From the aforementioned Neil Strauss article on Courtney:

Theoretically, this should be a time to celebrate. After a six-year hiatus that included disbanding her longtime group Hole, Love has released a new CD, America's Sweetheart, an assault of overblown guitars and screaming lyrics that is as raw and open as her personality. But on this front, too, Love is upset. "People say, 'You made a great record,' " she says. "No, I made a good five songs. I had twelve songs, but they're not on the album. I had no creative control."

She says that the label released the CD before she was finished, selected the cover art without her and didn't get her approval on some of the final mixes or sequencing..."We're going to put out a press release saying that if Virgin doesn't give me enough money [to promote the CD], I'm going to quit."

Right now, Virgin is all she really has. She recently parted with her manager and business lawyer. If she pisses Virgin off, I tell her, she'll have nothing.

"Fuck it!" she leaps to her feet and yells.

This is one of the reasons I'm really loving Courtney these days. These are the kind of complaints artists make all the time: I lost creative control, the label isn't doing enough to promote it, etc. But you'd usually either make it in private, to friends, or make it in public, but quietly. Courtney does it in a Rolling Stone story while she's promoting the CD, and says she's going to follow it up with a press release. Now, don't get me wrong: this does happen. I've certainly been on the semi-receiving end of a few of these sorts of missives, but it was never quite in this context. There's something different about it, and what's different about it is everything else.

The charge has been made against punk rock that the choice it has is either to be unsuccessful or to sell out. What do you do when you're getting money and living the high life? How can you rage against the system when you depend on it for your continued success? Well, you can act like Courtney, getting right to the pinnacle and then fucking everything up, continually, then getting people to trust you again, and then fucking it up. This is not what you might call a spontaneous combustion model of self-destruction along the lines of the Sex Pistols; this is a slow smolder marked by flare-ups, a parasite that lets the host keep living to preserve its own life. Courtney Love has made immeasurably harder the lives of any number of worker bees in the eternally hated music business, and even as much as you can accuse her of hypocracy by continuing to profit from its mechanations, you can't deny that she brought more attention to the issue of artists' rights (for better or for worse) than anyone else. I'm not saying that her being mean to her manager or fellow touring acts or A&R people or photographers or anyone else is necessarily a good thing; it's just true to the spirit of punk rock. Her escapades are undeniably juvenile, but that doesn't make it un-punk, since punk's just a wee bit juvenile itself. I'm not necessarily approving of a certain subset of C-Lo's behaviors by associating them with the historically determined meaning of "punk," which is something I have a few issues with. Nevertheless, it's undeniable that she either doesn't give a fuck or doesn't give a fuck about certain things you're supposed to give a fuck about--unlike the current situation of a certain white rapper we might get to later.

The charge has been made against Courtney Love that she is a "fame whore," that she does things merely to get in the tabloids. Given what we know about Courtney at this point, I'm a little unclear how you can believe this to be true--that, in other words, Courtney would not be taking her shirt off at fast-food restaurants and hitting fans with mic stands if it were not getting printed in the Post. How can you believe this? Crazy is crazy--attention is sometimes a factor, but I don't think Courtney needs Page 6-level attention to justify her antics. At this point, Courtney's going to get covered no matter what; someone from X random hardcore band doing what she's doing would not make it into a major paper, but Courtney knows that she will.[1] And so what I think people who accuse her of being a fame whore mean is that, given that she knows her public indiscretions will get wide play, she should be responsible and not do these things, because...well, I'm a little sure why not. I think Frances Bean usually gets invoked. But I think what they miss is the implicit bargain Courtney has struck: realizing that she's going to be able to get people to print stories about her in the media, she basically uses this as a means of leveling the playing field between her and the people with more money and more connections and more power. She has become a master at media manipulation--so much so, I think, that the media doesn't even seem to realize, or care, that it's being manipulated.[2]

And so the above quote has to be regarded (indeed, it's probably only regarded) in the context of the rest of Courtney's public life. Saying this seems simultaneously a) crazy, given that there was some doubt that she'd be able to find another label big but cooperative/stupid enough to fund a new album, and given that it was somewhat of a miracle that it came out at all, and b) about as far from unexpected as you can possibly get, given that this is exactly what she's always done. You know both of these things because you know everything else, because Courtney has let you know it. But what's significant about all this is that Courtney is 100% aware that most people will think this, and she says it anyway. Sure, the fans'll get up in arms (recall my point about how Courtney's hardcore fans actually seem more insane than she herself is[3]) and maybe make some stink for the label--and sure, I'm a little intrigued too at the idea that there's more "authentically Courtney" versions of the songs somewhere, being a fan myself--but Courtney knows damn well that most people who care will think some combination of a&b, and even fans will at least have to acknowledge it if we're honest about the object of our regard at all. And this is something I love about Courtney: that she lives a significant portion of her life wholly in public, and she is completely honest in the way she portrays it.

Let's pause for a brief clarification here. I'm not saying Courtney always tells the truth. I'm just saying she tells the truth to the New York Post with the same frequency that she tells the truth to, say, Wendy Cobain, or Dave Grohl. I think that's true because I think she says exactly the same thing to those parties in public and in private. For everything Courtney's been accused of, she's not often portrayed of saying one thing in public and another in private. Even during the darkest hour of her shudderingly self-interested legal strategy in the Nirvana, LLC lawsuit, she would explain it on bulletin boards, and none of the principals ever contradicted her. The stances were wrong, but fairly portrayed. And that's what I'm saying she does: she honestly portrays her perspective. That's something you can't say of a lot of public figures.[4] That it is almost certainly a symptom of a mental disorder doesn't necessarily make it any less admirable.

The reason that Courtney seems so unstable, in part, is that she refuses to make a lot of the compromises you're expected to make to acheive a settled kind of fame, which I think we agree she could get if she tried. Her particular balancing act involves building up enough power to get the attention to get her message across, and then uncompromisingly delivering that message, which in turn strips her of much of that power, and then building it up again. It's a remarkably political process for someone who's mentally unbalanced. She doesn't just wreck things; she wrecks thing and then survives to wreck 'em again. At first it was the cultural capital of punk cred that she was building up and wrecking, and now it's marketability. And she knows this, but she really works with it well.

Moreover, I admire what she's been able to get across with this process. In addition to the great, positive feminist stuff, I think she's willingly given up something that's of immeasurable use to public figures: the aura of mystery. A lot of people need to do this trick where they can't tell you what they're really thinking, partially because people respond to things a lot better if they can pretend like it means exactly what they want it to mean[5], and partially because what they're really thinking is kind of boring, banal, and uncreative. Celebrities don't seem like celebrities if we know that they're doing their taxes and cleaning the toilet and having a hard time finding something to eat. Courtney is the rare celebrity that does everything she can to ensure that you don't see her that way, that you do see her as a flawed, graspable, real human being. She will tell you who her lawyer is and how their meetings go; she will tell you about her relationship problems; she will tell you about her custody battles and everything else. There are certainly parts of her life that remain hidden--but these are small and well-chosen. Just as what some people see as fame whoredom is actually a form of honesty, since Coutney's refusing to conform to what someone in the public eye is supposed to act like[6] is just her being her, so is her incessant (and, honestly, kind of annoying) name-dropping a similar aspect of this openness. She really does hang out with these people, and because she's a real person instead of a celebrity for whom hanging around with famous people is just run of the mill and nothing special, she's excited about it and wants to tell people about it. Ultimately, I think it's less her trying to make herself look better by associating herself with Nicole Kidman or whoever, and more just her being genuinely excited about doing this stuff. I don't think people want to acknowledge that genuine strain of excitement and wonder in Courtney, but there's no doubt in my mind that it's very much there.

