November 29, 2006
Made a blizzard when she blew her nose (i.e. she did voluminous amounts of cocaine)
Here’s my only real bid:
I move bricks like Stevie Nicks moves moms/Weepin’ through “Landslide” on the five o’ clock freeride
(i.e. on the regular and without the expenditure of much effort)
Okay and I’m out the game.
I don’t know why the Clipse album should even be any of my business except that I too am white and enjoy blogging. But I’ve been listening to it a lot lately, so I need to break from the lean comedy of my s.a.d. catalog to throw a few words into the wind. As rappers, I like Clipse fine. I also acknowledge that I’m woefully underqualified to talk about rap, though I have no problem listening to it as it is frequently in English and concerning a variety of topics situated within the oft-blogged-about “human drama.”
What weirds me out about Clipse isn’t who they are or what they do, but how they’re read. Clipse’s loudest champions are still basically huddled under a more glamorized umbrella of that fucking brilliant, pithy, look-at-yall’s-selves, top-10 GQ note (CLIPSE WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU DIGEST FOOD). This was, I remember, something of an issue when We Got it 4 Cheap came out: kinda brilliant white kids playing the scattered apologist or philosophizing on behalf of the guns. (Make no mistake: I adored Nick for it, because I think when you scratch the lolz, he’s more morally engaged than most.)
A lot of people seem to want to hang isms on Clipse. Philosophical rubrics slide easily into validations. Because otherwise, we’d have to own up to our morbid fascination with RUTHLESSNESS (to wit: “An unforgivable mean streak powers this album” [Pitchfork]; “As they rap about drug deals and money stacks, Malice and Pusha T wield lucidity like a weapon; you get the discomfiting feeling that they know exactly what they’re doing.” [the Times]; “Fury becomes less about retribution than business: the business of sneering, vicious, infectious, professional hip-hop. Global. Capital-first. Emotionless. They never look back.” [Stylus]).
And really, a lot of this press has bullied them into an image that I think they don’t fully project. What I hear on Hell Hath No Fury isn’t the sound of two cold hustlas with the world by its dick, but scraps vying for a seat at the edge of society, knowing that the very thing that brought them there—trap, the game, whatever the hell people that don’t do it like to call it—will always keep them at the door. The hook in “Dirty Money” is whispered out of shame. Apologies are made to their families. “Hello New World” is very “slingers of the world unite,” but loaded down with fear and totally without Marx’s bravado—“Funny how my neighbors think I’m not where I’m s’posed to be/They think I’m cuter in jail,” so shine on or whatever, and don’t worry about starting that IRA because the pound always puts bad dogs down. They don’t even seem half-proud of their shit; it’s all panic-of-acquisition.
It’s not that Clipse aren’t smart enough to debase human compassion, but nihilism (by any name) is an agonizingly far stretch. Really, I only tasted metal once—the lyric about turning girls into liars. But other than that, Clipse’s paranoia commands more of my pathos than the world—the one they’re supposedly ruining, devouring—does.
So, sum is—and there’s no way I’m going to really step out with the word “racist,” but—I feel like everyone’s making them out to be boogiemen because it helps keep the picture, ahem, greyscale. The last thing we need to do is figure out why a bunch of pale college kids are enthralled with the hyperbolic villainy of some black folk, especially when said villainy has clearly come with deep psychological bruises.
(NOTE: I *do* know that K. Sanneh, who wrote that NYT review, is not white. Okay. I’m just assessing trends in rhetoric.)
November 24, 2006
Jangles the Junkie Returns: A Dictionary for Curing Hella Seasonal Depression, Year Two, Part One of Three
Query: How Many Humorous Blog Posts Does it Take to Get to the Center of Melancholic Despair?
Admittedly, last year’s lists were born in the wake of seasonal affective disorder and not the heat of it. I was gettin’ all cocky and excited to report that I’d escaped it this year but lo! Like a whisper to a scream in a hairsbreadth, like the pruned paw of inevitability, like a kissing partner with canker sores, it’s here and it’s great. In a very psychologically complicated way.
