Exit Only

I recently made use of my insomnia to take in this debate from last year between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza. As hard as it is to forgive Hitchens his last seven years of White Man's Burden-esque bullying, he's still got the sharpest knives in the antitheist butcher's block. (Unlike Richard Dawkins, whose utopian faith that humans are perfectable mirrors that of his targets; or Sam Harris, who - unlike Hitchens - makes time in his book to advocate the nuclear extermination of Islam.)

Meanwhile, D'Souza appears to have taken the same mail-order public speaking course as my elementary school principal: his head mechanically ping-ponging like a lawn sprinkler, D'Souza over-enunciates in a torpid lilt as though the audience hasn't yet learned to tie their own shoes. That this mental mosquito armed with cherry-picked evidence is not only a Stanford prof, but a leading intellectual among the American chattering class makes me want to award Russell Brand the MSNBC anchor's chair and promptly hang myself.

Given that almost every word D'Souza utters is easily rebuttable, I'm not typing the X-hundred pages of blogspace required for a complete evisceration of his idiotic demagoguery. I'll leave it to you to decide if (a) watching a fundie and an antitheist catfight on C-Span is worth 90 minutes of your life, and (b) it would be better painstakingly to refute every straw man and tautology D'Souza burps out or just sock him in the throat. Here are the highlights for those not quite curious enough to be arsed watching:

• Hitchens has achieved a Howard Stern-circa-'85 anti-fame, judging by the number of people who attend his talks just to cheer on whatever faith-enthusiast he's facing off against.
• Jump ahead to part 7, around the 7:00 mark, and dig on the more-books-than-brains pseud (in a trucker shirt!) who couldn't find a way of asking, "Ex nihilo, nihil fit - yes or no?", that took under a minute.
• Immediately following, the next question inadvertantly revealed a great deal about the fickleness of the "faithful," as Hitchens was asked by a Tongan gentleman, "What do you have to offer us as an atheist?" Put another way: I'm willing to trade up, so what's in it for me?

That last point hung neatly on a thread that ran throughout the debate. If what people tell the Pew Research Center can be trusted, athiests are the most disliked constituency in America. If you compiled a one-sheet of the false accusations & hysterical indictments made against atheists and replaced the proper noun with "Jew," you'd Godwin yourself faster than you could say "shemozzle." The faithful constantly prod athiests to prove their core contention - that is, to prove a negative, despite the fact that (as Hitchens said) if atheists are right, "the world looks how it would look without god."

The crux of the theist/atheist battle is faith: those with see it as their greatest virtue, while those without see it as the worst kind of wish-thinking. The problem of faith, of course, is that it's as unprovable as god's inexistence. Consequently, the defensiveness often exhibited by the faithful in debate can be read as the nagging ache of the phantasmic/fantastic doubt: "What if we ARE wrong?"

This question of being wrong - of acting irrationally, of inherent inconsistency - is far from some faith-specific quirk: it's the very keystone of ideology. As Žižek would say, it's one of "these unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to." Another possibility is that someone would know damn well they're wrong, but continues unabashed - in which case, we're dealing not with an ideologue but a fetishist. But in either case (aware that they're wrong, or unaware that they're wrong), people live as if they were right. Which is bloody infuriating.

I've recently been engaged in some old-school correspondence with my grandfather, next to whom it's very easy to feel stupid. But I was thrilled to recognise this sentiment in his last letter:

[Deconstructionists] remind me of when I was studying political philosophy away back at Cape Town University after WW2, and there was one guy who was a Marxist and had the answer for everything. I'd be sitting trying to worry out my understanding of some writer - Hobbes, Marx, Hegel, or whoever - while this guy always had the answer - THE answer, from his comfortable Marxist standpoint. In fact I had, and have, a lot of time for Marx' analysis, but also some doubts. I used to envy that guy in a way, for his certainty, his lack of doubt.

This is precisely why I'm such a fan of Žižek, "an improvising philosopher, rather than a composer of philosophy," as it was put over at Endschwindet und Verghet. Hokey though his billing as "the Elvis of cultural theory" is, it's perfectly apt: a populist, ad-hoc repackaging of ideas derived as much from junk culture as from "authentic" sources. Being the toe-dipping philosophical hobbyist that I am, I'm considerably more comfortable with this frothing goofball than amongst the button-down self-seriousness of "authoritative" intellectuals. There's an ease in an enthusiastic sloppiness that can readily result in error that can't be found in obscurantist efforts at some abstract infallibility.

