You're A Ghost

Marching on

2009-08-07T17:44:00.002-04:00

Here, quoted from the July Wire, is Ariel Pink's rendition of music history:

"I'll go one step further and say that it all goes to music degenerating over the aeons. Like, the most inspirational things are possessed by something morally and aesthetically bad and undesirable. So you've got Bach at one end, who represents all the ambition in music that could ever be attained, in a sense, and then you infuse it with a little sensuality and you get Beethoven, right, which is kind of profane. And then you infuse it with a little bit of opera, which makes it kind of campy, and then you've got your Wagner. Then you take your Wagner, make him Jewish and you've got Mahler. Then you've got Arnold Schoenberg, who said, 'No, listen to Bach, he started his own language, we've got to rewind it all the way back to the top. How do we start a new language?' [Sings a series of apparently unrelated notes] Then you've got John Cage, which is pure American nonsense in the midst of this several hundred years of trying to progress music to its apex. Then, of course, the Germans, Stockhausen. And in the midst of that you have all this terrible music coming out of America, which is rock'n' roll, the music of numbskulls [slaps fist in palm four to the bar]. That's where we are going, right. That's after hundreds of years of musical evolution and we get to the poor people's music: let's lift that up and see what we can make with that."

And then the big finish: "And I think my contribution, if I have any, is to make it more terrible."

That's pretty charming! Especially the bit about taking your Wagner and making him Jewish. Like how if you took "What Women Want" and made it Jewish you would get "Annie Hall."

Me and Eminem

2009-07-23T21:34:00.002-04:00

Hello there!

Please read a piece I wrote for the website of N+1 on the only great white rapper ever. My favorite part is the title, but I didn't come up with the title.

Here.

How the Avant Garde Got Popular (Or Not)

2009-05-25T10:05:00.002-04:00

Me, in The Advocate, on David Stubbs' Fear of Music, which came out about one month ago. It's a really smart book, but it spends too much time trying to convince people to like avant garde music and not enough time explaining why it hasn't become popular like visual art. Me, I think it's institutions.

RichardBeckAvantGarde

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Not Batman

2009-05-20T09:28:00.004-04:00

It's time for everyone to listen to Joker all day.

And one more for good measure. Doesn't he seem like a lovely kind of weirdo? Also the secret theme of the interview seems to be coat hangers coming out the back of their jackets. Joker has a bunch under each arm as well, but that seems like cheating. The hoodie hanger is where the action is.

Wu Note

2009-05-11T00:52:00.003-04:00

You can find the Blue Noted ODB album cover above here, along with a bunch of similarly reworked Wu Tang family covers. Pretty fantastic . . . I guess some of them (Cuban Linx) are a little too easy, and the seams show pretty much everywhere.

Imagining Wu Tang as something that happened forty years ago, as these covers do, got me thinking about the "classic" status of something like 36 Chambers. It's hard to imagine the record soundtracking dinner parties like so many Blue Note albums do now. Last year Wu Tang came to play at Harvard's Yardfest–I reviewed it for the Phoenix, here–and I was completely surprised to see almost ninety percent of the students react with complete indifference or hostility. I could just be too wrapped up in talking to the same people all the time, but I had thought Wu Tang had made it at least into the periphery of "We-will-respect-this-if-not-exactly-embrace-it" territory. This has something to do with what a nice job upper-middle class white cultured types have done concealing a pretty broad disdain for rap. Nobody minds pop music with rapping in it, of course–and the point of this post is not to criticize rap that hangs out with pop–but Yardfest was a straight-up rap concert, and a lot of people just wished they could eat their hot dogs in peace.

This is also why I picked the ODB cover. Talk about someone who's going to stay disreputable. Also one of the most creative people of the last two decades.

Sonic Old

2009-05-10T19:41:00.002-04:00

K-Punk is really good on what makes Sonic Youth such a gigantic waste of time these days. Money quote:

"Kim Gordon in New Statesman last week: "Are Sonic Youth political? Well, they are, in that they offer an alternative to mainstream music." Well, they may not have hit singles (but neither did the prog dinosaurs of the 70s); but here they are on Later With Jools Holland; here they are doing compilations for Starbucks; here they are, the darlings of the broadsheet press, their pastiche-of-themselves records not exactly guaranteed a good review, but always automatically accorded event status. In what way is the so called mainstream perturbed by any of this? In what way, in the decentred era of web 2.0, is this not the mainstream? Their avant credentials rest on a few hoary old formal innovations - just as the prog rockers' did in the early 70s. SY have disconnected experimentalism from social and existential maladjustment, just as prog rock did. But while punk annihilated prog after a mere half a decade of flatulent complacency, Sonic Youth are still lauded as countercultural heroes even though they have been making variations on the same record for over twenty years now."

