random thoughts

I bought three new releases in the past week. What does it say about me that two of them, the Living Sisters' Love to Live and Sharon Jones's I Learned the Hard Way are unabashedly retro. I have a blog entry coming about how interesting it is the very traditional songs have very modern sentiments. That is, if I wrote blog entries...

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of a good historical analog for the million of crappy glo-fi bands. The best I've come up with is the crappy Look-out! pop-punk bands from the early to mid-90's. The Look-out! bands would be those like Screeching Weasel and the Queers who sounded just like the Ramones and wrote songs about growing up in suburbia. Heck, I kind of liked these bands, but I was still in high school and should have known better even then. Repetitive, snide, somewhat clever. Some songwriting talent there (especially in Screeching Weasel, their song "Leather Jacket" is a pretty good kiss-off song) but forced through a very narrow channel. Maybe it helped me get through high school. Still, I can't imagine anyone not already initiated wanting to listen to this. And anyone already initiated should have been buying records by the Buzzcocks, the Clash, Ramones, X, Television, Blondie, or even records not obviously "punk." Nevermind what the indie kids would have been listening to at the time like Pavement or Fugazi or Guided by Voices. Hell, you got to a record store that carries, say, Screeching Weasel, it carries music by lots of other bands. But maybe that music says nothing to them about their lives... So I guess as fun as it is to say, "Damn kids with their Neon Indians and their Ducktails and their the Memory Tapes," I have as dark a secret in my past. And I'm not even bringing up the third wave ska.

So perhaps I'm bugged by the glo-fi blip not because I'm old and don't get it, but because I'm old and I do get it. In the 15 years since my pop-punk days, I've developed a somewhat wider perspective and my instincts are to be bored with the music and try find a historical analog and try to understand why I don't like it... This doesn't even touch on the difference in attitudes. Blissed-out, gauzy glo-fi is worlds away from dumb angry punk (cue Michael Azerad). Which is just reminds me that the kids have it different these days.

By the way, the 2000's pop-punk band Exploding Hearts were transcendent. Possibly better than the Buzzcocks.

cycling through sxsw

I just got back from cycling through a bunch of SXSW day events. Down Sixth street to the east side and back. Saw the IFC studio or whatever it is where Neon Indian was supposed to be playing. I tried to distract the crowd with "Whoa! Is that Ryan Schreiber." I passed the Levi's Fader party and heard some tunes from (a check of the schedule reveals to be) Freelance Whales. I was not part of the crowd. I'm going to see some California hip-hop artists tonight and doing some day events tomorrow. Most of the bands I'm going to see, I've seen before.

There was a mixture of sx hipsters and St. Patty's Day celebrators. I smelled weed and saw lots of fixed gear bicycles with white-wall tires. I was wearing my Levi 507's bootcuts, white Sperry's, burgundy Gucci plastic-framed glasses, my Mae Shi t-shirt reading, "I'm Glad You're Alive" and riding a mid-80's entry-level Bianchi 10 speed, some combination of hipsterisms past and present.

People were wearing badges that had the names of the organizations that they were affiliated with. For a lot of participants, SXSW is as much about the experience of feeling like a taste-maker as it is about the music. I guess this appealed to me at one point. I was a college radio DJ. My airname has appeared in College Music Journal. But my own interests and priorities have changed. I'm trying to have an academic career and don't have the time to spare to get back on the air. I've been involved in a couple of radio station civil wars, and I don't much like how I've acted in them, so that's another reason why I'm not on the air. About four and a half years back (right before I was going to see the New Pornographers), my appendix burst, and my health has become a higher priority. While my eating and exercise habits had little to do with my burst appendix, being reminded that you are mortal changes things. So I'm not on the air and okay with not being a taste-maker. And it's just as well, it's a young person's game and if you stay in it too long, you become the creepy old guy standing alone.

