Neon Hustle

The Immortals #90 - Carlos Santana

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:16:00 +0000

Santana is lot like Jimi Hendrix, if Hendrix was as nonthreatening as a plate of refried beans.

Was that racist?

In 1999, Santana released the mega-selling collaborations album Supernatural, featuring such enduring creative powerhouses as Rob Thomas (he was in Matchbox 20!), Eagle-Eye Cherry (his name is all nouns!), and Everlast (he wrote "Jump Around!") This made him the most popular middle-aged Mexican in the world, a title he held until the rise of George Lopez. Maybe Supernatural was the record I should have studied for this series. It was probably the most representative document from his entire career of everything Santana's music really is: comfortably re-tread classic rock, uninspired-but-pleasant virtuoso leads, and tasteful cameo-whoring, all dressed up with a "muy caliente" Latin flair that'll have you running for the border.

I might have read that last from a packet of Taco Bell hot sauce.

Supernatural is exactly the kind of record you want to make when you're old and boring and waiting for some lifetime achievement recognition, and a fitting tribute to a man who personified the phrase "popular recording artist." But I didn't pick Supernatural for this entry, opting instead for Santana's sacred and time-tested "best" record, Abraxis. And you know what? It's lame.

It's telling that Santana's enduring classic only contains two original compositions. He doesn't really have much of an original voice or point of view beyond wanting to play electric guitar over traditional Latin inspired standards. I suppose it's nice that in his way, Santana's popularization of more diverse instrumentation in rock informed some of the better diversions into world music in later decades. And hey, a pre-Bonnaroo culture of blacklight poster enthusiasts needed something to listen to until Phish came around, right?

I can see why this sold a ton of records. Despite its illusion of exoticism, it's blandly palatable to seemingly any audience. And while it's non-challenging, it's also not an entirely unpleasant score for any number of background music needs. But I can't just sit down and actually listen to the whole record today without it really just making me want to listen Jimi, or Fleetwood Mac, or Tito Puente or Can instead. Or maybe eat some chips and salsa.

Mmmmm... chips and salsa.

The Immortals #91 - Ricky Nelson

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:08:00 +0000

You might hear the name "Ricky Nelson" and think of the spoiled, talentless offspring whose terrible music was only popularized for his ability to be a televised proxy of famous parents. But you're actually thinking of his kids.

Ricky Nelson's career was notably discredited his lineage through much of his adult life, but the posthumous recognition he's seen for his place as not only the original teen idol but one of the first great rock stars is deserved. His wasn't a music career born of contrivance, like, say, David Cassidy's, but the result of an actual talent that just happened to grow up on TV.

That doesn't change the fact that in the beginning (for white people anyway) there was Elvis, and there was Ricky Nelson. Where Elvis' aping of rockabilly leaned more heavily on rhythm and blues of the delta, Nelson mixed similar influences with an overt and unabashed pop sensibility. And he wrote a couple of plain amazing songs for it.

Go listen to "Travelin' Man" right now. Go ahead.

But all the modern praise for Nelson is probably a bit overstated. In truth, he wouldn't have made my top 100, and his legacy benefited from an age-old biopic plot device: he died suddenly and tragically, and in a plane crash to boot. There aren't many better bonafides for to admittance to rock and roll Heaven than that.

And hey, he died. So let's just let him have it, yeah?

The Immortals #92 - Guns N' Roses

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:53:00 +0000

Way back in January, the erstwhile co-authors of this site and myself made a road trip from southern California to Las Vegas, Nevada. Each of us being inveterate gamblers (untrue) and borderline problem drinkers (closer to true), the neon capital of the world called to us Hustlers for an off-season weekend of wandering the strip, seeing the sights, and intermittent gaming heightened by the thrill of undeserved "free" drinks carried by Eastern European-born waitresses.

A particularly memorable moment came on our second proper evening in town as we approached the gleaming casinos from our borrowed timeshared condo on the outskirts of tourist-land. Popping a disc into the car stereo, the intro started with an echoed, clanging guitar lick, followed by snaking high-hat... I made sure to carefully time the music with our left hand turn onto Las Vegas Blvd, cruising in time for the climactic "Cha!"

Welcome to the Jungle, baby.

It might have been the highlight of the whole weekend.

Except that it wasn't.

If memory serves, we turned the stereo back down before the first bridge. Why? Because it's 2009 and we're neither strippers nor professional wrestlers- who the fuck wants to listen to Guns N' Roses?

In 1987, it's not too hard to imagine why this was considered "revolutionary." Compared to all the other hair-obsessed pop metal bands popularized by Guns' own hometown Sunset scene, Axl, Slash, Duff, Izzy and Steven were about as badass as could be. Never mind that they were themselves just as hair-obsessed and poppy as any of their counterparts- Guns felt different, back then anyway.

To be fair, Slash plays electric guitar quite well, and Izzy/Duff both helped craft several tracks into catchy hits. Axl was surely compelling (if not particularly charismatic.) There's a reason that Appetite for Destruction has been so much longer-lived than albums by Guns' contemporaries. It is, on the whole, a solid 40% better than most of the excrement it can be compared to from its era. It was 1987 and mainstream music sucked. In fact, I could have been a whole lot more fair to Guns and picked the noble failure of Use Your Illusion, with its high points offering glimpses of actual nuance in Rose's persona and- dare I say it?- talent, even. But Appetite is the record they/he will forever be known and celebrated for, plus it sold a a million bajillion copies, so good on them.

And so it was that Guns N' Roses was perhaps the biggest band in the world for a glorious 4 years of excess and undeserved acclaim from people with shitty taste. And then along came Nevermind. Although technically true that Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson's last good record off the top of the charts (Dangerous- RESPECT), it wasn't the end of the King of Pop, who enjoyed another good 5 or so years of absolute peak popularity worldwide. Rather, it was Guns N' Roses who were relegated to a distant 2nd place in the world of rock music, soon to be outpaced by dozens of less-than-Nirvana grunge and grunge-imitators (and then eventually by Nirvana again with Kurt Cobain's 1994 suicide.)

During the long wait for (and following the inevitable failure of) Chinese Democracy GN'R became more sideshow than legend. The creatively valid members of the band left and/or got fired, Axl challenged Jacko to a race for who could descend into freaky cult-figure status and social irrelevance the fastest (sadly, Axl lost again- nobody beats the King), and their fanbase waited, dwindled, and eventually realized that Fred Durst was a reasonable enough facsimile for their lost messiah. By the time of Democracy's release late last year, it was little more than an afterthought on a career that all but the douchiest of males had forgotten. The transparency of Rose' cashgrab was almost insulting- you could only buy the record at Best Buy in the US, and there was even a Dr. Pepper tie-in!

Guns feel today like a band that were never more than the sum of their parts: Crazy redheaded controversy magnet, stoner icon with a cheap fashion gimmick, bass player from a "real" music city and not fake-old Los Angeles, a drummer who repped "punk" to people who don't know shit about T.S.O.L., and at least one guitarist with an awesome nickname (I refer, of course, to "Izzy." What kind of name is "Slash?" I mean REALLY...)

That sense of hollowness was only heightened by the decade-plus that Axl Spent bloating its lineup with as many potentially notable names as possible, including actual notables like guitar-noodling demigod Buckethead, session super-man Josh Freese, and Tommy "I Was in the Fucking Replacements!" Stinson. Now you can see Guns N' Roses on their periodic tours for a couple hundred bucks. The venues they play are surely better than whatever state fair Ratt is gigging next summer... but by how much?

Well, they're #92 on the "Immortals" list, so I guess the upside is that I get to take potshots at them for eternity. In fact, the picture for this entry was very nearly one of Kurt Cobain himself, from the famous "Where's Axl" scuffle backstage at the 1992 Video Music Awards (the same telecast that yielded a memorable Guns duet with Elton John on "November Rain.")

Why?

Because fuck you, Axl.

You lose again.

The Immortals #93 - Booker T. And The MG's

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:48:00 +0000

Too much is made of their being an integrated band. Recognition for their monumental importance as the house band at Stax, a fine bit of historical revisionism. Their sound? Overestimated. And that's a shame, because they really should be loved for exactly what they were.

First, addressing the obvious- they had no vocalist. One of only 2 entrants in the Immortals list not to have featured a singer. But, at the risk of sounding an apologist, I'd posit that the organ and guitar on those records were a duo worthy of mention alongside any fronting duo in rock history. And I don't mean Booker T. Jones and Steve Cropper, not the men or how they played those instruments/parts- that's an important distinction. I mean that the organ and the guitar on those records were Mick and Keith, John and Paul... or maybe more appropriately Sam and Dave. Even backing Wilson Pickett or Eddie Floyd, the instrumental track itself always seemed to present another frontman and sidekick, commanding the listener up front in the mix.

It's good that they had their effect on other people's records, because they released precious few compositions of their own (the landmark Green Onions contains a mere 3 original tunes.) Most if Onions is composed of reproductions of songs they'd already fleshed-out on other people's records, and yeah, it's sort of impossible not to prefer the originals we know and love. That's not to say that it isn't a sheer pleasure to listen to Booker T. and the boys- that title track is utterly un-improvable. But it would frankly be a lot easier to overlook the fact of their own songs' scarcity if it didn't highlight a suspicion you get listening to the MG's: that in a few records-worth of material, they could have ended up so much more than extras for the Akroyd/Landis canon.

In another universe they might have been the Animals (if never the Stones): remembered for their lasting influence but also beneficiaries of an era of mania that let them cash in while they were young enough to enjoy it. Instead, they get the distinction of being imitated in modern music just as often as they're sampled outright, a more obscured legacy (though certainly one of honor itself.) Maybe that's all fitting, just as well for the world's best backing band.

The Immortals #94 - Nine Inch Nails

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:01:00 +0000

Nine Inch Nails are the most popular "industrial rock" band of all time. So yeah, Trent Reznor got famous, but just technically.

No era of popular music was ever as accepting of naked emotional release as the 1990s, but as the grunge boom snowballed out of control, we lost our sense for deciding quality from insistence, meaning any two-bit lump could and would be signed to a multi-record deal worth many major label millions for our eagerness to confuse earnestness with talent. This would be taken to even further extremes (bordering on the grotesque and/or humorous) in the early 2000s with nu-metal and emo ascendant, but in 1994, that shit was juuust about to ripen. And so, after a modestly successful (but only cautiously embraced) also-ran debut called Pretty Hate Machine, Nine Inch Nails was ready set the new curve.

The resulting album, The Downward Spiral, feels pretty transparently like exactly the record Steve Albini and Brian Eno's hyperneurotic trust fund kid would make. And not really in a cool way, but I fully get how it would have been taken that way 15 years ago.

In hindsight, think the most compelling thing about the album today- like so much about the alternative/industrial genres- isn't the fact of it's peripheral associations. No matter how schlocky Mark Romanek's video for "Closer" seems in a post-Saw-franchise-society, the truth is it's actually every bit as vital as the song for most of us, and probably more. Johnny Cash had a knack for stealing the songs he covered by virtue of the indelible, unmistakable mark he left on the source material, but I think we can all tell that he had an easier time of it elevating album-closer "Hurt" by virtue of the patina of superficiality it carries when eventually filed away in the Reznor oeuvre. I mean, Bowie himself wrote the damned piece in the original "Immortals" issue of RS, and for a while there in my thought proccess that alone seemed as interesting thing to write about as anything else related to The Downward Spiral.

And it was. And that's why I just said that. Yet Michael Trent Reznor remains a semi-famous, sort-of rock star... and a damned millionaire to boot! Does that dredge up any of the anger we were supposedly feeling and embracing in the 90s? Not really.

What were we talking about again?

The Immortals #95 - Lynyrd Skynyrd

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:01:00 +0000

Today I talk about my personal feelings regarding Lynyrd Skynyrd.

