art vs. commerce, etc.

i found out that pavement will be appearing on jimmy fallon. and they're holding a contest to see who can jam with pavement. you can enter here, guitar hero.

so how do you feel? yeah yeah, if you care for pavement, i know, c4ts.

1. yay, pavement on a mainstream tv program!

2. jesus, pavement on jimmy fallon?

this, combined with the fact that i corresponded with a 2L today who was born in 1987, i need to up my fibre intake. or something.

how you doin'

hot? tired? me too. must be a case of the olds.

here is a surprisingly informative interview with stephen malkmus. i guess he's over his post-adolescent nihilistic phase. oh such earnest and relatively comprehensive answers about pavement's history!

and yes, that photo is my bi-annual eric foner update: on anderson cooper 360 talking about the 14th amendment! does he have a book to shill? what's happening?!

the wall street journal reads my mind

fffwhat???

music blogs i like

i read somewhere that NPR is the most popular source for non-top-1o new music. is this true? i guess i agree, since 3 of the 4 blogs/podcasts i like are affiliated with public radio of some sort.

1. all songs considered: good blog and podcasts of concerts in their entirety, usually out of DC. mostly indie bands, but every once in a while they'll throw in other stuff like mavis staples.

2. monitor mix: carrie brownstein of sleater-kinney (why did you break up? i never even got to see you live, boohoo) writes an amusing blog on music and other randomness. her breezy, chatty tone surprised me. i guess it's the pacific northwestern friendliness in her, but s-k's music made me think she would be less lighthearted. i don't think she has a podcast yet (?). she should get on that.

3. sound opinions: a talk show all about music with the music critics of the chicago tribune and chicago sun-times. they bicker over best-of lists, invite guests for concerts, and geek out. it's by american public media--is this different from national public radio? anyway, good podcast, if only to yell at them for choosing yoshimi battles the pink robots as best album of 2002. (foreal?)

4. itunes celebrity playlist. is that embarrassing? i have no idea how to link to them, so here's stereogum's running list. if you ever wanted to know what clint eastwood's been listening to (or what his PR person told him he's been listening to, y'know), this is the right podcast for you.

did you read the profile or whatever of vampire weekend (sorry, subscription required, although here is a bizarre excerpt featuring some guy from blink-182) in the new yorker? they sound kinda insufferable. oh well, maybe i'm just jealous since all i got with my pretentiously latin columbvs unversitvs degree were some dog-eared copies of civilization and its discontents. you go, boys.

song of the month--two ways

how lou barlow managed to make this song sound so, erm, sebadoh-y i will never know, but it's kind of awesome.

selling out

i know i've been writing a lot of "i feel old" posts. i can't help it! besides, this is my blog. go get your own blog where you pontificate about relevant things.

so i went to that superchunk book reading/mini-concert. it was very well-attended, mostly by graying, middle-age-spread types. average age, probably about 30? 35? mac sang 3 songs, laura didn't participate in the musical portion (not sure why), and they read passages about themselves, spoon and the magnetic fields. nothing about the arcade fire, kids. sorry to disappoint.

they were kind enough to humor the audience by engaging in some q&a, usually my least favorite portion of any book reading. the heavily male crowd asked the usual fanboy qs, like, "erm, that 7-inch in limited release for that one week in 1992, how did that come about?" or " was [insert super obscure band name here] a big influence on you?" and one near spastic guy who couldn't stop gushing, "you are the greatest rock band, like, ever." all's i gotta say is, i was sitting near the bathroom that kid definitely did not wash his hands.

in response to one guy's question on how to get a demo in front of them, laura quickly shut him down, "we usually hear bands through our friends or friends of friends." then near-ironically, "you know, networking."

networking! superchunk!

anyway, back to how old i felt. amidst all this geeking out to the musicality of it all, i just wanted to hear about their business model, who their lawyers were, how they obtained financing, how they've sustained their profitability over all of these years. i mean, they can't just be all artistes. those guys know what they're doing.

i kind of reminded myself of this article. oh yeah, they wouldn't answer any questions about neutral milk hotel either, in case you were wondering.

britunes!

aside from being like the most uncomfortably/ridonculously handsome and disarmingly witty tv anchor ever, brian williams apparently is super informed about indie rock. wha?

an interview about his foray into indierockbloggerdom here.

pandas to distract you from my secret shame

ooh, this is a good game - the telegraph of london asked authors which Great Books they were ashamed to admit they had never read. since that list would be MUCH too long, i'm going to present a less literary (and more new york magazine-y) version. at the risk of alienating the entire readership (i.e., c4ts), here is a list of Great Pop Cultural, uh, Things which i've not read/seen/heard:

• the wire - yes, i admit it! bayrex, i'm sorry. i made it to episode 3 of season 1. i will have to return the DVDs to you.
  
