Misplaced Indignation Again?

Am I obliged to comment on M.I.A.'s "finger malfunction" because my most popular post ever - by a factor of over four times its closest competitor - is my 2010 takedown of her pop-provocateur persona? Because, like, I've got shit to do besides rehash two-year-old quarrels of stage-managed mischief.

But fine, let's get into it, if only because it'll be easy. Turning first to the finger itself: really? Really! Have we backslid into such petty puritanism that flipping the bird is cause for a proper conniption fit, as opposed to the single most overused & hackneyed gesture of juvenile waggery that packs all the symbolic punch of overcooked rice noodles? She doesn't even do it well! Look at her hunched shoulders, look at how tightly drawn in her arms are: a meek & defensive posture, like a toddler who's committed to misbehave deliberately just to piss off the parents. Pathetic. This is how you give someone the finger:

Boom! Ain't no equivocatin' when you're telling someone to fuck off.

Now, with regard to M.I.A. as riotous pop shit-kicker, a lame, recycled flip of the middle finger is merely the latest in her continued reliance upon lame, recycled gestures. The chorus of her latest single is a monotone bleat of "Live fast, die young" and it doesn't get more threadbare & depleted than that hoary countercultural trope. Hopefully, M.I.A. has accepted (as most of us have) that she's utterly inept at articulating a political position so we needn't reexamine precisely why her identity-derived political aesthetic is bullshit. Of course, she still covets the currency of being branded a "political artist," but she can shoot every one of her music videos within safe distance of a "conflict region" from now on, and everyone will understand it's empty & opportunistic provocation, like Madonna fornicating with Black Jesus and burning crosses.

Which returns us to the stock defense of M.I.A.: the provocation itself was the point. As I explained before, I'd have no problem with such an excuse - heck, I might even become a fan - if M.I.A. was able to transgress the form or process of "being a pop star," but she isn't. (In fact, no one has been - not even Lady Gaga, I'd argue - since Kurt Cobain.) Because M.I.A.'s transgressions are limited to the realm of content, she is - at the risk of repeating myself - doomed to one of several failures:

1. The provocation fails to provoke. Congrats, you're boring.
2. The provocation succeeds, at the expense of banalising the provocative.
3. The provocation succeeds to the point of returning the threat to the provocateur, who stands by the ever-present escape hatch of "not meaning it."

And if anything is symptomatic of art's sickly & moribund state in the post-modern era, it's an absence of meaning.

Change The Channel

A dozen time-zones away from Washington, DC, I happened to wake up in time to catch both the State of the Union and the Republican response this morning over breakfast. Yeah, over breakfast, what kind of a ludicrous glutton for punishment am I. At least it was all pathetically predictable, with Mitch Daniels painting modern America as some litter-and-body-strewn hellscape that the Republicans will somehow miraculously cure through the alchemy of deregulation & cracking down on gayness, while Obama laid out his platform for re-election thusly:

1. I killed Bin Laden, yo!
2. Support the troops!
3. Jobs 'n' schools 'n' shit!
4. Iran, we will fuck you up.

By the end of it, I felt mildly drunk as I was physiologically incapable of determining what possessed me more, anger or boredom. Boredom won out in the end, as I realized I could've skipped both Obama and Daniels' speeches and simply watched the keystone speech from Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion on loop for two hours. In fact, I recommend you doing precisely that instead of watching the SOTU every year from now until the bloody erosion of the American empire is complete.


Of course, the fundamental difference between the SOTU and Investigation is that Gian Maria Volonté's police inspector, loathsome fascist that he is, has more integrity than any American politician in office today.

iCame, iSaw, iConquered

Come December, I'll be curious to see whose death ends up earning more year-in-review ink: that of Osama Bin Laden or Steve Jobs. For now, I just feel bad that Bert Jansch was robbed of his last moment in the spotlight.

The only thing I feel about Jobs' sudden passing is surprise at how quickly it followed his resignation as Apple's CEO. Perhaps this is another instance of how intimately entwined are sense of purpose and will to live. Jack Layton, for example, took the New Democratic Party of Canada from a marginal parliamentary presence to the official opposition in a single election and was dead within a couple of months. Even T.E. Lawrence - a man whose feats of endurance & military daring read like pulp fantasy - was scarcely two months into his retirement when he met an ignominious end in a minor traffic accident.

Beyond that pseudo-philosophical chinstroke... so what? Can't say I particularly care. But judged by the online tsunami of farcical grief, I am starkly in the minority. So maudlin & wracked is the tenor of the bereaved I'd have thought that all these people were personal friends of Steve Jobs, that he'd brought them chicken soup on a cold November night, that he'd awarded their kids college scholarships, that he'd given sight to their blinded-by-moonshine great aunt.

But no, they are not a one his friend. They aren't Steve Jobs' acquaintances, they're his customers, his consumers.

Lest we forget that Apple is a corporate behemoth whose liquidity exceeds that of even the world's largest national economy. Lest we forget that Apple is a technocratic Goliath which dodges corporate taxes and whose idea of "healthcare coverage" extends to suicide-prevention nets but barely any further. Unlike his oft-maligned doppleganger, Steve Jobs is not a philanthropist - he's a corporate padrino whose brilliance lies less in innovation than elaboration & refinement - making borrowed ideas better. Apple's very first personal computers (the Lisa and the Macintosh) were little more than liberal imitations of the Xerox Alto. Similarly, Jobs did not invent a GUI platform to (re-)distribute digitized music, but he did figure out how to monetize one.

The true genius of Jobs was his aestheticization of appliances. He transformed utilitarian machines into the fully syntactic symbols of a lifestyle; his public-relations alchemy made technological amenities into elite totems. Between his products & his customers, Jobs fostered not just a relation but a relationship - a transubstantiation presented literally in those anthropomorphic "I'm a Mac" TV ads.

At least the UK got to watch the guys from Peep Show make smug pricks of themselves.

Anyway, this explains why Jobs' death is a big deal beyond the business section. A man like Philo T. Farnsworth arguably had a more revolutionary effect on daily life, but Steve Jobs was a man with whom people felt they had a personal relationship, a friend who had enriched their lives & enabled them to unleash their expressive potential. It's no exaggeration to say Jobs' death has elicited a despair whose scale and substance are equivalent to - perhaps even greater than - the passing of the Pope. Within a mere hour of the news, floral tributes were piling up outside Apple stores the world over. Social media was more choked with endless inspirational quotes than a Deepak Chopra book. The grief was so sensational it would've been considered too stagy for a Broadway musical.

