T'hese are shitty times to live through, but it's one hell of a television show. Or maybe it's a dream. It feels like a dream sometimes, right down to the way nothing ever resolves--the Mueller investigation, Brexit. They just keep going and twisting with false ending after false ending just like a dream.
And today is always a good day to think about the nihilistic cesspool that is the Republican Party, a governing body driven exclusively by its need for power and money at the expense of anything else.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
Note About Frequency Of Content For The Forseeable Near Future
The book proposal I've been working on has been approved, or as approved as a proposal can get when you're writing a book for an academic press that is subject to critical review at each stage of completion. As a result, that means the writer of this blog has actual (paid! semi-prestigious!) work to do in addition to the actual work of my brain-numbing part-time job and the raising of a small child and participation in a functional, mutually fulfilling romantic partnership. Basically, I'm going to be busy as fuck for the next several months, just as this blog was finding its feet/voice. As the lowest priority in my schedule (but the highest priority in my heart, you must believe me), our two-to-three-a-day posting schedule will probably be unsustainable, esp. some of the longer form stuff I was planning on writing here. The Number Fortys, however, are quick and easy, and literally take about as long to write as it takes a semi-literate 11 year old to read them. Feel free to write your own ideas in the comments section. Better yet, make your own thing and send me the link.
Catch as catch can, who the fuck thought of that as a saying.
Catch as catch can, who the fuck thought of that as a saying.
The Number Fortys: Billy Joel - "The Longest Time"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
Didn't we just write about this guy (why yes we did). Jesus, did all this guy's songs enter at #40? This one is definitely gonna fuck up my YouTube algorithms well and good.
As was the case with his last song, Billy Joel can write a damn fine melody, one that's capable of being both evocative and pretty. It's a gift, but what he chooses to do with that gift...
It's nice to see Billy hasn't forgotten his dance moves from the Uptown Girl video, i.e. walking from one place to another on the beat while occasionally snapping his fingers. Good job, Billy!
The Longest Time is a nice song about nice things. You ask me what is wrong with nice things, and I sigh wearily and reply, nothing, nothing is wrong with nice things. Nice things bring, I don't know, good feelings to people. And life is hard, and a nice song can brighten a person's day. Yes, I know. I know. That's an important contribution to society. But what about those of us who aren't a part of society, who live as exiles in their own country, in their own culture? What fucking good does doo-wop nostalgia about rediscovering the thrill of love as an adult do for people like us? Great melody though.
Score: 4/10
THE NUMBER ONE
Like, could this song even exist without the movie?. Would it make any earthly sense at all? The lyrics are mono-syllabically rhymed doggerel about needing to "cut footloose," a phrase that I'm pretty sure nobody had ever used to this point in human language ever. I mean "cutting footloose" sounds like some jazz-age vernacular for "fucking shit up." Is this a christian song? I would imagine "cut footloose" is what Chick-Fil-A employees do after their pro-life supporting, LGBT-hating asses get done spreading obesity throughout the south. Fuck this white bread piece of shit song, and fuck me for liking it when I was 11 years old. Though I should point out that if you like this song, if it speaks to you in any way shape or form, then you are basically the intellectual/emotional/cultural equivalent of me at age 11. And I lived in Brockton, Massachusetts for three years without asking my mom to buy me a winter jacket, or hat, or gloves. So I was a neglected dumbass that nobody cared about. And if you like Footloose, then so are you.
Didn't we just write about this guy (why yes we did). Jesus, did all this guy's songs enter at #40? This one is definitely gonna fuck up my YouTube algorithms well and good.
As was the case with his last song, Billy Joel can write a damn fine melody, one that's capable of being both evocative and pretty. It's a gift, but what he chooses to do with that gift...
It's nice to see Billy hasn't forgotten his dance moves from the Uptown Girl video, i.e. walking from one place to another on the beat while occasionally snapping his fingers. Good job, Billy!
The Longest Time is a nice song about nice things. You ask me what is wrong with nice things, and I sigh wearily and reply, nothing, nothing is wrong with nice things. Nice things bring, I don't know, good feelings to people. And life is hard, and a nice song can brighten a person's day. Yes, I know. I know. That's an important contribution to society. But what about those of us who aren't a part of society, who live as exiles in their own country, in their own culture? What fucking good does doo-wop nostalgia about rediscovering the thrill of love as an adult do for people like us? Great melody though.
Score: 4/10
THE NUMBER ONE
Like, could this song even exist without the movie?. Would it make any earthly sense at all? The lyrics are mono-syllabically rhymed doggerel about needing to "cut footloose," a phrase that I'm pretty sure nobody had ever used to this point in human language ever. I mean "cutting footloose" sounds like some jazz-age vernacular for "fucking shit up." Is this a christian song? I would imagine "cut footloose" is what Chick-Fil-A employees do after their pro-life supporting, LGBT-hating asses get done spreading obesity throughout the south. Fuck this white bread piece of shit song, and fuck me for liking it when I was 11 years old. Though I should point out that if you like this song, if it speaks to you in any way shape or form, then you are basically the intellectual/emotional/cultural equivalent of me at age 11. And I lived in Brockton, Massachusetts for three years without asking my mom to buy me a winter jacket, or hat, or gloves. So I was a neglected dumbass that nobody cared about. And if you like Footloose, then so are you.
Monday, February 25, 2019
Excerpt From Traumnovelle
And so to write/type/keyboard my way out of the night, or at
least through the night, to trace the contours of this room the way it
shapeshifts as the pulsing light of this starry evening affects even the wells
and transforming everything I see.
Beneath the moon, a country eye surveys all it sees. The
time has come, the teacher said, to map out my insanities.
I’m calling this a novel so I don’t end up in jail. Though I
already live in a prison—of sorts.
You can’t spend your way out of feeling like this. You can’t
think your way out of feeling like this. Or drink your way, or fuck your way,
or even hate your way. All you can do is hope to live long enough that this
feeling of sickness/disappointment/dread will eventually go away for a while,
recede like a radioactive red tide even if we all know that due to the lunar
cycle and its effect on our gravity, it will return stronger & further
& more rancid than before.
****////
Implement (impudent) impotence. All humor is useless when
practiced by someone who has no acquaintance with death. I’m a poorly fed man
so you have to understand that I am almost always hungry, and being almost always
hungry affects the way you move through the world.
My father owned several collections of Doonesbury when I was
growing up; my aunt had the first three books in a series called Truly
Tasteless Jokes. That, along with overgenerous helpings of childhood trauma
& neglect, explains pretty much everything you need to know about my sense
of humor.
I am a fecund steaming pile of ugly psychological shit .
My Retesting pen, snagged from an education conference many
years ago by my wife, is so dear to me that when it runs out of ink, instead of
tossing it in the garbage like you would with most pens, I replace its inkstem
with an insktem from another, less valued, pen.
I am here, I said, to plead my case before an unseen jury.
***//////
The Number Fortys: The Romantics - "One In A Million"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
This piece of vaguely new-wavish retro-fluff comes courtesy of The Romantics. Hailing from Detroit, Michigan, the band may have dressed in leather, but their sound, at least on this one, was 100% tweed.
The Romantics are probably best known for their beer commercial jock-jam "What I Like About You," a garage-y, power-pop number from 1980 that didn't crack the Top 40; it's a 7. They had hit #3 the year before this with "Talking In Your Sleep," (I hear...the secrets that you keep...duh duh, duh duh...when you're talking in your sleep" it's a 3, I guess). By some accounts, the Romantics were a kick-ass power pop band that were a breath of fresh air in the late-70s early-80s. To me, they sound like a more boring, corporate Knack or Marshall Crenshaw--neither of which were all that non-boring and non-corporate to start with. And this song, the last time The Romantics would reach the Top 40 (it reached #37 before fading into oblivion) is so ephemeral that there's barely anything to say about it.
It's nothing about craft. We can appreciate that, unlike a lot of rock bands of their era, the Romantics don't come across like a bunch of drooling, misogynist cokebags, i.e. they appear to see women as genuine, actual human beings. Still, can't help wishing the women in this video grabbed those instruments and made their own music. It would have been way more interesting.
I guess it is worth noting the proto-Kim Deal bass playing going on in the verses. One can imagine the Pixies doing a cover of this (early in their career, when they still gave a shit) that brought out the longing and desperation in the lyrics that the singer of The Romantics, (looking it up....) Wally Palmar, couldn't be bothered to invest in his singing because he was trying to have a hit single, and he thought it was still 1964 or some shit.
Score: 3/10
THE NUMBER ONE
Van Halen?....Guys...?
No seriously. This isn't funny. Didn't America want to keep listening to Jump forever?
Apparently, not.
Look. I'm not going to lie to you. I was 11 years old this week in Top 40 history, and I loved the fuck out of some Footloose soundtrack. I saw the move in the East Side theater in Brockton, Massachusetss, and I rode my bike while listening to the soundtrack on my walkman, pedaling my ass off while listening to "Holding Out For a Hero." But in the cold light of adulthood, I can hear this song as overproduced musical theater garbage being propped up by a music video that makes the song appear way more exciting than it actually is. Even the movie (and if you've seen the video, you've basically seen the movie) is just an updated Rebel Without a Cause (only this time the rebel HAS a cause, and that cause is...PROM). Prom is bullshit; it gets a 1.Footloose is bullshit; it gets a 2. Kenny Loggins is also bullshit (except for House at Pooh Corner because I'm a dad and fuck you I'm not crying right now you're the one that's crying). Kudos to that ugly little weasel for having the good sense not to appear in his video. He's doing three dates in Las Vegas next month if you want to go and heckle him. Otherwise you'll have to wait until June when he plays the Global Event Center at Winstar World Casino and Resort in Thackerville, Oklahoma. What is success really?
This piece of vaguely new-wavish retro-fluff comes courtesy of The Romantics. Hailing from Detroit, Michigan, the band may have dressed in leather, but their sound, at least on this one, was 100% tweed.
The Romantics are probably best known for their beer commercial jock-jam "What I Like About You," a garage-y, power-pop number from 1980 that didn't crack the Top 40; it's a 7. They had hit #3 the year before this with "Talking In Your Sleep," (I hear...the secrets that you keep...duh duh, duh duh...when you're talking in your sleep" it's a 3, I guess). By some accounts, the Romantics were a kick-ass power pop band that were a breath of fresh air in the late-70s early-80s. To me, they sound like a more boring, corporate Knack or Marshall Crenshaw--neither of which were all that non-boring and non-corporate to start with. And this song, the last time The Romantics would reach the Top 40 (it reached #37 before fading into oblivion) is so ephemeral that there's barely anything to say about it.
It's nothing about craft. We can appreciate that, unlike a lot of rock bands of their era, the Romantics don't come across like a bunch of drooling, misogynist cokebags, i.e. they appear to see women as genuine, actual human beings. Still, can't help wishing the women in this video grabbed those instruments and made their own music. It would have been way more interesting.
I guess it is worth noting the proto-Kim Deal bass playing going on in the verses. One can imagine the Pixies doing a cover of this (early in their career, when they still gave a shit) that brought out the longing and desperation in the lyrics that the singer of The Romantics, (looking it up....) Wally Palmar, couldn't be bothered to invest in his singing because he was trying to have a hit single, and he thought it was still 1964 or some shit.
Score: 3/10
THE NUMBER ONE
Van Halen?....Guys...?
No seriously. This isn't funny. Didn't America want to keep listening to Jump forever?
Apparently, not.
Look. I'm not going to lie to you. I was 11 years old this week in Top 40 history, and I loved the fuck out of some Footloose soundtrack. I saw the move in the East Side theater in Brockton, Massachusetss, and I rode my bike while listening to the soundtrack on my walkman, pedaling my ass off while listening to "Holding Out For a Hero." But in the cold light of adulthood, I can hear this song as overproduced musical theater garbage being propped up by a music video that makes the song appear way more exciting than it actually is. Even the movie (and if you've seen the video, you've basically seen the movie) is just an updated Rebel Without a Cause (only this time the rebel HAS a cause, and that cause is...PROM). Prom is bullshit; it gets a 1.Footloose is bullshit; it gets a 2. Kenny Loggins is also bullshit (except for House at Pooh Corner because I'm a dad and fuck you I'm not crying right now you're the one that's crying). Kudos to that ugly little weasel for having the good sense not to appear in his video. He's doing three dates in Las Vegas next month if you want to go and heckle him. Otherwise you'll have to wait until June when he plays the Global Event Center at Winstar World Casino and Resort in Thackerville, Oklahoma. What is success really?
Friday, February 22, 2019
The Number Fortys: Matthew Wilder - "The Kid's American"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
Wilder, who looks like a distant relative to Gene, is best known for 1983's "Break My Stride," a hellacious piece of optimistic pseudo-reggae that reached #5. This was his only other Top 40 hit, making it all the way to #33. Let's take a minute to enjoy the video, because it's uh, quite something there, yes it is.
Man, I'm really glad the at-the-time-of-this-video 31 year old Wilder gets to take that girl to the prom. Ah, he was probably just trying to appeal to the youth market. Not his fault. The sudden ascendance of MTV as a career-maker (ca. 1982-3) forced all kinds of, shall we say, photogenically-challenged musicians into appearing in front of a camera. It's not Wilder's fault he looked goony as hell. Let's talk about the music.
