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General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, April 27 at 2:52 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Blended, Chopped & Screwed
In answer to the question on the cover above, it seems that Britney has at least outlasted Blender. This morning I got an email from one of my editors there, Jonah Weiner, giving me the news, which was a nice courtesy, considering that I've only written a handful of reviews for the magazine. This is the first time that a publication I actually work for has joined the print-media death march, though I'm sure it won't be the last. (Though to those who wonder, despite the layoffs I am fairly confident The Globe and Mail will survive for the forseeable future.) My sincere condolences to all the staff and to Blender readers.
The shocking part is that I had figured Blender was the most commercially savvy one in the music-magazine market - they built their business on photos (especially of scantily clad pop starlets), best-ever/worst-ever/most-outrageous sorts of lists, titillation and trivia, backed up for credibility with a review section full of some of the best working music writers struggling (for a good paycheque) to squeeze wit and insight into tiny little capsule reviews. I hated its glibnesss, but it wasn't snobby - it was pro-pop, pro-hip-hop and pro-indie all at once - and it certainly seemed saleable; if even they can't survive, I'm not sure there really is a music magazine market. Curiously, a lot of the more niche-oriented publications - rap magazines and metal magazines in particular - seem to be doing well still, when I thought they'd probably be the most easily displaced by fan sites and blogs. Perhaps cliqueishness (and even snobbishness) is actually a safer marketing bet?
I still think there is room in the market for one more readership-oriented music publication, one aimed at the same audience that buys books about music. Something close exists in the UK (Mojo and, to a degree, The Wire) but a North American one might bring less of that musty British muso feel - like a general-interest version of No Depression, a great mag that was hampered by the narrowness of its "alt-country" focus. (ND continues to live online and as a twice-yearly "bookazine".) Given events like Blender's closing, though, I am less hopeful of ever convincing a publishing company of that idea. Sigh.
PS: Does this include the Indian edition of Blender, which I just discovered 5 minutes ago? If not, I want a subscription.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, March 26 at 12:04 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (9)
Everything's Coming Up Tommy (Edison)
In response to my interview on this week's Spark show on CBC radio about music and technology, in which I talk about ringtones, mp3s and the like, John Meyer sent me this link to a relatively new project rating the sound of various media - which concludes that listening to a 16kbs mp3 is the fidelity equivalent of listening to a wax cylinder! How steampunk, kids. (Maybe the Decembrists are on to something with their annoying neo-Edwardianism after all.) Any comments from audiophiles, anachronists and audio-anarchists?
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, March 25 at 5:07 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
This is so not like sexting
Today Peli and I talked about Gossip Girl, Britney, poptimism and finding a happy medium between Bourdieu and Adorno or something like that.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, March 17 at 4:18 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
The Tech of the Hesperus
I talked to Nora Young of CBC Radio's tech program Spark this morning about ringtones, MP3s, computer speakers, iTunes, Auto-Tune and all the other gadget-adjustments that are changing the sound of pop music. In shorter form, it'll be part of their special music-themed March 25 show (re-aired on March 28) but, impressively, you can already listen to the full interview today on their site.
Speaking of tech and transition, you may have heard the newspaper business is having a rough week. Those who take this blithely because they assume that Twitter is going to take care of everything - or that, for example, somehow the same job can be done by the 20 reporters the now-online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer is retaining as by the 165 it formerly employed - might benefit by reading this Globe & Mail Focus piece by my colleagues Sinclair Stewart and Grant Robertson (which I edited). I also recommend the Clay Shirky piece on "Newspapers & Thinking the Unthinkable" on the parallel between the Internet revolution & the Gutenberg one - only this one of course is much, much faster. The conclusion I draw from both is that, yes, newspapers are mostly doomed (I think weekend papers remain a viable model for now at least), but no, nothing exists to replace them. And we may be in for a rough decade, democratically, until something emerges that can.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, March 17 at 2:12 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
A Big Steaming Mug of Ogre Milk
Fake photo by Torontoist now replaced by real photo from The Colbert Report.
Hi everyone. That hiatus was a bit longer than intended. Back to regular Zoilus business this week, but first a couple of links and notes from my psychic-teevee jaunt.
First, in case you missed it, here is my interview on the Colbert show in a link for Canadian viewers and here it is for the Yanks.
A lot of folks have been asking me about the experience, and it's difficult to sum up, except to say that it was very positive. [... continued after the jump ... ]
The show did a pre-interview with me by phone the day before that I almost wish could have been televised instead: The producer started by saying that she was going to ask me a bunch of serious questions, "which tomorrow will be turned into jokes. But answer them then the same way you answer me now." She proceeded to ask some of the most intelligent, well-thought-out questions I've had from any interviewer, all speaking directly to the themes of the book and not overly harping on the Celine angle.
Everyone I met at the Colbert show seemed to be smart, relaxed and really enjoying their job, which is frankly a contrast to the stressed-out, often grumpy crews I've met on a lot of Canadian TV shows - no doubt that's a function of having more adequate resources to work with, but I think it must also reflect the strength of vision and sense of purpose on the show itself.
As for Mr. Colbert himself, though he was rushing around and only had a few seconds before and after the show, he came across as a very solid, thoughtful & kind man. He had the affect of a 1950s TV dad - firm handshake, meets you right in the eye, focuses all his attention on the person he's speaking to. His voice is about a half-octave deeper than his vocal mask on the show. He has a little routine he goes through to make sure guests aren't caught unawares by his character if they aren't familiar with the show (it runs in part: "I do the interview in character - my character is a complete idiot, he knows nothing about you or your work or anything else, and your job is to disabuse me of my ignorance"). They also ran through the prospective questions for me, though their list was twice as long as the ones used, and clearly Colbert improvises as he sees fit throughout.
The green room was not lavish. I will sum it up in two words: Fruit plate. There was a swag bag, mostly containing product samples like Starbucks energy drinks, NY-company chocolates, miscellaneous makeup, etc. (apparently the gift bags aren't customized even by gender). But there was also a nice gift of a $100 coupon to be used to support the charity of Stephen's choice, which allows you to donate to projects in impoverished classrooms (my desk is a mess so I can't link to the specific one, but I will when I find it later).
For those who thought the interview seemed a bit clipped - it was. On set we talked for another minute or two but they jumped to the end, although apparently I had my memory-chip set on "don't worry, it's being recorded" as I don't recall what we talked about then, though I think there were a couple of good moments. For those who thought I seemed nervous - no, that's just my regular jittery personality, a bit heightened by the situation but mostly exaggerated by being framed on a TV-sized screen. And no, those weren't joke teeth; sadly, mine own.
It was a roller coaster - the whole interview seemed to last 30 seconds to me - but Colbert was fairly gentle and let me make my points. My instinct was that he felt a bit conflicted about where to take it, humorously, since after all the book is already a kind of ju-jitsu topsy-turvy act; but moreover I sensed that he was genuinely intrigued by the topic.
Which makes sense, if you think about it. His whole schtick is already a kind of cultural boundary-crossing exercise; even though he is being satirical, his jabs hit both liberals and conservatives for their intolerance and knee-jerk points of view, a feat he's able to carry off by walking the identity borderline that he does. So there's a kind of meta-level to him discussing a book about attempting to get inside and have empathy with a set of cultural positions and personae different than one's own. In fact, I had hoped to find an opening in the interview to point that out in a subtle way - without breaking the implicit contract to play along with the illusion - but I wasn't quite deft enough.
My greatest regret, though, is that I didn't have the wit and timing to echo the super-straight-man Colonel from the segment before me by cutting Colbert off during his recitation of fake "hipster" band names and saying wearily, "Stephen, there's no such thing as Ogre Milk."
Although, of course, that would have been fibbing.
As for the "Colbert bump"? In full effect. The next day the book jumped to #1 on Amazon among music books, and nearly two weeks later it remains in the top 10. Because Amazon stats are arcane and occult, I don't know yet how many sales that represents, but it must be substantial. And the book is now on Kindle and is being recorded for an audio book from Audible.com (I'll let you know when that's out). All of which means more readers and more discussion, hopefully, of the themes and ideas, which is what counts.
Thanks to long-time readers of Zoilus for helping create the climate in which such nutty things can happen. It's a mystery but a delightful mystery.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, March 15 at 8:31 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (11)
After these messages
I've got a review on the Globe and Mail site right now of the new book Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music.
The details of the many exciting papers and panels at this April's EMP Pop Conference on the theme of "Dance Music Sex Romance" are now posted, including mine.
Otherwise, I'm on the move this week - see below for the reason. Torontonians, some folks are gathering on Wednesday night upstairs at The Pilot on Cumberland St., to watch the Colbert show but also listen to some live music and readings, featuring my friends Laura Barrett, Angela Rawlings, Andrew Kaufman and Sean Dixon plus MC Sean K. Robb. Doors at 9, entertainment at 10, TV at 11:30. Here's the Facebook page - I didn't organize it but I appreciate it.
See you, as they say in the teevee biz, "after the break."
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, March 03 at 10:42 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
"Curiouser and Curiouser!" cried Alice
Uh. Huh. Wed., March 4, 11:30 pm EST, on The Comedy Network and Comedy Central.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, February 24 at 7:59 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (30)
James Franco Journeys to the End of Taste
(a.k.a. Strangest Day Ever)
I woke up this morning to various emails and frantic Facebook "wall messages" conveying the news that James Franco (Sean Penn's boyfriend in Milk, Peter Parker's frenemy in Spider-Man and, of course, bad-boy Daniel in Freaks and Geeks) name-checked my book on the Oscars red carpet last night. Turns out that not only did he mention it, he gave it a more on-point quick summary than almost any of the reviewers.
Now, besides acting and preparing for his bar mitzvah (as he discussed earlier in that interview), Franco's currently doing simultaneous MFA's at Columbia and NYU, so it's not really so weird (however it feels to me!) that he's plugged into stuff like this. I hope he passes the book along to a few of his Hollywood friends - the movie industry could stand to unthink some of its assumptions about the "mass" audience versus the "prestige" audience, no?
PS: Apologies to Idolator for ripping off their headline, but I just loved it too much.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, February 23 at 2:22 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (14)
The Secret Love Affair
of Speech and Song: A History
Saxophonist Leon Kingstone introduces Charles Spearin's "Mrs. Morris" in the middle of a Broken Social Scene concert.
Following up on my piece last week about Charles Spearin's The Happiness Project, in which he turns the cadences of his neighbours' conversations about happiness into the melodies and rhythms of songs, I've put together a quick (well, not so quick) cultural history on how musicians have tried to transform human speech into music through the ages (but particularly, often thanks to technology, in the 20th century).
[ ... continues on the jump ...]
Caveats: In places my knowledge of these instances is not deep, and any corrections of fact are welcome. I know I left out talkboxes, vocoders and other voice-processing stuff from the '70s to today - that's the subject of a future, more substantive project. Plus, I've moved some of my general remarks from the original version of this post to the end, for efficiency's sake. Future posts might cover some omitted examples, especially with your help.
Prehistory to Gutenberg: Chant, lyric, epic
Sacred texts and epic poetry in many cultures are transmitted orally as chant/song long before they are written down, from the Hindu Vedas to Homer's Odyssey to Gregorian chant. The Vedas, in particular, use a tonal system that places them very much in the twilight zone between speech and song.
Mantra Pushpam - Vedic Hymns: This mantra is from Taithreeya Aranyakam of the Yajur Veda.
c. 8th-13th Century: African talking drums
Griots in the ancient Ghana empire use drums whose tones imitate speech to communicate across distance in villages; even in their musical use in various places in Africa they operate with a kind of grammar related to language, though of course they can be and often are played without reference to those systems.
Nigerian-born drummer Rasaki Aladokun, "Master of the Talking Drum" and former King Sunny Ade accompanist, demonstrates and explains.
1580s: Florentine Camerata, monody
Renaissance humanists in Florence create more intelligible vocal style (voice-and-accompaniment rather than polyphony) to emulate their suppositions of how ancient Greek drama was spoken-sung (their suppositions were wrong, but...); an influence on operatic aria and recitative in particular (and western musical history in general).
Giulio Caccini (c.1550-1680), "Amor, io parto," for soprano voice, from "Le nuove musiche, 1601" set on an anonymous text (Montserrat Figueras, soprano; Hopkinson Smith, baroque guitar; Harmonia Mundi).
1868: Modest Mussorgsky, Zhenitba
Russian composer attempts to write opera in heightened but naturalistic speech patterns; he abandons it after Act 1 but uses a moderated version of the technique in later works such as Boris Godunov.
Boris Christoff in the death scene from Boris Godunov. Vienna, 1980s.
1904: Leos Janacek, Jenufa
Moravian composer incorporates his own notation of local "speech melodies" into his opera, though how directly he did so remains a debate among musicologists.
The end of the first act of Janacek's Jenufa from The National Theatre in Prague in 2005 with Tomas Cerny and Dana Buresova.
The great Czech violinist-vocalist Iva Bittova sings Janacek's song "Muzikanti" (Musicians) from "Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs" (Moravska lidova poezie v pisnich) with the Skampa Quartet. See a past Zoilus post about Bittova.
1912: Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire
German modernist composer uses sprechstimme ("spoken voice") as a less-tonal extension of traditional recitative; the technique is taken up by Alban Berg in operas such as Lulu.
Glenn Gould & Patricia Rideout perform Pierrot Lunaire on the CBC in 1975.
1914: F.T. Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tumb
Italian Futurist leader performs manic nonsense-syllable sound poem, which influences Luigi Rossolo's "art of noise" as well as Dadaists such as Kurt Schwitters, whose Ursonate (1922-1932) extends sound poetry into four movements of gibberish lasting nearly 45 minutes (though today, Canadian poet Christian Bök can perform it in under 19 minutes, from memory - download from UBU Web).
ZTT.
>Ursonate.
Christian Bök covers a sound poem in Icelandic (a language he does not speak).
1920s Wah-Wah sounds in jazz.
Jazz solos using mutes and hand flutters over the end of a horn create a sing-talk kind of wah-wah sound, often to humorous effect. Often heard in Duke Ellington's band, for interest. The "wah-wah" pedal later achieves this for guitar.
1943: Harry Partch, U.S. Highball
As many of you will know, this midcentury American eccentric invented a microtonal 43-tone harmonic system and a host of bizarrely beautiful junkyard instruments to play them. What's less known is that Partch's initial motivation was to find a music that could better capture the subtle melodies of speech - to actually score the way people ordinarily talk, rather than (as most of the composers in this list do) "rounding" their tones off to the nearest standard instrumental note. This piece based on overheard hobo dialogue is one of the finest examples.
Partch's piece performed & discussed by Robert Osborne.
1951: Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, Symphonie pour un homme seul
Musique-concrete innovators incorporate speaking voices along with other "unmusical" sound in compositions for records, tape, mixers, soon followed by others such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Gyorgy Ligeti and John Cage. (For some reason embedding is turned off for this video, which on YouTube is also misattributed to Yoko Ono.)
1957: The bebop/beat-poetry connection.
This year marks the first "jazz poetry" reading at the Circle in the Square, with David Amram and Jack Kerouac. Ken Nordine releases the first of his Word Jazz albums, which explicitly attempt to reproduce the effects of bop in prosody. The jazz-poetry practice (which I should note was presaged by scat singing and Lord Buckley, and one might try to get Vachel Lindsay [though that poet-performer, with his racist views, viscerally disliked jazz] and the Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes in too) becomes clichéd so rapidly that it's being parodied already in the following year's B-movies and TV (like High School Confidential and Peter Gunn - "there ain't no jelly doughnut!") and would soon be a staple of sixties sitcoms from The Munsters to Petticoat Junction, not to mention ongoing Dobie Gillis character Maynard G. Krebs.
Amram recalls the Circle in the Square reading in a TV news segment decades later.
Ken Nordine's "Colors".
Ornette Coleman with an unidentified reader (Kenneth Patchen? Herbert Huncke?) and percussionist, while Allen Ginsberg looks on, date unknown.
1960: Charles Mingus & Eric Dolphy, "What Love?"
Two jazz masters take a playful approach to imitating speech on their instruments in several early '60s cuts; this one in which Mingus's bass "argues" with Dolphy's bass clarinet, from Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (one of my favourite records), is the best-known. Sadly I can't find video evidence online, but if you have or download the recording, go to about 8:30 in the 15-minute track to hear the start of their dispute, though the most uncanny highlights come at about 11 minutes in, here's the relevant section - the interplay becomes more intensely dialogic as it goes on.
1960: Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite
Roach's jazz landmark not only united bop and African music, poetry and protest, but in the cadences of many of Abbey Lincoln's performances, linked African-American song to the style of political speech in the Civil Rights Movement.
1965: Steve Reich, "It's Gonna Rain"
American Minimalist pioneer plays two identical tape loops of an apocalyptic Pentecostal preacher out of phase so that his voice gradually begins creating overtones and contrapuntal rhythms with itself - an influence on much voice-based work to follow, including David Byrne & Brian Eno's vocal-sample-based tracks on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, most obviously "Help Me Somebody."
A documentary clip about this period in Reich's work.
1967: You're in Love, Charlie Brown
The muted-horn, jazz wah-wah technique is adapted by Bill Melendez, the producer of the Peanuts TV specials, for the "Charlie Brown's teacher" voice. The incomprehensible (usually scolding) blather of adult talk was actually played on trombone: "Composer John Scott Trotter directed his trombonist to 'enunciate' the teacher's dialog as though it were a trombone riff. Trotter did a great job... he would read the teacher's line, e.g., 'Linus, where's your homework?' then direct the trombonist to repeat Trotter's inflection through his instrument." Here's a clip. (Go to about 1:20.) And here's a pure blast of Peanuts wah-wah adultspeak:
Charlie Brown's teacher voice.
I mention this one partly because Spearin told me it was an influence on The Happiness Project, the first place he'd heard an instrument used to simulate dialogue. As a kid, he would listen to his parents' conversations, often not knowing or caring what they were talking about, and listen to low-pitched Dad and high-pitched Mom as if they were two Peanuts voices singing a duet.
1970: Alvin Lucier, "I Am Sitting in a Room"
Composer recites text into tape recording, plays it back to re-record it, over and over, until the text is swallowed up in echoes and resonance and becomes pure tone. Another seminal track in contemporary music and sound art.
A dance-video interpretation of Lucier's work.
1970s African-American spoken word and diasporic dub poetry.
From militant black nationalist vocal group The Last Poets (who called their music "jazzoetry") to soul poet Gil Scott Heron and the great Linton Kwesi Johnson in the UK, the forerunners of rap funked up the linguistic volume, with a steady riddim and a strong vein of political protest, throughout the dismal decade.
1971: The Last Poets, "When the Revolution Comes."
1972: Gil Scott Heron, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."
1978: Linton Kwesi Johnson, "Dread Beat an' Blood."
1978: Paul Lansky, "Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion"
In a highly influential piece, the pioneering computer-music composer processes the sound of his wife reading text by a Renaissance poet. Lansky went on to compose many more voice-based pieces, including this one:
Lansky's "Pattern's Patterns" animated by Grady Klein, from Lansky's CD, Alphabet Book.
1979: Sugarhill Gang, "Rapper's Delight"
First hit rap single is widely mistaken for a novelty rather than the start of a pop-music shift that would make stylized speech nearly as important as singing and sampling (beginning with DJ'ing) as vital as drums.
Original 1979 promo video.
1982: Scott Johnson, "John Somebody"
New York composer uses transcribed pitches and rhythms of taped casual chatter ("You know that guy - John somebody... ?") as the basis for a fully harmonized score with electric guitars. He later used the technique in a piece for the Kronos Quartet called Cold War Suite, featuring the voice of the great journalist I.F. Stone in "How It Happens".
John Somebody part 1.
"Lawless Things" from Johnson's Cold War Suite, featuring tapes of I.F. Stone.
1984: Hermeto Pascoal, "Tiruliruli"
Brazilian jazz giant (a favourite of Miles Davis) accompanies loop of excited soccer announcer; Pascoal develops his own theory of "Som da Aura" (sound of the aura) in which he musically imitates not only voices of ordinary Brazilians but barnyard sounds, inanimate objects, etc., trying to capture their essences, their souls, in sound, to capture the ongoing music of the world. He can even do it spontaneously in concert, with members of his audiences, with remarkable accuracy.
Tiruliruli (from the album Canoa da Lagoa, Municipio de Arapiraca).
Pascoal sets the speech of three blind sisters to music.
Pascoal does the same with the voice of actor Yves Montand.
1988: Steve Reich, "Different Trains"
Interviews with Holocaust survivors weave in and out of train sounds and a string quartet in this moving, Grammy-winning "speech melody" piece, the first place most music fans heard the speech-into-melody technique. Reich goes on to use digital samples of voices in works such as The Cave (1993), City Life (1995) and Three Tales (2002).
Steve Reich discusses Different Trains on ARTS: The South Bank Show on ITV in 2006.
Reich's City Life, part 3: "It's Been a Honeymoon" (1995).
1990: Réné Lussier, "Le trésor de la langue"
In the aftermath of the controversies around the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord, the prominent Quebec "musique actuelle" guitarist composes an album based on the voices of francophone culture, politics and literature (the title means "The treasure of language"). His guitar traces the tunes of everything from Charles de Gaulle's "Vive le Quebec libre" speech and the FLQ Manifesto to warmer, sweeter aspects of Quebec life. Lussier was quoted: "It's remarkable what melodies we speak to each other every day! And no one's the least bothered by these phrases, but transpose them into music and they can become surprising, even disturbing!"
I wish I had an excerpt to share (my copy is on cassette and I don't have conversion capability); if anyone can help, please do.
1990s-2000s: Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Maranthappa
Influenced by multiculturalism and hip-hop, interconnected young New York jazz musicians compose pieces based on speech in different languages, etc. Here's an NPR story about Moran's 2006 "Artists Ought to Be Writing," based on artist Adrian Piper's early 1970s manifesto. And here's part of a piece Moran and his trio-mates (bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits) based on a phone conversation between two Turkish friends, from 2003's The Bandwagon:
"Ringing My Phone (Straight Outta Istanbul)" (excerpt)
2001: Topology, Airwaves.
This Australian contemporary-music group (not well-known in North America) with composers Robert Davidson, Jonathan Dimond and Jamie Clark, create an entire suite of music based on historical radio archives. (Davidson in particular had already done some work on speech-into-song.) They used different genres of music to represent their various subjects, from radio inventor Guglielmo Marconi himself to Churchill, Hitler, Malcolm X, Einstein and more. In this damned-funny example, Bill Clinton's "That woman, Miss Lewinsky" press conference is tartly matched to the jaunty anthem of his own political campaigns.
2006: Diana Deutsch, "Speech-to-Song Illusion"
(aka, "Sometimes Behave So Strangely").
I discussed Professor Deutsch's University of California research in my piece on The Happiness Project. For a fuller explanation of her research on the "speech-to-song-illusion" - not to mention fascinating stuff on the effect of speaking a tonal language (in which words have radically different meaning at different pitches, as in for example Mandarin) on the ability to develop perfect pitch - give a listen to this segment with her on WNYC's Radio Lab. Here's an mp3 of her demonstrating the "speech-to-song effect" - in which any spoken phrase played back in a loop can transform seamlessly into music, in this case a hook so weirdly catchy I can still hum it to myself more than a year after I first heard it. As she explains (to much greater effect) on the radio show, she stumbled on it quite by accident when a tape loop of her own voice caught her ear. (Many more aural illusions can be found on Prof. Deutsch's own website.)
Diana Deutsch's Speech-to-Sound Illusion
2008-09: Political campaign propaganda on YouTube.
During the U.S. presidential race, musical settings of political speeches became practically an Internet trend, including, most famously, Will.i.am's celeb-stuffed "Yes We Can" video, which turned Barack Obama's New Hampshire primary speech into a tune that recalls Bob Marley's "Redemption Song." But much more fun are New York pianist Henry Hey's puckish jazzifications of Sarah Palin, John McCain and George W. Bush.
Hey does McCain & Palin.
Hey does a January press conference by Bush.
Sarah Palin again (with animated typography).
And of course, will.i.am's hugely popular "Yes We Can".
2009: Charles Spearin, The Happiness Project
Which brings us, finally, back to doh.
It's not only an intriguing area musicologically - where, each of these practices implicitly asks, is the actual divide between speaking and singing, and how much is music an extension of language or vice-versa? - there's also something almost inherently spiritual in the question (think of chants and mantras), an impulse that resurfaces in Spearin's project. We sing language and language sings us.
It's also inherently, potently democratic - it's not only the musically gifted who have something to sing but all of us, in our interactions, in our mundane and demotic remarks, are singing the songs of the self, the songs of the social. Many composers have grabbed on to speech-music's potential as a tool of political critique, and as a way of bringing history to life - no doubt partly because when we think of public speech, political speech is at the forefront of our associations (personally I await the first great symphony to be composed with snatches of dialogue from TV shows). An interest in greater naturalism is often involved (Harry Partch and Leos Janacek, each in their different contexts, wanted to represent speech more truthfully, particularly the vernacular of the poor) as is a kind of populism and occasional ethnolinguistic pride, as in the case of, again, Janacek's tributes to Moravian culture or Réné Lussier's to that of Quebec. And will.i.am and YouTube get in here too.
While Spearin's project may be less musically rewarding than some of the others, the conceptual marriage of form and subject really makes up for it - he is unearthing its politics in a broader non-ideological way and bringing the question full circle back to its spiritual origins. Many of the other 20th century examples are more formalist or structural in their concerns, but not Spearin (or Partch or Pascoal, I'd venture). These are voices you can breathe in.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, February 19 at 5:22 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (22)
Happiness is a Project
Today in The Globe & Mail, I have a feature about Toronto musician Charles Spearin (Do Make Say Think, Broken Social Scene) and his new album of compositions based on interviews with his neighbours, The Happiness Project, released this week. Bonus material coming on Zoilus later this afternoon, er, Thursday.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, February 11 at 12:12 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Lux E Tenebris
The Guardian puts brilliant spin on sad news: "It's hard to think of Lux Interior as dead, despite what reports say. Then again, it was always hard to think of him as alive."
Psychobilly was never my drug of choice, but it was a key influence on the first post-punk-alt-indie-underground bands that I saw as a teenager, the likes of Deja Voodoo and the Gruesomes in Montreal or Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet (forerunners to the Sadies) and The Forgotten Rebels in Toronto - not to mention what would become goth culture, and even emo, David Lynch movies, neo-burlesque shows, roller derby and so on. It's impossible to resist the romantic mythos of the Cramps - Erick Purkhiser of Akron (part of the irradiated generation of Ohioddity that would create Devo, Pere Ubu and, lest we forget, Eric Carmen) picks up California girl Christine Wallace hitchhiking in 1970, and by 1973 they're reborn as Lux Interior and Poison Ivy - a marriage of true minds and engine parts that gave birth to a band that would last 35 years and a refraction of '50s and '60s garage-band fashion and noise that seems like it will never end - if only because, in a way, it never began.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, February 05 at 3:26 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Comin' Round
Ohio/Texas swamp-blues band The Heartless Bastards, with remarkable frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom, has new disc The Mountain out today. I gave it a four-star review in Blender magazine.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, February 03 at 1:38 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
A Tale of Two Philosophes, and a Dilemma
The TLS presents a lively account of the correspondence of Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy, in which the confrontation between Nietzschean provocateur and pious liberal becomes a parable about the uncomfortable relationship between criticism and compassion. It closes with this remark from George Orwell to Stephen Spender in April 1938:
When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for that reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to.
I sympathize: It is hard to be harsh or even ironical about people one knows or has met - but rather than giving up meeting people, the only answer I see is to give up the kind of polemic that consists in treating people as caricatures embodying certain ideas. If a statement, a work of art or an action truly deserves a scathing response, its offense must be so deep that you would say the same to the person's face. Otherwise, even though intellectual brutality can be useful and especially pleasurable, it comes at too great a cost to the soul.
As Stanley Elkin (the late American novelist) put it, in a phrase I first read on Dial M that went on to haunt me throughout the writing of my Céline Dion book:
Listen, disdain is easy, a mug's game, but look closely at anything
and it'll break your heart.
Or that's what I think this week. How do others deal with the dilemma: Is it possible and desirable to be civil in private and yet be "public enemies" (as Houellebecq and BHL's collection of correspondence is punningly called), or should we shun human contact with our intellectual/ideological opponents lest it dull our rapiers? Do you find it harder to pass judgment on people's work in public or in print after you've met them, or even if you know they will be reading it?
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, January 29 at 2:01 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (9)
Here It Comes ... Bush-Era Nostalgia!
Just kidding, but one week into the new Age of Nothing's Wrong (I say in fun, though Obama's al-Arabia interview yesterday almost had me believing it!), I happened today to read Carrie Brownstein's transition-day, beating-around-the-Bush-era post on the former Sleater-Kinney guitarist's NPR blog, Monitor Mix.
She makes a fine list of songs of anger/angst/protest from the period. But then comes this summary, which hit home on first reading because Brownstein's such a convincing and clear writer:
"In the last few years, the songs and struggles have tended toward the internal: A lot of music has become as personalized and intimate as the means of recording it. There's a widespread sense of weariness and reflection in place of fury, alongside a hard-earned desire to dance, celebrate and escape. But, like the end of the Bush era itself, those recent musical trends are the denouement. The lasting musical embodiment of the Bush administration will be the songs with teeth - the ones that weren't afraid to snarl back at bared fangs."
No disagreement on the tendency to privatization of sentiment and thought in the songwriting of the past couple of years, which I agree is technological as much as it is zeitgeisty. But on reflection, while the Bush administration itself - or let's say the Cheney administration - was eager and willing to snarl, I'm not sure the songs that got traction or will have lasting impact actually are the angry ones, at least not the explicitly politically angry ones. This may be a Canadian point of view - one at a bit more distance from the action - but I think the songs that will end up embodying the era will be the ones that reflect what it feels like to have your government relentlessly snarling at you, and living in a society whose leaders openly sneer at "reality-based" perspectives.
Songs of escape such as Hey Ya (with its weirdly fucked-up family-romance narrative lurking under its chirpy surface) as well as the shelter-offering Umbrella aren't going to be forgotten soon, and the hip-hop fixation on "the club" seems to fall into the same area - recalling the way that escapist songs of the 1930s have endured. Even in the parenthetical, indie category from which Brownstein primarily draws, there was the ascendance of soothing folk/classical/nursery-song-influenced sounds, a lot of punk-disco party music, the Flaming Lips' dance-this-dada-around moves and so on.
The non-escapist music of 2000-08 that endures may include more generalized expressions of anxiety than explosions of anger. There was that initial post-9/11 backlash against critical thinking - which coincided with pop's most ferocious trickster, Eminem, withdrawing almost completely from the limelight during 2001-2008 (save for his brief intervention in the 2004 elections). That seemed to me to be followed by a wave of cynicism about the worth of calling down power in art (except in satire), and much of the music of the age reflected a sense of panic - some acted it out, like the "yelpy" school of indie (Modest Mouse et al) or songs like Crazy, while some staged it through withdrawal, such as Animal Collective and the other more insular sixties-revival-slash-experimentalist groups, or the mournful goth/emo bands such as My Chemical Romance.