Against this backdrop, the latest essay on Adam Curtis' blog made for some serendipitous reading: in his endless trawl of audio-visual archives, Curtis has managed to trace the evolution of demonstrative emotion on TV. Within barely a generation between the '50s and '70s, spilling one's guts on air went from being anathema - "shameful agony" - to the necessary signifier of human authenticity. This sentimental overflow has become a carved-in-stone commandment not only of broadcast media, but of western social relations in general. However, Curtis warns that this hysterical style of emotional "authenticity" may actually be anything but:

There is a creeping sense of someone pretending to have the emotions that are expected of them. And in this way hiding their true feelings even further below the surface. Or maybe the truth is even more disturbing - that there are lots of things that people live through and experience that they just don't have emotions about.

As irrational psychic ephemera, emotions are difficult to understand and even harder to reproduce convincingly - particularly positive, sympathetic emotions. This is why tearful confessions & expectorating fist-fights became mainstays of daytime television far earlier than the joyful hug-orgies & triumphal backslapping of more recent shows like The Amazing Race or American Idol. So how did gushing exuberance become part of the public's expressive mode? Curtis points to the rise of "self-help" and collaborative craft shows like Trading Spaces and its British counterpart, Changing Rooms:

I think the man that really brought the hug into British television in a big way was the producer Peter Bazalgette. His genius was to spot that the idea of transforming yourself as a person could be intimately linked to transforming the things around you - starting with the rooms in your house.

I think the first real hugs of these kind began in the series Changing Rooms in the mid 90s.

The original revolutionary idea had been that by changing yourself emotionally as a person you would then change society. Bazalgette created an easier and quicker variation. By simply changing the physical things around you - you could then change your inner feelings and became a better and more expressive human being.

Wallpaper as redemption.

Steve Jobs understood this perfectly. By emphasizing his products' artful design, and by casting them as tools of creative composition, Jobs enabled his consumers to feel they were more fully-realized, expressive individuals thanks to him.

What I find disturbing is that, by surrounding themselves with beautiful expensive objects that encourage a melodramatic solipsism, people are encouraged to construct & occupy their own private fantasy wherein the crueler aspects of reality are not allowed. No one wants to feel bad. No one wants to struggle with criticism, dissent, violence, or acrimony. This relentlessly positive self-regard creates the illusion of a cozy but false consensus: by engaging only with the familiar & agreeable, we diminish our ability to cope with difference. Think different, but not so different that it unsettles you.

This is why there is no such thing as a "Dislike" button.

Phoning It In

The overwrought pageantry that passes for political punditry is so hackneyed & calculated, it's a wonder anyone pretends to be surprised anymore. Everyone so desperately admires & awaits a Howard Beale or Barry Champlain moment, forgetting (or ignoring) how expertly stage-managed & corralled by corporate interests those fictional "mavericks" were. Thus audience & broadcaster alike have managed to turn yet another non-event - Glenn Beck's exit from the Fox News network - into frothing political scopophilia.

Personally, I could give a fuck, not the least because I live outside America and have no TV or radio. More importantly, Beck himself is not special: his is a role to be filled by whatever appropriately attention-hungry ex-cokehead lunges hardest towards the microphone. But, as I explained last month in an e-mail to a friend, I'd had an appalling premonition about Beck's next step:

Beck can get the fuck off the air already. The only thing I'm worried about now is that, for his next act, he'll undergo some histrionic "crisis of faith" in the conservative movement and refashion himself into a pseudo-libertarian leftist and everyone will eat that shit right up. Don't think it can't happen! Ariana Huffington pulled off that stunt with startling efficacy (though I believe she's far more sincere than Beck has ever been).

But surely such a mawkish turn would be so transparent & tacky, no one would fall for it, right? I mean, come on. Yet, yet, yet, as I click across to Crooks & Liars this morning, what do I see atop the front page?

Beck on Republicans: 'I hate them'

Well, stomp on frogs 'n' shove a crowbar up mah nose! Who'da fucking thunk it. As good forgive-and-forget liberals, we should presently, if prudently, embrace the Fox News rodeo clown, not only for his dubious disillusionment with both mainstream political parties, but because Beck is (now) solidly against extraordinary rendition:

"Ghost planes - we're picking people up in the middle of the night. We're saying talk to us or we're going to drop you off over in Egypt. That's insane... We don't stand for anything."

Beck is unconvinced of the efficacy of state-sponsored kidnapping & torture (for which legal repercussions have just been forever swept off the table). Welcome to the club, buddy! Everyone against zapping civilians' scrotii with car batteries gets a gold star! If you disapprove of kidnapping, you get a cookie! How about this: as long as we're doling out special credit for shit you're supposed to do, can I get extra sprinkles on my sundae given that I've resisted the temptation to chainsaw off my neighbour's head & fuck his wife?

Squibbity-flabbity-doo!

Labour's last stand in Wisconsin, turmoil in Libya, unsubstantiated xenophobia in the financial sector - how much horror can one ingest during the first cup of coffee? How angry can you get at breakfast? For want of any meaningful contribution to the conversation (and to preserve what fewed frayed nerves I've left), I gladly pick up the gauntlet cast by Simon Reynolds for a li'l musical frivolity.

Great guitar solos! Man, what are the odds of anyone under the age of twenty-five joining this debate? If the Great Riff War of 2010 was troubled by the recent restriction of the guitar to a supporting role, then the solo is an expressive mode dead & buried for two straight decades. Perhaps the last memorable moment a guitar stepped front-and-center was Kurt Cobain's minimal reiteration of the verse melody in "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Certainly, guitar solos have forever been stained with the nut-bustin' excesses of '80s metal. Whether you're an eyebrow-arching ironist or an melodramatic raconteur, the human voice is an unmediated, more easily-understood means of expression. You're not going to talk through your guitar. (With due respect to the possible exception of Stephen Malkmus.)

