Death to the industry!

This is a repost of a response I made to an entry on Elliott Randall's MySpace blog back in 2006. If you don't know the name, you know the man's work: he played lead guitar on Steely Dan's Reelin' in the Years, which starts with the 11 notes that, when I was a mere toddler, catalyzed my lifelong obsession with music. Mr. Randall is arguably the reason I'm sitting here writing this. Anyways, the entire entry and thread are here, if you want to check it out, but I've always felt that this really comes very close to encapsulating my views on music, so I present it here as well.

Also, I was considering cleaning up some of the text, but I decided to just leave it as is, if only for the amusement you'll feel at the rather quaint idea that I had, waaaay back in 2006, that $80 was an expensive concert ticket... and here we go.

Lots of great replies to this already, and I'm probably gonna echo a couple of them here.

There's a lot of things that have played into bringing us to this spot, but I remember when Napster was still around, people (the RIAA's people, mostly) were sounding the deathknell of the recording industry, and my immediate reaction was "we can only hope."

Now, take that the way I mean it, but as Elliot already pointed out, artists have been getting shafted by the industry for decades already, and while all this file downloading is certain to have a LOT of casualties, I can't help wondering whether, when it all shakes down, artists won't end up being better off.

It's been mentioned that the notion of intellectual property is on the way out, and I tend to agree with this, but there are powerful people who are going to fight hard to keep it. This goes way beyond the recording industry: look at biotech, for instance, who are pushing for the right to patent human DNA, or the pharmaceutical industry, who are pushing doctors to prescribe their expensive, and often unsafe, pills, and who will not budge on things like reducing prices for AIDS medications for victims of the epidemic in Africa. This, too, is intellectual property at work, and I don't think that the eventual death of intellectual property would be all bad either - this debate goes far beyond the borders of the music world.

And just how legitimate is this notion of owning a song, anyways? In fact, this is a very recent phenomenon, placed in the context of the whole history of music, is it not? I don't know exactly how classical music worked, but most of us work in the milieu of popular music, and any folk music fan knows that the idea of authorship is actually quite a hazy one. Traditional folk music draws on a number of key chord progressions, rhythms and lyrical themes, altering them slightly, rearranging them, moving one set of lyrics to a different set of chords - any blues or folk music (which are really the same thing) fan will know exactly what I'm talking about.

One of my favourite albums right now is Richard Thompson's '1000 years of popular music,' which runs the gamut from 'Sumer is Icumen In' all the way to 'Oops! I Did It Again!' - a great concept, though it could easily have filled a box set, or several box sets, and still remained incomplete.

But I digress. Jazz musicians, I am told, draw on 'standards,' which enable them to instinctually know where a jam is going. Similarly, the virtuosity that can be observed in the rhythm section at any blues jam is remarkable - somehow they know when the song is stopping, where it's going. Country musicians have what a friend of mine's musician father called "Nashville tab," a shorthand way for an experienced musician to walk onstage, speak to the band for 30 seconds, and then they all play, flawlessly. From this, I tentatively extrapolate (I know there's a lot of musicians present - feel free to correct me) that all musical forms have a basic vocabulary, a set of giants' shoulders if you will, on which all individual creativity rests, and a big part of becoming proficient in said form is learning this language - to know in a blues song, for instance, when you hear the I chord turn to a 7th, that you're about to go to the IV.

Song ownership really began in earnest, as I understand it, with the Tin Pan Alley era, where every good house was expected to have a piano, and would then, of course, require a collection of sheet music. Later, that paradigm became a phonograph and a collection of disks or cylinders, and then a Hi-Fi and LP records, and then a stereo and CDs, and then...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Something bad happened in there somewhere: the invention of the phonograph. Previous to that, music was something that you DID, not something you bought. In that era, music could be a profession if you were good - bars with pianos would hire people, for instance - but mostly women just sang while they hung out the washing, farmers practiced the fiddle over the winter (and read books, another activity that's increasingly unpopular these days), kids were given lessons and expected to learn. Music permeated the lives of everyone, not just people to whom the label "musician" was applied.

