Wednesday, June 25, 2008
I can be heard in this week's edition of the BBC show
Songlines, which is about "Halellujah."
Go here and scroll down to "Monday." The version about the football player is pretty awesome. My riff around the 21 minute mark will hopefully become a post here shortly.
(Only available for a week--I'll try and upload a copy later.)
Labels: covers, hallelujah, notes
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Lots of great stuff coming up in reaction to the previous post, two of which are elsewhere. It got a link from
Songs About Buildings And Food, a blog so good that it makes me wish I liked
The Hills so I could better understand what he's talking about. (And I mean that sincerely!)
Laguna Beach and all its offshoots are a pretty perfect example of what I'm talking about--MTV has built a whole programming bloc out of televising reenactments of the gossip-worthy moments in a particular real-world social group, and people love it. That's no accident. As stupid as MTV's programming can look to adults, it's generally ahead of the curve on these things.
Also, for those of your that are uncomfortable applying this theory to "lightweights" like Miley and Britney,
Alex Rawls sees a connection between my model and Bob Dylan's construction of character. I think that's true, but only insofar as Dylan is a singularly iconic character. There's a difference between the obsessive information completism of fandom and the social capital of gossip, which relies on widely shared knowledge.
Labels: bob dylan, hannah montana, narrative, notes, the hills
Friday, June 6, 2008
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
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
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
Thursday, May 8, 2008
I didn't say much about No Age's actual music in the post yesterday, but if you're curious, I think
Matthew pretty much covered it.
Labels: no age, notes
Monday, April 21, 2008
Hi readers. As you may or may not know, I am currently a grad student, and I could use your help with some research. If you are an American citizen or current resident of the U.S., please take
my survey. It's very simple and should take, at most, five minutes to do, but will be very helpful to me. Thanks!
The surveyLabels: notes, surveys
Friday, April 18, 2008
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
Monday, April 7, 2008
Just popping in from hell month (affectionately!) to throw a few notes your way:
1) If you liked my last EMP paper, I am going to be there again
this year. Rachel Arnold and I will be presenting a paper on
pop songs used as campaign songs. The paper will probably show up around these parts in the future.
2) Generally I think Stanley Fish is a tool. But apparently if you give him 40 years to think about something, he can come to a pretty reasonable conclusion on it, at least if his
article about postmodernism is anything to go by. It's pretty close to what I think about all them Frenchies these days: they weren't trying to disprove rationalism or claim that physical reality doesn't exist, they were just pointing out the socially constructed nature of things and kinda leaving it at that. I don't know if that's what they were actually trying to do, but it seems like the sensible way to think about them. That said, though, there were significant differences between them, and they're important. In retrospect, we can probably call Derrida and Baudrillard the Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin of theory: provacateurs who probably didn't mean all of what they said, and don't really need to be taken seriously, even if some people do. Barthes is kinda the Robin Williams: playful and entertaining, but harmless, if occasionlly annoying in the repetativeness of his schtick. And Paul de Man is just crazy.
But--and not to be a grad student talking about Foucault here, but--Foucault is genuinely important and generally right. His histories applied the deconstructive mindset to concrete and meaningful subjects, and what he turned up helped make strange questionable truisms. In a way, what he did is basically what Gallileo did; both questioned widely-held assumptions that had a real effect on people's lives. But where Gallileo did it with geography, Foucault did it with language. And that has to be attributed, at least in some small part, to the Frenchies, or at least the environment they whipped up.
I go on about this because the rection to Fish's post is just baffling. Comment after comment complaining about postmodernism! Who knew? And this is why I point out that not all French theorists engaged in the kind of rhetoric Fish is talking about (and people are complaining about). There were some that did do legitimate work that really called into question certain things. Many people would, I suspect, agree with Foucault's take on mental illness. It's unfortunate that certain theorists have given the whole enterprise a bad name, but it's really confusing how, after Fish spends a good number of words laying out a reasonable position, people still get really worked up about deconstruction. I mean, it sucks that the one dude went to McGill and had to read Derrida, but I think most English departments these days provide ample opportunity to engage in traditional studies of literature. All the postmodernists went off and formed critical studies departments, didn't they? Oh, what do I know. Maybe Foucault isn't even part of this group.