There's also a good bit about Juno.

I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching

2009-05-10T19:00:00.004-04:00

Me in the Advocate on the history of creative writing in higher education. Mark McGurl's new book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, was the excuse for the piece. It's great . . . I'm a little surprised to see that it hasn't picked up more attention. It's a completely new interpretation of more than half a century's worth of fiction.

Right. Here's the article, complete with nifty illustration by Dana Kase:

Get With the Program: Creative Writing in the Twentieth Century

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Hype? Us?

2009-03-18T15:34:00.002-04:00

Over at Sound of the City, they've got a post called SXSW 2009: Here's Why You're Glad You're Not Going. One of the reasons You're (I'm?) Glad is: "Rampant twitter mania."

Really?

It seems that many blogs and music writing outlets do almost nothing during February and March but talk about SXSW, and that about forty percent of that talk is shot through with a strange kind of self-loathing: "SXSW will be GREAT, you guys, but god I just wish there weren't so much hype all the time."

What's strange is the idea, which all these blogs participate in, that there's any real difference between making hype and talking about or criticizing the process of making hype. There is no difference, and Sound of the City is playing an annoying kind of game by acting as though what they really want to be doing is watching March Madness instead of bouncing around the annual indie orgy for four days.

This kind of anxiety swirls around a lot of indie-rock discourse. There are a bunch of terrific pop music writers with blogs, but there are also thousands of bloggers pantomiming at criticism when they're actually extremely knowledgable fans. SXSW is entirely their making. It is for them.

Flutes, Sneaky

2009-03-08T09:09:00.001-04:00

Me on the mighty Swirlies . . . This was extremely fun to write, even if Damon and Andy constantly seemed freaked out that I was so interested in talking to them.

David Simon Interview – Generation Kill

2009-01-30T10:05:00.003-05:00

Here is a link to an interview I did with David Simon–creator of The Wire–in the Winter issue of Film Quarterly. It's about his Iraq mini-series, Generation Kill, which aired this past summer on HBO.

Simon is so transparent about his project (and about his estimation of his own project) that he's almost too good at the interview game. His eyes glint when he's giving you the money quote:

"I would feel better about this war, personally, if I didn’t believe that the people who ordered it did so with as callow a sense of what war is as adults can have. Never mind whether it was the right war at the right time. Did they know what they were saying when they said “war”? And I just get the impression, since they didn’t serve, since they went out of their way not to serve, that maybe they didn’t know. And maybe there are a lot of Americans who are in that same category. And maybe walking for seven hours with these marines serves some surrogate purpose in terms of reminding and educating Americans as to what war actually is."

What do I even do with this?

2009-01-21T23:41:00.002-05:00

It occurs to me that probably nobody–like, nobody–reads this thing now, which is cool maybe, right? Like I can do anything . . . as long as nobody finds out! Maybe it will distract me from listening to the following:

Clube da Esquina
Edu Lobo – Missa Breve
Gas – Königsforst
Ragga Twins – Reggae Owes Me Money
1981 Box Set: Feet, Brain, Convertible, Amplifier, Cassette, Heart . . . waiting on the other four
The Secret Museum of Mankind (Vols. I-V)
Vampire Weekend ([?!] I'm making a good faith effort to transcend my liberal ivy league self-loathing here. Reasonable people love this thing, and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" is utterly charming.)
Bad Boy Mixtapes (Vols. I-IV)

Ok, that's not a big thing, but maybe a warmup. We'll see if I can keep it up.

Happy Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T10:49:00.001-05:00

Black + White

2009-01-20T10:46:00.001-05:00

No Age – Nouns, et al

2008-05-17T16:11:00.008-04:00

First of all, Tha Carter III is good, only a letdown if you were expecting the album's release to be accompanied by a hip-hop-apocalypse and subsequent rapture where Biggie, Pac, and Main Source would separate the wheat from the chaff once and for all. Yes, "Lollipop" is "Lollipop," "La La" is almost wonderfully strange but probably too dinky, and "Mrs. Officer" is stoopid but not Retarded. Let's be clear on this: Wayne does not exhibit the kind of wacko free-associative genius that made Drought 3 so terrific, nor is he as impassioned as he was on the leaked Carter III tracks.

