Walking up 5th Ave to work today, a bit earlier than usual, I saw the Empire State was entirely hidden by fog. I squinted into clouds so thick they just came off as background but nothing peeked out at me, no office lights or bits of facade that just needed a little focusing to emerge. Maybe it really was gone; maybe they'd come and taken it all down in one night, just to see if they could, and no one was making a fuss about it because they'd known for weeks. I had just missed the news somehow. Maybe it was in one of those flyers I don't take, or it was only discussed on cable. Maybe the people I thought were going to ask me for money were actually going to tell me about the dismantling of the Empire State.

I usually look to it when walking to work, just for a little bit of reassurance. I don't know quite why it has this effect on me, but it does. On sunny days when it's all shining it makes me feel particularly good. I have a constant, vague urge to go to the top, but it seems like it would involve too much money and too much waiting and not enough being left alone and lying down and breathing in quiet air. Miss Clap and I almost went to the top of Rockefeller Center a few days back but it didn't seem worth the money, especially when we could walk two blocks and go nuts in Nintendo World for free. (It was great, but that's another story.)

The fog wasn't just taking up the horizon as it sometimes does, but it was pouring out of plastic pipes and people's mouths, even though it wasn't very cold. It was wisping all over. My walk that day was soundtracked by two songs: Cristina's "The Lie of Love" and David Byrne's "Glass, Concrete and Stone." They are anomalies in my collection and so doubly anomalous that they would appear back-to-back like that, but they were absolutely perfect, in the same way that a particular mix was in its tendency to come to Fiona's "Red Red Red" just as I emerged from the subway into Union Square, taking the scenic route through sparsely-populated benches and still vegetation. It was the fall then, and there was a lot of fog, and the song seemed to fit. My initial impulse was to attribute this to the particular vibe of late 70s/early 80s New York the music was working, jazzy and live, with a lot of chorus, and conjuring the feeling of a lone taxi driving through dirty streets at night, even if there was, thankfully, no sax.

But this morning it occurred to me that the feeling is less a particular city at a particular moment in history and more just fog. (Annie's "No Easy Love" just came on, and that qualifies, too.) Critics have a tendency to use the word "hazy" when describing some music, but that seems to imply unpleasantness, discomfort. Haziness is in your head; foginess is outside, and if things come close enough, they come clear. If foggy music conjures that era of New York, it's probably because images of that era tended to focus on the vacancy and general disrepair of the city. And it's notable that I can still conjure that feeling, especially in the morning, before everything's started to move, in the period that feels like a shift change for the whole burg.

Many have commented about the great feeling you get in a city of being alone in a crowd, but it's also true that even when you're alone, there's this almost physical knowledge of all the people just out of view, the people in the buildings you're walking between, even if there's no one on the street, and this is a lovely feeling. This is the effect fog emulates; it takes a crowd and divides it into cells that know how many other cells there are in close proximity, but have no sightlines into them.

I would like to figure out how to make foggy music, and I guess I would like more foggy music, even though it strikes me that Cat Power is foggy music, and Cat Power makes me want to eat puppies. I once made a bunch of songs that seemed good for rain, but that's not the same thing. I think I would need more pianos and cymbals, and maybe rimshots. Violins seem to help, too. (Can you tell I'm listening to Carissa's Wierd now?) My tastes run away from music like this, I think, but when it's right, it's better than anything else.
posted by Mike B. at 10:29 AM 0 comments

Thursday, January 12, 2006

SOME THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT MUSIC CRITICS
especially if you are a member of a (local) band

1. We do understand how much work goes into making an album. We also understand that our job is to then judge the results of all that work, which means you do not get a gold star for effort. You get gold stars for having a good album.

2. Just because people have different opinions from you doesn't mean there is something wrong with them.
a) With certain exceptions, generally involving emo.
b) This is especially true when it comes to your opinion of your own work.

3. Very few rock critics think of themselves as cool. They think of themselves, quite rightly, as nerds. If you think they are "trying to be cool," you are wrong. 90% of the time this means you are projecting based on the fact that you do not understand something the writer is saying.

4. If you do not understand something the writer is saying, that is not necessarily the writer's fault. Also, you don't have to read every word, you know.

5. When it comes to local bands, critics are almost always erring on the side of being too nice.

6. Critics certainly get influenced by the hype attracted to widely-known bands, but local bands are almost always judged on their merits, then given a few mulligans. (See #5.)

7. Just because we have not seen your live show does not mean we don't have the right to criticize you. We are judging your album, not your band. There are lots of people who listen to albums by bands who they will never see live.

8. You are entitled to a review, not a good review.

9. We really don't like it when we say something positive and you complain that it isn't positive enough.

10. Please do not claim that we are not entitled to judge a work until we ourselves have produced a work in the same genre of equal quality. (i.e. "Oh yeah, well let's see you make an album as good as I'm Wide Awake It's Morning!") The inescapable correlary of this is that the musicians are then not worthy of being reviewed by us until they can write a better critical essay about a box set, or 200 interesting words about a band that there's not a damn thing interesting about. This is a game that nobody wins.

