Nomadology

disco jesus

2006-05-22T16:48:00.000-04:00

How much do I love that idea?
Maybe Madge has still got it.

poptimism

2006-05-22T16:33:00.000-04:00

Of course, when I say "real talent" I don't mean rockstars, necessarily, or rock bands. In terms of pop cultural idioms, rock probably has the least potential of all for making a comeback or having anything new to say. It's disappointing to realize that grime is probably one of the only idiom-like movements I was able to get excited about for a minute or two, and that it's already kind of imploded under the weight of such anticipation and the pressure of being the only new thing out there. I notice that a real problem some music bloggers seem to have with my point-of-view is that to take such pains to deny rockism is to somehow promote "empty-headedness." The implication seems to be that to tease out everything (classism, racism, sexism, etc.) that's latent in the notion that (often) anthemic, guitar-driven music is the only truly "great" music is to leap headlong into an abyss where there is no way to recover any sense of personal aesthetic without starting a culture war.

While I understand the sincere motivations behind this kind of slippery-slope mentality, it seems, again, to be very naive. Haven't we been "before the law" in regard to our personal aesthetic preferences for decades now? Probably since academia took deconstruction and mistakenly thought you could perform it on an institutional level without severely botching it in the early 80s. If the 90s taught us anything, shouldn't it have been that while we're all welcome to like whatever it is we literally take a liking to, we should be able to cough up a few words explaining why? Especially if we're holding up our preferences as some kind ideal? Critics of all kinds, in their role a public intellectuals (maybe some of the few remaining of this species), or at very least as journalists, shouldn't have huge reservations about this. If nothing else I think "Merrittgate" has opened up a "dialogue", and what can be bad about that? Only ego over-involvement could cast this sort of discourse in a negative light.

Get well soon, Kylie.

ai ai ai

2006-05-19T13:22:00.000-04:00

I realized today that the reason the rockism flame wars (fanned by John Cook of Slate then characteristically latched onto by the Times long after it was over) are so annoying is because both sides are essentially wrong and right, and both are equally guilty of letting their respective rhetorics get dangerously inflated. Stephen Merritt is not a racist because he dislikes OutKast, but I do question the level to which he's informed himself about contemporary chart-topping hip-hop if OutKast is the best example of nu-minstrelism he can cite.

What about Lil Jon and crunk? To my tastes, Lil Jon's brand of crunk is lighthearted and beat-happy in all the right ways. But I think his performance of his own blackness relies on a fantastical sort of fetishized "ghetto" where everyone's grill is iced, everyone has a white Escalade and a .22. This seems far more potentially negative and damaging to race relations than OutKast's more straightforwardly "smart" self-presentation. Black identity in a lot of recent hip-hop has fallen into a sort of self-parody (as "marginalized" cultures are wont to do--Larry David, anyone?) to no other end but white entertainment. I think most people, including Merritt's accusers, would admit that this, if it's true, is more problematic than OutKast's sort of charming revisionist historico-futurism. We all know I'm a sucker for retrofuture, but isn't the general consensus that OutKast is one of the few top 40 hip-hop bands that has a pretty sophisticated aesthetic despite occasional lapses into too-easy "booties and bling" lyrical conceits, rather than vice versa, as Merritt suggests?

I can't help but find it much more offensive that Stephen Merritt's so off-target when he had such a valid point to make than that he admits he can't get into hip-hop, or that he finds an old Disney tune catchy. When he admits to liking "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah"", is it really any different than when people still use the idiom "the pot calling the kettle black" even though it has racist origins? In degree only, I should think. Admitting that a racist tune is successful because it's good speaks more to the fact that the racists are insidious BECAUSE they are often clever, and that racism in the media can, like any propaganda from any era, be very subtlely persuasive and burrow its way into unconscious minds unnoticed.