So I really admire Courtney for all of this, for managing to be a celebrity without being a celebrity, for taking this negative of universal media attention and turning it into a half-positive, for being, above all, absurdly honest, self-destructively honest. I think--and I could certainly be wrong--that it actually does some good in the wider world.

[1] Witness the dressing-up episode in the Strauss piece that resulted in "the boobs conversation," as I will henceforth refer to it.
[2] In part, no doubt, because so much of the manipulation and even the surrounding justification seems antithetical to Courtney's interests.
[3] Which would be an interesting graph to plot--craziness of artist v. craziness of fans.
[4] Nor would you necessarily want to--Lord only knows what a whole media landscape of Courtneys would be like.
[5] And because they haven't internalized the death of the author, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
[6] What's that line from one of the Stooges? "What do you expect to happen when you pay a bunch of monkeys to act like monkeys?" Something to that effect.
posted by Mike B. at 4:43 PM 0 comments

ROCK 'N' ROLL BON MOTS #009

(disclaimer: yes, I know talking about your dreams is like one small step away, blog-wise, from talking about your cats, but bear with me here, I need to get warmed up)

I had a weird dream last night. We were in this big dining room of a faceless hotel and there were four of us seated around a table with a white tablecloth: me, my songwriting partner, someone who looked to be of South Asian heritage that I assume was my subconsciousness' version of Panjabi MC but who actually looked more middle-aged and doughy and Bangladeshi, and Jay-Z's sample clearance guy. Apparently me and my songwriting partner had produced a track for Jay that had done fairly well and now they wanted us to do another one. Me and my songwriting partner talked for a while but he/she (couldn't tell or can't remember) seemed kind of frantic; I said I had lots of little bits and we should get together and throw beats behind them and see what happened, but S.P. was quietly freaking out. I also suggested something with a lot of clapping. The meeting broke up and I looked through the binder (!) about our track. It reached #22! That's nice. Then I tried to ride the elevator and Jay was there, slogging his way up the down elevator. I blame the Time-Warner mall for this bit, and a sign on the subway for the other bits. (It was a really weird sign. I wish I could've taken it.)

And then there was something about a train tunnel dripping blood and a naked firefighter spraying gallons of water on a tower, and then I woke up and played with my cute little cat Muffin Pookums.

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

Friday, April 23, 2004

Hey--want to volunteer to work at the NYC Republican National Convention? Go here. It could be fun, if you know what I mean.

posted by Mike B. at 5:58 PM 0 comments

Thursday, April 22, 2004

Neil Strauss on Courtney. Or, rather, on three days with Courtney. It's a great article, sad and true. I think his assessment of her issues is a lot more fair than what we usually get:

Her flaws, then, are as follows: She is extremely reactive, responding in an excessive way to every new situation or thought that arises; she is a megalomaniac, making claims that no one with a healthy sense of modesty would make in front of a journalist (as when she dismisses comparisons to alternative rockers of the moment and insists, "I'm a catalog artist: I compete with Bob Dylan"); she is obsessed with detail, micromanaging her affairs and sometimes failing to see the bigger picture; and she has become consumed by her supposed enemies and believes that all of the bad things that are happening to her are the result of a coordinated financial, legal and personal smear campaign.

Also, she says, "I have a magic pussy."

posted by Mike B. at 12:38 PM 0 comments

You really, really need to read what Esselle links to here. It's pretty much the funniest English paper I've ever read. And that's saying something.

UPDATE: Yet more, found by mwanji.

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

Quo Vadimus points us to the great Klosterman piece envisioning what it would have been like if Cobain have lived and how it wouldn't have been all that great, wshew. There are also some other things mentioned that I will not mention lest this become a mere rewrite of the QV post, but seriously, go read that Klosterman piece. It's good because it's so goddamn smart--there's jokes in there about how Kurt talked to the press, about how he talked about upcoming albums, about the NME, etc., that ring very true. It's believable.

posted by Mike B. at 11:15 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

Paging through the Tori section of this (via Largehearted Boy, via Kinja), I was gratified, I think, to be able to look at file names and have a pretty good idea of which bootleg they were from, provided they're pre-2001. And I found a few good new ones: a "Purple Rain" cover! Which is awesome! Listening to it, I was reminded, first, of that particular mood she's able to conjure with just the piano: a particular kind of quiet, soothing stillness, sort of isolating, but sort of enveloping, too, although maybe this is just me picturing what it's like to be at a concert. And then the first verse, and I got a few chills, and then she botched the pre-chorus (ease into it, sweetie!), and then the second verse had a few nice bits. And the whole thing is good because it's Tori doing a friggin' song instead of just wanking on the piano, which is one of the reasons why her covers[1] are so good--they really harness her skills and tie them to something like a coherent structure, plus she makes great picks of stuff that works with her style.[2]

Which brings us to the other thing the page reminded me of: that during the '96 Dew Drop Inn tour (done with just her and a guitarist), she would preface a song sometimes with a little a capella improv that would incorporate the chorus of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt." The obvious parallel here, of course, is to Johnny Cash's cover of it, from his final album. Cash's version feels resigned and settled, very mid-volume vocally, taking the song and making it into a combination of a country-blues lament and a Biblical tale of negative destiny. The hurt in question isn't particularly deliberate, but is almost accidental. Cash turns Reznor's iconography into specific reality: "the needle" isn't some half-assed heroin metaphor, but a very specific, medical needle, used to keep him alive. "I remember everything" because there is, in fact, a lot to remember; it's not some overstatement about a bad relationship, it's a true thing, the piled-up regret and sorrow and loss of a whole life. "Everyone I know goes away in the end" not because your friends are fickle or because you chase them away with your gothic moodiness, but because they're friggin' dead. Reznor's original take on it (which I still love, incidentally) is perfect for teenagers, full of melodrama and romantic darkness; Cash's is the perfect representation of someone who has aged into respect, who does not need to speak loudly to be heard.

Tori's version, on the other hand, is characterized first and foremost by its almost extreme quietness, not just intimate like Cash's, but seeming totally unaware of any listener at all. Lying there in the air of a theater without anything to go along with it, it has the feeling of someone singing to themselves who suddenly makes a connection between what they're saying and what has come before, and the fact that Tori and Trent are friends just adds another layer to it. The '96 version that precedes "Caught a Lite Sneeze" is the best from that page, but the one before another cover, of the Cure's "Love Song"[3] is the best representation of what she can do with an audience--it's a rare musician who can do a capella without inviting cheers and whoops, and so here we have, first, an unaccompanied voice doing something like improv, swooping into a tidbit of a song the audience knows very well, and then actually whispering the last half of it, so quiet as to be inaudible on the recording, and then into this whole other cover, all without any disturbance. And she did this all the time, but it's still sort of breathtaking.

But what the hell is going on here? Of the four versions here, they each have entirely different vocal improvs preceding the snippet of "Hurt," and like all Tori vocal improvs, they don't seem to make a whole lot of sense. They're notable mainly for uniting a lot of Tori keywords ("girl", "stop," "boys," "everywhere," "sweet," etc.) with a bunch of other words that sort of cohere but mostly don't. As far as I know, she didn't do this again, but clearly she felt compelled to do so on certain nights on this tour, and what came out was just whatever was running through her mind at the time, which I like, although I do wish it was a bit more coherent. And so we have something that's almost like automatic speaking, speaking in tongues, connected--bing!--to something that already exists, and the way it feels, especially in the CALS version, where she transitions from the improv to the cover with a series of rhythmic gasps, is that it's all being torn out of her, like there was nothing else to do at that point except sing the chorus of "Hurt," which makes no sense, but it's certainly the impression I'm getting and have always gotten from hearing this. What in Trent's hands felt constructed and in Johnny's hands felt old now feels entirely present and maybe a little crazy, in some versions less like it's a cover and more like it's something she's making up on the spot that just happens to be exactly like another existing song (just like Cash's version feels like something's he's discovered from seventy years ago instead of ten). It does feel kind of psychotic to me, like the rantings of a crazy person that suddenly happens to coincide with aspects of your own life, but which you know can't be referring to that.

