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No longer in a relationship with the meaning of is, baby. Tragedy is always a bait and switch. Updated, anticipated. My profile hides my lazy I while yours mixes metaphors under London Bridge. Which? Boys are dying for the tingle of salt on their tongues. You heard me right. The word wasn't what it was when I circled the windy lake, sand hilling up like a documentary about the Dust Bowl. Face the music, darling, you're an open book when the flame turns your thin milk to bone. Tags: music, poetry
Current Location: 85704
Muse: 5-4=Unity - Pavement - Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: LA's Desert Origins
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As I prepared to clean the kitchen floor and both bathroom floors by doing the dishes, I listened to The Smiths' "This Charming Man" and then about half of The World Won't Listen. Reading the Mojo magazine feature on them from a few months back has me thinking again, as I have with increasing frequency this decade, about just how unique they were. And yet, they were also products of the same Manchester post-punk scene as New Order, a fact which got me inspired to hear some of the latter. Before I could do that, though, I had the urge to revisit Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks' latest, Real Emotional Trash. I liked the record on first hearing. Somehow, though, the fact that I'd been listening to most of the songs in live versions recorded at their January 9th, 2007 concert here in Tucson made me less excited than I wanted to be. Interestingly, though, after hearing them performed again live on Thursday, also at Plush, I felt my desire to memorize the album, something I've done with all of Malkmus's work in Pavement and as a solo artist, suddenly activated. Maybe it was the Jicks' new drummer Janet Weiss -- she of Sleater Kinney and Quasi fame -- saying "Hi!" to me at the merch table that sealed the deal. Whatever the reason, though, I found myself completely captivated on today's hearing. It lessened the burden of all that floor scrubbing. Real Emotional Trash is a great rock album that is not ashamed to summon the ghostly spirits of album rock's heyday. I guess "Fillmore Jive" closed Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain for a reason. After so much guitar, I felt the need to hear something without it, so I put on Carl Craig's More Songs About Revolutionary Food & Art. Generally speaking, the world of dance-electronica-techno has been oriented more towards the 12" aesthetic, with its emphasis on remixing a few strong songs, than albums, but Craig's masterwork, which I've been rediscovering after finally obtaining it for myself on CD, is emphatically meant to be listened to as an album, as its title suggests. Once I'd had my fill of Craig, I returned to the idea of listening to New Order. Only now I wanted to listen to some of their "dancier" synth-and-beats tracks, the sort I generally had the urge to skip through in my guitar-centric past. When I went to pick out an album, though, I was reminded of how much I'd liked their last record Waiting For the Sirens Call and opted to listen to that first. I made it through four-and-a-half songs before it started to skip. Luckily, my favorite songs on the album are the ones that open it. And track four, the single "Krafty," may just be the best distillation ever of their melancholy pop sensibility, with its "Love Will Tear Us Apart"-style fusion of rock and dance music cultures. For that one I felt obligated to dance, watching my legs reflected dimly in the television screen. Then it was on to Republic, the album with the highest percentage of the "dancier" songs I used to find uninspiring. I still think that one is their weakest pre-hiatus album, but it did sound better after listening to Carl Craig. Part of the problem is that the first song "Regret," which rivals "Krafty" and "Age of Consent" for the crown as catchiest New Order song, is so good that it makes everything after it seem sort of tepid. The effect is especially pronounced in my case, since "Regret" has great personal meaning for me, since I purchased the pre-album release CD single on one of the most complicated days of my life and one, fittingly, that flooded me a great deal of regret. Tags: autobiography, everyday, music
Current Location: 85704
Muse: a memory of the "space" in the middle of the song "Real Emotional Trash"
