Pretty Goes with Pretty

The Soft Synth, Softly Synthesizing

Andy Beta’s recent article for the Los Angeles Times, “A New Age for New Age Music,”  starts off as a trend piece—New Age is back! It’s cool!—identifying Animal Collective’s sampling of Zamphir, Jimmy Tamborello’s remixes of Enya, Beck’s cover of Yanni’s Live at the Acropolis, and other examples as a sign that the maligned genre is being rehabilitated. Clearly there’s truth to that (ironic or otherwise), but by the article’s midpoint Beta also exposes just how messy concepts like genre or influence can be.

[T]he tag New Age is rather broad. It encompasses the electronic soundscapes of Michael Stearns and Steve Roach as well as the gentle acoustic albums that Windham Hill made ubiquitous. It has roots in American composers like Terry Riley as well as Indian classical music. New Age founding fathers Paul Horn and Steven Halpern come from the 1960s jazz tradition, and yet it also contains Native American and Sanskrit chants. It's also influenced by the series of ambient albums made by Eno in the mid-'70s as well as the adventurous German music of Klaus Schulze, Manuel Göttsching, Deuter and Vangelis, not to mention the synth pop made in Japan by Kitaro. And then there were the California communes that gave rise to artists like Peter Davison and Iasos.

In this paragraph alone Beta has cited a dozen different New Age roots, each of which has branched into a myriad different subgenres which may or may not have anything in common with each other. It’s a fool’s errand to try and pin down all the ways in which this once-cheesy genre has wormed its way into contemporary music—as I learned when I attempted to do the same with soft rock, also enjoying a parallel resurgence in 2011 (though I use the term “enjoying” loosely).

That post on soft rock generated a fair amount of response, much of it taking me to task for presuming the artists’ motivations or just being kinda pissed that I hate the new Destroyer record. The thing that disappointed me about that response was that I realized, in retrospect, that I had framed my opinions as a "problem with music"—like, it was the musicians who were failing me. In truth I was more concerned, as I always am on this blog, with my own tastes and peccadillos. I was trying to identify the line between so-called soft acts who I really liked (Feist, Fleet Foxes, Midlake, etc.) and those I really loathed (Destroyer’s Kaputt, Gayngs, and now add the Weeknd too). Clearly there is a line—since that post the term “PBR&B” has become a thing, and those bands I loathe fall into that category while those I like do not, and yet all of these acts have something soft or hokey in their music. Different reference points, but soft in any case.

That’s where Beta’s paragraph, quoted above, resonates. He’s talking about a parallel trend happening in on the electronic side of music right now, citing acts like Gang Gang Dance, Emeralds, and Blues Control, and he quotes, among others, members of Animal Collective and Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never/Ford & Lopatin. All of these acts are drawing from disparate roots—krautrock, jazz, Eno, synth pop, etc.—but are, according to Beta, winding up somewhere approximating New Age (Nu-Age? Neu Age?).

 

There’s a lot to unpack in all of this, not least is what constitutes New Age in the first place and whether or not an act like Emeralds is remotely close to that definition (I’m not sure they are). They are clearly influenced by Klaus Schulze, but then again Schulze has released 60+ albums over more than forty years, some of which are drone, some are trance, some could be considered New Age, and so on. Looking solely at krautrock for a minute, as a genre it enjoyed at least a decade (roughly 1969–1979) of wild experimentation and improvisation before many of its most esteemed practitioners either slowed their output or evolved into something more peaceful and serene (and cheesy). Tangerine Dream, Michael Rother, and others released some serious dreck in the 80s, and those are the albums where the genre known as krautrock (kosmiche!) begins to be identified with New Age. Ambient music, too, started from a place of extreme minimalism and ideas formulated by the likes of Alvin Lucier or John Cage, among others. But in time melody and structure—and synthesizers—crept into the genre and thus an entire strain of that style also fell into the New Age ghetto.

I don’t think Emeralds or Gang Gang Dance or Lopatin or some of the others referenced in Beta’s article have taken up with New Age in such an extreme fashion—I mean, I hardly want to get out my crystals and celebrate the solstice when I listen to Returnal. But Beta does point to a similar arc happening within these artists’ own evolution, noting that the group Blues Control was originally interested in noise but lost interest in that form, so they “started exploring different types of psychedelic music like New Age.” A year or two back I read an interview with Lopatin where he said essentially the same thing—that he came from noise but pivoted to ambient (or whatever you want to call his genre) because he was looking for something more challenging to his sensibilities. There is still clearly an edge to his Returnal album (it starts with a noise track, after all), and it would be difficult to confuse any of these acts with Yanni, but if we’re looking at the trajectory of noise artists, then yeah, they’ve gone pretty soft.

 

Whether you think this trend is worrisome or not probably depends on your own musical allergies. I, for instance, am clearly allergic to the saxophone, as my soft rock post and any number of tweets and other stray comments might make clear. But I’m not allergic to that retro synth sound that seems to be creeping into a lot of ambient/nu-kosmiche acts. Just give a listen the Steve Moore track (from 2007) or the Harald Grosskopf track (from 1980) I included in the mix I posted on Monday, or the synth-heavy tracks on the new Mountains album which I’ve named one of my favorites of the year so far. And yet I could fully appreciate someone wanting to turn these tracks off within fifteen seconds, so painful to the ears they might sound if one has nasty musical memories of the last time this synth sound was in vogue.

And even that’s not to say one’s enjoyment of a song begins and ends with the instruments being played, or their exact tone. All of these acts still have it in their power to create or destroy a pleasurable listening experience. This whole idea of tying an assortment of acts to one (awful) retro genre misses the mark—an argument I realize can and should be levied against my soft rock stance. As Bruce Levenstein, who has a great blog called Rockets and Rayguns and tweets as @compactrobot, said yesterday:  “No, there’s a stigma attached to New Age music because a lot of it is/was incredibly shitty. Those New Age textures didn’t ‘signal’ something cheesy, they were cheesy. And Mr. Lopatin finding it 'amusing' doesn’t make it any better.”

 

This all loops back around to those concepts of genre and influence, of presuming an artist's motivations, and ultimately of how much stock you can put in identifying trends or viewing a trend's trajectory as a personal affront. As a fan of a certain genre, or of specific musicians, it can feel like a betrayal when the music heads down a path you don't want to go down. Of course that's not the musician's fault; what's really happening is you're seeing a schism between larger musical trends and your own listening trends--two totally different things. A couple years back I wrote a post called "Do I Want to Go There?", in which I tried to take a step back from my infatuation with music from Laurel Canyon to see where I'd wind up if I chose to go in deep with the genre. The answer was no. Frankly, whatever the genre, the answer is almost always no! If you go in deep with krautrock you wind up with a ton of shitty Tangerine Dream albums; if you go in deep with Laurel Canyon you wind up with the Eagles; if you go in deep the current nu-kosmiche, retro-synth trend, you're probably going to wind up with some hokey Enya-referencing ironic spiritualist; if you like PBR&B, god help you, you're already too far gone.

The experience of music is, at all times, a play on the tension between the evolution of an artist's creative arc and that of a listener's personal  tastes. They mesh or clash every time you press play, leading at the best of times to epiphany, at the worst of times to a sense of betrayal. It's a relationship; both parties are free to make it work or screw it up.

 

I Drew a Line and You Crossed It

Maybe I blame Feist. Her first album, 2004’s Let It Die, featured a couple of tracks that tested my tolerance levels: “One Evening” and “Leisure Suite” They were cheesy, quote-unquote sexy wink wink—“One Evening” especially. Feist even seemed to acknowledge this in her video for that song, in which she and her partner do a silly synchronized dance that underlines how dumb the whole thing is.

 

I recall an interview between Leslie Feist and Nic Harcourt on KCRW a few years ago in which she herself admitted that Let It Die was assembled piecemeal and was released with no expectation that it would catch on; had she been more premeditated about it, she said, she might not have put certain songs on it. I chose to assume she meant the songs I disliked. These were, after all, straight up soft rock songs. Maybe it sounds silly to say that about some Feist songs and not others—her music is, all around, pretty soft. But many of them are gentle without being corny, sexy without being “sexy,” heartwarming without being manipulative. These two songs, on the other hand, crossed over to something cheeky and ironic. Still, these were, to me, aberrations on an otherwise fantastic album.

Her next album, The Reminder, also possessed a few soft rockisms but more organically integrated. The irony was mostly absent but there was still a smoothness to it, in songs like “Brandy Alexander” and “Limit to Your Love.” I didn’t care. I liked it. Claims from other quarters were that Feist was part of a new wave in indie music that was… boring. Bland. I wrote a post at the time defending my enjoyment of the record, even if it was “Adult Alternative.” Defending my enjoyment against whom? Mostly me, if I'm being honest. Feist made me cognizant of an internal struggle over my own taste. I thought I detected a shift in my tastes toward something with less of an edge and I wasn’t really sure what that meant. The young punk in me was raging against the aging softy I was becoming. At any rate by the time Sky Blue Sky was the definition of "Dad Rock" and Fleet Foxes were winning hearts (and rousing consternation) with their latter-day CSNYisms, I was happily on board and I didn’t care who called it boring. So I'd gone soft.

*

Meanwhile something else was happening in indie rock that I wasn’t fully paying attention to. That winky nod to soft rock I’d detected in “One Evening” had become a thing. More specifically 80s soft rock, or more generally just shit music from the 80s. Critical consensus regarding Hall & Oates, they of the atrocious “Man-Eater” and “Kiss On My List,” was being reconsidered. So too was Phil Collins. I couldn’t take it seriously, and I still can’t. I’m convinced that every nod to the wonders of Hall & Oates includes a wink and sly smile—like, “They’re great (not really).”

Other than being occasionally mystified by this trend, I’d mostly steered clear of it until I saw the movie (500) Days of Summer, which I mostly liked except for the one scene that was soundtracked by Hall & Oates. Aside from a random dance sequence feeling out of place in the otherwise not-absurd film, it rubbed me the wrong way because I knew that I was part of this film’s target demographic. Maybe on the older end, sure. Here were two characters who hailed more or less from the same subcultural milieu as I did—they had jobs in the arts, they bonded over the Smiths, they sang Pixies songs at karaoke—and when Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character gets laid he bursts into… Hall & Oates. Fuck me. Whatever, it’s meant to be funny, that’s all.

 

*

Parallel to this was the emergence of “Yacht Rock,” a youtube phenomenon made by and for bearded hipsters. Clearly a joke, each of its dozen episodes found their punch lines in bad wigs and references to Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Toto, Christopher Cross, etc. It actually wasn’t that funny but a lot of people seemed to disagree based on how many times Yacht Rock showed up in my RSS feed. But whatever, it’s sketch comedy and who cares if I think it’s funny or not.

 

*

Then last year Grizzly Bear, a band who on record has zero sense of humor (intentionally, at least—often their songs remind me of the scary part of Splash Mountain), released a version of their song “While You Wait for the Others,” with the actual Michael McDonald on lead vocals. It was something of a bastard child of the genuine (not really) rehabilitation of Hall & Oates and Phil Collins and the obvious parody of Yacht Rock.

The thing that was weird about it was that the song was played totally straight. Like most Grizzly Bear songs it is dramatic and creepy and somewhat clinical. With McDonald on lead vocals, it was still all of those things. The punch line really came in the concept; the execution was straight, so you’d be forgiven if, midway into the track, you just sort of got into it the way you do with Grizzly Bear songs (assuming you like Grizzly Bear songs in the first place). Whatever. I just sort of took as an attempt at a joke by a band that had never made a joke before.

• Grizzly Bear featuring Michael McDonald: While You Wait for the Others

*

I was able to avoid all of these jokes because their whole basis for humor fell outside my sphere of interest. I was alive in the 80s and I remember these bands being massive hits. Barring a few exceptions (the Footloose soundtrack and Genesis’ Invisible Touch), I hated all these acts back then, so this whole “remember those shitty bands?” joke wasn’t that funny to me. Any joke that involves me remembering Bruce Hornsby or Christopher Cross or Air Supply is a joke I don’t need to hear. The punch line, fyi, is that it sucks.

Meanwhile I was perfectly happy listening to my bland, boring, no-edged indie bands like Midlake and Iron & Wine and Neko Case and Fleet Foxes. It’s not the softness that bothers me so much as the soft reference points. 

Note, however, that nothing I’ve mentioned thus far involves a saxophone.

 
(Note: the reason this clip is funny is because it sucks.)

*

Skip to 2010: Gayngs were joking too. They made an awful record which references white soul and R&B of the 80s. They wear matching white suits when they perform. They covered (and butchered) George Michael’s “One More Try.” When I went off on their album last year none other than Justin Vernon tweeted at me, informing me that the band in fact took their whole endeavor quite seriously. And, if you compare Gayngs' astute level of musicianship to, say, the half-assed nature of the Yacht Rock videos, he has a point. Though he also admitted it was supposed to be funny (as if it weren’t apparent). “So what?” he seemed to be asked me. (Maybe you're saying that too. Can't I take a joke?) I responded that if the band knows that, on some level, the songs are funny, then they must also grasp that they're funny for the same reason "Yacht Rock" is funny—the punchline is that it sucks.

I feel more or less the same way about Ariel Pink’s recent album, Before Today. Conceptually, the record seems to evolve over a kind of timeline, the early songs sounding like mid/late-60s garage and psychedelia, the middle songs veering toward 70s gaudiness, the end morphing into 80s cheese. Like the Gayngs record, I was attracted to Before Today because of one outstanding track which turned out, I realized later, to be an utterly faithful cover. (For Gayngs it was Godley & Creme’s “Cry”; for Ariel Pink it was "Bright Lit Blue Sky," by the Rockin’ Ramrods and later the Rising Storm.) Realizing both albums had just one gem, and that the gem required only some good ears and the musical talent to ape their source perfectly, only underlined how much I disliked the rest of their material—i.e., when they're not in tribute band mode, their ideas are bunk. I can grant that Ariel Pink is up to something more original, perhaps more ambitious (and has apparently been mining this territory for years), but it doesn’t make the music more listenable.

• Ariel Pink: Can't Hear My Eyes

*

In college my friend Dan used to say “sweeeet” a lot. He sounded like a douche when he said it, but he knew he sounded like a douche. He was mocking douches who said “sweeeet” all the time. But he did it so much—he admitted this to me—that he had gotten to the point of legitimately saying “sweeeet” in response to something cool. It had stopped being a joke and instead just became part of his lexicon.

This to me is the feeling I get while listening to Destroyer’s new album, Kaputt. The album is rife with smooth saxophone. All the air quotes that might surround all the other songs I’ve talked about here have evaporated. The music of Destroyer sounds genuine, earnest. And—going back to the same internal battle I had over Feist—that disturbs me. To me it feels like a sea change has happened within indie rock in which the “sweeeet” joke has just become part of the lexicon. At one point, back when Feist was fumbling through her choreographed "One Evening" routine and later singing about her Brandy Alexander, I felt a tide turning against that younger me who stridently hated anything appoaching lite rock. I still like Feist, and still side with myself in that inner dialogue... but Kaputt, and in fact a whole trend in indie rock, has crossed a line.

• Destroyer: Kaputt

*

I missed all the hullabaloo around James Blake last year. Now he's got his debut album hitting stores today. I've heard just two songs from this album, so I don't claim to have the last word on the dude. But God, those songs. One is called "The Wilhelm Scream," and is it just me or does it sound like Aaron Neville singing over the music for "In the Air Tonight"? The other song, no shit, is a Feist cover. Full circle!

 

*

There’s a line in one of the Destroyer songs where Dan Bejar sings “I sent a message to the press: it said ‘don’t be ashamed or disgusted with yourselves.’” I’ve seen the line quoted in a number of reviews of Kaputt, all of which cite how daring Bejar is to engage such a crap genre and how meta he is for acknowledging it. Oh, and by the way, as far as I can tell I am the only person on the internet who thinks Kaputt is an awful record. I’ve only seen raves, most of which are calling it not only good but the best album Bejar has ever made. Likewise Before Today was Pitchfork's top album of last year, Gayngs is not universally loathed or shrugged off, James Blake's debut is eagerly anticipated. I don't think I've ever felt more out of step with indie music. It disturbs me because, in the case of Bejar and Blake at least, the punch line is that there is no punch line. It's not a comedy anymore.

 

Buried Vocals

Ever since I wrote it, I've been thinking about the way I framed my recent Walkmen post:

Compelling frontmen with strong voices and a grasp of emotional and lyrical nuance are a rare breed in indie rock, a genre that has typically favored effacing the lead vocal through reverb, distortion, a low mix, nonsensical lyrics, or an enigmatic personality for the better part of twenty-five or thirty years.

This line of thought has stuck in my craw for a few reasons, none of which relate to the Walkmen. First, I grant that it's too broad a statement. There are plenty of dynamic and compelling singers in indie rock. Nevertheless indie—I'm using this term as an umbrella for a lot of sub-genres—seems to have more than its share of bands who use an obscured or effaced vocal as part of its aesthetic. (It's also more than indie: contemporary hip hop has been big on obscuring vocals via vocoder for a few years now.)

But as common as it is—as pervasive as it is—I don't find many people thinking of obscured vocals as an aesthetic that has been passed down through decades of music (beyond referencing shoegaze and leaving it at that). Compare to the way critics might analyze, say, harmony—an utterly fundamental element of songwriting, yet something that can be placed within different traditions. This band harmonizes like the Beach Boys, that band like the Beatles, those guys like the Everly Brothers. This act is influenced by doo-wop, that act by choral music. Three-part, four-part, fifths, thirds. Obscured vocals, on the other hand, don't seem to be thought of as being part of a tradition—or, I should say, the tradition has not been formalized or canonized.  

There are some obvious touchstones, of course: the Jesus and Mary Chain, Galaxie 500, My Bloody Valentine, the entire shoegaze genre. But I don't think it's that narrow. Nor does it get at the many ways in which bands might choose to blur or subvert their vocals—extra reverb being only one avenue to travel. For instance, I was thinking similarly about the anti-frontman, low mixes (and/or the lo-fi aesthetic), and spoken word as I was writing my Spiderland book. That too is part of the larger tradition in indie rock of obscuring the lead vocal. It's one part studio affectation, one part anti-rock-star persona.

