Pretty Goes with Pretty

Soundtrack to a Marriage

Today is our tenth wedding anniversary. Ten years! A few things have happened since then: moved from Arizona to New York to start our life together. Found great jobs and great friends while we were there. Jill schooled me on classic films. We lived in a giant empty loft in an industrial building in Williamsburg with little more than a mattress and two incredibly uncomfortable kitchen chairs. We moved to another part of Brooklyn and had a super named Ralph who'd say things like "Yous Guys." I tried to write a novel. We went to Paris in 2004--Jill's first time to Europe. We lived in Nolita in an apartment with a fantastic closet but a bed three feet from the ceiling. We moved to Los Angeles in 2005 and put some roots down, moved our careers forward. We embraced the beauty of LA--hikes through the hills, beaches in the fall. We got lost in a bamboo forest on Maui. We started doing weird things like exercising. I became a tennis fan. We went to Greece for two weeks and it was the most beautiful trip I've ever been on. We had Cooper. Jill became a runner--she went from not being able to run for more than a couple minutes to running a half marathon in a little over two hours, eight months later. Among other things.

I could make a hundred different mixes to describe our last ten years together, but I've settled on this one because it feels like time traveling. For every year that we've been married, I've chosen a song or an artist that we, as a unit, played the hell out of in that year. Some of these songs we still play the hell out of, others we haven't listened to in forever. Some years had a lot of contenders, others didn't.

• 2001 | Bjork: Hidden Place
• 2002 | The Decemberists: Shiny
• 2003 | The Radio Dept.: Where Damage Isn't Already Done
• 2004 | Feist: Mushaboom
• 2005 | The Ruby Lee: Skies as Blue
• 2006 | Midlake: Head Home
• 2007 | Andrew Bird: Heretics
• 2008 | Little Joy: The Next Time Around
• 2009 | Animal Collective: Bluish
• 2010 | The Radio Dept.: This Time Around

I don't think there is a qualifying song for 2011, or not yet. So let's conclude the mix by taking it back to this day, ten years ago, to our first dance.

• Low: Two-Step

What is Happening in the Back Seat

—"I like this but I wish I was hearing it as a sixteen year old."

—"You think you can't like this and be an adult?"

—"I just want to be in a car filled with my friends and we're all singing along to every word at the top of our lungs."

—"We can sing along to it now."

—"But the back seat should be full of our friends. Three friends on the seat and at least one more sitting on someone's lap."

—"We have friends who would sing along with us."

—"It needs to be 3:30 in the afternoon and we need to be on the way to a McDonalds or someone's house to watch MTV."

—"You want to go home and watch Parental Control?"

—"I want to be a teenager while this song is playing."

—"Let's sing along."

—"No."

—"It's a shame you don't know how to enjoy some things."

—"In four months there'll be a car seat back there."

—"And in sixteen years he'll borrow the car so he and his friends can drive around and sing along to a song just like this one at the top of their lungs."

• Ida Maria: Oh My God

My Listening Hours: The Rest of April–June

With so many albums purchased in a short amount of time, you can imagine that some albums spent less time in my iPod than others. These are the albums—some quite good, others mediocre—that for whatever reason simply didn't latch onto me all the way. As for the worst of the bunch, come back a little later today and I'll run down that list too.

The Fiery Furnaces, Widow City
Kim Gordon put it pretty well when she was asked for her current playlist by the New York Times a couple weeks ago:

“Widow City” feels like a song cycle, the way some things repeat themselves. One song seems to lead to the next, almost like an opera.... This record is incessant, it’s so wordy and dense, it wakes you up. It’s almost annoying and irritating to listen to, but it’s also compelling. The lyrics seem kind of obsessive. It pulls you along with it. The lyrics are fragments of meaning that you could maybe relate to, but I don’t mind that I don’t know what the heck she’s talking about. The lyrics are very filmic. There are images that don’t make sense. It’s kind of an act of suspended disbelief listening to it...

Really, there's not a whole lot else to say. Okay, I'll say this: I think Widow City is bordering on totally brilliant. I would say I was obsessive about this record except for the fact that it is (intentionally) a little irritating and a lot difficult. It's not an easy listen. I actually have interior arguments with myself about whether or not I want to put it on: "I can't get 'Philadelphia Grand Jury' or 'Clear Signal from Cairo' out of my head! I should put this album on!" "Jesus, don't put this album on. It is exhausting; it doesn't know if it wants to sit or stand." I've only had the album for a couple weeks now; perhaps if I'd owned it longer it would have made into yesterday's batch of albums. It's difficult for me to tell, at the moment, whether I'll keep coming back to this album or whether, ultimately, I'll never go back to it again.