So I'm also not too clued into what's going on. I don't trust too many of the music sites. And there are a lot of other traditions to explore rather than chasing down the latest hyped act who may or may not be a bunch of musical illiterates who have hit on something sublime.

I'll just say that any of you kids thinking about looking up Neon Indian on youtube, instead listen to some of the tracks by Elis Regina and Tom Jobim.

Now get off of my lawn!

The 5000th Best Band of All Time

The Long Ryders are quite possibly the 5000th best band of all time. They were active in the '80's as part of the Paisley Underground scene. This was a scene of bands that lovingly recreated '60's and '70's hard-rock and psychedelic music informed by punk rock. Well-written, well-performed, and energetic, these bands are mostly forgotten. The movement was a reaction to the primitivism of L.A. Hardcore. The best-known bands to come out of that scene were the Bangles and Mazzy Star (which was an offshoot of a side-project of members of the Dream Syndicate and the Rain Parade). Overall, the bands in that scene made some pretty good music, and if you're at a record store that has used vinyl, you really couldn't go wrong picking up something by the Dream Syndicate, the Rain Parade, the Three O'Clock, or the Long Ryders themselves. And if you're at a college radio station, go dig through the vinyl stacks, pull out those records, find the adoring reviews written by DJ's and check out the visible track burn on the platter.

The Long Ryders were led by country-rock devotee Sid Griffin. He was so heavily indebted to the Byrds, Buffalo Springfields, and the Flying Burrito Brothers that their first full-length Native Sons reproduces the cover of a Buffalo Springfield album. And what a fine album it was. "Ivory Tower" features Gene Clerk on vocals and would rank highly in the Byrds cannon if it had actually been written by them. "Run Dusty Run" is a driving number about betting on a horse race in order to have money to elope. "Never Got to Meet the Mom" is a cute song about trying to say that right thing to a liberal girl. In fact every song on the record is pretty good. Generally, it's fun and upbeat and the band members seem like good guys with good record collections.

I like this band, and I listed to their albums every couple of months. And while 5000th is awfully high on the list of all bands, if you haven't heard this band, it's not worth making a huge effort to hear them. A couple of their albums are very well-done but they are not some forgotten '80's masterpieces like Mary Margaret O'Hara's albums. The Long Ryders were not very sonically original. I'm not sure that their melding of country rock and punk is all that noteworthy given X's much less-contrived take on the same a couple years earlier. And there's little to tie them to their time as a historical piece. Even the take on a liberal girl's political checklist in "Never Got to Meet the Mom" ring false. If you're going to compare country-classicist singer-songwriters, the handful of really great songs that Ryan Adams has written wins against the Long Ryders. I guess the band has reunited and I'd see them if they were in town. But since the mid-80's, Sid Griffin has found his natural calling as a music historian.

I suppose this post makes it sound like I hate the band. But it's more my attempt to explain what a rock band is up against. If you're given the choice between hearing a Byrds album or a Long Ryders album (which you would have in a record store if there were any left), the choice is pretty straightforward. Maybe if you like seeing live music, they would have been a fun night out with friends twenty-five years ago. And it is perhaps even worse now that you can call up entire back-catalogs from iTunes or sample old videos on youtube. And unfortunately, the solution a lot of bands try to the problem or originally is quirk. As in some odd production tricks or arrangements. Like double-tracked falsettos, or cracked notes, irritating grooves, or an almost unnerving over-reliance on space and emptiness (apologies to fans of Bon Iver, Bonnie Prince Billy, Bon Animal Collective, and Bonny Grizzly Bear). Embracing your lack of originality (see garage-band revival of 2002) is not a better solution.

