Recorded in Dave Grohl’s garage studio — an environment that more ably captures the vibe of the band than any plush studio ever could — Wasting Light is as warm as it is unhinged. The Foos show off every aspect of their sound, yielding hard-core metal, snotty garage rock, pop-punk and straight-ahead burners in pursuit of something that sounds like where they started and where they’ve ascended to all at once.

The first single, “Rope,” is a deceptively simple mid-tempo rocker that outclasses most fellow tunes on modern rock playlists by revealing itself slowly but surely. There aren’t many major rock bands with the cajones to put out a song that takes a while to grow on the average listener, but Foo Fighters aren’t the typical mainstream band. Not by a long stretch.

“White Limo” careens wildly into near-screamo territory, shredding Grohl’s throat with a full bore shout over a racing metal track. It’s accessible, yet authentic, bearing out the Foo Fighters’ unmatched versatility.

In other places, Wasting Light approaches Nirvana at its poppy college-rock finest. “Arlandria” is unabashedly catchy, but buzzes with the edge of a lost 120 Minutes classic. “Back and Forth,” the hookiest tune in the bunch, is either spoiling for a fight or (at least) begging for better communication.

The Foos are also known for their ability to take the intensity down a few notches and deliver wrenching slower fare. “Walk” is this album’s best example of their more emotional work, coming off as a passionate autobiographical snapshot rather than the inspirational theme music it’s destined to become in popular culture. There’s a tear in Grohl’s voice when he sings “I think I lost my way” in the opening verse, his delivery gaining strength through the song before building to the powerfully-confident crescendo “I never wanna die.” It’s a fittingly poignant place to end the most compelling album of the band’s career.

Through sheer strength of will and artistic integrity, the Foo Fighters have – once and for all – rendered the “underrated” label they’ve always been anchored with irrelevant. Their place in rock history be damned; this is a band that knows who they are and, with Wasting light, have delivered their finest work to date.

The post Album Review: Foo Fighters – Wasting Light appeared first on American Noise.

Friedman eventually acknowledged his mistake, and the author of the children’s book learned of the source material’s origin just in time to have a “Based on the poem by…” message added prior to printing. But for Mali, it’s the emails — whose senders sometimes have the audacity to re-write poem — that bother him the most. Written in 1999, “What Teachers Make” has been consistently credited to Anonymous despite the fact that there are many videos of Mali performing it online. One is from a 2003 appearance on the award-winning HBO special Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry. Another is a YouTube clip with over a million views. There’s even a Ted Talk.

“Five minutes of searching for a phrase or two on Google would reveal I’m the author,” Mali said.

The plagiarism started when Mali published the poem on his website, TaylorMali.com, back in 1999. He said he didn’t include his name with the poem because he assumed the website address made it obvious who the author was.

Given how frequently he’s been plagiarized, Mali wasn’t shocked to receive my call about an unattributed use of his work. He was surprised, however, when he learned that the poem had been appropriated and transformed into a song currently being marketed to mainstream country radio — a process that requires the involvement and oversight of numerous people, from musicians and engineers to publishers and record label executives.

“I Make A Difference,” which is being offered to radio stations by an Atlanta-based company operating under the name Evergreen Records, can be streamed on the radio industry website AllAccess.com. The entry for the song in the database of Broadcast Music Inc., a performance rights organization that tracks and collects royalties owed to songwriters and music publishers, lists the writers as Brad Wolf (the artist) and Donald Goodman (who wrote Alabama’s “Angels Among Us” and Blake Shelton’s “Ol’ Red”).

In general, it’s a violation of U.S. copyright law to adapt an author’s work without their permission. While there are slight differences between the poem and the song, the chorus and second verse of “I Make a Difference” are almost identical to Mali’s “What Teachers Make.”

Wolf, Goodman and Evergreen Records did not respond to requests for comment. However, Robert “Buddy” Resnik, whose Resnik Music Group controls the publishing rights to “I Make A Difference,” said that he was unaware of any similarities between the song and poem.

“You kind of caught me off guard,” he said.

When asked what steps he planned to take as a result of being made aware of the issue, Resnik said that his company is “very honest and open, and committed to doing the right thing.”

In addition to Wolf’s version of “I Make a Difference,” a streaming audio player on Resnik Music Group’s website features versions of the song performed by Linda Davis (known for “Does He Love You,” her Grammy-winning 1993 duet with Reba McEntire) and a duo named Burns & Poe. Neither Davis nor representatives from Burns & Poe responded to my requests to comment for this story.

Resnik said that he doesn’t believe the song has been recorded by any other artists.

While the song has failed to garner any significant radio airplay, it’s available for streaming on Spotify, Apple Music and elsewhere. Mali is likely entitled to some or all of the royalties generated when people listen to the song on those services.

Mali said that he’s surprised by the lack of research conducted by Wolf and Goodman, and that he will likely issue a “cease and desist” letter to the appropriate parties.

“A part of me is honored that my poem moved someone to set it to music,” he said. “But the rest of me is disappointed that someone claimed my words as their own. I mean, the poem is a tribute to teachers. But you can’t claim to stand for that if you are also plagiarizing the words of a teacher.”

Mali said that if Wolf and Goodman had asked him first, he would have given them permission to adapt the poem — if they gave him appropriate credit in return.

Now, he hopes that any attention generated by this story will help him reattach his name to a poem that many people assume was written by no one in particular.

The post Poet Taylor Mali Plagiarized by Country Writers appeared first on American Noise.

But never fear, American Noise readers, because that’s why I’m here. Each week, we’ll examine a different style of music and discuss some of the classifications associated with that style. The goal, of course, is not to memorize every music label ever, but rather to sort through the jargon and appreciate the qualities these genres share and build upon. Whether you’re at a party and need to impress someone with your knowledge of contemporary musical movements, or you’re simply trying to read a music review that seems to be written in its own language, we’ll make sure you’ve got your labeling bases covered.

This week, we’ll focus on ambient music. As a genre, it has the annoying tendency to produce fantastic music with terrible nomenclature. Everything is “post-” something else or has a “-house” or “-wave” tacked on the end. And what does something like “noise-pop” even mean, anyway? Isn’t all pop music a sort of noise?

Categorizing ambient music is like trying to write a novella using refrigerator magnet poetry; you’ve got a limited vocabulary and a never-ending barrage of genre-bending artists releasing new material each week on their Bandcamp pages. How do you categorize music that defies limitations and expectations?

You hyphenate it, that’s how. It’s a known fact that the more hyphens your chosen genre contains, the better your music will be. With that in mind, let’s begin!

