hired hounds at both my wrists

I think I’ve gone on record here as enthusiastically favoring the cover of Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone as album cover of the year for 2009 – or even album cover of the decade (click to enlarge) -

And indeed, Tris McCall kindly quotes me on that nomination in his year-end Critics’ Poll, in which it won best cover. At the same time, he notes that of the voters for this cover, few were women (and of the voters for Case as best singer, a category she also dominated, none were women), and he implies this has something to do with the overwhelming babeness of Ms. Case.

Well, I certainly won’t deny that, or that that’s a factor – but for me, what makes this cover exceptional (I mean, if I were just voting for best cover on the basis of babeness, I might have just voted for this one…) is some ineffable something about the combination of the cover’s elements. I’m not sure who or what Case is looking at while wielding that sword (as Tris wonders), and I’m not entirely sure why she’s on the hood of that car (and I’m not sure whether the fact that it’s a Cougar is some sort of meta-joke). The combination of the borrowed advertising vernacular (the car photo) and Case’s sort-of-modelesque pose is amusing…but offset by her intentionally amateurish hand-drawn lettering, and why the whole thing is set in a blank nowhere (which looks as if it might have been made by layering torn strips of paper) – again, I’m not sure. But the overall effect is a lot of things: sexy, sure, but ironized (you’re not going to take the whole “muscle car/Cougar/cougar” thing seriously, are you?); ironic, but not entirely (Case may not really wield a sword, but she’s also clearly not the sort of woman to take a lot of shit from anyone, thank you very much); and somehow rather funny in a way that’s a bit hard to place…but not parodic, either. There seems to be some sort of comment on nature/culture, with the savage huntress riding her “Cougar” – barefoot, even…but of course, her mount is a car, not a wild animal; and you might at first mistake that sword for a javelin, but in fact it looks sorta museum-piece-like; and that’s not a necklace made of teeth around her neck, just a pattern on a top that looks sort of middle-level designerish (not that I’m any sort of expert).

There’s an intriguing blankness about the image: it gestures in the direction of any number of typical images, but doesn’t quite commit to any of them. The worst you could say about it, I suppose, is that it’s just a simple post-modern parody of this sort of thing* – but I think its refusal to overtly parody or editorialize about that sort of image is what makes it more than, and better than, an image that merely encouraged us to laugh at ha-ha the stereotypical swords-and-sorcery fantasy image.

I think the image is successful also because its complexity fits the complexity of the CD it houses: Case’s songs are deceptively direct and simple-sounding, but both structurally and lyrically they’re far harder to puzzle out and reduce to any sort of simplistic image or message.

Plus: hey, it’s not only guys who like the “good-looking woman with a sword” thing: look at the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or before that Xena…lots of female fans for those shows…

* Amusingly, I know this image because I know the woman who modeled for the cover…

charm of the rawhide strip

Stephin Merritt (from this interview):

And…a bassett hound:

better run, better take cover

Here is the score of a conceptual music piece I have composed, “Here Comes EEverybody”:

The piece is scored for any instrument or combination of instruments. The score consists in its entirety of the note E, in any or any combination of octaves, which note may be played any number of times, in rhythms, volume, and articulation to be chosen by the player or players. Other notes may be played, but such notes are not necessary.

An interesting fact about copyright is that under the Copyright Act of 1976, Section 102, copyright is granted, without any requirement of registration, to “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device…”

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to sue anyone writing any music that quotes my new piece. (Tonal musicians working in the keys of E-flat are probably safe, however.)

Is that absurd? Yep. But only a little more absurd than the judgment an Australian court rendered against Men at Work for “plagiarizing,” in their huge eighties hit “Down Under,” a children’s song written by schoolteacher Marion Sinclair in 1934 and sung commonly by the Australian equivalent of the Girl Scouts (the Girl Guides), known as “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.” You can hear an a cappella performance of the song at the BBC article linked above.

So what exactly did Men at Work “steal” here? Two bars, a total of ten notes on three different pitches and in a distinctive rhythm (the opening phrase of the “Kookaburra” song), repeated a couple of times in the flute interjections after “Down Under”’s chorus. That’s it – and for that, the “Kookaburra” song’s composer’s heirs are asking up to 60% of the income from the song. And that is utterly absurd.

First, if the phrase is from the “Kookaburra” song, it’s likely an ad hoc quotation, meant as iconic allusion to something typically Australian (just like most of the lyrics). Musicians have done this sort of quotation for hundreds of years. Second, it is not even a literal quotation: the original song is in a major key, and the phrase in question begins on the fifth degree of the scale (G in C major, say), moves up a whole step after the rapid repetition of the first four notes, then concludes on a repetition of a two-note minor-third descent from the fifth to the major third of the scale. Men at Work’s quotation is in a minor key, beginning also on the fifth degree of the scale but rising only a half step, and the final figure descends a major third (not a minor third) to the third degree of the minor scale. Again: this sort of transformed allusion is the sort of thing musicians have always done: classical music is full of such quotations, from folk songs and from other composers’ work…and jazz would all but cease to exist if such allusions and quotations were banned.

And of course, why did it take twenty-five years for anyone to notice this alleged theft? The composer, it turns out, lived till 1990 – and it’s hard to imagine any Australian not having heard this song. Apparently, either she did not notice the borrowing, or did not care. The only motivation here is financial, obviously: her heirs (or her heirs’ lawyers) happened to hear the song and a little bell went off in their heads. Or more likely, the sound of a cash register (KA-CHINNGG!)

According to this article, the allegedly offending phrase wasn’t even written into the song but was developed from stage improvisations by flute player Greg Ham. The rest of the band weren’t even conscious of the similarity at the time – which might sound like a convenient lie, except that the phrase is so small, so simple and basic, that it could have been from nearly anywhere.