A is for affliculitis, which I think Dr. Yee made up, but still: not a sex disease.
B is for Beach House’s Beach House, for indulging the mopey indie obscurantist—remember how great The Double’s Palm Fronds was? Not really? Here: several alt-takes from Jack Nitzsche’s Young Marble Giants sessions. Mind you, I have a policy about only making up intoxicating hypotheticals for beautiful shit. And Mazzy Star was lost on the country question. The Fragile Hands and Teacup Society’s would-be 2007 Gold Foil Choise for Staring Longingly Out Yon Window, were they so inclined to make assertions.
C is for The Coasters. The American Kinks. Or Blur. All the banalities of everyday life wadded up into proto-rock songs and an abundance of punchlines besides. “Charlie Brown” is great for karaoke because you can do three different voices in as many minutes. I drunkenly ruined a conversation the other day while The Ultimate Coasters played at a brunch: “This song is about marrying a stripper. Listen to those chipmunk voices. Those are their little babies, which are apparently everywhere. This song is about getting bored in front of the television. This song is about a guy who has a monkey for a pet. He teaches the monkey to do all kinds of silly and naughty stuff. It ends with the monkey waving a gun at him. Ta ha ha.”
D is for Doris Duke’s “Congratulations Baby.” Doris Duke was a pudgy singer forgotten by nobody because nobody knew her to begin with. Except Dave Godin. Bonus points for using the word “baby” literally. A snappy tune about the existential fears of parenthood that basically plays like a two-minute deep soul version of Eraserhead: you are disgusting and as a result my waking life is ever-carried on a current of muted terror, etc.
E is for Eugene Debs, my cat. I have only adored one animal more than this animal.
F is for Fred Neil’s “Little Bit of Rain,” a creation myth and family tree of the indie baritone whose climactic scene paints Bill Callahan of Smog as a dickless barker on the other side of a wide river from Neil; Neil just smiles quietly and Bill tries, vainly, to swim across. No survivors. One of those indoor songs that makes your head feel high and cold like a narrow cathedral.
G is for Get Up With It by Miles Davis. Hot, crazy, and pitch black. Without reason. Spookier than women. The best album I’ve heard this year. Some nights I’ll be in the dark listening and think I can see my bed from here.
H is for Hasil Adkins’s “No More Hot Dogs.” Tale as old as time: woman, you keep eating hot dogs and I will cut your head clean off and nail it on my wall. At the beginning of the song, Hasil seems focused on the hot-dog issue. But by the end, he is pretty singularly concerned with decapitating his girlfriend.
November 20, 2006
Futures and Filigree
MY FAVORITE ALBUM OF 2007
If this concert happens, the live recording. I basically can’t believe it. It’s a whopper of a deal. As Alfred pointed out over email, it reads like something from The Onion. I don’t often suspend my disbelief—a bad habit turned aphorism by modern idiots—but this is kinda worth it.
TWO BOOKS BY SOUTHERN WHITE MEN YOU OUGHT TO READ
The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure by Jack Pendarvis and Geronimo Rex by Barry Hannah.
Welcome back into my hot heart, fictive prose. Re-engagement is predictably on the terms of comfort food—uncomfortably sarcastic, deadpan pantomimes of po-faced-ness in an effort to drown you in the tidal waves of asininity routinely offered by, well, regular ol’ life. Pendarvis is more self-consciously absurd: lots of exclamation points, lots of belabored syntax; faux-chu’ch-newsletter-style with a touch of the naïf, like a good email from your mom, only about a lot of really terrible shit. A little bit of Beckett, a little McSweeny’s, a little Mr. Show. Hannah’s more forceful about his grotesqueries, which makes him a higher-wire act—so often can these funnies go horribly unfunny—but most of the time, he stays balanced. Which isn’t always good; through his deft pen I’ve been reminded of how colorful adolescent misogyny was. Literature is indeed, as you once epigrammatically noted, the history of the soul, Barry Hannah! But hell I had put a personal moratorium on bildungsroman and I really like Geronimo Rex, even if half its flexing is for a one-man dozens designed to cast the female sex as a uniformly eager, helpless one.
