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Friday, December 12, 2003

Although you wouldn't suspect it from the "they're the English Xiu Xiu!" Pitchfork review, so far the Mu album is actually kind of catchy. The first song, Jealous Kids, even has a verse-chorus-verse song structure (!), and the bits are all pretty hooky. There's also the moment in "Let's Get Sick" (around 3:30) where it suddenly breaks for a total club-diva hook, which regrettably gets lost in the mix, but it's still pretty cool. It's nowhere near as unnecessarily harsh as Xiu Xiu, and in many ways it seems like a more energetic version of the electro stuff being posted lately at Fluxblog.

So yeah, don't worry about the hype--there's a good bit of pop in here mixed in with the weird twists on gabba/jungle fuckups and glitch. It even sounds kinda Cibo Matto at times, although that may just be the, er, "Engrish," as PF put it.

posted by Mike B. at 5:19 PM 0 comments

Somedisco links to a Worlds of Possibility post that says of Pluramon (who I have not heard):

This whole return-to-Loveless thing hasn’t really worked, it’s not as woozy as it should be, as destabilising, as confusing and riveting and downright head-swimmingly Psychedelic as Loveless was/is/will always be...

(snip)

As an aside, why do people want to make the record My Bloody Valentine would have made in 1992? Surely it’d be a lot more interesting to imagine what a My Bloody Valentine record made in 2003 would sound like. And then make it yourself. If you apply that logic, the only person to come close to Shields’ intentions would be the Third Eye Foundation circa Semtex.
Is this really one of 2003’s best records? I want the drugs those critics are on!
(Still I’d much rather hear this than one of those fucking lame indietronica MBV rehashes á la Manitoba’s last one or the other shite on that label.)

Well, geez, I'd never even considered that there was a MBV thing going on there, which I guess was stupid, given that whole Morr Music album that was all shoegaze covers thing. (Yeah, I could look up what it's actually called and what they were actually covering in order to appear smarter, but eh. I'm really only a fount of musical knowledge with the generous aid of Google and allmusic.) It just seemed, so, you know, Pet Sounds-y, although I suppose that's the context that all the US mags put the Manitoba album in, so maybe it just depends on your cultural heritage.

Still, how could any of this conceivably be called a heir to the MBV crown? First off, it's not melodic enough: there are a lot of nice bits in these sorts of albums, but it's missing the perfect flow and mix that MBV had: there's none of the great melodic lines that Shields et al were so good at.

But, more importantly, it's nowhere near as loud as MBV. For whatever reason, electronic artists have never been good at building intensity and energy in their tracks with guitar--whatever processing they do seems to smooth out the guitar so much, level it out and take away the bite, that you just can't rely on the six-string to create loudness in an electronic song. The power comes from basslines, but mainly drums: the great splatter-breaks of jungle and drum 'n' bass, the big loud kick of house, etc. But in MBV, of course, the drums were kind of buried in the mix, so if you're going for that model, you're way handicapped. Granted, the thing I really like about Manitoba is the drumming, especially the last track, but as is it comes off lacking, somehow. Pretty but too even. Not ecstatic like MBV.

Granted, MBV's reputation for loudness came mainly from their reportedly ear-blistering live shows, but you can hear it pretty clearly on Loveless, too: the guitars buzz and splinter and scream and decay, getting almost swallowed up by feedback. There's none of this in these artists' work. Maybe it's because so much of getting a guitar to sound good is in physical manipulation of the instrument and its components (Shields' "glide guitar" which worked a digital reverb pedal and the whammy bar on his guitar, coupled with distortion and calculated distance from and angle to the jacked-up amplifier) rather than in the way the raw sound is processed afterwards. But regardless, it'd be great to see these folks, who are admittedly very good at making the guitar sound pretty or fractured, make some noise, but for that I fear they'd need a real guitarist.

posted by Mike B. at 1:11 PM 0 comments

Posting an instrumental track, eh? Wshew, I feel like less of a lone nerd now.

I would love to see more music writers put their stuff up for us to hear. I mean, LPTJ refuses to, won't even talk about it, although we can get it in a store. (The LPTJ article this week is killer, though.) But it would be kind of interesting to connect the music with the writing. Mebbe.

