Out! Of! Step!

Okay, as much as I dug Jem Cohen's Fugazi documentary, its "portrait-gallery" framing of the band as Instruments of the People dragged it perceptibly close to hagiography. In the decade since, between American Hardcore and endless Glenn E. Friedman pictorial tributes, harDCore had become as historicised as possible... until now.


Some unbelievably bad geek-rapper from Milwaukee told me about this back in June. Forgive my skepticism, but I didn't think (at the time) I could take a 98lb. punching-bag who made his stage entrance in a Hulk Hogan crop-top to the tune of Cheap Trick's "Surrender" at his word. Evidently I was wrong.

Say it with me now: I can't keep up, I can't keep up, I can't keep up...

Pop the cork and join the chorus!

Well, never have my own words tasted so succulent. As I was writing about unwarranted hostility and being "in an uncharacteristically conciliatory mood," the Lehman Brothers financial-services firm filed for the biggest bankruptcy in American history - and the crowd goes wild! Now the word is that the US gub'mint is about to pull AIG off the ledge and wrap it in an $85 billion security blanket to avoid an immediate sequel. I suppose one $691 billion giant biting the dust will have to do for our September dose of schadenfreude. I wonder if, once I roll my wagon eastward at year's end, I won't be followed by hordes of refugee financiers and carpetbaggers flying the flag of F.I.L.T.H. - "failed in London, try Hong Kong."

As good a sarcastic chuckle as this has been, there is a shadow cast across our little anti-capital celebration, as a grim spectre was invoked on the campaign trail. Eric Rauchway knows the seance:

Responding to the collapse of several major investment banks this week, John McCain reassured us, "I think still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong." That move comes from an old playbook: On Oct. 25, 1929, Herbert Hoover declared, "The fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis."

As Ezra Klein duly elaborated, "This is a guy who has said, proudly, 'I'm always for less regulation' and ...who, three years ago, wanted to turn Social Security over to Wall Street." And should you, even for a moment, find yourself deaf to the echo of Hoover, I'd point you in the direction of Lenin's Tomb for a swift reminder: "This crisis is rooted in the fundamentals."

Anyway, my modest goal for the week is to make a mix of musical misanthropy before I'm back off to Berlin. Currently in the capital is an art exhibition called Exactitudes, "a taxonomy-in-progress of street style," according to Momus. In spite of my sartorial ineptitude, I actually fit into one of the project's tidy tribal pigeonholes - archetype #19, Vagabonds, within which I am frighteningly similar to this guy. Were he wearing a John Lennon mask, he'd be a friggin' dead-ringer. Ignoring that whittling the breadth of the human guise to 96 "tribes" is still woefully insufficient (I know about three people who could conceivably be found in the Exactitudes chart), I'm a little disturbed by how the project casts appearance as an elected self-symbolisation, not as a product of circumstance & lifestyle. As though everyone from the religious devout to trustafarians, from yuppies to genuine street people, put equal consideration & effort into how they present themselves - and have access to the same kinds of tools & accessories to sculpt their exteriors. This looks awfully like more condescending poorism, though since it's billed as an "art exhibition" instead of a glossy multipage advert, I doubt it'll ignite the appropriate level of ire.

A Confluence of Hostilities

Last Thursday, I thought a simple, unadorned post of Laurie Anderson's eerie "O Superman" would be enough to mark that ugly anniversary. I thought - for once - I'd play it mature, tasteful, restrained, understated; I was almost proud for having pulled it off.

And then I had to spoil it all by idly clicking around. Tripping my hair-trigger temper (that would qualify me for the Republican candidacy), I immediately set about compiling a deliberately tasteless mix - some N.O.U. "Target USA" here, a li'l Cassetteboy there, topped off with a little BJM for good measure. But little by little, my rage dissipated between constant dashes to & from the Mr. Coffee in the kitchen. Who, precisely, was I exacting some psychic revenge upon? What would this achieve, other than making myself smug for my detached political superiority and trivially diverse music collection? By the time it came to master the mix, I felt appropriately like just another dickhead with a digital soapbox.

In an election year, it's easy to become prone to hysteria and overreaction - especially when some man-size dress-up doll has swiftly castrated liberals' momentum and lent reactionaries some inauthentic-yet-iron-thick deniability. The growing dread is that November 4th will soundly prove H.L. Mencken's cynical theorem "that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

(By Steve Bell of the Guardian)

At which point, there will be plenty of time for spittle-drenched diatribes about what a buncha blinkered rubes the American people are. But over the past week or so, I've seen enough misdirected hostility & troglodytic prejudice to have put me in an uncharacteristically conciliatory mood.

A friend of mine recently related that his own German students admit that, while exemplary as tourists abroad, Germans can be less than culturally accommodating at home - to which I'll testify.* Any derision I'd received in the past, I was willing to chalk up to the country's reputed wooden stoicism, but within a single three-day span last week, I'd found myself:

1. having not only to delineate the difference between Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, but defend East Asians in general as having souls to a self-professed "hippie chick."
2. arguing that, biological complications aside, gay couples should have the right to raise a child. (This, I might add, to a divorced man who has adolescent offspring he sees maybe annually.)
3. being tongue-lashed by a cop for not speaking proper German when I was attempting to report some domestic violence in a neighbouring apartment.

Speaking of pigs, the most bemusing facet of "Palinoia" is her sex-symbol status. Her austere sense of dress coupled with her enthusiasm for firearms fits very neatly into every neocon's fiendish, two-faced S&M fantasy: a Madonna as magistrate & mother, and an M-16-toting minx in the marital bed. Meanwhile, confused confessions of attraction from the left probably owe a lot to the recent near-ubiquity of that other auburn-haired, bespectacled boss-lady, Tina Fey. I'll cop to Ms. Fey being the closest thing I've had to a celebrity crush since Melissa Auf Der Mauer** way back in high school; so I'm biased when I'd say the resemblance, though inescapable, is... er, charitable. But the brain-VS-loins cage-match has since been inflamed, as Fey's uncannily accurate impression of Palin on the season premiere of SNL "supercharged both the 'rah rah 9/11 boom bah' and the 'hate-fuck' sides of America’s collective brain" (to borrow the words of the Onion AV Club).

Tangentially, it was at the same party where I was called to argue that gays & Asians are people too that I inadvertently introduced both "hate sex" and "grudge fuck" to a friend's vocabulary. Though the concept of grudge-fucking put her right off, she immediately took an interest in "hate sex" and, ex-psych major that she is, asked me to expound. I began by reciting from memory - as best I could - this personal ad from Craigslist. (The cherry on top: "Your pictures get my smarmy pretension.") As best I could explain it, "hate sex" is the better of the two viscerally-exorcismic responses to someone utterly repellent; the other response, naturally, is violence.

While this reasonably sated her curiosity, my friend wanted an illustration more concrete than some idealised personal-ad respondent; Palin (having just won the Veep nom) was the obvious exemplar, though I hastened to endorse Dana Perino as my political siren du choix.

Most terrifying is that the American election won't be a potentially historic ideological battle, but a libidinal referendum.

