Describe Your Turf

Reviews of the fifth season of The Wire–a show that was critically invincible throughout its first four segments–have all said roughly the same thing: "Everything about the streets, the police, and city hall is still pitch perfect, but this newspaper business is just a little off. Surely things can't be that bad. Surely David Simon must be obsessing a little, hm?" They said it here, here, and especially here, where the reader is cautioned against confusing Simon's "searing vision" with reality.

The argument against Simon's Sun newsroom hinges on small details. The banter is too saturated with jargon. The characters are too boldly drawn–the Marimow stand-in is a fairly unambiguous bad guy, while Gus is a saint. Simon, who has been out of the journalism business for years, ignores the real concerns of newspapers in 2007. He is just too bitter, too angry.

A couple of other things dovetail with this line of critique in interesting ways.

While J. Hoberman's critique of the denial of female free will in Juno–and Knocked Up, and Waitress–seems right, much of the venom hurled at this year's big-little-indie hit has targeted the film's faux-childlike naiveté and alleged hipster pandering. In real publications, it has been called "deceptively smug," desperate to establish itself as "the chick Rushmore or Garden State," and saturated with "lookatme! snark." In blogs, the invective has been less civil. Sasha Frere-Jones enthusiastically directed me to a review of the film's soundtrack written by someone named Ian Cohen, who writes that the disc–and, by association, the film–goes "beyond interesting, beyond cute, into empty and nauseating self-absorption."

Consider also the response to Vampire Weekend. While their debut's catchy, shimmery tunes are almost reluctantly praised, many writers have gone out of their way to go after the group's smarmy, ivy-league know-it-all-ness. This has become the point, to a certain extent, of writing about Vampire Weekend and their new album. How forcefully can you distance yourself from blue oxfords, afro-pop appropriation, and undergraduate humor?

It may be that all three of these lines of critique actually have much more to do with the people writing them than they do with the works being discussed. How ridiculous it is to go after David Simon because his newsroom hits a few wrong notes when that's the only group that most critics have any experience with. Are you telling me that these same writers who think Gus' dialogue should ease up on the slang actually spent time verifying the slang-to-non-slang speech ratios of Baltimore drug dealers? Did they hang out with dockworkers before passing judgment on the second season? In fixating on Simon's representation of the newsroom and journalists, critics are largely writing about themselves, their workplaces, and their coworkers. On behalf of their respective publications, they are reacting to the fifth season of The Wire in the same way that Baltimore's mayor reacted to the first. It's a forceful if subtle turf move, and it has little to do with discussing the fifth season on its own terms.

Likewise, it's interesting that those with the greatest dislike for Juno–bloggers, Sasha Frere-Jones in particular–are the same people who have invested the greatest amount of personal and cultural capital in indie rock, a genre of pop music which for years has exhibited exactly the same things that are found to be most damning within the film: faux-naiveté and a willful retreat into the warm embrace of childhood. Frere-Jones probably received a bit too much criticism for his piece on whiteness in indie rock last year, but he was right to express the feeling that indie had settled into a kind of cozy self-indulgence. Why indie's worst characteristics had to be identified and dissected in the context of a film rather than an indie rock album, however, is maybe an interesting question.

The best response to Frere-Jones' article on indie's whiteness was written by Carl Wilson, who argued persuasively that class and education have more to do with indie's more hermetic tendencies than race. Indie's associations with the upper middle class and liberal arts education are well documented, and Vampire Weekend's ivy-league origins seem to have provoked defensive maneuvers from all manner of over-educated blogging and newspapering sorts. I think this New York Times interview with the group, which loudly but passive-aggressively advertises its disdain for the band's preppy fashions and games of conversational one-ups-manship, is of particular note. Remember, this is an article which appears in the New York Times, a publication which writes almost exclusively for a liberal, educated, upper middle class readership.

And so these writers identify and obsess over those elements of different works which are of huge concern to writers and critics and of little to no concern to anybody else. What strikes me most of all is how little is at stake. The Wire is no less compelling and vital for the occasional heavy-handed exchange (it's not like Simon hasn't been writing those all along, and anyway it's a work of narrative fiction, not a stenographer's report). Juno may have problems, but they have nothing to do with hipster jargon and everything to do with the fact that women have been poorly served by abortion films that won't say the word "abortion." Vampire Weekend may be slight, forgettable, and boring, but they are not some horrifying manifestation of preppy elitism. When criticism contents itself with an amplification of personal neurosis or pet peeves, it's not criticism. It's the unintentionally confessional autobiography of critics.