The death of the recording industry won't bring that era back, as nice a thought as that is, but perhaps along with the many casualties that are coming from this era of shaking things down, some of the more odious aspects of modern music will also die out:

Things like the idea that a musician, as well as being talented, must also serve as eye candy. The primacy of visual beauty has gotten so ridiculous that nowadays, you don't even have to be able to SING - they've got pitch correctors for that. Once upon a time they were trying to make machines sound human, but now they'll settle for making humans sound like machines.

Maybe Clear Channel will croak, and their stranglehold on the airwaves, in which the same damn 500 songs get played over and over on every damn station on the dial, maybe that will end.

Maybe the idea that a live show needs to be a song and dance spectacular, with billion-dollar lighting rigs and ten costume changes and rising platforms and big screens and sattelite feeds, maybe all that can die out, and people will stop going to shows to "Be Entertained" and start going to "Hear Music" again. When that happens, concerts will no longer need to cost $80 for the worst nosebleed tickets.

I'm sorry, I babble and babble. Hopefully y'all get that when I say we can only hope that the industry dies, I actually say that out of my love for music, not my disrespect for musicians. We all, musicians and fans (of which I am both), deserve better than this.

Special bonus Steely Dan oddity for making it this far: a live performance of Do It Again featuring David Palmer instead of Donald Fagen on vocals.



Palmer is an interesting example of the record industry at work - as I recall, Fagen was not originally acceptable as the group's frontman (whether because his vocals were not considered up to snuff or because he was such an ugly bastard is open to debate), so Mr. Palmer was brought in to front the band, and was long gone by the time the second album came out.

That's it, I'm moving to Sweden.

This is the coolest workplace ever. And of course, like all awesome things*, it's in Sweden.



*Except Abba. Abba sucks, they have always sucked, they always will suck, and nothing anyone says can change the fact that Abba is the sucky black hole into which Sweden channelled all of its lame, unleashing it upon an unsuspecting West which was too gullible to realize what was going on. And that's why Sweden today is full of awesome.

This is a goddam hook.

I really have to be careful with youtube - one video leads to another to another to another, and next thing I know it's four hours gone by with nothing to show for it but a brainful of 80s music.

But anyways, I wasn't really thinking about what makes a pop music "hook," but when I stumbled into the Sheena Easton section, I rediscovered this funky [per/con]fection, which in my opinion really is a nearly perfect example of a great pop tune, no matter what year it is.

Sure, it starts with and heavily features that most 80s 0f musical conventions, the triggered percussion sample, but there is little else here which is dated by the ensuing years, partly because in its own age, the song was also anachronistic, with the horns lifted straight out of some 60s soul record, and the funky sound of slap bass has yet to wear out its welcome. Well, ok, Sheena's hair and earrings are pretty horrific as well.

What I find really interesting, though, is the relative complexity of the lyrics, and how this manages to enhance rather than get in the way of the flow, which is syncopated as fuck - unless you're too hip to dance, this should fill you with the urge to engage in some earnest bootyshaking. Anyways, the verses consist of long sentences, a single rhyming pair with a setup in the first and a payoff in the second:

He said, "Baby what's wrong with you? Why can't you use your imagination?" (oh no, oh no)
"Nations go to war over women like you, it's just a form of appreciation."

It's not really hard to successfully do this, if the vocals are done with a good sense of rhythm, which is definitely the case here, but have a quick listen to the FYC song linked above - it's got some musical hooks, to be sure, but the lyrics are both simplistic and overused; indeed, the singer could be replaced with another synth track, and the song would lose nothing for that. Anyways, I don't know if Sheena had any input into the vocal delivery or if she's simply reciting someone else's melodic lines, but either way she hits and rests and holds in all the right places, dancing over a set of complicated set of floating footprints.

