hold on, the wait is over

while you have, of course, been diligently enjoying my handily compiled collected works: january 2008 edition, and awaiting review round-up vol 3: february-march (it'll be around the same length, since i was basically m.i.a. for march) - expect it soon, and henceforth they'll probably be monthly and promptly, but i've gotta at least intersperse with some original mincxlusive content, doncha think? - i have somehow written a total of fifteen bios and reviews in the last twelve days (!)

but also, during that period, as sure as the springtime, it's gradually dawned on me that 2008 in music is, like, totally upon us; exploding like the trees all over this silly city, blossoming, burgeoning, already well past the verge of shifting from a distraction into full-on brain-drain on my attention-resources. and does feel like an emphatically recent explosion too, well-past post-sxsw (where, perhaps chagrinably, i mostly stuck to old 'n knowns rather than 'bout-to-break buzz-bombs), though that's kinda a function of perspective.

i was largely checked out of new music in january-march, inundated with piles of (mostly backcatalog, mostly scandinavian, mostly c. 2004-2007) promos; playing catch-up to some extent, like you do; only occasionally encountering bona-fide '08 releases in the line of duty (white, hukkelberg, yokota if it counts, and i'll say it does.) at least once, somebody asked and i couldn't even bother to remember the single actual new album i'd purchased, attended to, and enjoyed so far this year - the mountain goats' heretic pride, on which i'll have to do a fanboy-lowdown at some point. (bottom line: took a sec to remember not every darnielle song needs to be brilliant - this might be the spottiest, which is not to say the weakest, of his hi-fi period albums, but that won't keep it from my top ten.)

plus i just haven't cultivated a desire for some that new new until now, april, as i'm back to being in philly and plugged inter the net and, after nearly a six-week lacuna, perusing a.k.a. and thereabouts (newsflash! there's a new record store in westy! actually it's a satellite of the beautiful world syndicate, which i still haven't actually been to. d'oh! well, i've got my turntable setup in my room now, so we'll see...)

actually to be honest i don't so much have the desire to be hearing new music as the sense of obligation not to fall behind. and downloading torrents only goes so far to quell the sense that that's happening anyway (luckily so far it seems to be about far enough.) why am i saying all this? why am i up at 4:01 rambling in way over-meticulous diction about ... not music, really, anyway? (and listening to the new m83 - quite nice, 'tis!) is it because, although i am certainly in the process of familiarizing myself with a hefty handful of c. 4/08 new releases, three of which i actually purchased, new, this weekend (and two of which three i've listened to - they're the ones bolded at the top of my sidebar list which if you haven't figured it out is the major primary source document for this post), i don't feel up to saying anything concrete about any of them yet, save for the ones i've already dissected for amg (most recently retribution gospel choir and the sally shapiro remix album, both of which are awesome - no surprise since they're both, to an extent, reworkings of two of my favorite albums of 2007 - and both of which i turned around in 48 hours or less)?

yeah, maybe. i do have something i want to say about hot chip (whom i saw last week) and cut copy (whose new album is either rather quite good or TOTALLY AMAZING, i haven't decided) and neon neon, and (here's the tricky part) the like...but it appears that i don't actually have the impetus to say it, just quite yet. [so that'll be next time, we hope.]

and, however, relatedly, also, i've just just as-if-inadvertently plunged back into rock-crit-o-sphere, by which i mean thinking about it. and it has nothing to do with EMP, which happened last week and i didn't even notice or know about until i looked up the dates just now. it's just, really, that i happened across posts on both simon reynolds' blog and franklin bruno's blog wherein they discuss what they've been listening to recently (well, like you do) - in the former case it's a mega-post covering some twenty-five or so items, of which i'd heard two, heard of maybe five more, and would like to hear well over half, in the latter, it's the whole blog-project of trying to review/comment on 365 albums in elevenish months. in both cases, i was struck and inspired to equal-parts envy and admiring enthusiasm by how breezily, off-handed(-seeming?)ly witty and well-worded the writing is, how engagingly, unpretentiously knowledgeable the writers, and how free and nonchalant their approach to their wide-ranging subject matter. the envy part is maybe to some degree irrational - age, experience, fame, and promo-influx-rate aside, those guys probably don't have anything on me, particularly - but the enthusiasm part is the more salient and prominent, and it's a good thing. to be excited about criticism, about the potential for critical engagement, about the value of what casual critical comment can achieve. hyeah. that's about it. also, how much these writers allow their idiosyncratic personal relationship with the music to inform and even overtly factor into their writing about it. (again, like i don't do that? well, at amg i don't, much, but that's different?)

meanwhile, my peerless peer dave bedbugs has been doing his thing over at his place - without an external writing gig at this point, he's been able to engage with (mostly new) music in (accordingly) quite different ways - and recently published a major, excellent post, characteristically epic post, both helpfully recapitulatory and considerably revelatory, titled notes on the death of rolling teenpop (r.i.p.!), which is, among other things, no less than a detailed (personalized) history of a specific (if very likely the only) strain of teenpop criticism, c. 2005-2008, which gets at many of the concepts and contradictions which were central to that conversation, and some more that should/could have been. it seems unlikely that anybody reading this who isn't already familiar with bedbugs and that history would be inspired to read it on my say-so - and i'm not quite sure how much of it is accessible to the uninitiated - enough, certainly, though it does have something of necessarily insider stance. but...read it. it's
a great piece of writing and relevant in all kinds of ways.

