Saturday, December 29, 2012

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #11 (The Hood Internet, "Fuck with Mo' Money")

A joyous mashup of a classic posse track and some creamy synth-cheese. Like many of Girl Talk's best confections, The Hood Internet's "Fuck with Mo' Money" exposes the goofy, disco-poppy sweetness that bubbles beneath the surface of 90s mainstream hip-hop. Also, an FYI for aspiring mashup artists: always, always include a Biggie verse. In terms of rhythmic articulation, he's the best MC of all time, and it's not close.



"I got the dough, got the flow down piz-at, / Platinum plus like thiz-at, / Dangerous on triz-acks, / Leave your ass fliz-at."

Friday, December 28, 2012

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #12 (Ty Segall, "Thank God for Sinners")

A loud, scuzzy opener from Twins, the third of three (!) albums released by Ty Segall in 2012. Yeah, Segall wrote a ton of songs this year - and many of them were very, very good. Eventually something has to give: either quantity or quality. But in the meantime we can admire the apparent ease with which he bangs out tracks like "Thank God for Sinners": sloppy but well-made, catchy but hardly desperate to please.



"I'm out on the streets, you know, / I'm lookin' for you-ooo-ooo."

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #13 (The Walkmen, "Line by Line")

A deep cut from a deep-career album. Like many of The Walkmen's best recent songs, "Line by Line" works with silence, space, and subtle shifts in dynamics. It's a simple tune organized around a simple metaphor, but by the four-minute mark it accrues a complex kind of tension. And then the strings come in: release.



"Line by line, / Oh, we all scrape by."

Monday, December 17, 2012

ThoughtLeaf (Richard Slotkin)



"It is by now commonplace that our adherence to the 'myth of the frontier' - the conception of America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top - has blinded us to the consequences of the industrial and urban revolutions and to the need for social reform and a new concept of individual and communal welfare. Nor is it by a far-fetched association that the murderous violence that has characterized recent political life has been linked by poets and news commentators alike to the 'frontier psychology' of our recent past and our long heritage. The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience."

- Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973), p. 5

Friday, December 14, 2012

SoundLeaf (DIIV remixed by Memory Tapes)

How to turn something good into something differently good.

(Also, how to kill the final minute-thirty of a remix.)



Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Emily, Animated

What would Emily Dickinson have made of YouTube? I bet she would have dug its weirdness, its tendency toward brevity, its profusion of surprising associations.

Yesterday I stumbled upon (as one is forever "stumbling upon" YouTube things) the odd little video below: a short animation by Maureen Selwood paired with a reading by Blair Brown of Dickinson's poem "I started Early - Took my Dog."

I would recommend reading the poem first. It's one of my favorites. And please, watch out for that third line; it might trip you up.

*          *          *

I started Early - Took my Dog -
And visited the Sea -
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me -

And Frigates - in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands -
Presuming Me to be a Mouse -
Aground - opon the Sands -

But no Man moved Me - till the Tide
Went past my simple Show -
And past my Apron - and my Belt
And past my Boddice - too -

And made as He would eat me up -
As wholly as a Dew
Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve -
And then - I started - too - And He -

He followed - close behind -
I felt His Silver Heel Opon my Ancle -
Then my Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl -

Until We met the Solid Town -
No One He seemed to know -
And bowing - with a Mighty look -
At me - The Sea withdrew -

*          *          *

Now for the video (the reading starts at the 20-second mark, after an introduction by none other than Garrison Keillor):



This kind of video - a classic poem coupled with a commissioned animation - has wonderful potential. When I think of the many layers of meaning that might emerge from the interplay of spoken word and moving image, the cultural critic in me goes all tingly. He's like, "Technology really does open up new possibilities for art!"

But ultimately Selwood's animation doesn't do much for me. Perhaps it's too straightforward. We hear about a dog and the ocean, we see a dog on a beach; we hear about shoes filling with pearls, we see a bunch of pearls falling toward a pair of shoes. This literality has a deadening effect. Dickinson's words are so alive, so well tuned, so definitive, that any re-presentation of them is bound to seem inferior.

More to the point, though - and at the risk of stating the obvious - the images of "I started Early - Took my Dog" aren't meant to be seen. The poem's power lies in the fraught space between reading the text and visualizing what it describes.

Mischievously, Dickinson begins with a quotidian scene: taking the dog for a morning walk by the sea. Then, with no warning, not even an introductory clause, she hits us with "Mermaids" in a "Basement" and "Frigates" with "Hempen Hands." The sea morphs into a multi-story house, then into a ravenous man. The dog vanishes, apparently.

As the proceedings grow more and more surreal, as the narrative departs from the shore of the everyday, we realize this isn't a poem about a walk. It isn't about a leisurely, sun-dappled, Wordsworthian encounter with nature. No, it's more like an allegory - an allegory for... what? Death? Orgasm? Gender violence? Spiritual terror?

Dickinsonianly, the poem never settles. It resists our impulse to determine and delimit meaning, to tell a story, to paint a picture. And yet it haunts us, calls us back, tempts us to understand.

I mean, what happened to that damn dog?

Often, when a film adaptation of a beloved book comes out, readers say they would prefer to continue "imagining," as opposed to "knowing," what certain settings and characters "look like." This type of complaint has always bugged me, and now I know why: when I read, I rarely visualize things with any precision or permanence. From reading to rereading, the images shift, become new. A film adaptation, then, merely provides an alternate, equally nondefinitive set of possibilities.

