Addendum

Too late for the early edition, another instance of a band less-than-delicately stealing from a forerunner.





This serves as an excellent shorthand explanation for what bothers me about Deerhoof - aside from having seen Satomi refuse to speak Japanese to Japanese audiences. Yes, please, coyly flex having won the hip-cred birth sweepstakes while rubbing it in your countrymen's faces that you live in San Franciso and not bloody Saitama. What the fuck, do I spend my fleeting visits to Baltimore strolling around speaking German? Come off it! *Ahem* No, what I really mean is: Deerhoof flirt with our fondest power-pop memories to the verge of date-rape, then chop off a beat or two so the riff's in 6/8, and finally staple it to a largely unrelated melodic idea just to prove they're too clever to write just a slammin' indie-pop song we could, y'know, straight-muthafuckin' enjoy.

Honestly, hands up: who else wants an album of only "Dummy Discards a Heart"?

And yes, I will eventually get around to contributing something other than embedded YouTube videos.

If There Is a God, He's a Total Bastard

I hadn't even reached for my first cuppa coffee this morning when I encountered this utterly gutting headline. Slumping CD sales shake hands with the recession, and now the loss is personal. Shellshocked and as-yet-uncaffeinated, I'm bereft beyond being able to muster a cogent commentary, other than that sucks the big one, so here's a handful of videos from seminal Touch and Go acts across the decades.










If only there were any YouTube'd videos of Brainiac that weren't dinotech camcorder-quality!

In terms of a conduit for new ideas closing to the world, this makes the prior first-quarter death swell feel like a minor exhalation. You'd better make good on that promise of "probably" releasing new music, Rusk - especially if I'm not going to be able to find releases from KRS, 5RC, or Drag City anywhere other than fucking Amazon...

Quoth the Peanut Gallery

This week in Liverpool, Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher were going to be discussing, in propria persona, the lineage & evolution of British rave music. Not that I particularly cared (no offense intended), since I only dance when shot at, and to my ears bassline sounds like Paul Oakenfold eating a Twinkie wrapped in bacon, then farting through a Vocoder.

Zing! Juvenile derision & anomie are abound tonight! The point is this: sirs Reynolds contends that

These early sounds – bleep tunes from the North East, breakbeat house and ragga techno from London – were the first time that the UK came up with its own unique mutant versions of House and Techno (ironically by adding elements from dub reggae, dancehall, and hiphop that weren’t British in origin, but equally would never have been let into the mix back in Chicago and Detroit).

Fisher goes on to list of some perennial properties of this new (circa '90), innately British subgenre: "heavy synthetic bass, breakbeats, MC chat, film and videogame samples."

Hmmm... something "hardcore" that includes heavy synthetic bass, breakbeats, film samples - but couldn't possibly be rooted in Chicago house music? Okay, I'll see your chemically-crutched technicolour blipfest and raise you Al Jourgensen.



I know, I know, apples and oranges - or rather, ecstasy and heroin. Ah, but then, in such terms: which would narcotic omniathlete Gibby Haynes pick?



I rest my case. Foghat, motherfucker!

Fair Use It Or Lose It

Hey, keep that chin up, Fairey. After all, it doesn't just happen to the worst of us. To wit... Click on the mix title to download.

Actionable Flattery

1. Foo Fighters - "In Your Honor" (00:00)
2. Scratch Acid - "Owner's Lament" (01:40)
3. Ween - "Japanese Cowboy" (Live in Toronto; 06:05)
4. Vangelis - "Chariots of Fire" (10:21)
5. Primal Scream - "Shoot Speed/Kill Light" (13:42)
6. The Fall - "High Tension Line" (18:53)
7. The Dust Brothers - "This Is Your Life" (22:32)
8. Primal Scream - "Kowalski" (25:49)
9. Jonny Greenwood - "Henry Plainview" (31:34)
10. Krzysztof Penderecki - "De Natura Sonoris No. 2" (Excerpt; 35:40)
11. The Fall - "Athlete Cured" (Peel Session; 38:45)
12. Spinal Tap - "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" (43:30)
13. Nirvana - "Come As You Are" (46:05)
14. Killing Joke - "Eighties" (49:36)
15. Jean-Pierre Massiera & Bernard Torelli - "Whistler Program" (53:20)
16. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - "Child Of My Kingdom" (55:48)
17. David Bowie - "Rebel Rebel" (01:02:47)
18. The Mothers of Invention - "Trouble Every Day" (01:07:14)

Of course, Fairey's pop propaganda is less analogous to a misappropriated melody than to, say, DJ Shadow's radical recontextualisation of the churning organ from "Orion" in his own "Number Song". I'm being unfair to Fairey in comparing his icon(oclast)ic stylisation of an AP photo to intellectual theft as lock-stock & bludgeon-subtle as the Dust Brothers jacking "Kowalski".

