Elephant Rock

Donovan

2010-11-28T11:20:00.004-06:00

About a year ago, I became quite obsessed with Donovan and decided to write about the four albums I was especially enchanted with. Instead, I got sidetracked reading and writing about the old Donovan-Dylan rivalry and never was able to finish the post properly. I also knew that an editor would probably just cut this analysis of something I ultimately decide is pointless, but I couldn't make myself delete it. Now that this blog is more-or-less finished, I thought it would make a fitting home for this orphaned piece. Over on Ley Lines I plan to actually talk about some Donovan songs as a follow-up to this preamble.

I'm not sure what, if anything, I thought of Donovan before having my curiosity piqued by this Woebot post, but back when I read it I made a mental note to follow up on his music. That took two years, but I eventually picked up all three albums Woebot mentions--Mellow Yellow, A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, and The Hurdy Gurdy Man--as well as the one that precedes them, Sunshine Superman (plus The Hurdy Gurdy Man's patchy successor, Barabajagal). For many, Donovan is the arch-hippie, at least the British version, but I had no strong preconceptions about him or his music. I remembered his appearance in the Dylan tour documentary Dont Look Back but couldn't positively identify any of his songs, not even his hits. So if you have some kind of anti-Donovan baggage--maybe your parents played him a lot, or you've heard the song "Mellow Yellow" too many times--I hope you can ignore it, because this run of brilliant albums puts him on the same level as the best of the late '60s groups.

Donovan Leitch, born in Glasgow in 1946 (though raised outside of London), began his career at a very young age--he recorded a set of demos at 17 and appeared on Ready, Steady, Go! (a Top of the Pops style show) at age 18. Here's his take on the period leading up to his decision to become a musician:

In England, we'd leave school at 15 and go on to a college, and I went to further education in a town called Welling Garden City. I fully immersed myself in bohemia there, which included poetry and modern art, jazz, philosophy, social radicalism. My father brought me up to be a socialist. He was a strong union man, and I was brought up in a time of Celtic mysticism and socialism, and I ran into the music of Woody Guthrie, my goodness, at 16. That was it. I saw how the elements could come together. The vision I felt in the poems my father read me, the zeal of the socialism and the rise of the working class out of its industrial slavery, and the presentation of ideas through music. That was 1960 or something, when I heard Woody Guthrie. Then Joan Baez. Then Pete Seeger. Then Miles Davis.

I've yet to really immerse myself in it, but his early folk music is nice (some songs are a little dated for sure). It fits into the British folk milieu with ease and the standout tracks from his earliest records, "Colours" for example, are quite lovely if somewhat less original than the material that makes up the next phase of his career. By "less original," I don't mean they sound exactly like Bob Dylan, a comparison that was frequently made at the time (possibly first by his label) and has continued to stick despite making little sense. Apart from the gulf in sensibility between them--Donovan is wide-eyed innocence with an open heart and little self-consciousness; Dylan is, well, kind of the opposite even in protest-singer mode--Donovan's music is British to the core even though, much like the rest of the UK folk scene, it was initially heavily influenced by Woody Guthrie and other older American folk singers. Nonetheless, the "Donovan is the new Dylan" charge electrified the music press at the time, and when Dylan came to the UK for his infamous 1965 tour the two met as documented in Dont Look Back.

You can disappear into a gossipy internet rabbit hole trying to figure out what really went on between Donovan and Dylan. In addition to never arriving at the truth, you'll run into an unpleasant coterie of Dylan fans: the kind of people who idolize the sneering peacock badboy version of Dylan seen in Dont Look Back. (As Roger Ebert put it in 1998: "What a jerk Bob Dylan was in 1965. What an immature, self-important, inflated, cruel, shallow little creature, lacking in empathy and contemptuous of anyone who was not himself or his lackey." Of course, whether you're getting the "real" Dylan in the film is an assumption you should definitely question.) These people claim they can read Donovan's mind in the scene where he plays "To Sing For You" and then Dylan plays "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". Despite it being audible that Donovan asks him to play "Baby Blue," some claim that Dylan chooses the song to belittle Donovan* and that the shots of his face while Dylan plays show him devastated by his inferiority to the master.

In their defense, it is easy to read contempt into lots of what Dylan does or says in DLB, and in an earlier, funny scene he jokingly mocks Donovan in conversation with Alan Price of The Animals. For what it's worth, here is Donovan's take forty years after his strange role in Dylan's exceptionally strange 1965. I'm sure that version has been polished over the years--to save face surely, but I'd attribute some of it to Donovan's kindness**--but the truth is that Donovan was a teenager at the time, his career had just begun, everyone involved was frequently and highly intoxicated, and, most importantly, Donovan's music deepened considerably after he left behind his folk origins. If there's any reason to persist in comparing them, that's probably it: both of their careers changed dramatically in 1966 as they, in very different ways, embraced startling new sounds.

At any rate, the rivalry is mismatched, for Donovan partisans have to reckon with the fact that he never took on anywhere near the mass cultural weight that Dylan did. I see that as an advantage though; unless you encounter them when you're rather young, I think it's difficult to develop an intimate, personal connection to Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde at this point in music history. Like trying to appreciate the Mona Lisa or a Van Gogh self-portrait, the iconic stature of the work can cause alienation, apathy, or even resentment. Despite being something of an emblem for the cliched flower-power '60s, Donovan, on the other hand, feels more available and his beautiful, charming music can still feel like a personal discovery.

*This interesting paper on the film argues that the song is actually directed at Joan Baez. That paper also led me to the Ebert quote, and, in a footnote, Baker points out that Donovan wrote many of the signs used in the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video, which calls the seriousness of their supposed rivalry into question. However, Baker's interpretation of that rivalry is that Donovan, along with Baez, is being set up by the film as a representative of the past that Dylan sheds and that the Dylan v. Donovan scene is an important part of establishing that narrative, one fully intended by the filmmakers.

** In Electric Eden, Rob Young claims that Donovan gave Vashti Bunyan the money to buy her famous gypsy wagon and horse, Bess; her travels with her partner in that wagon make up most of the subject matter of Just Another Diamond Day.

Ley Lines

2010-10-20T18:46:00.004-05:00

I'm not ready to completely shut this blog down, but I've started a new one, Ley Lines, on Tumblr, which I think is better suited for the short-attention-span style of blogging I've evolved/lapsed into. If I ever get back to writing super long posts again (I have a hilariously old draft of a Donovan post that I still hope to put up some time), I will probably put them here.

Recent Stuff I Like

2010-09-18T12:16:00.006-05:00

This Gold Panda song is a year old, but you can hear the entirety of his excellent new album on his website. So far almost all of my favorite albums from 2010 as well as many of the reissues have fallen under the perhaps pointlessly large umbrella of electronic music:

I chose that song as a cute segue to this song, "Raga Megh Malhar," from the 1982 album Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, which was recently reissued by Bombay Connection. With its Roland beats and basslines, this is something of a precursor to acid house. And while it likely didn't influence anyone in Chicago or Detroit, its prototechno qualities and its fidelity to classical Indian musical rules make a bizarre but compelling combination. Geeta Dayal wrote a good piece about the album here:

The Third Eye

2010-08-31T11:44:00.002-05:00

Remember* when this blog was all about nostalgia? Like lots of people born in the late 70s, one of the things I am distinctly nostalgic for is the children's television I was exposed to as a kid. Before the advent of YouTube, indulging in that nostalgic impulse entailed a lot of musings on the lines of "remember that one show about the thing? with the kids? and the creepy music?" That show about the thing with the kids was actually The Third Eye, an anthology collecting various creepy shows from unAmerica, and it was an early staple of my Nickelodeon viewing along with Today's Special, Danger Mouse, and Mr. Wizard. Hauntological blog Toys and Techniques has a nice rundown of the series plus lots of clips here.

*I think we can all agree that it took real heroism not to make a lame joke here.

Bailliwik Issue 08

2010-08-29T10:12:00.004-05:00

It occurs to me that somewhere there may be somebody I have neglected to mention this to: the website for the new issue of Bailliwik is up. Unfortunately, we've already sold all of our non-virtual copies, but enjoy the site, which was designed by the amazing Sujata.

New South African Music

2010-08-08T11:07:00.002-05:00

In typical Western hipster fashion, I know more about obscure '70s Afrobeat, Ethiopian jazz, and Congolese soukos* than I do about what people in Africa currently listen to--or as Wayne Marshall put it "African popular music that is, you know, actually popular (not just what might best fit outsiders' expectations of African difference)." Two new compilations of South African electronic dance music offer an exciting glimpse of what's going on right now.

*Not that I'm by any means an expert in any of those genres!

From Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa, on Honest Jon's and compiled by (Saint) Mark Ernestus of Basic Channel:

From Ayobaness! The Sound of South African House on the German label Out Here Records:

Healthy

2010-07-28T13:15:00.001-05:00

Oh, let's just embrace the youtube-only turn this blog has taken.

Wildlife

2010-07-14T22:11:00.001-05:00

One for Christina and Stephen:

Forever

2010-07-10T13:53:00.004-05:00

Not feeling very verbal these days, but you should all hear this song, "Reggae Is Here Once Again" from 1979. The group, Steel an' Skin, was made up of a bunch of British nightclub musicians of African and Caribbean descent who got together in the mid-'70s for a community project designed to introduce schoolchildren to the music and culture of their ancestors. Hitting the sweet spot in a Venn diagram of reggae, disco, and calypso, it's perfect for the weather:

In a Nutshell

2010-07-03T10:14:00.003-05:00

One can easily conclude that from any angle you care to look at it--left, right, whatever--American politics is a poorly scripted farce by reading this article.

R.I.P. Pete Quaife

2010-06-25T13:17:00.002-05:00

So Nice

2010-06-25T11:37:00.002-05:00

Jamaican music's unique ability to recycle its past while absorbing a totally unpredictable range of influences from other countries and cultures is an ongoing source of joy here at Elephant Rock. So it's no wonder that this week I became a little obsessed with the Cure riddim, which was created by a German dancehall crew in 2002 and voiced by a number of Jamaican artists. Here is Ce'Cile's "Rude Bwoy Thug Life":

You can here a louder version here; Vybz Kartel's harder, more aggressive, and dirtier take is here. I prefer Ce'Cile's more buoyant version, but you can appreciate the riddim's off-kilter wooziness better on that version (or try the instrumental). The sound quality on this one is bad, but Tanya Stephens' version even keeps a little of the horn section from the original.

Speaking of the original, The Cure's "Close to Me" was one of my favorite songs when I was seventeen, and it's still one of their best:

Watch That Man

2010-06-19T17:08:00.003-05:00

Rob Young's forthcoming book sounds fantastic:

This is a hugely enjoyable and persuasive account of "how British musicians and composers have drawn on an idea of folk, alongside a literary (or cinematic) sense of nostalgia and connection with the landscape, all of which feeds into an encompassing expression of Britain that Blake, at least, called 'visionary.'" Dipping in its pages is to be swept up into a story that connects artists as different as Vashti Bunyan and the Aphex Twin.

He also has a blog to go with the book; I really like the second poster here--might have to steal that for my certainly-not-mythical, ten-months-in-the-making post on Donovan.

I should have mentioned the blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame a while ago. This is another of those long-term, super comprehensive projects that I love. PAOTD is dedicated to discussing every single one of David Bowie's recorded songs, even the covers. I started reading it somewhere toward the end of the Hunky Dory songs, and while I haven't gone backwards into the archives, I've enjoyed following him (I think the author is a he) from there. I was already a little over familiar with the Ziggy Stardust songs, so the transition to Aladdin Sane has been a nice change. Not that I'm a stranger to that album, but I certainly never came to the conclusion that "Drive-In Saturday" is about how "a post-apocalyptic civilization, through fear or reactions from fallout, has forgotten how to have sex, so the kids watch Rolling Stones promos and old films to see how it was done" before. While being a Bowie fan is obviously a prerequisite for enjoying the blog, even if you're not an acolyte it's a good example of smart, educated music writing that you don't tend to see much.

Synchronicity

2010-06-16T18:38:00.004-05:00

Cartoonist James Sturm--whose work I admire a great deal--has been writing a column for Slate about not using the internet for four months. To be frank, it isn't the most interesting thing I've ever read, but I did find myself nodding emphatically at this passage:

In the two months since I've been unplugged, I have been experiencing more and more moments of synchronicity--coincidental events that seem to be meaningfully related. Today, after finishing the first phase of a graphic-novel project that is based on the life of a fictional member of the Weather Underground, I received in the mail an unsolicited copy of a graphic novel about teaching written by William Ayers. Earlier in the week, at the exact moment I started working on a drawing of a monkey (see above), Michael Chabon started talking about Planet of the Apes--I was listening to his audio book Manhood for Amateurs. I know this type of magical thinking is easily dismissed, but I keep having moments like this. So how do I explain it? Are meaningful connections easier to recognize when the fog of the Internet is lifted? Does it have to do with the difference between searching and waiting? Searching (which is what you do a lot of online) seems like an act of individual will. When things come to you while you're waiting it feels more like fate. Instant gratification feels unearned. That random song, perfectly attuned to your mood, seems more profound when heard on a car radio than if you had called up the same tune via YouTube.

When I was younger these kinds of moments really struck me. They were often thrilling or wonder-inducing, but for someone who wasn't raised within any religious tradition and was never instructed to believe in God, they were also slightly disconcerting: brief intimations that perhaps the cosmos wasn't entirely random after all; benevolent nudges from a God who would be wrathful if I died having ignored all these really obvious signs of his hand at work. As my unbending atheism was tempered by skepticism about human claims to knowledge and a desire to be more open-minded, I began to cherish synchronicity and I have missed its absence from my adult life. If I'd thought about it, I would probably have blamed its disappearance on the shrinking of one's imaginative possibilities for the world that accompanies adulthood, but I think Sturm is on to something here.

Hope

2010-06-16T12:02:00.004-05:00

This piece from the Daily Show that Glenn Greenwald posted on his blog handily refutes the idea that Obama has been better than Bush on civil liberties and the restoration of the rule of law. But as usual with Jon Stewart, it's a little cutesy and it could be a lot shorter (NSFW):

Catching Up

2010-06-10T12:09:00.004-05:00

Hello, I'm back from a lovely trip to Europe. I may bore you with a photo or two eventually.

Having been out of the country for over two weeks and having adopted my usual vacation policy of mostly ignoring the news, I've been only slowly catching up on various stories: the oil spill (luckily BP and the government are collaborating to ease my load on that score!), the destruction of the Gaza aid flotilla, and, today, the violence in Jamaica. The relationship between Kingston's gangs and Jamaica's two major political parties is complex and has a long history. I'm not remotely qualified to provide that history, but this interview at the Soundclash blog and this article from the NYT provide some good background as well as an indication of how difficult it will be to change the way things work in Kingston.

