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).
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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)
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)
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)
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)
Iva Bittova, and Wine Music vs. Beer Music
My profile of Czech singer-violinist Iva Bittova appears today in The Globe and Mail, with an introduction for newcomers to her work and some cool news about recent changes and planned new projects for fans.
Above is a video of Bittova performing (with a children's choir she directed) on Czech TV. And here are a few outtakes from the interview that didn't make it into the piece:
On her father: "He was born in Slovakia near the Hungarian border. He grew up in a musical family and he could play many instruments, and also he played folk music, like Slovakian, Hungarian, Romanian, and as a professional doublebass player with opera. So he was very open to play and listen to many different kinds of music - I grew up listening to folk, opera, jazz. I remember he had many scores of classic music like Dvorak ... we were reading notes and listening to music at the same time, which was very important to me, to see how the writing of such beautiful music looks. He was a human being that was more quiet and full of emotions, and he was mostly practiciing at home and playing and listening rather than talking. I feel now that I'm more communicative through music. I prefer to explain what I really feel by music."
On the difference between Moravian and Bohemian Czech culture, in terms that might be relevant to Dave's contemplations of dinner music: "There was an article, because I released this Moravian Gems album [with George Mraz] - there's an article from a newspaper that said that Bohemian people drink beer and Moravians drink wine, so in Bohemia they play more brass bands, more simple kind of music, while Moravia is Janacek music - so it's better to be born there! And also near to Slovakia border, because also this is what I like to do in future - maybe collect traditional songs from east of Slovakia, they are very very beautiful songs. My father played lots of these songs."
On career planning: Everything in my work is just like, one day I receive some invitation and then I decide if I go or not. ... I have to make very careful choices. LIke when they invited me to sing in the opera, I was not really sure if I could do it. It was the most hard work for me in my life, but it makes me stronger as a singer. I cannot be afraid. I just have to find my way, and see if I am good or not. Most organizers ask me to come solo because it is more simple, but have many different opportunities to play with other musicians - for example, the Nederlands Blazer Ensemble, 15 brass musicians; a string quartet, sometimes; and last month I played in Sardinia and I'd never met the drummer before - I met Hamid Drake just at the soundcheck. He is a wonderful drummer."
Bittova plays the Music Gallery in Toronto tonight, solo, at 8 pm. Don't miss her.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, November 06 at 1:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Adult Alternative?
A couple of days ago, in Pretty Goes With Pretty's latest take at trying to unearth what it really is that Sasha/me/Jess/everybody have been bitching about in re: blogrock, he brought it back around to an earlier post of his that I'd never seen about the transformation of indie-under-mini-maxi-rock into Adult Alternative, using the obvious case of Feist as an instance. This gets very near the nub of what I was suggesting in my Slate piece. Coincidentally, I also just received the following email from Steve Kado of Blocks Recording Club, with whom I've been writing back-and-forth about these issues the past week:
Steve says: "i'd argue that we do have words for what we're talking about there are actually even radio formats for most of it: 'adult alternative' 'college rock'. seriously: what else is 'the national' or 'the hold steady'? that is college rock, or alternatively: it's college rock for 30 year olds who never outgrew college. never mind that we might want to feel different about it (or someone might), that it's "more than that". the violent femmes, archetypal college rock are also "more than that" - they are a kind of canny and clever acoustic post-punk band, but what did that add up to? college rock.
"i think that the main problem is that ideas of 'taste' are actually trying to manipulate the vocabulary surrounding what are basically very standard categories - in part out of shame or a desire to be 'above' shame. or maybe more accurately: the pejorative associations that 'calling a spade a spade' would produce would render the products 'unmarketable' in part because it would highlight things about the intended and enthusiastic audience that would not help them warm to the product."
Both Steve's and PGWP's words bring me back around to the question that animates much of my book. It involves playing devil's advocate against my indie-and-class position from Slate, but: What is the nature of the stake so many of us have in disliking conventionally pretty music? In the book, talking about Celine, it's in the context of "adult contemporary" (formerly MOR, "middle-of-the-road" music). Here, it is "adult alternative." In both cases it's easy to label it as "dinner music." Well, what is wrong with having music to have dinner by? Mightn't that in fact be one of the times that you most need some music to listen to, music to which you can chat along or else sit and chew and sip your drink and listen contemplatively, but music that is not going to disrupt and upset your digestive system or your conviviality with your dinner companions?
Not saying that I don't feel my knee jerk hard against "dinner music" too, against its unsexiness or decontextualizedness (my biggest complaint against Feist and against New College Rock in general, symptomatic of global-economy cosmopolitanism, but even then, perhaps too absolutist a value), its supposed complacency etc. But it is a rather strange prejudice just to take for granted, no? And I think the parenthood question in PGWP's post is very germane here: Is the reluctance to say, "Okay, I like some Adult Alternative music," owing to some atavistic fear that we are approving music that our parents might also approve of? If so, how moronic is that?
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, October 31 at 3:36 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (17)
Indie, Race, Class, Rock
and Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds: 2
A few more scattered points before I let this drop:
e) One of the most articulate commenters in Slate's "the Fray" objected that Sasha and I were each "fetishizing authenticity." This is a good question. My first demurral would be that you can't talk about these "big picture" things without making reductive generalizations, which unfortunately makes it easy for readers to take away points that you weren't actually making. (This happened to Sasha too.) To sufficiently qualify and evidence all the points would require a book-length treatment, maybe a really boring one. These were broad-brush pieces. However, I'm not saying that working-class music is better than middle-class/upper-class music, but that cultural insularity can be a problem. As she says, it can also be a fertile sort of concentrated force, but it does risk running into ruts, and if there is a problem with indie rock at all right now, it is the sense that there are ruts being dug.
However, if, as that same commenter goes on to say, you think either Sasha or I think that rhythm-centred music is made with less mental calculation and aforethought than any other kind of music, you are misreading. What each of us said, to different degrees, is that "indie" right now has a tendency to lack in body-consciousness and emphasize "smart" in a good-student kind of way (sometimes actually being smart and sometimes just loading up on signifiers of smartness). This does not entail, however, that more-body-conscious music is less smart. One does not require the other. (Also it doesn't mean that I don't like lots of music that's all head and no butt, because obviously I do. The proportions are just seeming out of whack.)
f) Scott from Pretty Goes With Pretty objects to my class thesis on the basis that "indie/alt-rock" and "college" have gone together since the '80s. But that overlooks the broader context I pointed to in the Slate piece, of growing material gaps between classes in the U.S. in the past 25 years. So yes, it's always been a mainly middle-class thing but as the true middle class shrinks, that starts to mean more of an upper-middle-class thing. For one thing I think its increased distance from the (arguably) more class-mixing hardcore-punk scene (what's left of it) has changed the cultural style of "indie." (This of course began with the mainstreaming of the harder-rocking sector of the underground in the early-to-mid 1990s.) As well, the devaluation of the literal meaning of "indie" has happened for a lot of reasons (downloading being one) but along with it comes the diminishment of the obsessive means-of-production discussions that used to be part and parcel of the "indie" aesthetic - once it was heavily politicized and concerned about material procedures and consequences; the dematerialization of music and the depoliticization of "youth culture" end up resulting in a default to a more unself-consciously insular class p.o.v. on the "college" scene, including confusing voluntary low-income status with class, etc. (Not that the politics of 80s and 90s alt-rock scenes were always - or maybe ever - convincing and coherent; but at least those questions were built in.) However, Scott's right to point out that a key class issue in this climate is access to high-speed Internet service.
g) One thing I didn't get to in the article, which I think is vital, is that what a good part of "indie" draws on are avant-garde gestures, but very few of these bands think of themselves or practice as an avant-garde. (This may apply to art across the board, but I won't get into that broader issue here.) So there's a confusion - at one time eschewing dance beats, conventional harmonies, etc, were deliberate decisions in an art practice, now they're simply features of a niche genre. (One that's increasingly mainstream.) You could come up with a class analysis but for our purposes let's just say that what "art-rock" means, what it's for, has become much more vague. It's tempting to say indie has become more pseudo-intellectual than intellectual, more of a "middlebrow" thing rather than a deliberate smashing together of high and low. Personally I have a really fraught time with that, feeling some lingering attachment to an avant-garde framework but also wary of the multiple snobberies embedded in using a term like "middlebrow." (See my book for a whole lot more about this.) This is why I left it out of the Slate piece, but I do think finding terms to talk about it is very salient to this conversation.
h) Bringing up the fact that dude from Modest Mouse grew up poor is, like the TV on the Radio thing, not a refutation of the more general point. The exceptions would be interesting to analyze, but that would be another set of articles. I'm sure there are tons of non-middle/upper-class people in indie rock now. If someone wants to do a statistical survey, bring it on. However, I feel my generalizations are valid enough, based on years of observation. (That said, remember that Isaac Brock and friends started Modest Mouse in 1993. The fact that they are the example that springs to mind for everyone almost seems to demonstrate that something did shift from the '90s to the 2Ks.)
i) One thing that got muddled in all the rhythm-talk - it seems to me a lot of the dance-punk stuff comes from a milieu that's if anything more upper-class (rich clubbing kids) than the folkie-indie stuff. Again, not all of it, but quite a bit. You might even guess this, since the choice to use hip-hop and techno materials shows a greater sense of entitlement, as opposed to the more hesitant skirting-around that the indie-folk stuff arguably does. I'm not sure how to fit this into the whole scheme of the debate, but it's worth noting.
j) Aside from all the social issues, what we might be talking about is just the decline of rock, as a very old, played-out form. Certainly when Sasha, perhaps inadvertantly, sounded like he was calling for a blues-rock revival, it raised the spectre of a Wynton Marsalis-type neo-classicism. Is rock (leaving aside metal) following the footsteps of jazz, where you have the neo-classicists (Kid Rock, for example, and even the emo bands in a way) keeping the styles of past decades in circulation and then the pro-innovation camp (indie/noise/etc) seeming to recycle gestures of "newness" for a small, specialized audience, with little sense of consequence on either side?
k) Finally, what is the problem with the upper-class-ization of indie rock, if that's true? It might mirror some social trends I find troubling but what is the musical issue? It's not an objection to any one or several groups' practice, but to an accumulated tendency, and some of the answers are similar to what Sasha named as the consequences of a lack of African-American influence. The main one I think is the profile of ambition that comes across in the music: Because the privileged musicians don't have the same survival issues at stake that pop musicians historically often have had (which are comparable to what motivates a lot of people who become star athletes), the aspirations are more modest and the stakes often seem much lower. Less seems to be on the line. The art of performance often suffers (that "show-biz" put-it-all-out-there fire). With the most gifted musicians, this doesn't matter so much, because they find something else to be ambitious about, something to stretch their capacities. But with others it can indeed produce a dullish, good-enough music, which was the core of Sasha's complaint.
Once again, that's a broad generalization but I suspect many people understand exactly what I'm talking about.
l) The one thing most people seem to agree on here is that the word "indie" is increasingly a red herring, an umbrella term for a lot of music without much in common, a fairly useless genre label, one that conceals more than it reveals. Could we do without it, or is there some unitary thing there we need a label for?
Which seems like enough footnotes. However, I'm happy to keep on debating these questions in the comments boxes, and if any super-compelling sub-debates arise - or after Sasha posts his planned rejoinders in the New Yorker blog - I'll return to them here again.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, October 22 at 3:17 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (14)
Indie, Race, Class, Rock
and Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds: 1
Image from the Dirtbombs blog.
Thanks to everybody who's given feedback on the Slate piece, whether in the Fray at Slate, at ILX, on your own blogs, in the comments section from Friday, or by email. And now, some clarifications, extensions, responses. I will break them into a few posts.
a) The point of my quibbling with Sasha's New Yorker piece was not that he was wrong. It's certainly true that indie rock, whatever-that-is, is a very white - or at least non-black - world, your TV on the Radios and Earl Greyhounds and other exceptions notwithstanding. (That the exceptions are so conspicuous underlines the point.) Rather I just objected to the way I felt he distorted the timeline - I was arguing that rock in general has been getting whiter and whiter for a very long time, and alternative-underground-indie-whatchamacallit rock in particular. People like SFJ and a lot of the British critics, who lived in New York or London in the early 1980s, were lucky to be around for one of the very rare places-and-times where there was a lot of exciting cross-fertilization, theft, mimickry and synthesis going on across cultural lines, and it quite naturally created a permanent hunger in them for that kind of thrill.
But even in that same period in other places, there was a move towards a foursquare, unswinging punk/new-wave metre as a reaction against bar-blues bands and classic rock. Nine times out of ten, a white musician or band's attempt to be anti-mainstream in North America is going to produce a less-"black" sound because, as Sasha rightly says, American mainstream pop music is built very centrally on a black-music-white-music-which-is-which mixture. So a white "alternative" band is probably going to be less R&B than a mainstream band, because rock's main underpinning is that it's white R&B. Again, there are exceptions (my favourite one today is The Dirtbombs) but we all know they are exceptions. So if we agree (i) that the whiteness of indie rock is not news; but (ii) that something has seemed a little different, a little troubling, in the state of indie the past few years; then (iii) looking at the changing class positioning of indie seemed like a useful exercise, alongside (but not instead) of race.
b) While my piece was subtitled, "it's not just race, it's class," the point was not just to throw another analytic into the mix. What I was trying to say was more like, "It's not indie rock, it's America." The fact that all these forms are tending towards more self-segregation is a reflection of the social fracture that's been implemented socio-economically over the past 30 years, the neo-conservative era, and while it'd be nice if the artists fought it harder, the fact that art is seeming narrowly segmented right now is a symptom not the source. My main objection to Sasha's piece was that while I know he's well-aware of all that, he leaves it mostly unmentioned. I think it's crucial.
c) In the piece I mention that reducing black music to rhythmic space is problematic - I didn't give this example, but I think Arcade Fire does include black influences via gospel and parade music and Caribbean music, for example, and the freak-folk people are definitely listening to old African-American folk-blues along with Brazilian music and much else. Sasha's perhaps muddied the issue by trying to take in all rock history, which leaves us arguing about how black-influenced Brian Wilson was, when the pivotal question in his piece has to do with hip-hop - the reactions or non-reactions of rock kids to this burgeoning force. It is simply not the same to draw upon generations-old or oceans-away African or African-American-based music as it is to engage with the "other" music and musicians of your own time - the latter is a lot riskier and more fraught, but also for that reason more exciting. I tried to underline some of the social reasons it hasn't happened that I thought Sasha slid by too easily, but his question stands.
d) Some people have objected to the word "miscegenation" because of its "ugly history" etc., but I think this is the strength of Sasha's case: There's ugliness everywhere in these matters, but what if we dared to trample the niceties and go for the utopian gold anyway? Shut our eyes and bear ahead and stop being polite? He's not just reclaiming the word, he's embracing it with its horrible baggage, realizing that to be American and to talk about race is always to end up smeared with centuries of shit and blood. In some ways he's asking: Which matters more in the long run, making great art or never offending anybody? (And again, to me, class helps explain why "indie" music has tended to get more and more inoffensive, since it's being made by people brought up to have good manners to a fault - sometimes to the point of passive-aggression.)
(Much more to come).
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, October 22 at 2:03 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (9)
Slated and (Soon to Be) Berated
The promised/threatened Slate piece is now up. It is a disagreement with but not an attack upon SFJ, and it will make certain people one degree more annoyed. Please eviscerate me cleanly, with your finest-honed silver knives.
Additions, outtakes, discussions and clarifications follow. Here's one to start with: I thought The Arcade Fire was kind of a bad example for Sasha to choose for his piece (as I mention) and I'm not particularly thinking of them in mine, despite the picture. Also, like Sasha, just because I think there are social dynamics and problematics to be analyzed in a sub-sub-genre does not mean that I dislike all the music it makes. Okay, enough, out.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 18 at 5:23 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (23)
Sexasaurus Rex: R. Kelly's Tightrope Act
(And the Serialized-Single Revolution)
Jody Rosen has a great piece on Slate today about R. Kelly's turn from love-man to "meta-love-man." (Though I have to mourn the missed wordplay-op there - maybe Jody couldn't decide between plain "metasexual" and "meta-ro-sexual"? I'm having the same problem. And also now on the hunt for a situation that would justify the use of "retro-sexual" - maybe the carryings-on in Mad Men.) I agree with Jody that Kells is now playing up his sense of humour, and that this is a refreshing thing in pop music, particularly in the over-earnest realm of R&B - and it's also an impressive lover-man move, as surely being able to joke about sex is a helluvalot more potent display of sexual confidence than male R&B singers' standard boasting and overbearing come-ons. The clearest precedent is Prince at his best, but generally Kells is stepping into the underrecognized lineage of perv pop, the boudoir music made by men so louche that coming on to you is almost a redundant formality - they can say any ridiculous thing and it all means "... and then we shall fuck." Serge Gainsbourg is probably the paradigmatic case, as New Zealand musician George D. Henderson argues in the above-linked blog (and as The Teenagers, No Bra and even Flight of the Conchords know). But Henderson's list should be balanced out by the long line of jelly-rolling, lemon-squeezing, backdoor-knockin' blues musicians whose comic flair helped furnish Kelly with his metaphor-slinging modus operandi.
For all that in principle I want to give kudos to Kells's vaudevillian turn, I have my hesitations about it, too. Kelly's humour has always been most effective when he leaves us guessing - when he plays the "is he kidding or is he actually such a crazy motherfucker that he means that?" game. It's not an easy effect to pull off - and there are times when people's inability to credit Kelly's comic awareness seems to spring from plain racism - but he is most able to fascinate when he teeters on the edge of self-parody without letting himself slip all the way over. It's a tightrope act. That's also a way of charging up the magnetism of the songs - jokes, after all, wear thin with repetition, but a song that winks at you so subtly that you're not sure whether you really saw it is going to pull you in back over and over again, to try and catch it in the act. So I confess I've been hesitant to watch the new episodes of Trapped in the Closet, because I felt like at the end of the first set the humour started getting really broad, and any illusion that Kelly believed in his characters started to collapse - moving from irony into camp into farce. After that, Kelly can only play the "how far do you think I can take it?" game, which is enjoyable, but a bit less mesmerizing.
The other conspicuous fact about Trapped is how sui generis it is; but I'm actually a bit surprised that it's remained alone in its category since Kelly launched it in 2005. The basic idea - a series of interlinked singles, released gradually online, with some kind of structure of narrative and/or suspense built in - is a perfect response to the changing conditions of the music industry. Naturally nobody should dare to make an imitation Trapped (unless it's Weird Al, or South Park, or some kid with Sims), but the basic template offers the potential for a wider variety of approaches. The singles-serial could be to the 2Ks what the concept album was to the '70s... Ah, right, maybe that's the problem. But still.
Mind you, Kells' penchant for seriality is not due to the existence of iTunes and YouTube, however much it suits them. He's been horsing around in the pastures of "to be continued" ever since his debut album when he introduced Ronald Isley's Mr. Biggs character. There aren't many other contemporary performers - except Eminem, at his peak - who seem so comfortable with creating ongoing characters. But that's not the only possible way to link a set of singles: Just think what Jack White, or Bjork, or Andre 3000, or Lil Wayne, might do with the form.
Jody's piece included a link to this performance I hadn't seen before, by the way - Kelly doing a kickass a capella live rendition of his new song Zoo - just earnest enough to make you laugh and hot you up at the same time, and as any would-be seducer knows, that's a consummation most profanely to be wished.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, August 22 at 2:07 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Rice Scented in Our Absence:
Paul Haines, In Memorium
ON BIRD
WALKS
OUGHT
THOSE WHO DO NOT
BELIEVE IN BIRDS
BE ALLOWED
TO TAG ALONG
WITH THOSE WHO DO?
AND WHEN
I TOLD THEM
THEY DIDN'T
BELIEVE ME
- Paul Haines, What is free to a good home?
In keeping with this week's unplanned poetry-and-music theme: My colleague Robert Everett Green has an excellent piece in today's Globe and Mail, talking with Emily Haines (best known as the singer for Metric) about her new EP, What Is Free to a Good Home?, being launched tonight at Harbourfront, which is named after the above poem by her father, the teacher, poet, artist and music writer Paul Haines. Tonight also marks the release of Secret Carnival Workers, a collection that for the first time brings together Paul Haines's poems, jazz-album liner notes, short fiction and other music writing, all united by his unique bodhisava-dada sensibility; the book was edited by Toronto composer and jazz critic Stuart Broomer, but it exists mainly thanks to Emily's efforts, as Stuart told me - she is self-publishing it through a company called H.Pal, although Coach House is printing and distributing it. (Emily also spoke about her father this week to Dose and The National Post and wrote an essay about him for The Toronto Star.)
In honour of the occasion I'd like to reprint the memorial piece I wrote for Paul Haines in The Globe, awhile after his death four years ago, but never posted on this site.
His words fit into music 'like fish in water'
Carl Wilson
The Globe & Mail
8 May 2003
Let's sit right down and say how slowly the passing can appear to take/ When nothing in the form of everything is at stake.
Those lines by Ontario poet, teacher and video artist Paul Haines could have been his own funeral march, if somebody sang them loud-and-soft enough, the way they are on New York avant-jazz band Curlew's 1993 album A Beautiful Western Saddle.
So could such works as Anti-Pondering or On the Way to Elsewhere and Here or What This Was Going to Suppose to Mean, many of them sung on the 1994 Haines anthology Darn It! Or the Michigan-born writer's Canadian Poem, which declared, "The summer has/ aged and I'm/ getting dark/ earlier and/ earlier."
This was an artist fluent in things that slip in and out of existence: a note, a laugh, a light, a life.
[... continues ...]
He was a high-school French teacher, husband and father in tiny Fenelon Falls, Ont., where he settled for the last quarter-century before his death on Jan. 21 at age 70. But Haines was also the inventor and inhabitor of a way of language just one step from jazz music, pivoted on its heel, at a tilt facing north.
One friend, Toronto critic and musician Stuart Broomer, puts it plain: "He was in some ways the most important imaginative writer involved in jazz in the last 40 years."
The musicians who in turn answered Haines's call have a few last responses to come, with tributes planned next Wednesday in Toronto and this fall in New York and at the Guelph Jazz Festival, in Guelph, Ont.
Consider Haines as a jazz songwriter, as Broomer does, and you'd go back to Hoagy Carmichael or Cole Porter to find lyrics that slip through to such wry, poignant effect. Yet his style was nothing like theirs, just as the new jazz wasn't Duke Ellington. Rather than suave couplets about cocktails and courtship, a typical Haines poem offered stripped-down postwar French surrealism, a haiku doing a can-can.
He gloried in puns, malapropisms, cracked syntax and ribald mental pictures that might raise a blush. He walked on mechanical knees -- a souvenir of his high-school track career near Saginaw, Mich., in the 1940s -- and the idea somehow suits his writing: Metal meeting meat in motion.
"The fact that his words were so baffling," British singer Robert Wyatt told BBC Radio 3 after Haines's death, "that's perfect for music, because you can say you liked the solo or not, but not what it meant. So his words sort of floated in music like fish in water."
Where other "jazz poets" through the years have taken the liberty of the music as licence for manic jags into the badlands of self-expression, Haines took his cue from its multidimensional form, at the speed of surprise. As Toronto composer John Oswald says, "Paul never wrote about music; he wrote music."
"His poetry is very polysemous -- it points in many directions at once," says a younger friend, Guelph, Ont., drummer and composer Jesse Stewart, with whom Haines wrote a multimedia opera in 1999. "And music might be said to do that as well."
The trombonist Roswell Rudd, who is helping organize the New York tribute, calls Haines, "one of the great listeners of the world," with a range from swing to punk. Rudd was a friend and musical partner of Haines beginning in the late-fifties jazz hothouse of New York's Radio Row (now Ground Zero), alongside free-jazz pioneer Albert Ayler, Canadian artist Michael Snow (with whom Haines made the landmark film New York Eye and Ear Control) and other giants-to-be such as Steve Lacy and Paul and Carla Bley.
Out of these friendships eventually came Haines's famed libretto for Carla Bley's dazzling avant-jazz opera, Escalator Over the Hill, which has been called the Sgt. Pepper's of early 1970s jazz, featuring everyone from Charlie Haden and Don Cherry to Jack Bruce and Linda Ronstadt. Haines sent Bley his poems from a Navajo reserve in New Mexico, where he and his wife Jo lived at the time.
The title came, he later said, from his irritation with the verb "to escalate" during the Vietnam War era (reflecting his eternally subtle social conscience, and adding shades to "over the hill," too). The paper back in Saginaw celebrated with a headline reading, "Local athlete writes opera," which so amused him he carried it around for years.
Escalator was revived for a live European tour in the late 1990s, but meanwhile Haines did a second Bley disc, Tropic Appetites, written while he spent five years in New Delhi. "He was this great traveller," says Broomer. "The kind of person who would go to Moscow for the weekend. He actually did that once."
Later, Bley would also participate in Darn It!, a double CD assembled over seven years by Haines and producer Kip Hanrahan, on which his poems were performed by dozens of musicians in and out of the jazz realm, from ex-Box Tops and Big Star singer Alex Chilton and Toronto's Mary Margaret O'Hara to jazz-improv composer Henry Threadgill, English saxophonist Evan Parker and cult guitarist Derek Bailey.
These albums are virtually the only way to find Haines's writing. His one book -- 1981's Third World Two -- went out of print once its texts had been cannibalized for songs and for the admired but little-seen video works he made in his final decades. He seemed to find print too static, though he could destabilize it, too, when he chose, as in his album notes and other critical essays.
He wrote a glorious dada-polemic booklet for the original pressing of Ayler's 1964 Spiritual Unity, a key album in free-jazz history (a rare copy recently sold on eBay for $1,725 U.S.), and notes for many other milestone records. On several, he even served as the recording engineer.
"He had an ear for sound, really quite beyond mine," says Rudd. "And this included language. There were times when it was difficult for me to understand him, as if he was speaking in tongues."
But friends also mention Haines's prodigious warmth, generosity and humour, and his avalanches of eclectic "gaslight" mixed tapes (or "K7s," a bilingual pun). Jesse Stewart mourns the end of the many letters, signed with aliases such as "Rudy L. Glorytractor."
I experienced that side of Haines personally in 1995 when a fax about an interview that, sadly, never transpired, included this text as a return address: "Matrigupta of Ujjain, India, wrote a poem that so pleased Rajah Vicrama Ditya HE WAS GIVEN THE ENTIRE STATE OF KASHMIR. The poet ruled Kashmir for five years (118-123) and then abdicated to become a recluse."
Haines may have won his own kingdom, but his end ("at his desk with his cassette deck on pause," says Oswald) was similarly obscure. His death met with silence in the Canadian press; compare that to the frenzy when his daughter Avery Haines was fired in 2000 for making an indiscreet joke as a TV news anchor. (Her career recovered. Another daughter, Emily, is a fine rising rock singer, whose father's sensibility often winks out from her lyrics.)
It may be that, as Toronto event organizer Glen Hall says, Haines was "a pretty intransigent non-self-promoter." And that, as Oswald says, "Like quite a few extraordinary, little-recognized Canadians who come quickly to mind, he is unclassifiable."
But Haines was also an ideal transplant, with his very Canadian-seeming, off-kilter humour, and deserved better treatment here. It was left to the BBC to do a half-hour tribute in March, including a passage from High Tide, commissioned there in 1999 for an Evan Parker session -- another elegy manque and one of Haines's sweetest:
Everyone's feet wetter -- musicians, listeners -- and tied now together.
Night parachutes concealed, their cargo installed.
The tide, no longer high, is in, and still.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, July 25 at 2:11 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
HRC
(Hillary Rodham Clinton
and/or Her Royal Celine)
L to R: Denise Rich, Bill & Hillary Clinton; Celine Dion in Air Canada uniform.
No media have called yet to get my author-itative opinion on Hillary Clinton's campaign's choice of a Celine Dion tune as her 2008 theme song: I guess it would help if the book had been published (or for that matter, if the manuscript were finished). But meanwhile a few bird's-eye notes on the story:
- The choice was the result of a faux-American Idol-style contest on Clinton's website. Which reinforces a single lesson: Celine is the Platonic form of the American Idol contest winner. If you hold an open-slate Idol sort of thing, Celine will always win. This can be confirmed by a survey of Idol-style contests around the world, including Iraq Star (an actual TV program, where the prize is, and I'm not kidding, getting out of Iraq): Along with the matinee idols of their own culture, everyone's other influence is always Celine. Even when she's not on the ballot. (Celine was added as a write-in favourite - wonder what fan community coordinated that? Anyone who knows, drop me a line.)
- In any case, the evocation of Idol by a (leading) presidential candidate is pretty entertaining, an arguably risky reminder to the public of a more ideal version of democracy, or at least what democracy could viscerally feel like. And it's a contest that no one has ever been able to say was fixed by powerful interest groups - even though it's actually a corporate creation, of course, and has its own narrowly defined scope of permissible ideologies and qualifications, the Idol process still rouses a more participatory, engaged spirit than U.S. politics have managed in quite a while. Although, like American presidencies, it peaked early: Kelly Clarkson is the Abe Lincoln of Idol-spawned pop stars.
- For conspiracy theorists: There's a shadowy kind of link between Hillary and Celine: Two songs on Celine's Let's Talk About Love were written by Denise Rich, the songwriter-socialite who got embroiled along with her ex-husband Marc in just a teensy bit of controversy towards the end of the last term of Bill Clinton, when Denise's campaign contributions to Hillary apparently helped Marc get a pardon for tax evasion. The web was tangled enough to ensnare Hillary's brother Tony and the scandal hasn't entirely died. (For those who nod off unless there are really salacious angles, here's one.) Clintons-haters might leap to the conclusion that there was a fix in on this contest, but since the chosen song is not actually a Rich production, but a song written for an Air Canada ad campaign, you would be overreaching. (However, this kinda stuff is why the Clintons should think twice about blithely inviting comparisons between themselves and a Mafia family.)
- Insert Lettermanesque "10 Ways that Hillary Clinton is Like Air Canada" list here.
- To be more serious for a moment, the result can be read as a wad of demographic tea leaves at the bottom of Hillary's teacup: The chosen song was by far the most "soccer mom" of the options, pointedly bypassing the civil-rights-era echoes of the Temptations, the more youth-oriented Smashmouth (purportedly Bill C.'s pick, but in general a weird case of wishful thinking and cool hunting that missed the mark), and the overly politically aware U2.
- For many potential Clinton voters - especially working and middle-class women of all ages, single mothers, new immigrants, exurban families, and many more - the Celine choice is going to be a much more sympathetic and welcomed selection than you would think if you went by the media and the blogophere, which predictably went right into mockery mode. As I argue at length in my book, critics and pundits are, by and large, exactly in the place in the culture least disposed to understanding Celine's appeal, and have always, as they are this week, stood by and jeered while Celine went on to be embraced by hundreds of millions of fans around the world. At least for once Hillary's managed a genuinely populist move here, rather than backing away into the neutral zone her handlers seem to prefer. Although maybe that's because she doesn't make a very convincing populist, which leads to our next problem.
- The song itself, as usual in Celine's English oeuvre, extends a cliched metaphor (flying) to improbable lengths over the course of a few verses, but clips its wings to avoid the danger of getting too poetic, high-toned or metaphysical by relentlessly speaking in terms of "You and I" (as the title has it), which the Clinton campaign no doubt hopes strikes a tone of intimacy - it's between Hillary and the voter, working together - but unfortunately bears with it a kind of individualism and selfishness that is the downside of the Clintons' image. Once again, the "You and I" can be Bill and Hillary, in their opaque, power-seeking dyad, cased within a marital arrangement that is a mystery to the rest of us: "You and I/ Were meant to fly/ Higher than the clouds/ We'll sail across the sky." Way to confirm the perception that you're incapable of being down-to-earth, HRC.
- In most contexts, the use of this kind of privatized-dream language works for Celine, because it suggests that her music belongs in a domestic context, relating to the daily life and struggles and aspirations of her fans. And because Celine herself never seems to have any real ambition except to submit her voice to the approval of a wider and wider public, to be the conduit for a kind of global exchange of broadbrush empathy - oh, and to buy a lot of shoes - it doesn't seem so self-important (except from the POV of committed Celine haters). But give that same message to Hillary and the tonality shifts quite a bit: She would have been better off with a song more like Bill's most memorable campaign anthem, Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop, which works in a kind of direct-address second person, an exhortation followed by a reassurance ("don't stop/ thinking about tomorrow/ don't stop/ it'll soon be here!"), which welcomes in the crowd much more, serves as much more of a rallying point rather than a breathless invocation of destiny.
- But then, that's the difference between Bill and Hillary, isn't it? His ambition always seemed to involve reaching out to touch (a few too many) people; her ambition always seems much more self-regarding and insular. (It's a kind of gender paradox in a way.) The Celine choice might be hoped to "soften" her image more than a rock-and-roll song would, and maybe that would work for a straight-shooting, tough-talking kind of woman, but for Hillary, who always seems just one blurry degree out-of-focus, what bleeds over are some of Celine's less-attractive qualities - her stiffness and awkwardness and melodrama - but not her common touch.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, June 20 at 12:26 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (7)
Handsome Memories
A guest post from Team Zoilus stalwart Erella Ganon, about a vital figure in Toronto music history who will be honored with a honky-tonk hootenanny this weekend. You can hear some Handsome Ned music at his memorial MySpace page. - C.W.
Many years ago, starting in the early '80s, I had a regular radio show on Toronto campus-community station CKLN-FM. My dear friend, the musician Handsome Ned, was a frequent guest. We'd play all kinds of things and gossip on about alleged "borrowed" lyrics or melody lines, tracing them from one popular or obscure song to another. Since Ned always wore a cowboy hat and played country and western music at the Cameron House on Queen Street almost every day at the time, people assumed that is where his knowledge began and ended. But Ned was an army kid, who was born in Germany and travelled a lot, picking up excellent useless information en route.
One thing he and I shared was our love of a good story. Venturing into all kinds of unusual musical genres, we'd play Flipper, Violent Femmes, Bay City Rollers or Aka Pygmy singing songs about their love of honey and tell tales of the connections we'd imagine.
At the time, CKLN's "promise of performance" allowed us to have virtually every kind of music on the air - except country. It seems preposterous now. I cannot remember why it was, but the country station in Hamilton was powerful and unhappy about our audience. Eventually, because of some my carefully worded proposals, we managed to get our friend, David Barnard, the program director to look the other way and grant Ned his own radio show because he was so fond of the undeniably charismatic Ned. However, there was one caveat: He wasn't to play any country. This became a running joke between us. Ned played honkytonk, bluegrass, blues, rockabilly and everything in between: We weren't to call it country, so it was anything but.
The defining lines between one genre of music and another were far less flexible then than they are now, but Ned wooed us, seducing us and transforming us into ardent fans of whatever song struck his fancy. He was not someone to argue with (though I frequently tested that). His brother Jimmy, Ed Mowbray, Mark from Pages Bookstore and I had our birthdays in the same week, so we celebrated together. A few days ago, on my birthday, we raised a glass for Ned, as we've always done.
Ned was born on his older brother Jimmy's birthday. His parents said, "Son, for your birthday, you can choose a name for your new baby brother." Thrilled, Jimmy decided to name him after his hero, someone he thought about daily, someone who had a big impact on his life, motivating him to no end: The baby would be granted the name "Batman." Oops! Ned's parents hadn't considered that one. Telling him they knew too many other children named Batman, they decided to grant the next best thing: The boy would be christened Robin.
