Two Hundred and Fifty Yen, Bitches!

In case you don't know how much that is.

And in case you don't know what this is.

More conversation on record collecting in Tokyo a bit later... now's the time for a celebratory spin!

Imperial Violence On a Blockbuster Budget

Several months after the fact, but more scorn can always be heaped upon apologias for military-industrial oppression, am I right?

Unlike the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, I didn't like The Hurt Locker - not that it's utter shit. The script suffers from a post-24 lack of narrative focus, but the film's strengths are plain to see: the actors acquit themselves admirably, and the cinematography is gritty & gripping. But like Quentin Tarantino's magnum o' post-modernism Inglorious Basterds, Kathryn Bigelow's film is a smug tribute to American hegemony. While Tarantino reiterates the United States' claim as the sovereign of narrative (fictional and, it's presumed, otherwise), Bigelow cheerleads the great American pastime of the last half-century: state-sanctioned violence.

As many a writer has been hasty to point out, The Hurt Locker is ostensibly a film expressing America's disillusionment with military endeavour. Instead of the square-jawed stoicism & heroics of WWII epics, we witness the tears, dread, incessant stress, and boderline breakdowns of the modern American soldier. But this doesn't encourage the United States to holster its weapon and retire to the quiet discomfort of being a former imperial power. Quite the opposite: by emphasizing moral ambiguity & displaying its scars (psychic & physical, societal & personal), The Hurt Locker shows that we are intimately aware of the chronic difficulty of military engagement - and yet we accept these hardships because such are the costs of the imperial adventure. We accept these hardships because of our nobility, our conviction, our strength of will. The locals are an anonymous throng of shape-shifty brown folks whose true intentions are foggy & dubious, but we are not so cowardly to deny our mission. Though our methods are flawed, our intentions are good. Though we doubt & struggle, we will not betray our commitment.

This is the same self-assurance of moral superiority that Žižek saw in the "darkening down" of such modern bastions of justice-in-action as James Bond and Batman. The "Boy Scout in blue" certitude of old-school superheroes doesn't reflect the endless complexity of contemporary society. As our iconic lone wolves suffer from all-too-familiar faults (e.g. doubt, vengefulness, lapses in reason) they reassure us that they understand the full scope & equivocality of the situation, while enacting their mission precisely as though there were no obscurity or ambiguity. Before, we enjoyed our violence because it had the full weight of Good & Truth behind it. Now, we enjoy our violence because it is difficult, invigorating, sadomasochism as proof of our dedication & macroscopic understanding. And make no doubt that we enjoy it, as attested by the the absurd slo-mo pimp stroll army recruitment ad of The Hurt Locker's final minute.

Bigelow's next project is slated to be "an adrenaline-filled exposé of life in the notorious triple border region between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay." I'm curious to see how bare she'll strip the scenario of social, economic, and military entanglements so dense it makes Traffic look like a Jim Jarmusch short. No doubt the film will prove that, asymmetric enforcement be damned, America has the intestinal & technological fortitude to make the difficult decisions in the War On Drugs, and the darkly-pigmented locals will be dealt with all the depth & feeling of a first-person shooter.

Syncretism As Ponzi Scheme

Plagiarism, while nothing new, can still be damnably annoying. But given that every new technology of the past 20 years is about reproduction, re-representation, and relay of information, artistic theft has swollen to comical dimensions. So The XX ripped off a second song at the same time - yeah? Only two uncited sources? Fucking amateurs. These days, you've either gotta monopolise a single inspiration like a timber wolf standing over a fresh kill, or steal from so many simultaneously that Bernie Madoff looks butterfingered by comparison. I'm talking Bomb Squad, El-P, Disco Volante-era Mr. Bungle, not the sloppy smash-'n'-grab of Girl Talk or some post-Koyaanisqatsi day-glo bullshit.

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.

Loudest Drunk Always the Latest to Arrive at the Party

Can't believe I completely omitted these guys from the Riff War, but it's never too late to enjoy some truly awful, antisocial rawk.



I know there was something else I wanted to mention briefly but I've got a wicked case of medicine-head at the moment, having spent most of the week at the mercy of a clogged olfactory system. Allow me to eat my breakfast and I'll check back in...

Mistaking Pop Stars For Political Theorists

I just listened to the third episode of the Hit It Or Quit It podcast, which is (in case you ain't heard) a fine cultural-commentary radio show to have on whilst doing your laundry on a sunny afternoon. I mean that as a sincere compliment; not everything need be immersive gesamtkunstwerk. Anyway, Nick Sylvester made an appearance to speak about the controversy surrounding M.I.A.'s "Born Free" video, the consensus about which seems to be that it's neither interesting nor illuminating.

