Pretty Goes with Pretty

Dead Men Tell No Tales (but Why is Journey on Their iPod?)

Via richgirlsareweeping, this article on Heath Ledger's iPod:

Aaron Eckhart and Maggie Gyllenhaal dropped by the Today Show this morning to shill a movie, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Eckhart earnestly related to host Matt Lauer a story about their deceased costar Heath Ledger which he'd told Ledger's mother—namely, that friends were passing around Ledger's iPod as a form of remembrance:

I told a little story about Heath's iPod. Whenever we went into the trailer we'd say "Whose iPod is this?" Because it would always be some wacked-out music nobody had ever heard of before. And it was Heath's. And that iPod has since become a symbol of Heath and his friends pass it around to each other, download the music and then pass it on.

...

Ledger was only 28 when he died, on the cusp of the generation often called "Millennials." If he was anything like his peers, he must have defined himself in part by his taste in music. It's only natural that friends would go through his music collection as a way of getting a sense of the man they lost, with a song they enjoyed together providing a poignant point of shared experience.

When I saw richgirls linking to it, my first thought was that it was deeply morbid—the idea of searching out a dead man's iPod in order to "know" him better. If the article did indeed start listing his playlists, maybe I'd still think it was morbid. But the way Eckhart explains it is more earnest and more personal than that. Maybe I'm responding to it because I know from firsthand experience that one of the first places I went when my dad died earlier this year was his record collection. Granted, it was to find music to play at his funeral, but I'd be lying if I didn't say it wasn't also a form of therapy. Just listening to Ry Cooder or Graceland or songs from the O Brother soundtrack were a mode of experiencing comfort, grief, and catharsis. 

The main article here jokingly warns at one point to watch what you put on your iPod, lest your corpse be misjudged by your ironic love of Journey. (By the way, love of Journey, however qualified, is grounds for harsh crtique, whether you're in the ground or not.) But really that is a grotesque way to think about it. Seeking out a dead stranger's playlist out of morbid curiosity will teach you nothing. If anything it will render him even more two-dimensional than he might already seem. We already know Zach Braff's taste in music—all it does is stereotype him as insufferable. To seek this sort of thing out as a way to "know" someone is a way to judge them on cultural terms. It's a cynic's game. Read People magazine if all you want to know is what the Stars like and dislike. (Or, if you must, go here to find out what was on Jesse Helms's "funky jams" playlist, which he was apparently listening to just before he died.)

On the other hand, to know someone who loved music, and listen to his music as a personal tribute, that's actually kind of beautiful. The idea of Ledger's friends quietly passing around his iPod actually begins to sound really meaningful. I hope that music, whatever it is, really is cherished, and is never shared with outsiders.

Genre Fatigue

Matthew's post at Fluxblog today travels down some familiar roads for me:

In recent months, I've been complaining a lot about this seemingly infinite wave of faceless, deeply unimaginative indie bands and their tired, worn-out influences. Thankfully it seems as though we've mostly cycled through the whole Joy Division/"punk-funk" thing and that the "we're playing cheap Casios, lolz 80s!" aesthetic is on the wane, but we've still got a glut of limp psychedelic folk, faux-Animal Collective bullshitting, and lame-ass attempts at mimicking the Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. I'm sure you can think of some other sounds that you've heard too much of in the past eight years.

In particular, the nu shoe-gaze stuff has got to stop -- it's dull, lazy, transparently dumb...

It's an interesting if somewhat misguided post; Matthew frames the post as if there is a problem with indie, though it might more accurately be called a problem with his taste in indie. Dude is obviously suffering from some genre fatigue, though he seems to be saying "it's not me, it's you." Hence he's being called out by the commenters at Idolator.

As far as my own interest in the subject goes, I'm intentionally gonna ignore everything he says about Janet Jackson, let alone the very notion that influences can be proscribed by anyone outside of the bands themselves. That aside, there seems to be at core a frustration in Matthew's post with the entire genre of indie; that it has somehow become populated by bands content to be pushed by their boundaries rather than the other way around. That's probably too unfair an assessment, made by someone with their eye too close to the microscope.

I say that as someone who shares a lot of the same feelings as Matthew (not to be too presumptuous). Perhaps it's simply a result of 2008 not measuring up to 2007, but a lot of the indie stuff I've heard this year has so far been good but not great. I don't know that I've yet heard an essential album released this year, and though I continue to pay attention to what's coming out and to spend money on new releases, I feel in myself a certain tentativeness in my expectations. The question is: is that because indie has become inured in its ways, or are my current tastes just not geared to that direction right now?

Everyone suffers from genre fatigue sooner or later. I stopped listening to true indie rock sometime around 1997 or 98, sticking solely to the folky/subdued/somnamulent end of the spectrum for five or six years. (It was the Futureheads, of all bands, that snapped me back into liking bands with backbeats.) Hey, fatigue happens, especially when you're downright immersed in a genre as someone who posts almost daily about indie rock for however many years Matthew's been going. I wrote about this idea a few months back in my own bout of navel-gazing, in a post titled Do I Want to Go There?, in which I noted my previous bouts of genre fatigue (post-rock) and the fatigue that I can see looming on the horizon (60s-70s folk rock).

I think when you, the listener, get to the point that you're noticing the production or playing techniques replicated from band to band, that's the sign that it's time for the listener to move on to new sounds. (Sure, it's time for the band to move on too, but who's got control over that?) I remember back in the 90s I was pretty much ready to slit the throats of any bands that refused to play upstrokes on their guitars. These days it's all about drowning your vocals in reverb, a trend which has really become a parody of itself. (n.b.: I just bought the new Fleet Foxes and I love it, despite feeling like the reverb was a mistake; the songs could have survived a more traditional production job.) The redundancy is not a problem unique to indie or to 2008. (And Janet Jackson is not the solution!)

Who's Hyping?

Last week's posts (part I, part II) seemed to provoke a range of responses, both here and elsewhere (Fluxtumblr, Idolator), all of which indicate to me that there are more than one thread tangled up in this conversation about scenes. Depending on your perspective, you might have a completely different point of entry for the topic at hand. (For instance, as I mentioned in the comments last week, I used to run a club not too unlike the Smell about eight years ago, hence my affection for local scenes.) Over the next couple posts, I thought I'd break some of the responses down to their crux, then see which paths might be worth traveling a further down. As I'm just scratching the surface, your comments (here or at your own blogs) are welcome as ever.

1. The actual quality of No Age, or the hype vs. the backlash. Pitchfork gave them a 9.2, Matthew thinks they're not that good. Probably you all have your opinions too. As I said before I've barely even heard No Age so I really don't have a horse in this race. In fact I prefer to not really have an opinion on No Age. Reading from a critical distance the various posts about the band just throws into relief the ongoing cycle of "genuine taste" vs. blog hype and backlash. When you like a band--Destroyer, Vampire Weekend, whatever--the online chatter about their unworthiness always comes off as "predictably dreary backlash"; as if all those bloggers out there hatin' on your favorites obviously aren't listening without prejudice. Of course, when you find that you hate a band getting such love--maybe TV on the Radio or Arcade Fire--surely you're baffled by all the blind idiot sheep on the web. It's the equivalent of hating slow pedestrians when you're driving and hating impatient drivers when you're walking, never realizing that you yourself are both.

2. By overpraising Nouns, critics run the risk of not properly positioning themselves to gauge their future trajectory. When I quoted Fluxblog last week, I apparently missed Matthew's real point, which he elaborated on at his other other blog, Fluxtumblr: "The problem isn’t people getting too big too fast per se, it’s about artists getting praised and shot through the roof before they even reach a creative adolescence." He elaborates in the comments to his post:

Well, I think purely in the context of Pitchfork, which is really at the center of this whole thing anyway, it's just a terrible idea to give a record like Nouns a score that breaks through the 9 barrier so early in their career because it's like, no matter what they do, you're going to be inclined to give a lower score the next time around because c'mon, how much higher can you get without looking nuts? Something that expressed enthusiasm and approval for the record -- which is cool, it's a nice enough album -- but gave them some room to move up even in terms of your institution's grading system, would've been much more sensible.