3) I had previously posted about how much I liked the video for Mariah's "Touch My Body," but I only now realize that I really like the song too! It's dirty but assertive, the melody is really strong, and I like that Mariah's standing up for both her own sexuality and her control of the situation. The sweet way she sings "I will hunt you down" is amazing. I think it's my single of the year right now.
4) Oh yeah: thanks, Universal, for making
my entire BYOP post a moot point by
removing "Becky" (and two other songs) from the final version of
Get Awkward. You are a bunch of enormous cameltoes.
Labels: academia, announcements, emp, notes, pop, theory
Saturday, February 23, 2008
I did a remix for Chicago band Canasta, and it reminded me of Faith No More for some reason, so I titled it "The Claps' You Want It All But You Can't Have It Remix."
It's the first track here if you're interested in hearing what I came up with. It doesn't really sound like Faith No More. (What do YOU think it sounds like?)
Labels: music, notes, remixes, the claps
Saturday, February 16, 2008
This NYT article, regarding Susan Jacoby's book
The Age of American Unreason, has been hanging around the "most popular" list for a few days now, and at present, it has attracted 978 comments. Soon, I hope to address why it (and grumbles like it) strike such a chord, but as for the actual content of the article, it demands a brief rejoinder.
The essential thrust of her argument, at least as it is depicted here, comes down to that evergreen canard: Americans are ('R'?) stupider than they have ever been. Often now, and exclusively in the past, that argument is made via anecdotal evidence, such as Jacoby's little parable about the two men on 9/11 who didn't know what Pearl Harbor was. This is, to say the least, inconclusive. Contemporary scolds, however, are able to draw on survey data to demonstrate just how widespread and shocking is the ignorance of Americans, and Jacoby invokes statistics on college students' shaky grasp of geography. This sort of evidence would seem to be more useful for someone looking to indict a whole culture; after all, to show that Americans are stupider now than they have ever been, they must show a) that they are stupid, and b) that they used to be less stupid. Presumably Jacoby shows a) well enough, but that leaves b). And b) is a problem.
The inconvenient thing for Jacoby's argument is that survey data have pretty much always shown that Americans are shockingly ignorant. I'm hardly an expert on the subject, but I could send you toward Philip Converse's "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" from 1964. Drawing on data from 1956-1960, he made an embarassingly convincing case that 90% of Americans had little knowledge or understanding about our political system. I don't know if Jacoby is using any similar statistics from modern times, but that sounds pretty ignorant to me, and that in the golden age of the post-war boom.
As for before the postwar era, no survey data exists, because widespread surveying of the population only began in the 40s. So could we have perhaps been smarter before then? Could that data just have gone uncaptured?
The problem with that idea is that universal compulsory education has only been in existence in America since 1918, and it seems unlikely that Americans were smarter when they did not have to attend school. The only possibility left, then, is that Americans were smarter in the 25 year (or so) period between the starts of compulsory education and surveying, and sure, it's
possible. But something would've had to happen during that period to make them 90% stupid about politics by 1956. It's hard to think of what that could be; certianly Jacoby's hobgoblins, anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, were not exactly unknown in the first half of the twentieth century.
In sum: Jacoby can say that Americans are stupid. She can wonder why they continue to be stupid, and indeed, many people do. She can even say that we should be smarter. Bravo! But she can't say we're
stupider, and she most certainly can't blame either pop culture or teaching about pop culture in colleges for
making us stupider. It seems like what she really wants to be saying is that the educational system in America needs to be fixed--but that would be a much shorter, or at least much different, book, and would probably not appeal to quite the same audience.