Pretty obviously, Men at Work need to get better attorneys. As I said, this sort of musical borrowing, intentional or not, goes on all the time. Some examples: Frank Zappa quotes probably hundreds of different songs in his music, including “Louie Louie” dozens of times. The opening of Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge” is most likely an homage to the beginning of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” (and their video to “Whip It” borrowed from a 1944 “Soundie“). The melody of “Paint it Black” is very close to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy transposed into a minor key. Approximately one zillion songs (including, oddly, prog-rock band Renaissance’s melodramatic Solzhenitsyn tribute “Mother Russia”) borrow Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse” theme. And, this famous Looney Tunes theme shares its first five notes with “Mary Had a Little Lamb”…

A couple of ideas. First, copyright should return to the notion of protecting and encouraging creative rights…not the property rights of publishers in perpetuity (otherwise known as “Mickey Mouse time”: the extension of copyright keeps getting revised…right around the time Disney’s rights in Mickey Mouse are due to fall back into the public domain…). Marion Sinclair’s grandchildren or whoever did not have anything to do with the success of the Men at Work song, nor did the publishers of Sinclair’s song. Frankly, if anything, the Men at Work song might have spurred the children’s song’s popularity, if anyone recognized the quotation. Second, there should be a reasonable notion of fair use in musical works, as there is (or should be: it’s been severely limited in recent years) in written works. Amusingly, in the latest issue of The Nation there’s a review of J.M. Coetzee’s most recent book. The headline for the article is “Telling It Slant” – a re-worked allusion to the famous phrase of Emily Dickinson (“tell all the truth but tell it slant”). Of course (as is typical with such literary allusions) the reference is not explained or credited anywhere in the article: it is left to the reader’s discovery. I rather doubt that Dickinson’s heirs, or any of the publishers of editions of her poetry, is going to sue The Nation for “plagiarism” in referencing, by a transformed quotation, material to which they own certain rights. Reference is not plagiarism, even if it’s indirect or not overtly acknowledged as reference.

The precedent this case might set (at least in Australia) is surely dangerous: it is very hard to write popular music, in that music’s limited tonal vocabulary, without inadvertently quoting or near-quoting short melodic or rhythmic fragments from other works. There’s a huge difference between purposeful or accidental snippets like the flute melody in “Down Under” and wholesale theft: I would argue that something like the non-transformed use of the bass riff in “Ice Ice Baby” (from Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure”), or even all those songs in the late seventies that blatantly stole the rhythm and riff from “What a Fool Believes” (notably “Steal Away” by Robbie Dupree), much more clearly owe a musical and literal debt to their sources than something like a two-bar flute lick which could be substantially changed without destroying the character of the song.

For Sale: One Amendment, Slightly Used

The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission purports to protect the First Amendment, but in fact, it erodes the very basis upon which that amendment, and the Bill of Rights entirely, is founded. It further occludes the transparency of the elective process, making it ever more likely that the public will not be informed about candidates’ positions, records, and personalities, and indeed that the candidates themselves will be less likely to retain control over their own campaigns. It does this by allowing huge piles of corporate money, allegedly to fund “speech,” to overwhelm a candidate’s own message in favor of whatever that corporate-funded speech wants to say.

For this reason (as well as for the Court’s overreaching, about which this New York Times editorial provides good background), the decision corrodes the potential of representative democracy. The purported First Amendment issues are a bit of a smokescreen. The First Amendment does not permit any speech, at any time, by anybody. There are clear and recognized limitations, many of which your average middle-school student is aware of: speech that defames another is not protected, speech that causes a clear and present danger is not protected (“fire!” in a crowded theater), among others. Further, some speech is essentially subsumed into the larger situation in which it exists and is categorized as “behavior”: this is the rationale behind the notion of “fighting words” and “disorderly behavior” (even though both have been subject to abuse). I cannot parade around in front of your house with a megaphone at 3 in the morning alleging that you kill babies and sodomize them. Assuming that’s not true, that’s one reason I can’t do so (I’m defaming you). Even if it were true, the conditions of my speech (that it’s enhanced by megaphone, that it’s the middle of the night) subject it to further limitations concerning disorderly behavior.

So the notion that limiting speech violates the First Amendment is not necessarily correct. The larger problem, though, comes from the notion (originating, I believe, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, and see the link to the actual case if you don’t trust Wikipedia) that corporations can be regarded as “persons” under the law. A curious sort of person: immortal (except for “suicide” a/k/a bankruptcy or reorganization), immune from any form of punishment or penalty available to actual persons (except financial—and even there, often able to evade the consequences via “suicide”), and of course utterly amoral. As has been pointed out several times, if a corporation is a “person,” it is a very, very psychologically ill person. The other problem here is the idea that spending money is a form of speech. Sure, such expenditures are to be regarded as “speech” only to the extent that they’re used to fund actual speech…but it’s naive in the extreme (by which I mean “quite knowing”) to imagine such an open-ended notion will limit what is essentially a forum for bribery and blackmail. (My offer of a generous contribution to the police fund, to be conveyed in person by this very trusted police officer who has stopped me for a traffic violation, is political speech in that it contributes toward funding my constitutionally protected rights of freedom of movement. See how well that works.)

Finally, there would seem to be a philosophical problem regarding “freedom” in limited venues. If we want to encourage freedom of expression, but a particular venue is limited in time or space or access, regarding money as a mode of speech creates huge problems. If there are ten slots for radio stations in a given market, arguing that corporate spending is “speech,” and therefore there should be no limits on how much corporations can be allowed to buy up and dominate those ten slots, clearly the only parties who will be able to speak are those who can afford it. And that creates quite the opposite of freedom of speech. While Citizens United does not address this issue, it may be seen as analogous: the ability of corporate interests to dominate media access is further enhanced.