Witch House is characterized by unintelligible lyrics, the lowest of lo-fi production values, and thick, plodding tempos that borrow hip-hop beats and slow them down to appropriately melancholy speed. And that’s the problem—there’s a lot of great witch house music being made right now, but it sounds absolutely terrible when you try to describe it. I guess it’s called “witch house” because the music sounds kind of spooky, and witches are spooky, and since the songs were probably recorded in someone’s bedroom, you can call it house.

Frankly, that name sounds more like a Super Mario Bros. level than a musical genre—it’s a-me, Mario, and I’ve got to a-borrow from a-Brian Eno!

Mr. Eno provides a good starting point for examining witch house music. Like today’s witchiest house-dwellers, he sought to make music that was more about atmosphere than melody (as found on his seminal 1978 work Music For Airports).

Unfortunately, unlike Brian Eno, today’s witch house artists seem to enjoy being impossible to talk about. I mean that literally—how the heck do you pronounce “oOoOO,” which is the moniker of a popular witch house artist from San Francisco? And try Googling “†‡†,” who recently released a song titled “>>>>▲<<<<.”

Yes, that’s the name of the song. When I play it on iTunes, it looks my computer has been infected with a gibberish virus.

While not all witch house artists have indecipherable names—Zola Jesus, White Ring, and Terminal Twilight, for instance, are straightforwardly named—a good many do. Between the aforementioned artists and other acts like LEEP ∞ OVER and xix, the genre’s artists tend to pick names that reflect their music’s concern with the unknowability of human emotion.

And this is totally harmless, of course, except for the fact that it runs the risk of coming across as a bit too silly for its own good. That’s a plight that plagued…

…Chillwave. Remember this? Last year saw a host of chillwave artists (Washed Out, Memoryhouse, Neon Indian, Memory Tapes) arrive on the scene, and guys like MillionYoung Toro Y Moi have taken up the genre’s mantle in 2010. Despite the fact that much of this music is very good, the term chillwave has acquired the same unfortunate cachet that now accompanies other genre signifiers like “blog house” and even more general terms like “hipster.” What gives?

Well, for one thing, it comes across as a bit disingenuous to deem yourself “chill.” It’s like bragging about modesty. The popular hypothesis states that chillwave grew popular out of the apathy and introversion of the nation’s youth in the face of several wars, a seemingly disappointing Obama presidency, and the economic shitshow that’s marked the past couple of years. In the wake of the Tea Party’s proliferation and such attempts at counter-programming as Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, however, it’s not quite as “cool” to be “chill.”

Such resignation is now seen as passive. Indeed, the chillwave has crested—and thanks to market saturation, it’s no longer enough to drape one’s pop melodies in drowsy synths and down-by-the-shore sound effects. I’m not saying that chillwave as a genre is necessarily played out, but if you call yourself a “chillwave artist” now, in October of 2010, you’ll face as much derision as you will admiration. I’d like to think that in a way, witch house is a cynical response to chillwave, turning the latter’s quiet rhythmic nostalgia on its head and crucifying it on an upside-down cross.

Plus, you know, the neologism itself is kind of lame. “Chillwave” sounds like something your stoner older cousin might talk about as he pecks at his Casio keyboard and rips bong hits on yet another unemployed Tuesday afternoon. No matter; the music deserves better classification than the current designations can offer, and artists like Washed Out can only benefit from an abandonment of the nomenclature.

Ambient folk music is tricky to identify, because it seems to mean one thing in America and another in Europe. See, across the pond, Norse and/or Slavic mythology—the kind of stuff you’d expect heavy metal bands to scream about—has informed a quietly intense subgenre that’s been deemed “folk.”

Here in the States, however, “ambient folk” has a more countrified connotation. We Yankees consider Finnish artist Islaja, who specializes in folk music of the avant-garde variety, California’s Jesca Hoop and even Devendra Banhart to be the bearers of this particular cross. Think acoustic guitars and wandering, challenging melodies.

Many critics refer to this style of music as inaccessible, but try listening to Islaja’s 2004 debut Meritie. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself immediately engrossed by her Bjork-y meditations and inviting voice. Also, her lyrics are in Finnish, so you may not know what the hell she’s talking about, but it sure is pretty. If you want something a little more straightforward from this genre, try Grizzly Bear’s 2006 album Yellow House, which is the musical equivalent of antique shopping in Hyrule.

I’ll end this installment of genre tourism with a quick visit to the unclassifiable appendages of this genre. Floridian duo Viernes, Animal Collective member Avey Tare (whose solo debut, Down There, comes out next week), San Diego native Gonjasufi, Flying Lotus, and Aphex Twin occupy different spaces underneath the ambient umbrella. They’re all experimental, to varying degrees, although what makes something “ambient” as opposed to simply “electronic” is hard to pin down; it might include the absence of melody and/or lyrics, nonsensical song and album titles, heavy musical repetition, a near exclusive use of synth instrumentation, and an avoidance of the typical verse/chorus/verse pop song structure.

The best ambient music challenges the listener, while at the same inviting him or her to a bizarre yet fulfilling musical landscape culled straight from the artist’s wacky imagination. In other words, your favorite ambient artist may break all these rules and defy categorization. That’s cool. There’s a certain visceral connection one has to ambient music; it’s stuff you feel as much as listen to.

As Zola Jesus assures us on “Night,” “In the end of the night I can feel you breathe. Don’t be afraid, don’t be alarmed; in the end of the night, you’re in my arms.”

Ambient artists won’t lead you too far astray, I promise.

The post Genres 101: Ambient, Chillwave and Witch House appeared first on American Noise.

I worked for the now-defunct Sacramento radio station 97 KROY. DJs spun discs, and the long-haired rocker boys sold out stadiums. And then the CD came along and changed the world.

I belonged to the school of thought that prophesied the CD as a passing phase. Turns out that I was right—it took years, but Beck released an album on vinyl and the Renaissance began in earnest. Still, even now, nothing sounds better than records that were made to be records; that scratchy, raw quality that is somehow pleasing to the ear.

Fast-forward to 2010. A typical winter evening in New York City. I didn’t really know what “typical winter in New York” meant, as I’d only been here for two months. But New York proved to be a feast for the senses. All of them. Even ones I didn’t know existed.

One of my first New York purchases was an unlimited Metro Pass. I’d catch random trains and go to random parts of the city. On this particular evening, I found myself in The Village, a place I had an instant love affair with. A place where the ghosts of Bohemians past still wandered the cobblestone streets, where hand-painted storefronts graced the walkways, and where Mom and Pop shops still ruled.

It was there I discovered what may be the best vintage vinyl shop in New York: Generation Records on Thompson Street. From the weird to the obscure, the bins runneth over.

