long hot summer

"As long as we're dancin', we ain't fightin'! When blacks were rioting, a song by Martha and the Vandellas came on the radio: 'Dancin' in the Streets'! I think that song was deliberately promoted by the government, during that long hot summer, to distract blacks from taking care of serious business."

Wanda Coleman, in Re/Search #13: Angry Women

juking

A quote from The Fugitive Kind, the Sidney Lumet/Tennessee Williams film, via my dad, as delivered by Joanne Woodward:

"Juking? Oh! Well, that's when you get in a car, which is preferably open in any kind of weather. And then you drink a little bit and you drive a little bit, and then you stop and you dance a little bit with a jukebox. And then you drink a little bit more and you drive a little bit more, you stop and you dance a little bit more to another juke box! And then you stop dancing and you just drink and you drive. And then, you stop driving."

Tonight I didn't drive drunk or dance at all, but I requested some silly songs on one of them digital jukeboxes on a trip to the Showdown with Brian, so I think maybe, technically, I did some juking.

the best sesame street song ever

is "Me Lost Me Cookie at the Disco."

who wants to be men of the people

Because I made a promise to Bruce: For the record, I like the new Arctic Monkeys record. I'm not sure why Bruce wanted me to make this public statement, but I don't mind a bit. I'm still figuring out what I think about it more exactly and how much I like it but I definitely think it's a solidly enjoyable record at the very least, and as I get more familiar with it I might grow to like it more.

they're gonna crucify me

For all my music nerdery, I have one rather freaky blind spot: I know next to nothing about the Beatles. Well, that's an exaggeration. I know as much about them as any reasonably observant music enthusiast would without actually investigating them intentionally. But as I've been known to point out to people on a regular basis, I know more about the Monkees than I do about the Beatles. And I'm not that freaked out about it from a music knowledge standpoint. But lately I have been thinking that maybe I would like to actually listen to some Beatles records, not out of obligation but because I might really enjoy them.

last.fm dream girls

You know how there are those fake women on myspace? I have been wondering today if there could be fake last.fm women. There are these gorgeous women on there with ridiculously impeccable taste, and I just wonder if they could possibly be real. I just don't know what would be in it for someone to make a fake last.fm person. Still, I wonder if it's possible that a few of these women don't actually exist.

I guess when you think about it, a lot of us are sort of fake on last.fm. Any sites with a social networking component are going to encourage people to put their best face forward, pick the most flattering pictures, mention stuff that they think sounds cool in their personal info, and in the case of last.fm, potentially skew their listening habits (unconsciously, if not intentionally).

you are the everything

I've been going through some old personal papers and filing stuff and I found an old piece of paper covered in incredibly corny, angsty writing from when I was 14 or so, with lots of references to R.E.M.'s Green. That's as specific as I'm going to get, though. It was with a pile of R.E.M.-related clippings from all sorts of publications from Melody Maker to Seventeen, mostly circa Out of Time.

dirty 30

My twin sister and I celebrated our 30th birthday last night. We organized a small show that some of our musician friends played. It was lovely, though every time anybody said, "Happy birthday, Karen and Susan!" from the stage I felt really embarrassed. I know everyone was there to celebrate the big birthday but it just felt too generous for them to come out and play a show at a tiny little bar just for us. I feel like baking them all cakes or something. Who knows, maybe I still will.

question

Might one's relationship to pop music (in the popular sense) be related to how you defined yourself vis a vis your peers in your youth? Well, if you're the sort of person who is enough of a music dork to be reading this right now, and thus, likely a regular dork (to some degree) in high school. Personally, I came into my own as a music listener at a point when "alternative" was becoming mainstream. Music with transgressive trappings (most of which was actually painfully dull and unoriginal) was big business then and the popular kids at school grew out their hair and bought Doc Martens. I liked my share of "alternative" stuff (I watched 120 Minutes religiously with my sister) but increasingly I employed a couple of strategies to differentiate myself from the alternateen crowd. One--being more alternative than alternative. Getting into stuff that was weirder, more abrasive, or just plain obscure. Two--the twee backlash method. Just as the whole C-86 movement originally happened as a reaction to mandatory pseudo-rebelliousness, I reacted to mainstream music posing as the underground by getting into obscure music that was aggressively poppy, more "mainstream" than the mainstream. Sometimes to the point of sappy excess, saccharine sweetness.

This two-pronged approach still shows in the way I listen to music now. I tend to like things that are poppy or a bit on the inaccessible side, and if something is both, it will probably appeal to me even more. I've changed since high school, certainly. But that was a formative time for me and the context I found myself in, including the pop chart at the time and the particular high school I attended and all the reasons that I felt like a misfit among my peers and grew to embrace that through my music fandom, it all contributed to the direction I took at that formative time. It makes me wonder about other people's experiences and how they might have sent them in different directions.

schemata

So, in a comments exchange earlier I started talked about cognitive schemata and music. I just kind of started throwing the term around, but I realized I don't think I've ever actually read anything that applied that sort of cognitive psychology stuff to music listening. Well, I've seen some stuff in the popular press about "framing" and "cumulative advantage." It's hard to tell to what extent these concepts come from cognitive psychology or related areas (for once I miss all of the laborious putting-everything-in-context exposition I'm used to from academic pieces) because these are popular pieces. But if they're not from cognitive psychology per se, there's an obvious relationship there.

