Oh No Supernova

Albums Of The Year 2011

2011-12-10T08:30:00.001-08:00

As far as I'm concerned, this year has been a fantastic one for music, and particularly for the kind of music that I love. There have been tremendous sadnesses - the breakups of Thursday and Thrice were perhaps inevitable but nevertheless really crushing for people who got into underground music when I did - but looking across my selections for Albums Of The Year there are a lot of reasons for joy too. To mention but a few: the rebirth of genuinely inventive and progressive hardcore (pioneered by bands like Touche Amore and La Dispute), a resurgence of quality pop-punk (courtesy of The Wonder Years, The Swellers and The Dangerous Summer), some new bands taking steps up with their most recent albums (Polar Bear Club and Twin Atlantic), some veteran acts raising their games in response (Thursday, Thrice and Face To Face) and a wave of hugely inventive and really exciting hip-hop (with Astronautalis and the phenomenal Doomtree collective leading the way). It has also been a year of diverse musical releases, with experimental instrumental music taking its place alongside gauzy pop and relatively unstructured rock.

There has been something else to 2011, though - while I have found the music itself exciting and moving, I have also been genuinely inspired by the way in which bands have gone about defining their identities, releasing their music, and expressing what they stand for. This isn't about capital-p Politics: I don't think any of the albums of my lists, with the possible exception of the Against Me!!! EP, have directly addressed the tumultuous political events of the last year. Instead it's about ethos and approach: so many of the bands on these lists have chosen to advocate for or simply to embody integrity. You could see this in the group of hardcore bands who defined themselves as "The Great Wave" and built a following thanks to their thoughtful, personal lyrics and commitment to rebuilding a vibrant and community-minded scene. You could see it in the way that more bands chose to self-release their material, to really engage with their fans, and to use their platforms to address causes bigger than the traditional drink and drugs rock lifestyle.

And, for me, the best example of what I'm talking about can be found in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The 'Doomtree' rap collective, first and foremost, make great music. Three of my top five rap albums of the year relate to that collective (the Doomtree, Dessa and Sims records) and the no. 1 rap album by my reckoning (the astonishing "This Is Our Science" by Astronautalis) features a number of collaborations with and production work by Doomtree members. They are all great records that would stand out even if you didn't know anything about the people involved or their approach to creation and business. But, for me, there is more to admire there. Doomtree have worked hard to build a fanbase and a business the independent way; they stress fellowship and collectivism both within their group and beyond it in the musical scenes that they inhabit; and they recognise they combine the strengths of a number of people to create art that is greater than the sum of its parts. And their mantra embodies all of this. They chose to call their album "No Kings", to make it clear that they believe that there's no real separation between artist and fan, that the modern world needs fewer hierarchies rather than more of them, and that we need to begin thinking of new ways to lower the barriers between people.

In that spirit, while I have ranked the albums of the year as I always have, it should be noted they are all great works of art, and many of them are created by people who are genuinely seeking to do things the right way. No Kings.

Top 20 Rock Records:

1. No Devolucion by Thursday (Epitaph)

2. Clash, Battle, Guilt, Pride by Polar Bear Club (Bridge 9)

3. !Hey, Hey Pioneers! by Farewell Continental (Paper and Plastick)

4. Elsie by The Horrible Crowes (SideOneDummy)

5. Major/Minor by Thrice (Vagrant)

6. Suburbia, I've Given You All And Now I'm Nothing by The Wonder Years (Hopeless)

7. Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me by Touche Amore (Deathwish Inc.)

8. Avalanche United by I Am The Avalanche (I Surrender)

9. War Paint by The Dangerous Summer (Hopeless)

10. People and Things by Jack's Mannequin (Sire)

11. Laugh Now, Laugh Later by Face To Face (Antagonist)

12. Take Care, Take Care, Take Care by Explosions In The Sky (Temporary Residence Inc.)

13. Holy Fuck by Living With Lions (Adeline)

14. Free by Twin Atlantic (Red Bull)

15. Ironiclast by The Damned Things (Mercury)

16. Pedals by Rival Schools (Photo Finish)

17. Hurricane Season by Dan Andriano In The Emergency Room (Asian Man)

18. Good For Me by The Swellers (Fuelled By Ramen)

19. Taking Back Sunday by Taking Back Sunday (Warner Bros)

20. Fake History by Letlive. (Epitaph)

Top 3 EPs:

1. Russian Spies / Occult Enemies by Against Me!!! (Sabot Productions)

2. Crosses EP by Crosses (self-released)

3. The Fire, The Steel, The Tread by Hot Water Music (Rise Records)

Top 5 Rap Records:

1. This Is Our Science by Astronautalis (Fake Four)

2. No Kings by Doomtree (Doomtree)

3. Take Care by Drake (Cash Money)

4. Castor, The Twin by Dessa (Doomtree)

5. Bad Time Zoo by Sims (Doomtree)

Top Live Shows:

- Groezrock 2011 at Meerhout, Belgium (inc. Circa Survive, Twin Atlantic, Millencolin, Every Time I Die, Thursday and NOFX)

- Jimmy Eat World (Clarity and Bleed American show) at the Kentish Town Forum

- La Dispute and Touche Amore at the Camden Underworld

- Face To Face and The Flatliners at the Kingston Peel

- Against Me!!! at the Kingston Peel

A Sketch For Time's Arrow

2011-11-25T07:52:00.000-08:00

Author: DC

Date: November 2011

Word count: 1,026

A wise man once said “all good things come to an end” - or at least, Nelly Furtado did. And while Miss Furtado has a sketchy track record when it comes to truth-telling[1] she is absolutely right about this. Sometimes relationships don’t work out, people die, start-up businesses fail, and bands break up. Not only do we understand that these things will happen but we actively expect them to, and in some cases wish that they would sooner[2]. That understanding, however, doesn’t stop us from being sideswiped when something that really matters to us comes to end. While at a rational level we may be prepared for events, we may not be emotionally ready.

I certainly wasn’t ready this week when on consecutive days two of my three favourite bands of all time broke up. To be clear, I’m not saying that band break-ups are as tragic as deaths or relationship breakdowns. While art is a vital element of life, art isn’t equivalent to life or love, and shouldn’t be treated as such. I rationally accept that, but emotionally this week has been a tough one. I have lived with these bands for longer than my longest relationship, for longer than my professional career, and for longer than my time at high school and University put together. While I never expected them to keep recording forever, I still wasn’t ready for them to stop.

One of the bands was the first experimental, heavy, generally weird band that I ever really fell in love with. My early teenage years were soundtracked by US radio rock[3] and some deviations into the back catalogues of the Offspring and other Epitaph / Nitro punk bands. I liked music but I hadn’t yet found the sound that I’d fall in love with, and that would become something that I’ve been obsessed with for the last ten years. And then things changed, in the time that it took someone to burn a CD-R and scribble on it with an off-brand Sharpie that smudged to the point of illegibility before it made its way to me. The someone was my friend Dusty, the CD-R contained Thrice’s “The Illusion of Safety”, and that was that. The record was brave, exciting, technical, like nothing I’d ever heard before, and I loved it. It was difficult too, with its screamed vocals and knotty lyrics, but that didn’t put me off. I wanted to understand it, to be able to decipher the words, to hear the songs that inspired it and those that would be inspired by it.

A little while later I impulse-bought a CD, without knowing very much about the band that had recorded it. I recall thinking that they had an extremely dorky name – who would name their band after a day of the week? Did they not realise how much shit that their fans would get? – but also that their dove-shaped logo was beautiful, and that the album should be good given the positivity of the reviews that I had read. On listening, I quickly found out that this was another difficult record, or at least a record that I didn’t yet have the frame of reference to understand. The guitars screamed, the song structures were unconventional to say the least, and the singer alternated between choirboy sweetness and a scream that sounded like a raccoon caught in a trap. It took me many listens to get into it, but somewhere around spin twelve or thirteen things just clicked. The record was “Full Collapse”, the band was Thursday, and since then they have either been my favourite or second favourite band in the world, depending on mood and quality of most recent album.

This week, both Thursday and Thrice called it quits. In their closing statements, neither band was quite R.E.M.-final in their declarations, as they both stated that they may wish to play together again at some point in the future. But nevertheless, they are dropping out of the album-tour-album cycle, and have acknowledged the possibility that they may never play or record again. They both have perfectly justifiable reasons for doing so: young families, the rigours of the touring grind, the financial challenges of being in a mid-level band on an independent label. Admirably, both bands also say that they want to go out on an artistic high, and the stellar reviews of Thursday’s recent “No Devolucion” and Thrice’s “Major/Minor” allow them to do so.

And this is where it comes back to rationality versus emotion: rationally, I accept that the bands have good reasons for doing what they are doing, and making these choices. If the band members were my friends, I’d probably be telling them that they were making the right decision, that which will make their lives easier and help them to grow as people. But when it comes to these bands, I find that I can’t be rational. It’s emotion all the way. They have brought me so much joy and so much excitement. They have given me some of the best nights out I’ve ever had. And as clichéd as it sounds, they have taught me a lot about life, and about the way that I want to live mine. Thrice’s “The Weight” was the song that made me realise that I was ready to get married, and Thursday’s Geoff Rickley expressed more clearly than anyone else has the core values that I want to live my life by in “Stay True”. So right now it does feel like a breakup, like a little death, as I don’t know how I will replace what they gave me. All good things come to an end, we know that – but that doesn’t stop us wishing that the opposite were true.

[1] I’m fairly sure that she’s not actually like a bird, that she has never really eaten a man, and that she’s not promiscuous. Oh no, wait, hold on...

[2] I still have my fingers crossed that the rumours that Nickelback will break up after this album cycle are true.

[3] For the record, I still love Everclear.

Swiss Central Rain

2011-09-24T10:47:00.001-07:00

September 2011

1,344 words

I didn’t kick, and I certainly didn’t scream, and I don’t think that I told my parents that I hated them or that they were ruining my life or that I was going to run away and live in a squat in Camden Town. In fact, I remember feeling excited when my mum told me that she had taken a job in Geneva, Switzerland, and that we would be spending our school holidays and summer vacations there for the next few years. I was a teenager who was desperate to see the world and experience new things, and getting to experience life in a European capital ticked all the boxes for someone who was rapidly growing tired of life in a small English town outside London. How could it not be an adventure to explore a new place, and why would I worry about losing touch with my friends when they would all want to come and visit? So no, there was no complaining from me.

As the time of our first trip grew closer, however, I began to worry. Not about the big stuff, about language barriers or loneliness or dislocation. Teenage me instead to chose to fret about music. I had begun to immerse myself in London’s frantic rock scene, going to shows at the Astoria and Barfly and Brixton Academy, and shopping at Tower Records and Rough Trade and the Virgin Megastore. I was fairly sure that the Swiss only listened to folk music and yodelling compilations, and that I’d find it hard to get the American rock records and import issues of Rolling Stone that I was growing to love. The prospect of long summers without new music and anything to read scared the hell out of me, and as for going to concerts… well, it seemed like I could forget it. Geneva was amazing but it was no London, it didn’t feature on the European itineraries of many touring bands, and the only people who lived in Geneva were investment bankers, and let’s face it, they probably didn’t listen to that much Weezer or Bad Religion.

It took about three days for Geneva to allay my fears. As well as being a thoroughly charming and gorgeous little city, it was well-stocked with CD shops and even a rock vinyl store, and every little streetcorner magazine stand had not only all of the American magazines but the British ones too. Yes, you had to sell one of your kidneys to afford the import prices, but that seemed like a minor inconvenience at the time. Live music was more difficult, as there was a local punk rock scene but it was dominated by French-language bands who played in over-18s venues like L’Usine (“The Factory”), which was a rough-looking club near a bridge in the city centre. While I still found enough to keep me going during our first few summers and winters there, it wasn’t quite the same as it had been in England.

As I turned 19, then 20, I continued to spend time in Geneva during the long summer breaks in my university calendar. It slowly dawned on me how much the city had grown on me, how much I had come to love it, the bitter snowy winters as much as the beautiful summers and the cold stony old town as much as the lush lakeside gardens. While it had felt a little cold and distant and overly professional to start with, I had been given enough time to explore the fuzzy corners and frayed seams of the city, to see what it was really like when it wasn’t pretending to be a global banking centre or the headquarters of international politics. What I didn’t have, however, was that one defining memory that would forever come to mind when I would think of Switzerland, the spine-tingling holy fuck experience that transform a trip or a holiday into something transcendent. The sun rising at four in the morning over an Egyptian temple, or seeing Las Vegas rise from the desert for the first time, if you will.

My Geneva moment, when it arrived, didn’t involve a temple or a desert or a casino. It didn’t happen on the banks of Lake Geneva, or on top of a snowy mountain. Instead, it happened on the balcony of a soulless concrete “multipurpose sports and entertainment venue” on the edge of town, on a cold but not pleasant January night in 2005. For Christmas the month before, my ma had bought me tickets to see R.E.M. play the Geneva Arena on their “Around The Sun” world tour. I couldn’t believe that one of my favorite bands, one of the all-time greats, was coming to Geneva or that we’d managed to get tickets. And on the night they didn’t disappoint. It wasn’t the perfect R.E.M. setlist, as it was very heavy on the beautiful but stately and mid-tempo “Around The Sun” and neglected “Life’s Rich Pageant” and “New Adventures in Hi-Fi”, which were then and are now my controversial choices for best R.E.M. records. I have heard them play more complete sets since, in venues with more character than the Arena, but… well, none of them have meant quite as much to me as that night did.