I've been mulling this over for a couple of weeks or so now, digging through my collection and my memory in search of some kind of thread, trying to discover how this aesthetic developed. Clearly it's a pandora's box: I came up with a good 50 or 60 songs stretching back to the 1960s, and that's just what's in my own collection. In fact the whole project has become so overwhelming to me that I'm almost ready to throw up my hands; I was looking for trees but by now all I see is forest.

This is something I'll probably be thinking about for a long time going forward, and may revisit here or elsewhere in a bigger way. But for now I just want to throw the idea out there in hopes some of you readers might think about it too.

Rather than tackle the big picture in one blog post, I'd rather start with a few antecedents as examples of the various threads I have winding through my mind, in some attempt to hone in on this aesthetic and how it has evolved from an experimental recording technique into full-blown musical genres (plural!). Am I forgetting anything? Let me know in the comments.

 

1. Turn Up the Reverb

• The Flamingos: I Only Have Eyes For You (1959)
• Buffalo Springfield: Expecting To Fly (1967)
• The Monkees: Porpoise Song (1971)

Reverb has been a staple of the studio for decades, and in fact dates even further back to the natural echo supplied by singing in cathedrals or opera houses. It's used on about a million classic songs, so it's hard to say what was the turning point from an artificial studio effect that took away some of the dryness of a cold microphone to its use in a more extreme fashion. These are three songs by acts who didn't regularly indulge the echo, but the effect clearly impacts the loveliness of these individual songs.

2. The Anti-Frontman

• The Velvet Underground: The Black Angel's Death Song (1967)

There are countless ways in which the Velvet Underground were the anti-Beatles and the anti-Stones, and Lou Reed's whole persona as a frontman is definitely one of them. Reed's New York cool was tough and stylish, but it didn't swagger like Jagger or preen like McCartney. Reed's vocals had their hooks and melodies, but they also sometimes veered toward monologue. His voice was also sometimes subsumed by the music; cacophony was often the point for VU songs, and Reed's voice is kept low in the mix (relative to, say, Mick Jagger always front and center). It's an approach that has had a long-lasting influence on countless bands who willingly reject the cliche Rock Star persona and its flamboyant lead singer, to the point that being an anti-rock star is just as much of a cliche.

3. All about the Atmosphere

 

• Can: Yoo Doo Right (1969)
• Silver Apples: Oscillations (1968)

Around the same time as the VU, the so-called "cosmic music" movement coalescing in Germany was exploring all variety of ways to break down the traditional song form. Repetition and improvisation were major components for all of these krautrock bands, many of whom were instrumental. Can was not. "Yoo Doo Right," from Monster Movie, their first official album and the only one to feature U.S. transplant Malcolm Mooney on vocals, is a 20-minute, side-long epic; it's rhythmic, hypnotic, and constantly forward-moving. Mooney's voice, like Reed's in "The Black Angel's Death Song," is usually equal in the mix to the other instruments, only occasionally reaching above the fray. His repetitive lyrics and melody become just as mesmerizing as the rhythms and the guitar textures.

"Texture" is a key word. It's not surprising that many of the bands and genres that would later embrace effaced vocals are also musically spacious and atmospheric. The Silver Apples are probably the first space rock band (if that's different from cosmic music); the music they made was vast and otherworldly, helped along by Simeon's massive synthesizer set-up and Dan Taylor's steady but unobtrusive drumming. Though the duo didn't exactly treat their voices with effects, their near-monotone harmonies were layered over every song. Each track on their debut album seems like a variation on the same idea. Their twin vocals ultimately fold into the atmosphere of the overall album.

4. Distortion!

• The Sonics: Shot Down (1965)

As far as I can tell the first use of distorted vocals wasn't acheived through adding a special effect, but rather by simply pushing the recording levels into the red. Garage acts like the Sonics were loud and raucous, and if that meant screaming at full lung a little too close to the microphone, so be it. Push the needles into the red—that's how you know they're not fucking around!

How does this all lead to chillwave and Grizzly Bear and Radio Dept. and the myriad bands today cluttering the indie landscape (for better or worse)? It's a long and winding road, to be sure. To me it seems a fascinating road to travel, even if at times it borders on something so pervasive as to be mundane. At any rate this is something I'll likely return to in future posts (famous last words, I know). If any of you out there have your own theories or input or know of others who have already traced this trajectory, let me know!

 

PGWP Reviews Pitchfork Reviews Reviews

Probably the worst trend in twenty-first-century indie rock is the degree to which people care about Pitchfork. Clearly they have a far-reaching influence--hell, even ABC News is asking them for recommendations--but so what? It's easy to get caught up in talking about Pitchfork's every move (is it suspect? is it genuine? is it naive? is it cynical? is it defining our culture? is it behind the curve?), and I've been guilty of it myself in the past.

At the beginning of this year I wrote a post, titled How Did It Start?, in which I said this:

It started with burning out on everyone's end of year/end of decade lists, which began in August and are still going strong in some corners of my RSS reader. All that Radiohead, all that Animal Collective! Never mind the Arcade Fire and the LCD Soundsystem and the Dirty Projectors and the Grizzly Bear. God, even the stuff I liked in the first place I was beginning to dislike. It brought home in an acute way both how much and how little my tastes align with Pitchfork. It doubly brought home how redundant most blogs I read are—how much they echo Pitchfork, how much they hold their noses at Pitchfork, how much they watch Pitchfork like its ratings were horses rounding the track on Derby Day.

With that last line I made an unspoken vow to myself that I'd stop contributing to the all-eyes-on-Pitchfork mania that hampers indie culture. Every time I see someone comment on a band's Pitchfork score--or worse, guess what a band's future score will be or whether an album will be annointed with a "Best New Music"--I silently translate their comment to what they're really saying: I don't value my own opinion. I don't have an issue with Pitchfork or its influence (if Spoon or Arcade Fire are debuting in the Billboard Top 10, I think I should only be happy for its existence); I also follow and interact with many of the site's writers via tumblr or twitter or ILM or this blog. As individuals they're uniformly among my favorite people to talk music with on the internet. So again, I don't have hard feelings against Pitchfork when I say people need to stop giving a shit about Pitchfork.

Obviously I've broken my vow with this post. But in fact, if you'll permit me to be this meta, I'm not writing about Pitchfork but rather Pitchfork Reviews Reviews, an anonymous tumblr blog that critiques and comments on Pitchfork's content every single day. When I first heard about the blog I didn't bother to follow it because I knew it would aggravate me. But I caught some reblogged posts and found the writing entertaining and well-considered so I started following.

Inevitably, I've become aggravated anyway. I think the most frustrating thing about PRR is that the guy is actually a pretty good writer with a lot of ideas and energy and optimism. I'd welcome reading his thoughts on whatever album he's into that day. But instead I get his obsessive critique of a site whose influence, while admittedly great, he's blown utterly out of proportion. It pains me to read his blog posts because they shout louder than anyone else, I don't value my own opinions! Reading his blog is like watching Rock Star, the Mark Wahlberg movie about the guy who aspires to be the lead singer of a tribute band until he gets the opportunity to sing lead for the band he lionizes. This guy is like the ultimate fanboy when he should be a writer in his own right. 

I was finally set off by his recent post on Altered Zones, the new Pitchfork-assembled conglomerate blog whose mission is to headhunt left-field acts who might not otherwise get coverage on the big site. There was cackling and cawing all around the web when Pitchfork announced the new blog last week. It really pained me to see so many complaints about a site that hadn't even launched yet. People have a reflexive, often negative, opinion about Pitchfork, which they inevitably undermine by following every move Pitchfork makes. What people don't seem to understand is that complaining about Pitchfork's influence is what gives Pitchfork its influence. If you really hated it, why can't you ignore it?

Not that PRR hates it. He lauds it as much as he slams it, to his credit. Nevertheless he has his eyes so close to the screen that he doesn't even seem to realize there is a real world out there, full of people making music, talking music, writing about music. Music, not Pitchfork.

I digress: it was the Altered Zones post that finally set me off. He seems to have granted Pitchfork so much power that he expects them to act as A&R for the acts they discover, rather than a) music critics or b) trainspotters.

so anyway, instead of recognizing the potentially devastating effects that fame has on young artists, Altered Zones digs even fucking deeper and Pitchfork’s spotlight protrudes even further into the underground, allowing them to stamp their imprimateur on larger and larger swaths of independent music until no kid playing lo-fi music is safe from the spotlight shining in through his bedroom window regardless of how premature Pitchfork’s arrival is. and how is some 20-year-old with a laptop and a drum machine supposed to turn down this crazy exposure? Pitchfork’s endorsement puts backlash targets on bands’ heads, and then he/she has to deal with the internet populated by contributors who’ve dedicated their presences to “DELOREN IS WURST BAND OF EARTH!?!!!!!”? how could that not fuck with you when people are saying it about YOUR band and you only have 2 songs out!!?! and one’s a cover!!! and whereas in pre-internet times you needed a decent full-length or a stellar EP to be critically validated, and the press and labels and the public might even be PATIENT with you, now fourteen bloggers thirsty for the earliest conceivable scoop are ready to lavish praise like you are the Second Coming on your song, and then once they’ve patted themselves on the back for discovering you at the earliest conceivable second, the expectations are yours alone to deal with. did you read all the track descriptions? Hipster Runoff must have fallen out of his chair.

This attitude really sets my teeth on edge. It's not the first time I've seen this critique of Pitchfork--that they are somehow hurting indie rock by annointing bands too early. Seriously, it's not Pitchfork's responsibility to shepherd bands into healthy careers. It's their job to critique what they hear. If some band comes along and knocks out one song and a cover and they're both fucking outstanding, I'd call out Pitchfork for slipping if they didn't cover it! How is Pitchfork supposed to know whether a band has a healthy attitude toward recognition? It's true that the cycle of hype and backlash turns as fast as a toilet paper roll, but it's not Pitchfork's duty to determine the pace. It's also extremely presumptious to think the bands that may or may not be covered by AZ are obscure by choice, fastidiously escaping Pitchfork's spotlight. These bands don't need protection or coddling, nor does Pitchfork need a policeman or a cheerleader.

I know this is largely being directed at one anonymous dude, but it really ought to be directed at everyone who blogs about music. Let Pitchfork do their thing. You do yours. Music (and writing) will be better for it.

Here's Where the Obsessive Part Happened

1. The more ambient stuff I've been getting into, coupled with the renewed desire for more krautrock and early electronica pioneers, has led me to finally giving Klaus Schulze a try. I've never really given Schulze much serious consideration before—a quick look at this 100+ album discography was enough to scare me off—but he's been on my periphery for a while. With no real sense of how to enter such a sprawling discography that spans 40 years, I figured the best thing to do was start at the beginning and pick up Irrlicht, from 1972—three tracks adding up to fifty minutes, notable for being droney ambient soundscapes but using no synthesizers or electronic instruments. It's a good album, in an intellectual sort of way—I'm not going to bust it out at parties, in other words. But it's a promising beginning.

2. I was at Amoeba a week later and, despite no longer being able to load CDs onto my ancient Mac and only being able to hear them while driving (something I don't do often), I bought more new-to-me krautrock: Harmonia's Deluxe and Ash Ra Tempel's Join Inn (which I mistook for their debut because I saw that Schulze was in the lineup, and I'd just read that, as he'd done with Tangerine Dream, he left the group not long after forming it; in fact he briefly returned for this two-track record).

3. Geeking out about my new purchases, despite being unable to hear them, I started wasting time on Wikipedia and ILM. Because frankly, the web of krautrock connections in the 70s is baffling. Schulze started Tangerine Dream with Conrad Schnitzler, who was simultaneously in Kluster with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Then Schnitzler and Schulze quit Tangerine Dream and Schulze started Ash Ra Tempel, which he then quit (and who eventually, years later, changed their name to Ashra). Then Schnitzler quit Kluster and they changed their name to Cluster and continued as a duo. Then Cluster teamed up with Michael Rother of Neu! and the trio called themselves Harmonia, which functioned simultaneously with Neu!. Then they made a record with Brian Eno and called themselves Harmonia 76. Then Neu! broke up and Harmonia broke up and Cluster kept making records and Michael Rother went solo and his partner in Neu!, Klaus Dinger, started La Düsseldorf. Then Cluster made their own record with Eno, which they called Cluster & Eno, then they made another and called it Moebius Roedelius Eno. Or something like that? Meanwhile Schulze kept making a million solo records, and so did Schnitzler, and I haven't even gotten to other iconic bands who were more on the organic psyche-rock tip than they were electronica, like Can and Faust and Guru Guru and Amon Düül and Amon Düül II and Amon Düül UK. And then, you know, Kraftwerk. And I even read somewhere that the Scorpions of all bands factored in somewhere though I don't know if that's all true.

If you've ever read Homer's Iliad, you know there's this ridiculous chapter early on where Agamemnon inspects his ships before they go to war, and something like 852 different characters are introduced, all of whom factor into the epic at one point or another, so good luck remembering who's who when they show up for their turn in the spotlight. Reading about all the different krautrock permutations sort of felt like that chapter.

4. Now seems like a good time to remind you of my obsessive nature. When I realized I loved Graham Greene, I decided that I needed to read each and every one of his twenty-eight novels. In a row, in chronological order. (Almost done.) When I realized I loved the Byrds, I decided I needed to buy their albums in chronological order, roughly spacing out each new acquisition to correspond with how much time separated their original releases, so that I would go through the cycle of consuming, digesting, and craving that a Byrds fan in the 1960s/70s would. For God's sakes I keep track of every single album I listen to every single week, and I do this manually—none of this automated last.fm bullshit. And then every three months I look at this list and analyze it statistically. All that is to preface this: I made a list.

5. Quick interjection: I said to my brilliant wife the other day, in all seriousness, "I fear I may be a dilettante." 

6. In an effort to wrap my head around the environment in which all these records were made, I tracked down all these bands' discographies, mingled them all together, and organized them by year. I find this immensely helpful as far as tracing the roots of the electronica strain of krautrock and also just seeing what came first for all of these bands, in a "you can't have Sgt. Peppers without Pet Sounds and you can't have Pet Sounds without Revolver" sort of way. I can't expect to get all of these—I'm not that crazy—but this list does give me a kind of road map as to what to get first, etc.

So, presented for your benefit and/or bemusement: krautrock, 1969–1979. If I forgot any seminal or otherwise noteworthy acts that factor into this universe, let me know so I can update my list.

1969
Amon Düül: Psychedelic Underground and Collapsing/Singvögel Rückwärts & Co.
Amon Düül II: Phallus Dei
Can: Monster Movie
Holger Czukay: Canaxis

• Can: Father Cannot Yell
• Holger Czukay: Boat-Woman-Song

1970
Amon Düül II: Yeti
Can: Soundtracks
Embryo: Opal
Eruption (aka Conrad Schnitzler and friends): Eruption
Guru Guru: UFO
Kluster: Klopfzeichen
Kraftwerk: Kraftwerk
The Organisation (aka Kraftwerk): Tone Float
Popol Vuh: Affenstunde
Tangerine Dream: Electronic Meditation

• Amon Düül II: Burning Sister
• Embryo: You Don't Know What's Happening

1971
Amon Düül: Paradieswärts Düül
Amon Düül II: Tanz der Lemminge/Dance of the Lemmings
Ash Ra Tempel: Ash Ra Tempel
Can: Tago Mago
Cluster: Cluster
Embryo: Rache
Faust: Faust
Guru Guru: Hinten
Kluster: Zwei-Osterei
Popol Vuh: In den Gärten Pharaos
Tangerine Dream: Alpha Centauri

• Faust: Meadow Meal

1972
Agitation Free: Malesch
Amon Düül: Disaster
Amon Düül II: Carnival in Babylon and Wolf City
Ash Ra Tempel: Schwingungen
Can: Ege Bamyasi
Cluster: Cluster II
Embryo: Father Sons & Holy Ghosts
Faust: Faust So Far
Guru Guru: Känguru
Klaus Schulze: Irrlicht
Kraftwerk: Kraftwerk 2
Neu!: Neu!
Popol Vuh: Hosianna Mantra
Tangerine Dream: Zeit
Timothy Leary & Ash Ra Tempel: Seven Up

• Klaus Schulze: Satz Gewitter Energy Rise Energy Collaps
• Tangerine Dream: Zeit

1973
Agitation Free: 2nd
Amon Düül II: Vive La Trance and Utopia
Ash Ra Tempel: Join Inn and Starring Rosi
Can: Future Days
Embryo: Steig aus, Rocksession, and We Keep On
Faust: The Faust Tapes
Faust & Tony Conrad: Outside of the Dream Syndicate
Guru Guru: Don't Call Us, We Call You and Guru Guru
Klaus Schulze: Cyborg
Kraftwerk: Ralf und Florian
Neu!: Neu! 2
Popol Vuh: Seligpreisung
Tangerine Dream: Atem

• Guru Guru: 200 Cliches

1974
Agitation Free: Last
Amon Düül II: Hijack
Ash Ra Tempel: Inventions for Electric Guitar
Can: Soon Over Babaluma
Cluster: Zuckerzeit
Faust: Faust IV
Guru Guru: Dance of the Flames and Der Elektrolurch
Harmonia: Muzik von Harmonia
Klaus Schulze: Blackdance
Kraftwerk: Autobahn
Popol Vuh: Einsjäger und Siebenjäger
Tangerine Dream: Phaedra

• Cluster: Caramel

1975
Amon Düül II: Made in Germany
Ash Ra Tempel: La Berceau de Cristal
Can: Landed
Embryo: Surfin
Guru Guru: Mani und seine Freunde
Harmonia: Deluxe
Klaus Schulze: Picture Music and Timewind
Kraftwerk: Radio-Activity
Neu!: Neu! 75
Popol Vuh: Das Hohelied Salomos and Aguirre
Tangerine Dream: Rubycon and Ricochet

• Neu!: Seeland

1976
Amon Düül II: Pyragony X
Ashra: New Age of Earth
Can: Flow Motion
Cluster: Soweisoso
Embryo: Bad Heads & Bad Cats
Guru Guru: Tango Fango
Harmonia 76: Tracks and Traces
Klaus Schulze: Moondawn
La Düsseldorf: La Düsseldorf
Popol Vuh: Letzte Tage - Letzte Nächte

• Harmonia 76: Welcome

1977
Tangerine Dream: Stratosfear
Amon Düül II: Almost Alive…
Ashra: Blackouts
Can: Saw Delight
Cluster & Eno: Cluster & Eno
Embryo: Apo Calypso
Guru Guru: Globetrotter
Klaus Schulze: Body Love and Mirage
Kraftwerk: Trans-Europe Express
Michael Rother: Flammende Herzen
Popol Vuh: Herz aus Glas
Tangerine Dream: Encore

1978
Can: Out of Reach
Cluster & Eno: After the Heat
Hans-Joachim Roedelius: Durch Die Wüste
Klaus Schulze: X
Kraftwerk: The Man-Machine
La Düsseldorf: Viva
Michael Hoenig: Departure from the Northern Wasteland
Michael Rother: Sterntaler
Moebius & Friends: Liliental
Popol Vuh: Brüder des Schattens - Söhne des Lichts and Nosferatu
Tangerine Dream: Cyclone

• Popol Vuh: Brüder Des Schattens

1979
Amon Düül II: Only Human
Ashra: Correlations
Can: Can
Cluster: Grosses Wasser
Embryo: Embryo's Reise
Guru Guru: Hey du
Hans-Joachim Roedelius: Jardin au Fou and Selbstportrait
Holger Czukay: Movies
Klaus Schulze: Dune
Richard Wahnfried (aka Klause Shulze): Time Actor
Michael Rother: Katzenmusik
Popol Vuh: Die Nacht der Seele
Tangerine Dream: Force Majeure

Where Did It Go From There?

