Jive Talkin': Doing it live
We could be talking about Jody's defence of Mariah Carey or whether blogs really break bands or how it is finally really, really, really time to declare an all-out Ticketmaster boycott, at least until the governments get off they's asses and go full-on combines-investigation on them. But we're not because I have been too busy.
For two things, I've been preparing a talk that I'm giving on Saturday for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (Canada) conference - if you're in St. Catharines at Brock University around 2:15 pm, I'll be airing some not-fully-cooked proposals on the subject, "Can You Talk a Few Bars of That? Music Vs. Words in Pop Criticism."
Then there's Monday's edition of the Trampoline Hall Lecture Series in Toronto, when for the first time in (oh my god) six-and-a-half-years of working behind the scenes and at the door, I will be giving a lecture. The show is curated by the brilliant and hilarious Becky Johnson, and its theme is her family. I am going to be talking about her mom, with some digressions on radio love-doctor programs and compulsive hoarding syndrome. The other lectures will be about her dad and her brother. They all live in British Columbia. It's a family that could be your own, except that it's Becky's. The host, as ever, will be Misha Glouberman, whom I hope will be gentle with me. (Tickets are now on sale at Soundscapes.)
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, May 08 at 3:23 PM | Permanent Link | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Heaven Knows I'm Miscellaneous Now
Harry Partch plays his "cloud chamber bowls" (see final item in this post).
The sight of people lined up down the block to buy copies of Grand Theft Auto IV made me wonder when the last time was that you saw such a line outside a record store. (I think it might have been for an Eminem album?) Granted, leaking means release dates don't matter anymore for music, unlike games and movies, but surely, the size of this phenomenon has to make one stop and think - video games seem a lot closer to the centre of that mythic "common conversation" in culture than music does now. And with GTA IV, it even seems that it answers that call for pop entertainment with "significance." Yet I still wonder whether gaming serves the identity-forming function that music does - is there a partisanship, are there fashions, looks, attitudes that go along with alliance to a particular kind of games? (Or does that really come only after the monoculture-making impact - is GTA IV more a kind of Beatles '65 phase?) These are random pre-framings of the questions, and your random speculations are welcome.
Speaking of identity and music, John Darnielle is blogging for Powell's about the five metal albums he might have written about for the 33 1/3 series if he hadn't chosen Black Sabbath's Master of Reality for his oughta-be-classic little young-adult novella.
In Toronto this weekend there is no shortage of diversion to be savoured, courtesy of the Over the Top music and film festival as well as the Jane's Walk sessions of collective flaneurie in honour of the late great Ms. Jacobs, with the obvious locations supplemented by strolls through the unappreciated inner suburbs and a tour of Parkdale "shortcuts and hangouts" conducted by schoolkids (the usual madness from Darren O'Donnell's Mammalian Diving Reflex).
Not to be overlooked, though, is also tomorrow night's show at the Music Gallery by the Harry Partch Ensemble from Montclair State University, the designated repository for the original instruments invented and built by the hobo-genius engineer and theorist of microtonal music - meaning this might be the one chance you get to see & hear the chromelodeon, harmonic canon, diamond marimba and other patented Partchian devices live. (They've never come to Canada before - way to go, Mr. Dovercourt et al at the MG.) For those who've never heard Partch's music - it was probably the single greatest influence (well, along with Brecht-Weill music) on Tom Waits's peak transitional music of the '80s, eg. Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs. Imagine the more chiming, rhythmic, marimba-percussion tunes on those albums with Waits' voice subtracted and you have a rough idea of the timbral zone of Partch's work, though of course there's much more to it. I assume we'll see Iner Souster there!
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, May 02 at 1:23 PM | Permanent Link | Linking Posts | Comments (16)
Now Read This: Gimme Liberty
or Gimme Indie Lazer Bass
Image by indie184.
Over at the ever-productive Moistworks facility, there's a terrific roundtable discussion about a subject Zoilus has revisited, oh, a few times - the surviving meaning, or lack thereof, of the word "indie". Contributors include Moistworks honcho Alex Abramovich (bringing in Franklin Bruno on an assist) and writers and musicians Jonathan Lethem, Douglas Wolk, Luc Sante, Andrew Phillips, Brian Howe, Christopher Sorrentino, Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding), Blake Schwarzenbach, Ben Greenman and me. And more in the comments space. (And as a bonus, tracks by Sebadoh, the recently reunited Great Plains and Big Dipper!)
More, no doubt, to come.
(Later: Coincidentally I stumbled across this April 9 post in Natalia Yanchak from The Dears' blog, titled "Death to indie rock." She links to a National Post piece after the Junos that asked record-store clerks across Canada, "Is Feist still indie?". Several obnoxious answers later - only one, Chris from Zulu Records in Vancouver, addressed it as an economic-model question, by the way - you're left thinking they should add to the question, "... And why would she possibly care?")
