Making Jesters Into Kings

Readers my own age may vaguely recall the name Jesse Camp. Folks older likely won't, since they had better things to do in the late '90s than watch daytime basic cable; folks younger won't because they hadn't yet been trained to care about the culture machine's wet farts. So, to put us all on the same page: a recap.

The 1990s were tumultuous times for MTV. After its Faustian dalliance with the semi-disinterested, ironically-distanced grunge/alternative audience, the network (like everyone else) was desperate to fill the Kurt Cobain-shaped hole left in the popular consciousness. Various ugly, ill-fitting hats were tried on: ska, electronica, swing. Before long, this pre-millenial tension & post-modernist introspection congealed into catharsis through wanton aggression, and self-parodic celebration of artifice through unmitigated consumption - manifested respectively by "nü-metal" bands and the resurgence of prefab boy bands & pop princesses.

MTV had hit the jackpot. Acts like Limp Bizkit and Slipknot allowed the network to court a nominally hostile & overwhelmingly male audience that fancied itself "transgressive" and "anti-establishment"; meanwhile, the legion bleached-blond teases from Florida captured the hearts of tweens, teen girls, middle-American prudes, and pedophiles alike. Best of all, MTV could pit these two camps against each other, a culture war between the minions of Light and Darkness for the soul of America with all the depth & stagecraft of pro wrestling.

The true masterstroke, though, was when MTV fully embraced the dawning information age's ethos of interactivity. A forum was crafted upon which the epic battle of the saccharine V. the sinister could unfold in realtime, with each side's footsoldiers beating back the other via telephonic vote. It was called Total Request Live.

Total Request Live (or TRL, as it rebranded itself in text-and-Twitter-era Newspeak) was the last of MTV's programs that dealt explicitly with music to become a pop-cultural touchstone. Ironically, its success also ushered in the "reality TV" format that ultimately eclipsed it in the mid-Aughts. TRL's emphasis on audience participation (both at home & in the studio) conditioned viewers to be entertained by - and want to be - shrieking, inarticulate narcissists pulled right off the street.

The most important erasure of the line separating MTV's on-air personalities & its audience came in 1998, with the inaugural Wanna Be a VJ? contest. Participants were pulled from the throng surrounding MTV's Time Square studio and vetted according to their music knowledge & on-screen charisma. Whereas candidates for MTV's first "reality" flagship The Real World were selected exclusively by the show's producers, the VJ-wannabes were eliminated by phone-in & online vote. Eventually, the contest was whittled down to two candidates: former college radio host & music geek Dave Holmes and trashionista space-cadet Jesse Camp.

Despite Holmes' experience & skill in front of the camera, Camp was voted the victor thanks to his dynamic personality & his populist persona as gutter-punk everyman (despite his plush prep-school background). There were, however, allegations of ballot-stuffing, an earlier incarnation of the "Vote For the Worst" culturejamming campaign that upset the sixth season of American Idol. Possibly in response to this, MTV hired Holmes as well, entrusting him with celebrity interviews while limiting wild-card Camp's onscreen responsibilities to occasional colour-commentary on TRL.

His popularity couldn't compensate for his obvious incompetence, and Jesse Camp unceremoniously left MTV after barely a year - a full two years less than Dave Holmes' tenure on the network.

Since then, Camp has more or less been off the radar. (Holmes still works as a TV commentator & host.) In 2006, Camp was seen working at a Los Angeles pet shop and is currently rumoured to be on staff at a McDonald's franchise. It's a fate commonplace to flavour-of-the-month reality TV "stars". But in retrospect, Camp's case seems excessively unfair. Let's review the particulars: a charismatic but unqualified character is plucked from obscurity; obfuscating their inherited privilege, their sloganeering performance as a populist simpleton foments a popularity that eclipses their better-experienced colleague. Their general cluelessness & inexperience, however, mark them as a liability and they're effectively marginalised by the very powers that anointed them. Finally, their inordinate fame precipitates them to abandon their office to follow their "true" calling and achieve their "proper" potential - despite a total deprivation of apparent skill.

