IT'S WEIRD THAT CHAIRS EVEN EXIST WHEN YOU'RE NOT SITTING IN THEM

Just for the record, "nonplussed" doesn't mean "not impressed."
Kermit the Frog: The Rainbow Connection

In an e-mail, a smart acquaintance recently likened modern politics to independent rock's big grunge payday. The Democratic party is an embarrassingly wimpy, centrist organization, the friend says; he's an indie dude who came up in the 1990s, so there's no use talking about "participating to change it from within." Seeing as we were probably in agreement about our ideals if not our politics, I decided it would be better to post my thoughts here than to shoot back an annoying e-mail. No point debating someone with whom you already pretty much agree, after all.

There are plenty of ways the parallel makes perfect sense. Obviously, yes, on an individual level a deep-pocketed political organization funded by interest groups will be nearly as hard for one person to change as one of the humongoid, incomprehensibly stupid major record labels. More importantly, though, in both cases good-hearted people shoot themselves in the fucking foot.

Indie rock is defined by its "independence", so its fans are reflexively contrarian, notoriously backlash-prone. Liberals can be the same way. Where part of the point of American Idol is that everyone (even indie-rock fans) watches it, and Republicans have been only too glad to line up behind the wealthiest village idiot, indie-rock fans volubly dismiss later albums by their favorite bands, and liberal politicans and pundits make it a point of pride to shore up their nonpartisan cred-- which for Joe Lieberman (and the previous editorship at The New Republic) essentially means becoming a Republican. For many individuals, and certainly hotshot center-left columnists like Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, this independence means sighing, "A pox on both houses." In 2000 it meant Ralph Nader. And John McCain.


Also, the whole "comprises" the parts. A band is not "comprised of" anything.
The Crayon Fields: Do It Right/Helicopters (live)

I guess I'd kind of unwittingly assumed everyone else had the same epiphany as I did during the post-9/11 phase of the Bush Administration: Sometimes, it's OK to take sides, because one side's actions are clearly hurting people. It's less "lesser of two evils" than "the perfect is the enemy of the good." I forget that for people whose first election wasn't Bush v. Gore, particularly those who reached political maturity when the post-Nirvana sweepstakes was laying waste to independent scenes, this road to Damascus might be less evident. And for good reason, too.

Here's the thing. I write all the time about both politics and music on this blog, and I've clearly devoted my career to the latter over the former, but what's at stake in these issues is, I'm sorry, a whole lot more important than the loss of some really great bands. The analogy includes a flawed assumption; democracy isn't the same as business (apologies to Larry Kudlow). Kids in schools, old people who need medicine, families in whatever countries some chickenhawk wants to bomb, young women who aren't ready for a baby, gay couples who want basic civil rights, working folks who deserve a basic living wage, etc., etc., are all affected by who is in charge in the White House. It hasn't been particularly cool to care about these things in my lifetime, but it's true.


I know a place where diamonds never fade away.
Fabolous: Make Me Better (feat. Ne-Yo, produced by Timbaland)

And stuff won't magically improve when Bush leaves office. The next generation of Republican presidential candidates is even worse, writes Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria (via Brad DeLong). The race for the nomination has turned into "an exercise in chest-thumping," according to Zakaria. "The competition to be the tough guy is producing new policy ideas ... that range from bad to insane," he opines.

Typical, naturally, of the conflicted indie/left relationship with both politics and commerce is the Arcade Fire. Like John Mayer, the Montreal indie-rockers make lots of allusions to politics on their newest record without ever coming down conclusively on a side; they "don't want to live in America no more," but they're not so much participating in a debate as opting out of one. Artistically defensible, of course, but if extended to a personal level fairly selfish, given the way democracy works (i.e., not like a major label -- i.e., what separates democracy from other forms of government is people voting, even occasionally for a turd sandwich).

Neon Bible benefits from major distribution and boasted a marketing campaign so good it was ripped off by R. Kelly. But the Fire have it both ways (neither way) on this, too: "Marketing campaign?" Win Butler laughs when asked about it in a Pitchfork interview, prompting Amanda Petrusich to seek a different phrase. The band debates even doing publicity at all, according to Rolling Stone, which quotes multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Perry: "We're trying to navigate a culture where people manufacture a lot of garbage. The goal is not to sell the most records or be the most famous. I think everybody in our band thinks we're trying to do something that's real and has some lasting value to it."

...OK, I'm basically just jealous of Win's recent sinus surgery. Like I said, my friend and I were probably pretty much in agreement to start with. Pass the Claritin-D.