Also this week in The New Yorker, Sasha Frere Jones introduces Montreal "lazer bass" to the smart set, in the form of Megasoid. More on that sometime soon too, I hope, but for now just a note that Megasoid is slated to be in Toronto on May 18 at the Drake (and less officially other locations), though their planned New York appearance this weekend was cancelled due to a loss in the family, for which we send our sympathies.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, April 30 at 4:08 PM | Permanent Link | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Destroyer Again: "There's No Salt to Be Passed"
I apologize to Michael Barclay for quoting him out of context, but some good hard thinking came out of it, so let's continue the ping-pong at least another round.
One point. Michael says: "Throughout Destroyer's career, singer/songwriter Dan Bejar seems to have been on a mission to convince me that the rock'n'roll game is little more than a ruse, a farce, something to held in contempt. That he does this while making brilliant rock records is all the more confounding. Yet the deeper into his discography that we get, the less I find reasons to care. His mission, it seems, has been accomplished."
My feeling is that as of Your Blues, and certainly with Trouble in Dreams, it became more a growing case of "mission abandoned."
[... continue? ...]
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, April 28 at 3:41 PM | Permanent Link | Linking Posts | Comments (14)
Hidden Agenda
I didn't get a chance to mention on Friday that I was on that night's edition of TVO's The Agenda in a panel discussion called "What Happened to the Hits?" - asking whether there are no longer broad-demographic "songs that everybody dances to" in North American culture, and if so why, and whether it matters. (See Agenda producer Mike Miner's related blog post here, complete with ensuing weird discussion - though I was glad to see someone bring up Guitar Hero.)
There was a bit of fuddy-duddiness about the setup - they compared Top 10 Charts from 1978 and 2008 - the 1978 chart being Bee Gees-dominated - and read out the names of the artists on the first-half-of-the-year chart with a certain "how can this Lil Wayne guy, whoever he is, possibly compare to the Bee Gees?" condescension. But I think we managed to get out of that mode at least part of the time, though there was plenty we didn't cover (the role of the introduction of Soundscan numbers, for example, in revealing that the "big hits" weren't as big as assumed and that country and hip-hop and R&B were selling more than anyone realized).
On the panel with me were Toronto Life/eye's Jason Anderson, Maple Music's Kim Cooke and Dan Hill - ! It was a tad surreal to be on the same panel with Hill (who was famous, at least in Canada, when I was a child). He was very cordial and knowledgeable, despite the show's attempt to set him up against me, since he's written songs for Celine Dion - I didn't say it, but in the early '80s, the book could almost have been about Dan Hill. Now there are plenty of people who don't know who he is, if my 31-year-old friend's reaction is any indication. (But she recognized Sometimes When We Touch, the ultimate 70s sensitive-guy anthem [and, regarded cynically, a gold mine of unintentional hilarity], when I, er, crooned it to her.)
Anyhow, I'm told that the video will be online today at the show's website, and soon on iTunes (at least in Canada).
General | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, April 27 at 9:42 PM | Permanent Link | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Street Fighting Man?
My posts on Tomfrankobamaculturetcetera have helped spur some good debate here but also a couple of nice posts I'd like to point out without further comment: Phil Ford at Dial M for Musicology, a site I should mention more often, reflects that "the problem with the culture-critical stance is that shorts the emotional meanings that people derive from their experiences." (He also says some very kind things about my book along the way. Thanks).
And 2fs at The Architectural Dance Society explains why, proceeding from Ellen Willis's critique of Tom Frank, the Democrats ought to be running the young Mick Jagger for president. Lately I've been wishing Barack Obama would do a little more strutting and tongue-flashing, frankly.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, April 24 at 2:21 PM | Permanent Link | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Destroyer in Toronto, April 19:
"A Nightmare," Three Witches Chant,
Confounding Nerds' Aim
Dan Bejar and Destroyer live at the Bowery Ballroom, a couple of days after the concert discussed below;
photo swiped from music journo Ryan Dombal's Flickr page;
I'm glad we don't have any kind of professional guild to spank me for it.
I've had the title for this one sitting on my computer all week, because I've noticed a lot lately doing cryptic crosswords (a recent adoption) that the clues often feel like Destroyer-ese. Unfortunately to mention puzzles suggests decoding, encrypted meanings, blah blah blah, which gets it exactly wrong (in Destroyer songs, the encryption is the message; the funeral is the biography). But I was too tickled by my cryptic clue to abandon it, so there it is.
Mainly, I just wanted to tell you that if you are anywhere in range of the current Destroyer tour (eg., in New York tonight, Philly tomorrow, DC the day after - etc), you should not miss it, because there's been something of a rip in the continuum and, suddenly, Destroyer is not just a band you enjoy live because there's something endearingly awkward and stiff and strange about it all - suddenly, they're a band you enjoy live because they kick ass. Dan's reluctant-prophet manner has gone up five levels on the fire and brimstone scale - there was a hilarious moment on Saturday night when he tried to make a joke, which flew over everyone's heads and fell in a puddle to the floor. After a second's pause he grimaced sheepishly: "Uh, sorry, I've never tried saying things to the audience before." His performance was more physical and stagey - John Barrymore-era theatricalism flashing out between shakes of a super-shaggy head, thoroughly through-composed guitar lines being peeled out as if they were just jammed - which is a long way round to rock'n'roll but it can get you there.