• sonic youth - pioneers, vanguard, forefather/mothers, etc. don't care.
• none of the russians (y'know, tolstoy, dostoevsky, chekhov, etc.) - i said that to someone once and he asked, "not even nabokov?" i dunno, i tend to not include him. am i wrong on this?
• big lebowski - everyone freaking fell all over themselves when this movie came out. i dunno, i don't get it. something about bowling or something.
  

anyway, if you have a Pop Cultural Shame, do let me know so that i don't feel so alone. and pedestrian.

the way we were

as i mentioned in a previous post, i've been rather out of the music scene of late. i'm just kind of bored by it. my chief complaint is that these new bands don't seem very consistent. case in point - tapes n tapes. their first album was great. then i went to see them in concert and yeah, maybe it was the fact that i was one of the only people over 25, but it kind of blew. so badly that i had to leave in the middle. they tried songs off their new album and it was some horrifying hybrid of sublime and, hmmm, live. yeah. that sounds about right. maybe i'm just getting old and i need to revive my rick astley collection or something? hey rick, turns out i won't ever give you up.

stay with me here, but what's fred armisen all about? where did this dude come from? how did he end up creating this new site with one of the sleater kinneys? anyway, i started listening to the woods this morning and it made me wish for a giant reunion tour--sleater-kinney and pavement. i'll throw built to spill in there, too, although i'm pretty sure they're still together. i'll pretend i'm still 20 and afraid to go to alphabet city.

what's that you say, sasha frere jones?

btw, c4ts - why do magazines in asia always have white women (and blondes, at that) on the cover? shit makes me ill.

average white band

c4ts, i know you started a new job and all, but have you read this week's new yorker? aka the "arts" issue? anyway, i direct your attention to two articles in particular: your fave sasha frere-jones yet again fretting, this time about the state of indie rock, and the profile of david simon. hmm, now that i think about it, did you edit this issue?

no matter. the simon profile managed to combine all of my interests in one neat package: a temperamental protagonist (simon), a dramatically decaying city (baltimore), and rare insight into how the "vows" column works (connections). yeah, i know, virtually everyone i know is freaking obsessed with the wire. why aren't i on board? what can i say. i'm often a late adopter (and have pretty pedestrian tastes) when it comes to tv. indeed, confession time. i've never seen a single episode of the sopranos, yet this onion article made me reminisce like nobody's business.

oh uncle jesse! remember the time your girlfriend rescued DJ from her imminent eating disorder? i do!

now to turn my attention to frere-jones' article. i know that most critics just sound like people lamenting the days of yore (to wit, yet another whiny piece from david denby), but he really aggravates me. i can't disparage his article entirely since i've been rather bored by the music scene of late myself, but he essentially blames the whitewashing of indie rock on pavement? really? what about nirvana? kurt cobain certainly wasn't "miscegenating" in his albums and nirvana are far more influential and widely imitated than pavement.

second confession time: i love pavement. no doubt. and i'm definitely going to raise c4ts's ire here, but something about malkmus' brilliant privileged-white-man-insouciance just got to me. when i read in the table of contents that sasha frere-jones was gonna write on why indie rock was so white, i thought he was referring to its target and actual audience. bc they're white.

but you know, what the new yorker taketh away with one hand, they giveth with another bc the same issue managed to rescue me with its article on the internets and classical music. i don't like schoenberg much, aside from transfigured night. who the eff actually listens to pierrot lunaire? be real, snobs. who doesn't like a little tonality. anyway, how can you not love the fact you can find archived letters of him writing to the ford motor dealership about his car's failing cooling system? i wish there were a blog devoted to brilliant people doing quotidian things. i'd totally read that.

while researching something else altogether, i came across this wikipedia entry. one of my favorites will be posted in a bit.

[Ed note: an apt and hilarious image will be uploaded later. blogger issues.]

update: apparently this sasha frere-jones article annoyed many in the (gag) blogosphere.

yet another update: you know i had a dream last night (for real) that someone commented on my posts? HINT HINT. anyway, this slate article sums up my frustrations at SFJ better than my own post.