But I haven't happened upon any academic stuff using cognitive psychology in the way I'm used to it being employed with other media (mostly film) to look at music reception. Not that I'm so familiar with it in that context, either--I just have a passing understanding of some basics. But I'm going to try to do a little amateur cognitive psychology of music reception thing here. I'm making a list of schemata that might come into play when you first hear new music. In my dorky cognitive psych dilettante way.

knowing the difference between music and other sounds
recognizing familiar scales and modes
recognizing instruments
recognizing song structure (verses, choruses)
deciding the gender of a vocalist
recognizing time period (contemporary, old, retro)
recognizing genre (this could be broken down into a bunch of sub-categories)
recognizing proficiency or the lack thereof
varying degrees of lyrical comprehension
mobilizing any number of various schema for determining value
placing oneself in relation to the song racially/ethnically (comparing oneself to the artist and/or the seemingly intended audience)

Anyways, this stuff is all on the basic side...I'm thinking about some stuff along these lines but more involved, but I may need to read up on my theory before I can really formulate it.

first impressions

Dave commented on an earlier entry of mine with some really interesting links, including this one, to a blog entry about Paris Hilton's album that turned into an incredibly long comments thread with some juicy arguments about poptimism, which got me thinking about a lot of thesis-related questions. One of the themes that kept popping up on that thread was emotion and passion about music, visceral reactions, etc., versus intellectual concerns or rational reasons for liking things that are affected by the arguments of others. Especially first impressions and whether initial opinions are really open to change.

Obviously, some of this stuff is going to vary from person to person. So it got me to thinking about the way I usually react to music initially. I know that there are presumptions and prejudices, some of them based on intellectual or political ideas that I've internalized. Sometimes I am really ill-disposed to something because of things I know about a band or artist, or even if I perceive that they have a fanbase of people I have very different musical values from.

But most of the time, if I bother to actually listen to something, I have reason to believe that I might like it. There is so much stuff out there and I always have a backlog of things that sound interesting, so I don't feel like I have time for things I don't think I might like. So most of the time, I am expecting to find something of value and not waiting to be underwhelmed. But sometimes I am. Usually, if I don't like something I know it right away. It's very unusual for me to feel differently after that point no matter what new arguments I hear or how much rapturous praise gets heaped onto something by people whose judgment I trust or whatever. And sometimes I like something right away too.

But it's actually a better sign if I hear something for the first time and don't know how I feel at first. I get this vaguely uncomfortable (yet curious) feeling. Sometimes I find myself listening to something over and over even though it makes me feel weird to the point of kind of bothering me. Usually if I get this feeling about something strongly enough, I end up liking it eventually, sometimes loving it and obsessing over it for years, as in the case of Cypress by Let's Active, which provoked very confusing feelings in me at first. It's always nice to like something right off the bat. I don't have the energy to plunge into records that provoke really complicated feelings in me all the time. But the things that end up meaning the most to me are the things I have to work a little bit to understand, that make me stretch a bit in order to enjoy them.

outness

Sorry I've been AWOL for so long. I missed a day and then I felt like I should do something extra interesting to make up for it and then I just built it up too much and I felt like I couldn't post until I had something real to say. I don't have something super exciting to say today, I just thought I should get off my butt and post anyways.

I've been obsessed with the Associates song Party Fears Two lately and got a copy of Sulk as a birthday gift from my sister. So I've been reading up about them and collecting fun facts like the story that Billy MacKenzie was the subject of the Smiths song William, It Was Really Nothing (which seems to be fairly accepted although explanations--a romantic relationship with Morrissey, a close friendship with him, or just a fan-crush he had on Billy--vary widely). Anyways, I could say more about the Associates but I brought them up because today while I was googling around for references to Morrissey and MacKenzie I came across this blog entry about Mika's unwillingness to go on the record about his sexuality. (Someone had brought MacKenzie up in the comments .)

There are some really interesting points being brought up here, points which I started to bump up against in an entry I wrote a while back. I really don't know what I think about musicians and issues of coming out, or the ethics of talking about musicians' sexualities. Some musicians wear their sexuality on their sleeve. But others are less overt, and obviously that's ok. Still, you hear things. But how do you know if you can trust the things you hear? Even if you could, is it ok to talk about it in a public space like a blog? Obviously I am not the only person who feels weird about this stuff, because when I do web searches for references to musicians' possible queerness their biographies are usually conspicuously low on detail when it comes to their love lives. Just discussing this right now, I keep finding myself being tempted to give examples and then stopping myself, because even bringing up a given artist involves making assertions I'm not sure are ok.

