There's Actually a Band Called We Were Promised Jetpacks

Magnet's long-delayed print issue arrived today.

Their letters page was blank (get it?), but in the Spin-esque mini-review section I found that We Were Promised Jetpacks has been around for 10 years.

Suddenly this decade seems entirely different.

Haterz Gonna Hate

News Flash!

• Musicians hate other musicians. (h/t Andrew Earles) Also:
• Authors hate other authors
• and Filmmakers hate other filmmakers

For the same reason that high school girls hate other high school girls: They're unformed people whose towering egos cover for their abysmal insecurities.

U mad, bro?

My Ding-a-Ling

I put this on the Novelty Records show for Rock'n'Roll Archaeology, and now I can't get it out of my head. So suffer along with me.

This was Chuck Berry's only #1 hit, which I suspect is due to the way he giggles it up here.

The Deepest Mystery of Black Flag...

...isn't how they survived with Henry Rollins as long as they did.

No, it's how anyone in their right mind would prefer My War to Slip it In.

But I suppose that's an argument for another day.

Remember Blender?

Yeah, I know it folded two years ago, retreating to an online presence that hasn't been updated since March.

But I found this Mad-esque mockery of a real Blender front page I did almost exactly six years ago, and I felt like posting it.

I'm pretty sure "The Nuttiest Hair in Rock" was real. The rest I thought moderately pithy back in 2005. Your mileage may vary.

Onanistic Recursion: Dana Vachon Uncovers the Dark Side of Rebecca Black

Vachon's tongue is so far in his cheek he's licking air. It's actually too good to block quote. Just read it.

The Strokes Battles Ad Hominem

Pitchfork gives the new Strokes record, Angles, a tepid 5.9 and a whole lot of "meh" in the review:

Throughout, the album is hobbled by disconnections-- between verse and chorus, lyrics and music, intent and execution. Casablancas' ambivalence about his own actions crops up often.

Whatevs. They like Battles, which sounds like crap spun through a cotton-candy machine.

Gallows Humor

Andrew Earles seems to lament a band called Gallows receiving the most recent style "PRESENT AND FUTURE OF PUNK".

I don't blame him. The cover art of their debut album looks like someone put strychnine in Roger Dean's acid.

We Don't Hear a Single...

Under the Radar reports that "Swedish twee-stars Acid House Kings" (just nod and smile) are going to prevew a handful of tracks from their upcoming album and let their fans vote on the single. This is either:

1. An awesomely awesome marketing move, which will soon be copied by everyone who's anyone!, OR
2. A sign that they have no idea if any of their songs are good enough to be a single.

Only time will tell. They look nice and non-threatening in the picture, though:

Dude? The Upturned Phallic Guitar? Could you BE more Rockist?

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'd Like to Feel Bad for Creed...

...I mean, it's 2011, and the hip still won't miss the opportunity to bash them, even for things they had nothing to do with.

According to Germany's Der Spiegel newspaper, little Walter Eikrem was walking home from school in his hometown of Rakkestad when all of a sudden he found himself on the same path as a pack of wolves.
Instead of crying wolf and running away, Walter did what seemed to be the only logical thing to him: he pulled out his cell phone, took the ear buds out of it and turned Creed's "Overcome" up full blast while screaming and waving his arms.

And the wolf ran away. GET IT LOL C WUT I DID THR?

Then I remember how skull-scrapingly bad Creed's music is, and I'm more or less fine with it.

Self-Abuse

With all the crap I sling at the hipster doofii, it behooves me to tossa few wads at myself when I merit it.

I just got a Pandora account this week. For real. I've been listening for days, and I'm completely enamoured. How was I not aware of this?


So much for Irony being dead...



Irony is Boring.

