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...