The issues here are pretty much the obvious ones we all associate with coming out. On the one hand, it seems more politically responsible for musicians to be out. Hiding your queerness certainly doesn't seem helpful. But is it really fair for us to expect this? How much can we expect--how out is out? If you don't hide it but don't go out of your way to proclaim it, then unless you are pretty famous a lot of people may just not notice. It seems unfair that this burden of self-disclosure falls on queer artists and not on straight ones. This is a particularly loaded issue for women musicians, who sometimes struggle to be taken seriously as good songwriters, skilled players, etc. instead of being defined in terms of their personalities and personal lives alone.

These are all tough questions and the whole issue is complicated by them. In the meantime there seems to be a sort of informal consensus on how we do things. If a performer seems to be banking on some sort of queer persona (almost always a campy male) we are allowed to discuss his sexuality a bit. If they have obvious lyrical references or other clear statements it can be discussed. Otherwise, there seems to be a pretty strong taboo against naming the queer sexualities of musicians. If you can find references they are often from queer web spaces, on lists of gay/lesbian/bi artists sort of like those lists of vegan celebrities you find on sites about vegetarianism. It seems as though it's more ok to talk about it if you are queer (and out) than if you're straight, but just a bit more. Despite this reluctance to talk about the issue, when the subject of an alleged closeted queer comes up, most people seem a bit pissed off at the person for not being out. But if someone seemed to imply queerness and then goes on the record as straight (or gives some sort of watered down Brett Anderson answer like "I'm kind of bi but I've never done anything about it") or pulls an Ani DiFranco and settles down into a straight marriage after building a queer audience based on clear or implied statements of homo- or at least bi-sexuality, these things piss off the public as well.

It does seem as though having a certain kind of queer identity as a musician could be constricting in a way that coming out as a private individual is not. I mean, it could be constricting when it comes to the way you make music and present that music to the public. Though as in the case of a Brett Anderson or an Ani DiFranco, hinting at or explicitly identifying with some degree of queerness could also be a way of marketing yourself, or to use a less loaded term, presenting yourself to potential audiences.

As usual I seem to be raising more questions than I am answering and bringing up new topics before I feel like I've fully addressed earlier ones. Mostly I'm just really torn about the whole thing. As someone who cares about the representation of people with different sexual orientations in music, it would be nice to know where different musicians stand and to be able to talk about it publicly. But for the same reason I don't want to see people get pigeonholed or ghettoized, and even if maximum outness were undoubtedly for the best, I don't think I have the right to demand it of anybody. I don't know, I'm still thinking about all of this, but I would love to hear anything people have to say on the subject.

fear of a female planet

Saw Jana Hunter at the Mohawk tonight and I think I might be coming around to her whole deal. I didn't get it at first but I think I'm starting to.

Talked to a friend tonight about music video fantasies. Like, whether there were actually any music videos that we would enjoy living out or somehow inhabiting. The only one I could think of at that moment was Sonic Youth's video for Kool Thing. I'm open to other suggestions, but I think it would be hard to top.

wondering

Does liking the Von Sudenfed record make me an electronic music philistine?

dream date

The other night I dreamed I went on a date with Kelly Clarkson. I was making a bad impression, though--she kept rolling her eyes at me. I tried to think of things to do to impress her but that seemed to just make me more annoying.

confession

A while back, I downloaded and listened to a couple of tracks from the new Voxtrot record. To check and make sure that I still don't like them. I still don't. That's not the confession part. But I feel bad about the fact that I turned off audioscrobbler while I listened to them because I didn't want them to show up on my last.fm. I'm such a dork.

accessibility questions

Is poptimism really an ethic, as some people would have it, or an aesthetic? Is its impetus some sort of populist approach, a commitment to being unpretentious, a rejection of elitist (possibly racist, classist, sexist) assumptions, which leads one to embrace either music with a wider audience (according to some inevitably flawed standard) or music that is somehow demonstrably more accessible? Or does it come about due to an aesthetic appreciation (possibly on a rather personal, subjective level) of music that is considered "poppy," "corny," or kitsch, with political interpretations heaped onto it after the fact that then shape the course of the approach?

On a related note--how do we define accessibility? It seems like it has a number of very different components to it. There are some aspects we might posit are fairly universal. Things like simplicity, repetitiveness, and predictability (all tied together). Others are clearly arbitrary. I associate accessibility with major keys in the conventional Western 12-note scale, because of the culture in which I was raised. Minor keys sound darker to me, or tougher, and so forth depending on the context. Unfamiliar modes bring to mind foreign countries and a sense of alien-ness. As visceral and near-unshakeable as these associations are, they are culturally determined and arbitrary. But there are other conventional aspects of the music we consider accessible that are way more limited, historical-context-wise. For example, synthesizer sounds that were once normal to hear in pop music (say, twenty-five years ago) now read as dated, possibly campy or retro. Music that was seen as transgressive or shocking as recently as the 1990s has been thoroughly recuperated. And so forth. Making assertions about what is or is not accessible is very hard to do clearly and rigorously. Of course, so is making assertions about what is challenging or authentically avant-garde--a difficulty for anyone championing other value systems opposed to poptimism.