Listening to "Landslide" and it's pretty good. (Better than my instrumental, certainly.) I'd be interested to hear what this sounds like w/vocals. I kind of hear a Dub Narcotic thing going on...

Even better, I think people should read music commentary over music. Maybe I'll try and turn that out this weekend. Maybe Sasha will, too.

This was actually going to be a Final Project for me at some point--doing commentary of music over the actual music, but I abandoned it because I love doing straight criticism too much to miss a chance at that. Anyway, that sort of thing is being done by the NYT now, so what I'm thinking is more commentary on other music over an original or semi-original backing. But, uh, I'm pretty weird.

At any rate, here's an example of what I mean when I say that spoken-word can be done in a way that it doesn't suck. (And yeah, it's mine, so be kind.)

posted by Mike B. at 12:30 PM 0 comments

"If you thought a successful marriage of IDM, House and R&B was impossible..."

...apparently you haven't listened to any electronic music in the last three years, because it's all over the goddamn place.

I like the Soft Pink Truth album OK, but honestly, I don't listen to it very much.

And ah yes: "Boy in da Corner is a must own for anyone who longs for creative beats and rhymes." But: "Granted, Andre and Big Boi have added some great tracks to the Outkast canon here ("Hey Ya" is among the best songs they've ever written) but this double record has WAY too much filler to be very enjoyable." So no creative beats and rhymes there, hmm?

(link via Fluxblog)

posted by Mike B. at 10:54 AM 0 comments

Hmm:

Tribune rock critic Greg Kot, who contributes occasionally to Rolling Stone, revealed an interesting nugget about the rock magazine’s star ratings, in the first of a two-part interview with teen magazine New Expression. (Part two will appear later this month.) The interview was conducted by Joseph Struck, of Providence Catholic High School. We pick up the interview about midway through the first installment. Edited slightly for clarity.

Kot: It helps credibility or whatever to have pieces published in Rolling Stone, and I like it because they’ve never changed a word that I’ve written. I have always said exactly what I wanted to say in reviews. Occasionally, I’ve been surprised to see that the star ratings get changed, but that’s the editor’s decision.

Struck: They change your ratings?

Kot: Yeah, they do. They have. It is weird. Occasionally they’ll bump up a record that I didn’t feel was as good, and they don’t change a word of writing, so it’s like weird, it’s like you read the review and it reads like a two-star review but there is a three-star rating on it. So it’s just kind of strange, but the editors do have the right. I guess it is in the fine print of the review section that the editors determine the star ratings and not the writers, but often that gets misinterpreted. The writers are blamed for everything [laughs]. So it’s like, “How did you give that thing three stars?” And I say, “I didn’t. I wanted two stars on it.” So that gets a little frustrating. But I have to say that the editors there have been great for the most part.

Linkage and eye-rolling "ho hum who doesn't know this" reaction here.

posted by Mike B. at 1:38 AM 0 comments

Some dude named Bob Lefsetz says some stupid shit about Missy:

30. Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott "This Is Not A Test!"
GM/Elektra/EEG

Sales this week: 63,346
Percentage change: -54%

And here we have what's wrong with the record business. It's become a HIT business.

Make no mistake, it didn't used to be.

Yes, everything Clive and Donnie and all those Chairmen are telling you is WRONG!

If you're hit dependent, you're fucked.

Look at this record. The hit isn't working, people don't want the album, it's OVER!

Believe me, in July you won't see this CD suddenly climbing the chart.

Whereas a rock album, like 3 Doors Down's, can hang around and BUILD!

Not that it has to be rock. It's just that a record must be sold on substance. Not on shock/glam/hype.

People want to have a RELATIONSHIP with an album. They want to take it into their family, give it a HOME!

Think about that. How can you get someone to kick the tires, and take the CD home.

Think of it like buying a car. You might want to take a spin in a Z4, but do you want to OWN it? For YEARS???

No, maybe you want a 530. Or maybe you even want a Camry. Because a Camry is DEPENDABLE! Hell, they sell more Camrys than Z4s, more Camrys than ANY OTHER CAR, because people see them as both functional and reliable. I used to buy records of bands that were functional and reliable. The public did too, even stuff as mediocre as Grand Funk Railroad. Yeah, Grand Funk didn't have hits until the TAIL END of their career.