The Iron Law of Gaga

Sometime last summer, my friend Matt or I formulated the Iron Law of Lady Gaga. It was "either you know who Lady Gaga is or you have retirement savings but not both." This was inspired by Matt's observation, after too many nights spent at some of Austin's douchier establishments, that there was a certain side of pop culture that virtually everyone in a particular subculture is familiar with. There are quite literally ten to twenty songs that are on repeat on your local autotune-FM station. At this particularly moment, some of them are by Lady Gaga, the Black Eyed Peas, Ke$ha, Jay Shawn, etc. You can literally familiarize yourself with all of them in under two hours. Anyways, this was before all of the articles intellectualizing Lady Gaga.

After formulating the Law of Gaga, we tried it out on groups of older people and it seemed to hold. I shared it with my parents. Within a week, they had each called me to tell that they had either gotten into a discussion about Gaga or seen her on TV. Isn't she outrageous. Since I will not be able to support my parents in their retirement, I am forced to declare the Iron Law of Lady Gaga does not hold. Less frivolously, as The Last Psychiatrist
would say, "if you're listening to it, it's meant for you." So Gaga the phenomenon after Summer 2009 is a different beast than Gaga the musician as of Summer 2009.

How to correct the Iron Law of Gaga? There's delving into the Gaga phenomenon which I'd rather not do at length. (My take: She writes pretty good songs. Someone was bound to hybridize Daft Punky dance-lite with R&B, and she does it well. The attitude expressed in her songs towards nightlife, dating, men, women and the way that it seems to resonate is kind of interesting. The things she says about her songs are not.) You could revise it to "Either you know the ten to twenty songs currently on repeat on your Top X radio station or you have retirement savings, but not both." This does not have the same resonance as the original formulation.

theme set

The Homesick Blues and the Radical Views, or How I Lost My Indie-Rock Credibility

I know that Rod Stewart has been a punch-line for over 30 years, but that doesn't keep his first four records (and the stuff with the Faces) from being really terrific. He is a punch-line because his early stuff was so great. Lester Bangs mentions hanging out with him and the Faces, and he even wrote a short story about Maggie May." Hell, Rod probably deserves rock and roll heaven for penning, "I could steal my daddy's cue and make a living out of playing pool."

But here we give a listen to "You Wear it Well" fron Never a Dull Moment.


In these facebook days, the situation is now more familiar than when the song was written. The narrator is writing to get back in touch with an old girlfriend. He tries, to be nonchalant, "I have nothing to do this hot afternoon but to settle down and write you a line." He blames himself for the break-up, and imagines her thinking that "he must be sinking or else he wouldn't try to get in touch with [her]."

He reminiscences about days spent more freely:

Remember them basement parties, your brother's karate
the all day rock and roll shows
Them homesick blues and radical views
haven't left a mark on you, you wear it well
A little out of time but I don't mind

He is stumbling over things to write about and reminding himself to "write about the birthday gown I bought in town" that she wore with a grace defying the times. And then his current situation comes into view belying his initial coolness. He's on a coffee break and trying to put a letter together before has to get back to work. And he's not just missing this girl but his youth and days he could spend at parties and rock and roll shows. The song was written in 1972, well into the 60's hangover, so he's also remembering more radical times. And seeing their cost. And yes, "The homesick blues and radical views haven't left a mark on you" is just brilliant. He seems to have survived even if he's laboring at some stupid job. But he's also a little pathetic: "I don't object if you call collect." And then he sends off the letter not even sure if it'll reach her: "After all these years, I hope it's the same address."

Of course, I focus on the lyrics but the music is great. A hard-driving folky stomp with violin and swelling organ. Some touches of blue-eyed soul but without any Joe Cocker ministrelsy.

One of my favorite songs. My radio show was even briefly renamed, "The All Day Rock and Roll Show." But mostly so I could start mic breaks with, "You're listening to the All Day Rock and Roll Show. We'll be here for another hour."

I learned about this song through the boozily affectionate Mekons cover. I was surprised that it was a Rod song, and bought Never a Dull Moment at Vinyl Solution for a buck.

A Listener's Manifesto

Okay, a theoretical post today.