apropos of that, i'm currently eagerly awaiting the forthcoming ashlee simpson album, due in two weeks, which i have requested to cover for allmusic; likewise the aforementioned cut copy - on the one hand i feel it's somewhat unlikely that i'll be granted either assignment, and i'm prepared to accept that (after all, they are outside my 'officially sanctioned' purview), but it would be a thrill to do them, and i think i would bring a fairly unique and useful perspective in both cases (the ashlee particularly.) sigh. if not, it'll just give me more to write about here.

so that's what's been going on, for the most part. some things are gonna have to change around here, possibly including the entire layout of this blog - especially now that i've got the URL on my nifty new business cards, i want to make things a bit more user-friendly and explanatory - specifically in terms of the sidebar - and i also want to start including information on my dj appearances, and possibly set up info on my mixtape activities differently.

and maybe i otter get with the 2008 and start muxtaping. (or is that so the-first-week-of-april?) i've been enjoying the ones i've checked out, and unsurprisingly i love the concept, although i'm having a bit of trouble conceiving of them as mixes/mixtapes, as opposed to extremely easy-to-use streaming mp3 playlists (much better than the things i was toying around with for my 'podcasts' last year.) it's maybe a little too easy to pick and choose your listening experience in this format. also, perhaps predictably, i'm rather whelmed that the potential for actual 'mixing' and transitions is very limited, essentially nil. still, will be good for talking about songs. whenever i feel like doing that.

dancing about arkitektur

i've spent the last day and a half, roughly (while frank kogan was looking at taylor swift's dresses) listening to, investigating and writing about the ark, a swedish glam-rock/pop group who are just possibly one of the greatest bands of the decade. i don't particularly want to say anything about them right now, since i've just written well over two-thousand words, cumulatively, about their four excellent full-length albums and one mediocre pre-fame EP. not at all a bad way to make a hundred bucks, though not an especially efficient one. those links don't work yet - that is, my reviews aren't up - but they should be soon (although with amg's buggy and byzantine navigational system it's hard to be too sure about anything - supposedly the url "tokens" change from time to time, which just seems totally bizarre to me.)

they are fascinating, though, and as usual it's interesting to find out what sort of things their fans have to say about them. their third album (in my opinion their absolute masterpiece, though maybe just because it's what i heard and loved first) was a partial stylistic departure, while their most recent was either a retreat or a regression or a return-to-form, depending on your point of view - i'd go with the former but a lot of fans feel the opposite. i'm still not entirely sure how i feel about it, but considering it in the context of their whole career definitely changes things. it's interesting to try to reconcile that in an 'authoritative' review. a lot conditional clauses. (obviously my opinions hold ultimate sway in the reckoning, but i think it's good to represent other prevalent perspectives.)

also, i must say that ola salo, the ark's iconic, idiosyncratic, palindromic, perfervid, bisexual, brilliant, flamboyant firebrand of a lead singer and songwriter, is a truly amazing guy - why don't we have superstars like that in our country? (any more? mostly?) i highly recommend the interview with him here, for anybody interested in gaining insight into the band. (clicking will download as a pdf.)

incidentally salo is evidently best known to wikipedia (to americans generally?) for once having made a throwaway joke about george bush. he's probably best known to readers of pitchfork and stylus (who have never reviewed an ark album!) or to listeners of my ¡OhSiX! mix as the guy in this song (by robyn, though actually by christian falke - and cowritten by k. åhlund - original/video is here but they're not in it), in which he is totally underused and wasted, singing in an uncharacteristically low register and masked by robyn's vocal the whole time.

here they both are:


speaking of robyn, who is the other absolute visionary genius of pop music that sweden has produced this century ... except wait i forgot about dreijer & dreijer and karlsson & windbag [remember?]... okay well, anyway, did i ever mention that she's coming to america?? and i'm gonna see her, in, um, a week and a half. and there are still tickets available for her new york show - wtf, i thought ny'ers were supposed to be hip or something. well i'll guess i'll have more to say about that later. (in the meantime, you can help her throw red things at bees here - while listening to electro remix of "bee mine"...get it??)

i love amg. (so much more than bmg - that was always just a marriage of convenience, while it's lasted, but they're hardly the kings of convenience these days...) i love stephen thomas erlewine's catholic tastes and generous yet authoritative tone; i love thom jurek's exhaustive, opinionated, lovingly detailed, forthright essay-reviews (even when i don't completely agree with them) [but apparently lots of people don't] - and i especially adore tim sendra's [first record bought: monkees greatest hits - hey me too!; favorite magazine: highlights for children] gleefully tweeful indie-pop crushes. (and i like the other reviewers too - andy kellman on electronica; marisa brown on hip-hop; john bush on assorted things but i associate him with earlier techno for some reason...everybody on everything really, which is part of what makes the site so great - you get the sense that everyone involved has at least a decent familiarity with basically any kind of music that comes up.) btw: all of the reviews i linked above played a substantial role in convincing to pick up the albums, in certain cases without any other information.

i love the sense i've gleaned of what many of the reviewers/editors must be like, even though i of course have no idea - i particularly like when the gang gets together to dish about recent pop singles or, like, how hot kat mcphee is. it's a little like getting to hang out with your favorite professors (or maybe your camp counselors) in an incongruously informal social setting; slightly awkward but revealing. (wish they were still doing that - i haven't quite warmed to this new blog format yet, though it seems promising; it's nice to have comments, and it seems like it'll be easier to keep track of things. actually, it fills in some of the gaps left by stylus' departure.)

i love the monthly new release lists (though they're only up for three months) which are the handiest memory guides that always seem to include not just the best releases (as they claim) but pretty much every notable release from the month period. which brings me to the key point that amg somehow manages to give at least marginally positive reviews to an unlikely majority of records, without seeming unduly gushy or indiscriminate - they rarely deliver pans, even to controversial records, always patiently exploring the positive aspects of records while putting them in perspective. and the reviewers convey a sense of individuality and personability without ever letting themselves get in the way of talking about the music. which is understandable enough, since it's supposed to be an authoritative, encyclopedia-style publication; it's just impressive and inspiring how much creativity passion the writing still manages to convey, within those restraints.

