clap clap blog: we have moved

2007-02-02T10:20:00.002-05:00

Hello. The new site is now up. You can find it at:

http://www.clapclap.org

See you there!

2007-01-08T19:08:00.000-05:00

As you may have noticed, things have been a little slow around these parts. As it happens, I am in fact shutting down this old blog and starting another with its very own domain name. It will be launching February 2. Watch this space.

In the meantime, though, I thought I might offer a clap clap best-of. Enjoy.

- There was the whole Blueberry Boat series, probably this blog's biggest achievement. This is a good summary post.
- I broke down the three levels of pop, probably too briefly. I've done a lot more thinking about this and a considerably longer version of this model should come out at some point.
- A very close reading of MIA's "POP," one of the best things I've written.
- Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" as a relationship you're having.
- Mutual Appreciation, fictional memoirs, realism, and the cultural hegemony of the tragic mode. (Note: nowhere near as bad as it sounds!)
- An analysis of a New Pornographers song, sort of the basis for the Blueberry Boat analysis.
- An in-depth analysis of a Billy Joel picture.
- Going to Coney Island with a 9-year-old seeing the ocean for the first time.
- I saw a crazy-ass Courtney Love concert and did an extensive analysis of the picture of some guy sucking her boob outside Wendy's.
- Home recording: it is awesome.
- A response to Steven Berlin Johnson's Everything Bad is Good For You.
- Things you should know about music critics.
- Reasons not to like music--something we don't talk about enough.
- Bill Clinton and others at the Apollo.
- LCD Soundsystem's "Yeah" and lyrical analysis v. musical analysis.
- The romanticized aesthetic of art-under-repression.
- Borat as a comic model for the 2006 midterm elections.
- The horror of Love Monkey.
- My fake application for the Rolling Stone reality show.
- A discussion of Rock Star: Supernova and the new class of "rock people."
- A fairly nasty review of Liz Phair's Somebody's Miracle.
- Freak-folk and the notion of community in music.
- Why we have payola.
- Fiction writers writing about music v. writers writing about music.
- Five books--a survey that turns all serious.
- Sex advice from a music critic. (Warning: kinda gross.)
- The use of Shania Twain in I Heart Huckabees.
- How to produce a (good) Tori Amos album.
- Kimya Dawson's "Loose Lips".
- Henry Darger and outsider artists as pop artists.
- MIA and Diplo's Piracy Funds Terrorism.
- A response to "The Persuaders," i.e. fear-mongering about advertising.
- The Cross-Manhattan Expressway.
- Playing (inadvertently) at a jambands festival in Scarsdale.
- A Prince concert.
- If music had a league commish.
- Me on my own writing.
- A historical view of American Idol and William Hung.
- More Courtney.
- Pop/rock's debt to art music.
- Nirvana: not sad.
- Genre confluence.
- The Scorpions index.
- Music and work. (And Nirvana and MBV.)
- An artistic bill of rights: the right to irony, etc.
- The dangers of peer critique in early art.
- New York when it has just gotten warm.
- Apolitical political comedy.
- Hole's "Awful." (From old Fluxblog.)
- Strong Bad Sings: a good album.
- "Sweet Dreams My LA Ex": a good song.
- Evanesence: a good band. Sorta.
- "Experimental pop," yikes. This is not what The Unicorns are.
- Mellencamp's "Pink Houses."
- Outkast's "The Rooster."
- A defense of Chuck.
- Bangs: kind of a jackass.
- The Starlight Mints' "Submarine #3."
- Music as actual language poetry.
- Culture and politics: different.

More later. Also, if anyone can find that post where I talk about Courtney Love outside Wendy's, I'd be grateful. UPDATE: Aha, found it! See above.

2007-01-01T16:09:00.000-05:00

I know, I'm shut down, but there's something I want to say, and it won't be relevent in two weeks.

You remember those old stickers that said "Skateboarding is not a crime"? Those always annoyed me. Skateboarding is a crime, because there is a law that says so. That is the only thing that determines whether or not something is illegal. We can talk about whether or not skateboarding should be a crime, we can talk whether it's moral or not (although morality isn't really the issue, the common good is), but there's no argument about whether or not it's a crime. The state says it is, so it is.

I'm reminded of this because of the whole outcry surrounding DJ Drama getting arrested. Yes, it sucks. Yes, he should be freed; someone should not be put in prison for making music. But what he was doing was illegal, and so to pretend shock that he would be arrested for doing what there are laws against doing is absurd. Making mixtapes and then duplicating them and selling them is against the law. The practice is supported by the labels, it's supported by the artists, it's supported by the retailers. But they can support it all they like implicitly; they have done nothing to change the law, and so it is still illegal, and people can and do go to jail for doing it.

You can rail all you want against the RIAA. What they are doing is stupid and wrong, yes, but that doesn't change the fact that it's (almost) entirely legal. If it wasn't, they wouldn't be able to continue raiding people's homes and suing them and sending them scary lawyer letters. Posting MP3s without the explicit consent of the copyright holder--which 99% of the time is the label, and which does not take the form of an e-mail from some low-level digital marketing lackey--is illegal. Downloading music you have not paid for is, broadly speaking, illegal. Making mixtapes with uncleared samples or songs not owned by you and then selling them is illegal. The labels may like you doing these things or they might not. But having their implicit consent doesn't matter when it comes to the law. If you do these things, you can get sued or put in jail. There are fair use exceptions, yes, but almost all the possibly illegal activity online involving music simply falls outside the definition of "fair use."

The point is not that you shouldn't be doing it because it's illegal. (This is what your mom would say, but what does she know about modern music, after all?) The point is not that it's morally wrong, or that it hurts the artist, or that the labels don't want you to do it. All these things have been debated endlessly, and frankly, no one has any idea whether they're true or not. But one thing is a fact: it is against the law, and when something is against the law, the law can punish you for doing it.

Laws are made by the state, but the great thing about democracies is that you are the state. You can work to change the laws. If you think all this shit is wrong, don't spend your time decrying the RIAA, or loudly proclaiming that music should be free when bands ask that you please not post the music they have made, or pretending that all your disclaimers and justifications make what you're doing legal. Pressure labels that support mixtapes and MP3blogs and mashups and all those sorts of mutually beneficial uses of copyrighted material to lobby to have the laws changed. You have a relationship with labels? Great. Write them an e-mail and tell them to support copyright reform. Tell them that the double standard they've supported lets them have it both ways while sending mixtape makers to prison. The labels have a relationship with consumers that the RIAA does not, and the status as copyright holders to ask the government to make room in the legal code for these uses. They have a real need to do something about this and the ability to make a change. All they lack is the will.

2006-11-29T17:58:00.000-05:00

I have had some reviews in Flagpole lately: here are last week's (Evenescence and another one), and here are this week's (Architecture in Helsinki and Isobel Campbell). Ones of note are this one, because the band members respond and it's hilarious, and the AIS review, which is of their remix album and says some things about the genre of remix albums in genreal that I think might be worth a look. I'm expanding all this right now and hope to have something longer to say about it in the near future.

2006-11-16T12:30:00.000-05:00

not pictured

Third Mainland Bridge

There's a great article by George Packer in the Nov. 13 issue of the New Yorker about Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria and one of the ten largest in the world. It's a fantastic piece of journalism, rich in on-the-ground detail, and it presents a pretty cohesive picture of a city teetering on the edge of chaos. Along the way, it also takes some shots at an attitude that's deeply ingrained in the geek establishment--"liminal spaces," William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, etc.--that the functional anarchy that apparently prevails in much of Lagos (no state presence whatsoever, all civil functions provided by citizens/gangs, all space as public space, the ever-present market) represents a kind of utopia and model for the future. But being "off the grid" isn't so great when you can't get on the grid even if you want, and a place where some of the most basic social services, such as garbage collection, aren't being performed, and where nothing is done without an economic incentive, is a pretty depressing model for the future. Valorizing the slums of Lagos or Rio De Janario just seems like an urbanist varient on envying the rural poor their simply, uncomplicated lives.

But aside from that, it evoked two more tangential reactions in me. One was related, sorta, to an exhibit Jesse did a few years back about spam. Packer mentions briefly in the article the rash of e-mails from Nigeria trying to scam Westerners by dangling a supposed lost fortune in return for some bank account info and, eventually, transfers of cash to "finance" the effort to recover the illusory millions. He does this as a way of illustrating the culture of Lagos, one that finds nothing wrong with scams as long as it enriches the scammer, and that trades in deception as a daily matter of course. But Packer also did a good job in the article of presenting everyone he dealt with as a full human being, not just another hustler. And so when he brings up the e-mail scams, it made me reconsider my whole notion of who was at the other end of those e-mails. I've had my e-mail account for over 10 years now, and so it's probably on every spam list on earth. When I get the Nigerian scam e-mails, they're mixed in with all the bot spam I get, and like the bot spam, they're rife with mispellings and odd grammatical constructions and all taken together, they just sound like more nonsense looking for a click. But they're not--they're actually looking for a fairly sustained interpersonal interaction. And while there may be some spamming involved, it's presumably much less broad than the e-mails trying to sell me pills or porn. Those don't care about me, and indeed I have an only vague idea why someone would send that out.

But the scam e-mails are different. Packer's article presents the people trying to hustle him--one actually offers him a varient on the e-mail scam, in person--as people with clear motivations for doing what they do. And so now I have a picture of the person sending me that e-mail--they probably paid someone for my e-mail address, and if they suceed in the scam, they will owe multiple people their cuts of that money, from their patron to the person who let them use the computer to the cops to their local gang. It was a strange feeling, an absolute shift in perception, like a sudden translation. The gibberish made more sense now.

The other thing it made me think about was, of course, Matt Friedberger. (I know--what are the chances, right?) While some of the things in Lagos have very evocative names clearly rooted in the past, others have names like "Third Mainland Bridge," being, I guess, the third bridge going between Lagos Island and the mainland. Mr. Friedberger named one of his solo albums Seventh Loop Highway, and while it had no particular resonance for me at the time, it's now come a bit more into focus. I never really got into that album, but the lyrics were fantastic, and reading this, I can see why he's attracted to those sorts of names. There's something attractive about their obdurate banality, their insistence on the name exactly matching the description, in contrast to our modern tendency to hide behind names chosen more for their aesthetic qualities, like "Shady Acres Estates" or "Viagra." At the same time, though, such prosaic language doesn't seem to fully capture the essence of what is being named, given that it is, after all, a Motherfucking Bridge, a massive triumph of human ingenity whose sheer scope can stop you short. And so this duality serves a useful artistic function: it evokes something specific yet unfamiliar with very few words, while hinting at a whole superstructure beyond the mere facts. It's something you have to focus on to really let it hit you, though, and the fact that it's mixed with music that doesn't encourage that is a nice summation of the strategy that album seems to take.

2006-11-16T10:30:00.000-05:00

My review of Girl Talk's Night Ripper went up at Flagpole yesterday; it reflects an opinion of the album more positive than my initial impression, but less positive than my current assessment, given that I am actually listening to the damn thing right now before my officemates arrive. I do still think it's getting a wee bit more credit than it should (I didn't read all the reviews, but did anyone bring up "Intro Inspection"?), but it's also a really fantastic little thing. Some mornings I can put it on and enjoy the flow, and other times I can pay close attention and notice just how good he is at bringing in elements and throwing them around to create movement without making it seem schitzophrenic. The part of "Smash Your Head" before the Biggie verse comes in is pretty great, too, with the production changing under the vocals every four bars, and it's shit like this that opens up more possibilities for non-mashup music. That's one of the great things about mashups: it lets people play with arrangement and production without having to deal with the additional work of making original elements, and given that freedom, new ideas can emerge.

Should be a few posts up today, so watch this space.

2006-11-08T14:27:00.000-05:00

An Inside Job

(NOTE: this will be a post about, in part, the movie Borat, and will discuss scenes you may not want spoiled if you have not seen the movie yet. So read no further until you've seen the movie, unless you don't care about that sort of thing, in which case do. But seriously, see the movie first.)

It should probably go without saying that commentators and critics have entirely missed the point of Borat. They saw the slapstick and the nudity and the poopy and called it gross-out humor; saw the Englishman making fun of rural Americans and called it cheap laughs; saw the Anti-Semitism and the ignorant (and presumably Muslim) foreigner and called it offensive.[1] And above all, they called it merely a comedy, funny, but not, you know, meaningful.

Putting Borat in terms of what it did not do is probably the best way to show just how impressive an achievement it is. Most of the things it addresses--racists, gun nuts, evangelical Christians, feminists--are such easy targets for outsiders that attacking them has become something of a cliche. They are easy targets in large part, of course, because they are so cheesy. These people have no taste. They have ridiculous outfits and say ridiculous things and are unafaid to look ridiculous in public. And so all you need to do is show up, stand outside their gatherings, and point a camera at them acting ridiculous and the audience will know how they are supposed to react. Your very gaze becomes the joke.

But Borat does not stand outside, which becomes clear when he attends a evangelical church service near the end of the film. There are some establishing shots of white people twirling around, which is always funny, but then the guy who's taken a dirty and dispirited Borat in brings him up front to accept Jesus, and when the preacher hits Borat in the head to heal him, Borat gets this look in his eyes like he doesn't know what to do. And he doesn't: Borat, like Cohen presumably, did not grow up with this culture, and does not know what is expected of him at this moment. But then he goes with it, and conjures a weirdly sexual ecstasy, all bucking hips and slithering tongue. He does not do this to make fun of them, or to disprove the presence of Jesus, as would be most people's instinct, but because he genuinely wants to be accepted by these people, to understand and be a part of this American tradition.

In other words, Borat gets inside. He does not stand on the perimeter and mock with his gaze, keeping everyone out of the joke. And since no one would willingly join him, he instead joins them; he walks into the joke and becomes part of it. This is precisely why Borat works so well. It does not attempt to find America, or to indict America, as you might expect a movie of this type to do. But neither does it celebrate America. Instead, its clear goal is to become bigger than America, and by doing so, contain it. It takes a foreigner's outsize image of what America is--this big, gaudy, self-confident place, a place without shame, a nation of perpetual grins--and attempts to merge that vision with the reality, to become one with it not by slipping in unnoticed, but by exaggerating it and internalizing it, making it part of your character, so you can encircle it completely with a hug. At the end of the movie, Borat finds Pamela Anderson--as perfect a symbol of America in all its mixed-blessing glory as we have at the present time--and attempts to put her in a sack, which is the movie in a nutshell. There's no attempt to fly under the radar here; instead of hiding from America, Borat tries to become America. He doesn't want to be an outsider, and so he continually thrusts himself inside.

This is why it's such a perfect political movie. Instead of creating fictional scenarios in which he can insert himself and create a comic meaning--which would of course be too easy, and make the meaning seem unreal itself--Borat is thrust into these real situations where he has to either work with their rules or ignore them completely. The process of finding out those rules is, of course, what produces the comedy. Borat--and please note here that I am explicitly talking about Borat the character, not any motivations that Cohen the creator might have had--genuinely thinks he is being as respectful as he should be with the feminists[2], and when he's at the rodeo, his escalating rhetoric about Bush and Iraq isn't a satirical attempt to provoke, but actually a rather careful probing of exactly what it is and isn't polite to say in praise of the President, whose power and strength Borat really respects. All in all, it's not so much the wrong way to go about it, it's just that Borat's image of America is so off-kilter that he fails to become part of it. Still, he's getting inside the joke and rooting around, trying to find a place where he fits, and it's that willingness to engage with his subjects rather than yell at them from outside that gives the film its power.

And that's why Borat is the Farenheit 9/11 of the 2006 elections. I couldn't say for sure that there was an intention on the behalf of Borat's filmmakers to influence the elections, as Moore made clear he wanted to do with the 2004 Presidential election, but Borat did come out the weekend before the 2006 midterms, and it was the #1 film at the box office that weekend. If there was a cultural influence for voters yesterday, Borat is the most likely candidate.

What's more, the Dems seem to have taken a particularly Borat-esque tack in their election strategy this year. One of their biggest problems so far this decade is that the left has been portrayed--and, in fact, has kinda acted like--the outsiders at an event they themselves are vaguely disgusted by, throwing criticisms at it, but refusing to engage with the American political scene on its own terms, stubbornly waiting for the gaudy participants to admit they were wrong and come back to the ones who see them for what they really are, i.e. stupid and violent and tacky. (And when they gingerly ventured into the fray, they couldn't hide their repulsion and came off looking very awkward, i.e. John Kerry hunting.) But now the Dems seem to have come down from their lofty position and are willing to work with the electorate on its own terms, to come inside America and keep a straight face. So they are running more conservative candidates in more conservative districts, even ones who aren't pro-choice (or say they aren't pro-choice), and so actually have a chance of getting elected. I mean, for god's sake, they actually ran a guy who looks like this:

Of course, Cohen's film and Moore's film differ in one crucial regard: where Farenheit 9/11 failed, Borat succeeded. In 2004, the GOP won, but in 2006, the Dems seem to have finally regained power. Sure, there were outside factors, mainly the GOP's cornucopia of scandals and the war in Iraq, that probably had more effect on the election's outcome, but outside favors are, by definition, ones the Dems can't control, and so there's no point learning the lesson of "hope the opposition diddles more boys." The lessons of Borat, however, may be of some use.

Comedies often don't get pegged as political unless they're not actually very funny, because only didactic things, ones that make their point abundantly clear, are considered political. But, again, Moore's film, one that was supposed to work by revealing truths and giving people knowledge they didn't have, with which they would surely have no choice but to vote Democrat--that film failed. This suggests that maybe the old saw that the truth will set you free neglects certain realities on the ground, like the one where people have the information already but simply don't accept it, or the one where the things the truth should make them do goes against their rules, or has been put that way, anyway.

Outwardly political art, like Moore's movie, are essentially issue ads, useful at times but not really sufficient. But political art like Borat, which demonstrated effective it can be to get inside the joke, works as a paradigm shift. It changes the narrative, maybe not explicitly, but it can certainly nudge things in that direction. And the truth is meaningless in the wrong narrative. If you want to change something, you can't hate it, or be disgusted by it. You have to be willing to dress up, keep a straight face no matter what, and manipulate the rules at hand until you can, with every good intention and measure of logic, show up to a dinner party with a bag full of your own shit.

[1] Although in at least one case, it's a funny-because-it's-true situation: people from the area Borat ostensibly hails from do seem to have a baffling and unabashed hatred of gypsies, presumably because they have actual contact with gypsies. The one person I knew who was of gypsy stock (hi Hawk!) was always pretty pissed off about anti-gypsy sentiment, but I think to Americans, making fun of gypsies is like making fun of wooly mammoths or something, funny because it's ridiculous.

[2] People have expressed their dislike of this particular scene as a low blow. I am going to see the movie again and will check this, but I am almost certain that while the two more middle-aged feminists were disgusted by his behavior, the older, more grandmotherly feminist actually seemed amused by the whole thing, like she recognized how blinkeredly over-the-top the sexism was and had seen enough of it in her lifetime to find it ridiculous rather than offensive.

2006-09-07T15:26:00.000-04:00

Three reviews in Flagpole: the Ice Cream Socialists, which is alluded to in the post below; Autolux, which posits an interesting theory; and the Essex Green, which is, um, whimsical.

2006-08-24T11:50:00.000-04:00

It's hard to think of a better encapsulation of the differences between 90s indie and 00s indie than the Go! Team covering "Bull in the Heather."[1] The most obvious thing, of course, is the vocals: instead of one woman cooing at you in a voice that alternates between lifelessly detached and sounding like something is pounding into her nether regions every time she lets out a line (and she is enjoying it, in a detached and beautiful way), you have a bunch of girls (even though it is probably only one) yelling at you, turning the fucking into a cheer, a rousing chorus of pep. The 90s version is intimate, with maybe a confused mariachi band playing in the closet, but very one-on-one, very whispery--and very adult. The 00s version sounds like it's in a gym, with a steaming hurdy-gurdy lurching along under the basketball hoop while a troupe of teens pom-pom it up while you sit in the bleachers, so oddly enough, it ends up being more detached than the Sonic Youth version, though in a different way. Now you are not being whispered to, you are part of a crowd, all feeling the same thing. It's depersonalized. But so is indie.

There are more subtle differences, too. In SY's version, Steve Shelly is trying to play something close to a breakbeat, but you can hear the clatter in the room, even with Butch smoothing things out. But the Go! Team literalize that breakbeat and mechanize it, and it flows smooth as a monorail. The guitar harmonics that serve as the hook (imagine!) that were very present and organic are now sequenced and chopped-up, sounding less like explorations and more like little bombs of intentionality. Also, there are handclaps, which I'm almost certain there weren't before.

Partially all this is related to Carl Wilson's point about indie kid sexuality, and the lack thereof. But I think it's interestingly related to the overall direction this sort of music has taken recently. I wrote a review yesterday of Ice Cream Socialists (who are alternately great and cringe-inducing) I talked about the differences between golden-age twee (K Records) and silver-age twee (Decembrists, Athsmatic Kitty). Used to be, twee was more or less explicitly 20-somethings self-consciously pretending to be children; now, it's people actually acting like nerdy middle schoolers, and the one good thing that got lost in this equation is the creepy sexuality that Calvin Johnson was so ickily good at.[2] Interestingly--and confusingly--this seems to have been lost overall, as the twee aesthetic is diluted and thus spread throughout indiedom. And I think the reasoning (albeit unconscious reasoning) works a little like this:

"We are tired of all this dour music. We want to have happy fun dancy music again! But ingrained in our souls is the idea that dour music is mature and happy music is childish. So we will be childish!"

Indie has cleaned up its act and is now wholly suitable for children, and while I do like this, I also like fucking; it's notable that the acts Carl cites as exceptions to the no-fucking rule in his post ("KoTV, the Hidden Cameras, Spank Rock, Xiu Xiu") have almost all gotten a lot of flack for this sexuality, although I guess in fairness Xiu Xiu's sexuality would get some flack regardless of the era, one hopes. But that, too, is indicative: the acts with sexuality take it really far so it's almost cartoonish, which is, again, kind of childish.

So is it possible to be fun/dancy/yay, sexual, and, um, good? You wouldn't think it would be too hard, but it seems to be.

[1] aka "The song that got me into Sonic Youth," I must admit.
[2] Those former nerdy middle schoolers in my reading audience--which I'm sure is a minute portion of you--may recall those years as not being particularly sexual, especially compared to the rumored antics of their peers.

ADDENDUM: I am reminded (via my referrer log) of a post I wrote two years ago in which I discussed how the currently disreputable electroclash boom directly presaged/influenced a lot of the music we see today. It's interesting that electroclash was highly sexual (and also, actually, very unskilled--how twee!), although arguably it was a specifically gay or cartoonish sexuality. There's probably an interesting connection in there somewhere. Current indie as taking electroclash's spirit but totally changing the content (i.e. fucking + amateurism + artificiality)? Hmm.

2006-08-23T12:12:00.000-04:00

I have two pieces in Flagpole this week: a generous but mainly negative review of the Ratatat album (currently listed as "Beggars") and a definitely negative review of The Knife that I think I meant to come out more persuasive than it actually did. That album is really fucking annoying, though, the two singles aside.

2006-08-17T16:47:00.000-04:00

A breakdown of why this clip is so amazingly awesome:

1) Kelly's reaction to the guitarist suggesting she show her boobs: horrified but amused, conveying the message "I am not going to do that not because I am a prude but because flashing your tits on stage is like lame X 100. But har har."

2) Then later she flashes her sweater vest. Sweater vest! What famous person wears a sweater vest out in public? And then makes a boob joke involving it?

3) Then later she takes off the sweater vest, but only in order to acheive a "performance look." She would clearly rather be wearing it, but OK, she thinks, I'm on stage now, better look put together.

4) After taking off her sweater vest, she then ducks behind her male companion, the Dude From Yellowcard, and pretends to play with his nipples. This is emo but with a sense of humor. (Remember, emo + girls = tolerable!)

5) The suggestion (only half-serious I think) that she is there to "put some edge" on her image. No rational person would consider going to see a band called "Metal Skool" if they wanted to seem edgier, though if anything this is a point in Metal Skool's favor. They would go into rehab, or punch the shit out of Carson Daily, or something. Plus, Kelly Clarkson is like 75% of the way toward being the coolest white person alive, she doesn't really need help at this point. Correspondingly, she nods sarcastically. And then licks her fingers and pretends to play with her nipples. Very thematic!

6) It is simply unwise to have Kelly Clarkson singing immediately after anyone else. Normally she just sounds great; in direct comparison to other people, it's like, oh, that's what good singing sounds like. Poor Dude From Yellowcard.