Accepting the differences between the conventions of literary and music criticism, B.R. Myers's A Reader's Manifesto - obnoxious as it is - says some valuable things about music. I haven't read Myers's book, only the Atlantic article and that was when it came out back in 2002.

Myers essentially has two theses which don't have too much to do with each other. The first thesis is that the prose of many "literary" writers isn't all that good. He does some close-reading of Proulx, DeLillo, McCarthy, Auster, and Guterson and concludes that they are imprecise, wordy, and often nonsensical. The second thesis is that the popularity of such authors is mystifying, and a lot of people reading them would be better off reading Louis L'amour. I can't really judge the first argument only being familiar with DeLillo and McCarthy (and thinking Blood Meridian is really terrific and being unable to finish anything else by those two authors). That said, the second argument is an interesting one, even if it is even more subjective than the first and it weakens Myers's overall argument.

Here are some thoughts on Myers's essay and how it might relate to music:

1. As in music, there are certain tricks that almost guarantee success for writers. One kind of popularity-bait in fiction is jewporn, books about Jews that appeal to a certain sensibility. Its main exponent is Jonathan Safran Foer who Myers attacks in a much better Atlantic article. To their credit, the New York Times usually sees through some tactics. Wish I could say the same about pitchfork.

2. The antecedents of the named authors are not all that popular among readers. Who reads Conrad or Woolf for fun nowadays? In fact, the established writers who are popular with readers come from a different tradition. Examples based on perusing facebook and my bookshelf are Nabokov, Bulgakov, Tolstoy, Kafka, Borges, and Fitzgerald.

3. There is a tradition of story-telling classicism in post-war English prose. I'm thinking of Burgess, Kingsley Amis, and Graham Greene. They were part of a rebellion against modernism and heavily influenced by, I dunno, Kipling, Maugham, and Orwell. I don't know if anyone has to read Louis L'amour since there is genrish fiction that works on a literary level. Examples in sci-fi are Ray Bradbury and J.G. Ballard. So Myers embrace of genre fiction is somehow analogous to the recent celebration of, say, the Black Eyed Peas in recent best of lists. There is, of course, an analogous tradition of pop classicism. Why this kind of classicism is not embraced by the public may be a topic for a future post.

I'm struck by a similar phenomenon when I was interested in jazz and found that a lot of jazz newbies were into Coltrane and Miles Davis's modal stuff (which is great but not always fun to listen to) while my friends who knew everything about jazz were either into hard-bop and soul-jazz(Cliff Brown, Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, etc.) (which is lots of fun) or downtown avant-garde (which is either fun or impossible to listen to depending on audience). Whatever is going on in pop music is a lot more complicated (most of the jazz newbies I knew were simply excited to be in New Orleans and decided that they ought to like jazz).

the name

The name of the blog comes from the lyrics of the Mekons song, "Memphis, Egypt."

destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late,
the battles we fought were long and hard,
just not to be consumed by rock n' roll...
capitalismos, favorite boy child, we must apologise,
up in the rafters a rope is danglin',
spots before the eyes of rock n' roll...
we know the devil and we have shaken him by the hand,
embraced him and thought his foul (stinking) breath was fine perfume
just like rock n' roll...
east berlin can't buy a thing, there's nothing they can sell me,
walk through the wall no pain at all
i'm born inside the belly of rock n' roll...
it's something to sell your labor for when hair sprouts out below,
i'm a microscope on that secret place where
we all want to go, it's rock n' roll.

I read it as a take on "My, My, Hey, Hey" in light of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since this blog is about the historical context of pop music, the vision of rock and roll as a consuming fire is a convincing one. In my likely absence in the next couple of days, it is a left as an exercise to contrast this with the Brazilian notion of antropofagia.

an appreciation:Personal by Eleni Mandell

As a continuing feature, I'll be highlighting songs that I like. This is a song off of Eleni Mandell's Artificial Fire album.