My brain is still readjusting to being in America, going to work, etc., so in lieu of anything more substantial from me, here are some things I enjoyed reading upon my return to the internet: Chris Ruen continues to do good work on the consequences of freeloading; here he addresses the rise of corporate patronage as a replacement for the traditional label-based music industry. Nitsuh Abebe wrote a great column on the furor over the New York Times profile of M.I.A. (and this post really made me want to seek out the recently deceased David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress). Glenn Kenny's consumer guide to recent blu-ray releases makes me want to rob a bank or at least acquire a blu-ray player.

Look: a meal I can make with complete confidence on Meals; For Moderns--this was also what I ate for lunch pretty much every day in Europe. Kathy took some great photos on her recent trip to Utah. One upshot of Arizona's descent into full-on lunacy is that Utah no longer holds the most-gorgeous-but-scary-state crown; congratulations Utah! I drained Weird Baby of color. And this funny post at the Soul Review features an amazing video of Ike and Tina Turner covering "Come Together".

Flying Lotus

2010-05-11T16:51:00.002-05:00

Andy Beta has a great interview with Stephen Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, up on his blog. I just got the new Lotus album Cosmogramma yesterday and have only managed to listen to it once, but on first impression it's one of a handful of amazing things I've heard so far in 2010*. The impression that I'd gotten from various reviews was that the album was overstuffed, dense, wearying--but I found it to be more spacey (Ellison has called it a "space opera") and airy than his previous album, Los Angeles. There's a '70s spiritual jazz quality to it that distinguishes it from the Dilla-esque beat density of Los Angeles (which is a great album too; I'm just surprised at the critical angle on Cosmogramma); it's more contemplative and introspective, and the Alice Coltrane connection that Beta delves into is abundantly evident.

I don't want to overstate the album's breezy qualities: the music is still heavily layered with lots of synth and cascades of processed beats; at times it reminded me a little of Aphex Twin's post-ambient stuff, though searching where Aphex is ironic. I wasn't surprised to read Ellison's response to a question about what Warp Records stuff he liked before they signed him: "I'd always loved the Broadcast stuff and obviously Aphex Twin, Squarepusher." The whole interview is good, especially if you're an Alice Coltrane fan.

*I've got a post listing everything I've liked so far this year (not necessarily from 2010) languishing in my drafts; it was originally called Quarterly Report, so maybe I'll end up doing a first half of 2010 list in June instead.

Thibault et l'arbre d'or

2010-05-09T10:47:00.003-05:00

One for Megan, who will no longer qualify for a long-distance dedication soon. This is from Emmanuelle Parrenin's 1977 album Maison Rose, which might show up in the favorite albums series at some point.

Dilettante Perfume Blenders

2010-05-05T14:23:00.007-05:00

"We are, in short . . . increasingly un-centred, un-moored, living day to day, engaged in an ongoing attempt to cobble together a credible, or at least workable, set of values, ready to shed it and work out another when the situation demands. I find myself enjoying this more, watching us all become dilettante perfume blenders, poking inquisitive fingers through a great library of ingredients and seeing which combinations make some sense for us--gathering experience--the possibility of making better guesses--without demanding certainty."--Brian Eno, quoted in David Toop's Ocean of Sound

One Year Later

2010-05-03T10:53:00.003-05:00

Elephant Rock began one year ago today. I'd be embarrassed to make too big a deal out of that, but I will say that a year ago I definitely did not expect this to last very long. Thank you all for reading and enjoy our theme song!

A Mere Fool Would Ignore This

2010-04-29T12:34:00.004-05:00

Unless you don't give a toss about your own life, you should watch this impressively morbid 1970s British public safety film featuring rather excellent voiceover narration from Donald Pleasance:

Found via this very good interview with Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle.

A Tábua De Esmeralda

2010-04-26T19:23:00.003-05:00

This may be the first in an occasional series of pieces on albums that I consider personal, perennial favorites.

Jorge Ben's 1974 album A Tábua De Esmeralda is a strikingly lovely example of Ben's charismatic singing and trademark fusion of styles. His beloved samba is the touchstone, but there are also strains of soul, rock, funk, and folk present. Tábua exemplifies one of the strengths of the album format: the power to evoke a particular mood over a long period of time--in this case, a kind of relaxed but stimulating bliss--and the album is notably sonically consistent. You might call it homogeneous or monotonous at first glimpse, except Ben's guitar playing is so beguiling and there are so many inspired details in the production and arrangements that the true unifying element in the sound of the record is ornate beauty, and why would you object to that?

A few of the tracks end by dissolving into gentle psychedelia: "O Homen Da Gravata Florida" gradually reverberates into the ether; "Errare Human Est" echoes off into space. While on others, the use of a small string section and chorus provides additional color, especially on "Zumbi", a song that Ben would radically revise as stomping funk for his equally stunning 1976 album África Brasil. The only outlier is "Brother", Ben's soulful testifying ode to Jesus and a rare instance of him singing in English. As is often the case when Brazilians sing in English, the result is a little goofy, but I find Ben's voice endlessly pleasing and the song has enough of the rest of the album's gently insinuating charm to carry it through (also his pronunciation of "music" as "music-y" is rather endearing). Another highlight is the album's final song, "Cinco Minutos (5 Minutos)", which features Ben's memorable falsetto.

Much to my recurring regret, I do not speak or read Portuguese, but I do think it's worth noting that even I can recognize that A Tábua De Esmeralda has some common themes. The title can be translated as The Emerald Tablet, which is the name of a foundational text for medieval alchemists as well as esoteric Christianity more broadly; this tablet is purported to be the work of Hermes Trismegistus, a figure (sometimes considered a deity, sometimes a man) from antiquity who has knowledge of alchemy, astrology, and magic and is name-checked here and on África Brasil. Some of these ideas and references recur in Ben's work, and while the language barrier is ultimately insurmountable for me, I do think even this shallow understanding of the subject matter helps partially explain the enchanting atmosphere on this brilliant album.

Listening notes: If you're in the U.S., you can listen to this on Lala, and Amazon and iTunes (and possibly other digital retailers) also have it for download. If you want a physical copy, Dusty Groove has it in stock, but like most Brazilian CDs these days, it's rather expensive at $22.

Short Story, Short Post

2010-04-23T13:00:00.002-05:00

My friend Ted has a great little short story (like, tiny) up here; you should read it.

Education Rock

2010-04-19T19:00:00.003-05:00

That last post ended up as more of a dry lecture than I'd hoped, though I think the idea has potential and I might return to it. But, like any teacher worried that he's strained the patience and attention spans of his students, now I'm going to play you a bunch of purportedly educational videos. Here are a few songs you can use to elucidate a variety of concepts in literary studies. Sadly the song that provided the title for this post isn't available on YouTube, but you can hear it on Lala.

Metaphor

Obviously a nearly infinite number of songs could illustrate this concept, but I find Bo's dedication to the "bucket = lover" metaphor in this song weirdly compelling.

Forced Rhyme

Internal Rhyme

I couldn't decide between these two songs, both of which are perfect examples of the odd way that internal rhyme is pleasurable to the ear.

Acrostic

Acronym

The Wu-Tang Clan are masters of the acronym; see also: Witty Unpredictable Talent And Natural Game, Criminals Robbing Innocent Motherfuckers Everytime, and Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.

Okay, school is over, go watch cartoons.

Terroir

2010-04-17T16:22:00.007-05:00

Terroir is a concept used by wine connoisseurs that I've often thought should take on wider application. It refers to the effects that the physical location of the grapes has on the finished bottle; as Wikipedia puts it "the special characteristics that geography bestow[s] upon particular varieties." For oenophiles, exploring terroir requires exacting analysis of soil quality and climate--all of which is beyond my limited knowledge of wine. But beyond geology and meteorology, there is a poetry to the idea: through the miracle of viniculture--a kind of alchemy or transubstantiation--by drinking a bottle from a specific corner of Bordeaux or Napa Valley or Mendoza, you're imbibing the place itself.

Terroir often comes to mind when I think about reggae. Reggae can be daunting for neophytes because the unique social and cultural circumstances that led to its development and continue to influence it are quite different from the models of music production we're used to in the rest of the Anglophone world. One of the difficulties is figuring out a point of entry: reggae is collected and classified in different and confusing fashions. Since Jamaica has always been primarily a singles-driven market, you can find compilations based around singers, groups, producers, engineers, backing bands, labels, studios, and theme (though I would steer well clear of those). Adding to the confusion: sometimes the backing bands are the same group of musicians in slightly different configurations; the number of singers or groups with one single who are never heard from again is countless; some producers simply ran the business end of things and had little impact on the sound of the records they produced; lots of singles appeared and reappeared on different labels; and so on.

However, certain studios have such a distinct sound that experienced listeners can identify them immediately, and if you like that sound, it's possible to enjoy nearly every piece of music made there. There are a number of studios that could be said to exhibit terroir, but I'm going to talk about two very different places: Studio One and Wackie's.

Studio One

Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's Studio One is a giant in the history of reggae, easily the most famous studio and record label in Jamaica. The rhythms made there in the late 1960s and early 1970s are foundational to Jamaican music and are still revived today (see this old post for an example of what I'm talking about). When the studio was reopened in the late '70s after a period of dormancy, it played a significant role in changing the music again as the roots sound transitioned into dancehall. That reopening was a direct response to the fact that most of the popular rhythms at the time were being recycled from Studio One's heyday (Channel One's name wasn't a coincidence). Ska, the music that launched indigenous Jamaican music, began there, and the studio remained massively important through the rocksteady and roots years. But apart from decisively shaping about fifteen years of the music's development, it is the trademark sound of records from Studio One--primarily a product of the engineer and the equipment--that makes them so special.

It's a little difficult to say what exactly that "sound" is, but the most obvious factor is the legendarily heavy bass sound. Like many Jamaican studios, Studio One grew out of Dodd's work as a soundsystem operator. Jamaican audiences were used to the intense levels of bass the soundsystems pumped into the open-air dancehalls, so when Jamaicans first began recording their music, the engineers recorded the bass at levels their counterparts in the U.S. or UK would have considered way too high. Sylvan Morris, the main engineer at Studio One, went even further.

As detailed in Michael Veal's book Dub, Morris built a special box to record the bass sounds coming out of the back of the speakers and used an equalizer that further boosted the low end of his recordings. The result is that the bass is usually the most prominent sound in any given Studio One record, a warm, deep, and physical sound that is hugely different from any American or British music until hip-hop or techno, both of which are clearly indebted to reggae.

Other elements added to the signature sound of the studio, including a tape-based echo unit named the Soundimension (a name the Studio One house band adopted as their own) and less tangible factors like the amazing speed with which new recordings were made, the tight-knit nature of the main musicians, and the inventiveness of keyboardist Jackie Mittoo who created many of the most enduring Studio One rhythms before emigrating to Canada in the late '60s.

Wackie's

Another label-studio combination, Wackie's was founded in the Bronx by Lloyd "Bullwackie" Barnes in the mid-1970s. Barnes was born in Kingston in 1945 and emigrated to New York in 1967. Like Dodd, Barnes began as a soundsystem operator, but, again like many Jamaican sounds before his, Barnes eventually decided the gang violence that dances inevitably attracted wasn't worth the risk. According to this brief history: "after picking some bullets out of a speaker after a party he decided to give up the soundsystem business." And so, Barnes, who had been a backup singer in Jamaica, switched directions and began producing, recording, and distributing music made by a small group of fellow immigrants in the Bronx as well as Jamaican artists--Horace Andy and Sugar Minott both recorded some of their finest work there--passing through town.

Easily the most significant producer of reggae in the U.S., Wackie's has, until recently, been mostly ignored. This has something to do with the indelible connection between the UK and Jamaica overshadowing reggae made elsewhere, but the biggest factor is the limited quantities the records were pressed in. Nonetheless, those rare records found their way to Germany where they played a large role in the development of dub techno, exemplified by Basic Channel and Pole. Basic Channel in turn has reissued a huge portion of the Wackie's catalog, reintroducing their music to a global audience and bringing these records more attention than they could have possibly had when they were originally released.

The Wackie's sound is even more distinctive than Studio One's--even songs recorded elsewhere and then mixed at Wackie's bear the studio's unmistakable fingerprints. Those fingers mostly belong to Douglas Levy, the studio's main engineer (as much as I like this terroir idea, obviously this piece is a testament to the unsung role of the engineer), who as Prince Douglas made perhaps my favorite Wackie's release, Dub Roots. The influence of Lee Perry's maximalist approach to recording and dubbing--as opposed to King Tubby's process of subtraction--is pretty obvious, but the Wackie's sound is nonetheless singular. Almost alone among dub mixers, Levy often treated the bass guitar with effects, creating a psychedelic, liquid bass sound that is disorienting compared to the heartbeat/pulse-like role the bass usually takes in reggae. This rubbery bass combined with the heavily processed sound of the other instruments and early adoption of a variety of synthesizers and effects units gives some Wackies productions a proto-digital quality--I can see why they would have appealed to German techno heads since they often remind me of the electronic side of krautrock (Cluster and Harmonia) as much as of their Jamaican counterparts.

Other distinct elements include a very flat, usually phased drum sound, huge amounts of echo, simple guitar lines that aren't far from the wiry post-punk sound being played in downtown Manhattan* at the same time, and a general dubwise approach to the production. Ultimately, though the sound is ineffable; it's as much a mood as a recognizable set of sonic signifiers.

*Wackie's location in the Bronx leads people to wonder whether you can hear a New York influence in the records, especially with hip-hop being born at the same time in the same borough. Ultimately, I don't really hear it on a literal level, but there is an urban coldness to Wackie's productions that could reflect the concrete, high-rises, and winters of the American ghetto.

Terroir Postscript

I've given a lot of credit to the engineers here, mostly because they put the final stamp on any recording that passes through their hands (I suppose you could make arguments for mastering services and pressing plants--and there are some famous examples of the latter that people claim have identifiable effects on the finished records) and they are often ignored. But the reason terroir appeals to me as an apt metaphor for musical production is the constellation of factors that influence recording a song in a room: the musicians, instruments, recording equipment, the producer, the engineer, and the acoustics of the room itself. I've focused on reggae studios because I'm more steeped in it than other genres--though the big omission here is Lee Perry's Black Ark--but there are plenty of other good cases, including Hitsville, Muscle Shoals, the Van Gelder Studio, and Abbey Road.

[Obviously I don't agree with some of the narration in that clip!]

