I Like Max Tundra...

...and until Fluxblog quoted this from his Twitter...: (I'd re-tweet, but everything here goes to my twitter anyway)

Lady Gaga should perform a concert of wildly unpredictable, dazzling, psychedelic music whilst wearing drab, conventional clothing.

...I'd never heard of the chap. Now I think I shall check his music out.

MmmmmmmmFree Vinyl...

Having slagged poor Pitchfork and Magnet enough of late, I thought to return to Filter and see what suckitude I could find there. Instead, I find serendipity: a free giveaway of turntable & records.

I mean, I've already got a turntable (two, actually), and already have It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back on CD, and am not super interested in any of the rest save Pavement and Bad Brains, but still. Free. Expletive. Vinyl. I'm so excited, I'm creating an all new blog tag.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Killed and Revived.

This is what I mean when I talk about the music industry double-helix:



Eight years ago, when the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion released Plastic Fang, Pitchfork had these words of encouragement:

In response to those failures, Spencer & Co. have returned to the basics for Plastic Fang: two guitars, a bag full of riffs, and frequent interjections of "Blues Explosion!" Never mind the tiny fact that the band's gimmick, if tired in the mid-nineties, is downright comatose these days. Nobody seems to have informed JSBX that the world's music warehouse has become overstocked on pale-faced blues, with the White Stripes, etc. improving the sound by keeping things quick and raw while dispensing with the ironic wink.

And now that they've got a greatest hits out, the kings of consistency appraise it thusly:

Dirty Shirt Rock 'n' Roll surveys the years between their 1992 debut and 2002's Plastic Fang. Unlike the consistently name-checked and beloved Pavement, another Matador band with a new retrospective in stores, the Blues Explosion seem ripe for re-evaluation. The early-2000s garage rock revival and the success of the White Stripes have given us a new context to hear these disarrayed blues-rock excursions, which similarly peel back the layers to get to rock's core elements.

 Now, I could go through a few more paragraphs of dudgeon, explaining that I always rather liked Plastic Fang, but I'm saving that for my CD ratings. So I'll give Pitchfork the same shrift I gave Spin: They're a Bunch of Whores.

The Third Man is a Fire Hose.

I didn't get the last Dead Weather album, even though I'm a fan of Jack White in general and Alison Mosshart in particular. I did, however, buy their first single on 45 on Record Store Day, and I have dug it on repeated listenings. So when the news comes down the pike that There's a new album, I am both impressed, intrigued, and slightly worried.

Impressed, because White just keeps pumping out the product. This is the lesson Beck learned to climb his way back to relevance: three albums in three years. You're a musician, make music. Keep throwing it out there and the public is bound to like some of it. I concur.

Intrigued, and slightly worried, by the concept and cover art. I do hope that White hasn't decided to go political on us, or if he has, he's going to be slightly more nuanced than musicians usually are. But the Klan-ish imagery suggests he's going to go all Olbermann on us, and then I might have to stop being a fan.

This may not bode well, either.

Rating My CD's: Dream Brother

9.  Jeff Buckley -- Grace 

Whatever I was doing in 1994 (graduating high school, working at Taco Hell, beginning college, etc), I wasn't listening to Jeff Buckley's Grace. Or much of anything else, to be honest; I approached the rhapsodized early-90's music scene with equal parts attraction, confusion, and mockery. My big purchase that year was Green Day's Dookie (on cassette, so it won't appear in this retrospective). I never even heard of the guy for nearly twelve years; when Spin put him on their Top 100 Albums of the 20 years they'd been in existence. I liked the cover art, which reminded me of a more grownup Sid Vicious, I liked the name, so I checked it out. And I didn't know what to make of it.

Every time I've listened to it since, I've had the same reaction. It certainly defies categorization, or even adjectivization.  I want to call it Operatic Rock, by which I mean nothing like Rock Opera. I want to call it Dream Pop. I want to call it the Perfect Album to Take a Nap To, but I've never taken a nap to it.

