preEMPtive

fighting for survival is such a boring battle
i want to get into my car and drive out to Seattle
where the used record stores have much better prices
but i don't have a car and i don't have a license...

well, here i am. and it's all true (except maybe the first line.)

so, i haven't mentioned this yet (here), but i'm going to this conference on pop music this weekend. (starting approximately now.)

which is part of the reason i started this here thingy, in fact. i thought that re-establishing myself as a music-type-writer, and specifically establishing a space in which do to it, might help me shore up some kind of identity from which i might approach the conference in a more useful and directed way. or something like that. also, not having any real conception of what this thing will be like, but mildly apprehensive about how i will react to encountering all of these 'serious'/'successful' academics, journalists, musicians, writers, and so forth. because, see, i could theoretially claim any one of those mantles, with some amount of validity... but none of them really feel like me. when you get down to it, what i am at this point in my music life is just a really big fan. which is not to disparage that category at all - it's a pretty essential role, after all. however, there's also room for a little dressing up. even if i'm not entirely comfortable presenting myself as a dj (more to the point, i would feel sort of lame answering the follow-up questions), i can assert myself as a record collector - a record librarian, to be more confusing/self-true - and just perhaps as a Mixtape Artist. which i something i'm intending very much to discuss on this site, and at length. just haven't really started yet. but that's okay.

why am i at this conference? because i'm tremendously intrigued by the whole concept, and i'm curious to check out what's going, in the flesh, with this burgeoning idea of pop music academia. and i'm hoping i'll be lucky enough to get some more specific ideas, or at least some more inspiration, about where i might fit in with all of this.

questions i have about the conference in general: what are the people like who are even doing this stuff? where will the prevailing attitude lie with respect to the academia/pop divide (i.e. will this really feel like an academic conference, or more like a pop/cultural celebration?) what are other people going to be there for? will they have any better idea about this than i do? will they be interested in talking to me?

[at the suggestion of rebecca, i have some things to give people in case i find myself wanting to give them things: copies of the freshly (slightly) revamped mix cd "october is eternal" with the new subtitle "continuous content" (depends how you pronounce it, see), on which i happened to have typed the url for this blog. also, alyssa made me copies of the "syllabus" (i.e. tracklist) for genrecalia - basically a mixtape-as-academic-course that may have some parallels to the goings-on this weekend. so we'll see about all that. one goal that has been suggested is to find a way to go out dancing with a group of conference-attendees.]

questions i have for this conference in particular, given the theme of "shame" and pop as guilty pleasure: for whom, exactly, is guilt a factor in pop listenership, and to what extent? will folks be presuming to speak for a wider audience, or primarily from their own experiences and sentiments? i ask because, personally, i feel like guilt plays a negligible, or possibly nonexistent role in my enjoyment of music - although to be fair i do have to deal with the spectre of it (at least the suggestion of it) when navigating how i relate my interior music-life to my external life of dealing with people. there are some panels - particularly today - which should be pretty relevant to me on a personal level (as opposed to an intelletual one - maybe), based on my recent enthusiasms for (obviously) teen-pop and (slightly more unexpected) soul music (which i also intend to discuss here but haven't really done much yet), because they deal with issues (or at least questions) for the enjoyment of those genres.

i think i've got my plan for today's panels figured out. based more than anything on sarah kelly's enthusiasm for drew daniel at last night's discussion (with stephin merritt, which i missed because i was still on the plane), i'll start out with this:

People Watching

Peter Doyle, “Living Large: The Field Recording, the Mug Shot and the Early 20th Century Mediascape”
Ronald Cohen, “Why Jews Have Been Attracted to American Folk Music”
Yuval Taylor, “Blues Tourists: Condescension and the Blues Revival”
Drew Daniel, “How to Sing Along with "Sweet Home Alabama"”

Moderator: Elijah Wald

the next time-slot was tougher to choose, (especially as they keep switching things around), but i feel obliged to check out "Black Girl in a White Boy's Body," to think about why I'm digging with the soul:

Rock & Roll Double-Consciousness

RJ Smith, “The Johnny Otis Show”
Devin McKinney, “Black Girl in a White Boy’s Body”
Nate Patrin, “I Wonder Who Taught Her How to Talk Like That: The Soul Aspirations of Mid '70s Rock”

Moderator: Daphne Brooks


next up:

Bad Subjects

Charlie Bertsch, “From Pleasure To Power: Confessing One’s Lack of Ignorance”
Michaelangelo Matos, “A Double History of the Supremes’ “Love Child””
Eric Weisbard, ““For the Love of You”: The Isley Brothers as Pop Unmentionables”
Carl Wilson, “Touch Me, Celine: A Dionyssee or, Poptimism Versus the Guilty Displeasure”

Moderator: Jody Rosen

ok, gotta run.

f(l)avor[-i{t/c(?)}e] (of the we{e/a}k)

Too much going on here already. I want not to let myself lapse into breathless, flowery, hyper-detailed song descriptions, as I felt myself doing at the end of that last bit. (You know, the part where I was actually talking about the song.) It's all well and good, this picking-apart of songs, at times down to the second (I tend to get compulsively completist about these things.) It is probably interesting, to call attention to the minutia of how arrangements and compositions and lyrics work their magic (or fail to) - and I'm probably pretty good at it. And, to be fair, it is basically what I was doing in that earlier "ten favorites" piece to which this is supposed to be a sequel.

However, it's secondary to what I'm realizing I actually want to do here/now. Which is... not just to say that these are great songs and why (because of course I think they're great, or they wouldn't be on this mix, especially), but to think more generally about how and why I selected them for a favorites mix (also noting that this is a different enterprise from just making a list of favorites - more on that later maybe.) Which is more in keeping with the putative project of this website being to complement my mixmaking activities.

(It is fun to do detailed song analyses, particularly on songs I love, although it begins to feel rote and weirdly chore-like, and I constantly find myself being overly laudatory - like I'm on AutoFanboy mode, or something. But if the descriptions aren't working toward a specific argumentative end, wouldn't you rather just listen to the songs for yourself?)

I do want to at least discuss the individual songs, but let's find a better framework to do it in. What's up with this nostalgia-value vs. intrinsic-value distinction? I'm framing it in terms of context vs. content, but I think that's a bit of an elision, because every song I know has a context in my life, and I'm not sure I can get outside of that so easily - the thing that makes these songs my favorites is absolutely me-dependent. Right?

Or nah? The songs all entered my life at some point or another - so what? Maybe the best case for nostalgia here is "The Fool", which hit me so hard when I first heard it that I actually used an expletive. (!) (read it here if you don't believe me.) It's hard to say how much my abiding love for it rests on the waves of that initial impact (buoyed a bit by its establishment as a favorite night-ending number for particularly transcendant dance parties) - I don't listen to it so often anymore, but it's still got tremendous potency, even when I think surely I must have grown inured to it by now. I'm listening to it now, and I really can't fathom how fresh it still sounds. So... I'm at a loss. Considering that famous power familiar music has to "transport us back in time" to the period we associate with it, I'm finding myself wholly unable to judge what I'm really hearing when I listen to it. Could its semblance of "freshness" actually be stronger for me than for someone listening for the first time? (Ironically, I think maybe yes - it can take a few listens to acclimate oneself to a song enough to truly appreciate any of its qualities accurately, even the quality of newness.)

I still think, listening as analytically as I can muster, that this is an incredible song. It puts me in mind of what I was saying about the Hefner tune: the sense of perfection, (as resulting from) simplicity and classicism. Similar constituent elements (melodic, form-defining bass; minimal, unshowy guitar; lush, textural keyboards); a major difference in that their organization is much more organic - the instrumental parts come together fluidly, in a loose, funkish jam, rather than in a meticulously choreographed arrangement. Lyrically, likewise, it's more of a you-already-know-the-rhyme puppy-love singalong than a pop-poet's clever-clever "modern relationships" lament. There's not much to remark on structure-wise: excepting the song's clear crowning moment - the glorious glorious a capella choral overture of heavenly heavenly "doot doo doo"s (as well as its accompanied recapitulation) - the whole thing pretty much just flows, making its mark through sheer groovey infectiouosity, more sunshine hippy (pl)attitude than true-school down-funk competence.