Haute Sheep

Bits and Pieces:

Reading through the Pazz & Jop this morning, and it's completely nutrageous that "Say It Right" doesn't show up on the singles list until (get this) slot number one hundred and seventy two?! Could the fact that the song came out in January have anything to do with it? Don't people have a notebook or something where these kinds of things can be written down for future reference? *sighs, shakes his head, it's so hard when nobody affirms your taste!*

Lil Wayne arrested for the second time recent months, this time on felony drug charges. Weed, coke, and E, along with $22,000,000. Also Carter III pushed back another month to March. Wayne is up there with the Phillies and the cast of The Wire in terms of excessive emotional investment on my part. Things are not looking good at the moment.

David Moore made me rofl with his top films of the year list. Holding it down in the #1 slot? "Armoured Bear: The Film." I also thought that his blurb on Ratatouille was extremely clever.

Meat & Potatoes: Hot Chip – Made in the Dark

Peter stayed up late to sing the praises of the new Hot Chip album, Made in the Dark. I think he's totally right to hone in on "We're Looking for a Lot of Love" as one of the record's highlights. Another friend of mine (Jake) cleverly reads "Wrestlers" as "the greatest whiteboy parody of/homage to" R. Kelly, which has some of the piano clank of "I'm a Flirt" as well as the lyric, "We'll tag team, double up (!) / Hit you in the sweet spot." So right.

Jake and I actually saw the group in Paris last July, where they put on a live show that very much reflected the new directions pursued on Made in the Dark. Standing all five in a line like "yay-uh wassup it's time to groove," the group didn't so much seduce the dance as strong-arm it. Even though they were tied to their stationary synthesizing instruments, each member rocked with considerable abandon. Also, the impeccably dressed French teenagers in attendance, who swayed their hips but didn't really move their feet, call the band "Haute Sheep," which as far as I'm concerned is a much better name.

The group's more muscular approach is in full effect on the album's first two tracks, which for all their neatly distorted rock riffs come off as rather clunky. "Out at the Pictures" is almost desperate to start things off quickly, and the sound reminds me of Justice, which is to say that you're always struggling to ignore the fact that all the cool funky synths are maybe a little unattractive sounding. "Shake A Fist" strikes me the same way.

I much prefer "Ready for the Floor," or "Made in the Dark," or "Whistle for Will," all of which play to Alexis Taylor's impressive knack for sinuous, keening melodicism. Remember that sublime, aching tune on "Boy From School"? Aside from the melody, what made that track so great for me was the way the instrumental parts conserved as much energy as they released, like a conduit that keeps juicing itself. Too much of Made in the Dark wants to let that energy out and start a ruckus, but I don't think that Taylor's voice can stand up to that kind of instrumental assault.

More of a love letter

Loose Joints – "Tell You Today"

In Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds writes that what gives rock critics such fits writing about dance music is that they've learned the paint-by-psychological-numbers method of writing about rock music too well: "the song is a mini-novel, a story (either personal confession or character study). As instrumental music, techno is closer to the plastic arts or architecture than literature, in that it involves the creation of an imaginary environment or kinesthetic terrain."

To a certain extent, this is a helpful distinction, except that it still needs to pad a claim like "music is not like literature" with another claim like "music is like architecture." On the one hand, you have album reviews as stories, which seem to insist that you should read them as you're listening to the record, so that you'll understand the story that you're listening to. On the other hand, you have record reviews that don't add up to anything more than a detailed "all senses on deck" description of pure sound. What peers out from behind both of these kinds of writing is the ever-unhelpful distinction between form and content.

But one of the things that I love so much about "Tell You Today" (1983), an exquisitely clumsy, rapturously joyous weirdo-disco cut by Arthur Russell (here appearing as Loose Joints), is that it absolutely will not be written about in either of those ways. The challenge is right there in the title. Yes, it is a dance track, which means that it's subject to the usual "does it work on the floor" kinds of evaluations (it does), but for crissake it's called Tell. You. Today. It's not a character, but it's not only there to take hold of your limbs and wiggle either.

That sly neither here nor there is all over the track from the very beginning, where a looped female vocalist (apparently a woman named Joyce Bowden) sings "Tell you, tell you, tell you, tell you," over and over again, except that it's not fully mechanized because Russell has a few different loops of the lady's two-note phrase that begin an end with slightly different timbres and pitches, as though his sampler had a few different digitized performances of the same two notes. That goes on for a while. (At this point, "Tell me what?" will be the perceptible but not quite articulable sensation kicking around the middle-depths of your head.)