1. Simultaneous to how it all started, in fact simultaneous to everything I've been listening to for the last year or two, was my ongoing if slow consumption of all things krautrock—a genre I thought I was "into" many years ago but upon further reflection all I really was "into" was Tago Mago and, like, Tortoise. So after grabbing the Neu! and La Düsseldorf discographies and beginning to do the same with Faust and Amon Düül II, I started itching for new catalogs to sink into. 

I don't know what made me search Cluster on eMusic for the fifth time since joining a year ago, but I did and was happily surprised to find that they'd added a bunch of their records. I'd snatch up a Cluster immediately no matter when I saw it, but this instance happened to dovetail with when I bought the Mountains album, so my ratio of instrumental spacey shit was increasing at a quick clip. I went for the earliest one on offer, Soweisoso. Since picking it up I've been going back to it over and over again as it continues to reveal itself to me. Cluster belongs on the "pioneering electronica" side of the krautrock coin, as opposed to the "pioneering prog/psychedelic" side, and from what I've heard they seem to do it better than the various Klaus Dinger-related projects. They're not as funny, nor as repetitive—Neu!'s two most definitive qualities—and they're more compelling for it.

• Cluster: Sowiesoso

2. Simultaneous to my purchase of Soweisoso and the Mountains record, my brilliant wife and I were having a conversation about music and our impending baby, due any day now. (In fact, I've been posting a song a day for Baby Tennent on my Tumblr, in case you don't follow me there.) This got my brilliant wife to repeat her desire for Raymond Scott's Soothing Sounds for Baby. Scott, if you're not familiar with him, was a pioneer of electronic music back in the 60s (as well as a jazz player who composed soundtracks for cartoons). He made three Soothing Sounds albums at the time—abstract sound works meant to lull your baby to sleep (each of the three albums was meant to be played at different points in the baby's development, with the sounds and patterns getting more and more complicated as the baby gets older). Again I went to eMusic and again I was surprised to find that they were available, despite my certainty that I'd looked once before and came up empty. I downloaded volume 1 and was pleasantly surprised to find that it... kinda sounded like Cluster! (Though the Soothing Sounds are about ten years older than Soweisoso.) Honestly, I had them on shuffle—yes, I even put my ambient music on shuffle sometimes—and I wasn't always sure who was who. That's a good thing, and I don't really give a shit if this soothes Baby Tennent or not. It soothes me!

• Raymond Scott: Sleepy Time

3. Simultaneous to these purchases—this is roughly that week between Christmas and New Years—I received the first Silver Apples album as a gift. I'd put it on an Amazon wishlist about three years ago and never revisited the wishlist again. My Sister-in-Law has just been winnowing down the wishlist every year and has finally gotten to the point where everything on the list is totally obscure and mysterious to her, so she took a shot with this one—thank God! Silver Apples gets a little repetitive after a while--at least two songs seem to use the exact same bassline—but all such negatives are erased by the constant reminder that these guys were making this record in freakin' 1967. This got me thinking about the similarly pioneering United States of America along with the Raymond Scott and Cluster records, and I got this notion that not only do I need to return to electronic music—a genre I'd once been pretty into, some time back!--but I needed specifically to immerse myself in the genre's origin point. What a great and inspiring world to explore, don't you think? Then I was directed to this blog which is uploading 62 discs worth of 60s-70s electronica and I was overcome by fear of what that would do to my hard drive. I mean, that's an amazing resource but I think I need to take baby steps. I'm going to act like I didn't see it.

• Silver Apples: Program

4. Simultaneous to that, I keep checking in on my friends' blog the Cargo Culte, which consistently has excellent mixes (not counting, okay, when they do powerviolence clusterfucks, but that's just me). I don't know how many random songs I picked up from them over the course of that week, but it was a bunch and they too fit this mold of instrumental, ambient, drone, space, electronic.

• The Bug: Freak Freak
• Oneohtrix Point Never: Hyperdawn

5. Simultaneous to that, I was reading that Coke Machine Glow blurb for Mountains' Choral, which noted that 2009 was a really excellent year for ambient records, so I scribbled all their recommendations down and generally kept an eye out specifically for other sites' mentions of the genre's 09 peaks. Most often championed seemed to be Emeralds, so I gobbled up What Happened; and I also started hearing of White Rainbow, so I tracked down New Clouds. The latter speaks to me more; there's something cold and unwelcoming about the Emeralds disc, though it is good, whereas White Rainbow's four twentysomething-minute tracks manage to be hazy and dense and spacious and varied and immersive all at once.

• Emeralds: Up in the Air
• White Rainbow: Major Spillage

How Did It Start?

1. It started with burning out on everyone's end of year/end of decade lists, which began in August and are still going strong in some corners of my RSS reader. All that Radiohead, all that Animal Collective! Never mind the Arcade Fire and the LCD Soundsystem and the Dirty Projectors and the Grizzly Bear. God, even the stuff I liked in the first place I was beginning to dislike. It brought home in an acute way both how much and how little my tastes align with Pitchfork. It doubly brought home how redundant most blogs I read are—how much they echo Pitchfork, how much they hold their noses at Pitchfork, how much they watch Pitchfork like its ratings were horses rounding the track on Derby Day. That's partly how it started.

2. It started with that Bear in Heaven album, Beast Rest Forth Mouth, which is not a bad record but is also just frustrating enough to not be a great record, either. I knew nothing about Bear in Heaven before hearing one of their songs in a Cargo Culte mix and being knocked out by it. Then ten minutes later I came across another song by them—someone I follow on tumblr posted it, I can't remember who. Anyway I liked it and I was itchy for something new so I downloaded the album. First impression was a good one. I thought, "this guy who is clearly a solo artist making a rad record in his bedroom is doing some cool shit and has a lot of promise." But then I read that they're not a solo bedroom project but a full band, which made me revise my thought to "dude, these guys need to tell their singer he doesn't always need to be front and center. He could stand to take a piss break here and there and let the music stretch out a little." That doesn't exactly lessen the bottom line—Bear in Heaven has promise, yes—but nevertheless the more I listened to BRFM the more critical I became and the less imaginative it felt. The reverb'd vocals, the electroni-rock vibe, the moodiness of the whole thing. Bear in Heaven have some great tracks like "Deafening Love" and "You Do You," but they don't do enough to rise above their genre. Whatever genre that is; I didn't listen to anything in 2009, I don't think, that fell under this tag "glo-fi" or "chillwave" or whatever. I mean, I don't think I did. Did I? Listening to Bear in Heaven I started to think maybe I'd officially heard something in that genre but I can't be sure. You tell me. 

• Bear in Heaven: You Do You

3. It started when I was trying to make my own end of year list and couldn't come up with more than two albums from 2009 that I felt were worthy of shouting from the rooftops. It occurred to me that it couldn't be 2009's fault, or music's fault; it had to be mine.

4. It started with the For Carnation's 2000 self-titled album, which I've been listening to a lot in the last year. Though the album features an ex-Slint guy, and I did start listening to it again because of the book I'm writing, the For Carnation and its records factor into my book exactly not at all. I just started craving it. It's such a minimally played album—as in, the musicians play simple things, slowly and simply; not that it's under-heard and under-appreciated, though that's true too. The patience on display on that record, the restraint, is quite lovely. I used to get off on bands that did this kind of thing all the time, and in fact a band like the For Carnation was a real gateway drug for me; in the late 90s I segued pretty naturally from slowcore and post-rock acts to space rock and ambient artists—basically everything Kranky records put out, more or less. But somewhere a few years ago I stopped pursuing new bands or artists that were trading in that kind of music; and my turntable broke so a lot of those artists I loved became inaccessible. It's shameful, I know, that the turntable is still broken. But I digress: the point is, I had this epiphany: remember ambient? remember drone? remember space rock?

• The For Carnation: Moonbeams

5. It started with a couple end of year lists I read after all the genre fatigue had set in. Specifically, the lists at Coke Machine Glow and Swan Fungus. For some reason I paused at CMG's rundown on Mountains' album, Choral (released this year on Thrill Jockey—another label I once devoured but have not diligently kept track of for years). And Swan Fungus—well, that dude's list basically kept me buzzing for a whole afternoon.

• Mountains: Choral

So that's how it all started. What happened was, I've spent the last month basically turning my back on indie rock and a lot of blogs I'd previously kept an eye on (not all of them, and probably not yours) in exchange for immersing myself in ambient, drone, electronica, etc.—both new and old. I say this with full awareness of the fact that I played the crap out of the new Vampire Weekend last week and I look forward to hearing the new Spoon posthaste. But to my head these are feeling like the exceptions and not the rules. My listening habits have been diverted lately. Whether it's just a phase or not, I don't know. More on this subject soon.

Remember the OC, Bitch

I'm a little behind in all things internet lately, but I did get a chance over the weekend to read Nitsuh Abebe's excellent overview of the decade in indie rock over at Pitchfork. It's a terrific read, surveying the various ebbs and flows of the decade in a fairly succinct yet broad (and entertaining) way. As I've tentatively dipped my toe into my own iTunes library in prepartion for some kind end-of-decade rundown (something I probably won't actually post until later in the fall), it really dawns on me what a challenge that really is. With that difficulty in mind, Abebe acquits himself quite well, not only reminding us of a few trends we might sooner forget (or wish to revive) but also illustrating how what's called indie rock these days has nuzzled up to more mainstream audiences. I'll spare you too much of my own assessment as I think Abebe gets it pretty much right.

The only thing I'd highlight that Abebe neglected is a little television show called The OC, which happened to debut in fall 2003, just before the boom year in indie rock that was 2004. The show was really a watershed for indie rock in the 00s—not because it brought indie to the mainstream, but because it brought the mainstream to the indie set. While it may not have been the first show to feature, subtly or not, musical acts either in the plot or on its soundtrack, The OC was the first to really embrace the indie sound of the era—Bloc Party, Death Cab for Cutie, the Walkmen, etc. Pitchfork would report it as news in a "gosh, wow, awesome!" kind of way—and it was, gosh, wow, kind of awesome to see the Walkmen make a bona fide appearance on a prime time TV show. It's not like MTV still had its pied-à-terre in the Alternative Nation, so where else were they supposed go?

For that matter, it's not like these bands' fans were necessarily buying their records. (Hello, dawn of the filesharing era.) Cries of sell-out in the last decade really dwindled to an occasional grunt—during The OC's commercial breaks, when that Outback commercial would come on—largely because fans and artists alike kinda figured out that the income options, slim as they already were for indie acts, were narrowing even more. So when Seth Cohen comes a-calling—he of the skinny frame and nice sweater, possessing an honorable awareness of manga and indie films, not to mention dashing out a self-deprecating charm and ego-less sarcasm—well, a lot of indie bands thought maybe it was about time they got in bed with this kind of thing.

Then they got paid. So when Grey's Anatomy dialed their number a couple years later, they picked up on the first ring.

But as an indie dick it's still easy to scoff at a show like Grey's Anatomy, which really only wants a ballad charmless enough to stay out of the way of the dialogue, or literal enough so that when the chorus comes in it narrates the action—"How to Save a Life!" Get it? They're medical interns! Then there's the groaner of the decade, that film set in New Jersey about vaguely depressed Shins fans. I don't even need to quote it—the point is it makes you angry; it almost makes you hate the Shins for being a part of some kind of cultural zeitgeist. That's a terrifically old-school indie rock reaction, one I admit I still let out every so often even when my maturity tells me I ought to can it. Yet The OC doesn't really elicit that reaction. Why not? Why was it basically okay for bands to have walk-ons on that show? Why did the producers' ploys to debut tracks from the new Beck album actually cause people to tune in, even when they could just suss out an album leak that day or the next? Why, of all bands, did Clap Your Hands Say Yeah—the most famous DIY band of the decade (not counting the other one)—reject the show's overtures in fears of being labeled sell-outs, only to become a punchline, a band that supposedly got too big too fast? (Did they get penalized by their fans for not making deals with labels? For not licensing songs to the right outlets and validating their worth in the marketplace?)

So where does that leave us? Well, for one thing it leaves a lot of indie bands—a certain kind of indie band, as Abebe is right to discern—hitting the pop charts and making it onto soundtracks for films about young, shampoo-less vampires. Bad thing, good thing, I can't really say. I'll only point out that I find it a little strange to see people on the web get way stoked about the New Moon soundtrack. Is it a validation of their tastes? I don't think so. If I were to make that charge I'd bet the response would be "Who cares what it's for? It just looks like a great collection of songs by my favorite bands so I want it." Okay, fair enough, though there was a time that punk and indie fans did care what it was for. Meanwhile, when films that seem actually marketed toward the indie sensibility—Seth Cohen 2.0?—I tend to see those films met with skepticism by many in the indie crowd. Good on the indie rockers, I guess, for recognizing that they're being marketed to (or exploited?) when films starring scrawny Pixies fans come their way. You can have your Nick & Norah, your 500 Days of Summer, your Juno—I won't have my identity sold back to me!—but can someone let me know when that New Moon soundtrack leaks?

What's the right business model for an indie band? What's the wrong one? What should indie fans tolerate? What should they not? Does being an "indie fan" even mean anything today other than trawling for leaks and bitching about Pitchfork album scores? Honestly I don't know. I only sense that there is a disconnect happening on both sides.

Gone to Graceland

As the recent posts list might indicate, things are a little dead around here. Chalk it up to the August heat and a dearth of new music purchases. Also, book writing is and will be in full swing, plus various real life matters taking up my time. So things here will likely remain a little quiet at least for another week or two. I'll have my quarterly My Listening Hours posts toward the end of the month, and I've a few other things planned but have not had time to make them a reality.

In the meantime, there's always tumblr and twitter, where I post freely without the baggage of making sure my shit's actually good or worthwhile.

An—oh yeah, the reason I'm posting something today—I thought I'd bring your attention to a guest post I did yesterday for the Post Punk Tumblr. In the midst of everyone else prematurely reviewing the 00s, Tristan time-traveled back to the 80s to count down the best songs of that decade. He asked me to contribute one post on one of my favorite songs from that decade, so I chose Paul Simon's "Graceland."  Not very post-punk of me, I know.

I was ten years old when I first heard “Graceland,” and though I knew of Elvis, I wasn’t sharp enough to connect him to the song. Maybe it was because the cover of Paul Simon’s 1986 album of the same name features a medieval-looking painting of a spearman riding a decorated horse, as if Graceland were a place sought by the Crusaders. Maybe it was because the song itself had nothing whatsoever to do with Elvis. As Simon sang of this place, this land of grace, I envisioned somewhere unreachable, almost mythical—Eden, Valhalla, Oz. “I’ve reason to believe,” Simon sings, “we all will be received in Graceland.”

More here...

Missed Disconnections

Today I gave my brilliant wife a ride to work. She works on the west side and has to be in early in the morning—by 6 am. Once I dropped her off I couldn't resist stopping by the beach since I was so close and had plenty of time to kill.

The beach in the early morning is probably my favorite thing about Los Angeles (rivaled only by the beach in winter, at any time of day). The air is cool, barely anyone is around, and the light is perfect—the sky almost blends right into the sea. You're subsumed by these three expanses—the sky, the ocean, the vast beach, smoothed out by the now-receded tide and unsullied by people or their tracks. There's nowhere better to just sit and be silent. It was good for me.

• Hearts & Flowers: Try for the Sun

*

On the way home I listened to Grizzly Bear's Vekatimest in the car. It was the closest I've ever come to connecting with this band. I don't know why I haven't, and honestly it flummoxes me that I can't. They've got all the ingredients that should go into my ideal band—beautiful harmonies, great atmospherics, an equal appreciation of 50s–60s pop and rock and contemporary art-rock, riding the fence between easy earworms and dramatic walls of sound. If I were to start a band today, it would probably sound a lot like Grizzly Bear. Yet I just cannot settle up to what they're serving. Too pretentious? Too self-conscious? Too quote-unquote arty? Maybe.

Sometimes you just need the right environment, mixed with the right mood, for a record to click. I came close this morning. I was feeling disconnected—from myself, from the world in front of my face. So maybe hearing a band who also strike me as disconnected—from me, perhaps from their own ability to hit on any kind of nuanced emotion amidst all their dramatic compositions—was the right thing. I floated on their harmonies, rode the waves of their ups and downs,  felt oddly unsettled yet comforted by their borg-like lack of humanity. I was feeling just slightly alien, was just barely outside of my own body. I was feeling about myself the way I feel about Grizzly Bear. Disconnected.

• Grizzly Bear: Cheerleader

*

On Saturday I was home alone, working on a freelance project, when I suddenly became distracted and started sifting through my iTunes to make a new playlist. I'm not sure what triggered it—maybe it was a Galaxie 500 song, or a Deerhunter track. I don't know. But I started scrolling through my library, pulling every song that "fit," though I wasn't really working with a theme. When I was done I had about forty tracks and the whole thing, I realized, resembled the first portion of this playlist, which I made last year. Here's how I described what I was drawn to at the time:

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 envelop me and keep the world on pause or at a distance.

