"hell is other people's music."

10/26/09

THE LONE AND LEVEL SANDS STRETCH FAR AWAY

r.i.p. geocities.

10/10/09

SLAY TRACKS

the other day, i sent this new york times article about slayer to the lieb, with a note that said: "argle bargle or foofaraw? or, to be more exact, does this article reflect the silliness and triviality at the core of death metal, or is it further trivializing even death metal?"

i was baiting him. his response:

basically, that piece made me really, really angry, to much the same degree and for almost the same reason as an uncomprehending assessment of the state of the irish nation, authored by an irish-american on the occasion of his first visit to the country, which also appeared in the pages of that esteemed newspaper. so here's my answer, which is longer and more poorly written than what either you or i are accustomed to, but what are you gonna do?

foofaraw of the highest order. the first thing that sprang to my mind as i read it was this oldie-but-goodie and before i actually engage seriously with his overall theme, i feel compelled (like many of the commenters, but not like the guy who gave a shout out to slipknot) to point out that he isn't talking about death metal at all. with the exception of cannibal corpse, all of those bands are thrash, not death metal. and that's a substantive distinction, rather than a mere quibble over terminology. where, pray tell, are the ridiculous blast beats? the distorted, down-tuned guitars? the cookie monster vocals? and let's be honest: as much as we may enjoy "rainin' blood," the output of those other bands (anthrax? this guy gives dilettantes a bad name...) is purest bollix.

supposing, to the contrary, that he had been listening to, and forming this emotional identification with, death metal, the answer to your exact question would be: a little of both. i've always had the sense that, with only a few exceptions, the practitioners of death metal have been pretty conscious of the ridiculousness of the style and of the kinds of imagery that they've been hammering to... death... for going on two decades now. this is even more true of its still-more-extreme offshoots like goregrind, which embodies absolutely everything about the misfits—except the music. this is in marked contrast with black metal types (about which, see this, which is so breathtakingly absurd and wonderful that it must—must—someday play a role in a doctoral dissertation). all of which is to hint at my suspicion that the people producing death metal these days, for all that their musical tastes run to the growling, dark, and thrashy, tend to be in on the joke. it isn't ideological, they aren't attempting to distill the sufferings of this world down to their primitive sonic essence. it's a show, and if it makes you feel like jumping around and hurting people—and that makes you happy—so much the better. in that sense, this guy was (or would have been, if he knew death metal from a swift kick to the groin) using it for something not so distant from its intended purpose.

but i can't abide his uncritical embrace of a form whose history and culture he misunderstands so completely. he might as well have picked up a copy of straight outta compton, identified with the anger, and, thinking to himself that "there's something to be said for this politically-conscious hiphop," immediately gone out and purchased a bunch of cypress hill, beastie boys, linkin park, and maybe fear of a black planet. the latter entirely by accident. whereas i am an admitted tourist in the world of extreme metal, he is the stereotypical fat, t-shirt clad american tourist who neglects to learn even a few basic phrases in the local language, and spends his trip speaking loudly, alienating everyone to whom he condescends to speak, and almost deliberately misunderstanding everything he encounters. in that sense, he is trivializing that which is already largely trivialized. and the ending... holy mother of fuck, godfrzej. i can just see him standing under the eiffel tower, doughy, t-shirted, and be-sandalled, chasing "angel of death" and his trite meditation on the passing of the german stranglehold on france during ww2 (which, like his father's sudden death [sic!] reminds him of nothing so much as him losing his job) with anthrax's atrocious "i am the law" and another timely meditation on, say, the terror, and how such troubling periods, like all things, must pass. dust in the wind, you fucking self-involved hippie scumbag.

there's more to be said, but i'm afraid i would literally choke to death on my own rage if i attempted the task.

10/04/09

I REFUSE TO INHERIT YR VALUES

as someone writing a dissertation partly about the concept of value in art and how it changed in the second half of the 20th century, i feel authorised to declare this article from the new issue of freize unbelievably fucked up.

10/03/09

1,000,000 BEST SONGS OF SOMETHING OR OTHER

by now, you have no doubt at least taken a glance at pitchfork's best stuff ot the 2000s lists. top 500 songs? top 200 albums? i guess so. top news? okay then.

this week, i was telling my class about pitchfork's old top 100 albums of the 90s list, which they have since scrubbed from the site and replaced with a new, less college-rock-y one. i remember an old ILX thread where the music critics on the site were complaining about pitchfork's canon building enterprise and how it had come in this decade to write more and more from an authoritative and "objective" point of view. mark richardson responded with something like, "don't think of it as an objective best-of list, think of it as a bunch of albums that a group of friends have made, as an opinion that reflects the favourites of a relatively specialized and aesthetically like-minded group." then someone wrote back, "you know it says 'top [number] records of [year],' right?" and mark was like, "it does? shit. i never agreed to that."

there is an ILX thread now called "The ten best songs from the 90s," which got me to thinking that i am not yet ready to talk about my favourite things of this decade, which will likely come in some form this december. but reading through the "top 500 tracks of the 2000s" has inspired me to revisit some of my favourite moments in 90s music.

blur "for tomorrow" (embedding disabled by request) [1993]

bratmobile "cool schmool" [1992]