So, these musicblogs--they're pretty dead, huh?

Seems that way to me, anyway. Can't remember the last time we had a good old-fashioned cross-referemced debate. Maybe the Ying Yang Twins, and definitely MIA, but it seemed like, aside from certain key points, the nexus of the discussion in both cases was ILM, or at least so I gather from reading, er, ILM. (Whose self-congratulatory nature is just endlessly endearing, by the way.) But still, that's two minimally vital discussions--the MIA one was great, but the YYT thing seemed ridiculous from the start--in 4 months, and I can't even remember what we had before that. Sure, the Dissensus folks still occasionally bat an idea around amongst themselves on their blogs, but even there, most of the discussion seems to take place on their chose message board. This doesn't even approach the rapid pace and intensity of two or three years ago.

Normally I would chalk this feeling up to my own inability to keep up a good musicblog. Lately, though, I've had lots of things to say, and have even been saying some of them. But it increasingly feels like what I'm doing is played out, done, over--not necessarily from my perspective, but in the attitude I get from everyone else, to say nothing of what I'm reading on other blogs, i.e., almost nothing, at least not about music, at least not in the vital, engaged voices I used to hear. I mean, check out the NYLPM sidebar--how many of those blogs came into being in the last 6 months? Remember when there was a new one every few days that seemed worthy of a link?

Let's just examine what's up with the old guard these days. Marcello stopped a month ago. NYLPM is still enjoyable to read, but Tom seems to barely post anymore. Jess is done, Skykicking is done, Woebot is done. K-Punk seems to mainly talk about anything but music. Simon cut down on posting and put a year or two of his life into writing a book about a 20-years-dead rock genre. Others have convereted to being either straight-up MP3blogs or just dispensers of short posts about songs. (Sasha's still working the short thing, but he always was, and his outside writing was far more central than than the blog itself.) There are certainly exceptions, some of which I don't read as much as I should--Gutterbreakz, Geeta, pop (all love), the Rambler, LPTJ, Le Fou, a billion others I'm doubtless forgetting. But still.

There are two primary reasons for this decline, aside from various personal reasons with the participants and/or the arguably waning vitality of the world of music itself.

One is MP3blogs. I don't think they necessarily set out to kill the old-style musicblog (although comments from certain folks have led me to think they're not entirely displeased with the situation), but the fact is, doing short write-ups accompanied by a song is both easier (if you don't care overmuch about quality) and, let's be honest, more fun to read 90% of the time. This isn't even getting into the philosophical concerns of them being better tools for our particular purpose, since simply letting someone hear what you're writing about is very powerful, but they do seem to encourage people entering the game to go that route, both because it's easier and because you get more traffic this way. That, in turn, seems to have diluted the vitality of MP3blogs themselves, because almost everyone converges around the same few artists week-to-week. Meanwhile, even the non-MP3-based blogs that have the greatest visibility follow much the same form of daily updates and short blurbs.

The other is the message boards. I quite deliberately stayed away from ILM for a while, but now that I've been sucked in, it, along with Dissensus, seems to be absolute death for blogs, especially once they reached a certain critical mass of participants. One of the great motivators for blogging rather than just writing like normal was always that you can get feedback and responses to what you post--absolute catnip for those of us used to an audience that more closely resembled a void--but the audience for the boards is bigger than almost any individual blog, and that plus the expressly discursive envirionment is much more encouraging of actually getting responses, so if that's what you're after, why not go to a board? Questions, links, and theories I would have in the past expected to see posted on blogs are now almost inevitably funneled to ILM, where they're batted around but it's hard to say that definitive statements really ever arise. People on the boards periodically debate about the vitality and importance of the boards themselves, but the fact remains that they are discussion forums, and no matter how much we might want to change Western hierarchies of importance and legitimacy etc. etc., the only dialogues in libraries are Platonic ones, sourced at some point to a single mind (or two or three), and there's a whole book's worth of good reasons for that.

I don't mean to complain about either of these reasons in and of themselves--hey, I spend most of my leisure time at work perusing message boards and short-form blogs--but I have always loved the particular blog form that was en vogue back in '01-'03. I love music, and I'm even a musician, but I'm also a writer and a reader, and at the end of the day I want to read about music almost as much as I want to listen to it, and MP3blogs and ILM, for all their good parts, aren't going to satisfy that jones in the way a substantial blog post will.

It may seem kind of absurd to talk about blogs as centers of reasoned discourse, but compared to those other two forums, they undeniably are. MP3blogs are concerned with desciption and persuasion, rarely going on for more than a paragraph or two, and while I've seen some great writing there, and even some great interprative readings, it's a lot fewer and farther between than on old-style musicblogs. And while you will ocassionally see a longer post on ILM, there's a strong impetus to get things out as quickly as possibly and without opening yourself up to insults; even the best longer message board post would probably be better off on a blog, where you wouldn't have to filter out all the conversational white noise, and where you wouldn't be expected to compose a reply as soon as you read it. A blog where there's no daily posting expectation and no particular word limit (whether self-imposed or not) encourages thoughtful writing, and allows you to develop your ideas (ideas!) in a way that the rapid-fire environments common today don't.

