BB #03: BLUEBERRY BOAT

Intro, one, two.

STRUCTURE

The general outline is that it starts off with an intro, does a quick intro verse, transitions into the main verse melody after a break, does two verse/chorus pairs and another verse, then 2 breaks, then the intro, a verse, another 2 breaks, 2 verse/chorus pairs, and ends with two breaks.  So this one's a bit more complicated than the rest, but really, if you chopped off that first section and took away all but 2 of the breaks, which could be bridges anyway, you'd just have a lot of verse/chorus pairs, and in this way it's a bit like a Gallowbird's song with extra breaks thrown in.

We start off with the intro, which for my money is one of the best hooks on the album.  After a great little bit of keyboard noise, a distorted drum machine beat kicks in for two bars, and then the great synth line drops on top of that.  I'm having a hard time figuring out how the intro relates to the rest of the song (although, again, I'm not in a position to play an instrument, so I'm doing this by ear).  In a lot of these songs the intro seems like a differently-arranged but melodically/chorally similar version of some other part of the song.  The switches between intro and other things work great here, but is that because of crash edits or an actual harmonic similarity?  I don't know.  But I do know that the intro kicks ass.  The distortion on the drums sends the snare skittering through the mix when it hits, the detuning on the (presumably multiple) synth lines gives it a rough and harsh but intense chorus effect, and the parallel line running in the left channel emphasizes the first half of the line.  And then they go down a key!  Awesome.

This gives way to some "whoo!" noises and rough percussion--sounds like drums, particularly kick and an open hat, miked from a distance, along with I'd guess some feet and hands doing percussion in various ways.  It's recorded very nicely to contrast with the up-front dryness of the wholly synthesized intro; hearing that air makes it feel like you went into a completely different room, or, better, outside.  After a few bars of this the melodic backing for the intro verse drops in, which consists of a piano and guitar doing a high, open chord on the 1, a big thump on the and of one (as the piano/guitar are muted), and a slide guitar slowly descending down from I'd say about a fifth above that chord back to the chord for the rest of the bar.  Eleanor sings a melody that pretty much only consists of two notes here, as the backing runs along uninterrupted or muchly varied behind her.

Then we have a break.  Except the great thing about this break is that it's actually describing the riff for the verses for the rest of the song.  I think we've been trained by "Quay Cur" to expect these things not to cohere too much, and especially when we hear a break like this, with its nautical synth patch, we don't expect it to connect much to the rest of the song.  So when, even better, they follow this break (the "Verse Break") with a wholly unrelated break (the "Keystone Kops Break") and we have some separation between the break and the melody it describes, I think instinctually we assume that the numerous verse to follow which use this melody are, in fact, variations on a break, rather than vice verse, and so not really verses.  But do not be fooled!  This arrangement does a nice job of subverting song-form expectations and making you feel a combination of lost and soothed. 

This second break consists of various percussion and garbage-can melody--I hear a triangle, kick-snare combo, and what I'm guessing is a synth on a "xylophone" patch before it starts getting crazed with the addition of one of those scrapy wooden things (help?), a few bells, and a piano that gets more and more out of time and barrelhouse-y.  I really like this break.  Then we have kind of a recapitulation of the last break with a lower synth line, Rhodes, piano and triangle added.

Then the verse starts with a pretty smooth solo piano transition from the previous break.  The verse riff consists of three pairs of lower-higher swung descending arpeggios that themselves feel like two pairs of augmented thirds, and then a little dip down a step from the higher arpeggio which it lands on for a while.  There's also clearly a center tone, as in later verses the piano will just ride on one chord while other instruments describe the riff around it.  There's also an open-tuned acoustic slide guitar which plays accents sometimes, and then kicks in for real with some of the same instrumentation heard in the two previous breaks right before the chorus, which consists of a higher chord (a fourth up?) with the addition of a whistling riff on top that emphasizes the nautical themes of these verses.  In the verse, Eleanor sings something a lot like the two-note melody of the intro verse, but then swings up a fourth at the end of the rep, which sounds nice with the chord descending to where she's heading.  In the chorus she jumps up to something near the top of her range, which sounds great, and sings another two-note melody that ends up being varied with triplets at the end of the chorus.

We have three verses and two choruses here, with the piano doing the aforementioned riding-the-chord variation on the second verse, and then we have our third break, the "Matt Break."  It features, as the name indicates, Matt on vocals.  The music takes a direct turn from the verse pattern (like it was all a regular song and stuff) and I think the best way to describe it is that it goes the opposite direction of the verse riff after starting in a similar place, joins up briefly, and then falls away.  Specifically, it starts with a muted chord and a descending melody that follows the vocal line, both on electric piano as the whole sections is, which then jumps up and alternates between two notes for 2 bars before dipping down to the previous chord with a lower, 2-note vocal line and then dips down even further with the vocal line dipping proportionately, and the right hand follows the vocals.  I hear it as IV-I-IV-iii, but I could be wrong, although I'm pretty sure that's an alternation between the root note and the second on the second chord there.  This all repeats twice. 

Then we're in another break, which 'm going to call the "Bittersweet Drinking Break."  The tempo slows in preparation, I think, for the next section, and like the previous break, everything is very focused on the melody, which is held in the vocals but echoed in a whistley synth line and then reiterated with a more forceful synth part after the vocals end.  I also think there's a nice metrical transition here, with the previous part keeping the one-two feel of the rest of the song but grouping itself into 6 beats rather than 4, and so when we have the tempo change here, there's almost a triplet feeling.  Very nice. 

And then, boom!  Back into the intro.  Awesome.  I like the intro. 

The intro lasts about 1.5 times as long as it did at the beginning of the song, and then we pretty much charge right back into the verse.  Except it's a short verse, only eight seconds long (as compared to, say, 30 seconds each for verses 2 and 3).  It's quieter than the previous verses and certainly a lot quieter than the intro, hushed really, and I hear an added autoharp, although maybe I just missed that before. 

This leads into the fifth (!) break of the song, which I'm going to pretty obviously call the "Pirate Break."  It's very tense, featuring at the outset only a plunked, augmented piano triad on the first beat and very light, distantly miked hand percussion--maybe some muted guitar strings being struck, or a foot setting and releasing the piano resonator.  It builds by adding a gong, another piano chiming a different chord on the first beat and then adding another one on the third. 

We then have a quick change into what feels like, to me, a whole different break, given the way it less dissipates the energy of the Pirate Break and more just totally ignores it, like a cross-cut between men with knives in their teeth climbing up the side of a ship and sailors calmly enjoying the ocean breeze.  This being the breeze part, let's call it the "Sailing Break."  It's really a piano solo, with the left hand playing the verse progression and the right hand soloing over it.  The only interesting thing here is the way the sort of haphazard, out-of-time soloing recalls Matt's guitar soloing technique (most on display in "Paw Paw Tree"), but aside from that, let's move on.     

We have now come to almost the end of the song and have only six more sections left.  Which is sort of funny, but I think it's fair to say in regards to this song.  At any rate, first comes a verse/chorus pair, with not much change, although the piano does ride the chord a bit before going into the riff and then the chorus.  There might also be a bit more slide, and the whistle riff is more muted in the chorus, and there's a bass double on the main riff as we go back into the verse.

This final verse is simply fantastic.  It totally abandons the riff and instead centers on the main chord until it jumps up at the very end.  The various string instruments describe the tonal with little slide dips down and back up at the end of every bar, and halfway through the piano drops in, really riding the chord, and the percussion builds.  Then everything stops but continues to resonate through the final bar of the chorus, which Eleanor sings a capella, before crashing in once on "boat" and then pausing for about a bar and a half.  I love this because it was the only thing besides the intro that really struck me the first few times I listened to the song (after Matthew posted it), but somehow, hearing the ending, and the subsequent resolution in the final chorus, made me want to hear the rest of the story, to figure it out.  It's that simultaneous reduction and build, and that great pause 8 minutes into a 9 minute song where there really aren't many breaks just nails it home, especially as the vocal line reduces to subtle variations on the same pitch and Eleanor delivers it very forcefully, with the same resolve we hear in the character.  More on this later, obviously.

Then the vocal part of the song concludes with a final chorus, again with not a whole lot of musical variation from previous choruses, but with a very strong delivery on the vocals.

Then there's pretty much a crash cut into our seventh break of the song, the "Stringy Break," which consists almost wholly of a semi-atonal left-hand piano riff shadowed by a two-step melody done on synth strings.  Both riffs are doubled for a while by other sounds.

Finally, there's the eighth and last break of the song, the "Wander Break," which as the name suggests pretty much totally consists of a synth line wandering around.

In chart form:

0:00-0:30 Intro
0:31-1:31 Intro Verse
1:32-1:39 Break 1 (Verse Break)
1:40-2:17 Break 2 (Keystone Kops Break)
2:18-2:31 Break 1 recapitulation
2:32-3:06 Verse 1
3:07-3:13 Chorus
3:14-3:49 Verse 2
3:50-3:56 Chorus
3:57-4:20 Verse 3
4:21-4:55 Break 3 (Matt Break)
4:56-5:23 Break 4 (Bittersweet Drinking Break)
5:24-6:10 Intro recapitulation
6:11-6:19 Verse 4
6:20-6:50 Break 5 (Pirate Break)
6:51-7:17 Break 6 (Sailing Break)
7:18-7:26 Verse 5
7:27-7:34 Chorus
7:35-8:06 Verse 6
8:07-8:13 Chorus
8:14-8:47 Break 7 (Stringy Break)
8:48-9:09 Break 8 (Wander Break)

Some notes on all this:

The transitions here seem less overdubbed or edited-together than mostly organic, almost orchestral in their way.  They might indeed require a conductor to accomplish (especially the first four minutes or so), but they could be done.  Moreso than a lot of other rock songs that might claim to be, this achieves a kind of classically structured interestingness. 

