r.mutt's blog

12/27/04 iTUNES AND THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND FOUR using iTUNES play count technology and a few less arbitrary criteria, i made a mix c.d. of the songs that most defined the good year two thousand and four for me. of course, you get the good with the bad, the quality with the guilty pleasures, the makes you feel like you're dancing even though you're not and wouldn't want to disco songs that i'd like to think are club hits somewhere but certainly aren't here with the novelty songs, the sea change-riding experimental post-post-post-punk with the fashion victim dance-punk bullshit, and the timeless pop songs with the more and more acceptable guitar-based "indie rock." i'll leave you to decide which are which. song name artist album "me and mia" the homsars* da vinci's notebook "formed a band" art brut formed a band 7" "bald, short, and have a hat on" the red light sting hands up tiger "my guitar" ghostface wu-tang corp.** "your cover's blown" belle and sebastian books e.p. "23" jimmy eat world futures "heartbeat" annie anniemal "some girls" rachel stevens some girls CD5 "tush" ghostface (ft. missy elliott) the pretty toney album "99 problems" danger mouse the grey album "hock it" the blow poor aim: love songs e.p. "disco dancer" li'l pocketknife pants control e.p. "good boys" (scissor sisters extended mix) blondie good boys CD5 "history" controller.controller history e.p. "starman" the mates of state all day e.p. "i am not your gameboy" freezepop fancy ultra-fresh "let go" frou frou garden state soundtrack "nobody's home" avril lavigne under my skin "boulevard of broken songs" party ben green day vs. oasis vs. travis vs. eminem*** "come back to camden" morrissey you are the quarry "drink to me, babe, then" a.c. newman the slow wonder * the homsars are actually ted leo/pharmacists. this recording was one of two web-only demos for TL/Rx's shake the sheets album. ** a web-only release on the wu-tang clan's now-defunct wu tang corp website. *** a web-only release from the party ben website. 12/16/04 AND I'M ALL ON THE FLOOR, LIKE, MOPPING UP YOUR VOMIT... kathleen hanna's rock star, which has influenced me on so many levels. 12/12/04 WHAT'S WITH THE CRUDELY PHOTOSHOPPED URINALS? thanks to "charles baudelaire" on friendster for bringing this to my attention: french reactions to la fontaine and its newly agreed upon "importance." 12/04/04 CURRENT MIX TAPE: KHAELA MARICICH = MVP SIDE A 1. the mr. t experience "take all the time you need" 2. ted leo/pharmacists "walking to do" 3. the blow "hock it" 4. ellen allien "trash scapes" 5. annie "heartbeat" 6. galaxie 500 "don't let our youth go to waste" 7. magnetic fields "100,000 fireflies" 8. mirah "the struggle" 9. mountain goats "mole" 10. fugazi "forensic scene" 11. the microphones "oh anna" 12. young people "ron jeremy" 13. bobby conn "soixante-neuf année érotique" SIDE B 1. atmosphere "don't ever fucking question that" 2. the blow "knowing the things that i know" 3. deerhoof "our angel's ululu" 4. xiu xiu "ian curtis wishlist" 5. eric's trip "behind the garage" 6. the shins "the new slang" 7. teenage fanclub "dumb dumb dumb" 8. ted leo/pharmacists "counting down the hours" 9. the exploding hearts "thorns in roses" 10. the thermals "everything thermals/no culture icons" 11. the jocks "martha must die" 12. superchunk "never too young to smoke" 13. dear nora "love song for my friends" 14. the badger king "you absent referent" note: recorded on a maxwell 90 minute cassette. if the labels on the cassette are an accurate indicator (and they're in my handwriting so they should be), this cassette was formerly used to record tullycraft and, before that, reagan youth. weird, no? 12/01/04 SUCK ON THIS, PICASSO read this. 11/26/04 BUYING DIARIES (ON THE BIGGEST SHOPPING DAY OF THE YEAR) earlier this week, the long awaited nirvana box set with the lights out finally came out. i didn't buy it and, unless someone (hint hint) gets it for me for christmas, i'll probably never own it. i did, however, come across something far better floating around the internet: the finest nirvana bootleg i've ever heard (velez sarsfield stadium; buenos aires, argentina; 10/30/92). serious nirvana fans will remember this as the argentina show immortalised in live tonight, sold out in which kurt cobain played the opening chords of "smells like teen spirit" and then refused to play the rest of the song. superficially, there is a lot to like about this bootleg: the sound, for one, is wonderfully clear. but, really, what's exceptional about this bootleg is that it captures nirvana as they really were and could not be captured on studio recordings, low-quality home recorded demos (while severely compromised by drugs), or fucking diary entries (mark richardson compares some of the very privately recorded demos collected on with the lights out to the kurt cobain journals, which were released for consumption just before the holiday season last year). for those of us so young as to have only been able to encounter the band secondhand, our obsessive fandom only hinted at or brushed up against what made nirvana so great: their