r.mutt's blog

6/28/04 PFORK IS A CROCK, OR: MY 55 FAVOURITE RECORDS OF THE 70'S off the top of my head and in descending order: big star's 3rd/sister lovers lou reed metal machine music elvis costello and the attractions this year's model richard hell and the voidoids blank generation television marquee moon lou reed berlin the ramones road to ruin elvis costello my aim is true no new york blondie eat to the beat the buzzcocks love bites wire pink flag david bowie the rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars public image, ltd. metal box joy division unknown pleasures gang of four entertainment! wire chairs missing miles davis bitches brew big star #1 record the buzzcocks another music in a different kitchen the clash give 'em enough rope the ramones the talking heads fear of music can tago mago brian eno ambient 1: music for airports x ray spex germ free adolescents big star radio city the germs (GI) david bowie hunky dory the clash sid vicious sid sings the harder they come the beatles let it be elvis costello and the attractions armed forces the specials television adventure the stooges fun house david bowie lodger david bowie low david bowie "heroes" suicide the dead boys young, loud and snotty wire 154 blondie parallel lines lou reed sally can’t dance the jam in the city the talking heads 1977 nevermind the bollocks here's the sex pistols lee hazlewood cowboy in sweden chris bell i am the cosmos patti smith horses throbbing gristle 20 jazz funk greats the clash london calling cheap trick live at budokan nick drake pink moon compare and contrast see also: magnétophone's canons and other lists 5/25/04 SOME THINGS (DON'T) LAST A LONG TIME i'm on that analogue v. digital debate again. yawn. super fucking yawn. so i pulled out my (illegal) copy of built to spill's the normal years after about a year of neglect and it doesn't work (there's probably a second lesson here: that i should go out and buy a real copy of what i'm re-realising, now that i'm downloading and listening to the mp3's, is one of my all-time favourites). i tried every CD player in the house and it doesn't play anymore. i tried to rip the songs with a new-fangled computer and the mp3's came out all static and noisy. three years ago, monoculture burned a (thee) goblins live performance that was slated to be on the music for punk rockers compilation onto CD and taped over the master cassette. a year later, when the compilation was finally coming into being, the(e) goblins CD-R no longer worked. CD-R's don't last forever and i suspect that no digital storage (DATs, etc.) does. like albini said, an entire generation of music will be lost. let that be a lesson to you kids. i've been making mixtapes all week (i can't tell you why — it's a secret). that's another argument for analogue tape, that making mix CD-R's don't involve nearly the same enjoyment level as making mix tapes. first of all, there's more space on a tape and, secondly, you actually have to listen to the songs as you put them on, so you get a much better sense of the sequencing. thirdly — and i suspect that this is also a problem now that artists don't think of their records as LP's or cassettes — there is a certain tension presented by the difficulty of "the gap" between sides a and b and it opens up myriad possibilities. 80 minute mix CD-R's just seem so much less artful. TOP TEN FOR MY IMAGINARY LIFE: I WANT MY MP3 1. henry's dress "target practice"        it's so obvious. i should have realised it all along, but i had no idea amy linton was in henry's dress until a week ago. as with all of the henry's dress songs that amy sings, this one is like one of those beautiful aislers set songs she'd later write only, instead of the charming but gets-old-fast retro production, there's the wonderful mbv meets C86 meets galaxie 500 meets lo-fi sound henry's dress made semi-famous in very small circles. 2. ted leo/pharmacists "me and mia" demo        a couple months after i finished recording pop songs..., i found myself with a batch of like-minded songs. interested in the essential elasticity of the pop song and obsessed with TL/Rx as i was and continue to be, i attempted to record them in the tinny garage band guitarist idiom so ably displayed on this recording. i learned then that you have to first write songs like teddy's to be able to play your songs like teddy does. 3 - 5. mirah "we're both so sorry," "jerusalem," "don't die in me"        another amazing record from mirah. as with the last one, i think something is lost by her ambitious production. i've heard her play these songs solo and they're, incredibly, amazingly, unfathomably, even more powerful (i can't really help but be vague here) than on her estimable new record. 