Alright, so let's do a little experiment. I download MP3s into a "New" folder that I then clean out periodically. I'm gonna dump all the files currently in there into a playlist, put it on random, and note anything that really strikes me one way or the other. This'll be about 300 songs dating back to mid-April. (I didn't say I cleaned it out very frequently, you'll note.)

So, without further ado, here we go. I'll update this throughout the day as more things come up.

My My - Klatta
This is a recent acquisiton, I think from MFR, and it's really good. Electro that starts off with a great drum clatter and adds a bassline that goes woozy as the drums go smoother, and then brings a few more blips into to create something that sounds like Basement Jaxx playing in a room that's so humid, their equipment starts misfiring in really interesting ways. Most things are detuned or mistuned in some way, and for the first half of the track it feels like one of the drum samples has been muted, so it's still dancable, just a little off. It comes together more and more and gets really fiery by the end, although it's still pleasingly detuned and disconnected.

The Chap - Baby I'm Hurtin'
Why do I remember this song as being good? I apparently haven't heard it before, because it sounds completely unfamiliar, and it really sounds like crap. Too much clanking and unwound bass strings and uninspired shouting. Sort of the bad, indie version of "Klatta."

Spoon - The Two Sides of Monseiur Valentine
I was actually listening to Kill the Moonlight this morning on the train and really enjoying it, and especially enjoying observing the production, which is, as Matthew's pointed out, pretty incredible. And I do like that album, but I still have to sort of force myself to listen to it, even if I'm usually happy I did. Why is that? Who knows? But I don't really like this song too much, either. I mean, it's fine, but it's the one I've listened to most from Gimme Fiction and it's really not doing much for me. Maybe since I like "I Turn My Camera On" more I should give the whole album a look. But again, the Spoon-induced apathy sets in.

Queens of Noize - Indie Boys (Don't Deserve It)
OK, despite some apprehension at the start, I do really like this song. It shares a lot of production touches with presumably more radio-centric British pop, as the guitar riff really strongly recalls Girls Aloud's "Love Machine" but having given it some more attention, I'm really enjoying the way the strongly melodic backing in the verses descends to more or less distorted noise in the chorus as the vocalist(s?) shout over it, all without actually losing the sense of melodicism.

Ethan Lipton - Whitney Houston
Bit of a Fluxblog run here, eh? Well, I do really like this song, although I can't quite pin down why. I guess it's the combination of a strong melody and lyrics that just really go with the concept. Is Bobby Brown really shaking hands in Palestine by the end? Huh. I'd like to hear this with a fuller production.

Britney Spears - Breathe on Me (Jacques Lu Cont Remix)
I can't remember if I've ever actually listened to this all the way through, but I don't really need to, do I? I really wish someone would play this when I was out dancing, although a) I haven't gone out dancing in some time, damn you NYC summers, and b) one of the great things about the production on this is how it already sounds like you're hearing it in a club. Yay filtering vocals. This is a good example of the kind of thing I wish more people in my social circle enjoyed so I could play it for them, but alas, I cannot.

Oxford Collapse - The Boys Go Home
Only caught my attention because I was like "what boring band is this?" Everyone seems to like them, but I'm not really seeing it somehow. I like the first 10 seconds of "1991 Kids" (and the title, too), but it doesn't really go anywhere. Meh. If you're going to do something like this, why not Bishop Allen or someone? Call me out if anything interesting happens in the last two minutes of this song, because I can't make myself listen to 'em.

Schnappi - Das kleine Krokodil
Oh my god, I have no idea where I got this song from, but it's exactly what I need right now when people are coming up to me and asking when they can get their checks and I have to say, "Uh, not yet. Sometime!" It's in German, sung by a small child, and is very bouncy and happy in an actually effective way. (You know those kids' songs that try and be happy and just end up being kind of painful? Those are ineffectively trying to be happy.) There's a sort of beerhall bass, shaker, xylophone, bright and shiny synths, and a clarinet. It's really perfect. I should keep this cued up to play every time someone comes to ask me for money. I should also make up a song to sing to it to communicate the information that they are not getting any money. "Weeee are broooke. Nooooo it's not a joke. It might seem gay but I have no money for you today. Schnappi schappi schnappi!" Oh, also at the end the kid starts vocalizing like Mick Jagger, or at least that's what it sounds like in my mind.