Why, with that kind of backstory, you'd expect Jesse Camp now to be treated as an esteemed expert in his field, to be the elected figurehead of a "grassroots" movement... to be a candidate in the 2012 presidential election.

The Infotainment Scan

It's old hat to complain that the 24-hour news cycle is a morass of irrelevant tripe because more coverage doesn't guarantee there's anything more worth covering... but this is ridiculous: a Guardian blog post bemoaning the lack of stand-up rock drummers, written by someone who's obviously never attempted playing the drums standing up. Hey, if you can maintain bipedal balance with all four limbs a-flailin', more power to you! But seriously, there's not much an upright stick(wo)man can do beyond the rudimentary boom-bap of Moe Tucker.

I'm not saying every band needs Terry Bozzio behind the kit, but unless there's room for a Burundi-class platoon of drum-beaters, it's nice to go beyond bang-on-a-can primitivism, isn't it?

How The Other Half Gigs

This blog's been a bit light on content recently because I've been preoccupied with band activities. Not that playing in a band is particularly interesting in & of itself - what is interesting is what it's like playing in a Japanese band.

This isn't to be confused with what it's like playing in Japan as a foreign artist. Every band's vanity documentary has the perfunctory Japanese tour montage, with giggling high school girls and urban neon hallucinoscapes, underscored by sincere corroboration of Dave Chappelle's Nippon-in-a-nutshell:

I've never been treated so well by people. I'd say that I was both loved and feared.

Though a lot of the professional courtesy & pampering can be ascribed to Japan's famed decorum, it's also an investment by promoters who are all-too-aware of how much of a pain in the ass it is to get to Japan. Treat the band like rock gods (whether they are or not) and hopefully they'll be happy to return.

Of course, the view of the Japanese music industry from the trenches is considerably different. It is, as the country in general is, an inversion of its western analog, where virtues become vices and old problems arise as new ones are solved. For example, digital music is Japan's strong suit: 85% of the global share of legal downloads and a mere eighth of illegal downloads are made within Japan. But this is because the major labels were far more savvy than their western counterparts, and made early efforts to woo their customers with digital convenience. As the American music industry shits out 14% of its mass annually, corporate hegemony in Japan remains more or less intact, along with all the ensuing problems of the major-V-indie "Two State" antagonism.

On a much more micro level, the professionalism & courtesy of venue staff (no matter how scummy or inexalted the venue) is a real treat - especially for those of us who are used to hostile alcoholics working the mixing board in dive bars across North America. Lest ye forget they're being polite because you're paying them to be: until your notoriety includes rotation on MTV and front-rack placement in Tower Records, all your gigs are pay-to-play.

From start to finish, a gig is less bacchanal than business engagement: attending the official after-party (打ち上げ, or uchiage) is mandatory for band members, crew, promoters, and auxiliary staff. Not many folks would voluntarily skip an after-party anyway, but being thus compelled is a little grating. And it ain't simply hitting the closest bar for some beers and back-slapping. Tables are arranged, drink orders are placed, and seating is orchestrated according to unspoken political accords & rivalries. Unsipped beverage in hand, everyone reverently listens to a brief speech congratulating the assembled on their fine work & cockily recounting the number of paying customers at the show. Glasses are finally raised amidst a unison bellow of "Kampai!", and everyone suddenly ejects themselves from their seats and scrambles about the room, banging glasses with anyone in arm's reach.

From there, a more familiar form of dissolute, shit-talkin' revelry returns, but it's still the thinnest shadow of a night out with John Bonham.

Naturally, I'm barely scratching the surface of this uncanny realm, all of which is fodder for much more extensive inquiry. Once I have more to share, I most certainly will...

Old Gods Almost Dead

It's embarrassing to see aging rockstars prancing with all the libidinous abandon of teenagers - not the least because of how their jowls flap now that the elasticity has been sapped from their skin. There's something inappropriate in seeing arthritic ex-junkies singing songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "The Kids Are Alright" when they should be at home watching The McLaughlin Group or Question Time, waiting for their next pension check and wondering why their kids haven't called in so long.

