I haven't touched Love Rock Revolution since this morning, but I stumbled onto this 2012 Calvin Johnson interview (by Ian Svenonius.) Compelling.
I remembered to read the last chapter of the Merge Records book this morning, Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small. Arcade Fire wasn't a band that commanded my attention. The postscript that Touch & Go downsized in 2009 made me wince. I felt bad for Corey Rusk & his laid off workers. I'm not comfortable with laying that at the feet of Merge Records, although Mac & Laura admit that they should've been more communicative with old friends.
The Butthole Surfers seeing Touch & Go sprang to mind. That hurt too. Listening to And Introducing cover Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life clouded by memories fondly of the Butthole Surfers. That was a shitty move. I wasn't a Fugazi person back then because they always seemed too dour. MacKaye's perspective made me come around.
When Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79–'83 comes back into print, i need to snag it. It was published 2010. Copies are going for upwards of $80 now.
I started Baumgarten's Love Rock Revolution this morning. Reading these indie rock books has been a healing salve for my long binge on reading the machinations of the CIA.
I finished an unexpectedly touching 33 1/3 book on Pavement's Wowee Zowee this morning. Despite being on a Pavement listserv in the 90s, i never much approached them as a band, only listening to their albums in isolation. The fandom actually turned me off. The precious indie boys on that time irked me. Maybe it's because i hung out with quasi-goths and traded zines with earnest DIY punks.
Wowee Zowee is my kid's favorite Pavement record lately. I'm not clear why. He's always seemed to like more songs from Brighten the Corners, but "Rattled By the Rush" is his jam.
David Berman popped up a couple of times in the book. He came off as more of a jerk than i expected. I've listened to more Silver Jews in recent months than any time previously, in part because of his recent death after Purple Mountains.
I half-watched Slow Century before, but i'll watch it in earnest ASAP.
Ran across this review for Japrocksampler, and this bit (which follows a pretty glowing review otherwise) caught my eye:
With detailed accounts of the above incident and others, Japrocksampler stands as a pretty good social history of Japan in the '60s and '70s. However, the book will likely appeal most to serious rock music fans who will be sent into a collecting frenzy over Cope's Top 50 Japrock LPs index.
For all of its merits, it must be said that Japrocksampler is rather sloppily written and edited. There are a number of misspellings and factual errors, and Cope has a bad habit of repeating himself.
Last month, in the Times, the white folk rocker Devendra Banhart declared his admiration for R. Kelly’s new R. & B. album “Double Up.” Thirty years ago, Banhart might have attempted to imitate R. Kelly’s perverse and feather-light soul. Now he’s just a fan.
The uneasy, and sometimes inappropriate, borrowings and imitations that set rock and roll in motion gave popular music a heat and an intensity that can’t be duplicated today, and the loss isn’t just musical; it’s also about risk.
“The Song Is The Single,” which starts “You make the record at night, ’cause everyone knows that rock ’n’ roll is the language of night/But this got made in the day; it was bright.” So what’s happening here is that the language of night -- black night or white night -- is no longer available. What you come up with is awkward in the light, but seems more true. Of course, this truth, this awkwardness, has long since become a shtick, a common blah. This means that the voice has to keep searching for itself anew. Night doesn’t work, day doesn’t work. Maybe twilight.
It's odd that i was reading Cope's Japrocksampler last night, to run across this story about "melody roads" in Japan. They already realized that they had the rhythm, so on some roads, they have cut grooves so that tones can be created while driving over them. A driver can adjust the car to create a song of sorts. They are going to out-literalize the concept of motorik in Krautrock!
This essay by Asad Raza over on 3 Quarks Daily kinda blew me away just now. Drawing from imagery from "Brazil" and "Goodfellas," and draws from the source material for "American Gangster," to paint a very ugly, sobering picture of America today.
One sentence that i'm afraid that i will be co-opting to scrawl anywhere i can is, "Big box suburbia is an alienation factory." It's a very succinct metaphor. Fuck it. That ain't no metaphor. It's concrete fact. Raza nailed it.
Weird that it seems that Juliana Hatfield coined the phrase "alienation factory" as when i googled that alone, it turns up mostly in her song lyrics. Nicely dystopian. I never really gave her or Blake Babies a chance, and still doubt her music would suit me.
Read that essay. Edifying.
By the way, another sentence that has me grinning maniacally is, " The new frontier is the first frontier, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and our representatives act as gangster-cowboys there while we exult in the televised fictions detailing the same." I've seen that sentiment elsewhere, but i like the way that sentence is constructed.
It's weirdly satisfying when Warren Ellis plays with music writing. (I enjoy a column like this more than some of his comics.) It reminds me of the glory days of Freaky Trigger when it was the flagship of a fleet of small music blogs, before the the hype hungry mp3 blogs devoured all traffic. Pop culture naval gazing is awesome.
