adventures in BLAWG

the other week i put the word "kids" at the front of a post title. a comment was left, our first since july. and who left this comment? some fucking robot selling kids music, or some wierd virus thing. don't click through. it's just a robot.

in other news, my most recent post was slamming a news article written by one tom breihan. i found him transparently stupid.

well today he's reviewing a terrible album from a terrible new band called "Girls". first of all, even though he seems to respect the frontman, the fact that his mother was a prostitute is actually placed in the fourth sentence of the review, proving once and for all that press packets are humane. of course, like it's a wonderful life or jerry macgwire (spelled correctly in honor of Mark), there's a happy ending. "Then a local millionaire took Owens under his wing, and Owens moved to San Francisco." and now he has an adopted millionaire father and he's in a hip band. the end. some stories really are tragic, no?

now, if christopher owen, of Girls, did indeed have a very hard childhood, then i imagine it wasn't fun for him. but a little greusome is reading a writer idolize tragedy and poverty in this way, when only three days ago he was waxing nostalgic about his own hazy, dreamy youth in the suburbs. "You don't need to know Owens' story to intuit that there's something going on here. When I saw the band play SXSW, knowing nothing about them beyond their compulsively listenable 'Hellhole Ratrace' single, I wrote that the band's music sounds 'like the work of one deeply weird and possibly sad person.'" so being weird and sad, having a mother forced into prostitution... GOOD! that's COOL to us!

but there's something else going on here. watch: "It's the sort of story that can overwhelm a band so completely that you never really hear their music; you only hear the story. So it's a tribute to Album that you don't need to know one word of that first paragraph to hear it as what it is: a dizzily powerful piece of work." see? we love your tragic upbringing, but we don't want to think about it, and certainly don't want to hear YOU singing about it. write about your break-ups instead, that way your presonal tragedy can be reduced to a preamble, so college graduates who only think gutter punks are cool because they've never had to smell them will go out and buy your album.

tragedy's generally cool, but kind of too sincere for our age. we'd rather a tragic figure sing about really banal shit. that way we can identify with you AND feel superior at the same time.

the big problem is, as always, this band sucks. their music sucks. i mean, you've got to be fucking kidding me. to my ears, it isn't even remotely interesting. they're dull, forgettable, dime-a-dozen pop songs. familiar progressions soaked in reverb, and a white singer whose (totally authentic) self-loathing has taken a curiously audacious and public turn. i've seen this movie before and it sucks.

but what do i know? as with Real Estate a few days ago, Girls is "getting a ton of blog love." more and more, i've come to fully expect such bands to be terrible, allowing for the possibility of a shocking exception or two. and i think i know the reason why these bands always suck: because music blog culture is the full marriage of the music industry and junior-high school popularity politics (i.e. an emotionally stunted mob makes snap decisions about how good a person is, and that person may become royalty, until he does something that confuses or dissapoints the mob, at which point he has to change schools or live out his education as a parriah.)

and bands like this age about as well as the popular kid has.

finally, the phrase "compulsively listenable" should probably have it's eyes plucked out by grape scissors. meaning-wise, it's precisely as dumb as bud light's "drinkability" campaign.

Surreal Estate

i noticed a curious headline while running my eyes over pitchfork's "news" section: "Real Estate Announce Debut Album".

i thought: huh... that's odd. usually when a debut album is announced (as opposed to simply being released), it's coming from some long-awaited supergroup, which of course goes on to suck.

recently, though, bands that haven't produced a full work, are having their debut albums pimped. all you need is just less than six songs to stay popular with just more than 500 writers for a little more than a month, and your in. black kids was a perfect example of this, and if you click through to that real estate story, you can see it all happening again.