• The Fiery Furnaces, The Philadelphia Grand Jury

The Little Ones, Terry Tales & Fallen Gates
I like this album—I swear!—though I do wish it were just a hair better. I still eagerly look forward to the full-length, to be released some time this summer, supposedly. I am confidently optimistic that their best tunes are still ahead of them—hopefully just a month or two ahead of them.

• The Little Ones, Unlock the Door!

The Byrds, Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde
The Byrds are probably my #1 favorite pre-1980s band. (Getting into all-time rankings, off the top of my head, they gotta start wrestling with R.E.M. at the very least.) They’re a relatively new discovery for me—my brilliant wife turned me onto Younger than Yesterday about four years ago—but in the last couple years I’ve slowly been picking up their albums in chronological order. Hence last year you've seen me going on about The Notorious Byrd Brothers and Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Now I’m officially out of the original-lineup territory. Dr. Byrds was the first album for which Roger McGuinn assembled an entirely new band—and rather hastily, I might add. Their resulting first outing is… okay. The title of the album refers to constant shifting between the country direction they’d been heading in over the last two albums and a more psychedelic sound closer in intent to Fifth Dimension. The genre-jumping isn’t too jarring—that’s not the flaw. It’s just not that special. I hear it gets better (then worse). Untitled is next on the list, as soon as I see it used at Amoeba.

• The Byrds, This Wheel's on Fire

R.E.M., Accelerate
So, given what I just said above, you can imagine I was in line for the new R.E.M. My expectations were in check, though. I’d heard “Supernatural Superserious” and thought it was okay but not amazing. It’s difficult to talk about a new R.E.M. album without addressing the albatross that is everything post-Bill Berry, so just for the record: I like most of the post-Berry stuff just fine. Sure, Around the Sun was 90% turd, but Up and Reveal—especially Reveal—get a huge bum rap. So my approach to a new R.E.M. is not “will they ever halt their downward slide?” but rather “I hope their one and only crap album was just an aberration.”

That said, Accelerate. It’s perfectly solid and totally mediocre. I won’t skip the songs when they come up on shuffle—does that count for anything? It gets HUGE props for avoiding anything resembling “The Outsiders,” the trainwreck of a collaboration with Q-Tip from the last album which by the way was the lowest point in the band’s history. At the same time, there’s nothing on this album that is better than “The Ascent of Man,” which was the high point of Around the Sun. Points for rocking, but I’m not convinced they mean it. The suit doesn’t quite fit like it used to.

• R.E.M., Houston

The Beau Brummels, Triangle and Bradley’s Barn
The Beau Brummels were a group of also-rans from the the 60s California scene. Perhaps if they'd moved south from San Francisco to Laurel Canyon they might have had a little more success. Their music fits in well with that scene—a mixture of rock, folk, and country (the latter more apparent on Bradley's Barn than on Triangle). Sal Valentino's voice is the defining trait of the band's sound; it's a deep voice with a natural vibrato (think a more masculine Devandra Banhart), up front in the mix and seldom layered with any harmonies. It's a unique voice but iit can also become a little wearying after a full album. I'm finding that I like the BBs most when I hear single tracks pop up on shuffle, rather than listening to ten in a row.

• The Beau Brummels, Are You Happy? (from Triangle)
• The Beau Brummels, Deep Water (from Bradley's Barn)

Chris Bell, I Am the Cosmos
When I became enamored with Big Star’s #1 Record, I had no idea just how much of that was due to Chris Bell. I guess I just didn’t get how much of a presence he was on the album (it doesn’t help that his and Alex Chilton’s voices are not that distinct from each other). Thankfully a few of you commenters steered me to Bell’s one and only solo album. Any Big Star fans out there who, like me, love #1 Record but are cooler on Radio City and Third/Sister Lover, seek this one out. It’s by no means a perfect record—there’s a lot of religiosity that puts me off, and some of the 70s-isms just don’t work—but when Bell goes soft, as on “You and Your Sister,” it’s like returning to the best ballads of Big Star’s debut. Over the long haul—I’ve had the album for almost three months now—I don’t feel drawn to keep putting it on; but I’ve made a little Fantasy Big Star album, made up of my favorite tracks from this, Radio City, and Third/Sister Lover, which does a good job of simulating the ideal follow-up to #1 Record.