most of all, i love and hate how easy it is to just get sucked into the web of all music guide: starting with their often-intriguing album of the day, or the notable releases of the week on the sidebar, or just looking up the records i just heard, or just bought, or saw at the record store and wasn't sure whether to buy (a total personal ritual), or was just thinking about...and then end up following hyperlink after hyperlink, constantly learning new things even when i thought i'd explored a particular strand to its furthest extent . there's so much music! and these guys think they can contain all of it!? (it's like something i said the other day to somebody who offered to lend me a book: thanks, i'd like to read it - i just have to finish the internet first.) no question, i spend more time on allmusic.com, on a daily basis, than any other website.

and now.....

OMG! OMG! OMG!

yup, there i am... just joined the team, as an "expert" (or something like that) on uk and scandinavian pop. of which there are some mildly surprising gaps in amg's coverage, which i am thrilled and honored to be filling. there are certainly a bunch of albums and artists - including many of my recent favorites - that i'm looking forward to covering for them. the pieces i've done so far - bios and album reviews on richard x, margaret berger, and amy diamond - have given me the opportunity to revisit some favorites and in most cases come to some new realizations and reflections about them. (well not that new...mostly just how bizarre amy is, and how amazing rich and marble are.)

i'm keeping a running list of absent bios and reviews i want to write - not just in those genres, since i'm hoping to be able to write about other stuff for them as well - let me know if you come across something that they're missing. and then, of course, there are many more (inevitably) other artists in my "area of expertise" that i haven't even heard of - my editor just tossed me a short list of them the other day - "artists who've been charting recently in scandinavia." so there's plenty to explore there. which is good - it'll encourage me to write quickly and efficiently about the ones i don't care about/can't find enough information on (seeing as how i can't read swedish); and it'll keep me from wanting to write nothing but raves. may have already discovered a new keeper this way too - norwegian folk-pop band minor majority. (hm, maybe a little too earnest and maudlin though. we'll see.)

anyhow. that's the news. hopefully i can get myself some discipline. (and not spend hours composing silly blog posts like this one, so i can get to actually sharing insights about music. er something.) so far, anyway, i feel like this is going better than my past attempts at holding down music-scribing gigs. hey hey hey!

before and after eternity

lot been goin on. you can see by my (just, finally, updated, but already out-of-date) sidebar that i've been doing some diligent collecting these past months - i'll have plenty to say about many of those recent acquisitions (many of them excellent); hopefully i'll get around to saying it, for now the emboldening will have to suffice. i recently contributed what will likely be my last bits of semi-amateur music-scribing for a while, in the form of some blurbs for the styjuke's track-by-track dissection of the radio one. established 1967. album/covers series. not an overly worthwhile thing to write about - forty top uk chart acts covering songs from 1967-2006; even on such a grand scale, with a nearly limitless wealth of implied possibilities, these kinds of things seem almost guaranteed not to produce any music of lasting value - but an enjoyable project nonetheless.

stylus magazine and most of its satellites, including the singles jukebox, are shutting down after this wednesday. i've actually known this for a couple months from certain inside sources, but it seems to have been a successfully kept secret until very recently - quite an accomplishment in itself on the 'nets, which i take (maybe fancifully) as just a small indication
of how beloved and respected stylus was, by loyalists inside and out. to join the cortège of eulogists who will doubtless continue to fill the commentboxes (also here) for the next two days and beyond...i too am certainly going to miss stylus sorely - it has meant a great deal to me in the past three years or so, even if my tenure as a writer - first as staff reviewer, more recently an occasional jukebox blurbist - there was fairly undistinguished. [eh...well short anyway; re-reading my handful of contributions now i'm reminded that i can in fact write a pretty damn decent record review, in fine stylus style, when i can actually be bothered to take the time. this is probs the best thing i did for 'em, although i made it into their farewell roundup - to my surprise - via my rare, impassioned, lone comment on this piece. heh. i'm sort of touched.]

but as it happens i'm moving on to, i guess, semi-pro music-scribing, for the only outlet that rivals stylus for my attentions and affections...well actually, in case you haven't already guessed/don't know (and, er, if "you" care), i'll hold off on telling you where for another minute, 'til i'm actually published. though it did occur to me today (not entirely for the first time), that if i couldn't make a decent go of it as a music writer in an environment as welcoming and open-minded as stylus (albeit uncompensated), it's probably just not something i'm sufficiently compelled to do... eh, but here i am. so here i go.

folk
more i wanted to say about folk and songwriting. it keeps coming up - maybe one of those october things. was gonna eta that devon sproule piece below (which ended both before i'd gotten everything out and long after it should have) but better to just keep it flowin'. anyway the night after i wrote that i discussed those ideas, and extensions of them, with a friend who almost uncannily predicted several comparisons just before i drew them - the magnetic fields as exponents of what i'm calling classicist or formalist songwriting, and more interestingly joni mitchell as an analog/precedent for what devon does: as a songwriter/lyricist, but simultaneously as a vocalist/guitarist, because point being that their musical creations don't fit neatly within those lines; the elements all combine in idiosyncratic, virtuosic constructions that, though they could certainly be performed by others, would lose something integral in the translation.

