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Ghost of the Machine (Oakland)
Annie Lin (San Francisco)
Found In the Alley
Roberto (Chapel Hill)
Justin (Houston)
mrshl (Houston)
J. Denkmire (Portland, ME) |
Первое второй третий Бонусы вещей Perhaps you remember the Wilco influences video I made long ago. Well, it still gets comments from YouTube users. Most of these comments are from people who seem deeply offended, but I think the one I got this week may be my all time favorite: Your fucking stupid. Omg you are so fucking stupid it hurts. Who can argue with that? Like playing a show and not telling anyone about it, and purposely trying to keep people from finding out about it. Remember the series going on about 160 weeks ago? Cycle 2 is almost done. To be published later this year. Here’s a sample, that is very close to being finished. The other nine will look substantially different as each is being done by a different artist.
Last week, I watched the 1997 film Joy Luck Club again for the first time in years. This time I sat through the music credits and noticed that two of the most famous Chinese songs in the picture came from the EMI Music Publishing catalog. An enterprising music publisher at MIDEM once told me that EMI made the sound decision a few years ago to purchase numerous Chinese music copyrights. The songs, which ranged from classic pop songs to traditional songs that people might otherwise assume to be public domain, continue to turn up in films, television shows and advertisements around the world. After all, a nation’s music is an integral component of its culture, and selling off those copyrights does not render those songs irrelevant or put the songs out of use. And after purchasing the catalogs, EMI collected revenues every time those songs were used. (Sidenote: Evergreen Music Publishing also bought up many Chinese copyrights, including the CRC catalog, but many of the well-known classics are controlled by EMI.) I have to admit that it’s discomfiting for me to scan the music credits of this (and many other Chinese and Chinese-American films), and realize that a Western company owns the songs most essential to China’s musical history. It somehow reminds me of when I lived abroad and found that the local programming was often drowned out by canned or expired sitcoms piped over from the United States. “Ye Lai Xiang” More Teresa Teng music on iLike
“He Ri Jun Zai Lai”
More Teresa Teng music on iLike
For this one, I asked our editors to submit songs we would play if we were DJs on a classic rock / AOR station. In particular, I was thinking about what kind of tracklist we would have generated if it was our job to program this compilation: http://lala.com/zJPTI Houston Press writer Craig Hlavaty linked to this comp on his Twitter the other day, and while I’m not stoked about all the choices, I was pretty intrigued at the question: what would we offer as “essential” rock tracks? This podcast, our second of the year, is your answer. Tracklist:
I personally don’t have a voice anyone needs or wants to hear. Since early in high school, it’s been painfully obvious that others find my nasally baritone less than appealing as a narrative or melodic force. And while I’m certainly willing to lend my vocal “talents” to a reading of Harriet the Spy or These Happy Golden Years, I can’t see myself putting my voice on aural display with my band or in any other context. This isn’t to say I haven’t tried. I did write and sing the occasional song early on with my first band, the results of which were reviews that said something like “I know this is someone’s moment, but damn….” I’ve also been known to yelp my way through a Crowded House cover at an open mic night, many MANY years in the past (probably more than a decade). But that’s what it was, yelping, and I know that even now, after having quit cigarettes prior to Maya’s birth and having no known respiratory ailments, about the best I can hope for on karaoke night is to hit this one:
and go home. Which is too bad because I fucking hate that song. This may be why I don’t like to talk about vocals a great deal. It’s partly a defense mechanism, partly an inability to believe I can really speak about them intelligently. Perhaps my poor singing skills made me initially more sympathetic to figures like Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, who clearly didn’t spend a great deal of time on their vocals, ever. Of course it wasn’t their vocals that attracted me to their music. And it’s not usually vocals that make me stand up and take notice. Sometimes it is. Yet the industry rarely produces those voices that would grab my attention. There isn’t anything technically wrong with the voices on most of top 40 radio for the past 25 years or even five years. Nothing in particular. They’re just…too often missing something elemental and specific about that person. You can find those qualities in vocal performances that no one would confuse with the highly trained sounds of a music student:
As the opening scene of Un Chien Andalou may be considered the tenth most shocking scene in film history, it behooved the Pixies, in writing a song about that film and that scene, to make their presentation equally shocking. Black Francis/Frank Black does his best by ignoring the concept of melody altogether in favor of a full throaty psychotic screech. It’s exactly what’s required. It won the Pixies no awards. But it encapsulated an idea, a surreal and uneasy feeling, that propels an otherwise cheerful little indie pop song to the fuzzy edge of the screen. That’s what good vocals do. They also use contrast to present tension, all while once again eschewing melody entirely: Is it cheating that this is Tricky and not someone who actually sings? Well, perhaps. But examining the quality of the voice is what makes this a more fair comparison. Not one hip-hop artist I can think of has ever aimed for an actual croaking phlegm-in-the-throat sound as Tricky does here. The words seem to have trouble getting out of his throat, punctuated by speedy, snarly incursions from Rock. You get an unsteady, wavering view into the vulnerability and self-deprecation that lie beneath the MC surface. It’s this vulnerability I remember; it’s a vocal performance that would never make the final round of a talent competition but is unforgettable in my opinion for what it reveals in context. And then there’s a Bristol buddy of Tricky’s:
Portishead – Chase The Tear from Mintonfilm on Vimeo. This new-ish track may not fit in with the epic Goth-rock masterpiece Third, but the simplicity allows the Beth Gibbons vocal to stand out. Still shrouded in mystery after all these years due to her refusal to do interviews, Gibbons seems to double down on disillusionment and fear every time out. I personally love her for it. Because no one gets it quite right like she does. She never misses a note, and there are moments on the earlier albums that make you realize she has powerful vocal cords, but the tentative, nearly tearful approach clearly speaks to her as an artist and a person. It is the sound of someone deeply uncomfortable with the spotlight, deeply saddened, afraid of being burned but not with a Gloria Gaynor kind of attitude. There is strength in the amount of fear she lets us hear in her voice. That strength plus the resolve of the Krautrock backing makes this a special performance, one of many for Gibbons. I think this is, in the end why I simply can’t watch American Idol. I’m not sure I believe any of these people are actually people. Do they have emotions? Fears? Vulnerabilities? Can they really make you feel a song? Would they be brave enough to take a nontraditional route to the right vocal? Of course not. And that always seems to work fine for the Idol winners and runners-up who produce useless well-produced album after useless well-produced album. Yeah, it’s the sound of their voice on those records. But when it’s the sound of your voice, you should be there too. If you’re not, if I can’t hear you, I’m not interested. ——— Speaking of “not interested,” in trolling about and looking for information about Tricky, I ran across this Bucharest performance from I’m-not-sure-when. Bizarre to me is that the whole track “Tricky Kid” has been stripped of MUCH of what made it a stunning statement in my mind. There is only a mumbled chorus, plus the unseemly addition of funk-metal-esque touches. Very strange how that could be good enough for the audience. Were they just not listening? Did Tricky forget his lyrics backstage? Does he need a teleprompter? It’s a little sad to watch, but it’s the perfect example of how a musician can try to smooth out or rework the original work and, in the process, lose much of what made it special. Or, Stop Telling Me How To Run My Band By no means did I intend for my third guest NAP post to come so soon after my second. I got talked into doing this by Marshall and Ramon after an article entitled 10 Music Writers Walk Into A Bar, Decide Bands Should Get Off Their Lazy Asses appeared on the Houston Press blog. This post was an account of a group of music writers getting together “to address the question of how [they] could better serve the music community,” the answer to which apparently was that bands need to do a better job of promoting themselves. An ancillary discussion was sparked by Doug Spearman’s rant on the Hands Up board (permanent PDF version) bashing the Press, in response, for basically sucking. “Discussions” like this have become something of a tradition in the world of online discussion of Houston music, growing out of the decades-old truism that the Houston music scene totally sucks, a condition which is often blamed on those lazy, lazy bands who don’t bother promoting themselves and never go on tour (or go on tour too often, whatever floats your boat). To be honest, I wrote the headline of this post earlier in the week, before a 10K human rights debate with Marshall sucked all the bile out of me. I just don’t have the mental energy to be pissed about this stuff anymore. Now it just makes me depressed. I’m so goddamn tired of music writers complaining about the scene and telling bands what to do. One meme in particular that is extremely annoying is along these lines: This attitude drives me absolutely crazy. There are a lot of musicians- among them some, if not most, of the best- who play music because they have a creative impulse, and just play shows because that’s just what you do when you play music. It’s a performative art that in a very real way does not exist until it’s either performed or recorded. There are also people who just don’t care for one reason or another. I have no idea why music critics and other people in the music industry seem to have such a hard time understanding this. Getting up on stage because you think it’s fun