My Hate Is Stronger Than Your Love

I scarcely pass up a chance to talk shit, but when no less a professional instigator than Simon Reynolds issues an open call for character assassination - well, how am I gonna pass that up?

A couple of folks have already responded, including Zone Styx*, who took Brian Eno to task for his Exlax-smooth glide from art-damaged visionary to Svengali of pastel banality. As boldly progressive as the first decade of his career was, Eno has spent the past twenty-odd years terraforming a plateau upon which the most median hacks have homesteaded. I'm tempted, though, to give Eno a pass because, in that first decade, he did pioneer almost everything interesting about modern pop. The tragedy is that he didn't pull a Barrett/Beefheart to cement his legend.**

Meanwhile, I'm putting my money on Carl for Hater of the Year.

The target of my wrath is not a sacred cow and is often maligned in a strictly anti-fashionable knee-jerk (which, naturally, is its own expression of consensus-culture). But as the record shows, I've had a long history of hatin' on these motherfuckers. So let it be writ in flames ten feet tall...

I Hate Animal Collective

Right off the bat, they're hateable on an obvious, superficial level. Their cringeworthy album & song titles - from the verbosely ersatz to bland single-word monikers - are almost as bad as their first-year community college art-elective album covers. Their hooks are as sharp as a pig's ass. Their stoned, smug permasmirks make me wanna punch 'em in the goddamned face.

Their music is... inoffensive. It's a meandering, granola-dude iteration of the Beach Boys' forgettably sunny pop for (and by) sampler-saavy postmodernists. Or, as one friend said, "it's a bunch of cut-rate competent musicians fucking around with delay pedals." Either way, it's hardly the kind of music that invites intense reactions.

Which is precisely why it's so dangerous. Animal Collective are not only a symptom, but an enabler of a contemporary American youth culture that is vapidly hedonist, politically uninterested, and libidinally solipsistic. AC's oeuvre at once reflects and amplifies these revolting traits: their music is kindergarten-teacher chipper, their voices like an animated musical, their subject matter twee and nonsensical. (I'm repeating myself there.) I don't begrudge any band born of the Bush era the urge to retreat from reality (at least a little), but AC have made careers out of a near-psychotic infantile escapism. Following in the footsteps of their forebear Brian Wilson, they're not just offering tuneful respite - they've dropped acid and buried their heads in the sandbox.

But whereas Wilson's contemporaries captured the dynamic & tumultuous zeitgeist in anthemic melodies, a dismaying number of AC's fellow travelers are echoing their chirpy, saccharine nonsense and childish self-indulgence. This could be a result of indie neutering itself of its anger, in an astigmatic move to distance itself from the truly dangerous anger of jingoists & imperialists following 9/11. It could also be that scores of bandwagon-jumpers attempted (and are still attempting) to follow the template for "success" in a Web 2.0 world that AC helped construct.

But either way, we're stuck with this ramshackle sonic sugar-rush by politically glaucomal, narcissistic man-children. If a band is going to drag a whole generation this far up their own ass, they could at least write a memorable tune to whistle as we plough through the shit.

(*) - Zone Styx mentions considering hip-hop as his hate-object du jour. Just the other day, I was having a conversation about how hip-hop could be to blame for the dismally regressive state of music as a whole - but that, clearly, is a big fish better fried at another time. For now, suffice it to say: hip-hop and hauntology share a specific kind of culpability...

(**) - I often think that the best move of Kevin Shields' career has been, despite the incessant pleas from his fanbase, not to release the eternally in-progress follow-up to Loveless.

Lightning In a Bubble

I, like every other self-respecting music nerd, spent last week devouring reviews of the ATP NY festival, if only to reaffirm the consensus that Kevin Shields is the supreme conjurer of megadecibel dark winds. (Survey says: hells yeah!) By most accounts, the rest of the line-up also acquit themselves admirably - though having Bob Mould (playing old Hüsker Dü songs), Trail of Dead, Dino Jr., and Mogwai on the same night seems redundant.

I'm in the enviable position of having seen almost all the bands on the bill of which I'm particularly fond. (Om and Harmonia, I'll hunt you down one day.) One band my 20-yr-old self would've drawn blood to see was Lightning Bolt, but in the years since I've actually passed up every chance I've had. It wasn't the numbing homogeneity their music betrays over several albums, nor was it part of some larger aesthetic shift in my listening habits. So why couldn't I be arsed to see one of the hot-shit live acts of the new millenium? It has something to do with Amy Phillips' impression of LB's Saturday night ATP set:

As usual, Lightning Bolt set up on the floor rather than the stage. As usual, it was only the most aggressive people who got to actually see Lightning Bolt. I've been to a handful of Lightning Bolt shows, and I've never been able to see more than the tops of Brian Chippendale's and Brian Gibson's heads. This time was no different. I think I counted maybe three girls inside the inner circle of normally wimpy dudes getting their slamdance douchebag on. Lightning Bolt's set was the one time during the entire weekend that ATP NY didn't feel like a happy, inclusive community.