Does the fact that accessibility/inaccessibility is such a slippery concept mean that using criteria to evaluate music that are based on these ideas is somehow futile? I don't think so at this point, but I do think the imprecise, inconsistent, even downright impressionistic way these words get thrown around is the cause of a lot of confusion, confusion which obscures important questions about aesthetics and politics.

the infamous drunk post

Sang "Strange" by Patsy Cline in front of a bunch of strangers tonight. Not a huge crowd-pleaser but it reflected my mood and according to Sara people were making out to it so at least somebody got some enjoyment out of it.

cat funeral music

Back when my dear departed cat Maurice was still with me, my friend Chris came to visit me from Seattle and spent the afternoon in my apartment while I was at work. He put on a Sigur Ros album--I think it was Takk. Maurice apparently went up to one of my stereo speakers as soon as the album started and sat right in front of it for the length of the album. He went about his business as soon as it was over. Lately I've been thinking about having a sort of wake for Mo. When he died in March they gave me his ashes and I've just held on to them, but I think maybe I'm ready to scatter his ashes somewhere and do a little something to say goodbye. I might have to go out and get a copy of Takk to play at my little private memorial.

soundtrack

Listened to a mix from my friend Curran while cleaning out the closet today. It was very conducive. I've always liked The Madcap Laughs for washing the dishes. When I'm writing papers I can't listen to a lot of music because it's too distracting, but for some reason Christ: The Album and Music Has the Right to Children are both ok.

conflict of interest

Sometimes having dated a few musicians puts me in a weird position. Especially when it comes to this one guy that sometimes comes up in conversation with people who don't know I dated him briefly when I was younger. I don't have a consistent policy on what to do but usually I just don't say anything but I feel a little weird about it. My attitude towards this guy's band is different than it would have been if I didn't know him. It wasn't some great love affair or anything, but as a result of this past relationship I feel a little more invested (in a way that makes me a little extra disappointed when his band puts out something I don't like that much) and a little more indulgent (usually my musical opinions are pretty strong, to the point of rubbing people the wrong way sometimes, but I always cut his band a bit of extra slack...except when I have a backlash thing where I feel like I have to overcompensate). I know that my perspective is skewed. It seems like I ought to cop to it in the interest of disclosure. But mentioning the relationship not only has the potential to sound like name-dropping, I think it inevitably implies that I'm claiming some kind of special position of knowledge or insight that I don't want. To say nothing of the unsavory associations of groupie-ism that this knowledge might conjure up in others. So most of the time I don't say anything but I feel weird, and every once in a while I do say something and I feel weird.

Of course, similar complicated stuff comes up for anybody who gets involved in a local scene, makes friends with musicians, anything, and then tries to express opinions about their music in any sort of vaguely impartial way. It's something I don't usually see discussed but it should be out in the open more.

nice haircut, artfag

I bought a copy of Half-Cocked. It makes me really nostalgic for math rock and that whole period in the early 90s or so when "indie rock" was an actual genre with identifiable characteristics, as opposed to whatever it is now, insofar as the term retains any real meaning. It also reminds me of how there were more women back then who played in actual rock bands and were supposed to be good at their instruments and stuff. Your Tara Jane O'Neils, your Thalia Zedeks. It seemed like this new thing that proved that things were changing, at least in this underground space, if not in the big magazines with their articles about "foxcore." But lately it often seems like it all never happened. Of course there are still women playing music, but it seems like we've backslid somehow.

(Feels like I'm sidestepping the question of out queer women in music here, though undoubtedly that's an important part of the discussion. And another area in which it seems progress has eroded.)

post-drag king show thoughts

What does it mean that boy bands seem to lend themselves so readily to drag king performances? I mean, obviously they are vulnerable to parody, but I don't think this is just due to poor musical quality or something. Seems to have more to do with the way masculinity is presented by boy bands than anything else. Judith Halberstam has contended that figures that work well for drag king performances usually have some kind of higher-than-normal degree of gender performativity, compared to an ideal version of masculinity that maintains an illusion of naturalness at all costs. Boy bands are so clearly tailored to their audience that their cuddly version of masculinity always carries a taint of suspicion--but that can't be all it is. (Interesting that they are so often singled out as fake, devised by svengalis and marketers, etc. when so much music is every bit as cynically constructed--it makes sense given the rich history of associating consumerism with women, especially teenage girls, and with homosexuality. Don't get me started on that. Suffice it to say I don't want to make the same association uncritically.) I think you could make the argument that boy bands are denigrated because of their girl-friendly form of masculinity and that their culturally abject status makes them available for parody while their attempts at alternative masculinities make them good candidates for the kind of gender play that occurs in drag king culture.

