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Sunday, August 31, 2003

I'm all over the shop here. Words are back; words spilled over other wordsmiths who in turn spilled them over the music that almost made them come apart at the tendons, the heartstrings, with emotion. The tension between the micro-personal-intense and the macro-universal-analytical. Feelings (heart) versus ideas (head). And how to connect them.

This, from Sasha Frere Jones, on Lester Bangs, in Slate. We may wrestle with "dear old Lester" over and over (doubling back on ourselves as we discover his own doubling back, tripping over our feet and scratching our heads), but he truly did manage to absorb and articulate the currents and pulses, and often well before they are manifest overtly in our heavy-handed, leaden-footed mainstream culture:

"Innocents in Babylon" is a long feature about Jamaica and Bob Marley written for Creem in 1976. Bangs gives a short history lesson on Jamaica's "colonial hangover" and winds up liking his subjects without pretending their future in the music business is any brighter than it looks. The interview with Marley is a great stereo experience: Bangs listens to Marley talk while other interviewers try, gamely, to guide Marley away from vague statements about Rastafarianism. The article is also as good a primer on the nuts and bolts of Jamaican music as exists in anything shorter than book length. Reggae was years away from being standard college background music in 1976, and only a few Anglo listeners had realized the potential of dub. Bangs sees the power of the sound system at work during a visit to a record store:

[T]his sense of the guy who plays the records as performer extends down into the record shops, where the clerks shift speakers, tracks, and volume levels with deft magicianly fingers as part of a highly intricate dance, creating sonic riot in the store and new productions of their own in their minds: I control the dials.


He's not just hearing the essential flux of Jamaican pop—he's hearing hip-hop a few months before it appears on the streets of New York. [Frere Jones]

Brilliant.

So, the micro-personal: I often wince at my over-earnestness, at that (unfortunate?) by-product of my own small defiant stance against the massed ranks of cynicism (not to mention my predilection for melodrama!). On ILM, I even outed myself yesterday (don't bother scrolling through such a long thread just for my two or three posts, either), embarrassed and self-conscious (fuck, I hate meanspiritedness, but I don't want to come off all sanctimonious, either, and besides, that thread turned out fine after the pissing contest ended). Regardless, what I was always drawn to in Lester's writing was something SFJ alludes to in his concluding sentences:

The cynicism that permeates much rock criticism would annoy Bangs more than anything. You can see him now, grabbing a critic, shaking him and saying, "HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS ISN'T A GOOD RECORD? JUST BECAUSE IT'S BAD DOESN'T MEAN YOU GET TO SLAG IT!"

(Or, just prior to this -- "That kind of naked investment would be too painful in the instant feedback world of the Internet" -- which opens up a whole 'nother road for a future blog entry. Ha.)

Bangs connected the intellectual and the emotional, often seamlessly. In my own writing, I'd be happy if I achieved a mere tenth of that synthesis. But I really could end up cutting and pasting the entire article here. Just read it already.

Saturday, August 30, 2003

Words have definitely failed this week. That happens. But music still speaks, and here are a few ways in which it spoke to me lately:

1. The Stairs are from Dedham, Massachussetts. They got a grant to make a record. They used some elementary schoolkids to help design their CD cover art, and they utilized choirs and marching bands from local high schools, the ultimate community outreach. Oh, and there are handclaps, toy pianos, trumpets, samples, drum machines, chimes, Moogs, Rhodes, banjos, harmonicas, sitars, kitchen noises, tubas, and car effects on this glorious mess of a record, Miraculous Happens. Makes Broken Social Scene sound like Phillip Glass. See what you think. (I'll be reviewing it for PopMatters, but don't hold your breath, I'm way behind schedule here.)

You know, I ran out of both time and steam just now. Or, in other words, To Be Continued...

Monday, August 25, 2003

"Can it be that the materialist worldview, in which there is no intrinsic meaning, is slowly murdering our souls?"