"Hazy Jersey-based indie poppers Real Estate have been setting our RSS feeds on fire all summer with tracks like 'Fake Blues' and 'Black Lake'-- blurry, innocent evocations of high school beach trips and first tokes."

now i haven't bothered to listen to the music. my internet's kinda shitty these days, and anyway it's been a while since i've gotten excited by something that sets "RSS feeds on fire". to be sure, though, the language is pretty fucking revealing. this writer, one Tom Breihan, misses high school.

those were the days, no? playing hookie, "blurry, innocent" trips to the beach, that "first toke"... all this shit's rushing back to me, it's like PROUST!

but seriously, people who really like music that makes them remember high school should be banned from the internet. nevertheless, with song titles like "suburban dog", "let'srock the beach", and "suburban beverage", you can't blame a 20-something for getting sucked in. after all, many 20-somethings are FROM the suburbs, and can totally relate. (it, like, sucks there because of your parents, but it can be totally fun sometimes cuz you can drive to the beach and there's parties!)

but who am i to judge? the blogs are abuzz about this band. and we all know how important blogs are. (cue crickets)

kids: DON'T GO TO COLLEGE OR YOU'LL TURN OUT LIKE THIS

http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/7693-the-top-500-tracks-of-the-2000s-20-1/2/

as i recently warned, pitchfork has put up their top 500 songs of the last ten years (which comes out to roughly one song for every week). and yes, the "list" (such as it is) is pretty silly, with basement jaxx and robyn getting quite a bit of attention, with a top 20 cracked by such mainstream non-artists as rhianna and justin timberlake, and more animal collective on hand than freshman orientation.

but that's not really important. to put together an accurate list of 500 songs is about as easy as putting together an accurate list of the top 500 restaurants on the east coast. it's part fool's errand, but its true purpose mostly is to give a handful of arrogant people a platform to wax educated about media and culture and stuff.

each and every song gets a paragraph. the examples of purely god-awful writing are too numerous to be chronicled. from some guy's belief that Joanna Newsom meant to invoke "whores" when she said "horse", to ridiculous overuse of the gerund, to the fact that anyone who wrote a song about new york was really singing about 9/11; the writing is just hackery. i mean, how many times can you publish the phrase "it goes without saying" before it starts looking like a red flag?

but even that's not really important, at least not to me right now. what i wanted to write about (i got distracted; don't like it? continue not reading.) was the way in which almost all of these writers discuss "what happened in music". the passive voice is used a lot. some bands "were never heard from again". some songs "are indellibly associated" with certain years. aside from being poor writing, this betrays a deep lack of appreciation for the critic's role in the whole process. it's YOU that chooses to notice something or not, to like it or hate it, not some invisible modernizing, culturizing force. a band that pleases one person consistently shouldn't automatically be recast as a band who "has longevity". an artist hasn't "dropped off the face of the earth" just because you haven't written up his last three albums. it's the pools from which the list was drawn that are pre-selected. they have already manufactured taste, now it only must be prioritized, and explained as the result of a mystical, natural process. UGH.


one more thing: marc richardson says, "If the songs on this list were chosen solely by how they captured the zeitgeist in independent music, 'Losing My Edge' would be an easy #1." and i'm afraid i agree with him. a comfortable, computer-owning music appreciator throws together a garage band beat, each new layer being introduced at perfectly predictable intervals, with all the depth of a casio demo-beat; meanwhile the computer-owner talks about cool things he likes, and he's being ironic, but he really kind of isn't, but really he is, but honestly he's lost his edge because he's not cool anymore, but he's actually the sole arbiter of what's cool.... etc.

i don't blame the song for sucking heartily, nor do i blame those who disagree and think it doesn't suck. i blame the critic, the person who says it "captures the zeitgeist in independent music" thus defining the boundaries of said zeitgeist without actually making a creative contribution. i'm not sure about you, but in my zeitgeist, we're not sitting around, pawing at our bald spots, wondering how being middle class and having impeccable taste simply hasn't made us more attractive.


one one more thing: white people have just gotten through "revolutionizing" dance music in the same way that columbus "revolutionized" the americas. when columbus arrived, a whole mess of people were already there, yet still there's a lot of talk about his "discovery".