So basically, it's great. All these songs are great. And, you know, more than just great, but. What else can I say? How would it be different if I wanted to make a list of "the best songs, IMHO"? Take "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard", which has the very specific nostalgic associations of being (1) a song that I always like to suggest for hiking-trip or long-car-ride sing-a-longs and (2) something I've known for so long that I have no recollection of when I first learned it, making it feel sort of ancient and archetypal - but which is far from the first Paul Simon song I'd want to listen to (the majority of his "difficult" early '80s albums One Trick Pony and Hearts and Bones, for example, hold much more musical and artistic interesting for me at this point.) Would something like that be more or less likely to make the cut? (Angela confessed last night that it was the one song on the CD she usually skips past - and I found myself unexpectedly sympathetic to that sentiment.) So... less likely I guess, which would be the expected answer anyway. Well never mind that then.

On a related note though - something worth bringing up here is how a song's widespread familiarity comes into play. Mix-wise, I'm not usually very interested in including songs that are already well known (on any mix, really -or, in the case of a mix for a specific person, songs that I know they already know.) "Me and Julio" may be a good example of why, assuming that Angela's and my less-than-enthusiasm for listening to it yet again has something to do with overexposure. There's a fine line (or at least, so I'm assuming, since I'm having trouble finding it.) I'm fond of saying that I think "Johnny B. Goode" is best and archetypal rock and roll song: how then to take my failure to find a spot for it here (in favor of at least a few rock songs, though maybe no rock'n'roll per se - more tellingly, I even came close to including "Little Queenie" on the forthcoming and/or possibly apocryphal volume 2, mostly on the strength of that couplet I love to quote, but "Johnny" not b good enough. okay i'll stop.)

Does it just mean I don't have the guts to back that sentiment up? Maybe. But that song really is hard to hear divorced from its weighty cultural baggage. It's not just that I don't want to be obvious (we all know that doesn't count for much - plenty of times the obvious is the unexpected and vice versa.) But I do have a harder time deciding whether I really like really famous songs and albums for themselves, because there's so much else (interesting) going on. And I think I'm loath to incur the ambiguity that brings, in situations like this where I'm trying to quantify myself, as it were. (This issue was even more prevalent when I tried to compile my "favorite albums" list - to include or not to include no-brainer London Calling?) On the other hand, "Tracks of My Tears" is pretty darn well acknowledged. I can't deny that I just plain like it more than "Johnny B. Goode". Also, funny of me to pick only, like, the best known song Elvis Costello ever freaking wrote, eh? That's where trying to narrow things down will get you.

(Meanwhile, it's hard to say if "But Not For Me" made it onto the specifically because of its status-by-virtue-of-association [er, with its author] - I think I better talk about that later on, in a paragraph entitled "Tokenism and Taboo".)

Personal/nostalgic context can also function to help disqualify widespread familiarity as a pertinent consideration. I came to "When You Were Mine" basically independent of the song's hit status, which is to say through my own copy of Prince's Hits CD (no that's not contradictory, be quiet). Oldies radio (source of several of these songs) is the music of my childhood, but I didn't especially encounter it in a communal context: my parents; a teacher or two maybe - but basically it was my own voyage of discovery, vastly different from people who grew up when it was actually new and popular music. "My Old School" may be a classic rock radio staple (is it? I dunno. I did recently hear it playing in a desolate and snowed in CVS), but that has nothing to with me, because I learned it from a weird "MCA TWIN PAX" cassette my uncle gave me forever ago. Oh my god I just just realized that the "PAX" there probably means pax as in "packs" and not pax as in the latin word for peace (my 10-year-old interpretation was something like, the record company offers these nifty cheap two-albums-in-one tapes to the record-buying public as a kind of peace offering. like some kind of britishism for "deal" or something... see, it makes sense?) Okay, that was pretty ridiculous of me. I guess that's what happens when your book-learnin' exceeds your common sense, or something. When you're ten years old. Wow.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, right, explaining why I have famous favorite songs, even though I'm not a brainwashed follower-of-fashion automaton I swear I'm not I promise. Well, then, Ross, how do you account for RAYdiohead? OK, computer. sheesh. Well then I will. It's because "No Surprises" is a beautiful, beautiful, lovely gorgeous song. (Besides, come on, it's not that famous a song. it was barely even a single.) Those sweet, consonant glockenspiel arpeggiations! Those high ringing guitars that are made to sound like sweet, consonant glockenspiel arpeggiations! (The glockenspiels here, incidentally, precisely split the difference between glockenspiel as kiddie-toy sentimentalism a la Buddy Holly's "Every Day" and the Glock=Rock revisionism of "Born to Run.") Talk about classicism and simplicity. (okay, or don't.) Or maybe I take it back. This song is Quietly Majestic, and those glockenspiels tower like marble pillars. It's a bloody anthem.