amazing live show and kurt cobain's uncompromisingly bad attitude, which was, by all accounts, usually far less mediated by the spectacle industry than his music videos and mythologising biographies let on and, as a result, far more human in person. both come through loud and clear on this bootleg. dave grohl and krist novoselic were both amazing musicians and nirvana's rhythm section is, as always, tight, loud, and dynamic. but what made nirvana special was the coming together of dave and krist's virtuosity and kurt's sloppy guitar playing and mumbly singing, something that was, sadly, lost on the band's studio albums. as for kurt's attitude, the other staple of nirvana's live show, he was in a foul mood on this night in buenos aires. kurt always refused to pander to audiences who he felt misunderstood nirvana and, in this show, he sings "hey hey hey" through the first verse of "come as you are," the band's single at the time, to fuck with them. but the performances still represent nirvana at their best. exactly one day less than a year after their watershed halloween show of 1991 in seattle, this was nirvana as kurt would have wanted us to remember them. yes, i still want the box set with the DVD and the liner notes by thurston moore, but that's because i'm materialistic and it's the gift-giving season. really, this free bootleg downloadable from the internet is a far better way to go. speaking of things to buy, sonja ahlers' new book fatal distraction is out (to wide acclaim including big ups from the cbc). i saw the installation at antisocial last week and i have to say that if there's one artist whose work demands to be distilled into a cheap, reproducible commodity form, it would be sonja ahlers. louise lawler too probably, but i go with sonja ahlers. rather than emancipate the book medium, fatal distraction represents work that comes out of the radical northwest d.i.y. zine tradition but enacts a criticism of itself as a fetish item. people tend to read ahlers as overtly personal, but they're missing the underlying antinomy of presenting a diary in the form of a mass produced commodity. so, really, her artistic project only works if we buy buy buy. 11/18/04 FACTORING FOR "X" some kind soul has posted a link to the aforementioned (see my entry from 8/24/04) ted leo cover of lauryn hill's "ex-factor." apparently, a panel of bloggers have declared TL/Rx the top band in america today. i've always thought of this webpage as an "mp3 blog" too, only, in most cases, you have to do your own legwork and search those filesharing networks for the songs i drop word on. lucky for you that someone's actual "mp3 blog" hosted this song so all you have to do is follow my link to it. in other news, if you care to marvel at a little piece of conceptual art or crazy bastard-rebel history, new york's swirner & wirth gallery is in possession of the gun from chris burden's 747. other synecdochic holdings ("relics," they call them) from their chris burden show last month include the nails from trans-fixed, the tarp from deadman, and the spiritus from dreamy nights (what happened to the whistle?). well looky here, my ex-fellow portlander miranda july's top ten for artforum not only lists khaela maricich (see my entry from 9/08/04) at number five, she also mentions tae won yu at number eight. a real blog entry coming soon. i promise. 11/09/04 (FOR MY IMAGINARY LIFE) 1. john zorn "never again" today, two days before the international commemoration of d-day, is an at once joyous and very ominous day in german history. it marks the founding of the weimar republic in 1918. in 1933, hitler declared the day a national holiday to commemorate the failed beer hall putsch of a decade earlier. and, as we are more likely to remember, the berlin wall came down on november ninth, 1989. despite the day's importance to hitler, november ninth would be a national holiday in germany (to commemorate the fall of the wall) if not for 1938, the reiskristallnacht. instead, they celebrate the day of reunification. john zorn's "never again" is at once the most harrowing and most aesthetically-minded song on his album kristallnacht. for all the aural violence, noise, and the sound of shattering glass throughout the song, a peculiar pattern rises out of the noise and the shattering of glass begins to sound like a lullaby played on bells. in fact, despite the track's obvious similarity to wolf eyes' "stabbed in the face," my first point of reference was a decidedly prettier album that came out this year: lullatone's little songs about raindrops, which sounds exactly like its name. but to what end does zorn aestheticise the unspeakable violence and hatred that helped lead to a climate in which the holocaust was allowed to occur? screams and brutal noise recur beneath the assonance of shattering glass but, in the end, it's difficult to draw the line between unspeakable violence (the sound of shattering glass on a record called kristallnacht, after all, will always signify unspeakable violence) and celebratory orgiastic freakout. i suppose that, depending on who you were, the line may have been similarly ambiguous during the reiskristallnacht, but i'm still not convinced this piece has any right to be as aesthetically pleasing as it is. were it not on an album called kristallnacht, i would likely listen to it on repeat. but, given that the song is called "never again," what is the point of re-presenting it in a highly aestheticised and, for people with musical taste like mine, appealing manner? perhaps this is what adorno meant when he said that, after auschwitz, to write lyric poetry is barbaric. 