The accumulated CBC Radio 3 Sessions offer a pretty damn comprehensive Baedeker to Canadian indie music 2002-04, and international too - from Add N to X, to Young & Sexy, with 100 more in-between. (It looks difficult to navigate, but sqint yer eyes to the left and you’ll see a Table of Contents button.) Note that the next issue will feature Clinic, though you can already stream that concert and many other live shows and studio sessions at Just Concerts. The CBC has issued one anthology of this stuff on CD (see above) but I wish the Official State Radio would go much further and put out some Peel Sessions-style EPs (or full-lengths with 2 or 3 compatible bands); CD booklets should include the complete stories & succulent photo features that accompany the sessions on-line. If you are at all familiar with the CBC, however, you know this will never happen. (Thanks to Chromewaves for the reminder.)

The Minutemen documentary is, sez the website, “one week from completion.” Hoot! You fuckin’ bahstid!

Luca responds to my throwdown on his M.I.A. diss with balance and equanimity. (Wuss!) He’s right to shift his sights from M.I.A. to the blather-around-M.I.A. Howevs, I’ve still got some bone to splinter here: I sympathize when L.L. says, “It’s just heartbreaking and again, frustrating, to see zero public/media interest being paid to the people who make music that is innovative and interesting and the clear influence for the type of music she is making, only because what? is it that its too exotic? its not framed for a comfortable first world music listener as MIA is? could it be that no one is paying attention to it because its made by people that are third world or lower class?” But I wonder if this question makes any sense.

While I don’t go so far as to say homogenization and appropriation are non-issues, or that Real World-label “world music” is as good as its source material that has not been re-recorded with Bill Laswell and a bunch of French studio musicians, I think that music is done a great disservice by the myth of the “universal language.” The more music I hear the more I’m convinced music is a local language, and that to understand the musical language of other communities (including class configurations as well as ethnic or national ones) does require immersion and study. Luca’s obviously done that work (my “nicknames” jibe was just a jibe) but is it fair to expect that of everybody else? And is it such a crime for musicians who are musically multilingual to offer polyglot alternatives, such as M.I.A.’s (to be way too reductive) Global Ghetto 101, which might entice people who just don’t feel dancehall or whatchagot to explore it for the first time, or reconsider it, and to brush up their vocabs - or, you know, not? The boundaries of underground/pop or ownership/piracy or native/colonist are already seeded with explosives, so I’m not eager to play the guard in the tower when somebody goes boogying across those borders. I hope I have the stomach, as a critic, to do the autopsies on the majority who fail, but I’m still pulling for Maya A. as nimble enough to make it. (To the degree that making pop music counts for a hill o’beans in this crazy world, shweethearts.)

Is dance music dead or not dead? (Via Aaron.) Eh. Declaring things dead is dead. Black is the new white, war is the new peace, Sex is the new funny-lookin’, Bowling for Soup is the Knack. … I’m much more interested in whether dissonance is the new dissonance, as Kyle Gann writes, which hints that rock is the new classical, i.e., young is the new old (but Downtown isn’t the new Uptown). (Via Alex Ross, who wisely is not sure, but does mention the great piece of trivia that he once opened for Sebadoh in a noise band called Miss Teen Schnauzer - can we get a witness?) Anyway, I’ll try to come back to this subject with something closer to a “thought” plus tard.

Not music: What Iraqi/Kurd bloggers are saying about the elections. A friend sent me this clip from the New York Times in 1967 which (assuming it’s real, which I don’t necessarily) strikes a necessary cautionary note: “U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote : Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2): WASHINGTON, Sept. 3– United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.” (Later: Ah, it turns out to be via Kos. It’s real.)

As should go without saying, I do hope things pan out better this time, for the Iraqis’ sake. I also hope Seymour Hersh is wrong about USA–>Iran. But lately Hope has been nothing but a dead comedian.

Proving that digital music is the new tea, people are putting their iPods in “cozies” (aka socks). Speaking of which you can also get souvenir Christo and Jean-Claude “The Gates in Central Park” socks, according to Women’s Wear Daily, which reported on both. (Via Catherine’s Pita)

As the election looms, there is one thing all Iraqis can agree on: They love them some Celine Dion. For a moment I pondered the stark implications of a culture that had heard Yanni but not Mozart, Celine Dion but not Ella Fitgerald, Country but not Blues. “This is a much bigger clash of cultures than I had ever imagined”… (Via Terry Teachout)

Is there a musical equivalent of Personism? (We are currently Frank O’Hara-fixated. “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.” All right, Frank, you’ve got it.)

Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout M.I.A., who plays her first North American date Wed., sold out, at the Drake. Meanwhile Luca argues that M.I.A. is a whole other kind of sell-out, and that we who am committing the hype are exoticizers or worse: “she’s kind of like a cypher, in which she can occupy any kind of ‘world music’ role, be it grime/desi/dancehall/hip-hop, without really embodying those musics.” A rule of thumb: Any time you find yourself italicizing “really,” you’re in trouble. Luca may be right about the enthusiasts: No doubt I’ve sometimes sexed up the otherness-of-the-other, and he even gets a sharp snap in at Sasha (though the quote is arguably set up out of context). But projecting intentionality and authenticity or lack of same onto the artist is a dubious enterprise. And to label the artist a dodgy “cypher” just because she doesn’t belong to any “underground” with which you’re on nicknaming terms is very dubious indeed. How much, just for arg’s sake, does Luca know about Sri Lanka, about Tamil culture, about Tamil exile culture in England, and about the music of any of those places and peoples, traditional or popular, past or present? If the answer is “not much,” then how can you complain M.I.A. doesn’t represent, that the chant in Galang is necessarily from nowhere? (It actually sounds to me like it’s from the schoolyard, whatever the longitude and latitude.)

But more importantly, because I doubt that specifically Tamil elements are all that prominent in Ms. Arulpragasama’s music, what she embodies is the underexamined aesthetic of the refugee. Her music is that of exile and migrancy and the hybrid identities, noises and dances that arise from them. Being “down with the London art scene” is one part of her, being a Tamil Tiger’s daughter is another, so is being a pop musician and a brown girl in the ring. To make that story boring you have to run it through a high-powered ideological laser printer. Part of what’s amazing is how vividly her music evokes today’s enormous levels of migration, internal and international, and the cosmopolitanism and conflict that co-exist at the margins as well as in the centres. Sniffing for phoniness in such circumstances is less viable than ever. Calling it “fusion food” proves nothing - is it a tasty fusion or a stinky fusion? Only the tastebuds can tell.

I object most strongly to the assertion that “pop is the mere crystallization of more vital and subterranean cultural streams” - sometimes, yes, but just as often, pop scoops up the liquid from those streams, stirs in flavour crystals from the back of the cupboard, mixes it with tequila and puts the whole thing in the microwave. To quote Uncle Tupelo, “this trickledown theory leaves all pockets empty.” Think more about trickle up - sublimation, as culture becomes cloud and returns to you in a torrential rain. M.I.A. to my eyes and ears is a fantastic illustration of why any formula for what pop is or how pop happens is bound to be undone. (T.W. Adorno pick up the white courtesy telephone please!).

But thank you for the challenge. Sometimes it feels as if to be usefully offended is the best you can ask.

( )

You’re sick of ‘em, I’m sick of ‘em but ILM’s collective Top 50 albums of 2004 list is worth a glance. (Supplementary: I forgot to vote. Strange ‘dat.)

I hear good things about the Lee Ann Womack album, and you can hear those good things now at this CMT Listening Party.

Late addition: M.I.A.’s Playlist in the Times today (Sunday) sheds additional light, featuring dancehall (Bad Girl Riddim, (Ce’Cile), reggaeton (Ivy Queen), baile funk (Diplo’s Favela on Blast), hip-hop (Jim Jones & the Diplomats) and grime (Lethal Bizzle). She says of Lethal Bizzle’s Pow! ‘Forward Riddim Remix’, “I live in a place with Somali refugees, Polish people, a lot of Arabic people, and this song is blaring out of every single car. It’s what’s empowering them now.” And of the Diplomats: “They seem to be experimenting the most and they have a real fight mentality. It’s the guerilla side of hip-hop.” Call that “dining out” if you like. I don’t like. (And this mixing-genres complaint is just off - like saying of Charles Mingus, “Man, I can’t tell if that’s gospel, jazz, folk music, Cuban, or Stravinsky - obviously the guy’s a fake.”)

The first best new radio idea of 2005 comes to us from BSR88.1 in Providence, Rhode Island - it’s called Phoning It In, and if you click that link you can listen to its first outing, in which John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats performs a short sweet set over the telephone. It’s lo-fi heaven.

The telephone and the radio are, of course, one of the world’s sexiest couples. The Internet can put on all the podcasting pasties and g-strings it wants, and it still can’t compete for va-va-vooms. This is proved by the second- or third-best show on the CBC, Jonathan Goldstein’s Wiretap, whose main concept is to celebrate the merry anal coupling of phone and airwaves.

(Criminally, Wiretap has no on-line archive, but the blog Acts of Volition has a rip of one episode featuring Montreal’s Constellation/Alien8 guitar-and-oud psychedelician Sam Shalabi. Unfortunately that show is actually devoid of telephonic content, ruining my point, but it’s amusing.)

Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project in Seattle.

It didn’t occur to me until Keith did it to mention that I’m going to be at the EMP Pop Conference in Seattle this April, giving a paper. The theme of the conference this year is “Music as Masquerade: Poseurs, Playas, and Beyond.” It’ll be my first time there.

My subject will be “Who Was That Masked Singer-Songwriter?” - about indie singer-songwriters of the 90s and 00s who are called things like Smog, Palace, Destroyer or Mountain Goats, compared to singer-songwriters who had names like James and Joni. What I especially want to look at is the attempt to disavow the confessional streak of past singer-songwriters, and in fact to shrug off the whole embarrassing history of “singer-songwriter” as a genre - while still being exactly that - and how this dovetails with the development of modern poetry, the attempt to develop a contemporary “lyricism” that is “post-lyrical,” that doesn’t buy the sucker’s game of the lyric “I” and the uncritical subjectivity (and sentimentality) that went along with it, or at least now seems to have gone along with it.

Er, don’t worry: I will deliver this while juggling flaming bowling pins and whistling Well You Needn’t in a Batman costume.

Mainly, however, I am excited about meeting fellow music writers and other wenches and rogues - as well as some correspondents from Seattle (John Turtletop, for instance), and visiting this storied city, where I’ve never been.

Who else is in? (And who’s putting me up?!)

Elsewhere: Some advice for my employer. (Where, by the way, I won’t have a column this week, because last week’s double deadline started me smoking again. So I am taking a breather, literally.)

Also if you are in Tdot tonight and want something to do, we heartily commend dancing to Tyler Clark Burke’s MEA CULPA night of Guilty Pleasures at the Drake for no dineros.

Being a set of scattered self-quotations and notations on current subjects of discussion here and on Internet music fora in which we sometimes participate:

First, in comparing rockism and anti-rockism to the “auteur” and “studio” positions in past debates around cinema in another conversation today, I started thinking more about comparing film and music, and what it led me to was this: We don’t really question or demean people who are solely actors in material they didn’t write or direct, and we certainly don’t expect actors to be basing their characters directly on their own lives. So why do we demean singers in the same position as “puppets” and “trained poodles”? Is it because it goes out solely under their names? Why should all singers have to do one-man shows when for actors it is optional (and often plainly undesirable)?

Sometimes I think it all has to do with the crediting conventions. Compare the white pop, rock or country formula - “by Ashlee Simpson” or “by the Beatles” or “by Tim McGraw” - to the past jazz convention (naming all the players, the producer and the exact date and time) or the way current rap and R&B credits are often presented - it might not always say “by Usher feat. Ashanti prod. by Kanye with samples from AC/DC and Prince” but that information is often much more available and evident, the fans are aware and unthreatened by it. Isn’t that a much more well-rounded account of the real provenance of the music, much more Hollywood-like, etc.? (Also Hollywood-like in the way it often goes so far as to leave out the writer altogether!) In a way that’s all less enjoyable than the Pop illusion of “by Tim McGraw” or “by Nancy Sinatra” or what have you, but it’s also less misleading and unbalanced. So, new pop thing - truth in labelling?