That Times editorial notes that the Constitution was formed with a much more mobile notion of its terms, with an understanding that the goals it sought to protect should determine its interpretation. Corporations were severely limited; a free press was subsidized in various ways; and the goal of an informed public was paramount (at least in theory: not always in practice, of course). Between the withering economic viability of traditional news media organizations, and the ever-expanding ability of corporate interests to blanket the media with its and only its viewpoint, the preconditions for democracy become frailer and frailer.

Resistance is futile!

Jaron Lanier is not on Facebook – or at least, he doesn’t appear to be currently on Facebook. This may explain some of the rather odd notions he has about the site, as expressed in his article in the February issue of Harper’s, an excerpt from his new book You Are Not a Gadget. (Alas, the article is not available online except to subscribers…if you are one, here’s the link.) I wanted to agree with him…and he makes some good points, such as his comments about Microsoft Word’s obnoxious default feature that assumes you want to form numbered lists, etc. – which indicate to Lanier that the design of much software is predicated on the notion that, essentially, computers or the network cloud are or will be smarter than we are.

Somewhere along the line, though, he goes askew. Take this statement, for example: “Wikipedia…works through what I call the ‘oracle illusion,’ in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text super-human validity.” Since everyone knows that Wikipedia is authored by, and editable by, anyone (such knowledge is the root of tedious jokes about the site’s purported unreliability, in fact), that “suppression” seems awfully gestural. Sure, there’s no credits in the articles themselves…but anyone who cares to know can examine an article’s history, and careful examination can even reveal (in some cases) which contributor did what. And insofar as Wikipedia works (I believe it often does, but I’m not going to argue the reasons here), it’s because of human validity: that is, rather than the impersonal alleged authority of, say, The New York Times, whose editorial pages persist in a state of Olympian namelessness (much more “super-human” than Wikipedia), the authority of Wikipedia arises from the ceaseless flow of informed contributors. In this environment (with some circumstances being exceptions), good information drives out the bad, simply because bad information has far less power of persistence than good: an article on quantum physics is likelier to be monitored, and edited, by those knowledgeable about quantum physics than by those who don’t know or care about quantum physics, and therefore, bad information will be corrected by a plurality of potential (and informed) readers, whereas the only power given to assist bad info in persisting is sheer cussedness or idiocy (or ideology, I suppose).

But where Lanier really goes off the rails is in his description of Facebook. He seems to believe that (1) Facebook’s patrons are identified solely or primarily by items chosen from a multiple-choice database, such as “single” or “married” etc.; (2) “Romantic status” is the first item thought of by Facebook users (at least, it’s the first kind of status Lanier mentions…the first two, actually); (3) Facebook users are unaware of any distinction between their everyday, real-world use of the word friend and the Facebook term “friend,” such that they presumably do not understand the difference between friends (real world) and “friends” (Facebook); and (4) implicitly, that such prefab categories noted in (1) and (2) are the chief means whereby Facebook users seek to accumulate friends (or “friends,” if you’re reality-based). None of these seem correct…and all of them contribute to the impression of the typical Facebook user as some sort of misguided horny teenager. True, the dating status line in Facebook is limited to a handful of options (including a blank, which removes the field from display), but many other fields (such as political and religious beliefs) permit user entries…which is why a sampling of my friends reveals the definite “whiff of the subtle experience of the author” (which Lanier feels is absent from Facebook) in such ad-hoc political or religious affiliations as “religion stops a thinking brain,” “Frank Zappa” (as a “religious view”), or “Constitutional midrashist” (that’s under “political views”). Even if those categories were all prefab, the resulting limited number of options, and the way their display would default to that mere handful of possibilities, would likely mean people would ignore them as meaningful aspects of anyone’s personality.

Lanier, though, seems to think people get on Facebook and immediately do a search for anyone whose “relationship status” is “single” or “in an open relationship.” Lanier also seems to think that most Facebook users are teens or college students…which was of course true several years ago. But as any number of recent media portrayals of Facebook never tire of noting, the site has become exceedingly popular among ever-more-graying segments of the population (such as, uh, your gray-haired correspondent here).

The main issue I have with Lanier’s article is its insistence on pushing its thesis far past the bounds its logic, and its evidence, set for itself. For example, Lanier writes, “The most tiresome claim of the reigning digital philosophy is that crowds working for free do a better job at some things than antediluvian paid experts”…and then immediately ditches that prudent “at some things” to argue the straw-man universalization of that principle. A few sentences later, Lanier writes: “If the crowd is so wise, it should be directing each person optimally in choices related to home finance, the whitening of yellow teeth, and the search for a lover. All that paid persuasion ought to be mooted. Every penny Google earns suggests a failure of the crowd—and Google is earning a lot of pennies” (my emphasis). Suddenly, the reasonable proposition that crowd-sourcing is sometimes the most effective option is turned to a crackpot universal claim that “the crowd” always knows best, in all situations on all subjects. And observe that sniping little “for free”: in the context of Harper’s lefty environs, that’s going to be read as a sort of huzzah for the exploited laborers in the fields of the intellect…but turn to another recent Lanier publication, in the rather-less-worker-friendly Wall Street Journal, and suddenly he’s all about “foster[ing] creativity and intelligence” and denigrating “design…by committee” and implying that there’s something undignified, even denigrating, in giving away for free the fruits of one’s creative labor. (An amusing game is to read each article and check off the number of “left-wing” and “right-wing” talking points each article manages to hit: if nothing else, Lanier is a skilled propagandist, culturing his message to massage the beliefs of his chosen audience.)