2. bobby conn "soixante-neuf année érotique" if bernardo bertolucci's disappointing film the dreamers lived up to its concept, this song and not the protagonist's rendition of jimi hendrix's version of "all along the watchtower" would have played over the film's central scene. of the film's many references, the four most striking were the filmic quotation of jean-luc godard's famous louvre scene in band à part, the freeze-framed shot of jacques-louis david's the oath of the horatii in the middle of that scene, the whimsical use of françoise hardy's "tous les garçons et les filles de mon age," and the film's underlying plot theft of jean cocteau's les enfants terribles (with none, of course, of the subtlety and restraint that made cocteau's film such an enduring reference point for all subsequent serious filmmakers). these four references could easily have come together in powerful blow of gesamtkunstwerk and, were it so, bobby conn's cover of serge gainsbourg's "soixante-neuf année érotique" would have played nicely on the film's soundtrack next to hardy's epochal song; after all, gainsbourg's insistent spectre haunts over all yé-yé songs. conn replaces gainsbourg's inimitably wry soixante-huitard francophone channeling of lee hazlewood's work of the same period with nineties post-post-hardcore noise and conceptual aplomb (the song is from the camp skin graft compilation that featured thirty-some of the most radical bands in or tangentially in the skin graft records universe). gainsbourg's celebration of the spirit of the late sixties in france and, metonymically, the student movement throughout western europe, would have underscored nicely the sexual-polical identity formation of band à part and les enfants terribles and the allegorical call to arms of referencing david's oath in one sweeping, lacanian stroke — my kingdom for a mirror stage. instead, bertolucci portrayed soixante-huit not as a postmodernist re-revolution in rousseauian terms as he seemingly intended to but, instead, as a simulacral repetition of the farcical quarante-huit. 3. archers of loaf "web in front" (demo) speaking of ostensible revolutions come and gone, what about the early nineties? some have hailed archers of loaf's icky mettle, particularly its two "slacker rock anthems" "web in front" and "plumb line," as the best illustrative reference points to the early nineties "slacker revolution." while bikini kill and fugazi had more overtly revolutionary content (more on the former below), for most historians of the period (and i don't mean the ones who write for SPIN), pavement's slanted and enchanted and superchunk's "slack motherfucker," along with archers of loaf and early dinosaur (jr), formed the nexus around which "revolution" so quickly turned into college rock farce (see: the lemonheads). personally, i always found icky mettle to contain extraordinary songs but to be sorely lacking in the shambolic musicianship and production that so marked superchunk's first two albums. but archers of loaf's b-sides compilation speed of cattle rights this wrong of history and gives us a noisy and visceral alternative to the acceptable version of "web in front" that we all know (the icky mettle version was in the movie mallrats for fuck's sake). while later archers albums managed to come closer to capturing the spirit of the band's legendary live show, icky mettle was too tame, both in production and in the band's performance, and now i've found the tossed off early nineties gem eric bachmann probably intended us to hear and that bands like the thermals are trying to revive. 4. boyracer "post modernist retro bullshit" unfortunately, the thermals, for all their energy and excitement, are on sub pop – the urban outfitters of "indie rock" — and always manage to come off just less than sincere and a touch too contrived, which might qualify them as "post modernist retro bullshit." boyracer aren't particularly known for their abandon, but this song is another clear example of what the thermals are trying to pull off. when twee-poppers want to rock out, they put on this record. there's a tuneful pop song buried deep beneath the fuzz and fast, less than adequate musicianship, but you can barely make it out. if guided by voices' fanatical followers knew about this song, they'd collectively climax into multiple orgasms, even though most of them are men (perhaps tellingly, the biggest boyracer fan i know is a woman). what separates this song from guided by voices, otherwise boyracer's american doppelganger, is stewart boyracer's good taste. as excellent as GBV's bee thousand and alien lanes are, you get the feeling that their excellence is