There's about four or five minutes here when they're really only circling around the same two chords, which is odd, and lends the song some of its woozy, drifting character, a fact that goes along well with the subject matter. 

I should be concentrating more on when particular synth patches reemerge, as I think this would be interesting. 

ANALYSIS

A pretty straightforward and uninterrupted story here, really.  We open with Eleanor's character going out to her cargo ship on a sailboat called a sunfish (in the midst of a remarkably wonderful line, "pink wine in the Labor Day sunshine / I'm sliding the sunfish up through the wakes"), negotiating the disturbance made by the larger ship unsurely, and worried about this, because she does not want to look unskilled before her crew, and doubtless some of this unsureness is caused by nervousness as much as by physics.  When she makes it on board everyone is indolent and drinking; she sneaks a peak at their cooler and sees that they have way too much alcohol to be healthy, so presumably she disposes of some of it.

They sail through the Taiwan strait past Taipei, and knowing that their destination is Hong Kong ("old H.K.") , this means they are going West, and thus could be coming from either somewhere like Japan/Korea or North America.  It is Eleanor's first time captaining a ship, and it is actually going very well, and she is filled with a kind of idealistic pride.  This has already manifested itself in the pragmatic-but-also-kinda-snooty move of stowing the alcohol, and further crops up in her insistence that a crewmember turn off some porno in order to properly appreciate the beauty of the ocean in the morning, even as she herself has some scotch.  But this is all OK, as she has won the respect of her mates during previous voyages, and indeed, everything goes remarkably smoothly. 

Eleanor is, as it happens, from Grand Rapids, MI (or claiming to be so for the purposes of the voyage). 

Then at the end of the third verse (which, notice, has no matching chorus), we get a sudden jarring interruption: something, undetected by radar, is coming up on her ship on the starboard side.

Then we have a quick break to Matt, who while drinking some drink involving Triple Sec in the belowdecks of his own boat, recalls standing on shore and trying to pick up a girl there waving goodbye (which is kind of caddish!).  He asks her who she knows on the ship and she suddenly sneers at him and replies, "I don't know no one there yet but just wait see what you get." 

There are two possible interpretations of this.  One is that she's merely reacting to the sexism inherent in Matt's caddish question, i.e. that she must simply know someone on board, she can't be involved with it in some way.  Instead, she is, like Eleanor was, a prospective captain, or at least crewmember.

The other option is that she's actually an advance scout for the pirates, one of whom may have stowed away on Eleanor's ship in order to disable the radar so as to make the pirates' ship undetected in its approach.  Thus she doesn't know anyone on the ship yet, but she will as soon as the pirates board it.

After this nice little jump in location (to Matt's ship) and then time (back to when the ship was boarding), we jump back to Eleanor's ship but also backwards in time slightly, to show what they were doing when the pirates attacked, specifically "pop[ping] the top" of some alcohol.  I like this part very much, because for all the pride and beauty we see in an ocean voyage in the first three verses, we now have a taste of the loneliness and isolation such voyages entail.  And so the traditional drinking song cry of "we'll never go home" has both a positive meaning, i.e. that they're having such a good time that they'll never go home, and a negative one, i.e. that they can never go home.  And it's also an odd premonition of what's about to happen, since they will, indeed, never go home.

And so we hit the fourth verse with a restatement of the third verse of the pirate ship approaching,  and then a quick jump into the ominous break that would seem to represent the pirate's boarding of the ship, followed by the placid break meant to represent the crew's drunken obliviousness to said boarding.  They capture the crew and beat two of the men to enforce order, kick over Eleanor and threaten her with death unless she cooperates.  But she refuses, and after making this defiant statement, we have a pause and then a cut to the revelation that the pirates do, in fact, kill her, and apparently sink her boat as well.  I love the way this is handled, mainly because of the various implications of the captain in this familiar-ish scenario being a woman.  So the blueberries in question could be literal, or they could be a metaphor for her choice of death over rape; she is sad and cold, but she has kept her honor.

A few questions here.  First, is the captain necessarily a woman?  S/he is never explicitly referred to as such, and of course it would be a critical error to simply assume and shit.  But it's more fun this way, so I'm going to go ahead and assume.

Second, was the captain's choice really the honorable thing to do?  In many ways it could be seen as reflective of that sort of prissy idealism evidenced earlier in the voyage: she is not the only person being threatened with death here.  It's "you and your men."  So by refusing to cooperate, she once again self-righteously sacrifices her crew's happiness for some abstract value like honor or beauty.  But they're still dead.

CONTEXT

I'm pretty convinced that this takes place in the present day, given the references to the pirates being Asian and this being a relatively modern phenomenon, as well as the modern Sunfish sailboat.  I'm also pretty sure that chronologically it's either the last or second-to-last song in the story, depending on how much of "Paw Paw Tree" you want to incorporate.  This song basically reflects the final end of Eleanor's character.  Unless it's all a fantasy.  Which we'll discuss later.

I think given what I mention above about whether the captain's actions are actually morally defensible, it seems reasonable to assume that this character is an older (or, I guess, fantasy) version of the one seen in "Straight Street."  There, frustrated by shady business practices that she was unable to play along with, arguably because of the traditional business-world bias towards women, she finds this very rewarding form of physical labor and sticks with it long enough to be a captain, but her idealized view of the profession leads her to make some stupid judgments, and once again her inability to practically compromise her values is her downfall. 

What the hell is Matt's character doing in here?  I think I'm going to assume that this is just one of those random coincidences, that years after he lost touch with Eleanor he just happens to be on a dock where her ship is leaving, and he maybe or maybe not talks to an associate of the pirates that will eventually kill her.  But you could also assume that either she or he is projecting himself into this scenario as an almost-but-not-quite savior, which is mainly only valid if you assume that the girl is a pirate and the whole thing is part of a story or fantasy on the part of the younger Eleanor.

At any rate, this is definitely related to the Eleanor we see in "Chris Michaels" and "Blancheflower" and maybe "Spainolated."  She's from Michigan and is taking a load of Michigan blueberries to Hong Kong, in what's interestingly enough the reverse of the journey taken by the ship in Quay Cur, which is hijacked somewhere in the Pacific and ends up in North America before returning to Europe.

This will all tie together later, but for now, let's move on to the next song.  ('Til the break of dawn...)

posted by Mike B. at 7:56 AM 1 comments

You wouldn't think a show called Amish in the City could really be any good.  But you'd be surprised!  Here are a few reasons why it's worth watching:

1) The idea is that 5 Amish kids are living in a house with 5 "city kids" as they generally refer to them.  One of the first things they do is all go to the grocery store together.  One of the Amish boys requests fatback and the spacey vegetarian girl (who, by the way, seems to honestly think that cows come from outer space) says, "Ew, that's so unhealthy." 

AMISH KID: Abraham Lincoln ate fatback every morning.
VEGETARIAN GIRL: Well, I bet he died at, like, thirty.
 AMISH KID: I don't think that's why he died.

2) Who knew that a bunch of Amish people seeing the ocean for the first time could be so touching?  But it was!  They were all so excited and cute. 

3) Three words: Mose!  Mose!  Mose!  Mose is awesome.  He's the doughy, dorky Amish guy, and I just want to make an album with him or something.  At one point he's in a hot tub (for the first time!) and really grooving on the fact that the jets are puffing up his big, baggy black swim trunks.  "So," he says, "I thought to heck with it.  I was underwater, no one could see me anyway..."  He goes to take off his shorts and you start to worry that they're showing Blind Date there on the farm, but then you see that under his swim trunks he's still wearing underwear!  And he's kind of paddling around the hot tub in his briefs and it's remarkably endearing.

4) At the end of the second day (Mose almost drowns) the city kids are making fun of the Amish kids.  So, of course, their "challenge" the next day is for the city kids to put on Amish clothes and go out in public.

Now, there's probably a logical place to go at this point, somewhere to really drive the point home.  But do the producers send them to that place?  No they do not.  They send them to a go-cart track.  To race go-karts.  In their Amish clothes.

At this point, I realized I really liked the show. 

It did drag a bit in the last 15 minutes as it descended into Real World-style squabbling over chores, and maybe it'd be better at a half hour.  But, it's sort of hard to complain when you've got that many points in your favor, and besides, as long as I get a little more Mose, I'm good.

POSTSCRIPT: I do feel like kind of a dingus for watching this instead of the early part of the evening's Democratic Convention coverage, but whatever, I'll see the Sharpton speech online.  Edwards' speech was excellent, and I did catch that l-i-v-e.

posted by Mike B. at 7:42 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

"I SNUCK A DRINK IN THE CAR, SMASHED THE CORPORATE STATE, AND HAD AN EARLY SUPPER AT THE SIZZLER IN YONKERS": MY PARTLY-CLOUDY AFTERNOON WITH THE DARK TWIN OF INDIE

About a month back, our band got an offer to play a festival just north of the city.  The pitch for this was that it was with a bunch of other bands from the college we'd all gone to, and apparently there were various connections to people we knew.  So we said yes.  It seemed like a fine idea.  We already knew a few alum bands in the city (in my circles I'd actually heard graduates of the college in question called a mafia, we seemed to be so pervasive), and they were all plying various versions of indie rock, some of which I like more than others, but all quality of some sort or other.  Plus, we were getting a little tired, I think, of the routine of city clubs[1], which, nice as they are, don't have the same feel somehow as a good basement or loft crowded with kids.  I guess I pictured something like a VFW hall, or a crappy garage somewhere, with the cops lurking just outside the property line.