Though I find this logic flawed--Marc Hogan's comments in Matthew's post mirror my own reaction--I do find the topic more interesting, and less picked-over, than the old hype-vs.-backlash line. It's nearly the same argument, but it explicitly puts the ball in the court of critics. Matthew uses Pitchfork but the same question could be put to Dusted or the critics at the New York Times--i.e., any outlet that is concerned with engaging an album critically. Critics often base their opinion on only a few listens; deadlines sometimes force a critic to go with his or her first impression. Even here at pgwp, where there are no deadlines, I've written reviews of albums that, in retrospect, overpraised or underpraised due to the fact that I couldn't wait to find out whether the record would truly make itself at home in my head. So, how do critics navigate that scenario? Will Amanda Petrusich regret her 9.2 rating (or, for that matter, will Matthew come around on Nouns) in a few months? How should--how can-- reviewers accurately adjust their first impressions?

Later (maybe tomorrow), the rest of the threads: art vs. commerce and community vs. iconoclasm.

This Ain't a Scene, It's a Comments Box Part II: Blood Sweat and Uploads

[Earlier, Part I]

Despite all I've said so far, something has obviously changed. I’d have to be an idiot to think the internet hasn’t had some influence on the way bands come up, and perhaps on the identities and sounds coming from different scenes. “Lord knows I'm no internet utopian,” Barthel writes, “but it seems strange to deny that there are real communities online. They may not be able to give each other haircuts or provide venues for bands to play, but none of that is necessary for vital art to happen.” Vital art, no. How about vital audience?

On the surface, the internet era seems like it should be tailor-made for bedroom stars—those kids who don’t take part in any local scene, simply uploading their work to the global audience that might find their MySpace page. That's the way the net gets idealized—whether by no-name bands looking for exposure, lonely bloggers looking to flex their influential muscles, or desperate major labels. But is that the reality? Is that really the era we now live in? Last week Ryan Catbird asked whether it was conceivable for small-time acts to follow the "new model" set by Nine Inch Nails and simply give their music away for free:

I still think the more important question is: “What if an artist that hasn’t already built a career on the label system released their work directly, gave it away for free, retained their rights, etc.  Would it matter?”

The answer, sadly, to that one is “no, it doesn’t matter.”  Myriad small unheard-of bands are out there posting their albums for free every day, but there’s still no good way for them to get heard.

For all the chatter about how new technology/Music 2.0/viral marketing etc. has the power to “break” new artists, there are precious few examples of this actually occurring. 

Catbird is right, but one needn't be cynical about the 2.0 scenario either. The fact is the business models for an arena-rocking megastar and a DIY band from Ohio have never been the same, not in the 90s and not today. The degree to which different revenue streams are available—whether through retail sales, touring, or licensing—is tied explicitly to one's audience. That's where a lot of bands, bloggers, and fans get mixed up when it comes to the internet: there is an illusion that the internet somehow holds the key to bypassing all the dues-paying, skipping straight to the career opportunities and adulation.

If your music bypasses Hank in your hometown but reaches Henri in Paree, where exactly does that get you? Aiming for the bright lights of internet stardom without honing your chops at home—and building a tangible, carbon-based following—is a chimera. Which is just to say that bands should log off and rock the old-fashioned way.

For that matter, bloggers should log off too. For those wondering why bloggers don't "break" the new hot shit band, here's a newsflash: the internet is not the ground floor. If you want to break a new band, go see a local show and find a band that's toiling away in your own obscure back yard. Why do bloggers think they need to sort through the desperate pleas for exposure in their email inboxes to find the right bands? Your inbox is not the scene.

Yet, sadly, there seems to be a danger that in fact that is the new scene. Not to put too dour a spin on it—Barthel is right to say that it's wrong to claim internet culture as "inauthentic"—but the national indie scene is beginning to shake down into the kind of singular social hierarchy that would usually define individual community scenes. Look, for instance, at last year's end-of-year lists, almost all of which, across the board, were identical. Maura Johnston, in a comment to her own post at Idolator last week, said this:

If anything a big part of my frustration with indie rock right now comes from the insularity that's bred by the ever-shrinking mass—it's so informed by itself and only itself that it's sometimes speaking a dialect full of really really boring words.

In other words, the variety of subcultures that has made indie rock so invigorating for two decades is currently getting a little vanilla, as the most popular tastemakers, whether based in New York or Chicago or Toronto or wherever, seem to be aligning their viewpoints, even if unintentionally. So if the blog culture is somehow consolidating all the music scenes of the country into one generic über-scene—to the point that it's novel to point out that No Age played shows at a dingy club that holds vegan potlucks—then it's time to start looking outside of that scene. As Barthel puts it,"the best and more enduring American indie bands of the 90s, if they were part of a scene at all, existed on the outskirts of that scene." And the outskirts of this scene is your scene. So log off and go see a show.

Follow-up posts:

• Who's Hyping?

This Ain't a Scene, It's a Comments Box Part I: Reading Brooklyn Vegan Is Not Going to a Show

Last week I pointed to Mike Barthel’s post Punk Grammar in the context of the band No Age. But in fact his post has almost nothing to do with the band and much more to do with the idea of local scenes and how they are perceived—or, more specifically, how relevant they are—now that the internet has rendered the idea of “local scene” quaint.

As Barthel and others (among them the New Yorker and Pitchfork) have made apparent, the phenomenon of No Age is indelibly linked to their origin in the L.A. scene surrounding the Smell. As far as No Age is concerned, I find the whole conversation a shade disingenuous—just as discussion of Vampire Weekend was less about their music than about their class issues and musical colonialism. It’s an excuse for us bloggers to talk about something more interesting than the music itself, yet throw a band’s name around in close proximity, blowing their importance as a musical entity out of proportion. (For the record: I’ve heard two songs by No Age and am ambivalent to them; I have no critique to offer their music.)

The common thread I’m picking up in all this discussion of the Smell seems to be how novel it is that a band can come from a living, breathing scene—as if the pre-MySpace/Hype Blog Era has existed for generations, and the idea of a band bolstered by its local fanbase is something to be nostalgic for; as if unearthing the Smell scene is somehow akin to anthropologists analyzing the tools of an ancient culture. Worse, I find it alarming that people are surprised that such scenes still exist. Amanda Petrusich, in her Pitchfork review of Nouns, writes:

To an outsider, the Smell is idealistic and romantic…. Save Baltimore's Wham City, it's been a while since American music fans have had a similar hometown scene to get riled up about; regional culture has been fractured and marginalized by the internet, and being too focused on anything local—except produce, maybe—feels depressingly provincial in 2008. Consequently, it's weirdly thrilling that a community-sponsored, community-supported art space can attract (and sustain) such a horde of admirable bands.

Barthel puts this in the context of what he calls “the myth of the 90s” (perhaps more accurately the mythologizing of the 90s). As to why No Age is the band garnering allusions to the bygone eras of local scenes—surely Wolf Eyes had/has its own venue in which to nurture its sound and audience?—Barthel rightly notes that it’s because they sound like they came from the 90s. It’s easier for music writers to therefore conclude that everything about them is 90s: they buy t-shirts at thrift stores! they eat vegan cupcakes! they… come from a close-knit music scene the likes of which (not counting Toronto or Stockholm or Brooklyn or Chicago or apparently Denton) haven't been seen since Seattle at its grungiest!

Are we so glued to our mp3 blogs, tour date aggregators, and bittorent sites that we’ve forgotten about local scenes? Should we believe all these bands we read about every day are born whole, without coming up from some sort of hometown scene? More likely, those of us who were twentysomethings in the 90s, taking part in scenes of “hardcore bands and community centers,” as Barthel puts it, are now the thirtysomethings who stay home and write blogs instead—forgetting that there are new twentysomethings going to those shows, starting their own DIY spaces, birthing the bands we’re writing about.

