A Messenger Who Shoots Back

One of the most oft-quoted lines from The Big Lebowski is The Dude's last-ditch retort to Walter: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole." Lord knows I've been slapped with that rejoinder many a time. Just this weekend, a friend and I were arguing, basically, over whether or not such a thing as "black music" exists, and he said, "Look, I know what you're saying, and I can't quite disagree with it, but goddamn I want to punch you in the fucking face!"

But I digress. What's really fascinating about The Dude's retort is how dramatically its sense is changed by reversing the sentence structure: "You're an asshole, but you're not wrong." It's no longer a statement of bare tolerance of some dunderhead's invective; it's grudging acquiescence to the fact that someone thoroughly unlikeable has made an incontestable argument. It's a less-condescending version of the old "broken clock" saw, and - to me - not a bad rhetorical position to be in at all.

Steve Albini is a man whose whole public persona hinges on being this asshole-who's-not-wrong. He's clearly unconcerned with whether or not people "like" him, though he's rarely been prone to the kind of cartoonish abuse Tesco Vee used to heap upon the world at large. So it should come as no surprise that I woke up today to find see the following headlines around the interwebs:

• Steve Albini Goes Off on Sonic Youth
• Steve Albini adds Sonic Youth to the list of things he's pissed off about today

Etc. etc. etc. It's not that Albini thinks Sonic Youth are a shitty band or a bunch of poseurs. ("I still consider them friends and their music has its own integrity.") Rather, Albini thinks that, by signing with a major label, Sonic Youth "became a foot soldier for [mainstream] culture's encroachment into my neck of the woods by acting as scouts." Sonic Youth lowered the drawbridge for the commercial huns and led to "a corruption of a perfectly valid, well-oiled music scene."

There's already been some considerable discussion here about Sonic Youth's "curatorial" stance, and ultimately I think they played that role well. Other bands who crossed over (e.g. Nirvana) made token gestures towards their underground peers by wearing T-shirts or name-dropping in interviews, but few were as urgent in championing music's margins as Sonic Youth. Had they not signed to Geffen, some other band would've torn a wormhole between the under- and above-ground; the commercial incursion into indie music would happen sooner or later. I think Sonic Youth understood this and worked to foster a more faithful relationship between the audience and underground music, a relationship that could've easily been superficial, fickle, and fleeting. As I wrote before:

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.

Where I think Albini is absolutely right in his criticism is that Sonic Youth "[took] a lot of people who didn't have aspirations or ambitions and encouraged them to be part of the mainstream music industry." In the sleeve photos for Goo (SY's first album for Geffen) and the video for "Kool Thing", the band adopted the glam-trash strut and Ray Ban-shaded thousand-yard stare of marquee-topping Rock Stars. It was clearly an ironic goof, laughing at the hilarity that a band once described as "pigfucker rock" were being ushered into the megawatt glare of mainstream success. But Albini identified the dangerous ambiguity of this stance in an interview last year:

If you see it as somewhat of an irony that someone from your background would be in the mainstream, you’re more inclined to participate in it. My experience has been 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.

And there’s an ironic defense that people use who want to maintain some perspective on themselves of being outside of mainstream culture that allows them to do crass, gross, grasping things with the idea that “it’s O.K. because it’s me doing it because I’m doing it for all the right reasons. I’m doing it for our team” as it were. That’s the point when the ironic distance narrows and the person becomes the thing he was previously a parody of.

