Sunday, January 25, 2004
What? You'd never heard of them? Apparently the nominations have been announced for this year's...wait for it...Jammys! And, big surprise, String Cheese Incident does quite well. Check out the full list.
I'd heard of the band for years but never knew what they were about until recently, when during a conversation about a recent Sonic Youth concert broadcast on PBS' Soundstage, a friend mentioned that SCI is known as a jam band. (He was teasing me for enjoying SY's jammier moments.)
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Monday, January 12, 2004
Disgusting! A friend reports that, at a recent show she saw, opening band The Legendary Shack Shakers's lead singer repeatedly blew his nose onto the moshers up front. She used the term "farmer's blow" which I'd never heard before. Yuck!
Thursday, January 08, 2004
An essay against the Da Capo Best Music Writing series. The writer makes a mixed case against the series for being white/rock-centric. As a fan of the series, which has exposed me to lots of ideas and music I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise, I think he is certainly right that the series needs to open up for more diversity. How much better the series would be if it truly reflected the actual music scene. Thankfully, Jeff Chang gives some suggestions for further reading near the end, though I wish there were many more. I salivate at the idea of more great stuff to read.
Still, he's off-base on some points. For example, here's a fact: rock is still the biggest single segment of the market (as the latest RIAA statistics indicate). A lot of younger urban music fans (of all races) don't seem to get this--they listen to pop, rap and hip-hop, and they think that's all anyone listens to, that rock is dead. It isn't, not even artistically. So this whole attitude that hip hop is dominant is not quite accurate. Also, speaking as someone who has read the first three editions of BMW, I have to say Chang's piece unfairly implies that the non-Hip Hop pieces are all about rock when actually there's a lot more variety, pieces that are neither rock nor hip hop: jazz, country, a piece about a collector of 78s, Aaron Copland, Disney radio, Onion spoofs, Dylan, and old Britsih music hall, to name a few. (I'm a fan of indierock, which has hardly ever been covered.) A lot of the writing is made up of pieces run because the subject died or has had a long career--there's definitely a mature p.o.v., in that sense, which is common to criticism. (It takes a while to get proper perspective on something.) And the series recently ran an excellent piece by Lori Robertson (on Hornby's watch, the best so far, as Chang seems to agree) about the whole question of aging critics, so the series hasn't failed to address its own limitations (in addition to the intros that Chang grudgingly quotes)--so I see the problem being more generational than racist in nature. (Then there's the whole issue of middlebrow writing--i.e., The New Yorker issue--which isn't quite articulated in this essay.) Still, despite Chang's mischaracterizization and oversimplification, I would love to see more diversity in the series. For that matter, I would love to see more coverage of the youth market, more hip hop writing, current trends. And he's convinced me I should write to the editors and demand it.
An afterthought: Now that I've looked at the RIAA stats, two more things strike me: 1) the only special audience separated out for separate study is the Hispanic audience, and 2) look at the dropoff in buying from record stores! You do realize that shift to "Other Stores" refers to Walmart and their likes, right? (That's going to present much bigger problems than which writers get anthologized in a prestigious but little-known yearly anthology.)
Look, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Lord of the Rings aren't liked chocolate and peanut butter, ok? Still, this project looks amusing--haven't downloaded any mp3s yet, though.
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Interesting article about music and copyright, mentions a couple interesting cases, like a small label, Magnatune, that lets you pay what you want for its music and claims to be doing well bit it. More interesting to me is this guy (from a band called Redd Kross) who added his own bass lines to the famously bass-less White Stripes and (with a verbal OK from Jack) posted online. He renamed the album Redd Blood Cells.
The new mini iPods are cute, but that price is a rip-off, isn't it? 4GB? $50 more gets you 10. The whole line is priced way too high. I'm sticking with my CD player--I barely have enough time to listen to a full disk in one sitting. Why do I need to store 1000 songs anyway? COLOR me unconvinced.