*Ahem*

Fuck classic rock
Fuck 3 guitars
Fuck solos
Fuck that hat
Fuck saying fuck Neil Young
Fuck multiple bridges
Fuck back-up singing wives
Fuck pride
Fuck confederate flags
Fuck stupid spellings for stupid band names
Fuck reunion tours
Fuck plane crashes

I'll try to get it some day, I really will. In another life, I'll say that my 3 years in Arkansas were an elaborate field study of southern culture. I'll actually chart the estimated thousand times a month that Clearchannel stations play "Sweet Home Alabama" in a given month and publish colorful spreadsheets. I'll listen to more than the first 3 minutes of "Freebird" before getting sick of it and turning it off. I promise I'll try. But now, at the age of 26, I know that I've spent enough of my life peripherally engaged by Lynyrd Skynyrd to know that I've never been ready to give them a fair shake. And I'm still not now.

Neon Hustle's Totally Subjective and Woefully Incomplete Guide to the Best Music of 2008, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 21:52:00 +0000

This is part 1 of an ongoing, year-end series from your buddies at NH.

Entries are presented in no particular order. Each author's parts were crafted independently of one another, and should pretty much never be taken as representative of an opinion/endorsement by the collective. Except when they are. But that'll probably be for totally different reasons anyway.

Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight

Let's call a spade a spade here, shall we? Emo generally sucks. Beyond the monotonic soundscape and whiny upper-middle class perspective lies a wasteland of lyrics so vastly insipid that Lou Pearlman has to be ROFLing in his prison cell.

With the bar set so low, then, it shouldn't be hard to make a "good" emo record, and The Midnight Organ Fight is certainly that. It's also one of the best albums of the year. It's caustic and funny and genuine -- you have to be legitimately scarred to write lines like "You won't find love in a hole / It takes more than fucking someone / You don't know to keep warm". And the music itself is strikingly affecting alt-folk, not the same upbeat pop-punk tune we've heard scores of times from the likes of Panic! At the Disco or their unfortunate clone, My Chemical Romance.

-Steven

Ezra Furman and the Harpoons - Inside the Human Body

There's something of a rarity that exists today, in a world about to see the release of the first 10 disc CD/Blu-Ray volley of the "Neil Young Archives" box sets and which welcomed the 8th (eighth!) installment of Dylan's long-running Bootleg series in 2008. That rare thing to which I refer is the opposite of those retrospective-obsessed dinosaurs: the young, unestablished artist whose output isn't yet outpaced by their creative productivity. That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but sometimes it can mean you've just been lucky enough to stumble in on a musician documenting the process of writing good songs and throwing them together to make an honest to goodness long-player. And if you're lucky and it turns out that his records don't suck, that's pretty sepcial, right?

Ezra Furman is still basically a kid, his Harpoons having been formed in 2006 after playing parties at Tufts, this year saw their 3rd album, Inside the Human Body released on Minty Fresh. Furman spends 45 minutes careening between imitations of influences and contemporaries alike, and at times you'll swear Furman's vocals are channeling Alec Ounsworth, Gordon Gano, Spencer Krug, and/or Robert Smith, even as his band plays indie rock, folk-punk, or Modern Lovers-styled decosntructo-pop. You can call it amatuerish and derrivitive, or you can step back and wonder at how anybody writes a track as monolithic as "Take Off Your Sunglasses."

-Brendan

Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

Bon Iver's debut dropped in February, which means it's been talked about as a potential record of the year for so long that the "it's overrated" backlash has begun.

It's all flimshaw.

There's something timeless about a lot of the songs on For Emma, or maybe anachronistic. It's easy enough to imagine "Skinny Love" being sung around a campfire on the American frontier, or "The Wolves" being the keystone to a movie soundtrack 100 years from now. And in the here and now, there's an austere intimacy to each track that provides a nice antidote to the in-your-face spectacles that defined 2008.

-Steven

David Byne and Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

Old people would have you believe that Everything that Happens could never be as good as the first Byrne/Eno record, 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I know they are old people, because they probably care about the influence of samples and world music on types of borderline popular music that nobody actually listens to today.

Despite the reported influences of gospel and soul having been filtered through Byrne's hermit-like prickishness or Brian Eno's eventual and complete tanshumanist merge of consciousness into a downloadable iPhone application, Everything that Happens is good because it's made up of songs. Real, catchy, pretty songs, songs better than anything either has released in quite a while. And if it sometimes sounds like a lost hit from 1988, well, that's probably all for the better then, isn't it?

-Brendan

The Immortals #96 - Martha and the Vandellas

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:22:00 +0000

Everything I wrote about Berry Gordy applies to Martha and the Vandellas too. Plus a few controversial claims which I will make after the jump.

They're ranked ahead of the Supremes on this list because, on average, any three members of the Vandellas were better singers than any three members in the Supremes' history.

The Vandellas had nearly half as many "hits", but they were all roughly 2.6 times better than most of those Supremes songs.

Martha and the Vandellas were more popular with black people at the time. Back then (as with today, but especially back then) that was important because rock and roll had only been stolen a couple of decades earlier. White peoples' taste wasn't that good in the early going (that's why we'll probably never catch up.)

Martha didn't leave Detroit.

Unlike most "pop" girl groups, when you listen to Martha and the Vandellas, you can feel your organs start burning inside your chest a little. Which is rad.

20th Century Masters: The Millenium Collection by Martha and the Vandellas

The Immortals #97 - Diana Ross and the Supremes

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:44:00 +0000

The significance of Diana Ross and the Supremes is not about Diana Ross. Everybody, from Rolling Stone to the Kennedy Center would have you believe that she is a special talent, and honestly, yeah, she could sing a little. But that's not why she matters (if she matters.) Neither is her relevance to anybody about Florence Ballard, or Cindy Birdsong, or Mary Wilson, or Holland, Dozier and Holland or the Funk Brothers or fucking anybody else save for one man. The significance of Diana Ross and the Supremes is that they were the crowing achievement of one man: Berry Gordy Jr.

Pop music in the 1960s wasn't really driven by The Beatles and Dylan and Brian Wilson all pushing one another, though that's a nice way to romanticize everything. In fact, those artists influenced one another and many more artists to make music that was on the fringe of the furthest acceptable boundaries at the time for rock music. Smile is nice and all, but even had it been released when originally planned, it wasn't going to rival the sales of "She Loves You" 45s, nor would it be accepted as idealized gospel of the psychedelic brilliance of what is, in hindsight, a great and important time in our cultural history. Fuck that shit. The popular consciousness is represented first and foremost by what sold enough to qualify as truly "pop" music, and the man who made the most profitable, popular music on the planet for the better part of a decade was Berry Gordy with his Motown sound. Keep your pitiful sales of Revolver, to this day more people know twice as many Gordy Motown hits by heart as can even name a track other than "Yellow Submarine." Truth. Hendrix is the soundtrack to our revisionism. Gordy, Motown, and Diana Ross and the Supremes were the soundtrack to the entire country's trip to the grocery store.

Included in Gordy's genius was his coordination of talented people with interesting people. That's what differentiated him from the other most important producer of that era, Phil Spector. Spector made hits without personalities- name me the drummer who pounded the first kick, kick-kick, snare on "Be My Baby." Nobody can. Practically everybody who wrote/co-produced/played/sang on a Spector hit in that era was sublimated to one man's singular vision... and that vision was more or less of himself.

Gordy, on the other hand, made personalities into hits, taking a just-alright singer who was kind of an insufferable bitch and made her the name in front for an already successful group. He recognized what sold their records and gave her top-billing, growing both the person and the brand in the process. Maybe the greatest music marketer of all time, and he had an ear too. He made more hits than he could count. Any of them could represent the man. But on this list, he's represented by Diana Ross and the Supremes.

The Best of Diana Ross and the Supremes by Diana Ross and the Supremes

Invisible Men

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 16:58:00 +0000

To anybody who's reading this, yes, we still exist.

But Just Barely.

See, we have jobs. We have other projects. We have stressful and time-consuming pursuits of postgraduate degrees. And at the end of the day, Top Chef ain't gonna watch itself, you dig?

An idea for a new beginning for Neon Hustle has been floated around. Perhaps it will take, perhaps it won't. Either way, we're just as pop/culture-obsessive as ever. I'd recommend against removing NH from your feeds, as I have a feeling we'll come up with something eventually to intrude upon your minds once more.

Thanks for reading.

IX: OMG GG

noreply@blogger.com (Darryl) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:40:00 +0000

After undertaking to re-watch the first season of The OCsuch that I could write essays by the episode, a curious thing happened: I couldn't stop watching. The same vortex that ensnared me on its premiere had me again. This isn't to say that I've stopped - far from it - but to explain my curiously intertwined absence.

Gossip Girl is the sort of cultural phenomenon that can escape one entirely if they don't own a television and aren't plugged into the right circles. I know this because it happened to me. When I woke up one morning to find my days filled with blog subscriptions instead of my second job, I found a world with a show so popular it has its own tag on Gawker. And here I thought I was still with it?

Whereas Josh Schwarz's previous project, The OC came at the beginning of the TV revolution - DVR was a distinctly luxury item and streaming piracy was naught but a twinkle in the eyes of the college students who scoured the torrents for Canadian Television rips of network shows - GG arrived into a world whose television viewers were in control. Apart from this, and its meager challenge to the final season of The Wire for the title of "Cultural Item of Note: 2007-2008 Television Season Category," I can think of no other reason why Gossip Girl did not reach the pan-cultural, iconic status of The OC. Not only is it practically the same show, but it arrived in a culture even so status obsessed that it can sustain The Hills and an American edition of the British OK tabloid.

Gossip Girl is, in its essence, the refinement of The OC. A comparison less on its tastes, sentiments, or even a coastal rivalry, GG is Schwarz distilling the same plots, the same themes, and even some of the same characters through the filters of network lessons learned and East Coast location filming.

In his new series, Schwarz has matured not just in his style, but also in his content. In Episode 9, "The Heights," The OC is at its high school soap opera best. Even with its B-Plot of the Balboa Wetlands development project, it is a John Hughes movie writ television. The tomboyish friend who helps her guy friend crush get the other girl, the missed connections that nearly tear apart the nascent star-crossed teenage romance, the showdown on the soccer field where Ryan tackles his nemesis because he thinks Luke is still after his girl! In this episode, and indeed much of that which redeems the series, the is high school, or at least its cultural simulacrum. Distorted, Technicolor, glossed, and exaggerated but not so impossible as to take it completely out of the sphere of the shared experience.

Gossip Girl owes no allegiance to your petty nostalgia. Insomuch as school exists, it is purposeful background to absurd shenanigans. Sure, in Orange County there was the USC obsession, but in the Upper East Side the Ivy League application process involves courting your author/idol and outing your best friend as a recovering alcoholic. And if you're not at that school, you're a home-schooled filmmaker. Or whatever it is that Vanessa does when she's not turning Rufus's gallery into a cafe.

The OC thrived on contrivance. Characters drawn deep enough to like and shallow enough to turn the plot on the dime, wildly unlikable personas cast as unlikely heroes, aspirational locations and people and products. And though I'd be lying if I said GG weren't possessed of these same flaws, I'd be no less dishonest if I didn't admit it I loved it. In part for the same reasons that I got caught up in The OC in the first place, but also because GG, for all its flaws, seems- at least on first watching- to dig a little bit deeper for its story lines. Little J's pyrrhic war with Blair, Dan and Serena's romance, Rufus's tragi-comic love life. Though these stories on occasion fall victim to television's peculiar coincidences, they're driven by characters that both define and are defined by their experiences.

And it's not that Gossip Girl didn't open the second season with a bizarre series of wildly unlikely and unfortunate events that all led up to one wonderfully salacious payoff. But at least when GG does bad, it does bad incredibly well.

VIII: The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies

noreply@blogger.com (Darryl) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:44:00 +0000

Some may consider it an abomination to even mention Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the same breath as The OC. However, it is in the same way that we owe Kafka the psychological referent for the nightmare of the bureaucratic state that we owe Solzhenitsyn for the visceral emotional referents of the autocratic regime. In America, we thankfully live far from the Soviet reign of terror, but The Gulag Archipelago is rife with reminders that the distance has been growing narrower at an alarming rate. The lack of recourse to the rule of law, the coercive interrogation techniques, the use of the legal system for political ends, the uncertainty.