The immediate rebuttal that pretty much everyone has slung at Albini is that he engineered some of "alternative" rock's major-backed breakthrough albums, both good (PJ Harvey's Rid of Me) and bad (Bush's Razorblade Suitcase). Pitchfork writer Ryan Dombal snickers, "Perhaps he never cashed those checks?" But this cuts right to the heart of why Albini qualifies himself as an engineer, not a producer. Whereas a producer coaxes & sculpt the music to elicit a desired emotional response, an engineer must simply document a band with maximum fidelity. Any engineer worth their fee will have a workmanlike, time-to-make-the-donuts approach, because they are a technician, not an artist. Whether or not the band is any good (let alone "cool") is not Albini's problem. He isn't there to fuss over lyrics, make the chorus "pop", or tighten the drummer up with Beat Detective; he's there to capture a band's performance as transparently & truthfully as possible. If the chorus ain't catchy, if the tempo wobbles a few b.p.m., if the guitarist's tone is like an electric baloney sandwich pumped through a 10" thrift-store Squire amp, that's on the band, not Albini.

Remote Psychoanalysis

First, it was three of the 9/11 hijackers, now it's a whole bunch of Mumbai wannabes. What exactly is it about Hamburg that apparently produces terrorists?

I believe I have the answer. It's not that the city is a magnet for, and provides cover to, religious fundamentalists intent on loosing bloody mayhem. As a former Hamburg resident myself, I just think these dudes are fucking bored. Hell, after five months of freezing rain, I was ready to stab a motherfucker on the Reeperbahn just to switch things up.

Freaks and Fire in Japan's Second City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cold Hard North

The problem with Osorezan is Mutsu. Poised at the base of the Shimokita-hanto axe-head, it is the gateway to & from the peninsula and, as such, an unavoidable hurdle for anyone who wishes to visit the holy Mount Dread.

Though Mutsu suffers from the same sluggardly pace and surfeit of empty storefronts common to much of northern Japan, it immediately differentiates itself by its North American-style sprawl. Most Japanese cities conform to the global standard of socio-economic topography, wherein wealth & power are concentrated at an urban core and fade the farther they're stretched out towards shoddy suburban estate housing. But Mutsu fits the classic (if inching-towards-obsolescence) North American mold: the decaying husk of a downtown nucleus is ringed by prefab strip malls, car dealerships, and chain restaurants which give it a curiously nostalgic, pre-globalization anonymity. Standing outside the Mutsu train station, surveying the McDonald's, the Exxon service station, the D.I.Y. home furnishing warehouse, this could be Brandon, MB; Decatur, IL; Surrey, BC; anywhere really. Only the garish facade of the pachinko parlor insists on the place's specificity.

Suburban sprawl is only the start of Mutsu's strangeness. At the tourist info office, they handed us glossy-print maps that highlight Mutsu's "nightlife & eatery hotspot" in pink, a colour that in Japan carries connotations far more sinister than girlish innocence. But in a town of barely 60,000 residents, we were sort of stuck for options, so off we went with hopes of finding a foreigner-friendly pub. Sure enough, the "nightlife & eatery hotspot" was solid square kilometer of snack bars, stucco-shedding windowless shoeboxes of iniquity with asphyxiating neon signs that crackled with all the hostility of an electric fence. The only things on the street in fewer numbers than working streetlights were women. Everyone we passed was some leather-necked man in ratty sweatpants.

We eventually found one izakaya with some guileless students stood out front, so it seemed like a safe bet. That didn't stop the young waitstaff inside from being struck speechless by the sight of two foreigners. After a panicked exchange, they hauled the head chef - apparently the only one with any English ability - out from the kitchen to seat us. Once we'd shown that, yes, we did speak some Japanese, the evening proceeded without problem and we enjoyed some grilled chicken before retreating to our hotel.

The next night, I thought steal a few snapshots of this roughneck warren, given that it's the kind of place few foreigners ever visit, even by accident. Except for the photo above, I came away empty-handed. It took little more than two minutes before I realized how obnoxiously I stood out, a lanky John Lennon lookalike armed with a camera in a backwoods red-light district. Gaggles of half-drunk fishermen and farmhands felt silent as I passed, sizing me up and finding me their physical inferior. Nowhere else in Japan have I ever felt such intense, ambient hostility. I remembered how distinctly unwelcome some friends had felt when they'd visited Tokyo's oldest adult-entertainment area. The key differences, however, were that the locals of Yoshiwara are used to seeing foreigners; my friends were traveling as a pair, not alone as I was that night; and they had a pronounced height advantage over any potential adversaries, which I did not. If any belligerent goon wanted to test his mettle by jumping the gaijin, I would've been sausage stuffing. I was one rude gesture away from starring in a Japanese remake of Easy Rider.

