Just buy a ticket and take a train, you'll find yourself tomorrow. Four Pennies: (When the Boy's Happy) The Girl's Happy Too (embed via Fire Escape Talking)
I might have time for a real post of some sort before the holidays, but I might not. I will be talking about stuff this week on PRI's Fair Game, for those of you who've always been wishing there were some way you could hear my ramblings rather than just skim them in your RSS readers.
It's dark and you're blushing, aren't you my love. Riz Ortolani: Cannibal Holocaust score (source for the Honeydrips' "Hej Då Karolin")
Now it's time to look for the summer in me. Sean Kingston: Beautiful Girls
embedding disabled, sorry If there's a throne, you're looking at a chairman. The Mundanes: Empty Boulevards
[Tonight's post is transcribed straight from the chicken-scratch scrawl on the first few pages of a just bought, probably never-to-be-completed (like all the others) composition book.]
On the subway. A little drunk, but not that drunk. Left a holiday party because my wife didn't have her keys, and if I don't get home soon she'll have to face a roomful of 7th graders tomorrow on even less sleep than usual. Still left later than I meant to said I would, because my non-music bosses started doing a Christmas Carol skit based on the CEO, and dessert somebody put dessert in front of me. I wanted to see what they were serving if you ordered "not the cheesecake." (See, I like cheesecake, but the other thing had a funny name, like "profiterole" but more Italian, and starting with a "t." Good-sounding.) (What they served was some kind of tiny cup of vanilla like ice cream, very disappointing.) Now I'm on the subway. Thom Yorke's wordless hum. Air-clearing, still slightly on edge acoustic guitar. "Jigsaw Falling Into Place."
[I'm transcribing this, btw, while watching "The Grinch Stole Christmas." Your brain is for spiders, you got garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch]
They say nobody talks about the music on In Rainbows. They The same ppl mention Radiohead and the Eagles in the same over-capitalized e-mails. (They're both business stories, right?) But the business-- which started killing itself once the acountants took charge at some always-to-be-unspecified date-- is dead. Never to be reborn until, perchance, it is. In the meantime music is all of ours. Yours and mine. Do it yourself!!! Why not? You can do it a zillion times better than the Eagles. Nobody would listen to you, because the marketing armies that launched those old fucks are defeated vanquished. But as the shittiest band in the world next to U2, those turds Coldplay, has already proven, nobody but nobody can do THIS -- Radiohead. What Radiohead does. It's a biiiiiggg cult, but it might be the last cult worth joining. (Jesus was two millennia ago, maaan.)
[transcribing, Simpsons ad, Homer singing about a "spider pig," YES!!!!!!]
If from here on out we're all nobodys, or at best nobodys pretending to be somebodys, Radiohead are somebodys-- major-label approved! w/ the emotive grunge-era one-hit-wonder one hit (in the U.S.) to prove it!-- who are unafraid to be loved by the nobodys. In the land of the nobodys, the last living somebody is king. There are more nobodys today than somebodys (see previous post). Radiohead is AWSOME.
[You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile. ...Arsenic sauce?]
Didn't think much about In Rainbows when I first downloaded it, I admit. Everybody else was thinking about it-- where's the fun in that?-- plus I'd just dropped $80 on some record I might receive in a couple of months, w/o even hearing it, so both expectation and embarrassment were running impossibly high.
Since I filed my main 2007 year-end list, In Rainbows-- ranked too low on my list-- has been the album I have played most, even more than new Drive-By Truckers or old Saint Etienne. Maybe it's the kind of record that needs to be free of year-end pressure for me, not least because OK Computer is practically the record that introduced me to the post-Beatles variety of the critically acclaimed Album of the Year. I was a kid from a foothill town in Northern California, with too few real friends in next stop Nashville, and not yet any real friends in next stop Arizona. What the fuck?
[It came without ribbons, it came without tags, it came without packages, boxes or bags.]
I'm listening to Videotape now, so I'll write about that. The halting broken piano chords. The electronic beats, spare, in between headphones. The off-kilter drums in the left headphone, the way you don't expect to hear from any band, not that you can expect anything from Radiohead after they had, first, innovated beyond your teenage comprehension (OK Computer, Kid A) and, after an album you never cared about as much as you wanted to, retreated into boring, depressive gloom-rock (that POS (for Radiohead) political album that came after Amnesiac). I don't know what it means but the sound comes before the sign, the sign before the signification.
[Maybe Christmas he thought doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.]