But he's thoughtful is what he is. I worried that Wayne's own hysterical rate of production would combine forces with frenzied internet discussion and send him over the deep end for good. But the record is a really well structured affair that knows exactly when to let itself go insane (see "A Milli" and most of all "Phone Home"). The production on Carter III is fairly muted, with lovely, expensive-sounding strings tying many of the tracks together. The best track is "Dr. Carter," which matches jazzy, utterly seductive production by Swizz Beatz to Wayne's most meticulous rhyming. Check this out:

Respect is in the heart
So that's where Ima start
And a lot of heart patients don't make it
But hey kid! –plural– I graduated Cause you can get through anything if Magic made it
And that was called recycling
Or re-reciting something cause you like it so you say it just like it
Some say it's bitin' but I say it's enlightnin'
Besides, Dr. Kanye West is one of the brightest.

The heart patient, of course, is hip-hop. Tom Breihan reported that Kanye was visibly disconcerted onstage by what he'd heard from Carter III at NYC's Summer Jam, promising to go to the studio that very night to work up some new shit. THIS IS A REALLY GOOD THING. Wayne's lines in "Dr. Carter" reminded me immediately of a great moment from Ye's "The Glory," where he raps, "When I die, I wanna be compared to Big / Any one, Big Pun, Big L, or Notorious." It's the "any one" that makes that line so lovely, so generous, without dulling any of Kanye's competitive edge. Wayne is a bit too goofy to come out and "compete" with any single MC, but Kanye clearly looms large on Carter III. I hope they keep looming large in each other's eyes for a long time.

But NOW! The Meat and Potatoes!

Nouns, seriously, is a gorgeous album, a big shimmering undersea world of distortion and feedback married to a terrific sense of craft and sequencing. Sasha Frere-Jones deserves much credit for pointing these guys out last November, which is what like thirty internet years ago or something? If I were 14 years old right now and heard Nouns, I think I might listen to it twice daily right up until my sophomore year of college, at which point a train-wreck of a romance would lead me to Scott Walker. That would be a dark time, but I would emerge stronger, bolder, a better singer. But yeah, Nouns reminds me of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea or Loveless–the sense of discovery is really strong.

And Loveless is probably the best point of comparison. They're both albums which feature heaving waves and slabs of moaning, roaring guitars as well as vocals which emerge from and then recede back into the band's hazy bliss. The difference is this: Loveless, front to back, is an album which speaks sounds like Melville speaks words (that is to say, fluently, perfectly, with absolute confidence, rightness, and command of every nuance). Nouns teaches itself to speak as it goes along. Here's another way of saying it: Loveless is possessed, a prophet. Nouns is a preacher who finds his voice over time, interlacing hard work and revision with rushing currents of inspiration.

Compare the two beginnings. Loveless with those four drum hits that explode into a fully-realized instrumental world that contains everything the record will have to offer. Nouns opens with a hazy riff that rocks gently back and forth in sleepy stasis but for a slightly jittery maraca rattle, but then from nowhere four knocking hits that introduce the all-enveloping guitar in a similar way. As "Miner" continues, however, a male voice fades in just a little. It's never intelligible, but you can pick out "I hear" at the beginning of each line. I hear what, exactly? In each of the next three songs, the vocals are pushed forward in the mix, trying to be heard, trying to speak, until the album arrives at its first song which doesn't need to spend a minute creating itself, "Things I Did When I Was Dead." This one is quiet, and easy, and gracefully composed from start to finish.

The album's final song, "Brain Burner," also just kills.

Nouns may have even nudged me away from beats and electronics toward guitars for a time (even Carter III features the ol' ax, hell Wayne plays the guitar–horribly–at one point). What with Simon Reynolds having lost his own faith in beats and Peter having all kinds of trouble finding music to like this year, maybe it's a good time to see if this L.A. scene can make something of itself. I should mention a really outstanding electronic record which will be released in July, though. Blevin Blectum's Gular Fluttler is as terrific as all of her other albums. It also, like Nouns, teaches its tracks how to get off the ground, although whereas it's a case of learning how to speak for No Age, with Blevin it's more an issue of learning how to turn a machine into a body and then a body into a spirit.

thump thump thump

2008-02-27T14:42:00.001-05:00

Me in the Phoenix, on bassline house. They only let me do these full page pieces every so often.