And it’s too bad. Because as I said, in some ways I wanted to agree with him. In fact, insofar as complex computerized algorithms guide enormously complicated financial decisions far beyond the zenith of human comprehensibility, we are harmed…particularly when the results don’t pan out as expected. And it’s true that one pole of American idealism is the notion that there’s an easy way to any good answer by way of technology, science, or some formula or other to obviate the need to actually weigh the complicated, nasty, and all-too-human variables. (Another pole is nearly 180 degrees removed: a deep suspicion of any sort of structure other than sheer “horse sense”…by which we mean, I suppose, whether someone’s rheumatic big toe aches at five in the morning one day rather than another, or the anti-rationalism whereby folks willingly deny reason in favor of, say, belief in crystals, or astrology, or UFOs…) But Lanier’s exaggerated depictions of “the hive mind” (which we have to kill) in the Harper’s piece tend to make one suspicious of his other claims…and the transformation of what is nearly an anti-advertising screed (in Harper’s) into a fist-pumping praise of individual genius vs. the collectivized digital regime in the WSJ piece suggests both opportunism and a touch of the crank: there’s quite a bit of old-school technological determinism at work here as well. Even if Facebook wants to market to its users (which of course it does), even if the categories of its identify-defining demographic data would box in those users, the way those things are actually received and used does not necessarily correspond to the way they’re intended. For example: Lanier mentions Google Ads, the links supposedly tailored to reflect people’s interests and predilections as suggested by the content of their e-mails (scanned and digitally analyzed by a computer, not read by any actual person), and implies that they’re somehow regarded as a species of holy writ…when in fact, the only time many people I know refer to them is when they’re used as grist for parody, or ironic commentary on their curious interpretation of the multiple facets of people’s online lives. For example: one Facebook friend of mine once mentioned the band The Dentists…and since then, she’s been besieged with Facebook ads for dentistry and related fields. This same friend also ended up with a Twitter follower blabbling on about “astral projection”…she thinks this is because one of her tweets happened to use the word “lucid” (as in “lucid dreaming,” one of the pet notions beloved of folks inclined to believe in notions like “astral projection”). The “dentistry” thing has become a running joke among her friends…and while the great collective machine lurches on under its misperception that she’s a dentist, it’s certainly not the case that this hive mind has, say, compelled my friend to actually take up dentistry, read about or buy dental equipment…or pretend, for the sake of fitting a procrustean profile, to have done so.

expired license pulled by sheer proximity

My last post extensively covered my favorite albums of the year. This one just lists a playlist I made of tracks from the top 20 of those albums (but wait! there’s more…): the final installment, Bagged, in a series of 2009 mixes, cumulatively titled The Audacity of Nope. Or maybe “Dope.” I’ve been too busy to do up cover art this year, so you can decide.

1. Circulatory System “Overjoyed” Signal Morning
2. Anton Barbeau “Plastic Guitar” Plastic Guitar
3. Adam Franklin “Surge” Spent Bullets
4. Why? “This Blackest Purse” Eskimo Snow
5. Fever Ray “I’m Not Done” Fever Ray
6. Animal Collective “Lion in a Coma” Merriweather Post Pavilion
7. Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 “I’m Falling” Goodnight Oslo
8. John Vanderslice “Carina Constellation” Romanian Names
9. Neko Case “This Tornado Loves You” Middle Cyclone
10. The Mountain Goats “Psalms 40:2″ The Life of the World to Come
11. A.C. Newman “Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer” Get Guilty
12. Phoenix “1901″ Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
13. St. Vincent “Marrow” Actor
14. Grizzly Bear “Cheerleader” Veckatimest
15. Dirty Projectors “Temecula Sunrise” Bitte Orca
16. Charlotte Hatherley “New Worlds” New Worlds
17. Polvo “City Birds” In Prism
18. Yo La Tengo “Periodically Double or Triple” Popular Songs
19. Seeland “Call the Incredible” Tomorrow Today
20. PJ Harvey & John Parish “Passionless, Pointless” A Woman a Man Walked By
    (bonus: tracks I listened to a lot from albums that weren’t in my top 20)
21. Hugh Cornwell “Please Don’t Put Me on a Slow Boat to Trowbridge” Hooverdam
22. Skates & Rays “Fort Ashby” You Are My Home
23. The Minus 5 “The Lurking Barrister” Killingsworth
24. Marmoset “I Love My Things” Tea Tornado
25. Amazing Baby “Bayonets” Rewild

Check the comments, check the guy’s post comments.

more words, more music

2009 was a fairly deep year musically, even if nothing leapt out for me as being incredibly outstanding. Some years, it seems utterly obvious to me from the moment I hear it what my favorite album of the year is going to be. Other years, the assembled list of albums I’ve listened to seems impossible to organize hierarchically; in fact, this year I almost considered ditching rank entirely and merely listing albums in categories (older folks, newer artists, growers, etc.). Anyway, without further waffling, here’s a list:

Favorites (alphabetical)

• A.C. Newman Get Guilty
• Neko Case Middle Cyclone
• PJ Harvey & John Parish A Woman a Man Walked By
• Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 Goodnight Oslo
• Seeland Tomorrow Today
• St. Vincent Actor
• The Mountain Goats The Life of the World to Come
• Why? Eskimo Snow

Some reliable favorites there…but I’ll note that Hitchcock is once again on a hot streak: I probably listened to that album more than any other this year. This was the year John Darnielle’s Mountain Goats clicked for me (aided by an illicit download of an unavailable item that came with a ton of other stuff: take that RIAA…because of this download, I bought two other Mountain Goats albums which I probably would not have otherwise). Both the St. Vincent and PJ Harvey & John Parish albums rose quite a bit from my initial estimation of where they’d fall in the rankings, the PJ Harvey in particular making a huge impression on me as I relistened to it while putting this list together. Yoni Wolf’s Why? put out two fine albums this year: I give a slight edge to this one. (updated: As Aaron implies in the comments, I’m wrong here. I think I mislabeled their 2008 Alopecia – a fine album as well.) Wolf’s hip-hop background makes his lyrical approach different from the generally indie-rock background of most of this music (to clarify: Why?’s music has now moved almost entirely over to the vicinity of indie rock), and the density and cleverness of his language really ought to inspire sometimes lazy indie lyricists to amp up their efforts…

Next Favorites

• Charlotte Hatherley New Worlds
• Dirty Projectors Bitte Orca
• Fever Ray Fever Ray
• Grizzly Bear Veckatimest
• Phoenix Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
• Yo La Tengo Popular Songs

I will notice that female artists made a very strong showing this year: half of the top albums listed so far are by women or feature female players in key roles. And not just as singers: I’d say Harvey, Hatherley, and Annie Clark (St. Vincent) are three of the finest guitar players working today.