Mr. Hauntologylisationalism Is the Boss

2010-04-16T15:36:00.002-05:00

There appears to be a resurgence of interest in hauntology afoot. Or perhaps it's more of a consolidation of interest, a recognition of the idea/genre as not merely a trendy buzzword but one of the defining themes of the past ten years or so, bringing together concepts such as nostalgia, media technology, decay, and memory. This old-ish post on the Wire's blog is something of a Rosetta stone for the concept, touching on some important online writing about the topic as well as linking to most of the major groups and musicians usually considered hauntological.

If reading about hauntology doesn't interest you then you should at least start downloading Jon Brooks' affable Cafe Kaput podcasts. Brooks is better known as Ghost Box artist The Advisory Circle, whose wonderful Other Channels is probably my favorite record from the label and whose Mind How You Go has just been reissued. Brooks' podcasts feature tracks from a wide range of music genres and periods--even advertising jingles--but much of it is drawn from '60s library music records and soundtracks, so they're very current for their time and yet totally obscure, giving you the uncanny sensation of hearing pop hits from an alternative timeline.

BodyWorld

2010-04-13T12:23:00.001-05:00

Here is a mesmerizing trailer for Dash Shaw's recently published BodyWorld, which was originally a webcomic:

I didn't get very far into BodyWorld in its online incarnation. I don't think that's necessarily a reflection on the work; so far the few webcomics that I've enjoyed all follow a more-or-less basic gag strip format or a fairly linear narrative structure. BodyWorld gives the impression of being a lot more complex, even dauntingly so, but the print version looks stunning, and the ambition of Shaw's hefty Bottomless Belly Button paid off surprisingly well so I'm quite looking forward to reading this soon.

Sunday in the Park

2010-04-11T11:13:00.003-05:00

Dois por Christina. Do click that link if you haven't visited in a while; earlier this year her site was beautifully redesigned and updated with a bunch of great new photos, especially in the Greenpoint section.

Here's Gilberto Gil performing "Domingo no Parque" ("Sunday in the Park") with Os Mutantes as his backing band:

And here he is solo in 1972 performing "Expresso 2222" after returning from two years of political exile in London; you can feel the intense joy and energy of his return to Brazil in both his performance and the audience's :

Have a nice Sunday, Christina!

Dickensian

2010-04-10T18:23:00.003-05:00

Anyone interested in writing should go subscribe to Jane Espenson's blog right now. Until a few days ago it had been dormant for over a year, so I'm very pleased she has started it back up again. If you're not familiar with Espenson, she is a highly experienced TV writer and producer. I first encountered her work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (where she wrote series highlights like "Band Candy" and "A New Man"), but she has a pretty amazing range of credits from Gilmore Girls to Battlestar Galactica.

Her blog is aimed at aspiring TV writers, but anyone who writes anything--especially comedy--could benefit from her advice. Her current post is about how when movies transitioned into sound, a huge number of new writers were needed to provide dialogue and that many of them were either novelists or journalists. I think her conclusions are basically sound, though I couldn't help but think of The Wire, which included novelists George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane on its writing staff. Of course, series creator David Simon is famously a journalist, but I think this combination is what made the show so special. Simon's journalist past (not to mention the journalistic tendencies of this particular group of novelists) informed the show's naturalism, while the novelists' scope and foresight helped the show develop the rich depth over five seasons that has secured its current place as the consensus choice for greatest TV series thus far.

Act Now, Supplies Are Limited

2010-04-09T14:08:00.005-05:00

This has been a thrilling week for people who enjoy depressing news--so much so that I'm not sure where to start. I could make this an Even More On That Video post by linking to John Caruso's sickening collection of quotes and stories illuminating the military frame of mind. Or I could point to this Glenn Greenwald column that features this quote from the commander of the war in Afghanistan: "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force." Perhaps I should say something about this study that found that 32% of the people killed by drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004 were civilians? But I think we can all rest easy in the conviction that that policy won't have any long-term repercussions.

Or we could talk about the totally unsurprising revelation (from a former aide to Colin Powell) that "George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror." And that "the majority of detainees--children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said--never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken."

Then there's the genuinely surprising news that Los Angeles County now leads the nation in death penalty convictions. But there's some good news about a general decline in death sentences included in that editorial, so that won't work for our purposes. But here's something: "the Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen," meaning that the Obama administration has just sentenced someone to death without a trial. I know there was a lot of excitement around Obama's election, but we didn't actually make him the King, did we? If I missed that, I apologize.

Cripes! I am sorry that I just ruined your day, especially since it's Friday and it's very sunny here in Chicago. Here's something that will cheer you up: you, yes you, can own this inspirational poster for the low price of $15.00! I have seen this thing in all four dimensions and the art and the timeless sentiment expressed by this odd infant are very much worth your money.

Bodies

2010-04-06T14:15:00.006-05:00

There was a puzzling wave of back-patting about Iraq a few weeks ago triggered by the recent elections. This purple finger phenomenon (essentially: now that Iraqis have voted, the entire war, the lies used to justify our invading a sovereign nation, and the many lives lost for it are all completely vindicated--indeed, ennobled--forever) was a routine occurrence on the right during the Bush years, but I was surprised to see a form of the argument still being made. Conservative columnist Daniel Larison had a thoughtful response; IOZ had a more vitriolic but also persuasive point.

In 2010 congratulating ourselves on what we did to Iraq is as intellectually dishonest and morally repugnant as hoping Iraq devolves into chaos to prove that you were right to oppose the war in the first place. For the sake of the actual human beings who live in Iraq, I hope for the best possible outcome from our unjustifiable invasion of their country, but I also hope the smug hawks read stories like this one about a study that reveals that "Iraqi children born in the most violent areas are shorter than those born in other parts of the country." And I hope they watch the video below of an attack in 2007 in Baghdad where U.S. soldiers in helicopters killed a group of men, including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two children who were in a van that arrived later to help the wounded. Here is a Reuters article about the video and its long-delayed release.

By the way, I completely understand if you'd rather not watch this video; I avoided it when it crossed my radar yesterday. And yet the worst thing about it is that there's nothing all that shocking in it--you hear some chillingly heartless comments from the soldiers, but in some ways (since I don't personally know any of the victims ) the most horrifying thing is how banal the incident is, how routine it is for these soldiers to fly around exterminating people from above, and how quickly they can justify possibly having murdered children.

Hero

2010-03-30T18:15:00.001-05:00

One for Stephen:

Sibling Rivalry

2010-03-24T12:04:00.005-05:00

For years both of my siblings have copied me in every way imaginable. While their relentless drive to imitate my every move, decision, or whim has been flattering, one flaw in their program of utter slavishness has stuck in my craw a little: their irritating failure to fail to develop artistic talent. So while clearly I--and I alone--inspired them both to take to the internet, instead of commenting on music and politics, they're posting the fruits of their annoyingly talented minds.

My sister Kathy has just started a Tumblr, The Hunt Domain, to share her photographs; see above for one topical example--there are also some great images from her trip to Thailand, feline portraits, and more. While Simon has uploaded some of his films, which include a charming animation, my film "acting" debut, and one of my favorite things that he's done, a hilarious and unsettling three-part collage of weird, old film strips. Here is part 1:

pt.1 I have been soiled from Simon Hunt on Vimeo.

Signs

2010-03-23T13:21:00.003-05:00

Over at The Freeload, Chris Ruen picks up on an absolutely telling image from the Republican response to the passage of the health care bill:

Republican members of Congress egged on protesters (only a few hundred) from the balcony of the Capitol, holding signs which read "Kill The Bill." During a non-synchronized moment, only one of the Congressmen held up his particular sign.

There he stood in a symbolic moment, looking out before the treasures of the National Mall, waving a sign that simply read, "Kill."

That's pretty much perfect, isn't it?

Shoegaze

2010-03-20T10:20:00.003-05:00

Excellent post by Nitsuh Abebe on shoegaze, the music that dominated my young life for a few years. I don't listen to much of this stuff anymore--mostly because it's so firmly entwined with memories of my adolescence that it pretty much immediately sends me into a nostalgic or melancholy reverie--but I'm glad it hasn't entirely dropped out of the musical discourse. For a while after its popularity waned, it was quite fashionable to be really contemptuous of this stuff--with My Bloody Valentine's Loveless always serving as the forward-thinking exception that made obvious the supposed shortcomings of similar groups. These attacks sometimes had a real aggro, masculine thrust to them, which I never quite understood.

But Abebe nails it in his piece and I think this explains the music's appeal to my teenage self: this is music about confusion, a kind of confusion that is specifically resonant for young people who often feel powerful and powerless at the same time. Grand emotions; major rites of passage; life having an immediacy and beauty to it, qualities which for the first time you might realize can be fleeting--these are things shoegaze captures through sheer sonic force (which is good since it's mostly impossible to understand the lyrics) while also offering catharsis and comfort. It's music for and of a delicious but delirious kind of swooning. Here is an old favorite, Slowdive's "Catch the Breeze", the way this ends is still pretty stunning to me:

Lies These Cretins in Texas Told Me

2010-03-15T19:51:00.003-05:00

Friends who have recently procreated or plan to do so in the future, I hope you are following the Texas social studies textbook standards story, one of the more depressing indications that the religious right's stranglehold on this country hasn't completely relaxed and that their medieval* views still have the potential to harm future generations. Hopefully James Loewen can be called upon to publish a new edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me, so parents can at least try to counter this nonsense at home. Washington Monthly has a good story on the whole sad history of textbooks and Texas; the New York Times has the tragic ending. Read those for dispassionate analysis, I'm going to pull some choice quotes from both articles out of context so I can feel better about these people having so much power:

"This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook," grumbled David Bradley, an insurance salesman with no college degree.

"Let's face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation," said one conservative member, Terri Leo. "You know, 'capitalist pig!'"

"Remember Superman?" he asked me, as we sat sipping ice water in his dining room. "The never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way? Well, that fight is still going on. There are people out there who want to replace truth with political correctness. Instead of the American way they want multiculturalism."

You know what? I do remember Superman: he is a fucking alien from another planet you sad, sick little man.

*No offense to the people of the medieval period who embraced their ignorance with somewhat less erotic fervor.

Thrown Like a Star

2010-03-13T09:39:00.001-06:00

One for Forest:

I'm Cleaning My Brain

2010-03-11T18:29:00.003-06:00

How come no one ever told me that The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads is a total monster, a serious masterpiece, like one of the best live albums ever made? Seriously, it makes Stop Making Sense look positively lightweight in comparison--and I love Stop Making Sense. I'm sure today's spring weather was a major factor too, but upon hearing this for the first time it took real strength not to run out of my office, hijack a car, and drive around playing it as loudly as possible.

Barney Chew Your Neck Like a Wrigley's

2010-03-09T10:38:00.005-06:00

First in a series. A long-distance dedication to Laura:

Zero Tolerance

2010-03-07T16:26:00.007-06:00

In an alternate universe this blog would focus exclusively on capital punishment and the war on drugs. (I am really fun to be around in that universe.) But in the interest of my own mental health, I try not to devote myself to cataloging stories like this one about how a middle school suspended a seventh-grader for a week for touching a pill--a pill that she had been offered and refused (found via). Even worse than the insanity of punishing people for doing exactly what they're constantly harangued to do is the infuriating illogic employed by the school's administrators who can do no wrong in the holy war against drugs:

"According to Greater Clark County Schools district policy, even a touch equals drug possession and a one week suspension. 'The fact of the matter is, there were drugs on school campus and it was handled, so there was a violation of our policy,' said Martin Bell, COO of Greater Clark County Schools. We wanted to know what would have happened if Rachael had told a teacher right away. Bell said the punishment would not have been any different. District officials say if they're not strict about drug policies no one will take them seriously."

Yes, I'm sure that now Rachael knows drug policies are applied without any sense of reason entering into the equation, she will take them much more seriously, especially the only good lesson to be learned here: don't snitch.

Pictured above: artist's rendering of the chain of evidence (taken from Wikipedia).

A Random Juxtaposition

2010-03-06T09:57:00.003-06:00

Weird life (via):

"Mono Lake, a basin with no outlet, has built up over many millennia one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth. Dr Wolfe-Simon is investigating whether, in the mud around the lake or in the water, there exist microbes whose biological make-up is so fundamentally different from that of any known life on Earth that it may provide proof of a shadow biosphere, a second genesis for life on this planet."(full)

Purple life (via):

Fun For a Girl Or a Boy

2010-03-05T09:18:00.005-06:00

I plan to post something more substantive soon (I think I wrote more in N.C.'s comment box for this post than I have here in a month), but here are a bunch of links I've been wanting to share.

A couple of my favorite comics artists have started blogs. Here is Renee French's simple, beautiful, super creepy blog; I've taken the image on the left from it. And here is John Porcellino's. As you can see if you click over there, JP will be on a panel at the Comic Symposium of Chicago on March 11. Surabhi Ghosh will also be on a panel for this event and you can read more details about it here.

My friend Stickyfingers (which may not be her real name) has finally given me permission to make her blog public. It's called Life in Boom City and it's a haunting tour of the underbelly of that notorious den of iniquity and haven for the insane, Minneapolis. From what I hear it's a lot like Renee French designed the place.

Ed's Tumblr

2010-02-27T09:58:00.001-06:00

More link hectoring. Go check out Ed Panar's tumblr--currently my cat Rafi, looking rather imperial, is the first photo.

Palin and Hummers II

2010-02-24T18:11:00.004-06:00

Hopefully my previous linking of Sarah Palin with Hummers means that GM's forthcoming shuttering of the SUV line bodes ill for the former governor. Then again, is it possible to sink lower than being a political commentator for Fox News?

Also, go check out my friend Nick's new blog, Coming Up for Air. He's already blogging at a positively alarming rate, throwing around words like "mountebank" willy-nilly. I'm sure he will appreciate being included in this, one of my more thoughtful posts.

The Pop World Cup

2010-02-19T18:28:00.003-06:00

Go check out--and vote in--Freaky Trigger's 2010 Pop World Cup, which is both fun and educational. This non-sports (er, I suppose that should be "sport") fan doesn't always understand the hilariously elaborate football/soccer metaphors, but this is still a fantastic way to hear music from all over the world. While I voted for Algeria, I don't know that I'd ever heard any music from Slovenia before that. And both Uruguay and Paraguay? I can name about four bands from either country, so I'm hoping they go far.

Day Jobs

2010-02-12T16:49:00.002-06:00

In a post about the folding of hip-hop label Def Jux, journalist/blogger Jeff Weiss notes: "I’m not sure if rap is going through a crisis right now. There is a lot of good music being made, but no one seems to be getting paid. It’s become a favor-based economy where there is no pot of gold in the end and rather, just money selling pot (many of my interviews end with offers. I’m saving names for the book deal)."