The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride

2008-02-23T23:08:00.003-05:00

I think it's the emotional immediacy of John Darnielle's writing. It explains the electric presence of the "we're-all-in-this-together-and-right-now" feelings that careen through an audience at one of his shows. It also explains why his songs are so exciting to hear, especially for the first time. When he writes a scene of anger, love, or addiction–and they're all precisely scenes, all songs about things that happened in a place at a particular time–the microscopic precision of the writing is what provokes that reaction that never gets old: yeah, that is exactly what that feels like. I know exactly what that feels like but I never said it to myself. Think of the cool or hot air rushing through so many of his songs, or the running water that's just a little too hot to stand. Or all of the fruits and plants. Cranberries in someone's mouth, or jasmine on his tongue. All means of provoking that internal rush of sensory recognition. His songs are tastes of things, moving air, emotional life as something present and not yet remembered. Even on Get Lonely, in which memory plays a significant role, it's more about what it feels like to be remembering and less about the content of any memory in particular.

Starting with Tallahassee (divorce), then running through We Shall All Be Healed (meth addiction), The Sunset Tree (abusive stepfather), and Get Lonely (aftermath of romantic catastrophe), Darnielle took his lo-fi guitar strumming to a studio, and suddenly his brilliant but fairly schizophrenic collections of songs became album length narratives with exquisitely crafted sonic projects to go along with them. Tallahassee is suffused with a muted, swampy grind–remember that horrible organ buzzing away on "Southwood Plantation Road"?–that reflects the inevitable sad futility of the Alpha Couple's emotional thrashing. There is a glassy, suburban sheen to Get Lonely. We Shall All Be Healed has that spiteful electric buzzing. It's not that albums are a more dignified or worthwhile kind of project than singles. But some people just cannot cope with the disappearance of Darnielle's bedroom recordings, and that baffles me. All of his studio albums are rich with narrative invention and filled with subtle instrumental or sonic choices. They're also, after everything else, incredibly affecting. Tallahassee beginning to end is about the limit of what I can cope with.

So the first thing to know about Heretic Pride is that there's no story. Darnielle sings as a new father, a raving paranoid, a rapist. The second thing to know is that the larger musical preoccupations are still there. There are many lyrical references to the sea, as well as to supernatural creatures or places. There are gorgeously arranged strings (sometimes Darnielle's ear for the sound he wants is almost too good). The album cover's threatening clouds vaguely suggest a seaside locale. Just as a shimmering, friendly body of water can darken and roll at a moment's notice, just as a monster can grin and wave or bear its teeth, so does the sonic profile of Heretic Pride tread a line between nimble, secure instrumentation and clattering, noisy recklessness.

What's also very much in evidence on Heretic Pride is the wonderfully understated versatility of Darnielle's voice. Like Bob Dylan, Darnielle is easy to dismiss as a punky, nasal yeller, and there's no doubt that Darnielle's declamatory shout is at the core of many of his best songs. But let's not ignore the fact that he can sing in a pained whisper, or with full-throated melodicism, or through his teeth. There are at least five distinct vocal personalities operating on Heretic Pride. Ultimately, this shouldn't be a very surprising observation. What on earth do you think was holding your attention on the boom-box records? The guitar playing?

So, here are a few things I like:
"San Bernardino" – This is the one where Darnielle sings as a new father. His gift for melody is on full display, and the strings, both plucked and played in a warm drone, are beautifully arranged. There's a moment where everything drops out to make way for a soft, quickly ascending, high-pitched string harmonic. It'll provoke shivers.

"Lovecraft in Brooklyn" – This is the kind of thing that nobody else can do: "Woke up afraid of my own shadow / Like, genuinely afraid." That is exactly what I mean by the sensory immediacy of Darnielle's writing. It's a cliche, but not if you're actually afraid.