And that's how a great song--and I do think these two covers prove that "Hurt" is a great song--can function. It feels like it knows you, like it's a secret fact about your own life that's being sung out loud but which remains secret. Different covers are just external reflections of the different internal interpretations we have of a song as open and accessible as "Hurt." Tori turns it into something that honestly feels like it's being wrenched directly from her subconscious, and Johnny turns it into something that honestly feels like he wrote it about himself and his own body. More importantly, Tori's cover shows the endless mutability of pop, not just musically but semantically--you can drop a quotation from "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" into a jazz improv, and you can sample "Tom Sawyer," but you can also thread together different things by closing your eyes and just making noise with your mouth and unconsciously making those connections, because they are already there, because they are just as much a part of you as your memories, and this is one of the reasons why art matters. It is written inside each of us--different works, and in different ways, but it is there nonetheless.

[1] With, sigh, the notable exception of almost everything on her covers album except maybe "Enjoy the Silence," "Time," and "Heart of Gold"--"'97 Bonnie & Clyde" is particularly odious, an Eminem cover for people who don't get Eminem, whereas I think all her other covers, from Nirvana to Steely Dan to Springsteen, could all be just as easily embraced by her fans and fans of the original.
[2] In "Purple Rain," for instance, around about 4:25 when she starts hitting the "oohs" it sounds exactly like another Tori song, although I can't for the life of me remember which one. Maybe "Hey Jupiter."
[3] She ends "Love Song" by basically yelling the last word of the chorus, and it works so friggin' well it's incredible one one's done it already.

posted by Mike B. at 6:40 PM 0 comments

In actual significant news, Hillary has a blog. She currently is writing about Kill Bill, Liars, and Billy Ray Cyrus. So you should read it, because of that, and because she is like butter, writing-wise. Expect various cross-dialogues and media empires shortly.

posted by Mike B. at 5:44 PM 0 comments

This afternoon, Modest Mouse on K-Rock. (Why am I listening to K-Rock? Er...I'm not really sure.)

This morning, Pearl Jam's manager, Kelly, in the office. I really wanted to yell, "Dude, play 'Jeremy'!" (That or "sellout!") But I didn't. I hope they sign with us so I can touch Eddie's hair. I will go home and wrap it around my guitar and use it to summon cred. I will act like my dad is dead and write a song about it and the first line of the song will be "MY EXHIBITIONISTIC TENDENCIES AS A LEAD SINGER ARE COMPENSATION FOR THE LACK OF A FATHER FIGURE IN MY LIFE AND OOOOOOHHHAAAAAGGGGHHH..."

posted by Mike B. at 5:35 PM 0 comments

ROCK 'N' ROLL BON MOTS #008

What the hell is up with the bridge of Live's "Lightning Crashes" and why didn't I notice it before? The guitarist dude just cannot hit that little turn/trill in the 6th and 7th bars of the riff. Did he just not practice it enough? Is he trying to hold the chord formation and getting a weak sound with his pinkie? Well, I suppose I shouldn't judge, there's a moment like that in our canon as well.

posted by Mike B. at 5:32 PM 0 comments

Monday, April 19, 2004

So I've given myself a few shots at liking the Killers, but for better or worse, I just can't get past the impression I had upon returning to my desk and hearing a bit halfway through "Somebody Told Me"--"Oh no, somebody's Franz Ferdinanded it again!" I would roughly define this verb as "missing the point of disco." Listen to that chorus--it's a disco progression, and even a disco beat, but rocked up in such a way that it loses about half the groove and a third of the energy of even a second-rate disco track, to say nothing of a good house song. And so then what's the point? It's an example of when you can legitimately complain about rock's co-option: when you just grab the tropes so it sounds like a rock cover of a disco song without learning (or intuiting) the actual compositional and technical lessons the other genre has to impart. I don't think you have to regard other genres on their terms, but I think it's much more productive to at least be able to do so, and then move back into your standard mode. (Thus the difference between rap pastiches of the 80s and when white kids actually figured out hip-hop in the 90s.)

But it's weird to me how many people genuinely miss the value in dance music when moving back into rock, and I think it's no accident that the best rock-dance songs have been electronic appropriations of rock rather than the other way around. When I hear a great house or rave song, I don't want to sort of shake my hips a bit, which is what Franz Ferdinand and the Killers make me want to do; I want to bop my head and pump my fists and twirl around. What rock and dance share is the emphasis on ecstatic expression, and it's at that intersection point that you can really cross genres. Honestly, Guns 'n' Roses are a better expression of dance-rock than the Killers, because there's a hell of a groove to, say, "Paradise City," which I just don't hear that much of in "Somebody Told Me." Rock expresses ecstasy via loudness and fastness, but a mid-tempo, mid-volume dance song can have just as much of an effect. (See innumerable Prince songs.) This is what rock can take from it. There's a lot of good, fast/loud dance music--gabba, jungle, acid-house, dnb, etc.--but if anything, they show rock how you can take that core trick of being energetic without expressing a lot of energy and ramp it up.

But maybe I need to give them more of a shot. I can see them being real good live. But that chorus groove just doesn't go along long enough! Lock into it, guys! The verse stuff just isn't good enough to ignore that chorus for that long. In the first 2 minutes of the song, there's like 10 seconds of chorus. Then 15 seconds of chorus, then 30 seconds of negligible bridge, then the last 35 seconds of the song are chorus, but by that point the impact's been so diluted that it doesn't really nail it right. And there's not enough groove, still.

Be pop, you bastards! Be pop!

posted by Mike B. at 6:27 PM 0 comments

ROCK 'N' ROLL BON MOTS, #007

I was groggy today and no music sounded very good, which was sort of OK, since I was out of hard drive space and this allowed me to be far less generous in weeding stuff out, but this does not mean that grogginess is always inconducive to Music Appreciation; indeed, one of the best feelings in the world is waking up alone on a Sunday morning around noon in the fall and putting on something like the Eban and Charlie soundtrack, or maybe If You're Feeling Sinister, and puttering around the apartment, maybe nursing a cup of tea, maybe reading a bit on the couch, as angled light filters in through half-empty tree branches and big windows, feeling pretty darn groggy and not like doing anything for the next eight hours or so besides eventually picking up a musical instrument and puttering around on that. But this is, I suppose, an entirely different kind of grogginess, one that is contained, both within four walls and within a head. There is nothing to disturb it or drive it out, as there is when you wake on a Monday and have to get out of the apartment, into the bright sunshine and the bright fluorescent lights and the general bustle of the city. Then, the grogginess never goes away, but it does get kind of shaken up and diffused, so that it lasts over just as long a period of time, but without the soothing effects that it can engage in within a more sheltered environment. And so the music doesn't sound good--because nothing sounds good.

posted by Mike B. at 1:09 PM 0 comments

Sunday, April 18, 2004

From a Newsweek article about a Christian nightclub/music venue at which there is no alcohol:

There are other official prohibitions as well: no mosh pits, no slow songs...

