Johnny Blog: Announcements, Proclamations, Music

Self-Destructive Impulse: Listening to M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes"

2008-01-17T12:31:00.000-05:00

I was scouring blogs the other day, looking for MP3s on the Best of 2007 lists posted last month, when I had a chance to reacquaint myself with the song "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. (Pitchfork's fourth-best song of the year), a pleasant and buoyant number about selling illegal visas and taking hostages that features a chorus of what sound like children singing of their intent to murder the song's listeners and steal their money. The chorus, which is repeated three times during the song, unravels with devastating rhythmic precision: as the children sing "all I wanna do is" -- then three gunshots and the ching of a cash register culminate in the refrain of "take your money." It is dark and unsettling and, for some reason, deeply satisfying to hear, over and over.

Of course the more one listens and craves the tuneful, synchronized chime of gunshots and cash registers, the more menacing the song becomes. M.I.A. has the reputation of posing a challenge to the U.S. government and its so-called War on Terror -- her (distant) affiliation with the Tamil Tigers (a proscribed Sri Lankan terrorist organization), lyrical references to "piracy," and trouble last year obtaining a U.S. work visa have contributed to her depiction in the press as a minstrel of what, in "Paper Planes," she calls "Third World democracy." But what kind of challenge -- if any -- does she pose to Western hegemony? M.I.A., at least, has referred to the chorus of "Paper Planes" as "a joke" about her "stupid visa problem" -- and the absurdity, as she says, of "them thinking that I might [want] to fly a plane into the Trade Center" -- adding of the song, that it's "up to you how you want to interpret" it. I interpreted it as a joke, although a sharp and double-edged one; its humor undercutting its apparent celebration of violence and apathy in the same motion as it condemns the real, economically-derived violence and apathy diffusing across many developing nations. Yet a message this nuanced is effectively bulldozed by the momentum of the song's banging, hypnotic chorus. Like any successful pop single, "Paper Planes" is overwhelmed by -- and ultimately reduced to -- its most outstanding effect, namely: a juxtaposition of mechanized rhythm and the brief, repeated flash of an appealing melody and lyric. Everything else is auxiliary.

This doesn't make "Paper Planes" any less violent. The recipients of its most violent gestures, however, are not the Eurocentric structures of global capitalism, but the listeners who have paid (or deliberately, and possibly illegally, avoided paying) for the privilege of hearing it. It is "you," after all, who are taken hostage and executed, almost ritualistically -- three times over the course of "Paper Planes" -- by the imperative of its danceable, electronic beat: a comment, perhaps, on the tension between forces of consumption and production, though primarily within the context of contemporary pop music; between its listeners and the creators of their favorite mass-produced songs.

Readers can find an mp3 of "Paper Planes" here -- and watch the video on YouTube.

Rev. Charlie Jackson: Oxford American Music Issue

2007-10-12T11:16:00.000-04:00

I have an article in the current issue of the Oxford American about the Reverend Charlie Jackson, a gospel singer from Louisiana. This is the Oxford American's Ninth Annual Music Issue, which is (as always) dedicated to the music and musicians of the American South (a definition the editors interpret as broadly as possible). There aren't many places to find intelligent writing about popular music, but the OA is a reliable one -- and it's supplemented with a thoughtfully-compiled CD.

Instant gratification is available to less patient readers in the form of two video clips of Jackson performing on an Irish television show, I'm guessing in the 1990s. One of the clips features Jackson singing a version of "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus" -- a song I discuss in some detail in my article (and below) -- with an ill-suited backup band that has no idea how to keep time, and a vocal quartet that sounds nice, if a little out of place. (Be forewarned: the song begins two minutes into the clip, after Jackson has endured a painful interview with his extremely condescending host.) There is also a clip of Jackson playing "Morning Train," solo, and an mp3 of one of his 'live' cassette recordings.

All of these performances are good, but none can match the work on God's Got It, a recent compilation of 45s recorded by Jackson in the 1970s -- available on CaseQuarter, a record label started a few years ago by Kevin Nutt. Nutt lives in Alabama, where he produces a radio program for New Jersey's WFMU called "Sinner's Crossroads" (click here for an MP3/podcast -- "Sinner's Crossroads" is well worth hearing).

***

"My mother is a fish."
--As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

As I was writing about "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus," an idea occurred to me that never found a place in the article . . . about the song's plausible connection to the standard "Catfish Blues," and its familiar refrain (I wish I was a catfish, swimmin' in the deep blue sea . . . have all you women fishin' after me), which has appeared in various forms over the years, under various titles: first as "Jim Jackson's Kansas City Blues," recorded in 1928 by Jim Jackson and, later that year, as "Kansas City Blues" by William Harris; as "Catfish Blues" by Robert Petway in 1941; "Deep Blue Sea Blues" by Tommy McClennan, also in 1941; finally as "Rolling Stone" by Muddy Waters in 1950, before becoming "Catfish Blues" again when Jimi Hendrix recorded it in 1967 (and so on . . . ).

The Rev. Jackson's "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus" does not include the familiar refrain about women, and is performed in a different style -- but it retains the singer who wishes he was a fish, and who imagines himself being caught, reeled in, and submitting to a fate of ecstasy and oblivion. Of course Jackson's vision is of a spiritual, rather than earthly, oblivion in which ecstasy must be preceded by pain and remorse -- to the exclusion of fleshly indulgence. I can't help wondering, then, if the Reverend's song was a pious (even self-righteous) retort to the rambling, rolling stone ethos of the comparatively lackadaisical secular guitar-picker . . .

The Blues Going On and On (Part One): Horace Silver in the Netherlands

2007-09-18T12:34:00.000-04:00

What solace is there for me in these strange reverberations, in these unholy echoes, what relief? If in moments of despair I am drawn to the blues because integral to the music (I have supposed) is a response to every cry, an answer to every pronounced existential appeal, at what point will I tire of its evermore mechanical replies -- of these inspired visions that are in fact only shadows of a sun that has long since set?

What to make of my recent, chance discovery -- of Horace Silver, performing on television in the Netherlands nearly half a century ago?

Anyone with a basic grasp of television history, which is to say, virtually anyone who has watched television, even indifferently, should be able to situate this clip in the late-1950s or early-1960s merely by looking at it. Something in its high contrast black and white is synonymous with our perception of the era, and lends Silver's performance the aura of an authentic artifact. How much it must tell us about our past, we suppose, which is to say the phase of collective memory preserved visually in high contrast black and white. Yet the clip wasn't produced as a document of history or even as a document of Silver's performance, but as a performance of its own in which the music would relinquish its precedence to the audience, and to the audience's reception of the music -- as well as to images of individual musicians, and the manner in which they perform. This is not happenstance, given that the backs of Silver and his band have been turned deliberately away from the people who are listening to them, so that the band -- and the process of watching it -- will be captured in a single camera shot. Meanwhile the camera tends to focus on either one musician at a time -- instead of the group as a whole -- or on clusters of individual audience members, at the sake of depicting either the band or the audience as an integrated collective.

The audience, in fact, or the presumed audience, I should say -- a finite group of spectators who in 1959 were assembled in a studio-theater in the Netherlands and saw five musicians playing their instruments -- is ultimately succeeded by a different, more abstract kind of audience -- one not assembled at the time of filming -- who would experience the performance only later, in the relative isolation of its respective homes. Yet the Europeans for whom this clip was intended, who lived within broadcast range of the television station that commissioned it and saw the clip only once, presumably within a few weeks or months of its production, represent a far more integrated body than the world wide web users who (in my case) would not be born for another twenty years but who can watch the clip now as often as they like on their so-called personal computers.

What, though, does this tell us about Silver and his music? Most of what I've said is self-evident. Modern technology has permanently disrupted the relationship between those who devise and those who receive forms of expression once considered immediate. Merely lamenting this disruption will do nothing to reverse its course, nor would such a reversal necessarily be advantageous were it even possible. For the moment, it seems we instead have an opportunity to reconsider those forms -- such as jazz -- that rely on immediacy as their determining factor. The viewer who watches the clip of "Senor Blues" may be justified in regarding it as immediate, in some sense, as an arguably more vivid display of jazz improvisation than an audio recording -- but only within the context of this immediacy as an artifact of yet another technology. The clip didn't simply happen . . . and I wonder how much of its success I can honestly attribute to circumstance, the element so often prized as vital to jazz expression, providing its circumstances were highly controlled and externally manipulated by a group of producers, advertisers, and executives. (Surely there are few scenarios less conducive to the often-professed objective of improvisational freedom than the prescribed, indeed programmed, formatting of television.) So when I assume that Horace Silver's music offers each musician a chance to express himself fully while contributing to the advancement of the work as a whole, I should bear in mind that the camera is enforcing (and possibly even leading me to) my assumption by zooming in on the musicians' faces, one at a time, as they play both solo and as an ensemble. And then if I admire the sweat glistening on the musicians' faces as evidence of their dedication and of the intensity of their efforts, I may likewise consider whether their sweat is only the product of unusually bright lights necessitated by the filming. Or is a hot lamp still a hot lamp, regardless of context?

At the end of the clip, Silver retrieves a handkerchief from the lid of the piano and begins mopping his brow while he bows in recognition to the camera. The studio audience obliges him with applause and he smiles at the camera knowingly, as if the handkerchief, which emerges from the piano in a single almost organic movement, was an inspired, dramatic flourish added specifically for my benefit.

This is the first of what will likely be a three-post series. The second post will consider the relevance of T.S. Adorno's infamous excoriation of jazz within the context of Horace Silver's eternal life on YouTube. The third post will examine Cecil Taylor as a possible counterpoint to Adorno's critique. I haven't written the second or third posts yet, so they probably won't appear for a while.

Imperfect Pages

2007-09-07T11:03:00.000-04:00

I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materializes. The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent. That is why we can love the saint but cannot love God.

... How I'd love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life's purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else's soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?

The Book of Disquiet
by Bernardo Soares,
assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon

Max Roach is Dead

2007-08-18T13:14:00.000-04:00

Right now I'm not particularly interested in how "great" Roach was, whether it was him or Kenny Clarke who invented bebop drumming, or when the overwhelming body count of jazz icons will be enough to bury the music for good . . .

Right now I want to watch Mr. Roach play with his brushes again.

Then maybe watch him again, with the hi-hat . . .

and once more with the whole kit.

"My technique really developed to its present level by watching old masters like Sidney Catlett, Jo Jones, Keg Johnson and O'Neal Spencer. I had a chance to check out O'Neal Spencer when he was with John Kirby's band. To me, he was a master. Today, brushes aren't used as much as they were once, but brush technique is beautiful, and some of the guys still remember these things. Lester Young's brother, Lee Young, was a fantastic brush man, too. It's almost as much of a lost technique as tap dancing now, where black people are concerned. The development of our music probably had a lot to do with it, and the attitude that musicians brought with it; sticks were more definitive, I guess. With a lot of people concentrating on volume, brushes are just out of it, unless you could wire the wire brushes in some kind of way so that they matched the sound of some of the electronics we have today."
-- Max Roach interview with Art Taylor, "Notes and Tones," 1970-71

Watch the old master, "Papa" Jo Jones, here.

Also worth seeing are two clips of Roach with Abbey Lincoln.
Finally, a few more words and some mp3s.

Max Roach, 1924-2007.

Wake Up: You Are On Stage with the Arcade Fire (part three)

2007-06-15T09:49:00.001-04:00

This is the final post in a three-part series. Click the links for the first or second post.

Nearly six months had passed since the release of Funeral before I was willing to fully relinquish myself to the music of the Arcade Fire, and at the United Palace Theatre it was likewise only after a period of acclimation to the band and the crowd and the incredibly loud volume that I began to let go. Perhaps I was self-conscious. I was surrounded by thousands of people who, more than anything, wanted a glimpse of what I -- situated in the front row -- stood directly in the way of. Even if they weren't looking straight at me, many of them were obliged to look around my head in order to see the stage. I wondered what they thought. The songs from Neon Bible, the Arcade Fire's second and latest record, are less exuberant than those on Funeral -- more concerned with apprehension and inner turmoil than the gestures through which our worries can be externalized and, as they were on Funeral, released. The sense of everyone singing along, for instance, while not altogether absent, is no longer pervasive, and the feeling that Funeral conveyed, of having to confront something profoundly difficult, has been replaced with a retreat from something ominous and inescapable.

It had, of course, been necessary for the Arcade Fire to modify their outlook. Funeral was a beginning, an approach toward mortality that had relied on an urgent and one-off irreverence, only to draw back in awe -- enthralled, as the band's recent profile in The New Yorker ("Big Time") suggests, by the grandeur of a universe that was finally beyond its grasp; its songs forever reaching for, even on the verge of, a revelation that in the end simply wasn't there. This made for a nice variation on the young person's initial and predictably uneasy struggle with fate, but it wouldn't be sustainable if the band hoped to continue making music long term. Neon Bible would have to match the Arcade Fire's ambition with perspective and understanding if their sweeping movements and lush instrumentation was to constitute more than an empty (if agreeable) gesture. This may explain why so many of its songs address specifically the current and public turmoil that Funeral, by focusing on a turmoil that was instead universal and private, had so gracefully avoided naming. The results are clumsy and, for all the record's calculated references, lack those particularities that had distinguished the families and neighborhoods of the band's debut. There are lovely melodies and assertive rhythms, but no center of gravity to hold them together as Neon Bible is gradually overcome and buried beneath the weight of its increasingly loaded words: church, ghetto, MTV, bombs, downtown, holy war . . .

