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.

WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?

Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

Everybody keeps asking how it felt, so: It wasn't a blur. We did get to eat. My uncle, the retired minister who officiated our ceremony beautifully, didn't even call anyone the wrong name-- an amusing occurrence at previous weddings of relatives. Thank you so much to the bride's parents, and to every family member and friend who made it to scenic Des Moines, Iowa, to offer support (all those who were there in spirit, too!). It was particularly wonderful to drive away after our little post-reception party while some of our buddies-- great people from high school, college, and New York, most of whom had only just met-- lingered in the parking lot exchanging hugs. Yup, I'm a softie.

For six days, my wife (!!!, etc.) and I kinda worried (only half in jest) someone might be more inclined to pull us over, ding our doors, or at least think we were oil baron fucktards because our rental Pontiac Grand Prix had plates from my mother's native Texas instead of from some famously nice state like, well, Iowa. Is this heaven? While on our honeymoon around Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park, we hiked up mountains, rafted down rivers, and saw marmots and elk and a dude walking a wolf on a leash. Not even a husky or an akita, dudes. Then, after we lost our car keys near the end of what turned out to be a 10-mile hike, a tale of clumsiness I was prepared to take to my grave, our "fellow Texan" happened. Oh sweet Irony. (Nottingham vs. Bear, other Texans: Hugs!)

Yeah, but the one thing I held back from doing before the wedding, I really should've done. I came up with a playlist for a pre-ceremony "brunch beverages" half hour (to which the girl added the Clientele's "I Want You More Than Ever" for extra length, a good choice even though she assumed I'd be too busy to notice; of course I noticed), and I also planned our prelude, processional, recessional, and first dance (plus managed to passive-aggressively nix a last-minute suggested parental dance involving "Wind Beneath My Wings"). I didn't come up with a comprehensive play list for the DJ because (a) I knew I'd obsess over it for months and never get anything else done and (b) the DJ was a friend of a friend of a friend and I wasn't supposed to act like a big-city know-it-all. The only flaw in a perfect day: He started to play the Midler tune instead of our selected first dance. Afterward, he played the Midler tune anyway. Then he played a bunch of mid-tempo '70s rock, kicking off with a little Kenny Rogers number, effectively clearing the dance floor until a younger relative recommended he play Motown (which we'd asked for many times over the previous weeks) (his response during the reception, apparently: "You mean, like Wild Cherry?"). My hilariously footloose high school buddy Brian unfortunately had to head back to his grandma's in LaCrosse.

They do have newspapers in the Rockies. "Umbrella" is not "just about perfect" (shouldn't we expect a tad more from perfection?); it's a hook. Then again, I don't remember hearing much of the pre-2006 summer songs mentioned in this article (in real time, anyway) even though I was still an actual person back when they I guess dominated the summer. Hey, look, Tom already wrote something kinda great about this! What's especially weird about the article, though, is a cheap Al Gore/global warming joke (even Bill Maher, no stranger to easy jokes, quips how easy these are in his new HBO special). The almost always on-point Kelefa (can I call you Kelefa) writes, "Al Gore's worst nightmare: 52 weeks of summer."

Dudes, if I may, an aside: Either we agree with virtually every relevant scientist and accept global warming as a serious problem, in which case such a joke is awfully silly. Or else we disagree, which is awfully silly. (Third possibility: Editors inserted the gag to meet the paper's Gore joke quota.) In any event, reducing the issue of global warming to whether or not you think you like Gore is a key strategy among reactionary types. If you're inclined to say, "Chill out, weirdo, it's just a joke," you might not realize yet what's been happening since the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s, exacerbated by FOX News. Blowjobs, inventing the Internet, "earth tones", windsurfing, gentlemen with expensive haircuts. Rather than dispute the facts, right-wing talkers (and often mainstream journalists) bypass voters' rationality by reducing candidates to convenient punchlines-- which are then picked up by vacuous, nominally liberal punchline-repeaters like Maureen Dowd and Chris Matthews, or even hard-news reporters like the Times' Kit Seelye, who then might attribute the lines to "late-night TV hosts". There's your ManBearPig, Trey and Matt. You let me down. One time.