My growing distaste for any ideological orthodoxy stems not a little from the now-deafening furor about carbon footprints, eco-friendly food, renewable energy, etc. Suffocating under so many mixed messages about how best not to be a wasteful bastard, there festers a guilt so bottomless that, were it a combustible semi-solid, our energy needs could be filled forever. Of course, this guilt is precisely the consumer impetus that capital breathes, eats, and shits. That our problems can be solved by consuming less, consuming ethically, but consuming nonetheless is a dangerously brilliant bit of three-card-monte. As K-Punk put it recently, "the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief;" all they do depend on is "a subject who is open to all kinds of fluctuating identities and who is therefore ready to be plugged into every commodity." (That's Dany-Robert Dufour via Jodi Dean.) And once again, the most confounding aspect of this ethical hedonism is its certainty, the smug self-assuredness that drops the curtain on the conclusive truth that All Your Carbon Are Belong To Capital.

Like my grandfather, while I do somewhat envy the womb-like warmth of self-delusion, I've always kept Orwell's caution against all True Believers close to my heart. Even in the instances where I agree with the essence of someone's stance, I find it slightly sociopathic if they're not even dimly aware of contradiction or insufficiency - in which case, I see fit to invoke the eternal words of the Dude:

I'm not saying you're wrong, Walter... you're just an asshole.

No Future If...

A McCain-Palin victory would tell the world in loud, unequivocative terms, "Fuck you."

Jonathan Freedland predicts a much louder, uglier, more vitriolic reply of, "No, fuck YOU."

(Just in case anyone thought saying, "Everybody except US citizens should elect the American government", was strictly well-humoured hyperbole.)

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.

More Blogging About Buildings and Sound

It's been quite a busy week, hasn't it? The Democratic convention wrapped up, Putin continued coaxing heat from long-cold embers, Japan lost its second prime minister in as many years, New Orleans was struck by a dreadful deja-vu, Thailand's esteem as a vacationer's paradise plummeted, and (as Salon.com put it) Hurricane Bristol hit Minnesota. As the above links give away, I've been listening to an inordinate amount of Nick Cave because his dank, sleazy Jeremiads seem well-suited to the atmosphere. But I'm not interested in talking about Nick Cave today.

My friend JD is a devotee of '70s big-band funk & r'n'b - the Gap Band, Chic, P-Funk, and the like. Last week, he noted that (outside the state fair circuit) this species of act has gone extinct, and wondered aloud why this happened. The easy answer is that their moment in the sun had expired and they had to hang up their sequined jumpsuits. But that's as intellectually satisfying as saying 9/11 happened because They Hate Our Freedom.

A better explanation would be an economic one. The ascension of hip-hop in the late '70s was nothing less than the first homemade-music revolution: no longer was it necessary to have bulky amps, prohibitively priced instruments, PA, or (often the most troublesome variable) a secure practice space. If there was a turntable in the household, there was the sole necessary musical tool. By tapping into a streetlight's electricity, a home stereo could turn a park or street corner into a music venue as MCs battled unamplified in public.

This phenomenon grew exponentially and across genres with the advent of samplers, 4-track cassette recorders, and laptop computers equipped with a plethora of user-friendly software. In The Psychic Soviet, Ian Svenonius argued that a housing crunch exacerbated the trend towards smaller ensembles and amateur production. Following the urban blights of the 1980s, the forces of gentrification launched a full-scale invasion of major cities in the 1990s, leading to vanishing vacancy rates and skyrocketing rents. When a basement efficiency is costing upwards of 60% of your income, you can't afford to be concerned about practice space - you make the most of what you've got.

There's also the social element to consider. Bands are considered creatively compromising by, uh, everyone who's ever been in a band, which is why they all break up, spin off, or implode. The chance to be the lone (wo)man on the mic, solo and center-stage, is irresistible to the ego. As a matter of format, hip-hop is a soloist's idiom. Particularly gifted - or at least bankable - MCs can have their pick of the production litter while remaining the locus of attention, if only because they're the sole constant over the course of a whole album. Conversely, a skilled producer also adept at rhyming can run the whole show unfettered by conflicting opinions.

Also, though there's an unmatched magic in the balance of multiple strong personalities, every additional person in a creative venture represents a risk. At best, they're an extra voice in the conversation, but at worst they're a liability - a truth clear to those familiar with Professor Griff of Public Enemy, The Game, or, heck, Scott Weiland.