There are exceptions, and Brownstein's right to celebrate them, from Green Day to Arcade Fire - the latter's mix of pessimism and optimism and nerve really does seem more heroic to me now than it did before November. And Sleater-Kinney's own muscular engagement with both social and sonic dynamics seemed heroic to me right away, so I'm happy Brownstein's not too shy to give herself and her comrades a nod. Finally, leaving aside veterans such as Young and Springsteen (who were really just taking up their appointed roles), there is the saga of The Dixie Chicks (pictured above on the notorious Entertainment Weekly cover that, in its 'aughties, Britneyish way, was an attempted show of strength that nearly pitched over the threshold of abjection): Not Ready to Make Nice seems likely to hold onto its place in pop history as a cry against the very deep-freeze in the culture that prevented a lot of other protest music from getting a real hearing.
What strikes me about that song is the way that it adopted not so much the language of traditional political songs to make its point, but the rhetoric of a relationship song. And that's a final development worth noting: I could be wrong, but it seems to me that breakup songs have had a real heyday in the past five years particularly. It doesn't take a Slavoj Zizek to read the political-cultural subtext in such expressions of frustration at being disrespected and abused and of the yearning for a fresh start - such as Hollaback Girl and Irreplaceable and Since U Been Gone.
And at the end of that cycle comes Single Ladies, which in that context almost seems like a triumphant kiss-off - for "single ladies" read "swing voters" (or non-voters) who at the start of 2009 can sneer at the sleazy chumps who underrated them and set their sights on someone who dares to "put a ring on it," which (while a retrograde image) still can stand for commitment and integrity and square dealing.
One could go on - I haven't touched on the re-emergence of the sentimental homefront ballad in Iraq-wartime country music, which has gone too little noticed outside the genre, or for that matter the newfound respectability of heavy metal, which maybe be a point for Brownstein's snarlers. But as for which music posterity will eventually elect to represent that messy era, well, as Bush himself once put it, "history takes a long time for us to reach."
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, January 28 at 11:07 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
On the last day of your life,
don't forget to die:
RIP Silver Jews
Worst loss of the recession so far? I'm devastated to see that David Berman quietly announced the end of the Silver Jews this week:
"I guess I am moving over to another category. Screenwriting or Muckraking. I've got to move on. Can't be like all the careerists doncha know. I'm forty two and I know what to do. I'm a writer, see?
"Cassie is taking it the hardest. She's a fan and a player but she sees how happy i am with the decision. I always said we would stop before we got bad. If I continue to record I might accidentally write the answer song to Shiny Happy People. What, you thought I was going to hang on to the bitter end like Marybeth Hamilton?"
My verklemptitude is mitigated a bit by fascination with the post that follows where he vows to wreak "justice" on his father, who turns out to be the worst kind of corporate spin doctor. But not much more than a bit - and David, really, it seems healthier to let it go and tend your own garden, you know?
I'm so grateful I got to see the Joos live before this happened, and for all the great records, and look forward to films, books and perhaps someday some other sort of musical endeavour from the gifted Mr. Berman. Perhaps it's true that the Joos never really seemed to fit this decade the way they did the '90s. But right now I'm just going to flop down on the mattress and sniffle over bygone days.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, January 23 at 4:10 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Encounters at the Edge of Possibility
I don't want to add too much to the verbiage of the past day - I did enough of that on Facebook. Obama chose wisely by going short, recognizing that the potency of the lived moment was, to some degree, beyond words. He could have stuck with a haiku. ("Dad was refused lunch/ Now his son is president/ Childish things, farewell.") Musically, John Williams could have been far worse - there was dissonance! Yo Yo Ma looked so "Yo yo yo!" - and Aretha's artistry overcame the weakness of her aging instrument unforgettably. (I was nervous for her.)
Two or three times I heard TV and radio commentators mis-speaking and claiming Aretha sang "America the Beautiful" rather than "My Country Tis of Thee." One could riff on that mistake for a while, but at the least it seems like a real deafness to how much she was reworking it as a freedom song, referencing Martin Luther King Jr's use of it in the Dream speech (a speech I was glad Obama avoided echoing in his address, especially after Feinstein and Warren [ugh] both did it), as well as Obama's past references to it and most of all Marion Anderson's singing it at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her do so at their indoor gathering. It felt like the broadcasters were confusing Aretha with Ray Charles - "oh, some soul singer does a jazzy version of a patriotic song."
Elizabeth Alexander's poem was unfortunately more prosaic than both Obama's prose and Joseph Lowery's funk, and made worse by her "poetry voice" delivery. But the occasional-poem commission is a tough gig. She should have read something already composed that would be appropriate - the way Robert Frost spontaneously, instinctively did in 1961, switching from his poem for JFK in midstream to "The Gift Outright."
Later in the night, tired of cable coverage but not of reality, I watched Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, his doc about scientist-travelers in Antarctica. Besides how much it put the day into perspective (oh yeah, extinction of the human race, right), and how humbling it was, a few further observations: First, the under-ice calls of seals sound like Pink Floyd (as one researcher observed) and like trance techno, not like an animal; anyone into sound should see it for that reason alone. Second, I had no idea that Henry Kaiser, the California-based improv/blues/world/rock guitarist, was also an expert cold-sea diver - he produced the documentary and is fleetingly seen playing music with one of the scientists, but is otherwise way in the background; I knew that he was a world traveller but this is a new angle.
Third and most of all, though, Herzog keeps putting intrusive atmospheric electronic and choral music on the underseas and volcanic-chamber sequences, which really detracted from a film where the most compelling aural aspect is the notion of silence. As a visual person, he might not have realized how invasive it would be for people who are more led by their ears - I could barely see the jellyfish and weird mollusks and ice-shelf footage for all the Bulgarian Choir noise. Eventually I started turning the music down to almost-inaudible so I could finally appreciate the visuals. It felt like a case-study problem in sensory-intensity diversity. It's an extreme case but I started to wonder if it indicated a basic paradox in soundtrack reception.
All that said it's a great film. Just ease the sound down in between the interviews and voiceovers.
And O, it was a blissful day. Big embraces to our American cousins.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, January 21 at 2:48 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (7)
Sophocles is potlucking
Toronto's own Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler win at Internet this week. (Not for the first time.)
"Mina Loy is my Industrial Park. Lorine Niedecker had a metted wet squirrel in her apartment yesterday and was amazed at what a cheeky little pre-stew rodent it was and how hard it was to get it out! Theophile Gautier is mechanical vacuum fixit genius guy. And it works so much better when you actually plug it in after you fix it. Erich Maria Remarque is regretting those chicken wings."
Brian Joseph Davis explains further.
NB: Bill Kennedy was Zoilus's designer & for several years its web-mechanic.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, January 19 at 3:02 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Hipstory Repeats
Mort Sahl, late 50s/early 60s, according to The New Yorker's recent piece about the Village Voice: "The beat generation is a coffeehouse full of people expectantly looking at their watches for the beat generation to come on."
Sounds like a punchline from Cat & Girl.
Note the mature refraining from comparisons to vague foreign threats, technological jitters and unspecified-hope-inspiring presidents of other decades.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, January 16 at 11:23 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Talk of Land
I have a profile today on The Globe and Mail website (not in print) of Montreal blessed-and-cursed trio Land of Talk led by Ontario-born singer/guitarist Lizzie Powell, who's also been singing with Broken Social Scene the past year. I'll print the full transcript of our interview this weekend, but you can see them for the last time in a while tonight in Kingston, Ont.
Key paragraphs: The oscillations between bright and dark spots in Land of Talk's career mirror its music, founded on the sour-and-sweet blend of Powell's spiky, dissonant guitar with her plaintive voice, as if Kim Gordon of post-punk band Sonic Youth had the wounded twang of Louisiana country-rock balladeer Lucinda Williams. Powell's lyrics, too, hover in a twilight zone between Eros and Thanatos.
On Some Are Lakes' title track, for instance, where another songwriter might have been content with "I'll love you as long as I live," she swerves into the hairpin "I'll love you like I love you, then I'll die." In this, she picks up on a cut-off 1990s strand from near-forgotten bands such as the Throwing Muses or Spinanes, who probed for a tough-but-not-macho feminine rock voice by more complex strategems of difference than the shock tactics of the riot-grrrl movement identified with Hole or Bikini Kill.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, January 16 at 8:08 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
'Translate the Bible into velociraptor'? Yes, we can
Weird. In what I can only guess is The New Yorker's attempt to join in this month's spirit of hope, unity and a post-ideological politics of citizenship, this week it's published a poem that is at once from the avant-ish side of the aisle and not by John Ashbery or Charles Simic or some other safe grey eminence but in fact by a grad student. Or, put another way, a poem by a young poet that is not about mourning one's spouse by the slant of winter light on lobster bisque. Quick, someone tell me this guy is William Shawn's sister's chiropractor's grandson or something, so I can relax again and enjoy the 40 below.
Confidential to Michael Robbins: "He has not yet found any academic application for his love of hip-hop, country music, & death metal" - ? Dude, you're clearly not looking very hard.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, January 14 at 4:53 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
Friday Fast Ones
Kenneth Goldsmith from UbuWeb talks "outsider writing" at Mercer Union tonight at 7 pm. Shit, that's soon.
In Eye this week, Dave Morris pens his final Totally Wired column after four years of providing this blog with fodder. And yes, Dave, we fell for it.
Just as Somali-Canadian rapper K'naan prepares to release his new album, Troubadour (recorded at Tuff Gong studio in Jamaica), the American music press has discovered his first one, 2005's Dusty Foot Philosopher, which was just released stateside last year. Perhaps this will be the T-dot's moment finally - the screwfaces get hypheny with it?
Steve Martin banjo album this month. Oh yeah.
No time to go into detail right now but Jon McCurley's play-that-turns-into-an-art-exhibition Double Double Land at Gallery TPW was a dazzling and delicious piece of creative work and included the most ingenious, confusing and astounding surprise ending there's ever been in anything ever. The surprise ending was so intense there could only be one performance. (Though secretly there were two.) If you missed it console yourself by reading this conversation between Jon and his comedy partner Amy Lam, aka Life of a Craphead, who it's still possible you could see someday so don't give up hope don't give up don't give up oh don't.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, January 09 at 4:49 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
2009, The Year of the Ox(ymoron)
(Plus: Help Wanted!)
Happy New Year, everybody, and welcome to the year of hope and change, I mean fear and austerity, I mean ... Anyway, the second half of '08 was a pretty inconsistent one for Zoilus postings, I know - my only resolution for the new year, or at least the only one that's any of your business, is to find my way back to a fairly regular posting schedule.
Let's start slow: I saw Un conte de Noel (A Christmas Tale), the latest (and my first) Arnaud Desplechin film, with Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric, last weekend. I was quite taken with the film's multifarious maelstro-dramas (nicely described by The Nation's Stuart Klawans as "psychoanalytic realism"), and its ambitious narrative structure (which makes a suitably bloodyminded argument for film's takeover from the novel as the standard-bearer of bourgeois consciousness).
But I bring it up here because the co-author of the screenplay is Emmanuel Bourdieu, the son of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose theory of "distinction" as the motor of taste-making I explain in my book (see left). The film includes a couple of perfect examples of the shift from "high-brow" to "omnivore" modes of cultural consumption that I also cover there.
It's emphasized that the members of the film's fractious family (split generationally from industrial to post-industrial - the neurotic siblings are baffled and embarrassed that their jovial father holds on to his unfashionable dye factory) are all adept musicians. The soundtrack, sometimes generated on-screen, includes everything from classical to free jazz (Cecil Taylor) to '60s R&B and so on. But it still comes as a surprise when it's revealed that the only one of the siblings whose career we haven't been told about yet, the fragile but responsible Ivan, is a hip-hop DJ - a turntablist, really - when he breaks out his skills at a Christmas party at their hometown's community centre.
No one on screen seems anything but comfortable and happy with Ivan's pursuit. In real life, although they're a culturally sophisticated set (one sister is a playwright, her husband an award-winning mathematician, a close cousin is a painter, etc.), I still think there might be a few cracks made about Ivan, who must be in his mid-30s at least, messing with this greasy kid stuff. But for Desplechin and Bourdieu, the pleasure seems to be in demonstrating their own ability to cross cultural levels and boundaries without the least friction. If the audience finds the juxtaposition a bit odd or inconsistent - notice, for example, that among the several films the characters are caught watching, none is ever made after 1980 - that's the audience's problem.
On other matters: Zoilus is in need of a Movable Type-literate design/troubleshooting helper, to do occasional tweaks and very infrequent larger overhauls and consult on technical matters. Since this site makes no revenue, I'm hoping there's a friendly reader who would be willing to help out on a modest retainer. If you might (or know someone who could), please drop a line.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, January 06 at 6:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Immodest Proposals: Pop Conf and 33 1/3
Agenda Item 1: Although it's officially past the deadline, you can probably still sneak in a bid on giving a presentation at this spring's 8th annual Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. This year's model? "Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop & The Body Politic." So far as a member of the programming committee, the paper I am most excited to have encouraged is one about sex sounds in music and how deeply unsexy that usually is. (Full exemption granted to Jane Birkin c. 1969, because.) Send proposals of up to 250 words and a 50-word bio to Eric Weisbard at EricW@empsfm.org and Eric.Weisbard@gmail.com. Right this minute! You are already late!
Agenda Item 2. You have two more weeks, though, before you are too late to submit proposals for the latest call from the 33 1/3 series of books on albums (which includes my book, see left). I won't reiterate all the details here - you can read 'em at that last link - but I encourage my Canadian readers especially to go for the gustibus here. I've already caught wind of a Metal Machine Music proposal brewing in the kitchen of a particularly terrific venerable Toronto critic, among others.
But if you are at all stymied for ideas, here are my two nominees for records I would write about if I were ever going to write another 33 1/3 book, which I'm not: 1) local hero John Oswald's founding manifesto of mashup, Plunderphonics (aka "Girl Talk is 20 years late to the party") (and btw, I'm sure you'd have Oswald's full cooperation on that project); or, 2) The classic K-Tel compilation Goofy Greats, a fantastic opportunity to analyze the nature and quiddities of the novelty song, of which Goofy Greats is one of the more formidable and, I would hazard, influential assemblages ever known to man.
You're welcome!
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, December 17 at 4:17 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (8)
Cramming It In
(End o' Week Notes)
I caught Sweden's Love Is All at the Horseshoe last night and was pleasantly surprised - the tracks I'd heard before seemed kind of smushily produced but live the band was very sharp and catchy: reminiscent at times, thanks to pixie-perfect lead singer Josephine Olausson, of the Sugarcubes in their heyday, but with No Wave saxophone, Ex-ish guitar slashes and maybe just a tad too much ska for my liking. Unfortunately due to an unavoidable proofreading incident, I missed the buzzed-about Crystal Stilts - I'd unfairly dismissed them for awhile because "crystal" was feeling like 2008's "wolf" (a joke the band themselves made in Eye this week), but when even Tim Perlich (the "Mikey" of Toronto music crits, as in "he hates everything") gave them sympathetic coverage (and tipped me off to the Vivian Girls connection), I took notice. But alas. Reports from the floor of the 'Shoe were good though. I'll try harder next time.
Frank Chromewaves presents the most elegant graphic case for a top-10 list I've ever seen: emblazoning all his chosen artists on gorgeous commemorative plates. In general, end-of-year lists and my love-hate of them have been very distracting this week.
Speaking of graphics, the funny-infographic-music-commentary trend has collided and melded with the obsessive annotation of Destroyer lyrics with the release of the Destroyer's Rubies statistical wallchart poster. It sure seems like something I ought to own (given the evidence against me) but the $87 (incl. shipping and handling) price tag is a true test.
The other most batshit thing I've discovered lately: A blog that obsesses on The Hills and free-associates in a way that can't quite be described as cultural criticism, but can't quite not, at really incredible length - this week, for instance, discussing the possibilities of a Heidi-and-Spencer spinoff show within the framework of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
And a treat: A new Pere Ubu download, free, from March of Greed, their collaboration with the Brothers Quay, although the latter aren't really in evidence in this example. (You can see it here.)
I'm sure I had something else to tell you.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, December 12 at 3:46 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
Odetta: Another One Done Gone
The original one-named diva, known as Odetta Holmes when she was born in Birmingham in 1930 and later by her married name as Odetta Gordon but most of her life simply as Odetta, died yesterday of heart failure in New York, after a couple of weeks in hospital and a couple of years of failing health. I missed her last time she came through Toronto, but saw her at Hugh's Room a couple of years ago, for the first time, and feel fortunate to have breathed the same air as those incredible lungs for a couple of hours as she knocked out her classic covers of Leadbelly and other folk, blues and gospel staples.
But Odetta, truth be told, wasn't exactly a "folk singer" in the sense people in her heyday usually meant it - although she was among the first, alongside the Weavers and Harry Belafonte, to usher in the folk-revival boom in the mid-1950s (and all the McCarthy-era paranoia and struggle that accompanied it). Though born in Alabama she was raised in Los Angeles and trained in opera singing as a teenager and then entered musical theatre. What she did with folk music was, much like Paul Robeson before her, to blend it with the techniques of art music and thereby make an implied argument for its artistic worthiness in a time when the divide between high and low culture was still intense. With a voice that was quite the opposite of an acquired taste, more like a thunderbolt that rivets you to the earth, and an undeniably fine technical command, Odetta didn't require you to listen through scratchy transcriptions and gurgly adenoidal hillbilly vocals. Odetta identified herself more as a folk curator and music historian, taking the old songs and putting them in a clarifying frame.
So for a middle-class kid like Robert Zimmerman, who was mainly interested in rock'n'roll at the time, hearing Odetta in a record shop could be a gateway into the entire folk tradition, and he later credited her as being the one who first inspired him to unplug and pick up an acoustic guitar - followed of course by his discovery of Woody Guthrie and everything else that made him Bob Dylan, folk-music god, for a few years, before he decided to plug back in again.
Coincidentally, Odetta was a gateway drug for me too - the gateway, in fact, to Bob Dylan. I was about 11 or 12 and hanging around my grandparents' house at their farm in Tweed, Ont., and killing some time by going through their musty old records, which consisted mainly of country and Irish music, some Tommy Hunter here, some Irish Rovers there. The falling-apart copy of 1965's Odetta Sings Dylan must have been left there by one of my mom's siblings years before, but just the surprise of my grandparents owning any records by black people was enough to intrigue me. I'd heard a little Dylan but was, I think, a bit put off by the voice. But when I heard this woman who sounded like I hadn't realized any black woman could sound (in my disco-era racially tinged ignorance), making what seemed like epic oratory out of Masters of War, The Times They Are A-Changin' and even Mr. Tambourine Man (frankly an interpretation that I now find too heavy handed for the song), I was arrested. Suddenly the whole phenomenon of early-sixties protest music seemed fascinating and Dylan as a wordsmith electrifying. When we got back to Brantford, I got some Phil Ochs records and Dylan's greatest hits out of the library, and soon bought my first Dylan record (I forget if it was Another Side or Bringin' It All Back Home) - a pretty significant development in a collection till then dominated (with pubescent randomness) by the three B's: the Beatles, Bach and Billy Joel.
A few years later, my friend Sean reintroduced me to Odetta via a mixtape made from his dad's Smithsonian Folkways collection - stunning songs steeped in the history of slavery and oppression such as the above (Water Boy), God's A-Gonna Cut 'Em Down, John Henry and others from the ballad tradition, including my single favourite cut of hers, the old English song John Riley, a "recognition scene" ballad involving long-lost love. Those tapes are a cherished part of the history of my friendship with Sean - the longest, most consistent in my life - today.
Earlier this year I read at the Happy Ending Reading Series in New York, where the rule is that you not only read but must do something you've never done in public. I chose singing a capella, and decided that since I was talking in the book about music that's meant to make you cry, I should sing a song that often makes me break down - that is, John Riley. For comfort, and to solve the a-capella problem of what to do with your arms while you sing, I asked two members of the audience to come up and hold my hands. It wasn't exactly singing O Freedom at the 1963 March on Washington, as Odetta once did, but it was a moment that wouldn't have been the same without her inspiration.
So thank you, Queen Odetta, and rest in peace - the joyful, angry and proud sound of your soul never, I hope, to be forgotten.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, December 03 at 4:06 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Burning Ears Give You So Much More
Sorry posting's been so light - I bet you're all busy this time of year too. I will try to redouble Zoilusian efforts. Just a quick note today of gratitude that my book (see left) was selected this weekend in The Globe and Mail's "Globe 100" selection of best books of the year. Because I work at the paper, feel free to be skeptical, but honestly the honour was unexpected - and a very nice boost for the book since most of its reviews and publicity came out at the very beginning of the year.
Postscript: I also just heard that it was listed among the UK Telegraph's seven choices for Christmas books on pop music, which calls it "the year's most essential book on music." And this time I don't know anybody there.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, December 01 at 5:18 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (8)
She Said, 'Johnny You Got Big Eyes'
In the NYT Magazine's "Screens" issue, coming this weekend, some prominent types name "Moments that Mattered" in their encounters with flat, candescent images of all sorts this year. Novelist Heather O'Neill picks the above YouTube video, titled "Dance Dance Revolutions Co.," and tells a touching story about it and her daughter. As she says, the song ("The End of Poverty") is by Toronto band Tomboyfriend (see the Zoilus entry about chief 'boyfriend Ryan Kamstra earlier this week). But she neglects to mention that the video itself was created by Toronto artist (and Zoilus comrade) Margaux Williamson using found YouTube footage of teenagers dancing in their basements (as she explains here); it was shown in an exhibit at Harbourfront in Toronto earlier this fall.
(Margaux was also inspired by YouTube in her full-length video, Teenager Hamlet 2006, previously mentioned here.)
But what O'Neill says of it is lovely and true: "Each time you watch it, you have a different favorite kid. They flail their arms around and gyrate their hips and completely, completely let themselves go. ... the side of them that just lives in the moment and laughs all afternoon and feels a rock song the way adults never can and spends all day looking for the most original way to shout out: I am here! I am me!."
Speaking of "I am here! I am me!" and of Harbourfront, try tonight or tomorrow to catch one of the last two performances of Hospitality 3: Individualism Was a Mistake, a performance by ex-Torontonian, now Montrealais, Jacob Wren and PME-ART's , in its world premiere. I'll be there tonight.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, November 21 at 3:24 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
I hate to side against Kraftwerk, but ...
Germany moves closer to justice on sampling than most legal systems have so far, in a decision against Kraftwerk, who were suing a rap producer for using two seconds of their song "Metal on Metal" (from 1977's Trans-Europe Express).
The court errs in banning quotation from melodies - are German jazz soloists in trouble now? - and indeed I'd be curious what their definition of a "melody" is. Do they mean vocal melodies only? What about instrumental hooks? What about rhythmic hooks? I'm curious if the ruling includes any guidelines in those directions. Personally, the only two tests I would advocate are (a) that the use must be substantially transformative of the source material, by whatever means; and (b) that the source material be credited. I realize licensing fees have been good for some under-appreciated artists, but the censoring effect has been greater - just ask Public Enemy, whose work has never been as powerful as it was in the sampling age. Conscientious artists could still donate profits from sales on songs where they sample deserving obscurities (and acknowledgements would permit those obscurities to pressure with public shaming of the non-conscientious). Meanwhile, if the original artist felt that someone had just ripped them off, not really created a new work, they could sue to make that case.
Does anyone know of anywhere else that explicitly has liberal sampling laws, rather than just weak copyright regimes because they're poor and it's not a priority? I know Gilberto Gil was trying as Culture Minister in Brazil, but as far as I can tell what's been done there is only to allow artists to use Creative Commons if they choose to. They haven't made the leap that Germany made today, where sampling artists would be innocent until proven guilty.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, November 20 at 6:04 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
Ryan Kamstra's
Apocalypse Madge
(And Girl Talk Etc.)
Madonna underdeveloped, underperforming
underwater, untamed . . . deserted North America.
There are Post-it notes in each drawer. Either my regime's
been changed or else I colluded.
My ass is missing. I really don't recall.
Between hunger or adoring welter, another interior hunchbacking
to another interior.
The crucial updates only:
There are a series of outstanding waiting lounges into which
I'm now departed.
A turntable made of only more but ever smaller dreams.
Orange slums beyond metal cities.
Cities barnacle the empire.
No matter which floor, it's repeating like this.
Sarah Liss wrote a very sharp, insightful profile of poet and musician Ryan Kamstra in this week's Eye, in anticipation of his launch on Tuesday night at Mitzi's Sister for his new book iNTO tHE dROWNED wORL_D, an end-times phantasiac poetry cycle in which the world ended eight years ago, dedicated and addressed to Madonna, or at least to a tattered poster of her Drowned World Tour (which ended the week of 9/11).
As Liss's article mentions, I've created a Madonna trivia contest for the occasion, though unfortunately I can't be there in time to deliver it in person. Skill level: middlingish. In addition there is a Madonna-costume contest with actual prizes and two sets by Ryan's ever-more-excellent band Tomboyfriend (currently recording their first full-length, Don't Go to School). Doors at 7, readings & shenanigans at 8, music at 10, drinks throughout.
I have had a lot of other things to talk about but no time to talk about them - for instance the way that Eye has been mixing up filesharing and appropriation art in its discussion of Girl Talk (Girl Talk doesn't threaten the "economic engine" of the music business because he's just making collages, not giving away the original music, and indeed is probably making people more likely to seek out the original music); how the usually perspicacious Mike Barthel became oddly literalist in his discussion of the same subject on Idolator - if Girl Talk "is not fair use" in the current legal definition then that definition needs to be expanded, mainly because its fixation on parody as the primary legitimate use of appropriated material is out-of-date, as I think Idolator's lawyer understands; how this is really just the sampling debate of the 1990s all over again - in fact it makes me dizzy with a sense of proximal amnesia - and Girl Talk's use of the technology is not anywhere near as exciting as the Beastie Boys' was; how music writers as a broad group seem to be way behind the curve conceptually on this stuff; and how everyone should read The Gift by Lewis Hyde, or at least, as a starting point, the quite beautifully written NYT magazine feature about him this weekend.
(On a related subject, was I the only one who initially missed Suzanne Vega's charming NYT blog post [many weeks ago now] about how the infinite number of remixes of Tom's Diner came to be, and how she inadvertently helped invent the MP3? You can tell it's written by an artist because she's not afraid of what she doesn't know.)
I wish Ryan had incorporated lines from Madonna songs throughout Into the Drowned World and I could make all these points tie up neatly, but he didn't, but you get the general idea.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, November 17 at 1:47 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Darren O'Donnell:
Can he tell us how to get to Sesame Street?
I've got a piece about Toronto writer-artist-performer-impresario Darren O'Donnell, creator of Haircuts By Children along with much more, in the new issue of Toronto Life. It's a radically reduced version of my original but gets the job done as an introduction to O'Donnell and his take on participatory/relational/social art-theatre - which he charmingly reduces to an attempt to recapture the Sesame Street urban-community fantasies of his childhood in his real life in Toronto. Forget Allan Kaprow and the Internet, he hints - all this social-art stuff of the current generation might be traceable to the Children's Television Workshop.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, November 11 at 4:35 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
The Blame-Celine-First Crowd
(Plus Digidoo and LadyFi's 'Representin Obama')
People are still claiming that the reason Hillary Clinton is not being elected president today was that in June of 2007 (!), she chose a Celine Dion tune for her campaign song. Here's what I had to say about that at the time.
The amazing thing to me reading that entry back is that Barack Obama is not even mentioned.
If you're in Toronto tonight and not sure where to go for election-watchin', the artist-activists of the Department of Culture are having an election-watch gathering at the Gladstone Hotel, and public-space group Spacing is organizing a "Welcome Back America" party in Dundas Square after the results are announced. (They encourage everyone to bring radios to play the acceptance speech in concert, in case the operators of the giant screens at the square choose not to do so.) There's also a shindig at my place, but I'm afraid I can't invite all of you.
Wherever you celebrate (or mourn, but I'm pretty sure it'll be celebrate) tonight's events, have a great party. We deserve it. If you need a soundtrack other than the prattle of talking heads, this special all-Obama music edition of WFMU's Transpacific Sound Paradise is a great source (thanks to TO Music Pix for the tip). Or check out roundups from Eye Weekly (thanks to Scott Woods) and PopMatters. Or just play Erykah Badu.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, November 04 at 3:06 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Fan Dance:
Fandoms & the 2008 Election
Election Dance-Off With the Obamanators and the McCainiacs.
An email from online streaming-music service Slacker.com saying that they'd implemented Obama and McCain "radio stations" where you can listen to the music the candidates have on their own iPods reminded me of something I'd wanted to point out for a while: This article by U of C Berkeley's Abigail De Kosnik comparing political constituencies and fan cultures, particularly in this case regarding the Democratic primaries. Her focus is on the "marginalized fandom" of Hillary Clinton supporters, whom she likens to the portion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom that was self-declaredly "bitter" about plot developments such as the Buffy/Spike romance not working out, or Willow's lover Tara being killed off. (Or conversely, about there having been a Buffy/Spike or Willow/Tara romance in the first place.)
A minority of the Spike "shippers" never forgave the show and spent their time trolling and lobbing rage-bombs on other fan sites, just as a small part of the Clinton faction moved over to various "Democrats for McCain" organizations, notably for example in Pennsylvania, where they are likely the biggest X factor that makes the Republicans believe they have a shot in that state tomorrow. (Listen to the Oct. 24 This American Life show from Pennsylvania.)
John McCain and Joe Biden don't really inspire that many fan-like followers, it seems anecdotally, but both Obama and Palin do, as their appeal is as much in style and identity as in policy. My initial reaction is that if De Kosnik's model is right, it's an indicator of how far the drift into tele-democracy has gone. I'm reminded of the sting of the Republicans' summertime attack ad on Obama as a "celebrity". The charge didn't stick - partly because of the silliness of comparing him to Paris Hilton, as Paris Hilton herself so effectively helped demonstrate - but it wasn't totally void of substance.
Fan democracy, even more than the soundbite-and-spin democracy that mediatization has generally given us so far, feels especially risky because it seems to tip easily into mob mentalities. You see this in the tone of comments sections on lefty-Dem sites such as the Daily Kos (where McCain is routinely called McSlimy) as well as in the ugly, ugly rhetoric that surfaced in late-campaign Palin rallies, where the real and fake America were set up against each other and Obama was accused of not seeing the country the way "you and me" do - that you and me (besides being potentially racially divisive) also being a way of constituting the sort of imagined communities that fandoms construct. Fandom feels like a highly inappropriate way to relate to political life: In my book I discuss the troubling tone of a lot of cultural-taste conversation, the way that it's used to sharpen social distinctions, but at least there the stakes are relatively low (at least in the short term); in politics the consequences feel more dire.