Our rental car came with free XM Radio-- the Alamo advantage. It's pretty much the cable TV of radio, in a YouTube and DVR age. We did hear a bit of good stuff ("Lipgloss", "Stuntin' Like My Daddy", "Buy U a Drank", the one twiddly guitar bit in Creed's "Higher") amid a lot of extremely terrible stuff ("I'm Going Home", "I'll Stand By You", anything by Linkin Park, the rest of Creed's "Higher"), but I don't think there's anybody who tunes into the '90s channel during a Nirvana song who sticks around for "A Whole New World". The '60s, '70s, and '80s channels were worthless, too. No P4k-y stations on the dial, despite AOL's two (as of 2003!) Internet indie-rock radio stations. A day or two in, the only station we could listen to without switching channels in disgust (despite the occasional lame New Country crossovers... y'all, Travis Tritt ain't interested in bein' politically correct!) was Track 14, Bluegrass Junction. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. BEST NEW MUSIC.

*love*

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)

NO MORE TIME FOR SPECTATING

This opens a new chapter in our relations with all nations of this hemisphere.
The Lucksmiths: Great Lengths
(live; please bear with the slight distortion!)


Not so much antic despair as desperate antics.
The Lucksmiths: T-Shirt Weather (live)

I participated in an American tradition this weekend. I spent hours stuck in traffic getting the heck out of the city. Like many Americans, the other people in the car and I whiled away our time listening to music. I don't have a road trip playlist or anything, and anyway I wasn't so fortunate as to be driving. However, I did listen to Blur's Parklife for the first time in years. Still sounds good, even if the Syd Barretty stuff has worn a bit, and "Trouble in the Message Center" always felt a bit tossed-off. Nothing was better, though, than listening to Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville on a screened-in porch with friends, reading and overlooking a mountain lake.

Today education blog The Quick and the Ed basically did what offnotes does in reverse. Instead of starting off talking about some random thing or other and ending up talking about some random music thing (or other), blogger Kevin Carey gets music out of the way first, then talks about some edumacation thing. But not before dropping this pearl o' nugget:

"The challenge of the information age isn't in gaining access to information, it's making sense of it. It's not figuring out how to buy CDs, it's figuring out which CDs to buy--and which not to. Those are issue of judgement and taste, which only people can provide."

Exactly! That's why, ultimately, just racing to promote every old thing without stepping back to assess what really works is a doomed proposition. Yes, the MP3 era has probably changed listening habits in some ways permanently, but particularly if people's music collections continue to grow at such an exponential rate, listeners will still probably be interested in some help finding music that appeals to them. Given how irrational and subjective music fandom can be, I'm less confident than perhaps my colleague Chris Dahlen in the extent of technology's ability to meet the challenge.

I leave my pajamas to Billy Budapest.
MP3s: King Khan & the Shrines: "Welfare Bread" and "No Regrets"
[from the forthcoming What Is]

Jonathan Chait notes (free reg req'd, or bugmenot) that some right-wing thinkers are moving from "the conservatism of Paul Wolfowitz" to "the conservatism of Montgomery Burns." In other words, conservative thinkers are leaving behind the small-"d" democratic values the Iraq war was supposedly fought to promote, instead seeing the virtue of authoritarianism now that our own democracy isn't swinging their way. An economist from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Kevin Hassett, rather enviously compares dictatorships to our democracy, noting that the former are "are not hamstrung by the preferences of voters for, say, a pervasive welfare state." Yeah, democracy really blows that way, don't it chief?

Lastly, I'd be remiss if I forgot to point out the great work Bob Somerby has done in the past week or so at the Daily Howler. (I know, I probably link to him every time, don't I?) In short: "Al Gore said our discourse is broken. And his critics rushed to prove that he's right." Somerby looks at the way reporters for the Washington Post and the New York Times have responded, as Gore wrote they would in his new book, not to the substance of his arguments, but with Maureen Dowd-esque irrelevancies. Chris Matthews is getting paid millions of dollars to speculate about Gore's possible plastic surgery (there, now even I have spread this rumor... this is how coverage of prominent Democrats works-- remember Gennifer Flowers? Kathleen Willey? "Clinton's New Girl Friend" that the Google Ads promise to tell me about? ...Botox?). Somerby has also written about the way Matthews, the Washington Post and others have rushed out to hype the possibility of negative info about Hillary Clinton in a pair of new books. In doing so, these high-paid pundits have treated former Timesman Jeff Gerth as a reputable source-- despite the fact the man not only concocted much of the Whitewater fable, but was eventually fired from the Times for his shoddy reporting in the Wen Ho Lee story. Look it up.