Let's repeat those last seven words for emphasis: didn't feel like a happy, inclusive community. But isn't the point of their in-audience positioning to pulverise the fourth wall, to dynamite the pedestal upon which performers loom over their audience? Yes, but it also serves to construct an entirely different kind of barrier.

Despite its proclaimed rejections of heirarchy & social barriers, hipsterism is a cultural economy wherein exclusivity is the only currency. Now that post-modernism has melted the distinction between High and Low Art, and that the Information Age has made the very notion of obscurity obsolete, there aren't stylistic criteria which cleanly cleave Hip from Square. Power electribalists Fuck Buttons idolise Leonard Cohen and Li'l Wayne's favourite musical act is Nirvana, and if there's some aesthetic standard to be gleaned from that, you're a finer taxonomist than I. No, hipsters function more like shambolic Freemasons: membership seems predicated upon a Gordian knot of social vagueries, when in fact it's a paranoid mafioso clique linked by vouchsafed familiarity and mutually benefical services rendered. Besides endorsement from a reputable member, a prospective inductee must also complete the studied self-integration process described by Dr. L. Ron Bumquist in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

If he figures out what is "happening," he can rise one notch - and become Hip. Then if he can convince himself to approve of what is "happening," then he becomes Groovy. And after that, he can actually raise himself to the rank of Cool. He can become one of those... cool guys.

And what is the key to being able to decode, accept, and successfully navigate such arcane, unrooted etiquette? Proximity. If you're not literally in, then you are doomed to being out. Which is exactly what happens at a Lightning Bolt show, a veritable diorama of hipster social structure.

The on-the-floor set-up is a bold rebuff of the "straight world," the hipster mission statement physically manifest: any two square meters of pavement is a performance space! Refuse the plastic idolatry of the stage! No guest-list gladhanding or AmEx Black card privilege will land you in the front row, because floor plans be damned! We are all part of the same sweaty embrace! But what is populist in its pretense is exclusive in its practice. The full thrall of sound & sight is enjoyed by only the elect few - that is, the scene players already aware of the ritual's conformation who jockey the most aggressively for position. Physically walled off by the corona of the crowd, those at a distance are left to piece together some sad shred of enjoyment from whatever sonic & visual scraps escape the ecstatic nucleus. Is it supposed to sound so muddy? What was churning within that sea of heads? What am I missing? These can only be answered with that most segregative of rejoinders: "If you have to ask, you'll never know." And you'll never know because you're not allowed.

There are other ways of hacking the stale environment of the stage without bisecting (and thus stratifying) the audience the way Lightning Bolt does. The champions of performance-environment deconstruction were (are?) Baltimore rawk situationists Oxes. Though they mounted their onstage wood crates ironically to exaggerate the distance between them and the audience ("when hardcore bands had been playing on the floor, staying low"), this actually made it easier for everyone in the venue to see the band, creating a reverse panopticon that the barstool-warmers & short people at the back undoubtedly appreciated. Also, their wireless guitar rigs allowed them to invade the audience, pinballing about the room, hurdling the soundboard, mounting audience members, and swiping cigarettes. This preemptive & improvised "audience participation" was far more intuitive & honest than, say, Tim Harrington's practiced prop-comedy schtick.

Hip-hop also offers different ways of approaching the stage. Though regional snobbery can quickly become grating, an MC's focus on their local social reality necessarily means their music is in rooted in their community. For all of hip-hop's narcissistic self-aggrandizement, the music only rings true if it's reflective of some collective experience. That's why it's never just a solo artist onstage: as corny a carnival barker as a hype-man can be, he's there because the star MC and his friends are there to convey their message together. When was the last time a member of the Wu-Tang Clan appeared alone? Like they said, "We gonna swarm!"

Similarly, the best battle-rapping can't rely on a vast vocabulary alone. The victor is most often whoever can appeal the most effectively to the audience, converting the crowd from objective spectators to a united front in the war of words. That the MC is onstage becomes irrelevant, because the audience is right there with them: they got his back.

Even certain arena tours attempt to create a more communal vibe when artists perform in the round, which (partially) eliminates the ostracisation felt by those audience members at the back of the arena. Such a circular setup is more inclusive than the rectangular yawn of every outdoor festival, which invariably feels less like a collective fête than (in the words of Jarvis Cocker) "just 20,000 people standing in a field." Funny how you can lop off the last two zeros of that number and experience the exact same sentiment against the back wall of a Lightning Bolt gig.