Even if he's exaggerating, that is one sad anecdote. I remember gradually realizing, when I was younger and just starting to explore current music outside of the mainstream, that most of the indie musicians I liked probably had to have day jobs. Of course, back then many of those jobs may have involved working at record stores, labels, recording studios, and other places tied to the viability of the music industry. As Weiss says, this doesn't spell the end of music--one thing I do agree with freeloaders about: there is a lot of music out there--but it does signal a coarsening of our culture. We're entering a situation where musicians and many other creative workers can't even earn supplemental income from their work. Of course, we're already in a situation where lots of workers don't have any income at all, and real wages have been in decline since the 1970s--obviously there are systemic problems with the economy and the baffling iteration of capitalism under which we live--but I shudder to imagine a future where very few people can dedicate their lives to making the world more beautiful, wondrous, or strange.

Marcello Carlin Rocks, But Gently

2010-02-08T10:52:00.003-06:00

Remember my profession of love for blogs that take the form of ambitious, slightly crazy long-term projects? If you share my ardor, then click over to Then Play Long, Marcello Carlin's blog wherein he plans to review "every UK number one album so that you might want to hear it."

I've only just discovered this, but thus far I've quite enjoyed the epochal '60s-into-'70s run of Abbey Road to Let It Bleed to Led Zeppelin II. Carlin deserves some kind of medal for not making those entries nauseating Boomer nostalgia trips--I certainly didn't think I wanted to read another lengthy piece on Abbey Road at this point in my life, but it's great. Two of his strategies pay off particularly well: 1) genuine musicological analysis deployed with a light touch and 2) frequent, surprising comparisons with music from much different eras: in one sentence about "Whole Lotta Love" he manages to reference both Eric B and Derek Bailey. Still, I'm almost more intrigued by the (previously completely unknown to me) likes of Val Doonican's Val Doonican Rocks, But Gently, which is a phrasing I expect to gain currency immediately.

Freeloading

2010-02-07T18:56:00.004-06:00

I suspect it's way too late, but it's reassuring to finally see some serious questions being asked by non-corporate music people about file-sharing. I've often thought about bringing this issue up as it's something I feel strongly about and find the attitudes of fellow music fans on this subject to be puzzling and immensely disappointing.

I haven't addressed it before because I find the pro-file-sharing camp to be incoherent and illogical. Reading the comments to this typically asinine Matthew Yglesias post*, I found this absurdly misleading (or perhaps 'willfully naive,' but I doubt it) article in the UK Times that purports to prove--with shiny graphs!--that musicians are faring better in the new system and only rapacious middleman labels are feeling the deserved pinch. Luckily some actual musicians post responses in the comments pointing out that lumping in, say, the Rolling Stones' annual windfall of concert money with what some indie band makes on a Monday night gig distorts the picture way past the point of universal applicability.

*I'm not an economist, but is Yglesias really suggesting that music should be free because (he claims) distribution costs are zero? He cannot possibly be that stupid, right?

Chris Ruen asks most of the questions I also have about what he aptly terms "freeloading." The people so anxious to dismantle copyright entirely and, more perniciously, defend file-sharing to any lengths always make me wonder: Why does the end of capitalism have to begin with music? When Eric Harvey writes in his "The Social History of the MP3" on Pitchfork that "there is nothing inherent or natural about paying for music, and the circulation of mp3s through unsanctioned networks reaffirms music as a social process driven by passion, not market logic or copyright," does he stop to compose a mental list of commodities that inherently demand to be part of a market system? Is it "natural" to pay for a book? For food? Why does Verizon deserve hundreds of dollars of my money every year, but the people who make music I love (and that could include not only the musicians, but anyone involved with the recording and even those who paid for the recording to happen) should settle for being appreciated?

Suddenly declaring that music--or "information" as the pro-file-sharers see it in their sterile view, pretty much making my point for me--should be completely free is a massive overreaction to corporate tyranny. And again, all this rage against The Labels makes me wonder: were music conglomerates (not to mention the independents, record stores, etc.) really the corporations that most needed to be brought to their knees? Disney repeatedly manipulating copyright legislation to ensure their characters not entering the public domain is despicable and troubling, but why not redirect that outrage towards, for example, KBR? Given that Disney's control of this issue hasn't been set back one bit, one might almost be moved to wonder whether "fighting copyright" is a rhetorical fig leaf for people just wanting music for free.

Ruen's point that "file-sharing" is in no way an act of genuine sharing is also damning. Harvey's quasi-mystical take--to be fair: in contrast to its introduction, the whole piece is more balanced and informative, especially with regards to the epic mishandling of events by the RIAA and their lawyers--crosses the line into pure fantasy when he writes "in the same way that Facebook visually represents 'having friends,' the mp3s coursing through file-sharing networks quantify the online social life of music by charting its path." I suppose he might be right in that my having a Facebook page only distantly connects to my having people in my life I consider friends, but that's obviously not the reading he's going for.

This kind of techno-utopianism feels like a relic of the silly hyperbole that characterized the late 1990s new economy/internet bubble. But just as the bursting of that bubble eventually resolved itself into Web 2.0 and our increasingly online lives, techno-utopianism has been so completely folded into the fabric of the internet in 2010 that anyone casting a critical eye on any of the deeply ugly, antisocial features of the Web is usually immediately dismissed as a crank, an elitist, or a neo-Luddite. As near as it is to my own heart, the damage done to the value we place on music is in some ways a relatively minor casualty of the ascendancy of the Web.

Big Brown Lozenges

2010-01-18T11:18:00.006-06:00

My brother has put the film he and Sara made together a couple of years ago online. It's called Perennial and is a beautiful meditation on nature and a year in their life spent walking around Chicago (and Georgia) filming water and leaves and snow and ducks. Apparently there is a sequel in the works. I'm addicted to embedding, but you can see a larger version on the Vimeo site.

Perennial from Simon Hunt on Vimeo.

Simon would have to confirm this, but I think that might be my autoharp making a cameo on the soundtrack. Not played by me of course, but surely this justifies an associate producer credit!

Dust Out A Sound Boy

2010-01-18T10:26:00.011-06:00

I can't seem to stop embedding things this month (got another one after this). Originally I was going to just post this song with little commentary, but then it struck me as an elegant illustration of Jamaican music's implicit argument against copyright. Recorded sometime in the early 1990s, Super Beagle's "Dust Out a Sound Boy" uses the famous Stalag rhythm. If you're unfamiliar with the term 'rhythm' (also spelled phonetically as riddim, but I will never be comfortable doing that), we're more or less talking about the music that backs the vocal, especially the bassline melody. Rhythms are endlessly recycled in reggae and there are some that are more than forty years old that are still in use; Stalag is from 1974 and was originally produced by Winston Riley, who also produced Super Beagle's take.

The infinite creativity of the rhythm phenomenon is already an argument against copyright; though the penury of all but a very small number of people in the JA music business should give pause to anti-copyright activists looking to idealize the situation. Super Beagle complicates the situation even further by basing his vocal melody on perhaps the most famous rhythm of all, Real Rock, and borrowing the lyrical structure from perhaps the most famous version of that rhythm, Willie Williams's "Armagideon Time". Non-reggae fans might know that song from The Clash's cover of Williams's classic, which was recorded in 1980 at Studio One where the original "Real Rock" was recorded thirteen years earlier by Studio One's house band Sound Dimension. Somewhat to my surprise, the New York Times has a nice little history of Real Rock here.

So, in addition to serving as argument against taking an overly assiduous approach to enforcing copyright, "Dust Out a Sound Boy" also encapsulates what can be both daunting and fascinating about trying to ground yourself in the history of Jamaican music--and I didn't even explain what a 'sound boy' is or who Fuzzy Jones, whose voice you hear introducing the song, is.

R.I.P. Vivian Jackson

2010-01-13T11:03:00.003-06:00

Dance Crasher is reporting the very sad news that reggae producer/singer Vivian Jackson, aka Yabby You, has died. As a fan of many musicians who were active in the 1970s, it feels like one of my idols passes away every month or so, though, given the depressing number of Jamaican artists who died at a young age, part of me is mostly grateful that they got to live long enough to see their legacy shown some appropriate reverence. Jackson was a relatively unsung producer until the now sadly defunct Blood & Fire label began reissuing his work. Their Jesus Dread compilation--the name derives from Jackson's unique religious outlook which combined elements of Rastafarianism with more orthodox Christian beliefs--is one of the very best releases in B&F's peerless discography.

Here is "Conquering Lion" from 1972; the chorus gave Jackson his nickname.

I also quite like Big Youth's deejay version on the same rhythm. And this King Tubby dub version of "No Tarry Yah" sung by Tony Tuff is another favorite.

Bridge Carols

2010-01-09T15:58:00.003-06:00

It won't be out until February 9, but below you can listen to the new album, Bridge Carols, from Laura Gibson and Ethan Rose (you can preorder the album and download an mp3 on their site). Beautiful and bewitching, the album is the evocative result of Laura's lovely, haunting voice being processed through and juxtaposed with Ethan's electro-acoustic sorcery.

As some of you already know, Ethan is an old friend of mine--though I've been woefully inadequate at staying in touch with him the last couple of years--and even when we were young teenagers I had a hunch he was some kind of genius. His other albums are all excellent too, and it breaks my heart that I was never able to make it to Transference, his amazing-looking collaboration with glass artist Andy Paiko at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR.

More Good News

2010-01-04T15:15:00.003-06:00

I can't honestly say I have the background to fully understand the implications of the American Law Institute's decision to cease its support for the death penalty, but this New York Times article sure makes it sound pretty momentous: "What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken."

In less important news, the MPAA has absolved itself of over forty years of sinning by being instrumental in not making me see a computer-generated alien sex scene (in 3-D!) in Avatar. Okay, this is of a piece with the MPAA's generally depressing stance that it's bad for teenagers to see people have sex with each other but super awesome to see them die violently, but still: in this one instance, I think they might actually have been right.

Year's End

2009-12-31T14:04:00.013-06:00

I apologize for the biliousness of the previous post, but those dark thoughts are hard to resist as the media over the past few months has been obsessed with looking back on 2009 and, more depressingly, the decade as a whole, an era that is striking in its colossal rankness. Not culturally--this was a fertile time for the formerly despised mediums of television and comics and there were lots of bright spots elsewhere--and not for me personally, I should point out, but I do think there's a very good chance the '00s will be seen by historians as a nadir, a terrible hybrid of swamp and plateau (at least in the U.S.).

I've lost count of the ridiculous number of lists I've read, and I've mentally composed and then discarded several posts responding to them. I almost started a few months ago with Pitchfork's hilariously early top 200 list which struck me as telling in many ways: an easy-to-predict top 10 heavily slanted to the first couple years of the decade and just enough mainstream choices to distill the slightly self-conscious way this decade's "indie" fans embraced certain pop, rap, and r'n'b acts; I wonder if country will be added to that list in the next decade. If you wanted to attempt the should-be-difficult task of arguing that this decade sucked for music, ironically that list would be a great place to start--though I suppose arguing that Pitchfork itself sucks was a major pop cultural meme this decade--reading through it I could feel a great shrug gripping me; if the '70s was the Me Decade, this one might have been the Meh Decade (I'm sure I'm not the first to come up with that phrase).

Even beyond the ennui inspired by that particular list, reading lots of them* has a mind-numbing effect nicely summed up in this piece from Dusted, and I quite like Ben Tausig's conclusion: "There is no reason to abandon year-end lists, but there is every reason to reform them. For the sake of readers, critics shouldn’t get away with writing lazy features, of which the album-of-the-year list has become exemplary."

*I know: no one is making me read them . . . but they're like junk food for geeks and even after reading that first Dusted piece, I read or skimmed almost all the other lists they posted.

His made-up examples struck a chord with me as I've just read the new collection of John Porcellino's King-Cat comics, Map of My Heart. Porcellino is one of my favorite comics creators and deserves a lengthy post of his own, and one of the more minor but affecting elements of his minicomics is his tendency to include top 10 or top 40 lists that are really just lists of things he enjoyed during the time period covered by the comic. So he includes lots of records and books, but also his cat, his wife, places he visited, etc. With cultural critics and writers I respect, this would be much, much more interesting (The Wire's individual writer lists in their annual "Rewind" issue--usually presented as lists of pros and cons--come close) and truer to one's own experience over the course of a year. When I was younger and thought keeping abreast of the zeitgeist was an intellectual responsibility, I probably could have come up with a top 10 list of records for the year, but I doubt I bought ten albums released, rather than reissued, in 2009, whereas I probably did pick up close to ten from 1968. So here is my top 10 list for 2009:

1. The Sixties
For some reason--obviously I was thinking a great deal about nostalgia, but I don't think it's that--this year I became more interested in music from the (late) '60s than I have been since I was a teenager who only listened to classic rock. It began with the Kinks, who I'd been meaning to figure out for years. Listening to their run of amazing albums from Face to Face to Lola* was a major revelation, especially the justly celebrated The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and the unjustly overlooked Arthur: Or, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. Then, over the summer, I fell in love with Donovan; I've already mentioned a germinating post on him and that might actually happen if I can resolve a four-month dispute with the lobotomized monkeys at Barnes & Noble.com who are preventing me from getting my hands on his excellent The Hurdy Gurdy Man album. Much like the Kinks, "discovering" a band as monumental as the Byrds felt a little foolish, but getting past their major hits--the ones guaranteed to be on the soundtrack of any movie about the '60s--their blend of psychedelia, folk, country, and rock is probably America's best claim to their own Beatles, see especially The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Speaking of the Beatles, I got the mono box set for my birthday and it's been a pure pleasure spending time with the music that first made me think about music as music.

*My friend Stephen has been urging me to pick up Muswell Hillbillies for almost a year now and I still haven't, but based on my one listen to it, I'm tempted to add that to the list.

I'm also about halfway through Joe Boyd's excellent memoir White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s. Boyd is most famous for his production work with the leading lights of the British folk scene, including Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band, and Vashti Bunyan, but he's also one of those people uniquely gifted with being at the right place at the right time: everything from working for the Newport Folk Festival during Dylan's notorious plugged-in performance to learning how to eat mussels from Freddie Hubbard in Barcelona ("Well, go on, man, suck the motherfucker!"). Boyd's voice is charming, funny, and refreshingly humble; his account is also largely free of the Baby Boomer sentimentality that makes so many younger people reflexively dismiss the '60s as overrated or painfully naive--Boyd avoids that latter charge by being quietly wise on issues of race and class and having very broad ears.