When Episode 8 finds Julie Cooper attempting to relegate Marissa to an institution, without the consent of her father, we find her in a situation that is physically entirely dissimilar from that of Ivan Denisovich. For one thing, Southern California is much warmer. But for another, when we are supposed to assume adolescence for everything and we are supposed to accept Julie Cooper as a scheming dictator, we can see something closer. Solzhenitsyn's lessons may have been meant for his people, and may even have been meant as specific warnings against the dangers of the Soviet state, but their significance goes much further. In his writings under threat of destruction, imprisonment, and death, Solzhenitsyn's stories of the terror and absurdity and incoherence and danger of a totalitarian state bent on the preservation of power for its own sake stand as a warning against all malfeasance and corruption within the status quo. It is naive folly to say that either power or government is intrinsically malevolent, but it is thanks to writers like Solzhenitsyn that we will always have the memory of just how far astray either can go such that we may stay far from such paths.

VII: Tijuana Hangover

noreply@blogger.com (Darryl) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:18:00 +0000

Now think about what this band could sound like on their first full length. Think about what it could sound like when they tighten up the beats and make the arrangements go somewhere, but keep the fun and the energy. Think about what it will sound like when you’re pushing those nifty bass lines through something other than your computer speakers. And think what will happen when that bass player realizes he can play half the notes and be twice as awesome. Pretty sweet, right? (10/08/07)

At Indefinite Articles, the writers undertake Preemptive Strikes, a category of posts subtitled: "Movies we haven't seen, books we haven't read, games we haven't played." Their Long Hauls tackle bodies of work as varied as Highlander, Star Trek: TOS, Doug, and Metal Gear Solid. Writing this as I am under the marque of my series of a season of a show off the air for nearly five years, I have a certain affinity for this project.

Between these two extremes of criticism, lies the status quo of the blogosphere. With neither the willingness to admit to their preconceptions nor the reflection of posterity, the electronically chattering class hops to keyboards as quickly as possible to register its opinions on whatever movie or record crosses their path. Now that "the scoop" is had by hitting post as quickly as possible, one needs only get a link to an mp3 and the critical equivalent of "OMG FRIST!" to claim blog supremacy. Beware quality; that way outdated timestamps lay.

Thus, we have the cycle of buzz: a band exists, gains exposure and then hits critical mass. Immediately, there is a spike in the blogosphere's attention before the only one's inquiring are the one's who care about the music. The brown dwarf that remains after a buzz band's rise to glory.

It was after just such supernova that I first looked at the Black Kids. It was October and I was hopeful. Going back and listening to Wizard of Ahhhhs, I can't help but feel it still. Listening to "Hit the Heartbreaks" the mugginess that pulls the voices together and makes a frenzy of the synthesizers and teenaged voices may not sound professional, but it lent them an urgency more compelling than most punk bands.

On Partie Traumatic, The Black Kids lose this along with much of what made them so special. One of the difficulties in listening to a band that cleans up its sound having finally gained access to professional studio, gear, and production assistance is trying to disentangle one's own ideal images from what the artists envisioned. When the Mountain Goats left the lo-fi era for the 4AD era, they picked up a slew of fans but left a few at the onramp wondering what happened to the songwriter who they'd associated with their own militantly lo-fi ethos. The Goats were of course a curious example in that they eventually picked back up many of those fans, but were also notable in that the tidal shift in their music was one of style and not one of quality. The Black Kids could hardly blame the failures of Ahhhs on a broken boombox: Partie Traumatic sounds remarkably similar apart from brighter synthesizers, better vocal tracking, a bevy of overdubs, and a generally more busy soundscape.

Perhaps these things are a matter of taste, but compare - if you can - the first three seconds of the two versions of "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You." In those three seconds, you have the beginnings of all the problems with the sound of this album. For all the band's failures, restraint was hardly one of them but it only worsened in the studio. The original version could admittedly be recorded more cleanly, but its reverb drenched solo guitar succinctly declares the hook and allows plenty of space into which the band can drop. The new one brightens the tone almost to distraction and leads off by scratching the rhythm before a second, almost identical sounding, guitar comes in to clutter up the track even more. The rest of the track feels like a clinical exercise. The backing vocals are sometimes separated out so far that the shouts seem like they're coming from a different room and the hyperactive bassline from the original still hasn't quite found a groove.

Partie Traumatic isn't all bad, and it certainly deserves more consideration than Pitchfork saw fit to give it. At its best, it's an incredibly accessible dance record that has all the inviting post-punk cues that made them the darlings of the blogosphere in the first place. The musicianship is consistently stronger, and the lead vocals are much stronger than before even if the weakness of the backup vocals (more the parts than the voices) is made awkwardly obvious by the brighter production.

Despite its high points, The Black Kids had little hope of recapturing our imaginations with this album. Even were it to have equalled Wizard of Ahhhs, we would have been left wanting because so much of what we loved in it was unrealized potential. To see them here - a record deal, a record - and but no closer to finding the next gear, is perhaps the biggest disappointment in listening to the album.

Still, we should probably be honest with ourselves: where could they have gone? We wanted to believe that their irresistibility would translate into something more and that they could be more than the sum of their influences. But what cause did we have? When Marissa Cooper got in the Cohen's Land Rover to drive down to Tijuana for the weekend on the heels of all her chaos, did we really expect anything else but for her to end up drinking alone in a sketchy bar before overdosing on pills? Nine times out of ten the dancey 80's revival band will remain just that, and just as frequently the poor little rich girl will mix Cuervo and codeine. When the surprises happen, they're brilliant. A glimmer of redemption for Marissa, Turn on the Bright Lights for the hopeful.

VI: Misses and Kisses

noreply@blogger.com (Darryl) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:20:00 +0000

If sincerity is the new irony, Jason Anderson may be the new Nerf Herder. His songwriting takes the high points of Bruce Springsteen, Against Me!, and the Weakerthans and occasionally swirls it together with an unabashed appreciation for the howling choruses, soaring guitar solos, and ostentatious piano that make people love the 1980s despite its myriad failures as a decade.

Drama can hook an audience with any of a thousand lures, but the most irresistable are those that speak to our common experiences. On the surface, the most alluring are the ones that titillate and excite, but these can rarely sustain. Celebrity gossip rags kept a steady business, but it took Us Weekly's concept of photoessays and stories that concoct a shared reality of Hollywood starlets and the shoppers in Aisle 5 to make American celebrity culture inescapable.

The OC plays on the same tropes: drawing the viewer in with the aspirational visuals and trying to trick its audience into establishing a sympathy with the all-too-similar problems of its characters. Alcoholism, outsiders, marital issues, and, of course, love in the time of home rooms and hormones. However much the show concerns itself with teen romance, it never wholly succeeds in the telling the romances in which it seems so invested.

At the opposite end of the success spectrum, is Judd Apatow's Freaks and Geeks. Where The OC thrives on the melodrama of the extraordinary, Freaks basks in the stunning awkwardness of the everyday. Though each show has its archetypal nerd, their lives could be no more different. Seth is smart, tall, funny, unconventionally cute, and has zero friends or acquaintances despite having lived in the same place for a decade. Sam is short, awkward, and always accompanied by his only two friends on the planet. Seth Cohen might be confronted with preposterously imaginary choice between a bombshell in a Wonder Woman costume and an impossibly cute girl who drew him a personal comic book, but Sam Weir pines after the cheerleader and wins her heart by a season's worth of luck. Fine, Apatow may require the fairy dust of television for his character's chances, but that's as much use as he makes of it. Even though Sam gets the girl, he realizes that the girl he dreamed of dating isn't actually the girl that he wants to be dating, leading him to the far more interesting questions of where one goes after attaining all one's adolescent dreams, and as an adolescent no less, and shortly thereafter realizing that they're hollow.

The reason why Freaks and Geeks is such an infinitely more affecting show, and the reason why it still sits on Blockbuster's shelves while The OC has been consigned to the scrap heap, is that even though it strains credulity to believe that Cindy Sanders would deign to date Sam Weir, we can understand why she makes that decision. When the supposedly slutty Summer is revealed as a virgin, it's a shock, but not altogether mind boggling because we know so little about her. She chats with Marissa occasionally, but turned down Luke once, but that's about all we know. Cindy Sanders, by contrast, has gone through an epic romance with Todd Schellinger

Apatow's retellings of the trials and tribulations of high school romance are hardly flawless, but they're closer to most realities than The OC ever is, not that any portrayal could capture the reality of those moments - where Summer grabs Seth for the kiss at the close of Episode 6, or Sam and Cindy sit on the bed at the make out party at the close of "Smooching and Mooching" - but the closest might be the previously mentioned Jason Anderson.

With a photographic gift for imagery, Jason Anderson is one of the most refreshing songwriters around - someone who doesn't need to hind behind the irony or dismissiveness that has become de rigeur among most songwriters who seem afraid to let on that they care. Not only does he clearly, but he makes you feel like you should, too, regardless of what he's singing about. At his best, he paints pictures that, for all their exquisite detail, are expansive and universal in their emotion. "Watch Your Step," from 2008's The Hopeful and the Unafraid is one of those songs. In it, he manages to capture everything that inspires wonder and terror in first kisses, with a melody that's inescapable and a production that seems ripped from 1986. And all this before hitting the first chorus.

When Seth kissed Summer, we cheered. But it was a strange victory because it was so clearly insignificant - she quickly excused herself to talk to a banker, after all. When Sam Weir asks to kiss Cindy Sanders, we're rooting for him and grimacing at the same time, as we enjoy one of the most awkward television moments this side of Curb Your Enthusiasm. But more than that, we feel for Sam - his satisfaction when he finally does kiss her, and the nervous fear as she pounces on him to make with the necking. With Sam, we feel it because we were there, especially if we were more than a little bit Sam Weir at one point or another in our lives. But with Jason Anderson, we feel it because it's all of our lives.

Jason Anderson - Watch Your Step
- MySpace
- Order from K Records
- Order from iTunes

The Tennessee Trick Deck

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 23:34:00 +0000

It’s maybe the laziest tendency of the national media when covering “underground” music to sell the image of a modern day Laurel Canyon, to attempt to recapture the mythical days when the most creative and popular artists of the day collaborated on one another’s best works during the 60s. This inclination in covering new music is really quite natural. After all, simply naming a young band that most folks have never heard and who might never appeal to the masses is largely pointless, but depicting those same artists as being a part of a scene- even if merely by circumstances of time and place- lends otherwise anonymous talent the collective weight of community. It’s intuitive form of marketing both the bands and the news, and when media outlets can’t find a localized narrative to suit a general audience, they’re often apt to just invent one.

The same article that the Times published as an 80s retrospective on Sonic Youth and the influence of No New York was again written in the early 2000s when we became re-obsessed with Manhattan and all things Strokes-ian. The New Yorker recently published its love letter for Los Angeles’ art space The Smell and the new record by No Age, and Salon reached for the holiest of hyperbolic metaphors when they proclaimed Portland “America's Indie Rock Mecca” (while, oddly, also somehow drafting the image of northern Oregon as sort of an alt veteran’s version of Boca.) Seattle, Brooklyn, and Montreal have all been given the same treatment, along with countless others. In fact, it seems that all it takes for a city to be decreed the new capital of Cool is to have 3 or more bands playing decent music within a 30 mile radius of one another.

The glaring exception to this rule, of course, is Memphis, Tennessee. In fact, I'll go so far as to say the River City is without a doubt the least glamorous “important” place in rock and roll. Its legacy of all-time greats maps like the hub at Dallas-Fort Worth (or, more appropriately, FedEx), a convenient meeting point from which the region’s country, jazz, R&B and blues musicians to cut and distribute records or depart on tours. Despite being touted as the “Birthplace of Rock and Roll,” the city has never sustained much of a scene of its own so much as been home base for a variety of diverse and largely independent artists. Its musical notoriety today is literally as a place where musicians come to buckle down beneath the lip-served notions of history and without the distraction of, you know, stuff to do before a track is finished. Also, sometimes people die there. It’s not an especially bad town by any means, but, having spent nearly 3 years of my former life a quick trip down interstate 63 away, I can tell you from experience that the locals- and the bands- have to make their own fun.