And suddenly I realized why Christian pop music sucks. It's not the religious lyrics--lyrics don't really matter to a lot of music, and Christian acts have succeeded in the mainstream for just this reason. Nor is it the way it imitates secular music--secular music imitates secular music all the time, often to fantastic results. It's because all the songs have to be mid-tempo. Can't have fast songs, because that inspires moshing. Can't have slow songs, because that inspires, er, sex. So what do you have? A bunch of mid-tempo songs. And those can be good--but a diet of nothing but them is pretty bland.

posted by Mike B. at 3:25 PM 0 comments

From a VR thread about Fiona Apple's new album possible getting shelved:

"So, they're not sure they have a "Single" and think that may mean lackluster sales, so they've decided to hide it away in a vault.

Sounds like a great plan to me."

3 words.

Yankee, Hotel, Foxtrot

This is exactly why the music industry is the laughing stock of any business where smart people dwell. You never hear a baseball coach say "Either hit a home run, or strike out. Those are your only two options."

This is, of course, not really true. It doesn't make logical or moral sense, but it does make business sense. (Indeed, the fact that it doesn't make logical or moral sense is sort of a good sign that it makes good business sense.) The first album did tremendously well; the second one less so. But it's reasonable to assume that Fiona renegotiated her new-artist deal after the first album, and it's further reasonable to assume that there was a guaranteed marketing commitment included in that renegotiation, and that this guarantee was somewhat high. And so if they do release the album, that's committing to an expenditure of a further $1 million at least in marketing, promo, and manufacturing. They'd have to sell at least 200k to make that up, and clearly some at the label don't think it will. Why release something when you're going to lose more money on it?

So why not sell it to someone else? Well, since the label has probably already spent let's say $300k in A&R costs, it needs to get these back, plus it needs a compelling reason not to have it in its catalog in case it does sell well. So it wants an override (presumably in addition to a partial repayment of recoding costs) of 2 or 3 points on the album, which would come out of the artist's royalties, except that unlike artist royalties, you have to pay from record 1, not just once costs are recouped. And so there's a big disincentive to pick the album up, since the new label will essentially have to start laying out money before the artist is recouped, and a similar disincentive for the label to give it up until they've exhausted all other avenues.

And so this is why shit happens like Wilco getting dropped by a major and resigned by one of its subsidiaries, or Dead Prez getting dropped by and re-signed by Columbia: it allows you to re-renegotiate the contract based upon the album at hand. So you drop the band, drop the contract, and resign with a whole new contract that's probably more beneficial to the label in a lot of ways but which also gives the artists certain rights of independence. (It also gives you time to let the album circulate in the free market to get a better idea of its value.) I assume right now there's an internal battle at the label between A&R, finance, and marketing (and the various execs thereof) as to whether or not to release it, and it's this internal battle, i.e. the hope that it will actually be released, that further delays its being shopped elsewhere.

Is this all pretty stupid? Sure. But it all stems from release and marketing commitments, and those are in there to protect the artist from being short-changed by the label. These end up hurting the label sometimes, and so they also end up hurting subsequent artists, but it wouldn't be necessary if the music industry wasn't one giant cesspool of untrustworthiness where, OK, it's a bad thing for the system, but fuck you, I don't want you releasing an album I spent years on without laying out a reasonable amount of money to promote it, because if you're not promoting it then why the hell am I with a record company? The solution at this point would probably involve a greater use of labels as marketing companies, rather than whole entities, wherein the artist would have a freer hand in setting the level of marketing and manufacturing, with proper consultation. You could also decouple the labels from ownership of the products, and so they wouldn't have a vested interest creating a disincentive to having it released. Furthermore, you could have bonuses based on benchmarks rather than individual unit sales, i.e. you don't get five dollars for selling one more CD, you get a chunk of money when you hit 500k sales, so there would be a greater incentive to increase sales.

Of course, this probably won't happen without everything sort of collapsing, and I'm not really ready for that yet.

The music industry is a "laughing stock of any business where smart people dwell" not because of its weirdo business practices (if anything, they're better for the salesmen than the practices of a lot of other industries), but because you can't really make any money in the music industry; from a business perspective, there really isn't a lot of money to be made, whichever way you slice it, unless you go gold and so actually, again, the smart business decision doesn't work out well for anyone. The industry survives by maintaining an aura of cool that draws people who are looking for some cool to it, and if they have a little money, well, they give us their money, they look cool, everyone benefits. Sort of. Without this steady supply of star-struck rich idiots, where would we be?

The lesson from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot wasn't that you can make money off "difficult" bands. It's that if you shelve an album and then drop the band and work it in a way that you get a ton of press for it, the album will do really well. This is not good for artists.

posted by Mike B. at 1:20 AM 0 comments

But I didn't say that I wouldn't talk about what happened immediately before or after recording.

Before, we saw a dead bird on the sidewalk in front of the studio, a starling, I think. No one stepped on it. When we got back from breakfast, someone had taken it away. We chose not to take this as a bad omen.

Afterwards, I was walking to Crip Dogs to get something to eat (Grilled Cheese was closed) and right after I passed Jesse Malin two blocks south of Niagra, a convertable tore by me up Avenue A, blaring "Hey Ya." It made sense, somehow.

The recording went very well. We laid down all the instrumental tracks for three songs and they sound very good. We are excited.

posted by Mike B. at 12:36 AM 0 comments

Saturday, April 17, 2004

In response to the NYT story about soldiers' listening choices/options in Iraq, a Plastic poster with actual experienece chimes in:

Music is important in Iraq for a number of reasons. A simple one is that, when you're living ten (or more) to a tent, you do anything you can to isolate yourself. So headphones become a lifeline. Particularly since the guy in the next cot probably doesn't share your taste in music 100%.

Why music on the server? I was there for four months, current Air Force policy is six month tours, and the Army does a year. How many CD's do you think you can pack in an A-bag? So it's an unwritten policy that everybody shares what they have. It's not p2p, it's just one big freaking server that everybody goes to. It contains everything from the ugliest "pull my glock/pop him in a drive-by" rap to Perry Como. I burned a few CDs while I was there, too. It's just self-preservation: you save your sanity however you can.

There's choice in the radio stations, though. Yes, AFN is the only thing some people listen to. But when I got there in July, we had other spots on the dial to choose from.

There were, of course, dozens of Arabic-language stations. Are you aware that there are multiple varieties of Arabic music, all practically indistinguishable from each other to the Western ear? In fact, their most unique feature, as far as I can tell, is how much they all resemble a 60s Arabian movie soundtrack (or maybe "The Thief of Baghdad." That would be fitting, wouldn't it?). These guys are all about the full string section backing the wailing pipes and... um... unusual singing style.

There were two non-Arabic stations to choose from... well, OK. One and a half. One of the stations played Western music every other song. Weird kind of dissonance there, although it worked pretty well when they'd play something like Sting's "Desert Rose." And after a while, it dropped to one Western song in three.

The other Euro-influenced station played about 50% Western music during the day, but just went hog-wild at night. And they seem to subscribe to the "How obscure can you get?" format ? I had a hard time identifying some of this stuff. (Between 0300 and 0400 one night, for instance, it was apparently Obscure-80s-Hair-Metal-Hour.)

There was one station... well, we were never sure what it was. It seemed to be prerecorded, since it repeated the same songs in the same order. But not at the same time, so it wasn't a 24-hour tape. (You notice these things on a twelve-hour shift.) And they put in a new tape every couple of days. There were no ads, no DJ, nothing but music. The selection was odd ? everything from middle-of-the-road country to heavy metal. There were odd groupings, like a half-hour of Blink-182-wannabes, or forty-five minutes of Oasis-inspired Brit-trash.

It might have been a pirate station, but every once in a while, it would throw in some patriotic semi-classical piece (the Battle Hymn of the Republican, "Yankee Doodle" with strings and a wind section, that kind of thing) that made us wonder if it wasn't some CIA-sponsored "hearts-and-minds" gig. They started having dead air at random hours of the day and night, and finally went away completely (I guess they didn't gather up enough hearts or meet their quota on minds).