And then I spied it—a forgotten treasure buried deep in the used and abused bin. I fished it out and admired its tattered corners, worn face and fading paint. The first time I bought this album, I paid nearly $15.00; it was a small fortune for me back in 1993.

17 years later, I paid $1.99 plus tax. I could smell the vintage-ness of the Frisbee-like disc. I handed over $2.08 and The Spaghetti Incident? was mine again.

The mid-80s Los Angeles rock scene that gave birth to Guns n’ Roses was a curious thing, neither quite punk scruffy nor given to glam excess, and largely populated by hip kids who were too young to remember that Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith had long been completely passé. In retrospect, the original Guns n’ Roses formula seems obvious enough, but no one had ever successfully crossed the grungy street attitude of the underground Hollywood bands with the polished, riffy sound of the pouf-haired Sunset Strip pop metal groups. The result was a giant paradigm shift in rock and roll.

But although the tremendous success of G n’ R may have all but erased the few vestiges of the underground rock scene that still existed in Hollywood, a legacy of punk rock continued to thrive, at least as a hip influence: punk rock codified the underground anti-establishment groove that was now mandatory for any artist harder-edged than Whitney Houston, and rock groups as mainstream as Skid Row and Mötley Crüe now considered it more or less obligatory to include Sex Pistols songs in their sets.

On The Spaghetti Incident?—an album of mostly punky cover versions of drunk rock classics—Guns n’ Roses reasserts its roots in hard-edged rock and roll (some punk, some not) the way that U2 tried to with Rattle and Hum when the band’s “authenticity” had become suspect.

But in recording half an album’s worth of punk songs, Guns n’ Roses revealed themselves as a glam-rock band, and a good one—as if T. Rex and The Dolls had come out of early punk rather than the other way around.

“Black Leather,” a post-mortem Sex Pistols song written by Steve Jones, sounds better than the original, thanks to more bounce and heartier groove. The tough swagger of Guns n’ Roses on this track may be what the original Pistols aspired to before Malcom McLaren pushed Johnny Rotten on them.

There are quick, goofy versions of The Damned’s “New Rose” and U.K. Subs’ “Down on the Farm,” which Axl delivers with an English accent as contrived as that of any Orange County hardcore singer; there is a loose, sloppy version of Iggy’s “Raw Power” that would be a hit at any Whisky Jam Night.

Punk rock is sometimes best read as a vigorous howl of complaint against one’s own powerlessness, but Axl doesn’t quite connect to the punk material on Spaghetti as anything but a conduit for pure aggression. He can’t even seem to curse right. In his version of Fear’s punk rock chestnut “I Don’t Care About You,” his is not the “fuck you” of Fear’s Lee Ving (the epithet of the misfit yelling at the cop car after it has safely rounded the corner) but the kind of “fuck you!” the tavern bully grunts as he shoves you hard in the chest.

When Chris Cornell sings, “I want to fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you,” in the Sound Garden anthem “Big Dumb Sex,” his voice is filled with longing and desire; Axl, reprising that Sound Garden chorus as a tag to the T. Rex song “Buick Makane,” sounds like a guy reading cue cards on the set of a porno movie.

But the Nazareth anthem “Hair of the Dog” is almost a primo Guns n’ Roses song to begin with: muscular riffing, forged-iron arpeggios, enraged lyrics just built for Axl’s manly scream. Exactly the sort of thing Guns n’ Roses is best at: hip wiggle music, ’70s sounding without being explicitly retro, and powered by the sort of glam-groove Slash guitar and oddly baroque Matt Sorum drumming that seem merely overwrought elsewhere on the album. “Buick Makane” works the complex riff until it screams.

Punk rock virtues are most apparent in the Duff-sung version of Johnny Thunders’ “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory,” which features irregular arrangements, wavery vocals, and even a splash of vulnerability.

It’s also the one song on the album you will probably fast-forward through in the car or skip on the record.

Still, I love The Spaghetti Incident?. It takes me back to a simpler time when gas was still a buck, Beavis and Butthead were controversial, and it was only the parking lot of the World Trade Center that got bombed.

The post Revisiting GNR’s <em>The Spaghetti Incident</em> appeared first on American Noise.

Not that Gimme Some is particularly bad–it’s not, at all–but Living Thing flopped because it wasn’t what most listeners wanted from a Peter Bjorn and John album. Its jingly first single “Nothing to Worry About” belied an album filled with terse, spare meditations that emphasized mood over melody. Never mind that it also contained some of the best hooks the band’s ever written. Without a “Young Folks,” Living Thing was doomed to fail.

A band’s decision to experiment usually runs the risk of alienating a good portion of its listeners, and that’s what happened to Peter Bjorn and John in 2009. But with their latest release just a week away, I think it’s time to reconsider Living Thing. In fact, let’s pretend it was the band’s first album. What would we say about it?

Immediately, we’d note the desperate, almost primal energy lurking beneath the cool surface sounds of the album. Opener “The Feeling” launches with forceful percussion, emphatic hand-claps, and the skimpiest of synth lines. “It Don’t Move Me” sounds just as sparse but veers more toward a bare-bones, bass-heavy beat and the murky sinisterness of a song by the Knife; indeed, lyrics like “Forget photos and letters/All the people that matter/They don’t move me no more” would have sounded right at home on Silent Shout.

Track three is where the sad beauty of Living Thing really begins to take shape. “Just the Past” moves at a slow but insistent gallop, much like the singer’s unrequited overtures toward a romantic, unnamed other. Lines like “you untie me as if I were a shoelace” sound trite on paper, but when they’re backed by ephemeral keyboards and sung to the tune of a heartbreaking melody, these lyrics achieve a poignance only hinted at on previous PB+J releases. Again, this is minimal pop music, but it’s to the band’s credit that they’re patient enough to let these tender songs unfold at their own pace, rather than trying to cram in another hook before embarking upon a forced chorus (a problem that plagues several songs on Gimme Some).

“Stay This Way” is the album’s apex, the moment at which the band’s newfound experimental itch activates a visceral sadness in the listener. It’s a song about growing out of the carefree selfishness of childhood, while not wanting to ever grow up; about finding yourself adrift in time, years gone by that you haven’t thought to count. “Things ain’t working out like they’re supposed to, but at least they’re working out,” it begins. The chorus finds the singer pleading, “Why can’t we stay this way?” backed by, yes, whistling—the trademark sound of “Young Folks” turned on its head and given a black eye, lending itself to the sort of defeated pop someone like Trent Reznor would have a field day remixing. The last line, sung acapella, goes, “I just wanna have you here.” We the listeners know in our gut, however, that the object of the singer’s affection doesn’t want to “stay this way.” The singer has made a hopeless request.