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Last Friday Joel Schalit and I gave our presentation at the EMP pop conference. It went reasonably well, despite a technical complication that led to the musical bed we'd set up starting late and therefore getting out of sync with the words of our text. Earlier that afternoon, however, we'd made the short trip to Seattle's superb independent music station KEXP in order to speak about our topic for possible later use in one of the station's short audio documentaries. And then we got to go on air, where, with Kevin Cole, a wonderful DJ, at the controls, the bed worked perfectly. Later that weekend, our gracious host Vance Galloway found a way to distill the four-hour stream in the KEXP archives into a sound file comprising only our twenty-minute segment. Be advised, if you listen -- it's in Apple's AAC format, BTW -- that I'd had way too little sleep and way too much coffee -- I was in Seattle, after all -- that day, amping up my nervous energy to the point where I ended up sounding like I'd been making recreational use of a dentist's office. Joel, who was so tired that I feared he would start nodding off, revealed his radio experience by sounding calm and collected. Oh well. At least the content came through clearly enough. In closing, I must give a shout out to some folks whose words played a major role in the development of our presentation and whom time constraints prevented us from properly acknowledging at the EMP: K-Punk, Simon Reynolds, The Stranger's Charles Mudede, Steven Shaviro, Tomas Palermo, and, last but not least, our host Vance Galloway. Joel knows enough about dub to fill their footprints, but I feel like I'm wearing baby shoes in comparison. Tags: clips, conference, friends, media, music, politics, theory
Current Location: 85704
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This is a self-interview I conducted while in the process of trying to write a big "statement" piece about the study of popular music for the Bad Subjects "Music" issue that I was then in the process of editing: Q: What's the basic point I'd like to convey in my piece?
A: The fact that the vast majority of popular music thinks of itself as being outside of a degraded mainstream. In other words, even the seemingly most 'mainstream' music (to alternative sensibilities) has its own ways of defining its artisitc expression as genuine, authentic, or culturally worthwhile. Often these depend more on the *context* of the music's production or reception. Madonna's music may be mainstream, but the apparatus that surrounds its marketing and performance strives hard for an alternative effect. A band like Bon Jovi thinks that it matters to its fans because it establishes rapport with them. Pet Shop Boys music sounds very mainstream, but its reception within gay/queer culture marks it as doing something else.
Q: So the real point is that popular music almost always distances itself from the supposedly democratic mainstream of 'popular culture' because it recognizes that 'democracy' has become synonymous with capitalism?
A: Maybe. That reading would suggest a 'moment of critique' within almost all popular music that I would feel inclined to deconstruct. I mean, isn't it the illusion that popular music provides something alternative to what the free-market in general provides a large part of what makes it sell so well? This would introduce Jameson's reading of the Utopian dimension to mass-cultural forms.
Q: Alright. I thought you wanted to talk about popular music as a 'means of distinction'?
A: I do.
Q: Well, how does it tie-in with the fact that almost all popular music distinguishes itself from a degraded mainstream?
A: I realize that there are two separate lines of thought in y argument. On the one hand, I want to talk about distinctions *within* popular music--'taste-preferences'--, on the other hand, I want to talk about the way in which individual taste-preferences within popular music define other taste preferences *as* the mainstream in order to make themselves 'alternative'. Popular music is a medium for the expression of 'negative identity', identity fashioned at the expense of others.
Q: What about 'cross-identification' and the cultural capital questions raised by the Bourdieu stuff? Are you going to throw them to the wayside? It seemed as if you were building up to an interesting point analogous to Annalee's point about trans-gender people and drag (of course, her point was based on economics--but it occurs to me right now that poorer people, particularly ethnicities, spend a lot of their money dressing in 'drag', i.e. as someone better off than they are--think of Darnell at Vallejo High who needed money for clothes). Do you want to evacuate the class issue?
A: No, I *do* want to note how an interesting combination of economic and cultural capital allows better-off people to musically 'trans-gender' themselves. It's harder to sustain collections in four genres than one. It occurs to me right now that music critics tend to promote diverse genres because they tend to get albums for free!--the music business gives them albums for review...I don't know, I'm getting lost here.
Q: Eat some pizza!
A: I did.
Q: Let's try this again: what do you want to say?