I think, quite simply, that many people out there are forgetting about and/or ignoring the importance of being a local band first, national act second. Also writing about No Age, Matthew Perpetua worried on the band's behalf:

I don't think No Age is a fully-formed band at this moment in time, and I worry that they might get screwed over/screwed up by Certain People overrating their juvenilia, whether it's out of genuine enthusiasm, or because it is beneficial to Those People's brand. This rarely works out—either the artist hedges their bets, and feels no need to progress, or they develop their skill and create better material, and the audience moves on to smothering some other inexperienced band.

This is a concern I've seen voiced on behalf of numerous blog-annointed bands (again, see Vampire Weekend): that maybe we shouldn't get so hot for their debuts; maybe we should let them mature first. Since we're treading around in 90s throwbacks anyway, I'd just like to ask: why start now? Slint put out two albums. Drive Like Jehu put out two albums. Rodan, one. Dare I mention Neutral Milk Hotel? The list goes on—either bands that were lauded on their debut and went on to have long careers (Pavement? Palace?) or bands that had tremendous influence but imploded before they could make three records. So No Age now has two records out—in indie parlance, that means they're ready for their close-up. Maybe in a year or two each dude will go on to form their own June of '44 or Hot Snakes.

I think the fear of letting a band get too big too fast, lest they stunt their growth, stems from a simple confusion: the internet is not a local scene. One needn't "worry" about a band's fragile trajectory, whether it's No Age or Vampire Weekend or the Dodos; they're probably further along than you realize.

Related posts:

• Part II: Blood Sweat and Uploads
• Who's Hyping? (May 20)

The 12 Stages of Grief Mixtape

[Brief disclaimer: This is, I think, the last post of this nature. I promise more lighthearted fare next week...]

I was back home taking care of my dad, then dealing with the funeral and otherwise putting things in order, for about three weeks total. (It felt like three months.) When I returned to work last week, greeted by flowers and cards and kindness from my many co-workers, one of them—who has no idea I'm a nerd for music or that I have this blog or used to be in a band or used to run a performance space—offered to make me a mix of cathartic music. She claimed that certain aggressive songs helped her get through similar times. I told her thanks but no thanks: I was in the country music phase of my 12 Stages of Grief Mixtape.

It was just an off-the-cuff joke, but it made me think about my listening habits not just over the last few weeks but the last few months. I've obliquely made mention of it here in the past though hadn't (until earlier this week) come out and said what it was I was dealing with.

I first noticed the way my listening habits were being affected around the beginning of the year. This is the point at which my dad seemed perfectly healthy, though the inevitability of what was going to happen had been made plain by a phalanx of doctors. Because he did not seem outwardly sick, visiting Dad was not a sad experience—we'd go out, barbecue in the back yard, watch sports on TV, do the usual. There was no dwelling on the bad news, no urgent heart-to-heart talks; just laughter and crossword puzzles.

Yet once I returned home, four hours away, I'd find myself gravitating to a certain kind of music. It was hazy, hypnotic, gauzelike, perhaps with some percussive undercurrent. So, a lot of krautrock. Animal Collective's "For Reverend Green" fit the bill in a big way. Of course I wasn't in the mood for happy music, but I also wasn't in the mood for sad music. I wanted some sort of emotionless music. Something that could enevelop me and keep the world on pause or at a distance. I took long walks with this kind of music droning in my headphones, not really seeing the world outside, simply trusting my body to take me down familiar streets.

• Animal Collective, "For Reverend Green"
• Can, "Father Cannot Yell"
• Leonard Cohen, "Avalanche"
• The Ruby Suns, "Remember"
• Spiritualized, "Shine a Light"

None of these songs fall into the same genre, yet they all have that sort of enveloping feeling. Sonically they somehow embrace you without feeling comforting.

By this time last month, though, I needed comfort. I coincidentally picked up Andrew Bird's Mysterious Production of Eggs just a few days prior to the call from home, asking me to come up. I listened to the album on the drive up more or less for the first time, easing into it the same way I did Armchair Apocrypha—that is, it felt inviting at first but exhausting by the end. I knew that repeated listens would heal that. Eggs is a slower album; it feels more like Armchair's second half than its first. For my state of mind, I welcomed the lack of faster-paced numbers.

• Andrew Bird, "Sovay"

I've already written about why the album turned out to be just what I needed. Dad was declining rapidly; he was mentally sharp but physically spent when I first arrived, meaning I had a lot heavy lifting to do—getting him from his bed to his wheelchair and vice versa. It was an emotionally draining experience, to say the least, and became harder and harder each day. I continued to take those long walks but this time I needed songs that felt more soothing, warmer.

• Andrew Bird, "Masterfade"

I listened to Eggs and nothing else for at least a week straight. I guess it turned out to be my wallowing record. I'm still listening to it almost daily, though at least now I'm alternating between that and other albums. It helps that I'm back in L.A. again, with my full music collection to choose from and more opportunities to be out, listening.

Thus I unconsciously started mixing country music into my daily consumption. And when my co-worker got me quipping about mixtapes I had a sort of Freudian epiphany—that maybe my listening habits were still being shaped by my dad. He was a huge country fan, mostly bluegrass and 60s-70s style. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, old-timey stuff.

It's hard for me to get more specific than that, though. Unlike the folky stuff he liked (which I've already written about), Dad's country tastes were exiled to his car stereo. Neither my mom nor his second wife liked it, so he kept it there. I think of his country music tastes as being more personal to him and more mysterious to me. I can't go out and buy the album I know he loved. I just have to guess, and make due with my own meager collection, most of which comes from a fairly brief alt-country phase in the late-90s/early-00s and a spate of downloading over the last few months.

• Jimmie Rodgers, "In the Jailhouse Now"
• Neko Case, "John Saw That Number"
• Gillian Welch, "Winter's Come and Gone"
• Buck Owens, "My Heart Skips a Beat"
• Willie Nelson, "My Own Peculiar Way"

That's okay though. I'm not really listening to this stuff to continue wallowing. For the most part I'm skipping past the aching ballads, opting instead for the upbeat numbers. Those are the kind of tunes Dad liked, I know that much. Right now, me too.

Just as Long as You Stand by Me

Planning a funeral is a strange experience. A day after my dad died, my brother and sister and I were sifting through photo album after photo album in order to make a slide show for the service. On one hand it was therapeutic—it allowed us to look back on a lot of happy memories—but we were under deadline. We had two days to put the show together and set it to music. So, the whole thing felt both like a distraction and an annoyance; immensely important and absurdly unimportant.

We had to pick a song or two that would add up to about five minutes; and the total time would therefore limit the number of photos we could use. That meant whittling the image selection down from 300 to a little less than 100. When you're trying to show the full spectrum of a man's life, 85 or 90 photos feels slight. Even more difficult was the song selection. It had to come from Dad's collection in order to have the right resonance, and of course it had to have the right meaning for a funeral. It's tempting to use a song that wallows in an I'll-miss-you sentiment, but that didn't fit Dad. He was positive, didn't linger on sad times. We thought maybe a song about growing up, becoming a man, might fit the imagery of a young boy growing into a grandfather—going to Vietnam, traveling across Europe in a camper with his wife and two small children for a year, working the same job for 30+ years, and ultimately remarrying and rediscovering his religion in between.

But we had limitations. The song(s) couldn't be too short nor too long, and couldn't be just any song. I remember when my grandmother died fifteen years ago and they played "Wind Beneath My Wings"—the right sentiment, I guess, but what the fuck: Bette Midler meant nothing to my grandmother nor to my family. It was just filler at a funeral. Think about your funeral: would you want filler?

My dad had a smallish collection but he loved what he had. Mostly he liked bluegrass and 70s folk, with a little bluesy rock thrown in for good measure. We narrowed it down to four or five contenders:

"So Far Away from Me," Dire Straits. Dad was a huge Dire Straits fan, and Brothers in Arms in particular. This album and Graceland are probably the two most-played household albums of my childhood. So the song worked from the standpoint of meaning something to my dad. It's also five minutes long, so the perfect length. My sister asked me, "What's this song actually about?" I told her I had no idea, except that every single lyric that isn't "so far away from me" is nigh-on unintelligible. So it has that going for it. Of course as soon as I said that my ears picked up a line about making out on the telephone. "Maybe people won't notice that line." Anyway, the overall mood of the song wasn't quite right: medium tempo the whole way through with no real shifts between verse, chorus, or bridge.