"The Kid's American" is catchy competent pop/rock. I'm always a fan of chorus where a bunch of instruments drop out (see Mamma Mia, Abba), but even this had nothing to offer anyone in a year like 1984. The week of March 24, 1984, the week we're dealing with here, saw the following songs in the Top 40: "Thriller," Rockwell's Sombobdy's Watching Me," "Girl Just Want to Have Fun," "Here Comes the Rain Again" by Eurythmics, "99 Luftbaloons," those Huey Lewis and Pointer Sisters songs we've covered, "Hold Me Now," by Thompson Twins, Duran Duran's "New Moon On Monday," Weird Al's "Eat It," John Lennon's "Nobody Told Me," The Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger," "Radio Ga Ga," Howard Jones' "New Song," Paul Young's "Come Back and Stay," Tina Turner's "Let's Stay Together, Tracy Ulmann's "They Don't Know," Shannon's "Let the Music Play." The competition was fucking fierce. And Matthew Wilder's hand-clapping, patriotic-pandering, waiter-looking ass wasn't going any where near the top of the charts with this shit. It made it to #33, the last time Wilder would reach the Top 40. He did, however, go on to have a long production career, including No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom; which is, in my highly subjective world, a 3.
Fun fact, the guitarist on the record (and possibly in the video) is none other than Dennis Herring. Herring produced two of this blogs favorite albums, Camper Van Beethoven's Key Lime Pie and Throwing Muses The Real Ramona (the first one's a 10; the second one's an 8), though he's probably best known for his work with Modest Mouse during the "Float On," era, or as I call it The Period When Modest Mouse Began Their Quick Descent Into Being A Boring Band That Sucked.
Score: 3/10.
THE NUMBER ONE
Five weeks for Van Halen. Still not sure I've been able to find the words to adequately express everything I love about this. But my favorite thing today is the way the band's outfits would be picked up and mainstreamed by The Golden Girls.
Wilder, who looks like a distant relative to Gene, is best known for 1983's "Break My Stride," a hellacious piece of optimistic pseudo-reggae that reached #5. This was his only other Top 40 hit, making it all the way to #33. Let's take a minute to enjoy the video, because it's uh, quite something there, yes it is.
Man, I'm really glad the at-the-time-of-this-video 31 year old Wilder gets to take that girl to the prom. Ah, he was probably just trying to appeal to the youth market. Not his fault. The sudden ascendance of MTV as a career-maker (ca. 1982-3) forced all kinds of, shall we say, photogenically-challenged musicians into appearing in front of a camera. It's not Wilder's fault he looked goony as hell. Let's talk about the music.
"The Kid's American" is catchy competent pop/rock. I'm always a fan of chorus where a bunch of instruments drop out (see Mamma Mia, Abba), but even this had nothing to offer anyone in a year like 1984. The week of March 24, 1984, the week we're dealing with here, saw the following songs in the Top 40: "Thriller," Rockwell's Sombobdy's Watching Me," "Girl Just Want to Have Fun," "Here Comes the Rain Again" by Eurythmics, "99 Luftbaloons," those Huey Lewis and Pointer Sisters songs we've covered, "Hold Me Now," by Thompson Twins, Duran Duran's "New Moon On Monday," Weird Al's "Eat It," John Lennon's "Nobody Told Me," The Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger," "Radio Ga Ga," Howard Jones' "New Song," Paul Young's "Come Back and Stay," Tina Turner's "Let's Stay Together, Tracy Ulmann's "They Don't Know," Shannon's "Let the Music Play." The competition was fucking fierce. And Matthew Wilder's hand-clapping, patriotic-pandering, waiter-looking ass wasn't going any where near the top of the charts with this shit. It made it to #33, the last time Wilder would reach the Top 40. He did, however, go on to have a long production career, including No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom; which is, in my highly subjective world, a 3.
Fun fact, the guitarist on the record (and possibly in the video) is none other than Dennis Herring. Herring produced two of this blogs favorite albums, Camper Van Beethoven's Key Lime Pie and Throwing Muses The Real Ramona (the first one's a 10; the second one's an 8), though he's probably best known for his work with Modest Mouse during the "Float On," era, or as I call it The Period When Modest Mouse Began Their Quick Descent Into Being A Boring Band That Sucked.
Score: 3/10.
Five weeks for Van Halen. Still not sure I've been able to find the words to adequately express everything I love about this. But my favorite thing today is the way the band's outfits would be picked up and mainstreamed by The Golden Girls.
Finished Meet Me In The Bathroom
The book. And yeah, I guess I finished the song too. I had a jokey headline all ready to go, "Please Kill Them," a reference to the Legs McNeil NYC Punk oral history, but the people in that book were even more annoying than the scions of the wealthy wandering through Lizzie Goodman's book. And while we're here, let's take a moment to marvel at the amount of work that went into this book. Lizzie Goodman, goddamn. She deserves a medal, as does whoever did the indexing for this fucker. Maggie Nelson, an NYU (I think) music grad who I heard on SNL one time, and who, in my completely subjective opinion, has a singing voice that could sterilize every guinea pigs within 30 yards of her voice, is thanked for her research help conducted when she was just an undergrad with stars in her eyes . The more things change...
There's a story where Marc Spitz, formerly a senior writer at Spin magazine--also formerly a living breathing resident of planet Earth; Spitz died a couple of years ago; his humor and passion are sorely missed--, so Spitz is hanging out with Julian Casablancas, frontman for The Strokes. Julian's just finished recording the follow-up to Is This It. And he and Spitz bring home a couple of girls and a big bag of coke, whereupon Julian, the Smart One in the band, plays the advance cassette over and over again wondering if it's any good. Then he plays Talking Heads' Don't Worry About The Government over and over, wishing his new album, the forthcoming Room On Fire, sounded as good as the T. Heads. Spitz comforts his buddy. The girls don't get mentioned. Sounds like a hell of a party!
There's something almost appallingly pathetic and sad in most of the book's stories. There's a story about an Austin club owner very sweetly asking Karen O and her buddies to be nice to the dressing room he just paid lots of money to renovate, and of course they fucking thrash the place just because, and I'm not exaggerating, he asked them not to. Weirdly, they're telling the story years later for the book, but there's no sign of any remorse, no sign that anyone in the book really gives a shit about anyone else, really. Hell, most of the time they don't even give a shit about themselves. Even their reaction to 9/11 is narcissistic and apolitical. Basically, a holy fuck we might all die. Let's party!
Back to Julian, Marc, and the anonymous girls (I think Eleanor Friedberger is the only woman in the book who gets to play an instrument) at the party. Anybody who gets coked up and tries to judge the quality of recorded sound is, how can I put this, barking up the wrong bamboo tree. What Julian should have done was call me on the phone and ask my opinion. There's some great songs on there, Julian, but it's sequenced all wrong. So you get this kind of mid-tempo lull in the middle that kills the momentum. And like, how do you not make The End Has No End the last song on the album? It's one of the best things you ever did, and it's such an obvious last-song. Instead you put I Can't Win at the end. Move it into that mid-tempo lull I was talking about, and you've solved that problem. Also, you might want to think about these song titles. Last album, you had Is This It, Last Nite, Hard To Explain, etc., songs where the title appeared in the songs lyrics. Ain't nobody going to be standing in the front row of your shows yelling Reptilia! or What Ever Happened! or Automatic Stop! I've had this album for fucking 15 years now, and I still can't remember which ones the reggae one and which ones the Smokey Robinson one. Again, great songs, sounds great, but it also sounds like a fucking mess.
Instead, they just put it out.
The only time class ever gets mentioned is when we're introduced to Vampire Weekend and Ezra pulls out his I'm-not-wealthy-I'm-just-middle-class bona fides. Motherfucker, you attended an Ivy League college in one of the most expensive cities in America. You're not Bruce Springsteen. (Bruce Springsteen isn't even Bruce Springsteen, but that's a subject for another time). You're a fantastic lyricist and guitar player. Just chill. But the featured players in Meet Me In the Bathroom the Book are all either fucking loaded (in every sense) or attached to loaded friends. DFA basically owes its existence to a NYC trust-fund weenie who got his dad to buy him a Manhattan building so he could set up a studio and have some cool music/film buddies. James Murphy, a man who never met an opportunity he didn't like, got in on the ground floor of that shit.
Funnily enough, TV On the Radio and Fiery Furnaces, probably my two favorite bands to come out of that era, get kinda short-changed in the book. Not enough crazy stories, true (hearing the TVotR drummer complain about how Interpol gets all the groupies and he gets married couples wanting to buy him a cup of coffee is funny as fuck), but also not enough chart success either. The music journalism adage that "the more popular you are, the more you're worth writing about" definitely applies here.
To be fair, those stories are great, as are those bands first albums (Is This It, the Master EP, Turn On the Bright Lights). The story seriously drags when those bands, uh, continue to make records. Intra-band fighting, underwhelming music, and way too many drugs--over and over, ad nasueum, ad nausea. Everyone thought these bands were ripping off VU or Patti or Joy Division, but it turns out all they ever really wanted to be was Duran Duran.
We'll leave you with this song, an angry stab of NYC nihilism and loathing from that era that sounds like someone smashing the mirror that everyone around them can't stop staring into (and snorting off of). It also takes the Strokes/Interpol sound to a place that neither band ever quite got to.
There's a story where Marc Spitz, formerly a senior writer at Spin magazine--also formerly a living breathing resident of planet Earth; Spitz died a couple of years ago; his humor and passion are sorely missed--, so Spitz is hanging out with Julian Casablancas, frontman for The Strokes. Julian's just finished recording the follow-up to Is This It. And he and Spitz bring home a couple of girls and a big bag of coke, whereupon Julian, the Smart One in the band, plays the advance cassette over and over again wondering if it's any good. Then he plays Talking Heads' Don't Worry About The Government over and over, wishing his new album, the forthcoming Room On Fire, sounded as good as the T. Heads. Spitz comforts his buddy. The girls don't get mentioned. Sounds like a hell of a party!
There's something almost appallingly pathetic and sad in most of the book's stories. There's a story about an Austin club owner very sweetly asking Karen O and her buddies to be nice to the dressing room he just paid lots of money to renovate, and of course they fucking thrash the place just because, and I'm not exaggerating, he asked them not to. Weirdly, they're telling the story years later for the book, but there's no sign of any remorse, no sign that anyone in the book really gives a shit about anyone else, really. Hell, most of the time they don't even give a shit about themselves. Even their reaction to 9/11 is narcissistic and apolitical. Basically, a holy fuck we might all die. Let's party!
Back to Julian, Marc, and the anonymous girls (I think Eleanor Friedberger is the only woman in the book who gets to play an instrument) at the party. Anybody who gets coked up and tries to judge the quality of recorded sound is, how can I put this, barking up the wrong bamboo tree. What Julian should have done was call me on the phone and ask my opinion. There's some great songs on there, Julian, but it's sequenced all wrong. So you get this kind of mid-tempo lull in the middle that kills the momentum. And like, how do you not make The End Has No End the last song on the album? It's one of the best things you ever did, and it's such an obvious last-song. Instead you put I Can't Win at the end. Move it into that mid-tempo lull I was talking about, and you've solved that problem. Also, you might want to think about these song titles. Last album, you had Is This It, Last Nite, Hard To Explain, etc., songs where the title appeared in the songs lyrics. Ain't nobody going to be standing in the front row of your shows yelling Reptilia! or What Ever Happened! or Automatic Stop! I've had this album for fucking 15 years now, and I still can't remember which ones the reggae one and which ones the Smokey Robinson one. Again, great songs, sounds great, but it also sounds like a fucking mess.
Instead, they just put it out.
The only time class ever gets mentioned is when we're introduced to Vampire Weekend and Ezra pulls out his I'm-not-wealthy-I'm-just-middle-class bona fides. Motherfucker, you attended an Ivy League college in one of the most expensive cities in America. You're not Bruce Springsteen. (Bruce Springsteen isn't even Bruce Springsteen, but that's a subject for another time). You're a fantastic lyricist and guitar player. Just chill. But the featured players in Meet Me In the Bathroom the Book are all either fucking loaded (in every sense) or attached to loaded friends. DFA basically owes its existence to a NYC trust-fund weenie who got his dad to buy him a Manhattan building so he could set up a studio and have some cool music/film buddies. James Murphy, a man who never met an opportunity he didn't like, got in on the ground floor of that shit.
Funnily enough, TV On the Radio and Fiery Furnaces, probably my two favorite bands to come out of that era, get kinda short-changed in the book. Not enough crazy stories, true (hearing the TVotR drummer complain about how Interpol gets all the groupies and he gets married couples wanting to buy him a cup of coffee is funny as fuck), but also not enough chart success either. The music journalism adage that "the more popular you are, the more you're worth writing about" definitely applies here.