-- Ian MacDonald (in The People's Music – Selected Journalism [Pimlico]), who died three days ago.

A truly terrifying question. He answered it himself in two conflicting ways: his writings, with their clarity and intelligence and heart, say "no"; his death, by his own hand, says "yes".

Friday, August 22, 2003

PopMatters put up their Top 100 Songs from 1977 - 2003 today.

It's not bad at all, for one of those consensus type things. Every writer got to send in 25 songs, listed in order, and somehow, -- I have no idea how, as I'm a disorganized clown, really, when it comes to this kind of thing -- Sarah Zupko compiled the above list. It was given impetus by some similar VH1 "Best Songs of the last 25 Years" or something (I'm in Canada, and don't get VH1, but I've seen their list online), and I think PopMatters does a far better job, even though my own personal list was very idiosyncratic, and doesn't happen to share a great deal with the consensus (ha, there were songs by Low, Billy Bragg, Bronski Beat, Destiny's Child, Aphex Twin, Cocteau Twins, Sisters of Mercy, the Roots, Chic and Missy Elliott on my list). *Sob* They never had a chance.

So, I've seen it said (on ILM) that this is a bit Anglophile, and a bit '80s skewed. Fair points, both, but PopMatters itself has always been quite Anglophile for a site that's based in Chicago. And that's pretty refreshing, I think. And the '80s were so unfairly maligned for so long that this may be a bit of a backlash. Or, even more likely, most writers reached their formative/college years in the '80s. Having said that, the USA and the UK are, of course, massively re(pre)sented here, which is usually the case (Canada = Alanis, and Australia = AC/DC, apparently). At least this list (unlike the VH1 version) acknowledges the existence of both the Smiths and New fucking Order (both pretty shocking omissions, whether you like those bands or not).

Anyway, I think the writers can be proud, most of all, of the standard of the ink spilled under each pick. As someone pointed out, anyone can make a list, but it's justifying it that takes a little more nous. My own lone blurb was for R.E.M.'s "Losing my Religion", by the way, and it's fairly standard/straightforward. Not my best work, but whatever.

I'm lucky to be able to write for sites that I'm not ashamed of, even if I don't get paid in, like, actual money or anything.


Thursday, August 21, 2003

A really interesting story has been running on Plastic these last few days. Revolving around a Guardian article, which in turn is based on a new book entitled Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin And The Lust For Real Life by David Boyle, the poster ("holgate") has pulled in an enormous wealth of links that, taken together, strongly suggest that modern humans and "reality" have long since parted ways, and that consequently we need to -- and allegedly are in the throes of attempting to -- get back to some elusive (illusory?) collective authenticity. Of course, it's not as simple as that; nothing ever is (but it's kind of funny that the story appears on a site called "Plastic", don't you think?).

So many sleeping tangents are stirring awake, but I'll just rouse two or three for now:

* First, it has to be said: the moment human beings took up agriculture as a cool new lifestyle, this elusive fake/real (false?) dichotomy was embarked upon, for good or for ill. In a sense, we domesticated ourselves. And, really, is a dog fake?

* Authenticity, as it relates to music, is a perennially fertile ground for debate. Is J.Lo really any more fabricated, with her "I'm still Jenny from the block" than, say, Pearl Jam with their equally self-crafted image (or, the Monkees any more than the Beatles)? In other words, an "image" of authenticity is still an image, a projection of how the object desires to be viewed. Bob Dylan is usually the example wheeled out here. Fake, fake, fake, Mr. middle class Jewish (Zimmer)man. I'm not disparaging him as an artist, here; quite the opposite in fact, I love Dylan. And yet, perhaps rightly, we're currently in a cultural phase that generally appreciates and prefers the openly, honestly, phony over the artificially authentic ("Keep it Real" notwithstanding). Justin T. is sounding more eerily like Michael J. every day, and come to think of it, why are we so repulsed/enthralled by the latter, anyway?