Yet De Kosnik suggests a more positive reading that actually resonates a lot with what I say late in my book, about the need to shift away from an adversarial to a more pluralistic model in taste talk. She points out that there's something impoverished and inhuman about insisting on a purely rational and "objective" ideal of citizenship. She cites (second-hand) George Marcus, author of The Sentimental Citizen, on the way that a modicum of sentiment is necessary to a rounded sense of life (and thus of politics and governance) - as I've argued elsewhere, the label of "sentimentality" (so common a weapon of pointyhead critics against certain styles of music etc.) can be a device to exclude valid parts of the spectrum (arguably those associated with women, the young, the old, etc.), in a parallel way that labels such as "subversive" or "offensive" can exclude dark or ironic material that makes another set of people uncomfortable.
Not fully sure how to reconcile the hopeful and fearful ways of looking at a fan-like or "sentimental" citizenship - that is, the fan as an engaged and more deeply connected citizen, versus the fan as an unwavering and potentially aggressive partisan - I dropped De Kosnik a line. Basically, what she argued was that a "fan" model might be a healthier one than the typical notion of a political partisan - that when we realize that part of our attachment to a candidate or party is based on identification, projection and context, the way that we insert ourselves in any kind of narrative, it's easier to understand that the people who disagree with us aren't evil monsters. It's a perspective worth contemplating in the wake of this extraordinary political year. She writes:
I definitely agree that fandom can be anti-rational and that a "sentimental citizenship" that would be wholly or largely positive for the public-at-large is impossible. At the same time, an Enlightenment rationalist politics is also impossible. I'm not calling for what my colleague David Bates calls a "politics of affect" - rather, I argue that such a politics is already here, it is what we have already, it is a method of emotionally investing in public figures that is equally operative in political discourse as in entertainment/celebrity discourse. So the question is, What do we do with a politics of affect, with "fannish" politics, now that we see that's how it's working?
In the Clinton vs. Obama fanbase wars, I still see a war raging, though now it's a quiet one compared to the McCain/Palin vs. Obama/Biden fanbase wars. I think one positive outcome that society can strive for with a politics of affect is acting ethically towards people who belong to fanbases different from one's own. For instance, I am neither voting for Obama nor McCain, but constantly find people assuming that I am voting for one and hurling all sorts of insults about the other quite freely. It is as if my participation in one of the fanbases can be assumed. To me, that's just as strange and off-putting as people assuming I'm Christian, or people I know from online communities assuming I'm a certain ethnicity or nationality.
Is it possible to be a fan of one candidate or another, and not speak ill of that person's opponent? ... Broadening the public political discourse to me would mean first of all, acknowledging that most people do have a kind of fannish allegiance to certain politicians or political platforms, and then realizing that there are almost always strong emotions underneath that, and then acknowledging that people who believe differently aren't evil - they're fans of a different stripe. They're Red Sox fans and you're a Yankee fan. They're West Coast rap fans and you're an East Coast rap fan. They're Palin fans and you're an Obama fan.
You'll never think the Sox, NWA, or Palin are the best, you'll never want them to win, but it is possible to have an attitude that people who love those other objects aren't horrid or ill-informed or moronic; they're fans. And so are you.
And when it's acknowledged that emotions run high on both sides, I think and hope there can be a backing away from name-calling and reductionist stereotyping of entire groups of people - millions of people, usually - as somehow morally defective. I know this sounds like "Live and let live," and I do think that is what I'm advocating, but when it comes to fandom and fan wars, it's still important that a clarion call go out for "Live and let live," because fandom too often ends up at, "Believe as I believe."
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, November 03 at 4:26 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (7)
Byrning Bright
Amazing time at the Songs of David Byrne & Brian Eno Toronto tour stop at Massey Hall last night. My review is up on The Globe & Mail website (bearing roughly the same headline as approximately one-third of all reviews of the tour thus far) (but at least it's accurate) (I wonder if he thought of the "Byrne/burn" pun when he was writing the song?).
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 30 at 8:55 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Kafka in the Office:
'A Cage in Search of a Bird'
It sounds like a piece of sketch comedy, like a fake ad for Tupac's Greatest Voice Mail Messages or Jimi Tunes His E String!, but actually I don't know that I've been more excited about any book in a long while than I am about Franz Kafka: The Office Writings: "Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire." Yes, it's his worksite inspection reports, memos on safety, policy recommendations and even his letters demanding a raise!
Besides the fact that there can never be enough Kafka, the fascination is because his work focuses so much on the existential-nightmare side of bureaucracy and business: Looking at these documents will be kind of like seeing a photo of the prostitute that posed for the Mona Lisa. As Stanley Corngold says in his introduction (downloadable at the Princeton site): "The specter of bureaucracy haunts Kafka day and night in every corner of his writing life." It was both his subject and his nemesis, his "hook into the real," and in many ways it gave his writing form, in a mutually parasitic relationship - his office work leeched on his time and energy as a writer, and yet his writing sucked blood and guts out of office life, aka the trial, aka the castle, etc.
Besides which it's always fascinating to catch an iconic figure when they're not being iconic. Kafka's letters and diaries are too much part of his legend to fill that function, so in a way seeing him wearing the mask of officialdom is humanizing - not that there's ever anything less than human about Kafka's writing, but more in the "celebrities, they're just like us" sense: "They pretend to care about bullshit at work - and they probably do care a little, actually." Although we know that doubledness from Kafka's own account, those accounts are always about how the mask felt, not how it looked. In this version, it is like we get to see Franz Kafka playing Don Draper (cf. Mad Men).
I can't decide which I want to read first: "Petition of the Toy Producers' Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge (1912)," "Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines (1910)" or "A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German Bohemia (1916)."
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, October 29 at 3:24 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Hymn to a Ballroom:
The Arkestra Meets Coleman Lemieux Dance
I hadn't realized what a posh event last night's launch of the X-Avant festival featuring the Sun Ra Arkestra and the Coleman Lemieux dance company was going to be. Among all the out-music heads I chatted with at the Palais Royale last night, it seemed like few had ever been there before; I hadn't been to the Twenties-and-Thirties-era dance palace since its renovations six years ago, when it was a drafty, peeling-plaster shed that looked a bit like a bandshell and a bit like an aircraft hanger that had been shelled. It had a Mrs. Haversham kind of glamour.
My initial response to seeing the new Palais was to regret its fancying-up, since it does look a bit like an Event Venue now, if you know what I mean. But it was impossible not to savour the incongruity of being at an avant-garde-music event where there are ushers dressed in suits and ties; where there are black-suited bartenders doing Tom-Cruise-in-Barfly-type flip tricks with bottles of coconut rum; where there's a roaring gas fire in a fireplace, and a table of expensive pastries for sale; where there are cocktail tables and sweeping multi-beam stage lights... It was a kind of social-science-fiction of its own, as if we were playing characters devised to set the greatest possible visual contrast to the Arkestra musicians in their shiny King-Tut-on-Saturn robes and the dancers in their headdresses, toga-dresses, modern-primative-dresses and undresses. It was especially effective at the end when dancers, band and audience were all together on the dance floor.
Musically, it was the best Arkestra concert of the three or four I've seen. In the past, I've found the group generally inconsistent, a bit of a museum piece that sometimes reaches the cosmic heights and sometimes seems a few thrusters short of liftoff; I'm not sure if there are some new members, or maybe a few of the veterans in wobbly health have retired, or maybe they were just inspired by the setting but they were super-tight and vigorous, whether they were playing Fletcher Henderson-style swing standards or swooshing and bleeping through the heliosphere. The dance component of the night was sensuous and playful, even if the choreography sometimes seemed a little loose, a bit hastily assembled - each segment had a strong central idea but not a lot of development - but never mind, as the general spirit seemed direct, simple and yet striking and faithful to the Arkestra's antic heart.
Congratulations to Jonny Dovercourt at the Music Gallery and collaborators on "a night to remember," as they say on the prom posters. (Hope they didn't lose a bundle doing it.) It's a very auspicious start to the X-Avant Festival, which continues tonight at the Drake with a tribute to Klaus Dinger, creator of the Krautrock motorik beat; tomorrow at the Gallery with a tripartite study in the art of digital dissolve, audio and visual, with Naw, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Klimek; on Friday with a show featuring a new, partially Sun Ra-inspired band from Jeremy Strachan of Feuermusik, as well as Italian bassist Stefano Scodanibbio and, in what I suspect will be an X-Avant highlight, Philadelphia's Sonic Liberation Front. (See David Dacks' Eye Weekly piece on the group from last week.)
There's more through the weekend - check the Music Gallery web page for deets.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, October 22 at 2:35 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Destination: Braxtonology
I keep neglecting to tell y'all that you should be tuning your dials right about now to Destination:Out, the jazzsite that keeps on giving, where they've been holding an Anthony Braxton "blogathon" throughout October. Tons of music, analysis, background stories and general science about the formidable composer and saxophonist - if you've ever felt daunted, as I have, by the vastness of the Braxton catalogue and its theoretical scaffolding, Jay and Drew make it easy going.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, October 20 at 4:02 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
It's After the End of the World
In honour of the Sun Ra Arkestra's appearance tomorrow night (with the Coleman Lemieux dance company) launching the Music Gallery's X-Avant Festival, here's a piece I wrote three years ago, last time the Marshall Allen-led big band came through town playing the compositions of their late friend & mentor.
It feels so different to re-read it at this moment, when the top of the news is Colin Powell knuckling Barack Obama's prospects further into the spaceways, rather than a swirling sky-fist slamming down on the people of New Orleans. Tomorrow's show at the Palais Royale should be a grand cosmic-slop celebration.
(FYI I'm going to be on a "Space is the Place" panel at 3 pm on Saturday (Oct 25) at the Music Gallery, talkin' Sun Ra & Stockhausen with Aiyun Huang, Arnd Jurgensen and Alan Stanbridge.)
† † †
Sun Ra's stream of consciousness still flowing into the future
Carl Wilson
14 October 2005
The Globe and Mail
The reality of the "off-the-grid," shunted-aside mass of the African-American underclass rarely breaks through to popular attention. It happened during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and again after the New Orleans hurricane disaster this fall. Each time, the reaction is as if the media's so-called observers had stumbled on a previously undiscovered planet of want in the western cosmos.
Turn that image on its head, to picture a new world of freedom and plenty for those same people, and you glimpse a strain of astro-Afro-utopianism that runs through 20th-century black movements, such as Garveyism, Rastafarianism, the militantly mystic Nation of Islam, and the music of Herman (Sonny) Blount: legal name at his death in 1993, Le Sony'r Ra; and more familiar on this astral plane as Sun Ra.
[... continues ...]
Blount "arrived" on Earth circa 1914, in segregated Birmingham, Ala. -- en route, he maintained, from Saturn. Over his 79 years, dozens of musicians passed through his Sun Ra Arkestra in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and, for six months in 1961, Montreal. They recorded more than 100 albums and untold numbers of singles, with titles such as Heliocentric Worlds, Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy and Space Is the Place (also the name of a recent biography, and a documentary available on DVD).
The Arkestra also garbed itself in colourful robes and ram-horned headgear that seemed to come out of a Hollywood Cleopatra epic. It snaked through audiences chanting: "It's after the end of the world, don't you know that yet?" It played unheard-of chord changes, skronked and squealed, and sang "Rocket No. 9 taking off for the planet Venus, Venus, Venus."
As a result, Sun Ra is often patronized as some sort of jazz Dr. Seuss by pot-smoking college kids intent on getting off on the far-out. Yet, the "myth science" taught by the former big-band and strip-club pianist went deeper for his musicians. They were the descendents of Africans who'd been brought into bondage by ship; maybe another ship -- a rocket, at least of the mind -- could get them out.
"You want a better world, play better music," says Marshall Allen, the 81-year-old alto saxophonist who now leads the Arkestra, which will hold court for four nights at the Lula Lounge in Toronto this week, still wearing its space gear and chanting its mantras.
The Arkestra sails on, Allen says, at Sun Ra's dying request: It was the last tune he called. And Allen composes new repertoire, despite the band's vast back catalogue, because "you have to stay with the vibrations of the day -- it goes around and it's constantly changing."
While Ra was alive, with his constant cosmic jive patter, even appreciative critics generally considered him an isolated sideshow. The story looks different in retrospect. Besides sketching the contours of free jazz a decade ahead of time, Sun Ra and his groups pioneered modal improvisation and the use of electric pianos and synthesizers. Even when they didn't have electronic instruments, Allen says, "you had to take those saxophones and make them sound like it."
The Arkestra adopted African and "world" elements to jazz before anyone else did, and Ra was an autodidact in Egyptology and other esoterica long before it became fashionable Afrocentrism. As Amiri Baraka wrote after his death: "It was Sun Ra and the Myth Science Arkestra that marched across 125th Street with us . . . announcing the 60s cultural revolution and sparking a Black Arts Movement."
Sun Ra's tenor sax player, the late John Gilmore, was an acknowledged influence on John Coltrane. Pharoah Sanders is a former Arkestra member. Sun Ra's mark is as visible on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (including the likes of Anthony Braxton and the Art Ensemble of Chicago) as on the 1970s funk-rock "Mothership" piloted by George Clinton with Parliament-Funkadelic and, by extension, on all jazz-fusion music.
It was no lark to be an Arkestra member. Sun Ra's rehearsals were marathon conditioning sessions that could last days, recalls Allen, who joined in 1958. "You got paid to come to rehearsal -- you might not get paid to play the gig." The edict was that a musician could not play what he knew -- he had to play what he didn't know. Allen puts it in a Socratic aphorism: "Once you don't know nothin', then you can do somethin'."
But the prohibitions went further. Musicians were required to abjure alcohol, drugs and the company of women. From the 1960s on, they were enjoined to live in the group's communal Philadelphia row house. Call it monastic or call it a cult. Sun Ra, who was jailed during the Second World War for his conscientious objection, sometimes described the Arkestra as a non-violent army.
Biographers dispute whether Ra was a traumatized person retreating into fantasy, or a sly satirist fully in command of his metaphors. I suspect it was both, at once escape and assault, just as he was at once an innovator and a traditionalist. Under Allen's more earthbound direction, there's stronger emphasis on the Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson swing standards Sun Ra always loved, plus the "simple melodies" Allen prefers to write, albeit with the Arkestra's "unique attack."
In his 1995 Sun Ra elegy, Baraka called Allen himself "a giant . . . There is no alto saxophonist I know today, or generally, hipper than Marshall." He added: "That this is not common knowledge is depressing."
The living Arkestra's position remains scandalously insecure today, despite wider recognition of its late leader's significance. The economics are punishing when you have to maintain a large band (such as the 14 players Allen hopes to bring to Toronto) as well as the legacy that resides in the communal Philly house where Allen still lives.
"You've got to suffer non-payment of rent in order to buy you an instrument or something you need to play," he says. "The music is for the future -- Sun Ra was saying that then. It was a good thought, that it'd come back around. But what about now?"
The old recordings have been reissued on CD and probably sell better than a lot of jazz does, but Sun Ra's management neglected to ensure any royalties would flow to the band. It's the perennial story of black journeymen abandoned by the music business. New Orleans floods, Sun Ra's roof leaks; the black Atlantis has yet to surface. But Allen will never yield.
"It's the size of your spirit. You can have all the material things, but then you've got to lift your spirit up to the height of the money you've got all stacked up there." He chuckles. "It's a balance thing in this world."
And if this one refuses to provide, you hold that vision of other worlds that will. It's a balance thing, but not, so far, a just one.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, October 20 at 2:22 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Somethin' On My Mind: RIP Frankie Venom
I've been too swamped with other deadlines for le blogging this week although there's been tons to post about. (If you haven't caught the Take On Me, Literally video yet, give yourself a few minutes of happiness.)
But I wanted to drop in to share my sympathies to those who today are mourning Frank Kerr, aka Frankie Venom, of one of Canada's original and most indefatigable punk bands, Teenage Head. My favourite tribute so far is on The Last Pogo website: Frankie Venom talked the talk and he walked the walk. He also climbed staging, hung from rafters, rolled on broken glass, danced on tables and once, at the Colonial Underground in '76, either fell through the shoddy wooden stage (according to some) or crawled underneath and punched his way through.
(Forget it, Jake. It's Hammertown.)
That classic punk documentary is now finally out on DVD, by the way, and watching it would be one way to honour Frankie's memory. There'll also be a Last Pogo 30th-anniversary event at the scene of the original concert-crime, the Horseshoe Tavern, at the end of November.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 16 at 8:58 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
'I 'ope Zee Rising Black Smokes Scarrees Me Fall Away...'
The idea that No Children is actually a song sung between Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo is a great interpretive twist. Completely plausible but completely counter to the "meth-lab trash" vision of the Alpha pair.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, October 10 at 4:02 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
ARTS GALA!
'No One Dances Like Michael Ondaatje'
I'm not sure the controversies during this election have been all that clarifying to Canadian artists about how we see our work, our role in society, the place of grant funding and our mode of relationship to the rest of the public. But Stephen Harper's sure making an entertaining foe - matching his belief that artists spend most of their time wearing gowns and going to glitzy galas with his impulse that the great thing about a global financial meltdown is that it's like a tag sale on stocks. It's not that Harper's an elitist or an anti-elitist - it's more that society as a whole is kind of a mystery to him. (I feel kind of sad for him.)
It's also produced quite a burst of agit-prop-making energy. As we go into the final weekend of the campaign, check out activist coalition Department of Culture's fundraisers across the country, as well as some of the quite impressive submissions to their Gone in 30 Seconds video contest. Meanwhile, I've just gotten this video from young Toronto band Hooded Fang (a reference of course to classic piece of Canadian literature - tho they're not the first musicians to drop that name). It gives Harper's gaffe a treatment that kinda reminds me of Electric Six's "Gay Bar" from a year, three ago. (Not that the arts are, like, gay or anything.) Ladies, gents and ordinary Canadians, let's go to an "Arts Gala."
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 09 at 2:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
They Got the Echo Prize and SOCAN You
The winner of the SOCAN Echo Songwriting Prize was announced today: It's the Weakerthans' song, "Night Windows." Since this is a songwriting prize, not a performance one, here's a video of a couple YouTubers in Germany doing a decent acoustic cover of the tune.
SOCAN said in the announcement: "Voting was VERY close with Veda Hille just missing out on the top prize." So, good try, Zoilus readers. It's hard to compete with the Weakerthans' big devoted fan base.
The French prize was won by duo Karkwa for their song "Oublie pas."
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, October 08 at 4:40 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
There is No Joy in Victo:
The Actuelle Gap
The stage falls silent at the Victoriaville festival's famous hockey-arena-turned-concert-hall.
The economic crisis spilled over into the avant-garde today, with an announcement from the Festival International de Musique Actuelle (FIMAV) in Victoriaville, Que., that "The 26th edition ... will be held from Thursday 20th to Monday 24th of May 2010!" Put in less enthusiastic terms, what that really means is that there will be no 2009 edition.
FIMAV, for those who don't know, has been a mainstay of the experimental-music circuit in North America for a quarter century, hosting the likes of John Zorn, Cecil Taylor, The Ex, Pere Ubu, Wolf Eyes, Anthony Braxton, Merzbow, Fred Frith, Matthew Shipp and many other big names as well as Quebecois and Canadian improvisers, noise musicians, art-rockers, free-jazzers and beyond.
In their explanation for the decision, the festival notes factors such as the need to develop "national financial partners" with resources to match the festival's international reputation, burn-out among festival staff and "the arrival of new competitors on the Quebec avant-garde music market," a not so subtle reference to Montreal's Suoni per il Popolo, a month-plus-long festival that provides Montrealers with the chance to see many of the artists they'd otherwise wait all year to travel the two hours or so it takes to get to Victoriaville. Montreal also gets more regular visits year-round now from European and American improvisers and other experimentalists, something that happened rarely to never back in the 1990s. And even Pop Montreal takes up some of the left-field-rock territory.
I imagine that the festival is also contemplating the avant-music devotees who travel long distances as tourists each year to come to Victo from the U.S. and other far-off locations. Many of them are business professionals of one kind or another for whom festival-going is just a passionate hobby, and they have to anticipate that this spring, a lot of people are going to have to eliminate their travel budgets.
Probably just the first of many such announcements about arts organizations cancelling, postponing or scaling back events. (In Toronto, I wonder if there will be a 2009 Luminato?) Anybody else heard similar news in their own areas yet?
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, October 08 at 3:42 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Pop Montreal: The Omnivore's Smorgasbord
My Pop Montreal retrospective semi-essay appeared (in miniature deep in the Review section) in der Globe today. It got chopped and screwed somewhat in der editing, tho, so I'm a-gonna put the raw version up for you on the jump, gussied up with linkage.
Hoped to share a few other notes today but had to finish up some hack assignment for some Spanish hipsters (honestly) + haven't had a chance. Stay tuned for the big love-splooge orgy for Darren Hayman tomorrow, then, as well as a report on a panel I was unexpectedly drafted onto, about the future of music criticism, as well as the improvisation panel, and some other stuff only briefly mentioned in the wrap-up.
Tucking in to an omnivore's smorgasbord of sound
POP MONTREAL
October 1-5, Montreal
Reviewed by Carl Wilson
What event in the world, let alone in Canada, can let you see hundreds of youthful indie-rock fans (and their parents) thronging an ornate church to sway and swoon to medleys of hits by 80-year-old (octave-agenarian?) maestro Burt Bacharach -- and later the same night, find many of those same people lining up to view a vintage, underground gay-sex movie in a fading skin-flick house, where a live band (led by genre-mashing composer SoCalled) matches "money shots" with double-entendre choices of 1950s chestnuts such as Sea of Love?
It could only be the annual Pop Montreal festival, which celebrated its seventh anniversary in a shower of melody, noise and spectacle this past weekend.
Sociological studies recently have documented a new order of western cultural tastes: The old high-art/low-trash hierarchy has been supplanted by the reign of the "omnivore," in which the most sophisticated audiences set themselves apart by consuming as wide a range of styles and backgrounds as their eyes and ears can suck up.
Pop Montreal is an omnivore's smorgasbord, the Bayreuth Festival of this new paradigm: It makes both that venerable Wagner marathon and more straight-up rock festivals such as Glastonbury in the U.K. (where rapper Jay-Z was jeered this summer) seem by comparison like out-of-it rubes who haven't yet learned how to rub their bellies while patting their heads.
A plurality of the acts that flood the clubs of St-Laurent, St-Denis and other central Montreal streets during the five days of Pop each October might still be guitar-based bands and singer-songwriters - such as Peterborough, Ont.'s cabaret-rock cabal The Burning Hell, who may have scored the most timely chant-along of the week with a song paying ironic tribute to the 1944 Bretton-Woods monetary-policy conference: "And the bankers sing: 'I can't get enough of the green stuff/ I can't get enough of the green stuff.' "
And yes, many of the big names on offer are those to whom rock scenes generally look for inspiration, such as post-punk icon Nick Cave, who scalded a super-sold-out Metropolis on Thursday, or UK bands Wire and The Wedding Present, who put the fest to bed in a blanket of feedback at the Theatre National on Sunday. Others, such as Florida band Black Kids, who played to a screaming Cabaret Juste Pour Rire on Saturday, are recent darlings of blogs and hip music sites.
But the festival also anticipates - and stokes - its audience's more eclectic desires by programming dance-rock (Hot Chip, Brazilian Girls, Ratatat), hip-hop (Shad, k-os), dancehall (Jamaican pioneer Sister Nancy, Toronto's promising young vocalist Bonjay), heavy metal (Watain, Withered) and bruising-beat remixers (The Bug, Pink Skull, Montreal's own increasingly touted Megasoid crew) -- but also, crucially, titans and "unknown legends" from previous generations.
Its audience has come to trust the curators' calls. There was no better example this year than Irma Thomas, the 67-year-old "soul queen of New Orleans" who never won the fame of contemporaries such as Aretha Franklin but, judging by Thursday night's show, has outdone nearly all of them at aging well. Still vivacious in presence and stunning in voice, Thomas noted how much younger the audience was than her usual crowd, saying, "Your parents have brainwashed you well." In fact, the key hidden persuader was probably Pop Montreal itself.
(That dynamic struck again on Saturday when doo-wop veterans the Persuasions, best known for their link to Frank Zappa in the 1970s, reportedly enraptured the Portugese Association hall.)
Thursday witnessed another kind of generation-crossing marvel when the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble took the stage. With seven horns and one monster drummer, almost all of them the sons of 1960s Chicago free-jazz figure Phil Cohran, this erstwhile street-corner band lived up to its name. Rugged charm and rousing chops marked their mix of funk, jazz, hip-hop, marching band and Afrobeat, despite many technical glitches. (They missed sound check thanks to our public servants at the Canadian border.)
Logistics could be a challenge. The generosity of the schedule, with up to 100 acts a night, was not complemented by the capacities of most venues, so many shows sold out long before the headliners came on, and the dash many blocks or further between clubs from set to set often got exhausting. (The festival experimented this year with renting bikes to out-of-towners, but neglected to include locks.) So even pass-holders were likely to miss much of what they hoped to hear.
Still, that left room for lucky discoveries. One was the under-publicized appearance by New York-based saxophonist Matana Roberts, one of the most vital young voices in contemporary jazz, at an improvisation workshop in the parallel "Symposium" discussion series Saturday afternoon.
Another was Japanese soloist Shugo Tokumaru's set at O Patro Vys on Friday. Aged 28 but looking a decade younger, he hushed the room with finger-picking guitar virtuosity reminiscent of the late John Fahey and a sweet set of vocal melodies that drew as deeply on 1960s psych-rock as on contemporary Asian pop.
For at least one listener, Tokumaru's music was the purest reminder that the value of an open mind is not to process a longer checklist of inputs: It's the chance that an unanticipated guest might settle in for the long haul and help rearrange your sense of human possibility.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, October 07 at 1:19 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Pop Top: My Day 1 (their Day 2)
at Pop Montreal
A rushed report from my first day at this year's Pop Montreal: New Orleans soul queen Irma Thomas set a high bar with her performance at the Ukrainian Federation hall, singing with nary an audible notch of lost power at 67 years of age. It was sweet that she kept apologizing in the first third of the set for doing numbers from her new Simply Grand album and promising to get to the classics soon, obviously not quite aware of the context: Likely little more than 10 percent of the room was at all familiar with her repertoire, being white northeastern kids in their 20s who were there because the Pop Montreal curators told them she was great, and they trust those curators, because they've earned it. Still, I feel like the organizers should have done a little better to prepare her in advance that it's far from being a jazz, blues and R&B festival.
Things did heat up a few cayenne points when she got to the classics, though - or at least I thought because by then I'd smartened up and run to the front of the hall to join the throng of pretty young things jiving by the stage. Thomas's band might not have been quite A-list but New Orleans C-list is plenty beyond most places' standards. And I was just thrilled she played my fave, "It's Raining": "I guess I'll just go crazy tonight."
After that I dropped in to catch a bit of The Bug's dancehall-grind massacree, which was ferocious (so much so that my earpluglessness became a serious issue), but also late starting, so I didn't get to hear any of Warrior Queen (except a little sultry dancing across the stage, assuming that was her). But I did hear the last couple of numbers from Toronto's own Bonjay, whose beats are a bit workaday but whose voice was undeniable, especially when singing in creole - a little more snap in the songwriting and we could have a star on our hands.
And finally we sauntered over to Club Lambi on St-Laurent to see southside Chicago's Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, the band of "blood brothers" (as they put it, as opposed to just "brothers in the struggle") who are the sons of Sun Ra/AACM musician Kelan Phil Cohran (whose discs as leader of the Artistic Heritage Ensemble are among my favourite late-sixties jazz records). They coped with sound-system issues for nearly half an hour, having missed their soundcheck because of border-crossing troubles - they were clearly taken aback, after touring all over the world, that Canada had the biggest assholes at the border. But they did it with good humoured, raunchy aplomb, chatting up the "sexy ladies" in the house collectively - tongue in cheek, but your cheek if you were up for it.
When the horns finally started blaring, though, there was no stopping them or the crowd's feet. The first few tunes were a little too "gonna fly now" in their constant fanfaring, but a Fela Kuti cover seemed to help catapult them over the hurdles and from there on - especially in a 180-degree turn into a klezmer-meets-Cuba tune (which should have Toronto's David Buchbinder looking over his shoulder), and some super-fun call-and-response with the audience - everything was starbursts and a rain of gold, kids, a rain of gold.
Tonight, some combination of genuflecting at the church of Burt Bacharach (the horns keep on coming); Porn Pop at Cinema L'Amour with SoCalled, Owen Pallett and friends; synth pioneer Jean Jacques Perrey; Japan's Shugo Tokumaru; some Herman Dune, and late at night, perhaps a taste of Hey Rosetta, and a nightcap of Semi-Precious Weapons and Fritz Helder. Unless something else comes to mind.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, October 03 at 5:28 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Caribou's The One
Caribou's "She's The One," featuring Jeremy Greenspan of last year's shoulda-been Polaris winners, Junior Boys.
Congrats to Caribou (Dundas, Ont-born, UK-resident Dan Snaith), the winner at last night's gala in Toronto of the $20K Polaris Music Prize for the best Canadian album of 2007-08. It was the result I was expecting, although when Holy Fuck played their blissgasmic closing set in the night's performances, I briefly hoped they'd snatch it. But the HF disc (LP) isn't the equal of their live show, so da judges made the call.
You can still hear the show on Radio 3, I believe, or just go read the wide range of coverage and commentary all over the place. Judge Frank Chromewaves Yang's memoir of his experience is my fave.
Polaris capo Steve Jordan movingly dedicated the night's proceedings to the memory of Calgary record-shop owner, Mike Pleau of Megatunes, who sadly died this weekend at 54. While it's easy to overlook now as they're displaced by digital, Steve used the occasion to remind the crowd of how big a supporting role the retail stores have played in nurturing music culture across Canada, thanks to dedicated proprietors and staff like Pleau.
And if anyone has a transcript of Black Mountain's kickass acceptance speech, post it in the comments please!
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, September 30 at 3:50 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Scratch and Win
Last call is today for voting in the $5,000 ECHO prize for best Canadian song : I make my case for Veda Hille's "Lucklucky" here, passionately, but with fellow nominees Wintersleep, The Weakerthans, So-Called and Sandro Perri, whoever wins will deserve it.
Various folks all over the 'netses are handicapping the Polaris Prize today. You can listen to the ceremonies (with live performances by most of the nominees) on CBC Radio 3 tonight starting at 8 pm EST and I'll catch you tomorrow for the post-game hangover analysis.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, September 29 at 1:21 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Suck the Canada!