And, the re-up rate on Camrys is ASTRONOMICAL! People buy one after another.

Same deal with Ford F150s.

These are basic machines. But, people are LOYAL!

The music business IS NOT the movie business. A movie is singular, one entity. Occasionally, there's a sequel. Whereas in the music business, you want EVERY album to have a sequel. You're not really making dough until you have a CAREER! And, if an act has a career, you can sell ALL their wares AD INFINITUM! People don't only want Led Zeppelin IV, they want II and III too!

Don't bang people over the head. Use a softer sell.

That's what all the indies do. They're FORCED to, they don't have the funds for these bludgeon campaigns. So the acts build more slowly, and the fans are loyal. And, even if they download the music, they buy the CD.

What kind of fucked up formula is this? Trying to get people to buy a whole album on one hit track. That would be like trying to sell that aforementioned BMW by only showing the steering wheel. That's an integral part of the car, but not the ONLY key part. Used to be the album tracks were also key parts. They will become so again. Maybe not as part of a single disc, but people don't only want the hits, they want FULFILLMENT! The people want steak, and potatoes, and fish, and salad, but the record business only wants to sell hot fudge sundaes, over and over and over again. And people have gotten so sick, they've tuned out, they've given up. They'll pick the cherry on KaZaA, but they don't want any more.

And, from an earlier entry on Jay-Z:

And, rappers release a record a year, because unlike with rock catalog, once
the public is done with a hip-hop record, they're TRULY DONE!

Hell, you don't even hear that Lauryn Hill solo Grammy Award winning album anymore.

Now, don't get me wrong: there are artists to whom you could accurately apply this argument. But Missy? Jay-Z? No no no. I don't really have any urge to hit SoundScan right now, but I'm pretty sure they've got a reasonable amount of catalog sales--any music fan worth their salt knows that 2/3 of the Jay-Z albums, and all the Missy albums, are required listening if you want to understand how they got where they are today. And that's not even getting into the kind of catalog sales that Tupac, Biggie, etc. must enjoy. Look, what you said about a hip-hop record: it's just not true. It's like writing a column in 1965 saying that because the radio's not playing Chuck Berry that the only lasting records with the public are crooner and big band albums. Hip-hop is still pretty segregated on the radio in most areas of the country, but let's be honest here, right now it's in the same situation that rock was in the late 60's/70's: it is the mainstream. So yeah, in twenty years you'll probably get "classic hip-hop" stations--I mean, fuck, the last Missy album was a classic hip-hop album! Sure, there are artists like, I dunno, Chingy and Digital Underground and Naughty By Nature that have big flavor-of-the-week hits (and I mean that purely from an economic perspective) and then drop off the radar, regardless of the worth of their songs. But people are still buying "The Chronic." People are still buying "Doggystyle." People are still buying "Ready to Die." And this is just the white audience--it seems reasonable to assume that the back catalogs of Mary J Blige and a whole host of others are doing just fine as well.

Look, one of the reasons Missy and Jay are so appealing and likable is that they manage to make hits that are also examples of great art. And if, fuck, Steve Miller Band is lasting art (and I'm not saying it's not) then "Miss E...So Addictive" and "The Blueprint" sure as hell are, too. On a certain level, I guess it sucks that the biz is so hit-driven, but the reason Jay and Missy have lasted is that they make hits that are also, regardless of that, great music. The two are hardly incompatible.

I recognize that, in many ways, he's making a purely practical argument here, that rock catalogs sell while hip-hop catalogs don't. But I think you're comparing apples to oranges: flavor-of-the-week hits in rock--the Beatles, Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Queen, etc.--have endured and prospered. Give it all a while before pronouncing hip-hop a shallow hit factory like some hyperventilating schoolmarm.

(additional: Lefsetz-EMI snipefest here)

posted by Mike B. at 1:32 AM 0 comments

Thursday, December 11, 2003

Was just talking to an artist's manager, and she said that they wanted to put some strings on a few tracks, but that the expensive thing about that was doing the charts. Really? Wow. I could make a good living doing that, huh? I always figured it would just cost a lot to get the musicians in, but I of course forgot that classical musicians will work for bus fare.

posted by Mike B. at 4:45 PM 0 comments

Two more letters (!) I got in response to my Pitchfork letter. This now brings the totals up to:

E-mails received from this PF letter: 3
E-mails received from all other PF letters (about 7): 0

Anyway, here's one of 'em.

