Everybody's Stupid But Me

I've got a piece up on Idolator about a recent kerfuffle on a certain other site, and anti-intellectualism. Enjoy.

Labels: blogtalk, idolator, notes

posted by Mike B. @ 9:22 AM 0 Comments

Scenes From a Blog

Scott over at Pretty Goes With Pretty has a couple of reactions to my No Age post that are worth reading; he's much more positive about local scenes, and negative about the internet, than I am.

Labels: blogtalk, no age, notes

posted by Mike B. @ 1:09 PM 0 Comments

You Can't Fight Forever

I neglected to link it below, but Todd's paper, on anti-rave laws in Britain, is online. You should read it.

Labels: blogtalk, notes

posted by Mike B. @ 8:47 PM 0 Comments

Professsionalization

There's been some talk about "professionalization" lately, and at the risk of being overly "me-too," allow me to point you to a couple of antecedents: the Pazz & Jop '06 comments (near the bottom, Barthel to Weingarten), and an article I wrote for Flagpole about the professionalization of indie. I point this out not just because of narcisscism, but because the Flagpole article puts a decent amount of blame on the bands themselves, which the current discussion seems reluctant to do. It's something I harp on, and maybe I'm coming from the wrong perspective, but the state of criticism has an effect on the choices bands make, especially in a genre driven by criticism like indie. Bands aren't affected by blog-hype only after they become the subject of it. They're aware of it when they're forming, when they're starting to play, when they send out their demos. The presence of a brass ring makes everyone lean out farther, you know? It's too easy to paint this as victimization.

Here's a selection:

What this means is that "indie musician" is now a viable temporary career
choice. If you're willing to play it safe and hew to a certain sound, you can
tour nationally, put out a record or two, and have a not entirely uncomfortable
life. Being in a band seems to have become the modern equivalent of the Grand
Tour: something superficially cultured and bohemian that represents a deliberate
step on the path to moving to the suburbs, raising a family, and having a steady
job. It fills up one's 20s....

Indie is derided as a middle-class pursuit. (But that was what made it so
great in the first place! In finding a middle path, indie-rock combined things
in new ways.) Now, though, it's become thoroughly professionalized. "Musician
wanted" ads might as well include a list of the position's duties, opportunities
for advancement and preferred resumé formats.

Interestingly, this shift has also produced a corresponding
professionalization in the apparatus surrounding indie music, which is even more
surprising: indie's whole ethos was Do It Yourself. But now, you can hire
publicity companies (staffed by cool people who graduated from a liberal arts
college, so you don't feel weird about it) to promote your music, graphic
designers to make your album packaging (so when people get your album it doesn't
look unprofessional), and get your picture in magazines catering to the hipster
demographic because you got style. Whereas indie outfits used to be staffed by
weirdoes and misfits with the time to devote to boosting the music they were
passionate about, now your parents will fund your internship with Nasty Little
Man so you can get +1s at the best shows, find yourself chumming it up at South
By Southwest and go on to make $30k a year doing marketing at Matador Records,
even though your degree was in Environmental Studies.

The weirdest thing, of course, has undoubtedly been the blogs. Arguing
about bands and making mixtapes used to be something you did with your friends,
or maybe on online message boards. But now advertisers will pay you to do this,
and bands and labels will send you free CDs, and this professionalization of
argumentation has produced a certain amplification...

The result, as with the mainstream incursions, has been a distortion in the
discourse surrounding indie. When bands are careers rather than artistic
pursuits, they're dumpable as soon as they become unproductive and unprofitable,
and the same thing goes for writing. Professionalization necessarily entails a
loss of community - you are competing against these other bands and publicists
and bloggers for the small share of money available to you, after all - and so
where there was once an awareness of the sound left unexplored, the band left
undiscovered, and an effort to fill that slot, now there's either grasping for
the last piece of cake by going with the tried and true or total disengagement
by retreating into distancing abstractions that no one can really call good or
bad.

Indie has been entrepreneurial in the past, but now it's codified so much
that it's become a profession; even experimental music on the national stage now
feels like a series of rote gestures you can see coming a mile away. No longer
are we contributing to the whole by contributing something new. We're merely
claiming our share, our reward for a short, short lifetime of loyal fandom.