Actually the thing that really gets me about it is that, maybe, possibly, if you squint, you can pretend it's Radiohead being earnest. Wait, they're always earnest - I mean, you can pretend it's really the happy, content, uplifting song it's pretending to be. After all, it's the cheeriest sounding thing on the thoroughly paranoid-depressive OK Computer, and even though the lyrics are technically probably about suicide or something, if you take them at face value it sounds like an ode to okayness; world-weary and resigned but at last at least at peace; a wanly-smiling suburban shrugging-off of life's imperfection. The government doesn't speak for us, work will kill you, love's a wasteland, but at least there aren't any surprises...please? Yeah, I know it's a poor excuse for happiness or even contentment. But this is Radiohead we're dealing with. And besides, nobody ever said you had to listen to the lyrics. Just listen to Angelic Thom, as his ugly-teeth head gets submerged in water.

So there you go - here I was thinking I couldn't possibly say anything new about Radiohead, and then I did it through a neat trick of blatant disregard. By the way, Ok Computer is basically a perfect album - the first time I've used that word to refer to something other than capital-p pop, notice (because that's important - i'll tell you later.) Picking that song was secondary to just taking the opportunity for OKC worship. Did I ever tell you the story of how I got into Radiohead? I will some other time.

What's left, known-entity-wise? Well the Supremes song is interesting in this context because, although I have always loved the group, that particular song wasn't necessarily high on my radar until, for some reason that I don't quite remember, I seized on it in the Spring of my Sophomore year as, oh my god, this is the best Supremes song ever obviously obviously. Back in the day, "You Keep Me Hanging On" was definitely a top favorite, and "My World is Empty Without You" - hell, they really never made a bad single - but now it's just gotta be "Some Things You Never Get Used To". I would really like to do a detailed reading of this song, actually, because it is pretty strange and wonderful. But not right now.

Along similar lines (perhaps?), I have a little suspicion that part of the reason I have taken "I'm Just a Prisoner (Of Your Good Loving)" and welded it to my soul is that, finally, it was a song that fit in perfectly with the Motown and Stax/Volt pop/soul I have always adored, but which I didn't already know so well as to make it a fait accompli. A lost classic, if you will. Just maybe, the fact that most other people didn't know it either also had some effect. On the other hand... it's another brilliant song. Among other things (like, um, Candi's incandescent vocal performance), it's a masterpiece of moments. Again, like the Hefner tune, it's got the entrances-piling-up thing going on, and every entrance and every shift works like a charm. Sometime maybe I'll catalog these too. Or, again, you could just listen...

Why are we talking about this again? Ultimately, I think famousness, like nostalgia, is basically a red herring here. "The Fool" and "I Took Her Love For Granted" may be hidden gems, unluckily undiscovered by the pop-ulation at large, but isn't that irrespective of the qualities (and quality) they share with actual-world classics like "California Girls" and "He's A Rebel", which earn them their VIP passes to shared tracklist space with the stars?

I've got just a few more songs to discuss, which are mostly the less-well-known ones. (Really, why was I using this as a framework again? Well whatever.) But first I might take a deep breath and talk about why I'm so interested in mix tapes in the first place. Or, more likely, I'll write something about this conference I'm heading out to tomorrow. Because that would be the timely thing. Til then then.

playing favorites

Before I go any further, I may as well disclose a major agenda that I have for this website: for it to be, as suggested by the title, a sort of extension of my practice of making mix tapes and cds. For a while now, I've been harboring a plan to create a site to display my mix creations - an online portfolio, if you will - and I'm hoping this will serve that purpose. But I would also like to use it to discuss and explore the process(es) of mix-making and the meaning(s) it holds. I'll have much more to say on this in the future, but first I'll try just doing it, with a minimum of premeditation; perhaps in the process establishing something of a template for how things might go down here.

