“I…experienced disorienting moments of temporal suspension when I downloaded large files of music; these were long moments of isolation and boredom. Everything seemed to pause in the speeded-up temporality of cyberspace. I had similar feelings of separation in Java during Ramadan, when performances and many social activities were halted for a month of fasting and introspection. I tried to fill these times with reading and writing, but the days seemed to stretch into eternity. In comparison, it seems astonishing that on the Internet, such seemingly endless periods could actually be measured in seconds or minutes rather than days or weeks.”

Rene Lysloff (2003). “Musical Community on the Internet: An On-Line Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 18(2): 233-63.

It’s not just normal people–online immersion in musical networks causes fun-house-mirror time-shifts for anthropologists, too.  Next step: understanding how and/or why this phenomenon manifests itself as ravenous leak-hunting and complaining on message boards when downloads take 10 minutes instead of 4.

“When I had a dozen CDs I loved them all and that was enough until the next one arrived. When I had a thousand… I wanted more. I am now 26 and I have had enough. Almost.

Part of it, I’m sure, comes down to wanting to recapture that moment when I first listened to In Sides or Paul’s Boutique and sat with my eyes and mouth wide open in surprise, or that time when I dozed off during “Don’t Stop” and woke up during “I Am The Resurrection” and felt in another place, or when I first heard “Retread” or “Eye Know” or when I danced to “That Lady” in Brixton at 1am, but how did trying to recapture a moment of magic end up as such a greedy, frenetic hunter-gatherer rush to acquire? Why did I end up wanting to have listened to things rather than actually be listening to them? It’s not even like I relate favourite songs back to events in my life when they were significant, because I’ve never used music as an emotional battery like that; I’ve always loved it in and of itself primarily, a song or an album as a beautiful thing on its own that is perfect and that I can love and immerse myself in or use to paint my daily life with colour. It’s about the point of contact. I’ve said that before, I’m sure. I don’t want to know everything about 50s rock n roll or the key movers in postpunk, I can’t relate to grime when I live with the moors behind me and the sea in front, I don’t want to write articles on Miami bass or crunk or nu-folk or whatever the hell is being revived or invented this week. As nice as it would be, the practicalities of owning and knowing intimately, as LCD Soundsystem put it, every good record, ever, make it a ridiculous ambition.”

Nick Southall, “Soulseeking” from Stylus back in 2005.  I’d never read this before, and I can thank rockcritics.com (currently counting down the best stuff written this decade) for remedying this situation.  I too frequently find myself acquiring and storing, waiting for the proper moment to explore.  And when it happens, listening often feels like an assignment, or something to check off a list.

I feel like this sort of self-analysis would be a great theme for a big Turkel-esque oral history of music fans’ changing listening habits in the digital era.  The comments thread on that post seems like a tiny start.

Oh man, does this excite me.  And it’s so overdue!  Overdue?  Maybe it’s perfectly timed.  He’s also featured in this film.  And in a “to be posted” episode of the amazing “Soul” series.  Those quotes!  “On your way to wonderful, you’re gonna have to pass through all right.”  “I would like to know how it feels for my desperation to get louder.”

Bill Withers is one of those weird dudes who’s written legendary, damn-near standard tunes (”Lean on Me,” “Lovely Day,” “Just the Two of Us”) and who is also more or less completely unknown. He came up when he should have, he had a gift for songwriting and a great singing voice, he was good-looking.  But he wasn’t Isaac Hayes or James Brown or Curtis Mayfield.  He wore turtlenecks and sat on a stool to play.  And while Withers’ music was undeniably funky, it was also undeniably folky.  And label executives don’t like to be confused.  Hence the title of this post (Withers made toilets for airplanes, and wrote songs on the side, guys). A brief Withers-inspired auto-bio moment, after the jump.

I discovered Withers senior year in college (either ‘99 or ‘00), after having heard…don’t know if I should admit this, but here goes…”Lovely Day” used in one of those super-dancey, really popular Gap ads we all remember (There was another one with square-dancing to Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”).  I decided to seek out the song, not knowing anything about Withers.  This was pre-Internet for me, so I went with an equally-game-for-this-sort of thing good friend (Josh) to our local Massive Music Store (called CD Warehouse or something), and asked the guy in the walled-off info section in the middle of the store–one of 9 or 10 employees working there–to look up the title in this big, colorful, proprietary, touch-screen computer database thing.  Lean on Me: The Best of Bill Withers: import-only, like 20 bucks.  I split the cost with Josh, and off we went.

The rest, if you’re reading this, is “history,” as it were.  Whoa! “Grandma’s Hands” was the foundation for “No Diggity!”  But just that little sliver of guitar and the “mmm mmm!”  Wow, this was the guy who did “Lean on Me,” too!  I thought that was just a dateless, authorless church standard!  For two guys who loved making mixtapes, the lesser-known stuff was the real goldmine: “Kissing My Love,” “The Same Love that Made Me Laugh,” “Who Is He”: no one knew this stuff but us.