2. Early '80s Dancehall
If I'd done this list last year, late '80s digital dancehall would have been number one--this year I closed the gap between the arrival of that very new, different sound (with Wayne Smith & King Jammy's 1985 sensation "Under Mi Sleng Teng") and the rocksteady/roots/dub stuff from the late '60s and '70s that I've been obsessing over since I was eighteen. Chronologically that was a strange way to get into the era, but ultimately logical as dancehall* is a transitional music easier to define by what it isn't than what it is. It isn't yet the obviously different sound of the digital period with its trademark Casio and DX7 synth sounds. But it also differs from the preceding roots era in harder-to-define ways. Those digital sounds were anticipated by the almost robotic tightness of early '80s rhythms and the gradual shedding of horn sections for economic reasons, and it was during the dancehall era that the DJ (equivalent to the MC in hip-hop) became more popular than the singer. Likewise, lyrical themes shifted from Rastafarian hectoring--which I, godless heathen, love dearly--to more earthly concerns like romance, sex, food, clothes, and the dancehall itself. Along with excellent stuff by Eek-a-Mouse, Sister Nancy, Lone Ranger, Henry "Junjo" Lawes, Jah Batta, Wayne Jarrett, and more, photographer Beth Lesser's excellent book Dancehall really cemented my love for the era.

*"Dancehall" seems to be the consensus term for this period, but after the roots era, reggae taxonomy becomes contested and "dancehall" is still being used to describe contemporary JA music (this is especially confusing as '90s reggae is often called "ragga").

3. Ghost Box
The Ghost Box record label has been getting numerous mentions in The Wire and on British music blogs for years, and everything they said sounded delicious to my ears: a label founded on mutual obsessions with a variety of things musical and not. As their website puts it: "Ghost Box is a recording label for artists that find inspiration in library music, folklore, vintage electronics and haunted television soundtracks." (All four of those ideas come into play in Broadcast's recent collaboration with The Focus Group, which I've already mentioned here.) So I was overjoyed when Other Music finally began distributing their albums in the U.S. this past spring and even happier when the music lived up to the sounds in my head. It's hard to pick just one to recommend, but the BBC Radiophonic Workshop fan in me is particularly fond of the analogue synth-heavy the Advisory Circle's Other Channels.

4. Three Excellent Jazz Albums
Apart from general passive cultural exposure through films, commercials, etc., my earliest, personal interest in jazz was sparked by one of those old Red Hot AIDS benefit compilations, Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool, which brought together members of the jazz old school with young representatives of the boho side of contemporary hip-hop in a Guru's Jazzmatazz kind of style (I was pretty into the Digable Planets album Blowout Comb at the time as well as the Native Tongues stuff). The second disc of that comp had a just fucking awful version of John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" performed by Branford Marsalis (!) followed by a much weirder and seductive version by Alice Coltrane. That one track led me to another Red Hot comp, Red Hot on Impulse!, which was really just a label sampler for the late '60s/ early '70s heyday of Impulse! Records and featured more great stuff from Alice Coltrane, her husband John, and Pharoah Sanders. I became obsessed with this blending of Indian, African, and Middle Eastern music with jazz, but it was difficult to find much more of it and a few missteps into glutinous hippie noodling scared me off for a long time.

This year though, I picked up three fantastic albums all with that same otherworldly but rootsy feeling: Don Cherry's Brown Rice, Alice Coltrane's World Galaxy, and Yusuf Lateef's Eastern Sounds. The Lateef, from 1961, is one of the earliest examples of a jazz musician borrowing from non-Western cultures and therefore doesn't deviate from jazz norms all that much. On the first track, "Plum Blossom", Lateef plays a Chinese globular flute to haunting effect--it's quite beautiful, and then you read in the (actually rather irritating) liner notes that the flute has only a five-note range and it becomes astonishing. World Galaxy and Brown Rice are from 1971 and 1975 respectively and could easily spark tedious arguments about what counts as "jazz." But that's an extremely uninteresting question to raise in the face of this pair of unique, funky, badass albums. Sadly, World Galaxy is only available in mp3 form ("sadly" because apart from the loss in audio quality, I'd also really like to be able to look at the Peter Max-designed cover), but if I start complaining about that this might turn into another rant about the decade. Nonetheless, these three albums have rejuvenated my passion for jazz of all kinds.

5. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
It was early 2008 when I saw my first Powell & Pressburger (aka the Archers) film, but this year--when I got to see A Canterbury Tale on DVD and A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes on the big screen--their oeuvre became quite possibly my favorite in cinema (I almost named our new kitten Pressburger; classic Bollywood singer Rafi took that honor instead). Being both something of an Anglophile and someone who thinks verisimilitude is overrated, it's a natural fit, but even if you don't share those prejudices, I urge you to seek out their films. I'm not sure where I'd suggest starting--and I still haven't seen a few of their classics--but if you can see any of their Technicolor films on the big screen, do it!

Sadly, this was also the year that brilliant cinematographer Jack Cardiff died; Cardiff shot A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes, and Black Narcissus for the Archers and everything smart I might have to say about him would be mostly cribbed from the Self-Styled Siren's blog, so go read her if you're curious.

6. Lala.com
Since I often have to suppress my strong Luddite tendencies, I'm glad to acknowledge that I've been using free online music-streaming service Lala.com since this summer and I highly recommend it. It won't lead you to undiscovered music like Pandora, but for checking things out that you know you want to hear, it's pretty amazing. And you can discover new music if you participate in the very low-key social media aspect of "follow"ing and being followed by other users, which allows you to check out what your friends are listening to and easily recommend songs or albums to others (hell, if you let me follow you, I'll probably bug you a lot more than Pandora!). Definitely the best thing that's happened to the internet in a while--sadly I hear Apple's recent purchase of the service means it might not be long for this world.

7. A Good Year for Animation
With Pete Docter's Up, Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo, and Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox all being released in American theaters, this was a good year for animated films. Up was a return to a more classical cartoony approach for Pixar after the more ambitious run of The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Wall-E, but it was both very funny and quite moving. Ponyo was a delight even if, on further reflection, it was Miyazaki's slightest film yet. I found Wes Anderson's two previous films to be dull (The Life Aquatic) and problematic verging on terrible (The Darjeeling Limited), so Fantastic Mr. Fox felt like a major triumph even though it wasn't flawless. No matter, if the fundamental appeal of animated films stems from seeing a new, unique, and personal world entirely created by an artist's hand (well more than one artist, obviously) come to life, then Fox succeeded and gave me hope that Anderson, once one of my favorite filmmakers, hasn't lost his gift. And along with Ponyo's gorgeous watercolors, Fox also made clear that an old-fashioned, analogue approach to animation can still thrive in the face of 3-D hype.

8. Dollhouse
I can't recommend Joss Whedon's ill-fated and now canceled series Dollhouse without a lengthy preamble about the show's slow start and the aggravating tendency for viewers and critics to confuse the premise of the series with the creators' moral beliefs--a preamble that would defeat the celebratory goal of this list. Suffice to say, this is handily Whedon's most intense work to date: I often found myself having to relax my grip at the end of each episode and even the infamously compromised first five episodes succeed on the level of thrilling action. Following that detour into somewhat generic action fare, Dollhouse proved itself willing to go into darker, messier, and more intriguing places than any other show I can think of--I'm totally serious when I say it's as close as we're likely to get to seeing something genuinely Philip K. Dickian on TV. And given many people's reservations about star Eliza Dushku, the show somewhat surprisingly has become an actor's showcase, particularly for Franz Kranz, Olivia Williams, the chameleon-like Enver Gjokaj, and a number of memorable guest stars; and for what it's worth, I think Dushku ranges from adequate to excellent. In a way the cancellation is a blessing as a show this visceral and morally queasy could have turned into a depressing slog if extended for too long (c.f. Battlestar Galactica). Now it will endure as a more or less compact story with twenty-six chapters and I am geekily psyched for the concluding three episodes airing in January.

9. Indian Novels
I began 2009 in Ahmedabad, India, which was a genuinely wonderful experience that reignited an abiding interest in Indian history and culture. Over the course of the year that meant watching a couple of Bollywood movies, listening to the handful of amazing Indian classical music CDs I picked up for ludicrously cheap there, struggling to read a somewhat dry history of the country, and reading three very different, very good novels by Indian writers: Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies.

The White Tiger is a refreshing antidote to the kind of novels that Salman Rushdie's success made ubiquitous: India painted as a candy-colored carnival of spice and sex and gods. Those novels were often overstuffed and florid--even when tragic they celebrated the vibrancy and multiculturalism of the subcontinent above all. The White Tiger is spare, lean, and cutting--I've never read any other novel as pessimistic and condemning of Indian culture and character as this. Adiga has acknowledged that he drew on mid-century African American literature as his model and the debts to Invisible Man and Richard Wright's books are obvious, but Adiga uses them to explore the new context of a totally corrupt "modernized" India where the oppression of the caste system still persists, not least in the relationship between the wealthy and its servant class.

Massive, sprawling, enamored with local dialect, and highly influenced by Bollywood, Sacred Games at first feels a bit like one of those Rushdie clones. And though it is ultimately more life-affirming and celebratory than Adiga's poisoned rant, Chandra's lightly fantastic epic of crime dons, cops, gurus, madams, and spies reveals an India as distant from its post-independence democratic idealism as Adiga's full-frontal assault does, but it's much more fun to read. Ghosh's The Sea of Poppies is even more enamored with language than Chandra is (both books have glossaries, though Ghosh's is quite eccentric), and the book's chief pleasure is the crazily polyglot and musical mixture of more languages than I care to list here. The book is intended to be the first of a trilogy and things are definitely only just beginning at the end of its 500 pages. But there is much to enjoy now, including a large cast of fascinating characters, multilingual puns, and a revelatory look into the history of the East India Company's opium trade (the novel begins in 1838 on the eve of the Opium Wars with China). If the next two books are as excellent as this one, Ghosh may emerge as the most important Indian author alive.

10. Random Reading
David Mazzuchelli's widely praised Asterios Polyp is absolutely beautiful, and after a few years where my intense interest in comics felt like it was waning this was a welcome sign that the medium is still capable of works of stunning genius. I cannot recommend David Mitchell's Black Swan Green more highly; while it hits some of the personal Anglophile, Thatcher-era buttons that I've mentioned before, in all seriousness, if you were ever a thirteen-year-old boy or you know someone who was, you must read this book.

This year I finally started reading some South American literature after trying a couple of Marquez novels and not really getting the hype. I started with Brazilian author Jorge Amado's Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, one of those big social novels you don't see much after the Victorian era where the town itself functions as the main character; I found it highly witty and an excellent way to broaden my knowledge of Brazil beyond the area of music. I'm also slowly making my way through Jorge Luis Borges's Complete Fictions; I won't pretend I have anything fresh to say about this masterpiece, but I will say that if you've been intimidated by Borges's reputation, don't be, the brevity of many of the pieces makes it perfect for commute reading.

I was going to conclude with a personal list mentioning: more on being in India; the Cloisters and Barcade; my sister's wedding in June and my brother's in August; Weird Baby; the most recent issue of Bailliwik; this here blog thing; lots of great times in Chicago, including my brother-in-law finally getting a visa to visit, drinking Harar with C and H and drinking grappa with S, the surprisingly awesome architectural boat tour, and the Modern Wing; and our new kitten, Rafi. But reading this far means you've already wasted an entire day of your life, so I'll simply say, Happy New Year!

Ahem

2009-12-31T11:05:00.003-06:00

Kellerman: I hate New Year's Eve.
Pembleton: Everybody hates New Year's Eve.
Brodie: Yeah. Another year older and deeper in debt.
Munch: Like having a birthday, only nobody buys you any presents.
--from the episode "The Documentary" of the series Homicide: Life on the Street; teleplay by Eric Overmyer

Most of my internet reading falls roughly under the heading of cultural criticism; earlier in the decade it would have been 90% politics. That younger self would have berated me for the following statement, but nowadays paying attention to and caring about politics is an exercise in soul-crushing futility. Keeping up with the details of Obama's plan to--liberate? democratize? bomb the shit out of? what's the right word for our important mission there?--raise the death toll in Afghanistan, let alone the almost comical uselessness of the oligarchy we call the Senate that the health care bill has made (once again) obvious, I feel fine telling people that I don't really have a political ideology beyond a strong belief that a nation of 300 million people is fundamentally ungovernable in a just manner. The people or organizations tasked with doing so will inevitably decline into a variety of bad ends: ubiquitous corruption, systemic injustice, and a foreign policy of violent imperialism necessary for maintaining one's power, whether political or economic, and, less obviously pernicious but corrosive to the soul: a nauseating culture of moralizing hypocrisy and self-love (The. Greatest. Nation. On Earth!).

I'm sure some people reading this will write it off as cheap cynicism, but clinging to a belief that America is a functioning democracy, guided by any kind of moral force, and worth investing a part of your soul in looks a lot like insanity to me. Please understand that I'm not claiming a different, evil kind of American exceptionalism: that Americans are uniquely or inherently corrupt, unjust, and violent (decades of American hegemony makes it harder to resist these conclusions, but only an idiot or a fraud would pretend there aren't historical precedents or comparisons), but that in this particular moment in history the bad vastly outweighs the good and that two full decades of reading bathetic exhortations such as this has made me realize that not participating in or even following the empty fantasy of empowerment that is national politics is simply good mental health.

Anyway, this isn't at all what I intended to write about--this was meant to be a segue into how culture has become increasingly important to me as both a refuge from the blood-stained realities of the world and as evidence that humanity can create wonders as well as horror. But because the bitter part of my soul couldn't bring itself to just delete this part of the post, I'm isolating it from the happier reflections on the year that will appear soon. Think of this as a misguidedly bitter first course!

The Decade in Comics

2009-12-30T10:43:00.002-06:00

Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter has hit on an excellent way of running a decade-in-review feature. He's interviewing different comics critics about one work from the past ten years, whether brand new or published in a new edition. All of the interviews are interesting, but I particularly liked Sean T. Collins on Craig Thompson's Blankets, a book that I have mixed feelings about, but Collins makes a compelling argument for it being a big milestone for the medium. I was intrigued to see Jeet Heer characterize Chester Brown's Louis Riel as the Canadian equivalent of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan--i.e., the graphic novel that legitimized the form for a general audience--since I think Louis Riel is extremely underrated here in the Great Satan. And Osamu Tezuka's MW was one of the best, weirdest things I read this year, so I enjoyed Spurgeon and David Welsh musing on both what is good and completely bonkers about it.

Take Back the Silent Night

2009-12-18T11:08:00.003-06:00

Yes! At last I have a really, truly excellent and irrefutable reason to hate Garrison Keillor, who I've always hated anyway, but now I can point to this confused, mean-spirited ("pinch-faced drone"?), illogical, rambling, defensive, and ultimately kind of pitiful column: "Nonbelievers, please leave Christmas alone."

Palin and Hummers*

2009-12-18T09:43:00.008-06:00

While driving down the exceedingly narrow street I live on, I've often asked myself, "how do SUV drivers justify their existence?" Apparently quite easily, for according to this article, Hummer drivers see themselves--simply by virtue of their owning a Hummer--as morally righteous defenders of classical American ideals. I suppose you could guess that from the way SUVs are advertised, but it's interesting to see it confirmed in the minds of the consumers rather than the marketers. I wonder if this applies to all Hummer owners, including those who live in large metropolitan areas that couldn't be further from the (already nonexistent) frontier.