7) She clearly doesn't entirely remember the song but sings harmony.

8) The headbang! That's a pretty good headbang.

9) In light of the previous rock people discussion, I think it's fair to take this not as an indication, as it usually would be, of either metal's relevence to pop, or of Kelly Clarkson being awesome, although it is both of those. Primarily it indicates how rock is now just another tool in pop's bag, illustrated best by the Metal Skool people never breaking face but Kelly laughing her head off. It's all a laugh because it is all a laugh--none of this shit's real anymore. Rock people are already halfway to this conclusion, but part of their particular viewpoint is pretending like they're not, like it's serious and it matters, while also wanting to party. Kelly just thinks it's hilarious, and from an outside perspective, hers is the one to make the most sense. An American Idol winner comes to an ostensible metal concert and doesn't feel out-of-place--indeed, feels so comfortable that she actually gets up on stage and starts singing? This does not seem to be particularly indicative of the genre's vitality, or of the ostensible trueness that its more serious-minded boosters posit. It's in the spirit of Metal Skool itself: not parodic, but certainly tongue-in-cheek.

2006-08-17T00:06:00.000-04:00

My Interior Monologue: Snakes on a Plane Trailer Edition

"Wait, why are there ninjas?...Oh, right, that's a stupid question."

Always a stupid question: "Why are there ninjas?" (Also: "Why is there bacon on this?")

2006-08-16T11:39:00.000-04:00

Oh hello there. I have three reviews in Flagpole this week: Casper & the Cookies, CSS, and Mr. Lif. All, or at least the last two, are probably worth your time, and you know how highly I value your time. The Casper album is the one I mentioned some time ago about talking myself into liking it, and it has actually really grown on me. I feel I need to be a little less jumpy in my music-listening habits.

In totally unrelated matters:

- Has anyone pointed out that the singer from Man Man sounds almost exactly like Rob Zombie? He's just farther back in the mix.

- I think Nelly Furtado is going to be this year's Gwen Stefani in the sense that I loved loved loved it at first but slowly grow to absolutely despise it. I'm pretty disgusted with "Maneater" now. And I can't tell you how happy I was to hear the Stefani diss on the Puffy album.

- Speaking of, is there something sonicly particular about teenpop albums that makes them sound better on headphones, presumably the chosen medium for the chosen audience? The Puffy album sounded pretty meh on the home stereo, but on headphones this morning it really popped.

2006-08-11T11:06:00.000-04:00

A Perhaps Unkind Definition

Based on this:

That’s how bohemia worked, as a mesh of interconnections, immediate and remote.

Outsider Artist: One who has failed to penetrate the social networks of bohemia but, due to mental instablity, presses on regardless.

2006-08-08T13:52:00.000-04:00

Uh, given that the ratio of comments I have received on recent posts via the blog's commenting sytem to comments I have received about recent posts via other avenues is something like 1:10, I am assuming people are having problems with the commenting system here, specifically the number verification thing. So I have turned that off and turned moderation on, and you should give commenting a try again, if you would like.

2006-08-07T15:42:00.000-04:00

Last night I saw The Devil Wears Prada, and yes, I am attempting to transition from a death notice about a political philosopher to commenting on a blog about a movie about working at a fashion magazine, based on a thinly-veiled roman-a-chicklit. (Now I understand how hard it is to be a local news anchor!) Anyway, I won't share my general impression with you, since when I shared it with my moviegoing companions the reaction seemed to be the sort of awkward silence that crops up so frequently in my day-to-day life. Instead, I will say that my reaction had a lot in common with Jeffrey and Jack Lewis' "Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror," which you can find at Fluxblog. (You can, and should, read the lyrics here.) Matthew mentioned that he immediately thought of me upon hearing it, and indeed, those two of you familiar with my complete musical works may notice that the instrumental componant here is fairly similar to that of one of my speaky-speaky solo songs, and one of the verses is remarkably similar to one of the verses of the title track on my band's last CD. I point this out not to be self-aggrandizing or to conjure dark intimations of plagarism (since, among other things, the verse of mine that a verse of "WWOH" resembles is actually something I stole from Alanis Morissette, so even if I wanted to complain I couldn't), but merely to point out that this sort of thing is out there, in the air, etc. etc., although as evidenced by the fact that I'm referring you to other people rather than actually talking about it myself, I think it's something we're all a bit embarassed to be thinking and talking about. ("WWOH" deals with this conflict in a satisfying way--it's a great song--which is not surprising given that Jeffrey Lewis and Kimya Dawson are BFF and share a remarkable ability to talk about fears in a self-aware way, to be emotional without being emo.) This relates to something else and its cousin (yay more links, yay less talking about me!), the main thrust of which is sort of questionable given the author but does seem to represent a viewpoint that is, again, Out There. And it does raise some interesting questions: are bands actually more careerist now, or are the receptacles for bands (publicists, labels, bookers, audiences) just dealing with them in a different way? Is the problem that bands should, like Pavement, pretend to be more untouchable, or that bands and critics and listeners remain too concerned with shame? Has indie's bubble status concealed the fact that, if it were to break wide, the most mediocre acts would in fact triumph, since an indie breakthrough, no matter how much we want indie to be otherwise, is really just chomping into the demographic that likes Dave Matthews and KoRn? And are we really expected to feel shame both for failing and for not failing enough?

Anyhoo, there's one point in Devil Wears Prada (remember that?) where Anne Hathaway is in the townhouse of the Anna Wintour character, looks up, and sees faux-Wintour's twin girls leaning over the bannister, looking down at her. In the midst of all that opulence and luxury, it's clearly intended as a sort of Hallmark image, but it struck me as a reference to The Shining or Children of the Corn. It's interesting to think of this movie not as a modern-day descendent of Breakfast at Tiffany's but as an alternate way for Americans to make a Japanese-style horror film: jam-packed with grostesqueries and tension, but with the promised bloodbath failing to come, for reasons that are never really explained. Maybe the ritual sacrafice of an unpublished Harry Potter book put it off; maybe the two scenes where Hathaway sees, in essence, Grendel without his monster-face on somehow deflate the threat. But ideally, they would put out a Final Destination 3-style DVD where, at this juncture, you could press a button and choose instead to have Hathaway climb the stairs and intrude upon the Wintour character feasting on the entrails of a chubby pre-teen girl, surrounded by blood-smeared models with hairlips, and would spend the remainder of the movie scurrying around the darkened, steam-shrouded streets of Manhattan, her every respite interrupted by the heart-rending sound of stilettos on cobblestones, with a final shot of the sun rising on the meatpacking district, animal blood mingling with old women's blood in the gutter and splashing the tires of a towncar heading down the West Side Highway to Wall Street, filled with old men in suits, laughing and laughing.

2006-08-07T11:10:00.000-04:00

R.I.P., Iris Marion Young, far too soon. She was probably the greatest living political philosopher, a position based in part on her critique of the previous holder of that position, John Rawls. The classroom classic is Justice and the Politics of Difference but Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays is probably the more accessible work. She was just ridiculously smart and, unlike a lot of other political philosophers, a fairly readable writer, and was brilliant at integrating feminist ideas into wider questions of justice--questions which tie directly into the global issues that dominate our political discourse today. I'm not writing this very well and not really doing justice to her ideas (the obit above does it far better), but suffice to say that it's really important to have read her if you want to talk about justice, I think. She was one of those people that I always figured I would meet one day and have a nice conversation with. I guess that's kind of a self-centered thing to say, but there it is. Philosophers shouldn't die at 57.

2006-08-02T11:17:00.000-04:00

I will have a fuller Rock Star update in a bit, but for now, go on ahead and watch Toby singing "Pennyroyal Tea." You know, I always thought it was one of those songs you couldn't ruin, but I was wrong. God but I was wrong. The reasons will be clear, but in sum, a) he does not do the loud parts loud (?!?!?), b) he sings it like Nickelback, and c) he sings "give me Leonard Cohen afterglow / so I can die eventually." I pictured Courtney Love charging into the studio afterwards and kicking him repeatedly in the shins.

And I'm not even going to subject you to the dude who sang "Losing My Religion" like it was an epic Coldplay ballad and Michael Stipe was straight as the day is long. Just deal with "Pennyroyal Tea" for now.

2006-07-29T18:15:00.000-04:00

Realizations I Have Had About Two Seemingly Unrelated Songs That Will Forever Color My Appreciation of Them

The voice in which PJ Harvey sings "lick my legs, I'm on fire" in "Rid of Me" is roughly the same voice as is used for the carrots in "Party in my Tummy." Which is sort of appropriate and sort of disturbing and sort of enlightening.

2006-07-28T12:00:00.000-04:00

I owe you all another post about Rock Star, but for now please let me point you toward Paramore. (Who, it probably should be said, I have a "professional relationship" with, but all this really means is that I get to go to their show for free, which means more content for y'all, and quite frankly I would never have heard of them otherwise.) They are basically a teenpop group--the lead singer is a 17-year-old girl--masquarading as an emo band, and they are awesome. Please watch the video for "Pressure," which involves eating disorders (in a way that critiques them, I mean, not in a Lohan-circa-2004 way) and then at the end the sprinklers go off and everything gets covered in water including the drummer's cymbals and it's even more like a pop-metal song than it was before. And the drummer is chubby! I love them.

2006-07-26T17:09:00.000-04:00

Rock star or transvestive? You! be the judge

I watched the first season of Rock Star (i.e. Rock Star: Autoeroticstranguwhat?) and I am now watching the second season (i.e. Rock Star: Mission: Take Tommy Lee Seriously) and I feel it is time for me to clarify something.

When people ask me what I think about it, I tell them that it is a little strange for me to watch, because unlike almost every other reality show, I am totally familiar with the kind of person who would become one of the contestants. People on most reality shows are either scary LA people (by which I mean "every single person who has ever appeared on Elimadate, even if they are not actually from LA)" or scary rest-of-the-country people--scary not because they are from the rest of the country, but scary because they are the kind of people who choose to be on a reality show, i.e. narcissistic and mildly insane, but they are not narcissistic and mildly insane in the way New Yorkers are. (The two major exceptions are Project Runway, whose contestants look like people I've accidentally knocked over while walking down 7th Avenue, and America's Next Top Model, which appears to have has had a bigger influence on the girls in my neighborhod than any other aspect of pop culture I can possibly think of and/or actually know about; at this point, I think the highest concentration of girls-with-fauxhawks in the world is in central Brooklyn.) No, the contestants on RS:S all seem like people I have or could have bumped into over the past five years in my capacities as worker in the music industry and player of shows at rock clubs, and this is because all the contestants on Rock Star are rock people.

By this I do not merely mean "people who like rock music." I mean "rock people" in the same sense you would call someone a "folkie" or a "goth." They are not people who enjoy listening to music that exhibits the characteristics of rock music--guitars/bass/drums/vocals, heavy, backbeats, power chords, pentatonic solos and melodies, lyrics about love and drinking and destroying things and God, etc.--but people whose whole style is derived from, but not necessarily actually connected to, rock music made between 1972 and 1988. If you had to pick one actual genre of rock music to slate them into it would probably be early heavy metal, but the distinctions that matter to partisans of different rock genres don't so much here, incorporating as they do elements of punk, blues, and boogie that metal would not necessarily countenance.

Here are the defining outward characteristics of a rock person:

- They are between the ages of 28 and 42.
- Their wardrobe consists primarily of things colored black, with accents of the colors found in Guns 'n' Roses' 80s album art, plus silver. T-shirts and jeans are a mainstay, not loose but not hipster-tight either. Their jeans will always have those studded belts or some other sort of awesome belt. Girls will show cleavage and wear boots.
- They have 2-3 piercings and tattoos, but never so much that they look full-blown emo/goth, although they will always look a little emo/goth; the differences are primarily behavioral.
- They will spend a lot of time at divey or faux-divey bars.
- They are generally very friendly and outgoing.
- Their conversations revolve around the following things: rocking, whether something is rocking, how much something is rocking, drinking beer, drinking whiskey, how hot some chick is (always sincerely), how drunk they are, the rock show they went to, the rock show they're going to go to, how much their own band rocks, some clothes they just bought or are going to buy and how much it rocks/will rock, throwing up the horns, smoking, smoking weed, going on a road trip, the drinking they're going to do/did do on the road trip, fucking, making out, blowjobs, whiskeydick, guitars, drums, basses, how awesome some band is, calling people "bro" and "dude," how awesome something is, how cool something is, and rocking.

Now, I don't mean this to sound insulting; these people (and I know not a few of them) are, as I say above, very nice people, clearly having a lot of fun, and always up for a shot, which you can never value too highly. But despite their clear dedication to the music, it's not really a kind of music that's actually been current for over 15 years, and they don't seem interested in advancing the art form; they just want more music that rocks. What's more, their value system places a high value on style, but again, while it's a style that comes back into fashion every few years (I think the hipster embrace of rock fashion a few years back actually served to swell the ranks of the rock people, because the elements of the style became easier to acquire and they could thus identify each other more readily, and more establishments presented themselves in a style condusive to attracting rock people), it's more or less unchanged since 1987, aside from the female incorporation of various goth elements, but this is mainly because ripped pants with fishnet showing through is ultimately not as hot as a black dress with your tits hiked up and big tall boots, nor is it as forgiving. The rock people, like rock itself, has become essentially a subculture, far more interested in faithfully recreating the past than in what might lie in the future. And this is fine, if a little offputting for those people used to rock being the epitome of mainstream music.

But that's not the way we're used to thinking, and that's why the curious specificity of similarities of all the contestants on Rock Star can be confusing. A rock star is no longer something you are or become; it's something you audition for. It's a role you play, a role that people want to see played a certain way. This is something the culture at large has implicitly acknowledged, most visibly when people all starting using the term "rock star" to apply to ordinary people exhibiting a particular kind of behavior, or just as a general term meaning "awesome," whereas before, calling your friend a rock star for drinking a lot would be as ludicrous as calling them the mayor because they took a trip to city hall. This transformation happened gradually and it's not like people didn't have an implicit definition of what being a rock star consisted of thirty years ago that would more or less match up with our own, but it hadn't become a cliche that the music's practitioners had failed to transcend. These are rock's fans now, and despite what they might want to think, they are a minority.

ADDENDUM: It's worth noting that of the people on Rock Star, only Tommy Lee and Dave "Ugh" Navarro are Rock People, although they have the distinction of doing much to create or perpetuate the modern Rock Person culture. (Tommy Lee is the rock star made into accessible everyman; who couldn't be Tommy Lee after injesting a certain regimen of substances and sustaining a certain number of sharp blows to the head? Whereas being Slash is much harder, and even Axl's abandoned the Rock Person image for, um, cornrows and hockey jerseys, because Axl is legimiately a weird fucking guy.) Jason Newstead is just a metal guy, i.e. an actual musician, and Gilby Clark--well, all I know about him is that he played "Brown Sugar" with one of the contestants on last night's episode--the lady pictured above, who is from, yes, Long Island--and afterwards he criticized her for grinding on him, saying how unfortunate it is that women in rock are perceived to only have sex to sell, and you shouldn't do things to perpetuate that. Go Gilby!

Oh, also, best example of a Rock Person in popular culture: clearly, clearly, Gil. Older but still playing guitar (with a lot of techinical skill) in a band, dresses the part pretty meticulously but willing to branch out to other things (i.e. Gwen Stefani) as long as it stays within the context of rocking, pretty normal and owns a sandwich shop but with a hot-ass wife. This is the Rock Person in isolation, to a T.

2006-07-26T17:02:00.000-04:00

So let's say I'm...back? I'm not promising anything. But we can hope.

Hey, it's still technically July, right?

2006-06-20T10:58:00.000-04:00

Still no actual content (still June!) but the profile I wrote of Parts & Labor is now up at the Voice. I love that album, and you should too. Miss Clap even likes it, and Miss Clap does not like these sorts of things. It's loud! Yay loud!

2006-06-12T23:55:00.000-04:00

Hi all. I am about to leave for a nice little trip and some things have been changing in my life lately and so I think I am going to take a little hiatus from this blog, which is crazy, I know, both because I actually have complete entries written up on notebook paper (remember notebook paper?) and ready to go, to say nothing of the multi-part serieses I have half-finished, but I think I'm going to take June off and then see where it goes from there. I may start up sooner, but in all likelihood you can just check back on July 1 and I'll start right back in, either enlivened by the changes to actually like and engage with other people's music again, or distracted by the feckless whims of my brain to pursue writing in other areas and finally realize my ambition of turning this into an MP3 blog of nothing but field recordings from my daily life and audio clips of me being snarky about fashion and vaguely lascivious toward female starlets, but as if I were Jimmy Carter. So anyway.

2006-06-01T11:54:00.000-04:00

Just as a public service, I should mention that the Anton Corbijn video collection is not very good. It was the first one I netflixed because it seemed to have the most videos, but all of them are basically the same; if you edited them all together, there'd be enough interesting images/scenes/shots for maybe like 3 complete songs. Maybe 2. Dude is a good photographer, but this is a big part of the problem, as the videos seem to be just a photograph that moves, and unless there's a lot going on in that photograph, including some sort of narrative arc, that is not interesting, and aside from the Nirvana video (which, probably notably, was based on Kurt's drawings, which he has a whole bundle of), they indeed are not.

Of course, I also hate U2 and am not so crazy about Depeche Mode, so maybe I was biased. Bet that Ian Curtis biopic is gonna turn out super-great, though. I hope it will be in black and white with a lot of dirtiness and static shots.

2006-05-31T17:43:00.000-04:00

The Lapsed Nerd's Guide to Final Fantasy's He Poos Clouds[1]

Mr. Owen Pallett, Final Fantasy himself, says that the three goals of this album are as follows:

1. A set of songs that attempt to modernize each of the eight D&D schools of magic
2. Every song will be written for string quartet and voice
3. Nobody who listens to it will ever again entertain thoughts of suicide.

Ah, but what are the eight D&D schools of magic, and how do they relate to the (ten, unfortunately) songs on the album? Well, armed with the lyrics and a copy of the D&D Player's Handbook (third edition[2]), I set off to find out. As it turns out, there's a pretty clear one-to-one correlation between the songs and the schools.

1. "The Arctic Circle" = Abjuration

Player's Handbook says: "Abjuration are protective spells. They creat physical or magic barriers, negate magical or physical abilities, harm trespassers, or even banish the subject of the spell to another plane of existence."

Final Fantasy sings: "Shieldth up! Shieldth up! Bar the door, and keep your duketh up!...
But the quarry don't share his taste for Anne McCaffrey
And he dresses alright but the conversation is wrong, all wrong
Nobody nobody nobody will ever know his longing
He has a heart that will never melt...
Now you can endure the fear now you can endure the hell
Now you can endure the lies now you can endure the fear.

2. "He Poos Clouds" = Enchantment

Player's Handbook says: "Enchantment spells affect the minds of others, influencing or controlling their behavior...All enchantments are mind-affecting spells...A compulsion spell forces the subject to act in some manner or changes the way her mind works."

Final Fantasy sings: "And move him with your thumb, I move him with my thumb
He needs, he needs my guidance, he needs, he needs my time
Though I am not the only one
He swam!
To the edge of the wall of the world!
Followed my voice, and he cried
Master! The answer is maybe... Maybe not... Maybe not...
Maybe not! I have goals!
Gotta fulfill the seven prophecies!
Gotta be a friend to grandmother!
Gotta rescue Michael from the White Witch!
Gotta find and kill my shadow self
Gotta dig up every secret seashell
You may have been made for love...But I'm just made."

3. "This Lamb Sells Condos" = Conjuration

Player's Handbook says: "Conjurations bring manifestations of objects, creatures, or some form of energy to you; actually transport creatures from another plane of existence to your plane; heal; transport creatures or objects over great distances; or create objects or effects on the spot."

Final Fantasy sings: "Have you seen our visitor? Look! Over the treetops!
Newly conjured erections are making him a killing
And Richmond St. is illing, so the graduates are willing
To buy in to the pillage, now there is no hope for the village...
When he was a young man, he conjured up a firemare
And burnt off both his eyebrows and half a head of hair
And then as an apprentice, he took a Drowish mistress
Who bestowed upon his youthfulness a sense of Champagne Chic
Oh seduction, his seduction to the world of construction
Now his mind will start to wander when he's not at a computer
Now his massive genitals refuse to co-operate
And no amount of therapy can hope to save his marriage"

4. "If I Were a Carp" = Necromancy

Player's Handbook says: "Necromancy songs manipulate the power of death, unlife, and the life force."

Final Fantasy sings: "Tragedy, tragedy! Death has you fooled!
No throne of bone, no terranean pool!
No scythe, no cowl, no skeleton
His greatest trophy is the myth
Every sailor, salmon, every carp will follow rivers to the source
Only the dead complete its course, and furthermore...
Do you really want to know of the afterworld?"

5. " --->" = Evocation

Player's Handbook says: "Evocation spells manipulate energy or tap an unseen source of power to produce a desired end. In effect, they create something out of nothing. Many of these spells produce spectacular effects, and evocation spells can deal large amounts of damage."

Final Fantasy sings: "A taut wire, her father's evil empire
Jenna dreams of being physically able
To behead herself at the dining room table"

(this is the entire song; I think he may be giving Jenna a little too much credit, but then again the image of a failed evocator rings true.)

6. "I'm Afraid of Japan" = Necromancy

Player's Handbook says: "Necromancy songs manipulate the power of death, unlife, and the life force."

Final Fantasy sings: "For some the spell was shafted, but I am in your sway
Yes, I am still enchanted by the ways of yesterday...
If I do it with an ice pick, will I come back as a jock?
If I fast until starvation will I be born again a Christian?
I read that death by burning means returning as a girl
But only by seppuku can I retain my virtue
But all my efforts have only made
An army of greedy gays..."

(incidentally, these are probably my favorite lyrics on the album, and the D&D parallels here are actually revealing: he's afraid of Japan because he views their honor & ancestors system as a kind of creepy-ass necromancy, necromancers in the D&D system often being after sort of half-human ghouls.)

7. "Song Song Song" = Illusion

Player's Handbook says: "Illusion spells deceive the senses or minds of others. They cause people to see things that are not there, not see things that are there, hear phantom noises, or remember things that never happened."

Final Fantasy sings: "Out of dust, out of empty space
From the bedroom to the marketplace...
Concern concern concern yourself with the invisible!
Concern concern concern yourself with the incredible!
Don't turn to motherhood so fast, you have been blinded
There's a word for all you keep inside
And though you try to hide it, we will write it!"

8. "Many Lives -> 49 MP" = Divination

Player's Handbook says: "Divination spells allow you to learn secrets long forgotten, to predict the future, to find hidden things, and to foil deceptive spells."

Final Fantasy sings: "Hey, Timothy, I wish for clairvoyance
I wanna see my wife and kids
And how I would live, and how I would die...
I picture a man who lives in the past
He keeps a book of photographs
Of his younger self, clairvoyant self"

9. "Do You Love?" = Transmutation

Player's Handbook says: "Transmutation spells change the properties of some creature, thing, or condition."

Final Fantasy sings: "This hand, this hand is a cunning little bugger
With a habit of turning every A into a B...
There's a twitch twitch twitch and a rash, and an itch
For a job, for a magic job, and a magic diet and exercise plan...
Take a look at this brochure:
Inject, inject, strip away, peel away
The scars of self abuse with a couple of hours in a private clinic
What have I left in life?
The Knife! the Knife! this knife! this knife!
Every inch, every inch of me will come to know its magic!"

10. "The Pooka Sings" = kind of a grand summing-up

And so, we might as well take an opportunity here to sum things up, this blog being, if nothing else, annoyingly schematic. While at first I was fascinated with the music on the album, over time I've come to be less impressed with it. The turning point was probably when I saw the new version of Sweeney Todd, which I meant to do an entry on in earnest because it's so interesting. But the point is, where before I had seen it in terms of composition-major influences, I now saw it as a take on artistic musical theater[3], with the music's tendency toward the unmemorable being wholly justified in its service of the lyrics, which I then proceeded to enjoy without reservation. They really are the best thing on the album, highlighted by the fact that they actually fulfill their mission: not only do individual songs productively tease out the metaphorical implications of the individual schools, but over the course of the album a lot of parallels are drawn between the fictional settings of not only D&D itself but nerd culture as a whole, and the reality in which those geeks live, a juxtoposition that can be roughly summed up as "going to a sci-fi convention." That Pallett is as interested in nerd culture as he is in D&D itself is probably most blatant in "I'm Afraid of Japan," since, after all, Japan technically has not a damn thing to do with D&D, but it has a lot to do with modern nerd culture.[4] But the exploration is everywhere, from the semi-ironic casting of anti-gentrification efforts as an epic struggle in "This Lamb Sells Condos" to the melding of dates at the shooting range and Anne McCaffery[5] in "The Arctic Circle" to the application of magical language to dieting in "Do You Love?"