(*) - Obviously, this isn't making a blanket statement about Germans being latent racists. C'mon, I'm not dumb enough to fall into that hypocrisy. The degree of icy aloofness (with regard to casual social interaction) also varies rather wildly from city to city: Berliners tend to be more forgiving regarding language, and Kölners are so damned cheerful I wonder if the Rhine is dosed with Prozac.

(**) - Yes, I wrote & recorded this when I was 16. That's my buddy Dan singing.

They're American planes...

Collapsing New Buildings

At this rate, anyone else wanna take bets on how long it is before Mr. Hatherly

(a) starts slurring at Quinlan Terry, "Fuck off, I'm forty years younger than you - I've got my whole life ahead of me..."

(b) gets a bit big-headed about his photo essays and, at the first whiff of impeachment, begins typing so fucking hard he might break his fucking Mac book Air!!!!!

(c) implodes under the weight of both public expectation and his own potential, the epitaph on his unfinished legacy: "I'm not for sale."

Let's set the over/under at five weeks, shall we?

Your Product Sucks

Offnotesnotes runs with my riff on the democratising/emancipatory effect of downwardly-mobile music tech, albeit with a few stumbles: I'd say the mystical patina of live performance began to flake much earlier, with the introduction of radio; and thanks to the magic of VST orchestras, note-perfect recreations of Beethoven symphonies are a few (thousand) mouse-clicks away, no session musicians required. But the real problems arise when someone named Benjamin joins the conversation:

With the emancipation of specific artistic practices from the service of ritual, the opportunities for exhibiting their products increase.

Italics included, by the way. Now, it's very telling that the word "product" is used in place of "art," or even "work." Do I detect the foul stench of commercial over artistic interests? Indeed, "the trend has been toward greater economy, portability, and accessibility," but none of that has anything to do with innovation, emotional resonance, intellectual stimulation, or any other quality of good art. Certainly, "a panel painting can be exhibited more easily than the mosaic or fresco which preceded it," but does its ease of transport & display necessarily make the panel painting better art than the mosaic or fresco? Obviously, that's a subjective judgment dependent on the pieces in question. But the implication seems to be that the piece with greater commercial potential is de facto "better." This is a vivid example of how capital poisons not only the public perception of art, but the creation thereof.

The machinery of the music industry has always been sufficiently difficult to navigate that restless effort was required of anyone serious about their career. Even novelty acts like The Fugs or Blowfly had to work and tour their asses off to get anywhere. This, ironically, meant that major labels were more willing to gamble on weird acts: as laziness threshed the wheat from the chaff, if an act came calling, Verve or A&M could safely bet that these cats took their music seriously - no matter how freakish they may have been.

Not only the blessing, but the curse of digital media's democratising effect is that now even the most hopeless layabouts and half-talented wannabes can foist their creations upon the public. Consider that there are currently 8 million-odd musical acts on MySpace. Now, let's say that your assessment of bands according to your particular aesthetic considerations assumes a normal distribution: a very few are solid-gold genius, a very few are unmitigated dogshit, and there's a whole lotta half-baked twaddle in the middle. So, if you hit 100 different shows in your hometown, 2 would be be a religious experience, 14 would be worth the cover charge, 68 would be forgettably pleasant, 14 more should have ended after the first song, and 2 bands ought to have their hands cut off and larynx removed.

Now move back onto MySpace and apply the empirical rule. Of those 8 million music sites, 160,000 are actually damned good (and are probably the "official" pages of already-established acts we know & love - including the dead ones like Raymond Scott). Another 160,000 are the kind of barrel-scraping excrement that occasionally goes viral for how stratospherically bad it is (see: Mickey Avalon). But waddling in the middle is a mountainous five million four hundred and forty thousand artist pages that are just kinda... there. Sure, Parts & Labour are unimportant fun, and Blaqstarr is at least better than Flo Rida, but how much of this cut-rate competent fluff do you have to wade through to get to some next-level shit?

Obviously, a lot.

Bitching about the abominable state of music probably began when the second caveman who started banging sticks together was dismissed as a pale imitation of the first. Rock is dead, hip-hop is dead, r'n'b sucks, country is horseshit - we've all heard it before, and the rejoinder remains the same: the good stuff is out there, the trick is finding it. The difference now is that we're so inundated by the deluge of digitally-peddled pop-crap that it requires a monk's patience and God's time to dig deep enough to hit diamonds.

"Evil is not in the extremes - it's in the middle mass."

There was a serendipity in the near-simultaneous 1998 release of two documentaries about two critically-canonised bands - Meeting People Is Easy, about Radiohead, and Instrument, about Fugazi. The former captured Radiohead touring the globe in support of their 8.4 million-selling masterpiece, OK Computer, and hating every second of it. The latter was a decade-spanning survey of an independent slash-and-churn post-hardcore band, who never charted higher than #126 on the Billboard charts, but by all appearances were diggin' the shit out of it. The contrast suggested most obviously that artists fare better (at least mentally) to struggle autonomously, rather than shake hands with a Mephistophelean corporate handler. But the Damascus moment comes in Instrument, when Guy Picciotto is waxing belligerent about Fugazi's anti-commercial M.O.:

It's more important that [our music] exists in a forum that people are comfortable with - and more importantly, that we're comfortable with - and people are invited to participate, but not forced, and not have it crammed down their throats with someone mouthing off every goddamn five minutes about how unbelievably great our new album is, or exactly what all our lyrics mean.

In other words, the primary purpose of art is not finding an audience, but existing on its own terms, to which the nature & size of the audience are subordinate. The great mistake made by all artists seduced by the possibilities offered by digital media is that the questions of distribution & presentation becomes a consideration within the creative process. No doubt, the constant connectivity of contemporary culture sands down idiosyncrasies, replaces grit with glam, tethers artists into a creative topiary, and leads to the kind of source-anonymity/nomadalgia that remodels individual artists into mere artistic archetypes - the middle mass.

Since the release of my last album, I've been asked innumerable times if I was going to tour to support it. As it stands, I don't have a band, and so would be forced to resort to backing tracks. (And since I don't do folk, it would be necessary to flesh out the sound.) Ignoring that I find laptop-oriented shows to be less a live experience than a sleeping aid, I refuse to do this because it's not how I intend the music to be presented. Is this the right choice? Perhaps not according to my bank account, but I'd prefer not have been dishonest with - or to - my art.

Update (12 hours later): Oh, that was Walter Benjamin, eh? Well then... that doesn't actually change anything. It's worth noting that, from the start, Offnotesnotes and I have been kind of talking past each other: he's been considering the sociopolitical ramifications of digitally-mediated communication, whereas I've been venting about the effect it has on the art itself. Yes, it'd obviously be silly to complain about the Frankfurt School as art critics. Yet at the same time, to focus on the media through which art is communicated (as I argued above) misses the fuckin' point of the art itself. I wouldn't look to political theorists to influence my creative philosophy for the same reason that people don't take Bono seriously on economics. As noble as Benjamin's fervor may be regarding the enhanced mobility of "de-ritualised" art, to consider capital at all (even as a purely corruptive Big Other) within the act of creation pollutes the process. Again, the use of the word "product" betrays a conception of art as little more than a commercial unit.