(A Call for More Hilarious Propaganda)
With all due respect to the Department of Culture folks (whose swing-riding-target plan is a great idea too), the video below shows how artists can intervene in politics, including arts funding, without seeming like whiners: Pool talents and make something smarter, funnier and more irreverent, pointed, charming and entertaining than anything professional politicos can dream up. The production values don't have to be as slick as this. Just for background: The musician in this video is Michel Rivard of the popular Quebec band Beau Dommage, and the song he sings is a classic hit of theirs, "La complainte du phoque en Alaska" (The Alaskan Seal's Lament). (How apropos for the age of Palin.)
While a bit of the humour here is cliched and inaccurate about the cultural problem in Ottawa (it's not that they can't understand French or recognize Quebec celebrities: the current Minister of Heritage is a francophone from Quebec), it will play to the intended audience, and symbolically it yokes the censorship and arts-abroad issues and nails the ideological deafness of the Conservatives. Encore! Encore! (Kids in the Hall and their younger heirs, call home - we needs yr skillz.)
General | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, September 28 at 12:48 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
The Polaris Paradox: Exclusive Inclusivity
My colleague Robert Everett-Green's Globe and Mail essay today on what kinds of acts are and aren't likely to win this or any year's $20,000 Polaris Prize would have raised more of a stir if it had appeared on the front of the Review section on Monday, the day of the gala, rather than deep inside the Saturday edition. So let's give it a swirl.
Robert's main point is that the Polaris bias leans against pop-chart music and non-rock genres. I feel sure independent hip-hop will have its day - at least one such album's been nominated each year, and I wouldn't be super-shocked if jury-room talk led to Shad winning this year (though I doubt it). But jazz, R&B, notational music, dance, contemporary country (as opposed to rootsy/artsy country-folk) and other genres? Not hardly. It's partly Canadian demographics - no matter how much the country's changing, there are still many more musicians here who make rock and singer-songwriter albums, and so both by volume and through cultural reinforcement, odds are there will be more good ones in those genres.
Music-critic culture mirrors that reality, but also exaggerates it, because critical writing about popular music is more of a tradition in those genres. You can expect that to shift over the coming decades - but I'm not sure by how much.
Robert cites the UK's Mercury Prize as evidence that this problem is endemic, but the Mercury's record of rewarding excellence in pop and non-rock is much stronger, especially on its short lists - because it's engineered that way (despite Britain likewise generating more rock/folk/etc music than other kinds). A Mercury jury is a small group with diverse specialties, and they make their lists not through big rounds of votes but by drawn-out group discussion - like an extended mix of the Polaris finals' "Grand Jury" or, say, a typical book-prize jury.
The Polaris is in its politely Canadian way much more democratic. Hundreds of people are involved. Which is great in itself, but means that critics who favour jazz or gospel or R&B or even pop are outweighed. Voters in the majority may conscientiously check out the non-rock recommendations but it's unlikely to be where their passion is and where the consensus ends up. Thus: In being very inclusive of working critics and other "taste-makers" across Canada, the Polaris paradoxically becomes somewhat exclusive musically.
The Polaris organizers have a tough choice: Do they go way beyond "tweaking" the jury pool, and deliberately rig it to be much more musically balanced, which would require it to be a lot smaller, but could have the virtue of really considering contenders outside the habitual boundaries? Or do they shrug and accept that the Polaris is gonna represent roughly where Canadian critical consensus tends to lie, hoping that (partly maybe thru the reflection the prize generates), that said consensus gradually will evolve into something more ecumenical and flexible?
The Polaris folks aren't the only ones ever to face this dilemma: Robert Christgau has talked about the way that for many years he and his fellow editors tried to recruit more hip-hop writers and other non-rockistas to vote in the annual Village Voice Pazz and Jop Critics' Poll. But despite their enticements, not many of the rap-and-etc. critics (and fewer and fewer jazz writers, for that matter), ever cared to take part. It didn't seem that relevant to them - and the result was that P&J became even less relevant to them and less true to the general state of American music. It was a referendum on what music was most important to a certain slice of the music-listening public, useful to those who broadly shared their biases and not so much to everybody else.
Then again, the Village Voice - let alone the Polaris Prize - didn't create the demographic and cultural divisions that sculpt tastes. How far should they go in order to correct for them - at the price, perhaps, of excluding a lot of competent jurists who really care about something like P&J or the Polaris?
My bias is that I'd like the Polaris to be a compelling, dramatic event; like a lot of stuff in Canada it's at risk of getting dull. And personally if the solution meant I didn't always get to vote - because if there's one group that must be over-represented in the pool, it's straight white male print journalists from Toronto - I'd say "fine." But the issue isn't weakness of acumen or intent among the current jury and organizers. As usual, it's a bigger social imbalance.
Footnote: It's unfortunate semantically that Robert uses "college radio" to describe the nominees. It rings like "sophomoric," which is unfair to the musicians (they're bland as a group, perhaps, but not individually). And college radio could probably disappear tomorrow and the Polaris wouldn't change. College charts serve as handy statistical backup for Robert's point only because the people who run stations (and compile those charts) are generally a younger subset of the sorts of liberal-arts-educated people who are likely to end up as music critics later in life. Most college stations play a far broader range of music, thanks to their myriad specialty shows - but fewer of those specialty DJs get into the list-making, meta-critical tasks, probably because it's not where the social/cultural capital lies for them. (They often do a lot of promo and organization of live shows/club nights.) If the Polaris shortlist looks like anybody's playlist, in fact, it's CBC Radio 3's, and that station parallels the combination of institutional embeddedness and liberal-arts taste ("classroom" taste, as Frank Kogan has put it) that knits together the majority of people eligible to vote for the Polaris.
Anyway, looking forward to seeing some of you at Monday's gala. (Shh, don't tell Stephen Harper.)
General | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, September 27 at 10:57 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Reading, Required or Not
Louis Menand's essay on Lionel Trilling's life and work in this week's New Yorker is a great pleasure, a circumnavigation 'round the great liberal critic through his neuroses to his fiction to his shifting relation to "Hebraism" to his disappointments to the fine balance act of his prose and of course to his politics (late-life neocon, or no?). Apparently Trilling had as many modes of feeling guilty as the Hold Steady has ways of describing driving round getting drunk on a Saturday night - or more, including his guilt about having once said Jack Kerouac could not write a great novel given his accessory role in the David Kammerer murder (!): a silly claim, sure, but I was surprised Trilling gained enough respect for Kerouac to bother regretting it. As always with Menand (cf. The Metaphysical Club) it's not so much the storytelling as the afterglow - a great appreciator of sentences, Menand always tries to return the favour:
For books, including the Great ones, are social products "all the way down." They do not come from some place outside the system, and they do not represent an independent alternative to the way things are. They are among the things that are, even when they belong to what Trilling called "the adversary culture" - even when they reject conventional ways of thinking and behaving. The adversarial is part of the system; it helps to hold the other parts in place. Responsible liberal people feel better adjusted for having an appreciation of art and ideas that are contemptuous of the values of responsible liberal people. It helps the world seem round.
(Menand is off though in his claim that taste disputes no longer come with moral stakes - it didn't end in the Sixties, Louis. And I don't just mean those Sixties-by-other means, the "Culture Wars." Sure, no one sane today feels so invested in pitting Theodore Dreiser against Henry James, but that is mainly due to - even aside from revisionist views of both writers, from their long-deadness, from et cetera - the conflict many people who read anything remotely like Dreiser or James assume they have with people who play Halo. It's a false opposition in many ways but still. And then what about clashes in gaming culture between shooters and role-players and Sims-fans, let alone music-fan disputes? Menand may be too generationally removed to credit that these too come with underlying philosophical conflicts, however much they go unarticulated - they lack only their Trillings.)
Meanwhile, for fun and catch-up, there's Canuckistan's Michael Barclay's thorough and thoughtful multipart punter's guide, continuing to Friday, to the nominated albums for the Polaris Prize, which will be awarded Monday, complete with handicapping and shoulda-beens. (He kindly cites yesterday's Zoilus post while touting Veda Hille's longlisted but not shortlisted This Riot Life.)
I'd second most of his calls even though we often get there by different ear-ways. (I'd be less generous with some nominees). Have any bets? I'm guessing a Caribou-Weakerthans split, with a possible election-season run up the yardline by Holy Fuck. Though I don't have much more than an idle interest.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, September 24 at 9:19 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Vote Veda (and Welcome, Anders!):
Grab Your Coat and Your Popular Music ...
With less than a week left in voting for the $5,000 SOCAN Echo Prize for Canadian songwriting, I'd better get around to fulfilling my promise to make my case for why, of the superfine roster of nominated tunes, Veda Hille's "Lucklucky" deserves your (daily) vote between now and the Sept 29, 4:59 pm deadline.
First go over to the prize page and listen to it and its worthy rivals.
"Lucklucky" is only the overture, in many ways, to one of the year's very best albums, a suite of songs about finding one's faith in the basic livability of life challenged by the cruel undertow of random fate and mortality, and looking within the lexicons of religion, of nature, of culture and psychology and more for some ways not just to survive but to flourish, to turn onions into tears and tears into water and water into wine. It shares some of these themes with other nominated songs: As Bertolt Brecht, one of Hille's heroes, wrote, "In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing... about the dark times. "
But this song goes further than any of the others in its appeal to the depths of resources we have to meet those doubts and darknesses: The very randomness of human life, it tells us, as its various elements keep swirling around one another, is its blessing - the way that our minds relentlessly organize absurdity into sense might be ridiculous, but the way life sorts itself into a narrative (whether true or fiction, i.e., ultra-true) is a precarious and fragile grace. "There is the place you know/ There is the place you don't know/ Curtain number 1, curtain number 1 (you are blind, blind, blind)/ This is where I did this, this is where I did that/ It took 30 years to draw this map." The theme of geography, of Vancouver, the place that matters only because it is the place you happen to have lived your life, has been prominent in Hille's recent music. And yet, is it the territory or the representation that counts? "Now do you see/ the city or the map of the city?/ The city or your life in the city?" The real, the desert of the real and the oasis.
So far, fairly standard contemporary psychogeographic, poetic and art-rock sets of ambiguities. But what happens next, in this relentless what-happens-next machine of a song, is that an anthem unexpectedly, balls-out (if Veda will forgive me the phallogocentric turn of phrase) springs from the introspection, as if out of a psychic break, a satori, an epiphany: "You need the air! You need the freedom! You need to pit yourself against the hardship of the world!" Horns, choral voices, booming drums, hints of the church-music influences to come later on this record but also echoes of 1967 Centennial Canada anthems, Bobby Gimby's revenge - not nation but land, urban plan, trees that you piss against (another less cultural way of making maps) and paths you beat as a cause worth fighting (even yourself) for - thunder-perfect-green-mind.
"This is where we are! Are you ready? What was, what is, and what shall be! City of destiny (you are blind blind blind), city of destiny... Grab your coat and your popular music - we're takin' it to the streets!"
So here's a woman who's been quoting the likes of Carl Sandburg and Brecht in recent albums, suddenly citing the Doobie Brothers. Just as in her side project with (surely pseudonymous?) singer Patsy Klein, The Fits (which can't really be understood except live), which mental-rolodex-flips-and-somersaults through homespun medleys of novelty tunes, children's songs, Broadway numbers and other throwaway sparks of cultural lightning, "Lucklucky" revels in its church-of-subgenius way in echoes of other texts and tunes, with not just a "nothing human is alien to me" catholicism of spirit but a sense that without the alien, without absorbing into its flesh all that is opposite itself, this song and its singer can't survive. This is where we are, loving the alien, amen.
You head toward destiny, still blind, blind, blind. But just keep heading. The inanimate landscape you never bothered to love is somehow animate, animate perhaps in dialectic, busily loving you for your passage through it, remaking itself in your imag even perhaps as you make too heavy a tread, the scars self-conscious beasts leave behind. In the end if you're searching for yourself, looking within is barely a scratch on looking around.
It's not a matter of whether or not we're lucky to be alive, but the revelation that without being alive, that question would be senseless. And so to be alive is to be a creature of luck, a fluke, a fate-being. We're born luck-y, as we're born bloody and smelly and rhythmic and loud.
It's a prayer, it's a path, it's a joke, it's a victory march, it's the most Canadian (Northrop Frye School) song I've heard all year and yet the most worldly, it's an ecological anthem, it's change you can believe in and it's a mathematical constant. It's a summation of all that's come before in Hille's music and a preparation for the songs that follow it on This Riot Life, which take that question of the magic of everyday life and knock it every which way for proof and a vitality damn few artists ever uncover. It comforts as it confronts, and I find myself singing it under my breath in moments of distress at least a few days a week. You may find something similar happening, but it will be dissimilar because it will happen in your city, on your map of the city (even if that city is in the same location as mine).
And finally, since after all this is the kissing-babies time of year, with the estranged-twin election campaigns going on in Canada and in that country not so many miles from Vancouver, Hille's already won because today (Tuesday), she celebrated the arrival of her first child, Anders, with her husband Justin (of Vancouver rhythm'n'indie band No Kids, incidentally) and stepdaughter Saoirse - a healthy six-and-a-half-pound addition to the mass of this riot life, born on the birthdays of both Bruce Springsteen and John Coltrane (!), crashing in blind, squawling and o so lucky.
So think of that $5,000 as a baby bonus, and go cast your vote for a song that votes for you right back - a small act of mutual, crazy, improbable but necessary faith.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, September 24 at 1:46 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Inside Extermination Music Night
(In-Depth Version)
Zoilus amanuensis Chris Randle ran an interview with the organizers of Toronto fabled surreptitious-music-series Extermination Music Night in Eye weekly last month, but it was much truncated. This weekend, on the occasion of the latest in the EMN series (Sat at midnight; see the gig guide), we thought we'd run the full shebang. (Man, that's the dirtiest word.)
Chris: What inspired you to start doing the series?
Dan: I'd gone to these Wasteland events put on by Jubal Brown in the late 90s, that were done in factories...I started going to those when I was 17 or 18 and that had a pretty profound effect on me. Initially for me it was more of an aesthetic thing than a conceptual thing - maybe I thought about the conceptual aspects a bit later after the fact ...
Matt: I was living in Calgary for a while when I got out of school and I'd been interested in just going and looking at buildings like that, I did the same when I came here. I'd heard about the Wasteland parties that Jubal had done and I'd probably heard or read in magazines about people doing shows with generators...During certain years in Toronto people started putting on shows at alternate spaces so it kind of led off of that - why not do something where you rent the generator and then do it in an abandoned space?
[... continues ...]
What's the process for scouting out new locations? I know some of them are already used by skaters or rave kids...do you only use those established venues, or go looking for new ones?
Matt: We try to go and look for new ones. Dan does a lot of driving around looking at places. The thing is, most of the places that we've used are documented on the [urban] infiltration sites and stuff, just because they end up being the most reliable in a lot of ways.
Dan: Yeah. The last one I found out about from an urban exploration photoblog. A couple of friends had told us about the second one in the Buns Master factory. Our friend Ian had gone to a rave there a year previous or something. But yeah, mostly we'll find something on the internet and go check it out.
Matt: We sometimes come across places that we see and aren't sure if they're possible. There was one that...actually, that was the last one. I'd seen that site a while back and a friend had told me that...I don't know what it was, an assembly plant? And a friend of mine lives near there, he'd shown me that a couple years ago...I mentioned it to Dan but at that time it seemed really impossible. And it turned out to show up on one of those infiltration blogs. Then you realized "oh, okay, you can get in there."
Dan: They didn't have the location specified but they'd taken a photo from the tenth floor. And then I emailed Matt...
I know it's not a uniform thing, but what has the reaction from the cops been like? I remember there was one where they found you guys and then let it happen...
Matt: Yeah, there was one cop that came - we had just finished setting up when we could see their shadows wandering around the building. They opened up the door and they didn't come in, but they talked to Dan and asked us if we were allowed to be there. There was some hemming and hawing and then they said "In a word, no...You'll probably get a noise complaint, but good luck to you," and they left. It varies a lot depending on who it is.
Like, the last one, the cops were probably a bit more pissed off than they've been - although that's hard to say. They react depending on the situation. There's one that we did under the Lansdowne bridge and there was a fire lit under there, people chopping wood, and when they looked down on that and saw that it was on the train tracks they weren't too happy. But there've been other guys who almost... you look at them and you think they're kind of into it.
Dan: Yeah.
The last one was kind of insane - I don't know if you were out there for most of it but there was a Cockney bobby for some reason...
Dan: He came up to the eighth floor. He was pissed off. He was so pissed. Or he was acting pissed.
Yeah, they kept being like, "we're gonna let out the dogs..."
Matt: Did you see a dog?
I think they had - there was an ominous van, but...
Dan: Steve Kado's theory was that it was an mp3 dog. Just dog sounds.
Matt: I want to hear confirmation that somebody saw a dog. I heard a lot about hearing dogs, but nobody can claim to have seen a dog.
There were some pretty hilarious threats, like the whole "art party" thing ...
Matt: Yeah, that was pretty good. I enjoyed that.
It seems that they don't really care about it overall, though. They're not assigning a task force to it or anything.
Dan: No. Yeah, I guess ever since the rave scene died it's not really much of a concern.
Matt: And that could change on a dime, right? Any time these go off, we're just so happy because you know how those things can change. If something bad were to happen - if somebody were to do something stupid and hurt themselves or whatever...You know that they would make it Priority One. Stamp out illegal art parties!
Dan: There was one [urban-explorer] guy who died, a photographer. ... There wasn't much follow-up after that.
Matt: Yeah, I was worried. When I read about that happening just before the last one I thought, oh, this is going to make it into public consciousness and they're going to be all over this.
I think that sort of adds a sense of occasion, though, because not only is it something that only happens once in a site-specific sense, but it could also all end if some politician tries to crack down on it.
Dan: Yeah. I don't see how they'd be able to crack down on it, really. If they decided to charge us or something...
Matt: I think if they got really belligerent about it and were able to find out who was organizing it they would just slam those people really hard... Slamming them with the largest fines that they could. Not to say that I think this will happen.
There's that danger there, I guess. I think that's part of the appeal.
Matt: I'm sure that people either enjoy the sites or the architecture or just being in these places that they would never see ... the music, whatever goes on, the occasion of it, but on a fundamental level it's like when you're younger and the older kids come to your door and want to play a game of Fugitive or Manhunt or whatever... You're running around after dark with these kids ten years older than you -
It's play, not work...
Matt: I don't think that people really feel any fear going to this, but there's a certain level of -
Dan: There's a charge.
Matt: Yeah.
Dan: Just by the fact that there's no bureaucracy or mediating thing between the space and the event.
You're not actually risking your life, it's just this adrenaline -
Dan: Yeah.
Matt: I think - the analogy with the younger and older kids, and you know that it's a game but if they capture you they're gonna at least give you a really bad snakebite... it's the same with the cops. You could get a fine, they're going to be really nasty to you or whatever... It's that small amount of fear that gives it the charge.
Dan: Certainly for me, within the narrative of the series the authority factor doesn't figure in that prominently for me. For me it's not reactionary against the way music is normally performed, it's just an operation outside of that.
Matt: Yeah.
So it's not an oppositional thing.
Dan: No. That's not the intention, I don't understand how it could be read as that. The police don't factor into the narrative for me at all. Although, it's undeniable that when you put that many people in a space within that context, there will be a certain atmosphere that self-produces as a result of being unsanctioned.
Do you guys worry about it becoming too popular, just for logistical reasons? I know there was that one - not the last one, the one before - with 500 people or whatever...
Matt: I guess I would worry about it if it came to the point where this wasn't possible for some reason, but otherwise I don't give a shit about that. I'm not into saying "oh, this person should be here and this person shouldn't," or any of that shit. I don't care if 500 people show up or not, myself, other than that I want the thing to happen.
Dan: Fundamentally I don't care, but I have to admit that that one felt like it was too many people. Or not even too many people, but - I don't want to say the wrong type of people, but there were a lot of people there who didn't seem to get it, like it was just another party. I don't know.
Matt: I think that that's true, but at the same time I think if you say 50 people came simply because it was a party, and even 40 of them left just thinking "cool party!", there were probably at least ten people who were like, "weird," who were like, "What is this about?" It's their choice how to interpret it, and maybe most of them will interpret it as just "party," but it's worth it if ten people come away thinking "oh, there's something interesting here." Maybe it does something to somebody.
Dan: Yeah, for sure. I think you have to consider relational aesthetics, how the audience is interacting with one another in the space. I don't know, I don't really give a shit.
Matt: [laughs]
Are you guys experimenting with the formula at all? I know that one had the record sale, and at this last one there was the art on each floor...Do you have any idea what you're going to do with that in the future?
Dan: This summer - excluding the one that's coming up, because there isn't much of an art component to that - with the first two, [we were] definitely ushering in another phase...EMN 3.0?
[laughs]
Dan: But yeah, that was done to create a more total environment, and to more palpably recontextualize the space rather than just set up music...
Matt: In a lot of ways, it doesn't matter that that last one was busted. It still happened, it was there for a couple hours, and a lot of people still got to see interesting things for a short time. But it's a shame in a way, because that one I really felt was the place to be very different. It really was going to be mostly about those performance artists on those ten floors for the majority of the night - most of the music, or at least half of it, was going to happen on the roof, almost like... "Celebration" is too much, but I looked forward to it as being "everything else happened, now go look at this view up on the roof."
I was looking forward to the fact that it was based so much on the artwork, and it would be nice to do another one like that. This thing started off as being a lot about music, but people have come to it for other reasons. I think there's a lot of room to do interesting things because of that.
Dan: Yeah. I mean, definitely the original motivation for me was presenting music in a context that wasn't a bar - and actually, that last one, I have to say that I think the police presence kind of figured into the narrative
It was pretty awesome how you guys kept playing up there -
Dan: Even though I said that this isn't a reactionary thing, that felt really reactionary and overtly anti-authoritarian, maybe even in a corny way? I thought it was great.
Matt: We can't really take credit for that. The band was up there and they came to me as everyone was getting busted downstairs and were like, "what should we do? Should we play?" The thought of them playing at that point hadn't even occurred to me, I just assumed that it would all wind down, people would get ushered out. I wasn't really thinking about what we should do next, more responding to what's going to happen next. And then I was just like, "yeah, why not?" And they went ahead and did it.
[crosstalk]
Matt: I would love if somebody had footage of what was going on down on the ground with the cops at that time, because what I've heard from people is that there was a real reaction from them at that moment. Definitely not from the standpoint of "fuck you, cops," but I'd like to see the reaction on their face. I heard that it was just surprise. They were like, "Are you kidding me? The band is actually starting up with all these cop cars down here?"
One of the cops actually knew one of the people at the show.
Dan: I heard about that.
Matt: Really?
Dan: Yeah, there was a girl in a gold-lame bathing suit and she was like, "Karen!?" And the cop was like, "Kimberly!?"
Matt: Seriously. Really. That was that woman cop?
Dan: The woman cop, yeah.
There was this hilarious mix of reactions. I was just there with my hands up thinking it would be kind of gangster if Sandro Perri got a Polaris nomination and arrested in the same month.
Matt: What happened after these two recognized each other?
They were, y'know, hugging and stuff, at this crime scene...
Matt: That right there is the reason that this should get busted from time to time. That needs to happen on some level, you know? A cop should see - "oh, a friend of mine is here?" It's not criminal activity.
Was it conscious on your part to have the series be so widespread geographically? You've done one in the east end, you've done stuff right up on the beach or on Leslie Spit...
Matt: Totally. Yeah. I think the moment that really took hold was when Dan suggested doing one at the Guild Inn in Scarborough, and at first my initial reaction was, "Oh, that's too far, no one will go." And then I was like, "yeah, of course they'll go!" You can do these anywhere. I've been driving around a bit, and it may not even be possible - I just don't know if anything's available - but I'd really love to do one in Mimico or something like that, go in the other direction.
Dan: Yeah, for sure. Mississauga?
Matt: Yeah, yeah. And I'd love to go back and do one in Scarborough. Secretly, I'd love to do the Guild Inn. I think that - being very different from the other locations was also -
- with the columns?
Matt: Yeah. I'm kind of obsessed. I think it would be very interesting.
A lot of writers now talk about how the notion of a local scene is dead, because of the internet, or whatever, and I think EMN is a good response to that. It's like you're representing the totality of the city, rather than just a few bars and a few streets downtown...
Dan: I don't think Extermination Night would be as interesting in a city like Detroit, because abandoned buildings are par for the course there. Whereas here, it's like stepping out of - not necessarily a comfort zone, but stepping outside of the norm a bit, as far as the venue is concerned, and also as far as the location of the venue is concerned. Because of course the trip to the location is important. And also, just on a purely practical note, most of the locations that we can use happen to be outside of town.
Matt: We should be doing this interview in that abandoned house around the corner.
Dan: I think it would be really funny to do an Extermination Night in the alley behind Sneaky Dee's.
[laughs]
Dan: You should think about that. Put that on the backburner.
Matt: For some reason I've been interested in doing one that's, like, outdoors but walled in. It's not an original idea, I've seen pictures of shows that happened in spaces like that, but there's something really interesting about it. I wish we could find a place that's between some abandoned buildings, where you're not in the building, but in these - a maze, or an alleyway. That'd be really awesome. Especially if it was daytime.
[crosstalk]
It's almost as if it changes the way you think about the landscape. If you go to a bunch of these, when you're walking along you might start thinking "hey, this would be a good place for a show," instead of "hey, this is a weird, creepy abandoned building."
Dan: Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I mean, that's what I always think about when I look at these. My interest in ruins is primarily event-based. And that ties into the fact that it's unsanctioned. You can use this space, you just have to do it. You just have to do it! That's it.
Matt: By the same token, I'm interested in a more traditional sense - tradition in that, yeah, there's a history, a subculture of people who do this infiltration. I'm happy to hear if somebody goes to one of these things and is like, "I never even thought of looking at these buildings," and even if they're not looking at these spaces as "an event can go there," that there's an appreciation. I'd be happy to hear that people are like, "Yeah, one weekend I didn't have anything to do so some friends of mine, we thought about these events and just wanted to go look at some of these buildings." That's cool too.
In a normal show the centre of the attention is obviously the band and you're sort of spreading that around. ... You emphasize the building and even the audience more than usual.
Matt: I think as time goes on that becomes more pronounced. I really believe that a lot of people who come to this - as time goes on they come back for reasons other than a band playing there. They're just really interested in seeing these sites.
Dan: I'd say the emphasis is more towards the space than the people because...so many local shows I find that the emphasis is on the people rather than the band....Increasingly I find that shows in regular venues are more of a social call.
Matt: There's been some pretty brutal examples of that recently. To a level that I've never seen in Toronto before, to the point where there's an alleyway full of 200 people and inside where the band is actually playing there's 10.
Are you talking about that Cinecycle show?
Matt: Yeah. I've never been more upset by a show, actually. I was really - I don't mean to be negative or a nanny or anything, but I was really disappointed in us. As a city. At that show.
Do you just look at local bands, or -
Matt: No, we think about out-of-town stuff all the time, we just haven't had much luck with it. Primarily because ... given all the ways that this can fail - not fail, it never fails. Given all the ways that this can go wrong, it's hard for people to get up the gumption... They're really putting themselves out on the line by even participating in something like that.
It sounds like a story some serial killer would lure people in with.
Matt: We can't offer money or any sort of guarantee about anything, that they'll even get to play. And so understandably, touring bands or people from outside the city, it's kinda hard to do. I mean, the most we've been able to muster is bringing in a band from Guelph at this point
[laughs].
Dan: I was talking to this guy in Buffalo...Who's the big minimalist violin player? He named the Velvet Underground?
Tony Conrad?
Dan: Yeah, I was talking to Tony Conrad. I actually talked to him on the phone and he was into the idea, and then I never heard back from him.
Matt: I've talked to some bands from out west in the States and some bands from Texas, friends of mine, and sent a lot of information about this thing and people are very excited about it, but it's just a matter of, does the actual date line up with them being on tour and halfway across their country? It's hard if you're trying to find someone close to where we are who's also willing to do this at a specific time.
Dan: We've definitely thought about people who are relatively close-by, like Wolf Eyes or even New York bands.
[banter]
Dan: That's pretty comprehensive.
Matt: A lot better than the CBC interview.
What'd they interview you guys for?
Matt: The Leslie Spit one.
Dan: The whole event sounded very quaint..."You know, we're just listening to some music on the beach here, whatever..."
Matt: And we sounded at the same time like pretentious hosers. I don't know how you managed to sound like a hoser.
Maybe they edited it down, so every third sentence you'd be like "So as Debord says..."
Dan: Kinda. I didn't quote anybody. Oh, there was one quote...there's an article in Spacing coming out, and I quoted Zizek. This was the quote. The quote was this. Let me tell you what the quote was. A true act...a true act, uh...creates the, um...oh, fuck.
Matt: What, did you bring the book along? Was it an email interview?
Dan: It wasn't an email interview! It was an interview in person...The quote is something like "a true act creates the conditions for its own possibility." There it is.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, September 19 at 4:11 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
RIP, RIP, RIP
Norman Whitfield. (Listen.)
Mauricio Kagel. (Watch.)
And, belatedly, Richard Wright, who wasn't to blame for this turning into that.
Also a reminder to T.O. readers of David Wallace that there's a silent memorial tonight in Trinity-Bellwoods at 9.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, September 19 at 3:00 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Charice is a Word I Use to Describe...
Thanks to Jon Caramanica's insightful Celine Dion concert review in The Times the other day, I learned that Celine appeared with a 16-year-old Filipino singer, Charice Pempengco, "who came to her attention through an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show," one of several Charice (as she's known back home) has done on U.S. teevee (the Ellen show, too), complete with weepy family drama. Celine's very popular with Filipino audiences, so it's a savvy hookup, typical of her global-audience-connecting strategies, but I'm sure it was also an immediate identification with a fellow unnatural-pipes-bearing teen star and singing-contest winner from a relatively unrecognized part of the world. (Along with Celine's devotion to the cult of Oprah and its in turn to her.)
I'm most struck by Charice's version of Mama, a wrenching sentimental song (what else with that title?) about migrant work - a major issue for Filipino children whose mothers go off to raise other people's children overseas. There are heartbreakers like, " 'I'll be home in three years time': / Mama it seems like forever/ You've been gone since I was 5," although the one that really gets me is, "They say you were a good teacher/ In the same school where I can't survive" - a whole novel of details compacted into two lines, never elaborated in the rest of the song.
The tune was originally by Smokey Mountain, an early-'90s group that was an unusual hybrid of protest music and boy-band pop - named for Manila's infamous Smoky Mountain waste-landfill-cum-shantytown, and costumed to fit the part. Knowing nothing at all about Filipino music (except what Tom Waits has tried to tell me), I'm not sure how common that sort of blend is there, but it's certainly not one I've stumbled across elsewhere ... kind of Up With People with a twist of Down With Global Capital.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, September 19 at 1:46 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Defragging the D-Mag
A curious twist in the Loudnessiad: A Guitar Hero alternate mix of the new Metallica album Death Magnetic (widely agreed to be seriously overcompressed, which if we still used magnetic tape would make its title rich in... is there a term for unintentional appropriateness?) provides the transition point from the fan remix to the fan remaster.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, September 16 at 5:05 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
RIP DFW:
When the Jest Becomes Infinite,
It's Not Funny Any More
David Foster Wallace: Leave a light burning.