But I think the most interesting example is the title song, which begins with a D&D-ish computer game that is compared to human relationships ("But hey, hey, all the boys I have ever loved have been digital/I've been a guest, on a screen, or in a book!/I move 'em with my thumb, I move them with my thumb") to the much more prosaic/banal, sordid/dirty real world of dating and sex ("Escape! Escape! This time, for real!/We fool around in the service lane/He's the only friend I have who doesn't do cocaine") and then back into the mythically distant ("He swam! To the edge of the wall of the world!/Followed my voice, and he cried/Master! The answer is maybe... Maybe not...") which is supposedly a differenet kind of cleansing distancing than games--chronological separation rather than the more present barrier of the screen--but even here it's put in the language of computer games, as anyone who has experienced their character bumping up against "the edge of the wall of the world" can attest. It brings up all sorts of interesting metaphorical parallels--between role-playing in games and in life, between emotional distance from fiction and emotional distance from reality, between myths about the outside world and myths about the self--without explicitly stating any of them, and in the process represents the movement between the private and public spheres with remarkable precision and complexity. Good shit.

[1] People complain about the album title, but in retrospect it's a pretty smart move, given that not only does a general search for "Final Fantasy" prove unhelpful, but a search on the All Music Guide doesn't even turn up the Canadian FF--it turns up some UK techno act. There is, however, no other album named He Poos Clouds in the history of music.
[2] Although I had a really good Thursday in general last week, the highlight of my day was undoubtedly when meeting up with Scott to borrow a copy of the player's handbook: as he works near Broadway and Price, and as we wanted to see which edition had a better description of the schools of magic, we ended up standing outside the Prada store, comparing versions of D&D guides.
[3] Much as I think there's a temptation to hear Rehearsing My Choir in terms of the Furnaces' live shows, but it's more productive to view it as a song cycle; I left the theater with the distinct impression that RMC was the best album of the decade, but this is a horrible indie-rock thing to think, I know.
[4] Although the reference to The Sound of Waves has nothing to do with either; it's just straight nerdy, or I guess maybe geeky. God bless us aesthetes.
[5] Sort of the Pink Floyd of a certain type of nerd girls, for the unfamiliar. (Pink Floyd is the Pink Floyd of a slightly different type of nerd girls.)

2006-05-25T12:11:00.000-04:00

Apparently Literary Agents are the Laziest People on Earth

ON the first day of his internship last year, Andrew McDonald created a Web site for himself. It never occurred to him that his bosses might not like his naming it after the company and writing in it about what went on in their office. For Mr. McDonald, the Web log he created, "I'm a Comedy Central Intern," was merely a way to keep his friends apprised of his activities and to practice his humor writing. For Comedy Central, it was a corporate no-no — especially after it was mentioned on Gawker... But Comedy Central disagreed, asking him to change the name (He did, to "I'm an Intern in New York") and to stop revealing how its brand of comedic sausage is stuffed... [T]he success stories...can embolden a determined blogger...For Mr. McDonald, the Comedy Central intern, it was the call of literary agents. Now back in Kenosha, Wis., where he is finishing up his degree in English at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, Mr. McDonald is hard at work on a book — a novel about a guy from Wisconsin who gets a job in New York.

To any literary agents who might be reading this: I have a blog! I could write a novel! I could get fired!

2006-05-24T09:20:00.000-04:00

I was asked to do a Jukebox Jury for onelouder (thanks Paul!) and now it is up. In it, I confuse the Homosexuals with the Police, contrast Sonic Youth unfavorably with the Smashing Pumpkins (!), discuss the staying power of teenpop, and get a li'l bit emo, sorry. Also, the King Biscuit song is just abominable. Even before the toasting starts. I don't know if I made that clear enough.

2006-05-22T23:12:00.000-04:00

Walked out of practice tonight and turned on KTU, and danced all the way down Houston, due to "Kiss" being on; dancing while walking is easier than I thought it would be.

On the D train and as we pull onto the bridge, "The Champ" comes on, and it's absolutely perfect, the swagger stomping in lockstep with the pull of the buildings below and the water beneath, some total Wall Street shit, but locked-in, too, enclosed, like the train, giving us a beautiful view through girders. Next to me, a teenage girl sporadically does a shoulder-and-head dance to her music that pops.

On the 2 train, there's a younger dude sitting next to two bundles of eggcrate foam about as tall as he is, looking like they're going to go soundproof a studio somewhere. I listen to more Ghostface and bop my head. Down the row, a Hascid reads some scripture and bops his head, too.

Sometimes I think about the idea of music in everything, but I think it's more useful to specify that there's also a beat in everything, and some we haven't found yet. The beat to trains or cars or walking or praying or ecstacy is easy, it's "don't stop" plus "mix it up." You box a beat in, you contain it, and you can understand it. But there's a beat to the open air that's lurking out there somewhere to be discovered, the beat of as-the-bird-flies distances and sightlines and the horizon. Maybe this is hippie shit or maybe it fuckin rocks, who knows.

So yeah, it was a good trip. And I got an idea...

2006-05-21T22:55:00.000-04:00

It is time to put away childish things

I'd read the list of the best American fiction of the past 25 years, but it wasn't until I actually sat down with the physical copy of the Book Review that I really grasped the implications. The thing that struck me when I saw the whole thing all splayed out like that in front of me wasn't so much that it was a bunch of white dudes and Toni Morrison as much as that it was a bunch of modernist realism. Oh sure, the well-represented DeLillo ostensibly writes postmodern fiction, but it's not, really, is it? White Noise is just a slightly more psychadelic Roth (though is real good), and Libra and Underworld are about as postmodern as Mason & Dixon. The most forward-looking book on that list is probably A Confederacy of Dunces, which was actually written in the 60s, and it seems really significant to me that the novels we've apparently chosen to canonize since then often feel like a regression. Postmodernism is, after all, forty or fifty years old now as a literary pursuit, which should be long enough to make it safely accepted, but whereas you'd certainly find postmodern works in any canonical list of visual art, architecture, film, TV, or even music, it's astounding that here we find a list of novels almost totally devoid of anything beyond solid realist narrative.

There are a number of possible reasons for this, most tied up with the methodology used: a request was sent "to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.'" In the accompanying essay, by A. O. Scott, he mentions that a number of people asked to submit refused to on various ideological grounds, and it's certainly possible that these people, the ones with strong ideological opinions about fiction, were the ones who might have voted for non-modernist works, so it's more of a bullet vote. (Certainly looking at the people who did submit votes it's easier to understand the results, but still not entirely, and there's a handful on there whose abscence from the actual list of "winners" is absolutely baffling--though maybe it's significant that I see a lot of geezers on there.) Scott also mentions the fact that there was a similar poll done for the period 1940-1965, so perhaps the preponderance of authors born in the prewar period is in some way a compensation for the lack of a similarly-constructed 60s and 70s canon.

But to be totally honest, the thing that struck me, and that still strikes me, is the omission of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which, according to Scott, received no votes whatsoever. Admittedly I'm a bit of a fan, but my impression was that there was a wide consensus that IJ is probably the most important novel of the 90s, both because it's making a clear effort to be a Big Important Book and because it actually succeeds. Certainly it's still cited as a major influence in all sorts of places, and I think it's impossible not to see Wallace's influence in the current crop of literary wunderkinds, i.e. The Jonathans. Scott observes that all the books on the list seem to be, at best, concerned with the present, but almost entirely concerned with the past, going as far to peg this as the dominant theme of the list. IJ, in contrast, is explicitly set in an imaginary near-future, and while it has things to say about the past and the present, its view is resolutely forward. That it's nowhere to be found on this list is very telling.

I've written before about being put off by fiction, and while I think I've dealt with that fairly well, this is a pretty good encapsulation of what makes me shy away: its inherent conservativism. Not politically, but artistically, fiction seems remarkably backward-looking, the most visible symbol of which is probably the visual style associated with being a fiction writer. If you are a serious fiction writer, you are supposed to look like you stepped out of a picture of the boho 50s, exhibiting a sort of stoic, working-class, grumpy masculinity. And the fiction you write should in some way reflect this. Sure, certain weird deviations might be the flavor of the day, but in the final analysis, quality fiction always came down to a solid, well-crafted narrative, with believable characters showing clear psychological motivation, all revolving around a thorough treatment of a real geographic location and some sort of central tragedy.

This is modernism, and this is fine--there's lots of modernism I love. But as I say above, postmodernism has been around in America for 40 years, which should be more than enough time for it to be established as something worthy of canonization, and though Scott feels that Gravity's Rainbow would be a shoo-in for the 60s/70s canon, it's unclear if that would prove that pomo's moment passed or merely that fiction decided it had had its fun, but it was time to grow up and be responsible now that the 80s were here. (Certainly the row of author's pictures

The crazy thing is that it hadn't. It's possible that, as Scott says of Ann Beatty, postmodernism and its attendant literature "steadfastly refuses to try" to be part of a canon, but every new idea that announces itself as a revolution inevitably becomes the mainstream, and that's a good thing. Forget IJ for a moment--novels like Geek Love or Middle Passage or Motherless Brooklyn were good in no small part because they refused to do what they were expected to, and they're certainly better than any Philip Roth book I've ever read. (I might be more eager to read another tragicomic trawl through the aging male libido if I wasn't subjected to it on a daily basis.)

Maybe the fault lies with pomo, which presented itself, foolishly, as an insurrectionary movement, making fiction perhaps unwilling to integrate any useful lessons it could have, or making the canon's gatekeepers wary of anything smacking of its touches. But, once again, this shit isn't actually revolutionary anymore, and some of it is fairly widely accepted, so to refuse to acknowledge it even is almost the defintion of conservative, especially when your field looks remarkably similar, style and subject-wise, to the field from the 40s and 50s, except (arguably) not as good. Things building on the past are great, but it just seems foolish for there to be nothing that looks to the future. And, for that matter, it might very well indicate that pomo's children have themselves failed to integrate its lessons in any productive way.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: criticism is literature, and this is one of the many reasons why. You'll find more acknowledgment of the forward-looking literature of the last 40 years in the year's best pieces of criticism than in this NYT list, and while that's pretty sad, it's also I think demonstrating why criticism has become literature: because literature itself is failing to evolve. There are steps it could be taking that it almost stubbornly isn't, and so that energy ends up emerging somewhere else. Criticism attempts to deal with the future and change the present, to think what could be and to gather together; fiction seems to want to wall itself off, and to join poetry in becoming mere craftsmanship. I know I'm wrong about all this--I've disowned this stance before, more or less--but goddamn does fiction make it hard not to be wrong sometimes.

2006-05-18T13:45:00.000-04:00

Tom Breihan has a really, really good piece up about music and politics. It's specifically a response to the kind of complaints we've seen for some time now that there's not enough "political music" in these dark times etc. etc. I have more to say, but I can't, so just go read it.

2006-05-17T15:40:00.000-04:00

Three reviews in Flagpole today: two regional bands, one bad and one good (the Winter Sounds), and a really bitchy review of the new Flaming Lips album, which I am amused by but was probably overstating the case a bit. Still, if you're in the mood for a bitchfest, there you go.

2006-05-16T11:13:00.000-04:00

Really, nobody else gives a shit!

Simon Reynolds:

(Topic for a future thesis: the absolute terror people have of being seen as a snob-- another sign of how culture has become the battleground for blocked egalitarian impulses that in another age would have found expression in actual you know politics)

Well, that, or culture is the only place we can play at the fun game of egalitarianism, since "actual you know politics" requires a certain amount of elitism to function.

Not much else worth adressing in there, but it's interesting to read with the whole shame thing in mind.

2006-05-15T13:29:00.000-04:00

Virtua EMP paper

Part 2: Economies of Shame

(read part 1)

Before we get into specifics, let's orient ourselves with a comparison or two between Economies of Shame (EOS) and Economies of Pleasure (EOP). A good example of a participant in an EOP would be something like an A&R guy or a DJ, whereas a good example of an EOS participant would be a poster on an internet message board or blog comment box, or, I dunno, a clerk at a record store or something. They're worth separating as markets because of fundamental differences in their functionality. An EOP is a gambler's market, with participants placing relatively few "bets" on individual acts and hoping those will pay off big. An EOS is more of a war of attrition (or, to be nicer, it's like owning your own small business), with the daily maintenance of capital through numerous small acts the norm, excepting the occasional well-timed big gesture, but even then, said gestures are really only effected when a participant has accrued a lot of capital in the market. In other words, where an EOP is about anticipating market valuation (and then working to manipulate that variation, but never so blatantly)--betting a work/artist is going to get yay high and then paying off if they hit the mark you've set--in an EOS, you work to impose your own individual valuation on the market, so your reward comes by changing market variance. In an EOP, the reward comes only if evidence of your involvement is absent, whereas an EOS requires your involvement to be as clear as possible, and thus pays off more constantly and in smaller increments than the all-or-nothing EOP. That's a big part of why the EOS is the much more common model.

The reason for this distinction lies in the common belief that your likes are your own, but your dislikes stem from the understanding and imposition of external standards.[2] Thus, in an EOS, cultural capital is primarily accrued through the rejection of cultural offerings, and, as stated before, not only the rejection itself, but the timing and nature of the rejection. Such a rejection is presented as a "once I was blind but now can see moment," an understanding of the truth that must, as the night follows the day, change your opinions about individual pieces of music; if this rejection is not made by others in the marketplace, such performative utterances attempt to dictate, then you are simply rejecting the truth rather than its implications. The nature of an EOS dictates that even utterances ostensibly meant to promote or embrace a given artifact are simultaneously rejections: you are claiming that said artifact has a value greater than its current market value, and that disparity is due to cultural capital being tied up in certain other, overvalued artifacts. So, for instance, championing Gang of Four in 1998 would have entitled you to a lot of cultural capital two or three years hence~, but not if you were doing it as a "Gang of Four fan"--you had to be doing it as a function of shame. Why weren't you listening to Gang of Four back in 1998 you fool, since they are so obviously great?[3]

The Essential Statement of an EOS is: "You don't like them, do you?" (This sounds pretty teenagery, and it is, but I think it's always there, if sublimated.) It works through assumptions, which is to say that it evokes the value of a particular work as something absolute and widely accepted, rather than in flux and contingent on the market in question--in other words you gain capital by convincing other people that the market value of a work is something other than what it actually is, and thus incrementally drive the value toward your own. The Essential Statement is not actually an argument, it's just opinion presented as observable fact, and indeed actual well-reasoned cases for the value of a particular object aren't really an efficient technique, economically speaking. If the market is well-balanced and large enough to contain so much capital that it would take a massive fluctuation to have any large-scale effects, then reasoned argument becomes a viable tool since the blunt object of scorn is no longer as effective, but as we'll see later, if the EOS is tied to a corresponding EOP, this actually diminishes the power of argument.

Once a given player in an EOS gains enough cultural capital, the game for them changes somewhat. For instance, where generally one of your primary goals is to avoid the appearance of ignorance, once you have a large enough store of capital you can "spend" it by expressing ignorance in such a way that it seems noble--"Well of course I wouldn't have heard of them, I don't deign to follow such trivial matters." If someone with that much cultural capital hasn't heard of them, how good could they be? Again, the power in an EOS comes from your (perceived) intelligence and the (perceived) strength with which you express it. There's a real man-standing-alone image, although that image is pretty dangerous, as we'll get to in a second. You deserve capital because you are clear-headed enough to reject what others are accepting, or vice versa. It's very oppositional.

But let's get out of all these semantics for a second and talk about the basis of all this: shame. This probably stems from the fact that we start talking about music in a way that's key to our identities as teenagers, which is a stage of life when we're ashamed of lots of things, few of which we can actually control. And the process of becoming a music fan involves gradually realizing how little you actually know, sort of like being a monk, except instead of being a religious devotee, you're ostensibly a free-thinking rebel, so willingly sublimating yourself to a master feels like the wrong way to go, even if we end up doing that anyway. I feel at this point I don't really need to point to the mountains of evidence of shame as a motivating force in music listenership, from the simple fact that people have "guilty pleasures" (yes yes I know) to people judging other people on behalf of their music collections to people actually making moral claims about music, with such moral claims rarely being positive. And I don't say this as someone who himself is trying to situate himself outside the dynamic, looking in and saying "tsk tsk tsk" to the participants. When I started writing my blog, avoiding the shame dynamic was a big motivating factor: I wanted it to be, like pop, a big inclusive tent, where if you didn't know something, that was cool, because there's lots of stuff I don't know, and let's talk about it, hey. But as I've become more enmeshed in the music nerd community, I've found myself, and found others with ostensibly similar views on inclusiveness, nevertheless resorting to shame as an easy tactic, no matter how hard I might resist it. And this, in turn, has made me think about how shame can actually be a productive force in some circumstances. [4]

That said, it can also clearly be a negative force, and one particularly glaring example of this is what I'll call a deflationary spiral~, when an EOS market actually "crashes." As I say above, two characteristics of an EOS market are that shame is regularly invoked to acquire capital because it is more efficient than reasoned argument, and there's a persistent image of "standing alone" that is economically productive to cultivate. By itself, this combo is fine. But add in the fact that there's a low cost to entry~ in an EOS, i.e. that even actors with little to no cultural capital can nevertheless have an effect on the market, and you get what the internet has helpfully termed "trolls." Put in terms of the language we've been using, what a troll does is come into an EOS market and make a statement about a particular object "totally sucking," which of course amounts to "everyone is wrong but me." Now, while this is obviously wrong (it's positing the value of the object at 0, which is true for basically nothing, and it's positioning the speaker as the only one to hold such an opinion, which is also almost never true), it's also a pure expression of the way an EOS creates capital: it opposes the actual market valuation of an object. But whereas normally there would then be a counter-opinion introduced, with the resulting exchange actually producing capital for both parties, there is no possibility of discussion, because to admit any flaw in the original statement would violate the "standing alone" stance, which is the only way the troll can get any capital.

If the troll is ignored, then nothing happens. But if they are engaged, the only possible counter is not to oppose, but to join in with the denunciations, creating a kind of post-revolutionary fervor of purity. At first, this is productive: it's like a breath of unambiguous fresh air to the constantly hemming-and-hawing EOS market. But after a while, the market will start to run out of things to denounce, so as the aggregate value of all objects in the market declines, so does the store of cultural capital in the market, since it's something that if not maintained is lost. The market's supply is choked off, and it either dies or descends into a forum solely for trolls.

The funny thing about an EOS is that everyone in it is willfully (and, I might add, productively) ignoring its contradictions: it's a community, but made up of people each with their own strong opinions that derive solely from a clarity of vision uninfluenced by the community; it's a game of shame in which one way of winning is to be unashamed. Take a look again at that Essential Statement: "You don't like them, do you?" We've focused here mainly on the first clause, but it's that little turn at the end that makes an EOS market work. The first part posits the existence of shame, but the second part presents a way out of it, thus making yourself subordinate to the speaker, but also (so the assumption goes) boosting your store of capital and thus your position in the market overall. Every statement of shame is also, oddly enough, a pandering statement, meant both to question and to confirm the listener's assumptions--"you are wrong about this, but you are a smart, thoughtful dude, so you see that, right?" It's this pander that fundamentally separates an EOS from pop, which is inclusive, rather than pandering. But, like lotsa stuff, we'll get to that later.

[2] Whether this understanding is true or not is immaterial, and is the subject for another discussion entirely.
[3] A great, admittedly self-conscious example of all this was something Simon Reynolds would do from time to time: create a kind of "market snapshot" of bands it would be a good idea to "back" (particularly as an up-and-coming musician) if you wanted to score points in the coming year. Regrettably, I can't find this anymore, which makes me wonder if I'm imagining it, but it is interesting that he hasn't done it in a few years, basically since he stopped being particularly enthusiastic about modern music; if he did it now, it would come off as either self-parody or bitterness. Seems like when he doesn't have something to boost he moves from an EOP market to an EOS market, and maybe others have moved with him, but this will all be covered after I get this paper finished.
[4] This statement in and of itself will probably cause some people to wish shame on me, but just wait and see where I'm going with this in a subsequent part.

...to be continued in part 2a.

But first, a graph:

1-2: Market is somewhat stagnant and getting worse. General listlessness all around.
3: Trolling begins, with the market being too weak to oppose it. The value of objects decreases but capital shoots up as it is freed up and becomes falsely productive.
4: Value and capital cross at such an angle that a crash is almost inevitable, especially following (as it does) a slight dip in the aggregate capital.
5-6: Value and capital change in inverse proportions, as participants go on a denouncing frenzy and milk all value from the market.
7-8: Value comes close to bottoming out and capital, consequently, begins to fall. Realizing this, a market correction is attempted, but it fails.
9-10: Value and capital reach their lowest point and, lacking new supply, the market dies. Start over.

2006-05-15T10:34:00.000-04:00

Sugar we're coming up

Spotted in a catalog of Miss Clap's, a catalog in which you will also find girls in tank tops holding ukeleles on the beach:

Oh, things have changed, haven't they?

Maybe there's something to the whole "this generation's Nirvana" thing after all, although judging from what I hear around my neighborhood, this generation's Nirvana would seem to be Dipset. They aren't, but still.

2006-05-15T10:27:00.000-04:00

Such high standards

Presented without comment, because oh how it will tie in to some upcoming things:

Point blank: Has the 5, 8, 30-year old discussion around popism and rockism helped us establish an aesthetic practice and discourse that changes the world for the better? Answer: Nope, it hasn't done shit. So I've figured out it's pretty much a waste of my time.

- Jeff Chang (author of Can't Stop Won't Stop)

2006-05-11T17:34:00.000-04:00

Virtua EMP Paper, Part 1

(Disclaimer: this is a quick pass at what would have been my EMP paper, had my proposal been accepted. As such, it does not incorporate all the various readings and research I would have done had I had an actual conference presentation to get me to do it, to say nothing of the $50 I still owe the library that would've allowed me to get books out again. So anyway, there are some parts that I am going to go ahead with even though I don't know if they're true or even necessarily what I'm talking about, and I will indicate such parts with the following symbol: ~. This is meant to represent the twirly motion you do with your forefinger by your temple to indicate that something or someone is crazy, because I believe in academia this is referred to as "hand-waving" or, once a few drinks have been consumed, "talking out your ass." But this could be listed as a skill on my resume, so whoopdeedoodle.

On the bright side, I can now focus less on the one section I was going to limit myself to for EMP and present the theory as a sort of broad-based whole. I'm sure you are wetting yourself with anticipation, so, without further adoo...)

"Why Would You Like Them?" : Performative Speech in an Economy of Shame

At this particular moment in history, arguing about music is as American as apple pie, or at least as American as "Cherry Pie," and as much a part of growing up as pimples and hormonally induced manic depression (but not hormonally induced "Manic Depression," which only afflicts a certain segment of the male population generally known as "shredders"). We discover music, we find artists we like, and then we argue about their worth and the worth of other artists, both with those we agree with (the "Metallica vs. Megadeath" argument) and those we disagree with (the "punk sucks vs. no it doesn't" argument), repetitiously and vociferously. We continue to do this even beyond the heady years of adolescence, not only as listeners with emerging sensibilities (i.e. college students) and full-fledged music geeks, but as casual listeners; even people with a minimal music collection are likely to have an opinion on the suckiness of Coldplay or the awesomeness of Johnny Cash. At first glance, the reason for this might seem to be obvious: we do it to define our identities. But this merely explains the possession of taste, not the arguments about it. After all, we don't feel the need to argue about our clothing with other people (though of course we will pass judgment on others' decisions, because this is fun) or to loudly declare how a particular model of car is not really a true hatchback. (Unless we are nerds, but this caveat applies to everything.) So what is the point of all that arguing?

Fig 1: The "Shredder," here pictured in semi-repose.

Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron have this widely-known theory~ of cultural capital, you see, the idea of which is basically that some kids do better than others in school because of the particular familial, i.e. cultural, background they come from: because of your parents' place in the culture, they have instilled in you certain values that confer advantages other people don't have.