To be fair, those stories are great, as are those bands first albums (Is This It, the Master EP, Turn On the Bright Lights). The story seriously drags when those bands, uh, continue to make records. Intra-band fighting, underwhelming music, and way too many drugs--over and over, ad nasueum, ad nausea. Everyone thought these bands were ripping off VU or Patti or Joy Division, but it turns out all they ever really wanted to be was Duran Duran.
We'll leave you with this song, an angry stab of NYC nihilism and loathing from that era that sounds like someone smashing the mirror that everyone around them can't stop staring into (and snorting off of). It also takes the Strokes/Interpol sound to a place that neither band ever quite got to.
Thursday, February 21, 2019
Those Who Make A Revolution By Halves
So I was talking with a UK friend yesterday about the Laura Snapes thing we wrote yesterday He had been talking to some fellow UK critics who were wondering the same thing I had been wondering. Who exactly were these nameless editors and publications who were perpetuating indie misogynist culture? My friend didn't think she meant anyone at The Guardian. He thought it dated back to Snapes' tenure at Uncut in the early/mid 2000's. This raised a question that neither one of us could adequately answer, is it really a good idea to call people out without actually, you know, calling them out? Doesn't that just invited idle speculation, and potentially lead to merit-less (or maybe not merit-less, who knows?) accusations to people who don't (or maybe they do, how can we know?) deserve to be accused.
To be clear, the problem with sexist male-dominated bullshit indie music culture is with the sexist male-dominatd bullshitters who maintain it, i.e. the powerful. The problem isn't Laura Snapes. But if she's going to write articles that only imply, or insinuate, or raise awareness, she isn't part of the solution either. Courage is a hard thing to have in this day and age of scarcity (remember this blog's motto: SC.R.E.A.M., SCarcity Rules Everything Around Me), but if Snapes, a connected, recognized name who has been writing about music for nearly 20 years (I don't always agree with her opinions, but she's a damn fine enough writer), doesn't have the courage to add specifics to her stories, then why would an intern, or someone just starting out, have that encourage. I guess my question is, if not her, then who?
We're quick to excuse people who don't rock the boat. Don't want to risk your job. Don't want to be unpopular. But the music industry is in the business of destroying souls as much as it is anything else. Let's watch this video of a child, called by Dave Grohl last week as the Future of Rock or some shit, (we all know Dave has been the Past of Rock since the instant Kurt Cobain's body hit the floor). I emphasize her age, not to take anything away from her as an artist, but to remind people that this seems, to me at least, a pretty vulnerable age to be doing this kind of thing for a living.
This video doesn't have anything to do with Laura Snapes and the subject we're currently talking about, except to remind us that the Music Business is a nasty, nasty place that treats its artists like disposable meat. It doesn't have to be that way. And while I respect Ms. Snapes' right to decide for herself what she does and does not feel comfortable disclosing, I can't help wishing she had named names. I don't think it would have destroyed her career. It likely would have earned her a large amount of respect (and probably a significant amount of death threats, let's be honest--I once had a guy threaten to beat my ass for not liking a recent Julia Holter album). It, at the absolute very least, would have made life uncomfortable for the people she named. Also, I don't want to support any of the artists or publications that were (un)implicated in her article.
The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. So what was the point of the article? There's some shitty people in the music industry? That it's as riddled with misogyny as the rest of the planet? I guess it's just what it says, that Ryan Adams is only the tip of the iceberg. Which is something, but, in the scheme of things, it's not much. The piece feels brave at first, but looking back now, it feels more afraid than anything else. It reminds me of a kid flipping off the teacher only when they're sure the teacher won't see them. It's a kind of cowardice, a cowardice that congratulates itself on its bravery. Again, Laura Snapes isn't the problem. The industry, the society, that makes Laura Snapes feel she has to hedge her bets, to write in fear, that's the problem.
The only solution is to be brave, to create solidarity, and to refuse to live in fear. I am rooting for all of us.
To be clear, the problem with sexist male-dominated bullshit indie music culture is with the sexist male-dominatd bullshitters who maintain it, i.e. the powerful. The problem isn't Laura Snapes. But if she's going to write articles that only imply, or insinuate, or raise awareness, she isn't part of the solution either. Courage is a hard thing to have in this day and age of scarcity (remember this blog's motto: SC.R.E.A.M., SCarcity Rules Everything Around Me), but if Snapes, a connected, recognized name who has been writing about music for nearly 20 years (I don't always agree with her opinions, but she's a damn fine enough writer), doesn't have the courage to add specifics to her stories, then why would an intern, or someone just starting out, have that encourage. I guess my question is, if not her, then who?
We're quick to excuse people who don't rock the boat. Don't want to risk your job. Don't want to be unpopular. But the music industry is in the business of destroying souls as much as it is anything else. Let's watch this video of a child, called by Dave Grohl last week as the Future of Rock or some shit, (we all know Dave has been the Past of Rock since the instant Kurt Cobain's body hit the floor). I emphasize her age, not to take anything away from her as an artist, but to remind people that this seems, to me at least, a pretty vulnerable age to be doing this kind of thing for a living.
This video doesn't have anything to do with Laura Snapes and the subject we're currently talking about, except to remind us that the Music Business is a nasty, nasty place that treats its artists like disposable meat. It doesn't have to be that way. And while I respect Ms. Snapes' right to decide for herself what she does and does not feel comfortable disclosing, I can't help wishing she had named names. I don't think it would have destroyed her career. It likely would have earned her a large amount of respect (and probably a significant amount of death threats, let's be honest--I once had a guy threaten to beat my ass for not liking a recent Julia Holter album). It, at the absolute very least, would have made life uncomfortable for the people she named. Also, I don't want to support any of the artists or publications that were (un)implicated in her article.
The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. So what was the point of the article? There's some shitty people in the music industry? That it's as riddled with misogyny as the rest of the planet? I guess it's just what it says, that Ryan Adams is only the tip of the iceberg. Which is something, but, in the scheme of things, it's not much. The piece feels brave at first, but looking back now, it feels more afraid than anything else. It reminds me of a kid flipping off the teacher only when they're sure the teacher won't see them. It's a kind of cowardice, a cowardice that congratulates itself on its bravery. Again, Laura Snapes isn't the problem. The industry, the society, that makes Laura Snapes feel she has to hedge her bets, to write in fear, that's the problem.
The only solution is to be brave, to create solidarity, and to refuse to live in fear. I am rooting for all of us.
The Number Fortys: Kool & the Gang - "Tonight"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
As someone who's catered his (un)fair share of Florida weddings, I've got some bad trigger stuff when it comes to certain Kool & the Gang songs. How are you gonna do it when you really don't wanna dance, by standing on the wall? Yes, Kool, that is absolutely how I am going to do it.
Anyway, this one's more rocking than your usual K&tG fare, especially during this decade, which they dominated with a smooth, non-threatening R&B that was so light it practically threatened to evaporate. "Tonight," on the other hand, is absolutely saturated in guitars that, in 1984 anyway, signified rock (I'm not sure what the howling tiger sound signified, maybe a love of Survivor).
Because K&tG had been, in the previous decade, a pretty hot-shit funk band, they lay down a solid groove that's more convincing than, um, Billy Joel's "Matter of Trust," which my YouTube algorithm, now broken and perverted by two weeks of doing this column, coerced me into watching the other day; it's a 3. The backup vocals feel choppy and plodding--tonight....oooh....this is the night...you'll see the light--and kind of ruin the song for me. But the backup vocals on that bridge, when it goes to the major! Tonight you'll finally see the light. That's the good shit right there. Somebody needs to pull that out and put it over...well anything, It's just pure saturated bliss, and in the context of the song's subject matter, does a nice co-mingling of the sacred and profane. Too bad it only lasts about 20 seconds.
Oh yeah, that subject matter. The song seems to be about a 16 year old on the night they lose their virginity (unless you think the song is about learning to dance, which is also a valid, if over-literal interpretation). As a song, it's nothing special, other than illuminating a musical corner of the K&tG universe that most people don't know exists.
3/10
THE NUMBER ONE
You bet your ass Van Halen is still number one. Four weeks and counting.
As someone who's catered his (un)fair share of Florida weddings, I've got some bad trigger stuff when it comes to certain Kool & the Gang songs. How are you gonna do it when you really don't wanna dance, by standing on the wall? Yes, Kool, that is absolutely how I am going to do it.
Anyway, this one's more rocking than your usual K&tG fare, especially during this decade, which they dominated with a smooth, non-threatening R&B that was so light it practically threatened to evaporate. "Tonight," on the other hand, is absolutely saturated in guitars that, in 1984 anyway, signified rock (I'm not sure what the howling tiger sound signified, maybe a love of Survivor).
Because K&tG had been, in the previous decade, a pretty hot-shit funk band, they lay down a solid groove that's more convincing than, um, Billy Joel's "Matter of Trust," which my YouTube algorithm, now broken and perverted by two weeks of doing this column, coerced me into watching the other day; it's a 3. The backup vocals feel choppy and plodding--tonight....oooh....this is the night...you'll see the light--and kind of ruin the song for me. But the backup vocals on that bridge, when it goes to the major! Tonight you'll finally see the light. That's the good shit right there. Somebody needs to pull that out and put it over...well anything, It's just pure saturated bliss, and in the context of the song's subject matter, does a nice co-mingling of the sacred and profane. Too bad it only lasts about 20 seconds.
Oh yeah, that subject matter. The song seems to be about a 16 year old on the night they lose their virginity (unless you think the song is about learning to dance, which is also a valid, if over-literal interpretation). As a song, it's nothing special, other than illuminating a musical corner of the K&tG universe that most people don't know exists.
3/10
THE NUMBER ONE
You bet your ass Van Halen is still number one. Four weeks and counting.
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
How Far Down Does This Iceberg Go Exactly?
So Laura Snapes wrote this wowser for The Guardian about the Ryan Adams-is-even-more-of-a-skeezy-fuckbag-than-you-already-thought scandal. Entitled "The Ryan Adams allegations are the tip of an indie-music iceberg," it's worth coming back to because Snapes talked about how typical shitty sexist misogynist behavior is in the music industry (and as someone who once played in a band fronted by women, let me concur it sure the fuck is).
It was the section at the end, where it seemed Snapes was writing from personal experience, that got my attention.
That last example she's referencing is Pitchfork, a place where Snapes' writing also appears. One big things jumped out at me as I read this. If I ran a music magazine/website, I wouldn't cover artists who treated my writers like shit. If a publicist made those kind of demands, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves. If a manager attempted to intimidate one of my writers, I wouldn't cover that artist, not for that press cycle at least. Or I'd encourage the writer to write about their treatment. These "publications" Snapes talks about, I have to assume include such bastions of liberal woke posturing as The Guardian and Pitchfork (according to her twitter bio, her work has also appeared at Q).
I've seen a lot of commentary around her article, but I haven't seen any one notice that Snapes essentially just wrote that two of the largest music publications at the moment are staffed by misogynist-enabling, almost entirely male, assholes who allow the women on their staff to be treated like shit. But then, you'd have to be a naive dreamer to assume that the rest of them aren't like this too. At least, Ryan Adams has the excuse of tortured artist to hide behind (though hopefully that tired old trope is just about finished), what the fuck is the excuse for an editor at The Guardian?
It was the section at the end, where it seemed Snapes was writing from personal experience, that got my attention.
To this end, publicists for male indie stars ask for guarantees that allegations and evidence of an artist’s bad behaviour aren’t referred to in interviews, and often receive those guarantees. Managers intimidate women at public events because they don’t like the way they have written about their male charges. Music magazine editors sideline female employees who raise red flags when plans are made to cover well-known creeps. Publications continue to write about men outed as beasts once the heat has died down – having profited from clicks on righteous op-eds at the time of the outing – and venues continue to book them, disregarding protests.
Beta male misogyny is a musician repeatedly emailing me asking to be his “antagonist pen pal” even though he knows I dislike him. It’s another male musician threatening to get me fired because I tweeted a joke about him. Another using the full force of his management to try to make me delete a report about him telling a rape joke at a gig. In just nine years in a supposedly more enlightened industry, I have seen all of this. To be clear, these infractions are minuscule, but legion, and the tip of an iceberg visible from space.
Misogyny is also a band and label refusing to eject an offending male musician because they don’t see the big deal. It is a man putting obstacles in the way of a former partner who seeks to release new music. It is praise being lavished upon male musicians who make obvious statements about masculinity and sexism, and the women who have been saying those things for years being asked why they’re so angry. It is men being dismissed from high-profile positions for sexual misdemeanours and walking straight into similar roles. It is major publications not reviewing Taylor Swift’s album 1989 – too pop, too disposable – but lavishing space on Ryan Adams’s tedious song-by-song cover of it.
That last example she's referencing is Pitchfork, a place where Snapes' writing also appears. One big things jumped out at me as I read this. If I ran a music magazine/website, I wouldn't cover artists who treated my writers like shit. If a publicist made those kind of demands, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves. If a manager attempted to intimidate one of my writers, I wouldn't cover that artist, not for that press cycle at least. Or I'd encourage the writer to write about their treatment. These "publications" Snapes talks about, I have to assume include such bastions of liberal woke posturing as The Guardian and Pitchfork (according to her twitter bio, her work has also appeared at Q).
