Book review: Goodbye 20th Century

I finished David Browne's new Sonic Youth bio a few weeks ago and tried to write up a quick review of it, but got blocked up for want of an angle. Two things jogged me today: first, the review of David Lebedoff's The Same Man in tomorrow's Times Book Review contained a single quote from George Orwell that crystallised what it is I liked most about Browne's book: "good prose is like a window pane".

What Browne does best is tell the band's story simply and directly, using language in a way that can best be described as transparent. Too many music writers nowadays (especially on the Internet, where editorial oversight is at a minimum at best; case in point: the run-on parenthetical you find yourself slogging through at this very moment) "learned" their trade worshiping at the twin altars of the inimitable Lester Bangs and the various apprentices of Robert Christgau's Village Voice music section, all of whom seem fascinated by their own ability to turn obscure cultural references into elaborate puns. Some of the latter are quite good at what they do, but their Pitchfork progeny are, to be blunt, not.

It occurred to me to contrast Browne's book with one of the most egregious examples of this tendency toward self-satisfied logorrhea writ large in book form: Jim Greer's unfortunate Guided By Voices biography. Whether his closeness to his subject doomed the book from the start isn't the point: his love of his own prose sinks the book before the end of the first chapter.

And the second thing that jogged me: as I was about to start writing, B— called to say he was at a bookstore in Boston where he had scored a cheap copy of Browne's book. He had also found a copy of Greer's Voices book and was asking whether it was worth picking up. Shit you not.

I think the biggest obstacle I had in coming up with something to say about the book was that Sonic Youth's story is... well, not boring, but hardly salacious. They're just not decadent rock stars, and never were. No one in either the band or its immediate circle of associates wound up strung out on drugs. Their are no illegitimate sonic youths of disputed parentage strewn across the tour map. The closest the band has come to a tragic death in the family was the murder of Black Flag roadie Joe Cole. Sure, he inspired a couple of songs on Dirty, but as far as the band's bio goes he's a marginal figure at best.

In fact, Sonic Youth may be the only band in rock history whose story is interesting solely for the enormous shadow they cast over basically all guitar-based music that developed in their wake. For any left-of-the-mainstream rock music from the early nineties onward, the band's influence is immeasurable. Guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo essentially dismantled rock guitar and built an entirely new vocabulary of playing and composing from the ground up. They are one of the only bands who ever truly started over from scratch. Which is not to say they didn't have influences, just that, from about their first full-length onward, they never sounded derivative of them. We may one day be saying the same thing about Radiohead in terms of compositional development, but I don't think their influence will be nearly as inescapable.

Browne doesn't really get into a technical or aesthetic analysis of the band's musical innovations, which is in some ways unfortunate because someone really needs to. It's an incredibly rich body of work that remains largely unexamined. Matthew Stearns similarly declined to attempt any sort of musical exposition in his 33¹/₃ volume on Daydream Nation. There's a great multi-volume dissertation out there waiting to be written, if anyone's up to it, something on the order of Tim Riley's peerless Beatles book or Ben Watson's exhaustive Zappa treatise.

What he does do is tell their story, plain and simple and with little flourish, in a way it deserves to be told. He does a terrific job of painting the scene of New York's overlapping downtown music and art scenes in the early eighties, when the ashes of punk gave way to the far more nihilistic sounds of the so-called "no wave" movement. Having lived in New York throughout the economic boom of the go-go nineties, it's hard for someone like myself to picture just how dangerous day-to-day living was in the East Village at the time, and how much this informed the sounds and styles of the time. In one particularly telling (and chilling) quote, artist Dan Graham notes of the androgynous fashions favoured by the scene's female contingent, "all the women back then were afraid of rape. These were sexually oriented women trying to look unsexual."

Browne also shines in detailing the band's often contentious relationship with Geffen Records after signing with the major label at the end of the eighties, just in time for the "alternative" music boom that followed. While the label tried mightily to break the band to wider audience through the first half of the decade, they remained (and still remain), for the most part, a cult band. Browne includes a few surprisingly dissatisfied quotes from Moore, who seems frustrated to this day at the band's failure to become bigger stars.

Nevertheless, the band re-upped their deal with Geffen in 1994, when their management team managed to score them a signing bonus well above that which their sales alone might have merited, based on the fact that the band had been a major factor in the decisions of cash cows Nirvana and Beck to sign with the label. So in a way, being the coolest kids in school did pay off to some extent.

The book comes to a close following the release of 2006's Rather Ripped, the final record in their renegotiated Geffen obligation, a turning point which leaves the band's future in question. Browne hints that it may be their final album, but that's probably wishful thinking on his part, hoping that his book will wind up being the band's complete story. As it happens, the band have announced plans to release a new album next spring on an as-yet-unnamed independent label.

And so the pattern into which they've settled in the last several years continues: new album every other spring or so, then touring in the summer, when the band members' kids are out of school. Hard to believe it's been over ten years now since the band's longevity and cult-hero status first began garnering them comparisons to the Grateful Dead.

Book review: Double Nickels On the Dime (331/3)

To me, the primary appeal of the Minutemen has always been their friendly, unassuming vibe. I love the high energy, the instrumental chops and the angry-young-prole-with-a-library-card lyrics. But it's the fact that they always come off like dudes hanging out and jamming, regardless of what they're singing about, that's always kept me coming back.

Double Nickels, as it turns out, is ideal fodder for the 33¹/₃ series. It's brimming with material, there's interesting stories behind many of the songs, the lyrics bear close listening, and it's the product of collaboration that includes contributions from more than just the band's principal members. Many of those involved were quite willing to talk, and Michael T. Fournier (who, by the way, teaches a class in the history of punk rock at Tufts; are you kidding me?) does a fine job of whittling those stories down to a concise and well-organised summary of the album's stories and meanings.

Fournier opens the book with a brief history of the band, follows with a brief history of the album, takes a quick detour to recount his own experiences listening to it as a teenager, and gets down to a track-by-track breakdown in less than twenty pages. He seems to feel that the point of the book is the music, so why waste time on the other stuff? I couldn't agree more.

One of the things I liked most about the book was that I learned things about Double Nickels I didn't know before. For instance, there are a few tracks I've never even heard; they were left off the CD in order to fit it on one disc. One of them is a Van Halen cover! Rest assured, this situation will soon be rectified; the vinyl is en route in the mail as I type.

I also didn't know that the running order was determined in a manner similar to a fantasy sports draft (Fournier's analogy): each member had one side, and they took turns picking songs for it. Anything unselected went on side four. I also didn't realise how many of the songs had lyrics written by some of the band's friends, including Black Flag's Chuck Dukowski and Henry Rollins. The idea was apparently, to keep the music fresh by incorporating outside ideas. The album never gets boring over the course of four sides and more than forty songs, so that seems to have worked out.

What works best of all here is Fournier's writing. Like the Minutemen's music, it's breezy and casual. Rather than coming off like the dry observations of a college professor (which...), Fournier's prose reads like the musings of your buddy who's really into this album, knows a bunch of neat stuff about it, and can't wait to tell you. Asides, interjections and unnecessary exclamation points abound, all of them adding up the a 100 page speil that perfectly fits its subject. Double Nickels greatest triumph may be that it is simultaneously dense and highly accessible. By packing his book with facts and insights while keeping it simple and readable, Fournier has followed the band's example and done the album proud.

Book review: OK Computer (331/3)

How long does an album have to be around before it becomes "timeless"? As Dai Griffiths points out in his 33¹/₃ entry on Radiohead's OK Computer, the Beatles' music has lasted 50 years to Beethoven's 200, but the gap narrows proportionally as each year passes.

OK was probably admitted to the echelon of all-time-greats faster than any album I can remember, and it's still easy to see why. The performances are clearly those of a band at the peak of their creative powers. The lyrics are clear enough to convey an overarching theme, but still vague enough to allow for individual interpretation. The music is ambitious and complex, yet the band's reach never exceeds their grasp. There are no embarrassingly self-indulgent passages of prog pretentions; not a single note is wasted. The album is suffused with ideas and invention but, more than anything else, the band sounds confident. It sounds as though they knew they were crafting one for the canon even before they began recording.

This immediately-bestowed classic status is one of the primary themes of Griffiths's study of OK. The book was published in 2004, just seven years after the album's release; he probably wrote it in 2003. And yet its place in the pantheon was already firmly established, and hasn't evolved since. So what kind of classic album is it exactly?

Griffiths sets up this question, then tackles it by discussing different categories of classic albums (concept albums, double albums). He introduces the possibility of a CD album to be judged on its own merits, in terms of running time and continuity, in the post-vinyl era. He then discusses the ways in which long songs are used to pad out the times of CD albums, and lists the different categories of long songs (really slow songs, songs with a lot of verses). He concludes that OK is a great CD album, and that its songs have extended intros and outros in the fashion of the CD era. This is all the first chapter.