Labels: blogtalk, critics, indie rock, professionalization

posted by Mike B. @ 8:13 PM 14 Comments

The Funniest Thing Ever Pt. 1

Recently I asked a few people the question: what is the funniest thing ever, in your opinion, and what about it makes it so funny? These were all people of taste, and occasionally refinement, but certainly people who thought about what they liked and what they didn't like. Had they thought about what they did and didn't like in comedy? It's not something we usually do--at least not to the extent we do for, say, movies or music, those genres that launched a million lists--maybe because laughter is a much more involuntary reaction than appreciation or enjoyment. We can laugh at things we don't agree with, or think we don't agree with, so provoking this reaction doesn't necessarily coincide with being liked. "Sense of humor" is a broad and often unitary term: you have a sense of humor or you don't. But don't different people have different senses of humor? Just as we might prefer electro-pop to jambands, can't we prefer satire to pratfalls, or offensive humor to puns, or camp to parody? Or do we all basically find the same kind of thing funny?

Here's what they had to say.

Dave Moore:

The best humor blindsides me. Often it provokes an initial, intense feeling of dislike or aversion, slowly it grows on me until I just boil over into maniacal laughter (sometimes just on the inside, or metaphorically or something). I FEEL like the guy in the Napoleon XIV song, but the NXIV song itself also blindsides me with how funny it is, given that it makes me shudder when I listen in headphones (I was a big Dr. Demento geek as a kid thru tapes compiled by a friend my dad made on an early comedy music chat group -- most of my favorites simulatenously scared the SHIT out of me, like the story of the guy who gets anchovies on his pizza and his wife ends up being turned into a bowling ball..."that's not a bowling ball...THAT'S MY WIFE!!! ...So the next time you order a pizza, remember to say..."Noooo aaaaanchovies, pleeeeeease...") .

Or I can be "blindsided by pathos," which is what I said about Margaret Berger's "Robot Song," which only gets funnier as it gets sadder. Ditto Aly and AJ, whose music (and fans) constantly challenge me along "funniest" and "weirdest" and "most affecting" lines simultaneously.

Things that are profoundly sad and profoundly funny are very much linked for me. If I want to get pop-psychological about it, I could attribute it to growing up watching a parent fighting cancer and countering the painful aspects (which truthfully don't arise all that often, what with living yr life and such) with a fairly twisted sense of humor (from an old home video, opening a birthday card: "From my own long lost sick mommy!" and my father, minutes earlier, with crash zoom on a truly disgusting piece of pizza, "How's yer appetite?" These films were essentially performances for my mother, and I bet she thought they were hilarious. One of the last things she ever wrote before her death was "I'm feeling better, my strength is returning -- I've got a lot of Christmas shopping to do!!" which makes me laugh and cry, and frequently one precedes the other, and that's how I know the humor has really "clicked." (I wish that the Fiery Furnaces album we were talking about a few weeks ago, Rehearsing My Choir, was just a LITTLE bit sadder, a little less self-conscious and on the nose narrative-wise (maybe a little less cutesy?) because I love love love it, but it never sucker-punches me in the gut like I want it to.)

I watched "AI" again recently and was moved, though I'm not sure in what way, except to say profoundly. It might be one of my very favorite films. There's the sadness, the humor, the maniacal laughter. Fargo is maybe the Rehearsing My Choir of fiction film in this vein -- just a touch too on-the-nose, but still moves me (to laughter).

But that's only a small part of it, because you can't be PROFOUNDLY MOVED at all times, even though I really do think that's where the most affecting ("deepest") humor comes from. I also like comforting humor, funny ha-ha, Lil' Mama's "Lip Gloss" and "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road" and "My Humps" and Toy-Box. Y'know, STUPID. A few degrees from "Ow! My Balls!" even (come to think of it, the first Jackass movie was kind of profoundly funny). They Might Be Giants are more often clever than profound, and I like them about the same for both tendencies. But I hate hate hate it when clever seems unnatural or forced; it might be the least funny thing EVER. It must appear/feel effortless, regardless of how much effort it took (easiest place to spot this is in decent-to-pretty-good stand-up comedy; the greatest stuff finds room for the pathos, outrage, etc., though on a "safe day" I'll probably listen to a Steve Martin routine). I've been semi-railing against Avril's new "Girlfriend" single for trying way too hard to sound "fun."