I liked the first two editions of Pitchfork's Why We Fight, but I've missed every one since. I've read #3 and #4 just now, and while I thought #4 was an okay walk through the perils of MIA's playing with politics, I got three quarters of the way down #3 and was suddenly, un-utterably bored with the entire enterprise:

This idea of knowingness, though-- our relationship with it can get complicated. Right now, one of the internet's most successful bastions of knowingness is a blog called Hipster Runoff, a performance that's almost nothing but knowing: It shrugs, it takes an arch, pseudo-scientific tone, it puts every other word in scare quotes. Here you go, it seems to say: Here is your weird market of hipness and cool. The end. You can take it as withering satire, if you want to, because its skewers are dead on target. Of course, if its pseudonymous author really thought the market of cool were that pointless and vacuous, why spend so much time thinking about it-- why know it well enough to be savvy? It's not so much a satire as a whole performance of knowingness. And even if I don't often have the stomach for it, I can't pretend the performance isn't an immaculate one: it's knowingness raised to the level of poetry, free of the burden of "intent" or sincerity or any point beyond what the reader reflects out of it. It goes beyond "the author is dead" and turns the author into some kind of zombie.

When I was in college, REM had a rather large hit song with the line "You said that irony was the shackle of youth." At the time, I disagreed, saying that irony was the weapon of youth. We were both right, I suppose, but I don't care to examine the matter much further than that, because Irony, capital "I", is not that interesting. It's not really a thing, it's an act, a choice. That's why an analysis or discussion of Irony will always feel overblown. And it's why Family Guy will always be less than its competitors.

I say that because the article namedrops The Simpsons. But The Simpsons, however arch it seemed, always leavened its snark with a sincere heart. The show actually cared about its characters; even, or especially Homer. Homer Simpson serves the show as the butt of most of the jokes, but if something really really bad happened to him, fans would be heartbroken. Because Homer is not really a bad guy, just flawed and limited, like all of us are.



Family Guy, on the other hand, doesn't really care all that much. About anything. The show's evolved from an even arch-er version of The Simpsons to an endless On the Road movie with a drunken hipster dog and a gay baby standing in for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. It's breezy and stupid and fully aware of its breeziness and stupidity, and works them like Stevedores for every laugh. At the root of every Family Guy gag is the thought, "This is so completely retarded that I have no choice but to laugh."



And while such cheap absurdity is a well that may never run dry, it's a good distance away from the archness and intellect of The Simpsons, and light-years away from its great rival South Park. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's show is a lot of things, but almost never ironic. Rather, it's bone-cuttingly satiric, to the point of being mad-dog mean:



The humor here comes from saying the unsayable, and while that sounds knowing, it's not irony, because it's meant with deadly earnestness.

My point is that irony is not worth the effort of hashing out, because it's by no means as central to our cultural narratives as people who wallow in it, or fuss about it, think it is. There's a time when we all love it, and think ourselves superior for being aware of it. It passes.

Robert Pollard is a Dork.

I don't care about Robert Pollard, or Guided By Voices, or any of that. I just don't. It's Stuff I've Heard of But Never Listened To. And I'm sure that his new disc, Space City Kicks, unleashes just as much awesomeness as Under the Radar says. I like that title so much, in fact, that I'm willing to listen to some samples on iTunes. But the cover...



Dude...


Why is he standing there like that? Is this some kind of kung fu position? And why isn't there anything spacey or city-y, or even kick-y (unless Robert refers to his badass two-tone shoes as "kicks" as the kids do these days)?

I mean, it's possible that some dippy photographer came up with this, and the record label went with it sans Pollard's approval, but this is out on Pollard's own label, so that answer's stupid. No, he thinks this picture is cool, from the understated tiny red heart on the king's-blue shirt to the guitar just hanging out next to the whatever-white building in the vacant lot down the street from the Bob Evans. Robert Pollard this the whole thing, including the "punch me in the jimmy! Do it HARD!" stance, is just too ineffable to be effed.

Ergo, he's a dork.

New Foo Will Kick in the Kicking Place, ChartAttack Assures Us

And we are meant to be excited by such. By the Foo Fighters. The fighters of Foo. No, really.