• Chris Bell, I Am the Cosmos

Bob Lind, Since There Were Circles
I came across this album via a post by Brendan at The Rising Storm, where I fell in love with the country-inflected "Loser." Lind's voice occupies similar territory as Neil Diamond or Lee Hazelwood—which I'm inclined to describe as "sandpapery." Lind isn't as creepy as Hazelwood or as robust as Diamond, though. He's got a little more ache in his delivery. The majority of this album is solid if not spectacular, with both "Loser" and the title track being the biggest standouts. I get a real kick out the chorus to the latter: "How long have I loved you? Since there were circles." Wow. That's a really long time. In all seriousness, though, I think the song has a real gravity to it. His love is not lighthearted, nor is it stalkerish; he's simply not joking around. 

• Bob Lind, Since There Were Circles

Fairport Convention, Unhalfbricking
This was my first Fairport Convention album, though they've been on my radar for quite a long time. I'd been advised in the past to begin with Liege & Leaf, but darn it if the library didn't have that one. So Unhalfbricking it had to be. No matter: I quite like the album, or half of it at least. To some degree it's still sinking in with me; I don't feel like I've fully digested it yet, despite I-don't-know-how-many listens. The freer, looser material resonates with me a lot more than the Ye Olde Traditional stuff. Hence I think "A Sailor's Life," with its rustling rhythms in the beginning morphing into a guitar/violin jam are fantastic, while the more traditional folk style of "Cajun Woman" is, for me, less compelling.

• Fairport Convention, Who Knows Where the Time Goes

The Tough Alliance, A New Chance
Not a bad record, though a little repetitive (and cheesy as all get out). I wish the singer had a little more range or knew a few more melodies, as the tracks get harder and harder to differentiate as the album goes on. That said, not a bad workout record, though it's really just not where my head is at right now. Can you tell I'm not the one in the family that picked this album up? I'm ambivalent.

• The Tough Alliance, Looking for Gold

 

The Little Ones: Terry Tales & Fallen Gates

“Sometimes being happy means being corny.”
                                                        —my brilliant wife

It’s nice to hear from the Little Ones again. Their debut EP, Sing Song, came out in 2006 and seemed to be re-released two or three times over. When I picked it up at the time, I said it was great, straightforward indie pop, if nothing groundbreaking. A year and a half later, it turns out I still put Sing Song on pretty regularly. Last week my wife and I tooled along the PCH from Malibu to Manhattan Beach blaring the six songs out our open windows, car-dancing the whole way. You just can’t help but clap in time to every breakdown and chant along with every Oh, La, and Hey. [Actually, looking at what I wrote about Sing Song back in early 07, you'd think all we ever did was listen to the Little Ones while driving up the coast. Pure coincidence.]

The Little Ones have a full-length slated for release this summer (care to place your bets on who’s gonna have the indie rock summer jam?), but in the meantime they’re serving up one more EP. My first impression was similar to my first impression of their debut—sounds like pretty straightforward indie pop. The real question is whether Terry Tales lodges itself in my pleasure centers as comfortably as Sing Song.

In other words, this time around I’ve got higher expectations, and the first few listens forced comparisons to the debut. Terry Tales is still high-energy, though all those fun-filled breakdowns are gone. No handclaps! No chanting! No—wait a second: was that a steel drum?

I listened to Terry Tales at home on my computer, not totally feeling it. I listened to it on my iPod while taking the bus to work in the morning—again not feeling it, to the point that I started creating negative associations. My wife accuses me of lapsing into negativity with nearly everything I listen to; nevertheless I started envisioning Terry Tales as the soundtrack to some kind of ABC Family made-for-TV movie. "Boracay"—yes, with its steel drum (!)—or the similarly tropically inclined “Unlock the Door!” could play over a montage of Zack and Cody living up the suite life while on a Hawaiian vacation.

And then I listened to it again, this time—where else?—in the car, with my brilliant wife, windows down, tooling along the PCH. Suddenly Terry Tales was the funnest album in the world. My wife shouted over the music—completely free of cynicism—“It’s like Radio Disney!” I said to her how the album was having a completely different effect on me here in the car, with her, car-dancing down the coast. “Of course!” she said. “The Little Ones are like the soundtrack to total happiness!”