Having taken extensive notes, the rock underground (Jacking black culture since 1951!) has produced its own reconstitutions of the above creative considerations. Electroclash, mash-ups, chiptune, hardware-free solid-state techno, whatever the fuck it is village idiot Dan Deacon does - these are all self-produced, small-ensemble subgenres born of cost-efficient equipment and claustrophobic spaces. But unlike hip-hop, they're also tainted by the nebbish indie insistence upon an intrinsic smallness of the music; when made, grand gestures and spectacle invariably wink so hard the irony drips out like crocodile tears.

And so begins the bitter expostulatory portion of the essay! Following the analogous relationship between religion and music, I'd define myself as a kind of gnostic pentecostal; my philosophy is antithetical to Momus' anti-metaphysical "superflat" nihilism. Consequently, I find that the deconstructive materialism of much indie rock misses the whole point, smirking itself into an artistic Limbo instead of shooting the moon with the crosshairs on Heaven. There's little solace in hip-hop either, but for an entirely different reason: I find the human voice to be an invasive, traumatic presence. Card-carrying Lacanian Slavoj Žižek put it in layman's terms in his Pervert's Guide to Cinema:

Voice is not an organic part of the human body, it is coming from somewhere in-between your body. Whenever we talk to another person, there is always this minimum of ventriloquist effect, as if some foreign power took possession... It is as if we are expecting the famous scene from Ridley Scott's Alien to repeat itself. As if we have just waited for some terrifying, alien, evil-looking small animal to jump out.

In that regard, most of my favourite vocalists are pointedly unpleasant, exaggerating their assaultive presence within the music: David Yow, Mark E. Smith, El-P, early Nick Cave. (He made it into the conversation after all!) If only because their skills are rooted in street-corner braggadocio, most MCs have no interest in psychically unsettling the listener. They opt instead for either political discomfort (considerably easier to dismiss), or paying tribute to their own boundless star-power.

Though this comes as no suprise given how often I refer to His Worship Kevin Shields, the music I find most effective is a pan-sensual miasma, a syrupy narcosis, or a searing hail of sonic shrapnel. It boasts mass and velocity, but of a mercurial, chaotic sort. The music that ultimately means anything to me is an audial short-circuit to Stendhal Syndrome - immersive, overwhelming, yet organic. Being a mechanical artifice, the digital is incapable of transcendence. As noted last week, "Events that don't happen in air have no medium for existence, sounds made in a totally digital environment are effectively stillborn" - or, more horrifying, undead. But, stripped of digital alchemy, it becomes very difficult to produce music capable of sensory overload as a solo act.

And so, for all the squabbles, cramped quarters, and clumsy stacks of equipment... we're back in a big room, full of hotheaded humans, armed with steel, wood, and speakers.

By the way, the next time Earth, Wind & Fire come to your town, check 'em out. I hear they're still able to kill it. Click on the mix title to download.

Sensory Overloud

1. Ashra - "77 Slightly Delayed" (00:00)
2. Can - "Oh Yeah" (06:31)
3. Fugazi - "Steady Diet" (13:45)
4. The Jesus & Mary Chain - "Upside Down" (17:23)
5. Faust - "Krautrock" (20:16)
6. Brian Eno - "Here Come the Warm Jets" (27:45)
7. Tim Hecker - "Blood Rainbow" (31:30)
8. Jonny Greenwood - "Henry Plainview" (35:19)
9. My Bloody Valentine - "All I Need" (35:48)
10. Sonic Youth - "Eric's Trip" (38:47)
11. Tricky - "Christiansands" (42:32)
12. Fela Kuti - "Roforofo Fight" (46:11)
13. Boredoms - "Super Going" (53:57)
14. The Psychic Paramount - "Gamelan Into the Mink Supernatural" (01:05:56)
15. The Beatles - "Tomorrow Never Knows" (01:15:48)

Non-Sequitorial Postscript: Well, a pity - looks like we no longer live "in a whurruld..."

Classical Liberal VS Lapsed Marxist: Round II (and III)

Once again, Andrew Stevens and I rampaged through Micah Tillman's site with as much wrath and little regard for our environs as Godzilla and Mothra - this time about the comparative collateral damage between Capitalism and Marxism. In the interest of allowing ourselves to stretch out conversationally, I've dragged the discourse back over here. One quick reassurance a la Bill Hicks to everyone rolling their eyes at political cockfighting: don't worry, there's more music-nerd snark on the way.