we (my friend and i) mostly meant the joni of blue, i think, specifically - even as soon after that as court and spark, the music had moved well beyond what could straightly be called "folk," i think (and her writing was if anything less classicist, despite perhaps some literary formalism.) her earlier days of course had their share of classicism, or, at least, classics, in the trad-folk, campfire-sing sense. (not that even these entirely fit the straightforward, economical model of formalism i've been hawking.) (ok, i'm actually pretty ignorant of mitchell's music beyond those two albums and mingus, so i'll stop talking about her, and try to rectify that.)

it's not like devon's work is entirely lacking in formal structure, either - "let's go out," particularly, stands out as an excellent 32-bar aaba (one reviewer rightly pegs it as 'her own jazz standard.') and that's not to mention her earlier work either, the two albums she released, under her first name only, back we (she and i) were in our teens (i like how the amg reviewers point out that she's more like ani difranco than britney spears), in the immediately post-lilith era, when she was hanging with the likes of dave matthews band and, yknow, being a teenager - albums she seems to have (rather adorably; also understandably) attempted to bury. [a little bird told me that although she claims they're "out of print" to any prospective buyers, there are in fact has stacks of them in her mom's basement.]

i haven't heard them, so i don't know. but do i gather that one thing which sets her later "mature" [=early 20s] work apart is also the thing which most markedly separates it from blue-era joni: a pronounced rootsiness. which can be a stripe of authenticity, general speaking, but more specifically and germanely sets it up as folk music in a way that is more ambiguous with, e.g., blue (which could be called folk, but doesn't signify it nearly so overtly, and really oughtta be labeled "singer/songwriter" if anything should, since it practically originated s/s as we know it.) funny thing about that, actually - a modicum of country/blues/hillbilly/even jazz (in dev's case) signifiers (instrumentation, vocal stylings, general ramshackleness, what-have-you) helps to establish something as folk(s)y (those being musics of the people)...but too much of those things and you're already off in a different direction: genre. (i wanna say something like folk isn't so much a style as a mode, but i don't even really know what that means.)

and that's the thing about dev - she's got, if anything, more of that backwoods, ol'-timey flair than you could ask for (and with nary a hint of affect; lilith-pop closet-skeletons notwithstanding), and her songs fit beautifully into that aesthetic, in lyrical and musical content, but structurally they seem to be something fundamentally other - more in the realm of a artsy-poppy literary mitchell or newsom or will sheff (okkervil river) or maybe even springsteen (?) than a traditionalist/lyrical-minimalist like lucinda williams or patty griffin or ryan adams or perhaps loudon wainwright or ron sexsmith. which seems like something a little unique. at least i'm struggling to come up with parallels. erin mckeown comes to mind (as sharing a lot in common with devon), though distillation leans more formalist, grand is rockier, and i haven't heard her last couple.

what else? i'd come up with some other examples for the kind of songwriting i was and have been describing, in addition to stephin merrit, andrew gregory, carsie blanton, and perhaps john hiatt (whom i don't know well at all):
• edith frost (particularly her most recent album - but: she does a poor job of conveying that crucial 'folk' intimacy/rapport in concert - she just seems like such tentative a presence)
• much of beck's sea change album (in such marked contrast to most of his lyric-writing before or since as to arouse suspicion - which is partially why i've given him so much flak for it over the years...even though there are admittedly a couple gems. actually, his failure to connect convincingly live is probably more of the reason.)
• well john darnielle, indeed - albeit in style more often than substance (which is often more abstruse, but get lonely, especially, peels back those layers to become, by contrast, shocking in its starkness. and he certainly delivers the personal-magnetism goods live. he supposedly denies being "folk," but he can suck it.)
• some of will oldham's stuff. loudon, probably, but in a clunky/sappy way (eh, i just don't like him much.) maybe some early billy bragg (but i doubt it.)

but it's hard. none of these are stellar examples, and frankly what i'm getting at is something that probably happens pretty rarely, and probably never consistently across a whole body of work. i want to set out this dichotomy [succinct/effusive, structured/fluid, perspicacious/evocative, pithy/poetic, direct/discursive, universalist/idiosyncratic] that speaks in theory to my sense of what traditionalist folk writing, rigorously defined, wants to be (viz., the first of each binary in that list), but of course in practice most songwriting falls in between most if not all of these pairs of poles - a majority of good songwriting draws from both strains, intertwining as necessary. so it's hard to single out examples, particularly without actually discussing specific lyrics. and i'm thinking it's particularly hard to stick entirely within either column in a way that's both engaging (not boring) and effective (not pointless.) which may be why it's so impressive to hear either done well.

deejaying
i've been djing a bit. did one party last weekend (the night before mine), where there wasn't a whole lot of dancing, but what there was was enjoyable: first a cute couple grooving to motown; later the predictable whooping it up for madonna and prince - but they disappeared back into the kitchen when i slid that into some peppy italo; finally a bit of h.c.g.d.a. to harder-edged club pop and jungle/d&b schtuff - a guy who clearly knew told me i was "too good for my own good." awshux. it was one of my more fun, fluid, flawless recent sets if i do say so.

on saturday, the second of three costume parties this weekend (i barely noticed the music at the first, except for the romantics' funky "walking in my sleep" downstairs and old 97s upstairs), i djed what i knew would be the most rollicking dance-party since...the last time i played at the walton house - the dancers didn't disappoint. one of them asked me what the soul songs were that i played, so i e-mailed her this list:

laura lee - i need it just as bad as you
tyrone davis - can i change my mind?
tommy roe - sweet pea
stevie wonder - signed sealed delivered
temptations - i can't get next to you
sharon jones and the dap-kings - tell me
candi staton - i'd rather be an old man's sweetheart (than to be a young man's fool)
dusty springfield - lost
katherine mcphee - love story

which was one entire set (i think that's all of it) - i tended to stick with one genre at a time that night more than i often like to do (from there - roughly - to chart-pop to massive dance jams to some electronica then roundabout to some '80s favorites and then more recent uk/scandinavian stuff, and even a little set of rock at the end.) some very good requests, and i think i played all them, usually right away (sort of a challenge/point of pride): "sweet pea" was a request (that was pretty leftfield - glad i happened to have it with!), later the roots, justice (i played a different cut than i'd intended so i played two more later), "challah-back girl," "cock-rock," and michael jackson. several people asked that, and i was a bit hesitant, but i'd kind of known all along that i was going to play "thriller" - so i did, and it was undoubtedly the pinnacle moment of the party. so, excellent.