Then a little group of horns, which also play a completely repetitive four-note series and nothing else, except that these guys are really terrible at their instruments, blaring all over the place and each a microbeat off from the others. It's a little annoying the first time around, but not in the same way that the endlessly repeated laser beam from an electronic track can be annoying. One wants to be annoyed at someone, maybe the same someone who can't get that two-note "tell you" quite right, but there's no one exactly there.

Then, very gradually, the song decides to get its shit together. An ascending, briefly harmonized whistle figure is a really witty thing to include, both for its signaling of a person-there-who-won't-talk as well as its shrugging disavowal of those gawdawful horns. A piano follows, suddenly puncturing its descending staccato figure with a bluesy trill that personally served as the moment when I started walking warily back into the thing. At that point, very quietly, it's all over. The piano revvs up for about a minute more, charismatically rumbling some gospel bass when it feels like it, and for the first time in three minutes I'm dancing, which I've been doing anyway but damn, suddenly it feels good to be stepping around.

Then a glissando crash into a hiccup–where'd the piano go?–and that lady going "tell you" a few more times but I'm not mad anymore because I'm getting the inkling that she had a plan the whole time anyway, so step step step. Then another hiccup.

Here, I'm almost positive that the beat slows, for about a beat and a half, by maybe two metronome clicks. Then, two glissando piano crashes, which is just so perfect because what I'm waiting for is one, leading into the downbeat and sending me off, but when it's the second one that actually does it I come out disoriented and ignorant of when or how exactly I was born into what is now obviously a full-fledged disco beat, with funking guitars and piano chords and the whole deal. Hey! The whistling is back! Oh man this song just really came together nice job Arth-

Oh. That's why. That's what the rest of it is for. I did not see those voices coming.

Walking down your street
I knew it was my chance
Chance to lay
New shoes on my feet
I thought that they could dance
Dance away
Makes me come alive, I remember
A look of sadness on your face
That was before
I want to tell you today.

Russell's voice, harmonized in layers on itself, has a watery quality that somehow manages to indicate both the sickness crying at the center of his World of Echo LP as well as the watery-eyed health of Tolstoy's spiritual pilgrims. In both of these respects, the voices that rush into "Tell You Today" in such an ecstatic way effect an irresistible affirmation of something like physical existence. The first time I heard it, I was sitting at my desk, and what rushed through my body when the voices kicked in was the ability to turn my head, or to lift a book, or to shift my weight, transformed into a real physical sensation, as real as shivering or bumping my foot. His voice turns the ability to move into a sensory experience. The cool thing is that his voice turns the ability to move into a sensory experience even if you're already moving, which you probably should be by that point. Of course, this is all accompanied by unambiguous feelings of joy, which as I'm listening to the song are most easily directed towards the people around me.

Don't worry, the vocals drop out–it's for the best, I promise–and Russell lets you down as easily as possible. There's a warm glow that hangs around though, like the knowledge that one has heard without having been informed. "Beyond words" is a cheap way of putting it, but that's a problem that's built into the phrase anyway.

Happened a while back, but it still strikes me as a fairly absurd thing.

LCD Soundsystem's recently-released-to-CD long track 43:55 was originally put online by Nike as a "running mix," of all things (I think that Aesop Rock has done one of these too ... None Shall Pass ... my furiously in-shape jogger's physique!). As has been reported, though, Murphy wasn't that interested in the jogging part. He just wanted to pay homage to Manuel Göttsching and E2-E4.

Göttsching, though, who seems to be a little prickly for a fifty-five year old, isn't having it. This from the Ashra website:

For the cover of his album "45:33" LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy has imitated the artwork of E2-E4 and thus inappropriately exploits the reputation of the famous original!

Among other things, Göttsching is upset that Murphy won't have a sit-down in Berlin to have it out. Murphy, who hasn't evidenced anything other than wide-eyed fanboy admiration for the cranky bear, getting slapped for trying pay the ol' artistic respects! Could be that Göttsching's still haunted by that '89 Italian remix of E2-E4 which sold more than his entire recorded output? Intellectual property is intellectual property, after all–and Murphy did remove the offending checkerboard pattern from the cover art of the CD release–but just how frequently do popsters tangle with mega-corporations for the sake of someone affiliated with the Cosmic Jokers?

Get off the geezer's gravy train, Murphy! Those nickels aren't yours.

sniffle, yawn, blink blink – what's going on?

aaaaaaaand . . . . blog.