If this sounds like an elegy, maybe it is. I loved being able to read people writing at length about something they were passionate about, something I was passionate about too. I loved the musicblogs as a counterforum to the paid gigs that couldn't and still don't accomodate that kind of sprawl and particularity. And I loved the words, the writing itself, to say nothing of the ideas that were put forth. But maybe by a year or two in blogs had already attracted everyone who might be able to make use of such an opportunity, and maybe by a year or two after that they'd said all they had to say about the admittedly limited subject of music, or just, you know, gotten older. Maybe all those people have moved on to paying gigs, and don't have the leftover energy for blogging that they did back when it was merely a hobby. Or maybe Pitchfork just got less stridently indie; lord knows that served as an impetus for a number of musicblogs!

Whatever it is, I'm not posting this hoping for a resurgance--I'm just pointing out what seems to be a reality, and explaining why I think it's a negative. But I certainly wouldn't mind a fresh burst of energy, a new crop of writers, not just talkers.

Don't take this the wrong way--this isn't one of those "Well, I'm done, nice knowing you" posts that are so common in the blog world. As many people have pointed out, I always go on too long, and clap clap blog as a whole won't buck that trend. There's still lots of stuff I want to talk about, and there ain't no editor here that I can see, so I will be around for a while.

Of course, if someone wanted to give me a book contract, I wouldn't say no. Books are even longer, mmm...
posted by Mike B. at 12:14 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Flagpole reviews by me. The first is of the Farfisa-pop side project for the one of the Casper and the Cookies guys, and is servicable, (ADDENDUM: my review is servicable, I mean--the album itself is good!) but then comes Rob Thomas, and oh man, someone needs to spread the word about that album! Fucking hardcore! Shit.

Also, Hillary on a band apparently called The Orchid Tree.

posted by Mike B. at 11:12 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

I'm actually fairly happy with my comments on this week's Stylus UK Singles Jukebox, so I will go ahead and point you there in der realen timen. Me and Joe often seem to disagree on things we should agree on, but thankfully we're together on the Bobby Valentino, which is a wonderful thing to have come on the radio, and deserves much higher than a 5.86.

In other news: I am still apparently the only person who really dislikes the Juan MacLean, I am perhaps overly harsh with MIA, and I more or less admit I have no idea what "Come Up And See Me" is. Why didn't someone tell me it's an old song?! Oh, wait, you did? Damnit.

posted by Mike B. at 11:49 AM 0 comments

Well, perhaps I spoke too soon about Mr. Eggers' response.

The part that stuck in my craw in particular as I mulled yesterday was this bit:

It was our hope at McSweeney's, and continues to be our goal with The Believer, that the literary world could be one of community, of mutual support, of spirited but nonviolent discourse—all in the interest of building and maintaining a literate society. It's what we teach at 826 Valencia, too: that books are good, that reading is good, that everyone can and should write in some capacity, and that anyone pissing in the very small and fragile ecosystem that is the literary world is mucking it up for everyone—and sending a very poor message to the next generation.

Now, Eggers claims that this is the woo he's been pitching all along. But in my recollection--and this is as someone who's been out of the McSwyns loop for a year or so--it's never been put quite this explicitly, even granting that this was at the core of his arguments all along. And put this way, it annoys the hell out of me. You can see the obvious parallels between what I was bitching about yesterday in the old 'hood and the idea of "everyone supports everyone" that's being put forth here. (I imagine the more virulent anti-Eggersites would point out that the widespread resentment of McSweeney's stems almost solely from the fact that the Eggers cadre seems to only "support" a fairly small group of people, but that seems unfair; there's only so much they can do, and Eggers is always quick to point out the smallness of their staff.) The particular brand of support that seems to emerge in such situations always seems intensely self-interested, with the patina of communitiy laid on top, which as far as I can tell has always just made things harder, and in the end is a sort of nervous horse-hitching, a micobandwagon you calculatedly jump. This is a bit cynical, I realize, but especially at a young age, none of the writers I know are really capable of being supportive in the way Eggers is proposing, and that's why the competitive model has held for so long. I've been in enough goddamn workshops to know that "being supportive" is just the watchword we slide through clenched teeth. And, indeed, this may be the best response to the imagined anti-Eggers criticism above: Eggers believes in being supportive of stuff that isn't crap. I don't know if this is true or not--maybe he just doesn't want to say it out loud, which is certainly understandable--but that I could get behind.