and wanting to be on American Idol aren’t the same thing. Going along with this, another “thought” that ALWAYS surfaces in these things is that “bands want success handed to them on a silver platter/ believe they will be ‘discovered.’” I’ve never seen this accusation leveled against any of the real people that supposedly hold this belief. Which means it’s just thrown out there as a generalization. Heck, what’s wrong with THAT? Surely musicians who practice for years to learn their instruments, spend all their money paying rent on nasty practice spaces with no A/C, and send e-mail after e-mail to people that never come to their shows already understand that they’re all entitled losers because some no-name music critic didn’t get a CD in the mail. To sum up, the takeaway on both of these complaints is: when you have something to say, JUST TELL US WHO YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT. If you want to take shots, you have to put yourself in the line of fire. Making these kinds of sweeping generalizations like “bands are fucking lazy” (Marc Brubaker) is insulting. And, I might add, pretty damn lazy. I wouldn’t mind these articles half as much if they weren’t so value-laden, as if bands are somehow doing something morally wrong by not marketing themselves properly. Matt Wettergreen (whom I met when I was in college and we were both DJs at KTRU, and whom Ramon has previously slimed, I think- not to open a whole other can of worms- a little unfairly, on NAP) illustrates this nicely: Why in the world does anyone care about what someone in Chicago thinks about the Houston music scene, and why is it a duty of Houston musicians to make national news? I just don’t get it. Wettergreen, at least (and I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t think this is valuable, because it is) has as his stated goal helping musicians to build their careers; this attitude makes even less sense coming from a music critic, as was frequently the case with John Nova Lomax when he was in the music section at the Houston Press. As a music writer myself, I’ve never had the faintest inclination to address this subject, because I really don’t understand why it matters, and I can’t believe anyone who reads music reviews give a fuck. I guess it’s easier to formulate an argument about business than it is about music, although Lomax has no problem constructing sentences about music or anything else. I really can’t understand why anybody thinks shaming bands is worthwhile. At the risk of repeating myself, pointing fingers at musicians for not doing things the way you want them to doesn’t help anything. It demoralizes the artists, it makes you look like a tool, it creates bad feelings all around and just is generally corrosive to the camaraderie that a community depends on for existence. There’s a tremendous amount of survivorship bias in music criticism, and I wonder if that doesn’t play a part in the hold that these kinds of articles seem to have over the critical imagination in Houston: when you look for success and there’s none to be found, naturally you start looking for answers. Unfortunately, everyone seems to be coming up with the wrong ones. It’s true that some bands who work hard and go on tour end up with a national reputation. Way more of them end up with an empty bank account, an old broken-down van, and five years of their lives missing. Playing in a band and trying to make it takes an incredible amount of time and money and usually doesn’t lead to anything much. The odds against you ever being in the right place at the right time are discouraging, and when you live in Houston, they’re downright staggering, because not only is it never the right place, ever, it’s about 1,000 miles from the closest place that even could be. Instead of another round of advice on how best for bands to pimp themselves, I’d really like to hear more in these “state of the scene” articles about how often bands do everything that all the books and the blogs tell them to do and still fail. I’d like to hear about how Lance Walker ended up with a storage space full of unsold CDs from Ojet records. I’d like to hear about how the Kants hit a wall with touring and just gave up. I’d like to hear about why the Fatal Flying Guilloteens broke up despite rave reviews for their last record. I’d like to hear why I still can’t buy a Satin Hooks record. I’d like to hear about how Feow records crashed and burned and then one of its two releases went on to be a hit for another label. And I’d like to see some speculation about how long these people might have lasted and how much more great music they might have given us if they hadn’t pushed themselves so hard to succeed. Linus Pauling Quartet and Rotten Piece (they don’t even have a website people!) both have deep discographies and more than a decade under their belts. Neither are much for self-promotion. I’d also like to hear an admission of how ridiculous and unnatural the whole idea of self-promotion is in the first place for people who have any amount of self-awareness. Contrary to popular belief, rock musicians are not all rampant egoists who think they’re the best thing since Hendrix. A lot of them, especially the ones I’ve met in Houston, are nice, normal, thoughtful human beings who may not feel terribly comfortable with constantly pushing their art on everyone around them and generally acting like they’re rock stars when they