Saturday, February 28, 2004
So I saw me The Passion last night and it just sort of confused me. My companions were pretty disgusted by the violence and gore, and while I wasn't--takes a lot for me to be grossed out with sights, although smells and descriptions not so much--I told my squeamish parents that they defeinitely wouldn't get through it very far, which is true. I also made some comments afterwards that belied my general lack of affect toward it, but I'm smart enough not to repeat them in a public forum, since they even greatly disturbed my companions, and that's saying something.
Apparently it has a much different effect on believers, which I can certainly understand--certainly, for instance, seeing Tara killed on Buffy had a lot more impact on me than on someone who hadn't lived with the show for awhile. But I'm sort of unconvinced that under the current critical rubrick it's really valid to call it a great movie, which some people seem to be doing.
However, I WOULD be quite interested in discussing it in comparison to a) historical passion plays, and b) grindhouse gore movies, to both of which I believe it owed a lot.
The audience was pretty subdued. No crying or anything, but it was a midnight Friday showing in Chelsea, so it's pretty goddamn far from representative, fair to say.
I'd probably reccomend "The Rapture"[1] or "The Apostle" over this one[2].
Oh yeah, and what the fuck was with Satan? It was like watching a Marilyn Manson video or something, especially the shot at the end where apparently his wig blows off. (!) This is to say nothing about the undeniably symbolic but also undeniably Whitesnake-video-like dove-hovering-in-midair slo-mo shot. Or Pilate looking like Zero Mostel, and thus the whole Pilate scene seeming like a creepy outtake from A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. Or the whole part where Judas is partially eaten by Jewish (?) demon children, especially the shot that seemed to be a reference to "Life of Brian." If you haven't seen the movie yet, I know this sounds weird, but I swear, this whole paragraph is true.
[1] After seeing which I actually had to go home and take a shower. Blarrrgh.
[2] Or maybe "Breaking the Waves," but that's pushing it, I know.
posted by Mike B. at 8:00 PM
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Friday, February 27, 2004
I had a weird trip to work this morning. The train was running slow and I got out late, but the train was right in the station when I got there, so it was like a straight line from the apartment down the street into the subway. I didn't even stop at a stoplight, I think. I rushed into the train car, sat down in one of those corner seats wedged up against a window, and listened to Black Box Recorder's The Facts of Life.
It's one of my favorite albums. I first got it in London, just when the title track was getting big (or big for a track like that, anyway, but they were on TOTP), and really loved it then. Sometimes song associations fade, but even today, four years later, when I'm listening to "The English Motorway System," it just feels like I'm on the top deck of a bus on a rainy London day, which was where I first heard the song. It's a very specific feeling and I guess I can't really describe it any better than that, but it feels just sort of empty and misty and chilly, slow-moving and peaceful.
At any rate, I ended up nodding off. Usually when I do this on my morning commute, the station stops are jarring enough and the other passengers are loud and jostling enough that I don't really get more than a few minutes' sleep at a time. But this time, either because of my tardiness or the vagaries of the MTA scheduling system, there were very few people in the train; I'd say the seats were only about half-full. The announcements were quiet, and there were some extended station stops that were similarly muted.
And so I ended up dozing lightly for pretty much the entire half-hour trip. I don't know what was going on--I got a decent 7 hours of sleep last night, but I guess it was just one of those things. I would come up briefly and be surprised either by the hat I was holding or the thought that I had missed my station, but it was something about that particular set of circumstances that pretty much put me under for the duration.
In large part, I think it was because of the music. It was a very odd sensation, because as I say, I was a lot more asleep than I'd usually be, but I was drifting in and out. I suppose it felt dreamy, like a walking dream, except that instead of my brain producing dreams, my brain was producing the music I was listening to, or so it felt like. Or maybe it was more that the music was clamping down the dreams. But no, that's not it--it really seemed like the music itself was what I was dreaming.
Probably that's because of the headphones. Headphones are wonderful things, aren't they? So warm and enveloping. I get the biggest pair I can find. I actually used to have a lot of problems with loud noises on the subway until I discovered that as long as I'm listening to music all the time it's not a problem. I guess you could say that it's a technique of distancing yourself from other people, but fuck it, it's New York: if I didn't distance myself from other people, I'd go crazy.