* But without getting into "whoaful" sophomoric Neoisms, is it really all just consensus reality? Is nothing real, or is everything real? Speaking of Keanu, the Matrix movies are by no means the only recent cinematic explorations of this existential conundrum. In fact, the very turning of the millennial wheel seemed to usher in numerous parallel journeys into the heart of (un)reality, and the questions it raises. It seems that the entire culture became concerned over authenticity -- particularly how it relates to memory, history. Perhaps that arises from some sublimated collective wish to actually forget the last century, the "Hemoclysm", that visceral, brutal confirmation of humanity's propensity for utter, harrowing darkness. Skeptical? Just look at the cluster of similarly themed movies that were released between 1999 and 2001 (the original Matrix in '99, Memento in March 2001, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in June 2001, and both Donnie Darko and the masterful, sorrowful allure of Mulholland Drive in October of that same year). And then recall (ha!) that Kid A found itself endlessly cloned on endless ranks of flourescent-lit shelves in October 2001, soon to be trailed by its brilliant-but-awkward squinting sibling Amnesiac in June of the following year. Our society was sure talking to itself pretty restlessly in that period. And perhaps we're not out of it, yet. The loose ends remain untied, the awful questions neither sufficiently answered nor properly ignored to our satisfaction. I mean, Soderbergh's remake of Tarkovsky's Solaris was only recently released on DVD/VHS, and the very same concerns -- memory, authenticity, grief, denial, loss -- resurfaced once more to chilling effect. And Hail to the Thief itself seems to be struggling and torn between a desire to return to a pre-adult world of shadowy childhood archetypes on the one hand, and the impulse to unleash a feral, violent, nihilistic rage aimed squarely at the political leaders who brought us to this point, on the other. Which culminates in the very last song, "A Wolf at the Door", a weird, chilling amalgam of both these impulses.

So, childhood (Kid A, David in AI), memory (all the above), and trauma (from the airplane engine crashing through Donnie Darko's roof to Betty/Diane's terrible self-negation and helpless, seething revenge fantasies following her humiliation at the nonchalant hands of a cruel lover, from Chris Kelvin's frantic need to erase the psychic violence of his wife's death in Solaris to Thom Yorke wailing futilely "I'm not here, this isn't happening"). As someone a lot smarter than me said "If September 11th hadn't happened, we'd have had to invent it" (sorry, can't find that quote anywhere now).

Okay, these aren't the only cultural products of the time period. But they are significant ones (it's not necessary to use the loaded word "important" here), and for me, the unnoticed (by their authors) common thread tying them together seems the most significant of all, in its mere hint of a suggestion that we may very well prefer a kind of sanitized amnesiac oblivion to facing the crawling bleating horror of what we "actually" are.

But I'll leave the last words to Laura Barton in the Guardian, because we can decide for ourselves (individually or collectively?) whether or not her conclusion is either hopeful or ironic (utopian or dystopian):

But is this necessarily such a bad thing? We've got strawberries that taste more strawberryish than the real thing; we've got bosoms that don't jiggle when we run for buses; we've got hair like Rapunzel, tans like Barbie, and records that supersede the songs they bastardise. Perhaps this is just a new era, a bootleg of the real, outshining its parents; perhaps, after all, this is a brave new world.



Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Oh, since I've been asked, the "Description" under the main banner -- Where words fail, music speaks -- is a quote by Hans Christian Andersson, which is fairly appropriate, and especially pertinent to anyone wondering where the childhood trauma stuff comes in.

Believe me, it does come in. Although, all in good time.

But back to Anderson. For this:

When fairy tales at his time were didactic, he brought into them ambiguity.

he should be commended. And for this:

His identification with the unfortunate and outcast made his tales very compelling.

he should be celebrated.


Friday, August 15, 2003

So, lyricism. As a music writer, I have to learn to inject fresh ideas, I have to back up positions with a wider knowledge. There are so many gaps. But lyricism I think I have.