What it's harder to get behind is the last bit. I've long argued that if an art is so fragile that it needs to be protected in this way, shielded behind some sort of protective mother-figure from the mean bullies of the critical schoolyards, then maybe it's time we put it out of its misery. If something we love so much has withered away to the point where it can't withstand a few jokes at its expense, it's better for all concerned that we choose the time and place of its demise, rather than letting it be pricked to death. But this seems an awfully pessimistic view of literature, and it seems equally dangerous to send a message "to the next generation" that the genre is near-death. Given this view, why would anyone want to get involved with writing?

I was a big fan of the critical ideas put forth by Eggers, Lethem, Julavits, et al, because they were much more nuanced than this. And, sure, maybe it's unfair to expect Eggers to convey these subtleties in the course of a paragraph in something called "a small correction." But then why include it at all?

One of the first things I posted to this blog was actually a (supportive) response to that Julavits essay in the first issue of The Believer. I just went back and reread it, and was shocked to find that it wasn't anywhere near as embarassing as I assumed it would be. So I'm going to point you to that, although I would request that you just begin at the paragraph beginning "First off..." This, anyway, was what I took away from the essay, even though it seems to have been a fair ways off what Julavits (who is not Eggers, etc. etc., but you know) was thinking.

Anyway, all that said, Mr. Wolk has an article on the Fall at the Believer's site, so go read that if you don't want to deal with more of my yammerings.

posted by Mike B. at 11:06 AM 0 comments

Monday, June 20, 2005

In brighter news: Dave Eggers' corrections have become much more light-hearted. "The quote helps put some juice into his piece, but Neal knows I didn't say it. 'New age of literary celebrity'? Oh man. I don't even know what that means." Ha!

posted by Mike B. at 5:10 PM 0 comments

I opened the special "New Brooklyn" section of the Times on Sunday to find: this.

And then I read it. And then I snarled and threw it away.

For those unfamiliar, let me explain: this is my former neighborhood. And by "former neighborhood," I mean I lived in one of the buildings described in the article. The stretch pictured at the head of the story was directly across the street from me, and the "Brooklyn's Natural" at the far right was where I often shopped.

This was the first place I lived in New York, and I have since, fairly recently, moved out.

And so I have a few responses:

1) "I guess we're pioneers, but we're not homesteaders, you know?" Pioneers? Cracker please. When I moved in it was July 2001 and there were only three other occupied apartments in the building. The first floor hadn't even been converted yet--we went down and took a desk and some envelopes and a sweater or two and a fog machine. There were no stores in the immediate vicinity; the only nearby bodega, two blocks down from the Morgan stop, closed at 8. Life Cafe opened a year after I got there, when Kristie was moving in. Cab drivers didn't even seem to know the area existed. And this is to say nothing of the people who'd been living there for years and years and years. The Catch-22 analogy is invalid, but if you want to push it, you're as much oil speculators as the brokers are. People like you chased my ass out.

2) Cheap? Are you serious? When I moved in it was already moderately expensive, but when I moved out those damn 800 square foot lofts were going for $2000 a month. Unfurnished! Some without walls! In what universe is this cheap? Oh, right: the universe of Rutgers dropouts in a band in Brooklyn. Which brings us to:

3) "It's dirty, it's cheap, and we can play music all night." Few quotes have brought quite such a chill to my heart. The dirty part is technically neutral, the cheap we've dealt with. As for the last bit? Well. What conditions have to exist in a building for you to be able to play music all night? Basically, there can't be anyone around who really needs to sleep at normal hours. In other words, no one living there can have a job. (Or children, but.) The problem is, dude, some of us did have jobs, and some of us did need to sleep. But y'all were playing music all night. And not good music. Oh no, not good music. What kind of music would you expect from a band with the word "Plastic" in its name, and made up of Rutgers drop-outs, one of whom describes the neighborhood as "like the new Haight-Ashbury"? That's right: hippie music. Motherfucking hippie music. Twenty-four fucking hours a fucking day.

Look, no band needs to practice "all night." OK, maybe La Monte Young, but if I lived next door to La Monte Young, I would have killed myself long ago. (Nice to listen to and all, but maybe not something you want to hear muffled and constantly, whether you want to or not.) I'm certainly sympathetic to the desire to play music at odd hours, and indeed, the ability to make noise was attractive to me. But make music by yourself, man. Do you really need to play with your band all the goddamn time? Let me answer for you. No you do not. If you do, you need a better band, or to stop playing music and get a goddamned job.

