or not. But this is not the way to do it. I like the relentless self-aggrandizement thing, but Neal Pollack does it better, as does Jay-Z. I like other aspects of it, too, but they're just always done better by someone else. (Harlan Ellison, Terry Gilliam, etc., etc., etc.) Leaving almost everyone out of a joke makes it not-a-joke, and that's pretty unconscionable in my book. The main thing is that you're only successfully pranking people for being sincere, and while on one hand some of these folks are hypocritically disparaging others for being sincere (Christians, conservatives, middle America, etc.), on the other hand I'm not sure how, um, mature it is. Making fun of someone for being liberal doesn't seem a whole lot more honorable than making fun of someone for liking Dungeons & Dragons or the Smiths. posted by Mike B. at 1:13 PM 0 comments
If you're going to post an internet personal, it's probably not the best idea to use Layne Staley's picture as your own, seeing as how he a) was the frontman for Alice in Chains, and so his visage is reasonably well known, and b) is dead. posted by Mike B. at 12:15 PM 0 comments
Friday, November 14, 2003
Pitchfork replies to my letter, which also gets published in the mailbag today. I'll eviscerate it in a bit. Ooh, I love it when they just totally ignore points from my original message...
***** Thanks for writing, man - let's get right to the point... The flaw in the central argument here, when you say it isn't easy to write a traditionally catchy pop song, is that you imply that it IS somehow easy to succeed by making other kinds of music, which is patently false. Succeeding in music AT ALL is incredibly tough! I never said that any dufus with a guitar could churn out something along the lines of Fountains of Wayne. Far from it - but the fact remains that the vast majority of rock bands that enjoy popular success utilize very traditional verse-chorus-verse formulas, and it stands to reason that it's easier to write pop (and by "pop" I mean music specifically designed to appeal to the largest possible audience by being accessible, non-alienating in it's technique, etc) songs along very rigidly structured lines. It MUST be easier to to write pop songs that way - otherwise, the Unicorns would be par for the course, and I'd be touting the not-so-subtlties of Fountains of Freakin' Wayne. This also highlights the second flaw in your argument; without going on some deflating tirade over the relationship between critics and the audience at large, you somehow take it for granted that critical acclaim is the only success a band can achieve by talking about how difficult it is to write a critically accepted pop song. That much is true - critics are often rough on pop music, but that doesn't keep a whole lot of crap from flying off the racks half the time. Critically, pop gets kicked around a little, but in the market, it's another story... The valuation of those two kinds of success is better left for another day. To say nothing of how many non-pop bands also find their CD's fighting for dumpster space right alongside pop-rockers... I don't believe that experimental acts should be given points for "trying really, really hard" any more than a pop band should get credit for being merely "catchy", even when every other aspect of the band's sound and practice has been done to death; but when an experimental act manages to push the boundaries of technique AND make something compulsively listenable at the same time, THAT beats a song that rides one killer hook any day of the week. All I'm trying to say is that given the overwhelming dominance of traditional "PT"'s, as you're calling them, a band that can succeed at creating unfathomably infectious songs without regard to classic structure as the Unicorns have is a stunning feat. There's nothing "wrong" with A-B-A, really, but damn, it could use a rest. As for why the Fountains of Wayne ended up being the example of my (limited) wrath, re-read my argument for the Unicorns, and then go ask Stacey's mom. Only she knows for sure. Thanks again, and feel free to write back any time! Sincerely, Eric posted by Mike B. at 8:31 AM 0 comments
Thursday, November 13, 2003
Just looked at Billboard Bulletin and noticed that Outkast has two singles in the top 10--"Hey Ya!" and "The Way You Move." Good for them!
However, it does prompt me to write a letter. Dear songwriters, Listen to me. "Hey Ya" is at number 5 on the Billboard chart. It has been on the chart for 6 weeks. Listen to me. "Hey Ya" is a goddamn indie-rock song. And it's at #5 on the chart. Listen to me. You can do this. It's not that hard. Write a song as good and produce it well and you'll be all set. "Hey Ya" is a fantastic song, but there are lots of fantastic songs out there that clearly aren't on the chart. Why? Because they pussed out, that's why. Produce it right. Just for fun. Do it for me. Would somebody please fucking do this, please? Argh. posted by Mike B. at 1:01 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Man, you're just asking for it, Pitchfork...