All this melancholy would be a little too much for a pop album recorded by lesser talents, but Peter Bjorn and John seem to have Swedish twee pop written in their DNA. Even in the album’s bleakest moments, flashes of melody and even humor can be found like saplings peeking out through cracks in abandoned sidewalks. “Lay It Down” rides a rollicking piano with all the heroism the album’s dejected narrator can muster: “Hey, shut the fuck up boy/You are starting to piss me off/Take your hands off that girl/You have already had enough,” goes the chorus. But the narrator’s chivalry is ineffectual, and he concedes to his aggressor that “You’re just gonna let her down,” as though there were nothing he could do to change that.

“Blue Period Picasso,” meanwhile, is absolutely gorgeous acoustic pop-rock that arises from the ashes of a sparse, jarring intro; the lyrics’ central metaphor compares the singer’s ennui with the loneliness of a second-tier Picasso painting (“I’m a bit too early, I’m seen as development”) that’s “stuck on a wall in the middle of a hall in Barcelona.” The analogy is more charming than labored, and when the singer encourages the object of his affection to “Hold me close unto your breast/Run down the stairs out in open air/Away from the ladies, the Japanese tourists,” the song shines with the promise of hope faintly shining through a dense fog of hopelessness.

Shortly after Living Thing dropped, DJ/producer Mick Boogie put together a mixtape called Re-Living Thing that recast each of the original album’s tracks in a grittier hip-hop context. The results are sublime–not just because of the mixtape producer’s sampling prowess (though Boogie definitely chose the best moments of each PB+J track to sample) but also because the mixtape makes more apparent the original album’s charms, hooks and memorability that so many listeners seemed to overlook.

That a diverse group of rappers found rhythmic and conceptual inspiration in Living Thing, however, should come as no to surprise to those of us who appreciated Peter Bjorn and John’s attempts to play with the beats and instrumentation we often take for granted in Swedish pop. And therein lies the true magic of Living Thing: cut away the cobwebs and you’ll encounter a hushed musical ecosystem that sounds richer and fuller with each subsequent listen.

The post Second Look: Peter Bjorn & John – <em>Living Thing</em> appeared first on American Noise.

The way I see it, you can look at American folk music from two different perspectives. You can consider it musically, observing acoustic themes that carried over from one end of the twentieth century to the other. But you can also view it as a continually unfolding story, a weathered diary of the laborious narrative that is America, the antique mirror that reflects the soul of the patriot.

The former interpretation is a bit spurious, though; it implies that anyone with a guitar and a voice is making folk music, and while genre labeling is subjective, I don’t think it’s fair to shoehorn each of these artists into the “folk” category. In fact, I often find that it’s the lyrical content more than the musical composition of a given song that makes it “folk” to me. Let me explain.

A large contributor to the far-reaching success of American folk music was the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Like many farmers and settlers, musicians from what we’ll call the southern midwest—northern Texas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and much of Kansas and Colorado—were forced to leave the barren prairie and head to the places where they could find the most work: cities. Some headed west to Los Angeles. Others headed east to New York and Chicago.

Coupled with the rising proliferation of black culture throughout the country, in the forms of Louisiana jazz and traditional slave songs, this mass displacement opened up new territories and populations to both folk music and its firmly-held beliefs in hard work, self-sufficiency, the promise of the common man, and—as one might expect—folklore.

The tradition of Americana in the past decade or so extends far beyond the so-called “ironic” appropriations of working-class signifiers like trucker hats and PBR. 2005 was a big year for sincere folk-inspired music, as evidenced by the success of albums such as Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois and The Decembertists’ Picaresqe.

The second (and, perhaps, final) entry in Stevens’s “50 states” project—a now defunct attempt to record an album for each of the country’s 50 states—is seeped in the legend of the everyman. The song titles themselves reflect this: “To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament,” “Prairie Fire That Wanders About,” “Riffs and Variations on a Single Note for Jelly Roll, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Baby Dodds, and the King of Swing, to Name a Few.”

There’s even a song about John Wayne Gacy Jr., the infamous serial killer who dressed as a clown to gain closer access to his juvenile victims. Stevens’s obsession with history—of both the factual and mythological variety—reflects the interplay between past and present, legend and fact, the temporal and the spiritual. “You came to take us/All things go, all things go/To recreate us/All things grow, all things grow,” he sings to a higher power on “Chicago.”

For Stevens, the idea of religion as a transformative experience trumps material or geographic concerns: “We sold our clothes to the State/I don’t mind, I don’t mind.” As he tells us about how he “drove to Chicago” and New York, one can’t help but think that he didn’t just drive—he was driven to travel, just like the narrator of “Oh Shenandoah” who was “bound away/Across the wide Missouri.”

Likewise, Picaresque is rife with legends. “Eli the Barrow Boy,” “The Bagman’s Gambit,” and “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” are but three examples of songs on which singer/songwriter Colin Meloy verbalizes the vitality of spiritual feeling over earthly possession. With few possessions to their name, many settlers of the late 1800s and early 1900s had to turn elsewhere to find salvation; when relocating, moreover, they also had to make some difficult choices about what—or who—to leave behind and how to acquire necessary land and goods.

Acts like killing Native Americans and taking their land could only be excused by an intangible, overarching “manifest destiny,” reinforcing the idea that the ends—providing for one’s family, encountering personal freedom, securing heavenly grace—justified the means… however unethical those means might be. And so, Meloy’s narrator falls in love with a cop-killer in “The Bagman’s Gambit,” sacrificing his professional integrity for emotional fulfillment: “I recall that fall, I was working for the government/And in a bathroom stall off the National Mall, how we kissed so sweetly/How could I refuse a favor or two, for a tryst in the greenery?/I gave you documents and microfilm, too.”

Traditional folk music also takes pride in nature, reveling in its sublime environs and puzzling over its mysteries. Texas outfit Shearwater, a side project by several members of the band Okkervil River, constantly praises the natural world. On “The Snow Leopard,” taken from their 2008 album Rook, lead singer Jonathan Meiburg informs the listener that “The way is to climb, the way is to lie still/And let the moon do its work on your body.”

Likewise, Seattle’s Fleet Foxes write beautiful songs that tell—often in harmony—of quiet tragedies. “Oliver James,” from their eponymous 2008 album, tells the story of a drowning boy.

“White Winter Hymnal” also concerns the death of a young man, only in this case it’s a much more abstract affair: “And Michael, you would fall/And turn the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime.” Both songs feature pitch-perfect vocal harmonizations, pretty acoustic instrumentation, and absolutely stunning melodies. But like the slave songs of the 18th and 19th centuries, the beauty of the music is at once bolstered and tainted by the realities of their contexts. (You wouldn’t normally sing a happy fugue about a bleeding or drowning child, would you?)

