Pitchfork Jens

My love affair with Jens Lekman continues (not literally) with the release of his new EP on Tuesday. I was gonna write a review, but Brian Howe at Pitchfork did such a good job, I figured I'd just link his review. For all its faults, the site packs a cadre of damn good writers. Choice quote:

The modern lingua franca is an abstract slipstream of memories, slogans, admonitions, and impressions, as if emotional states were free-floating entities, unmoored from specific experiences. This mode is ideal for self-projection and introspection, both valuable quantities. But Lekman's music makes me think more about other people than myself. For all of their polished mannerisms, his songs are uncommonly free of pretenses-- they're about people, places, and things that happened or could happen in the world; about how we spend our time and how we talk to each other. Against a backdrop of enigmatic universalism, musicians who undertake the ticklish business of pinning down the minutiae of human affairs are very dear.

Well said. Well said.

Watch Lekman playing a song about Kirsten Dunst.

Nirvana, Grunge & Collective Cultural Longing

Did everyone feel the earthquake yesterday? I felt it here in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Not knowing how earthquakes work or what to do when they come, our supervisors quickly evacuated the building and I walked onto Flatbush Avenue to see thousands of people milling around in the street, excited and chatting about what had just taken place. I was a little shaken up by the experience (da-dum-chh!), but I couldn't help but feel happy about the immediate result. Strangers were talking. And maybe more importantly, they had something to talk about. Like when Obama won the presidency, like being in Hartford after UConn won the national championship, like the few times when everyone seems to have something in common. It's rare now and I was happy to see it taking place. But it also made me think about how our experience of the world now is so shaped by a lack of shared experience. Life without a cultural touchstone is to me one that lacks a wholeness, that is isolating and lonely. And this brings nostalgia for a time when, even if we weren't all holding hands singing Kumbaya, there was at least a greater ability for shared experience through shared cultural focus.

Posted yesterday on Slate, Simon Reynolds has a fantastic peice discussing the psychology around nostalgia, specifically for the grunge period of the early 1990s. As someone weaned on the music of the time, including grunge, its later, softer and mostly more annoying iterations, as well as the disparate popular movements that followed (ska comes to mind), I took a particular interest in its themes. I am, admittedly, a 90s nostalgiac. Reynolds discusses the longing for a defined culture, the feeling of living in "an era," and for the 90s in particular, an era of rebellious authenticity. Thom York sang on The Bends in 1995, "I wish it was the sixties," a line that seems, in a way, to define the 90s. Youthful earnestness, but with a tinge of depression and hopelessness, yearning for a more authentic, powerful life, believing that things should change, but lacking the belief that anything could. This at least, is one analysis, not exactly of the 90s as a whole, but for how early-mid 90s culture was and is conceived. For more, google "Metamodernism." Reynolds moves from the specifics of the 1990s into a discussion of how we define this time in a particular way through a particular lens, deconstructing the concept of "era" itself and the ways in which central, mainstream cultural media are necessary for the creation of our definition of not only this era, but any era, be it the 1990s, the 1920s, or the middle ages. He writes,

When people—fans, critics, industry, whoever—look back to grunge, then, what they feel wistful for is not just the particulars of that moment (flannel, shaggy hair, down-tuned guitar sounds, Tabitha Soren) or even qualities that music seemed to have then and since lost (anger, rebellion, spontaneity, anti-gloss realness, etc). It is for the concept of period vibe in itself, for "aura of era" in the abstract. It is a nostalgia for a time when the Zeit actually possessed a Geist.

The nostalgia here is not for the 90s per se, but for the escape from cultural isolation. In the age of the internet, of a million new stories from a million sources that register barely beyond the feeling of momentary sensation, I wonder where such cohesive perceptions of the world can arise. What can define us together? We're all staring at different screens...quite literally. Collective viewership, collective listenership (is that a word?) and collective cultural understanding have been dissipating for years now, with nothing to fill the void. The best we can do to define our time, to give identity to our culture in this collection of years, is to point to its infinite divergences; we define it mainly by its lack of a defining feature. And while in many ways this can be good, I wonder if the five thousand or so MP3s on my computer are worth all the cultural loneliness and isolation. I wish it was the 90s.

Image from Taringa.net

New Jens Lekman: An Argument with Myself



The man of eternal whimsy, Jens Lekman, is releasing a new EP on September 21 and a new LP sometime later in the year. I fully recommend everything he's done to every one I know. Despite wit, intelligence and a seeming awareness about the shitty state of the world, Jens's music is somehow instilled with an eternal sweetness and optimism. Over the past few years, he's strayed from his indie-pop beginnings sound into amazing sound kaleidescopes that take the whistful yearnings of young love and adventure and deftly move them into the realm where Daft Punk meets Otis Redding.