6. france gall "nous ne sommes pas des anges"        i'd previously only known this song because heavenly covered it on operation heavenly, but even amelia fletcher, one of my all-time heroes, can't phrase a line the way france gall does. amy did, however, playfully change the lines "laissez-les au ciel là-haut les anges/ la terre n'est pas le paradis" to "laissez-les au ciel là-haut les anges/ et fermez la parapluie" in the heavenly version. and cuteness counts for something. 7. saturday looks good to me "ambulance"        i love the all your summer songs version with the ted leo duet, but the original version on their self-titled record is even better. if retro girl-group pop is your thing, this song does everything the aislers set (who, for the record, i do think are a pretty good band) fails to do. a sad sack ballad to rival the best motown had to offer, a working class battle hymn in the company of "dirty old town," the song for the kids the who wish they wrote. 8. mccarthy "an mp speaks"        so many great, forgotten pop bands. here's another. C86 pop with a sense of melancholy that anticipates, but isn't matched by, ride and the galaxie 500. [ADDENDUM: man, i didn't know amy linton was in henry's dress and now it turns out that, unbeknowst to me, tim gane from stereolab was mccarthy's guitarist. apparently, laetitia sadier sang backup vocals on their last record. jeez, what do i know?] 9 - 10. aden "intro"; masters of the hemisphere "give me something clearly"        these songs are inexplicably in my head, inexplicably because i haven't heard either of them in almost two years. if anyone has these records, please email me the mp3's. or, if someone out there has the $1.98 to spare... 4/14/04 POP SONGS YOUR BOYFRIEND'S TOO STUPID TO KNOW ABOUT 1. la la la la la la smokers in la la la la la la smokers in la la la la la la smokers in love... (cf. the lucksmiths) 2. yo la tengo's acoustic version of "tom courtenay" with georgia hubley singing 3. claudine longet's cover of "god only knows" 4. reagan youth's "degenerated." [ADDENDUM: i just remembered that this song was famously covered by the lone rangers. the lone rangers, for those of you who don't remember yourselves, were brendan fraser on guitar and vocals, steve buscemi on bass and backup vocals, and adam sandler on drums. joe mantegna: "how can you pluralise the lone ranger?"] 5. i've recently been listening to the screeching weasel anthology kill the musicians, which really takes me back to being sixteen. white girl couldn't go on knowing she was just a waste of time... we don't give a fuck about tomorrow... i wanna be, i wanna be a homosexual... mary threw a rock at a cop and, man, she felt like a man... and she ended up exactly like her mom 2/11/04 TOP TEN MP3'S WHILE MY RECORDS ARE PACKED AWAY IN BOXES 1. mountain goats "golden boy" if thine enemy oppresses you, you must let him oppress you some more/ so that when you go shopping in paradise you'll find those magnificent peanuts from singapore. 2. mountain goats "the mole" pitchfork dissed the orchestral middle part of the song, saying it had nothing to do with the rest of the song. shows what those morons know, it's the single best part of the entire new mountain goats album. 3. the mr. t experience "i wrote a book about rock and roll" take a look at these thousands of cd's/ no one has more than me/ and i got all of them for free. 4. camera obscura "eighties fan" they're scottish, this song sounds vaguely like television personalities' "the boy with the paisley shirt," and it's the a-side to a single produced by stuart murdoch. with credentials like that, i bet they know stephen pastel. 5. camera obscura "suspended from class" yep, i'm newly obsessed with this band. i should be suspended from class/ i don't know my elbow from my ass. 6. the pogues "dirty old town" i'll chop you down like an old dead tree. 7. saturday looks good to me "alcohol" everynight you fall asleep with the headphones on. 8. cinerama "edinburgh" a bootleg from john peel's radio show. i'll admit we've had some memorable days/ but just not very many. 9. the aislers set "the snow don't fall" second best christmas song of all time (behind you-know-what). the west was won by santa claus. [ADDENDUM: it's actually the third, i forgot about "christmas card from a hooker in minneapolis"] 10. mary lou lord "his indie world" his heavenly hang-up is getting me down. 1/26/04 ART IN THE AGE OF THE DIGITAL MILLENNIUM COPYRIGHT ACT i was speaking with the guitarist (and literary theorist-manqué) from centipede (look for the centipede manifesto at centipede.diaryland.com