One of the themes of the discussions that I've had with friends about popular music is about how it's gone from being a soundtrack for a certain partying lifestyle to being about that partying lifestyle with all of its repetition and cruelties. Take for example, "I got a Feeling." It's a song about going out night after night (and apparently on Saturday, twice).

What about music for people who don't partake? (One of the themes of this blog will be that entire genres are out of touch with the lives of their listeners and are instead as Carl Wilson likely says (can't find the reference) "music for making critical judgments.")

I've been reading an acquaintance's online-dating/advice blog. It contains reasonable, well-meaning advice. What's interesting is the conception of dating there which is to find some online who is not too bad, who fulfills a list of requirements, contact them meet up and hope that "chemistry" developments. And for a lot of men and women, this is dating. This should be a good source for a song. Yet I can't think of any grown-up songs about online dating. Sure, there's a lot of novelty songs about people misrepresenting themselves online and mistaking online relationships for real ones. But what about trying to commodify yourself, grading others while knowing that you are being graded, meeting a stranger, the weird drive to move the relationship forward with all the usual romantic preconceptions of what a relationship should be, even in the absence of social context, often without the excitement of, say, seeing an attractive stranger at the bar, and the sheer repetitiveness of this.

In that sense, "Personal" is a pretty great song even though it isn't specifically about online personals. It is personal in two senses. There's the personal ad which leads it off in which the protagonist distinguishes herself with specific details (and which is followed by the universal, "I like to feel hopeful.") But it's also personal in the sense that the listener is mostly excluded from the relationship between her and her crush. What happened in Audrey's backyard? Why is she expecting him to make a move? Has she been deluding herself about him? Here are some lovely lyrics from the song:

I thought about love
And how I love somebody else
But is that enough?

Lining up memories
Each one a hair
At the edge of the mirror
I count and I stare

my approach

I should probably finish planning class for the coming week, but...

I guess this blog also arose out of discussions with my friend Matt who has agreed to be on staff here. Matt is not an indie-rock dork. I think that until recently, he mostly listened to ragtime. He has some familiarity with the big hit songs from the past twenty years. And he is an expert on the popular autotuned hits (I believe that he was one of the friends who pointed out to me that my game of autotune roulette to be played on car trips with the "SEEK" button isn't very challenging since there is always one station playing autotuned songs). He can speak insightfully about popular music. And the stuff that he really likes is really good.

I've tried to share some music with him with varying success. I've also bounced ideas about why I dislike what I dislike off of him. And this was challenging. For example, I find Grizzly Bear annoying and boring. Their songs have some interesting parts to them but this is negated by none of their tracks being engaging for longer than say, 20 seconds. And indie-rock short-hand for why I don't like them is something like "do we really need a hookless denatured Pet Sounds? And besides, His Name is Alive did the indie Beach Boys thing better." But you can't really do that when your audience hasn't heard of His Name is Alive or even Pet Sounds. (That said, probably a lot of people who like Grizzly Bear know what Pet Sounds sounds like but probably don't listen to it.). Snarky blogger for why they suck is "They are the Jonathan Safran Foer of dreamy pop. Self-consciously 'experimental' but never challenging. Guaranteed to make their audience feel smart." But this isn't convincing to someone who doesn't share your worldview or record library or dislike of JSF. And just imagine my trying to explain why Micachu is tons better than Girls.

another rerun

Song Suggestions or a Meditation on Love

An extract from an email to a friend who was trying to put together a live act:
Caetano Veloso - "London London", a song about being exiled and lost in London. Simple, but a wonderful song. If not for [...] hearing Caetano Veloso perform this in Chapel Hill would have been the highlight of my 2007.

Arthur Russell - "A Little Lost", a song of nervous uncertain infatuation. A beautiful off-kilter song.

