I USED TO SAY DUMB THINGS I GUESS I STILL DO

It was a disappointing sunset, only 'cause my hopes were much too high.
Harpo: Movie Star

Via Greil Marcus (again) via Simon Frith's Sound Effects via Roland Barthes: I wonder if part of what attracts me to Jens Lekman's wonderful Night Falls Over Kortedala (9.0 from this schmuck) is the sense of what Barthes called signifiance (not a typo). As Marcus puts it:

"Barthes argued that the thrill of music is not a result of one's consious or subliminal response to 'significance' (the rendering of an important idea, emotion, moment in time, or whatever -- think of how you've tried to make sense of your response to 'Like a Rolling Stone' or 'Gimmie Shelter'); rather, the thrill comes from one's response to signifiance. This odd and intriguing word has baffled Barthe's translators (some, as if to say the hell with it, have rendered it as'significance'), but Frith handles the word best: signifiance refers not to a sign but to 'the work of signification'-- not to meaning, but to 'the making of meanings'. We do not respond to symbols (doom in the dark chords and apocalyptic lyrics of 'Gimmie Shelter,' escape and release in the rising choruses of 'Like a Rolling Stone'), though we seize on such symbols and connect them to historical events or personal situations in order to explain our response; we respond to symbol creation."

Marcus/Frith go on to hold up Elvis Presley as the prime example; who the hell knows what he stood for, but sure as Memphis sits on the mighty Mississippi, Elvis stood for something: standing for something.


If we all decide that there are five pints in a quart, that's objectively true. (And a bargain!)
Jens Lekman: Interview in Paris

So if Elvis stood for signifiance, then maybe Lekman's album stands for the possibility that we can be in control of the process-- that we can make our own symbols, just as he shores these pop fragments against our 21st-century cultural ruins. I don't really have this all pinned down yet. See in the above interview (posted yesterday) how Lekman sort of makes a similar point to the one in my review-- he says the wealth of unedited music on the Web allows us all to edit out our own favorite tracks, decide for ourselves which matter, create our own Jens Lekmans and have them, Whopper-like, our way.

Side note: I love how on "Shirin", he sings, "I won't tell anyone," just as he is telling, um, everyone.

Something capable of revealing that point of access which provides a shortcut to the magical realm behind this spectacle.
Mainly Spaniards: That's What Friends Are For

Here's something worth getting political about. In Vanity Fair, Evgenia Peretz goes on at length about what the indefatigable Bob Somerby calls the press corps' two-year "War Against Gore": the one where the brightest, best-paid pundits at The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, and MSNBC-- not just FOX or crazy right-wingers-- falsely convinced you that Al Gore said he'd invented the Internet, claimed he personally discovered the infamous Love Canal toxic-waste site, invented that he and Tipper were the inspiration for the novel "Love Story" (the author has said they were), changed into "earth tones" at the behest of Naomi Wolf (Wolf has denied this, the original reports were based on speculation by disgraced former Clinton aide Dick Morris, and besides, who doesn't occasionally wear "earth tones"?), etc. etc. etc.

A sample of the kind of misconduct which, in any other profession, would get someone fired or possibly sued:

"MSNBC anchor Brian Williams went after Gore's clothes at least five times in one week. 'Here is a guy taking off his suits.… This is the casual sweater look—what's going on here?' … 'He would have been in a suit a month ago.' … 'He's wearing these polo shirts that don't always look natural on him.' Williams's frequent guest Newsweek's Howard Fineman later chimed in: 'I covered his last presidential campaign, in 1988. One day he was in the conservative blue suit, the next he was playing lumberjack at the V.F.W. hall in New Hampshire.'

"And Gore just kept going on about issues. Alluding to five speeches he made in two months on education, crime, the economy, faith-based organizations, and cancer research, [the Times's Katherine] Seelye wrote, 'Mr. Gore becomes almost indignant when asked if his avalanche of positions might overwhelm voters.' The Washington Post's David Broder later found Gore too focused in his convention speech on what he'd do as president. 'But, my, how he went on about what he wants to do as president,' wrote Broder. 'I almost nodded off.' As for the environment, while Gore was persuaded by his consultants not to talk about it as much as he would have liked, whenever he did, many in the media ignored it or treated it as comedy. Dowd wrote in one column that 'Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he's practically lactating.' In another, referring to his consideration of putting a Webcam in the Oval Office, she wrote, 'I have zero desire to see President Gore round the clock, putting comely interns to sleep with charts and lectures on gaseous reduction.'

"The trivial continued to dominate during the postmortem following Gore and Bush's first debate, on October 3, 2000. The television media were sure Gore won—at first. But then Republican operatives promptly spliced together a reel of Gore sighing, which was then sent to right-wing radio outlets. Eighteen hours later, the pundits could talk of little else. 'They could hear you audibly sighing or sounding exasperated as Governor Bush was answering questions,' Katie Couric scolded him the next day on the Today show. 'Do you think that's presidential behavior?' For the Times's Frank Bruni, the sighs weren't as galling as Gore's familiarity with the names of foreign leaders. 'It was not enough for Vice President Al Gore to venture a crisp pronunciation of Milosevic, as in Slobodan,' he wrote. 'Mr. Gore had to go a step further, volunteering the name of Mr. Milosevic's challenger Vojislav Kostunica.'"


These people are still among the most prominent, highest-paid people in my profession. They are responsible for George W. Bush. They are responsible for the Iraq war. They do not care about you. And they will not do their jobs (John Edwards has fancy haircuts! Rudy Giuliani is Mayor of America! Fred Thompson is hung like a mule!) unless we stand up to them.


Final thought: If anyone knows where to find the "dub" version of Shai's "If I Ever Fall in Love" that Diplo uses on this insanely awesome mix, please, for the love of Christ, hook a writer up.