It's just as well that I finally started talking about Disc 1 as Disc 1 ended, because Disc 1 is still something I admire, even adore, even maybe love, w/o ever feeling like I can touch it. The way Brent D. I think once described the diff between Loveless + OK Computer. Disc 2, which I thought I'd hear for the first time when my $80 slabs of vinyl beautiful vinly vinyl arrived in the mail, is what reignited my interest in this album when it finally leaked. From the mournfully percussive dark-side-of-the-moon goo goo goo joob of "Down Is the New Up"-- hit me, string section!-- w/ it's ladies + gentlemen, w/o a safety net , I shall now... -- to the "Karma Police" analogue "Last Flowers" -- regretful, fragile, and terrified where its precursor was accusatory and fuck you and terrified (appliances have gone berserk -- I cannot keep up... "snot-nosed little punk" is maybe a bit nicer than "arrest this man" for a "hitler hairdo" if not-- diff song-- kicking screaming Gucci little piggy) seeking relief like an old man, so like a fan of the Eagles, or the worst band in the world Coldplay, and fucking finding it, goddamn it, in the beats and drones and Climbing up the Walls and dystopian mists of Up on the Ladder climbing
to the deranged --
"Bangers + Mash"
to the perfect 4 Minute warning
(everyone has a different favorite song on this, WTF?)
I'
I need to go let my wife into the apartment now. She is waiting for me, possibly in the rain. I have a Santa hat in my bag which will make her laugh. [I should've said it was on my head!] And only one more stop to go, so I'd better stop.
MySpace link, scroll down for song He lay awake at night, tossing and turning underneath his printed quilt protector, tears welling in his eyes. Dominique Leone: Nellie McKay
Context is everything, but context can be changed.
(What was yours is everyone's from now on.)
As the novel moves toward a purer, more private expression it will cease altogether to be a popular medium, becoming, like poetry, a cloistered avocation. The Professor Brothers: The TA Interview
Remember when the days were long and rolled beneath a deep blue sky. Babycakes: Group Therapy
I'm still convinced the internet is changing everything. A pretty boring idea by now to anybody reading this blog, I guess. But like, everybody 20 years ago got their information from newspapers, radio, basic TV, cable TV, movies, CDs, tapes, records... many people still do. Not long before that, there wasn't even cable TV. As recently as a decade ago, even the most dedicated information junkies still had relatively few sources: just add to the list Salon, Slate, and the like, and online versions of news outlets from other mediums. (There were chatrooms and message boards, too, of course but those were different somehow, especially chatrooms. I'll have to think how -- this is a hole in my idea so far.)
Anyway, nowadays, as everybody has probably noticed, there are like a gazillion more voices. These new voices are less authoritative, maybe, but they also have revealed to us that the older media weren't as authoritative as we had assumed, so the shift is self-reinforcing. And just the fact that there are more of them opens them up to previously unheard or even suppressed perspectives (although the simple financial and social requirements behind computers and blogging still pose a class barrier of sorts, for now). I don't know whether it's all a good thing, for society, as an economic issue, or on an artistic level. But it's what's happening.
The blogosphere, too, is different than it was just a few years ago, with the discovery of an audience leading to corporate financing for some, copycat moneymaking schemes at others, and the entrenchment of publications you "have" to read because everybody else does, whether you like them or not. Just like the traditional media. And now, as more of us use RSS readers, the blogs that we actually read via RSS are privileged, too. We aren't as likely to see their comment sections, to interact with them, to click through their blog rolls. When we see random-ass, ugly, live journaly blogs like this one on Google, we're think of them as random-ass, ugly, live-journaly blogs-- different than the bigger blogs. As blogs become more established, we interact with them more the way we did with traditional media than the way we interact with a less-established voice.
But there's no requirement of expertise or journalistic responsibility, at all, for any of this. People sensationalize headlines worse than the New York Post just for clicks, and nobody writing or reading even seems to realize this is essentially lying for money and reprehensible. We can say whatever we want, hold forth on how, like, New Edition were sorely underrated, or how New Edition were totally shitty, and you have no idea whether I've actually spent time listening to the group for hours and hours or not (not as much as I should, mostly know them through the new jack soul-type groups they influenced and then the white boy bands that followed, but hope to revisit). Everybody can at least know all the names now, though, thanks to having so many sources at our fingertips. And everybody always has an opinion. But then again, how did we know "real" journalists weren't full of shit? We thought they weren't, we went to journalism school to be like them only better, but then the more closely you follow what went on in media right before the dawn of the blogosphere, the more ways you find out that people you respected let you down.
