r.mutt's blog

7/30/04 EVERYONE KNOWS ROCK ATTAINED PERFECTION IN 1993/1986/1974 — IT'S A SCIENTIFIC FACT i was recently talking with two old friends of mine (both fellow children of the nineties) about the merits of the music of the nineties within the larger scope of pop music. the conversation soon shifted to which bands and albums would be canonical and, as coincidence would have it, rhino's nineties box set came out three days later, provoking further discussion. while i'm an occasional early nineties nostalgist, i declared the decade a dark age for pop music. the eighties, i argued, should end up more fondly remembered by history. on a similar topic, follow these links to read the stupid arguing with the stupid arguing with the stupid. i was especially shocked and amused at that first one — who knew people still held alice in chains in high esteem? and i thought my old friends from high school were stuck in the nineties. shit. but, as i was discussing the nineties canon with my two old friends, it struck me that my own heavily revised canons are largely irrelevant (their protestations at my insistence that sonic youth ca. '86 - '88 would go down as one of the high water marks of eighties pop music made me realise this — doesn't everybody know how important sonic youth is?). i'm thinking that if, say, the replacements' place in the canon can only be secured retroactively after terrible bands like the goo goo dolls sell millions of records, then why do i care which bands and albums popular opinion will remember? mapping an historical scope onto pop music is tricky business because of its dialectical ties to popular culture and the media industry on one hand and the pursuit of artistic and/or (non-short-sighted) cultural relevance (i.e. autonomy from popular culture and the media industry) on the other. but, if we privilege work that favours the latter, maybe the nineties have a fighting change against the eighties, seventies, and even the sixties. let's listen to the old records and hold heavenly's first album and galaxie 500's last album up against the best work of de la soul, serge gainsbourg, and the zombies to see. regardless of the outcome, i guarantee that it'll prove a more rewarding exercise than breaking out the pearl jam, U2, fleetwood mac, and doors. 7/28/05 I FEEL LIKE I'VE DONE KISS TOO, DONNY. AND IT FEELS GOOD. i'm always the last to hear. many moons ago (february of this year), jona leaked a thirty second clip of the blow's new song "pile of gold" on his blog. i didn't know, however, that a full version of the song emerged on the pdx pop now! compilation earlier this summer. the song is great and i could have been listening to it for the last couple of months. but since i been gone, i'm always the last to hear. but that happened when i was in portland too. in my senior year of college, while writing for the yuppie paper that dare not drop its name (don't worry georgia straight, no one's pointing fingers at you), i was going through the paper in question's archives and came across this hatchet job on my beloved alma mater on the occasion of some prime time scandal two years before my freshman year. the scandal was shocking, but i was taken further aback by the city at large's animosity towards my college. who knew they all resented us arrogant elitist assholes? and et tu, my then employers? one of the senior reporters there at the time was an alumnus and their intern pool is perennially filled with the more unemployable among us. earlier today, while writing a much deserved and even more deeply indebted letter of recommendation for a former professor of mine and searching the internet for the committee for advancement and tenure's mailing address, i came across these letters to the editor (scroll to the bottom). shocked — and, as always, indignant — that people outside of willamette university and eugene bible college resented us so, two alumnae shot back and, while both acquitted themselves reasonably, one did so in a tone quite less indignant and arrogant than the other. i've been thinking about my writing (in and outside this space) and i wonder if i'd have, in the same situation, come off more like the former than the latter as i would hope to. i'll leave it to you, objective readers of this blog, to judge (though this particular entry probably does me no favours in this regard). i read just minutes before beginning this blog entry that the aforementioned newspaper that used to print my hastily conceived chicken scratch won a pulitzer. a fuckin' pulitzer, can you believe it? it was announced in april and no one told me. you'd think i would have heard from someone. anyways, here is the series of articles that won the prize. the most recent of these pieces is called "who knew," as in who knew that self-important, middlebrow rag o' fluff news in the front and limp criticism in the rear would ever get its shit together and win a fuckin' pulitzer? (i am, of course, exaggerating; i was just a little frustrated by the kind of work that was expected of me when i was there. furthermore, i reserve judgement on the quality of mr. jacquiss' articles until i've read them — it's 4:30 in the morning and i'm about to go to bed.) but congratulations nigel. back in my own interning days, i used to transcribe tapes of interviews with boring nobodies for him. 7/21/05 DON'T GO CHASING WATERFALLS to further pursue