Like Busby Berkeley With Enriched Uranium: The DPRK Mass Games

1. Yesterday I went home to visit my family for a day or two before moving. At dinner, my 14-year-old sister said, after a long pause in the conversation, “Can someone explain to me what is happening in Lebanon?”

2. “One of the reasons I named the band after that city was the fact that it’s seen a lot of conflict. It’s not a political position. I worried about that from the beginning. But it was such a catchy name. I mean, if things go down that are truly horrible, I’ll change it. But not now. It’s still a good analogy for my music. I haven’t been to Beirut, but I imagine it as this chic urban city surrounded by the ancient Muslim world. The place where things collide.” - Zach Condon from (the band) Beirut (hoist a flag, this reference officially makes me a music blogger)

2a. Condon later says “There are three ways I see music used in the modern world. One is for thinkers: They approach it analytically. Then there are people who use music to get a raw attitude out. And then there are people who are simply looking for beauty, for the sentimentality that good music has.” Destroyer Destroyer Destroyer Destroyer Destroyer Destroyer. Destroyer.

3. Music bloggers are people responsible for current musical events. Okay so I went to the Beirut show at McCarren Park in Brooklyn last Sunday and there was a line oh I’d say about 4 to 8,000 kids deep, unless that was the line for the Covetably Adorable Girls with Dumb-looking Boyfriends support group. So I walked up the block and ran into my friend Youri, whose bike had just been set on fire. “I was just watching The Princess Bride at my friend’s house! What the fuck?” And so the sailor turns and says to me, she’s driving me nuts. Girl, I’m shaking the wire just for you:

Israel::Black Dice, Manoman.

You just keep pushing but you kind of have to stop soon.

North Korea::That Mariah Carey episode of Cribs that I watched two years ago and have thought about every month since.

Nobody really knows exactly what is happening on the inside, but it always looks huge and sort of weird from out here.

Joe Lieberman::TV on the Radio

Stop hedging/Keep hedging

China::Animal Collective

Please hurry and take over the world.

Fidel Castro::Tupac Shakur

May many live on to feel drastically confused about the trajectory of your legacy.

***

On the F.B.I.’s “Most Wanted Terrorist”: “But then he’d become this other guy who wanted to hear Van Halen or some B-52’s. To this day, I hear the song ‘Rock Lobster’ in my sleep.” And Kim Jong Il calls all western music “jazz”—the worst, spoiled culture of capitalism.” I hope Nick’s dream finally comes true one day.

Rev. Gary Davis Singing “Hallelujah, I belong to the band—HALLELUJAH”

Green Gartside of Scritti Politti has spent a lot of time getting wasted. This makes plenty of sense to me. He made White Bread, Black Beer alone; the process of enlightenment self-reliance finally complete after 20 years. Recovery, for some, is about submission—it’s why AA is sort of like church but dirtier and with folding chairs. But the gesture is always kinda misguided or incomplete; I so vividly remember going to AA and thinking that sitting around listening to people talk tirelessly about their humble, wonderful lives under god was only slightly more pitiably self-indulgent than regularly getting trashed.

Plenty of people drink to relieve themselves from their own thoughts and it usually doesn’t work. Prayer is its own submission and gospel is primarily about transcendence; tropes of “leaving” things to god, lifting burdens, joining the choir, etc., speak to collectivity over individuality. Scritti’s “Wood Beez,” from 1985’s Cupid & Pysche 85, is—I know, Gartside, bookworm, theory hound, master of emotional detachment—a song about envy. What he envies is faith and conviction; his spirit is so logged down by his natural tendency towards irony that religion becomes an idealized promise of delivering himself from his intellect. If only he could believe the way Aretha Franklin does. (Also, I only realized recently that Gartside says, “There’s nothing I wouldn’t be / Oh that’s the gift of schizo”—I was caught up in Daniel Johnston’s conviction a few months ago)

In “After Six,” from the new Scritti Politti album, White Bread, Black Beer, Green Gartside plays a young, hairless deist cooing over a pre-programmed “swing” patch on a keyboard. And why does this fuck me up? While plenty of WB, BB sounds exceptionally plastic, even toy-like, “After Six” plays at being gospel—the grail, the rillest of reals. Granted, the fetishization of soul and gospel—of black music in general—by British musicians has a long history (and heaps of discourse), and one that Gartside has been apart of for 20 years now anyway.

But the lyrics to “After Six” are really nasty: “Jesus, keep your love away from me.” Garside is for: truth, justice; Gartside is against: wisdom, mercy. Wisdom and mercy are things mammies daub on when you come running through the screen door, weeping on a broken heart; he’s afraid to surrender to the choir because it makes him feel like less of a person—weakness is human, to a point, but humans are evolved, humans are intelligent. Humans (okay, humans born under Western ideals) don’t run in packs.

Numero Group’s new compilation of Gospel Funk caused a temporary brown-out in my brain. And I’m still listening to Washington Phillips and fanning out into other classic gospel stuff. And I really like the new TV on the Radio record, which, in its own way, is gospel, or at least has gospel flourishes, and not just gospel-as-genre, but as spirit—the same way I think that Animal Collective is essentially a gospel group. Gospel lapses into tongues, so does the Animal Collective. They used to wear masks; trying to cover your own identity is the first step to self-effacement and submission; once they got ahold of the spirit, they took the masks off. TVotR has started using a lot more group vocal and big drum techniques. I’m not sure that a gospel choir is all that different from a drum circle of voices, at least in intent. It’s a threat to blah conventions of individual expression and band-hood (Gartside might participate in the former, but at least he problematizes).

I grew up in the suburbs and liked indie rock, so I’m predisposed not to transcend, but to just think about it a lot. Sorry.

Mechanics: at the beginning of September I’m going to be moving from Brooklyn to Little Rock, Arkansas to work at the Oxford American. I do not know anyone in Little Rock and I’m not taking anyone with me. No girls, no friends, no girlfriends, though I might bring my cat, Eugene V. Debs aka Gener aka My Li’l Lion. This is my way of “finding a spanner” to stick in the works of the hedonic treadmill aka existential static aka depression.

Here’s a good one: so, a guy walks into a bar and starts throwing up and sobbing and then eventually pulls himself together. That’s the end of the joke, sorry.

In the wings: Busby Berkeley’s Battle Royale, BBC’s The Life of Lycanthropes and Other Improbables hosted by David Attenborough , PBW’s The Genealogy of Night, whatever else.

New Segment: Three Minutes of MTV

Rev. Run looks chubby but confident. Rev. Run convinces his wife that people who go to Yoga spent a lot of time farting. “The thinking mind is an illness” says the instructor. Happy Birthday, MTV, you are two years older than I am. I am going to watch you and Busby Berkeley movies all day.

Anyhow. RIP, Arthur Lee. I’m always undecided on Forever Changes, but “7 and 7 Is” still blows my mind—bloop blip-blip, bloop blip-blip, yeah.

You’d rather gimme a second than read tripe, but trust—