Pop music gets off way too easily; so long as groups stick to only the shiniest and gooiest of melodies, throw in a couple of ba-ba-buh's, and sing about how much Stacey's mom "has got it goin' on," or some other such timeless verse, they're valued as somehow above the fray. Even the most venomous rock elitists can be defanged by a few simple hooks, it seems, turned endlessly forgiving by some easy harmonies. If Stalin himself had ruled with less of an iron fist and more Beach Boys-style harmonies, he might be remembered as much for his keen songwriting chops as for the wholesale slaughter of millions of his own people; such is the inexplicably titanic redemptive power of pop. That self-same blinding power is also why it takes a band as innovative as The Unicorns to throw the complacencies of pop into stark relief, finally hold it accountable for such casual abuses, and, in doing so, transcend them. ...and with the Stalin ref, I think they've managed to say something that'll annoy almost all my regular readers. I, of course, am annoyed just at the en passant, completely gratuitous Fountains of Wayne rip. But we'll get into all that in a bit. First, let me see if I can parse the actual critical viewpoint behind this mass of opinionatedly frustrated verbiage. Pop Techniques ("PT") are bad, clearly. They are bad because they are easy, because they make it easy for someone less talented to make something that seems good. This is bad because it allows people who are evil--like Stalin, or, um, Fountains of Wayne--to be perceived as good. Despite the fact that they are evil. Thus, although PT bring an enormous amount of pleasure to people, they should be avoided in favor of deconstructing pop songs and ahead-of-the-curve innovation, because this is more honorable and because it does not constitute abuse. (Abuse here presumably being...OK, I have no fucking idea how this constitutes abuse.) Boy oh boy, where to start with that, huh? First off, let's try the bit about "Even the most venomous rock elitists can be defanged by a few simple hooks." Which universe is this true in? Hell, it's not even true on that particular website. The hardcore elitists will break out in hives at a single sweet harmony, and will instead cross their arms, narrow their eyes, and listen to Ssion or Matthew Herbert or something. Sure, elitists sometimes embrace poppy stuff, but this very review gives the lie to the formulation being advanced: they're not seduced to otherwise unlikable music via PTs, they're able to choke down blatant PTs because of an overriding abstraction or difficulty. Indeed, the puzzle for indie folks most of the time is how to make poppy stuff that the critics will be able to accept, because even if the songs are great and the performances is great, unless there's a Beckish lo-fi guitar line or a Nirvanaish metal/punk patina, it can't be easily embraced. Hell, the formulation doesn't even work for the more open-minded pop fan; there are loads of PTs in radio-friendly R&B, Celine Dion, Luther Vandross, etc., but you don't see, say, your typical Merge fan with a B2B CD in their discman. (More's the pity, but so it goes.) So while it may be easy to throw in a harmony (although that's debatable), it's also easy to make an E chord or hit a snare or make a wall of feedback, and none of that guarantee that the noise you make will actually be appealing to anyone but you. If PTs were a surefire route to success, presumably we'd be seeing more of them, yes? But we don't. And as Matt points out, there's this perception that because a great indie-pop single sounds simple it must be simple to make, but if that was the case, we'd have seen much longer careers for a whole host of bands. It's just not that simple: I'll grant that subverting pop cliches might be difficult, but crafting a perfect, well-turned pop song is extraordinarily hard. (Just ask, among others, the Dismemberment Plan, who despite many efforts, never quite pulled off this trick, although the chorus of "You Are Invited" came real, real close. Travis will attest to this--see the entry on Paul Simon here.) It takes a lot of work and dedication and craftsmanship, all of which is particularly hard to concentrate on when you know that you'll come out with this perfect ball of melody and rhythm that gives many people much pleasure and some little shit will call it "too catchy." (Still haven't gotten over that one.) So let's get down to it: why is there this continual reflexiveness down at PFHQ to rip on Fountains of Wayne? Why do they stand for all that you disdain? They're amazingly talented, hard-working guys with solid indie roots who did two albums in major-label hell and now finally have something like a breakout hit. Moreover, why is "Stacy's Mom" so horrible? It's not the best song on the album, granted, but it's a fantastic album, and that song is smart, tight, exceedingly well-constructed and enjoyable as hell. What's wrong with that? Why can't the Unicorns and Fountains of Wayne exist in the same universe? Why does one have to be bad for one to be good? Why would you try and convince people to like a pop album by ripping into what amounts to 90% of pop's catalog, from where I'm sitting? Pop does not get off way too easily; indeed, it has as hard a time of it as most other genres. It's just kind of in reverse. Everyone listens to pop and assumes someone else must like it and that this must be bad, and so a disproportionate amount of energy is spent deriding something that sounds appealing rather than dark or difficult, even though the dark/difficult thing might actually have a wider appeal. Pop is almost universally regarded as disposable, cheap, knocked-off and worthless, whereas it can in fact be some of the most valuable art we have. Innovation is valued over craftsmanship, difficulty over pleasure, the boring but timeless over the exciting and immediate, and--to understate a bit--all these things are not necessarily true. Most importantly, if you're reviewing something that's ostensibly a pop album, maybe you should be a little more forgiving about pop. Indeed, maybe that's one of the things this album is trying to say. posted by Mike B. at 7:09 PM 0 comments
So does anyone have any thoughts or secondhand opinions on the new Pink album? I listened to the first three tracks kind of quickly at Virgin today and the production seemed really good but the songwriting sounded weak. Maybe I'm not giving it enough of a chance, though. It's coming close to what I think of when I think of really good modernist pop-rock, but there are nowhere near enough keyboards--it mostly sounds like processed guitars with a squiggle or otherwise decorative synth noise/sweep/wash/rush from time to time.