unintentional. beneath the lo-fi pop goodness of GBV's best work lies bob pollard's distinctly mid-western seventies stadium rock pretentions. i think deep down we all know that, had he major label money and ric ocasek manning the boards, bee thousand wouldn't be the epochal lo-fi album we all know (case in point, GBV's later work). but boyracer shows us, years before the fact, that there's no going back. now that sub pop has bought up all the middling and acceptable independent bands of the punk rock and post-punk tradition, branded the ignominious term "indie rock," and sold it to the O.C. and gilmore girls and any multi-national ad agency that cares to buy it, the self-consciously independent music movement of the nineties is a closed project, never again to be reopened. 5. le tigre "deceptacon" to no one's surprise, death cab for cutie recently announced their signing to a major label, following in the footsteps of their tiny northwest independent label cum MTV buzz bin and tv commercial soundtrack brethren modest mouse. are they sellouts? and do i care? seriously, reacting in a knee-jerk fashion to any independent band that grew out of the punk rock and post-punk traditions to sign to a major label is getting a little old. it's almost 2005, not 1992. by now, independent labels have long been operating on business models that have absolutely nothing to do with what k and sarah and simple machines and dischord records did in the eighties and nineties. in fact, throw simple machines records presents: mechanic's guide to putting out records right out the window. it can still be done, but most would rather operate on the matador or epitaph or jade tree model. (sidenote: curiously, the same week as death cab for cutie jumped from barsuk records to the major leagues and still feeling the aftershocks of le tigre's defection from punk rock, sleater-kinney announced their signing to sub pop. just what the hell are wolf eyes doing on sub pop anyway?) sure these labels care about music, but they also count on one or a few of their bands to "break through" to make money for all the rest. the liz phairs and promise rings, then, inevitably jump ship when their labels can no longer support their success, but their back catalogue not only continues to create revenue for the label's roster but, in most cases, retroactively creates an even bigger cash flow both from their back catalogue and through increased public attention to the label. i believe sub pop was the first label to make bank doing this by piggybacking on nirvana's success and insisting that their logo remain on all nirvana releases next to the david geffen company's "dgc" logo. i don't like the politics of this kind of mini-major business practice, but i don't begrudge it; at least their hearts are in most cases in the right place. but kathleen hanna? really? i've written about this before, but i'm not sure i'll ever get over it. the first time i heard le tigre, "deceptacon" being the first track on their first album, i thought it sounded all the world like kathleen hanna had signed to grand royal, especially after the conceptual and celebration of lo-fi that was her julie ruin project. but i told myself that it couldn't possibly be true because kathleen would never sell out to the man and, at least in 1999, i was right. along with a small group of other d.i.y. heroes — i'll enumerate them: jenny toomey from simple machines records, ted leo, and andy dixon — kathleen was someone i looked up to, not only for her music but for her politics. d.i.y. was supposed to be our generation's answer to the avant-garde, a radical coming together of art and politics with everyday life. if kathleen hanna can not only justify working for a multi-million dollar media conglomerate, but rent her songs out to an ad agency representing a telecommunications corporation — i'm referring to the use of "deceptacon" in the seemingly ubiquitous telus ad — then i'm not sure what to believe in anymore. kill rock stars? kill yr idols (before they let you down).* it's actually come to the point where "deceptacon" has joined the ranks of the lightning seeds' "pure" (aquafina), frou frou's "let go" (garden state), old 97's' "question" (nintendo), and coldplay's "clocks" (too many sitcoms, tv dramas, films, and ads to mention) as an unexorcisable twenty-second jingle repeating in my head at every quiet moment i have to think. how someone with the critical intelligence of kathleen hanna, who has taught us all so much and in the process took a punch to the face from courtney love for it, can offer up her work to be cut up in a fashion tantamount to plastic surgery to make a few bucks for herself and a lot more for big business is beyond me. hey chicka bomb... * or, to borrow the title of an old punk planet article (vol. 31, may/june 1999, pp. 86-89), "kill your idols — before they make fools of themselves." 