The goals of many slave songs were to vent frustrations, express desires for freedom, and prevent boredom from constantly working in plantations. While the members of Fleet Foxes don’t have to worry about slavery, their music is undeniably informed by slave songs like “Wade in the Water,” which features the lyrics: “Who’s all those children all dressed in Red?/God’s gonna trouble the water.”

Red as strawberries, indeed.

The post The Link Between Folk Music’s Past and Present appeared first on American Noise.

It’s been a good year for alternative country music. It’s an unassuming genre, but that doesn’t mean its participants resist experimentation. On the contrary, the most exciting aspect of this year’s indie rock/country output has been its willingness to engage with other styles and eras, from Phil Spector’s famous “Wall of Sound” production technique to sparser, emptier recordings that find moments of beauty in silences and echos. Alternative country, as this year has shown, is far from an insular or stagnant genre. Here’s a brief rundown of five of the best examples of that.

From the wistful opening chords of “Sail Of The Silver Morning,” Cotton Jones’ Tall Hours In The Glowstream takes listeners on a poignant nostalgia trip. Touching upon soul, 60s folk, ambient and even some Sergeant Pepper-inspired orchestration on the positively stirring “Glorylight and Christie,” Michael Nau and company paint a coat of hazy daydreams over their typically solid country rock. Experimental choices—vibraphone-driven rhythm section, anyone?—pay off marvelously here, and Nau’s sweetly heartbreaking vocals never let the songs amble too far from their central melodies. It’s the band’s attention to detail that truly elevates this album, though; check out the drumming on “Soft Mountain Shake,” for instance, or the quiet looping of cymbals on “Place at the End of the Street,” or the huffing trumpets on “Goethe Nayburs.” Listen to this album yourself, then play it for your friends, who have unfortunately probably never heard of it. Then tell them to pay it forward, and we can all try to bring this album the recognition it deserves.

In a similarly reverb-heavy fashion, Philadelphia’s Kurt Vile (guitarist for The War On Drugs) released his Square Shells EP earlier this year, and it’s stellar. At over seven minutes long, “Invisibility: None” is an epic slow-burner that curdles nostalgia into regretfulness, attempting to find solace in everything from drugs to his pet dog. “I Wanted Everything” further carries the theme; indeed, Vile wanted everything, “but I think that I only got most of it.” Like a wisp of smoke, the tune drifts through its three minutes, always purposeful while leaving exposed vast measures of empty space—as though his sadness can’t be contained by the music or lyrics. Vile’s most impressive achievement in these songs is being able to explore loss without wallowing in self-pity or anger. Vile is a Philly boy with a Nashville soul, turning the acoustic guitar and his studio space

Speaking of Tennessee, Memphis-based Harlan T. Bobo is another acoustically-driven singer-songwriter whose 2005 debut album Too Much Love was a quiet study in timeless folk music. This year, however, he released Sucker, where we find tracks like the nearly-psychedelic “Selfish Life,” the honky-tonk piano rocker “Perfect Day,” the punk-shoegaze-surf rock shouter “Bad Boyfriends,” and most eclectically, the English-French call-and-response acoustic ditty “Mlle. Chatte,” which sounds like Harlan opened up a French language textbook and picked out phrases at random to translate (sample lyric: “I’d like very much to take the cat for a walk in the park”). Mr. Bobo proved his songwriting chops on his debut. On this follow up, he shows how much fun he can have with the cliche-ridden folk-rock genre.

These three albums are restrained (if not a little unhinged), but it’s worth mentioning the billowing country-rock albums released this year, too. Two new bands jumped onto the scene under most everyone’s radar; the Futurebirds and Magic Kids (from Athens, Georgia and Memphis, Tennessee, respectively) both unleashed some sprawling material. The Futurebirds’ “Yur Not Ded,” for example, is a southern rock answer to Arcade Fire, complete with communal chanting and that Bruce Springsteen sense of bigness. “There Is No Place to Go,” meanwhile, is closer to Kevin Shields than Kenny Chesney, all crunchy feedback and harmonic layering.

The Magic Kids’ “Summer,” an indie blog favorite, is perhaps the most achingly beautiful ode to the season I’ve heard since the Flaming Lips’ “It’s Summertime.” Horns, quivering strings, female harmonies, Spanish guitars, sci-fi synths, echoing pianos: here is that “Wall of Sound” I mentioned before. The Futurebirds’ album is called Hampton’s Lullaby, and the Magic Kids’ release is aptly titled Memphis. Go check them both out.

There was plenty more good alt-country released this year, from Lubbock, Texas’s Thrift Store Cowboys to Brooklyn’s acclaimed The National (listen to “Bloodbuzz Ohio” if you think they can’t put their own rollicking twist on country rock). And I’m sure American Noise readers can think of a ton of bands I missed. No matter how trendy other styles of music get, country music—both mainstream and alternative—will inevitably have a place in the national musical conversation.

The post A Look Back at the Year′s Best Alt Country appeared first on American Noise.

Of course, updating the canon is nothing new. Pet Sounds comes to mind: it was released in 1966 with tepid commercial success and an under-the-radar charm. Half a century later, it’s regarded as a preeminent American pop statement, what Rolling Stone has called an “evolutionary compositional masterpiece.”

But what of the overlooked bands that exert similar influence over contemporary pop-rock? It may seem impossible for an album or an artist to be at once overlooked and enormously influential, but several acts come to mind as the sonic forebears of some of today’s best new music. Three of them stand out, and all three deserve a greater legacy than they’ve been given by critics and audiences alike.

First, I’m hearing Galaxie 500 all over today’s musical landscape. Hailing from Boston, they released only three proper studio albums: 1988′s Today, 1989′s On Fire, and 1990′s This Is Our Music. Their catalogue may be limited, but it also adumbrates the ambient leanings of successful indie acts today.

Actually, I think their influence goes further back. For example, listen to Dean Wareham’s nasally delivery on “Tugboat,” the best-known track off Today, and tell me you don’t hear Jeff Mangum’s plaintive whines or Zach Condon’s passionate vocal imperfections.

Galaxie 500 seems to have reached a new peak of relevance this year, however, and I don’t just mean “shoegaze redux.” For one thing, arguably the year’s strongest release, dream pop duo Beach House’s aptly titled Teen Dream, revels in the same less-is-more songwriting mindset that Wareham and company used so effectively. Galaxie 500′s music is remarkable because it employs only the standard rock-band instruments (drums, guitars, bass) but gets these instruments to create a full, layered sound; listening to Beach House’s “10 Mile Stereo,” it’s impossible to ignore the rock-music-as-ambient-music influence.

