simon re: me & the klaxons:

See, if he means the stuff the band themselves spout, well I kinda think that’s how UK bands should be–mouthy but confused, fired up by having read a lot of stuff they’ve not properly digested. In that respect they do remind me a bit of Manic Street Preachers, who very early on I did kind of fall for as rhetoricians (only to become increasingly aghast at, as actual music makers).

(again, the problem isn’t with a band-as-rhetoricians scenario. i generally like when bands seem to care about the language people use in describing and categorizing their music. the problem with the klaxons is that they’re young and their fans are younger, so throwing out a term like ‘nu-rave’–which is both shitty and insufficient–does less to rally and more to a) draw ire from ex-ravers angry that their ‘ideals’ are being ‘corrupted’ and b) give writers a ‘interesting’ platform and tidy way to talk about the band [that, or deride them for not being what they claim, or something]. moreover, it binds them to a past that they’re not really a part of anyhow. seriously–as far as i can tell, ‘nu-rave’ only applies to them insofar as they make high-energy music with an occasional window for bliss. but, y’know, keep talking, klaxons, you might find a way out yet.)

also: new chapters in the tale of the stylus takeover:

andrew unterberger, boy wonder: now blog-fresh

the stylus singles jukebox, reanimated, at a frightening clip

aka they’re taking her children away because they said she was not a good mother

i suspect this is some nu-rave shit as well

from what i understand, it was actually lead singer jamie reynolds who called his band the klaxons ‘nu-rave.’ granted, it’s not entirely his fault that people at print magazines and newspapers regularly engage in severe jackassedry just to make ‘good copy.’ of course, he should’ve known better. deer do not walk up to gun barrels and say things like are you looking for a deer.

so, teenagers like the klaxons; they like to come to klaxons shows and act like moonbats and wear stripes and goggles or whatever. the klaxons make teenagers dance. this is fantastic news! what is not fantastic news, however, is that instead of getting to be a decent band, they’re going to spend the next several months as a show pony, which is evident–to me, at least–by the fact that philip sherburne says they’re already trying to shake the ‘nu-rave’ tag, a nervous realization of the light mess they’ve gotten into.

i’m not arguing that rave, something i know very little about apart from what i read in generation ecstasy (which, remember, wasn’t even its original title), wasn’t an influence on them. and i don’t have any problem with bands being rhetoricians. but the klaxons sound more like a mash between supergrass and brainiac or les savy fav or an un-shitty version of the faint than any rave music. light psychedelics, kooky lyrics about oceanic tropes, polyrhythms 101, vocal octaves: this is not a scene.

and so nu-rave is just a cousin to that other misshapen premie, ‘freak-folk’: for one, the style just had to be a reiteration of something that had already happened–even if, say, the incredible string band was just trace influence; because cyclic histories are really reassuring–even if they co-opt the vitality of the present. second, bands were reluctant to be tied into a scene by journalists who desperately wanted one to exist, and so it just hung as a pr term for a little while and withered. the artists then found space to forge their own paths: joanna’s last album was as far from folk as could be, devendra discovered the antithesis of charm, and animal collective became a really good dance band.

what ultimately depresses me, i guess, is that the press on the klaxons reminds me that there’s a huge scene void in indie music that people are trying to fill in goofy ways. that, and that an energetic, unironic, slightly weird rock band that has kids really excited warrants, post haste, a lot of shitty writing in a style section.

pt. 2 of this will be all about fall out boy’s infinity on high, which contains two songs produced by babyface and, subliminally, the sound of an entire demographic setting themselves on fire out of curiosity and then trying to put themselves out by jumping in an ocean.

at home i have two small speakers that sit on a mantle next to a wooden mallard (drunkenly thieved from here), and a red-orange vase with a dead stalk of something. sometimes, headphones.

i started going to see the band stars like fleas because co-founder william fields was a sometime-contributor to stylus and an intelligent, right decent man.

the intent of most live shows, as far as i can tell, is to perform the music that the band has written together with a requisite amount of “flair.” did you see the drummer’s hair and so forth. was that not a scorching guitar solo. it’s not even like that on the record. i feel like the producer hemmed them in. no less than god could commit their music to tape and even then they would have to insert the tape in an angel’s mouth. they are indeed a force of nature.