Look, Griffiths is my kind of guy. Anybody who mentions Dire Straits, Tori Amos, Pixies, Oasis, De La Soul, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Webb and disc 2 of British Bird Sounds on CD all in the space of a few pages, just to make a point about Radiohead, is weird enough for me. But too much of this book is just talking in circles. His grand point about OK being a CD album is undercut quite obviously by the placement of "Fitter, Happier" right in the middle, a track on which, by the way, Griffiths focuses as the album's key thematic song.

He spends the second third of the book breaking down each song by key(s), beats per minute, lengths of verses and choruses and other minutiae without ever really making much of a point. What makes this especially frustrating is that I've been saying for years that this is exactly what rock criticism needs.

Too many rock critics don't know an augmented seventh chord from a locrian scale, which is what separates their work from serious writing about jazz and classical. To write about non-pop genres, a writer is expected to understand at least the basics of music theory, and to recognise certain aspects of it in the music. This is why so much rock criticism focuses excessively on the lyrics, even when they're not especially important. And of course we have the great Lester Bangs to thank for the occasionally inspired, often insufferable school of rock critics who attempt to creatively reproduce the excitement of the performance itself, usually through onomatopoeia, run-on sentences and too many capital letters.

This is not to say that this sort of writing doesn't have it's place; some of it is terrific. But there remains a critical void awaiting someone to step in and fill it with technical, theory-based criticism of popular music. After all, if you think the musicians don't know this stuff you're kidding yourself.

And if any band's music cries out for this sort of analysis, it's Radiohead's. Their use of non-traditional modal structures and time signatures (even more so on the two albums that followed OK) makes their music ripe for fine-toothed dissection. Griffiths breaks down each song into obsessive charts showing lengths of intros, outros and instrumental breaks, and even maps out the key and tempo changes in "Paranoid Android", but fails to follow through with any substantive analysis. What could be a breakthrough study of an already much-pondered album instead collapses under the weight of its own unexamined raw data.

This makes the book all the more infuriating after one slogs through pages of fairly opaque, directionless ramblings only to find no real conclusion. Griffiths spends the third and final section speculating on OK's place in future history, its staying power, if you will. It's a decent enough read, but at this point I was exhausted. It's hard to imagine I would ever have said this about one of these little 100+ page tomelettes, but this one is actually too long.

Book review: Loveless (331/3)

My Bloody Valentine's Loveless is one of rock's most frustratingly elusive records. The more one learns about it: the creative inspirations, the engineering processes, the lyrics, the secrets; the less, paradoxically, one understands it. This is largely because the biggest secret one might discover about it is that there really are no secrets. Unlike, say, the backward noises on "Tomorrow Never Knows" or the snare sounds on Low, the band employed few if any radical recording or mixing techniques. The guitar tracks, for the most part, don't really have any effects on them. There aren't even that many layers. The inscrutably complex whole is comprised of remarkably simple parts. Which makes it that much more intriguing.

So from that standpoint, there's not much for Mike McGonigal to reveal in his entry in the 33¹/₃ series. There are a few interesting tidbits, like the bit about guitarist Kevin Shields playing a guitar through two amps at once with independent tremolo effects running at slightly different rates with their speakers facing each other with a single mic in between. Cool. But most of the technical details (the tremolo effects are almost all done by hand; the drum tracks are mostly programmed from samples because drummer Colm O'Ciosoig was too sick to play; there's a lot of vocal tracks) are old news. If you've read anything else about Loveless, you know all this stuff.

So McGonigal goes for something of a grab-bag of 33¹/₃ styles. He begins with a bit of personal history (thankfully not dwelling on his briefly-mentioned youthful drug habit; yawn), throws in a bit of track-by-track commentary, then settles into a comprehensive making-of history assembled with the help of a bunch of new interviews with the principal players. It's this last element, the meat of the book, that make it worthwhile.

The recording of Loveless really was quite an ordeal. The band bounced from cheap studio to cheaper studio as their label's budget allowed putting in a few days at a time before moving on again. This meant a never-ending series of arguments with in-house engineers who just didn't get it, many of whom, claims Shields, were excluded from their own studios, strictly ordered not to do anything, and received a credit in the liner notes for their troubles. Details like this make it worth it.

The book itself, from what I've heard, went through a birthing nearly as arduous as that of Loveless itself. Apparently Shields agreed to the interviews, spoke quite openly, then changed his mind and refused to sign off on any quotes in the book. That's what I was told by a notoriously unreliable source, anyway. I guess he came around eventually, though, because the book's full of Shields speaking quite freely about what really happened and who's full of shit.

Still, the back story explains the somewhat haphazard narrative toward the books end, where the text is interrupted by asides along the lines of "When Kevin read the first draft, he said..." or "My editor asks me to change...". McGonigal was apparently asked to tack on a sort of epilogue to the story, and he chooses to describe another album by some other artist who was apparently a big My Bloody Valentine fan. Relevant? Not really. Interesting? Sure. At the very least it makes me want to hear this guy's album, and for me that's the universal measuring stick for any book about music: if it makes me excited to hear something new, thumbs up.

Book review: Use Your Illusion I and II (331/3)

I've read a bunch of those 33¹/₃ books, but haven't got around to writing any up yet, so hopefully this'll get me in the habit. I suppose I really ought to respond to all of them. I just read Eric Weisbard's (No homepage, dude? No blog?) study of Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion albums and found it occasionally frustrating, but ultimately worth the read.

Weisbard starts out by offering up the album's historical moment as the twilight of the blockbuster "event" album release, one followed by an inevitable two years of stadium tours and expensive videos, an era ended more by the fragmenting of public tastes than the so-called "alternative rock" revolution. Using the trajectory of the Musicland chain as a paradigm, he shows the rise and fall of the dominance of a small group of individual artists (Springsteen, Madonna, Zeppelin, etc.) within the music industry as a whole. UYI, as he awkwardly abbreviates the twin behemoths, were the grand finale.

As an incurable Hegelian who loves revisionist narratives, I found this to be thrilling stuff. The first two dozen pages of the book are stuffed with ideas, examples, connections, allusions and compelling arguments. The rest of the book is decent, but none of it holds up to the opening. Not because it's bad, mind you, just because the first bit is really good. Weisbard talks about his own music writing career, and which artists loomed large at each stop. Fine, interesting stuff, he's certainly been around enough. Then he recounts the oft-told history of the Guns in their heyday, followed by Axl's tortuous vanishing act. The history is well-written and interspersed with in-depth musical analysis, though mostly of non-UYI tracks. Still, Weisbard's thoughts on "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "One in a Million" are interesting enough that I didn't mind if he wandered off from the point.

I enjoyed the book thoroughly until the last chapter, when he finally addresses the albums track-by-track. Earlier in the book, he made a point of explaining that he hadn't heard the album in years, was relying strictly on (remarkably vivid and quite believable) memories to write most of the book, and would listen to it once again at the end. The last chapter consists of a sketchy and unsatisfying paragraph or two about each song, which Weisbard brags was largely unedited. Cute idea, but a little lazy. There are a few terrific insights scattered throughout: he dismisses the first two tracks on UYI I as filler with the zinger, "Two throwaways in a row. In the notorious tradition of GN'R live, are they now even showing up late for their own album?" But there just isn't enough of this, and I can't help but thinking that a few more hours of work could have made an enormous difference in the content (to say nothing of the grammar).

Part of the problem may have been that I found myself disagreeing with many of his assessments, and surely this coloured my overall view of the chapter. Weisbard is clearly obsessed with Axl Rose, and views GN'R as Axl's band, UYI as his flawed masterpiece, and other band members' contributions as lesser tracks. Izzy Stradlin's songwriting contributions are dismissed as half-written Stones knockoffs (sort of true, but that doesn't make all of them bad), while Slash's guitar work is heard as an annoyance to be sat through while waiting for the auteur to sing again. Hasn't he noticed that the band is (literally, to judge by their studio output) nothing without those guys? That Axl is completely lost on his own, reduced to an infrequently touring nostalgia act? That "Bad Obsession" rocks, but "The Garden" is corny-ass bullshit? Well, everyone's got their own favourites, I suppose. Plenty of room for that when you've got two and a half hours to sift through.

The Used CD Rack of History

C— sent me a pretty funny list of albums you need to throw out, basically a bunch of "this is considered a classic but it's really crap" rants. It's always fun (if easy) to throw stones at sacred cows.

What I find most interesting about it is the fact that this list was written over five years ago; it's amazing to be reminded of how quickly popular culture evolves. By early 2002 the 90s had only just ended (don't let the number fool you; the 90s ended the previous September). The selections at the top of the list are all pretty obvious timeless overrated classics, but the more recent entries toward the end are particularly revealing.

The Prodigy, for instance, have already become so forgotten that people too young to remember the hype could be forgiven for having trouble believing that the band ("band") was once touted as pop music's next big thing. Seriously, electronica was going to replace rock completely in the popular consciousness and the Prodigy were going to be the Beatles of rave.