6. annie "heartbeat" now that "indie rock" has been twisted and perverted into a slicked-up and acceptable beepy pop format (e.g. the postal service, múm, frou frou, and probably the new le tigre album which i have refused to ever hear), i listen to annie's album anniemal to feel better. in the last few years, i've listened obsessively to artists who deconstruct the electronic pop format, from kylie minogue to missy elliott and timbaland to the badger king and the blow to kid 606, and annie, whose album was co-produced by torbjørn brundtland from röyksopp, is my newest love. at a time when a ubiquitous twenty second fragment simultaneously on MTV, movies, and ads is all you need to manufacture a hit song (exemplified by any recent britney spears single), annie reaestheticises pop music. what makes "heartbeat" great is the same thing that made missy elliott's "work it" so great: an attention to aural texture long missing from 99% of pop music. for someone who generally listens to music for songwriting, "heartbeat," which, like all the songs on anniemal is a good but not great song, is an immense treat the likes of which only comes along in popular music every couple of years. 7. suicide "cheree" (remix) we don't see deeply-textured monotones in contemporary music anymore, but they were everywhere in the late eighties and early nineties. in particular, the jesus and mary chain's psychocandy and the spacemen 3's playing with fire and the perfect perscription revolutionised a strain of guitar-based pop music that eventually found its apotheosis in my bloody valentine's loveless and has since suffered an ignominious afterlife of lesser shoegazer bands and neo-shoegaze bands and still haunts us in the form of catherine wheel-soundalike, middle period radiohead worshippers. but what today's seventh-generation shoegazer bands don't understand is that the jesus and mary chain, the spacemen 3, and my bloody valentine took their cue from suicide's first album. they piled guitar over guitar not for symphonic bombast like radiohead's ok computer, but to create a rich, singular monotone. this remix of "cheree" is the bonus track on the CD reissue of suicide's 1977 eponymous debut album. the album proper is extremely minimal and, in many parts, relies on single deep and warm held synth notes and a cheap electronic rockabilly drumbeat as the backdrop to alan vega's psychotic elvis-via-johnny cash-isms. the remix layers the sound and lends it a richness that anticipates british shoegazer (as well, oddly enough, as the smiths) by nearly a decade. in new york at a time marked by the new and no waves, suicide at once stuck out like a sore thumb and fit in perfectly. for most of suicide's contemporaries, minimal didn't mean paring down the elements; that was merely an effect of what they were trying to do: taking a cue from the minimalist visual art of the previous generation, they pared down the structure of the elements, simplifying but making counterintuitive their drum rhythms and using dissonant guitar chords and counterintuitive rhythmic patterns to deconstruct conventional R&B and blues-based guitar playing and draw attention to the materiality of rock and roll's elements (i'm thinking of the no new york bands, especially DNA, but any number of british bands were fellow travellers in this project: the slits, the fall, wire's pink flag, etc., as well as later so-called "primitivist" american post-punk bands like half-japanese). but suicide's minimalist strategies were more literally reductive. in many ways, their use of country and rockabilly rhythms and song structures achieved a similar feat as their more theoretically sophisticated peers, but, right now, i'm really more interested in the warmth of their drone. the obvious inheritors of the suicide legacy are big black and, in the present day, xiu xiu, but what people tend to forget and what this remix reminds us is that their influence is just as strong in the similarly dark but more conventionally beautiful music of the jesus and mary chain and the spacemen 3's early work, and finds an altogether different realisation in loveless. 8. xiu xiu "ian curtis wishlist" i can't place the drone at the beginning and end of "ian curtis wishlist." i have no idea what it is and i especially have no idea why it sounds so familiar, but the drone's rising glissando effects a sort of crescendo that has nothing to do with volume and, in its second incarnation, acts as the dramatic climax of the song, if not the entire album. from the moment i heard an advance copy of their debut album knife play, i didn't like xiu xiu. a little later, after i had heard bands like young people and THETEETHE who are steeped in a similar abject aesthetic and who come out of the same 5 rue christine circle, i knew why: xiu xiu is too melodramatic. and where young people and THETEETHE have a deliverance thing going on, both xiu xiu's sound and lyrical themes are very suburban. i have owned and sold copies of both young people's excellent debut and xiu xiu's a promise, of which "ian curtis wishlist" is the final track. i suppose that when one gets as many free records as i used to, coupled with my love for record shopping, it's hard to take the time to properly listen to the challenging ones before trading them in. and, while i admit that i didn't give a promise enough of a fair chance, especially given my existing dislike