Black Dice - Smiling Off (Luomo Remix)
Pretty much a disappointment, despite Mr. Raff's cheeky review which told us to "settle down" about the track before anyone'd actually had a chance to hear it. Blame it on the source material or on the fact that I've never cared much about Luomo, but there's just not much going on here of interest. The bassline doesn't grab you, the drums kind of plod, and to me the whole thing sounds like a Wasteland b-side.

Kathleen Edwards - Back to Me
Always liked this one, but something about the line "wear all the things you always wanted me to" really catches me today, either because of the sentiment or because of the great phrasing, fitting all those syllables into a tighter space than they seem meant for.

Lady Sovereign - 9 to 5
Uh, suddenly not something I have any interest in listening to, even though I listened to it before. I think the turning point was realizing that she was talking about her career as a musician rather than simply someone working a job, which was much more charming. Dude, you're making it as a musician. Suck it up. The line about Kate Moss is kinda funny now though.

Tiger Tunes - Kristen is a Fuckmachine
The male counterpoint to Queens of Noize, but this one's sounding much worse for some reason. Maybe because it's less dense, or because there aren't any guitars. Who can say.

Menomena - Strongest Man in the World
Generally shitty because it sounds like Red Snapper doing an album for Def Jux or something, but the little breaks where the piano shines through sound like Tori Amos. More of that, kids!

Vanessinha & Alessandra - Gira
Sounds like Baile Funk and makes me wish I could understand what they're saying, because the cadence is similar to a lot of baile funk I've heard, but the backing's really, really interesting. I bet if I could speak Portugeuse, there'd be something else to grab my interest and I'd really like this, but as it is, especially with the voices mixed so high, it's hard to envision myself listening to it intentionally again. But I love the 50s guitar in the background and the "mee-neep mee-neep me" break around 1:10. Who knew I cared about lyrics so much?

Scissor Sisters - Ooh the Blues (Demo)
Didn't hit me much at first, and indeed has not until now, but now, hey! Good stuff.

Tom Vek - A Little Word in Your Ear
Good beginning; pity about the sucking. By which I mean "singing," really.

New Pornographers - Sing Me Spanish Techno
I'm fading here; right now this song sounds like a sort of mathematically determined summation of every New Pornographers song ever, and thus kind of formless and vague, although when he says the title that's kind of nice. If anything, that's the problem with getting into this album for me, and I don't even have the full thing yet--they sound like New Pornographer songs rather than songs, if that makes any sense. Or, rather, they sound like what it'd sound like if someone who wasn't the New Pornographers tried to write a New Pornographer song, then got Carl to sing on it. I know I'll come to love them, but right now it's wandering the tundra, alone. I think I need some coffee. Lemme put this on pause.

Ninja High School - It's All Right to Fight
I want to say it's a Luke Haines ripoff, but let's be honest, when they yell "You're going home in a fucking ambulance!" it's a Supergrass thing. This distracts me too much to pay much attention to the rest of the song. Damnit! (Although apparently it's just a sports thing, so perhaps it is me who is gauche.)

DFA1979 - Blood on our Hands (Justice Remix)
Hits in this weird place where I really like it but not enough to force it on other people, who might well like it, but it seems more likely that they won't. So mainly it makes me think of different ways of using my tracker. I really love the arrangement here, the way the different parts come in, especially that little sparkly part, and the tempo change that isn't really. Spoon-worthy.

Spitfires & Mayflowers - Pirates
Holy crap! This is fantastic! Find of the day, no question, although I don't know where I got it. I can't even quite tell what's going on, it's just one of those great burst-of-sound rock songs. There's a guy with a high voice singing very loudly, and background singers, and good noisy drums, and a slightly distorted bass, and mainly clean guitars successfully avoiding chords. It's also nice that it's called "Pirates" and does appear to be pirate-themed, but it doesn't feel the need to sound "nautical" like certain other bands I could name. And then it slows down and there are horns, and then it stops, and then it goes some more slowly with horns, and then again, and then again, and there's an organ, and it sounds like Tom Waits kind of, and then it gets noisy and fast and the organ is droning, and then he yells "I went to Rome!" and they stop and there's crowd noise even though it didn't seem live, and then he does a band intro. No, really. And it appears to be from a live recording. Everyone has solos. The trumpeter is called "Baron von" something. And then he says "And I play guitar!" and it stops. Wow! Gotta listen to that one again. And google. ADDENDUM: Aha! Thank you Dan/Sean!