I have a strange weakness for images of headphones in pop music, especially big headphones. The thing that springs to mind first is the cover of the Craig David album, but there's also the somewhat less ideal example of the Papa Roach album. And, of course, there's the wonderful Bjork song " Headphones." These headphone images all seem to present a particular image: tranquility, coolness, smoothness; beatitude, really, is what I feel they represent. (The chorus of the Bjork song, for instance, goes "my headphones / they saved my life / your tape / it lulled me to sleep.") You almost never see images of sullen teens retreating into their headphones in pop music; when these creatures do appear, they're not blaring music against the world, but instead, the headphones seem to act almost like a magic amulet, making them smooth, gliding through the problems of life without turning their head to notice. Controlling the soundtrack to your own life allows you to control yourself, and teens have a problem controlling themselves. (So do I, but that's another post entirely.) But more importantly, someone listening to music on headphones, especially with their eyes closed, seems to be meditating. They are quietly reflecting on the music and are at peace.
The problem with this image, of course, is that most people are not listening to headphones in environments that can properly be called peaceful. Indeed, in the especial case of the NYC public transport system, you really can't listen to anything peaceful, because you won't be able to hear it. There's a decent number of albums--Mogwai, spoken word, classical--that I just can't listen to on the subway because I just won't be able to hear most of it. And so, unless you have some of those noise-canceling headsets, you end up blasting somewhat or very loud music at full volume, not necessarily to avoid the outside world as to hear what you're listening to.
Not that this is a bad thing all the time. There's something very appealing about the idea of a very loud and very contained thing; it reminds me of the image of an entire miniature planet contained within a jewelry box. It's there, and everything's proceeding as normal, and if you're inside the jewelry box, it all seems very nice, and if you're outside the jewelry box, it doesn't seem like anything's there. But once you open it...
The Black Box Recorder album is not a loud album, but it's not a peaceful album, either. There's not many distorted guitars, the synth lines are pretty clean (mostly basslines and strings, actually), and the drums tend to be 808 pops and snaps and ride tinkles, all very clean and soft, but not actually quiet, per se. I could hear it just fine; indeed, as I say, it sort of drowned else everything out. But it felt like it shouldn't have. And maybe that's why everything felt so weird. If I'm listening to Metallica, well of course I can't hear what else is going on. But if someone's whispering in my ear and a tremeloed guitar is chiming and there are pretty backing vocals, why shouldn't that blend in with everything else? But it doesn't, and all that space feels like a dream, like something I can walk around in.
And that's what that album is to me. That and the top deck of a London bus.
posted by Mike B. at 3:08 PM
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Pitchfork implies that there are rumours floating around that the Pixies' full US tour will be a co-headlining one "with another massively popular, massively influential early-alternative act who also happens to be playing at Coachella." I thought it might be Mission of Burma, but checking the website, this would seem to mean Radiohead, except they're 90's rather than late 80's. Same deal with Belle & Sebastian.
So...Flaming Lips? That would be nice. Aside from the part where my head explodes, but yes, very nice.
posted by Mike B. at 11:54 AM
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Wednesday, February 25, 2004
In Fargo Rock City, Chuck Klosterman writes:
Part of the reason 80's hard rock will never get respect--even kitschy respect--is because so many of the major players have retroactively tried to disassociate themselves from all of their peers. Disco didn't wrestle with this kind of shame: Even after it had been flogged like a dead horse, formed discotheque superstars were still proud to be part of the phenomenon they built. Subsequently, it's become acceptable to play disco albums at parties.
Which leads me, of course, to the issue of Sebastian Bach on Gilmore Girls.
Before we get into all the critical issues, let me just say first how much I love this. The character Bach plays, Gil, is an older guy who could be accurately described as a "metal dude." He has a family and runs a sandwich shop which he owns. The guitarist for the band some of the characters play in quits to go to college, and so in their search for a new one, they end up with Gil.