At which point, the conversation should naturally end. But sweet merciful crap, it don't. God knows how many terabytes have been dedicated over the past two weeks to this very topic (of which I'm also, however minimally, guilty). This is due to the epidemic mistake of perceiving M.I.A. as a political artist. Of course, Ms. Arulpragasam has worked overtime to portray herself as such: Jessica Hopper opined on the podcast that the political sloppiness of "Born Free" is because it's more calculated image construction than commentary. But signifier-slinging and bumper-sticker sentiment do not a political artist make. The only thing discerning M.I.A. from Eddie Veddar, Michael Stipe, or my favourite punching-bag Bono is her demographic.

I've never had much time for Nick Sylvester. While his creative fiction is mildly more interesting than his criticism, his tastes don't hew far outside the post-pomo orthodoxy of deconstructionist pop. He occasionally hits it on the head, as when he called A Place To Bury Strangers "a songless one-trick turd" (though I then wonder what he makes of the sophomore effort by Serena Maneesh, for whom Sylvester once went purple with praise). But Sylvester's conservatism is laid bare when, in discussing "Born Free", he professes that "the avant garde need not be moral" and that M.I.A. is "acutely aware of structural violence."

If M.I.A. is the avant-garde, then our cultural limbo contest is into sudden-death overtime, wherein only expert practitioners of the dope-fiend lean can escape elimination. And to say someone as prone to meaninglessly broad gestures as M.I.A. is "acutely aware" is like citing Idiocracy as a definitive argument for eugenics.

My New Favourite Band

And with apologies to all the Yankees, it's pronounced Zed, not Zee.

Land of the Rising Sound

The Great Riff War of 2010 has hastened into its indie phase, which means this Beagle has docked at the guitar Galapagos. As I mentioned before, most even vaguely indie bands that I enjoy don't really do riffs - at least in conventional terms. "I Can See It (But I Can't Feel It)"? Not a riff. "Kissability" or "Eric's Trip"? Not riffs. But Reynolds brought up the rusted barbed-wire stylings of Captain Beefheart fairly early in the conversation, and once Big Flame is in play, then fuck yes this is a goddamn riff!

In the interest of furthering Carl's (or perhaps ネッビルさん) cultural integration, there's plenty of good riffs that Japan has produced. It actually suffers a surfeit of riffs, thanks to an inherent insecurity that makes Japanese rock musicians feel the need to measure up to - and thus adopt - foreign (i.e. American) standards. Ergo, every imaginable subspecies & splinter cell of "lock 'n' loll" is present here in Japan, from the most brain-numbing, derivative banality to the borderline-unlistenable. (Well, for a lotta folks, but personally I think "Psycho Buddha" is Acid Mother Temple's absolute apex.)

Japan has been been accused over the past century of having "bought their entire civilization from other people's hand-me-downs," as A.A. Gill put it. And yes, as an island nation, Japan didn't just spontaneously self-generate; everything had to come from somewhere else. But when Gill argues that Japan's adoptive pastiche of an identity is essentially void, that "you can't put on the suit and not the beliefs that went into tailoring it," he's not only missing the point but clearly didn't spend enough time here to argue with anyone wearing an SS uniform "for fun" around Yoyogi park. Will Ferguson, tell 'em how it is:

Nothing has ever come out of Japan that has ever revolutionized the world, for better or for worse. ...It all depends on how you define creativity. In Japan, it's seen in terms of problem-solving, a new approach to an old puzzle. This type of creativity encourages group effort and fuzzy logic. For Westerners, it is the rugged individual with the sudden light of inspiration. The first is practical creativity; the other, romantic. Neither view is superior, but the one is often baffled by - or even contemptuous of - the other.

So rock music is essentially an unending Year Zero project in Japan. The difference is that in the west, what is ripped up is abandoned as we start again; in Japan, what is ripped up is then gathered & painstakingly pieced back together in a new form.

If it is indeed wearing the West's suit, Japan has custom-tailored the jacket to fit no one else. Everything is a step or two beyond. An American's hobby is a Japanese's lifestyle. If an American would set something on fire, a Japanese would strap C4 to it and blow it up. Pop appeal appears like a weed, almost by accident, amidst askew sonics, instead of the other way round. Occasionally the differences are merely sartorial, but just as often there's something genuinely baffling & unutterably subversive.

Lest I be accused of painting Japan (as it is too often painted) as irredeemably weird, there's actually a lot of solid rock bands. Post-hardcore is a particular area in which Japanese bands excel - perhaps since it requires above-average instrumental skill (and the Japanese are nothing if not technically studious) while providing the catharsis that is scarcely found in daily life. Bloodthirsty Butchers are probably the only O.G. post-hardcore band still currently active; they're too often laconically midtempo for my taste, but they've written a real barnburner or two. Mo'some Tonebender are better when they lean more towards the Jesus Lizard than AC/DC (as they did too much on their last couple of releases). More recently, I wasn't too taken with Lostage's first few releases, but having shed their second guitarist has made them lean & mean as anything by Drive Like Jehu or mid-period Fugazi.