Speaking of boy bands and drag kings, another thing you shouldn't get me started about is how much Justin Timberlake looks like a woman in drag in that "dick in a box" video and what that means. Hint: I seriously think there is some dialogue happening between Mr. Timberlake and the drag king community.

note to self

I think I need to start wearing earplugs.

parents

How did a guy who likes movie soundtracks, Barbara Streisand, and cheesy 80s pop-country, and a lady who likes baroque classical stuff, choral music, and Bread, who bonded through their shared love of Rogers & Hammerstein musicals, end up with kids like me and my sister? I guess there's always an element of mystery with these things. When I was a teenager my sister and I occasionally found music we liked that our mom could appreciate. Mostly Teenage Fanclub (for the harmonies) and R.E.M. (because my mom had a crush on Mike Mills before he discovered Nudie suits). Since we didn't live with my dad we never made that sort of effort with him. But given his interest in soundtracks I wonder sometimes if I couldn't get him interested in some sort of post-rock stuff.

you broke my heart

Saw Lavender Diamond play tonight. I keep saying how the best song lyrics are often the kind that look stupid on paper, that are very simple and repetitive and have to do with things that are important but sound goofy out of context. I get sick of lyrics that are supposed to sound clever but just end up being cutesy and stilted. Anyways, Lavender Diamond took a while for me to warm up to but once I did I realized they were a great example of this idea. Also, of the corollary that lyrics of this sort demand (and lend themselves to) interesting singing.

obsession

I was saying to a friend of mine yesterday how I miss having obsessions with bands. When I was a teenager, I had an R.E.M. obsession (8th through 10th grade) followed by a Sebadoh obsession (some of 10th, through senior year). Back then I never had to think before answering what my favorite band was. My taste has broadened a lot and I can't say I'm sorry for that. But I miss getting that excited about a band. Especially one with a nice juicy back catalog and/or prolific new releases (R.E.M. had more of the former, while their new releases always disappointed me, but Sebadoh and its side-projects kept me busy and at the height of my obsession were still reasonably consistent).

I might be too jaded and blase now to appreciate things the way I used to. To some extent it's probably like high school crushes--I'll never feel that way about anyone again. But it would be nice if I could have a nice adult love affair with a new band. Maybe I just haven't found the right one yet, who knows.

a torn white boat shoe

Saw Calvin Johnson perform tonight. He played Milquetoast Brigade by the Go Team, one of my favorite songs ever. It was delightful. Overall, it wasn't the best Calvin show I've ever seen (that honor would go to the show/play he did at the Hyde Park Theater years ago with Phil from the Microphones and Khaela from the Blow), but he always delivers a quality performance. I must say, I can't think of anyone else who has more artistic conviction. There's so much about him that only works because he is so committed to what he is doing and is so unapologetic and earnest about it (even when he also displays a sense of humor about himself).

backlog

I was reading Bring the Noise, the new Simon Reynolds book, today. There's some interesting material on Radiohead in there. It made me wonder (not for the first time) if I should try to actually get to know them. I mean, I've heard them, it's almost impossible not to, but I have never really given them a chance. I guess it's partly because I was reading a lot of British music press around when Pablo Honey came out and it sounded really dumb so I wrote them off for a while and by the time I could admit they had gotten interesting I was deep into my dual high school obsessions of indie rock and twee pop. Later, they just became one of those things I put off checking out.

Of course, there's a jillion other bands I feel like I need to learn more about. But I think I feel more like I should spend some time on Radiohead because in addition to being influential and being well-liked by many people whose opinion I respect, like other bands, their (reputedly) most important work came out when I was old enough to pay attention, which is a less common characteristic.

There's still lots of other bands I need to go back and investigate, though. If I think about it for too long it starts to freak me out. But it's also nice to know I'm in no danger of running out of promising stuff to listen to. Though I guess that attitude is the reason that I listen to so much more old(er) music than new stuff. Most of the time I'm ok with it but sometimes I wish I had more new bands to get excited about, more people I could go and see when they're here on tour.

popularity

Had a late night last night and was curled up in bed with my eyelids drooping before I remembered about blogging. Guess it's a good thing I said I'd post almost every day.

I've been meaning to talk about my thesis here, but I haven't been sure how to delve into it without writing some huge epic thing. The short description is that I am writing about the EMP conference last year and its aftermath, and issues relating to poptimism/rockism/possible non-rockist alternatives to poptimism, elitism/populism, race, gender, and queerness. Mostly I'm looking at how the whole thing played out in the blogosphere, but I'm also looking at published articles and some books, including Carl Wilson's forthcoming 33 1/3 book on Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love.

That's the big picture, sort of. Well, it may not seem like that big of a picture--it's a pretty specific topic. But it raises a lot of big questions about the state of contemporary music journalism and popular music scholarship as well as art, politics, and other big ideas. So I'm just going to pick a few smaller things to bring up in posts over time, instead of doing the epic thesis post.