Robin "Ned" Masyk died Jan. 10, 1987. He was an important person on Queen Street. Kind of an unofficial ambassador, the peripatetic troubadour sparked an interest in country music that inspired many musicians that came after him. June 4, 2007, would have been Ned's 50th birthday. To celebrate his life and love of all things musical, his friends are gathering on Saturday night, June 16, at one of his favourite watering holes, the Horseshoe. Expect to see these fabulous former Ned collaborators: Mary Margaret O'Hara, Steve Koch, John Borra, Cleave Anderson, Teddy Fury, Lori Yates, Johnny Macleod, Jim Masyk, Steve Leckie (of the Viletones), Screamin' Sam, Tony Kenny (of the Razorbacks), Emily Weedon, Heather Morgan, Michael Brennon, Scott B, Joanne Mackell and others performing at the event. It also will feature the re-release of the The Name is Ned CD, as well as a preview of the upcoming Handsome Ned documentary film and a limited-edition line of Ned t-shirts.
Some of the money raised that night will pay for the design and installation of a memorial plaque on the side of the Cameron House. That's where I was on the night Ned died. Herb Tookey, one of the Cameron's owners, and I were the only people that knew Ned was dead at the time. A cop heard it on the police radio and came in to tell us unofficially. We had to keep it a secret until Ned's family was notified. As people asked us if we knew where Ned was, and whether he was going to play later that night or at a speakeasy, we kept our lips still, stealing moments to break into tears and resume composure until word was out at the end of the night. It was a series of impossibly difficult tasks.
- Erella Ganon
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, June 12 at 3:22 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Guest Post: A Chat With Arnold Dreyblatt:
'I had no musical ability at all!'
Arnold Dreyblatt (right) with Toronto's Scott Thomson on trombone, at the Music Gallery. Photo by Jonny Dovercourt.
My call for guest submissions to Zoilus during my bookwriting downtime has yielded unexpectedly swift & scintillating results: Jonny Dovercourt, co-artistic director of the Music Gallery, contacted me tonight (Friday) to ask if I'd be interested in posting his freshly transcribed interview with Arnold Dreyblatt, who is appearing Saturday night at the Gallery as a co-presentation with the Over the Top Festival. As someone who's been given excitations by Dreyblatt's "Excited Strings" - though only on record before now - I immediately said yes. Jonny's done a terrific interview. Enjoy.
- Carl W.
Play one of my favourite Dreyblatt pieces, The Adding Machine, while you read. Audio via Dreyblatt's website.
Biographical boilerplate: Arnold Dreyblatt was born in New York City in 1953. He has been based in Europe since 1984 and is presently living in Berlin. From 1979-1997, he was director and composer for his music ensemble, The Orchestra of Excited Strings. In composing a performance opera entitled Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933, Dreyblatt formed a new ensemble in 1991. In 1995, recordings by the ensemble were released by Tzadik Records (produced by John Zorn) under the title Animal Magnetism. He's also released material on Hat Art, Jim O'Rourke's Dexter's Cigar label and Table of the Elements Records, and recordings of his work by the Bang On A Can All-Stars. A four-CD box set of historical recordings will be released by Table of the Elements in 2007.
"As one of the most engaging of the second generation of New York minimal composers, Arnold Dreyblatt has developed a distinctive - and delightfully accessible - approach to composition and performance. Employing modified and invented instruments and a unique tuning system, his music is a vigorously rhythmic and richly textured romp through the natural overtone series." - Second Layer
Arnold Dreyblatt performs Sat. May 5 at the Music Gallery (197 John St., Toronto) at 8 pm, with Toronto's Anne Bourne, cello; Rob Clutton, double bass; Nick Fraser, drums; John Gzowski, guitar; Kathleen Kajioko, violin; and Scott Thomson, trombone; with Dreyblatt leading the band on modified bass. Tickets are $10-$20.
Jonny Dovercourt & Arnold Dreyblatt in Conversation
May 2, 2007 - Toronto, Ontario
JD: Arnold, I believe you grew up in Queens, New York. Do you want to talk a bit about that and how it maybe influenced you getting into music in the early days?
AD: Actually, I didn't get into music in the early days. I was just telling the musicians today that I was taking piano lessons as a six-year-old and the teacher taught me with a number system, ironically, and I was kind of improvising with it. And she didn't like me not playing from the notes, so one day she told me, "Well, it's not actually numbers." And then she showed the five-line staff, and I said, "Forget it."
And then The Beatles came out a few years later, and I wanted to take guitar lessons, and so my parents sent me to this Spanish gypsy down the block, and after one lesson, he said, "It's throwing your money down the toilet to give your son music lessons." So then there was a long hiatus!
But I was always interested in experimental music, even while quite young, and I was also listening to a lot of rock music. I was going to concerts at the Fillmore East in New York while in high school in the '60s. Then I was in upstate New York studying at various colleges and universities, I was interested in video and experimental film, which brought me to Buffalo, not far from here, around '74/'75.
JD: What was your area of study?
AD: This was SUNY [State University of New York] Buffalo, and there was this very interesting department called Media Studies, which was a public access centre and a department in the university, and it was very connected to the New York or national experimental film scene, and also the beginnings of video art, which was just starting around that time. The medium was practically created by the New York State Council on the Arts in the early '70s. Portapacks were just invented at the same time a lot of funding became available.
JD: Portapacks?
AD: The portapack was the first portable video recorder. There's a question whether Nam June Paik got his hands on it first, or if another artist did. They used half-inch tape, reel-to-reel, black-and-white, really heavy. You had to carry around the whole recorder, which weighed a ton, and a camera, but it was the first time that artists could get instant feedback, audiovisually. It was the first moment that that was possible. So it was very exciting.
I should say that I was a student, in Buffalo, of Woody and Steina Visulka, who were the founders of The Kitchen in New York. Two years before I arrived they had come up from New York - they were invited by a guy named Gerald O'Grady, who founded this department. They were very interested in producing electronic images, that means not working with cameras but using various frequencies and electronic interference to create electronic imagery.
So I was learning this language of frequency and amplitude; at the same time, during my first month in Buffalo, I was interested in having contact with the music department. Morton Feldman was then head of the music department and there was an event they called "June in Buffalo," the first one with Pauline Oliveros, an electronic music composer called Joel Chadabe, and Feldman.
So I was very happy, after my childhood experience with the numbers and the staff, to learn that the language of physics can explain sound. That it's not just a cultural language with notes on a page and certain letters indicating frequencies and so forth - but that I could escape all that! So that was a very important discovery for me. I was at first applying it more to video, and ironically my early video work was kind of stroboscopic colourfields. I didn't see Tony Conrad's work until much later, but it's interesting that I started with that and then went to music. But I was gradually interested in how this language could be applied to working with sounds, and my videotapes were periodic images; they were in periodic cycles. I was working with putting audio signals into video X & Y and creating different shapes and colours and movements, rhythms. So it was just natural that I would slowly want to move into working with sounds.
And the music department was just as interesting as the media department: They were bringing in a lot of composers from around the country, and in that first year Alvin Lucier came. He did a piece with a snare drum on a stage. It's a piece that I recently had the possibility to realize myself in Dublin. In this piece, he's on the side with a sine-wave sweep generator, with some speakers pointed at the snare drum with the snare on; there's nobody on the stage, other than Alvin Lucier on the righthand side of the stage, and he's turning this dial up, and as it reaches certain resonating frequencies the drum begins to sound. And the audience could feel it, they could feel the standing waves in the room, going through their bellies as the drum would start to sound on its own. So a sense of, "Okay, here's this language of frequency and amplitude, but with video you can just see it on a screen or a monitor" (we were using video almost like an oscilloscope, but with more than one line). But suddenly you could actually feel it, like it was a physical thing - these are like molecules dancing around, up and down.
Alvin Lucier.
So that made me very interested in sound, and then in the bookcase of one of the experimental filmmakers there, Hollis Frampton, I found [at a party] a copy of Selected Writings by LaMonte Young, which he gave to me. It's a very rare publication, and it was there that I read about his work in the '60s. So I came back to New York, met him and spent a number of years then studying with him. First I was interested in his work with sine waves, and then in the idea of basing an ensemble on his acoustic principles.
You could say that Alvin Lucier, who I also ended up studying with later, his medium was more concerned with sound installation, or sound in spaces, or very directly just transporting acoustic principles through an aesthetic situation, whereas LaMonte in a way took the same principles, and from his own very dense composition background, applying it to an ensemble, which was probably the first amplified "band" in contemporary music. That form hadn't yet existed in contemporary music, a composer with own ensemble, heavily amplified. The band that made him famous was the one with Tony Conrad on violin and John Cale [The Velvet Underground] playing viola.
JD: Was that the Theatre of Eternal Music?
AD: Theatre of Eternal Music if you talk to LaMonte; the Dream Syndicate if you talk to Tony!
JD: At the time that you started studying with LaMonte, had you already started composing your own music or doing your own sound experiments?
LaMonte Young.
AD: I came back from Buffalo in '75, so I was 22 when I became LaMonte's "slave," and I spent a year living in his loft, trying to understand how he worked. Then I stopped working with him for personal reasons, but continued as his tape archivist for another year. It takes some time to get out from under the influence of someone like that, so I gradually started developing the music in '76/'77, and in '78 started doing my own sound experiments. I was having trouble finding an orientation for this tuning system that LaMonte and Tony had developed, and it wasn't until I started working with strings that I started to understand what the relations are, because on strings you can actually see it. So again, I was looking for a physical model, a geometry you can hear.
I spent some time doing a lot of theoretical work, looking at the use, in history, of strings for generating tuning systems. Of course I always give credit to LaMonte and Tony for their work in that area. So I did my first concert with an instrument in this period, in 1979, in an artist performance festival. I bought a double bass for $100 from the visual artist Robert Longo, another Buffalo connection, who was collaborating with Rhys Chatham. In New York, we were living in the same building, and I strung it up with piano wire as an experiment, and found this fantastic sound. So I developed this technique of brushing and bowing the strings rhythmically, which became my signature sound, and I had this solo concert which was very successful; it happened to be a very beautiful, very resonant room.
Then in '79/'80, I founded my first ensemble, my first Orchestra of Excited Strings. The first one was called Arnold's Orchestra of Excited Strings, and Alvin Lucier told me to take the "Arnold" out. Then I went to Wesleyan University [Middletown, Connecticut], where Alvin invited me, I had a kind of assistantship there, I basically just did my band and taught a few courses. I had an ensemble there of students, and then I moved back to New York, had the third ensemble, and then the fall of '83, I moved to Europe.
JD: Was your tuning system established by the time you founded the first ensemble, or did it evolve more slowly over time?
AD: No, it was basically set then. Completely, the full system. I had this little piano I found that was a miniature upright with tiny keys for a rich family and their nice little girl to play, and I restrung it and I tuned it with unwound wires. And I tuned it with the first 23 overtones to see what would happen, using F as my fundamental - the first 23 odd overtones; all even numbers are octaves, so you don't need to tune the even ones.
And I found right away that there were these relationships. First of all, prime numbers, like 3, 5, 7, 11, were new tonalities. And I also noticed that if I played by accident 5, 3 and 15, it made this incredible chord. And that's how I started to develop the system. Of course, Tony and LaMonte use another version of the same thing - it's not anything I invented; it's something that exists in nature.
JD: You just had to discover it.
AD: Well, I had the background from what they did, and then I had to discover it for myself, let's say, and then the version I came up with had to do with this series of experiments which I carried out. It's a slightly different way of approaching it, but Tony recognizes a most of the tones in the system. So I heard those relationships, then I worked as I began to understand the system, I came up with this "magic square," which is a multiplication table with 1, 11, 11 and 121 at the four corners. I can show it to you.
JD: And these are overtones.
AD: My music, from the beginning, was based on the principle of having a very rich harmonic series, enacted very much in the early days, but to some degree still, being produced by a long string. When I play bass, all it is is a big body strung with a long unwound wire, to produce a strong harmonic partial series, and then I mesh with that what I call an intellectual act, which is to calculate these higher overtones, which are related to the lower ones, like those odd numbers in the magic square - I multiply them by each other, transpose them into a lower octave and then sound them together with the long excited strings.
JD: So how did you take this vertical realm of the tuning system and put it into the horizontal realm of rhythm, which also plays a big role in your music?
AD: Well, when you listen to the early music, like Nodal Excitation [1982], I had no musical ability at all! [laughs]
JD: Punk rock!
AD: I went to high school with the Ramones, you know? Well, with Joey Ramone, what was his name, [Jeffry] Hyman? I had social studies class with him. And I read this interview where someone asked him, "Can you really play guitar?" And he said, "Man, you just turn up those Marshall amps, and then you just strum as hard as you can, and then you listen to those overtones, man, that's all I need to do." So, in the beginning, the striking of the bass, I used to call it "juggling." You'd have to keep hitting it a certain way to get those resonances to come up, to coax them out.
Normally in music, people feel like they're the masters of their instrument, but I'm like a servant to the instrument. I'm there to make it sound, to get it into vibration. So in the beginning I was hitting, and the whole ensemble in a way went into that. There was the little crazy piano I made, amplified, there was a hurdy-gurdy in the beginning, then I started experimenting with some brass instruments. We went into what I called "the rhythm of one," and then a year later I discovered that I started playing in triplets. I figured it out at home and then we all played. The ensembles were always mixtures of musicians and non-musicians, often visual artists.
Joey Ramone and friend.
Of course, over the years, some other things happened. I remember when Rhys Chatham gave me a gig at the Mudd Club [in NYC], he said to me, "Do you have drums?" I said "No." And he said, "Without drums, you're dead." [laughs] I was very good friends with Phill Niblock then, and I was having a very hard time putting drums in, but then when I moved to Europe I realized it was a very natural thing to help propel the music along. And of course, from all those years of listening to rock music, under the influence, I had that feeling in me, actually. So I started with a snare drum, one snare drum. I've never used a full trap set - I don't like that. I've introduced percussion to the music, and always tried to keep the percussion non-resonant, that means drums are tuned up very tight, so they can cut through all the overtones but don't cloud it. And that gave another rhythmic possibility for the music, and that changed the rhythmic possibilities for the strings, which started becoming more complex.
In the '90s, I realized that the music was wanting to become more complex, and that it wasn't taking away from this other aspect. So I stopped performing with the group then, because I wanted to score it out. So then I had to learn how to notate - and then computers came out, and that helped out a lot - but then there was the question of how to notate it? There were in fact no "bars" in my music until not that long ago, around '99 - which means there were internal systems within the bands to give cues from chord to chord. In the '90s, I began to develop what I call the "Next Slide" structure ("Next Slide" being a cut on Animal Magnetism [1994]). I would have different rhythmic and tonal patterns and it would just cut from one to the other. It's from my film background, to contrast different scenes in the music. Gradually I started to notate some of the more recent material.
In '97, I stopped maintaining an ensemble. I'd been working with the same group of musicians for years in Europe, who knew everything, but I felt like I needed some fresh air, to see what I could do with other musicians. Jim O'Rourke invited me to Chicago, and then in New York, Bang on Can invited me to work with some other classical ensembles. So I started to embark on some new directions, either longer-term commissions where I really write a piece, sometimes for classical musicians. I actually wrote a quartet and an octet. Took me forever, especially when trying to find how to communicate this to musicians that actually don't have the time to learn the tuning for months.
When I did the quartet I worked with a very famous new-music quartet from Germany, the Pelligrini Quartet, but there was no way they were going to sit there and learn how to do all this. So they retuned their strings, they played only open strings and harmonics, which is beautiful.
And then I've also done a number of projects like we're doing here in Toronto, which is meeting a group of musicians and trying to put something together in a shorter period of time - sometimes for two days, this time for a week. There's a certain risk in that, but it's also exciting to see what comes out of it.
JD: Do you want to talk a bit about the pieces you'll be playing at the concert this Saturday?
AD: Actually, there's going to be three pieces. First I'm going to play what I call a recreation of Solo Nodal Excitation from 1979, on this prepared instrument, the "Excited Strings bass," which I started playing again in the late '90s in some club situations, and I feel like it's really developed, in some ways more than it was originally. And then we're going to do a piece which I'm actually quite excited about - with the ensemble, they've actually retuned their instruments and they're struggling to learn that the 5th harmonic is really the major 3rd. This drives them completely mad! But they have actually learned to play in this intonation, and we have a great percussionist, so it's going to be what I call a very sustained, very meditative piece going through these different tone combinations, which is quite long for me, because I'm used to having very short pieces. I'm not sure how long, I'll know tomorrow morning [at the next rehearsal].
Nick Fraser, percussionist for Saturday's show.
And then we're going to do kind of a rhythmic piece which is based upon a similar technique to what I do on my bass, but by bowing on the violin-family instruments, and to some degree guitar. Listening to the different tones in an open string, and playing tones against it. So there are those three things that show three different aspects of my music. Not that it represents everything. I talked to John [Gzowski] and we agreed that it would have been too time-consuming for me to write out a whole complicated score and have everybody learn to play it, so it is a workshop situation of a week with them, so it's a challenge to see how far we can go. They're going to have charts with what the sequences are, for what they're going to play.
JD: Are these two ensemble pieces relatively new then?
AD: The sustained piece in that form I've never done before. It's actually been created here ... it's a premiere! [laughs] The second piece has aspects which I've used in other pieces, but it's going to be a more complex version than I've done before.
JD: It seems that in your relationship to your music, you're working with something you invented more than 25 years ago, but you're still letting it evolve. That seems really rare. What do you think it is that's kept you committed to this idea of making music?
AD: Well, I have one good excuse - that I can't play anything else!
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, May 04 at 11:11 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Investigate, Impeach, Indict and Incarcerate:
EMP Pop Con, Part 5
Finally, notes from some of the papers I got to hear:
Jonathan Lethem's opening keynote talk was a lovely piece of writing about the sort of transcendental condition of the "wannabe," about the music critic and fan's place in the "fifth Beatle" position and the way various musicians have created room in their own music for those sorts of points of identification. (The hypeman being an obvious example.) People were a bit snooty about Jonathan's talk, mainly because it didn't tell us anything we didn't already know, but I appreciated the generosity of it: Jonathan, who's got the kind of popular recognition for his writing a lot of critics would envy, was explaining in subtle, memoiristic style why he's got his own case of music-critic envy. Still, as a keynote, it did set a bit of the tone of the conference, in which provocation and dissent took a back seat to appreciations and contextualizations.
Robert Fink showed how musicological analysis can rock in his paper on James Brown's Soul Power, 1971, when he mapped that chorus against Stokely Carmichael's 1966 "Black Power" chant - and showed that the "soul power!" shout falls rhythmically like a shout back at the black-power chant. "It's as if James Brown recognized Stokely Carmichael as another performer - and decided to cut him," Fink said. He also noted that Brown's anti-revolutionary song ("we don't need-uh/ revolution!/ we gotta have-uh/ constitution!") put the emphasis on the word "soul" whereas Carmichael's revolution-minded chant stressed "power." He was calling up the political speech but also rebutting and rewriting it. As Fink summed up, "If one's brothers rhythmicize politics, what can one do but politicize one's rhythm?"
Joshua Clover gave one of the conference's best presentations, "1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About," part of a book in progress. I can't convey all its multimedia umph, but its main point was to weigh the actual year 1989 (the year that included Tiananmen Square and the "fall" of the Berlin Wall) against the signified cultural 1989, or 1989 versus "1989". Using the example of La Marseillese, he said that "it's no easy matter to date a song" (adding, "as every Pazz & Jop voter knows"), which is like "the difficulty of dating history itself." When the French Revolution happened in 1789, La Marseillese didn't exist; it was composed in 1792. "It cannot belong to 1789 but it belongs entirely to '1789.' " The result of these slippages is that "our sense of process disappears," and we lose our awareness of historical contingency, when memory is consolidated in images and symbols and songs.
Joshua then applied that thought to the songs of "1989", such as Scorpions' Wind of Change, which came out in 1990 but actually had been written earlier about glasnost, but was attached to the Berlin Wall story by its video (and the fact that Scorpions were German). "Power ballads exist so one can feel all weepy and overwhelemed, as one does in the face of the historical sublime... like a tiny Zippo in a world on fire." He went on, "The 'moment' is 'magic' but unstated, so that it can attach to whatever magic moment may arrive - the first kiss, the sixth beer, the end of Communism, whatever." His next example was 1991's Right Here, Right Now, by Jesus Jones, which was the musical equivalent of Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis and made the boast "Bob Dylan didn't have this to sing about." His last example was Roxette's Listen to Your Heart, which besides being the first number 1 single that never came out as a 45, was the soundtrack to Civic Forum (Vaclav Havel's party) advertisements in the then-Czechoslovakia, a song that Joshua said had the "eventless, pleasurable, post-historical ongoingness" that mirrors "the path of the 'new world order,' or as it would like to think." These songs and their videos helped make "1989" an "image-story that every song helped to tell," a story in which "1989" is removed from historical process and becomes a "magic moment," rendered unanalyzable, a moment of "nerf humanism." The music critic, he argued, has a responsibility to historicize in the face of "the pop-songization of history."
I enjoyed all of the "Songlines" panel, though I missed Roni Sarig's first paper on Triggerman while I was listening to Mark Sinker's interesting ramble on music writing; Michael Barthel, known to Zoilus readers for his Clap Clap Blog, one of my favourite music blogs, gave a great paper about how Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah has gradually been reduced by successive cover versions (beginning with John Cale and then multiplying exponentially with Jeff Buckley's cover of John Cale's cover, which was then itself used as the source of uncountable covers), and their use in film and TV soundtracks. It's gone, he said, from a drily sceptical, wry, multifaceted work into a one-dimensional "sad" song to use whenever you need to show a montage of various characters in various places being sad. "It's become the auditory equivalent of a silent-film actress pressing the back of her hand to her head." The effect, he said, was like "making a Matisse into a washcloth" - but, he added, a song isn't a Matisse: "Wring it out and it's ready again." Then he demonstrated this by playing his own recording of Hallelujah, using verses Cale and Buckley cut from the original (which no one ever sings) and a panoply of wild, cheerful musical styles. Now there's a critical manoeuvre you wouldn't get from an academic. It was great finally to meet Mike, who's as bright-eyed and wry himself as any reader would expect. His paper is up on his site now.
Next came Mike McGonigal, a writer I've admired since he was publishing the wonderful Chemical Imbalance zine in the early '90s, speaking both reverently and humorously about Blind Willie Johnson's Black was the Night, Cold was the Ground, and offering fascinating notes on guitar evangelists, street-corner singers and shout-singing preachers (most amazingly, Washington Phillips, who sang to an instrument that might have been an autoharp or a miniature piano called a doceola, but which sounded like "a celestial ice-cream truck"). His paper also featured the most hilariously self-reflexively sarcastic Power Point slides of the conference, which went perfectly with his mix of passion and self-mockery as a speaker. And the panel closed with Anthony Miller's survey of songs about Patty Hearst, of which of course there are loads, and I can't believe I'd never realized it before - from Patti Smith's version of Hey, Joe to some awful Dylanish folk music to the Ramones' Judy was a Punk, the Misfits' She, Camper van Beethoven's Tania on Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart and Black Box Recorder's Love Song to an Heiress. Miller didn't really have an extensive argument to make about all these weird refractions of 1960s mythology, but it was rich material.
Yuval Taylor's piece on "feelgood/bad vibes" culture in 1972 was very fine, though he couldn't improve on his opening, which pointed out that 1972 was the sole year the Grammys gave out an award for "Best Pop Instrumental With Vocal Coloring," and the nominees were Santana, Isaac Hayes and Emerson Lake and Palmer. What kind of strange world was this, he asked, where flutey exotic-semi-rock with sighs and chanting could be considered an entire genre? A world where gatefold album covers were for rolling joints, clearly. (I'd say this was also a foretaste of the New Age music to come.) Meeting Yuval was one of the weekend's highlights.
Franklin Bruno may win the prize for the conference's weirdest topic: The various fifties-and-sixties satirical versions of My Fair Lady and their cast albums. He pointed out that My Fair Lady's own original cast album was actually the "jackpot" that cemented the place of the 33 1/3 LP, selling 8 million copies. One of the versions was Canadian content (Franklin apologized in advance if he was about to commit any offences against Canadian culture): My Fur Lady, a hit musical at McGill in the late '50s, featured, if I followed correctly, an, um, "Eskimo princess" who for political reasons needed to become a proper Canadian, and the main joke of the show seems to have been that you can't "Teach Me How to be Canadian" (as one of the songs was titled) because Canadians don't have any distinctive attributes. The others were My Square Laddie, in which someone tries to learn how to be a bohemian ("I could've boozed all night"), and, most interestingly, My Fairfax Lady, a kind of double-reverse-satire in which a British actress in L.A. wants to learn to be American, but stumbles onto L.A.'s Jewish strip and so ends up being taught to speak in a Yiddish accent, in a script loaded with Catskills-style humour. Franklin was a little pressed for time so he didn't get to elaborate too much on his final analysis, and I didn't take proper notes - again, hopefully he'll publish it, at least on his blog.
Another of my favourite bloggers, Mike Powell, was at the conference for the first time, and it was a delight to meet him. I really enjoyed his paper, "The Pyongyang Hit Parade," which brought us into his pathological obsession with North Korean state-produced pop music, which is of course the only pop music there. It seemed as if Mike started out his journey feeling like he'd stumbled into sort of a "reverse Disneyland" that could be his own private anti-utopian dreamworld musical hobby, but became more and more uncomfortable and disturbed by it as he found out more about it. What sticks with me is his assertion that there is absolutely no sign of a musical underground, a culture of samizdat, in the country, according to accounts from people who have gotten out. I find this an impossible thought to assimilate - usually, at least after dictatorships fall, one finds out about the underground activity that was going on all along - it even happened in Nazi Germany - and I feel compelled to believe that of North Korea. It seems like the bleakest of all possibilities to contemplate that there can be a totalitarian state so complete as to staunch even private imaginative expression. But it also feels important to consider that possibility. This is what I love about Mike's criticism, that it's not only intellectually keen and curious, but never without a personal imprint, an eagerness to put the messy emotions and less-noble impulses and involuntary nerves and bruises on the page, too. I aspire to that.
It's late and this is getting lengthy, but a few more: Kathy Meizels' paper drawn from her thesis work on American Idol was typically strong - I've interviewed Kathy for my book, so I'll wait to remark on her ideas there; Daphne Carr presented some cool research on the Great Battle of Hot Topic among teen punks and wannabes; and Michaelangelo Matos had the brilliant idea of doing a reality check on the stereotype of the Bob Marley poster in the white kid's dorm room, highlighted by his interview with a couple who go around from campus to campus selling posters.
Wendy Fonarow talked charmingly about her "three zones" research on the psychogeography of the indie-scene club gig, which I've referenced here before - I need to read her book - updating it with some salient thoughts on how the cellphone-camera gig-documenting epidemic in zone 1 (the "pit" in front of the stage) is messing with the participatory dynamics there, moving the experience "into the future anterior," so that it's not about being there, but that tomorrow, "I will have been there."
I've already referred to Jesse Fuchs' paper on musical video games, which was a technical tour de force of game visuals and sounds. He argued that games can offer music context, causality, a blur of the listener-performer boundary, familiarity, educational purpose and decontextualization (appreciating music differently by engaging with it physically rather than aurally), and made a pitch for the value of the "honest fake" over "fake honesty" and the utopian impulse in game playing, an activity that's the opposite of work.
The conversation at the University of Washington on Friday evening, between the great hip-hop writer Jeff Chang and the music historian Gaye T. Johnson (whose research on the way the arrival of the Eighth Regimental Band from Mexico in New Orleans in the 1880s for the Cotton Exposition would influence black music in NOLA sounds fascinating) was just a delight, and included some very stirring discussion of the plight of New Orleans now, "the right of return" and "the imperative to forget." Their commitment, sensitivity and intellectual rigor were inspiring.
There's more, like RJ Smith's recreation of how the first incarnation of Destroy All Monsters (a proto-punk noise band with artists Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw) emerged from the post-sixties bummer of Detroit and Ann Arbor. Kembrew McLeod's uproarious recounting of how his tiny Virginia town became the butt of a Spin magazine prank in the post-grunge search for the "next Seattle." Simon Reynolds's paper talked about the way that techno goes through cycles in relationship to the city of London - that a new style will come out of London (usually meaning black London), and then it will get modified by DJs who are responding to the tastes of a more international (white) audience, and at some point that will reach a breaking point where someone feels the need to assert a London identity again, and often their response creates the next genre. The kind of thing that's obvious when pointed out but not beforehand. Meeting Simon at last was another of the Pop Con's pleasures.
Then there was Ned Sublette's call on the "Resurrecting New Orleans" panel that members of the Bush administration be "investigated, impeached, indicted, and incarcerated" for what they did and didn't do around hurricane Katrina, which does in some ways seem even more criminal than the Iraq war. I spent a long night in the hotel bar being regaled along with David Grubbs with Ned's tales of playing with Glenn Branca and LaMonte Young in the 1970s. Ned is an amazing, intoxicating raconteur.
But enough now. An affectionate hi to all the folks I got to meet at EMP this year, the old friends I got to spend too little time with, to Jake London and John Shaw for being my chauffeurs and tour guides to Seattle, and to those I wish I'd met and didn't find space or nerve to talk to, or whose papers I had to miss. Next year, the great spirit and Paul Allen willing.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, April 29 at 4:08 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Freaks in the Forkways:
EMP Pop Con, Part 4
I moderated a panel at the Pop Con called "Forks in the Folkways," unfortunately at the same time as the exciting "Rethinking Hip-Hop Roots" panel with Oliver Wang on boogaloo, Jeff Chang on the Latin sources of the breakbeat, Garnette Cadogan (whose acquaintance I was delighted to make over the weekend, a very quick, warm, learned and funny guy) on the Jamaican side of the story (which, as he mentioned to me, is a little more obvious to people in Toronto than it is to most Americans) and Joe Schloss on the Puerto Rican uprock antecedent to breakdancing. But I was proud of our panel, which included some of the best shit I heard all weekend. My friend Carl Zimring, an environmental historian who also happens to be a huge music geek, gave fascinating paper on Woody Guthrie's love of dams and other attitudes that separate (and historicize) his politics from what contemporary left-wingers (including Billy Bragg and Wilco) might assume he thought.
Meghan Drury Askins, who comes from the same small countercultural California town as Joanna Newsom, put her old schoolmate's music in the context of Nevada City history and psychogeography - for example the local river, which she points out appears in Newsom's songs as a place of respite and recharge; not to mention the fact that the outline of the county is deliberately drawn in the shape of a pistol pointing at a neighbouring county, in hommage to old historical resentments, which points up the place's ornery side. Scott Seward showed off his habitual blend of wit, knowledge and beautiful language in his paper on the folkie bent of much current extreme metal (not flinching from the way that folkie bent crosses over with Euro-metal's pagan-Aryan drift toward Nazism, but pointing out that worrying too much about the politics of guitar-obsessed dweebs who seldom leave their basements may be misplaced).
And the amazing Erik Davis, as always, managed to make topics hippies think about seem a million percent more intriguing. This time he brought his engaged scepticism to bear on "Freak Folk and the Analog Ethic," pointing out that unlike most analog fetishists who fixate on vinyl records, folks like Newsom and MV&EE and, to some degree, Steve Albini, among others, look to analog as a practice, and by physically intertwining themselves with the inconveniences and slowness of analog methods, they take an impulse that appears like mere nostalgia and turn it into a lived reality. I can't do justice to the complexities of his talk (digital/analog as particle/wave, for example) because I didn't want to take notes up on the dias, but it was exactly the sort of thing that our imaginary crossdisciplinary Believer-styled music mag ought to publish; it sparked some great chat in the q-&-a period.
(To be continued...)
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, April 29 at 2:27 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Good News for 'Sounds of the Ocean':
EMP Pop Con, Part 3
My first two posts on EMP were a whole lot of meta-talk, but I think the meta-talk was one of the most invigorating parts of the event this year. One reason was that Robert Christgau was such a presence this year. In a way, the whole event and all this thinking about the future of music writing was in the shadow of the conflicts around Bob's firing at the Village Voice, and Bob was in a (deserved but amusingly odd) position of being the Pop Con's sort of patron martyr and saint. But I think finding himself turned into a freelancer also made him feel more than before that at EMP he's among his peers, so he was a less distanced observer. His contributions definitely helped liven things up, but I think a few people also felt intimidated out of participating in discussions, inhibited from arguing with his authoritative voice. That's probably inevitable at a gathering that brings together "big names" and small, and it's mostly a wonderful thing that Bob, like Greil Marcus and other star critics, comes out year after year to mingle.
Bob's own address was the essay manque for this year's VV Pazz & Jop poll, the first ever that he didn't preside over, and his thoughts on the rival Jackin' Pop poll that Michaelangelo Matos organized for the Idolator blog. (And in which I voted, while boycotting P&J - Christgau, fyi, voted in both.) His talk included a lot of wise reflection with a smattering of generational crossfire, the flipside of Amy Phillips' remark about "the kids." I think Bob, too, was overgeneralizing. He was obviously right that a poll that skews younger might privilege "emergent" culture at the expense of the "residual" (TV on the Radio over Bob Dylan and the New York Dolls), but I think it's actually that younger critics have more diverse interests in terms of older culture - that is, practice a kind of "long tail" historicism, with less focused attention on the established canon and more time for other roots and rhizomes. What's more, those younger critics will be older someday too, and come to share Bob's interest in the long view. (Maybe I find this easier to see, being almost halfway in age between Bob and the whippersnappers he was fretting about.) Whether they/we will be able to get jobs at that point, of course, is less assured.
In the same panel, Daphne Brooks gave a beautiful, erudite paper about TV on the Radio's sonic black internationalism that made me want to give their album a fresh listen (although her mentions of their commonalities with Radiohead reminded me of other reasons I'm not so drawn to them).
Tim Quirk, the well-named, affable and charming executive from Rhapsody.com and singer for Too Much Joy, spoke about what the "universal jukebox," subscription-based model of music delivery might mean for the future of listening and "the economics of adoration." The upside is that it favours deep catalogue, transforming the industry term "turntable hit" (something that gets played a lot on radio but doesn't sell) from a perjorative to a goal; the downside is that it favours background music - especially "warm, upbeat acoustic troubadors." Several people voiced distress about the implications for black music, though Quirk pointed out that while he called his paper "Good News for Yo La Tengo" he could have called it "Good news for Luther Vandross." I'd say what's distressing is that this model disperses the marketing imperatives and pressures that can push pop toward novelty and surprise; that is, big hits could become less interesting.
Jesse Fuchs (who'd earlier given a fantastic presentation on interactive music-based video games, from Parappa the Rapper to Guitar Hero) nailed it when he said that the paper should have been called "Good News for Brian Eno and 'Sounds of the Ocean.' " And bad news for Timbaland.
Incidentally,, in the closing session, Quirk also pointed out that music writers are in demand by such services to serve as guides and curators for subscribers. Which is a way of thinking about music for living. But it's not much of a way of writing about music, and that distinction matters to me much the way the distinction between foreground and background music does.
(To be continued...)