ALSO
Me on the jogging thing, which is okay I think.
November 16, 2006
Trap Muzik Criticism
Even Joe’s dancing makes The Game kind of paranoid
Let me tell you about Texas.
It has the new Decemberists album and a cat.
Music criticism is getting excited about complimentary tickets to My Morning Jacket, whatever that is.
Music criticism is not dying. Don’t be a fucking dummy. It just gets smaller. It’s like this: the bigger bigger bigger (take sociology and see what I mean), the smaller smaller smaller (turn off your computer and see what I mean). I listen to less music than ever and value a good opinion more. It always happens like this. Watch Blade Runner and see what I mean. Once everything gets cut to ribbons again you’ll be all Ribbons, I remember those.
So what’s Texas? Poet Josh, who has no internet presence whatsoever, tells me he still remembers a mix I made for him about four years ago. “I bought the album for almost every song on that CD.” Five people mashing a panic button and straining some elegiac/Linda Blair shit about how critics are spouting missives into the void doesn’t mean anything.
The power to steal every record in the known universe has nothing to do with the mechanics of time or our ability to listen. It makes me sweat to have someone across the table screaming Why are you swallowing without chewing when I’m just like Shut up I’m trying to chew. And when someone burps and discourse comes out, all the brilliant minds—in search of fun, no doubt—will rush to point out how efficiently a few stiff-legged, crappy ideas trip up the frivol of “discovery” or having a remix beamed into your colon or something.
Words aren’t wasted unless they’re empty to begin with. Ideas and opinions aren’t, either. The prevailing charge that music writing doesn’t matter shouldn’t drive anyone into either hermetism or laziness, but it’s kinda happening all the time. Let people have a breath. They’ll re-engage.
And I promise that within a couple days, I’m just gonna toss good talk about records in the interest of coagulating agents and ass-plugging and whatnot.
***
me: wow it stopped raining
and yet i blog on!
Caleb: blog on man!
me: hit dem letters like it’s bloggle
Caleb: it is bloggle!
neeed italicss
me: sorry I was auditioning for the next the game album
(that IM was for the game)
Caleb: huzzah!
the ad at the top of gmail sez: “bloggers: who are they? New report reveals who bloggers are and what they are blogging about”
November 8, 2006
Mailbag: Soft Rock Against Phantasy
Pænuƒ Butter WordƒDear Jane Dark,
I am upset because your fairytale about Scritti Politti gave me the heart-tickles but you are not allowed to write fairytales about him because he said no more fairytales in “Robin Hood”!
Your fan,
PBW
***
Dear Joanna Newsom,
Why is it not okay for your PR friends to say “fairy tale or childhood or innocent“ about you? Easy for you because you took the thesauruses and made them groan. Think about their feelings and thumbs! Also it is okay because we all know you only make fairytales because you are in pain. Make it work for you!
Listening,
PBW
November 7, 2006
Humanity: Fuck You, Seriously
Dear Adrienne Shelly,
I was just in the middle of writing more humorous, irrelevant blogletters when I found out you were senselessly and brutally murdered. I can’t really explain–well, not without smothering my feelings–how much your performances in Trust and The Unbelievable Truth meant to me. You grew up and it seemed real. You were beautiful. Maria Coughlin was my hero. And because of the weird way films work, you’re going to just have to be okay with being Maria even though you weren’t really Maria in real life. I’m sorry.