Re: political humor, I have similar problems with it that I have with "political music" -- used too explicitly, politics is too often reduced to bumperstickerism, jingles, tag lines, punch lines, nudge-nudges. For me, the best political humor is usually *implicitly* political; if Paris Hilton's album is political (whether she intends it to be or not -- and in the music-plus-conversation-about-it sense, it certainly is), it's political humor. (A political carnival or circus or freak show, maybe.) Which isn't to say I don't laugh at the Daily Show, but at their most effective they let reality play against itself, and the jokes act merely as punctuation. Somehow this doesn't get tiring after five or so years, maybe because there's no dearth of material to play against itself (so I guess I'm saying the Daily Show, particularly through the Bush admin, has been *sadder* than it is funny, hence very often profoundly funny. Compare to the late-90s Craig Kilborn incarnation, which relied way too much on weirdo human interest stories about giant stinking plants -- which I seem to remember vividly for some reason -- and kind of mean-spirited pre-recorded segments). (Funny -- er, not -- I *don't* usually laugh at the "Colbert Report." He's like Avril, yanking me out of my chair all the time. Ditto the Borat movie.)

What's the funniest thing ever? Easy -- I'm five years old, I visit my uncle in Pennsylvania, I immediately ask him if he has any toys for me to play with. Sure, he says, and he reaches into a bowl on the counter and hands me a wooden banana. Wooden banana, funniest thing ever, end of story.

kungfuramone:

I find unexpected left-turns in pop-culture-related humor to be the funniest things ever. I like the ambient level of hilarious to already be at a high level, then have a brutal funny twist drop out of nowhere. Two examples:

1. The third episode of Metalocalypse (Birthdayface) when Dr. Rockso the rock and roll clown does a power-slide out onto stage and delivers his trademark "G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-YEEEAH! I'M DR. ROCKSO, THE ROCK N' ROLL CLOWN! I DO COCAINE!" The first time I saw that, I fell off my chair.

2. This morning's strongbad e-mail, at the very end, in the easter egg (when Strongbad is asleep on the couch and "Dartmouth" comes on the tv.) A kind of routine homestarrunner level of funniness is suddenly punctuated with absolute genius ("I know what to do! BLAAGH!" "Ow, Pokey!")

I think what makes metalocalypse so great is that, yes, for one, it respects the genre. The songs themselves are awesome (Spinal Tap's songs were great parodies, but Dethklok's songs actually rock) and the technical proficiency of the two guys who do the show is such that they can employ hyperbole without it undermining the effect. What I mean is that the wailing guitar solos and lyrics can be completely over the top (see: summoning a troll, chanting "die die die!" in most songs, the insane guitar noodling of "crush my battle opponent's balls") but it still sounds like *real* metal. The other thing is the genius plot device of having them already be the most famous band in the world; unlike every other rock show, it isn't about a bunch of losers trying to get famous, it's a bunch of losers who are the 12th largest economy in the world. (Famously, they just passed Belgium.) It's been so long since hair metal actually did propel anyone to super-stardom (I think of your long-ago blog post about how the American Idol "rocker" contestants represent a kind of rocking that never existed) that it makes the whole thing just surreal enough to be endlessly funny.

Nick Sylvester:

Difficult question since what's funny is more/less tied to the element of surprise, i.e. the funniness evaporates once the surprise is reached. Even retelling funny stories has that dramatic tension built into the performance of telling, which salvages what it can of that original surprise. Then again there are definitely things i do go back to, more replenishably funny than other things, possibly because they're not ironic, just slapstick, so I don't know. It might involve my landlord in italy 02 sitting on an eight-foot pile of bedsheets.