Jens Lekman - "I saw her in the Antiwar Demonstration." - best lyrics I've heard in years:
"You're looking for me in the demonstration
Well I have already lost patience
And you might find me sitting by the pavement
Or maybe not, 'cause I have shrunk
I fell in love with a punk and she took my breath

Now there's nothing left
Of blood enough to feed a family
Well I just wanna feed Emily
With lukewarm English beer and vegan pancakes "

Sam Phillips - "Reflecting Light", a lovely world-weary waltz. about religious ecstasy or falling in love or both.

[...]

Mary Margaret O'Hara - "Help me Lift You Up" - a great odd song with a weird time-signature. Caroline Crawley's version on the This Moral Coil album, _Blood_ is good too. My musical taste owes a lot to _Blood_

Chris Bell - "I am the Cosmos" - quite possibly the most depressing song I know. I have no idea if you can make it work. I think my adolescent self thought this is what being lovelorn would sound like. It doesn't. Love is about hundreds of anticipations and hundreds of disappointments, and a couple of stray moments of happiness, not ridiculously overwrought sentiments and drawn-out dramas. I've outgrown this song, but I'll throw it out there.

Bruce Robison or Kelly Willis - "What do you think" - a lovely song about being in love with a friend who cries to you and her not noticing. Not a whole lot of songs about this. But...

John Johnson - "I said 'these are lonely days'" a snotty stoned old-timey jazz number about the same subject as the last song. Really funny.
"Women talk so sadly when they speak of the men in their lives
So why do these girls continue with worthless guys
Hey, when you wake up in the morning
and take a look around and it is storming
Know that no one loves you like I do...

Well maybe if they were lesbians
Then it wouldn't be bad that they just want to be friends
Now I'm stuck at home with boxed wine and magazines
While you've gone out with him to break up all of my dreams

Hey, and if you call me in the morning
And try to tell me about it with no warning
Know that I won't listen 'cuz you're dumb"

Billy Bragg - "Greetings to the New Brunette" - A song sung by a soccer hooligan without much ambition who has hooked up with a liberated college girl. Some great lyrics:
"How can you lie there and think about England when you don't even know who's on the team. "

Billy Bragg - "A New England" - Another great song. This one by a poor guy to a rich girl who he has been sleeping with, whose parents disapprove of him and who seems to be losing interest in him. But also about being kind of direction-less and wondering whether you're growing up. From the first lines, you know you're in the presence of genius:
"I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song
I'm twenty-two now, but I won't be for long
People ask when will you grow up to be a man
But all the girls I loved at school
Are already pushing prams

I loved you then as I love you still
Though I put you on a pedestal,
They put you on the pill
I don't feel bad about letting you go
I just feel sad about letting you know."

[...]

----

As far as I know, the friend did learn to perform the Billy Bragg songs but no others.

Indie-Rock as World Music

Me going off on a tangent in an email to a friend:

Music has an artistic context and it also has a role as providing a soundtrack for social experiences. This artistic context is a very strange one when it involves the popular music of the community of the say, 2 million people who have ever bought an indie-rock record, many of whom are themselves marginalized (and with a population that small and eccentric, there could very well be a Putamayo Compilation, The Music of the Plastic-Framed Lands).

canonical

I'm planning an entry which will be a list of songs that I really like. I'm going to need it later when I discuss why I'm not impressed with a lot of today's indie-rock. Rock'n'roll is a genre of music where there's a chance that any bunch of musicians barely conversant with their instrument can bash out something catchy, compelling, and meaningful. But it's a challenge to say that one creation of a bunch of musical illiterates is better than another (Of course, Times New Viking is the greatest bunch of musical illiterates ever, having filled four albums with catchy sublimely naive songs that sound like the first ones they've written (which of course means that they're not in the same category as the Shaggs)). So, I find the San Francisco band, Girls cloying and slickly half-assed, aspiring to be nothing more than a hipster prom band for kids who only went to prom ironically, and probably inferior to the Brazilian Girls and the Theoretical Girls and the Parenthetical Girls and every other band of mostly guys who call themselves girls, but as I write this, "Lust for Life" is stuck in my head. So I'd like to point to "Love you more" by the Buzzcocks as a song that I like more, think is a better song, and is just as catchy. So I've got the beginnings of such a list. But as soon as I started, I was tempted to name certain songs canonical, but I could find no grounds for the inclusion of such songs except that I haven't gotten sick of them as my tastes have changed and that people whose tastes I trust also like them.