Anyway: I wasn’t sure at first whether Dirty Projectors’ work was really this good or whether its innovation and sheer jaw-dropping factor (yes, they are singing those parts, live and in real time) was covering up some deeper deficiencies. The more I listened, the more I doubted that: these are good and affecting songs as well as being strikingly arranged and performed. The Yo La Tengo album is similar to their last few, in that it sort of sneaks up on you: you think it’s just a typical competent YLT album, relatively middling…until one of its songs comes up in shuffle, and you realize, first, that you recognize it and know it more than you thought, and second, that it’s a really good song. When that happens with song after song, you realize the band has snuck another really great album past your initial impressions.

Next Next Favorites

• Adam Franklin Spent Bullets
• Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavilion
• Anton Barbeau Plastic Guitar
• Circulatory System Signal Morning
• John Vanderslice Romanian Names
• Polvo In Prism

Vanderslice’s track record over the past several releases is strong enough that the quite good Romanian Names counts as a bit of a dropoff: its subtler textures may improve its standing with more listens. (That happens a lot…) The Animal Collective album was, of course, one of the most hyped releases of the year: sure, it’s good, and I like it better than the sometimes overly formless stuff that preceded it…but it isn’t the cure for cancer. Polvo’s comeback record was way better than I would have guessed (I’m one of the few who thought their seeming swansong Exploded View was a bit bloated and disappointing) and might even sound better the more I listen. Barbeau’s been on a hot streak in the last few years, but the latter half of this one tails off a bit. Circulatory System’s Signal Morning is definitely an album; it’s hard to excerpt sensibly, but overall its panoramic psychedelia is entrancing.

Honorable Mentions

Amazing Baby Rewild; Bob Dylan Together Through Life; Deastro Moondagger, Doug Gillard Call from Restricted; Engineers Three Fact Fader; Future of the Left Travels with Myself and Another; Githead Landing; Morrissey Years of Refusal; Skates & Rays You Are My Home; Sparklehorse/Danger Mouse/David Lynch/et al. Dark Night of the Soul; Tegan and Sara Sainthood; The Felice Brothers Yonder Is the Clock; The Flaming Lips Embryonic; The Sky Drops Bourgeois Beat; The Starlight Mints Change Remains; Wilco Wilco (The Album)

Andrew Bird Noble Beast; Brendan Benson My Old Familiar Friend; Jay Reatard (R.I.P.) Watch Me Fall; Maximo Park Quicken the Heart; Mission of Burma The Sound the Speed the Light; Peter Bjorn and John Living Thing; The Church Untitled #23; The Dodos Time to Die; The Minus 5 Killingsworth; The Young Fresh Fellows I Think This Is It

As I said: it’s a pretty deep year—we’re down to about 40 now, and these are still pretty strong.

There were some disappointments, though (aside from some titles above that weren’t as good as I’d hoped): Echo & the Bunnymen The Fountain (blah); Editors In This Light and On This Evening (synth sounds don’t suit); Elvis Costello Secret, Profane & Sugarcane (just haven’t got it…yet?); Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs Under the Covers Vol. 2 (great selection of songs, but near-karaoke in terms of reimagining them); Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey Here and Now (just didn’t click); The Fiery Furnaces I’m Going Away (I think they do “complex” better than “more or less straight”).

Miscellany

Stuff I haven’t listened to enough to form a proper opinion but which are likely quite fine: A Sunny Day in Glasgow Ashes Grammar; Allyson Seconds Bag of Kittens (songs by Anton Barbeau); Atlas Sound Logos; Califone All My Friends Are Funeral Singers; David Bazan Curse Your Branches; Joe Henry Blood from Stars; Robert Pollard Elephant Jokes; Sunset Rubdown Dragonslayer; The Clientele Bonfires on the Heath; Throw Me the Statue Creaturesque; Tris McCall Let the Night Fall.

Notable EPs

Anton Barbeau Plastic EP; Deradoorian Mind Raft; Destroyer Bay of Pigs; Superchunk Leaves in the Gutter; The Joy Formidable A Balloon Called Moaning; The Mountain Goats & John Vanderslice Moon Colony Bloodbath.

Most Ridiculously Charming Video

This has to go to Milwaukeean Pezzettino, whose “You Never Know” presents her scampering about NYC with videographer in tow (sometimes literally)…her album Lion is more interesting than the music in this video, though, which is a bit…minimal.

Album Cover of the Year – or Decade – or Forever

Neko Case’s cover for Middle Cyclone. I will brook no argument on this one.

The Pollard Prize

Named, of course, for Robert Pollard and commemorating busiest artists of the year. Pollard himself is always on this list: this year, four studio albums, two under his own name and two with Boston Spaceships; one live album with Boston Spaceships; work with Cosmos (with Richard Davies), and the Circus Devils…I’m probably missing something, like another GBV “Suitcase” mop-up collection or something. I’m exhausted just writing this. Anyway: The Fiery Furnaces released two albums, or one album twice: I’m Going Away itself, plus reimaginings of several tracks by each Friedberger alone. Anton Barbeau released an album and an EP under his own name and wrote, produced, and played on an album by Allyson Seconds; and Scott McCaughey was all over the place: as part of Robyn Hitchcock’s Venus 3, as a live player with R.E.M. on Live at the Olympia; and as main band dude with both the Minus 5 and the Young Fresh Fellows.