Lately I've been drawn to that sound again. Perhaps not as propulsive, perhaps with less simmering tension. Something a little more numb. I don't know why.

• Galaxie 500: Temperature's Rising
• The Eloise Trio: Island Woman
• Deerhunter: Little Kids

*

I know why. It's not anything special—it's work stress. It's a feeling of not being productive enough outside of work. It's the feeling of hurtling through a busy year full of personal and professional hurdles. You know, the same shit everyone else goes through.

• The For Carnation: Tales (Live from the Crypt)
• The Electric Prunes: General Confessional

*

We watched (500) Days of Summer on Sunday. It was a great movie, recommended. There was a scene, though, where a line out of Zooey Deschanel's mouth had the accidental effect of reminding me of my dad. I went into a funk for the rest of the day and, as of today, haven't really risen out of it. I will, I will. There's enough wonderful things happening in my life right now that I will. But it's a strange feeling to be pulled—forcibly, imperceptibly—into a mood or mindset that you weren't expecting. No external event really triggered this. It's not his birthday, not father's day, not anything. I just felt a memory.

It's not really something to explain. I expect it will happen many times in the future, for the rest of my life. My brilliant wife asked me about it last night, asked if I wanted to talk about it. Well, no. There's not really anything to say—"I miss my dad." Okay. That's it and that's also hardly it. There are no words to articulate how I feel—there's only the search for the right song to connect to.

• Seam: Autopilot

 

tl;dnr

Don't know if you saw it or if you cared about it, but Drowned in Sound dedicated the week to articles on the death of music journalism--perhaps four days too many to cover a subject that I feel has been beaten to death. I'd be curious to know from DiS's stat-counters how popular the series was (compared to other week-long series on, say, slow-core, shoegaze, or alt-country). Personally I feel invested in only one facet of the issue. I don't care much about the ramifications of new technologies, and I don't care much that business models are crumbling; I just care about good writing.

I gather that there are, in fact, two problems at hand. The first (less interesting to me but more interesting to people trying to make a real living off of music writing) is tied to the music industry itself. As the industry dies, so goes the financial viability of all its ancillary industries. Yeah, artists don't get paid. Also, magazines fold or go online, where the advertising opportunities are fewer and less lucrative. So the writers looking for money are, to put it mildly, in a pinch.

The second problem has more to do with the quality, variety, availability, and unfiltered nature of music writing itself, now that so much of it is on the web. One of today's DiS articles, by Ringo P. Stacey, tries to differentiate between the death of "criticism" vs the death of "writing," using as a jumping off point Christopher Weingarten's recent rant (worth a watch if you haven't seen it, though I do have some problems with its content). I think that's a much more worthwhile topic to bellyache over, personally--less the authority of the critic than the pleasures of great prose. I grant that many writers need to worry about getting paid, but writers--and I mean very specifically those of you/us who consider yourselves writers--ought to put quality of output ahead of everything, regardless of platform or paycheck. This is one thing Weingarten says in his rant that I think is right on (though I still loathe Twitter). Were the general quality of music writing on the web to increase, I wonder whether or not everyone's game would raise. Other writers, musicians, fans: everyone. (I'm not trying to put myself above it: I have a tumblr and it's full of half-thoughts. It could be better. I'm also not trying to say that good writing doesn't exist--but it could exist more.)

Stacey ends his article claiming that "to date, although online critics have triumphed, the best music writing is still originating offline." He also claims that there are a lack of good editors when it comes to online writing (true!). Couple that with Ben Myers' "Day in the Life of a Music Critic," also posted as part of the DiS series: "I maintain a blog but it is worthless. Blogging isn’t writing, it’s masturbating." Clearly there's a disconnect happening here. Everyone looks to the web for music, and thus for whatever text accompanies that music, whether it be from Pitchfork or DiS or me or some other amatuer who says little more than "Atlas Sound + Panda Bear OMFGyessssss!" But the guys who consider themselves real writers aren't bringing their A-game to the web--unless they get paid for it! If they don't get paid, then they're not writing, they're masturbating. Great. But FYI the readers don't give a shit whether you got pait for what you wrote or not. They're looking for great content. So let's all think about that when on the one hand "blogs are masturbation" and "all the good writing is happening offline" while on the other "music journalism is dying" because no one reads print mags anymore. Not only that, but most readers/consumers of content are not differentiating between sites with true mastheads and sites done by dudes in their living rooms. If the reader isn't discriminating but the writer is, then the writer is in a pickle.

In the comments to Stacey's post someone complains about the glut of music--too many people can make, record, and disseminate music nowadays for people to keep up with or process. That seems tangential to the present discussion but it does give cause to bring up the parallel--anyone who wants to can write about music nowadays too. I'd actually argue that more people are reading about music today than ever before, thanks to the internet! Unfortunately many of the providers of content don't consider themselves writers, and many who do seem to consider their blog their "side thing," less important and not worthy of quality control. That could have some relation to the sentiment I often hear from the more cynical mp3 hounds out there who think writing about music has become irrelevant now that we can simply listen to anything we want. That misses a crucial point: writing about music is itself an artform. It's not mere utility.

[Related: Tom Ewing did a post today that rounded up a list of newish youngish writers out there. Some I know, others I don't. Worth exploring.]

Sculpting the iTunes Library

I love the smart playlist function on iTunes. I am so anal about getting all the data correct for my iTunes library—genre, year, song ratings, etc.—that it makes the smart playlist really functional. I even have smart playlists to help me manage my library to make my smart playlists even better: one playlist gathers every song in my library that I haven’t yet rated, so when I’m bored on a commute to or from work I just shuffle through it and rate random songs; I have another that collects any song in my library that doesn’t list its year of release, so when a lazy Sunday comes around I can get lost on the internet researching release dates; and another playlist collects any songs that I haven’t given a genre tag to.

The idea, ultimately, is to get those three playlists down to no songs. Some tasks are more Sisyphean than others, I grant.

But I love my smart playlists. As I update my library—rate songs, tag genres, or just download new stuff—the playlists update themselves. I have one playlist that gathers anything tagged as krautrock, psychedelic, or garage rock. You don’t really equate garage and kraut (unless you’re writing a Monks review, I guess), but somehow all the psychedelic stuff like 13th Floor Elevators or Electric Prunes creates a bridge between all the genres. It makes for a fun, varied playlist of obscure and not-so-obscure 60s and 70s rock experimentalists. I have another playlist that I just made, called “indie best.” It takes everything I’ve tagged as “indie rock” and whittles it down to those songs I’ve rated four or five stars.

Of course, what I deem “indie rock” as far as my iTunes library is but a segment of what you or I might consider indie rock in general. For purposes of properly sculpting different playlists, I’ve segmented all my circa-1980–present rock music into four categories:

1. Punk: mostly comprised of the most traditional kind of punk—70s British punk & post-punk, and early 80s punk & hardcore

2. Alternative: mostly 90s stuff—grunge and brit pop and vaguely "not indie rock but still rock" acts—as well as earlier stuff like the Smiths or the Talking Heads, and even going as far back to someone like Brian Eno; and also more recent stuff that is too polished to be indie—Radiohead, REM, Amy Winehouse, etc.

3. Classic Indie: bands that defined that aesthetic starting roughly around 1985 (Dinosaur Jr., Husker Du, etc.) and going through about 1995 or 96, maybe even 97. So covering the most traditional kind of "indie rock" in the sense Lou Barlow meant, going through the post-rock acts of the 90s and ending, more or less, with Tortoise's early material. I personally use them as the end of that era because of the original incarnation's direct lineage to indie rock and not jazz or electronica (e.g. Bundy Brown and John McEntire were in Bastro, McEntire was also in My Dad is Dead, Dan Bitney was in Eleventh Dream Day, etc.). So they kind of symbolize, for me, the moment that all that O.G. indie stuff transcended itself and moved into wholly different territory.

4. Indie Rock. Or more accurately, contemporary indie, which is more or less the indie (blog) rock being made in this decade.

So I made the “indie best” playlist because I’ve been overdosing lately on the older stuff and needed a kind of palate-cleansing dose of newish shit. (One thing I notice when I put those 1400+ songs on shuffle, though: I apparently sure do like Spoon, Belle & Sebastian, Okkervil River, the New Pornographers, Joe Pernice, and Andrew Bird—all of which I suppose is a shock to no one.)

The old stuff: I also have a playlist I’ve created that I use whenever I’m thinking about or working on my book. Basically I start with those four categories—plus a fifth category I’ve labeled “Louisville” that collects certain albums and songs I’ve acquired that pertain specifically to my research—and then limit it to the years I’m writing about. So the playlist starts around 1975 as a way of getting all the relatively older albums that would have been in the air in the early/mid-80s; then I adjust what year it ends on depending on what era I’m writing about—Squirrel Bait years (roughly 84–86), Tweeze era (86–88), and soon enough I’ll get to the Spiderland era (89–91). Narrowing the playlist down to these eras helps me put the records in context: such-and-such record couldn’t have been an influence because it came out at the wrong time; whereas so-and-so’s album is surprisingly resonant and I wouldn’t have thought about that if I hadn’t been trying to put my ears in that time frame.

Other smart playlists I’ve created: one for every decade, regardless of genre; one that gathers all the New Pornographers albums plus all solo offshoots; and a quarterly “My Listening Hours” playlist which gathers every single thing to come into my library over a three-month period so that I don’t lose sight of, or become overwhelmed by, what I’m consuming. (Incidentally that playlist is going to be purged and restarted beginning July 1—my week of MLH posts will start up next week.) I’ve touched on my reasoning for the playlist before.

And I haven’t even begun to talk about the playlists I update manually! But that’s another post. How about you? Am I the only Obsessive iTuner out there? How do you sculpt your library?

Stubbornly Suspicious

For as long as I can remember—at least going back to high school, maybe further—I’ve always been suspicious of other people’s music recommendations. Every album I bought had to feel like my discovery. Whatever age I was, it didn’t matter if it was my older brother, my best friends, my brilliant wife, professional music critics—the least trustworthy!—or amateur bloggers: I have a kneejerk response to every music recommendation made to me. Oh really? It’s great? Sure, maybe we’ll just see about that. I know it’s a stupid response. I try to curtail it but I admit I have a hard time doing so. Maybe the reaction is rooted in my experience of clumsily discovering so much music—seemingly created just for me—with no real roadmap when I was a teenager (a topic I’ve been going into great detail on for the last couple months at Do You Compute, starting with this post). Even my brilliant wife gets peeved at me when she recommends something to me and I sort of shrug my shoulders, only to buy it a few weeks later as if the thought had occurred to me without her aid.

Despite the illusion, in a way it does need to feel to me as if I have picked out an album without her aid, without anyone’s aid. I convince myself—manipulate myself into thinking—that I am forging my own way with regards to the musical paths I go down. Sure, there are sources I trust—my wife, a few friends, a handful of bloggers—but I don’t trust any of them entirely, 100%. I’ll hear a recommendation from one and sort of file it away in the back of my mind—even from a trusted blog, I often don’t click on a new mp3 link the first time I see it pop up in my RSS feed. I wait until the same recommendation comes from a second trusted source, or passes through the air and hooks into my mind, and then I go back and revisit. Through this somewhat vague, ephemeral quorum of recommendations, I arrive at a new discovery—and it feels like my discovery. You’d probably all be aggravated by my methods if you were around me enough to witness them; only my brilliant wife rolls her eyes at how arduous I sometimes make things for myself. “Just click on the mp3!” Even in this age of every song at one’s fingertips, my most common refrain is “I’ve heard of them, but I haven’t heard them.”

This habit probably hurts me more often than helps. The way indie snobs are mocked for being suspicious of anything mainstream whatsoever—well, I’m that, plus I’m suspicious of indie snobs, too. So I’m kinda doubly fucked if I don’t watch out. For instance, I’m always suspicious of new albums or bands that seem to be widely hailed. That’s why I didn’t get into Animal Collective until last year, and why I still haven’t gotten into Grizzly Bear (though lately I’ve given it another shot with them). It's the natural hate-the-hype reflex innate in most indie dicks (when they're not doing the reverse, perpectuating hype and slagging haters). But there are worse omissions in my personal history of listening than that. This reflex of mine is the reason I’m always picking up so many new-to-me blind spots. For years I was inexplicably suspicious of pretty much the entire canon of rock history. Not that I figured it was all crap—of course I didn’t—but I just couldn’t will myself to buy a capital-C “Classic” simply because it had been unanimously canonized by the critics or the popular masses. That couldn’t be the only reason I bought a record. I have to find my way to each record in my own oddly organic way. Maybe my wife simply brings a record home and loads it into our iTunes library—that’s how I got into the Byrds. Maybe it’s me going to the Beverly Hills Library and picking up albums willy-nilly in a rush of hyper-consumption—that’s how I finally clicked with Elvis Costello and Big Star. Maybe I fall down the obsession hole with specific genres or eras of music, hence finally getting around to both Faust and Fleetwood Mac in the last couple years.

But really, what’s the alternative? Whenever I try to force an acquisition—I have to buy this because it’s a classic and I’m supposed to know it—its chances of not taking increase. Plus, that organic path keeps me looking forward. I like knowing that my discovery of, say, John Cale's solo material or Caetano Veloso's early albums or the entire discography of the Fall are all still in my future. It might be days, months, or many years before I get around to these albums, but I can only take them on when I feel they are rightly in my path. Ultimately, I'm in no hurry.

Let's Not Be Assholes

The news of the day today was that the new Grizzly Bear had leaked—three months before its official release date and apparently of a quality substantially below what the band intends. This post at Idolator, in which people were actually asking Grizzly Bear's Ed Droste outright if he would point them to the link for the leak, or better yet be a sport and leak a higher-quality version, was the most entertaining thing I'd read about it all day, though also the most depressing.

Back in December when the Animal Collective album had yet to leak there were similarly entitled claims, appeals, and threats related to a stupid rickroll that got out of hand. In both cases the moral of the story is this: don't tease indie rock fans. We deserve our music when we want it, without payment. We place no value on a musician's artistry. Albums have become like bounties one can collect on, holding them up and shouting to the masses "LEAKAGE!"

I'm sick of it. It's gotten to the point that it's just... gross. And sad.

I'm not innocent. Though I've never been to a bittorent site or downloaded a full album prior to its release, I have hunted down individual mp3s, often amounting to a full album, through places like Hype Machine. I don't acquit myself of anything. I will say: I've never pointed other people to a full-album download for a record that hasn't come out yet. I've always felt like that was kind of a dick move.

Anyway, the point is, whether I've participated or not, I've typically accepted that that's just the way it is these days. Leaks happen. People get excited and it's there so they download it. But then two weeks ago Touch & Go essentially went out of business. And a bunch of people who care deeply about music—independent music—were laid off as a result. A bunch of smaller labels that depended on T&G's distribution aid were left to figure something else out. It might be too soon, but could some of those smaller labels go belly-up as a result of this?

It sucks! And sure, you can be cynical about it and see nothing new under the sun here—the current climate of downloading is ruining record labels big and small, yawn. And Animal Collective's album leaked but they also hit #13 on Billboard in their first week of release (selling a whopping 24,000 copies... see, it's still sad). And Grizzly Bear may well hit a similar mark. But come on: think about a label like Touch & Go, one of the most venerable indie labels of all time. It's all but gone now. And we're all a bunch of assholes for helping them toward their ruin. You think they'll be the last? You don't have to be the douche twittering in Ed Droste's face to be complicit in all this.

 Chill on the Grizzly Bear and all those other records. Just let them come out when they're supposed to. And if the leaks are out there, don't be the asshole who flashes the big blinking arrow. Let the bands retain a little control over how and when their art is consumed—and for god's sake give them some money. Hype don't pay the bills, bitches.

I'm just a little tired of it all. I feel like someone's parent right now, lecturing on a subject you've been lectured about a million times before. All I ask is you just think a little about what hunting down a leak is all about—or worse, offering a leak to others. You're being an asshole.

Slow Listening

Related to the previous post, I read Rob Horning's column over at PopMatters earlier this week, Projects for Paying Attention to Attention, in which he notes another blogger who sets aside blocks of time to confine his listening to artists who begin with a specific letter of the alphabet. Horning writes:

I’m sympathetic to the desperate feeling of being overwhelmed by all the music that’s accessible to us, but I’m not sure that setting up arbitrary limits is the best solution. Ideally, there would be something at least semi-organic about how we pursue pleasure and pay attention. Is that the impasse we have reached, where we have to force ourselves to pay attention to the things we intended to do for fun? ...

That said, my arbitrary listening approach has to do with waging a campaign to play every song I have on my iPod at least once. It’s a Sisyphean task and a bit joyless too. It certainly isn’t what I want music in my life for—to be the arbitrary yardstick for how much entertainment-industry product I’ve compelled myself to consume.

I'd respond that it's only joyless if you consume albums and mp3s without regard to your actual taste. I too feel the need to hear everything I acquire into my iTunes library, but surely there's nothing but pleasure in that, no? Aside from the occasional bum album? (After all, you don't have to right-click-and-save every mp3 you listen to on the internet.) 

Music should never feel like a task (though I admit that I forget this myself from time to time) unless you're a paid critic. Perhaps Horning views it as joyless because he's counting all the promos and solicitations he gets as a PopMatters staffer and freelancer. (I'm just guessing.) That seems to be the lament of Michelangelo Matos, who started a project for 2009 called the Slow Listening Movement. From his inaugural post, back in December:

I need to clean out my ears. So from January to November 2009, I'm embarking on a kind of purification rite. In that time, I'm only allowing myself to download one MP3 at a time; the next MP3 can only be downloaded once I listen to the first one. With CDs, if I buy one, I have to listen to it all before I buy another, and before I am allowed to rip any of it to iTunes. There will surely be exceptions--CDs that suck, that I can't deal with playing all the way through--but hearing a bad album end to end is, if nothing else, a learning experience, so I plan to stick by this rule as much as I can.

Matos's project is a little different from what Horning does, since Matos's goal is not only to focus on what he's listening to but also to curb his rate of consumption (it's doing one but not the other which likely makes the task joyless). In either case, it speaks to the more and more common dillema that it takes a lot of effort to keep up with one's music consumption these days.