Another aspect of the argument I find amusing is that I was arguing with my avid hip-hop fan friends about nu-minstrelism as early as 2001, so Merritt hardly seems like an iconoclast, if he is the gadfly here. People who are shocked by his suggestions are astoundingly naive, and make exactly the intellectual errors they're accusing Merritt of making. I'd be more interested in hearing someone address the construction of "ghetto" as the new blank canvas upon which our collective-Id is projecting its needs and finding surrogate satisfaction. Grand Theft Auto? San Andreas? They actually sold the soundtracks to these games. Hip-hop has been repackaged as a lifestyle in order to bracket it off, zap it of some its real subversive power, make it a fetish object so it can be used to make money off the ones with all of it, the 18-35 year-old caucasian males. This is the same thing America's always done with any subversive display of female sexuality. It's eventually reclaimed by men as "theirs" via condescension: "aren't girls cute when they're angry?" or "it's awesome that girls are so 'slutty' now?" Britney is a feminist as long as she's wearing elementary school drag and appealing to a rape/pedophilia fantasy. Black men are still seen as "sex apes", which is ok as long the average white boy can join in on the action. Through games like Grand Theft Auto, and I suppose I would argue a lot of top 40 hip-hop, white boys get to feel a part of this secret homosocial community where "masculinity" reigns unfettered, black men and their communities, then, being more "savage"--or at least more "primitive"--and in touch with aggressive drives (which are, of course, a sort of biological mandate, which excuses them). They roleplay life in the "ghetto", where cars mysteriously explode in the background and no one thinks twice as they watch someone beat a prostitute to death with a baseball on the street. Because they can't do it for real, and probably can't even admit to themselves that they'd want to, they get off on it so easily.

In the end, the reason why the witchhunters in this debate are so wrong even when they're "right" is because, of course, they're acting as if rockism and racism are things that one can subscribe to by choice. Personally I'm starting to understand "rockism" in much the same way people understand "racism"-- as something we all participate in, wittingly or not. This means that for an individual to deny personal racism is missing the point of what racism is, a cultural condition, something from which we cannot awake (the way history was the nightmare from which Stephen Daedalus "could not awake" in Ulysses) even though we have to continue to try. Rockism is something like a Derridean aporia, in that it's one of the near-paradoxical contradictions that is built into the very fiber of what we've held up as great popular music from its inception. Authenticity is the spectre that will always haunt or rock/pop ideals--what kind of art form so concerned with the cult of personality, with iconography and subversion wouldn't be haunted by this idea of the romantic rockstar hero who shits gold? Why wouldn't we have legends, and prevailing idioms, that eventually become standards? The issue for me is that it's getting so boring to work in the old idioms the old heroes created. It's sounding canned--rock or pop or hip-hop, I don't care. Boring. The Bloc Party, for instance: decent, safe, bland 90s-aping "indie" "rock" with tons of mid-range and midtempo ballads. Yawn. Annie? Kinda catchy indie-metapop? Uhh, no thanks. M.I.A. came close to being interesting, but buckled under the weight of her premature blog hype and embarrassing use of third-world politics to make a fashion statement that's been around in one form or another since the early 19th century.

For a while, hip-hop had promise because it was so fresh-- the dust hadn't yet settled on its brand of self-policing normativity. Now we've seen the hip-hop meta-narrative emerge and we're bored. The terrain is not only mapped out, but thoroughly explored and even colonized.

Let's be our own heroes. Let's make music no one's ever heard. I'm sick of songcrafters in the old idioms, I'm sick of stolen punk "attitude" standing in for Bowie-caliber uebermensch charisma. I love pop and hip-hop, but I, like Stephen Merritt, am sick of teendiva "girlpower" anthems and black men making fun of themselves. I realize that because post-modernism is a condition, we all inevitably think through a nostalgia that can be stifling to the creative impulse at best.

But I know there is still real talent out there, somewhere. We can only hope there are people with vital, new, exciting things to share, lying in wait ready to give me something I can get behind and even (if I were to cut back on opiates) feel.

maybe this isn't DOA

2006-05-19T11:21:00.000-04:00

Thanks to my finals recently ending, I may actually have the requisite amount of time and boredom at work to update this again. Post-secondary education should not get in the way of blogging. Nor should one's job or career.

new weekly feature!

2006-03-30T13:59:00.000-05:00

From now on, every week, probably on Thursday or Friday, I'm going to pick out something that's played out. Just as an FYI.

This week, via GawkerStalker, further proof of my hypothesis that leggings are now played out like Kanye West, and perhaps the sole necessary antecedent to this proposition:

I spotted Atoosa Rubenstein at a new low-budget sushi place on 57th and 8th around 2:00pm today, eating with a grey-haired older man and acting very concerned. When her phone rang it played "Golddigger" by Kanye and Jamie Foxx.