And so: we drove all around the south side of Indianapolis that weekend, stopping into our friends’ apartments and parents’ houses, popping in the disc, playing a few seconds of a song, and waiting for that moment of recognition, which always came–from our music geek friends, and their parents, too.  As we drove around that weekend, we memorized lyrics, picked personal favorites, skipped the lite-jazz middle of the comp.  And sang.  Loudly and fervently.  And, because of Withers’ unique songwriting tics and talents, lengthily and repetitively.  That hypnotic “I know I know I know” sequence in “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and (especially) the 18-second held-note (some sort of achievement, scroll down) on the second word of the “Lovely Day” refrain.  I was a smoker at the time, and could never hold my voice through the whole thing.  Josh could.

I was splitting time between Indy and Bloomington then, working in the former and living in the latter, and my drive back down to B-Town that Sunday afternoon was rife with anticipation.  I couldn’t wait to play “Lovely Day” for my best friend at the time (and still my best friend today, though she’s very far away).  It was her little television I’d seen the Gap ad, and her pen I used to write a note on my palm, and her shared excitement at the awesomeness of that song.  I called her on the way down, (on my massive Cellular One-sponsored cell phone) and told her I had a surprise.  When I pulled into the lot, she was standing out on her stoop, eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream.  As she walked up to my car, I rolled down all the windows and cranked “Lovely Day.”  She let out a loud squeal after hurriedly swallowing a bite of half-melted ice cream, and we both danced around in the parking lot for a few minutes.  Awwwww.

And Withers’ own story–his own Southern modesty and reluctance to put himself too far out there, the equal reluctance of label execs to take a chance on a hard-to-market genius, his subsequent cult status–is what allowed for me and my two best friends to feel the unfettered joy of “discovering” him a decade ago.  It’s one of those ironies of fandom, really: the less well-known an artist was in their own time, the greater the emotional impact they can have when you feel like they’re “yours,” even if just for a quick weekend.

Watch that trailer, and be prepared to get a little choked up at the end, when Withers reacts to Cornell West (yup) asking Withers what he’d like his legacy to be.  Man do I love Bill Withers.

Haha yeah.  Dave Bry’s article, in which he laments a review he wrote 13 years ago, is a funny and self-effacing bit of critical revisionist stock-taking.

I have no idea who any of these people are, but I can verify that they’ve made something great here.  Like the fisherman said to the fish:  Just try to get that hook out of your head.

“That’s very simple. ‘Indie’ is short for ‘independent.’ Independently released music is not directly financially dependent on any of the four major labels (WMG, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal). ‘Indie’ does not refer to a style of music; it refers to the financial circumstances of its distribution. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to you, and should be viewed with suspicion.”

Love Douglas Wolk’s definition (which he earlier offered at Moistworks–great stuff all around on that post), and all discussion should stop here, really.

But it never will, will it?  Which is why it’s good that Carrie Brownstein’s tackling The Big Issues over at her NPR blog, and not doing the “OMG rock lyrics are quite crazy when you think about it, right?” stuff anymore (hopefully).  This is the epitome of pub chatter, but it’s a lot of fun.  Al Shipley’s take, for instance, is a nice step outward:

“‘Indie’ was already well on its way to primarily describing an aesthetic criteria, more than a business model, ten years ago. The main difference since then is that where it once was used colloquially as an abbreviation for ‘indie rock,’ the rock is gone and indie is just indie now. Indie pop, indie dance, indie hip hop, every genre has its own variant filtered through the indie sensibility, and what little rock still exists in indie doesn’t rock very hard anymore.”

It’s tough for some folks to think of music genres as anything other than the folkloric/musicological ideal of “co-occurrent formal features,” but it’s necessary.  American indie used to be linked to post-punk, hardcore, white-dude guitar rock because that’s who was making the most out of independent music–from a numbers perspective perhaps, but mainly from a discursive angle, i.e., using the term as a badge of honor.  It’s a historical coincidence of music and market, really: indie started to show some market mettle at the same point it was dominated by a particular strain of style.  Done, and done.

Over the past 10 or so years, of course, independently-released music has become “the majority of worthwhile music,” with a few notable exceptions (hip-hop primary amongst them, but probably not for long).  I think one of the important future-predicting questions to ask, especially as more labels get savvier with distribution and promotion: When will “indie” cease to really mean anything even in economic-distinction terms?  When will we (will we ever?) stop thinking of “the majors” as anything resembling a force in musical culture?  When will thinking about “major labels” as a creative force be dismissed out of hand as residual longing?  Are we almost there?  I think we’re almost there.