"Angel Band," Ralph Stanley. Dad loved everything on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. Many of the tracks were songs of his own boyhood. One night he and I were driving in a car with his mother and he put the soundtrack on and she just started singing along with nearly every song. But no, it wasn't right. Maybe it's just me, but these songs that essentially say "I'm tired of the earth and I am ready to go to heaven" just aren't what you want to hear when someone has actually just gone to heaven.

"Brand New Day," Van Morrison. Like "So Far Away From Me," the song is half-unintelligible and its subject matter is vaguely meaningless—lots of sunlight references, meaning it could have a decent metaphoric resonance. And the mood was somber yet hopeful. (Though I don't personally have a high tolerance for Van Morrison, I tried to suppress that feeling.) But like the Dire Straits song, it just wasn't a perfect fit. We'd be settling if we chose this song.

"Fire and Rain," James Taylor. My brilliant wife picked this out as she thumbed through Dad's collection. She comes and gets me, eyes pink from crying, and says "What about this one?" The song comes on and Taylor softly laments,

Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone
Suzanne the plans they made put an end to you
I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song
I just can't remember who to send it to

And so I start to tear up too. "Well, it works," I said. "But is it too emotionally manipulative?" "Maybe," my wife says. (Reason #842 I love her: she doesn't call me out for getting all High Fidelity about my funeral song choice; rather, she's totally High Fidelity with me.) But then my sister heard it and said this. Small problem being it was only three minutes long—too short.

"Photographs and Memories," Jim Croce. Thus we came to Jim Croce. Like Taylor, Croce was a staple of our household growing up, and his songs certainly hit the right emotional buttons. This one was a bit too literal—playing as we look at photographs and memories—but it worked. It was also two minutes long and paired well with the Taylor—the right length, the right tone. We were set. Unfortunately Dad's version of this song was on vinyl; I had it on my iPod but we couldn't transfer it over to the computer with the Taylor song. So we went to iTunes and downloaded it—or thought we did.

The night before the service my brother realized that we hadn't downloaded the Croce version, but rather some sort of studio musician knock-off. Unacceptable! Into the middle of the night my brother tried to search out a worthy replacement. He landed on Ry Cooder.

I'd forgotten about Ry Cooder. But his albums were certainly played all the time in our house. I knew Cooder's versions of "Blue Suede Shoes" and "All Shook Up" before I knew Elvis's. We settled on his cover of "Stand By Me," from 1976's Chicken Skin Music. It still paired well with the Taylor and also was the best testament to Dad's character through the years—not to mention was a somewhat more positive song, a nice tonic to "Fire and Rain"'s melancholy, without being inappropriately sunny.

Ry Cooder, "Stand By Me"

Pitchfork's Apparent Conflict of Interest

Well, I really have to ask. First of all, thanks so much for the review. I was really very flattered about that. You know, I heard something about the "8.0 club" a long time ago. Oh You're So Silent got 8.6. Everyone kept telling me, "Oh, you're in the 8.0 club now," which was kind of intriguing to me because it literally means that all these festivals and all these distributors want to have your record. It sort of puts wheels in motion.

And then when I got this review [for Night Falls over Kortedala], I was like, "9.0? I wonder what that means." The day after, my frequent flyer card was updated from ivory to silver. I just wanted to check if you had something to do with that. I was thinking, "Oh, the 9.0 club"

                                —Jens Lekman, in an interview with Pitchfork

In regards to this interview with Pitchfork's Ryan Schreiber, in which Jim DeRogatis gives Schrieber a light grilling on the appearance of a conflict of interest between Pitchfork's role as a critical entity and their slew of commercial endeavors—web tv, video game soundtracks, concert promotion—Dan Weiss over at Kiss Out the Jams sums things up nicely:

It doesn't help that a lot of Schreiber's answers are "I don't know."

Whether or not their is a conflict of interest could be debatable, but as DeRogatis notes,

[O]ne of the things that you study in ethics class at journalism school is avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest, which is different than actually having a conflict of interest. If I had written an authorized biography of the Flaming Lips, readers might question, “How do I know you really did the reporting and told us everything there is to know about this band—the good, the bad and the ugly—if you were financial partners with them and they were making a dollar from every book sold?” People have the right to ask that question.

Schreiber is able to duck the question, to a degree, because the main subject at hand—pitchfork.tv—is not the grossest example. Schreiber sees the upcoming video site as "a logical extension of the kind of journalism and features that we already do. It’s just a different format." There's no real quibbling with that, for the moment, since the site hasn't even launched. There's no reason to think a video-based ad-supported music site is entirely different from the current format.  One could raise the question of who's paying who to get the content on the site, but frankly I'm not that cynical—and judging by all those I don't knows, neither is Schreiber.

The video game soundtrack and the concert festival, however, seem a little more smarmy. When Pitchfork gives a band a great review and that band's cachet increases, to the point that Pitchfork then turns around and makes money off that band—not through ads supporting the Pitchfork brand, but through video game royalties or ticket sales based on the band's popularity, which Pitchfork had a hand in creating—that is what DeRogatis correctly points to as the appearance of a conflict of interest.

From Schreiber's point of view, it seems to be simple: they like the band first, therefore everything after is kosher.  I'm not completely sure it's that easy. Turning to a parallel critical avenue, Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes interviewed the Village Voice's art critic, Christian Viveros-Faune, a few months back. Viveros-Faune had a similar I don't know sort of attitude.

MAN: You're a managing director of a commercial art fair, Volta, and an organizer of another commercial art fair, Chicago's Next fair. At the same time you're a writer, a journalist, you're the art critic for the Village Voice. Why isn't that the most basic kind of conflict of interest?

Christian Viveros-Faune: I think essentially, because, I believe you can wear a lot of hats in the art world, and one needs to because, among other things, critics can't survive on the money that they make from writing. Very few critics can. And, not only that, but I'm interested in curating, and I firmly believe that there is no interest in the art world without a conflict of interest.

...

Can I curate an exhibition as an art fair for a company that will pay me money for it? You're damned right I can. Do I see a conflict there? No I don't, I see potential for a conflict, which is not the same thing. It's the same dilemma I have every day when I decide not take candy from a baby. One it's easier than it looks, and two it's just not done, it's unethical and uncivil. Decent, cool people don't do it, and that's that.

...

MAN: Have you considered what it says about you, about the Voice, about the state of the art world when someone holding one of the three major critical positions in New York City has hands in two different pots, both trying to be a journalist, to be a critic, while operating in the commercial side as well?

Viveros-Faune: Honestly, I thought it basically came with the territory. It's either that [conflict] or teaching. We're not nuns here.... I don't write about the market. Also, in case anyone has missed this detail: I no longer sell art work to anyone, which in my mind takes me out of the area of real conflict, period.

Within days, Viveros-Faune was fired from the Voice. From the Voice's official statement:

Christian assures us that the consulting work he is doing for those fairs does not conflict with anything he has written for us or would write in the future, and he has demonstrated to us that besides being an excellent and highly readable critic, he’s also a man of integrity. But we’re concerned that his work outside the Voice at least creates an appearance of conflict.

So how different is it when Pitchfork reviews bands on a daily basis and is promoting mega-festivals and having a hand in licensing songs for video games? When it comes to Pitchfork's various commercial endeavors, maybe there's not a conflict—in fact I really believe that Schreiber never considered it, because he just digs the bands so damn much.  But there is an appearance, and one that Schreiber would do well to address and stop I don't knowing about.

[Update: all of a day later I had to change the awkward title of this post. Also, I hope you're reading the comments.]