This is nice, and apparently very useful, but I think it's unfairly claiming a really useful term. And they're doing it inaccurately, too--one of the main characteristics of capital is that it's fluid, but "cultural capital" as conceived by Bourdieu and Passeron can neither be traded with another person for goods or services, or accrued in greater amount by a given individual through participation in a given economy. I think it's much more interesting to conceive of cultural capitalism as the arty cousin of Richard Neustadt's (god rest his soul) theory of political capital ~, a term that was, unfortunately, introduced into the popular vernacular by our current President.[1] Like that slogan for that game ~, it's a concept easy to understand but difficult to master. In brief, political capital seeks to explain why a particular actor in a particular position can sometimes get what they want and sometimes cannot. It encompasses variables like favors owed to and from, public image, the party's strength, the actor's strength within the party, a general sense of inevitability, etc. and etc. and etc. It's very interesting but we're just going to get bogged down.

What, then, do I mean by "cultural capital"? An easy but misleading shorthand would be "cred," but given that disowning "cred" is a great way to accrue cultural capital in this day and age, it's probably the wrong tree in terms of barkability. Basically, it's a representation of the fact that some people's opinions have more force than others', and an attempt to track why, exactly, that is the case. Cultural capital is primarily gained and lost through speech acts, which makes these speech acts, in the context of cultural capital, performative speech, like the courtroom pronouncements of judges, another useful holdover from politics. You can't assign a numerical value to it, but hell, since when was economics about actual numerical values?

Where things start to get interesting is when you notice that an actor's cultural capital is actually tied to the cultural capital of particular art objects. After all, people might disagree about the worth of, well, pretty much every piece of art ever created (except for Prince's "Kiss"), but that doesn’t mean we can't assign a particular value to it. Thus, people accrue cultural capital based on what art objects they back, the absolute value of that art object, the change in value of the art object over time, the time period in which they choose to back the art object, and how they actually go about backing said art object. But the value of different art objects is different in different cultural markets: the Beach Boys, for instance, will have a widely different value depending on the group of people making the valuation, as would Tupac Shakur, although the accrual of individual opinion, depending on the cultural capital of the individuals, can drastically change the valuation of a given artwork in a given market.

But given all these givens, let's talk a bit more abstractly, and focus on the two basic marketplaces of cultural capital: economies of shame (hereinafter referred to as EOS) and economies of pleasure (hereinafter EOS).

[1] He said this after winning the election of 2004, but what he really meant was "I have a mandate," which is one of the ways you can have political capital but by no means the primary one, and even then it still wasn't true. It would have been far more accurate to say that he had a near-monopoly on political capital after 9/11 but blew through that in two years and was now back in a competitive market, with his stock being particularly volatile, with allegations of accounting irregularities surrounding it. But now we're just getting baroque.

...to be continued in part 2.

But first, some illustrative graphs.

This graph illustrates a typical value cycle in a "mixed economy," i.e. one neither shame nor pleasure based and of whatever genreic affinity. The cycle in question is one familiar to most of us: the process wherein a song, having languished in obscurity, is discovered by a small set of tastemakers and then enthusiastically embraced by the market at large, followed by a falling-off in value as the market begins to regard the work as "played out" or "dated," and ending up in the settled value position of a classic, although I am being a bit generous here, and it can easily fall off even farther. (See: Langley Schools Project.)

1-2: Obscurity.
3-4: Discovered by a small, generally "elite" segment of the market, and passed around for consideration; value within this mini-market has already hit a high and will enter its falling-off period about twice as fast as it does within the larger market.
5: The work's "IPO" if you will into the market, with near-universal awareness acheived through the means of its prominent use as a sample, its placement on a well-known MP3 blog, its reissue on a prestigious label, etc.
6-8: Value falls off, initially merely as a function of wider penetration (the plateau), but then steadily downward as early adopters see later adopters taking up the work and viewing it through the prism of their own familiarity.
9-10: Value falls / levels off to its "normal" level given near-perfect knowledge.

Which leads right into the next cycle:

The previous cycle is an exceptional one, but so familiar to us as a perceptible process that I thought it might be a useful initial example. In slight contrast, this one can be encountered at any point in a work's life cycle, assuming a certain constant level of regard.

1-2: General respect, but no particular attention paid; somewhat forgotten and thus useful to bring up if it has not been brought up in a while; a pleasant surprise.
3-4: Sudden spike in value as it becomes a common reference point for artists who themselves are ascendent or already at a high level of value, or as it is used in a well-respected movie in current release, or as it is otherwise embraced actively by the market for whatever reason.
5-6: Steep dropoff as it is now a "dated" reference, fixed in time by its value-spike rather than its actual date of release.
7-8: Languishing, which allows it to retain its previous value as a constant of constant quality.
9-10: Back to normal.

2006-05-02T17:19:00.000-04:00

Kind of crickets on the novelty stuff right now, which is fair enough, but while you're, um, "digesting," let me point you toward Tom Breihan's most recent post, which is about hip-hop and Frank Kogen and immigrants and dovetails nicely with the novelty stuff, I think.

For these guys, having an opinion on hip-hop is directly contingent to being hip-hop, and being hip-hop depends on adhering to certain aesthetic and cultural codes. A term like hip-hop means more than a term like rap music. Rap music means music with rapping on it. Hip-hop means burned-out Bronx tenement houses in the mid-70s and climbing fences into train yards and stealing electricity from street lights to fuel open-air DJ parties and Busy Bee battling Kool Moe Dee and KRS-One pushing Price Be offstage. The term has baggage, and that's why I don't use it.

Next up...well, I'm not sure. Maybe I should take a poll or something. But right now I have to go do some guitar edits.

2006-05-01T16:09:00.000-04:00

Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many

A few other thoughts about novelty songs, a bit more more broad-view this time. Note: includes Ghostface content.

What exactly is the "normalization" process that turns novelty songs, which are explicitly comedic, into "straight" pop, which is generally tragic or epic? In the podcast, I touched on two explanations. One is that of maturation, demonstrated both by the transition from Spike Jones' childlike mouth noises and bangs to the restrained sexuality of Aaliyah and by the more literal growing-up we hear of the child's voice in Lil Markie -> Daniel Smith -> Jack White; kids are silly and weird in part because they like things that are silly, but also because they have not fully socialized and are a bit more willing to let their strangeness out to those close to them, and so as we normalize and become older and become more fit for public consumption, so does novelty become pop: it grows up, but it still retains that inherant, particular strangeness, which differentiates it from everything else and thus provides a hook.

The other was that of ambiguation, if that's actually a word. What most people call novelty songs are songs that are blatant about being different from non-novelty songs, whether it's the clear silliness of "Cocktails for Two" or the vocals on "Diary." The best test for whether or not something fits the conventional definition of a novelty song is if you can remove the novelty parts and still have a song left. You can take out the baby noise on "Are You That Somebody?" or add more instruments to "My Doorbell" and still have roughly the same song, but you can't do that with the Jones or the Markie. More than anything else, this has to do with the lyrics, since, after all, few pop songs are particularly ambiguous musically. Instead of being literal about the connection between the music and the words, there's more a channeling, as both the White Stripes and Danielson songs are much more concerned about expressing the feeling of a particular age than talking about being that age. This is pop's universality at play: by making things more ambiguous, you broaden your appeal.

But it's also fair to say that the novelty to pop transition is also one of increased professionalism. Aaliyah's voice is so good and the production is so sonically perfect that she probably could sing about being aborted and still have it work in a much different way than the Lil' Markie does. A key aspect of novelty songs' weirdness is that they do things differently from how you'd expect them to, and indeed, it's precisely the unprofessionalism in "Cocktails for Two" that is the novelty, that great comic eruption of noises and shouts, the cool restraint of the crooner loosed into cartoonish mayhem. Pop demands professionalism, both in conception and execution, which is what makes the Danielson Famile indie rather than pop. Professionalism is the unity here, combining strangeness and the ambiguously familiar by smoothing out the edges, touching up the trim, making it sound like something you've heard before even if you haven't.

Taken together, this is the way I think novelty models and creates pop. Pop's story is one of continual consumption and assimilation, and people talk about there being some sort of pop "formula," but I used the word "mystical" up there at the top for a reason: it's almost impossible to apply a formula successfully, because combining the strange and the normal in a way that doesn't abandon either is incredibly difficult; if you try and do it with a formula, you get something that sounds formulaic (which no great pop song ever is, at heart), and if you focus on the novelty, you get, well, novelty. Not all successful pop songs are novelty songs, except in very limited ways (none of U2's recent hits are novelty songs unless you've never heard U2 before), but it's the way novelty is incorporated that grants the aura of unfamiliarity to those that are. (Traditional novelty songs are new but familiar, in that they're pretty obvious about their oddity.) How do you make the repeated sound of a baby cooing not sound jarring and out-of-place? How do you make piano, unconventional drumming, and high male vocals lyrically and melodically harkening back to the 40s sound like something you should play on the radio? There may be answers to each of those questions individually, and they are actually just the kind of questions I like thinking about, but I think it's nearly impossible to generalize any particular techniques to a general philosophy. It's just very useful to look at novelty when you're looking at pop.

A great place to see that in the here-and-now is on a track from the new Ghostface album: "Whip You With a Strap," which has novelty in fucking spades: starts out with a siren, then builds itself around a sample of a soul singer from the 70s saying "take my across her lap / she used to whip me with a strap / when I was bad" and the the vocalist starts talking about getting beat when he was a kid and how kids these days are spoiled. Take just that description and there's no way it could be anything other than novelty, whether unintentionally like Lil' Markie or otherwise. But it works. Partially it does so for the reasons above: he's not talking in the voice of a child and indeed is explicitly speaking from a position of experience, the tale he's telling is complex and detailed, and it's all tied together with a familiar, professional style: take out the lyrics on the hook and it's a regular ol' rap song.

That Ghostface is able to do this so successfully and so easily for something that's not even going to be a single (probably) points toward an explanation for why hip-hop has the amazing cultural energy it does right now: it's the best right not at turning novelty into pop. This is hardly surprising. The first hip-hop record, after all, was regarded as a novelty song, and not without reason: it was a bunch of dudes talking bullshit over a disco record, and while this kind of thing is hadly unprecedented in terms of the crap they put out on vinyl, in its place and time, it simply didn't sound like legitimate pop. Hip-hop's more partisan historians are careful to present its origins as rooted in social injustice and subcultural eruptions and all like that, but then there's the new LL Cool J song, which somehow manages to do the "sound like how the band makes you feel, not like the band itself" thing despite actually sampling Afrika Bambaataa; perhaps this is because it does duplicate the feeling of Bambaataa while actually sounding sorta like "Funky Cold Medina." And if this all doesn't sound like novelty to you...

All genres that take temporary posession of pop begin as novelty; it's just been to hip-hop's advantage that it depends on novelty for its continued existence, with samples and voices as fuel for that particular fire, and now that it's gotten so professional about its sounds, ironically enough it can actually assimilate things much more easily. As any number of producers have demonstrated of late, you can put the right drum sounds behind anything and make it sound like a track. And while this can be formulaic, it's also liberating, since much of pop's history is the search for more efficient ways to unite the strange and the familiar. We all notice the weirdness of pop songs, but we don't seem eager to unite them in the way we'd see the other elements as part of a whole. But there is a unification behind all those noises and samples and weird voices, and it's called novelty.

(title's from the quote here, by the by, which synchs up amazingly well, considering that it's about, uh, math)

2006-05-01T14:39:00.000-04:00

I Choose America

Big pro-immigration protest (is that the phrasing we've all decided on?) in Union Square right now, and it's great. In the middle, there are Che signs, which there always seem to be at these sorts of things--I guess when your dorm is right next to the protest site you can get out there faster--which is too bad, and across the street gawky white dudes say vaguely racist things to their girlfriends like "the problem with those protesters is that there's no rhyme or reason behind different races' attitudes toward work," but on the edges, on the corners and patrolling the borders, are people selling flags:

And not just American flags, but flags from all different countries:

And, you know, it made me tear up a bit. Somehow the whole thing seemed like exactly what's great about America, for reasons I can't really articulate. I think it probably has something to do with the fact that it was a bunch of people, at least some of whom were breaking the law simply by being there, all hanging out and waving brightly-colored things and yelling and pushing strollers, and buying things from people who might also very well be breaking the law simply be being there.

Something about that attitude of, "We're breaking the law, woohoo, let's yell and buy things" that appeals to something patriotic in me. Maybe patriotic is the wrong word.

2006-04-27T11:10:00.000-04:00

Hey, hey, do that brand new thing!

Recently, Todd Burns was nice enough to come interview me and let me play some songs, and the results are now up, all podcast-style:

Stycast #249: The Aesthetics of Pop #012

Tracklist
01: Spike Jones - Cocktails for Two [buy]
02: Aaliyah - Are You That Somebody? [buy]
03: Lil’ Markie - Diary of an Unborn Child [buy]
04: Danielson Famile - We Don’t Say Shut Up [buy]
05: The White Stripes - My Doorbell [buy]

I decided to talk about something I've wanted to address for a long time: pop's roots in novelty songs, which I think has been weirdly overlooked, as has the history of the American novelty song in general. I seem to recall thinking after I recorded this that there were other things I wanted to say, and that I would say them on the blog, but quite frankly I have no idea what those things are. So let's all go listen to it, shall we, and maybe I'll remember what I forgot. I do think I called Jack White a "gigantic grown-up fetus" or something along those lines, or at least I hope I did.

2006-04-27T11:07:00.000-04:00

Street Teaming is the Blogger Entertainment Tonight

Oh yes.

2006-04-26T17:52:00.000-04:00

Mindless ditties do not glorify

Speaking of clapping, here is probably the best document I have come across lately:

CLAP AND SING! Clapping has a dual significance in the Bible. There is the clapping of derision. Job speaks of hand clapping and hissing. Lamentations refer to clapping AT a person. Ezekiel speaks to those who had clapped their hands and stamped their feet against Israel. Nahum tells of the clapping of hands over a despised person. The modern equivalent of all this is the slow hand clap. But the Bible also speaks of the joyful clapping of hands. When they made Joash king, they clapped their hands and said, "God save the king!" The psalmist gives a beautiful picture of the joyfulness in nature, singing, "Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful together!" God is the cause of our joy. He is terrible - that is, He is to be revered. He will set in order - just wait until God comes into the scene. He is planning order and He will set up order. Clap and sing! God is in power. We know the joy of Jubilee. God is gone up with a shout, with the sound of a Trumpet. In verse 6 of this psalm there is a triple injunction, "Sing - sing - sing!" How the people of God have sung since our Saviour ascended up on high. The world owes its music to the Church. What a pity if now the Church has to borrow some of it back again. We need to clap and sing our wholesome praises to our God - Glory to God! Clap and sing with wisdom and understanding. "God is king of all the earth!" sings the psalmist. "Sing praises with understanding!" Sing wisely; sing skillfully; sing with spirit and understanding. Mindless ditties do not glorify God. The more we understand about the Power and Providence of our God, the more we have to clap and sing about. God reigns over all the earth. Everything is in His hands. He is in control and He will order all things aright. The Shields of the Earth belong to Him. The safety and protection of the earth are in God's hands. We can well leave them there. Bring forth the royal diadem and crown Him Lord of all! Clap and sing!

This connects, oddly enough, with a lot of stuff that's been in my mind lately. One thing is that I dug out my Danielson Famile collection for a certain project, and in checking out the first album, A Prayer For Every Hour, I was reminded that the band actually started as Daniel Smith's senior thesis at Princeton! It's an oddly secular and quotidian beginning for something that's become so cloaked in otherness and spirituality, but I think it's one of the things that endears Daniel to us, much more so than Sufjan, whose beginnings seem properly cloudy. It also reminds me of J0sh R1tter, whose salt-of-the-earth schtick I find impossible to swallow after going to a nerdy liberal arts college with him.

I also love this--for personal reasons, obviously, but also because I love the particularly American notion of making faith that was explicitly supposed to be personal something for public display by, ironically enough, making it more personal, and by taking something, speaking in tongues, that would seem like proof of posession by evil and making it into proof of posession by good. I like the idea of the holy spirit as something that enters you, something you can feel, something that fills holes in you, less for the way they sound like sex, and more for the way they make sex sound like something religious, and about the way they model I think the experience a few of us have had with music, to say nothing of the way the modern model for a musical performer is tied up with glossolalia, with all those "huh"s and "yeah"s of rock and, now, hip-hop, hypemen as a church choir, singers as a Greek chorus channeling the will of the gods--and the way speaking in tongues can be traced to a specific date and time without this diminishing the perceived authenticity of the spiritual experience. I kind of wish we did more of that, transforming the quotidian into the sublime, and keeping the two in balance simultaneously throughout, that kind of divine ambiguity.

Plus "Song Song Song" is the best track on the Final Fantasy album, but we'll talk about that later.

Clap and sing! Clap and sing! Clap and sing!

2006-04-26T13:02:00.000-04:00

Missing the STD Connection Entirely

I am about to bitch about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! I am doing this in 2006, and I realize this is a horrible thing to do. Nevertheless, I feel I am justified and that it will be a somewhat productive exercise. Let me take the first part first and the second part second.

I started this blog in 2003. I picked the name based on the name I had chosen to release music under, which I chose some years prior--2000, I'd say. I had picked this name as a reference to gonorrhea ("Clap is derived from the obsolete French word clapoir meaning sexual sore") but when searching on MP3.com (RIP), I discovered that a Cleveland horror-rock band had already claimed that name. So I added the s. It was a happy coincidence: as the blog started to focus on pop, the name became strikingly apropos.

But then those fuckers came along.

I never really liked them, but it was always more of a focused ambivalence. I certainly was put off by their name (which I can't imagine predates mine), as I am indeed by all the imitators that have sprung up in their wake: Austin's "Clap! Clap!" (whose existence, when I discovered it, sent a shiver of revulsion through my body) and Dublin's "The Clap" who I kind of like given that they have a picture of gay bodybuilding Hitler on their website. (Even though, again, name's taken guys, at least in Ohio, and where else matters?) It annoyed me in that narcissism of small differences way--was I really kin to these fuckers? And should I really be third on the Google page? I was being kinda stupid, you see.

As I said, I never really liked them, but this was really on the basis of one or two songs, which told me, I thought, all I needed to know. But then people I know, people I like, told me they were good, and that I would like them. They said I should listen to them more. I ignored them. Then yesterday, I was searching for the new YYYs album, and I got theirs as well. So I grabbed it, and today I listened to it.

And holy shit.

Thinking about what I'm about to say, I feel a bit weird, because a lot of what I'm about to say is exactly the kind of stuff I've complained about other people saying. I don't like it when people complain about bands being derivative, because that doesn't seem to matter, and I don't like it when people complain about a singer sounding like another singer, because who cares? I don't like it when people complain about bands being popular (or, I guess, indie-popular), because people liking things is nice, and the whole thing just makes me feel like a grumpy old man, which I hope I'm not.

But what I've realized is that all of this stems from one basic fact: not only do I not like this band, I do not understand why anyone would. Maybe this is a failure of imagination, but I honestly cannot hear anything about this band that would seem to inspire affection or joy or passion. And because I can't understand, based on the music, why this band would be so well-liked, I must conclude that there are other, extra-musical reasons. And I must bitch about them. So here I go!

The thing that strikes me about CYHSY is--and this is the narcissism of small differences thing again (hey, might as well abbreviate that: NOSD)--is that they sound remarkably like what a band I was running would sound like if they made all the choices I would consider but then avoid. It feels like they've rummaged through my back catalog and picked all the songs I decided not to pursue, the ones that were too samey, too droney, too default-rock. And then they arranged them like an unsatisfying demo, with unnecessary instruments and rocking-out parts that fail to acheive any feeling of rocking out. The drums do what they're trying to do but no more. They're too quiet, too constant.

I'm personalizing this, but it's not personal. CYHSY are very much of my generation and demographic of musicians, and so a lot of what they're incorporating feels very familiar. It's just that they seem remarkably skilled at taking this set of influences and choosing all the worst ones, or rather, I guess, all the safe ones--all the ones I hear people talking about at a party or in a bar and immediately steer clear. (Here's an example: the production aesthetics of Neutral Milk Hotel rather than the song structures and lyrics and vocals, which seem by far to be the interesting part about that band, but there you go on the CYHSY album: fuzz bass and toy piano. Woot.) And for all the influences that get thrown around, I can probably reduce it to one bon mot: they sound like a bunch of late-period Wilco fans got together and decided to make an album.

And then there's the voice. The voice, no matter how the vocalist arrived at it, sounds like David Byrne. There's simply no way around that basic fact: dude sounds like David Byrne. And this makes me think horrible, horrible things, like: has indie-rock become one giant impersonation contest, one big game of trendspotting where the music nerds become musicians and we worship them as originators? Have we drifted maybe a little too far from our puritanical 90s roots? Or is it just that the cult of low expectations has become a bigger cultural gatekeeper?

But the big worry, the one that keeps me up at night, the reason I bitch about a band having a name similar to that of my blog, stems from the fact that CYHSY and me are clearly both working from a similar set of ideas and aesthetics. They're a poppy, happy band, with disco beats and non-rock instrumentation, so it seems reasonable to assume they have a mistrust of miserbalism and (see above) authenticity, as well as affection for dancing and cheerfulness and all that crap. But the music they make, which presumably is a result of those values, sucks. It sucks monkey brains. Even worse, it's something those values were specifically meant to oppose: it's boring.

This is why CYHSY so repulse me. It's not so much them, it's the fact of their popularity. My peers have voted, and this is what they want. For all the effort made to change indie attitudes, apparently there's so little capacity for ecstacy in that crowd that it ends up in a sort of mown-lawn mush. If they're not moping, they've got nothing, just some rock guitar and pallid beats you can move your feet to and a retro patina that just makes me shudder. If this is where all this is heading, count me out.

2006-04-26T11:12:00.000-04:00

Bryan, who we are playing with tonight, has drawn the band as robots. I am the second from the left--the one that looks like it is about to dismember a minor character while yelling "SMASH!" but in the original picture I was just showing off my shiny new bracelet, I swear. I actually meant to link to subinev yesterday and comment on his shiny new design, nice new posts, and robot drawings, but I got distracted by shiny things that weren't bracelets or subinev. I am still mildly confused why all the robots look vaguely insect-like, but mustn't question the muse.

So yes, we are playing tonight, at the Delancey, and it is the final night of our monthlong residency. You should come out and dance. I won't scare you, I promise. It'll be just like the internet. Man in Gray and the Wowz are also playing, and who doesn't like them? 8 o'clock sharp, and free.

2006-04-25T13:08:00.000-04:00

Well that was weird.

I was eating lunch in Union Square. As I finished, someone walked up to me and it turned out to be an old college friend, Alec Longstreth. We had a nice chat and then he left.

I then walked back through the park so as to get to the north side, thinking about how funny it was that I had run into Alec, and wondering if there was anyone else I knew in the park. At which point I passed a guy sitting on a park bench, thought he looked familiar, looked a bit closer, and realized it was Matt Friedberger. Eleanor was sitting on the ground in front of him.

I spent a decent bit of the last two days thinking about the Fiery Furnaces, and then all of a sudden there they are, sitting on a park bench. I didn't really know what to do about it ("Hi, my name's Mike, and I was mildly dissappointed with your new album"?), so I went to Barnes & Noble and looked at guidebooks.

So what should I have done?

2006-04-25T11:30:00.000-04:00

Also, Jukebox. Apparently people actually like that Lips song; maybe I should listen to it again. I also am starting to think that British people have been so traumatized by the glut of horrible, wimpy rock bands in their area of the world that they have a lingering resentment toward all rock bands, even ones involving Jack White. This is truly a tragedy.

2006-04-25T10:57:00.000-04:00

After all my bitching, this is a nice thing to see: An exhaustive guide to the proper nouns of Bitter Tea. It does the legwork I have been too uninspired to do and tracks down some of the real-world references thrown out over the course of the album, and, among other things, really illuminates the speak-sing parts in "Bitter Tea" (the song). Go Cleveland! The rest of the blog is great as well, but this in particular really enhances my appreciation of the album.

A few notes on "Oh Sweet Woods" while it's up (definitely one of my favorites from the album, by the way): I will ask old-skool clap clap blog poster Jason about Albertson'ses outside Boise, as this is where he grew up (and I need to write him anyway), but it does seem worth mentioning, somehow, that Lake Tahoe is right by where the Donner Party got trapped in the mountains. Just sayin'.

2006-04-24T16:36:00.000-04:00

They may both pucker, but a whistle ain't a kiss

The mashup of "Kiss" and "The Whistle Song" (and a li'l bit of "A Bizarre Love" I think), which you can hear aroundabout here (it's the first track on the player), is one of those things that are interesting because they don't actually work. That little whistle riff just doesn't quite fit with Prince's funk, even though both are so wide-open that it seems like they could fit with anything, especially since both theoretically spring from the same tradition. But put one on top of the other, they're at odds, and because of this even the vocals don't quite match up, all of which indicates that they are in fundamentally different musical modes.