But as quickly as everyone groans at cankering Paul McCartney and the withered Bob Dylan, they not only tolerate but encourage the retrospective victory laps being run by "alternative"-era rock icons. No one was convinced that it was necessary, let alone cool, for the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac to reunite in the mid-'90s, but Generation-X and its successors have yet to show a shred of their characteristic disillusioned nonchalance towards the Pixies, Blur, Dinosaur Jr, Faith No More, the Jesus Lizard, the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Sleep... uh, Polvo...

There are almost more '90s bands these days than there where in the '90s.

This gush of resurrection isn't as welcome with Mark "K-Punk" Fisher, who in the latest issue of Loops attempts to answer the question of why bands don't break up any more. It's a timely query, given that the Pavement reunion has nailed shut the coffin of baby-boomer cultural hegemony. The '90s are haunting the '10s, as they were haunted by the '70s, because - especially in the nanosecond hypecycle of the information age - it takes too much damned effort to remain au courant. No longer endowed with the impetuous energy & autonomy of twentysomethings, Generation-X have more pressing errands than surfing music blogs or attending Todd P shows and are probably content to dust off their 15-year-old Sub Pop & Matador records when they want to tickle their cochlea.

The second issue is the internet itself: a whole generation has by now grown up without the memory of mail-order or the Dewey Decimal System, with the wealth of all history a mere Google search away. "In the age of Web 2.0," writes Fisher, "nothing goes away, everything comes back – if not in the flesh, then as a YouTube clip." How could this produce anything but an infinite feedback loop? It's an odd nostalgic simulacrum - memory not necessarily anchored in experience - but it's a kind of nostalgia nonetheless.

This makes it easy to see why a band that broke up a decade ago would want to reform: in addition to their old fans, there's a whole new generation keen to see what they missed the first time around. Who'd prefer to watch grainy bootleg videos of My Bloody Valentine when you could see them in the flesh?

The other, more cynical answer is that contemporary music is such shit, bereft of imagination or vitality, that the shoes of the last batch of bands have yet to be filled. If the scariest & most dynamic experience to be had in the contemporary hardcore scene is Daughters covering the Jesus Lizard, then please, cut to the chase and get David Yow himself back onstage.

Fisher seems to reserve special disdain for the acts who, like the Stones and The Who, did not fade away: The Fall, Nick Cave, Sonic Youth, etc. As cynical and sticky-fingered as reunion tours can be, there aren't many people who'd opt not to pay off their mortgage playing in a rock band instead of punching the clock down at patent office or call center. This is easier to understand than the musicians who, through good fortune and/or force of will, never quit the stage. Carl made a similar complaint about "career artists" a while back, but that sounded more like a case of sour grapes than anything. For Mark Fisher, the persistence of formerly "underground" acts is a betrayal of their original raison d'être: "wasn't this everything that post punk's scorched-earth modernism disdained?"

Of course, if he more closely examined the acts he accuses of perfidy, he'd find no inconsistency. For example, The Fall's mayor domo, Mark E. Smith, has often been compared (by Fisher himself, too) to a factory foreman, a wizened prole whose devotion is solely to his work. Nevermind that it's silly to chastise a band, whose first single included the tune "Repetition", for their dogged persistence; Smith's no-nonsense work ethic and incessant (if inconsistent) productivity are directly at odds with rock's no-future hedonism and its planned-obsolescence capitalist ethos. Also, as the developed world has de-industrialised into an anaesthetised service-oriented pleasuredome, much of society's ills stem from the fact that we don't make anything any more. Amidst regurgitative mash-ups and laptop-toting "performers", a guitar act that pays the rent through gigging, instead of media saturation, is as much an anachronism as steel mills and and mines. This actually casts The Fall further from mainstream society than the band was at its inception in the late '70s.

Sonic Youth, meanwhile, are victims of their own success. It's not that the band ever disavowed itself of the revolutionary intent of the No Wave scene (though I imagine Fisher would be rather disappointed to know that most of its participants went on to join more historically reverent & formalist units like the Lounge Lizards). By the time SY's most startling innovations were behind them and they signed with a major label, the band wasn't selling out to the mainstream: they were the mainstream, godfathers to the entirety of '90s "alternative" culture. Their appearances on MTV and atop festival playbills weren't the product of some crafty publicist, but again of an intransigent work ethic and the crafting of an aural aesthetic that captured the popular imagination.

