2005: A YEAR IN WHICH THINGS HAPPENED

Which is to say, this is my year-end wrapup. There are section headings.

What 2005 was

2005 was trying to get pregnant, and there were signs of hope and some disappointments, but by the end of the year there was enough morning sickness to justify crossing your fingers. But it could just be food poisoning. Or a hangover. 2005 knows it's not supposed to be drinking, what with the trying to get pregnant and all, but it's been a hard year. 2005 is hoping for twins but mainly cares that whatever pops out is healthy. Some of 2005's friends are hoping that it dies in a particularly dramatic fashion, but they don't tell 2005 this, as this would be cruel, but they think it anyway; they remember 1999 with a certain relish. 2005 has been getting more and more subdued since the process began and the negative results started coming back ("negative results," it thinks about that phrase sometimes, a contraction of "the results came back negative," sure, but it shifts the emphasis, makes it sound a lot more final, and, not coincidentally, sums up a lot of other things 2005's dealing with right now that it'd rather now get into), to say nothing of the weight gain, and lord knows I'm the last person to be talking about weight gain, but it is a medical symptom after all. It's just the most visible sign. You used to be able to tell what 2005 was thinking just by looking at its face, but now there's like a thin film covering it, metaphorically speaking. 2005 is looking inside itself and seems to be lost there. If it weren't for the drinking, 2005 would be no fun at all.

What we learned about the music business in 2005

The legends we had read turned out to be true in spirit if wrong in specifics, and it was that latter bit that threw us off for a while. Because what usually gets complained about is the totality, but there are a lot of good people doing their best, but it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch, another cliche that, whoops, turned out to be true, although maybe it's more like that "rotting from the top down" or something. You know what they say about rich people? You know who owns record labels? Well.

Why we're using "we" here all of a sudden

I believe it's called "distancing." Whoops, er, should've said "we believe" there. Ah well.

The moment of the year

We were not able to devote the attention to year-end pieces we would have liked to, and so we did not get to write about moments at all, but the musical moment of 2005 is not even in question. It occurred during the Electric Six show at the Bowery Ballroom, when Dick Valentine came out and played "Jimmy Carter." Now, the album this song appears on had not yet been released in the country we were in, and even then it doesn't carry any of the particular signs of a massive crowd-pleaser that some of their other songs do, i.e. it's a guitar-only power ballad about ex-presidents. But Miss Clap and I decided that this was our summer jam of 2005, and so when it started, we reacted much the way, say, any resident of MSG during a Bon Jovi concert would react when "You Give Love a Bad Name" comes on: we put our arms around each other, pumped our fists, and sung along at the top of our lungs. Thing is, not only were we not at a Bon Jovi concert at MSG, not only did not most people not know the song, but even if they did, they probably wouldn't react in the way we did. (Indeed, as we were told later, we attracted some odd looks.) So it was just us. But that was OK: indeed, that was actually kinda great. As much as I love that rush of being part of a crowd all reacting with joy to a beloved song etc. etc., this was something different, like a command performance, except without the command, like we had created a command performance for ourselves out of thin air. In a way, it's analogous to one of the pleasures of being a fan, when you know the catalog so well and have a great deal of affection for obscurities, you can get really excited when you attend a concert of the object of your devotion and they play one of those obscurities. But this was sort of a perfect version of that, distilled to its very essence, and thus the source of a feeling the song itself tries to convey: triumph. Now, this phenomenon is somewhat rare in music due to the contageous nature of fandom (the best example would be a particular type of gig that I'm told happens occasionally: you play a small town and not so many people show up, but those people have become fanatically devoted to your band and pass the night in a kind of ecstatic rapture), but you could make it happen wherever, with whatever. Might not be a bad idea. It helps if you have someone like Miss Clap as a co-conspirator.

Other people we meant to analogize to a stereotype of a developmentally disabled kid

Tyra Banks, Geraldo, a few others.

Why we're not going to see The Ringer

Apparently, it doesn't actually make fun of developmentally disabled people, and that would seem to be its whole raison d'etre.