The necessary malevolence of capital's influence upon art clearly wasn't lost on the Frankfurt School. In Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno suggested that a film that satisfied the plethora of moralist nitpicking enforced by the Hays Office could indeed be made - so long as the Hays Office didn't exist in the first place. This could be in line with what Benjamin was suggesting was beneficial about separating art from ritual, in that art could be created independent of whatever authority oversaw said ritual. The same potential exists in the portability & accessibility of digital media - that an artist can work with total autonomy - but the problem is that artists' behaviour has swung in the opposite direction: towards total self-subjugation to the frothing "marketplace of ideas," one eye on the canvas, the other on the hustle.

The Machine Demands a Sacrifice

I'll be the first to testify that music's quantum leaps are often contingent on new gear. We'd be stuck in the stone age were it not for multitrack recording and amplifiers; Hendrix couldn't have happened without the wah-wah pedal; Eno and his Kraut contemporaries would have been useless without synthesizer modules; New Order (and new wave in general) were midwifed by sequencers; hip-hop production wouldn't have grown beyond beat-juggling without samplers; and pretty much any music that thoroughly melted our snyapses over the past decade was created on a computer.

But in the past few years, music tech innovation has become stagnant - that is, beyond higher bitrates and simulating all the old gear. The obvious consequence is - for all the refining, tweaking, expanding, contracting, mixing, and matching that's happened in the Izz-'00s - not one new sound has been bestowed upon us by Apollo. For sure, a number of the old hats that have been dusted off are well worth the renewed attention, and there's been some big-brained reframing of otherwise-dehumanising tech-cultural phenomena. But how many times will people sit through Cheap Trick covers played on Gameboys before they hunger for something surprising instead of merely clever?

But I'm not pulling some cranky-grandpa, "Everythin' After Muh Birth Is Fer Shit" schtick (not today, at any rate). No, I'm here to rip on gear, ladies and gentlemen. So be warned: if you don't dig on audial mechanics, well, you're Pee-Wee and you just hitched a ride with Large Marge.

Unlike everything else in the global Ponzi scheme called "civilization," technology is downwardly-mobile. It's invariably born of some secret military agenda too depraved to fathom; it subsequently becomes the latest in conspicuous consumption, as sported by Manhattan penthouse-dwelling financiers/S&M freaks and Saudi oil magnates; fifteen years later, it's being either sold only at Value Village or fished out of the Payatas. Witness the VCR: originally an über-high-tech storage device within the US Defense Dept., it quickly was adopted by rich Baby Hueys as a convenient, portable means of showing skin flicks at parties, and finally it was marketed (for more or less the same purpose) to loners & shut-ins living in their parents' basements the world over. Need I invoke The Internet as retread of precisely the same? The pattern holds: (1) shadowy military-industrial conception; (2) exploited by salacious Master of the Universe greed-huns; (3) commodified & sold to anti-social bedroom-dwellers.

So it is with much music gear. The Pentagon is developing some new USW, or Exxon/Mobil is scanning for Texas Tea in Tahiti, and they inadvertantly produce the audio-software equivalent of cellophane; meanwhile, Cher can't hold a pitch and Trent Reznor wants full production capacity within the pajama-clad comfort of the green room. Solutions to their respective problems are concocted, and once the novelty has faded, gravity drags the price down within reach of every music-hobbyist mug with a home computer.

Bunker mentality is less a hazard than a virtue for audio engineers; no work will get done if you're off to the pub for a pint with your mates every evening. Yet, working in the analog domain, a concentrated engagement of the physical environment is necessary: in moving mics, tweaking knobs, and patching in compressors, you're literally sculpting the air. But audio software removes even this interaction. Instead, you're hunched over a keyboard, rotting your retinas as you atrophy into a six-foot slug like the space jockey in Alien. I'll not deny that the democratising aspect of cheap(er), accessible recording programs has been a boon to many a poor musician; I certainly wouldn't have been able to crank out as many albums worth of material as I have without such software. But in exchange for not having to head down to the local studio and fork over a small fortune, the surfeit of options audio software provides is too much of a good thing.

Allow me to introduce my pet peeve du jour - amp-emulating plug-ins. Now, recording a guitar (or bass) directly into a computer produces a tone not unlike a baloney-on-Wonder Bread sandwich: flabby, spongy, shapeless. Enter amp-emulation: these plug-ins simulate the timbral muscle of a proper amplifier & speaker cabinet. Quelle grande convenience, oui? Wrong. Now I've got to wade through the digital facsimiles of over a dozen amp heads, twenty speaker cabinets, five different mic models (each of which can be "placed" in a half-dozen different positions), and god knows how many stomp-boxes, effects processors, and outboard units. Make-do pragmatism isn't even possible, because there are no restrictions of choice. Whereas twenty minutes of painstaking knob-twisting and mic placement with the tangible tools would have sufficed, whole hours are flushed away taming the shrieking midrange of a wholesaler's supply of amplifiers that aren't even there.

Paradoxically, this surplus of options permits laziness as easily as it paralyses. Want your guit-box to have that Green Day grit? Well, click on that preset labeled "American Idiot" and shazam! Want the snare to pop with the sinewy warmth of a $3000 tube compressor? Just load up that Renaissance digital compressor and schmapow! Who cares if you can't tell the difference between an SM57 and a C414? To paraphrase Dave Chappelle: you graduated with a B.A. in English lit and you don't have to take shit from nobody!

I'm far from alone in finding it incredibly difficult to connect viscerally with much contemporary music, and I often wonder if this is because it's music from sources that don't physically exist. As my friend Jonny put it, "It tickles your cerebral membrane without really penetrating to that animal core - like drinking a Coke when a nice glass of water would have done." If anything explains the perennial appeal of the clattering wood and clanging steel, it's Iggy Pop's indelible axiom:

Speakers push they air, and push me too.

This was one of the things that hit me so hard (literally) when I saw My Bloody Valentine: for all of Kevin Shields' clinical studio tinkering to hand-craft that hurricane smear of sounds, that is how the band actually sounded. Four shabby mammals with standard-issue instruments, conjuring a sonic maelstrom like aurora borealis setting a forest ablaze. Not a laptop in sight.

As many reasons are there are to dislike indie demagogue Steve Albini, it's damned hard to find fault with his analog-purist philosophy that a recording should be a document of how a band sounds, nothing more, nothing less. Again, I'd be a hypocrite if I were as quick to dismiss digital software's benefits as him, but I'll gladly second the words emblazoned across the back cover of Big Black's last album: Fuck digital.

Hip Is Not a Four-Letter Word (But Boho Is)

Well, about ten days have passed since the initial publication of the infamous Adbusters article; this lapse, translated from real-time, equals about 2.3 years of online-time. (Not insignificantly, this is the same ratio of Earth-time to Uranus-time.) Netizens ripped through the article like Norman Bates in a Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and I myself bore witness to about a half-dozen discussions in various bars. By now, the thematic terrain has been torn up and left as barren as the Somme - but that ain't gonna stop me from having one last waltz through the minefield.