The stage production of recent performances only exacerbates the turgid subject matter, overpowering the viewer (who already had enough to look at during the Funeral tour, when the Arcade Fire was seven somberly dressed musicians) with more lights, horn players, neon reproductions of the new album cover, amplified megaphones and tiers of video screens that replicate and magnify every note and movement of the performers -- presumably a kind of comment on advertising and surveillance in the age of terror that succeeded only in making me dizzy (and sick of looking at the performers). Neon Bible was recorded last year in a church, and many of the subsequent performances have likewise been staged in churches -- the one I witnessed at the United Palace Theatre, which was originally a movie theater and is presently home to the congregation of a famous evangelical preacher, "Rev. Ike," didn't begin until the Arcade Fire had screened a brief sermon on the video monitors by an evangelical preacher (a woman, not Rev. Ike). So there is one more implication, I suppose, involving the relationship between religion and the secular media. The point is unclear. Has the media undermined our ability or willingness to pursue a meaningful spirituality by disseminating false icons, and is the hollowness of most rock concerts merely a reflection of our pervasive spiritual malaise? Is the church ideally a sanctuary from the electronic images with which we otherwise incessantly bombard ourselves? Or has televangelism subverted that sanctuary, as well as the media and perhaps the entire secularist enterprise by broadcasting messages that are originally intended for a particular congregation, to serve the political and economic interests of its leaders? The ambiguity of a song like "(Antichrist Television Blues)" seems, in this context, without consequence. If my suspicion is correct, and the setting of a church represents an attempt by the Arcade Fire to channel into their performance some celestial revelation, the band would've done better to simply jettison the video screens, stage effects, and lyrics about World War III, and instead concentrate more intently on the stylistic elements that had emerged on Funeral -- its soothing reiteration of ebullient rhythmic and melodic motifs, the singer's function as a fabulist whose stories unfold almost as a dialogue with the song of a distant and innumerably voiced reply, and of course a performance routine in which the natural playing movements of the musicians coalesce as a dance that brings all this into sharper focus, speaking to the audience -- in its best moments -- as if an intuition.

When such moments were in evidence at the United Palace Theatre, it was generally during the songs from Funeral, when little by little the crowd would begin to hum, sing, and all together emanate a tremendous ghostly noise that hovered somewhere above our heads, and commingled restlessly with the music from the speakers. If at first I regarded the singing of the crowd with skepticism, wary of a behavior that seemed mindlessly obeisant and conformist, when the noise continued to grow, at times even challenging the predominance of the musicians, I began to understand it as a form of empowerment. Rock concerts are exercises in visibility. They cultivate a yearning among musicians to see their work enlarged and circulated on a grand scale by manipulating the same yearning -- to see and be seen -- among listeners, who may find it difficult if not impossible to stand out from a crowd into which they are intended to recede. The individual who tries to rush the stage and claim a moment in the spotlight will, as several of my fellow United Palace theatergoers ascertained, be inevitably and ingloriously rebuffed by a team of so-called security guards, if not also forcefully removed from the venue altogether. An audience only effectively stakes an identity in unison. The singing of Arcade Fire listeners, then, which culminated during the last song of the set, "Rebellion (Lies)," when the musicians left the stage and for several minutes the entire theater continued humming the violin part until the band returned to play two more songs, was the most convincing act of defiance and self-discovery of the evening -- the crowd realizing that, together, it could not merely dodge the security guards but (more significantly) refuse to acknowledge the band's authority to stop the music, and thereby destabilize their claim to its possession.

Whether this qualifies as a proper purgative for the bitterness that springs inescapably from the audience of disproportionately celebrated performers is debatable. Encores are a standard element of rock concerts. If the Arcade Fire hadn't planned on playing two more songs, the lights would've turned on and everyone -- no matter how dearly they may have liked to stay and sing -- would've been forced to go home. As certain as there is a pure and elemental release that comes from wholeheartedly singing in a crowd, the moments of such release at the United Palace Theatre were occasional and of limited effect. More than half of the evening was devoted to material from Neon Bible, which is dominated by an unrelenting, brooding wariness; rather than ease or empathize with my concerns, in the end the concert merely drew my attention to them. When the band returned for its encore and I took the stage to sing "Wake Up," apprehensively and with the realization that I was being watched as well as photographed and videotaped by the rest of the audience, I could no longer tell if I was releasing something or simply working myself into a greater and more unsettled fervor.

***

The morning after the concert, I checked my e-mail and discovered -- at first with childlike delight -- that an image of the crowd on stage (myself visibly among them) was featured at the top of a popular blog. I indulged a moment of vanity in which I congratulated myself on a newfound sense of style and renown -- then took another look at the photograph and grew dismayed. I was lost in the crowd! Only the reader who already knows what I look like can identify me and see that I am actually turned in profile, as if to show off the line of my jaw. I also appear several times on YouTube, climbing onto the stage, and in a three-part video taken by another theatergoer on stage -- equally indistinct in each instance. (All told, I've found more than a dozen clips of the crowd singing "Wake Up" on YouTube -- and, in most of them, at least one and usually several audience members can be seen filming or photographing.) The more I thought about this, the more startled I became, first by how successfully I had disseminated myself across the web and then at how vacuous an achievement this was. I've often had the feeling that I'm being watched, but now, ever since the concert, I worry not only that my suspicion is true but that all I amount to in the eyes of my observers is an indiscernible blur flashing somewhere in the background of a grainy two-inch screen. Perhaps this is what the Arcade Fire are describing in "Black Mirror," the first song on their new record, in which the protagonist wakes up from a nightmare to sing of the impossibility of seeing oneself through the lens of a security camera -- "you can't watch your own image," he says, through the "black mirror" that "knows no reflection."

If so, among the conclusions one may draw from the Arcade Fire's run at the United Palace Theatre, which began on a Monday with "Black Mirror" and culminated Tuesday May 8, 2007 in the crowd taking the stage, is that the systematic surveillance to which each of us is presently subject has not been constructed by an Orwellian government agency, but by our own camera phones, wireless connections, and MySpace pages, in other words -- as Kafka implied in The Trial -- it is primarily self-imposed.

Other blog reviews of the Arcade Fire's United Palace Theatre concerts: (Mon., May7) Thoughts on Stuff, S/FJ, Brooklyn Heathen, Brooklyn Skeptic, Brooklyn Vegan, New York Magazine, Qbertplaya's Gigoblog, The Tripwire, Fluxblog, the daryl sng blog, Snakes Got A Blog (Tue., May 8) Fresh Bread, Shelves of Vinyl, Product Shop NYC, Vicarious Music (Both nights) Earvolution.

Photo: (above) of Win Butler at the United Palace Theatre, and on a screen - by Product Shop NYC.

Interesting Links: The Arcade Fire performs in Union Square, and in an elevator. Two reviews of early Arcade Fire concerts by a Canadian listener. How much would you pay to see the Arcade Fire? Did the Arcade Fire steal this guy's basketball? Is it okay for Radio City security to beat up the Arcade Fire's fans? Win Butler guest-blogs about music and Czech history. The Arcade Fire's violin player has a band called Bell Orchestre! David Bowie performs "Wake Up" with the Arcade Fire on TV. Thoughts on the United Palace gigs from opening band The National. More photos of the Arcade Fire at the United Palace Theatre on Flickr.

Notes

Frere-Jones, Sasha, "Big Time," The New Yorker, Feb. 19 & 26, 2007.

Moore, David, "Review: Funeral," Pitchforkmedia.com, September 13, 2004.

Petrusich, Amanda, "Interview: The Arcade Fire," Pitchforkmedia.com, May 14, 2007.

Schreiber, Ryan, "Interview: The Arcade Fire," Pitchforkmedia.com, February 14, 2005.

Wake Up: You Are On Stage with the Arcade Fire (part two)

2007-06-14T09:25:00.001-04:00

This is the second post in a three-part series. Click here for the first post.

Media coverage of the Arcade Fire typically refers to the band as a collective from Montreal, relying on words like family and community to describe its members (since several of them are related, and supposedly they all lived together while making the new record) as well as its lyrical concerns -- as if the Arcade Fire was a direct result, and their music the expression, of an admirable social unity. The band has found various ways to emphasize this notion in concert. For instance, the musicians stand in what is more or less a single line across the stage, so that the guitar player commands no more attention than the violinist, and even Win Bulter, the lead singer (who on some songs hands the lead-singing over to his wife, Régine Chassagne), seems to fade out of focus; while the rest of the band trades instruments, giving the drummer a chance to step from behind his kit, and the bass player a turn on the accordion; and when everyone else is clapping and singing along, including the audience, the result is a kind of continuous call-and-response. Inevitably the line extends into the seats, as the band often enters or exits the stage by walking through the crowd or beginning their performance directly in the middle of the crowd, playing for them as intimately as possible -- almost like a serenade -- on acoustic instruments. "But then there was a palpable sense that we were supposed to come play in the crowd," Win Butler said in a recent interview. "Fuck that. Maybe we will, maybe we won't. It depends on the moment. But you start to feel like you owe them, like this is what you're supposed to do. Well, we won't do that anymore, then."

Of course, by inviting the audience to sing on stage in lieu of playing in the crowd, the band doesn't elude the expectations it has created for itself, but rather proves it is beholden to them. Every indie rock band must confront this predicament once they've achieved widespread acclaim: how to embrace their growing audience without losing the credibility -- as authentic creators of independent music -- that allowed them to cultivate that audience in the first place. It is a precarious balance grounded in the fundamental double standard of indie rock, that an inherently impersonal, public, and mass-produced media should retain elements of the private and the uniquely handmade. Indie rock listeners want to feel as if their favorite musicians are friends and peers as well as stars-in-the-making, but quickly resent any performer who actually achieves (or, even worse, aspires to) wider recognition -- not only because such achievements are seen as vain and self-important but because they are betrayals of a sacred trust. The music is an exclusive pact that should remain inaccessible to the uninitiated. In the age of the Internet, however, as this proposition becomes less and less tenable, the successful indie rock musician must maintain one of two available illusions, according to his or her situation: either he should appear less famous than he actually is (often by claiming to be the unwilling recipient of a degree of fame that he did not seek, like Kurt Cobain), or more famous than he actually is (by exuding an attitude that demands attention, saying I'm a star with such conviction it doesn't matter that his audience still knows him as a co-worker or former roommate). The ideal indie performer exists somewhere on the trajectory in between these two illusions, not yet globally famous but well known among a group of informed young people distributed across the cities and campuses of North America.

Indie rock is arguably less concerned with the creation of music than by the question of social mobility. How -- and whether -- one ascends from the middle class to the ranks of the celebrity performer. Both musicians and listeners are invested in the answers, but only the musicians reap the full benefit, and consequence, of fame; the listeners merely enjoy the vicarious satisfaction of watching from a comfortable distance a precipitous climb -- and its sometimes devastating falls, relishing the moment in which a performer receives either the triumph or failure we feel he accordingly deserves. Thus the resentment and hostility with which Win Butler regards his audience in the aforementioned quote is in some sense deserved. It is also compulsory: the typical indie rock listener will lose respect for a performer who regards the masses without reservation. Yet the listeners, who don't realize that they have -- in an expression of their apparent self-hatred -- obliged the performers to dislike them, become befuddled when they do. For instance, during the Arcade Fire's first performance at the United Palace Theatre, Win Butler supposedly directed a condescending remark at theatergoers who had purchased overpriced tickets on eBay. This, according to one blogger, "confused" the crowd -- "some even booing" -- when in fact it should have been expected by the very listeners who have demanded their performers to be two precisely opposite things at once.

The challenge of navigating these contradictions has, for the Arcade Fire, been amplified by the speed with which they were beset by fame -- a trajectory that literally took place overnight, leaving the band little opportunity to adjust to a new set of expectations and without the benefit of a more gradual ascent to notoriety (namely, the empathy of an audience that prefers its performers when they are -- like themselves -- still struggling for success and acceptance). Listeners who saw the band even three months after their breakthrough performance (early a.m. October 14, 2004, the Mercury Lounge) could no longer identify with the Arcade Fire as peers -- the band was at that point playing ever-larger, less intimate venues; and their record, Funeral, was still accumulating the so-called universal acclaim that would famously include the support and approval of David Bowie. Meanwhile the images, sounds, and feelings that had during their earliest performances constituted a mutuality of audience and performer waned as time accumulated into an impenetrable distance between the present and the moment when this mutuality had been forged. For the few listeners who had attended one of these performances, its memory took on the quality of an extremely rare possession -- the beauty of which they were willing to expound on and share fleeting glimpses of, but which they considered too precious and fragile to be touched or felt by anyone else. Of course, the listener who preserves a memory with such fastidiousness will soon find in it a disappointment as inevitable as the one I experienced by accepting the invitation to climb onstage. Thus even a band whose performances seem as heartfelt as those of the Arcade Fire -- who, in the words of the Pitchfork review that helped bring them widespread attention, restored "honest emotion" and "sincerity" to popular music -- would nevertheless reach a point when the same songs played in the same way so many nights in a row sounded false and enforced, actually insincere.