Mass Self-Deception at the C*cks*ck*rs' Ball

At the risk of crossing the number-of-mentions-per-month threshold into scuzzball stalker territory, one reason I enjoy 30 Rock is I find a certain emotional resonance with Liz Lemon (Tina Fey's onscreen alter-ego), and no, it's not just because of the glasses, pointy beak, and addiction to crap snacks. It's her wastrel, dimwit boyfriend, Dennis.

I mean this metaphorically, of course, lest my wife acquaint my face with a frying pan. The preamble proceeds: in the episode "The Break-Up" (duh), Liz' good instincts to cast off this gel-haired goon are thwarted by her peers' insistence that he's eminently likable, a go-getter, or at worst a slight dunce with the noblest of intentions. Naturally, Liz knows the truth about this selfish, stagey, table-turning, tumid, semi-literate simian with a double-digit IQ - yet she can't deny there's something mawkishly irresistible about him. (Speaking of "hate sex"...)

So it is, ladies & gentlemen, with how I regard, am repusled by, yet invariably attentive towards the contemporary pop underground.

"Oh boy," you say. "Thar he blows again..." Well, if you're familiar enough with my tendency towards muckraking cult-crit that it's become eye-rollingly predictable, what are you hanging around for? Fuck off, go back to reading the Gawker subsidiary that matches your wardrobe and feeling intellectually smug, dig?

Anyway... it's very easy to adopt a Shopenhauerian stance regarding both politics and pop culture: things began badly and are only getting worse. Most people convince themselves there came nothing new under the sun past the time they turned 30. This self-conscious narrowing of scope is as conservative as creationism: there was a divine genesis from which all current forms came and have since remain unchanged, or at least unimproved. Certainly, almost everything has its antecedents, but to reduce recent artists to second-hand reiterations (Burial of Massive Attack, Scratch Acid of Johnny Cash, etc.) betrays an incredibly coarse, glaucomal "appreciation" of the arts.

Yet, measured against the fossil record, there's very little to suggest any quantifiable evolution going on. I don't mean there's a creative permafrost (there ain't even a tundral permafrost these days) and nothing is happening. But tweaks, updates, variations, imitations, and minor refinements have taken the place of face-slapping flashes of genius - and this is most obvious when we look at how far from the center the "fringe" currently extends.

Devendra Banhart, for example, is the closest candidate to filling the scuffed leather shoes of Captain Beefheart: king of the madcap primitivists, a mercurial shaman born of some Martian swamp. But compared to the junkyard tornadoes Beefheart used to conjure, Banhart sounds as straight as John Denver. There's a similar dearth of new ideas amongst highbrow bohemians: whereas fashion-conscious dandies of the past (Jacques Dutronc, Paul Weller, etc.) polished their edge to a stainless steel gleam, current fops like Amanda Palmer or Jeremy Jay affect antique poses so preciously they gut their inspirations of the reckless fervor that made them bold in the first place.

The worst consequence of Pop gaining an -ism is rhythmic & diatonic conservatism, lumping listeners with unreconstructed mediocrity like the Arcade Fire, Spoon, and (yeah, I don't like the Beach Boys) Panda Bear. The Brooklyn duo High Places make for a concise case study: while taking advantage of digitech convenience and flexing their musical literacy (from twee no-wavers Ponytail to metal mathlete Mick Barr), their trifecta of musical perfection is Joni Mitchell, Canned Heat, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. That's right, folks, the vanguard is Dad Rock. Fukuyama was right, there was no one to fool us again after the Who; I'm going to put on The Idiot and find a bit of rope.

And what of the ruckus-bringers, the riot-starters like Les Savy Fav, Jay Reatard, or Team Robespierre? They're the musical equivalent of Dane Cook: so much energy is spent gurning and swinging the microphone about, they all but forget to, y'know, practice their craft. Is it asking too much that musicians take the time to sculpt songs and hone their instrumental skills? I get that the vibe is more party than Berklee, and there's similarly little to enjoy attending one of The Mars Volta's finger-sports decathlons. But remember how awesome At The Drive-In were? Or Fishbone? Fu-fuckin'-gazi?

The worst consequence of Rock gaining an -ism is that its symbolic ossification was contingent on physical signifiers (amps, guitars, long faces, bottles of Jack) yet somehow not on its sole ideological constant: anti-authoritarian rebellion. As tiresome and often empty as flipping the bird may be, it's still a more noble gesture than simply gettin' fucked up and trolling for tail. (Of course, even Dionysian dissolution is a kick to the crotch of pedantic moralism.) More enervating than the lack of a hook to hang your trucker hat on is the cottonweight frivolity of bands like the DeathSet and Crystal Antlers. It's all Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs and Saturday morning, which is great if you've succumbed to the Peter Pan syndrome epizootic. But for we who actually enjoy adulthood & thematic complexity, the kindergarten giddiness give us glucose gut-rot.