Perhaps because so few bands of R.E.M.’s size and stature played in Geneva, the crowd were perfectly primed for and incredibly stoked on the show. The atmosphere was brilliant, with audience members quite literally hugging strangers when their favorite songs were played, and people reacting to Michael Stipe’s manic conducting by singing and dancing and generally losing their minds. My moment came at about half past ten at night, when the band crept softly into the first verse of “Walk Unafraid”. They played more quietly than you’d think possible in an arena, forcing us all to strain to hear the plaintive singing and tender guitar work. Then as the chorus came around the band dropped out entirely – and after one second of awestruck silence, the audience began to absolutely roar the words back at the band. “I will walk unafraid / I’ll be clumsy instead”. It was perfect, and the rush as the band kicked back in at full volume was undeniable. And, via the giant video projection screens, we saw Peter Buck crack a smile and shake his head, as if to acknowledge that he’d just experienced something that he didn’t expect to on a grim night in a concrete box somewhere a hell of a long way from Athens, Georgia. As sickly as it sounds, that moment made me feel more connected to Geneva and the people who lived there than I ever had before, more connected that I had felt to some of the places that I’d lived in for much longer before.

I had my Geneva moment, and from then on no trip back there has ever seemed complete without listening to some R.E.M. while walking around the old town and along the lake and up towards the monumental towers of the UN district. That band gave me the perfect soundtrack to a place that I love, and a moment that I will never forget. And I think that’s why I feel quite so heartbroken today on hearing that R.E.M. has decided to disband after 31 years, and that in all probability I will never get to see them play live again. While I was lucky enough to see them live quite a few times, and still have all of the albums to listen to, I think that I was hoping for something more. I think that I was hoping to get to see them again in some remote corner of the world – or back in Geneva, who knows – and to experience another moment of magic like the one that I had in 2005. The moment that made you feel like you belonged in a place, and the moment that made you realise just how great the band you were lucky enough to be watching were. Au revoir et bonne chance, R.E.M.

The Fuckup Revival

2011-08-18T02:51:00.001-07:00

Author: DC

Word count: 1,572

August 2011

I took on my first proper full-time grown-up scary adult job the year after I graduated from University. I had worked summer jobs before, the usual video store or care home type of things, but nothing more serious or more long-term than that. At the time I remember thinking that it was daunting – no, scratch that, it was terrifying – but that I was ready for it, that I was keen to ‘make a contribution’, and that I was mature enough to handle the responsibility of entering the workforce. Most of all, I was really keen to do well so that I could pay back the people who had taken a chance on hiring me, so that they would feel that their generosity was being rewarded. So I turned up, went through the training that was offered, and was quickly dropped into doing work and reporting to senior people.

And you know what? For the next three years, in spite of my desire to live up to the expectations of the people who hired me, I was mostly a total pain in the ass. I was an underwhelming employee who talked back to people who were older and wiser and worthy of respect, didn’t do work on anything that didn’t interest me or wasn’t aligned with my ambitions or expectations, couldn’t be bothered to dress smartly so came into a suits-and-ties office wearing jeans and t-shirts, and… well, I must have seemed like an ungrateful, stroppy kid. And that was the key point: as grown up as I thought I was, I was still a kid. I was 21-going-on-17, trying to adjust to living in a new city with all the burdens that being fully independent of your parents or your University for the first time placed upon you, struggling to sort out my love life, and generally flailing around to find a path or direction. I went out too much, slept too little, brought some of my baggage to work, and generally failed to live up to the expectations that people had of me.

Thanks to some amazing people, however, I still work in the same place. In fact, I still work with many of the people that I did when I started, who mercifully seem to have decided to forgive or forget some of the shit that I got up to. Those people accepted that I had a lot of growing up to, were patient while I did it, didn’t take my sound and fury too seriously, and were generous enough to take the time to coach me and teach me how better to do things. And now it’s my turn, six years in, to try to look after some of the 21 year olds we have joining us as they go through the same stuff. And it has me thinking about one fundamental question, one for the philosophers, one that none of the great thinkers of the world have yet managed to answer: at what point does a hot mess become simply a mess? Or, to put it another way, at what point does being screwed up and a little all over the place cease to be sort of endearing and forgivable and most of all acceptable, and instead becomes sad and depressing?

The prevailing message being put out there by pop songs at the moment is that dysfunctional is the new way to be, that it's alright to brush your teeth with a bottle of Jack if you can't find any toothpaste, and that both guys and girls would prefer their partner to be an edgy but hopeless rager rather than a calm and sensible paragon of solidity. If you don't believe me, just look up how many people online are holding up Ke$ha as a role model, or who are buying the "pre-ripped, pre-laddered" tights now being sold by a major high street fashion chain. We all know people who have adopted the hot mess approach as a way of living, and who resolutely refuse to 'shape up' even when it would be in their best interests to do so. And don't get me wrong, there is something wonderful and freeing about that way of thinking, and everyone wants to feel that they are at least to some degree a free spirit who isn't overly bound by the constraints of society and responsibility. I know that I do - I may work for a big company, I may be married and the owner of a house, but some part of me would die if I felt that all of the nonconformity and messiness had been beaten out of me.

There is a point, however, at which not having your shit together somehow becomes less funny and less amusing, and when actually being in control and in charge most of the time is no bad thing. I’m not sure that there is an absolute age number we can pin to it, it's not that when everyone hits 30 they must suddenly grow up, but there is a line that we all sense sometimes. It’s the “if you’re still in the bar hitting on twenty-somethings when you are fifty” line, the “if you cry or fall asleep in the office more than once a year” line, the “if you accidentally wear mismatched clothes more than once a week” line. The line does exist, and at some point the vast majority of people feel it approaching and sort themselves out, and then everything flips.

Once you’ve figured out who you are and what you’re supposed to be doing, the danger reverses – rather than being a hot mess, the danger is that you become flat, that you become too good and too responsible too fast. That you forget that letting off steam and being a mess from time to time can keep you sane when the pressures of day to day life mount up on you. We know that lots of us struggle with this, mainly because a lot of you told us so – when the magazine ran the issue asking you what your favorite party songs or fun songs were, we had hundreds of responses that said, in effect, “I can’t answer that question because I can’t really have too much fun anymore”. Some actual replies:

· “Don’t you think that it’s a bit much to be asking us about fun when we’re in a recession, and when a ton of us are trying to make things meet [sic] with families and bills?”

· “I don’t really listen to those kinds of songs anymore, they don’t really fit with where I am now”

· “There isn’t much that I can learn about how to be a wife and mother from songs about bars and clubs”

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: that it’s fucking hard to find the path to being grown-up when you’re not, and that it’s difficult to remember to kick it loose sometimes when your life has become, to some degree at least, pretty uptight. I’ve been through this, we’ve all been through this, and we’ll all continue to wrestle with this until we die or, Buddha be praised, reach a place of enlightened contemplation and peace. And having exchanged emails with some of you on this subject, and spoken to people I know about it, I think we can conclude one further thing: that no-one has any single silver bullet piece of advice that helps. You just have to find the thing that works for you in your particular situation, and that helps you remember where you want to get to or recall where you used to be.

The thing that’s working for me at the moment is a song, written by a band called The Copyrights. On their great new record “North Sentinel Island”, there is a track called “Well-Fed and Warm”, about the journey from being the carefree singer in a punk band to being a married father with a day job. The singer captures the drift towards responsibility perfectly, noting that “we’ve all got our ghosts, our vices and hooks / we buried them all to avoid dirty looks”. He recognises that this isn’t a negative thing, that there is virtue in life being “well-fed and warm, relaxing and clean”, but like some of us he clearly pines for a momentary reminder of what his life was like before. So he proposes a plan, admitting that “I’ve been looking at troubles, and planning an excavation / a fuckup revival, a deadbeat vacation”. What this plan amounts to is asking your friend, your partner, whoever it may be, to join for a memorial go-round – to ask them:

"Can you promise that you won't come through, one more time?

Can you get us in it over our heads, one more time?

Can you leave me hanging out to dry, one more time?

And then come back, like nothing ever happened…"

Whether you’re in over your head and trying to swim out, or you long to drown just one last time, good luck finding what you need. And let me know the songs that helped you get through it. We’ll put those up on here instead of the party songs, and maybe we’ll help each other out. Maybe we won’t. But we’ll end up with a list of great songs about growing up and growing old, and that’s not a bad place to start.

The London Riots - a view from the Underworld

2011-08-10T15:07:00.000-07:00

Author: DC

Word count: 724

August 2011

A lot has been written and said about the causes of the riots that have occurred throughout England during the last few days. You can construe them as mindless violence or a mishandled response to oppression, or anything in between. But as someone living in London, the experience of this week boils down to this: for the first time in my lifetime, London has felt like a fucking scary place. Scary because of the violence, scary because of the hate, and scary because of the way it has made everyone look at each other.

The only thing I can compare it to is the period after September 11th in New York, or the July 7th bombings in London. That may be a crass comparison but it feels like the right one, because the manifestation of fear and distrust has been the same - people are looking upon each other with such a profound suspicion that it makes you want to shudder, or scream, or just give up. That feeling has been more acute even than normal if you're one of the tribe who self-identify as punk fans, and accordingly rock the black hoodie and jeans look. The rioters have appropriated our outfit, and as a result the rest of the people - absolutely fairly - are inevitably suspicious of us right now.

Saddest of all is that "community" seems to have become a dirty word. Those on the right are disparagingly using the term to describe the groups and areas who are failing to control or punish the rioters, and the left seem to feel that talking about community spirit and how we rebuild it isn't a suitably decisive and robust response to this awful turn of events. Togetherness and a sense of common purpose has been replaced by disconnection and mistrust. On a personal level, it has been crushing. My wife and I sat watching fires on TV on Monday night, not knowing whether to be distraught that it was happening and that people felt driven to such rage, or terrified that it was creeping closer to our front door.

It's going to take a lot even to get things back to the broken but stable state they seemed to be in a week ago, let alone to somewhere more positive and progressive. On a micro level it will need each individual to heal and to rebuild, and then on a macro level links and bonds have to be reconstructed, and firmer than before. And for me, my micro moment came sooner than I thought it could.

Tonight at the Underworld in Camden, an area that has been targeted - albeit lightly - by rioters, two astonishing young American bands played. Touche Amore from Los Angeles, a town which has seen its fair share of discontent, and La Dispute from Grand Rapids, Michigan. They are bands who write music that is inspiring even devoid of context: Touche Amore play powerful hardcore with a deft melodic touch and a deeply personal lyricism, and La Dispute play more spacey rhythmic rock and are fronted by an extraordinary singer who reels off stories that sound more like English epic poetry than traditional rock lyrics.

But tonight their music, and their honesty, and their ability to unite a crowd of disparate individuals into a keening, desperate, emotional mass, meant more than the sum of its parts. Or it did to me. Music, as it often has done, gave me exactly what I needed. It reminded me that positivity will ultimately always beat hate, that art and creation is so much greater than destruction, and that community can be real and positive and powerful. That it can be a home and a refuge rather than something to mistrust and ruin.

Actually, as is always the case, one line from one of the bands puts it better than five hundred from me can. At a time when the situation requires us all to do our bit to help piece things back together, to create something loud and beautiful to counter the gunfire and explosions, the crowd in the Underworld made a pact to do just that, screaming the following words: "if actions speak louder than words / I'm the most deafening noise you've heard". As loud as the riots have been, we need to be louder. We need to be deafening.

Top Hats and Monocles

2011-07-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

DC, July 2011

1,488 words

In London, England there is a colossal modern art gallery housed in a converted power station by the side of the Thames called Tate Modern. The building is a monument to human artifice and maximalism, with every one of its vast external surfaces covered in details and embellishments that you normally wouldn’t find on walls that were built to have very specific, functional purposes: to keep sound and dirt in, to keep foreign objects out, to make sure that the turbines could keep spinning whatever the weather. Before you even get inside to see the art, you can happily spend an hour or two studying the lines and patterns and mouldings and tiling and veneers applied to the brick and stone of the structure. It’s a testament to the fact that many of us, when it comes down to it, really do believe that more is more.

Inside the gallery, however, in its main exhibition space, a very contradictory lesson is being taught. The Tate’s splashy summer exhibition this year is a blockbuster career retrospective of the 20^th century Spanish surrealist painter Joan Miro. The majority of Miro’s work was completed using quite traditional materials – although he made some sculpture, his primary form was the ages-old old on canvas painting - but his progression as an artist tells a fascinating story. He started out painting in a relatively conventional way, completing still life studies and portraits that were quite bright and trippy but otherwise very ‘normal’. He painted objects as they were, so that his depictions of people were clearly people, oranges looked like oranges, the sky was clearly our earthly sky. Soon though he started doing something different with his paintings, attempting to boil things down to their essence rather than depicting them in detail. Miro tried to evoke as much emotion and feeling as he could while presenting as little of an object as possible, reasoning that people can have a more intense, personal reaction to art when being asked to use their imagination to interpret forms than when the artist presents a detailed picture that leaves little room for interpretation.