Yet many of my favourite guitar solos came after the finger-sports Olympics of the 1980s. This is partially due to my age: 1990 was the first year I paid attention to contemporary music in a conscious way. Granted, the window hadn't quite closed on masturbatory machismo at that time. Slash & Kirk Hammett were unarguably the most popular guitarists on the planet, and the friend who first encouraged me to pick up the instrument was still spending his days deciphering the flurried fretwork of Steve Vai and Nuno Bettencourt. But such pyrotechnical playing was a bridge way too far for an eight-year-old still struggling to form a bar chord. It also struck me as a kind of silly - but silly in that awkward way that is totally unaware of how silly it actually is. If I was going to go silly, I wanted to enjoy it overtly.

Enter Primus. My parents, bless 'em, bought me The Beavis & Butthead Experience on cassette for Christmas '93. A bunch of my favourite bands were on the dodgy cash-in compilation (Nirvana, Anthrax, et al.), but what seized me by the cerebellum were the first two tracks on the second side: "I Am Hell" by White Zombie and "Poetry & Prose" by Primus. White Zombie were gloriously coarse, like Metallica deprived of any artistic pretense, and Rob Zombie had the most resolutely unpleasant voice I'd heard - mesmeric in its repulsiveness. (You can imagine how excited I was when I finally heard Ministry six months later.) But Primus were just baffling: a nasal redneck spitting syllables at auctioneer speed over the Ren & Stimpy house band. And what was up with the guitar solo (which hits around the 1:30 mark)...



This fleet-fingered loon was desperately snatching notes all over the neck and grabbing the wrong one every time. I had no idea what to make of it. I'd never heard playing so willfully unhinged.

...That is, until I discovered Marc Ribot and Frank Zappa. Evidently, Larry Lalonde's two greatest influences were even further out in orbit that he was. Ribot's playing, particularly his more restrained performances behind Tom Waits, was what I thought the blues should sound like: gnarled, lacerating, and not quite on key. His solo on Waits' "Way Down In the Hole" has long been a favourite.

And Zappa - well, the first spin of Zappa's Apostrophe(') was my Damascene moment as a young musician. As I've written before, "it defied every rule that Top 40 radio had imposed on my impressionable mind: it was virtuosic but hilarious, it was orchestral but whimsical, it was psychedelic but cynical." His guitar playing was stupefying, especially for its near-total aversion to rhythmic regularity. Many people find his three-volume instrumental tome Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar overly indulgent, but I still think the opening salvo of "Five Five Five" is a terrifying piece of modernist improv.



After my prog-head period, I began gravitating towards more textural, deconstructive guitarists like Kevin Shields and Ian Williams. Still, players whose concepts exceeded their chops can surprise with the occasional searing solo, like Lee Renaldo's fuzzy freakout in "Kissability" or Chris Woodhouse's confounding blitzkrieg during the late, great Mayyors' "Metro". And I have to admit, two-meter sentient phallus though he may be, Billy Corgan killed it during the solo on "Zero".

But, as so often comes to pass with rock history, you gotta go old school for honest-to-god, as-yet-unmatched genius. The solo that scorched, then salted the earth so that nothing could grow in its wake was Robert Fripp's six-stringed exorcism on Eno's "Baby's On Fire". There's hardly a more exciting three-minute instrumental span in rock music, and its serrated howl echoes in every other solo I've cited above. Every time I listen to it, I simultaneously want to throw off my instrument in futile disgust and to kick on the Big Muff and run through Lydian scales until my fingers bleed.



Your move, Mr. Neville.

Invasion and Occupation of the Ears

As I explained in my last post, the late fall frequently finds me seeking a little distance from the outside world. While this is usually accomplished by adopting a new hobby or subcultural fascination, I just as often self-impose arbitrary & unrealistic deadlines for mammoth projects - as though Death's icy grip will close faster around my throat if I don't release two albums and a 7" by New Year's Eve. Perhaps I'm terrified of being without braggable exploits during the inevitable holiday reunions with old acquaintances. On the other hand, if I manage total consistency for another decade, what is underwhelming now will have become gloriously eccentric: an artsy polymath circa 30, without a stable income since his early twenties, is just some pseudo-bohemian loser - but when you're knocking on 40's door, dude, you're Daniel Higgs.

I digress. The point is that, several months ago, I sat down and assigned myself several large projects with little chance they'd all be completed by the late-December cutoff. What's amazing is that I might actually succeed.

• After intermittent recording over the autumn, my band finally completed an album's worth of demos, from which we selected a well-matched pair of songs for a quick 'n' gritty 7" single; I placed the order with the pressing plant yesterday, in time to get the test pressings back before Christmas.
• What started as a sonic sketchbook of improvised production exercises somehow coalesced into an album. I should have it pressed up in time for a run of shows coming next week, though I'm not sure if a bunch of post-hardcore kids & aging alts will be very interested in my bogus Frippery. Maybe Kranky will release it and I can start doing improv gigs with Fennesz.
• Meanwhile, I overstepped my musical bounds by several strides and decided to *ahem* make beats. This was largely out of frustration with the likes of Doom, Madlib, and Oh No, whose releases are maddeningly half-brilliant, half-baked. Instead of groaning when a banger like "Gazillion Ear" is followed up by filler like "Ballskin", why not just stitch together a solid 30 minutes of samples that I already like?

Only that last project is unlikely to see light before year's end, but at least sample-splicing and beat-tweaking will keep me busy during the dull moments of the holiday season.

Consequently, my ears have been worked into callused stumps. Demo recording was especially exciting and excrutiating: what could've been a no-frills rehearsal recording ballooned into a kitchen-sink production exercise. I suspect this was because our bassist (the veteran of the band) was "auditioning" me to engineer our album when we record in earnest next year; more likely, though, no one had a clue what "our sound" is. ("This song is kinda PiL-ish, but that song should sound like a track from Goo.") To accomodate diverse stylistic demands, from song to song I aped different engineer's signature styles - some Alan Moulder here, a dash of Andy Johns there, and more than a little Steve Albini throughout. This was made difficult by a paltry selection of microphones and a limited number of inputs. Alone, either one of these doesn't hopelessly hamstring a recording. After all, The Beatles & George Martin were able to craft Sgt. Pepper's on four tracks - but they had several-thousand-dollar microphones and outboard gear almost worth killing for. Conversely, Slayer's epic Reign In Blood was recorded almost entirely with cheap, small-diaphragm dynamic mics - but with 24 tracks all blazing at once. I, on the other hand, was trying to siphon torrents of sound through a bunch of Beta-57s into 8 tracks - not quite as difficult as trying to part the Red Sea with a teaspoon & a paper fan, but almost.