We all probably have our own ways of keeping up. Matos goes into the minutae of making sense of all his new acquisitions through iTunes playlists, etc. That's something I do too. I have a "2009" smart playlist, which is simply anything that was released in 2009; then I have a smart playlist for "my listening hours," which gathers anything whatsoever that has been added to my library within a three month period. Come April 1, that playlist will will be wiped clean and I'll begin it anew. I find that helps me hear everything I or my brilliant wife add to the collection. Shuffling that playlist is kind of fun, too. Everything is new to me, but hearing it all out of order makes certain tracks by certain artists jump out at me in a fresh way. (To get even more anal: from that smart playlist, I have two subset playlists: "my listening albums" and "my listening downloads," separating out the stray singles and full-length records.) Tracking my listening habits in three-month increments is my way of, as Matos describes in a more recent post, "carving a narrative" out of my listening habits.

I forget sometimes that most—many, at least—of the bloggers and consumers of music I follow (and often interact with) online are professional critics, or have at least entered into the game by establishing relationships with publicists and treating their blogs as pseudo-professional sources for new music and/or news content, or writing regularly for sites like Pitchfork, Idolator, etc. Sometimes I get caught up in trying to keep up with the conversation. I need to hear the Vivian Girls! I need to know when Merriweather Post Pavilion leaks so I can stay on top of the dialogue! Even though the truth is I don't really care about the Vivian Girls, nor do I have time to seek out leaks or bittorent sites. I do have a full-time job, after all, and my title is not "music critic." Honestly, as much as I think on and obsess over and listen to and write about and opine upon music, I think it's a bit of a blessing that I'm nothing more than an amatuer.* I do have the luxury of only listening to what I want to listen to, of not feeling the need to spend an hour or more with an album just so I can keep up with "the conversation." I doubt I'm alone, though, when I speak of the occasional feeling that I'm not keeping up—not doing my utmost as a consumer of music. 

Professional or not, there's truth to what both Matos and Horning are getting at. Surfing music blogs can sometimes be the equivalent of shopping hungry. It all goes in the cart and a lot of it rots before you get to it. My most fulfilling trips to the grocery store usually begin with a trawl through a cookbook or two, putting a little thought into my diet, my palate, my cravings. Matos says in one of his posts, "even in my usual multitasking sort of way one thing I'm finding is that the more premeditation that goes into an album or MP3, the keener my standards are for it." I think that's a sentiment worth highlighting. To show a little premeditation, to slow down, to focus on the music at hand. To listen.

*That's not to say my inbox doesn't fill up with emails from random bands and publicists. I'm solicited daily but I ignore nearly every request. Incidentally, I've always found it hilarious that I didn't start getting solicited by anyone until I did a massive four-part anti-hype-blog rant a little over a year ago. That's what put me on publicists' radar!

Letting it Click

Last week I picked up the new Andrew Bird and Animal Collective, two albums I've been looking forward to for a few months now. It's been kind of refreshing to have them both enter my world. In December I was so distracted by looking back on everything I purchased in 2008, and I've also been on an acquiring spree that has me re-buying or re-listening to old albums that have disappeared from my collection in the last ten years. Anyway, for whatever reason I've been listening to a lot of music, both familiar and not, with only a light-to-medium focus. Now these two albums have come along and have basically pushed everything else out; they're consuming all my time (especially, predictably, the Bird).

I probably listened to Noble Beast and Merriweather Post Pavilion three or four times each before they clicked. Until then they were vaguely good collections of sounds and hooks and random flashes of brilliance. But, like many records (especially the good ones), I had to hear them a few times before I could really pick out what I was loving, what made sense. Listening to them was like hearing a foreign language slowly morph into broken English. (Eventually it will be fluid English, though I'm not there yet with either album. Another way to think of it might be that an album needs to click three times, like a combination lock. As of today Animal Collective has clicked once and Andrew Bird has clicked twice; more on Noble Beast next week, I think.)

I've begun walking to work again—about three miles, or a little under one hour, or one album. Walking to work in the morning, especially at this time of year, when the Southern California weather is crisp and the mornings have the slightest bite to them, is my favorite way to consume an album. It's probably no coincidence that Noble Beast clicked for me the morning I took it for a walk to work. Merriweather Post Pavilion clicked on the same day, when I walked home just as the light went away. I'd forgotten just how pleasurable that is: to just walk with a record. Not work out, not drive, not surf the internet or read, not cook, not anything. Just walk. Me, my headphones, neighborhood streets, a cup of coffee. And one album. It's like my own personal communion with my record collection. The experience can't be shared with anyone.

A Brief but Worthwhile Interruption

Yesterday Rawkblog wrote a post on the Vivian Girls, a band I've actually never heard beyond the briefest of snippets in a friend's apartment a few weeks back. This sparked a really interesting conversation between Marc Offnotesnotes, Matthew Fluxblog, Sam Raptoravatar, Dave Rawkblog, myself, and a few others. Then that splintered into another conversation that also saw Tom Freaky Trigger and Eric Marathonpacks, among others, join in.

The threads are a little confusing to follow; sometimes a new comment will appear in the middle rather than at the end, and all the indenting gets a little nutty. So head over to MBV where the whole thing was edited by Ryan Catbird. The conversation continues there. It's going to go up in multiple parts; I'll update this post as the new links go up.

• Part I: A conversation about Vivian Girls, lo-fi, influences, artist growth, hype, and “a super queeny version of Thurston Moore.”

It’s a Matter of Trust

It’s the month of lists, you’ve no doubt noticed. It’s an entertaining yet tedious time of year: we get to find records we might have slept on and argue over albums that are underrated or underhated. Maybe it's the lack of galvanizing consensus albums this year, or the oft-repeated complaint that everyone's favorites are too boring, but I'm detecting an odd, if fascinating tone to the usual kvetching this time around. It's not the same old sux/rulz dichotomy: rather, there seems to be a distinct lack of trust, a suspicion of the listmakers' motives.

Over at Idolator, Dan Gibson asked readers—genuinely!— “Have you had any luck yet with the mysterious albums that seem to populate the middle of these lists? Is that Girl Talk disc everyone seems to list any good?” To wonder aloud whether an album frequently appearing on everyone’s list is actually any good says something about Gibson’s lack of faith in his music-consuming peers. It’s doubly amusing considering he is asking the vague entity that is “Idolator readers”—many of whom are probably the same ones putting Girl Talk on their lists. Is Gibson going to feel any more inclined to download Girl Talk based on some commenter’s recommendation? (Not likely, when the next commenter will say it’s overrated.)

I don’t think Gibson is alone. It seems to be assumed by all readers that somewhere on any given top ten list, a gap must exist between the truly outstanding and the merely good. The question is, where is that gap? No one’s list includes that important detail, hence no one’s list is trustworthy. Add to that one's  personal knowledge of how few of 07 picks still get regular play around the house. Surely the same will happen with these 08 releases. All the more suspicious then: these lists must be designed to swindle you out of your time, money, and belief that indie rock can change your life. Right?

Too, we have no reference point: okay, you’ve got a top ten—how many albums did you actually hear? How can I possibly know how discerning you’re being? Shit, you’ve got a top fifty—are you just ranking every album you bought? How can I possibly know how discerning you're being?

It’s easy to mistrust the hobbyist bloggers—all of whom, surely, are too lazy, stupid, or sheeplike to stake out their own personal tastes, independent from the domineering tastes of Pitchfork’s critics or the Machiavellian commercial interests of Stereogum. I mean, it’s one thing for Vampire Weekend and Lil’ Wayne to show up on their lists—it’s in their editorial interests, right? For some reason? Cuz they're pro?—but why would the hobbyists, for whom nothing is at stake, claim to like these albums? They’re clearly drinking the Kool-Aid and can’t be trusted. Right?

Then there are the Kool-Aid dispensers: Pitchfork, Paste, Q, et al. As this ILM thread demonstrates, such lists are to be dissected in order to determine each publication's true motives, for surely it cannot be that they like all these albums. Probably they’re catering to their readers’ tastes—but, predictably, they must throw in a few albums from outside their stock genre in an attempt to display the illusion of critical breadth. So there's a "token" hip hop act, a "token" dance album and a "token" pop album. You see through it, don’t you: these mags are puffing themselves up in hopes you don’t notice how critically corrupt they are. Right?

In further effort to show how on-the-pulse their critics are—because even the publication knows its list is bullshit!—you're made privy to their individual lists. See, staff-derived lists place undue weight on populist albums like that dastardly Fleet Foxes record that appeals to everyone but is no one’s favorite. (right?) So it racks a bunch of points in the staff polling and places high on the list, way ahead of that one actually outstanding album that not enough people spent time with, hence its inclusion on the low end of the top 100. But the individual critics’ list rectifies that! Except that all that amounts to is a bunch of jerks that, other than their inclusion of Fleet Foxes, are just trying to show off how obscure they can be. They’re not being honest—if it were that good, we all would have heard of it. Right?

You can’t win.

What does it mean, as an avid reader of indie music blogs, that you suspect the motives of every blogger you read? Can no one steer you right? Is every blog's purview too limited/populist, too wide-ranging/obscure, too professionalized, too amatuer? Must you depend on Largehearted Boy’s list of lists to surmise some nebulous overall endorsement of ten supposedly outstanding records? Maybe you do. Maybe that’s also why so many people view this year’s indie releases as boring. Reading so many reactions to the lists that have come up so far is like seeing a mass realization that the trainspotters we depend on aren't flagging down the right cars. (Don't look at me: when  I get around to posting my list, you’ll see some of those boring releases, too.) How's that Stephen Stills song go? If you can't find the blog you trust, trust the blog you're with?

I don't really know what it all means. I just sense some collective feeling that indie rock—or was it the critics and bloggers?—let us down this year. Or we let ourselves down, by not trying a little harder to find that album that really meant something—to me, to us, to music. It's probably out there: who found it? Pipe up!

A Cluster of Impressions

I don’t know where I got the impression that they were boringly gentle, either. It’s weird how you get these weird impressions of bands - I’ve been hearing about them for so long that I kind of accidentally built up this little cluster of impressions around them, mostly, it seems, plucked from thin air.

This is something Song By Toad said last week about Neutral Milk Hotel, whom Mr. Toad just heard for the first time. It stuck out at me because I'd just finished saying something similar about Brian Eno the day before, in that the pop of Another Green World—even the overall melodicism of the proto-ambient tracks, for that matter—was at odds with my expectations. I was prepared for minimalism. Vocals, guitar solos, even the general sense of warmth that permeates the record—all were a surprise to me. Like Mr. Toad, I'd built up a "cluster of impressions... plucked from thin air."

I said something similar about Neu!, too, who are more less new to me this year. I like Neu! more than Neu! 75 in part because, as I said last week, "I long had an impression of what Neu! was supposed to sound like, and Neu! 75 wasn't really it." (My preference for one over the other is more complex than that, but nevertheless I recognize that expectation is part of it.) In the comments to that post, Richard had a similar response:

As for Neu!—I was really surprised by them. Since, like you, Stereolab was how I got interested them, before the reissues, I expected a certain type of sound (and I was coming from the Transient Noise Bursts period of Stereolab). Only one or two of the tracks on Neu!2 have ever really met my pre-conceived notion

On one level or another, every album that has been described to you prior to your hearing it will cause some disconnect between your expectation and your actual perception. (I'd argue that any album that doesn't cause this disconnect probably doesn't stay in rotation for long.) Dear Science Comma [Comma?] has been out for less than a month, but that doesn't mean you're not developing a "cluster of impressions" about what it might sound like—ice skating to heaven, perhaps?—only to reframe your understanding of the record once you've listened to it (imho, it's more like windsurfing through purgatory). Not only might you have to reconsider what the band is "supposed" to sound like--what you thought they were supposed to sound like—but also perhaps where they fit into the musical landscape at large.

I had that kind of disconnect/reconnect experience, for example, with the Fiery Furnaces when I heard them for the first time earlier this year. I was expecting something like a second-rate Yeah Yeah Yeahs or perhaps a lo-fi Animal Collective—don't ask me why, but that's the cluster of impressions I'd built for myself—only to hear a band that is aggressively more complex, and probably the band of the day that I would laud for having a firm, considered, fresh aesthetic perspective on pop music and where it is capable of going.

• The Fiery Furnaces, Clear Signal from Cairo

It's one thing to have your cluster of impressions about a fairly new band or album dispersed upon actually hearing it. It's far more pronounced when it happens on a musical blind spot—an album or artist that is firmly part of the history of rock and roll, which you've managed to never actually hear. Like Eno, or any krautrock band, or Neutral Milk Hotel (whose album is, after all, more than a decade old now). To go ten years or more with an impression of a band, only to have it dissolve within thirty seconds of hearing the first track—it can be a dramatic musical epiphany, causing you not only to rethink the artist in question, but also all of the artists that came after. Just think: you thought Jeff Mangum was a twee, Sarah Records–loving sadboy lamenting the tear in his sweater; then you hear "The King of Carrot Flowers," with its morbidly surreal/surreally morbid imagery. You thought Eno was droning synths and blurbs and bleeps, then you hear the jagged guitar, fluid bass, and harmonizing refrains of "Sky Saw"; You thought Neu! was supposed to be the uber-definition of "motorik"—one steady drumbeat, no fills, rigid as a factory assembly line—only to hear the light-as-air ambiance of "Isi" or "Seeland."

• Neu!, Seeland

Mr. Toad talked about how, after listening to NMH, bands like the Decemberists or Beirut suddenly existed in a new context. It's acutally the perfect illustration of what I'm talking about. You listen to either of those bands and everyone tells you that they owe a debt to Jeff Mangum. So you build up an impression of NMH that their lyrics must have a literary edge to them; that Mangum's voice probably occupies a certain range, and maybe he carries on a little while he sings; that maybe there's an accordian or some kind of world music influence. All of those things are somewhat true. But the reality is whatever the Decemberists or Beirut are lifting from Mangum, it's not the essence of Neutral Milk Hotel. Personally, I'd argue that those acts are barely skimming the surface of the waters NMH treads in, to the extent that it's almost offensive to align the groups. Neither is as intimately connected, on a kind of personal level I can barely understand, to their lyrics or imagery. Neither has sewn together a single album into the kind of tapestry that In the Aeroplane over the Sea is. Neither has made a record that congeals its historical, personal, and musical components into a perfect whole.

• Neutral Milk Hotel, The King of Carrot Flowers, pt. 1

At the same time, I saw a documentary on Syd Barrett a few months ago, and hearing snippets from his post-Pink Floyd material—which I've never heard in full—opened at least a small window for me; namely that Mangum owes his own debts. To what extent, I don't yet know. (Wait 'til I buy more Barrett and I'll pick that thread up). The thing that jumped out at me was a similarity in their vocal delivery--a kind of wailing moan--over simple acoustic guitar. That may well be the extent of what Mangum lifts, leaving the rest of Barrett's distinct style and personality to Barrett. Just as the Decemberists barely lift anything worthwhile from Neutral Milk Hotel. Just as Stereolab didn't so much as rip off Neu! as riff on one or two specific Neu! songs. Just as the many musicians who credit Eno as an influence are not really thinking of "I'll Come Running" when they say so.

I'm sure I could think of others. What about you? Any albums (new or old) you finally heard that sounded completely unlike what you'd built them up to be in your mind?

The Iliad and Odyssey of R.E.M.

Michael Stipe has taken to answering Pop Songs readers’ questions about his songs/lyrics over the course of the next few days (weeks? seems to be until whenever he wants to stop). This one comes from the first installment:

A general question: you’ve intimated in interviews that the first two R.E.M. albums essentially had no real lyrics (something which you just alluded to in mention of the chorus to "Orange Crush”). Did the lyrics to the songs on those two albums eventually stick or do they continue to evolve for you over time with repeated performances?

those songs were mostly written to be sung live. The pa systems were so crap that no one could ever really hear the singer anyway, including the singer. We just never intended to make records, and then suddenly we were making records and the songs were in my head like that, so we just blurred the vocal and turned it way down. The songs that do have words don’t really make any or much sense, it was about creating a feeling and emotion in the room in the moment. As it turns out the records turned out pretty great too, just inscrutable. I had to learn pretty fast how to write a good or great lyric after that. Please don’t analyze them, there’s nothing but feeling there. Sing along and make it up, that’s what I still do.

This is a pretty good explanation for why I've always had trouble fully embracing the first few R.E.M albums, as someone who came of age around the time Green came out. I've always known the earlier albums in a kind of archival way, only able to process them from the perspective of what came later. Fables of the Reconstruction and Lifes Rich Pageant are, too these ears, bridges from the first albums to the later period: still some of that inscrutable material but also more signs of Stipe stepping forward. For me, everything really moves to the next level with Document. That's when Stipe's voice and lyrics were finally, boldly up front in the mix.

Not that I needed Stipe himself to point it out—though it's always nice to hear it from the source—but Murmur will always feel like a lesser album to me precisely because the production and lyrical content are willfully obscured. Likely the lovers of Murmur will point to those two components as the reasons why it's their best album.

Discussions of R.E.M. often point out how the band is one of those perfect quartets—no member is replaceable; every member contributes something specific that defines the band's identity. Stipe's voice, lyrics, and overall presence; Mike Mills's voice and piano; Peter Buck's Rickenbacker (both those ringing arpeggios and jangly strums); Bill Berry's powerful yet nuanced drumming. What's interesting to me is that on those early albums each is subsumed into the whole. Somehow, by consciously coming together into a kind sonic mass via muddy production, reverbed drums and backing vocals, buried and mumbled lead vocals, and indesipherable lyrics (what is a moral kiosk, anyway?), they made records that at least some of the time sounded like less than the sum.

• R.E.M., Laughing

In some sense that's exactly what Stipe says above: "...it was about creating a feeling and emotion in the room in the moment.... there's nothing but feeling there." This recalls something I wrote a while back, about separating the song from the sound in a band's songwriting aesthetic:

It’s a balance any band worth their salt has to achieve. It’s elementary: if your sound—the aesthetic quality of the noises produced by guitars, rhythm section, keyboards, voice, and combinations therein—is strong, then you’ll stand apart from the rest. But if you’ve got no song—the skill of lyric, structure, emotion, and delivery—then you’ve got no foundation.