Life's Rich Tapestry (Music Edition)

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Honest, Straightforward Entreaty

So there's this website you might have seen 'round, Chunklet, that hits like a bucket of ice water to the smug, disaffected face of indie culture. (They also kick a little dirt at those feckless twee ninnies for good measure.) The point is they're hilarious, and actually fine people aside, playing the invaluable role of subcultural gadfly.

And they're putting out a new book! I managed to blag my way on board as a contributor, so when you sit down with your copy of The Indie Cred Test, I am among those administering the exam. No favouritism, either.

But first we've got to get the book out, and so we humbly ask that you donate towards the book's publication at Kickstarter. I know times are tough and you were really saving for that box set of the complete first season of Glee or whatever, but please. If you want to demonstrate your support for talented, whip-smart writers in a rapidly withering, calcifying literary environment, please contribute what you can.

Played By the Game

There's one born every minute:

Pitchfork originally ranked Little Earthquakes [by Tori Amos] as the eighth-best album of the 1990s, but when they revised the list a few years later, it was left off entirely. So maybe the listmaking process is democratic, and the site’s staff/aesthetic changed, but surely good music is inherent?

Surely good music is inherent? Why yes, of course it is my dear! And surely Obama will withdraw from Afghanistan by year's end, divert military spending towards creating a "green energy" infrastructure, create tax incentives for weatherizing* one's house, repeal all of Bush's (and Clinton's) tax cuts, declare amnesty for illegal immigrants currently in the U.S., close Guantanamo, create thousands of new jobs in the administration of a national healthcare program, muzzle the dogs baying for Julian Assange's blood, and charge Michelle Bachmann & Rick Perry with treason.

Because surely doing the right thing is inherent?

(*) - So Blogger's auto-spellcheck finds no fault with "weatherizing", but it always lights up under "healthcare" and "commodification", because obviously those words ought not exist.

Why So Serious?

Feign outrage! Set phasers to "troll"! Clothe your indignation in inanity! A Pitchfork feature has prompted online controversy and lively debate! (Vomits in overreactive excitement)

Actually, for once the conversation isn't about how hard a certain review pandered, or trainspotting the number of Bon Iver headlines in a single week, or if the Vampire Weekend cover girl is "tappable." Barthel and Abebe are using the Top Videos of the 1990s countdown as a cultural weathervane, examining the balance of sincerity-VS-irony. While any discussion of irony/"irony" will be, to a certain extent, frustrating and inconclusive, Abebe's made the valuable point that Aught-style irony is fundamentally different from '90s irony.

The distinction is fundamentally the same as that which separates two styles of post-modernism: retro-necro pastiche and hauntology (which respectively resemble '00s and '90s irony). Both employ a knowing referentiality, and thus are formally similar, yet they express very different relationships to the contemporary mainstream: the former revels in artifice and built-in obsolescence, mischievously celebrating a culture whose facades are its substance; the latter mourns the same condition, pining for alternate paths not taken and now impossible. The latter understands the emptiness behind the facade is not an erasure of taboos, not some fissure into a realm of anarchic hedonia - it is existential abjection.

Now, to rephrase in slightly more useful terms... Aught-style irony is (was?) all about arrow-straight citation, expressing uncynical affection and even reverence for its references. A commentary-free pop-cultural patchwork of purely aesthetic concerns. Abebe offers Weezer's "Buddy Holly" video as an early specimen, though I'd say this "pointless, morbid game of references and sarcasm that never actually says anything" was first fully articulated on Odelay! by Beck.*

However, '90s irony was born of disgust at the flattening-out of culture, at the commodification of fringe elements, and at the realization that so many of our memories & developmental milestones were cooked up by some Madison avenue huckster. When Nirvana appeared with natty suits & blinky innocence for the "In Bloom" video, of course they were having a dig at the geeky politesse of rock's infancy. But more importantly, they were saying, "Okay, we're on Geffen, we're on MTV, we've been swallowed by the monoculture. We might as well be the fucking Dave Clark Five with a fuzzbox."