AFN went through a lot of changes while I was there, and if they have their own DJ's, they've undergone at least one more, although the music choice seems to have stayed pretty much the same.

AFN, for you civilian types, is the "Armed Forces Network" (if you really want useless detail to clutter up your minds the way it clogs mine, AFN springs from AFRTS, the "Armed Forces Radio and Television Service").

At first, we didn't have a "real" AFN station ? it was prerecorded. No ads "on purpose," but every once in a while, the monkey on the editing board would miss one and we'd get fifteen or thirty seconds of somebody pimping Radio Shack or somewhere. There were, though, a lot of PSAs (Public Service Announcements) and, yes, station identification (in case you didn't know you were listening to AFN based on the "Armed Forces News," "Navy Update," "Moments in History," or the rest of the nausea-inducing-but-blessedly-short filler between the songs).

In the afternoon, a strangely "sanitized" DJ came on, with no reference to where she was broadcasting from, nothing location-specific at all. Maybe it's the next big thing. "Generic Radio ? all the programming, half the cost!" (like ClearChannel, but with less personality). They stuck firmly to their genre, though. Mostly current pop, with a smattering of seventies-through-nineties pop (emphasis on the more recent years). Hard-core country or rap fans were out of luck. (The metalheads could go to the CIAirplay station and get the occasional fix.)

For a while, AFN split in two: one was news/talk, and the other one only played music. As time went on, we lost 90% of the talk station (I guess the second antenna went to Tikrit or somewhere). That didn't bother anyone too much though: they didn't have enough bits to make up a whole day of programming, and so it repeated the various bits it played several times throughout the morning.

As it changed to one station, the music side went from crap (all pop all the time), to upgraded crap: the pop of "the 80's, 90's and today." And the pattern changed. Instead of a constant string of bad songs, we got a couple of songs, a crappy "History Minute," a song, the "Army Report" (military-oriented news, delivered badly), a song, oops-a-commercial-slipped-in, a song, and so on. They still used generic syndicated DJ's. No big names ? no Bob & Tom, no Howard Stern, just faceless voices ? and the afternoon guy was just annoying as hell (thank god I slept most afternoons and worked all night).

The final choice? BBC World. It's everywhere. I've listened to it in Europe, in Kuwait, and we got it in Baghdad (weak signal, though ? not sure where they were broadcasting from). When I had a radio available AND a taste for NPR-style talk-radio (without the political agenda, and WITH a sexy British accent), that was where I went. But that's just me.

posted by Mike B. at 7:21 AM 0 comments

Friday, April 16, 2004

Hey folks. Recording diary will not appear here after all, due to my general workload and business stress; I think it'll actually make the recording process harder, and lord knows we don't want that. So sorry about that. Mebbe next time.

posted by Mike B. at 11:09 PM 0 comments

From the estimable Tom Ellard:

Spent some time on another soundtrack job which I can't say much about. Also played through some albums I've borrowed.

So many albums seem to be this thing, I think I'll call it 'half music'. It's a strange thing - it's very clever, with precise production, beautiful sounds, many wonderful sonic events - but it has the overall feeling of a hamburger without the beef. There's so much of it, and it's very popular I guess because it doesn't intrude at all - vocals are forbidden. What's an example, well the last thing I listened to was RUOK by Meat Beat Manifesto, and it needs a few more listens, but it's that kind of - "pardon me? May I please play in the background while you use your XBox? I promise to only throw a few vocal samples in every now and then.". Like I could say that I have tended towards that recently but I have the baggage of old school and glam that keeps me from being too polite. And I make that horrible mouth noise.

Seefeel. That was another one. The album starts and you think 'fucking eh this is interesting loopy stuff', but then it kind of just keeps doing that. You can bet that track X will be much the same as X-1. There's going to be a loopy noise and then the drum and the bass and then... it'll stop. Nice, but can I have some songs?

Took a reality check - played some older albums - yep - there's songs. You know, songs. Buzzcocks. Wot a great band.

Of course you could go the other way and do an album like Plaid. I mean, a minute has gone by it must be time to throw another key/rhythm/mix change in there - people's attention might wander if they just played a fucking song for more than a minute - can't have that. Everytime I started to enjoy some thing it was whipped away from me like a restaurant where they want to clean the table. Haven't you finished listening yet? Geez you're slow. I felt like telling them to calm their asses and give me back my entree.

Actually, shamefully the album I enjoyed hearing again was "After The Heat" by Eno and Cluster. Damn fine album that. Tuneful and weird. I'm going to try find some more Cluster LPs.

Yeah. Songs. Damn straight.

posted by Mike B. at 10:41 AM 0 comments

Thursday, April 15, 2004

In everything I've read about the New Pornographers, as far as I can remember I can't remember critics saying much about Carl Newman's lyrics; at most, you'll get a "sure, they don't make any sense, but that's OK." And honestly, that seems like a pretty fair assessment. Sure, they're in the same ballpark of randomness as the Fiery Furnaces' lyrics, but in the case of the latter there's a real feeling of narrative flow there, so you're compelled to dig deeper, and usually rewarded. (More on this later.) With Carl's stuff (but less so Dan's), individual lines or couplets might have some resonance, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of coherency to individual songs. For instance, here's a reasonable bit from "The Electric Version":

Our electric version calls, you alone create the full spectrum of light, so what could go wrong? Just as long as it sounds lost, streaming out of the magnets. The card you're dealt by the crowd goes wild, make believe you are an only child. Here are the clothes, please put them on. Still to come...

Eh? You certainly get a sense of some sort of thematic unity in some tracks (especially this one and "All For Swinging You Around"), but who the hell knows what they're actually talking about? Theoretically it could be a situation like with Nivana's "Scentless Apprentice" where it seems random until you know what it's supposed to be about and then it all clicks into place, but supposedly "It's Only Divine Right" is about the Bush daughters, and while this does make some of the references more clear in the song, it still doesn't make it actually make sense.

While this essential incoherency didn't disturb my listening experience a whit, with the headphones off I sometimes wondered. I'm certainly not the lyrical fascist I used to be (i.e. in high school, followed by a total drop-off in college), but given the opportunities here, and given Newman's general deliberateness about everything, I couldn't help but consider whether or not he'd faltered in this fairly major way, songwriting-wise, although the ability to write entirely incoherent songs that weren't disturbed by this incoherency is impressive. But why do that?

And then this morning, it hit me, while listening to "The Laws Have Changed" and thinking about Carl's claim that it had originally had even more hooks but that he'd had to take some out to make the song intelligible, why this was so. A big problem for me when I'm writing songs is that, when I finally seize upon a subject for the song, I want to explore it fully, and so sometimes I end up writing a lot more lyrics than I really should have, and throwing in extra bits just to get all the words in. Sometimes whole verses or bridges will end up getting cut, and that's certainly fine. But there's still more than maybe should be there, and I recognize that I can't say less because I'm basically tied to the narrative or argument of the thing.

But what Newman's managed to do as a songwriter is essentially divorce himself from this need, and thereby free himself up a lot more compositionally. Because just as the music is made up of a series of "hooks," so are the lyrics, functioning less as a melodic, narrative line than like the way a pop song does: as a series of connected repetitions with less of a linear relation and more of a parallel one, being connected with previous sections chordally (which in the case of lyrics consists of words in the same meaning-family--see the Word Menu) or in a theme-and-variations way (for the music, this would mean variations on a central rhythm). For every meaning-based impact, the lyrics just as often have a euphonious or purely aesthetic impact, but what makes them hooks is that this impact is contained in no more than four lines in a row.