Sublime? Do people still listen to them? How about the Wallflowers? The Gin Blossoms? Ben Folds Five? It's doubtful many of today's college students know who they are. (My favourite one in this category? Paula Cole.) And while I can certainly remember its ubiquity from my dorm room days, I would be surprised if very many people under 30 know that Pulp Fiction even had a soundtrack album, let alone what was on it.

I also find the inclusion of Dinosaur Jr curious since they were a thing of the past when the list was written. But they've reunited and released a new album in the meantime, and the album named here has been reissued with attendant hoopla. Would they still make the list today?

My missing nominees: London Calling, Some Girls, Moondance, Imagine, Brighten the Corners, Metallica, Desire, Darkness on the Edge of Town, several of which I own, by the way. And some of them I even like.

By the way, if you enjoy wallowing in the detritus of 90s pop culture, this list is pretty amusing too.

Movie review: American Hardcore

I read Steven Blush's American Hardcore a few years back and loved it. It's comprehensive, stuffed with great quotes and stories, a little bit disorganised and bluntly opinionated. Just a terrific object lesson in writing an entertaining and enlightening oral history by a guy who was there for a lot of it. On top of that, I'm always biased in favour of books about American independent music in the 80s. I find the stories of these bands more inspiring than any others in rock history. It's partly a personal thing; I toured in a van with my own unknown band for a few years, so I know how hard it is.

But I think what I admire most about these bands is that, prior to 1984, none of them ever caught a break. The biographies and histories of all worthy artists, scenes, genres in rock all have a "big break" moment that functions as an early turning point in the story. Sam Philips discovered Elvis. Brian Epstein found the Beatles. All the San Francisco bands were signed by major labels. Same with the British class-of-'77 punks and the CBGB denizens just before them. Same again with Seattle's finest in the early '90s. Let the glory years begin. A few years later comes a second turning point and the glory years come to close. A key member dies, a key member quits in a huff, the drugs result in shitty records, the fans lose interest.

Hardcore never had that first turning point. The second one, the end of the line, came in 1984. Blush posits the disillusion resulting from Reagan's re-election as the death blow, but ignores the equally damning effects of success. Following the critical success of R.E.M.'s Murmur, indie rock was suddenly a viable commodity in all its forms. This led to 1984's critical landslide (q.v. #'s 4, 6, 8, 14, 20) and within two years Husker Du and the Replacements had deals with majors.¹ What made hardcore unique for the first few years was the complete lack of commercial expectations. None of those bands, in their wildest dreams, ever believed they could wind up on MTV someday. No one thought they'd ever make a dime. Once the very possibility of success was introduced, the scene was never the same.

But back to the big break, or lack thereof. For the bands whose greatest years passed before 1984, there is no moment in their story when their popularity suddenly began snowballing, took on a life of its own. All of these bands, particularly the big four (Bad Brains, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat) slogged it out on the road month after month, built their fanbases one kid at a time, built their legacies one show at a time. Oftentimes interviews with has-been bands for rock retrospectives are suffused with a sense of loss. We had it all, man. When I look back? We thought it would never end. But hardcore bands? They never had anything to lose.

So last night I watched Paul Rachman's companion film and... not the same. For one thing, the movie suffers from the same shortcoming as any narrative film adapted from a novel: you can fit more detail in a book. In the case of a documentary history, this detail can be crucial.

Biggest problem, right off the bat: the Dead Kennedys are barely mentioned.² It's a glaring enough omission to make me think there must be a reason behind it, most likely a refusal of the band members to be interviewed for the project.³ But Blush's book has pages of quotes from Jello Biafra, so why sit out the film? Because Feral House is an independent press but Sony is a big corporate film studio? Who knows?

Other than that, the raw material is there. There's some decent stuff in the interviews once you wade through the usual we were just like fuck you man and fuck your rules man nonsense that always pervades in conversations with aging punks. The archival footage is terrific, the kind of stuff that makes you say, "Thank God someone actually thought to film this." It's not that surprising to see good footage of, say, Bad Brains or Minor Threat, but the onstage brawl at an SS Decontrol show is an absolute treasure. It's one thing to hear grizzled dudes bragging about just how violent the scene was back then, it's quite another to confront the indisputable photographic evidence.

The film's biggest problem isn't the gaps in the source material, though, it's the editing. There's almost no attempt to really tell a story. Most of the interviews and live clips seem thrown together. There's an intro (Reagan-disco-yuppies-arena rock-blahblahblah) and an outro (the scene petering out in the wake of Reagan's re-election). About two-thirds of the way through, there's a half-assed attempt to cover each of the major scenes from a geographical standpoint (like the book's chapters). But other than that there's no narrative thread, just one visceral impression after another. This may have been an artistic choice by Rachman, but if it is it doesn't work. It comes off looking too haphazard, like an editor's early draft. For an audience already enamoured of the music and well-versed in its history, this isn't such a big deal. But if you're looking for a coherent introduction to the story of hardcore, you won't find it here.

The most surprising impression I took from the film, one I had never really read about or heard discussed before, isn't even mentioned explicitly in the film. Being straight, I don't have much of a gaydar, but as I watched one interview after another, it occurred to me that more than a few of the subjects seemed gay. It may have been the way they talked, the way they dressed, even the way some of their apartments were decorated. There were a few scattered bands with out members at the time (Husker Du, MDC, Big Boys), but nothing that's ever been addressed as a dominant theme of the era's history. I'd be curious to hear a gay man's take on the film, particularly one who doesn't know much about hardcore.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Here was a subculture that attracted kids who felt like outcasts from a surburban world that offered little quarter to its non-conformists: a conservative environment in a conservative era. Both the bands and the crowds were composed of teenagers, the quintessential age of sexual confusion. There was male bonding all around, immediate emotional release in the music and (intense, shirtless) physical contact in the pit. There were very few females involved with the scene and even fewer songs written about them. The whole scene was a tailor-made refuge for the emotionally confused and disenfranchised seeking some sort of social connection. I wonder how many kids in those bands and in those pits grew up and came out. I really think this could be the great untold story of the hardcore scene.

Tangents & Clarifications
1. R.E.M. would take longer to follow, but keep in mind their records were already going gold on IRS; they didn't need a major yet. [Return]
2. The Misfits also go unmentioned in the film, despite getting an entire chapter of Blush's book. But while Danzig and the boys may have built one of the most resilient and bafflingly rabid followings of any of the era's bands, in a way they aren't really part of this story. Certainly their own story deserves to be told, but in the context of the national hardcore scene being discussed here they're really only a footnote. So here you are. [Return]
3. Blush, incidentally, is also not interviewed. He's credited as the film's screenwriter, but there's no voiceover narration either. I suppose he gets points for not wanting to stroke his own ego by preening before the camera, rattling aff a string of I-was-there tales, but considering how much of the book is told in first person, it seems a bit odd. [Return]

The other singles

Rejoice! Everybody's year-end best-of lists have graced us at last, and of course some gems were inevitably overlooked. What follows is a list of my ten favourite singles that didn't turn up on any of the following lists:

• Cokemachineglow published an unordered list of favourite tracks unified by a quaint storyline imagining the songs as the soundtrack to a fictional holiday party attended by the site's writing staff. Cute, but the joke gets old quickly, particularly if you don't know the writers personally. Interesting bunch of tracks though, and that's what really counts.
• Paper Thin Walls asked 31 writers to pick one track each and discuss. Predictably, theirs contained some of the oddest selections, but a few usual-suspect-types turned up as well.
• Pitchfork made an ordered countdown, but theirs included any songs they liked, singles be damned. Album tracks, bootlegs, remixes, whatever. To incorporate this newfound embarrassment of riches, they expanded the list to 100 tracks. Killer.
• PopMatters didn't make a singles list, but they embedded a video to accompany the blurb for 42 of the 60 selections on their best albums list; going by the logic that any song that has a video is a single, I counted those tracks as PM's singles list. Definitely the safest choices out of all the lists I've seen; they seem to aim for the oldest/least-hip audience. No shame in that, mind you, but the distinctly NPR vibe to many of their selections makes the whole thing seem a bit out of touch.
• And of course Stylus were the only ones to do a traditional singles-only countdown. Bless them. I've got a soft spot for the classics as far as format goes, plus my tastes usually skew closest to theirs.

All in all 273 (non-unique) selections, and still the tracks below didn't make one of these lists. I stuck with singles¹, criteria being any song that can be reasonably argued a single, like has a video or is available on iTunes without a parent album or whatever. No sense getting too picky here.

Incidentally, when I went back and re-read some of these I noticed a pattern of overwhelming negativity in some of these blurbs. Rest assured, this is not a piss-take; these really are terrific songs. I just sometimes get a little down on myself for falling for the facile siren wails of unabashed pop. I was young once, you know. Young and way too cool for these sorts of confections. Thank God I've outgrown that foolish notion.