Within a certain online cul-de-sac, the Adbusters article couldn't come at a better time, following a sudden flush of posts about how at-least-middle-class "creatives" have franchised a butterknife-dull brand of bohemianism. Both Simon Reynolds and Phillip Sherburne connected the dots between this nuevo-cosmo sprawl and the HUAC-like hysteria over hipsterism by way of one Mr. Nick Currie.

Momus... with his nomadic lifestyle and restlessly mobile aesthetic, his Japanophilia and his privileging of the faux/unrooted/"superflat", was very much a pioneer, an early settler on this post-geographical "terrain".

His CV bullet-pointed with such po-mo touchstones as Shibuya-kei, Wired.com, and Vice Magazine, few are better qualified than Momus to comment on all things au current. Indeed, his response did not disappoint, lambasting the article's theatrical tone ("Haddow comes over all purple, all 6th form apocalyptic") and its ankle-deep cultural analysis ("Haddow fails to get down to the serious business of art criticsm"). But the most fascinating moment of Momus' rebuttal is when he agrees

with my former boss at Vice, Gavin McInnes, when he says that disdain of hip subculture tends to come from "chubby bloggers who aren't getting laid", people who are "just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable".

This accord, between the dialectical and juvenile fronts against anti-hipsterism, is key in understanding anti-anti-hipsterism. (If there's such thing as pro-hipsterism, it's a better-kept secret than Merchandise 7X.) Momus has made a career of being the token outsider, an arch-Orientalist in a mobile bubble; meanwhile, McInnes (an anti-immigration activist with a history of racist outbursts) did more to define the parameters of irony in indie culture than anyone since Stephen Malkmus. In short, they are both Other-ers of the first order.

In spite of the avant-garde associations with the word, Hip rarely debuts any new ideas these days. (We'll come back to the this.) Instead, it traffics almost exclusively in irony, manifested typically as either hostile mockery, or deconstructive play-acting. Either way, the relationships created are oppositional, across lines of generation, gender, class, and race. But there's nothing ideological about these oppositional positions. Take everyone's favourite polyglot performer, Mathangi "M.I.A." Arulpragasam, for example. She named her debut after her Tamil Tiger father's nom-de-guerre, and her current single's chorus is a bald endorsement of armed robbery. She's posed herself as the voice of the developing world's vengeful animus - at least to the extent that everyone else agreed upon her role as such. Yet this former St. Martin's College film student panders to Western pop-cultural hegemony by relying heavily indie-orthodox samples (the Clash, the Pixies, etc.); she likewise denies supporting violence under any circumstance. Indeed, this is already several years after Robert Christgau succinctly argued against expecting a coherent political agenda, much less a revolutionary one, from a pop star - and yet his reasoning demands that the audience be possessed of a normative psychopathy:

The decoratively arrayed, pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck her album are images, not propaganda...

Just images. See? Nothing to get frazzled over. Naturally, that a signifier is hollow to some doesn't mean that it's universally null & void. Momus himself made this point in his riposte to Adbusters:

I'm sure that somewhere, as we speak, a Shining Path Maoist is being sold a Shining Path Maoist t-shirt via AdSense, thanks to a link between Shining Path Maoist keywords and Shining Path Maoist products being marketed in his area. This does not, however, invalidate the politics or philosophy of Shining Path Maoism. It just gives him the chance to proclaim what he believes in via a t-shirt, should he so desire.

By extension, anyone might buy a copy of Kala not because it's got a good beat, but because they want to express their hatred of Sinhalese Buddhists over the stereo at a house party. Call it Che Shirt Syndrome: as commodified and mediated by capital, all symbols are sold to one of two customers - either the True Believer, or the cultural scavenger who can afford such whimsically purposeless purchases.

That is, to either the ideologue, or the bourgeois hipster.

A twentysomething in a Che shirt may qualify themselves as a revolutionary Marxist, but until they grab an AK, storm the streets of São Paulo, and fight to nationalise Brazil's $517 billion industrial sector, then the symbol remains unfulfilled, necessarily empty. The now-intrinsic vacuity of bohemianism is a consequence of it being reduced to a spin-cycle of pop symbolic flotsam with a shrinking circumference. (The current sample-rate of the nostalgia feedback loop is down to a mere five years.) Very telling is that many discussions, both online and off, of the Adbusters article were petty turf wars over specific objects like the fixed-gear bike. I've no doubt that the fixed-gear bike is of great importance to anarchosyndicalist eco-activists, but if their only place in the conversation is as a rhetorical prop and not a participant, of what use is the bike beyond a stylish accessory? If artifice is its own reward, then there's no argument to be had. But the pretense that there's a bigger point has little to recommend it.

This debate is by no means new, and hipsters have been subject to ridicule by their own for decades. One Brooklyn Vegan commenter cited Marcel Duchamp's 1913 Armory Show as an early example of such infighting (though it was Wallace Stevens, not William Carlos Willams, who played Duchamp's nemesis). There's also been an implacable parade of slumming rich kids, from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker up through Lou Reed to Lee Ranaldo and Gerard Cosloy. However, a crucial (if arguable) distinction between the hipoisie of generations past and now is that, before, some genuine sacrifice of comfort & entitlement was required to live down on the street - which isn't to deny that it's always been true that, "if you called your dad, he could stop it all." But there now exists an infrastructure, social and physical, to comfortably accomodate any & all who can afford to exile themselves from the straight world. And it's that word - comfort - which presents the biggest problem: its presence is anathema to art. As Leslie Feist recently put it:

Comfort is comfortable - there is no need to circumnavigate. Once you stretch your mind out to get around something, as it pulls apart, you see stuff in the cracks - things you wouldn't glimpse otherwise.

Contemporary boho inharmony has apparent little to do with dialectical self-critique. Rather, it's the sound of a corrosive boredom, of deracinated dilettantes whose ennui has metastasised into cannibalism. Make no mistake, their complaints emanate from the elevated strata of society. Whenever Pitchfork is derided as a Cliff Notes of Cool for dumb kids in Des Moines, or when Momus describes "the general population, which schlepps about in jeans and listens to shapeless, floppy music and sleepwalks through shapeless, floppy jobs" - there is no disguising the sneering, priggish contempt for the lower & working classes. I'd almost admire the gall with which Momus lets the cat out of the bag, comparing hipsters to "chivalric aristocrats," were he not so astonishingly smug and condescending.

Which brings us full-circle to the debate about minimal techno. What struck me as the key phrase at the time was this observation by Owen Hatherly:

One often got the sense... that whatever was happening, it didn't really matter, nothing was at stake.

In light of conversations since, this would be the keystone of anti-hipster sentiment: above and beyond all else, hipsters are inconsequential and ineffectual. Momus (again) has a point in remarking that "maybe this 'smashing' [of conventions] has always been mostly gestural," but wouldn't it be better if a gesture were revolutionary as opposed to self-consciously empty? Shouldn't there be a more noble goal than staying one step ahead of the advertising agencies by ceaselessly subdividing into smaller & smaller subcultural cliques? Or does "what's at stake" have be of greater urgency than something gestural? Does the cold hand of actual catastrophe have to slap us across the face before we become bold? Because, right now, there's a whole lotta standing around and talking shit behind each other's backs - which is hardly the recipe for refinement, let alone revolution. "When," Christopher Hitchens once wrote, "a precious and irreplaceable word like 'irony' has become a lazy synonym for 'anomie,' there is scant room for originality."