And so what this means is that there's no reason to extend, say, a verse section, or a chorus, to encompass more of the narrative, because it can all be encapsulated in, at most, twice the minimum length of a musical unit. In some cases (mostly in other songs on Electric Version) Newman even extends thoughts over multiple sections, and you don't realize this is the case until you actually see the lyrics printed and realize that, say, three sections of "Electric Version" actually contain two sentences, the first two quoted above. Thus "The Laws Have Changed" flows seamlessly from one basically unrelated (except by key and tempo) section to another, without real transitions, lyrical or musical. That's why it's a song that you could pack even more hooks into: there's so many bits, you can just add new bits over the existing ones and have new hooks.

To illustrate, let's map the song. Instead of my usual time measurement, I think it'll be more instructive to note how many bars each section lasts for.

Verse riff (4 bars)
Verse w/singing and upturn at end of each rep (6 bars)
Pre-chorus ("Introducing...") (4 bars)
Chorus ("All hail...") (7 bars)
Verse riff (4 bars)
Verse w/singing and upturn (6 bars)
Pre-chorus (4 bars)
Chorus (7 bars)
Hook pt. 1 ("Na na na...") (2 bars)
Hook pt. 2 (2 bars)
Hook pt. 1 (2 bars)
Hook pt. 2 (2 bars)
Verse riff (2 bars)
Verse (6 bars)
Pre-chorus (4 bars)
Chorus (7 bars)
Verse riff (1 bar) [ed. note--this is awesome! I always wondered why it worked so well here.]
Hook pt. 1 (2 bars)
Hook pt. 2 (2 bars)
Hook pt. 1 (2 bars)
Hook pt. 2 (2 bars)
Verse riff (4 bars)
Coda (6 bars)

I may have cheated a bit by breaking the bridge hook up into two separate bits, but they're pretty separate arrangement-wise (different drums, different keyboards, not just chordally), so I'm OK with that. Anyway, look at it: nothing longer than 7 bars! That's incredible! Even if you disagree with my bridge assessment, it's 8 bars. And so many different bits! That's partially, I think, why Electric Version is a harder thing to grasp at first than the first album, Mass Romantic--it's more fractured and short, sectionally. Mass Romantic's "Letter From an Occupant," for instance, consists of 16-bar verses broken up by 4-bar choruses (that are distinct 2-line hits, as opposed to the lyrical flow across sections of Electric Version) and an 8-bar verbal hook, with a 4-bar verbal break and a bridge that's four bars but probably gets repeated for at least 16. And so the longest section there is twice as long as the longest of "Laws."

Anyway, looking at the tab, it's not as fractured as you might think, but still, it slips in and out of key, especially with that D at the beginning of the pre-chorus that throws everything off. But the arrangement is incredibly fractured, with bits dropping in and coming out and changing after 2 bars to something else for 4 bars to something else for 2. Are there horns in any other section besides the pre-chorus? And the keyboards are constantly shifting, too, to say nothing of the drums that still groove despite the fact that they pretty much change every section.

And so there you go. It's a lovely little trick that Carl's done, because there's no reason that it should work; the songs should require a lot more to hold them together. Hell, "Laws" even has two lead vocalists! But the compositional technique works across the whole album, and that's neato. He's explicitly avoiding narrative for the sake of the hook.

posted by Mike B. at 6:05 PM 0 comments

Superstar USA, basically an inversion of American Idol on the Joe Millionaire model wherein they keep the really bad singers and make them think they're great, sounds pretty good--I mean, Tone-Loc is a judge--but what about when they say "and to ease the embarrassment, the 'winner' (or 'last person standing,' as producers phrase it) gets $100,000 and a recording contract" and "Fleiss hopes to release a 'Superstar' album and take the final 12 on tour"? Can this actually work?

Maybe so. It strikes me as sort of the indie AI--first we laugh at people who think they're good but we all know are horrible, then we encourage them, then we go see people who can't sing or play instruments perform. It's sort of like Welsey Willis in stage one, and then sort of like, um, 90% of existing indie bands in stage 2. Awesome!

posted by Mike B. at 4:27 PM 0 comments

Reason to hate Sleater-Kinney #2,147 (from Real Life Rock Top 10):

3) "In other news," official Sleater-Kinney website (Sleater-Kinney.com, March 3) "Urban Outfitters, the store dedicated to reselling your childhood back to you via nostalgia and irony-based fashion, is selling a T-shirt that says: 'Voting Is For Old People.' Unless you are under the age of 18, this shirt will be banned from all Sleater-Kinney shows."

Wow, if that shirt can have that much of an effect that you have to ban it from shows, it must be really subversive, huh?

Don't wear Urban Outfitters, kids! Why? Sleater-Kinney says they're not cool!

posted by Mike B. at 10:52 AM 0 comments

ROCK 'N' ROLL BON MOTS, #006

Things my weird musical education deprived me of knowing: just how goddamn noise-rock the middle section of "Whole Lotta Love" is! OK, maybe it's not a whole lot noise-rock for today, but for the 70s, hey, that's pretty damn good. It's specifically the Sonic Youth feel to the whole section--the drums sort of pounding away blindly (the steady pedal-hat beat is very Steve Shelly, although I can't remember for the life of me what song this is from) while non-rhythmic noise elements float through, like the channel-crossing buzz, Plant's distanced vocals, the guitar's mechanical elements ringing out. Certainly elements of the whole song are sort of annoying (in the context of hearing all the noise bits and weird arrangement choices, the more conventional, hooky blues bits at the heart tend to grate), but I think this one deserves closer attention.

posted by Mike B. at 9:18 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

This is a simply fantastic post about the toxic legacy of the 60's, the benefits of selling out, and the value for miscegnation along with purity. Excerpt:

Straight Edge, with its reduction of counter-cultural opposition to an individualistic moralising (no longer is the goal a body politic in opposition to capitalism, but merely an individual body remaining free of the taint of consumerism), represents the most extreme form of the political bankruptcy of No Sell Out, alternative, culture. Clinging to a vision of purity without a desire for change (which is, after all, a type of impurity) means that not selling out is not a political programme, but an inward looking and ultimately barren form of 'merely cultural' activity. So let's sell out.

The worst sell outs, we would be told (if we were still listening to those who care about selling out) are the rappers, who took the beautiful nascent counter-culture of Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy and reduced it to bling and bitches. This ignores, of course, that 'sell out' hip-hop has brought us the beautiful (and politically astute) lyrics of early Jay-Z, or the pure insurrection of NWA and Eminem. More fundamentally, though, this criticism fails to understand where the revolutionary potential of hip-hop came from in the first place. Because perhaps the most interesting thing is that hip-hop has never been a counter-culture; it didn't start out as oppositional...

Here we have the revolutionary principle of miscegenation, the absolute eros which gave counter-culture its energy and threat, tied now not to separation but to infilitration (in both directions). This miscegenation has allowed hip-hop to be coopted by mainstream culture, no doubt, but it has also allowed hip-hop to keep reinventing itself as revolutionary within mainstream culture. Rap stil has the energy that revolutionaries can take and turn into a threat...think back to Nirvana performing on Top of the Pops. Pop culture energy with a gun in its hand blasting out of every TV in the country. That's the kind of sell out we should be working towards.

Great stuff.