Ambient folk singer Julian Lynch in many ways inhabits a musical land of his very own, but recognizable inspiration peeks through. “Interlude,” for example, finds him chanting in the uppermost registers of his voice—much like Wareham does on “Tell Me,” the second track off On Fire.

The artsy southern rockers of Deerhunter—whose Halcyon Digest was just recently released to universal acclaim—can also trace their influence back to Galaxie 500 with ethereal tracks like “Fountain Stairs” and “Sailing.” A whole host of other bands also continue Galaxie 500′s experiments in stretching out the barest of rock instrumentation, from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (think of the piercing, monotonous guitar work on “Maps”) to Here We Go Magic and Cotton Jones.

Similarly, we certainly don’t have a shortage of Cocteau Twins fans making indie music today. Like Galaxie 500, the Cocteau Twins made lush music that’s often more than the sum of its parts; the wailing “Persephone” from the band’s masterful 1984 LP Treasure, for example, is nothing more than a distant guitar, subtle bass line, and reverbed vocals, but it would provide a marvelous score for a sweeping movie.

Recorded at a time when most pop artists were loading up on as many then-cutting-edge synth sounds as they could fit onto a track, albums like Treasure and 1990′s Heaven Or Las Vegas remain impressive today because they perfectly balance instrumental restraint and studio trickery; the fullness of their sound comes more from careful songwriting and meticulous atmosphere-building than any old synth line or backing sample could offer.

The Cocteau Twins came from Scotland, but their music sounds otherworldly in its delicate brilliance—thanks in no small part to lead singer Elizabeth Fraser’s avoidance of recognizable English-language lyrics, opting instead to sing in her own dreamy tongue that relies on cadence and texture to impart its messages. Fans of Sigur Rós will recognize this technique, having dubbed that band’s unintelligible language “Hopelandic.” Avey Tare (of Animal Collective fame) is also no stranger to singing without a language; his forthcoming solo album Down There is filled with instances of chanting, yelping, and whooping that recall Fraser’s vocal gymnastics on tracks like “Ivo,” which serves as the opener to Treasure.

Even the relatively recent “chillwave” movement owes much to the Cocteau Twins. Genre pioneer Washed Out, for instance, harmonizes over hazy pop melodies on songs like “Lately,” and one listen to Cocteau tracks like “I Wear Your Ring” and “Fifty-Five Clown” reveal an all but certain influence.

In addition, Los Angeles ambient artist Glasser, whose debut LP Ring just came out after months of online buzz, is indebted to the Twins’ gothic, earthy fugues (“Beatrix”especially comes to mind). And if you don’t mind my mentioning Beach House again, their 2008 album Devotion is a lesson in Cocteau-inspired moodiness, equal parts gorgeous and heartbreaking.

If the Cocteau Twins were masters at giving their delectable melodies a graceful poppy sheen, then the members of Black Tambourine were masters at laminating their own poppy hook with a blissful post-punk trenchancy. Black Tambourine was a DC-area rock quartet led by lead singer Pam Berry. Effectively fusing the feminist anger of 80s garage rock acts like the Pandoras with the more introspective musings of the shoegaze movement, Black Tambourine laid out the template for grungy girl rock, a style that’s seen a renaissance as of late thanks to girl groups like Best Coast, the Vivian Girls, and the Dum Dum Girls.

Black Tambourine also had a knack for slipping in some killer hooks behind all the feedback, and many bands today—including The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart (who, like Black Tambourine, are signed to Slumberland Records), Brilliant Colors, and Surfer Blood—have retained Black Tambourine’s power-pop leanings in their rock releases. And it’s impossible to listen to a group like Sleigh Bells, who ground their noise-rock with surprisingly delicate female vocals, without thinking of Pam Berry’s laments on tracks like “We Can’t Be Friends.” Along with other noise-pop rock bands of the early 90s like Henry’s Dress, Black Tambourine saw the possibility for grunge music to be intimate and even romantic, at a time when romantic pop-rock was dismissed as cheesy and artificial.

Galaxie 500, the Cocteau Twins and Black Tambourine are three bands from the mid-to-late 80s and early 90s that have maintained an influence on indie rock music today. So, why don’t we hear more about them? Why is it that despite its warm critical reception (having garnered, among other accolades, a perfect 10 Pitchfork score), On Fire has but a fraction of the cachet of, say, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless? Why don’t we consider the Cocteau Twins when we discuss albums such as The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead?

Well, that’s the problem with canonization; while it often promotes deserving work, it inevitably excludes other, equally excellent albums and artists. Once their influence has been established, canonized bands develop a juggernaut of a legacy, seemingly inspiring generations of subsequent artists both directly (“hyped new artist has cited The Cure as a major influence during his adolescence and introductory forays into songwriting”) and indirectly (“hyped new artist is the latest in a long, evolving line of melancholic rockers, all of whom have Robert Smith to thank for their brooding jams”).

Like a snowball racing down a mountain, the juggernaut only grows in legend and importance, and when enough time passes and a canonized band can officially be given a paragraph or two in the music history books, lesser-known acts can only fade into obscurity. After all, there’s only so much room in a paragraph. Once you’ve covered Morrissey and Kevin Shields, it’s time to move onto the next designated music period.

It is my hope that Galaxie 500, the Cocteau Twins, and Black Tambourine can find new life—and new fans like me—on the internet, where such spatial concerns are obsolete.

The post Three Canon-Worthy Indie Bands appeared first on American Noise.

JULI THANKI: You’ve been with Cake since the beginning. How has Cake evolved over the past 20 years?

VINCE DIFIORE: The electric guitar was bound to creep in and become stronger; it was so restrained on the first album and the second album, too. There was a very deliberate restraint that didn’t want to be restrained, because it’s an electric guitar. Given time, that sonic expression of the electric guitar is going to make its presence felt to a greater degree. I think it’s the nature of the beast and probably something that had to happen.

I became the default keyboard player in the band starting with “The Distance” synthesizer line. When it dawned on me and everyone else in the band that I was playing keys, we started adding a lot of keyboards in the studio because we had somebody to play them. It was like we added a keyboard player. The first album has instrumental organ parts that we didn’t really play when we played those songs live.

The third part of that answer would be the background vocals. We have always had harmony vocals but I think we really stepped it up as other band members have been in the band longer. Once you find your voice in the band, maybe even through your instrument or how you identify yourself in the band, then the vocals come. There’s something singing that’s very personal, and you have to mean it. All five of us are singing onstage now. Victor [Damiani], our old bassist, never sang, and Gabriel [Nelson, the current bass player] sings. That’s been a huge difference.