THE DECADE IS OVER! THE DECADE IS OVER!

well, kind of. i mean, the decade will be over, in seventeen months, five if you don't count right. whatever, the decade is over. do you people even know what that means?

it means soon we get to find out what were the best albums, tracks, and music videos of the last ten years. we'll surely get to find out what some writers think the decade "meant" -- lots of long essays about mp3's, about how online distribution is SO FUCKIN AWESOME!

one thing's for sure: the current crop of pitchfork writers is probably starting to get nostalgic for their college days. consequentially, look for smarmy indie dance bands to be extremely well represented (you know, fast guitar music with no backbeat [whites gotta dance, too]), competing most directly with smarmy indie folk bands (sweet christ on a cracker, i hate those woodland brooklynites who seem to practice their instruments as frequently as they shave).

expect certain TITS bands to be erased down the memory hole (black kids, arctic monkeys, clap your hands...), and expect the editorial staff to show diversity of taste by including a bunch of hip-hop records that they never bothered to promote.

i won't miss the 00's (pronounced "oooohs"). it's kind of been a militarist corporatist nightmare of a decade. if there's one thing we can learn from it, it's that dystopian writers like Huxley and Orwell weren't as imaginative as modern-day republicans and democrats.

musically? general taste has been eviscerated by the atomization of the public, corporate sponsership of music is UP (sales are, of course, DOWN), and brittney spears had more fight in her than the beta band.

while pitchfork has presided over the death of anything like counter-culture, many of us just last november participated in the untimely death of political activism. the next decade's movers and shakers need to survey the wreckage, and realize that being king of the mountain now means only that you reach the peak of a pile of rubble.

morrissey, box sets, and reissues

so EMI is putting out two box sets of morrissey singles, and morrissey is pissed(through a fansite) because EMI hasn't paid him any money for seventeen years, and since he's in no position to collect royalties from songs he doesn't own, he instructs his fans not to buy the box set.

now, i approve of morrissey's edict, if not his singing. record companies love box sets and reissues and "retrospectives", usually because they own all the rights to the music, don't have to front any money to produce it (it already exists) and make one hundred percent of the profits from sales.

pitchfork has recently unveiled a "reissues" subheading in their "best new music" section, where congolese blues rock meets REM collecters editions. and what do the far flung members of the "best new reissue" category have in common? the artists no longer own the rights to the music being distributed.

YAY FOR SONY!

Friend Request

so i talk about the fork a lot, and now i have an opportunity to explain why.

every time they publish one of these "poptimist" columns, i know damn well that something stupid is contained within -- something abrasively, arrogantly, obviously stupid. i'm sure one or two can be dug out that aren't masturbatory pieces of garbage, but if that's what you go in suspecting you usually won't be disappointed.

this one, subtitled "chartopia" is quite disturbing in that it addresses much of the crap i've been yelling about on and off for a few years now. he's talking about culture, about our much vaunted "new media", and how it's affected whatever remains of aggregate taste.

he says something that is stupid, and it's importantly stupid. "In a recent blog post, marketing guru Seth Godin touched disdainfully on the much-predicted demise of newspapers, writing 'Neatness is for historians.' This bon mot duly buzzed around the digiverse. Godin was addressing-- and dismissing-- journalism's much-honored role as 'the first draft of history,' its mission to make sense of the world for its readers. Social media, according to Godin and many similar thinkers, give people the tools to do this for themselves."

now here's why this is really stupid. some people call bloggers "citizen journalists". david simon once asked if you would call a man who puts out a small trash fire he sees while on a walk a "citizen firefighter". he then asked if your next conclusion would be that real firefighters are obsolete.

in reality, bloggers tend to be parasitic (as this blog). we live commenting on other companies' actual reporting. foreign policy blogs link to the new york times and the washington post, and most people don't follow links, meaning readers are consuming the product of a news company, but the company itself has no imaginable way to profit from it. aggregators (blogger's spell check doesn't recognize this last word; is it made up?) like google news and huffington post are the biggest violators of this, but the same dynamic exists for low-traffic blogs.

now, extend this to "social media" (i'm now realizing how orwellian this term truly is). some asshole TWEETS about a band; of the thirty five people who read his TWEETS let's say five take interest in the band; of those five presumably plugged-in folks, let's say one buys a few songs on itunes, while the rest torrent every single song the band has ever recorded and proceed to live the rest of their lives with thirty additional never-to-be-listened-to mp3s. the artist thanks the tweeter for the additional eight cents of income.

the problem with newspapers going out of business is that in order to produce news you actually have to pay some poor cunt to go somewhere and ask some questions and write some shit down. as adorably motivated as most "citizen journalists" are, someone needs to buy your food while you sit around at courthouse all day. reporting news is not an inherently profitable thing to do. neither is making music.

