THE REFEREE ALWAYS WINS

Democracy opens up the possibility of "abandonment," and creates opportunities for men and women who understand how to play to or on that feeling.
John Mayer: Kid A cover (fan video, but the video isn't the point)

I call my parents twice a week, almost without fail. I don't know if that's more or less than the average twenty-something-- I know it's much less than my sister calls, sigh. Usually we just talk about what we've been up to lately, but I guess I was feeling a bit less frantic than usual last night and so my dad and I actually had a discussion. About ideas. I know, right?

He recently saw a history professor give a lecture on the New Testament. The professor talked about the multiple layers of meaning in the original Greek and also described the huge impact the Gutenberg press had on religious life. Apparently (and probably some of you know way more about this and can fill me in down in the comments section) prior to Gutenberg and mass literacy, lots of people had huge portions of the scripture memorized, and the gospels would often be performed, almost like a play. Once people had a printed Bible to refer to, they no longer needed to keep so much of the text memorized, and most of us have lost even the ability to do so.

A literate people, the professor went on, interacts with the scripture differently; I forget how, exactly. As McLuhan would note, the technology of the printing press was an "extension of man." And as Neil Postman observed, every new technology is a Faustian bargain: You get something, and you give something up.


Talent is an asset.
TRC feat. Zoe: Lately
(thanks to Smug Police, which has this and other bassline tracks in convenient mix form)

Caleb Crain has a fascinating article in the New Yorker's winter fiction issue, in which Crain imagines what life will be like if people stop reading. Literacy, it seems, wires people's brains differently than orality. And the act of reading is a special one, in that it frees up our ability to think critically while we digest information-- an ability which, as McLuhan would surely have been the first to note, is compromised when we're absorbed in more immersive, electronic mediums such as the radio or the television.

Apropos of my dad's story, Crain quotes Proust and the Squid author Maryanne Wolf agreeing that writing "freed the Greeks from the necessity of keeping their whole culture, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, memorized." However, we may finally be returning to a state similar to the way the Greeks were prior to mass literacy, Crain writes, noting that scholar Walter J. Ong once called this condition "secondary orality." It probably won't surprise you to learn that secondary orality would be bad news for a democracy.

[On the one hand, Ong's speculations about secondary orality have me convinced that the political journalists whom Bob Somerby so rightly pillories day in and day out must watch waaay too much TV. Crain writes:

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

So that's why we're constantly fed scripts instead of news! (Look at the Washington Post's recent series of profiles on the candidates, which included articles about how they dress but nothing about policy-- and when the candidates DO talk about policy, you can count on either David Broder or young Dana Milbank to complain vociferously about how boring or smarty-pants those candidates are, while still failing to inform us about the policies.) Bush=would like to have a beer with, Gore=big fat phony, Obama=Obambi, John Edwards=$400 haircut, John McCain=straight talk, Rudy Giuliani=9iu11ani, Joe Lieberman=bipartisan, Huckabee=nice guy with a funny name, Mitt Romney=Mormon, Fred Thompson=Ronald Reagan, Dennis Kucinich=saw half as many aliens as Ronald Reagan, etc. Pundits have to recite these storylines-- because they lack the power of abstract thinking. If only they were better readers, maybe we'd have a better-functioning press corps.

On the other, and ultimately more important, hand...]

What's next? As to this point, Crain's conclusion is worth quoting in its entirety:

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the New York Times, for example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching. Like the peasants studied by Luria, he thinks in terms of situations and story lines rather than abstractions.

And he may have even more trouble than Luria’s peasants in seeing himself as others do. After all, there is no one looking back at the television viewer. He is alone, though he, and his brain, may be too distracted to notice it. The reader is also alone, but the N.E.A. reports that readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer. Proficient readers are also more likely to vote. Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence. No matter how much one worships an author, Proust wrote, “all he can do is give us desires.” Reading somehow gives us the boldness to act on them. Such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to lose.

Aside from the journalistic and little "d" democratic ramifications of declining literacy, I'd be interested in discussing the implications of rising Internet use. For example, the written word freed the Greeks from having to keep their culture memorized, and Gutenberg freed the Christians from having to keep the scripture memorized; the downside is that few people can quote the entire Iliad or Bible verbatim nowadays, but the plus side is that anybody can access those texts, anyplace, anytime.

So what about Google? I consider that technology, as McLuhan likely would, another extension of man: Information that I know I can easily Google is information I can safely forget, like the Greeks could forget the Iliad and the Christians could forget the Epistle to Philemon. If, as Postman theorized, any new technology is a Faustian bargain, what is the downside of my reliance on Google? My dad points out that one ill effect might be a loss of the ability to connect the dots-- I can find all of the pieces of information, but I may lose the broader comprehension that allows me to see how they fit together. Because of this, it's also possible that I might not even look for the right things. And, as Crain writes of TV, it's certainly true that on the Internet I am exposed, more and more, to ideas with which I already agree; I think we all are, especially as we fill up our RSS readers.

One last thing: Internet literacy is inherently something possessed by an elite, at least these days. (Not everybody has a computer or has the time or inclination to use the Internet, etc.) So will reading and the use of technologies such as Google become skills for only an educated global class of information workers? If so, what becomes of everybody else?

And, crucially, if only a select few have access to the information that reading and the Web provide, what becomes of democracy? Or will Internet use gradually spread to almost every home, like TV and radio and literacy before it, and lift up the impoverished rather than hold them down? Maybe M.I.A. knows. I don't.