Out of the Mouths of Boors

A great debt is owed to perennial shot-caller J-Hop for helping disseminate this bit of brilliant digital detritus:



Like his brother-in-knuckle-scraping-arms Liam Gallagher, Diamond Dave operates as a William of Ocham for the jet(trash)-set: he's a perpetual-motion machine of flapping gums so incapable of complex thought that he's able only to express the elemental truth; everything else, being more complicated, could only cause him confusion. (Perhaps that's why DLR's hair looks so fried: he blew a synapse discussing mechanical royalties with Mo Ostin?)

No, I'm not taking the piss. I defy you to find a single false statement issued from his shit-eating grin. Let's pick it apart, shall we?

Van Halen music, heavy metal music, any kind of rock music, is what I like to call "high-velocity folk music."

Consider (as we've done before) that, essentially, folk music is anecdotal narrative or reductive personal expression wrapped around simple, uncluttered chord structures that resonates upon some universal truth. Well, isn't that precisely what Van Halen in their prime produced? Who hasn't jumped, run with the devil, been hot for teacher, or, uh, fallen under the control of Manuel Noriega?

Taken as a general statement, it's true that heavy metal fulfilled the same role that campfire acoustic singalongs did a hundred years prior. Certainly, upon closer examination of niche subgenres, not many people would say the songs of Cannibal Corpse, Gorgoroth, or Dragonforce speak directly to/of them. But across the broader sweep of metal - from "Paranoid" to "Aces of Spades", from "Welcome To the Jungle" to "Midlife Crisis" - it's easy enough to find some empathetic resonance therein.

I look at heavy metal music - Van Halen's brand, rather, of heavy metal music - as a combination of religion and hockey.

Again, dead on. Consider the intricate weave of metaphysical devotion and gaudy materialist ceremony, the relation to a higher spirit through annointed spokesmen (yes, spokesmen), the large celebratory gatherings of the faithful to behave in manners unbecoming of their quotidian reality - and then consider the presence of large, sweaty, swearing men with an emphasis on indelicate, antagonistic contact. Ian Svenonius has written far more exhaustively on the parallels between rock and religion, but it bears remembering that sports occupy the same place in a great many people's lives.

We had to get into a band because we are this way... I have successfully turned "monkey hour" into a career.

A band as a synergistic culmination of personalities; to play music as a means of personal psychic reconstitution; making art as an end unto itself as opposed to a single facet of some larger marketing campaign for one's career as a public persona... how bloody tragic is it that these now seem like quaint idealisms, delusional romantic fantasies? That it should be expressed so succinctly by David Lee Roth of all people is, as they say, a head-fuck.

Meanwhile, his "monkey hour" anecdote is a perfect example of precisely why I regard the psychiatric industry as fascistic and dehumanising.

Style is not to be confused with Class. A Mercedes Benz is Class, because it represents money. However, chili dogs have absolutely no Class, but a great deal of Style. Punk rock, new wave, whatever you have, reggae, rastafari haircuts, what-have-you, are all different kinds of Styles. None of them, however, have any Class - I got class.

Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Roth's 15-second summation of the ontology of capital! Assuming it's true that chili dogs got mad style, Style would be the more desirable of the two characteristics: Style implies a kind of substantive polysensual engagement, an experience that diversifies (or even gives body to) reality's symbolic framework. Class, on the other hand, is symbolic of a single substantive quality: economic power. For those who would question Roth's claim to Class in view of his squalid apartment, recall his analogy between music religion; consider the decidedly unglamorous daily lifestyle of the average priest, contrasted with the elaborate pomp & circumstance of his rituals before his flock. There exists the same degree of difference between Roth's life on and off the road.

There's no question, DLR does have Class, in spite of the frat-house squalor of his apartment: he was (and is again) the face & voice of a band that has sold over 80 million albums to date - a distinction shared by only about a hundred other musical artists in history. Among the many bands that can't match Van Halen's account balance is, ironically, the act that best signifies the detached superficiality and bland "good taste" of Class in the 1980s: Roxy Music. Consider that, as Roth was giving this interview, Roxy Music were recording Avalon, the summa of vapid yuppie sumptuousness. I wonder if it frustrated Bryan Ferry that, after his studious & painstaking adoption of all the hollow affectations of wealth & privilege, that he was lumped into the same club as this dandelion-haired yahoo. Ferry may have sported all the appropriate symbols, but Roth had the substance.

Mixed Media

So: which is it, lads? Is it "false to frame the biofuel debate as a choice between people or SUVs," or is it literally a choice between "a Prius hybrid on a trip from San Francisco to San Diego and back... [or] feed[ing] a person for a year"? Having enjoyed not one, but two burgers of locally-raised red meat last night, is my moral credit as bad as someone who commutes downtown from Bergedorf in a Beemer, or, alternatively, who sups on tofu flown in from Japan and Pink Lady apples? Are we trapped between complicity in the deaths of either up to 150,000 Iraqis or at least 130,000 Burmese?

Please note, naturally, that all four articles linked above were published via the same website. It's very hard to move forward when you're not sure which direction to face.

Everybody Else Is Doing It So I Won't

I'm all for a little bloody-minded contrarianism now and then, even if it involves backlash against the new Batman movie, but if it can't be done with the minor courtesy of spoiler warnings, the kid gloves are off. David Cox' humourless dismissal of The Dark Knight has so ruined my morning that I was halfway to titling this post "David Cox is a twat" just to cool my blood.

Like every salaried hack, Cox doesn't even treat his readers to moderately imaginative writing. This aloof exercise in simplistic indignation stumbles right out of the gate, under a title unduly pleased with itself as a bad pun built on cheap consonance and sort-of synonyms. This is followed by a pre-critiqued laundry list of the objects he'll be examining, a cheat-sheet so we can keep up with him - a device as tired and condescending as beginning a trailer with, "In a world..."

The central conceit of Cox' article (that the film wrongly denies any moral authority in the War On Terror) is awkwardly incorrect. He's right in his analysis ("the distinction between good and evil has evaporated") but wrong in his condemnation thereof, not the least because Cox seems to have missed the past seven years. He posits the Joker as Osama bin Laden's onscreen incarnation, and makes 9/11 - but no subsequent events - the moral climate in which all decisions are made. If these cinematic metaphors don't bear up under scrutiny, it's because they're the wrong metaphors to be inferred. When Cox scolds the film's apparent moral ambiguity towards such things as mutually-assured destruction, extraordinary rendition, and total surveillance, he does so with a hubris that ignores that our own governments are engaged in exactly those things. The film is explicitly post-9/11 in its ideology, necessarily acknowledging our betrayal of our principles in their own name. We "have become a monster out [our] very excessive attachment with seeing Evil everywhere and fighting it." If the Joker is an imperfect stand-in for the "boringly purposeful" bin Laden of September 11, 2001, then the Joker is a perfect stand-in for bin Laden as he currently exists in our imaginations: an indefatiguable trickster, a walking embodiment of an anarchistic sadomasochism, an "evil-doer."

