Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Video of the Day: Your 33 Black Angels - "Lover's Limbo"
Self-relesaed albums are a tricky proposition even in this bold-new internet musical economy. Usually, it depends on which critic happens to pick up your album out of the bin and likes it. Rolling Stone was the first to give Your 33 Black Angels a vote of confidence on their fantastic debut album Lonely Street, but most critics other than myself have since moved on to newer and supposedly better things.
Despite this all, Y33BA have endured, releasing their third self-released album Pagan Princess last week. I have no idea how this band makes music this ambitious, epic, and clean-sounding while presumably maintaining day jobs. Here's a freakishly awesome modern-looking video for Lover's Limbo, which connects the first two album's Byrds/Neil Young roots to Rolling Stones/Clash style rockish roots revivalism:
Last week there was excellent discussion on the increasingly essential On the Media last week about the Internet's tendency to promote homophily.
A lot of issues got swirled about (Moldova, Iran, swine flu, etc.), but the one that struck me most was about music:
People feel extremely tribal and passionate about their music. And once they've figured out what they like, they don't go very far outside it. The music industry is worried about this form of homophily because they'd sell more music if they can expose people to a slightly larger array of music than they would listen to. And so they've worked really hard on collaborative filtering technologies which basically look at bouquets of people and say, well, you know, Clive, you are like this and you listen to these 10 things.
This is the theory behind iTunes Genius, Pandora, and last.fm. The only problem? The lack of broad thinking:
They're all based around a model called collaborative filtering, and collaborative filtering essentially says if I enjoy listening to these five punk bands, it’s going to find 10 other people out there who like these five punk bands and it’s going to recommend some other musicians I've never heard of. So even though I say I really like the Ramones, someone in there likes John Coltrane, and I'm going to get a John Coltrane recommendation.
[...]
But we're not thinking nearly broad enough. When we think about this problem, we tend to think about, how do I bridge the huge gap between punk and jazz or the huge gap between left and right in U.S. politics? There’s much, much bigger gaps we need to be thinking about.
Say for instance, you're a big fan of the song "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" by X-Ray Spex.
Musically, you may like it because it's a great first wave British punk song, with sing-shouty vocals and a brilliant use of a saxophone and nontraditional punk instruments. In that case, recommendations like the Damned, Wire, and the Stranglers are excellent recommendations. Or you may like it because you're a radical militant feminist. In which case, you may not appreciate Genius picking out songs like "Peaches," "Orgasm Addict," or 25 other punk songs that probably don't feature another female vocalist.
If music is not the driving force in your life, your tastes will be dominated by what political, economic, and cultural pressures tell you to like. It also tells you what movies to buy tickets to, what TV shows to watch, and what politician to vote for.
That's not fun to think of as a fan of any art form, and especially for music, when today there's a virtually unlimited supply of choices on the internet. Still, you have to be really vigilant to avoid homophily on the internet for music; that means reading more than just one music website, looking beyond the ratings on metafilter, and finding entire universes of other types of music that are not as frequently found on the internet. Even Google doesn't work; better websites with more traffic and more resources are going to rank higher on most music searches, whether or not they actually have the most valuable input to the individual searcher. And that assumes that a searcher knows what he or she wants to search for.
There may be no other place on the internet where race, age, class, and politics have been so cleverly applied, intentionally or not, to aesthetic taste as the indie rock music blogosphere. I discovered Pitchfork in high school froma Google search for The Darkness when I was in a serious Queen listening phase. I was interested in musically generally, and had enough of a bullshit detector to take what I was reading with a grain of salt. Other 17-year-olds may not be so lucky.
No new post, but with Chicago rock 'n' roll in the news with Pitchfork and Lolla on the horizon, I thought it high time to republish a post from my old blog about one of the better local bands I encountered in Chicago*: The Cathy Santonies: University of Chicago Riot Grrls (November 6, 2007)
One of my friends at this school once remarked that his brother decided not to apply to the University of Chicago because of the write-up we got in Rolling Stone's Guide to Colleges that Rock. Apparently, our campus is so classical-based that its pathetic rock offerings are taking away potential applicants. This coming from the publication that gave Papa Roach 4 stars.