of the band, i should also let it be known that, until a few weeks ago, i had never heard "ian curtis wishlist." you see, the album's penultimate track was an abysmal cover of tracy chapman's "fast car." i think radically dissonant covers of famous songs can work well. for example, THETEETHE do a stunning cover of the beach boys' immortal "don't talk (put your head on my shoulder)" (see also: my discussion above on bobby conn's cover of "soixante-neuf année érotique"), but this was just awful: the song was faithfully performed, but in xiu xiu's trademark abject manner, which made for a pathetic track more than anything else. but when i heard "ian curtis wishlist," everything clicked. the "fast car" cover still sucks, but now i see a musical depth in xiu xiu's work that underlies the facility of james stewart's execution and the triteness of many of his lyrics. suddenly, xiu xiu's sickly melodrama became aristotelian tragic pathos and the performances — the appeal of the band is easily more in the performance than the songwriting — with their constant threats to collapse into themselves, become heroic, if only because they know that they'll inevitably go too far and induce the listener to cringe but proceed nonetheless and, on the way, achieve fleeting moments of young people-esque brilliance. but perhaps all of this is beside the point because "ian curtis wishlist" is the one track in xiu xiu's œuvre that begins and ends without a hitch. the droning glissando returns at the end of the song and it is a fitting end to an album that constantly belittles and dehumanises itself and, at many points, falters, but continues heroically on that its dramatic climax is merely an echo of the beginning of the song. it sounds exactly the same as before and, again, the drone mechanically changes its pitch but not its volume, but it's completely different and it's the ability to make it so that proves xiu xiu as a worthwhile musical project as opposed to an emo novelty, which, given that the cover of "fast car" is xiu xiu's best-known work, is easy to assume. 9. new grenada "eric's trip" speaking of bad covers, i've recently come into a spate of recent tribute albums. in the tradition of a punk tribute to nirvana and a punk tribute to metallica, green day, weezer, jawbreaker, and NOFX have all in the last couple of years been lionised in "a punk tribute to" form. by and large, these albums have been horrendous. predictably, the weezer and jawbreaker tributes were populated almost exclusively by cookie-cutter bands of the mall-punk emo genre and this new metal/pop punk crossover "screamo" thing. in addition, each of these four tribute albums has one, seemingly perfunctory, ironic country played solo with a beat up eukelele-sounding acoustic guitar cover. why? no one knows. the only redeeming track on the green day tribute is weezer's articulate reworking of "worry rock," which means that, surprisingly, the NOFX tribute, containing two worthwhile tracks, does the most with the least useable source material. the first track, by an australian band of japanese expatriates called mach pelican, is an energetic and "poppist" (for a discussion of the imaginary pop résistance, see my entry from 7/06/04) take on "the longest line" and goes nearly two-thirds of the way to liquidate pop-punk of its formulaic aspect (i.e. what separates the thermals from any "punk" band on MTV or superchunk from the get up kids or le shok from ikara colt). the other decent track is the groovie ghoulies' cover of "the brews," which goes about three-quarters of the way. but, because of their "a punk tribute to" natures, none of these tribute albums can really be called disappointments. neither, really, could confuse yr. idols: a tribute to sonic youth, despite its being released by the usually staggeringly great narnack records. maybe if they got bands like lightning bolt, d. yellow swans, and wolf eyes (bands with sonic youth's experimental spirit as opposed to having been directly influenced by sonic youth's music) to reinterpret the songs, it might have turned out well, but it's pretty unrealistic to expect sonic youth-influenced "indie rock" bands, radical as they may be in comparison to, say, death cab for cutie or bright eyes, to turn in performances that aren't reverent but grossly inadequate renditions of some of the most challenging songs in the rock and roll canon. the band that did pull it off was new grenada, who pulled a groovie ghoulies. rather than trying to do what sonic youth did, which no band, even if they borrowed sonic youth's specially modified guitars, can do, they played "eric's trip" in an idiom closer to the faster songs by the band eric's trip. new grenada played it fast, they played it loose, they played it irreverent and kind of cute (think: bunnygrunt's cover of the descendents' "silly girl"), and they popped it up. this isn't to say that there isn't a bit of sonic youth's interesting guitar work at play on this track but, rather than show off everything they think they've learned from listening to daydream nation over and over again, they celebrated the fact that, underneath the innovative experimentation, the members of sonic youth could also write some great songwriterly pop songs. 