If all bands had to be positioned on some sort of spectrum—song at the extreme left, sound at the extreme right—the most rewarding, most the time, would be somewhere in the middle. Sigur Ros skews toward sound, but then again their best album (Agaetis Byrgun) is the one that wraps their sonic textures around chord progressions and vocal melodies (just listen to "Sven-g-Englar": its two best qualities are the melody of the chorus and the sudden chord change 2/3 in). Bob Dylan is considered by many to be the greatest songwriter in pop history, yet many find him unlistenable: it’s his sound, not his song, that repels.

For most of R.E.M.'s career, their trajectory could be seen as a movement across that spectrum, a progression from sound toward song, as if each record pulled one more layer of sound back, becoming slightly less inscrutable than the previous record. Some might cite Lifes Rich Pageant as the turning point, the full embrace of a perfect balance between song and sound, but I place it one record later. The opening track on Document, "Finest Worksong," is a statement of progression like nothing they'd done prior. All those essential ingredients necessary to define R.E.M.—Berry's drums, Buck's guitar, Mills's voice, Stipe's presence—are not only there but are perfectly, crisply identifiable. Nothing blurs, yet everything coheres.

• R.E.M., Finest Worksong

The next string of records saw them get more and more comfortable with that balance of song and sound, culminating in their most perfect execution of song—the antithesis of Murmur—Automatic for the People. When I think about R.E.M. in this way, as a journey from one aesthetic perspective to another, that is the journey: Murmur to Automatic. Automatic was the final destination. So what to make of everything that came after?

• R.E.M., Find the River

It's routine to point to Berry's departure as the beginning of a new era for the band, but I personally place the beginning of that era at Monster. Their journey from sound to song completed, it was time to venture back. Not to regress, but to reframe their songwriting in new textures. You could think of Murmur to Automatic as the band's Iliad, and Monster to Reveal as their Odyssey. (More on post-Reveal in a moment.)

Coming off of Automatic, the band had to be as confident in their skills as songwriters—able to erect interesting pop structures, to evoke tangible lyrical imagery, to deftly spin any instrument into their music as needed—as they were in their skills as purveyors of mood, feeling, or aura during their earliest years. Keeping the image of that spectrum in mind—sound at one end, song at the other—you could argue that the band had begun to move too far down the line. The only way to remain interesting—both to themselves and to their fans (at least theoretically)—was to move back in the other direction. You can see that the band clearly made that choice when you think about the kind of limitations and/or options they gave themselves for the following records. Stipe freely distorted his voice and Buck refused to pick up an acoustic guitar during the Monster sessions. What's more, he took a new approach to the electric—all fuzz and vibrato, no chiming arpeggios. The choice is a clear indication that the band sought to reconceive their sound. For New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the band forced themselves into a unique songwriting and recording process, doing a bulk of the work during their soundchecks on the Monster tour—a forced limitation to their songwriting methodology. 

• R.E.M., Crush with Eyeliner

For Up and Reveal, they went even further, making the drastic decision to bring in wholly new sounds via drum machines and other electronics. Up's opener, "Airportman," is as much a statement of direction as "Finest Worksong" was eleven years earlier. Even if the rest of the record wasn't as aggressively different as that track, it nevertheless signaled the band's renewed interest in mood and texture. It was the first song in years on which Stipe put his voice back underground—not to mention every other defining characteristic of R.E.M.'s sound had been stripped away, once again aiming for feeling as the primary end.

• R.E.M., Airportman

Considering the band in this way (and this is the first time I've articulated this idea to myself or to anyone else), I think that's why I was always on board with every choice they made all the way through Reveal (an unfairly maligned album). Admittedly the last two records don't fit squarely into this Iliad/Odyssey concept—both seem to be a retreat to song, an abandonment of sound, as I've defined them here. Perhaps, not coincidentally, that's why I find them to be the band's two least interesting albums. (I'll grant that Accelerate is leagues better than Around the Sun; the songs are solid, but I don't feel like a new dimension of R.E.M. has been revealed—something I did feel on every one of their first twelve albums.)

I would love the band to get back on track with this second journey—their Odyssey, returning to sound over song. No, not a regression toward Murmur, nor an album's worth of "Airportman." Accelerate demonstrated that intentional regression is not ultimately satisfying; the album sounds as if the band was trying to shoehorn it into an earlier part of their discography. No, I want an R.E.M. album made by R.E.M. model 2008. But their guiding principle could be just what Stipe said above: "it's about creating a feeling and emotionin the room in the moment."

Nothing more. "There's nothing but feeling there."

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 for this record—I could post all week about it, at least. Nevertheless, next up: Drive Like Jehu.

Albums of My Life

Last week I referred to Paul Simon’s Graceland as an “album of my life.” Coincidentally, this thread at Last Plane to Jakarta took a brief tangent into what constitutes a “life-changing album.” Two different concepts, and I’ve had both on my mind in the last few days. The first is a lot easier to find examples of: albums that I played intensely during some period of my life, to the point of becoming something other than good or great albums; rather, they're the soundtrack to memories. The second category, life-changing albums, is harder to figure out. Before I try to sort that one out, I want to think about the other.

Albums of my life. Going back as far as I can, my childhood was filled with Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, Ry Cooder. I have strong mental associations with all those artists, and in retrospect they all must have set some kind of foundation for what I’ve come to like today.

George Michael’s Faith might have been the very first album I ever viewed as wholly mine: an cassette I kept in my own room, played on my own walkman. INXS’s Kick and Run-DMC’s Raising Hell, too. In elementary school I would walk laps around the track during recess with Danny Casares as we tried to piece together the lyrics to “You Be Illin’ from memory. By sixth grade I was transfixed by Appetite for Destruction—probably the first album I’d ever associated with danger. This led to junior high and high school, where Master of Puppets, Rust in Peace, and Persistence of Time set the template for my taste in metal. By my junior or senior year I was transitioning out of metal and into something else: Rollins Band (particularly the early stuff), Tool, and a band I’d discovered through a blind purchase at Tower Records, Craw, all made music that was heavy but was more dynamic musically and more sophisticated lyrically and emotionally.

Somehow from there I stumbled into indie rock without any real guidance (which I’ve written about before). By then I’d lost interest in heaviness but was actively looking for music that shifted dynamically. Slint, Fugazi, Rodan, Codeine. I vividly recall moving to college and trying to describe the kind of music I liked to a kid I’d met in the dorms. “It can be really loud and really screamy, but it can also get really quiet, and it’s not heavy like metal.” He just looked at me and said “what, you mean emo?”

Another dormmate gave me a dubbed cassette full of songs by what I thought was some friend of hers; the recording quality was exceptionally poor and all the label said was “Elliott Smith.” I played the hell out of the tape but was embarrassed to tell the girl I dug it so much because it seemed a little weird to be really into her random friend’s music. Six months later I was in a record store and saw the album in the bin—a real record by a real guy on a real label, and best of all that was another album (Roman Candle) in the bins as well!

The rest of college was Tortoise, June of 44, Blonde Redhead, Unwound, Superchunk, the Pernice Brothers. After college, when I met my wife: My Morning Jacket’s The Tennessee Fire, Cat Power’s Moon Pix, Rufus Wainwright’s first album, Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker.

We got married in September 2001: she walked down the aisle to Sigur Ros’ “Sven-g-Englar” and we danced to Low’s “Two Step.” We moved to New York not long after. If you asked me to soundtrack the winter of 2002, when we lived in a spacious but empty loft above a functioning sweatshop in a shitty part of Williamsburg, I’d have to hand you Pete Yorn’s Music for the Morning After. When we moved to Boerum Hill it was Chutes too Narrow, Michigan, and Radio Dept.’s Lesser Matters. We bought Feist’s Let it Die in Paris in 2004. We moved to L.A. in 2005 and in the last two or three years it’s been Funeral, Antonio Carlos Jobim & Elis Regina, Midlake, and most recently Andrew Bird.

These are albums of my life. And really I’m just scratching the surface—this is what I can come up with just thinking about it in the time it takes to write these words. Were I to focus on one period of my life, other albums would come into view, sort of like staring at the night sky and seeing the stars reveal themselves the longer you look.

But not all of these albums are my all-time favorites, necessarily. Some I haven’t listened to in years, either because my tastes have changed drastically (everything pre-Spiderland), because I associate them too strongly with my memories (Moon Pix), because they’ve just not aged well (sadly, Spiderland), or because they’re frankly not that good (Music for the Morning After).

Thus we come to the difference between an album of my life and an album that changed my life. More on that later this week.

The Conversation on Adult Alternative Continues...

Carl at Zoilus and John at uTopianTurtleTop have picked up on my post from the other day (and older "Adult Alternative” post). Carl:

What is the nature of the stake so many of us have in disliking conventionally pretty music? In the book, talking about Celine, it's in the context of "adult contemporary" (formerly MOR, "middle-of-the-road" music). Here, it is "adult alternative." In both cases it's easy to label it as "dinner music." Well, what is wrong with having music to have dinner by?

The comments section at Zoilus is also picking up some steam.

John points to a conversation between Simon Reynolds and K-Punk earlier this year in Fact Magazine on the “disintensification of indie,” among other things, and an earlier post of his own which responded to that article.  One thing from the Fact article that jumped out was this quote from Reynolds:

The web has extinguished the idea of a true underground. It’s too easy for anybody to find out anything now, especially as scene custodians tend to be curatorial, archivist types. And with all the mp3 and whole album blogs, it’s totally easy to hear anything you want to hear, in this risk-less, desultory way that has no cost, either financially or emotionally.

This doesn’t apply so much to my adult alternative post, but it’s a nice counterpoint to something both Carl said… somewhere (can’t remember if it was the Slate article or on his own blog) and what Jess Harvell said in his hype blog post last week—namely that the makers of music have less at risk now; being in a band is something you can spend all your twenties doing (as opposed to just your college years) before you move on to your “real” life. Reynolds’ take makes the whole idea of risk, as associated with underground music, problematic not only for music makers but also for music consumers.

The Song vs. the Sound

On the same day I downloaded In Rainbows, I also entered the physical world and went to a bricks-and-mortar record store and bought Beirut’s newest (among other purchases). I’ve been meaning to write some kind of formal review of it but I’ve been distracted by my first impression, which was this: Zach Condon has nailed his sound, but he’s yet to fully nail his song. To some extent that first impression has been proven wrong (kinda) with increased listens: The Flying Cup Club is far better than Gulag Orkestrar, despite my three favorite Beirut songs being on the earlier album (rounded out by numerous songs I could do without). But even though Condon’s songcrafting skill is improving, I still can’t totally get beyond that distinction: the song vs. the sound.

It’s a balance any band worth their salt has to achieve. It’s elementary: if your sound—the aesthetic quality of the noises produced by guitars, rhythm section, keyboards, voice, and combinations therein—is strong, then you’ll stand apart from the rest. But if you’ve got no song—the skill of lyric, structure, emotion, and delivery—then you’ve got no foundation.

If all bands had to be positioned on some sort of spectrum—song at the extreme left, sound at the extreme right—the most rewarding, most the time, would be somewhere in the middle. Sigur Ros skews toward sound, but then again their best album (Agaetis Byrgun) is the one that wraps their sonic textures around chord progressions and vocal melodies (just listen to "Sven-g-Englar": its two best qualities are the melody of the chorus and the sudden chord change 2/3 in). Bob Dylan is considered by many to be the greatest songwriter in pop history, yet many find him unlistenable: it’s his sound, not his song, that repels.

You get the idea. No matter how traditional or experimental an artist is, you can listen to an album and make the distinction.

So my brilliant wife and I were driving through Los Angeles one evening, listening to the new Beirut for the first time, maybe not giving it our full attention but listening nonetheless and forming opinions.

“So this one’s supposed to have a big French influence.”
“He’s not in Eastern Europe anymore?”
“Guess he’s done with the Balkans. He took his muse to France.”
“I don’t know, pretty much sounds like the last one.”

It wasn’t that reductive, but more or less that’s how the conversation started. “I like this album,” my wife said, “but if he does another one like this I think I’m done with him.”

Why is that? What is it about an artist that can sate us after one or two albums, even if the output doesn’t necessarily get worse? It’s the sound. Sound doesn’t have staying power without song. (One could argue vice versa as well.)

We started talking about the French/Balkan influence, our conversation colored by the  New York Times article I mentioned last week—“authenticity,” ancestral roots, whether any of that matters. I don’t think the latter matters, but I think the question of authenticity sticks to some artists but not to others as a direct correlation to their ability to let the song, not the sound, be their foundation. Perhaps inevitably, Paul Simon’s Graceland came up. That is one the albums of my life, not only because it’s good but because I’ve been listening to it since I was in sixth grade and it's forever entwined with too many great and mundane and iconic memories. But I digress. The reason Graceland is so good is because Simon never let world-music inclinations subsume his songs. “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” “Under African Skies,” “I Know What I Know”—they could all, technically, be stripped of the African influence and still be pretty terrific. On the other hand, it is that African influence that sets Graceland apart from—and above—every other Paul Simon album. The song and the sound, balanced.

Condon doesn’t achieve such a seamless integration. If you took away the horns and warbly chanting, not every track on The Flying Cup Club would survive. That’s not to say that means it’s not a good album, but it might explain my wife’s reaction—“I don’t need another one of these.” I have the same tentative feeling toward Sufjan Stevens. It’s that sound fatigue that keeps me from purchasing any album by Stevens that doesn’t have a state in its title. He’s a fantastic songwriter and has a unique sound, but too often he leans on the latter without confidence in the former. In my book he’s got one more album to prove his sound serves his songs and not the other way around.

Maybe it’s because I bought Beirut and Radiohead on the same day, but my first impression of Beirut has informed the way I’ve been listening to everything in the last month: I’m listening to everything with “the song vs. the sound” in mind. That might explain my reaction to In Rainbows, since I think Radiohead is most interested in exploring the sophistication of their sound than giving into the gratification of their songs. No, they don’t need to go back to writing pop tunes that would fit better on The Bends, but they could consider what effect each and every one of those washes of sound and effected vocals and doubled drum tracks has on the pure, simple pleasure of the song.

Other Voices: Race, Class, Hype, Adulthood

Happily, there has been a lot of conversation going on all over the place—too much to keep up with!—and it’s been going on for weeks now, much longer than I would have expected any topic to last on the blog circuit. I’m a little meta-’d out, but nonetheless I’ll point you to:

• Sasha Frere-Jones’s most recent response to all his article hath wrought, including a response from Arcade Fire’s Will Butler
• Carl Wilson’s two follow-ups to his Slate article, which further elucidate his points on class issues in indie (a more interesting topic than SFJ’s, I think)
• Richard Crary responds to Wilson’s point about “less being on the line” for kids who spend their twenties rocking out only to start their real lives in their thirties
• Related, Mike Barthel’s post about the “professionalization” of the indie world—both in music-making and in the blogs and other apparatus that go with it
• Matthew Perpetua and John Darnielle both try to bring a little historical perspective to the hype blog conversation [follow-up discussion to John's post here]
  
• And a re-referral to Jess Harvell’s Idolator post, which has had stellar comments that have added a great deal to the discussion

It’s been fascinating to see these three or four topics all synthesize into one larger conversation. To some extent it’s all boiling down to the same complaint: indie rock (apparently) is boring. There’s no rhythm! It’s too nerdy! It’s too careerist! There are too many bands! It’s too disposable!

While we’re at it, perhaps I can toss in one more variable into the mix: we’re growing up. A few months ago I did a post on “Adult Alternative”—basically indie rock for mellowing (i.e., aging) indie kids.

…there does seem to be such a genre, one that didn’t exist five or six years ago but which has quietly come into existence on any thirtysomething indie rocker’s iPod. Feist is far from the only one to occupy this territory. The newest Sea & Cake record, for instance, is so free of rough edges it’s practically dust. KCRW’s celebrated music programming is filled to the gills with underground soft rock. Even my beloved Midlake has garnered their fair share of comparisons to America.

Have we been snookered? How can I read Pitchfork every morning and enjoy an album so palatable my mother-in-law might even like it? How can Pitchfork swoon over [The Reminder] with an 8.8 rating?

It ties in, at least tangentially, with what Wilson and Barthel and Crary are talking about, and also applies to the underlying point just about everyone seems to be making—that indie rock (suddenly!) is boring. Another interesting parallel, while we're at it, between Wilson's posts on class and the boringness of indie and adult alternative is the recent phenomenon of Bruce Springsteen supplanting Brian Wilson as the indie rock muse du jour. Can we talk about the disconnect between Bruce's working-class lyrics and his mostly well-to-do fanbase? Not to mention these bands Wilson tags as "future knowledge workers" covering Bruce at every turn? There's irony in there somewhere, though I don't know that I'm a big enough fan of Bruce to unearth it (full disclosure: I'm not a fucking fan of Bruce at all).

Anyway, I think all of this is related and there's probably another massive post gestating inside me right now, though I think I need to sit on it for a while—I love the conversation but I need to get back to listening to music for a bit.

You Got Miscegenation in My Fusion

A day or two after I originally posted my two cents about Sasha Frere-Jones’s New Yorker article, I updated the post to include a few comments from my brilliant wife. One of them was her questioning why SFJ would call out Devendra Banhart for not appropriating black influences, when it was quite obvious that Banhart has no trouble practicing musical colonialism—i.e., his albums are filled with references to music from various parts of Latin America. His music is miscegenated—just not in a way that SFJ seems to notice.

My wife also wondered why SFJ insisted on placing a judgment on his observations. So there’s less African American influence on “white” music—why does that need to be portrayed as a negative assessment, when the acts SFJ points to are busy making great music without that influence? It seems an arbitrary critique. Part of what makes SFJ’s article so unappealing is his insistence on using the racially charged word miscegenation. Another word, more benign but more accurate, would be fusion.

I was pleased to see this article by Will Hermes in Sunday’s New York Times, therefore, which in effect elaborated on both of those points; and though it is not an explicit answer to SFJ’s article, it could easily be read as such.

On any given night in an American rock club you can hear bands like Gogol Bordello, Man Man, Beirut and Balkan Beat Box playing odd-metered songs drawing on the rhythms of Eastern European Gypsy music. You might encounter Antibalas or Vampire Weekend riffing on African sounds, Dengue Fever making psychedelic Cambodian pop or a D.J. like Diplo spinning Brazilian funk. On the recent “Kala,” a contender for the year’s most exciting pop album, the British-Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., who works from Brooklyn, draws on Indian, African and West Indian sounds. The folk-rocker Devendra Banhart creates fusions with Mexican and Brazilian musicians on his recent CD, “Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon.” And the veteran musical adventurer Bjork toured this year with a West African percussion troupe and Chinese pipa virtuoso.