Waiting for you is like waiting for the man in the moon.
R. Kelly: The World's Greatest

FAITHLESS NOW, JUST GOT SOUL

Herds of nerds stubbornly compete to become king of a fantasy world.
Professor Brothers: History Lesson #1
(by Brad Neely, who also did this)


A reader recently e-mailed me with a smart question about my Pitchfork review of the great new Cub reissues.

READER: Just wondering what source you took the idea from for your conclusion on the Cub reissues review:

"It's been said that you can reason someone into believing in God, but you can't reason them out of it, and I wonder if it's the same way with true love: Once you've taken that leap of faith, does everything change?"

...[F]or some reason, the first part of your conclusion sent me off on some sort of mental/intellectual/odyssey thing...

I'd actually had a very specific piece in mind, and the e-mail caused me to go back and revisit it. I was thinking of a fantastic article by John Jeremiah Sullivan called "Upon This Rock", which appeared in GQ and was featured in Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2006. A lengthy feature on a Christian music festival, it includes the evocative passage below.

SULLIVAN: Belief and nonbelief are two giant planets, the orbits of which don't touch. Everything about Christianity can be justified within the context of Christian belief. That is, if you accept its terms. Once you do, your belief starts modifying the data (in ways that are themselves defensible, see?), until eventually the data begin to reinforce belief. The precise moment of illogic can never be isolated and may not exist. Like holding a magnifying glass at arm's length and bringing it toward your eye: Things are upside down, they're upside down, they're right side up. What lay between? If there was something, it passed too quickly to be observed. This is why you can never reason true Christians out of faith. It's not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it-- many were-- it's that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping into a circle, one that closes with you inside. If this seems to imply that no apostate was ever a true Christian and that therefore, I was never one, I think I'd stand by both of those statements.

I hope I didn't just give away the ending.
Gui Boratto: Beautiful Life (cross-posted from Pitchfork)

Elsewhere:

Maureen Dowd on George Tenet: "If you have something deadly important to say, say it when it matters, or just shut up and slink off." Cool, but what if you've never had anything deadly important to say in an entire career as a professional political scrivener? Then you make up NASCAR-related quotes and call Democrats sissy girls. Dowd's not a misogynist, you see.

Fellow NYTer Frank Rich's Sunday column, "Earth to G.O.P.: The Gipper Is Dead" probably gets a pass from most of his readers because it bashes conservatives. Rich is playing for the right partisan team or whatever, but he's just so clearly unburdened by concepts like "truth" or "logic" that it's pretty hard to imagine what-- other than no doubt unparalleled social connections-- even qualifies the dude for his job. The Republican convention looks like a country club? Look at the Democratic candidates just eight years ago: white males only. Approving Matthew Dowd namedrop? Apparently, all supposedly cynical political journalists are required ignore the fact that a guy who changed from Democratic to Republican to work for now-President Bush might now, with Bush's poll numbers mired at Nixonian levels, have a professional motivation to turn on dear leader. Then there's Rich's bewildering construction on immigration.

RICH: The sole piece of compassionate conservatism that Mr. Bush has tried not to sacrifice to political expedience — nondraconian immigration reform — is also on the ropes, done in by a wave of xenophobia that he has failed to combat. Just how knee-jerk this strain has become could be seen in the MSNBC debate when Chris Matthews asked the candidates if they would consider a constitutional amendment to allow presidential runs by naturalized citizens like their party’s star governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (an American since 1983), and its national chairman, Senator Mel Martinez of Florida. Seven out of 10 said no.

Um, so Republican presidential candidates wouldn't fulfill Chris Matthews' thigh-rubbing fantasies and tell him the muscular dude, not they, should be president. Why was he even asking this question, again? And does this really show "xenophobia"?