Basement Jaxx definitely nailed the dancier, poppier end of the spectrum, but while the Mandy did a pretty good job on the rock end, I'm still looking for something a bit different. Hmm. Nothing's really captured the bombast of early Britney in a rock format the way, say, Queen or ELO did in the 70's. C'mon folks, you can do it! posted by Mike B. at 3:49 PM 0 comments
Googling for "lou reed asshole" is kind of fun. posted by Mike B. at 11:37 AM 0 comments
From Esselle:
But Pancake Mountain's main asset is music, music, and more music! The first week's musical guest is very special indeed: IAN MACKAYE (Minor Threat/Fugazi) who with his new - and as of yet never seen or heard - group THE EVENS. MacKaye not only performs but lip-syncs to an amazingly fun and catchy diddy called "Vowel Movements". And City Paper dared to do a cover story saying this guy has ruined DC music by not being fun enough. And it does, indeed, seem really really real. Which is weird. The John Edwards part is pretty oddball, too. posted by Mike B. at 10:52 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
Checked out Camden Joy at the suggestion of the NYLPM crew. On the bright side, I'd been trying to remember for years now who put out the book of all-text posters. On the negative side, the guy's kind of a nitwit, music-wise. But that's OK. Maybe I should read the whole Liz Phair book--if the excerpt is any indication, maybe I'm a little closer to understanding why people got so pissed off at her last album. Oh well, eh?
Sorry for the paltry posts today--got bizzee. More soon. (And yeah, on PF on EC.) posted by Mike B. at 6:31 PM 0 comments
Man, the Clash sure were shitty lyricists. Blech.
Maybe I'll do something better with this chorus, though... posted by Mike B. at 6:26 PM 0 comments
Call me emasculated, but I quite like this, on weirdass women's mag sex tips. Also this, on attending an ex's wedding. Good stuff from the apparently soon-to-be-deported Eurotrash. posted by Mike B. at 5:03 PM 0 comments
SF/J on that discombobulating Killing Joke blurb in the Times.
Also, he points us to the video for "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Brian, call me, we'll do some shows. (I'll let Nick use my Feedbacker if he explains the double-amp setup to me.) posted by Mike B. at 4:25 PM 0 comments
Long, but worth reading: this post, which does a pretty thorough job of taking down conservative males' whining that America is going to the crapper because American men have been feminized by liberalism etc. Here's my favorite bit, about Queer Eye For The Straight Guy:
So, anyway, like I said I don’t actually have a television, and I haven’t seen this show, and it doesn’t even sound interesting to me, but I’ve been told that what happens is that a bunch of guys who are gay--so, let's face it, they know what chicks dig--come to your apartment and get rid of all your old crappy stuff, like the couch with a stack of books under one corner instead of a leg and that rug that smells funny, and the cinderblock bookcases, and then they just give you a bunch of good new stuff. Apparently they also give you new clothes of the kind that increase your probability of meeting cool girls. Now, as I said, I haven’t seen this show, but it sounds like an unbelievably good deal to me, and I just want to say: what kind of girly-man would let these guys change his life around? Me! I would! I’m that kind of girly-man! And, in case the folks who make that show happen to be reading this, I will be on your show in case it is still on t.v. and you guys need more straight guys who are big slobs! Not like I expect there to be a big shortage or anything. I don’t know for sure, but I have a pretty good idea that these sweat pants, for example, are not exactly working in my favor, female-wise. Now, see, maybe du Toit thinks that these guys expect you to have sex with them or something in exchange for the new couch and stuff, in which case it’s not as great a deal as it originally sounds like. I mean, that’d have to be a really good couch. But, anyway, nobody is forcing these guys to take a new couch, right? And nobody is saying “look, you are a loser if you don’t get a new couch,” right? So what I’m thinking is that consenting adults should be able to give couches to whomever they like, and that the government has no business telling us who we can exchange furniture with. But anyway, back to the other point: I don’t think you have to worry about these guys wanting to have sex with you, Kim. You see, you are probably a slob like me, and they probably aren’t interested. Lots of good stuff in there. posted by Mike B. at 3:31 PM 0 comments
I hate to take up his bandwidth, but while it's there, you should really listen to this song:
Severed Heads - Cabala Baby "Beans?" posted by Mike B. at 12:02 PM 0 comments
Boy oh boy, do you little nerdlings need to cheq this out: Ten Thousand Statistically Grammar-Average Fake Band Names. Explained thusly:
When working on the paper "The Quest for Ground Truth in Musical Artist Similarity" (paper PDF link) we built MusicSeer to collect human evaluation of artist similarity. We expected a lot of responses but needed a way to ferret out "bad" results-- robots, users just clicking randomly, and people that didn't know the bands presented. One idea was to pepper the list with "red herrings" in the form of fake bandnames-- and if someone chose one, we'd ignore their responses later on. Try matching up some of 'em with styles. For instance: "An Warrant" - Post-hair band "Cocky Magpie" - Long Island bar band "All Beehives Aviator" - GBV song title "Goodby Celebration" - Emo band/song "Nimble Crossroad Creamery" - E6 or Iron & Wine-ish folk band "Automata Politics" - Hardcore band "Abundantly Arsenic" - Mars Volta song title "Placenta Boathouse" - Industrial band "0694904732" - Post-punk band "Bluefish Canister" - Jamband "Transistor Playwrights" - Decembrists song title "Gentile Blues" - Clem Snide song title "Monks" - hee hee. Actually, almost all of these could be either a Mars Volta or GBV song title, come to think of it. ("56265 Sculptors Beside" especially.) I almost want to name a band "Tourists" though. posted by Mike B. at 10:55 AM 0 comments
Monday, November 10, 2003
QV points us to an anti-Fugazi rant. I guess Travis was right about it, mostly--there are a lot of fun-oriented DC bands, not least of them Unrest, and Fugazi's impact on the DC scene has been almost entirely positive, without making most people feel like they need to be similarly sincere and political. On the other hand, it is a reasonably accurate (if not entirely fair) critique of Fugazi-as-Fugazi, and you could argue that it has had a certain impact on the national indie/punk scene that's been almost as harmful as Little seems to think it is.