People used to sit for hours in front of, like, MTV. In the early 1990s, Disney was a big powerful brand. (People bought NEW Mickey Mouse t-shirts, unironically.) But now, as David Brooks, my sweet Brooksy, finally discovered, we're all deeply fragmented. The cultural capital is in knowing whatever is in the sources that the people you're arguing with don't also follow. So the process may be towards ever greater fragmentation, ever greater loss of authority by the existing authorities. Which brings me to a quote from an old New York Times clip from 2005 that was recently brought to my attention again.
"By weekend's end, it was clear that Intonation had succeeded on its own terms. But it was hard not to think about what was missing, namely the swagger and ambition and hunger of musicians ready to take over the world, or at least the country. Many of these acts seemed happy to stay right where they were, making music for fans who accept them as they are. Any park where Deerhoof is a crowd favorite can't possibly be a bad place. Still, two days is a long time to spend there, let alone a whole career."
What's weird is this was only two years ago. Almost all of us, even some of the most media-savvy, thought there was something bigger. There might not be ever again. It's possible that the age of the transcendent star is pretty much behind us for pop music, and the changes of the past few years are going to accelerate until the media universe becomes infinite, unprofitable, and unreliable. Or it could be that the sub-trend of the new-media establishment starting to act like old media will continue, and by decade's end culture will again be as stifling as it was under Reagan and Thatcher. Or maybe this is 1990, and next year we're going to get Nevermind and the year after that The Chronic. Until then, a successful band now is just a cult band with a really big cult. Bob Lefsetz, of course, doesn't get it:
"Radiohead is a cult band. The cult is quite large, but there's a distinct line around the group of people who care. Beyond that, no one gives a shit. Guy Hands and the media care about the business story, but they don't care about the music."
He contrasts this with the Eagles. Do people really care about the Eagles album? Well, yes. Do people really care about the Radiohead album? OF COURSE, it's great, especially disc 2, but Bob hasn't listened so he doesn't know. And I probably shouldn't admit this, but I haven't listened to the Eagles album.
This is how the future works. It's terrifying, but at least the Eagles are closer to dying than I am unless I die young or they live forever. Which is possible, given whatever deal they made with Satan to get them to the point where even some of the people closest to me kind of like them. It's you or me, Henley! Or David Brooks!
There was a new Robyn album out in 2005. It has since come out in the UK, and it will finally come out in the U.S. soon, or so I've read in the usual places. One way of succeeding in the new environment might be to constantly maintain your cult's interest through touring, blogging, new music, etc. Another way might be the Robyn route-- put out a really good album, and make sure everybody hears about it, so eventually you find the big cult you deserve.
Humpty Dumpty will not be put back together again.
Other recent clicking recommendations: - This old piece about Bob Dylan (and lager) by David Stubbs. I like how he's honest about his meager background with Dylan (and I like lager). - Bradford Cox is a better interviewer than I am. - Jonas Game shows up on Sweden's P3 Live radio show, which is occasionally hosted by Hello Saferide and Sakert's Annika Norlin. Link is to the recent archives, where you'll find a few other familiar names, as well.
We'll forget the sun in his jealous sky as we lie in fields of gold. Pete Townshend & the Deep End: Hiding Out
The traditional press is an undemocratic institution, so the least pundits and reporters owe the public in a democracy is some goddamn honesty. Not merely looking out for our own hides.
December 5, 2007, 9:23 am Nonpartisan AEI
I have a lot of problems with this Kit Seelye piece. It’s kind of weird that the usual “both sides may have a point” reporting gave way to a clear declaration that one side is right — precisely on an issue where many, many health experts believe that Obama is wrong, and that mandates are both feasible and essential. Much better coverage of the issue, I’m sorry to say, in the Murdoch news.
But this takes the cake:
Joseph Antos, a health policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan group.
Is it really possible for a veteran reporter to believe that AEI is nonpartisan? Not even a qualifier, like “right-leaning” or “free-market-oriented”?