Caribou - Medium Sized Working Dog (Steady Steady)
Didn't think Caribou would be able to sound at all good after that great little blast of fun, but after an unpromising drone to start, this really picks up in a nice way. Tempo's good and fast, with a shuffling hi-hat pattern accompanying a warm vamp that varies nicely for a while, bringing in other parts until this great bit hits when the snare finally kicks in and a buzzing synth drone overlays the whole track, rocking out for a while until the drums and bass cut out, leaving that buzz to zip across the channels and really fuck with your head. When the song first started I thought, "Ah, it's a good example of a problem I face: you come up with a nice warm part or two but feel like it should, for lack of a better term, 'rock out' at some point, yet can't seem to make that happen." But nope, this track overcomes that. Kudos, although the drums stay cut out for entirely too long. Plus, it doesn't need to be 7 minutes, really, especially not with 2-3 drumless mintues in the middle.

Sufjan Stevens - Come on Feel the Illinoise!
Again, a very good song, but not really the j-word. There's hardly a tonic to be found in the whole song. I mean, he's got horns and there's not a blast to be found! (Plus: "I cried myself to sleep last night," c'mon now.) Comes closest in the transition, as I demonstrated once upon a time, but that's about it. This is not a complaint, just an observation. I love what the boy does. He should do an album about the state of confusion, because that's the state I'm in, maaaaan! Or he should cover "The State That I Am In."

Ying Yang Twins - The Whisper Song (Instrumental)
Still can't get over how boring it is as an instrumental. That is some good production, to be able to put your trust in something such as this. Yay minimalism, I guess. Maybe it's just that if you had a track as boring like this, you'd have to say something like "Wait'll you see my dick" to make it interesting.

CONCLUSIONS
So what did we learn today? Well, seems like two of the things I semi-decy in the posts below would actually be pretty helpful, because as it turns out I do really like a lot of recent stuff, I just haven't listened to it enough or heard people talk about it enough for it to really leave an imprint. (I also have a really bad memory for these sorts of things.) This is especially the case with MP3s, because as individual songs, I don't have packaging or a series of tracks to help me remember what band I'm dealing with, I just have 2-7 minutes of music among a few thousand minutes on my playlist. (Just the 300-song playlist I was working with today encompasses about 24 hours, although it should be noted that it includes two Certified Bananas mixes of about 35 minutes each and some radio excerpts of similar length.) I might want to revisit a listening technique I used a lot before getting my mini MP3 player: burning actual <80 minute CDs of MP3s I either like already or think I might like. That's why I have such strong feelings toward songs from that era ("Naked, Drunk and Horny" "Heartbeats" "I Am Oozing Emotion" etc. etc.) but not so much with more recent songs. As a matter of fact, it was only once I burned the actually quite wonderful "World War IV" to a CD and listened to it in a car that I really got into it.

The other thing is that timing matters. After a strong start, I gradually started writing, and liking, less and less, and believe me, the number of words is roughly proportional to my enthusiasm for the track. Partially this is due to the natural energy cycle where you get really tired out in the late afternoon, but it's also worth noting that things really picked up around 5:30. What this demonstrates, I think, is that more than me myself being tired, my ears were tired. There was a big officewide meeting I didn't attend from 11-1, and during that time I was really enjoying stuff, but then once people came out of that and started playing their own music, my appreciation really lessened. Then once people started going home for the day and turning off their music, I began enjoying things again. This backs up the solitariness thing, but it also gives a more rational explanation for why that's such an important thing for me: the better I can hear the music (and the louder I can turn it up), the more I'll be able to enjoy it. So this, too, is something to keep in mind.