Enough said. Hurry up and go to that Blackbook photo op, Kanye, so I can see past you to look at Juelz Santana.

that new shit

2006-03-30T10:46:00.000-05:00

So the Times and other trendspotters (for example MTV, left) tell us that "leggings are back." Having spent the better part of 2001 furiously cutting the feet off my tights (among other things) while my girlfriends did the same, I find this amusing. What will they tell me next?? That people do a shitload of meth in the mid- and southwest? Thanks, cultural arbiters, for being ahead of just about no one but, umm, my grandma.

There really is no aura anymore.

We have been asking ourselves ever since, 'what could possibly come after the orgy - mourning or melancholy'? Plainly, neither this nor that, instead an incessant face-lifting of all the episodes of modern history, of its processes of liberation (of peoples, sexes, dreams, art and the unconscious - briefly, of all the constituents of the orgy of our times) under the sign of a premonition with respect to an apocalyptic end to it all.

Thanks, Baudrillard. I think that post on Gawker about leggings being "in" might just be such a premonition. If not, this livewire post about the Olsens-cum-muslims will do.

it's only rock and roll, but...

2006-03-24T10:19:00.000-05:00

I must admit, after reading about Pete Doherty's heroically cracked-out feats this week, I have newfound respect for his clearly innate skill for mixing completely incompatible drugs and not only surviving, but maintaining a conversation. In all my misspent youth I never once witnessed anyone mix crack with ecstasy, or even make a depraved joke about wanting their worst enemy to do so-- forget about adding smack to the equation.

At this point, everyone rolls their eyes and screams "stop cluttering the internet with this trash!" But there is something interesting going on here. It seems patently ridiculous to write Doherty off as just another reincarnation of Sid Vicious, to me. First, Sid nodded off almost compulsively (Nancy came in handy here, she usually was there to slap him awake)--he was always very present in his addiction. Truly incapacitated by it. He was completely checked out of reality, in a way only junkies can be.

Pete Doherty not only doesn't nod off, he actually shows up for his court dates. He doesn't have that junkie tunnelvision droopy-eyed blank stare, or that throaty monotone going, ashen as he is. He makes it to (most of) his gigs, plays an instrument, writes songs-- even if he has to vomit publically doing it. Where Kurt Cobain had his Sid Vicious impression spot on, down to details like the evil controlling girlfriend/puppetmaster, Pete Doherty built his junkie identity around dating a real legend, the original "heroin chic" ingenue. He is Hedi Slimane's muse. His look is a perfectly executed pastiche of the costumes worn by nearly every legendary junkie-rockstar. By all accounts he's a lovable, affable twat in the end, (ok, he did kick that reporter, but even Bjork's done that!) unlike spit-in-your-face Sid or fetally-positioned-sobbing-in-the-corner Cobain. He claims to have tried dope because he had a "romantic vision of taking opium," referencing and at the same time equating himself with Byron and Keats.

Somehow, Doherty has managed to aestheticize himself out of his own addiction. I would say the interesting thing about Doherty-- the reason he's a phenomenon even though we've seen this story play out a million times-- is that he's the first rock star to *perform* his addiction in this way. Doherty is in junkie drag.

so fucking zen

2006-03-23T23:27:00.000-05:00

I could've been wrong about Ian McCulloch being the target of Adam and the Ants on "Stand and Deliver." Apparently, Adam himself liked the Bunnymen. Even better, then, that they could absorb that sort of contradiction. (We love your music, but ditch the trench coat!) I only end up respecting people who can face the fact that, let's say, "the way up and the way down are the same way" without getting too flustered about it, or navel-gazing too long and hard. (Boring! Make something or go home.) No self-righteousness entailed, I swear: I only half-respect myself when I manage to do the same.

zzz

2006-03-23T10:20:00.000-05:00

Music writing just seems too located in the frontal lobes for me, these days. It's not limbic enough. I want to hear something and care about it for no particular reason again. I'm not asking for MTZ activation, just some kind of unknowable pleasure, like I used to feel.

For a while, I entertained the thought of being a neurosurgeon. Anyone who knows me is probably terrified to envision me brandishing a medical license of any kind. But I was fairly good at getting to the hippocampus in a sheep brain without damaging it, using only a few slices, during dissections in my anatomy class. (My experience with a cadaver, I'll admit, sent me on an 8-year vegetarian bender.)

The architecture of the brain is everything. It evolved in layers. Buried below even the limbic system (which makes drugs and sex and having babies feel good) is our reptilian brain, where fear and aggression are seated, also found in fish, amphibians, and of course reptiles. It's what leads biologists to believe that humans most originally evolved from some sort of aquatic creature. In other words, we emerged, dripping wet, of vaguely imagined morphology, out of some primordial sea goo, angry, and fighting for survival in the unlikeliest of circumstances.