I was interviewed last night, due to the last Overtones column, by somebody writing for the Ryerson Review about Pitchfork and trying to divine the secrets of its success, as many outlets seem to be these days. A few quick theses:
1. Pitchfork is Pitchfork because indie rock and the Internet have a common base constituency, geeky middle-class white kids on their computers. So it makes sense that the biggest Internet effect on music would first be on indie rock. It’s only recently that hip-hop and jazz blogs, for instance, have begun to come into existence. (There have been dance music blogs but pretty much all by rock turncoats, former rock fan/journalists who’ve been converted to electronic music, with Simon Reynolds the obvious exemplar.)
2. Pitchfork is also Pitchfork because it was in the right place at the right time when Addicted to Noise shut down. Typically when people write about Pitchfork they don’t know enough about Internet music history to realize that AtN ever existed and had as big an audience as Pfork does, if not bigger, and a broader one too, if still mainly indie-rock-centric. (See thesis 1.)
3. Pitchfork is also Pitchfork because it emphasizes new content all the fucking time and lots of it. More is more. Even I have a hard time resisting the sheer quantity of news, reviews, etc. I find whenever I check it. The Internet cares lots more about quantity than quality, especially when quantity is delivered with scattershot attitude and quick-hit sarcasm.
4. As I argued in the column, P-fork’s days may be numbered because indie rock is becoming less underground (so Pfork’s I-know-something-you-don’t-know attitude may lose its traction) and the underground is becoming less indie rock (so if Pfork rejects joining indie rock’s leap into populism, it will be wedded to things like psych-folk, noise and metalcore and other not-pop sounds, and its audience will become more marginal than the audience it has now).
5. Brian Joseph Davis’s line in the comments about one kid bigging up Weather Report to another kid is the best illustration of what I mean by information putting an end to indie rock.
6. This also relates to the past and ongoing debate about the lack of a positive politics in hip-hop today, the lack of any effective counterforce to misogyny etc. There isn’t currently a politics to “youth culture” that you could compare to the politics of punk or the politics of 1991 identity-politics or nationalist hip-hop. There is an unrootedness, at-sea-ness in the stuff that bothers us about hip-hop the way there is in Pitchfork. This is not to say there is not a rebellious energy, not an anger, not a political awareness, but there is no political movement out in the world to correspond, so when music gets to yellin’ it is often just yellin’ into the void in the discourse. The question of what you’re rebelling against is again answered by “what you got?” - and if what you got on the left is a general piety around womanhood, homosexuality, etc., don’t be surprised if the rebellion-inclined rebel against that as well as against Bush and the Iraq war. There’s confusion about the state of things but no movement - so there is an instant gratification culture and an instant-exasperation reaction. But this may be just a hush before a boom, who knows? Anyway, that all ties in to the debate around Greg Tate’s Village Voice article on the hip-hop anniversary, the smartest responses to which said that hip-hop had not failed politically so much as the political leadership in the black community and elsewhere had failed to reckon responsibly with hip-hop and to incorporate its energies. (This is all over the internets, eg., lookie here (and read the comments) and here.)
7. To go back to Weather Report, where there are politics to indie culture today they seem to be non-generationalist, which is a good thing but a totally mindfucking one for any kind of poprockahiphop mentality which has always been “youth”-based - not that youth doesn’t count (and maybe in my agingness i am beclouded) but it doesn’t seem like anyone is making claims around the inherent revolutionariness or autonomy or dropoutness or any of that of youth culture, and in fact many kids are much less alienated from the politics of their parents, and from the fragments of history and foreign cultures and such they find lying around them on the virtual landscape, even if they haven’t much of a linear framework in which to place them? Again, this is all neutral, just potential energy of which nobody can say anything until it turns into a battering ram or a slushie.
8. Obviously this could all be better knit together but no, not right now it can’t.

But overall, I am too excited about the new Haruki Murakami book to contemplate such subjects further.

Keren Ann + Feist.

Compare-and-contrast: The new Feist video for Inside & Out vs. the new-ish Keren Ann video for Ailleurs.

The latest thing in Frenchdie-rock videoism is apparently retro-Umbrellas-of-Cherbourg chic. And Zoilus, a corn-syrup-hearted francophile deep down, succumbs, succumbs, succumbs. We give them both four berets out of five!

Further brownie points for the Feist video: On the sense-of-place tip, it’s shot indoors and outdoors, giving new meaning to “I love you inside and out” in the original Bee Gees lyric, rather than moping around in Feist’s bedroom as some might have it do. Also plays with the binary of the title with some shots in half-negative or polarization or whatchamafilmit. It also realizes, frenchly, that it is sexier to watch a woman put her shirt on than to see her take it off - there’s the tantalization of what you have just missed, and the ability of the (male? nah, any) mind not just to mentally undress the object of the gaze (masculin-feminine) but to set the gaze on rewind (analog-digital) in order to undress her.

[Edited to add: It's been pointed out to me that I should say, tho I talked about the Feist clip because she's been topicky 'round here of late, that the Keren Ann clip is in fact far better, headspinningly pretty. Clap if you like dance.]

Speaking of SEX, eye (scroll down) so agrees with us about Republic of Safety and No Dynamics and about the tag-team sex-punk-socialism of the Torontorgasm Liberation Front and how it roolz 2005 lemme hear ya say yeeeeah. (Note: Zoilus so does not endorse the inference that Sonic Youth doesn’t know how to party. That would be Frank Black. [Because picking Fugazi is cheating.])

In return, Zoilus totally agreeing with Stuart about John Sakamoto’s superfine Anti-Hit List, and John’s all-round superfineness (I worked alongside him when he was all-too-briefly a Globe editor), lamenting the A-HL’s departure from eye and supercurious where it’s landing next. C’mon, Stuart, a hint?

Also compare-and-contrast: Stephin Merritt and Elvis Costello in both-simultaneously-writing-musicals/operas-on-the-life-of-Hans-Christian-Andersen shockah. COULD THEY BE THE SAME PERSON JUST A GENERATION REMOVED? Well… no.