In no particular order (well, okay, alphabetically):

• "Doctor Blind", Emily Haines
  Pitchfork actually put the accompanying clip on its year's best videos list, but where's the love for the song itself? Haines's moody ode to an overmedicated loved one is a marvelous example of that rare pop song in which the music perfectly complements the lyrics. The unsettling shifts in the time signature keep the listener off-balance while the woozy strings perfectly evoke the soft, fuzzy intoxication of chemical depressants. There have been countless attempts through the years, but rarely does a listening experience actually feel like a drug.
• "Here (In Your Arms)", Hellogoodbye
  Let's see. If you've never heard the band, this is a tough one to explain. Hellogoodbye are sort of like this typically lame southern California emo band, with all of the whiny vocals and nauseatingly precious lyrics that implies. But then last Christmas the singer got a vocoder and the drummer got a cheap-ass drum machine, and they all got way into shitty Euro-club pop. So now they write the same cloying songs, but they slather them with obnoxious four-on-the-floor disco beats and gobs of woefully unecessary autotuner effects. And the results... are awesome. Trust me, this cut is infectious.
• "Hey You", Basement Jaxx
  I am baffled as to how this little slice of excess got ignored, especially since Internet music dorks have always celebrated Basement Jaxx because, not in spite, of their utter ridiculousness. This might be their most ludicrous track yet, a towering carnival of blaring brass, tribal chants and all the (literal) bells and whistles they could stuff in there. I mean really, would you take "Oh My Gosh" over this over-the-top circus of excess? Turn it way up on some good speakers and listen to the way the tympanies(!) carry the chorus away to some magical cotton candy world and back again.
• "Hit the Floor", Twista ft. Pitbull
  Twista's world's-fastest-rapper gimmick gets pretty tiresome over the course of a full-length album, particularly the 70-minute endurance tests of the CD age. In small doses though, he's never less than a welcome delight on any track, and this one is no exception. The relentless mindfuck of a beat obscures the generic party-hearty lyrics; bob your head in lieu of singing along.
• "I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Is In", Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings
  I'm not sure if this was released in 2006 or late 2005, but I spun it enough times this year that respect is due. Available as a mail order only² 45 (presumably for copyright reasons), Jones and her Dap-Tones take a corny old Kenny Rogers chestnut and, rather than make a joke out of it, transform it into a tight, mean funk workout, key changes and all. The year's hottest old-school track, the magnificent Amy Winehouse be damned.
• "Keep Holding On", Avril Lavigne
  Remember when her whole "anti-Britney" (her own term, by the way) gimmick seemed so fresh? The whole punky skater-chick thing (wifebeaters and neckties: Whoa! Somebody stop her!) was a breath of freah air for teen-pop back when squeaky-clean Disney alums ruled the adolescent airwaves, and her slick, radio-ready guitar kick-ins stood out sonically from the shiny plastic dance-pop being force-fed our nation's youth just a few short years ago. Naturally, she inspired career makeovers across the board, as girls from all walks, from the prefab TV princess to the aging indie queen, recast themselves as modern-day grrrls with loud guitars and engineers like the Matrix got paid big bucks to water those very guitars down for the impressionable youth of TRL Nation. Which raises the most vexing question of young Avril's career: what does the revolutionary do when she's won?

  In Avril's case, she grows up fast and reinvents herself as the Diane Warren of the teen set. Already learning to rake it in as a songwriter-for-hire (check the credits atop Kelly's last one), here she steps back behind the mic for a movie soundtrack one-off. The song is essentially "How Do I Live" rewritten with a bunch of yearbook slogans; the guitars are turned down, the strings are turned up, every note is obvious, every word a cliché. The song essentially functions as a publicly-posted resumé for anyone who can't afford Linda Perry's services.

  Having said all that, it probably sounds as though I don't actually like the song, but I do, a lot. I'm a sucker for this sort of overblown sentimentalism, and this track is textbook. What places it slightly above other songs of its ilk is little more than a personal predilection toward Avril's voice, especially the way she pronounces all of her "s"es with a slight "sh", as in "We were meant to be, shupposhed to be/But we losht it". It's the little things, you know?

• "Like U Crazy", Mates of State
  I heard a music writer say in an interview earlier this year that he adores the Mates of State, that "they don't have a bad track in them." When the skeptical interviewer asked him to elaborate, the writer explained that he loves the idea of couple bands, in which the boy is no longer yearning for the girl, he's already won her, and the two simply write beautiful music together to celebrate the love they share. Like Yo La Tengo, like Viva Voce, like Mitch & Mickey, etc. I, for one, second that emotion.

  "Like U Crazy" has it all: weepy, dominant chord progression, simple waltz time, two voices declaiming their love in unison. When they get to the chorus their voices rise as they pour their hearts into the song. From a conventional standpoint they sound awful: there are no pretty, intricate harmonies here, just two amateurish singers belting away at a sloppy duet. It's confusing, messy and somewhat out of tune. Just like real love.

• "Mon Coeur, Mon Amour", Anais
  What I love most about this song, besides the fact that it's a delightfuly fizzy piece of underproduced indie-guitar candy, is that, since I don't speak French, the lyrics are whatever I want them to be. I know the title means "My Heart, My Love", which gives a basic idea but not much beyond that. If the song were a weepy ballad, there wouldn't be much left to the imagination. As it stands, it could be anything: a joyous declaration, an unrequited plea, a defiant break-up, you name it.
• "Setting Sun", Howling Bells
  British people wearing cowboy hats, western shirts and other basic signifiers of Americana are generally a dicey proposition, and for the most part the Howling Bells' bland roots rock ably lives up to the dubious promise of their wardrobes. "Setting Sun", however, is a marvelous exception with the unmistakeable power to inspire all manner of overwrought metaphors, a haunting slice of twilight that sneaks around behind you and taps you on the opposite shoulder. The singer's sleepy voice and vague lyrics are pleasant enough, but it's the spooky lead guitar lines that carry the whole the tune across the good/great divide, dripping a trail of voodoo magic along the path behind them as they go.
• "Vans", The Pack
  I love the way hiphop is finally embracing skateboarding, and can't believe it took this long to come to full fruition. Both are urban youth cultures that place a premium on the absolute latest in anything, embrace any defiance of authority, develop elaborate and constantly-evolving codes of fashion and language inscrutable to outsiders, and have a strong and lucrative appeal to a suburban demographic. What was the hold-up?

  "Vans" is the oddball flipside to Lupe Fiasco's widely praised "Kick, Push", a hiphop skater's anthem tailor-made for wider acceptance what with the lush samples and easily-parsed storytelling. "Vans", by contrast, features a group of average rhymers mumbling about their shoes. They praise them for their "punk-rock" qualities, list a few of the designs available, brag on how little they cost, even drop a bit of well-researched company history into a verse. All over a track consisting of little more than a few fingersnaps, some high-hats and a dizzyingly deep synth line, just the sort of disorienting minimal weirdness that makes one scrutinise the spaces between the sounds to see if there's anything else there.

• "Way I Be Leanin'", Juvenile ft. Mike Jones, Paul Wall, Wacko and Skip
  "Get Ya Hustle On" seems to be the consensus pick from Reality Check, but I'll take this relentless ensemble number over the album's opening statement of purpose as a standalone single. The screwed-n-chopped Jay-Z sample in the hook would be the best part if it weren't for the irrepressible Mike Jones, who hops all over the mic like a kid at recess. Praise for "Hustle" tends to focus on its uncompromising sociopolitical message in the wake of the Katrina disaster, but if you can't see the relevance in a New Orleans rapper cutting a posse track with an all-star lineup of Houston MCs, you weren't paying attention when it all went down.

And while we're at it, some other observations of all these lists:

• Most appearances, song: Clipse's "Mr. Me Too" made four lists, all but the Paper Thin Walls mix; presumably the one-track-per-writer format made that one much tougher to crack. Incidentally, Gnarls Barkley's ubiquitous "Crazy" would have made the same four lists, but Pitchfork proudly pointed out in their introduction that since they were cool enough to hear the white label of the song in 2005, it wasn't eligible for 2006's list. Whoopee, dorks.
• Most total appearances, artist: Clipse had one more appearance with a different song, bringing their total to five. This tied tham with Nelly Furtado, who spread three different songs across three lists, and Hot Chip, who placed two songs on three lists, for a total of five each.
• Most unique songs, artist: Over the space of three lists, Ghostface managed to rack up a whopping four different songs.

Aaaaand how about my favourite cuts that only made one list:

• Cokemachineglow: I'm stumped here. Every song I've heard and liked is on another list as well. Which is not to say that CMG didn't come up with their share of unique entries, just that I haven't heard too many of them. But I will. And perhaps I'll update this line in the future.
• Pitchfork: "Ain't No Other Man", Christina Aguilera
  How on earth did this miss Stylus's list? Those guys are the biggest pop suckers going. Hands down one of the best singles of the year in my view. Terrific vocal performance, urgent and unstoppable rhythm track. This is quite honestly one of my favourite singles of the decade.
• PopMatters: "Here I Come", The Roots
  Arguably ?uestlove's finest three minutes to date on the ol' trap kit. Listen to him work that ride cymbal. Black Thought is frequently criticised for his mediocre lyrics, but I don't even notice the lyrics on this cut; too wrapped up in that beat.
• Paper This Walls: "Apple Tree Victim", Prurient
  Just the latest in a long line of examples of how an excruciatingly distorted recording of a simple, elegant melody can be one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful sounds imaginable.
• Stylus: "Rehab", Amy Winehouse
  I don't care if this is fake-ass British neo-soul. The groove is funky, the voice is smoky, the lyrics are a hoot. She pulls this schtick off in a way Jamiroquai's never even approached.