As I say, this should not be the case. Hip-hop production derived directly from funk, in a quite literal sense, for most of its existence. That it's shifted away from that is undeniable, but I think the thing people focus on is the sonics. Clearly, those have shifted, and this has had an effect on the musical mode: with a greater focus on the low end, basslines have become much less busy, and the high end has become almost a drone at time, with very little of the sharp horn breaks and hi-hat patterns that characterized hip-hop's first decade and a half of productions. I get the sense that all this started with G-funk, as modern hip-hop productions seem to have taken the keyboard lines and ditched everything else, reducing the bass to single-note hits and thus flattening out a lot of the emphasis on a particular key that funk tended to do, ending up with more free-floating lines, untethered to any particular center, which certainly works with the slippery vocal style most modern MCs employ. That's why I think the mashup doesn't work: funk's emphasis on a particular, definite note, and the particular, definite intervals above that doesn't really gel with the darker turn you hear in the production of "Whisper Song."

But what I can't figure out is what exactly that turn is, and how it's acheived. What I'm trying to say with "mode" is: if I had to create a Dipset kinda production with a marching band, how would I do it? I know how I would create a funky backing track: aside from the obvious rhythm requirements, I'd have a bassline that stayed around the tonic but elaborated it with a lot of octaves and 4ths and 5ths in particular places in the pattern, as well as major 7th chords and short bursts of triads that leaned heavily on octaves. But I don't know how to do that with the modern hip-hop production style, because I don't know quite how those lines would be classified. Are they minor? Are they in a particular minor mode? How much do they rely on the note the bass is emphasizing? Does it even matter what note the bass is emphasizing? (My sense is no, but I could be wrong.) Is there any particular relationship, even an accidental one, between the low and the high ends? How do producers think of these things as they're creating them? Not the producers doing more unusual productions, but the run-of-the-mill guys. This is what I wonder about, maybe because I wonder how it could be productively twisted.

2006-04-24T16:28:00.000-04:00

Oh man is Hillary right about the "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)" remix. Oh man oh man oh man. The last thing he says, you see, I think we have all thought that, and it is nice that someone has put it in a song. You should go listen to it.

2006-04-24T12:43:00.000-04:00

You've got the wrong Eleanor Friedberger

People have always accused the Fiery Furances of being obtuse and difficult, but with Bitter Tea, we can say for the first time that they seem to be doing it deliberately. Gallowsbird's Bark didn't seem that odd at first blush. On Blueberry Boat the off-kilter nature of the music fit the songs perfectly, and it's hard to imagine them sounding any other way, even if in the final analysis they could have made three or four songs b-sides or singles. And Rehearsing My Choir, which drew a lot of flack, again made perfect sense, especially once you became familiar with the narrative, even if, again again, there were bits (in this case musical bits) that could have been cut.

Now that we have Bitter Tea, however, it's impossible for me to shake the sense that they are not merely doing what they said about Blueberry Boat: "But in trying to be a decent rock band ourselves, we also have to accomplish progression by regression, and thereby should not only sing about---for instance---failure and incapacity, but embody it as well." They are not merely embracing failure, but actively undermining themselves, embracing one of the worst parts of the indie aesthetic, with Matthew pursuing the new-Dylan thing a little too hard. I guess this sense stems, in part, from the fact that we got to hear some of the Bitter Tea songs, unadorned, before the album came out. Once it did, some of these songs seem to have disappeared behind a wall of fruitless tinkering, and it's easy to draw a line from the production choices made on the songs we heard in their gestational state and what must have been done to the other songs we only got to hear in fully-produced versions.

Though I like the album and the songs, it's hard not to feel frustrated with how they turned out. Lots of people have complained about the sequencing by now, and they're totally right--it's a hard album to sit through, and it didn't have to be. But there also didn't have to be so much there--the album could be shorter by half without losing very much, either by cutting whole songs or sections of songs--and what's there didn't have to be so cluttered. This is frustrating because it seems so obvious, and given both the reliably good ears Matthew Friedberger has, and the inarguable fact that there are good songs buried under all that bullshit, it's hard to come out with any conclusion other than he's intentionally sabotaging his work.

Worse, this trend has carried over to the live shows. It actually began with the Choir tour, in which they played the entire album so fast and so hard that it almost didn't matter what songs they were playing, and it was, to my ears anyway, pretty much a failure, and, again, a frustrating one, like they were preempting criticism of Choir by refusing to present it in a positive light--"Yeah, whatever, it's difficult, people aren't going to like it." But I still think that album wouldn't sound out of place being played as an NPR segment, which I mean as a compliment. And then on their current tour they're doing a "rock band" approach, which sounds accessible, except that the Furnaces' charms don't really come out in a straight rock-combo arrangement, so again, it's a kind of grumpy distancing thing.

But then I started thinking about this, and I realized the seeds of this current disappointment have really been there from the beginning, and indeed are inseparable from the amazing work they've produced thus far ("thus far" being, it seems useful to remind myself, a mere 3 years!). Take their first, and supposedly most user-friendly album, Gallowsbird's Bark. Almost everything that bugs me about Bitter Tea is already in place: illogical noises, off-kilter takes on perfect songs, and general abundance; hell, even on the album's single, "Tropical Ice-Land," there aren't any actual drums, just a bunch of percussion. The thing is that here, all this stuff works: almost none of the songs are extraneous, and almost half come in at under three minutes; the noises get out of the way in time for the choruses, all of which provide solid, clear hooks, and are mixed in such a way that they compliment rather than overwhelm the songs; and the off-kilter takes are different but often better than what a more conventional band would come up with. Live, too, as they say, "The starting point of a rock band thinking about playing a show should be dissatisfaction with their songs," and their 2003-4 live shows, in which they chopped up and rearranged the various sections of their songs into a giant medley, were a big drawing point for new fans, but in the abstract, "let's play our songs really hard and fast" is no different from "let's play all of our songs as one big song"--it's just way less effective.

So in the end, I think the conclusion you have to draw from Bitter Tea isn't that the Furances are going about things in the wrong way. They're going about things the same way they always did. It's just that it isn't working like it used to. Arguably, this is the law of diminishing returns in action. But it's worrisome because, unlike with every other album they've put out, we have no idea where they're going next. There are no unreleased songs they've played live, and they don't seem to have said anything about their future direction as a band, as they always have before. Matthew has two solo albums coming out, but it seems unlikely that taking Eleanor out of the equation will really make things better, and from his descriptions, they don't sound that much different from the Choir/Bitter Tea style. I worry that I sound like just another fanboy when I complain about this sort of thing, but I don't want things to sound like Gallowsbird's again--I just can't shake the feeling that they've played this particular set of instincts as far as they can go, and they really need to try a different tack. Take a break, even. I suppose we'll see.

2006-04-13T12:21:00.000-04:00

From the heartland comes news of a MIRACULOUS matzoh! Jesus died for somebody's sins but now he's back, in unleavened form! You can click here to buy this priceless etc.

Here is the product description:

This a bonifide miracle. Jesus's face has appeared to us. In the Christian faith, the Last Supper was the last meal Jesus shared with his apostles before his death.The meal is discussed at length in all four Gospels of the canonized Bible. According to bible scholars the meal was a Passover seder. The main staple of Jesus's last meal was the Passover Matzoh. Matzoh is a religous food item made of plain flour and water, which is not allowed to ferment or rise before it is baked. The result is a flat, crispy, cracker-like bread. There is a commandment to eat Matzoh on the first night of Passover. Miraculously upon opening our box of Shmura Matzoh (the holiest vareity of matzoh) we were shocked and awed to see the holy apparition of Jesus's downturned face within the fireburned marks on the bread. This is truly a miracle from God and His Son. The timing of this appearance on Passover the meal of the Last Supper three days before Easter Sunday.

Well I'm sold!

2006-04-12T16:47:00.000-04:00

I Used To Think Life Was a Bitter Pill

Dear Art Brut,

Thank you for putting on such a good show at Southpaw last night. (Bryan has a report and a picture. Other people were there, but I am not going to link to them because you might think it was some kind of goddamn blogger party or something, but seriously, it was great.) Halfway through I was going to yell out something about New York crowds not moving, but then you said the line at the end of the second verse of "Modern Art," the one I can never understand, and you jumped into the crowd, and you looked kind of uncomfortable (here I am saying "you" but meaning "Eddie Argos, the lead singer," sorry about that), but you jumped around with us, and after that people started going crazy. New York people really just need one person dancing around in a prominent or loud way to get them moving (witness the one girl who came to one of our shows and started dancing and yelling at other people to dance, which totally worked; I wish we had gotten her phone number, I'd totally buy her drinks if she always showed up and did that) and it sure worked, because the rest of the show had all types of moving about. I mean, shit, some dude stage-dived, and when's the last time that happened at an indie-rock show? Matthew said (of a previous Art Brut show) it was like being 14 and at your first punk rock show, and Janine said (of this one) that they just made her happy. It is a hell of a live act you've got going there, and it proves that the songs aren't just riding on the funny lyrics.

But it was a different show than the last one, and I don't think it was just because it was at night in a Brooklyn club instead of during the day under a tent in Texas. (Nick is also doing some comparisons.) For instance, the way I was going to describe your SXSW show in the wrapup I never wrote would've gone something like this:

A rock band comes out and starts playing "Back in Black," which is never a good sign unless you're actually AC/DC, in which case it is like a chocolate icing waterfall. They launch into some rock number and it is not encouraging. And so a used-car salesman who has been drinking for some time staggers up on stage, grabs the mic, and starts making fun of the players, with sacastic comments like "Look at us, we formed a band!" But instead of kicking him off, they keep playing, and his comments seem to rile them into being better, and the whole thing starts to gel. Instead of mocking them, the used car salesman starts encouraging them, and by the end of the show, they've effected this miraculous transformation into an actual rock band.

But last night's show was different. For one thing, you actually seemed like a band: the singer and the blonde guitarist dude interacted, instead of going off on their separate paths, and when the singer started songs with "Ready, Art Brut?" it seemed like grinning camraderie rather than ironic command. What was most notable, though, was probably what you did at the end: you spoke to the crowd, and you told us all to start bands--threatened us, actually, saying you would be back in Brooklyn in five years and if we weren't all in bands you would be very annoyed. And as far as I can tell, you were being entirely sincere. And if you can ever tell if someone's being sincere, it's Art Brut, since we have so many glaring examples of you being at least somewhat sarcastic.

While I'm tempted to try and parse this in light of the whole Art Brut, um, project, that really seems pointless. When you sincerely command us to form bands, it's not furthering the ambiguity of your song "Formed a Band"--it's purely in service of the mood of the night, which, seemingly without trying, conjures the very basic capacity for joy that rock has. It's not retro, but it still works like "Tutti Fruiti" or "I Saw Her Standing There" or "Blitzkreig Bop" or "Kiss" or "Birdhouse in Your Soul." It does that trick that I think bands know they need to do but always have a hard time with: you don't want to make music that sounds like your favorite bands, you want to make music that makes other people feel like your favorite music makes you feel. I think the blurriness of that line has led to a lot of rock's creep away from that primacy, as sounds become gestures conjured not in a particular spirit but as a reference to the previous sound. (Or, uh, both.) It's different in every context, and for whatever reason, what Art Brut does is perfect for this context.

Miss Clap couldn't make it last night (I know you're crushed), but in discussing how she wished she could come, she said, "You haven't been this insistent about everyone seeing a band since the Scissor Sisters, and that worked out great." At the time, it made me leery--I like you, Art Brut, but I would not say you are the Scissor Sisters, maybe because what you're doing feels more basic than their masterful combo of genre-digging and melodic drive. But now that I think about it, it is the same, because it's the same feeling. Play "Take Your Momma Out" and "Good Weekend" and they induce roughly the same mental state. And that sure is saying something.

Anyway, thanks for the good times, and I am totally going to see you again in May.

Butterfly kisses,
clap clap blog

2006-04-11T15:08:00.000-04:00

Oh yes, and Jukebox, in which I restrain my wordiness only to see others start to stretch out a bit (yay), I am 180 degrees away from everyone else on Noyau Dur, and "Kan Niet van Die Sletten Houwe" (whoof) doesn't get nearly enough love. My Snook blurb didn't get it, which I actually think is too bad, so:

Sounds like a wrestling match between a guy in a smoking jacket and one in a white knit cap. Smoking jacket ducks and weaves slickly, sliding in occasionally to tap ashes from his pipe on white hat's head, while white hat stalks him determinedly around the ring. Just as it looks like white hat's exhausted and smoking jacket moves in for the coup de grace, white hat grabs him by the wrist, flicks him into the air, and everything goes slow motion as smoking jacket flies out of the ring. When we get back to normal speed, smoking jacket climbs back in with an angry expression on his face, but then smiles, and does a little dance with white hat until the fadeout. Ends on a black screen with the logo: SNOOK! [7]

Good news, though: "the system will be down" for the next two days, so I will have time to write about things and listen to songs by certain 80's superproducers. Yippie!

Oh, and once again, I am playing at the Delancy tomorrow night. It was real fun last week and we're getting all the Passover slackers this time. Here is a picture of Kristie last night:

ADDENDUM: I am listening to Noyau Dur again. You guys are nuts.

2006-04-11T11:55:00.000-04:00

Presumably this is what Rivers Cuomo sees when he goes to an Electric 6 show

Dick Valentine Knows His Audience

Over at the Electric Six site, there is a compendium of reviews of Senor Smoke, and my Voice review is indeed listed, along with my name, which is totally awesome. (Thanks for the heads-up Twan.) It is just a little bit funny that Electric Six has done a series of shout-outs to rock critics, though. I'm just sayin'.

Also, and I guess more importantly, there is news about their new album:

We are 5 shows from wrapping up our North American tour. If we could, we'd go out for another 7 weeks. And it looks like we'll get our wish in the fall when we tour for our upcoming record called Switzerland, which will come out on Sept. 12 in North America. Keep a look out for everything about us becoming a tad bit more Swiss in the months to come.

Woo!

Anyway, today is apparently "everyone be a little bitch" day, so I might have to talk atcha later.

(Although, uh, did anyone else find it slightly disconcerting that the front-page headline in the NY Post yesterday was "TEEN THUG SQUAD"? Chugga chigga wugga?)

2006-04-03T18:52:00.000-04:00

Oh, and incidentally, we finished up all the non-vocal recording on our CD this weekend. I got to play my wooden scraper thing, it was awesome. Here's a picture of the producer, producing:

We are also doing a residency this month at The Delancey here in NYC, playing every Wednesday in April at 8 pm, and for free, too. And if you don't want to listen to us, there are two more floors, one of which usually has some barbeque going on earlier in the evening. The schedule's on our website. You should come down and have yourself a good time.

2006-04-03T17:03:00.000-04:00

A series of RPG battles

This is a video by Japanese band YMCK , who, if I had to put on my music-critic hat, I would describe as being like Cibo Matto as produced by Koji Kondo. They seem to play hacked soundchips from 8-bit systems accompanied by jazzy girl-group vocals. I really like the show description here:

The coolest part of the show was that they brought on stage guests from each of the previous bands for a series of "battles", displayed on screen as old RPG fights (ever happy, no one's HP ever went down! :)).Blasterhead, Aprils' Imai-kun and Ram Rider in turn added their touch to a YMCK song. In the case of Aprils, we got a YMCK version of "Twinkle Stars, Little Stars, Shining Stars" (Aprils song co-produced by YMCK), which was really great!

It works way better than it has any right to, coming off much more like a continuation of an abandoned musical tradition than a retro joke. The fact that they produce tracks for other acts is certainly encouraging; you can find a sample of said song on this page, and you might want to check out "pan-da" while you're there, it's great. (That band, the Aprils, have apparently recorded with one of the folks from Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, who are also really awesome.) They do a nice job of taking the cheery harshness of 8-bit sounds and using that to offset the softness and slight melancholy in their songwriting to produce something that's somehow even brighter and shinier--instead of sounding kind of backgroundy like that kind of music can, these new distinctive elements give it a kind of energy it wouldn't normally have. They're remarkably good, and they have an album out called Family Music, which you can listen to samples from here.

ADDENDUM: Speaking of Nintendo...

2006-03-28T13:31:00.000-05:00

Uh, so I know I was saying things about SXSW, but I appear to have stopped, and will probably end up doing what I had planned on doing as just regular ol' posts about bands rather than something justifying all the time and expense that went into going to Texas. (Since, really, I probably got enough free beer to justify that.) But if you wanted to read about SXSW, you could always check out what Rollie has to say.

2006-03-28T12:35:00.000-05:00

It's nearly impossible to find a picture of Lil Kim that I feel comfortable putting at the top of my blog, so you get this instead.

Champagne in my Campaign, Kim For Mayor

Hey, remember Missy Elliot's "Lose Control"? Remember how it was built around a classic of 80s electro, ostensibly the genre that 80s hip-hop production was indebted to, but which always seems to turn into 808 pastiche when someone wants to "take it back"? Remember how that was a big hit? Have you noticed how no one else has really done it?

Well, Lil Kim's "Whoa" (formerly "My Niggas") doesn't seem to be built around a sample, but if there's a hook in there, it's clearly the electro-toms that end the loop (a hook at the end!), which could have been taken straight from a Jam & Lewis song. This, in turn, twists your perception of the other elements in the backing, placing a standard-issue string part into the context of synth-strings and thus making them electrified, and bringing it all together with distinctly analogue sparkles and lazy backward spinning noises. In other words, it takes something that would formerly have failed to convey menace and instead gives it a real skip in its step. The emphasis is on the downbeat, but those electro touches give you enough beats in between to move your feet. In the end, it approaches a disco feel despite not being disco at all, making you feel cooler for walking down the street.

It also joins "Gold Digger" in being one of those songs much improved by its radio edit, which in censoring out much of the chorus not only allows the beat to shine through but silences what's probably the worst part of the song, lyrically speaking. (I like sexy ladies goin' crazy as much as the next person, but the rest of it I could kinda do without.) I haven't been able to find that online but you can get a sense of it from the video, which plays around with the structure and adds an uninteresting coda, but also gives you the frisson of seeing Kim commit fictional crimes. (You can also read the comments on the page linking the video, and indeed you should.) Indeed, the album version is probably the worst of the three. Something about the sonics, like with Prince's "Black Sweat," really makes me want to pick this up in vinyl.

People are going nuts right now for T.I.'s "What You Know About That," and while I see the appeal, I kind feel like if it's stringy bop you're looking for, you could really stand to check out "Whoa."

2006-03-28T11:40:00.000-05:00

If you check out the Jukebox, do so for my entry on Prince, which is somewhat like what I would have written here if I had ever gotten myself to do so. Try and ignore my continued tendency to be about twice as long-winded as the next person (they're supposed to be what now? Blurbs?), and definitely ignore my error-riddled writeup of what is apparently the Swedish Eurovision entry, who knew. But ignore what everyone else says about Oomph!--I love me some Rammstein, but that shit was no Rammstein.

Or, alternately, just watch the Muppets sing "Fuck Tha Police."

2006-03-27T14:39:00.000-05:00

Sensualists Without Heart

From the New Yorker's review of Francis Fukuyama's new book:

Modernity, Weber said, is the progressive disenchantment of the world. Superstitions disappear; cultures grow more homogeneous; life becomes increasingly rational. The trend is steadily in one direction. Fukuyama, accordingly, interprets reactionary political movements and atavistic cultural differences, when they flare up, as irrational backlashes against modernization. This is how he understands jihadism: as a revolt, fomented among Muslim émigrés in Western Europe, against the secularism and consumerism of modern life. (This is also how he interprets Fascism and Bolshevism: as backlashes against the general historical tendency.) Jihadism is an antibody generated by our way of life, not a virus indigenous to Islam. Fascism and jihadism are nihilisms; they cannot be co-opted into the modern system of pluralism, and so they have to be wiped out. But they stand, in a perverse way, for the dark side of disenchantment, which is that, as life becomes more rational and transparent, people lose the sense that there are spiritual forces in the universe greater than themselves. Supernaturalism goes, but so does the idea that anything transcends the biologically human. The “last man” was Nietzsche’s term for the citizen of the completely modern society; “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” was Weber’s description.

Weber was an intellectual crush of mine that never got the chance to really blossom--I liked a lot of what he had to say, especially about bureaucracy (although I apparently got a much different reading from it than most people did, but apparently most people are Marxists), but I think it just didn't entirely fit in with my interests at the time.

What's interesting about the above passage is in the way the premise contradicts the ostensible conclusion: if there is an irresistable human urge toward the irrational, then you can't see eruptions of irrationality into the geopolitical mainstream as anomalies. This only works if you read Weber's ideas as tragedy, as a story about bureaucracy as the inevitable endpoint of human history, an "iron cage"[1] toward which we proceed and then cannot escape. But to me, that's as bogus as Marx's historical determinism[2], and I think it's much more useful to regard his commentary on bureaucracy as a depiction of the push and pull between institutionalized administration and person-to-person governmental interactions, and the role each has to play in any functioning model of governance; certainly the role of bureaucracy seems poorly examined when it comes to questions of statecraft.

A much better way of looking at it would be to see things like totalitarianism and religious fundamentalism as tragic irrationalism, prophecies that seek to be self-fulfilling through the constant verbal and physical insistence on their own inevitability. But these tragic irrationalities are not doing battle with the rational practices that ultimately are too convinced of their own rightness to be bothered. No, what they're opposing is the comic irrationalities--which is to say, art and culture.

A teacher of mine once pointed out, more in passing than anything else but enough times to make it an implicit theme, that the question at the heart of all criticism is ultimately about the purpose of art, and about how the fact that there is no real rational answer for that question is frighteningly significant. I sort of disagree in that I think there are a few practical purposes for art, mainly concerning the idea of play and the way they can act as a simulator (deliberate word choice alert!) for the practice of being a citizen in a republic. But there's little use in denying that art is mainly irrational, that this is a huge part of its appeal, and further that most people's experience of art at this point in history is the kind of art we choose to call "pop culture." Pop is our aesthetics, our superstitions and our (gulp) spiritualism, the ghost in the machine if you want to talk about "transcending the biologically human"--what does that more than a DVD of Brad Pitt? If you want to talk irrational, what qualifies more than a billboard using women in bikinis to sell alcoholic beverages? Yet these are the things our beloved "islamofacists" seem to be reacting to, not "freedom" or democracy or pluralism. They are repulsed by the culture, not the politics, and they are most visibly repulsed by the most visible culture, the pop kind. So too, of course, were the other "reactionaries" mentioned above--the Nazis with their book burnings, Communists with their socialist realism and anti-aesthetics, and so forth and so on, to say nothing of (gulp again) modern-day religious extremists of all stripes, which we maybe better not get into.

What's suggested by all this is that they hate pop culture not because it's opposed to their values so much as it's competition for that irrationalist portion of the human spirit, and it has an amazing track record of winning. People complain about pop culture, of course, but if you see it as an alternative to, say, organized religion, it doesn't sound so bad. And it seems clear that art is spiritual in all sorts of ways, from its indefensible basis to its indescribable appeal to its tendency to rapture to the devotional practices of its adherants--that the word "cultish" appears in relation to pop-cultural artifacts so often is no accident. Being nerdy about a band serves similar spiritual needs to devoting yourself to Biblical study, and sitting around arguing about science fiction is not so far off from doing the same thing about the Torah. (Or what have you.) These seem like facile comparisons, but they're not--they're absolutely vital to understanding pop and the culture that contains, encourages, and eventually is overtaken by it. Pop takes all the irrational impulses of human nature, which have an unfortunate tendency to be violent and ugly, and makes them beautiful, or something like it: it makes them into play.

[1] Speaking of an iron cage, the irony behind this particular entry is that I had most of it mapped out in my head during a walk in the park during my lunch hour, but when I returned to the office--the place where art gets turned into bureaucracy, necessarily but not particularly pleasantly--it practically fled my mind.
[2] I honestly don't know why anyone would try historical determinism at this point--even if you refuse to learn from past practicioners everything from Schrodinger to a trip to the racetrack would seem to counsel against it.

