Because the Internet

Symptom? Sign? Cause? Not a damned clue.

Counter-Creative

The following has been rephrased, re-presented, and reiterated in a variety of ways, some more scholarly than others, but Frank still said it best: if you're involved with music in any way other than making it, you are the problem.

Misplaced Indignation Again?

Am I obliged to comment on M.I.A.'s "finger malfunction" because my most popular post ever - by a factor of over four times its closest competitor - is my 2010 takedown of her pop-provocateur persona? Because, like, I've got shit to do besides rehash two-year-old quarrels of stage-managed mischief.

But fine, let's get into it, if only because it'll be easy. Turning first to the finger itself: really? Really! Have we backslid into such petty puritanism that flipping the bird is cause for a proper conniption fit, as opposed to the single most overused & hackneyed gesture of juvenile waggery that packs all the symbolic punch of overcooked rice noodles? She doesn't even do it well! Look at her hunched shoulders, look at how tightly drawn in her arms are: a meek & defensive posture, like a toddler who's committed to misbehave deliberately just to piss off the parents. Pathetic. This is how you give someone the finger:

Boom! Ain't no equivocatin' when you're telling someone to fuck off.

Now, with regard to M.I.A. as riotous pop shit-kicker, a lame, recycled flip of the middle finger is merely the latest in her continued reliance upon lame, recycled gestures. The chorus of her latest single is a monotone bleat of "Live fast, die young" and it doesn't get more threadbare & depleted than that hoary countercultural trope. Hopefully, M.I.A. has accepted (as most of us have) that she's utterly inept at articulating a political position so we needn't reexamine precisely why her identity-derived political aesthetic is bullshit. Of course, she still covets the currency of being branded a "political artist," but she can shoot every one of her music videos within safe distance of a "conflict region" from now on, and everyone will understand it's empty & opportunistic provocation, like Madonna fornicating with Black Jesus and burning crosses.

Which returns us to the stock defense of M.I.A.: the provocation itself was the point. As I explained before, I'd have no problem with such an excuse - heck, I might even become a fan - if M.I.A. was able to transgress the form or process of "being a pop star," but she isn't. (In fact, no one has been - not even Lady Gaga, I'd argue - since Kurt Cobain.) Because M.I.A.'s transgressions are limited to the realm of content, she is - at the risk of repeating myself - 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 if anything is symptomatic of art's sickly & moribund state in the post-modern era, it's an absence of meaning.

Meanwhile, on the Far-Eastern front of the class war...

A Lamborghini, two Mercedes Benz, and eight Ferraris were involved in a high-speed pile-up on a rural highway in Yamaguchi prefecture, totaling the cars and sending ten people to the hospital.

Good.

Another Other

Today, walking home across western Tokyo, I strode past a pentagenarian Japanese man who was speaking heatedly with his elder friend on a quiet residential corner when suddenly, the man wheeled around, pointed at me and began barking, "Jew! Jew! Jew!"

This took me aback, not only because I've neither seen nor heard of such open antisemitism in Japan, but especially because I'm not Jewish.

What a schmuck.

Déja-Vu Times Two

Both of the following albums were released in 1969, one in March, the other in November.


Care to guess which one came first? Here's a hint: one was a meticulously constructed masterpiece of elegiac beauty, and the other an anonymously cookie-cutter rehash of sub-Sly Stone funk with a snare sound thin enough to give your eardrum papercuts.

Also, listening to good ol' Bullhead earlier today, I'd forgotten how bald a ripoff of "It's Shoved" was Nirvana's "Milk It". Still, Grohl was about the only drummer whose "bigness" could match - even occasionally exceed - Dale Crover's.

Meanwhile, to the North...

Goddamn it, Canada. I thought we'd come so far. I thought, after over a century of defining ourselves negatively against our noisy neighbours to the south, we'd crafted a distinct & sovereign sense of national self. After all, our elephantine bedmate has been neither a "friendly and even-tempered" beast nor an honourable example to follow.