Given that the world woke up last week to the biggest financial crisis in history, this may sound like sniping over the tune Nero's fiddling. Well, Jane Dark recently asked, "What will be the soundtrack of capital's auto-da-fé?" She suggested M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes," but its "bona-fide hustla" braggardy about taking money at gunpoint sounds to me like the ethos of the former Masters of the Universe whose stock-born clout has swiftly deflated like a flan in the cupboard. Alternately, Owen offered Disco Inferno's "Summer's Last Sound," whereas I personally have been spinning the Fall's "Hexen Definitive - Strife Knot." But those songs are respectively 17 and 25 years old; who among the current crop have captured the zeitgeist in song?

No one. There's no contemporary update of "What's Going On" or "Fight the Power," no Sign O' the Times. Instead, we've got "A Milli," the Louis Vuitton Don, models with guitars in flagrante inferno, and 18 records worth of black-matte dinner music by Trent Reznor. As refreshing as wading into a "warm spot" in a public swimming pool.

And it won't get any better in the forseeable future. Now that the internet is the matrix through which all music is mediated, word-of-mouth and performance residencies have been replaced by blog chatter and webcasts, chewed & spit out by the gears of multinational media conglomerates. Even the most dick-swinging party banter about bands is more vital & provocative than anything aggregated by the Hype Machine. (Seriously, did you see the Pitchfork review of the new Mogwai LP? Someone shat on a thesaurus and left it aflame on Stuart Braithwaite's front porch.) Not that the contemporary "counterculture" has any interest in disentangling themselves from the cultural-industrial complex. Quite the opposite, in fact, given how gleefully they weave themselves amongst the cogs.

As quaint & potentially archaic as the Sell-Out = Bad dogma may appear, it's still applicable within the digital paradigm. Market your music via MySpace or A&M - Vivendi still owns your ass. Build schools in Liberia with your corporate-party paycheck - your good deed was funded by profits stolen from Southeast Asian sweatshop labourers. The MSM doesn't care if your appearance represents some ironic exploitation of capital's mouthpiece - they only care that they sell more advertising space. You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding.

(For a far more eloquent examination of the entertainment industry's corrosive assimilation & capitalist brainwashing, please read Theodor Adorno's genius essay "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception", of which I was reminded last week by Offnotesnotes and really would've done well to remember more about during the discussion about Music Industry 2.0's gluttony for cut-rate adequacy - man, my memory is for shit.)

My one hope is that My Bloody Valentine's live reintroduction will ingnite a few epiphanies. Perhaps some people with put down the laptops and eschew softsynth code-topiary, turning their focus to an intimacy with hardware and air sculpture. Perhaps people will finally tire of that delay-pedal patchwork-pillow ambience, cranking up the volume not as an end unto itself but as tool of sensual engagement. Perhaps TV On the Radio will finally stop fucking around and get their live act together, given that Shields & Co. have no trouble translating three years & a quarter-million quid worth of studio-time in concert.

Or who knows, maybe we'll get a bunch of dull pedal-junkie somanauts (because Slowdive wasn't boring enough the first time around), a growing legion of tone-deaf amplitude-obsessives (because why should A Place To Bury Strangers be the only ones not to learn from Lightning Bolt's mistakes), and retentive tech-heads who sap any jouissance out of live performance painstakingly reproducing their studio creations. Fuckin' hell, make me deaf now.

On that note, here's the misanthropic MP3 mix, as promised last week. Click on the title to download, and get to mean-muggin'.

We Are Not Your Friends

1. The Clovers - "The Rotten Cocksucker's Ball" (00:00)
2. Drive Like Jehu - "Caress" (01:16)
3. Rapeman - "Steak and Black Onions" (04:32)
4. Cody Chesnutt - "War Between the Sexes" (07:17)
5. Mu - "Jealous Kids" (08:53)
6. The Monks - "I Hate You" (14:17)
8. Pissed Jeans - "People Person" (17:47)
9. PJ Harvey - "Is That All There Is?" (22:42)
10. Brian Eno - "Baby's On Fire" (27:41)
11. The Birthday Party - "6 Inch Gold Blade" (32:57)
12. Ministry - "So What" (36:08)
13. Electric Wizard - "We Hate You" (41:23)
14. N.W.A. - "Straight Outta Compton" (46:15)
15. Guns 'N' Roses - "Doubletalkin' Jive" (50:26)
16. The Velvet Underground - "Who Loves the Sun" (52:58)
17. The Billy Nayer Show - "Billy's" (55:46)
18. Frank Zappa - "Broken Hearts Are For Assholes" (58:45)
19. The Brainbombs - "Stupid and Weak" (01:02:27)
20. The Fall - "Hexen Definitive - Strife Knot" (01:07:08)
21. The Jesus & Mary Chain - "I Hate Rock 'n' Roll" (01:13:59)