You'll find the title track of the EP, An Argument with Myself, here.

The photo is by Erlend Öye, taken from Jens Lekman's Smalltalk blog.

Vile Bodies and Bad Bitches in Brooklyn

If you're in New York City on Friday night, you might be interested in checking out what's going on at 285 Kent Avenue in Williamsburg. It's the party with the coolest mix of arcade games and alternative, punk, dance, etc. music in the city. Vile Bodies, as the show is called, includes a lineup of indie garage rock bands and DJs. There's also a lineup of sexually-themed videogames called Bad Bitches from Babycastles, curated by Leigh Alexander. I'll be there, but don't take it from me. You can read about it on MyOpenBar, Kotaku, Motherboard and Facebook. $10. 1/2 price before 7pm. Open vodka bar.

Kanye You a Genius for This One

Kanye West featuring Bon Iver - Lost in the World. Whaat? Fantastic. My favorite track so far on the new Kanye CD, this song may be the most effective indie music/rap collaboration I've heard. Building naturally from Bon Iver's autotune-heavy 2009 release, Blood Bank, Lost in the World uses its guest star with surprising necessity. Rather than a novel and perhaps ironic cameo, Bon Iver's looped voice is used to set the emotional tone -  a simultaneous build-up and resolution to Kanye's ego-fueled, emotional torrent of a record. This type of confusion-in-resolution recalls the last track from from Bright Eyes' Cassadega, Lime Tree (at least to me) - an attempt to create something that feels large, substantial and meaningful, but one that is mired in its own wanderings. How can you create a resolution to an album that's about heart-wrenching upheaval and self doubt? Here, on Kanye's track, Justin Vernon's encoded voice starts out the track and later becomes layered over what appears to be a choir-like R&B loop, with only a short verse from West himself. It's like indie-rap Daft Punk. I'm not the biggest Kanye fan in the world, but damn! every new record he puts out takes the thrasher to genre conventions, creating something that feels fascinating and new. Each album could be taken as a strand to be built on, to create an entirely new brand, not just of rap music, but musical in general. Apologies for the lack of mp3s. I'm still a blogging novice. Anyone know how to add music tracks to a Blogger account?

The Internet Eats Music

For a while now, I've been going on about the role the internet has played in the dumbing-down of popular music. My theory went like this- the internet has allowed people who really love and care about music to seek out new material from a multitude of sources. Whereas in earlier times, someone who loved music would turn to radio, MTV, label catalogues, etc., they now turn to the internet. With an audience made up of both serious music consumers and casual listeners, bands like Nirvana or Radiohead could become huge mainstream successes. With the loss, or relative loss, of the more serious audience, the main consumers of music through mainstream channels are casual music listeners. With this audience, there is less of a need to appeal to consumers looking for better music with more content (as subjective as these designations may be), because these consumers aren't listening, they are scouring blogs or getting music from friends through YouSendIt or Mediafire. The same basic idea applies not just to listening, but to buying music through physical media as well.

I'm not sure that I want to make any sort of value judgment on any of this, but it is sad for me that there are unlikely to be any more genuine rock stars, any major musical acts that are shared across large segments of the population. I used to be able to talk about Nirvana or The Smashing Pumpkins with nearly anyone. It's a bit more isolating to love Joanna Newsom or even MGMT. I purposely chose very large indie music acts, as even with their massive popularity (tickets to "indie" act Newsom recently cost me $45), these artists are anonymous to large swaths of the population (less so for MGMT). There is less of a shared music culture, and with this loss, communication and community with dissimilar people becomes more difficult, especially if one of the ways you connect to others is through music.

Tirade ended.

Anyway, I came across a fairly in-depth article about the current problems of the major labels and the ways in which they are trying to change. While the article's focus is not the same as my pseudo-thesis on the music industry, it seems to take the internet concept even further- they explore how the broadening accessibility of finding and creating music is killing the music industry. An interesting read: Record Labels: Change or Die

Are They Serious?

Over the last decade, I've felt an increasing difficulty in categorizing art in terms of any one genre, style, or even medium. There could be many books written about this difficulty, so I won't delve deeply into the problem here. However, along with the complication of categorization has come a seemingly increased difficulty in acertaining the intentions of the writer. Art has become almost purposefully enigmatic in a way that differs from art produced during the heyday of New Criticism. Many new pieces of popular art have no seeming message, yet offer experiences just bizarre enough and just far enough out of the range of expectation that we can't assume that they are merely poor art. From obvious postmodern poster-children such as Pulp Fiction to lesser known (and often maligned) films such as Dana Carvey's The Master of Disguise, I often find myself wondering: are they serious?

Are these films what they portray themselves to be? Is there some sort of genre-parodying going on? Or is there a certain heralding of the unexplainable as deconstructionist and postmodern theories of art slowly seep into mainstream consciousness?