I've seen a lot of commentary around her article, but I haven't seen any one notice that Snapes essentially just wrote that two of the largest music publications at the moment are staffed by misogynist-enabling, almost entirely male, assholes who allow the women on their staff to be treated like shit. But then, you'd have to be a naive dreamer to assume that the rest of them aren't like this too. At least, Ryan Adams has the excuse of tortured artist to hide behind (though hopefully that tired old trope is just about finished), what the fuck is the excuse for an editor at The Guardian?
The Number Fortys: Wang Chung - "Don't Let Go"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
Wang Chung had a love of hexagon-shaped drums and UK art rock. Unfortunately, they're best known for "Everybody Have Fun Tonight," as featured in endless Vh1 specials from our youth, but they had a couple of great moments as a pop group. "Hypnotize Me" for example has a swoon-worthy chorus that is like some combination of candy and angels; it's a 7.
This one is not one of those moments.
Serious kudos or whatever to the Wang Chung dudes jumping in the recording studio like they're playing Wembley Stadium or something. For all you aspiring musicians out there, it's not a good idea to do this in an actual recording session. Anyway, "Don't Let Go" is histrionic nonsense that sounds more like an action movie soundtrack than an actual song. Interestingly, Wang Chung did the soundtrack for the following year's William Friedkin film, To Live and Die in L.A; the title song's a 7, the film's a 7 too. But getting back to the song. Actually, let's not get back to the song. Let's notice how much the singer looks like a balding, less physically fit Sting, aside from the neckerchief, or is it a scarf? The singer has a name by the way, because he is a person, and persons are given names when they are born. It's just how we do things. His real name is Jeremy Ryder, but he changed it when he became a musician to...are you ready?...Jack Hues.
Isn't that fucking great. Jeremy Ryder? Nah, not rock and roll enough. I'm going to change it to Jack Hues. I fucking love english people. Maybe it was an ironic gesture at all the punk stage-naming that was going on around that time. Oh, you're gonna call yourself Sid Vicious, well I'm going to be...Jack Hughes. Anyway, Jack studied music at Goldsmith's College, and went on to something called the Royal College of Music, where--for this song at least--he appears to have studied bullshit. This song gets a 2.
THE NUMBER ONE
Wang Chung had a love of hexagon-shaped drums and UK art rock. Unfortunately, they're best known for "Everybody Have Fun Tonight," as featured in endless Vh1 specials from our youth, but they had a couple of great moments as a pop group. "Hypnotize Me" for example has a swoon-worthy chorus that is like some combination of candy and angels; it's a 7.
This one is not one of those moments.
Serious kudos or whatever to the Wang Chung dudes jumping in the recording studio like they're playing Wembley Stadium or something. For all you aspiring musicians out there, it's not a good idea to do this in an actual recording session. Anyway, "Don't Let Go" is histrionic nonsense that sounds more like an action movie soundtrack than an actual song. Interestingly, Wang Chung did the soundtrack for the following year's William Friedkin film, To Live and Die in L.A; the title song's a 7, the film's a 7 too. But getting back to the song. Actually, let's not get back to the song. Let's notice how much the singer looks like a balding, less physically fit Sting, aside from the neckerchief, or is it a scarf? The singer has a name by the way, because he is a person, and persons are given names when they are born. It's just how we do things. His real name is Jeremy Ryder, but he changed it when he became a musician to...are you ready?...Jack Hues.
Isn't that fucking great. Jeremy Ryder? Nah, not rock and roll enough. I'm going to change it to Jack Hues. I fucking love english people. Maybe it was an ironic gesture at all the punk stage-naming that was going on around that time. Oh, you're gonna call yourself Sid Vicious, well I'm going to be...Jack Hughes. Anyway, Jack studied music at Goldsmith's College, and went on to something called the Royal College of Music, where--for this song at least--he appears to have studied bullshit. This song gets a 2.
THE NUMBER ONE
So there's this Danny Boyle movie coming out this summer about this guy who gets hit by a bus and---actually, I'm not sure how it works, but the premise is what if the rest of the world had never heard the Beatles, but one person knew all the songs and so he could play all these great songs and people would think he wrote them (or something). The whole think reeks of boomer-centric nonsense, if you ask me. And now that I'm thinking about it, it'd be a way more interesting movie to do the same thing, except for Van Halen, and except for the guy gets locked up and goes to jail. This song is still, and will always be, a 10.
Project Cancelled - Some Ideas On Improving Cancel Culture
Theme music for this post, or an excuse to post one of my favorite Bowie songs.
A friend of mine was conducting an interview for their doctoral thesis with a tenure-track professor at a mid-western university. During the interview, the professor bragged about how she wouldn't teach Judith Butler in her class anymore. For those small handful of people who aren't already aware, Butler is one of the best-known gender theorists of our era. She's written lots of books about it and everything. So why wasn't the professor teaching her? Because Butler had authored a letter of support last year for an NYU professor that had been accused of sexual harassment by her grad student. As far as this professor was concerned, Butler was siding with the powerful over the powerless, and therefore she could not, in good conscience, continue to teach her ideas in her class.
The NYU professor's name (the professor in our story, the interviewee, is going to remain anonymous, because really she's just here for rhetorical purposes) is Avital Ronell. The grad student was Nimrod Reitman. So we've got a female professor accused of sexual harassing, assaulting, stalking, and retaliating against their male grad student. And we've got Butler believing the woman, or at least arguing that she shouldn't be punished because her work was so important (not a good look, there Judith, in any era).
This story is glorious for the way it encapsulates the bullshit insularity, the simultaneous hyper-seriousness and pointlessness, of academia. It's also funny that Butler, then the president-elect of the MLA (don't even fucking ask), later apologized and resigned from her presidency after being criticized for her letter.
But getting back to the anonymous professor, the one that stopped teaching Butler in her classes after the controversy. I can't help wondering about her motivation, especially her motivation in telling my friend, a mere doctoral candidate working on their doctoral thesis, about it.
It was all social positioning of course. The term "virtue signaling" is vague and overused. Isn't signaling virtue better than signaling being an asshole? Is it really worth criticizing someone's motivation, or more accurately, what we perceive to be somebody's motivation, when there are literal countless raging shitbags all around us screaming as loud as they can? I'm not interested in virtue signaling, but I am interested in the idea of using social justice--the loosest strands, most likely to be governed by fashion--to stake out a claim for one's self as being more virtuous (this professor implied) than any fucking philistine fascist who continues to teach Judith Butler in their classroom. It reminds me less of virtue-signaling, and more of like indie rock in the 1990's or something. I will now demonstrate my purity for all to see.
Because I can't help thinking, that despite whatever misguided, strongly worded letters Judith Butler might write, her philosophical writings on gender are relevant and essential in her field. Even the parts that might be, uh, questionable, have to be questions, and argued with because of her position within the field. If we assume this professor's students aren't being taught about Butler (though I imagine she would pop up in other writers' work, such is her influence) are they being done a disservice?
This got me thinking about cancel culture in general. Is it kinda arbitrary who gets cancelled and who doesn't? Pretty much, especially in music, where most critics and listeners have the critical thinking ability of an unopened bag of Doritos. The guy who provided the soundtrack for our post? Not canceled, despite sleeping with girls as young as 13. Axl Rose was a notorious woman-beater who used racial and homophobic slurs in his songs (when asked, Axl expounded upon the difference between a black person and a n***er). Appetite In Destruction got a 10 just 18 months ago by Pitchfork. I'm not saying David Bowie and G'N'R need to be taken off the air, and canceled, or that well-meaning people who proudly proclaim they'll never listen to, say, John Lennon again because he hit women are all hypocrites who--I don't know--need to be forced to listen to John Lennon or something. I'm just saying people are taking something really complicated--the creator of the work vs. the work itself--and treating it like it's really simple. And any time you do that, in any kind of arena, you're going to risk looking a little foolish.
Cancel culture abounds, carried out (mostly) by people with good-intentions, and sometimes a little bit of social positioning, but the question remains what to do with the works of canceled things like Cosby, Louis C.K., Roseanne, the entirety of The Dukes of Hazard. On one hand, it's not fair to Malcolm Jamal Warner (Theo Huxtable) to have to lose royalty checks because his boss was a gross pathetic rapist. On the other, it's pretty awful, as a rape victim, to see your rapist on TV all the time. Well you'll be pleased to know that I, with the help of a friend, came up with a solution. All works by problematic people come with an introduction, either through voiceover or a person addressing the camera--it could even be one of the victims--informing the viewer/listener what the canceled person said or did. So for Louis C.K., it might go something like this:
The person you're about to see can be very funny at times, with insights into the human condition and the struggle to become a better person, particularly a better father. However, he also liked to take out his penis in front of women who worked for him and pleasure himself in front of them, oftentimes without permission. That's pretty skeezy, but here's the worst part, and the part he's never apologized for--when these women told somebody what Louis C.K. had done, he accused them of lying. He used his power and influence within the industry to punish these women, and he got his powerful friends to defend him in public. It was only when so many came forward that he could no longer credibly deny it that he finally admitted what he had done. He is a horrible person, but he did make a couple of decent TV series, and a handful of standup specials that are really good compared to, say, Dane Cook or something.
See what I mean? If we have to trim a couple of minutes off the original show to make this work, I think it's worth it. I know this might sounds like I'm joking, or trying to make some kind of satirical point, but I am 100% serious. This would work for Butler, for G'N'R, even The Dukes of Hazzard. Wouldn't a brief five minute lecture about the causes for the Civil War and the history of the Confederate Battle Flag be more productive for society than simply pulling the show from circulation because it prominently displays a hate symbol?
I'm saying that the problem with cancel culture is that both the canceling and the culture being canceled are problematic. I'm into critical culture, a less extreme, more fair, more educational way of engaging with cultural stuff that is problematic. We could append people's twitter bios, author bios, etc. in this same way. They get to lead a public life, but with the story of their monstrosity trailing along behind them.
A friend of mine was conducting an interview for their doctoral thesis with a tenure-track professor at a mid-western university. During the interview, the professor bragged about how she wouldn't teach Judith Butler in her class anymore. For those small handful of people who aren't already aware, Butler is one of the best-known gender theorists of our era. She's written lots of books about it and everything. So why wasn't the professor teaching her? Because Butler had authored a letter of support last year for an NYU professor that had been accused of sexual harassment by her grad student. As far as this professor was concerned, Butler was siding with the powerful over the powerless, and therefore she could not, in good conscience, continue to teach her ideas in her class.
The NYU professor's name (the professor in our story, the interviewee, is going to remain anonymous, because really she's just here for rhetorical purposes) is Avital Ronell. The grad student was Nimrod Reitman. So we've got a female professor accused of sexual harassing, assaulting, stalking, and retaliating against their male grad student. And we've got Butler believing the woman, or at least arguing that she shouldn't be punished because her work was so important (not a good look, there Judith, in any era).
This story is glorious for the way it encapsulates the bullshit insularity, the simultaneous hyper-seriousness and pointlessness, of academia. It's also funny that Butler, then the president-elect of the MLA (don't even fucking ask), later apologized and resigned from her presidency after being criticized for her letter.
But getting back to the anonymous professor, the one that stopped teaching Butler in her classes after the controversy. I can't help wondering about her motivation, especially her motivation in telling my friend, a mere doctoral candidate working on their doctoral thesis, about it.
It was all social positioning of course. The term "virtue signaling" is vague and overused. Isn't signaling virtue better than signaling being an asshole? Is it really worth criticizing someone's motivation, or more accurately, what we perceive to be somebody's motivation, when there are literal countless raging shitbags all around us screaming as loud as they can? I'm not interested in virtue signaling, but I am interested in the idea of using social justice--the loosest strands, most likely to be governed by fashion--to stake out a claim for one's self as being more virtuous (this professor implied) than any fucking philistine fascist who continues to teach Judith Butler in their classroom. It reminds me less of virtue-signaling, and more of like indie rock in the 1990's or something. I will now demonstrate my purity for all to see.
Because I can't help thinking, that despite whatever misguided, strongly worded letters Judith Butler might write, her philosophical writings on gender are relevant and essential in her field. Even the parts that might be, uh, questionable, have to be questions, and argued with because of her position within the field. If we assume this professor's students aren't being taught about Butler (though I imagine she would pop up in other writers' work, such is her influence) are they being done a disservice?
This got me thinking about cancel culture in general. Is it kinda arbitrary who gets cancelled and who doesn't? Pretty much, especially in music, where most critics and listeners have the critical thinking ability of an unopened bag of Doritos. The guy who provided the soundtrack for our post? Not canceled, despite sleeping with girls as young as 13. Axl Rose was a notorious woman-beater who used racial and homophobic slurs in his songs (when asked, Axl expounded upon the difference between a black person and a n***er). Appetite In Destruction got a 10 just 18 months ago by Pitchfork. I'm not saying David Bowie and G'N'R need to be taken off the air, and canceled, or that well-meaning people who proudly proclaim they'll never listen to, say, John Lennon again because he hit women are all hypocrites who--I don't know--need to be forced to listen to John Lennon or something. I'm just saying people are taking something really complicated--the creator of the work vs. the work itself--and treating it like it's really simple. And any time you do that, in any kind of arena, you're going to risk looking a little foolish.