[strange as it may sound, i don't really know michael jackson, outside of the obvious singles (of which there are many) - i don't have any of his albums, even though they're always around and are very manifestly both good and important. i suppose i've sort of been holding them in reserve them for those very reasons - no reason to hurry, really. at the third party of the weekend i chatted with a longtime mj fan who helped convince me that the time may be soon...]

"thriller" went right into rjd2's "the horror," which went over quite well. i was also very happy to play "frankenstein" (edgar winter - not the whole thing), adult.'s "nausea" (just got 12"!), "like a pen," cerrone's "supernature," black box's "everybody everybody" (thrift store pickup), and two tracks each from blackout (which went over v. well) and in rainbows (which didn't exactly - thought "bodysnatchers" might work as a dance jam but no dice; "reckoner" was my last song, and they did some nice improvy things to it.) i specifically bought a dennis yost and classics iv greatest hits lp that afternoon so that i could play "spooky," but of course i forgot to play it...oh well.

status
stalled out on the mixtape front - which is cool, for now. i do want to upload an existing dj-mix or two but have been having trouble finding a frustration-free way to share 'em. am more or less waiting on making more until i get some kind of laptop set-up worked out - have been playing around with traktor but it's going slowly. most of my cd collection is in boxes now - save 400 in two binders for djing, and 96 i guess in another for home listening. and of course the fifty or so that i've bought or otherwise acquired in the last two months (and if the sidebar is to be believed only sixteen of those were in september, all in one fell swoop on a brilliant a.k.a. day.)

actually, i don't think i've bought anything at a.k.a. since - in well over a month that is - though i have stopped in there. branching out, then - finding some excellent stuff at long in the tooth (on 20th and sansom) which has a tremendous amount of character despite an odd layout - definite focus on true-blue (for want of a better word) rockist tastemaker territory - punk, vintage indie, pedigreed country, jazz, '60s garage/psych and folk-rock... got some girl-group comps there too, which seems to fit in as well. prices not too bad either. have also made some cautious stops at th!nk music, the new a.k.a. only in that it's next-door to my new work-place, which has an equally bad layout without the redeeming features (they even sort used records alphabetically with new, ew), but managed to get some nice indie gapfillers. finally, i redeemed all my volunteer credit at the marvelous for a grab-bag of whatsit. otherwise, did some carefully plotted 'net shopping in the weeks leading up to my birthday (that's allowed, right?), among other things, expanding and consolidating various recent explorations in genre, and prepping my self for my new writing gig.

hm, how 'bout i stop talking about buying records? maybe i'll get around to talking about the music on them. or maybe i'll at least talk about the new britney and radiohead albums - those are pretty much the big news of the month, aren't they? since i'm all about being relevant. both are about 43 minutes long - bit too much for them to fit on a cd-r together, which is too bad b/c blackout rainbows has some good artistic possibilities. also both are quite good, but i'll give you a hint: one's better than the other. and it's not the one dave bedbug thinks. oh yeh, speaking of, teenpop is finally starting to perk up for '07 - save hilarity, rihanna, and ashley t., there'd been precious little action up until a month or so ago. and i may just be ready to listen to some more of it. digital-wise, i've been processing a handful of enjoyable things recently, one of the better of which, in case i don't get to mention it again, is tmbg's cast your pod to the wind. what the christ. what the devil.

one more recent obsession: "one sound" by knife in the water. dusty semi-country minimalism. nine minutes plus. same progression just repeated and repeated, sometimes with verses. organ harmonizations just so-slightly off, never quite resolving they way they should, but growing familiar enough that you almost don't notice - the unsettling rendered inconspicuous through desensitization. "i want to fall right back to sleep/to dive back in the sheets." hypnotic. hmm now.

over and over and over and over and over

i felt like there was something else to say about EMP, since i didn't really offer any general comments on my experience. like carl wilson, i didn't find it to be nearly as mind-blowing as
last year's conference, although it was plenty enjoyable.

of course, as my second exposure to this curious, ad-hoc community, there was less of a transcendant sense of new and unexplored possibilities. but there also just weren't as many papers or panels that stood out as really engaging and provocative (as, for instance, the girl-group panel and carl's own celine dion paper did last year.) somehow, there didn't seem to be many papers that addressed areas of directly relevant interest to me, though i don't understand how that's possible. i definitely felt like the expansion to four simultaneous panels diluted the energy and cohesion of the conference, and - although nobody else seemed to complain about this much - i found there to be strikingly little adherence to or concern with the con's decidedly vague "theme."

i guess this didn't bother folks because the theme is something of a red herring - the true theme is always simply "pop music," and the point is overwhelmingly to bring together the best and most prominent writers/thinkers on the music to share some of their work, rather than to enact a large-scale discussion around a set of more specific topics. which is certainly reasonable, given that this is really the only event of its kind. but it's also a shame, i'd say, since there are certainly a range of very potent and significant ideas to be explored even hewing quite close to this year's ostensible theme - the relationship between music, time, and place - which could have enhanced cross-resonances throughout the conference if more of an effort had been made to draw them out as the focus. it would have made it easier to come away with a sense that something particular had been discussed, considered, and, perhaps, in some small way, explained.