Which is to say that there are some interesting things in there worth highlighting: David and Lou (and Iggy too) understood that the decline of the West could be fun. But not the guys in Fugazi. They would put us on a mirth-free, high-moral-fiber diet, and let us enjoy none of the wonderful bad things in life. Rock is one of the most childish, stupid, and, yes, fun things around—and it's for these very reasons that it's one of the most important forces on the face of the Earth. So rock is a) amoral and apolitical (so essentially unbothered even by MacKaye's own critiques), b) dumb (so it's good that it's not making moral arguments to begin with), c) massively important (so in some area other than politics/morality), and d) ironic/insincere. Lots of stuff here to piss off the kind of people who get pissed off by any mention of irony, but I think the formulation he's putting forth here is both interesting and wrong, which is one of my favorite combinations. What's important about something that can't address politics or morality? That it simply is this liberating force that's also somehow apolitical? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And is the irony thing supposed to mean that rock's apathy can also be read as interest and engagement? Regardless, to me this all suggests that there's a need for pop music that's smart, fun, and political, one that can make points while also addressing Little's need for hedonism. Kind of a midpoint between Fugazi and Pussy Galore, in other words. If MacKaye thinks lyrics have to be X, and Little thinks lyrics can only talk about Y, I think lyrics can talk about A-Z. If you've got a good hook and a good melody and a good beat, go on about Sherpas if you want to, although it helps if you have a fist-pumping, repetitive chorus. That's one of the coolest things about pop music, to me--its total mutability and adaptability. Young Ian is still pretty much an asshole, but late Fugazi is pretty good, and there's points to be taken from both if you want to be really, truly good. posted by Mike B. at 5:09 PM 0 comments
Got kind of excited at the outset of this--a music magazine for adults! Maybe it'll be interested in the kind of things I am! Oh, but then it descends like a slide whistle into the basement of dumbness:
Mr. Light and Mr. Rollins are out to prove that music does not begin and end with Beyoncé and downloading. I can understand that this makes good business sense, but c'mon, guys, do we have to be this middlebrow? Not that there's anything wrong with covering Norah Jones, but surely there are a few other people you could slip in there that aren't getting reviewed already in Newsweek, know what I mean? Ah well... posted by Mike B. at 4:24 PM 0 comments
Thinking more about this, I mentioned the Baudrillard thing about nuclear weapons being less physical things and more linguistic threats to someone this weekend and, surprisingly, they liked it. (Surprisingly because they're generally pretty anti-pomo and pro-hardheaded policy, which this doesn't strike me as being.) Which caused me to go back and maybe give the whole turning-point theory a little more attention than I did before.
I think I like pomo theory a lot more than most people, or, at least, I find myself frequently defending it to people whose skepticism I agree with most of the time. This is partially, no doubt, because I regard it more as entertainment and literature than serious worldview-changing philosophy, and keep in mind here the particular connotations I mean to evoke when I say "entertainment." But I think that I get very angry about bits of it not just because those bits are wrong and/or in being wrong they make me look wrong, but because there's such promise being squandered. The bits in question, of course, being the ostensibly political ones. It all started off so well, and so interestingly, with Saussure. Say what you will about him now, he was concerned almost exclusively with linguistics, and within that, he made certain key and in-retrospect-obvious distinctions that were absolutely brilliant. The jump from there to literary theory is obvious and acceptable, literature being, of course, an established and widespread language game. The move from there to semiotics, or "interpreting" things that aren't high art, is questionable but would have been OK if it'd been kept small-scale and diversionary; for one thing, social phenomena aren't "texts" because they're not fixed, and for another the move from actual text to "texts" apparently set in motion an alienation effect wherein these other cultural products, despite being, in many cases, wholly fixed (TV shows, movies, popular magazine articles), were nevertheless viewed as far more alien and removed than we'd ever view a piece of literature, and such studies became far more hand-wavingly sociological and anthropological than strictly linguistic. Then again, I am someone who likes to read political messages in musical arrangements, so maybe I shouldn't be talking shit, but hopefully I'm making it clear that I'm imposing these messages most of the time, not that they're inherently there. But then when the whole thing moved into politics (a major impetus, if my intro-theory teacher is to be believed, for pomo's widespread popularity in the 60's), it really fucked up, because instead of viewing it via two millenniums' worth of collected political knowledge, it interpreted politics always through the lens of literature. And this just doesn't work, because literature has a language all to itself that it most definitely doesn't share with politics. For all the complaining people do about pomo's relentless abstraction and its tendency to wedge everything into its narrow conception of the world, its circular logic, there was a clear way out, because politics is a case where language has demonstrable real-world effects. But it didn't take that. Which makes no sense! After being so concerned with language games for so long, it failed to notice the biggest, most important language game in the world: politics. It's a game with a whole host of rules both spoken and unspoken, a rich tradition, institutionalized and effective intertextuality (amendments to earlier laws, precedents in legal judgments, etc., etc.), and a real use for the kind of rigorous, rational analysis this kind of theory could bring to it. It was a way out of both disciplines' limitations. But the connection remains unmade, by and large. And that's really too bad. posted by Mike B. at 4:20 PM 0 comments
Hillary makes a good point in the comments to the below post (i.e. that the Boondocks strip is actually anti-sitcom, not anti-laughter), and I found my response to be getting kind of lengthy and substantive, so let's make it a whole other post.