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, April 29 at 2:04 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
The Death of Rumination?
EMP Pop Con, Part 2
Ellen Willis, photographed by Jade Albert, circa 1981. Thanks to Rockcritics.com.
The other lunch sessions included the very touching tribute to Ellen Willis, where Bob Christgau, Ann Powers, Sasha Frere-Jones, Daphne Carr and others who had known or been very affected by Willis's work spoke affectingly about her and read various kick-ass passages of Willis's rock writing, which cries out for a comprehensive collection. She sounded like a formidable woman. Christgau, who had a relationship with Willis in the 1960s and renewed their friendship later in life, said, "People thought she was shy. She wasn't shy. She was thinking - and ignoring you."
And then there was the closing discussion, "On the Future of Thinking about Music for a Living." The story of this session has already been boiled down to the moment that Pitchfork's Amy Phillips said that kids don't read long pieces anymore and that if the writers in the room wanted to make a living they would have to learn to write very, very fast, for a market that wants information about music faster than they can listen to it, practically faster than it can be made. And then the room had a collective shitfit and Tom Kipp (a great thinker-without-portfolio) said, "We must not accept the death of rumination."
Part of what's wrong with how this story has been recounted is that Amy was interpreted as saying, "Pitchfork is gonna eat your lunch," whereas in fact her passionate tone definitely conveyed her own alarm at the situation. But it also omits a lot of the other responses to and anticipations of the same idea that came up at the session: The academics spoke about the increasing support in disciplines such as American Studies and Musicology for pop-music studies and a growing crossover with journalistic methodology (as in researching music by actually asking the musicians). Jody Rosen (of Slate and many other publications) talked about the publishing industry's hunger for non-fiction books - saying that he's written a book about Irving Berlin and the song White Christmas and has a contract for a book about an obscure 18th-century musical instrument (Benjamin Franklin's glass harmonica), and as a result he and his wife own an apartment in Brooklyn. If that sounds crass to you, you're not a critic - the future of thinking about music doesn't seem at all dark to me, but the question of making a living at it (and thus having time to do it deeply and well) is a fraught one indeed. Also, Douglas Wolk made a great, pithy point, that with the Internet, writers need to think of what they do less as making pronouncements and more as proposing conversations. (This is exactly why I started Zoilus.)
But Jody's point also spoke to the bigger context that I think Amy missed: If nobody wants to read about pop music, if nobody wants extensive analysis, why does the 33 1/3 series exist? Why does the Da Capo anthology exist? Why are there more high-quality books about all kinds of music being printed these days than ever before? I think what Amy sees from the Pitchfork vantage point is actually a lot of "kids" who never would have read in-depth pop criticism in the first place, and are using blogs and Pfork the way previous generations would have relied on John Peel or another favourite DJ, just as tip sheets for good new music. But other blog readers, the students in popular-culture courses, the buyers of those books, form the same passionate minority that's always been the critic's audience, and I suspect that mini-crowd is bigger now than before - maybe not as activated as in the 1970s, when rock crit as we know it was born because music was the overwhelmingly dominant force in youth culture, but still plenty healthy enough to give rumination a future. (Pretty Goes with Pretty has some parallel thoughts.)
However, to move that future in a direction that Pop Con types would like to see, as Eric Weisbard (the director of the conference) pointed out, the Pop Conference community, if we can call it that, also has the ability to band together. Josh Kun brought up one possible venue - the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg's Popular Music Project, which he directs, and which proposes to be "a one-stop home for the interdisciplinary study and analysis of popular music" and a "point of open contact between scholars, musicians, students, producers, musicians, engineers, critics, label chiefs, and of course, fans."
As well, though, there was some talk about trying to create a way for the people that EMP brings together to stay in touch and share their work between Pop Cons - apparently this happened once before, in the early years of the event, with the "Pop Talk" message board, which fizzled, but perhaps the time has come to reinvigorate that effort. The most exciting vision, though, would be to try to start a magazine - online or in print or both - that would talk about music in the terms and on the level that the Pop Conference inspires. The Believer has been brought up a couple of times as a model, and in fact the Pop Con is in discussion with that magazine about doing a collaborative issue sometime in the future. An ongoing magazine, obviously, would require a group of people to step up to plan, finance, edit and publish the thing - and it would have its own downside, no doubt factionalizing folks who felt included and those who didn't - but it's a dream worth dreaming.
As for those who say rumination has no future? Keep thinking - and ignore them.
(To be continued...)
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, April 29 at 1:47 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
One Week After:
EMP Pop Con 2007, Part 1
I didn't get quite the mind-jolt from the Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle this year that I have in the past. As always, it was an amazing event - the only place journalists, academics, some musicians and some industry people as well as a few thinkers-without-portfolio (like Internet fan-discussion group members) gather and exchange ideas and energies. I'm going to break my notes up into a series of more digestibly sized posts but this is really one long recap and reflection.
As I said, I didn't come away with quite the same high. I don't think it's because the presentations were any weaker, though I felt that many were less pointed - collections of intriguing material and analysis rather than arguments. It was partly because it was my third time, and also that I'm a bit worn out from busyness and wasn't as sparkable as usual. It may have been that the subject - about "time and place," geography and history in music - was, though worthy, by nature a little distancing and less likely to cause present-tense controversy and conflict.
But it was also because there were more panels scheduled - which meant that whenever you were hearing one speaker, you were missing three others, and that when you chatted with people at the conference, chances were that they hadn't heard any of the same presentations you had. So conversation was often limited to, "What have you heard that you liked?" rather than "What did you think of what so-and-so said?" I realize it's tough for the programming committee to reject so many submissions, but the number will likely only rise in future (the way proposals have risen for the 33 1/3 series, which along with the annual Da Capo Best Music Writing anthology is in some ways a print analogue of the Pop Con), but the value of the event - as of all criticism - is as much in the conversation it enables as in the presentations themselves, and that side should be nurtured just as diligently. The curators recognized this by scheduling three different discussion/plenary sessions and a presenters' afterparty (thanks, Matos!) on top of the opening and closing receptions, but the architecture of the conference also affects the content of those interactions.
For my part, I decided to propose a discussion session rather than a specific paper this year. It was called "Seeing Scenes: The Music Critic in Place." My idea was to talk about localism and partisanship as both fruitful strategies and conflict-ridden problems in critical practice. I partly used Toronto theatre-maker Darren O'Donnell's Q&A format - getting individuals up one by one and letting the audience ask them anything they wanted on the theme - and then let that morph into a more free-form discussion. I was happy with how it went - a chance among other things to talk to non-Toronto folk about my somewhat-controversial place in promoting and analyzing things like Torontopia and Bad Bands - but there were some disappointments: First, predictably, it took awhile to get warmed up, and with the necessary time constraints, it felt like we had to end just when things were getting interesting. Second, a lot fewer folks in the room than I expected actually work as local rather than (as they say in the U.S.) "national" critics. I inadvertantly compounded that problem in my facilitation, as the people I knew personally and who were therefore the first to pitch in and help the talk get going were all "national" writers, although Ann Powers, for instance, had some really fascinating things to say about working in Los Angeles and feeling frustrated by the way the entertainment-industry agenda and her editors' need to drive eyeballs to their website prevent her from being able to engage with the city itself as much as she'd like. (With a nice sidebar on the fact that in L.A. the music business itself is "local.")
In the second half a few folks, such as Peter Scholtes of Minneapolis's City Pages (I love the name of his blog, by the way: "Complicated Fun") spoke up for the values of localism, saying that all music begins as local music and that if critics disdain getting their hands dirty in that arena - a lot of the critics present said they just didn't hear good music being made by local acts, for instance - then part of the ecosystem of how great music happens gets damaged. But mostly the localism idea (which to me is also a political proposal about the need as a citizen and an intellectual to be engaged with the community in which you're physically situated, not just in the notional and virtual communities of culture) was slighted in favour of a discussion about how friendly critics should be with their subjects. I felt like this was a misreading of my advocacy of "partisanship" and critical engagement with the artistic process, but probably an inevitable one. Robert Christgau intervened on the side of the predictable but worthy ideal of critical distance, saying that critics who don't maintain it are just bad critics. Ann asked, picking up on some points I'd made in my introduction, whether they might just be up to something different. Bob said, "No, I'll stick with bad." Which got a laugh, but was a bit difficult to answer without feeling like you'd be picking an unwinnable fight. (More about that in a second.) Still, it felt like the session stirred a few pots, and people said they enjoyed it.
(To be continued...)
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, April 28 at 11:46 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (12)
Turning Around on Rirkrit Tiravanija
A Tiravanija installation, with the artist at the far right of the pic.
I went to hear the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija speak tonight at the Ontario College of Art & Design, of which, by the way, he's an alumnus: He moved to Canada with his Thai diplomat parents when he was 19, started as a history student at Carleton in Ottawa and as his interest in art was stirring, happened to notice an OCAD (or OCA as it was then) calendar on a counsellor's office shelf, pulled together a portfolio and applied. This was in the early '80s, an especially dynamic time in the Toronto art scene, which spilled over into the school. (He moved on from there to study at the Chicago Institute of Art and the Whitney program, and is now based in Thailand, Berlin and New York.) On his return visit, Rirkrit (as everyone seems to call him) is the first of OCAD's "Nomadic Residents," a program of the school's new Professional Gallery, which is meant to "inspire and influence the OCAD community by featuring artists from around the world whose work questions issues such as travel, mobility, displacement, dislocation, and homelessness, as well as the speed or instability of modern life. ... [to] to join here to there, the local to the global and the provisional and the permanent." He had a low-key chat with OCAD prof and gallery curator Charles Reeve, sometimes so low-key it was boring, and yet I walked away feeling inspired.
Tiravanija is a bit of a pet of the "relational aesthetics" scene, enough so that a picture of one of his installations formed the cover of Parisian critic/curator Nicolas Bourriaud's book of that name. He's best known for installations he's been doing since the early 1990s in which he cooks Thai food for gallerygoers, making the social interaction his material. Another is a meticulous reconstruction of his New York apartment, installed in various galleries in other cities, open 24 hours with an invitation for people to just come hang out and use the place as they pleased. I've always been a bit mystified by the acclaim, from descriptions of his work, feeling that aside from the obvious desire to subvert the inertia of museum/gallery space (an old theme by now), it sounded rather thin. And when he started talking about his student days, when he said his work was always very well-received, I thought, "Aha, maybe he's just, like, the perpetual 'A' student of the art world."
But as he spoke, in gentle tones and small whorls and spirals, around his work, of how he concentrates on the details of the spaces he works in and, particularly, how his projects are always in contention with the physical and legal and institutional barriers and limits of those spaces, and how he changes his work in relation to those limits, I started to get a sense of the energy and chargedness that those who attend his shows seem to experience. It was also striking how much of his work is really to create instructions (or "recipes" if you will) that other people interpret and carry out, and how unnarcissistically open he is to the inevitability of those instructions being altered and improvised upon by the participants, in a flux and flow. For two "retrospectives" of his work in Europe, for instance, he simply left museum spaces totally empty and wrote a script for their docents to use (and elaborate on) to guide audiences around the room while pointing out and describing the "works" that weren't actually there. It's a beautiful concept, a game of let's-pretend that at the same time elegantly answers the absurd problem of how to gather together a body of work that consists mainly of ephemeral experiences. (Very cagey.) And it doesn't involve Tiravanija's presence at all, except as absent referent, as source of initial chain of reaction, reinforcing the quiet rebuke to individualism in his approach. Likewise, I was moved by the idea of "The Land," a collaborative project he's undertaken on a large former rice field in Thailand, which is simply open for artists to use as a site - including architectural investigations of sustainable development. He described the recent "One Year" project, in which a group of artists just spent a year there, getting some work done, but mainly getting to know and talk with one another - it made me think about relationship versus work, in the way some of the best "relational" projects I've seen or been involved with have done, whether all this business of producing artifacts and documents and art is, in the end, as important as the human connections that arise in the process.
His responses to audience questions that drew on the art-world rhetoric around his work were also nice to see - when people asked about "the social as the new modernism" or "open-source art" he would shrug them off, a bit embarrassed, though respectful, conveying that his role as an artist was to explore and expose the territory, not to be the one to map it. I often feel that it's unseemly when artists get too excited about the critical vocabularies around their own work, as though their works really were reducible to a journal article on issues in politics or philosophy or aesthetics, in which case maybe they'd be better off just writing journal articles. (This isn't meant to be a slam against artists who do have a precise intellectual armature for what they're doing, as many of the greatest have, and certainly not against journal articles; but with the re-academicization of the art world, sometimes the critical discourse has become the cart drawing the horse; by distancing himself from the hype other people use to sell his work on the intellectual market, Rirkrit seemed to avoid becoming their product.)
I was also stirred by the video that was projected while he and Reeve talked, a gorgeously simple documentary of a meal he cooked with a group of people in Singapore, which gave a bit of a taste (sorry) of his work for those of us who haven't encountered it first-hand. And then there's his exhibition in the OCAD gallery, which opens today, and which he avoided addressing directly but explained by means of several stories about dealing with those aforementioned institutional limits in other places. The background (at least as rumoured in the audience) is that he wanted to have something cooking, but that was deemed a fire hazard; other proposals ran up against other OCAD rules. So what he did, as a few of us found out by slipping upstairs for a peek, was to wall up the entrance to the gallery - and again, remember, this is its first exhibit, as well as Tiravanija's first Canadian solo show - with, I think, cinderblock bricks, and sealed with mortar. So no one can enter it. He said this was also a "time-based" work, hinting broadly that it wouldn't stay in the same condition over the coming months. I'm very curious to see how it develops.
You can view a video of a conversation a year ago between Tiravanija and science-fiction writer and conceptual gadabout Bruce Sterling at the Walker Center in Minneapolis online. It's more animated than tonight's talk was, but be warned, Sterling is rather overbearing in relation to the softspoken Tiravanija. Still worth watching, though.
Plus, for some music content: the Rirkrit Tiravanija song (er, not a keeper).
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, April 04 at 11:55 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Tranzaction Figures
The Bicycles in their "Last Schmaltz" cd-release party at the Tranzac in Toronto last summer.
Their four-week Wombat Wednesdays series at the 'zac begins tonight.
Photo by Beth Hamill, Rockpaperpixels.
This entry was co-written by me and Zoilus contributor Chris Randle. - C.W.
On one wall of the Tranzac is a bulletin board for events and meetings around its Annex neighbourhood. This isn't exactly unique for Toronto venues, but what's across from it is: The opposite wall is covered with dead men in uniform, a roll call of Australian Victoria Cross recipients. This is the Toronto Australia New Zealand Club's curious nature, as a space deeply devoted to nurturing and housing communities whose history stretches back to before almost all of that community was born, back to a Toronto where even seminal venues like the El Mocambo and George's Spaghetti House were dream buildings.
The past doesn't just leave wistful memories, though. It also creates debts, and the Tranzac has a lot of them. As Kate McGee, a board member as of this fall, puts it: "Obviously, as a member-run community space, there is often a degree of worry about funds and maintenance and sustainability." The fundamental changes that the community has undergone since the group's inception only complicate things further. [... continues on the jump ...]
The Australians and New Zealanders have mostly drifted away now. The Tranzac moved to its current digs at Brunswick and Bloor in 1971, and a few years later it had become an essential hub for traditional music from the British Isles (almost as though Oceania were being colonized again!). And the Tranzac remains an adoptive home for that tight-knit, familial community: Both Chris and Carl, in attending the occasional folk event there, have heard the clatter of Morris dancers' wooden swords (memorably at dawn one May Day), the raucous sea shanties sung from memory by an entire room. Kate McGee grew up in a folk-music family and still participates in that music, while (like Richard Parry of the Arcade Fire, whose dad David was a member of Toronto's famous Friends of Fiddlers' Green) also becoming a part of the indie-rock scene: "I've been going to the Tranzac since I was a little girl," she says. "I remember getting to see all sorts of old friends and family friends and family members everywhere I looked, and being able to roam free all over the club to sample whatever music suited my fancy. I remember other kids falling asleep in guitar cases and on piles of coats under tables, while their parents played music late into the night. My friends' kids still do this."
In the interim, though, the Tranzac has opened its doors to music much beyond the boundaries of - although not entirely forgetful of - folk music. In the past several years, the front room of the Tranzac has become the day-to-day drop-in centre of free-improvised music in Toronto, especially the Rat-Drifting constellation as well as other portions of AIMToronto; yes, the Arraymusic space and Now Lounge are the homes of weekly series that grant this music its most intense testing ground, of players among players, but the weeknight front-room berth the Tranzac affords to improv groups may well be Toronto's most relaxed, affordable experimental-music venue, where you can hear the likes of Drumheller, Deep Dark United, the Reveries, the Silt, the Saint Dirt Elementary School and the Woodchoppers' Association; it was a frequent stop for Rock Plaza Central before they broke through to Pitchfork-level recognition. It's been the site of the annual 416 improv festival, and last summer the three-day Bummer in the Summer psych-noise-improv-boree. More and more, when new-music pioneers such as Rhys Chatham have visited Toronto recently, you'll often find them at the Tranzac, which is like a shambling rec-room little sibling to the more formal Music Gallery.
Given all this confluence, it's no surprise that some of the city's most broad-minded and activist musicians and organizers have begun to take up the Tranzac's cause. According to McGee, it was Jonny Dovercourt, of Wavelength and the Music Gallery, who first recognized the venue as a fellow traveler of the "Torontopian" project, which after all perceives the entire city as a member-driven community - imperfect, lovable and human. Thanks to treasurer Chris Hendricks, the vital musicians' co-op, Blocks Recording Club, is now a tenant of the Tranzac. Not long ago, Chris Randle dropped in to hang out with friends who were working there, and it was such a casually marvellous thing: teenagers, basically helping to run a record label, one of whom has also played shows there - another link in the Tranzac's multigenerational, extended-family story. Blocks luminaries Final Fantasy and the Phonemes, among others, recently played evening and afternoon benefit shows (the latter all-ages, natch) to help the Tranzac deal with its financial issues.
This is the dream for the club - that it become a fully sustainable centre for music and the arts, a nexus, an infrastructure. A space where performers can bring their kids (instead of quitting music for parenthood, or at least quitting the communitarian approach, as too often happens), and where those kids in turn discover what they want to create. When the Tranzac board first started reaching out to the Torontopia-identified rock scene with these ideas, there was some suspicion - was this just a mismanaged folk club scrambling around for ways to survive? But in the past couple of years they've proven some depth of commitment. As McGee says, "I've heard so many people dream out loud about a place like this, an artist-run community space, a social club with lots of room for debate and creativity, and it makes me kind of want to shake them, because it already exists."
We don't mean to minimize the logistical challenges. Despite the numerous artistic organizations that call the place home, its membership is not as high as it once was. What if no one who visits the Toronto Zine Library there realizes that they can get involved with the entire building? We started writing this piece in resignation, thinking it might well be doomed. But the new President, John Sladek, has some experience in turning around arts organizations (specifically the Mariposa festival), and the board as a whole seems to understand the challenge posed to them. We were delighted to learn that Blocks co-founder Steve Kado is now the Tranzac's Building Manager. It needs that spirit of collaboration.
This ethos is personified in one of the bands that played the fundraiser. 123Ten are the children of Tranzac-denizen folkies (one of them is Kate McGee's younger sister) but their debut was opening for Ninja High School at Sneaky Dee's, and the oughta-be-a-hit single Squirrel Babies that announced their existence was released on 2006's infamous Bad Bands Revolution compilation. The trio sings about fighting whales and a crippled "wheely dog" who still finds love with irresistable vocal harmonies that attest to the rich musical heritage they grew up with. Moreover, as Kate McGee says, "It's not unusual to see one of 123Ten doing production up in the Blocks office for a couple of hours, or stuffing envelopes with the new Tranzaction newsletter, or singing along in the crowd at the Flying Cloud Folk Club." The Tranzac has the potential to become an incubator for culture like this, localized without insularity. There are so many gaps this space can bridge if the struts holds together.
Tonight (Wednesday) the popular Toronto bubble-core group The Bicycles (who held their own epic record-release party there last summer) begins an effort to help that happen, by curating the first in their "Wombat Wednesdays" series of evenings of poppier, more song-based evenings at the club - which, in their turn, are meant to help the Tranzac also persist as a venue for the sonic R&D the weeknight improv evenings allow. It's all a part of a musically cognizant culture that understands how disparate pieces fit together, a realm in which pop and humour and experimentation and exploration can meet and resolve to survive. But without an audience, that leap of faith will not find a treetop to cling to. Don't let the venue fall into misuse or disrepair. Help support the modest ramshackle building with its wonderfully flexible and mutually beneficial vision: All they want is to be one of our landmarks.
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, March 07 at 2:48 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
Celine Dion, Barney the Dinosaur and
the Weaponization of Culture (A Polemic)
In this corner, alleged "dirty bomber"/torture victim Jose Padilla; in that corner, Barney.
The other day, reacting to my musings on the Celine Dion/Ennio Morricone moment on the Oscars, Zoilus reader Phil S. commented, "I can't think of any reason to purchase her recorded work, unless I get a job working in Gitmo for the U.S. State Department, in which case I'd definitely be forcing enemies of the state to sit through one of her Las Vegas shows on DVD. I'd probably have a hold of Osama by now."
It's an old joke, and I don't mean to single Phil out. If I dug back through my archive of Celine-hate in the press, I could quote a half-dozen similar formulations; you could Google up a dozen more. Trouble is, the commonplace reference to some disliked music as "torture" is not, in our time, some fanciful exaggeration, a pointed grotesquery like Lester Bangs's fantasy of bottle-slashing James Taylor in the 1970s. It's a literal, ongoing practice of statecraft. Yet it's still generally played for laughs in the media - when it was revealed a couple of years ago that the U.S. military had been blasting loops of Christina Aguilera and Eminem at prisoners, there were a hundred bottom-of-the-editorial-page bits of drollery in the newspapers guffawing, "Now they know how the rest of us feel!"
The fact is that firing ear-splitting recorded sound on repeat at prisoners isn't an aesthetic exercise. It's more like using blinding light and other methods of sleep deprivation and sensory overload - part of the "no-touch torture" repertoire that soft-authoritarian regimes like Bush's use to try to circumvent the Geneva Conventions (which, incidentally, forbid it). They're the flip side of sensory deprivation, and equally liable over time to cause the onset of schizophrenia-like symptoms and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Coincidentally, today in Now weekly in Toronto, Naomi Klein has a piece on Jose Padilla, the former Gitmo detainee who (as a U.S. citizen) has won the rare right to due process, though he's in no shape to stand trial. (Customs officers take note: This Jose Padilla should not be confused with the Spanish chill-out producer, though what you wanna bet?) Naomi's description of the section of Gitmo reserved for prisoners who've been driven over the edge deserves particular note. Former Army Muslim Chaplain James Yee says, "They would respond to me in a childlike voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over." Which calls to mind other reports that the music used to sandblast prisoners' consciousnesses at the prison in recent years has included Sesame Street music and the Barney the Dinosaur song. Is that what these delusional shells of human beings are helplessly babbling back to their captors?
Now, I get the impulse to blurt out, "Anybody with a toddler knows what effective torture the Barney song can be!" If I've never called a piece of music "torture" in print in the past decade, I'd be very surprised (though pleasantly). But when you stop and think, Sesame Street songs as psychic bludgeons isn't just ugly; it's a gross perversion of what that music was made for. It's the weaponization of culture.
Clearly, it is only one point on a spectrum that includes worse abuses. I don't mean to magnify it out of proportion. But I think people whose lives revolve around culture, and music in particular, should consider taking the lead in objecting to this one.
For purposes of torture, it doesn't matter what music you choose, though it's likely most efficient to use the most harsh or the most repetitive. In some cases the selections seem to be jingoistic, such as Metallica or Toby Keith brandished as brightly coloured flags with serrated edges. Other times, as with Eminem, they're probably attempting to offend cultural sensibilities. And with the Barney song, David Gray and Yoko Ono (both genuine cases), they probably are operating at the same glib middlebrow-snob level as a columnist or blogger.
Unlike some European legal systems, the anglo-saxon tradition doesn't include droit moral, the "moral rights" of a creator over her work, which (among other things) includes control over any use of the work that offends the artist's sensibilities. And I'm generally glad that it doesn't. Once a work of art is released into the public sphere, I believe, it becomes part of the collective unconscious, of popular/folk culture; compensation and copyright issues are trickier, but on principle images and ideas should be available for resuse, recontextualization, satire and even misappropriation. I don't think that the Catholic Church should control what artists do with icons of the Virgin Mary, or Muslims the image of Muhammad; and so I don't think Bruce Springsteen should have been able to stop Ronald Reagan from inverting the meaning of Born in the USA for propaganda purposes, though I wish people hadn't been careless enough to fall for it.
But musicians and music lovers' deeper moral rights are violated when the story goes beyond a figurative abuse of cultural discourse to the literal abuse of human subjects. And finally, some people are saying so. In February, the U.S.-based Society for Ethnomusicology took an official, unanimous position against the use of music as torture, demanding the U.S. government end the practice. (Predictably drawing yet more asinine humour.) In 2005, Irish music therapist Jane Edwards wrote a letter to Condoleeza Rice in protest and a column urging her peers to speak out (notice the Celine Dion crack she quotes). Perhaps the music industry could follow their lead, turning their attention from the "monetization" of music to the weaponization of it for a few heartbeats.
For further reading on torture and music: The ethnomusicologists link to this academic essay from the Transcultural Music Review. But for a more affecting, journalistic take, I highly recommend Moustafa Bayoumi's Disco Inferno, a Nation feature that was more than deservedly reprinted in the latest edition of Da Capo's annual Best Music Writing collection.
After that, whatever you decide about the issue, let's agree to this much: A moratorium on the crappy jokes, for the duration.
PS: On the subject of culture and torture, Jane Mayer's recent New Yorker piece on 24 is worth your time. Canadians beware: Kiefer Sutherland does not come off well.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, March 01 at 10:58 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (14)
Against the Doctrine of Relatability
Neko Case topped the albums list in the Eye Weekly critics' poll.
Yesterday brought the annual Eye Weekly national critics' poll, Canada's own Pazz-&-, er, Jackin' Pop. I like Eye's results a bit better, which may be some small testimony to a distinct Canadian society. Hosers remain more rockist, which despite my ideological objections I find kind of sweet in my compatriots. It's clearly waning, although the "most overrated" list and the "best artist" lists could switch completely and I'd be just as (un)happy. But I'm glad to see honourary-Canuck Neko Case atop the heap, astride Ghostface and safely above the overly lauded TVotR, Cat Power and Hot Chip (in the latter horserace, I bet Spank Rock); as well as to share the true patriot love for Junior Boys, Final Fantasy, Malajube and others; and to see Amy Winehouse, whose new music I've been bathing in, sneak into the top 10. Tokyo Police Club (whom I like) outranking Destroyer is not benign for my stomach-acid levels. But, eh, it's a list. (In which spirit, note the advent of the Parsefork review-aggregator. So far, so underwhelming: "MetaCritic with fussier statistics, fewer sources and an ugly-ass layout! Woo!")
I did enjoy the comments: Scott Woods' defence of Paris Hilton, Phil Dellio on the Clipse vs. Michael Richards, and also in the Seinfeldian field, Stuart Berman's The Hold Steady=Newman thesis (with a nice sideline on the Constantines as superior Springsteenians). As for the case of Zoilus vs. Adrien Begrand in the matter of J. Newsom... Well. First, kudos to the editors for making me look like a blowhard with the full-paragraph-vs-one-liner contrast. My bitch is that it's comedy over context, as the bit on Newsom was pulled out of a bigger point about the year in music (I'll print it after the jump, though it'll hardly exempt me from charges of wordiness). Still, strange that a guy who writes a heavy-metal column should get snarky over the idea of an instrumentally dense, verbally obscure, antiquarian suite. How does he handle those Nordic epics?
But Begrand is right: Ys isn't an album many people will throw on as background or workout music day to day. I'd compare it instead to a favourite novel that you re-read on a quiet Sunday every year - it's more in that internal register, an interior-experience-transporter to activate when needed. Dismissing that option hints at a pop-ist cognate to rockist bias, likewise asserting a narrow range of legit functions for music, and that intensities of specialization (whether that's "mainly good for dancing" or "mainly good for serious introspection") are inherently inferior to broader utility. That kind of attitude has sour outcomes in politics and culture alike. It's not the "lowest common denominator" problem - it's more similar to my most despised buzzword of 2006, "relatability."
"Relatability" isn't all bad: On its face it could read as a corrector against the idea of art being either self-expression or stimulus-response, saying art needs to speak from one interiority to another, that the magic happens in the dynamic relationship between maker and audience. That's the "relational aesthetics" I've often written about this year. But in practice, "relatability" nearly always boils down the presumed interests of the audience to the crudest drives, like sex and status. It doesn't say people are dumb, just that they're homogenous and easily summed up. Sentences (like Adrian's comment) that begin, "Come on, admit it," work aggressively along that line: "Look, don't pretend to be complicated, don't pretend to have your own motivations or curiosities or whims or moods - you're just like the next guy, and the next guy is just like you, and this is how we all are, all the time, and it's bullshit to say otherwise."
This perspective is part of the disproportionate bio-determinism that permeates social thinking right now - that we are the sums of our drives, which are in turn direct expressions of genetic destiny. That's not a crazy position: It stems from recent discoveries that indicate we probably are more biologically programmed than we thought when, for instance, psychoanalysis was the dominant paradigm for the human operating system. But it's an over-extreme pendulum swing, which I optimistically assume will eventually swing back into better balance. And it's a view that, as "relatability" indicates, synchs up conveniently with the current dilemmas of dispersed market capitalism: For instance, when you're trying to market to and extract labour from a mindbogglingly diverse range of people and places who don't share social references and norms, it's reassuring to fall back on universal drives as a hu-manual for how to work their buttons and levers.
This approach has ugly consequences in many fields. But in culture it removes most everything of interest from the dance - except, I guess, the funk, the pheromone trace, or rather the signals that stand in for it. Funkiness is all that counts. I once speculated that there's a corollary to rockism one could call "funkism," and maybe this is what I meant. The positive thing about funkiness in this sense is that it can be found everywhere - you sure can like metal for its funk; that's the "heavy" part. But - and this is a reason not to adopt the term "funkism" - generalizing funk as a "universal" entails forgetting what funk meant to James Brown. For a start, see the last three 'grafs of this definition, for a cursory look at how "funk" fits into the history of oppositional script-flipping in African-American culture. When such inversions get assimilated and incorporated into the outlaw romances of mainstream global culture, into the "rebel sell," the flip gets flipped - and literalized, so that, for instance, the millionaire is now the outlaw and the guy with the hundred-buck-an-ounce cologne is now the funkiest. And the most "relatable." (The meaning of gettin' paid is a lot more complex and contradictory, of course, but that's the part the music business likes best, because, to use another gross 2006ism, it can be "monetized.")
Part of what I like about Newsom, and Matmos, as I say in my Eye comments, is that their music is so physical, so bodily, while not remotely "funky." Then there's Ghostface, who's less funky in the 2K usage than in the older sense, stinking of eccentric individuality that doesn't reduce down to any pusher/pimp/tycoon blaxploitation figure.
And Neko's funky in that way, too - her voice is big-bottomed and sensual, but her persona and concerns don't track to anybody else's outlines. One of the most irritating comments in the Eye poll praises her singing but backhands her as "having her way with a thesaurus" with the title and lyrics of Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. In fact, her title character is drawn from the Russian folklore she got from her grandmother - exactly the kind of funk (old picture books in indecipherable script; the must of grandma's sweater when she pulls you in to tell a story; her weakening voice, ghost of an accent) that marketers don't know how to fake, that doesn't relate to get-it-and-spend-it imperatives but asks for the listener to enter into a more thickly woven narrative of where people (and their music) come from and what they might become.
Whew. I was going to try and tackle the CBC radio realignment in this post too - especially the demise of Brave New Waves - but that'll have to wait for later. Now I'm rushing off to satisfy some drives, namely by grabbing some dinner. Just like the next guy.
My comments for the 2006 Eye Weekly Poll:
"It's too bad that the Destroyer and Ghostface records came out so early in the year, or their ranking in the Eye poll probably would be closer to what they deserve. Instead they're probably eclipsed (pun intended) by fresher novelties to our jaded ears, including mine. And despite the many many reasons these days to celebrate Canadian music - which the Polaris prize did a terrific job of marking and making memorable - I actually think that Destroyer and Final Fantasy aside, 2006 was a weaker calendar year than the previous couple of years. But that's mostly just the accidents of release dates. I'm betting the average goes up in '07.
"Otherwise, the digitization of musical experience, between YouTube and listening to music on computer speakers, reached unprecedented lengths in my life in the past year. Perhaps in reaction, I appreciated that the Californian dyad of Joanna Newsom and Matmos struck blows for the re-embodiment of music in 2006, from entirely different angles.
"Newsom is the organicist, consciously deploying her anachronistic arsenal, her fingers blistering on the harp, her folkloric vocal tones, her natural and mythological allusions, and even her intricate metrics and internal rhyme schemes, to knock out the cobwebs of media illusion and open space for the sort of unforgiving introspective examination that is distinctly out of fashion. Ys demands a ridiculous amount from its listeners, but far less than the artist does of herself, and it confirms - if her debut left any doubt - that she's an artist we're going to be contending with for decades.
"Matmos, by contrast, applies the most sophisticated, synesthetic technological tools to combine found physical objects with a whole pantheon of cultural heroes, making a witty but also deeply touching argument for the continued vitality and importance of the bohemian tradition (from modernist literary and philosophical icons to queer sex radicals) to our lives as we live and experience them in real time today.
"In a year when the broader social picture was so very often so very bleak, it was sustaining to hear Newsom and Matmos (among other artists) locate the reasons for hope and faith in each small human body, carrying its unique memory, its shared history and its essential fragility."
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, January 19 at 5:50 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (9)
William Parker: The Mayor Comes to Town
William Parker. Photo by Francesca Pfeffer.
Any genre where reissues get attention ahead of new work and there are more students of the form than listeners has to provoke worries over its continued health, and for the first time in my life, in the mid-2Ks, I'm starting to feel more sympathy with the "jazz is dead" crowd when it comes to instrumental, improvisation-based jazz. Not that there's not great work in the field, and "dead" is always a ridiculous formulation - music mutates, branches, burrows, migrates, but forms almost never really terminate. But it's hard not to feel that jazz as a popular form, as a non-academic music, is in a pickle; its feeding currents (whether in dance, song interpretation or identity-remolding experimentation) are mostly turning other wheels, in electronic music (including hip-hop and remixing), non-jazz-based-improv, noise and other hybrid forms. Which would be fine except that it's happened less consciously than it might, so some of the electricity of jazz's legacy and knowledge is leaking out of the code along the way. (One of the reasons I was such a partisan of the Anthony Braxton-Wolf Eyes live CD was that it seemed to resist that dispersion.) The upheavals in the Toronto jazz scene - venerable clubs collapsing, new ones seeming uncertain in their identities - haven't helped my mood on the subject - which is probably a temporary one, but it's a question that's on my mind.
