The First Post.
I'll be writing an introduction later. For now, I just wanted to post the following, which I posted to a music board (on a comics website. That right there should tell you something) earlier this evening. After working for like two hours on it, I thought, hell, I'm not going to get any responses anyway, why not use this as the first post in the blog I've been meaning to start for several months now?
So here it is. (Links have been added for the sake of latter-day comprehension.)
I've just spent three or four days intensely immersed in music that's no older than a year, and, man, I've got to agree with leonaozaki.
The Decemberists, to riff a while on previously established themes, are amazing; I love "Sixteen Military Wives" beyond reason; it's the most obvious and least innovative song on Picaresque, but it's got a hook as mile-wide as "Hey Jude"'s, only not faded from having lain out in the sun for forty years. (Sure, "Hey Jude" was new to me eight years ago, but man! that was eight years ago.)
This morning, I had my mind chewed up and spit back out by M.I.A.'s album Arular, and it started me thinking about the amazing range of female dance/pop acts out there right now. M.I.A., Shakira, Gwen Stefani, Goldfrapp, Lady Sovereign, Missy Elliott, Annie, Beyoncé and hell, why don't we throw in Nelly Furtado and Pink, assuming they ever release anything worthwhile again. Even Nellie McKay has some dancey songs on her recently-unreleased CD; a good DJ could sequence them properly into a banging mix. These aren't the faceless divas of the disco era (except Beyoncé, who's really more of a type than a character), they're peculiarly individual, unnervingly idiosyncratic artists who take in an astonishing array of influences from around the world and throughout history and process them into wholly original sounds.
Consider: the number one single of the past year had a backing track of a high school marching band's drum section spliced up and and reconfigured to fit a lyric line that was so cheerfully potty-mouthed it almost sounded like the singer -- sorry, chanter -- was a somewhat trailer-trash high school cheerleader instead of a thirty-something pop-music wundermädchen who could buy a small island. If nothing else, it's a weird moment in pop history.
But, to sample Alan Moore, aren't they all? Remember that Ms. Stefani first came to prominence in a ska band singing an Aerosmithy ballad in an emo voice with a flamenco guitar solo, and had her break-huge moment riding Moby's coattails. Remember him? The guy whose other claim to fame was sampling field hollers in his standard-issue coffeshop electronica? And, of course, showing up in an Eminem rhyme. Gosh, remember Eminem? Whatever happened to that guy, anyway? (That's how fast the pop market moves these days. The Great White Hope/Great White Satan of hip-hop, five years later, is doing the Noughts' version of "Tears in Heaven.") But all this is just a sidebar.
Shakira's new CD, to jump back a thought or twelve, hasn't fully made itself known to me, but here are some initial thoughts: she's still as crazy magpie-eclectic as ever (more surf-guitar breaks over sped-up tango beats! Yes!), she's got the cojones to open the album with a song forgiving God for his mistakes (shades of Patti Smith!), and, best of all, she has officially, with the song "Illegal," not only out-Alanised Alanis Morrissette (her vocals always did that), but rendered her entirely superfluous. And America thanks her.
This too is a sidebar. I'm loving how hip-hop is less and less its own specific thing (used to be that singing was as frowned upon as guitar solos in punk songs; at least the stodgy old-punk Guardian critic is still complaining about the "widdly-woos" on the Stroke's new album), and more and more just one more ingredient in the mix of sounds available. Of course, the whole concept of "sounds available" comes from hip-hop, which (of course, this is what happens; rock did it in the early 60s and jazz did it in the late 30s) has gone from being a new genre to being one genre of many to being the dominant genre to being the filter through which a generation perceives music as a whole. The impetus for this thought was that I wanted to mention Canadian bearded guys Buck 65 and Sage Francis, who aren't exactly hip-hop, but they're not exactly not hip-hop, either (they rhyme over beats). I don't know if they are actually bearded, by the way. They sound like they have beards, which is the important thing. Not hip-hop, but not not hip-hop, like grime in the UK, like dancehall in Jamaica, like hiplife in western Africa. Like, again, M.I.A., and I've finally come full circle. Now for the next ring.