Here's the tracklist of a recent mix CD, " ›o« plays favorites vol. 1":

1. California Girls - The Beach Boys
2. Red - Okkervil River
3. He's A Rebel - The Crystals
4. I Took Her Love For Granted - Hefner
5. When You Were Mine - Prince
6. Following Through - The Dismemberment Plan
7. No Surprises - Radiohead
8. Tracks of My Tears - Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
9. Alison - Elvis Costello
10. Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard - Paul Simon
11. A Journey to Reedham - Squarepusher
12. This Must Be The Place - Talking Heads
13. Some Things You Never Get Used To - Diana Ross and the Supremes
14. What Makes You Happy - Liz Phair
15. My Old School - Steely Dan
16. But Not For Me - Chet Baker
17. I'm Just A Prisoner (Of Your Good Lovin') - Candi Staton
18. Anything You Want - Spoon
19. The Sunshine Underground - The Chemical Brothers
20. The Fool - Call and Response

My project for this mix was pretty straightforward - to compile a CD's worth of my favorite songs. Even though it was in response to a prompt from (and made as a gift for) my girlfriend, it was not designed for an overly specific audience, since it was an attempt at an "objective" representation of my musical self, at least with respect to this peculiar matter of "playing favorites". I selected and wrote about ten of these songs a year ago - [here] - so half of the task was done before I even started. Compiling the other half involved launching once again into a reflection on the nature of favorites.

Funny things, favorites. The quantifications of qualifications. (Not sure if that means anything?) They happen strangely: when they're evident, they're self-evident, but otherwise they're often indeterminate. Theoretically, they come one to a category, but this hardly means we have one for each category (not even each category we have a certain degree of mastery over) - for instance, I am quite confident that Figure 8 is my favorite Elliott Smith album, but I can't come close to identifying my favorite song of his. (I tried recently, but - and this is, of course, obvious - no amount of trawling back through his catalog made the determination any easier.)

Why is it easier to figure favorites in some domains than others, if it doesn't have to do with the extent of our exposure? There's more to it than this, but the size of the category is certainly a factor (after all, Elliott has many more songs than he has albums.) Given that, how I could I hope to select a few favorites from the tens of thousands (?) of songs that I know? Well, by being flexible, for one thing. Every list of favorites comes with the implied disclaimer: "this is all subject to change."

Part of this imponderability comes from the fact that favorites earn their status through the interplay of (1) qualities specific to the thing, as we perceive them, and (2) the circumstances of the thing's relationship to our lives. We might cherish a thing because of memories we associate with it, despite considering it to be less than worthy on its own merits; conversely, we might admire something greatly for its intrinsic qualities, but fail to feel a personal connection to it. Perhaps I am simply saying that there are both aesthetic and emotional factors at play.)

This creates particular quandary for ascertaining "all-time" favorites - as I tried to do for this mix. The tendency might be to choose songs that have been favorites in the past - which could be as easy as bringing together "the songs that I always [used to] put on mixtapes." (Somewhat surprisingly, very few of these songs fall into that category - exceptions being the Steely Dan and Hefner tunes, and to some extent Call and Response - although they've almost all been on at least one or two other mixes.) There was a long period when "Get Back" was absolutely my favorite Beatles song, for instance, and I also remember loving "Up Around the Bend" by CCR and "'Cos It Isn't True" by UB40 (not to mention Dave Matthews' "Recently") - but that was then...

Better example: in the period of my most pure and undiluted They Might Be Giants fandom (c. 1990-96), I would have told you that my fave was "It's Not My Birthday", whereas now I find myself much more taken with the emotional lyrical nuance and melodic craftsmanship of "They'll Need a Crane." I certainly knew "Crane" back in the day, but I don't recall having an especial fondness for, and I almost certainly misunderstood it as essentially nonsensical (as opposed to "Birthday", which is essentially nonsensical.) On the other hand, "Crane" has plenty of the requisite personal-historical value - simply by virtue of it having been on that cassette of Lincoln and Miscellaneous t plus a few b-sides (the awesome "Ant") and random assorted Pet Shop Boys and Wang Chung tunes (which I didn't identify until many years later) that Josh Hall-Bachner's mom's friend who was a DJ at WBER taped for Josh and he copied for me... [Meanwhile, "No One Knows My Plan" has made great headway as one of my absolute pets since I realized what brilliant dance track it is and started slipping it somewhat subversively into my DJ sets at college parties - the song thereby accruing a great deal of emotional capital and also garnering an opportunity for me to take note of its lyrical clevernesses and so forth - not that on those strengths I'd rank it one of their top tracks, but on the other hand it's undeniably my favorite TMBG trad-salsa tune!]