For a man who makes his living in the media, Cox is surprisingly unsophisticated in his interpretation of the film: that by presenting the collapse of moral authority, the film endorses it. Yes, let's take everything at face-value, shall we? (This could explain why Cox apparently thinks we occidentals are still possessed of some unimpeachable sense of right-and-wrong: because, after all, we say so!) Of course, if the anomic aside of "Cool, man!" is Cox' idea of piquant "irony," then he's measurably forty-some years behind the curve on symbollic literacy. Sure enough, solemnly intoning that "without morality, there can be no saviours," Cox makes clear his preference for the ol' "Boy Scouts in blue," two-dimensional propaganda for a grey-less worldview. This is the same brand of escapism that led Depression-era audiences to sympathise with unrepentantly spoiled debutantes and dandies: when reality gets ugly, flee into an anaesthetising fantasy anthithetical to real life. But should he find his own enjoyment interrupted, Cox ought to be angry at our governing bodies, not grease-painted fictional action figures, for casting "a smokescreen behind which... some kind of coherent whole can be persistently ducked."

Of course, I might be demanding too much of Cox. We're dealing with a man who fell head over heels for a Francophone exercise in Ed Burns-esque provincial romanticism. Perhaps Cox is just grumpy while he waits for Flash Of Genius, that heart-rending David-&-Goliath allegory balanced upon legal appeals over the patent for friggin' windshield wipers.

Most disturbing in all this, though, is the peak in his libindal scrapbook Cox offers us when expressing shock & disappointment at seeing "Maggie Gyllenhaal drained, astonishingly, of sex-appeal." Great, thanks for that, Davey-boy, now we can all imagine your unsypathetic mastiff/headmaster pout drooling salaciously as Maggie crawls around in a pantsuit-and-leather-leash combo. Nevermind that most of my friends and I always saw Gyllenhaal as a pleasantly unglamourous indie everygirl instead of some ur-sexual goddess. Perhaps Cox is a textbook pervert who willingly accepts any actor, in a role signified as "sexy"/sexual, as innately "sexy"/sexual.

Can we please hand Anna Pickard all the Guardian's AV coverage already?

Weltanschauungkrieg

What does it mean for Tricky to say, "Remember, boy, you're a superstar," in the age of Guitar Hero?

The other day, I was knee-deep in another diatribe about the dire state of music, how progress has been replaced with pastiche and rehash, and I demanded some manner of explanation from my friend. He pointed to the decline of the recording industry - which isn't to say he's pining for the days of mafioso maneuvering and the artist-as-indentured-servant. The Big Four's throne is eroding not because people can get music for free, but because people don't really need music any more.

As a collectively-accessible storehouse/exhalation of lust, fear, anger, joy, desire, excess, lack, whatever: pop isn't insufficient, it simply isn't needed. The quest for communion over shared aesthetic tastes, the osmosis of the zietgeist over the airwaves, and (most importantly) the unrequited idolatry of pervert rock stars... This is all archaic in the age of MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Guitar Hero. As encouraged and enacted by the parade of role-playing mediocrity on American Idol and its bottom-feeding spawn, the brave new wired world is less an information superhighway than a panoptical full-length mirror. Everyone can be the star of their own ipsocentric universe, smiling for the cameraphone, applauding their vlogged views as both pundit and audience, investing pale karaoke pageantry with the same vigor once reserved for the original object or event.

Perhaps contemporary pop's greatest mistake is its relentless effort both to mystify and demystify. Some artists, like Daft Punk or Animal Collective, concertedly create a folklore out of cosmic debris; others, like Kanye West or Bradford Cox, "just wanna be real as much as possible" and are exhaustively confessional, barely stopping short of blogging their bowel-movements. Yet there's an undeniable sense in Animal Collective and Cox being good friends: "Keeping It Real"-style demystification is simply "brutilitarian" antiglam, which itself is a form of mystification. Whatever the method's style, the end result is that the persona surpasses the music as the artist's essential product. Every action or utterance by an artist is an expression of a marketing campaign for themselves, not their art.

The more specifically tailored and ornately detailed an artist's identity becomes, the less empty space there is in which the audience can resonate with the artist. The most enduring & indelible legends of pop are such because of their ambiguity. How deep were Led Zeppelin's dalliances with black magic and mudsharks? What was Kevin Shields thinking during the three years it took to make Loveless? Who knows? Which is exactly the point: in those blank margins, the listener can articulate their relationship to the artist. These days, every artist write-up is so heavily footnoted (often so referential because they have nothing new to say) that the page is already full, no room to respond or reflect.

Writing nine years ago, Zizek already identified cyperspace's founding myth - the promise of a Global Village - as just that: a myth.

...What effectively happens is that we are bombarded with the multitude of messages belonging to inconsistent and incompatible universes — instead of the Global Village, the big Other, we get the multitude of "small others," of tribal particular identifications at our choice.

Individuals create ever-more elaborate online shrines to themselves, while filtering content to whatever crumbs do not clash with their constructions. These "small others" simultaneously proliferate and shrink in their specific scope, chipping away any intuitive sense of community until understanding is so rare that it appears more conspiracy than compassion. More and more of the rest of the world necessarily appears psychotic to any one person.

This is not a new point: Mark K-Punk has written probingly about modern youth's possession by depressive-compulsive hedonism, a desperate pleasure-hunt to fill their unnameable emptiness that leads to the hollow make-believe of MyFace, Rock Band 2, and the like. (Mark has dubbed these electronic IVs of fantasy "The OediPod," one of the better buzzwords I've heard since "-izzle" became a suffix.) There is also something larger at work. Rather than a simple swap of EMI for iTunes or Sony/BMG for Google, the sacrifice of the music industry to the ascendence of Web 2.0 marks a behemoth victory for capital. As the internet can amplify negligible differences into flamewar-worthy impasses, the Global Village has managed to divide and conquer itself, placing greater emphasis on bitchy bulletin-board retorts than building a progressive consensus. Capital is being fed by our infighting. What remains to be seen is if the Captains of Industry will score the truly horrifying hat-trick of resurrecting the old media industry while tightening its chokehold on the new one.

So how does Mr. Adrian Thaws figure into all this? I recall an interview on Canada's MuchMusic around the time of Angels With Dirty Faces (named after the classic Cagney mobster movie), wherein Tricky was queried about "urban" music's fascination with the antisocial & criminal element. I'm paraphrasing through the cobwebs of a decade-old memory, but he said (more or less):

Growing up in the ghetto, the only people who got out of the ghetto were gangsters and drug dealers. So those were my heroes growing up.

Aside from explaining the now for-granted characteristics of "ghetto" culture (paranoia from being constantly surveiled by police, the romanticising of strongmen, etc.), this speaks volumes about the types who would succeed according to the rules of capital. Also, amid the ruckus over Knowle West Boy, The End Times reminded himself (and us) of Tricky's role as class antagonist during a lengthy rumination on the socioeconomic tension he (Dan) endures as a bookstore wage-slave. Evidently, a hefty psychic tax has been exacted upon him by

the middle-class-and-over customers... [who] never once tak[e] pity on a face prematurely aged by harassment, as all working-class faces seem to be, but feel that they have to treat you like a piece of shit, and that you should be thankful for the privilege of even speaking to them.

