Things I Learned from Reading Fluxblog II

Because:

• Kanye West is a Marvel; Jay-Z is a DC.
• Matthew Sweet has nothing to do with the Illuminati
• The emotional center of a Shabazz Palaces song is "oooh wee"
• Being anxious to skip ahead to some point in the future is sometimes about wanting more than the world can possibly give you
• Making eye contact with forced assurance could blow holes in people's faces. Like a Cyclops.
• Things which are obvious in retrospect seem patently false at the time.
• The last few Sonic Youth records have been middle-of-the-road.
• Sound in original context produce less attachment than sound in artistic quotation marks.

Ariel Pink's Empty Graffiti

Via Fluxblog, this messy catchall, which Perpetua praises for it's "cheap glam Cobain look":



Bit of Suicide, bit of Bowie, and...something else...can't quite put my finger on it:

Ah...



Hurry that 15 minutes up, boys...

I Agree With Fluxblog

If I tease Fluxblog occasionally, it's done out of love, or at least, respect. Perpetua's career is testament to the value of passion and determination, and I don't begrudge him a bit of the success he's earned.

And sometimes, we manage to oddly mirror each other. For example, his post about the Replacements expresses my thoughts entirely. I've been sort of wanting to get into them, but I haven't yet, and I'm not sure why. I think it's because they seemed redundant to me. "Ah, sure, punk rock," I'd think, "I know punk rock. What's that you say? Then they 'matured'?"



But now I'm more okay with letting bits of 80's rock past my nose, so I think I'll give them a fair hearing. Suggestions as to Replacements songs/albums to start with will be welcome.

Perpetua Sticks it to M.I.A.

At Pitchfork:

The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade. It aims to capture a technological and cultural zeitgeist in its over-stimulated, digitally degraded sound, but the songs are too flimsy to carry her bold conceit. Without compelling tunes, the obnoxious public antics, dubious political messages, and thin voice that had grated on her naysayers have become impossible for even dedicated fans to ignore. It's as if everything that was great about M.I.A. has been stripped from this music, leaving behind only the most alienating aspects of her art and public persona.

I should probably stop wailing on the girl. That "Born Free" video really got under my skin somehow.

Things I Learned From Reading Fluxblog

This bears the earmarks of a continuing series:

• Knowing what you want is usually a lot more exciting than having no idea at all.
• Capitalism as a terrible boyfriend.
• The best LCD Soundsystem songs tap into the ineffable.
• The Liars are the kind of punk band that makes people think of Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead.
• Robert Pollard just put together together an appealing tune and song structure with a gentle emotional epiphany that comes across as earnest and true, but he's just phoning it in.
• "Peacebone" is the worst title for an amazing song, ever.
• A line like "an obsession with the past is like a dead fly" doesn't make sense, and it totally does.
• Although Fol Chen creates danceable pop music, they don't feel they belong in that genre.
• To enjoy a Phosphorescent song requires alcohol and loose gravity.
• An accordion lends a song a peppy oompah, yet not so much that precludes the woozy sentimentality or gentle enthusiasm that allows the song to be blown off course by some light springtime wind.

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.

Casting Around the Blogosphere...

1) The aforementioned Andrew Earles has a book out about Hüsker Dü. I pretend to like Hüsker Dü, so I'll pretend I might buy this. Maybe If I had something other than Zen Arcade, or if I felt the need to listen to Zen Arcade more than once a year, and that out of an obligation similar to what Lester Bangs felt for The Who's Happy Jack, I could maintain that pretense through a paragraph. Nevertheless, I wish him good sales, as this is the sort of project a writer goes into with reverence.

2) A quick scan of Fluxblog yields the following knowledge:

• Charlotte Gainsbourg working with Beck is an "enigma in itself."
• Anxiety comes in two varieties, good and bad.
• A member of Portishead has a side project called Beak.
• For the Fiery Furnaces to perform crowd-pleasing rock shows is abnormal.
• Bands that are about to get all over the coming wave of 90's nostalgia are giving themselves appropriately Zen-bizzarre names, like "Boat."
• People are fixating on R. Kelly yodeling in a song.
• I can't read anything about a band/artist named Gigi. It just sounds too stupid, no matter how many laudatory adjectives are sprinkled like M&M's in it.
• It is possible to say that a band that consists of "super-hard working veterans" has put on "a very enjoyable rock show" and yet worry about being condescending to them.

3) A woman who looks like one of the members of Monty Python in drag can record an album of all covers with a tautology for a title, and it can become #1 on Amazon.