As a result of this, his paintings became more simple and surreal – for instance, in his paintings of Catalan peasants from the area where he grew up, Miro didn’t paint their faces and clothes and tools. Instead, he portrayed the peasants in shorthand, with four objects representing them: two disc-like eyes, a distinctive red hat, and a wispy beard. Through that simple depiction, he evoked a wealth of feeling, with observers of the art coming away with a sense of the wisdom of the simple man (from the beard), the pride that the peasants took in their local heritage (from the Catalan red hat), the hardness of the peasant existence (from the grey colouring of the wisps of beard), and the constant need of the peasant to observe the world to gauge weather patterns and the state of the soil (from the gazing eyes). Miro realised that he didn’t need to paint any more than that to say what he wanted to say, and that sometimes a simple formula holds true: simplicity plus imagination is greater than detail and overproduction.

That same formula can hold true in the music world too, both when it comes to business and in relation to the creative process. On the business end, the dominant construct at the moment seems to be that the best way to build a stable, successful band is by deploying a huge range of complex tools. You need a 360-degree revenue sharing strategy to leverage your merchandising sales to offset declining income from recorded music. You need a dynamic branding strategy to harness new and old media to turn your band from simply one of thousands of wannabe’s to a viral sensation. You should still sign with a label and a promoter rather than going it alone because that gets you access to chains of corporate-controlled venues that allow for optimal tour routing and cross-promotion opportunities. In short, for all of the stories proclaiming that the “old music industry is dead”, the new model being promoted by a lot of industry experts looks a lot like the old one, just with corporations taking an ever-increasing share of a broader range of spoils. You buy in, because you’re told that it’s still the best way forward…

…or you don’t. You do a Miro, and boil things down to their essence. What are the tenets of how to build a successful career, when you get down to it? What are your equivalents of the beard, the hat and the eyes? Well, you need to create great music. You need to put it out online, and then tour like crazy. And you need to sling some t-shirts to make some money, as you’re not going to do that by selling records. If you do those things well, you might well succeed. If you don’t, then no amount of leveraging your brand synergies to create dynamic co-vending opportunities will bail you out. This is exactly the approach that punk rockers evolved in the 80s and 90s, to the extent of creating their own touring routes by setting up relationships with VFW halls and community venues, and then sharing the details of those locations to other aspirant bands. And it’s exactly the approach being taken now by a range of underground acts, and expressed most articulately by rapper MC Lars, ex Coheed and Cambria drummer turned hip-hop artist Weerd Science, and their acolytes in the independent rap scene.

On his mixtape “Indie Rocket Science” and most recent album “Lars Attacks”, Lars attempted to sketch out the principles of his Miro-esque approach to the business. First, don’t assume you’ll make money by selling records (as expressed articulately by Lars guest rapper MC Frontalot: “you try to sell music, and they’ll look at you funny / it’s not a transaction that necessitates money”). Next, before you do anything, make sure that you have created some art that you’re proud of, and that you’ll feel proud of performing every night. After that, don’t be too proud to try to sell merchandise and related products whenever you can, as that’s the only way that you’re going to make enough to be able to carry on recording and touring. Lars and Frontalot expresses this bluntly using the terminology that other rappers have used when talking about the hustle, albeit with a rather more retro frame of reference than the usual talk of Frank Lucas: Lars notes that “part of the job, I mean the other part from caring / is taking t-shirt money like we’re modern robber barons” while Frontalot puts together what may be the modern thesis on musical money-making:

“We know every fabric weight,
every drop ship price,
every line screened density,
and Designs are precise…

And we savor all your savvy
as it leads you to our wares,
up in the gilded age of geekery
we’re so sneakily prepared.
This fool-proof method -
Making just the shirts you want:
With my top hat and my monocle
and your money I abscond”.

Bands are also realising that mimicking Miro artistically can sometimes pay dividends. Critics have frequently alleged that the beloved punk band Alkaline Trio lost some of their appeal when they moved away from the rawness of their earlier material and began experimenting with glossy production and layered instrumentation. In 2011, however, the band have sought to put the focus back onto their song writing and ability to create dark, sexy, moody music by releasing a record called Damnesia for which they have re-recorded some of their finest songs in a simple, acoustic-led style. Basically, it’s is four object theory in action: strip back the overdubs and layered recordings, and go back to simple drums, acoustic guitar, a touch of piano and some beautifully hoarse vocals. The resulting record works wonderfully, summoning a mood of gloom and smoke but leaving room for your imagination to fill in the gaps around the skeleton sounds.

In the gallery next to the Miro exhibition, there is a show by a New York-based photographer called Taryn Simon. Simon presents her simple portrait-style photos with a huge amount of supporting material, from artist-written explanations of their content to other, related photos to extracts from documents and archive material. For her, this works, as the extra explanation adds richness and insight that the photos on their own cannot offer. But it’s not the only way of doing things, as Miro proves – his work would lose some of its tremendous power and emotional weight if he felt the need to explain each abstraction, to append photos of his source material, to fill in all the blanks for you. And so it is in music, where sometimes detail and front can be the way to go, but at this particular moment in time simplicity and reduction may be even more effective.

Four Scenes of a Pop Song

2011-06-21T13:55:00.000-07:00

DC - June 2011

1,425 words

“If you’re listening, woah-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh,

Sing it back, woah-oh-oh-oh-oh”

(Opening lines of Sweetness by Jimmy Eat World, from the album Bleed American)

Scene 1:

In the late summer of 2001, I was feeling extremely carsick. I was trying to hang my head out of the window of the rented Buick Regal that my family and I were travelling in, because the cooling sensation of wind rushing past always made me feel less nauseous. Unfortunately this already complicated operation, which was making me consider whether it would be preferable to throw up into a paper bag or be beheaded by a passing Winnebago, was only made more difficult by the fact that my mother was shouting at me to close the window before the rain started coming in. We were in the middle of the desert in Arizona, and about to be treated to the mother of all storms.

The reason why I was enduring sickness, shouting and soaking was that I had spent the previous twenty minutes reading a Rolling Stone magazine review of a record called Bleed American by a ridiculously-named band called Jimmy Eat World. I hadn’t intended to browse through it, as I was fully aware that reading anything at all in the back of a moving car would only result in illness. The review intrigued me, though, with its mentions of spiky guitars and soaring melodies and a song called “Sweetness”. It sounded like something I needed to hear.

A very short time later my dad had to pull the car over to the side of the road, I regretfully closed the window, and we sat for forty minutes as the car was buffeted by winds, bombarded by raindrops that sounded like shotgun buckshot, and shaken by thunderclaps rolling across the plain. While lightening crackled around us, I resolved that I would track down Bleed American when we got to Las Vegas or Los Angeles at the end of our desert drive, and if it wasn’t out there then I would order it when we got back to London. It might not be great – Rolling Stone reviews are always hit-and-miss – but I was willing to take a risk on it.

Scene 2:

A year or so later my brother and I were lounging in the upstairs ‘study’ room of the farmhouse that our family lived in. I say ‘study’ in inverted commas because what had started out as my dad’s office and computer room had slowly been converted into a den for two grumpy, argumentative teenagers who had been drawn there by the appeal of playing video games on the clunky desktop computer and listening to music through the huge speakers that my Mum had owned since the seventies. In fact, just about the only things that stopped Adam and I arguing and fighting were video games and music. The games made us shut up and concentrate on something other than how annoying the other person was, and the music... well, one of the few things that we agreed on was that guitars were awesome, and the louder the better.

While we bought new music as fast as we could save up money for it, we had a rotation of favourite CDs that were never far from the player. Americana by The Offspring. The Blue Album by Weezer. The self-titled album by American Hi-Fi. So Much For The Afterglow by Everclear. And Bleed American, which I had found on our return from Arizona and rapidly and completely fallen in love with. Every song on the record was great but Sweetness, the song namechecked in the review, was the one. We put it on all of our mixtapes, we knew most of the words, and when we were at our most energetic we would listen to it while climbing the worn green corduroy sofas in the study, brandishing our air guitars. And you know what? Every time we did that, it made us wonder whether the other person wasn’t quite as much of a jackass as we thought, that maybe we did have something in common after all.

Scene 3:

2002, 2003, 2004, in fact pretty much every year between Arizona and now. The Scala, the Islington Academy, The Astoria and Brixton Academy and Reading and Leeds and Give It A Name festivals. A revolving combination of our friends Dusty and Shirley and Robyn and Nini and Mike and Johnny. But always Adam and I down at the front, right in the centre until we got too tall and worried about blocking people’s views and stood off to the side, by the front right stage speaker stacks. We loved pretty much the entire catalogue of the band, from the early scratch of Static Prevails to the spacey majesty of Clarity to the dark pop of Futures and the pop gloss of Chase This Light. But still, standing just above all else was Bleed American, and Sweetness was the crown jewel.

We knew every drum hit, every scratchy and discordant guitar part, just how much echo Jim Adkins put on his voice to make the opening “woah-ohs” seem skyscraping. And when the song kicked in, we and the rest of the faithful knew exactly what to do. You sing the first two lines as loud as you can, fingers pointing in the air and ecstatic looks on your faces. Then you brace, and when the guitars kick in you mosh and jostle and dance. Repeat that throughout the first verse, then bend the knees, and when the “I was spinning free” line heralds the start of the chorus you leap into the air, bouncing along. More singing and moshing through the second verse, more jumping in the second chorus, with just a touch of air drumming thrown in, and a yell of the “stumble ‘til you crawl” line. Then heads back and wail like wolves for the “woo-oooh-ooohs” of the bridge, some air keyboard. And finally, the key moment. Everything cuts out except for some twinkling guitars and a quiet drum fill, and that signals preparation time. You have about five seconds to take a deep breath and tense yourself up before absolutely exploding into the repeated “if you’re listening” line, singing it with absolutely everything you’ve got. The most wonderful thing about all of this was that repetition never dulled its impact – it was still as much fun the fifth or tenth or twentieth time as it was the first.

Scene 4:

The lounge of the new apartment that I’ll be living in with my wife now that we’re back from our honeymoon still looks too empty, like it ate all of our furniture and is still hungry. Still, we have a sofa and a TV and, crucially, a record player and some speakers. I say crucially because I have just unwrapped a four-disc vinyl release of Bleed American released to celebrate its tenth anniversary, and it needs to be played. All of the songs still sound magnificent, with the pop perfection of The Middle set against the low-slung violence of Get It Faster and the sheer beauty of Hear You Me. Still though, ten years in, Sweetness remains the most majestic of all, be it the studio version on Side A or the blistering live version on Side [x].

I’m digging into the album again, listening to Sweetness for what must be the thousandth time, for two reasons. On the one hand, the song has been popping into my head with increasing frequency since we played it at our wedding a month ago, when it held its own as one of the few wild card songs in a playlist that was otherwise all wedding singalong classics. And on the other, for what must be the 25^th or 30^th time, I’m getting ready to see a Jimmy Eat World live show in a few days time. This time around Adam is on holiday and Dusty is busy so I’m going with the lady, for what will be her second of their shows, to hear the band other things play Bleed American in its entirety. While I’m sure that the show will be outstanding and that I’ll fall in love with some new songs and be reminded of how good the old ones are, I’d put money on Sweetness being the highlight of the night once again. I still get shivers from hearing it, even after I have been listening to the song and singing it back for then years – and I have a feeling that I will do for many years to come.

Stay True

2011-04-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

Author: DC

Date: April 2011

Word count: 1,148

One of the great challenges for individual human beings is growing up. There is no established roadmap for how to develop as a person, and so we’re left scrabbling around for guidance on how to manage it. Typically, it seems that we try to find clues in two ways: by comparing ourselves with other people or by comparing our perceptions of ourselves now with how we felt about ourselves days or months or years before.

The first approach is always challenging for the simple reason that it’s very difficult to actually truly know and understand another person to the extent that you can use their beliefs and actions as an example. The result of this is that we tend to mythologize people that we admire, creating exaggerated standards of behaviour and character that we can never hope to achieve, or we over-stress the character flaws of anyone who appears merely to be a normal person, destroying their value as a role model.

The second approach is even more tricky, as it seems almost impossible for someone to form a genuinely balanced and ‘correct’ perception of what they themselves are like, and whether on balance they have redeeming qualities or not. Do you know anyone who you would say has managed this, without erring towards either unwarranted self-admiration or overly harsh self-criticism? We all tend to have warped views of ourselves, and we all struggle to work out what about our characters we want to hang onto and what we would prefer to throw away or change.

As a result of this uncertainty and lack of clear perspective, people often make two mistakes when it comes to self development. We either plunge ourselves into periodic programmes of total personal reinvention, remodelling ourselves to such an extent that we risk throwing out or deleting the parts of ourselves that may make us better people. Alternatively, we can end up stuck in a rut of recreation, trying to copy someone else or to recapture that lightning in a bottle moment when we thought that we were at our best, or when others have told us that we were. The bottom line is that growth is just difficult. Successful evolution is hard.

As difficult as it is for individuals, it is even harder for bands. After all, bands are collectives of people who are all struggling to grow and develop in terms of personality and taste and desire as individuals – and then on top of that they are being asked to synchronise that growth with that of two, three, four, five other people. It’s like trying to coordinate the most complex of Cirque Du Soleil routines, but with the added pressures of a lifestyle that gives none of the individuals any free time or alone time to think and reflect.