A downside to the recent trend of media coverage is that a city without a featured profile on page 1 of the arts section often leaves its musicians precious few ways to access the national conversation. Jay Reatard has felt the brunt of this neglect. Since his late adolescence he’s been the creative force behind projects like the Reatards, Lost Music and Angry Angles, and he’s spent over 10 years a return to punk's origins as a singles-driven medium, releasing his self-recorded songs without regard for the integrity of who constitutes your band at a given moment or even knowing who was going to press the vinyl. In 2006 he released Blood Visions, his first record as Jay Reatard, a concept piece about possibly murdering ex girlfriends played in the catchiest way possible. And with the buzz he worked up from touring that album (and from occasionally wailing on drunk assholes at his shows), he’s managed to release a steady stream of singles for the last 2 years. Highlighting exactly what kind of exposure Memphians can expect for their hometown’s coolness currency is that Reatard has remained pretty much under everybody’s radar all this time… despite having been releasing his new material on Matador for the last year, one of the most established and powerful independent labels in the world. 17 of these tracks have now been compiled on one disc as Singles 06-07.

Not so much growing out of his punk past as rounding it out, this collection absolutely slays. The DIY aesthetic Reatard carries over from the best old punk acts belies the sophistication of his influences and the subtlety of his new compositions. There are new wave referents (“Night of Broken Glass,” “Let it All Go”), pitch-perfect pop (“All Over Again” and a cover of the Go-Betweens “Don’t Let Him Come Back”) and plenty of thrashing rockers (pretty much everything else) rounding out a near-flawless 40 minute set.

Without our crutch of regional association to buy coverage, we’ve lost some of our ability to self-regulate perspective. The temptation is to compare him and the rest of what John Norris’ hair has recognized as the new lo-fi “scene” to acts like Guided By Voices, but that would be faulty. Not just because Reatard’s own endowments stop well short of the attention span required to appreciate Quadrophenia but because at least in GBV’s heyday the term “lo-fi” was a de-facto descriptive for an emerging genre of home-recorded bands that broke through established ceilings of critical and mainstream acceptance. It was actually a relevant thing for GBV, Pavement, Liz Phair, Sebadoh, and others collectively defined an aesthetic that was more than an arbitrary group of good bands- they were a substantial part of what made the 1990s music boom an “alternative” in the first place. The same can’t be said of today’s supposed movement, which conveys little more sense of community than an overlap of MySpace friends.

But even a man whose choice of surname is, frankly, pretty retarded (he was born Jay Lindsay) deserves more than that. What impresses most about Singles 06-07 exists independent of its recording quality, which is nowhere near emphasized to the point that bands like Times New Viking have chosen to make theirs. Upon one listen, it seems glaringly obvious that the production value on this year's Rip It Off are intended to be as inextricably tied to the songs as their melodies, and this seems to make them wear thin in a way that Reatard’s more sturdy, road-worn compositions don’t. A record that “sounds bad” usually translates into a great live show, and TNV certainly have their share of pop hooks and a sense of hip that certainly owes little to their being from Columbus, but Reatard just has something that the Vikings lack.

No, the most impressive thing about Reatard’s Singles is that you have to be reminded that that the compilation represents the fruits of a single year. It’s merely a chronological document and nobody, least of all the man himself, has even claimed that it’s his best work. The fact is that he’s just so shit-hot right now that he can shuffle together his output any which way and is still dealing aces that trump nearly any other rock release of the year.

V: On Rights

noreply@blogger.com (Darryl) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:02:00 +0000

In light of the recent Supreme Court decision, we bring you the climactic scene of Episode 5 as imagined by advocates of individual gun rights

"What was that, Abercrombie?" Donnie yells, pulling his gat. Donnie broods and glares, because that's what one does when one is from the wrong side of the Orange County-Riverside border. He stares down Luke, raising his .357 at the All-American water-polo captain ten paces across the room, waiting for an answer.

Luke reaches around to the back of his designer board shorts, feeling for his piece, when his cocksure stare melts like a lonely Balboa Bar abandoned on the pier at noon.

"Jesus, Luke, do you never do anything right?" a soused Marissa Cooper contributes to the conversation, pulling a 9mm Beretta from the gun compartment of her matching Gucci handbag. "Drop the gun Donnie." Her words turn stern, but her hand can't quite hold the authority, or the straight line.

Seeing his star-crossed love interest once again as a distressed object that could only be saved by his actions, Ryan quickly switches from Brood to Break and pulls his own gun from the signature holster that he wears across his signature wife beater. In Newport, everyone packs heat, but in Chino, everyone lets everyone else know it. Because they gots to represent.

Ryan steadies himself behind the bar; Donny is the only obstacle between he and Luke. Luke is all that stands between Donny and the glass door. The bottle of Skyy was the only line between Marissa and a good night, but she broke through that line.

The Natty Ice is thick on Donny's breath, or as thick as Natty Ice can be. He didn't come here looking for a gunfight. A fight, sure. And yeah, he pulled the first piece of iron, but when it's 1am and you're eight beers and fifty Newporters deep into a party, sometimes these things like a good idea. It doesn't? Well, you're not the one with a gun. God bless the USA.

"What's going on?" Holly walks down the stairs, stumbling up next to Ryan with a comically over-sized shotgun that she must have taken from under her parents' bed from a box labeled "Use in the Event of the Apocalypse or a Democratic Administration." Donnie turns his head to look behind him, keeping his gun ahead on Luke, to see Holly aim the shotgun and almost tip over.

Ryan lowers his weapon and steadies Holly, taking the shotgun from her hands in the process. "You have acquired: The Shotgun" Seth Cohen remarks in his videogame announcer voice. Later, Summer would ask him why he doesn't pack heat. "Summer, my witty banter is all the heat I need." He would die in a gang shoot out on the pier two days later.

As Ryan, is holstering his Colt 45, the glass door slides open. It's Donny's friends. Blustering but without weapons drawn, they burst into the room, "What the hell is going on here Donny? Is this chump bothering-"

But that's as far as he gets, because Marissa's drunkenly itchy trigger finger freaked out and put a slug into Corona Hoodlum #1's shoulder. Immediately, Donny turns to his right and exacts vengeance, cutting a full three seasons out of the life of the show. Luke, in a fit of rage, runs to tackle Donny, because that's what Cro Magnon Man did, but Ryan had already aimed the shotgun at where Donny's chest would have been. Where Luke's head was.

All the while Corona Hoodlum #2 was pulling his sholem, an M-16 that he keeps strapped to his back. Because, you know, there's an inalienable individual right to carry guns. For the protection of a free state. This is our well regulated state militia.

Is It Over Yet?

noreply@blogger.com (Darryl) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 23:47:00 +0000

Pop Punk has always existed on the border of legitimacy and farce. For every Buzzcocks record, there was an Enema of the State. And for the bands that have always lived on that precipice, such as the Offspring, balancing the tight rope of mainstream acceptance and satisfying the best and worst of their fanbase has led to a variety of comic, terrible, and comically terrible results. The following is perhaps the most perfect of the last.

Show me how to lie
you're getting better all the time
And turning all against the one
Is an art that’s hard to teach

Another clever word
Sets off an unsuspecting herd
And as you step back into line
A mob jumps to their feet

"You're Gonna Go Far Kid." (Offspring - MySpace)

(Alternatively Panic! At The Disco's Myspace, where the album version's lack of an intro makes the point even clearer)

The troubling part of this comparison isn't that the Offspring ripped off Panic! At the Disco, it's that they somehow took the concept of the speak/sing diatribe and made it worse. To start, they copped the theme of deceit and made it even more painfully obvious, turning it from the agonizingly emo to the vacuously vague social criticism of 90's California punk. If there's one thing less interesting than hearing breathy teenage breakup angst, it's angsty teenage Soc 101.

Still, these things might be forgivable for the backbeat, the melody, and the powerchords, because that's pop punk's point, anyways. But that's where the wheels fall off. Assuming you're still reading this having listened to both of these songs, there's not much more I need to say: the vocal phrasing is identical; the only thing keeping the verse drum parts from being carbon copies is Panic's willingness to mix it up a bit, and the emo kids' instrumentation is infinitely more interesting than the Offspring's, which gets through the words with little more than stabbed powerchords. But I suppose finding room for one of the members of the trinity ain't bad. However much I loved Ixnay on the Hombre and Smash in my adolesence, time comes to admit they were never the Buzzcocks.

First there was the unlistenable kitsch of Pretty Fly for a White Guy, then the blatant theft of the most godawful Beatles song, and then a string of forgettable attempts to recapture the cultural zeitgeist. But this is enough, this is where we have to draw the line. This is Offspring's own "Greatest Man That Ever Lived," their Cut the Crap, their Return of Saturn. This is the proof that the band has finally outlived its usefulness and need never be heard from again. Find other projects, fade quietly into that good night, take up needlework or woodcraft. But please: no more Offspring.

Cartoon Blood

noreply@blogger.com (Darryl) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 06:16:00 +0000

Here at Neon Hustle, we like music. We also like television. Living back in a house with the latter, I bring you the following exploration of that once bold attempt to join the two media. But this ain't yo' momma's MTV. No, this is FNMTV: A liveblog on cartoon blood, one man's immovable hair, and the ethical-cum-aesthetic low point of summer songs.

0:04 - I forgot that Pete Wentz hosts this show. He's wearing a sleeveless hoodie and just introduced a ten second clip of LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out." This is already seeming like a very bad idea.

0:05 - They're running a clip wherein LL Cool J is talking about going to the market as a kid. "I can't work the register, ma!" The message for today's youth: Work might be good for some people, but not if you want to be a star. He's bagging groceries now as a photo op and asking where to put things. If he were a candidate, his questions would be the equivalent of Kerry asking for Swiss on a Philly Cheesesteak. We'll accept elitism from our celebrities, but not from our leaders.

0:09 - Run DMC "Rock Box" Clip. LL Cool J is talking about how rap was blowing up at the time of this clip and how he was partying with Russel Simmons and Madonna when it came out. "Rock Box" was released in 1984. LL Cool J released Radio in 1985.

0:10 - The crowd is cheering for a clip of Pete Wentz stuffing his face with spaghetti in an homage to "Doin' It." So far my enjoyment of this show is directly correlated to the dude's screen time.

0:11 - Video Premiere! It's hard to say what the most distracting part of this experience is: there's the video effect that makes me feel like I'm constantly engaging hyperdrive and the "your baby" being looped through the chorus. The worst is probably the crowd noise randomly piped in during the track. Having come of age in the midst of TRL, I keep thinking the producers are about to cut to the studio. No such luck.

0:15 - They've got a skybox? Tim Kash, the British accented VJ, sits with The Game and James Montgomery, a "music journalist" who resembles Craig Finn, sans 20 years and 60 pounds. And Montgomery just dissed the track! "I didn't see that drive there, I want to see the hunger from the kid who wanted to get out of the supermarket." While it sounds disturbingly like commentary on a basketall halftime show, he's got a point. The crowd booed, and the VJ advised him to watch his back. They're about to cut to commercials, a phrase I use loosely since they just spent thirty seconds talking about how you could use Verizon to be a better MTV consumer, but not before letting us know that She & Him will be coming up soon. Did you know Zooey Deschanel is an actress!

00:20 - Last week, Rihanna played with Maroon 5. Apparently she has a song other than "Umbrella" and justice still hasn't been served on their career.

00:21 - "You may know her from a movie called "Almost Famous." And he is almost famous. Please welcome She & Him." I wonder if Wentz writes his own material. Oh, he's asking her about the actress/singer transition, and him about getting involved with someone making the actress/singer transition... He probably does. Next question is an homage to Almost Famous because, get this, she was in that movie! "Is there a record that did set you free, or that is so influential to you?" If you were wondering, she said Revolver.

The video is unbelievably, adorably, and wonderfully twee. Which makes it all the better when they turn to The Game for the first word: "I just like all the cartoon blood. I figured out a way to get blood into my videos without MTV blurring it out, ya gotta make it cartoon." Montgomery makes the Scar-Jo comparisons and then the VJ continues sucking up to The Game. The dude's got a Dodgers tattoo on right cheek, clearly way cooler than the journo.