In other words, she had the same reaction as I did—family friendly, perfect for montages—only she embraced it on first listen and it took me four or five spins to warm up. “But the steel drum is pretty corny, right?” I said. To which she replied—well, you know what she said. It is kind of missing the point to critique the Little Ones for appealing to the most childlike pleasures—it’s right there in their band name, on their album covers, in their gleefully wide-eyed stage show.

In the end, Terry Tales has completely worn down my cynical side and won me over. We’ve learned the lyrics, we're singing along. The windows are down, the PCH is jammed, and the lady in the car next to us is wondering what the hell has got my wife and I bouncing around like teenagers.

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.]

My Listening Year: Best Discoveries of 2007 (Blind Spot Edition)

2007 was a great year for new releases, but even better for all the blind spots I filled in. I unintentionally had a very 70s year—seventeen out of my twenty-eight blind spot purchases were released in that decade. That's a good thing. Talk about blind spots: as a whole, I think the 70s were one of the least represented decades in my collection until this year.

Elvis Costello, Imperial Bedroom [mp3: "Human Hands"]
Hands down the biggest surprise of the year for me. I'd already made my mind up about Costello—I like him, but I don't like him like him. So when I picked up Imperial Bedroom and This Year's Model, it was really a matter of "eh, why not?" I was so ambivalent about it that I didn't even listen to Imperial Bedroom right away. Good thing I finally did, as the album turned out to be among my most-listened-to albums of the year. Like I said about Armchair Apocrypha last week, this is one of those wonderful albums where every song, at one point or another, is your favorite song. For the first time I consider myself a fan of Costello's, and will likely pick up more of his albums in the near future (starting with those from the same era as Bedroom.)

Big Star, #1 Record [mp3: "The India Song"]
As with Costello, I had no real expectations for Big Star, and picked up #1 Record/Radio City on a lark. Based on Third/Sister Lover, I thought I'd already made up my mind. I'm so thankful I gave these guys another chance! I've been listening to #1 Record pretty obsessively since getting it a couple months ago. My sense is that this might be the only Alex Chilton album I really need, however. The other Big Star albums, to my ears, descend in quality (Radio City is pretty good, not great, and Third/Sister Lover is unfocused). Somebody help me out—does his solo material change tack?

The Byrds, The Notorious Byrd Brothers [mp3: "Wasn't Born to Follow"]
Going into 2007, I knew it was going to be a year for the Byrds.  And it was: I picked up three Byrds albums total, in addition to the three I already owned. They were all great, each in their own way, but The Notorious Byrd Brothers sets itself apart in my eyes. For all the accolades Sweetheart of the Rodeo gets, Notorious is a far more interesting fusion of country and rock because it is more subtle. Gram Parsons's contributions to Sweetheart are fine, but they're also totally transparent, in that they simply are country and bluegrass, sharing album space with McGuinn's folk-rock tunes. Notorious is, from beginning to end, a Byrds album which has integrated the lapsteel and largely set the twelve-string acoustic aside. Crosby's excellent harmonies are still there, and neither Parsons nor Dylan's fingerprints are anywhere to be seen. It's not the perfect Byrds album (in fact, I don't think there is one), but it's the most interesting. It's still the Byrds, but you can hear, quite obviously, that the band was growing artistically. Sadly, it was the swan song for the original lineup, so there's no telling where the group would have gone if they'd stuck it out.

Joni Mitchell, Court & Spark [mp3: "Free Man in Paris"] and Blue [mp3:  "Carey"]
If anything, my Byrds fascination has grown to a near untenable obsession with their entire scene. in addition to steadily tracking down all of their albums, I've begun delving into the Laurel Canyon scene of the 60s and 70s. That's brought me to Buffalo Springfield and Joni Mitchell so far, with a long list of others I want to pick up. Mitchell in particular has turned out to be a terrific discovery for me (actually it was my brilliant wife who picked up Court & Spark).  I didn't fall immediately in love with this album, or with Mitchell in general. The first half was immediately engaging, but it sort of fell off after the midway point. Mitchell, left by herself, has some tics that were/are repellant to me, particulalry on first listen. Mostly it's the way her voice jumps into the upper register almost at random, or the way she seems to squeeze as many syllables into her lyrics as she damn well pleases, meter be damned. It's offputting. Nevertheless I liked enough of Court & Spark to give another album a chance. So I bought Blue. On first listens I was disappointed to find that this was a sparser album, none of the full-band treatment as on "Help Me" or "Free Man in Paris." But as time goes by I'm finding Blue to be the stronger album, and I'm coming around on all of Mitchell's quirks. There's still something kind of antagonistic in my listening relationship with Mitchell, but that's precisely what keeps me coming back to her.