One of the few developments in the past couple of years that's helped to stave off such pessimism has been the Interface series staged by improv-community group AIM Toronto (whose founding has also been very encouraging). Interface has brought guests such as Lori Freedman from Montreal, Wilbert Dejoode from the Netherlands, Stephen Grew from the UK, Joe McPhee from the U.S. and many others to collaborate with members of the Toronto improvising scene. It's inspiring to see the effect of these more experienced players on the local ones, to see people learning and stretching and reconnecting with a global tradition in real time, undoing the isolation that it sometimes feels afflicts the scope and ambition of the music here. It's a reminder of the potent informal processes that helped jazz's place in the previous century remain so compelling for so long, that helped it spread and change as a vernacular music, an oral culture.
The incarnation of Interface taking place this week is likely to be a pinnacle in that process. The guest is New York's William Parker, a figure whose ubiquity, artistry and immensity of spirit has been a binding agent, an essential ingredient in the glue that's held the jazz-improv tradition together in the past few decades. For those who don't know Parker's work, a quick survey: He was best-known from the early 1970s through the 1980s as a sideman with Cecil Taylor (though he also played with artists such as Frank Lowe, Don Cherry, Billy Bang, Jemeel Moondoc, Charles Gayle and Peter Brotzmann) but in the later part of that period he started playing with the likes of David S. Ware and Matthew Shipp, who helped drive the 1990s renaissance in free jazz that took over from the John Zorn/Knitting Factory "downtown" scene (which I'd argue ran into certain dead ends around the same time). In the early 1990s, he began playing and recording solo, participated in the Brotzmann-Vandermark axis that connected Berlin to Chicago, and founded his groups the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra and the In Order to Survive ensemble, among others. (If I had to recommend one Parker disc as a place to start, it'd be 2000's amazing Little Huey double-album Mayor of Punkville.)
Since then, it'd be little exaggeration to say that Parker's been everywhere and played with everyone in east-coast U.S. and northern-European jazz improvisation, including the electronic and hip-hop crossover projects curated by Shipp for Thirsty Ear's Blue Series. His alliance with percussionist Hamid Drake has to be noted as one of the most formidable rhythm sections in any genre in the past decade, probably the equal of any drum-bass pairing in jazz ever; he's also been the force behind the vital Vision Festival of music, art, dance and activism in New York.
What stands out for me with Parker, more than any specific detail of his rapid, rumbling walking bass lines, or his ultraviolet-spectrum bowed atmospherics, is the stunning empathy that he brings to every session. To intuit, underline, echo, counter and reply to the underlying thoughts of your fellow players is arguably the essential skill of improvisation, but Parker seems to raise it beyond a musical form to a humanitarian one - he has an uncanny ability to make his fellow players seem more themselves, to pinpoint their emotional and expressive potential and subtly guide a piece towards that territory, while balancing out their weaknesses. I'm not sure that he's technically superior to any of a hundred other bassists, and he's certainly not the most bravura or innovative of soloists, but in his performances he seems to put fewer barriers between himself and others than most people can manage - not only to follow the music where it wants to go without imposing his ego or will on it, but really to create an environment in which the audience, too, feels embraced, and in that security, can let its own imagination (collective and individual) range freely as well.
All of which makes Parker the ideal Interface guest, and I'm thrilled for the Toronto musicians that will have a chance to meet, play and learn from him. The series begins tomorrow (Thursday) night and runs to Saturday night at the Arraymusic space in Liberty Village, at 9 pm each night, $15 a show. (Parker's also holding a free participatory workshop on Friday from 3 to 5 pm at U of T - the Boyd Neal Room, Edward Johnson Building - that musicians ought not to miss.)
If you're the sort who always intends to catch improv shows but never quite gets there, make a point of coming to one of these performances, and see jazz the way it's meant to be, not reissued but issued into the world as if for the first time, a newborn answering the cry of the moment-to-moment, and very far from dead.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, January 10 at 6:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (8)
Extra: 2006, An Assistant-Baker's Dozen
In which Zoilus listings-&-otherwise help-out guy Chris Randle discusses 12 songs that didn't come up in my own year-end roundup of albums and singles... and one that did. - CW
Pet Shop Boys, I'm With Stupid
George is dumb and Tony's his poodle, as the jokes go (often gayed up for extra hyuks). Somehow Neil Tennant can wring emotion out of even these tired jibes, turning their special relationship into the stuff of all his best songs - tortured queer love. His affecting portrait of a self-absorbed man attempting to justify his feelings for a lover everyone deems dumb as a post is that rare thing, a political song both sympathetic and damning. Tennant twists the knife even as he pities: Is his man really stupid, the singer quails as those sirens blare, or just an unthinking user? "Have you made a fool of me? Are you not Mr Right?" Oh, Tony - why couldn't you tell?
Rozasia, Track 3
Whirling flute trills, raw noise, mad little yelps. I first encountered Rozasia at one of those vital shows being organized in the city's dark, abandoned industrial spaces and it couldn't have been more perfect. I'm happy that their soundtrack for insanity will help ring in the new year for a hundred or so lucky people.
Meat Loaf, It's All Coming Back to Me Now
The Eye writer who reviewed this album called Meat Loaf "an eight-year-old's fantasy of what 'rocking out' might sound like when he or she grew up to be a teenager." I can't put it any better than that. Apparently the latest album was mostly a disappointment, but I love this single, reclaimed from Celine Dion (unlike most of her songs, it sounds more uncomfortable than merely terrible) and inflated with all the hot air that Loaf's barrel chest can muster. Bombast seemed to come back in vogue this year, with even mallcore bands embracing operatic openings and gothic excess. There's a kind of naive charm in the likes of My Chemical Romance attempting ludicrous concept albums they can't actually articulate the meaning of (better that than the Decemberists' basing songs on their English-lit classes), but the Wagnerian heavyweight still blew 'em out of the water with this one.
The Bicycles, Two Girls from Montreal
Summer was idle days in parks and snug clubs, listening to songs like this. They admire The Monkees and the drummer girl's voice is deeper than the singer boy's. How could they not be lovable?
Tim Hecker, Blood Rainbow
Music to fall asleep to, music for moving on, as a friend said when I was listening to this record recently. The glitchy soundscapes soothe while hinting at disquieting, thrilling uncertainty.
The Hidden Cameras, Lollipop
Awoo didn't get as much attention as it deserved, most reviewers glossing over a notable shift in the Cameras' subject matter from all dicks, all the time to a subtler, more wide-ranging lyrical approach. It's no classic, but it feels like a maturation. Of course, having said that, I would go and pick the ditty about blowjobs. But I love the sly poetry here, Joel Gibb yelping about "mouths of salivating froth" over bouncy sing-song staccatos that sound like a kids' song. They've broadened a bit, chosen to code and play coy more, but the Cameras are still queer and explicitly sexual in what they address, and when more indie groups seem willing to show that side of themselves than even at the year's beginning they deserve some credit. That Kids on TV album can't arrive soon enough!
Belle & Sebastian, The Blues Are Still Blue
Quite possibly the best song from their best album yet. The twee has been dialed down and augmented with a playful glam swagger. Kind of like a feyer New Pornographers.
The Blow, Parentheses
Paper Television seems to have been underappreciated, judging from all those year-end lists. True, it lacked an unflinchingly honest and heart-flaying vocal performance on the level of Come On Petunia or Hey Boy, but it's still solid, with this song being a particular standout, as the captivating Khaela Maricich gently tells her lover that it's cool to be sensitive and a punctuation mark: "You're not a baby if you feel the world/All of the babies can feel the world, that's why they cry."
Yelle , Short Dick Cuizi (Tepr Remix)
Some kind of French dance thing? Apparently remixed by a Gallic rapper? I could barely find this track online after hearing it at a dance party, with my limited capacity for the language, let alone uncover much information about it, but I love this, even if mocking a guy over his small penis seems like a failing of that famous French wit.
James Kochalka Superstar, Superfuckers Theme
I wanted to include a song taken directly from a video game for this, in recognition of the medium's increasing convergence with mainstream art and music and my own interests, but nothing was weird and compelling as 2004-05's Katamari soundtracks. My nerd substitute is the theme song for indie-comics-weirdo James Kochalka's demented, hilarious and sneakingly affectionate parody Superfuckers, performed by his side project band (which has gotten a distinctly higher profile in the past year - they did the theme for a failed sitcom!): "Always in our clubhouse getting high/ Everybody wishes we would die."
Plastic Little, Rap O'Clock
Ghostface frankly kicked their asses on his guest spot, but Plastic Little aren't really concerned with refining technical skill or the best production; they're practically outside the game, some goofy guys from Philly simply having a good time. The rap equivalent of a Toronto bad band? I'm just happy there's a crew with "being funny" as its main goal that isn't soul-destroying nerdcore. Plus I'll always like any group who came up with this rhyme: "I like indie girls who say they like electro/ Clash, crash, that's cool, I like Fischerspooner too/ But nah, bitch, I don't bitch/ I like some Ice Cube."
DAT Politics, Turn My Brain Off
I took some speed for money recently (long story) and the first thing I did under the influence was play video games. It still paled a little in comparison to these guys. Sounds like Sega Genesis on crack. God willing, the inevitable 90s revivalists will take their influence from 16-bit and not Pearl Jam's Ten.
Final Fantasy, He Poos Clouds
Not the best song from my favourite album of the year; my head would go with the anguished vaudeville lament This Lamb Sells Condos or the quavering percussion that forms Song Song Song. But He Poos Clouds is my favourite, having become more personal than that tale of condo developer/wizard as an impotent, hubristic despoiler. It was, I think, during a late-night discussion of the song-in-progress that I actually met Carl for the first time, almost exactly a year ago. I heard this song at the first local show I ever went to. I was a nerdy kid, pretty solitary for much of my childhood and into the beginning of adolescence, and a young Owen Pallett taking skirt-wearing elf Link from the Legend of Zelda games to be his alternative gay icon makes perfect sense to me, just as the Final Fantasy series' fey, operatic melodrama lends itself beautifully to the name for all his work. 2006 was also the year Grant Morrison completed his brilliant, affecting forgotten-superhero epic Seven Soldiers (itself often concerned, like He Poos Clouds, with malevolent father figures and confronting mortality); the year in which the most universally-acclaimed film appears to be a fairy tale (the old kind, bloody and frightening) created by the director of Blade 2 and Hellboy. Gutter culture or folk culture, both ostracized in their own way, imbued with a modern sophistication and vital relevance to the present. So why not a meditation on loss, on the atheist dealing with death, that quotes Zelda and Narnia and Dungeons & Dragons in the musical language of a band geek? Inside so many nerds beats the bleeding heart of an emotional basket case.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, January 03 at 7:04 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Year-End Clearance: Top 20 Albums + Singles
Okay, it's official: The music blog world's year-end rituals have burst the bounds of rational exchange and have become a full-on listmaking orgy. For that reason, I am going to do this with minimal fuss & exchew illustration and justification.
Zolius: Top 20 Albums of 2006
Not likely to surprise regular readers very much (with a few exceptions), what follows are the albums that captured my attention most strongly or longest in 2006. How they overlap with what is according to some cosmic metric "best" or "most important" is a matter of conjecture. Dozens of others bubble beneath the no. 20 mark (from Howe Gelb to Kode9 & the SpaceApe to Agalloch to Eric Chenaux to Bob Dylan to Charlotte Gainsbourg to Vijay Iyer & Rudresh Mahanthappa's Raw Materials) and thousands of others I never got to hear.
1. Joanna Newsom, Ys
2. Matmos, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast
3. Destroyer, Destroyer's Rubies
4. Ornette Coleman, Sound Grammar
5. Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
6. The Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury
7. Xiu Xiu, The Air Force
8. Final Fantasy, He Poos Clouds
9. Ghostface Killah, Fishscale
10. Anthony Braxton/Wolf Eyes, Black Vomit
11. Junior Boys, So This is Goodbye
12. The Mountain Goats, Get Lonely
13. Richard Buckner, Meadow
14. Scott Walker, The Drift
15. Matthew Shipp, One
16. Lupe Fiasco, Food & Liquor
17. Beyonce, B'Day
18. Lily Allen, Alright, Still
19. Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac
20. Tom Ze, Estudando o Pagode
Zoilus: Singles of '06
Using the old-fashioned definition of "single," plus a few allowances for MySpace, iTunes and YouTube, here in no strict order are some of the tracks that I bobbed, strolled, danced, shouted, laughed, sighed and (in the case of the first, my genuine no. 1) cried to in 2006. As for favourites songs? That's just beyond my ability to calibrate at this point. They shuffled a lot in this most changeable of changeable years.
The Mountain Goats, Woke Up New; Beyonce, Irreplaceable; Lupe Fiasco, Kick, Push; Prince, Black Sweat; Willie Nelson, Cowboys Are Secretly, Frequently (Fond of Each Other); Ne-Yo, So Sick; Clipse, Ride Around Shining; Lily Allen, Alfie; Simon Bookish, Terry Riley Disco; La Plage, Coupe de Boule (Zidane); Justin Timberlake feat. T.I., My Love; Lil Wayne, Georgia ... Bush; Cansei de Ser Sexy, Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above; Christina Aguilera, Ain't No Other Man; Cham, Ghetto Story; Ghostface Killah, Shakey Dog; Gary Allen, Life Ain't Always Beautiful; The Raconteurs, Steady as She Goes; Nelly Furtado feat Timbaland, Promiscuous; Neil Young, Let's Impeach the President.
Elsewhere, some online 2006 mixes you should hear: Sean's always-indispensable best-songs list; Marathonpacks' four-volume year-ender; and Paper Thin Walls' collective mixes, which notably includes T-dotopian songstress Laura Barrett's Robot Ponies (and a little interview between her & Douglas Wolk about the song). I feel like I have to count Laura's EP as a 2005 release, but if I hadn't, it would be on my list too. As it is, her 2007 release on Ta-Da! is atop my roster of anticipated records for 2007.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, December 20 at 7:54 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
Revivalists Dance the Mutation
I've neglected (except in the gig guide) to share the news with you all that beyond-legendary Hamilton, Ont., band Simply Saucer is having its first reunion gig ever, 27 years after the band broke up, and a full 30 years since it recorded its sole album, Cyborgs Revisited, a set of demos and live recordings the band never released during its existence. The news has broken elsewhere now that Saucer will be playing the Casbah in Hamilton on Dec. 28. I'm a bit ambivalent about the news: Very much like Rocket from the Tombs (probably the band in the world most similar to Saucer in both sound and stature), or the Beach Boys' original Smile, Simply Saucer is a group whose essence in some ways is that barely anyone ever saw them, their recordings were unavailable for decades, and those bootlegs that existed seemed like only a hint of the full hulking body of strangeness that was the thing itself. When such a group reunites (or such an album is re-recorded), a closely related facsimile comes to stand in the way of the original enigma. When a ghost story is made real, some larger cultural reality is erased; it seems unfaithful to the specificity of time and place. What's more, as with Rocket from the Tombs, the new Saucer is only partly the original band - inevitably in these cases, some members either can't or won't participate, so you get substitutions, which again distort the picture.
But then when the reunion actually happens, sometimes the portion of reality it is able to capture is so powerful in itself that these quibbles fade. Mission of Burma, who put out one of the best rock records of this year, are probably the supreme example. But Rocket from the Tombs are an extraordinary thing live, too - it is as if the bodies of these aging men, David Thomas (of Pere Ubu), Cheetah Chrome (of the Dead Boys), Craig Bell and the rest, are supernaturally possessed by the spirits of their teenage selves. The garbled fury and cultural cross-signals that enabled them to cross an unseen threshold to a previously undreamt-of sound, all of that becomes present and manifest, and in the strangest way the most obvious and right response to the puzzle of their own existence, in a manner you just can't get from decades-old recordings. (And we'll see what happens when the promised new RftT album is completed.)
So two cheers for the Saucer reunion, and you can bet I won't miss it.
In celebration, I'm posting a Globe and Mail column I wrote about Simply Saucer three years ago, when Cyborgs was first reissued on CD (which includes the phrase "Simply Saucer, wisely, has never reformed..."). It's a pretty good one, if I say so myself - having been a kid in the same chunk of Ontario when Saucer was busy burning out its roman candles, the subject goes to my gut. Er, Torontonians will have to pardon the not-quite-warranted optimism in there about the then-new Distillery District. It's after the jump, here. Hope you enjoy.
Vomiting up prophetic punk in Hamilton
SCENE
CARL WILSON
22 May 2003
The Globe and Mail
The scenario is hard to imagine: A hot Saturday afternoon in June, 1975, with shoppers coming out of the Jackson Square mall in Hamilton holding paper bags of polyester pants and living-room-yoga sweats. Over their heads, on the roof, stood a quartet of young men looking like any other gang of jean-jacketed greasers wandering the downtown alleys, but pounding guitars to cosmic death, with outer-space effects from a crude synthesizer, and singing about Hitler's love for Eva Braun: "Ah-hah, ah-hah, I'm cyanide over you."
The band was Simply Saucer, already two years into its Syd-Barrett-era Pink Floyd and Velvet Underground-inspired trip to the dead ends of rock'n'roll and sounding like nobody else in Canada, almost nobody in the world. And the roof of Jackson Square was the greatest height to which they would ever aspire.
As the story is told in long-time supporter Bruce Mowat's liner notes to Sonic Unyon Records' new reissue of Saucer's Cyborgs Revisited, the band led by singer Edgar Breau endured from 1973 to 1979 in a Hamilton that barely acknowledged its existence and a Canadian music industry that actively feared and loathed it.
Punk rock in the later 1970s only confused matters - the group cut its hair and hired Teenage Head guitarist Sparky Park, got a couple of opening-slot gigs in Toronto (notably for Pere Ubu, by all reports blowing the fearsome Cleveland avant-garage band off the Horseshoe stage), and released the only record of its lifetime, the 1978 single She's a Dog. But the band didn't really fit in with punk, either, and was too old to care; a year later, the mothership self-destructed.
It was another decade before Mowat managed to get the songs SS recorded on that rooftop and at the studio of Hamilton boys Daniel and Bob Lanois out on vinyl, feeding a legend that had already, by some channel no one can explain, circulated among unpleasant-rock-noise fanciers around the world. But Cyborgs Revisited, now embellished with outtakes from the band's later years, is pretty obviously one of the best Canadian albums ever.
Like a handful of other bands in Cleveland, New York, Detroit and Munich, Simply Saucer drew together the wisps and wraiths of proto-punk from the sixties. Against 1970s rock machismo and folk-rock sanctimonies, they vomited up a prophetic blend of Velvets, Stooges, MC5, Brian Eno-era Roxy Music, psychedelia and late-adolescent rec-room nihilism, which a quarter-century later still smacks the ear like a squawling newborn with a slight case of demonic possession.
Each band that stumbled on this mix did it in absolute isolation, and yet they sound remarkably alike, the same string-snapping Planet of the Apes guitar chords and embryonic Moog technology underlying similar B-movie poetry and premature millennial panic. ("In the future," Breau tells the crowd on one of the live recordings, "unless you have a metal body, they're not gonna allow you to walk the streets. No kidding.")
Hamilton may have seemed an unlikely wellspring for the songs of a future that was not to be, but so did Cleveland, which eventually had a half-dozen such bands, locked in an incestuous, cannibalistic cluster that nearly made up a scene. These armpits were the only places this music possibly could come from. If the groups had anything in common, they were middle-class delinquents, petty thugs making music because they were nerds at heart, Bigfoot fans and conspiracy-theory bookworms not quite up for actual crime.
I was just 9 when these songs were recorded, but the ambience sounds familiar immediately: Anyone who grew up near the shores of the Great Lakes, where the filthy factories already looked like relics but the info-age commerce to replace them was yet undreamt, would recognize the miasmic stink of despair and dispossession and, its impulsive opposite, the nervous rush of groundless optimism: "We're gonna dance the mutation!" Breau proclaims in one song, in his best Lou Reed-as-hoser drawl. Beauty, eh? Beauty, yeah, in spite of everything.
After the split (and amid struggles with heroin and other elixirs of escape), several Saucer members went on to other groups. Breau plays acoustic-based music now, and on Wednesday he makes his first appearance at the Horseshoe in Toronto since that infamous 1978 gig. But Simply Saucer, wisely, has never reformed, its sound rusted in place like an old silo full of lug nuts and broken gears, solitary as Frankenstein's monster, towering over a wasteland that's long gone.
Most of the real landmarks of the industrial era were torn down, paved, painted over in pastels, but not all. In Toronto, the exciting exception is the distillery complex on the east side, buildings lately rescued by developers as a centre for arts groups. This week's Distillery Jazz Festival, which begins today and runs through June 1, offers the Toronto public its first chance to wander through the rummy caverns of the former Gooderham & Worts, while listening to dozens of the city's most unruly ensembles playing every variety of jazz - music that is itself a knotty little industrial-age holdover.
I confess that the most romantic part of me wishes the distillery still churned out hard liquor, or went on standing deserted, an empty repository for anxieties and wishes real architecture never allows. A city needs its blank spots, back roads, ghosts. But the rest of me has never been more thrilled. If it is creatively run, not overly prettified or tamed, the distillery district can not only make Toronto a richer place, but refute our cultural amnesias, showing that decrepitude isn't ugly, there are no dead ends, and obscurity is only what we've forgotten or don't yet know.
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, December 05 at 6:13 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Cap'n Jackin' Pop Will Get You High Tonight
(in the Statistical Rankings, That Is)
As the Times reported yesterday, the newbie Idolator website has stepped up to offer an alternative to the Village Voice's long-running Pazz & Jop annual critics' poll, by creating the "Jackin' Pop" poll. The move comes in response to calls from many in the critical community - including me, both on this site and on the I Love Music online message boards (currently on hiatus) - for a boycott and replacement of P&J since the Voice fired both the poll's creator, Robert Christgau, and its presiding spirit of recent years, Chuck Eddy, earlier this year. The Voice was for decades the hub of intellectually rigorous and musically wide-ranging pop criticism in North America. The new owners' move was explicitly to get rid of the intellect and the range, so to my mind they've forfeited the credibility to be the place critics collectively "meet" to assess the year past.
I do think that function's important, partly to perpetuate dialogue and partly for the historical record: The P&J serves as the best marker of critical reception we've got: If you want to suss out the profile of a year in pop history, you look at the Billboard charts and the P&J for that period and you've got the best quick time capsule you can crack. Sure, maybe in the future something like Metacritic will turn out to be the true substitute, but P&J so far has had a bigger sample and a grittier, grainier texture, with all of the correlations to critics' individual ballots and their comments. And on the consumer side, I still know plenty of people who use it to pay catch-up on the previous year's releases. Music fans still like lists, and P&J is the list of lists.
The initial talk of a boycott was met with predictable "it's not worth politicizing" complaints, but from a critic's point of view, there's also a straightforward professional issue: If you play along with two of the most respected and senior voices in the entire rock-crit field being treated this way, you send publication managers the message that you're a doormat. Freelance and staff writers get plenty of opportunity to show editors and publishers how little power we have on a daily basis - why reinforce that imbalance by volunteering to do unpaid work to help a writer-hostile publication put out one of its highest-profile and most prestigious products of the year? It just seemed blood-stupid.
I thought Pitchfork might be the ones to raise their hands, but on ILM they said that they considered it then decided to stick with their own staff poll, preserving the site's default insular quality (which isn't entirely a bad thing). I've been agnostic on Idolator so far in its few months' of existence - it's an entertaining site, with decent taste in music, but the quick-hits-and-gossip model inherited from its Gawker parent, plus mp3s, isn't exactly a direction I'd cheer as the future of music criticism. I really hoped that Paper Thin Walls would volunteer, as the place where Chuck Eddy and some of his stable of writers have migrated sinice the Voice firings, and one with a more essayistic bent. In general, it'd be more comforting if the new poll were happening in a venue with a bit more of an established berth, one that you could feel more sure would still be here next year.
Still, Idolator has started off right with a name paying tribute to the lame-o handle of the poll's predecessor, and Idolator made an especially savvy move by picking Michaelangelo Matos, the former music editor of Seattle Weekly and the text portion of Emusic, to oversee Jackin' Pop. Not only is Matos a total list-head who'll apply scrupulous, persnickety math to the exercise (which is a necessity), he's a widely respected writer (viz his super book in the 33 1/3 series on Prince's Sign o' the Times, among many other great pieces), and someone deeply embedded in the critical community. Unlike GW Bush, he really is a uniter. In fact, as a younger person with more of a dance-music background than Eddy or Xgau, he's likely to broaden the base of critics, to get more non-rock people, which may help make the ultimate results more varied and surprising - maybe Bob Dylan and the Hold Steady won't win after all. Many thanks to Matos, who has reportedly been banned from Village Voice Media/New Times, his former employer, for his troubles.
It remains to be seen how many critics participate - people from the daily newspapers and regional weeklies who don't get as involved in intramural discussions or dabble on the Internets. (Did Eddy take his contact list with him, and is he going to share?) The Voice has resolved to keep holding P&J, so this year at least we'll have two versions to compare and contrast - all more grist for discussion, which is the true pleasure of these rigamaroles in the end. And maybe they'll convince Christgau to present his annual dean's address as part of the package, in his inimitable oft-convoluted but always insightful manner? Everyone bitches aout it, but I'll miss it if it's gone.
Speaking of lists, by the way, the new issue of Exclaim has their annual best-of list, one of the more comprehensive in Canada. And here it is December. Let the games begin.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, December 01 at 11:23 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Zoilus Guest Post: If Matt Collins Did It
The room was almost entirely fuchsia (the porter referred to it as "marigold" but I know a sickly pinkish orange when I see it), and I was poolside. Not that I was going to swim, but shit, great is great, right? Why settle for good? The next time you're a 15-year-old with killing for Charles Manson and a media conglomerate as his weekend plan, get back to me on whether or not you took the poolside room.
In a first for this website, Zoilus is pleased to present the following work of fiction: "If I Did It," a rollicking topical young-adult noir by Matt Collins of Toronto band Ninja High School. The events portrayed are fictional, not meant to represent any person, living dead or incarcerated, and all opinions expressed belong to the author, or CNN, or Charlie Manson.
You can read the whole twisted, incredible saga, after the jump. And no, further fiction submissions to Zoilus are not invited - unless you catch me seeming pliable in a bar at about 3 a.m.
Zoilus presents
IF I DID IT
by Matt Collins
I got the phone call during a rerun of Cheers where Cliff lies about a stolen postal van after it is found, by police, near a motel where he is about to lose his virginity to another postal worker, and when they lie about what happened, her devotion to the U.S. Postal Service drives her passion away from Cliff.
So he tells the truth, and she gets fired, and decides to move to Canada and wants him to come too, and he's working in "Dreaded Zone 19," which has some improbably huge Rottweiler population - anyway, there's this fantastic subplot where Sam discovers that Rebecca's one sensory sexual stimulus is the song "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," but Rebecca manages to hold it down while he plays it, and just LUNGES at Norm, kissing him passionately, and then when she says, "I don't know what got into me. Please apologize to Vera," and Norm says, "Are you kidding? After that Vera should apologize to me" - good good stuff - and then the phone rang.
"Chuck Manson? Who in the fuck gave you phone privileges? ...Bleeding heart, yeah..., ..., ..., ..., ..., ..., ..., ...wait, say all that again? ...OK... yeah, I suppose that would start a... yeah, ...no... exactly, a race war, yeah... exactly. Who? ... Who's paying for all of this? No shit! ... Uh... um... uh... Chuck. Charlie... uh... Charlie. Um..."
I rolled my eyes and decided to pretend I knew what he meant by different colors on different people's backs doing things to those different people. "OK. Stop. Stop. I'm in, I just need to know when... lemme check my... no, suuuuure ... OK, you know what? Fuck it. I'm in."
It was a pretty good plan. I was supposed to go to California and stab to death the ex-wife of some former Buffalo Bills/San Francisco 49ers running back with a college record of rushing 3,160 yards and 33 touchdowns in 1967 and 1968, total Heisman winner, who had been reduced to print ads for cowboy boots and cameos in movies like Back To The Beach (I know what you're thinking - when Pee Wee Herman sings Surfin' Bird and finishes by getting hit by a bolt of lightning and surfs into the sky, I get chills too) in order to pay alimony cheques.
Better yet, it was all bankrolled by a big-deal cable news network that my friends and I had been hooked on since the LA riots, who figured it was all a write-off once the footage went on the air and the ad revenue started rolling in. I had no problem with skipping school on Monday - the last week of classes before my Grade Ten exams? Like any university worth their salt was going to check those marks?
The in-flight movie was Sommersby - I cried, of course (romance!) - and this old Italian dude sitting next to me, who was on his way to the fifth congress of the IASS-AIS in Berkeley, pointed out that the movie had much the same point as Brecht's The Good Woman of Szechuan, which is that things should belong to those who love and use them best, regardless of legal ownership. I shrugged and said, "The transition of the story from the Middle Ages to post-civil-war America was awkward."
"Oh, you mean The Return Of Martin Guerre? But that didn't have Jodie Foster in it."
I looked back out the window and flipped open the copy of Thunderball I brought for the flight. The balding and Pavarottiesque English teacher sighed and put his headphones back on.
We weren't even in Los Angeles, and already it was as if we were having six lunches an afternoon while endlessly pitching hopeless romantic comedies to anyone with a chequebook and a suit but no tie. I kind of saw how Charlie got driven to biker-ranch orgy-cult murder delirium in the first place. And I had to get pumped for that, too, if I wanted a penny of that 24-hour-news-coverage money.
I got in late Saturday night and immediately started drinking. It was coolish and there was no humidity; I cracked a can of Pabst in the airport men's room and, finding it empty, began rock posing in the mirror, standing about three feet back from the sink. With my free hand I did a windmill, and made a "BRUNGGGGGG" sound, then inhaled for two seconds with my nose, tilting my head back. I held my breath in that position for roughly five seconds and stumbled forward, leaning on the sink, and staring into my own eyes I whispered, "Looking good, killer..."
The details, between an LAX security guard finding me and confiscating my beer and getting out of a taxi in West Hollywood, are hazy at best. My booze rampage continued into the lobby of the Best Western Sunset Plaza. It wasn't my chequebook, I figured, and I had heard the hotel bar was good.
The room was almost entirely fuchsia (the porter referred to it as "marigold" but I know a sickly pinkish orange when I see it), and I was poolside. Not that I was going to swim, but shit, great is great, right? Why settle for good? The next time you're a 15-year-old with killing for Charles Manson and a media conglomerate as his weekend plan, get back to me on whether or not you took the poolside room.
The next morning I woke up to Donahue - apparently I'd had the TV on all night - and the desk wakeup call. I mumbled something cordial and realized I had slept in my clothes. The blonde with the cute mouth from the Aerosmith videos was lying on her back, naked, on the floor next to the bed; PETA literature was scattered everywhere.
I kicked her playfully. "Wanna hit the buffet?"
Continental breakfasts are a joke. Sure, you can eat all the waffles and miniature bowls of Froot Loops you want, but it isn't breakfast. The girl started poking through the Times and I was on my sixth coffee.
"So, is it far to Brentwood from here?" I ran my finger across hers and tucked it into her hand. She looked at me over the rim of her shades and smiled, then looked puzzled.
"What do you want to go to Brentwood for?"
"I gotta drop off this package of... uh... drugs?"
She clasped my hand tightly. "Um... not far."
Then she motioned across the pool toward my room and raised her eyebrows. My rule back then was "never sober," but I had things to do as well. Chuck had given me what amounted to a script: Every move was planned out down to the number of steps someone my height (5'3") and weight (99 lbs) would have to take to effectively do the job and get the results the writers were looking for.
Step 1:
I walked up to the cash register at Ross Cutlery and loudly said, "I'm here to pick up the knife my boss, O.J. Simpson, ordered six weeks ago. Can the receipt say O.J. Simpson on it? Can we get that? Great. I'm his assistant. I am O.J. Simpson's assistant, and I am picking up this knife for him."
Step 2:
Al was taking too much time looking through the suitcase.
"OK, why am I putting $8,000 in cash, pictures of O.J.'s parents and kids, a fake beard and moustache and a loaded gun in O.J.'s front hall? What have you got against him?" He was waving the passport around like he didn't even know it was supposed to go in there too.
I smacked it out of his hand. "Cowlings, shit. Put the passport in the suitcase. OK? Look. Just do the fuckin' job. I could care less about that sad sack, but I do care about you dropping this off for me. In his front hall. Like I said."
Like I needed this shit? I was hungover as fuck and couldn't remember a thing about losing my virginity to the chick from The Crush. I had spent the entire cab ride trying to drag up some memory of digging up Cary Elwes' buried treasure.
Step 3:
Now, this may seem too stylized, but I like to wear Aris Isotoner gloves when I shop, and when I kill. I know it was the middle of June in California, but when you have a thing that makes everything you do you, it just makes more sense to give up on making sense.
The guy in the shoe store seemed to think they were worth staring at, though.
I looked all around the place then back at him. "Hey, up here, buddy."
Like I needed this shit?
He tried to regain composure - "Sorry, I..."
"Look, I said a pair of size 12 Bruno Maglis."
"There's no way your feet will fit a size 12."
"I figure at the price I might as well get a pair I'm going to grow into, shithead."
Step 4:
If you ever want someone's condo keys in LA, just fake being a UPS guy.
"Aren't you a bit young to be a..." Ron Goldman eyed me as if this was the craziest thing he had ever seen.
"I'm saving up to go back to high school. They don't let me drive a van. I have to take a bus," I replied, trying not to laugh. I couldn't believe how this city lived. A small-town Ontario boy was winning this town like playing Fish with an anterograde amnesiac. "Shit, you need to sign for this. Do you have a pen?"
He smiled a knowing smile and walked off into the living room. A set of keys was on the table by the door, and I snatched it and jammed it into the brown shorts I had on. Christ, I wanted to change. Like I needed this shit? I wanted the job to go off hitch-free, but dressing like the UPS man was going kind of far. Ron came back.
"Alright, sign here... and here. Your name is?"
"Goldman."
"Goldman what?"
"Ron."
"G... Ron. Okay, thanks, Goldman," I gave him a little hand pistol. I wondered who he was and if it was going to screw up killing this woman. I kind of wanted to know what she looked like. The upshot was, he obviously lived there, too, so I could see whoever he was with and stab them. Then a Ferrari pulled up and I walked away quickly without looking.
Step 5:
"Al, all you have to do is sound black and call her."
Cowlings was killing me! The hell kind of backstabbing best friend doesn't call his buddy's girlfriend the night he's being framed for murder?
"Matty, I don't even know HOW to sound black," he stammered.
Like I needed this shit? "Look, all you have to do is sound black and incriminating."
Al rubbed his face with his palms. "OK. Gimme the phone."
"OK. You're calling her back because she left a message, you've been busy all day."
"What do I do?"
"Roll with it, buddy. I'll direct."
He dialed. I cracked my knuckles and sat up straight in the passenger seat of the Bronco. I had never seen a cellular from this small a distance.
"Nothing."
"Try again."
"Try again?"
"Look, your girlfriend just left you a message breaking up with you - are you gonna let that stand?"
"I guess not..."
"Of course not!"
He dialed again.
"Nothing."
"Try again. Leave a message, at least!"
"It picked up. The, the machine, picked up."
"Leave a message!" I hissed.
"Yo, Paul-uh."
I winced and mouthed the words "Less black! Dammit!"
Al waved his hand at me and looked away. "I wuz just, um, calling you back? Frum, uh, before."