That said, I obviously differ slightly in terms of the rhetoric and the assesment of the current situation, but then again I'm not interested in having a "revolutionary culture," so the fact that we're not there doesn't worry me so much. I'm also obviously not so big on seeing pop culture's sole value being in essentially subversive messages, since a) I don't think subversive messages are very effective, and b) I think pop culture as it is has a value in itself, since it's always been a forum for ambiguity. But this is just based on a possibly innaccurate interpretation, and I still say "yes yes yes" to the rest of it, which does seem to acknowledge the value in the pure energy pop provides:

Hip-hop provides an alternative to counter-culture, a new tactics we can use now that the culture of opposition is failing on the terrain contemporary pop culture offers us. Understand the energy of pop culture and we have the sharp esde to which we can add the politics of opposition to forge a real blade.

posted by Mike B. at 2:01 PM 0 comments

Via a little birdie I like to call our anonymous source, here we have two new Klosterman pieces, on Super-Size Me and the new Suicide Girls magazine. The second is OK, but the first is great, a total takedown of what can only be called lefty-porn. Only thing I would quibble with is that when he says "don't blame McDonald's because you can't control your own life," that's not quite what's going on here. Even worse, people are blaming McDonald's because they think other people can't control their lives. Yeah.

Of course, I haven't seen the movie, so what do I know? Chuck did, though, so go read that article.

posted by Mike B. at 1:07 PM 0 comments

Ed. note: yes, I'm doing interviews now. Any suggestions for ones I should try and do?

Many thanks to Carla for being my first! I probably shouldn't mention this, but the first piece of music journalism I ever wrote was, I think, a piece on the Fibbers, so, you know, there is a season, turn, turn, turn...

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

Interview: Carla Bozulich

Carla Bozulich has taken what can only be described as an unusual musical path. Beginning with California hardcore/punk band the Neon Veins, she formed theatrical industrial band Ethyl Meatplow, whose album, Happy Days, Sweetheart was produced by ex-Bad Seed Barry Adamson. After that band's demise, she formed country/punk/noise group The Geraldine Fibbers, whose EP Get Thee Gone led to a lot of buzz and an eventual signing by Virgin. After two albums--Lost Somewhere Between the Earth And My Home and Butch, both highly regarded and well-loved--they were dropped by the label, and the Fibbers went on an extended hiatus. Carla then formed Scarnella, an experimental noise project, with well-known avant-garde guitarist Nels Cline, who had joined the Fibbers for Butch. Carla resurfaced last year with her first solo album, Red Headed Stranger, a song-for-song reworking of the classic Willie Nelson album recorded in various styles with Nels and a few other cohorts, as well as Willie himself on three tracks. She's just released I'm Gonna Stop Killing, a live album culled from her recent tour and featuring Marianne Faithful and Neil Young covers as well as reworkings of two Fibbers songs. In addition, she's had innumerable side projects, including a few pieces in seminal 'zine Ben is Dead on Mahler and other things, singing on the first solo album of fellow San Pedroan Mike Watt (including an incredible Sonic Youth cover recorded with the members of Sonic Youth), and, most recently, a performance at the Getty museum in Los Angeles revolving in part around a reinterpretation of Fibbers track "The Dwarf Song." I asked her some fairly bad questions via e-mail, and she was gracious enough to respond.

Was there a lot of planning/rehearsal for Red-Headed Stranger? A lot of it sounds improvised, but some of it sounds pretty carefully laid out. What was the process like? Was there anything in particular that influenced the sound you employed?

This is a really boring answer. The rehearsal for the stranger came in the form of a 30 day tour. We played 27 shows or something like that. A lot of the sound developed that way. When I have the luxury that's the way I like to work---tour first. When we got home we soon went into the studio and recorded all but Willie's vocals in 2 days. It was all live except some of the vocals and a couple of overdubs. It was a lot like playing the stuff live. The songs were slightly, or a lot, different every night. Sometimes the time signature would change...whatever. The length of songs varied. We'd mess around on some of the songs and others, like the ballads, we played straight. As far as what influenced the sound, it would have to be the invasion of Afghanistan and just the musical creativity of the people I was playing with.

How did the Fibbers' hiatus (and/or the label issues after Butch) affect your personal and creative life?

I definitely went through withdrawal when I stopped touring 10 months a year. I like being on the road. I stopped making tons of money. That cleared out a lot of my buddies and left me with some good friends.

You seem to have turned away from that kind of material afterwards with Scarnella (although of course you made your start with noisy stuff, so maybe it was more of a return), and it's only recently that you've begun to revisit the Fibbers catalog with "Outside of Town" on the new album, the performance exploring "Dwarf Song" at the Getty, etc. Has there been a particular path you feel you've taken with what you wanted to do with your music in the last few years?

I just want to follow and expose my gut as much as possible. I think that's what I particularly am finding when I turn to making music, so I try not to fight it. As far as the more loose improvisational approach, it just feels so fucking scary and good. It's such a risk because you can't gauge what will happen at all. I love that possibility of making a fool of one's self.

Is there something in particular that draws you to country songs? Or, for that matter, noisy improvisational music?

Country music I came to late in life. As for what drew me to it, it was George Jones. I heard him first in 1987 and he ruined me for life. The more abstract music has been part of my inclination since I was a teen listening to he Fall and Steve Reich and Flipper and Gavin Bryers and John Cage and even the Germs---who influenced me early on as much as anything.

When I saw you at Tonic last fall, you said something to the effect of, "Why can't I trust my own songs?" Clearly you were mostly kidding, but Red Headed Stranger was, of course, all covers, and on I'm Gonna Stop Killing less than half are your own compositions, so do you feel this is true in some way? Do you have an answer for that question you asked yourself?

I write a lot but most of it just hangs in old books being useless too self-indulgent rantings. Then there are the directionless snippets. I can only understand a tiny bit of the writing enuf to make songs.

I understand that post-Fibbers, you tried your hand at being a professional songwriter for other artists. Did anything come out of that? What kind of genres were you working in? I know you said at one point you were pursing a dance music project.

I think I say I'm going to do a lot of things that I never get going because I'm usually doing two or three things at once and some of it falls away. Those songs I tried to write to make money never got themselves together. I got a couple of funny specimens.

Do you see a particular interaction between your visual art and your music, or are they more or less separate projects for you?

It all runs thru the same brain to heart to between the legs wire.

posted by Mike B. at 11:50 AM 0 comments

Also: a VR thread about aging rock critics. It links to an article, but the discussion itself is sorta more interesting.

posted by Mike B. at 8:52 AM 0 comments

Via this Velvet Rope thread we find this Slate article which is a qualified appreication of Courtney. It's pretty good, even though it makes a few errors to my mind--almost totally ignoring Celebrity Skin and America's Sweetheart except to trash them, which is just annoying her-early-stuff-was-better-man-ism, and concentrating on her role as a performative feminist over her role as a critical musician are the two main things, although it's probably worth noting that for all the smart grammatical analysis of the lyrics the author misses the smart, highly specific and referential circularity in the songs on CS and AS. But largely, it gets some good points in. Sample:

Love roots her lyrics in ambivalence, in those dissonant moments where conflicting urges meet and fail to resolve, like oil and water (or, as Cobain once characterized the chemistry between Love and himself: "like Evian water and battery acid"). "When they get what they want/ They never want it again," she sings in "Violet," before she hollers her assent: "Go on take everything/ Take everything/ I want you to." But just when it seems she has settled into the predictable men-take-and-women-give dichotomy, she blurs the distinction with the subtle switch of a pronoun that leaves it unclear whether Love or a male, Cobain-like figure is speaking: "I told you from the start/ Just how this would end/ When I get what I want/ When I never want it again," she intones spookily.