Well, that was oddly productive. Tomorrow, though, less navel-gazing, I promise, even though this is a blog and all. Maybe you'll get a book review. Try and contain your enthusiasm.
posted by Mike B. at 11:56 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Tom has his own reaction to Nick's Stylus essay over at NYLPM, and it includes a handy list of why we listen to music repeatedly.

posted by Mike B. at 4:47 PM 0 comments

Monday, September 19, 2005

Of course, there is a point to all this: to justify listening to the music we've (I've) been listening to in the way we (I) have been listening to it. Listening to pop, that is, as if it were not-pop; not something on the radio, not something public, but something private.[1] Validating the solitary experience of music that is not generally regarded as being a solitary experience. I think this is something pop partisans have been dancing around but have been reluctant to commit to because where they know it must lead--into auteurism, into conscious artsiness, into self-absorption and pretentiousness and all the things we like pop for not being. But I think it's time; that reading doesn't preclude others, and the transitional period is always real fun.

What I'm suggesting already exists, of course, and all that's necessary is for us to recognize it, to call it by its name enough times until it comes to resemble the word we're using. Precisely because of the very technological changes that Nick Southall decries (-ish) in his essay, you can make a complete pop masterpiece in your bedroom now, as the Scissor Sisters, among others, more or less did. In contrast to the old model of pop, where it was an expensive public undertaking with lots of cooks seasoning the broth, you can now make a top 40 album in exactly the same way you would make a bedroom singer-songwriter album. For people who care about these sorts of things, this is very important, because there is now a one-to-one transmission going on, straight from the artist's brain to yours.

Of course, we don't care about these things, do we? We care about fun. But fun is an invaluable part of this critical model too: if there can be solitary music designed to reassure the sad person by also being sad, why can't there also be solitary music that can actually help the sad person by making them happy? Why expect the depressive to venture into polite society in order to feel succor when they can just as easily retire to a quiet place with a loud stereo and listen to music? Why can't pop actually function as the balm we recognize it for being?

In many ways, we Americans have British pop to thank for this, for being given pop music that's impossible to hear in any way besides the way we'd hear underground noise bands, and thus allowing us to see that both can function in exactly the same way--except, you know, with pop doing it much better. Now we can see that hit singles are also headphones music, that club bangers are backpacker anthems too. You can't play a quiet, slow song at a club, because it won't work, but when you're alone, you can play anything you want, and it will all be intimate.

We need pop music that's unshackled from the four walls of the club, bedroom music that's not limited to sensitivity and smallness but expands to fill your entire body. We need pop music that doesn't worry so much about appealing to demographics but in sounding good regardless. We already have it, but we need to recognize it so it continues to exist, so more is produced, so it becomes something we can choose to listen to rather than happening on by chance. We need minimaximalist pop, and oh baby, we need it now.


[1] This might be something MP3s have given us that we haven't recognized yet--the ability to experience pop music like we experienced it when we first came to it, divorced from its status as a mass-market product, beamed directly into your ears.

posted by Mike B. at 8:06 PM 0 comments

Pretty good article in Stylus by Nick Southall about downloading-induced music burnout. It's a very good articulation of that by now apparently common phenomenon, even if I disagree with a lot of the ideas actually put forth, being fairly pro-dilettantism and all. (The paragraph beginning "There is a compulsion to consume..." is particularly tiresome, as you can probably deduce from those few words alone.) Still, what particularly interested me about it were the parts about, well, me--although in this case the striking thing was how little of myself I saw there.

What he's describing is distinctly different than the particular musical ennui I've been experiencing of late, an ennui which, as you might imagine, has me wearing berets made from old Backstreet Boys t-shirts and smoking pensively while I watch the My Chemical Romance video playing on a TV in a room across the courtyard from my bedroom window, only to close the curtain and turn away, turn away. The Southall Syndrome seems to be primarily characterized by an inability to be surprised by music (although really it should be pleasurably surprised, since there are still many surprises to be found in this world of ours) induced by overexposure/overstimulation, by getting so worked up that your aesthetics have a nervous breakdown and have to go sit in a salon chair in the mountains of Switzerland for several months just to be able to enjoy indie rock again. But in my case, I just realize I haven't really added many new CDs to my regular rotation in the last several months, and I have a hard time finding a CD to listen to in the morning that actually interests me, which has not really been the case for several years now.