Speaking of which:

4) "Anybody you meet has got something going on." And that something is inevitably stupid. The thing no one wants to tell you about bohemia is that for ever legendary community that produced all this great art, there are 99 other scenes that resulted in nothing but horrendously narcississtic pseudo-art and a shared set of venereal diseases. Everyone seemed to have their thing "going on" because they didn't have to deal with being at a job for 10 hours a day--they had some mysterious outside means of support. And they all had to be supportive of each other no matter the merits of the project at issue.

So, in sum: no one discovers anything new in New York, they just move there based on a complex set of values (proximity to Manhattan/subway lines, amount of space, sociability of neighborhood denizens, demographic makeup of the building, etc.) and you should not be proud of where you're living unless you've done some nice things with your apartment. Also, you should probably get a job, it would either make your art better or convince you that it sucks. And both are fine with me. And, finally, the neighborhood merited an article like this maybe two years ago, and has since spread even farther. That the Times is behind the curve is unsurprising; that they were able to find a chode of this magnitude (the reportedly quite nice Mr. Travis Harrison, who seems to be having fun with the whole thing, aside) to say this crap is just mind-boggling.

posted by Mike B. at 2:18 PM 0 comments

Friday, June 17, 2005

It's Friday, so a few random notes.

- Joan Jett and the Blackhearts' "You Don't Know What You've Got" is probably the best song anywhere ever. I thought it was on Bubblegum Machine, which woulda been nice because they archive everything, but no such luck. It's fantastic though.

- We are now of the opinion that Katie Couric and Matt Lauer play industrial shows in their spare time. (Rumor has it that Matt is the man behind Pigface, but these are nebulous.) Katie is the drunken skeeze of a manager stumbling around the bar and accosting people who just came in to use the bathroom, Matt dresses in business casual and drinks motor oil and spits it on the audience. Dude is fucking hardcore. I mainly imagine them doing this in 169 Bar, for some reason.

- Excerpt from a Publisher's Weekly interview with Klosterman that ties in nicely to my riff on A Supposedly Fun Thing below.

***********
PW: Are there any rock journalists who have had particular influence on you? Lester Bangs seems like a natural reference point.

CK: The first time I ever read anything by Lester Bangs is when my first book was compared to him. I used to read Spin and Rolling Stone growing up, but I was never that interested in rock critics. I think there are some rock critics who are great writers, some of the smartest people I've met, but I don't feel like they've influenced me in any way. I feel a little weird saying that, though, because it sounds arrogant.

PW: So who has influenced you?

CK: David Foster Wallace seems to be one of the only writers able to be very intellectual, almost overtly academic and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.
***
(thanks George)

posted by Mike B. at 5:08 PM 0 comments

Thursday, June 16, 2005

Oh...well, OK, I do have a free moment here.

Total number of books I own:
Actually, all the books I own (bar like 10) are currently in boxes, and I'm going to take them all out this weekend, so were I that sort of guy, I could count them. But I'm not, so I won't. I did just buy 3 bookcases, if that helps. I guess somewhere around 300? I have more CDs than I do books, but that is because a) people do not send me free books (sadly!), and b) CDs are much smaller. I have to actively restrain myself from buying books these days, just because I know I'll be moving, on average, once every two years until I'm in my 30s, and books are goddamned heavy. There are always libraries. One day I would like to have a permanent residence and nice bookshelves, but for now, I'll take what I can get.

Five books that had a big influence on me:

The Public Burning, Robert Coover. I'm hesitant to recommend this to people because it is very long and the real payoff isn't until the very end. But that ending, good lord, it's the single best ending of anything ever, and given how well this fits in with my general worldview and obsessions, it's hard to conceive of The Public Burning being bumped from the top of my favorite-books list anytime soon. For all the times that Coover doesn't work, goes too far, relies on his schtick, here it all comes together, and I can't help but think the reason is his subject: politics. Few things in our contemporary culture, including entertainment (which is too self-conscious), reflect the postmodern absurdist aesthetic better than politics, and when Coover fuses this broad view with the narrow personal vision of Nixon, who narrates half the book, it gets closer to what politics is all about than most public policy books ever will. He embraces historicism but is writing close enough to the events concerned to imbue the whole affair with the kind of fire you don't usually get from what's essentially historical fiction. Maybe the very nature of mass culture, of making the distant struggles of individuals into a story shared by all and experienced in something close to real time, allows us to write books about public events in the same way we would write about family struggles. Or maybe not. Maybe this is just an anomaly. But it's a great one, and it serves as a possibility, an example of what could be.

Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem. More for personal reasons than artistic ones, and there's a strong possibility I should replace this with something older and/or more embarassing--the Chronicles of Narnia, The Tao of Pooh, the Hitchhiker's "trilogy," something by Arendt or Rawls, etc.--but it makes the list anyway, even though I can't quite articulate why.