When we started to get a little more information about the event so we could start promoting it, the picture began to change.  The promoter--who was the funny-but-weird combination of obviously young and overly professional ("what's your draw like these days?")--sent us a link to the festival's site, and while I won't post it here, suffice to say we started to get a better idea of what kind of festival it was when we saw the phrase "interband collaborations" on the descriptions page and "jugband" on the performers page.  Oh yes oh yes: we were playing a jambands festival.  Confirmation followed; I forwarded the info to a friend who has roots in said community and he replied with a description of the promoter's reputation (who, in fairness, is 19) that was, shall we say, less than glowing, and included the phrase "hippie shit."  And so there it was.  We had signed up to play a jambands show.

Upon realizing this, we were a bit annoyed and a bit dismayed but mainly amused and intrigued; our aesthetic fits into the jambands thing in a tangental way--our Venn Diagram circle probably intersects with the hippie one about 180 degrees away from where the Flaming Lips' does, but it's a similar kind of thing--but that's not really our thing, man.  So it was a surprise, but we were still planning on renting a van and bringing people up with us. 

But then we got another update e-mail, and it included the immortal words: "No Alcohol, No Drugs." 

Now, the thing about music is that you can put up with a lot of crap if the two above things are involved; indeed, whole genres are based on this phenomenon.  So we could ask people in good faith to get up, get in a van, ride an hour to Westchester, and listen to hippie shit if we all got to hang around and drink while we were doing it.  But without drinking?  No friend in good conscience would ask such a thing.  So our draw would be, uh, kind of low.

But listen: we haven't reached the final fact yet, the one that turns this whole experience from "Well, you're just being picky," to "Oh.  Oh.  I'm sorry."  Because why, you might ask, would there be no drugs or alcohol at a hippie festival?  Are there really such things as straightedge hippies?  Ah, but no, of course there wasn't.  Because, you see, a quick scan of the address of and directions to said event revealed that, in all likelihood, this was not at a club.  Nor a hall.  Nor a public space of some sort.  No, said event appeared to be taking place at the promoter's parents' house.

In--wait for it...Scarsdale.

And so we got up Saturday morning around 9, showered, gathered in the LES around 11, and set off to drive upstate.  It started off all normal--turn onto Houston, get onto the FDR, cross the 3rd Avenue bridge, get onto the Major Deegan expressway.  But then it got weird.  Maybe a brief description of the location-narrowing process we underwent will help you picture what this was like.

Imagine one of the richest counties in the country, Westchester county.

Now, imagine getting off the parkway into one of the richest towns in the country, Scarsdale.

Imagine driving through Scarsdale, which is an incredibly affluent suburb.  Imagine driving through the wooded lanes and past the very expensive houses.

Now imagine turning off one of these wooded lanes onto a suburban cul-de-sac.  Imagine the houses that line this cul-de-sac.   You know what they look like.

Imagine parking the car on this cul-de-sac and walking up the driveway of one of these big, rich homes.  Imagine walking into the yard and seeing a bunch of canopies and couches in the yard, and lights and equipment on the porch.

This was where we were playing.

In truth, it wasn't so bad; our set went OK, despite some technical problems, and we got a good reception.  Really, if there's a lesson to be learned from the whole experience, it's that even if you're dreading a gig, if you're a decent band, people will respond well to you, and playing live music is rarely not fun; there are very few gigs not worth playing, especially in areas you haven't been in before.  So it was really, honestly, fine.

This does not change the fact, however, that the whole context was absolutely insane. 

The two most insane things were probably the first things we saw there in the driveway: the promoter's vehicle (I want to say SUV, but maybe I've just imposed that in retrospect) and, next to it, a portapotty.  In a backyard.  Now, that's obviously insane.  The insanity of the car, on the other hand, lay mainly in its bumper crop of bumper stickers, and oh, I wish I had a picture.  I guess it's partially because of my lack of exposure to the scene, but there was something about the particular combo--the Phish "1983-2004 no regrets" sticker, the venue sticker that boasted "the best bands, the kindest sound," the private school sticker, the very weathered "Free Tibet" sticker, etc.  It was like a joke that was real!

We'd arrived about an hour and a half before our set time, so after loading in we mainly hung out in our cars, I think because the situation freaked us out so much.  Plus in the car we could listen to our own damn music.  As there was no alcohol allowed inside the grounds, the bassist's friends had brought some beers in an ice bucket (very classy) and the two other members went on a supply run and came back with vodka and orange juice and plastic cups.  We sipped in the car.  It was weird--it felt like being teenage again.  Well, if I had done that stuff when I was a teenager.  This was the impression I got, though.  And honestly, it was 1 in the afternoon--we didn't need to have anything to drink.  But, again, like teenagers, there was something about being told not to...

Eventually we found out that the first band had canceled--for some odd reason, cough--and that we were the openers.  All right.  So we set up as they attempted to set up, using what looked like very new equipment that they didn't entirely know how to use.  Also, they miked our amps.  On the porch.  In the backyard.  The guitarist's sister came in and told her that the cover had been $12.  I guess they had to make up the money for the portapotty rental somehow.  I did a mic check and after babbling for a while settled on a high-pitched noise that fluctuated slightly.  Someone from another band yelled "Test, test!" and I yelled, "Don't you fucking tell me how to soundcheck." 

We started playing.  Someone was videotaping.  A dog ran on stage.  The drummer busted through the head of the kick midway through the first song and used duct tape to patch it up every once in a while.  It was not his kick drum, but meh.  I couldn't see who was there because the tarp was in the way.  This meant, I guess, that they only saw up to my chest.  Meh again.  Afterwards the dad came up to us and told we had "a mellow sound."  The guitarist and drummer nodded and sipped their screwdrivers.  It was weird.

But it did get me thinking about jambands.  Really, if you're indie, there's no reason not to like jambands.  Well, aside from the music, of course.  But there are a host of things the indie mentality values that the jambands scene has in spades.  A non-corporate business structure: check.  A community-based promotion and distribution model: check.  No sell-outs: check.  Being totally "for the kids": check.  Bands form organically, make the music they want to make uncompromisingly, get signed and distributed by independent labels, tour relentlessly in largely non-corporate venues, build up a fanbase through hard work, get written up in grassroots publications as well as independently-owned ones, and maybe find wider fame and success.  What's there to complain about?  They've acheived amazing popular success without much of any compromise to either the mainstream or corporations.  Jambands constitute probably the largest independent music movement in our time.  Why wouldn't you want to emulate it?

Well...because the music's bad, right?

There's a tension in most white subcultural movements, jambands and indie included, between social value and aesthetic value, between community and quality.  Do you value something purely because its members are good people and the way they make music lines up with your value system, or because the music is really good?  There seems to be a certain agreement that decent music made the wrong way is somehow "tainted;" not very good music made the right way gets more of a pass.  Obviously a combination of the two would be a home run, but given how rarely this happens, which do you favor?

Jambands fully endorse the former, the community model.  If you can get up there on stage and lay down a decent groove, and if you're good people trying hard, well, you're doing OK.  You might not be wildly successful, but you'll be able to do reasonably well, I think.  Because the music itself doesn't matter to the experience so much as the simple fact that music is being made, and that people are listening to it, and dancing, and all in this place together and seeing each other. 

Indie, on the other hand, leaves it unresolved.  For every band that gets a good reception because the people in it are good friends or interesting characters or supportive of other bands, there's someone to accuse them of being merely "trendy;"for every band whose uber-indie image is a grabber, there's someone to point out that they're not actually very good.  But, similarly, for every band with a great set of songs, there's someone to accuse them of having the wrong production style, or the wrong label, or the wrong style.  Now, you could argue that it's this tension that produces a lot of the good that comes from indie, that by having this social endorsement in place it can work in tandem with people who look for musical quality to rise up the best-of-the-best, that elusive home-run combo of the right values and the best songs.  Maybe the fact that there's the option to favor one or the other that allows indie to thrive in so many different directions and to be of such interest to so many people, relatively speaking.  (It is a style that seems to emphasize suffering over dancing, so how big are you really going to get?  Even goth's avoided this one.)  

But you could also argue that it's what's holding indie bands back, that by their social status and reach depending in part upon their adherence to the scene creed, it encourages process over product.  That by having some value assigned to you simply because you are a noise band who employ muted vocals but at the same time throwing you into a critical context that does value content over context, it invites the wrong kind of activity, the kind of activity that can in the end be detrimental to a scene.  It's this odd combination of morality and high standards that makes indie such a weird beast, the insistence on both an absolute morality and a totally arbitrary aesthetic taste that makes its waters so difficult to negotiate without succumbing to the urge to make a load of crap. 