Now, it's easy to see how this could've gone wrong. It could've been condescending, an act of pure stunt casting, and just turned out insulting and wrong. And sure, the members of the group are a little bit weirded out by Gil. But 18-year-olds who listen to the Shins are weirded out by metal dudes, especially metal dudes who want to play in their indie-rock bands, so that's hardly unrealistic. And it works, because Gil is presented as a slightly out-of-it (as are almost all the characters on the show, about one thing or another--Lorelai about her mother, Rory about her OCD, Luke about his grumpiness, etc.) but undeniably good guy. Bach neither tries to coast on nor wholly avoid his image, but simply uses a certain veracity to evoke a very real kind of person--the aging local metal dude who never really made it in music but still retains his metal-dude roots while settling into a comfortable existence, and many guys of this type are, indeed, good folk through and through. They're arguably the naughts version of the aging hippie, except instead of abandoning ideals of social change, he just abandoned his ideals of partying all the time, which being sort of a good thing, tends to make him more of a positive figure, I feel.
It's just really nice to see. He's been good in the follow-up episodes, but the one where he actually joins the band is just so charming--when Lane decides to reverse the band's decision and let him in, Gil, who's in town watching the fireworks with his family, is just so happy about it, it's really nice. Because he's honestly happy to be making music. And it's sort of rare to see that acknowledged--that metal dudes really did, and do, love music.
So anyway, what I'm trying to say (aside from "Gilmore Girls is awesome!") is that I think this signals that practitioners of pop-metal are finally beginning to embrace their roots. Hell, this article[1] starts off with a quote from Bach thusly: "How did heavy metal become so mainstream?"[1.5]
Well, of course, it was a huge mainstream musical phenomenon that died over 15 years ago, so right on schedule, here it comes as retro. In some ways, not seeing this coming ("will never get respect") is a failure of vision on Klosterman's part, since he's lived through a few retro revivals himself--I mean, the guy grew up in the 70's for heaven's sake, and describes himself as having a Richie Cunningham haircut, if I recall correctly. The book was only written 3-4 years ago, so you'd think this trend would've been at least partially evident. Granted, in the Epilogue (which I've only skimmed) he acknowledges the coming pop-metal revival, but at the same time it would seem to be a clear critical point that if you're talking about a genre that's had over, let's say, 5 platinum albums, it's going to be sincerely revived at some point. It seems pretty obvious in hindsight, but I suppose that's what hindsight does: make things seem obvious when they really weren't.
That said (and I don't mean to be too harsh on Chuck, since in many ways making that claim of its eternal outsiderness was more true to the spirit of metal fandom than cynically predicting a retro renaissance[1.75]), I think the comparison with disco is a really useful one, especially as it validates the existence of a certain sub-cycle in the retro cycle. Of course, in many ways neither disco nor metal went away after their public funerals--the former simply transmogrified into house music, and the latter was subsumed in more diffuse ways, i.e. Soundgarden, the continuing dominance of the power-ballad form, Staind, etc. But this is the mainstream we're talking about, and both died, as I say, pretty public deaths.
What I remember about disco, though, is that it initially came back not as we know it today, but as a jokey fashion device along with the general wave of 70's nostalgia that the whole weird Gen-X thing ushered in. This was, I think, in the mid-early 90's, and "disco" was mostly bell-bottoms you wore because they were sexy and platform shoes you wore because they were funny and lava lamps and disco balls you displayed because they were tastefully hilarious, sort of. But music-wise, I think you'd have to search pretty hard to find anyone using the term "disco" to describe themselves.[2] Sure, there were scattered instances--the ABBA-worship of Ace of Base, the disco perfection of "Lovefool"--but these are a far, far cry from Franz Ferdinand and Heiko Vos, who come bearing both scene cred and genre fealty. I suppose it's still largely referred to as "dance-punk" or "shuffle-tech," but we all know it's disco, and it does get called that a significant portion of the time. It's disco without shame now, not disco-as-kitsch.