In an implicit critique of SFJ, Hermes even points to these artists as being directly influenced by hip hop in their eclecticism.

[R]ather than replicating an “authentic” sound… [Vampire Weekend] is more interested in collage, understandable for a young group weaned on the cut-and-paste aesthetic of hip-hop.

Hermes spends a good portion of his article addressing the issue of authenticity in these artists’ music, which is certainly something every band must consider on some level, no matter the influence—hell, even hewing too close to the sound of the Velvet Underground or Led Zeppelin will invite jeers. In terms of the black influence in American indie—frankly I’m still uncomfortable with the notion of what even constitutes “the black influence” in this day and age—both SFJ and Carl Wilson, in his excellent response at Slate last week, speak to the delicacy of making that influence too apparent.  It has become an extremely racially charged act for a white American artist to appropriate black American music in way that is not “authentic.” Importantly, Wilson notes that "at least half of Frere-Jones' lauded precedents are British, a context in which appropriating black American music has vastly different connotations."

With those connotations in mind, perhaps it explains why so many indie bands are more quick to take on Balkan or Brazilian influences. As Hermes’ article articulates, many American indie rock acts are indeed practicing musical colonialism. Nick Urata of DeVotchKa

noted that while some of his band mates were schooled in Eastern European music, he was not, and in any case stylistic accuracy was not the point. "The ‘authentic’ Gypsy brass-band stuff is great, but it’s better to leave it to the masters,” he said. “We figured we were never going to nail it exactly, so why not just take it into our own realm?”

Hermes’ article seems to reflect how many indie bands have internalized a hip hop philosophy—every sound, genre, and culture is fair game in songwriting—yet look outside of North America for their overt musical references.

Unlike hip hop, however, this culture-grabbing in indie music requires more than crate-digging and sampling; it requires studied musicianship on the part of at least some members in each band, as in DeVotchKa or Beirut. This points in some way to the corollary Wilson, in his Slate article, draws between contemporary indie rock and class, insomuch as indie rock is largely made by collegiates, or at least people for whom higher education is an option.

With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded "creative" college towns such as Portland, Ore., this is the music of young "knowledge workers" in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire.

Mind you, this is nothing new. Twenty-five years ago, the music Wilson and SFJ are both talking about was not defined by artists’ business decisions (“indie”) or their proximity to the pop charts (“alternative”). Rather, it was defined exactly by what Wilson describes: college rock. That you listened to R.E.M. or 10,000 Maniacs at all signified on some level that higher education was within your sphere of possibility. That largely hasn’t changed—lest we’ve all forgotten about the College Music Journal Festival that ended less than forty-eight hours ago.

Which brings me back to my wife’s original comment: why are we placing a judgment on such influences? Wilson titles his article "The Trouble with Indie Rock," the subhead "It's Not Just Race. It's Class." But indie rock as we know it traces its roots directly back to the college campus, when its sound was disseminated by the original arbiters of cool, those forerunners to today's mp3 blogs: college radio DJs. No wonder, really, that pseudo-intellectual bands like R.E.M. or Pavement ascended as they did. Why has that become "the trouble with indie rock" today? To make that claim—to label it a problem—would call into question the trajectory of the entire genre.

Any takers?

Bring In Da Noise, Leave Out Da Funk

There’s been a good deal of discussion this week about Sasha Frere-Jones’s article in the New Yorker, “A Paler Shade of White,” in which he laments the lack of black influence in indie rock. Yes, his claim is truly that dubious. Many other blogs have already dissected this article and its many flaws—most notably Status Ain’t Hood, the Existence Machine, and Clap Clap—so I won’t go into too much detail, other than to list the article’s three most significant flaws. As Richard Crary says at the Existence Machine, SFJ’s points are either “too vague and, as a result, largely dubious,” or “too specific, and hence sort of silly.”

First, as nearly everyone else has pointed out, SFJ is being too selective in his examples, picking on Arcade Fire but ignoring !!!, the Rapture, Battles, Amy Winehouse, Cold War Kids, White Stripes, Spoon, My Morning Jacket (check the reggae influence on Z), Tortoise (an egregious omission, coming from a guy who was in Ui), and of course the official (as of last week) biggest indie band on the planet, Radiohead. The percussion on at least half of In Rainbows is heavily influenced by jungle, which itself is based on sped-up hip hop beats.

Some of the bands I’ve mentioned there aren’t technically indie, though they do play to the indie audience (among other people)—and I didn’t even mention Beck or Bjork or Gnarles Barkeley (am I allowed to note actual black people or does that ruin the game?)—but that’s the second flaw in SFJ’s argument: he is arbitrarily lamenting the loss of black influence on “indie rock,” a term notoriously ill-fitting as a descriptor, as it can be applied to an aesthetic or to a business decision. SFJ himself doesn’t seem to hold himself to a concrete understanding of the term. He picks on Wilco, a band on a label owned by Warner, but then dispatches the entire genre of rap-rock in one dismissive statement.

Finally, most problematic for me is that SFJ deigns to draw these lines at all. By now—i.e., the twenty-first century—music has already passed through its postmodern stage and come out the other side. To say that concepts as broad as “rhythm” or “swing” are purely the forte of black music at this point is a little ridiculous. The sound of modern music is like the outcome of a game of telephone. For instance, many people are holding up LCD Soundsystem as an example refuting SFJ. James Murphy's act is obviously dance music, but his direct influences sound to these ears more European than African-American. Brandon Soderberg, in a comment to the Status Ain’t Hood post, made a similar point:

For example, James White & The Blacks were taking from James Brown and free jazz as well as punk-ish, nowaveish contemporaries. Now, one gets the sense that bands get their rhythmic influence from only stuff like James White and the Blacks.

My question to SFJ, then: is that necessarily a bad thing? Is a band inherently wrong in the execution of music-making to “only” be influenced by James White, and not James Brown? If the end result is good, it doesn’t really matter.

SFJ seems to implicitly acknowledge that the black influence is so ubiquitous that it’s nearly pointless to try and identify, for he doesn’t go after modern-day groups that incorporate elements of jazz or blues or gospel (the Killers!) in their music: he only goes after the one genre of music that is still explicitly tied to black culture: hip hop. And frankly that is where his whole argument finally derails. There is an entire genre of music dedicated to the white co-optation of hip hop, and SFJ himself notes that it fucking sucks. He further digs his own hole at his blog, where the conversation continued. A reader pointed out the ludicrous attempt to “devote an entire section of your article to white rappers without mentioning any of the successful indie/underground examples… like Aesop Rock or El-P.” SFJ’s response was that he ignored those acts—get this!—because they weren’t popular enough!

Eminem is the rapper known to people all over the world, just as Zeppelin was the rock band that everyone knew. What struck me was how many good blues-derived rock bands of the seventies there were and how few white rappers (really only one) are big, good, and important. I have lots of time for Atmosphere and El-P and MC Chris, without thinking hard. I was simply trying to outline the pop landscape against which indie rock is working.

Which brings us back to just how SFJ is defining his parameters. Indie rap is covered fairly extensively by indie rock outlets (just yesterday Pitchfork ran a news item on the possible reunion of Company Flow), so how are these artists not working against the same pop landscape? Why exclude independent white rappers, yet attack an alt-country band on a major-label subsidiary, and try to use that as an example of how “indie rock” has lost its soul?

Update: my brilliant wife read the New Yorker article last night and made three excellent points.

1. Did he really ask why Devendra Banhart doesn't rip off R. Kelly? I'll tell you why: he's too busy mining Latin music. Miscegenation lives!
2. Where would Brian Wilson be if doo-wop (and choral music) didn't come first? Viva miscegenation!
3. Seriously, the guy makes a lot of interesting, possibly valid points—but why does he place a value judgment on them?

Can't Talk; Hyping Part IV: Coalescence

[Continued from part I, part II, part III]

Is music the ultimate Cliffs Notes version of emotional experience? Must writers inevitably be a bit jealous?

The above quote comes from Alec Hanley Bemis, from an LA Weekly roundtable he moderated between Rick Moody, Jonathan Lethem, and John Darnielle on the intersection between literature and music—an intersection that resonates with me, since those are my two main interests. Second only to music blogs, I check litblogs daily for news from the publishing world, reviews, reviews of reviews, tips on new authors, and think pieces. Typical stops for me include the Reading Experience, the Elegant Variation, Conversational Reading, Black Garterbelt, and many others.

On bad days, these blogs can be no more than news aggregating circle jerks, each pointing to the others, all linking to the same articles with little analysis—much like music blogs’ worst days. But on their best days, this network of amateurs (many began as such, at least—some have graduated to non-blog bylines and book deals) coalesces into a running conversation, borne from a news item or one blogger’s personal musings or, sometimes deliciously, from direct antagonism by the mainstream media.

I draw the parallel between litblogs and music blogs because it throws into relief a potential yet to be fully realized by music blogs, which is to be a dynamic, ongoing interblog conversation, as opposed to an unthinking echo chamber: OMG ARCADE FIRE COVERED VIOLENT FEMMES!!! via You Ain’t No Picasso via Brooklyn Vegan via Stereogum via via via via.

One thing litblogs and music blogs have in common: they both have an entire industry wringing its hands over their long-term effect. What they don’t have in common: the industry worried about music blogs is the industry those blogs ostensibly support—the music makers; publishers, on the other hand, must love litblogs. Never has there been more support shown to midlist authors—those authors who are given zero marketing & publicity support, for whom a single book review is not a given. Litblogs are granting visibility to a huge portion of the publishing world that previously had little to hope for, and the publishing industry fully supports that. Who hates litbloggers? Print critics, watching as their book review sections are minimized or cut altogether. Academics. Elitist dinosaurs who think the “permanence” of paper legitimizes their authority, compared to the “ephemeral” digital archives of these mere… book fans.

Unlike publishers, the music industry works with blogs only in the sense of keeping its enemies close. Reason being, of course, is the litblogs are trading in ideas and music blogs in product. Not to say that the music blogs aren’t doing a job on print media, too. As magazines like Rolling Stone or Spin stay focused on music news, they appear hopelessly out of date. Fluff pieces—who needs them? Reviews? They better be damn good. The thing is, the average music fan supposedly doesn’t want anything other than the music—who needs to write about it? That’s what many of them think, at least. But then again, who is reading Pitchfork? Because it didn’t cement its reputation on the Forkcast, which is a relatively new feature; it did so on its news, reviews, and columns: its writing, butt of jokes it often is. As I noted yesterday, “the Pitchfork effect” is apparently stronger than the more general “blog buzz" when it comes to impacting album sales. That must mean something.

I’d like to think it means that people do want context. That people do view music as an art form, not just a form of instant gratification, like Chips Ahoy. And like any good art form, music warrants—requires!—its own exchange of ideas outside of the making of the art itself. That's not to say this hasn't, or doesn't happen in music blogs. Dial "M" for Musicology, Offnotes, and Marathonpacks, to name just a few, talk music regularly. Each is frequently interesting; I guess I'd just like to see them and others come together more often, rather than what I perceive as musing in vacuums.

I said yesterday that the hype blogs somehow morphed from “sharing music” to “setting the agenda.” Talk about setting the agenda: why can’t music blogs coalesce, the way litblogs do, around an idea, an aesthetic, an artist, and push that which underlies all music—experience, emotion, sound, tone, lyric, attitude, distortion, volume, geography, history, memory—into the conversation? There’s more to it than the latest leak. Blogs, if they wanted, have the potential to affect music, not just to provide it.

Can't Talk; Hyping Part III: The Perpetual Debut Album

[Continued from yesterday: part I, part II.]

[W]hat about the bands from six months prior—Annuals, but also White Whale, Bound Stems, Tokyo Police Club, bands whose names even you, unfaithful reader, perhaps have already forgotten… I had begun to forget them, too.

Going back to the “Britainization” of the American music culture, there is an additional side effect to all this hype. Bill Wasik describes Annuals’ plight in his article:

[W]hy did so many of these bands disappear? What about the second album, or the third? Why did indie rock seem to have become wave after wave of disposable new bands? …. [KEXP DJ John] Richards said he now assumed that he would not even see second albums, no matter how good their sound. “Even an Annuals,” he said. “I’m not even thinking about a second album from them. I just assume that this is the document that I have.... You think: ‘This is a great movie—I hope there’s not a sequel.’“ But Richards acknowledged that he and the other indie-rock tastemakers bore some share of the blame. “A big deal with us is discovery,” he said. “And you’re discovering not just a song; you’re discovering a band. When you’re just discovering a second album, there’s not as much hype involved.”

One gripe you often hear when people are grousing about the music industry is the dearth of A&R people. Bands on corporate record labels are no longer given the opportunity to grow into their fans; they need to turn a profit within three months of their album’s release or their careers are in jeopardy.

Personally, I’m not too concerned with the fates of bands on corporate labels, and neither are most the blogs I read. We’re all supporting indies (or labelless bands), a culture that never supported the concept of an “A&R Guy” in the first place: bands developed their following through touring and word of mouth, and were given room to develop their sound by their fans. But now hype blogs and the “Pitchfork effect,” so wrapped up in breaking the new, are possibly eroding interest in subsequent albums, either by ignoring bands on their new work or by passing judgment months before an album officially drops. This could, theoretically, have similar detrimental effects on the long-term success of smaller bands, whose fan base has become more fickle, more distracted than in years past.

If a layman wants to be a part of the critical conversation, he or she must download the leak when the conversation is actually happening, possibly depriving the band and the label of a sale. What’s more, if that initial buzz (and that first mp3) is bad, the album is dead in the water—there’s too much new shit to keep up with to risk of purchasing an album that might not be good; or if the initial buzz is positive, it’s often expended well before the album hits, which dovetails instead with the backlash.

That’s not the hype blogs' fault—more so the fault of record labels that insist on abiding by the requisite long lead of print magazines. But until labels decide to put more stock in immediate word of mouth than in the review section of Spin or Paste (and it is happening—hello, Radiohead), then hype blogs’ rush to be first could sabotage the sales chances of the very bands they want to support.

The other side of that is that with so much hyperbole floating around out there, expectation for albums following the breakout record has never been higher, making it harder and harder for bands to grow into a more mature sound. The Shins, for instance, couldn’t possibly hope to live up to the infamous “This band will change your life” tag. But we’re told daily by blog after blog that this band, no this band, will change your life. Growing past your breakout album is a tall order. Annuals told Wasik that their plan was to retreat into different permutations of their band—each version led by a different member:

Annuals might be the perfect name, I realized, in a different way than I thought. Maybe their destiny is to be a march of bands in themselves…. Maybe they, and maybe we all, will learn to make art, to find narrative, in this churning, viral culture by embodying the churn, embracing it, by envisioning a life not as some decades-long epic, but as a succession of discretely plotted six-month shorts.

This reminded me of an article from the Believer magazine a few years back, “The Perpetual Debut Novelist,” by David Amsden, in which he imagined that he would change his name for every novel he published, so as to be showered with the press that is reserved for the rising stars of tomorrow. 

Call it the Era of the Debut Novel: where first-time authors receive treatment previously reserved for established writers; where an author’s entire career seems to pivot around his first published work; where important, reputable writers feel increasingly marginalized (because they increasingly are); where certain editors often seem to spend the bulk of their energy scurrying for the Next Great Debut as opposed to the Next Great Book; where the reading public, the bulk of whom couldn’t care less about any of this, is often repeatedly disappointed….

Then, if all goes well (which it often does not), by the time the book is actually published and reviewed something very funny has happened: it’s nearly impossible to remember that this is a first-time author who has, as yet, no Genuine Readers (and, no matter what, it’s still the Genuine Reader—he who reads for nothing more than an intense love of story and style, a fascination with the mutability of words, and a compulsive desire to simultaneously escape and learn through fantasy—that fuels the entire industry of literary publishing, or, at the very least, the artistic fantasies of the publishing industry.)

It’s not too difficult to apply this to music; just think of the Genuine Listener, who listens for nothing more than an intense love of lyric and chord, a fascination with the alchemy of sounds, and a compulsive desire to filter life and memory through song. As with the authors Amsden writes about, many of the bands proffered on hype blogs have no Genuine Listeners. For that we must buy albums, must sit with them, alone, undistracted, and hear them through our own ears, process them through the context of our own lives. For that, you've got to log off.

Later today, the last (planned) installment: Coalescence

Can't Talk; Hyping Part II: Check My Stats!

[continued from Part I]

“It’s officially October 1st, which means I’ve got 10 days to hype the crap out of Radiohead and their upcoming new album In Rainbows.”

When I read this post on I Guess I’m Floating, I took it facetiously; but guess what: that’s just what he did. As of the day I’m writing this post (Saturday) IGIF has done six Radiohead posts—all of which have been at best tangentially related to the new album. They’re b-sides, covers, videos, etc., all for the old stuff, with no real context other than ZOMG RADIOHEAD IN RAINBOWS ZOMG.

Compare IGIF’s week of Radiohead posts to Ned Ragget’s. Faced with the same anticipation for a new album that hasn’t leaked, Ragget wrote about Radiohead. He’s done a post apiece on each of Radiohead’s previous albums, intertwining personal reminiscences with discussion of the albums themselves. Ragget, like IGIF, supplies some instant-gratification youtube videos as well. The difference is that IGIF's posts are pure instant gratification, no meditation. To each his own, I suppose. You know which I prefer.

Of course, there’s little doubt which blog is getting more hits. I don’t doubt that IGIF is a Radiohead fan, but his series of arguably irrelevant posts is obviously calculated. Catbirdseat cynically made the same observation on the day the Radiohead announcement happened.

You know, I could give two shits about what, if anything, is going on with Radiohead, but I figured posting about the announcement of this In Rainbows thing, hoax or not, would be an interesting experiment for the old referrer logs. Let’s see.

A day or two later he posted his results: “something like this, times a gazillion.”

If posts like IGIF's (or the many other blogs that did Radiohead posts last week—he was hardly alone) are not calculated to get hits, then he and the other blogs have gotten wrapped up in the pressure to hype, rather than the desire to share. To what end? Are all of these bloggers big fans of Radiohead who are just way totally stoked and want you to be way totally stoked too? Or, as Ryan Catbird identified, is it all just a ploy for blog hits? These posts are only nominally intended to pump u up 4 radiohead. There’s a certain narcissism—a desperation to be noticed—inherent in these posts.