More interesting still is the subject matter. This track was from A Private Heaven, the album in which Easton reinvented herself in a more sexy and provocative mode than her Morning Train days. Note that it was called 9 to 5 in the UK, presumably changed to avoid confusion with Dolly Parton's smash from the movie of the same name. I've always been more partial to her cover of Mule Skinner Blues. Dolly Parton with a whip, yo...

But I digress. This Sheena Easton album also included the then-controversial, now-quaint Sugar Walls, which made the PMRC's rather silly top 15 list. Speaking of the PMRC, I still maintain that it was Tipper Gore's erstwhile attempt to appoint herself moral censor of the nation, and not any failings on her husband's part, that cost him the election in 2000. Like Obama this year, Gore in 2000 needed the enthusiastic engagement of young people to win, and I believe that it was the long memories of my generation that couldn't stomach the thought of Tipper living down the hall from the oval office.

But I (haha) digress. We were discussing the fact that on A Private Heaven, Sheena Easton came back on a strong tide of lyrical innuendo, playing up the sexy, and musically speaking, Strut is pure aphrodisia in that very mold. But if you look a little closer, the lyrics subvert that very image, revealing a female protagonist who is fed the fuck up with her body being used as a canvas for creepy men to paint their boring and cliche'd production line sexual fantasies:

Come on over here, lay your clothes on the chair, now let the lace fall across your shoulder
Standing in the half-light, you're almost like her, now take it slow like your daddy told ya.

And while I obviously can't tell women what songs they should use when they want to feel emancipated from the patriarchy, I personally think that Strut fills that role much better than Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive, especially when it comes around to the chorus, which is defiant and cutting and way way way more in your face than Gaynor's narrative:

Strut, pout, put it out, that's what you want from women
Come on baby, what you takin' me for?
Strut, pout, put it out, all takin' and no givin'
Watch me, baby, while I walk out the door...

See, now, let's just look at that for a second. Easton's protagonist finds herself in a situation where she's briefly fallen for a shallow and hyperbolic "compliment" in the first verse, but then finds that his game is all about his own gratification, and his interest has nothing to do with her at all - she is literally a blank canvas to him, ideally with an empty head who will do as says so he can get his rocks off, most likely before she even gets fully turned on. So, rather than allow herself to be used like a girl for hire prostitute, she points out just how pathetic the guy really is, and then invites him to indulge his voyeuristic leanings for a few last seconds as she leaves him to his sad little life. Sheena = winner.

Gloria, on the other hand, has some serious flaws in her narrative. No matter how emancipated she may feel at the moment, the story here does not speak well to her strength of character. Rather than a strong woman with good critical thinking skills like Sheena, Gloria is a recovered victim clinging to her tenuous and uncertain freedom. She's been wounded, and badly, and laments that she didn't change her stupid lock, and indeed one has the sense that her freedom and emotional well-being is definitely threatened by the looming presence of her ex-whatever he was. Sure, she shows some strength when she sends him on his way, but what's she got to look forward to? "As long as I know how to love, I know I'll stay alive?"

Come on, dammit, you can do better than cling to the hope that you'll meet someone nice and merely survive. Sheena's gonna walk out of that dingy little flat and go become a fucking CEO of a major corporation or some shit. She's gonna go kick some ass, is what she's gonna do. Gloria's gonna make some chamomile tea, mentally go over her litany of greivances, and hope that someone better comes along, because it's only by loving a man that she's gonna be complete. Now really, ladies, which one do you want your daughters to emulate?

And if the respective subject matter of the two songs doesn't convince you, you could also take into account that while I Will Survive was written by two men (hardly surprising, that), Strut was co-written by an obscure but rather excellent singer and songwriter named Charlie Dore - she had a hit in the late 70s called Pilot of the Airwaves (the harmonies on this track remind me of a more pop/country version of Fairport Convention), and is still writing for some rather famous singers as well as recording her own material. She has a MySpace page up here with some of her tunes. Highly recommended, and I'm going to bed.

Gay for Stephen Fry.