This brings me to the song I heard today. I came upon the new Weezer/Lil Wayne collaboration, Can't Stop Partying. The song, penned by Weezer's Rivers Cuomo with a verse by Wayne, sounds at first glance like a cheap rap-rock collaboration, a typical celebration of women, booze, and well...partying, as the title suggests. In the mid-1990's, Cuomo made a (huge) name for his band by releasing bitterly honest and painfully introspective pop-rock tunes that vaulted him to the status of legend in the indie rock community. And yet, since the commercial failure of Weezer's sophomore release, Pinkerton, an album that was composed while Cuomo was studying at Harvard and was written as a retelling of a Puccini opera, Weezer has released seemingly derivative, bland pop-punk. What happened?

I go into depth about Weezer's history as a musical force because it seems that there is some connection between the enigmas described above and Weezer's new glam-rap anthem. Since the release of Pinkerton, it seems that Cuomo has been dedicated to producing generic music that is obviously below his capability as a writer. Moreover, these songs are often laden with subtle nods to the fact that even their author thinks of them as garbage: intentional garbage. This is a man intentionally making music with no clear substance, and yet he still manages to produce albums with hints and flashes of depth. Again, the question arises, is there anything more here than music for the masses?

Like the violence and fart-joke laden works of Eminem that, while they appear shallow in content, are crafted with a great deal of formal skill and intelligence, Weezer's newest song de-stabilizes our expectations for songs. What are we to make of a track with the line, "I gotta have the cars, I gotta have the jewels" that comes from a guy who cited Nietzsche and Stendhal as major influences? If we make the assumption, and I think we can, that Cuomo is not being serious when talks of bottles of Patron and rollin' up to the VIP, we are still left with the enigma of a decade's worth of goofy pop-punk.

But this goes beyond Weezer. Each day there seems to be a new song that can't be made sense of, that fits no traditional genre expectations and has sly lyrical content that seems purposefully impossible to make sense of or even understand whether or not the author is remotely serious. Like Jerry Seinfeld, favorite comedian of the postmodern crowd, might put it, what's the deal with ambiguously ironic songs?



image via HipHopWired

Brian Eno on "the death of the uncool"

There is a brief article by Brian Eno in Prospect Magazine on the recent diversification of music tastes. He makes the point that with an ever-increasing number of subcultures and sub-categories of music, that there is no one standard for what makes something "cool." As Eno writes, "The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness." While Eno never uses the word "internet," I would attribute much of the credit for the dissolution of limitations on music taste goes to the accessibility of free music on the internet. With access to millions of songs with little to no cost, it's no wonder that cultural respect has been dissipated across a wider range of music.

At the same time, the music that is mainstream seems to suffer from this leveling of access, at least in terms of quality. Bigger, if not better, media, seems to dominate the attention and pocketbooks of casual customers more and more. Two of the largest media openings in entertainment history have occurred within the past few months, New Moon (film) and Call of Duty 2 (video game).


So, what direction is entertainment media headed in?

the death of uncool

Pop Matters

It has been some time. This blog was started in an attempt to habituate myself to writing frequently. An implicit assumption in the creation of the blog was the difficulty in writing often, the need to create in one's self the habit of writing. As such, writing this post nearly a year later is proving a bit awkward. I'll begin then with a link to some other writing I've been doing. I realize the ego-boost in doing this (it's fun, ey), but it also serves as an archiving of sorts.

I've snagged a gig as an album reviewer with one of my favorite sites (Popmatters.com). I co-write reviews (about 1/month) with my ole' buddy Matt Vittone. Our first two reviews are here:

Blitzen Trapper- Black River Killer EP

Dead Prez- The Pulse of the People

Electronic Music

I think (and talk) a lot about the way the internet is effecting our lives. So do a lot of people. Well, whatever. No one is reading this and so it's fine to cover well-covered topics. Anyhoo, most of these thoughts are too broad to pin down, too rooted in a feeling, a general compiled sense of the way things were and the way things are, rather than sharp, cutting, fit and trimmed thoughts that can be easily translated into words. Some, more specifically my thoughts on music, are prime for such translation.

I was in a class the other day, Education and the Aesthetic Experience, in which we were discussing the role of music for people living under the Soviet Union in the 60's. Slowly, this turned into a lamentation on the fact that music ("rock and roll") (supposedly) doesn't have as much to say as it used to. Examples were thrown around, as Marc Antony and J-Lo were unfavorably compared to Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Ignoring the misuse of the term rock and roll and the clear lack of exposure that the class had to music, it did re-highlight the changing nature of music delivery.