But no, evidently Canada wants to mirror its adjacent nation, bisecting into a fiercely polarized country whose vocal majority is composed of pigheaded reactionaries terrified of taxes. As in America, the political timbre is being tuned by retrogressive, provincial rubes. So New Brunswick, southern Ontario, Saskatchewan, and especially my fellow Albertans, I hail you in the resonant words of Mr. BDR: nation of motherfucking crackers.

However, there is a considerably bright silver lining to this otherwise dismal election: the New Democratic Party has vaulted from a modest Parliamentary presence to the official opposition. Instead of the ruling right-wingers being opposed by a bunch of milquetoast militarist corporate apologists (cf. American Democrats), they will face a socially progressive, communally-minded party with dedicated nationwide support. The mind reels pondering what hysterical smears American news organizations will chuck at the NDP, given that the American "left" falls somewhere around the middle of the Canadian political spectrum. I can already imagine fat-assed whoremonger Dick Morris calling Jack Layton a "Trotskyite."

But despite their greatest electoral gain ever, the NDP does not have an easy road ahead. This has been the wildest toss-up in Parliament's composition since 1993, wherein Chrétien swept the country, the separatist Bloc Québécois became the official opposition, and the ruling Progressive Conservatives - who once held the largest majority in Canadian history - were nuked out of existence. Today's electoral shake-up is equally shocking, especially with the NDP wiping out the Bloc. The problem is that, between the Conservative's new majority and the collapse of the Liberal Party, Layton has comparatively less influence in Parliament than during the previous minority government. Not only will he have to fight harder to rebuff the Conservatives' mandate, Layton's hard-won prominence is entirely dependent on the notoriously fickle & self-interested Quebec. If he fails to satisfy "les chialeux qui font rien," the NDP's new gains could be nullified the next time around.

But reelection schemes be damned, all that matters now is oppugning Stephen Harper, that beady-eyed oligarchic android who bleeds oil. I would like to return to Canada someday, and I'd prefer it not to have been transfigured into a snowy, sparsely-populated counterfeit of the United States. I left that country for a goddamned reason.

To the Delight of Caucasian Dullards Everywhere

Well, look who took home top prize at the music industry's annual closed-circle-jerk. Doubtlessly, such an achievement by a 1.3 million-selling band that has licensed its songs to major corporations, has performed at private functions for political insiders, and whose record label doesn't happen to have a corporate parent, will be hailed as another culture-industry equivalent to David taking down Goliath. Backslaps all around, you smug pricks!

Honestly, who is excited by this band any more? Scratch that - who ever thought an anemic, sphincter-clenching hybrid of "Once In a Lifetime" and "Born To Run" was a good idea? I swear, anyone thrilled by the Arcade Fire's coronation at the Cocksucker's Ball is such a boring, beige-souled, conservative bastard that they'd have similarly picked Tom Jones' "Green, Green Grass of Home" over anything off Revolver for Record of the Year 1966.

Today's Aphorism

Anyone who complains that their "tweet" was misread, has misread Twitter altogether.

If I should die before I wake, would I really notice?

The only thing worse than a dude with a Napoleon complex is a senile megalomaniac and his son the shaved Ewok with both a Napoleon complex and a rusting Soviet arsenal at their command.

I suppose it bears remarking that the neighbours are having a moment. What's the odd artillery shell between (bitter, estranged) brothers, right? Well, now that the global balance of power is - regionally, if not nationally - up for grabs, no government wants to look soft, especially when their assailant is the maniacal, mangy village idiot starved halfway to madness. So, in the international game of King of the Hill, soft power & compromise take a backseat to saloon diplomacy, which is unhelpful to those of us who wish neither to be shot or blown up, nor to shoot or blow up other people.

But I'll be damned surprised if this fracas leads to war. North Korea's only ally is China, while South Korea have been occupied by an American military presence for over fifty years. Both China and the U.S. stand to lose their asses if Sino-American relations turn actively antagonistic: how could American remain in China's financial pocket if Americans stop buying all the cheap shit the Chinese manufacture, which in turn fosters the economic growth that allows China to buy up U.S. debt? Who would want to disturb that glorious Moebius-strip of bitter commercial codependency?