I've been talking about dance music and hip-hop because, frankly, guitar music is boring me at the moment. I listened to the Arctic Monkey's new, massively-raved-over CD, and aside from the "Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" single, which I only sort of liked in the first place, was not only unimpressed, but found it gruelling to sit through to the end. Probably just my mood at the time, but does every British guitar band have to use the exact same fucking tone on their guitar? Is there now a "wiry/abrasive" setting on ProTools? God knows I love Television and Robert Quine, but the sound was only rescued by dance beats with Franz Ferdinand, was getting really old by Bloc Party, slipped into self-parody with Art Brut and now it's just useless. Until Arctic Monkeys does an acoustic set, I'll get my whimsical British social observation from the Streets and the smoking ruins of the Libertines, thanks.
That's right, you heard it here: Guitar bands are on the way out.
(Yes, joke. See, there was this Decca record executive, see, and ... oh, forget it.)
One reason for taking refuge in the past (I do it as often as anyone and more than most this side of Joe Bussard) is, though this may sound a little counterintuitive, the sheer amount of stuff available. For a music head, it's a little disconcerting to realize that there is more good music already in existence than you will be able to listen to in your lifetime; and of course, every day you live adds another ten albums. And that doesn't even take into consideration all the crappy music you have to fit into your listening schedule, in order to give the good stuff some kind of context. And it's not like everything's brilliance is immediately apparent on first listen, or even twelfth. So rather than face the horrifying prospect of spending a week with the new Nickelback album just to see if there are any deathless gems buried within, sometimes we hop a train for Yesterday City. The Eighties, the Sixties, the Twenties, the 1790s, whatever, just so we don't have to hear 50 Cent or Scott Stapp going on and on about whatever. And damn, dude, sometimes they really don't make 'em like that any more. There are some awesome crunchy-clean guitar tones in the 70's that have been processed out of existence; no one will ever sing like Howlin' Wolf again without it being an affectation; and listening to Duke Ellington loses half its magic after the invention of hi-fi.
So Tom Waits is, naturally, the way back to the present. To return to hip-hop for just a moment again, I've been wanting to say for some time that his latest record, Real Gone, sounds like hip-hop would have if it had been invented by tubercular hoboes circa 1927 in, say, northern Mississippi. The Old, Weird America has nothing on the New, Weird America. (This, to cast my line over other threads on the board, is exactly the problem with The Last Waltz. The Band were always kind of academic about their Americana, and when they started thinking that they were the giants, instead of merely standing on the shoulders of -- in short, when they stopped being weird -- well, that's when it all got good and pointless.) And so Tom Waits is, for me, kind of the pinnacle of modern music. No, seriously. He's backward-looking and forward-looking at the same time, he's incorporated so many separate strands of, well, everything into his music that the resulting tension is more powerful than any pissant group of twenty-somethings with fashionable/unfashionable haircuts and something to whine about could possibly begin to imagine, let alone express. (Not that whining can't be cool too; if more people whined like the Arcade Fire, then ... well, then I guess it wouldn't be so special.) I don't just mean the junkshop instrumentation, either. The man is the the voice of the dead 20th Century, only it doesn't know it's dead. Waits knows, but he plays along like the good theatrical trouper he is. He also knows that theatre is a spectrum, and that opera singers, rock stars, tap dancers, lap dancers, politicians, minstrels, and carnies are all working the same turf. This is why he is brilliant, because he neither condescends to the riffraff, nor rejects the elite. His fanbase may be turtlenecks and cappuccinos, but he's not responsible for that; if they can sit through Real Gone (which is one of those records that is so much cooler in the mind than in the ears), then they have what it takes. I doubt I've sufficiently explained why I think Waits is so cool (I'd have to do a track-by-track analysis of Alice for that, and, just no), but I'll finish with: Bob Dylan's Love and Theft is great for many reasons, but perhaps the most obvious is that he sounds a little like Tom Waits on it.
Okay. Last thought: new Belle & Sebastian album coming out. Who the hell thought they'd still be around? And getting cooler; "Your Cover's Blown" is one of the great head-smacking songs of the half-over decade: of course that's how they were supposed to sound! Like some tourist's fantasy of the Seventies! That faint moaning sound you hear just as the album opens is Elliott Smith realizing that the other option was this. Not going commercial, necessarily (dude already had the most devoted fanbase in the world), but going immediate, for lack of a better term. Yes, your heart is broken, but it's so much better when it's broken in 4/4 time. Twee as fuck, went the old lo-fi scene t-shirt. They got a word wrong; it should have been can.