10. mo tucker "pale blue eyes" i love pop songs, perhaps to a fault. and probably because i've listened to (and, more importantly, listened closely to) far more pop songs than i have any other kind of song, i privilege music that displays a sophisticated understanding of the history of pop songwriting over, say, the rite of spring. and, for this reason, i like the third velvet underground record best. i know that white light, white heat is far and away VU's best work and every part of the (former) music critic in me knows that their first album is the most "historically significant," but damned if i don't always go back to the third one and listen all the way through to "the murder mystery" and "after hours," which are, as far as i'm concerned, the best two consecutive songs on any album ever. that said, no song ever written, with the possible exception of big star's "thirteen," deserves to have a moratorium on cover versions more than "pale blue eyes." i remember in tenth grade when i bought my friend jonathan a copy of the best of the velvet underground for his birthday and he pulled out this hole c.d. with the most god-awful cover of "pale blue eyes." and i firmly believe that r.e.m.'s cover of the song has inspired nothing in anybody other than embarrassment and blind melon's similarly countrifried and somehow even worse cover of "candy says." i could go on and on about bad covers of songs from the third VU album, but i'll move on. i remember reading in the liner notes to the VU box set that mo (maureen) tucker was terrified to hear her own voice and was extremely reluctant to sing "after hours" (she eventually acquiesced on the condition that no one in the studio face her while she was singing). the result was a performance at once overtly self-conscious and wholly naïve. and i'm convinced that the entire lineage of shy twee singers from katrina and aggi of the pastels and heather lewis of beat happening to isobel campbell to whomever the kids are listening to now (not to mention latter day shaggs enthusiasts jad fair and daniel johnston, both of whom appear on tucker's album) is based on that one moe tucker performance. so it was with great anticipation that i have been for years trying to track down mo tucker's album life in exile after abdication, especially for her cover of "pale blue eyes" which lou reed claimed to be his favourite performance of the song. the interesting thing about this album, however, is that tucker and the myriad performers who show up to lend a hand (the biggest names of which are ol' lou, three quarters of sonic youth, fair, johnston, and frequent fair and johnston collaborator kramer) play on this stereotypical female naïveté (france gall, a near contemporary to the third VU record, is another great example). a part of me has always wondered if tucker's performance on "after hours" was also a conceptual joke and, given that calvin johnson is so schtick-heavy it almost detracts from the awesomeness of beat hapenning's jamboree, i've also wondered about heather lewis. and what about the shaggs? tucker's album makes the case that even the immortally naïve and unselfconscious shaggs knew exactly what was going on and was playing its listeners as the sexist, condescending assholes that they are. a post-television, pre-sonic youth brand of art rock runs through life in exile after abdication that blurs the line between serious deconstruction the likes of which DNA had done and the supposed inability of the shaggs. tucker's vocal delivery also invokes the shaggs and, while i had always imagined a pretty, "after hours"-like rendition of the pretty as hell "pale blue eyes," this deadpanned but not ironic performance, backed by patti smith prom-ballad reverby guitar noodling, comes off with the sincerity of the best eyes-closed karaoke performances. only tucker is lying to us. her performance is ironic, she's not and perhaps never was naïve, and her self-consciousness was a put on; she is self-conscious in a completely different way. i would say that makes us suckers, but if nobody was fooled, what would be the point of masquerading? 10/31/04 IF HIS NAME WERE "THOMAS," HIS NEPHEW WOULD CALL HIM... on this blog, i've written about dissing foucault on the twentieth anniversary of his death (7/05/04) and, more recently, dissing derrida in obituary form (10/10/04). in that vein, here's to indira gandhi on the twentieth anniversary of her "holy" assassination. in june of 1984, indira gandhi authorised the military storm of the sikh golden temple in amritsar resulting in the death of over a thousand sikhs, as well as anti-sikh police action, other state sanctioned military genocide, and general hindu anti-sikh behaviour and vigilianteism. four months later, two sikhs posing as her bodyguards fired a combined sixteen bullets into her. current indian prime minister manmohan singh, a sikh in name only it would seem, is singing her praises but if his name were "thomas," his nephew would call him... on this, the twentieth anniversary of mrs. gandhi's death, it might be fun if someone disinter her corpse, sixteen bullets and all, and parade it through punjab mussolini-style for people to spit at. admittedly, much of my knowledge on the subject and, yes, some of my indignation, is secondhand, but i've sided with so-called "terrorists" and secessionists — hell i've voted secessionist — before. so vive le khalistan and so forth. 