The problem, then, is not of revolutionary intent or lack thereof, but of what if the revolution succeeds? As pure as it may be then to wipe one's hands, declare the job done, and ride off into the sunset, this leaves the freshly razed ground at the mercy of tyrants & thugs - be it Stalin or the Universal Music Group. Not to forfeit what was fought for requires the victors to become stewards of the movement - in artistic terms, curators. Though this role is frequently disdained for plasticising new forms and jealously protecting legacies, good curators use their seniority to support & shepherd younger artists flush with potential. Even if popular taste swings away, a safe haven for bold thinkers & iconoclasts will have been carved out, with nothing ceded for the sake of fame or money.

Ultimately, Mark Fisher's article is itself rooted in the kind of memorial arrogance typical of someone past the peak of their cultural relevance. "Modern culture is stagnant & redundant" is in no way different from "shit was better back in the day" - the same, tired moan of countless curmudgeons who can't be bothered to explore the very culture they're criticizing. As I've said before, "all music nods to its antecedents; torches are passed, picked up, or rekindled." It's also reactionary & provincial to protect music from an audience that isn't exclusively "our people." Music, like the word, is a virus, and is impossible to quarantine. What is important is that the underground-mainstream conversation remain one-sided. Steve Albini recently said that

the more comfortable that outsiders get saying and doing stupid shit, the more the ironic distance narrows. And the ironic distance eventually narrows to a point of nothing. Then you have this sort of ascendancy where something from the underground, by ironically adopting the mannerisms of the mainstream, becomes the mainstream.

This, I suspect, is what actually troubles Fisher: the blurring of counterculture and mainstream until the distinction is functionally meaningless. This, however, is not the same as underground artists gaining acceptance from the bourgeois & corporate classes. Musicians shouldn't be punished de facto for their success; if anything, their accidental intrusions into the mainstream should be welcomed as fissures opening to possibility, giving sight to the culturally blind.

It's unreasonable to force artists into retirement simply because their lingering presence is an unpleasant reminder of how old we ourselves are. Nick Cave, Tom Waits, The Fall, and Sonic Youth are all releasing records of far greater audacity than anything Lou Reed, Bowie, or the Stones were releasing at the same age. Had those performers vanished into some subterranean cranny long ago, it would only allow us to feel smug in our apathy towards contemporary culture because dude, shit was real back in our day. Any embarrassment felt towards the senior class of modern musicians is simply that these geezers, these ancients still rock harder & weirder than the juveniles - so what the fuck is wrong with these kids, man? Nevermind the pentagenarians, tell Passion Pit and These New Puritans to step their game up.

And even if, even if, even if the Bad Seeds, The Fall, and Sonic Youth aren't quite as spry as they once were, that's not cause enough to demand they cease practicing their craft. After all, I don't see Mark Fisher shutting down his blog even though his writing's been getting worse over the last couple of years.

Always want credit for some shit they supposed to do...

To paraphrase Mr. Rock, what do you want, a cookie? You low-expectation-having motherfuckers.

Pearls To Swine

Well, I've hit a few unfortunate snags in distributing my recently-completed full-length, Rogues Gallery, so the masses frothing with anticipation (ha!) will just have to hang on a bit longer.

The good news is that in the meantime, here's a digital 7" pour gratuit to whet your appetite. "The Bug Man", a track off the LP, is the toe-tappin' tale of a sociopathic exterminator, while the B-side, "Tarred Memory", started as a simple folk tune but was quickly swamped in so many overdubs it'd make Kevin Shields blush. Nonetheless, it's a relentlessly fun track.

So please, go download the sumbitch, pore over the artwork, and pass it amongst your friends. May it bring a little joy to your auditory organs.

Is it spelled "poorism" or "pourism"?