Josh Ritter is No Brad Paisley

Amidst all the wanton downloading that accompanied my reading of every goddamn best-of list I came across back in December, I came away with about half of Josh Ritter's most recent album, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter. It's good stuff, if perfectly straight down the middle in its execution of well-trod Americana. I was listening to it the other day and had a mini-debate with myself: I kinda want to buy the full album, because it's filled with hooks and is just, well, fun and good-natured and... nice. But occasionally that niceness comes dangerously close to being boring and/or banal, in the way most mainstream hits are. In particular it was "Right Moves" that brought on that feeling. I like the song, but it made me think, "This could be a radio hit, in the sense that if it were a radio hit, I don't think I'd even notice it." The structure of the song is classic (by which I mean cliche), the chorus feels manufactured, the lyrics not particularly insightful or clever.

Yet! I like the song. Not my favorite of the bunch I have, but I like it. So for a minute my self-debate got heated, as Charitable Scott accused Cynical Scott of being an elitist—"Maybe you should give more mainstream stuff a chance, snob!" Then the Grammys came on, and Brad Paisley played his hit song "Ticks." At which point Charitable Scott said "never mind, this shit is idiotic." Comparing Ritter and Paisely really throws into relief the difference between true mainstream pop and merely straightforward, clean songwriting. For as much as "Right Moves," to these ears, is not very far removed from, say, "Bad Day," watching the video for "Ticks" is a reminder of how thoroughly calculated each and every break, every hook, every lift of the eyebrow is.

Elsewhere, Claire Howorth has a detailed breakdown of Paisley's poetic lyrics over at This Recording.

‘Cause I’d like to see you out in the moonlight
I’d like to kiss you way back in the sticks
I’d like to walk you through a field of wildflowers
And I’d like to check you for ticks.

Indeed! Paisley is truly makin' all the right moves, singin' me the right blues.

Sucking the Fun Out of Vampire Weekend

The more I read about the backlash to Vampire Weekend, the more I wonder if there actually is any significant backlash against Vampire Weekend. I’ve found few bloggers openly decrying hatred for the boys—only fly-by commenters and message board posters—but plenty of blogs have rushed to the band’s defense. DON’T LISTEN TO THE HATERS. Don’t worry, I can’t hear the haters over all your shouting.

I was all set to offer my own defense of the band as well but I’ve been so exhausted by everyone else’s posts that it seems pointless. I’ll leave at this: if you love Vampire Weekend because they’re the greatest, most original thing ever—you’re wrong; if you loathe Vampire Weekend because they’re not the greatest, most original thing ever—you’re stupid.

People reacting harshly to VW are not reacting to the music; they’re reacting to the hype. The phenomenon, on the surface, seems like the same-old same-old. Band gets love from hype blogs, band gets good review on Pitchfork, band gets hated. Hence the tone of exhaustion in so many bloggers’ defense of the band—“ugh, the backlash is so predictable.”

What’s interesting though is that Vampire Weekend brought it on themselves. More than anything else, the band is being taken down for two reasons: their Ivy League status and their appropriation of Afropop. Both seem like such bullshit things to hate on. Talking Heads came from RISD—never mind Black Dice!—and any number of current indie rockers were borne from a college campus. Would Vampire Weekend be more admissible if they’d gone to a state school? Is their crime that they name drop Louis Vuitton but may have been able to afford the designer luggage prior to forming a band? And the Afropop is an affectation. They wear it like one of their cashmere sweaters. (And they look good in it!) One gets the sense that VW’s next album could be free of the influence but still be full of terrific pop songs. I’d previously equated VW’s refreshing (to my ears) pop to the Shins of four years ago or so (speaking of: another band who never deserved its backlash and who, while deserving of love, never deserved it in such hyperbolic doses). Vampire Weekend should make you happy. Their songs are simple, nice, a little naïve and a little witty, and best of all, wonderfully catchy.

But they brought it on themselves: when did these two issues first reveal themselves? When the band titled a song “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” and released it to the blogs. As-yet unsigned and unknown, the band wrote their own press—they tagged themselves “Upper West Side Soweto.” Both terms lock in the two things they’re being attacked for. To hate the band is really to hate the hype—but to hate the hype is, after all, to hate the band.

Mike Barthel has really honed in on the way the band opened themselves to be attacked for something that likely would never have come up if they hadn’t highlighted it themselves. Barthel uses an earlier post from Marathonpacks and the line from “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” “It feels so unnatural / Peter Gabriel too” as his jumping-off point:

[Marathonpacks] argues—convincingly, I think—that it wasn't just a self-conscious admission of derivativeness, but a way of beating critics to the punch, not about being derivative, but about appropriating. The song contained its own prediction about reaction to the song, and the assumed reaction went like this: critic hears song, critic recognizes debt to Afropop, critic looks at demographic characteristics of band members (as well as the first two words of the song's title), and critic roundly decries band for stealing the sound of third-world artists.

…

The first problem with this: I remain unconvinced that anyone would have actually had the above reaction, absent that particular line…. In effect, the line created the controversy, making their musical choices into a problematic move that needed to be defended, and once it needed to be defended, then it could be attacked.

I highly recommend reading Barthel’s post in full. It’s easily the best VW-related post I’ve seen on the web, and more so just one of the best blog posts I’ve read, generally speaking, in a really long time. Extra points for invoking Freaks and Geeks.

At any rate, I still question whether the hate is truly as bad as defenders would think. The last time I made this comment it was in relation to Feist; namely, that the music should make you love it or leave you ambivalent. It’s not confrontational enough to inspire anything more.

Here’s my suggestion: scroll past all the Vampire Weekend posts. Don’t read them (okay, Barthel aside). Don’t blog about Vampire Weekend. Don’t comment about Vampire Weekend. Don’t post on message boards about Vampire Weekend. Just put it on. Buy the album and listen to it. And for godssakes, log off while you do it. Read the paper instead. Do the dishes, loll about. Just let the music play and enjoy it. Don’t try and figure out whether it’s being colonialist—be honest, do you even own any fucking Afropop in the first place?—or classist. Just put it on, and see if it makes  you want to put it on again.

Let’s do this for the month of February—no writing or reading about Vampire Weekend; listening only—and in March, we’ll reconvene and see if any of our opinions have changed.

Drawing a Line

As an addendum to Tuesday's post, I've had this post, again from the Existence Machine, bookmarked for an obscenely long time, meaning to respond to it. Richard's post is about unexpectedly liking a Stephen Stills album, and he goes into the idea of "drawing the line" as far as what roads he can or will go down in terms of his taste and/or purchasing decisions. He wrote the post partly in response to one of my posts about the Byrds. Here at pgwp he commented “I was perfectly happy not bothering with the Byrds. You can't listen to everything, so you have to make decisions, even unfair ones. The Byrds got dropped from serious consideration years ago."  He elaborated at his own site on both the Byrds and Stills:

I confess that I never expected to have the slightest interest in a Stephen Stills solo album. For one thing, the music he'd been associated with didn't thrill me: the ubiquity of "For What It's Worth" obscured its quality, and I didn't really like Crosby, Stills, & Nash. Another reason is that you have to draw the line somewhere. ... Early encounters consigned [the Byrds] to the effective dustbin in my mind (I hated "Turn! Turn! Turn!" and wasn't fond of their version of "Mr. Tambourine Man"), though later I suspected that if I took the time with them, I'd find a lot there to appreciate. With Stills, I found it easy to completely ignore not just his solo material, but anything related to Crosby, Stills, & Nash (other then Neil Young)...

The idea of "drawing a line" stuck with me. We all draw the line somewhere, choosing not to go down a road however worthwhile it may or may not be. For instance, I flirted with hip hop (underground and mainstream) when I was in college working at a record store, but I've since left that avenue unexplored and have fallen way behind (anyone care to update me one what's gone on in hip hop since, say, Black Star's album? Whatever happened to those guys?). The idea of even trying to get back into hip hop is daunting, both in terms of the number of albums I'd need to pick up to feel caught up and the sheer number of dollars that would require. So, I've drawn the line.

On the other hand, there are other genres I'm equally unfamiliar with beyond the surfacemost knowledge, which in a way I'm saving for later. While I own a few Philip Glass and Steven Reich albums, and a box set with material from Stockhausen,  Cage, Riley, etc., I've never truly immersed myself in contemporary composers.  The entire genre is like a continent I haven't been able to get to yet. But I know it's in my future and I will savor the experience when I get there.