I think we're in that same early-revival stage with metal now. There's the jokey fashion, of course--I think that whole wearing-vintage-Styx-t-shirts trend started in late 2000, and has now simply been sublimated into trucker chic but has never really gone away. Music-wise, I think people are really beginning to undergo an honest reassessment of the music, but while it does get played, it's similarly for ironic nostalgia value; you don't yet see people touting their DJ sets of deep metal album cuts in the same way that you currently see them getting cultural capital out of obscure italo-disco.[3] Like with the Cardigans/ABBA/"Girls and Boys" thing, you have a few scattered instances you can point to, but none really suggest a sincere renaissance. Andrew WK is described as "dance-metal" despite having just as much in common with Motley Crue as the Rapture do with Donna Summer. The Darkness are doing an ironic take on it, and while it's certainly an awesome ironic take on it, it's also certainly going far off its kitsch value, and I don't think it's exactly prompting kids to look at the back catalogue of their sound. Rob[4] likes to point out how much certain Matrix and Matrix-y productions (Liz Phair, Courtney Love, etc.) have in common with pop-metal; certainly you'd be hard-pressed to listen to the first minute of the Liz album and not see the connection there.[5] But, as with mid-90's mainstream disco, no one's calling themselves pop-metal, so you can't really say it's arrived yet.
So let's call this a test: if good vocal pop-metal (I'm not counting bands like the Fucking Champs and Don Cab, who are more based on underground metal anyway) is the hot thing in the underground in five to ten years, let's call that a pattern. Backing up my claims is the fact that synth-pop, which was the pop predecessor to pop-metal--new wave of the early 80's, pop metal of the late 80's--is the big thing right now. I think it could work.
[1] Incidentally, the first picture on the second page of the article, featuring Bach in full frontman mode with his arms around a prim-looking Rory, makes me feel like someone's hitting me between the lobes of my brain with a trowel, but I can't say exactly why.
[1.5] Rereading this, it's odd that he doesn't have the word "again" at the end of that statement. Maybe he means to say that million-selling metal records are metal, but going on a TV program is mainstream?
[1.75] And, of course, you could point out that FRC itself is, in no small part, the cause of the critical re-evaluation of 80's metal, so maybe it was a self-denying prophecy. (Or, uh, a reverse prophecy.)
[2] Unless U2 did. Did U2? Or were they just calling themselves "pop"? Of course, I harbor a murderous rage toward U2, so I'm unlikely to put much stock in this fact, true or not.
[3] Which is not to say that such purveyors are insincere; it's the culture that's changed around them and given their true, abiding loves cachet.
[4] Who gets an assist on this one for a discussion a while back about the whole Bach-on-Gilmore-Girls issue, as well as pointing me to Bach's awesome website.
[5] Not to mention the fact that major tracks on Courtney's last two albums have focused on LA/Hollywood ("Malibu," "Celebrity Skin," "Sunset Strip"), which Klosterman points out is a key trope of 80's metal.
posted by Mike B. at 6:36 PM
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Hey, I know this doesn't really seem like a Beach Boys kinda place, but (as Rob pointed out) you should go read this article on Smile, written by a friend o'mine. Well-written and generally very good.
posted by Mike B. at 12:03 PM
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Ha ha ha ha. Ah, that's good. Liars: walking, talking chodes.
posted by Mike B. at 11:57 AM
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Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Just finished...well, I guess "watching" is the wrong word, so let's go with "listening to some folks watch" Josie and the Pussycats. Which I love--it's my copy--but I'm loyal first and foremost to you, my wonderful blog readers (extra special greetings to the 250 extra or so of you that showed up today just for the kiddie-porn jokes!), and I wanted to get up some new, non-kitten-based content for yas.
At any rate, I like Josie's ambiguity about the whole corporate-control-of-culture thing (i.e. that it's bad, but the movie also takes its depiction of same to a such ridiculous level that it's easy to read it as a parody of cultural criticism as well), but I also had two thoughts the movie probably didn't intend me to have.
Number one: "A machine that makes you love pop music MORE?!?!? Sign me up!"
And number two: "You know, I wouldn't mind getting signed like that..."
Ah well. Where the hell did I put my soul, anyway?
posted by Mike B. at 11:48 PM
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Thinking about The Passion...
Front-page headline in the Post yesterday was something like "Fans' Verdict on Mel's Movie: 'I CRIED'" (the Post being the hilariously righty NYC tab; the more moderate one, the Daily News, also featured the movie on the cover, but called it "the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II," so.)
What is it about Christian fandom that's so deeply creepy? And this has nothing to do, I think, with me not being a Christian: I don't find Christian faith creepy, and I don't find other kinds of fandom creepy[1], so what is it about that? About the Left Behind stuff? About the Christian-themed, vaguely cheeky t-shirts? About the Christian mall gift shops?