Excuses aside, everyone was (mercifully) pleased with the results.

As maddening as handicapped recording sessions can be, they stage incredible games of mental chess. Technical limitations force ingenuity, while inspiring "what if?" scenarios for the next step. For example, now that I've managed to achieve a decent three-mic drum sound, will I record the drums differently when I have 16 simultaneous inputs available? Would an ORTF stereo pair or an M-S setup sound better in this room? Why not run the bass through a Marshall and the guitar through an Ampeg?

The process provoked me to revisit my old recording textbooks, not to mention it's given me renewed concentration as a music listener. Studying every whisper & crash that comes out of my speakers has reminded me of the oft-forgotten distinction between engineering and production: engineering is material, the nuts-'n'-bolts mechanical documentation of a sound, whereas production is metaphysical, the sculpture of music's intangible qualities. The two are commonly confused, if only because it's tempting to assign why music moves us emotionally to its material qualities.

Take Steely Dan, a band renowned for their meticulously-constructed records which sound as clear & smooth as a fine Scotch. I've always found them too clinical, distant, dull. Presumably, Becker & Fagen don't mean their music to have all the vitality of a dead sturgeon, so as productions, are they failures?

Meanwhile, there's plenty of deliberately ugly music out there - from black metal's treble-heavy buzz to the speaker-exploding grit of Brainbombs or the Psychic Paramount. While such records are ostensibly examples of "bad recording," it's obvious that these acts want to sound repellent, and their audial odiousness is the very reason why some listeners love them and others loathe them. Thus, as productions, does such music succeed even when repulsing a portion of its audience?

(Image from Sleeveface.com)

Clearly, cleaving between engineering & production is so difficult because the two are entwined, each serving to support or spoil the other. Those krautrock classics by Neu, Kraftwerk, and Ashra inspire visions of a futurist technotopia so effortlessly because of their painstaking, state-of-the-art construction. Likewise, the Wu-Tang Clan's debut remains a touchstone of rough, streetwise hip-hop because it sounds rougher than a spiked bat.

Ah, but what's missing from the equation? The performance, the very thing being documented. A good performance is immediate & unmistakable; it almost requires concerted effort to record a strong performer so badly that no one would listen to it. The engineer's job is to prepare the physical environment & tools necessary to capture a good performance, whereas the producer's job is to enable a good performance. The producer is the architect of the soundworld in which the performer will be most at home. This may sounds nebulous & variegated, because it is, which is why no two producers work in precisely the same fashion. Many performers produce themselves, feeling (sometimes erroneously) that outside influence only interferes. Some producers are technical taskmasters, detail-oriented drill sergeants; others, like Rick Rubin, are closer to "life coaches," therapist-cum-sycophants who coax & cajole performers into their comfort zone. Arguably the most interesting are those producers who purposefully antagonize & nettle the performers, aware that certain artists thrive on adversity & discomfort.

So with everything that goes into a recording, it's galling that there are musicians who I don't feel have ever been produced perfectly. I don't necessarily mean "recorded badly" in that it sounds like a shit-caked dictaphone, but rather the artist was framed in a soundworld where they were not at home. As much as I adore Bowie's Berlin trilogy, those albums have always sounded a bit flat & musty, like old cardboard, as though the whole band was crammed into a single three-meter-wide, drywalled room. Station To Station is much more effectively layered in its arrangements, though musically it's nowhere near as coherent or compelling. I've also never been entirely satisfied with how The Fall or Sonic Youth have been recorded. They each came close to finding their pitch-perfect space for a single album in the '80s (The Wonderful and Frightening World and EVOL respectively), but sadly got lost again afterward. When they finally arrived (Fall Heads Roll and Washing Machine), their most striking innovations were long behind them.

At any rate, below is a mix of songs that, to me, strike the perfect balance between a strong performance and engineering that serves to create a distinctive, vivid soundworld.

Master Sculptors

1. Brian Eno - "Sky Saw"
2. Ashra - "77 Slightly Delayed"
3. D'Angelo - "Playa Playa"
4. Can - "Oh Yeah"
5. Wu-Tang Clan - "Bring Da Ruckus"
6. Nino Rota - "O Venezia, Venega, Venusia"
7. Bachi Da Pietra - "Altri Guasti"
8. The Jesus Lizard - "Seasick"
9. Scott Walker - "Clara"
10. My Bloody Valentine - "Come In Alone"

If I could be, for only an hour...

Well, it's Hallowe'en weekend. If you're a foreigner in Tokyo, this means partying hard on the Yamanote train with a bunch of other white people, though in recent years these impromptu costumed hullabaloos have drawn fire from not only embarrassed foreigners but an increasingly strident hard-right. Personally, I'm not particularly bothered. The Yamanote parties are hardly a utopian T.A.Z. and combating xenophobia doesn't begin by dressing up like Borat and acting like a douche; yet it hardly bears complaining that the train transforms into a mobile drunk tank on October 31 - as opposed to any other night.

Of course, people everywhere concoct all manner of fanciful excuse for the explicit purpose of playing the fool in public. Such saturnalia are exhaust valves for the populace's pent-up frustration & compounded stress, which otherwise might be channeled into some kind of radical political expression - and we certainly can't have that! So when Japanese wag their fingers at an American holiday that is little more than culturally-sanctioned juvenile terrorism, lest they forget they spend summertime getting drunk & playing with explosives.

Really, though, to be content with such intermittent tomfoolery is missing the big picture. Just become a musician. Then you can act like a complete asshole 'round the clock and get paid for it!

Then again, musicians are often as discontent to be themselves as anyone else. (Even moreso in some instances.) This is why the musical masquerade of cover songs is impossible to resist. Yes indeed, it makes good P.R. to associate yourself with an established act, not to mention trumpet your own impeccable taste. But no one's ever kicked out a Jimi Hendrix or Stooges cover who didn't want to be Jimi or Iggy (who also wanted little more than to be their respective heroes). Hell, some bands make entire careers out of hollow impersonations of their idols. As an audience, we owe thanks to those talented few who only unveil their influences occasionally & purposefully.

So instead of the usual ghosts 'n' ghoulies Hallowe'en mix (which you can grab here if you really want), here's an amusing selection of musicians playing at being other people. Click on the mix title to download.