The Wheel of Love, Joyce Carol Oates. My introduction to the short story, it resonated especially well with the area where I grew up--I read "Four Summers" and I know exactly what parks, lakes, picnic tables, boats, and people she's talking about. This is arguably a negative influence, because I now do the kind of tragic, breath-held melodrama she specializes in best, to the detriment of other styles, but so it goes. Still a terrific collection from the literary world's Robert Pollard.

The Aesthetics of Rock, Richard Meltzer. Part 1 of why this blog exists. In fairness, it should be also noted that I read this after graduating from college, where one of my key classes in my last semester was a comedy class, and there are a bunch of things there that would make the list if they were books, and indeed, one day Rabelais and His World or that other Bakhtin book whose name escapes me might make this list instead. But for now, it's the Meltzer, because more than anyone else, he was able to write academically while not losing the tone of his subject, plus I was mature enough to recognize that aping his style was a dead end. It's got the denseness of a good pop song, has a sort of sensual pleasure componant when you're just reading-reading, and busts open possibilities that are still unexplored. I can understand why in the rock-crit canon Meltzer is "that guy who isn't Lester or Christgau, what'd he write again?" but maybe that's OK.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace. Part 2 of why this blog exists. I'm curious to see if this (our?) generation gets pegged as being Wallace's children, but it's clear his post-irony doctrine, his uneasy embrace of pop culture, and his quest for sincerity in the context of cool--all of which predates Eggers, by the by--are the watchwords of the ascendent crop of cultural commentators and artists. Certainly popism is just Wallacism that's acheived escape velocity and has finally managed to get past the self-consciousness, more or less. I feel this is the best of Dave's books, and yes, I know, Infinite Jest, but while it's certainly fantastic, it's sort of the Blueberry Boat to ASFTINDA's Gallowsbird's Bark, to get all blog-centric for a second. If it included "Tense Present" it would be completely perfect, but you can't have everything. I think my voice on this blog is, if anything, a little too Wallace-inflected, but I like that he's given me license to do that. He's just a fantastic writer, about almost anything, and his vastness of spirit is exhilerating. This comes through best in his non-fiction, and this is a great collection of it.

Last book I bought:
Somewhat embarassingly, David Kamp and Steven Daly's The Rock Snob*s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge, which is pretty good, but still.

Last book I read for the first time:
Even more embarassingly, Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, which I've discussed previously. But before that it was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I swear.

Five other bloggers to tag with this meme:
Uh, geez, I dunno. How about Chris, once he gets back from Cali, Joe, because I'd like to know (Ayn Rand, I hear?), Mwanji, to get him writing, Cyn, unless she's done it already, and Abby.

Wait, did I really say "a free moment"? Jeez...

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

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Since we were talking about UG and all, I might mention that this post is very charming in its way.

Also, she has alerted me to the fact that my former obsession, my great love, my destructive passion, Anytime, now has an East Village location that inexplicably delivers to my office! I ate there almost every night for a period when I was living in Bushwick, and now they can solve all my lunch woes. Mmm, lunch woes.

posted by Mike B. at 11:40 AM 0 comments

Incidentally, this blog now intends to drop all previous obsessions and devote itself full-time to getting Kelly Clarkson to cover "Gigantic" on her next album. It's a great song, she'd sing the hell out of it, and it'd piss off all the right people.

And then the IHYWYP dude could do a remix. Or not. But he should cover that song, too.

posted by Mike B. at 11:16 AM 0 comments

If you are in the new york city area, your favorite band and mine, I Hate You When You're Pregnant, is playing a loft party with the somewhat less-exciting Japanther (and the unknown-to-me Jetomi) at 9pm. The address is apparently 440 Lafayette, 2nd Floor, in the borough of Manhattan, and the charge is $5. I am going to try to be there, cause hey, pink speedos, but I also had a bit of a rough day yesterday, so who knows.

Listen to Gary Sinese. (Which I've posted before, yes.) LISTEN TO IT!

GARY SINEEEEEEEEESE!!!

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

Monday, June 13, 2005

Just to add a few things to Matthew's post about the Maxi Geil show:

I've been a believer for a while, but with this show I now know the best way to bring people around. The album's good, but if they keep playing live shows like this, they're going to get a rabid fanbase in no time flat. They're just really, really good at getting people to dance, and given that you couldn't really hear the lyrics very well, that just leaves a whole other world to explore once you get the CD.

It should be noted that Guy's outfit was super-yacht club, tight khakis and a navy blazer, with standard black dress shoes. This didn't really fit in with the Maxi character but worked amazingly well to highlight the dancing, which was especially impressive given that he held a drink in his hand for the entire gig. Super-classy, super-smooth.

Get yourself to these shows now, while they're still small. Trust me on this.

posted by Mike B. at 11:29 AM 0 comments

Friday, June 10, 2005

I haven't linked it before because I wasn't particularly proud of it, but nevertheless, here is my Nikka Costa review from Flagpole (alla way at the bottom), which upon reflection is actually sorta good. Or, at least, there's a good zinger at the end.