The funniest thing ever for now at least was last Halloween, when my friend rob threatened his girlfriend that he was going to dress as something he called youngsanta. It was going to involve a closely shaven beard and like a hat. This was a pretty great idea so i don't know why she was so upset. Anyway he didn't end up doing this--I think they did one of those"combo" costumes instead--but she was really nervous he was going to.

Sean Michaels:

I find a lot of things funny. I find arbitrariness very funny. I could be vaguer and say I find surrealist and absurdist exclamations, images, convergences to be funny - but really it's the arbitrariness that makes me laugh, and there needn't be any kind of subtext. The ridiculous, random and forceful. I find 'extreme' jokes funny - racism, antisemitism, homophobia, pederast priests, dead babies, holocaust gags. The word "lollercaust" is very funny. I don't find the scatalogical funny - just kinda gross. I like puns, especially arbitrary (and strange) puns. I'm very sarcastic, and I think I'm funny. I like suddenness in comedy. I like contrast. And I really like funny faces.

The funniest thing I can think of is a scene from the UK version of The Office, where David Brent points out a stuffed yellow monkey when he's giving someone a tour of the office. He does this a few times over the course of the series. It's the third time that made me laugh harder than anything I can remember. Partly the call-back -- the recollection of that strange, early, awkward, funny-face moment. But something in the moment itself, the truth and absurdity of it at once, and the silly expression.

A better example (since I can't find that clip online) is this photograph.



I find this photo ridiculously funny. Not because it's George Bush and "George Bush is a moron". No - because his expression and indeed his whole pose is hilarious. Look at him! Blow the picture up big and get a look at it! It makes me laugh every time. It's such an awesome face. It's seriously one of the most hilarious faces I've ever seen. It's also funnier if you don't know why he's making that face. The explanation kind of ruins it. The arbitrariness of this ridiculous face. And the fact you're not used to seeing this man with this face on. And finally, that knowing the president, this is a -real- face. A face caught in a moment. The ridiculous come to life: not fake, not 'goofy', not an impression to make the kids smile. This is a spirit coming alive in this man's face, occupying it totally: the clown bubbling to the surface and assuming the visage of an awkward, terrified, nude turtle.

Daniella:

My answer would be simple and telling. Dave Chappelle's R. Kelly 'Piss on You' video. It will never stop amusing me. Ever.

Maura Johnston:

This, which always makes me laugh, because of the juxtaposition of music + text + internet lolz:

http://omgitsomg.ytmnd.com

The music is apparently from a Japanese game show.

Thanks, everyone, for your answers! Another edition will be along soon, but in the meantime, feel free to put your own answers in the comments.

Labels: blogtalk, funniest thing ever

posted by Mike B. @ 7:45 AM 17 Comments

Rage, Rage

I think Nick is right about "Killing in the Name," which I don't think I've heard since I played it by request at a dance at nerd camp and all the little nerdling boys went spazzy-crazy on the coffeeshop dancefloor. So I found it and listened to it and yeah, it's a really great song. When we all first heard it, the thing works so well that it's easy to miss the multiple leaps of faith that make it work, and given Rage's current (or, I guess, pre-Coachella) critical reputation--and by "critical" here I don't mean "just critics" but, like, everybody everywhere--it's easy to revisionistly see the particulars of those leaps/moves as odious, overdone, played-out. Crass. Distasteful. Cheesy. Embarassing. My my my, once bitten, you know.

Hearing it fresh, though, it's a shock to the system, because it's an inventively and masterfully constructed rock song. The structure can be found in other songs but none of those are mosh anthems, as it's like one of those giant pirate ship rides that, at the peak of its second swing, busts a bearing and goes tumbling down a hill, only to find a vacant pirate-swing-ride-chassis at the bottom and latch onto that. A straight intro goes into a syncopated hook, then back into a syncopated version of the intro (the pirate ship gets going), then a straight verse that busts into a chorus and that great "now you do what they told you" stomp-swing that itself busts into a louder, wider part. And then back to the straight verse, repeating the whole process, which can be either seen as verse-chorus-bridge1-bridge2 or just one long build that suddenly resets itself and goes entirely back to the beginning. What it's all building to, of course, is the big bust-out section with the screamy swear words[1], a moment rivaled in its awesomeness in the 90s maybe only by "March of the Pigs," which does its own interesting series of moves that we won't get into now.[2] And then it happens, and then there's that syncopated intro again, just once, and we're out.