In the past, you didn't need to be a music aficionado to hear good music on the radio. Sure, you would hear a great deal of crappy music as well, but you'd also get in some Nirvana, some Pearl Jam, some Third Eye Blind. These days, quality music coming out of a mainstream source is much more of a rarity. My theory, as I have espoused repeatedly, is that most of the people looking for great music do it through independent channels, a task made infinitely easier due to the internet. For these music-lovers, there is no need for the radio or anything like it. This, I imagine, greatly reduces the market and the buzz around major rock artists. Without the core listeners, record companies need to cast a wider net, hence more generic music that you might buy on impulse at Wal-Mart for a relative, but that you wouldn't spend time scouring Limewire to download (if you've even heard of Limewire).

For me, the internet has been a wonderful source of music. As for the state of mainstream music, I find it lamentable, but it's hard to shed too many tears when you're busy downloading new jams every day. What is currently bothering me, and what I was thinking about after my aesthetics class is that this dissipation of a core group of quality music acts that everyone knows deprives music of its holy celebratory status. Bob Dylan is a legend. He has an aura several decades after his time that almost anyone who was alive, and many that weren't, will talk about. Will the same be true for acts like Conor Oberst, arguably an even better songwriter?

There is a certain wholeness lacking in music. Even with the most loved of artists, the constant accessibility of a million other songs takes something away from the best and most loved groups. This, in a sense, has been one of the tragedies of most modern developments--the loss of holiness surrounding the most elite in any category, the leveling of playing fields. I can't help but feel a special tinge of pain thinking about it with music though, as memories of the hours of repeat listens of the freshly opened cd are still close to my heart. I also can't help but feel that the internet, whether for better or for worse, is going to be pushing us all both into greater public view (on the internet itself), but also into greater anonymity (in our real lives), in a similar way as it is happening to musicians right now.

Musings on Rap Music in The Age of Recession

The second song on Kanye West's new cd begins,

My friend showed me pictures of his kids

And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs

He said his daughter got a brand new report card

All I got was a brand new sports car

My head keeps spinnin'

I can't stop having these visions

While I am not going to delve into these lyrics, they do illustrate a potential shift in focus for popular rap music. The genre is expanding mostly in terms of beats and production, but as Kanye's album highlights, this expansion of scope could start occurring with "content" as well (lyrics, message, theme, etc.). It is still too early to tell if Kanye's next entry will resonate with the public. Maybe it will bomb and the best selling album of the year will turn out to be some album that Chingy farts out. If last year's sales battle between Kanye West and 50 Cent is any indication, the winds are blowing in the opposite direction (Kanye's techno-soul heavy album, Graduation, outsold 50's Curtis by a 3:2 margin in their first week).

I highlight Kanye's new lyrics to illustrate that rap has the potential to change and might already be changing. However, what I am wondering about is not the already-in-place changes occurring in the rap world. I am curious as to what, if any, impact, an economic recession (or depression) might have on the content of rap songs. Will it still be endearing to roll around in a Hummer on 24" rims sipping Moet off of a ho's breasts if the entire country is strapped for cash? Now, you might say that most rappers come from perennially impoverished communities and therefore, excess is still appealing, still a statement about rising from rags to riches. For them, the situation isn't changing very much. I would agree. However, these rappers are marketing their albums largely to people who are not continually impoverished. Will their market still want to buy albums about lavish excess when the perception is that most people aren't doing too well. Perception is the key here, affecting both the communities of the rappers and the people they are marketing to. If there is a widespread perception that the entire country is in a recession, and the rappers share this perception, it might not seem so appealing to rap about living the luxurious life. They are no longer trumping the dominant culture by beating them at their own game. They are just dicks rubbing it in everyone's face. Similarly, even if an individual person is no worse off economically, if they share the perception that the country is worse off, then the excess might not appeal to them. In a more literal sense, if these people decide not to buy CD's about livin' the life, then it might decrease the motivation to do so. Not that rappers are rapping strictly for CD sales, but it is not unreasonable to suggest that they are influenced by the expectations for what they should be producing.

Plus, all that shit is tired anyway.

808's & Heartbreaks

The new Kanye West cd is certainly a genre bender. Many dancy, heartsick rhythms, all sung in Kanye's auto-tuned voice. Without going into any deep thoughts about it, a few musings and queries:

I'm enjoying these new songs more than the new Conor Oberst EP. I think part of the enjoyment of new music has to do with the feeling of exploring new territory- be it musically, lyrically, whatever. It has to take you into a new part of yourself. The new Conor songs feel like well-treaded territory.

I wonder if you could use this cd as a way to begin exploring genre in an English class. It certainly raises questions about genre in a very obvious way. Is this a rap cd? Does it have elements of rap music? Is Kanye West a rapper? A musician?

That's about it. Now, back to Love Lockdown (HatchMatik Remix)

Link: Hype Machine's Kanye Songs