A great deal of popular music -- and almost all indie rock -- derives its impetus from the presumed sincerity of the emotions it conveys. There is, however, nothing inherently more sincere about the music on an Arcade Fire record compared to any other record that is manufactured for commercial profit. What set Funeral apart was not the presence but rather the specificity of its emotion -- that here, clearly, was a record about mourning to satisfy the feeling, common among certain young people in the autumn of 2004, that something should be mourned. Precisely what was to be mourned didn't matter, and wasn't really addressed by the lyrics or gestures of the record. Funeral doesn't concern itself with September 11 or the war in Iraq, as some have suggested, nor would it be any more than an apt coincidence a year later, when the Arcade Fire performed "Wake Up" with David Bowie on television, days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans -- a performance that was later packaged and sold on iTunes to raise money for the hurricane's victims. The only certainty about Funeral is that it deals with grief, and the expression of grief, from the viewpoint of youth, which is to say that it is confused and sounds frustrated by the limitations of inexperience. Its songs refer primarily to family and to the bedrooms, neighborhoods, and forgotten names of an unrecoverable childhood, while its prominent shape -- a long sustained crescendo (that takes place within almost every song, and over the course of the entire record) -- reflects an attempt to expel the uncertainty and disorder of these evocations without controlling the direction in which they go -- the necessity is to simply send out, indeed broadcast, what feels buried inside.

The vague sense of an intent behind Funeral's aimlessness is what I suspect ultimately attracted so many listeners to it. The pressure of life's travails (the endlessness of which the youngest listeners must have barely realized) and the feeling that sorrow could effectively be mocked and celebrated in a manner both haphazard and fun was, at least, what the band called attention to in the performances that accompanied it -- the musicians each dressed in mourning black, singing and swinging their instruments, marching with drums and tambourines and -- oddly -- two of them in motorcycle helmets, beating each other in the helmets with drum sticks. The prominence of movement and line and the show of exuberance in the face of death may have recalled a traditional New Orleans funeral parade, while the record's liner notes, which spoke of the recent death of several family members, gave onlookers -- such as the Pitchfork reviewer who announced that the Arcade Fire "have known real, blinding pain and they have overcome it" -- the impression of a significant and truly healing experience, yet I couldn't help consider the whole thing banal. The record sounded derivative, the performances too far removed from a tradition that could've given them ritualistic meaning, and the concerts that autumn (at least in New York) had all sold out before it seemed they had even gone on sale. What was supposed to be therapeutic and inclusive had assumed an annoying exclusivity.

"Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard, and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask." This is the assumption on which so many listeners and critics seemed to have based their esteem of Funeral. "Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow." The words belong to Oscar Wilde, who wrote them while in prison (on charges of indecency) -- and they sound with a ring of truth. I have never doubted sorrow's prominence among the lineage of artistic inspiration, nor did I suspect the Arcade Fire of contriving the display of grief that they had, nonetheless, taken pains to emphasize whenever they appeared in the press. I only wondered if the artistic rendering of an emotion required more than the literal experience of it. Oscar Wilde didn't arrive at the lines I cited by merely drawing on his own miserable circumstances, but through an excruciating and often contradictory spiritual deliberation. The Arcade Fire's response to misfortune may have been real, but compared to a work such as Wilde's De Profundis, it is limited by a one dimensional tendency toward exaggeration, and seems in the end unenlightening. It seemed even more so the following winter when my grandfather died and I found myself turning to Funeral for answers. I didn't find many. The only revelation I could come up with, in fact, was that since most people are made profoundly uncomfortable by death, the typical reaction when one takes place within the family of a neighbor is to lavish unexpected kindnesses and support on the bereaved. Never in my life had I seen such an unnecessary abundance of flowers, and so many well wishes from strangers! My conclusion was that the Arcade Fire had benefited from an equivalent impulse felt among the writers of blogs, web sites, and newspaper or magazine columns.

Still. I continued listening to Funeral. After a while, and whether this was the result of an association that hereafter developed between it and a period of personal contemplation and solace I don't know, but I began to like it. Its melodies are sweet and easy to remember, imbued with pleasing reiterations and rhythmic buoyancy that, by humming to oneself, perhaps offer a kind of consolation. To fully appreciate its effect, one must simply give way; surrender completely to what is above all a visceral and even bodily experience. Once I was able to let go of the belief that the record should offer me direct insight into the life beyond this one, or an answer to the question of what our human endings can mean in the face of infinite, I was able to enjoy its actually charming naivete and feel invigorated by the energy of its enthusiasm.

Click here for the rest of the essay.

photos: of the Arcade Fire at the Mercury Lounge, by Brooklyn Vegan.

Wake Up: You Are On Stage with the Arcade Fire (part one)

2007-06-13T10:09:00.001-04:00

Last month I found myself in the front row of a sold-out theater, basking in a spectacle known to indie rock listeners as the Arcade Fire. It was the end of the evening, and the Arcade Fire had just retaken the stage to deliver their requisite encore. I was admiring the band's violin section -- two attractive young women with wide belts (one of them, I think, may have been playing the viola) -- as I leaned my elbows on the stage and wondered if this was one of those pinnacle moments for a young violinist: two sold-out nights before thousands of adoring fans at the United Palace Theatre, one of the largest and most elegant venues in Manhattan; national television appearances; celebrity galas; prestigious award nominations. I looked at the crowd: eager and intoxicated twenty-four-year-olds, shaking their heads, singing nahh na-na, nahh na-na as the lights blinked and images of the band flashed from video screens. I thought of the dexterity required to bow a violin string in tune and assured myself that an attractive and talented young violinist could aspire to loftier heights than these -- when all of a sudden I experienced a disorienting reversal.

Win Butler, lead singer of the Arcade Fire, was pulling audience members onto the stage and beckoning the rest of us to follow. I directed an uncertain glance at my friend, Matt, who'd been beaming ever since I told him that our tickets (secured by chance on Ticketmaster) were in the front row, as if to ask him, do you really want to climb up there? He did. So as we made our way onto the stage I wondered why now I regarded with ambivalence an invitation that, a few years ago, I might have considered an exhilarating delight -- aware not only of having been content where I was, leaning comfortably against the stage as it vibrated with the force of electronically amplified instruments, but also of a powerful and elusive threshold that this invitation had asked me to cross. For in order to claim a new position, among the ten musicians on stage, I would have to of course forgo my place as an audience member -- my position of detached observation and scrutiny -- for another in which, conversely, I would be observed and scrutinized.

I began to worry about my backside, and how it would look as I climbed onto the stage. I moved as fast as I could, upstage, hiding myself among the band and the crowd, embarrassed by the sound of my voice (for I had given in to the impulse to sing, which I was now doing as loudly as possible). I stopped in front of the violinist -- actually, I think she was the violist -- and considered her position again from up close. Her viola had been affixed with a wire connecting it to a set of pedals on the floor, presumably for amplification, which had come loose during the stampede. I could still hear her well, better actually than during much of the performance, which had been marred by excessive volume and an indistinct mix, but realized that almost no one else in the theater could. Then a stagehand arrived and attempted to reconnect the wire, which failed, as his hands were repeatedly stepped on by thronging audience members. He seemed annoyed and when the violist realized that her viola was no longer connected, she stopped playing and disappeared. Someone nearby had meanwhile seized a tambourine and begun banging it gleefully. Now it was primarily the audience members who had stormed the stage, singing "Wake Up" for the audience members who had remained in their seats, most of who were singing as well. I could no longer hear anything but bass, the drums, and our three thousand voices screaming, you better look out below!

Which was precisely my concern . . . that as I struggled to sing and recall the words to "Wake Up," effecting a posture of dignified yet wholehearted merriment, countless discerning eyes would be following me -- from the seats below, and above -- from all directions. There was nowhere to hide; wherever I went I would be followed by the searing glare of the stage lamps. I felt hot and confused. Once I had gotten situated, however, and started settling into my singing, I actually began to enjoy myself. I had sung from a stage before, and as the memory of my days as a performer returned -- the matchless and invigorating sensation of standing in front of a crowd with no clear sense of what exactly was going to happen, anything could happen, I can make anything happen -- I felt a tinge of regret at having summarily abandoned my career in music. Perhaps, I thought, this is my moment to shine. I wondered what kind of outrageous act would bring me the most attention, readying my body for a sudden discharge of impulsive energy, before I realized that whatever I did, no matter how outrageous, I would immediately recede and disappear into the crowded stage.

When we had completed our rendition of "Wake Up," a stagehand appeared and, with a commanding and spiteful glare, snatched the tambourine away from my neighbor. Our moment was over. It was time to go home. Still exuberant from the concert, though, I felt suddenly let down -- almost thwarted by such an abrupt (and somehow deceptive) ending, and wondered how many others were leaving the stage with a void inside. Later I would realize that dissatisfaction had been the only logical conclusion to a performance in which our desire to be seen and heard was at once gratified and frustrated (a typical paradox in the age of digital imagery, when visibility is encouraged by the same mechanism that overwhelms and denies us the chance to actually be perceived). Who or what, after all, could emerge distinctly from a landscape of echo and static? Even the Arcade Fire ultimately drown in their own "Ocean of Noise" -- the title of a song on their new record, as well as a problem the band encountered when they tried to perform that song, specifically the soft and gradual fade-out at the end of it that was all but silenced by cheering from the audience. If it had worked, the fade-out would have been a rare moment of graceful subtlety during an evening of obvious and sweeping gestures. When it didn't, the audience saw through -- briefly, and even if they didn't realize it -- an effect that had been tagged onto the end of the song as superficially as the invitation to climb on stage had been tagged onto the encore.

Click here to continue the essay.

photos: top, Arcade Fire violist, Marika Anthony-Shaw, by Houari B. on Flickr; below, the United Palace Theatre and a tambourine, by Matt McLaughlin.

Coming Soon: The Arcade Fire!

2007-06-11T16:49:00.000-04:00

In the coming days, I'll be posting a three-part review of the Arcade Fire's performance last month at the United Palace Theatre -- so stay tuned.

Bitter Tonic: On the Closing of NYC Night Clubs, and the Discussions of Indie-Blog Readers

2007-04-17T15:15:00.000-04:00

Last weekend Tonic, a well-known Manhattan night club, self-described as "a home for avant-garde, creative, and experimental music," closed its doors for the last time, priced out of the Lower East Side by a large and expensive condominium tower. The proprietors say they still hope to re-open in another location. Meanwhile, supporters of the club staged what they're calling a Tonic Eviction Musical Protest last Saturday, which resulted in the arrest of two musicians, as well as a press conference this afternoon outside City Hall:

"Let it be a wake-up call to say that small music and cultural spaces can no longer pay these outrageous rents and that important music and culture is being forced out of NYC! We need YOU to come to our press conference at City Hall, so that city government sees how many people need and support all kinds of non-mainstream music. ... City Councilman Alan J. Gerson of District 1 is supporting this press conference and will stand in support of our group; and will challenge other members of the City Council to come to the table on the issue of public interventions to save artistic creation in NYC."

When CBGB's closed last October, I considered the fuss Patti Smith made about "the empty new prosperity of our city" a rather pretentious display of "bourgeois sentimentality." But my feelings about Tonic are mixed. I have no illusions about the space itself -- I always found Tonic cold and inhospitable -- but neither am I optimistic that a new place will soon emerge where the free and open exchange of musical ideas would take precedence over the needs of finance. The kind of music that once played at CBGB's, or Sin-é (another recently closed and bemoaned rock club), will find a new home -- as long as that music is popular and potentially lucrative (which it still is). The music at Tonic, however, was of marginal interest from the start, and it offered limited financial incentive to either the club owners or the musicians, most of whom make a better living performing in Europe or Japan than they can anywhere in the United States.

The organization of a mass rally outside City Hall is therefore a well-intentioned, if somewhat misled, effort -- to show the officials "how many people" support a music that is, by definition, not widely supported. The task that these organizers ultimately face is in fact quite different -- and more formidable: to convince not only the officials, but the public at large that certain music must be valued and supported, regardless of its unpopularity or commercial promise, simply because it places more emphasis on the act and process of creation than on the creation itself; that the products of an artistic pursuit may be less valuable than the undertaking -- not only for the artists, but for the community as a whole.