This sort of goes to sroden's comments in my previous post:

single trajectories are the path of the anal... multiple trajectories are for the messy. i think that the deeply personal messy connections that are born where multiple trajectories meet, keeps us human and full of musical loves.

It's a sentiment I agree with. As I said in my response to that, also in the comments: I'm not wholly obsessed with Laurel Canyon. I do listen to other stuff. But I think all of us (right?) have little phases or mini-trajectories within the bigger picture of our personal life-long musical consumption. In the sense that I listen to "everything," I have reggae, latin, punk, rap, soul, doo-wop, folk, contemporary composers, and plenty else in my collection—at my fingertips, thanks to iTunes. But I hardly know all those genres. And for me there's few better feelings than knowing a music.

Do I Want to Go There?

Where are my tastes taking me? Do I want to go there?

I asked myself this question, at least a little facetiously, in a post a couple weeks back. If you've followed this blog at all in the last year, you know many of my listening hours have been spent with the Byrds, which led in turn to more groups from the late-60s/early-70s Laurel Canyon scene. I've slowly been following that trajectory into the 70s with mixed results—Joni is great, Fleetwood Mac has many great moments, America is offensively awful. Despite some misfires, I'm still undeterred in exploring this area of pop music (with the help of the Rising Storm, among others).

The thing is, I know where this ends: The Eagles. The Fucking Eagles. Connecting the dots, the line doesn't get much straighter moving from the Byrds to CSNY to the Eagles. The bands sprang literally from the same landscape, separated only by a few years.

And I know it just ain't gonna happen for me. I've loathed the Henley et al. ever since I was a wee lad watching Henley's ugly old face sullying my MTV. At some point, as I mine this period of pop music, I just know I'm going to come to a point where I say "enough." (Eagles aside, I know that many of my beloved Byrds went on to make some pretty crap records.)

Where are my tastes taking me? Do I want to go there? In the context of Laurel Canyon it's easy to mock that question. It's easy, as Richard did in the comments to that original post, to presume that I'm "worried" about where my tastes are going. (Granted, I've worried in the past.) But the fact is that with any sub-genre in which one gets thoroughly immersed, the answer, sooner or later, is no. No, you don't want to go there.

This simple truth occurred to me when I was having a discussion elsewhere about post-rock bands from the 90s—the many bands that were coming out of or inspired by the Louisville/Chicago axis: Slint, Rodan, Tortoise, June of 44, Rex, Him, the For Carnation, Shipping News, Ativin, A Minor Forest, Ui, Dianogah, To Rococo Rot, Kriedler, et alia ad infinitum. These bands were everywhere for a long time, including my own collection, and now they've largely fallen out of fashion both at large and in my personal estimation. Sure, I still have a soft spot for certain songs here and there (Ani-sette! Anisette!), but in general I cringe at the idea of listening to a band with two bass players or a baritone guitar playing angular riffs with all downstrokes, stark drumming playing in odd time signatures and stop-start beats.

Can't the same be said for any sub-genre? To love the harmonies and easy feelings of the Byrds must mean an inevitable loathing of the Eagles. To have your mind blown by Tortoise's blend of Ennio Morricone, Steven Reich, Can, and Miles Davis is to be inevitably underwhelmed by Ui's moody funk.

Some sub-genres go deeper than others, depending on your taste. One could spend years with "alt" country before noticing a vague sense of boredom with the latest Jay Farrar release; or maybe get one's fill of, I don't know illbient or dubstep, after just a couple albums and artists. There's a distinction to be made between genres and sub-genres (or even sub-sub-genres), of course. One could devote one's lifetime to the larger umbrella of country or electronic music. Despite not being very interested in post-rock, I'm still neck deep in indie rock (including a liking or at least awareness of bands like Battles or TV on the Radio, who are obvious descendents of 90s post-rock). It's the difference, I guess, between the interstate and the access road. You can travel on the latter for a stretch with some success, maybe passing by the gridlock of the genre at large; but eventually you run out of road.

Everyone has ruts: some impression that, well, music sucks. I just can't find anything interesting right now. But of course it's not music that sucks; you've just run out of road and it's time to get back on the interstate. Where are my tastes taking me? Do I want to go there? Yeah, for a while longer.

Life-changing Albums: Low's Songs for a Dead Pilot

A while back I promised a post on Low—the third in my series of “life-changing albums” (part one, part two). I fumbled on the post because, among other excuses, I couldn’t figure out which Low album to talk about. Everything from I Could Live in Hope to Secret Name—four albums, two EPs, innumerable 7”s and compilation appearances—might be worth calling life-changing.”

Then the topic of Low’s best album came up elseweb. I picked The Curtain Hits the Cast and immediately regretted my choice, realizing in a moment of epiphany that my favorite Low album, all along, has been their EP Songs for a Dead Pilot. That was the album that proved Low had more gas in the tank than expected, and that they truly had made an aesthetic leap. No other band, and no other album, better illustrated the idea of setting up parameters as a special kind of freedom.

I discovered Low by chance. I picked up their first album solely because I liked its cover. This was some time in 1994 or 1995, when I was getting out of my metal years and looking for something else. Coming from metal, it doesn’t get much more “something else” than the eleven lullabies that are I Could Live in Hope. It was a beautiful record—probably the first album I’ve ever owned that could be described as such. I listened to it unendingly and really felt a kind of ache in songs like “Words” or “Lazy.”

In a way my embrace of Low could be seen as a direct reaction to my love of Drive Like Jehu. As I said about that band, who I also consider life-changing, they killed rock music for me. They executed my idea of rock music so perfectly that I simply had no need for other bands treading in loud/fast territory. Where else to go but Low? Over the next three years the band perfected their approach to their sound, with the colder, darker Long Division and their masterpiece, The Curtain Hits the Cast, in which the band’s lyrics gained added dimension and their musical continuum seemed to reach its plateau in the somnambulant epic “Do You Know How to Waltz?”.

As good as Low was—and despite their steady perfection of their sound—it was becoming difficult to imagine remaining a fan beyond that album. Reviews, even the good ones, were routinely dismissive—“Low is really slow!”—as if nothing more needed to be said. Lines like that got my dander up but at the same time, how many more Curtains did the band really have left before the whole thing became redundant?

And so we come to Songs for a Dead Pilot, a statement of intent if ever I’ve heard one. By ditching their producer (Kramer), the band eliminated the pristine sheen that was draped across each of their other albums. Staying true to their explicitly stated parameters—play slow—Songs for a Dead Pilot nevertheless broke the band into new emotional territory: tension, anger, disappointment, resentment. These feelings lurked under their previous songs (such as “Mom Said” from Curtain), but they were hidden beneath that sheen of perfection. Perfect harmonies, delicate musicianship. Maybe it's a subtle shift, but Songs moved from delicate to fragile.

Beginning with Songs, the band chose to expose their flaws. Mimi stopped double-tracking her vocals, making her voice sound more human, less angelic. Alan stretched his vocals further (“Landlord”), practically flaunting the fact that he is hardly as good a vocalist as his wife. You can also hear the band paying closer attention to every small sound their instruments make. Listen to "Born by the Wires," and how Alan plays that one chord over and over for nearly ten minutes. Every strum of that muddy chord is just a little different, calling attention to each individual note and the way his pick hits the strings. No song better illustrates the band's progression. They made a conscious decision to become more raw and more explicitly minimalist, as opposed to merely minimal, as their prior albums could be described.

Perhaps this was always the band’s intent. But it was Songs that allowed me my personal epiphany. Low’s approach to music is like Zeno’s paradox: no matter how small the space, there is always further to go. They’re not interested, like Slint for instance, in expressing themselves through dramatic dynamics. This becomes a kind of limitation that sets Low free. In a sense they're like a musical embodiment of Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was damned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back to the bottom each time he reached the top, for eternity. Where one might view that as a kind of hell, Camus made it a metaphor for the aburdity of life; accepting his fate, Sisyphus eventually would have no expectation that his boulder would do anything other than fall down that hill. Locked into his routine, he certainly must have come to know any variety of emotions beyond despair. As Camus wrote, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Songs for a Dead Pilot, while certainly not a happy record, nevertheless finds Low embracing a similar philosophy. Knowing that their sound is limited to certain rules, they must now find aesthetic fulfillment within those parameters. Songs for a Dead Pilot took a slight left turn from the trajectory Low had been on; just enough to show that they could go anywhere they pleased.