I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that I woke up grumpy this morning and now I'm scapegoating evolution, the head injury I incurred a couple of years ago, and the genetic hand I've been dealt. And my amygdala for being hyperactive at random intervals.

This remix of "Cherry Coloured Funk" from the Otherness EP by the Cocteau Twins makes me want to take a nap forever. Here's another great EP track for good measure.

language and fascism

2006-03-22T16:05:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I learned that if you make a crappy recording of someone talking, and can't quite make out what they're saying, you can boost four specific frequencies to make the recording more intelligible. Those frequencies happen to be the ones where consonants are heard-- consonants, then, being the key to the intelligibility of language. This explained why I can read through French with relative ease yet I don't think I'll ever be able to follow spoken French. It also got me thinking about German and how everything in German seems conceptually very clear even when it arguably isn't, thanks probably to its abundance of consonants and consonant-endings.

Speaking of German, I keep running into this notion of fascism=art, or "art might as well be fascism", everywhere, lately. Having a highly developed aesthetic immediately brings you before the anti-fascist tribunal. The way post-punk is now widely considered a bastion of modernist tendencies toward fascist adherence to formalism and sincerity of purpose. The way Germans are always fascists in American cinema. The way Arnold Schwarzenegger is Austrian (like Hitler!) and appeals to fascist chic as blatantly as David Bowie did in that car in London.

This idea is everywhere this week. Even on Vh1's superfluffy programming. Make it stop!

I love Germans and hold them in no way solely responsible for modernism. They just happened to be the best at it.

piggybacking TG

2006-03-21T16:31:00.000-05:00

Let me just put this on record: Throbbing Gristle are going to be the next Joy Division. In fact, they already are, but not many people have noticed yet. They're the next "big, difficult" band to compare just about anything to in order to bolster its credibility--I've read everyone from The Knife to Alex Smoke held up to them, recently. The Juan Maclean openly loves them. Anyone who wants to be "edgy" will soon be wearing the Mission of Dead Souls t-shirt I bought my boyfriend three years ago.

Think of it this way: we're months, weeks away from having a new Interpol, only this time instead of having a singer who tries to be as flat and Ian Curtis monotone as possible, we're going to have a band named something like Persuasion or Discipline who makes tape loops, has a porn star whispering over their beats, and who uses negative ionizers on stage.

I personally can't wait to walk into a loft party in South Williamsburg and see the hipsters trying to dance to "Hot on the Heels of Love." Kids who used to think freakfolk was really important and deep.(I'll try to remember to bring my camera.)

Day one and counting...

[more on TG later]

stand and deliver

2006-03-21T10:19:00.000-05:00

...and then I was thinking that the brilliant thing about punk was exactly that it collapsed politics and fashion into the same gesture, whether John Lydon himself will ever cop to that or not. Maybe people just need to wear makeup to make good music.

Adam and the Ants, for example, said it like this in "Stand and Deliver."

I'm the dandy highwayman
who you're too scared to mention
I spend my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention
the devil take your stereo and your record collection!
the way you look you'll qualify for next year's old age pension!
Stand and deliver your money or your life!
try and use a mirror no bullet or a knife!
I'm the dandy highwayman so sick of indie* fashion
the clumsy boots, peek-a-boo roots that people think so dashing
so what's the point of robbery when nothing is worth taking? it's kind of tough to tell a scruff the big mistake he's making
Stand and deliver your money or your life!
try and use a mirror no bullet or a knife!
and even though you fool your souls
your conscience will be mine all mine
We're the dandy highwaymen so tired of excuses
of deep meaning philosophies where only showbiz loses
we're the dandy highwaymen and here's our invitation
throw your safety overboard and join our insect nation
Stand and deliver your money or your life!
try and use a mirror no bullet or a knife!
and even though you fool your souls
your conscience will be mine, all mine

My favorite is the line about showbiz losing. I believe he had his bullseye painted on Ian McCulloch's forehead. Kurt and his ilk had much the same problem with lack of visual interest. At least Echo and the Bunnymen sounded psychedelic. Another reason why I hate grunge: its attempts at psychedelia are so, well, lame. "Black Hole Sun" is as good as it gets, unless I missed something.