Tangents & Clarifications

1. Best-album only tracks of the year: "A Method", TV on the Radio; "1,000 Seconds", Secret Machines [Return]
2. You can pick it up here. And I highly recommend that you do. By the way, full disclosure: I knew the bass player in college. But I haven't seen him in years. [Return]

Book review: Body Piercing Saved My Life

Just finished Andrew Beaujon's Body Piercing Saved My Life¹, a book about Christian rock. A quick, solid read, nothing too heavy but just substantial enough to keep it interesting. Beaujon writes for SPIN, and it shows; Body Piercing reads less like a book than an extended SPIN article, with all the good and bad that implies. On one hand, there's a breezy, conversational tone on the surface, as well as plenty of witty digressions and a sharp eye for ironic observations. On the other hand, way too much personal stuff about the author's own "journey" in gathering material for the book and developing an understanding of his subject,² and both the theses and conclusions are pretty indistinct.

Still, while those may seem like tough criticisms, they're really just minor quibbles. The main thing I came away with, and this is the highest praise I can offer up to any book about music, was an eagerness to listen to several of the bands described therein. MuteMath³ and mewithoutYou seem like the most obviously enticing candidates, both of which Beaujon describes as mildly art-damaged indie rock with only vaguely Christian-themed lyrics. But he even manages to make the David Crowder Band, described as one of the better examples of an altogether odious strain of Christian music ("worship music"), sound intriguing. I've never cared for Christian rock, mostly because what little has crossed over to the "general market" (DC Talk, Creed, Evanescence⁴, etc.) has been universally rubbish. But there's obviously quite a lot of it out there (it's the only segment of the music industry currently experiencing growth in CD sales), and Beaujon is happy to report plenty of worthy acts to be heard.

After laying out the history of the genre in one early chapter, Beaujon tries to cover all aspects of the business and culture surrounding the music, from meeting with an indie label impresario and several different artists to attending a conference, and awards show and an outdoor festival. For the most part he finds people eager to show him around and help him out⁵ and is almost never hassled about getting saved (he's an athiest, though he hardly goes around announcing this). This makes the chapter in which he describes hanging out with some pro-life activists on the protest scene in Washington stick out like a sore thumb for two reasons: one, it has little, if anything, to do with music and two, try as he may, Beaujon is unable to conceal his dislike for the views of his subjects, never a problem elsewhere in the book. And every few chapters he transcribes an interview with what he calls a "Christian Rock Lifer," (musicians, magazine editors) and each of them is engaging and passionate.

I think the most important thing I got out of this book is the idea that you don't have to be Christian to dig some of this music. Plenty of Sufjan Stevens fans already realise that (or don't, and that's the point). Remember when Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was all the rage with the kids? How many of his American fans were Muslim?

Tangents & Clarifications
1. I was amazed at how many people didn't get the joke in the title, which appears on the cover below a cartoony doodle of two hands with holes poked through the palms. People would ask me what I was reading, look at the cover and say "What does that mean?" Seems pretty obvious to me, and I'm hardly an evangelical. [Return]
2. Stuff like "When I got back to my hotel that night I thought about..." and "I was starting to realise that this might not be what I was really looking for..." These aren't quotes, by the way, just generalisations off the top of my head. But you know what I mean. I guess you could take the whole thing as a metaphor for a spiritual journey to parallel those experienced by many of his subjects, but if that's his intent it doesn't quite work. [Return]
3. The clip on their homepage, by the way, is worth watching strictly for the fact that the lead singer is playing a key-tar. [Return]
4. Whom, by the way, I never even knew were Christian until I read this book. There were a few others like that in there as well. [Return]
5. Curious exception: label publicists, who seem inexplicably reluctant to allow their artists to be interviewed. [Return]

These horns, they do not wink, my son

So a couple weeks ago I saw 3 Inches of Blood at the Knit with Early Man and Bad Wizard.¹ Bad Wizard won hands down, and they went on first. Go figure.

Bad Wizard occupy some beer-stained grey area between late-90s stoner rock and early-2000s garage rock, mostly the former. The rhythm section swings hard and fast; the riffs are all uniformly simple and repetitive in that bloozy kinda way; and the lyrics seem almost exclusively concerned with sex and weed. None of those statements are criticisms, by the way. The frontman was terrific, not too showy, just a guy who seemed completely at ease on stage, like if you met him elsewhere he'd seem like the kind of guy who ought to be on a stage somewhere; not at all in an off-putting way, just very comfortable. He'd shout out semi-intelligible intros between each number like, "'S one's called 'Natch'l High' y'all know'm talk'n'bout" and the band would launch into some variation on the previous song. Awesome.

Then came Early Man. Problematic.

Heavy metal is the only genre I can think of that simply has no place for irony. I used to dig acts like Beck and Pavement, who would wander from genre to genre without ever pulling their tongues from their cheeks, finding goofy thrills in whatever sounds they stumbled upon. Styles like hiphop, hardcore, country, etc, could withstand these jokers because it's possible to rap funny lyrics badly and still pull off a killer tune if the beat's funky enough.

Metal's a pretty delicate house of cards; you have to play it like you mean it, or it doesn't work. If you try to put it in quotes, it just sounds lame. Part of the underlying appeal of metal is that no matter how extreme it gets, those playing it sound like they believe in it 100%. The best metal bands thrash like their lives depend on it, like they'd go to war for the right to bang their heads. As a listener, I need this in order to buy into it.

Metal is fantasy; adolescent, masculine fantasy, whether it's about battling evil sorcerers or chopping up bodies. It's powerful, ultimately kind of silly, a lot of fun and a terrrific release. But if the performers acknowledge the absurdity of it, the illusion fails.² So when Early Man got up there and started playing a bunch of riffs that essentially said "Hey, we're a 'heavy metal' band, get it?" it let all the air out of their admittedly tight-as-shit playing³ from the first number. Yeah dude, we all know metal's kinda dorky, you don't need to play the cool card for us. Afraid to look foolish by letting yourself get too into it? Play math rock. Metal's ridiculous enough on its own; it doesn't need your help.

Vancouver's 3 Inches of Blood⁴ tread dangerously close to just-kidding territory, but play with just enough conviction to pull it off. They're one of those bands whose lyrics are actually about heavy metal, so they come off as kind of a minor league Man-O-War. What's interesting about them is that they have two singers: one guy for the high-pitched screams and falsetto wails, another guy doing mid-frequency Cookie Monster shrieks that sound more like static from faulty equipment than a human voice.⁵ The audience was into them, there was a lot of synchronised fist-pumping, and soon I was swept away with the crowd. Kick ass.

Tangents & Clarifications
1. Best shirts (and you know metal shows are all about the shirts): blue ribbon goes to the Early Man shirt with the skull-faced unicorn; runner-up goes to the Bad Wizard one that just lifted the Oakland Raiders logo wholesale with "BAD WIZARD" written across the top (can't find a picture, I'm afraid; bonus points for not even being from the Bay Area; everybody knows the Raiders are the discerning headbanger's sports team of choice; I mean, their fans dress like KISS auditioning for a Mad Max sequel). [Return]
2. Exhibit A: the Fucking Champs, a band noteable almost exclusively for their song titles. Come to think of it, Don Caballero, another band whose chops far exceed their listenability, also have some pretty terrific titles and rarely live up to them. Same goes for Anal Cunt. And some of these newer dress-up punk bands like Panic At the Disco are starting to gravitate towards more and more elaborate titles as well. Theory: humour of song titles is inversely proportional to quality of music. Discuss. Actually Anal Cunt's not bad. But not as good as their titles, either.[Return]
3. Early Man, by the way, have no bass player. Not only is this detrimental to their sound, but the resultant two-guitarists-and-a-drummer lineup serves to remind one of the John Spencer Blues Explosion, a more than apt comparison. They're also on Matador Records; coincidence? [Return]
4. Man, they're just beggin' for it with that name, aren't they? [Return]
5. This guy aroused my suspicions upon initial entrance due to his short hair (a serious red flag for irony-metal), but those doubts were cast aside when I heard him speak between songs and detected a European, possibly even Scandinavian, accent. When it comes to metal, Europeans do not fuck around. [Return]

Let the decline begin

Just got back from vacation, haven't posted in like two weeks, will totally catch up this week. Need to finish those football things soon.

So I haven't heard the Thom Yorke solo record yet, but its very existence worries me. We may wind up looking back on The Eraser or whatever it's called as the moment Yorke began to break away from the 'Head. It'd be one thing if this was Yorke's quirky rap project or whatever, but from what I've read it doesn't sound much different from Radiohead's more electronic-y records. The band, meanwhile, are concurrently working on the follow-up to Thief.