2006-03-26T23:05:00.000-05:00

I Was Kicking Ass In My Mind

Saw V For Vendetta yesterday. It's a stupid movie on many levels, a fantasy for aesthetes (V being, after all, basically a geek, notable primarily for his taste and his dedication) about what would happen if they actually engaged in direct action. And what would happen, according to the movie, bears a remarkable resemblance to the amazing, choreographed drubbings boys give in their mind to tormentors, which should probably tell you something, especially given the fairly minimal role aesthetics generally plays in violent resistance. It's a fairly destructive fantasy, I think, steamrolling as it does the very real effects art can have on society in favor of constructing precisely the right set of circumstances to justify geeks' violent adolescent fantasies (adolescent fantasies, of course, being what constitute geek culture at any age). It's an odd phenomenon that when adherents of a particular artistic style, genre, or philosophy go to address political or societal concerns, they often construct a fictional world in which some variation on their particular adherence is the solution to whatever (exaggerated) problems exist. But this is just politics porn for non-politicos. It's wish fulfillment, and it doesn't really tell us much about the world we live in, even if some of those scenes near the end were pretty rousing. But oh, the music--first off, you have to tell me that it's not the Timberlake "Cry Me a River," which would have been much better, and secondly, dude risked his life to save a Cat Power album? I had much less respect for him.

Anyway, complaints about its stupidness aside, there was one detail that was really successful in evoking our current troubles in some sort of illuminating way, and that was the renditions. More specifically, it was the hoods used in the renditions. Sure, there's an obvious visceral kick to seeing people beat up, terrified, and getting taken away to a horrible fate, but before the hood comes out, it merely seems like action-movie masochism. But the sight of that familiar ornament really sent a shiver through me, and I can't really identify precisely why. Maybe because it both made sense in the context of the movie's world and was a familiar item from our world, and the fact that something of significance in a totalitarian dystopia had a one-to-one correspondence with something in my reality made clear just how bad that aspect of reality is. There are of course, differences, mainly in the fact that the English detainees in V were taken for thought crimes, whereas America is extracting people for crimes of association or even no crime at all, simply a bureaucratic snafu, which is dark comedy rather than V's simple terror, and another example of why political art so often suffers from a failure of imagination when it comes to the real world.[1] But otherwise, it's basically the same, and while we may have heard about what happens, what we're presented with in V is a visual representation of what it's like to be taken from your home by agents of the government, which is of course exactly what's happened to many of the people we've renditioned to black sites, or even just the people American troops and Iraqi security forces take from their homes on, apparently, a nightly basis. It rings true, and that's utterly terrifying.

They make that connection a bit too explicit later in the movie, but even that can be ignored, and we can see how powerful it is to trust your audience to make the connection. The fact that I was seeing a fictionalized depiction of what happens in the real world didn't really strike me until I sat down to write this entry, but simply seeing it gave me an utter chill. In its way, it's probably the most shocking thing I've seen in a piece of art in some time. We are attuned to find the familiar in the unfamiliar, and art is sometimes wary of making use of that. True, it can become an overused technique, and simple juxtaposition is a trademark laziness of beginning artistes, but finding an unobserved corner and reflecting light into it is something art can do really well, if it wants to.

[1] Also another example of why Brazil is one of the best pieces of political art ever made.

2006-03-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

I honestly don't mean to make fun of these ladies, but come on.

Updates

Since, as stated below, I know everyone cares deeply about my critical omnibus, the debate over the sexy continues at Hillary's, who, for the record, I have not even met. I have refined my position to "There is a decent bit of wholesome sexuality in music, but there is not very much dirty sexuality, and if you're like Mike, you would like there to be more of that." Also, I would like to point out that Prince is not even half dirty sexuality, there's all those slow jamz.

Also also, if you yourself would like to apply for the below-mentioned reality show, here is the application. Best question: "DESCRIBE YOUR HOMETOWN. IN GENERAL, DO YOU FEEL POSITIVELY OR NEGATIVELY TOWARD IT?" Yeah, I hate my little podunk hometown! No one there understands me! I want to work for Rolling Stone so I can escape my boring life and start doing press junkets with Audioslave!

2006-03-23T15:25:00.000-05:00

Gunning for the Santino slot

TRANSCRIPT OF MY AUDITION TAPE FOR THAT ROLLING STONE/MTV REALITY SHOW THING

[sits down in swively chair in front of computer] Um, hi, my name's Mike, and I'm applying for this reality show thing. I'm a writer, I've been one for a while, I used to write like stories and plays and things but now I mostly just do non-fiction, mainly music writing, though a little bit of everything really, and ideally I'd like to be a food critic ha ha ha. I love eating.

I've written for a bunch of places, my college paper and then the Interboro Rock Tribune and Farenheit in San Diego and now this paper in Athens, GA called Flagpole. But the thing you really need to know about me is my blog. It's called clap clap blog, and it's linked, like, everywhere. I'm fucking famous on the internet. On the internet they call me Eppy, because it's all about, like, throwing off your old identity and forging a new one. See, here's a picture of me at a blogger brunch. That shit was like the conference at Yalta. Fucking high-powered, man. Wave of the fucking future. Except that nothing, you know, got done. But that's just how we work, you know? We don't sit around and talk about ideas, or, like, our personal lives or anything, like we're friends or whatever. We talk business, because you gotta get that hustle on if you're gonna get shit done. And man, lemme tell you, we are gonna get shit done. Fucking print now is all like the fucking Pennysaver now or something, a total joke. They don't know what's up. They're not telling me shit I don't already know.

[visible edit]

I mean, except for Rolling Stone. That's the one exception, you know? It's still leading the way. I would love to work for that place.

[visible edit]

I guess as a writer I really think of myself as a public intellectual, you know? Not like one of those pretentious ones but a populist one that swears a lot but still talks about ideas or whatever. I like journalism and all, but I think of it as really one tool in my bag. That's why I like writing on the internet so much, you know? It really lets me produce like a personal canon.

I'm interested in making connections across genres, from music to fiction to television to food to whatever. Aesthetics and like that. My chosen subject is pop as it exists in the world. I want to show how pop as a model can be productive. I want to bring about the new world order, or I guess just encourage what's already on its way to reach full fruition. This is the fucking way things are going, and, like...

[falls off chair]

[visible edit]

Um, what else. I'm not really good at living...with people, one time I was living with these girls and one of them kept leaving the phone in her room so I pissed on her pillow and turned it over and I don't think she ever knew. Um...I like my personal space and my personal time. But, you know, once I'm social I'm tons of fun. I have a kind of offensive sense of humor but I think people know I'm, like, kidding, because I'm such a nice guy. They say I'm very sweet. You can tell I'm nice because my hair's poofy, see? [grabs hair] I get along really well with girls, but I have a hard time putting up with people who are, um, stupider than me, or pretentious, or rude. But I'm really open-minded.

Uh, yeah, I live in Brooklyn. Broooooooklyn! I hang out in the Lower East Side a lot. I've never had like a traumatic addiction or anything but I can pretend to. "Oh, sorry guys, I gotta go to a NA meeting." "Oh man, I am having a really hard time not doing addictive drugs right now." "Boy, you guys sure are lucky I'm clean now, because I would totally be stealing your shit and selling it for drugs. I would probably be smashing things because I would be so crazy." See, that was a little sample of that offensive humor I was talking about, ha ha ha.

So yeah, that's me. I would like to work for Rolling Stone because they still publish long pieces and I could finally get my whole philosophy of life into the public consciousness, because it's going to take like 20,000 words. We can do a multi-parter or something. Um...I guess that's it. Hope you pick me!

[shot of subway train]

[shot of me typing]

[shot of my belly]

2006-03-22T11:33:00.000-05:00

My brief, list-based SXSW summation is up at Flagpole if you want to read--it tips my hand somewhat, but I'll try and flesh things out over the next few days. To wit:

SXSW Wrapup #1: The Sexy

I finally got to see Of Montreal, and--let's be clear about this before proceeding--they were very good, and I would like to see them again, if for no other reason than to re-experience the awesome keyboard solo. But as I stood there listening to them, something struck me about the particularities of their sound, a particularity that I think is shared by a lot of bands these days. Indiedom's embrace of dancability has been widely publicized, whether they're taking inspiration from latter-day dance music or just the general cheery grooves of 70s pop, especially--in my mind at least--ELO.

But dance music, to my mind, should be at least a little bit sexy, and there does not seem to be a whole lot of sexy in indiedom today, at least not beyond the superficial "ooh the lead singer's hot" kind of sexy. There are not, in other words, many albums I would like to fuck to. (Make out to maybe, but fuck, not so much.) And thus my semi-rhyming aphorism: prowl and pounce, don't just bounce. Of Montreal's songs were dominated by a bounce that was dancable but so jaunty it was almost musichall, and it did not seem to stop so much. I hear the bounce in a lot of other bands, too--the Shins springs to mind first but there's also the Decemberists and Belle & Sebastian and Love is All and lots and lots more. But bounce isn't sexy--bounce is walking. Sexy has a little stutter in its step, a little hitch in its stride, just enough to throw you off and keep you looking. Steady as she goes is not the rhythm of sex--it's irregular, like the "robots fucking" break on Beck's Midnite Vultures.

The alternative, of course, would be those bands whose sense of dancability descends from disco, new wave, electro, and (to a much, much lesser extent) house. I think the "originators" here, the Rapture (who I owe you a big piece on), actually succeeded in making a fairly sexy album, one that's even arguably more sexy than the the ostensibly non-indie LCD Soundsystem album. But almost every other band that could be described as "dance-punk" seems to have taken that jittery tendency in Prince and amped it up to a full-on spazz, turning the disco rhythm up until it loses any swagger it ever had. Prince's little outbursts are sexy because, again, they're little stutters, small interruptions. But a sustained spazz isn't, as I think its practicioners might envision, appealing in a sort of pentecoastal ecstacy way, but just spazzy. (Note: I'm sure this does not prevent them from getting laid, but I also kind of doubt they listen to their own music while fucking.) Alternately, they're taking the shiny surfaces of disco and electro at face value, amping up the kitch while losing the groove.

This is all immensely ironic, because the reason dance had to be brought back into rock was ostensibly the 90s. But check out "Smells Like Teen Spirit" again: Kurt might have wanted to use ugly girls as cheerleaders in the video, but the strippers they ended up using are dancing sexy for a reason. Krist is playing the bassline under the verse like it's fucking "Billie Jean"'s panther-crawl, and that's what makes the chorus so big--it hasn't been merely bouncing along, but tension's been building, and all that loudness is even more of a release. Nirvana may have hated Guns 'n' Roses, but that band's rhythm section fucking swung like hell, and there was still an expectation at the time that rock should serve as the soundtrack for hot girls to dance to. I'm not quite sure who to blame for that disappearing, as I suspect it's late-90s grunge inheritors misinterpreting the past, but just for convenience's sake, let's say Pearl Jam. (Sorry guys.) And as much as I hate K Records and Calvin Johnson, there's no denying the sexuality there, even if it was a creepy sexualty. The muddy bass sound of the 90s is annoying but it also encouraged that sort of creep when it wasn't just rocking out to punk rock eighth notes all dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga. And this isn't even taking into account people like PJ Harvey, who were both sexy themselves and made very sexy music, or Kim Deal, or Kim Gordon.

So yes, while there was a lot of sexuality on display at SXSW, there was not much actual sexy, and there isn't much in most ofthe albums I get these days, except for the electro stuff, which I think despite its popularity in music crit circles does not have much traction in the indie mainstream. And even in the mainstream, bands that have a sexy image still don't make sexy music. (The Killers could make sexy music if they weren't so damn ridiculous--which is one of the things I love about them, but still, I think that whole "I got soul but I'm not a soldier" rondelay might really break the mood.) I don't think this should be too hard to remedy--it just requires bands going against a lot of the instincts they've inherited from their most recent influences, like hardcore, jambands (how a genre can be so enamoured of funk but so relentlessly unsexy is beyond me), grunge-as-an-abstraction, and twee. You have to play a little slower, swing a little more, not let the easy signifiers of sexy stand in for the real thing. You can do it guys--I believe in you.

2006-03-22T11:26:00.000-05:00

Paperback Reader

You know, I expected this article, headlined "Literary Novels Going Straight to Paperback," to be disheartening, another sign of the decline of books etc. etc., but it's actually a really good idea. There are at least 5 books I can think of off the top of my head right now that I'd like to buy if they were out in paperback, but by the time they are out in paperback, I will probably have forgotten that I wanted to read them. It's just really hard to justify spending $25 on a hardcover book I may not actually like or even read when technically I could get it for free from the library. Paperbacks cut a nice middle path where I'm more likely to actually read the book since I've committed some money to it, but I don't feel like a chump if it turns out to be not my thing.
So bravo. I don't understand the economics of the publishing industry in the painfully in-depth way I understand the economics of the record industry, but if they can get it to work, I think it's a great idea.

2006-03-21T17:22:00.000-05:00

I will be with you in a minute, but in the meantime, read Cyn's article Some Advice For The Gentlemen: 8 Ways Not To Pick Up A Lady while you wait? Here is an excerpt:

7. Spouting your bullshit theories about life and acting like you'd been doing her a favor by sleeping with her because you're so much older and wiser. I'm going to let you in on a little secret here: I am much, much smarter than you. This is why I'm not impressed when you're all, “Entropy, man. Everything tends towards chaos,” as though this is an actual explanation for why you don't have a job. Maybe some people fall for it when you misuse big science words, but I'm a grad student. Faking understanding of science and math is what I do for a living.

2006-03-21T12:28:00.000-05:00

See, it's crap like this that makes me want to start a blog solely dedicated to reviewing people's sub-dick-joke conception of political humor and/or political art, but that would require me to watch that show where Geena Davis is the President every week, and I can't imagine putting myself through that. (Thank got Love Monkey was canceled.) I mean, wow, making fun of the President and American Idol? Shit, all you need in there are some Paris Hilton jokes and you've got the zeitgeist on a tether, boy howdy!

2006-03-21T11:10:00.000-05:00

Nothin But The Hits

Can I give you some advice? Don't listen to Bartok's first string quartet on the way to work. Oh, it might seem harmless, but it turns a group of normal, neutral commuters into a death-train of heartbreak and despair. Think that guy's just reading the paper? When those low harmonies start to creep up, you'll be convinced he's on his way to kill himself just to escape his memories of war atrocities and the woman he loved who died in a gondola accident.

But here's some slightly different Bartok for you:

Béla Bartók - String Quartet No. 3 - Seconda parte - Allegro (Nova Quartet)

It occurred to me while listening to this that being a classically trained composer is actually not bad preparation for being a pop songwriter. Writing a three-minute string quartet movement actually requires way more invention than writing a three-minute pop song, just because repetition is so rarely used in classical music. You have to be constantly coming up with variations, and those variations tend to morph into newness over time. In other words, classical composition requires you to come up with nonstop hooks, as I hope the Bartok movement above demonstrates. If we accept that pop is like classical in that both are basically frames that allow endless variation within (and I think we should), the problem is not that pop is inherently more vital than classical, because it's a neutral system, a delta to which any number of influences flow to be synthesized and reappropriated. As per the Levels of Pop Classification System (additional visualization here), the problem is that pop's feeders, its tributaries, are simply more active than classical's are. Both are built around similar frameworks, it's just that there's been more rain in the pop system of late.

2006-03-20T10:59:00.000-05:00

Whoof. Hello folks. I am back from SXSW and boy is my frontal lobe tired. I do have many things to say, but I have even more things to do, and I left my notebook at home, so you'll just have to wait. In my brief lookings-around I feel there is so much to get caught up on, but in the meantime you could do worse than reading Alta's piece on Darwin and marriage.

2006-03-08T12:03:00.000-05:00

Three reviews in Flagpole for ya: Goldfrapp, who I actually came around to liking in the process of reviewing; KT Tunstall, which I wrote about 4 months ago but stand by; and The Robocop Kraus, whose nationality I bet you totally can't guess, and which I've been meaning to talk to you about for a while, but gotta get some things off my desk first.

Also, Stylus jukebox, notable mainly for me being bitchy about Jenny Lewis (although when I read myself calling Tunstall "Lilith Fair-esque," I realize that's what they're both doing!) and me, along with everyone else, gushes mightily about Marit Larsen. William has kindly edited out the bit where I compare the piano to Elvis Costello rather than ABBA.

2006-03-07T15:16:00.000-05:00

Like Smart Biker Chicks

I can imagine that if you didn't actually see the episode in question, you might have reacted to my mention below of Sebastian Bach covering "Hollaback Girl" with something like revulsion. But oh no: oh man, it's really good, and you can watch it at Recidivism. (Thanks Omar!) Though I love Gilmore Girls like a baby animal with whipped cream on top, they've always had slightly questionable musical morals; the indie-centric, anti-disco rants by my fictional crush Lane were apparently heartfelt on the writers' part.

But there's no irony here, no condescension, although I suppose a big part of the appeal of Sebastian Bach and the genre from whence he came is the total lack of irony. He delivers it straight, and really well, considering, you know, it's a Gwen Stefani song. The arrangement is also effective in an unflashy way, and the whole choice of cover is remarkably ahead of the zeitgeist, especially given that it was recorded months ago--for all they knew, by the time it aired every indie band in existence could've covered it. (Although I guess that was unlikely, given the lack of guitars.) As with any good cover, it partially demonstrates just how good the original song was, but it also maybe draws some interesting parallels between the stripped-down Neptunes aesthetic and the similarly stripped-down rock-band model.

The whole scene is great, really, with a bunch of great lines, but that cover, man, that's really good.

(Image from here, which is funny if you translate it.)

2006-03-06T17:46:00.000-05:00

I should mention that if you're looking for something about Mutual Appreciation that actually, uh, talks about the movie in any real way, you should check out Stylus' review, which is very positive, probably moreso than I would be, but certainly more thorough.

I had various quips and things ready for today, but then they did not actually look so funny when I wrote them out, so they did not get posted. Don't you hate it when that happens?

2006-03-03T13:53:00.000-05:00

It Won't Be Awkward, It'll Be Fun

Back before the sickness hit all concerned, I went over to Matthew's to watch a movie called Mutual Appreciation. (The guy who made it also made Funny Ha Ha, which you may be familiar with; I was not.) It's about an indie rocker who moves to Brooklyn from Boston, lives in a room in someone else's apartment while the room's regular occupant is away, and hangs out with two friends who are also recent Boston-Brooklyn transplants while he tries to get a band together and get some action. It is a good movie, maybe more so at the beginning than at the end, but then it may also have just been too long for my tastes, or the shots were too long for my short-attention-span brain. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that considering it's the kind of movie I don't really care about that much (a "comedy of manners") I liked it a lot, and it's really stayed with me.

I found myself laughing quite frequently during the movie, even at parts that I don't necessarily think were meant to be laughed at. Not in that "so bad they're hilarious" way, but with a combination of recognition and surprise that someone had so accurately depicted something I'd seen many times before but never on a screen. (That involuntary exclamation of surprise and familiarity is the basis of most comedy, although I think I was feeling especially giggly that night.) There was a remarkably true-to-life scene depicting the main character walking into a party at someone's apartment that had long since died down, with everyone else continuing jokes that had begun many drinks ago and him trying to fit in; there was the scene in which he auditioned a drummer and said he didn't really want him to do too much, he was going for a sort of pop thing; and the best scene in the movie, one depicting a phone call between the main character and his father (who appears to be sitting in some sort of private office, in nice clothes) that should be familiar to anyone who has or knows anyone who has moved to a big city and had a little trouble getting started. The dad expresses concern about his choices, the son tries to put a happy face on it even though he's not doing so hot, the dad talks about money, the son talks about his "music career," an expression he wouldn't use sincerely in any other context. But instead of cutting between the characters so you hear each of their lines, as is traditional, we stay on one character for a series of exchanges, because the whole scene is so familiar, there's no need to hear the responses.

It struck me that for a movie that was ostensibly capturing the zeitgeist (indie-rock Williamsburg in the early 00s), it was remarkably vacant. There wasn't much vitality to anything that was going on, in part because it felt sparsely populated, and this was a big part of what made it so true-to-life. At this point the way most scenes get depicted, if they get depicted at all, isn't in some sweeping, systematic way. What we know at the time usually comes from scattered profiles of various institutions (people, venues, artists, styles), primary documentary evidence like fliers or recordings of performances or pictures, or interviews, and what we know in retrospect seems to almost always come from oral histories. But the contemporary coverage only gives scattered glimpses, and oral histories are colored by selective memories, with the participants inevitably more interested in bringing up old grudges or reliving past triumphs than in presenting an accurate picture of daily life, which is, of course, the really important thing. In the end, it seems like what’s best at depicting the truth about a particular time and place is fiction.

This might seem like a poetic truism, but maybe it'll carry more weight if I admit that I once was not particularly enamored of the idea. In my righteous crusade against realism, I had convinced myself it was such a sham, such a drag on the artistic production of our culture, that it should not be admitted at all, that in its quest to colonize our tastes it had managed to suppress our imaginations, and that the proper role of fiction was to use these imaginative powers to write about things that explicitly did not exist. This by no means had to be some sort of fantasy or sci-fi deal, but I was so repulsed by the spate of confessional literature that I thought it necessary to get as far away from that as possible.

In retrospect, I think that you could chalk this up in part to me not being the best writer and not understanding that simply because a setting or even plot came from your own experience did not necessarily mean that there was no imagination involved. Indeed, the way in which imagination is most necessary is in imagining the thoughts and actions and words of the characters, in getting into that heads via using and thus evoking empathy which, I am told, is one of the great benefits of fiction. (I do not read fiction for the purposes of empathy--I've got empathy out the yin-yang already, thanks--I read fiction for pleasure, but maybe in a few years I will be embarrassed for thinking this, too.)

If there was something that got me to finally break free of this idea, it was David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. It appeared to be the kind of thing I was looking for, being set, as it was, in an imagined near-future America which had been through a political upheaval and now included, among other things, a Quebecois terrorist organization made up entirely of men in wheelchairs and a section of the Northeast which had been cordoned off to serve as a giant garbage dump and through which packs of giant feral hamsters roamed. But where a lot of books with similar characteristics had left me cold (I won't name names), this was enormously more satisfying, and I recognized that this lay, at heart, in the sections of essentially realist fiction clearly drawn from some aspect of Wallace's actual human experience. Sure, I liked it better with the giant feral hamsters, but it would have worked even without it. It all showed me that you could take your own experience and transform it into fiction that not only presented various arguments about the world and the things in it (although on the matter of what exactly those points are I apparently differ from some of Wallace's other readers) but also depicted human existence in a way you'd never quite understood before but which immediately registered as true. I am, I think, less convinced than a lot of fiction's other partisans on the matter of how much its ability to depict truth has an actual effect on the world, but as someone who recognized the little burst of serotonin that newly acquired understanding imparts, it now seemed pointless to deny the value of a well-crafted depiction of what already exists.

Which brings us, of course, to James Frey. (Did you like how I buried that after 1000 or so words about a totally unrelated movie so that you wouldn't go "ooh, pfft, James Frey, I'm so tired of reading about that dude"? I was going to put this in a footnote, but then it would've stood out too much.)

When the whole thing broke, I was not inclined, as apparently others were, to denounce Frey himself in terms generally reserved for people who drown their children in bathtubs. Partially this was because I had already gotten my mental denouncing out of the way when the book first came out, as it seemed an oddly dudeish variation on confessional memoirs, and Frey himself had transparently revealed himself as the kind of Napoleonic-complex'd sniveler that spawn like head lice on internet message boards, a creature so blinded by the allure of superficial transgression that he misses his self-awareness for the trees. I always assumed people were being more than a little disingenuous in getting so elaborately worked up about a memoirist embellishing his life, as I always thought that was an accepted part of the genre. But in retrospect, what's most notable about the whole affair is not the fabrications but the fact that apparently millions of people really do care about issues of veracity in literary non-fiction. I mean, I recognize why plagiarism or lyin' is such a serious charge and all, but whenever these things come up, as they periodically do, they always struck me as a bit of a tempest in a teapot, certainly not an issue of interest to a national television audience. Who knew? I'm sure there were extenuating factors, Ms. Winfrey chief among them but certainly comeuppance ranking there too, but what was basically an academic issue was apparently enthralling to the general public, and it wasn't even enthralling to me.

My reaction to this ran along the lines of what Sasha had to say here--I once wrote a typically collegiate piss-and-vinegar essay about the idea of writers exploiting themselves (as opposed to exploiting other people by "stealing" their stories or characters), and it has always seemed to me that just as much blame lies with an audience hungry for narratives of real lives they can devour and discard, with nothing but the out-of-fashion imagination to replace it, as did with the authors who generated them, to say nothing of the grasping-at-straws publishing industry for so vigorously pushing confessional memoirs. (Were this that kind of essay, I would bring up JT LeRoy and how confessional memoir was quite the facilitator in that case, too, but talking about JT LeRoy has always struck me as a bad idea.) It's worrisome that a book with a trumpeted correspondence to a story outside itself has more traction than a book mostly imagined, not just because it represents a privileging of something art isn't really about all that much, but because it represents a consumption, a taking-up of aspects of someone's life, whereas a creative work is just that. And ultimately, non-fiction and fiction are both literature, and so issues of authenticity are as peripheral as they are to pop music: when you're inside the text, it doesn't really matter if it's "real" or not, because the text itself is real, and that's what you're experiencing.