So, here's a question for today. How much should writing about music reflect the tastes of most people, versus focusing on music that meets some sort of standard of quality? "Writing about music" is a bit intentionally vague here. It covers both music journalism and music scholarship, even though the answer to this question might vary between the two.

There are other reasons why this question isn't as simple as it appears at first. Let's say that you think that popular music (in the sense of music that is widely appreciated) should be covered by journalists and scholars to a pretty great extent. Maybe you think that people who are presented as having authority on musical matters are usually too elitist. How do you propose some kind of alternative? The trouble is, finding out which music is popular is a lot more difficult than it seems on the surface. This is a point that Simon Frith makes quite well in Performing Rites, but frankly, right now I'm too lazy to look up a page number and give you a quote (though I'll dig up the information if anybody really wants me to).

Is the music that sells best the most popular? The music that gets played most often on the radio? The music that attracts the largest audiences at live performances? Maybe we could do some kind of poll to find out what music people bought that they continued to enjoy after they made a purchase, or that actually meant something to them, or that they considered a favorite. After all, just because people buy something doesn't mean they like it, or at least that they liked it for longer than the five minutes it took to buy it, and just because people don't buy something doesn't mean they don't (it could mean they can't afford to spend money on music, or that they downloaded it for free or copied it from a friend or bought a bootleg, or lots of other things). And that's just when it comes to new music. What about the copy of Gyrate by Pylon that I bought in 1992, my first vinyl LP, which I still listen to regularly? That's not going to show up in any sales figures, and neither does any other music people bought in years past and continue to listen to.

The other problem with the idea of popularity is that even if we could determine what was most popular among, let's say, the entire American population, different subsets of the population will have different tendencies. Some populations will have more disposable income to spend on music and music-related items, according to class. Which I probably don't need to point out to you guys has a complicated but important relationship to people's places in hierachies of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, etc. Even if class didn't weight sales towards the tastes of the privileged, it's problematic if we leave the question of value up to majority rule--it means that minorities (in more than one sense of the word) get ignored.

Just because I can see the complications doesn't mean that I don't think that it's important that music liked by regular people should be covered by both music scholarship and music journalism. But it's complicated to say how, and the answer is different for either type of writing. To be honest, I'm still figuring out what I think about all of it. I do think that really thorough, systematic attention to certain types of questions (like a. determining a tenable way of defining popularity and b. determining when/if popularity is a politically/morally tenable standard for determining objects of study) is better left to academics. Though that doesn't mean academic work couldn't, or shouldn't, inform the work of journalists. Or that journalists shouldn't think about these questions or hold themselves to high standards when they believe there are ethical or political implications to their professional practices.

I could say a lot more but I'm going to leave it at that for now. Any thoughts on this stuff would be very much appreciated.

do you have to be confusin'?

There are a lot of songs with my name in them, even more if you count nickname variations like Susie. The best one I've heard is Susan by the Buckinghams. It starts out as this rather inane pop song that rhymes Susan with "confusin'" and "losin'," and ends with an unexpectedly freaky, chaotic instrumental outro. It's like two completely opposed 1960s aesthetics colliding.

That's just my favorite of what I've heard, but if anybody has any suggestions for other good Susan songs (or notably bad Susan songs I may not already know) feel free to let loose in the comments.

they used to say ma'am and yes sir

There's this Sears commercial that always comes on during the soaps (yeah, I watch them sometimes, shut up) with this song that sounds like a band who are pretending to be Spoon. It's funny, I don't usually think of Spoon as a terribly original band, but they're more original than these people who are hacking off of them shamelessly, down to Britt Daniel's vocal quirks. Anyways, I googled around and apparently the band is called The 88 and the song is called Coming Home. Apparently there have been Sears commercials recently featuring ELO and Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks as well. Seems like this trend towards more musicians letting their music be used in commercials is still on the rise. I wouldn't be surprised if Spoon would have allowed one of their songs to be used in that commercial, which makes it seem dumber that Sears used ersatz Spoon. But I guess they have their reasons. Maybe it's just that Spoon don't have a lot of songs with the word "home" in them. But they do have "Fitted Shirt."

dubious charity

So, Voxtrot got panned by p-fork. It's the most charitable bad review I've read in a long time. The tone couldn't be more different from the infamous review of Sound Team's Movie Monster, which was downright snotty. There's an extended sort of disclaimer thing about how it must have been really hard for them being under so much pressure due to the hype surrounding their early EPs and so forth. Seems like this has more to do with Pitchfork maintaining some degree of consistency after they've spent so much time hyping up Voxtrot themselves, though who knows. Could just be a matter of one writer being more softhearted than another, or any number of things.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the purpose (well, purposes) of music criticism, including reviews specifically. There are some questions about this stuff that are really hard to answer. Some that aren't so much questions you should even try to answer, but just things everyone has to decide for themselves, like political views or personal aesthetics (and they can encompass both those things). But there are some things I'm pretty sure I know what I think about right off the bat. Things that I don't think there's a lot of room for argument about. And one of them is as follows: Speculations about what sort of reasons a band or artist might have for making a mediocre record are outside of the scope of a review. Sometimes some context makes sense. Is the record a big departure for the band in some way? Is the album centered around an important personal event that occurred in the artist's life? Even commenting that the record was a disappointment after a great deal of press attention might make sense. But if you try to explain the shortcomings of one album by detailing all the mitigating circumstances that could have caused them, in the interest of fairness you ought to extent the same grace to everyone. And if everyone got this sort of treatment, well, that would be pretty silly.