Eraser is apparently an outgrowth of Yorke's creative process, born of the four-track noodlings whence emerge Radiohead songs. Does this mean that the stuff on Eraser isn't good enough for a Radiohead record? If it's inferior work, why put it out? Or does Yorke set aside certain bits and pieces that he really likes for his solo work? Isn't he therefore depriving the band of some of his better work and diluting his talent in the process? Or is the solo album a collection of work Yorke liked enough to present to the band only to have it rejected? Does this mean he's frustrated by his bandmates, unhappy with their current direction, and investing more energy in other work?

Any of these possibilities is a negative one. Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but I don't think solo albums, by the frontman no less, are ever a good sign for the future of any band. On top of this, the record was released with minimal promotion, ostensibly to keep it from distracting the public from Yorke's main gig, but is being praised to the skies anyway. It's even been nominated for the Mercury Prize in the UK, where Yorke could probably stand for just about any seat in Parliament these days and win going away.

Am I overreacting? Perhaps. Radiohead are arguably the biggest band on a global scale, in terms of both commercial and critical success, to come out of the British Isles since U2. Regardless of whether you believe that band to be past their expiration date, you must notice that the media continues to treat a new U2 album as an event, a remarkable feat for a band who've been in the spotlight for about a quarter-century. If you're looking for a reason for the band's perpetual relevance, you could start by giving a listen to one of Bono's solo albums.

Same goes, to a lesser extent, for R.E.M.; Stipe could have gone solo years ago (it would have made perfect sense after Berry left), but is smart enough to know that his career longevity rests in no small part on the stability of the band and its creative interaction.

Ditto Vedder and Pearl Jam; you may not have given a shit about them for some time now, but they continue to pack arenas for multiple-night stands whenever they tour. Vedder alone? Probably do one night at a large theatre.

Conversely, you could argue that Washing Machine was the last album on which Sonic Youth were culturally relevant to an audience broader than their core following. It was released around the same time as Moore's Psychic Hearts and Gordon's Free Kitten project.

You can run this meme all the way back to acts like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd (discounting a movie soundtrack Waters collaborated on in 1970): their peaks lasted so long due to a combination of lineup stability and singularly focused energies.

I'm not saying Radiohead will break up next week, nor do I think their next album will be a clunker; it's a subtler and more gradual process than that. What I am saying is that when the ride comes to an end, as they all inevitably do, a lot of listeners may wind up pointing to this era as the turning point, and either Thief or the next one as their last good album.

Instant history codified the video star

Poor Stylus. They try so hard to distinguish themselves from the mighty Pitchfork, only to have the latest countdown feature they've spent months working on pre-empted a few weeks earlier by the 'Fork, who did a far more half-assed and consequently better (not in spite of, because of) job of it, and once again they appear one step behind.

I'm speaking, of course, of the two sites' respective lists of 100 music videos. Both lists are essentially celebrations of the glory of YouTube, a topic that's been popping up quite often lately; Bill Simmons did a list of his favourites for ESPN.com, for instance (and you don't even need one of those bullshit subscriptions to read it). (Yet). The timing seems about right, if you think about it. People are getting over the initial shock at the embarrassment of riches suddenly available and are settling into a world in which YouTube is no longer a Godsend, merely an accepted part of everyday life in the wired world.

As you know if you've read the articles, the sites took two different routes: Stylus, as is their wont, presumably went through a painstaking voting process¹ in which everybody submits a list, finalists are narrowed down, everybody watches the finalists and re-votes, and eventually the definitive list emerges. Pitchfork's list, on the other hand, appears to be the fruit of no more intensive deliberation than a late night at the office and a few six-packs. Other than wisely disqualifying any video on the Directors Label DVDs on the grounds that most of those are both too obvious and too well-known, there seems to be no overarching logic to the selections or the running order other than "Aren't these cool?"

And that, in a nutshell, is why Pitchfork's list works so much better than Stylus's on so many levels. First of all, part of YouTube's appeal is that it's so disorganised; you start out looking for something specific, then wind up stumbling all over the treasures strewn temptingly about. Before you know it, it's five-o'clock, you've accomplished nothing, and you go home.² Pitchfork's list reflects this perfectly.

Secondly, music video, and the Stylus list really highlights this, is just too narrow a field to support a best-of list this long. Surprising as this may seem given the age of the medium, the canon is still under construction.

The Directors Label thing is a big problem. 29 of the 100 videos on Stylus's list can be found on these seven DVDs³; six of them in the top ten alone. Are these seven guys really responsible for almost 30% of the best videos ever? Truth is, while the popularity of the series certainly inflates these directors' representation, that number's probably not that far off. There just aren't that many truly great music videos, or for that matter music video directors, out there.

Thirdly, I also noticed that the Stylus list skews pretty recent, an imbalance which at first I chalked up the the relative youth of the site's stable of writers. A few of the blurbs referred to the writers' having first seen videos from the mid-90s while in their pre-teen years. After all, how else do you account for the absence of so many 80s classics like "Hot for Teacher"? And for God's sake, where the fuck is fuckin' Devo?!?

But on further reflection I've decided that age is only part of the reason; in addition, there probably are more good videos, and better ones, being made in recent years. The medium only really came into its own as an artform within the last fifteen years or so; MTV only began showing director credits in what, '92 maybe? What makes a list like this different from a music list is that a list of the best singles or albums or what have you of all time inevitably skews older as critics are inclined to value originality over other factors. Thus, earlier works are showered with plaudits like "pioneering" and trailblazing". Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is routinely cited as the greatest rock album of all time, but very few critics or rock fans will tell you it's their favourite album ever; most won't even point to it as the best Beatles album. It earns its place at the top of the heap because of its historical significance, and because of how many musical ideas appeared there first.

Videos are the opposite: they grow consistently more daring, more imaginative, more expensive. Unlike with all genres of music, no one points to one particular era as a "golden age" of music video, one against which today's videos just don't hold up. Yes, there are visual ideas which recur in many videos, long-established sets of cliches and conventions, and someone must have done it first. But no one is arguing that the early videos did it better.

For this reason more than any other, this list just wasn't ready to be compiled. Until the day that someone says "You know? Videos used to be so much better," we're just not there yet.

The most glaring difference between the two lists, besides the fact that the Pitchfork one has a lot of older clips (again, the age thing), is that the Pitchfork one is just more fun, evidenced by the fact that they weren't afraid to throw on novelties like the ultimate Is-this-supposed-to-be-funny? classic, Journey's "Separate Ways", or laughably sentimental rubbish like Lionel Richie's "Hello". There's even a few that Stylus probably would have declared ineligible, like David Brent's jaw-droppingly brilliant cover of "If You Don't Know Me By Now". And there's a few that Stylus should just be downright embarrassed about having overlooked, particularly Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots".

If anything, you could even argue that what makes Pitchfork's list better is, ironically, the same thing that usually makes me prefer Stylus's underlying aesthetic: the unabashed embrace of pop. While Stylus is always eager to celebrate disposable top 40 singles for the addictive sugar rush they can so reliably provide (and rightly so, in my view), Pitchfork built their reputation on their indie-snob attitude (and let's face it, there's a place for that). But with these lists, Stylus makes the mistake of trying, with a few notable exceptions, to be the stuffy gatekeepers of true video art. Pitchfork, on the other hand, haven't forgetten that, more often than not, music videos are just flat-out stupid. And that's why we love them.

Tangents & Clarifications

1. Having briefly written for Stylus, I speak from experience on two counts here: one, their list-making procedures really are these completely convoluted multi-stage projects, which is why I don't doubt for a second that they began working on this long before the Pitchfork list was posted. Seriously, their annual Best Singles of the Year list takes like a month to compile, all in the name of true democracy, and invariably results in readers posting comments in which they accuse the editors of some image-cultivating motive behind their supposedly intentional placement of some crappy pop song at number 78, inexcusably ranking it ahead of some obscur-o hipster twaddle at number 79. "your just tyring to makea piont here, arnt you?" Seriously, every fucking time.

   Two, the Pitchfork-envy is absolutely palpable on Stylus's internal message board (at least it was when I was there), which is why I'm sure that getting scooped on this must have just killed those guys. Shame, too. Personally I rather prefer Stylus's brand of criticism and I'm not just shilling for them, either.[Return]

2. Speaking of which, I suppose I should have warned you at the outset that perusing either of those lists individually, to say nothing of tackling both back-to-back, will utterly annihilate your day. Perhaps it's already too late, in which case sorry about that.) [Return]
3. In addition I counted that I own six more on other DVDs (and the Dylan one on VHS!), which I mention not to show off how vast my DVD library is (it isn't), but to reinforce the point that this field is pretty narrow. If I own copies of 36 of the top 100 videos, either a list isn't warranted or the list makers need to watch more videos. By contrast, I owned copies of I think 4 of the videos on Pitchfork's list including, again, one on VHS. Two more random stats:
   1. Number of videos that made both lists: 11, I think, though I may have missed one
   2. Total number of Juvenile videos between the two: 3, with no overlap [Return]

The lyric police

The bad

I think the first lyrics I ever found genuinely offensive were those to the Ying Yang Twins' "Wait". Yes, this will be another post about how I'm getting old now. I didn't give a shit when I was younger. I thought Dre and Snoop's "Bitches Ain't Shit" was a harmless lark. I thought N.W.A.'s "Don't Bite It", with it's extended intro about "the art of sucking dick" was pretty damn hilarious. I thought 2 Live Crew was... well, talentless. In fact, downright awful. But ultimately harmless.