More Blogging About Buildings and Sound

It's been quite a busy week, hasn't it? The Democratic convention wrapped up, Putin continued coaxing heat from long-cold embers, Japan lost its second prime minister in as many years, New Orleans was struck by a dreadful deja-vu, Thailand's esteem as a vacationer's paradise plummeted, and (as Salon.com put it) Hurricane Bristol hit Minnesota. As the above links give away, I've been listening to an inordinate amount of Nick Cave because his dank, sleazy Jeremiads seem well-suited to the atmosphere. But I'm not interested in talking about Nick Cave today.

My friend JD is a devotee of '70s big-band funk & r'n'b - the Gap Band, Chic, P-Funk, and the like. Last week, he noted that (outside the state fair circuit) this species of act has gone extinct, and wondered aloud why this happened. The easy answer is that their moment in the sun had expired and they had to hang up their sequined jumpsuits. But that's as intellectually satisfying as saying 9/11 happened because They Hate Our Freedom.

A better explanation would be an economic one. The ascension of hip-hop in the late '70s was nothing less than the first homemade-music revolution: no longer was it necessary to have bulky amps, prohibitively priced instruments, PA, or (often the most troublesome variable) a secure practice space. If there was a turntable in the household, there was the sole necessary musical tool. By tapping into a streetlight's electricity, a home stereo could turn a park or street corner into a music venue as MCs battled unamplified in public.

This phenomenon grew exponentially and across genres with the advent of samplers, 4-track cassette recorders, and laptop computers equipped with a plethora of user-friendly software. In The Psychic Soviet, Ian Svenonius argued that a housing crunch exacerbated the trend towards smaller ensembles and amateur production. Following the urban blights of the 1980s, the forces of gentrification launched a full-scale invasion of major cities in the 1990s, leading to vanishing vacancy rates and skyrocketing rents. When a basement efficiency is costing upwards of 60% of your income, you can't afford to be concerned about practice space - you make the most of what you've got.

There's also the social element to consider. Bands are considered creatively compromising by, uh, everyone who's ever been in a band, which is why they all break up, spin off, or implode. The chance to be the lone (wo)man on the mic, solo and center-stage, is irresistible to the ego. As a matter of format, hip-hop is a soloist's idiom. Particularly gifted - or at least bankable - MCs can have their pick of the production litter while remaining the locus of attention, if only because they're the sole constant over the course of a whole album. Conversely, a skilled producer also adept at rhyming can run the whole show unfettered by conflicting opinions.

Also, though there's an unmatched magic in the balance of multiple strong personalities, every additional person in a creative venture represents a risk. At best, they're an extra voice in the conversation, but at worst they're a liability - a truth clear to those familiar with Professor Griff of Public Enemy, The Game, or, heck, Scott Weiland.

Having taken extensive notes, the rock underground (Jacking black culture since 1951!) has produced its own reconstitutions of the above creative considerations. Electroclash, mash-ups, chiptune, hardware-free solid-state techno, whatever the fuck it is village idiot Dan Deacon does - these are all self-produced, small-ensemble subgenres born of cost-efficient equipment and claustrophobic spaces. But unlike hip-hop, they're also tainted by the nebbish indie insistence upon an intrinsic smallness of the music; when made, grand gestures and spectacle invariably wink so hard the irony drips out like crocodile tears.

And so begins the bitter expostulatory portion of the essay! Following the analogous relationship between religion and music, I'd define myself as a kind of gnostic pentecostal; my philosophy is antithetical to Momus' anti-metaphysical "superflat" nihilism. Consequently, I find that the deconstructive materialism of much indie rock misses the whole point, smirking itself into an artistic Limbo instead of shooting the moon with the crosshairs on Heaven. There's little solace in hip-hop either, but for an entirely different reason: I find the human voice to be an invasive, traumatic presence. Card-carrying Lacanian Slavoj Žižek put it in layman's terms in his Pervert's Guide to Cinema:

Voice is not an organic part of the human body, it is coming from somewhere in-between your body. Whenever we talk to another person, there is always this minimum of ventriloquist effect, as if some foreign power took possession... It is as if we are expecting the famous scene from Ridley Scott's Alien to repeat itself. As if we have just waited for some terrifying, alien, evil-looking small animal to jump out.

In that regard, most of my favourite vocalists are pointedly unpleasant, exaggerating their assaultive presence within the music: David Yow, Mark E. Smith, El-P, early Nick Cave. (He made it into the conversation after all!) If only because their skills are rooted in street-corner braggadocio, most MCs have no interest in psychically unsettling the listener. They opt instead for either political discomfort (considerably easier to dismiss), or paying tribute to their own boundless star-power.