But we differ, or at least I differ with the Platonic foil here, when it comes to the question of why these narratives are so alluring to us--why we seem to have a never-ending appetite for them. (Certainly it's not fair to pin it on poor, maligned reality TV--never has something suffered more for its name! I thought we all agreed by now though that everyone knows reality TV is not particularly realistic, and that's really a big part of the fun.) I think the issue of truth is really just incidental, that it is, as usual, a mask for something else. Most people aren't seeking out the authentic because they're somehow repulsed by the unreal; that's just the hippies and college students. Most people are quite comfortable with, and even greatly enjoy, the obviously artificial and constructed. Certainly you'd think our country's recent political history would demonstrate that the body politic has a much more postmodern view of things than they are generally given credit for.

No, the issue isn't that people are embracing things for their supposed reality; it's that the things they are embracing in this way present an entirely negative view of reality, a tragic one, filled with suffering and horror and debasement. People aren't reading memoirs of the happy and successful, they're reading memoirs by people who have had really horrible things happen to them. We're not interested in the backstories of artists who have had easy lives, we're interested in ones that have been abused or poor or both. The big sellers when it comes to true stories are about suffering, abuse, neglect, addiction, prostitution, violence, destitution, degradation.

What's the why here? What causes us to associate truth and realness with all the negative aspects of life? I'm tempted to ascribe it to our prurient interests: we want to hear about sex, death, violence, and degradation, because naughty things are fun--transgression is fun--but if they're made up, that seems icky; for someone to imagine the kind of things that happen in confessional memoirs indicates a sick mind, and we don't want to be associated with that. Similarly, if someone writes about these things but they've happened to someone else, it seems exploitive.

But if you can find someone who has done all these naughty things and get them to tell the tale, then it's OK, and it's OK because it's true, because then, we're not sating our appetites for the forbidden, but we're educating ourselves about the dark side of life. We are not gawkers, not voyeurs, but simply realists: we understand that bad things happen in life, and we face up to that. And in the end, there's always redemption, reform, rehab, which makes it not lurid, but cautionary. It's not that we're getting a thrill from reading about blood and fucking, we are raising our hands to heaven and saying, "There but for the grace of God…"

So what's the why behind that? Why do we regard bad things as somehow more true than anything else? Again, I can't be sure, but my instinct is that it comes back to the college students and the hippies, because they're the ones who decide what we read when we're kids. Think about it: if there's a genre of literature more relentlessly full of suffering than confessional memoirs, it's acclaimed children's literature. People are always dying in really sad ways, or being imprisoned or tortured. Books like that--and don't get me wrong here, I read and enjoyed my share of 'em back in the day--work on kids' natural sensitivity to injustice by giving them a kind of unfairness porn. This is not presenting an accurate picture of the world: this is finding and tapping a fairly primal part of kids' brains.

When people insist on the validity and even primacy of pop, it's not just about getting people to listen to Britney Spears who wouldn't otherwise. It is, in my view anyway, an argument against the dominant cultural mode, which seems unquestionably to be tragedy. Comedy is nice, but it won't ever win an Oscar; sad endings are more real than happy endings; boys with guitar singing about their lost loves are more real than girls with producers singing about their lost loves. Sadness has a strangehold on truth, but that makes no sense. I've gone on elsewhere about why all this is bad (I think whenever a negative viewpoint is considered inherently more truthful than a positive one, there are troubling implications for politics), but I think in this case it's self-evident.

Which brings us back, of course, to fiction. Because if you want an accurate view of the world--if you are a "realist"--a first-person perspective is no good, no matter how much it's grounded in actual experience, because it's limited. It can only tell you about itself. Fiction, though--artificial, constructed fiction--isn't limited by anything, in theory, although it, too, has a tendency to conform to the dominant cultural mode. But for that which manages to break free, which manages to resist the temptations thrown at us not by the impure world but by holier-than-thou cultural assumptions, there is something like understanding waiting at the end, and, much as I like voyeurism and being naughty, that seems like a more positive goal any day.

2006-03-02T15:38:00.000-05:00

The most disheartening conversation I have overheard all day

"Oh yeah, Elastica, I remember them!"
"And Hole, they used to be really big."
"Yeah, and Soundgarden..."

(spoken by, I think, interns, or at least very young employees.)

2006-03-01T11:10:00.000-05:00

I can't think of how to do this other than Recidivism-style, so: a mouthful of features. (Thanks Tasha!)

Also, speaking of, if anyone has an MP3 of Sebastian Bach covering "Hollaback Girl" from Gilmore Girls last night, hook me up. Best scene ever.

2006-03-01T10:57:00.000-05:00

Beard + Glasses = Competency

I read the NYT Magazine article about the Toronto indie-rock scene (which Carl is quoted in) and man, I had a hard time getting through it. I had nothing in particular against those bands--I was even starting to grow fond of some of 'em, especially Metric--but sure seems like nothing sours me on a band faster than hearing about their ideals. What was particularly icky was the insistence upon the quintessentially indie (and wrong) idea that making music with your childhood friends is a higher pursuit than the alternative--indie and wrong because it presumes that everyone is basically an equally good musician and what matters is the social connections. But that's not true--some people are simply better at music (or, OK, particular kinds of music) than others, and they themselves can produce better or worse work based on the people they make music with. I was fortunate enough to meet some folks in college I have a strong musical connection with, but I've also been in lots of situations where I've had a strong musical connection with people I have no social connection with, and inevitably it doesn't work out--they don't have the social pressure on them to come to rehearsals, mainly, but there are a host of other little factors, too. Maybe I'm the one being idealistic in insisting that the musical connection should be enough, that social concerns shouldn't matter, but it still seems weird to me to insist that the kid who grew up in a town where no one else liked the music she liked is now doomed to making a less pure music than the one who grew up in a nice suburb somewhere. Maybe it's just that a kid like that gets used to working alone anyway.

I was also fairly skeeved out by the ability of all involved to apparently take the notion of an indie label seriously (although maybe it didn't help me that both SST and K Records were invoked, labels run by self-important, purist dicks who produced nothing of consequence except maybe the Minutemen), a notion that becomes more understandable when it's revealed that the only folks involved who have any label experience at all used to work at EMI--shades of Love Monkey! The grass is always greener, I guess. I've never understood the idea that ethical business practices somehow depend on who you do business with, rather than how you do business; certainly I'm familiar with not a few truly independent record labels whose business partners are models of ethicality whereas the labels themselves are not the kind of place you'd leave your grandmother for any extended period of time. (I mean this literally.)

Don't get me wrong--everything I've read about Toronto outside this piece makes it sound like a perfectly nice place, and I'm sure there was a lot of distortion going on for the benefit of Times readers (or, more likely, editors). Still, I'd hate to think what ideas aspiring indie rockers outside "Torontopia" are getting from all this. Brr.

EX POST FACTO DISCLAIMER: I wrote this post at 2 am, and in the cold harsh light of morning, I think it sounds considerably more grumpy than I actually feel about the subject. Still, that's what blogs are for, I guess.

2006-02-27T18:54:00.000-05:00

Is Depression Delusional?

For all the verbiage in your archetypical indie comic--let's just use Chris Ware as the best example ever of this--there seems to be an unasked question that's posed over and over again by the art: is depression delusional? It's something that could stand to be asked more often in other venues, because the answer would seem to be kinda yes. Depression is something that, more than anything else, changes your perceptions--it takes an object, a person, an activity, or an idea that you previously had a positive or neutral attitude toward and turns it negative, and no matter how much you might try to rationally convince yourself it's not true, it's a perception you can't shake. It overtakes your mind and refuses to leave. You perceive things--emotions, value judgments, opinions, sure, but things nevertheless--that aren't there, or that probably aren't there anyway. And it does this in a way that seems like a veil has been lifted, that a curtain has been drawn, rather than that it's simply another overlay. Before, life seemed worth living, now it doesn't, and not because anything happened--life seems like it was never worth living, or that it hasn't been worth living for some time now. You were a fool for thinking otherwise.

And so while the text of a comic might stick pretty strictly to reality, the visuals depicting said reality quite frequently diverge by depicting the interior life of the narrator or characters and then taking those to a certain conclusion while the text continues as before. It's a reliable, if greatly embellished, model of that interior life, but the way it's presented has a physicality that mere thoughts do not. This is one of the things comics do well, of course, playing with the reality of visuals, lacking as they do the full real-world correspondence of the movies but still having a lot more than regular ol' words. It registers as a passing thought but then when you turn back it's still there. The text is presenting these ideas as transitory but the art is drawing them out in such detail that they acquire a realistic force, and in this way are analagous to the "restless thoughts" syndrome of depressive lying in bed, unable to sleep--modeling it without resorting to the literalism that would require a lot more repetition and self-centered bathos than good art can support. (Most indie comics already pushing at the acceptable limits of self-centered bathos as they are.) When a depressive thinks about these negative perceptions, this is what they do--spinning out imagined situations into the worst possible conclusion, the effort of doing so imprinting in their brains, as if they were studying this worst-case scenario for a test, to the degree that it can seem, in some subconscious way, as if it actually happened, or actually could happen, and this perception overriding any subsequent ones in a frankly delusional way.

This is in its way not unlike religious belief, and more specifically like the similarly unacknowledged push-pull between "good Christianity" and "bad Christianity." Religion is a bit of a delusion too, although of course putting it that way makes it sound like a negative. Still, it's essentially an occupying metaphor that colors the way you see the world. This is something believers are happy to talk about: the way the world looks different after you accept God into your life. But it seems like American evangelicals seem to have a sort of "bad Christianity" going on that's in its way oppositional to "good Christianity" (St. Augustine, tortured faith, scholarly theologism, etc.) in the way that mainstream comics are oppositional to indie comics, or indeed the way mainstream and indie values are seen to be oppositional from the indie perspective. "Good Christianity" is valued, if it is valued at all (and I like to think that it is, though that may itself be delusional), for its acknowledgment of a broken world, of original sin, of human suffering as something that needs to be justified, not excused; lessened, not deducted for year-end faith tax purposes. American evalgelicals seem to work around this by making faith personal, a conversation between yourself and the godhead that acknowledges no one's suffering but your own, and whose ultimate goal is redemption, not acceptance.

But it's a false dichotomy, of course; seeing one view of faith as more legitimate than the other simply because it smiles less is indicative of a reductive worldview and is at least as delusional as the depressive view, although oddly enough this anti-depressive statement is in its own way just as depressive-delusional: the revelation that things are bad is not correct, the one that things are good is. Neither is necessarily true, and this is why faith seems problematic.

Declaring something delusional takes a whole bunch of issues of responsibility off the table. When your mental illness is delusional--that is, when you have full faith in the perceptions that you're basing your actions on--you become a much more passive actor, something that you'd probably want if you're depressive. If your mental illness is one that's not delusional, like, say, Tourette's Syndrome, you become open to charges of fakery and you start to think, ironically enough, that you might actually be delusional--that you are imagining your non-delusional disease. Faith seems easier, but of course when you put it in terms of mental illness, the two are clearly not comparable. Depression or delusion under this scheme is much closer to the "bad Christianity" of unquestioning faith, and the "good Christianity" of wrestling with issues of belief is, oddly enough, not depressive at all. It's declasse--pretentious is maybe more specific--to worry about the reality not of artists but of the world. Luckily, there are backhanded ways of getting at it that artists are deploying all the time.

2006-02-27T18:28:00.000-05:00

What is that little freaky thing?

Usually by this point in the year, I've discovered a few things that I really regret leaving out of my best-of lists for the previous year. But right now, there's only one thing I wish I'd put in, and it is, naturally, a song from a cartoon, in this case an episode of Kim Possible that used American Idol in a plot point for a very Brain-like evil villain's attempt to rule the world. Kim is supposed to sing a song that will win the competition and thus foil the plot, but she is otherwise occupied and so her sidekick, Ron Stoppable, sings a song about his pet instead. His pet is a naked mole rat, and so he does a rap about it, with said rap also fulfilling a creative writing assignment he's been procrastinating about.

It should be an absolute bomb, but for some reason, it's not. It's very teenpop, which is good, and the hook's actually fairly fantastic, with the whole thing just being so comfortably silly that to me it sounds like an even better example of this whole quality-fake-rap thing than the SNL skit everyone went nuts for a while back. (It also helps that it reminds me a lot of DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince.) It seems to come from someone who has an understanding of hip-hop production basics and then decided to consciously avoid most of them. There's also something oddly compelling about the way he delivers the chorus.

Above is the best option I could find on youtube, which is sadly not how it actually appeared in the episode; there are some pretty priceless cuts and visuals in that which are lost here, so if you've got a chance to see it, it's totally worthwhile.

2006-02-24T11:43:00.000-05:00

brave young bachelors

She Gave Orders

I was thinking about posting the Furnaces' "Teach Me Sweetheart," but Stereogum beat me to it. You should give it a listen if you haven't already. It's an interesting case study when you compare it with the guitar-only version they did on the radio a while back--whereas they had a tendency with the other songy-songs on Bitter Tea to dress 'em up in maybe a few more things than they needed, or to deliberately avoid using traditional arrangements, arguably to the songs' detriment at times, "Sweetheart" clearly needed a little something, since while it does have a very nice melody, it's pretty much one chord a bar, starting right at the beginning of the bar, in two four-chord patterns. So most of the odd little noisy bits they perhaps overuse on the rest of the album fit right in here, especially that high-pitched little backwards loop that runs through most of the song (and is kinda Beatlesy), and that allows all the fancy variations (different keyboard noises, subtle percussion changes, guitar noodling) to come off as much less showy. It all sorta fits here, and while a big part of what they're doing involves things not fitting, when that final little flourish comes at the end, it really hits. This is a different kind of pop purity than on Gallowsbird's, but it's still quite a jolt.

ADDENDUM: I'm quite a fan of "Borneo," too.

2006-02-24T11:25:00.000-05:00

Power to the People

We've all gotten sick of hearing a certain song on the radio. I first heard Ne-Yo's "So Sick" for the inagural edition of the new Stylus singles jukebox, and I liked it fine. But then, a few weeks later, I started hearing it on the radio. All. The. Time. So now, of course, I hate it, and I really wish the radio would stop playing it.

So I decided to do something about it.

See, it's not really worth bitching to the radio stations, because they are many, and you are one--plus, they are getting perks to play what they're playing, and you are offering none. But there is one person who could instantly cut down on radio play for a given single, and that is the record company executive who is directing radio promotion efforts for that song. In this case, the guilty party would appear to be Island / Def Jam's head of promo, a probably very nice man named Greg Thompson.

Now, I could publish his e-mail and ask you all to bombard him. But that would be super-rude and probably get me in some sort of trouble. So instead, I have created a petition.

Here is the petition statement:

We, the undersigned, totally think Ne-Yo's "So Sick" is a decent song. Cool, laid-back, catchy, all those kinds of things. The thing is, it's on the radio all the goddamned time. Seriously, on more than one occasion we have turned from one station playing it to another station that's also playing it. While we admire this sort of crossover success, it's getting a little ridiculous. And so we petition you, Greg Thompson, head of radio promotion for Island / Def Jam, to stop getting radio stations to play the song so much. We're not saying totally pull it--I'm sure if we heard it once in a while (and, just to stress, we are sporadic radio listeners at best) we would mildly enjoy it. But you are wasting your money paying for all these spins. We understand you want to break this dude, but why not play that Ghostface song he sings on instead? We would totally enjoy that. But we feel it is in our mutual interest for you to cut down on the radio play: you will save money, and we will not want to write you snotty petitions like this anymore. We all promise to download it from iTunes or something. Seriously. Please.

Go here to sign it. When it's done, I'll send it to Greg.

2006-02-17T11:16:00.000-05:00

Oops, forgot to mention that I have two reviews in Flagpole this week. One is of the Future Retro comp and the other is a probably needlessly mean review of Boysetsfire, but man that album pissed me off.

The difference between simply having a sore throat and having an actual cold is that when you try and write something intelligable, it's like playing tennis with a ball of wet newspaper. Still, I'll try and get something up today, weather permitting.

2006-02-15T15:47:00.000-05:00

A spring wind of marketization

I am currently reading a book called China Pop, which is about Chinese pop culture. It is very good so far, but unfortunately is from 1995, so I'm treating it as a sort of a historical document; if anyone knows of a more recent book covering the subject, please let me know.

In the first chapter, the author talks a lot about how Chinese culture changed in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. She seems to see the modern Chin as springing directly from that event--not just the human rights abuses and political repression aspects but the massive economic growth and urban development too--and has a lot of good anecdotes about elites who felt crushed by it, then joined the business world, and then the pop culture industry. But there are a lot of good broad observations, too, and I was especially struck by this one:

Profound cultural differences aside, though, China's post-Cold War social transition is marked by a singularly important factor that sets it apart from all others: the revolution failed in 1989, and the Communist Party stays on to guide and control the reform process. This is a crucial fact in efforts to understand the peculiar complexities and ironies of China's current situation. It produces a half-baked, sheepish, defensive, cynical, masked, stealthy, and often comic atmosphere in which China's reform zigzags ahead. Instead of dramatic, exhilarating breakdown of old regimes, as occurred in Eastern Europe and Russia, what we witness in China is a slow, soft, and messy meltdown of the old structure. I would whimsically refer to this as "the Whopper effect": there is an impure, junky, hybrid quality in nearly all spheres of the present Chinese life--culture, politics, attitudes, ideology. This is not romantic, not a picturesque scene for the cameras. It's too blurry, too slippery, often shamelessly vulgar. Who can blame the CBS, ABC, and NBC anchors for not having rushed back since Tiananmen? To some, it might be akin to filmin a merry, grotesque banquet on the ruins of a slaughterhouse.

(She then goes on to quote former activists saying a) the Tiananmen students weren't protesting for democracy, they were protesting against economic hardship and injustice, and b) that the country would be much worse off today if those students had succeeded!)

It's an interesting little passage, because not only does it invoke a lot of the qualities I like to see in pop culture (impure, hybrid, slippery, shameless, vulgar) without actually placing an explicit subjective value on them, but it depicts these qualities as flowing directly from the political system under which the culture is created. We tend to think of political systems as reflecting the culture they come from, but in China we have a pretty clear example of the culture changing in parallel with the political system, although of course in part it's simply adopted aspects of other cultures, primarily Hong Kong but Japan and Korea as well, and amping them up. There are certainly practical reasons for this, but the pratical reasons are mainly negative freedom rather than positive freedom, and when you contrast it with the forced cultural change of Maoism, it's revelatory, I think. The culture is like the politics: new, vital, and vaguely troubling while also endlessly fascinating.

Of course, it also makes me want to map it back onto American pop culture, and wonder if maybe this country's pop culture vitality isn't due to the native qualities it's usually attributed to--individualism, entrepreneurism, ahistoricism--but rather reflects the often-overlooked fact that our political system is a hybrid, too, and indeed, this is a big reason for why it's been so vital. The phrase "Western-style democracy" is often invoked, but it lumps together a lot of different systems. American government was never really democratic, and this was one of its strengths--the republican aspects of American government are as important as the democratic ones, and the lack of republicanism in certain foreign "democracies" has been a reason for their failures.

So I think American pop culture tends to reflect both this hybridization and its privledging of democracy over republicanism with the widespread "guilty pleasures" complex. The rhetoric of American pop is often at odds with its reality, and the error people make is in assuming that this disconnect needs to be resolved by hewing to the rhetoric. But we'd all be a lot better off if we were able to acknowledge and embrace the reality of the duality.

Chinese pop seems to have a whole other set of issues, though. More on this as I go along, I hope.

2006-02-15T14:06:00.000-05:00

Claps of Death Metal

Lord Viscuvious & friends - Claps of Death Metal

As promised, here is the death metal song made according to Strong Bad's rules. Miss Clap sang backup and a lovely Valentine's Day was had by all. If you'd like the lyrics, I can post 'em later.

Warning: there is a dramatic intro.

ADDENDUM: Lyriques--

Deconstruction, Deepak Chopra, detonate!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Delicioso, delicate flower, defrock!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Declaw, de-lovely, decapitate!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Decadent Weimar Republic, decapitate!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Debutante, decompose, defrost, deflation!
Demagogue, den mothers, Deutchmarks!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Demi Moore, Def Jam, Delaware!
(chugga chigga wugga)
Raaaaagh! Raaaaagh! Raaaaagh! Raaaagh!

oops, totally did decapitate twice! Well, it is a great word.

2006-02-14T13:25:00.000-05:00

Cyn nicely sums up the mixed feelings I have about The Vagina Monologues:

I'm glad that the Vagina Monologues exist, and it's nice that people organize the productions and the proceeds go to support women's issues and all of that. I guess I'm just sort of bummed that it feels like this is the big feminist event on campus, that a bunch of college girls get to giggle about vaginas and feel virtuous about it, and then we all go back to having no women in science and getting paid sixty cents on the dollar or whatever it is.

(picture via demonbaby, which I have not heard of before but which looks good, i.e. I came across the picture by searching for "vagina talk")

2006-02-14T11:08:00.000-05:00

I come for the wuggas, but stay for the jiggy juggas

On Sunday I woke up with a throat that was fairly well closed. There was no particular reason for this, since I only had two beers the night before, and (as mentioned below), one of them was partially gargled.

But my loss of voice is the blogosphere's gain, because together, we will construct a death metal song according to Strong Bad's rules! You can get the full details here if you haven't seen it already, but in sum: "ugly, Nordic, bowels, d-e words." I will provide the ugly Nordic bowels, but I need you to provide the d-e words. Here is an example:

DEFENSESTRATE!
(jugga jigga wugga)
DECEMBERISTS!
(jugga jigga wugga)
DELOITTE AND TOUCHE!
(jugga jigga wugga)

Give me your d-e words, and I will sing them in my raspy throat-voice over a death metal backing. (Note: it may not actually be to-the-letter death metal, as I don't actually have my guitar at home, but it will be, um, metalish?) I will then post an MP3 tomorrow.

(I sang Miss Clap a Valentine's Day song in this style this morning. I believe the lyrics were: VALENTINE'S! (jugga jigga wugga) VALENTINE'S! (jugga jigga wugga) I LOVE YOU! (jugga jigga wugga) YOU ARE PRETTY! (jugga jigga wugga))

But since I am going to post it tomorrow, that means YOU NEED TO POST YOUR D-E WORDS BY 7 PM EST TODAY. I don't know how long this lovely throat condition is going to last!

So, in sum: d-e words (or phrases), in the comments, by 7. Go!

2006-02-14T11:04:00.000-05:00

A brief addendum to my food post: although I mentioned both bad fondue and my friend Janine, I would just like to clarify that my friend Janine's fondue is not bad. In fact, it is delicious, and I would be very sad if she stopped making it.

2006-02-13T18:37:00.000-05:00

I know this is just the picture that went with the story, but it's pretty much impossible to beat

Please get out of the new one if you can't lend a hand

I haven't exactly had tons of time to click around today, but I didn't notice anybody commenting on the article in the Sunday Times about hip-hop tours:

Today, for the price of $70, the Hush Tours bus whisks visitors to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, making stops at, among other places, the Graffiti Hall of Fame at 106th Street and Park Avenue, a schoolyard featuring enormous murals by some of the city's top graffiti artists, and Bobby's Happy House, a record store owned by Bobby Robinson, the onetime proprietor of Enjoy Records, which released some of the earliest hip-hop singles. At the Graffiti Hall of Fame, there is a Disneyish touch: Caz distributes Kangol hats and fake gold chains with dangling dollar-sign pendants to the tourists, who cross their arms and strike B-boy stances for snapshots in front of the spray-painted walls. Harlem residents have seen a lot over the years, but a gaggle of white tourists dressed like LL Cool J circa 1985 is something new.

In and of itself, this is fine, and actually kind of cool; as the owner points out, you can get a country music history tour in Nashville (and I know at least one person who had their eyes opened to country through one), so why not let people see the sites of hip-hop's birth? (Although this does make one consider the possibility of the Bronx River housing project being somehow turned into a tourist attraction, which is both unlikely and hilarious. Maybe they'll build a scale replica in Times Square?) It seems both slightly odd and, in retrospect, inevitable.