Now, is it unfair to say the Dust Brothers deliberately traced "This Is Your Life" over Primal Scream's blueprint? Absolutely not. I doubt the Dust Brothers missed anything upon which Andrew Weatherall put his imprimatur. Both songs open and close with an AM-quality voice-over pulled from a film, and sport near-identical bubbling sixteenth-note sub, stacatto funk beats, cut-&-paste production that skips across vocal samples... but Primal Scream got there over two years earlier.

Yet not on their own: the song's martial crackle comes from a sample of Can's "Halleluwah". It's startling how many iterations an idea can withstand before anyone feels compelled to create something anew. But Primal Scream have always walked the tenuous line between sarcastic PoMo scrapbooking, classic rockist role-playing, and a more finespun resurrection of musical spectres in the spirit of hip-hop's oral history. Unfortunately, they more often fall into the first two categories.

As for the other songs, all the artists filching riffs & hooks were equally aware of what they were embezzling, given their particular idioms. As the drummer for Nirvana, Dave Grohl once split a single with the Jesus Lizard, who rose howling from the ashes of Scratch Acid - a band Kurt Cobain counted among his favourite acts of all time, not too far ahead of Killing Joke.

Meanwhile, a considerable amount of musical overlap is guaranteed within the diatonic vocabulary of the Western musical tradition - but within the inexhaustible sprawl of microtonal composition? What are the odds that, in his score to There Will Be Blood, Jonny Greenwood would merely happen to compose a legato string swell that crests upon a queasy F# - precisely the same motif that opens Penderecki's "De Natura Sonoris No. 2"? Or that Greenwood's chattering derrick fire theme bears more than a passing resemblance to Penderecki's "Utrenja (Ewangelia)", as does There Will Be Blood's title theme to certain phrases from "Polymorphia" by Penderecki?

About the same as the odds that all three Penderecki pieces appear in the soundtrack to The Shining.

And before expressing shock that Spinal Tap would be anywhere on Mark E. Smith's radar, remember that The Fall's gone through over three times as many drummers as Tap. Truth is stranger etc.

Another One Bites etc.

R.I.P. Eric Lee Purkhiser

What a sepulchural tone this year has taken already: from McGoohan to Updike, from Gary Kurfirst to the surprisingly-lamented John Martyn*, beginning of course with the thousand-odd souls in Gaza and running on over to Glendale, CA, where Lux' ticker stopped kicking. Someone could make a killing (zing!) developing a Death Blog™ aggregator.

The Old Guard, no matter how much we've deferred their retirement, is finally keeling over - which means that we'd better start getting our shit together. No more time for thinly-embellished homage or nostalgia; stop with the necrophilic dissection of past cultural pan-flashes. We've got so much slack to pick up it will already take all of us to lift it.

(*) - I ain't saying Martyn's place in the folk pantheon is undeserved. The sudden up-chuck of eulogies - after what's been years since I last saw Martyn's name in print - sound like the reclamatory boasting of candidates for His Best Friend, jockeying around the open bar at a wake. Then there's my admitted bias: listening to Martyn's music, I can feel my inner Red Neck surging past my gums, flicking cigarettes at the stage and screaming for Foghat.

I just don't dig folk music. Sorry. (That one's for you, Ben!)

Please Turn Off All Electronic Devices

I'm coming home, baby!

Our broadcast will resume in short order. Meanwhile, please enjoy the in-flight entertainment.

Won't Be Seeing You

Well, the man has made his final escape...



So first they tell us that Falk has Alzheimer's, and now McGoohan's gone to the great Village in the sky. Not to mention all that other bullshit to lose sleep over...

'09 is gonna suck, man.

The Beatles were for sale - I give it away!

It's one kind of shock to find you've become a fixture on Russian file-sharing sites; it's another to find other people making money off a freebie CD-R you used to give away at live shows in Baltimore.

So, in the interest of undercutting these plunderous leeches, I've cast dignity & profits to the wind and posted I Used to Write Jingles For a Living in full, free to download, over at Last.FM - go get 'em, tiger.

Und für die Wahrheit verraten, yes I did actually used to write jingles for a living. For proof, a few melodic husks peeled off my soul are still kicking around the Discovery Channel, if my royalty statements are to be trusted. Then I was unceremoniously & acrimoniously shunted out of the company the last day before the company's winter break - thus depriving me of the Christmas party, a week's paid holiday, and any chance of getting a job until well after the post-holiday economic lull. Not that I was terribly upset: I regarded my superiors with as much contempt as they regarded me; I was the low man on the totem pole, which meant I was as much a janitor as an engineer; and there was nothing creative about being A Creative, since the instructions often boiled down to, "Just make it sound like that Coldplay song."

So the second Friday of December, 2003, I got fired. Following a celebratory screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, I headed home, dusted off my 4-track, and spent the weekend cranking out the uneven scrap heap of sonic whimsy that became IUTWJFAL. I later gave it away as a bonus disc to anyone who purchased my band's then-new album at shows up & down the East Coast.

