ANTIQUES - JWNS

I haven't been posting much lately because all my creative energy has been going into this:

ANTIQUES - JWNS, out june 28th

I'll be in the shit working on the website and school until late June. Please keep your eyes peeled and follow me at the ANTIQUES WEBSITE for updates, art, videos, music, and info. We should have new singles coming out soon. Album drops on June 28th. It is amazing, truly. Hear the first single here.

I just put up a RIDICULOUS video today -- something about me spinning around a lightbulb upside down and the military ballet.(?)

After this dies down, I'll be back here, don't you worry, wit as acerbic and razor-sharp as ever.

This Post is an 8.7: Brief Thoughts on Pitchfork and Internet Music Journalism

(I wrote this a little while back, but it seems timely with some of the speculation about the new RH album.)

People obviously take reviews on the internet a little too seriously and have a very aggressive stance toward Pitchfork. For me, I remember discovering Pitchfork when I was in High School (2000 or so) and I just used it as a way to discover bands I didn't have any other access to. I grew up in a small, rural town with no radio market for alternative music let alone an artistically-minded music scene. The only record stores were FYE and Borders (although to give Borders credit, they had quite a lot of listening stations and some of their college-age employees were forward about introducing music and hipping me to some things I never would've picked out for myself). For me, the internet and internet music journalism was a good means to an end, a way for me to explore and feed my eclectic and expansive music tastes.


But when you read the reviews, they obviously feel amiss. Nothing written in a music review is ever a valid substitute for a truly aural experience and attempts to capture that (especially on Pitchfork where the approach to music journalism is so pretentious and cliquey) often fall far short of describing what is truly great about music: immediate nervous interaction.
Even now, Pitchfork readership is just a matter of convenience and not of devotion to their semi-postmodern gospel. Now that I live in the city, I could frequent local record stores with niche markets and see unknown bands at clubs, but it's nice to test them out for free first via Pitchfork or any other blog that caters to my tastes. I'm a graduate student with very little money and what's more, I'm tired of the way youth culture has perverted the excitement of music into a vehicle for their immaturity (which is why I avoid all ages show like the plague... kids these days, etc. - get off my lawn!) The mistake people have is that they think they either have to read Pitchfork like sacrosanct commands or reject it out of hand as a sad faction of hipsterdom with domineering, ubiquitous control over the music world. Has it ever crossed anyone's mind that it might be neither and that taking either reaction is sort of fashionably knee-jerk?

Do I resent the fact that Pitchfork is a kingmaker for whether a band is good or not in the public domain? Sure, but I try not to think about that and just get on with my life. Music, to me, is largely personal rather than social, anyway, which I know will garner some disagreement, but hey that's just... like... your opinion, man. I like to sit and talk about music with someone just as much as anyone, but when it comes to a heated debate over the quality of something I lose interest. It's largely why I'm fleeing the "industry" sector of music, which is doomed to collapse eventually anyway. Music criticism (to paraphrase Frank Zappa) is analogous to fashion blogging in that the subjectivity is so varied and loaded with mythologies that to take them seriously is to no longer be yourself. I would write music criticism, sure, but I don't think I could ever be anything less than tongue-in-cheek in describing the quality.

My advice? Enjoy and read Pitchfork, but don't treat it like a touchstone of value or a pariah. Treat it like a damn good radio station.

The King of Limbs, Listens #1 & #2

The King of Limbs, the 8th full length album from the relatively unknown band Radiohead, became available today for download (you may be familiar with their song "Creeps"). Watch as it takes over the rest of you and all your friends' days.



Forsaking the essay form for thrift. Thoughts in bulleted form:

• Bloom is a jittery opener. A lot of glitchy energy going on and definitely influenced by Bitches Brew. Those drums are fantastic.
• The new Morning Mr. Magpie is a highlight. I always liked that song. The arrangement is very "Harrowdown Hill" (from The Eraser) -- much of this album seems to have gotten the Eraser production treatment, but I don't think that's the essential gist of things. I hear much more free jazz in this and less dubstep. 
• Lotus Flower & Give Up The Ghost are the big highlights, nay, they are devastatingly awesome. Lotus Flower is a Thom vocal masterpiece. He's really kept his voice in top form and it works very well on the sultry tone of that song (and also on Little By Little)
• Lyrical content, per the usual, is unremarkable. Thom has never been one of my favorite lyricists, at least not since Kid A, but he has a few highlights on this album (Lotus Flower, Separator)
• People seem to be loving Codex, but I can't get on board yet. It reminds me a lot of Go Slowly without the anthemic payoff (which is secretly what all Radiohead fans want -- that anthemic Bends Pt. 2 they never got or got in OK Computer, but didn't accept).