I've been spending much of the day, after spending a lot of yesterday simply knocked out by it, looking around at quotes and articles and YouTube videos and other tributes to and reminiscences about David Foster Wallace, whose suicide this weekend was a shock and devastating and disappointing even though he was a writer who was always frank about the struggle against succumbing to enormous sadness and despair (and art's role on both sides of that struggle), someone whose work addressed depression and addiction so incisively but also compulsively. They are being compiled here, on the longtime fan site "the howling fantods," named after the catchphrase in Wallace's masterpiece Infinite Jest for extreme agitation. (A term that has a longer history than I'd realized.) It seems apt, given what a deep kinship and admiration and envy and inspiration DFW kindled in other writers, that what came to mind when I heard the news was a line from an unpublished story by an old friend: "He died of an attack of suicide."
As a fiction writer, Wallace seemed to me to be perhaps the only one in North America who both understood what the project needed to be in his time, and had the full unquestionable capability of doing it, although there did seem to be some self-stalling and sidelining going on in the past decade. It speaks profoundly of the sociality and intimacy and seriousness of his work that when I heard the news my first feeling, and others have told me they felt the same, was to wish I had known him and had been able to do something to help - even though it's immediately obvious that he probably had no shortage of people around who cared, and that often when an attack of suicide comes on no amount of door-bolting and torch-waving by the villagers can drive the monster off. But the first feeling was that empathy for the loneliness he must have been feeling, because his understanding of human loneliness was so obvious in his writing, with all his willingness or rather determination to use all his erudition and verbal firepower to acknowledge and face the sentimental and the banal, which in the avant-pomo-whatever tradition that spawned him is of course the forbidden zone. (It's just hit me that his influence on my own book was bigger than I consciously realized.) The second feeling, of course, was of the great loss to literature and to culture, of all the potential that will go unfulfilled.
Partly because his death coincided with a not-so-great weekend for me on that banal-human-sentiments, stuff-of-life level, I really am too smacked to say much more, but I'll end with a quotation I've always remembered from a 1996 Salon interview by Laura Miller, whose appreciation of Wallace today was one of the most resonant I read.
"It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like "It's really important not to lie." OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don't feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel that I'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why. Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie." The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel."
David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
Note: There is going to be a memorial event for Wallace in Toronto on Friday night, 9 to 10 pm, in the "pit" at Trinity Bellwoods Park. All are welcome.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, September 15 at 4:47 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
Max Tundra: Music to Pass Out
with Meringue in Your Hair By
This seems to be "quote week" (or should that just be "week") here on Zoilus, but I couldn't resist this uproarious testimony from f.o.z. Owen Pallett to a musician previously all but unknown to me. (Yes, it's a press release.) Followed by Max Tundra testifying for his chosen instrument, an antique that once was the darling of the world. Followed by one of the songs from Tundra's upcoming, third album Parallax Error Beheads You so we can all assess how full of it Owen is, or what it is he is full of.
About Max Tundra by Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy)
Max and I met in Barcelona in 2005 at Primavera Sound. His slot was at 4 a.m. He put on a mask, wrapped himself up in tape, and played forty minutes of music made mostly using Amiga sample tracker software from the late 1980s. There was virtuosic melodica playing, Pointer Sisters-style singing, and an eight-minute version of "So Long, Farewell" from The Sound Of Music. I was wasted and ended up passing out on a beach in my underwear. When the sun rose, I woke up with dried merengue and sand glued to my hair [er, I think Owen means meringue, the eggy topping, and not merengue, the Dominican dance music, but since he was in Spain and in Spanish they're the same, no harm no [sic] - ed.], and in a daze, I realized that I had just witnessed nothing less than the best music performance of my life.
What sets Max Tundra apart from any other band in the world is his attention to detail. This album is impossibly full of ideas, seeking out every imaginable sound in the world and giving each their own curtain call. When you listen to this album, you'd think that it was made by an eccentric millionaire, with every name-brand pop music producer in the world contributing their own two seconds of material. Upon closer inspection, you'd realize that it's been six years since Mastered By Guy At The Exchange, in that time, Max probably hasn't had a single good night's sleep.
I can't compare this record to any record I've ever heard before. Even Max's previous records are a distant echo. It is dance music, it is discourse, it is teen sex comedy, it is a video game, it is a dance troupe, it is a thirteen course meal with Amontillado. It is shock and awe. Listen and be humbled.
About the Commodore Amiga 500 by Max Tundra
There are no modern-day computers on this record. My PC is strictly for emails and Photoshopping the words Max Tundra into Coldplay line-ups. The main technology behind this and all of my albums has been the Commodore Amiga 500 - bestselling home computer at the time - running a $1 public domain software tracker program. The sounds don't emerge from the Amiga itself however; the machine is used to control various synths, samplers and the like. I look at colums of numbers all day on the screen of a black and white television; these digits relate to pitches, durations and tones. A lot of the noises on my record are real; the cello, bass guitar, drums, piano, trumpet and others are all rehearsed and played by me, but sometimes I will use realistic fake versions of these noises. Each song is recorded in a different way; drumkits are recorded on mono cassette recorders twice, then stuck together on the left and right of a mix; string arrangements are planned and then layered up; each note of an electric guitar is sampled so that it can be sequenced in ways too complicated for my fat fingers to play at full speed. And then I have a cup of tea and sing my heart out.
Max Tundra, "Which Song"
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, September 11 at 11:47 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Wajdi Mouawad to Stephen Harper:
'Do Not Ignore That Reflection on the Opposite Shore'
So there's a Canadian election going on, too (to my personal irritation). The following "open letter" has appeared many places in French and a few in English, but among anglos it might be mainly theatre people who've read it. It is an unusually powerful evocation of the intimacy of art and politics, in a broader spirit than merely that of "protest," though of course it is that too and for good reason. Playwright-director Wajdi Mouawad is one of the more distinct voices in contemporary Canadian writing.
An open letter to Prime Minister Harper
Monsieur le premier ministre,
We are neighbours. We work across the street from one another. You are Prime Minister of the Parliament of Canada and I, across the way, am a writer, theatre director and Artistic Director of the French Theatre at the National Arts Centre (NAC). So, like you, I am an employee of the state, working for the Federal Government; in other words, we are colleagues.
Let me take advantage of this unique position, as one functionary to another, to chat with you about the elimination of some federal grants in the field of culture, something that your government recently undertook. [... continues ...]
The Symbolism
Firstly, it seems that you might benefit by surrounding yourself with counsellors who will be attentive to the symbolic aspects of your Government's actions. I am sure you know this but there is no harm in reminding ourselves that every public action denotes not only what it is but what it symbolises.
For example, a Prime Minister who chooses not attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, claiming his schedule does not permit it, in no way reduces the symbolism which says that his absence might signify something else. This might signify that he wishes to denote that Canada supports the claims of Tibet. Or it might serve as a sign of protest over the way in which Beijing deals with human rights. If the Prime Minister insists that his absence is really just a matter of timing, whether he likes it or not, this will take on symbolic meaning that commits the entire country. The symbolism of a public gesture will always outweigh the technical explanations.
Declaration of War
Last week, your government reaffirmed its manner of governing unilaterally, this time on a domestic issue, in bringing about reductions in granting programs destined for the cultural sector. A mere matter of budgeting, you say, but one which sends shock waves throughout the cultural milieu - rightly or wrongly, as we shall see - for being seen as an expression of your contempt for that sector. The confusion with which your Ministers tried to justify those reductions and their refusal to make public the reports on the eliminated programs, only served to confirm the symbolic significance of that contempt. You have just declared war on the artists.
Now, as one functionary to another, this is the second thing that I wanted to tell you: no government, in showing contempt for artists, has ever been able to survive. Not one. One can, of course, ignore them, corrupt them, seduce them, buy them, censor them, kill them, send them to camps, spy on them, but hold them in contempt, no. That is akin to rupturing the strange pact, made millennia ago, between art and politics.
Contempt
Art and politics both hate and envy one another; since time immemorial, they detest each other and they are mutually attracted, and it's through this dynamic that many a political idea has been born; it is in this dynamic that sometimes, great works of art see the light of day. Your cultural politics, it must be said, provoke only a profound consternation. Neither hate nor detestation, not envy nor attraction, nothing but numbness before the oppressive vacuum that drives your policies.
This vacuum which lies between you and the artists of Canada, from a symbolic point of view, signifies that your government, for however long it lasts, will not witness either the birth of a political idea or a masterwork, so firm is your apparent belief in the unworthiness of that for which you show contempt. Contempt is a subterranean sentiment, being a mix of unassimilated jealousy and fear towards that which we despise. Such governments have existed, but not lasted because even the most detestable of governments cannot endure if it hasn't the courage to affirm what it actually is.
Why is this?
What are the reasons behind these reductions, which are cut from the same cloth as those made last year on the majority of Canadian embassies, who saw their cultural programming reduced, if not eliminated? The economies that you have made are ridiculously small and the votes you might win with them have already been won. For what reason, then, are you so bent on hurting the artists by denying them some of their tools? What are you seeking to extinguish and to gain?
Your silence and your actions make one fear the worst for, in the end, we are quite struck by the belief that this contempt, made eloquent by your budget cuts, is very real and that you feel nothing but disgust for these people, these artists, who spend their time by wasting it and in spending the good taxpayers money, he who, rather than doing uplifting work, can only toil.
And yet, I still cannot fathom your reasoning. Plenty of politicians, for the past fifty years, have done all they could to depoliticise art, to strip it of its symbolic import. They try the impossible, to untie that knot which binds art to politics. And they almost succeed! Whereas you, in the space of one week, have undone this work of chloroforming, by awakening the cultural milieu, Francophone and Anglophone, and from coast to coast. Even if politically speaking they are marginal and negligible, one must never underestimate intellectuals, never underestimate artists; don't underestimate their ability to do you harm.
A grain of sand is all-powerful
I believe, my dear colleague, that you yourself have just planted the grain of sand that could derail the entire machine of your electoral campaign. Culture is, in fact, nothing but a grain of sand, but therein lays its power, in its silent front. It operates in the dark. That is its legitimate strength.
It is full of people who are incomprehensible but very adept with words. They have voices. They know how to write, to paint, to dance, to sculpt, to sing, and they won't let up on you. Democratically speaking, they seek to annihilate your policies. They will not give up. How could they?
You must understand them: they have not had a clear and common purpose for a very long time, for such a long time that they have no common cause to defend. In one week, by not controlling the symbolic importance of your actions, you have just given them passion, anger, rage.
In the dark
The resistance that will begin today, and to which my letter is added, is but a first manifestation of a movement that you yourself have set in motion: an incalculable number of texts, speeches, acts, assemblies, marches, will now be making themselves heard. They will not be exhausted.
Some of these will, perhaps, following my letter, be weakened but within each word, there will be a spark of rage, re-lit, and it is precisely the addition of these tiny instances of fire that will shape the grain of sand that you will never be able to shake. This will not settle down, the pressure will not be diminished.
Monsieur le premier ministre, we are neighbours. We work across the street from one another. There is nothing but the Cenotaph between our offices, and this is as it should be because politics and art have always mirrored one another, each on its own shore, each seeing itself in the other, separated by that river where life and death are weighed at every moment.
We have many things in common, but an artist, contrary to a politician, has nothing to lose, because he or she does not make laws; and if it is prime ministers who change the world, it's the artist who will show this to the world. So do not attempt, through your policies, to blind us, Monsieur le premier ministre; do not ignore that reflection on the opposite shore, do not plunge us further into the dark. Do not diminish us.
Wajdi Mouawad
(translation by John van Burek).
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, September 10 at 4:34 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (10)
Dreaming Out Loud: Zorn at Guelph
I didn't flip the word-producing, note-taking, signifyin' Critic Machine chip on in my head during yesterday's astounding double-feature matinee at the Guelph Jazz Festival featuring John Zorn's The Dreamers and Electric Masada. Sometimes all the humming and whirring of the analytic hard drive is just too much static in the ears. But it was truly one of the finest shows I've seen in years, and I think the finest I've ever seen in Guelph's handsome Riverrun auditorium.
The two ensembles had almost the same personnel - Marc Ribot (guitar), Jamie Saft (organs), Joey Baron (drums), Cyro Baptista (percussion), Trevor Dunn (bass) and Kenny Wollenson (percussion) - except that in Electric Masada they were joined by Ikue Mori on electronics, and Wollesen switched over from vibes to drum kit, making it a dual-drummer barrage. And, in Electric Masada, Zorn played his sax more (none of us could recall after if he'd played it at all in The Dreamers) - although he still let it rest much of the time in order to conduct, which he does with great charm and precision. Indeed watching him conduct was one of the great pleasures of the show - slamming down his fists to trigger an improvised-explosive blast of a group sforzando, or tapping the air with his knuckles to bring an abrupt pause, or stretching out a hand and giving a spidery come-on with his fingers to ask a player to give him more of what they were doing (at one point Mori, sitting a few inches from the bandleader, responded by wiggling her own fingers right back along his). But most of all it was just the fluid, unforced power of all these musicians, making this collective music like they were sailing a boat out to sea: As the rhythm section pulled their ropes tight, Ribot's guitar might rise cinemascope-style up into the sun; or when Saft's organ would move from harmonious vamping into a set of anxious amphetamine riffs, Baptista might reach into his seemingly wheelbarrow-sized stock of noisemakers and, say, shake a hula hoop covered in bells and gauze to hint that gentler waves would soon surface over the horizon.
I hadn't heard the recording of The Dreamers that came out this spring, but on the evidence of yesterday's show it's roughly in the mode of Zorn's popular 2001 album The Gift - surf-inflected, Morricone-refracted, post-lounge with beautifully concise head melodies played mostly on the guitar and vibes, never going so far out as to get skronky or violent. But that was what E-Masada was for, of course, and by the end of that second hour-plus, Zorn and his companions had taken us on a musical tour through so many emotional weather regions that it felt thoroughly, classically cathartic, as if we had all vaulted together through a purgative sonic-obstacle course for the soul. The Guelph crowd repaid their efforts with two standing ovations and screams of rapture, and after an encore (a few tunes from the aforementioned Gift), the band seemed to leave the stage feeling very pleased with their day's work, arms slung around one another's shoulders, chatting amiably as they vanished into the wings.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, September 08 at 5:13 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
Short-Attention-Span Friday
Wasilla, Alaska, band Portugal.The Man are no fans of their neighbour turned governor
turned VP-candidate, Sarah Palin. See final item.
I am on the programming committee for this year's Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. Our call for papers went out this week: This year's theme is "Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop and the Body Politic," a deliberate turn to the saucy after last year's perhaps-a-bit-earnest mix of topics. If you want to talk over ideas, feel free to get in touch - I'll be getting in touch with a few of you.
My fellow Pop Conf. committee member Ann Powers picks up on some points from my Silver Jews article to discuss the generational place of politics in today's music on the L.A. Times music blog. My quick answer to the question of "where's today's Rage Against the Machine/Public Enemy/The Clash/Bob Dylan?" by the way, is that the idea that putting messages in music is an effective means of rallying people politically is out of fashion - so the politics in music is now more about subcultural cluster formations and social networks. But since this is short-attention-span Friday, I won't stop to develop the point.
Local queer zine Fab talked to me for a piece in their new issue that asks: Celine Dion - worst gay icon ever?
I should have said earlier in the week, but voting is now on for the ECHO prize for Canadian songwriting. Go the page and you can listen to all five nominated songs; you can vote once a day up till 4:59 pm on Sept 29.
Another reminder: As part of the Toronto International Film Festival, my friend Margaux Williamson's beautiful documentartry Teenager Hamlet 2006 is screening through Sept 13 at the Katherine Mullherin gallery, 1082 Queen Street West. Previously discussed here, and this week's Eye has more.
Meanwhile, with a Canadian election call hanging over us like a dirty spiderweb about to get all up in our hair, the arts community is getting organized to respond to the Harper government's recent round of disses. Get involved in the well-sorted strategy of the unofficial "Department of Culture" here. More comment sure to follow.
Anyone been attending the Guelph Jazz Festival this week? I'd be happy to hear reports. I was there on Wednesday afternoon to moderate a panel discussion on "Improvising Digital Community" between DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) and Vijay Iyer, which flew by way too quickly to even summarize, though I think it got hottest when it ran into this zone: the role of creative labour (and corporeal labour) in digital culture, and whether there is still an important distinction between the artist's role as consumer and as producer. Vijay put it out: "We are more than our playlists" - Paul agreed, but ambivalently. I'll be going back to Guelph on Sunday for the double-header John Zorn jawn.
Finally, have you read this scorching anti-Sarah Palin screed from her Alaska hometown's leading rock band? Guitarist/vocalist John Gourley of the oddly punctuated Portugal.The Man writes, after a lengthy and touching personal anecdote: "I see the sport hunter, the censor, choice taker, the revelations reader, and the high school cheerleader. It is endlessly embarrassing to watch people fall all over this idea. This is not my Alaska. The Alaska I know." (Via Rock&Rap Confidential.)
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, September 05 at 1:45 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
David Berman:
From a DMZ at the back of the universe
Here is my email interview with David Berman, of/aka The Silver Jews. He was writing (for the first time, he said) from within a moving van, so his answers are uncharacteristically brief, but there's plenty of detail I didn't get in to the Globe profile.
CW: There aren't that many precedents for your position in popular music: A "serious" poet - not a poetaster, not a light-verse guy, not a Rod McKuen or Jewel - who is (or becomes) a similarly respected songwriter. Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, a few more-obscure figures. I'm curious how you experience and regard the aesthetic divide between those worlds. And why isn't it crossed more often?
DB: It's definitely not a case of dual citizenship, as the gatekeepers of neither poetry nor rock have tried to claim me as one of their own. I live somewhat uneasily, in a little noticed DMZ at the back of the universe.
I wanted poetry's intensity of language poured into a larger vessel than academia can provide. Perhaps I now need to be pouring into an ever bigger vessel, i.e., a screenplay.
Is literary writing something you continue to do or intend to return to?
The labor is thankless, the rewards are small, and frankly there are many great talents in the language arts. I want to be working in a field where the high marks are low enough as to make real-world historical songwriting victories entirely achievable. I don't see painting or fiction or poetry within miles of its masters. I'm working in a field whose commonly acknowledged greatest practitioners - Dylan, Springsteen, etc. - have so little control over their supposed mastery.
And that small distance between the greatest practitioners and the novice musician is what keeps it folk. In practice though it seems songwriters hide the fact of this, pulling up the ladder behind them. Almost every interview has asked why I included the chords. [Note: The liner notes for Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea include chord charts for every song.] Isn't anybody interested in what it means that almost no one does? Why is it mentioned so often that punk or country is rudimentary, yet there are no simple directions available to the novice?
How have your feelings about live performance changed, and do you think now that it was a mistake not to tour before?
I'm new out here. I'm like an 18-year-old compared to my peers who are jaded and have been touring for years. I enjoy playing the role of the rube in rock. Touring wouldn't have worked when I was younger. I would have done bad things and taken advantage of some of the privileges that I gladly pass up as a 41-year-old.
Those years of isolation also kept me away from the ridiculous kind of "can do no wrong" adoration offered musicians. The poor guys never get a chance to develop writing skills because so little is expected. Everything in rock seems under-imagined from here, riding the asymptote of good enough.
I'd like to ask what the Stephen Bush painting on the cover signifies to you. The image suits the mood of the album instinctively to me but I wonder if there's a thematic reason for the choice - and whether/in what way you were attracted to Bush's continued repetition of that image year by year.
It's as you say, intuitively complimentary. To unpack it all, you have to think about the mock-heroic aspect of what I am doing. And about my countrymen, who are as oblivious to their peril as stuffed animals in a storm.
You've said that this album is you talking to people who were born after 1980. I find that really interesting, as someone nearly your own age. We're no longer the young people. So three questions: (a) What do you think now about the ideas that prevailed among that '90s youth cohort, that "slacker" identity with which you were often identified? (b) What is it that you wanted to say to or address about people in their 20s now, and (c) why them rather than your own generation?
a) The slacker attitude, which is really just the pure product of a seventies childhood, probably hasn't served its historical purpose yet. Soon we may know why slacker 50-year-olds had to be so cynical and independent to fulfill its role. Some generations move history as young people; others, like FDR's, later in life.
My generation doesn't have 'following' skills. The younger generations, growing up in a more enlightened world perhaps, are team thinkers. My belief is that the next twenty years will be the story of what the adults (us) and the young adults (people born after 1980) do to recover from the damage that this exceptionally stupid and selfish generation of Republicans, businessmen and God-botherers has inflicted.
There is no doubt in my mind that the 40-year-old guys out there who think life has passed them by, the slackers who kept slacking while their peers sold out, will have a very active second half of their lives.
Do you feel this album is looking towards a post-George Bush era, or has a relation to the zeitgeist in that sense? It seems to carry some kind of on-the-upswing charge compared to the rawness of Tanglewood Numbers, and I wonder how much that has to do with external social context as much as the personal one. (I won't ask whom you're voting for, but feel free to expound.)
My anger at the 40 million Americans who voted for Bush in 2000 and the 52 who did in '04 has been a terrible poison I've fed myself every day for eight years. I have no doubt about who is to blame for what we have going on here. No politician can tell the truth to the American people. Who is going to tell them that they are the problem?
Does your adoption in recent years (as I understand it) of a more serious Judaism and Talmudic study alter what you are going after in your writing? There's certainly a Talmudic quality to the first song on Lookout Mountain... (or perhaps a meta-Talmudic, Edmond Jabes kind of tone). But then on "San Francisco BC," for instance, you sound just as comfortable as ever in indulging in nonsense and whimsy...
It's profoundly affected the way I write. It's a repository of story and wisdom that really has no bottom to it. It's made me excited as a reader again.
I don't want to ask you to rehash the story of your drug problems, but I am curious why you chose to put the story out so publicly in such detail at the time. It came as a surprise coming from someone who'd seemed quite private. Was there a moral choice involved in that - perhaps a debt being repaid to fans, or a kind of atonement - or was it a more personal need or strategy?
Getting sober is the end of many different privacies. You're exhausted with privacy.
It feels good to talk about hard times when they are over.
It felt like a way to put some space between me and the Drag City m.o. which marks so many of the label's releases: Agressiver Mysteriousing.
People who go through hell like to let it be known that they are available to help another.
And subsequently has it been difficult to see your work all being interpreted now in the light of those events, or do you somehow feel it's appropriate to be subject to those kinds of biographical readings/hearings?
It's not difficult. My problem is people knowing too little about me and what I'm trying for.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, September 02 at 4:16 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Coming Out of the Black Patch
In celebration of the long-awaited first-ever visit of the Silver Jews to Toronto tonight (and Montreal tomorrow), I have a feature today in The Globe and Mail. The more I listen, the more impressed I am with the Jews' new album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea - with the way it bursts out of the previous dingy-basement-window-view perspective of bandleader David Berman (seen above with wife/bassist/backup-singer Cassie and canine companion). It really reaches out into the world - probably not coincidentally given that it's the first album he's made since going on tour for the first time ever (and when he did it he did it all the way: a world tour - the related short documentary, Silver Jew is more than worth an hour of your time). But the shift is also a reflection of breaking out of the kind of insulated self-regard that was part of the '90s-disaffected-dude attitude that Berman raised to a kind of poetic sublime.
Rather than the droll monologue of a very very smart friend, as a lot of his work seemed in the past, LOM LOC feels more like poetic reportage - wondrous scenes he's witnessed that are over before anyone else gets there - but with the bright hope that someday you, his listener-companion, might arrive just in time to see the "chicken-fried pigeon in a Sonny James sauce," the "vocal martyr in the vegan press," the menacing Mr. Games with "a jeweler's hands and a blurry face" and other Snuffleupaguses (Snuffleupagi?) of the Joosian plane.
Later today I'll post a full transcript of my email interview with Berman.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, September 02 at 12:40 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Stick a Pitchfork In It, PTW's Done
I'm not sure why, but I could never remember to check Paper Thin Walls, even though I intended to read it every day. I guess I wasn't the only one, as the site is shutting down. Today they provide a retrospective on their two-years-plus of existence that offers a lot of fun reading, such as the "tell us a story" feature (Chad Van Gaalen does Stupid Human Tricks; Dan Deacon, in Hamburglar suit, feeds frat boys rancid ant-infested burgers), some nifty making-the-video stories etc., and PTW's own ridiculous effort to cover a Deerhoof song. They present Part 2 (less gossip more tuneage, I think) on Tuesday, before they fold up their tent. What I liked best about PTW though was actually their reviews, which whiffed of that old-Creem-smell and then would get all adorably bro-on-bro snark-vs-sympathy in the comments threads. They'll be missed.
Also memorable: In July of ought-seven, Ryan Catbird depicts PTW's place in online music journalism and somehow the platonic form of said field's soul or lack thereof, in diagram form:
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, August 29 at 1:33 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Tin Pan Idol:
Echo's Songs Rock and SOCAN You
(psvoteveda)
I've got an idea for a reality show: Tin Pan Idol. It would be like the cultural-work-honouring Project Runway but with songwriting instead of fashion design - show us how the material is chosen, how it is cut to fit the frame, when someone is just chasing a trend or when they are just bucking it and when they are doing something beyond either. Tell the contestants that they need a bridge. Tell 'em they've got too many bridges. Show us what it's like to craft an arrangement and make a demo. At each stage narrow down the field, until at the end some bright spark of a compulsive hook-throwing tunesmith emerges glistening into the light of a publishing contract and a handful o' guesting real-life stars agree to cut a few of his or her songs. (I'm making that an idea an exception from the Creative Commons license at the foot of this site: All rights reserved!)
Until then the closest thing we've got is the SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada) Echo Songwriting Prize, which annually since 2006 offers $5,000 to the writer(s) of a song released in the past year as voted on by the point-and-click public, "to identify what's next and what's best in current Canadian independent music." (Eligibility is determined by being below gold-record status, which in Canada is 50,000 copies sold.)
For the third year running, I've been part of the 10-person panel that selects the nominees - last year the winner was Toronto rapper Abdominal for his urban-cyclist anthem "Pedal Pusher"; in year one, it was Winnipeg's Propagandhi ("the soundtrack for the voluntary human extinction movement") for their song "A Speculative Fiction."
This year it's an extremely strong field, if a little lacking in cultural diversity (except for the final pick, a Jewish-cowboy-hip-hop blend) but robust in geographical diversity. In the order of artists pictured (left to right and top to bottom) in this post:
"Lucklucky", written and performed by Veda Hille (Vancouver)
"Double Suicide", written and performed by Sandro Perri (Toronto)
"Night Windows", written by Stephen Carroll, John Samson, Greg Smith & Jason Tait, performed by The Weakerthans (Winnipeg)
"Weighty Ghost", written by Loel Campbell, Tim D'eon, Paul Murphy and Jud Haynes, performed by Wintersleep (Halifax)
"You Are Never Alone", written by Josh Dolgin, Doris Glaspie, Katie Moore and Waleed Shabazz, performed by Socalled (Montreal)
You'll be able to vote here (one vote per ISP address daily) starting on Sept. 1 and through Sept. 29 to determine who emerges as the Echo Songwriting Idol. Get your clicking finger warmed up.
I will make no secret of it here and now that I'm'a'gonna do my part to see that this is Veda Hille's year: After her recent masterfuckingpiece album This Riot Life was woefully neglected in the Polaris Prize nominations, this is the least we can do. † That said, I'd be nearly as pleased to see Sandro Perri or Socalled take the prize (two more should-have-been Polaris nominees), and not at all sad to see the Weakerthans or Wintersleep have a few grand rained down upon their nappy heads.
I'll make a fuller case for the merits of "Lucklucky" next week when voting is open. There'll also be a video online for "Lucklucky" soon, I hear. Meanwhile, here is a charming live, lo-fi rendition of a track from This Riot that's just as deserving. "Ace of the Nazarene" on the record flirts with heavy metal, but in the version shown below, shot by Playgrrround in a courtyard in Vienna, it's more like a cultish campfire ritual. (VH sez on her site: "i love how we finish the song and all sit up straight like we are in kindergarten.")
THE KID OF GOD STAYS UP ALL NIGHT LONG!
†Quick full-disclosure: Over the years, as often occurs between writer and their subjects, Veda and I have developed some personal connections; but it's the kind of relationship in which I had no trouble airing my misgivings about her last disc, Return of the Kildeer, and I'm confident I'd feel just as blown away by This Riot Life without ever having shared a sip of bourbon with Ms. Hille. (Go back)
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, August 28 at 4:26 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
Horsetail Feathers!
Final Fantasy meets Alex Lukashevsky
(and Nico Muhly and many others)
At the request of longtime Zoilus favourite Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett), I'm very happy to offer you this preview of the opening track from Owen's new EP, Final Fantasy Plays to Please, which is a set of covers of songs by Alex Lukashevsky, a fellow Torontonian singer-songwriter and also of course leader of Deep Dark United, played with as many as 35 other musicians, dubbed the St. Kitts Orchestra (an expansion, then, on the St. Kitts String Quartet, who played on the last FF album He Poos Clouds), featuring members of the Hidden Cameras, Drumheller, Andrew Bird and others. The results are a jangling candybox of sound spilling from Pallett to aural palette, presenting Alex's songs in more accessible surrounds than usual, and perhaps introducing him to a host of other musicians who might begin to draw on his rich catalogue. Here then is a taste: Horsetail Feathers.
(This is the first time Zoilus has hosted an MP3 file, and it required a lot of tricky tech I've never used before, so if there's any trouble downloading the file, please drop me a note. Update: I think the problems people had should be fixed now.)
The EP is one of a pair being released at tomorrow's show at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto (the CD gods willing), the other being Spectrum, which features the members of Beirut and is the first installment of Owen's long-threatened imaginary-world conceptual suite, which will continue on the upcoming album, Heartland. (Exclaim! explains in detail.) A song from Spectrum and another from P2P were posted on Stereogum this morning.
Owen's show tomorrow is together with NYC compositional prodigy Nico Muhly, who in his mid-20s has collaborated with the likes of Bjork and Philip Glass and Bonnie Prince Billy but more importantly, as documented in this well-circulated New Yorker profile by Rebecca Mead, has a sensibility all his own, a classical version of the mashup and YouTube mind, and also a fresh-feeling kind of amodernism - neither post- nor anti-modernist, he seems unusually capable of bypassing not only the old 20th-C debates but also the conventional bypasses of said 20th-C debates. His new album Mothertongue blends the babble of digital information overload with the brouhaha of history, via his love of 16th-century English church music. (He's also a ridiculously entertaining blogger. If he weren't so charming I might want to kill him.)