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

Whoa.

"Losing My Edge" but with every reference linked to an MP3.

See, kids, this is why we love the internet...

posted by Mike B. at 11:23 AM 0 comments

Thursday, June 09, 2005

A thread on ILM about Ultragrrrl that starts out horrendous and gets fairly good--for the good part, please scroll down, past the multiple postings of the picture of someone falling off a motorcycle--and is well worth reading if you've ever been worried that you care too much about hipsters. (Caring about hipsters so much that you regularly express your hate of hipsters counts, by the way.)

A few quick bits before I get into the main thrust:

1) Jaymc said that Jessica Hopper is a scenester! He's gonna get his ass whupped.

2) As far as I can tell, the only reason Nick Sylvester's been so successful is because of his taut bod and face that could cut glass, to say nothing of his dreamy eyes. Whenever I see him, I just want to lick him and assign him articles, and the fact that I've done neither is simply a testament to my cowardice.

3) Marissa does not serve her argument well by saying "the men of ILM," given that really very few regular posters seemed to be supporting the virulantly anti-ultragrrrl line. I think the point made later about "music dicks" being basically the male equivlent of scenesterism, and that dickitude being in full effect on ILM, was a better way of going at things.

4) I back Miss Clap's theory that everyone on TV should be pretty, so her being on VH1 is fine with me. Male rock critics should put more effort into their appearance. If it's good enough for Prince, it's good enough for you, buster.

I don't really care much about UG one way or the other, but maybe this is because I don't have cable and don't read Spin; her blog these days seems to primarily consist of party flyers and promotional pictures, and since I tend to read blogs for the writing, I just pass over it all. It's hard to ascribe the more extreme hatred directed toward her as anything besides, at best, bitterness, and at worst something much more icky. Certainly if I were to pick something to really hate, she'd be very far down the list, but we all know my ambivalent feelings toward hipsters. ("Anything that gets you laid is hard to argue with," basically.)

But as to what she represents--Mis-shapes, Lit, NYC scenesters, all that--I can certainly register a hearty pang of disappointment. There's no denying that they appear to be having fun, and that all signs indicate they are, in fact, having fun. This simple fact goes a long way toward explaining the bitterness--I can cycle through theoretical explanations for the love of artistic suffering all day, but in the end people are going to hate you a lot more if you're having a great time than if you're miserable. (Note, for instance, how criticism of Conor Oberst always ends up couched in the high volume of poontang he's getting and/or his alcoholism being an affectation; his theatrical misery is not genuine, because if it was, the hatred would seem mean-spirited.)

But having fun is great! Fun is the way you should experience music, because that's the heart of its appeal, at first if not always. In the abstract--having great parties with your friends and listening to music you love--sounds wonderful. There's nothing wrong per se with the way these folks are experiencing music, and given the overserious way most music fans seem to approach their passion, it's nice to see someone determined not to take it (or herself) too seriously, even if there's something offputting about the "I made out with so-and-so," the exhibitionism seeming to put the focus on the writer rather than the music. But even this, really, isn't so bad--the writer is really the listener, and the listener is the ultimate focus of the music, right?

What's disappointing, then--and this is why I say disappointing rather than maddening or enhatenating as some might--is the music this otherwise admirable approach is applied to. Now, I know this might end up sounding like "their problem is that they don't share my impeccable taste," but, as others have said, I certainly don't dislike most Ultragrrl bands; I'm too lazy to check, but one of not both of Franz Ferdinand and the Killers made my top-10 last year, and I've always been vocal in my affection for the Strokes and Interpol, even if certain others (the Bravery, the Arcade Fire) have passed me by. But they just don't seem like the funnest choices to organize a scene around. The Scissor Sisters, Europop, neo-disco, shit, gimme a fuckin' 80s night. Hell, I really liked the electroclash scene, even as I recognized that I just didn't have the style to fully participate. But as much as I like Interpol, are they really the band that's gonna get me good and pumped up when the DJ throws 'em on? Not so much. Of course, as you know, I've never really seen the transcendence in post-punk.

It seems, though, that ending up with these bands as a focus is an inevitable result of the methodology at play, with scenesters liking bands that are themselves scenestery. This doesn't necessarily disqualify those kinds of bands--again, I like not a few of 'em--but it does seem to tragically narrow the scope of inquiry, and given that--due to the retarded obliviousness of A&R folks, who I'll blame this on long before I blame it on Ultragrrrl et al--this is the kind of music that tends to get pushed toward the mainstream, that's really too bad. In other words, I wouldn't mind at all being part of this whole deal, I just can't muster the enthusiasm for the bands they do, and it's mystifying, in the end, why you would want to.