i don’t love the music of stars like fleas. what i love, and why i tried to go to nearly all of their shows while in new york, is the feeling that their music is designed for place. sure, they write songs, but more often than not, what sticks is situational: slf with a shape-note choir at tonic; slf in a small forest clearing; slf completely unplugged at the glasshouse gallery. sound and place as inextricable as panflutes at the times square stop. i’m not saying it’s not compelling to hear music performed well, as i have been known to love a good scorching guitar solo with accompanying grimaces. but there’s something nervy, something priceless about a band who seem thoroughly concerned with music as a spatial thing, with live shows as a real-time negotiation of venue rather than an algorithm.

milking the sonic present is a feeling i’ve become unaccustomed to again, which is probably why i’ve returned to robert ashley’s private parts, an album that sorta serves as a–ha–placeholder for, treatise on, and reassurance of the entire sound/environment experience. i don’t really feel like i’m listening that much anymore, an absence that hadn’t really hit me until the other night, when, at a meeting for irrepressibly brilliant mix-cd swappers THE COUGARS, rod bryan said: “you know how you can tell? just put the speaker far away and see how the sound carries. some of this stuff…it just carries.” then rod, a man with things on his mind, put on an olive space suit and rode a bicycle. i lay flayed by his assertion.

watching these slf videos is a tease. time, preggers and showing, i pledge to show you new meanings of the word “waste.”

strongest endorsements for the new dust-to-digital sacred harp compilation. i really did almost crash my car.

what would’ve been north korea’s first-ever rock & roll show, the rock for peace concert, has been cancelled with a hugely confusing, emphatic, and emotionally nervy statement. i probably would’ve wept if it didn’t make the mystery even thicker: who was mr. kim working with? how were the meetings? austere? little richard? what had he really intended? what did he think would happen?

i can’t say that i’m not disappointed–i’d corresponded with mr. kim and he was actually trying to help me make passage–but i also can’t really say that i was expecting it to come off without a hitch. so we huddle around the table and, hush hush, next year in pyongyang.

the soccer son scenario has re-consumed me lately. let me explain the soccer son scenario:

i value art more than i value sports and i’m over six feet tall. these are not choices. i have two hypothetical sons: one is a fantastic soccer player and one paints pictures. the soccer player’s room is full of trophies. he has the grace of water and the humility of bark. the painter son ekes out brilliance at times but doesn’t have consistency; he doesn’t reek of quality and achievement in the same way soccer son does. and yet, i find myself valuing him more. (it’s perverse, i know; i’m sure this metaphor will disgust me by the time i’m a father.)

this is basically to say that, after a lot of critical catholicism and attempts to love everything, i’m finding myself back in the seat of accepting ambition over achievement, of weighing a great idea over its execution.

because, well, movies this weekend: guillermo del toro’s new hot dark verdant fantasia pan’s labyrinth and last year’s brick, a film noir played out in a high school. brick, which i’d first seen in august, is an imperfect movie, no doubt. some of the lines are loose, made all the more obvious by the concision needed to really pull off noir, where each line lands like a dart. the story, for all its ever-unravelling mystery, doesn’t really thrill. it’s a little mum. pan’s labyrinth is iced-out perfect, totally well-trained. no mess. and i felt nothing. brick tried something wildly different and, comparatively, failed. painter kid wins.

also, i don’t really know where to start with the dj drama and don cannon controversy, but i think it has something to do with finding out who owns lil’ wayne’s brain. i mean, it’s clear that the only reason the blind eye of the riaa and labels has miraculously regained sight is that people are actually making money off mixtapes. right? but the one dark corner that seems really crucial to illuminate would be, beats aside, who owns the rights to the work rappers are doing on mixtapes? i’m guessing that most of these guys have exclusive contracts and that recording a dj drama session would breach them, regardless of whether or not the artists “endorse” it or not. also: be sure to read jonathan lethem in this month’s harper’s for more good times in the grey area of appropriation.

but i have a camera now and the poodle dog in austin has shuffleboard.

also, i’ll be going to emp this year. here’s my proposal. there’s a good chance i’ll ‘fail’ as much as anyone could ‘fail,’ but i’m going to do my damndest.