I'm not so sure you can assume any Boondocks strip is simply anti-sitcom--you can't help but read the series, I think, and get a sense that McGruder is profoundly distrustful, and even kind of ashamed of his chosen medium. (This is not uncommon among "strippers"--even Watterson's challenges to the syndicates'/editors' rejection of quality on the comics page were couched in a deep sense of futility and incrementalism. In his semi-celebratory formulation, the comics only possessed greatness in a bygone golden age.) So I think that I'm right in the context of the first panel, you're right in the context of the individual strip, but I'm right again in the context of the strip as a whole. I'm not sure how much McGruder wants people to actually laugh at his strips--I far more often tend to smile knowingly or, yoinks, smirk, and I don't think I'm alone in this. Laughter is, ultimately, a sub-rational reaction, something you DO do without thinking, but while that doesn't make it invalid (I think that makes it remarkably useful), it does make it debased in the cosmologies of some of your more "this is SERIOUS goddamnit!" types, and I think these days you could include McGruder in that category. Especially problematic, of course, is that he's presenting Grandpa's comments as an anti-elitist critique, which is awkward because there are far more coherant and smart critiques out there. Like the Zippy one, for instance. One of the reasons I like that strip so much is that it seems to admit an honest ambiguity: whereas Griffy often represents the most virulent elitist voice way back in our head, Zippy tempers that pretty well, partially because he never falls into Griffy's formulations; he doesn't try and defend things as guilty pleasures or necessarily consistent with the values Griffy puts forth. He just has a whole other set of standards. And so I think there's a competing notion of humor even within that strip, and I also think that the fact that Griffy is supposedly the authorial standin is evidence enough of the kind of bitter self-hate you see among newspaper cartoonists. And maybe that's one of those limitations, along with daily deadlines and space contraints, that make great strips truly great works of art--but I think it's defintiely there, and definitely a voice in the argument that is often heard. So yeah, the McGruder strip is anti-sitcom, but it's sort of anti-laughter, too, if not anti-comedy. McGruder wants his readers to, you know, think, and thinking is the opposite of laughing. Or so it appears to me. posted by Mike B. at 3:21 PM 0 comments
Saturday, November 08, 2003
Warring notions of comedy in the funny pages today: the Boondocks posits comedy as something stupid, considers laughing as the opposite of thinking (oh ho no, excuse me thurr), whereas Zippy, always the savant, sees comedy as a logical response to our world. Who will win? YOU DECIDE!!! posted by Mike B. at 10:28 AM 0 comments
Apropros of nothing, sort of: say what you will about Dave Eggers (and he does kind of annoy me these days) and his sort of stifling self-consciousness, this long exchange between him and J. Lethem about the nature of criticism is a Really Good Thing and certainly started me thinking in a whole bunch of new directions when I first read it a few years ago. Of course, the fact that Lethem is involved may have helped, but I still see a way more reasonable version of a view Dave's expressed other places here--a kind of Klostermanny view, although I can't quite articulate how that works.
Anyway, it is late, and I should probably get to bed. To be continued. posted by Mike B. at 4:11 AM 0 comments
Speaking of the Clark ad, here are all the Dems' Rock the Vote ads. None are as good as Clark's, and some are, in fact, hilariously lame. Mmm. posted by Mike B. at 4:04 AM 0 comments
Friday, November 07, 2003
Long Island. posted by Mike B. at 5:28 PM 0 comments
"Leaky Tunnel" by the Fiery Furnaces starts off sounding like more or less exactly that: after a piano plink, we hear an organ riff that holds one note for a beat before spending half a beat plummeting down an octave to a note which is held for another half-beat, it's got a certain stereo spread and reverb on it that make it sound tunnelly, like an alarm echoing off concrete walls, presumably--given the title--indicating a flood, etc. A kick enters playing a strict backbeat and a low-volume guitar, miked and played in such a way that you hear a lot of string action, and heavily reverbed, so it feels like it's a long way away and played, though it electric, more for the rhythm of the strumming than the chords, more or less. Vocals enter, singing a melody semi-unrelated to anything else, miked close and only lightly reverbed, so it sounds fairly present, in contrast to the relentlessly distant backing.