(I've also got to admit a personal bias towards those guys. How could you not like any band with whom you can spend an evening drinking Scotch & listening to old Karp singles?)

But the best of the bunch has gotta be Number Girl. Though the band broke up eight years ago, I've yet to hear another Japanese band whose crowd-pleasing arena anthems could still strip the paint of your fuckin' car. Okay, so they steered too far into post-punk "reggae des blancs" on their last record, Num-heavymetallic, but up until that point their output was without blemish - especially Schoolgirl Distortional Addict. Every song on that album absolutely slays.

Oh, and before I wrap up: if Carl's a keen fan of the Ron Johnson catalogue, then there is only one band in Japan that he absolutely, desperately needs to hear: Oshiri Penpens (オシリペンペンズ, a.k.a. "The Ass-Slaps").

Addendum: Mr. Reynolds wants us to get more taxonomically specific - hey, yo, Simon, you link to my post but don't read it? What's up, man?

Well, to reiterate, I'm going with Carl's definition of a "lick": the minimum possible unit in a cunnilingual encounter, or as I rephrased, a quick tickle or cocktease. Meanwhile, chord progressions are easily the majority of all rock music (embarrassingly so). A vamp is something rock cribbed from funk & soul: too few chords to be called a progression, a harmonically minimal rhythmic mood-setter. Vamps can come slow or fast. Motifs or vibes are the most diffuse, amoebic structures rock can affect, a la doom or shoegaze.

As for the riff itself, for now I think we're all tacking to the ol' Supreme Court opinion on pornography: I know it when I hear it!

Riff Rabble

A quick word of warning: we are entering the unforgiving realm of Total Rockism on this one.

It's only been a couple of days, but so thick is the bombardment that the opening salvos of the Great Riff War of 2010 already seem like a distant memory. I'm just glad that Carl's opened up a conversation I had with a friend a few months back: whatever happened to good guitar riffs?

Think about it. How many songs from the past decade do you recall primarily, let alone exclusively, for a good ol' meathook of a guitar riff? Two? Maybe. Odds are one of 'em is by Queens of the Stone Age and the other's by the White Stripes, which is a sorry goddamn state of affairs when such derivative throwback pablum is the only populist statement a guitarist can make.

The retreat of the guitar to textural support is thanks to a two-pronged attack by (1) too-clever indie kids, and (2) an ever-retarding mainstream. After grunge had re-democratized the instrument and made underachieving mediocrity cool, the underground (as always) circled the wagons. Some guitarists took their cues from the '80s most progressive players - Moore & Ranaldo, Shields, Haino - and began pushing the instrument into more abstract & impressionist realms. (See: Fennesz, Nadja, etc.) Others, like U.S. Maple, Polvo, and Shellac, went deconstructionist, piecing rock back together Frankenstein-style into fractal, schizophrenic, and deliberately anti-cathartic forms. But what most stripped the guitar of populist appeal was indie's own bebop movement: math rock. Emotionally obtuse and indifferent to audience expectations, it was first a reaction against the earnest simplicity of the post-grunge glut. But moreover it was a wry reclamation of skill from onanist shred-heads. This swiftly became a war of attrition amongst who could most cleverly subdivide a single beat, reaching its endgame in 1999 with the impossibly dense finger-sports marathon Calculating Infinity by the Dillinger Escape Plan.

Meanwhile, things were going from bad to worse in the mainstream. Once flannel & greasy hair had fallen from favour, grunge's longest-lasting contribution to pop culture was its mawkish alienation. So when bands equally enamoured of Pantera and N.W.A. began appearing, their lyrics read as much like a high school alcoholic's diary as the prelude to an ass-whuppin'. As this "new" (or nü) metal's currency grew, it sacrificed any iconoclasm or cleverness it might have brought with it from the underground metal & hardcore scenes - neither of which were particularly dedicated to crafting earworm guitar work in the first place. As the culture machine serves only to sand off features, eventually nu-metal's angularity & dissonance were completely shorn, abdicating the rock Top 40 to sensitive rednecks blasting the same ol' bar chords through Marshall stacks.

Now, the musical centrality of the guitar both above- & underground waxes & wanes as quickly as the moon, so it's not as though the past decade has been riff-free by any stretch. Hell, in the mix below, the Aughts are better represented than the '60s. (Just a matter of taste... and avoiding the dead-horse obvious like Zeppelin.) So a better conundrum to tackle would be... what exactly is a riff?