Monday, January 05, 2004
Every year, I write up a big top ten of films of the year to exchange with a pal. As part of that, I like to list favorite musical moments of the year:
2003 Movie Music Highlights:
- Leonard Cohen's "A Thousand Kisses Deep" in The Good Thief
- The classroom lessons & the kids' band in School of Rock
- LOTR: Howard Shore's entire score, esp. the Tolkien poems set to music (sung by Boyd and Mortensen) and "Into the West" sung by Annie Lennox
- The musical numbers performed by the Triplets of Bellville
- The use of "Night and Day" by Fred Astaire in Reconstruction
- "Spiegel Im Spiegel" by Arvo Part in Gerry (even though other films have used it)
- Nina Simone's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" (live) in The Dancer Upstairs
- "Ben" sung by Crispin Glover over the closing credits of Willard
- the entire Kill Bill Soundtrack, esp. the chilling opening ("Bang Bang")
- Karaoke scene of Lost in Translation (Brass in Pocket by The Pretenders, More Than This by Roxy Music) as well as the shoegazer soundtrack
Ode to a Love Song
I just heard "She Loves You" by the Beatles in a cafe and it was as if I had heard it for the first time. Every time I hear it it's that way.
I had such a rush of thoughts and feelings, but that's the Beatles for you: there's so much compressed into 3 minutes that your mind gets kicked into overdrive trying to take it all in. It suddenly struck me how on the one hand it's just a silly pop song, a trifle, and yet it has such emotional and musically textural complexity. They've always reminded me a little of Mozart in early songs like this, with the classical mastery of their received vocabulary, their economy and grace in melody. As Bach had gone before to synthesize an elaborate system of harmony, leaving Mozart to soar in the task of its Classical refinement, so all those amazing blues musicians and guys like Elvis had done before the Beatles (who would progress from Mozart to the Beethoven stage and beyond). Here the lads take 3 powerful little words that stir up our most basic desires and needs (love being emotional, sexual, spiritual)--we are loved and we instinctively love in return, but who is this 'she'? So, we love them! Those who serenade us! Towards the end of the song, the thought struck me that every few bars there was some new delight in focus: guitar to drum flourish to melody in beautifully double-voiced unison into sudden two-part harmony; change in singing voice from too-sweet croon to sudden growl, harmonica. At the end, the fermata on "don't you know you shou-oo-oo-ould" (note the classical-style turn)--and then "be glad" opening into an octave, the most strong, open (like a concert hall), clear harmonic relationship of all. Blue skies on a mountaintop. (Can you hear the girls screaming?) There's a magnificence of happiness (they told you should be glad, and you are, try and resist), and yet before we're there even a moment, there's the return of that sad little falling cascade of three notes (yeah, yeah, yeah) underneath it all, making me want to cry in the middle of all that gladness, repeating until it comes back down to rest on first, but the 3 part harmony keeps someone on fourth and someone on second (that is, the first and third yeahs), a jarring, unresolved clarion piercing to balance all the fucking classical beauty and jab you just the slightest after you've been emotionally worked up. The hypnotist has snapped his fingers. You may awake, a better person.
Friday, January 02, 2004
Favorite CDs of 2003
It was a great year. I heard so much wonderful music that I have to pick 20 (and I'm not done buying).
1. Belle & Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress: This album took longer for me to warm up to than any other B&S album, but in the end I came to love more songs off of it than any other single B&S album. New directions, new successes.
2. Radiohead, Hail to the Thief: My first slight disappointment from Radiohead after two incredible albums, but this still towers over most albums in my collection. I won't be parted with it. Ever.
3. Cat Power, You are Free: I recently compared this to her last LP of original material, Moon Pix, and I can't believe how much more focussed and powerful the songwriting is. Her new approach is almost primitivist (think children's/outsider art), and a couple songs grate (the catalog of misery otherwise known as "Names" is unbearable if you're in the wrong mood), but the approach is the best studio attempt yet to capture her raw talent and show off her voice. A beautiful vision of freedom in a year when the word was especially abused. (Crappy packaging, though.)