Still trying to think of something to say in reaction to Jess Harvell's tirade on Idolator a couple of weeks ago. Reading some of the hyping blogs has been a dirty chore, as i want to keep up with any potential developing bands, but it's boring. Music is still exciting, and a good new song can send me into opiated bliss, but i'm feeling like i'm being conned a lot of the time with mock earnestness. I love a good flash-in-the-pan, one-hit-wonder pop moment from an unknown band, but everyone playing John the Baptist to anyone who could be passed off as a potential messiah with the right marketing.... yeah, fuck that.
Now bands only really seem interesting when woven into a larger context, when played off cultural or political moments, whether it's a comic book or an election.
Nope. Don't know where to go with that, other than... Less press releases. More thought experiments.
Fuck it. I'm dumping anything remotely hyperiffic from my music RSS feed. They are weeds choking my enjoyment of music, making me doubt the sanity of the alleged tastemaking public.
Whether there is music hidden in Da Vinci's "The Last Music" is not something that i would venture to make a judgment on. (No, there isn't, but it would be very cool.) The statement by the man claims to have deciphered this rumored encrypted music though, bugs me.
"A new figure emerges -- he wasn't a heretic like some believe," Pala said. "What emerges is a man who believes, a man who really believes in God."
I'm so absurdly late on this that's it's nearly pointless, but i just saw this X-Force cover for the very first time. I read all of the X-force/X-statix in trade paperback
Tea and oranges? Is this a reference to Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne"?
Since Mr. Sensitive is essentially a stand-in Kurt Cobain, is this his Leonard Cohen afterworld of "Pennyroyal Tea?"
Yeah, probably... i just often see connections that aren't there though.
ACL was fun, but a little of a bust for us.
We attended Friday, seeing Blonde Redhead, LCD Soundsystem, part of Spoon (who turned out not to be very compelling live,) part of Queens of the Stone Age (who were quite good live,) the Kaiser Chiefs, and the Killers. Actually i saw a bit more than that, but thopse are the ones i caught enough to identify songs. I only regret not seeing more of Del McCoury, and choosing Spoon over QotSA initially.
Saturday, we skipped altogether. The White Stripes cancellation played a factor in that decision, but we were having too much fun sightseeing.
Sunday, we showed up for Bloc Party, only to be defeated by heat and overcrowded. Kat & i were fed up with tripping over the abandoned chairs set up for camps at the AT&T tent. There were plenty of shows that i wanted to see, but it simply wasn't worth the claustrophobia. My brother Travis was able to make it into the tent where Preservation Hall Jazz Band was playing, and said it's the best thing he saw at the whole festival. He stuck around to catch part of Wilco, who bored him, and My Morning Jacket, who he said was excellent. He tried unsuccessfully to get us to come back to see Bob Dylan, but we already got our money's worth, as i had lucked out on the $50 for 3 day pass deal.
LCD Soundsystem was my favorite performance. I was a little worried about dragging Kat & Travis to see them despite LCD's great reputation as a live band. (Also, at the time, i was not aware of Travis' near obsession with Daft Punk. I feared that he might be bored with dance music.) Although it wasn't necessary for my entertainment, i was amazed that nearly every sound on the songs was replicated live, no tapes, very little sampling, which was a huge contract to the Blonde Redhead show that we saw earlier on the same stage. Murphy was also one of the most engaging presences i saw onstage at ACL, chatting up the audience, making funny quips, and making a spectacle of himself. For allegedly being a go-to hipster band to namedrop, they seemed like one the most grounded bands that i've seemed in awhile, with a real desire to entertain, not so much striving to impress with credentials.
A trip to ACL next year seems like a longshot. The outdoor festival thing in 90 degree weather surrounded by tens of thousands of people just doesn't seem to be my thing anymore. SxSW maybe?
Catalog FAC 501 goes to Tony Wilson's coffin.
Was he in on this decision, because i sure hope he was. It makes me happy.
via Idolator.
The first obituary that i've seen for him is over on Idolator. Honestly, i didn't really understand who he was properly until after 24 Hour Party People, as Manchester was never center of my universe, even though now some of the bands on Factory play key roles in my music collection. (Lou was very patient with my ignorance of certain periods of British music, but i deserved to have had my ass kicked.)
Quite depressing... he'd been fighting this cancer for awhile.
Overview on the new M.I.A. album Kala on 17 dots. I reckon that i've heard a third of the tracks and still enjoy them, even though Damien has me feeling dirty over my fetish for her.
I've already chose to see LCD Soundsystem over her at ACL Fest in September, but i might have to see her after all with Voodoo Fest in New Orleans.... as if i really go see live music that much. There has been at least a dozen bands in the past two months playing in New Orleans and Baton Rouge that i've skipped out on. Not even pretending that i intend to see Marnie Stern at the Spanish Moon tonight.
