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.