OFFNOTES is ridiculously proud to premiere a new remix by the Tough Alliance. It's true: Gothenburg, Sweden's punkest electro-pop sluggers have remixed Jonas Game's excellent, Nirvana fan-baiting stadium strummer, "New City Love". Come as however the fuck you are.
I say confusion is next to happiness. DAF: Der Mussolini
Burning question in indiepop land is Who the hell do Los Campesinos! think they are? when it should be At what point do we vanish up our own trapper keepers? Not even talking about asymmetrical haircuts! Or exclamation points!!!
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Good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege. Los Campesinos!: International Tweexcore Underground (cross-posted from Pitchfork)
On their new single, Los Campesinos! name-drop (in order): Black Flag's Henry Rollins, Heavenly/Talulah Gosh's Amelia Fletcher, Minor Threat/Fugazi's Ian MacKaye, Beat Happening/K Records' Calvin Johnson, and Sarah Records. These mentions come in the form of "I never cared about..." or "...never meant anything to me." With last week's release of the video, the lyrics about Sarah, Amelia, and Calvin caused a bit of concern over on an indiepop list where I lurk, and frankly I was a bit taken aback at first as well.
Fortunately, Dave Maher was more diligent in his fact-gathering than I was and dug up a bulletin from the band's MySpace. In their own, disappointingly exclamation-point-free words, the song "is a story of a friendship of two opposites and how they are in the best band in the world, one embracing things that are, shall we say (and you would almost definitely say) 'twee' (yuck) and the other embracing music that is...not so." OK, cool. Parentheses are the new etc.
A little more surprising were comments out there to the effect that "International Tweexcore Underground" was big-budget, would make Los Campesinos! massive radio stars, was MTV-ready, etc. etc. (etc.) I mean for our purposes the budget probably isn't bad, and the video is polished enough for MTV, but MOST PEOPLE DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE SINGING ABOUT. Do they?
What's the meaning of life anything you like. Shocking Pinks: End of the World (again lazily cross-posted from Pitchfork)
Most people don't know what I'm talking about. Most people don't know what Art Brut are singing about, or Tullycraft, or LCD Soundsystem at least until Jams Murphy started wanting to be with his friends again. Los Campesinos! songs like "You! Me! Dancing!" or Fall Out Boy-sized potential smash "Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks" could imaginably, with proper production, hit home for a broader audience that doesn't spend all its time yet STEALING MUSIC OH NOES.
But "International Tweexcore Underground"?
Oh, it's a really good song, precise and well-crafted and kinda funny once we're in on the joke. What I'm wondering, I guess, is whether we're headed for (or have already arrived at) pop music that only works if you're part of a relatively small group of obsessives, either at a mainstream level-- even knowing what's a hit takes more effort now-- or "underground". Tom Breihan has mused before about how niche-oriented pop is now, and I've probably mentioned how I see the Internet as exacerbating all that, each of us seeking out content that reconfirms the importance of our own narrow interests, like the difference between cable and network TV but on a vastly more personalized level. As MTV circles the drain, a big enough cult and whatever major distribution Arts & Crafts presumably enjoys might be enough to give a Pavement-loving band of clean-looking Welsh kids a hit video, who knows, why not, just beat it.
Don't take five (take what you want) R. Kelly: "Same Girl (Remix)" (ft. T-Pain and Usher)
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.
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.
I'll take the subway to your suburb sometime. Super Furry Animals: Hometown Unicorn
Taking a cue from Ned Raggett, I thought I'd atone for my recent silence (here anyway -- lots of me over at Pitchfork in recent days) with a look through the archives. I've written plenty of horrible but possibly interesting stuff, plus some other things that hopefully don't suck too much.
- Ben Folds: Songs for Silverman review, Pitchfork I'm still getting called out for this one. I don't think it was that bad if you're part of the (admittedly small) audience that knows what "OTM" means, though I do wish I'd made it clearer how much I love and respect Folds' earlier work.
- Bees: Free the Bees review, Pitchfork During my five-review trial period, I wrote this concept review about concept reviews. Somehow I was not fired. Somehow the site still exists.
- Hercules: In the Alleyway review, Pitchfork Terribly written, and the reference points I use could be refined a lot further, but this is one of the first records I really got behind for Pitchfork. It's still one that people would do well to check out.
- Depeche Mode: Remixes 81-04 review, Pitchfork Far and away the most embarrassing thing I've written for Pitchfork. I didn't enjoy spending a weekend listening to this Depeche Mode remix double-album, and maybe I still wouldn't, but I'm not sure how you'd read this review and not come away with the impression that my problem with the album was largely my own ignorance.
- "Failure Is Victory" post, Whopundit I dug up here and in other posts an extensive listing of instances where Administration officials said that things turning shitty in Iraq was really a sign that things were turning awesome. Obviously, I was wrong and George W. Bush has been proved right by history, which is why all the major print and TV pundits not named Paul Krugman are people who were still pro-war even at the time I was writing this.