At about the time the piano part comes in is when we expect the song to break out and really rock, but it doesn't; it stays in a kind of vamped breakdown, staying on the same chord except for minor, superficial changes that don't effect the two foregrounded instruments, organ and voice. Then there's something in the lyrics about jangling a tambourine (previously purchased, apparently, at the Millenium Dome in London--disembodied but specific geographic locations abound here in the way you might find them throughout Soul Coughing's Ruby Vroom) and everything cuts out but that guitar, still sounding way distant and way indistinct. It flails along for a few bars before the lead comes in, and the interesting thing about the lead is that for the first few notes it sounds like it should sound like shit, like the lead on an early Beck album or something, only vaguely in tune and in rhythm, the rhythm part being particularly difficult seeing as how the established guitar has apparently taken this opportunity to spazz out at will in a kind of indie-rock rubato. But after those first two notes it resolves itself to a good, semi-conventional riff and a nice melody that re-introduces the vocals well: it's an unexpectedly expected bit of standard arrangement, and while it wants for drums, its clash with the utter weirdness of the rest of the track works a treat. (Woulda been even better as an orchestra hit, but I am apparently one of the few people left in the country who likes orchestra hits.) Finally, at 2:33, at a totally random but somehow just-right point in the vocal line, a full rock-n-fucking-roll drum part kicks in, with cymbals and everything, and oh, it's a hell of a release, a great, crashing bwamp of energy and emotion. Besides bringing all the instruments together, it really makes the vocals work, which had seemed super free-floating and unstructured in the previous section, lacking as it did either a kick or a regular organ arpeggiator. But the goddamn drumbeat breaks down after about 5 seconds, and while it occasionally nails everything together again for a beat or two, it never really does what it did initially at any length, refusing or unable to keep the kind of rock momentum we want here. I like this song a lot--it's about five songs in one, and it gestures at a whole bunch of other songs, at arrangements and instrumentations that you'd expect to be there but which just aren't. Adding to that is the fact that the song is sequenced at #3 on the album, typically a place for really grabby singles. This one feels like a sketch, but if you listen right, it also feels like a complete song, because you can so easily fill in what isn't there. (A lot like Manitoba.) Good stuff. posted by Mike B. at 4:34 PM 0 comments
The other day I got a package from Stephen Notley, author of Bob the Angry Flower, containing two autographed books, which I actually won in a contest, oddly, and I just wanted to thank him publicly and give a whole pile of pointers to BTAF, which I honestly think is one of the funniest goddamn things ever.
More specifically, I love the pacing of it. If a graph of your typical three-panel strip looks something like this: / - - - ! __/===\ / | -- \-------/ |_ Then a Bob strip looks more like: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! | | ?----|  / -----/ \ !!!!!!!!!!!!!\ / \----\ / \ / \-------/ \_________/ Know what I mean? There's maybe a punchline halfway through, maybe not, but it drops off for a few panels, and then has an ending that just goes waaaaahhhhhhANGGGGGG!!!! If that makes any sense. Oh, also Kofi Anaan is a regular character, which makes me very happy. Go read, if you don't already. posted by Mike B. at 12:46 PM 0 comments
Sasha linked to this essay on language poetry by Joshua Clover a while back, and I got some things to say about it.