10/15/04 TAKING THE "ERR" OUT OF "DERRIDA" re: my last entry on the times' derrida obit, i was apparently not the only one to take note of the headline. others, however, did not seem to find it quite so humorous: LINK. it was a thrill to sign my name on a letter next to rosalind krauss, hal foster, douglas crimp, andreas huyssen, benjamin buchloh, and other of my heroes, but being associated with this is just embarrassing. to be fair to professor engle, i only take issue with his parting shot, but what a thoughtless parting shot it is: "Mr. Kandell and the Times have gone to great lengths to put the bitch back in obituary." neither clever nor at all befitting of derrida's memory, engle demeans the uc-irvine humanities department's otherwise admirable attempt to defend and remember derrida to the unseemly level of the aforementioned jonathan kandell mentioning peter lennon's guardian article about the derridean reading of mein kampf (though an allusion to stanley fish's stupid "eskimo reading" of "a rose for emily" might have been in order as an example of bad deconstruction) sandwiched between four paragraphs on derrida's role in the scandal of paul de man's wartime journalism and a mention of martin heidegger's nazi affiliations. bear with me as i "deconstruct" engle's sexist epithet if you will. many of derrida's defenders have described kandell as malicious (following from kandell's decontextualised quotation of mitchell stephen's claim that derrida's work evokes enmity from otherwise "unmalicious" readers), but calling kandell a "bitch," indirectly or not, shows how even derrida-citing english professors can fall prey to the insidiousness of certain oppressive words — and furthermore it testifies to the continued importance of derridean thought and a post-structuralist attention to language that has outlived barthes, foucault, deleuze, and now derrida. but just what is so bad about calling someone a "bitch"? the same thing that's bad about calling someone a "slut" or "fag." the attempt among high schoolers, lifelong fratboys, and thoughtless oafs the world over to "democratise" these words, which is to say extend their meanings as insults beyond just the denigration of women and homosexuals, has only led to a broader, albeit slightly more subtle, denigration of said groups. when we say "bitch," we're not talking about all women and when we say "fag," we're not referring to gay people are the battle cries of apologists for this kind of language. but, historically, a bitch and a slut are women who act in certain ways and everyone who uses these words knows it. when one calls a man a "bitch" or a "slut," one compares his behaviour to behaviour that, when exhibited by a woman, is determined to be unacceptable (just as, when one uses the word "fag" to describe a non-homosexual person not in the context of comparing some aspect of that person to that of a homosexual, a comparison is made between the unacceptability of the person being called a "fag" and the unacceptability of homosexual people). using the word "bitch," then, not only dehumanises women by implying that certain behaviour when exhibited by women is unacceptable (and, furthermore, that the women who exhibit this behaviour are unacceptable), but also gestures at a patriarchal authority governing our social space. professor engle, this is what's truly unacceptable. many of the articles on derrida i've read this week dismiss such thinking as knee-jerk political correctness, but i think it's in keeping with the spirit of derrida's writing that those who read and admire it try to be a bit more careful in what they say and what it means, especially when it is published in a public forum intended to celebrate his life and his work. jacques derrida taught me that — r.i.p. 10/10/04 THEY PAVED DERRIDA AND PUT UP A PARKING LOT "the name is pronounced day-ree-DAH" new york times headline: "Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74." would that someday someone will write me so moving and respectful an epitaph. on a completely unrelated note, ben weasel has decided to publish his book of interviews with dr. frank about songwriting on his blog. in lieu of a proper index at weasel manor, i've included one below. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 10/01/04 MIRAH YOM TOV ZEITLYN, WITHOUT YOU WE AIN'T SHIT check this out (#17). a record i was on on the same playlist as the sick lipstick (and monoculture on the same playlist as narnack). how did this happen? monoculture didn't even send CJSF a promo. but i'm going to damn well make sure they send one to john peel now. [ADDENDUM (10/26): r.i.p. john peel, get teenage kicks right through the afterlife.] albums r.mutt is listening to at the moment r.mutt's shopping list r.mutt blog archives