November 6, 2006
Friend Shickwell writes of dreams with Joanna Newsom: Last night I had a dream that I was on a boat with J.N., in the below decks pub. Large wood beams and medieval dark. It was a celebration and I bought something called a “half-gallon” to be spread around in a toast to her. I missed the toast and was dismayed, so I caught up with her after and tried to talk. It turned out then, that she had a child, and not just a baby, but a fat, large, female child aged 6 or so. For some reason talking to her really depressed me. She said that she and Andy had the baby, though she wasn’t really with him. I assume this was Andy Cabic of Vetiver. I was surprised to find out he was there, and asked where he was, and she kept saying, he’s right there, but I missed him constantly because he was so enormously fat and distorted. I found myself longing mightily for Ms. Newsom.
Me on Ys.
Last week I had a dream that I was in a video store with Jenny Lewis. I was grilling tomatoes on a portable grill and she was leaning over my shoulder and we were picking out a video to watch. I woke up very happy.
November 3, 2006
Missing thunder already
THA GAVEL:
For all my wincing, it turns out that Joanna’s Ys is one of the strangest, saddest albums I’ve heard in a long time. Stay tuned for about 900 words on Monday, at least three of them expletives.
LIVING ON CENTRAL TIME, OR, WHEN I MISS NEW YORK, AM I NOSTALGIC FOR THE FUTURE?
I’m absolutely powerless to resist discourse on the level of Simon’s, re: “nostalgia” for the future. This has been an ongoing knot for me, from, well, lots of tawdry college papers, to an essay I wrote on Electric Light Orchestra about a year ago and am still quietly proud of in spite of its minor ugliness, to last week’s writing on the Boredoms, to my Yank love for Ghost Box.
Okay, well, I’d first say that what makes Ghost Box compelling is that its version of the future died a long time ago. Rather than “nostalgia for the future,” it’s “nostalgia for a backdated version of the future”; the disorientation comes, I think, with trying to reconcile those two worlds and not being able to. Like science fiction, it’s a win-win situation for the uncanny: if the past was right about the present (the then-future), then we’re spooked by its prescience; if it was wrong, then we have to re-experience a bygone ideal knowing that it flamed out. On the PBW currency exchange: it’s like looking at someone and thinking I used to love them and now I don’t; how did I ever? “Nostalgia” is itself a term that implies a rosying up of the cheeks, an inability to remember the pocks and pimples of something buried under memories. Ghost Box music feels quaint because we know that those myths never really came to fruition; Ghost Box music seems strange because there was a time that we went ahead with full faith as if they would.
Sez Simon of “futurism”: “what we’re really talking about is a future-now feeling, something that feels utterly of-the-moment and in that sense seems to be tilted to the future… but of course that futurity is very rapidly (sometimes almost instantly) turned into datedness, affixed as a period signifier … nothing dates faster than yesterday’s idea of the future….”
Now, when it comes to the future—pun breath—the things worth thinking about aren’t “what will this particular new version of the future look like,” but “in what ways does this future feel like older versions of the future.” Because in all versions of the future—in the Boredoms, in ELO, whatever—we deal with cumulative ideals about what the future could be; by being cumulative, we’re constantly invoking the greatest hits of the past. So Simon’s half-right, I think—nothing dates faster that yesterday’s idea of the future, but as time goes on, few ideas seem more bulletproof than the “vintage” futures. Think about it: the happiest science-fictions always involve a kind of prehistoric lack of clutter and restoration of airy humanism (the Boredoms). The aliens are always peaceful. The ideas of “connectedness” provided to us by economics or technology or whatever always have that ad-ready, vaguely neo-tribal undercurrent of “bringing people together.” ELO cobbled together a recent past (the 50s) with a distant one (classicism/romanticism) and tried to imagine a future that would end up echoing both.
Anyway, completely inconclusive, but now I’ve got to run and catch a plane to Charlottesville, Virginia, for my Very First Wedding. Glancing over the karaoke list, which the groom kindly sent me in advance, I’m preparing for my own therapeutic, retro-futurist moment: hoarsely shouting Ace of Base’s “The Sign” through a curtain of whiskey and, for once, trying to believe the words.