Oh yes, the third part of the title.  After we packed everything up, we went to the Sizzler in Yonkers for Meal.  We ordered at the checkout, we got chicken wings and fried creamed corn at the all-you-can-eat buffet, we saw senior citizens taking advantage of the $10 steak-and-buffet deal, we said "Sizzler!" in a particular way numerous times.  It was pretty awesome.


[1] We did recently play a festival in the city, but the setting of that is the subject for another post of the restaurant-review variety.

posted by Mike B. at 3:41 PM 0 comments

"'Love is a hat-lead field?' This superintelligent panda can't transcribe Belinda Carlisle worth a good goddamn!"

Hi, folks.  First: thanks for coming!  Second: stuff's half-done but will be coming later today.  Check back in the afternoon.  I promise I won't hurt the panda.  He's just a little logey today.

posted by Mike B. at 11:10 AM 0 comments

ROCK 'N' ROLL BON MOTS #016  
You wouldn't think Lightning Bolt would be a good thing to listen to in the morning while getting ready for work.  But man, it sure is! 

Although, as I found out, less of a good thing to listen to while shaving, especially while shaving off 8 days' worth of facial hair.  But how can I not shave against the grain when he's doing those bitchin' hammer-ons?!?!?!

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

Monday, July 26, 2004

The Fiery Furnaces on the Fiery Furnaces.  Written, I am informed, as a parody of academic-rock-crit style.  I'm not so sure, the end of the 3rd and 5th paragraphs aside (yes yes "triumphant assault on notoriety and money" and "the classic applicable" and "doubly debilitated by our enabling example" obvs).  Thoughts?

posted by Mike B. at 11:10 AM 0 comments

Friday, July 23, 2004

Really, really good Lynda Barry comic: is the new favorite sound the laughter, or the imitation of the pop moves?  Aren't the two inextricably intertwined?  Doesn't the one create the other, and what creates the one?  Is crap only as good as the reaction it inspires?  Etc.

posted by Mike B. at 6:11 PM 0 comments

I try not to do too many restaurant posts, but I can't resist this one: Shake Shack is fucking fantastic.  And I'm not just saying that because they have peanut butter sundaes, which I've had a hell of a time finding in the city.  But they do, and they're good, if a bit odd--they spread the peanut butter (not PB sauce, just regular peanut butter) on the bottom of the dish, and so you scoop into it.  Kind of nice.  I also had the fries, which were pretty good, and the double burger, which was just really great, beefy and well-grilled and on a good (potato bread?) bun.  The custard was OK, a bit thin I thought, but maybe I need to try it without whipped cream and peanut butter.  The chocolate flavor was definitely the best chocolate soft ice cream I've ever had.  (Although the vanilla has a tough act to follow after some of the stuff I've experienced.)  So highly reccomended, even on rainy days.

posted by Mike B. at 3:21 PM 0 comments

Follow-up on BB #01: although you should of course be reading Fluxblog every day, today Matthew's featuring an excerpt from Eleanor's appearance on (the generally excellent, by the way) East Village Radio in which she does acoustic performances of bits of "Quay Cur" and all (oops--actually just parts) of "Straight Street."  She also talks about the Inuit section of "Quay Cur" a bit, thank the lord, and Matthew adds further explication, which I've added as an addendum to my analysis of the song. 

Additionally, I know that not everyone has the booklet for Blueberry Boat, so I'm going to scan it as soon as I can so you can see the full lyrics of each song.  This whole project will end up being a permanent installation on a different website once it's finished, and I'll definitely host lyrics and maybe the EVR MP3 there.  More details once this is all tied up...

Oh, also, I meant to ask this before, but hearing the acoustic "Straight Street" actually helped a lot to sort out the chord progressions in the verse.  So, aside from the single version of "My Dog Was Lost," does anyone know of any alternate versions of these songs?  I guess the live versions are different, eh--"Spainolated" sounds a lot better live, I think.  A little help cataloguing that might be nice.

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

Thursday, July 22, 2004

BB #02: STRAIGHT STREET

Intro, one.

STRUCTURE

Surprisingly basic.  It's three verse/chorus pairs, then a bridge, then two more verse/chorus pairs with a different arrangement (and/or key), but with the final verse having the same lyrics as the first verse.  Since there's less to deal with here, maybe I can delve into the instrumentation and whatnot a bit more. 

The song begins with a shot that's more of a rock explosion than any point in "Quay Cur" was, and it reminds me strongly of (don't kill me) Loretta Lynn's "Portland Oregon"[1]--slide guitar, simple drums miked roughly, bass, very twangy and much lower on the keyboards, despite the clucking noise that plays eighths here.  The contrast with "Quay Cur" is, I think, quite useful, as we actually hear the first crash cymbal of the entire album here, at the very beginning of the track, which is an odd thing for a rock-ish band, although not as much if you know the Furnaces.  Moreover, the crash doesn't reoccur until the section change, and the only percussion throughout the intro appears to be a snare.  This can work sometimes, but here the fact that it doesn't, that it doesn't really hold down the other instruments (the clucking noise is often hugely off-beat) and that it doesn't actually work for the rocky structure being set up, is somehow important.  In the context of following the first song, even that small sop to conventionality becomes huge.  So they're playing with our expectations here, I think.

At any rate, moving beyond the first beat of the song (ahem), the explosion also works because of the particular slide riff being deployed here, which besides being the only significant source of tonality in the intro, starts at a pleasing height[2] before descending to a tone, repeating, and then dipping down before coming back up to the same center tone, and repeating.  This is powerful for two reasons: a) it starts relatively high in pitch for the instrument, and b) it's basically vamping on the same chord, going, I dunno, a fourth above and a fourth below or something alone those lines.  (I should really do these not at work so I could have an instrument handy, but oh well, I'll have to keep doing it by ear.)

The riff also works well because of the way it charges into the first verse vamp, which it does at 0:20.  What happens here are a few important things that represent an almost crash-edit difference between the two bits: the slide and snare cut out, there's a crash hit but then no more drums, piano and bass come in, and the only thing that runs through is the squawk noise.  (Which if you want to get technical about it sounds like a high-res medium-cut fourth-octave half-noise synth burst.)  As for the bits itself, the piano is playing a discordant stagger between two notes with a syncopated swing that resolves to a straighter sixteenth-eighth-eighth-eighth on the higher note at the end of the bar, which actually flows directly out of the tonality established by the slide guitar in the intro; both vamp around basically the same chord.  (I think it suggests a V-7, but I'm almost sure I'm making that up.  Maybe a ninth?  Oh, fuck it, it's called "clap clap blog," not "rigorous musicology blog.")  The bass seems to be riding on the same note throughout.  Near the end of the pre-vocal bit of the first verse here, the drums come in, but end up focusing on a slap-delayed snare and claps on the 2+4.  Similarly, a lead guitar comes in, played sort of furiously and semi-randomly, mostly sixteenths with repeated notes and occasional very brief forays into doubling of the piano part, with some trademark sloppily-played accidental low-string hits from time to time.  This fades out right before the vocals come in.  The first set of verses has a distinctly (and, I think, explicitly) country feel, although the chorus doesn't.  I think this has some relation to the lyrics, but we'll get to that later.  It's also notable that you could play this bit of it live in a conventional band arrangement, unlike a lot of "Quay Cur."

When Eleanor's vocals come in, they display the second brand of melody she deploys.  The first was displayed through almost all of "Quay Cur," and consists of a line that's doubled or even tripled by instruments, one that's fairly closely tied to the backing and which can't be changed very easily; it's highly tonal and tied to some sort of chord present also in the orchestration.  What we see in "Straight Street," however, is a vocal line that's very strong and confident--indeed, this strength and confidence is a lot of what makes Eleanor's delivery and melodies so appealing--but which has only a glancing relationship to the orchestration.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, and indeed, I can think of quite a few Furnaces songs where this works exceedingly well.  (If it doesn't work as well here at first, I think that's because the backing isn't quite as compelling as we've come to expect.)  This second brand of melody is absolutely key to much of the Furnaces' MO--take a melody line that isn't much dependent on any other element of the song, and you can change all of the other elements without disrupting the vocals.  This is how we get not only the different live and single arrangements, but the arrangement switches within a song, which we've already seen to some degree with the final verse of "Quay Cur" and which we'll see again very soon.

The format is this: Eleanor sings a couplet, the backing changes slightly--the bass slides up a third, the piano changes a bit--and then back into the vocals.  This happens four times, the backing pauses with a slight rollantando and an actual coherent chord on the piano, Eleanor sings a few more words, and then we're into the chorus.

The chorus is a basic IV-V blues chorus, and is only two lines.  It starts out at a slightly slower tempo than the verse, and with definitely a more deliberate rhythmic structure, and then accelerates through the last line, which is said very quickly.  Don't hear a piano in here, but there's  a regular chordal guitar and root-note bass with a full drum kit.  The great thing about this chorus--and it's a goddamn great chorus--is the combination of the accelerando with the synth riff that comes in at the end.  It's really just a series of steps up to a fifth, but both the patch (a midrange-heavy tone with a vibrato) and the really deft playing (which sort of lags a few clicks behind the changing tempo), along with the swooshing noise, kill it, and really build to that final line.

The verse/chorus bit repeats two more times, with not a whole lot of changes, aside from the quite notable addition of strings, chorus and viola, sounds like, along with a quick-strummed slide acoustic guitar in the third verse, playing little glissed-up accents that are more rhythmic than anything else.  (It's a pretty rhythmic song, really.)  After the third chorus there's a change into a bridge that starts off with a piano and synth playing doubled lines, then a quiet piano for a few bars that modulates the key down a few steps before being joined by an electric piano and, maybe, a synth, which plays a little dabble between two notes, and then the piano reprises its earlier riff in the new key accompanied by some sort of basic percussion, either a foot stomp or a muted clap on the 2+4.