I sympathise. My wife spent quite some time in the same gig, and my incumbency as a record store clerk forms the bulk of my CV. (My professional history gets no more glamourous either, with one fleeting exception from which I was ultimately sacked.) But before I raise my fist in solidarity with service industry drones everywhere, let's be clear about one thing: working in a bookstore is considerably different than working in a Chinese coal mine, Alberta oil rig, north Atlantic fishing trawler, Vietnamese sweatshop, or African diamond mine. Across the spectrum of employment, working retail ranks as pretty damned easy, comfortable, and safe - sufficiently so that I hesitate to designate it blue-collar.

Nonetheless, anyone who's ever worked in the service industry would affirm the presence of a seemingly inherent antagonism between the customers and the staff. The political persuasion of the antognism, however, is elusive. Retail work seems to be a Rorschach test for this fundamental antagonism's ideological framework: it can be racial, a Nietzschean upstairs/downstairs dynamic, the classic religious condescension which endorses the wealth of faith alone, or (in Dan's Case) black-and-white Marxian class struggle. Though the antagonism's nature is not given, its presence is - in every exchange, eye-roll, request, sneer, smile, and sale.

Since the predominant context of human interaction is within the work environment, the political vagueness of the interaction allows any ideology to be adopted as a basically-true filter through which to view all interaction. Of course, to adopt an ideology immediately disavows its exceptions, only hardening our opposition from the Other while doing the individual no justice. As Carl Jung put it more concisely than I can, "While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way." More useful references for the antagonistic dynamic might be the Stanford prison experiment or the Milgram experiment, in terms of the persecutive nature of demands by authority. Again, this is not to dramatise the service industry as the frontlines of an epic battle for humanity's soul. But to frame the antagonism psychologically makes it a human problem, as opposed to a product of the necessarily dehumanising will to power of capital.

Does this complicate the issue? Almost certainly - but then, when has getting along with people ever been easy?

On another front of the class war: Ladies and gentlemen and fair folk in between... In a discovery that will be rivalled only by the eventual detection of the Higgs Boson, I have stumbled upon the single most pretentious and precious band name ever: To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie. No, I'm not fucking around. They are beyond parody, people. A coed duo dressed all Derelicte, doing a digi-glitchy update on 4AD's glacial, gothy art-rock with the (somewhat tone-deaf) lady cooing into cavernous reverb, complete with a David Lynchian video whose self-important vapidity means it blows its load only a third of the way through the interminable seven-goddamn-minute runtime. The music crosses from tastefully minimalist to totally blank, from emotional coldness to zombiefied void - probably to avoid the embarrassment risked in articulating a position.

I mean, look at 'em - is that 100% class warrior or what? The only thing saving this band from being a pitch(fork)-perfect Brooklyn Vegan Spinal Tap is that they live in Minneapolis instead of Bed-Stuy.

...Until the Worst of All Happens

Not to be all Chicken Little, but:

The Death of Free Internet: Imminent

The Orphan Works Act: Your Work Will No Longer Be Yours

The Middle Class: Going, Going...

Habeas Corpus: ...Gone!

But at least, uh, if there's no internet, it'll be harder to steal people's creative work... right?

This Just In: More Bad News!

Charm City lost a true original: DJ K-Swift, R.I.P.

But hey, at least someone out there is owning up to the horror they unleashed.

I Will Possess Your Soul

I heard it in a shop two days ago, then as a ringtone this morning, and now I've had the bloody Death Cab For Cutie single stuck in my head all day. I thought, perhaps, perusing the video might fish out the earworm; it did, but now I'm even angrier than I was before. It's bad enough to be haunted by what sounds like Coldplay's Starbucks-ready rendition (read: neutering) of "Death Valley '69" with a full five-minute preamble of deathly undynamic M.O.R. motorik. But fear not, good friends, because not only does the video not cut the anodyne intro, but it slaps atop it a montage of some pallid mannequin being manifestly unmoved by great scenery around the globe.

Is this Death Cab's tribute to jetlag-addled noninteractive vacationing in the Scarlett Johannsen vein? More indie Orientalism posing as pancultural, One World group hug? Or conversely, an anti-Othering attempt to flatten the globe by demonstrating how to be bored anywhere? A music clip that can be cynically edited into a 30-second commercial that appeals to local narcissism worldwide to make fat mad stacks for Atlantic Records? Who cares?

A better question: why do I care about such milquetoast post-emo pop when it has no function in my life?

Short answer: I don't.

Long answer: I care that it's occupied my consciousness for the better part of a day because I couldn't escape it in the public sphere. I care because it horrifies me to think that every single square inch or second of media that I absorb has been bought, paid for, done as a favour, scratched someone's back, and/or is a single battle in a larger war to possess me and my wallet. There is no such thing as a coincidence, and nothing is so iconoclastic or esoteric it can't be commodified. Lest I be accused of being some music industry incarnation of A Scanner Darkly's Barris, here it is straight from the horse's mouth: these whore-clown huns of universal pillage are out to get you. In a civilization where Starbucks (again) sells a selection of Sonic Youth favourites, it's not merely a matter of having test-marketed tripe shoved down our throats by the Big Four. I'd be no happier if I heard Rick Froberg hollering at me in the frozen food section.

Magnet School of Rock

An eminently punchable face if ever there was...

Once again, the Baltimore City Paper just cranked out their annual Big Music Issue. How things change: my last article for them (one of the Big Music Issue '05 cover stories) examined why a city with such a perennially fecund underground escaped any larger notice for so long; now, not only does Charm City sport one of the highest municipal musical profiles in America, but there's an even a eulogy for the passing of the DC scene, that former Spindletop of East Coast cred.

Were the wit a bit dryer in Baltimore, I could already see the column space dedicated to dissecting the two cities' Revenge of the Nerds-type role-reversal: the brooding high-school chick-magnet, all James Dean cool, (Washington, DC) is showing wrinkles and has coagulated into a curmudgeon, while his nerdy, hyperactive younger brother (Baltimore) has matured into a cultural Galapagos, and now everyone wants to hear his weirdo ramblings.

Instead, we're treated to the same smug, Love-Me-But-Leave-Me-Alone solipsism displayed by every two-(million)-bit whore hounded by the paparazzi. Now that the underdog's been pronounced prime pedigree, the City Paper staff have grown more & more accustomed to spitting invective at "woefully misinformed out-of-state writer[s] extolling our city as the promised land of American pop music" (as though this is somehow objectionable), going so far as to call them "carpetbagging Baltimore boosters."

When I mentioned this to one of my Atlanta-bred cousins, he damn near spit out his beer. "They call them carpetbaggers?! Do they know what that means?"