mark mcgowan's logic, someday i'm going to have a bunch of kids and film them for a video installation wherein i round them up in a room with darling little handkerchiefs over their eyes as blindfolds and popeye candy cigarettes in their mouths and shoot them in their cute little faces to protest rwandan genocide. to all future would-be dadaists of the post-adbusters generation that is falling over itself making compromises to preserve necessary fictions, where are you going to draw that line? 7/17/05 I COULD SHOW YOU MEMORIES TO RIVAL BERLIN IN THE THIRTIES early in my freshman year of college, i was assigned a jean-pierre vernant essay called "feminine figures of death in greece." the essay began with a discussion of the ancient greeks' two personifications of death, thanatos and ker, the latter often portrayed in literature as the keres, the black-winged, feminine takers of human life. the former, a masculine figure, is associated with youth and immortality, the heroic fulfillment of life through death in combat. when young greek men dreamed of death in battle and fame after it, they dreamed of thanatos. when greeks dreaded the mysteriousness and terror of death, they dreaded ker. the classic example of the feminine figure of death is medusa who, when the object of the masculine gaze, turns men into stone. freud posed the medusa myth as the product of a presymbolic male's first sighting of female genitalia. in a mirror stage of non-equivalence, the male interprets the female's lack of a penis as the product of castration and, accordingly, fears for his own genitalia. i bring all of this up because i've been listening all day to pop music's feminine figure of death: nico, the chanteuse of trauma whose blank gaze (reminiscent above all of, to borrow a trope from yeats, the blank and pitiless gaze of another feminine figure of death par excellence, the sphinx) is one with her emotionless vocal delivery. the two come together in a terrifying performance of everything freud ever said about women — see, among many other sources, freud's sexuality and the psychology of love. i remember, the day i bought the velvet underground box set, putting on the disc that began with the velvet underground & nico and falling asleep. i awoke in a cold sweat in the middle of nico's "chelsea girls." it was the poor susan she's uptight she can't turn out her light she rolled susan in a ball and now she can't see her at all verse that hit me with the force of a passage from vernant's essay: gorgo and ker are not the dead as the living remember, commemorate, and celebrate them; rather, they represent the direct confrontation with death itself. they are death proper, that domain beyond-the-theshold, the gaping aperture of the other side that no gaze can penetrate and no discourse can express: they are nothing but the horror of unspeakable Night (mortals and immortals: collected essays, ed. zeitlin, 97). scared of the dark as i have been all my life, nico's pitiless narration of the traumatised mary character made me glad i woke up to this on a bright afternoon instead of in the middle of the night. that moment, that sudden waking and being too shaken to go back to sleep (here, "she can't turn out her light [...] she can't see her at all" and nightmare on elm street find an unlikely symmetry), was my introduction to nico's solo work. in recent years, we've seen a reclamation of nico contre this feminine figure of death persona. thanks to the royal tenenbaums and its use of "these days" (from her debut chelsea girls album), a more pleasant folky nico has emerged in place of the teutonic death goddess flanked by the twin horrors of john cale's piercing viola and her own droning harmonium. i've recently come across the end, a nico album that takes the latter figure to its most terrifying realisation imaginable. several years earlier, my friend ian bought me june 1, 1974, a live performance by kevin ayer (of the soft machine), john cale, brian eno, and nico, for christmas. on this LP is a cover of the doors' "the end" that trumps even the merciless album version. just nico on vocals and harmonium and eno on synthesizer (as opposed to the album version, which revolves around a theatrical john cale on piano), this performance drones for nine minutes, slowly crawling closer and closer to the song's famous climax in nico's de rigueur deadpan, drawing out the listener's dread like beckett draws out his audience's anticipation in waiting for godot. and, like godot, the climax never arrives. "mother, i want to..." and then nothing: eno's synthesizer feeds back softly while nico sings a whimper — or a sound as close to a whimper as nico's pitiless voice could make. to invoke freud again, here is a song that's all castration anxiety and, when you finally get to the oedipal showdown — "father, i want to kill you" — nico denies you the climax. lops it right off. on the end, nico follows the title track — the album's penultimate — with a terrifying version of "das lied der deutschen" (a.k.a. "deutschland über alles"), the then-outlawed former (and, after reunification, current) german national anthem. i am fully convinced that this is the scariest closing to an album that i'll ever hear. i am wont to compare things to the holocaust and, often, i am called on it. for example, i was recently at a party and my friend josh called me at one o'clock in the