Besides some evident sonic sympathies (the violin music, the use of looping figures, the unabashed embrace of prettiness, the knife-edge-thin layer of camp), Muhly shares with Owen a concern for communication and affinity and collectivity: Just as Owen has been stalwart to his compatriots in the Blocks Recording Club of Toronto, Muhly has made common cause with labelmates in a project called Bedroom Community, an Iceland-based label (not so local-aurist, then) that gathers "like-minded, yet diverse individuals from different corners of the globe who all creatively orbit around an inconspicuous building and its inhabitants on the outskirts of Reykjavik Iceland- Greenhouse Studios where the music is mostly created." (Another Bedroom Communitarian is Sam Avidon, a frequent Muhly cohort [/boyfriend?] who also appears in Toronto on Wednesday.)
I'd been planning to say more about Muhly but as the technical challenges of this post (yes, I'm a digi-wimp) have taken up too much time, I'll reserve further thoughts till after tomorrow's show. Meanwhile as a warmup, here's a video of Muhly's "It Goes Without Saying," from his previous album:
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, August 26 at 6:26 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (14)
Teenager Hamlet 2006-2008:
Something Un-Rotten in the State of Toronto
I'm giddily happy and/or terribly frightened to tell you that the long-awaited movie Teenager Hamlet 2006 - created by Zoilusian friend and occasional collaborator Margaux Williamson and including deeply humiliating cameo appearances by, um, me - will be making its premiere next week in the Toronto International Film Festival, and screening daily throughout the week at the Katherine Mullherin gallery.
Musically, the soundtrack of the film was supervised by Steve Kado (aka The Blankket, former head of the Blocks Recording Club and member of the Barcelona Pavilion, Ninja High School, etc.) and it includes music by Kado as well as Toronto artists such as Tomboyfriend, Traditionm, Nifty (Matt Smith), Permafrown, Pony Da Look and Republic of Safety, plus some Diamanda Galas, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Beethoven and Shostakovich.
Above is the trailer, if you're the sort who likes to get sneak peeks, or (blatant solicitation) the sort who might program movies for exhibition in other cities or countries. Zoilus-skin-flick aspect aside, the film is truly beautiful and unassumingly smart. As it says in the synopsis: "A startling hybrid of make-believe and documentary, art and politics, Teenager Hamlet 2006 is an insightful and off-beat look at what it means to live and make art in the 21st century."
Don't miss out: Put it on your calendar if you're coming to the festival.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, August 26 at 5:22 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Radio Silence
Hey all, it's been a busy week but we'll back in gear soon. If you're in Toronto this weekend (I'm not), don't miss Vancouver cellist Peggy Lee in the AIMToronto Interface Series. Like her classic singing namesake, Ms. Lee's playing will give you fever. This quote sums up well: "With her deeply sonorous instrument in hand, Lee has more-than-shared the stage with creative improvisors from all over the world: Joelle Leandre, Dave Douglas, Mark Dresser, Susie Ibarra, and Barre Phillips to name but a few. Her playing blends grace and precision, yet when the music demands it she can be equally challenging and vibrant." - Jon Morgan, Signal to Noise.
I've disabled comments again for the weekend while we continue to plug the spam leak in our hull. Meanwhile, watch this sad short doc about the ultimate (and ultimately deluded) record collector.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, August 22 at 3:12 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
'Do You Suffer from Post-Mortem Depression?'
The gold-medal record-release announcement of the month, reproduced below, including persistent misuse of semi-colon as colon.
"Wintage Records & Tapes proudly present; Disguises' highly anticipated debut lp, Post-Mortem Depression, launch party!!
9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ?????
"Taking place @ 5 non-traditional venues all in secret locations ??? Incorporating a night of live musical performances,very unique non-traditional venues, guided walking tours, DJ set by King Greyskullz, live visuals, and interactive theatre/performance art that will culminate in attendees being "kidnapped" and driven off to the final secret location for the Disguises performance.
"Included with ticket purchase you get a map, w/times & locations (in case a ticket holder has to play catch up) & instructions. Guaranteed to be a once in a lifetime concert going experience!
"Making fans through the suggestive power of "Stockholm Syndrome" DISGUISES are proud to release their debut lp; Post-Mortem Depression featuring hit songs such as; Meathead, What Happened to Your Face, T.H.R.E.A.D.S., Dead Patterns, Flesh Bodies ... and more.
"With very special performances by; Lambsbread (Delaware, OH) Ecstatic Peace recording superstars are a three-peese mixed gender spazz/jazz punk aktion unit. There bio reads, Sabbath meets Coltrane. They have had nothing but ++ reviews, strong word of mouth, and in the words of Paris Hilton are "Hot" right now! WHERE:?????
"Bottom Feeder(Hamilton) Ex-Fossils duo consisting of minds eye
splintering Horn headwallop and Scum/Sic/Surge electrifiried pedal slomp! WHERE:?????
"R.O.M.I.N.S. Random jet blasts of confusion and wrestling
the dada bird are this duo's thrash palace. Molding mind matter into conscious thought, the tools they will be using for this night a secret..it is left up to our own psychic prowess to decipher the mysteries ... WHERE:??????
"WHERE:???????????
"Tickets available in very limited quantities (hand ##) 08/22/08 !!! @ Hits & Misses (on Bloor), Rotate This (on Queen), & Soundscapes (on College). Tix are $7 (only in advance!!!). Doors 8pm."
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, August 20 at 1:50 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
I'm Out Like Flout
(plus a plug for Tramp Hall)
Away for the weekend and due to our little Spamalot problem, I've turned off comments. My apologies. We'll fix 'er up next week.
Speaking of, a reminder to Torontofunions that yers truly curated this Monday's Trampoline Hall (my maiden voyage!), with these lecturers, every one a headliner: Zoilus team member Erella Ganon speaking on "Friendship 202," friend-of-Zoilus (and Slate music critic) Jody Rosen on "The Jody Grind" and man-about-town Jesse Huisken on "The Curta Calculator: Its Construction, History & Aura." Tix now on sale at Soundscapes on College St, last-minute rush seats at 6:30 pm Monday at Sneaky Dee's, doors at 7:40, show at 8 sharp.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, August 15 at 3:17 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Thursday Reading:
HolyP-Orridge BonnieTyrannaLove
Holy Fuck responds to Eye's Marc Weisblott on being dragged into the Tory arts-cuts controversy. To paraphrase, "Oh, shit, here we go again."
This feature about Genesis P-Orridge (ex-Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Temple ov Psychick Youth, etc) from the latest Radar magazine is the saddest, strangest, most stirring piece of music journalism I've read in a long moment. Further thoughts later if there's time. Caution: May produce tears.
I review the latest Bonnie Prince Billy joint, belatedly, this week in the Globe and Mail.
Vintage '78 Toronto punk band Tyranna (get it?) opens vaults, reunites for one-off Friday night at the Silva Dolla.
Audio interview with Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love (of The Thing with Ken Vandermark and other nord-meets-midwest projex). Nilssen-Love appears with saxophonist Frode Gjerstad on Thurs Aug 21 at the Imperial Pub (54 Dundas St East), 8 pm, $12. As promoter Ron Gaskin (Rough Idea) puts it: "In the vicinity of former jazz HQ the Senator, the oldest becomes the newest jazz room, within the neon shadows of Yonge-Dundas carnage." Stu Broomer of Cadence magazine says of the saxophonist: "Gjerstad has a voice of his own: he is a singer and a storyteller with his horn, with a talent for extended improvisations in which motifs are developed incrementally."
The New Yorker's Ben Greenman gives a holler to Ontario country-rock firebrand Fred Eaglesmith, whose new gospel-themed album Tinderbox is, incidentally, his best in a few, which is saying loads.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, August 14 at 4:51 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Long Long Overdue
I am updating this site's links page for the first time in, oh, two years or so. If you have a site (especially a Toronto/Canadian music blog or site) you think belongs, let me know. If a listed site is defunct let me know that too. (I've cleared away the deadwood in the first Toronto-music section only so far.)
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, August 11 at 5:21 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
'Anyone Caught Doing Culture, It Was a Career Killer'
And Other Just-So Stories
Toronto band and federal whipping post Holy Fuck.
1. The Globe has a news story, an editorial and at fine column by Simon Houpt about the Harper govt's attempt at a stealth attack on the cultural sector. I'm often critical of the effect of arts grants in Canada - the sense that Canada Council dependency results in a blander, more "worthy," "healthy," good-citizen kind of art culture here that breeds mediocrity - but these two programs are the kind of pragmatic aid that I think is pretty free of such effects: they promote "soft power" for Canada internationally while broadening artists' horizons and career potential.
The bust on the not-very-expensive programs is not just yokel philistinism: The fact that they're being justified by invoking the naughty-sounding name of Toronto band Holy Fuck (who despite their name are a danceable, creative and hardly threatening electronix-meets-rock band, who coincidentally are on an international tour right now and may not even be that aware of their ideological exploitation) and grants to authors to read abroad who might sometimes have a different political agenda than the Conservatives (because, y'know, milquetoasty neo-con-ism has given the world so much great art), all recalls the Gingrich-era cultural attacks of the Republicans in the U.S. If it were an isolated case, that'd be one thing but in combination with this spring's film-funding-censorship bill C-10, we're seeing a consistent pattern. And this while the Cons remain in a minority position: If they gained a majority in this fall's likely election, it could (like a lot of their agenda) shift into warp drive.
If you're Canadian, please write your MP as well as trade minister David Emerson and Heritage (ugh) minister Joseé Verner. If you're not but you can attest at all to the fact that international cultural outreach for Canada or any other country matters, drop them a note too. I'm proud of The Globe for applying fire to Harperite tootsies on this.
2. Elsewhere: T'cha Dunleavy of the Montreal Gazette had an interview with me this weekend about my book, taste and of course La Diva Dion. I always feel like I come off much more equivocal than I mean to when I'm asked about my final feeling about Céline in interviews. It's partly a reluctance to give away "spoilers" but maybe I should just say Céline Dion is amazing. Other recent reviews/coverage of the book from Bricolage and Nigel Beale as well as a wonderfully reflective LiveJournal post and subsequent discussion from someone I don't think I know named Christopher Pratt. It's the kind of reaction that's truly a pleasure to read. The book also comes up in the comments section of this post on "Eclecticism and Class", a Bourdieu-oriented discussion of cultural omnivorism on the new-to-me-blog The American Scene that could have come straight out of the middle chapters of my tome. If I have a spare mo' the next few days I may respond at length.
3. Also note that Vespa is continuing its Scooter Head campaign by moving into yet another relatively fresh medium - first paste-up graffiti, now wall projection - one of the themes of my Toronto Life piece this month on street artist Dan Bergeron aka Fauxreel, which I don't think I've linked here before.
4. And finally I've been remiss in not mentioning to Torontonians that the current edition of the Summerworks theatre festival has added a very well-curated nightly musical component featuring a roster that should be quite familiar to Zoilus readers. It takes a break tonight (Monday) but picks up again tomorrow through Saturday, 10:30 pm each night at the Theatre Centre.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, August 11 at 1:35 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
They Say Everyone's a Critic...
... but in this case, the critic is everyone: Today in Slate, F.O.Z. Jody Rosen uncovers what just might be "in purely statistical terms ... the greatest plagiarism scandal in the annals of American journalism".
Update, Friday: The tale ends badly. It's worth reading the plagiarist Mark Williams' incredible aria of self-pity, quoted at the end of the blog post - it's very vulnerable underneath all the vituperation it aims at Jody. It's a case study in a pattern I've seen before, of people who end up kicking around writing/ publishing/ media jobs without the talent and/or energy to get anywhere, and end up extremely embittered at the more successful. And, in this instance, resorting to extreme measures to cover up their problems. There but for the grace of fortune... I do feel truly sorry for him, and hope he can bounce up after hitting bottom - into another field of endeavour.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, August 06 at 3:54 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (17)
Let's Listen to Them Talk About Let's Talk About Love
Finally CBC Radio has posted an online version of one of my favourite things that happened after my book came out - an edition of their entertaining chat show Talking Books all about it, hosted by my colleague Ian Brown, with guests Noreen Golfman, Jonathan Garfinkel and Beatriz Hausner. It's a smart but down-to-earth, rollicking roundtable, which ranges abroad into questions of cultural shame in general and the weirdness of music critics in particular. Listen here!
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, July 30 at 4:59 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Pop Montreal Edition
Dear Pop Montreal, You know I love you. And I know you're excited to have such a very prestigious guest star this year. But this -
"To begin we have the insurmountable songwriting legend Burt Bacharach, perhaps the single most important figure in popular music of the 20th [century]."
- is just silly. Pop Montreal, sweetheart, may I introduce you to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, John Coltrane, Bing Crosby, W.C. Handy, Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rogers, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Bo Diddley, Les Paul, Benny Goodman, Leonard Bernstein, Hank Williams, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Paul McCartney & John Lennon, Phil Spector, James Brown, Berry Gordy, Joni Mitchell, Chet Atkins, Lou Reed & John Cale, DJ Kool Herc, Rakim, Chuck D ... and the rest? Burt's an icon and he's written some terrific tunes that stretched some boundaries in pop songwriting. But runaway hyperbole is no one's friend.
That said, I'm excited about this year's lineup, which along with Burt inclues Irma Thomas, The Persuasions (!), Nick Cave, Wire, The Silver Apples - and several musicians actually under 50. (Just kidding, Pop Montreal; I love it that you scampy whelps are so much into giving recognition to historical figures. Even if you're sometimes shaky on the deets.)
fondly,
Carl
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 29 at 3:38 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (10)
From Bad to Verse?
I'm writing a review, a bit belatedly, of the Silver Jews' great new album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, and it occurred to me - aside from the Jews' David Berman, Leonard Cohen and Jim Carroll, are there any other English-language pop (or semi-pop) singers who have published books of poetry (not their lyrics) that stand up as excellent poetry with no jot of special pleading?
I have mixed feelings about Dylan's Tarantula (I like it, but I like his liner notes better, and it feels impossible to know how one would feel about it without knowing Dylan's music). I think Patti Smith's poetry works a lot better when she's performing it than on the page. I generally feel that way about dub poets, too, though that could be a failing on my part. There must be more, but they're not springing to mind. (Oh, wait - Ed Sanders of the Fugs, though the Fugs themselves sometimes require special pleading.) The crossover seems a lot more common in other cultures, as in Latin America, Africa, France, even Quebec.
(If you say Gord Downie, I'll try not to be dismissive - I've only read a couple of poems from his book and I'm a bit kneejerk about the Tragically Hip.)
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, July 28 at 1:06 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (28)
Forced to Write About American Idol?
Call Our Help Line Now
My imaginary big sister Ann Powers has an essay today in the L.A. Times that seems curiously unpegged - perhaps rock-snob readers writing in to complain? - but neatly sums up the pro-pop shift among music critics, a subject discussed in my book, as she kindly mentions. She describes it as the result of a kind of generational coming-full-circle: pop criticism begins as an in-your-face challenge to elitism; as time goes on, like any other field, it tends to develop its own elitisms, but that founding iconoclastic impulse always surges up from somewhere to dethrone them.
I'm not quite sure what point Ann's making by pointing out that artists like Steinski and Fleet Foxes are highly rated on Metacritic now - she seems to imply that the next generation yet of critics (the post-Pitchfork generation) may make its own stand by challenging the poptimists to a duel, but I doubt it. Even the most pop-loving critics also have their more esoteric loves, because we're still all, like, nerds. But from what I've seen, younger critics don't tend to remain anti-pop purists nearly as far into adulthood as I and many of my peers did - partly because our positions were affirmed/enforced by a self-conscious counter- (or "alternative") culture that doesn't exist in that mode now. Which comes with its curses and blessings, its liberations and its blinders.
At Creative Loafing's Tampa Calling blog, Wade Tatangelo intelligently speculates that the trend may be economically based: With the crisis of critical authority brought on by the Internet and the (also 'net-related) decline of newspaper sales, he says, critics are losing their jobs and those still employed are in more vulnerable positions: Maybe they take an interest in American Idol because they can't afford not to? There's something to that - I remarked in my book that unlike, say, an academic specialist, a working critic has to address a broad audience, and one who wrote only about the ultra-weird and never about the popular eventually would be out of a job. In the book I add "(rightly)", but it's debatable.
Certainly I know people who've been required professionally to review shows they wouldn't have volunteered to watch. Tatangelo says that a couple of years ago he quit a job rather than cover Idol - and that he's not sure he would feel emboldened to make a similar move today.
But wait, imagine a film critic who proudly resigns his job rather than write about a popular movie or genre of movies - say, movies based on comic books. Would we think that guy was a hero, or kind of an asshole? Wouldn't we point to great film critics who have written favorably or unfavorably about blockbuster popcorn flicks and found insightful aesthetic and social analyses there? If you're being told what to say by your editors, that is cause to make a stand; if you're being asked to cover a major phenomenon in your field, that's the job, bucko. Granted, in the more flush past of newspapering, you'd probably have been able to slough off lower-status assignments to the junior critic, and today there usually is no junior critic. And nothing against Tatangelo making life choices that make him happier. But there's a boon to critics being pushed out of their aesthetic habits to observe what's happening out in what remains of the mainstream - it gives us the function of conducting that cross-conversation about common cultural objects that those lamenters of the semi-mythical, semi-extinct monoculture say they miss.
Whether we jumped or were pushed, then, the shift towards pop actually helps answer the substantive question of what professional critics are for, not just the marketing one. Ideally the "end of criticism" could be more like the end of thumbs-up, three-stars-out-of-the-crab-nebula reviewing (or rather its migration to the amateurs and Metacritic) and the renewal of engaged cultural journalism.
That sounds rather over-saturated in rosy hues, of course, but see for example my colleague Robert Everett-Green's new series in response to the fooforaw over the reduction of "classical" music on CBC Radio 2, where he takes a step back and says (in chorus with this weekend's festival at Harbourfront, about which more later), well then, "What is 'classical'?" (and whatever it is, why is the government obliged to provide it a radio station?).
It's a superb corrective that makes me very glad Robert's back from his couple of months on leave - but it's also indicative of the value of the pro-pop realignment: I wouldn't call Robert a "poptimist," but as someone with an extensive high-culture background and leanings, he probably wouldn't have had the same perspective if he'd been born a generation or two earlier; as it is, though, he (like, say, The New Yorker's Alex Ross) is able to appreciate and advocate for music in all its messy, unpigeonholeable, crosspollinated complexity. If you're for that, dial in and press "2."
General | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, July 27 at 4:46 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (15)
Matmos and Leprechaun Catering:
Their Minds Are Not For Rent/ To God or Government
Great set last night by Matmos at the Music Gallery, as always, though certainly less of a spectacle than their usual inanimate-(or animate)-object-sampling, cabinet-of-wonders performances, due to the "no microphones" constraint on their new synthesizer-celebrating album Supreme Balloon.
Drew Daniel & Martin ("MC") Schmidt of Matmos are aware that nobody wants to sit and watch someone play a laptop for two hours, so they had plenty of video and a few ritual physical acts and other shenanigans to keep the optic nerve sated while the ears drank in the sounds. For 'zample, I'm not all that aurally enamoured of the long mesmeric title track, with which they closed the show, but it perfectly suits the psych-out op-art film they showed along with it of expanding dots and planets and seas, and the other dancey, crunchy, noisy, spacey tunes and acts of telepathy and numerology all came off dreamily.
The encore was especially fun - I assume it was improvised, as Martin went off to the dormant piano in the back corner of the church, pounding out some classical riffs that Drew then sampled and turned into a noise symphony that toyed with our spatial perceptions of the sources of the sounds.
My only real complaint is that it was the wrong encore: How dare they play Toronto without playing the new disc's tribute to our own experimental-animation-and-direct-sound proto-homocore king Norman McLaren, Exciter Lamp & the Variable Band, which contains a round-the-bend cover of O Canada. (See video below.)
However, that was compensated by tourmates Leprechaun Catering from Baltimore (where Matmos now live, as Drew's become a professor at John Hopkins). The openers named each of the pieces in their noisy, mad-laboratory improvised set with titles that acronym to "Toronto" ("Tits on Reindeer Offer Nourishment to Offspring," for instance, but my favourite was "Therefore, Our Rap Operas Need Tighter Oratorios"; I couldn't help spending much of the set trying to come up with more - my best was, "Teach Old Rover One New Trick, Okay?").
And they topped that off by playing a Theremin-led cover of Rush's Tom Sawyer (with Drew acting as "human microphone stand" because a metal microphone stand will fuck up your Theremin's mojo) - I dearly hope someone will post it on YouTube (like maybe that guy sitting in front of me who spent the entire show watching it through the little screen on his digital camera, taking 30-second clips - why bother coming to the concert if you'd much prefer watching it on a four-inch TV?): As Gallery programmer/host Jonny Dovercourt put it, "We stand on guard for Lee."
Please read the very funny and informative Matmos interview transcript posted by Zoilusian protegé Chris Randle on his rival blog.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 22 at 6:21 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
More on 'Missing the Monoculture'
This Toronto Star story yesterday by Ryan Bigge jumps off from a Zoilus post awhile back to consider the fate of the monoculture, covering a lot of ground along the way, from the lack of a recognized "summer hit" this year to the "loudness wars" to the "long tail" to an intriguing study by David Huron I want to look up, about whether non-western music is becoming more dominated by western harmonies (gives the term "global harmony" a decidedly more sinister twist).
You could try refuting Bigge with three little words: "The Dark Knight." But I think this idea that there is no middle ground between monoculturalism and alienated uncommunicating tribes is also at fault - in fact, I'd set Bigge up against this piece on "cross-genre covers" by Jonah Weiner on Slate last week, to argue that they each show up the flaws in each others' cases: First, if you want to find the sweet spot of majoritarianism in our culture, just look at, say, what teen country-pop star Taylor Swift chooses to cover in concert: Lose Yourself by Eminem (as seen above), Irreplaceable, Umbrella - these are all big singalong moments for an audience that's not expected to be an R&B/hip-hop audience. But of course we're all in that audience, whether we buy the record or not - sometimes less willingly, of course, the way we're all in the Katy Perry audience this summer. But we're not only in that audience - most people are also part of some niche audience. The monoculture has turned into more of a wheel with many spokes, but it still has a hub. Cross-genre covers are one of the ways that multivalent quality is now expressed.
Of course, Weiner is mostly criticizing the "propensity for condescension" in the cross-genre cover - ie., what used to be known as the "ironic cover." But as I argue in the chapter of my book called "Let's Do a Punk Cover of My Heart Will Go On", the ironic cover has been passing from fashion as openness and omnivorism have become the cooler cultural model. Part of my own turnaround on late-90s teenpop came from hearing Richard Thompson doing an acoustic cover of Oops, I Did It Again done with real respect for the songwriting craft involved. (Notice in the concert video how the crowd laughs at first - and how Thompson pays no mind to that laughter at all, just boring into the song until he's produced an entirely different kind of pleasure at the end. You often see that pattern with cross-genre covers today.) Weiner mentions John Darnielle's version of Ignition (Remix) without noting that the Mountain Goat does it in a medley with Thin Lizzy's The Boys Are Back in Town, which is clearly an attempt to draw connections across different continents of the musical map. So there may not be any overpowering single sector of the culture now, but there is a dominant mode - and that mode is connection. And when you think of it that way - that what we have in common is this process of placing things in relation, discovering what they have in common - it doesn't leave me "missing the monoculture" much at all.
Later: Oh, and I meant to add that for a neat example of the advantages of connection - what you might call the monoculture's transformation into "interculture" - read Josh Kun's excellent NYT feature from Sunday on Shawn Kiene, an American country fan who's morphed into "El Gringo," and eventually may help introduce the sounds known as "Mexican Regional" and norteno to anglo audiences in the States.
Such stories are Josh's specialty, as evidenced in his work directing the Norman Lear Center's Popular Music Project and in his book, Audiotopia.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, July 21 at 5:58 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Woah, oh, oh, we're counting to four
This has been everywhere, of course, but why not here, too? The thing about the Sesame Street remake of Feist's hit is that it seems like a revelation of the real nature of the song - it's always been a counting song (a form found all over the world - music and math being a natural marriage). It was just disguised as a love song. So the self-parody is an improvement, as if the original version had just been an excuse to get to this point.
Of course, you can't go too wrong when you put Sesame Street, music and counting together:
That last was the Pointer Sisters. And that's not even getting into the oeuvre of the Count. Meanwhile, since we're at it: Philip Glass does Sesame Street (from either 1977 or 1979, depending who you ask):
Seventies Sesame Street is one of the few things capable of making me feel positively overcome with nostalgia - like, chloroformed with a nostalgia-soaked rag. Congratulations to Leslie for joining that great lineage.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 15 at 4:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (11)
All the Young Dave Matthews Dudes
(Were Not at the Alejandro Escovedo Show)
(Plus: RIP Schroer; Polaris noms)
When Alejandro Escovedo asked the crowd at the Mod Club last night whether any of us had seen him opening on the last Dave Matthews Band tour, he seemed surprised (and a bit amused) to find that not a single soul in the club had. Clearly it's reasonable for a performer to hope and expect that a crossover experience like that will bring new fans to their own shows, but Dave Matthews isn't as big a deal in Canada as he is south of the border, and the people who go to DMB shows aren't that likely to come to the Mod Club - despite it being a larger venue than anywhere else Alejandro's played in Toronto (I used to see him at Ted's Wrecking Yard, and he reminisced from the stage about playing the Ultrasound, which predates me), the sizable crowd last night was just the accumulated result of a slow building love affair between Alejandro and Toronto.
I wonder what he'd have done differently if he'd known. The set list and style of the performance last night was very much in summer-rock, even jam-bandish mode, with a lot of emphasis on guitar solos. Lead guitarist David Pulkingham certainly has the chops for the job, but he's more of a stylistic chameleon - while he can switch from blues bruising to flamenco-ish classical guitar, he doesn't make his own stamp on the music. Whereas when Alejandro plays even the simplest lick, it rings with his soulfulness. You could almost feel him urging Pulkingham on to reach in deeper, but I think he's too gentle a guy to play the disciplinarian. The cost, for me, was a much less emotionally moving show than I've ever gotten from Alejandro, who usually leaves me buzzing with feelings. But I couldn't really complain about the closing round of covers, exuberant versions of All the Young Dudes, Beast of Burden and I Wanna Be Your Dog that sent us out glowing into the summer heat. And it did get me excited about his new record - Real Animal, which chronicles his musical life from his days in the Nuns in San Francisco (opening for the Sex Pistols) through twang-rock bands of the 80s to days living in the Chelsea Hotel and then the Austin scene of the 1990s, people loved and lost, and so on.
I'll look forward to the next time he returns on his own, or with a string trio, or one of his other many versatile combinations, rather than the showbizzed-up version we saw last night. Although that may be awhile, since his recent very conspicuous endorsement by Bruce Springsteen might keep him in the arena-rock, er, arena for a while yet. (It's got to be a lot less painful than his last high-profile media appearance - getting the nod from George W Bush for his song "Castanets," which Alejandro said last night kept him from playing the song for a while.)
Much else to talk about - the death of Oliver Schroer. Owen (Final Fantasy) Pallett dropped me a line over the weekend to say how sad he was about his fellow violinist's death, and lamenting that Schroer's explorations weren't the kind that tend to attract Internet-music-fan attention; read the lovely final-days interview with Diane Flacks from the Toronto Star last week. And then of course there are the Polaris nominations - I'm half-tempted to rage against the outcome, but I'm afraid the leaning towards broadly appealing, smart youth rock (as opposed to non-rock genres, as well as pricklier rock sounds) is a product of the process that's involved in the Polaris, which I'm beginning to think is, well, perhaps too democratic for the award's good (imho).
The winner will depend on the makeup of the final 11-judge panel, of course, but if I were to bet now? I'd say Caribou.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 08 at 1:31 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Calgartopia Riseth?
"There was no pre-existing culture for us, really, so we had to make it up. And since no artists can afford houses here, we had to basically build an imaginary castle that's based on music and art."
"My friend in Edmonton claims everyone there is jealous of how connected the Calgary scene is. Even if you don't like each other's music, there's this mutual support and respect that's really incredible."
Shows in churches, autonomous festivals, proliferating side projects, inventing your own culture... It's striking how much the Calgary musicians that Sarah Liss talks to in this week's Eye sound like Toronto musicians four years ago. It makes sense - Toronto was going through a wave of high-speed gentrification etc. in the early 2000s that seemed to call for a critical-creative response; Calgary's gone through a hyperwarp version of such processes the past couple of years that would also breed urges to express another perspective. It's good to be reminded that it's not as monolithic as easterners sometimes think. Go, alt-Calgary!
Meanwhile a few of us old Torontopian hands were chatting last night about how we haven't kept up so much with new happenings (new bands, in particular) since that moment semi-passed - at first consciously displeased with the more homogeneous stuff that seemed to be emerging, and then just distracted. It's like the Grade 8s who snub the Grade 7s but simply don't know the Grade 6ers. So I'm going to try to make a few field trips to other corners of the playground in the next month. Anybody want to recommend newish acts (defined as having surfaced since, say, early 2007) that I should make a point of hearing, ideally ones that aren't just catchy indie-pop?
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, July 03 at 3:45 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (13)
They Can't Get On His System 'Cuz His System Is The Solar
Plus: Bishop Bros. Revisited
As several people have noted, cover of Lil Wayne's new album implies
a claim to monumental status with obvious visual reference to Nas's Illmatic and Biggie's Ready to Die.
My review of Tha Carter III - the new Lil Wayne album, if'n you've been living under a rock (or, perhaps, inside a rock-music bubble) - was in The Globe and Mail today. I repent a little bit of the claim that Wayne has talent instead of "drive" - you don't put out all the material he does if you don't have drive, although I meant that he doesn't give the same impression of career-micromanagement that a typical pop star does, that he's a lot more spontaneous. Likewise "friendliness" is a subjective call - his giggly megalomania is kind of personable though it's also kind of offputting - and he does seem to have cleaned up his look a little bit for record-promo season, compared to his usual I-slept-in-the-studio raggedy-ass look. Writers: See where going for an easy joke when you're right on deadline gets you? Take a lesson. But the point stands, I think: Wayne doesn't preen and doesn't try to seem user-friendly in the usual star manner. And that is of course another way of being a star, the don't-give-a-shit iconoclastic way.