He sounded fucking Italian. I grabbed the phone.
"Fucking idiot."
"I was just!"
"You're an idiot. And I hate your guts." He went to open his mouth, and I raised a fist. "I am trying to build a perfect, beautiful thing here. And I told you that I needed your help, and all you do is half-ass everything. All I'm asking for is a full-ass job."
Like I needed this shit!
"Look, you get scarce. It's going to get real ugly here in a couple of minutes."
The weather was the same on Sunday night, but it felt a bit worse because Saturday night still hung heavy on my temples - how was it I couldn't remember railing the blonde from the episode of The Wonder Years where Kevin tries to pass his driver's test?
I looked at a light on in an upstairs window - was that kids? I didn't want to have anything to do with children. The light went out, and I scaled the fence and walked up to the front. Pretty out-in-the-open-like. Goldman was there, with an envelope or something. I could hear a dog barking, but couldn't see it. I figured it was going nuts because the garage door was opening.
My target opened the front door. All of a sudden, I was in action.
"Hey, the UPS guy!" yelled Goldman, and I slashed open his throat in one action. He fell to the ground, gurgling. I looked over, and realized this other guy was doing my job for me! He had my gravy train down in a kneeling position, and was cutting open her throat.
"The big idea?" I waved my hands back and forth between the body and the guy.
He dropped the body and walked past me, and started stabbing Goldman's body like crazy.
"Did Charlie send you? You seem like one of his guys."
No answer.
"Uhhh... that guy's already dead. Are you crying?"
Whoever this character was, he hated Goldman. I didn't even mean to kill Goldman. He just recognized me. Timing like Wayne Gretzky on SNL. Kind of an idiot. Rich kids in L.A., what do you want? For every Nathaniel West, you get six Nicholas Meyers, right? It's in the gene pool. They're charming at parties.
I walked back over to my job and put my knife down on the second step. I grabbed the body by the legs and hauled it over to the fence, and went back to the steps again.
This other guy was looking at me now.
I shook my head. "What?"
Then a voice came from behind me. "Son? What's going on? Jason?"
O.J. shoved me and rushed the stab fiend, grabbing for the knife. I went for mine, but before I knew it, the fight was over, and O.J. was huddled over Goldman's body, slamming his head into Goldman's chest.
I wanted to say, "Don't do that!" but I hid instead. I tried to go back to where I hopped the fence, but almost slid in some blood left over from dragging the body to the fence. The guy at the shoe store was right. These Bruno Maglis didn't fit for shit. My feet would never be this big. I sadly mused for a second about my adult cock size, and it hit me - my knife was still on the step! Or was it over by Goldman's body on the lawn? Did I drop it when the other guy was stabbing the living shit out of Goldman's lifeless corpse for no reason I could be in on without interrupting him and asking? Wait, I walked over to the steps, and put it down...
Why would I even do that? Or did he drop his knife after stabbing the corpse? Why didn't I stick it in my belt? Why would he leave his knife on the steps? That made about as much sense as stabbing an already dead body. Why did he hate Goldman so much? Was Alicia Silverstone into small johnsons? Which knife was mine?
The knife on the stairs clearly made no sense at all. Lawn knife. My knife was lawn knife.
I snuck up behind O.J. and reached for the knife. O.J. leaned back, looking panicked. I dropped flat next to him. Great. Covered in bloody grass. The knife was on the other side, and I tried to kick it away from Simpson. He was looking all over the place now. He stood up, and walked over to the steps. He didn't notice me, and I instinctively shook my head and shrugged. L.A., what the fuck? I stayed low, and put the knife between my teeth.
I scaled the wall again, and realized that I had the same problem with Broncos now that I had with knives.
Did Al stick around for all of that?
"Al. Aaaaalllllllll." Like I needed this shit!
Al flashed the interior lights of his Bronco once. What was he going to do next, honk? I waved my arm and pointed down the street. He drove off. I walked over to O.J.'s bronco, and had to stop myself from rubbing my forehead. "Shit - blood," I whispered to myself. I pulled off one of the Aris Isotoners, and massaged the bridge of my nose.
He was still doing something in the yard. With the bodies. "Californians are sick and idiotic," I mused.
Then I fucked with O.J.'s Bronco.
Fin
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, November 30 at 4:02 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Bad Bands Revisited, Part 2:
Lawyerama for Dollarama?
Can you tell the difference? Dollarama band shot by A Soundtrack for Everyone.
In other "Bad Band" news, Dollarama reportedly received a cease-and-desist order from the retail chain of the same name this week. As pointed out in that thread, there's no reasonable way that the store would win a suit: There's no plausible danger of a junkshop band being confused with an actual junkshop. (Dollarama-the-store doesn't even sell CDs.) If anything, Dollarama the band actually promotes the chain: "Look, it's also an instrument store!"
I have my own complaints about Dollarama, actually: I wish that they'd practice and develop the texture of their improvisations, which are inconsistent and too-often tedious: The joyously hyperactive heights are always surrounded by flat plains of ho-hum. The group would do well to pay some heed to a few of the found-object-improv precedents (Nihilist Spasm Band, VoiceCrack, even some of the current Rat-drifting bands in Toronto).
But this argument goes beyond this band, which is admirably vowing not to buckle: The chain is flexing its biceps, but case precedent is against them, and artists should do their best to face down this kind of intimidation and lawsuit-chill attacking their ability to refer to the commercial world in their work. (Notice how the music industry has started ignoring mashup artists as too much bother to harass.) If corporations are going to usurp ninety-eight percent of the cultural air space, then artists need the freedom to represent, criticize, lampoon and just plain use those reference points, if art is to be relevant to the general stuff of life.
Warhol's soup cans and Brillo boxes remain the clearest example of where fair-use thinking needs to go, partly because they don't involve the distraction of the "parody exception": His Campbell's soup paintings weren't satire or, arguably, even commentary on Campbell's soup; they were simply portraits of the world as the artist found it, with tonalities open to multiple interpretations. And if Campbell's had been able to cease-and-desist them out of existence, it would have been an atrocity. It seems that they didn't because it wasn't common practice at the time; they were open to the idea that it might be harmless or even good for the company, since hegemonic "branding" thinking hadn't advanced that far by the early 1960s.
Dollarama is still a very young group, and you can't rule out they're going to blossom into brilliance; Warhol was dismissed when he first moved from commercial to "fine" art, too. (And if the Riptorns can improve their game, anybody can.) The crucial fact is that Dollarama's name is by no means extraneous to their conceptual pursuit - it's a strong signpost to the themes raised by their methods, questions about cheapness, the throwaway society, the class questions within music (expensive gear as shortcut to legitimacy, for instance) and the creative recycling of social waste on a broader level. Even if I'd like to see the creativity of their actual recycling practice increase a notch, that's a fertile landfill they're plowing.
(Postscript, Monday: I accidentally deleted a few comments to this entry in my usual spam-comment deletion routine last night. I was alerted and I think they've all been restored now - if any are still missing, let me know. Huge apologies to those affected. It was just a slip of the mouse, not at all intended to censor commentary.)
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, October 20 at 6:16 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (12)
Bad Bands Revisited, Part 1:
Constructive Destruction! Unity Through Idiocy!
(Guest Post)
Zoilus space-friend Chris Randle contributes his latest guest post, this week on the baddest of Bad Bands, The Riptorns. Comments disputing his interpretation of Brechtian "alienation" are invited. Have I told the story here about the director from the Berliner Ensemble whom I met in university, who asked what the English translation of Verfremdungseffekt was and winced painfully on being told it was "alienation"? - CW
When Carl mentioned his desire to explore the social implications of musical issues, I immediately thought of the most antisocial band in Toronto: The Riptorns. Their music is certainly abrasive enough - a cacophony of attempted guitar-playing and yowling - but the band's mindbogglingly atrocious covers of other Toronto groups are practically reverent in comparison to their stage presence. The Riptorns' stage persona is basically "destructive idiots." Their last real show, a showcase put on by torontoindie.com, was mostly made up of the band attacking each other, their equipment and the audience.
They managed to infuriate members of other bands on the bill, the bar staff and the person who unwisely booked them (apparently the trio still hasn't been paid for the show). Performing with scene sweetheart Laura Barrett at the "Voodoo" edition of Matt Collins' resurrected "In Search of ..." series last week, they not only made light of this but also cracked blowjob jokes about her. Their stage presence resembles a punk band on the surface, yet its insularity and obnoxiousness creates a very Brechtian distance - fed-up alienation instead of an urge to participate. Riptorns shows aren't about being lost in the moment; they force you to stand outside of it and look on as it stretches into an irritating eternity. But what I find intriguing about the Riptorns is that this is all an act, a deranged Kabuki mask. As civilians, the two main band members, Jeff Wright (also of We Had Wild Adventures and Bacon of Brunswick) and Ryan McLaren (heavily involved with Wavelength, co-founder of All Caps!) are both pretty much goofy, mild-mannered indie nerds. So what would possess them to try and become the most hated band in Toronto?
I can't claim to know their personal motives, but I think the Riptorns, perhaps inadvertently, are creating at least one positive social effect: they're a lightning rod for loathing. That emotion used to be encouraged (in The Iliad, Homer speaks of "strong Hatred, defender of peoples..."), and while things have obviously changed in the interim, I don't believe human nature is an infinitely malleable creature; hatred, like love, will be with us for the foreseeable future.
This is a bit tricky when it comes to music, especially since enmity towards entire genres ("I like everything except rap and country," kids in my high school would say) has been interrogated and questioned at such length. In a community like Toronto's, I think there's a real danger of that natural spleen turning inwards, becoming corrosive, poisonous rancor. It sometimes seems as though there's unreasonable disdain from some people in the local scene towards bands like Broken Social Scene and Metric (something I can be guilty of), or conversely an amazingly visceral dislike for less traditionalist, more conceptual projects like Bad Bands. Look at the recent K-os silliness, where that black artist accused a black Now critic of being the dupe of his white-indie-nerd bosses (as opposed to the white indie musicians K-os has collaborated with). (Zoilus' note: See Danko Jones' great riposte in this week's Now, in the 6th letter here.) It's divisive and damaging, differences in genre or approach or personality used as fodder for bitter arguments instead of discussion and/or collaboration.
But a band like the Riptorns is the perfect outlet for collective bitching: Their music is terrible, they leave a path of destruction wherever they go and the personae they adopt onstage are intentionally, gleefully reprehensible. The Riptorns aren't just a bad band; they're a little bit evil - our cuddlier, less unsettling equivalent of Mayhem or Skrewdriver. The Grand Theft Auto of music. And I suspect the catharsis may exist as much for the band members, allowing for an overflow of id, as it does for spectators. There's no pressure for them to create constructive, meaningful music: A Riptorn is free to express all the snarky mockery of local musicians that might've been building up within them. They can be satire, spurs (burrs?) or scapegoats; that last one also having the potential to be beneficial in its own strange way. Even Jesus needed a cynical little dick around before he could do the salvation-of-all-mankind thing.
- Chris Randle
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, October 20 at 4:51 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
Quasi-Participatory-Objects: More Matmos, Portland,
Pick 7, CCL1, & the Canada Council
Matmos shaves Jonny Dovercourt's head at the Music Gallery in Toronto on Monday. Photographer unknown, lifted from Stillepost.ca.
First, a note that I didn't note yesterday because I was sniffly in bed with a post-Pop cold: My omnibus Pop Montreal review appeared in The Globe & Mail. Its main value, aside from kvetching about the flaws of the PopMtl program, is its mention of The Nymphets.
Now to the meat: By all reports, Monday night's Matmos show was even more dazzling than the night before, including - as in the picture above - a performance of Germs Burn for Darby Crash in which MC Schmidt gave Music Gallery programmer Jonathan Bunce (aka man-about-Torontopia, Jonny Dovercourt) a Mohawk on stage, while Drew Daniel turned the buzzing clippers and falling hair into music, and another piece (I'm not sure which?) in which a volunteer had his butt flogged, with the spanking similarly sampled and processed. These plans had been hatched the night before over a lovely, way-too-big, late-night Chinese dinner on Spadina - I helped talk Jonny into it! - so I was sorry to miss the outcome. I also wanted to mention that Matmos and So Percussion encored on Sunday night with a new piece composed on tour in the past couple of weeks, consisting of the percussionists playing Aaron Copland excerpts and Schmidt reading excerpts from Hugo Chavez's infamous "Bush is the devil" speech to the United Nations. (I suggested later that it could be titled Appalachian Spring for Hugo Chavez.)
I've been reflecting since Sunday on what makes Matmos's electronic work so special, since when it comes to beats and samples it's not that they're the most sophisticated technologically or any such thing. And it's not even the stunt and satirical value of the use of unconventional sampling materials, though certainly humour is always a welcome element and one too often scant in the testosterone-race to be the most hyper-genre-cool in that field. Rather, I think it's the deeper effect of that technique, which is to return a referentiality to electronic music - to make it, in an oblique way, a representational form. I had a little outburst last week on the blog panel at Pop Montreal about how much I dislike the anti-geographical tendency in cyberspace - the way many websites withold information on what city or region they come from. I always want to know. It's my first question about a band, for instance, much ahead of what genre label is attached. I was surprised by my vehemence about it at the panel. I think the reason is that I value these anchors and hooks back into a grounded physical, historical and, generally, material set of circumstances - while they're by no means determinative of category or quality or content - as a counter to the abstracting leveller of international commerce and capital. Just like the on-stage shaving and spanking, the names of cities and towns (and even of authors and artists) return to a human scale. Perhaps unlike many techno-utopians and transhumanists, I don't wish to escape that scale nearly so much as I fear losing it. It's rather like, in a disaster or war, the difference between casualty statistics ("109 dead in Baghdad today") and reading the names and backgrounds of the fallen. Geography and mortality; objects and names. The problem with digital culture - despite all its positive aspects - is that, like Hollywood or the pop chart, it becomes an enclosed self-referentiality, in which not just individuality and community but subject matter itself threatens to become irrelevant. Matmos's performances, like their new album, mitigate against all that. And they do it while every moment being fun and - crucially, in a manner from which other interactively inclined artists definitely can and should learn - with every aspect also being integrated with a fierce attention to aesthetics. Two great tastes that don't often go together, you know what I mean?
On Tuesday night, I was fortunate enough - along with about 40 other people at Sneaky Dee's in Toronto - to witness another blow struck in that cause, the Which Side Are You On tour by a small crew from the Portland, Ore., scene. It was a fantastic blend of concert and lectures, mostly given by Power Point, on the subject of humanity's relationship to technology, specifically our personal computers. Sounds a little dry, I know, but it ain't so: It was full of built-in little tricks and misdirections, all kind of revolving around the fact that this relationship is loaded with failure, and that this fallibility is the human element that we wish away at our peril. It was sort of a hybrid of a night of Trampoline Hall bleeding into the distinctively mixed-up Portland storytelling-and-song performance style familiar from the work of The Blow and, another layer back, Miranda July. Highlights included Jona from Yacht along with Claire L. Evans ("Universe") singing duets with their suddenly come-to-life laptops, and Aaron Flint Jamison's entire, RPG-meets-metapolitics performance as "the messenger" coming to bring "the particle workers" the good news about the forces of darkness and light - and a tough choice between them, which had real consequences on the spot, including being "banished" from the show - though again in the end things were not quite as they appeared.
Plus they were followed by a Yacht set and then the official reunion, now as a three-piece, of The Barcelona Pavilion, in their first gig under that name since November of 2004. TBP is, for me, the real founding band of Torontopia, with a definite attention to geography ("to see that thing you'll have to leave the building/ all of these things are in different buildings") and real-life subject matter, and that neverendingly fundamental slogan: "How are you people going to have fun/ If none of you people ever participate?!" (They also announced their current plan to release covers of the entire discography of Beat Happening.) Not to mention, one of the best avant-rock dance bands ever. (Although I wish some of the larger boys would recognize the anti-participatory effect of throwing yourself into the pit with maximum force, velocity and violence, especially in groups: There's a fine line between slamdance-playfighting and actually making the pit an impossible place for smaller people, women especially but also the bespectacled and wimpy, to inhabit. I get pissed off when the bigger guys stop respecting that line, even when I know they don't mean to.)
A couple of more peaceable participatory-minded events in the offing include the next, Oct. 14 17th installment of Pick 7, the theatre-meets-music event at Hub 14, which is part-lecture, part-talk-show, and part-concert. The musicians who will perform and converse with each other and the audience this time are Toronto's Sandro Perri, aka Polmo Polpo (whose new Constellation album I mentioned here) and Montreal's Eric Craven, the composer/percussionist whom you might know from Constellation band Hangedup. Highly recommended.
And I wanted to remind you of Thursday's opening (probably tonight, as you read this) of the apartment-based "open-format project and art centre", the Centre for Culture and Leisure 1, right here in Parkdale. This is the new space run by Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis. Whether you can make it or not, you should read their Mike Watt-inspired manifesto, which makes several strong points on community-based culture. And they don't just talk the talk here: First off, you would be welcome to propose a project for the space. Second, their own work displays a similar spirit - for instance, check out Emily's Pledge Me, an exercise in mutual plagiarism in which people are invited to submit writing that will be incorporated into a "curated novel" - which cheekily challenges writers' claims that they don't actually steal their material from friends, lovers, family, etc...
Since this is Canada, one of the issues that these multi-source, crossdisciplinary, etc., projects always face is one of funding. It can be sidestepped, of course, but really if this is a country where one of our collective choices is that we provide funding to culture, the kind of work involved in all the foregoing projects shouldn't just fall through the cracks. Today the Canada Council announced that it was going to make its "Artists and Community Collaboration Fund (ACCF)" permanent. This is welcome news immediately, as the fund supports work such as artists teaching video skills to inner-city kids, or oral history work in aboriginal communities, or parades or dances or plays put on jointly by professional artists and neighbourhoods and towns, etc. But I wonder whether this area of funding will consider more sidelong approaches to collaboration, ones that are less obviously about social amelioration, ones that explore interactivity and open-source techniques without the same kind of altruistic cover story? I know that many of the kind of artists I'm discussing here bypass government funding as too much trouble (or, sometimes, ideologically unwanted), but I hope that they apply to this Fund frequently enough, even if they get turned down at first, to help stretch the funders' definitions of community-based art a bit beyond the easy Worthy Initiatives, to pull them a bit into the Unknown.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, October 11 at 8:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Joanna In (Even More of) Her Own Words
Here is the transcript of the Joanna Newsom interview that I did this week for Pop Montreal. Wary of journalists (for reasons you'll grok as she talks), she is agreeing only to e-mail interviews, which is a pleasure when the subject is so articulate but also frustrating because it cuts off so many avenues for follow-up and elaboration. I add a lot more detail in my Globe article (later: hey, David Byrne read the piece!) but I figured that fans might like to have the whole exchange, as I could use only bits and bites in the piece. Joanna was just getting over a flu when she answered these, which delayed the article itself by several days. I've retained the dumber parts of my questions for the sake of honesty. But honesty is never a whole truth.
1) Can you describe to me what the thought-and-intuition process was, even before the recording, that led you to the vision for this album, and for the more expansive approach to songwriting compared to your earlier work?
I don't think I can describe it in much detail. There was a particular set of thoughts weighing very heavy on my mind; there were three or four particular experiences that were staying with me, sharply, in a way that i couldn't shake, and so tried to articulate musically. And these things settled into a real form very quickly; it was immediately apparent to me, for example, that the songs needed to be long, and that it would be a clumsy, vulgar waste of time to even try to make them short. Then I just started working real hard.
2) Was it at all a reaction to the reception of the last album - did you feel that since it was surprisingly widely embraced, you would see how much further you could take it?
No, it was not that. Those things can't stay in the mind for very long, when they have to try to stand up next to actual life. Those sorts of thoughts pale and get washed out, get mushy and drain away. There were more important and pressing agendas (as there always, faithfully are, when you actually sit and try to write music), and these agendas operated independent and unconscious of anything resembling an "audience".
3) Were these songs each written as full pieces or are they, at least in some cases, different fragments incorporated into a larger whole? I ask partly because when I first heard Only Skin it was a four-minute live recording, with you playing piano, which was only what I'd call the verse and chorus parts of the song, which are now only a portion of it.
They were always intended as full pieces. What you heard, the four minute section of the song you mention, played on piano--that was in London. I had blisters on my fingers from my harp strings, and they'd burst and were bleeding, and so I switched to piano. But I wasn't able to play everything i'd written so far in that song on the piano; i'd never practiced it before. So I just played that little bit. It actually drives me crazy when people refer to these songs as, like, 'suites', or use any words suggesting a cobbled-together, modular narrative; because they're completely bound together, in my mind, and they tell the story I wanted to tell very deliberately. I did learn my lesson about playing unfinished songs in a live context.... I thought it was a lovely and interesting thing to do; but it's only lovely and interesting if it's ephemeral. Bootlegs and live recording ruin everything about that idea, everything.
4) Your songs take place mostly in quite pastoral landscapes, very elemental and rustic. Does this reflect what your hometown was like, or is it more an imaginary realm? Do you consciously eschew more urban and contemporary-sounding references, and if so, why?
I don't think it's either a direct reflection of my hometown, or an imaginary realm. And you'll notice that the "nature" represented in these songs is different from the one represented in the first record, and will probably be different from any version I'd invoke in the future. It's a collection of images intended to convey, collectively, certain themes... all sorts of things; I mean, you'll notice there are many, specifically 'contained', tamed, exploited versions of nature in this record; there are a lot of invocations of harvest, fecundity, rot, livestock, domestication, flooding, property lines, etc. And the other nature represented in these songs is a gaping, cosmic one; not close, not familiar, not harmless, not knowable. Like standing in a dark field at night, smelling the fruits on the ground and hearing the sighing animals but not seeing them, and only seeing the big, dark, swallowing sky. These are certain feelings that were integral to the subject matter; because I didn't want to tell a story explicitly; I wanted to tell the shadow-version of it.
5) Does the title reference to the mythology of Ys bear upon the songs as a whole? What is the connection for you?
The title was the last decision to be made. The songs are not about Ys. But there are many connections. And many coincidences, dreams and so forth that necessitated that title
6) It shares this title with the opening song on Alan Stivell's classic Renaissance of the Celtic Harp. Is he an influence, and was that reference significant to the album to you? I've always understood your style to be quite deliberately distinct from the Celtic one.
No, that's not a reference. I didn't know that. That wasn't deliberate. But there are lots of works of art in existence that were outgrowths of various people's experience of that particular myth. So I am not surprised.
I was trained in Celtic harp. My style is pretty different now. But I would not say it is completely devoid of Celtic influence.
7) On the previous album the harp was central, but on this one it frequently recedes into the background, as the voice and the strings take focus. Did arranging the harp for these pieces call for different techniques than the way you played it on your earlier songs? The harp lines seem perhaps a bit sparser and less polyrhythmic, but I'm not certain.
Yes, it's sparser. I knew i was going to fill in a lot of space with other instrumentation, and I knew that Van Dyke's arrangement style often involves figures playing off the beat in somewhat disorienting (albeit gorgeous) ways; I wanted the harp to feel really grounded on this record, more rhythmically straighforward than usual. But there are some particular moments of polyrhythm more complicated than any on the previous record.
8) Do you ever hear from young musicians who're taking the harp up because of hearing you, or harpists who've started songwriting or are emulating your style?
Well, there are young kids in my hometown who've started playing harp because of seeing me play! That's about all I know of.
9) Was there a particular recording or aspect of his work that inspired you to invite Van Dyke Parks to work with you?
Song Cycle. Above anything else.
10) There seems to be a bit of a return to symphonic arrangements in the 'indie' world of late, between your album, the Sufjan Stevens records, and here in Canada we've got Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett, who actually has done a fairly well-loved cover of Peach, Plum, Pear that you might have heard), among others - all very different, I hasten to add, but there does seem to be some confluence, or at least a freshly receptive audience for orchestration...?
I don't know anything about that. The word confluence makes me break out in hives.
11) When I listen to your songs they seem consistently concerned with death, desire, friendship, sex and other adult themes. But many people emphasized the whimsy and "childlikeness" of the writing with the last album, and now this one will probably be received within the framework of fantasy and myth - partly due to the cover art. Do you worry at all that these trappings can create false impressions and prevent people from engaging with the more serious themes?
It bugs me to no end, but I've promised myself that I won't pay attention any more. I've tried engaging the various comments or assumptions made in various interviews, but the thing is, it never makes a difference. I'm tired of feeling like I need to put extra energy into making statements outside of my songs. But it remains startling, deflating, and somewhat funny that people can ignore so much of what I've said and am saying.
12) The obligatory question about the "new folk movement" hype: On one hand, it's brought attention to some of the lesser-known influences some of the people in that boat have in common, such as Vashti Bunyan. On the other, I hear what you're doing as very distinct from what any of the other artists lumped into the category do, even those you've toured and collaborated with. What have been the advantages and demerits for you? Do you think there are any broader social reasons, media trends aside, why this kind of music is getting renewed attention at this time
I'm gonna take the obligatory pass on that one. No offense.
13) Do you feel that these long-form pieces are what you'd like to continue doing indefinitely, or are you still interested in working in pop-song-sized forms? Would you take it further, and perhaps write a full-album suite?
No, I think it was important to do these songs this way, but i think writing longish songs indefinitely could create a bit of laziness. In this case, it was necessary; I don't know if it will be necessary for me again.
14) And finally, aside from this tour and the release of the album, what's in your future (immediate or more distant) that you're excited about?
Well, I just moved into a new house. I'm excited about decorating, gardening, and getting dogs when I'm able.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, October 08 at 5:59 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
Pop Montreal, Nuit Deux: Oh, oh, oh, oh, Desire
Joanna Newsom in Toronto the night before last, as portrayed beautifully by Frank Chromewaves.
I wanted to let you know earlier that my Joanna Newsom/Pop Montreal piece appeared today (a day delayed) in The Globe & Mail. You can read it here. Also, in a day or two I will, I promise, post the interview transcript, which includes many nice moments that didn't make it into the article.
It's nearly 4 a.m., and I've just come from eating a very filling smoked-meat special at the Main with Helen Spitzer and Michael Barclay, so I'm not going to be up long enough to run down today in full for you - a day that included not only Joanna's concert but a lot of noteworthy moments at the Future of Music Coalition Summit: I'll recap some of the "Mini-Me-Dia" panel that Spitz and I were on, as well as such weirdnesses as David Byrne's surprisingly useless talk (he was so much better in this interview, f'r'instance,, tomorrow - mainly, I want to say that this meeting, which has never been held outside DC before, and could be so great, needs to turn into an Unconference immediately. More meaningful as always were the personal encounters - with fellow panelists such as Matt from Fluxblog, and Dan from Said the Gramophone, Montreal blogger MC, our convenor Andrew Rose, conferencegoers such as Frank from Chromewaves (first time in-the-flesh!) (btw Frank's speaking this morning on the doomed-to-be-dominated-by-Pitchfork-talk panel), and many others. (Okay, the one that geeked me out was, thanks to Spitz, finally meeting Mac McCaughan, which happened so unexpectedly that I couldn't even choke out, "Uh, sir, I just want you to know that in 1994, I kinda would have given my life for Superchunk." Mac, if you see this - I should have said. And if your show hadn't been counterprogrammed with Joanna Newsom's, I'd never have missed it.)
And then, yeah, there was Joanna's concert, which mainly felt like 90 minutes in which she drew us up close and whispered the stories of love, loss and mystery that are Ys into our ears. The old songs were extraordinary to hear for the first time live - especially Peach, Plum, Pear which, as Barclay said, having heard Owen (Final Fantasy) cover it so many times, sort of felt like hearing a cover-in-reverse of "our" (Canada's) Joanna Newsom song. But never has it been so clear how much stronger and deeper her writing and singing have become from one album to the other. And meanwhile her fingers whirligigged around the harp like a superior alien intelligence - her couple of missed notes (and one case of forgetting the lyrics in the encore, Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie, where a crowd member stepped in and shouted out, "dedicated dourly!") were welcome, if only to ground the phenomenon in fallible reality. It's otherwise an impossible show to review, because, as I gleaned from post-show conversation, my thoughts like many others' were on terribly personal, emotional matters all the way through. I didn't actually burst into tears, as some did, I think because I knew well beforehand that it would be so, but seldom have I reflected on and felt so much during a show while at once feeling that my attention was riveted every moment. However, since I have a bit of a cold, whenever I did feel like weeping, I started sneezing instead - sorry, if you were sitting near me. (Does this happen to you? It's so annoying!)
The single most powerful new songwriter and performer of the decade? Tonight, I and hundreds of other people in the never-before-used, beautiful venue of the Ukrainian Federation on Hutchison in Montreal said yes, at a roar, rising from our seats. Each individual song practically got a standing ovation. There could be more words for it, but Joanna had already used them: "We could stand for a century, starin', with our heads cocked, in the broad daylight/ at this thing, joy, landlocked, in bodies that don't keep."
Set list, as I remember it, corrections welcome:
Bridges and Balloons
Emily
The Book of Right-On
Sawdust and Diamonds
Sadie
Only Skin
Peach, Plum, Pear
Cosmia
----
encore ("I'm getting serious blisters, so I can only play one more song"): Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie
Later: It always feels redundant to link to Pitchfork, but these photos by Ryan Schreiber really do a lovely job of capturing the visual impression. (I met Ryan briefly - who was either faking it or does read this site now and then - and he was very nice, but we didn't get into anything substantial. Which is just as well, as I have no more desire to argue about Pfork than to argue about the weather. My opinion on balance is like the Hitchhikers' Guide entry on Earth.)
Tugging at the harp strings
Joanna Newsom's complex, charismatic work has shot her to the indie-music stratosphere, CARL WILSON writes
The Globe and Mail
Review section
05/10/06
How much scope and challenge is there to California songwriter and harpist Joanna Newsom's coming second album, Ys? Well, the chorus of the first, 12-minute-long song - to the extent that there are any choruses here - provides a lesson in cosmic terminology.
"The meteorite is the source of the light, and the meteor's just what we see," she sings in a high, passionate lilt, proffering a mnemonic for science students everywhere. "And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee."
Newsom, who plays at the Pop Montreal festival tonight, can empathize with such issues of perception and mismeasurement.
She burst into the skies of the indie-music planet with her acclaimed 2004 debut album The Milk-Eyed Mender. Ever since, she has seen her own intentions confused with the constellated guesswork that fans and detractors alike project onto the charismatic figure of this "elfin" 24-year-old blonde with a very-non-rock axe wedged between her knees.
She has been mistaken for "childlike" because of the heady naturalism of her singing style, when on closer inspection her songs leap routinely from personal lyric to themes of sex and death and environmental disaster. She has been labelled an antiquarian nerd for her allusions to mythology and the pastoral - and the occasional "thee" - when in fact the delicate stateliness of her harp line is consistently juddered away by a verbal and vocal tone as urgent as an ambulance siren. (Though the Renaissance-pastiche portrait on the cover of her new album does her no favours in that area.)
"It bugs me to no end," she said in a rare interview with The Globe and Mail this week, which she would conduct only by e-mail. "I'm tired of feeling like I need to put extra energy into making statements outside of my songs. But it remains startling, deflating, and somewhat funny that people can ignore so much of what I've said and am saying."
Then again, to extend the astronomical analogy, that's what happens to a star. Which is what Newsom is rapidly becoming.
She grew up in the exotic atmosphere of Nevada City, Calif., a former prospecting town taken over by artists, academics and post-hippie intellectual families like her own, which may account for some of her distance from her popular reception. Minimalist composer Terry Riley was a neighbour. She nursed a fascination with the harp as a toddler and began studying it as soon as she could hold one, but quickly spurned the instrument's stereotypical, decorative glissando pastels, learning Celtic styles and then catching on to both Appalachian traditions and African polyrhythmic harp idioms as a teenager at folk-music summer camp.
In university, she started as a composition major but, finding her inclinations out of fashion with academic currents, switched to creative writing.
Her first album (which followed a pair of homemade EPs) shot to the upper stratosphere of best-of-the-year lists from music blogs to magazines to The New York Times. It was an unpredictable fate for a collection of idiosyncratic pop-folk tunes played mainly on solo harp, and one that led to concerts before adoring fans around the world - wherever a quality instrument could be borrowed - including opening a show for an admiring Neil Young.
The status she has garnered among musicians is further evident in the personnel list for her second album, due next month. It is co-produced by Van Dyke Parks, the veteran eccentric best known as Brian Wilson's collaborator on the Beach Boys' legendary lost-and-found master stroke, Smile. Parks built his elaborate symphonic arrangements around voice-and-harp bed tracks engineered by Steve Albini, whose most famous work among hundreds of seminal underground recordings was with Nirvana. And the record was mixed by composer-guitarist Jim O'Rourke, a former member of both Sonic Youth and Wilco.
What, were George Martin and Brian Eno tied up? One has the feeling they wouldn't have said no.
Yet, rather than merely consolidating her position, Ys is an intensely personal album that will test the capacities of acolytes and new listeners alike. It has only five songs, but together they last nearly an hour, with Parks's orchestra, as she put it, "playing off the beat in somewhat disorienting (albeit gorgeous) ways."
The twirling verbal mobiles that Newsom pasted together in miniature on her first record (rhyming "dirigibles" and "irritable," or coining hybrid synecdoches such as "you were knocking me down with the palm of your eye") now become a 4,000-word torrent of images, metaphors, ontology, epistemology, anecdote, punning and rhetoric that seldom repeats itself.
It's a vast thing to absorb. And yet Ys (pronounced "Ees," after an ancient Welsh and Breton myth about an idealized, inundated city, reminiscent of events a year ago in New Orleans) also feels like one of the richest, most moving works anyone has made in pop music this decade.
Despite the flood of information that passes through a listener from song to song, each one has passages that raise goose bumps. In that opener, Emily, she sings of how "tugboats shear the water from the water, flanked by furrows, curling back, like a match held up to a newspaper."
The process, beginning from a stubbornly nagging set of personal experiences, took over a year, but the conception was ever intact. "It actually drives me crazy when people refer to these songs as, like, 'suites,' or use any words suggesting a cobbled-together, modular narrative; because they're completely bound together, in my mind, and they tell the story I wanted to tell very deliberately."
The central, 17-minute saga, Only Skin, in particular, juxtaposes the erotic, artistic and ethical realms so vividly that it feels like a vast summation of Western existence in 2006. "You'll notice there are many, specifically 'contained,' tamed, exploited versions of nature in this record," Newsom said. "There are a lot of invocations of harvest, fecundity, rot, livestock, domestication, flooding, property lines, etc. And the other nature represented in these songs is a gaping, cosmic one; not close, not familiar, not harmless, not knowable. . . . I didn't want to tell a story explicitly; I wanted to tell the shadow-version of it."
But fans of The Milk-Eyed Mender need not worry that Newsom is giving up permanently on compression.
"I think it was important to do these songs this way, but I think writing longish songs indefinitely could create a bit of laziness. In this case, it was necessary; I don't know if it will be necessary for me again."
So Ys is just one more comet streaking across the infinite space of a restless young mind. It seems very likely that there are decades more yet of indelible radiance to emanate from Joanna Newsom, if we make it there - more light from a source that won't be mapped to any foreseeable orbit.
Joanna Newsom plays tonight in Pop Montreal at the Ukrainian Federation, 5213 Hutchinson.