Look, Dave Grohl has enough grandfathered indie cred that he could play on a Justin Bieber record and still be cool. And as long as he whips out those drumsticks whenever Josh Homme demands it of him, he can do whatever the hell else he wants to pay the bills. And hell, the're one or two Foo songs I like. "Monkey Wrench" comes to mind.

But I'm never going to be excited by a Foo Fighters record. The Foo Fighters were the methadone we all needed to get over Nirvana's downfall. That's all. Sorry.

Then again, that little tease they link does sound pretty good.

2010: The Year "Douchebag" Jumped the Shark

At least, going by this meandering piece in the Village Voice, which claims that Kanye West and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem won "one for the douchebags," whatever that might mean.

Their fantastic lives begot fantastic albums. MBDTF was a delirium of influence, a recombination of musical DNA as varied as gothic East Coast rap classicism, '70s prog rock, and winsome '90s electronic music. In doing so, West paid maximalist homage to his own best work: the sped-up soul sampling of his early productions, the glossy thump of Graduation, the ornate orchestration of Late Registration, the sad robot pulse of 808s and Heartbreak. And he rapped better, too—a necessity on an album that featured historically grand competition, from a bloodthirsty Nicki Minaj to Raekwon to Jay-Z himself (twice!), a hip-hop fantasy camp basically unparalleled, in part because any other artist would've been afraid to try. Murphy, for his part, boiled down a decade of sarcasm and ironic dance-floor excess into a plainspoken kiss-off to the career that had cost him everything external to the band he found himself trapped in.

So I guess that means...we like them? We don't like them? They're douchebags? What the hell does that even mean anymore? Did we ever know? The word "douche" suggests feminine hygiene, or other matter gynecological, and George Carlin testified to its use to insult women only, at least among NY Italians of the 1950's to 1970's. But by some kind of post-modern inversion, it's come to be applied as an all-purpose insult against hyper-masculine bro-types. Joel McHale can't get through a bit about Tool Academy without using it.

Their fingers smell delightful. Delightful.

Here's Andrew Earles, my muse, two years ahead of the curve: as usual:

“Douchebag” is perhaps the most overused slang in the parlance of the under-50 set. It’s so damn effective, and I love nothing more than to latch onto slang that’s either showing its expiration date or recently expired altogether.

That was in 2008. So now that it's ubiquity is secure, and it has passed from meaning whatever it meant to "something not desirable," I'm going to quietly retire "douchebag," and it's little bro, "d-bag" from my parlance. You may consider this official:

Question:

Do I find the idea of listening to the Decemberists boring because band names that refer to long-dead Russian political movements are just too precious to be taken serously, or because I'm afraid I'll start confusing them with the Arcade Fire?

Animated History of the Beatles

Kind of awesome, albeit cliched:

BEATLES Rock Band from alberto mielgo on Vimeo.

When you think about it, the Beatles kind of were a cartoon.  Everything about them seemed to follow a script, and the image and sensation of them grew to be larger than the four men in the band could actually fulfill. Since they broke up, they have apotheosized into cultural symbols that cannot be killed.

The more cartoony of them seem to be dying last, anyway.

Kung Fu!

NATO Causes Arcade Fire Show Cancellation.

In other news, NATO is awesome.

Okay, I don't hate Arcade Fire. But I feel like I should.

"And They Sucked at Altamont, Too!"

Lileks confronts the Beast:

“You listened to Starship?” the photographer said.


My wife said she had. The photog looked at me. “You a Starship fan?”

“No sir,” I said.

“Really? Aw dude, c’mon, We Built This City!”


“They didn’t build anything,” I said. “The idea of Grace Slick singing ‘they’re always changing corporation names’ when the band had three names is just the start of my problems, and ‘Marconi does the Mambo’ is the other.”

“Yeah, you’re right, it was Jefferson Airplane, then Jefferson Starship, then just Starship.”

“I hated them all,” I said. “‘White Rabbit’ is the Bolero of rock.”

“Okay well I can see you got opinions!”

Family by now is cringing. Yes, Daddy has opinions.

I always wondered who on earth ever liked "We Built This City". It surprises me not at all to discover they work at Disney.