Because, make no mistake, it's fandom just as we're familiar with it. Oh sure, Xters have different aesthetics from the groups we typically associate with fandom--there's significantly more pink and puppies and raised lettering in a Christian shop than in a comic store or a record store--but aside from those surface differences, I think they're pretty similar. Most fandoms are based around taking a behaviorally-centered activity, limned by certain moral guidelines, and either taking something of limited consumptional value and widening it to a bunch of ancillary things (the Bible -> Jesus mugs, Star Trek -> books, t-shirts, conventions) or taking something of wide consumptional value and making it a larger social activity (comic books -> conventions and bulletin boards, indie albums -> concerts and, er, bulletin boards). It's a gathering around people who have pretty similar tastes--most Xters are also into family films and sports, most comic book fans are also into computer games, most indie fans are also into literary fiction--centering it around a central realm of expression, and making it into a cohesive group via marketing. People crying at The Passion shouldn't be any different from people crying at a Dashboard Confessional show; athletes thanking God shouldn't be any different from bands talking about how much the Velvet Underground inspired them.
But, of course, it is. Why? Because Christian fandom exists in a much wider context than any of those other groups[2]. It's much more mainstream, but more accurately, it exists in a much larger political context. Sure, indie fans tend to be liberal, but their political beliefs don't spring from liking Yo La Tengo; indeed, in some cases, it's exactly the opposite. But for Xters, a decent portion of their political beliefs spring directly from being Big Into The Christ.
And so, sure, some Christians get disgusted at people going to degenerate movies, but the action, technically, is the crime; going to a dirty movie means that you went to a dirty movie, but it doesn't mean, say, that you support gay marriage or something. But if someone's buying a significant volume of Christian merch, it flows pretty much inevitably from the terms of their Christ-fandom[3] that they're anti-abortion, anti-gay, etc. They may not--Lord knows I know enough Christians to say that--but I think that it's a reasonable assumption that most dedicated Xter-fans are also evangelical, and those kids, well, they're a bit more straightedge than the rest of y'all. And it's creepy, if nothing else, that a product choice also makes a logically unrelated political statement, and that in part it's being bought for that reason. There's no actual connection between a cross on a mug, but at the same time, well, there really is.
Don't get me wrong--I'm pretty regularly annoyed by libs' refusal to engage with believers on a respectful level, and I don't think this analysis is trying to justify. But I am trying to show a) just how much Jesus boosters have in common with your run-of-the-mill indie kid, but also b) that the creepiness libs feel about all this Jeebus stuff is, if not exactly fully justified, at least fully in tune with traditional lefty values.
As for the movie: I want to see it, I think. I like that it's gory, cos goddamn, the Bible is fucking gory as hell sometimes, although more the Old Testament. Still, AFAIK Passion Plays themselves often involved a decent bit of low-tech gore themselves, so it's a kind of pop updating of traditional art.
On the other hand, I'd like to see someone take it farther. Like a Jesus horror film. "Try as you might, you CAN'T KILL HIM...unless you're a JEW!"
[1] OK, except for some, which need not be named, but suffice to say I'm no longer an active Tori Amos fan. Speaking of Christians...
[2] Interesting tangent to be pursued here about political fandom, but I have to go to bed soon.
[3] This is getting a bit flip, but eh, I'm addressing them in the same terms as all the other fans, so I'm going to run with it.
posted by Mike B. at 11:44 PM
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Well shit, if a Bikini Kill poster tells me I'm wrong...
One of the logical errors here is that if I say something is a joke I somehow am also saying it isn't something else as well, making a political argument. If folks wanted to engage with the issue--which no one did--I could've explained. But they didn't, so I don't. Ah well.
Last you'll hear on the issue.[1] Nothing but religion and comedy and music and nun-fucking from now on.
Damnit!
[1] Unless I decide to make tomorrow "rape day."[2]
[2] Which I probably won't.
posted by Mike B. at 10:23 PM
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Liars: sucked before, suck in a different way now.
posted by Mike B. at 4:49 PM
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And here you can learn that I am a Republican and like Vice magazine, which is bad.