what tom ewing promises in his column is that social media allows people "to make sense of the world". i disagree. i think social media confuses its users, and disrupts any perception of the difference between the real world (of people, things) and the digital world (of pixels, numbers). as this happens, the real life institutions of the real world (newspapers, concert venues, etc.) die very rapidly, because the entire money-having nation spends ten hours out of every day typing and staring and typing and staring and typing and staring, all the while expanding their knowledge of everything, finding more people they know, being lords of their own universe.

sideshow bob once threatened to kill all television from a jumbotron, and i feel kind of like him, i guess. a luddite born in the 80's has a hell of a time these days. at the end of his sprawling, unfocused column, mr. ewing actually says, "There is still a great deal to be poptimistic about." as a musician, i find myself in another camp.

"social networking" (another phrase our society could probably do without) is incredibly useful for self-promotion. as an artist without any institutional support, it's more or less irreplaceable. but the rest of you, those non-creative people, whose generosity has fed us guitarists since the birth of our profession, you need to get off your god damn screens (right after you agree to attend my show). stop talking to each other all the fucking time and do something!

there's only so much that people can share. part of the equation has always been injecting new ideas, previously non-existent and unknowable, into the stream. mr. ewing thinks new media can do this job just fine, and that's why i called him stupid before. for real culture to happen, culture that we can be proud to pass to our children one day, we need to interact with one another in a way that can never be mechanized, a way that simply won't be made obsolete by tiny little machines that break if you kick them.

i'm talking, of course, about live music and fucking. who's with me?!

this post has been heavily influenced by african rhythms

pitchfork has an interview up of the dirty projectors guy, and even though he's talkiing about the fact that he's more of a band than a one-man act, even as we see pictures of the newly formed group being a group, the interview is with the guy and the guy alone, who says an awful lot of shit. wow, what a lot of thoughts he has. must be sharp.

anyway, what i want to focus on is the african influence section of the interview. check:

Pitchfork: You've been influenced by musical styles from Africa, and I wondered if you could speak to what you've listened to and the avenues you took to find it.

DL: To me it started with being into just sort of like, Motown shit, and into some of the earlier James Brown shit. And then there's that Brian Eno essay about the return of these Americanized African music to Africa, in music like Fela Kuti. I guess that's where I began, and I quickly ran through a whole bunch of those Nonesuch and the Okura discs, more like ethnomusicological folk musics.

And there's that book by John Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, in the same way that Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head served as a kind of gateway to me getting into 4-tracking and the recording artifice as something to be into.

Pitchfork: What do you think that influence has brought to your music?

DL: I don't know. I guess it's an ideal for me to take what you love in the same way that you take elements of your life, your personal experiences or whatever, and digest them into something new and incoherent. I like the idea of trying to make what you love unrecognizable. Although Bitte Orca is also sort of about doing the opposite of that.


i've omitted nothing. this is the entire bit of conversation on african anything in the whole stupid interview. seriously, it's as if it's a major influence, only it's not at all, even for a moment, relevant to any of the direct questions asked previously. when the journalist (hehe) asks questions about specific songs, about lyrical phrases, about various creative choices that were made, african music does not come up.

when prompted, however, by the statement "You've been influenced by musical styles from Africa," Mr. Dirty Projector, of course, has an answer loaded up. needless to say, the answer is incomprehensible. he heard some records, read a book, and though he likes the idea of making "what you love unrecognizable", his most recent record is about the opposite of that (this last part is a doozy). a simple listen to his music reveals the dearth of African influences, such as the writer means here. does this guy like african music? probably, but if it's altered his music in any significant way i can't tell. (to my ears it still sounds more Lauper than Farka Toure.)

but there's another aspect to this trend (and it is a trend; i have to hear about "african influences" playing out in all these white as paper bands and i'm like "nigga what? nigga please."): if you listen carefully, most indie rock adheres pretty strictly to the twelve-bar blues. arrangements may be getting out there (dirty projectors). vocal harmonies can be piled on top of one another until the listener gets the impression of depth (animal collective). broadly speaking, though, all of these college educated culture-loving wankers are playing songs that were written by people whose FUCKING GRANDPARENTS WERE FUCKING BORN IN FUCKING AFRICA.

just saying.