know damn well they aren’t. Tex Kerschen once told me that the secret to DIY touring was to have absolutely no shame. I have to say that seems like a pretty draining way to live if you aren’t cut out for it. A few years back, I did a couple of interviews with a guy named Michael Dean who used to play in a reasonably successful band called Bomb. He wrote a book about DIY music called $30 Music School that had a lot of the same information that you can get from blogs on the same topic. My copy of the book itself seems to have flown the coop sometime in the last five years, so I can’t quote him directly, but he said something like, “Being a successful DIY artist takes about eight hours a day of promoting yourself in addition to actually making your art, for the rest of your life. If you aren’t prepared for that, there’s no shame in just doing it for fun on the weekends.” I’d add that if you’ve made that entirely rational choice, it really sucks to open up your favorite music website and hear about how lazy musicians are and how pointless that art that brings you so much joy is. The crushing irony of the original blog post- hardly even the worst of the bunch- being the breaking point for me is that the local music press in Houston is more robust and varied than it has been probably ever. Since moving to a blog-heavy format, the Houston Press under Chris Gray has really stepped up its game in music coverage generally, and Craig Hlavaty in particular (dear Village Voice Galactic Empire: author search. figure it out) is absolutely tireless in writing enthusiastically about nearly everything that’s going on. Space City Rock publishes new material probably five or six times more often than it did when I started writing for them, and Jeremy’s showlist- no less functional twelve years ago than it is today- is still the single most ingenious and valuable resource for a music fan in Houston. Sara Cress at the Chronicle has built 29-95.com (which I’ve been writing for recently) into the source for some of the highest-quality music writing in Houston. The Free Press is a true voice of the community, and Omar Afra- who, to his credit, I can’t remember ever seeing quoted in one of these stupid state-of-the-scene articles- has not only reopened the old Oven as Mango’s, but also put together a series of incredible music festivals, to put it rather mildly. David Cobb at Houston Calling does more actual work digging up unknown bands these days than anybody else. And there’s lots of other valuable work coming from sources that didn’t even exist five years ago, like Breakfast on Tour and Houstonist. I know it sucks when people bitch about the local press when things are better than they’re ever been. Sorry, Doug. But, as Marshall put it, to see true dysfunction, you’d have to go back to 1998. Considering how far Houston has come, couldn’t we get down to the business of talking about actual music, accept that not everyone has to do everything the same way, and dispense with all the inside-baseball scene-is-broken hand-wringing? That shit is such a bummer. Thanks to NAP for having me back so soon. Hopefully I haven’t worn out my welcome with all this depressing crap. बात एक I can’t figure out if that’s a Brooklyn hipster having a laugh or whether it’s a Tamil with a genuine concern. In any event, it goes on for a couple minutes too long. बात दो बात तीन I think only one person reads this. My apologies to you. I’m gonna unload posts that I meant to write, but never did and probably won’t. It will be unreadable. Apologies again. But it will clean up the queue. *** Try to get the words, to do something more, more than signify, more than emote, more than be a Dadaist experiment. Try different combinations, but understanding is important to make the words not be just a deserted forest. See, that was a terrible sentence, because meaning ruins it, but not meaning in and of itself, just that meaning. There’s so much music these days. Most of it is noise. How do we fit into the noise? What part do we play in the noise as a whole? Turn off the stereos and TVs, throw away the CDs and LPs and MP3s. Go back to the family piano and only hear music played for our family. But family now spreads over more miles that the sound of a piano can reach. Virtual families gather ’round a virtual piano. *** She calls every day. Five minutes. Only five minutes. Just a little longer than most 45s. She calls when no one is here. Leaves messages. Talks to the answering machine. Sometimes it’s just one call. Sometimes it’s 20 calls. Sometimes she’s calm. Sometimes she screams bloody murder and worse profanities at the people who put her in the situation she’s in. It’s crazy. I’ve learned her story over time, listening to these short messages, one after the other, day after day. Our voice mail system doesn’t allow us to erase the message in the middle, you have to listen to the end, though one can speed it up to a chipmunk style speed, which makes her words run into each other like desperation. One day she’s going to get tired of calling. *** When he walked by me as I stood waiting for the bus, and I reached out to him and shook his hand enthusiastically saying, hey man, how are you? sincerely. Well, I thought he was someone else. I thought he was the guy who a few nights before had vomited all over the booth at the bar. He was sitting borrachisimo but quietly, alone at a booth. So I left him alone, he