Speaking of assigning cultural and personal activities a political value... First off, I guess I should give my general position. I don't like poetry. Oh, I like a lot of poetry, probably more than the majority of the population, but I like about 0.1% of the poetry being produced today, as far as I can tell. I don't like the way poetry currently is, or, really, how it's been for the last forty years or so, although again, this may simply be because I haven't been exposed to enough. I've tried from time to time to like what I read or find what I'd like, and the theoretical issues interest me to no end (see below), but I get little to no pleasure or intellectual stimulation out of actually reading the stuff. And this isn't just an issue of being exposed to too much new stuff most of which is necessarily bad, whereas the past is already filtered for me: I read a decent bit of contemporary short fiction, too, and I find a lot to love there, even if some of the more dominant strains annoy the living hell out of me. I know this particular position on poetry is fairly untenable, and it may annoy some people, and yeah, I should probably try and explain it, but I can't, really. I just don't like contemporary poetry, and I don't even feel compelled to try to. That said, my position on the piece in question--which is really interesting, really well-written, and a great example of why I think criticism can be a far more vital medium than poetry, literature-wise--can probably be best summed up in my reaction to the following section: The confusion here is twofold1: the first is the rather uninteresting one between whole and hole. Of essence is that this homophone starts the chain of confusion, which gets very interesting very quickly. It engenders the understanding that language is a troubled instrument. The second confusion is that between the sound "(w)hole" and the functional hole through which we escape. This is a confusion of kind between, as a Swiss grad student would have it, signifier and referent.2 And while the riddle poses this as a way out, it presents a terrible trap. If the "hole" and the hole are identical - if they occupy the same space - one can't point at the other; language suddenly can point only at itself; there is no outside. My response to which was: Clearly, Wittgenstein never played guitar. I need to read more of ol' Ludwig's stuff, which seems pretty key, but I really do think the whole tragic model of language, the whole riff on "the limits of my language are the limits of my world" is enormously short-sighted and the kind of thing only an overintellectualized nerd who spends too much time in his head could take seriously for too long. While it's undeniable that the language we use has a good bit of effect on how we perceive the world, and our perceptions have a big role in our experiences, nonetheless--and you can classify this as blind faith if you want--I do think there's a real, concrete world outside my own selfhood. (I also think my own selfhood is way more porous than most post-structuralist theory seems to admit when it's engaging with these kinds of issues, but that's a side point.) I know, it's very gauche to believe in reality, but eh, I do. On the other hand, I do see what he's saying; often our inability to properly describe something, out inability to bridge the gap between our perceptions and another person's, can be frustrating, and an inability to literally understand sort of ineffable feelings or cause-and-effect chains can cause a lot of problems. But in a way, those unliteralized things have their own language, and even if you can't literally grasp it in the way you understand your native tongue, you can communicate with it; there are methods beyond the verbal. And so when I play guitar, for instance, or listen to someone else playing guitar, that's a form of communication--a way of describing and understanding your world--that breaks free of the supposed prison of language. Even if the message is as simplistic as "I feel better when I hit this E chord," it's still a message that's being conveyed outside of a conventional communicative system. In footnote #3, which references this paragraph, he gives a good explanation of why this whole debate is relevant, and it's worth reading, as it's honestly one of the smartest things I've read recently: One might want to confine the debate to Linguistic Theory - after all, the damage seems limited to the sphere of Saussure's semiotics: important enough to merit a department at Brown University, but barely a gleam in the eyes of most curricula. Except that you will likely encounter, say, an ethics debate in which law prof Katherine Mackinnon holds that the representation of rape, in images or words, is an act of violence with an exchange-value equal to a physical rape. Or philosopher/comedian Jean Baudrillard reassuring us that we need not worry about nuclear weapons: because they work only to represent what badasses we are to other nations, they form only a language of annihilation rather than any actual damage. Or J.L. Austin's Speech Act theory, interested in language for its "performatives," the units of speech which are actions unto themselves. Or Gödel's Theorem, showing that there are more true statements than provable ones - the most common lesson drawn from this problematizes the hope of self-consistent systems, but the delightful side effect is that of rendering language as a child's "plus one" game: it will always be more than all the things we can say about it; we will never come to its frontier. Or consider the deconstructionist holding that "the text is composed of all possible readings of the text," or New Criticism's invocation of the "intentional fallacy," the main effect of which is sophomores claiming that The Odyssey is about holding on to your dreams, because "that's what I got out of it" . . . (Hahaha, "philosopher/comedian Jean Baudrillard.") So I love this--I love that he demonstrates why these kinds of issues aren't just the province of daydreaming philosophers and poets, how widely it's spread and how the fundamental lack of understanding of this position by certain parties leads to a lot of clashes. However, I also think (and Clover may agree) that the first two examples he cites are kind of, well, retarded, and it's worth asking why this particular point, which feels like such a revelation, can lead to such dumbass conclusions. I got a flash after reading the following paragraph and its footnote: Try to puzzle out which is the word "rose," which indicates the idea of the rose, and which stands for a particular rose . . . and you will find a scented but slippery slope. And what if you imagine the poem to mean not merely that linguistic identity is endless? Consider this reading: [The phrase] "A rose is a rose" is a rose. Not merely does this collapse the distinction between word and thing, but between phrase and thing; between proposition and thing; between metaphor and thing. Language here cannot be about roses any more than you can be about a reader7 - each falls endlessly into the other. But this, as far as I can tell, is absolutely the wrong road to go down, especially if you're going to claim that this is the portal to "actual (that is, economic) effects." Because, first off, "the collapse of the signifying chain" is not a recent phenomenon, mechanical