This personal challenge is reflected in the way that bands approach the act of creation. When they are trying to write and record a new album, bands are trying to balance a desire to maintain what was unique or exciting about them in the past, and that in some cases made them successful, with a craving for growth and evolution. As Dan Campbell, singer of the Wonder Years, has said to AbsolutePunk this week when talking about their new record “I remember how shitty it was when your favourite pop punk band went from putting out a record you loved to putting out a weird jazz fusion record. I also remember how shitty it was when your favourite pop punk band released the same record twice in a row”.

The honest answer may be that, unless you are Charlie Sheen, there is no such thing as an absolute win when it comes to growth. You may not be able to recapture who you were or what you created before without risking creating a sense of diminishing returns. And you may not be able to move forward without accepting that the cost of growth may be that you disappoint the friends or audience members or even bandmates who liked you the way you were before, or that you become an acquired taste rather than the best friend of everyone in the bar. We have all seen bands struggle to come to terms with this. How many times, for example, have bands released great early albums and then over the rest of their careers flip-flopped between releasing records that they claim represent ‘artistic growth and challenge’, and others that are ‘a return to what we do best’?

One of the rarest things in music, as in life, is a person or a band that manages to chart a steady evolutionary course, free from grating stylistic lurches or obvious artistic compromise. A band to cherish, who seem to be navigating that course in the most graceful way possible, is Thursday, the second-wave emo pioneers from New Jersey. This week they release their new record No Devolucion. Make no mistake, this record will almost certainly sell fewer copies than any of its scene-defining predecessors. It may well reduce Thursday’s draw as a touring proposition. In spite of or perhaps because of a willingness to embrace that, however, what it may lack in commercial impact it makes up for in integrity and as a statement about growth it is almost flawless.

There is a core to the record that is undeniably and recognisably Thursday, from the guitar tone to the dynamics of the songs to Geoff Rickley’s vocals to the sly nod to much-loved old song Five Stories Falling during new number Sparks Against The Sun. Around that core, however, the band have pushed the boundaries of their art, blending in Explosions In The Sky soundscapes and the windswept dynamics of Envy and the sad sweetness of The Cure. They have moved forwards while not forgetting the greatness that they had to start with. For an undeniable statement of this, listen to the driving, majestic Turnpike Divides, with its frayed screamo heart and graceful melodic carapace.

Indeed, in making No Devolucion, Thursday as a band and Geoff Rickley as a lyricist may also have helped sketch part of the roadmap to growth we’ve been lacking all along. In the epic song Stay True that closes the album, Rickley has proposed a reference for the rest of us. Written primarily for his friends in new band Touche Amore, this advice, first sung in a hushed voice and then proclaimed more stridently, is a simple but wonderful and real guide to growing up:

“Disregard those clapping hands,

They turn to punches when you’re down.

Disregard the critics’ praise,

They’ll be the first to tell the news that you sold your soul.

Disregard those dollar sings,

They’ll buy the biggest house in hell where you’ll live alone.

Just keep your head down,

Just keep your friends close,

Hold fast to your beliefs,

Whatever else you do.

Stay true.

Believe me when I say, it’s the hardest thing to do.”

United By Fate After Ten Years

2011-03-11T10:56:00.000-08:00

Author: DC

Date: March 2011

Word count: 1,060

When I go back to my parents’ house to visit, I often end up sleeping in the bedroom that used to be the Hobbit Hole where my little brother could be found. When Adam lived there it had all the signifying marks of the late-teenage bedroom, with its blackout blinds, Rage Against The Machine “burning monk” posters, unwashed clothes on the floor, and an inhabitant who was extremely grumpy to be disturbed any time before three in the afternoon. Now that he has moved out my parents have redecorated the room, with the gloom and disorganisation replaced by Swedish furniture and halogen spotlights. The only real reminder that it used to be Adam’s lair is a single bookshelf which my mother has never tidied.

The shelf contains mementoes and keepsakes that Ad gathered during our formative concert-going years. Many of them evoke strong memories; the signed Taking Back Sunday setlist from the first time that we ever saw the band that went on to become one of our favourites; the Hiding With Girls sticker from the show where we were the only paying customers to turn up; the AFI drumstick that Adam was so thrilled to collect at one of their rare London headline shows. If I could only keep one item, though, it wouldn’t be any of those objects, as fond as I am of the feelings that they bring back. Instead, the thing I would choose is a slightly battered, bent plastic Frisbee, embossed with an instantly familiar logo of a stylised boy and girl running.

We snagged the Frisbee in 2002 at the huge Reading Festival here in the UK, on our second or third trip there. I was 18 and Adam was about 15, and we participated in the full festival experience. We camped on ground that was either rock-hard or sodden and muddy, we drank too much, but most of all we saw as many bands as we could in the three days that the festival lasted. That year we saw Hell Is For Heroes and Biffy Clyro go on early on a tiny stage and blow the crowd away, we saw Finch and Thursday stun with the complexity and energy of their post-hardcore, we saw Jimmy Eat World as their star began to go supernova. The band that left me reeling was another new band, though its members had been around for a while, playing in several influential New York hardcore bands. The weekend of the festival they were celebrating the release of their second single, a driving but uplifting song called “Good Things”, and at the end of their set they threw promotional material into the crowd. Things fluttered down from the stage, a shimmer of stickers and flyers and, yes, white Frisbees.

The set that the band played that day was the perfect blend of harmony and fury, with swathes of slashing guitar and brutal drumming playing against the keening vocals of Walter Schriefels and odd flashes of sweetness in the sound. Even though their album had only been out for a few weeks, and the seminal single “Used For Glue” a few weeks more than that, a dedicated group within the audience knew the songs backwards, and the rest of the crowd were soon engrossed by the heart and energy that the band put into their performance. They made a cavernous tent feel like a small club show, and the 40 minutes that they were allocated by the organisers was over before people were ready for it to be.

The Frisbee has served to remind of two things since that day – first of all, that it is possible for a concert to be cathartic and transcendent even in the most unlikely of circumstances. The setting for the show was relatively inauspicious, with a new melodic hardcore band playing in the middle of the day to a crowd of tired and hung-over people who hadn’t even had time to build up a hair of the dog buzz yet. In spite of all of that, it was at the time and still is one of the best shows that I have ever seen. Secondly, the Frisbee has reminded me that sometimes you only get one shot at things, and after that have to make do with memories and remembrances. Rival Schools never released the second album that they promised in 2005 and 2006, I wasn’t able to see them on their next UK tour, and then they broke up. What I had to remind me of them was a fantastic album, a single brilliant live show, and a white plastic Frisbee.

All of this goes some way to explaining why my reaction to the announcement that a new Rival Schools album was to be released in 2011 wasn’t as joyful as I thought it would be. I couldn’t work out why I wasn’t more excited that one of my favourite bands was coming back, making a record, playing shows. It took me some weeks to figure out that I was worried that it would underwhelm, that it would erode and undermine the memories that I had of the band. That the Frisbee would come to mean less to me than it does at the moment.

I shouldn’t have worried. As the sports commentators say, form is temporary but class is permanent. Rival Schools have come back with a 10-track record called “Pedals” that is different but no less excellent than their debut “United By Fate” album. It is different, to be sure, with songs of a more reflective nature and a greater emphasis on atmosphere rather than angst and anger. But it is another intelligent, wonderful collection of songs that will stay with me. To complete the circle, I am going to see them play live in a month’s time, and I can only hope that they have the same effect on me in 2011 as they did when we were all much younger men in 2002. If they do, it’ll be easy to spot me on the way out of the venue after the show. I’ll be the man looking for a poster, a drumstick, a flyer, a ticket stub, or anything that I can take home and put on the shelf next to the Frisbee. After all, I need something to keep me going for the next ten years.

Packing Boxes

2011-03-02T12:52:00.000-08:00

Author: DC

Word count: 820

March 2011

Three weeks ago my fiancée and I finally managed to buy what will be our first house together, once we decorate it and move out of our current rented apartments. I’m moving in first, with the lady following several weeks later, and my date to leave the tiny one-bedroom place that has been my home for the last two and a half years is rapidly approaching. Given that, I’ve been doing all the usual things that we’ve all had to take care of when moving – packing boxes, finding utilities suppliers, working out where in my new house my life-sized plush cuddly sheep is going to live. The important things, you might say.

Last weekend, I had a 24 hour blitz, trying to do as many move-related things as I could in a day, so that it wouldn’t eat up all of my evenings during the next week or so. There turned out to be one recurring theme that dominated that 24 hours: it quickly became clearly, visibly, and possibly scarily apparent just how major a part music has come to play in my life. During that day I took down record sleeves hung from my kitchen walls, rang people to change the delivery addresses for my Rolling Stone, NME and Alternative Press subscriptions, boxed hundreds of CDs and vinyl records, unplugged speaker systems and record players, backed up the iTunes library on my computer to avoid move-related music loss, put some signed concert posters into tubes, donated to charity a Phil Collins record that my friend Dusty had ‘hilariously’ bought me as a birthday present, filled bags with band t-shirts and took down from shelves concert DVDs and Behind The Music documentaries. I ordered the shelves that will be the new home for those CDs and DVDs, I planned to have the posters professionally framed, and I tried to work out whether I could buy some replacement, more powerful speakers without annoying our new downstairs neighbours.

All in all, I realised that music has come to dominate not only what I listed to but what I read, what I watched, what I decorate my house with, what I allocate space to, what I wear, and what I annoy my fiancée with. This left me thinking, and by now I’ve identified a number of possible things that this music overload could mean. Option One: I’m one of those people who are going to end up on a TV show called something like “Hoarders: Extreme Tales of People Who Have Died of Asphyxiation While Buried Under Piles of Accumulated Junk”, or “Stories Of My Divorce: The Husband Who Loved Vinyl More Than Me”. If that turns out to be true, please address all letters to my rehab centre, and don’t give me money to buy magazines with, it will only feed the habit.

I don’t think I’m quite in Discovery Channel territory yet, though, for one simple reason. So many of the emails that I’ve received from you, readers and commenters and friends, during the last few years suggest that many of you have a similar level of immersion in all things musical as I do. Sure, we all have different tastes and preferred formats, but it seems that the vast majority of people reading this column don’t just have a casual, transactional, “something to listen to on the metro on the way to work in the mornings” relationship to music. Which led me to Option Two: that for a certain kind of person, music becomes something much bigger than a soundtrack. It becomes something much bigger, oddly, than music, than that song you put on when you get home from work in the evening. Instead it grows, it shoots tentacles through many different aspects of our lives, and in doing so it becomes both a part of us and something else as well, something external.

Music, when you love it this much and are this interested in it, actually becomes a character in your life. It takes your time – time spent reading music magazines or searching for downloads or fixing the names in your iTunes. It can’t be neglected, as you wouldn’t want to miss the new song by your favorite artist. It can’t be put in a corner when you consume too much and become sick of it, as it’s on your walls and your clothes. It’s a part of who you are, and it’s part of what you have to do every day and what you see. And this may be where I cross the line back into Option One territory, but for the last week it has felt like music is a third person moving into my new apartment, putting its stamp and its personality on our space. I don’t love it as much as my lady or in the same way, but I adore it, and I have a feeling that many of you feel

Super Lupe Raps

2011-02-13T09:24:00.001-08:00

Author: DC

February 2011

Word count: 1,241

It seems very odd to criticize anyone for not talking enough, for not expressing his or her personal feelings enough, in this era of Fox News and Facebook. The world in the early 21^st century is defined by externalization, by the way in which it has come to be acceptable for anyone to express their innermost thoughts to everyone else, or to take a personal perspective on events rather than buying into a narrative defined by anyone else. The ultimate expression of this was the perception held by George Bush and his regime that there is no such thing as fact, that every situation is open to individual interpretation.

The result of this trend, when applied to politics and the way that people relate to society, has resulted in the outward expression of feelings that would previously have been kept private, out of deference or a sense of what was proper. In the United States, Europe and most recently throughout the Middle East, the public have been expressing a simmering anger about individual politicians or political systems, societal structures and the way that people are being supported by institutions, and corporations and perceived corporate greed. Discontent and rage has been expressed via Twitter and online protest, via mass gatherings and demonstrations, via organizations like the Tea Parties, and via the actions of artists like authors and filmmakers. Notably, however, this wave of dissatisfaction has not been supported to any great degree by the graft of songwriters.

Musicians have, for the most part, stayed away from discussing politics and social sentiments, or have discussed them in an abstract and depoliticized way, or have spoken out but only in relation to issues of such gigantic impact and relative party-political neutrality that everyone can agree on the sheer fucked-upness of it all[1]. Few musicians have had the courage to express rage and disgust and ill-feeling, and of those who have very few indeed have combined an expression of their frustration with intelligent criticism and a constructive, anti-nihilistic approach to how things might be improved.

One major exception to this is the Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco, who about a week ago released a single called “Words I Never Said”. “Words…” has been put out just a little over a month before the release of Lupe’s next album “Lasers”, and is supposed to be the single that crashes the charts, that sets up big first-week sales for the album, that makes people forget the tortured history of the record. The need for a song to do this usually results in simplicity – to appeal to as many people as possible, artists strip things back to simple, easily-relatable and easily-repeatable constructs. Usually, this means talking about sex (think Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop”), broad motivational statements (think “Lose Yourself”) or how awesome the artist is.