Here, you try. "Hallelujah" definitely belongs on the list. So does "Blitzkrieg Bop." And "Billie Jean." What about "Living on a Prayer." What about your favorite song from the great early '90's pop-punk band, Pierre and the Quixotes*, who were every bit as infectious and energetic as the Ramones, but wrote better songs and captured exactly what being your age at the time felt like for you.

Hard isn't it? I'll try again tomorrow.

*Pierre and the Quixotes do not exist.

from a facebook meme

15 Albums that Changed My Life

Here goes. It's going to be hard not to fudge. A more honest list would be much more embarrassing and less music criticky. Listed in the order of acquisition. Consider yourself tagged.

1. The Beatles - "Sgt. Pepper's" - from digging around my dad's old records. listened to it a lot and can't really hear it anymore. Needless to say, I prefer "Revolver" but my dad didn't own it. Other favorites from my dad's records were "Catch the Wind" by Donovan and "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore" by Phil Ochs. All of them are in my musical DNA.

2. The Bangles - "Different Light" - First cassette I bought with my own money. I still like it even though I have no way to play it. The cover of "September Gurls" prefigures my love for Big Star.

3. Grant Lee Buffalo - "Mighty Joe Moon" - One of the first current releases that I bought after years of listening to nothing but oldies. If the oldies station had not decided to add the Eagles to their playlist, I might still be listening. After about six months of listening to the alt-rock station, I switched to college radio. MJM is still a solid record and I have endured mockery from roommates throughout college for owning it. I also bought "Slanted & Enchanted" during this period of my life, and for my money that's still the best Pavement album.

4. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - "Orange" - To my freshman year roommate, I am so sorry. You played G. Love and Bjork incessantly but you didn't deserve this. A love for soul music and an inability to express that love without an ironic explosion of minstrelsy do not make this a classic. A lot of '90's indie-rock is a musical dead-end. In the great American Studies doctoral thesis explaining why that is, a chapter will be devoted to this album. But still, BLUES EXPLOSION!!!

5. Big Star - "#1 Record/Radio City" or "Third" - Don't make me choose. A twist on Eno's dictum: "Not many bought Big Star's first record, but everyone who did became a music critic." Still a favorite. December boy's got it bad.

6. This Mortal Coil - "Blood" - this album rather than the first because it's the first of theirs I bought. I love druggy displaced pop music. This and the Big Star were like an induction into the music geek brotherhood. This is as much an advertisement for Ivo's favorite music as it is an album in its own right. I dutifully tracked down the originals by the Apartments, the Byrds, Syd Barrett, Mary Margaret O'Hara, and Rodney Crowell. Great stuff!

7. The Zombies - "Odessey and Oracle" - listened to this compulsively freshman year. A great cute album. It's funny that today's indie-rock owes a lot more to this than to, say, Fugazi.

8. Sun Ra - "Atlantis" - another selection that irritated freshmen-year suitemates. This one I won't apologize for. Even for the tracks that sound like caffeinated monkeys beating on drums and chihuahuas convulsing on organ's keyboards. Incredible in a lot of ways and the ensuing discussions/arguments with suitemates prompted a lot of my thinking about music. Have to confess that I don't listen to it a lot and now prefer Sun Ra's albums that sound like music. So ends the freshman year selections beginning at 5.