It's a hell of a structure, and worth noting, because that repetition, despite being more or less identical to the first runthrough, is so unexpected that it doesn't register as repetition. There've been too many shifts by that point for it to come across as just a end-of-chorus-back-to-verse change, and there's no real dynamic indication at the end of that first repetition that it's going to drop off in volume/intensity, and when it does, it happens instintaneously, almost like an edit (which maybe it was). So that surprise functions as a further tension-builder, the novelty of the structure working as a disruption and, even though it turns out things are going to proceed as before, you're not expecting it to do so, as you would be in a normal verse-chorus-verse structure. There's a dropoff in energy, but not necessarily in tension, with that disruption allowing it to build far further than it would have with just the one repetition, so when the crest hits, it hits really hard, and it's one of the most cathartic releases, as I say, in all of the 90s canon, one filled with nothing if not cathartic releases.

All in all, the structure is far less that of a rock song than it is of a dance track. There's no key shifts and no change in the melody, but there is a lot of changes in texture: whether the guitar's muted or not, how open the hi-hat is, whether there's a crash going, how high the pitch is, etc. The whole thing centers not around the development of a melody or the delivery of a lyric, but the building and release of tension, which it does very effectively, and though screaming "FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME" is not as subtle as it could be, it is an effective and wholly accurate translation into language of the musical vocabulary being used at the high point of a DJ set. Which is why, as Nick says, the remix is kinda stupid: it leaves out the best part, and the part that's most dancey! Presumably because it's too embarassing/cheesy/tasteless.

(Of course, from an abstract point of view, the best part of the song is right before the FU section, where they go all Sonic Youth and build tension via free-jazz, or at least free-jazz drums, as everything else is keeping the voice while the drums flail around until they hit the beat hard right before they come back in again full. Awesome!)

This is all especially interesting in light of this Esquire article. If you don't want to click through, it sarcastically congratulates Zach delarocha for not releasing music while Bush was President, which the writer thinks is hypocritical because Rage / Zach were/are "political." Certainly the course RATM took as a band was disappointing, but it's interesting that the writer (Jason Notte, in case he's auto-googling--I see I'm about to join his alma mater) identifies exactly the opposite of why that's so. He complains that '"fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" has become the mantra of suburban teens who don't want to do homework or leave the mall early.' Thing is, that's exactly what the damn words were always destined to mean, how they were received, and how they work best. As political speech it's fucking worthless, but as teenage enhancement--as rocking (see footnote 4 here) it's the best shit ever. The problem with RATM and Zach is that they took themselves far too seriously. What difference would it have made for good ol' Zach to be yelling about imperialism publicly for the last 6 years? It's not like other people weren't (despite what people would like to retroactively think) and it's not like it would've mattered much anyway. The political stuff was what made Rage, tragically, respectable, at least in the most obvious way, whereas their actual respect derived from their music, and their ability to fuse a bunch of different ideas and sounds in potent ways.

This all raises the question: what if Zach DLR had, instead of taking himself seriously as an ersatz radical gifted by minority birth with unflaggable lefty cred, developed the skill he shows in "Killing in the Name," where he uses his voice not as a vehicle for championing obvious causes, but to shape and enhance the musical arc of a song? What if Rage's ability to construct a song had been emphasized? Well, problem is, that happened. It's called Audioslave and it sucked. So that's that question answered, more or less. So this suggests, at least to me, that maybe we just have to accept that Rage was a band with fantastic but limited ideas, and if that first album (and parts of the second, maybe) are so much better than the rest of their various output, it's not because their course could have been different-better, but because that was the best they could do, and they did it. Maybe one of the problems with the 90s--or, maybe, with rock--is that it did encourage people to develop as artists, even when that was a bad thing for them to do. Or maybe Zach de la Rocha is just a twat. Either way.

[1] Yay!
[2] Skipped beats as thrash!

Labels: aesthetics, blogtalk, pop, ratm, rock, value added

posted by Mike B. @ 5:11 AM 1 Comments