The Rosebuds -- Blind Pig, 5/29/07

In an earlier post I took on Sasha Frere-Jones' hypothetical alter ego and commented on the state of indie rock. Last night I went to the Rosebuds' show at the Blind Pig, and was reminded anew why I care about the whole indie scene to begin with. You see, A2--like many college towns, I suppose--has been emptied of its sheepskin boots and Hollister t-shirts. It's just me, Sugarpockets, some other bar exam preppers, a few undergrad summer-schoolers, and the locals. (After four years, I've discovered there are some.) Given the depopulation of this place, the show, as expected, was maybe a quarter-full. 'Pockets and I pulled up stools right to the front of the stage and sat and watched. There wasn't much cigarette smoke. No elbows to the ribs. No obscured lines of sight. Just a band playing its heart out and a few appreciative souls. And that's why indie rock has flourished like it has: You can come to know intimately the band you love.

The Rosebuds--whose latest effort is a light disco-pop-tinged affair with melifluous lyrics, jangly guitars, and catchy keyboards--have been playing to packed houses throughout their current tour, but if they were disappointed with last night's showing, there was no telling. Ivan, the limping frontman, a guy whose principal interests are basketball and rocking out--they're mine too, but unlike him I engage with them from the comfort of my couch--strolled around the bar during the opening act, mingling with the little people. It was the strangest thing. He wasn't an aloof rock star. Eventually, he came our way, and I told him how 'Pockets wanted "Shake Our Tree" (below) to be our wedding song. He was clearly distressed by the undanceablity of the choice, but was flattered, talked to me about WXDU, and agreed that it's a drag getting old (and being at indie rock shows).

Then he and his wife/co-conspirator Kelly and the rest of the band played their set. At the end, Ivan grabbed a guitar, Kelly got her moraccas, and they moved all of us to the back hallway and opened up the doors. They closed the show with an acoustic version of "Shake Our Tree," which they dedicated to me and 'Pockets. Then they manned the t-shirt stands, and 'Pockets and I strolled home along an empty Main Street, thankful we're not the kind of people who think the pinnacle of live entertainment is 80-dollar nosebleeds at Madison Square Garden.

The Rosebuds -- Shake Our Tree.mp3
The Rosebuds -- Get up Get Out.mp3

two americas -- part two

I was just going to respond in the comments section to Blogger E's post below, but I found myself being needlessly and typically maximalist, so I thought it best to unleash my feelings here, dear, dear, indifferent reader.

Regarding the New Yorker fretting E draws our attention to, I wonder how much stock we should put into the opinions of Sasha Frere-Jones--a man whose taste in music tends toward major label releases, but who gets to lay claim to indie cred by introducing MIA, Dizzy Rascal, Feist, and others to the literati. Not a bad gig. As E points out, Frere-Jones laments the state of indie rock--to his credit, actually he hedges his bets a little, saying merely that he harbors some "unease"-- because the movement has come to embrace a diversity of musical stylings. But let's interrogate this unease.

I'm old enough to remember in the mid-1990's when the post-grunge, fledgling indie rock kids put all their eggs in the Sebadoh and Pavement baskets, while at the same time harboring some dismissive views about hip-hop: hardly a muscial genre worth our time, one of my old colleagues at WXDU told me. Of course, the post-Native Tongues movement and members of the Wu-Tang Clan put to rest that stupidity, and now Clipse, Devon the Dude, Mad Lib, et al. draw in the skinny-jeaned and dandruff-coiffed, and no one complains. Enter alt-country, singer-songwriters, and--gasp--chanteuses like Feist, and indie rock's become a true alternative to the collective wisdom of the A&R guys over at the Big Five.

But Frere-Jones' "unease" reminds me that there're still those pitiable, superficial indie rockers out there who can't see past punk rock. To them, and to Frere-Jones' conflicted mind I say this: It's okay for there to be more than three emaciated dudes in a band. It's okay for songs to be languid and moving, for them to be "black-sounding," as Patrick Bateman would say. It's okay for good and dignified muscians to mine disco and lite-rock and reinvent those tired forms. The astonishing thing about Feist is that she has done the impossible: She has reconstituted lite rock, repackaged it, and fed it to scores of scenesters, and in the process made us all forget her shady beginnings with Peaches and all that clash-rock cacophany. If indie rockers can't evolve past "Fuck the Pain Away," 0r shouldn't, as Frere-Jones' uneasy alter ego might suggest, then really the "movement" is what the main-streamers have accused it of being all along: more artifice than substance; snobbery for snobbery's sake.

I for one am not buying that. Nor is my pretend millworker dad.