The Lowest Common Denominator Is the Biggest Factor

As anyone with even a few cilia tuned to international affairs knows, the U.S. midterm elections are upon us with all the thunderous fusillade & megadecibel hysteria of a civil war. It's a minor miracle that, in the American electoral process, no one actually ends up dead.

The consensus narrative of 2010 has thus far been: Americans of every political persuasion are unimpressed with the first two years of Obama's administration. Progressives feel that the President has failed to deliver on the promises of his campaign. Conservatives are convinced that the country is on the bullet-train to Soviet hell. Moderates have, by all appearances, vanished from the political landscape. The consequence of the left's disillusionment and the right's white-hot ire (and it is very white) is that the Republicans will reclaim control of the House and, perhaps, the Senate.

Of course, as history suggests, this familiar tune may have a surprise coda. The past couple of weeks have produced more "October Surprises" than a pumpkin patch laden with landmines. NPR arguably served conservatives their own Shirley Sherrod when they fired Juan Williams. Alaska Tea Partier Joe Miller is quickly slipping off the ballot, either due to his security detail's brownshirt-style bullying or his apparent inability to grow a proper beard. Meanwhile, Gawker's muckraking exposé on Christine O'Donnell's hypocritical pecadillos has both infuriated the right and disgusted the left, with little time allowed to gauge which way the fallout will gust.

The true terror is that the American left is caught between Scylla - a Republican Congress that will attempt to roll back over a century of social progress - and Charybdis - armed revolt by reactionaries who confuse an electoral setback with tyranny. Beyond any American election in the modern era, right-wing violence has move beyond the rhetorical to the literal, including voter intimidation and physical assaults upon journalists and private citizens. Several Republican candidates have even advocated armed insurrection against the federal government if the election does not tilt in their favour. This more than anything should motivate moderates and progressives alike to pursue their primary legal protection against subjugation: to vote.

Democracy is nothing if not imperfect, as it swaps more stratified forms of tyranny with that of the majority. The fundamental mistake the Democratic Party has made is to believe that they can control a two-party system by compromising with their opponents instead of winning their active support. Obviously, not everyone will be satisfied with a single party's platform, but the Republican's success stems from their talent at convincing people whose lives Republicans are actively destroying that the Grand Ol' Party represents their interests. So what is their secret?

Allow me to introduce you to Malcolm Tucker, Director of Communications in the BBC sitcom The Thick of It. As the Prime Minister's enforcer, Tucker is a parliamentary Svengali of such partisan drive and profane thuggery that he makes Rahm Emanuel look like Mr. Rogers. If there's anyone - fictional or otherwise - with the sang froid and killer instinct to produce a desired political effect, it's Tucker. So heed what he said during the British electoral campaign earlier this year:

Frankly, I think you're getting the wrong advice on the debates... Most people are not going to see these Bestivals of bore. After all, with the 478 debate rules in place they're going to have all the drama of three middle-aged guys fencing with limp dicks. The only ones watching are going to be the pointless bastards who already know what they think.

We need to get to the people who only hear the rumours. Bottom feeders who get their views via the quotes from the models in the Daily Star. Van drivers who guard their vast ignorance with concealed Stanley knives. Businessmen who like to expose their self-aggrandising cynicism to schoolgirls on the Thameslink. These dumb motherfuckers are the battlefield. Shitheels. Dunderheads. People who when you talk to them it's like shouting through six pieces of double glazing. Potheads, cider drinkers, kids who don't know who Thatcher was and think the NHS grew on a big fucking NHS tree. Wankers. People who count to 11 using their 10 fingers and their head and still get it wrong. This is who we have to get to via the debates. So we are going to have to shout extremely fucking loud.

Now, substitute a few proper nouns in the above paragraph - swap "the Thameslink" for "Pennsylvania Turnpike", "Thatcher" for "Nixon", and "the NHS" for "Social Security" - and the same is absolutely, unequivocally true for America. Electoral success stands on the shoulders of envious, ill-informed, bored morons who've scarcely been outside their own zip-code, who can't find the next county on a map, who can't distinguish between opinion and fact, and who prefer scapegoats to solutions.