It's in keeping with the tone of Trouble in Dreams, which is in many ways the least hostile and aggressive Destroyer record yet - almost in inverse proportion to its noisiness (Fisher Rose drums way loud). It's more of a band album (a more focused This Night) than Destroyer's Rubies and more of a Your Blues-esque crooner and 1950s-musical album too - contrary to all the backlashy "just more of the same" reviews, which one might expect after nine albums, except that it's silly to hear it coming from reviewers who only actually heard one of those albums. The erratic semi-random nature of the ... Rubies mania of aught-six is thus confirmed. Anyone have a better theory?
(I should note that true to his backlash-courting ways, there was only, I think, one ... Rubies song on the set list the other night, which I'm sure frustrated some who haven't gotten well-acquainted with Trouble and don't know This Night, the other well the band was drawing on.)
Michael Barclay told me the other day that he felt like Dan had worked so hard to convince him of the ridiculousness of rock'n'roll that he found it hard to listen to him with the current band just playing rock'n'roll. I share some of those feelings; after Your Blues, not just my favourite Destroyer record but one of my favourite records of the decade, I did regret the return to rock on Rubies - but Dan's changes have never been linear, so the sequel to Your Blues, the all-clarinet-and-sitar album, could be right around the corner. I think the thing is that right now he has this band that, when it locks into formation the way it did on Saturday night, shoots the songs straight into orbit. That might not be true tomorrow, with the musicians of Dan's Vancouver generation (including Dan himself) gradually settling into businesses, family life, and so on. In some ways the notes of regret and anticipation that I scent between the lines of Trouble in Dreams seem like change-of-life vibrations, a goodbye and the breath right before "hello." (Perhaps that desire to hold on accounts for my one real complaint about it, which is that it's two or three songs too long.) The absurdity that Destroyer has always imputed to rock, after all, is by no means unique - the path from politics to poetry leads through understanding that the effort is always ridiculous and doing it anyway. So hit the drums hard.
(Oh, and speaking of [collector] nerds' aims...)
(Plus, later:: See Dan spar with Emusic readers. Note the John Cale/Syd Barrett discussion at the end - this is what you have to explain to the people who confuse matters with all their pointless Bowie comparisons.) (On the other hand, I just realized I've never heard The Apartments.)
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, April 23 at 5:33 PM | Permanent Link | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Clap Clap Culture
I'm always happy to be questioned and challenged by Clap Clap's Mike Barthel, an incisive and never-dogmatic thinker. But in his response to my Tom Frank/Obama/class-culture post, he misinterprets me, so I must have been unclear.
Mike says, "the only thing [Carl] reverses about [his past] position is that the people who like Celine have been duped - he still believes that their communities' cultures are being ['strip-malled and outsourced ... out of existence'] ." No. That was also a reference to a past set of beliefs - in this case, actually, further past than my feelings about Celine. I realize things might get confusing when I set myself up as my own foil, in the name of a reflexive, introspective approach to cultural conflict. But since Mike has read my book, I would have thought he could extrapolate this from the chapter on globalization.
Globalization has formidable problems - how trade deals are contracted and the way multinationals can grow to out-muscle the countries trying to regulate them, for starters - but I don't believe it or "corporate culture" simply homogenizes and eradicates, because for one thing there's no singular monolithic "corporate culture."
[... keep reading? ...]
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, April 21 at 1:17 AM | Permanent Link | Linking Posts | Comments (8)
EMP 2008: Academy Fight Song
Douglas Wolk's super Ballad of the Green Berets presentation at the Pop Conference. Photo swiped from Chelsey's Practice Space.
Some folks have been down on the recent latest edition of that annual pop-think mindmelt, the prattle in Seattle, the EMP Pop Conference, for leaning harder than before to the academic end rather than the journalists' side. They complain that it makes for drier presentations and more esoteric language. Maybe yes, maybe no, but I also wonder why that shift might be happening.
(... for that and other post-EMP thoughts, please,
click here to continue reading ...)
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, April 20 at 11:10 PM | Permanent Link | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Bona valetudo melior est quam maximae divitiae
Pop Conference-related distraction meant that I missed the moment when this news, about Mountain Goats singer/songwriter John Darnielle dealing with unspecified "chronic health issues," circulated over the past couple of weeks. Zoilus readers know how much John's work means to me (and to many others), so let's all send healing vibes North Carolina way. The very best wishes to John and his loved ones.
Here, by the way, is a video of John D. making a cameo appearance at a Weakerthans show in NC and duetting with John K. Samson on "Anchorless," on April 9 - John D. certainly seems vigorous enough (not to mention tremendously stoked) here, which is nice reassurance that whatever is up won't keep our man down long.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, April 16 at 7:03 PM | Permanent Link | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