To give an idea of how formidable it will be to convince even a sympathetic audience of this, I'm posting a series of comments about Tonic, retrieved from the message board of a popular indie rock blog called Brooklyn Vegan. The comments indicate a formidable, if latent, hostility among indie rock listeners, not only toward music of limited commercial appeal but -- what is more distressing -- the people and institutions that would support it. (These comments are conspicuously different from those posted on Brooklyn Vegan last October, when CBGB's gave its final performance, most of which were about celebrity sightings... )

From Brooklyn Vegan
(see all the comments, originally from two posts, here and here):

What can really be done though? That's capitalism, right? And also the reason that parts of Brooklyn and Queens are flourishing.

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The Tonic protesters want "to ask for public and political intervention to protect new music/indie/avant/jazz in New York City"

They seriously hope to accomplish that? Why should an indie club have more of a right to exist than some other business? Furthermore, why should people devote their political efforts to this cause, rather than something that would benefit a greater proportion of the population?

***

music venues are businesses. they may represent something culturally significant or worthy, but make no mistake, they exist to make money. real estate owners and investors are also businesses. they also want to make money. this is what makes the world go round.

what do you suggest be done about this?

force the owner of the property to not get (or try to get) more money for his investment if someone is willing to pay it? or force the owners of tonic or other venues to run their business smarter so they can make more money so they can pay more rent or to negotiate better lease agreements...such that they could stay where they are forever?

Tonic or any another venue (CBGB's...) that looses its' lease can surely open up somewhere else if they've planned appropriately. surely they knew the day of reckoning would come and they would have to consider such a move. i think that is the issue that one should attack - their lack of planning or just plain bad business sense. the owners of these establishments have let us down, not rising real estate prices.

one business or neighborhood changes or goes away, another replaces it...THAT IS WHAT NEW YORK IS ABOUT...and this is nothing new.

***

"yeah, blame the owners of these places for not making enough money booking shows that have artistic merit."

Exactly. Why should taxpayers support a business that can't make money on it's own? In the cases when taxpayers do provide subsidies, it normally goes toward the greater good of the public. I loved Tonic, but it's patrons do not constitute the greater public by far. Keep the government out!

***

so anon 9:15pm, instead of criticizing, why don't you offer a suggestion? Let me guess: raise taxes so that the government can subsidize Tonic and other venues that cater to YOU.

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Whats the point? If you cant pay the rent go find a cheaper space.

cant expect landlords to lose money in the name of experimental music and what is the mayor supposed to do about it anyway?

Get a job.

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dont any of these people have jobs?

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my favorite part about your porous arguments:

-all people that live in condos are bland and boring

-people who have or make money should be willing to lose it to investing in something that is historically a money sieve.

You sound like a bunch of naive, xenophobic hipsters. start something yourselves, sponsor something yourselves. stop complaining start doing.

***

And Elsewhere...
Similar perspectives can be found on Curbed, a blog dedicated to New York City real estate:

What is it with you socialists. You want evryone else to foot the bill for your "art". Okay, I think taxpayers should provide a fund so that teenage girls can buy Britney Spears albums. How is that different?

As it regards Tonic, if they either cannot pay the rent and/or the landlord refused to reup the lease, then that is life in the big city. Take up your shit and find another place like the rest of us do.

***

These comments are not intended to represent the majority opinion of either blog's readership, or of most indie rock listeners -- only of a tendency that exists, prominently in this case, among the audience (perhaps I should say, consumers) of the so-called independent media.

Also, the comments on Curbed feature one very intelligent exchange, between the authors of comment #3 and comment #17, which is followed promptly by the amusing retort of comment #18.

More Thoughts on Closing Tonic:

Neither More Nor Less (many lovely photos, in three parts: I, II, III)
Tiny Mix Tapes
William Avery Hudson
The New York Times
Village Voice
TimeOut New York
New York Magazine
Gothamist

Take it to the Bridge is the organization that put together Saturday's Tonic Eviction Musical Protest. They have a petition and an update on Tuesday's City Hall press conference.

Rejected Book Proposal: Metal Machine Music

2007-03-15T00:14:00.000-04:00

So this is my first rejected-book-proposal post . . . I'm hoping it will be my last . . . and if it's not, at least I can say I'm assembling a Ghost Library of my unwritten books.

This book proposal was for Continuum Publishing's 33 and 1/3 series, "of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years." I proposed a book about Metal Machine Music, Lou Reed's double-LP recording of 1975.

One has many regrets as soon as one has irrevocably submitted a book proposal. One could have misspelled an important name or overlooked an embarrassing grammatical error, for instance, or mixed up one's facts or dates or mentioned that I've never listened to the record I'm proposing to write about (at least not all the way through). One may also wonder if one shouldn't have implied that he is insane in the first sentence of his proposal -- or if music-book publishers ever avoid writers who refer to their subjects as "novelty records" or "a bad joke," "the figurative dead-end of pop music listening." (Maybe it was unwise to admit that I didn't think Metal Machine Music was "a fully realized avant-garde composition" or even "a work of art.")

Perhaps it was a bad idea from the start, to propose to write a book for people who are unusually attached to their records at a moment when I'm desperate to detach myself from mine . . .

***

[Note: the proposal was to include my name; a brief outline (up to 1000 words); a brief bio of myself explaining why I'm the best person to write about that album (up to 500 words); and a couple of sentences on which 33 1/3 book I've enjoyed the most so far, and why.]

Outline: Metal Machine Music

Perhaps I'm mad. Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music has been ranked among the worst records ever released by a respected rock musician and I'm proposing to write a book about it. Surely I'm deranged -- a four-sided LP, more than an hour long, consisting of nothing but amplifier feedback; a rip-off, as many of its original customers claimed when they returned it to the store and demanded their money back. Alright, then, suppose I am deranged . . . but only enough for the task with which I ask you to appoint me. After all, Reed was at the peak of his popularity when he released Metal Machine Music, which he considered an electronic masterpiece with "about seven thousand different melodies," "harmonic buildup," and "infinite ways of listening." Instinct suggests it was either an ingenious prank or a misguided attempt to recover Reed's waning 'street' credibility, but I'm more than happy to take Reed and the record's advocates seriously, suspend my disbelief, and consider Metal Machine Music a fully realized avant-garde composition; evaluate the record in terms of Stockhausen and Xenakis; survey its impact on the so-called noise, industrial, and ambient genres of rock 'n' roll -- Merzbow, Throbbing Gristle, My Bloody Valentine.

In doing so, however, I should be careful not to be carried away by the idea of Metal Machine Music as a serious work (like the German fellow who recently transcribed and arranged it for a 40-piece orchestra). When Lester Bangs, the well-known author of "A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise," named it "The Greatest Album Ever Made," he wasn't entirely sincere. Although Bangs said he liked the record -- and I believe that in some sense he did -- supposedly he listened to it constantly and eagerly played it for all his friends (much to their dismay), in print he called it a "migraine" and suggested, "that as classical music it added nothing to a genre that may well be depleted." He added: "As a statement it's great, as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity -- a sick, twisted, dunced-out, malevolent, perverted, psychopathic integrity. . . ." Yet I sense that, for Bangs, who is somewhat responsible for the record's enduring cult status, Metal Machine Music was more of a bizarre novelty than a work of art. This is not necessarily an insult. Bangs loved novelty records and consistently mentioned them in his articles and reviews. For him, and I think for any music geek, the novelty record adds personality to a record collection that might otherwise seem caste from a mold. Let me offer an example. A while ago I downloaded the first half of Metal Machine Music onto my iPod. I listened to it closely several times and, after a while, found I most enjoyed playing the record in the background at parties without telling anyone, then waiting to see how long it would take before my guests began to notice and complain. (Longer than you might think. Usually at least fifteen minutes, which is surprising when I explain that, by party, I mean a quiet gathering of perhaps twelve friends -- none of whom are particularly interested in electronic music or distortion.)

This anecdote serves several purposes. One is to show off my terrific sense of humor. Another is to prove that, like Bangs, I have an imaginative feel for what a record is, or should be. The truly dedicated listener, after all, aspires to something greater than good taste. Since the records he collects, studies, and really enjoys are also, as I have told myself, the very elements of being, it becomes necessary to convince, not only himself, but indeed everyone he knows, that they are not merely the commercial products of a vast and indifferent industry. By proclaiming affection for a record that almost no one would honestly say that he or she likes, whether it's Metal Machine Music or a musical adaptation of Finnegans Wake, the listener seems to achieve a rare moment of individuality and surprise among a lifetime of prefabricated certainty. Of course, it's possible that what he really achieves is only solitude and isolation. Bangs once suggested that Metal Machine Music was a "kind of ultimate antisocial act." Thirty-seven years later, the record still has a reputation for being aggressive, hostile, and off-putting. Is alienation, finally, the price of individuality in a mechanical age? If one really believes in Metal Machine Music, it is -- most likely -- as an indictment of the pop album's capacity for self-expression. The record has no songs and, in spite of what Reed may claim, no melodies or harmonies, and only the vaguest, crudest sense of rhythm. Though it came in the same gatefold, double-vinyl package as Exile on Main St. and The Beatles (white album), it refused to be identified with on the terms to which the listeners of those records were accustomed. Those who could identify with the record on its terms, a barrage of distortion and screaming feedback that was literally endless -- the fourth side of the LP* ended in a locked groove, which played the final seconds over and over until the listener decided to turn it off -- became the figurative dead-end of pop music listening, obliged to manually terminate their relationship with a potentially dangerous noise that had no foreseeable purpose or conclusion.

For the moment, however, as I look forward to transforming Metal Machine Music into a book, I prefer to see its infinite drone, not as a dead end, but as a starting point for fresh discussion; a blank slate to write upon without having to worry about fitting my statements into a context that is already set and fixed. The listening body has invested much less in Metal Machine Music than Blonde on Blonde, and this lack of preconception should allow for a greater freedom to examine both the potential and limitations of the pop album honestly. Metal Machine Music may have the reputation of a bad joke, but I'm excited by the possibility of taking that joke seriously and hopeful that, within its void, there may be a chance for renewal.

*The eight-track tape version of Metal Machine Music (pictured above) automatically looped from one side to the next, over and over, with no breaks whatsoever. [Incidentally, the photo of the eight-tracks and this caption were not included in the original proposal.]

Bio: John Uhl

Hopefully my outline has already given you some sense of my personality and relative talents as a writer. Generally, when I write, I try to allow my biography to emerge gradually, through inference and connotation. At this point what's important to know about me is that I care about records and music, in particular their potential to express truth, such that I refuse to sentimentalize my relationship with them. I may be a fan of Lou Reed's work with the Velvet Underground, but I consider his solo career erratic and have no strong convictions about Metal Machine Music, one way or the other. I haven't even listened to it all the way through (I could only find half of it online), and see no reason why this should make me less qualified to write one of your books than someone who listens to it (or some other widely beloved record) everyday, start to finish. Popular music places too much emphasis on the fan's perspective and, frankly, I think it would be more interesting to read a book in which the author worked toward a new conclusion -- rather than against his, her, or the public's bias. Of course, I have my own biases, which present themselves clearly whenever they are needed, but -- in this case -- these don't pertain to my esteem for the record that would be up for discussion.

[At this point I included two paragraphs of professional biographical information that I will refrain from publishing here.]

Thoughts on the 33 1/3 series

So far, my favorite books in the series have been:

OK Computer, because I enjoyed its numerous musical charts.

Led Zeppelin IV, because even though it addressed a record and subject (the occult) about which I had no interest in reading, I got through at least half the book.

Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love, which I like in theory, because it seems a ridiculous choice of subject and suggests a willingness on the publisher's part to take on ostensibly imprudent projects.

-- proposal written, 02.14.07

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Other Rejected 33 1/3 Proposals

Jerry Lee Lewis, "Live At The Star Club, Hamburg," by Keith Phipps
Jefferson Airplane, "Crown of Creation," by Tim Lucas (this one doesn't include the actual proposal, but is interesting)
The Jesus and Mary Chain, "Psychocandy," by Daniel Fuller
Butthole Surfers, "Locust Abortion Technitian," by Antonio Lopez
Bonny 'Prince' Billy, "I See a Darkness," by Mike Hotter
Cheap Trick, "Dream Police," by Matt Cibula
Peter Gabriel, "So," by Nik Dirga
Sufjan Stevens, "Illinois," by Benjamin Squires
Soft Cell, "Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret," by Kurt B. Reighley
The Dukes of Stratosphear (XTC), "Chips from the Chocolate Fireball," by Paul Margach
Buffalo Springfield, "Buffalo Springfield Again," by Bryan Thomas
Bright Eyes, "Fevers and Mirrors," by Sarah Feldman
Isaac Hayes, "Shaft," by AKA
Phish, "Hoist," by Dave Heaton

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Update

Of 449 submitted proposals, 21 have been selected for publication. A list of the selected proposals can be seen on the 33 1/3 blog.