At the same time, there are lots of MP3s I've downloaded that I like immensely and get the same sort of pleasure from that I used to get from blasting Evanesence while showering, and I really haven't been downloading anywhere near the volume of MP3s that I was two years ago. If there's a difference here, it's not that I downloaded too much in the past, but that I'm downloading too little now. I just don't have the time or energy to seek things out as much as I used to, so I'm mainly just looking at what's presented to me, which people have been nice enough to continue to do. I also haven't bought a CD except for the Knife album in the last four months, and technically that's something I've wanted to buy for at least a year and a half, so it doesn't really count for these purposes. The pleasure you derive from being a consumer of pop music is directly proportional to the amount of passion involve in that experience, and the more passion you're getting, the more you're giving, so for most people ("normal people," let's say) there's a point beyond which the feedback loop is self-sustaining, but if circumstances (availability, production, access) conspire to nudge you below that point, the amount of effort it would take to hurl you back into that cycle of knowledge and acquisition seems, at the time, to be more effort than it's worth. Whether or not it would be worth the effort in the long run is, of course, a question everyone has to answer for themselves, but it's hard to make that judgment when you're consumed by what Nick describes as "a vague sense of disgust mixed with guilt" and which I would describe as a sort of resignation. Of course, I'm still more ahead of the curve than 99% of the music listening population, but when you spend your time on ILM, that's hard to remember. Maybe that's a big part of the problem.

For me, the question has never been if I would run out of music to enjoy. As a matter of fact, to a certain degree I'm intentionally avoiding certain musical areas that I know I'll derive a great amount of enjoyment from in the future because I recognize that I won't enjoy them as much now. I know at one point I'll finally give into the temptation to dive headlong into the entirety of classical music, and it'll be wonderful; I have enough of a basis of knowledge and I already derive a basic level of pleasure from listening to it that when I can devote some attention to it, it'll probably be a great passion. But right now it's too quiet to listen to in the subway, so I'm sticking with pop.

At a certain point, I became very aware that I am young and so there is no shame in acting like a young person, even if I know that some of those actions might seem foolish when I'm older, because we all do foolish things when we're young, if we're worth a damn, and if we did not do these things, we would grow up to be much less interesting adults. I recognize that I will not be able to enjoy pop music as much when I get older, so I fling myself into it now with as much passion as I can muster, because it does provide a real source of pleasure. Seize the moment, etc. etc. And I construct elaborate justifications for this love while I am in the grips of this extreme passion on the off chance that some of it may turn out to be right, as well as to remind my older self just what it was about a synth line and a disco beat that provoked such devotion in my young and foolish mind.

But I recognize this makes me something of an oddity among my peers and that it's one of the many things that separates me from the general critical culture. I talk to certain editors who shall remain nameless and I vaguely consider trying to make this music criticism thing a more permanent enterprise, but then I think about me in 15 years listening to CD after CD of local indie band and I remember that I can't even do that now without being sorely tempted to take out a flamethrower and burn down every coffeehouse in town; that these noble editors do it every day is a testament to their dedication, good nature, and just basic ability to sustain a passion, an ability I don't think I really share. If anything, this reflects badly on me, but really it's just a difference, like the moment when I realized I didn't really derive much pleasure from solving the problems inherent in writing a working computer program, and so therefore I probably shouldn't pursue programming as a career.

In other words, I never got into this thinking I'd end up a music nerd, and as much as I've become one (albeit not a very good one), it makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable. Like I said in the previous paragraph, there's nothing wrong with being a music nerd per se, especially if you like the bands I like[1]; indeed, I've always been pretty comfortable with the fact that I am and will always be a nerd of one sort or another. It's just that music nerd falls somewhere around the low-middle of the list of kinds of nerds I'd like to be, higher than sci-fi nerd but lower than, say, classics nerd. This list is mainly arbitrary, but if I had to explain what criteria I use[2], it would probably be something like: the more serious the nerds take their subject, the less I like them. And there's a difference between being passionate and taking it seriously; the difference is whether you think there's a corrolation between value judgments about the subject at hand and actual truth. This, too, is a feedback loop; the more members of the community feel like there's an objectively true position you can take as to the awesomeness of Firefly, the more other members of the community have to assert an objective truth-value to the opposite position in order to even begin a discussion with those members, and the whole thing tends to snowball if it's not nipped in the bud.