Update in the Indie Bono-ism department: Swedish songbird Lykke Li has jumped on the bandwagon to Uganda. Evidently, what the world needs now is yet more fashionable white people going slumming on their fans' dime. At least one ugly angle has been wrenched out of this con job - donations towards the trip (organized by the noble folks at Invisible Children) are no longer going through a website in which Pitchfork editor Chris Kaskie is an investor. One less eschelon in this Ponzi scheme.

To reiterate: by all means, lend whatever support you can to Invisible Children, but do so directly instead of investing in this ridiculous indie rockstar Make-A-Wish field trip.

Souvenir Parts 3: Guys With Guitars

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

2002:
Fugazi, Red Medicine
XTC, Drums and Wires

As the first few pages were torn off the 2002 calendar, my mood was gradually improving. I'd spent the winter listening to records that were series of bloody gut-punches from start to finish - Big Black, the Jesus Lizard, and especially the Birthday Party's live album. It had helped sooth my uglier moods, but it was a strictly passive activity: I was without a band & living in a one-bedroom where I daren't plug in any instruments for fear of upsetting my alkie wife-beating neighbour. Stuck noodling on an unplugged SG, I at least wanted to play along to tunes that were a little more energetic than "Nick the Stripper". I was neither ambitious nor studious enough to tackle the finger-sports athleticism of the Dillinger Escape Plan, and a workplace feud had put me right off the gentler dexterity of finger-picked folk guitar.

So I settled on Fugazi's "deal-breaker" record, Red Medicine - often derided by the hardcore faithful for not being "punk" enough, yet too wry & recondite for emo fucks clutching copies of Diary to their chests. Which is exactly why I loved it so much: every repeat listen revealed a new harmonic warp or timbral weft, wrapped up with scathingly funny lyrics. Obviously, it was just a lot of fun to pinball around my living room jamming along to "Bed For the Scraping", but it was equally enjoyable to unravel the ambiguous, serpentine melodies of "Fell, Destroyed" or "Long-Distance Runner", or to parse the guitar-tone patchwork of "Latest Disgrace" or "Birthday Pony". It was impossible to tire of this record.

But Red Medicine also boasted a lot of hooks - not something often associated with post-hardcore slash-and-burn. By the early Aughts, there was already a glut of bands who squeezed every last histrionic drop out of the soft-loud dynamic, who screamed like drama queens, and who could purposefully hammer away at root/relative-minor chords. But Fugazi crafted choruses that could be sung, not just shouted; their riffs were armorial & memorable; and there was swing & groove in their rhythms.


This lead to the (incredibly late) realization that, perhaps, nuanced songwriting really mattered. Blisteringly obvious, I know, but remember that I'd preferred Zappa to Zeppelin and Mike Patton to Pavement over the course of my adolescence. During that time, one band that had been just compositionally perverse enough to attract my attention was XTC. I found it hysterical that a hyperactive pop romp like "Scissor Man" was actually about a serial killer, and the staccato clangor of "Paper and Iron (Notes and Coins)" sounded like Fugazi playing at being the Beatles. I'd also never heard low-gain guitar tones that still attacked with such crackle & whizz. Concerned I'd been buying all these distortion pedals for nowt, I became a little obsessed with this production trick, and so my fandom of XTC became slightly self-congratulatory when, of the various low-volume home-recording experiments I'd been conducting, one of my most successful had been in recreating Andy Partridge's guitar tone on the Black Sea record.

(There was also the fact that XTC had written the unequivocably anti-theistic "Dear God", wherein Partridge kept the tone intelligent and didn't resort to pseudo-occult faith-baiting. This song could be a musical madstone for a young atheist living in the dogmatically faithful United States.)

Though Black Sea is arguably my favourite XTC album, it sags in the middle such that I spent calculably more time listening to Drums And Wires. Also, though Drums is far more sapient & eccentric than the forgettable, naive New Wave of the first two records, it's still got the pluck & pathos that disappeared from XTC's music after 1982, as they fossilized into more of a fastidious songwriting workshop than a band. Consequently, Drums was a reasonable blueprint off which to work as I first attempted writing an entire song in a single key, or slowly accepted that repeating a motif more than once didn't automatically make a song "boring."