Stephen's got a blog, and on that blog he has some words. EIEIO.

For instance, this entry features a lovely sentence indeed:

How can we hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture with which music originally smote us amidships and enslaved us for ever?

It's time to retire the name.

It's not that I would deny James Hetfield, a major hero of my youth, the right to mature, and to enjoy the fruits of the success he so richly deserves. I also hate to join in the chorus, but try as I might, I simply can't get past the fact that Armani is simply not acceptable. If you play metal, you wear a suit you picked up at Value Village for $10 for your court dates. It's as simple as that.

Nonetheless, I still retain a lot of admiration for Hetfield. Lars Ulrich, on the other hand... well, I think Sunn o))) said it best.

If you love this, I love you.

Bring Back the Beachcombers!

The scene: a lakefront cottage in Whytewold, Manitoba. I'm in my single digits and visit my great grandparents with my grandparents and usually an uncle or two nearly every weekend in the summer. After dinner, I would poke around in their shelf full of games - two in particular, a bingo set with a cranked number dispenser and the glow-in-the-dark game board, missing all the other pieces, of a game called The Green Ghost used to be good for a few minutes of amusement. Here's a picture of the Green Ghost box and set:

(photo links to a site dedicated to this awesome
game. Yes, I know I said it was missing a bunch of pieces, but just look at that picture. How could it possibly NOT be awesome? How?)

Anyways, I digress. Going to the cottage was like an anachronistic adventure, and yes, it definitely had elements of that "magical childhood world" people like to talk about, like the store which inexplicably carried things you had never seen before and never discovered again. Things like sodapop with exotic names (there was a 7up knockoff called either Sparkle or Snowflake of which I was quite fond, for instance) that came in cans and bottles with old world, often psychedelic designs (ten year old signs in 1980 would definitely bear the mark of the psychedelic era). It was here that I first encountered the non-venerable Swedish Berries, which were like the newer, better, cooler and tastier version of the old-style ju jubes, which stuck to your teeth, that my great grandpa used to share. And a lot of the candy cost a penny! It was easy to scare up a quarter somehow, and be in sugar heaven for the rest of the day.

But this is not Once Upon a Win, and I did not start this post to go off on some Stuart McLean screed. I came to talk about a most important issue to Canadians at this crucial time, one which could profoundly affect the way history will view us. Yes, that's right, CBC needs to bring back the Beachcombers, preferably to DVD!



After sunday dinner (ALWAYS a roast, generally beef but sometimes a chicken or two, along with taters and carrots and sometimes yam and stuffing and gravy... drooling I am), or sometimes during (as IF they didn't have tv trays, come on....), we would watch Disney and The Beachcombers before I started to get tired and sent to bed. It took me a good year, but over time I came to know the characters fairly well, and eventually all but lost interested in Disney, particularly since it was such a crap shoot as to what you'd get from week to week. I wanted cartoons - always cartoons, and they had all these damn live action crapfests like Old Yeller, which I refused to watch on principle. haha I'm stupid. Anyways, I've been told it was a big hit internationally, but maybe that was by Canadian standards, meaning "the Americans made their own version that sucks".

For those who've never seen it, the youtube above is apparently part 1 of a whole episode of the show that someone posted to youtube - I've just been listening to the theme over and over again, which is causing me to get a bit weepy. Bruno Gerussi was a reluctant hero of mine - the reluctance being on my part, about accepting the idea that I could be at all interested in the protagonist of an "grownup" show. Even Gerussi aside, the whole case was fantastic, in my memory, and the show's longevity suggests that many others agree.

I've never been a big booster of Cancon, because as many others have pointed out it's the sole reason that Tom Cochrane still has a career. But Cancon hasn't only resulted in top 40 pap which seems to have been composed and recorded to answer the question "if mediocrity could be expressed musically, what would it sound like?"