In a Stupid-Ass Way

1. Scott Walker - "Jackie"
2. Tricky - "Lyrics of Fury"
3. Teddy and His Patches - "Suzy Creamcheese"
4. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - "I Put a Spell On You"
5. The Fall - "Mr. Pharmacist"
6. The Toreno Brass - "Eleanor Rigby"
7. Sonic Youth - "My New House"
8. The Wooden Glass feat. Billy Wooten - "In the Rain"
9. Melvins - "Going Blind"
10. Dick Hyman - "Green Onions"
11. Shirley Bassey - "Light My Fire"
12. The Chico Magnetic Band - "Crosstown Traffic"
13. La Tia Leonor Y Sus Sobrinos - "Marcha a la Turca"
14. Alex Chilton - "Jumpin' Jack Flash"
15. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Wanted Man"
16. Pavement - "The Classical"
17. Faith No More - "Easy"
18. Martin Denny - "Midnight Cowboy"

Freaks and Fire in Japan's Second City

Funny how stereotypes can be so stubbornly self-sustaining. A few years ago, I showed some friends in Baltimore my favourite Japanese TV show, Gaki No Tsukai. Though most found it hysterical (if mildly disturbing), one friend was actually angry with me. "Y'know," she started, "whenever I say 'my friend lives in Japan,' I spend all this time telling people it's not like you live on Mars, it's not completely batshit insane, not a real-life Blade Runner, the Japanese are just normal cats with some slightly different cultural conditioning - and then you show me this. What the hell am I supposed to think now?"

Similarly, six years ago, almost all I knew of Japan was the lunatic notoriety of the Osaka noise scene. Tokyo was forest of steel & neon, Kyoto was all bamboo & raked pebble gardens, and Osaka was an open-air asylum packed with certifiable nutters who'd swapped bushido for bulldozers & fuzzboxes. Of course, after moving here, I saw how coarse & ignorant this assessment was. Tokyo is an omnivorous hyperreality, Kyoto is more than a historical diorama, and any perceived derangement on the part of Osaka-jin was likely more middle-child contrarianism than a hysteria innate to the city.

But after last weekend's Bakuto festival, I take that last bit back. There really is something in the Kansai water, and Osaka people are off the fuckin' hook. Okay, that's a little unfair: any festival will draw a self-selecting (and thus unrepresentative) multitude. Bakuto is equal parts skate show, dub-head soundclash, tattoo convention, and experimental rock extravaganza - none of which screams "mainstream appeal." But if I threw a loudly-'n'-proudly "countercultural" festival in Tokyo, I'd likely draw as many reactionary nationalists ("Death to post-modern demographics!") as anyone. I certainly couldn't expect the diverse congregation of J-dreads, mori gyaru, baggie skaters, gangsta pseuds, techno-hippies, hardcore punks, fashionistas, greasers, tweakers, pushers, enforcers, Vice mag devotees, expat Williamsburg/Brighton wannabes, aloof chin-strokers, awkward tag-alongs, and unhinged musos that populated Bakuto.

Immediately striking is the festival's setting: a disused shipyard, backdropped by the post-industrial rust & grime of the Suminoeku waterfront. Strolling the docks, it's hard to see whether or not the outside world has indeed crumbled into the yawn of the apocalypse. This dilapidation at once encourages avant-gardistes to bring their convention-smashing A-game, yet makes whatever Neubauten-esque mayhem ensues seem merely appropriate to the environs.

My band was playing the outside stage (next to the skate park) in the mid-afternoon. I spent most of the morning people-watching and wandering wantonly. The earliest bands were all the kind of willfully-amateur, pseudo-tribal dance-punk acts that made Wham City famous, despite how dull & gimmicky they are. Watching a band with the exquisitely dull & gimmicky name Ultrafuckers (ウルトラファッカーズ), a Jared Swilley lookalike was trying way too hard to be really into it while simultaneously stonewalling me, as I depressed his currency as "in-the-know" white guy. Tokenism will only get you laid for so long, dude.

Lunch was a Kafkaesque experience that bordered on sensory breakdown - which had nothing to do with the quality of food. I'd slunk indoors to avoid sunstroke, but the second-floor concourse was sandwiched between competing bass frequencies of obscene volume. From above came the indolent throb of house DJs soundtracking the tattoo convention, while below bands on the Gareki stage vied for sonic supremacy with the incessant thrum of the "Black Chamber" drum-n-bass room. The whole building - windows, walls, ventilation ducts - groaned as several streams of sub swam in and out of phase, coalescing into the same ear-canal-clenching whomp as the Inception score. It sounded... no, it felt like a war zone. Seasick and half-deaf, I stumbled back outside.

Happily, Bakuto delivered that epiphany you always hope for at festivals: when you discover the kind of music you knew someone had to be making but had yet to hear. Kyojin Yueni Dekai (巨人ゆえにデカイ) more-or-less translates as "Because I'm a Giant, I'm Big," which explains why frontman Mizuuchi Yoshihito plays atop stilts, exaggerating his already wiry & mantis-like frame. His guitar has the tinny, equivocal tone of a shamisen or wounded banjo, except for the bass string substituted in the instrument's lower register. The bass string is so roughly detuned that it doesn't so much articulate notes as belch concussively; an atonal gut-punch. Skinsman Wada Shinji alternates between the most minimal of percussive accents and blastbeat freakouts, mirroring Mizuuchi's vocals as he leaps from stony blankness to hoarse bellow. But catharsis is always deferred in favour of suffering the anticipation of the next note; restraint and painfully drawn-out pauses become more tensely theatrical than any punk shitfit abreaction. The effect is like mid-'80s Swans if Gira had been a kabuki student instead of a construction worker.

Unfortunately, two acts that I was especially looking forward to - オシリペンペンズ and オニジャガデルカ - were both playing at the same time as my band. Still, we had a healthy turnout considering we were competing for attention with two giants of the Osaka underground. Hell, I wouldn't even blame someone for skipping our set to go watch the Battle Robots.* Don't get me wrong, I think we're pretty good, but not a lot can compete with remote-controlled scrap-heaps going at it hammer-and-tongs-and-flamethrower.