THANKI: Aside from the B-side comp, this is your first record since Pressure Chief in 2004. Why was there such a long gap in between records?

DIFIORE: We toured on Pressure Chief for two and a half to three years, going all over the world touring, then resting for a while. It became a lot of business details with record labels and stuff. We made the decision to leave Columbia Records and started Upbeat Records and put out B-Sides and Rarities. We did a little bit more touring for that. Then we took about three years to make this last record. We did gigs here and there to keep being a band that plays and has a connection with an audience. We communicated with each other musically and through the website to get us all on the same page and have a similar worldview. We weren’t on a deadline; there wasn’t a record company saying “Your three years have passed. Where’s your next album?” It was up to us. We knew that if we were putting out an album we want it to be an album that we can really stand behind. So we took the time to do that.

THANKI: What else do you dig about having your own label? Is it mostly the freedom?

DIFIORE: It’s a lot more freedom. There’s a feeling of helplessness in anything if you don’t have control over the situation. It’s probably why couples fight so much and why there’s antagonism in business relationships, because you want to determine the outcome of something and say how much of your life is going to be committed to something and hope that the commitment turns out to be some sort of self-fulfillment. When you’re living like that and you don’t have control, it makes you feel helpless. We’re experiencing the opposite of that now, in terms of calling the shots. There’s a lot more administration that needs to happen, but we have a very good manager and a very good distributor. Everybody put their best foot forward and had all the pistons firing at the same time.

THANKI: I heard you guys have a solar-powered recording studio. Tell me a little bit about the decision to go green in that aspect of the band’s career.

DIFIORE: We figured how much energy we would need to rehearse and record and then put thirteen solar panels up. Lo and behold, we did the entire album with solar energy. I think it changed the way we felt about being in the studio. It was a really good move. It assuages some of the guilt of being on the road and consuming energy and traveling about and using hotels and all that. Everybody is an energy consumer if you want to participate in society; that’s the way things seem to be running. That made us feel a little bit better about [the band’s] carbon footprint.

THANKI: Cake plays DC fairly often. I don’t know how much free time you have, but do you have a favorite thing about the city or a favorite part to visit?

DIFIORE: You know what’s remarkable? The amount of space there is. You’d think it would be a crowded place like New York City or Boston or Philadelphia. Those places are roomy, but when you’re out on the Mall, there’s so much space around you. There’s not much difference in the Mall when there’s no one on it and a weekend in the summer when everybody’s there. Things are still working out. I feel so safe at night. I love to go out on the Mall at night on a bike or walking; it’s so open and peaceful out there.

THANKI: You’ve got a couple co-writing credits on Showroom. How involved do you get in that process?

DIFIORE: John wrote the words for those songs. He came in with the words and melody; I got credit because I came up with a lot of parts for the arrangements. He was nice enough to give me credit on there, and I think I deserved it (laughs). I did write a lot of the music around the melody. You want something that’s interesting both melodically and rhythmically and that goes along with the song. A lot of the process is intuitive, just doing it, then stepping back and then doing it again until everything seems to work.

THANKI: Where do you see the band going from here?

DIFIORE: I liked how everybody worked together on the last album and how everybody felt confident about bringing what they liked about music into the band. That was really great. Nobody was shy about their contributions. We all played how we wanted to play, and there was a great chemistry working out. If we do that for the next record then no matter what we bring in, it’ll be something good. It might not be different [stylistically]. It will be a different experience certainly, but the precedent that The Beatles and The Police set for changing their sound on every album is pretty freaky, you know?

I think our strength is writing songs within an album. The sound works out for us. It’s guitar-bass-drums-trumpet-keys-vocals, and that’s what we are. I don’t think we’re going to bring in any kind of robot to play synths or Xan’s going to turn into a classical guitarist or we’re going to start playing like U2. It’s going to be the same effort if we are so lucky to get together and make more music.

THANKI: As a big Louvin Brothers fan, I was so glad to see you guys touring with Charlie Louvin a few years ago. Whose idea was it to bring him onto the tour?

DIFIORE: That was John’s idea. I’m so glad that so many people were introduced to Charlie Louvin’s music; that’s a great thing. He was fun to be around. It was important for him to be funny. He always had some jokes. He was a very friendly guy. I actually visited him in his museum that he had near the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. He just hung out there during the day; you could go in and see the Louvin Brothers’ stuff and talk to him and get photos with him. He was really a good person to be around. The Louvin Brothers were the Everly Brothers’ favorite band, which says a lot. They had those really sweet vocals and wrote incredible songs and harmonized really well together. It’s a beautiful thing when brothers are singing like that.

THANKI: Were you a fan of their music before touring with Charlie?

DIFIORE: I knew of the Louvin Brothers from when we were on the road; we had mix tapes and mix CDs in the van and John loved “The Great Atomic Power,” which I heard on the way to Portland once. I clearly remember going over the bridge over Lake Shasta and hearing that song. It’s a good memory. There’s a bunch of great Louvin Brothers songs, but there was about two or three that I knew before we toured with him. It was really special. What a great experience to have.

The post Interview with Vince DiFiore of Cake appeared first on American Noise.

The first flow­er­ing of my bud­ding ob­ses­sion with rock and roll came as July melted into Au­gust, 1971. From the back seat of my father’s new Cougar con­vert­ible, lis­ten­ing to the ra­dio tuned to then-Top 40 sta­tion KRTH, I was sud­denly over­come with quiet rage. My (then) all-time fa­vorite song—the Raiders’ po­lit­i­cally coura­geous (at least to my pre-adolescent ears) sin­gle “In­dian Reser­va­tion (The Lament of the Chero­kee Reser­va­tion In­dian)”—had just been un­cer­e­mo­ni­ously booted out of its #1 slot by the trea­cly “How Can You Mend a Bro­ken Heart?,” from those ba­nal Aus­tralian schlock­meis­ters the Bee Gees.

Some­day, some­one would pay for this. I had had my first taste of bloodlust.

Flash for­ward eight years or so, and join my Mu­sic Critic Ori­gin Story in situ:

Suf­fice it to say that from roughly 1979 through the band’s break-up, I was a huge Clash fan. Along with many other true be­liev­ers, I rec­og­nized the band as rid­ing the crest of rock and roll’s fourth (or maybe third) great wave (#1: Elvis; #2: Bea­t­les; #3: Vel­vet Un­der­ground; #4: Pistols/Clash, etc.). Through­out my fresh­man year at UCLA (1979-80) I com­muted from home to West­wood (about 35 miles one-way through L.A.’s worst traf­fic), play­ing over and over, on my baby-blue ‘65 VW’s car stereo, a home­made 8-track tape of Lon­don Call­ing.