I found that article through reading this analysis of the Reason for Sarah Palin, a topic I would have thought exhausted, but Sanchez offers an elegant answer to this non-puzzle.

*Note: I created this title in order to increase page hits from lonely conservatives. Sorry to disappoint, guys.

UPDATED: related.

I See

2009-12-14T09:56:00.003-06:00

Here is a haunting, beautiful, and weird video from the haunting, beautiful, and weird mini-album Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, a collaboration between the best band on the planet* and Julian House's The Focus Group of beloved record label Ghost Box. They've made one other video for this record, and the project grew out of Broadcast's live improvisations to Julian House's films. So hopefully a full Ghost Box DVD is in the works, though I suppose they'd probably rather put it out as a filmstrip or grainy VHS.

Also of interest: this interview with Broadcast's James Cargill where he discusses the roots of the project in the sonic palette and grainy visuals of obscure horror films and warped '70s and '80s children's television programming (including Children of the Stones which terrified my brother and I when it was shown on Nickelodeon's anthology series The Third Eye).

*That's right.

A Mix

2009-11-29T18:34:00.004-06:00

Absolutely fantastic mix by King Midas Sound available at FACT magazine here. As an occasional creator of all-over-the-place but obsessive mixes, I'm extremely impressed with the way this manages to show both range and consistency. And there's just some great songs on there, including a few tracks from Bronx-based reggae label/studio Wackie's (along with one on Donovan that I've mentioned to a few people, I've got a long gestating post on Wackie's in the works). I hope to eventually post something more substantial here, but in the meantime enjoy!

Weird Baby Birth

2009-11-18T12:56:00.001-06:00

Simon and Sara have embarked on a lovely new webcomic endeavor called Weird Baby. Go check it out! And keep checking it out as they aim for an ambitious every-two-weeks publication schedule. Boy, that's shaming: I haven't posted in two weeks and you'll notice a distinct lack of intricately rendered fabric patterns on this blog.

Also worth keeping an eye on: the Belbury Parish Magazine, Jim Jupp of Belbury Poly's new blog.

Crazy Rhythms

2009-11-04T15:53:00.002-06:00

Excellent appraisal of the Feelies album Crazy Rhythms at Zone Styx Travelcard. When this was reissued a little while ago, the expected chorus of glowing reviews appeared: such as these. Not that there's anything grossly objectionable in those reviews (actually the Pitchfork review is pretty good), but I think ZST benefits from being relatively new to the album--or so I assume based on the opening sentence--and not approaching it as a seminal artifact of American indie rock. I also liked his concluding remark about "jangle," which is one of those widely used rock critic terms I've never really understood in practice. It was, I believe, coined to describe the Byrds but I don't even hear it in their music. ZST, in typical Brit fashion, assigns it to the music that every decent British music critic hates, "indie." As an American, "indie" has different meanings (indeed, the Feelies and Pixies might both be considered "indie" by some people here), and I can't really think of any music that sounds like a jingle bell or bells or someone shaking their keys, etc., that isn't avant-garde. The Wikipedia article on "jangle pop" devolves into the kind of minute hair-splitting that makes me more sympathetic to the musical taxonomy haters I've dissed in earlier posts.

Speaking of the Pixies, I have to disagree with this analogy: "Listened to in conjunction with the massively underwhelming follow-up The Good Earth, you realize The Feelies pulled off the same uncommon trick as Pixies, making a first album which is better recorded, more intelligent, more developed, just better all round, than its successor, even down to the crisp, dry, force of the production, almost clinically clear and undistorted, where the second is mushier, messier, duller, more conventional." The Good Earth is disappointing from what I remember of the only time I listened to it, but I always preferred Doolittle to Surfer Rosa, which meanders a little until "Gigantic" (admittedly, that song might be their finest moment), whereas Doolittle holds my attention from "Debaser" onward.

On the other hand, I suspect I might be under the influence of a common musical syndrome that lacks a name as far as I know. Call it the law of album primogeniture: that phenomenon where the first album you heard by a particular band or artist, regardless of the album's chronological position in their oeuvre, is and always will be their "best." Rooted in the unpredictable neurochemical chaos of adolescence, it's an odd phenomenon that is nowhere near universal--for me, there are far more bands where it hasn't happened that way--but is strangely resilient.

Raise Your Hand If You're Invulnerable

2009-10-29T16:36:00.002-05:00

Now that I think about it, the third season of Buffy (especially its conclusion) is essentially an anarchist parable about the limits of democratic government and the extremes you have to go to overcome them. Hell, it barely qualifies as supernatural: here in Chicago we've had a mayor named Daley for forty-one of the past fifty-four years, and the current one certainly seems politically impervious.

Quite a Long Way from Cairo

2009-10-29T15:06:00.003-05:00

More stuff I like.

I recommend Andy Beta's dispatches from his trip to Finland (1, 2, 3, 4), all of which are accompanied by some splendid Tove Jansson artwork. Speaking of Jansson, I'm only familiar with the (wonderful) Moomin comic strip collections that Drawn and Quarterly have been publishing over the past couple years. But I've recently been lent her novel/memoir The Summer Book and I'm looking forward to it even more after reading this little tidbit from her Wikipedia page: "Jansson said that she had designed the Moomins in her youth: after she lost a philosophical quarrel about Immanuel Kant with one of her brothers, she drew 'the ugliest creature imaginable' on the wall of their WC and wrote under it 'Kant'." Check out this nicely illustrated and presumably comprehensive bibliography of her work.

The ES album Beta raves about is on Lala and it lives up to his Harmonia and Popul Vuh comparisons. I also listened to Paavoharju's Yhä hämärää, which was lovely. As Beta mentions, there was quite a bit of buzz about the Finnish psych-folk scene and the Fonal label in particular a few years ago. Now that I know that Fonal's main inspirations are Terry Riley and Alice Coltrane, I'm going to be doing some more investigating.

Sightseeing

2009-10-25T14:46:00.003-05:00

If you look to your right, you'll see that I've expanded the blogroll. People that I actually know in real life are now Fellow Pachyderms. Other Animals has become Other Phyla, a name I chose upon reading Wikipedia's definition of phylum: "Although a phylum is often spoken of as if it were a hard and fast entity, no satisfactory definition of a phylum exists. In fact, a phylum is perhaps best described as a statement of taxonomic ignorance." After briefly trying to sort these blogs into categories and realizing they were a frequently overlapping mix of music, politics, comics, film, and other, a statement of taxonomic ignorance seemed apt. Basically, these are (well, most of) the blogs I read regularly and recommend.

Post-Rock

2009-10-20T14:42:00.002-05:00

I should probably get out of the habit of making predictions about the direction of the blog; it’s clear that trying to guide or focus this thing just makes me write less. Oh well, here is one anyway: I’m going to try to take a break from writing about depressing things beyond my control like the death penalty or government corruption on a grand scale. Not that I want to seal myself off from politics (not that that’s possible), but if all goes well, the next few posts will be about things closer to home that roughly fall into the category of “stuff I like.”

I’m quite enjoying Bubblegum Cage’s Post-Rocktoberfest as post-rock made up a huge portion of the soundtrack of my early twenties. While it was never widely popular even in its heyday, over the last decade it seemed to inspire a surprisingly intense revulsion, if it was mentioned at all. Maybe it was the name: post-rock is often the go-to whipping boy for the weirdly hated critical practice of naming genres. Not that I carried much of a torch for the stuff: in reaction to the boredom brought on by the overwrought dynamics or endless droning of second- or third-tier post-rock bands, I dumped the bulk of my collection in the early ’00s as I embraced a much wider spectrum of music and began focusing mainly on music from before I was born. But it’s interesting to note something of a groundswell of appreciation or at least an urge to defend the good stuff cropping up this year. Along with Bubblegum Cage, online magazine FACT did one of their “20 Best…” lists, and Matthew Ingram—who wrote about post-rock several times in his earlier Woebot incarnation—has recently put up a couple of posts at his newish blog Hollow Earth. No consensus emerges—though taken together this is an interesting exercise in canon building on a very small scale—apart from a general preference for British post-rock over American, but there were a few albums I was particularly pleased to see mentioned:

Bowery Electric’s Beat. I can’t remember the last time I listened to this, but in the late ’90s it was a personal favorite. Somewhat like my unfortunate dalliance with the lesser lights of trip-hop—but less embarrassing—Beat was an early sign of where my taste would migrate after souring on indie rock. I still find the prospect of smeary guitar pop on top of breakbeats and prominent basslines attractive, though I suspect that Beat would now suffer from my obsessive over-listening (I used to fall asleep to this every night for a long time). But as Bubblegum Cage says, it’s a pity more post-rock bands didn’t explore this territory instead of aping the masculine bombast of bands like Mogwai.

Insides’ Euphoria. A record that manages to be hauntingly beautiful while making your skin crawl. Maybe it’s because I first heard it when I was sixteen, but Euphoria’s frank lyrics perfectly capture the thin line between sexy and icky that makes sexual intimacy emotionally painful and a little terrifying when you’re young: the way the dark pull of desire felt separate from your conscious mind for reasons impossible to put in words, the way guilt and pleasure could mix so easily. Listening to it now, it’s also clear that the sonic palette is equally unsettling; the way they use woozy, chirping, overlapping, and repeating loops to build many of the songs feels a lot like the way your head feels when it’s spinning from drunkenness. As one half of Insides put it in an interview with Simon Reynolds* from 1993, “I’d like [the listener] to swoon first, and then throw up! Or feel that rising, heady sensation you get when they give you anaesthetic at the dentists, and then the next minute you realise you’re covered in blood.”

*Tried to fit this in earlier: it was Reynolds who coined the term post-rock.

Papa M’s Live from a Shark Cage. This is just gorgeous and it’s a genuine loss that David Pajo’s subsequent output took a more conventional turn. His decision to sing on Whatever, Mortal completely broke from the strange and evocative mood he creates on this (though there are some good songs on Mortal). His trajectory is similar to Do Make Say Think’s, who earn a deserved spot on FACT’s list. Do Make Say Think singlehandedly maintained my interest in post-rock into the ’00s with an impressively consistent run which ended when they added insipid, generic indie vocals on You, You’re a History in Rust. Nonetheless, their albums prior to that are all fantastic.

Seefeel’s Quique. Not mentioned in any of the posts I’m linking to, but that’s mostly because this is now recognized as a classic (a bit like MBV’s Loveless, though certainly not nearly as famous on this side of the Atlantic). I’d dismissed Seefeel as sub-Aphex ambient techno back in my original post-rock phase, but hearing it now, it has aged far better than a lot of the bands listed at the bottom of this post on Hollow Earth, quite a few of which I liked at the time. Quique reflects the UK post-rock scene’s openness to dance music and dub, but now it sounds more of a piece with the originators of ambient—Brian Eno, Cluster, Harmonia, etc.—rather than with the garish likes of contemporaries like The Future Sound of London.

I’ve avoided trying to define post-rock, because it’s impossible (though Wikipedia takes a stab at it). But all four of these albums rely on technologies of sampling and looping to a degree that genuinely subverts or bypasses traditional rock songcraft in a way that I think legitimates the label. They're also all quietly moving and hypnotically beautiful.

Usually Cover-Ups Are More Clandestine Than This

2009-10-01T12:31:00.001-05:00

It’s not short, but if you haven’t yet read David Grann’s piece in the New Yorker about Cameron Todd Willingham, do so. The article is getting some much-needed attention (not as much as Roman Polanski’s case of course, but I suppose America’s obsession with celebrity isn’t going anywhere anytime soon), and it seems clear that Texas now has the distinction of being the first state to execute a demonstrably innocent human being in decades. Even if you think that’s overselling it, the best spin you could put on this is that, as Scott Lemieux puts it, “they executed a man despite the fact that there was no reliable evidence at all that he was guilty.”

Now we have the spectacle of Governor Rick Perry’s hamfisted and nakedly transparent attempt to make sure the Texas Forensic Science Commission did not review Willingham’s case. While his actions are disturbing (though understandable; if Willingham is ever exonerated, Perry will have been complicit in his murder), surely this won’t work as a long-term plan.

Digital Amnesia

2009-09-09T11:19:00.001-05:00

As probably everyone reading this knows I work for a book publisher. Watching the e-book evolve from “I guess this will probably happen eventually” to an economic reality has been interesting, though one thing has bothered me about it. I can’t remember where I first came across this insight, but it’s often been said that the music industry’s decline began as soon as they made the leap to digital: transform music into easily and perfectly reproducible digital information and you’ve made file-sharing and downloading inevitable. In 1982, it was likely impossible to foresee the rise of the internet (though widespread CD burning seems easier to predict), and yet one can still see that initial decision to turn music into data as a self-inflicted, potentially fatal, wound.

Surprisingly, almost no one ever mentions this same line of historical reasoning in discussions of publishers choosing to make e-books. Everyone is so focused on whether or not the Kindle or whatever is inferior, comparable, or superior to the printed book that almost no one I’ve run into bothers to worry about the pitfalls of turning books into data. One of my company’s new ideas is to allow users to rent e-books—50% off list price for 180 days; $5 for thirty—which seems pretty smart, given that the audience for many of our books consists of students and researchers, if you’ve never heard of Napster, famously begun by a college student.

Of course, the economics of book publishing differ significantly from the music business and the existence of libraries might make this argument a tad hysterical. But I was glad to see this post by Zone Styx Travelcard, especially with its hilariously bleak concluding paragraphs, a rhetorical move I plan to steal in all arguments about the future from now on.

Soul Review

2009-09-07T10:25:00.002-05:00

I've added a new pachyderm to the list: Soul Review. This is an old friend of mine's new blog where he reviews old soul and reggae music. There are already a few posts up with some excellent songs to listen to. Go listen!

Flickr Fun

2009-08-25T13:45:00.000-05:00

I’m eager to push that depressing Blackwater post further down, so here are three great sets from Flickr.

As previously mentioned, I am a big fan of old Penguin/Pelican design. Here’s a set of album covers reimagined as Pelican paperbacks. Here are two sets of different comics artists tackling the same subject matter: David Bowie and Nancy. And Fantagraphics has some exciting news for Nancy fans!

Blackwater

2009-08-21T15:21:00.004-05:00

Over the last month there have been some pretty stunning revelations about military contracting company Blackwater—now called Xe . . . obviously they have a failed screenwriter concocting these names for them—and the depth of their involvement with the C.I.A. First, the Nation published this chilling article by Jeremy Scahill (who published a book on the company in 2006), detailing claims “that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company.” That article also explores Prince’s anti-Muslim (or should that be pro-genocide?) beliefs and how, according to a former employee, “Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis.” Oh, and there was also some gun smuggling, which almost seems like an innocent lark in light of the first two allegations.