The interesting suggestion about the above analysis, though, is that there might be a fairly logical reason for why Americans think so little of themelves and so much of the Americans of old: we
know how stupid we are, but we
don't know how stupid we used to be. And that, sad to say, is the direct fault of the national survey. It seems elitist and condescending to think of most Americans as fundamentally ignorant, but survey after survey comes out to say that we are. We want to think of our fellow citizens as decent, kind, respectful human beings, but surveys pop up to inevitably remind us that they are not. And if we are not now, it seems likely that we never were. The only evidence of our predecessors' sanctifying grace is either anecdotal, clearly unrealistic, or taken from the sullied minds of the elderly. Just like everyone everywhere, the American people are not wonderful human beings. (American culture or American ideals maybe not so, but that's a different discussion.) We have surveys to thank for that knowledge, and though what they reveal may be disheartening, it is imperitive that we resist the siren song of nostalgia, that we do not view the past through a Vaseline-smeared lens in order to make ourselves feel better about the present. We're stupid, we're mean, and we're selfish. If we want to change that, there's no backwards path, no state of grace to return to. There's only forward.
ADDENDUM: Regarding the "maps" thing brought up in comments,
this guy makes a good point:
Apropos of Jacoby, the reason FDR wanted people to buy maps in World War II
is because polling showed a significant number of Americans did not know where
Germany was located on the globe, and of course, at that time, there were far
more people than today who believed the earth was not a sphere, but essentially
flat. My question to Jacoby would be "How many people really went out and bought
maps--and of those, how many were the ones who didn't know where Germany
was?"
Labels: everything that is old, notes, pop, shitty world theory
Thursday, February 7, 2008
I see from my referrer stats that people are coming here from a course site at UGA, and I am curious as to what particular course is sending you all here. (I can't see since it's behind a login.) If any of you happen to see this, let me know.
Labels: notes
Monday, September 10, 2007
Were you thinking that by the time the next post went up, it would actually be time for a Top 5 + 1? Yes, there hasn't been much activity here lately. This is due to the fact that your propriator has done a stupid thing and gone to grad school, and thus the deadline likely to be observed on Wednesday nights is not this one.
So I'm going to transition this site to a (sigh) blog, kinda like
the old site, but with less dumb shit. Hopefully. It'll be irregularly updated but, I hope, more frequently than it was before, albeit with smaller items.
Enjoy!
Labels: announcements, notes
Thursday, July 19, 2007
- Tomorrow I'll be at
Idolator again. See ya there!
Labels: notes
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Today I am guest-blogging for
Idolator. You can see all of my posts
here, but regular readers might be most interested in the
Kelly Clarkson post.
New content will be up next week at the regular time.
Labels: notes
Thursday, May 17, 2007
- I'm going to get a few shorter posts up over the next few days, so check back later this week for more stuff.
Labels: notes
Thursday, May 10, 2007
- What was clap clap convergence #1? When I walked out of my office to buy the
Tori Amos CD and almost bumped into
John Bolton. Literal and figurative, whee!
Labels: notes
Thursday, May 3, 2007
- Adam Gopnick
on Kingsley Amis:
It is a very good thing to have a built-in bullshit detector, but a bad thing when the bullshit detector crowds out the rest of your brain; that’s why they call it being narrow-minded. You quickly reach the stage where anything ambitious, complicated, or merely foreign gets spat on along with the things that are genuinely phony. Pretense and ambition are different words for the same thing, and a writing without pretense pretty soon becomes a literature without ambitions, content to congratulate itself on its own insularity.
Sound familiar? Doesn't just apply to literature...
- Oh hello
Pitchforkers. Now, I love
Marc, but listen: that original Cohen version is fucking fantastic, once you adjust your ears to the 80s. I
refer you to Dan Bejar: "a balancing act between the Adult, the Contemporary, and the Disastrous."
Labels: books, notes
Thursday, April 26, 2007
-
Post will be up shortly--it'll be the EMP paper, but I'm working on some additions that may end up being longer than the paper itself, whoops. Stay tuned. Paper is now up, sans italicizing
and most music files, which will have to come later.