Here, this is a blog. I'm supposed to sound my own horn. So, here's a fairly lengthy post I made on ILM a while back that I enjoyed in itself. It's not polished, or over-written in any way, but in that respect it more accurately reflects the music it describes. The sneaky added bonus is that I can evangelize the band Calla again (heh):

I haven't seen much written about the band, but I know that they're transplanted Texans living in New York, and I understand that their music reflects the tension between those disparate landscapes. That's all clear. That and the Morricone soundtrack over a David Lynch movie featuring a cameo from Tom Waits impersonating Nick Cave. Well, okay, I don't know if anyone else has said that, but it's difficult to get a foothold here [I was discussing their eponymous debut here -- Ed.] Perhaps that's the point; pop culture footholds and musical reference points are superfluous, just attempts to fill spaces that cannot be filled. The music is everything.

With the opening bone-dry howl of "Tarantula", the thirsty tambourine pony trot, the languid coyote song of the guitar, as it builds and wends and falls away, a serpent death rattle dragging its emptiness behind it, the song is kind of ominous (and yet more organic Texas than New York). "Custom Car Crash" is what invited the Waits comparison, which is too easy, since way more is going on here between the lines, the layers. The vocals are plain creepy with this band, those barely whispered sounds. "June" plays with rhythm in a completely different way, but what I love is the sparking electrical fizzing, the nod to urban technology which could also be bugs on a porch getting zapped, so it's both. For the first time. Empty heat. The desert, a dry organic sweltering place, but the curious emptiness of a large city flagging under a humid summer day, enervated, panting like a half mad dog.

This music scares me, at various points, sometimes at different points on different spins. It seems to tap into feelings I never knew existed.

On "Only Drowning Men", that repeated beat could be hammers-on-wood, or marching boots. And the spaces between all the sounds are incredibly huge (as on most of their songs here), vast as the dark sparkling bowl of sky over the desert's nighttime. Each plucked reverbed string is like a star shimmering. Nothing moves fast here. Bones reflect the moon's white. Melodies take an age to come clear out of the night, emerging like spectral hoodoos. More than once, when voices intrude, they're startling, unexpected. This music sounds like instrumental music, and the hushed near-spoken words spook you when they arrive suddenly at ear height. (The Leonard Cohen sample is driving me crazy -- which song is that from? It's an inexplicably sad sound).

"Elsewhere" is barely there. The hunting horn/passing ship sound like something from a bygone age. Lethargy, ennui, follows. Something squeaky like a weather vane, something hanging from a rusted fence. That heartbreaking guitar sound like the distillation of all frontier Western myth. Then the hair-raising goosebump feedback shrieks like cougars fucking (honest). I still hear more country than town, though, unless the throbbing pulse at the heart is more electric grid than the pulsating flanks of a sick, hounded beast.

"Truth About Robots" is astonishing. The melodic theme reminds me of Cat Power's John Lee Hooker cover on
You Are Free ("Crawlin' Black Spider", which would be apt after we've already had a song called "Tarantula"). It doesn't sound a lot like the blues, and yet, in essence, it does. The creepy melancholy of this repeated refrain assaulted by shrieks and howls of guitar feedback is like the unraveling of the secret unpalatable truth at the core of our dissolute urban nightmares. There is both fear and an infinite sadness in steel.

"Trinidad" is plain lulling, like something deadly and mesmerizing. You know that nothing good will come of following its lazy meanders, but you go anyway. Sure enough "Keyes" continues the charade, easing us in softly only to swing the club of its industrial rhythm at our heads. There's that sick Eraserhead feeling again, and the dentist drill whines that come in after a couple of minutes of this busy industry (the workers are faceless) don't help. They almost hurt. Then something breaks like glass or steel, and it's gone. Just gone.