Well, on Saturday I did discover one band that may change that. Fire Escape Films hosted the event Synesthesia, which put student films on the backdrop of some of the University's best rock bands. The featured band was U of C rock staple The Goddamn Shame, who had the unfortunate problem of trying to banter with the crowd with a guy fellating a toothbrush in the background. But the band that stuck out to me the most was The Cathy Santonies, a band of two girls and a guy who have been performing together for only a year and a half, but sounded like goddamn pros. They played a nice mix of riott girl and balls out punk rock, and sounded like Bikini Kill, X, and Le Tigre (bassist Radio Santoni donned a Le Tigre shirt during the performance). They seemed a bit unsure of themselves performing, but if they keep playing like that, they'll get more comfortable much more quickly.
*I'm by no means the only critic whose interest the Cathy Santonies have perked. Jim DeRogatis likes them enough to write about them for the Chicago Sun-Times. They've also opened for DeRo's own band Vortis several times.
Rock 'n' Roll Case Studies #3: Holy Shit! Holy Shit! Holy Shit! The Jesus Lizard is getting back together!
Image by armcurl via FlickrWhy the return of a once-forgotten noise rock band has the rock world crapping their pants.
Five years ago, if the Jesus Lizard had reunited, the indie rock world most likely would have shrugged it off. Never mind that, in 2003, the Jesus Lizard had only been broken up for 4 years; Pavement had been broken up for the same amount of time, but a Pavement reunion would have had music fans selling their possessions to acquire tickets back in 2003. The Hipster Handbook had just been published, a book that more or less defined the spirit the first half of the 2000s, fun, laid back, sweet but snarky hipster cynicism was in full force, and the postmodern chillness seemed like it was never going to go out of fashion. That was just 3 years into the Bush presidency, when the sentiment of the Iraq War was "Mission Accomplished" before it became an occupation. I don't need to tell you it ain't been the best 5 years since.
Earlier this year on the Electrical Audio forums, posters were forced to choose who was a better band: Fugazi or Jesus Lizard (what one poster described as Sophie's Choice.) Fugazi, need I remind you, was arguably the band that defined the indie spirit and ethos more than any other band of the last 20 years. But in a race that made Florida in 2000 seem like a landslide, the Jesus Lizard ultimately won out.
Perhaps this was shaped by a mid-poll endorsement by Steve Albini himself, who noted that though Fugazi "conducted themselves impeccably and treated everyone they dealt with generously," the Jesus Lizard "conjured up a new kind of rock music, simultaneously uglier, smarter and more perverse than anything before it. They have no peers." Albini’s sentiment summed up what ultimately swung this race among hardcore indie snobs (indie here referring to its original ethical meaning): there have been plenty of bands that did what Fugazi did musically before Fugazi and afterwards. There's never been anyone who did what the Jesus Lizard did.
In the 9 years since the Jesus Lizard broke up, the void that band left has only grown larger. The sense of danger, mixed with a strange sense of fun, intelligence, and permanence, had been replaced by a sense of permanent safety and blandness. There were noise rock bands after the Jesus Lizard, but they all had a sense of cool to them rather than danger (wasn't the point of noise to be dangerous in the first place?). None had the same sense of teetering off a 10,000-foot high brink, daring you to push them over. Over the past 5 years especially, the music scene has grown softer as the world has grown harder. By 2007-2008, with the economy no longer making apathy sustainable, the need for something urgent--something like the Jesus Lizard--had reached a fever pitch.