Portia Sabin: I think labels are caught in a cultural bind: No one really wants to know what a label does; it’s like the sausage factory. Even long-established bands have a hard time talking about what labels do.
…
Mac McCaughan: I don’t know. I think that bands are into labels because bands — at least most of the ones we all work with — are music fans. Music fans, like baseball fans, also have a sense of history and an interest in the trajectory of things, not just the current moment. So, when we toured in New Zealand for the first time, I was as excited about meeting the people at Flying Nun as anything.
Chris Swanson: I agree. Music fans want as much information no matter how esoteric it may seem to a casual fan.
Portia Sabin: I agree that bands are into labels; I’m talking about people understanding what labels do. I think there’s a semi-willful lack of understanding.
Chris Swanson: Now that labels don’t run studios as much as they used to, it definitely is more abstract what our role is.

A great roundtable discussion about the future of indie labels–featuring our friend Chris Swanson, as well as Jagjaguwar’s Darius Van Arman–over at Carrie Brownstein’s Monitor Mix blog.  There’s tons more great stuff–including lots more from Merge’s McCaughan and Matador’s Gerard Cosloy–where this brief bit came from.

We open in a tightly-packed recording studio–perhaps a camera tracking in through the door, with the words “Dirty Projectors” clearly visible on the nameplate (because that’s how recording studios are)–with Dave Longstreth and his harem of female vocalists running through the song (which is playing on the soundtrack in its fully-mastered form, obviously).

Then, in some feat of camera/editing trickery, the camera starts floating backwards, perhaps through the sound-padded wall, into the adjoining recording studio.  The first thing we see isn’t a person, but a necklace reading “Solange.”  Then, panning around the room, we see a few other session musicians sitting around, nodding and trying to make sense of what they’re hearing.  Then, one of them suddenly plucks out that guitar line, Solange smiles, puts on her studio monitors, and steps up to her mic to start singing the same song.

We hold on this for a few seconds, and then a hard cut back to Longstreth in the adjoining studio.  He can hear Solange, and he likes her take on the song.  He smiles, and–looking down while shaking his head in begrudging admiration–picks up a brand-new glass bottle full of delicious Coca-Cola.  As he leans back and takes a refreshing, lengthy chug, we go to split-screen.

On the left side, Erykah Badu is suddenly present, and pulls a 2-liter bottle from inside her headwrap.  She hands it to Solange, who takes a healthy series of gulps, straight from the bottle, as her band settles into a groove.  The Coca-Cola logo comes full-screen as the shot shifts to an overhead split-screen of both studios, with the bands playing and the two leaders continuing to slug down the beverage.  A llama is visible on the right.  On the left, Questlove’s afro can be seen nodding to the beat.

“But with Rob Schnapf behind the controls, Isolation Drills sounds like the real rock album GBV have always wanted to make; Pollard’s hooky-but-rollicking melodies pay audible tribute to his great love for mid-’70s rock throughout, while Doug Gillard and Nate Farley’s guitars finally crunch as much as they chime, making the band’s rock moves as credible as their pop gestures (’Glad Girls’ and ‘Chasing Heather Crazy’ even finding them managing both at the same time, to superb effect). And Guided by Voices has never made an album this consistently strong from start to finish; with the possible exception of ‘Frostman’ (which appears to have been processed to sound like it was recorded on four track), every song here matters, with Pollard’s vocals at the top of their form (it helps that most of his lyrics actually make sense for a change — sounds like Bob’s been having relationship problems again) and the band sounds tight, forceful, and emphatic throughout. God knows if the indie rock audience will ever forgive him for such obvious craft, but the side of Pollard’s personality that thought touring with Cheap Trick was a great idea finally gets the album he’s been waiting for with Isolation Drills.”

eMusic’s Isolation Drills blurb (buy it!), from their ongoing 2000s retrospective.  Sure, the mid-Nineties triptych of Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, and Under the Bushes, Under the Stars are tough to supplant in terms of “importance”.  And they’re great.  But GBV never made a better album than Isolation Drills.  There, I (and eMusic, too, sorta) said it (and have been saying it and getting no end of shit for it, the entire decade).

“Daily Swarm: You’ve been making your own music while simultaneously helping other people with their records. What motivated you to want to help people with their careers while yours was in progress?

Steve Albini:  Nobody ever thought of it as a career when I first got into a band. Nobody had any commercial aspirations. I was participating in ‘band culture.’ It was a social thing like being on a bowling team. The same way that if a friend was having a cookout and needed to borrow your grill, of course you’d let him borrow your grill and of course you’d go to the cookout and of course he’d offer you a hot dog.”

The 2,372,991st interview with Steve Albini about what Steve Albini does and how he does it is just as good as the other 2,372,990.