i don't mean to keep bringing this up - because i really don't want to complain about it -
but if my paper had been included (it was evidently not aided by the increase in accepted submissions - though it was, by-the-way, abso-bloomin-lutely on-theme) ... well, golly it would have been nice - i feel like i would have gotten a lot more out of the conference. not just for the obvious reasons, but simply because it would have given me more of an entree into the "hallway" conversations that form a lot of the substance of the conference. as it was, i didn't really end up talking to that many people. because i'm shy, but more because i didn't have anything particular or urgent to say to anybody there, even though obviously there are all kinds of things i could fruitfully discuss with most of them.

also, since i had friends to hang out with and things to do in the evenings, i didn't need to or attempt to join any of the myriad social activities that went on outside of but connected to the conference, such as what i'm sure was an awesome party at m. matos' house saturday night. i did end up going to lunch on sunday (after the big wrap-up discussion, which has been described/discused/dished on in detail elsewhere) with carl, ned raggett, tom kipp, and several others - most of that conversation was about the idea of creating something (a web forum? an online magazine? a print publication?) to carry forward the spirit and substance of emp throughout the rest of the year - an idea that despite some big talk has unsurprisingly not led to even subsequent e-mail dialogue (unless it has and i was weeded out.)

anyway, thanks to the lovely mr. kipp, who, like me, is what carl calls a "thinker without portfolio" (even though his 'folio does now include four popcon presentations, and mine stretches to fit some academic and some periodicalized pop writing.) at the end of the conference, he made some discouraging comments about the prospects of ever getting a paper accepted at there without some significant credentials. of course that's not entirely unexpected - but i'd previously have thought that the selection process would weight the quality and relevance of the proposal at least somewhat substantially against the "brief bio" and acknowledged insider status. kipp's doubtful about that, and he's probably in a position to know (himself standing as one of the few perennial exceptions, since "once you're in you're in.")

coming after the intense but inspiring final roundtable talk - on the fraught subject of "the future of thinking about music for a living," which left me musing optimistically about academia (as the academics were on the whole way more positive about said future than the journo-types) - that comment was a tiny buzzkill that brought me down to thinking about my future for living about music, period. which is to say, my position with respect to this group of people who inhabit emp-world. because, once more, i'm left feeling like these are my people, at least rightfully, but that i don't quite belong to/with them, at this point anyway. despite lots of rhetoric about inclusiveness and intermingling, i still end up on the outside. which is something i do to myself, more than anything. and i'm trying to figure out how not to.

one thing i want to do is to start focusing (on) my writing here; making an effort to create something more potentially accessible and reader-friendly. which means, mostly, to just write better. and also shorter, and maybe less erratically. we'll see. i've got a few several loose ends to tie up, as always, but i'm going to perhaps be playing around with format here in the coming weeks/months, to see if i can sculpt this blog into something more emphatic, deliberate...something with a stronger sense of itself. eh?

criticasters!

(know what it means? i betcha joanna newsom does)

basically the entire music section of last week's philly weekly pissed me off... so i figure it's time to deliver some popjustice, bedbugs-style.

first of all there's this always-useless feature, wherein they (oh, i see, it's a 'comedian') make snarky jokes about album covers and say nothing about the music. this week wasn't any more obnoxious than usual (except that the targets were more recognizable and possibly more legitimate), but the thing about the lcd album really doesn't seem to make any sense.

then there's this very silly and nonsensical piece about how white people only dance in times of national distress. i know it's supposed to be cutesy and playful but this really just makes me angry:

Fact: Traditionally, straight white American males don’t like to dance. They think it’s gay. You might find a few here and there who profess loving it, but that’s because it’s gotten them laid a few times. It’s a Pavlovian something-or-other that’s left them confused. Believe me: no bushy, no dancey.

(you can't tell it from that paragraph, but "bushy" actually refers to our president.)

well, whatever. the thing i really wanted to respond to was this column about amy winehouse. craig lindsay, who writes a weekly about "soul" (interpreted pretty broadly), has annoyed me occasionally in the past, but for the most part he's no more harmless than your typical genre-blinkered, generationalist music scribe, and i often enjoy reading his pieces. but this one really ruffled my feathers.

fair enough that he wants to share his excitement about winehouse - but isn't it a little backhanded to hype her by grousing about an impending backlash? and, really, is it necessary to frame his entire column as a response to one measly negative review, in the raleigh news & observer of all places? granted, awarding the album 0 stars is a very harsh move that betrays some serious personal/ideo-cultural bias on the part of the reviewer, josh love.

love readily admits that the album is listenable (though only "on the surface" - if that's even coherent), and that his primary gripes boil down to (extra-musical) identity politics - and then attempts to justify the rating by hastily adding that winehouse is "simply uninteresting." well...okay. back to black has been kicking around on my hard drive for over four months now, and it hasn't done a lot for me either, outside of a few tracks (mostly "rehab" and the title song. and i really really wanted to like it too - contemporary music that sounds this much like soul achieving genuine success ought to be cause for excitement.) but there's enough base-level musical merit there to make up for a bland persona. especially in the face of such an overwhelming consensus of praise (even the lowest-scored blurbs on metacritic are phrased positively), a zero-star review of this album is a political statement, not an aesthetic assessment.

to his credit though, even though i'm not necessarily convinced by love's assertions about the album's problematic racial politics or "cynical formula," his review is very upfront about the source and substance of his issues. lindsay's response, though, almost completely sidesteps love's clearly (albeit briefly) articulated gripes, and baselessly accuses him of fomenting hipster backlash for the sake of backlash. this is criticasterism of the most obnoxious stripe - petty stereotype-mongering - and it just comes of as willful misrecognition of love's arguments, second-guessing his motivations to set him up as a target for scorn. indeed, the quote which apparently provoked the bulk of lindsay's outrage is a secondary comment, practically an aside, in love's piece:

“People call Ashlee and Britney artificial all the time,” Love wrote, “but they feel 10 times more genuinely expressive than Winehouse.”