See an excerpt from an accepted proposal here: Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, "Facing Future," by Dan Kois

Some Notions of a Bicycle

2007-02-17T20:51:00.000-05:00

I wouldn’t sell my bike for all the money in the world, not for a hundred billion million trillion dollars.
-- Pee-Wee Herman, “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” 1985

The future’s all yours, you lousy bicycles.
-- Butch Cassidy, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” 1969

I left her my bicycle which I had taken a dislike to, suspecting it to be the vehicle of some malignant agency and perhaps the cause of my recent misfortunes.
-- Samuel Beckett, “Molloy,” 1951

Without a word to anyone who might have had a say in the matter, I left the town square riding high on my mount and made my way through the area called Au and out into the open country, heading for Salzburg. Though I was still too small to reach the pedals and at the same time sit on the saddle—like all undersized beginners I had to stand on them—I got up a fair speed, and the fact that the road went downhill afforded me additional delight. If only my people knew what I’ve achieved already by my surprise decision, I thought; if only they could see me and at the same time admire me—for they would not be able to do otherwise! I pictured their amazement, their utter astonishment. I did not doubt for a second that my skill was such as to cancel out any offense, indeed any crime, I might have committed. Who, apart from myself, would be capable of getting on a bicycle for the very first time and simply riding off—with the supreme ambition, moreover, of reaching Salzburg? They would have to realise that I always succeeded in whatever I set my mind to, despite any constraint and opposition, and emerged as victor! Above all, I wished, as I pressed down on the pedals, having already reached the ravines below Surberg, that I could be seen by my grandfather, the person I loved more than anyone else in the world. But since they were not there to see me and knew nothing of my adventure (which was by now well advanced), I had to perform my feat without witnesses. When we are riding high, there is nothing we long for so much as an admiring observer; but there was none present. I had to make do with observing and admiring myself. The harder the air blew in my face and the nearer I got to my destination, my Aunt Fanny’s house, the greater was the distance between myself and the scene of my enormity. When I came to a straight stretch of road and closed my eyes for a moment, I felt a thrill of triumph. Secretly I was at one with my grandfather, for on this day I had made the greatest discovery of my life so far; I had given my existence a new turn, possibly the decisive turn, by learning the art of movement on wheels. This was how the cyclist met the world—from above! He raced along, his feet not touching the ground. He was a cyclist, which was as much as to say, I am the ruler of the world. In a state of unparalleled elation I reached Teisendorf, famous for its brewery. Immediately afterwards I had to dismount and push the bicycle, the property of my guardian, who had vanished almost completely from our lives by joining the army. Now I got to know the unpleasant side of cycling. The road became very long, and I began to count first the stones lining the edge of the road, then the cracks in the asphalt. Only now did I notice that the stocking on my right leg was covered with oil from the chain and hanging down in ribbons. I felt dejected at the sight of my torn stocking and my oil-covered leg, which had already begun to bleed. Was this the first stage in a developing tragedy? Before me lay Strass. I knew the countryside and the villages from a number of train journeys I had made to visit my Auntie Fanny, who was married to my mother’s brother. It all looked quite different now. Would my lungs last out as far as Salzburg? I jumped onto the bicycle and pedaled away, adopting the well-known racing posture, more out of despair and ambition than out of exaltation and enthusiasm, trying to get up an even greater speed. When I had passed Strass and was within sight of Unterstrass, the bicycle chain broke and became hopelessly entangled in the spokes of my rear wheel. I was catapulted into a ditch. This was the end, without any doubt. I got up and looked round. No one had observed me. It would have been ludicrous to be caught doing this fatal header. I picked the bicycle up and tried to disentangle the chain from the spokes. Covered with oil and blood and trembling with disappointment, I looked in what I took to be was the direction of Salzburg. When all was said and done, I would have had only another seven or eight miles to cover. Only now did I realise that I did not know my Auntie Fanny’s address. I should never have found the house with the flower garden. If I had asked, Where is my Auntie Fanny? or Where does my Auntie Fanny live?—supposing that I had actually got to Salzburg—there would have been either no answer at all or else several hundred. I stood there envying the people passing me in their cars or on their motorbikes and taking no notice whatever of my distress. At least the back wheel would still turn, and so it was still possible to push my guardian’s bicycle, though admittedly back to where disaster awaited me and darkness suddenly loomed. In my previous exuberance I naturally had lost all sense of time, and to make matters worse a rain storm suddenly came on, making an inferno out of the countryside I had just ridden through in such supreme elation. The rain came down mercilessly, completely drenching me and turning the road within seconds into a raging torrent, and as I pushed the bicycle in the downpour I never stopped crying. Each time the wheel revolved, the buckled spokes scraped against the frame. It was now completely dark, and I could no longer see a thing . . .
--Thomas Bernhard, “Gathering Evidence,” 1985

Today, on The History Channel

2007-02-06T10:38:00.000-05:00

This morning, on The History Channel, I saw the most fascinating and informative program. Perhaps you've seen it? It's a documentary, apparently, called "Patriot Games" in which a group of bloodthirsty terrorists invade America. In this case the terrorists are Irish (I'm sure you all remember when Irish terrorists invaded America, I think it was in the 1980s), but somehow this doesn't make the film any less pertinent than if the terrorists had been from, say, Iraq. Frankly, I learned a lot by watching it!

For instance, I learned all about the way a terrorist's mind works. "Patriot Games" focuses on one terrorist in particular, Sean, who went out of his way to attack the American home and family of a well-known CIA agent, Harrison Ford. Sean was very upset at Harrison Ford because, while on holiday in England, Harrison Ford killed Sean's little brother (who was also a terrorist, but still a young and relatively innocent one). Apparently Sean didn't realize that a good CIA agent never goes off duty, even while on holiday in England he is allowed -- actually, encouraged -- to kill whatever kind of terrorist he sees fit, even the relatively innocent kind. (I guess I learned something about the CIA too!) Anyway, Sean was really upset about this, so he convinced some of his terrorist friends to attack America with him, as revenge for his little brother. Pretty soon it became clear to me that terrorists don't even care about anything at all, other than revenge and mindless killings. Although these particular terrorists started out with some kind of mission (I think it had to do with something called the IRA, I'm not exactly sure, the film wasn't so clear on this point), but by the end it's obvious that the terrorists are only thirsty for blood, especially the blood of Harrison Ford and his family, for which the terrorists had gained a taste earlier in the film when they machine gunned Harrison Ford's wife and daughter (who survived, thankfully, even though his daughter lost her spleen). This, I think, is why the film was ultimately about family values. In fact, the more that I think about it, the more important I think "Patriot Games" is with its numerous messages about family values and national defense and the bloodthirsty mindset of the terrorists who will clearly stop at nothing to pursue their mindless killings, even when it means coming to America and trying to kill us family by family at night while we sleep in our own homes. Anyway, I also learned that it's better to keep the family shotgun loaded and easily accessible at all times, with plenty of fresh shells nearby, than to hide it in some closet, unloaded, with the box of shells stashed somewhere else altogether. I mean, what kind of sense would that make?

So, you see, I learned a lot by watching the documentary "Patriot Games" on The History Channel. The whole experience has convinced me to tune in to the History Channel more often in the future. In college, I used to watch The History Channel all the time. My favorite program was a documentary about all the different kinds of poison gas they used in World War I. Some kinds would choke you to death or burn you or blind you whereas other kinds would make you bleed on the inside. They sure used a lot of poison gas in that war! But now I have seen that The History Channel has broadened its scope even more and will now cover current historical events -- and with equal grace and authority. Bravo History Channel!

Kafka: Horror of the New Bargain

2007-01-22T16:40:00.000-05:00

Today we cannot forget or ignore what all this was leading to. We see the First World War, Nazism, the Second World War, the struggles for independence from imperialism, the millions of dead: starved, burnt or dismembered. We can also see the increasing anonymity of life as the scale grew larger and larger: the anonymity of death by the electric chair (first authorized in 1888), of the skyscraper, of government decisions, of the threat of nuclear war. Kafka, whose formative years were 1900 to 1914, was the prophet of this anonymity. Other artists of the same period -- Munch and the German Expressionists -- sensed the same thing, but only Kafka understood the full horror of the new bargain: the bargain by which in exchange for sustenance a man forgoes the right to have his existence noticed. No god invented by man has ever had the power to exact such punishment.

John Berger, "The Success and Failure of Picasso," 1965

[Note: The best part of this post is its comments, below!]

Gerald R. Ford; A Return Home; Grand Rapids, Michigan

2007-01-03T14:14:00.000-05:00

I don't usually discuss my personal life here, at least not in any great detail, but since an issue of (apparent) national concern has coincided with my recent family-holiday in Grand Rapids, I felt a few words of observation were in order. The body of former President Gerald R. Ford arrived in Grand Rapids on Tuesday, just hours after Karen and I were able to -- at the last possible moment -- struggle past the incompetent airline clerks at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport, a small and ineptly run outfit from which we barely escaped. We are never able to travel in and out of Grand Rapids without some awful episode, some dreadful display of incompetence that ruins our trip and sabotages whatever nice feelings we might still have for the scene of our youth and the people who inhabit it. The weather there is not nice. It is cold and damp and the sky is full of clouds. The land is flat, the buildings are low, and the dark clouded sky seems always to hang down and press forcefully into our souls.

The day after President Ford died, the front-page headline of the Grand Rapids Press was "He Saved the Nation." President Ford was, as the Press would inform us in the following days, a "man of character," an "uncommon man," a "common man," a "Michigan man." One headline even called him "a national treasure." But I find myself repulsed by the legacy he has left us, of Christian forgiveness, phony honesty, and Eagle Scout salutes. Of Michigan football and Midwestern normalcy. What an absurd lie, that the only unelected president in the history of our supposedly democratic union should be the most representative, the most down-to-earth citizen ever to take office. Maybe it’s even true! Actually, I'm beginning to fear it is -- which is even worse, by the way. To think that what the nation really wanted in the wake of Watergate was not understanding, but only someone honest-looking enough to make it all go away. This, I suppose, is his heritage: a legacy of covering up and burying, of obscuring the truth. Of looking the other way at the moment when it is most necessary to take a closer look. A legacy that -- I must admit -- is well suited to a man from Grand Rapids.

Watching the President's funeral on cable yesterday, I heard many references to "values." Middle American values, Christian values, the "values of a place like Grand Rapids." Every moment of the funeral had been scripted by the Ford family, but it was Grand Rapids that played the most important role, lending its so-called values to this fairy tale pageant about a Michigan everyman who accidentally became the Leader of the Free World. I won't specify why the values of Grand Rapids are, in my mind, far from unimpeachable. But I will say that the sight of Dick Cheney sitting in the pews of the church where I once watched my brother being baptized set my teeth on edge. Donald Rumsfeld giving a eulogy from the same podium where, two years ago, my father and uncle eulogized my grandfather -- this actually made me nauseous. This church "where the Fords worshipped since the 1940s," this Grace Episcopal Church, where I formerly recited the Lord's Prayer and sang hymns and never once saw anyone from the Ford family praying or worshiping or singing beside me, may no longer be a part of my life, but (even though I do not believe in God and have long since moved to New York) I find myself unable to leave it for good.

So I watched in morbid fascination, waiting for the moment when the President's casket would at last be dropped into the ground. I wanted the closure of that moment, of the final burial of thirty years of subsequent burying and covering up and turning a blind eye -- but, in the end, that moment never came. The cameras turned away. (A respectful gesture for the Ford family, certainly, but a kind of final denial as well -- a refusal to acknowledge the mortal facts one last time.) Instead I am left only with the following remark, which President Ford is said to have made shortly before his death:

"When I wake up at night and can't sleep, I always think of Grand Rapids."

BCS Mess: Three Arguments Keeping the Bullshit Corporate System in Place

2006-12-12T15:14:00.000-05:00

Although I happened to graduate from the University of Michigan, I would've been just as frustrated had it gone the other way and Florida been left out of the national title game. This was a lose-lose situation, and everyone knew it. If UCLA hadn't beaten USC, it would've been a lose-lose-lose situation. (In fact, if you count Boise State -- and you probably should -- it already is a lose-lose-lose situation.) My feelings about the BCS are well established: it is a Bullshit Corporate System that only serves the interest of a few bowl-game administers and university presidents, and of course the advertisers. No one who plays or watches college football likes it and no one ever has. Nevertheless, the sports media continues to stand up for the BCS. Here, then, are three of the ridiculous arguments now being made on the system's behalf. Again, if Florida had been left out, the arguments would be different (perhaps even easier to diffuse). For the moment, however, I am interested in the given circumstances and will argue against the arguments that presently seek to defend this sham so-called championship.

Florida had a tougher schedule

This is an inherently arbitrary claim that relies on the premise that the SEC is the strongest conference in college football -- a very dubious premise, since the only way we have of determining the relative strength of one conference as opposed to another is by watching teams from one conference play other teams from their own conference. The SEC may have several teams with excellent records this year, but most of those victories were won over other SEC teams. This makes for a closed circle of victory. It works the same way in the Big Ten, Pac 10, and every other conference. The only way to determine whether one conference is better than another is to play more inter-conference games, but match-ups between top teams from different conferences are incredibly rare during the regular season. Even the ones that do take place tell us very little about which conference is the best. For instance: just because Ohio State beat Texas (this year) doesn't mean the Big Ten, as a whole, is necessarily better than the Big Twelve, as a whole. And so forth.