Then the fourth verse kicks in straight to vocals, and as with the first verse, we have totally different instrumentation all of a sudden.  While Eleanor's singing an electric bass slides from a high note down a fifth to a lower one while a church organ plays the chords and a synth does a sort of parallel line to the riff the piano was playing in verses 1-3.  When there's no vocals, the bass slides up to mirror the wah guitar, which is playing a noisy bit of rhythmic accent which may form its main tonal suggestion purely from the wah, not any notes, but I also might be making that up, and which both, again, mirror the piano riff of the early verses.  After the fourth verse the chorus kicks in, but--and here's the odd thing--exactly as it was in the first part of the song.  There doesn't seem to be any changes.  This is followed by a brief instrumental bit that introduces the fifth verse (which is a repeat, lyrically, of the first verse) by adding the cello/viola from the third verse.  As the vocals start, these play a gliss up for the first two beats and arpeggios for the final two, emphasizing the rise and fall of Eleanor's vocals, but cut out for the inter-vocal bits.  Then another identical (but slightly more intense, somehow--more of an accelerando?) chorus, and we're done.

The second half is odd, stylistically--there's a suggestion of a sacred atmosphere with the organ and the strings, but it doesn't really sound like traditional church music or even gospel--it sounds more like, I guess, a classical combo covering a country song.

In chart form:

0:00-0:20 Intro
0:21-1:15 Verse 1
1:16-1:24 Chorus
1:25-1:58 Verse 2
1:59-2:07 Chorus
2:08-2:41 Verse 3
2:42-2:51 Chorus
2:52-3:25 Bridge
3:26-3:59 Verse 4
4:00-4:08 Chorus
4:09-4:50 Verse 5
4:51-5:00 Chorus

Update: after hearing the acoustic version of the song, Eleanor plays the verse as a I-IV progression with what sounds like a V-7 between the verses, but I'm not sure how well this maps to the album version.  I'll have to try it at home at some point.

ANALYSIS

This song has a lot more in common with Gallowsbird's than many of the other songs here on Blueberry in that it seems more concerned with interesting couplets than a narrative, but once you start to tease it out there's definitely something there.

The basic story is that Eleanor's character is a not very successful global salesperson for a the cellphone company Ericsson, and the song chronicles her sort of Gil-in-the-Simpsons if you will misadventures.  The song opens in a Syrian internet cafe where she's trying to pick up tips from the locals but it studiously looking disinterested, trying not to draw their attention and so having to go by who smells the best (by which I think she means "most affluent").  This scenario to me seems like something plucked directly from Eleanor's travel experiences, where you're in a 'net cafe in some foreign country just wanting to get some sort of connection back to your home life but being surrounded by the cafe's regulars who use it as an information center.  And so here, she hears "all the nonsense in extensia," especially about football games ("Leeds v. Valencia").  She picks out the group most likely to respond to her sales pitch, but they regard her as either: 1) a mere automaton who's there to be an opponent in a very deliberate game, or b) someone they're going to fuck with by taking on ultra-stereotypical behaviors and mannerisms.  This I'm getting from the last line, "but the only thing they care about is to whom to play the Turk," which is either a reference to a famous, but fraudulent, chess-playing machine from the 19th century (later reincarnated as a computer game), or a joke about how foreigners fuck with Americans/businesspeople.  At any rate, her sales pitch is unsuccessful.

In the second verse, she's in a more rural area; I'm going to guess from the context as some of the details that it's a North African area, but it could also easily be a lot of other places in the world (Eastern Europe, southern Russia, Asian steppes, etc., although the stuff about a cup of water and "when the sun came up" do suggest a warmer climate than these).  She's subsisting on very slim resources and ends up in a dilapidated car, suggesting both that she's out in the boonies trying to make sales and that she hasn't been doing very well, cash-flow-wise.  She does make it safely to wherever she's going, it seems, because she's able to put a question to her "local adviser" about the "trucks...parked up by the town" but receives no distinct reply, suggesting that it's a forbidden subject and makes the trucks into even more of a menace than the simple mention of noticeable-but-mysterious vehicles would imply.  I absolutely love this verse--there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on, especially with the trucks at the end, which paints a picture of whatever country (or region) she's in as being under some sort of military or otherwise milita'd control, except so covert that she's not aware of it (or, I guess, she's so oblivious that she doesn't already know and commits the faux pas of asking).  That nice collision of this very stereotypical American-style, door-to-door capitalism with the improvised governmental protection of a private or overly prominent police force (which is the case in not a few areas of our modern world) is really interesting, both because of the revelation that free market sales are only possible when the citizens are reasonably free--or, more accurately, when they're more concerned with comfort than basic survival--and because I think she would be more successful a salesperson if she wasn't so honest.  If she was crooked enough to know who had control of the town, she might be able to sell to them instead of the impoverished residents. 

This inability to make a sale continues in the third verse, where we get specific, sorta.  We're back in a more corporate environment because she's talking to "the head of sales for Western Asia" (aha!  But then why "Damascus"?) who is warning of an encroaching threat from Nokia, who might tell presumably Muslim consumers that Ericsson "uses pig by-products."  The salesperson shows up for a meeting with the Nokia people but "knew that we were Finnished" (a pretty funny actually play on words based on the fact that Nokia is from Finland and Ericsson is from Sweden) because, as the rep tells her, the phones are already being "stoned," which here I think means not "smoked up" but "hit with stones," as Muslims sometimes do to religious violators.  In other words, they have successfully spread the rumor of pig-use and so the phones are being destroyed for religious reasons.

This causes the character to be fired, and the switch in music we have after the third verse is meant, I think, to reflect this change.  In the fourth verse we see her trying to find a new job, in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia trying to learn some of those nasty tricks of the trade and setting herself up as a fence for religious and historical artifacts.  Her friends, though, try and talk her out of this, saying that she could work in Baku (in the former republic of Azerbaijan) for an American cellphone company.  But when she calls her contact at the company in Houston, she finds they have no use for her.  And thus, in the fifth verse, we find her back in the Damascus internet cafe, trying to scam her way into sales to Syrians.

The song seems to be about the conflict between honesty and theft in business dealings, and here the blur of references works for a thematic reason: in a world where there is so much, where local cultures collide with global ones and vice verse, there's no way to make sense of it, no way to go door-to-door.  And that's why the chorus: "So I walked up the length of the Street they call Straight / cursing myself cause I got there too late."  She's trying to go straight (or, even better, trying to go what people tell her is straight) but it's too late--there's no way to go straight anymore.  Everything is tainted, and even when you're trying to be devious it doesn't always work.  The only verse mention of straight street comes in reference to where the religious authorities are destroying the tainted phones, and I think that's a decent explanation of what it's talking about--a place where faith is untainted by doubt or contradiction.

CONTEXT

This is really a self-contained little episode, although aside from the various thematic references I'll get to in a moment, I do think it fits into the character arc for Eleanor.  This is probably what she's doing in between her youth in the US and being a ship captain in Asia, and her frustration here with modern capitalist business practices explains the pride she feels from managerial responsibility and manual labor in "Blueberry Boat," which we'll get to on Monday.

Aside from the geographic similarities with other songs (especially her boss being the head of sales for Western Asia), the most interesting thing here, I think, is in the title: straight street, or strait street?  I.e., a street that's a body of water.  In "Blueberry Boat" there's a mention of the Strait of Taiwan, and I think that's part of what's going on here, with nature as something purer than the cluttered earth.  But maybe not.

[1] Not that I'm asserting a relationship of influence, here, as the timelines don't mess up, but then the sound Jack White went with on Van Lear Rose sounds just a bit different from most country or blues things that came before, so I don't know a better precedent. 
[2] This is a post for another time, but it's interesting how expectation and context matter to our perceptions of instrumental intensity.  Higher, of course, is generally held to be more intense, but we get so used to the timbres and conventional sonic ranges of an instrument that it's really only high-for-that-thing.  So, for instance, a high weedly-weedly guitar riff that sounds like it's reaching into the stratosphere would still only hit maybe third position on the violin, which still has a long way to go.  (Ah the glorious high squeakiness of the violin!  I love it so.  But that, too, is for another post.)  And when we play outside that range, even on the same instrument, it usually gets regarded as somehow being a different instrument--think, for instance, of the way free-jazz saxophone squeaks were described before we got used to them, or how a pitch-shifted guitar (or one played with a slide above the fretboard) gets described.

posted by Mike B. at 5:58 PM 1 comments

Mark replies to Simon's guilty pleasures post and touches on my comments in the process.  Poptimism part 2 ensues.  Maybe.

posted by Mike B. at 1:17 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

There's been some talk recently about "guilty pleasures"--see Mark's and Simon's take on the issue.  Because I'm a hugely egotistical prick, I might as well repost what I wrote about that issue about a year ago, because, eh, I think I have a different take.