Dear Mike,

thank you for writing one of the more intelligent letters to pitchfork i have ever seen. i am a 21 year old college student, and your point about them voting for their "own choices" as opposed to 12 year old girls is nothing short of correct. in fact, it would actually be a lot easier for them to run TRL, except, as you mentioned, they don't give a shit.

often when i hear people my age, many of the "elitists" talking about TRL or even music thats on the radio like puddle of mudd or whatever, they make their point of how it sucks for only one reason: they think they're better than the people who listen to it. this is probably due to the fact that being an "elitist" is on of the very few things that they have to hold on to. this is probably the case for many of the writers for pitchfork, but i dont want to judge anyone.

i have only recently began to listen to what is considered "indie rock" as far as e.g. The Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth, Pavement etc., so i feel like ive been on both sides of the fence with popular and independent music. while i feel like the stuff i listen to now is "better" in quality, i would never put someone down for liking Audioslave or Blink 182, because all they'd get out of that is: man why the hell would i want to listen to something that that arrogant prick listens to, you know? and hey, whats wrong with liking saves the day or coldplay, i mean there is some freaking sincerity in it, isnt there? sorry this is so long but i really felt like you nailed that
point on the head better than anyone. so yes, "like what you like" and thanks again for the wisdom.

In case it's of interest.

UPDATE: My reply-

Hey Marty-

Thanks for the note. Glad to know I'm appreciated. Although I've gotten 3 e-mails in response to this letter, as opposed to none for the previous ones PF has published, so I dunno if I hit a nerve or it's getting linked to or what.

Anyway, I'm with you, although I would say a few things in response:

#1: This kind of thing seems especially bad in college, because, believe it or not, I'll betcha all those PF-lovers were listening to either Puddle of Mudd or Behead the Prophet a few years ago, and they're just growing into their indie-rock shoes too. So in many ways, they're being exclusionary because they're a bit insecure about their own place in the hierarchy, and that, plus the ol' newly-converted-true-believer syndrome, makes them kind of insufferable. But always remember that indie-rock is a big nerd pile-on, and as long as you take them less seriously than they take themselves--not too hard--it's a lot more endurable. (Also, remember that you'll probably end up cooler than them, anyway.) Indie rock kids are ridiculous human beings. This is something I need to remind myself of a bit too often, like when an ex-hardcore fan who's into indie rock tries to tell me that Interpol sucks because they're pussies, but it's good to keep in mind.

#2: That said, and you probably realize this, but it's probably not a productive argumentative technique to link your opponents' positions to psychological inadequacy. They probably do have other rewarding bits in their lives, but, you know, this is the way you interact with them. Ah well. So I think I get a certain traction with PF writers because I do respect what they're saying and recognize it as legitimate--I just think it's wrong. I'm cooler than them, anyway. ;)

#3: Good point about elitism actually causing a negative reaction most of the time. Me, the only reason I'd be annoyed at a POD listener is if they refused to listen to the Flaming Lips or something like that. The only sin in my book is closing yourself off, which the PF mindset seems to happily embrace. Ah well.

Anyway, thanks again for the note.

m.

posted by Mike B. at 3:57 PM 0 comments

I whipped this up last week. (2.4 meg MP3) If you can think of something you want to do with it, feel free, just lemme hear. Alternately, if you can think of anything for me to do with it, that's cool, too. It can be rearranged fairly easily if necessary.

posted by Mike B. at 12:29 PM 0 comments

For what it's worth, Liz Phair's "Why Can't I" just came on my winamp playlist and at the opening, I thought, "Ooh, what's this, this is great!"

It really is a good song. Fuck all that Pitchfork bullshit.

Incidentally, it's hard to write dumb lyrics. I've been working on this song for about five months because I think it's killer and could be a great anthem, but I can't seem to write convincing dumb lyrics. So it's about a postmodern English novel instead. Ah well.

posted by Mike B. at 12:08 PM 0 comments

Check this out--the "Coming Soon" entry.