Well, I suppose that's not entirely true. There's something odious about scenesters, and I'm actually thinking primarily of the straight dudes here. It's the sense of false camraderie, of achingly low standards, of coolness rather than passion--they're just not very fun to hang out with. And really, having a group of friends where you're all that much alike seems really weird. I mean, I want to hang out with other liberal arts grad as much as the next hipster, but do there really need to be more than 2 music geeks in any given group? Do you all have to be artists? Can't some of you be holding down day jobs and really interested in literature? Can't there be people who watch a lot of TV? Can't we all just hang out at a cheap, dirty bar and get drunk and flail around to whatever the DJ's playing instead? I hang out with them, and, you know, maybe I'm just too weird, or maybe I'm not being social enough, but good god, they're boring. Gimme a call when you're doing a DJ night that will be guaranteed to include Prince and George Michael. If we're going to act like we're in middle school, can we at least have the kind of awesomely pop-centric dances we had back then, too? Shit, I'll get dressed up stupid and go to a difficult club if I know I'm gonna hear music that'll justify the beer prices, and I don't mean italo-disco. (Which, god bless it, but still.) I know all y'all DJs want it to be like we're at a rave in England in 1991, but we're not, so shut up and play some fucking pop music.

The whole thing is disappointing because the promise that I felt back in 2001 seems to have coalesced into everyone liking the same four or five bands in any given week--every blog's got an MP3, every mailing list's got a gig posting. And that's not what I'm here for, people. Variety is what I'm looking for, because I am a creature of pop, and I have a voracious appetite. Give me more! More and more and more!

posted by Mike B. at 2:45 PM 0 comments

You think A&R would be a fun thing to do, but then you end up listening to a Freddie Jackson album real close to see if the mixes sound plausibly final. Yoinks. Is there a genre called drone-thrash, and if so, can I listen to some now, please?

posted by Mike B. at 1:03 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Oh my god, people, System of a Down! They're so good! I know this is my latent metal-ism speaking up, but wow! So fun! They're like the Darkness, except working with 80s speed medal instead of 70s cock-rock! I can't even pin down why I like them so much, but I listen to them really loud on the train and I smile and I bop my head! Mezmerize is just such a good album! They're going slow and then they're going reallyfast and at first he's singing in a nice normal voice and then he's singing in this hilarious silly voice and they're all Eastern European and you less want to mosh and more put on bandannas and dance around a fire! And maybe find a tuba! And play that tuba! Wow! So good! Tuba! Yow!

posted by Mike B. at 1:18 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Look:

YOUR COMPLAINTS ARE CRAZY

This tracklist is insane. I mean, just check out this run:

"Hey Jealousy," Gin Blossoms
"My Sister," the Juliana Hatfield Three
"Whatta Man," Salt-N-Pepa
"Back & Forth," Aaliyah
"If That's Your Boyfriend (He Wasn't Last Night)," Me'Shell NdegéOcello
"Freedom of '76," Ween
"Cut Your Hair," Pavement
"God," Tori Amos
"MMM MMM MMM MMM," Crash Test Dummies

I MEAN COME ON.

posted by Mike B. at 6:14 PM 0 comments

Friday, June 03, 2005

We wanted to see Kung Fu Hustle last night, but that was sold out, so instead we saw--and this really was the best available choice--House of Wax. We'd been pretty excited to see it back upon release, but the reviews had been so very very bad that we stayed away.

But that was the wrong decision, because the movie was remarkably good. Sure, the setup is ridiculous and badly-acted, and Paris was just a mistake, but everything else is really well done--scary, well-designed, well-paced. Basically, once they hit the main town, which happens about 20 minutes in, everything's good.

It was also especially scary and nicely gory, both of which I hadn't really been getting from my horror movies of late. So keep your expectations low, but I think you'll be pleased.

ADDENDUM: The movie has now been converted to chart form, by me, over at The Face Knife. I do not quite match Todd's level of style ("don't try and pick the wax off" v. "choke a bitch"), but I do make a joke about Paris Hilton and probably misquote something from the beginning of the movie. Zing! Take that, Paris Hilton-slash-movie screenwriter!

posted by Mike B. at 11:36 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Here's the review, cross-posted for the lazy. I put back in a thing or two, because hey, blog.

******************

The fact that Paul Morley's Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City (University of Georgia Press, Athens, 2005) has already been embraced by music geeks around the globe should come as no surprise. The book's aim to make its creator into the Lester Bangs of his generation, a position currently, and unfortunately, held by Simon Reynolds (perhaps the best argument yet for why Lester's death did his reputation nothing but good), is self-apparent, from a section devoted to why he is the best music writer ever to the laughably enormous scope of his musical references to the stylistic experimentation that would seem to be a requirement for any "serious" book of rock criticism.