I'm at a loss as to the significance of insects and why they are the Ants. Something to do with African rituals and animal spirits? That would explain why masks are so important. Someone clear this up for me...

In other news, I just bought "Gimme the Light" on iTunes last night. It reminded me of eating at Taco Bell in Poughkeepsie.

*I hear "indie", many online authorities claim it's "easy." I'll try to make this available soon so you can decide for yourself.

white, indulgent

2006-03-20T10:29:00.000-05:00

I don't even know if I can do this. It feels so white and indulgent. I am white, and often indulgent, though. Happy reading.

So I have "Hung Up" in my head. A lot has been said about Madonna cannibalizing herself, elsewhere, you know, in the blogosphere (unless I dreamt all that)-- I'll feel free to avoid being redundant. The short story is that she's fallen into nostalgia for the current incarnation of an imaginary 80s when she, in fact, helped to invent the actual "80s." Seems silly, but it sounds fantastic. Of course, the ABBA sample that comprises the song, going back to disco and all that, is more properly late-70s. (Can't my generation have its turn at history's revision?) I know how slow on the uptake I am with this one, but I'm no longer hag enough to be exposed to the latest Madonna singles before it's gauche to spin them at parties.

Speaking of gauche: the 80s. A yen for the lost ability to be unironically gauche is why my generation is nostalgic for an imaginary "unremembered" 80s. Grunge's stranglehold on the 90s once rendered that 80s sound rinky-dink, overproduced, washed out, effete, over-the-top theatrical. Grunge wanted you to believe that its aesthetic was grounded [read: anything Heideggerian you want to into that word choice] very literally in grit and dirt, in what I tend to feel was a left-handed appeal to a Marlboro Man type of American masculine ideal [we could get into the whole cultural noise made about single moms and the absence of the father in the 90s, even the absence of Kurt's father, here, but we won't], where the pomp and bombast of the 80s seemed like a lot of girly-man (or shall we say "art-fag"?) posturing. The ironic thing is, from a production standpoint, stadium rockers like Nirvana (thanks to Albini) and Pearl Jam were equally as produced as, say, Simple Minds or the Thompson Twins. Just because you're using Marshall heads and/or shitty Japanese-made guitars doesn't mean you haven't filtered the hell out of your high- and low-end frequencies on your recordings, right?

Then there's the appeal to the original punks as ancestors. It's sad that all the good intentions could never resonate with quite the power Lydon did on "God Save the Queen." Instead, you had a lot of college near-dropouts with dredlocks driving Jeeps to the Tibetan Freedom concerts. Reheated boomer idealism grounded, in the end, in a very nebulous kind of nostalgia where politics and fashion were the same gesture.

It all makes me feel like a sort of prophet. (What doesn't?) In the mid-90s, there were even "all 80s" radio stations that people like embarassing uncles listened to. Never really buying into grunge, I remember one day, age about 14, Tears for Fears' "Head over Heels" sounding like a revelation. I haven't quit listening to reverb-drenched music-- or those radio stations when and where they exist-- since. And I've never looked back. [All the heroin in the world hasn't made me want to listen to "Rape Me"...]

The 90s were so afraid of being gauche that they forgot about performativity, the iconic power of makeup and wigs and pansexuality. It was all dull and monochromatic in the worst kind of crunchy-granola earth tones. The original punks knew better. At least they had the balls to wear swastikas.

Of course, I'm not taking ravers into consideration...

babel

2006-03-16T10:22:00.000-05:00

I used to read a little Borges everyday. Afterward, for kicks, I'd find new ways to realphabetize my book collection. I was an eccentric child. But along the way I managed to divest myself of neuroses. Which was, of course, a battle hard-won.

As it turns out, in my older age, I'm not much of a librarian. Recently I gave up on looking for one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes of the Clementine, because--like that librarian--I was going blind in the process. My pupils have finally finished adjusting to reality.

There was something about the endless list making. The cataloguing. The collecting. It felt like hoarding--or, it felt like it used to feel to rearrange my bookshelves according to whichsoever burning neurotic necessity. Only years ago this would have fulfilled a need. This second time around, in my encounter with librarians as an outsider to their particular vice, it began to feel like a pointless distraction that could no longer even serve the purpose of scratching any deep psychic itch, like an ego clusterstroke in which I certainly didn't want-- or more importantly need-- to partake.

hallo

2006-03-13T15:36:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my nightmare.