THE FIRST EVER GUNS N'ROSES KIDS TRIBUTE BAND!!!
THEY ARE......Li'l Gn'r!!!

That's right, five children ages five to eleven dressed in GN'R costumes pay tribute to the greatest rock band of all time! Li'l Gn'r will play all your favorite tunes and still be tucked into bed by 8:00pm.

Well, that should be interesting.

posted by Mike B. at 10:44 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Apropos of nothing: dude, Beck and Kid Rock should do a duet. I mean, haven't they had basically the same career trajectory? Hip-hop fusion to country, "Loser" and "I Am the Bullgod" to "Round the Bend" and "Single Father."

Uh, OK, I guess Kid Rock skipped that whole funk phase--pshew--but still, they just seem like high and low versions of one another.

posted by Mike B. at 11:42 AM 0 comments

Discussing Outkast over on the ol' mailing list, and a Mr. Hunter Felt made this really great point:

I just want to add that "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below" is the only other non-Prince album I have ever heard that comes close to the surreal/party-loving twisted appeal of "Midnight Vultures" era Beck. I would give just a curiosity listen to, say, Big Boi's "Bowtie" or Andre 3000's "Spread" and see if they aren't exploring the same musical terrain. It's almost odd how two different artists from the mid-nineties managed to get to the same musical terrain after starting from two radically opposed beginnings (rambling, anti-folk and Southern gangsta rap). The mind boggles.

Yeah, Beck and Andre3000. Why didn't I think of that?

In other news, have I become a missionary for the Strokes or something? I seem to be continually defending them. I guess that's OK. I just really think people should give the new album a few listens before they dismiss it, because there's a lot of good there.

posted by Mike B. at 11:38 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

The gig last night actually went very well. These folks opened and were very good and funny, even if their website doesn't necessarily reflect that.

But I couldn't really get to sleep and so am kind of exhausted today and unable to post, which is really too bad. Ah well. I'll go to bed right after Gilmore Girls tonight, I promise.

posted by Mike B. at 5:25 PM 0 comments

Here's a USA Today article on the Grammys that makes some odd claims in terms of their hipness/relevance/etc...

The 2004 Grammy marathon is off to a good start with a wildly diverse pool of nominees. Whether music's most coveted prize adds integrity to its checkered legacy depends on who crosses the finish line.

(...)

For album of the year, voters have an opportunity to anoint the dizzying brilliance of The White Stripes' Elephant or Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Or they could play it safe with Justin Timberlake's Justified, a smoothly crafted pop album but hardly worthy of the year's top trophy.

Likewise, the Grammy membership could hand the best-record award to Crazy in Love, the radio-saturated hit by Beyoncé and Jay-Z and again deny Eminem his rightful place in Grammy's upper tier.

Now, granted, I like the Outkast album more than the JT one, and I like "Lose Yourself" more than "Crazy in Love" (though I think I'm in a very wee minority there). But at the same time, I don't think any of these are particular hipper than any other, and I'd even say that objectively the Beyonce and JT albums are regarded as fairly respectable, certainly moreso than 90% of past Grammy nominations. It's not like we're talking Beck v. Steely Dan here (which, regardless of the merits of the individual albums, can rightly be considered a horribly mismatched cred battle)--these are all albums with roughly the same amount of cachet. Arguably the Grammys have already helped themselves immensely with these nominations, while at the same time the choices themselves seem so obvious that it's unclear if that's actually the case.

posted by Mike B. at 5:23 PM 0 comments

Monday, December 08, 2003

Gotta go play me a gig, but given the number of posts today let me direct your attention downward to the Christgau / webzines post below, which I'm quite happy with but which has only attracted off-topic posts so far. It's long, but worth a read, I hope.

Coming tomorrow, lord willing: Mochipet, Strong Bad Sings, and dancehall.

In the meantime, you should probably go download this Frames song from Tangmonkey, as it's really beautiful. I've liked them ever since I saw them open for the New Pornographers, but none of their albums are as good as their ecstatic live shows, regrettably, which manage to go from beautiful pop bits to soaring a capella vocals to incredibly loud violin-driven noise freakouts in the space of a minute and a half.

posted by Mike B. at 6:54 PM 0 comments

Picked up the Colder album, Again, this weekend. It's OK, pretty good background music, although I haven't gotten a chance to investigate more than one video yet, which I understand is the actual focus.