Ah, the true soul of your Washington press corps. David Broder, would-be Xgau of All Pundits, on one terrifying possibility of the upcoming Presidential primary schedule: "The time from February to Labor Day will be boring beyond belief." Priorities, priorities. (via Bob Somerby)


I've always dreamed of moving to Pakistan or India and becoming a cab driver.
Edwyn Collins and Paul Quinn: Pale Blue Eyes (Velvet Underground cover)


The New Republic's Clay Risen plays the role of a silly, logic-twisting political pundit: "Barack Obama is playing the role of the 'grassroots candidate'" he writes. "Obama plays the people's choice," Risen adds a graf later. In between, he cites the huge number of donors Obama boasts, indicating that the Illinois senator is, indeed, a candidate with grassroots support-- not just playing the role of one on TV. Oh no, some of the people who give to liberal Democrats are rich. Hedge fund managers, in fact. JOHN EDWARDS GETS EXPENSIVE HAIRCUTS! At one point, Risen even acknowledges that, in fact it's "somewhat inaccurate to lump [hedge fund managers] in with 'Wall Street,'" but two grafs later, he complains, "It's strange to see someone so young and so, well, liberal raking it in on the Street." Apparently, liberals are only allowed to get donations from poor people.

Meanwhile, TNR writer Thomas Edsall's report on the possibility Rudy Giuliani can not only win the Republican nomination, but reshape the party and win over Reagan Democrats is pretty terrifying to anybody concerned with civil rights and not going to additional misguided wars launched by complete fucking idiots. BTW, what's with Republicans and men who publicize their Viagra use?


Apparently "Mercury rising" is not a common expression everyone uses to indicate that they are going to get drinks and go clubbing.
Shop Boyz: Party Like a Rock Star (Tom Breihan's take)

Back at Pitchfork, Jess Harvell totally nails his assessments of two of the year's big albums, new LPs by Dan Deacon and Battles.

Woebot delivers a Panda Bear mix.

P.S. Anybody know how to keep the the blockquotes code in blogger from completely throwing off the font for the rest of a post?

I'M JUST A BLUE-COLLAR GUY FROM BUFFALO

Sasha Frere-Jones gets serious like crazy.
Natasha Bedingfield: I Wanna Have Your Babies (mp3 at Obtusity)


Don Imus don't wanna kiss the bride, he just wants your lucky charms.
Tim Russert: Comedy Gold

There's an essay-length rant in me about this week's embarrassing Maureen Dowd columns, the concept of backstory in pop music, and basically how everybody is always obsessed with the wrong damn superficial things. You think I have time for that? Well, maybe, but instead I'm just going to humbly suggest you catch up on last night's Bill Moyers examination of the media coverage leading up to the war. Maybe it'll air again? UPDATE: Of course there's totally a snippet on YouTube.

Key points: Knight-Ridder stuck to its guns and kept reporting stories skeptical of Administration intelligence; the facts were out there, but the New York Times and Washington Post preferred to stick to big-name sources; Tim Russert would've included more skeptical voices on Meet the Press-- if only his phone had rung.

Oh, and pretty much everybody who got paid for telling us false things about the Iraq war is doing even better now. William Kristol and Peter Beinart have been rewarded with space in Time. Key Bush speechwriter Michael Gershon scored a Washington Post column. Thomas Friedman is still Thomas Friedman. Charles Krauthammer is still... well, I could tell you, but then he'd have to make a psychiatric diagnosis about you.


It was easy it was cheap GO AND DO IT.
Jarvis Cocker: Running the World

Elsewhere: My Arctic Monkeys album review, Lucky Soul track review, Aliens album review, Franz Ferdinand track review, and Ghosthustler track review on Pitchfork.

Over at TAPPED, Paul Waldman does superlative work debunking Roger Simon's small-minded mythologizing of Bernard Shaw, and expands on his point with some much-needed historical context here-- including David Broder's dumbfounding admission he's basically a world-class bullshitter (via Bob Somerby).


They come here alone, and they leave in twos.
The Teenagers: Homecoming

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.