Not for Lupe Fiasco, however, will things be about the licking of lollipops or the sexing of ladies. On his single he wants to slay some dragons, and he sets this up with the hook, sung to start the record by Skylar Grey, which acknowledges how difficult what he’s about to do is and what it may cost him. However, he comes to terms with the fact that the alternative to speaking out – staying silent – is ultimately more corrosive for you than risking incurring the wrath of others by voicing your feelings. However, even at that point thigns could go either way. Yes, Lupe has claimed that he’s going to be bold, but lots of rappers and musicians have said that but come up short. Yes, he has chosen a bassy, thumping, ominous Alex Da Kid beat that bangs but is also unshowy enough to provide an unfussy base for some fierce lyricism. But will he really go in, or just express the same watered-down sentiments that some many other artists have been peddling?

Verse one, line one. “I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit”. Okay, so we’re not fucking around here. American sacred cow being address – check. Strong word choice – check. But interesting word choice, with Lupe’s use of “think”. He’s not making a broad or knee-jerk statement – instead, he’s reflecting his considered thoughts and inviting you do to the same, to contribute to the dialogue, whether you agree with him or not. In any case, regardless of your personal opinion, it’s undeniable that Lupe is spitting the sort of blunt speech that popular music has been running scared of lately, is showing a courage and boldness that others have been lacking.

The lyrics are particularly bold relative to the prevailing attitudes, values and forms of hip-hop in 2011. Hip-hop at the moment seems to be about battling and being tough, as typified by Jay-Z and Kanye West’s collaboration “H.A.M.”, or about valuing the struggle of the individual over anything collective, as seen in the lyrics of Young Jeezy and Lil’ Wayne. In contrast Lupe, as you’d hope given his quasi-conscious background, is unafraid to be different. He acknowledges that he isn’t hard as a motherfucker, recognizing his own weakness and uncertainty (“So scared of what you think of me, I’m scared of even telling you / sometimes I’m like the only person I feel safe to tell it to”) and pointing out the inherent limitations of an approach to life that is based on violence, thuggery and rugged individualism (“I’m part of the problem, my problem is I’m peaceful / and I believe in the people”)

Throughout the song Lupe demonstrates both his courage and his intelligence, taking on major social and political issues in a thoughtful way, with nothing that could be pigeon-holed as superficial sloganeering. He confronts phony wars, corrupt politicians, the poor education system in the United States, sub-standard nutrition, pharmaceutical dependency, and the financial crisis. However, he doesn’t just vent his range, directing it upwards and outwards while denying personal culpability and responsibility. He questions his own motives and those of his family, friends and followers, inviting people to “walk with me into the ghetto, this where all the kush went”, before blasting abnegations of responsibility with calls to arms like “complain about the liquor store but what you drinking liquor for? / complain about the gloom but when d’you pick a broom up? / just listening to ‘Pac ain’t gon make it stop”.

Even religion, that most taboo subject and an issue that is rapidly becoming a no-go zone for discussion and commentary, does not escape his focus. Most notably, Lupe takes on the extreme fringes of his own Muslim faith, perfectly expressing the views of moderate Islam by stating that “Jihad is not a holy war, where’s that in the worship? / Mudering is not Islam, and you are not observant / and you are not a Muslim”, before pointing out that other faiths who might be quick to agree with him might need to look at their own failings first.

Occasionally Lupe goes too far in confronting conventional wisdom, as when he repeats tired 9/11 conspiracy theories about the intentional blowing up of the Twin Towers. This sort of reference isn’t helpful to those who are trying to construct a more open and responsible political dialogue, as it blurs the line between appropriate cynicism and anger and outright fringe thinking, making it easier for people to disregard the entire message. However, given how things are should we not applaud informed and passionate speech, even if it is wayward in places?

[1] Think Hurricane Katrina, the Pakistan cyclone, the incarceration of Lil’ Wayne.

Personal Training

2011-01-08T09:07:00.000-08:00

Author: DC

January 2011

Word count: 990

When I joined my current gym I was given as a “free gift” [#1 Free gift! With every purchase of an insanely overpriced gym membership!] a single half-hour session with a personal trainer. When the day came to have my session, I very nearly didn’t go because I assumed that the person I was about to entrust half an hour of my physical wellbeing to would be like the caricatured drill-sergeant trainers that you see in movies. Usually played by a guy in very tight shorts, and altogether too much spandex. You know the type, the “quitters never succeed! Are you a quitter? Are you a man or a mouse” breed of psychological bully who harass you into doing “just one more set”, their sole achievement being that you never want to go anywhere near a rowing machine ever again. But eventually I convinced myself that they couldn’t all be like that, and when I got to the gym I was relieved to look around the room and see several very friendly-looking trainers offering helpful advice and not yelling Kanye tweet-style ‘motivational messages’ at people. Then my trainer turned up. Jason. Tight shorts, spandex and shouting. Within five minutes he’d come out with such gems as “when you come hear you have to leave your tired at the door” and “you must be mentally stronger than your body is physically weak”. His defining moment, however, came ten minutes in. I had just finished stretching in ways that my body will never forgive me for, and as I moved off the mat I smiled at the man who was about to take my place, and wished him good luck. At which point Jason turned to me and said “focus. There’s no place for friendship at the gym”.

I never had another session with Jason, who spent six months glaring angrily at me whenever I went near him. But his words stuck with me and I thought of them again this week. I was bored of stationary-bike cycling, and thought I’d put my iPod on to distract me (I have a small, pink gym-only shuffly. Manly, huh?). I’d forgotten that, just after Christmas, I had wiped my usual mix of sugar-rush gym music from Pinky, and instead loaded her with an end-of-year mix that my friend Dusty had made for me. He has been making mixes for years, from the themed (I currently have mixes called “A Bit Gruff”, “For The Summer” and “Early Emo”) to the you-have-terrible-taste-if-you-don’t-like-this-band (my protestations that I just don’t get Morrissey didn’t stop Dusty making me a complete Morrissey mix), but his best are always the annual best of the year compilations that he puts together. I’d only recently received the 2010 version, and for some reason I sort of thought that I might not enjoy it as much as I had done the 2008 and 2009 versions. I figured that I knew most of the good albums and great songs that had come out during the year, and that while it was nice to have lots of them on the same tape it would all feel a bit familiar.

Within two minute, I had to stop the bike, move away from the TV blaring out “Ministry of Sound Running Trax 2011”, and go stand in the rarely-used and therefore blissfully quiet fitness room in the gym, just so that I could have another listen to the first song on his mix, without background noise or sweating middle-aged men distracting me. I’d never heard the song before. I’d never heard of the band. I’d been half-listening while trying not to die of post-Christmas exercise overload. And it was great enough to grab me straight off. [# that song was “I’m Gonna Change Your Life” by The Thermals. Just a kick-ass, dark, snarky, sexy song]. A couple of tracks later it happened again. And then again. The mix was dotted with songs that I’d missed, or that were by bands I’d never heard of, or that I had downloaded but for some reason not appreciated. I must have looked like I’d gone crazy, sitting there on a bike, sweating and dishevelled, but smiling to myself while skipping back to repeat these great songs.

It made me realise that Jason was wrong, and that there was room for friendship at the gym. In fact, that there is room for friendship, and for actual reminders of that friendship to appear, pretty much anywhere these days. A huge number of people now carry digital music players of some form or another – iPods, cellphones which can handle music files, laptops with iTunes. Some people even play it retro, continuing to rock the Discman or Walkman or Minidisc player long after most people have moved on. As a result, most people have access to songs wherever they are or whatever they are doing. And while a lot of people put together their own music collections, I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people have at least one or two tracks in their collection that they have been sent via email by one of their friends, or that they’ve ripped from a CD that someone lent them, or that they have downloaded from a blog or from iTunes based on a recommendation from their brother or sister or that creepy guy who hits on your every time you go into Starbucks. Each one of those recommendations or transfers or lendings is a minor act of friendship, an indication that someone has thought about you enough to let you know about something that they think will make you smile, or make you rock out. And as long as you’ve got those songs with you then there really is room for friendship anywhere – at home, at work, even at the gym.

Happy New Year to all, and I hope you have a wonderful, musical time of it all in 2011.

Albums Of The Year 2010

2010-12-04T07:25:00.000-08:00

So it’s that time of year again, when everyone starts choosing their favourite works of art of the year. For the last few years I have been pulling my picks together for a magazine run by a friend, and this year will be no different. I think my overall take is that it has been a really, surprisingly good year for music. I say “surprising” because lots of the bands that have been my favourites for the last few years haven’t released records this year (no Thrice, Thursday, Brand New etc.) and yet quite a few newer bands have stepped up and put out records that I have really dug. That said, there are definitely some old hands on the lists too, which I suppose proves that you like what you like! Anyhow, my choices (with rap, as ever, split out from rock) are:

Albums Of The Year:

1) I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone by Crime In Stereo (Bridge Nine)

2) White Crosses by Against Me!!! (Sire / Warner)

3) Chamberlain Waits by The Menzingers (Red Scare)

4) High Violet by The National (4AD)

5) Buzzard by Margot & The Nuclear So-And-So’s (Mariel)

6) My Dinosaur Life by Motion City Soundtrack (Epitaph)

7) This Addiction by Alkaline Trio (Epitaph)

8) Total Life Forever by Foals (Warner Bros.)

9) Invented by Jimmy Eat World (Dreamworks)

10) Symptoms and Cures by Comeback Kid (Victory)

Honourable Mention 1: Treats by Sleigh Bells (Mom & Pop)

Honourable Mention 2: Demos by Matt Skiba (Asian Man)

Honourable Mention 3: Recitation by Envy (Temporary Residence Limited)

Contenders released too late: Varuna by The Republic of Wolves, Disambiguation by UnderOath, What Separates Me From You by A Day To Remember

Rap Albums Of The Year:

1) My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West (Def Jam)

2) Sir Lucious Leftfoot, The Son of Chico Dusty by Big Boi (Def Jam)

3) Thank Me Later by Drake (Cash Money)

4) Man On The Moon II: The Legend of Mr Rager by Kid Cudi (Universal Motown)

5) A Badly Broken Code by Dessa (Doomtree)

EPs Of The Year:

1) To All My Friends… by Atmosphere (Rhymesayers)

2) Farewell Continental by Farewell Continental (Self-released)

3) Never Mind The Bombings, Here’s Your Six Figures by United Nations (Deathwish)

4) Touche Amore / La Dispute Split EP (No Idea)

5) Simple Science EP by The Get Up Kids (Self-released)

Honourable Mention 1: Appendage by Circa Survive (Atlantic)

Honourable Mention 2: The Young and Defenceless by Funeral For A Friend (Self-released)

Favourite Lives Shows Of The Year:

1) Polar Bear Club upstairs at The Garage

2) Funeral For A Friend (Casually Dressed Show) at Shepherd's Bush

3) Jimmy Eat World at Brixton Academy

4) Against Me!!! downstairs at The Garage

5) Motion City Soundtrack at Electric Ballroom

Honourable Mention 1: A Day To Remember / Architects (UK) at Kentish Town Forum

Honourable Mention 2: The Menzingers at The Fighting Cocks, Kingston

Looking across all of the categories, it really does strike me as having been a really strong year. Even the honourable mentions that didn’t make the Top 10 in my albums of the year list are all really strong – Sleigh Bells released what was in many ways the most original, ‘new-sounding’ album I heard, the Matt Skiba demos record was of very high quality and while the album as a whole is a little inconsistent, the best songs on “Recitation” are absolutely stunning. Overall, though, it’s noticeable that in each of the record categories there was just a little something that separated the top two from the rest of the ten, as far as I was concerned. It was hard to decide which should be 1 and which should be 2, but they did pick themselves. The Crime In Stereo and Against Me!!! records are quite different – the CIS one is inventive and inward-looking and stormy whereas AM!!! released a record that by their standards was anthemic and universal in tone. Kanye West’s album was idiosyncratic and hugely experimental whereas Big Boi released a record that deployed a lot of what is traditionally effective about hip-hop in a rock-solid way. And Atmosphere made an EP that’s engrossing but clean and tidy, whereas Farewell Continental write songs that emerge from a haze of fuzz and feedback. However, I love all of the records, and think I’ll still be listening to them once 2010 has expired.

F Bomb Threat?

2010-10-07T11:50:00.000-07:00

Author: DC

Date: October 2010

Word count: 1,350

Ladies and gentleman, I believe that we have reached a landmark moment in the history of the human race. A moment that shall be remembered with some fondness, a touch of sorrow, and a great deal of awe by those who lived through it – and yet a moment that will scarcely be understood by those born after it. A moment that all men should rise up and celebrate, sure in the knowledge that... oh, sorry, I was getting carried away a bit there. Everyone wants to be Abraham Lincoln, right? But seriously, during this past month I do believe that we have witnessed something momentous – we have seen cursing cease to be cool. Let’s face it, as much as we’d all like to think that we’re mature, grown-up adults, most of us (the religious aside, to whom I would like to apologise for the entirety of this article) have gotten a bit of a kick out of well-implemented swearing. Not just random cursing or vulgarity but the unleashing of a perfectly timed, well-chosen curse word (none of which I can say while writing here, of course) can be satisfying, and can give us a brief thrill. In the modern world there aren’t too many ways for a guy or girl to feel like an outlaw, a badass, a wild person (unless, of course, you actually are any of things. In which case more power to you, and good luck dodging the parole officers), but dropping an f-bomb when you really shouldn’t can do that. But I think even this thrill may be on the wane. Let me explain...