There’s even more cause for suspicion when it comes to the more popular blogs that are supported by ads. In a comment to a post I did here earlier this year, Catbird spelled it out even more explicitly:

The fact of the matter is, whether consciously or unconsciously, there are quite a few music blogs (and I’m not talking rinky-dink ones) that are almost surely motivated just by the struggle to stay on top, get super-high traffic numbers, and, by extension, get higher and higher ad payouts, side-deals, perks, swag, etc.

I mean, I’m not talking about $20 here or there, there is BIG FUCKING MONEY going out via ads to blogs. Thus, it becomes all about making sure there are many posts regularly throughout the day, *GUSHING* about everything (I mean, Christ, how can every other post be about THIS IS DEFINITELY A CONTENDER FOR TOP ALBUM OF THE YEAR?), securing “exclusives” and “premieres”, etc. etc.

I’m not gonna throw out figures here, but if you’re curious, go to blogads.com, click on “choose ads a la carte,” look up some of the blogs you want to find out about, note down their current number of ads and their rates, and then multiply that out over the course of a year. You might want to figure in a few hundred, upwards to an extra thousand per mo., if the site has other, non blogads ads running too (banners, etc.).

When we’re talking about thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars.... is it still just “all about the music?” I highly doubt it.

Money or no, the hype often seems to be driven by a need for hits—for status, for potential influence. (That, or the need to not seem out of the loop.) Between hyping the "right" band—the one you know people are searching for—and the pressure to post new content daily, if not multiple times per day, most mp3 blog posts lack the more modest ring of guys, i like this band!

You forget that half these blogs are outsiders in shitty apartments in Pensacola or Indianapolis, who likely started their little blogs because they loved music. Worse, they forget.

They post about multiple new bands per day with little articulation of what’s worthwhile about them, aside from an audio clip, myspace link, a list of tour dates, and—not always—a perfunctory they’re grrrreat! I guess they’re assuming the music will speak for itself. Ultimately it does, of course, but rarely are mp3 blogs a true reflection of one person’s tastes. There was a time when it seemed like most blogs were digging for new music. More recently, the passion seems to have been replaced by some kind of faux professionalism. At best they tell you what’s good, not what’s great. They’re giving you all the dirt: you do the digging.

Tomorrow, Part III: The Perpetual Debut Album

Can't Talk; Hyping Part I: First on the Scene, to What End?

“Get ready to get sick of hearing about this band”—it would be difficult to think of a more apt motto for indie rock in the age of the Internet.

So writes Bill Wasik in his terrific article “Hype Machine,” part of the Oxford American’s annual music issue (via Catbirdseat). Today, between the non-event that was Arcade Fire’s boring video for a boring song on a boring website and the über-event that is Radiohead’s new album, I thought I’d use Wasik’s article as a jumping-off point to get into some of the issues touched on in the Rock Critics Roundtable I mentioned last week.

Wasik’s article is really about the band Annuals, but he charts the last year or two of their career as a case study in what it means to be an indie rock band in the age of mp3 blogs and Pitchfork. He begins with “the Pitchfork effect”:

Once Pitchfork blesses an act, any mention of that act on other blogs needs to be accompanied by an acknowledgment that one has lagged terribly behind the times. On September 7, Stereogum.com not only quoted Pitchfork’s review [which ran on July 18] but wrote, “The hype machine”—by which they presumably meant blogs like themselves, because not a single dollar had yet gone into promoting the new band—”has been in motion for this band, so we feel sorta silly calling them a Band to Watch (we know, we know...you blogged about them first.)” Even so, the first comment, just fifteen minutes after the post, began with one word in all caps: “DUH.” By September 18, Idolator… could pull back for a world-weary dissection of the new band as phenomenon, complete with “Odds of Backlash,” which it placed at five-to-one. On October 5, when Rolling Stone magazine’s “Rock & Roll Daily” blog finally weighed in, with an unctuous pronouncement of phony hipness—”Trust us on this one: you guys are gonna seriously sweat us for introducing you” to this band—commenter “nick” unloaded with justifiably righteous scorn:

yeah...everyone is really gonna “sweat you” for being (LITERALLY) the last blog on the Internet to write baout (sic) these guys.

Wasik, in effect, draws a line between Pitchfork and the rest of the indie music blog world. Though as he indicates, the lag time between a mention on Pitchfork and the rest of the blogs is practically nil—assuming Pitchfork is even first, which it often isn’t. It’s hard to pinpoint how “the Pitchfork effect” is at all different from the rest. But in the Rock Critics Roundtable, Idolator’s Maura Johnston asserts that there is, indeed, a way to measure the effect:

I see SoundScan numbers every week, and while you could argue that some bands’ promotional pushes might be helped by their being mentioned on music blogs, the music blog world does not at all have the impact that Pitchfork has at this point.

I’d be curious to hear from Johnston how she is able to differentiate. Assuming that’s the case, though, it makes the existence of most mp3 blogs—those that seem to be regurgitating press releases and offering little critical content—somewhat mystifying. mp3 blogs’ greatest function, of course, is to turn us onto something we otherwise wouldn’t have heard before. But on the other hand it seems that there are less and less mp3 bloggers out there who are purely concerned with sharing their personal discoveries (and hopefully articulating what they like), and more and more who have become a conduit for press releases. As David Moore said in the Roundtable, “The ‘professionalization’ of the blogosphere toward what amounts to a big network of cable news tickers is disheartening.”

The blogosphere is typically portrayed as a cacophony of amateurs, taking consumerism into their own, unmediated hands. It’s supposedly got major labels, record stores, and print publications all wringing their hands. But have bloggers begun believing their own hype? Where once bloggers had to do their own digging, out of simple love for music, labels have now begun coming straight to them when they want to give a promotional push. This provides a kind of false validation of mp3 blogs, as if they are no longer amateur fans but rather part of some industry. Actually, they’re just being manipulated into setting a pre-planned agenda. Johnston, again:

The concept of the “promo MP3”—the MP3 that is sent to MP3 bloggers and is legal to post for “hey this record is coming out” purposes—serves to focus bloggers’ energies/bring the blog world more in line with other marketing efforts. This has resulted in the charts on elbo.ws and the Hype Machine top 10 being generally populated by a crowd of usual suspects—right now it’s Iron & Wine and Animal Collective, for example. There hasn’t been a band that’s been “broken” by blogs in a long while, and I’d argue that the efforts by labels and promotional companies to work with bloggers/make sure that they aren’t distributing entire albums over the Internet piecemeal is a big reason for that.

When labels come directly to the bloggers, those bloggers start to think maybe they could, actually, compete with/enhance “the Pitchfork effect.” Where the aim, previously, was to share music, now the bloggers are more interested in setting the agenda. It is a perhaps subtle but significant difference.  Carl Wilson, in the Roundtable, offers his two cents:

MP3 blogs… turned the music-blog scene into an acquisitive feeding frenzy which spares little time for reflection and contemplation. It’s a shame, as the earliest mp3 blogs such as Said the Gramophone and Fluxblog present an entirely different model, but few are the people who have followed in their model, compared to the here’s-the-latest-leak-with-200-words-of-hype model. The earlier, more criticism-oriented bloggers lost some focus and, more so, I think, have been turned off by all that.

While I certainly see the use of discerning mp3 blogs, I would contend that that this race to be first is actually hurting the overall music environment. The last time I did a post on this subject, I compared mp3 blogs to NME; Wilson makes the same comparison when he says the North American music culture has been “Britainized” by mp3 blogs—i.e., that music trends “now follows the rapid rise-and-fall cycles that people long mocked the NME etc for causing.” Following the latest happenings in our music culture has become so breakneck that the critical conversation is all but left in the dust. As Wasik says in his article, “To be an insider today one must merely be fast.”

Later today, Part II: Check My Stats!

Rock Critics Roundtable

New-to-me blog Rock Critics has gathered five prominent music bloggers—Maura Johnston of Idolator, Rich Juzwiak of fourfour and the VH1 Blog, David Moore of Cure for Bedbugs, Simon Reynolds of Blissblog, and Carl Wilson of Zoilus—for a roundtable discussion about the state of music blogs. Well, they call it a roundtable; really they asked each blogger the same ten questions, apparently answered by email unaware of what the other four were saying. This is ironic since the nature of many of the questions had to do with the potential for music blogs to create a real dialogue, and whether or not that’s really happening.

Some of the bloggers that have been around longer thought that there was once a time when that was the case, but for whatever reason it’s not like that any more. They credit the rise of the rapid-fire mp3 blogs, or bloggers simply giving up due to time constraints or throwing up their hands at too many nasty flare-ups between fellow music writers. Yet when asked what they’d like to see from blogs in the future, they were near-unanimous in wanting to see more inter-blog dialogue, more in-depth writing, more personal perspectives, less press-release-as-blog-post, less gossip.

I’m in! More to come next week.

Previously on pgwp:

• Where are the Music Critics?
• Critics Found: Navel-Gazing in Seattle

I Think It's Time You Met the Beatles

I realized lately that for all my declarations, it’s been a while since I’ve really written about music (as opposed to the music industry). That’s partly because I spent most of this summer picking up more musical blind spots—albums I’ve never actually “processed” from beginning to end as the artist intended, despite knowing many or all the songs as filtered through thirty years of living on planet earth.

I was chatting with a friend of mine about this via email. We’ve known each other for fifteen years—we met in high school teaching each other different parts of “Holy Wars” in guitar class.  I was telling him about the many blind spots I’ve been filling in and his response was “You know, I always wondered if you were ever going to get into classic rock.” He was happy that we could talk about bands and albums that have been part of his musical language his entire life—it’s simply what he grew up with (me, I grew up with folkies). But at the same time, it’s a little shaming. I can’t help it: I’ve been a freak for music since I was a kid, but in the last few years I’ve really come to realize that much of my knowledge of pop’s history is more casual than I'd like.

The first record I ever owned was Meet the Beatles. A fitting first record, I think, and my parents had to have known that. (But why, when I was in kindergarten, did they buy Meet the Beatles for me, and not my older brother or sister? Did they see something in me at that young age? That album—purchased for me—was the only Beatles album in the house. But I digress.) Anyway, it was the only Beatles album I ever owned until I was a sophomore in college, when one of my roommates gave me Sgt. Peppers, again on vinyl, as a gift. The next Beatles album to land in my possession—Revolver—was a gift yet again, six years later, this time from my wife. Third time was the charm: I finally felt the need to fill in the entire discography (something I’m still working on, actually, though close to complete.)

There’s something a little poetic that my first three Beatles albums would come as gifts from these three people—parents to son; best friend to best friend; wife to husband. How's the song go? “Love, love, love?”

But still. I mean, it’s fucked up. I was 28 when I finally decided for myself that it was time to go to the record store and exchange dollar bills for an album by the greatest pop group of all time. Oh, and this was five years after my stint as a record store employee. Truly it’s unforgivable.

Of course it’s ludicrous to think I never “knew” the Beatles, despite never sitting down, alone—that part’s important—with one record from beginning to end. They’re simply too ubiquitous to not understand on a more than casual level whether you want to or not. Nevertheless it’s a significant experience to listen to Revolver and understand that “Taxman” came first, followed by “Eleanor Rigby,” and so on. To truly understand the Beatles beyond merely expert crafters of pop songs—to grasp each member’s role within the context of the album, how Lennon’s songs played off McCartney’s, how Harrison nearly steals the whole show in his rare appearances, even how Ringo’s one-song-per-album injects a necessary type of levity into each release (and importantly, to note that there is a variety of kinds of levity on each Beatles album)—can only be done through processing the album itself. Tracks out of context can be exquisite, but for the best artists a mere single is ultimately unfulfilling.

It was really a revelation though because here I thought I knew every freakin’ Beatles song ever written simply by dint of being alive. But it’s a whole ’nother experience when you hear them in proper order, as the band intended. Despite thinking there was nothing new to understand, even at age 28 it was like hearing them for the first time. As my friend said, “the first time is always like fucking Christmas!”

And for that matter it’s important not only to listen to an entire album from beginning to end, but to experience a discography, as I’ve been doing steadily for the Beatles—and many other groups—in the last many years. I’ll revisit this idea in the coming weeks (starting next week when I get into my quarterly installment of My Listening Hours).

I suppose I’m just navel-gazing. In fact I sat down to write this post not because I’m on a Beatles kick (I’m on a Byrds kick); and not because I wanted to even write about the Beatles (I was going to write about R.E.M.—boy, you should’ve seen the rough draft of this post!). Really what I wanted to get at is that thrill of discovery, so often followed by a bout of self-agonizing: why didn’t I know about this before?

There are a thousand bands or albums that can give you this feeling. My example of the Beatles is extreme, but surely we all experience this feeling regularly. Last year I heard Television’s Marquee Moon for the very first time and it had the same effect. What was your last revelation/humiliation?

Just Gimme Indie Wha??

Richard Crary pointed me to Charlie Wilmoth’s review of The Reminder over at Dusted, which begins to raise some of the issues I’ve touched on here and in some comments at the Existence Machine. Wilmoth doesn’t so much review Feist’s album as he does use it to talk about some other issues—namely the disappearance of lo-fi recording in indie rock. Gone are the days of Sebadoh and Beat Happening, where whole albums were made from 4-tracks because that’s all these people could afford. These days, if anyone is making an album with that equipment, it’s an aesthetic choice, not a necessity.

Wilmoth’s observation is a good one, though it might have packed more punch in the context of Elliott Smith’s newest, since Smith is arguably the last significant artist to squeeze genius out of a 4-track (and subsequently lose some of his genius once he had every trick at his disposal). I’m not sure why Wilmoth would choose a major-label release by an artist who has never claimed to have roots in lo-fi (in fact Wilmoth admits this slight absurdity his review). His ultimate complaint seems to be that Feist used her major label–quality recording equipment to make a record that is not very challenging—whereas if she were limited by budget and technology, it might have pushed her to make something more visceral. I can’t ride that train all the way to Wilmoth’s destination, however. His wish for Feist to be “more amateur” is ridiculous given that she’s done nothing with her career other than prove that she’s far from amateur—she’s versatile and commanding, both on record and on stage, solo or in support of others.

But Wilmoth’s observation concerning The Reminder’s many smooth corners, and his discomfort with that as he tries to place Feist within a Pitchfork (or Dusted)-approved context, points to a similar idea I’ve been circling for a while now—namely that Feist is trading in what Wilmoth dubs “Adult Alternative.” He writes:

The less obvious effect that technology is having on indie rock is that the punk spirit of so much ’80s and ’90s indie is just about gone from many of the biggest records. You can now buy the Shins’ latest album at Starbucks. And when I hear the Shins, or Death Cab for Cutie, I mostly hear a very beautiful-sounding brand of bougie, thirtysomething myopia. Even when the Shins’ lyrics drip with bitterness, and even when Ben Gibbard sings about his estrangement from the church, the underlying message is that everything is okay, or at least that everything is okay beyond the world of the narrators' personal lives. Their music is perfect, professional, and Starbucks-friendly. As much as I enjoy many aspects of both bands’ music, there is something wrong with this picture.

It may seem absurd to mention Sebadoh’s III in the context of a review of a record like The Reminder, which was released on a major label and features an opener (“So Sorry”) that could easily be mistaken for Norah Jones. And, after all, Leslie Feist has received a huge career boost from NPR. So why not just acknowledge that it’s Adult Alternative fodder and let it be?

Again, I’m not so sure the onset of Adult Alternative is the fault of technology, but nevertheless there does seem to be such a genre, one that didn’t exist five or six years ago but which has quietly come into existence on any thirtysomething indie rocker’s iPod. Feist is far from the only one to occupy this territory. The newest Sea & Cake record, for instance, is so free of rough edges it’s practically dust. KCRW’s celebrated music programming is filled to the gills with underground soft rock. Even my beloved Midlake has garnered their fair share of comparisons to America.

Have we been snookered? How can I read Pitchfork every morning and enjoy an album so palatable my mother-in-law might even like it? How can Pitchfork swoon over that album with an 8.8 rating?

Since Wilmoth uses Sebadoh as his foil to Feist, let’s travel back in time, to the days when indie rock was so fucking new Lou Barlow hadn’t even written a song about it yet. Sebadoh’s first album, The Freed Man, was released in 1989. That same year the Who infamously embarked on their 25th anniversary reunion tour. “What happened to ‘Hope I Die Before I Get Old’?” the baby boomers lamented—not so much because they didn’t want to rock out with their spouses and children to “Pinball Wizard”; they just realized that, like 3/4 of the Who, they did not die before they got old. The irony that the anti-establishment g-g-generation had become the establishment had officially dawned. It’s okay that the spirit of the song no longer makes sense; I just want to hear that song again.

Around the same time, boomers were upgrading their music collections from vinyl to the relatively newfangled format, the CD. They headed to their local Tower with the intention of buying Exile on Main Street, but they came out with the new James Taylor, too. Worse, they didn’t even bother re-buying any Kinks albums; they bought Kenny G instead.

Fast forward to present day. Now that indie rock itself is as old as the Who were in 1989, it is perhaps not surprising that there is such a thing as indie rock for parents—that same combination of mellowing contemporary tastes and a nostalgia for bygone rockers. Even Lou Barlow is in on it: Dinosaur Jr.’s back together. It’s the same disconnect found in our parents' record collections.

Which brings me back around to Feist and Adult Alternative. We’ve been listening to punk, alternative, indie, underground—whatever you want to call it, not mainstream—pretty much our entire lives. Why, now that we are married and are having kids, would we suddenly abandon our innate distrust of mainstream music, even if our tastes are, perhaps inevitably, mellowing? Fuck no I’m not going to buy today’s popular equivalent to Kenny G—but I’m considering buying the new Air. How’s that for a middle finger to the mainstream? Just gimme indie dinner music!

The ultimate question, finally, is this: so what? Wilmoth is onto something when he alludes to a sort of discomfort in acknowledging that the easiness of Feist’s sound is precisely what makes her records so beguiling, all the while reconciling that with your inner teenager, who would sooner punch his head through a wall than sing along with “Brandy Alexander.” But overcoming one’s inner college rock snob is a personal battle. I’m waging mine. How’s yours going?