soon) who explained to me that centipede was a reaction to the digital millennium copyright act and the concept of intellectual property. the story of centipede is an odd one: the band quit when the drummer learned how to drum and the guitarist, who randomly tuned his guitar so he would never know what note he was hitting, realised that he had started to fall into patterns. the band's refusal to know how to play (and they practised hard to "unlearn" everything they knew) is, in my eyes, a duchampian gesture in the face of an economic system that inches steadily closer to charging for cultural inheritance. the estate of john cage sued someone for having a track of silence on their record (see here). the estate of margaret mitchell sued the publishers of alice randall's the wind done gone. at some point, the estate of john milton is going to sue the estate of william wordsworth, who will, in turn, sue the estate of percy bysshe shelley, who will then sue the estate of william butler yeats. harold bloom, provided he doesn't die in the next couple of years (and it is a pretty big "if"), will laugh as he adds "opinions herein endorsed by the english supreme court" to the book jacket of the anxiety of influence, only to turn around a find himself and everyone else who taught literature at yale in the 1970's and 80's served with a lawsuit courtesy of jacques derrida. in this cultural landscape, centipede are right to break not only with tradition but with the idea of music as it stands (though it should be noted that the band clearly owes a debt to coltrane's free jazz, captain beefheart & his magic band, dna, john zorn, boredoms, i could go on). lost in the fracas is the artist. centipede articulated the concerns of the artist from a creative (or, perhaps, productive) standpoint, but what of the artist as the owner of cultural capital? it is true, not every artist owns his or her own work (see here) but, more often than not, artists, even supposedly subversive ones, are completely oblivious and take no responsibility for their actions or positions of privilege (see here). artists cry about file-sharing but, at some point, one has to step back and realise that the consumer and the artist are being screwed by capitalism, it's just that the consumer chooses to do something about it. if you can't make enough money to support yourself selling records, then do what everyone else does and tour. the top 0.001% of artists live off of record sales; it's a pipe dream, like making the NBA. fans and the label screwing you out of money? try going indie or, better yet, do it yourself. how many ways are you trying to have it? and, to the bigger and richer bands, how much money can you spend in a lifetime? like i said, at some point artists are going to have to take responsibility. if they want their work to live on (or, a more drastic ultimatum, if they want their genre or even their medium to live on), clutching to copyrights is not the way to do it. under this system, the only feasable posthumous fame is on the level of fatboy slim or shit like that, licensed to every car ad, action movie, and in-store mall soundtrack imaginable, with most of the profits lining the pockets of the multi-billion dollar corporations to whom the rights to the song are being rented. media oversaturation and corporate whoredom, some legacy. so the alternative, i think, is to do away with the near-indefinite copyrights we have today (see: the "copy left"). people need to be able to borrow ideas and, in today's artistic environment, the borrowing has become very literal. that's fine, that's how art works. if the estate of da vinci can't sue the estate of duchamp, then U2's record label can't sue negativland. as for the whole file-sharing fiasco, i have two observations: 1. public libraries have CD's; anyone with a library card can take them out and copy them. 2. people not only still buy CD's, they still buy books (i think, at least for the average joe, i can compare burning a CD with no artwork to reading a book from the library and then returning it). but, again, this boils down to artists and the compensation to which our advanced capitalistic system tells them they're entitled. are you about the art or are you about the paycheque? if it were a hobby, would you still do it? and if you could have a million people hear it but not gain financially (though, of course, you would anyways because file-sharing leads to sales and, more importantly, brings people to the shows), would you still want them to hear it? i think my answers to these questions are obvious. but a part of me wonders about people i respect like ted leo (who pleaded with