But I lose track of myself. Let's take a gander at the songs I did happen to select for this installment. On the scale of pure aesthetic appreciation to total nostalgia value, Hefner's "I Took Her Love For Granted" probably leans the furthest to the former. God, even the title is great - y'see, he doesn't say that in the song; he says "she took me for granted." But we know what he really means.

So yeah, this is the first (maybe only) thing on the mix that I would describe as a perfect song. What do I mean by perfect? It has a lot to do with simplicity. (Which, as we all know, is often deceptive.) It also has something to do with classicism. The song consists of a small handful of simple, classic-seeming components, put together in a way that feels (craftfully yet artlessly) precise and that, crucially, emphasizes their component-ness. Specifically, the way that (almost) every part makes its entrance individually, calling attention to its role (á la the breakdown in "Dance to the Music") while remaining subservient to the total effect of the song.

The bass that enters first, a generous eight unaccompanied expository measures of the line around which the whole song will revolve (a bassline akin to that of the other perfect pop song that first comes to mind: Blur's "Girls and Boys") It's a coolly controlled but undeniably bouncy rhythmic figure that anchors a fresh take on one of pop's oldest chord patterns, achieved by darting all over the place in a curious sort of melody that only just grazingly, as if incidentally, reveals the skeletal outline of the progression. Second of the dramatis personae to appear is Darren Hayman's charmingly unaffected voice, which vaults almost immediately into an unexpected and brief but thrilling octave falsetto. The vocal melody fleshes out a little more of the harmonic content through counterpoint with the bass part (repeated verbatim under his entrance), while the playful innocence of the lyrics echoes the novelty and sweetness orchestration: "soon as I saw her, I wanted to taste her lips...so I did."

Before we can quite recover from the snarky foreshadowing of "I was ecstatic...for at least six weeks", the drums and guitar have hit, in tandem - plunging the song into familiar indie-pop rhythmic/harmonic territory, much as that six week statute of limitations on newfound bliss crashes our narrator back to the imperfection of reality. The organ, meanwhile, saves its entrance for a lone sly stab following the line "she asked me if it hurt" - than backs off until the chorus, when it joins in full-gospel-tilt, creating yet another textural shift. Finally, a horn section entrance marks the conclusion of the first chorus with a single, subtle swell. (I always envision this last, unheralded addition to the ensemble as a couple of sneaky session players gradually peering out, like cartoon villains, from behind a piece of furniture or something.)

Just past the one minute mark, this arrangement has gotten dramatically more cluttered since the single voice of the extended opening bass solo. But (naturally), not for long, as verse two strips back down to the basic rhythm players. And - get this - the horns don't appear again in the whole song! Instead, the second chorus ramps up the excitement by other means: call-and-response backups! handclaps! modulations! contrapuntal vocal layering! each in rapid succession, and each contributing to a truly dizzying outro vamp that gives way by a single, suddenly unaccompanied organ note. My goodness, and I thought this song was simple!

And with all that, it never feels cluttered in the slightest - and all ears are on what I've barely mentioned; Hayman's delicious vocal performance and terribly smart and truthful lyrics. Anyone would forgive it the ever-so-slightly sub-par chorus - the whole of the song is nothing but hooks, so who cares if the chorus doesn't happen to house the best of them. (I still feel like the utter brilliance of the verses and all the rest of it are asking for a little better, though I'm not complaining.) Really, it's just astounding how crisp and fresh this song still sounds after all the times I've heard it. It's hardly worth me trying to defend my allegations of its perfection - I just defy you to hear it and disagree.

So. That's one song down, and there's no reasonable way this entry can stand being any longer, or me up any later. So I'll pack it in here and post, and continue this project at a later (or sooner) date. Just to bring things back around a bit into the larger discussion, I should remark that the circumstances of my relationship with this song have little or nothing to do with my appreciation of it. I first checked Hefner out in high school, downloading a few tracks based on somebody's likening of them to Belle and Sebastian - but I didn't hear this until mid-college, on the advice of a casual friend. That's about all I remember. I probably played it on the radio or something? I bought the album from Half some time later, and it has since found its way onto a large number of mix tapes. And almost everyone I play it for has a similar reaction. (When I told Angela it was one my favorite songs, she said it was one of hers too - this was after she had heard it for the first time!)

Sleep well.

problogomena

I'll begin with some context.