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.

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?

High Desert Test Sites

Last year was our first chance to check out High Desert Test Sites since moving to Los Angeles, and it's coming around again May 12–13. My brilliant wife and I had a great time, even if we spent more time in the car than seeing the art, and when we did see the art, guess what—it was hot outside! But it was fun nevertheless, the community spirit of it all. Strangely enough the highlight was doing laughter yoga with a bunch of art snobs. It was a nexus of lame cliches somehow coalescing into a lot of fun. It was almost like we were initiated into California once and for all.

HDTS, if you don't know, is put on once a year in Joshua Tree and Andrea Zittel is one of the organizers. One of the best parts of HDTS is that you get to roam around her property—and if you know anything about her work, you know that that is her work. Her show, currently up at MOCA, is terrific; but it's even better in person.

Last year involved something like twenty or thirty artists or groups, spread miles apart. We therefore missed most of it because we tried to cram it into one day. This year purports to be "more like the early days," with fewer artists (including Zittel, Ann Magnuson, and David Shrigley, among others). Check the site for more details. If you're in Southern California then you should make the trip. For the art, for the fun, for the outdoors, for the sake of getting out of town for a day or two.

My brilliant wife has begun blogging again, I'm happy to say, and if you haven't browsed her blog, upon which I piggyback, take HDTS as your opportunity. She's got a whole smattering of suggestions for hotels and campsites in Joshua Tree.

And if you're thinking about traveling anywhere else—really, anywhere else—you may do well to check in and see if she's got some suggestions for you.  Croatia? India? Kentucky? Madrid? Seriously, she has some suggestions for you.

No One Ever Talks about the Real Heroes

Maybe you heard about this bizarre story: two dolphins at a theme park in China were choking on some plastic, and vets at the aquarium did not have a way of reaching far enough into their gullets to get the plastic out. So, they called the world's tallest man, because his arms were long enough to reach inside the dolphins and pull the plastic out.

A completely ridiculous story—perhaps, some might say, ridonculous. Yet while the "mainstream press" can only focus on the tall dude, leave it to my brilliant wife to look for the real story.  "What I really want to know," she said,  "is who the troubleshooter at the aquarium was that said, There's nothing we can do. Unless... unless! Sally! Get me the yellow pages... we need to find the tallest man in the world. Because that's the kind out-of-the-box thinking that deserves some props. Someone get that guy a raise."

Hey, Leave My Brilliant Wife Out of This

File this post under "vain bloggerism."

A few weeks ago I posted about the insipid Angels & Airwaves song "The Adventure." Surprisingly I've gotten a lot of traffic from that post, all from people googling "I can't live, I can't breathe." As the weeks went by the google searches didn't let up, so out of vain curiosity I googled it myself—to find that my post appears in the top ten hits for that phrase (actually, top three). I must admit I get a lot of pleasure out of the idea of some fifteen year-old, fresh from swooning over this epic song on the radio, rushing to the internet to google the lyrics and find out who pierced his or her heart with a thousand darts of sincerity—and finding my post.

In my heart of hearts, I can only hope that my post opens for these people the magical world of Peter Cetera. In reality I'm sure my post is not what they're really looking for, and they probably spend all of a minute looking around here before finding another website that soothes their souls and coos in their ears. Which leads me to a personal milestone: my first hate comment!

What a retard. I'll bet u anything this jerkoff can't play anything that resembles an instrument. Think about what it takes to even make an album, let alone form a band, u shit for brains. And he tries to woo us by interlacing the "my ever brilliantly astute wife"- That doesn't even make sense Spicoli. What a loser, let me guess, she's good lookin too...

And it's the best kind of hate comment, attacking me for not making sense while simultaneously not making sense himself. (If anyone else was wooed by my references to my wife, please speak up!) But for the record, my wife is brilliant, she is always brilliant, and she is certainly astute (hence the category). So, nothing nonsensical there. And since you asked, she is good lookin, too. Please keep the hate comments coming but leave my wife out of it. Thanks!