Like I said, I can see a lot of complex potential questions about how music criticism should be practiced. (I've been thinking about these sorts of questions a bit too much, actually, and it has left me with a tendency to insert these little disclaimers which I hope aren't too annoying.) But I think it's a pretty accepted truth to say that when people approach reviews they are primarily expecting to find description and evaluation. They want to know what something sounds like and whether it's any good. Why it sounds one way or another, or why the result is good or not, is not supposed to come into play in any major way. I can think of a few reasons to break this rule, a few examples of times when it might make sense. But being under pressure or having to rush to get out an album are not unique or even noteworthy circumstances to contend with.

In addition to all of that, it's important to note that if this sort of explanation on the part of the reviewer was intended to soften the blow of the bad review for the band, it probably failed. I don't think many musicians would take kindly to this sort of review, which in addition to finding fault with their work, goes on to patronize them. The only purpose I can really see it possibly serving is that it might help Pitchfork to save face given how fervently it championed this band early on. But their flagging credibility isn't really helped by this sort of wishy-washy writing.

for your consideration

"Forbidden sexualities stay vague because they fear detection and punishment. Historically, music has been defined as mystery and miasma, as implicitness rather than explicitness, and so we have hid inside music; in music we can come out without coming out, we can reveal without saying a word."

Wayne Koestenbaum, in The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire

In other news, today I saw a guy named Slim Something-Or-Other singing Everybody's Talking At Me on the Lawrence Welk Show. It was kinda surreal, but nice.

Also, I saw the video for Karma Police and was reminded of something. Does anybody besides me remember the Jim Henson TV special that happened in the early 90s, that had a version of Karma Police starring Elmo? I swear I didn't make it up.

on accidental originality

My sister once saw Doug Martsch play a solo show at which he did a cover of Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want. She said that hearing him sing that song made her realize that Morrissey was a big influence on Martsch vocally. That the way he sang a Smiths song made her see that his way of singing on his own songs was almost indistinguishable from the way he sounded imitating Morrissey. But no one could have guessed without this clue, because Martsch's voice is so utterly different.

This is a perfect example of something that I think we all underestimate when accounting for what music sounds like: imperfect imitations. It takes just the right confluence of factors, and a good deal of certain sorts of talent, to be an effective hack. But trying to do something somebody else does and having it come out different than what you intended can lead to originality. If you mangle your influences so exceedingly that they are no longer recognizable, you might seem like you have this great unique voice.

It's not that I don't think true, intentional originality exists. But so many new and interesting things come out of people trying to be like their heroes and not succeeding. I guess the trick is knowing when to keep working on emulating something and when the failed approximation has become its own valuable thing that you should pursue for its own sake, or at least preserve in its current state.

mix-related ruminations

Dang, just my second day doing this and I'm already doing a last-minute entry before bed. I've gotten distracted today because I've been making mix cds for a swap with some friends from school. Once I start making a mix I get really focused on it and obsess over all of the transitions and stuff. Recently I made a mix for someone I had a crush on and I spent hours on it every day for almost a week, and didn't even give it to my crush until weeks later.

But crush mixes are always the worst. I get extra intimidated, of course, but I also get a complex about not including anything that sounds too sexy or mushy because I'm afraid it'll be obvious how I feel. I guess there's the method of actually declaring your feelings through a mix. I've never done that, I just send mixes with impossibly subtle undercurrents of repressed feeling. But I think I might have given people mixes that seemed flirty, because if I only want to be friends I feel totally free to put all kinds of love songs and scandalous material on a mix. It's part of a larger tendency in my life, where I can't seem to flirt effectively when I want to but end up seeming flirty to people when I least expect it. Luckily I don't have to worry about that with these folks as everyone else in this group is a) in a committed relationship and b) only into dudes.

I also have a bit of a confession to make about mixes. Sometimes when I'm looking for stuff to put on a mix I end up listening to something I've had for a while but haven't listened to much. So in the process of recommending something to someone else I discover it myself. I find it embarrassing to admit this, but I imagine it must happen to other people too.

There's certainly more I could say on the subject, but I'd better get to bed...

where the music went

Lately I've been watching Fuse a lot. The campus TV station broadcasts it whenever they don't have original content to show, which is most of the time, especially in the summer. It's kind of blowing my mind.