A: I want to suggest ways in which popular music differs from other mass-cultural media like mainstream film and T.V. by showing how it functions as a 'means of distinction', a way to separate oneself and one's subculture from a mainstream figured by other people's identities, taste-preferences, subcultures. By way of explanation I want to take alternative rock and rap as an extreme example of this. It occurs to me even more strongly now that both alternative rock and rap try to capture their alternativeness *within* the text more than supposedly more 'mainstream' acts like Van Halen or Madonna do. Maybe that's too fine a distinction to make. It *is* clear that alternative musics strive to interrupt pleasure with what is painful (white noise_), jarring (violent, sexual, or Joycean lyrical content), or otherwise demanding interpretation.
Q: So are you going to find a 'safe' way of explaining how alternative musics take the inherent anti-mainstreamness of popular music to its logical extreme?
A: I guess.
Q: What about the generational thing?
A: I do want to raise the issue of generational distinctions. It seems to me that music of a given generation has always tended to define itself against an older mainstream: the mainstream is the world of stable, secure, grown-up, self-satisfied fathers (and mothers). I think there's some blurring between such generational distinctions and the distinctions made within a generation between 'alternative' and mainstream youth for example: somehow the mainstream kids get coded as being like their parents. I think I might also want to bring up the hatred older artists like Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton arouse in younger generations.
Q: And where does Bourdieu fit in to all of this?
A: As far as generational distinction goes, clearly younger generations have a 'temporary class consciousness' as the not-yet and possibly never empowered lackeys and toys of the older generations in power. Whether this makes any sense within Bourdieu's schematics is a mystery. It occurs to me that his definition of taste is extraordinarily static and not particularly receptive to the notion of generational distinctions *within*, say, the working class.
Q: How about cross-identification and drag?
A: There would appear to me both generational cross-identification or 'generational drag' (me liking the 60's) and generational *identification* through the mixing of disparate musical genres *within* a particular generation's music (rock and rap co-mingling).
Q: Is this drag emancipatory a la Butler's *Gender Trouble*?
A: Not inherently. Maybe I should address the non-fixity of cross-id, the fact that temporary alliances form (90's rock and rap) for one situation (hating older folks), and are then replaced by other temporary alliances (60's psychadelic rock and alternative rock of today) for another situation (bonding with/or having nostalgia for Boomer music and time).
Q: So how does this tangent tie-in to your basic point about popular music as a means of distinction?
A: Maybe I just want to say that popular music is a particularly potent means of forging identifications and thus constructing an identity (however temporary a particular identity might be!) and that we must consider it not as a unified mass-cultural form so much as a potent aesthetic means of dividing the whole into subgroupings and individual.
Q: Would that just be a bad thing?
A: I think I'd like to isolate the capacity to make distinctions itself as a potentially useful political tool honed to sophistication by popular music. The trick would be to transfer the moment of distinction from the aesthetic realm (sucks/doesn't suck) to the socio-political realm (sucks/doesn't suck), *then* use it to distinguish between passivity and praxis, cynicism and commitment. The issue turned out nicely, with pieces that continue to impress me. And my editor's column, composed in a matter of minutes, provides the most succinct summary anywhere of my take on the politics of taste. But the essay itself went down in flames. I'd tried -- and not for the firs time -- to do too much, to do more than I needed to do. And what I ended up with was the difference between my aspirations and my capacity to realize them. Still, the remainder lives on, reflecting scattered light onto the potentially breathtaking but always already benighted shapes that rise from the vast steppes of the counter-factual. Although I haven't even looked at what I wrote for this abortive essay since October, 1993, I can see now, rereading this self-interview and a number of other fragments from the same period, that I ended up making many of the points I'd intended to make back then in the conference presentation I delivered at the UCLA DisChord conference on May 8th, 1997, a piece I later revised for publication in Bad Subjects as "Autobiography in Music Criticism." Even though all the sentences in that one were composed from scratch, a good number are eerily similar to ones that I had written for the "Music" issue and then filed away in the crawl space of trauma. "Autobiography in Music Criticism," incidentally, continues to be the essay of which I am proudest. Tags: autobiography, bad subjects, cultural studies, fragment, music, taste, theory
Current Location: 85704
Muse: a mental breeze from The Chronic
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