So how exactly did it end up online in the former Eastern Bloc? Fuck knows.

Do Androids Dance the Electric Boogaloo?

Throwaway as my comment may have been, I'm pleased that Carl decided to spin it into a more meaningful examination of music appreciation. A bit frustrating, then, that Carl either slapped me with a straw man or completely misread me: labeling my stance as materialist - in opposition to "pussy/redundant cultural/psychological readings" - plainly ignored my use of the word "libido." Nowhere did I say that enjoyment of certain music is contingent on being "set up that way." Nothing I wrote could be extended to argue that selective breeding would necessarily produce devotees of a given genre. If your auto mechanic used the words "miasma" and "sensory overload" half as often as I do, you'd rat the guy out to the DEA and get your hatchback tuned up elsewhere. I thought my music-oriented rants here were embarrassingly theatrical & psychonautically flaky, like some bedraggled madman holding aloft a cardboard-'n'-crayon sign that read Stendhal Syndrome or Bust! I thought I was on the street team to promote music "as a form of ecstatic transport and access to jouissance."

Evidently, I'm not making myself clear enough.

For everyone, there are certain "tones & sonic constructions that tickle [their] audial libido." But I'd not argue that this is determined by physical synaptic architecture; how dully didactic would that be? It's more a matter of conditioning: the personal aesthetic topiary that takes place over a patient span of time, via friends, mass & indie media, study, and simple repetition. This, obviously, is in harmony with Carl's contention that enjoying music is - at the very least in part - enjoyment through/of the Other. Nevertheless, social pressure & "cred" are but two tools by which a sonic libido is crafted. Repeated exposure, a hook or phrase ceaselessly pounded into your ears, mustn't be underestimated, and is almost certainly why incredibly smart people will listen to incredibly shit music. Hell, for a few months in early '02, I almost enjoyed "Get the Party Started", just to avoid having to throw myself under a streetcar as it blasted from the storefront across from my workplace every morning.

Chalk that one up to a temporary psychosis triggered by the survival instinct. The point is that our most honest reactions to music are instinctual, and like any of our other instincts, they are subject to change - both inadvertent, by shifting external circumstance, or deliberate, by discipline & practice.

Now, if I were an ice-cold mechanist, there'd be a shortcoming in Carl's argument to which I'd call attention. To rebut a materialist interpretation of his curdled regard for My Bloody Valentine, Carl says:

But my experience of listening to MBV isn’t consistent, it’s had a different character at different times, the music has done different things, been different at different stages, neither it nor I have had a definite fixed form or inter-relationship.

This in no way disproves that enjoyment of music is anything greater or more metaphysical than a well-matched waltz between audial stimuli and neurochemical response, a tickling of the eardrum as the amygdala giggles and the pituitary pumps dopamine. Materials transform over time - they grow and degrade, bloom and wilt. Does our skin not wrinkle and flake as it oxidizes, decade after decade? Does a pert grape not crumple into a raisin in the sun? Do you not occasionally find yourself pleading vainly with a higher authority as your paleolithic hatchback belches a final sooty plume and crumples into scrap on the shoulder of a crowded motorway?

Now, I'm no mechanic, but were I to peer through the smoky miasma billowing out from under the hood of that expiring AC Pacer, I'd probably say that car just had one too many trips and went into overload, man.

Shoulders of Giants

Quote of the Week, or quite possibly the epoch:

I would like to see the vast majority of prissy indie Pop driven screaming naked out into the wilderness. If any of their offspring ever do come back to us I trust they’ll sound more like the Jesus Lizard and less like Brian fucking Wilson.

To that end, I can promise Siahalan: there are people working on it. It will take the paint off your car, and wreck your windshield too. Meanwhile, the esteemed Chris Richards bitchslapped the Schreiber famiglia the way we'd do in our most spitefun dreams:

Pitchfork has completed its slow morph into the Fox News of music journalism, consistently elevating the reputation of its brand over the quality of its criticism, disguising wildly conservative opinion as "edgy," routinely punishing artists who take risks, cultivating a stay-in-your-lane mentality so that the master narrative is easier to control, subsequently fostering a culture that prevents the Animal Collectives it supposedly reveres from ever getting out of the practice space.

Granted, this is a more efficient iteration of what I've been arguing for the past five-plus years. This is no grand reveal: what business succeeds that isn't coldly agenda-driven? There's a reason why magnates, thieves, and hucksters die rich while artists die poor.

Art plus commerce make for a toxic marriage - this has gone without saying for nigh centuries. But there is something especially disgusting when these culture sculptors start fucking with our art retroactively: No Pussyfooting gets a 7.9 while the new Animal Collective gets a fucking 9.6? Are you fucking joking? History-doctoring and parameter architecture that would make Stalin proud, you Catholic-minded scum.

Anyway, some interesting thoughts about othering & wiring over at the Impostume that merit a proper reply, but any Big Think claptrap will have to wait until after the matinée...