The idea of guilty pleasure is a stupid, Catholic, one, but so, I often feel, is loudly declaring that you don't have guilty pleasures. Because, let's face it, you probably do. Mine include Tori Amos and Eurovision-y europop, mainly because I don't know anyone else with decent musical taste who non-guiltily likes these things. (I still listen to 'em, though.) The problem with the concept of the guilty pleasure is less the "guilty" part and more what's defined as a guilty pleasure. The term is used by people with "good taste" to describe anything mainstream which they, horror of horrors, like. But this presumes that anything mainstream is bad, or falls within "bad taste," and I think that's just not true. Just because something is liked by a lot of other people, or not liked by the Wire, doesn't make it a guilty pleasure. The point of guilty pleasures is that you just like them, they're pure pleasure, and you don't think about it too much (viz. the above strategy of listening to the song without thinking about the horrendously politically incorrect lyrics). But there's lots of pop stuff that you should think about, that is well-crafted and interesting and wonderful.

So what should we call a guilty pleasure? ("GP" for short.) Well, GPs are fun in their own special way--aside from the "no thinking" part, you enjoy GPs alone. There's no one else you know and respect who will admit to liking it, so you have to do it "in secret," and this has a certain adulterous excitement that makes it, well, pleasurable. That's why "guilty" pleasure--because guilt can be pleasurable, too. All the lapsed Catholics (or the male submissives wearing panties and garters) will tell you that. But it's different from a regular pleasure...With a GP, you enjoy it by keeping it to yourself, your own little discovery among the trash; with a regular pleasure, you want to share it with everyone else (i.e. pop's inclusivity).

posted by Mike B. at 5:43 PM 0 comments

Just saw a bunch of interns sitting around. 

One says, "I could play you some Melt-Banana, but you wouldn't be able to handle it."

One says, a bit later, "Rap sucks.  Except maybe some Public Enemy."

Either someone else or the same one says, "All the new rap is shit.  It's all, 'Jigga-what-jigga."  Much laughter.  Then someone says something about Master P.

I don't say anything, because you have to use your power judiciously.  And, uh, apparently I have power now.  I don't know when that started.  I mainly try and undercut it by making everyone hate me.  Mission: accomplished.

posted by Mike B. at 3:39 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

BB #01: "QUAY CUR"
 
For what this is all about, please see the intro.
 
STRUCTURE
 
Actually a surprisingly simple structure, when you break it apart; go ahead and cheat down to the chart if you want to see just how simple.  Really, you can reduce it to the highly traditional verse / chorus / verse / chorus / bridge / verse / chorus format if you want to (although it's more like briiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidge and, OK, there's an extra chorus in there). 
  
The track starts with a slight squeak for a few seconds before a distorted drum machine beat kicks in, consisting of two kick quarters and a distorted snare-ish noise that has a trailing tone that goes down for the remainder of the third beat and then up for about 2/3 of the fourth.  After 2 bars piano chords come in, which will form the basis of the verse and chorus melody; these sound like minor sixths a step or so apart.  A synth noise comes in before bass and a strong synth line drops at around the 0:40 mark.  I don't know how they're making the particular "shooting star" synth sound that floats over the beat, but how I would make it would be to hook up a feedback loop through my four-track, compress and distort the signal, and then play with a pitch shifter.  In addition, there are little whistles that play underneath.  The bass follows the piano chords.
 
It continues in this semi-dub fashion until the vocals kick in at 2:06, quieting down about 20 seconds before this.  A more contained version of the "shooting star" synth (sounds like a triangle/sine wave combo with a medium-length attack and then a decently long release, with some chorus in there too) doubles the melody, which settles around a strong tone (either the tonic or the fifth) at the end of the first three repetitions but then descends to a more illogical note at the end of the phrase.  There are two phrases.  The drum machine, bass, and piano continue under this, unaltered as it sounds like.  The first verse is followed by a short chorus, where the piano doubles the melody with the synth accenting the first note.  The melody is all sixteenths that is in some ways a double-time version of the regular verse melody, alternating between two close notes for the first two beats before proceeding stepwise down to a modulated repetition in the third beat and a descent to what I'm guessing is an augmented fifth (?) at the end.  It repeats four times.  The second verse and chorus proceed in exactly the same fashion.
 
There is then a break that starts with a beatless repetition of the chorus melody on piano and synth.  This happens twice.  Then there is a tempo and key shift and the piano and synth play the melody in a lower register for a few times before a counterpoint melody comes in on the synth.
 
Then there's a jump cut to the first bridge part, which is very short and does not occur again.  The backing is an acoustic guitar played with a slide alternating between two notes over tambourine with piano and kick/hat accents at the end of the bar.  Matthew[1] sings vocals here and they're not really a lead, just another interlocking part in this little hook, where the guitar and vocals dominate for the first half and then drop out to make room for the piano and hat.  It's all pretty precisely sequenced and very effective even in isolation.  The slide ascends rapidly at the end of the section and there's a very sudden cut to the second bridge section, a transition (lacking any percussion and suddenly charging to a new instrument) that's highly reminiscent of their live set.  This is the most bluesy part of the song, with a very strong electric guitar pentatonic riff forming the basis, more-or-less doubled by an acoustic.  A kick drum thump punctuates the section from time to time, and Eleanor sings an appropriately bluesy melody.  This repeats a few times and then there's a chord change that's much more Broadway than blues, although I can't identify it precisely.  The electric and acoustic play a palm-muted lower-string riff that sounds like a quick alternation between a sixth and a fifth interval.  Matthew picks the vocals back up and it's another mainly interlocking, three-note melody.  The electric breaks out at the end of the bar and hits some high open strings.  At the end of the section there's a descending sequence of quickly-picked notes leading to eighths, descending into the old chord, with a quick slide up after each note and a longer slide at the end leading back into the previous section.  These two sections repeat as before.
 
After this there's what I'm going to call "The Goddamn Inuit Section."  I don't really like TGIS.  The backing is actually pretty nice, with an arpeggiated finger-picked acoustic, bass and tambourine/kick on the 2/4 setting off a synth line that mirrors the pretty melody.  But good lord, it goes on two and a half minutes!  And you don't really know what she's saying!  Not much else happening besides some synth quivers, so let's move on.
 
After TGIS there's a short break that starts out with a synth/piano variation on the melody of the previous section which modulates into the chorus melody.  Then there's a slight slowdown as it goes into a sort of plodding, bassy rendition of the chorus with basic kick instead of the drum machine.  Then there's another break that's sort of a sea-whistle improv on the chorus melody, with no percussion.  Then back into the verse, which has no drum machine, but a pipe organ is added.  Matthew sings this.  Then they go into the chorus with no change in orchestration, with Eleanor singing her usual chorus bit and Matthew singing a new bit over that.  It then ends with a slower piano rendition of the chorus melody, with some left-hand accompaniment.
 
In chart form:
 
0:00-2:05 Intro
2:06-2:38 Verse 1 ("I had a locket..." to "...safe again.")
2:39-2:53 Chorus
2:54-3:27 Verse 2 ("Up to the quarantine..." to "...up a storm.")
3:28-3:42 Chorus ("We hid beneath..." to "...we're cast.")
3:43-4:27 Break 1 (chorus melody w/key + tempo change)
4:28-4:47 Bridge 1 - Matthew ("The clouds..." to "...Bay Madagascar[sic].")
4:48-4:56 Bridge 2A1 -Eleanor ("Great gulps..." to "...through the fluke.")
4:57-5:21 Bridge 2B1 - Matthew ("A lobby..." to "...Sir Edward Pepsi.")
5:22-5:40 Bridge 2A2 -Eleanor ("Course it wasn't..." to "...without any cares.")
5:41-6:05 Bridge 2B - Matthew (as before)
6:06-8:32 Bridge 3 -Eleanor (the "goddamn inuit bridge")
8:33-9:02 Break 2 (nautical melody of Bridge 3 moving into Chorus melody)
9:03-9:14 Chorus 3 ("And now we live..." to "...our general any more.")
9:15-9:26 Break 3
9:27-9:58 Verse 3  - Matthew ("Down came..." to "...eyes were dull.")
9:59-10:25 Chorus  - Matthew/Eleanor ("And as we pass..." to "...Barehaven to land" over "And now I'll never, never, never...") 
  
I'm warming to this song the more I listen to it, but looking at the structure, I can't help but notice the intro being 2 minutes long and TGIS being 2 and a half, and think that maybe there were some missed opportunities for edits here. 
 
ANALYSIS
 
The song begins with a girl being given a locket for protection.  The girl works the docks, presumably as a prostitute, and feels safe until one day a ne'er-do-well tears off the locket and throws it in the ocean. 
 
It then moves to a specific incident where the girl illegally sneaks onto a quarantined whaling (?(?) ship to get work, presumably because there's a captive audience as it were, but she finds that since the men can't get off the ship, her attempts to exploit the situation are stymied by the fact that the men do not have access to any additional cash besides what they have on them.  She and her fellow prostitutes are waiting for the "all-clear" sign that no authorities are watching so they can get off the boat, but a storm comes up and they are trapped on the boat, hiding behind barrels of blubber.  The storm is very fierce, and they are cast out to sea, which they think is because the anchor has broken, but it is in fact because they have been towed by, apparently, Bornean natives.  They are sold, possibly into slavery, at Kobaba, which I'm going to guess is a port in Japan, but it could also be a misspelling of "Kobala," which is in the Netherlands.  Let's all just chalk this up to poetic license and go with the Japan thing.
 
Meanwhile, we're also getting the perspective of a male crewmember who was, apparently, recruited for his skilled and then pressed into service by an aristocrat with the unlikely (and, indeed, made-up) name of "Sir Edward Pepsi." 
 