The dearth of inter-conference games is a symptom of how ill suited college football is to determining a national champion at all.

Michigan didn't win its conference championship

This places a fundamental importance on conference championships that is not in keeping with the increasingly national character of college football. One of the reasons the BCS has failed so thoroughly is that it is a quick-fix solution -- a hasty attempt to transpose national legitimacy onto the vestiges of a regional system. College football was originally, and has for most of its history been, a regional game. Due to the limitations of long-distance travel in the early-twentieth century, when the game came of age, local rivalries were more important than defeating a team from six states away. A bowl game was an opportunity to play on a more visible stage, perhaps, to extend the scope of a school's reputation, even to test one's own worth, so to speak, against an unfamiliar opponent. But the bowl system was never intended -- and is not well suited -- to serve as the basis of a national championship.

When I was growing up, Michigan fans didn't care who won the national championship -- we all knew the end-of-season rankings were an arbitrary farce, and that the only important thing was to go to the Rose Bowl. It didn't even matter if we won the Rose Bowl (though winning was always nice) because just going was sufficient proof of a successful and hard fought season. But cable television has had its influence and, this year, the disappointment among Wolverine (and USC Trojan) fans, whose teams are going to the Rose Bowl as a consolation (!), signifies the totality of our shift. Fans now care more about the national championship game than anything else, about a perfect record and "finding a way to win" than about the other, more abstract qualities that might make for an excellent season.

This can make for a boring season, I think, in which everything seems to come down to a single game. This year it was the Michigan/Ohio State game, which was all anyone wanted to talk about for more than half the season. Last year it was the USC/Texas game. These were both great games, but they also wound up making the rest of the season -- and all the other bowl games -- seem irrelevant.

In college basketball, a decidedly national game, which came of age during the era of plane travel and birthed a popular and non-controversial tournament, it is common for a team to win the NCAA championship without having won its conference championship. It is also not unprecedented, in men's basketball, for two teams from the same conference to play in the title game: Michigan and Indiana met in 1978; Georgetown and Villanova in 1985. To my knowledge, no one has seen this as a reason to question the credibility of the Final Four.

So if college football is going to come to terms with its desire for the two best teams in the country to play each other in a title game, it will have to acknowledge the possibility that, at some point, the two best teams will come from the same conference. It is a statistical inevitability.

At least this isn't the computers' fault

When Florida coach Urban Meyer was asked about the potential for a Michigan/Ohio State rematch in the BCS title game, he said that such a match up would be immediate grounds to abolish the BCS in favor of a playoff. "All the presidents [would] need to get together immediately and put together a playoff system," he said. "I mean like now, in January or whenever to get that done." Incidentally, now that his own team is playing Ohio State instead of Michigan, Meyer isn't pushing for a playoff nearly this hard. "It's an imperfect system," Meyer said after his team was selected for the title game. "If you want a true national championship, the only way to do it is on the field." (If you want my opinion, selecting Florida was an entirely political decision. Surely the BCS knew that if they didn't select Florida, Urban Meyer would've had a conniption and done everything in his power to destroy the BCS. As things stand, Meyer has been placated and Michigan's coach, Lloyd Carr, a "company" man who wouldn't yelp if a university bus ran over his daughter, has -- predictably -- not raised much of a fuss.)

Meanwhile, when Meyer was asked about what happened in 1996, when Florida won its only national title by beating Florida State in the Sugar Bowl, a rematch of a game that Florida had lost at the end of the regular season, Meyer said, "that was a completely different era." He said, "I think what happened in 1996 was a lot different because you didn't have the BCS. You had simply voting at the end and that was unique. I don't believe that's right either, what happened in 1996. I think it worked out, but there was no BCS."

Yet it is apparent that, even with the BCS, the national title is still largely determined by "simply voting." This supposedly different era is actually the same as the previous era. What's so strange is that many of the pundits are using this argument to defend the BCS. This year, the computer polls interpreted the choice between Michigan and Florida as a dead draw -- in the end it was the human polls, rather than the computers, that selected the title match up. Since many of the anti-BCS arguments made in previous years invoked the BCS formula, which seemed overly determined by computer polls, the media now seems to believe that the BCS has finally got it right! Of course, this is only a matter of convenient memory. Anyone who can remember farther back than last season will recall that the argument for implementing the BCS in the first place was that human polls had too much influence in determining the national champion.

Oh, how far we've come!! Such great lengths to sell more tortilla chips!!!

*For more on the BCS, read my post, BCS: Stands for Bullshit Corporate System.*

This Blows: YouTube, Mp3 Blogs, and How to Hype a New Band (as in, The Blow)

2006-11-24T13:37:00.000-05:00

I'd rather not make a habit of this. It was with reluctance that I posted my first YouTube clip, and it is with remorse that I will post my second (below). This clip, of a recent performance by the Blow, has been watermarked as the property of the indie rock magazine, Fader, as well as YouTube (which is owned by Google). In it you can see that, before she begins, the singer will try to sell the audience her band's new record. I happen to like her new record, but still I worry that by posting this clip I am facilitating the process through which the so-called independent media commodifies the spirit of music-for-its-own-sake. Music that may have begun with the intention to create autonomous expression has by now been rendered a commercial product that I am in the process of distributing. What's worse is that if you wind up buying Paper Television, the new record by the Blow that is advertised in this clip, not only will I have helped sell it to you -- I will have also sold you the idea that you are buying an authentic and meaningful form of self-expression. No music betrays its own good intentions as self-consciously as indie rock, and nowhere are those intentions betrayed so readily as the blogosphere. The idea behind a blog, after all, the reason it is a successful way to promote popular music, is that it feels more personal. The recommendation isn't coming from MTV or a professional rock critic, but from an actual human being -- who, we think, really digs this music. Of course, that is an illusion. Blogging may have worked that way for six months in 2001, but by now most blogs -- especially the well-read ones -- have been fully integrated into the industry's machinery. Not every blogger is a shill, but even those who mean well don't seem aware of their place in the mechanism. The rest, meanwhile, simply regurgitate press release or marketing copy (sometimes verbatim), post mp3s and links to the MySpace page of whatever band is presently up for discussion, and relegate the actual discussion -- or whatever passes for it -- to the comments boards. This is an externally controlled and inherently limited mode of expression that undermines the little opportunity we still have to engage in a broad and meaningful dialogue about popular music.

I have alluded to this before, in regard to my qualms with The List, but now I can clarify. The lack of such a dialogue online, where it would seem most at home, is in some sense a result of the blog's specific appeal, which is to value a sense of intimacy or honesty over analysis and judgment. This is generally achieved by means of a clever, apparently offhand, and ironic voice that says amusing things like, Yeah, you all know I have the unholiest of unholy loves for Interpol and the National. (A smart, if ultimately unchallenging, variation on the intimate voice can be seen in this video review of the Blow's song, "Pile of Gold.") The message conveyed by this voice is I'm a real fan, my devotion is genuine, readers should trust this band truly moves people.

The bloggers, I suppose, don't have the luxury of being philosophical. Music festivals like CMJ, where the clip (below) was taken, feature a lot of potentially exciting bands. The Blow was only one crop among this year's bountiful harvest, and every word spent on them would subtract from the time left to pitch the Knife or the Thermals or the (aptly named) Annuals. It happens every year, new bands emerging alongside autumn's back-to-school clothes while the old ones are stored away and forgotten with last summer's shorts. This twisted harvest ritual, insofar as it can be called a ritual at all, has to satisfy the industry's insatiable hunger for new products. In the end, it this hunger -- the industry's -- rather than our need for nourishment, which compels the craving for tunes. The tunes won't nourish us. They offer easy, fast-burning energy, not protein and vitamins. The notion that these tunes might sustain us is a myth perpetuated by The List and the larger web sites, which is accepted by the blogs as a given. At Pitchfork, which employs a team of writers and a finely calibrated decimal-point rating system, readers are offered only the pretense of criticism. There are words and ideas, but no reflection, no connections, no analysis. Significant questions are not raised and the cultivation of complex thought is actually discouraged -- by the rating system in particular. Indeed, Pitchfork's rating system reveals how literally mechanized the process of turning out new, discussable bands has become.

The blogs, as I've suggested, don't usually bother with even the pretense of criticism. They proceed from the assumption that the music they like is important and worth linking to -- and don't care to have that assumption undermined. Contrary opinions are only acceptable when they conform to the circle's expectations. Judgment may be passed, casually, especially if it is tinged with irony and self-deprecation, but serious criticism is not appreciated. In certain cases, as I have discovered, the bloggers will gang up on a dissenting voice and, if it threatens them sufficiently, as I did, they will expel the voice from their midst. Open minds must be annihilated inside the sphere that has made laws of cherished opinions.

Anyway, perhaps you should listen to and see the Blow for yourself:

Now perhaps you like her song, and perhaps you don't. I found the performance charming. It's not quite as appealing as the recording, but it seems heartfelt. Her voice is ordinary, sometimes it cracks, and her shirt is halfway untucked -- but this only further endeared her toward me. The song is called "True Affection" and it's the final song on the Blow's new record. It was also my favorite song when I first listened to the record. On my second listen, I didn't care for it as much. It seemed too easy. On a record struggling with love, relationships, and miscommunication, it is the sparest and most intentionally sincere ballad. It tells the listener it is pouring its heart out too eagerly. I am awkward, it says. I am lonely. Love me for my awkward loneliness -- know the meaning of "True Affection"! I decided to withhold my affection instead. (I think that placing the song at the end of the record is manipulative, a trick designed to leave us feeling lost and forlorn -- yearning for something unnamed that can only be found by listening to the record again and again.) I decided that "Parenthesis" was my favorite song of the record instead. "Parenthesis" is clearly superior to "True Affection" anyway since it features hands-clapping. Clap-clap, clap! It also depicts a scene between two lovers in a grocery store in which the girl sings of something in the deli aisle that makes you cry. I love this lyric. It makes me nauseous. One of the Pitchfork writers tried to complement this lyric, but actually ruined it -- and then made an incoherent accusation about the originality of the hands-clapping. (Who cares if it sounds like "My Boyfriend's Back"? Does that make it any less enjoyable to clap along, or bob my head and tap my feet on the ground as I listen?) Something in the deli aisle! Makes you cry! Of course I put my arm around you and I walk you outside, she says, through the sliding doors, why would I mind? More affection is implied with the words of course than through the entire performance clip of "True Affection." For weeks I listened to "Parenthesis" every day, singing it out loud to myself whenever I was alone. It haunted me. Then, after a while . . . I became bored of it. I had listened to it too many times. At the moment, my favorite song on the record is "Fists Up." "Fists Up" features hands-clapping, like "Parenthesis," but has the additional benefit of not being the subject of a lame Pitchfork review. Also, the hands-clapping is more urgent -- two well placed claps snapping from out of nowhere. Fists up! she says as the beat increases and electronic swirls encircle her voice. I don't wanna come to the point of this song, she says, because the point of this song would have to be sooo long -- long -- long -- long -- and it becomes very quiet and suddenly she is all alone, singing ah ha haaaa, her voice turning circles in overdubbed harmony with itself.

I am in awe of this song.

If you haven't left the site to look at the links I've been posting, or if you have but you haven't seen this for yourself, the cover of the Blow's new record depicts a girl and a boy together. The boy, as you may have noticed, doesn't appear in the performance clip from CMJ. He wasn't there. He was performing in Europe with his solo project, YACHT. The boy's role is to create the Blow's rhythm and instrumental tracks while the girl sings the songs, but I don't get the impression they perform their music together in person -- at least not very often. The best place to see them together is on the cover of their new record or in publicity photos on the band's MySpace page, where they appear in two streaming videos. One of the videos depicts them in a loft, working at a computer on their new record (although the only time in the video that they appear side by side is in a video-within-the-video that shows a holographic version of them both dancing on a computer screen).*

In concert, as I was saying, the girl has been performing by herself. Her name is Khaela Maricich. She has a blog called The Touch Me Feeling and, on it, there is a post about being alone called Alone vs. Alone. I have had this idea of myself, alone, Khaela says. In it I am cool. I carry a bag that I have packed very well, and I listen to my ipod often, because it has a lot of interesting and inspiring music, which makes me feel both comforted and adventurous. She says that on her adventure she takes pictures of herself alone. A photo of myself on the toilet, she says, to show myself later. Then she seems to pause, and wonders: Is the picture secretly to show to someone else later, when I am telling them about how cool it was to be by myself all night?

This question, I think, can be phrased another way and applied to her performance at CMJ. Was it truly heartbreaking to watch her on stage alone, a victim of circumstance, trying to perform the songs she had written and recorded with her friend, or had Khaela's solitude been intended somehow? A picture to secretly show someone later . . . (to convince them she is cool). Indie rock thrives on displays of emotional vulnerability, and Khaela's performance -- which is naïve and off key and emphasizes the words I never felt so all alone -- is the stuff of which indie coolness is made. You feel awful for her and touched at the same time, according to the review Pitchfork gave her new record (which received an 8.3 rating, and was included on the site's Also Recommended list). I bought her record because of this review. Actually, I bought her record because two years ago I had downloaded an mp3 of her song "Hey Boy," which (can be heard on the band's MySpace page and) represents the moment when the Blow first becomes a couple. Originally, the band had been Khaela's solo project. There was no boy in the Blow -- it was just Khaela, single and alone, with some of her friends sitting in for support. "Hey Boy," it seems, is Khaela's way of introducing listeners to her new partner, Jona Bechtolt.