But, to his credit, all these are explained or explainable. The "Greatest of All Time" thing is winning and ultimately self-effacing while still being cocky, a reflection of our desire for music writers to be a nerd variant on the rockstar persona. The abundance of references and lists is fully explained at the end as an endless and ultimately futile attempt to map our world, to reduce the totality to a comprehensible scale, even if the explanation doesn't really hold water. And the style is a gamble that pays off in full.

Words and Music, published in England in 2003, but only recently issued domestically by the University of Georgia Press, purports to be an investigation into the connections between two pieces of music: Alvin Lucier's experimental art-music composition "I Am Sitting in a Room" and Kylie Minogue's electro-pop masterpiece "Can't Get You Out of My Head," all within the narrative framework of a automobile trip to "a history of pop in the shape of a city," as the subtitle puts it. Morley admits up front that this framework is likely to break down, and it's no giant whoop when it does, but nevertheless, he manages to stay remarkably coherent while wedging in such great diversions as: a complete, albeit selective, timeline of the Earth's existence (arguably the book's highlight); a list of other possible song pairings the book could have been based on; and a great interview Morley did with Jarvis Cocker. (I must admit I skipped over the Fad Gadget liner notes, though.) He does this by also including great investigations into the high-art context of "Room" and Minogue's own career as a triumphalist narrative, to say nothing of his own (nearly failed) audition as Minogue's biographer.

Morley's point, if I had to pick just one, is about the way the seemingly simple and limited world of a pop song is actually immensely complex. He does prove, sort of, that Minogue's song is related to Lucier's, and that particular reduction is useful, as are the endless connections he draws. But the best feature of Words and Music is the way Morley manages to declare so much (but leave even more up in the air) by constantly doubting himself and showing where things in the book itself could have gone differently, presenting it as simply one option among many, de-canonizing the text. (He even admits he may not have actually heard "I Am Sitting In a Room"!) This playfulness is a breath of fresh air in the accuracy-obsessed, self-righteous, geeky world of rock criticism, and by itself says a lot more about pop music than many critics' entire corpora.

Morley's book is both a failure and a triumph because it reflects everything music writing currently is and represents much of what it could become. On the one hand, it is frustratingly obsessed with historicism over engagement with the work at hand, lazily using mentions of often obscure songs or groups in place of real description to make shallow critical comparisons. The book is too tied up with the past to apply its passion to what other people are passionate about, and too tied up in similarity to really examine the differences. But at the same time, it insists on taking pop music (as explicitly opposed to rock music) seriously, which requires the playfulness Morley does so well. For every eruption of cynicism, there are countless moments of optimism; for every failure to address pop as music in the same manner as the Lucier piece (in contrast to the intense technical focus on "Room," Morley's description of the genesis of "Head" is almost mystical); and for every misunderstanding of the pop pleasure principle, there's a wonderful recognition of the importance of context.

To a critic, the peculiar triumph of pop music is that it expresses amazingly complex ideas in ways with which other people actively desire to engage, and it's one of the particular joys of criticism to parse these ideas, to draw them out and make connections and express them in one's own language. The form of criticism Morley's pointing toward is modeled after pop, which is to say it's both all-inclusive and endlessly energized; a hallmark of traditional rock criticism is the latter, and pop criticism has slowly engulfed the former by broadening its scope. However, often when it swings towards the energy of Bangs, it too easily embraces his inheritors' restrictive rage. We can and will find a way to talk about pop the way it talks about itself, in a voice that never limits and only enables.

So what do we want? Something that, instead of trying to distill pop's purity of essence, seeks its endless expansion; something that internalizes the lessons of the poststructuralist theorists its more highbrow adherents constantly reference, accepting their invitations to play. Something that is not merely a slowly decaying grumble about its practitioners' inability to rouse themselves in their middle age to the chemically-induced summits of yore and instead seeks to understand the pleasures of the new young on their own terms by refusing the temptations of doubt and too-quick dismissal. Something that doesn't settle for the shallow, automatically-generated critiques inherited from our rockcrit forebears, dusted off and mapped onto an unwilling new context. Something not only as pleasurable as pop, but as intelligent, a criticism worthy of its subject. Words and Music is an incomplete roadmap, but it takes us a little closer to where we want to go.

posted by Mike B. at 10:53 AM 0 comments

There's certainly no reason not to read all of the Flagpole reviews this week, since not only are there two of mine (Weezer and Fannypack), but also two from Hillary, one from Chris, and a few other good ones.

You will also find my review of Paul Morley's Words and Music. It's a decent length and well worth reading, although I get a little manifestoy. My favorite line got cut, oh well. Since I'm unclear how many people clickthrough to the f-pole, from this blog at least, I may copy and paste that as a separate post. We'll see.

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