Yeah, he’s going to hell for that one—and let’s hope Lester Bangs, Paul Nelson and Ellen Willis are there to take turns sodomizing him with red-hot rhino horns.

whoa! hold on there. okay, this is mostly (or at least partly) a misunderstanding, and a rather understandable one on lindsay's part: i doubt he even considered that love might actually like ashlee and britney, so he assumed that that comparison was intended as a dire, vindictive insult, whereas it was actually just trying to put things in perspective. (turns out love wasn't the josh who wrote the stylus review of i am me like i thought, but he did give kelly osbourne an A-) but, um, seems like it made lindsay pretty angry.

[i really don't understand what lindsay thinks is the big difference between winehouse and joss stone - certainly amy's not much less "callow and pale-skinned." he mentions stone like it's understood that we're supposed to be disdainful, but i thought stone was reasonably well-liked by neo-soul folks - i haven't heard her much, but i'm enjoying the singles from her new record. anyway. i guess we'll find out at the end of the month.]

the only "substance" that lindsay really seizes on from love's review is the complaint that winehouse doesn't have the life experience to back up her persona. actually, love doesn't really say that - he complains that the "boringly 'taboo'" drug references in the lyrics are cheap and manipulative, and that the persona she presents is uncompelling and unoriginal (and therefore not detectably "herself"), but he never suggests that the problem is winehouse's lack of life experience (he certainly doesn't claim she's "too young.")

regardless, lindsay counters by bringing up her widely-publicized alcoholism. indeed, it would be pretty hard to deny that "rehab" is drawn from life, no? (still, a drinking problem that leads to public punchups and unprofessionalism doesn't quite constitute "heartaches and hardships," especially when she doesn't face up to the issue by seeking treatment.) but somehow this sidesteps again (suddenly he's not concerned about the "haterade from critics") into a vaguely patronizing concern for winehouse's health - and the bizarre, incongruous assertion that the fact that amy's "self-destruction is so imminent" makes her "the sort of pop/soul star we need more of." wtf? we want our talented musicians to be mentally unstable?

whatever...i'm going to bed.

totalizingly wired

so now i'm meant to talk about isolée? nope, just to say something about dance/idm/techno or whatever it is; this is meant to be a series of musings on genre, not just an albumist smorgasbord.

i'll say this: electronica can be hard to write about. partly because it can be hard to focus on - listening to it tends to make me want to do other things: dance, or groove, or zone out, or bob my head distractedly. also because there's not usually much you can say about meaning or concept - despite its pragmatic aspects, it's fundamentally fairly "pure", which is part of what makes me want to align it in some ways more with classical or art music, or at least jazz, than a lot of pop/rock. and there's often not much to say about the people making it either. more significantly, though, it's hard to write about because it's hard to find vocabulary that conveys much that's meaningful about the music. this - as well as the often trendy, exclusionary, and obscurantist culture that surrounds the music - may be why electronica has seen such a proliferation of sub-genres and sub-sub-classifications, perhaps more than any other realm of music.

there used to be a good deal of sense to it - at least, in the late '90s i felt like i had a pretty good handle on IDM and ambient, trip-hop, big beat, jungle/drum 'n' bass [which nobody is ever going to convince me are two separate things; i've had this discussion way too many times], trance and house (though those last two did at times seem fuzzy, a distinction occasionally based more on socio-cultural value judgments than actual musical criteria.) now big beat is more or less dead (though...more on that later); trip-hop has been diffused and subsumed into so many other forms that it's effectively gone, or else it's just called down-tempo now; d'n'b has given way to two-step and now slowed down into dubstep, supposedly; meanwhile house, trance, and IDM have all fused together and/or disintegrated into a bewildering array of labels that have more or less stopped being useful, certainly to me, but i get the sense even to the people that actually pay attention to the various german and scandinavian and south american microcliques of techno production.

this is not a bad thing: despite having its forebears and pioneers like any other genre, electronica seems somewhat ill-suited to traditional narratives of stylistic development and pigeonholed categories. there have of course been discernable "scenes" centered around certain stylistic substrata (and often geography - detroit, chicago, bristol, paris, ibiza) but i feel like this is due to patterns of trendiness and influence within very small and close-knit artistic communities, as opposed to the arguably more gradual, but also more sweeping, across-the-board shifts that happen in genres with more formal coherence and discernable lineages of stylistic progression.

that is, with the possible exception of specific scene-based movements like trip-hop and jungle, which have fairly well-defined aesthetic parameters and are fairly self-contained, electronic music seems to have a variety of strains or tendencies, between which it is always fluctuating, but all of which are active, to a greater or lesser extent, at any given point. it can have prominent dance beats, or frenetic, hard-to-dance-to beats, or mellower beats that don't really inspire you to dance, or be entirely beatless; it can be highly melodic, or harmonic, or neither; it can have lush synthesizers, or plinky or squiggly ones, or harsher industrialish sounds; it can be structured in clearly defined sections, or gradually evolving progressions; it can have few elements or many; etc. etc. - people are making electronica with pretty much any possible combination of these qualities today, and i think that if you go back to the early 90s or maybe even the late 80s or earlier, you'll find music that fits into all or most of those combinations then as well.