Here’s the theory: cursing has gotten its cachet, its frisson of danger, its cool, because according to social norms it has always been viewed as marginally unacceptable behaviour. And almost everyone, even if they are otherwise entirely clean-living and well-meaning folk, likes to think of themselves as a rule breaker, of someone who just occasionally is willing to be unacceptable. As a result, when we curse it makes us feel just a little bit cool, that we may be 99% certified public accountant but that we’re still 1% Roger Sterling. I believe that social norms have now changed to such an extent, however, that cursing is no longer really unacceptable to most people and is in fact viewed as just part of the dialogue, as something that even the most straight-laced of us are expected to do. Given that, it’s no longer cool. What is more, I think we can see evidence of this by looking at four pop songs of recent years, all of which flirt with the f-word.

Song one: F*** It (I Don’t Want You Back) by Eamon. This was the first song of a pop persuasion to be so completely upfront in its use of the f-word, to the extent that it caused a social scandal on release. Sure, hip-hop songs had been laced with profanity for years before this, and hard rock songs had always featured their fair share of cursing, but genres always appealed to a non-mainstream demographic and as such their use of cuss words can’t be taken as evidence as a broad social trend. Eamon, however, inspired a real backlash, with commentators condemning him for his inability to express himself to a lady without dropping the bomb (and, not uncoincidentally, ladies dissing him for being a total ass). Given this, F*** It serves as both evidence that times were changing – someone could write and release, and have a hit with, a song featuring some hardcore swearing – but also a clear indicator that as recently as eight years ago it was still seen by the majority of people as unacceptable that curse words be used in popular songs and cultural dialogue.

Song two: If You Seek Amy by Britney Spears. Now fast forward a few years, and you can find incontrovertible evidence that attitudes have really moved on. On the face of it, this song was to a great extent even more risqué than the Eamon number (and wasn’t sung by a guy who would surely be on Jersey Shore if he’d been born ten years later, which must be a good thing). This wasn’t because of outright cursing – in fact, if you read the lyric sheet Britney doesn’t swear once while singing this song. Instead, she simply talks to a guy who is looking for a girl in a club, hence “if you seek Amy” (if you don’t get it, just say it fast. There you go). But that cute use of pronunciation doesn’t hide the fact that somehow this song is more shocking than F*** It simply because it serves no other purpose than to be a delivery system custom-designed to get 12 year old girls cussing like troopers. It’s a blatant attempt to sidestep censorship and deliver serious profanity to a tween audience. The telling thing, though, was that Britney didn’t receive a quarter of the backlash that Eamon did. Even though she was using a schoolyard trick to get young children to buy and sing a song during which the singer clearly invites someone to... well, you know... people couldn’t find it in themselves to get too worked up, because attitudes were changing.

Song three: Florida University by The-Dream. Another landmark song, released earlier this year by The-Dream on his “Love King” record. This track had a sing-song refrain that was sure to get everyone in the club up and a-cursin’ (“F-U, F-U, F-U [repeat until out of breath]”) and was even more knowing than Britney in the way that it went about its business, with The-Dream even noting sarcastically that the track was “a hell of a clean version”. It got radio play, again aimed at a young adult audience, and it shocked absolutely no-one. There was no complaint or surprise, and there was certainly no outrage. It had become perfectly acceptable for the hook of a sugar pop record to feature a strong curse.

Song four: F*** You by Cee-Lo Green. No surprises what the last song is, given its cultural ubiquity this year – and that in itself says it all. Not only was there no shock value in Cee-Lo releasing this song (other than some minor Fox News scare-mongering and chatter, which bordered on the racist in the extent to which it focussed on Cee-Lo’s blackness as a cause of his addiction to the f-word) but the track was actually viewed as cute and fun. As fluffy and kittenish. The opposite, in other words, of dangerous cool. Yes, this is part to do with the funky soul-drenched tone of the music, and the degree to which the venom of the swearing is undercut by how oddly loveable Cee-Lo is), but it also reflects the fact that any residual outlaw spirit attached to swearing has died and gone, the fact that cussing is no longer cool.

This mirrors what we’ve seen about the presentation of sex and sexuality in popular culture. Just as cursing has crossed over, so it has become more acceptable to talk about sex in a frank and up-front fashion. Again hip-hop was doing this comfortably before pop was, but chart pop and even songs aimed at young audiences are now talking pretty explicitly about sex, as anyone who has heard a Ke$ha or Gaga song this year knows. Just about the only barrier that hasn’t been surmounted is open discussion of male gay sex, and even that has to happen sooner rather than later.

So The-Dream’s song is likely to be the last of a breed, the last song to have any residual novelty value or to receive a boost by trading on profanity. For some this will be a refreshing sign that society is at last getting over some quite antiquated hang ups about language and sex. For others it will be a worrying sign that a set of desirable cultural values has been eroded, and that the young are being exposed to too much too young. Either way, we’ll all have to find new ways of convincing ourselves that we’re still badasses...

Douchebags, Scumbags and Vanilla Thunder

2010-10-05T07:34:00.001-07:00

Author: DC

Date: October 2010

Word count: 1,155 (inc. footnotes)

I’ve just returned from 3 gloriously sunny weeks in California spent driving very slowly from San Francisco to LA in a ridiculous record-exec-pimp-wagon Mazda called “Vanilla Thunder[1]”, sampling amazing restaurants and brilliant local record stores on the way. Seriously, Californians, I’m not sure that you realise how lucky you are to still have the phenomenal collection of indie stores that you do. Every town we went to, from San Francisco to San Luis Obispo to Santa Cruz, had a fantastic record emporium staffed by fun and insanely knowledgeable folk, and that is absolutely not the case everywhere in the world. Support the local, as you won’t realise how good it is until it has gone. Anyway, not the point, which was this: while cruising in Vanilla, I got to listen to a crazy amount of chart music, simply because I forgot to take any CDs with me and as a result was at the mercy of the FM dial. While much of it wasn’t my thing (or, in the case of “DJ’s Got Us Falling In Love Again” by Usher, really wasn’t my thing but still ended up stuck in my head for three entire weeks), something really interesting struck me about some of the songs that were getting a lot of play.

Let’s take two songs as examples. Both were getting increasing amounts of airplay as our trip went on, building up to what will inevitably be radio ubiquity for both. Neither was a life-changer in and of itself – one is a very good modern rock song, and the other a very funny but quite lightweight hip-hop jam. The former being “Waiting For The End” by Linkin Park, and the latter being “Runaway” by Kanye West. However, both were fascinating in as far as they perfectly encapsulate a trend that we’re increasingly seeing in popular music.

Musical convergence is what we’ll call it. The basic thesis here is that the concept of ‘genre’ in modern music is becoming less relevant all the time as artists increasingly look beyond the confines of a single style, set of influences or “sound” to inspire them. If you will, it’s the end point of the shuffleisation of music – if your iPod plays you a smooth r ‘n b song followed by some speedmetal, a samba number, a sugarpop Katy Perry song and a South African zef-rap, why wouldn’t you begin to see commonalities between the songs, or ways in which the elements that they bring could be blended together? On the flipside, this expectation of variety is what has made FM radio stations, with their myopic focus on single micro-genres[2], feel so staid a medium.

You can see the convergence at work in these songs, without even having to listen that closely. Linkin Park, who are commonly perceived to be relatively conventional rockers, bring out a huge assortment of styles and influences on “Waiting…” The song begins with a Nine Inch Nails-style treated guitar line, is underpinned by a hip-hop beat embellished with country-sounding woodblock hits, uses a reggae cadence for some of its vocals and a traditional balladeering approach for others, has an Indian chant harmony part, and also includes some electro pulses and DJ scratching. While the resulting songs sounds big and busy, it doesn’t come off as a badly-combined Frankenstein’s monster of a track. In fact, it’s astonishing how unstrange the final product seems. We have simply gotten used to genre-blending. Sure, I could still just about describe it as a ‘modern rock’ song in my opening paragraph as there are some crunchy guitars in the mix, but to do that is to use pretty lazy journalistic shorthand to describe a song that is in fact very difficult to pigeonhole.

“Runaway”, in contrast, is in its recorded form much more minimalist, certainly when compared with the live version that Mr West has been performing lately, which layers over the core track with grating vocal drops and Bomb Squad noise effects. The song is also a degree more conventional than the Linkin Park effort – it is at least a hip-hop song underpinned by a traditionally hip-hop beat, and has a dextrous but recognisable guest verse from Pusha-T of the Clipse. But in many other ways the song is still all over the map, especially for the second single by a major-label artist: for instance, there’s little clear delineation of verse, bridge and chorus with Kanye instead repeatedly drawing on certain motifs cyclically throughout the song[3]. He also brings in an almost dubsteppish baseline, disco vocodering and a prog-rock echoing of vocals, just for fun. And again, none of this seems surprising or out of place. Convergence does that to you.

Sure, there are problems with convergence. If handled poorly, style-blending can result in songs that are just random-seeming soundclashes, with little stylistic coherence or thematic clarity. The appropriation of styles from other nations, if not done with sensitivity, can also lead to charges of cultural imperialism or ‘fakeness’, as can be seen in the criticisms of globetrotting producer Diplo for the way that he has drawn from South American and African culture. Equally, stressing how refreshing convergence can be can lead to the marginalisation of artists or bands who choose to operate within a particular niche and to perfect that particular craft, and this marginalisation can potentially be as constricting as the FM radio insistence that bands DO have a particular genre. It may explain why, for example, there is the start of a backlash against Brooklyn’s superb The National, with it alleged that they are “just indie”. Well, when you write songs that good, being “just indie” is more than enough. Given the state of radio, however, defending genre traditionalists seems to be of lesser concern than trying to encourage boundary-blurring, if only to finally put the nail in the coffin of single-genre stations. So, having spent three weeks in Vanilla Thunder with only the FM dial for company, I’d like to raise a toast, as Mr West would say – just in this case to musical innovators, rather than his “douchebags”, “scumbags” and “jerkoffs”.

[1] Because it was huge and very, very white. Seriously, thanks to car rental company that shall remain nameless for the free upgrade, but seriously… a ridiculous white hybrid the size of a killer whale?

[2] During our trip, we noted stations dedicated to “modern urban salsa”, “Hispanic hop-hop”, “contemporary Christian active metal” and “granola-inspired rural passive whale song”. Only one of those is made up. Promise.

[3] I wanted to write more about the absolutely extraordinary lyrics to this song but my editors weren’t keen on it, seeing as how my last 4,289 articles have been about rap lyrics. Let’s just say that Kanye outdoes himself, and becomes the first guy to release a song to radio with the word “douchebag” featuring prominently in the chorus.

The Giraffe of Rock Records

2010-08-06T02:40:00.001-07:00

August 2010

Author: DC

Word count: 880

During the last couple of weeks I have been reading one of Henry Rollin’s journals about his travels and career, the excellently-named “Smile, You’re Travelling”. During 1997 he took a trip to Kenya and Madagascar, and as part of that he went on a safari. Rollins writes wonderfully about being a product of sprawling American cities, of Washington DC and Los Angeles, transplanted to the wilds of the world.

In particular, he talks about being completely astonished by the animals that he saw, and how he found each one more amazing and wondrous than the last. First he saw monkeys with “blue balls”, then baboons with their amazing twisted bodies and protruding backsides, then majestic lions. All of these creatures blow him away but to a degree at least he felt that he know what to think of them, that he had a frame of reference for their looks, their behaviour, their size. Then, however, he sees a giraffe, and has what he would call a “holy shit” moment. It’s not that any of the individual elements of a giraffe were necessarily shocking to him: in isolation he could handle the long legs, the horsey face, the yellowish skin. But put together they made the giraffe totally incredible to him, a creature that took recognizable parts but put them together in a completely different way to anything that he had seen before.

The way we react to records can be a bit like the experience that Rollins describes. You have your monkey records, those that are of a really high quality but are absolutely of their type and somehow how familiar, as if you’ve hard many things similar to them before. You have your red-assed baboon records, which are still somehow comprehensible but add an exciting new twist to the things you have heard before. Then, just occasionally, you have a giraffe record. It’s not totally alien as you can pick out recognizable component parts – guitar riffs, drum lines, vocals, keys, handclaps. But somehow the way that the elements are welded together is surprising and fresh.

While this year has, in my humble opinion, been a genuinely excellent one for music so far, until recently all of my favorite records of the year had been monkeys or baboons. Wonderful, aggressive or romantic, sweeping or claustrophobic records, but all within the realm of what I think I understand. Recently though, I found my giraffe record. I don’t know if it will still astonish me in a few months time, or whether the shock of the new will gradually wear off, just as a giraffe would somehow become more ordinary if you were to see it a hundred times. But for now, it’s all I want to listen to.