Some acts were less willing to sacrifice their audience share to automated warriors, and fought fire with fire - literally. Following our set was D.D.S., who performed as a kind of checklist for "subversive" noise rock. Bondage masks? Check. Samples of Hitler? Check. Theremin, circuit bending, turntable abuse? Yep. Gratuitous immolation of old televisions? Of course - but these brainiacs had set the TVs atop a stack of old tires. They deliberately started a tire fire. As plumes of noxious yellow smoke rose into the sky, an ambulance came screaming onto the festival grounds. I suppose the authorities reasonably assumed the sudden expulsion of fumes meant some bad shit was going down.

D.D.S.'s vocalist responded to this incursion by clambering atop the fence and hollering at the EMTs, "Dees eez LOCK AND LOLL!" Couldn't really argue with that, eh?

(*) - That's actually my band in the background of this video clip.

Life's Rich Tapestry (Music Edition)

Shimokitazawa is the Williamsburg of Tokyo: a hustle-bustle locus of all things cool & au current that may have been genuinely countercultural a decade ago that is now more populated by tourists & trendspotters than radicals. Why it became a hotspot is a bit baffling: Shimokitazawa stands on the suburban border of the metropolis with nary an arterial road nor marquee metro line to access it. Beyond that, the neighbourhood is a near-unnavigable tangle of tiny streets wherein even the keenest sense of direction chokes in confusion.

At the bottom of a sloping street, in the unmarked basement of a liquor distributor, is Three - arguably the worst live venue in Tokyo. Sure, it's got glossy brutalist decor that screams modernism, and the clientele is tragically hip, but lord does it suck. The PA was set up by someone I wouldn't trust to fine-tune a home stereo: the speaker stacks face inward towards each other at 45º angles, creating a swamp of phase-cancellation that makes every square inch in the room sound different and bad. Then there's the one-meter-diameter column right in the middle of the fucking floor.

But there's something psychically wrong with Three as well. Maybe its low-lying location at the bottom of Shimokitazawa's labyrinth make it a sinkhole for bad voodoo, but whenever my band has played there we've suffered catastrophic, show-stopping technical difficulties. The first time, the bass cabinet blew out and the bridge on my guitar collapsed. A week ago, barely two songs into the set, I broke two strings and the drummer's kick pedal came unscrewed during the same verse. It's enough to make you wanna get medieval on a motherfucker.

The good news is that we've a chance to redeem ourselves tonight at a sightly more upscale venue in Shibuya. The better news is that in a little over a week, we're playing the Bakuto Festival in Osaka. Not only are Osaka audiences as bacchanalian as the Japanese get, the line-up includes some of my favourite bands - Solmania, Oshiri Penpens, OOIOO. A good way to spend a long weekend, indeed. (And I don't even have to do any of the 8-hour drive!)

The best news for the time being, though, is that my latest solo effort, Rogues Gallery, is finally available to you dear people overseas. Six months after its initial release in Japan, the album is now for anyone-from-anywhere to own on cassette. Yes, cassette, but not because I'm capitalizing on Reagan/Thatcher-era nostalgia. I simply ain't got the scratch for a vinyl release right now. But format snobbery aside, it sounds delightfully thick & feral on tape and every copy comes in a handmade cardboard case.

Still need to be convinced of this fine product's artistic worth? Well, you can stream the whole album on Bandcamp and the lead single, "The Bug Man", is available online for free. Lend me your ears and they will be richly rewarded.

Odds 'N' Sods

Just a few non-sequitors strung together to retune my synapses to typing-mode...

An oft-forgotten and neglected stop on the Yamanote beltway is Uguisudani (鴬谷), or "Valley of the Nightengales" - an appropriate name for a labyrinthine pit of iniquity populated largely by ladies of the night. Nestled within the neon smog is a claustrophobic music club called What's Up, a ramshackle dive whose construction-site decor reminded me of Toronto's Bovine Sex Club. I played an improv gig there last night with some friends. The music most often split the difference between post-rock cathartic crescendos and jam-bandy noodling - at least until the last set, when the whole thing went full-tilt-boogie batshit a la Acid Mothers Temple, complete with barefoot vixen writhing around the stage. Mercifully the "key" had become completely unhinged by the time I'd broken two strings and was struggling to play anything other than echoplexed banshee squall.

The return journey from the gig revealed that it was a strange Sunday night all around: a shirtless white man was engaged in a screaming match with several police officers at Ikebukuro station, and as I strode home there were several EMTs scrubbing spots of blood off the sidewalk outside my local station. No other indication as to what had happened.

Meanwhile, the local discount dry-goods-'n'-liquor store has stepped their game up by installing a Muzak system. But instead of golden-age easy listening or chirpy contemporary pop, they've decided that ragtime is the ideal soundtrack to purchasing overstock pasta and almost-expired yogurt. The juxtaposition between jaunty Scott Joplin tunes and the defeated ennui of the staff is cartoonishly tragicomic.

Finally, during our jaunt around northern Japan, my wife & I suddenly began communicating almost exclusively via daft slang. We're fairly fond of odd turns of phrase (e.g. "gong show" for a chaotic or unfortunate event) but it was a little strange to find ourselves quoting Gucci Mane or Dizzy Rascal ("Blüd! Kin ya heeya them sah-rens coomin?") on an hourly basis. Perhaps all that sulfur at Osorezan strangled our grey matter a bit.

Occupational Hazards

Coming off the road is a retread of the same agonizing steps. First: faced with the divine form of a private bed with clean sheets, I drop my gear and sleep for a solid 16 hours. Second: I'm awoken by caffeine withdrawal clawing holes into my brain. Third: as I contemplate my muscle aches & callused fingers over a cuppa joe, I wonder how in the hell I managed to survive going on tour again.

Any working musician who tells you that going on tour is straight-up fun is either lying or facing one motherfucker of a come-down when the drugs wear off. That's not to say touring's no fun at all; it's some of the most fun you can have, legal & otherwise. But touring takes its toll, as attested by the wrecked relationships, band breakups, chemical casualties, and creative burnout it can leave in its wake.

Mercifully, I've so far avoided the most abysmal pitfalls. None of my bandmates have been junkies; no relationships have been sacrificed on the Dionysian altar; any accident has been the kind from which everyone walked away; and I've never even stayed on the road for a single stretch long enough to forget why the hell I play music in the first place. The worst episode of my touring experience - i.e. no fun then, not funny now - was when, in the boondocks of Pennsyltucky, a drummer was suddenly acquainted with a previously-undiagnosed congenital heart condition. A frightening moment, but obviously he bore the brunt of the misfortune. All I had to do was kill two days' time while he was in hospital (though in Johnstown, PA that's a Quixotic mission at best).