Though this comes as no suprise given how often I refer to His Worship Kevin Shields, the music I find most effective is a pan-sensual miasma, a syrupy narcosis, or a searing hail of sonic shrapnel. It boasts mass and velocity, but of a mercurial, chaotic sort. The music that ultimately means anything to me is an audial short-circuit to Stendhal Syndrome - immersive, overwhelming, yet organic. Being a mechanical artifice, the digital is incapable of transcendence. As noted last week, "Events that don't happen in air have no medium for existence, sounds made in a totally digital environment are effectively stillborn" - or, more horrifying, undead. But, stripped of digital alchemy, it becomes very difficult to produce music capable of sensory overload as a solo act.

And so, for all the squabbles, cramped quarters, and clumsy stacks of equipment... we're back in a big room, full of hotheaded humans, armed with steel, wood, and speakers.

By the way, the next time Earth, Wind & Fire come to your town, check 'em out. I hear they're still able to kill it. Click on the mix title to download.

Sensory Overloud

1. Ashra - "77 Slightly Delayed" (00:00)
2. Can - "Oh Yeah" (06:31)
3. Fugazi - "Steady Diet" (13:45)
4. The Jesus & Mary Chain - "Upside Down" (17:23)
5. Faust - "Krautrock" (20:16)
6. Brian Eno - "Here Come the Warm Jets" (27:45)
7. Tim Hecker - "Blood Rainbow" (31:30)
8. Jonny Greenwood - "Henry Plainview" (35:19)
9. My Bloody Valentine - "All I Need" (35:48)
10. Sonic Youth - "Eric's Trip" (38:47)
11. Tricky - "Christiansands" (42:32)
12. Fela Kuti - "Roforofo Fight" (46:11)
13. Boredoms - "Super Going" (53:57)
14. The Psychic Paramount - "Gamelan Into the Mink Supernatural" (01:05:56)
15. The Beatles - "Tomorrow Never Knows" (01:15:48)

Non-Sequitorial Postscript: Well, a pity - looks like we no longer live "in a whurruld..."

The Machine Demands a Sacrifice

I'll be the first to testify that music's quantum leaps are often contingent on new gear. We'd be stuck in the stone age were it not for multitrack recording and amplifiers; Hendrix couldn't have happened without the wah-wah pedal; Eno and his Kraut contemporaries would have been useless without synthesizer modules; New Order (and new wave in general) were midwifed by sequencers; hip-hop production wouldn't have grown beyond beat-juggling without samplers; and pretty much any music that thoroughly melted our snyapses over the past decade was created on a computer.

But in the past few years, music tech innovation has become stagnant - that is, beyond higher bitrates and simulating all the old gear. The obvious consequence is - for all the refining, tweaking, expanding, contracting, mixing, and matching that's happened in the Izz-'00s - not one new sound has been bestowed upon us by Apollo. For sure, a number of the old hats that have been dusted off are well worth the renewed attention, and there's been some big-brained reframing of otherwise-dehumanising tech-cultural phenomena. But how many times will people sit through Cheap Trick covers played on Gameboys before they hunger for something surprising instead of merely clever?

But I'm not pulling some cranky-grandpa, "Everythin' After Muh Birth Is Fer Shit" schtick (not today, at any rate). No, I'm here to rip on gear, ladies and gentlemen. So be warned: if you don't dig on audial mechanics, well, you're Pee-Wee and you just hitched a ride with Large Marge.

Unlike everything else in the global Ponzi scheme called "civilization," technology is downwardly-mobile. It's invariably born of some secret military agenda too depraved to fathom; it subsequently becomes the latest in conspicuous consumption, as sported by Manhattan penthouse-dwelling financiers/S&M freaks and Saudi oil magnates; fifteen years later, it's being either sold only at Value Village or fished out of the Payatas. Witness the VCR: originally an über-high-tech storage device within the US Defense Dept., it quickly was adopted by rich Baby Hueys as a convenient, portable means of showing skin flicks at parties, and finally it was marketed (for more or less the same purpose) to loners & shut-ins living in their parents' basements the world over. Need I invoke The Internet as retread of precisely the same? The pattern holds: (1) shadowy military-industrial conception; (2) exploited by salacious Master of the Universe greed-huns; (3) commodified & sold to anti-social bedroom-dwellers.

So it is with much music gear. The Pentagon is developing some new USW, or Exxon/Mobil is scanning for Texas Tea in Tahiti, and they inadvertantly produce the audio-software equivalent of cellophane; meanwhile, Cher can't hold a pitch and Trent Reznor wants full production capacity within the pajama-clad comfort of the green room. Solutions to their respective problems are concocted, and once the novelty has faded, gravity drags the price down within reach of every music-hobbyist mug with a home computer.