That record is "Treats", by Sleigh Bells. It's a deeply strange record in many ways, and not least because it's the product of a hardcore guitarist and a singer who sounds like she's most inspired by the vocal stylings of Gwen Stefani or a “Mickey”-era Toni Basil. Ex-Poison The Well axeman Derek Miller writes the music, which broadly speaking is huge guitar riffs layered over dancey, drum machine boom-bap beats. New Yorker Alexis Krauss sing-chants in a Hollaback Girl fashion over the top.

So far, “Treats” must sound relatively normal, yet another hipster rock-dance crossover record – not even a monkey but a horse, if you will. But then Miller extends its neck by making the record, to put it simply, noisy as fuck. Every guitar tone is overdriven and distorted, every beat hit fuzzy and boomy, the whole production echoey and indistinct. The only thing that comes through clearly is the pseudo-click track of fingersnaps that serves to keep time for the songs. Krauss's vocals aren't pop-crystal-clear either. They swoop into and out of focus in the mix, are equally distorted in recording, and she doesn't really enunciate at all. As a result the vocals almost become another element of the rhythm, rather than the driver of the melody.

That's not to say that there's no variation here - some songs are funloud, others tenderloud, others brutaloud, and some just ecstaticdanceyadrenalinerushloud. But it’s not a record for the faint of heart. And that's perhaps what's so exciting about it - when many rockers seem to be trying to shorten their necks and scrape off their yellow skin to fit in with the horses that get airplay on modern rock radio, Sleigh Bells add more weirdness. More distortion. More noise. And more fun.

The song that steals the deal for me is the album recording of "Crown On The Ground", a song that has been floating around in demo / lo-fi form for a while. Simply put, despite being hopelessly static-ridden, lyrically impenetrable and, yes, loud, it's the most purely fun, exhilarating song I've heard all year. It's more pop fun than every chart number one this year put together. It's more likely to get you dancing than a million Tiesto mixes. And once you've heard it once, it will be the only song you'll want to hear at one in the morning when you're at a club, nicely drunk, and waiting for that one euphoric jam to blow the roof off the place. It's a giraffe in a sea of monkeys.

Light It Up or Shut It Down

2010-07-10T09:58:00.000-07:00

Author: DC

Word count: 1024

The majority of albums that top the charts now, as has always been the case, are relatively straightforward affairs. They are, for the most part, fairly down-the-line representations of one of the major musical genres – mainstream rock, country, pop and hip hop / r’n b. Since record sales have declined and thus the number of albums you need to shift to number 1 has dropped off precipitously (if you’d suggested four years ago that you’d have number one albums selling fewer than 100,000 copies the execs of Behemoth Recording Industries would have laughed you out of their lavishly-decorated boardroom), you now get the occasionally strange pick. An indie rock upstart getting their die-hard fans out in week one. A comeback album by an ageing nostalgia act. But for the most part the rule still applies.

The rule seems to operate within genres as well, as most notably within hip-hop. In the last 10 years, with the exception of some of Kanye West’s more experimental moments and some of the early-90s blockbusters that managed to combine huge sales with quirky creative statements (listen to Illmatic now, and you’ll be surprised by how odd it is), the hip-hop records that have sold huge have conformed to a formula. A mix of hood tracks and party beats, one huge pop jam, repeat to finish. Look at the failure of many of the backpackers or underground kings to penetrate the higher reaches of the charts. The reliance on using existing beats to test lyrics via freestyling, and the periodic dominance of top producers with their own styles have made it hard for original sounds to break through.

That’s what makes it so unusual that hot property Drake saw his debut full-length major label LP go straight into the charts at number one, before he was unseated in his second week by sales titan Eminem. Drake and his producers have curated a vibe that, while drawing on recent touchstones like Kanye West’s “808s and Heartbreak”, is unique and distinctive. A minimalist sonic palate, 808 rattles, dreamy synth washes drawn from indie rock and a reliance on singing and talk-rapping rather than all-out flowing mark him out. What’s even more surprising is that he seemed to arrive at this sound early on in his career, that it seems fully formed even in the pinnacle tracks of his early releases (listen to “Houstatlantavegas” and “Baby, You’re The Best” from his So Far Gone EP). Even his limitations as a lyricist and his as yet relatively underdeveloped rhythmic sense marked him out as something a bit different from the polished wit-slinging wordsmiths in the T.I. vein that have come to the fore in hip-hop.

However, this originality could be a double-edged sword for the man who, regrettably, really really wants us to call him ‘Drizzy’. While listening to a few songs in his style sound originally, too many in that style put together tend to underwhelm, regardless of how good the individual tracks are. 5 minutes of minimalism is a refreshing palate cleanser after you’ve feasted on big beats, but 30 minutes tends to have a soporific effect on you. The key thing that Drake will have to master, as most other innovative creators have, is how to take your basic sound and build on it, innovate around it, so that you retain the distinctive core but retain interest.

You can see this very clearly on Drake’s chart-topping new record “Thank Me Later”. The album is a genuine mixed bag, with some fantastic high points and a reasonable amount of filler. The songs broadly fall into 3 categories. There are some very good songs in what we can now legitimately start to call the characteristic Drake style. The album opener “Fireworks” and another early track “The Resistance” just flat out work, they throw in all the usual Drake ingredients but still sound fresh. Then you have the filler tracks that repeat the formula of the more winning numbers but somehow fall flat due to weaker hooks, less interest textures or simply a lack of that magic hook or perfect one-liner that lodges in your head. Tracks like “Show Me A Good Time” and even the Lil’ Wayne-starring “Miss Me” fall into this category, coming and going unmemorably.

If they were the only styles of track on the album you’d be a bit concerned about the potential longevity of the Drizzy career. However, most intriguingly and promisingly for the Canadian, there are some tracks that have something a little extra. Tracks that throw in new ingredients while still being recognizably the work of the particular artists, and it is these tracks that elevate the album from merely acceptable to very good. The best song is the long r ‘n b jam “Shut It Down”, a genuine duet with ferociously hot soul man The-Dream. The song takes the standard orchestration of almost every Drake song but smartly and deftly layers on new elements like electric piano, some slashing electric guitar, and towards the end of the song a digital bitstorm of backing vocals, synth strings and effects. It all sounds organic and complementary, not over-egged but more substantial that his usual. Lyrically and vocally The-Dream challenges Drake as well, forcing him to push the limits of his singing voice, and encouraging him to concentrate his raps into brief bursts, mitigating Drake’s tendency to ramble rather than be concise.

The other stand-out song is another collaboration, the smouldering “Light Up” with Brooklyn kingpin Jay-Z. The song is almost exactly the opposite of “Shut It Down”. It is lean and spare where that song is ornate, menacing and terrifying where “Shut It Down” is enticingly sexual. The staccato flows of the two rappers reverb around with an echo chamber effect, lending the song a street-corner-at-2am vibe that is hard to capture and unforgettable once you’ve heard it. It’s a diversion, but still somehow bears the Drake trademark – and that’s what is most encouraging about it. It’s what is most encouraging about Drake’s album as a whole – that it contains these moments of relative experimental exploration, while still establishing a core sound that Drake can build on .

To Grind Or Not To Grind, That Is The Question

2010-06-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

Author: DC

Word Count: 1,761

For as long as human beings have been making artistic creations, be they paintings or musical compositions or documents, there has been debate about whether artistic greatness is the result of effort and toil, or simply springs from an indefinable “creative genius”. In short, some believe that certain individuals are simply blessed with a unique creative talent which they can then channel into their work – a sort of divine inspiration, if you will, that separates a Shakespeare from a Stephanie Mayer. Other thinkers, while accepting that levels of talent vary from person to person, place more emphasis on the development of skill and creative understanding via hard work and repeated activity. The most sophisticated analyses of the backgrounds of our great artists, such as that conducted by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers”, have concluded that, unsurprisingly, the real answer lies somewhere between those two polarised views. Some people are simply more talented than others, and of those people who are talented the men and women who apply time and effort to their chosen field tend to achieve greater things than those who coast.

This evaluation of talent and effort isn’t just an abstract intellectual exercise, however, as the beliefs of particular artists in relation to this issue seem to have very marked consequences for the ways in which those artists practice their craft. This can clearly be seen in relation to the modern music industry, in which the effort / inspiration debate is shaping the way in which music is created, presented and sold. The debate is also moulding the development of the music industry, whether artists fully realise this or not.

In rap music, the notion that artistic success is a direct function of effort and toil has become a dominant, broadly-accepted construct that very few artists, producers or label executives disagree with. It has become axiomatic that rappers who work hard and fully commit to a ‘life in the industry’ are more likely to become successful than those who don’t, and that having artistic talent is no substitute for some bleeding-knuckle effort. Work is valued so highly in the hip-hop community that a complex vocabulary has emerged to describe the application of effort to the craft. The recording studio has become “the lab”, rappers are no longer creating songs but “building something”, and most notably recent years have seen the characterisation of the creative and commercial process that a rapper must go through to make and sell records as “the grind”. In fact, a whole family of grind-related words has evolved; “the grind” is the day-to-day struggle of being a rapper, you can “grind” or “be on your grind” (work hard to get what you want), you can hire a “grinder” (someone who will work hard at promotion or sales on your behalf), and you can also use a “grinder” to separate your weed before smoking it. Oh no, hold on, that’s something different[1].

So many chart and underground rap songs of the last few years have talked about the grind that it has started to fall into non hip-hop usage (the New York Times recently quoted a Senatorial candidate as saying that he “has been grinding hard, trying to drum up support”). Most recently the latest single by Asher Roth is actually called “G.R.I.N.D.”[2] During the song Roth lays out a positive social message that he hopes to promote by successfully making uplifting music – and why is he confident that he will achieve this? Because “I work real hard and all for every little bit that I get”. It’s the work that results in great music, it’s the work that will lead to his success. Roth admits that this can make things difficult and tiring, and that it would easier if simply having talent was a guarantee of good fortune, as he notes that “I… I’ve been on my grind / I can only grind / for so long”. In fact, if you listen to what rappers are saying, work has become almost the only thing that’s perceived to result in record deals, the creation of hot beats and strong rhymes, and ultimately in record sales. Having good luck is said to help, but the possession of actual artistic inspiration is some way down the list of prerequisites.

In contrast, you don’t hear very many rock stars talking in a similar fashion. Occasionally a band will stress the importance of effort and time in their creative process, as anyone who has read one of the recent flood of interviews with Brooklyn group The National can attest to. However, their statements aren’t exactly the same as those made by their rap counterparts, as in the eyes of The National the work on its own didn’t make successful creation more likely. Instead, the application of effort was necessary simply because the five members of the band and their musical associates had very different musical tastes and inspirations, and it was hard to combine them all into coherent compositions. Most of the time, however, rock stars seem to ascribe to the view that they, when writing and recording music, are tapping into a pure vein of artistic creativity that exists within their souls. Sometimes it may take months for genius to strike and no amount of hard work can force it, on occasion you may strike gold on the first take and that’s that, but regardless of timelines the concept of ‘inspiration’ guides them. In the recent documentary “Stones In Exile”, Rolling Stones producer Jimmy Miller describes how the band, while recording “Exile On Main Street”, spent the vast majority of the time being unfocussed. They didn’t work hard or knuckle down, they just came and went as they pleased until, just occasionally, “inspiration struck, and Bill looked at Charlie, and then it was on”.

This antipathy to effort and reliance upon the creative muse has become such a part of the rock and roll psyche that we are now suspicious of any act who releases more than one record a year, on the grounds that producing that much material so quickly must be ‘forcing things’. The dominant ethos in rock and roll is that the avoidance of steady work is the surest way to ensure a consistent idea flow, and that placing restrictions on anything can lead to stifled creative potential. This partly explains why rock bands are obsessed with shutting themselves away for months to write, and recording in expensive studios in Malibu mansions. It’s all about putting as much distance as possible between the artists and any obligation to do anything.

Neither of these constructs, expressed in terms this strict, are a correct identification of the ideal creative and commercial process. Artists are individuals and will respond to different creative environments, and while some are suited to writing frequently others genuinely have to contemplate the songs that they are creating for months before they take shape. Undoubtedly, having a focus on these approaches can be unhelpful in certain situations – there are many rappers who would benefit from grinding slightly less and instead taking time to actually write half-decent rhymes (2009/10 Lil’ Wayne, here’s looking at you!) and some rockers would be more productive and less self-indulgent if challenged slightly more about their process. In music as anywhere else, the Gladwell maxim about needing a balance of talent and effort may well be true.

What the constructs have done, however, is served to shape the modern commercial landscape of the music industry. In the hip-hop field, volume of material produced is now perceived to be everything. Artists are flooding the market with studio albums, mixtapes and freestyles. Around this they are trying to find time to undertake waves of touring and promotion, as well as opportunities simply to “be on the street” and connect with fans simply by physical presence in their communities. All of this effort is thought to be required simply to develop or sustain a successful commercial position, and very few rappers are ever perceived to have become such big stars that they no longer need to jump through these hoops (recently, only Eminem comes to mind). And this serves a purpose, as having a constant presence raises profile and keeps an artist fresh in the mind of the customer. However, as we have said, it can be a double-edged sword that leads artists to rush out half-baked material, and can lead to the saturation of fans to the point that they become overwhelmed with output. In rock, in contrast, artists undoubtedly feel that they have more room to breathe and focus on developing high-quality material, without the same pressure to release records on tight, regular schedules. However, this makes rock acts more difficult to manage for record labels, as it is challenging to maintain interest in artists who only release a record every three years – in three years an entire generation of fans can have grown up and moved along, depriving artists of their core fans.