"Hey Boy" is the reason I bought the Blow's record. It is a song about a girl who likes a boy and wonders why he hasn't called her. She gave him her number. She has been waiting for days and, after a while, she begins to speculate . . . a) you're gay, b) you've got a girlfriend, c) you could've thought I came on too strong, or, d) I just wasn't your thing, no ring. The song has hands-clapping and electric beats and, near the end, Khaela says it's not a lot that I want, just some talking. I always start laughing to myself as soon she says a) you're gay and, then, when she says it's not a lot that I want, just some talking, I think awwww!!

But the Blow is more than cute, and the anxiety expressed through their music is not merely endearing bittersweetness. It is a statement made possible by the very technology that keeps Khaela separated from her partner and which, every day, helps implement a new and evermore frightening kind of American isolationism. America Online. YouTube. MySpace. iPod. The trajectory from collective aspiration to individual profit is striking. It is the difference between good intentions and their accomplishments; the difference between when Khaela confidently sings I will always be around, and when, later, she corrects herself and says, I thought that I would always be around.

I pretty much only know how to write about myself, Khaela says in an interview with ELLEgirl magazine ("Parenthesis," ELLEgirl says, is our latest obsession). I like being alone in my house, zoning out, sitting in the bathtub and singing to myself, she says. She doesn't play any musical instruments particularly well, though she picks around with the guitar and the keyboard. So if someone wanted me to perform live while playing an instrument, she says, I would have to practice A LOT. This is where Jona comes in. Jona can play several instruments competently and is skilled at programming music with a laptop computer. The pair met about four years ago through friends. Khaela said she wanted to make pop music and Jona seemed interested. They decided that, together, they would make what Khaela calls, clean radio-style songs that our moms would like. At the time, this may have seemed a daring proposition. It wasn't easy for an indie mindset to reconcile pop songs with its preference for supposedly handmade music that attempts to be difficult to listen to. So it was important, as Khaela told ELLEgirl magazine, that Jona was willing to go all the way.

Four years later, the Blow have made two records of clean radio-style songs without losing their indie credibility. The indie landscape, it appears, has changed. Inexpensive computer software has made it easier for an individual to create glitzy songs without betraying the do-it-yourself ethos. File-sharing, blogs, and mp3s have made it easier for a band with a local reputation to instantly achieve national or even international recognition. And Pitchfork, which stated in 2004 that not liking pop singles was a form of bias, has been called the new Rolling Stone. The Blow, meanwhile, have the advantage of apparent authenticity. Their MySpace page says they are from Portland, Oregon, and their press write-ups are quick to say things like DIY or Pacific Northwest scene. Listeners who make their way to Khaela's blog and read her Alone vs. Alone post will find 31 comments from people offering reassurance and thoughts on being alone. Take heart, says Lindsey. Take heart, says Luke. They all wish Khaela wasn't alone. They all want to be with her. (And I get the sense that many of these people are Khaela's real friends.) I think you're really really great, says Mitsu. Jona, meanwhile, has an mp3 on his website that was featured on French National Radio called "Music By Friends for the Radio in France" of previously unreleased remixes and songs by the Blow and their friends' bands. Friends, friends, friends! he says. (According to the band's MySpace page, the Blow have 10,656 friends -- and counting -- while MySpace page visitors have played "Hey Boy" 126,670 times.) This is intimate music, made special by friends, for their other friends to share (while it is distributed anonymously online to 100 million global users at a time). You can share it too.

The Blow make no apologies for expanding their audience. In fact, the band's MySpace page proudly asserts that the Blow have developed a pop music formula, fashioned, as the best popular music is, with the function of getting under the skin of the people. (I don't know about The People, but I usually take special care to avoid things that would penetrate, and dwell beneath, the barriers of my flesh.) Perhaps the Blow don't realize that they have compared themselves to a parasite. Perhaps they do, but feel that, once it has burrowed its way inside us, their message of friendship, sympathy, and understanding could only be beneficial. I'm less optimistic. The gleaming electric beats and themes of inspired loneliness are so alluring I fear they wind up sentimentalizing what we might otherwise call despair. We become lost and wallow in darkness instead of learning to recognize our despair and call it by its proper name.

The Blow's characters are aware of a pervasive loneliness. They sing of great distances between friends and lovers, of lost hope and long hours at work -- even as they hold out for a utopian peace (or at least a light at the end of their long tunnel of struggle). Yet peace won't come. The rebels just can't muster the force, Khaela sings, to walk the thin line between belief and delusion. She has stopped calling for them to raise their "Fists Up" and, as the song ends, Khaela seems unable to say anything but ahhhhhh. Distance and frustration have culminated in a final isolation -- not only for the Blow's characters, but for the listeners who don't realize that this music is alienated from itself by means of its very structure. The way that Jona and I record, Khaela says, all on separate tracks on the computer, it works for us to pick out single lines of music and compile them all together. Khaela doesn't say whether the Blow write their own tracks or borrow them from other recordings, but Pitchfork, in its Track Review of "Parenthesis," says that the Blow have appropriated some of their material in a perhaps irresponsible manner. Pitchfork's argument isn't very clear, but it seems aimed at the present concern over copyright protection and ownership. I'm not very interested in this concern, however, which is generally understood in the most simplistic and cynical terms, because I think there's something more basically problematic about music that is constructed from samples, whether these samples are borrowed or originally composed. It makes for songs that are a mere, as Khaela says, compilation of separate tracks and single lines. None of the songs is an integrated whole, but rather a mix of unique parts that have been unified primarily by circumstance (this sounds good with that . . . these sound good with those). The final product is nice, sometimes, but the elements out of which it has been fashioned are estranged from the contexts that originally gave them meaning. Intention, finally, has been removed from the equation, no longer a factor at all.

Watch the Blow's YouTube clip again. After a while, the similarity between Khaela's performance and a karaoke routine will seem less charming. Eventually one realizes that, in this music, any given vocal performance is interchangeable with its accompaniment. The track playing behind Khaela will be the same whether she is singing in New York, Chicago, or Portland. It is inflexible. A pervasive inflexibility, moreover, which may be brought into clearer focus by considering the phenomenon of the remix. Remixes rely on the fact that certain musical works have already been divided into two basic -- and separate -- parts, vocal and instrumental tracks. Either track is potentially disposable. The instrumental track may be disposed so that the vocal track can be matched with a new instrumental track; or the vocal track may be disposed so that the instrumental track may be matched with a new vocal track. They are like a pair of my socks: each fits on either foot, and they're both sized 6-11½ -- for just about anyone.

Music like this is not multi-dimensional, and art that is one-, or in this case perhaps two-, dimensional will never give us insight into the paradox of modern communication. It may even perpetuate the paradox by sabotaging our willingness to address its fundamental questions. Why, for instance, do we feel so alone in spite of our ever-greater capacity for interconnection? Why do we attempt to resolve the isolation of a technological age by spending more time on the phone or online or surrounded by holographic images of the companionship we so presumably lack? It seems to me that, not so long ago, it was a blessing to have a little quiet time to one's self. Now, however, we would rather preoccupy ourselves with someone like Khaela. Her projected insecurity becomes a focal point for our anxieties. We begin to feel a connection to her. The stability of a knowing, recorded presence that will always be there, exactly the same, makes us feel less alone when, in fact, we are no less alone. At one point, for instance, after I had listened to "Parenthesis" eighty-seven times in a row, I decided that I was even in love with Khaela. The coy toss of her eyebrows, the way she says ah, her white ruffled shirt. I began to yearn. At first I had assumed she was too young for me. Later one of the comments on her blog led me to believe she was closer to my age. This was exciting. I imagined her singing, holding my hand, whispering of course in my ear -- until suddenly I remembered a) I've never met her, and b) I've got a girlfriend. (Karen, my girlfriend, has been crushing on the Blow along with me, incidentally; her favorite song is "True Affection." We have been listening to it on our respective iPods as we ride the train together.)

In the end, I sense something unhealthy about this relationship. I have nothing to offer it. I only receive. I am given the same simple sentiments, over and over, without any nuance. Karen and I are tired of the Blow now. Their music unsettles us. We no longer want their songs in our heads.

The Blow, however, will not leave us alone.

(WHEN I-I-I-I-I'MMMM HOLDING YOOOOOOU, WE MAKE A PAIR OF PAR-EN-THE-SIS!!!

THERE'S PLENTY OF SPACE TO EN-CASE
WHATEVER WEIRD WAY MY MIND GOES

WHEN I-I-I-I-I'MMMM HOLDING YOOOOOOU, WE MAKE A PAIR OF PAR-EN-THE-SIS!!!)

NOTES

*This video has since been removed from the Blow's MySpace page

"Parenthesis" mp3 (above), via Instrumental Analysis

"Fists Up" mp3 (above), via Merry Swankster

Khaela's performance photo from Flikr, via FixedGeer

Other blogs discussing the Blow

Gorilla vs. Bear
Idolator
Indieblogheaven: Music for People with Taste
Lullabyes
Macktronic
Podbop
Slutty Fringe
Stereogum
Steregum, again (with video!!)

Also

Khaela's blog, The Touch Me Feeling (her Alone vs. Alone post)

Jona's web site for YACHT

Pitchfork's review of Paper Television

Cultural Revolution

2006-11-16T10:10:00.000-05:00

Now the question arises: if today we are witnessing a disintegration of bourgeois culture which is the work of the internal dynamic of contemporary capitalism and the adjustment of culture to the requirements of contemporary capitalism, is not the cultural revolution then, inasmuch as it aims at the destruction of bourgeois culture, falling in line with the capitalist adjustment and redefinition of culture? Is it not thus defeating its own purpose, namely, to prepare the soil for a qualitatively different, a radically anticapitalist culture? Is there not a dangerous divergence, if not contradiction, between the political goals of the rebellion and its cultural theory and praxis? And must not the rebellion change its cultural "strategy" in order to resolve this contradiction?

Herebert Marcuse, "Counterrevolution and Revolt," 1972

Johnny Blog: Now with Moving Pictures

2006-11-08T18:58:00.000-05:00

With some reluctance, I've decided to post the occasional film from YouTube. I find myself unable to overlook the wonder of a technology that affords us such incredibly blurry clips of Eric Dolphy and Booker Ervin trading fours.

CBGB's: Leaves Home

2006-10-17T09:28:00.000-04:00

Glad to see you
Go go go
Goodbye

Glad to see you
Go go go
Goodbye

Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye

The Ramones,
"Glad to See You Go"

Sunday night was the last evening of live music at CBGB's. The New York Times has mucho plenty coverage, and there's more here, here, and here. It's a relief to have it over with, though. The club hasn't produced any significant music in more than twenty years and, while memories are nice, this several-month-long sendoff has assumed an aura of positively bourgeois sentimentality. Patti Smith called the closing "a symptom of the empty new prosperity of our city" -- but, for the last few years, I've found the CBGB t-shirts that have been so popular among NYU students and other young residents of the recent, upwardly-mobile Downtown to be a far more emblematic symptom of such "prosperity." With each day I find myself a little more skeptical that a genuine counterculture has ever existed in postwar America, but I suppose that, for a few years in the 1970s, at least, CBGB's represented the idea that something good could come of not fitting into a conformist and increasingly prefabricated society. Not a revolution, certainly -- in fact it was the beginning of a new brand of conformism -- but for a little while, it seems, there was a flicker of hope.

So, as Lester Bangs once said of John Lennon: Good-bye, baby, and amen.

P.S. Richard Hell is looking forward to a CBGB's afterlife in Vegas. ("CBGB’s is going to be dismantled and reconstructed as an exhibit in Las Vegas, like Elvis. I like that. A lot. I really hope it happens as intended.") In a way, I suppose, the punk rock uniform -- leather jacket, tattoos, ripped jeans, piercings, optional mohawk -- already has an ersatz, mask-like quality that is reminiscent of the Elvis-impersonator. Perhaps one day the people who dress like this will be called punk rock impersonators...

The List is a Fucking T-Shirt

2006-09-15T14:15:00.000-04:00

A t-list is a t-shirt with your top 5 list on it.

According to the site, you can...

Become part of the vernacular and have people in bars say: "Dude, that band is definitely on my t-list, too."

And what could be more fun than that??? You can list your top 5 bands or, get this, your top 5 overrated bands. I know, I know: just thinking about it is exhilarating. (I mean, look at the enthusiasm that has infected her face?)

Seriously, I think this is the most repugnant idea I've encountered all week...

T-List. Now argue for hours anywhere.