-
Please see the note at the beginning of the paper--can anyone covert Quicktime files so my 1-minute clip isn't 200+meg? Lemme know and I can give you an FTP login or something, it'd be a huge help. Thanks
Eric!
- I have some review
in Flagpole this week:
The Rosebuds, and an Athens band who I love to death called
Telenovela. Here's
their MySpace if you want to check out the toonz; three of their best songs are there.
- I also had
a review of LCD Soundsystem a couple weeks back that I think I missed, talking about the album in terms of sequencing, as well as
a review of Adult.
- And yet more reviews in the new issue of
Under the Radar, though I don't entirely remember of what. Cornelius and the Danielson DVD for sure; also Bang Gang and...uh...well, I can't remember. Anyway, they're not online.
- Great, broad post about EMP at
Dial M for Musicology:
So what looks like soulless professionalism to people outside of academia
is really just a way of keeping things interesting. Still, things have gotten to
the point where aesthetic advocacy (i.e., saying something is awesome) is
considered not only unprofessional but wrong. Saying Wagner is awesome -- or,
for instance, pointing to the opening contrabassoon E-flat of Das Rheingold and
discussing how all the exfoliating little figures that grow out of that one note
create a musical image for creation itself and then saying now that's awesome --
seems politically regressive. I've written about this
suspicion of aesthetic pleasure before. But what struck me about the EMP pop
conference was how most of its participants seemed to be pretty comfortable
geeking out on their topics, and that the fanboy tone that crept into the
sessions didn't make them any less intellectually stimulating.
"Suspicion of aesthetic pleasure"? Uh oh.
Labels: academia, emp, flagpole, musicology, notes, reviews, utr
Thursday, April 12, 2007
- I have a piece in Flagpole this week
on Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! It's working similar themes as the article I linked in the post above, but maybe makes the negative points a bit more clearly and specifically. The comments I've gotten so far seem to be missing the point, which is essentially the 4th paragraph.
- The likihood of there not being a post next week is fairly high, as I will be preparing for
my EMP presentation. If you're going to be in Seattle next weekend, say hi!
Labels: emp, flagpole, notes
Thursday, March 29, 2007
- Sorry about no post last week, but I ditched to go to the beach. It was real purty though--here's a picture:
- I got to see Madeleine Albright on
The Colbert Report up close and in person, thanks to
Nick. (Thanks Nick!) Seeing the taping was a pretty interesting experience, although I think I'm too scattered right now to really express how. I can say this, though: Maddie looks like, if you cross her, she'll shoot lightning out of her fingers at you, and I like that in a woman.
- Congratulations to
Scott and
Alison!
- Thanks, Google Ads--you can watch the Bolton interview
here if you'd like.
Labels: clinton administration, colbert, comedy, notes, pictures, politics
Thursday, March 15, 2007
- There's an excellent article by Chris Hassiotis about the new Of Montreal album
in Flagpole this week. You should read it, if only to find out the name of Kevin Barnes' child, because that name should win some sort of cuteness award.
- Also, I have
three reviews in Flagpole this week:
Lily Allen,
Bloc Party, and
The Broken West. (You can probably ignore the last one, but the other two are worth a look.) I was totally wrong on Lily Allen last year, it's actually fantastic.
-
Todd has been nice enough to set up a LiveJournal syndication for this here site. You can find it at
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/clapclap_org/profile.
- I did a final, stealth post
at the old place that's relevant to this week's post. It's about the law in the context of DJ Drama.
Labels: bloc party, lily allen, livejournal, notes, of montreal, reviews, shitty indie, syndication
Thursday, March 8, 2007
- Twoheadedboy
makes some great points about the Arcade Fire and their public reception:
And what of the Arcade Fire's purported sincerity? Their heart-on-sleeve
emotionalism? Should we be touched, moved? When every song recruits a gargantan church organ to swell Win Butler's high school poetry to apocalyptic proportions
(“mirror, mirror / on the wall / show me where the / bombs will fall”)? I say,
stop touching me.