First time I heard "Wait" I thought it was terrific, and I still do. I wasn't yet familiar at the time with any of the Atlanta duo's earlier second-rate crunk hits, but they never would have adequately prepared me for "Wait". The song stands entirely apart from the rest of Twins' calalogue and, for that matter, from the work of their peers as well. The first version I heard was with the accompanying video, which is hilarious, especially the champagne bit. You can watch it at their website¹. The song is simple and spare with very few individual elements, each of them perfectly placed. The minimal beat is crisp and spacious, right down to the finger snaps where the snares should go². The bassline is prominent, atonal, disorienting... and very smooth. The whispering gimmick is marvelously effective, evoking a mood that's either intimate or menacing, depending more on the listener than the song. And then there's that "oh!", as in "Wait'll you see my-- oh!", in the chorus, my favourite detail in the whole track. The only fully-voiced syllable surrounded entirely by whispers, it leaps out from the vocal line, coyly winking at the listener while highlighting the rather obvious dirty word it's covering up. Of course, you don't know for certain that they're actually saying "dick", but it's obviously that or some variation thereof, e.g. "cock", "jimmy", what have you. It immediately invokes a naughty charm and cheek that keeps the listener grinning while the line "I'ma beat dat, beat dat up" slips past unnoticed.

Curious as to what they were actually saying and too lazy to sit and listen closely, I found the lyrics³ online and was surprised to find myself shocked at the explicit language in the uncensored version⁴. When I heard it, the song was tranformed from a wry bit of fun to a disturbing threat. I was not alone in my discomfort; the song sparked reams of debate within online music communities, and writers lined up to condemn or excuse it. Some saw it as an ode to rough but consensual sex, carefully pointing out lines like "yo ass look soft/Mind if I touch it... Naw I'm just playin less you say I can." Others focused on the violent tone of "beat dat pussy up" and "But it depend on the swing of the baseball bat," some going so far as to read the song as a threat of rape.

Stepping down from my moral soapbox, I still think the whole thing works overall as a pop song, especially the whispering gimmick, but I much prefer the video version, and not just due to my newly-sprouted prudishness. Just as a Victoria's Secret catalogue is much sexier than Penthouse, hearing the Twins censor themselves with a wink and an "oh!" is way more erotic than just hearing them say "Wait'll you see my dick." Those "oh!"'s made all the difference. Well not all. You'll notice that the dirty version includes the words "Hey bitch" between every other line of the chorus, which only adds to the song's misogynistic atmosphere; the video version, rather than trying to cover it up, cuts this out entirely. Also, "I'ma beat dat, beat dat up" has a better syllabic rhythm than "I'ma beat dat pussy up," which is not only disgusting, but drags a little in the third trochee.⁵

The good

Several months later I was relieved to find that I had not grown completely into a crotchety old schoolmarm when I stumbled upon the genius that is Spank Rock. I can't remember where I first heard "Put That Pussy On Me", but I'm sure it was an mp3 blog⁶ of some sort. The point is, I was hooked after one listen. For a while it was posted at the redoubtable Aurgasm (it's since been taken down⁷), and I would listen to it several times a day while at work.

Every detail of the song is note-perfect, from the back-to-back Snoop Dogg and Beach Boys samples to the old-school stutter samples ("P-P-Put--," etc.). I found the song both hilarious and endlessly catchy, an unbeatable combination in my book. Exactly why the song grabbed my fancy so mercilessly can't possibly be explained, and what's more I didn't choose to give it much thought; with brief obsessions like these, reason is never the point.

What struck me, however, was the fact that the lyrics didn't bother me at all⁸. Now that the Ying Yang Twins had exposed me as the doddering old prude I've become, why did Spank Rock make me feel so gloriously immature all over again?

The difference

I gave it a lot of thought, and the answer I came up with is threefold. First what it's not. The most obvious answer here, the white elephant in any discussion of hip-hop amongst white Americans, is race. I'm a white male, and my middle-class suburban upbringing means I grew up with minimal direct contact with urban African-American culture, particularly southern (the Twins are from Atlanta; me, New England). So the most immediate conclusion would be that I find the Twins' expression of black male sexual aggression threatening, and from there you can take all kinds of tangents from white liberal guilt to Freudian inferiority complex blah blah blah. These are all well-worn topics.

But I don't think that's it. For one thing, sexually aggressive rap lyrics have never bothered me in the past. For another, I don't find the Twins threatening (though, granted, I'm not a woman), just rather distasteful. I don't fear them, I disapprove of them.

Rapper Naeem Juwan of Spank Rock is black, but the rest of the band is multi-racial. Unlike the Ying Yang Twins, Juwan explicitly addresses race in his lyrics, closing the song's lone verse with the line "Some white boys surely imitate that⁹," repeated several times. Still, the colour of the rappers' skin doesn't carry nearly as much weight as the images they (choose to) project. The Ying Yang Twins come off as ghetto-fabulous Dirty South thugs; their image makes their lyrics somewhat believeable. Spank Rock, on the other hand, are nerds through and through, and their image makes them sound like a bunch of horny but harmless teenagers noodling with samplers in their mother's basement, who don't get one-tenth as much play as they rap about. Both these impressions may have little or no connection with reality, but that's not the point; it's the perception that influences my response to each song.

Beneath this surface impression is the issue of lyrical content. "Wait" articulates a fantasy of male aggression so forceful that the object (or target, or even victim) of the narrator's affections (and I use that term with a healthy dose of irony) is powerless to resist; she succumbs the his "charms" (again...) in spite of herself. Add to that the inferences of violence and the song is well outside the bounds of social acceptability. Ladies, suppose a handsome man approaches you in a club and, as his pickup line, says, "Excuse me, bitch. Allow me to beat the shit out of your vagina with my penis." Not a very tasteful opening.

"Put That Pussy On Me" presents almost the exact opposite scenario: here the male is fantasising about a female aggressor, picturing himself as the helpless (albiet more than willing) victim of a paramour who knows what she wants and knows how to get it. "Put that pussy on me," he begs. "Push me in the corner/Put that pussy on me". Hardly the words of an overt sexual predator.

On an even more subtle level, and this is the distinction I find most interesting, is the perceived distance between the vocalist and the listener. The whispering in "Wait" gives the song an immediate and intensely personal quality, as though the Twins are addressing you directly. This serves to highlight the inappropriateness of the lyrics, as well as adding a layer of menace that rapping in a regular voice lacks. If you can hear them whispering, they must be close, close enough to grab you, which makes the danger that much more real. Not only that, but the whispering also means that no one else around you can hear; these sweet nothings are for you alone. "Put That Pussy On Me" not only features Juwan's voice at a normal volume, but opens with the song's lyrical hook being cut up by a DJ: "P-P-Put--/Put that pussy on me". The effect is to make the vocalist seem less real; he's not only not near you, he's not even in the same room. Whereas "Wait" sounds like someone standing right next to you, "Put That Pussy On Me" sounds like your buddy playing you a record of someone reciting the lyrics, and everyone in the room is free to have a good laugh over it. Relax, it's not real; it's just a recording.