The Pyongyang Hit Parade

A segment from an interview with a communist party official in Bradley Martin’s North Korean history Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader:

“‘What is rock-and-roll music?’ he asked me. ‘Do you mean jazz?’”

The DPRK’s pop landscape is less fertile than its soil. Fewer than 15 bands release CDs on one state-run label. The sound—a ghastly jigsaw of militaristic pomp, light jazzercise, and heavy-handed prom balladry—has hung in formaldehyde for decades. In a 1970 address, Kim Jong Il remarked that “Music which merely sings of nature unrelated to the struggle of our people for socialist construction, is utterly worthless.” Foreign music, known as “jazz,” is illegal; there’s little ethnomusicological arithmetic to be done. Superficially, then, it’s radically different from the way pop music tends to function almost anywhere else in the world—as culture that listeners, writers, and actors participate in freely and voluntarily; as art permeable and susceptible to influence; as entertainment or as a readable reflection of the time and place of the sound’s origin.

Oddly, though, DPRK pop resonates with one of Western pop’s richest contradictions—the tension between the idea of pop as an aural manifestation of time and place and the idea of pop as escape or transcendence, a knot most readily found in contemporary hip-hop’s rhetoric (but a theme the permeates music as separate-seeming as the Electric Light Orchestra and Sun Ra).

If there’s anything I fetishize about DPRK pop—because it’s not particularly exotic—it’s the comfortable distance it gives me to consider questions I still have about my own musical time and place. What can pop in North Korea tell me about its place of origin? What can it tell me about the idea of pop in general? Though DPRK pop isn’t the easiest stuff to track down, I’ve had some success, and plan to keep buying more as I’m able. I hope to draw on a formal analysis of the music, my own reading about the country’s history (and its present), correspondence with scholars who have been to the country, and theories of art in Communist countries.

thanks. also, oh my god.

i’m disbanding the affect catalog on the grounds of what the hell was i thinking, the last thing i ever wanted was for this blog to turn into a glorified laundry list. plus, i’ve been inspired lately by messy, robust correspondences with nick and domenico, the latter on radio emo, which has driven me to download the most recent fall out boy and panic! at the disco records. i.e. another mess entirely.

new year’s lull. i’m moving back to new york to work here and put some more time into stylus, meaning, ostensibly, unmitigated fun and more encounters with young, art-school-educated women.

well, it’s about one month until valentine’s day, which means it’s about one month until the westminster kennel club dog show. you all may recall that last year, a wormy bull terrier named rocky’s top sundance kid took best in show, robbing the monolithically gorgeous carter’s noble shaka zulu of his rightful title. granted, the rottweiler hadn’t taken the working group in the show’s history, so it was a minor coup. year by year, carter’s noble shaka zulu. year by year. and he’s back again for 2007, while some wormy bull terrier is not. (this might have something to do with winners not returning on following years though; not sure.) either way, the bull terrier was, in some respects, a good sign for the wkc, like how spin—i know, surrounded by the stink of death, but—put tv on the radio on last month’s cover: edgy within reason.

the dog show is one of the most visibly stratified social events i’ve ever attended, a quality likely heightened by the fact that madison square garden is a stadium, and hence has stadium seating, which, if you’re housed five feet from the back exit, enables you to hang out with fat women in labrador sweatshirts and feel distant enough from the folk in black tie & evening gowns to enjoy a spicy sense of dickensian poverty.

i’ve fallen for beagles as of late, and was probably too numbed from all the plebe hollers for the golden retriever to even notice what a handsome-ass specimen last year’s 15-incher was. for some reason, most house-kept beagles i’ve met are porky. porky beagles are shaped like footballs and far from cute. not the case with the prizewinners, who serve as a constant reminder of mankind’s dazzling ability to manufacture beauty.

one short month.

(if i could only write about music with the same untethered excitement and total lack of self-consciousness with which i write about dogs.)

for friends and the interested: “our project,” richard, your postman, on myspace.