I got onto my second listen while I was typing this and I've gone from thinking it was a good album to thinking that, yes, unfortunately it is another masterpiece. What a cliché. A Radiohead fan thinks the new Radiohead album is Masterpiece #5 (Pablo Honey, Amnesiac, and HTTT are their non-masterpieces). It's a very moody album and since it bears some sound similarities to The Eraser, I don't think it's going to win a lot of people over. But, I dig. Less immediately accessible than In Rainbows, but much more layered and neurotic, leaning towards an effusively dark spirited album. This is not the fun "band in the studio" album that In Rainbows was; this is a thematically less drippy, more restrained album.

That's it for now. More proper thoughts later, perhaps?

Yikes. (PALIN ALERT)

Catchy.

Of course, in all the tea party fervor, people have forgotten those 8 years leading up to the economic recession... you know, when we let the free market run wild under the oversight of Republican [sic] leadership? I understand and agree with many Tea Party talking points, but find it a little stunning the way the Tea Party movement is exploiting its own working class and middle class members. It feels dangerously like a conspiracy.

Why Does Everyone Like Girl Talk So Much?

And when I say "everyone", I mean why do people with respectable taste like Girl Talk? Particularly, when his music is far from having even an understandable appeal for music enthusiasts. I'm just going to rattle off a list of reasons why his appeal is so confusing to me:

1) He does the same thing on every single album. There's no progression. Play a song from Night Ripper next to a song from All Day and I couldn't tell you which came from what album. How uninteresting is that?

2) His selection of samples is uninteresting and, at best, only palatable as novelty. Once novelty wears off, then what? Is anyone genuinely excited about hearing Tiny Dancer mashed up with Juicy? I know both those songs. They're ubiquitous within the 18-30 year old demographic of music listeners thanks to Ben Folds, Almost Famous, and... well, whoever executed Biggie (the C.I.A.). Hearing them put together evokes about a 5 second interest in my head, the equivalent of: "Oh yeah. That's kinda fun. Don't really get the point/purpose, though. If it's to be danceable, couldn't I just put one or the other on and be just as sated in my thirst for ubiquitous karaoke mainstream songs?" In the meantime, play that shit for one of my music-loving, vinyl-ordering, skinny-jeans wearing friends and watch their faces light up: "Man, what a beat! Greg Gillis is on point, SON!" Meanwhile, I'm sitting there with a beat up Avalanches record in my hands, looking like Charlie Brown. Girl Talk's "songs" are the equivalent of YouTube viral videos of kittens that say, "Nom nom nom." Not even! At least the "nom nom nom" kittens reward repeat viewings. I listen to a Girl Talk song once and I throw it away like a half eaten Twinkie: "Oh, I get it. He put that song with that song. Cool. Next."

3) It preys on people's nostalgia and love of 60s-90s pastiche to an unforgivable level. This music isn't challenging in the least. It might as well be sold at Wal-Mart next to "Now: Vol. 46" and People Magazine. I thought the idea of sampling was that as a pastiche recycled art, it turned something old into something new. In the case of Girl Talk, it turns something old into something old played over top of or underneath something less old.

4) Those Girl Talk concerts look unbearably stupid. I bet all those people are really stupid.
See 2:55 for evidence of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxcCfqbazpg&feature=related

Olbermann Suspended: Thank You, Jesus

(Courtesy of ugh, CNN.)

Keith Olbermann was suspended by MSNBC for contributing to Democratic candidates.

Apparently, this is an "ethics violation" in journalism, but is what Olbermann does actually journalism? He is the Bill O'Reilly of the Democratic Party. When he gets on TV every night and picks the "Worst Person of the Day" award from a myriad number of right wing demagogues, how can anyone call him a "fair and balanced journalist?"

As ludicrous as this so called "ethics" standard is, I'm happy to see Olbermann get a break from the air. If I'm going to watch any ridiculously biased liberal-lefty on cable news, it's going to be Rachel Maddow. At least she's entertaining and (most of the time) correct. Then again, I don't have cable. And I wouldn't watch cable news if I did. Opinion news and punditry now takes up about 95% of all cable news programming at a significant sacrifice to actual reportage, which is unbelievably sad when you think about it.

"30 Is the New 20"

Quickly, because I'm busy.
I take exception with this phrase: "30 is the new 20" or "40 is the new 30".
Why?
Because I want to feel like I'm 30 when I'm 30 (albeit, I want to feel physically 20).
I mean, by extension of this logic, by the time I'm 35 I'm going to feel like a confused, jobless, broke college graduate trying to figure out what to do with my life.
Well, fuck that shit.
When I'm 35 I want all my plans to have succeeded. I want to be comfortable. I want to be in a strategic position to buy property within 5 years. I want a $50,000+/yr job. I want to live in that comfy and wonderful area between the suburbs and the city. I want 35 to be 35!
Who honestly thinks their twenties are the best years of their life? That is a sad, morbid philosophy. It means the next 60-70 years are just going to be a long decline with intermittent moments that MIGHT be as good as that one time when you were in your twenties... but, alas, it's not.