*****
Pop Montreal
Joanna Newsom's appearance is just one of many coups the Pop Montreal festival can claim in its fifth-anniversary year. Founded by a handful of local promoters, it has grown more and more ambitious by the year, now including nearly 30 local venues, with parallel programs for film, art and small publishing. And as its hometown deserves, it has a reputation for the best after-parties of any music fest on the continent.
Among the more official highlights this year are concerts by several long-lost legends of the 1960s and 1970s, including Bob Dylan's rival Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Newsom's personal hero, British folk singer Vashti Bunyan, Texas psychedelic pioneer Roky Erickson and New York new-wave-era maverick Gary Wilson. Also not to miss are Calypso icon The Mighty Sparrow, young Eastern European emigre Regina Spektor, legendary hip-hop absurdist Doctor Octagon, and bands such as Denmark's Under Byen, Victoria's Daddy's Hands (a decisive influence on such current indie favourites such as Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown - who play the festival on Sunday - and Frog Eyes), and Montreal's own electronic innovators Akufen and Tim Hecker, among many others.
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, October 06 at 2:40 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
Live Notes in the Rearview:
1. The Mountain Goats
John Darnielle with Elvises, photo by (Mountain Goats bassist) Peter Hughes, not taken at the current Toronto Andy Warhol exhibition but somewhere else last year.
A backlog of notes, now that the Polaris pandemonium has died down, on recent live experiences. I'll begin with last night's Mountain Goats show, and work back through Jandek and to the Guelph jazz fest. 3, 2, 1: Go!
John Darnielle's body when he performs is a one-man symphony of tics, spasms, awkward dance moves and grotesque facial expressions. Even when he is just strumming the chords of a passage between verses in a very quiet song, he will bend one knee, squint, bare his teeth and half-spin around the stage as if he's rocking out on the solo to Crosstown Traffic. On Tuesday night at Lee's Palace in Toronto, he built up such emotional tension in many of the songs from the melancholy and hushed new album Get Lonely that the cartoony mannerisms made some spectators burst into giggles. It worked like a fart in church. And it was at those moments, most of all, that one saw the agonizingly gawky adolescent nerd in Darnielle poking through what in many other ways is a confident and commanding stage presence, through the authority that he takes on through the power of his writing, the status that he (like a lot of his geeky brethren) gains with his quick wit.
And it struck me then that this juxtaposition of the clever and often profound adult mind with the adenoidal voice and the barely-held-in-check guitar style and so on, just like the mix of charisma and physical awkwardness on stage, has a lot to do with how disarmed I often am by his music of any pretence to critical distance. Because I am just too much a part of his tribe. Some of his experiences, it's become clear in recent years, were much more extreme than mine, but they usually raise parallels (for instance, his songs about childhood abuse raise milder but still painful memories of childhood bullying). But the general personality set that comes through - hyperverbal, hyperactive, isolated but still extroverted - is awfully familiar, so much that when people in the audience the other night giggled at him, I got protective and a bit disproportionately pissed off. All of which adds up to a classic, adolescent-style fan relationship to the Mountain Goats that I seldom have for other music now.
It's a huge pleasure. But it's also really useful in a broad way: I was reflecting after the show that normally I listen to music somewhat through a critical framework I've built up over the years: Not only a set of reference points and terminology, but an ideology that maintains, for instance, that songs are by their nature as art an artificial construct, and so fantasizing about their authenticity or sincerity or autobiographical content is generally a mistake and a distraction. But when I have that teenaged feeling about an artist and their music, those thoughts start popping up - this desire to feel one's way into the singer's own personal thoughts and motivations, because the identification is so huge - you feel (don't you think?) that the artist is you, but a bigger and shinier you, who's saying what you want to say but aren't gifted enough to articulate. As a kid I kinda felt this way about every musician I loved, no matter how outlandish the connection: As my friend Eric said when I was chatting about this idea after the show the other night, "Yes, it turned out that I wasn't really all that much like Jimmy Sommerville." And my love life hasn't turned out to be very comparable to the romance of Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones. As an adult, I suspect that the identifications get a little more precise. Who knows? But they certainly get more rare. The twist, of course, is that I'm having these reactions to a songwriter who's just as aware as I am of the critical problems around authenticity and autobiography, has pretty much the same opinions, and has lately been more and more deliberately fucking with them. So it's that much easier for me to get sucked in, no coincidence. But it's a relief to realize I still have this capacity for projection and empathy through music, because it's such a large part of its potency - and it brings me as a critic back in touch with music listeners who aren't quite as caught up in textual and cultural analysis and are just there, swept up in the music, feeling the love.
And there was plenty of love at the Mountain Goats show here on Tuesday. I think John was feeling it too. This tour is no doubt difficult for him, because he has to generate a very different mood to bring these songs off than the "standard" Mountain Goats show that the fans expect. When someone shouted, "Play some old songs, John," early in the show, he responded that he liked the new songs better, so that if he played the old ones, he'd be pandering: "I'd be whoring, and I'm not a whore. I know I look like one. I'm pretty. But I'm not actually a whore." But after a couple more quiet Get Lonely numbers, which were very well received considering that many in the audience might not even have heard the record yet, he turned to the same guy in a forgiving mood and said, "I understand how it is. You go to see Nick Cave and he's doing everything from The Boatman's Call and you're like, I hate that fuckin' record. That's not what I want - piano ballads? So I'll do an older one. What do you want to hear?" The guy answered, "Water Song?" and Darnielle laughed: "Not that old! I'm surprised I even know what tape that was on - no way do I remember how to play it." So he sang Going to Cleveland.
Michael Barclay in the comments section on Zoilus last week remarked that he didn't get the musical appeal of the Mountain Goats, asking (I'm paraphrasing) whether anybody would give a shit about them if the words weren't so good. The answer's probably no - Mtn Goats fans are words people, surely - but that doesn't mean that the music's bad. Darnielle's been straightforward about the fact that he started making music because (along with being a huge music fan) he was writing poetry, and music seemed the best vehicle for it, since hardly anyone reads poetry and he wanted to reach people. But to make that wish come true - as obviously he's doing - the accompanying music has to do two things: It has to serve the words by giving them an appropriate emotional setting, and have enough lilt and force to make the song memorable. Mountain Goats songs may not seem musically impressive on the surface, but audiences seem to remember the words and music with more of Darnielle's stuff than just about any artist I've seen live in recent years - half the crowd's always mouthing the words or singing along. So for a lot of us the music does what it's supposed to do, make the poems and stories more meaningful and memorable and affecting - it fulfills the age-old bardic function. And that seems plenty. (Which doesn't mean that it will do that for Michael, which is just a matter of taste, although I won't get into the whole "too white" thing now except that some day I'm going to have to write a post about Funkism and the abuse of the word "uptight"). But I also think that on the recent albums, and the new one in particular, there's more and more concern for making the music exquisite in its own right. And that was borne out by this week's concert too.
The new material really sounded astounding. Darnielle is able to apply the same theatrical savvy to the soft and serious as he does to the loud and outrageous. And he likewise does it with exaggeration - if you think those songs are quiet on the CD, you should hear them live. They were damn near inaudible sometimes. And the quieter he got the quieter the crowd got. Cliches about pins dropping came to mind. Peter Hughes's supple, finely calibrated bass counted for more at those moments than ever before, too. I got shivers. I welled up. In introducing Cobra Tattoo, Darnielle spoke about some of the misapprehensions of the record: "A lot of people are calling it a 'breakup' album. Well, I guess you could say that, but what some of the people in these songs are breaking up with is Almighty God. Or their own DNA."
All that intensity made the cathartic release of the louder or funnier songs all the more joyous - most of all his cover of Houseguest, a darkly comic stalker anthem, "a song I didn't write but wish I did," originally by Darnielle's friend and collaborator Franklin Bruno (who plays piano on several recent Mtn Goats discs) with his band Nothing Painted Blue from the 1994 album Placeholders (still available via Absolutely Kosher, apparently). Darnielle did it like a theatrical monologue, acting out the whole plot of a film-noir parody, making every line feel like a punchline. It was delightful.
A couple of other theatrical highlights came with the introduction to Dance Music, in which he explained that the record player in the boy's bedroom in the song was actually a model rocket attached to a small turntable that came with some mini-flexidiscs ("now the collectors in the room are going, 'I've gotta find some of those' ") with recordings of the moon landing. Which forever changes how I'll hear that song, whether it's true or not. And then there was the full-crowd singalong to No Children, a newly minted Mountain Goats ritual that I wasn't even daring to hope would happen, much less come off so well. (Go, Toronto!) And there was likewise a really rousing shoutalong to the "Hail Satan!" climax of Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton in the second encore - but what I'll remember better is how he played the first half of that song with a new restraint, singing it dim and low like a tragedy, as if to imply that these characters too could have been included on Get Lonely, so that when he let rip vocally in the latter half, when the boys in the song get unfairly punished and squashed by their parents and school, with possible dark consequences (I thought of that sad messed-up fuck who went in shooting to Dawson College in Montreal last week), it sounded like what it really is, one of the finest and most on-point goddamn protest songs anybody has written this decade. Darnielle made a dedication: "This is for the young men and women I used to work with" - before the Goats became a full-time thing, Darnielle was a psychiatric nurse and worked in a group home for troubled kids - "who are now scattered to the four winds, and none of whom I will ever see again."
He also dedicated one song to Christine Fellows, his opening act, "whose boots I don't consider myself worthy to polish." And then he realized that what he was about to play was a pretty grim little number: "I've never done that before. Great way to create an awkward moment!" Fellows' set was really good as well, but this has been more than long enough, so I'll have to talk about her another time. Meanwhile, here is the Mountain Goats set list as best I can remember, probably with omissions and absolutely in the incorrect order. (Much later: Proper order here.) My only real disappointment was that he didn't play Woke Up New - I would have shouted for it, but hell, it's the single! I kept being sure it was coming. Damn you - and bless you - John Darnielle, for never being predictable.
Design Your Own Container Garden
Wild Sage
New Monster Avenue
You or Your Memory
Get Lonely
Going to Cleveland
Dance Music
Cobra Tattoo
Dialudid
Game Shows Touch Our Lives
Lion's Teeth
Moon over Goldsboro
In the Hidden Places
This Year
-----------------
No Children (mass singalong)
Houseguest (cover of Franklin Bruno/Nothing Painted Blue)
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(pre-encore dialogue w/ Peter. Overheard: "Do you think it's too obvious?")
Best Ever Death-Metal Band in Denton (lyric change: Instead of "the top three contenders after weeks of debate, were Satan's Fingers, and The Killers, and The Hospital Bombers," JD sang, "the top three contenders, which were later ripped off...")
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, September 20 at 10:43 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
'Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Anonymous'
Jandek in Glasgow, photo by Keiko Cummings.
Zoilus on Jandek, today in The Globe and Mail.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Anonymous
He released dozens of albums while keeping his identity a secret. Now Jandek is coming to Toronto, along with the man writing the singer's 'fictional biography,' CARL WILSON reports
The Globe and Mail, Sept. 16, 2006
When last heard from in these parts, the reclusive Texas musician known as Jandek was busy appearing not at all in the 2003 documentary Jandek on Corwood.
It recited the classic Jandek lore: Real name, Sterling R. Smith. Location, Houston. First record released in 1978 by his mail-order company, Corwood Industries; 47 more follow (six this year alone!), often sent by the crate to unwilling radio DJs.
His lyrics? Moaned fragments with all the jaunty joie de vivre of Samuel Beckett. Music? Guitar or piano, bluesy but about as melodic as the slow crank of a medieval torture rack; usually solo, but with just enough exceptions to confuse the rule. Album art? Blurry photos, often of a redheaded male at various ages. Publicity? One-and-a-half reluctant interviews, in which he divulged nothing. Most people can't abide two minutes of Jandek, let alone 48 albums.
All of which has made him a kind of anti-superstar for a fervent knot of fans (Kurt Cobain once among them) who love to speculate on his identity, mental state and artistic intentions or lack thereof. It was hardly necessary to add that Jandek never, ever played concerts.
But in October of 2004, those verities were shaken by the appearance of a tall, gaunt "Corwood representative" at a Scottish music festival. He has performed with increasing frequency ever since -- including his first time in Canada, in Toronto tomorrow night.
It's hard to convey how thoroughly this screws up the Jandek mythos. It's the meteor hitting the dinosaurs. It's the Jandek Reformation: A man who lived like classified intelligence now takes the spotlight in a natty black suit and wide-brimmed hat. A guy who seemed allergic to humanity now jets into foreign cities and gets onstage with pickup bands of total strangers.
The accompanists are usually prominent local improvising musicians (recruited by the promoters), with whom this supposed musical primitive meshes with apparent ease. For each gig Jandek writes a new batch of lyrics, which he reads from a music stand.
The Toronto band is percussionist Nick Fraser, acoustic bassist Rob Clutton and guitarist Nilan Perera. Their only rehearsal will be to meet Jandek in the afternoon for a quick sound check and chat.
Perera admits that the initial lure was that "you're going to play with this ultimate cult figure," but the more he listened to Jandek's albums, the more sympathetic he found them. "The back-and-forth between his poetry and his instrument, whatever it may be, is very defined." (In Toronto, Jandek will play a pair of Korg synthesizers instead of his usual guitar, as he did in a recent New York show.) "His way of playing is in the vein of free jazz, in that it's following and commenting from one line to another."
Fraser extends the parallel: "When you're used to experimenting, you wonder about this idea of 'outsider' art. Look at [free-jazz pioneer] Ornette Coleman! People thought he was nuts, and maybe they're right, but it doesn't matter."
"I suspect," says Perera, "that Jandek's found out what improvisers can do -- that there are these other people who are willing to play out of time and by feel. Like any good artist, if his work starts to get rote, he's going to find another way."
Danen Jobe agrees: "He's found a way to make it fresh, and that's great." Jobe has special insight into the mood at Corwood these days, as he has been in close written contact about a project that demonstrates the devotion Jandek can spark.
A young author and university teacher in rural Arkansas, Jobe has just published the first book in a planned fiction trilogy that uses Jandek's songs "to create what seemed to me could be the life of the person that released these albums and made this music." He is giving readings in conjunction with the Toronto show and at Jandek's next stop, Chicago.
Named after the first Jandek song Jobe ever heard, Niagra Blues (sic), the tale uses only scraps of the facts about Sterling Smith, whose name never appears. Instead, Jobe supplies Jandek with a childhood in the Ozarks and a long affinity with the Delta blues. Jandek has approved and serves as musical consultant by correspondence -- Jobe sends him notes and "sometimes I get something back," mostly corrections on lyrics or technical details.
In one memorable case, Jobe sent Jandek a list of possible blues influences, including Blind Lemon Jefferson. "He wrote back and said no, not him, but Blind Willie Johnson. I put it on and could see what he meant. Like a lot of those guys, Jandek moves from gospel to total psychotic stuff. Listen to Charley Patton, or Tommy Johnson talking about drinking Sterno. Except those guys were serious."
Not, Jobe adds, that Jandek is kidding -- you don't put out 48 albums on a lark -- but he has "a hell of a sense of humour, a sly sense of sarcasm, and as you get familiar with the music, you can tell."
Later volumes will imagine Jandek into Texas and the present day. "I'm interested in identity, the things that define you. . . . It starts with your childhood and extends through your interests, and down the line you find you've become the peculiar person you are, whether it's Harry Houdini [the subject of another project] or Jandek.
"I'm not doing his biography," he's careful to specify. "It's this character, Jandek, that he's created, and I'm just creating another place for that person to be."
Jobe thinks Smith is more conscious of constructing a character than observers presume. "He put out his first album and expected people to dig it, to take it seriously, but no one did. So when he released the second one, that's when he became Mr. Anonymous. And he definitely cultivated the mystique, though never at the expense of putting out the music he wanted."
Adds Perera, "The mythology is amazing: that Jandek is an employee of Corwood Industries, but at the same time is its product -- to give yourself that many separations and divisions. . . . And to maintain anonymity, that lack of visual identity in North American culture -- that never happens."
But with the success of the documentary, this strategy may have gotten Jandek as far as it can. "So the mystique is changing," says Jobe. "He doesn't talk onstage, but I think it's because so much emphasis would be put on whatever he said -- even if it was 'Hello, Cleveland!' -- that no one would pay attention to the music. Without a word, Jandek really does command the stage, by looks and gestures, the way Miles Davis used to do."
The crazy, tuneless Texas cracker being compared to the coolest icon of New York jazz? As Jandek once said, "A little intrigue goes a long way." The gap between outsider and insider may be just a matter of a decade or three.
Jandek plays tomorrow at 7 p.m. at The Centre of Gravity, 1300 Gerrard St. E., Toronto (888-222-6608). Danen Jobe reads at Circus Books and Music, 253 Gerrard St. E., Monday, Sept. 18 at 6 p.m., free.
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, September 16 at 1:10 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Polarised! It's (Not?) All About the Music, Man
Two dialogues: First, re: my Mountain Goats article (intro'd in my last post), there's a just fan-fucking-tastic panel in the current issue of metal mag Decibel called Hipster Metal: True or False?, in which frontgoat John Darnielle along with critic Joe Gross, Decibel writer Kory Grow and metal label guys Keith Abrahamsson and Brian Slagel chew over what to make of indie types glomming onto the Southern Lord bands or Mastodon (who played in Toronto this week with plenty indie types in enthusiastic attendance). It shows once again how much more revealingly the "big issues" can be handled when you begin from a highly specific focus: Darnielle's demolition of the "hipster" label, among other moments, is required reading whether you give a fig about metal or not. (The discussion of the "literary" nature of Mastodon provides a counterpoint to Michael Barclay's anti-Goats comments today, but I hope to respond more to Michael at least by the time of Tuesday's Mtn Goats show in Toronto.) One concrete outcome: I plan to start wearing a lot more suits and ties to hip-hop and metal shows, and maybe everywhere.
And second, in anticipation of this Monday's Polaris Music Prize, yesterday's Eye had a fine discussion with the above hilarious cover image of Owen (Final Fantasy) Pallett and Rollie (Cadence Weapon) Pemberton rumbling in some sort of finalists' virtual-reality holding pen. As one of the 10 final-round judges, I'm chuffed for tense debates and nervous about compromise, especially with such a large panel. I'd be only too happy to see the Eye-cover showdown realized, but it's not gonna happen. I hearby pledge not to be swayed by Eye's survey of how the prizewinners will use their $20-thou, though it's amusing to note how much the suggestion of the scenesters-that-scenesters-love-to-hate, Metric, parallels what Saint Torontopia Jonny (Dovercourt) Bunce proposed in the Coach House uTOpia book last year: A "green" recording studio. (Though Jonny was promoting a "green" venue/studio/community centre instead, which may be a telling difference.)
The Polaris organization, btw, has mandated us to consider the albums solely on their merits qua albums, as recorded artifacts, not "overratedness" or "underratedness", the career positions or prospects of the artists, who "needs" the prize or doesn't, nor presumably any societal "extra-musical" concerns such as genre or race/class/gender etc. I assume this is a reaction to criticisms of erratic judging in the Mercury Prize in the UK, on which the Polaris is modelled. But it's a hallucination. These criteria will be in play but will be rationalized into other terms -- subsumed as ideology into a pose and lexicon of critical "objectivity," and arguably thereby made more ideological still. It's not realistic about the way people listen to and evaluate music, or even can: Listening is always an outcome of an entire history of listening, social values and commitments, perceived zeitgeist and other biases. And it's richer and more fun that way. I will play by the rules of the Polaris game, but I'm pretty sure the experience is just going to confirm that hypothesis (mind you, in ways that might not be as illuminating without the artificial boundaries!). Which is fine: They've just started this thing, and it's a great thing, but there's gonna be a learning curve.
Coincidentally I had a similar exchange this week with the editors of a Major American Music Magazine (M.A.M.M.). In the course of some unexpectedly fraught editing tussles, they told me that they explicitly strive for reviews not to refer to other press and other external reference points. In part that's just the normal stuff of mainstream media, which want to avoid an "insider" tone in relation to a mass audience, and I'm down with that. But M.A.M.M. consciously does this to contrast with "the blogs" - they don't want a conversation, a series of links, but for each review to be as self-contained as reasonably possible - in order to say yay or nay whether a record is "good." In other words their method is nearby ye olde New Criticism - to read the text as autotelic, and in its artistic manoeuvres, stripping out biographical, historical and intertextual levels. It was a startling stance from this particular M.A.M.M., which in its feature pages seems to fairly revel in the gossipy, performative, iconic elements of pop. But close reading (irony intended) of the reviews section - which is full of great writers - reveals that they do try to stick to that brief. Again the exercise is a healthy switch and stretch from other writing, where my interest is often to be as "contexty" as a piece will bear. I can even see its usefulness precisely in a M.A.M.M. where gossipy and performative and iconic aspects tend to predominate. But it's a fiction, and not one I anticipated running into in 2006, much less twice in a week. It says a lot about professional mindsets and the distances between critical discourses that I'll be absorbing for a spell.
To give just one counterexample, I was interviewed for an academic project today about "experimental music" in Toronto, and the conversation was about nothing but context - scenes, venues, series, audiences, interconnections, how music is framed by language and gesture. These are my preoccupations, but even I was taken aback a bit, asking at the end, "Should we talk about music 'in itself' at all?" and hearing, "Nah, I don't think that's necessary."
(For way more about context in art and criticism, check out this post and the ensuing comments on poet/professor Ron Silliman's indispensable blog.)
Which has everything to do with Jandek. More tomorrow.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, September 16 at 12:33 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (10)
Getting Lonely?
Richard Buckner, photographed live by the improbably named Randy Bacon.
Apologies for my blog truancy this week, especially to those who'd wanted to hear my report from the Guelph jazz fest. The logistics of the multi-track career thing can sometimes go haywire. But some of the results become visible today and in the next few: First of all, there is my Mountain Goats article today in The Globe and Mail. The piece clarifies some of the points I tried to make in an aborted Zoilus post last week on the new album, Get Lonely, albeit more (perhaps too) drily, for newsprint consumption. One idea that didn't make it into the piece: Beyond the subject-matter and artistic-evolution reasons for the subdued vocal tone on Get Lonely, I wonder if Darnielle might (even subconsciously) be backing away from his yelpy vocal style because it's no longer very unique - it's what all the kids are doing, at their burning arcades and their promenades of wolves and their handclapping yeah-saying parties? So rather than trying to yell overtop of those with fresher pinker young lungs, the comparative veteran chooses to undercut them with a whisper. Maybe it's rude to say so but I think Darnielle has a good showman's instinct along with his keen artistic sense, and getting away from yelping seems like a wise pack-breaking strategy at this point. (By the way, I've got an essay coming up later this fall in EnRoute about what to make of those yelpy little buggers.)
Also today I was supposed to have a review in the paper of the new Richard Buckner album, Meadow, in advance of his show tomorrow night at the Horseshoe in Toronto (with Eric Bachmann). For some reason it did not run. This is a shame, because I think it's the strongest outing from him - a songwriter I hold in very very high esteem, right up there with the likes of John Darnielle - in a very long time. So, if you're interested, you can preview it on the jump.
Also, tomorrow keep an eye on The Globe - or on this site - for my feature about the fabled oracle of Houston, none other than Jandek, whose first-ever Canadian concert takes place in Toronto on Sunday.
MEADOW
RICHARD BUCKNER
(Merge Records)
★ ★ ★ ☆
Some eight records along, Richard Buckner is no longer the nearly unbeatable pick he seemed to be in the late 1990s for most-powerful American singer-songwriter of his generation. After three classic, visceral albums, he grew into a more abstract style that gave up vivid subject matter for writerly adjectival compounds, and distinct melodies for explorations of the curlicue paces he could run his guitars and baritone pipes through. But on Meadow, producer JD Foster thrusts the words and the voice back up in front of rocket-propelled rock arrangments, and suddenly even Buckner's most impressionistic portraits of loss and leaving sound once again like stories you can't ignore, phrase after unparsable phrase pounding another spike into the casket of overlooked insights: What will you miss when things are fine? ... It's just too far the way we are.... - Carl Wilson
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, September 15 at 1:52 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (9)
CopyCamp! (or, T-Dot Thrillz 2)
Mark Hosler of Negativland, one of the participants at the upcoming CopyCamp in Toronto.
Copyright law. Pretty dry subject, eh?
On his latest album, Bob Dylan presents a song, Rollin' and Tumblin', which many critics have noted is very much akin to an old blues song called Rollin' and Tumblin', popularized most by Muddy Waters - but is credited as "by Bob Dylan." Dylan has always swallowed old blues and folk songs whole and coughed them up new, but how do you draw the line between love and theft?
Tanya Tagaq Gillis (appearing this weekend at the Guelph Jazz fest, by the way) takes the Inuit communal practice of throat-singing - traditionally a women's recreational pastime, as much a sport as an art, and never performed solo - and writes modern songs with it. Then she is sampled by Bjork, who makes her own songs out of Tagaq's. Not everyone in Tagaq's community is pleased: What happens when collective culture and individual creativity conflict?
As one-half of Crazy hitmakers Gnarls Barkley, DJ Danger Mouse - formerly mashup-world darling - issues his music on major labels and thus becomes part of their copyright regime, which goes around threatening to sue people who make mashups of Gnarls Barkley. Meanwhile, Banksy sneaks into record stores and plants parody versions of Paris Hilton albums - with a full album remix by Danger Mouse - into the shelves in place of the original.
Rupert Murdoch announces that MySpace is transforming itself into a record label - and that the millions of songs already on MySpace would be the building blocks. What kind of deals will these MySpace bands be getting compared to conventional music contracts - which are already famously horrible - and is there really any way anyone's making money out of this? (Or out of any kind of creative career in the age of instaneous digital reproduction aka piracy, for that matter?)
In the art world, a fight breaks out over whether artists should be paid a royalty when images of their work appear in gallery catalogues, or a secondary fee when the people who bought their paintings resell them at auction - even if it severely cripples the secondary art market.
And Pere Ubu lets fans record and make videos of their live shows for personal use - but when those fans post that video to YouTube, David Thomas demands the videos be taken down.
That's just a few random examples of the ways in which copyright and intellectual-property issues affect creators and fans across every art form. This fall, the federal government is undertaking a review of copyright law in Canada, and given the ideology of the Harper cabinet, it seems likely that as in so many other areas, the Conservatives will end up trying to drag this country into line with the American copyright system - a system shaped by lobbyists who, as Lawrence Lessig says, distort the entire domain of intellectual property in order to prevent Mickey Mouse from ever passing out of the Disney company's control. In fact, I'd say intellectual property issues are, in the digital age, the single sharpest lens through which to talk about the nature and future of art (and capitalism).
In that context (and many others I haven't even nudged), one of the most intriguing events of the year could well be CopyCamp, an "unconference" taking place at the end of this month in Toronto. The gathering, which will be hosted by Misha Glouberman (host of Trampoline Hall and close Zoilus associate) at the Ryerson student centre Sept. 28-30, brings together artists of both the traditional and the appropriative kinds, as well as activists, lawyers, open-source software heads and GNU/Linux fanatics, indie-rock cooperatives, industry suits and government bureaucrats - people whose interests, though inextricably entangled, often prevent them from gathering in the same room - unless it's a courtroom. The schedule of activities will be set and guided by the participants themselves on the spot, and structured in ways that allow everybody to contribute from their own expertise, rather than the usual conference thing of having overly long droning papers, panel discussions that go nowhere, and frustratingly short Q&As. Even if you're not as compelled by intellectual property issues as I think you ought to be, the model (also known as "open space" conferencing) might be useful to experience for your own organizing purposes.
There's been some misunderstanding about the pricing of the event - it's officially a hefty $700 per person, which is very contrary to the tradition of "BarCamp" and other tech-head conferences that CopyCamp is drawing on, which attempt to be as cheap and accessible as possible. But the idea is that people who are attending as corporate or government functionaries pay that much so that the event can subsidize artists, activists and others (me included) to attend for free, and also fly in some guests so that the scope of the conversation can reach well beyond Toronto.
Higher-profile guests will include Mark Hosler of Negativland, the California experimental-music group that was famously driven to the brink of extinction by lawsuits after they used the letter U and the numeral 2 for the name of a single, and went on to become prominent thinkers on copyright and advocates of fair use. Hopefully we'll get to see some exchanges between Mark and John Oswald, the Canadian composer who preceded Negativland in the art-versus-copyright wars. There's also Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons, Ottawa law-and-technology expert Michael Geist and Canadian artists such as Richard Fung and dub poet Lillian Allen, among many others.
If you want to come and can't afford the $700, there's still a (very) short time left to apply for a subsidized place in the proceedings. Failing that, some of the people who were upset about the fee structure have talked about holding a parallel, free "CopyCatCamp" during CopyCamp, in a public space - though that remains unconfirmed. And one way or another, I'll be doing some blogging live from CopyCamp, so you can follow some of the proceedings right here on Zoilus.
PS: To anyone visiting from the CopyCamp site - they've got an odd link up that doesn't allow you to see the comments on this post. Try this one instead.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, September 07 at 3:37 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (27)
Christgau on Torontopia
Neil Young, wandering Torontopian godfather.
The great thing about Aaron is that he's able to write like a rare representative of normal people in the world of weird music geekery while geeking out just as hard as anyone else. His essay in response to last week's debate on Torontopia is a perfect example - even though I disagree with much of it, the simple insight about the friction that's caused by change when it's never enough change really helps explain the high fevers this infection causes. And it's just plain good to be reminded that pro basketball explains things far better than bull about Pitchfork can.
It also prompts me to reprint, in part as an explanation of why I don't agree with his thrust, this passage from Robert Christgau's last big feature for the Village Voice (to touch on last week's other major unfinishable business). Yes, sometimes Xgau can be a muddled writer - see the ILM thread on parsing his sentences (which for me to point out is a little pot-meet-kettle) - but he's always shooting for something substantial, and when he hits it, he hits it. Here is him hitting it, on the issue of participatory musical culture as it happens and doesn't happen in, especially, indie rock. It has sentences on indie rock much more definitive than the one from Frank (happy anniversary) that Aaron uses as his headline. It's useful for addressing the most misunderstood aspects of The Torontopia Thing, as I'll footnote after you read it:
" 'Live Music Is Better' bumper stickers should be issued," joshed Neil Young in 1980's "Union Man," which he has performed in public precisely once. Two visionary musicologists honor this dictum: Charles Keil, adept of participatory discrepancy, and Christopher Small, who believes all music celebrates the intricacy of relationship. For surprise-craving jazz fans, spirit-feeling gospel fans, and house-rocking blues fans, the primacy of the unique, unduplicatable musical event is a truism. The gig is the sacred ritual of indie rock.
Note, however, that all these music lovers like it live for different reasons. Contingency fan Keil treasures the marginal miss, contingency fan Small the magic mesh. Jazz locates inspiration in the mortal musician, gospel in the celestial divine—while blues fans, not unlike indie fans, romanticize the grotty, beer-soaked venue itself. Where blues fans differ from indie fans—and always have, even down at the crossroads—is that they regard musicians as means to a party, and the party as the goal. Indie fans aren't so sure about parties—or anything else, except maybe their favorite band that month. At their best, they're musical adepts combining all of the above. At their worst, they're one-upping self-seekers who wouldn't know a good band if it played their student union for three bucks with proper ID. Either way they regard the venue as the crucible of their developing values and personalities.
This process now has its own theorist: indie kid turned bizzer turned anthropologist Wendy Fonarow, whose Empire of Dirt proved a stimulating 'tween-set read. Fonarow did her formal research in Britain in 1993 and 1994, and some things have changed—moshing has declined, and the guitar relinquished its absolute dominance. But the basic pattern, in which indie is more temporary identity marker than aesthetic commitment, is depressingly stable. The best of Fonarow's many concepts divides venues into three zones. Zone One is the pit, crammed with the youngest, maddest, and most physical fans. Zone Three is the back or the bar, where what the Brits call liggers yap through sets—bizzers, musicians, scenesters, casuals. Also, Fonarow claims, journalists—but not me, or any other rock critic I know. I've been a Zone Two guy since stand-up shows became the norm 30 years ago.
The reason, obviously, is aesthetic. Zone Two is the best place to hear music—and see it, and feel it. Its sensations fill you without overwhelming you. Keil is right about participatory discrepancy—part of live music's excitement is the way it transfigures tiny failures of synchronicity. But this counts for more in the musics Keil loves—jazz, blues, polka—than in rock per se. I go to shows to get a fuller sense of the artist and to augment my experience of the music with other people's cheers and pheromones. And I go to concentrate, focus, immerse. Invariably I find myself registering new details and making new connections. Usually I have a good time, and every once in a while I luck into an epiphany. I'm a record guy, always will be. But records can't match the exhilaration of the best gigs. You walk home prepared to live forever.
So Torontopia is about imagining (and willfully romanticizing) a whole city the way one does a beloved venue, not as the city qua city and not even as Home but as a second home, grotty and with shitty sound-mixing but nonetheless loaded with possibility. It's about the city as a crazed emporium of ephemera, like a Japanese toy-and-housewares store, where no artifact is in itself as important as their bric-a-brac assemblage and the overall sensorium of the arcades. It's (perhaps naively) hopeful about making a more permanent aesthetic commitment than the passing-phase model. It's also about abolishing Zone Three, where people snipe and shmooze and hold themselves at a superior remove from the action. (It even has its doubts about Zone Two, where conventionally good critics live.) It's not about being a record guy, even though a record guy is an okay thing to be: It's about applying both Charles Keil's "participatory discrepancy" and Christopher Small's "musicking" (the music experience as a multi-sensory, social-communal experience) to rock, in ways that the consumerist idea of pop/rock generally disdains. The comparison to blues fans worries me a little! But it's still a disdain that movement after movement in underground rock has had to challenge, in new terms each time - in this case in civic, public-space and questioning-of-professionalism terms. Not for "World Peace," though there's a grit of truth in Aaron's scepticism, but just to survive the continual emptying-out of meaning by the bewitched buckets of all the sorcerers' apprentices. To live forever, at least for now.
(PS: Please see Jody Rosen on Xgau on Slate.)
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, September 05 at 2:13 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
"I waddle out and get a couple of gasps:
'Is that what their hair looks like?' "
My Junior Boys profile is now up on The Globe and Mail site (let me know if you can't access it, please). Outtakes to come on Monday.
And isn't tonight the craziest night in shows of all crazy nights in Toronto? Gee, would I rather see the Jr Boys, Damo Suzuki, the Hidden Cameras, Jessica Rylan (amazing Boston-area noise-type artist playing free in Trinity-Bellwoods Park at sundown), the Deadly Snakes, Amy Millan or They Shoot Horses Don't They? Or go to Santa Cruz on the Capt. John's Seafood boat in the harbour? Can't do 'em all! Who wants to give up, meet in the alley behind my house, and drink cooking wine instead?
No, I am actually going to see the Jaybeez, 'cuz I've barely seen them live at all. But it really does hurt.
Also: I have a contribution in the first issue of Becky Johnson's new zine, Point Form: A Zine of Lists. It's the zineyest.
Junior Boys bring electro-pop home
Hamilton's Junior Boys want to prove their bleeps and bloops are as Canadian as Tom Cochrane, CARL WILSON writes
The Globe & Mail Review
August 26, 2006
When Jeremy Greenspan walks on stage, some spectators do a double-take.