Live/Reissues

Robyn Hitchcock’s I Often Dream of Trains in New York is a live rendering of his classic album, with excellent performances and rearrangements; R.E.M.’s Live at the Olympia is a comprehensive overview of their entire catalog with fiery and engaged performances suggesting Accelerate was not a fluke (the performances actually predate the recording of that album, but the live album was released in 2009). The Australians, at least, were able to get hold of Wall of Voodoo’s classic first album Dark Continent; the bulk of the Kraftwerk catalog was reissued in a wonderful box set (with hopes that their obscure, out-of-print earliest stuff may have a follow-up set of its own)…oh, and some band from Liverpool had its catalog revamped: you may have heard of it.

Next up: a playlist.

voulez-vous crochet?

My embrace of the green lifestyle expresses itself, apparently, in recycling various elements of cultural detritus by creative repurposing. Which is a fancy way of saying I’m a damned magpie, stealing anything shiny to make a nest I like.

In this case, a couple of months ago, one of my Facebook status updates wondered aloud about what would happen if all the “Super-” bands lost their powers and had to function as regular old Chunk, Drag, etc. This led to a discussion, soon moving to other diminishments of extreme situations, until eventually Brian Block got clever and wrote a song lyric. The idea there was expanded quite broadly, with any sort of exaggeration or superlative dimmed down to the unexceptional. I thought it was quite clever, and started coming up with a song to set the lyrics. It’s called (and I think the two references in the title are relatively un-obscure) “Little Audio Sparkler and the Slightly Scary Gentlemen of Rock.”

I still haven’t bugged Brian about everything in the lyrics (which appear below): there are a few lines whose reference remains a bit murky to me. (Update: Brian has kindly posted a Skeleton Key for Slower Rabbits in the comments area.) Along the way, the lyric incorporated a couple of other folks’ suggestions in that Facebook comment thread, specifically Stewart Mason’s and Joanne Staudacher’s (who are duly credited here therefor). I kept his lyric almost exactly as is: the closing tag is my addition (and in fact is where Stewart’s and Joanne’s ideas show up); I changed the page number for that New Yorker cartoon for reasons of scansion; and where the issue was “next” for Brian it’s “new” for me, merely because I could not resist using the syllable “new” in three different meanings within four syllables.

This song is also my first experience with Garageband (the drum part) and Logic Express (everything else). It was fun learning how that works (although a few things I tried still mystify me…the manual suggests I should be able to bounce down two tracks of my choice to one, by mysterious means involving sacrificing a virgin, burning some feathers, and selecting the output in the channel strip, but it didn’t work: I suspect the virgin lied…), and doing five zillion vocal takes in an effort to find something that sounded like singing in tune and less like (as the Wrens put it at their website, referring to a recording of one of their live shows) “a woodsy, call-of-the-wild relationship to pitch” was way easier. Also the first time I tried to EQ the various parts to get a clearer mix: I think I was mostly successful but I’m still a bit at sea about making the vocals fit (that may also have something to do with my singerly technique being approximately on the level of a sea cow’s).

Every time I make one of these I continue to be fascinated by the way things fall together. The title phrase from Brian’s lyric reminded me a bit of something Scott McCaughey (Minus 5, Young Fresh Fellows, etc.) might write, and the initial notion of the song’s feel began there. I began by playing around with the drum parts in Garageband, and perhaps it’s fortuitous that Apple labeled various parts as “Motown,” because it then seemed like the right thing to do to write a sort of bass part that James Jamerson might have played (although I don’t think he would have leaned on the faux-Leslie effect that way: I was inspired by Let’s Active’s “Still Dark Out” – whose bass sound, in turn, was almost surely inspired by Chris Squire’s in the studio version of Yes’s “Starship Trooper”). I had in mind a slightly, lazily psychedelified take on Motown song structure, so something very like that flute-y keyboard sound was in my head from the start. Took me a while to find, and then I added some subtle detuned reverb to finish it off. I knew there needed to be piano, but I didn’t really know what the part was going to be until after several failed experiments (including parts inspired by Floyd Cramer, which I couldn’t play well, and a rip of the opening piano bit of Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way from Memphis”…one part of which remains: see if you can spot it). And the part in the second verse is obviously a steal from Sweet’s “Love Is Like Oxygen”…

None of the above answers the burning question: qu’est-ce que fuque are the background vocals on the bridge doing in French? You can blame Brian (I do): obviously, he rhymed “endive” with “survive” etc….while I believed it was pronounced in a vaguely French manner “on-deev.” (We’re both right, depending how snooty you want to be.) Originally, there were a couple of elements of rather more broad humor on this track (including an intro going “one…two…one, two, two-point-five…” to go with the “diminished” idea: ha-ha), one of which had an outraged Frenchman protesting the butchering of this pronunciation, correcting it, and then – well, what else would a Frenchman do? – playing a romantic Parisian accordion solo. I think I’m safe in assuming everyone’s glad that bit of sub-Benny Hill humor was ditched…but I rather liked the idea of an accordion solo anyway, and I still wanted to pronounce it “on-deev.”

Fortunately, in mapping out the song, I discovered that it was about half bridge. How to get the bridge in more correct proportions? I thought I’d layer the vocal parts so they could occur in, essentially, half the time…but then it was too short. I was eating a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup when the answer hit me: put French in the backing vocals, and layer some of the overflow also! (I wasn’t actually eating a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.) All blame for crap translation may be laid at the feet of my assistant, Mr. Google.

I will end this already TL;DR post by printing Brian’s lyrics, as adapted here. And to thank Brian for inspiring me to make this new Monkey Typing Pool noise (don’t blame him, though – he didn’t force me to do it).