in rock, jazz, country, song-based dance forms, or most other genres you could think of, there is certainly plenty of recycling and variation between extremes and of course there are multiple strains coexisting at any given point, but there are also clear, broad historical progressions and overarching shifts and trends - and when these double back on themselves, as has been happening plenty lately, in rock particularly (and has happened so much in jazz in the last few decades that many people question its vitality/viability) it is manifestly evident that that's what they're doing. not so much, i would argue, in electronica - the recent upsurge of interest in italo disco, for instance, has revealed how much the last five years or so of microhouse, minimal, and what-have-you have borrowed from records that are sometimes over two decades old. now, the people making the music may have been aware of this, but i wasn't, not particularly, and even when i am now, the new stuff still sounds extremely modern.

perhaps another way to get at what i'm trying to say - or maybe just a related point - is the realization that there is little or no formal and musical vocabulary inherent in the way electronic music is produced. whereas most instruments have traditional styles and techniques that are usually passed down from teacher to student, changing only gradually to fit the trends of the day until some innovator comes along to introduce new dimensions - as well as physical parameters that make certain kinds of playing, and even certain melodic and harmonic choices, more idiomatic - the tools for making electronic music offer a much wider range of possibility without requiring a corresponding degree of technical proficiency.

i don't mean to underestimate the effect of learning to use the tools and programs - i'm certain that lots of great electronica has been the unwitting result of trying to get the machines to do something else, and that, of course, very proficient techno producers who really know their programs/equipment are far more effective at realizing their compositional goals. (same goes for those who are willing to put in a lot of painstaking work - squarepusher comes to mind, for example.) but there is a sense in which - especially with the present technology - creating an innovative or just plain interesting piece of electronica requires, first and foremost, simply concieving of it, and that being able to then actually create it is a secondary part of the process. (this is unlike a lot of music, where much more emphasis is put on the performance aspects - instrumental and vocal - of musical creation, and where recording and production may be valued very highly, but are not necessarily considered integral to the music in quite the same way.) on the other hand, this view of electronic composition belies the extent to which a lot of the music is probably composed through the very process of creating it, perhaps without much of a preconceived idea of how it will turn out. the composer is the producer is the performer, because all of these functions can be collapsed into one activity. (along these lines, it's pertinent that most electronic music is made by individuals rather than groups.)

this has been a long and hard-argued tangent that i hadn't anticipated taking, but was hopefully worthwhile. where i was at one point headed is the observation that by throwing out a lot of the genre subdivisions that once permeated thinking and writing about electronica, it becomes simultaneously harder to know what to say about a particular piece or artist's output, and easier to identify what is significant or salient about it. it's gotten so hard to know whether a techno sound in the '07 is minimal or neo-disco or neo-trance or whatever (and so irrelevant) that all that really matters, basically, is whether you think it's any good. whether you want to dance to it or fall asleep to it, whether you're compelled to listen to the intricacies of its arrangement or get its poppy melodies stuck in your head. most importantly, i guess, whether or not it stands out from the overwhelming output of modern electronica you may or may not have heard, demands your attention, and sticks in your memory.

(there are certain artists that fall somewhat outside the scope of this discussion - conceptual provocateurs like matmos and the books, song-centered popsters like richard x and the knife, perhaps unmistakeable sonic-signaturists like ratatat and cornelius - all of whom are electronic artists to a greater or lesser extent, but none of whose work is especially "pure" from a genrelogical perspective, which is all for the awesome in my book - on the other hand, you could just say that means they've found a way to resoundingly fulfill that last criterion.)

i give up on electronica. there's so much of it and so much of it seems to be relatively inaccessible (i mostly mean that in logistical terms.) i know some things that i like; i'll be happy to check out anything i hear good things about, provided i can get my ears on a copy; i'll keep trying to find artists that seem worth developing a relationship with. but i give up on trying to understand it in any kind of overarching and cohesive way. let's remember that whenever we try to do that with any music, we're mostly deceiving ourselves anyway.

9 pictureloved Y isolée

so there's isolée. honestly, i put this track on the 'cast mostly to demonstrate how fluidly the justin timberlake song functions as electronica, and also 'cause it's hard to find electronica songs about love. [except it's not really as hard as you might think - shoot, actually i had at one point intended to include the field's "action," which is the part of a 12" side called "love vs. action" - and which interpolates, i guess - doesn't actually sample - the four tops' "reach out i'll be there" - which would have given us something to talk about. oh well, maybe next time.]

anyway, isolée fits well here because i really have no idea what to call his music. before i heard it i thought it was going to be like IDM, and then i thought it was going to be microhouse, and i guess it is sort of like both of those (way more danceable than most IDM, but more structurally involved than most microhouse, and it's generally song-like in a way that both of those can be but not as a rule.) it's definitely melodic but not especially poppy; it's very warm and has a lot of unusual and interesting sounds as well as plenty of more standard ones. it's got guitars (as a lot of electronica does! - we shouldn't forget that) and voices doing things that aren't singing. basically it sounds great and has a lot of personality. but i don't know what to compare it to.

the only other similar record that i've felt this good about in the last little bit is lindstrøm's it's a feedelity affair, which is somewhat easier to describe: it sounds like disco, for the most part; electronic, obviously, so mostly like italo disco; it's somewhat but not overtly song-based; a lot of the tracks are somewhat epic and spacey - so that's why they call it "space disco." makes sense. the first time i listened to it it made me giddy from the first notes. it doesn't quite live up to that the whole way through, but it does have "i feel space," which is so, so achingly beautiful and majestic that i really have a hard time conceiving of anybody disliking it.

but i'm sure that some people would or do, because there are some people that "don't like electronic music." well, fancy that.

(but those people probably don't even like "i feel love")