Why the hell hasn't anyone i've read yet has mentioned that Will Oldham is also in this video for Kanye West's "Can't Tell Me Nothing"?! It looks a little odd seeing him playing Flavor Flav to someone's Chuck D.
No, i'm not well-versed enough in hip-hop to come up with something more timely than a reference almost two decades old. Then again, no matter how much it amuses me this moment, this video ain't much more than another riff than something Weird Al already explored with that Amish Paradise bit.
Even though i have most of Oldham's albums, and probably qualify as a devoted fan in some respect, i missed this entirely. I didn't know who Zach Galifianakis was either until i looked him up just now. Now i get Oldham doing the stand-up comedian thing a bit better.
Also, didn't Oldham do some R. Kelly covers? .. oh yeah... Superwolf did "Ignition" and it was sort of awesome in a puzzling way.
New Orleans never can do enough to secure its own heritage. Some great citizens are making heroic efforts to document sites relevant to the history of jazz. I hadn't even stopped to think that Jelly Roll Morton's house might still be standing. It is, and someone is hellbent on preserving it. For a city that makes tourism its primary industry, the amount of heritage that gets overlooked and neglected is insane.
Yesterday we discovered at work that a couple of sites that were previously blocked are now coming through clearly. The big revelation this morning is that YouTube works now. It's not as if i really can watch YouTube all day when i have work to do, but i'm a bit giddy. YouTube doesn't work so well at home obviously.
Thanks to video, i think that i finally get Battles though. It's sad that i need visual supplementary to sell me on the band, but i'm getting something conceptually that i wasn't convinced of no matter how hard i listened, no matter how many reviews i read.
It doesn't look as mechanical as i felt it to be. It looks genuinely as fun as it's supposed to be (bouncy rhythm and singing machine-elves,) while remaining hermetically sealed.
Thank you, video medium. I apologize that i'm so intellectually stunted. Please know that while i'm of the age that i should be well acquainted with music videos, because i lived so far out that cable was not available, i never learned to take them for granted.
Harold Bloom analyzes Obama's poetry. Curious. A candidate who openly wrote poetry.
While i don't listen much to Ben Harper anymore, as he was passed onto me from an old friend of mine who I've lost contact with, he's certainly a lot easier for on my ears than Celine Dion.
Sweet Jesus. Nick Cave performed a karaoke of "Bootylicious" at a benefit for a bid of £70,000. (via Idolator.)
Tender Prey & Henry's Dream have come back into rotation on my iPod after falling out of favor for many years. I still wince at how silly and heavyhanded some of the imagery has become for me, but the absurdity of "Deanna" won me over. Sort of. Lemme get back to that...
Last night, whilst tagging mp3s yet again, i noticed that the riff for Pavement's
Box Elder" was probably copped from Neil Young's "Don't Cry No Tears" from Zuma. That little guitar bit has always charmed me. Neil Young is usually an artist i avoided in the past, originally because he was a favorite of an ex-girlfriend, a strident classic rocker. As i moved on musically, he became attached in my memory to a certain pack of pot-smoking fry cooks who drove BMWs with Deadhead stickers on them. Damien further tarnished him by cursing his weedy voice, constantly comparing him to Kermit the Frog.
I'm constantly embarrassed by my artificial partitions of what i like and don't like based on arbitrary judgments, peer pressure, and tangential associations. If i heard this Zuma track first, would i have liked Pavement when i did? I initially liked to mock Pavement when a friend introduced them to me, just out of goodnatured spite. It wasn't that hard to come around to them after a few months of constant exposure.
My path back to Neil Young isn't through Pavement. Damien relented on his mockery, and conceded that Young's a good songwriter. The Deadheads that i loathed didn't go on to become yuppies. The ex-girlfriend later independently moved onto music that claimed as my own.
Now i'm going back through everything i rejected for possibly superficial reasons, to check if my kneejerk reaction was right.
Post-Barrett Pink Floyd still makes me wince. Pearl Jam is still boring. I don't know what to do with Neil Young. I followed my way back to him by way of Buffalo Springfield, a band that i never completely embraced, despite my '60s fetish. I'm still wrestling with connecting Young to Pavemenet, as it might make the transition easier.
The Jackin' Pop 2006 poll threw me off a little bit. I was expecting something a little less... um.... rock? I quite expected The Knife to top the Album list that poll, not TV on The Radio, who i listen to more, but feel that most of my appreciation came from seeing them at ACL. That list didn't look too much different from Pitchfork or Stylus.
The Top Tracks was far better, but again... i dunno... i barely blogged about music in 2006, because i was not listening to much of anything new, either out of depression, laziness, or lack of opportunity. It's been a struggle to catch up and create my own 2006 lists, cherry picking tracks from other people's lists. There was no opportunity to wade through the undistilled ocean of music for myself. Everything has been preselected for me. Maybe in a few days, i can stammer out some stuff that stuck for me.
I'm just glad to have ILX back online honestly.