Tangents & Clarifications
1. The website is all Flash, so I can't direct link to the video; to find it, click on "Music" along the top banner, then click the third album from the top in the thumbnails running down the right side; click the "Watch" link next to "Wait". [Return]
2. A neat trick that has since been codified into a sub-genre all its own and produced a slew of shitty mid-level hits, but at the time was still pretty fresh. [Return]
3. As you can see, the transcriber was at times as confused as I was; give the guy a break, man, the whole thing's whispered. There are numerous variations floating around the web; I just chose this one because it didn't come with any pop-up ads.Anyway, you get the basic idea. [Return]
4. You can hear a clip of the dirty version's chorus by clicking the "Listen" to the immediate left of the link to the video. [Return]
5. To add insult to queasiness, there is a third version^a of the song on the clean version^b of the album; rather than simply putting the video mix on the clean album, they re-recorded the vocals with altered lyrics. Thus "Wait'll you see my dick/I'ma beat dat pussy up" becomes "Wait'll I show you this/You will never get enough," which is unfathomably lame. So lame, in fact, that it's possible to read the clean version's lyrics as a broad parody of re-written clean-version lyrics in general, and of the very idea of the Wal-Mart-ified clean album phenomenon. But that's a whole other topic. [Return]
1. And that's not even counting the so-called remix, which just has a bunch of guests rapping over the same track, and became a hit in its own right.
2. If you're still in the "Music" section of their website the clean version is the fourth thumbnail from the top, immediately beneath the dirty version; you can listen to a clip from the chorus there.
6. Spank Rock are nothing if not a textbook Internet phenomenon: hip underground sound (they're sort of an odd variant of Baltimore Club, a genre known for its flagrantly illegal samples; get familiar) with a hefty nerd-appeal factor (old school synths, terrifically awful glasses). [Return]
7. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a full version to which to link, but if you go here and click on the "Listen" button next to "SPANK ROCK : 01" you can hear a thirty-second clip^a, which is at least enough to hear the vocal hook and the main Beach Boys sample. [Return]
1. NSFW, BTW.
8. The other track posted on Aurgasm, however, made me a little queasy, but not for moral reasons. "Backyard Betty" opens with the lines "Ass-shakin' competition champ/Ooh dat pussy gets damp." Damp? Doesn't that mean, like, cold and wet? Am I nitpicking here or does this sound somewhat unappealing? [Return]
9. Admittedly, I have no idea what this line means, with or without context. In fact the whole verse baffles me, as does the oft-repeated line "Make me wanna, make me wanna/Grab my buck-stick[?]". Truth be told, the lyrics to "Put That Pussy On Me" as a whole don't really make much sense, which may be another reason I don't find them partticularly offensive. [Return]

Stevie's sad smile revealed

The "mash-up"¹ genre was destined to be played out almost from the moment it became codified. The technique was pre-existent; DJs call them "blends". They're the reason club 12-inches always come with instrumental and a capella versions, and even those were hardly without precedent. But the Internet made them an artform, and for a brief moment after the discovery of "A Stroke of Genie-us," music writers were discussing the apex (or nadir) of the art of sampling, the final frontier of postmodernism in music, the moment that pop at last completely ate itself. Songs were being created not only with no original recording and no attempt to disguise their sources, but in a way that foregrounded and in the best cases commented on those sources. The songs were about the songs they sampled, and nothing else.

The prevailing cliche at the dawn of punk rock was that anyone could do it, but what went unspoken was that it wasn't easy. To play three chords in the basement in front of a few dozen friends was one thing; to achieve distribution, exposure, publicity; quite another. But the advent of affordable digital music software (most importantly Sonic Foundry's Acid) and the availability of an instant audience via the web (not to mention instant viral distribution; remember, this was also the heyday of Napster), at last fulfilled the promise of true egalitarianism in ways in which the hardcore 7-inch and the Xeroxed zine could never have approached. Not only could anyone do it, it seemed for a while as though everyone did.

Before long, the glut of half-assed cut-n-paste hack jobs, combined with the inherent disposability of even the finest examples of the genre, rendered the daunting task sifting through the mounds of chaff for a few stray grains of wheat seem hardly wothwhile. Hence the near-instant obsolescence of the mash-up. Had Warhol² lived to see it, he may have remarked that this must be the future, where every genre is relevant for fifteen minutes.

The biggest shortcoming of most of the mash-ups out there isn't the careless editing³, it's the lack of any sort of context other than, "Doesn't this sound cool?" Which, don't get me wrong, is a perfectly legitimate reason to make a mash-up; it's your spare time, after all, spend it as you please⁴. It's just not a good enough reason to listen to many of them more than once (if that). Slightly more high-concept but equally disposable are mash-ups that slyly refer to events, rumours, etc. involving the artists being appropriated, q.v. any number of examples of Eminem rapping over one Britney Spears track or another. Still others appear to be based solely on finding an excuse to pun on the song titles or artists' names, most notoriously DJ Danger Mouse's The Grey Album.

These are all well and good, and a few are quite entertaining. But rare is the mash-up that a evinces heretofore undiscovered meaning from its sources, that refracts a fresh understanding through the prism of unfamiliar context.

I recently came across the work of producer Mark Vidler, who creates mash-ups under the name Go Home Productions, and was excitied to find some of the best mash-ups I'd heard in... I'll say at least a year. His website includes not only an exhaustive discography of his mash-up work, but makes available mp3 downloads of his best ones. The technical quality is near-uniformly excellent (I have no idea how he comes up with such clean a capellas for some of these), which helps to make even the pointless ones downright listenable. Check out especially the Destiny's Child/The Orb one, as well as the entire Rapture Riders EP.

Having listened to all of the available tracks, I noticed one that leapt out at me and made me do what none but the best mash-ups ever do: reconsider my understanding of the source. Scroll down to the Stevie Wonder/Rod Stewart one and give it a listen. If you're familiar with the original version of Wonder's "Uptight" (excerpt here), you know it as a rousing soul number with blaring horns and a relentless rhythm section. Had you asked me to recite the lyrics before listening to Vidler's mash-up, I would have gotten no further than "Baby, everything is alright/Uptight, clear outta sight". Had you asked me what the lyrics were about, I would have guessed it was a party anthem, with vague references to dancing, pretty girls, going out on Friday night⁵, etc. The effect of pairing Wonder's vocals with the opening (12-string acoustic guitar?) riff of Stewart's "Maggie May" (excerpt here) is twofold. First, and more obviously, the spare arrangement allows the listener to focus on the content of the lyrics, whereas in the original they get lost in the overall sound of the track.

The second and more subtle effect is to refocus the tone of the lyrics, drawing out the pathos underlying the narrator's momentary exuberance. Wonder's character is celebrating his luck at having landed himself "a pearl of a girl," noting that "I'm the envy of ev'ry single guy/Since I'm the apple of my girl's eye." But he also explains that he feels so lucky because she's a rich girl, "born and raised/In a great big old house, full of butlers and maids," whereas, he's "a poorman's son, from across the railroad tracks." Throughout the songs's verses Wonder reiterates the economic disparity between the couple, later noting, "Can't give her the things that money can buy," etc. When heard in tandem with the buoyancy of the music in the original, the words take a backseat to the music. The band⁶ keeps the party moving with the simplest progression possible, hopping from C-major to D-major and back throughout the song, never even hitting the root, keeping those feet stomping and those hands in the air.

The riff from "Maggie May" (and Vidner uses only the first four bars or so, before the bass even comes in) is also based on a major-key progression, but the second bar throws an E (the sixth/relative-minor note) in the middle a simple G chord to give it a minor feel without uglying it up with a flat third. It's this second chord that gives the whole progression a slightly melancholic undertone, which serves to direct attention to lines like, "My money's low and my suit's out of style," without drowning out the joys of "we go out stepping on the town for a while." Vidner also leaves off the opening lines (the original begins with a chorus), instead starting the vocals from the beginning of the first verse with the aforequoted "I'm a poorman's son, from across the railroad tracks."

Vidner brings in his own booming funk beat when Wonder gets to the chorus, but by then the bittersweet mood has been established. Wonder's narrator is thrilled at the privilege of courting the town princess, but the music, rather than just celebrating the accomplishment of scoring way out of his league, won't let us forget why it can't possibly last.

Tangents & Clarifications
1. Or "bootleg," or "bastard pop," etc. [Return]
2. Clearly one of the genre's foremost non-musical progenitors, by the way, second perhaps only to Duchamp. [Return]
3. Though Lord knows that's bad enough; there's nothing so unlistenable as a sloppy mash-up. [Return]
4. Plus you could get into a whole thing here about how it's better to be making mash-ups than just listening to music, better as in healthier, as it involves an active participation in the art^a itself, interaction as opposed to passive consumption, the listener taking control of the work as presented and making it his/her own. As in like, hey, maybe I really dig loud guitars and R&B harmonies, and why can't I hear them together? And if I prefer Nirvana over Survivor, and wish that Destiny's Child had sampled the former instead of the latter, why can't I make that happen? To paraphrase Zappa quoting Edgard Varese, "the present-day consumer refuses to die." [Return]
1. You may elect to put "art" in ironic quotes here at your own discretion depending on your opinion of the specific sources of any given mash-up and, in a broader sense, of mass-produced popular entertainment in general; it really doesn't affect the main point.
5. This supposition has an unusual source: in 1994, English retread renegades Oasis released a single called "Don't Look Back in Anger". The b-side was a song called "Step Out", which had apparently been intended for inclusion on "Don't Look"'s parent album, (What's the Story) Morning Glory, but was pulled at the last minute due to fears of legal action by Wonder, to whose "Uptight" the song was deemed to bear a more-than-passing resemblance. "Step Out"'s hook consists of "Uptight"'s main melody line applied note-for-note to the lyric "You might/Think you're gonna cry/But it's alright/Step out tonight". As a result, I now think of "Uptight"'s lyrics as having something to do with going out on Friday^a night, which it sort of does, but that's not why I make that association, I just confuse it with the ripped off version, and the two become merged in my memory, which is the subject of a whole other post, possibly several. [Return]
1. Or Saturday.
6. As it were; I think Wonder plays most of the instruments himself. At least he does on his later albums, but this one might be the Funk Brothers, I'm not really sure. [Return]