So I suppose that part of the pleasure I take in reading literature (can it be called "pleasure" when it's a mixture of frustration, fascination, and compulsion?) inheres in the maddening, ever-fruitful absence of certainty.

Monday, December 10, 2012

ThoughtLeaf (Toni Morrison)





"There is still much ill-gotten gain to reap from rationalizing power grabs and clutches with inferences of inferiority and the ranking of differences. ... And there is quite a lot of juice to be extracted from plummy reminiscences of 'individualism' and 'freedom' if the tree upon which such fruit hangs is a black population forced to serve as freedom's polar opposite: individualism is foregrounded (and believed in) when its background is stereotypified, enforced dependency. Freedom (to move, to earn, to learn, to be allied with a powerful center, to narrate the world) can be relished more deeply in a cheek-by-jowl existence with the bound and unfree, the economically oppressed, the marginalized, the silenced."

- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), p. 64

Friday, December 7, 2012

SoundLeaf (Majical Cloudz)

How to make up for a dumb band name.
 

(Thanks for the tip, Peter.)

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

You'll Love It Because Everyone Loves It

Question: What albums can everyone love?

I'm not talking about the "best" albums. Not even your "favorite" albums. I'm talking about the albums that appeal to nearly everyone. The albums you can recommend to all of your acquaintance with serene confidence.

Recently, in an attempt to identify this rare breed of album, the All Songs Considered blog conducted a series of polls. Some of the results might surprise you.

Whereas 47% of readers said they "loved" the Garden State soundtrack, 48% admitted they "hadn't really heard" M.I.A.'s Kala, which was associated with a far more successful film. 63% declared their ardor for Michael Jackson's Thriller, but 7% claimed they hadn't listened to it. How is that even possible? The damn thing sold like 60 million copies! Almost every track got radio play!

In many other respects, though, the All Songs Considered polls met expectations - and not always in a good way. The audience of NPR being what it is, the hip-hop genre took a beating. Only 62% of readers had an opinion on Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a Billboard #1 only two years ago. Even more alarmingly, 69% hadn't heard Nas's 1994 masterpiece Illmatic. (Note on that link: many, many f-bombs and n-bombs. Beware, seniors.)

To be clear, I'm not saying you're an awful person if you don't listen to hip-hop. Everyone prefers certain sounds to others. (Me, I like fuzzed-out guitars.) Nevertheless, I find it instructive that more than half of the All Songs Considered poll-takers had never listened to Jay-Z's Blueprint, a mainstream hit and an era-defining statement - and about the same percentage had not only heard but actively "loved" Arcade Fire's Funeral.

If NPR epitomizes middlebrow culture, then middlebrow culture has some color-line issues.

The Beatles, on the other hand, were predictably dominant. Rubber Soul received a 77% "love it" vote; The White Album, 83%; Abbey Road, 85%; Revolver, 85%.

Nearly as popular was Paul Simon's Graceland, which has always been my go-to album-everyone-can-love. I can almost guarantee you'll love it. And your parents will love it. Your metalhead step-cousin will love it. Only your anthropologist friend, who will take issue with Simon's blithe appropriation of African pop, won't love it.

(No matter. Your anthropologist friend is kind of a douchebag.)

Unsurprisingly, Graceland polled at a robust 70%. By comparison, The Beach Boys's Pet Sounds, regarded by many musicheads as the greatest pop album of all time, garnered a 63% approval rating.

The secret to Graceland's appeal? I'll leave that for another post. Provisionally, though, I might gesture toward the album's mixture of formal innovation and auditory inoffensiveness. It sounds like little else, which makes the critics happy; but it doesn't sound weird, which makes your grandma happy.



Paul Simon's Graceland: bringing the critics and your grandma together.

So I turn it over to you, dear readers. (Ye few, ye happy few!) Which albums would you recommend with equal conviction to the young and the old, the dim and the bright, the hip and the unhip, the stoned and the sober?

Monday, December 3, 2012

ThoughtLeaf (Patricia Nelson Limerick)


"In Western America, neither loser nor winner wasted much time in wondering how the other party felt. Western property users developed a style of maneuvering that made them resemble drivers who plunge into intersections, uninterested in the presence or intentions of other drivers. Given the limits of the Western environment and especially of water, there have been only so many avenues to prosperity. Users of those avenues have always encountered each other at intersections; hydraulic mining got in the way of farmers; farmers got in the way of cattle ranchers; urban water users got in the way of irrigators; dam builders got in the way of recreational river rafters. Collisions have occurred, but for most of the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth, traffic has been unevenly distributed, and sequentially jammed intersections - an effect urban dwellers know as gridlock - have not been much of a risk.

"In our own times, the calculation of risk changes. Mining, oil drilling, farming, recreation, tourism, fishing, hunting, lumbering, manufacturing, power generating, and real estate developing - all the Western routes to power and prosperity are heavily traveled. At their intersections, the tension builds. Regulatory devices - courts and executive agencies - have attempted to keep traffic flowing, while the habit of blaming the traffic cop for the traffic jam has provided another source of resentment directed at the federal government. The multitude of intersections where interests conflict are not guaranteed to produce compromise. Property and profit have been for decades, and remain today, very sensitive subjects."

*          *          *

"In Western America (and elsewhere), the dominance of the profit motive supported the notion that the pursuit of property and profit was rationality in action, and not emotion at all. In fact, the passion for profit was and is a passion like most others. It can make other concerns insignificant and inspire at once extraordinary courage and extraordinary cruelty. It was the passion at the core of the Western adventure."

- Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987), pp. 75-76, 77