This has of course nothing to do with anything. Deerhunter: Fluorescent Grey (live at South Street Seaport)
So that's that for now. Some stuff is better left in the archives-- and will stay there until John Mayer and Kanye West meld into some kind of unassailable Super Frat Boy, laying waste to every lowly music scribe in his/their media-blitzing path and, if I get to the Emerald City before midnight, bestowing upon me both heat vision and the power to erase memory. (Kevin Spacey is the killer.)
from el Records' Abracadabra comp If I had one day when I didn't have to be all confused and I didn't have to feel that I was ashamed of everything. Mr. Martini: Number Four St. James Square
I talked to this creepy old lady at a bar yesterday. She kept saying what it used to be like on the French Riviera. I said I have the E! network thanks. She kept telling me would you believe I'm 33? I said no you're not. She said would you believe Bitchpork's Number 99 track of 2006 "Our Lady of a Certain Age" is totally a rip of an obscure single for the defunct el Records imprint? I said yes I fucking would thanks lady.
"PopMatters would be an awesome name for a website"
You say you want revolution / I want to know why Blur: Ambulance (fan video)
I've been reading some old Greil Marcus pieces lately. One thing that stands out from his reasons for loathing Journey, the Doobie Brothers, or the Knack-- and from his interviews with the likes of Gang of Four or Rough Trade's Geoff Travis-- is how trivial and superficial music crit and appreciation has become now that "everything is cool". I mean, I'm part of the problem: I don't believe in guilty pleasures, and I don't care how high-minded or forward-thinking a track is if I can't find a way to enjoy it, too. But I don't think anyone in the current discourse agonizes over how pre-existing social frameworks, possibly bad ones, affect what we create, what we enjoy, the way the likes of Gang of Four used to. It's almost the type of thing you'd get laughed out of the cool lunch table for now to suggest that pop can change the world. But our culture does matter. Maybe that's why I write about this stuff.
What's wrong with cherry-picking facts? Then you can make the perfect truth pie. Lullatone: Pajama in the USA (and Canada)
Seems like back then it wasn't necessarily enough for something to be merely enjoyable. That's what "rockism" probably meant to its practitioners, especially after punk came along: Good music, in that view, must not only be enjoyable, but also be a revolutionary force, something that changes the way we view the world, causes us to constantly question our inherited assumptions, our sexism, racism, ism ism. The kind of stuff the chattering classes have deemed tres gauche nowadays, much to the benefit of the presently established order. I'm not prepared to turn away from my current approach to evaluating music-- I'd be hard pressed to say the Lucksmiths' Naturaliste is going to make you a better person, though it might make you a happier one-- but at the same time, I'm not convinced that Marcus's punk-era outlook was wrong. The conversation around pop music, like every conversation in this age of increasingly fragmented media, is often way too insular. We treat popular culture as if it's endlessly interesting, sure, but not as if it should actually matter to anyone but nerds and college students with too much time and bandwidth.
(Then again, maybe times are just more trivial now. With the specter of World War II still in the near past, a sardonic lyricist like Elvis Costello could invoke the symbol of absolute evil, Hitler, and be sure to provoke a reaction in his listeners. And of course Vietnam, the civil rights movement, etc. The baby boomers' betrayal of the Sixties' promise has rendered revolution just another hoary old cliche. Which doesn't mean we should stop finding ways to open each other's minds.)
Correction the coat hangers should be upside down. Jens Lekman: Julie
P.S. Like Homer Simpson, I'm nodding "yes" to every beat of Matt LeMay's Pitchfork beatdown of the "This Is NEXT" compilation. Unsurprisingly, music-biz blogger Coolfer calls the piece "weak and uninformed" without any evidence or explanation. Wait, an argument without support? On the Internet? I thought only Pitchfork writers supposedly did that! A so-called industry with year-over-year earnings increases and stock price gains like this one is clearly way smarter than Matt.
P.P.S. So apparently I'm following in the footsteps of Pitchfork's Chris Dahlen last year and receiving an "other notable" pieces mention in the forthcoming Da Capo Best Music Writing 2007 book for this silly old thing. Holy smokes! Such an honor, and thank you so much to everyone involved. Make sure to buy the actual book so you can have a nice printed copy of Nitsuh Abebe's superlative piece, "Making Plans for Daniel". Good company indeed.
P.P.P.S. Last time I asked, "Why has nobody called Michelle Rhee on her unverified credentials and apparent falsehoods?" The Washington Post's Debbie Cenziper has wisely called Rhee on one of the smaller apparent falsehoods. Better late than never. (Via Bob Somerby.)
P.P.P.P.S. Attention, Juggalos (and fans of photographers with an eye for what is interesting about ordinary people). Also see this dude's "Zero's Heroes" curatorial project at the same blog.