Not that the singer and songwriter for the Hamilton-based duo Junior Boys is such a bizarre sight. Quite the reverse: Due to his music's introverted moods and synthesized bubbles and whirrs, listeners often expect a dour rake sporting globs of mascara and asymmetrical locks. What they get is a grinning, mildly pot-bellied 26-year-old with owlish eyes and the trimmed brown beard a soulful folkie might wear.
"I waddle out and get a couple of gasps: 'Is that what their hair looks like?' " Greenspan says, laughing.
And it's not just about fashion. Electro-pop, unusually for today's mix-and-match culture, is stereotyped as belonging to one place and time: England in the early 1980s. It's assumed to be the soundtrack for lyrics about boredom, gender ambiguity, dystopias and androids. None of which has much bearing on Junior Boys' second album, So This Is Goodbye.
The record draws an intricate map of losses and reclamations, etched with traces of conversation that could be domestic squabbles or mumblings into a mirror. Though it's plagued with dust and doubles, shadows and moans, those anxieties are woven into witty melodic filigrees, with a youthful, rhythmic swing assured enough to shake the ghosts off at the curves.
It's one of the finest suites of pop music of the year, and most reviewers call it a distinct advance on Last Exit, Junior Boys' already superb 2004 debut. So This Is Goodbye was rated 9.0 this month on the popular Pitchfork website, which reputedly helped to make the careers of bands such as the Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene.
And Greenspan, a motor-mouthed and articulate theorist of his own work, will argue its bleeps and bloops are just as Canadian as Tom Cochrane belting out Life Is a Highway.
"A lot of the mood I'm trying to capture is a uniquely Canadian thing -- the highway thing, the experience of driving up north," Greenspan says. "If you look from a high place, it seems like the city is carved out of wilderness. Even in America, if you take a highway and drive in some random direction, you'll end up somewhere you recognize. In Canada, it's the middle of nowhere.
"This produces an agoraphobia, a fear of vastness, a fear I sort of get off on . . . [an] opposite of claustrophobia that we have here, that is sort of uniquely ours."
Greenspan says he is "totally obsessed with Canadiana," including the animation of Norman McLaren and the contests of figure-versus-ground in the canvases of Christopher Pratt, "a painter that encapsulated everything I'm trying to say about where I'm from musically."
If his music gets mistaken for an anglophilic period piece, it's partly because it was first vaulted to notice by a London cabal of Internet critics. Greenspan's initial duo with programmer Jonny Dark had already split when demos began circulating among British music bloggers and message-board devotees. Their fervour for the amalgam of underground dance rhythms with crisp pop melodies pricked up the ears of Warp Records's Nik Kilroy, who tracked Greenspan down to invite Junior Boys to be the first artists on his own label, KIN.
Greenspan took up with another Hamiltonian beat-maker, Matthew Didemus, to complete what became Last Exit, and to go on the road. Junior Boys is now signed to Domino Records, best known as the home of recent British indie hit-makers Franz Ferdinand and the Arctic Monkeys. "I find myself at times getting more ambitious than I thought I would," he comments on the prospect of similar success, "but we're kind of a culty band. . . . I'd love to be a one-hit wonder, though. That'd be great."
One of Greenspan's frustrations is that the Domino rock bands' revisions of 1980s post-punk get called fresh, while Junior Boys is considered retro. "The equipment we use somehow codifies in people's minds this specific historical moment in the way it doesn't if people play classic guitars, drums and bass. There's often all sorts of bands reproducing the equipment specifications of the bands they love in much more 'authentic' ways than we do. We use far more contemporary machines, machines they couldn't have used then."
But they did reach back in their choice for the album's architecture, and for an influence on Greenspan's singing now compared to his reedy fragility on Last Exit -- Frank Sinatra's classic concept albums Point of No Return(1961) and No One Cares (1959). The latter's title song, remade as a half-frozen still life, serves as a centrepiece of So This Is Goodbye.
"What I identify with [in Sinatra] . . . is this sort of sense of distilling objects and moments from their contexts," Greenspan says.
That approach brought to mind the theme of collecting, and Greenspan decided to construct the album around it: "I think everyone knows what's sad about collectors -- many music fans are among them. . . . Collecting things is how you deal with saying goodbye to moments, the inability to actually part with things -- to deal with the fact that the moments are gone."
Of his title, he says, "The reason it's not just This Is Goodbye but So This Is Goodbye is that it's, 'So, this is what goodbye feels like.' I hate overwrought drama in music. Simple little sadnesses are far more powerful to me. . . .
"[It's] about dealing with the kind of goodbyes you say to things all the time that actually don't tear you to pieces. It's not about dealing with the death of someone extremely close to you, but saying goodbye to some part of your life that just drifted away and you didn't even see it happen. The kind of sadness everyone deals with all the time, and it's not dealt with in art all that often because it's seemingly not particularly important."
Greenspan credits the rusty byways of Hamilton, "my muse," with inculcating him with his sensitivity to the periphery. "When you live in a big city, so much of your emotional investment in that place has to do with recognizable iconography, whereas for people like me, the things you see every day are strip malls and highways. They start to have emotional resonance for you. . . . I got into this idea of cataloguing, about people who find and hold onto something beautiful that isn't supposed to be beautiful."
For an artist who emerged from the non-place of the Internet, these "homesick, home-obsessed" themes provide ballast and balance. Yet Greenspan also sees value in the "lack of identity, the lack of historical reference" that often vexes Canadians: "I think we should embrace that. A lot of people are overburdened by their own history. Instead, what people want is to invent and replicate a Canadian culture that's not really true -- like Celtic fiddling. . . . I'd like [my music] to be a challenge to what people think of Canadian."
However, he adds, "It's time for me to deal with something else, and record somewhere new." His sister lives in Shanghai, and after the coming year of touring is done, he might move there. "I figured I'd go as opposite as you can go from Hamilton. . . . And I don't think any Western pop group has ever made a record in China.
"At least I'll get my name in the history books somehow."
Junior Boys play the El Mocambo in Toronto tonight [Aug 26], with further dates across the country in September and October. See their MySpace for details.
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, August 26 at 3:44 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
Damolition Squad: The Pickup Band Tour
In case you didn't notice it down in the "top shows" list in the sidebar, Damo Suzuki (ex-Can) will be playing Toronto this weekend, presenting more of his "instant composing" - unrehearsed sets backed by local musicians, whose participation brings them into the Damo Suzuki Network. He does the same tomorrow (Wed.) evening in Montreal, as the above Seripop poster proclaims, and Thursday in Ottawa and Friday in Hamilton, Ont.
It strikes me that his methodology has been borrowed by Jandek, who will be backed by local improvisors Nick Fraser, Nilan Perrera and Rob Clutton in his upcoming Toronto concert. Ariel Pink also attempted the trick earlier this year, albeit with less success because he was asking the musicians to learn his whole set in advance, rather than to wing it. (Anyone see a show where he pulled it off?) And Shiu-Yeung Hui (sometime member of Maher Shalal Hash Baz) pursues similar techniques in his gig tonight at Graffiti's, to which he invites even the audience members to bring instruments and play along. (If you can't make it tonight he's back next week at the Poor Pilgrim series.)
It's a touring model that's relatively common in jazz, of course - a pianist or singer or trumpet player drops into the city and picks up a rhythm section for the duration. You also find it in bluegrass and other forms where there's a set of standards all professional musicians would know. And improvisors in the usual (jazz-derived) sense likewise can play with anyone, as can noise musicians etc. But a pickup-band-tour also comes with many advantages for the adventurous musician who toils in the towers of song: You may not be trying to bring world unity one band at a time the way Damo is, but the economics and creative dynamics are hard to beat. And by accepting the deviations and warpings that a song - or set of song-fragments, as Suzuki uses - will undergo when entered into the atom smasher of improvisation, you present to the audience the possibility that the boundaries of song need not be so rigid as we assume. In fact you generate a kind of spontaneous folk-culture, not only among the musicians who are participating in a hypercompressed version of the oral tradition, but among the audience, who are receiving material that is in some sense indigenous to that specific time, that specific gathering, in that specific room, temporary though it is. Ephemeral folkways. Mobile mother tongues.
I'd be fascinated to see it become more common. You don't have to go on tour to do it, of course. You could do a pickup-band tour of your own town just by calling in different players at each gig. (We could get off here into a discussion of conducted improv too, but another time.)
On the other hand, you have to try to assert the boundaries between "spontaneous composition" (or "instant songs," as I've heard them called), improvisation and jamming. And the latter should be ruled out unequivocally, in the long campaign to wipe jamming off the face of the earth like polio. (What's that you say? Feh. I contain multitudes, etc etc.)
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, August 22 at 6:02 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
Come Up & See Me Sometime
Today in The Globe and Mail, I profile Toronto lo-fi-bubblegum quintet The Bicycles, and review the new Xtina Aguilera and Bonnie Prince Billy CDs.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, August 18 at 10:44 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
A Few Words in Defence of Randy Newman
Every once in a while I get into an argument with someone in which I try to claim that Randy Newman was the most significant songwriter to follow after Bob Dylan. I do mean as a writer, not as a performer, in which regard he pales compared to dozens of others. But still I can never persuade anyone. There are other viable late-sixties and early-seventies candidates - Lou Reed, Captain Beefheart, Curtis Mayfield - but Newman did more than anyone to widen the pallett of techniques in 1970s pop songwriting, with his uses of irony, unreliable and/or actually despicable narrators, and pastiches of classic American pop forms (which was a minor sixties post-folk trend - see Lovin' Spoonful, various "jug bands," etc. - but never done so richly and competently as Newman did it). He arguably introduced serious Brechtian techniques to the pop tradition - a little-noticed influence on Dylan, actually, but one Newman used as more than an affectation, unlike what the glam crowd (including Bowie) tended to do. He's also one of the few people to have combined comedy with rock music and not come off like an idiot or vulgarian, but he's just as effective a tragedian. Besides immediate successors in the L.A. scene, such as Steely Dan and Tom Waits, I would put Elvis Costello at the head of the line of Newman's heirs, along with Morrissey, the Magnetic Fields, and dozens of other pop ironists. You could even add the likes of Kool Keith and Eminem, though I think their play with flipside identities comes out of strategies from the histories of black music, minstrelsy etc. - a legacy that Newman has always been keenly aware of, anticipating all the recent pop scholarship and discussion on the centrality of the minstrel tradition to American pop by decades.
Perhaps with the upcoming release of a Newman tribute album, which strangely seems to feature mainly country-rockers such as Steve Earle and Allison Moorer, more people will come around to my opinion. I'm also thrilled to learn that next year will bring the first album of new Newman songs since 1999's excellent Bad Love, which will include a contrarian, seemingly pro-American song - notable since Newman has mostly been a fierce critic of U.S. policy and culture throughout his career - titled A Few Words in Defence of My Country. (Which might end up being a backhanded critique, on the other hand - to say "we're not the worst country in the history of the world" might just be another way to say "we are pretty horrible," which is the kind of signature Newman move that he made on the last album's brilliant rumination on the death of Communism, The World Isn't Fair). In the above-linked interview he suggests that the new album might be called Fat and Angry.
(PS: I forgot to mention: Newman is scheduled to play a rare live date at Convocation Hall in Toronto on Oct. 14.)
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Monday, August 14 at 12:49 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (27)
Said the Carlophone, 5th & Final
My last guest-post of the season at MP3 blog Said the Gramophone offers a fruit-basket of Final Fantasy, Destroyer and (related) Vancouver Nights rarities. I may not have much time for more than Gig Guide updates here the rest of the week so check out the whole series there - definitely the most substantive blogging I've done this summer. As one must, given their high standards.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, July 13 at 5:11 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Said the Carlophone IV: Kathleen Yearwood, Tagaq
(Plus: UbuTube)
I know I've been neglectful. It's because I'm still cheating on you with that other blog, and it leaves me spent. Today's entry is about two of the most unclassifiable, undomesticatable women in Canadian music.
Meanwhile as a follow up to last week's Pere Ubu post - check out this footage from YouTube: One a Tenement Year reunion tour (1987) rendition of the band's best-known song, Final Solution - with one of the best representations of David Thomas's stage magnetism that I've seen on video. And, for kicks, a performance from June of the same song by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails), TV on the Radio and Bauhaus's Peter Murphy (whose cover version of Final Solution helped popularize it in the 1980s).
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 11 at 3:41 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
We Have the MP3ology
(Said the Carlophone, Pt. 3)
My latest guest post on Said the Gramophone is about two versions of We Have the Technology, one of my favourite songs by Pere Ubu, originally on The Tenement Year, one of the "lost" Fontana albums. It kind of turned out like a one-act radio play.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, July 07 at 4:58 AM | Linking Posts
Everyone's a Winner, Step Right Up
(Plus: Said the Carlophone, Pt. 2)
Veda Hille: Not the Polaris prom queen this year, but the regent of all our gramophones.
The shortlist for the $20,000 Polaris prize for Canadian albums of 2005-06 was announced this morning. (Drumroll.) And the nominees are, in alphabetical order:
Broken Social Scene, Broken Social Scene (Arts & Crafts/EMI)
Cadence Weapon, Breaking Kayfabe (Upper Class/EMI)
The Deadly Snakes, Porcella (Paper Bag/Universal)
Final Fantasy, He Poos Clouds (Blocks Recording Club/Sonic Unyon)
Sarah Harmer, I’m A Mountain (Cold Snap/Universal)
K’naan, The Dusty Foot Philosopher (Track & Field/Sony BMG)
Malajube, Trompe L’oeil (Dare to Care/Outside)
Metric, Live It Out (Last Gang/Universal)
The New Pornographers, Twin Cinema (Mint/Outside)
Wolf Parade, Apologies to the Queen Mary (Sub Pop/Outside)
Congrats to all. The nominees will be on a compilation album coming out in August and the winner will be chosen Sept. 18. (It was also revealed today that the prize is being sponsored by Rogers Wireless/Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet.) A few reactions: Final Fantasy and Cadence Weapon were among my nominees; I'm startled to find the Deadly Snakes on there; pleasantly surprised that Malajube were able to break the blue anglo wall; sad to see the Pornographers where Destroyer's Rubies (which fought it out with Final Fantasy for my top spot) should be; as well as, though less so, Wolf Parade instead of Sunset Rubdown. In conversations this weekend, I got the feeling that there is an "anyone but Metric" campaign afoot out there. My other votes, between the two ballots, went to Jon Rae & the River's Old Songs for the New Town, Brian Joseph Davis's Greatest Hit and Veda Hille's Return of the Kildeer.
In honour of Veda, who is perpetually overlooked in these reindeer games, my guest post today on Said the Gramophone is all about her, with nods to Brecht, Eisler and the bootlessness of vanity.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 04 at 2:42 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (14)
Report on UnCanadian Activities
Of Montreal: Secretly not Canadian.
For the Canada Day weekend, I had a piece in yesterday's Globe and Mail about all the bands in the U.S. and elsewhere who use Canadian place names as their band names and titles of albums and songs - from Mark Robinson's Flin Flon to Indiana label Secretly Canadian to California band Halifax to the new Michigan-based band Canada. Unusually, it's an idea the arts editors suggested to me, rather than one of my own - and I only discovered late in the game that Exclaim actually had covered the subject in 1999 in a piece by Michael Barclay. But, well, it is seven years later, after all, and shit, the world needs its sweet Canada Day fluff pieces. Includes a dollop of musing on perception/reality issues of Canadian identity. Do not consume while operating heavy machinery.
Lost in translation: The editors, probably rightly, cut my quote from the chorus of one my own favourite examples, Son Volt's deeply Neil Young-damaged Medicine Hat: "A tip of the hat and it's already started/ Just like that and the deed is done/ Oh, how I wish that the hat could be medicine/ The time is ripe to be on the run."
Hear Canada Oh Canada by Icelandic singer ̃órir.
Thanks to the Stilleposters and ILMers who helped out with ideas - sorry I couldn't fit most of them in.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, July 02 at 12:35 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (7)
Laconic Couth (or: How Many Sonic Youth Headlines
Does The World Have Left To Give?)
Whenever a new Sonic Youth album comes out, there's a gang of reviewers/fans who say, "This time they've finally lost it/sold out/gotten lazy/etc." and another pack who say, "A return to form! Their best since Daydream Nation!" (if it's a long-guitar-solo album) or "Best since Goo!" (if it's a poppier album). The new one, Rather Ripped, is no exception. But if you hear either line, shrug it off - instead, Rather Ripped is just yet another fine SY disc. Of course, with their occasional weakness for cheezy rebel-talk, SY set themselves up to be misinterpreted as a band that's all about destroying and revolutionizing Rock As We Know It. But I always think of them as a much more celebratory band - for them, the purpose of a teenage riot isn't to fuck up The Man, it's just a good reason to get out of bed. They usually display the right mix of creative pique and pleasure that is dignified in someone lucky enough to be a white, middle-class bohemian New Yorker - which by any measure is one of the most fortunate positions in the world. Maybe in the history of the world. They've always seemed like gifted appreciators of the countercultural heritage and overall cultural abundance surrounding them, but enlightened enough to acknowledge - in their lyrical ambiguity, yes, but most of all in harmonic overtones - that this good fortune depends upon structural inequities that are not only wrong but unsustainable. Aside from Kim's specific salvos against patriarchy (which I'll listen to anytime - she puts sexism in its place with more aplomb than pretty much any other white woman in music), and the occasional lapse like Youth Against Fascism, they generally know better than to grope for the language of protest or complaint, which sounds phony in privileged-hipster patois. Instead their critical thinking is folded into the rolling documentary-of-consciousness of the music. Their music is a vehicle of their attention. They love and respect the kind of battering noise assaults of the MC5 or the Sex Pistols or, today, Wolf Eyes, but that's never been what Sonic Youth is about - I've always thought their best manifesto came in the title Confusion is Sex, and that their music is a balancing act to keep both sides of that equation vital, to get dizzy enough to feel new sensations but also keep cool enough to absorb them. People who come to the band expecting something more formulaically radical are always going to be disappointed. (It's only with revisionist hindsight and indie bias that they invest the pre-Geffen albums with that radicality.) And those who come to a new SY album thinking they know what they're getting will always be surprised at how much there is to it - and probably overrate it. As a musical ensemble, Sonic Youth is a group that depends on interplay - its sound is about combinations rather than spotlights. But it's not a conceptual band: It's always more about the parts - about moments, about songs, about exclamations, about dropped beats and scraped strings - than it is about the sum. Processes, not outcomes.
I tried to keep all that in mind when I wrote my review in the Globe today, but then I had to prune it down to fit and the results were a bit of a hash. So if you don't mind, I'll paraphrase what I said:
Having finally realized that Thurston Moore is never going to introduce them to another Nirvana, Geffen Records (now part of Universal) has decided it's paid off that debt (incurred shortly after Geffen shocked the underground by signing SY in 1989) and is letting the band's latest contract expire. As a result, some listeners will snark that Rather Ripped's compact style marks a last grasp for commercial appeal, or betrays a "contractual obligation" toss-off. But it actually fits right in to the band's long pattern of switching between more exploratory albums and tighter, sharper ones. And among the latter it's one of the best, not streamlining or simplifying the harmonic complexities of the music so much as carving away the feedback to reveal the shapely core. There's a summertime sense of summing-up to the album, as if the four were scrawling their names in one another's yearbooks after grad .... from the old-school-punk-flyer cover to the musical winks to the hundreds (thousands?) of bands SY has influenced: Certain moments here sound almost like quotes of Pavement, Smashing Pumpkins and other mid-90s alterna-rock. Kim Gordon's divine gutter-mumble dominates, as it generally should, but Thurston has an SY classic-to-be in Do You Believe In Rapture?, and guitar hero Lee Ranaldo's sole vocal lead Rats goes the furthest toward recalling the era of Sister and Evol. (The most blatant effort to recall Daydream Nation, the extended Pink Steam, falls flat.) And SY's too-often-overlooked drummer, Steve Shelley, also gets a moment in the forefront, not vocalizing but still leading proceedings on the coda, Or - a tune that, with only the barest sardonic touch, even makes room for the voices of the fans, caught in the final verse straining to be casual when they get a chance to interview or chat with their idols: "How long is the tour? What time you guys playin'?/ Which comes first, the music/ Or the words?" But there's one more typical question Rather Ripped leaves unspoken: "What're you up to next?"
(I gave it three-and-a-half stars out of 4.)
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, June 30 at 5:08 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Said the Carlophone
Beginning today and twice a week for the next few, I'm honoured to be guestposting on mp3 blog Said the Gramophone while the wonderful Sean Michaels is on vacation. I thank fellow StG posters (um, do we call ourselves "Grammers"? "Grammies"? "Said-o-mites"?) Jordan and Dan for welcoming me to the clan. My first post, up now, offers a track from the upcoming album by Hamilton, Ont.'s wunderkinds, Junior Boys.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, June 28 at 5:34 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
The Sound of Joy Goes HA HA HA HA!
Funny that I would have this tussle with Simon (see below) on a day when I have written a piece in The Globe in praise of a very old-skool-style post-punk band, Toronto's own The Creeping Nobodies, and their new album Sound of Joy, launching at the Horseshoe tonight with Jon-Rae's Ryvyr, Wyrd Visions and the five-guitar Wharton Tiers Ensemble. (Tiers, best-known as a frequent producer for Sonic Youth, produced most of the Creeps' new disc.) (See also Kevin Hainey's five-star review of Sound of Joy in Eye.) Tickets for the show were issued on microfiche, which include lyrics, art and notes to the album - inaccessible to most people who don't happen to have a microfiche reader, which is pretty funny, though there are rumours that there will actually be a reader at the show tonight. (Luckily, I work in a place that does have a microfiche reader. Hah!)
Full text of my email interview with the band, full of thoughtful notes on practice and perplex, will follow over the weekend.
How to build a better album
By Carl Wilson
The Globe and Mail
Fri., June 2, 2006
On first hearing Toronto band the Creeping Nobodies, you may feel the urge to take cover. But the hammering, sawing, slashing and grinding of their guitars, drums and keyboards are just the racket of a construction crew at work: They're building an exposition hall to house the grandeurs and, mostly, follies of civilizations past and present -- with annexes for activist seminars, dioramas of poisoned landscapes and inner chambers for more intimate congress.
Architects have joined and left the team, delaying the unveiling. But the torque and contour of the Nobodies' project are clearer on their third full-length album, Sound of Joy, brought to you this week via Toronto's art-rock symposium, the Blocks Recording Club.
A chorus has been rising to demand why, after five years, the Nobodies haven't shared in the breakout success of Canadian indie rock - especially after their arresting 2004 disc Stop Movement Stop Loss. But it's no mystery: Other Canadian collectives have specialized in flamboyant, celebratory displays of feeling. The Nobodies are less apt to march around banging parade drums. Instead they beaver diligently away at their paradoxical pavilion, with exteriors that may look like abattoirs but, inside, vast fields to roam.
Observers also have been misled by the band's beginnings, formed to play a tribute to the Fall, the recondite British outfit Mark E. Smith has led for nearly three decades. Add obvious influences from the likes of Wire and Sonic Youth, and the Nobodies are tagged as a wing of the indie world's revivalism of New York and London post-punk sounds.
Yet as bassist Matthew McDonough points out, immersion in the Toronto scene has been just as formative - whether it's the music of compatriots Anagram or the late Les Mouches, or the hands-on experience of helping organize the early years of the Wavelength weekly music series.
Then there's the ever-shuffling band roster. McDonough and lead vocalist Derek Westerholm are the only original Nobodies in a group that now includes keyboardist Sarah Richardson, guitarist Valerie Uher and drummer Dennis Amos, along with guest James Anderson banging away at found objects.
"The music is entirely based on the dynamics of the band members," says McDonough. "In fact, to a large degree, with each membership change, we have left [behind] all songs written with that group and just wrote new music. That way, you always have the energy of each individual."
Songs are written together during the group's two or three weekly rehearsals - often even the lyrics. Multiple singers are heard in single songs, creating content in counterpoint, much the same way Westerholm's clipped, strangled outbursts contrast with the female members' more mellifluous tones.
As Uher says, "Frequently I'll add lyrics that I feel in some way complement or question words which Derek writes. . . . We usually don't attempt to create a linear narrative or song. It's more of a conversation with tangents and addendums."
The themes of these exchanges are always elusive, but on Sound of Joy they have grown more explicitly political. Westerholm says the images of dark plotting and surveillance partly grow out of the band's recent frequent forays into the United States.
"One tour coincided with the final days of the 2004 presidential election campaign. Another tour was done in the wake of hurricane Katrina, where we were pretty much following FEMA trucks and military convoys on the highways," he says.
"And on yet another U.S. visit, I found myself adding, 'The government loves you,' to the lyrical content of Concrete. That song is based around the idea that concentration camps were actually constructed piece by piece, just like any other building. The general population worked on them, saw them going up. . . . Looking out the window on tour in North America, these questions come up again and again through my mind: How did this all get built? What are all these buildings? What's being manufactured? For what purpose?"
A far less sinister American experience has been connecting with New York's Wharton Tiers, who produced part of Stop Movement and most of Sound of Joy. Tiers's roots are in the 1970s downtown art scene; he went on to record Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Helmet, among others. He brings his own five-guitar Wharton Tiers Ensemble to Toronto and Montreal for the first time this weekend to support the Nobodies' CD launches. "Working with Wharton has been a huge eye-opener for us," McDonough says.
And Sound of Joy is an unusually pellucid indie-rock disc as a result. It opens with the words, "Shadowy shapes call to us/ Lean back, lie down, regress" -- a suspect invitation, but as voices hover luminously over guitars and bass that coil and, yes, creep, a fatally seductive one.
Here's hoping it's enough to lure the world inside the Creeping Nobodies' hacienda. But once within, beware - watch for falling revelations.
The Creeping Nobodies play tonight at 9:30 p.m., $10, at the Horseshoe, 370 Queen St. W., 416-598-4753.
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, June 02 at 4:16 PM | Linking Posts
Mao Now, Brown Cow?
Simon uses me as a test case in his passionate argument for a Nietzschean "strength" (as opposed to pussyish Last Man hall-of-mirrors historicism), saying my Celine Dion project is a doomed exercise in "fretful self-cancellation" and that "at the end of his investigation Carl might find himself back where he started: repelled by Dion's music and, despite his better intentions, thinking less of her fans." Celine's crappiness, he says, is "an assumption worth leaving unexamined." To examine it is to send yourself to the aesthetic equivalent of a Maoist reeducation camp.
John kindly comes to my (and his own) defence. (And, later, Dave goes at it too.) I can only say that Simon isn't finding the flaw in my experiment, but precisely its theme. It cannot "fail" because I am at least as attracted to the outcome that Celine Dion's music is irredeemable shit as to the outcome that it's not. (What's oppressive about Maoist re-education and auto-critique is that there is only one acceptable answer.) However, I am unhappy about the gulf between those aesthetic reflexes and the opposite reflexes of millions of other people to whom I don't consider myself superior (many cultural cues to the contrary), and who never, despite the most articulate persuasions I might muster, will agree with me. And yet there is the axiom: "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." Aesthetically I'm not so bothered by the idea of "falling for" (falling in love with) just about anything. However, I have grave concerns about the prospect that, "If you'll fall for anything, you can't stand for something."
There are many things I love beyond life in the realm of art, and am compelled to champion. There is very little that I have ever loved artistically that I do not still love, with the exception of some adolescent-boy clever-clever stuff that turned out to be rather hollow. But I have had the experience again and again of realizing that when I disliked things it was because I just didn't get them. And then realizing how rich and wonderful they were. Country and disco being my two signal examples. I have had the experience of my aesthetic instincts being wrong over and over again. So how do I know when they are right? The answer is probably that I can't, so for a period of time I want to immerse myself in that not-knowing with some concentration. My hypothesis is that whatever the outcome this immersion will be like tuning an instrument, like playing scales for hours a day, like sitting meditation. But I am not afraid, when the exercise is over, of returning to a provisional, pragmatic practice of going with my instincts and my beliefs, of loving what I feel compelled to love and objecting to (but, sorry, not hating) what I don't. But I don't see any honorable or authentic course other than to follow the line of critical thought where it leads, and this radical uncertainty is where it's landed me. I find no heroism in choosing the unexamined life, no value in blindered white-light-white-heat. (This is a poem called Why I Am Not A Punk.)
But I call bullshit on this complaint: "anti-rockism is the attempt to remove an aesthetico-moral framework from music discussion." Only literally true: It's an attempt to remove one aesthetico-moral framework, entirely on aesthetico-moral grounds: It posits that rockism has boring aesthetics and inhabits a social fantasy that is in fact morally dangerous, in which visionary Supermen are meant to lead the masses, who are distracted by their corrupt bodies (bodies that are too young, too old, too female, too gay, too repressed, too sexual, etc.) from true engagement with the pure rebel mind - with the help of the Superman they may be shown the way to enlightenment. It precisely is modernist vanguardism. The 20th century has provided us with all the experiments we need to know what is morally wrong with modernist vanguardism, despite its notable aesthetic triumphs. (And its even more frequent, misguided, pathetic aesthetic messes, which litter every bohemian scene.) Though I share the thrilled shiver that comes from hearing it, I am no longer "on the side" of the rhetoric of hanging Peter Frampton from a lamppost, even symbolically - partly because killing a symptom is no kind of a cure, partly because humanity has proved rather adept at literalizing its most vulgar symbologies.
Unfortunately this critique doesn't offer a positive program, a set of critical yardsticks to substitute for the old warped one. This is a problem which it has in common with the left, more broadly; politically, the only plausible responses that have emerged have been those that employ a range of analytic tools in a contextualized dialectic to aim at best guesses at what will produce the most desirable outcomes, or "good enough" outcomes, to use the psychoanalytic catchphrase. The abandonment of any all-purpose formulae. And we all agree there's something unsatisfying about this. In the pro-pop traffic with populism, in its retreat into subjectivism, and so on. It may simply be that a broadly workable aesthetico-moral framework is yet to come. But to take a stance for the sake of taking a stance - that is, to take up an aesthetico-moral framework because it makes you feel better to take it up - is wanking off, with a very weak relationship to critical or political responsibility.
I share Simon's worry that it is difficult to write well without such a grounding. But in myself I recognize it as a status fear - that I will lose critical power (status and success and money and all that shit) if I'm not aggressive and sarcastic and definitive and annihilating. Luckily, there's a wealth of good writing in philosophy and criticism and most of all in literature (let's start with Kafka) that tells me you can write from uncertainty. You don't have to posture on some fictional knowingness in order to write beautifully and justly and wisely. And beauty, justice and wisdom, much more than power - these are the qualities that fucking move me.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, June 02 at 2:25 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (14)
A Little Vomiting Music, Maestro
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Photo by Declan O'Neill. © www.declanoneill.com.
It feels, with one thing and another, like months since I've done any actual, you know, music writing. What better way to reimmerse than with a full-body dip into the blackened tar of the genre known as doom metal? I've got a feature today in The Globe limning out some thoughts on Sunn0))), the Kasimir Malevich of metal bands, who play the Music Gallery on Monday. (Read it here.) Also in today's Globe, I take the wheel of the Essential Tracks column, with squibs on songs by Michigan's NOMO (post-techno-post-Fela-post-Ra-free-funkestra), London's smartie-teen Internerd springtime lollipop Lily Allen (next big thing or next Amy Winehouse?), the single from the new Wiley album (you can still hear it over at DJ/rupture's place) and a blues standard by Irma Thomas (from her post-Katrina album After the Rain).
This is not just music to vomit by
BY CARL WILSON
The Globe and Mail
Friday, May 19, 2006
Rock has died and been revived so many times now that no one should be surprised if some part of it behaves like a true zombie, dragging its ravaged limbs along under compulsion from some cruel and absent puppet master.
Like garage, post-punk and a dozen other rock offshoots, heavy-metal music is back in the near-mainstream, returned from its much-mocked big-haired 1980s phase to its earlier roots as the home of rock's most earnest self-taught intellectuals, with the bad-boy appeal of Satanism serving as cover while you read a lot of books about conspiracy theories and the supernatural.
The rigid genre distinctions that sustained metal fandom through the lean years seem to be breaking down amid its new popularity, as the genre absorbs adherents of goth and puppy-eyed "emo" punk. But along with such commercial successes as bands like My Chemical Romance, or the Ozzfest and Sounds of the Underground tours, the genre is also developing its own art-minded counterculture, with groups that take metal's concept-album tradition to new heights, or may draw heavily on the 1990s Japanese noise-rock underground. And these groups are attracting an audience of listeners who may not normally consider themselves metal fans.
At the forefront is the guitar duo Sunn0))), who perform Monday. (The name is pronounced just like "Sun." The 0))) isn't a word but a pictograph, showing the heavenly body radiating three waves of light.) It's led by guitarists Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson, who also founded the new art-metal label Southern Lord Records, with a changing cast of collaborators.
Sunn0))) certainly doesn't eschew the grand guignol of metal's past. They perform theatrically cowled in druidic robes, they are prone to song titles such as Flight of the Behemoth or Bathory Erzebet - and on that latter song on their latest album, the vocals were recorded with the singer confined in a coffin locked in the back of a hearse.
But this band is to most metal bands what colour-field artists are to painting - just look at their last three album titles, White1, White2 and Black One, for a hint. Like Russian painter Kasimir Malevich's 1915 painting of a black square, Sunn0)))'s music distills something essential from the form but takes it to such an extreme that it becomes almost another medium.
Specifically, Sunn0))) is about guitar frequencies. There's little concern for song form or rhythm and certainly (and this it has in common with such long-standing subgenres as death or thrash metal) not melody. There are no drums. Vocals make only rare appearances. Rather, Sunn0))) produces long, slow, deafeningly loud drones that sound a little like a Black Sabbath album skipping so that just one chord plays over and over again. It's what you get when faith in the unifying rebel myth of rock has collapsed, and the anatomists come to pick over its corpse.
Yet if you open your ears, the music is not tedious. O'Malley and Anderson have a beguiling command of timbre and texture, keeping the crackle and buzz of their sound mobile even as the harmonics barely budge. They seem constantly to be urging the groaning, slow-grinding music forward, and the effect can be trance-like, particularly at the extraordinary volumes the band favours in live shows.
Indeed, Sunn0)))'s main preoccupation is not so much with music as with the physiological ramifications of noise - they're turning metal from music to take drugs by, into sound that acts as a drug in itself. They linger particularly around what are called "sub-bass" frequencies, a range that has long been studied by military strategists and scientists as ripe for weaponization. Fans like to boast that they've gone to a Sunn0))) concert and nearly lost control of their bodily functions: The band has even complained that they're tired of fans vomiting at their shows, as if it's become drearily de rigueur.
But closer to its core, Sunn0))) is not a juvenile gross-out game - their vibrations can bang your head into the kind of meditative state that monks spend years trying to master. As Malevich wrote in 1920, "perhaps the black square is the image of God as the essence of his perfection" - or what's really going on between the devil's horns.
Sunn0))) is at the Music Gallery at St George-the-Martyr Anglican Church, 197 John St., on Monday. Sold out.
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, May 19 at 10:33 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
Merritt Postscript: Zip-a-dee-doo-Dad
Left, Scott Fagan with his sister Gale, in Hawaiian garb.
Right, his son Stephin Merritt, with ukulele.