"Tianchi Lake" – The piano is so graceful here. There's a terrific combination of everyday animals and supernatural creatures (namely, the Lake Tianchi Monster). And, even though it's a monster, its appearance here is magically serene: "Backstroking on the surface, moonlight on its face / Floats the Tianchi Monster, staring into space." Darnielle moves on quickly, without fanfare, to sing about a temple on shore. Things that can exist share space with things that can't or shouldn't, which sounds about right I think.

Give this record a few listens! Go to his concert if he plays nearby! I know that he's been doing this stuff for years, but he isn't bored, or tired, or running out of ideas. I think I'm done with the Mountain Goats from time to time, but really, who has been a better songwriter this decade? Has anybody even come close?

I am forced into speech!

2008-02-19T09:12:00.002-05:00

This could be nifty, although I didn't like Pan's Labyrinth all that much. Magical Realism usually seems kind of cheap. Still. Nothing but observations for pages and pages and pages, but the things described end up overloading something as dry and limited as scientific observation. Let's hope he doesn't try to add some kind of story.

Goodbye, Babylon

2008-02-09T16:41:00.005-05:00

This is a box set of religious music from the American South in the first half of the twentieth century, and it is outrageously, abundantly good. I bought it four years ago, and every time I return to it I'm moved, scared, refreshed. It's implications are unavoidable. One can't enjoy the flights of rapture and joy without buying into the desperation and fear as well. It's the opposite of attending mass on Christmas and Easter only, or of identifying with the Jewish community instead of the Jewish religion (both of which are perfectly sensible ways to engage with a faith). Goodbye, Babylon is something more irrational, more threatening, and as a result it's some of the most penetrating, thrilling music I know. A review which appeared in Wire included the following: "This is such gorgeous, moving, vital, sensuous music, such a testament to the human spirit that it's a shame to drag God into it." I could not disagree more. I'm an atheist and all, but a good deal of the fun of listening to this is engaging with music that thinks I'm going to hell. So fine, SAVE ME! The songs I write about below are the ones that have most burrowed their way into me over time, but there really isn't a wasted track on any of the set's six CDs. Hear it post haste!

01-03 "Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind On Jesus)" by, Roosevelt Graves and Brother
Joyfully sympathetic guitar and tambourine playing here, but the real kicker is the way the brothers' voices harmonize on the word "standing," which happens 12 times during the song and sounds like a new faith every time. There are many songs in this set where death lends joy a tinge of desperation, but here the tears in Roosevelt's voice are there because he's been saved and he knows it.

01-06 "Satisfied" by, J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers
The fiddle that introduces this song is rich, gravelly, and modest. The gently rocking guitar has an almost narcotic effect, which is appropriate for a song aspiring to the peace of death. This one always ends too quickly for me.

01-13 "Crying Holy Unto the Lord" by, The Blue Chips
My roommate Noah reminded me that the shuffle happened when the blues crashed headlong into the polka. This is impertinently buoyant, earthbound music, and to me it's like the inverse of "Satisfied." There's a line, "For if I could, I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood," but one gets the sense that the Chips aren't really too worried about it.

02-01 "There Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down" by, Brother Claude Ely
This crazed Pentecostal roar is like Phil Spector's wall of sound before Phil Spector knew what the wall of sound was. It's only guitar–driving, always accelerating–Ely and various harmonies and shouts, and handclaps, but it fills up the sound space like nothing else on this set. When he holds the word "Graaaaaaaaaaaaaave" and sets the recording equipment to a mad kind of buzzing, I'd like nothing more than for the house I'm in to tear itself from the foundations and come crashing to Earth.

02-06 "How About You" by, Thomas A. Dorsey
This guy also wrote "If You See My Saviour," "Peace in the Valley," AND "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" in addition to this one, so, yeah, he had things figured out. I like how the recording dampens the piano, and Dorsey's voice is just so charismatic and cool.

02-07 "Jesus is a Mighty Good Leader" by, Skip James
This is a dumb thing to write, but Skip James has the kind of voice that doesn't really seem to exist anymore. It's keening, almost crying, even childlike in some ways, and what I really can't get over is that it's not a voice that has some bedrock foundation deep down in the gut. It just sings itself, almost straight from the mouth. James lists family members who have been led away–mother, father, sister–so if his voice sounds like crying consider that he no longer has anyone to cry to. It's hopeless grief, which means its irrationally, insanely sure of its own impending deliverance.