Maybe if I hold your hand you will understand. Dick Cheney: Iraq Shuffle
I had prepared a 1,000-word post that would answer, after a fashion, a question from an esteemed reader. A while back, I posted the following: "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." This reader wrote in to ask, "Wondering how it is that you came down on the side of music rather than politics for yourself, particularly as you go on to catalogue the various ways you find politics to be more important than music."
Well, shit. Like I said, those 1,000 words were going to answer that, tie in all kinds of bullshit ways that people treat discourse (political and musical) as if the symbols that compose language didn't also stand for a real something, and then eventually totally explain how this means we need a new, crazy way of approaching language to match the medium of our time-- that we need, like Finnegan's Wake, or Super Furry Animals, to transcend language. I think at some point I actually tried to address dude's question.
A song for the young believers, who woke up and found themselves neither. The Standells: Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White (via Dennis Cooper)
Then this happened. I mean, I'll probably put up most of my previous, aborted post sometime (actually, I accidentally posted a draft of it, so there's probably a copy floating out there in a Google cache somewhere). But one of my daily reads, Bob Somerby's Daily Howler, posted this following exchange regarding young Atlantic blogger Matthew Yglesias:
SOMERBY:
YGLESIAS: This is what I've referred to as the "hack gap" and it seems to me that it's very important. The nature of two-party democracy is that elections are decided by the small minority of the public too confused or too ill-informed to realize that there are persistent, substantial differences between the two federal political parties. As a result, the issues (or, more likely, pseudo-issues) that are most important in deciding elections tend to be the issues that are least important in substantive terms.
Due to this unexplained “hack gap,” pseudo-issues tend to decide our elections. We’ve been discussing such issues forever. But guess what? As we continue, we learn that Matt doesn’t want to waste his time on these decisive pseudo-issues. Darlings, the lovely shall be choosers! Matt would rather spend his time working on things that he finds “interesting.” The gentleman wants an “appealing” way to spend his valuable time:
YGLESIAS (continuing directly): As a writer, though, I'd rather spend my time writing about things that I think are important or at least interesting. Harping away on haircuts, Bykofsky's appalling column, the way George W. Bush lied to the American public about what kind of cheese he likes on his cheesesteak (really!), etc. doesn't seem like an appealing way to spend my time. But the fact that the right has an army of people willing to pretend that this sort of thing is the most important thing in the world is a massive, massive impediment to having sensible policies about national security, taxes, health care, global warming, etc.
Darlings! Haircuts and earth tones decide our elections—and, thereby, the fate of the world. Their pre-eminence is also “a massive, massive impediment to having sensible policies about national security, taxes, health care, global warming.” But so what? Matt would rather spend his time writing about the things that are interesting! Writing about things that decide our elections “doesn't seem like an appealing way” for Matt “to spend [his] time.”
Let's see here. I also think this stuff is vastly important! I have also said as much, on my blog! So why the hell am I doing what I do, then? Is it because I love it, love the music, and the writing, and the writing about music (not so much music about writing, though there's not enough)? Is it because it's easier for a twentysomething smart-ass to find an outlet for music writing than political writing? Is it art for art's sake? Is it because I'd never want to end up in Washington, D.C., and I invent stuff like that as an excuse? Is it because I'm a big goddamn hypocrite?
Why won't you recognize how psychedelic I am / And love me? Josh Ritter: Me and Jiggs (from 2002)
Then again, what the hell are you doing? Is that part of my rationalization process? Is this one of the five stages of grief? Why would I be sad? Lil' Wayne's so mother-fucking high he could eat a star! Lil' Wayne was in the New Yorker! Dick Cheney was against invading Iraq before he was for it ("How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? ...Our judgment was, not very many"). Wait, does that mean I'm rehabilitated?
Why would a seashell illustrate Jens Lekman's homelessness? Where are all the homeless in this town? Why don't you ever run into Chicago-style crazies on the subway? Why has nobody called Michelle Rhee on her unverified credentials and apparent falsehoods? Why is nobody talking about the fact that other countries have much better health care, for much less money, than the U.S.-- the equivalent of a BMW that was half the price of a Hyundai? Why isn't everybody talking about the Tough Alliance? Is it because Josh Ritter actually sings in the inspired Dylan-esque torrents other critics write of hearing in Lil' Wayne (true!) and Jack White (words are meaningless, and regrettable), or is it because he doesn't have a punk pedigree? Is everybody reading Deerhunter's blog every day? Is there a Santa Claus? What's the Soft Pink Truth about the Shocking Pinks?
Um yeah but posting about Justin Timberlake is interesting and appealing to me. There was an article in the New Yorker about head trauma making people obsessed with music. Let's rationalize it that way. "My mind is on another continent." One blink for yes, two blinks for no, sweet dreams, sweet cheeks. Yours truly.
I'll never be free of memories. Anonymous Keyboardist: Hot for Teacher
EDIT: a crygasm so powerful, it encompasses us, as a group, and we too are caught up, brought to a cathartic peak, and we all... release:
P.S. Oh hey, I forgot to mention, my Dizzee Rascal review ran in Spin.