morning on a saturday night from wherever he was to chew me out because he'd just heard about my offhand comparison of pepperoni to auschwitz. i won't go into detail about that but, in this case, a holocaust comparison is warranted. clearly, the lines "deutschland, deutschland über alles/ über alles in der welt" will never be heard without thoughts of hitler's master plan not far behind ever again. (after the reunification, germany reinstituted the song as its national anthem but, for obvious reasons, only the third stanza, which doesn't contain the lines mentioned above, is permitted to be sung.) in nico's hands, the song evokes paul celan's "todesfuge"; "tod ist ein meister aus deutschland" comes seamlessly to mind after "deutchland über alles." the nyctophobic trauma of "chelsea girls" and the oedipal trauma of "the end" have nothing on the holocaust, the twentieth century's greatest and most singularly terrifying source of historical trauma. (dein goldenes haar) nico plays celan's margarete, one part goethean femme fatale, one part the impossibly psychotic pan-german dream ("deutsche frauen, deutsche treue,/ deutscher wein und deutscher sang!") that obsessed celan's meister aus deutschland, hitler, and the germany of that time so maddeningly that the final solution seemed like an acceptable course of action. the death dirge (fugue) of nico's harmonium is for all the world reminiscent of a line from the additional stanza of a variant version of the poem: "he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise up as smoke to the sky." nico reportedly once claimed that the cover was in the same spirit as jimi hendrix's "star spangled bannder," but, being that the song was at the time (1974) only unofficially germany's national anthem — and, even then, only the third stanza; nico sings them entire song — she must have been talking about the spirit of radical negation that hendrix's "star spangled banner" and serge gainsbourg's yet to be conceived "aux armes, et cætera" (his anti-neocolonial reggae goof on "la marseillaise") draw upon. to wit, she would dedicate live performances of "das lied der deutschen" to the memory of andreas baader — deutschland ist ein meister der tod. like notorious b.i.g.'s ready to die (though for completely different reasons), nico's the end is at once an indispensable cultural document and a remarkable piece of art on its own terms, but one that makes me extremely uneasy when i listen to it. and, like b.i.g.'s uncompromising ready to die, the end is a traumatic experience; you're never the same once you've heard the album. with or without "das lied der deutschen," the album is the feminine figure of death's siren song — like the one celan's margarete must have been singing to der meister aus deutschland in his insane fantasies while he forced the jews to dig their own graves — pitilessly drawing you in with its aesthetic beauty while a terror-wielding hand waits hidden behind its back. returning to where i started, the ancient greeks, aristotle hailed tragedy as the height of literature because of its ability to evoke terror and pity. the end is pure terror and pitilessness: one lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon gazed upon all things known and unknown, in triumph of intellect with motionless head erect. 7/14/05 PHILOMEL, SHE COMES TO SING SONGS TO EVERYONE if not for a surprisingly good sonic youth album and two of my favourite musicians in the world, khaela maricich and jona bechtolt, unexpectedly coming together to make the words-fail-me amazing poor aim: love songs, two thousand and four would have gone down in my mind as the most disappointing year in the history of music. almost every other of my favourite artists (mirah, the red light sting, deerhoof, fennesz, of montreal, DAT politics, lullatone) came out with records that disappointed, some after years of anticipation (dear nora, the mr. t experience, mouse on mars, boredoms, IQU). two albums from last year stand out in my mind: brian wilson's smile and ted leo + pharmacists' shake the sheets. the former couldn't possibly have lived up to thirty years of brian wilson saying that he was working on topping pet sounds. nothing could. but that's just the kind of year it was: mirah's c'mon miracle, a remarkable album in its own right, followed advisory committee, in my mind the finest album of the millennium thus far, and failed only to continue the steep upward trajectory of mirah's career. but shake the sheets disappointed for a different reason. as a rock and roll album, it's adequate. were it by any band other than my beloved TL/Rx, i would probably have burned myself a copy to play every now and then when i feel the need to mindlessly sing along to fast, tuneful music. on the level of entertainment, it didn't disappoint at all. sure, it wasn't as strong as TL/Rx's previous two albums, the tyranny of distance and hearts of oak, but the progression between those two albums mirrored that of elvis costello's my aim is true and elvis & the attractions' this year's model so closely that we were all expecting an armed forces, which shake the sheets surely was (okay, it had no "oliver's army," but close enough). but i try not to listen to music for mindless entertainment too often. i try to hold the music i listen to to the same standards as the books i read and the art i study. especially with the musicians i