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.

Instead of thinking up a few, I made a quick script to part-of-speech tag the original list of 6,500 artist names that we were considering. This left us with a set of common band name grammars (popular ones were NNP NNP and NNP #.) We then fed terms from our already collected music text set ('Klepmit') through the grammars again (at the natural probabilities) to make some believable names.

If you start a band with one of these and get famous, I only ask that you don't use "Caldera Catnip," as it is already taken.

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.

(...)

Look, I'm going to tell you the truth here: Rock music is dumb. So dumb it's funny. What's more, it's supposed to be, even though MacKaye would like to think otherwise: "I made a mistake thinking that rock 'n' roll had something to do with being intelligent and not accepting society as it was being given to us," he once lamented.

Don't despair, rock fans, because dumb is good. Hell, dumb just could be your salvation.

(...)

Rock and morality don't mix. Never have, never will. Morality says, "Let's be better people." Rock says, "Let's all go to hell in a hand basket, preferably after having totally meaningless sex and snorting enough crank to keep Red China grinding its teeth for a week." Now, rock may not necessarily mean this literally. Good rock, unlike the kind served up here in D.C., is as likely as not just doing what the British quaintly call "taking the piss." Because rock is a prankster, and anybody who hasn't caught onto the fact that rock doesn't always mean what it says by the time he's old enough to vote deserves whatever he gets.

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.

The first issue features durable, adult-friendly performers like Sting, Ryan Adams and Robert Plant in a pure music format, one that avoids the broader pop culture sensibilities of more established magazines like Rolling Stone, owned by Wenner Media, and Vibe, owned by Vibe/Spin Ventures. Tracks pays little heed to of-the-moment bands like The Rapture and Killing Joke that are a staple of Spin. And it has none of the cheeky attitude of Blender, a more recent arrival from Dennis Publishing USA, or the teenage sensibility MTV's recently christened magazine.

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