Also, at the end (and more importantly): "taking the Arcade Fire to task for aestheticizing politics." This is really smart.
I'm still trying to figure out why musicians' clumsy attempts at political gestures bug me so much, beyond, you know, "they're stupid." I hadn't really considered this one, though, and I think it's getting close to the heart of the matter, although I would phrase it more like "imposing lame indie aesthetics on politics, which already has its own aesthetics." The lyrics quoted above are a 1:1 equivalency of John Ashcroft
singing "Let The Eagle Soar." Just because you're singing something over a piano part doesn't mean it's a good song, and just because you say something about bombs doesn't make it a meaningful political statement, and when people think otherwise, that just indicates that they don't really know what they're talking about when it comes to songs or politics. Oh sure, sure; everyone's entitled to their opinion, and god forbid we "supress dissent" by telling someone they're being shallow, but if you think Ashcroft's song is lame, well. Aesthetics matter.
- As
suspected, the
House episode this week was practically a religious experience. I think I might be mentioning it again in the near future, so I won't say too much now, but seriously, episode of the year or something.
- As Frank
pointed out and Dave
responded to, there's been surprisingly little chatter in pop-nerd circles about Britney shaving her head, aside from the requisite "OMG she's bald" reactions. There's been a quote going around attributed to Courtney Love that I can't find an original source for (it might be on a google-proofed page like a message board), but it certainly
sounds like her:
she?s insane! I love it! I?m sad about what she?s ingesting, and the bad man who got her started on that shit.But she?s made herself a true outsider under the influence or not- which in itself is not a crime, she?s expressed what she?s feeling inside on the outside an dyes its the result of a psychotic break due to uh?ingestion of a very very very evil substance. and i know what I know because I know, the people who know- she cried for a long tome before she did it and her bodyguards were all that was with herhow the ultimate insider the person whose almost directly responsible for ruining guitar rock ended up shaving her head is an ultimate irony and the fact that she shaved her head hell if i did it no one would blink butt hats cos I?ve always been an outsider even when I?m an insider- but ths is breaking news due to that fact that this was the lolita fuck up fantasy doll jonbenet nightmare- i remember the first time i saw a little thing on her in spin I seriously very seriously thought it was a parody like an snl skit and when it became real I worried and it affected everyone, in my world in the world of rock n roll and this may as well be death in some ways- she wasn?t sober when she did it - i wish she had been because then id be able to really kind of get behind it and just say- fuck yeah express yourself- do it= you don?t feel pretty on ths inside anymore show it man, but it s happened and its legendary, this is going to be legendary.Is she going to join mercury rev? Start hanging at space land?i doubts he even understands that world but no decent punk at heart can begrudge the once totally self an dmommy sexualised ?virgin? for shaving g her dammed head, i love it and I?m sad for her at he same time.I?m sure she?s clueless to how brilliant this was, how in some ways anarchic an feminist it was- but she still needs to go back to rehab.That my two cents.
I like this, but I would. Maybe another productive avenue to go down would be comparing it with the "makeover" episode on
America's Next Top Model. It's at, what, the seventh time around now? Eighth? And every "cycle" (ugh, sorry) there's the makeover episode, and every makeover episode, they chop off a bunch of the girls' hair. And there's always lots of crying. It doesn't make sense--the contestants have clearly watched the show before, they know this is coming, and yet, every time, "OMG I can't believe they cut off my hair!" Really? Well, yeah. It's notable in comparison to another ANTM pattern: the nude shoot. Every season, usually after the makeover episode, there's a shoot where the girls have to be either nude, near-nude, or looking as if they are nude, and for the first few seasons, this would always knock at least one contestant out, because they would refuse on moral grounds to be nude and my body is a temple etc. etc. OH MY GOD GIRL YOU'RE TRYING TO BE A MODEL TAKE YOUR DAMN CLOTHES OFF ALREADY.