8. Chet Baker - "The Best of Chet Baker Sings" - still my go-to album when I'm feeling depressed.

9. DNA - "DNA" - part of an extension of my conception of music. Also acceptable is the Fall or Pussy Galore. For artistic purity, I've picked DNA.

10. Van Morrison - "Astral Weeks" - anything I say will be cliche. Please see Lester Bangs's essay.

11. Gram Parsons - "GP/Grievous Angel" - As has been noted by every rock critic ever, this does not stand the test of time and I don't know when the last time I listened to it was (let alone actually heard it). But it was a good indie-dork-friendly introduction to country music and I did do an alt-countryish radio show.

12. Neko Case- "Furnace Room Lullaby" - A wonderful album. I got it not too long after it came out. Reminds me of a period of my life when I went to shows once a week back in '02. First record I played on my radio show.

13. Os Mutantes - "Everything is Possible" - this is the Luaka Bop compilation. Just amazing. It's funny that it wasn't until I was 26 that I realized that good music doesn't have to be in English.

14. Sam Phillips - "A Boot and a Shoe" - I do love this album, but it's on this list because it reminds me of a friend who passed away. Not a friend I knew very well but the first (and only, knock wood) friend of mine to die. It is about loss and longing but I happened to be listening to it one time I was out with this friend. So many of the albums on this list are tied into the experiences of adolescence or are separated from any experience, but this is one that relates to an adult albeit a sad experience.

15. Cibelle - "The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves" - a beautiful album and one that I like more with every listen. Yes, my music tastes are starting to move in a worldy direction. Comes with age, I guess.

Inaugural Post

This is the beginning of my music blog. I hope it will grow into a group blog and I welcome contributions.

I don't have a specific aesthetic viewpoint or genre to spotlight. If I have an agenda, it is to situate today's music in its historical context. But mostly, I have a bunch of questions that I'd like to explore:

1. What is the parallel development of undergroundish rock and mainstream pop? Honestly, they seemed to have diverged in perhaps 1972, occasionally coming into closer contact since then (with new wave and the alternative rock's brief moment in the early 90's).

2. What is the American songbook? When I watched American Idol, I was surprised by how few songs I knew. There's an American musical canon that is unknown to many music fans. What distinguishes it?

3. What is popular about popular music? There's always something compelling about a hit song even if it you find it infantile or trite or annoying. What's compelling about today's pop music? What does it say about today's culture? Is indie-rock taking place entirely outside of that discussion?

4. What is the legacy of 80's and 90's indie rock? Can you listen to pitchforky bands and hear any trace of any the bands featured in This Band Could Be Your Life? What does this say that today's indie-rock has a lot of the culture baggage of that music but not many stylistic similarities?

5. Why don't I like a lot of today's indie rock? There are a number of current bands that remind me of music that I like but do not grab me enough to really explore them and figure out if there's something new there. Why is it that I find Amy Winehouse not only more fun to listen to but also more interesting?

6. What is the role of earnestness and irony. Many of today's genres are informed by irony but are taken at face-value. For example, it's possible to read the lyrics of the Black Eyed Peas' "I Got a Feeling" as a condemnation of vacuous nightlife. But no one hears the song that way. In this discussion, expect liberal quotations from David Foster Wallace's TV essay.

7. What is the influence of the web on music? At first approximation, a lot of kids who would have listened to Modern Rock Alternative stations fifteen years ago are reading pitchfork. In that sense, the kids may be alright. But I'd like to think that they aren't...

I'll also discuss some music I like to keep this discussion from getting too theoretical.

Also, somehow, I feel that a lot of music criticism is stuck. I want to find another direction for it. At this point, I'll link to a couple of music blogs I like:

AND YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF... is my main inspiration. And he has provided compelling reasons why bands like Deerhunter are disappointing.

Indie Rock Sycophants is a necessary corrective to pitchfork. I often disagree with him, but he's worth reading.

I also dig Carl Wilson and Simon Reynolds in the rare case that I can understand him.