There's a regional element to address here too. While the Gawker culture of New York, L.A., and various other hotbeds of Yuppie allowed people to flourish in empty fun for the majority of the decade, people in the Midwest, South, and shit towns across the country still needed something to appease their never-ending sense of bitterness (Obama was more right with Bittergate than he could ever admit). In these places, and in impoverished, hopeless regions across the world, the Jesus Lizard mindset/ideal still reigned supreme. This is why come 2007-2008, we saw a slew of bands emerging from said shit towns with an axe to grind. We got the Pissed Jeans (Allentown, P.A.), Titus Andronicus (Glen Rock, NJ), The Black Lips and Deerhunter (Atlanta, GA), Jay Reatard (Memphis, TN), among others. There was also a strange Canadian contingent, helmed by Fucked Up (Toronto) and King Khan & the BBQ Show (not your Arcade Fire's Montreal). Basically, anywhere discontent in America was brewing, so was slummy, spiteful Indie Rock with a capital I-R. It was a sign that Nick Cave, who had gone soft and sweet earlier in the decade, went back to nasty mode again. It is also no coincidence that all these bands have emerged at that same time that the previously mid-American and foreign discontent has spread across the nation, coasts included.
This was the spirit that Jesus Lizard once and perhaps will always dominate. Dave Yow & co began their dominance with their Scratch Acid work (which came deep from the American Armpit of Texas), and eventually took on full dominance while in Chicago when that city's scene was exploding (backed by indie rock's greatest bittermeister: Steve Albini, a Missoula, Montana native).
In September 2006, before the economic downfall hit the nation, but when bitterness was still brewing worldwide, the Jesus Lizard briefly reformed for Touch & Go's 25th anniversary. People came from Brazil, from Eastern Europe, any little pocket of the world where spite still resonated. The mere glimpse of the greatest, most unique spite band of a generation was more than enough to justify the plane fair that five years earlier would have been spent on a Pavement reunion. With the biggest recession we've ever seen however, who gives a fuck if Stephen Malkmus and Steve West start speaking again?
Hence, with spite brewing in the world like very rarely before (certainly more than in 1992), the Jesus Lizard's finely-tuned bitterness is about to explode. Think the Pixies were big in 2004? Think Mission of Burma was big in 2006? You ain't seen shit yet, mouth breathers. The kings of bitter are back, and they're taking names.
UPDATE: Anya kindly points out to me that it was Scratch Acid, not the Jesus Lizard, who got back together at T & G 25. My apologies.
So far, my vote would go to the following couplet from TV on the Radio's "Dancing Choose":
Angry young mannequin/ American, apparently
It should be obvious why I like the first lyric. Buy it's the second lyric, a a subtle jab at American Apparel, that kills me. (I sounds like sounds like Tunde Adebimpe is saying it in the song, but the official lyric is lawsuit-free).
These five words reek with so much concentrated intelligence that I may need to put it in a bottle.
How Rock and Roll can still shock: by being uncool
Paul Lester has a post up on the Guardian's blog about how rock and roll has lost its ability to shock. He argues that between the fallouts of R. Kelly, Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse, there's not much material left for music that can shock a society that no longer embraces a genteel spirit:
I went to review The Zutons, expecting to be surrounded by tweedy toffs and straw-chewing yokels, the only 21st century boy in the village. But distressingly, the locals in the pub where I stopped to ask for directions to the gig didn't resemble extras from An American Werewolf In London; they looked just like their big city counterparts, all 3G mobiles, designer jeans, sharp haircuts and T-shirts emblazoned with the usual sexually audacious slogans (the blokes, too). And I finally realised: everybody is cool, everybody is hip, everybody knows. It was a sad moment.
I believe Lester misses an enormous point. The past ability to shock comes not from the substance of the music, but from the style. Lester uses The Sex Pistols as a sort of gold standard for shocking music. But the enduring shock of The Sex Pistols was not their calls for anarchy or allusions to gas chambers, but by how little they actually resembled rock stars. The band were spazzy, outsider weirdos with more than a little attitude to spare, and by giving the impression of not caring while still rocking out, they inspired the whole British punk movement and everything that followed.
While yes, there's very little topical subject matter that can be still be found shocking, there's still room to take people aback, and Lester even alludes to it in his column. The conversion of anti-cool punk rock into cool indie rock is a major source of the problem, which is why a band that doesn't give a crap about fashion, isn't afraid to talk politics like most current bands are, but still finds some way to take their music in a new direction, is exactly the kind of band we've been needing for at least 5 years. I would argue we haven't had a band like that since The Jesus Lizard broke up.
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