It's a clumsy image but it encapsulates the playfulness of that record and its blend of sexuality and emotionally stunted yet self-aware infantilism.
Billy Bragg: Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards (via Steve Gozdecki)

RIGHT NOW MY JOB IS EATING THESE DONUTS

I will punish my body until I believe in my soul.
My Bloody Valentine: Lovelee Sweet Darlene

Is it weird that I like to hear Justice's "D.A.N.C.E." (vid) and "B.E.A.T." (stream), two sides of the same dance-pop single, as metamusic? In this jaded day and scene, their fun-oriented directness seems to me like a music-critical statement in itself. Where LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" ironically challenged aspiring dance fans to wayback through hipster history (where kids' lack of taste-- "you don't know what you really want"-- would always keep them a little "behind"), the simple Jackson Five-Oh instructions of the Justice tracks return the dance floor from the heads to the hips. Even if those hips belong to wedding-reception grandmas who'd just as soon be wiggling to "Y.M.C.A.". Oy.

Frank Rich was wrong, as expected: Thus far, Don Imus's firing hasn't had a "chilling effect" on free speech, at least not on other talk radio outlets, the New York Times reports. To Rich's credit, he finally turns on the press myth of Saint Condoleeza Rice in today's column, though he continues to place Colin Powell on a long-since-undeserved pedestal. Oh, to be Rich.

Saint John McCain doesn't care about gay people. Mainstream media orgs don't care, period. (Also: Matthew Yglesias on McCain's infinite dumbness.)

FreakyTrigger's latest Poptimism podcast includes Simian Mobile Disco, Justice, Uffie, and a Robyn vs. The Cure mashup.

Kelefa Sanneh praises the virtues of nostalgia. I have a couple of quibbles, but I love that he recognizes the trans-genre importance of sentimentality to music fandom: "We fans are a flighty, easily distractible, gossipy, hopelessly sentimental bunch; our fondness for reunions only underscores the point. Fans of punk and postpunk once thought of themselves as different, but the current reconstitutional convention makes it clear that Pixies fans aren’t so different from Fleetwood Mac fans." (But surely Steve Albini is still better than Fleetwood Mac fans?)

Get Lonely: Bob Desper album download.

Barry Ritholtz lists famous wrong opinions: "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."

Oh and I forgot to link to my Patrick Wolf review at Playboy.com (Cleveland Steamer jokes get edited out even at Playboy, kids, sorry).

Surely you've listened to M.I.A.'s "Hit That" by now.

BOFA DEEZ.


It's about to get metaphysical.
Architecture in Helsinki: Heart It Races


Brian Williams wuvs Rush Limbaugh. I am so gonna keep blogging about your worthless millionaire ass, Williams.
Rush Limbaugh: Barack the Magic Negro

FOUR IS A MAGIC NUMBER, BUT SO IS FIVE

"...forget racism, what strikes me about our media elite [is] how profoundly stupid they are."
- Atrios, 4/13/07


Meant to weigh in on the Don Imus dust-up. Y'all hear this shit? Rich, powerful, unexceptional white guy-- crony of other rich, powerful, unexceptional white guys-- gets booted out of a job for talking like a cracker. And he's not even politically conservative? Bro got famous with booze and coke streaming out his nose!

Jesus, the way Frank Rich tells it, it's almost worth telling. Free speech under fire! In a slow post-holiday week, too. Rich Boy, learning from David Brooks, makes a show of admitting his own hypocrisy in order to distract from his other hypocrisies. But c'mon now, scribes and Pharisees: First off, I don't care whether Imus stays on the air or not, but what he said was uniquely fucked. Second, Imus has been airing significantly more hateful thoughts about people of (sorry!) much greater importance for years now, getting his rocks off with the fraternity and poisoning your discourse. Third, Imus's firing shouldn't have a chilling effect on free speech because Don Imus is uniquely, profoundly stupid.

Oh I know we're all actually sitting around in our parlors calling various women "nappy headed hoes." Wait, no, we're NOT. It isn't as if this phrase is something "everybody thinks" but most ppl are too politically correct to say. It's not even the kind of language a traditional bigot like South Park "n----- guys" Mark Furman or Michael Richards might find accidentally running out of their mouths. It's totally weird. About anyone. How did these words even get in a man like Imus's brain? The Rutgers basketball team's blamelessness helped them win over the media, but that isn't why the insult was so disturbing. Guy even looked all smirky and proud of himself as he was warming up to deliver his new phrase (vid).