Bunker mentality is less a hazard than a virtue for audio engineers; no work will get done if you're off to the pub for a pint with your mates every evening. Yet, working in the analog domain, a concentrated engagement of the physical environment is necessary: in moving mics, tweaking knobs, and patching in compressors, you're literally sculpting the air. But audio software removes even this interaction. Instead, you're hunched over a keyboard, rotting your retinas as you atrophy into a six-foot slug like the space jockey in Alien. I'll not deny that the democratising aspect of cheap(er), accessible recording programs has been a boon to many a poor musician; I certainly wouldn't have been able to crank out as many albums worth of material as I have without such software. But in exchange for not having to head down to the local studio and fork over a small fortune, the surfeit of options audio software provides is too much of a good thing.

Allow me to introduce my pet peeve du jour - amp-emulating plug-ins. Now, recording a guitar (or bass) directly into a computer produces a tone not unlike a baloney-on-Wonder Bread sandwich: flabby, spongy, shapeless. Enter amp-emulation: these plug-ins simulate the timbral muscle of a proper amplifier & speaker cabinet. Quelle grande convenience, oui? Wrong. Now I've got to wade through the digital facsimiles of over a dozen amp heads, twenty speaker cabinets, five different mic models (each of which can be "placed" in a half-dozen different positions), and god knows how many stomp-boxes, effects processors, and outboard units. Make-do pragmatism isn't even possible, because there are no restrictions of choice. Whereas twenty minutes of painstaking knob-twisting and mic placement with the tangible tools would have sufficed, whole hours are flushed away taming the shrieking midrange of a wholesaler's supply of amplifiers that aren't even there.

Paradoxically, this surplus of options permits laziness as easily as it paralyses. Want your guit-box to have that Green Day grit? Well, click on that preset labeled "American Idiot" and shazam! Want the snare to pop with the sinewy warmth of a $3000 tube compressor? Just load up that Renaissance digital compressor and schmapow! Who cares if you can't tell the difference between an SM57 and a C414? To paraphrase Dave Chappelle: you graduated with a B.A. in English lit and you don't have to take shit from nobody!

I'm far from alone in finding it incredibly difficult to connect viscerally with much contemporary music, and I often wonder if this is because it's music from sources that don't physically exist. As my friend Jonny put it, "It tickles your cerebral membrane without really penetrating to that animal core - like drinking a Coke when a nice glass of water would have done." If anything explains the perennial appeal of the clattering wood and clanging steel, it's Iggy Pop's indelible axiom:

Speakers push they air, and push me too.

This was one of the things that hit me so hard (literally) when I saw My Bloody Valentine: for all of Kevin Shields' clinical studio tinkering to hand-craft that hurricane smear of sounds, that is how the band actually sounded. Four shabby mammals with standard-issue instruments, conjuring a sonic maelstrom like aurora borealis setting a forest ablaze. Not a laptop in sight.

As many reasons are there are to dislike indie demagogue Steve Albini, it's damned hard to find fault with his analog-purist philosophy that a recording should be a document of how a band sounds, nothing more, nothing less. Again, I'd be a hypocrite if I were as quick to dismiss digital software's benefits as him, but I'll gladly second the words emblazoned across the back cover of Big Black's last album: Fuck digital.

C'mon, Feel the Beautiful, Euphoric, Transcendental Noise

Not even close...

I have the discrete pleasure of testifying to what a great many others have already been evangelising: My Bloody Valentine are back and will peel the skin from your skull using only air sculpted with their Fender-brand divining rods. The general critical consensus amounts to the impressionistic descriptive quicksand I find myself wading through every time I recount the concert on the phone:

I mean, like, str0bes&tremo1o-arm swand!ves went *#%*^!*#!* "Soon" and "Feed Me With Yr -> Blinida <3 fuckin' LOUD 5-10-15-20-25 minutes into "You Made Me ~ l0se my hearing #*%^* g!rl passed out, dude... w00t!

Honestly, all the ham-fisted similes and nebulous descriptions that bloggers & mag hacks have cranked out are blamelessly quixotic: given that the legend of The Loudness has proven inarguably true, how can one explain an experience for which one has no first-hand precedent? With ham-fisted similes and nebulous, impressionistic descriptions! After all, for any first-time MBV attendee, it must also be their inaugural experience of sound as a non-environmental (i.e. not derived from mechanical or meteorological sources) yet physically-arresting phenomenon. It was sensory overload of a purity and extremity I'd certainly never experienced.