But narcotic indulgence, sexual frivolity, or lengthy estrangements can have ill effects even outside the context of, say, the sawdust-floored bathroom of some mildewed punk bar in Winston-Salem. Perhaps the furtive sociality & itinerant lifestyle of the touring musician make such excesses more accessible than if I was working at an office supply store around the corner, but sex, drugs, and nervous breakdowns have more to do with being human than rock 'n' roll.

What's genuinely strange about touring is the quotidian reality of it: it begins & ends familiarly enough (with slumber) and features the same dull hurdles everyone faces in their day-to-day (e.g. inane small talk, the occasional meal, lots of waiting). But this routine is lived through the warp of a funhouse mirror. The waiting isn't for a train or a slow-moving supermarket line; it's for a large, balding, bearded man called "Jerry" or "Bo" to duct-tape frayed cables so you don't burn to death in an electrical fire. The meals bare only fleeting molecular resemblance to food, and the dining establishments are provincially weird beyond a Cohen brothers movie. The small talk consists of the same Q-&-A with a new set of strangers every day, coalescing into such a reflexive script that you begin to wonder whether or not you have anterograde amnesia. What little sleep is had is in a different place every night, usually under dubious circumstances. (You'd think with the infinite spectrum of stains' colour that no one would bother with white sheets anymore.) For want of some kip, the average touring musician becomes functionally narcoleptic, nodding off in odder places than the average Baltimore junkie.

Speaking of which, I don't mean to make the musician's existence sound like the nadir of human experience. It's still nowhere as dangerous as growing up in Lexington Terrace, or as stressful as being an ER resident. But it's an incredibly odd milieu for anyone to choose, given the relative comfort & credibility most musicians willingly sacrifice in the name of the most ephemeral of arts.

Of course, there's no accounting for how people get their kicks, even in such a semi-masochistic schizogonzoid idiom. I wouldn't do it if I didn't really enjoy it, and I appreciate the musical world's capacity for the ridiculous... as evidenced by the above pic (snapped backstage by Misato from Kacica) of GEAR & myself doing our best to look like world-class pricks.

Oh, and since I've made no prior efforts to substantiate that I'm actually in a band, here's the second half of our set from the gig in Osaka last night.

Mrs. Bronfman Jr.'s New Clothes

On one hand, I'm embarrassed that, a month later, the internet is still aflame with intense detraction & defense of M.I.A. before her new album's even hit the shelves. On the other, the tide has turned in favour of her haters, thanks to Lynn Hirschberg's instantly infamous NYT profile of the pop star. For several thousand joylessly skeptical words, Hirschberg observes M.I.A. play dress-up, self-mythologize, confuse knowledge of with solidarity with, make facile juxtapositions of first-world glamour & third-world aspiration, and repeatedly refer to herself as a "terrorist" in the same blasé tone with which Liam Gallagher discusses his hairdo. It's awkward if marvelously entertaining to witness M.I.A. tar herself as (in Simon Reynolds' words) "bullshit artist of the decade". Even ex-flame/producer/co-cultural appropriator Diplo dog-piles atop Ms. Arulpragasam: "She can’t really make music or art that well."

Hirschberg's first brush with journalistic notoriety came in 1992, with her persona-defining profile of Courtney Love in Vanity Fair. This has prompted M.I.A. boosters to cast the NYT piece as character assassination (slight return), though I'd say Hirschberg specializes in selling her subjects surplus rope. Much has been made of silly ephemera - who bought the truffle fries?! - but possibly dumber than M.I.A.'s own shallow shibboleths is her fans' renewed insistence that we take her seriously as a political artist by, er, not taking seriously her political statements. It's apparently enough that she merely exists as a marble-mouthed fashionista raising her fist, outside the realm of the usual sledgehammer-subtle suspects of "political" art: punkish anarconservatives (Rage), crunchy socialiberatrians (Ani), and earth-mother superfreaks (Badu).

Among the more eloquent defenses of M.I.A. is Mike Barthel's elaboration on her role as "globalism's enfant terrible", but even he falls back on the old canard: "The provocation was itself the point." I'd accept such an excuse when the provocation is transgression of form or process, but with regards to content, shit-talking for the sake of talking shit is doomed to one of several failures:

1. The provocation fails to provoke. Congrats, you're boring.
2. The provocation succeeds, at the expense of banalising the provocative.
3. The provocation succeeds to the point of returning the threat to the provocateur, who stands by the ever-present escape hatch of "not meaning it."

And to that end, through her incessant backpedaling & self-rationalization, M.I.A. has renovated "not meaning it" from emergency exit to a revolving door.

Content cannot eschew politics or meaning; it cannot substitute for itself vacuous beauty. Content without conviction is cowardice, and let's not be so obtuse as to confuse "conviction" with "literal advocacy of". Writing a song about Josef Mengele does not necessarily constitute an endorsement, but there is no way for it to be winkingly void of intent or ideology. Even Genesis motherfuckin' P-Orridge criticized Whitehouse for their commentary-free employ of "extreme"/taboo content. Meanwhile, the only subject for which M.I.A. has consistently stood up is her own ego.

So her politics are pure shin-kicking, the content is symbolically unstable, but evidently we're not meant to "take the statements of someone who has worn pants that light up at face value." This bequeaths M.I.A. the sole purpose of channeling subjectivity. She is a purely aesthetic identity, Barthel argues:

MIA seems interesting to me not so much as a conveyor of rigorously conceived political treatises and moral clarity, but as the vessel for a particular viewpoint that’s largely absent from US culture. ...MIA’s great gift is for aesthetics, and while we’re accustomed to thinking of that as meaningless superficiality, probably the primary reason Americans don’t care about global culture is because its aesthetics are so, well, foreign to us.

After 25 years of Live Aid, enviro-globalism, My Beautiful Laundrette, Youssou N'dour guest spots, and the Sublime Frequencies label, I seriously doubt that many (non-xenophobic) Westerners are unfamiliar with the aesthetics of the third world. What they're unfamiliar with is the political subjectivity of the third world: the poverty, the disease, the instability, the fear. These are affects of which most Americans & Western Europeans have no genuine experience. Even if M.I.A. were more interested in performing as the third-world political subject than goofing on American gangsta-ism, reconstructing such a subject in the first-world would be impossible. She instead prefers some kind of horrid first-generation immigrant buffoonery.