A brief point about Hurricaine Katrina

There's this notion in cultural and artistic criticism that art, especially art that's primarily entertainment (there being, in cultural and artistic criticism, a weird divide between art and entertainment), has the unfortunate side-effect of dissipating energy for social change by acting as a valve to let off the pressure of opressive conditions, that if there were no entertainment the masses would have no option but to rise up. For instance, in a recent Harper's piece about Lars "von" Trier, Jim Shepard writes, in reference to Lars, "He knows movies keep people vacant and slack-jawed when constructive anger might be a more appropriate response to their lot in life." Now, there's a whole bunch of problems with this, but if you're looking for a practical critique, you might turn to the events of August, which precipitated a real social unrest, but only after numerous towns and one major city were almost entirely destroyed, and even then, the social unrest mainly concerned immediate concerns like food and shelter. I guess you could argue that the real reason for the unrest was that the masses could no longer watch TV, or that their sense of outrage had been dulled by years of exposure to the mass media, but it seems a more reasonable conclusion that art, as usual, isn't a factor, and that the only thing that's going to prompt social unrest, by and large, is a catastrophic event of one sort or another, and that, in effect, wishing for social unrest to be triggered is to wish for something fairly horrible to happen. It seems more sensible to observe, if you want to talk about social unrest, that the actual practical execution of revolt is a primarily bodily endeavor, and so the best way to trigger that is to threaten basic bodily functions. Thus rooted in the body, it would imply that not only does art not really suppress unrest (it's unlikely that showings of Wife Swap to hurricaine victims would have made them less agitated), but in terms of directly inspiring it, it has a hard task on its hands, since it has no real direct effect on the body. In other words, if you're looking to why people don't protest their own unjust conditions more vigorously, Hollywood blockbusters might be the wrong place to look.

A brief point about Robyn

I am told that it's somewhat surprising to see Robyn's self-titled album on my year-end list, so maybe I should say something about that, but I don't really have much to say aside from that I like different parts of it in different ways at different times. I can tell you about the first time I listened to it, though. I had to take one of those complicated train rides that is now required of me if I want to get to north Brooklyn from my current apartment, and so I was taking the overground shuttle train as I the CD whirred into existence. So I passed between buildings and yards as the intro speech played, dulled a bit now maybe but absolutely thrilling at the time, which is one of the curious qualities of the Robyn album--it's designed both for initial impact and for replay value, but those two things tend to function independently. And then, another moment of the year: the pause between the intro and "Who's That Girl," absolutely perfectly calculated, because when that Knife beat comes in, shit, it's like an answer track, a validation of the brag in the most casual way possible. And it sounded perfect, just then, on that minute or two minute long train ride as we passed over small streets and Atlantic Avenue and pulled into the station on Fulton street, seeing the tops of buildings in the distance, cars below, and I felt like there was a reason, a purpose, for what I was doing, besides just the errands I had to run and the places I had to go. And that's a big part of why Robyn is one of my three albums of the year.

What 2005 actually was

Not too shabby.

My New Year's resolution, which I do not usually do, make resolutions I mean

To write more, and to do whatever it takes to make that happen.
posted by Mike B. at 10:16 AM 0 comments

"I know you like that emo stuff, George Michael, but Lou Barlow made me this cassette personally..."

There's a foundational feel to Portia de Rossi's record collection, although I can't quite peg why. Certainly the Arcade Fire entry is interesting, since it's the only entry that's not 90s canon or Radiohead or Iggy Pop, and that explains a lot about the Arcade Fire's appeal. And if it ever seemed surprising that she was gay, this should dispel any doubts--I mean, flannel and "drama," c'mon! (But is Dinosaur Jr. really "grim"?)

But there's something else about it, something that seems to sum up a particular segment of the population that's in its ascendence now. It's odd how little we really talk about the effect of grunge on the current musical climate, perhaps due to the odd dominance of British viewpoints on pop music criticism. Or maybe it's just because it's so obvious, like how we never talk about the Beatles anymore.

But it does bear mentioning every once in a while that the musical tastes of the current generation were formed not just by hip-hop, disco, new wave, and punk, but grunge, too, for better or for worse.

(Via Recidivism, which you're checking every day, right?)

posted by Mike B. at 9:32 AM 0 comments

Friday, December 16, 2005

Oh man, you guys. I am way too busy to explain why Trace Adkins' song/video "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" captures the elusive essence of pop, but Hillary does a damn fine job.