It's worth saying that, even beyond the catchy single, great video, and adorable singer/actress, the She & Him record really is quite good. The songwriting is strong, and it's a refreshing throwback in sound and sensibility. Her voice, while far from perfect, is strong when it needs to be and vulnerable in just the way that her songs ask. It's a shame that she's unable to escape the actress narrative, when the more apt comparisons may be to 1920's revivalists The Ditty Bops or still-learing-the-vocals Kaki King.

0:31 - Dark Knight Returns clip instead of immediately bringing out Daughtry. I'm really quite ok with this. Though the clip isn't all that interesting. Heath Ledger shoots some guns and Batman stoically rams a garbage truck. Wentz: "I want to see the Game driving the Batmobile." Ok, the sucking up to the Game is getting a bit much.

0:33 - Fuck, they're rolling the Daughtry clip. The phrase "American Idol" isn't mentioned, but the blue-collar family man makes good is laid on thicker than Pete Wentz's product. Seriously, I don't think I've seen his hair move - it's like Trump Hair or something.

0:35 - Watching Pete Wentz's hair for movement is more interesting than this interview. Daughtry observes: "We can say anything and [the crowd would] be all, "WOOO!"" He's painfully right.

00:39 - Blurring the line between the show and the advertisements. Pete Wentz drives a smart car to go pick up The Game and his entourage. They kick him out, and two guys sit on the gate of the trunk as they drive into the distance. Wentz forlornly asks a local for directions. If this is an ad, it sucks as much as the Daughtry clip. Pete Wentz just claimed Ryan Seacrest as a friend. I don't think Ryan Seacrest would admit to having Ryan Seacrest as a friend.

0:42 - This is the first time I've consciously listened to Daughtry and I'm really wishing I hadn't. This band seems to combine the self-satisfied, over-the-top vocals of Creed with the rhythm section from Nickelback. Their guitar and piano parts fall between the aforementioned and Aerosmith.

Is it wrong to hate on a band while they run a video publicizing the charity work of underappreciated groups and people from across the world? While it's been done before, there are a laundry list of groups that people might never have heard of were it not for this video. Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty Internaional, Urban Compass, Insight Prison Project, Seacology, Surfaid, Room to Read, Homeboy Industries, Keep a Child A Live...

0:49 - I'd keep listing, but the commercial break is over and Katy Perry is on talking about what might be the song of the summer, "I Kissed a Girl." Hilights of the clip, which cuts between shots of her face (cleavage and up) and her hands... on her legs.

"Girls are very girly, we have summer parties and we have choreographed dance moves in pajamas... It's kind of about that. It's like kissing your arm sometimes. We smell very good. We smell like vanilla, watermelons, strawberries. [...] Not trying to be a role model or a posterchild for anything because I'm in the business of rock and roll. I'm in the business of rock and roll... I came here to inspire people to listen to pop music again."

This is one of the worst hit songs ever. There are some that are unlistenable but inexplicably turn to pop culture earworm ("Pop" by N*Sync). There are others that are just plain bad, in the "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)" way. I'll defer on the latter to the posters and commenters at Feministe:

In popular culture, kissing a woman is only permissible and sanctioned if a woman is already an avowed heterosexual. [...] The icing on the cake comes from Perry’s own objectification of a female subject: “Just wanna try you on / I’m curious for you” and “No, I don’t even know your name / It doesn’t matter / You’re my experimental game / Just human nature”. Now we’re free to dehumanize and sexualize each other into pieces of meat to be sampled, instead of waiting around for a man to do it! [...] This attitude underscores an aggressive masculinity that runs through the song, its beat, and Perry’s singing: “and I liked it” is sung with such defiance. It poses as third-wave feminism with a “girly” but loud-and-proud protagonist, but is really just good, old-fashioned woman-using.

Back to the point, Perry's song is abysmal. It rides its sing-along chorus as far as it will go, but has little else but a story written in lyrics that don't quite scan over a marching electro-drum beat. For someone who claims to be in the business of rock and roll, she doesn't have much faith in the holy trinity of bass, drums, and guitar.

As the show draws to a close, Perry is showered in balloons.

In watching an hour of television, I saw three music videos and one live performance. If I'd gotten to hear The Game's thoughts on Katy Perry, it might have almost been worth it.

III-IV: Collars

noreply@blogger.com (Darryl) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:27:00 +0000

It is entirely coincidental that the posting of the third installment of the series coincided with the conviction, without jail time, of Lee Kun-Hee, former Chairman of Samsung Group. Not that his sentence is big news; such occurrences have become commonplace.

Having cast off the shackles of their colonial oppressors and defined the framework of a free state, our country's landed white forefathers set their sights on the next great set of legal challenges facing an ever-westward expanding America. Willard Hurst's "Law and the Conditions of Freedom" presents the development of legal institutions in 19th century America that a cynic may see concerned as much with promoting a climate conducive to the development of enterprise as the rule of law. In fact, if the latter was a goal, it was perhaps worthwhile only in service of the former. And so the law of torts, of contracts, and of property were developed to help the entrepreneurial souls of these United States fulfill the potential of the land they saw before them. Pristine and uninhabited... though only described by the former prior to being placed in the thrall of industrialization, and only noted as the latter for ignorance or disregard of multitudes of Native Americans. But, yeah, go west, young man!

Episode three of The OC throws the contemporary viewer into a swirl of reference, and a sensation of pop cultural vertigo. Ryan's nemesis is none other than Francis Capra (Eli "Weevil" Navarro) from Veronica Mars, who lays the crime/prison drama hurt on young Mr. Atwood in the form of a fork to the neck. If the wound looks a bit like a vampire bite, you can blame the writer: Buffy expatriate Jane Espensen (Band Candy). The "crime": Ryan is unable to be released to a guardian after being held for questioning in the fire that consumed the Newport Group's latest model home.

Episode four of the series closes with what everyone enjoys the show for most: rash, poorly thought out decisions which cut a clear and tantalizing path to high melodrama. In this case, we have the confluence of Jimmy Cooper's embezzlement of his client's money to pay for his family's lavish lifestyle combined with his total unwillingness to confront his problems directly... until the social event of the year when one of his clients would like a check for his at-this-point embezzled money. Never mind that he could have not shown up, or simply written a bad check considering he was already hemorrhaging cash and looking at 20 years in the joint, but no, he was going to own up to it.

There's been plenty of ink spilled on the place of law in society, whether it has played such a consciously mustache-twirling capitalist role as Hurst portrays and critics of capitalism would accuse, and whether such roles can be normatively categorized for good or for ill. Not only have I yet to even begin my legal education, but these questions go far deeper than a few hundred words in a blog post on a tv show. Still, it's admirable that a primetime high school soap points out what should be obvious and inescapable: that it's all too rare that white collar criminals have to roll the hard eight, and it's far too often that the disadvantaged find themselves on the losing side of the craps game that our legal system can sometimes be.

In abstract terms, we believe justice should be meted out equally - a thief should be treated as a thief. In specific terms, we are willing to carve out exceptions in the name of circumstance and familiarity. But in between, our conception of justice has become so warped that the prospect of a white collar criminal serving jail time is almost impossible to comprehend. Since 2003, we've made steps: but they're more punchlines than warnings. Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, Enron Executives? But by and large, it is far easier to sell America on jailing a man for life for stealing a few video tapes than it is to sell them on defrauding the country and taking its citizenry for millions. After all, if 3 strikes work for baseball, it must work for the criminal justice system.

Perhaps this means that Hurst was wrong - if our legal system has engendered bad business practices, can it really be said that is the course on which it sought to set us? Perhaps the country lost its way, and the protection of markets and enterprise was gradually replaced by the zealous guarding of entrenched monopolies and corrupt actors? Maybe those old, propertied white men had a point when they were focusing on preventing bad people from doing bad things to take advantage of good people, just expanding that notion to business as well as government.

II: The Greatest Song That Ever Lived

noreply@blogger.com (Darryl) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:31:00 +0000

As these pieces were written sequentially, the show's most greivous use of this song was not mentioned in the original draft. Watching the series finale, one is left to wonder if there will ever be a new universal dramatic shibboleth in the vein of the Buckley cover. We can only hope it will be "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived," from Weezer's Red album.

"Jeff is the son of cult songwriter Tim Buckley
Jeff's Song "the last goobye was udesd in the movie vanilla sky
Jeff was born on noember 17, 1966 in Orange County, California."

- Music Guide Subtitles, Episode 2 of Season 1, The OC

These are the optional subtitles that appear while Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" plays in the moments prior to the fiery climax of the second episode of the series - when Marissa Cooper walks into the model home in which Ryan Atwood is living, throws herself at him, only to have herself turned down in what is either the most emotionally mature decision by a sixteen year old juvenile delinquent or what would be the stupidest decision of any man's life. These are also perhaps the stupidest facts to include while this song is playing.

For starters, the song is not a Buckley original, but a cover of a Leonard Cohen song: a fact that has been common knowledge as the track has been used ad naseum by TV producers since they seemingly discovered the track. Perhaps this history also bears mention, in that the the OC is blazing a trail cut by dozens of pioneers before them, most of which also dropped the dramatic ball with their use of the song. There are also the more charitable facts to include: Buckley described his Orange County roots in a Raygun interview as "rootless trailer trash," a characterization which would make Marissa's introductory line, "this song reminds me of you," a bit more sensical. Of course, it would also risk problematizing the concept of the OC as universally perfect and hazard the very premise of the show.

Perhaps the show isn't premised in such an inviolable perfection of the county, but it does (at least at this stage) rely on defining issues of class along distinctly geographic lines. While the OC doesn't deny that there are problems with class in America, it says that these problems are ones of The Riverside County. Perhaps even more importantly, they are ones that come when the Riverside, and the LA, meet the OC, as happens when Seth goes to the LBC in the third episode, only to have his mom's Range Rover tore up. As long as Ryan were to have stayed in Chino, things may not have been great for him, but he could have maintained his path without much interference, aberration of the carjacking aside.

The other tidbit about Buckley the producers neglect to mention in their three point summary is perhaps the most tragic, and the most widely known -- which makes its absence all the more conspicuous. Jeff Buckley died in Memphis, drowning in the Wolf River Tributary of the Mississippi River. Fully clothed, wearing his boots, and singing Zep's "Whole Lotta Love," the thirty year old swam out and disappeared from sight. Maybe this is to what Marissa's enigmatic line was referring, but such subtext is way too good for this show.

Or consider this explanation: Marissa attempts suicide in a swirl of emotions brought on by her parents divorce, her ill-fated romance with Luke, and her then un-requited love for Ryan, by whom she is reminded of this song. Fall Out Boy named the song "Hum Hallelujah" after the Jeff Buckley cover since it was playing in Pete Wentz's car when he attempted suicide. Pete Wentz parlayed the commercial success of Fall Out Boy into the creation of a personal brand that has evangelized the aesthetics of the contemporary wave of emo-punk -- or mall-emo; emo; pop-punk; deriviative, uninventive and misogynistic crap; whatever you choose to call it. The OC turned its position as a cultural arbiter into a venue for the first bridgings of "indie" and "mainstream" culture from the perspective of the mainstream. That is to say, while underground scenes have cried cooptation for decades, and have broken to varying degrees (hip-hop, new-wave), it was the advent of the OC that started the groundswell of mainstream journalistic consensus that indie was " in" beyond the post-Nirvana search for suitable college radio acts. Now, indie was in because it was indie.

Perhaps, Marissa Cooper is foreshadowing her eventual role in the cultural landscape. Perhaps Marissa Cooper is Pete Wentz.

I: Forward, Into the Breach

noreply@blogger.com (Darryl) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:45:00 +0000

Inspired by timing, geography, and our friends, what follows is the first in a series.

Phantom Planet first skyrocketed to fame on the identity of their drummer, Wes Anderson's beloved Jason Schwartzman. One of the bands to synthesize LA club buzz with nationwide nerd appreciation on the heels of Rushmore, countless records were sold into the hands of fans soon to be disappointed with the workmanlike attempt to crib the Attractions without the dynamism of Elvis Costello. That is, of course, but for the lead single: California.