Thank you and goodnight.
The Decemberists, to riff a while on previously established themes, are amazing; I love "Sixteen Military Wives" beyond reason; it's the most obvious and least innovative song on Picaresque, but it's got a hook as mile-wide as "Hey Jude"'s, only not faded from having lain out in the sun for forty years. (Sure, "Hey Jude" was new to me eight years ago, but man! that was eight years ago.)
This morning, I had my mind chewed up and spit back out by M.I.A.'s album Arular, and it started me thinking about the amazing range of female dance/pop acts out there right now. M.I.A., Shakira, Gwen Stefani, Goldfrapp, Lady Sovereign, Missy Elliott, Annie, Beyoncé and hell, why don't we throw in Nelly Furtado and Pink, assuming they ever release anything worthwhile again. Even Nellie McKay has some dancey songs on her recently-unreleased CD; a good DJ could sequence them properly into a banging mix. These aren't the faceless divas of the disco era (except Beyoncé, who's really more of a type than a character), they're peculiarly individual, unnervingly idiosyncratic artists who take in an astonishing array of influences from around the world and throughout history and process them into wholly original sounds.
Consider: the number one single of the past year had a backing track of a high school marching band's drum section spliced up and and reconfigured to fit a lyric line that was so cheerfully potty-mouthed it almost sounded like the singer -- sorry, chanter -- was a somewhat trailer-trash high school cheerleader instead of a thirty-something pop-music wundermädchen who could buy a small island. If nothing else, it's a weird moment in pop history.
But, to sample Alan Moore, aren't they all? Remember that Ms. Stefani first came to prominence in a ska band singing an Aerosmithy ballad in an emo voice with a flamenco guitar solo, and had her break-huge moment riding Moby's coattails. Remember him? The guy whose other claim to fame was sampling field hollers in his standard-issue coffeshop electronica? And, of course, showing up in an Eminem rhyme. Gosh, remember Eminem? Whatever happened to that guy, anyway? (That's how fast the pop market moves these days. The Great White Hope/Great White Satan of hip-hop, five years later, is doing the Noughts' version of "Tears in Heaven.") But all this is just a sidebar.
Shakira's new CD, to jump back a thought or twelve, hasn't fully made itself known to me, but here are some initial thoughts: she's still as crazy magpie-eclectic as ever (more surf-guitar breaks over sped-up tango beats! Yes!), she's got the cojones to open the album with a song forgiving God for his mistakes (shades of Patti Smith!), and, best of all, she has officially, with the song "Illegal," not only out-Alanised Alanis Morrissette (her vocals always did that), but rendered her entirely superfluous. And America thanks her.
This too is a sidebar. I'm loving how hip-hop is less and less its own specific thing (used to be that singing was as frowned upon as guitar solos in punk songs; at least the stodgy old-punk Guardian critic is still complaining about the "widdly-woos" on the Stroke's new album), and more and more just one more ingredient in the mix of sounds available. Of course, the whole concept of "sounds available" comes from hip-hop, which (of course, this is what happens; rock did it in the early 60s and jazz did it in the late 30s) has gone from being a new genre to being one genre of many to being the dominant genre to being the filter through which a generation perceives music as a whole. The impetus for this thought was that I wanted to mention Canadian bearded guys Buck 65 and Sage Francis, who aren't exactly hip-hop, but they're not exactly not hip-hop, either (they rhyme over beats). I don't know if they are actually bearded, by the way. They sound like they have beards, which is the important thing. Not hip-hop, but not not hip-hop, like grime in the UK, like dancehall in Jamaica, like hiplife in western Africa. Like, again, M.I.A., and I've finally come full circle. Now for the next ring.