Um. Anyway, point is that this happened for the first few seasons, but then it stopped; there's still always a nude shoot, but people seem to have finally learned not to apply to the show if they don't want to get nudies. But they do still apply to the show even though they don't want to get their hair cut. It's still that unbelievable that someone would do that to them, I think, that you go ahead anyway.
So compare that to Britney: this is seen as a form of self-mutilation, evidenced by the fact that a few days later, people thought it credible that she
attempted suicide. And so, hair: it's an unacknowledged but potent symbol in pop, and maybe the seemingly superficial things we see female popstars do with their hair are worthy of a closer look: P!nk, Ashlee going brunette, etc. I don't really know what this would yield, but if I did, it would be a post rather than a note.
Labels: aesthetics, arcade fire, britney, courtney love, House, john ashcroft, notes, politics, pop, teenpop
Thursday, March 1, 2007
- TV reminds me of probably the best argument for
House's continued excellence: next week's episode features Dave Matthews playing a guy with brain damage. Allow me to repeat that. Next week, we will be able to turn on our television sets and see Dave Matthews, South African-born songwriter of such tunes as "Ants Marching," playing--and one can only assume he does so convincingly--a man with brain damage.
Mmm.
- This bolsters another thing TV told me tonight, or more specifically
Walter Mossberg, personal technology reporter for the
Wall Street Journal, told me. Walter
Mossberg says that TV critics say that we are currently in a golden age for television. I don't know who he's talking about, and I am suspicious given his claim to only watch things broadcast in high-definition, but I suspect those apocryphal TV critics are right. As far as I can tell, it's the only golden age we're living through right now, so enjoy it!
Labels: critics, dave matthews, House, notes, TV
Thursday, February 22, 2007
- Due to some, ah, internal problems at the clapclap household, the above has not been edited as well as it should, so if you're one of the early birds, you're likely to see a different version later tomorrow. I'm sure there are any number of errors both factual and grammatical in there right now, but they'll be gone soon enough. If this bothers you, click your heels together three times and say, "It's only a blog..."
- Today's post was partially a reaction to a review of
The Sarah Silverman Program by Tad Friend, in
The New Yorker. You can
read it here. As a whole, it's good, but some of the the things he says along the way are absolutely baffling. For instance, he writes:
Sarah’s crowd punishes sexual indeterminacy: when she suddenly decides that she’s a lesbian, everyone scoffs. 'As a lesbian, I resent your laughter,' Sarah says. 'And all laughter.' Is the joke about identity politics? Lesbians? Or is it on us: So you think lesbians are humorless? At times, you wonder whether you’re laughing with Silverman or at her, and then you realize that she’s laughing at you.
The last point is good, but as for what comes before: dude,
it's a joke about lesbians. Trust me on this, I went to Oberlin. I've heard that joke before.
- I have
two reviews in Flagpole this week, of local Athens bands King of Prussia and The 63 Crayons. The latter will hopefully be interesting even if you haven't heard the band, but the former is actually about music, and it's very positive. I reference the New Pornographers, and that's quite intentional; it's baffling to me why bands are imitating other indie bands but not that one. Well, King of Prussia, intentionally or not, sound like the New Pornographers, and I couldn't be happier about it. Their CD, only seven songs ong, is absolutely wonderful, and I really hope they get some wider attention.
Here is their Myspace page, where you can hear two of their best songs: "Terrarium" and "Misadventures of the Campaign Kids." If you like the New Pornographers, or good guitar-pop in general, you should really check them out. (Ha, and I see they have now changed their motto. Thanks guys!)
Labels: critics, flagpole, king of prussia, notes, reviews, The New Yorker
Thursday, February 15, 2007
- This post began life elsewhere, and it originally featured a few Frank Kogan terms that I've removed in this version because I wasn't really using them correctly. Still, his PBS concept was definitely a springboard, and the stuff at the end is, in part, a response to some points he made about the original piece.