Listening in Color

I’m reading Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars right now, and the first chapter is about a painter who, after an accident, suddenly goes 100% color blind. He sees the entire world in a muddy, dingy black and white. He dreams in black and white. His memories are now in black and white. It’s a terrifying condition, all the more so for this man for whom color was an intrinsic part of his identity.

Then, this passage jumped out at me:

Music, curiously, was impaired for him too, because he had previously had an extremely intense synesthesia, so that different tones had immediately been translated into color, and he experienced all music simultaneously as a rich tumult of inner colors. With the loss of his ability to generate colors, he lost this ability as well—his internal “color-organ” was out of action, and now he heard music with no visual accompaniment; this, for him, was music with its essential chromatic counterpart missing, music now radically impoverished.

My brilliant wife was nearby when I came to the passage and I wanted to read it aloud to her. “You know how you can sometimes see colors when you listen to music?” I prefaced. But she looked at me with a curious look and said, a little baffled, “No.”

It never occurred to me that perhaps not everyone shares this experience. There are certain bands, albums, and songs that always put a color or group of colors in my mind. Low does this to me, for instance. When I hear their early albums I inevitably see a deep burgundy, silver gray, and black. When I hear their later albums (everything after The Curtain Hits the Cast), I see washed out whites and blues with sharp punctuations of black and blood red.

I happen to be listening to Iron & Wine as I write this: right, brownish gold, like a wheat field at sunset, with stripes of a dull, flat green.

My wife asked me who else. Thinking clearly about it, I found that if I tried to call a band to my mind I’d simply see the colors of their album covers. The more conscious I was of it, the more literal I was, the more influenced I was. Later that night, as I lay in bed, I tried a psychological test on myself, which was to think of the color first and see which band or song came to mind. Some colors had immediate mental associations. Yellow: Jonathan Richman. Orange, for some strange reason, makes me think of Death Cab for Cutie (I don’t even own anything by them). Sometimes I would give myself a color, then a band would spring to mind, then the color would start to change. Ash gray made me think of Sigur Ros, and then the gray slate in my mind was dappled with specks of pure white and darker shades of black, and finally a faint blue hue would radiate from the center. 

Have you ever thought about listening in these terms? Do you see colors when you listen to some songs? How conscious of it are you? Do you have to “catch” yourself seeing things when you’re listening to music? Do you see abstract images? Is it a pattern? Does it move or morph? Or does music paint actual scenes in your mind, like memories or fantasies?

[An Anthropologist on Mars was written in 1996 and draws seven portraits of people who have rare brain disorders. Sacks is also author of the recently published Musicophilia, which I posted about once before. That book is structured similarly but connects each case study directly to some relationship with music. I haven't read it, but intend to as soon as it comes out in paperback and, I hope to god, has a new cover that I can stomach having on my shelf.]

Accounting for Taste

I've been doing this blog for almost exactly two years now. Most of that has been a scattershot look at all that interests me—music, literature, art, etc. In September of 07, however, I made the explicit choice to focus more on the music, and as that parameter has given focus to what I choose to write about, I find this blog developing a kind of personality I don't think it quite had before: namely, pgwp has really become an investigation of my own taste in music. Not merely letting you all know what I like, but asking myself why I like it. Where are my tastes taking me? Do I want to go there? It's kind of a weird question but one I find myself asking. I've never been more aware of what I'm actually listening to, what is actually giving me pleasure, than I have in the last six months.

Crafting what I thought was going to be a quickie, look-at-these-other-blogs post, I realized I was once again circling these same ideas. So I think it's fitting for this post to land on New Year's, to serve as a kind of summing up of some of the themes I've been visiting here at pgwp in the last year, and also as a way of (perhaps) setting the tone for what's to come in the next year.

Alfred Soto at Humanizing the Vaccuum had a nice post a couple of weeks ago, in which he addresses a critics' roundtable held at Slate:

[T]he subtext of most of this round table's discussion is an acknowledgment of how age slows us down at the same time at which young people and technology speed past us. No, not an acknowledgment: an embrace, even.

Soto quotes Christgau, who puts acts like Wilco and Josh Ritter in one, "less hip" corner and acts vaguely defined as hyped by Pitchfork—I'll assume he means Battles, Panda Bear, etc.—in another. The notion resonates with the categorization of Wilco as "dad rock," which I guess is the male equivalent to the similar slagging Feist gets for being some kind of indie Norah Jones. All of it points, in my estimation, back to the idea that there is a large generation of new adults--just married, new parents, on the career track, etc.—that are mellowing in their tastes but were weaned on indie, hence a new genre developing and hence a kneejerk backlash to Wilco, Feist, et al. These people who grew up sniffing out sellouts are frankly suspicious. Soto approaches this problem from the critic's perspective; i.e. that both Wilco/Ritter/Feist are worthy of investigation as much as "challenging" artists such as Battles.

Ryan Adams and Wilco are at worst failed craftsmen; whether you prefer Battles depends on how much you accept craftsmenship as an end in itself, or think Battles are an act whose development bears close scrutiny.

This ties in with what I view as a common thread (among others) here at pgwp, which is to consider what makes certain albums or bands "challenging." In other words, to consider bands' aesthetic choices. I got into a somewhat misguided dust-up over at ILM [c. Dec. 27] recently over Of Montreal and Radiohead, partly due to my casually dropping observations about the bands' aesthetic choices, which were perceived as negative critiques (admittedly, I really have no business talking seriously about that Of Montreal album, as I've barely digested it). Part of the misunderstanding (it's not really necessary to read it), I think, is that I may well split hairs too finely when it comes to listening to some bands. Radiohead, along with Beirut, are what inspired my post on the song vs. the sound, which in some sense has become a guiding force behind how I've long listened to music; now explicitly stated, for better or worse.

I've wrestled in the past with the idea of "challenging" music, and surely will continue to. Thanks to a comment in the previous post, I've just discovered the blog Neon Hustle, which last month had great post on Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's Some Loud Thunder (using Band of Horses' Cease to Begin as a way of throwing CYHSY into relief), essentially the positive side of the coin to the negative review I gave it upon its release. We both seem to start from the same question: is Some Loud Thunder actually challenging? Assuming the answer is yes, is it sucessful to some end? My answer, at the time, was no. Darryl at Neon Hustle votes yes. And he makes a case for it, using the controversial opening track, which he calls "the most frustratingly great pop song of the year," as his example. He goes on:

Perhaps challenging music is an end in itself - music exists as a search for better and more perfect forms of expression and staying atop that evolution is thus clutch - but more likely music has other places, other functions, fills other needs in your life. For me, it's the emotional and aesthetic qualities - how music makes me feel, what music says about life, how fucking fantastic some melodies can sound, how some rhythms just seem to catch me, and how all those pieces fit together. And that's why "Some Loud Thunder" has become my favorite track on the album.

Without tackling CYHSY specifically, this really does get to the crux of what I look for in music. It can't be challenging as an end in itself; it must have emotional and aesthetic qualities. Just to tweak the emphasis to suit where I'm coming from: it must have emotional and aesthetic qualities. There needs to be an intertwining of the two in order for me to view a song or album a true success. It's not always easy to identify, and perhaps it's not even a hard and fast rule. But it's a good barometer.

[update: for those of you reading this blog via your blog readers, I thought I'd point out that there've been a couple of great comments to this post; hopefully more to come if any are so inclined.]

Life-changing Albums: Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime

One of my criteria for a “life-changing album,” as I outlined on Monday, was that the album permanently alters the course of everything you seek out going forward. In other words the albums of your life are necessarily shaped by your life-changing albums because the latter influence your overall taste directly. Talk about altering the course of my tastes: Drive Like Jehu destroyed rock music for me.