11. If you think music critics are in any way superior to you, please ask one how many groupies they get. Then stop being such a jackass.

12. The more people complain about bad reviews, the less mercy we have.

13. Sometimes we make factual errors just to piss you off. Well, OK, just to see if anyone's actually reading, but still. Same thing.

posted by Mike B. at 9:39 AM 0 comments

Monday, January 09, 2006

"THIS IS YOUR LAST ISSUE" would be a bad name for a magazine.

posted by Mike B. at 5:29 PM 0 comments

A strange thing happened this morning: I got off the shuttle and it was the 90s. There was flannel, there was a Beastie Boys patch on a ratted-up backpack, there was a general air of the Pacific Northwest as the stylistic golden mean, which consequently implies that this quality was hard to nail down. Nevertheless, it was quite clearly and quite suddenly sometime around November 1992, or possibly April 1994.

And my first thought was not to use my knowledge of the future to somehow win an immense amount of money through betting etc. or to prevent bad things from happening, but to see if I could ride the wave of the coming musical trends to come in some productive or interesting way. Specifically, I thought about the prospect of becoming a key player in the whole teenpop boom of the late 90s. (Apparently I am only able to think in the long term by projecting myself back into the past. Ah well.) More specifically, I was thinking about the prospect of becoming one of the major producers by hijacking the sounds that would come to be so popular, although there was also some consideration given to simply stealing songs wholesale. (It would still be 2006 in my apartment, so I could always take the shuttle back and listen to old Backstreet Boys albums for reference.)

Almost immediately, though, flaws appeared in my brilliant plan. Even if I did make a note-for-note recreation of "Hit Me Baby One More Time" a year or two before it was slated to be released for real, how would I get it to anyone who'd want to hear it? I would still be some nothing kid in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn was only hot in the 90s in terms of hip-hop. Plus, while I've gotten OK at using FruityLoops to make my own weird variations on pop sounds, I don't really know how you'd create those huge Max Martin soundwalls. The best option seemed to be to travel to Finland or wherever all those folks were and just work myself in as an apprentice, which was at least plausible since back then I wouldn't have any credit card debt, although I would also not really have much credit. Still, it all hardly seemed worth staying in the past for. I mean, we can pine for the 90s, but faced with the prospect of actually living them all over again, we would remember that an in-depth knowledge of the K Records catalog is not that desirable a trait.

The past is a funny thing, and knowledge of the future would turn out to be less a windfall or a tragic obligation as it's traditionally presented but more of a moot point. For foreknowledge to really make a difference there either need to be a whole hell of a lot of coincidences ("Holy guacamole, here I am in 1955 and it just happens to be the moment my mom and dad met!") or that knowledge needs to be very specific, certainly not the kind of knowledge you'd gain from simply living through a particular historical moment more than once. The same practical problems would still exist, because causing a large-scale change is always hard, no matter how much information you have. It seems like the really tragic problem of the past isn't being a Cassandra, it's being a human, and that tragedy would only set itself in motion if we tried to fight against it. In the context of this, what duty could we actually have? What difference could we expect to make? And, consquently, how is this any different from the present? Once the tragedy of the past is activated, we're faced with the same choices as we would have been if we stayed in our own time and waited to see how things would play out: the simultaneous illusion of being able to change anything and the reality of being able to do anything. And who'd care if I wrote "Bye Bye Bye," anyway?

ADDENDUM: Turns out it wasn't the 90s, it was just some sort of regional weather-based fashion variation. Everything's fine.

posted by Mike B. at 3:26 PM 0 comments

Friday, January 06, 2006

OK, let's just knock down this bullshit idea once and for all:

Only one full-fledged star tried that in 2005: Kanye West, whose second album, "Late Registration," exulted in his own success without settling into formula. The album expanded his musical sources, found comedy and sorrow, and raised questions about temptations and responsibilities amid the boasts. He even acted like a star by daring to make a controversial statement - "George Bush doesn't care about black people" - on live television. Mr. West's year was a rare show of the old pop ambition - the kind that's validated by album sales and radio play, that pleases a mass audience but doesn't kowtow to it.

It's going to be harder to maintain that kind of large-scale public dialogue in a culture of atomized individual preferences. Independent companies, small and large, are claiming an ever larger part of the music market, bypassing radio to apply the old do-it-yourself strategies of touring and noncommercial media, and the newer ones of file-sharing and word-of-blog.

How many goddamn times do we have to see something posted on every single goddamn website you care to click on before we stop saying that an "atomized" media (right, like individual consumption preferences weren't atomized before) aggregates to pretty much the same thing as a mass media when it wants to, that if lots of people like something they don't all have to see it on TV at the same time, they can e-mail it to each other? Do we have to mention the fact that the mass media still exists and that a lot of what gets aggregated on the web comes from the mass media? Do we have to remind everyone that ambition is almost never something based in reality and pretty much always goes unfulfilled?

In other words, please let's stop saying that the multiplication and formalization of subcultures is going to kill mass culture, because they're two sides of the same damn coin. Thanks.

posted by Mike B. at 11:34 AM 0 comments