Cancel culture abounds, carried out (mostly) by people with good-intentions, and sometimes a little bit of social positioning, but the question remains what to do with the works of canceled things like Cosby, Louis C.K., Roseanne, the entirety of The Dukes of Hazard. On one hand, it's not fair to Malcolm Jamal Warner (Theo Huxtable) to have to lose royalty checks because his boss was a gross pathetic rapist. On the other, it's pretty awful, as a rape victim, to see your rapist on TV all the time. Well you'll be pleased to know that I, with the help of a friend, came up with a solution. All works by problematic people come with an introduction, either through voiceover or a person addressing the camera--it could even be one of the victims--informing the viewer/listener what the canceled person said or did. So for Louis C.K., it might go something like this:
The person you're about to see can be very funny at times, with insights into the human condition and the struggle to become a better person, particularly a better father. However, he also liked to take out his penis in front of women who worked for him and pleasure himself in front of them, oftentimes without permission. That's pretty skeezy, but here's the worst part, and the part he's never apologized for--when these women told somebody what Louis C.K. had done, he accused them of lying. He used his power and influence within the industry to punish these women, and he got his powerful friends to defend him in public. It was only when so many came forward that he could no longer credibly deny it that he finally admitted what he had done. He is a horrible person, but he did make a couple of decent TV series, and a handful of standup specials that are really good compared to, say, Dane Cook or something.
See what I mean? If we have to trim a couple of minutes off the original show to make this work, I think it's worth it. I know this might sounds like I'm joking, or trying to make some kind of satirical point, but I am 100% serious. This would work for Butler, for G'N'R, even The Dukes of Hazzard. Wouldn't a brief five minute lecture about the causes for the Civil War and the history of the Confederate Battle Flag be more productive for society than simply pulling the show from circulation because it prominently displays a hate symbol?
I'm saying that the problem with cancel culture is that both the canceling and the culture being canceled are problematic. I'm into critical culture, a less extreme, more fair, more educational way of engaging with cultural stuff that is problematic. We could append people's twitter bios, author bios, etc. in this same way. They get to lead a public life, but with the story of their monstrosity trailing along behind them.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
On The Nature Of Invisibility In The Surveillance Age
Years ago, in a previous public incarnation, I joked that, "In the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes." I felt pretty proud of that one for the way it subverted/updated Andy Warhol. It had a Wildean epigrammatic air about it that tickled me to the point where I was in a good mood that lasted for nearly an hour.
During my flu-induced hiatus, this blog passed the 1,000 view mark. That's kind of incredible when you think that the only real promotional outlet is a twitter account with 11 followers (YOU CAN FOLLOW US HERE! @KPostpunk). Now 250 or so of those views are b/c Tom at Stereogum re-tweeted The Top Fortys, a column that is many things: it is really fun to write, a shameless exercise in Gen X pandering, a self-aware commentary on the nature of grading things (I give the column, as a whole, an 8), and a kind of time-capsule unearthing examination type thing.
I started this blog because I wanted to be invisible. I wanted to write, work out ideas, without the self-consciousness that comes with knowing you're being watched. All you have to do is see how Facebook changed once everyone's parents and grandparents joined up to know how the awareness you're being judged can affect what people share.
Around the end of last year, I really wanted to get back into writing current cultural/socio-cultural thoughts in real time. I had spent the fall collaborating on a book proposal (found out last week it was accepted--congratulate me, this spectral anonymous online presence), and after spending months doing research-based, academic press-quality writing, missed the days of shouted off opinions and experimentation. I considered approaching some people in a position to make that happen, but quickly realized that anywhere I went I'd be limited, not only in what I could write, but how I could write about it (music, but not politics; no cursing, etc.). So I thought why not just start up this thing, just for myself, as an experiment. Put it in the lamest area of the blogosphere. Accentuate its amateurish-ness, its lack of venture capital, its desire to do nothing more than say things. To go back to blogging like it was in 2005-ish (from what I hear), a time when people (apparently) just found things. I missed out on those days because I didn't have regular internet, and I seemed to be on a path where my future would be in print (and I was a dummy, and maybe I was a snob).
Reading some Mark Fisher over xmas-time was a big inspiration too. I have problems with some of Fisher's stuff (more of a, wait, hold on a second than get the fuck out of here), but we have a serious overlap of interests with culture and politics, how they intersect, etc. And so I figured I'd start this thing that could be whatever I want it to be from moment to moment, and most importantly, I would not care if anyone read it.
....
But then why do I keep checking the stats? More importantly, why did I feel a genuine excitement when I saw the spike when Tom re-tweeted me? Why have I messaged a couple of friends after writing something I just knew they would love to let them know hey, I'm doing this thing over here, but it's kind of supposed to be anonymous. Why, even in a venue meant to avoid detection, am I still looking to uh, be detected.
I stopped putting question marks at the end there because I realized I wasn't really asking questions anymore.
I'm not surprised by any of this. Or upset by it. But I think it's worth being open about my own dreams of glory and recognition, esp. in a venue that is so critical of that quality in others. Some of it is just making something beautiful that you want to show to the world--because you think it could have a positive impact, or because your parents didn't like the drawing you made for them when you were 7. But narcissism is in all of us. It's deliberately cultivated. It's a hard fucking habit to break.
We want to be invisible; we are terrified that being invisible means to no longer exist.
During my flu-induced hiatus, this blog passed the 1,000 view mark. That's kind of incredible when you think that the only real promotional outlet is a twitter account with 11 followers (YOU CAN FOLLOW US HERE! @KPostpunk). Now 250 or so of those views are b/c Tom at Stereogum re-tweeted The Top Fortys, a column that is many things: it is really fun to write, a shameless exercise in Gen X pandering, a self-aware commentary on the nature of grading things (I give the column, as a whole, an 8), and a kind of time-capsule unearthing examination type thing.
I started this blog because I wanted to be invisible. I wanted to write, work out ideas, without the self-consciousness that comes with knowing you're being watched. All you have to do is see how Facebook changed once everyone's parents and grandparents joined up to know how the awareness you're being judged can affect what people share.
Around the end of last year, I really wanted to get back into writing current cultural/socio-cultural thoughts in real time. I had spent the fall collaborating on a book proposal (found out last week it was accepted--congratulate me, this spectral anonymous online presence), and after spending months doing research-based, academic press-quality writing, missed the days of shouted off opinions and experimentation. I considered approaching some people in a position to make that happen, but quickly realized that anywhere I went I'd be limited, not only in what I could write, but how I could write about it (music, but not politics; no cursing, etc.). So I thought why not just start up this thing, just for myself, as an experiment. Put it in the lamest area of the blogosphere. Accentuate its amateurish-ness, its lack of venture capital, its desire to do nothing more than say things. To go back to blogging like it was in 2005-ish (from what I hear), a time when people (apparently) just found things. I missed out on those days because I didn't have regular internet, and I seemed to be on a path where my future would be in print (and I was a dummy, and maybe I was a snob).
Reading some Mark Fisher over xmas-time was a big inspiration too. I have problems with some of Fisher's stuff (more of a, wait, hold on a second than get the fuck out of here), but we have a serious overlap of interests with culture and politics, how they intersect, etc. And so I figured I'd start this thing that could be whatever I want it to be from moment to moment, and most importantly, I would not care if anyone read it.
....
But then why do I keep checking the stats? More importantly, why did I feel a genuine excitement when I saw the spike when Tom re-tweeted me? Why have I messaged a couple of friends after writing something I just knew they would love to let them know hey, I'm doing this thing over here, but it's kind of supposed to be anonymous. Why, even in a venue meant to avoid detection, am I still looking to uh, be detected.
I stopped putting question marks at the end there because I realized I wasn't really asking questions anymore.
I'm not surprised by any of this. Or upset by it. But I think it's worth being open about my own dreams of glory and recognition, esp. in a venue that is so critical of that quality in others. Some of it is just making something beautiful that you want to show to the world--because you think it could have a positive impact, or because your parents didn't like the drawing you made for them when you were 7. But narcissism is in all of us. It's deliberately cultivated. It's a hard fucking habit to break.
We want to be invisible; we are terrified that being invisible means to no longer exist.
The Number Fortys: Culture Club - "Miss Me Blind"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
So if I'm remembering the old VH1 Behind the Music about this band, most of George's lyrics were written about his current on-again/off-again romance with the band's drummer, Jon Moss. George was sure of who he was (a gay man), and what he wanted (Jon). Jon was, uh, less sure.
So this is a song about masturbation right? You're going to miss me so much you're going to spend the rest of your life thinking about me while you jerk off, and you're going to jerk off so much that you'll go blind? It's not impossible. The first lines of the verse go Bet you got a good gun / Bet you know how / To have some fun. "Miss Me Blind" is high-quality fluffy smut. On a third listen now, and I'm thinking yep, this song is definitely about "I'm such a great fuck that now that gone and you've left me you're going to have to spend the rest of your life masturbating while you think of what a great fuck I was." Which, you have to admit, is a pretty badass lyrical conceit.
I think there might be some anti-consumerist stuff going on too, for whatever reason.
The music's got a lot of things going for it. The fuzz-toned guitar is a blast, especially when it does the ascending bit leading into the chorus, and then doubles it up heading into the last chorus.
Also note that the only real musical difference between the verse and the chorus is an extremely well-placed electronic snare drum on the two and four. Sometimes it's the little things.
Miss Me Blind went to #5. It was the band's sixth US Top 10 hit in a row, all in a span of less than two years. It would also be their last. In our universe, it's a 6.
THE NUMBER ONE
This song is going to be #1 forever. I just know it is. Did I mention this is a 10.
True story. Back in my younger, more vulnerable years, I recited these lyrics, punctuated by flailing leaps across the stage whenever the word "Jump" occurred, at the biggest poetry slam place in the Boston metro area. It went pretty good, I think.
So if I'm remembering the old VH1 Behind the Music about this band, most of George's lyrics were written about his current on-again/off-again romance with the band's drummer, Jon Moss. George was sure of who he was (a gay man), and what he wanted (Jon). Jon was, uh, less sure.
So this is a song about masturbation right? You're going to miss me so much you're going to spend the rest of your life thinking about me while you jerk off, and you're going to jerk off so much that you'll go blind? It's not impossible. The first lines of the verse go Bet you got a good gun / Bet you know how / To have some fun. "Miss Me Blind" is high-quality fluffy smut. On a third listen now, and I'm thinking yep, this song is definitely about "I'm such a great fuck that now that gone and you've left me you're going to have to spend the rest of your life masturbating while you think of what a great fuck I was." Which, you have to admit, is a pretty badass lyrical conceit.
I think there might be some anti-consumerist stuff going on too, for whatever reason.
The music's got a lot of things going for it. The fuzz-toned guitar is a blast, especially when it does the ascending bit leading into the chorus, and then doubles it up heading into the last chorus.
Also note that the only real musical difference between the verse and the chorus is an extremely well-placed electronic snare drum on the two and four. Sometimes it's the little things.
Miss Me Blind went to #5. It was the band's sixth US Top 10 hit in a row, all in a span of less than two years. It would also be their last. In our universe, it's a 6.
THE NUMBER ONE
This song is going to be #1 forever. I just know it is. Did I mention this is a 10.
True story. Back in my younger, more vulnerable years, I recited these lyrics, punctuated by flailing leaps across the stage whenever the word "Jump" occurred, at the biggest poetry slam place in the Boston metro area. It went pretty good, I think.
Friday, February 15, 2019
Weak Hiatus
This blog spent the beginning part of the week taking care of a small human who was ill. The small human is now healthy, but now the blog has a temperature of 103, which, needless to say, makes it hard to formulate pithy, somewhat intelligent ideas about the current state of culture & society. With household schedules being what they are, we may not be posting again until Tuesday. However, feel free to refresh this screen every five seconds until something new materializes. The increasing number of page views will be like medicine to my delirious, worn-out soul.
Monday, February 11, 2019
Impulse Array - Folded Realities
I'm not going to come across like a know-it-all expert on that one. I'm sick to death of reading reviewers propping up their weak ideas with "facts about the artist" they read off a press release, or another website. I'm going to come clean here. I know nothing about Impulse Array. I had never heard of them before today. I can tell you they're from Lancaster, UK, but that's only b/c I read it on their bandcamp site. Could I do some research? Of course I could. But maybe let's for once just try to enjoy the music free of the context of where it sits in current music hype cycle (ir)relevance.
I'm not an expert on anything. I only know what I like, and what I don't like. I think music writers love to write about instrumental/ambient stuff because they can project anything they want to. I hear Burial as some dude frying bacon in cave. Mark Fisher hears a contemporary London-style post-apocalyptic negation of neoliberalism. Other music writers hear the sound of their bread being buttered, and well, there you go.