Only reason I come around is for the double-dutch.
Lil Mama: Lip Gloss

Back in the reality-based community, this is how the "Gang of 500" who run our national political discourse like to talk about everyone all the time. Especially women, but especially Democrats. Over at The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby remembers Imus "always" calling Hillary Clinton-- i.e., the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination-- "Satan" ("Satan"!) and dubbing Al Gore-- i.e., the man who was right all along about the two biggest issues of our time, Iraq and global warming-- simply "the most evil man on the planet." A more dysfunctional press corps could hardly be imagined. If a major political commentator were to use either phrase to describe John McCain or Rudy Giuliani-- or, more revealingly, Jack Welch-- do you think frequent Imus guests like Tim Russert, Jeff Greenfield, and Chris Matthews would still show up on that honky's show? Yet they kept hanging with Mr. Imus, at least until all us meddling non-millionaires had to go and get our race/gender panties in bunches.

Fact is, these and other figures of the Washington Establishment share the same hateful views, which aren't far removed from batshit Ann Coulterism. Our pundits would rather be Howard Stern than Walter Cronkite; "liberal bias" is an outmoded and rarely applicable term these days not because of FOX, but because of a deep-seated animus among the likes of the Washington Post, New York Times, and NBC toward all signs of intelligent life-- particularly from anybody linked to icky slicky Blowjob Bill. Bummer everyone who actually wants a career writing about this stuff is too desperate to work for those pubs to expose their prospective employers' journalistic malfeasance, huh?


"My daddy mentions me in his New York Times columns."
Rich Boy: Boy Looka Here

So you may not know that prominent Iraq war critic and former Democratic aide Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, has called Hillary Clinton "witchy," a "stripteaser", and, to him perhaps worst of all, "ambitious", even falsely claiming hubby Bill has called her an "uppity woman." You may not know Matthews' long history of unprofessional petulance toward Gore: calling the former veep Bill Clinton's "bath tub ring", or a man who "doesn't look like one of us... he doesn't seem very American, even", or someone who would "lick the bathroom floor" to be President and wears troubling, troubling suits ("My joke is, “I'm Albert, I'll—I'll be your waiter tonight'").

You also may not know that, beginning in 1997, ostensibly liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd for years wrote columns from the point of view of Gore's "bald spot"-- including a pre-election column on Nov. 5, 2000 called "I Feel Pretty." Now she complains a lot about Bush and interviews billionaires who accuse Hillary Clinton of being "ambitious." Aww.

Further, you may not know that Dowd wrote about seriously substantial issues like health care and Al Qaeda during the all-important summer of 1999, when the stage was getting set for the 2000 election. Wait:

July 28: Dowd described her recent lazer eye surgery.
August 1: Dowd reviewed the movie "Runaway Bride."
August 4: Dowd discussed a Talk magazine piece about the Clintons' marriage.
August 8: She interviewed Bob Dole on the prospect of being "first gentleman."
August 11: She compared the Talk magazine piece about the Clintons with an auction of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia.
August 15: Will Warren Beatty run for president?
August 18: Bush and the question of youthful drug use
August 22: Bush and the question of youthful drug use
August 25: Dowd reviewed a Showtime movie about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas.
August 29: She ruminated on the life story of John McCain. "Never have so many men wanted to run," she mused, "to prove they are worthy to larger-than-life dads."
September 1: "I ran into Kato Kaelin the other night," she wrote—at the start of a piece about Monica Lewinsky's fashion business.
September 5: Dowd penned a review of the Paris, the new Las Vegas casino-hotel.


Airplane food was on the plane, airplane coffee too.
Karin Strom: Klaustrofobi
(plus great remixes over at Discobelle)

You may not even know that Frank Rich himself, the former theater critic who so skillfully bobbed and weaved on the Imus issue this weekend-- the devilish wag who makes you so happy in his Bush-bashing Sunday missives-- is the same dude who in 2000 called Gore "about as different from [Bush] as J. Crew and Banana Republic" under the headline "Survival of the Fakest", who mocked Gore's focus on actual policy ("Dingell-Norwood, anyone?") and pronounced the then-veep "the truly stupid one"; Rich is the shameless schmuck who even recently, in a column admitting An Inconvenient Truth is right, found it far more notable (troubling!) (phony!) that the film includes multicultural audiences, people who laugh at Al Gore's jokes, and the fact Al Gore once owned a gun. Did you know Rich helped make up the falsehood that Gore falsely claimed he and Tipper were an inspiration for the film Love Story, even though the story's author said the Gores really *were* an inspiration? Rich probably still thinks Al Gore said he invented the Internet. "Frankly, that's Rich."