-
A list is up of all the submissions received for this round of 33 1/3 book proposals. The 33 1/3 books are pocket-sized paperbacks, maybe 100 pages long, each discussing a different album. Past books have run the gamut from a purely historical account of
Let It Be by to a novella about
Meat is Murder by musician Joe Pernice to a social history of
James Brown Live At The Apollo by critic Douglas Wolk, so they're open to a lot of different things. (For instance, Carl Wilson is currently working on one about Celine Dion, and why he doesn't like her.) While I'm tempted to go into a lengthy analysis, I probably shouldn't, since one of the proposals is mine. (Try and guess!) I will say, though, that this could easily be read as a fantastic "best albums of all time" list, if you wanted. The criteria, instead of being straight voting or staff collaboration, was essentially "what one album do you think is the best album ever, except it has to be both well-liked by a large number of people and unlikely to be picked by anyone else?" The way it turned out is certainly flawed (just in the B's, the only Beck is
Guero and the only Bjorks are
Homogenic and
Vespertine), but also a fairly honest reflection of the canon as it currently stands, aside from the artists
removed from consideration. How would criticism and music be different if this actually was the widely-acknowledged list of the greats? What if (scanning again), the artists who really loomed as important influences were the Grateful Dead, Genesis, Jefferson Airplane, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Mekons? How about if we also had to acknowledge Steve Martin and NOFX and OMD and John Denver and the Muppets?
- One of my favorite albums of last year was by the Ice Cream Socialists, and they have a new song up on
their myspace page called "Mr. Crazy." It is very good and references both Phantom of the Opera and, I think, "I Am the Walrus."
- Dave at Cure For Bedbugs
responds to this week's post.
Labels: ice cream socialists, notes
Thursday, February 8, 2007
- If you haven't heard the new Avril Lavigne song yet, you should. Lots of interesting voice things in there (the reverbed stutter leadin in the chorus, the differing degrees of overdubbing), and the way the production meshes with the emotional tone of the song is fantastic--check out the way the bass plays sustained notes in the prechorus that makes it drift before being caught by the riff and increased low-end in the chorus. That bottom just hits you in the chest, and it's like Avril's a ghost ninja attacking you from all directions or something.
- As a bonus, here are my comments for Pazz & Jop, partially because it just came out, but also because they involve Paris. For the record, I don't entirely feel this way anymore, at least not in the broad sense, but I do still think it's notable that the "important" albums of last year seemed to offer so little to talk about.
***************
You know it's a bad year for music when the most urgently-discussed subjects all concern the music industry: Tower going under, rap sales crashing, Disney selling (a fact noted but not really, you know, investigated), alt-weekly consolidation (hi dere!), and of course the neverending debate about MP3s, which has pretty much entered its perpetual-motion phase. This wouldn't be a problem if the connection was actually made between economic factors and the art that results, but everybody's too tied to their position right now to admit anything that might weaken it, and so of course we spiral ever-downward toward making pop music--and writing about it--a hobbyist's field.
Despite rock nation's loud insistence that they're entitled to free downloads come hell or high water, we're still told that live performance, not those unvaluable studio records, is the true metric of a band's worth. CSS, for instance, got framed as hipster poseurs led by a svengali drummer, right up until they like totally tore it up at the P-Fork fest. We are shamed into sincerity again: their clever referential humor is icky until it's drowned out by pure rockingness.
God seems to be using said Internet to drive home that our crutches of authenticity have been knocked away, but instead of embracing the new real, we ceaselessly attempt to recreate the real of the past. Dragonforce, an even more cartoonish metal act than Dethklok, stages a Guitar Hero tournament on their tour bus, and that's a far better mirror of reality than their concerts. But we cling to the NWOBHM cosplay still, auditioning for a supergroup on national TV with consultants dictating our appearance and convention dictating that we loudly insist how much we want this patently worthless prize, because we are the most dedicated to real rock. Yeah, we saw what happened to the realest person, Zayra, a Puerto Rican girl who proudly donned the most outlandish outfits those consultants could find and sung "pop (ugh)" songs with more honest passion than anyone else could manage. Zayra was seen as ridiculous, but rock is not ridiculous. Rock serious! Rock real! And so Zayra lost the battle of rock. In a genre with no future, who wants to be a loser, too?