I've been talking about dance music and hip-hop because, frankly, guitar music is boring me at the moment. I listened to the Arctic Monkey's new, massively-raved-over CD, and aside from the "Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" single, which I only sort of liked in the first place, was not only unimpressed, but found it gruelling to sit through to the end. Probably just my mood at the time, but does every British guitar band have to use the exact same fucking tone on their guitar? Is there now a "wiry/abrasive" setting on ProTools? God knows I love Television and Robert Quine, but the sound was only rescued by dance beats with Franz Ferdinand, was getting really old by Bloc Party, slipped into self-parody with Art Brut and now it's just useless. Until Arctic Monkeys does an acoustic set, I'll get my whimsical British social observation from the Streets and the smoking ruins of the Libertines, thanks.
That's right, you heard it here: Guitar bands are on the way out.
(Yes, joke. See, there was this Decca record executive, see, and ... oh, forget it.)
One reason for taking refuge in the past (I do it as often as anyone and more than most this side of Joe Bussard) is, though this may sound a little counterintuitive, the sheer amount of stuff available. For a music head, it's a little disconcerting to realize that there is more good music already in existence than you will be able to listen to in your lifetime; and of course, every day you live adds another ten albums. And that doesn't even take into consideration all the crappy music you have to fit into your listening schedule, in order to give the good stuff some kind of context. And it's not like everything's brilliance is immediately apparent on first listen, or even twelfth. So rather than face the horrifying prospect of spending a week with the new Nickelback album just to see if there are any deathless gems buried within, sometimes we hop a train for Yesterday City. The Eighties, the Sixties, the Twenties, the 1790s, whatever, just so we don't have to hear 50 Cent or Scott Stapp going on and on about whatever. And damn, dude, sometimes they really don't make 'em like that any more. There are some awesome crunchy-clean guitar tones in the 70's that have been processed out of existence; no one will ever sing like Howlin' Wolf again without it being an affectation; and listening to Duke Ellington loses half its magic after the invention of hi-fi.
So Tom Waits is, naturally, the way back to the present. To return to hip-hop for just a moment again, I've been wanting to say for some time that his latest record, Real Gone, sounds like hip-hop would have if it had been invented by tubercular hoboes circa 1927 in, say, northern Mississippi. The Old, Weird America has nothing on the New, Weird America. (This, to cast my line over other threads on the board, is exactly the problem with The Last Waltz. The Band were always kind of academic about their Americana, and when they started thinking that they were the giants, instead of merely standing on the shoulders of -- in short, when they stopped being weird -- well, that's when it all got good and pointless.) And so Tom Waits is, for me, kind of the pinnacle of modern music. No, seriously. He's backward-looking and forward-looking at the same time, he's incorporated so many separate strands of, well, everything into his music that the resulting tension is more powerful than any pissant group of twenty-somethings with fashionable/unfashionable haircuts and something to whine about could possibly begin to imagine, let alone express. (Not that whining can't be cool too; if more people whined like the Arcade Fire, then ... well, then I guess it wouldn't be so special.) I don't just mean the junkshop instrumentation, either. The man is the the voice of the dead 20th Century, only it doesn't know it's dead. Waits knows, but he plays along like the good theatrical trouper he is. He also knows that theatre is a spectrum, and that opera singers, rock stars, tap dancers, lap dancers, politicians, minstrels, and carnies are all working the same turf. This is why he is brilliant, because he neither condescends to the riffraff, nor rejects the elite. His fanbase may be turtlenecks and cappuccinos, but he's not responsible for that; if they can sit through Real Gone (which is one of those records that is so much cooler in the mind than in the ears), then they have what it takes. I doubt I've sufficiently explained why I think Waits is so cool (I'd have to do a track-by-track analysis of Alice for that, and, just no), but I'll finish with: Bob Dylan's Love and Theft is great for many reasons, but perhaps the most obvious is that he sounds a little like Tom Waits on it.
Okay. Last thought: new Belle & Sebastian album coming out. Who the hell thought they'd still be around? And getting cooler; "Your Cover's Blown" is one of the great head-smacking songs of the half-over decade: of course that's how they were supposed to sound! Like some tourist's fantasy of the Seventies! That faint moaning sound you hear just as the album opens is Elliott Smith realizing that the other option was this. Not going commercial, necessarily (dude already had the most devoted fanbase in the world), but going immediate, for lack of a better term. Yes, your heart is broken, but it's so much better when it's broken in 4/4 time. Twee as fuck, went the old lo-fi scene t-shirt. They got a word wrong; it should have been can.
Thank you and goodnight.
No comments:
Post a Comment