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

Monday, December 12, 2005

For all the horrible things in the paper, I can't think of a recent paragraph that chilled me to the bone more than this one:

But that's the baby boom for you. This vast American cohort has exhaustively explored life's other big themes: love and sex, work and child care. Now, inevitably, boomers are watching loved ones die, and confronting their own fragility. Assuming that Ms. Didion has struck a generational chord - think of that huge one on the piano at the end of "A Day in the Life" - it seems fair to expect a melancholy river of death-themed books, plays and movies until the last of the baby boomers follow their predecessors into the grave.

Dear god.

Oh, and don't forget, if you buy enough copies of her book, her husband comes back to life!

posted by Mike B. at 11:17 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

I have a write-up of the Backstreet Boys' "Incomplete" on the Stylus 2005 singles list up today, and its very inclusion is apparently causing a fuss, which I can't understand at all. Maybe those people don't like Bon Jovi either, but those people are fools. The write-up is kind of about my Thanksgiving break. I wish I had written more here about that break, but oh well.

Also, if you're having trouble getting the album off rapidshare,

posted by Mike B. at 12:58 PM 0 comments

Friday, December 02, 2005

Incidentally, if you've just come here looking for the album, it's down that-a-way. Imagine there being a big down arrow here.

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

Speaking of child abuse, we caught some of a Dateline segment last night, about a Russian girl who was adopted by an American man through an adoption agency and was subsequently abused and used in child porn. It's a horrible story, and given that the girl herself was brave enough to go on-camera and talk about it in public, it seems like all you'd really need to do is tell it straight and then delve into the fact that apparently there's no requirement in Pennsylvania that children adopted from foreign countries have to be monitored by a social worker. I imagine Frontline, say, would have done a fantastic job.

But no. Watch the clip for yourself--they seem determined to present it in the ickiest way possible, from the music to the weird sentimentality to the way she's being interviewed. I mean, the girl is clearly mature enough to tell her story for herself, she doesn't need some dude in a suit leaning in and saying in a breathy voice, "Did he hurt you?" or if she does, you don't need to include that dude in the broadcast. To say it's almost titilating is an understatement.

Probably the most egregious bit is at the end, where they flash examples of the kiddie porn pictures she was used in, but white out her body, leaving the surroundings. Now, sometimes when they do this it's OK, because you can't really tell what the picture was like before. But sometimes they do it in such a way that it's clear what the picture was of. In one, there's simply no way around it--it's obvious from the outline that it's a picture of a person with her legs spread, and then they cut from this directly to video of the girl herself. It's just absurdly gross. Guys, if you hate kiddie porn, don't show it, even in modified form, in your report about a girl who was raped, ok?

(I mean, there's a reason for that Brasseye episode--to make abundantly clear just how repulsive these sorts of reports are.)

Is this really the only way to do this? Do we only respond to accounts of horrible things when we're hit over the head with them, when they're presented in the most exaggerated light possible? I don't know. But I sure do wish TV news organizations, from local stations up to the newsmagazines, would stop doing shit like this.

posted by Mike B. at 12:19 PM 0 comments

Oh good, a children's album with songs by the guy from Low, the guy from Red House Painters, and Sufjan frickin' Stevens. So if you want to make sure your kids grow up depressed, get 'em this. Those guys are like the three horsemen of killing yourself.

Maybe you could follow up by sending your kid to bed without any supper and then keeping them awake by playing Jeff Buckley as loud as possible. And then telling them how disappointed you are that they're not asleep.

Buying this album sounds a little like child abuse, is all I'm saying.

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

Thursday, December 01, 2005

The Claps - Bever Fever

I finished my National Solo Album Month project, and you can get it by clicking all the stuff above this. I zipped up the whole album and it's a little shy of 40 megs, which is somewhat large, so if you'd like individual songs or a hard copy, just let me know. I forgot to include the "art" in the zip file, so here it is. I did it in a high-tech graphics program called MS Word.

Tracklist:

1. Intro, in which the relentless pounding of the drums attests to the fact that there is no God, plus fanfare
2. Johnny Ray
3. Abu Ghraib
4. Darlene
5. What She Needs
6. Your Sweater Says Twee But Your Ass Says Goddamn
7. Park Place
8. Fell For a Flirt
9. Beaver Fever
10. Outro, in which a pleasing resolution indicates that despite the foregoing ontological quandry, everything is basically OK, plus another fanfare

The album is about fucking and all the consequences thereof. Also, ideally, parts of it will make you want to have sex. It's a vicious cycle.

Enjoy! I'd really love feedback.

posted by Mike B. at 11:33 AM 0 comments