It's also got a way valuable account and interpretation of a recent TV appearance I certainly missed:

Last week, Love appeared on The View in what seemed a bizarre joust for respectability. Looking radiantly healthy—in contrast to her wan mien of recent months—Love lucidly defended herself as the women of The View tried to extract an apology from her. She explained that throwing a microphone stand is a punk-rock gesture like guitar-tossing or crowd-surfing and that male rock stars (she cited Marilyn Manson) often expose themselves in public. Of lifting her shirt for Letterman, she said: "I was being a rock star! I was commenting on the Janet Jackson situation. I was selling rock!" She was, and she wasn't; you get the sense, watching Love, that she's not always in control. But there's a funny irony tangled up in all of this. Where once this kind of authenticity was crucial to rock—and female rock stars understood that the muddy boundary between art and life could lend them a mysterious allure—it's now clear that if you reveal too much, you've become disappointingly unprofessional. Janis Joplin once commented on the public's unwillingness to separate her life and art: "People seem to have a high sense of drama about me. Maybe they think they can enjoy my music more if they think I'm destroying myself." For Love, the inverse seems true.

Nice to see Courtney spelling out the reasoning behind the Letterman flashing thing, which seemed obvious to me but which a lot of people seemed to want to ignore.

But the real gold in the VR thread--which thread is really worth reading, incidentally--is a story on the third page, which appears in a different form in the NY Post. Excerpt:

The plucky 11-year-old daughter of Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain has come out swinging in defense of her drug-plagued mom - insisting that Love's outrageous antics are not as bad as Janet Jackson's breast-baring Super Bowl stunt.

"Janet Jackson was inappropriate," Frances Bean tells Love during an intimate mother-daughter chat published in the May issue of Blender.

"But I've shown my t - - s in front of people, honey," the blond rocker tells her daughter.

"But [what Janet did] was in front of children," Frances Bean replies.

In the bizarre give-and-take that's bound to get Love, 39, in even more hot water, she also laments to her only child that she's man-hungry and fantasizes about getting a new squeeze.

"Sometimes, mommies need to get laid, too," Love tells her daughter.

"But Mommy," the girl shoots back, "You intimidate men!"

Whoa.

Well, I guess I'm buying Blender.

ADDENDUM: DeRo feature article about Courtney that's not too bad.

I've met Frances Bean Cobain twice before: backstage at Lollapalooza in the early '90s, when she was a toddler playing in the grass, and in the Beverly Hills house in spring 2002, when I was writing about Love's celebrated legal feud with her husband's surviving bandmates. Then, Frances bounded into the living room to collect a fiver after she heard her mom curse. "She charges me $5 every time I say the 'f-' word," Love explained at the time.

Now, the beautiful pre-teen was sitting in the kitchen, wearing a T-shirt from the club where she goes horseback riding along with the daughters of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steven Spielberg. She was having her hair tastefully curled by a punk-rock stylist so that she could accompany her mom to the Grammys. "She really wanted to go with me," Love had explained. "It's the first time she's ever asked to do that sort of thing."

posted by Mike B. at 12:27 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

I promise the Weezer stuff is going to just be backgrounded, but I really, really have to point this one out. From a story Rivers circa Maladroit, after relating the familiar stuff about his spreadsheet of songs:

This isn't the only chart he's kept: A few years ago, he started keeping a notebook of every song Kurt Cobain wrote. In it, he dissected the songs in as mathematical a manner as he could. "He figured if he could home in on Kurt's formula, he'd figure out his own formula," says Todd Sullivan, Weezer's A&R man. "That way, he would be a never-ending supply of songs."

"It wasn't only Nirvana," Cuomo says, "but also Oasis and Green Day." He still keeps a three-ring binder he calls "The Encyclopedia of Pop," full of his analysis of different artists. "I'm probably just a natural-born scientist. I like taking notes and analyzing things."

See, that's what I'm talking about. You can break it down and find all the little bits and reuse 'em.

The problem here is one that's abundently clear from the last two Weezer albums: you need to use these analyses as arrangement guides, not composition guides. The initial inspiration still needs to come from the random combination of ear, training, and luck we call "inspiration." This is where pure talent comes in, songwriting-wise, although of course you can train this to a large degree. And then you use the musicology stuff to lay stuff out, to do transitions, to find a verse or a chorus that'll match. But you don't use it for the totality very often, or you get the sort of, well, formulaic stuff that I think has populated the Green Album and Maladroit. I like it, but I just don't have that much impulse to listen to it, and I think the method related here is tied to that.

That said, I really want to see that fucking notebook.

posted by Mike B. at 6:56 PM 0 comments

And there, I think, ends the VMB. There are a few more things I wanted to talk about, but I'll work them in somewhere else. And so...

posted by Mike B. at 6:35 PM 0 comments

Monday Night, Dining Room / Living Room (Long Table)

Saw this in the Haggadah during Seder and almost, um, plotzed:

Out of the fiery furnace
Seared in body and soul
Reborn in self-redemption
Finding favor in the wilderness

Now, I'm not saying this is actually where a certain band got their name from. The phrase itself is both alliterative and euphonious, and it's certainly not a random adjective-noun combination like we've become used to with band names; furnaces have flames in them, and thus they are fiery. No real mystery there. Well, OK, some mystery, but no surrealism.

But riddle me this: a quick Google search for "fiery furnace" turns up pretty much nothing but religious links, mainly to children's retellings of the Book of Daniel.[1] The story is set in Babylon[3] and is basically a prohibition against worshipping false idols, along with the usual hosannas for keeping the faith[4], etc. King says worship the idol, Hebrew children don't, get tossed in said fiery furnace, but said furnace does not, in fact, hurt them. The story I'm reading here ends with the line: "We know this because the Bible says so, and we know that the Bible is true."

So lots of interesting stuff here, of course, especially with the fire and Pentecostalism and all that sort of thing, but it's particularly good when you combine it with the Haggadah passage and then backflip it all onto the band. I don't think there's any question that there was at least a resonance intended there with either the Daniel story or the Passover verse, as spiritual (and specifically Biblical) concerns play a role in not a few FF songs. The obvious bit is "I Lost My Dog," which then leads us to the particular harmonic convergence, where it turns a blues progression and trope into an animal story into a religious fable. But religion isn't exactly alien to blues tropes, either, and the whole genre is only a lick away from gospel, a style suggested by not a few FF songs.

But what does the whole thing mean? What, in other words, is the fiery furnace? My immediate impulse is that it's either a sincere or a self-mocking or just outright critical evocation of indie purism stuff: as children, you refuse to worship the false idols of bad music, and you are thrown into the fiery furnace of social ostracism, but it does not hurt you, because your faith in the One True Music sustains you. I'm especially grabbed by the last two lines of the Haggadah verse: we find ourself not in redemption from a higher power, but in redemption that comes from our individualism, and we learn the benefits of the wilderness, of being an outcast, outside. It's a particular romantic version a lot of my peers (and me, hey) have of themselves, but maybe this isn't who it's being applied to. Maybe it's the siblings themselves, or the band itself. Maybe it's just that the Biblical reference was a useful thing in establishing the aesthetic, working along with the country-blues[5] tropes to evoke a feeling of age, of connection with the past.

Anyway, the points are: a) I don't know what the hell it means, but it's maybe useful in starting to dig into their songs, a project I hope to embark on shortly, and b) the story itself is something that has a weird number of resonances with the values system of my little subculture, and not a few other subcultures besides, and that's interesting. It's a nice little archetype to work in there.

[1] It also turns up this page, leading to this page, which has "Punk to Monk" in the title and is about a book called Youth of the Apocalypse and the Last True Rebellion, which is amazing. It also leads to this page entitled "Otherworldly Music & Hardcore Chant" which reminds me of the Danielsen[2] Famile on downers, or something. These all seem to be based around an Eastern Orthodox church in Roanoke, VA, which I should ask my friend Kris about. I want to buy this book.
[2] And the book of Daniel. Hmm.
[3] Mon.
[4] Like Jon Bon Jovi, damnit.
[5] Not country/blues, country-blues.

posted by Mike B. at 6:00 PM 0 comments