I had been a pas­sion­ate rock and roll fan since I was eight or nine, but Lon­don Call­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ized my sense of mu­sic, art and com­mu­nity, and turned me into an evan­ge­list. Two years later, the UCLA Daily Bruin ran a pseudo-hip, half-baked dis­missal of San­din­ista! that pissed me off. Know­ing I could have done bet­ter, I strode into the Bruin of­fices and, on the strength of a test re­view (of the Go-Go’s’ Beauty and the Beat), be­gan, in Th­elo­nious Monk’s words, danc­ing about archi­tec­ture. Within a year, I was the paper’s re­views ed­i­tor; by grad­u­a­tion I was at the Bruin more of­ten than I was in class.

Af­ter grad­u­a­tion, I shifted from one writing/editing job to an­other, gen­er­ally hav­ing a fab­u­lous time, and al­ways on the prowl for that elu­sive fifth (or maybe fourth) wave. Since punk broke, the clos­est rock and roll has come to pro­duc­ing an­other true prophet is Kurt Cobain. His core vi­sion, how­ever, was of shared pain, which ul­ti­mately proved fa­tally introspective—an artis­tic and com­mu­nal cul-de-sac. This is not to say that the mid-80s marked the death of rock and roll (as some crit­ics fatu­ously claimed back in the day). The Re­place­ments, Los Lo­bos, Husker Du, the Blasters, the Min­ute­men, Elvis Costello, XTC, the Meat Pup­pets, plus about 849 oth­ers (in­clud­ing sev­eral dozen women, and it was about damn time), bright­ened up my days and nights.

But un­like the Clash, none of them wanted to be big­ger than the Bea­t­les (who in their day, of course, wanted to be big­ger than Elvis… who ap­par­ently wanted to be big­ger than Dean Martin).

In 1991, I started up as a staff writer for the MCA Records pub­lic­ity de­part­ment and dis­cov­ered why the phrase “mu­sic in­dus­try” is two words long. For­tu­itously, at MCA (now Uni­ver­sal) I had landed at just the right van­tage point to ob­serve what I have come to be­lieve is the sin­gle key mo­ment in post-punk rock and roll his­tory: the gen­e­sis of niche marketing.

For nearly 40 years, up un­til the early 90s, the mu­sic industry’s ma­jor la­bels had been fa­mously in­ept at pre­dict­ing or rec­og­niz­ing the un­prece­dented po­ten­tial (artis­tic, so­cial and mon­e­tary) in­her­ent in rock and roll, the most de­mo­c­ra­tic art form ever cre­ated. Ex­am­ples of in­dus­try my­opia are le­gion; the most damn­ing is that nearly every ma­jor artist or band, from Elvis to Nir­vana, was first signed by a small, in­de­pen­dent la­bel, only to be ac­quired later by a ma­jor (Dy­lan is the big exception).

So, one day in the early 90s (let’s say, just for kicks…August 27, 1992), some ner­vous ju­nior ex­ec­u­tive at one of the ma­jors held up his or her hand at a meet­ing and meekly sug­gested that maybe in­stead of slic­ing the pro­mo­tional pie into just five or six pieces (pop, rock, R&B, coun­try, jazz, maybe gospel), why not make 15, or 20, or 50 slices—each with its own mini-staff of pub­li­cists and pro­mot­ers? Not just R&B, but Ur­ban Con­tem­po­rary, Dance, Hip-Hop and Quiet Storm. Not just Rock, but Al­ter­na­tive, Hard Rock, Adult Con­tem­po­rary, Adult Al­ter­na­tive, AOR, DOR. Then, sub­di­vide even fur­ther: Grunge, Thrash Metal, Sad­core, Dream Pop, Skate Punk, Elec­tron­ica. I could go on and on and on.

Out of the mouths of crit­ics, this kind of mu­si­cal name-dropping can, at its best, rep­re­sent an en­joy­able game of lex­i­co­graphic one-upmanship. How­ever, from the of­fices of the quickly-con­sol­i­dat­ing ma­jors (and then there were three…), genre omi­nously mor­phed into strait­jacket. Thirty years ago, a la­bel was judged by how many gold and plat­inum records it could hang in its lobby. Now, the la­bels fig­ured that, rather than blow their an­nual bud­get on five or six po­ten­tial plat­inums, they could squeeze an equal or greater amount of profit out of 50 or 60 tightly pi­geon­holed niche-marketing cam­paigns, each mov­ing 50,000 to 200,000 units apiece.

What in God’s name, you ask, does all this have to do with the Clash, fer­cryi­nout­loud?

OK, here’s where it gets ugly. Back be­fore the Niche Mar­ket­ing Era (as I’ve tried to iden­tify it), an 11 or 12 year-old as­pir­ing rock star still had the en­tire uni­verse spread out be­fore her. Thanks to the gen­eral hap­less­ness of the mu­sic in­dus­try, rock and roll still be­grudg­ingly re­served a chair for the un­cat­e­go­riz­able dream­ers, the ob­sti­nate op­ti­mists who just might ex­plode into the Next Big Thing. In the mid-90s, how­ever, the newly minted army of niche mar­keters be­gan in­sist­ing to an en­tire gen­er­a­tion of mu­si­cians that un­less their mu­sic matched one of the spe­cific sub-categories that the la­bel was will­ing to mar­ket, the young-’uns might as well stick to dri­ving trucks.

As a profit-making scheme, niche mar­ket­ing worked smash­ingly well for the record com­pa­nies (al­though, truth be told, the ob­scene prof­its of the 1990s were just as likely fu­eled by plung­ing CD man­u­fac­tur­ing costs). But—and here’s the truly evil part—after three or four gen­er­a­tions of kids having been lec­tured by record-industry suits that the road to rock and roll im­mor­tal­ity lies best within the care­fully delineated bound­aries of their given mar­ket­ing niche, that lie became the truth that fu­ture gen­er­a­tions of punks and pun­kettes be­lieve. It’s the only op­tion they’re given. And if you can’t re­al­ize that there ex­ists the pos­si­bil­ity to dream be­yond genre, to aim higher than you pos­si­bly can reach, to change the world for the bet­ter, well… you aim lower and dream smaller. And you don’t even know you’re shrinking.

To quote an uniden­ti­fied pic­ture cap­tion from the San­din­ista! press kit: “The Clash made promises they couldn’t keep, kept promises no-one else could have made, res­olutely stuck them­selves in the fir­ing line with the sin­gle­minded courage of lu­natics or chil­dren, got knocked down, got up, made fools of them­selves, dusted them­selves off and car­ried on.”

I’ve been search­ing for those qual­i­ties in a band, and not find­ing them, for 25 years.

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