wasn’t sleeping or passed out, but I wouldn’t serve him anymore, and no need to send him out into the night like that. By the time I closed up, he was gone and imagine my surprise when I went by the booth and noticed that he had puked all over it. Imagine my double surprise when I realize he had left a fifty carefully sitting under an empty bottle like a tip. That’s what you call a yuk & yay. So when I saw him walking down the street, I wanted to say gracias. But it was someone else, who looked like that guy. Someone else who works in the same building as my other job. Someone else who I had now enthusiastically greeted like he was a good friend. And now, every time we see each other in the building, I say hi in the normal way that strangers say hi to each other. And he looks at me with wonder and maybe a little disappointment or relief that the warmth of friendship that I showed that day has disappeared. *** My friend’s dad hates music. He does not allow it being played at his house unless it is the background and incidental music of television shows. Mostly the news. My friend’s dad thinks music softens the spirit. Makes you lazy, weak, susceptible. He thinks those are bad things. He is old and his way has earned him several houses in various locations around the world. So there is no arguing the point with him. He’s been this way for a long time. Probably since rock and roll started freeing minds and cranking out hippies. My friend of course turned out 100% hippie. But now, in these days of complete music over-saturation, his home is an oasis of silence. Not just because you won’t hear any music while you’re there, but because you won’t see a single recording of music, not a CD, not an LP, not a stray cassette. You won’t see a stereo either, not even a small radio. Have you ever noticed that stereos and radios play music even when they are turned off? I think his house is the only place you would notice that. Cause bringing in a contraband ipod in your pocket, you’ll be able to hear music without turning it on. It’s an aural hallucination of the potentiality of music. He can hear it too. And he told me to please leave the ipod in the car. My bad. Disrupting the beautiful silence with music equipment. What about the voice? I ask jokingly. Should I leave that outside too? Do I need to make sure what I’m saying does not modulate, what if i suddenly started talking in a sing-songy way… he cut me off with a hand gesture. Don’t be silly. And please don’t talk in a sing-songy way. Of course the minute someone says that, all I want to do is say shedoobie, shattered, shattered. *** Sometime around the time I was in high school (1980-1984), my mom told me that Marvin Gaye had been killed by his dad. I remember, because Sexual Healing had just come out and he was riding the billboard charts and we both thought it was so sad that he had been killed, by his dad nonetheless, right as his career was taking off again. So sad. John Lennon had been killed just a few years before and we both felt something must be wrong that people are killing these great musicians. This was a very confusing event in my life because years later, sometime in the late 90s, someone told me Marvin Gaye had been killed by his dad. I told them, of course, years ago. And they said, no, just yesterday. And sure enough, there it was on the paper. So for years I’ve thought that I had imagined the conversation me and my mom had in the mid 80s. But it turns out that he had died in 1984 and that what I must have imagined was the later conversation and having seen it on the paper. What’s Going On is right. Time is a motherfucker. Wait, that line isn’t on the song? *** Si no creyera en la locura de la garganta del sinsonte qué cosa fuera, que cosa fuera la maza sin cantera un testaferro del traidor de los aplausos qué cosa fuera, corazón, qué cosa fuera si no creyera en lo más duro si no creyera en el deseo qué cosa fuera, que cosa fuera la maza sin cantera qué cosa fuera, corazón, qué cosa fuera un testaferro del traidor de los aplausos qué cosa fuera, corazón, qué cosa fuera *** This post was written last Thursday, but it’s being posted this Thursday which is no longer Thursday, along with this Thursday’s post. Last Thursday’s post went near some black holes and lost a week as a result ended up running into this Thursday’s post as if it was last Thursday. Last Thursday not noticing the lost week, mistook this Thursday’s post as an invader on last Thursday’s position and therefore would not listen to this Thursday’s post request that last Thursday’s post retire having missed it’s day. They spent so much time arguing that another Thursday post came by and told them to cut it off that it was now next Thursday and they both had missed their days, and needed to get off his Thursday. The others looked at next Thursday and said, no, no way, you ain’t even come around yet. Wait your turn. The argument escalated and before long, there was a multitude of Thursdays all claiming this was their Thursday. At which point someone threw a punch, bottles and chairs followed, and soon there was a full on bar brawl between a bunch of Thursdays, and this is the result. *** What’s that you say? You’re gonna pop a cap in Sancho and slap that heina down? Just like Bob would’ve done, right? Sneaky. Violence and death to a happy reggae beat. Sneaky pop music. |
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