After being sold, everyone bands together (or so it seems--both the male and female voices tell of an escape) to bribe the guards, slip down a chimney, and to reclaim their whaler, which they take north, apparently to wherever they speak Inuit, i.e. Alaska.  The girl then either stays with the Eskimos for a while or already knows their language (seafaring father?  Of Eskimo stock already?) because she's able to give a bunch of narration in said language.  The crew finds themselves in dire straits (har har har)--the rigging breaks, they have no food, but five survive until they run aground in Barehaven, which is either in Ireland or Newfoundland, but given the context I'm going to go with Newfoundland.  

All in all, aside from the Inuit section which I can't tell about, it's a whole coherent story, and a fairly interesting one, even if the moments of drama are a bit more buried in the music than they are in other songs--"Blueberry Boat" or "Chief Inspector Blancheflower," say.  Speaking of which (the music, I mean) the music here mainly serves as a reinforcement to the lyrics.  Maybe I need to listen a bit more closely, but I don't hear a lot of instances of the backing either counterpointing or commenting critically on the vocals.  Mainly it just does what it's supposed to do: it sounds nautical in the nautical sections, slightly menacing in the sections about being unsafe, fast and exciting in the escape parts, etc.   
 
CONTEXT 
 
The setting here is unclear.  On the one hand, all signs point to a Pacific setting, except for the very European language of the dockside stuff ("killicks," "Sir Robert Pepsi," etc.).  So there are two options: either they began in England and were towed to the Pacific straits, which seems unlikely, or they were in some European protectorate of an Asian country.  I'm going to go vaguely with the latter, but I don't think it matters so much; it's mainly important that they start out in a Western setting, move into an Eastern setting, and take a detour in a Native setting.  (Using archetypes here because I think it's the most useful thing.)

The way I'm going to frame this, going with the three-storylines idea I mentioned in the intro, is that this is a primary narration for Matthew's character, which is a future incarnation of the one introduced in "Blancheflower."  Eleanor's character, however, is an ancestor of her character in "Blueberry Boat," and her verses of the song are that character's narration of her family history.  I think Matthew's character remains consistent throughout and their occasional intersections culminate in the present-day suburban stuff which isn't present here but which we'll see later, mainly in "Chris Michaels" and "Blancheflower."
 
The song does a very good job of introducing a number of themes on the album, which I think is the best explanation for the placement of a somewhat confusing and relatively less hooky 10-minute track in the leadoff spot.  It certainly does a good job of presenting the general nautical theme of the album, which is an interesting contrast with Gallowsbird's Bark, since in that album the narrator seemed to leap from place to place with little mention of transport.  On Blueberry Boat, the transport plays a key role, and that's one reason why there's more languid sections in this album than on Gallowsbird's.  Additionally, there are the first signs here of Matthew's playing with Victorian language and European settings. 

I should mention the title, since it's actually pretty good.  In the context of the song, "Quay Cur" likely refers to the "killick" who stole the girl's locket, since quay=dock, cur=scoundrel.  But, of course, it also is a homonym for "Quaker," the American religion known as the "Society of Friends" which is pacifist and generally kind of hippie, and who had a large role in the founding of Pennsylvania.  So this suggests a few things (even while quay cur itself suggests both the various port-based situations on the album as well as the general theme of malfeasence that crops up in almost every song).  Aside from fitting in with the suggestion of religion that lurks behind their name, maybe the most direct reference on the album is to "My Dog Was Lost," which aside from explicitly stealing a line from the African-American spiritual "Amazing Grace," also ends up in a distinctly Pentecostal situation, I think, although more on this later.  So there's a fascination, I think, with uniquely American religions, which is also at the heart of the blues, a form the Furnaces play with a lot.  But at the same time, the Quakers were religious outlaws who emigrated to America.  Most of the movement in this album seems to be from America to Europe, actually, but I think it touches nicely on the theme of immigration and movement across national borders that's probably important in some way I haven't figured out yet.

So that's "Quay Cur."  Doing it has suggested a few things I might want to do in the future, like note in the structural layout when there's tempo or key changes, or to maybe do a bit more analysis, but eh, let's go with this.  "Straight Street" next.

UPDATE: Matthew has a translation of the Inuit bridge (#3).

half hour sandglass / seven saker round shot/ ice for the moonshine / and chichsaneg / kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, don't say no / tie tight my coat / in comes the fog / fallen down in the sea, go fetch / look yonder / get out my knife / I mean no harm, I mean no harm / weave us on shore / give it, give it to me / will you have / and I gave a bracelet / kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, don't say no / tie tight my coat / in comes the fog / fallen down in the sea, go fetch
 
"Chichsaneg" is the only word that I cannot find anywhere online - my guess is that it is some kind of food or beverage. Also, I am not sure if a "sasobneg" is strictly defined as being a bracelet. I suspect that it may be a reference to the lost locket from the beginning of the song.

I think this adds something to the context, but not necessarily to the plot of the song itself, aside from confirming that Eleanor's character did, in fact, spend some time with the residents there.  I'll work it into my final storyline, although I haven't entirely processed yet Matthew's excellent point about the bracelet and the locket...at any rate, go check it out.

posted by Mike B. at 5:55 PM 0 comments

Monday, July 19, 2004

How would music be different if there was a league commissioner?

It's been said that professional sports leagues are the most socialist things in American life: profit sharing, regulated market expansion, strict trade laws, and mutually agreed-upon operating principles. Like music, they're a form of leisure activity which has been made into a profitable thing to ask people for money to experience, and both are now big businesses. The difference is that the vast majority of professional sports in this country are controlled by five or six organizations; indeed, if you're not working for an organization that is a member, you'll have a hard time making a case that you're actually a professional. Whereas with music, that line is much more finely drawn. There are tens of thousands of professional musicians that don't answer to the RIAA, or often even the FCC, whereas the vast majority of football players (and team owners) have to do what the NFL tells them to.

Sure, that means they're a monopoly (or close to one, anyway), but why use that dirty word when there's such a nicer one: leagues. With music, we have labels and companies and distributors; with sports we have teams and leagues and players. So much nicer!

Yes, it's a bit ridiculous: it's a lot harder for two teams to play against each other and to then compete in a league without semi-universal, mutually agreed-upon rules than for a band to play a show. But that's the one aspect that's not useful to consider. So think, for a second: what would it be like if music was a league?

The main thing to consider is that the reason sports have leagues is not to maximize profits. Well, OK, it sort of it, but it's a second-order thing: in order to maximize profits for everyone, that means they have to maximize competition, so in a free market system where one team had all the money and therefore all the best players, there would be no competition, which means there would be no entertainment value, which means there'd be a lot less revenue for everyone. It's a demonstrable fact[1] that in seasons where the races are tighter, there's more ticket sales, there's more TV viewers, there's more merch sales, etc. Competition is a large part of what makes sports interesting to watch, and a bunch of lopsided contests is bore-city. Oddly enough, a monopolistic superstructure[2] exists in order to make sure the market it regulates is productively competitive.

In music, this impetus does not exist; individual companies, having no need to serve the narrative of pop (if you will), can do things like cut off the nose to spite the face, or have such disproportionate resources that there's no need to develop a long-term strategy. If there was profit sharing and regulation of "trades," then this would not only limit the overall expenditures of individual labels--definitely a good thing since it would calm down the marketing/promo "arms race" that produces some of the biz's worst outrages--but it would ensure that labels had to foster some mid-level or even small-market talent; it would make a lot more smooth, in other words, the whole idea of a "farm system" that's incredibly crucial to artist development, whether the talent came from subsidiary labels or indies.

Of course, one of the reasons labels don't do this currently is because it's to their advantage to sign acts that a) don't know much about the business and b) negotiate from a position of almost total weakness so they accept terms that are sort of punitive of success. But if there was a league, that would make a non-studio musician's union[3] a viable propositon, because there would be a unitary entity to negotiate. The end of the reserve clause and advent of free agency in Major League Baseball (an absolutely fascinating thing, by the way, for the non-sports-fans out there) happened in part, I think, because there was something concrete to challenge. While a lot of contractual abuses are standardized in the record business, they're not really dictated from above or in collective bargaining agreements. If music was constituted as a league, a lot of the really ridiculous employment outrages in the biz right now--a label being able to shelve a record but not drop a band, or retain the rights to a band name and not allow the band to record under that name for another label, or to have absurdly long terms on new-artist contracts[4]--would, I think, have to disappear. You might even get pension plans or healthcare or uniform termination procedures, but let's not go nuts.

Finally, professional sports has done the neat trick of convincing people that they're good for the community, and as such they've been uniquely successful at getting goverment to contribute to their operating expenses, mainly by giving them land, subsidizing their facilities, building roads, and so forth. The actual economic benefit of these sorts of efforts is highly debatable, but for our purposes, this kicks ass, considering how amazingly unsuccessful Americans have been at getting public subsidies for the arts. Let's look at the Swedish system and how oddly productive that's been! Even better, we could get stronger subsidies for music education (at least as strong as the subsidies sports get!) as well as public support for struggling musicians so they could concentrate on their music, to say nothing of being able to helping out indie labels just barely staying above water.[5] We could harness some of that public goodwill (massive public rock concerts as a source of revenue, vital music scenes generating tourist dollars, rock/jazz/blues/hip-hop music as a uniquely American tradition) and turn it into cash, cash, cash!