I didn't have space in the review to get into another point about Wayne's use of the "alien" persona, especially in Phone Home, which is the way that he's invoking what Deepak Mehmi (at the recent Canadian conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music) has called "the metaphorical Afronaut" in hip-hop, a trope others have noted in jazz (Sun Ra being the classic example), funk (George Clinton with his Mothership) and techno (all over the placed). It's the Afro-Futurism theme, the "sonic fiction," as Kodwo Eshun has called it, of black people as alien beings - or at least of particular black artists as being so far-out - and not really "of" the world they come from - that they are like alien beings. This self-exoticization is a sort of reclaiming and reversal of the treatment of talented black people as freaks, and I wish I'd discussed it in my review because my discussion of him as a wildly atypical pop star could be critiqued as falling into the exoticization trap too. But I think that Wayne is very deliberately raising and promoting this image, just as Clinton and Sun Ra did, because it can be a liberating place to operate. By freeing himself of his context he frees himself of rules and expectations. (Unlike Ra or Clinton, though, he does try to have it both ways by keeping up his New Orleans bonafides, especially since the hurricanes, another rich vein of contradiction to explore with Wayne.)
I also didn't talk - because I was writing for a Globe audience that I wanted to convince to give Wayne a chance, and not provide an excuse for them to ignore him - about the sexism you do still hear all over Carter 3, with its alternate greed for and sneering dismissal of "pussy" in track after track, one of the lazy places Wayne lapses into when he doesn't have enough else to say. It's what I meant when I talked about the "garbage" that sometimes bobs in the stream of his flow. For instance in A Milli: "The bible told us every girl was sour/
Don't play in her garden and don't smell her flower." The rumours about Wayne's sexuality make these moments especially ambiguous - touching the forbidden issue of gay males and misogyny - but at the same time he's of course always posing as this indomitable cocksman, like any other rapper but with an extra dose of protest-too-much. Not that I have a clue whether or not Wayne is gay, but if he is and could just go ahead and say so, he would certainly be vouchsafing the fearless individuality he's always asserting - though you can also imagine him not wanting his freakiness to be reduced down to his orientation, too. That's how I figure it with Missy Elliot, for instance, though she certainly doesn't strain as hard to disguise things.
And that's not even getting into the very-hard-to-parse political speechifying in the closing track. All that said, though, the album's maddening and marvelous, though I'm still waiting to compare it to the new Nas (which it probably outstrips) and the upcoming Andre 3000 (which it may well won't).
Meanwhile, I never got around to my promised report on the Bishop brothers (ex-Sun City Girls) concert in Toronto last week. It was a funny one: The show was divided into two parts, the first of which didn't connect much with the audience, to the Bishops' obvious frustration: The first set was mostly the misanthropic murder, blasphemy and incest-themed hillbilly-styled songs that have always been a part of the SCG repertoire, especially the Beat-styled nihilism of the late third Girl, Charles Gocher, to whose memory this tour is dedicated. While there are points where those songs' gonzo intensities can't help but be amusing and occasionally even visionary in their surreal violence and such, a lot of it depends on a shock value that by this point seems pretty threadbare and adolescent. Maybe some of the anti-religious stuff hits home better south of the border, where everyone feels more impinged upon by the fundamentalists, but in Toronto it's hard to work up a sweat about it. On top of that, we were in an art gallery where the strongest drink on hand was soda pop, so we didn't get the drunken-yahoo fun out of it that probably happened at more bacchanalian Sun City Girls shows of yore. (Alan Bishop took all this as a sign that Torontonians are the same cross-their-arms-and-judge types as New Yorkers, as he saw it, and there's no doubt something to that - but as he found out when he started making fun of Canadian bands, especially Rush, we weren't a crowd averse to humour - he just hadn't found our funny bones yet.)
A sizable chunk of the crowd left after that unfortunately (some of them, I know, understandably enough were racing over to the Tranzac to catch the final Silt show). But as Alan promised before the break, they came back with their guitars in different tuning, ready to "sell out all over the place and make you love us." Selling out for the Bishops turned out to mean playing their fantastic pastiches of blues and global music in oceanic acoustic-guitar duets, kind of an extended series of variations on Zeppelin's Kashmir but with wider ethnomusicological sensibility and some ear-scouring, very impressive vocals from Alan in semi-Arabic and African tones. (It's worth remembering that the Bishops are of Lebanese heritage, so they have deeper connections to this music too.) A lot of it was beautiful - with a little comic relief in the fact that Alan broke guitar strings in nearly every song, and in one case two of them, which is even more notable when you realize (as Richard later pointed out) that he started out playing with five strings instead of six because, he said, he was inevitably going to break the top string anyway, so why bother? Richard (who as "Sir Richard Bishop" has been doing a lot of solo, instrumental-guitar records and tours in recent years) didn't break a single string in the same time.
It's too bad that they didn't mix the two sets up over the course of the evening - the naughty novelty songs would have been easier to enjoy if they'd just been interspersed among the more musically compelling ones. Sure, that would have required that they tour with an extra set of guitars (because of the different tunings), but it would be worth the effort. I was a little let down too that there wasn't more of a sense of theatre to the show - at one point Alan did get up and scatter some powder around the room, including on audience members' heads, without identifying it; while it looked like cocoa the buzz was that it was Charlie Gocher's ashes (I doubt it, but who knows?). It's tough to live down your own legend, even when it's a legend only a handful of people have ever heard, and while this was not at all the psychic journey that the storied Sun City Girls shows of the 1980s and 1990s were, I was very happy in the end that I got to witness it.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, June 24 at 10:02 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (19)
Polaris Top 40 Announced
Still in the maw of distraction, but didn't want to let this innovation in the Polaris Prize process go unmentioned. Instead of just announcing the nominees, the Canadian best-album prize - judged by critics and broadcasters (including yours truly), sponsored by Rogers and carrying a $20,000 purse - is now spreading the love (and publicity bump) around by making public the 40 strongest contenders in pre-voting by the entire jury pool: We each chose 5 albums released between June 1/07 and May 31/08. The most frequently mentioned (and highest ranked) got onto the long list. This allows for strategic voting - we can (but are not obliged to) replace or re-rank the no-hopers on our ballots in order to elevate the prospects of favourite up-and-comers.
Here it is in alphabetical order - just think, an extra month to complain about jury bias and imbalance! For the record, four of my five picks made the list, the exception being The Reveries' Matchmakers Vol. 1: The Music of Willie Nelson. I'm left wishing I'd made my jazz/improv selection more strategically - perhaps I could have boosted Feuermusik or David Buchbinder's Odessa/Havana over the wall. At least Sandro Perri is there representing the improvising massive (arguably along with Thee Silver Mt Zion and Socalled's sui generis disc Ghetto Blaster which crosses four or five genres). Perri would be my no. 1 were it not for the true object of my upcoming lobbying efforts, Veda Hille's This Riot Life.
At quick glance hip-hop, electronic, country-folk and francophone representation all seems to be improving; harder rock/emo get some 'spect, but not hardcore or metal; pop music registers not at all unless you count City and Colour. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell likewise draw blanks. Regional balance doesn't look too shabby: Someone do the math - which city's musical cuisine reigns supreme? And who the hell is Gatineau?
Finally, sympathies to the unheard and unsung. Remember, there is joy in being barred from the temple.
2008 Polaris Music Prize Long List (alphabetical)
The Acorn, Glory Hope Mountain
Attack In Black, Marriage
Black Mountain, In The Future
Born Ruffians, Red, Yellow and Blue
Buck 65, Situation
Basia Bulat, Oh, My Darling
Cadence Weapon, Afterparty Babies
Cancer Bats, Hail Destroyer
Caribou, Andorra
City And Colour, Bring Me Your Love
Constantines, Kensington Heights
Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles
Destroyer, Trouble In Dreams
Fred Eaglesmith, Tinderbox
Kathleen Edwards, Asking For Flowers
Christine Fellows, Nevertheless
Gatineau, Gatineau
Hayden, In Field And Town
Veda Hille, This Riot Life
Hilotrons, Happymatic
Holy Fuck, LP
Islands, Arm's Way
Karkwa, Le volume du vent
Corb Lund, Horse Solider! Horse Soldier!
The New Pornographers, Challengers
Pas Chic Chic, Au Contraire
Sandro Perri, Tiny Mirrors
Plants And Animals, Parc Avenue
Ghislain Poirier, No Ground Under
Protest The Hero, Fortress
Justin Rutledge, Man Descending
Sadies, New Seasons
Shad, The Old Prince
Socalled, Ghetto Blaster
Stars, In Our Bedroom After The War
Tegan And Sara, The Con
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band, 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons
Two Hours Traffic, Little Jabs
The Weakerthans, Reunion Tour
Wintersleep, Welcome To The Night Sky
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, June 12 at 2:37 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (9)
Watching the Ripples
Salif Keita, in Toronto as part of the jazz festival on June 29.
Sorry for the spate of radio silence. I've been playing three-dimensional deadline chess all week with various competing assignments. Meanwhile, though, locals might like to know that NXNE and Jazz Festival listings can now be found in the gig guide. If we've missed anything (NXNE's website is a nightmare, and the Jazz Fest's is good but huge) just holler.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, June 11 at 4:23 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Bloody Momofuku Asshole
That title's misleading - this post isn't really railing at anybody - but I couldn't resist combining the names of Elvis Costello's latest album and an earlier Martha Wainwright EP, as I have reviews of both their terrific new records today in The Globe and Mail.
Supplemental notes: Momofuku finds Costello (hanging out with Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley as well as his own old mates in the Imposters) in his most incisive mood in a long while, much more of a return to form to my ears than When I Was Cruel or Brutal Youth (though they're both good records) - though much more a return to the form of, say, Spike or Blood and Chocolate than to his first four or five records, a do-no-wrong streak people ought to stop measuring him by. Bob Dylan's made some great records since 1970 but it verges on impossible for him to touch Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde, because that was all about how Dylan's energy and creativity fit into and altered the spirit of its time. You can't assess stuff like that "purely" as songs and performances, aside from context and pure newness, and the same goes for albums like My Aim Is True and Armed Forces, I'd say.
As a side note, because Elvis is among other things one of the biggest music nerds ever to become a pop star (sorta) himself, there's a fascinating historical background to one of the songs on Momofuku, called "Stella Hurt." (You can stream it, with the rest of the album, on the Lost Highway site.) Rather than simply one of Costello's fictional or composite characters (like "Veronica" in his hit with Paul McCartney), Stella Hurt was a real person, the final married name of a forgotten jazz singer of the 1930s and 1940s once known as Teddy Grace - she's in the centre photo above, and you can read her rather sad tale in this article from The Oxford American by Derek Jenkins (though its real hero is New York jazz/blues-collector David McCain, who tracked down the former singer in a nursing home just months before she died and got her story). I have little doubt that Costello read the OA story and his wordplay-loving mind could not resist the aptness of Stella's fall from Grace to Hurt.
The other review is of Martha Wainwright's new, second (but it might as well be first) album, I Know You're Married, But I've Got Feelings Too, whose title (like that of her Bloody Motherfucking Asshole EP) encapsulates its dominantly rueful mood - but not nearly all of its moods, as this is a beautifully rounded record. My review might be a bit overboard in its enthusiasm, but it's such a pleasure to find a performer I first heard a decade ago singing her collegiate compositions on guitar in little Montreal cafes finally making the record she's long had in her, one with the potential to win thousands, even millions of hearts, that I don't feel the slightest apologetic about shouting it to the skies.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, June 02 at 10:24 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (12)
Love Don't Change
Tonight marks the release of Eric Chenaux's latest album, Sloppy Ground, a lovely term for its main subject matter, which Eric describes as not the beginning or the ending but the middle of love - the main part, that is, but the most overlooked, the part for which we need much more music: the "ever after" that follows the closing clinch of the courtship dance. There's a nice interview with Eric in Eye today too. Meanwhile Eric's frequent collaborator Ryan Driver (of Deep Dark United, Silt, Reveries, etc) has his first solo album, enticingly titled Feeler of Pure Joy, coming out on home-base label Rat-drifting. (Both releases are celebrated tonight with a show at Wrongbar in Toronto.)
Additional Thursday reading: David Dacks has a perspicacious survey of the new generation of Toronto soul on AOL Canada of all places.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, May 29 at 2:01 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
I Miss the Tyrant
The most quotable quote from this year's EMP Pop Conference was probably Robert Christgau confessing, "I miss the monoculture" - that storied (and arguably mythic) time when "everyone" listened to the same songs, watched the same shows, and so on. A similar sentiment animated the TVO's Studio 2 The Agenda panel I did in April, asking what ever happened to the big hits that "everybody" danced to.
Leave it to this week's Cat and Girl to provide the counterargument.
It makes me imagine a fable ending with this dialogue:
"I miss the tyrant," the old hero sighed.
"But you killed the tyrant!" his young disciples cried.
"At least under the tyrant," he replied, "we all knew who needed killing."
Okay, a fable or maybe a prog-rock song.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, May 28 at 1:11 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (9)
Starlet Sing-Off, Round 2
Since people seem to love arguing about Scarlett Johansson's Tom Waits covers album, let's extend the theme: The most frequent comparison raised (whether for or against S.J.) is Zooey Deschanel's duo with M. Ward in She & Him. It's hardly a one-to-one parallel, because Deschanel's nowhere near the household name that Johansson is - she's about M. Ward-level famous in movie terms (which means much more famous ... but you see the point).
But the one I've got my ear on is Jena Malone, partly because her musical pursuits don't seem so side-projecty (though a little self-indulgent/twee). She's not only writing her own songs, she's dropped her backup group (flying without the safety net of a "real musician" male partner) in favour of inventing her own "one-woman band" rig, The Shoe (see below). And last weekend she did a "treasure map tour" of L.A. with it. You can hear some of The Shoe's recent output at her MySpace. I'd give them at least a "promising," and notably I find I don't think about her status as "actress-singer" at all while I'm listening - I just listen the way I might to songs by any other young new artist. ... Arguably, of course, that is to be deprived of a pleasure rather than to gain one.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, May 27 at 3:57 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
The Sadies' Most Wanted
Toronto's pride The Sadies exercise a light-hearted version of YouTubin' vigilante justice by posting this security-cam footage of some asshole breaking into their van and grabbing their GPS unit, and the group's discovery of the theft, all given a Dukes of Hazzard-esque rollicking soundtrack. If only cameras were on the spot more often when bands' instruments and gear get ripped off, but that's usually from the back alley behind some club. The video's very funny-sad - them Sadies never met a lemon they couldn't turn into a bourbon sour. If you do recognize the perp in these pics, let their management know.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, May 26 at 1:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Rocks On!
(Concrete Toronto Music)
"We wanted to encourage the musicians to explore the true meaning of musique concrete, which is to make music using non-traditional musical sounds," says Bunce. "You don't have to have studied Pierre Schaeffer at university to do that. ... That's one of the reasons why we wanted to approach minimal techno and noise artists. There is a sense of 'ugly beauty' to those styles of music, which corresponds to the way a lot of people feel about brutalist architecture. ... In terms of a real concrete experiment, [noise artist] Knurl will be [using contact mics on] actual concrete and cement! I'm really curious to see how that will go over with the family crowd at the Science Centre."
That's a quote from Sarah Liss's piece today in Eye weekly about the Concrete Toronto Music shows this Sunday and next, co-curated by Zoilus and the Music Gallery. (And tomorrow, I'll post my answers to Sarah's questions, which came too late for her to use.)
Plus: For those who missed this year's FIMAV festival in Victoriaville, John Kelman at All About Jazz catches us up. (Below, the semi-reunited Art Bears.)
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, May 22 at 4:50 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Scarlett Letter
For the first time in a while, I have a record review in The Globe and Mail today, of the new Scarlett-Johansson-sings-Tom-Waits joint, Anywhere I Lay My Head. It is not a positive review. I still like her in movies though.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, May 20 at 4:31 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (34)
Yon Ferrets Return
Strange synchronicities: It seems that just as my book about Celine Dion and "good vs bad taste" came out, a bunch of contemporary dancers in London and Berlin were undertaking exactly the same project - in live dance and YouTube video form. From looking at their site, there are no hints that they know about the book, but I definitely must get in touch with them. I'm so taken with what they're doing, at least at first sight, that I don't feel the urge to respond more criticially-analytically, but perhaps later.
Other gleanings from all over:
- It's a few weeks old but I've just discovered this podcast on the making of Veda Hille's This Riot Life, the amazingliest record of 2008. If you have not heard it, you have been wasting your year, friend.
- In further Hille-related news, she did some music for a show currently playing at the Factory Theatre in Toronto, Theatre Replacement's Sexual Practices of the Japanese, which is enough recommendation for me (along with all the good reviews).
- If you want to follow the R. Kelly trial, WBEZ in Chicago is doing a daily blog, but also opened with a smart set-up essay on the race-gender-celebrity-perversity-etc. codes that will make this particular merry-go-round spin. If you would rather not follow said trial, I cannot blame you.
- The Guardian blog makes a zippy argument that all the ridiculousness of rock is being hoarded by metal and that the rest of music ought to go back and claim its rightful share of ridiculousness (which is what we love R. Kelly for, no?). But that piece also reminded me that I wanted to recommend to you the new issue of Mike McGonigal's great art-music-what-have-you zine Yeti, which includes a more indepth and emotionally stirring and funnier celebration of black metal by esquire Scott Seward (adapted from his 2007 EMP Pop Conference presentation). Yeti also always comes with an ear-scouring compilation CD.
- There's another fun mix in the current issue of Esopus magazine, in which Neko Case & Carl Newman (of the New Pornographers), Marnie Stern, Busdriver and others were asked to find a "good news" clipping in the paper and write a song about it. (The Case/Newman entry provides this post's headline.) You can listen to the results online.
- Finally, let's all go to this concert. (I hear rumours that the Ex might bring a similar bill to Toronto someday - but not in '08.)
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, May 16 at 3:49 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
May 25 & June 1: Zoilus presents
Concrete Toronto Music!
The month is flying by and I've neglected to tell you that a week from Sunday (May 25) as well as the Sunday after (June 1), Zoilus and the Music Gallery are presenting two versions of a special show called Concrete Toronto, first at the Polish Combatants' Hall and then at the Ontario Science Centre (with a bus going up from downtown).
This extravaganza is part of the Soundaxis festival and performers include CCMC (Michael Snow, Paul Dutton and John Oswald) (May 25 only), Sandro (Polmo Polpo) Perri with Tony (Great Lakes Swimmers) Dekker, Greg J Smith & Neil Wiernik (aka "naw"), Knurl, and composer Erik Ross presenting a new work (with some text by yours truly) with performers Carla Huhtanen (voice) and Wallace Halladay (sax). There will be visual projections and the like too.
As the writeup sez: "Concrete Toronto Music is a concert of original new music, created by Toronto composers and musicians, in response to Toronto's Concrete Architecture, as catalogued in the 2007 book Concrete Toronto (ERA Architects/Coach House Books). Many iconic buildings, such as City Hall and the Ontario Science Centre, used concrete as their primary material during the building frenzy that gave expression to the growth of Toronto in the decades of the 1950s to the 1970s. The Music Gallery has commissioned a significant handful of Toronto-based composers and musicians to create new works that pay tribute to Toronto's concrete legacy, experiment with concrete's mutability and explore these buildings' role in the city's psychogeography."
Complete details at the Music Gallery site.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, May 14 at 5:54 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Goodnight Mr. Rauschenberg
Painter, sculptor, assembler, composer, choreographer ... Robert Rauschenberg died last night at 82. Rauschenberg helped pry open a lot of the space "between art and life" that's been central to my own interests, influencing happenings, Fluxus, performance, participatory, conceptual (although he said he "never used ideas") and other art movements. A moment of noise (he wasn't much one for silences!) in his honour.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, May 14 at 1:09 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
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 | Linking Posts | Comments (8)
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 | Linking Posts | Comments (18)
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 | 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? ...]
Savaging rock just doesn't propel the songs anymore; though it still pops up here and there on Destroyer's Rubies, it's a side issue, as is the angry-young-man aspect in general. "I've been living in America in churches of greed," Dan sings on the new album's Dark Leaves Form a Thread: "It's sick! No, it's cool." The theme of complicity lingers, in a more tragic, personalized register, but with a maturity that is "perfectly at home with this dread."
It's something Destroyer's been arching towards all along, I think - just as the "arrogant" avoidance of direct contact with the audience in live shows had more to do with wanting to offer something otherly-sincere to cliched rock-show behaviour but finding, until recently, his only alternative was awkward discomfort. Similarly, the Bejarian attack mode is often more reactionary/defensive than other aspects of the writing (though redeemed by its sense of humour), and I think it's gradually receding.
It still seems odd to say Destroyer has convinced you that rock's a farce and so you've lost interest in him unless you've actually lost interest in all other rock, too. I suppose you could argue that it's hypocrisy or something, but as I argued in my previous post I think the hypocrisy is precisely the point: Destroyer is an ongoing drama about a guy struggling with his purist urges and ambitions, about falling from grace and then wondering if the place you've fallen is actually more full of grace than was your previous lofty perch.
Michael also says: "The more I immerse myself in the ongoing Destroyer discography, the more I think he's just making fun of me and every other pretentious asshole who wants their music to 'mean' something. ... But why would you ever bother being that verbose if you actually don't have anything to say? What kind of a poet, other than a self-declared con artist, would claim that his choice of words is entirely arbitrary and devoid of intent?"
I find Michael's example, the lines "you've been wandering around/ you've been fucking around," weird (what is arbitrary and meaningless about those words? they could have been written by Paul Westerberg), but I realize that's how a lot of people react to Dan's lyrics and what he's said about them. Still, asking a writer to explain what they've written seems to me either to suggest that they've failed in writing it - that it isn't sufficent unto itself - or that the reader/listener isn't willing to bring their own interpretive and emotional apparatus to bear on it, to cooperate in the making of meaning.
It's a big misunderstanding to think the claim that lines of verse have no paraphrasable meaning - no sense that can be restated in other words without abandoning their precision and their multiple layers of meaning - implies that they are "arbitrary and devoid of intent."
Dan probably has sewn confusion with some of his sloppier answers to interview questions, but he's never been more clear on that score than in this discussion with Grayson Currin of North Carolina's Independent Weekly. The whole thing (which includes chat about the origins of songs like "Foam Hands" and "The State" - "I'm pretty sure that song is about political torture in some ways, and in other ways, it's just about a girl") is worth reading, but particularly this passage:
Q. Are there times when you discover what may be a new meaning for a song years after you've written it?
A. I guess it's possible, but usually I do that with the overall, as in, "What was I trying to get it, making that record sound the way it did?" As far as writing goes, I don't really have the same view of meaning as maybe some people do. ... [Every] single line in every single song means exactly what it says when it says it. That's how I generate meaning, just by trying to find the perfect word to follow the perfect word that came before it so that the next perfect word... I'm not saying that Destroyer songs are perfect, but I have this idea in my head of what ideal musical writing sounds like. I just try to get close to it.
As far as what the song is about, [it's not] I say one thing but really it's about my dog that went missing. Or I say "Blue flower, blue flame," but what I'm really talking about is the river behind my house. That shit doesn't exist. Meaning to me is whatever abundance of emotion I can create by saying something.
Q: So you don't mean a phrase like "blue flower, blue flame" to be any bigger than its exact meaning?
A: No, I don't. There's no code. There's no hidden veil. There's nothing behind the curtain of these words. It's just like notes, you know? I feel like the languages have to be cut some slack, just like the melody or a really awesome drum fill or a swell of strings, it kind of means the same things as those words mean. It's hard to get your head around that, I guess, because we generally try to communicate ideas and concepts with words. When we say "Pass the salt," we want someone to give us salt. When you're making art, there's no salt to be passed. It's just a mystery, right? It's just like "pass me..." - "create a mystery for me."
I think that's what art is. It's this thing that gets made, and you don't know exactly why, but it just blows you away. When I read something and I really like it, I just have to put the book down for a second or a minute. It's the same sensation as someone knocking you over. You have to kind of brush yourself off and make sure that what happened happened. Maybe that's just me. Maybe that's not normal.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, April 28 at 3:41 PM | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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? ...]
To use an easy example, Brazilians in Rio's favelas are borrowing from American hip-hop and other foreign, commercial music when they make baile funk, but the result is still unquestionably local culture - which would be diminished if some cultural militants tried to push them to play sambas. Hip-hop and other music in Britain and the U.S. (such as M.I.A.'s) are in turn influenced by baile funk, and that's cultural process for you - and this kind of exchange, of course, goes pretty much all the way back in human history.
However, there are occasions when cultures need defense - in colonization, for example. Cultural preservation is urgent right now in New Orleans, for example, as Larry Blumenfeld illustrated in his moving and enraging talk at the EMP Pop Conference, reporting on cops cracking down on second-line parades and traditional jazz funerals, and musicians and other citizens passionately objecting.
Milder cases of gentrification, as with Mike's Disney Store, raise valid, though milder, concerns. There's a desirable midpoint between freezing things as they are (or seeking some fantasized "pure" past, as some cultural conservationists seem to desire) and just giving private capital a free (invisible) hand to decide on its own how a community or a city develops, no matter what the people without as much money need or want (the latter being what's often called "neo-liberalism").
But cultural influence runs in all directions: The world is not becoming flat and it's not becoming (white) American - it's a self-flattering assumption on the part of western critics to imagine that our cultures are so seductive and powerful that people are unable to resist succumbing. (Almost as self-flattering as it is among those crusaders and "freedom"-exporters who want that to be true.) Non-western and western cultures change each other, as do city and country, region and nation. Celine Dion's music implicitly recognizes such changes as both exciting and traumatic. People love her for her traditionalism and for her glitz, for her modernity and her anti-modernity.
On Friday, I was honoured to be part of a conversation on WNYC in New York's great Soundcheck program about the way music expresses and constructs personal (and group) identity, along with philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose work I admire. There's a great deal of overlap between my book and Appiah's Cosmopolitanism (so much so that it was often hard for me to add to what he had just said; understandably, he got the lion's share of the theoretical questions).
In retrospect I wish I had referred directly in the book to Appiah's praise of "contamination" - both our investigations have to do with letting yourself be contaminated while maintaining a sense of identity, how to assert strong values while being aware that they're deeply contingent on social context, and how to recognize commonalities while also respecting differences. That's what my post and my book were really about, though I don't know that even Appiah has reached a final synthesis. (Mike says "being curious and respectful of what other people like isn't the goal of criticism, but the base standard for responsible criticism," and of course I concur, but it's not nearly so widely practiced that way.)
Mike's other main objection to my post - part of a larger argument about how critics at places like the Pop Conference combine culture and politics - is that "to conflate 'adventurous art' and 'reproductive freedom' is ludicrous." He goes on to add, "You can never really 'win' an argument about the avant-garde. You can win an argument about abortion. And that's as it should be, because abortion policy has real, demonstrable consequences."
I can't fully answer here Mike's question about what the "consequences" of cultural actions are - as he says, it's "an entire field of study." But as I'm sure he knows, but doesn't say, a large part of that field no longer holds "that culture maintains the power relations in society by distributing the ruling class's dominant messages," because contamination occurs here too - culture also distributes resistant messages, audiences receive messages resistantly, and so forth. There are people who believe very strongly that the dominance outpowers the resistance, and other people who believe the reverse. As usual, I'm a both/and guy (though I have my more dour moments).
Nevertheless, Mike and I do disagree: Abortion beliefs, for example, are broadly culturally based, and much of the debate about them (like most values/ethics arguments, as Jonathan Haidt maintains) is backwards rationalization. A religious-versus-humanist dispute is seldom resolved by logical debate alone. "Winning" on abortion has more to do with how much social influence either side accumulates - not just political power but which one becomes more attractive and advantageous for people in various contexts to accept. Which isn't all that much unlike how social disputes over art - say, representation versus abstraction or swing jazz versus rock'n'roll - are "won."
Any "red/blue" map of political preference covers up more than it explains, but those patterns - the way social conservatism, religiosity and cultural conservatism tend to cluster, for example - do persist and have consequences. I use Pierre Bourdieu's work to discuss this in my book, but I like the way Appiah describes it - as "social scripts." Culture and politics are alike influenced by an implicit understanding of what "people like me" (or "people like what I want to be") are supposed to like and dislike, believe and disbelieve, not to mention what "people not like me" are figured to think and prefer. (Though the objects of approval or disapproval and the metrics that define social "likeness" are always reshuffling.)
To take another of Mike's examples, he says, "If a lot of people dislike gay marriage, that means a bunch of my friends can't get married. If a lot of people like Celine Dion, I occasionally get annoyed while in a department store. That's not just a difference of degree, but a difference of kind."
Sure, but it doesn't mean those forces are radically distinct from one another. Instead of Celine (who has gay-friendly associations, though you could argue that a lot of people see her in "family values" terms), let's talk about the effect of a lot of people liking, say, Ted Nugent - and another bunch of people having hostile notions about "people who like Ted Nugent." Let's say at a guess that the pro-Nugent crowd is more rural and the anti-Nugent crowd more "downtown." The pro-Nugent camp is not unaware of what the anti-Nugentites think of them. They're also aware that the folks downtown include a lot more gay people (at least openly) than they have in their neighbourhood. The Ted Nugent issue becomes a reason for them to think that homosexuals are not only weird but hostile to their own lifestyles, the ones echoed and expressed by Nugent's music.
The result? A lot of Mike's friends can't get married.
This is shorthand caricature, of course, but it's suggestive: Art matters politically in part because of its contribution to reinforcing and/or challenging social scripts - or enhancing social experiences in which those scripts are reinforced/challenged - in a way that debate can't. And politics affects art partly because it helps construct the social scripts that art draws upon and revises. Those scripts are collective creations, to which culture and politics both contribute, and they have collective impacts, of which culture and politics both partake.
(Of course art also matters in a lot of ways that are not political and have much less to do with identity, politics and social scripts. Likewise, little things like, say, money probably matter more than art to those processes. Mike is right to caution against "conflating" anything.)
Finally an aside to Frank Kogan, who says: " 'Everybody has false consciousness' and 'no one has false consciousness' are ridiculous statements, since there's nothing inherently false or inherently true about having a consciousness based on one's social experience and position."
Perhaps my tone wasn't sarcastic enough, but that's exactly what I meant by equating the two statements. I think "false consciousness" is in the same set of unhelpful, misdirecting concepts as "authenticity," which you could equally ascribe to everybody or to nobody.
(While I'm really happy to have Frank, a writer I greatly respect, participating in this argument, I wish he'd stop publicly characterizing my thinking as "terrible" without actually reading the work. It feels like turf defence.)
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, April 21 at 1:17 AM | 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 ...)
To make that argument, you have to overlook the amazing work many academics have contributed - including this year Katherine Meizel on "God Bless America" and "God Bless the U.S.A." and American civic religion; John Vallier on Christian "applied ethnomusicology" (that is, writing hymns in the style of local musical cultures as an evangelical gambit); Dan Thomas-Glass comparing Public Enemy and poet Lyn Hejinian's pauses, stresses and caesurae as figures of urban spatio-cultural gaps, in a hilarious fast-thinking power-point presentation; Tim Lawrence's bracing polemic on the way disco is left out of the story of the late 70s/early 80s downtown avant-art/music scene (with Arthur Russell as exhibit A); and Charles Hughes's lovely meditation on Sam Cooke, among others.