Impulse Array make electronic music that does more than one thing. In fact, I can count at least six different things that they do well. This is, in my (un)expert opinion, roughly five more good things than your typical electronic/ambient project. I'm tempted to throw all kinds of projections onto this canvas they've created: ideas of inner space travel, cosmic journeys, glowing capsules, etc. I'm going to resist this temptation for now. I heard about it here. You can go there and find other stuff that exists, more or less, outside the hype cycle. You can listen to the album on bandcamp and create your own projections. There's an infinity of takes to be had on an album of this breadth. For me to reduce it to anything would be a form of tyranny, maybe. My favorite track is Quasar Unknown because it's second section sounds like the crumbling of teeth.
I'm not an expert on anything. I only know what I like, and what I don't like. I think music writers love to write about instrumental/ambient stuff because they can project anything they want to. I hear Burial as some dude frying bacon in cave. Mark Fisher hears a contemporary London-style post-apocalyptic negation of neoliberalism. Other music writers hear the sound of their bread being buttered, and well, there you go.
Impulse Array make electronic music that does more than one thing. In fact, I can count at least six different things that they do well. This is, in my (un)expert opinion, roughly five more good things than your typical electronic/ambient project. I'm tempted to throw all kinds of projections onto this canvas they've created: ideas of inner space travel, cosmic journeys, glowing capsules, etc. I'm going to resist this temptation for now. I heard about it here. You can go there and find other stuff that exists, more or less, outside the hype cycle. You can listen to the album on bandcamp and create your own projections. There's an infinity of takes to be had on an album of this breadth. For me to reduce it to anything would be a form of tyranny, maybe. My favorite track is Quasar Unknown because it's second section sounds like the crumbling of teeth.
The Number Fortys: Olivia Newton-John "Livin' In Desperate Times"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
I have no memory of this song ever existing, and have never heard it before in my life. And I write this as someone with copies of Olivia's Greatest Hits Vol. 2 and the Xanadu soundtrack in our house. Olivia's previous single, Twist of Fate, had gone to #5 (it's a 4), and this song briefly struggled to #31. Olivia would have only one more US Top 40 hit, 1985's Soul Kiss (it's a 2).
So Livin' In Desperate Times appears to be a bit of social commentary (the dropped "g" in the title's participle is a dead Dylan-esque--or more accurately, Guthrie-esque--giveaway). The video there is, uh, definitely something. Flashing the words MENACE and MANIAC as the "urban" looking guy grabs a writhing white girl and starts shaking the shit out of her isn't just problematic. It's racist as fuck.
However, watching Olivia hopscotch over the word tantrum is...delightfully bizarre? Cool sunglasses though.
As for the song, it's overproduced and underwritten. There wasn't much for Olivia to work with. The lyrics are trite. The melody hardly ever deviates from the same six note pattern da-dudda-da-da-da, which over the course of four minutes gets real old, real fast. The chord progression echoes the previous year's Love Is a Battlefield from Pat Benatar, without any of that song's melodic or dynamic strengths (It's a 7, in case you're wondering). Olivia had many great moments in her career. This isn't even close to one of them. To paraphrase an old church saying, something about loving the singer but hating the song.
Score: 2
THE NUMBER ONE
Holy fucking shit. I'm going to just assume this is going to stay number one for, like, the next 17 weeks. It's a 10. I'm guessing the lyrics were written about 30 minutes before they were sung, probably in a car. This song almost makes me proud to be an American, where at least I know we can produce a band like Van Halen. I suddenly feel nostalgic for California. Somebody slap me.
I have no memory of this song ever existing, and have never heard it before in my life. And I write this as someone with copies of Olivia's Greatest Hits Vol. 2 and the Xanadu soundtrack in our house. Olivia's previous single, Twist of Fate, had gone to #5 (it's a 4), and this song briefly struggled to #31. Olivia would have only one more US Top 40 hit, 1985's Soul Kiss (it's a 2).
So Livin' In Desperate Times appears to be a bit of social commentary (the dropped "g" in the title's participle is a dead Dylan-esque--or more accurately, Guthrie-esque--giveaway). The video there is, uh, definitely something. Flashing the words MENACE and MANIAC as the "urban" looking guy grabs a writhing white girl and starts shaking the shit out of her isn't just problematic. It's racist as fuck.
However, watching Olivia hopscotch over the word tantrum is...delightfully bizarre? Cool sunglasses though.
As for the song, it's overproduced and underwritten. There wasn't much for Olivia to work with. The lyrics are trite. The melody hardly ever deviates from the same six note pattern da-dudda-da-da-da, which over the course of four minutes gets real old, real fast. The chord progression echoes the previous year's Love Is a Battlefield from Pat Benatar, without any of that song's melodic or dynamic strengths (It's a 7, in case you're wondering). Olivia had many great moments in her career. This isn't even close to one of them. To paraphrase an old church saying, something about loving the singer but hating the song.
Score: 2
THE NUMBER ONE
Holy fucking shit. I'm going to just assume this is going to stay number one for, like, the next 17 weeks. It's a 10. I'm guessing the lyrics were written about 30 minutes before they were sung, probably in a car. This song almost makes me proud to be an American, where at least I know we can produce a band like Van Halen. I suddenly feel nostalgic for California. Somebody slap me.
Saturday, February 9, 2019
SC.R.E.A.M.
Scarcity Rules Everything Around Me
The only cultural/socio-political analysis you need, really.
The only cultural/socio-political analysis you need, really.
Friday, February 8, 2019
The Number Fortys: 38 Special - "Back Where You Belong"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
The first outright skunk-ass stinker of this doomed petulant endeavor. 38 Special were a southern rock band (started by one of Lynyrd Skynyrd's little brothers no less and named after a type of gun) that spent the 80s getting progressively less southern and significantly less rock. By 1984, they were churning out generic arena mush like this.
I don't get nearly enough money or readers to watch this video all the way through, but I hope that girl in the video kills every last one of those pudgy truck-fuckers, especially the short one that looks like a sentient ferret. This one gets a zero because there it has nothing to offer any one except blandness and an overabundance of treble. And it better not fuck up my YouTube recommendations any more than this series already has (no, I DON'T fucking want to watch "Matter of Trust" by Billy Joel).
THE NUMBER ONE
You know why nobody ever says anything shitty about Culture Club and Boy George? Because they provided a stark alternative to the likes of 38 Special. Karma Chameleon continues its reign at #1 for the third week in a row.
The first outright skunk-ass stinker of this doomed petulant endeavor. 38 Special were a southern rock band (started by one of Lynyrd Skynyrd's little brothers no less and named after a type of gun) that spent the 80s getting progressively less southern and significantly less rock. By 1984, they were churning out generic arena mush like this.
I don't get nearly enough money or readers to watch this video all the way through, but I hope that girl in the video kills every last one of those pudgy truck-fuckers, especially the short one that looks like a sentient ferret. This one gets a zero because there it has nothing to offer any one except blandness and an overabundance of treble. And it better not fuck up my YouTube recommendations any more than this series already has (no, I DON'T fucking want to watch "Matter of Trust" by Billy Joel).
THE NUMBER ONE
You know why nobody ever says anything shitty about Culture Club and Boy George? Because they provided a stark alternative to the likes of 38 Special. Karma Chameleon continues its reign at #1 for the third week in a row.
Meet Me In The Bathroom (And Please Hold My Hair)
I saw it at the library and so I picked it up. Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzie Goodman. I liked a lot of that music, and I'm a sucker for a lightweight music oral history. I'm only about halfway through it, but the book's fine. It's entertaining enough, even if it does have all the drawbacks that come with an oral history (limited POV, context, etc.). For example, no one mentions the privilege involved in sustaining that kind of lifestyle, or the advantages that said privileges gave the ambitious privileged over the ambitious underprivilege. There's also some rough spots early on where people talk about how the only thing going on in NYC during the early 90's was hip-hop. Public Enemy and De La Soul are mentioned, but we never hear anything about Wu-Tang, or Jay-Z, or Nas. Just a weirdly jarring line about NYC white kids sitting out the 90's. Apparently, when Jonathan Fire Eater (I'm not looking up where to put the asterisk) started around 97-98, it was a revelation to NYC people that an indie rock band could be in NYC, to which I immediately went wait a second, and off the top of my head thought of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Luscious Jackson, and Soul Coughing. And wasn't Yo La Tengo in Hoboken the entire decade? And didn't Pavement live there?
Whatever. We're not here today to write a book review, or pick apart the holes in people's coked-out memories. We're here to make fun of James Murphy, the master-mound behind LCD Soundsystem. Back when he's still house producer for the nascent DFA Records (the seeds of which were planted when a wealthy NYU undergrad asked his dad to buy him a building in Manhattan so music and film people would be friends with him--I obviously went to the wrong college).
So Murphy is working on this album with some hot shit UK guy, who according to Simon Reynolds (who apparently is this blog's favorite punching bag this week--no hard feelings, Simon!), was like, really into movie soundtracks. Hold on, let me go find the quote.
Now beyond the stunning lack of punctuation, everything about this is complete and total hilarious horseshit. If Holmes had said to him, I want to do what Can did and create a type of music that sounds like nothing ever heard before in the history of recorded sound, then yes, he would have to do something like that. But as far as sounding like Can, he doesn't have to do any of that. He can just, uh, put on a Can record. Can you imagine recording with Murphy and saying, I kinda want to try to do something Beatles-esque here, and having him start screaming WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?, and then going on this rant about how you have to go to Liverpool and start a skiffle band, and your mom has to get run over by an off-duty policeman, and then you go to Hamburg for two years, before coming back to Liverpool and waiting for a gay businessman to catch your lunch time set--like what the actual fuck? Wouldn't you just be like, nah James, I was just thinking I'd plug into this Vox amp and maybe do some cool harmonies instead.
This could actually be a recurring sketch on a TV show that nobody on earth would want to watch. Great Studio Moments With James Murphy. Next week, he could have a guitarist who wants a tone "like Kurt Cobain had on Nevermind." Murphy starts screaming at him to go sleep under a bridge a couple of times and befriend the tall goofy kid in high school class. The guitarist is like, how about I just get a distortion pedal and mix it with a little chorus?
What's most amazing about James Murphy's Theory On How Art Is Made, is that I'm fairly certain that when Murphy recorded Someone Great, he didn't form a post-punk band, wait for the singer to hang himself on the eve of their first US tour, then form a new band with the surviving members, and then embrace electronics. He just went, I think on this one I'll sound like New Order. What a fucking weirdo. And just so we're clear, at no point in this story does Murphy sheepishly go, "Yeah, I was kind of a stupid dickbag when I was younger." He is telling this story in recollection, as a grown person reflecting on his past.
Whatever. We're not here today to write a book review, or pick apart the holes in people's coked-out memories. We're here to make fun of James Murphy, the master-mound behind LCD Soundsystem. Back when he's still house producer for the nascent DFA Records (the seeds of which were planted when a wealthy NYU undergrad asked his dad to buy him a building in Manhattan so music and film people would be friends with him--I obviously went to the wrong college).
So Murphy is working on this album with some hot shit UK guy, who according to Simon Reynolds (who apparently is this blog's favorite punching bag this week--no hard feelings, Simon!), was like, really into movie soundtracks. Hold on, let me go find the quote.
Sounds like a hell of a lot of laughs. Anyway, so Holmes is working on his album in NYC with Murphy when Holmes has the audacity, the FUCKING AUDACITY, to tell Murphy he wants to do a record that sounds like Can. Murphy is having none of that shit in his goddamn studio. Says the Murph:
David Holmes is one of those guys who is obsessed with soundtracks.... And David Holmes, even though he is from Northern Ireland, was part of that crate digging, and creating-a-soundtrack-without-a-movie scene. All these people are film buffs, too, but for the soundtracks.
I was really offended by that. Can were people who worked at the Musee Arteum and the keyboard player won the best young conductor award in Europe and as his reward he traveled to New York and met the Dream Syndicate people (blogger note: La Monte Young, not Steve Wynn) and John Cale and it blew his mind and he went back and formed a band with the best free-jazz drummer in Europe and they payed together eight hours a day in a house with no distractions. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Now beyond the stunning lack of punctuation, everything about this is complete and total hilarious horseshit. If Holmes had said to him, I want to do what Can did and create a type of music that sounds like nothing ever heard before in the history of recorded sound, then yes, he would have to do something like that. But as far as sounding like Can, he doesn't have to do any of that. He can just, uh, put on a Can record. Can you imagine recording with Murphy and saying, I kinda want to try to do something Beatles-esque here, and having him start screaming WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?, and then going on this rant about how you have to go to Liverpool and start a skiffle band, and your mom has to get run over by an off-duty policeman, and then you go to Hamburg for two years, before coming back to Liverpool and waiting for a gay businessman to catch your lunch time set--like what the actual fuck? Wouldn't you just be like, nah James, I was just thinking I'd plug into this Vox amp and maybe do some cool harmonies instead.
This could actually be a recurring sketch on a TV show that nobody on earth would want to watch. Great Studio Moments With James Murphy. Next week, he could have a guitarist who wants a tone "like Kurt Cobain had on Nevermind." Murphy starts screaming at him to go sleep under a bridge a couple of times and befriend the tall goofy kid in high school class. The guitarist is like, how about I just get a distortion pedal and mix it with a little chorus?