Don't forget, kids--I'm from Brooklyn! Judge me accordingly!
posted by Mike B. at 4:13 PM
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Interview with a fan of kiddie porn.
(Note: this is true AFAIK. I am not just making a convenient joke.)
posted by Mike B. at 3:46 PM
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Babies as flowers! So cute!
posted by Mike B. at 11:47 AM
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Pretty flowers.
posted by Mike B. at 11:47 AM
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A cute little kitten.
posted by Mike B. at 11:46 AM
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Monday, February 23, 2004
I'd hate to end the day on a bit of Williamsburg gossip, so let me instead link to this thing, which I think is a bit overheated. I mean, it doesn't get to the key question: sure, they're revolting, but are they fuckable?
I think you should never get so offended by child pornography that you neglect to tell me whether it's good jerk-off material.
posted by Mike B. at 6:22 PM
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So, er, they're building an NYU dorm in Williamsburg?
What's up with that?
posted by Mike B. at 6:13 PM
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A brief, probably unfocused response to watching The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas last night:
God, I just want to hang out with Dolly Parton for, like, two years. I can't seem to find the link right now, but there was a surprisingly great article about her in the Rolling Stone "Women in Rock" issue a while back. Among other things, it noted that she has written over 3,000 songs[1], which makes me want to kiss her, that she has been married to her publicity-shy husband for almost 40 years, and that Velveeta was one of her favorite foods. Upon hearing this, the interviewer said something to the effect of, "C'mon, that can't be true." Dolly then took him into her private quarters and showed him a kitchen stocked with boxes of Velveeta, cans of Spam, loaves of Wonder Bread--just piles and piles of white trash food that she doesn't have to eat anymore, but does anyway, because it's fucking good.
And seriously, how good is "I Will Always Love You" in that context? It just breaks your heart, doesn't it? What a fucking song. Goddamn. I want to MARRY IT. It's one of those songs that you just can't fuck up. Doesn't matter what the arrangement is: just lay that chorus melody over it and it's all you need in life.
But it's all Dolly: when she's trading verses with the hookers and they all have these sort of straightforward musical-theater voices and she comes in and it's just this totally different, unique phrasing and delivery, wow! She really does do that, and it doesn't sound affected in the slightest.
Other than that, the scene with the gaily dancing Governor (played by Charles Durning, a wonderful character actor who was also in a few Coen brothers movies and played Doc Hopper in The Muppet Movie) is some sort of perfect comic thing: aside from seemingly inspiring the Crazy Evil Texan character on the Simpsons, and quite possibly Bill Clinton, it somehow nails exactly what I had in my head of what politicians do when they've just hoodwinked the press. Can't you sort of see Ari Fleischer going backstage from the press room in the White House and just sort of doing a Texas shuffle into the wings? I sure can.
[1] Memo to Ryan Adams: when you've written over 3,000 songs, and when one of them's been covered by Puff Daddy and one by Whitney Houston, then you get to call yourself prolific.
posted by Mike B. at 6:13 PM
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I was thinking a bit at lunch about "selling out." Now, I hope we've gotten to the point where we don't just accept this unquestioningly as a bad thing--we at least look at the context, and if you're like me, you get real suspicious of the person leveling the charge.
But while I think that notion has become a bit ridiculous, when you abstract it slightly, it starts to look a lot more reasonable. After all, "selling out" is really scenester shorthand for "betraying your ideals for material gain," and I'm not sure how many of us would really be comfortable arguing against this particular concept.
On the other hand, why not? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for ostensibly liberal-humanist people to embrace such a quasi-religious concept as this. After all, it would seem to come down to the idea that if you reaaaaaally believe something, you should continue to let that belief guide your actions no matter what. But what does reaaaaaaally believing consist of? Presumably, believing despite all inducement not to, and what is this besides faith? And since when do we put a lot of stock in blind faith?
Now, like all good little post-structuralists, I know that pretty much everything we do, and 100% of what we say and write, is guided by principles that sorta-kinda have no more basis in objective fact than the Branch Davidians' light-hearted child-marryin' creed. Morality, language, justice, science, law: all of these things are ephemeral human constructs. But we abide by them anyway--and, indeed, it's perfectly acceptable to do so anyway--because they make our lives generally easier and happier. We believe in these things for practical reasons.