What's strange is the attitude that gets displayed on the bus. As the article puts it, the tour is "an argument about authenticity," with tour guides, many of whom are figures from the early days of hip-hop, saying things like, "Today you're going to learn what hip-hop is and what it's not. It's not just rap music, and it's definitely not just the 10 records you hear over and over again on the radio." The author does a good job of shooting down this attitude, calling it "nostalgia" and pointing out things like how the gansta rap era is now longer than the so-called "golden era" of hip-hop, asking, "Does anyone really believe that Spoonie Gee and Whodini were better rappers than, say, Snoop Dogg or Ludacris?" (He declines to note, though, the disconnect of talking about authenticity on a tour bus.)

There's one thing, though, that maybe deserves to be explicitly addressed:

"We have a real thing in hip-hop about out with the old, in with the new," Ms. Harris said. "I'm shocked about how little awareness of history there is, especially since so many people are making so much money in the rap industry. There's much more awareness of hip-hop history in other countries." Artists like Grandmaster Flash tour regularly overseas, where they draw far bigger audiences, and Ms. Harris estimated that 80 percent of Hush Tours' patrons are "international visitors." Sure enough, a recent tour included just four Americans, along with tourists from England, France, Germany, Australia and Kenya. In this respect, old-school rappers and D.J.'s have in recent years become similar to jazz musicians, who have long experienced rapturous receptions in Europe and Japan while struggling at home to find respect and decent-paying gigs.

This hardly seems like a problem. I understand why you'd want to get a piece of that mainstream dollar, but don't try and blame it on a defect with America. The reason old-schoolers can get better gigs in foreign countries is because it's not a live art there. Certainly there are skilled practitioners in those countries (I've heard a surprisingly large amount of good French rap), but hip-hop isn't part of the culture in the way it is in America. Hip-hop dominates here, and it seems really hard to argue that this is a bad thing, that keeping the art so alive and so fresh is really worse than it actually becoming like what jazz is now (and jazz finally becoming an offshoot of classical gas). Hip-hop is just mind-bendingly vital right now, going in twelve directions at once because there are just so many damn people doing it and so many ideas left to explore, even if there are stretches where every album that crosses my desk seems to have hit the "default crunk" button on their produce-o-bot. It's one thing to say that Grandmaster Flash got screwed over by his record company. It's a whole other thing to complain about more people wanting to see Jay-Z than wanting to see him. If anything, we should be worried that old dude Jay's still drawing the crowds he does.

2006-02-13T18:07:00.000-05:00

This, sadly, was not representative of our experience

Some notes on food

Went to a place called The Chocolate Room on 5th Ave in Brooklyn on Friday. Maybe my expectations were too high (when you've just polished off a diner grilled cheese and fries and someone suggests a walk concluding in chocolate fondue for dessert the reaction tends to be something along the lines of FUCK YEAH) but it was pretty meh. The whole setup was very nice and as a place to sit and consume things it was great, assuming you ignore the part where they put 6 of us at a table clearly made for 4. And it certainly could've been worse--I've had chocolate fondue before that was just sickening, over-sweet and dense as fuck. But it still wasn't too impressive. It wasn't too rich but it was heavy, and not really all that flavorful, so it ended up striking me as heavy for the sake of being heavy. It would be a plus that it was neither too sweet nor too bitter if it was much of anything at all. Not bad by any means, but not necessarily worth seeking out. Everything was made by them for them, and one of my companions did have a very good tart (and another had a brownie sundae that looked great), but the homemade chocolates we got to go impressed Miss Clap but again, meh-ified me. (Although I did not taste the caramel-and-sea-salt one, which sounded great.)

Then again, I guess my taste in chocolate runs in the Hostess Cupcake direction, i.e. decidedly downmarket and nothing too high-percentage. I would feel self-conscious about that were it not for dips like this one, who ends up sounding like a french Dr. Nick. I appreciate that she's not making the "milk chocolate=bad" argument, and I of course am with her in the alleviating guilt thing, but when you start arguing that said guilt then actually causes a physical reaction that makes you enjoy the thing less, I start backing away slowly. When I've had good chocolate I think it's been less due to the quality of the chocolate itself and more to the fillings or add-ins, although of course a good base is nice. Still, I've had lots of expensive-ass chocolate that didn't rise to the level of a Crunch bar.

Speaking of candy, I was getting sleepy at the Electric Six show on Saturday, so Janine gave me some caffienated candy. But this was not those mints you may have heard of: they were coffee or hazelnut flavored. Having associated the smell of hazelnut with cloudy Mr. Coffee pots for as long as I can remember, I chose the coffee option. Man, was it bad. I am told it tasted like bad truckstop coffee, which would make sense as she bought it at a truckstop, but having only had a really bad truckstop doughnut, I couldn't say for sure. Still, I ended up gargling with beer to try and chase the taste away. Janine likes 'em though.

2006-02-10T16:59:00.000-05:00

Our Love It Forms a V

Two posts down, I presented a picture of Billy Joel, Christy Brinkley, and a bunch of other guys. I'm not going to reproduce it on this post, because, to be honest, it was weirding me out to click on my blog and see some like 80s version of lastnightsparty show up on my screen. But here is a link to a large version.

As I said, I'm fascinated by it; there's just so much going on there. It's one lady, who is also a supermodel, and a bunch of band nerds that are now in rock bands, all male, of course (this was the 80s)--9, to be precise. The lady is quite clearly trashed, having fallen onto something or other (I kept thinking it was a garbage can, for some reason, but it's not) while pincing an empty champagne glass between her thumb and middle finger. Her posture reminds me of this, actually:

...except with her head and legs propped up.

All the dudes who aren't married to her are doing the thing where they're carefully avoiding the center of gravity, pretending they're not interested, that there's not a really hot drunk girl supine before them. Even the dude on which she is obliviously resting her head is managing to do this, which is quite impressive.

All except blondie, who has taken what might delicately be called the opposite tack, placing himself between Christy's legs (or "gams" as they seem to demand to be called) and taking a fairly friendly grasp of her right calf, which is of course sculpted and lovely and reflective of the very pleasant way calves (all calves, really) fit into hands. I have always felt that there's no such expression as a leer, that it's just a handy way of summing up a whole attitude, but if what's floating above that dude's shirt, which is actually a baseball jersey with his band's logo on it (!), isn't a leer, I don't know what is.

And above all this, figuratively and literally, is Christy's either current or soon-to-be husband, Billy. He's the only person in the photo not smiling and not looking at the camera. He refuses to be distracted from doing what he's doing, although you could make a series of guesses at what that is and not be right. At first blush he simply appears to be extending his hand in order to help Christy back to her feet, but then you look up and you see his mouth open as if he's saying something, something that is undoubtledly along the lines of "C'mon, honey, it's time to go," at which point you examine the hand again and notice it's less offering assistance and more beckoning. But Christy isn't acknowledging him at all--she's not awknowledging anything except the camera, as is her tendency, you'd imagine. But nor is Billy acknowledging blondie, the dude between his lady's legs, which is also indicative: the conflict here is not between the two men, it's between the man and the woman. The man is using guilt, and the woman is using avoidance.

It's a lovely photo just as a photo, and although I don't know a damn thing about art, it seems like it's classically composed: you could draw an offcenter triangle there and pretty well contain the major action in the frame, and your eye is led around all sorts of places. It somewhat reminds me of this:

Aside from its function as an image outside of context (aside from knowing that Joel and Brinkley are romantically involved, without which knowledge he could easily be her father or brother), it's interesting even beyond the fact that you can see the end of their marriage here even as it's a situation (drunken revelry) that would be more typically associated with courtship and the conflict more clearly at play, jealousy, did not seem to be a factor in their divorce, although what the hell do I know.

No, the most interesting contextual thing about this picture is the way it perfectly represents an oft-overlooked aspect of the Billy Joel oeuvre. He's known for his more ridiculous, over-the-top stuff, but a crucial element of the Joel persona is the air of defeat that clings to him even when he's playing, you know, like a dozen sold-out shows at MSG in a row. He's a loner, but not in that cool way--more in the way you see in this picture, where the dark cloud above his head manages to maintain structural integrity even in a situation where everyone is having a rollicking good time. It's a dark cloud that seems reflective of an eternal dissatisfaction, a feeling that nothing he ever does is really good enough, and so that air of defeat is less imposed from outside as it is with your stock Willy Loman types and more burbling up uncomfortably from within. It's an emotion that can repulsive, but when it's expressed in the right context, it cuts right to the heart of pop's bad mood, the most well-known modern example of which is Blur's "Country House."

The other bit of context springs from the guys surrounding Joel and Brinkley (if we're following the classical composition thing, blondie is an ancilliary character, dude in the white shirt with the nerd glasses is like the dude behind the window, and boy would I love to know his deal, and everyone else is actually background, like they should be furniture or drapes or something), who are all members of an apparently Blues Hammer-type band called The Nighthawks, and if you look at the page this picture comes from, you will see that the only description is "With Christy Brinkley and Billy Joel." In a sea of unremarkable (and even somewhat embarassing) performance photos, you have this one picture that's utterly amazing, and all you have to say about it is "With Christy Brinkley and Billy Joel"? Unfuckingbelievable.

2006-02-10T16:27:00.000-05:00

Morrissey - Suedehead (Sparks Remix)

My first impulse is to explain the goodness of this song by saying that it takes Morrissey and puts him in a Sparks context. But that isn't really sufficient; recent DFA remixes have demonstrated quite well that simply applying your style to a preexisting piece of music in no way guarantees good results, even if the style in question is a good one. Certainly Sparks are working their recent sound here, symphonic not only with its melodic instrumentation but with its percussive as well, but still working somehow (and in this way unlike some of their more recent material) as electronic music in a way that, say, P. Glass' cover of Aphex Twin songs don't. Mr. James was reworking art-music tropes in a dance-music context (eek!) whereas Sparks are reconfiguring pop-electronic tropes in the orchestral form, in the process coming as close to film scores of the 30s as they do to, say, Handel.

I think the abstract frisson of this particular track comes not from Sparks applying their template to any old "that's not like Sparks!" genre, but a specific one: over-emotive acoustic balladry. You can hear those sort of songs with string arrangements, but not like this one; indeed, what's noticable is that they're working with a track that already has a string arrangement and simply by giving it a different one makes it sound new. Maybe it's just the beat or the sharp edges, but my guess is that it's clearest in the contrapuntal breakdown that comes around the four-minute mark. Sparks layers Moz's vocals in an ingneous and fascinating way, creating both melodic and linguistic relations that weren't there before, but what's significant is that they're so layered, you can't make out the all the words. This is something you could never see Morrissey doing, but it works remarkably well, and results in a quite unique piece of music. So in the end, I think the success should be ascribed not only to the choice of genre, but to the particular member of that genre they're focusing on. It's a great song, but in a way it could be most any Morrissey song; what matters is the way Sparks, by chopping up the vocals, highlights certain tendencies of the source (in this case, the hidden harmonic relations in the vocals) and its connections with the remixers.

(Buy Future Retro, from which this track was taken)
(Buy Viva Hate, which contains the original "Suedehead")

2006-02-08T10:57:00.000-05:00

Two things in Flagpole this week: a Belle and Sebastian review, and a piece on Billy Joel's first-person love songs and the productive role of bathos in realist art. Give that one a read, at least, I think it turned out very well.

(I love the picture above, by the way--I've never seen it before but the whole scenario fits kind of perfectly with what I'm talking about. There's a bigger version here if you really want to appreciate the expression on Billy's face. It's amazing.)

2006-02-07T18:09:00.000-05:00

Here are some of the many reasons you need to watch the video for Miranda's "Don" right now:

1) Hot girls in nurses' outfits.
2) The nurses' outfits apparently involve short skirts, which is as customary in Argentina as it is in 80s hair-metal videos.
3) The hot girls in nurses outfits with short skirts doing a synchronized dance involving bedpans on sticks.
4) And then another one with just their hands around the singer's head. It's a syncronized finger dance. I want to learn it.
5) The singer looks either like Noel Gallagher if he grew up as a nerd or Mr. Bean if he was trying to be sexy.
6) Another dude looks like someone from an Australian new-wave band. This doesn't sound impressive, but it is in context.
7) THE VISUALS FOR THE GUITAR SOLO WHICH INVOLVE A CHURCH HALLWAY, A CAPE, AND GLOWING.

Man, now I really want to know what the hell they're saying.

I am going to attempt to "embed" it here. Wish me luck.

2006-02-07T13:09:00.000-05:00

Writing About Music is Like Writing About Politics
or,
I Don't Care What You Say Anymore, This is My Life

One of the nice things about getting to the point as a writer where you can reasonably assume people are familiar with your outlook that I can say things like what I am about to say and people will know I'm not being glib or ironic: the infamous "42 page document" that is the Justice Department's January 2006 white paper laying out their justification for the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, a/k/a "Legal Authorities Supporting the Activities of the National Security Agency Described by the President," is, despite the clunky title, one of the best pieces of criticism written in the past several years. (At least in the way awards shows seem to mean "best," but that's still kinda best.) Oh sure, the writing's not the best, but that's the sad dictates of the medium of white papers; as a piece of criticism, though, it's amazing.

Doubt that it's criticism? It's doing close readings of a series of texts in order to justify a particular theoretical point of view--of course it's criticism! There's a narrative, an unstated but clearly present ideological point of view, a dense mass of jargon and uncontextualized referents, and like 23 footnotes. There's no bibliography, sure, but that just intimidates a popular audience anyway.

Partially it's like criticism in that it's entertaining if you know the context (the first section heading after "Summary" is "The Attacks of September 11, 2001," which is like the administration's version of Marxist rhetoric at this point, invoked without explanation in the assumption that everyone knows what it means so many times that it's ceased to mean anything, so now it's just an in-joke), but mainly it's like criticism in that it processes a mountain of selective evidence through an ideological filter in order to prove a counterintuitive proposition, like "revolution is good" or "pop culture is bad" or "punk was basically Situationism," suggesting that if Greil Marcus really wanted to be making bank, he'd apply for a job as a government lawyer. ("I am particularly proud to have worked on the critical project that made rock music discursively valid" or maybe "You are the punkest governor ever!")

What's all over this document, as indeed it is all over the administration as a whole, is a serious anxiety of influence. Everything is presented in terms of a conscious break with the past ("pre 9/11 mind set,"), even though they're well aware of history and indeed in many ways are just referring to supposedly outmoded ideas[1], in order to create a kind of messianic atmosphere that meshes perfectly with modern political imagery. They're misinterpreting what's come before and rejecting it, and in the process making something new that sure seems a lot like what's come before. That's administration policy, but one of the reasons why this white paper is such an amazing document is the way it distills this philosophy. It's practically a manifesto, except that instead of saying "this needs to change," they're saying "this has already changed, without you knowing it, and it's time to embrace the consequences of that; if we seemed too extreme, it was only because we were the avant-garde, recognizing and acting before everyone else did." It's not just that this 1978 law, FISA, should be overturned; it already has been, through the inevitable march of history and the actions of a few brave forward-looking individuals. (The only way to make Dick Cheney not evil is to regard him as sort of a Cassandra without the curse, tragedy turned grim necessity through the liberal application of power--or, maybe, a one-man Leninist vanguard.[2])

In this way it's just another data point illustrating the way the right has embraced the left's cherished ethos of rebellion. Sometimes it looks like paternalism but in this white paper it's clear it's more "we're gonna do what we want, we don't care about your rules." And this sells because Rock Won. Rock Won because it gave individualism an updated images, of course, but that updated image included something new: an idea of rebellion being a good in an of itself. Times were, America's concern was preserving the republic against destruction, and that simply doing this would preserve freedom. Now the idea is that individualism is best preserved by preventing anyone from bothering you in any way, even if that restricts their or even your freedom. Because you're the rebel: you're the one that's got to stay within a zone of opportunity so you can accomplish the big things you have to do.

The right has benefited immeasurably from the pervasive and appealing idea that simply doing the opposite of what's established is positive. This was an effective idea for the left back when what was established was fairly conservative, but they've stuck with it so much that it's starting to eat itself as leftist ideas become established. But the right is eating itself too: the administration's policy now bears little resemblence to actual conservativism. They've rebelled so much they've actually moved beyond core American values to something older than America itself. They're referring to the Constitution in this document but not in their ideology. That's why it's such an amazing distillation: it's taking everything you could marshall aginst their position and using it as ammunition.

It's especially impressive in that they actually invoke the War Powers Resolution, the sort of shot heard 'round the world of the issue they're pushing right now, i.e. Presidential power. Even more, what's been progressively done to that resolution by succeeding Presidents is almost exactly analogous to what they're trying to do to FISA. It's like bringing up the elephant in the room and then using it to trample over everyone else. There is an absolute lack of shame, the hallmark of the rebel, but also the nuclear option in political discourse, especially when dealing with things like FISA and the War Powers Resolution that were specifically ennacted in response to behavior that we as a nation decided we were ashamed about. Rock Won.

I know it's dangerous to compare things to criticism because it makes it sound like you're trying to minimize them by implying that they could be most properly grasped as examples of a pattern most suited for analysis by college professors. But that's not what I'm doing. I'm trying to elevate criticism here by showing how it's nearly identical to politics. When you look at a political text like this one, you are looking at something that is performative, something that merely by putting together words makes something happen. In this case, it's not as clear-cut an example as it is with a piece of legislation, the ultimate performative text, but it is trying to get a number of things to happen, like not get the President impeached (which is another reason why it's such an amazing document). But this is the case with all criticism; you're trying to massage an idea into existence that will then get out there into the world and influence people's behavior. When people say that art is political, I think that they mean it exists in some sort of political context (although I think they really just mean "historical context") or makes some sort of political statement, but that's not really the main way that statement is true. It's maybe better to say that art is politics, in that it works the way politics way--through discourse rather than actions, and if you're doing the crit-nerd thing of seeing art objects as texts with an idea to push, there's no denying that those ideas end up influencing other artists in the same way that criticism does, or in the same way that legislation influences everyone. Sometimes they even get a little anxious about it.

[1] Or, of course, referring to an idealized past--"America wants somebody to restore honor and dignity to the White House"--but honestly, I think that's either background, lazy default, or, um, pre-9/11 rhetoric, not the main stuff, which is very going-forward.

2006-02-07T10:43:00.000-05:00

I am linking to the Jukebox thing mostly just to let you know that there will be posts coming today, probably of a political bent. I am most certainly not linking to it so you can admire the quality of my writing, because hoo boy [insert me waving my hand in front of my nose like I just laid a stinker], do I look like an ignoramus. In my defense, the internet was down in my apartment to my building, so I had to walk to the public library and rush to get all my blurbs done in the 30 minutes they gave me to use the computer. And...I was distracted by ice cream? Sure, that's why I messed up the one entry I actually had planned out ahead of time, argh.

Anyway, don't let those fools scare you away from the Kapanga track in particular--in my eyes, the first sentence of Dom's blurb reads as a ringing endorsement! And I guess if anyone wants to explain why "You Got the Love" sounds so hollow to me when I can't get enough of "Everytime We Touch," please do.

2006-01-25T13:44:00.000-05:00

Wshew, stomach flu is a hell of a thing, but while I'm getting back up to speed, you could read this review of Kyle Gann's new book and then maybe go get it so we could talk about it. (Ooh, it's got a nice cover, too.) Don't be dismayed by the presence of actual sheet music on Gann's site at the present time, he's never anything less than accessible, and I was not haphazardly pointing you toward a review that says Gann's writing "sticks to essentials: what the music sounds like, who's writing it, and why you should listen." You could also do a lot worse than to read this piece on naming music movements (via be.jazz), which, though it focuses on one specific period of art-musical history, is pretty well applicable to pop, too.

2006-01-23T11:35:00.000-05:00

I don't normally link to it if for no other reason than everyone else does, but I will point you to this week's Stylus singles jukebox, partially because I am actually very happy with my writing for it and partially because it is now not looking incredibly likely that I will get other writing out today. Ah well.

2006-01-18T14:46:00.000-05:00

I don't entirely know how I missed this, but here is a review of the new Strokes album I done wrote.

2006-01-17T22:48:00.000-05:00

In the tragic aftermath of Love Monkey, the viewer is not so much left with questions of quality or accuracy as he is left with questions of theology.

Basically, this can be summed up as: Does God hate me or does God love me?

Let's look at the two sides.

GOD HATES ME

God hates me and has sent this abortion of an entertainment to Earth to torment me. Ow, my head hurts. Why, God, why. Why do you make me suffer. Why do you make me watch this show. Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.

GOD LOVES ME

But maybe God agrees with me about the whole everything-that-comes-out-of-this-character's-mouth-is-loathesome thing, and so He has created the most absurd possible exaggeration of that viewpoint and made it into a CBS sitcom so everyone can watch it and say, "Oh, you know, this really is stupid. We shouldn't think this way. It's just absurd."

GOD HATES ME

But then at one point Miss Clap turns to me and says, "Hey, he really does look like you. But, like, the movie star version of you." And granted she has the flu, but maybe this just means that God is speaking through her to directly torment me. Get the hell out of my girlfriend, God!

GOD LOVES ME

But come on, the whole morality arc of the pilot is that he gets fired by the big bad major record label ("Goliath," get it?) because he objects to them wanting to sell music like Ashlee Simpson to ten-year-old girls. which "anyone can do," sign a lip-synching one-hit-wonder, that is[1], and should be promoting timeless acts like the Stones and Dylan and Aretha Franklin instead[2], and considers starting his own label, but instead gets a new job at this indie label called "True Vinyl Records,"[3] but the "genius" new singer-songwriter dude he wants to sign is actually a new artist for Sony/BMG![4] Which, you know, I don't give a fuck, but for the love of You, God, You can't expect me to believe that someone could both embrace that horrible yay-classic-rock-boo-major-label-pop morality while also doing synergy for one of the biggest music labels in the history of the world? No one could be expected to take that seriously, right? And by placing them side by side, you're trying to expose the silliness of both positions, right? Right, God? God? Where are you going? God?

GOD HATES ME

Jason Priestly calls Tori Amos "vagina music."[5]

GOD LOVES ME

The A&R dude's friend who is a former pro baseball player is also gay. His friends do not know he's gay. which we find out via a scene where the former pro athelete gets hit on by a beautiful woman and turns her down, and his friends kid him for this in a "oh you are so straight" kinda way. We, the viewer, find out he's gay during a montage in which all the main characters are coming home to their sweeties. The ex-ballplayer knocks on the door and there is a man. He gives the man flowers and they hug.

GOD HATES ME

The final scene has as its soundtrack "Mr. Brightside."

GOD LOVES ME

It's on opposite Boston Legal.

So, as usual, a tie. I'm going to go have some cake.

[1] Note to people who did not watch the show: this is not an exaggeration. This is pretty much verbatim.
[2] No, I know, but really, verbatim, I swear to you.
[3] I swear to you! I swear!
[4] No, really!
[5] This is all sounding like a prank at this point, I know, but you have to believe me.

2006-01-17T10:41:00.000-05:00

The Supreme Court upholding Oregon's assisted suicide law is absolutely amazing--less for legal reasons, I think (in retrospect, the 1997 decision denying the constitutionality of a "right to die" seems less a rebuke and more a clear "uh, let's send it to the states, and we'll let the lefty ones try it out and see how it goes" sort of compromise in the face of something whose time had either come or was very close to coming) and more for political ones. The personal rebuke to Ashcroft ("'authority claimed by the attorney general is both beyond his expertise and incongruous," whoa) is in a certain sense kicking a dead horse, but in another way it's very much a warning to one still on its feet. Ashcroft's behavior at the Justice Department was, at the time, the most blatant and public display of the administration's assertion of an all-power executive branch, with maybe the best example being his policy of forcing federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in jurisdictions where public opinion about capital punishment would make it extremely hard to get a conviction; it didn't fit into any system of political reasoning except for one that sought to advance executive power at all costs. Ashcroft now stands out not as an Icarus of the right but as the canary in the coalmine, pushing the strategy without stating the ideology and seeing how far they could take it before he kicked the professional bucket. Now that the whole "the President can do whatever he wants" thing is being said out loud, especially in the face of the rebuke of the previously-fashionable "the Republican part can do whatever it likes" doctrine, it's interesting that after Ashcroft's fall from grace, he's become a successful lobbyist. Canary indeed.

It's also amazing because even the principals didn't see it coming. Miss Clap's uncle was one of the lawyers on the Oregon side, and when this was discussed, the attitude was pretty much "that's so great that he's arguing a case before the Supreme Court, too bad they'll never win." You never know.