Carl's already been parsing the taxonomy, splitting hairs between "riffs", "licks", and "vibes". I like his idea that a "lick... impl[ies] everything from a painterly, Fine Art flick of the wrist to the minimum possible unit in a cunnilingual encounter." The latter part is especially relevant: guitar licks, like the hook to "Layla", are generally spry, dexterous single-note runs that convey sensual melody - a quick tickle or cocktease, as opposed to the clenched-fist masturbation of, say, anything by Yngwie Malmsteen.

"Vibe", of course, suggests ambiance - which is generally what the guitar drifts into once the tempos ascend past or fall below a certain threshold. Most doom & sludge fall well below a b.p.m. you could comfortable bang your head to. On the other hand, as Carl explains, excessive speed isn't what's wanted either:

I think it’s probably why speed and thrash metal are such boring genres... too fast on one level but not so fast that it blurs into ambience a la black or death metal. It's more akin to a series of rapid-fire quips... that just leave you feeling slightly puzzled, there’s nothing to savour.

This reminded me of when David Yow explained why he was never terribly taken with hardcore punk (I'm paraphrasing): it just flies by like a bird trapped indoors; once the tempo slows down, the music becomes more tactile, visceral, "like being in a fistfight."

But then, what to call all the stuff guitarists do that aren't riffs? There are the obvious non-riffs: chord progressions, fingerstyle. But most of my favourite guitar bands are surprisingly riff-free. The closest to a riff that My Bloody Valentine have ever come is "Feed Me With Your Kiss", but that's still more a Big Black-like series of face-slaps than a proper riff. Do the Fall or Sonic Youth really traffic in riffs? I feel like they're more into motifs, and the obvious exceptions prove the rule. And what about Fugazi, Drive Like Jehu, Spacemen 3, or the Butthole Surfers?

The word "riff" itself has a lupine growl, and suggests something base, feral. A hoarse, rhythmic breath. This suggests to me a possible expansion beyond the bounds of pentatonic, palm-muted chopping: there are times when the bass supplants the guitar as the spine of the song. The Fall and the Jesus Lizard are excellent examples of this, where the bass is the music's inky outline with the guitar adding accents & colour.

Of course, am I just using this notion to excuse the inclusion of the Birthday Party in the mix below? Maybe. Click on the title to download.

Riff Raffle

1. AC/DC - "Let There Be Rock"
2. Flied Egg - "Rolling Down the Broadway" (Live)
3. Focus - "Hocus Pocus" (Live)
4. Sir Lord Baltimore - "Master Heartache"
5. The Birthday Party - "Nick the Stripper"
6. Lungfish - "Searchlight"
7. OXES - "Dear Spirit, I'm In France"
8. Shellac - "My Black Ass"
9. Karp - "Bacon Industry"
10. Rye Coalition - "Stairway To The Free Bird On The Way To The Smokey Water"
11. Melvins - "Hooch"
12. Mayyors - "Metro"
13. Metallica - "For Whom the Bell Tolls"
14. The Jesus Lizard - "Mouthbreather"
15. Sleep - "Dopesmoker" (Part 5)
16. Sleep - "Dopesmoker" (Part 6)

Addendum: Yes, the above is all rather North Americentric, but only because I'm not about to make sweeping generalisations about Britain over the past twenty years - least of all in the company of Messrs. Reynolds, Ingram, and Carl. I'll go so far as to say that Britpop was a provincial, conservative revival, and the guitar's been a backwards-looking instrument in England ever since the ascension of the Stone Roses. The closest the UK's come to having a six-string visionary since Kevin Shields is perhaps Graham Coxon or Johnny Greenwood - but of course the former's overshadowed but that twat up front, the latter is a tad too advanced to be content with such a quotidian instrument.

Requisite Expression of Knee-Jerk Apoplexy

Staring at the above photo, I can only fantasize about placing a loaded Desert Eagle into her hand and watching her pull the trigger.

Thank you, M.I.A., for raping one of my all-time favourite songs, you politically disingenuous, sub-GaGa, bafflingly untalented, conceited, C.R.E.A.M. of the crap, signifier-flexing Socialite of the Spectacle. May the pomo cultural feedback loop be your noose.

Update (Monday April 26th): And already there's the compulsorily "shocking" snuff film to accompany the songs! I ain't linking to it, because M.I.A. isn't winning any click-throughs from me, but the video is at least crassly spectacular enough to distract from what an outrageous bit of mafioso appropriation the song is. It's directed by Romain Gavras, the French director who specializes in faux-documentary exploitation flicks with all the sociologial depth of a Dixie Cup. This time out, he's ripping off one "park" - Punishment Park - but alas, his brilliant twist-premise was scooped by another - South Park.