Now the New York Times has published two articles revealing the close dealings the C.I.A. had with these murderous sociopaths. The first looked at Blackwater’s role in an assassination program and the second their involvement in putting bombs on unpiloted drone planes (in other words: the other assassination program). That article also contained the alarming news that Blackwater has a secret division whose “operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.”

Scahill has a follow-up article which includes this quote from Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky: “Erik Prince operated at the highest and most secret level of the government. Clearly Prince was more trusted than the US Congress because Vice President Cheney made the decision not to brief Congress. This shows that there was absolutely no space whatsoever between the Bush administration and Blackwater.”

I’m sure as time goes by more and more crazy lefty conspiracy theories from the Bush era will be proven to be true. For example, Tom Ridge apparently acknowledges in a forthcoming book that the Bush administration manipulated the terror threat level for political reasons. But what’s insane about these Blackwater revelations is that the U.S. government continues to pay the company millions of dollars. The Obama administration argues these payments are simply continuations of Bush-era contracts, but seriously, is there really no legal means to break a contract with a company that has committed war crimes? And how do the various facts in this paragraph from an earlier Scahill article work out exactly?

[On August 1] the Obama administration extended a contract with Blackwater for more than $20 million for “security services” in Iraq, according to federal contract data obtained by The Nation. The State Department contract is scheduled to run through September 3. In May, the State Department announced it was not renewing Blackwater’s Iraq contract, and the Iraqi government has refused to issue the company an operating license.

1960s/80s Postscript

2009-08-07T15:01:00.005-05:00

This summer is really bringing that feedback loop between ’60s and ’80s nostalgia into relief. Michael Jackson’s and John Hughes’s deaths’ coinciding with the Summer of ’69 commemorations—the moon landing, Woodstock, the Manson murders—makes the idea so obvious I almost feel absurd commenting on it.

Why Are We So Nostalgic?

2009-08-05T19:18:00.004-05:00

In the latest issue of The Wire, David Keenan takes a turn at one of the magazine’s periodic attempts at playing genre taxonomist (see also: post-rock and hauntology). His new genre, “hypnagogic pop,” doesn’t interest me in its particulars all that much, but it does tie into this blog’s unofficial theme: nostalgia. The kids in the bands Keenan writes about were all born in the 1980s, and, according to the article, the pop music of the era seeped into their DNA—even though they’re making weird and noisy music that doesn’t have anywhere near the mainstream appeal of the massively popular MTV hits they’re claiming as influences.

The thing that most caught my attention in the article was the bizarre fact that Don Henley’s 1984 hit “Boys of Summer” is a touchstone for these bands. “Boys” is the kind of incessant radio staple that is less a musical composition and more a grim signifier of the cultural stagnation I was alluding to in this post. If you’d asked me five minutes before reading the article what I thought of the song, without hesitating—or really thinking about it much—I would have told you I hated it. But the incongruity of a bunch of early twenty-something weirdoes taking the song as an important sonic blueprint made me look it up on YouTube.

“Boys” has a cinematic lushness that is emotionally appealing; like a lot of ’80s hits it sounds like it was designed to play over a bittersweet movie’s closing credits. Twenty-five years after the fact, the song’s primitive digital gloss has managed to accrue a patina of strangeness and a naivete it actively avoided at the time of its creation. There’s something about the production that is on the one hand alienating and slickly machine-like and on the other melancholy and haunting.

But what’s most striking to me is that here we have a bunch of young musicians taking a song as a nostalgic key to their youth that is itself about nostalgia for one’s youth. But not just anyone’s youth; Henley’s lyrics are about aging and they’re fairly specific about who is growing older: baby boomers. Henley sings, “out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac / A little voice inside my head said, ‘don’t look back. You can never look back.’”

Anxiety and guilt over ’60s radicals turned ’80s sell-outs was a common cultural trope back then, but more to the point, I wonder if this little feedback loop of nostalgia is symptomatic of why our current moment is so suffused with nostalgia. Anyone who grew up in the ’80s grew up in a climate of constant reminiscence over The Sixties (don’t worry: this isn’t going to be a tiresome rant about boomer cultural dominance, I promise). In other words, anyone born after 1975 or so, grew up in a profoundly nostalgic time, and therefore indulging in nostalgia for your youth can lead to nostalgia for nostalgia, as is the case with “Boys”. Perhaps we’ve also been conditioned for nostalgia—programmed into a preciosity about the past, especially our own, through repeated exposure to things like “Boys of Summer”, A Christmas Story, The Wonder Years, Happy Days, etc.

I think I mentioned in a comment to an earlier post that when I was a kid I didn’t realize Happy Days was made in the ’70s—I thought it was an authentic document of the ’50s much like all the other shows I was watching on Nick at Nite (Donna Reed, et al). I think as we go forward, and as the internet transports almost all cultural production to an eternal now, that kind of temporal blurring will become characteristic of our time.

I don’t think I’ve answered the question posed in the post title, but as I’ve mentioned to a couple of people off-blog, nostalgia is emerging as the guiding concern of Elephant Rock, so this won’t be the last word on it. Whether it can be chalked up to a generational accident of birth, the internet, the cultural decay of late empire, or me entering my curmudgeonly old man phase rather early, how people process, think about, and use the past defines my perspective on the present.

Go Bang

2009-07-18T19:05:00.005-05:00

(or: White Riot, continued.)

I was reminded of those officers and their obstinate refusal to feel ashamed of braining protesters with billy clubs by a recent flurry of media attention for the thirtieth anniversary of Disco Demolition Night. Notorious within the mostly non-overlapping worlds of sports fans and disco historians, Disco Demolition Night was a promotional stunt that took place at Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, on July 12, 1979. Attendees were allowed in for only 98 cents provided they brought a disco record to add to a large pile of them set to be detonated between the two games of the night’s double-header. As people in the stands flung records at the players on the field, the crowd’s mood turned ugly. After the records were blown up, chaos erupted and eventually riot police on horseback shut the thing down (there are many more details in the linked articles below).

Articles in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Reader all retell the event in warmly nostalgic terms, positioning it mostly as a wacky story from sports history or an amusing time capsule from the outrageously unfashionable late ’70s. These articles are all written from a perspective where the idea that “disco sucks” and therefore deserved to die—and indeed, as everyone notes, DDN proved to be a turning point in the genre's fortunes; this public execution actually worked—doesn’t warrant a second thought. Despite DDN’s similarity to Christians burning Beatles records after John Lennon’s infamous “bigger than Jesus” comment—an event I assume most rock fans don’t sit around chuckling over—no one in these articles seems the slightest bit disturbed by the event’s original purpose.

Which is odd, since thinking about the various tensions that made the event so explosive is much more interesting than simply reminiscing over it or engaging in a mild bit of revisionist history—as in the Reader piece’s subheadline “the kids were alright.” That headline attributes this supposedly new take on DDN to Diane Alexander White whose recently displayed photographs from the night serve as the impetus for the article. Her perspective on DDN is much more thoughtful than any of the journalists’:

What her shots end up capturing is a moment in time—the south-side rock ’n’ roll youth culture of 1979 on the verge of pandemonium. “This was a backlash,” she says today, looking over her pictures. “[Disco] was so stylized, with pressed pants, white suits, collars outside of jackets, gold chains. The girls are blow-drying their hair to death. A lot of these kids identified it as very shallow, in the dress, in the repetitive beats in the music, crystallized in Saturday Night Fever.”

“To me, it wasn’t about the disco records being blown up,” White says. “It was everything leading up to it, which is what a lot of these pictures are.” It’s the kids themselves, “blue collar kids, kids whose parents were Sox fans. We were still churning out products in this town. You could still get a job at the steel mill.”

While she’s referring specifically to disco, White’s use of the word “backlash” is telling. The cultural backlash against the increased social freedoms (or moral failings, depending on your perspective) brought about by the revolutions of the late ’60s was about to help elect Ronald Reagan. And throughout the ’80s and ’90s, the Right would master the art of using irrelevant, but charged signifiers—e.g. that blow-dried hair; accusations of shallowness and vanity have been thrown against every Democratic candidate for president in my lifetime—to distract people from the real reasons steel mills were closing. White’s statement hints at that misdirected anger and also points up the sloppiness of backlash logic: whatever you think about Saturday Night Fever, you can’t pretend John Travolta’s character isn’t young, poor, and from Brooklyn—not a world away from Bridgeport, the neighborhood outside of Comiskey.

So what were these kids lashing back at? Class resentment was certainly justifiable; the Studio 54 version of disco culture was glamorous, coked-up, and sexy—totally out of reach for most people in 1979. One also can’t understate the sheer ubiquity of disco at its peak. Peter Shapiro’s history of the music, Turn the Beat Around, catalogs the way disco acted as a virus in American culture in 1979, infecting breakfast cereals, Sesame Street, and a long list of musicians, including Kiss, the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, and even Frank Sinatra. Okay, “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” is vile, granted, but why would disco kids wearing “white suits” or “gold chains” bother your average Van Halen* fan?

*1979 is a fascinating year for music, a genuine watershed, but I'm guessing that the kids at DDN weren’t listening to “Rapper’s Delight” or the Raincoats.

There aren’t a lot of photos accompanying that Reader piece, but in all of the samples, the subjects are overwhelmingly white and male. Disco is the opposite: gay, black, Latino, female. As Shapiro puts it:

Even when it was purveyed by chancers and formulaic followers of fashion, disco was a remarkable moment in American cultural history, a time when female voices (even if they were singing the words of mostly male songwriters and producers) temporarily drowned out the beefy bluster that usually characterizes America’s discourse. Not since Noel Coward’s reinvention of Tin Pan Alley had articulations of gay pleasure and style been so popular.

Disco’s status as supremely lame cultural punching bag hasn’t improved much since 1979. Meanwhile rock maintains its role as the bastion of authenticity in music, despite that notion being thoroughly, repeatedly debunked by music critics. Nonetheless, I take comfort in knowing that while disco was mortally wounded on July 13, 1979, it beat out rock for cultural influence. Rock over the last thirty years isn’t a complete wasteland, but disco’s children (rap and house, especially) took over, giving birth to constantly evolving forms of electronic music and decisively shaping the glossy, digital sound of pop music over three decades. Those forms and sounds made in disco’s wake have defined the new in music, while rock has mostly offered variations on the old.

Intermission

2009-07-13T10:42:00.001-05:00

Following up on the end of that last post, it occurs to me that some of my out-of-state readers may not be familiar with Illinois’s disgraceful history of police brutality, prosecutorial misconduct, and wrongful imprisonment. Here is the relatively happy ending to the sadly typical story of Ronald Kitchen, recently freed from jail after spending twenty-one years there (he is 43), including thirteen on death row. To summarize: Chicago police detectives tortured Kitchen until he confessed, and then Illinois prosecutors used that confession and other, remarkably flimsy evidence to convict him.

Two genuinely heroic groups at Northwestern University work to oppose these kinds of injustices: the Medill Innocence Project and the Center on Wrongful Convictions. From the Center’s website: “Of 314 men and women sentenced to death under the current Illinois death penalty law, which was enacted in 1977, 20 have now been exonerated and released—an error rate of more than six percent.” Former Governor George Ryan (currently in prison for corruption) famously declared a moratorium on the death penalty in 2000 and commuted the sentences of all current death row inmates (including Ronald Kitchen) to life imprisonment on his way out of office in 2003.

That moratorium is still in place—with good reason, obviously—but the death penalty has not been abolished and the state still seeks it in certain cases. I’m at a loss to explain what argument you could make in favor of keeping it or lifting the moratorium in the face of that +6% error rate, much less when you factor in its inevitable rise due to the Capital Litigation Trust Fund, which assists public defenders in mounting a proper defense in death penalty cases, being bankrupt.

White Riot: Prologue

2009-07-10T11:26:00.001-05:00

This is going to be another two-parter—hooray!

One of the pleasures of being a Chicago resident is living in the midst of a long* and fascinating history. On my daily commute I walk by a building that used to be Essanay studios; I wait for the bus across the street from the Chicago Theatre; and the building I work in was built on the property that once housed the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s practice space. I haven’t yet seen Public Enemies, but I’d like to—in addition to the history, I’m kind of a sucker for films shot locally (ultimately that was about the only thing I liked about The Dark Knight), and it would be thrilling to see Johnny Depp strolling around the Aragon Ballroom, a venue built in 1926 where I saw my first concert.

*You know, for an American city at least.

Of course not all Chicago history is Charlie Chaplin, gangsters, and free jazz. My friend Stephen sent me this New York Times article about a reunion of police officers who were in the 1968 Democratic convention riots with a simple “really?” The Chicago Police Department has a lengthy history of abuse and an equally lengthy history of getting away with it, so I wasn’t that surprised. In fact, I was almost more dismayed by the protesters—what could they possibly hope to achieve by picketing a bunch of retired police officers eating pizza? Protesting an historical event; it sounds like a sad postmodern performance piece. Besides, at least in terms of the CPD’s behavior during the 1960s, I believe there’s a consensus that they were out of control. Partisans can argue over what happened during the riots, but I can’t see anyone claiming they “feel fine about” murdering Fred Hampton.

More to come.

Summertime

2009-07-02T13:42:00.001-05:00

“Gomorrah is a nursery rhyme
You won’t find it in a book
It’s written on your city’s face
Just stop and take a look”
—Sixto Diaz Rodriguez

Summer is often a bleak time for me. I tend to blame the decades of conditioning that made summer’s vast free time feel like a right promised by natural law. Whiling away those same lengthy hours in a windowless office with my eyes on a screen all day tends to darken my thinking. Perhaps spending six summers in Georgia added to the effect; the heat of summer there tended to have an undercurrent of madness to it.

Or maybe it’s just my current reading material: Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces. I’m also rereading Calvin and Hobbes again, and both have a lot to say about the pointless drudgery of adult life. This morning I was reading the Marcus on the bus as we took an alternate route to avoid the traffic snarls caused by the annual tourist bacchanal, Taste of Chicago, an event that lives in my memory chiefly for the time my younger sister was burned on the cheek by an asshole smoking a cigarette in a thick crowd of people.

Anyway, the new route took us through the South Loop, once a commercial dead zone and now newly built or rehabbed into a weird sort of Alphaville of a neighborhood (impressively sycophantic piece from the Chicago Tribune here). I lost count of how many high-end dental salons we passed, and I’d conservatively estimate that there are forty million condos for sale there.