I first started writing about music in high school, as a journalist for the just-begun school paper, the "SOTAcrat and Chronicle." (The cringable and seemingly inexplicable name being a takeoff on the main local daily "Democrat and Chronicle" - SOTA was the name of my school.) This was mostly reviews. For at least a while I was doing two per (monthly) issue: one of a recent release and one of a "classic" (Paul Simon, Joe Jackson's Body and Soul, and Stop Making Sense are the ones I remember.) I remember a classmate telling me her dad had purchased the Fountains of Wayne's Utopia Parkway on the strength of my review. I also remember doing a feature at the turn of the millenium on my favorite album of the nineties, mostly memorable for a photo of me with my head surrounded by carefully arranged CDs.

The paper has virtually no web presence, then or now (if it even still exists), and if I still have copies of any of that writing - which I would have done on my dad's computer and, I guess, e-mailed to myself at school (?), they're buried on some hard-drive data back-up CD somewhere among my more disorganized belongings. However, I seem to have posted several of the reviews at amazon.com, where I am reviewer #13893 (a ranking I somehow share with a lot of other people.) They are still available there (the ones I wrote in high school comprise page 3 and most of page 2 - the more recent ones date to my second year of college.) Rereading these now, I sort of feel that my reviewing style hasn't really changed all that much since. But it's a little hard for me to tell - and maybe that's a discussion for another day.

I continued in a similar role in college, although not until my sophomore fall, when I figured out that writing reviews for the Swarthmore Phoenix was a good way to request and receive copies of many many free CDs. These reviews are all presumably available online, somewhere in the Phoenix archives - in fact, I believe for a while the editors had arranged for longer versions of my reviews to run in the online edition (as opposed to the - of course - mercilessly hacked versions that appeared in the print edition.) However, the Phoenix website has never been at all well maintained, and there remains no convenient way to access my reviews there. (The best way is probably to go through archives of each individual issue from fall 2001-spring 2004. Not that I expect anybody would want to - but that isn't the point.)

My third (and final, to date) stint of rockcrit lasted from the fall after my graduation until early the following summer (a little less than a year ago) - and is somewhat better documented, as well as much smaller in output and probably better edited. I was writing simultaneously for the very fine web publications stylus magazine and dusted magazine. Before too long, through a combination of spreading myself too thin between the two sites but mostly just generally losing energy and interest, my contributions to both started to taper off - and shortly after I was somewhat surprisingly and unceremoniously "let go" by the extremely genial editors at stylus, I just sort of let myself drop off the dusted map too.

My work, such as it was, is still there, of course. I wrote just few enough reviews for stylus (six - pitiful, really) that you can link to any of them from the bottom of any of the others (this for instance), although not to this feature, which was probably the best thing I did for the site. My nine reviews for dusted, meanwhile, are all handily available on this one page, quite nicely formatted I might add.

So there you have it, my complete history as a music writer. As a formal music writer, perhaps I should qualify, because it doesn't include various mixtape liner notes, (very) occasional message-board posts, a number of academic papers (about Shostakovich, George Crumb, and CD jewel cases, among other things.) And then, naturally, there's my long-running blog, reminced, on which I write about music all the time, starting from the tiny review of Spoon's Girls Can Tell that was one of my very first posts. (Many of my reviews for the Phoenix are also somewhere in my blog archives - which, for their own part, aren't very well maintained these days either.)

Which brings me to the question of what's going on here, and how and whether it will be any different from other music writing I have done before. The easy answer is I don't really know. I'm creating this as a dedicated forum for myself to write about music with more focus than I have usually allowed myself on my blog (which I still see primarily as a personal journal intended to document my life and thoughts, although its character has changed radically since its inception), but without the formal and stylistic restrictions of music journalism (which is to say I don't particularly intend to write reviews here, at least not primarily, and hopefully I won't beat myself up about not writing super-regularly.)

I don't have very well-formed ideas about audience (intended or actual), because I'm more interested in just exploring for myself how I feel about music writing at this point in my life than in trying to write something that might be of interest to others. But this is not worth writing about right now either.

Enough for this post. I would like to innaugurate this project, properly now, by doing something I feel pretty confident about: writing in depth about music that I know and love. Specifically, I want to follow up what I feel to be the best piece of writing I've done about music in a long time - the "close readings" of ten of my favorite songs that I wrote last winter. this thing. I made a mix-cd recently, "plays favorites," which includes these ten songs and ten more of my abfaves. And so, next time out, I will try to write about those next ten. Sounds okay? See you soon.