I think of myself as knowledgeable about music, to the point of dorkiness. At least certain specific kinds. But I'm so out of touch with this stuff. I assume that it's all very popular, probably with people who are younger than me. But there are all these band names I've never heard before. I can't even think of them right now, they're so totally unfamiliar. Well, there are some I'd heard the names of before, like My Chemical Romance and 30 Seconds to Mars (though I had no idea Jared Leto was in that band til I saw him in a video and thought I was going nuts). There are some more high-profile pop artists on there, like Avril Lavigne. And they have videos by bands like Bright Eyes that cross over from indie music to some extent, and older videos by bands like Green Day. Well, actually, Green Day almost exclusively. I'm really struck by how often I put the TV on Fuse and see a video from Dookie, after all these years, when there's very little else from that period. I think that's some kind of clue about something.

But for the most part, there are all these bands that are totally new to me. What's even weirder, I can't seem to place them at all in terms of genre. I know that if I was more familiar with this thing that is now known as "emo" (which stylistically has nothing to do with, say, Rites of Spring, and little to do with, say, Sunny Day Real Estate) that might help me place some of it. At one point they even had the authors of Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture on one of the shows being interviewed. I might have to read some books on the subject, whether I read that one or not. This whole Fuse obsession is making me feel a need to understand this stuff better. Though I'm not going to undertake any sort of Carl Wilson-style project to actually listen to a bunch of this stuff and try to find an appreciation for it. Well, never say never, I guess--I don't want to jinx myself. But I certainly don't plan on it. Still, it's this whole giant cultural thing. I feel obliged to try to understand it, at least in some kind of cursory way. But I don't even know how much of the stuff I'm seeing on Fuse is actually supposed to be emo. Seems like a lot of it is, but I'm not sure.

Mostly it's just weird running across this whole other world of popular culture that I know almost nothing about, where all my usual reference points don't make any sense. It brings up some interesting points. On the one hand, the kind of music that makes up most of Fuse's programming, whether it's strictly emo or not, definitely positions itself as...well, for lack of a better word, "alternative." The network positions itself the same way, I think. (For example, they have a show called "Tattoo Stories" that sandwiches videos between vignettes where people show their tattoos and explain the meaning behind them. Tattooing, like this emo stuff, has become pretty widely accepted while retaining an air of deviancy and transgression, which Fuse clearly wants to capitalize on.) Yet obviously these bands sell a lot of records and this TV network, while it has a sort of low-rent feel to it, is still a TV network. I don't doubt that these artists could be expressing authentic feelings of disaffection and that their audiences, however large they might be, could be primarily comprised of people who feel marginalized, different, etc. But the popularity of this stuff is at odds with both the image these bands are marketing and the self-images of anybody who somehow sees listening to them as an expression of their alienation.

I'm really interested in this disparity and whether it might relate to the fact that I've never heard of this music. Most of my information about music comes from sources that are either unapologetically oriented towards the obscure or that incorporate some degree of a poptimist aesthetic, which embraces some very overtly mainstream music but never seems to cover this music that's in denial about its mainstream-ness (though I haven't exactly done a thorough survey of poptimist criticism at this point to back up my impression). Getting into the nature of poptimism isn't something I should probably tackle in this blog post. But there have been arguments made that poptimism is more populist than other schools of music criticism, at least by some. And I wonder, if there's a lack of attention to certain veins of mainstream music by poptimists, if that suggests that the populism argument is something tacked on after the fact and poptimism is really more about an appreciation of certain aesthetics...well, regardless of what it is about, maybe it really isn't about populism at all on a basic level. Though the promulgation of the populism argument could result in pressure to live up to it, causing it to become more true in the process.

There are lots of other questions I could get into that have been raised in the course of my recent Fuse obsession, but I'll leave them for another time...

the deal

I've been thinking about starting some kind of blog to write about music for a while now. Today at dinner with some friends I was talking about it and I realized there was no reason not to go ahead and do it. As for reasons to do it, I have a few. School is out (I'm getting my masters in media studies and just finished my first year) so I have some time on my hands and could use an excuse to practice my writing. I'm also getting started with my thesis, which is going to be about...well, it's kind of hard to explain, but it's going to involve music blogs. Somehow it seemed appropriate to do some blogging about music myself, particularly in a context where I might be putting down some preliminary thoughts about my thesis and (hopefully) seeing how people respond to them.

So I'll probably be explaining (or trying to explain) my thesis idea here and talking about stuff relating to it, but I'm not confining myself to that. The only rule I'm setting is that I'll try to write every day and that it'll be something relating to music, but that's it. It might seem kind of silly to make these rules but I think it'll be a good exercise. I could always change my mind, anyways. Oh, and right now my plan is just to keep up this daily posting through the summer, until my classes start up again. I can't really say for sure what I'll end up doing, if I'll make it through the summer, if I'll keep this going in some form after that, but for now that's my plan.