hold dear to my heart, ted leo certainly being one of them, i expect a certain level of critical engagement and self-awareness. what separates shake the sheets from TL/Rx's three other albums (as well as the tell balgeary, balgury is dead e.p.) is that, on the latter, the songs said something about songwriting and the references amounted to something meaningful. shake the sheets, on the other hand, feels rushed, as if ted, in his haste to get the political message in his lyrics out in time, didn't have a chance to fully conceptualise his material. for example, the even the nights they could get better part of "me and mia": the riffing here references british post-punk, gang of four most obviously but also the slits, the pop group, josef k, and countless other deconstructionists of guitar-based pop music. the music being referenced, serious stuff, is currently being rehashed as fashion by bands like the futureheads and franz ferdinand. i would have expected ted leo, of all people, to notice and critique the appropriation and stylisation of genuinely radical and experimental work at the hands of his contemporaries. the futureheads and franz ferdinand stylistically resemble the british bands i listed and, as such, borrow the aura of their revolutionary agenda, but the music of the futureheads and franz ferdinand has no revolutionary agenda of its own, nor does it do anything other than mindlessly entertain. ted leo is the last person i'd expect to join in on the act. but that's exactly what he does; he integrates the guitar work of gang of four, et alia seamlessly into his panoply of historical references, among them '77 british punk rock, the punk-influenced british pop of the same period (e.g. joe jackson and dexy's midnight runners), and, most pronouncedly, thin lizzy. yes, the surface of the songs is the political message in the lyrics and it is there for all to see. but a stylistic aestheticism runs through the record, a self-satisfied pastiche of historical references that amounts to mindless entertainment, albeit mindless entertainment with a leftist lyrical bent. and it's almost as if ted himself knows it: down again, i sit, to try to write, an open letter to the president or melodies to help a girl pay rent as if he acknowledges that parroting the utopianist sentiments of the historical avant-garde will inevitably end in failure without the avant-garde's rigorous interrogations of the methods of production. ted's revival of historical styles doesn't draw attention to the contextual contradictions between these styles. rather, shake the sheets smoothes over these contradictions (reference for reference's sake) and ends up with a pastiche for pastiche's sake. the medium, it seems, has no message, which is most dangerous of all, as it promotes cultural amnesia and ahistoricism. and maybe the next time we hear a josef k song, we'll think: hey that reminds me of "me and mia" and if this came out twenty years later, they would have made a million dollars instead of reflecting on the failure of the '77 - '82 period's project to destroy guitar-based pop music (i.e. the devolution of its anti-rock and anti-pop strategies into "new wave," as well as its reappropriation twenty years later at the hands of people in sportcoats) and how one might resume such a project in the present. ted leo, i love the guy. ted, on the very minute chance you might be out there reading this, i love you man. but i've been listening to shake the sheets all week trying to uncover a redemptive aspect i'd overlooked and i can't. it's a nice rock and roll album — it deserved a higher mark from pitchfork, to be sure — but that shit won't fly. it isn't good enough and you know it. 7/03/05 QUOTE OF THE DAY i don't care about the philistines — the philistines can forget how to read for all i care — but i have to put an end to the charlatanry. it's just so easy and attractive to be a charlatan that soon everyone will want to be one. complete non-sequitur: another chapter in my lifelong pursuit of funny uses of the word "emo" — (don't read the whole thing, just scroll to the very bottom — it's funnier out of context.) katie the pest, a great fuzzy guitars, girls singing pop duo that came across my desk in the summer of two thousand and two, came through portland a week and a half later, and that i eventually forgot about, has a new seven song album out later this summer. preview tracks here. 7/02/05 THE MUSEUM WAS TEDIUM recently, i called out vice magazine and the beautiful losers exhibition's indiscriminant pluralising, which brought to mind something benjamin buchloh wrote in artforum on the MoMA expansion earlier this year: "all of these founding fathers of modernism inhabit the same white hall of fame in a continuous line-up, forced to hang side by side, as though they had never fought for anything in particular anyway." buchloh was talking about cezanne having to hang beside gauguin, but remove "founding fathers of modernism" and he could just as easily have been talking about a cynthia connolly fugazi photograph having to hang beside one of terry richardson's pictures of some guy throwing up on a passed out girl — or, for that matter, a nike logo. several days ago, i found myself inside the vancouver art gallery looking at a black and white television screen on the floor of an otherwise empty white room. inside that black and white television