Rating My CD's: WOO-HOO!

8. Blur -- Blur

The first time I heard Blur was sometime in college, during their Parklife phase, and I responded to them with active nausea. For some reason "Girls and Boys" was the most irritating song I heard that year, and I had no problem with making my feelings on this subject well known to any of my friends who were Blur fans. I'm still not a super-fan of the song; there's something in that rubber-band bass that just triggers the gag reflex, to say nothing of that wretched "always should be someone you really love" line, which can't decide if it's being cheekily naive or ironic. But where once was loathing has come now a kind of quiet understanding, if only because I endured far worse in the long dark rut of late-90's glam-disco sloppy-seconds.

Guess Who's Still Alive, Part II

The following artists have Top 25 CD's on Amazon as we speak:

• Jimi Hendrix
• Sade
• Johnny Cash
• Jeff Beck
• K.D. Lang
• Peter Gabriel
• Ry Cooder
• Drive-By Truckers
• Gorillaz
• The Black-Eyed Peas

The last few are the only evidence that the last decade even happened. Unless you count Susan Boyle, and I don't want to.

Indie Hits the Wall

Because I'm not that into "indie" music, I don't know much about Joanna Newsom. I've heard the name, sure, scattered about the mags like so much hipster detritus, but never bothered to listen. The name does not excite me and I've other things to do.

So it's something that Nitsuh Abebe, inaugurating Pitchfork's "Why We Fight" feature, draws me into an analysis of the elbow-throwing and hyper-criticism of the music world that centers on Newsom. The theme runs universal, I think, fandom puts pressure on artists to meet ever-rising expectations while limiting the range in which the artist can act on them. A typical band fan wants every record to sound like the one he/she fell in love with, and yet be different. The impossibility of this diminishes its ubiquity not one jot.

Besides, we want pop stars to be oversized and perverse-- often we want them to think they're more special than us. My question, though, is this: Don't we want the same level of imagination and confidence from indie acts? And if so, why do a lot of us seem slightly wary about the possibility? Why celebrate pretense and bold gestures in pop music, but get weirdly skeptical of them in the indie world? It's as if we've reached the point where one long-running indie value-- the idea that the performers are a lot like the audience-- has started eating up a much more interesting one: that indie can be a realm that embraces oddity and strangeness. This is the funny predicament of a lot of talk about modern indie. It's as if the audience doesn't think of itself as very interesting, and is skeptical of any band that comes out of its midst thinking it's any better. (Especially if people, somewhere outside of the indie world, seem to agree.) Successful, self-conscious strangeness in the mainstream is a triumph; the same thing in this fringe genre is, for some reason, sometimes considered pretentious, self-satisfied, laughable, overstepping one's station.

This sounds exactly like the problem that punk rock had/has: the grooves are so well worn, the visual and audio expectations so determined in the word "punk" that it's impossible to push the envelope without becoming something else, and thereby losing the audience. I'm as guilty as anyone else; most of what gets called "melodic punk" sounds overwrought and dull to my ears, while what gets called "77-style" sounds like a tedious copy of other bands work. There's something of inevitability to this process; rock music is deliberately amateurish and there's only so much you can do with 12-bar structure and pentatonic solos.

So maybe the answer is recognizing the un-originality of this and embracing the repitition, or at least, not being surprised by it. I'm rather moving in this direction myself; there's no pleasure in telling people "This was better 20 years ago, when it was __________" except as sharing _____________ as something cool. We don't need to reject the Raveonettes to save the Jesus & Mary Chain.

Overall, though, I'm intrigued by this series. Music meta-criticism is rather long overdue.

Pitchfork Alerts Us

New Label Alert: Tri Angle

Tri Angle will exist to perform a genre with the working title of "drag" What's "drag" sound like, you say? Well...