The song was released in November of 2002, but hit the bigtime after McG picked it as the theme song to Fox's summer premiere blockbuster series, The OC. For the first episode, it is a transition piece, playing as Ryan moves from Chino to Newport Beach. The carefree, echoing track starts as he packs his bag, fleeing his mom and abusive step father, and futilely seeks refuge with friends. Pulling his public defender's card from his pocket and sticking it in his mouth, not unintentionally like a cigarette, Sandy Cohen arrives once more as the savior in an incongruous black BMW.

For all of Phantom Planet's faults, and all the qualms one can have with a pop song, this track is a fantastic piece of work. The piano and guitar build a surprisingly solid base until the drums come in with a casually powerful backbeat under the second verse, and the the chorus is among the best reasons why stereos were put in cars and roads were built down the California coast.

But the 101 doesn't go from Chino to Newport, and that isn't even the biggest problem here. "California" is a song about coming back, and the OC is a show about being anywhere but. Despite any overtures toward similarity and common human experience, it is a show driven by conflicts bred by difference. "Welcome to the OC, Bitch."

It used to be that residents of Orange County, CA would describe their origins to foreigners by some combination of landmarks. Los Angeles, Disney Land, San Diego, Not in Florida. This show had the remarkable effect of putting a place on the map, no disrepect to Colin and Jack. From here on out, the response to identifying your origins behind the Orange Curtain was no longer, "Where's Orange County?" but "Do you know Seth and Summer?"

That isn't exaggeration. I've been asked a variant of that query on multiple occasions: by Brits, Irish, Spaniards, Thais, Serbs, Tenesseans. Mostly with the same wink and self-aware smirk that belies the stupidity of the question, but with the question nonetheless.

We are nearly five years from the premiere of the Oc. A show that began the shift toward the year-round prime-time premiere scheduling, but that couldn't stop the onslaught of reality-television on the networks. A show that forever altered the self-perceived and therefore only reality of the place in which I lived for eighteen years. A show that today isn't even carried in my hometown's Blockbuster. A show that is perhaps due for a critical reevaluation, or perhaps one that can occupy me for twenty seven episodes and two months before I start law school.

Hagiography for the Hostile

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:48:00 +0000

George Carlin died of heart failure Sunday in Santa Monica, California. He mattered.

Our last true living link to the time of revolutionaries like Bruce and Pryor, he possessed a decidedly more intellectual lean than either yet neither man’s trappings of lifestyle affectations. We seem prone, in our least optimistic times, to ask what could have been but for Bruce’s casual-turned-consuming drug use (a predictable result of the naïve Beats’ junk affectation and, arguably, listening to jazz) or Pryor’s surprising expiration at the age of 65 (the inevitable result of such prolonged use of heavy narcotics and, arguably, those movies with Gene Wilder.) We had such a relic among us for all those years, and a man who stayed long enough to see more than one boundary to push in a lifetime. Of all the icons to inspire so many generations of comedy writers, Carlin seems the most immediately traceable to our modern “alternative” sensibilities, and he can also be remembered as a life lived in example to his philosophical descendents.

In all these ensuing decades of hack pun-smiths and observational retreaders coming to typify our expectation of comedians, but Carlin’s routines were not only clever and utterly original those years ago, but remarkable in their acuity and economy even today, defining a style truly unique from his peers and imitators. At his best (and he was always at his best, right up through his final performance just one week before his passing) he could proudly call himself the finest bullshit detector we’ve ever had, and to George Carlin that was a responsibility. Where imitation has lead so many to comics to (lucrative) mediocrity bereft of legitimately dangerous insight, Carlin never lost his edge… or his nerve. Equal parts performance artist and dedicated semanticist, and he remained every bit as attuned and committed to his roles as an Andy Kauffman or Umberto Ecco. The vanguard of all enemies of the status quo, Carlin spent a career in our invented social covenant of language and put our skeletons out to bleach in the sun. His methods of subversion were both novel and precise, and his most memorable works sprang not only from the absurdities of the things we’ve experienced, but the very ways in which we talk about them.

But contrary to what we’d like to think, commentary isn’t always activism. You have to earn the distinction of having ever changed anything, and Carlin won his bona fides many times over. A pierced longhair in the button-downed entertainment industry of the 60s and 70s, one of the only outspoken atheists to remain in the public eye through the “moral majority” uprisings of the 80s (and again in the 2000s), and a vital source of anti-institutionalism through the new century, he can be pointed to as someone who has definitively and profoundly altered not only popular culture, but the nature of American public discourse well beyond that as well. And, of course, Carlin also has a badge of honor that none of whom we consider “edgy” comics today ever will- his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” bit was so damned good it was played before the justices of United States Supreme Court.

In recent years we’ve seen the departures of the only voices of dissent to have ever made any difference: Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, and now perhaps our last great critic of convention, all in an era when we need them at their most volatile in an all-too urgent way. We’ve spent so long in numbing self-delusion that his clarity of vision could only be called miraculous, and his willingness to share it was among the closest things I’ve ever known to a promise of redemption that I could believe in. Before the official canonization, let me declare his nomination here: in our shared cultural mythology, George Carlin is our saint of words.

Live Blog Listening Party: Stay Positive by The Hold Steady

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:38:00 +0000

While we at Neon Hustle certainly esteem each other’s opinions, we’re by no means monolithic in our likes and dislikes. Even if we tend to agree or disagree on the specific quality of something, oftentimes the reasons for those assessments are at complete odds. So when a band we all admire (for predictably different reasons) releases a new album, we're of course going to try and make sense of it all.

The Hold Steady will issue their fourth LP, Stay Positive, in July on Vagrant Records. One of the most anticipated new releases of 2008 (at least in our camp), we’ve consequently wasted no time in assembling. What follows are our opinions of the album—biased in orientation, baseless in gestation, and bellicose of argument—as produced in real time listening to Stay Positive. Our missives have been edited only for length, coherency, and to mask the scent of three budding alcoholics.

Into the breach...

*********

Brendan: Any things to say about The Hold Steady or Stay Positive before we begin? Thoughts, expectations, etc?

Darryl: As a general thought, I have enough faith in Craig Finn as an artist that I was willing to put in the effort to work through some tracks that irked me at first (like “One for the Cutters”) and at this point I'm a pretty big fan of the album. I'm not yet sure where I put it overall in their work.

Steven: It’s not as good Boys and Girls in America, certainly, but that album was pretty freaking spectacular. It's strange, the Hold Steady sort of assumed the mantle of being the voice of America's youth with Boys and Girls, and this album seems a very concentrated reaction against that.

Brendan: In terms of literally using their age to reconnect with adolescent experience, this seems a more overtly pop-punk record. But my initial reaction is that I immediately connected with a higher percentage of songs on Stay Positive than any other Hold Steady album.

Steven: Okay, well let's go.

TRACK 1: “Constructive Summer”

(Tattoo by Adam Suerte, Brooklyn Tattoo. Thanks to Mr. Lee.)

Darryl: The unreconstructed pop-punk fan in me adores this track. So does the rest of me, but that part especially.

Steven: Yeah, I'm a total sucker for unadulterated optimism, which this song has in spades.

Brendan: "Constructive Summer" marks the first Hold Steady track with backing vocals by Lucero's Ben Nichols, who guests on 3 tracks.

Darryl: Wait, he's somewhere other than here and “Magazines”?

Steven: I didn’t even know he was on this track! The only time Nichols ever distinguishes himself at any point in this record is in "Magazines".

Brendan: Here's my problem: people seem to like the shout-along choruses that started in earnest with "Chips Ahoy!", but I think the band is underselling itself by not letting any other member of the band/guest compliment Finn with a true backing vocal. Nichols sings in his lower register the whole time and he's absolutely buried in the mix.

Darryl: I think the other vocalist is a false need. Yes, there are amazing bands with great second vocalists (Saint Mick Jones?) but I by no means think they need to define the band. Even sing-along songs can work with layered vocals by a single singer.

Moreover, I think the inclusion of a second vocalist with presence risks diluting the impact of a band whose identity is in so many ways defined by the consistency of Finn's gravel. Insomuch as second vocalists come in, they fill specific needs (“Chillout Tent,” “Constructive Summer”). I dig.

Brendan: So why even have the guest vocal then? What specific need is filled here? I mean, Nichols has a unique enough voice to be used well, but he really seems noticeably buried in this mix. Like, it stands out that the response vocal is so low.

Darryl: Could the story in “Chillout Tent” be told as well by Finn? Maybe, but the fresh voice adds so much to it. On this track, I think it's a matter of creating a dynamic that follows the sort of band/concert/summer/experience evoked by the song. I can almost envision Ben leaning into a mic at a live show to sing this, and I think that's what it's supposed to sound like.

Brendan: I do have another point quickly if we're off that one. What's the threshold on Minneapolis shoutouts? The "double whiskey coke no ice" lyric in "Constructive Summer" is, in a song otherwise not actively acknowledged to be set in Minnesota, is a reference to Dillinger Four.

Darryl: I appreciated it. And I appreciated Dillinger Four. It's subtle, which is nice.

Brendan: The band is from fucking Brooklyn . Pick a loyalty already. At some point, you fail to be from your hometown.

Darryl: Says the man who reps Texas but still has the "I Love the OC" shirt.

Brendan: But why is Brooklyn not a part of their mythology?

Steven: Inertia?

Brendan: Of course, Newton! What a fool I've been!

Steven: Seriously, if you're going to be a hyper self-referential band, you have to call back to your old albums. And for whatever reason, Finn sang first about Minnesota. That was what, 10 years ago now?

Brendan: More than that if you count Lifter Puller, which I do.

Darryl: Whether conscious or not, there's always a degree of resistance to change. Which in some ways is representative of some of their characters, and in other ways simply a product of growing up and not being quite willing to let go.

Do we want to move on to “Sequestered in Memphis”?

Brendan: After this: “Constructive Summer” is so far is the #2 best opening track on any album this year. Because it rocks face. That is all.

TRACK 2: “Sequestered in Memphis”

Darryl: I had my doubts about this track when it premiered, but I've since come around to everything about it. The story, the characters, the sound, the instrumentation.

Brendan: This is Nichols’ second track.

Steven: I'd have never known.

Darryl: When you talk about them addressing a new range of experiences, is this one of the tracks you're talking about?

Steven: Yeah, this is certainly part of that. It’s the first time any of Finn's protagonists deals with the fallout from their actions.

Darryl: Exactly!

Brendan: I don’t know about that. He's flippant about the "consequences".

Steven: Sure, but even if the protagonist is dismissive of those consequences, he's still dealing with them if only because he’s being questioned by the police. The acceptance of those consequences comes later in the album, which we’ll get to. It’s a soft-build up, but an important change in the usual HS narrative.

Darryl: I think it's as much about the context as anything else. "Reality" or "the law" or whatever is an abstract or perhaps nonexistent entity in other tracks.

Brendan: "Do you think I'm that stupid? / Well look, what the hell, I'll tell my story again …" This guy doesn't give a shit; you’ve got nothing on him.

Darryl: It bears mention that even if the same kind of character is still dodging the same kind of issues, the story is being told from a different perspective than usual, which I think is a notable difference. (This might be Gideon in twenty years.)

Steven: It's THE noticeable difference, in my mind. I completely agree that the character's paradigm hasn't shifted at all. But, again, the previous consequences were usually detoxing in some way or another. This dude's got a shitstorm of problems coming his way beyond “my head hurts”.

Brendan: In any event, as the only one of us who has lived in both Texas and the Memphis metropolitan area, I am tempted to make this my banner HS song. I probably would too, if I didn't place a horrible stigma on first-singles from albums.

Steven: You could do worse. This is a kick-ass tune. For instance, you could choose....

Brendan: Uh oh

TRACK 3: “One for the Cutters”

Steven: … this one. We’re entering the two-song doldrums of the album.

Darryl: It's such a drastic shift, and it references back to something altogether different both in style and era from the first tracks.

Brendan: I’ll bite. I love this track. Go off.

Darryl: First listen: Too long, weird instrumentation, your songs are NOT sing-along songs!

Steven: The harpsichord is cloying. It's too long. And Finn’s first foray into economic/social justice just feels false to me.

Brendan: Tell me why "When one townie falls in the forest does anyone notice" aren’t the best lyrics on the record.