Which brings us back to selling out. The moral formulation behind selling out is that you should stick to your principles even when it becomes inconvenient to do so. But this simply doesn't make any sense. If your principles are only there for your own convenience (in the case of indie folks, for example, it helps them to continue do what they're doing without it feeling sort of silly and inferior and worthless compared to commercially successful musicians), then why shouldn't you sell 'em out?
Now, don't get me wrong: I recognize that the whole morality of sticking to your guns is socially practical, too, and I'm not advocating simply looking out for #1 all the time; this can easily come back to bite you in the ass. But let's at least recognize it for what it is.
But moreover, why the hell would we believe that something is right or true simply because it's what we feel in our hearts? Since when has that been the case? And, even more importantly, if that thing we feel can be proven wrong or silly, isn't it more intellectually proper to change what we feel, no matter how hard that can be, than to simply continue on?
Let me illustrate here with an example about music, which may simply serve to marginalize and delegitimize the issue I'm discussing, but hey, that's why we're here.
A few months back, I was talking in the real world with some folks about Liz Phair. I made the familiar argument that she clearly wanted to make a pop album, and besides the fact that we're supposed to respect an artist's choices, it's just great that she made a pop album, because it turned out really well and more good indie songwriters and singers should be willing to do that, since it produces good songs.
To which someone responded: yeah, but not everyone likes pop. Not everyone wants to make pop songs. Actually, very few indie people like pop or want to make pop albums.
Now, I don't know if I had forgotten this or just never knew, but suffice to say it came as something of a surprise. (I think I'd either just gotten lost up my butt in the course of the debate, or honestly assumed that most indie musicians secretly like pop, but the arguer was probably right.) But as I've said ad infinitum, this seems so weird to me. Pop is so pleasurable: why wouldn't you like it? Wouldn't there be something there you could like, and if there's something, why would you say you wouldn't like it? And so on.
The fact is that most people seem to make this objection less on the basis of uncontrollable personal taste than on some sort of ideological notion of Pop Is Bad. It's an allergy. But unlike just not being able to like something, this is a conscious choice not to like something based not on what it is, but what it is like. And that seems just really weird to me.
But supposedly this, like a lot of other ostensibly liberal attitudes, is justified because you Really Feel It, Man. But so what? Who gives a crap? And who says your idiot attitudes are Just As Valid as someone else's? Fuck that shit! If you honestly believe in critical authority, then you have to believe that you could be wrong.[1]
I dunno. Maybe I'm getting too concerned with the whole thing, but it really does confuse the hell out of me. Do you not have enough time to listen to pop and indie and experimental? Pop-I and II and III? If not, why not? Be honest about your choices; be up-front about why you're thinking what you're thinking. And I feel like we'd all be better off.
[1] I sure do.
posted by Mike B. at 5:36 PM
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My favorite line from America's Sweetheart right now, from "But Julian..."
"I know you're dangerous
What a punk
You would never sell out
Just like I did Playboy
That was art
It didn't count!"
Delivery being key, but you get the idea.
posted by Mike B. at 4:38 PM
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THINGS I WOULD LIKE TO DO IF I EVER BECAME A SUCCESSFUL MUSICIAN
- Write a song for Greg Dulli
- Play violin with Warren Ellis
- Play guitar with PJ Harvey
- Produce Tori Amos
- Be produced by Luke Haines
- Do an album with Carla Bozulich and Nels Cline
- Be produced by Kevin Shields
- Play on Top of the Pops
- Play the Royal Albert Hall
- Write a song for Dolly Parton
- Play with Willie Nelson
- Have Krist Novoselic lay down accordion on a track, hang out a lot afterwards
- Collaborate with Courtney Love
- Tour with Sonic Youth
That's all I can think of for now.
I'd love if other people gave this concept a try and made their own lists, so please feel free!
posted by Mike B. at 3:32 PM
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Two music nerd questions:
1) What 80's song does the opening piano riff from the Twilight Singers' "Teenage Wristband" sound like? Some Kate Bush thing? Or is it a Who song? Am I totally insane on this?
2) What song shares almost the same chord progression as the verse of Courtney's "Uncool"? I know it's something...
posted by Mike B. at 11:59 AM
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