Any “statistical grudge match” with any kind of intellectual honesty would be forced to conclude that Marxism caused vastly more premature deaths than capitalism ever has. I can only assume that your claim is going to be that capitalist countries cause life expectancies to fall somehow, since a mere body count won’t even get you close.

"A mere body count"... ah, how we value life in the free world! But no, I wasn't referring to life expectancies. Of course, even that isn't an airtight argument for the free market, not the least because most of the countries with greater life expectancies than the US (Japan, Iceland, Sweden, Canada, etc.) have market regulations that would be decried as draconian on Wall Street. The chief difficulty in comparing body-counts between Capitalism and Marxism is that no one has ever been killed in the name of Capitalism as such. Whereas the enforcers and executioners of Communist regimes dispatched dissidents and undesirables under the flutter of red flags, no tanks or helmets have ever been decorated with dollar-sign decals. So it's a delicate yet arbitrary judgment as to how many deaths are on capital's tab. Those who've died of famine or a toxic environment as a result of exploitive trade practices? The victims of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre? The 2 million dead of the Korean war? The 6 million of the Vietnam war? The minimum hundred-thousand of the current Iraq war? The 8 million slaves who died en route to the Americas, to say nothing of the untold millions killed during the procurement of the surviving 11 millions slaves shipped west?

I think it is quite appropriate to measure how good a government is by how few people it gratuitously slaughters.

Well, it's obviously a handy criterion, but if that becomes the chief consideration of a government's worth, that's bloody pathetic (no pun intended). What about access to healthcare? Education? Low unemployment rolls and CPI? No? I'd think that quality of life would be a greater consolation than a simple shurg, "Well, at least the prime minister ain't no Ismail Enver."

...Experiments [in competing ideologies] were East Germany/West Germany, North Korea/South Korea, and arguably Hong Kong/China. In each one of these experiments, the regimes in question started with similar resources and similar, if not identical, cultures.

As "laboratory experiments," these qualify as incredibly sloppy science. Not only had Hong Kong been a British concession for over a century by the time Mao Zedong consolidated power in 1949, but to think a country as expansive & ethnically diverse as China was (or is) even vaguely homogeneous is ignorant. Meanwhile, in Korea, there was violent agitation by left-leaning activists in the south following WWII; had the US not ditched the Moscow Accords and helped install Yi Seungman (a thug who embezzled over $20 million in gov't funds and died in exile) and subsequently reinforced his flagging defenses, Korea very well may have been reunified by Kim Il-Sung. (Kim, of course, was a unimaginative, waffling narcissist responsible for the deaths of 1.6 million of his countrymen.) West and East Germany are the closest to "control" groups by which to compare the success of competing ideologies. Nevertheless, the Soviet "scorched earth" war tactics and its extra-aggressive dismantling of German industry (to compensate for the USSR's desperate economic situation and staggering loss of 26 million lives) bequeathed the GDR a far more tenuous socioeconomic foundation than the West, and a consequent, inherent resentment of its foreign overseer.

Though it goes without saying, I am not an apologist for Mao, Stalin, the Stassi, or Juche. But throughout the Cold War, the single answer to the myriad problems of Communism was: capitalism. And still, the single answer to the myriad problems of Western capitalist hegemony is: more capitalism! As jaded as I may be regarding humans' collective discipline or reason, this as a prescription is, well, insufficient.

Round 3

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Stevens was (again) the sole respondent to my questions regarding whether or not the US is in a recession. I felt compelled to comment not the least because the cited source of "good news" was walking mental laxative Jonah Goldberg, and Tillman seems to take his sources at face-value. A great many people (Tillman included) received the news the 3.3% bump in the US GDP as though it was some ad infinitum forecast of the country's economic health - forgetting about those stimulus cheques and White House Press Secretary Dana Perino's caveat, "No one is doing a victory dance." Mr. Stevens was right to articulate the value of imputed income, though I wasn't so much arguing against its inclusion in the equation as encouraging statistical scrutiny. Take the unemployment rate for example: officially 5.7%, it rises to around 9% once "discouraged" workers, "marginally attached" workers, and involuntary part-timers are included. But then factor in those on Social Security, disability, etc. who've been "bought off the unemployment rolls" and the number crawls closer to 12%. There are other concerning facts to consider: construction continued to hit the brakes at a current rate of almost 16%, and after-tax corporate profits fell by 3.8% after a single-point gain in the first three months of 2008.