We look at rock's bloated corpse and decide that the best thing for it is more histrionic emotion. Bernie's not dead! Look, he's vomiting onstage out of pure sadness! AP gave him 4 stars! Our choices are clear: win the battle, like whatshisface with the frosted tips, and seize a lifetime supply of guitar picks from Musician's Friend or lose the battle, like Zayra (although being a hot chick will get you through several rounds, assuming Tommy Lee is a judge and Gilby Clark doesn't remind you he used to be a feminist), and spend the war being pecked to death by defenders of the faith wearing studded armbands but resembling nothing so much as the adults in Footloose. No dancing! No playing around! No gay shit!
Given all this negativity, my list might seem odd. But all this negativity is precisely why The Rapture is there: they made the most optimistic album of 2006, sometimes arguably to the music's detriment, and I admire that level of dedication. They weren't floating the usual "everything will be alright" bullshit balloon; instead, they went with the much more difficult "everything is already alright," eschewing the former's quasi-Christian "there will be peace in the next life" excuse-mongering for an exhortation to live in the moment. It's a sentiment that shouldn't have been hard to find in pop music, but in 2006 it sure was.
Speaking of negativity, and living in the moment, let's discuss Paris Hilton. I soured on music for a while this year--though in fairness, I soured on everything for a while there this year--and so about a month ago, when I realized it was time to start wrapping the year up, I got myself all the notable albums I'd missed: TVOTR, Justin, Nelly Furtado, Joanna Newsom (which is horrible by the way--the internet owes me $13.99), etc. But the one that stuck was Paris. I understood why people would have a kneejerk reaction to her: Paris is a pretty loathsome creature, the child molestation of our cultural life. (We know it's wrong, but we just can't help it!) But the album has a few non-Disney things going for it. First it was one of the few pop albums not trying to be something else this year. I love Timbo and all but if he's going to keep melding singers to his "I am so much better than pop" beats, he needs to get someone else in to make sure half the vocals don't suck; it's no accident that when the camera pans across Prince's apartment in Purple Rain it catches SHEET MUSIC for as-yet-unrecorded songs. Gnarls Barkley had Danger Mouse being all "ooh, I'm subversive," which I think we've heard enough times now to realize it's code for "I care more about you thinking I'm cool than about making music you enjoy." Hell, even the American Idol winners were making intentionally retro albums of crooner and gospel music. But not Paris. She was extending her brand, and that worked great with pop. Paris is about pleasure, so what point would a Paris album be if it did not please you?
Plus, it was more up-front lyrically than most anything else. Where indie intentionally obfuscated its simple sentiments in order to seem more mysterious and rappers talked about living the good life in tones that suggested they weren't happy about it at all, Paris sang songs that didn't hide: this is about how Nicole is a total bitch, this is about how I enjoy sex, this is a shout-out to the people helping me make this album. Plus, when the fourth wave of ska rolls around, we'll get to hear "Stars are Blind" covered like 50,000 times.
So but does this--souring on music and missing albums, I mean, not liking Paris, although you can count that too--mean that you shouldn't trust my list? Probably. But a little critical skepticism, as opposed to critical disengagement, is good, no?
And so here we are: vaguely disgruntled, but also a little gruntled, disengaged the more we try and address specifics but more than willing to roll around in the broad strokes. We don't know where the hell we're going, and that's scary, so we try and hold the high ground or at least profess to absent ourselves from the fight. The truth will out--probably--but in the meantime, it's a little too gray for my tastes.
Labels: avril, css, notes, paris, pazz jop, pop, rapture, rock, rock star, teenpop, village voice, year-end