Little Audio Sparkler and the Slightly Scary Gentlemen of Rock

They were sprung unto the world as good and gracious spheres of gentle warm.

Their height and mass did not exceed two standard deviations o’er the norm.

They want to rock’n'roll till 2 a.m.; it’s notarized on these here forms.

They’re more popular than that guy where, in his father’s house, are cramped and tiny dorms.

They’ll only catch the slower rabbits, but they’ll surround and firmly nudge your clock.

They’re Little Audio Sparkler and the Slightly Scary Gentlemen of Rock.

They were born to trot and jog, to go unshaved, and join in fun disorder.

Their school was out for weeks when its librarian found cracks and weakened mortar.

They party like it’s 1953 in their maroon and rusted four-door.

Their angel drew the cartoon on page 47 of the newsstand’s new New Yorker.

The clock struck one, but glancingly, and missed the others, hick’ry dick’ry dock.

They’re Little Audio Sparkler and the Slightly Scary Gentlemen of Rock.

They’ve suffered napalm hamstring tears and scratchy fever they’re blaming on the drizzle.

Their velveteen ground-level semidetached apartment just got shelled by Viscount Missile.

Ooh-ooh-ooh la-la, voulez-vous crochet?

But if they don’t thrive (they’re staying alive),

Survivront…

they won’t lie down to drive (they’ll survive)

Ne se couchent…

or use the wrong fork and knive

Mauvaise couteau…

to eat Belgian endive.

Manger endive…

They’ll only catch the slower rabbits, but they’ll surround and firmly nudge your clock.

They’re not Me-First and the Please-Sir-May-I-Have-Some-Mores, or The Tallest Man on the Block.

They’re Little Audio Sparkler and the Slightly Scary Gentlemen of Rock.

Monkey Typing Pool “Little Audio Sparkler and the Slightly Scary Gentlemen of Rock”

it’s another collection of noise!

My final listening diary of 2009, this time covering stuff that captured my fancy from October through December (okay, more like the first two-thirds of December: whatever). This sequence is titled Czarmania…

1. Dark Meat “The Faint Smell of Moss”: Go ahead and hallucinate, you know you want to.
2. Fruit “Sally’s Car”: My friend Miles pointed me at this one: ex-Kitchens of Distinction dude Patrick Fitzgerald’s late ’90s band. The entire album is available for free download…although I forgot to record the URL. Search away!
3. White Mystery “Power Glove”: For some reason, several entries from the gasoline-choked garages this time around…
4. Marmoset “Treat a Boy”: Is it geeky to spend lots of time wondering what key this damned thing is in? I can’t decide between the first chord and the second one…
5. The Mantles “Don’t Lie”: Power garage – with some curious phrasing.
6. Gigi Gaston “Je Suis Perdue”: This particular mid-60s French chanteuse happens to be wholly fictitious, an art project by Josh Gosfield. But the sound is correct.
7. Sloan “Take it Upon Yourself”: I always underestimate these guys. Putting out very good albums every year is hard…even if none of them quite seem to be great albums.
8. Mike Benign “All the Married People”: Ironic…cuz, see, Mr. Benign (which, in a weird twist of fate, is his actual name: “Stefaniak” is a pseudonym chosen to make him seem more ethnic) is himself one of them there married people. He emerged from the cocoon of family to play a few shows this year…and must’ve gotten bit again, because now he’s formed a band, to debut in a few weeks, called the Mike Benign Compulsion.
9. Dominant Legs “Just Silly Ones”: All I know about this is that apparently it’s recorded in GarageBand and the guy to whom the software is registered is named Ryan Lynch. Funny how that works.
10. Tindersticks “Black Smoke”: True fact: as the date on this track indicates, it was actually recorded in 2010, within the last (checks clock) 34 hours! Truer fact: they lied – it was done in 2009. An intriguing track from a forthcoming release, sent out in advance to the blogging hordes.
11. Laminated Cat “Aquamarine”: No one who knows me will be surprised to find out that if you want me to listen to your song at least once, give your band, song, or album a reference to a feline. Sometimes, that works out quite nicely, as it does here.
12. Anton Barbeau “Egg Hating Lady”: Slightly edited: there’s some “psychedelic” rabble of about 10 seconds that I lopped off for reasons of continuity. You can go to myspace and hear it too. Anyway: Barbeau does one of the things he does best: compels listeners to repeatedly sing rather nonsensical phrases because they’re too damned catchy not to. I swear to my god.
13. Espers “Caroline”: I just know that someone in this band was dancing in flowing robes beneath the full moon last night. Although I hope they were on vacation, since I think they’re from Philadelphia, where unless those robes were made of several layers of wool, more freezing than dancing would have been entailed.
14. Dirty Projectors “When the World Comes to an End”: This otherwise unreleased song was performed on Jimmy Fallon’s show. I haven’t quite decided whether Dirty Projectors’ songs are actually really good or I’m just too busy trying to pick my jaw up off the floor at their vocal arrangements to notice otherwise.
15. Caribou Vibration Ensemble: “Brahminy Kite”: In which Dan Snaith, mathematician, transforms his elegant little electronic numbers into freak-jazz by means of adding a whole bunch of players: live from the New York edition of All Tomorrow’s Parties and courtesy WFMU.
16. Pizzicato Five “The Audrey Hepburn Complex”: Someone (probably Stewart Mason) pointed me in the direction of this track’s YouTube video, whose soundtrack is a bit more experimental than the P5 stuff I know, which was more neo-jetset in tone. I like it.
17. Bear in Heaven “Lovesick Teenagers”: And still there are Bear bands. Does the Pope play synth in the woods?
18. Charlotte Gainsbourg “IRM”: The new thing is to write music about brain hemorrhages. Easier if you don’t have to, you know, actually have them first. Poor Ms. Gainsbourg: first that, then having Lars Von Trier tell her to pummel Willem Dafoe’s genitalia.
19. Clean Equations “French Noise Piece”: If I were as verbally obsessive as I once was, this track would have had to have followed the Dirty Projectors track. It does not. (Pretend I didn’t notice that Charlotte Gainsbourg is French.)
20. Modern Skirts “Soft Pedals”: This kinda reminds me of a less-precious Aluminum Group. That’s a good thing.
21. Bobby McClure “Peak of Love”: From a compilation of semi-obscure ’60s soul singles, which I discovered seeking out a track recommended by the ubiquitous Dave Monroe. (I’ve never met the man in person, but he knows friends of mine in about every possible social configuration…I think it must be an alias.) Anyway: the track he recommended proved to be excellent…but I like this one even more. Intensity focused nearly unto obsession.
22. Brimstone Howl “Suicide Blues”: This is here mostly because of the sound of the guitar breaks. I’m doing a little project around the house cutting some glass – and as it turns out, the guitars here work perfectly to that end.
23. Vic Chesnutt “Flirted with You All My Life”: Rest in peace.
24. David Bowie “When I’m Five”: This is a rather charming, very early little Bowie piece that I wish he’d properly recorded and released. Courtesy the very wonderful Pushing Ahead of the Dame, which is tackling every song Bowie’s ever recorded, chronologically (he’s up to 1970 at this point).