I heard both Jehu albums around the same time, must have been 1994 or 1995. And to my mind they had perfected rock music. Post-Jehu, whenever I heard a new band that was trying to play fast and/or loud, it felt limp. I just turned it off and put on Jehu. For about a decade—literally!—I never once felt the need to purchase albums by rock bands (particularly new ones). Perhaps it’s not coincidental that the most typical brand of indie rock during those ten years was the nascent genre of emo, which was ridiculously in debt to Jehu, among other bands (too, all those spazzcore bands, largely hailing from San Diego, who also owed much to Jehu). Lots of people credit Rites of Spring as being the original emo band, and I won’t argue against their influence; but Jehu had a significant impact as well, in the form of the octave chord.

Much like Slint inspiring a myriad sub-par post-rock acts to abandon upstrokes, Drive Like Jehu neutered the power chord. The crunch of the power chord felt almost amateur compared to the sharp-edged attack of the octave. The worst (and most prevalent) emo bands took as their template the inward-looking lyrics of Rites of Spring, the song structures of Orange County pop punk, and the octave chord of Drive Like Jehu.* You might see, then, why I felt this music paled in comparison to Yank Crime. These bands missed everything else.

And it’s the everything else that made this album so important to me. Like Spiderland, Yank Crime’s brilliance did not dawn on me immediately. I had a nearly identical experience with “Luau” as I did with “Washer.” I owned the album for more than a year already. I knew that I loved it—its pure adrenaline was undeniable—but one day I was on a long drive, alone, listening to “Luau” for the umpteenth time when I noticed that, hang on a second, this song has a guitar solo! It kicks in at the 7:35 mark and it is 90% feedback. In the 1960s I guess Hendrix was giving people the same epiphany, and in the 80s (and 90s) I’d guess Thurston Moore was doing the same, but it was John Reis’s solo in “Luau” that blew my mind, and I can pinpoint that revelation as the exact moment I figured out what kind of guitar player I wanted to be. The epiphany was two-fold: 1) that noise can be manipulated into melody, and vice versa; and 2) that making music is a lot more primitive than I’d ever truly grasped. Technique, in the traditional sense of the word, doesn't mean much. Scales, speed, dexterity—it's irrelevant. That's not to say that a Ramones-like approach to punk is  some kind of ideal. What Jehu taught me is less naive, more intuitive. The great guitar players in my book concern themselves with the sound that comes from their instrument, and the emotion evoked by that sound. To try and parse that concept any further is to undermine what the instrument is capable of. If you're Drive Like Jehu, you can do a guitar solo that is nearly all feedback and sounds like gamma rays from a 1950s sci-fi flick. If you're U.S. Maple, you can detune your guitar and play whatever fucked chords you want. If you're Mick Turner of the Dirty Three you can leave the flash to your violinist and set the tone of each song through your fragile, muddy chords. (For further proof of Turner's brilliance, listen to Cat Power's Moon Pix and ask yourself why that album is still her best: it's those fragile chords, and it's Turner, not Marshall, playing them.) These are some of my all-time favorite guitarists, and to my ears what they all have in common is an approach to the guitar that respects the sounds it is capable of creating, rather than any kind of presumptions about their technical skills as guitarists.

Slint taught me something sophisticated about songwriting—how to apply sound to song in a meaningful way. Drive Like Jehu taught me something much more primal but no less significant: how to relate to one’s instrument; how to extract sound from an instrument rather than simply “play” it.

Next up: Low.

[*Caveat: I know Jehu didn’t invent the octave chord. In fact the template for the entirety of Jehu’s sound seems to have been set by a 30-second snippet of Television’s “Marquee Moon”—tune into that song at 8:10 through 8:40. But Jehu took that single moment and turned it into their driving aesthetic; and it’s that aesthetic that influenced everyone post-Jehu.]

Life-changing Albums: Slint's Spiderland

Belatedly picking up where last Monday’s post left off, my list dwindles significantly when trying to think of albums that changed my life, as opposed to those that were the soundtrack to my life. First of all, what does it even mean to have an album “change your life”? It's not like a person, who can encourage or influence you. It's not a change of location, which can present you with new opportunities. It's not even like a book, which can articulate ideas or philosophies in profound ways. The more I think about it, “life-changing” might be a phrase too hyperbolic for music.

But an album can profoundly change your relation to music, and in effect set a new course for all those “albums of your life” that are so much easier to rattle off. That’s no small thing, and in some sense that could be considered life-changing if your world (like mine) revolves so heavily around music. It’s the albums that taught you to hear music in new ways, and shaped your overall taste.

No surprise, then, that the biggest life-changing albums for me came during high school. Probably the same can be said for you. For me, the holy trinity of life-changing albums, all bought within a year of each other, were Slint’s Spiderland, Drive Like Jehu’s Yank Crime, and Low’s I Could Live in Hope (actually, I often think of both of Jehu’s albums and everything by Low through Secret Name as of a piece, but for this post’s purposes I’ll stick to the first albums I heard by each.)

I heard all of these albums at a time when I was actively looking for a new musical trajectory, as I mentioned in last week’s post. I had no real guidance, no roadmap to indie rock. I was hungry for something new but really had no idea what that meant. Each of these albums were unique epiphanies. Not just in the way that I said “yes, this!” to something vaguely called “indie rock”—though that did happen; not just in the way that I said no to “heavy” and said yes to “quiet” or “dramatic” or “dirty” or however you want to describe these bands. I wasn’t merely trading adjectives: I was discovering nouns: tension, nuance, adrenaline. Each album showed me how to articulate feelings, ideas, and emotions through sound—and in turn how to hear all other music at this level, and determine whether a band (to my ears) was successful at what they were attempting. This week I’m going to try to dig into each of these albums and try to explore this in more depth. We’ll begin with Slint.

None of these albums were lightning bolts to my brain. I owned Spiderland for months, simply liking the album, before one night in my bedroom when “Washer” came on and I quietly stopped what I was doing and listened, from the first note to the last. Though I’d heard the song numerous times already, this was the first time it had become exhilarating. Never had a song’s dynamic shifts seemed to resonate so perfectly with its emotional content. The genius of “Washer” is that it attempts, three times, to reach some sort of sonic release. But it doesn’t hit: just as it feels that it’s about to climax, it gets quieter instead. The lyric “I’m too tired now” seems to apply directly to the song’s ability to reach its payoff. Finally at the end it blows its lid, huge chords and squealing guitars—but it only lasts a few seconds. It was all the energy the song could muster after building for six or seven minutes.

So many of Slint’s imitators got it wrong, and listening to “Washer” you can see where they erred. It’s not about the juxtaposition of loud/quiet. Mogwai’s Young Team, for example, is a good album but not nearly so great as Slint’s modest effort. Young Team takes the polarity of loud/quiet to a dramatic but elementary extreme: things get really, really, really quiet, to the point that you need to turn your stereo up just to hear it, and at the drop of a hat the band becomes ear-splittingly loud. Dramatic, sure, but it doesn’t earn its drama the way “Washer” does.

And don’t even get me started on downstrokes. Spiderland nearly ruined indie rock by encouraging people to abandon upstrokes altogether. “Don, a Man” is the only song on Spiderland that employs this guitar style, yet for most of the late 90s it seemed to become the template for hundreds of forgettable bands trying to get more facile ideas across. But again, the bands that applied this technique to their guitar playing missed the point of a song like “Don”: tension. “Don” had a palpable sense of foreboding and anxiety, both lyrically and musically. It’s the subtle difference between a tense song and a song concerned with tension.

Slint weren’t the first or last band to understand the kind of thought that must go into the details of songwriting, but they were the band that opened my eyes to nuance in song craft. Hence Spiderland may well be the most life-changing of any album I’ve ever owned. This goes back to what I was saying the other day about the song vs. the sound. Spiderland taught me that more needs to go into one’s music beyond “that sounds cool,” and that, beyond lyrics or vocal delivery, a song can explore feelings more subtle than love or anger purely through how the instruments are played.

This only scratches the surface of my feelings