What I wanted to talk about, though, is the sticker. The sticker on the album contained a quote that referred to this album as "pop." It is very, very wrong. And, as a matter of fact, it demonstrates a phenomenon, which I will capitalize to make it more important and maybe Newsweek will pick up on it: The Debasement Of "Pop" Amongst The Upper Classes (especially as une term criticale).

I've seen this happening a lot lately, electronic artists getting called "pop" despite having little to no relation thereto. Colder, Manitoba, M83 and the Notwist have all had this adjective applied to them[1], and while I've sampled them all the only one that's vaguely stuck has been Manitoba, and even then it's only a fraction of the interest I have in, say, Jay-Z, or even electronic music like Kid 606's Down With The Scene, an album arguably far more informed by actual pop music than any of these artists.

The problem, basically, is that when you think of "electronic pop," you think of things like Erasure, the Cocteau Twins, New Order, like that. The artists above sound nothing like that. At all. They sound like...well, here's the problem. Those artists were all coming from a tradition of pop songwriting that grew from Elvis through the Beatles and the great pop bands of the 70's, and then applied those lessons and songs to new equipment. The new technology genuinely created a new sound, but it didn't necessarily create new songwriting.[3] What these "electro-pop" artists are coming from is a dance songwriting tradition that starts with funk, goes through disco, and then becomes techno and house and so forth. They're then trying to take this training and apply the pop tradition to it, and it's just not working, because they don't seem to have a real understanding of pop or pop songwriting. Sure, there are guitars and vocals there, but that just means they're microhouse that happens to use guitars and vocals, not pop, but it seems to be that the mere presence of these elements has been enough for most people to label it "pop."

Well, no. For instance, I listened to about half of the songs on the Colder album, and there doesn't seem to be a single chord change on it. Not a one. Now, far be it for me to dictate terms of a genre, and while it's fine to try and do a song with no chord changes (though even the Beatles couldn't manage to keep a straight face with "Tomorrow Never Knows") but if I can go through half your album and not identify a single change, I'm sorry, you're just not pop. I don't want to do that thing where I'm defining a genre as "only things I like," but I genuinely think that a definition of pop which requires chord changes will still incorporate a lot of crap. Seriously, if you can point out what in these artists makes them pop besides the guitar and vocals, please do so.

To my ears, I just hear the same dancey pile-loops-on-top-of-one-another thing, all centering around roughly the same tones. Which is not to say that this is a bad technique--hell, something as recent as the new LCD Soundstem single basically stays on the same chord all the way through for 9 minutes, and it's fucking fantastic. The problem is that when artists like this are being labeled pop while being critiqued with the handicapped attitude toward pop that we grant electronic acts, it's weakening legitimate attempts at the genre. (In fact, many great examples of this "new phenomenon" are arguably being overlooked because they're actually pop--that Girls Aloud cover of "Jump (For My Love)" that Manchester posted a while back is far more compelling[4] than anything on the Notwist album to me.)

So let's just watch ourselves here--it's OK to call stuff pop, but let's try not to make it sound like modern primitivism, and let's try not to be fooled by the obscurism and apply the same terms to it that you would to up-front pop, eh?

[1] Also the Postal Service, which I hate, but which I'll admit is genuinely poppy.[2]
[2] Max Tundra has also been called pop, but it is pop and I like it, so again, different story. It's still not very poppy, it's just kinda poppy and could be better if it was more poppy, I think.
[3] I mean, it had, had been since the first synth, but this new songwriting didn't become widely recognized until the late 80's.
[4] Let me not damn with false praise here: actually, I just listened to it again, and it is fucking fantastic. Making a genteel pop song agressive as hell without actually making it punk, a real nice trick.

posted by Mike B. at 6:51 PM 0 comments

Three things I learned from the Virgin Ultimate Guide to Holiday Gift Giving:

1) The new Offspring album is not called Chinese Democracy, due, apparently, to "legal issues," which as a music-law person I can only assume means that Axl/Geffen already registered it as a trademark or something. If so, man, that's some sharp lawyerin'. (It is actually called Splinter.)