And to think that the album I listened to most frequently last year was Dopesmoker. I've come a long way, baby.

Next: Going to extremes and retreating.

Apocalypse No

Poor Evan Calder Williams... I never give the guy a fair shake. Every mention of him here and every comment I've made on his blog has been from a combative, borderline-bullying stance. But the truth is that we're both Marxists of one sort or another; we both try to imagine means by which capitalism can be choked; and we both have unruly beards that do us no aesthetic service. We're on the same side - and yet I can't read his writing without taking a swing at him.

How ferocious the battles are when so little is at stake.

Anyway, Williams has contributed to Mute magazine an article a propos apocalyptic cinema. It's well worth a read, and makes some interesting distinctions between crisis, catastrophe, and apocalypse. Most of my disagreement with the piece is specific & quibbling. For example, whereas Williams tacks to the original zombies-as-consumers interpretation (updated with a Žižekian notion of drive), I think the new glut of zombie films differ significantly in intent from the original Romero movies. The old Living Dead films were satirical critiques of persistent consumption, whereas the current crop are exploitation flicks preying on the audience's fear of the Other. Suppurating blank slates as they are, zombies are floating signifiers for whoever the audience fears are tearing at the fabric of civilised society: leftists may see fascists; Christians may see Muslims; conservatives may see immigrants, gays, or communists. (The heathen/immigrant/homosexual angle is especially persuasive, given bigots' fears of corruption of the blood & conversion by a kind of lobotomisation.)

I also think Williams gives The Road incredibly short shrift when he calls it "a terrible, terrible film." I see why many people wouldn't enjoy it (long, bleak, proud of its own straightjacketed sentimentality) but to call it "terrible" is unfair & inflated. I think the film is as embarrassed as proud of its nostalgia for good ol' late capitalism, especially considering how quickly the film's survivors/survivalists turn to cannibalism. Taking this literally - as an animal "urge" to digest human flesh -, Williams utterly misses the obvious symbolism of the cannibalistic act: that we as a species have eaten ourselves out of house & home, and will continue to do so until the last man gnaws his own kneecaps off rather than suffer from want.

I also get the sense that, as a good Marxist, Williams finds The Road's lack of faith in the collectivist spirit repellent and perhaps inaccurate. Maybe in Santa Cruz, where Williams lives amidst the redwood-shaded spectre of hippie utopianism, a group-oriented, egalitarian approach to survival would prevail. Let's hope it would. But from the rust belt to the Gulf Coast, where the bibles are beaten the hardest and the Gini coefficient is at its widest, American citizens faced with the deprivation & desperation presented in The Road would make the marauding motorheads of Mad Max look like British aristocracy.

A greater problem with Williams' piece is the writing itself - what happens to academics that bleaches any style or wit from their writing, leaving in its place a skree of adverbs and neologic nouns? Most infuriating (and this almost ruined Dominic Fox' Cold World for me) is an over-reliance on stock first-person-plural devices that affect the tone of the dullest college lecturer ever:

• To start, we should...
• Let us...
• What do we mean...
• Let us...
  
• To conclude, we should...

No, not "what do we mean," but what does "we" mean? Who is this phantasmic "we" that I, as a reader, have been presumptively lumped into by the writer? What are "we" fighting for, and can I get a deferment?

Ultimately, it's Williams' apocalypse fetishism that bugs me the most. Clearly, he's found his theoretical niche, and I can't begrudge him that, but his pontifical embrace of the eschatological suffers from two problems of perspective. The first is that Williams has never experienced first-hand the truly catastrophic. I'm not asking that he suffer, but anyone in Haiti or the Gaza Strip would probably find him naïve & privileged.

The second is the same arrogance that every post-apocalyptic film appeals to: that "I" am one of the lucky ones, that "I" am smarter-faster-stronger, that "I" will survive.

What are the odds of that? Well, how many heroin addicts aren't William Borroughs or Iggy Pop?

A Fantastic Life!

Happy 53rd, Mark.