Romantically, superpowers/empires/civilizations are thought to end precipitously—they fall with hordes of barbarians at the gates. Or they’re stricken by environmental catastrophes or diseases so swift and lethal they verge on the allegorical. Hubris and moral decadence—orgies literal and figurative—bring down that old divine wrath. The Bush years felt like the middle stage of just such a spectacular flameout. A country with a national death wish, led by the political equivalent of Columbine’s trench coat mafia: armed to the teeth and pissed off at the world for reasons that never really added up but could apparently be solved with mass murder. But the eschatological nightmares of liberals (and their flipside: the end-times fantasies of evangelicals) have more or less faded with Obama’s election, and now a putrefying kind of stagnation—political, economic, and cultural—seems more likely to me.

Allow me to maintain my habit of making sweeping political statements and then sidestepping the issue by talking about music. I’m too lazy to come up with a list of linkable support for this statement, but I believe there’s nearly a critical consensus that this decade has been one of the worst ever for music. And this morning I was struck by the horrifyingly cyclical implications of this passage from Lipstick Traces. Here’s Marcus writing about the mid-70s in 1989:

“Rock ‘n’ roll became an ordinary social fact, like a commute or a highway construction project. It became a habit, a structure, an invisible oppression. . . . There was no need for change; ‘change’ began to seem like an old-fashioned, sixties word. The chaos in society at large called for a music of permanence and reassurance; in the pop world, time stood still. For years that seemed like decades, you could turn on the radio with the assurance that you would hear James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain,’ Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ the Who’s ‘Behind Blue Eyes,’ Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May.’ It was all right; they were good songs.”

A few pages before that, Marcus quotes a list of slogans from the May 1968 uprisings in Paris, including:

Under the paving stones, the beach!

A good motto for summer.

Artifacts

2009-06-04T11:15:00.001-05:00

In anticipation of the promised nostalgia post, here’s some links to the past from the collective memory machine.

This NY Times collection of readers’ Polaroids is spectacular. Polaroid fans should definitely read the linked article about a group of Dutch men trying to re-start the company’s film production process (which ceased last year), if for no other reason than that it has this quote in it: “‘So we stopped drinking beer—which is a pity because Dutch beer is good—and started talking business,’ Mr. Kaps said.”

And Hard Format, which I just discovered via Gutterbreakz (who has quite a few books I want) and will probably spend the rest of the day looking through. I quite liked this reggae collection, of course, and I’m excited to look through the collections grouped by designer.

Conservatives and Music, Part Two: Preserving the Old Ways

2009-06-03T07:46:00.006-05:00

Clearly modern movement conservatism is a kind of bizarre brain fever, a malfunctioning program corrupted by a nasty virus called free market capitalism (well, amongst other nastier things). By being wedded to a messianic belief in the power of the market, conservatives end up with a mindset where something as fundamentally unconservative as global megacorporation Wal Mart is actually a hallowed signifier of the small-town folkways of Real-Americans, rather than one of the more obvious culprits behind their destruction. Attempting to graft libertarian free market dogma* onto conservative reverence for tradition and the past simply doesn’t make any sense: nothing provokes radical change like unfettered capitalism. So I hope it’s abundantly clear that what “conservative” means or could mean to me is completely unrelated to lattes or NASCAR or demonizing gay people—hell, I should probably have just chosen a less loaded word and skipped this screed (sort of; there is a point buried somewhere down there about how a conservative politics could act as a brake on liberals championing war and imperialism).

*Not that right-wingers’ belief in the free market is ever enacted, but that’s a whole other post.

Let’s return to music since I already had to go back and delete an earlier sentence where I said I didn’t “feel like talking about politics.” How could we go about uncovering “a much more stimulating tradition of conservative thought in popular music?” One important strand would be the work of musical archivists and preservationists: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, field recordings of old folk songs made by people like John Lomax, and ethnomusicological recordings on labels like Nonesuch Explorer or Ocora would all be important and influential examples. With the globalizing forces of capitalism and technology erasing centuries of tradition in local cultures—even while, of course, new technologies like sound recording, record manufacturing, and air travel, as well as the possibility that people might pay for these recordings, made the sounds available to a new audience—the people behind these projects sought to collect and preserve rapidly vanishing ways of life.

Smith and Lomax’s active approach to musical conservation decisively influenced the folk revival of the 1960s: the Greenwich Village scene that Bob Dylan exploded out of—and essentially destroyed in the process—and its longer-lasting and (to my ears) more interesting corollary in the UK. Much has been made of the purism of these revivalists, crystallized in notorious incidents like Dylan’s appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and the infamous “Judas” heckler at his 1966 concert in Manchester. It is just this kind of dogmatic insistence against seemingly inevitable change that makes the folk scene look (ironically of course; their politics being anything but at the time) a whole lot like modern conservatism.

This kind of mini-culture-war within a musical scene ended relatively quickly in folk, but in the jazz world it began in the 1980s and hasn’t ended yet. In the polarizing figure of Wynton Marsalis we can see the ramifications of the purist urge to police, to exclude, to define, and to delineate narratives where they don’t necessarily exist. In his role as artistic director for Jazz at Lincoln Center and as a consultant for Ken Burns' Jazz documentary, Marsalis has written off both the avant-garde and fusion, promoting a frozen-in-amber classicist view of “jazz” that is intellectually arid and has had real financial consequences for artists who fall outside the mainstream.

Nonetheless one could argue that something was lost in Dylan’s pied-piper effect on folk fans—luring them away from their budding interest in gospel, bluegrass, and a kaleidoscope of world music toward the banal prospect of yet another kid picking up an electric guitar—and that jazz in the 1980s was in a sorry state when Marsalis came along to restore its dignity and remind everyone that Charlie Parker didn't make music to perform data entry to. Sometimes resisting change is resisting the corruption of something valuable. You tend to see “nostalgia” characterized as an always-wrong weakness of the mind these days, as if the idea that progress is constant had achieved consensus, but sometimes nostalgia exists because the past was better.

Which is a perfect way to segue into The Kinks, but this topic expanded the more I thought about it, so that will have to be another post or maybe this will just be an ongoing concern. I certainly find the way people conceptualize and talk about nostalgia fascinating.

Conservatives and Music, Part One: Not Actually About Music Yet

2009-05-29T15:16:00.004-05:00

The combination of an ongoing and growing obsession with The Kinks and recently reacquainting myself with The Modern Lovers has prompted me to think about (what I am choosing to call) the conservative impulse in music. I first started thinking about this a few years ago when this breathtakingly dumb list of conservative rock songs was being pilloried by lefty bloggers. The level of cognitive dissonance required to create that list really does boggle the mind. It also concisely lays bare the contradictory, confused mess of ideals, kneejerk reactions (taxes are tantamount to slavery and driving 55mph is oppressive, but it’s a good thing when the law “wins”), manipulative overemphasis on the cultural signifiers of class rather than economic reality, skewed perspective on and nostalgia for the Cold War—a war which we all know liberals were unanimously opposed to—and pasty Tolkien fanboyism that makes up the contemporary American conservative. Really, just skip to numbers 24 and 25, weep, and then just forget about it because it’s not even worth dismantling. Or read Jon Swift’s list, especially the comments section wherein anonymous outraged liberals repeatedly demand to know if he is joking (A: yes).

But what’s ultimately so pathetic about that list is that if movement conservatives weren’t so eager to co-opt music made by outspoken liberals like The Clash (for fuck’s sake!) in order to rebrand themselves as sexy rebels—who favor abstinence of course—they could very easily illuminate a much more stimulating tradition of conservative thought in popular music. Of course in order to do that, they’d have to come to grips with the basic incoherence of their worldview.

I have no desire to start writing about day-to-day politics on this thingy—in fact I’m trying to withdraw a bit from obsessing over politics in general—but there are certain conservative impulses that appeal to me. To take one example: if the way American empire has pursued its interests and expanded its power across the globe since World War II (at least; the Cherokee might want to extend that a bit further back) doesn’t make you angry, ashamed, and deeply dubious of the motives of anyone seeking to wield that power, then, frankly, I think you’re disturbingly, possibly willfully, naïve.

So, a conservative perspective that perceives that using the highly trained killers of the United States military for “humanitarian” purposes is a non-starter makes sense to me. The conservative who sees the project of American empire as largely spreading death and misery to other countries, rather than democracy and hope, is more convincing to me than the liberal who thinks the U.S. can still act with some kind of moral authority in the world, that as long as it’s Obama and not Bush dropping the bombs on Afghanistan, things are automatically better. Fictional Liberal interjects, “but Rob, conservatives don’t actually think any of those things. In fact many of them actively advocate spreading death and misery to the Muslim-y and/or oil-having parts of the world.” Okay, that’s true, and I’m hard pressed to think of a prominent conservative who has expressed these views who hasn’t also signed on to some other repellent, racist, or just crazy ass ideas (cf. Ron Paul). Even more damning: many, many conservatives are hell bent on destroying the natural world as swiftly as possible—you’d think it would be easy to convince conservatives to show a modicum of interest in conservation, but that’s because you’re a limp-wristed hippie.

I could chalk the relative nonexistence of a compelling, cohesive conservative viewpoint up to the intellectual impoverishment of our relentlessly binary political system, but it also speaks to the way the word “conservative” has become essentially meaningless today. I’m certainly no expert—I’ve never read any Burke—and many more learned people than I have explained how the right wing ended up in the ideological Chinese finger trap it is currently stuck in—a self-destructive cycle of bilious resentment that currently has them comparing Nancy Pelosi to Pussy Galore and alienating even more women (plus Hispanics! this is the Brewster’s Millions approach to electoral politics) with their lashing out at Sonia Sotomayor.

Ok, this ran a lot longer than I anticipated, so I'm making it a two-parter. In the next post: I get to the point!

A Drowned World

2009-05-13T09:59:00.006-05:00

Check out this stunning collection (found via Bookslut) of Penguin science fiction covers from 1935 to 1977: here. I've run into a few different collections of old Penguin paperback covers online before and this is one of the best. As James Pardey, the proprietor of the site (his commentary is worth reading if you're into this sort of thing), somewhat mildly puts it: "Penguin books and their iconic covers have a place in history that merits study and appreciation." These covers, their typography, the colors, the choice of images, are utterly of their time and place, evoking an era in Britain that has increasingly been on my mind for the past year or so; in fact, the chosen period here, '35 to '77, is almost exactly right: I would simply extend it through to Thatcher's reelection in 1983. I couldn't possibly sum up everything personal, political, and cultural that compels me toward that era here, but I hope to return to this with some future posts on a few of my current objects of fascination: the Kinks, Ghost Box, Powell & Pressburger, etc.

UPDATE: Good lord, obviously I need to get this!

The Name

2009-05-12T13:45:00.000-05:00

Richard wondered if I named Elephant Rock after the state park in Missouri. I did not, though it looks pretty great. As does this rock near Port Reyes, California that I found searching for Elephant Rock images. Apparently there are Elephant Rocks all over the world, from Nevada to Canada to Africa to India to New Zealand (just google image search elephant rock if you're curious).

I've also always liked elephants in general--gigantic matriarchal vegetarians with no real predators--but the name was taken from this Upsetters song, which to me really does sound like something elephants would enjoy.

Hands Across the Internet

2009-05-08T08:33:00.000-05:00

In direct contradiction to my semi-serious "computers ruined everything" theory (see here for a rebuttal to this theory from Harry J, but watch out for some wild volume switches on that link), here are a couple of testaments to what's great about the internet.

In response to my starting Elephant Rock, my friend Richard returns to his blog, The Stumpwasher!. There I learned the excellent news that even though he's in China, I can hear some of the beautiful music he's been making there by going to his myspace page.

And despite my having food poisoning just 24 hours ago, Rebecca's always mouth-watering Meals; For Moderns has a particularly tasty looking raspberry smoothie up today that has me very happy to be able to eat again.

Projects

2009-05-06T14:58:00.000-05:00

The vaguely pathetic half-urge to start a blog has invaded my daydreams for a few years now. Suddenly wanting to type up Panda Bear’s list of musicians/bands from the liner notes to Person Pitch (see below; and I do hope to do something with that list in future) was the somewhat odd impetus to finally start. But back when I was actively looking for a reason, I entertained numerous project-type ideas thinking I needed some kind of discipline, or, more accurately, thinking I needed some kind of justification for such a narcissistic endeavor.

There were a couple of other internet projects I found inspiring. One was Noel Murray’s Popless column at the A.V. Club (actually there’s a few good ones there, see also the New Cult Canon, which recently featured the awesome Millennium Actress and My Year of Flops, which recently featured The Love Guru). While I find actually reading Murray’s column to be kind of enervating—our taste in music is extremely different—I admired its obsessive quality. Another possible model was the even more entertaining and much more hopeless Criterion Contraption, Matthew Bessem’s doomed attempt to watch the entirety of the Criterion Collection. He started five years ago and he’s on #91 (by the end of 2009, Criterion should be past or near #500). #91 happens to be The Blob, a movie I watched many times as a kid and those shots of that weird little boy are truly haunting.

The Panda Bear List

2009-05-03T15:07:00.000-05:00

Basic Channel; Luomo; Dettinger; Wolfgang Voigt; Cat Stevens; The Police; Scott Walker; Daft Punk; The Tornadoes; The Zombies; Moodyman; Erik Satie; Madlib; Jonathan Richman; Roy Orbison; King Tubby; Caetano Veloso; Black Dice; Sam Cooke; Pink Floyd; Sparks; The Beach Boys; Everything But the Girl; The Orb; Basement Jaxx; Vashti Bunyan; S.E. Rogie; Jay Dee; Phoenix; Ariel Pink; Robert Hood; Aphex Twin; Arthur Russell; SRC; Air; Tom Jobim; The Beatles; Michael Jackson; Benjamin Diamond; Syd Barrett; Jay-Z; Talk Talk; Black Flag; Hall and Oates; Lee Perry; Bjorn Olsson; Can; Isolee; CNN; Chris Bell; Kylie Minogue; Ricardo Villalobos; Ennio Morricone; Louvin Brothers; Metallica; Wu Tang Clan; Spacemen 3; Cindy Lauper; Nina Simone; The Clientele; Markus Guentner; Pete Rock; The Strokes; Dr. Dre; Carsten Jost; Notorious B.I.G.; Duran Duran; The Chills; Portishead; Nirvana; ODB; Echo and the Bunnymen; ELO; Kraftwerk; Enya; Neu; Everly Brothers; The Free Design; Skip Spence; Erik B and Rakim; Nico; The Kinks; George Michael; Salz; Bob Marley; Ghostface Killah; Grateful Dead; Doce; Horace Andy; Incredible String Band; The Equals; Joni Mitchell; Kaito; Linda Perhacs; Love; Maria Callas; Antonio Variacoes; Harry Mudie; Black Sabbath; Nas; Phil Collins; Queen; Ride; Gang Starr; The Stooges; New Order; Theorem