2) There is a Dead Milkmen DVD, which you could do worse than to buy. (But buy SGC2C first.)

3) There is apparently a Cat in the Hat Movie Storybook, by some folks named Ron Fontes and Justine Fontes. You'll note that neither of these people are named Dr. Seuss, who wrote, um, the actual Cat in the Hat book. I guess the original book needed to be...simplified? OK, I admit it, I'm stumped.

posted by Mike B. at 12:40 PM 0 comments

I really do need to do some actual work here, but first, allow me to offer for your reading pleasure this Chuck Klosterman article on Friendster. (The whole thing, not just the excerpt that made it to Gawker last week.) It's really good, especially the riff on "Favorite TV Shows":

Yet weirdly, there are some elements of the Friendster personal profile that no one seems to lie about, most notably what TV shows they like. Friendsters seem totally comfortable with strangers assuming they cheat on their wives and sketch portraits of unicorns in their free time, but they don't want anyone to think they watch According to Jim unironically. This is similar to how a person will have oral sex with you on your very first date but won't let you look inside her glove compartment at the moment because it contains a Tori Amos cassette.

As usual, the text was provided by my anonymous tipster.

posted by Mike B. at 12:26 PM 0 comments

An e-mail I received apparently straight from the Pitchfork letters page:

Hi Mike,

I really enjoyed reading your email to Pitchfork; it was articulate and intelligently argued. But it doesn't change the fact that that Liz Phair single is absolute rubbish.

Cheers,

Dave.

Now, keep in mind that this guy has an e-mail address that begins "youandwhosearmy." As much as I like Radiohead, man, their fans...

Anyway, I replied:

Hi David-

Thanks for writing. I'm glad you enjoyed the letter. Clearly we have different tastes; I think it's a damn good song, if not as good as "Rock Me." But I will say that despite the fact that Pitchfork wants to portray the album as a miserable failure that no one could ever possibly like, it's already on the best-of lists of pretty respected critics like Robert Christgau, Sasha Frere-Jones, and Keith Harris, to say nothing of various other positive reviews it's garnered. Certain people seem to feel "betrayed" by it, but it's a record, not a relationship, and I think if they were able to take a few deep breaths and give it an honest listen they wouldn't feel the same. (Ryan, as I noted, still admits to an irrational hatred of it.) Maybe you should bring the album out again in a few years and see if it doesn't sound kinda OK. But then, maybe it's just not to your tastes. And that's OK, too.

Sincerely,
m.

posted by Mike B. at 12:04 PM 0 comments

Matthew at Fluxblog posts a new LCD Soundsystem song and you should go download it, because it's great. (Keep in mind that it doesn't really get great until about 4:45.) Matthew thinks it's better than "Losing My Edge," which I'm unsure about, since I'm a bit of a lyrics snob, but it's still really, really good.

It also prompts me to mention that I read the TapeOp article on DFA recently. It was a good interview, even if it focused a bit too much on Tim's work, and if it was clearly conducted a WHILE ago ("We've got the Rapture tracks almost done on our computer right now..."). The part that made me all hot 'n' heavy, though, was when they were talking about their studio and how it has an elevator shaft that they use for recording handclaps, percussion, piano, etc., and how to change the amount of reverb they raise and lower the elevator. Wow. Unfortunately, now I really want to record there. Especially the handclaps.

posted by Mike B. at 11:57 AM 0 comments

My Liz letter gets 'Forked today. Last letter on the page, and no response from Ryan, as per usual. I'm not sure I get the ref in the headline to my letter--AWK?

Incidentally, Rob wrote in mentioning that the people who had the most harshly negative reactions toward the last Liz album seemed to be big Exile in Guyville supporters, especially Chicago critics like Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot.

And guess who else is based in Chicago? Yep: Pitchfork, i.e. Mr. Ryan Schreiber.

posted by Mike B. at 11:08 AM 0 comments

Cat gets very annoyed at theorizing, in a fairly hilarious and understandable way.

posted by Mike B. at 11:01 AM 0 comments

is it true that werewolves are responsible for emo music?

posted by Mike B. at 10:59 AM 0 comments

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