"Awake and Under" is the bad dream that tricks you into thinking you've woken, over and over, a cruel lucid nightmare ("short waves and chemicals," "she walks on water / so tell her father / she's a miracle"). The singer has some bad shit on his mind, something awful, some dangerous hate or even more dangerous love. The guitar chord at the end, hesitant, gorgeous, backed by some kind of treated, processed keyboard sound (another guitar?) is the moment before the terrible deed. The entire album is perhaps the moment before this unspoken occurence, some product of a sidewinder brain baked at noon and dragged half mad into the sweltering hidden alleyways of the city. A sacrifice needing to be made.


Ha, a second reference to Cohen in one day. What are the chances?

I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm as much in awe of words as I am of music. Sure, music stands alone. Words, too. But combined, something alchemical happens. I love to listen to music, but do I love to write about music more (or, failing that, express it verbally to a friend, say)? Or, is the experience somehow not complete if -- having heard something that grabbed me, shook me, speared me, made me laugh, made me choke -- I don't subsequently express that moment (those moments) in words?

I think it's the lyricism I respond to. Lyricism in music and in language. The flow and rhythms, the whole synaesthesia thing. And by lyricism in music, I don't necessarily (or even generally) mean the lyrics. I mean, the Cocteau Twins glossolalia* can be as important to me as any overt word-play/"poetry" a la Leonard Cohen, or the flow of hip hop. Lyricism does not exclude rhythm -- in fact, it's dependent upon it. Which is why, given my individual makeup, I can groove happily on (aspects of) all of the above.

Okay, enough navelgazing.

*glos·so·la·li·a
n.

1. Fabricated and nonmeaningful speech, especially such speech associated with a trance state or certain schizophrenic syndromes.

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

A review at Pitchforkmedia got me thinking, something I've been trying to do more of lately. Here is the line that sparked me. It is basically about the terror of blinking and (consequently) missing the presence of genius among us:

as Rene Ricard succinctly put it in a 1981 Artforum essay called The Radiant Child, "No one wants to be part of a generation that ignores another van Gogh."

A good quote. So good that I checked out the entire essay it was pulled from. In context, Ricard was actually saying that the fear of looking the wrong way while something special and unique walks by, is not only distracting and embarrassing (behaviour on the part of many) art critics, but it's also ridiculous, since the conceit of "the unrecognized genius slaving away in a garret" pretty much lived and died with van Gogh (hmmm, Beethoven?). In other words, it happens so rarely, and is so unlikely to recur in our modern world of "professional" artists as to render anxiety over such an occurence pointless. Or as Ricard puts it:

"There is no great artist in all art history who was as ignored as van Gogh, yet people are still afraid of missing the Van Gogh Boat."

So, do those of us who write about music do this (Chris Ott, the Pitchfork writer here, charges Greil Marcus with it, in the latter's constant championing of Laura Logic)? Me, I'm not sure. The closest I've been to this feeling (as far as I know) is the small frisson of vindication when a piece of music I've avidly championed suddenly seems to catch alight elsewhere, in the hearts and minds of others (recently, this happened for me, to an extent, with Broken Social Scene, and also with the Califone spin-off Sin Ropas). But I can't say that such instances have really involved "genius". Neither did I set out to "discover" something unique or precious or special. Perhaps the problem lies in those concepts themselves -- that ideas about genius, or unique, or precious, or special, are in themselves flawed.

But thanks to Pitchfork for helping my brain rise above the usual murk that swims around the parapet of my cranium, even if only for a short while.

And to balance the Pitchfork props (since these two entities seem to be in oppostion so much), here is a great "revived" thread from I Love Music (ILM), which makes me wonder if I got to ILM too late (only discovering it earlier this year). A thread about the Smiths which became pretty much focused on one song, "Panic". It's brilliant, as my compatriots used to say (and no doubt still do).

Monday, August 11, 2003

There really is no justification for yet another music blog, so I won't even try. But I'm doing it anyway.

If there are is to be any theme at all, it is the loosely braided rope of childhood, trauma and music. A rope can get you out of a bad spot. Or it can hang you 'til you're dead.

(Y)our choice.

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