02-07 "No More, My Lord" by, Jimpson
Vocals, with wood-chopping accompaniment. This one stays with you, and the little buzz that happens when a wood chip flies into the microphone is a horrifying moment of sonic violence.

02-24 "The Bible's True" by Uncle Dave Macon
"Evolution teaches man came from a monkey / I don't believe no such a thing / In the days of a week of Sundays / For the Bible's true oh yes, I believe it / I've seen enough, and I can prove it / What you say, what you say / Bound to be that way." Macon also has the best track on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, called "Way Down the Old Plank Road."

03-05 "I'll Fly Away" by James and Martha Carson
"I'll Fly Away" may be my favorite song–it's inclusion on Kanye's The College Dropout is just another sign that the guy is a genius–and this country gospel rendition is perfect, probably the best song on this set. Martha's guitar playing is so wonderfully sonorous, and their two voices during the verses know each other well in a way that I think has to be the product of singing with someone for hours and weeks and years. If you're only going to hear one, hear this one.

03-19 "What Are They Doing In Heaven Today" by Washington Phillips
This recording, made in 1928, is the first ever recording of this song. Phillips finds a middle ground here between speaking and singing which is very affecting, and I love that he's accompanied by something that the liner notes only identify as a "Novelty Instrument."

03-24 "Death in the Morning" by Rev. Anderson Johnson
Because it was recorded in 1953, this record's quality is better than most, but I think it would take a lot to hinder Johnson's voice, which dances, sobs, and roars furiously through his own version of the Conversation With Death. Death takes his child, of course, but before he does Johnson pleads with such a range of tone and personality that he might as well be the whole congregation.

04-05 "Found a Wonderful Savior" by Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet
Unaccompanied, chugging gospel quartet madness. When you don't worry so much about melody and put all of your stock into impossibly intricate poly-rhythms, what you have is compulsively music that will set you to shaking. The lead tenor's nasal voice is also pretty silly.

05-08 "Keep On the Firing Line" by Brown's Ferry Four
This number's conception of faith as battle scares the hell out of me. Merle Travis' guitar is so efficiently well played–he doesn't miss a single note–and the harmonies are so exact that it has something of a martial feel to go along with its country swing.

05-12 "I Got to Cross the River of Jordan" by Blind Willie McTell
McTell's guitar playing here is absolutely unhinged. It's a fairly straightforward blues, and he takes time to linger a beat here, wiggle a note here, overplay something there. His vocals make use of the blues trick of dropping the final words of a line and substituting a guitar figure instead, which is deliciously alienating for a listener. As though McTell weren't so much interested in communicating as in working some things out on his own. Like the best blues, it's bottomless.
05-15 "Amazing Grace" by Mahalia Jackson
Stops conversation in its tracks. I've seen it happen. She only sings the first verse, and it's all you'll need.
___________________________

Phew! I didn't even mention the sixth disc, which contains only SERMONS ("The Black Diamond Express Train to Hell" = My Fave). I've recently started reading Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic, in which he makes the point that people think rock is actually about three minute thrills when it's really about a runaway train. So many of the tracks on Goodbye, Babylon, particularly those made by pastors and their congregations, start at a given tempo and then just rush and rush and rush. I think you can find the seeds of rock's runaway trains in the kinds of insane headlong leaps made on these songs.

I'm going to start writing more about things going on in the present, but I've been listening to these for a while. I'm not done with them by a long shot.

With Odds Like That

2008-02-09T16:21:00.000-05:00

From The Crimson, me on music videos at the Museum of Fine Arts. I surprised myself by liking "Ali in the Jungle" by The Hours, which is so shameless as to include the line "It's the greatest comeback since Lazarus" multiple times. It's like a vision of what The Arcade Fire would be if they stopped dressing up their desperate feel-good-ism with ART signifiers, which they will never do.
__________________

PUTTING MTV IN THE MFA
Friday, February 8

When I was in middle school, there was a television station called “The Box.” A kind of mass-scale precursor to YouTube, it played music videos—chosen entirely by viewers—twenty-four hours a day. If I wanted to see pop at its trashy best (apparently viewers just could not get enough of Eiffel 65’s “Blue”), “The Box” was the place.

“Mirrorball,” a series of four programs of carefully selected music videos screening at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) through Feb. 23, may be the opposite of “The Box.” Quietly, respectfully watching music videos? In an art museum? If nothing else, the Mirrorball series demonstrates just how much the music video’s cultural place has shifted in recent years.