I Rate This Amazon Review 5/5

In the dregs of summer television, my wife and I have become—well, not addicted to, but regular viewers of—So You Think You Can Dance. Last week one of the pairs had to dance in the style of '80s Disco. My first thought was that this almost doesn't even make sense; what, dance like Molly Ringwald? Of course my wonderful wife did her usual thing—took what I was thinking, said it out loud, only much more astute, brilliantly so. "If they really want to do a good '80s disco dance routine, they should just do the climax scene from Girls Just Want to Have Fun, step for step." After demonstrating some of these moves (trust me, it'd be on YouTube if I had a camera—for visualization purposes, it was something similar to whatever it is Sarah Jessica Parker is doing on the VHS cover, above), she got nostalgic and wondered if the soundtrack was available. To Amazon!

Lo and behold, Amazon has ONE copy of the soundtrack for sale. On CASSETTE.

Also, for NINETY-NINE DOLLARS AND THIRTY-NINE CENTS.

Seriously, a hundred benjies for a cassette tape? My wife paused—this couldn't possibly be worth it, could it? Unsure, we checked the reviews. All reservations were removed:

This rare and totally awesome soundtrack from the movie is well worth purchasing it has all the good up tempo classics that contributed to the feel-good factor of the movie.

Come On Shout: this song was in the opening sequences/credits of the movie, when Dance Tv started. I rate this song 5/5.

On The Loose: when Janey sneaked out to dance with Jeff at the court. I rate this song 5/5.

I Can Fly: this song was playing when Janey and Jeff are rehearsing, Jeff finally does a sommersalt and dancing is co-ordinated. I rate this 5/5.

Dancing In Heaven: this song was played during the contest finals. I rate this 5/5.

Girls Just Want To Have Fun: played when Janey, Lynne and Maggie distributed bogus invites to Natalies ball, I rate this 5/5 as good as Cyndi Laupers version.

Dancing In The Street: This was playing when people were up on stage trying out for the Dance tv contest,I rate this song 5/5.

Too Cruel: played during Janey and Jeffs first rehearsal session. Rate this song 5/5.

Technique: played during the dance off between Natalie/Ben and Janey/Jeff. rate this song 5/5.

Wake Up The Neighbourhood: Played when the Ball at the Country Club was Gatecrashed. rate this song 5/5.

Could it be that the Girls Just Want to Have Fun soundtrack is the greatest collection of songs ever produced? It was beginning to seem like it. I advised my wife to make the purchase. This could be the next Beatles' Butcher album. Purely from a collector's standpoint, it just seemed silly not to buy the $100 cassette.

I Can't Live, I Can't Breathe, Unless We Do It For the Glory of Love

Have you suffered the new single by Angels & Airwaves yet? This is the new band from Tom DeLonge, the whinier of the two Blink-182 singers.  God, but it's the funniest/most horrendous thing I've heard in a long time. For a laugh, check out the wikipedia page for these guys, in which the band claims:

It sounds like it has the conceptual depth of Pink Floyd, the anthemic architecture of U2 but with Tom from blink writing all the melodies.... The music sounds angelic. Every song gives you the chills and you feel like you want to cry but you're conquering the world at the same time. It sounds like stadium rock done by a band that's meant to be the absolute biggest band in the world.

Yeah, sure, Pink Floyd, okay. But on a recent drive to the beach, the song came on the radio and my ever-brilliantly astute wife made the far more accurate call:

What is this, fucking Peter Cetera?

You can go on and on about Bono and Roger Waters all you want, dudes, but I think you've been listening to "You're the Inspiration" a little too much.

Here's another great quote, from their bio on their website:

We would literally shut the blinds, dim all the lights, put Stanley Kubrick's 2001 on the flat-screen TV and take these Stephen Ambrose World War II books, with these two-page spreads of cities burning and people dying, and we'd paste them all over the wall. So on one end of the room, you'd have the endless hope of space, and on the other end you'd have the worst of humanity, and then in the middle, we'd write a love song.

Later, when asked to describe the last sequence of 2001, DeLonge said "You mean the part where Ralph Macchio tries to do the crane kick but his Japanese nemesis doesn't fall for it? Yeah, that was really gripping. There's a really great song that comes on just after that scene."

[thanks again to the Last Plane to Jakarta forums for pointing me to the press release]