Here is where it bears expounding upon "The Holocuast": that sonic schisming of space & time at the end of "You Made Me Realise", which lasts anywhere between a quarter- and half-hour. (I sure as hell wasn't checking my watch.) The effect on the audience was uncanny, utterly bizarre. Punters that had been punching the air all night slowed their bouncing into bug-eyed, shellshocked stasis. People nodded off like junkies in every direction. God knows how many eventually fled the front of the room with their fingers in their ears. The girl in front of me slowly crumpled against the barricade and, at song's end, needed to be picked up & carried away by security. I took my earplugs out and immediately felt my spine flush into my stomach. (I put the earplugs back in.) It erased any sense-memory of every song before, and the salvo of the final verse was like being resusitated out of an overdose only to be bitch-slapped by the medic.

It was also during this onslaught that I experienced a bemusing mix of existential dread (see above) and arousal (keep reading). As many others have mentioned, the band appears to have been cryogenically preserved over the last sixteen years - meaning Bilinda Butcher is still indie-adorable, the angelic yin to PJ Harvey's gothy yang. The sight of this petite pixie, strumming away in total indifference to the evil fucking sound assaulting the crowd, was one of the most oddly sexy things I've ever seen.

Long story short (too late)... I wouldn't have traded it for anything. You could have told me that, provided I tore up my ticket, Veronica Lake circa 1942 was arriving in a time machine for a threesome with me and Tina Fey and I would have told you to fuck off.

So, to keep the buzz in the air, here's a mix of songs to sandpaper everyone else's eardrums a bit. Click on the mix title to download.

Lo(-Fi) Rider

1. Nation of Ulysses - "The Sound of Young America" (00:00)
2. Laddio Bolocko - "Goat Lips" (02:29)
3. Shit and Shine - "Danielle" (09:24)
4. Method Man - "Sub Crazy" (11:00)
5. Ween - "Awesome Sound" (13:14)
6. Alex Chilton - "Baron of Love Pt. II" (15:34)
7. The Black Lips - "Lock And Key" (19:43)
8. My Bloody Valentine - "Feed Me With Your Kiss" (22:23)
9. NO - "This Suit Burns Better" (26:12)
10. Fugazi - "Swingset" (29:07)
11. Pavement - "No Life Singed Her" (30:43)
12. The Fall - "Slates, Slags, Etc." (32:43)
13. Karaoke Vocal Eliminator - "Hideously Amplified World" (39:12)
14. Oshiri Penpenz - "Love Letter From Shitty Booze" (43:25)
15. The Cramps - "Love Me" (45:01)
16. Jacks - "Gloomy Flower" (46:58)
17. The Brainbombs - "Drive Around" (50:13)
18. Labtekwon - "Capoiera" (55:13)
19. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - "Get Over Here" (57:58)
20. Ogikubo Connection - "Staring At Blood" (01:00:02)
21. The Brian Jonestown Massacre - "The Origin of Love/The Amazing Electric Talking Cave" (01:03:18)
22. Love Life - "[Trails]" (01:09:11)

Addendum:

The week before the concert, I came across this article about the use of music as a tool of torture by the American military. For a split second, I wondered whether my enthusiasm for both excessive volume and repetition somehow put me in a morally unteneble position. (Answer: only when it gets on Th' Wife's nerves!) Approaching the subject too subjectively (as demonstrated by Deicide drummer Asheim) can also lead to "Bring 'em on!" braggadoccio, or even to the myopic dismissal of the very possiblity that music can be torturous. (Similarly, the composer of the Barney The Dinosaur theme argues that "playing hymns to someone strapped to a chair wouldn't make them a Christian," never seeming to consider that such a scenario may have the exact opposite effect.) All of which ignores the simple yet fundamental difference between those of us in front of Kevin Shields' amp stack, and those in the Guantanamo Bay "disco": choice.

Take the time to read the full article, if only because it provides (in the fourth paragraph) yet another concise & explicit reason to hate James Hetfield.

Extension:

Fellow concertgoer and musical polygamist Bradford Cox sought to spark discussion by suggesting that

My Bloody Valentine are a folk band. Their music transfers experience in broad, ambiguous terms utilizing simple chords and melodies.

And now I'm running my mouth like flint and tinder: this seems to me a confusion of terms. I agree that MBV convey [whatever it is they convey] in broad, ambiguous terms - but isn't that the antithesis of "folk" music? I've always understood "folk" to stand for a thematic focus on finite, anecdotal evidence which alluded to some universal condition or sentiment.

It's also insultingly reductive to call MBV's chord changes and melodies "simple." Certainly, the melodies are spare and uncluttered, and there's no finger-sports athleticism on display, but part of the beauty of MBV's music is that it's largely adrift from a clear tonal center, a la Joni Mitchell. Though legions of knuckle-dragging hardcore acts may suggest otherwise, a workmanlike hammering of a handful of chords needn't be monotonic or unsophisticated. Please, if you disbelieve, tell me what key any given song by the Fall from '81-'83 was in.