The slight skip in GDP is obviously good news, but it'd be foolhardy to dismiss the "doomsayers" so quickly. The benefit of being Chicken Little is that, if you're wrong - hey, no problem! But given that 97% of consensus forecasts in the 1990s failed to predict some sixty different national recessions, perhaps "permabears" like Dr. Nouriel Roubini aren't quite the marketplace miserablists they appear to be.

Owing to Mr. Stevens' relative online anonymity, I initially wondered if I was debating either a veteran business journalist or the star of Body Chemistry 3: Point of Seduction. No such luck: he's a midwestern economist, judging by his extensive font of financial know-how (not to mention haughty asides deriding "non-economists"). As such, that he indulges an autodidact muso in lengthy exchanges seems explicable only because they take place on "his" turf. Nonetheless, I appreciate that he's the only one who deems my ideas worthy of rebutting on Tillman's site, where my minority opinions (however carefully worded) have apparently earned me troll status. No great loss, though, as that site disappears increasingly up its own skyward nose. Tillman's monocular political skepticism and dull predilection towards grammatical fundamentalism make him sound ever more like the idiot who looks at the finger, not the moon at which the finger points. As much as Mr. Stevens and I may differ in our ideological orientation, his readiness to have an concerted discussion is most welcome.

Intermissionary Position

I'm off to Köln/Cologne for a couple of days to visit the chocolate museum and compare moustaches with Holger Czukay.


Next week: the Libertarian VS Lapsed Marxist death-match continues, plus homemade speaker-endurance tests!

Sub Pop

Recently, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a surprising number of those rarest of musical jewels: stuff I'd never heard before. Obviously, this isn't to say they've never alighted upon the ears of another human in history - were that the case, how would I have found 'em? But let's be honest, someone else passing you some tunes is never as satisfying as excavating something yourself.

The great danger of crate-digging is that a record would be valued strictly because of its obscurity. This (along with its equally-evil twin, Popism) replaces any aesthetic considerations with cut-throat market ideology. There's a Sophie's Choice in approaching music strictly as a consumer: either the log-hollow pretension of the DJ who announces (to no one in particular) the "first UK spin!" of some forgetabbly muddy funk 45, or Girl Talk.

It's hardly controversial to note that some pop music is popular for good reason, and much obscure music is obscure for good reason. Less baffling than when something good goes unnoticed, though, is when something without popular appeal is popular nonetheless. I'm not talking about Timbaland's continued ubiquity despite the series of gold-leafed turds he's been handing his audience; booty-shakers three bottles of "woooo!" into their Saturday night are hardly going to care whether it's Madonna, Nicole Sherzinger, or Aaliyah cooing at 120dB. No, I'm talking about Jandek becoming standard on student pub jukeboxes; about Les Rallizes Denudes' swampy second-rate psychedelia getting glowing reviews on Pitchfork; about any band in the Nuggets collections singled out as geniuses despite the stylistic anonymity that earned their inclusion in the boxset in the first place.

In some cases, like Wesley Willis or Daniel Johnston, the story is too good to ignore. In others, a ridiculous name that goes viral as a punchline (!!!) is all the PR a band needs - or, for an unlucky few like Holy Fuck, all the PR a band doesn't need. Or (adopting squirrely Robert Downey Jr. voice) here's a theory, I'm just gonna throw it out there... maybe people are lot more sophisticated than the RIAA and Clear Channel give them credit for; maybe there's a reason Revolver, not A Hard Day's Night, is routinely cited as the greatest rock album ever; maybe something broader than rotation on 120 Minutes put Sonic Youth in arenas during the '90s.

Of course, the Smithsonian Institute ain't big enough to archive all the music that is, en fin, fucking ridiculous. Some white-label singles aren't worth spinning, and not every Italian horror soundtrack is worth sampling. But the sick joy to be found in dead-baby jokes and episodes of COPS is also in listening to people that should never have been sat in front of a microphone. (Hello, Liam Gallagher!) People stop more often to study a dead bird than to smell the roses.

Accordingly, here's a hodge-podge of some of the more peculiar curios in my collection; some of them are fresh discoveries, but most have been just weird enough to be worth hauling halfway around the world with me. A couple of tracks have been edited, 'cuz seriously, you don't need a quarter-hour of Gracious! quoting Beethoven and relating some thuggish reverie. Click on the mix title to download.