reproduction having been an issue since Lascaux and leading to, among other things, the tablet-etched provision against making graven images. You can't experimentally separate out the effects of mechanical reproduction because they've pretty much always been there. So, in other words, you have to assume--as a shudderingly small percentage of post-structuralists seem to--that people can quite rationally deal with things like simulacra and reproductions and like that. We're equipped to handle it--indeed, anyone who can't contain two contradictory ideas is likely to explode by age 3. They overlook, in other words, that quote I have in my blogroll there: "the death of art, until someone forgets." They can make great arguments for what X doesn't exist anymore, why it's utterly disappeared and why no one can rationally think it's still around, and everyone who reads this will read other things confirming it and, to them, it will be more or less true. But then someone forgets: someone new comes along who doesn't know that the author is dead, or that art is dead, or whatever, and they do something new and good and rejuvenating. They come from outside the discourse and make it whole again. Simulacra is only a problem for you guys: the rest of us like watching Top Model. In other words, the trap of language is not language but literalism. Language is only confining if you think that words, deep down, do have fixed meanings, or are limited somehow, and they're just not. (Wittgenstein's meaning-as-use formulation, for instance, hilariously commits the intentional fallacy: the meaning is limited by the speaker's intentions, which is clearly not true.) The world is debased only if you honestly think that there are something like platonic ideals which mechanical reproduction and pop culture deviates from, if something has to be literally real--i.e. "authentic"--instead of just, you know, real, i.e. existing. What this all gets down to is the way language poetry rejects narrative and, eventually, coherency for ostensibly political reasons. Viz: Supposing I pair Roussel ("a president of the republic of dreams," per Louis Aragon) with Jacques "Language is the whirlpool which picks up the tree and throws it" Derrida: Between the former's construction of fantasy worlds out of photorealistic detail, and the latter's Deconstruction work, I would certainly end at Language poetry's political rejection of narratives of the self - because "the story of well-off European males needs no more telling" - and that would in no way be a false version. Just an incomplete one. And of course, there would be an honor in that: version is the child of verse is the child of veritas. While I don't think this is an argument Clover is endorsing, it's still one I see a lot--that, somehow, rejecting narrative is a political act. Blech. Most of the time they're not even rejecting narrative at all, just good narrative, but in the case of language poetry, of course, there really is a rejection of narrative. But this cannot be a political act, only an apolitical one. Narrative is one of the languages of politics, symbolism being the other one, and when you reject both, you're just opting out of the game. And that's fine--but don't try and pretend that it's any different, politically, from baking cookies. If you want to make a political statement, ultimately, you have to be willing to participate in politics, and that inevitably involves playing games with power. Maybe this sucks, maybe this feels distasteful to you, but just as you can't help the poor without getting yourself some icky money, you can't play politics without using what power you have to help yourself and others. That's the way it works. Anyway, great article. I've ordered Mr. Clover's book-and-CD set, partially at Sasha's behest and partially because inventive combos of literature and music is one of my big interests. posted by Mike B. at 12:37 PM 0 comments
In case you're curious (and I know Harm will be), here is a FrontPage article on the place I went to college. It mostly just makes me smile. For the record, Safer Sex Night really doesn't qualify as an orgy--there's not a whole lot of public sex, never with multiple partners, and while the people may be dressed skimpily, that doesn't make them attractive, and on the whole it's not a whole lot different from most nightclubs, aside from the blowjob videos in the corners.
Oh, also, I was a member of the club mentioned that can't get chartered but which Nancy Dye ostensibly "supports." Ha. That's a good one. At any rate, the interesting thing about said club was that it's not really a leftist thing; afficianados are just as likely to be conservative, and given the conservative temperment, you might be tempted to say they're even more likely to be into That Kind Of Thing. Mais oui, the folks in our particular group would be more likely to support Gore than Bush (snicker snicker), but that's just the nature of the demographic we were drawing from, and we were almost entirely way less likely to eat organic food and go to Socialist meetings than your typical Obie. I say all this because of the opposition we encountered. Yes, the most vocal opponant was a conservative physics teacher, may he forever eat naught but overcooked beef. But the far more effective opposition took a liberal position on racial issues, arguing (one might say a bit patronizingly) that blacks would be offended by a group that seemed to be making slavery into a game (what?) and that it would discourage African-Americans from applying because it would offend their more conservative morality. The main problem with this argument, besides the fact that we weren't exactly playing games in which one of us dressed up like a plantation owner and one of us picked cotton all day, was that--as you'll note from the article--we have a drag ball. It is, as a matter of fact, the biggest campus party of the year. We also have a very active socialist contingent, pot smoking on the quads, and a very vocal homosexual community, and good for them. So I'm a little unsure how, if you're of a conservative moral bent, black or no, a club of this type would be, like, the deciding factor, you know? Especially when such notoriously left-wing places as Princeton and Dartmouth also have such clubs without any noticable drop in enrollment. Anyway, point being, if you're troubled by sex on college campuses, I'd think you'd be more interested in getting rid of frat houses than Safer Sex Night, and unlike most residents of said frat houses, at least Obies are participating in politics, which would seem like a neutral good, regardless of their positions. ADDENDUM: FrontPage being David Horowitz's deal, Horowitz being the "Slavery Reparations are Racist!" dude, i.e. a guy who enjoys the fish-in-a-barrel activity of making college leftists angry a wee bit too much for my particular embarassment-o-meter. Oh, and the point of the point is that you have to be very careful in assigning cultural and personal activities a political value, as both Obies and FrontPage should realize. posted by Mike B. at 11:08 AM 0 comments
Wesley Clark finally takes a position on Outkast. (Via QV.)
You should probably go watch this right now. Somewhat embarassingly, he's got my vote. posted by Mike B. at 10:47 AM 0 comments
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