oh my soggy brain! today was the first day of classes and i now have 3.5 hours of 'intro to western music' under my very snazzy belt.
of things i had and hadn't heard:
Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op.10 (1913), which condenses all the quasi-orientalism, taut anxiety, and offchance sublime of 12 tone as bite-sized confections
smoke gets in yr eyes: something about internal rhyme just sets me to thinking about stephen merritt. i know i am reversing cause and effect.
Hey, here's the call for the new issue of front row center + the last issue...Man, you should write for it...:
It's called Front Row Center. It's a hot new zine that's half as wide as a maga-, three times more matte than Sassy and infinitely cheaper. Get on the rickety ship and write for it!
The concept is this: write about music from the first person, experientially, as a fan, as a hater, as someone listening not just at a desk, in front of a computer and because you have to, but because it's actually part of your world.
re: lifestyle politics... i forgot abt the system of a down non-prof until i read this interview with Tom Morello where he challenges Fugazi to a punk foot race.
hey, the new tortoise is really good, if you still care. it's got this weird spinning plate thing going on, melodies just hover and the drums are much less chicago/cliche than one might expect from mcentire. the whole thing seems tastefully epic, a bit new agey but also there's this killer guitar solo somewhere in the middle of the CD that sat me up in my bed last night. nice.
on the "ya, so what" front is a good idea, lackluster conclusion by the ever-fab Kelefa. he writes about bad singing in hip hop as if amatuer vocals were something new to pop music. the observation is apt - a lot of hip hop is being made with totally offkey choruses, but i'm of the opinion that this might be bc hip hop has radically shifted gears to cross over to more r n' b texture/beats and radioslick choruses, thus rappers have to sing more than they did in the past.
i remember reading an article about "real" bands that play corporate functions (meetings, conventions, parties) for big bucks, but for the past few years, corporations have been going in-house for their entertainment.
In the clear bfr school starts again, listening to that which I hadn't in '03. That is:
+/- the acoustic/blip trip that has been serving me well as of late, a little too straightforward, corny moby drops for me but lovely
i now have three friends on the Dean campaign, and one lowly and beloved (misguided) friend on the Kucinich campaign. It seems everyone around is gettting fired up to over take W, including
Mike from Fat Wreck Chords. The article gives me grand visions of mid-90s punks and Simmons' hip hop summit meeting the NRA and Xtian Coalition head on in the back lot. Ahh, the end of multiplicity and the new age of identity politics as the only politics.
this has been sitting on my harddrive for a few days...sorry if the nytimes link doesn't work, they've been cracking down on archived articles these days:
Just when I thought it was safe to read the Times...Michael Azerrad's
terribly two-dimensional sob story on how nu-metal, what he calls
'therapy rock' and i call 'camp counselor punk,' is giving depression
drug-addeled, suburban wastoids 'earnest' advice about suicide (a la
listening to the newish yo la tengo - so jazzy jazz - having those winsome high school thoughts. whenever i listen to them i get dangerously close to setting up those dreaded reception scenarios that bad writers always use in reviews...music for pre-twilight winter drives while chewing mint gum with the heater on 65% warm.
oh, after a day of lounging around and reading 'the best unrequired reading of 2003,' which had a great story about a the first ten years of the life of child born during the LA riots by Daniel Voll, i sauntered through some unrequired listening of '03 while figuring my pazz & jop best ofs, listened to the rosebuds who have the twee jangle pop thing going on but the worse iron-on'ed smiths quotes and hey baby vagueness that just spins them out of being really, really decent.
i'm trying to figure out if blink 182's 'feelin this' or 'figured you out' by nickelback is the most sinisterly anti-woman clap coming out of the nu-metal basement at the moment. that nickelback song makes my skin crawl when i hear it, i mean, at least puddle of mudd is self hating (when not blatently kurt ash-kissing) and linkin park writes one banal but decent song (over and over, love that smashed turntable in the numb video), but nickelback does like dean and just drops mention of that confed flag wit their trailertrash, inarticulate violence ridden angry boyfriend bullshit.