Steven: It’s didactic.

Brendan: Ah, but why isn't this growth? I mean, he's spent how many years now playing on the middle-to-lower class sandbox? Previously, the only upper-class characters were there to score, and we get that.

Darryl: A friend of mine was a big fan of Separation Sunday, but found Boys and Girls too "sing along song" for her tastes. Of course, she reads a lot of Joyce and lived in Greece for a while. She doesn't love HS for the Springsteen drenched opening of “Stuck Between Stations,” or the chorus of "You Can Make Him Like You." She liked the fact that Finn could tell a story with words, punctuated by music, like nobody else these days. That's what SS did, and that's what this song does. Awkwardly, it puts its musical adventurism totally in service of the story.

With this song, if I listen to the music, I want to tear out my headphones. If I hear the words, I'm pretty much hooked.

Brendan: I love the harpsichord. Why is the instrumentation not rewarded?

Darryl: Because it sounds like a troubadour traveling through Sherwood Methampheta-Forest. This is not a great song. But it's not "The Greatest Man that Ever Lived" either.

Steven: So why are you so taken with it, Brendan?

Brendan: This song, to me, is when Stay Positive hooks me. It’s lyrically engaging, and if you can't take harpsichord, I understand. But if you like the sound, this is an exceptionally well paced track, and Franz gets double credit for the rising piano scale.

Steven: Yeah, the piano is fantastic.

Brendan: If you like the piano, recognize that it is a direct foil to the harpsichord. You like it because the melodic work is already being done in another register!

Darryl: I like this song for the characters it creates and where it puts them. I like the sound insomuch as it carries me into a mildly unsettled feeling that I think is something key to the story. The Stranglers were a post-punk band, but they never had the dancey-ness of New Order or the heart on the sleeve emotion of the Cure, but what made them interesting is how they created sweeping, dark, and occasionally operatic songs that were drenched in reverb, experimented with synthesizers and other instrumentation, and were dark in the most pathetically 15 year old deadjournal way, but were still interesting because they held you with their melodies and their ideas.

What ultimately gets me, though, is that I never liked the Stranglers that much. And I don't like this song this much, even if it's got some incredibly redeeming qualities.

That's pretty much all I wanted to get out there. And also that I don't really think I'd call it well paced.

TRACK 4: “Navy Sheets”

Steven: Continuing with the theme of "totally wasted backup vocalists," that's Patterson Hood you can barely hear on this track.

Darryl: Continuing my theme of not knowing that a backup vocalist was brought on...

Brendan: This record has a weak as hell mix.

Steven: I only know it’s Hood because of the band’s website. How did you know about Nichols?

Brendan: His voice is more distinct, plus there was the promo material.

Darryl: Also, Brendan stalks Lucero.

Brendan: Not since That Much Further West, thanks.

Steven: That was the one album Darryl recommended to me! No wonder I dismissed them.

Darryl: Damn, my bad. I can't remember when I'd have put that as my Lucero pick. I like that album, but I'm not sure I'd have ever put it over Tennessee as an intro.

And is Is it safe to say that, given the digression, that no one has overwhelming opinions on this track?

Steven: Yup.

Brendan: We just spent the whole of "Navy Sheets" talking about another band!

Darryl: I don't know what this song reminds me of.

Brendan: It reminds me of the re-done CGI in the Star Wars re-releases of the late 90s.

Hey guys, if I ever meet George Lucas, remind me to punch him in the junk

Steven: It reminds me that I want to skip this track whenever it comes on.

TRACK 5: “Lord, I’m Discouraged”

Steven: Craig Finn said this album was about growing up, and this is most clear-cut example of that. It’s definitely the album’s highlight.

Darryl: I figured that would be your take. Given your DBT appreciation and affinity for this sort of song, this was written for you.

Steven: Yeah, I’m predictable.

Darryl: And probably right.

Steven: I can't think of a single fault with it. Seriously, a copy of this song should be buried in a time capsule or sent into space or something, just as evidence of the worthiness of human endeavor in the 21st century.

Brendan: Even though Kubler goes to the finger tapping in the 4th minute? Seriously, is the guitar solo worth a fucking thing anymore?

Steven: I'd say absolutely, but then I'm a DBT fan

Darryl: I'm not sure the guitar solo can really exist as an independent entity anymore. Especially with a guitar solo like that, you can't help but be reminded of every other shredder to do the same, or some similar thing, before it. Hair metal ruined any stretch of notes that fast and that long for future generations.

Steven: So does that mean I'm a dinosaur? Because I’m a total sucker for guitar solos.

Darryl: No, it just means you're not as jaded. This song really is fantastic. I think I’m willing to indulge the guitar solo in the sense that it seems to fit in a bizarre, depressed way.

Brendan: Someone tell me what this story is about.

Steven: It's a guy with an ambiguous relationship with a girl who's clearly on the downward spiral, praying for her salvation. So it's the first ever HS protagonist outside the prism of the usual lowlifes.

I think that guitar solo is there just to make sure that we know the guy hasn't given up all hope. In the first couple of verses he’s just listing off all the things gone wrong, but after that solo, the tenor of his confession changes to one where he puts the resolution in the hands of God, who wouldn’t handle the situation any worse than he has. There’s something powerful in that.

Brendan: That last line might also be the admission that he's completely moved on. He hoped she's alright because she's not in his life to watch over anymore.

Steven: Oooh, I like that, even if I’m not sure I totally agree.

TRACK 6: “Yeah Sapphire”

Steven: This is a fucking great song, even if it’s pretty redolent of “Constructive Summer,” musically speaking.

Brendan: Only slower and not as propulsively interesting. Nothing here speaks to my 16 year old self, except the Sacto shoutout, where I was born and hope never to return to.

Steven: I thought we had decided this album was beyond the 16 year olds? Anyway, this is a pretty cookie-cutter HS song, but there’s a ripping line I’ve totally latched on to: “Dreams they cost money, but money costs some dreams.” I also think its tempo works great after “Lord, I’m Discouraged”.

Brendan: I never agreed that this wasn’t for “The Kids.”

Darryl: Structurally, this could be a sing-along. It has all the makings of the Boys and Girls tracks that put us in that place, but it's more restrained. I'm not sure if that's intentional or whether they swung for the fence and missed.

Brendan: Is Boys and Girls really a sing-along record? I sing along to “Chips Ahoy!” and “You Can Make Him Like You”, but is that the REAL HS?

Darryl: I don’t know if there’s a “real” HS. I think there's a continuum of evolution, I don't think they're static.

Steven: Is “sing-along” a pejorative term for you guys?

Brendan: No, I like sing-alongs, but not without a defined secondary vocal presence (see “Magazines”). But I consider a straight ahead rock song that I can sing along with to be an unevolved version of what I used to like, back before I realized that I couldn’t mute every other chord effectively enough to play ska.

TRACK 7: “Both Crosses”

Brendan: Worst song on the album?

Steven: This is a very dense track, lyrically speaking, that is frankly beyond me without access to the lyrics. With that caveat, it’s pretty bad, but what makes it so? The banjo doesn’t help things, I know that.

Darryl: The indulgent instrumentation and dense wall of sound.

Brendan: Are Finn's lyrical pretensions towards Catholicism an affectation at this point? Do they serve a purpose beyond saying, “I went to Boston College!”?

Darryl: I think Catholicism is a crucial element of some of his characters.

Brendan: Ah, but this is not a character-driven record.

Darryl: Not in the broader sense, but I think it's still stories about people, and still very directly so.

Brendan: But without the context of the other characters.

Darryl: You mean across the whole album/catalog?

Brendan: Yeah. There is no connect on this album’s characters. It’s not a story record.

Darryl: I think that's true - and in the sense that the characters could sometimes be drawn without Catholicism and be no less full, I think it can sometimes be a crutch for him.

TRACK 8: “Stay Positive”

Darryl: The pacing on this album is really great.

Steven: Yeah, we've been listening to this thing for about two hours, and that's the one thing that's struck me most about it. There's really only one off note ("One for the Cutters").

Brendan: So, is this one a reach-out to the kids? You’ve got shoutouts to Youth of Today and 7 Seconds.

Darryl: Only if you reach out to the kids these days with references to bands that started in the 80s.

Brendan: Ah, but the throwback shit is popular with kids (like me).

Darryl: True, but the song rags on the actual youths of today (not the band) pretty heavily. “The kids are too skinny, the kids are gonna have kids of their own, etc...” It seems like it’s looking at the scene by looking back.

Also, this is Stay Positive’s reference-every-other-HS-track-ever song.

Steven: "Stay positive" the song is to Stay Positive the album as that long guitar solo was to "Lord I'm discouraged": bit of levity before the resignation and fatalism set in (in the album’s case, the last three tracks).

TRACK 9: “Magazines”

Steven: Wherein we finally meet Ben Nichols.

Brendan: Somebody please tell me why "Magazines" shouldn’t be a hit?

Steven: I'm actually surprised that this wasn't the first single.

Brendan: This is the most adult of any relationship Finn seems to write about. Not to say middle aged, but characters with real jobs and the same leanings they had when they were 17. You know, like anybody else.

Darryl: I think that's pretty accurate; it's definitely a lot closer than anything on Separation Sunday, but I'm still put off by some of the lyrics. “Hits her like a tambourine,” "I know you're pretty pissed, I hope you'll still let me kiss you." It's this sort of lyricism more than any other factor that reminds me of the mall-emo genre. There's a casual misogyny and a dynamic of objectification that's eerily reminiscent of Fall Out Boy, Brand New and company. Which isn't to say it's a bad representation of that character, but it weirds me out.

Brendan: I'm just saying, these are as fully formed as any characters on the record. Why can't their experience be taken as a matured relationship?

Darryl: Because I think after the first verse, the character of the woman isn't really defined by much apart from the way in which she's pursued by the men.

Brendan: Is “Magazines” the best song on the album?

Darryl: I don't think it's the best song on the album, but I do think it's probably the best single on the album.

Brendan: Do either of you have significant issues with the hypothetical of if the album ended now? Would you miss the latter songs?

Darryl: No. It was a great album up to this point, and resolves pretty well here.

Brendan: And how can you not love that “Magazines” ends with the exact note as “Holland 1945”?

TRACK 10: “Joke About Jamaica”

Steven: So does your previous observation make these next two tracks superfluous? Because I really like the narrative conceit of this one. I think it's pretty important to the album, both as a warning against superficial self-worth, and a pretty sardonic take on ossifying in a youth-dominated culture.

Brendan: Explain.

Steven: It's about a groupie who thinks she's hot shit till she gets older, at which point the bands won’t have anything to with her. So she gets bitter: “The boys in the band, no they’ll never be stars.” It doesn’t really add anything to the album thematically, but it reinforces the themes. And it's very listenable.

Darryl: But being written from the perspective of a woman, I think it is a different take.

Steven: Yeah, but I think there's also a bit of transference there. The fears of age squeezing you out of a youth-dominated scene are probably front and center for Finn and Co.

Brendan: Why the marked lack of Tad's leads? This is the first track to feature them since "Lord, I’m Discouraged". I remember when I first started listening to HS, Kubler’s guitar was all over 'em. But I think there are 2 guitar solo tracks on this entire album.

Darryl: I think the role of the guitar changes pretty significantly in the style of the last few songs. With Boys and Girls there was a pretty significant shift to other instruments, though.

Brendan: I half want to enter a philosophical deathmatch with Steven over guitar solos. But okay, let’s move on.

TRACK 11: “Slapped Actress”

Darryl: What's the best album closer HS have done?

Brendan: “How a Resurrection Really Feels”

Darryl: Yeah, that's always been my pick, too. Both for what it does for the album and for the song itself just kicking ass.

Steven: “Killer Parties”

Darryl: That was my second choice. I think “Slapped Actress” is third, with “Southtown Girls” coming in last.

Steven: Considering “Southtown Girls” is a pretty strong track, that's still some high praise. They certainly know how to close out albums, in other words.

Brendan: That, or they have a high percentage of good songs equally worthy of praise.

Darryl: I dunno, I don't think “Killer Parties” would have worked nearly as well had it been placed anywhere else on the record. “Southtown Girls” is the exception in that I think it may have been better somewhere else.