What's most amazing about James Murphy's Theory On How Art Is Made, is that I'm fairly certain that when Murphy recorded Someone Great, he didn't form a post-punk band, wait for the singer to hang himself on the eve of their first US tour, then form a new band with the surviving members, and then embrace electronics. He just went, I think on this one I'll sound like New Order. What a fucking weirdo. And just so we're clear, at no point in this story does Murphy sheepishly go, "Yeah, I was kind of a stupid dickbag when I was younger." He is telling this story in recollection, as a grown person reflecting on his past.
Thursday, February 7, 2019
The Number Fortys: The Pointer Sisters - "Automatic"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
Easily the best song since we started this endeavor for our own personal amusement. "Automatic" combines a Roland drum machine and calliope synths with a voice that transcended traditional notions of gender, to the point where when I saw Prince's 1999 album had a song on it called Automatic, I wondered if maybe it was this one.
The Pointer Sisters were also the Pointer sisters, that is to say they were actual sisters with the last name of Pointer. Ruth Pointer sang the low parts. On Automatic, she got to sing lead, and she sang it in the lowest part of the register. Most people assumed it was a guy singing it. The following year the sisters dressed as men and got in the fucking ring.
We're what, six installments in so far? Every single video I've posted has had comments underneath proclaiming this was the best time for music while also shitting on artists today. Most of these comments are stupid, and barely conceal their racism, sexism, etc. But man, The Pointer Sisters' run of top 10 singles in the middle of the 80s was fantastic, and every one of them still holds up today. They were the missing link between the Supremes and Destiny's Child, and aren't nearly appreciated as either one of those groups. Automatic is pure unfettered joy with so much to love--the key change for the solo around the 2:30 mark, the little syncopated keyboard run after each line of the verse, lyrical phrases like "stream of absurdity" that gets rhymed with "circuitry." This went all the way to #5.
Score: 9.
THE NUMBER ONE
Two weeks in a row for Culture Club.
Easily the best song since we started this endeavor for our own personal amusement. "Automatic" combines a Roland drum machine and calliope synths with a voice that transcended traditional notions of gender, to the point where when I saw Prince's 1999 album had a song on it called Automatic, I wondered if maybe it was this one.
The Pointer Sisters were also the Pointer sisters, that is to say they were actual sisters with the last name of Pointer. Ruth Pointer sang the low parts. On Automatic, she got to sing lead, and she sang it in the lowest part of the register. Most people assumed it was a guy singing it. The following year the sisters dressed as men and got in the fucking ring.
We're what, six installments in so far? Every single video I've posted has had comments underneath proclaiming this was the best time for music while also shitting on artists today. Most of these comments are stupid, and barely conceal their racism, sexism, etc. But man, The Pointer Sisters' run of top 10 singles in the middle of the 80s was fantastic, and every one of them still holds up today. They were the missing link between the Supremes and Destiny's Child, and aren't nearly appreciated as either one of those groups. Automatic is pure unfettered joy with so much to love--the key change for the solo around the 2:30 mark, the little syncopated keyboard run after each line of the verse, lyrical phrases like "stream of absurdity" that gets rhymed with "circuitry." This went all the way to #5.
Score: 9.
THE NUMBER ONE
Two weeks in a row for Culture Club.
Flowchart - "Another World Explodes"
Saw this song on the Tw***er and it got me good & truly both centered & dis-centered in all the places that needed centering & dis-centering, and now I'm all set for a day of respirating trees and drifting bliss, and so I'm posting it here in a gesture of solidarity or something. A tip of the toupee to Petridisch and the good folks over at I Heart Noise.
The Number Fortys: Jeffrey Osborne - "Stay With Me Tonight"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
The lyrics read like an attempted translation in an ESL class that got the student a B-minus (Sung Kim, see me after class).
Another morning, you are on my mind
Takin' up my time throughout the day
I try controllin' images I see
Always you with me, that's in my dreams
You give me fever, love I can't explain
Fire uncontained, what is this, girl?
I try to fight, but I never win
Seems I just give in to your embrace
Luckily for Jeffrey (with two F's, and never Jeff), the rhythm section here is so strong that even if he never sang a word, this still could have been a hit. The fact the drummer in the video is smoking while he plays just makes him more of a badass. Can't be sure the drummer in the video is the drummer on the song, of course, but Steve Ferrone played on Scritti Polliti's Cupid and Psyche 85, which would sound a lot like this song. The bass player, Alphonso Johnson, was in Weather Report, and his slap bass here is good enough to make the idea of good slap bass an idea I can almost get behind.
It's hard to follow the story. There's a subplot that suggests Osborne is being coerced into these nightly fuck sessions, but it goes unexplored, and even gets contradicted in several places. Either way, Jeffrey Osborne does the best he can with it. Again, it's got a solid groove, and the melody does a nice job in the chorus of building to a climax (ooh!), which is kind of ingenious the way it syncs up with the subject matter, also supported by the agitated restless nature of the verses. This is top quality songwriting, melodically at least, and, as such, would climb all the way to ....number 30? Ah well. There was a lot of competition that year, and thanks to the pernicious influence of MTV, 1984 was not a good year to be a black person trying to crack the Top 40 (Stay With Me Tonight did reach #4 on the R&B charts).
It gets a solid 6 for the kick.
By the way, Osborne is a singer who, to me, can never be forgiven for his woo woo woo song that I had to listen to on the magic soft hits station 40 hours of week when I was working at the Singing Hills Lodge for two years (I got robbed at gun point, then promoted, then fired for, and I still have the letter, "playing solitaire on the computer and being sarcastic with his co-workers"). It's a fucking 0, and now you too shall have to suffer and hear it.
THE NUMBER ONE
We'll just pretend that video doesn't exist, because I'm not about to unpack the "Mississippi - 1870" setting going on here. Let's just sit back and appreciate the moment when Boy George, dressed in full makeup, sings the line "I'm a man." That's the kind of pop moment the three minute single was invited for. The fact that it echoes Muddy Waters, The Yardbirds, Spencer Davis while genderfucking them into oblivion is absolutely perfect.
The lyrics read like an attempted translation in an ESL class that got the student a B-minus (Sung Kim, see me after class).
Another morning, you are on my mind
Takin' up my time throughout the day
I try controllin' images I see
Always you with me, that's in my dreams
You give me fever, love I can't explain
Fire uncontained, what is this, girl?
I try to fight, but I never win
Seems I just give in to your embrace
Luckily for Jeffrey (with two F's, and never Jeff), the rhythm section here is so strong that even if he never sang a word, this still could have been a hit. The fact the drummer in the video is smoking while he plays just makes him more of a badass. Can't be sure the drummer in the video is the drummer on the song, of course, but Steve Ferrone played on Scritti Polliti's Cupid and Psyche 85, which would sound a lot like this song. The bass player, Alphonso Johnson, was in Weather Report, and his slap bass here is good enough to make the idea of good slap bass an idea I can almost get behind.
It's hard to follow the story. There's a subplot that suggests Osborne is being coerced into these nightly fuck sessions, but it goes unexplored, and even gets contradicted in several places. Either way, Jeffrey Osborne does the best he can with it. Again, it's got a solid groove, and the melody does a nice job in the chorus of building to a climax (ooh!), which is kind of ingenious the way it syncs up with the subject matter, also supported by the agitated restless nature of the verses. This is top quality songwriting, melodically at least, and, as such, would climb all the way to ....number 30? Ah well. There was a lot of competition that year, and thanks to the pernicious influence of MTV, 1984 was not a good year to be a black person trying to crack the Top 40 (Stay With Me Tonight did reach #4 on the R&B charts).
It gets a solid 6 for the kick.
By the way, Osborne is a singer who, to me, can never be forgiven for his woo woo woo song that I had to listen to on the magic soft hits station 40 hours of week when I was working at the Singing Hills Lodge for two years (I got robbed at gun point, then promoted, then fired for, and I still have the letter, "playing solitaire on the computer and being sarcastic with his co-workers"). It's a fucking 0, and now you too shall have to suffer and hear it.
THE NUMBER ONE
We'll just pretend that video doesn't exist, because I'm not about to unpack the "Mississippi - 1870" setting going on here. Let's just sit back and appreciate the moment when Boy George, dressed in full makeup, sings the line "I'm a man." That's the kind of pop moment the three minute single was invited for. The fact that it echoes Muddy Waters, The Yardbirds, Spencer Davis while genderfucking them into oblivion is absolutely perfect.
Criticizing the Critics' Criticism of Criticism
We would just like to point out that the next time you see a professional music critic get up on their soapbox about how negativity in music criticism, that is to say criticism that actually criticizes, is pointless, or mean-spirited, or a waste of time, we urge you to go and see how they reacted to Maroon 5's super bowl performance a few days ago, or Greta Van Fleet. It's acceptable to criticize those bands because the magazines and websites they write for won't be adversely affected by making fun of Maroon 5. The artists in their world are sacrosanct (until they aren't--there's actually a slow, backing away process that occurs when a band sticks around too long and starts to suck, a nervous eyeing of each other until it gradually becomes acceptable to question the music superiority of, say, Taylor Swift or Arcade Fire).
Almost every single paid piece of music criticism is produced by an industry shill who is trying to sell you something. You probably already knew this. But the next time someone urges people to be positive, and mocks someone (almost always a music fan or a non-paid critic) for getting "so worked up about" an artist/song/album. Or wonders aloud to their community who would take the time to bother writing about things they don't like, why people don't just listen to something else, go back to the first week of February and pull up their tweets about Maroon 5, an irrelevant band playing a show during the halftime of an event that has more to do with organized war than with music, and remind yourself that it's all a shell game. In 2019, the job of a paid music critic is to prop up a music industry that has very little to do with actual music. They're there to manufacture excitement for whatever editors and publicists and labels tell them to, using a set of criteria that literally shifts from one record to the other. To be a paid music writer in 2019 is to champion a female post-punk-sounding band for their fierce feminism one minute, and then champion a hip-hop artist with misogynistic lyrics the next day for their fierce "realness," then the next week calling out a male artist the following week for their problematic comments they made about woman musicians in an interview. It's a hell of a job, one that would make Orwell proud. But then late-capitalism, with its dwindling resources and endless acceleration, makes hypocritical jackasses of us all.
Wednesday, February 6, 2019
The Number Fortys: Huey Lewis and the News - "I Want a New Drug"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
There's a lot of fun stuff to know about Huey Lewis and the News. Lead singer Huey Lewis, back when he was Hugh Cregg, sweet-talked a flight attendant into letting him onto a Transatlantic flight without paying (airports in the 70s were a different place, man). Some of the News backed up Elvis Costello on his debut album My Aim Is True (every Costello album after is light years better than his debut up until Trust). Also there's that American Psycho cultural analysis. And the fact that Ray Parker Jr. ripped off the subject of this post for "Ghostbusters." Lots of fun stories about HLatN.
Unfortunately, the music isn't much fun at all. 1982's "Do You Believe In Love" is a hooky fusion of new wave and doo-wop backing vocals (it's either a 5 or a 6, depending on my need for melodic bliss). And they have a #1 coming up next year that is a great piece of pop. Maybe the problem is that HLatN could be a terrific pop band, but all they really wanted to do was rock. Or maybe the problem is that their definition of rock was so narrow and boomer-centric. Or maybe they just happened to be a white rock band making slick videos soundtracked by hooky songs at a time when Mtv played mostly white rock bands, and therefore ended up being pulled out of relative obscurity into a massive audience.
Regardless, "I Want a New Drug," while titled like a Ramones song, sounds like a beer commercial.
It's possible to hear this song as a plea for all the drugs that came in its wake, if not a prophetic commercial for our present-day medicated lives. Paxil, Prozac, Adderall, Xanax, Ecstasy, Zoloft, Oxy, so many drugs. But that's giving the song way too much credit. "I Want a New Drug" is just a joke repeated over and over again, a joke that isn't all that funny to start with. You have to be incredibly boring to sing a song about wanting a new drug because of some serious reasons--your current drug intake has resulted in you crashing your car, disrupted your sleep patterns, altered the perceived density of your body, covered your face in zits, increased your anxiety, etc.--and have no one believe a word of it. Elliott Smith sang so convincingly about drugs that even during the (entirely possible) brief periods of is life when he wasn't on drugs, people still assumed that he was. Huey Lewis sang so unconvincingly about drugs that even after singing a song that basically says "I've taken every drug on earth to the point where I have become bored, and am now in search of an even more extreme drug experience," a boast so gloriously decadent it sounds almost Sadean, no one took him seriously. Maybe it was the tooty-toot horns. Anyway, the song may have entered the charts at #40, but it would go all the way to #6.
Shit, almost forgot to give this a score. It gets a 3.
THE NUMBER ONE
Yes was still at the top with "Owner of a Lonely Heart," which I'm pretty sure every middle schooler intentionally mis-sang as "Owner of a Lonely Fart" (much better than / the owner of a broken fart). It's still whatever score I gave it last week.