The thing is, Cancon has also produced shows like the Degrassi series, and Davinci's Inquest, and indeed Winnipeg's own Less Than Kind. By the way, for anyone who watches that show and has never been to Falafel Place on Corydon, you need to go meet Ami and let him know that he should be demanding royalties. I always get the falafel plate, because while Ami's garbananzos are truly a pinnacle of flavour, the wrap form is a pinnacle of messy.

Happy Birthday Kahn!

It's Ricardo Montalban's birthday! The man who made Star Trek more than camp, who taught us all about the satisfaction of having your needs fulfilled while reclining on soft Corinthian leather, and who made the fantasies of millions come true, apparently at $50k a pop (somehow I missed that fine point as a child).

I wish he had better roles than he's been getting lately, mostly in kids' fare, as I've always experienced a strange kind of calm wash over me at the sound of his rich Spanish accent. Hmm. I wonder if Fantasy Island is out on DVD yet...

Anyways, in honour of Ricardo's birthday, I give you... the Chihuahua Choo Choo.



And if that only whetted your appetite, here's a couple more famous Choo Choos. First, Glenn Miller, Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers take a ride to Chatanooga:



And who can forget old Louis Jordan's Boogie-Woogie train?



And to finish off in keeping with the hispanic theme, here's Carmen Miranda's take on the Chatanooga train:



More is sure to follow...

A quick one...

Via Boing Boing, this:



It's really just the most fantastic thing I've seen this week. As you were.

Gordon Lightfoot is going on tour!

And as a perfect example of the joys and pain of having, shall we say, offbeat tastes, even though I waited four days to buy my tickets, I still got Row 9 on the floor. What upsets me, of course, is that Gordon Lightfoot (Gordon Lightfoot, people!) has only sold nine rows in four days. Even in this jaded, pop-obsessed world of today, I still expected to be relegated, if not to the nosebleeds, at least to the bleachers.

Honestly, I remembered a couple of times over the last few days that I hadn't bought my tickets yet, and nonetheless didn't run to the computer to buy em up. I have this damnable inertia that, even when I know that I have an opportunity to witness something historic, or to do something that I will remember until I die, a lot of the time I just go "meh" and go back to my crossword puzzle.

But occasionally, I overcome that lethargy and find myself heading out to a play or a show or a French movie, and I sit in the venue, surrounded by people of like mind, digging the art that I'm seeing, and really, profoundly, enjoying my life for a few hours - something that I honestly don't do very often. And I have this sense that "out there" in the world, even in a backwater like Winnipeg, there's this whole other awesome existence that's mine for the taking, if I would just get off my lazy ass and go do stuff. It's my "real" life, I think, the life that I truly want to live, as opposed to the insular, lazy and sedated life that I seem to choose by default.

I'm not talking about some kind of jet-set world travelling fantasy, though I do want to see more of the world - right now, for instance, I'm trying to figure out how I can get to New York City to catch one of Les Paul's monday night shows before he, like so many other musical heroes of mine that I never got to see in life, is gone. It's not even expensive, really - I suspect that there's at least three little places in town, even as I write this, featuring some music or play or movie that I would just be soaking up like a drug if I were there. Instead, I sit here and lament same, probably to little or no audience whatsoever. But at least I'm writing instead of rewatching South Park or something...

But anyways, here's what I wanted to talk about: Six finalists from Canadian Idol, collaborating on a surprisingly fantastic version of Mr. Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy.



It's puzzled me, since the first time I heard this song, that I never encountered it in a school room as a kid - it was the first history lesson I ever had (on a road trip, appropriately enough (in a car, inappropriately enough), from Vancouver to Winnipeg) that I repeated over and over and over again, looking through my windshield at the Canadian Rockies* and feeling profoundly connected to all the history, glorious and shameful and otherwise, of my home and native land.

Indeed, it was through Gordon Lightfoot that I really learned the meaning of the word Patriotism, because up until that day I had never really felt love, never even understood how someone could feel love, for a place, or the idea of that place. I didn't suddenly forget what European colonization has always meant to indigenous people, mind you, but we're all born into an imperfect world, and we should love that world no less than we love our friends and families, for all their imperfections. The alternative is madness.