More significantly, you have to overlook the fact that many, many of the people who present at the Pop Conference are both academics and pop critics, including some all-stars like Joshua Clover (whose by-all-reports-mindblowing M.I.A. lecture, like many others, I missed on the Friday because I was holed up in my hotel room overcoming writer's block on my own talk), Oliver Wang, Elijah Wald, Daphne Brooks (whose Amy Winehouse paper, which again I missed, was named by many as the best piece in the conference), Daphne Carr, Will Hermes (whose paper on 70s NYC rhythm culture, from salsa to minimalism to hip-hop, dovetailed beautifully with Tim Lawrence's), Franklin Bruno, Greil Marcus and of course conference organizer Eric Weisbard himself.
By conference's end, Robert Christgau was surveying folks to see how many critics were doing academic work or knew other critics who either were combining the two fields or had switched over to academic work entirely. A comparison to poetry and fiction occurred to me - sometime, it seems in the '70s or '80s, there must have been a pivot point where the authors who made a living mainly from writing or from another sort of day job started to be outnumbered by writers who made their living as teachers, because that's how the economics and the culture had shifted. These days, it's almost surprising to meet a creative writer who is not in some way connected to the academic world (unless they work in the publishing field itself). Are we seeing the same thing happen with pop criticism, and indeed arts criticism in general?
For sure, the freelance environment has gotten harsher both economically and creatively, as the print medium is struggling to survive and most newspapers/magazines also have become less hospitable to long-form reviews and cultural journalism. Simultaneously the academic world has become more welcoming of pop-cultural discussion and studies (provided they're put through disciplinary filters, of course) - an opening partly owed to the way journalists and critics on film, music and TV built up intellectual cred for their forms over the past 40-plus years. The Pop Conference itself is a product of that crossover.
I don't want to leap to conclusions about the trend, but it's worth tracking.
Otherwise, I thought it was a strong conference. The opening panel suffered a bit from the decision to cross-promote with the EMP's (excellent, from the bits of it I saw) "American Sabor" exhibit on the history of Latino/Chicano/Hispanic (take your pick) contributions to U.S. pop music. It was great to hear the perspectives of Louie Perez from Los Lobos (whose testimony to the band's discovery and embrace of their "parents' music" was terrific), Raul Pacheco of Ozomatli, the amazing El Vez (Robert Lopez, fromerly of The Zeros, who connected punk outsiderness and Latino outsiderness) and younger L.A. musician Martha Gonzales of the band Quetzal (whose music I have to check out) as well as the scholars and curators.
But the tendency to continually refer back to the exhibition and debate its effectiveness and its set of terms really hobbled the discussion and prevented it from getting deeper into the core issue the panel began with, the dominance of the black music/white music binary in talk about American pop music and everything it erases. (It was great to learn that "Louie Louie" was actually based on a riff from a cha-cha sung by Ricky Martin's dad - I'm embarrassed not to have known before!)
What's more, and this made for an uncomfortable tension in the whole conference, it meant that the opening panel didn't succeed in framing the conference theme of "music, conflict and change." Of course the two subjects are related - any exploration of race/ethnicity, community and cultural history has to do with conflict and change - but there was a split throughout the program between the Latino/a-themed panels and papers and the ones squarely aimed at political-social content and context in music. There were a few points where they were juxtaposed, but it was a programming challenge that couldn't really be overcome.
Combine that with the fact that there were so many presentations this year - more than 160! - with four panels going on at once, most of the time, and it exacerbated a sense that there were several separate (albeit intersecting) conferences going on at once. While the inclusiveness is great, I still would prefer a somewhat smaller conference with less counterprogramming in the interest of what comes out of the conference, as a conversation that then continues in the days, months and years to come. When fewer conference-goers have heard the same papers, it's harder to have that conversation.
I don't want to come off as endorsing Christgau's "I miss the monoculture" proclamation (during his terrific John Mayer talk), but just as there is content to that sentiment, in yearning for a shared public culture that maybe never existed, I'd like the conference to combine its diversity with a strong sense of focus. (Which may mean that not all of the all-stars get to present every year - which might be a promotional obstacle but still seems the right road. That's what you call affirmative action, no?)
That said, I do think the "conflict and change" theme prompted people to sharpen up their arguments this year - there were more strong assertions and on-a-limb theories, along with the excellent research and analysis. For instance, in Jody Rosen's utterly ass-kicking talk on early 1900s vaudeville wild girl Eva Tanguay (which I hope becomes a book and a documentary and, hell, PBS series on vaudeville and the American experience), he didn't stop at asserting that she was the first-ever pop star (!) and that her all-but-forgotten influence can be traced in the styles and manners of female image-making and music-making alike well into the jazz age; he added that pop history has overlooked vaudeville's vital role in between minstrelsy and the age of recording, and that it's a distortion that needs to be addressed.
However, in my experience the stronger theses didn't lead to so many really lively, provocative Q&A sessions - maybe because the schedule was so packed that people were thinking more about where they were headed next, and also felt run a bit ragged?
I won't go into all the other fine work I saw and heard, let alone all that I missed. (Do a Google blog search on "Emp Conference" and you'll find a nice set of reports.) But despite my (I hope constructive) criticisms, it was a great conference. As always, I can't wait for next year.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, April 20 at 11:10 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
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 | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
What's the Matter with
(the Son of that Mom from) Kansas?
Baby Barack with his feminist-anthropologist mother, Stanley Ann Durham:
I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.
I'll get to that post-EMP Pop Con report (I discussed it this afternoon on CBC radio's show Q - the podcast should be posted here eventually) but first, I want to talk about the current Obama flap - because it raises some questions I really wanted to address in my book, but dropped for lack of space. (Maybe if I had, and if it's true that Obama's read some of it, all this could have been prevented!)
Obama's remarks are being overanalyzed, exploited, exaggerated and spun by the Clinton campaign and opportunistic pundits, but it really is a problem that the segment of the population that connects worst with Obama is older working-class white (and Latino) voters. It's not a question of policy - it's more credible to me that Obama would actively pursue policies that favour the disadvantaged than that Clinton would turn her back on her Wall Street and multinational business connections. (Though both of them are bullshitting on Nafta.) But Obama is the child not just of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya but also the child of a white bohemian feminist intellectual agnostic from Kansas (after all what other kind of white woman from Kansas married a black man from Kenya in 1961?). While she didn't come from wealthy stock, she wasn't exactly the meat-and-potatoes type - and her son is about as much from Kansas as he is from Oz.
Thankfully Obama doesn't pander and playact the way Wesleyan/Yale girl Hillary Clinton does, insecurely taking on phony accents, dropping her G's and pretending to be a gun-toting, God-fearing country gal, if that's the local atmosphere. I don't think anybody wants that. But Obama hasn't found an entirely effective alternative.
As several pundits have noted, his remarks are reminiscent of Tom Frank's thesis in What's the Matter with Kansas? - that the right wing has taken advantage of economic suffering in the "heartland" to encourage those voters to blame their problems on liberals and city people and immigrants and homosexuals, etc., rather than on the corporate and political elites who put them out of work. There's no doubt that Republicans and neo-con media do that. But the reason it works is not because they've brainwashed the public into acting against "their own interests." Overall, I suspect white working-class voters in deindustrializing areas are skeptical any politician is going to act in their economic interest. (On top of that, they are Americans, and they believe in individualism and capitalism.) However, their cultural interests weren't just imposed on them - they are long-standing parts of many people's identities and communities, and if they become more defensive and "cling" to them in hard times, that's an act of strength rather than simply weakness and "bitterness." That is to say, cultural interests are real interests, and any way of thinking that doesn't recognize them as such is a vulgar materialism you'd expect from some naive Marxist-Leninist groupuscule.
I thought a lot about these questions with regard to Celine Dion. There was a time when I would have figured that listening to Celine, like going to big blockbuster Hollywood movies, was a kind of false consciousness - being seduced by a materialistic Disneyland escapism that says nothing about real people's lives. I could have written a "What's the Matter with Celine Dion?" critique parallel to Frank's, claiming that people were being duped into listening to fairy-tale fantasy music sold to them by the very people who were strip-malling and outsourcing their communities' cultures out of existence.
But when I listened to Celine's music more and talked to her fans, I realized that she did, in fact, reflect her audience's values and concerns back to them in complicated ways - how to be at once strong, modern and feminine, for example, or the fate of tradition and family and community in an era of globalization and mass media - and that the more "rebellious" music that I used to think superior to the mainstream is often indifferent or hostile to those values and concerns. So why should they want it?
I came to think that everybody has a "false consciousness" of one kind or another, because everybody's cultural tastes are the product of their social experiences and position (including critics and rebels and radicals, seeking affirmation in the beliefs and culture they approve). Which is the same thing as saying no one has false consciousness. It's not that all beliefs are equally valid, but you won't get anywhere by assuming or claiming that other peoples' beliefs are inauthentic.
As the late, great feminist rock writer and social critic Ellen Willis (who probably would have had a lot to discuss with Obama's mother) said in her brilliant rebuttal to Tom Frank (which remains very, very worth reading), those of us who care about culture can only betray ourselves by dismissing other people's cultural interest as trivia that arises because of structural misalignments. If we want to assert the importance of multiculturalism, adventurous art, minority cultures, reproductive freedom, then we have to recognize that some other people are equally attached to and serious about their religions, their social values, their leisure activities, their "American" culture.
You might want to change some of those things - for instance, to convince people that American culture has always been built by immigrants and won't be "lost" by accepting and welcoming new people; to get people to think differently about abortion; etc. - but you can't do that if your starting premise is that their positions are just pathological hallucinations or side effects. The social-conservative surge in some areas in the past two decades has also been a backlash against genuine "progressive" success on many fronts (in social attitudes to sex, gender, race and sexual identity), and it seems quite likely that the backlash will be temporary - even in rural Pennsylvania, I'll bet many, many young white people are much more comfortable with diversity than their parents, irrespective of whether they are doing as well economically.
In his follow-up statements so far, Obama has elaborated very compassionately and thoughtfully on how he thinks the government has failed people like working-class Pennsylvanians, and what has to change. But he still seems unable to speak directly to the class-cultural question, much in contrast with the eloquence with which he addressed race after the Pastor Wright controversy.
Then again, no one else has been able to have that kind of "grownup conversation" about class culture in America lately either.The faux-populist news anchors go into an orgy of tut-tutting about Obama's "elitism" that, however justified, still erases and conceals everything he was really saying about prying government from the clutches of corporate interests and making it respond to human needs. It's grim to see that the pattern Tom Frank points out in his book is being re-enacted in the response to Obama - the media talking as if what really matters is not whether there's been decades of economic decline in your community but that some latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, fancy Harvard lawyer thinks he's better than you.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, April 15 at 4:09 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (12)
No Ordinary Love:
"Double Bill #1"
Posting has been sparse lately, partly due to life and partly due to scrambling to get my paper done for the EMP Pop Conference, which will be the subject of upcoming posts this weekend. Before I get Seattle-bound, I want to tell you about a beautifully Toronto-bound event that opens tonight (Wednesday, Apr 9) and runs until Saturday.
"Double Bill #1" is the yield of a "mash-up"-style concept from Dancemakers artistic director Michael Trent: he wants to reach out to other artists to create works in dialogue. Having seen last year's wonderful "Dance/Songs" piece (subject of past Zoilusian praise), Trent chose to invite Ame Henderson of the Public Recordings company as his first collaborator. The parameters they agreed on were simple: They would each create pieces that used the same people, from dancers to music, which would mean each choreographer's process would be bumping and grinding up against the other's.
The results, which I previewed at a dress rehearsal on Saturday before they moved it to Harbourfront's Premiere Dance Theatre, are superlative. I have to single out Ame's "It Was a Nice Party," which, like "Dance/Songs" (which took the skeleton of a rock-club show and draped it in a dance piece, with equal measures of wit, irony and reverence) and her Nuit Blanche piece (which involved large crowds of dancers emerging in and out of the margins of a Kensington Market park, dancing to music from hand-cranked portable radios), is a playful exercise in slow-motion revelation: If you pay attention, a seemingly arbitrary and cryptic set of behaviours is slowly unveiled as a self-conscious game.
( ... continues ...)
I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that what the dancers are doing is "sampling" from the party scene of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, in a series of algorithms that's almost an Oulipian set of themes-and-variations that you slowly decode. The byproduct, as Dancemakers dramaturge-in-residence Jacob Zimmer put it to me, is that out of the film scene, the company was able to generate quickly a fresh set of gestural vocabularies that are not at all "dance" vocabularies. (They also tried using a bank-robbing scene from The Thomas Crown Affair and a bird attack from The Birds but settled on the more cheerful-strange ambience of a party - which, bonus points, allowed some of them to pretend to be Marcello Mastrionni.)
Humour and energy spring out of this strategy, all the more so because Ame's preserved the unheimlich grammar of film in the choreography - the dancers keep suddenly dashing across the stage to keep pace with the cuts and crosscuts of film editing, too, so the typical dignity and smoothness (even in choreographed awkwardness) of dance is undercut by the frantic splicing and interruption to which reality is subjected by the camera.
In addition, the ensemble keeps the mood of the piece itself party-like - casual, companionable, conversational, giddy. At intervals, in personae somewhere between themselves and themselves-as-character, the dancers come to microphones at the corners of the stage, to explain what just happened and what's about to happen next: "We're going to do that again, only this time, Kate's going to be over there and I'm going to start here... okay?"
Both pieces are scored by The Reveries, a band I've toasted in the past as one of Toronto music's uncanniest combinations of silliness and sentiment, with their poker-faced techno-peasant routine of playing instruments that are amplified through cellphone speakers lodged in each other's mouths, while they slobberingly deliver the lyrics of love-song standards. The group features local improv luminaries Eric Chenaux, Ryan Driver and Doug Tielli (plus, more recently, percussionist Jean Martin).
For "Double Bill" they presented the company with several CDs featuring dozens of songs they'd be capable of covering, ranging from jazz standards to Willie Nelson to Sade, and let the dancers choose over the course of rehearsal which songs to use. Then they provided recordings of covers of the selected songs as the final soundtrack, which gets played by the dancers from an on-stage boombox.
In both dances, but Ame's in particular, there's some aleatory space left after that, too, as the dancers can choose which Reveries selections to play during the show, which reinforces the party theme ("hey, what should I put on?" "no more Willie, I'm tired of Willie") but also severs dance from music and allows for recombinant effects - they might end up dancing frenetically to a slow ballad, or the song might end before the segment does and leave them dancing to silence. It all helps to free the dancers from what can in dance sometimes seem a slavish relationship between music and choreography - while the movies scene is dictating the motions, moments might fall anywhere on the beat, so it's a new dance every time.
The mood is also struck by the frantic effort that goes into following the movie's kinetic "score" - the dancers are constantly checking video monitors to see what action they should be imitating, so they have a split focus, which mirrors the audience's own effort to watch what's happening at the same time as puzzling out the embedded structure. Viewing it in the smaller rehearsal space, I was particularly conscious that I kept wanting to watch the movie on the monitors (even craning my head around to do it) instead of the real people in front of me - the same trouble one has, for example, carrying on a conversation in a bar while a TV is running in the corner over your friend's shoulder, or the way people you know in real life take on a kind of extra-reality in the microcelebrity of their Facebook pages and YouTube videos. In a way the dancers cannot compete with the film's aura, but their physical presence catches the viewer out in that guilty attraction, and reminds us of the satisfaction and complication the person-to-person encounter can offer. For instance, the dancers use their real names to refer to one another in dialogue, except that there are two Kates, so the second insists on being called "Magenta," after the colour of her dress, which is both an assertion ("I'm the girl in the magenta dress") and a surrender of identity.
Michael Trent's second half, "And the Rest," is a bit jarring after the revelation of the first, in that he turns the company back to a modern-dance physical vocabulary, and there's much less narrative drive. But on the other hand it's here that you get to see these dancers dance, again to the Reveries' wobbly ebbs and flows of song, and things get sexy in a much less ironic and more realistic (and thus more disturbing) way, as themes of dominance, submission and Bartleby-like abstention come into play.
My favourite section was one that went head-on at the sadomasochism of choreography itself, in which one dancer started giving instructions for moves to another and then got caught in a kind of deranged loop demonstrating the ridiculously strenuous motions that were required to fulfill her own orders, while the rest of the ensemble lazily ignored her. The orders she's barking ("put your wrists on your thighs, half-twist, sink to your knees, thrust three times, flutter your elbows twice") are of course exactly the kind that the choreographer must have used to make the whole piece - our pleasure rests on the mnemonic and physical labour of the artist-interpreters, our admiration of their seeming freedom resting on their terpsicordian bondage. The dress-rehearsal crowd laughed familiarly, but for those of us who aren't dance insiders, it was more of a moment in which the emperor stripped off his clothes to reveal that underneath, he was stitched up in a tight, rough corset. The work of the dancer, in those interludes, became its own subject, and its own reward.
In the program, Michael and (in his program notes) Jacob tell us that the piece is about tyranny and change: I wish only that they'd followed Ame's example and put more of those cards on the table in the piece itself. But that might just be that I'm a relatively inexperienced watcher of dance, and its pure physical abstraction (and perhaps its voyeurism) always make me crave more intellectual semaphore, more clues to the content within the form.
A real dance lover might find Ame's piece more frustrating because its whole mechanism stymies the flow of dance, blocking and undermining the performers' skills at each turn. I find that both funnier and more moving, seeming closer to daily life, but since I'd probably be unsympathetic to a similar argument about highly abstract music or painting, I'll offer that reaction with a grain of suspicious-tasting salt.
In any case, the pairing left me with plenty to smile over and think about and I wholeheartedly urge you to get down to Harbourfront to drink it in with your own eyes and ears. Also, check out The Reveries' new CD of Willie Nelson tunes, which was released this week.
Read More | Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, April 09 at 3:24 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Goodbye Excentrico (RIP Klaus Dinger)
And Other News
Neu! in 1974 playing an early version of Hero.
Although it happened more than a week ago (March 21), news is only reaching the internets today of the death of Klaus Dinger - early Kraftwerk drummer, core member of Neu! (shown above playing guitar, though he's best known for creating the "Motorik" beat as a drummer) and founder of La Dusseldorf. The influence of Dinger (whose brother and Neu!/Dusseldorf partner Thomas predeceased him in '02), from postpunk (see under PiL) to post-rock (Stereolab on out) to various branches of techno (minimal, ambient), would be hard to fully estimate.
In happier news, it seems that there's finally a concrete outcome for Canadians from the fact that Elvis Costello is semi-resident here (on Vancouver Island with spouse Diana Krall and baby twins Dexter and Frank): He's doing a series on CTV. It's a talk show of sorts, coproduced by Elton John (oddly enough - I'd never known the two El's, Declan and Reggie, were friendly), and seemingly partly inspired by El Cos's success guest-hosting the Letterman show in 2003. Titled "Spectacle" (subtitle: "Elvis Costello with ..."), it'll feature various guests, musical and otherwise, in actor's-studio-style indepth chat. No hints yet of who's on the guest list. From angry young man to genial chat-show host - I can think of worse fates.
As for me, the podcast of the Happy Ending Reading Series event I did in New York in January is now up on Radio Press (the promising new project of Toronto expatriate and former Anansi Books editor Martha Sharpe - to download, go up to the "your playlist" box and click download). And I can't resist mentioning that my book made #7 on Entertainment Weekly's "Must" List this week. Celine and I are sandwiched in between a Joan Crawford movie marathon and Horton Hears a Who, which somehow seems just right.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, April 02 at 1:43 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Au Claire de l'Histoire:
Recording History Revised
Music history, or at least the history of recording technology, is re-made today with the publication of Zoilus friend and ace anachronist Jody Rosen's A1 piece in The New York Times about the discovery of an 1860 "sound recording" that pre-dates the famous Edison "Mary Had a Little Lamb" side by decades.
The twist is that the "phonautogram" technology involved was a development in sound recording but not in sound reproduction, leaving our Benjaminesque paradigms in place. So history has been excitingly footnoted more than rewritten, I suppose.
Nevertheless, it's fascinating as an instance of how current technology is able to lend new meaning to past technology - it's an artifact that only gains significance now, when there's a way to translate it back into sound via digitization. I'm really curious what else is in the archive of what was done with phaunotogramophony. What parallel developments can we imagine with other dead-end retro-explorations if they were re-examined by current science? (I'm sure there must be hardcore-science equivalents, eg., revisiting naturalist observation of the 19th century with current software... scientists out there?) It's all very steampunk!
It does make me think of, for instance, Colin Nancarrow's work with player-piano rolls
or the digital reproduction of Glenn Gould performances on magical robot pianos.
On a personal note, I'm tickled that the piece of music in question, "Au claire de la lune" - and by the way, I suggest you listen to the later NYT mp3 example first, as it makes the 1860 one more comprehensible - is the one French songs all English-Canadians know from FSL classes (aside from "O Canada" en francais, I suppose, as well as "Frere Jacques" [pardon the lack of accents but they're a bitch to program at 2 a.m.] which everybody knows). Recorded music and bad French singing in Grade 9 share some DNA.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, March 27 at 12:38 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
Sigh
From an email I got this afternoon (at random, I assume) from Atlanta-based BREAK magazine. It seems kind of worth repeating as a snapshot of the music-journalism game 2008.
My question: Is anyone actually getting $2500 to post an MP3?
"Since you are an avid supporter of BREAK, we would like to introduce to you first PUSHIN. To learn more about this exciting opportunity, I've attached a detailed media kit explaining more about this new venture. This is an innovative project and unprecedented on today's underground scene. The complete PUSHIN experience kicks off in April of this year. And don't say that I left you in the dark! This initiative is going down major and you should reserve your slot in the hottest new Indie rag on the streets today, and perform @ the PUSHIN Showcase/Launch Party, get featured in the PUSHIN Mix CD, and receive an MP3 PUSH for $400.00.
"Think about this: you pay XYZ publication $200-$300 for a feature, a showcase promoter $500-$1000 to perform, a mix CD promoter $300 for a feature, and an online promoter $125-$2500 for 1 MP3 Blast. On average that's about $2500.00! BREAK Media Group has proven that we can put together a scorching hot publication, produce scorching hot showcases, and put out fire hot email blasts! And now you can get all that and more for $400.00. Now who's really down for the independent artists PUSHIN to get a BREAK?
"Why be in the PUSHIN' section? Because the industry is watching! You will be featured in 2500, full color/full size glossy magazines that will be distributed throughout the nation, and your story will be blasted to over 60,000 industry contacts beginning in April. Through BREAK Magazine and PUSHIN, your story will be told the right way!"
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, March 21 at 4:52 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
A Compressed Thought
Jake's comment on that Deerhoof-and-silence/dynamics post from last week: "If everyone digs music with dynamic shifts, why do so few of us make it?"
He blames it, basically, on indiscipline and ego. But today it occurred to me that it might relate to the great debate about compression - both the kind of compression that shrinks songs down into mp3s and the kind that makes all the records on the radio go to 11, all the time. If most of the music people hear has its dynamics all squashed together, that becomes the kind of music they want to make. Or are at least afraid not to make, which may be the psychological dynamic Jake is observing.
And this seems as good a point as any to point to Carl the Impostume's two superb posts about Pere Ubu (one and two), who understood that if you wanted to make your guitars "sound like a nuclear destruction" you first had to get "a ticket to the sonic reduction."
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, March 17 at 5:33 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (15)
Three or Four Goats out of Five?
Centre, John Darnielle; right, Peter Hughes; lower middle, drummer Jon Wurster.
Rear, just nudging into the frame: that missing star from my Blender review.
My review of The Mountain Goats' Heretic Pride, written two months ago, is finally up on the Blender site. Magazine time takes time to get in tune with. Also, looking through this month's review section I decidedly feel like I underrated the record: nothing wrong with the writeup itself (well, one thing, which I'll get to) but it should have been four stars instead of three. This is one of the flaws of the starring system quite apart from the reductiveness and near-meaninglessness of it: Unless you're the editor and can compare how every writer is rating records, each of us are using a star system in our minds and that adds up to an incoherent syntax. For example, here's Xgau giving Ottawa's Kathleen Edwards a thanks-but-no-thanks review. Three stars. Meanwhile I had in mind more the question, "How does this record rank among Mountain Goats records?" because I assume that relative to most records, every TMGs record is a five-star record. I was thinking, "If Sunset Tree and Sweden are five-star TMGs records and maybe Get Lonely and Nine Black Poppies are four-star TMGs records, then maybe this and Nothing For Juice are three-star TMGs records."
I may have been "wrong" about that - it earns four stars relative to TMGs norms, I feel now (stars are all about mouth-feel, or the aural equivalent) - but not no-better-than-Pride-Tiger wrong.
On more substantive grounds, the following thoughts got left out or muddled by space squeeze: First, I wanted to say that fans might end up calling Heretic Pride "the drums record," unless touring and all the fan enthusiasm over "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" makes the next one even more of a drums record. Second, in the review I ended up saying, "The mixture of corrupters and corruptees helps Darnielle explore the nature of evil without losing his sense of humor." This is not quite what I meant. Rather, what helps him do that is the mixture of a psychological naturalism (albeit an expressionistic one) with imagery and characters from genres that either reject or don't bother with psychology (such as horror and fantasy). It's like Ibsen or Strindberg being directed by Roger Corman or Russ Meyer. Things that would be too overwhelming to face become approachable because they are situated "In the Craters on the Moon" (which I've lately come to consider less an Iraq song than a New Orleans song, though I know that it isn't "really" either one) or in a comic book or a pulp novel. (Even "San Bernadino" almost, almost, seems like it could be set in a Harlequin-style romance. "Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident," on the other hand, doesn't allow any such outs; only its elliptical lyrical style prevents it from being unbearable.)
Finally, "succumb, willingly or not, to corruption" is an understatement of what happens in many of these songs. I hadn't been living with the record long enough when I wrote it to understand that the "heretic pride" of the title, as I and others have discussed before, has to do with characters throwing themselves willfully, sometimes almost gleefully, into the flames (in at least one song, literally so) - affirming their humanity, even if they can affirm nothing else.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, March 17 at 4:14 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Istvan Kantor's Transmission Machine:
Message (Redundantly) Received
Istvan Kantor was formerly known as Monty Cantsin, although of course he wasn't the only artist to use that Neoist multiple identity, just the only one who angrily claimed to be the "real" Monty Cantsin, which is a fine showcase of Kantor's persistent deafness to his own contradictions. I went to see his latest work, a showcase called Transmission Machine last night at the Theatre Centre in Toronto as part of the Free Fall performance-art festival, and I think my arm candy (as she likes me to call her) put it best when she said afterwards, "Why does the theatre of the oppressed always have to be so oppressive?"
[ continued after the jump ... ]
Kantor's got a reactor's worth of energy - constantly on the move except when doing a headstand on a long stainless-steel sink, burning off excess calories by trashing furniture seemingly at random. By any means necessary he'll make sure you can't ignore him, which explains why he's forever splattering his blood on valuable paintings in museums and galleries and, everywhere else, setting shit on fire. (His bio for Free Fall points out that he is probably the sole person ever simultaneously banned from the AGO and Sneaky Dee's.) As he must be in his mid-50s or so, the vigour is impressive, but all that drive is directed down the "shock art" dead end of masculinist modernism, with self-glorifying-martyr crap fully intact.
My favourite section of the show was the opening monologue, in which Kantor narrated his life story - that he came from Budapest, but before that he was a "monolith that was really a filing cabinet" (using a black cabinet on stage to illustrate this creation myth) as well as Wilhelm Reich and other historical figures - and reached the point of describing the past 60 years as an era of "mental gentrification" in which "broadcast imperialism" has forced all other elements of life to the margins in favour of the "shiny" - the remaking of reality on the model of the television screen, for example in the AGO's current renovation with a new titanium facade courtesy of Frank Gehry and Damien Hirst's $100-million diamond-encrusted skull.
And then Kantor went on a spree of very shiny fire-setting and giant-video-screen projections (okay, he does throw paint on the video screens at the end), with a crew of videographers and photographers following him around the stage documenting the performance and not inserting "broadcast imperialism" between us and him. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that this was intentional, which is generous considering what followed.
What followed was sound and fury and the fumes of burning gas, giving us three kinds of headaches, as Kantor tried to analogize broadcast imperialism and neighbourhood gentrification in Toronto, in speech and video (a hokey bunch of actors playing "developers" stalking Kantor's neighbourhood) and song (a ditty called "I love the stench"). He set himself up as a paragon of "the poor," falling into the usual but nevertheless irksome pattern of blithely equating the voluntary poverty of the artist with the unchosen poverty of poor people. And what's to be done? Well, "revolution," though by the time he's tangled his red flag (literally) around his head three or four times, you get that he knows the non-ness of this answer, but he sticks to it because it sounds exciting despite its void credibility (which you'd think someone from Budapest might have realized quicker). Along the way he elaborately, through video images, compared gentrification both to torture with electrification and, here it comes, to Nazi genocide. (Good ol' reductio ad Hitler, or Hitler ex machima if you prefer.)
The show ended with Kantor inviting members of the audience to come up on stage with him as "revolutionaries" and the others to make a "ratatat-tat" machine-gun sound, "executing" them. It was kinda fun, as goofy group-participation exercises are, even when they're a dispiriting wallow in futility.
That moment at least had some gentle conviviality to it, as opposed to the ego-on-performance-art-cliche-amphetamines of the previous hour. More than the shallow analysis, what's maddening is, given the anti-sociality of the problem he's addressing, the unexamined way in which he tries to attack it with more anti-sociality. Cute as the "stench" song was, praising the noise, pollution and violence poor people are forced to live with "because it keeps the developers away" is revolting, and it only keeps the developers away till there's a buck to be made - as is the case currently in Kantor's nabe of "dirty Bloor West," which is where the art galleries fleeing high rent on Queen West are about to relocate.
The real-estate regime - which Kantor, with 1980s-punk-zine panache, dubbed "the Rentagon" - goes unchecked because there's no public will to develop neighbourhoods any other way. Private interests are quite willing to bulldoze their way through social and architectural dysfunction, since that all makes land and buildings cheap enough to turn a tidy profit. Meanwhile government and political formations aggressively neglect those areas. The Rentagon would be undermined by efforts to bring healthy development to people and places that need it while preserving affordable housing (ideally owned by the residents) and services - efforts not sexy and politically profitable enough to be worth the bother.
By mirroring the black-and-white view that places and cultures must by nature be either unlivable shitholes or yuppie palisades in the rhetoric and symbolism of his show - it's either Hitler or revolution, it's either quiescence or red flags and fire and furniture-smashing - Kantor is just re-enacting the logic of gentrification, not to mention repeating 20th-century avant-gardism as farce.
That's always been my reaction to his stuff, but last night I at least appreciated some of his countervailing eccentric charm. It was much better when he was dancing around and singing a kooky, Cabaret-style song about the cities he lived in befo