It's a frightfully loaded term that harbours no small amount of hate, though I'm willing to guess the young (maybe?) writers who toss it around so casually haven't a broad enough awareness of the word's history, and are just flexing their thesaurus. But if they're fully aware of the word's weight? That lands them in the tar pits of hypocrisy mighty quickly: how embarrassing it must be that about 8 out of every 10 bands under the Baltimore brand aren't native Baltimoreans. Ponytail, The Death Set, Ecstatic Sunshine, and the don of ADHD, Dan Deacon, are all out-of-towners.

Shameful, Baltimore. Shameful. Let a bunch of SUNY Purchase art students do all the work, BELIEVing more in the city's vitality than the city itself, and jaded homeboys take the credit. Pathetic.

Oh, wait! Sorry: Beach House! Yeah, totally the keystone of the scene. (Nods off)

So then where are all the real Baltimore bands at? Brooklyn.

Bringing Flowers to a Gunfight

The other day over at the venerable I Cite blog, Jodi Dean pondered the ramifications of former WH press secretary Scott "Doughboy" McClellan's defrocking of his former employers. Dean has been banging her head against the same wall as many of us for the past five (if not eight) years, and echoed Stephen Colbert's sentiment that, “These are shocking revelations — in that it is shocking that Scott McClellan thinks these are revelations.”

Dean also extracted the following subtext from McClellan's late confession:

Namely, he might be understood as telling us something about the Republicans' understanding of the media and the Democrats (and their unholy union, the liberal media). The Republicans fight like vicious attack dogs because they presume antagonism. They presume political warfare, political struggle. The failure of the Democrats and of the msm is to hold up their end of the struggle.

...[The Republicans'] game has been premised on the presence of adversaries also out for blood. But the media and the Democrats gave up, gave in, and didn't play. And it seems, then, that maybe the Republicans were a little shocked and little over their heads when they got what they wanted and more.

I wrinkled my nose a little upon reading that. Not because I doubt it; on the contrary, it's dead-on. But such an assessment of the Republican mindset is as revelatory as the fact that the Administration *ahem* "oversold" the evidence against Saddam.

This is a criticism I have of the American left as a whole - an indictment that extends far beyond the confines of a particular party. Political correctness became the ultimate expression of identity politics, and the left obliged by focusing on people's feelings and not offending anyone, as opposed to objective policies. How successful can a political movement be when its only coherent goal is inclusiveness? For the better part of the past two decades, protest marches have been miasmal gatherings of pro-choicers, anti-poverty activists, environmentalists, Black Block anarchists, consumer advocates, pacifists, pinkos, and folks for freeing Mumia. There's been no concise expression of purpose, no consenual agenda.

Now, who's going to win the fight: this ad-hoc assembly of unfocused activists, or a cabal of thugs thirsty for power?

I personally never cared for political correctness, but out of an Orwellian suspicion of any linguistic restrictions upon plain speaking & free debate. Conservatives, on the other hand, detested all things PC because it forced them to speak as though they gave a shit about others. They didn't care about anyone's feelings; they had an empire to build.

The Democratic Party's milquetoast centrism has been driven by this urge to include, rarely seeming to consider the impossibility of, say, including secular humanists and fanatical Baptists in the same group-hug. As much as I rooted for John Edwards earlier in this election cycle, I recalled the repulsion I felt when, in the 2004 campaign, he explained the Democratic strategy RE: the War On Terror as, "We'll hunt them down and kill them." If I was the kinda guy who didn't mind my elected representatives advocating murder on prime-time TV, why wouldn't I just stick with the administration who'd already demonstrated the will & means to git-r-done? Rather than than make an issue out of the Republicans' policies, the Democratic Party traded away its identity out of bet-hedging cowardice (a.k.a. political expediency).

Mercifully, the left (though not necessarily the Democratic Party) is finding its footing again, and almost exclusively I credit the internet: a medium that allows alienated citizens to tentatively broadcast their frustrations and find peers to confirm, no, they're not the only one this pissed off. The blogosphere saved the American left from becoming the eunuch slaves of some national reenactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Let's just hope that Obama breaks the role-playing quicker than Zimbardo did.

What's Pissing Me Off About Music Today?

From the always epic FAIL Blog

For starters, this juvenile act of dick-swinging will only impress people who can't tell a record press from a waffle iron. Never mind that way back when Nick Sylvester eviscerated their record, it was the one-in-ten he gets right. I can't tell if Ackermann & Co. are trying to push this pathetic bumper-sticker marketing about "loudest band in New York" into some all-encompassing dogma, or if they're just so gloriously inept as musicians that they're not even aware of how records are made. Hey, I know: let's just make the lock groove a square wave the width of the record and it'll be the loudest vinyl release ever! Sure, it'll only be 1.8 seconds long and break everyone's stylus, but... dude! LOUD!

And as Pitchdork becomes the MTV of the post-millenial, I barely know where to begin with why this is so wrong. Do we start with the porcine mouthbreather who was assigned to be interviewer? Or how transparently, self-referentially agenda-driven Pitchfork has become, as can be inferred by the smug, reverent tone in which Dave Maher referes to a fellow writer? How about that outrrrrrageous accent on Xavier de Rosnay?

I'll confess an immediate bias against Justice: I distrust dance music because, bottom-line, it wants nothing more than to please, and that makes for bad art. Dance music - rooted in nightclubs and, thus, fashion - exists on the ficklest of stimulus-response reflexes. Hence the thoroughly unenjoyable video for "Stress", a clear knee-jerk distancing from the cutesy bubblegum bounce of "DA.N.C.E." as though to prove their balls have dropped. This isn't speculation: in the clip, a teenager in a tantrum literally kicks "D.A.N.C.E." off the airwaves. Comment la Justice est MACHO! This is the same measured approach to image construction that, say, Carrot Top employed when he wanted, if not respect, at least fear. As for the video itself, yes, indeed, what hath France wrought by producing such disaffection in its youth, but as Anna Packard argued, how is watching a gaggle of adolescents acting like total cunts going to help anyone? (Other than Justice, what with the extra attention garnered by the controversy.)

Back to the Pitchfork interview... something very symptomatically European about les hommes de Justice is the manner in which they deny any fundamental significance of ubiquitous religious imagery. This is in stark contrast to Americans, who generally minimize the public display of religious accoutrements but loudly and ceaselessly profess their faith. While these are very opposite approaches to worship, they both display a certain characteristic: a disregard or even disbelief in the power of the symbol or image. For Europeans, the symbol can be appropriated (as on the jackets of the ASBOs in the Justice video) and carries no inate power; for Americans, the symbol is an unnecessary, though occasionally helpful, signifier. This stands in stark contrast to Islamic society, where the image is still unimpeachably important. (See: Danish Mohammed cartoon reaction) Could this be one of the cultural disconnects that led to the rage of unintegrated immigrant youths portrayed in the "Stress" video? Oh, snap! The irony!

Now, in closing, perhaps what's pissing me off the most about music today is that I've expended such mental energy dissecting & discussing such inconsequential bullshit because no one told me that this is what happened here in Hamburg on May Day. I understand that I was out of town at the time, but for fuck sake, isn't this disquieting and dire enough that someone would have mentioned it to me before today?!

I'm one Molotov cocktail or inflammatory speech away from "Screw you guys, I'm going home..."