What I particularly enjoy about Barthel's argument, though, is that it comes from a fellow who, just two months ago, wrote the following:

...it’s possible that, in becoming cynical about art’s ability to comment on the wider world, we find ourselves in a situation where the self—identity—is the only source of truth. And as such, those artistic creations considered valuable by any particular individual are the ones that impress that individual—that “speak to me,” as the saying goes. Thus, we find an emphasis on aesthetics and referentiality. ...With culture, you have the totality there before you to examine, and the meaning is constructed rather than manifest. ...Art becomes valued not for its discursive possibilities, but purely for its expressive features.

Well, then... projection of meaning, an insistence upon referring to instead of being referent, and the solipsistic dead-end of identity politics. Yeah, I'm going to agree with Barthel-circa-March on this one.

Souvenir Part 2: Then I Had Worry

Continuing a look at the albums that logged the most spins on my stereo over the Aughts.

2001:
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Now I Got Worry
The Jesus Lizard, Liar

For the past thirty years, the personal evolution of the rock musician has traditionally functioned as follows: an angry young man or woman spends hours by the radio or MTV, bedazzled by guitar-slinging demi-gods, wishing it were them on the airwaves. Then they hear their older brother - or maybe a hipper friend - spinning either the first album by the Clash or some Void 7" and realise that anyone can pick up a guitar and start bashing out a glorious noise as long as the amp's cranked up enough. They start a band with their friends, and though it sounds bloody terrible, they don't care - they're making music! Then someone moves away, or takes umbrage that the guitarist won't turn down and quits. Instruments are swapped, a new member or two is introduced, and vocal duties are handed to the least-unwilling candidate. The band is still atrocious, but slowly a synchronicity develops. The playing gets tighter, the songs become less derivative, and total strangers start approaching the band after shows to inform them earnestly of how much it "rocked."

After a few years of this, either the band breaks up as everyone decides it's time to get that bachelor's degree in engineering or marine biology... or they sacrifice the comforts of middle-class existence to couch-surf, to drive thousands of miles in an Econoline van with a cracked windshield, to live off instant ramen & Subway sandwiches, and to bring their punk-rock gospel to the people. Onstage, the band is a rhythmic maelstrom, but their records never capture the crackle of their "incendiary live shows" (or so the critics say). But as their age inches closer to 30 than 18, their musical tissue begins to stretch & soften. Why are they still writing fuck-off anthems about their parents? Why do Abba and Burt Bacharach no longer disgust them as they once did? And have you heard Giant Steps by John Coltrane? Who knew there were so many chords available to play!

No more interminable bouncing between the I and IV chords. No more reliance on the relative minor as a harmonic trick. The time has come for musical sophistication, and hence there are any number of musical fates that await. They may shift from shaman to showmen, from music-as-exorcism to music-as-discipline (Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds). They'll perhaps ditch snarling wit to write tender confessionals, augmented by "serious" instruments like the piano & acoustic guitar (Joan of Arc). They could very well mistake gratuitous technical exercise for aesthetic substance (The Mars Volta). On very rare occasions, they may just become a better, more engaging band (Fugazi) but don't count on it.

This isn't what happened for me at all: I came to punk rock the wrong way round. I spent high school ripping off Mingus basslines for my own bad psych-funk songs (a la Primus) and studying Ligeti scores. My ex-bandmates covered Weezer to approving hoots; my own band covered Pizzicato Five to awkward golf-claps. What I didn't get was that music was supposed to be less an intellectual exercise than an existential one, an understanding that didn't sink in until a friend showed me the Fugazi documentary Instrument. That I was enjoying it should've been anathema: these clowns were missing chords, botching cues, speeding up/slowing down, and the dude with the Rickenbaker was dancing like a girl. It wasn't until the climactic single-chord seige of "Glue Man" that I got it - the total surrender to excessive sound, the pentecostal fervor, the physical transgression of performance.

"So that's what punk rock is really about," I muttered to myself.

Around the same time, my buddy Mike was schooling me on the finer points of rockabilly- and surf-tinged retro. Mike wasn't a crate-digger exhuming unheard-of garage 45s; his cup o' tea was decidedly more absurd & theatrical, like The Rev. Horton Heat and Southern Culture On the Skids. Grateful for the education, I wanted to return the favour and bought him The Jesus Lizard's Down for his birthday. I knew Duane Denison's gnarled twang would please Mike, but since my punk-rock Damascus moment, I was personally more taken with the jackhammer rhythm section and frontman David Yow's gleeful malevolence. Either way, the album scarcely left Mike's car stereo during our countless drives to & from the Towson Diner.

I spent most of 2000 and the first half of 2001 working as a tour manager, during which the Blues Explosion's Now I Got Worry had become my favourite on-the-road record. I'd picked it up before a particularly epic trek when I'd asked a record store clerk for "something like Southern Culture minus the gimmicks," and I've rarely since been so perfectly recommended a record. It had more than enough explosive riffs & wailing (ha!) energy to keep me awake during marathon nocturnal drives, and the locomotive rhythms meshed nicely with the steady thrum of the interstate beneath the van's wheels. It was also a civilised compromise between the band's current album du jour (Massive Attack's Mezzanine) and my own (the Dillinger Escape Plan's Calculating Infinity).

Fast-forward to the fall of 2001: I was living in Toronto and, in spite of the city's myriad wonders, was a miserable son-of-a-bitch for a combination of dull personal reasons and the spectacular trauma that scarred the world at large. Bandless for the first time in five years, I had to exorcise stress through my stereo and so began pursuing the most pathologically pessimistic, unrepentantly vengeful music that didn't collapse into the cartoonish cosplay of, say, black metal. This eventually led me to fire-and-brimstone post-punk of the Birthday Party, but for most of the autumn I listened endlessly to the Jesus Lizard's Liar - a flurry of bare knuckles & spit that doesn't relent until the elegaic penultimate tune, "Zachariah". The songs' industrial-strength rhythms lock like Swiss clockwork, and it's arguably Steve Albini's finest hour as a documentarian of live-in-the-room fury. I may have been stuck furious & fulminating in a room myself, but I relaxed at least a little knowing that a man like David Yow lived to rage on behalf of all us other sinners.

Next: Six-string strum & clang.