First of all, “The Box” ceased to exist years ago, and while MTV’s TRL is technically still on the air, it’s fallen a long way from the days of Carson Daly and the ceremonial “retirings” of its most popular videos. MTV and VH1 have both devoted themselves largely to reality shows, which are cheap to make and infinitely reproducible. Music videos today just do not exist in a TRL-dominated universe.

A sly reference to these days gone by was included in Saturday’s program. In Jonas & Francois’ ingenious video for the Justice hit “D.A.N.C.E.,” two skinny males walk disinterestedly through a nightclub while eye-popping words, letters, and illustrations dance across their form-fitting t-shirts. For a few seconds, one t-shirt simply reads, “Internet Killed The Video Stars.”

It’s a nifty play on the title of the song that inaugurated the music video era, The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and it’s also so true. Nestled in the warm embrace of MTV, record companies could drop millions on clips in which Mariah Carey could ride jet skis in a wet suit with a plunging neckline. Michael Jackson could seduce Eddie Murphy’s wife in Ancient Egypt over the course of nine minutes. Britney Spears could do it again—on Mars. By comparison, music videos today find themselves without a home.

So in one sense, it’s very nice of art museums to try and give them a new home. More than any other kind of institution, art museums have the power to transform the raw materials of culture into intellectually elevated Works Of Art. The MFA and “Mirrorball” make no bones about these kind of aspirations: “at their best, these music promos have more in common with groundbreaking short cinema than commercial flash.”

But do they really? At last Saturday’s “Global Selection” screening, a few of the videos on display lived up to their high-art billing. Karina Garcia Casanova’s video for the song “Disown, Delete” by the Ensemble featuring Cat Power accompanied Cat Power’s breathy, threatening vocals with grainy, slow-motion video footage of hurricanes in action. As the song swelled to a kind of breathing, desperate mass, the video showed a world pulling itself apart shingle by shingle and branch by branch. Best of all, the video didn’t try to glamorize the performer or interpret the song by adding a story. Instead, the video focused on the sound itself, and it did a perfect job.

Koichiro Tsujikawa’s wonderfully strange video for the Cornelius song “Like a Rolling Stone” was another highlight. To accompany Cornelius’ ambient electronics, Tsujikawa created a detailed, swirling world of archways, pedestals, and many small plastic humans. At the end of the video, the plastic humans turn back into rocks. Of the twenty one videos shown, “Like a Rolling Stone” least resembled “commercial flash.”

In other cases, though, it was clear that a fancy video had more to do with a band’s efforts to construct a particular image of itself. Michael Spiccia’s video for the Jet single “Rip It Up” combined video and animation to little effect. Cut-and-paste style text danced across the screen, pencil sketches of buxom women frantically erased themselves: the whole thing looked like a vulgar high schooler’s notebook collage.

In fact, there’s a whole “Mirrorball” program devoted to animation. While the technique can signify everything from gothic emoting—The Horrors’ “She is the New Thing”—to folksy good-naturedness—Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End”—the videos themselves tend to dissolve into an undifferentiated mass.

More than anything, I kept coming back to the strangeness of watching mass-culture clips in a darkened theater. One of my favorite videos, made by Jonas Odell, accompanied a song called “Ali in the Jungle (version 2)” by a British band called The Hours. The completely animated video adopts the excessive, faux-Victorian, theatrical aesthetic embodied most prominently in the U.S. by The Arcade Fire—think old-timey machines, flickering projector light, and skeletons in top hats.

The song is shameless in its attempts to inspire, with soaring lyrics like “Everybody gets knocked down / How quick are you gonna get up?”, but I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that it has been added to my YouTube playlist.

That’s the thing, though. As gorgeous and ornate as the video is, it’s the song that really matters. And a cheesy pop song works better in a dorm room or car radio than in an art museum theater. “Mirrorball” is a terrific survey of the music video as a genre, but let’s hope that these clips find a stable place somewhere out in the real world.

Describe Your Turf

2008-01-31T00:08:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-24T15:04:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-07T14:41:00.000-05:00

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.

2008-01-06T18:55:00.000-05:00

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.

2008-01-06T18:42:00.000-05:00

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

aaaaaaaand . . . . blog.