Always focused on the big issues, today Rich Boy is miiighty concerned over Imus's canning. "If we really want to have this conversation" about the ugliness of the disgraced jock's words, Rich muses, "it also means we have to have a nonposturing talk about hip-hop lyrics, Borat, South Park and maybe Larry David." The fuck? I'm all in favor of Rich, Imus, Coulter, or any other moron having freedom of speech-- in the privacy of their homes, or on sidewalks and subway platforms (wild-eyed and spittle-flecked, haranguing passers-by)-- but the biggest difference between Imus's brand of humor and the stuff Rich mentions, aside from the fairly huge distinction between first-person speech and character-driven art, is that Imus's joke wasn't funny. At all. Who could defend it? As Different Kitchen notes, conservatives too are blaming the Imus brouhaha on rap. Do you think this man listens to rap? Does Michelle Malkin?



My dad models SN3 not HO scale but pretty close.
Tokyo Police Club: Cheer It On
(Ryan Dombal's take at Blender)

Borat looks at the world from the perspective of a casually offensive outsider in order to highlight our own casually offensive ridiculousness (part of the joke is the fact we even have to write all these big serious words about it, let alone the fact that kneejerk, joke-missing tuttutters like Frank Rich and David Brooks despise it)-- though, as Nick Sylvester notes, sometimes a blowjob joke is just a blowjob joke. South Park ventures into taboo territory on the premise that "either everything's OK, or nothing is"-- the freedom to transgress is what separates us from the Taliban (cancel Family Guy and the terrorists have won!). Larry David is pretty OK, I guess.

The rap question gets a whole lot more complicated. I've already touched on it in dealing with Devin the Dude's sometimes hateful new album, but I do get uncomfortable about the misogynistic/homophobic language and attitudes of yr fave rap clips. When Lil' Wayne is treating his objects like women, man, on the "It's Me Bitches" remix or on the really exciting so far Da Drought 3 mixtape, I squirm even as I can't help but be dazzled by his verbal acuity and charismatic delivery. In rap, you can kinda write stuff off as being spoken in character, but maybe it's just a music that-- like South Park, or more like the way rock used to be-- requires transgression to thrive. It's hard for rap to be good without being "bad"; that's why M.C. Hammer became instant kitsch (surely it wasn't the pants). Rap's moral ambivalence probably isn't going away anytime soon, but it doesn't have the least thing to do with the rich white guys at the top of the Washington, D.C. political journanimalism establishment being fuckwits.

Something else you probably didn't know: Dick Cheney was a major-league Imus fan. Yeah, big time. Cheney's spokeswoman once explained, "He has the same sense of humor that Imus has. He thinks Imus is funny. He gets good guests on. And he asks good questions. It's not really strategic or complicated. Not everything we do has to work on 50 different levels." (She totally loses me with that last part.)


You dudes gotta stand in the mirror backwards cuz you can't face yourself.
My boy John Mayer, circa 1999

Look, the only reason this matters is because if we don't understand the forces that have driven our discourse for the past 10-plus years, we can't begin to push back against them. The same hateful millionaire world view will be inflicted upon Obama, Edwards, or Richardson should they defeat Clinton, just as it was upon "phony," "French-looking," "wind-surfing," "effete" John Kerry-- another recent Imus victim (vid). In any other profession, such malpractice would've put these pundits out of a job long ago.

When Chris Matthews made the following statement last month, which fearless speaker of controversial thoughts might he have imagined nodding in cowboy-hatted agreement?

"You know, somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, I think there might be a giant, green, ugly, horny monster. A gigantic, gigantic monster of anti-Hillary, and anti-woman Hillary, anti-liberal woman Hillary, some real ferocious beast out there that says no matter what happens between now and Election Day, they're not going to let her win. Men, some women, are just not going to let this woman, this woman win the presidency. I don't know whether that monster's out there. All men I meet are afraid to talk like that. You only hear criticism of Hillary from smart, college-educated women. They're the ones that always have a problem with her now."

HEY PUNDIT CLASS, RAPPERS AREN'T THE ISSUE HERE.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO TOUCH MY GIGANTIC MONSTER?


...As for Wonkette, she doesn't deserve to live.
Husker Du: New Day Rising and It's Not Funny

Elsewhere: Kelefa Sanneh compares Nine Inch Nails' noisy new Year Zero to '90s cyberparanoia.

Eric Harvey ponders Grindhouse, "art-enjoyment-context," and the Washington Post's novel panhandling experiment involving acclaimed classical violinist Josh Bell.

My Love of Diagrams review over at Playboy; my Mice Parade review at Pitchfork.