There's a lot of fun stuff to know about Huey Lewis and the News. Lead singer Huey Lewis, back when he was Hugh Cregg, sweet-talked a flight attendant into letting him onto a Transatlantic flight without paying (airports in the 70s were a different place, man). Some of the News backed up Elvis Costello on his debut album My Aim Is True (every Costello album after is light years better than his debut up until Trust). Also there's that American Psycho cultural analysis. And the fact that Ray Parker Jr. ripped off the subject of this post for "Ghostbusters." Lots of fun stories about HLatN.
Unfortunately, the music isn't much fun at all. 1982's "Do You Believe In Love" is a hooky fusion of new wave and doo-wop backing vocals (it's either a 5 or a 6, depending on my need for melodic bliss). And they have a #1 coming up next year that is a great piece of pop. Maybe the problem is that HLatN could be a terrific pop band, but all they really wanted to do was rock. Or maybe the problem is that their definition of rock was so narrow and boomer-centric. Or maybe they just happened to be a white rock band making slick videos soundtracked by hooky songs at a time when Mtv played mostly white rock bands, and therefore ended up being pulled out of relative obscurity into a massive audience.
Regardless, "I Want a New Drug," while titled like a Ramones song, sounds like a beer commercial.
It's possible to hear this song as a plea for all the drugs that came in its wake, if not a prophetic commercial for our present-day medicated lives. Paxil, Prozac, Adderall, Xanax, Ecstasy, Zoloft, Oxy, so many drugs. But that's giving the song way too much credit. "I Want a New Drug" is just a joke repeated over and over again, a joke that isn't all that funny to start with. You have to be incredibly boring to sing a song about wanting a new drug because of some serious reasons--your current drug intake has resulted in you crashing your car, disrupted your sleep patterns, altered the perceived density of your body, covered your face in zits, increased your anxiety, etc.--and have no one believe a word of it. Elliott Smith sang so convincingly about drugs that even during the (entirely possible) brief periods of is life when he wasn't on drugs, people still assumed that he was. Huey Lewis sang so unconvincingly about drugs that even after singing a song that basically says "I've taken every drug on earth to the point where I have become bored, and am now in search of an even more extreme drug experience," a boast so gloriously decadent it sounds almost Sadean, no one took him seriously. Maybe it was the tooty-toot horns. Anyway, the song may have entered the charts at #40, but it would go all the way to #6.
Shit, almost forgot to give this a score. It gets a 3.
THE NUMBER ONE
Yes was still at the top with "Owner of a Lonely Heart," which I'm pretty sure every middle schooler intentionally mis-sang as "Owner of a Lonely Fart" (much better than / the owner of a broken fart). It's still whatever score I gave it last week.
The Algorithm's Going To Get You #3 - Pom Poko "Crazy Energy Night"
The premise of the column: we got a cheap-as-shit Spotify subscription as part of this package available to students (a designation that applies to a member of our household) so we're sifting through Spotify's Friday recommendations to see if we can find anything good--or at least worth writing about. We will do no research before writing, because too much music writing is a reaction to an artist's biography/press release instead of the music.
Slowly turning madman into savior is a fucking phrase that I can fucking get behind. Do I dig the Deerhoof vibes and the Gang of Four/Fugazi guitars? Yes I do. Do I dig the massive compression that makes me remember the good parts of Sleigh Bells? Yes I do. Do I dig that crazy percussion that sounds like someone ferociously tapping a cowbell? Kinda.
This will wake you up and get you moving. It might even make you think and feel. I don't know. It's only two and a half minutes. You should hear some of the other stuff Spotify recommended. Listen to Astral Weeks while you're reading that 1968 secret history book by Ryan H. Walsh (one of the best music-related books I've read in year), and keep getting sent tracks off Van's latest for the rest of your life, apparently.
Slowly turning madman into savior is a fucking phrase that I can fucking get behind. Do I dig the Deerhoof vibes and the Gang of Four/Fugazi guitars? Yes I do. Do I dig the massive compression that makes me remember the good parts of Sleigh Bells? Yes I do. Do I dig that crazy percussion that sounds like someone ferociously tapping a cowbell? Kinda.
This will wake you up and get you moving. It might even make you think and feel. I don't know. It's only two and a half minutes. You should hear some of the other stuff Spotify recommended. Listen to Astral Weeks while you're reading that 1968 secret history book by Ryan H. Walsh (one of the best music-related books I've read in year), and keep getting sent tracks off Van's latest for the rest of your life, apparently.
Beg And Plead For The Culture - Thoughts On The Wire's 2018 Rewind
Because I'm someone who loves challenging music, and hates challenging myself, I went into a Barnes & Noble and handed over $12 for a copy of The Wire's 2018 recap issue. The #1 album of 2018, according to the "notes compiled from the votes of the following contributors and staff," is some fine contempo-jazz slam from Sons of Kemet. Wouldn't mind hearing a daughter or two of Kemet, but I digress. Anyway, each song is a tribute to a powerful black woman (My Queen is ____), so its politics are unimpeachable. Me personally, my queen is Marla Gibbs, but to each their own I guess. The album's great, though, even if I do like the shouting dubby parts (which are cool) better than the jazzy parts (which aren't a million miles away from Squirrel Nut Zippers). Here listen for yourself.
We can quibble--is this really the most forward-looking radical experimental album of 2018? But it's an impossible album to dislike. And as any one who's ever been part of a committee can tell you, "impossible to dislike" is what usually brings home the gold.
What I'm really interested in though is that listing of "contributors and staff" from which they sourced the list. Because in parentheses, we get to see each writer's personal best release of 2018. That's where the good shit is, especially (I'm going to guess) the stuff I haven't heard of. But there are two choices in there that had me laughing and shaking my head. Raymond Cummings listed Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks Sparkle Hard as his album of the year, and Simon Reynolds had Migos Culture II, which suggests Reynolds may be going through the mid-life crisis from hell.
Culture II isn't even the best Migos album. It's not even the best Migos album with the word Culture.(that would be 2017's Culture). Culture II is nearly two hours of lazy meandering bullshit.I can't help imagining Reynolds driving around L.A. tossing around all his $20 bills he made off his latest book, shouting out the window, Higher we go beg and plead for the culture. Beyond the opening lines though, I hope Reynolds stops singing and just nods along to the rest of the album.
Not that I don't think Reynolds doesn't believe his wife, Joy Press, is a bad bitch who Reynolds like to pass to one of his homies when he's finished with her, but...it's funny to imagine, as is Reynolds decking himself out in expensive jewelry. I hope his next book is all about fucking and chains. He can call it Heteromania (a title I'm sure Migos will totally appreciate).
But it's Cummings' choice might be even more ridiculous. I can imagine Cummings running around The Wire offices (I know this is not a realistic scenario) shouting to his writers and editors. Hey everyone! It's 2018 and Stephen Malkmus made an album that doesn't totally completely suck! It's not even close to anything good he's ever done in his life, but like, it doesn't make you actively angry to listen to! It's only kind of boring in places! It's gotta be the album of the year! Get out of her with that Jlin shit! Too dark! Not wistful enough!
Jlin's Autobiography was #39 on Wire's list (kudos to Jacob Arnold for putting it #1 on his personal list). It's cooler than any single thing I've talked about so far, including Marla Gibbs and my jokes at the expense of Simon Reynolds. Even if Autobiography is just a soundtrack, Jlin's ability to fuck with sound and rhythm is just breathtaking.
I wouldn't put it #1 on a list. My personal album of 2018? Whichever album from 2018 I've currently chosen to listen to. List making is for upper-middle-class dweebs trying to impress each other.
Monday, February 4, 2019
The Number Fortys: Billy Joel - "Uptown Girl"
In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).
Sometimes you meet a song on its way back down the charts. By the end of January 1984, Uptown Girl had been places. It had seen some shit. It had gone all the way to #3, and had been on the chart now for over four months. As a song, Uptown Girl was the definition of a genre exercise, the genre in this case being Franki Valli and the Four Seasons. It's the kind of song that probably meant something to a lot of people (esp. people in the mid-Atlantic states) at the time, but it doesn't sound like it meant very much to Joel.
Which, you know, maybe it did. That is his future wife in the video after all, a statuesque model named Christie Brinkley. But even if the song reflects aspects of their relationship (she's a fashionable lady, he's kinda of a schlup-y guy), Joel's too much of a professional, too much of a pop craftsman, to put too much of himself into the song. The album Uptown Girl's taken from, An Innocent Man, was a blockbuster. It came on the heels of The Nylon Curtain, an album that, according to a Joel biography that I distractedly looked through for 20 minutes one time in my local library, Joel considered his masterpiece. His attempt to say something profound about the alienation of modern life, They Nylon Curtain featured the song Pressure, which I like a lot, especially the crazy circle-of-fourths pre-chorus where the drummer comes in late. But Pressure only reached #20, a stiff by Joel's standards. Anyway, it gets an 8.
The Nylon Curtain, to date, has sold 5 million fewer copies than the Joel album that came before it, and 5 million fewer than the album that came after it. Joel wasn't in a place to fuck around, commercially speaking, and An Innocent Man delivered the chart goods. Three Top 10s, Four Top 20s. Assuming he ever paused at #40 on his way up and down the charts, it's likely we'll see Joel again.
Let's take a moment to appreciate the craft though--the impeccable background vocals, the opening drum fill, even those last four words of the chorus, that's what I am, how the matter-of-factness of the melody matches the matter-of-factness of the lyrics. Every part of Uptown Girl is a hook. There's hardly any instruments at all besides drums and vocals (and motorcycle engines, apparently).
As a child, I heard the last line of the second chorus as She's got her toys, and had always assumed that's what it was--even into adulthood, as I wondered if Joel was slipping in some masturbatory innuendo. Just now I'm realizing he's probably singing choice. That's, um, disappointing.
That video. You have to love the time-space anachronism postmodern who-give-a-fuckness of putting 50's mechanic greaseballs in the same video as 80's breakdaners. Do you? Don't you? I guess you do, right? By the way, most of Joel's dancing involves walking from one place to another on the beat, that is when he's not being rolled from one place to another on a jack.
THE NUMBER ONE
Yes - Owner of a Lonely Heart
Produced by Trevor Horn just before he fell in with the Art of Noise and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The song has cutting-edge samples which kick all kinds of ass on headphones, and features a video that was, in the MTV of its era, like putting a Kafka novel in with my kid's Paw Patrol books. The song's not much more than tepid UK art-rock though. It's a 5.
Sometimes you meet a song on its way back down the charts. By the end of January 1984, Uptown Girl had been places. It had seen some shit. It had gone all the way to #3, and had been on the chart now for over four months. As a song, Uptown Girl was the definition of a genre exercise, the genre in this case being Franki Valli and the Four Seasons. It's the kind of song that probably meant something to a lot of people (esp. people in the mid-Atlantic states) at the time, but it doesn't sound like it meant very much to Joel.
Which, you know, maybe it did. That is his future wife in the video after all, a statuesque model named Christie Brinkley. But even if the song reflects aspects of their relationship (she's a fashionable lady, he's kinda of a schlup-y guy), Joel's too much of a professional, too much of a pop craftsman, to put too much of himself into the song. The album Uptown Girl's taken from, An Innocent Man, was a blockbuster. It came on the heels of The Nylon Curtain, an album that, according to a Joel biography that I distractedly looked through for 20 minutes one time in my local library, Joel considered his masterpiece. His attempt to say something profound about the alienation of modern life, They Nylon Curtain featured the song Pressure, which I like a lot, especially the crazy circle-of-fourths pre-chorus where the drummer comes in late. But Pressure only reached #20, a stiff by Joel's standards. Anyway, it gets an 8.
The Nylon Curtain, to date, has sold 5 million fewer copies than the Joel album that came before it, and 5 million fewer than the album that came after it. Joel wasn't in a place to fuck around, commercially speaking, and An Innocent Man delivered the chart goods. Three Top 10s, Four Top 20s. Assuming he ever paused at #40 on his way up and down the charts, it's likely we'll see Joel again.
Let's take a moment to appreciate the craft though--the impeccable background vocals, the opening drum fill, even those last four words of the chorus, that's what I am, how the matter-of-factness of the melody matches the matter-of-factness of the lyrics. Every part of Uptown Girl is a hook. There's hardly any instruments at all besides drums and vocals (and motorcycle engines, apparently).
As a child, I heard the last line of the second chorus as She's got her toys, and had always assumed that's what it was--even into adulthood, as I wondered if Joel was slipping in some masturbatory innuendo. Just now I'm realizing he's probably singing choice. That's, um, disappointing.
That video. You have to love the time-space anachronism postmodern who-give-a-fuckness of putting 50's mechanic greaseballs in the same video as 80's breakdaners. Do you? Don't you? I guess you do, right? By the way, most of Joel's dancing involves walking from one place to another on the beat, that is when he's not being rolled from one place to another on a jack.
THE NUMBER ONE
Yes - Owner of a Lonely Heart
Produced by Trevor Horn just before he fell in with the Art of Noise and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The song has cutting-edge samples which kick all kinds of ass on headphones, and features a video that was, in the MTV of its era, like putting a Kafka novel in with my kid's Paw Patrol books. The song's not much more than tepid UK art-rock though. It's a 5.
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