It's like a witching-hour vision of Cocteau Twins dream pop, meshed with the roar of early-60's British skiffle and the soundtrack to a particularly angsty Gregg Araki film full of Gen X shoegazer atmospherics and industrial beats, sieved gently through Ukrainian disco-folk, the good kind, brought bang up to the date by the influence of raw hip-hop mutations like chopped and screwed and juke, at which point we take these bits, these sonic doodles if you will, and we play them raw over muted clips of old Laurence Welk or Sonny & Cher clips, while we strap the listener in and make him watch, Clockwork-Orange style. We're not joking about that. We've got the basement all set up, and there's a user-agreement that comes with the download, CD, or LP. The effect is a major drag, and the great thing about the name of the genre is that we're not intending that ironically. Irony is dead anyway.

That's not actually what the person said. I added a bit. See if you can guess where.

The Greatest

Lists are tedious. They just are. Whatever you include is wrong. Whatever you disinclude is wrong. It's why I don't write them. The X most Blah of Whatever format will never ever appear on the Notion. Unless I change my mind.

That said, sometimes it can be done right, and over at Big Hollywood, Ben Shapiro show the best way to write a list feature: extensively. First, he issued a 10 Most Overrated Directors of All Time that had a few directors I quite like (Scorcese? Really?). Then in response to the obvious response, he put his money where his mouth was and gave us the Directors He Liked, including explaining why certain guys (it's a sausage-fest in here, ladies, sorry) didn't make the list. I don't know that I'm about to go rent the movies of William Wyler, but I'm appreciating the fullness of his thought.

Opinions are Like Rocks. They're Everywhere, but You Can't Eat Them.

Andrew Earles hates Spiritualized and all things Jason Pierce, as he makes abundantly clear:

Jason Pierce was a 32-year-old man when he decided it was a novel idea to present a limited number of 1997’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space CDs in fake prescription-pill packaging. An 11th-grader blasted on Lortabs for the first time doesn’t have ideas like this; he has better ones....For some reason, telling the ugly truth about this aggressively mediocre outfit is the music-criticism equivalent of telling dead-baby jokes in a Planned Parenthood waiting room.

Matthew Perpetua, on the other hand, finds him damn fine:

Is there anyone else who can self-flagellate with as much elegance, wit, and grandiosity as Jason Pierce? “Come Together” is a masterpiece of over-the-top self-loathing, a thunderous mass of shrieking guitars, blaring fanfare, and gospel bombast all at the service of a scathing lyric sung by Pierce in the first person, tearing himself apart for being a junkie.

And me? I'd have to listen to the guy to make a descision, and I don't want to, because I hate the band name. At some point I'm going to have to go into the logic behind my band name contempt process, but for the nonce, I'm just going to make a tag out of it.

Get Rythmn in your Melody

The author of this article on rythmn, melody, and pop music knows a hell of a lot more than I do. Or for that matter, most people who consider themselves "music" journalists. And he makes the argument that music is a moral force, that it is the expression of the soul. And as such, it ought to be submitted to judgment.

And even if we don’t forbid musical idioms by law, we should remember that people with musical tastes make our laws; and Plato may be right, even in relation to a modern democracy, that changes in musical culture go hand in hand with changes in the laws, since changes in the laws so often reflect pressures from culture. There is no doubt that popular music today enjoys a status higher than any other cultural product. Pop stars are first among celebrities, idolised by the young, taken as role models, courted by politicians, and in general endowed with a magic aura that gives them power over crowds. It is surely likely, therefore, that something of their message will rub off on the laws passed by the politicians who admire them. If the message is sensual, self-centered, and materialistic, then we should not expect to find that our laws address us from any higher realm than that implies.

I cannot argue. I freely admit that most of the music we listen to is deliberately primitive; it appeals to the animal instincts and not to the heart. Most of the music that appeals to the heart, in fact, bores me. For me, music is not a complement to my life, but a vacation from it. What that means about me, and modern music, will require serious thought.