Stupid people aren't a political hazard to be mitigated. These dumb motherfuckers are the battlefield.

The brilliant sleight-of-hand that the Republicans have performed is that they've courted a fearful middle class & a devastated working class with snappy slogans, straw-man whipping boys, and provincial snobbery. It's not that the Democrats are short on examples of how Republicans fuck over every American making under a quarter-million per year, but that the Democrats refuse the political potential of angry voters. Ironically, it's the Democrats - not Republicans - who have ignored the real political effects of class resentment, and thus have ceded the power of America's underclass to the worst colporteurs of xenophobia, superstition, paranoia, and hysteria.

The Democratic Party failed to understand that it's better to have knee-jerking mobs shouting with you rather than against you, and they are shouting extremely fucking loud. If the Democrats lose this coming Tuesday, they'll only have themselves to blame for it.

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.

In Which the Author Questions If Anyone Knows What the Fuck They're Talking About

From Sean Fennessey's review of the new Queens of the Stone Age reissue:

Studied repetition and precision are unlikely virtues for weedheads...

Really?



I understand the resistance to speaking of music as though it were autonomous, and that every review must now adhere to a metanarrative of some sort, but come on. You can't just ignore shit 'cuz it conflicts with your "angle."

My Country, Right-Wing Or Wrong

A blogipelago to which I'm quite sympathetic - IOZ, Charles Davis, and SMBIVA - have rightly gone apoplectic over Matthew Yglesias' spineless rationale for murderous imperial adventure:

From a Keynesian standpoint, I believe that with the economy depressed it’s better to spend the money in Afghanistan than not to spend it. But it’s kind of nuts that at a time when we “can’t afford” to do all kinds of things, this is what we can afford.

Now, most re-posts of this have omitted that last sentence, which Yglesias would surely feel deprives his argument of moral burden. And what a heavy load it is: how painful & difficult a decision it be to continue a 9-year military incursion based on bloodlust & revenge! Oh, how it pains us good, liberal Americans - if only it didn't make so much sense economically!

Rather than make Yglesias out to be a morally-sensitive, considerate man devoted to reason, that last sentence underscores how morally bankrupt & coldly calculating Beltway liberals are. Human dignity be damned; realpolitik and maintenance of the empire are the rules.

(Especially since the war doesn't actually make much sense economically. As Jon Greenbaum pointed out on Yglesias' own comment thread, "What’s the jobs multiplier on military spending?")

Something I'd like to hear much more, though, is calling out Yglesias for his recurrent Red-baiting. Like any good toady for neoliberal hegemony, Yglesias repeatedly & pedantically warns of the danger posed by (duh-duh-DUH!) international Communism while employing capitalism's logic of dehumanization & alienation (as when he refers to the very human problems posed by China's overpopulation as its "human capital issues.") Now this:

Newt Ginrich's spokesman told Salon in a phone interview today that building a mosque at Ground Zero "would be like putting a statue of Mussolini or Marx at Arlington National Cemetery."

Asked what the 19th century German philosopher had ever done to America, Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler said: "Well let's go with Lenin then." Tyler explained that he was talking about Lenin, who died in 1924, as representative of the Cold War and ideologies opposed to America.

What upsets Yglesias is not the continuing false analogy between fascism and communism, but the implication that Islam is somehow fundamentally anti-American. An idiotic & xenophobic contention, for sure. (Why, what could be more American than blind faith in an expansionist ideology?) But Yglesias' knee-jerk rejection of leftism shows that anti-left reactionism has been so fully woven into America's banal nationalism, it's impossible to even consider socialism as a legitimate political mode.

SMBIVA's Michael Smith is dead-on when he says that, apparently, to "Think Progress" must mean finding "more cost-effective programs of mass murder."

J'accusatory

Whenever I read remarks about the dire state of music journalism, I'm shot through with potential guilt - until I go read the examples of what constitutes genuinely shit writing. I then thank/curse The Internet for operating upon such a gross baseline of stupidity that someone of moderate talent (such as myself) sounds like Bangs or Christgau by comparison.

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.