MP3/Stream via XLR8R One might as well sculpt a statue from toothpaste. Pikelet: Bug-In-Mouth (Faux Pas Remix)
I'm from the United States of kiss my ass. Saint Etienne: You're in a Bad Way
"Little Drummer Boy". It occurs to me I really like it. I can think of plenty of reasons maybe it's not as good as other Christmas songs I really like-- it's not super festive, and there are some terrible versions-- so I guess it must be a partly sentimental attachment. My parents have this really old, like, antique toy drummer boy from my grandma, and if you turn the little key in his back the guy still beats on his drum. Hell, sometimes he does this for no reason at all, which I've assumed was just because he's so old, but which Joe Tangari points out probably means he's haunted.
Pa rum pum pum pum.
I wish I could remember all the Christmas tapes my parents would play in our house and car-- there were only three or so main ones, and we still play 'em every year-- but Julie Andrews was the biggie. And there was some kind of compilation; I forget who was on it. Oh, and another one was this nice man Stu Boyer playing the pipe organ. (I don't think I've mentioned it on here before, but my dad used to own a pizza restaurant in Sacramento called Pizza & Pipes, and there was a pipe organ in it.)
The life you save may be mine. Thom Yorke: Last Flowers
Turns out other people have childhood memories of Pizza & Pipes-es of various names, too, from completely different parts of the country. The way they describe theirs-- long tables, families eating, pitchers of beer, often totally packed and awesome, worst pizza ever-- is surprising to me, because it's pretty much like my own recollection. (Also, like the beer garden in my old Queens neighborhood.) Except in my version it's the best pizza ever. (And at the beer garden it's kielbasa.) There was also a children's play area with games and rides and stuff. One of them was called the Chuck Wagon or something and still is what I find myself mentally picturing when trying to determine whether to say "off the wagon" or "on the wagon" when talking about pretty much anybody. I recall the children's play area, and the restaurant's being in Sacramento, turned out not to be the best ideas once the '90s hit and the world got so litigious that lobbyists could use the trend to turn public sentiment against the right to sue the rich and powerful when they do shitty things (not talking about mom and pop here, obv).
This is all as bizarre to me as it probably is to you. I imagine most people haven't even actually seen a real Wurlitzer pipe organ-- the info on this one seems about right-- but seriously, the whole setup was amazing. All those keyboards, all those pipes, lots of other fun instruments on the walls that the organist could control with a push of the proper pedal. I used to ask him to play "Tomorrow" from Annie.
So anyway, yeah, no idea why people used to do this except it must've been a way to go out and drink beer and still keep the kids entertained. Dad also owned one in Fresno, and I remember interviewing some band that was originally from there (forget which one, maybe they moved to Silverlake?) and them recalling getting high and going there. Anyway the economy went bad soon after, and my dad had to close both restaurants, and that was that.
Off to Nashville. "Are you a surfer." Naaahh I lived near the mountains. "Ohh a mountain surfer." Naaahh they have that it's called snowboarding. SCREECH BANG CRASH.
My days of free pizza were over.
Save yourself some misery and get away from here. Eddie Rabbit and Crystal Gayle: You and I (karaoke version by Piet & Tonny Kamper)
but the funny thing is he read the tracks and said that guy may be french canadian because he thought a song was titled in french. the song was "Kanske Ar Jag Kar i Dig". that song is SO not french. its swiss. quit flirting and do your job guy at borders ! youre suppose to be intelligent and cultured. FOR SHAME !
...OR WERE THEY??? Stay tuned next week for more tales from Marc's past derailing Christmas critical musings, when I should be doing year-end stuff and everything else, ALL AT ONCE, and OK enough late-night coffee!!!!!!!!!!!
"Skinny Love" is to Edwin McCain as.
embedding disabled, sorry I'm too full for tears, eat drink, sleep smoke, tobacco & coke. Van Morrison: Streets of Arklow --> You Don't Pull No Punches, But You Don't Push the River (two Veedon Fleece songs, live in 2006)
I don't usually feel compelled to write about musician's deaths (last time may have been Elliott Smith). Maybe I've got a problem dealing with the idea of death, maybe most of the musical ones you read about have either lived long lives or done things that made their demises predictably self-inflicted, but I just can't add anything to the conversation without coming off cretinous either way. This Pimp C thing? Has me really bummed, doing boring pointless stuff like listening to "One Day" multiple times, and I still don't even want you to talk to me about it. Well, maybe just Tom. RIP.
People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.
My past is my business. The Honeydrips: Here Comes the Future (ft. Ring Snuten)
"Schizophrenic homemade pop with bluesy acoustic guitar, fragmented electronic beats, occasional beeps and whistles, and lazy vocals looking for a tune." -Listen.com
The worst part is the banality which is and this is the really banal part also the best part.