One last entry to the Stephin Merritt file before I move on. This is something I meant to post ages ago, before this bunfight even happened, but there's more point now: Go check out the site of Merritt's father, Scott Fagan - it's friggin' wild (thanks, Michael Barclay, for pointing the way). Fagan was a folksinger in the '60s folk revival, then a singer-songwriter with enough cachet that Jasper Johns did a painting of one of his records, then wrote an anti-music-industry rock musical in 1970-71 and, he claims, was blacklisted from the biz. He then retreated home to the Virgin Islands, where he had grown up, and has stayed there doing music in a sort of Jimmy Buffet vein ever since. (He and his mom were abandoned by his own musician father; Fagan says he was raised by a succession of "black alcoholic stepdads"). Somewhere along the line, he found the time to have an affair with Merritt's mom, but it ended before Merritt was born in 1966. The two have never met, but I gather that Merritt grew up aware of Fagan while Fagan has only found out about Merritt fairly recently.
The fact that Merritt was actually spawned by a sixties singer-songwriter makes him a ridiculously literal case of what I argued in my "bandonyms" essay last year is the pattern of 1990s solo artists rejecting the heritage of confessional 1960s-70s singer-songwriterism, in part by adopting band names in the place of their own. Merritt's archly ironic voice provides more such distancing. Yet if you listen to some of his birth father's music you'll catch some surprising presentiments of Merritt's own sound. In most of Fagan's music the similarities are smothered by the "islands" vibe, but you can hear it in ballads such as Where My Lover Has Gone. Except that when Merritt does it, it's much more tongue-in-cheek, as I discussed in an earlier post about his Brecht influence, camp, etc.
But Fagan is also intriguing when you're talking about the racial coding of Merritt's music: There's been a lot of jawing about the thoroughgoing "whiteness" of the Magnetic Fields and other Merritt projects. Well, here he has a father (though absent) who was raised in a black environment and does heavily black-influenced music. Fagan's earliest demos, in 1963, were full of Harry Belfafonte-ish numbers such as Maryann or Rum and Coca-Cola, not to mention something called Shame And Scandal (In de Family). He carried that influence through his hippie-songwriter period and then went back to it full-swing, as you can hear on most of the tracks on his website, such as La Beiga Carousel/Tutsie. You can debate the legitimacy/ickiness of Fagan's blue-eyed-Caribbean style as much as you like, and I don't know how much Merritt knew of his father's music, but: If you grew up aware that your father is this sorta white-rasta guy who sings in dialect, not to mention a self-styled musical genius who happened to leave you and your hippie mom to fend for yourselves, perhaps you would feel there's something unappetizing about white songwriters who piggyback on black culture, and become inclined to look mostly elsewhere for inspiration? You might, in fact, come to have kind of a harsh line on crosscultural appropriation (viz. the Merritt: "White blues" is "fundamentally racist" sub-fight), and therefore steer far clear? Just a thought.
There's been some interesting side-conversation about whether white people should be condemned for being attracted to "white culture," if black people should be criticized for listening exclusively to "black music." That's too simple, but maybe leads to a better question: If we are critical of mainstream America for ripping off black culture as its own (see "rock'n'roll"), why can a songwriter also get shit rained down on him for scrupulously avoiding that move? Rip off black culture, and you're a thief; don't, and you're a musical white supremacist. Granted, the Tin Pan Alley, post-disco europop (esp. Abba), new-wave and country performers who are Merritt's main musical wellsprings all drew on African-American music to a degree. Everything mixes; there is no original source. But the Scott Fagan factor might at least suggest what Merritt is trying not to do, and why his motivations may be far from the ones being imputed. Which, once more, is by no means a story about how tastes are just meaningless accidents of chemical pleasure; but does testify to how scrambled the genetic (and ideological) material of any aesthetic might be.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Monday, May 15 at 2:00 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Zipadee-Deja-Vu
Bizarrely, Slate magazine has seen fit to weigh in on the EMP-conference-inspired "Is Stephin Merritt a racist?" (not-really-a-)debate. (See previous Zoilus coverage.) I'm afraid Sasha and Jessica have earned the drubbing they take there, but the writer, John Cook, goes too far: First, it's not true that no one can have any idea what Merritt's other tastes in music are; he was a critic for Time Out for several years, and has frequently commented on music in other venues, and, more importantly, since he is an artist who works in pastiche, his musical interests are quite thoroughly and complexly documented in his music (the Magnetic Fields, the Gothic Archies, etc.). That they tend to the paler side of the pop and non-pop traditions is fairly obvious. The question is what to make of that. Cook claims that suggesting "one's taste in music can be interrogated for signs of racist intent" is "dangerous and stupid." He's right, but the crux there is the word "intent" - unless your tastes in music run to white-power bands, of course very few people intend to express racism via their listening choices. But Cook's implication is that tastes cannot be "interrogated" at all, whereas in fact the patterns in our tastes (and, as I argued at EMP, distastes) have a lot to say about our identities. We instinctively know this. That's why people ask each other what kind of music they like when they're, say, on a first date. "I can't stand that pretentious jazz shit" or "I hate that cheesy teen-pop pap" are statements of self-definition as much as they are statements about the music. Listening near-exclusively to white artists doesn't mean you hate black people, but it may well indicate a sense of distance from and perhaps a lack of curiosity about black experience. Likewise, for some listeners, gangsta rap very well might be a way - as Merritt has suggested and Cook stops short of agreeing with - of indulging racial(ist) fantasies of black masculinity, engaging in a fatal-attraction tango of admiration and repulsion. For other listeners, it may not be that at all. The narratives of taste are rich but very slippery; any attempt to boil them down to a moral indictment (in SFJ and Jessica's case) is bound to be as foolish as trying (as Cook does) to wish them away.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, May 09 at 5:10 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (12)
EMP 4 & Final: Quote-Unquote
EMP 2006 - nothing but the hits. (Continued after the jump, as a courtesy to readers who don't care.)
Besides everything quoted below, there was Ann Powers riffing lyrically on Kate Bush, Rapunzel and ultrafemme new-wave hair; Robert Christgau and Sean Fennessy on how flagrantly offensive coke rap (Young Jeezy, Lil' Wayne, the Clipse) ended up becoming a trap-door through which they experienced their relationships with their fathers - for Christgau as an unexpected vehicle of catharsis after his dad died (one of his only experiences with an actual "guilty pleasure," he says); for Sean as a window into his drug-cop dad's world (followed by a very confusing Q&A in which it was debated how literal the coke dealing is and what its economics would be, and why anyone is bragging about selling coke when coke has gotten so cheap); Michelangelo Matos on the song Love Child - and being a love child (see yesterday's post); Daphne Carr taking pleasure in shaming the critical world by doing a hilarious pastiche of all the inaccurate ways critics use "art school" as an epithet; Elijah Wald on Louis Armstrong's love of Guy Lombardo (a "guilty pleasure" most of us aren't old enough even to understand as shameful); Baz Dreisinger on Jah Cure, the convicted Jamaican rapist who sings sweet loverman songs of regret from within his jail cell thanks to a prison-rehab program; Alex Ross's off-festival guided tour through 20th-century notational music; Jalyah Burrell's contentious position that Mary J. Blige has started pandering to her white audience (her best line: "Black people who express love for Kate Bush or John Mayer are positioning themselves as cities on a hill") and Jabali Stewart's rallying cry for black people reclaiming rock as "fearless vampire killers" (the vampires being white appropriators of black history and culture); and Sarah Dougher's unsummarizable conflicted tour through her experience as a left-feminist experiencing catharsis through patriotic Nashville country (whose best line was about the song Riding with Private Malone: "I'm crying to a song about a magical car") (I think I cried three or four times during her presentation, which included Dougher playing recordings of tons of the songs but also sometimes singing them herself).
I missed at least that many good papers, such as Geeta Dayal's talk on the neuroscience of guilt-and-pleasure, Drew Daniel's How to Sing Along with Sweet Home Alabama; Franklin Bruno on his guilt about what's become of indie rock (its conversion from bohemia to petit-burgeois business model, mainly); JD Considine on J-pop; Jody Rosen's rescheduled talk on ragtime; and Douglas Wolk's talk about YouTube and "The Numa Numa Dance," which drew a standing ovation while I was oversleeping.
This year's conference was a guilty pleasure in its own way. I loved it, but it felt less sharp and focused and challenging than last year's. Many of the papers were smart and informative but not so pointed. Is this perhaps because people only want to go so deep talking about shame (see Stephin Merritt quote below)? Perhaps because with the Chuck Eddy firing at the Village Voice and other shakeups in the field there was less desire to argue amongst ourselves and more desire to applaud and support each other (this is Ann Powers' theory)? Or because this subject matter doesn't jack into the really divisive issues in criticism right now, the way last year's minstrelsy-and-masquerade theme did? I'm not sure. It could have. (I had thought David Thomas, not Merritt, would be the guest rock star who made everyone furious.) Anyway, it gives Eric and Ann and other organizers plenty to consider when setting up next year's conference. For which I can hardly wait. No matter what, this conference is helping to change some of the face of pop criticism, by educating us, by informing us what others are up to, but perhaps most of all by moving the goalposts, giving everyone who attends a new imagined audience - this network of brilliant readers and peers to serve as a standard. Not to mention a great place to workshop one's book ideas. And now here's some semi-random one-liners.
Stephin Merritt: "Western harmonic music is a system of thwarting and rewarding the expectations of the listener. Undercutting the pleasure only heightens the pleasure. If you've ever had sexual relations, you'll know what I mean."
[On what he learned from doing 69 Love Songs]: "I discovered quantity is quality."
[On falsetto]: "When there's a break in the voice you can't tell if you are laughing or crying. I've discovered this trying to sing at a show in Colorado, at high altitudes. The body starts heaving, huhh-huhh-huhh, and you just choose whether to laugh or to cry, since we're conditioned to associate it with one or another. ... This is also why men cry at Wouldn't It Be Nice by the Beach Boys more than women do - because you are subvocalizing along with the song without knowing it, and when you reach the falsetto break, you subconsciously feel like you are already crying."
[On why he subverts genres]: "Because I'm embarrassed." (He added that this is also why Andy Warhol did everything the way he did.)
[On the difference between shame and embarrassment]: "You can talk about embarrassment. You cannot talk about shame."
Drew Daniel. [On shame and the conference theme - guilty pleasures - which was Drew's idea]: "Last year's conference was all about masquerade, about how pop allows you to escape who you are. I was inspired by this quote from Emmanuel Levinas who said that 'shame is the experience of being riveted to your being.' " (To, as Levinas also said, " that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I is oneself.") "Musical pleasure resembles shame in that you can't control it."
[On the French band Nouvelle Vague, which covers punk and new-wave classic in a faux-bossa-nova style]: "Nouvelle Vague don't just beat the dead horse of punk - they liquefy the dead horse and serve the dead horse as a smoothie."
[On camp]: "At this point, if you're shooting for camp as a gay person, you've already lost." (Followed by a comment I didn't quite get down on how straight people use camp - like the Mamma Mia stage musical - at this point as a kind of "relief" from heteronormativity - that is, in a way, as blackface... queerface?)
Tom Smucker: "The Carpenters represent the thought that maybe Phil Spector and Mama Cass had 'gone too far.' But Karen's voice is the 'maybe.' "
[On Lawrence Welk's music and its fusion of all forms of "postwar fun"]: "It was about a musical family; it was a music about mainstream social cohesion. It wasn't about an inner life, which is what makes it horrifying to rock audiences. ... You can't 'flip' his music because there's nothing there on the inside." .... [And for those who say affectionately, 'I used to watch it with my grandmother']: "That's not a guilty pleasure, that's a temporary suspension of aesthetics for valid reasons of sentiment." (The loneliness of Karen Carpenter, as one of "Lawrence Welk's children", he went on to say, is that she has no musical family - she's just driving through the suburbs with her brother in an expensive car.)
[In the Q&A, discussing Karen Carpenter's big, Neal Peart-esque drum kit, in which she almost entirely used just the snare and one tom, Eric Lott says]: "That seems like another aspect of her self-denial - you have this huge kit and you're not playing it!"
David Thomas (whose talk was delivered so theatrically that nobody broke through the screen of his performance to question some very questionable assumptions). "Rock is electrified folk music. It is not catholic but parochial, not a wide tent but a narrow road. It is in the blood."
[On the Tuvan region of Yaktusk]: "Land of the mammoths, frozen as they chewed buttercups." [On the band Cholbon from that region]: "Their sound was closer to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon than Pink Floyd ever accomplished. Put aside questions of cargo culture. You wondered why Pink Floyd had never owed up to their debt to the Yakutian rock scene."
"There's no alternative to meaning."
"The corollaries of datapanik: 1: Dataflow is imperative. 2: Judgment is evil. 3: Everything is true. Datapanik muffles the voice of geography."
"The answer to 'Can foreigners play rock music?' is no. No. Not under any circumstances. But sometimes they can sure sound good if they don't try."
[In the Q&A] "I don't believe that human beings think. Sound is the basis of consciousness. But I can't explain that now. This is just the result of not having had a job for 35 years."
Seth Sanders. [On a Slayer-inspired murder in California] "The girl's family sued Slayer, who responded that they hadn't even done the necrophilia rite!"
"Everything modernity takes away, it gives back on its own terms."
David Grubbs: [On what John Cage didn't understand about recordings]: "Records make accidents happen." (By providing a frame that makes chance visible/audible.)
[Quoting John Cage, when someone offered him a middle-row seat at a concert so he'd get better acoustics]: "Imagine, sound being 'better' in one place than another."
David Sanjek. [On Nashville Sound recordings that provide effervescent music with peppy background vocals by the Anita Carr Singers for bleak lyrics about not wanting to live anymore]: "It's the commercialization of mood swings."
[On music fans who value the tragic stories of dysfunctional musicians]: "The word 'schadenfreude' grants these lookyloos way too much dignity."
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, May 03 at 7:15 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
EMP 3: Supremes (Beyond Good & Evil)
Love Child's pioneers, the Supremes: See link to Matos's EMP paper, below.
I don't think I've met Ali Marcus but I appreciate what she said about my EMP paper. She really got it, which compels me to answer her kinda surprising inference - "that Wilson is a person who, when asked if human nature is basically good or basically bad, would choose the latter." No, if I had to guess, I'd say good and bad only exist as bounded human concepts - that "nature" is indifferent to both - and that if you step back from a human paradigm, neither word is meaningful. Ali says, "To believe that a primal, innate, subconscious force within us is there because of repression and therefore is fundamentally negative, is not something I am capable of." Contra Freud, maybe, our repressed subconscious forces aren't necessarily evil; I think we can be as afraid of positive drives - such as empathy - as we are of impulses to violence or lust. (Later: Er, not that lust, or even violence, is negative in every circumstance.) Repression is a survival mechanism run rampant, ignorant of the realities of our lives; if it worked better, social order - fascist or utopian - would be totalizing. Instead we are disruptive, for good and ill. It's not that what's repressed is the real truth of the world; it is just a jumble of displaced pieces of the puzzle, fitting and misfit. Or that's my current feeling, anyway.
Ali also has a set of other reports from EMP that cover much of the action I'd have blogged if I'd managed it. Elsewhere online, so far, you can read Michaelangelo Matos' remarkable Love Child paper (which brought people to tears), and others I missed in person by Josh on righteous fundamentalist toonz, Nate on '70s white soul-rock, and Maria on figure-skating music. Part 4 - highlights from my notes - tomorrow.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, May 03 at 1:30 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
EMP 2: There's No Such Thing as a Zipless Doodah
Race, taste and pleasure: In this corner, an offensive old Uncle Remus image;
and in that corner, Stephin Merritt's childhood hero, Bertolt Brecht.
Is anybody still reading this mother? I'm back for real now. I'm going to have more notes on the Seattle EMP conference later today but first ...
Chatter continues on the EMP-generated Stephin Merritt/Song of the South controversy I mentioned on the weekend, which I meant to point out (as Sasha does) was a continuation of a previous sizzler in blogland (look down toward the end of that post, under "A Debate..."). It's worth noting this followup from Sasha via Douglas Wolk at the time. Now Jessica posts Drew Daniel's letter on the subject, which squares with my recollection of events. Jessica persists in conflating liking Zipadeedoohdah with liking the whole movie, despite Merritt's explicit separation of the two, and then using that liking to indict people of racism, which, I'm sorry, is knee-jerk and wrong. But she also links to Joshua's post on the relationship between tastes and exclusion and social affiliation, which is very near the core of my Celine Dion project.
Without posting too many spoilers for the book, my argument in my EMP paper was that if poptimism means liking what you like and disliking what you dislike without apology to anyone else's standards, that's a better starting point than using an artificial rockist set of virtues, but it's going to run into the problem of where those "gut" tastes come from. I told the story of growing up in a very white but also quite urban southern-Ontario town, and that when I was 11 or 12 I would tell people that musically I liked "everything" - and then say "except disco and country." Looking back now I can see that "disco" meant "all the African-American music on the radio" (I liked jazz; hip-hop mostly hadn't reached Canada yet) and that country did pretty much mean "hick music" to me. That these prejudices were both ethically unacceptable and musically idiotic only became clear to me after I'd left my home town.
Now, was I racist in any other sense of the word? Consciously, quite the opposite. And I wasn't classist in the terms of my setting either: I was very middle-class, but in a high school where social circles were often defined by class, my gang of weirdos was the one where those barriers at least partly broke down, with alienated bookworms and smoking-area badasses making common cause (though there were misunderstandings and hurt feelings that happened that did have a lot to do with class along the way). But I was still sheltered from the much broader differences of a wider world, and actually was racist and classist in ways I didn't yet have personal experience of. I thought my "good" tastes were natural and objective, which they weren't, and that's a problem I'm still working out. I'm using as a case study and vantage point my more recent distaste for Celine Dion - who has a mindfuckingly mixed-up class and ethnic position as a white non-anglo-american semi-R&B ballad singer. (As I've said, the fact that Merritt's gaffe was about Celine was exemplary, not trivial.) When we call ourselves "open-minded," what are we letting pass in one ear and out the other?
Tastes always involve such stories, is my argument. It's fascinating that this fight has happened about Merritt's taste, because he explicitly said in that panel that he didn't believe that musical taste was related to identity - he was responding to Drew's stories about what his "straight" punk teenage life in Kentucky had to do with being queer. Merritt (who's also gay, of course) said he'd always listened to all kinds of music (hmm, what was his "except"?) and did not see how it accounted for anything. And yet elsewhere in the panel he was talking about how he'd been exposed to Brecht and Weill by his folkie mom growing up, and acknowledged its influence. If there's ever been anyone whose whole public persona, musically and nonmusically, seems like he was taken to Bertolt Brecht operas as a kid, it sure is Stephin Merritt - and that also accounts for how one might value a song such as Zipadeedoodah. (Merritt's (non)-relationship to his hippie-folk-musician absent father is also a compelling subject, everything to do with my paper last year on "bandonyms" and the singer-songwriter, but I'll save that for a later post. For now...)
I often quote Townes Van Zandt, who said there were only two kinds of music, "the blues and Zipadeedoodah." Townes was a (country-)rockist, so he said he liked the blues; Merritt is a Brechtian ironist down to his bones, so he says he prefers Zipadeedoodah while very well knowing its ties to a racist narrative, because he automatically reads it ironically. He also likes disco, while hip-hop, a more blues-lineage music, has never surfaced in all his genre pastiches, to my knowledge. (Totally unconfirmed untrue report of upcoming collaboration with Snoop Dogg notwithstanding.) Not that the blues and hip-hop aren't full of ironic levels, and Merritt appreciates and to some degree uses them, but his whole project is to queer them into other sorts of ironies, ones to which I happen to respond strongly (i.e., there's nothing happenstance about it). Nothing racist about that, except that it takes advantage of a structural societal racism that gives him (us) the privilege of putting his (our) attentions elsewhere. As Angela says in My So-Called Life, "How come he gets to be the one with other things on his mind?" What are the ethics/politics of having other things on your mind? (Put another way: How much responsibility do we bear for the circumstances of our birth?)
Specifically what is assumed in a reflexively ironic relationship to music, and by extension to your subjectivity, and what does it exclude? For one thing it might assume that you have easy access to a legitimized subjectivity, that it is not something you are still working to claim, but something you are free to discard or disavow. And thereby bypass genres and artists and people for whom constructing and claiming a subject position - and escaping an objectified one - is still a priority. This came up in the discussion period regarding catharsis - Merritt had asserted that catharsis in art is "embarrassing." ("Always?" asked Ann Powers. "Yes. No. Yes and no," said Merritt.) Someone in the crowd pointed out that achieving catharsis in soul and gospel, for instance, is quite the opposite - it's something to be celebrated. (Consider Celine's awkward straddling of these two sets of expectations.) Does it matter, does it help, that Merritt foregrounds his whiteness, and his ironic relationship to it, in his music, as opposed to all the white-boy-blues-rockers who try to sidestep it or wish it away...?
Merritt had as many insights about aesthetic issues as anyone else at EMP, and I think nearly everyone's tastes closely examined would betray similar sets of blinders and backstories. Perhaps because he's quite defensive, and less used to being in this sort of setting, what he was unwilling to cop to was more conspicuous. But for a conference about "guilty pleasures," it seemed, with important exceptions, that there was more of a collective will to discuss pleasure than to take a hard look at guilt (and/or shame). Every pleasure has an ethical ambiguity, a responsibility suspended or elided; there's no such thing as pleasure without complication or consequence, what Erica Jong called "a zipless fuck" and Walt Disney called zipadeedoodah. The fact that the only one whose guilt really ended up on trial was Stephin Merritt seems like a very convenient sort of catharsis - the subset known as scapegoating.
PS: Hear pieces from Merritt's new album, Showtunes - highlights from his semi-Chinese-opera collaborations with director Chen Shi-Zheng - here.
PPS: Years ago, pre-69 Love Songs, I was vociferously arguing in print that mainstream pop singers (with conventionally good voices) ought to be picking up Magnetic Fields songs to cover. That sounds a bit naive in retrospect, but it's gradually coming true: First, there was Peter Gabriel's cover of Book of Love for the soundtrack of the Richard Gere-Jennifer Lopez vehicle Shall We Dance?, and now upcoming is apparently a take on When My Boy Walks Down the Street by Ashlee Simpson. For extra credit, guess what the reaction's gonna be.
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, May 02 at 3:52 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (12)
EMP preliminotions
My EMP liveblogging plan did not click, as readers have guessed. I didn't get my paper finished soon enough to recap day 1, and since then there has just been too much action. Which is a bad blog thing but a good life thing. Dull days at the desk are better for this medium.
I will do a thorough recap later - I've been taking notes for you, my friends - but a couple of initial randoms: First, in relation to my talk about "guilty displeasures," someone asked me tonight about current Nashville country, and I said that while I like some of it, my barrier to embracing it has always been (besides some production values) its centralization of an American style of masculinity - which I said that as a Canadian I have always found alienating. This led to a big talk about what I considered the differences between (the typical) American masculinity and (the typical) Canadian masculinity, in a group with only one other Canadian. After the fact, I thought the word I would use about U.S. masculinity is "unapologetic." While Canadian masculinity is not as deprecatory and miserablist as British masculinity, even the macho version of Canadianness is marked by an ongoing texture of parody and self-undercutting that to a Canadian is noticeably absent in the prototypical American version. I would add that the Canadian machismo is also hard for me to handle, and that Nashville is full of reconsiderations of masculinity as a text, regret and guilt and sentiment being a big part of that, but that it's not doubtful of the starting line in the same way. I'd really like to hear if I'm just being a crazy alienated adolescent about this, or if I'm articulating something identifiable to other men. (American femininity is different too, but I think maybe the ways in which gender is occupied, ironized and questioned as part of the texture of character in both countries trumps the national aspect, so that the gulf between the men is more conspicuous?)
Second, to jump on the only controversy of the week, I disagree with Jessica about what transpired at the opening panel talk with Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields. It wasn't the most dynamic discussion of all time, but it was actually quite good humoured and smart. And for anybody who's ever interviewed Stephin, as I have, it was glaring how he was receptive and engaged in a way he's not when he deals with the press. But as for the "racism"? The way I recall it, L.D. Beghtol brought up the fact that Stephin's said that Zipadeedoodah is the only successful happy song, and that prompted Stephin to say that he likes the music in Song of the South, "which is really hard to see now, for obvious reasons." I'm paraphrasing, but I certainly wasn't left with the impression of him celebrating Uncle Remus. And while you could critique the music in that film as being part of the minstrel legacy it uncritically perpetuates, you'd have to take into account the ways that legacy has been reconsidered, at EMP itself last year, as a much more ambiguous and complicated thing in its relationship to black culture, before you could label an appreciation of anything related to it as racist. I'm glad Jessica has agreed to reconsider.
But on the closer-to-home aspect of him talking about Celine Dion as if she were non-white: It was a gaffe, in its way, but a fascinating one in context. Of course, Celine is white, but Stephin was discussing production style and technology, and Celine is in many ways produced and positioned as if she were in the same niche as Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey - as if she did R&B - so he was just choosing the most awkward case for his point, which was that in that genre, highly mediated production for "entertainers" is not considered out of place the way it is for rock or white singer-songwriters. (He contrasted it with Belle & Sebastian's work with Trevor Horne, which I think was a case of them deliberately transgressing that line, but never mind.) And he was using Celine because Drew Daniel had brought her up first as an example of highly compressed, mediated production. But the point was odd because Stephin was saying that it's a basically racist perception of entertainers versus artists: That artists in non-white genres are just here to entertain us, so their production authenticity doesn't matter - they aren't individuals.
To me it was all telling about how Celine exists: First, that she's a white artist whose niche would not exist without a black precedent. (Is she the Elvis of power-ballads?) Second, that she's an entertainer rather than an individual. (She is entirely on-board with that role.) And third, that even though people know that she's French-Canadian (there's no category of Quebecoise here), her foreignness and, I'd argue, her class renders her ethnically Other in an American context, so "non-white" (did he ever actually say "black"?). Stephin's blunder was still a blunder, but it was an exemplary one, not a crazy one. If Celine were Lebanese, things might not be wildly different; if she were a pure white anglo American, her career would be nearly unthinkable. (And if she were black, it would also be radically different.) This entry is ultra-parenthesized because these questions are hard to address directly; I'm still unsure of how they will be dealt with in the book. So, sure, she's "unblack as hell," but doesn't that locution indicate it's impossible to say she is "white as hell", too?
In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, April 30 at 5:18 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
They Shoot Horses & Prince: 'These wonderful,
wonderful kids! Still struggling! Still hoping!'
Today in The Globe and Mail, I have an article about They Shoot Horses Don't They, the post-punk marching band from Vancouver - making hay (sorry) of the parallels between their sound and the mood of the 1969, kickass, dance-marathon movie from which they took their name. There are similarities to Frog Eyes or Wolf Parade, but more to the anarcho-squat bands I used to call "circus punk" in the early '90s (the Ex, Dogfaced Hermans, pre-Tubthumping Chumbawamba, and to some extent No Means No, Rhythm Activism, etc.). TSHDT plays Toronto tonight @ Sneaky Dee's, along with the Creeping Nobodies and Anagram - a dance card you couldn't beat with a riding crop. (Read it here.)
Plus, here's a clip of the band in action. But more eyeball-slurping is the video for Sunlight by band artist-in-residence Julia Feyrer.
Also in today's Globe, I have a short (and belated) review of Prince's new album, 3121.
Incidentally, the Vancouver edition of the paper also has a Destroyer profile, not by me but a Vancouver writer hitherto unknown (though it sure feels like I've read it before). Still, Dan's always wryly quotable: "I have probably grown more comfortable with my role as singer, whatever absurdity that role might inhabit. ... So there's kind of a swagger to the music, I think -- even if it is a tipsy old man swagger." And then: "I haven't gone out and bought a summer home or anything. ... But I've got a man on it."
I also noted this piece a few days ago about "circuit-bending music". Agents, does this merit further investigation?
Horses' mad, brisk gallop
BY CARL WILSON
The Globe and Mail
April 7, 2006, R19
In the hypnotic 1969 Sydney Pollack movie They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a ballroom floor full of disparate Depression hard cases (most memorably Jane Fonda) dances out a gruelling month-long marathon that can lead only to a cash prize or death by exhaustion, all for the diversion of callous crowds of punters.
Now, examine the eight radiant faces of the young Vancouver band that takes its name from Pollack's film. They don't seem like they've seen much material want. But they've got a similarly crazed determination to ride a rhythm through the noxiously spoiled faith and usury pervading their era. Their own unlikely deliverance will come howling, shaking maracas, tooting horns, banging on pipes and jitterbugging till it falls to pieces.
Though the Emily Carr art-school grads share some of the post-punk, neurasthenic-preacher cadences of Victoria's Frog Eyes or Montreal's (B.C. expats) Wolf Parade, the sound swirling here has more to do with high-school band class. They start their songs neatly marching and wind up swarming over themselves as the paired-off Noah's Ark of two-by-two beats breeds and becomes a house divided against itself that somehow still can stand. It's an endless fusillade of friendly fire.
The best precedent might be the experimental house bands that came out of 1980s anarchist squats - Scotland's Dog Faced Hermans, Holland's the Ex and England's (pre-Tubthumping) Chumbawamba, or even British Columbia's own No Means No - who all had the same exuberant way of turning junk piles into punk Big Tops, despite the dark rodentine gnawings from below. That's a movement that still has too few followers - among them Toronto's Creeping Nobodies, who share the stage with They Shoot Horses in Toronto tonight.
On this, the most extensive tour in the band's couple of years of life, They Shoot Horses are using their cannonade of energy to convert idle spectators into rambunctious mobs, with all the efficiency of revival-tent veterans. But on Boo Hoo Hoo Boo, their first full-length album (as a rare new signing these days on pivotal northwestern U.S. indie label Kill Rock Stars), the funhouse mirror seems turned inward: The yelling sounds more like a bayhound's yelp, the emergency less in jest. You notice for the first time how vocalist Nut Brown's poetic slogans, full of cracked antitheses, hardly ever slow down to squeeze in words of more than one syllable, as if time and breath were both too short.
And you begin to wonder what kind of inner isolation makes the frantic polymorphous togetherness of They Shoot Horses so urgent: Like many of the other jamboree-sized collectives making music across Canada lately, the band could be called just They They They They They . . ., a cry craving for a "we" to echo back.
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? with the Creeping Nobodies and Anagram, tonight at Sneaky Dee's, 431 College Street, $7.
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Friday, April 07 at 2:50 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Smoove It On Over:
Notes on Schmaltz (2)
Kenny G.: The jazz that dares not speak its name.
In today's Globe and Mail, my colleague J.D. Considine (who's blogging a bit more now that he's the Globe's new jazzman) returns to a subject that I wrote about in my column at this time last year: "Smooth jazz."
Coincidentally the Daily Show had a smooth-jazz joke on its mock special on race last night: Jon Stewart said that despite the sharp racial inequalities surfaced by, for instance, Hurricane Katrina, "it's also a fact that no nation on earth is as integrated as ours. Let's look at the fruits of that effort, for instance, jazz - music created by black people, which they shared with everybody. And I mean" - flashing up a photo of Kenny G, like the one above - "everybody." (You can see the clip, for now, under "Afrospanicindioasianization" here, about halfway in.) That quip has thick cultural layers, because smooth jazz is very much a racial matter - though, as I'll get to at the end, not quite the way Stewart's jibe suggests.
I was bemused in J.D.'s piece to find guitarist Jeff Golub trying to claim that "All 'smooth jazz' is, really, is a moniker for contemporary jazz." What bugs non-smooth musicians and fans is the way the industry has turned "contemporary jazz" into a euphemism for smooth, an erasure of everything else current in jazz. But overall, in my queasy position of self-appointed champion of schmaltz (if smooth is schmaltz) (and just how did this happen again?), I say J.D.'s done the right thing by mounting the case for the defence much less ambivalently than I did.
However, Bob James - who is a huge smooth success and recipient of a lifetime achievement award at this year's Canadian Smooth Jazz Awards (oh, please, can't they be called the Smoothies?) - is being disingenuous when he blames commercial radio/record companies for editing out the solos, which he says gets "deep into the danger zone." Clearly he's chosen to go along with such choices, so if he really does believe that erodes the integrity of jazz, he has to share that blame.
James also missteps, I think, when he compares today's smooth to "the roots of jazz" in "dance music and popular music. Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman - they played for dancing. It was the popular music of its time." All true, and a point I've often made in discussing hip-hop and techno crossovers with jazz. But smooth is by and large not at all a music for dancing. It is a music for relaxing and for dinner parties and for seduction. None of which is bad, but it's not a populist move in a class-based sense. It doesn't take jazz back to being the social music in which it had its roots. Rather it is an extension of the way jazz has been used by upper-middle-class people since the 1950s - but with the excision of all the intellectual content that was the justification for the move away from social dance music in the first place. A demand that jazz return to those roots doesn't lead to smooth jazz. It leads, maybe, to today's Cuban-jazz revival.
And that's where the case that "smooth jazz" is bastardizing the jazz legacy has force, because it hasn't got either the musical experimentalism or the social populism that are arguably the two legs on which the tradition stands. Which doesn't mean it's illegitimate, or that it isn't a part of the jazz family tree. But it's a tough knot to untie: Part of me thinks that it would be better just to call it Instrumental R&B. (For more on these matters, see Christopher Washburne's essay, "Does Kenny G. Play Bad Jazz?: A Case Study" in the Bad Music collection, which I discovered after last year's column.) Another part thinks it helpful that there remains a commercially viable genre under the jazz rubric: If smooth/pop-jazz were reclassified, the bolder jazz might just find itself not the artsy margin of a larger genre but a defunct category, more like polka.
One sure thing - to get back to Jon Stewart's point - is that smooth jazz is fascinating sociologically: According to radio-station surveys, it has at once a more affluent audience and a more racially diverse one than practically any other genre. At this point in history, it seems to me almost like a "hopeful monster," a mutant survivor and reminder of the arrested 1960s to 1980s evolution of the U.S. black middle class, a perversely bland soundtrack for the wildest American dream of all, the process of integration strangled by Reaganism and its aftermath.
Note: I am willfully misusing the term "hopeful monster" here, since smooth was by no means a spontaneously generated phenomenon - it came right out of jazz fusion on one hand and 1970s R&B on the other. But I'll swipe it in that scientifically sloppy way writers do, because Smooth does seem at once monstrous and, in some lingering way, hopeful.
Read More | In Depth | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, April 06 at 3:02 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (22)
Byrne & Eno's Danish Cartoon?
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts on vinyl: The new reissue is at once enhanced and,
for surprising reasons, incomplete.
Like Bomb Squad producer Hank Shocklee, I was one of those kids whose mind was squeegeed by the sonic collages of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in the eighties, when samples and loops were still a startling sound. And now it's reappearing at a time when samples and loops are like toast and jam, in a deluxe Nonesuch edition for its 25th anniversary. (It was released in 1981 - I caught up with it several years later, because of age and because that's the way it was in Brantford back then: Decades tended to arrive about five years late.)
For those unfamiliar with it, it was a work of imaginative "fourth world" anthro-tapeology, maybe comparable to today's Sublime Frequencies found-global-sound compilations, but set to Remain in Light-stylee grooves. It's sometimes referred to as the first sampling record, but that's a myth ...
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