But anyways, on to Canadian Idol. I don't watch it. Much less do I watch American Idol, Britain's Got Talent, or any other such show. To me it seems... ok, well, I've watched bits of American Idol on Youtube, and this is a personal favorite:



Too hardcore for you, indeed. The thing about these death metal idol guys (I think at least one of them is actually Black Metal, but the multitude of metal categories they've got nowadays is as unintelligible to me as death metal lyrics) is that they aren't really seriously trying out - they're basically there to say a big rock'n'roll Fuck You to the whole Idol concept, and for that, I at least applaud them.

When I first heard about American Idol, I decried it as illegitimate. And it is, really - a person getting into making music should really not be doing so in order to become an "idol," and nobody can possibly deny that there is something just *wrong* about a musician skirting the traditional process of performing, touring, recording, shopping demos and basically sweating to make it, and being adored on national television for doing so.

But sure, stardom sounds great, and believe me, I'm not saying that ironically - after all, isn't it a fairly universal desire of people everywhere to want to be doing something that matters? But at the same time, what actually matters should probably not be determined by the call-in votes of people watching a reality show - I like to think that we ought to rely on some kind of objective standards, both in terms of just how important a pop star is in the grand scheme of things, as well as what criteria we should use to determine who becomes a pop star. American Idol takes pop stardom, something that's supposed to have a patina of magic to it, a romantic story of struggle and victory behind every great artist, and turns it into a job interview.

But when I gave it further thought, I realized that American Idol is not, as the narrow selection of music and arbitrary selection system would suggest, a corruption of pop music, but in fact is the American pop music star system given a more perfect form. After all, actual musical talent has, since the advent of MTV, taken a distant back seat to photogenicity in terms of importance for pop stars - witness the sad case of Christopher Cross, whose oh-so-smooth compositions (which included collaborations with the inimitable Burt Bacharach) were nonetheless not smooth enough to overcome his fundamental lack of stage charisma once MTV made visual presentation an essential component in a successful pop music career... and would, over the next 20 years, bring us to the point at which we now find ourselves, where musical talent is optional. The truth is that American pop music has been a reanimated corpse, shuffling around and growing more and more putrid in it stench since long before Vanilligate.

So now we get a tv show, remarkably similar in form to the Gong Show, where America gets to Have Its Say in who becomes the next big star. Of course, as with all American democratic mechanisms, the deck is stacked: contestants, as the death metal auditioners demonstrate, are limited to a narrow range of musical selections and styles - the same constricted musical range, interestingly enough, that you will find on modern, ClearChanneled (and what an unintentionally appropriate name that corporation bears...) FM radio. All the finalists are MTV-ready (Aesthetically pleasing. In other words, fly...), practically begging to be processed and shrinkwrapped, anticipating their artistic asphyxiation with great joy.

I'd like to say that if the American Idol people gave Americans a real choice, that they would choose something new and interesting over the same old recycled pretties they've been fed for these last couple of decades. But I wonder, at this point, whether the Clearchannelization of America has had enough time to take root, and in true Orwellian fashion, managed to make Americans forget that there once was a choice to be had. Could American Idol voters get over the exotic nature of, say, Manu Chao for long enough to appreciate his funky latin reggae grooves and dance in their seats like their parents once did to Perez Prado? Is Middle America still that open-minded?

And that's the tragedy of it: For much of the last century, America had a thriving music scene, fecund with inspiration, innovation and creativity. What happened to the America that birthed jazz?

Chao himself, a true world citizen, has an interesting observation at 1:45 of this video: when he tours in Europe and looks at the television, he gets programs and news from all over - France, Italy, England, etc. Whereas in America, you turn on the TV, you get programming from America only. Derrida would probably point out that Chao only mentioned other European locales in his speech, but I think he's got a point nonetheless - where other nations seem to see themselves as part of an international exchange of ideas, America seems to always view itself as the possessor and exporter of all relevant ideas, with no need of input from the old or developing worlds.