DSL-toting fans to mind the "working class of this industry") and dr. frank (who said, "rock and roll costs money, and the money has to come from somewhere"). i've never downloaded a full album by either, but records cost money. actually, they're ridiculously expensive. and, honestly, i doubt that either mr. leo or the good doctor seriously wants to kiss all the fans at their shows that found out about them by downloading mp3's because they can't afford to buy CD's of bands they want to check out but haven't heard before goodbye. people are entitled to art (culture?) and the entire fucking system is out of order. the truth is that we are at a critical time and have a small window of opportunity (before the complete monopolisation of the internet by iTUNES) to reclaim a bit of art from advanced capitalism, from the media (virtual) monopoly that has already killed radio. people who are complicit in the system, even people whose livelihoods depend on it, well, i don't want to sound insensitive, but sometimes we have to make sacrifices (though i hesitate to associate bourgeois decadence with "the working class of this industry"). as for the radioheads of the world: you didn't think you'd play in the NBA forever, did you? 1/23/04 IF YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING NICE TO SAY i remember reading this interview with, i'm pretty sure it was jeff tweedy, but it could have been jay farrar or mark eitzel. anyways, he said that back when uncle tupelo (or, as the case may be, american music club) were together, he and jay farrrar (or, as the case may be, jeff tweedy or someone from amc) used to go to clubs to make fun of grunge/metal bands and then went on to say it was immature and that he regretted "not trying to enjoy the music on its own terms." well, around these parts, they say that you're not really a portlander until you've endured an embarrassingly bad emo band at the meow meow. for old sake's sake, we're going to the meow meow one last time to laugh at (and possibly heckle) the clarity process on wednesday before i skip town. 1/19/04 ONE MORE MP3 in honour of martin luther king, jr. day, please enjoy this old mp3 by former monopöle! guitarist and monoculture founder g leung. "mlk day": mp3 lyrics 1/18/04 TOP TEN LP'S, TAPES, AND MP3'S NOW THAT MY CD PLAYER'S BROKE 1. arrested development "tennessee" mp3 while i don't have iTUNES and my mp3 software doesn't keep statistics on my mp3's, i think this has been my laptop's most frequently played song. 2. pete rock and c.l. smooth "T.R.O.Y." mp3 "raised me from a boy to a man so i always had a father even when my biological didn't bother." shaq once wrote a song called "biological didn't bother" that bit those lines. 3. missy elliott ft. ludacris "gossip folk" mp3 heard it at some club last night. lord help me if timbaland ever stops coming out with that whomp whomp production. 4. sleepyhead the brighter shore LP haven't listened to this in a long time, but i bought myself a henry's dress record for christmas and got back into the slumberland. 5. the rapture "house of the jealous lovers" mp3 it's like "hey ya," you just can't escape this song and sometimes you forget you're alive when you don't hear it for a couple of hours, especially that 2001 version. 6. dr. frank "institutionalized misogyny" mp3 best song to mention foucault ever (weakerthans, this is a diss on you). dr. frank is a clever man. 7. ramones road to ruin LP hadn't listened to it in months, but it's got this timeless quality like all the all-time greats do. 8. nancy sinatra sugar LP i had to return the gainsbourg/bardot record to the library, so this will just have to do. 9. paul simon graceland LP i saw the royal tenenbaums again and had "me and julio down by the schoolyard" in my head. personally, paul simon's obsession with/cultural appropriation of the other doesn't really sit right with me, but "me and julio" is a fine song. 10. young and sexy stand up for your mother cassette there was a while when this tape really did something for me. then i decided i was moving back to vancouver and now the magic's gone. thank god, i was worried for a bit there. now i can go back to listening to tigermilk. 1/15/04 YESTERDAY RULES i got the new MTX record in the mail today (thanks tristin). included in the press package was a lyrics sheet with extensive commentary and actual essays. très pretentious. dr. frank is like the me of real music. 1/01/04 NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS 1. quit smoking 2. make new friends 3. stop writing so many fucking lists on this blog albums r.mutt is listening to at the moment r.mutt's shopping list r.mutt blog archives