Coolness is having courage.
Hi-Five: She's Playing Hard to Get

I guess now it can't hurt to post this, although it's a couple of weeks old already. I decided that there are people reading this blog who know me from life outside of music journalism (imagine!) and don't really know what I do, so I've also included links to my reviews where applicable. This year, even 50 top albums just didn't feel like enough, and I can already think of albums I wished I'd included or ways I would change the order, but here goes:

1. Jens Lekman Night Falls Over Kortedala (review) (interview)
2. Deerhunter Cryptograms / Fluorescent Grey EP (review 1, review 2)
3. The Tough Alliance New Waves EP / A New Chance (review 1 / review 2)
4. Lil Wayne Da Drought 3
5. The Field From Here We Go Sublime
6. LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver
7. Josh Ritter The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter (track review)
8. Panda Bear Person Pitch (review -- possibly NSFW)
9. Battles Mirrored (reviewed in Spin print edition)
10. V/A After Dark (review)

11. M.I.A. Kala
12. Jay-Z American Gangster (review -- possibly NSFW)
13. Sally Shapiro Disco Romance (review)
14. Feist The Reminder
15. The Honeydrips Here Comes the Future (track review)
16. Simian Mobile Disco Attack Decay Sustain Release (review)
17. Los Campesinos! Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP (review)
18. Studio Yearbook 1
19. Black Lips Good Bad Not Evil (review -- possibly NSFW)
20. The Good, the Bad & The Queen The Good, the Bad & The Queen

21. Shocking Pinks Shocking Pinks (review)
22. Burial Untrue
23. Justice †
24. Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
25. Life Without Buildings Live at the Annondale Hotel
26. Ricardo Villalobos Fabric 36
27. Radiohead In Rainbows
28. Dan Deacon Spiderman of the Rings (review)
29. The Crayon Fields Animal Bells (review)
30. Taken By Trees Open Field (review)

31. Elliott Smith New Moon
32. Animal Collective Strawberry Jam (review -- possibly NSFW)
33. UGK Underground Kingz
34. The Twilight Sad Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters (EP review)
35. A Place to Bury Strangers A Place to Bury Strangers (review)
36. Grizzly Bear Friend EP
37. Black Kids Wizard of Ahhhs EP (review)
38. A Sunny Day in Glasgow Scribble Mural Comic Journal (review)
39. Lucky Soul The Great Unwanted (review)
40. Gruff Rhys Candylion (review)

41. King Khan & His Shrines What Is?!
42. No Age Weirdo Rippers (review -- possibly NSFW)
43. Thurston Moore Trees Outside the Academy (review -- possibly NSFW)
44. Säkert! Säkert! (review)
45. Dinosaur Jr. Beyond
46. Blitzen Trapper Wild Mountain Nation
47. Art Brut It's a Bit Complicated
48. The Postmarks The Postmarks (review)
49. Sly Hats Liquorice Night (track review)
50. José González In Our Nature (review)

As always, my favorite list-related tomato-throwing comes from Three Bulls!, which I believe is a website for Log Cabin Republicans.

And just for fun, here's a year-end list from the Musikbyrån, Sweden's "leading music news/live/info televison show", according to a kind Swede with whom I've been corresponding. Attention, DJ Martians and Largehearted Boys of the world:

1 Feist – The Reminder
2 Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
3 Jamie T – Panic Prevention
4 LCD Soundsystem – Sound Of Silver
5 Justice - Cross
6 Säkert! – Säkert!
7 The Hold Steady – Boys And Girls In America
8 Panda Bear – Person Pitch
9 The National - Boxer
10 Laakso – Mother, Am I Good Looking

11 Jens Lekman – Night Falls Over Kortedala
12 Pharoahe Monch - Desire
13 Familjen – Det Snurrar I Min Skalle
14 Band Of Horses – Cease to Begin
15 Jack Peñate - Matinée
16 Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
17 Rufus Wainwright – Release The Stars
18 Interpol – Our Love To Admire
19 M.I.A -Kala
20 Radiohead – In Rainbows

21 Erik Enocksson – Farväl Falkenberg
22 CocoRosie – The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn
23 Robert Wyatt - Comicopera
24 Simian Mobile Disco – Attack Decay Sustain Release
25 Animal Collective – Strawberry Jam
26 Britney Spears – Blackout
27 Aa - Gaame
28 Modest Mouse – We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
29 Kanye West - Graduation
30 Maps –We Can Create

31 Beirut – The Flying Club Cup
32 Bloc Party – A Weekend In The City
33 Skull Defekts – Blood Spirits & Drums Are Singing
34 P J Harvey – White Chalk
35 Shout Out Louds – Our Ill Wills
36 José González – In Our Nature
37 Klaxons – Myths Of The Near Future
38 No Age – Weirdo Rippers
39 Kent – Tillbaka Till Samtiden
40 Kate Nash – Made Of Bricks

41 Florence Valentin – Pokerkväll I Vårby Gård
42 Cut City – Exit Decades
43 Björk - Volta
44 Soulsavers – It’s Not How Far You Fall, It’s How You Land
45 Tegan & Sara – The Con
46 The Pigeon Detectives – Wait For Me
47 Calvin Harris – I Created Disco
48 Keren Ann – Keren Ann
49 UGK - Underground Kingz
50 The View – Hats Of To The Buskers

I'll walk the streets of London, which once seemed all our own.
Blur: This Is a Low