But we all know that it's exchange that brings innovation and new ideas - cities which are big shipping centres, for example, have always traditionally been where you find such things. This is no accident - the traders and sailors who came and went brought more than goods with them. They brought music, books, news of the world, and enabled the people there to synthesize all this input into fresh output, which they sent back out.

America has long since ceased to engage in this kind of meaningful exchange. True, there's a lot of import and export, more than ever before, but there is no trade - the goods are put in containers and loaded on and off the ships by cranes, with no conversation between transient sailors and stationary dockers, no strange and exotic fiddle music carried on the air from dockside taverns, no news of strange and wondrous events in distant lands pass from mouth to ear around town.

Even the goods themselves cannot be seen as objects of real exchange - Americans design what they want, send the plan to China, and receive back what they ordered a few months later. Even with the entire world available with a google search, America looks ever inward, and dies slowly.

*Here's a link to a google image search, but really, as if a grouping of pixels on a computer screen could possibly convey what it's like to stand at the bottom, or drive through a pass at the top - you need to go there, honestly.

I don't care about Beck

...but I am completely in love lust with Chloe Sevigny, so via Boing Boing, I give you the new Beck video:

Beck - Gamma Ray

And you know, the tune ain't bad either. Really, most of his stuff is actually quite good, but I kind of lost interest when he made the jump from DIY Genius to Postmodern Phantasm.

I kind of pulled those two phrases out of the air, but think about it: On his early releases, up to and including Mellow Gold, you could verily smell the bongwater he spilled on the 4-track cassette tapes. Tracks like Truckdrivin Neighbours Downstairs verily placed you on the sunken, worn-out couch in Beck's living room, listening to the drunken bearfight (shades of Pete and Ray*) coming up through the floor. And while I loved the lo-fi Loser (and low production value, found-footage vibe of the video), it was tracks like Pay No Mind and Soul Sucking Jerk that really spoke to me in those lethargic and aimless days of my (supposedly) GenX heyday. My local pool hall made the mistake of putting Mellow Gold in their CD jukebox, and when I was flush (not very often) I also used to terrorize people by playing Motherfucker several times in a row.

I was also impressed by Beck's behavior at Lollapalooza 95 in Toronto. I had no interest in watching Hole - even then, I knew exactly what Courtney Love was, and I was way too far back to enjoy the playing of ogle Melissa Auf Der Mar, the second-hottest bass player in the world - so I wandered over to the second stage, and discovered that Beck was playing an impromptu, and very long, acoustic set, taking requests from the audience and just generally enjoying himself. This, I thought, was why I came: here is a consummate musician successfully and passionately plying his craft.

Move ahead to 2006, and Odelay comes out. My first exposure was the Where It's At video, which starts off with a mellow Hammond organ line... just like Paul's Boutique. From there, it was pleasant, but uninspired, very much unlike Paul's Boutique. And while we're on the topic of Beastie Boys songs with Hammond organs, here's a link to So Whatcha Want, which is the best of these - even at Youtube quality, it rocks the house.

But I digress. Where It's At was really not representative of Beck's new direction at all. What followed it was Devil's Haircut and The New Pollution, and here's where he lost me. At the time, I didn't have even a small inkling of what the word Postmodern meant - twelve years and one English degree later, I still don't know what it means**, but like a moral crusader at a Mapplethorpe exhibit, I know it when I see it.

The 90s were a decade in which irony grew from a subtlety to an affliction. It was no coincidence that Ben Stiller and Helen Childress made Ethan Hawke define it out loud in Reality Bites - they were subtly giving us the tools of self-analysis for when we grew up enough to start wondering why we did and didn't do what we did and didn't do. Detachment was our touchstone, and where Kurt Cobain chose death over the job of generational spokesman, Beck, with his Odelay material, came as close as anyone did to taking on the job of generational poster boy.