Brendan: Let’s wrap this up, then. Best songs: "Magazines,” "Lord, I’m Discouraged," "One for the Cutters"

Darryl: “Lord I'm Discouraged,” “Slapped Actress” and “Constructive Summer”

Steven: “Lord, I’m Discouraged,” “Constructive Summer” and “Sequestered in Memphis”. So there’s a general consensus about the best songs, with the obvious exception being “One for the Cutters”.

Brendan: So is this album a progression? A regression? A holding pattern?

Darryl: I think it's a progression. If you look at Separation Sunday and Almost Killed Me as records heavily focused on stories and words, and at Boys and Girls as their first step towards a more musically adventurous band, I think it's hard to see this as anything but a further progression down that line. There’s a question as to whether it's been a success—there weren't the missteps of “One for the Cutters” on Boys and Girls—but I don't think it's regressing or holding. I think they're pushing themselves for sure.

End Transmission

The Big Laydown

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan K) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:01:00 +0000

It started in late 2006, with the curio announcement that Scarlett Johansson- yes, that Scarlett Johansson- was to make an album. What’s more, she was to make an album of Tom Waits covers. Eye rolling turned into a sustained level of interest, which was piqued with the accompanying details. Dave Sitek, musical backbone of the adored TV on the Radio, had been tapped to create a backdrop for the assuredly surreal sounds to come. Cameos and collaborators piled up with each infrequent press release, along with rumors and gossip, whisperings of Ziggy Stardust sightings in the bayou, and speculation as to whether or not Johansson could actually, you know, sing. More than a year and a half later, Anywhere I Lay My Head arrived.

The average music fan has probably heard some of mostly the same criticisms. The record certainly has its rough spots, and yeah, the lows are pretty low indeed- especially the painfully-obvious music box on “I Wish I Was in New Orleans” and the hideously juvenile dance track train-wreck that is “I Don’t Want to Grow Up.” But it is also true that the highs are actually quite close to… stunning. Sitek’s now-trademark percussive drone, highlighted by string and woodwind flourishes, pair beautifully with some of the melodic highpoints of Waits’ career, which manage yoke the sometimes meandering and abstract tendencies of Sitek’s own band to some plain perfectly-written songs. While Johansson’s immature contralto stands out repeatedly in the record as a glaring point of weakness, it is, at the very least, an interesting diversion in places and occasionally manages to reach peaks simply not suggested possible by her previous known work at the mic.

It turns out, that we could reverse the billing on the closing duet “Who Are You” and have a decent case that Tunde Adebimpe alone would have made this a terrific TVoTR release. Consider his tracks as nothing more than a collaboration between him and Sitek, and we could easily extrapolate Bowie's sample into an album we’d call at least 3.4 times better than Heathen and proceed to argue its relative merits alongside Scary Monsters as his last good albums. In all actuality, pretty much the entire first half of the album (up to and including the co-written Johansson/Sitek original) is an unqualified success. Johansson’s taste in covers material is vindicated by some long-overdue attention paid to a couple of Waits’ should-be classics. The Brooklyn all-star backing band cameos (members of TV on the Radio, Celebration and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) exceed their ill-defined expectations and produce some great instrumentals. Bowie remains convincingly Bowie-like (in shades of Lou’s “Satellite of Love” no less) and Sitek absolutely produces the shit out of everything. Then we drink some lemonade, maybe watch Manhattan again, and head home happy in the early summer night.

Yet although most reviewers have claimed pretenses wanting to of give the album a fair shake, everybody seems to hedge against venturing any kind of strong sentiment as to the ultimate quality of these eleven tracks. The resulting critical response has come in deceivingly mediocre ratings and disingenuously superficial assessments. No attempt is made by anybody to reconcile the phenomenon of why this album, once a nexus of fairly intense fetishism by more than a few people, has been met with such absolute indifference upon its arrival. Given the principles involved and lopsided results, it seems that there would be at least a little spirited debate about Anywhere I Lay My Head. Yet a glance around the media reveals that it’s not just that the major outlets aren’t into it, but the fact is that nobody seems to be into it, and the question of why has consumed me...

Right around the time that anticipation of the Scar-Jo record had mounted, another musical debut by an indie-crush-worthy actress arrived with little fanfare. She & Him is a collaboration between Zoey Deschanel, she of healthy filmography and radar-straddling profile, and M. Ward, he of notably consistent (and Pitchfork-approved) folk-inflected solo career. The two have produced, by all accounts a lovely little collection of songs entitled Volume One, consisting of both covers (by the likes of key Ward influences Smokey Robinson and the Beatles) and originals credited to Deschanel and produced by Ward. With a studio band assembled by Ward and featuring members of the Decemberists and Devotchka, the duo manages to recall the pop highlights of obvious idols Tammy Wynette and Patsy Cline. Despite a few missteps, like the poorly-placed slowdown of “Take it Back” and a completely useless afterthought of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” (seriously), the album is full of affecting, hook-filled songs that know when it’s better to quit than risk going too far out of their depth.

At a loss for explaining the different receptions for Johansson’s and Deschanel’s respective efforts, my mind wandered among a number of possibilities. Obviously, the subject of novelty in music has been on my mind recently. When and why a given project may be dismissed out of hand while another is celebrated for whatever reasons still evades me. What I have come to understand, in a very “hipster-bashing is a totally hipster thing to do” kind of way, is that coolness-as-commodity requires a level of sub-cultural protectionism. This is often taken (rightly or wrongly, but mostly rightly) as exclusionary and elitism by the world at large. And, for people who spend as much time listening to and thinking about music as I do, the single biggest conceit we seem to make for our obsession is the lonely life of being a definitive arbiter of our own tastes.

Of course, these standards become compounded by the fact of indie-rock being a still largely male-dominated society, begging the engagement of forces beyond rationale, and sometimes bordering on misogyny. Scarlett was everybody’s dream girl from Ghost World through Lost in Translation. Now we respond to the unmistakable signifiers of her being finally and totally co-opted by the mainstream: appearing in lousy Bruckheimer summer blockbusters, going bicoastal (and unabashedly “Hollywood”) and, most painfully of all, dating Ryan Reynolds. As such, these recent albums are more than anything a referendum on the state of the people who made them. Anywhere I Lay My Head isn’t especially bad, but the collective yawn it has elicited is our final proof that Scarlett Johansson just isn’t cool anymore. Divorcing our opinion of the woman’s work from any ability to care about it is the only mechanism we have to protect ourselves from the fact that such an undertaking high likelihood of being an abject failure. To invest ouselves now risks seeing Scarlett make a joke of herself- and, by extension, us- in the most demoralizing way possible: on the E! Network between comments about her upcoming role in yet another shitty (and profitable) movie.

It is now abundantly clear that only thing Ms. Johansson could have done to change anybody’s opinion of her record was to be less famous when she made it. In the hands of an unknown (preferably male) quantity, we’ll not only forgive such a “novelty” project, but applaud it heartily, as in the case of the Dirty Projectors, whose Rise Above was a fixture on every cool kid’s favorites of 2007 list. A collective based in the consensus Center of the Universe (Williamsburg, apparently) has every advantage to produce- without fear of reprisal- a Black Flag covers abomination that remains, nine months after its release, as flimsy and frequently unlistenable as it did the first time I ignored it.

Likewise, Deschanel gets a pass for essentially being so far out of the greater public consciousness that it doesn’t matter when she fails. And she inevitably will fail. Volume One, for all its pleasant moments isn’t exactly announcing itself as a definitive work of an assured new voice to take the medium by storm, though Deschanel’s prominent role in M. Night Shyamalan’s forthcoming The Happening promises to be a debacle enough to ensure that she’ll have the chance to produce a few more volumes of She & Him to try for something even better. And you know what? I’ll bet they’ll be pretty good, too. If only the poor movie star would be afforded the same chance.

Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, Episode 8, "Sine Qua Non"

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:24:00 +0000

After three straight adrenaline-fueled episodes, Battlestar Galactica returned from its Memorial Day hiatus with “Sine Qua Non”, a frustratingly uneven character study probing into the collective consciousness of those left behind in the wake of the events in “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner?” It’s tempting to think of “Sine Qua Non” as a regression of sorts, a callback to the meandering character sketches of the first few episodes of BSG’s fourth and final season. But whereas those earlier revelations often felt frivolous, exploring the remaining fleet’s reaction to the disappearance of their President, to say nothing of half the fleet’s military strength, was of the utmost importance.

“Sine Qua Non” opens up promisingly enough, with a blizzard of washed-out hallucinatory sequences imagined by Natalie, the gutshot cylon leader, superimposed against a flurry of medical activity, as Galactica’s medics rush to resuscitate their new ally. They fail through no fault of their own, and with her last act Natalie, true to the sensuous nature of her model, grasps blindly for one last physical touch, here provided by the good Doc Cottle. Apparently I was wrong in my speculation that she might be the dying leader. Ah well.

Elsewhere, Vice President Tom Zarek, the former terrorist and master politician, attempts to assume control of the Presidency, as stipulated in the constitution. In a strange turn, the normally expedient Admiral Adama—the man who accepted the presidency of Gaius Baltar, for goodness’ sake—outright refuses to acknowledge Zarek’s legitimacy, and so the youngest member of the quorum, the Admiral’s son Lee, is tasked to find a suitable replacement for Zarek, while the Admiral is forced to look within for the first time in a great while. Thus are the two main thrusts of this episode launched.

It was always apparent to anyone paying attention that Lee’s foray into politics was going to result in him becoming President. And that’s okay—inevitability is a perfectly acceptable narrative choice, provided the journey in question is handled deftly. Unfortunately it hasn’t been. Lee has always been the least defined character on the show, and his dealings with the quorum this season have totally compounded this. Jamie Bamber is a great actor, but his recent scenes, apart from negotiating the safety of Gaius Baltar, have always seemed perfunctory at best, superfluous at worst. That dynamic continues here, as the writers had to bring in Romo Lampkin, erstwhile public defender, just to get Lee sped along.

Lampkin is a bit like Anton Chigur—he’s a force of nature, more a collection of tics than anything recognizably human. I always liked him, but he was totally unnecessary in “Sine Qua Non”. The entire point to his presence was to reiterate and reilluminate the survivor’s guilt, which of course brings up a problem. The logistics of Galactica ensure that we’re never far away from any of the survivor’s guilt, so focusing on Romo’s anguish didn’t add anything to this equation. Indeed, it was mostly mimicry, as Romo Sixth-Sensing his wife’s cat echoed the guilt of both Saul Tigh, who sees his dead wife in the face of his current lover, and Admiral Adama, who has conversations with his dead ex-wife each anniversary. Lampkin is a secondary character in the midst of the show’s final season, and having him complete a totally unbelievable arc (in the span of a single episode, no less) was a colossal waste of time.

As Galactica moves more and more towards character-specific episodes, it often leaves us some crucial character in the lurch. Take Saul Tigh, who has been largely relegated to the periphery for much of this season. Because we haven’t seen much of him, two starting developments—Saul impregnating Caprica-Six (what’s Baltar gonna think?), and Saul assuming command of the Galactica, didn’t strike home with nearly as much force as intended. But hey, at least we got to see Romo get a new dog.

Lampkin also pops up in Bill Adama’s narrative, as he once again tells someone something they should already know, namely, Bill hearts Laura: “Sine qua non … those things we deem essential, without which we cannot bear living. Without which life in general loses its specific value, becomes abstract.” From Galactica’s outset, there has been romantic tension between Adama and Roslin. But they’ve always danced around it, which, come to think of it, is probably a good thing. When BSG’s other two leads, Starbuck and Apollo, finally decided to explore their oft-ignored personal feelings, it erupted in an angsty, completely forgettable mess that was painful for both viewer and character to watch.

But Adama’s intentions here are much more pure. Starbuck and Apollo hooked up because they could; Adama, thanks to Roslin’s abduction, has his hand forced. He might not ever unite with his love—this is Battlestar Galactica, after all—but as the camera pulls back on his lone raptor framed against the oblivion of space, it's clear that he’s damned sure going to try.