The reason for this criteria's prominence for me is, I think, the other big way in which I differ both from Nick's diagnosis and from the aforementioned general critical consensus[3]: I don't have any particular need to participate in these discussions, but am perfectly happy to watch them from the outside. Partially this is because once I do start to participate, the debates stubbornly refuse to conform to my preferences, but mainly that's just the way I came to pop: self-taught, and mainly alone. I didn't have an older sibling or cool friend or job at a college radio station: I just watched TV, listened to the radio, and read magazines, and picked up what I could, as much from the library as from the record store. It's nice to have people today who will write me and say, "Hey, I think you'd like this!" and be right, I can't lie: what I like about that is the new music to enjoy, not having someone write me about it.

While Nick talks about wanting to listen to something just to be able to say he's listened to it, or of feeling like he has to be able to justify his dislikes through careful factual argument, I understand those impulses but don't really recognize them in myself. If there would be a reason for me to overindulge in music, it would be to find new things to enjoy; I'm always more eager to like a new piece of music than dislike it, even if this doesn't actually result in me liking more things than I dislike. What I do recognize in Nick's motivations for massive downloading is the influence of peer pressure, of the standards of the musicnerd community and the desire to participate in it.[4] As I say above, this is not something I'm particularly interested in. Maybe this was a mistake on my part; maybe, given my tendencies, making a greater effort to conform to the standards of the community would have better sustained my interest in the music.[5] But I don't really think so. Again, although I have a sort of irresistable urge to put in my two cents even when I know I'll regret it later, I don't need to participate in the discourse to get something out of it. I may even be better off when I don't. Because I regard criticism as an art as fixed as any other, just as I don't need to talk back to an artist to enjoy a painting, neither do I need to feel like a participant in the grand game of music nerdism to get something out of it.

And, honestly, my relationship with the music itself is much the same, which is to say, solitary. I don't really much like the social aspects of the artistic community, and it often seems like my biggest problems with various communities are just those aspects, even if it's not obvious. The music is like a book: something you ultimately experience alone, and which should thus be judged and discussed primarily in that context. This is not to say that social factors don't end up having an impact on your solitary experience of listening, but at the moment you are actually doing the hearing, they're fixed, set at whatever moment in time you hit play, although they may shift before the next time you hit play. I think it's extremely important to keep this in mind when you're talking about music in particular, as well as the fact that while everyone's context for hearing the music is different (and thus can't really be generalized), everyone's experience of the music itself is more or less the same, and thus should be the focus.

Also like a book, I feel that one listening can and often is enough to "properly" experience music, and that's why the dilettante model is so properly applied to music. As an artistic product, music demands less of your time than anything besides visual art, and so that initial impact has to be important, but in particular the initial impact when you are experiencing it in solitary, alone. Even when I got music in a social context, it only ended up imprinting itself upon my brain in a solitary context. We forget that, because we are nerds, and we want more things to connect us, more things to debate and have opinions on and to let us show off our brains. But music is something that happens in time and in isolation, with every beat serving as a summation of every moment that's led up to this one, the one that's flowing into each ear right through to your brain and then back out with your breath. When I think about music, I think about what might happen if you could lie on your bed with your headphones on and hold it all in, hold it tight, let all those moments build up and fill your lungs until you have entire albums in there, whole discographies, until your body is a perfect library of sound. And the fact is that you can't do this. No one can hold their breath that long, so what matters is what's happening moment to moment. But the mistake people make is that the crucial moment isn't the passage through the ear canal. It's the exhale, the point where those sounds pass over your tongue. And at that moment, do you smile?

Or don't you?


[1] OK, I'm sacrificing clarity for yuks here; what I really mean is that it's OK if you use your bredth of knowledge in the service of careful thought and good writing. Which I guess applies to everything, but especially nerdism.
[2] Aside from, arguably, "amount of exposure I've had to the particular subculture involved," of course.
[3] Which I picture as being not unlike Victoria's dad from Corpse Bridge, except much, much bigger, and maybe sitting on a hill.
[4] I mean, this is an article on Stylus we're talking about, after all.
[5] Although, honestly, I think a big part of it is that there's no particular sound or genre or scene I can reliably turn to for good music, so I have to look maybe more widely than other fans do.

posted by Mike B. at 5:00 PM 0 comments