Of course, being this generation's poster boy meant that the last thing he could do was deliberately seem to be trying to consciously identify with this generation. Leave that to the vicious hordes of Pearl Jam/Alice in Chains tribute bands that were and are still running roughshod over the musical landscape, slowly murdering the soul of radio with an endless tsunami of mediocrity that comes in wave after homogenous wave, leaving a bleak and featureless landscape populated by pale refugees who are barely even aware that there was a time when ideals like originality and creativity were valued...

There I go again. Seriously, this is why I do like love Beck: he always, always does his very best to keep it weird (here's a Tom Waits Song of the same name from the related videos, just because he rules the universe), and for that I can never hate him, especially after I remember what else is out there. Still, it seemed to me at the time (and still does) that Devil's Haircut and (especially) The New Pollution were and are, in their own unique way, just as creatively barren as the Creeds and Silverchairs of the world. In both cases, the artist is mining the work and style of others and repackaging it in a new configuration - the key difference with Beck is that while Nickelback are earnestly trying to duplicate the style, sound and success of Pearl Jam, Beck was serving up a less specific pastiche of various eras and styles, with a thick layer of that tasty, comforting irony sitting on top like shellac - not a reference to Steve Albini, but since you mention him, anyone who still hasn't read this should really take this opportunity to do so.

Ok, it's way past my bedtime...

*Pete and Ray will get their own entry soon, particularly in light of the fact that someone has apparently made a movie based on the tapes, and the preview looks pretty good...

**and I mean, can anyone really *know* what it means? And what does it mean to mean anyways? It's a mean world, after all, and frequently paradoxically devoid of meaning, and what meaning can we derive from such mean means as that?

A Change Has Come

Thanks, America.

But seriously, folks...

I think it was Churchill who said that Americans can always be relied upon to do the right thing, after they've exhausted all the other options. Through the years, I've held onto that notion, that in some difficult-to-elucidate way, we can count on America when the chips are down, and that while they may lead us to the very edge of the abyss, it won't be America that pushes (or drags) us all down. I do, in other words, believe in America, though not entirely without conditions.

To put it simply, if Sarah Palin becomes the vice-president, it will seriously damage that belief. Even Bush II had his moments, rare as they might have been, and I believe that he comes from a clan whose predominant self-interest is informed, albeit not at all enlightened.

However, in the relatively brief time we've had to learn who Sarah Palin is, she's revealed herself to be an almost perfect personification of the worst side of America - Smug in her abject ignorance, insulting in her presumption that a sugary wink will make her audience swallow poisonous rhetoric, reckless in her unthinking indulgence of the moblike quality of her rallies, and most recently, her abusive invocation of the first amendment was so frighteningly ignorant that her very candidacy could arguably be construed as an act of terrorism.

The time has come to do the right thing, America. Believe me, you've definitely exhausted all the other options.

The Polysics: My favorite band for the next two days.

Let's start this right...

I found this on Boing Boing, and it really just says so much about this world in which we live. The meaning comes in layers upon layers. The juxtapositions, overt and implied, verily cry out the cruel surreality with which our lives have become imbued at the hands of our own precocious reach and our almost complete lack of the maturity to deal with what we have wrought.

If our world were being monitored by some outside civilization (and oh, what a comforting delusion, that anyone could possibly be "out there" to witness, if nothing else, our headlong charge towards special implosion), then some alien anthropologist somewhere is currently displaying the above image on the alien equivalent of an overhead projector, or perhaps of a powerpoint presentation, as an example of the great contradictions of our world: a work of art that subverts even as it displays, a powerful symbol of the depths of idiocy and heights of sublimity to which we can simultaneously aspire, an image which is the product of the cerebral cortex and the reptilian backbrain in equal measure. It is, in a word, artistic perfection. (I choose my words carefully.)

Yes, this is the perfect subject matter with which to inaugurate my new blog, for here, I hope, you shall find the mind and the groin at play, not at war. Oh shut up already.