screen was a woman and an unidentifiable object inside another otherwise empty white room. fuck me, now i'm supposed to be psychic? that video could have come from anywhere: any artist, any time since the advent moving pictures, any country, any social context. it turns out i was watching a live broadcast of the next room but it could just as easily have been, i don't know, a concentration camp gas chamber or the inside of apollo 11. i bring this up because i had a similar feeling later in the day while bombarded with rodin sculptures, each on its own grandiose pedestal. yes, there was mention of the gates of hell and, yes, there was even an explanatory poster on rodin's casting process, but is this any way to exhibit rodin's work? it's not like i was expecting a recreation of the gates of hell on the first floor of the VAG with thirty pages of footnotes pasted to the back but to parcel out the work of rodin — who, thanks to leo steinberg and rosalind krauss,* has gone down in history as the grandfather of seriality, who engaged his works of art in the discourse of mechanical reproduction in the age before mechanical reproduction, before walter benjamin was born, even — on individual pedestals as singular works of artistic genius, as if rodin were in the room (or even alive) when these sculptures were made or, for that matter, as if these sculptures were even the size rodin envisioned them to be (that would be the work of leonce bénédite)? and for no one to think twice? there's a stigma attached to reading things on the walls of museums, as if reading an explanatory note or even the artist's name, title, and date of a piece is somehow an admission that you can't engage with the work on its own terms, that you're an art poseur or an uptight square or something. since when is being informed — for argument's sake, let's be charitable and pretend for a moment that the things written on the walls of museums count as information — a hindrance when it comes to looking at art? and since when is looking at art a competition to see who has the best psychic powers? (i ask these two questions rhetorically; it's always been this way for as long as i've been alive.) i can tell without even knowing that one is by van gogh and the other is by renoir that this one is about the overwhelming depths of the human condition and that it is more powerful than the one about the ennui of modern life. that's the right answer, isn't it? and while we're all congratulating ourselves for being so sensitive — so telepathically attuned to some sort of sublime artistic spirit floating around museums (the vast warehouses of great art) — as to be able to appreciate works of art while wearing blindfolds, we still haven't gained anything from going to the museum. we might, however, have our tastes validated the next time time magazine runs a "ten greatest paintings of all time" article. so there i was in the vancouver art gallery staring at a black and white television screen sitting on the floor of an otherwise empty white room. rather than wondering what the hell was going on and under what conditions it came to be, i should have just stood there grooving to the art; i should have instinctively appreciated the video in the same manner as i should have stood transfixed in front of those rodin sculptures on big pedestals inside glass vitrines admiring the genius of rodin's hands.** there's no need to know anything about these objects in front of us (after all, since when did art count for anything other than instaneously apprehensible beauty?) and of course these works of art are great and exude some sort of spirit i can tap into if i just stand there looking dumbly for long enough; they're in a museum.*** * see the chapter on rodin in leo steinberg's other criteria: confrontations with twentieth century art and rosalind krauss' "the originality of the avant-garde" and "sincerely yours," collected in her book the originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths. ** i shouldn't kid. someone in a college seminar on the art of modernity once told an anecdote in the middle of class about being so moved by a rodin sculpture that he had to touch it so that his hands could touch something rodin once touched. surely he was speaking metonymically, as this stoned hippie had no doubt read the assigned rosalind krauss essays and knew that rodin's hands had never actually touched that sculpture (he was dead, to be sure). on a similar note, my favourite art work of the day was cornelia parker's marks made by freud (subconsciously), a close up photo of a leather chair said to have been freud's. personally, i think it's funnier if it's just some chair parker found in some store that sells furniture for psychiatrists' offices. *** lest this be misunderstood as elitism, the kind of engagement with art that i'm talking about is hardly restricted to those without an art education. for example, here's a true elitist, roger kimball, saying "fuck you rosalind krauss, why can't you just thoughtlessly venerate art objects for their perceived aesthetic beauty like the rest of us?" over and over again for six pages in the new criterion, one of this continent's last bastions of cultural classism and the anti-intellectual authoritarianism masquerading as populism with which it comes. albums r.mutt is listening to at the moment r.mutt's shopping list r.mutt blog archives