Of course, there are also negative aspects to this model. Record labels are a lot cheaper to start than professional sports teams, and so the idea of regulating expansion would be very restrictive. You could also argue that since league offices currently regulate TV contracts, a music league might end up regulating all music licensing, which would suck, given the productive revenue/promotion source it's become.

But of course, it'll never happen. Still, there would be some nice things about it, wouldn't there?

[1] That I am too lazy to Google right now.
[2] Ah, I'm going to hell.
[3] AFTRA/AFM are very nice, but they haven't really adapted well to the new model, to say nothing of the fact that it's a pretty big burden on indie labels or small studios to deal with the regulations and fees that go with using AFM/AFTRA talent.
[4] Football has, I believe, a five- or seven-year term on new player contracts; a major label new-artist deal could last for 10 years if they were successful and reasonably productive, and how many bands have careers longer than 10 years?
[5] Unless they're Sub Pop. Those guys were just stupid.

posted by Mike B. at 6:42 PM 0 comments

BB #00: INTRODUCTION

For the next however-long, I'm going to attempt to do something of a guide to the new Fiery Furnaces album, Blueberry Boat. I usually focus on doing analyses of singles, but I think in this particular case there really is something to be gleaned from trying to consider it as a kind of whole, as I mentioned before. At the same time, I don't want to do it in the traditional rock-crit way of sort of picking and choosing bits that fit the case and ignoring other stuff; I want to look at it as a series of linked singles, as it were. And so I can't really dump all of this out at once--while it will eventually be collated into a whole, I think in the spirit of the blog, I want to do each song as an entry. So, time permitting, that's what I'm going to do.

Each entry will consist of three parts:

STRUCTURE

This will be, pretty basically, a narrative rendition of the arrangement of each song, followed by a chart/formula laying out the structure. Given the insane number of sections the songs on this album incorporate, I think it'll be very useful here, rather than merely revelatory, as it might be for other albums. It's less that seeing the structure will aid in understanding why the song works and more that I need to understand what the hell is actually going on in the song before I can hope to get a grasp of it. For a decent example of this, see my "Electric Version" entry.

ANALYSIS

This will be a discussion of what's going on in the song, musically, lyrically, and at the intersection of the two. Hooks and hidden hooks and odd little turns and sudden choruses and all the usual clap clap claptrap.

CONTEXT

I think you can--or, rather, that it's interesting to--construct a coherent narrative or two or three out of this album, and this section will attempt to reconcile what's going on in the song to the larger plot of the album. Basically, I think there are three "settings" on this album: East Asian seaports, Western Europe and certain parts of the Medditeranean (contemporary for Eleanor, ancien for Matthew) and the American suburbs (slightly past-tense for Eleanor, present-day for Matthew). (Note: I can't see any character names in there for the narrators, so for purposes of clarity, I'm just going to use the singers' names.) What's interesting here is which are used as framing devices and which are memories and which are fantasies and the way that they slip into each other, much like how the music changes without warning. There are a few different ways you can construct this, and maybe I'll try and pursue multiple paths, but I also might not. We'll see where it goes, eh?

posted by Mike B. at 6:16 PM 0 comments

Speaking of Klosterman, that Metallica-goes-into-therapy movie (i.e. Some Kind of Monster) kind of sucked. And by "sucked," I mean, "was not very enjoyable to watch," not "failed to acheive some kind of purpose," although more on that later.

Mainly it sucked in this particular way because it was 2 and a half hours, a fact that has been oddly left out of other reviews I've read. Miss Clap thought there was only really one redeeming sequence in there (the art sale), but I really could assemble a great 80-90 minutes of moments and context that, for me at least, would be fantastic documentary. But at 150 minutes, man, it really wore you down. And I don't think it's because I'm not a huge Metallica fan (although, contrary to what has been said in other reviews, I think it does help a good bit if you're at least a metal fan, if not actually a Metallica fan. Or, I don't know, care about metal somewhat. Prior interests helps, is what I'm saying), since I think it would have been way worse if I was a Metallica fan. It would have been even more painful.

I seriously left the theater considering a career change--to go into finance, or grad school for the professoriat, or something. It made it just seem like a horrible thing to be a successful musician, so crushing and stultifying and difficult to get anything done because so many people want things. And any tensions that are there in the band, any tensions, they become such a huge deal that they prevent you from doing what you love. For all that they refer to the band as a "family," it's like a family going into business together--it can work out really badly. Plus, they're not, you know, actually a family.[1]

I dunno, maybe this is my own hang-ups, but spending so much time in such a sterile studio, working on songs in this un-intimate environment, and being there for, what, 600 days, doing an album that's not really that complex (or, for my money, remotely as good or interesting as Load [which I really liked] or Metallica) sounds like a good definition of hell. For all that I like collective creations, I think there's a necessary balance between that and creating in your own private space, just following your own instincts where they lead. And sometimes you can do that with a band, but a lot of the time you can't. Plus, they didn't play any gigs! You saw how much that bugged them, but geez, I can't really go for a month without playing a gig without feeling really antsy.

And, of course, then it culminates in these really depressing gigs. I guess I don't know entirely why it was so depressing, although it might be connected to the shots where you couldn't even see the back of the goddamn stadium, which, again, sounds like hell. It just sounded like shit, too, and I do like Metallica. Plus how fucked up all that James stuff was, where, yes, he really did need to spend more time with his kids, but also, yes, he really needed to spend more than 4 hours in the studio. Yoing. This is why I build up songs for later in case something like that should happen...

I dunno. I guess I'm not doing a very good job of articulating exactly why it was so soul-crushingly depressing. But Jesus, it really was. Talking to someone recently, they mentioned how hard it is to be a rock star, because you're suddenly the reason for existing of this entire corporation, but you don't really have control over it unless you want to go all MacKaye. That's sort of what you're seeing here, but it's sort of not, since Metallica did manage to thrive for a while under just that structure.[2] But maybe--and I'm being a bit more generous than I really think is deserved here--a realization like that was kind of the point. For all the talk of this not being for metalheads because the movie laughs at Metallica, so do metalheads--or, at least, laugh at the present incarnation of Metallica. I certainly remember the fuss in true believer-land about Load's genre experimentation. So maybe all this crushing horrendousness is a sort of commentary on "corporate rock" as it were.

Then again, maybe it was just shitty editing.

At any rate, there were two fantastic sequences which I want to point out.

One was, of course, the one noted in other reviews, where, as part of the therapy, Lars was confronted by Dave Mustaine. This is one of the few places in the movie where a prior knowledge was useful, because, damn, it was kind of shocking just to see them talking to each other in that context, and when Dave just starts in on the way getting kicked out of the band has affected his life, it's incredibly powerful. I mean, granted, Dave is not the most stable person in the world--no one who's done that much freebasing can be, really. And sure, maybe he was playing to the cameras. But regardless, to see him talk about how much it's meant to his life not to have been in Metallica (and to have been, instead, in Megadeath, a band that sold a mere three [?] million records) is simultaneously absurd--something about walking down the street and hearing people say, "Woo, Metallica!" and it really bothering him--and absurdly logical, in a purely dramatic, even cliched, way. Of course it bothers him; of course it's had that big of an effect on his life. He got kicked out of fuckin' Metallica, dude, and shit how fucked up do you have to be to get kicked out of that band?

The other thing is what happens after they ask Ozzy's bassist, Robert Trujillo (who looks just disarmingly like a guy I knew in college named Gael) to join the band. Specifically, they show not only the introductory talk when they tell him that he's going to get a million dollar advance (!) against future profits (!), but they also show the meeting between the four band members (in beanbag chairs, if I'm recalling correctly, although maybe this is just wishful thinking) and their lawyers to hash out the new corporate agreement that incorporates Trujillo. The lawyers are clearly very uncomfortable having the cameras in the room, and, fuck, no wonder: for me, at least, it was absolutely shocking to see those kind of closely-guarded details on public display. I want to go back and watch it again and again and nail down exactly how they worked that shit out. Sounds like Trujillo was going to get a 5% voting stake that would then increase a bit per period until he was a full equity member. That gave him voting rights and, I'm assuming, his portion of profits, with none of the pre-existing projects collatoralized against his stake. Yoinks! It's sort of engaging me to write about it in isolation like this (I sure wish we knew more about how this sort of shit worked before we're actually in the situation ourselves), but in the context of the contentious studio sessions and the band maintaining purely professional relationships--which it seemed like would be the extent of Trujillo's participation in the "family"--it was deeply unsettling, sort of like watching people haggling over a corpse, somehow. Not to mention the part where Jason sends word that he wouldn't mind rejoining and they straight-up reject him...iee!

So it's maybe a DVD pick, but in the theaters, I dunno, skip it unless you want to discuss it right now. Uh, that's my review. Hey.

[1] There was a sorta-good essay on the band-dynamic subject that made this point in the This Is Pop collection, which I might comment on at some juncture.
[2] This makes me realize, I guess, just how nice it is to be Bjork or PJ Harvey or Beck or Steven Malkmus or someone like that--someone who's acheived both mid-level commercial success and critical success, so you can basically do whatever you want without people being too concerned about it making oodles of money, and have some influence without it being so powerful that people can reasonably ask you for things aside from your kind attention. Then again, at least 3 of the people I mention have been very good (or lucky, depending on your point of view) at managing their careers...

posted by Mike B. at 5:13 PM 0 comments