The Book Scandal Strikes Back

2006-08-30T15:44:00.000-04:00

And this time it's a real writer who's under the gun: Günter Grass, Nobel Prize-winner. I'm not going to say much about this other than to remark that these book scandals seem to be getting more serious. Next thing we know, Charles Darwin will be accused of having rigged Origin of the Species.

Seriously, though, we're getting closer to a potential carthsis this time. The betrayal represented by Mr. Grass, his memoir, and its revelation that he was once a member of the Waffen-S.S. is far closer to the sort of massive, international political treachery that I believe these scandals are sublimating.

For me the big question that remains is what the skepticism of Grass (as well as less distinguished authors like James Frey) implies about our contemporary attitude toward truth. There seems to be a growing sense that, in every arena, those who have been appointed to articulate our collective truth are somehow dishonest -- not only with us, but (perhaps even more imporatantly) with themselves. Is this what these scandals are trying to say, to articulate our shared sense of denial? Is that why we haven't yet been able to collectively express our outrage at the Bush administration? Because too many of us still can't admit that things actually are as bad as they seem...

Pitchfork, the 60s, and our Interminable Commodity Culture: Part I

2006-08-23T18:09:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I've blogged regularly and even longer since I've blogged abo ut music -- too long, it seems. Well, anyway, I'm back -- on topic -- and ready to hurl myself into the messy aftermath of Pitchfork's latest list, "The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s." Although I have several gripes about the construction of this particular list, I'd like to hold off on those until I've outlined a few of the broader, universal problems I have with The List. The List, as I see it, is an ongoing collaboration between amateur and professional music critics who are, for whatever reason, dead set on reducing American music to a serial inventory: The Top 10 Selling Albums of 2005, The Top 100 Albums of the 1980s, 500 Songs that Shaped Rock. This is what the official and self-appointed ministers of popular music would have our culture boil down to.

At Pitchfork, six of the site's ten "Most Read Features" are currently lists, and each serves the same purpose as the Best-of countdowns that arrive every December: to encourage us to buy records. I therefore use the word inventory on purpose. Each list is an itemization of property. It says, Here are the records I own. I own a lot of great records. Do you own any of my records? Is your collection great -- as great as mine? The List is no different from a childish boast. Still, there are some bright people willing to regard the list's regressive character as an enjoyable way to open up broad and intelligible discourse. "The real fun of a list -- and the intellectual labor," writes Michael Bérubé (blogger, writer, professor), "is realized only when its creator has to explain and defend its rationale." This may be true. But Pitchfork does a pretty poor job of explaining itself. Like previous lists, "The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s" is preceded by a brief and largely uninformative introduction, and each song is accompanied by a paragraph of "criticism," usually as inane as the kind I dissected here. I should stress that each of these paragraphs is signed by a Pitchfork writer, as if to suggest that the described song is somehow the writer's property. The labels aren't misleading, exactly. We never believe that the Pitchfork writer actually wrote the song, but are merely led to regard him as an author and to associate him with the song he has brought to our attention. In this way, the writer receives credit for his great taste; which, incidentally, is why these lists are such a hit among rock journalists: they represent the easiest possible way to show off one's great taste . . . item by painstaking item. Rock fans like them for the same reason, although from another point of view. As Kelefa Sanneh (pop critic for The New York Times) wrote last January, "lists are a way for consumers to evaluate whoever made them, a handy way to pass judgment on the people who pass judgment for a living. (Really? Someone thinks Foo Fighters' latest album is better than Mariah Carey's?)" Unfortunately, the discourse that results from The List rarely rises beyond the level of childish acrimony. (Anticipating skeptical readers, the Pitchfork writer who has contributed #11, Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused," says "I don't care who you are ... if you're not down with "Dazed and Confused", I can't hang out with you" -- a trenchant insight indeed!)

If Bérubé is correct, that "the nakedly evaluative function of the list is underwritten by a mode of popular-culture criticism that is considerably more complex -- and more exegetical -- than the form of the Top 5 seems to suggest," then the discussion surrounding these lists -- especially the lists of a publication like Pitchfork, whose readers are largely college-educated -- should amount to more than a juvenile shouting contest. Yet the closer we look, the harder it is to say with a straight face that The List is a gateway to dialogue and interpretation. Here are some examples:

This is a response to "The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s" from Gorilla vs. Bear, a well-known music blog that says "we love lists" (in July, the blog began compiling a list of the best albums of 2006, so far). Even though Gorilla vs. Bear believes that Pitchfork's 60s list is "their greatest" list yet, he still can't help printing his own alternative "Top 5 Songs of the 1960s" list (meanwhile, two of his five songs are likewise included among Pitchfork's Top 5 -- and all of them appear on Pitchfork's list, at one point or another). This list is all the analysis we get from Gorilla vs. Bear, but if you scroll down and read through the comments section you will begin to get a sense of The List's true mode of dialogue.

The commentary varies only a little from one site to the next. This is a response to "The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s" from a blogger who thinks Pitchfork's 60s list is its "most retarded yet." His conclusion is that Pitchfork's lists are actually "retarded on purpose, just so people will bitch about them." I don't really believe this; I think Pitchfork writers take themselves too seriously to intentionally sabotage their lists. But bitching is a pretty accurate description of what ensues when music fans discuss a list -- more accurate than criticism, anyway. Because the more we read through the blogs and their comments and the various, related web discussion threads, the more clearly we are able to perceive a pattern. In almost every case, the reaction to a list includes the following observations, often in (roughly) this order:

Which songs on the list actually deserve to be on the list and which songs don't.
New lists of songs that should have been on the list, but weren't.
Other ways in which the list could be improved.
The feeling that the list is stupid.
The feeling that all lists are stupid.

This form of discussion is so predictable as to become self-evident. In fact, it already is self-evident: at I Love Music and Listology, for instance, the bitching began before Pitchfork had even finished releasing its list. At I Love Music, there is the thread "Let's predict Pitchfork's No. 1 song of the '60s!," which begins with a cynical prediction about what song will top the list: "The Beatles would be too obvious. Anything Motown would be too black. I'm putting my money on something Pink Floyd, so they can hope on what's left of the Dead Syd Barrett bandwagon." Then the commentator becomes serious and reconsiders: "No wait, it'll be The Beach Boys. It'll be Good Vibrations, I know it." Close: it was the Beach Boys, "God Only Knows." (And one wonders if this song was chosen as a kind of pun on the tendency to predict who will top these lists... ) At Listology, the name and content of the thread are less cynical -- "Which Song(s) will top Pitchfork's Top 200 Songs of the 60s?" -- but, like the I Love Music thread, this one begins with a series of predictions, some of which are quite accurate, and an aura of impending disappointment (the culture industry, as Adorno says, "gratifies desires only to frustrate them at the same time").

Once the rest of Pitchfork's list has been published, both threads quickly fall into the pattern outlined above. The Listology thread never quite insults the integrity of The List itself (but most list discussions do and, remember, Listology is a web site dedicated to list-lovers); instead, it ends in a debate about whether or not the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" LP is overrated. The I Love Music thread is much longer, sprinkled with non sequiturs like "so much wrong" and "it pisses all over the crappy," and ends in a riff on whether Pitchfork's list has shortchanged jazz. Neither discussion contains much in the way of critical merit; rather, each is a series of disconnected, untried assertions. When one of these assertions is defended it is generally by means of a personal insult or some other aggressive display of attitude.

Perhaps, then, my issue is not with the individual commentators, but with the limitations of trying to have a discussion collectively over the Internet. Because everywhere I look I see the same oversimplifications falling under the same rubrics, the same incomplete ideas being repeated in the same order -- here, for instance, in the response to a list made by Spin magazine of the "25 Greatest Live Bands." Simply remove the word song and replace it with the word band and these comments follow the exact same pattern as the comments on the Pitchfork list! The Internet lends itself to these lists and to the lightweight discussions that come with them, of course. And it is far too late to diminish the role the Internet plays and will continue to play in the distribution and interpretation of our music. We simply must reckon with it.

Lastly: the title of this post refers to "our interminable commodity culture," a concept I have not yet broached. There is a great deal more to be said on these matters, and I intend to do so on follow-up posts. (I'll try to actually follow up on my incomplete post this time.)

*So far, there is no Part II to this post. Soon come. This post extends an idea that began with: A List to End All Lists.

Dewey, Individualism, and the Liberal

2006-08-08T11:32:00.000-04:00

The lack of secure objects of allegiance, without which individuals are lost, is especially striking in the case of the liberal. The liberalism of the past was characterized by the possession of a definite intellectual creed and program; that was its distinction from conservative parties which needed no formulated outlook beyond defense of things as they were. In contrast, liberals operated on the basis of a thought-out social philosophy, a theory of politics sufficiently definite and coherent to be easily translated into a program of policies to be pursued. Liberalism today is hardly more than a temper of mind, vaguely called forward-looking, but quite uncertain as to where to look and what to look forward to. For many individuals, as well as in its social results, this fact is hardly less than a tragedy. The tragedy may be unconcious for the mass, but they show its reality in their aimless drift, while the more thoughtful are consciously disturbed. For human nature is self-possessed only as it has objects to which it can attach itself.

-- John Dewey, "Individualism, Old and New," 1930

Unbinding the Universal Library: A Response to "Scan This Book!"

2006-05-15T15:56:00.001-04:00

Now that my good friend Mr. WD has made a more formal critique of my last post, I should admit that -- in that case, at least -- my sweeping tone and will to generalize were perhaps a little excessive. I have a tendency to conflate certain idea-connections that seem obvious in my head but lack a genuine basis in the real world -- which is why I always reserve the right to revise myself. I agree with Mr. WD's suggestion that television holds the primary responsibility for our lowered attention spans and the current situation in which "publications that feature thoughtful, challenging, multi-page essays have seen a precipitous decline," as well as his conclusion: "If it is indeed the case that Americans' attention spans are significantly lower than they were 50 years ago . . . then it is incumbent upon us overeducated leftists to get better at 21st century 'message crafting.'" Nevertheless, I can't help voicing a few reservations as we plunge headlong into the sea of sound bites.

Allow me to refer to the article I mentioned in yesterday's comments section: "Scan This Book!" by Kevin Kelly, currently the most e-mailed article on NYTimes.com. The article focuses on Google's endeavor to scan the books of five research libraries to make their contents searchable online and the idea of a so-called universal library that will contain in one place a record of all human knowledge, past and present. Every book, every article, every painting, photograph, film, piece of music, web page -- all of it "fully digitized" on 50 petabyte hard disks. "Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet -- if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords."

I'm put off by the tenor of this article; by its unrelentingly optimistic view that the creation of such a library is not only inevitable, but inevitably good. First of all, I don't necessarily believe it can be done (or at least done as well as Kelly envisions it). Kelly spends much of the second half of the article detailing the numerous copyright-oriented obstacles that stand in the way of completing the book digitization process, but never doubts the final inescapability of that digitization. He refers to the Great Library of Alexandria as the predecessor to his universal library, as if to suggest it can be -- and has already been -- done, but makes nothing of the fact that we remember the library of Alexandria primarily for the fact that it burned down. Its place in our collective imagination is as an embodiment of lost knowledge. Am I the only one left with any qualms about putting all our intellectual eggs into one digital basket, so to speak? I can't help feeling unsettled by the idea that the best way for us to store information is no longer in the form of an accumulation of bound volumes, but rather a single stream of 1s and 0s that reside on a server (or servers) owned by Google. (Kelly hasn't advocated for getting rid of our paper libraries, but he implies that regular books are inherently limited and delights in listing the seemingly unlimited benefits of his own universal library.)

In point of fact, the notion of achieving unlimited knowledge is one fraught with a series of deep, mythical reservations: think Faust or Prometheus. I am reminded of the men in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," who invest the better part of their lives trying to decipher a series of nearly magical, knowledge-bearing parchments -- a quest that succeeds, but ultimately dooms the lineage of these men and their civilization forever (**Spoiler Alert: these are the last two and a half sentences of the book!**):

" . . . [Aureliano] began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of his death. Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave the room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

The Internet is this city of mirrors (or mirages): an interconnected series of words and images -- not of objects, but of reflections of objects and reflections of reflections of objects. The digital age, as Kelly suggests, is one in which we are so glutted with copies of objects that finally the copies no longer have any value. This is more than a threat to current business models (Kelly's idea), it suggests that we have embarked upon an entirely new form of perception -- one that no longer relies on observations of the world, but on a rearrangement and resorting of those observations of the world that have already been documented. Perhaps this is what I was getting at in my last post when I referred to a "growing mistrust of facts" . . . television and the Internet are less interested in coming to an understanding of the world than in creating a dazzling manipulation of that world by means of the screen and a series of refracted, electronically beamed lights. I can't help wondering whether, if we continue on this trajectory, the twenty-first century will finally lose touch with reality to such an extent that it winds up like Marquez's Macondo: wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men.

Stay Tuned: Next time (probably Wednesday) I will continue my discussion of this article by looking at the potential drawbacks to Kelly's plans for linking, tagging, and weaving books into the web.