I have not even begun to figure out my 20 favorite album releases of 2009…my vague impression is that there were a lot of good ones, but I’m a bit at sea. That’s a symptom of the increasing ephemeralization of music: this year, I finished ripping my entire music collection onto a big-ass external drive, so it’s all in iTunes. I will pull out the actual CDs only rarely these days…and while I do still buy actual physical objects that contain music, they tend to become archival backups rather than the actual medium by which I listen to music.

That’ll eventually be the last post related to 2009 music.

Check in to Ye Olde Comments…

I can dance like Sherlock Holmes…

Rose and I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie the other night. We enjoyed it, knowing in advance that the film made Holmes and Watson into action heroes (seeing the preview in a theater a few months back, I immediately christened the film “Sherlock Holmes and the Temple of Doom” – which, really, they should have used, if only they’d heard me).

What I don’t understand, though, is the reasoning of some critics in disliking the film. I understand why they might dislike it…but they appeal to supposed traits of the characters that simply aren’t borne out by Conan Doyle’s stories. For example: Roger Ebert dislikes the squalor of Holmes’ rooms in the film; his Holmes, he says, is always “fastidious.” That may be true of Ebert’s Holmes – but Conan Doyle’s Holmes most certainly was not: he kept his tobacco in the toe of a Persian slipper, his unread correspondence impaled on a knife jabbed into a table, and his patriotism expressed (and this is in the movie) by means of bullet holes in his wall forming the characters “VR” (Victoria Regina). That hardly sounds “fastidious.”

Or the complaint that the film’s plot is (variously) overly complex, tedious, and stolen from Dan Brown (in its mystical hoohah). Well, first, it must be noted that plots were never really the strong point of the original stories: they exist primarily as a framework for Holmes to be Holmes and Watson Watson, and quite often they fail to stand up to even the merest interrogation as to plausibility. “Tedious” is, of course, a judgment call – I found the plot engaging enough, but I was more interested in the characterizations Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law brought to Holmes and Watson. As for Dan Brown: that hack is the thief, of course…and supernatural whatsit is quite prevalent in Victorian popular literature and certainly right up Conan Doyle’s alley (he was, in addition to being a writer, a prominent spiritualist…to the extent that his reputation was somewhat damaged by his enthusiastic advocacy of the fraudulent Cottingly fairy photographs).

But chiefly, critics object to turning Holmes into an action hero. I think it’s really a matter of emphasis. Conan Doyle’s Holmes is hardly an armchair ratiocinator averse to any sort of physical activity: he’s an enthusiastic amateur boxer and fencer, and the brutal physicality of Victorian-era boxing is well conveyed in the movie. And Holmes’s physical strength is also canonical (or Conanical…): to take the clearest illustration, he straightens an iron poker bent by the doctor in “The Speckled Band.” A man of that era would surely not object to fistfights and physical violence in the name of right; and though I can’t call to mind a specific example I am certain there are more than a few of such episodes in the Holmes stories.

One other thing that struck me a bit weird: several critics (notably Ebert and A.O. Scott in the New York Times) seem uneasy with what they perceive as homoerotic undertones in Holmes and Watson’s relationship. First, if that’s what they perceive, their unease is their own problem…but I don’t see it (even though that trope is nearly as old as the Holmes stories are…). Yes, Holmes is jealous of Watson and resents his moving out; yes, the two men clearly are very fond of one another and in fact love one another…but it’s a curious thing that although homosexuality as such was surely not accepted in Victorian times, the notion that two men could be exceedingly fond of one another without an element of sexual longing was more amenable to Victorian sensibilities than it seems to be to ours. We tend to be very wary of strong attraction between men and assume that if such attraction exists, it must be sexual in nature, however “suppressed” that sexual component may be. I don’t see it. I see that the Holmes and Watson in this movie are very dependent upon one another (Holmes upon Watson moreso) but, bluntly, I don’t think either one of them wants to fuck the other one.

But you know, in the movies, two people with strong attraction to one another simply have to fuck – otherwise the attraction must not be real. This is true for male/female relationships as well: the notion that a straight man and straight woman could be very dear friends without a strong sexual attraction is rare, particularly in mainstream movies. Of course, in real life this sort of thing happens all the time. And history is full of men who were inseparable companions: while I have no doubt some of these men were sexually attracted to one another (and some expressed and fulfilled that attraction), I’m equally sure many of them were not, and not because they were repressing their emotions. As Morrissey might have said: there’s more to life than sex, you know…