4. Britta Phillips & Dean Wareham, L'Avventura: After Luna's disappointing recent forays, Dean got back to doing what he does better than anyone: woozy, dreamy, romantic pop/rock. The best songs are his originals (Ginger Snaps, Knives From Bavaria, and Night Nurse--even if its orchestration rips off the beginning of Lee Hazlewood's "Your Sweet Love"), but some of the covers are also dazzling (Madonna, Buffy St. Marie). Another CD I'll keep forever.
5. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell: All the signs pointed to backlash after the huge success of their debut EPs, but the YYY's first full album managed to keep 'em impressed, and for good reason.
6. Ted Leo, Heart of Oaks: It may not be the best CD of the year, but I got more excited by this than any other CD because (as with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs last year) it made me feel like I was being drawn into new territory, personally. I'd never thought I'd go for this kind of punk-inflected indierock, but the intelligence of his lyrics and the sincerity of his passion really drew me in.
7. Morvern Callar soundtrack (2002 copyright, released 2003): Probably the single disc that had the most impact on me this year, this soundtrack that comprised the film's cool mix tape (practically a character of its own, standing in as it does for a dead boyfriend's absence) opened my ears to artists I'd heard of but never properly heard before.
8. Junior Senior, d-d-don't don't stop the beat: The most fun dance-pop in ages. Bound for film soundtracks and wedding reception dance floors for years to come.
9. Hidden Cameras, The Smell of Our Own: An album of queer politics, sexuality and spirituality, it came just when I needed solace. The music, kind of Sommerville-does-folk, is a consistent delight. (And the profane-as-sacred approach to lyrics is oddly uplifting.)
10. Kill Bill V. 1 soundtrack: Tarantino's back! I didn't realize I missed him so much! He ought to be paid to do other director's soundtracks. Awesome, and bound up with the experience of the excellent movie. Bring on Volume 2!
11. New Pornographers, Electric Version: I don't understand how this can be so much fun.
12. Longwave, The Strangest Things: I bought it thinking they were Strokes-clones and that it would just tide me over, but I grew to adore this album on its own merits.
13. Strokes, Room on Fire: Higher highs and lower lows than the debut. Unbelievable guitar.
14. White Stripes, Elephant: I was disappointed at first, but the album's best tracks continue to grow on me as the year goes on. I'm going to have to buy this for myself!
15. Nada Surf, Let Go: Wallowing in self-pity, but achingly beautiful. If it weren't for some of the lyrics, which get in the way (I prefer lyrics to stay out of the way and not take the spotlight) I'd have it much higher.
16. Steve Malkmus and the Jicks, Pig Lib: Not what I expected or even wanted from him, but that's the point: a new (Classic-rock) direction for "Mr. Pavement," and after initially balking, I found myself happily going along for the ride.
17. Wrens, The Meadowland: Still getting to know the album: weakish front end, but it builds up tremendously in the second half.
18. The Raveonettes, Chain Gang of Love: After a summer vacation where I fell in love with oldies all over again, out came this CD that sounds like an update of the best of the best oldies. A few highlights make this sensational.
19. Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers: I reasoned that by playing the radio pop song game, Fountains of Wayne must end up with essentially disposable music. But it doesn't quite seem to work that way, from what I've heard of the album, which is clever and witty and unique. Do I dare compare it to Weezer's Blue album?
20. British Sea Power, The Decline of British Sea Power: Some outstanding songs, and I like the style overall. They have real potential beyond just opening for Interpol.
Honorable mentions:
- Grandaddy, Sumday
- Holly Golightly, Truly She Is None Other
- Notwist, Neon Golden (copyright 2002, 2003 US)
- Stereolab, Instant 0 in the Universe EP
- Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man, out of season (2002 import, 2003 US)
- Gillian Welch, Soul Journey
- !!!, Me and Guliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story) EP
- VA, Rough Trade 25: Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before
- Monade, Socialisme ou Barbarie: The Bedroom Recordings