Which is where slack comes in. Were it not for that sloppy scoffing not-giving-a-shit, '90s irony would be nothing but more mawkish referentiality. But these artists had come from an audience that was too savvy to fall for Bill Bernbach's thimblerig and were well aware that any conventional success meant assimilation. Resistance was futile, but at least they could demonstrate an awareness of their own appropriation instead of appearing as guileless rubes (or worse, brass ring-snatching apostates). Slack signified that these artists neither cared for nor sought mainstream approval. The Malkmusian smirk was the last, best defense against total co-option.

This indifference against the machine is the earnestness that Abebe sees underlying '90s irony, "irony to communicate completely earnest things, that the audience would receive completely in earnest." The problem - that is, the transposition of '90s irony into '00s irony - is that the mainstream absorbed the medium without the message. It became a cheap trick to pile up pop-cultural detritus while completely ignoring the gestures of subcultural revolt. Perhaps the resurgent sincerity of the past decade was in reaction to the mainstreaming of snarky pastiche - and yet, if audiences are now attuned to endlessly floating signifiers taken with shakers of salt, this would result in more distance and less earnestness than in the '90s. Sincerity cannot survive as such if it's perceived ironically, and consequently it's become a simple affectation, mere aesthetic, just another branding tactic - like lo-fi or slack.** I accept Abebe's point that "you’d have to be a lot more committal to front Fischerspooner than to front a grunge band!" But to call electroclash "almost tragically sincere" begs the question: sincere about what? Fischerspooner et al. (and indeed many of today's most "earnest" acts) didn't offer sincerity, they performed "sincerity" - a gestural sincerity, an aestheticization of sincerity. Again, this only serves to underscore the subtextual vacuity of today's culture.

Remember the Lollapalooza-spoofing episode of The Simpsons?

Gen-Xer 1: Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He's cool.
Gen-Xer 2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Gen-Xer 1: I don't even know anymore.

Finally, Abebe is rightfully wary of remembering the '90s as a ten-year sneer: "They seemed, as a young person, strikingly earnest and optimistic, especially around Earth Day." Political causes of every possible persuasion - from global warming to AIDS awareness - sprouting like dandelions in the wake of "PC" fatuity. And of course, this was the decade that gave us emo, "conscious" hip-hop, and the testosterone-soaked confessionals of nü-metal.

(*) - In film, the blame falls squarely at the feet of Tarantino.
(**) - No matter how ratty your hair or anemic your stated ambition, you ain't slacking if you have a booking agent before your first tour.

My Father Will Guide Me Up Nick Cave's Back Catalogue

So the new Swans album sounds like The Bad Seeds circa '93 fronted by Pete Seeger's evil twin. Given that The Bad Seeds themselves are evermore merely pub-rock for English lit majors, this is very very nice. Slightly disappointing that it ain't Filth Deux: The Rebludgeoning, though we all knew it wouldn't be.

Shitting On Political Romanticism Is Fun!

Given the name-recognition that Armando Iannucci has most deservedly won in the UK, this is addressed more towards all North American armchair political strategists...

I ain't asking you to flush your principles or become so ruthlessly realpolitikal that you make Rahm Emmanuel look like Bob Ross. But if you want to know how the game is really played, you need to watch The Thick of It RIGHT NOW.



So if you're in it not to win it, but genuinely to make a difference for the benefit of humankind, understand that this is the level of PR opportunism, ideological schizophrenia, and sailor-mouthed sociopathy that you're up against.

Good luck! You'll fucking need it.