Less Allegro More Retardo

1. T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo - "Intro" (00:00)
2. Jackie Wilson & LaVern Baker - "Think Twice" (Alt. take; 00:11)
3. Klaus Doldinger - "Sitar Beat" (02:40)
4. The Bangers - "Baby Let Me Bang Your Box" (04:04)
5. Chinga Chavin - "Asshole From El Paso" (06:37)
6. Merv Griffin - "Have a Nice Trip" (11:19)
7. Cookie Monster - "Cookie Disco" (13:31)
8. Ray Sanders & Friends - "Karate" (15:35)
9. Alex Chilton - "Girl After Girl" (17:48)
10. Unknown - "Big Al's Country Bus" (20:06)
11. Boredoms - "Which Doo Yoo Like?" (22:15)
12. Machida Machizo - "心臓賭博" (24:09)
13. Plywood 3/4 - "Travailler Dans l'Beurre" (25:48)
14. Brainticket - "The Space Between" (27:46)
15. Les Baxter - "The Devil's Witchcraft" (30:43)
16. Ging Nang Boyz - "あの娘に１ミリでもちょっかいかけたら殺す" (32:39)
17. Tony Lowry - "Screw On the Loose" (36:44)
18. Marvin Pontiac - "Bring Me Rocks" (37:43)
19. Sex - "I Had to Rape Her" (41:13)
20. The Brainbombs - "Lipstick On My Dick" (45:23)
21. William Trytel - "Saw Theme" (49:55)
22. Apryl Fool - "The Lost Mother Land (Part 1)" (50:33)
23. Gracious! - "Dream" (55:55)
24. Dark - "R.C. 8" (57:51)
25. Aphrodite's Child - "Infinity Symbol" (59:47)

'Cuz Everybody Hates a Tourist

So much is written about the foreigner's experience of Japan (guilty as charged) that it appears to be an inexhaustible entertainment cottage industry - if only it weren't for such a small, self-selecting, and narcissistic audience that creates both demand and supply. What makes so little of it actually worth reading is a pervasive & unapologetic Orientalism, be it fawning Japanophilia or precipice-racist censure, that very few people can - and even fewer do - call "bullshit" on (R.I.P. Westerner's Fear of Neon Sign).

It's one thing when a foreigner as integrated & respected as Alex Kerr produces a polemic as parti-pris-yet-insurgent as Dogs and Demons. It's a whole different rice-ball when a whistle-stop national audit is extrapolated into a crazed indictment of an entire country, its people, history, and culture, as in A.A. Gill's "Mad In Japan" (an essay from his 2002 travelogue, recently revisited by Fucked Gaijin).

Now, I'm not interested in crafting a densely-referenced rebuttal. I'll not even say Gill is 100% wrong: contemporary Japanese culture is nothing if not absurd, and his first impression of Kyoto ("an ugly sprawl of low-rise confusion") mirrored mine. What sickens me most about this bog-roll scrawl is that this is what travel-writing has been reduced to: a gonzo rendering of Bill Bryson's bemused kvetching, fattened by the splenetic supremacy that rancorous harpies like Michael Savage have made their calling card. The only alternative seems to be self-reflexive reductivism, the kind Christopher Hitchens acerbically noted in P.J. O'Rourke's dull tendency to be reminded, where ever he traveled, only of southern California. Either way, people seem hell-bent on convincing themselves they're better off at home. Hollywood (ever the dead skin flaking off of culture's scrotum) is a gleeful co-conspirator, shitting out a steady stream of "noble savage" adventure films (The Last Samurai, The Kingdom) and gornographic exploitation flicks set in exotic locales (Hostel, Turistas).

I'm not asking everyone who comments on foreign countries to heed Chomsky & Zinn's example of following every outward-aimed incrimination with encyclopaedic self-criticism. Not every Chinese commentator need express contrition for the 49 to 78 million people killed under Mao Zedong's regime, nor must every British cultural critic supplicate themselves for their past imperialism (or even their current societal shortcomings). Hell, it can be very well amusing to read something as glibly beserk as

Japan is a lunatic asylum built on a hideous history, vile philosophy and straitjacket culture.

But instead of prosaic slapstick, this is the standard for Gill's intercultural (dis)engagment. This isn't travel writing, this the red-faced bleating of some astigmatic git who'd likely take the Racial Pixie sketch at face value. Lunatics haven't their own nation (island or other) yet, but apparently they can get publishing deals no problem.

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.