The upshot of all of this may be that we need a new set of directives for our artists, to maximise their commercial potential and the quality of their releases. Rappers, it’s okay to grind slightly less hard than you have been. Even God rested on Sunday, so feel free to spend one day a week sitting on your porch / diamond-encrusted throne, just musing. Honestly, we can go one day without hearing your third freestyle over “Wipe Me Down”. Rockers, get out of the hammock and put down the pina colada, your month of beach-lounging and waitress-seducing in Hawaii is not a key part of your creative process. Maybe rappers and rockers have something to learn from each other, to their mutual benefit. Just please don’t bring back rock-metal, we don’t need another Limp Bizkit…

[1] “Grinding” should also never be confused, especially in conversation, with the type of dance also known as grinding, which is hilariously described by UrbanDictionary as “A form of the most horny dancing imaginable. Guys looking for ass will grind profusely with random girls in order to persuade them to come home and get some bun action. Involves pushing the male genitalia up the [censored]”. Telling your friends that “me and my brother were grinding last night” could lead them to make some false assumptions about your lifestyle, for example.

[2] Apparently this stands for “Get Ready, It’s A New Day” – perhaps a day when Mr Roth hopes that people will talk about him for his rapping skills, and not just for how annoying “I Love College” was after a few listens

Montag Music

2010-05-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

Author: DC

Word count: 700

The modern musical world is all about perfection. Sonically, singers, bands and engineers have fallen in love with advanced studio technology and are using it to create evermore polished and note-perfect songs, and we are buying them. The charts have become dominated by songs that are as immaculately arranged and styled as Mitt Romney’s hairdo – and that’s not always a bad thing. Some bands have used Pro Tools tweaks and cutting-edge systems to create sounds that are new and exciting, and that push what bands are capable of compositionally to new levels (if further proof of this is needed, listen to the new Foals and Ratatat records).

In terms of the personalities of our pop artists, things have for the most part gone the same way. Many of our chart starts have been moulded into perfect, airbrushed human beings who seemingly feel only the purest of human emotions, the Disney take on life. Or they have gone the other way, albeit to another extreme of perfection – people who want to be seen as edgy or dangerous can’t just be flawed, they have to be perfectly imperfect. They can’t just be freaks but have to be superfreaks, they need to position themselves as girls so far off the rails that they’ve replaced their Colgate with Jack Daniels, or guys so corrupting that they can instantly make even the good girls go bad. It’s not really acceptable to just be human anymore, you have to be a Greek ideal of virginal, chaste behaviour or a Keith Richards harbinger of chaos.

As a result of this Heidi Montag airbrushing approach to humanity, it sometimes feels like there isn’t much in modern pop and rock for many of us to relate to. Most of us aren’t angels but we’re certainly not Slash either, we’re neither squeaky-Bieber-clean nor Ke$ha-disinfectant-dirty. WE get many things right and we fuck some things up, we mostly have good intentions but are sometimes vindictive, and we hope that our 20 minutes on the treadmill today will cancel out the beers and a slice that we wolfed down last night.

I think that this is why I haven’t been able to stop listening to Chamberlain Waits, the new album by The Menzingers, since my friend Dusty recommended it to me. There isn’t even a touch of the robot, of the studio polish, about this record. From start to finish it is 100% heart and 100% human, for all that entails. The protagonists of The Menzingers’ lyrics fall somewhere between angels and devils – they argue, fiercely, but out of belief and conviction rather than spite. Their arguments are frequently trivial but that doesn’t make them any less vital or worth waging; after all, what’s more important to argue about than music and bands (“we argued over which Bad Religion album was better / I thought No Control or Suffer”). They want to get things right (“Maybe one day I’ll mend your wounds / maybe then I can mend mine too”) but know that, like everyone else, they’ll have to overcome their self-destructive streak first before that will even be a possibility (“I’m gonna get me fighting fit / I’m gonna let my liver play offense”).

This sense of failure and aspiration extends to the way in which The Menzingers have crafted their record. One of the two singers that they band employs is sometimes struggling so hard to find the right key that even Auto-Tune couldn’t help him, but it doesn’t matter, it’s somehow masked by the way that he half-yelps his words, making the belief worth more than pitch-perfection. The other vocalist has a sweeter singing voice – but can’t force himself to sing perk-pop, instead choosing to brutally assess his own shortcomings via three-minute punk jams. The guitars twitch and roar and fuzz, the drums clatter and bathe the whole recording in cymbal-splash… and the whole thing is just so perfectly imperfect. The lack of smooth edges, the unwillingness of the band to use all of the technology that they can afford to buff their songs to a 21^st century sheen, is what makes Chamberlain Waits quite so wonderful. It’s the anti-Montag, and for that we should all be very grateful.

The Limits of Description

2010-04-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

Author: DC

Wordcount: 976

Progressive hardcore band Crime In Stereo have called their new album “I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone”. On one level this perfectly sums up the lyrical content of the record, which is all about relationships and the difficulty humans face in ever really knowing and understanding each other. More knowingly, however, the album title is a sly nod to the fact that CIS understand that their music is not easily pigeonholed. It’s not quite hardcore, it’s not punk and it’s not post-rock. It’s all of those things fused together, and this both makes things easier for the band (as having a unique style helps you stand out from the crowd) and harder (as standing out from the crowd often means standing alone). The music that Crime In Stereo make is inventive and original, which is a rare thing in music. Many bands lay claim to originality, some deliver, but many flatter to deceive.

Crime In Stereo haven’t always pushed the boundaries in this way. Their music has always been a step ahead of their post-hardcore brethren in its scope and intelligence, but only a step. On their early records, the roots of the band in the fertile Long Island scene of the 1990s clearly showed. Their songs sounded like an amalgam of the edgy pop-punk of the Movielife, the vocal lines of Brand New and the arcing atmospherics of GlassJaw. This referencing of peers and forebears didn’t make the music that the band made derivate, as they always added a little something different. But taken as a piece, the band were solid but not exceptional. This reputation was confirmed by the live shows that the band put on, which were always raucous affairs but often featured short sets and some uneven musicianship.

On their new record CIS have taken a leap forward and made a piece of art that, as the album title suggests, can’t easily be described using simple terms and ready references to their peers. The album is at once musically complex but simple in effect, alloying textures and sonic dazzle with clean song structures and driving focus. The song “I Am Everything I Am Not” is a perfect example of this, combining fiendishly tricksy patterned drumming and sparkling electronics with blunt-force gang vocals and a pair of simple repeated guitar lines that, in one form or another, run throughout the song. Similarly on album-opener “Queue Moderns” ghostly voices emerge from a guitar fuzz, and then the song slams into life in the style of a classical hardcore jam. Throughout the album the band throw curveballs at you, lead you down musical alleys that you don’t expect, but not in a way that feels pretentious or indirect for the sake of it. Everything feels organic, with the various song sections sympathetic and complementary to each other. Key album track “Young” is perhaps the starkest example of this, with a slow opening section with almost monastic chanted vocals suddenly exploding into frenzied wall-of-noise guitars – and even this whiplash a transition seems just right in the hands of CIS.

The same richness and sense that CIS are operating with a higher degree of skill than many other bands in the punk and hardcore scenes comes through when you read their lyrics. The majority of current bands seem to have gravitated towards lyrics that are either purely (dashboard) confessional or so opaque as to be almost impossible to parse by anyone other than the author of those lyrics. Try listening to “Daisy” by Brand New if you need proof of this. I really like that album but even after repeated listens I still have no idea what the songs are about or relate to. CIS, as scene father figures Jimmy Eat World did before them, tread a middle path, presenting a poetic take on some big themes – love, isolation, relationships and… well, police brutality – that is clear enough to understand and relate to but oblique enough to retain a real artistic force and subtlety of impact.

Now that they are touring again after something of a hiatus, the band convince even further. The dynamics of their shows are different to those of almost any other band currently touring. Hardcore bands have often used atmospheric or ultra-melodic interludes to amplify their onslaught, and poppier bands have in recent years turned to punk and hardcore sounds to add an edge to their tunes. Bands like A Day To Remember and Four Year Strong have built careers on top of exactly this sort of fusion. Frequently, however, this duality has always felt slightly bolted-together, a touch strained. This doesn’t bode well when you consider that CIS are trying to fuse together both of those two strands of modern rock, and then adding in spacey atmospherics and some grunge-esque choruses. However, based on their current performances that are managing it and then some. Their recent London show was mesmerising, with the variations in tone stunning and very moving, much more so than a hardcore show has a right to be.

I came out of that show wanting to tell you, and the friends that I go to shows with but couldn’t make it that night, what had made it so special. I wanted to take Crime In Stereo, and try to describe them to someone. I tried then, just I have tried now, during these last four paragraphs. And now, as then, I don’t feel like I have quite managed it. I have drawn out some comparisons, I have tried to pin down just what make their album and shows so special, but I haven’t succeeded. So all I will say is this: check out the new Crime In Stereo album. Go and see them live. And when you love them, pass on the message to your friends. Just don’t expect to be able to describe them to anyone.

How To Make A Great Song In America

2010-03-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

Author: DC

Word count: 1,031

Every so often a song is written that captures the spirit and mood of a particular period of time. From “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” to “Tainted Love” to “Ice Ice Baby”[1], these tunes become cultural milestones that people refer back to when trying to understand past eras and the cultural artefacts that they produced. In general musicians have found it easier to write zeitgeist-capturing songs during good times than bad, which is perhaps unsurprising when you consider that the word “anthem” means “a song (or composition) of celebration”.

Take the happy-go-lucky years between 2000 and 2007 – this span of time produced not one but two bona fide defining anthems that, even if all other songs and photos and narratives from this period ceased to exist, would give a social historian looking back from 2150 a real sense of what things were like. M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” and MGMT’s “Time To Pretend” were irresistibly bubbly powerhouses of optimism and exuberance that perfectly documented a time in which the world seemed frothier and more replete with opportunity than it had done in decades. The fact that they made relatively little lyrical sense, and that the sugar-high sort of wore off once you’d listened to the songs a dozen or so times, further enhanced their credibility as noughties anthems, because the time period didn’t really make any sense either and the good times didn’t really last.

Since the mortgage industry collapsed, the bond market burst into flames and we fell headlong into the current economic crisis, artists have failed to write a song that perfectly reflects the strange, possibly unique mood of these times. We’ve had attempts from country singers that are too true-blue and optimistic to ring true, from rappers that have been too focussed on how the recession will impair their ability to afford syrup and grills, and from soulful acoustic whiteboys that have been just awful. Now, however, as we appear to be entering the second phase of the “double-dip” downturn, we have our song.

The song is called “I Need A Dollar” by soul singer Aloe Blacc, as re-created and rapped over by an MC called Marky on a remix that he calls “Rasta Monsta”. The original is a fantastic horn-driven song that first attracted the notice of many when it was used as the theme for HBO’s New York-set drama “How To Make It In America”. Unusually for HBO the show has turned out to be a shallow disappointment, but its music directors found a real gem to play over the credits, and Marky has if anything improved on the original with his addition of some thoughtful rhymes.

The vibe that Blacc and Marky capture so well[2] is the creeping yet eventually all-consuming nature of the current slump. This recession, for all of the historical comparisons, was not started or fuelled by a single cataclysmic event, as the Great Depression was by the Wall Street Crash. In the financial world Meltdown 2009 was heralded by one microdrama after another, each resulting in a few bankruptcies, a tranche of redundancies, disasters on small scales. When they are taken together, however, the staggering cumulative impact of the microdramas becomes evident. This is how the recession has been felt by many of us, in increments, in stages so small as to be almost imperceptible at the time but crippling when taken together. First our jobs got less secure, then our credit limits came down, then our mortgage rates went up. If you were lucky, then you managed to contain the damage and keep the lights on. If you just couldn’t keep the pieces together then perhaps your utilities got cut off, or your house was repossessed, or you had to declare bankruptcy. That is how the story went, bit by bit, blow by blow.

This is exactly the tale told by Blacc and Marky. You go from having “big dreams / to make it to those bright screens”, from being so positive that “after graduation I was on my high horse”. Then the boss “says he ain’t got no work”. Next, with Marky showing a killer eye for salient, heartbreaking detail, “Wachovia collapsed, my account’s still in the negative / Verizon cut my 3G[3] / funny thing about it, I don’t find that shit hilarious”. Suddenly “life wakes your ass up out your narcolepsy” and, in the words of Marky, you are left with only two choices. You can “rob Ray to pay Paul just to buy shit”, or you can find a change cup and beg folk, telling them that you “need a dollar, a dollar, a dollar is what I need”.

The artists also nail the sense that this experience could be as long-term psychologically tough as it is short-term situationally horrific. Marky doesn’t see any quick solutions, he knows that the state is overwhelmed with demands for bailouts and aid, and he doesn’t expect a handout – instead he takes the weight on himself. He chooses not to be angry, although many are and we have some right to be, with the naïve and corrupt market makers that hastened our descent into difficulty. Instead, he is personally ashamed, muttering that “I think failure’s embarrassing”. Above all, isn’t that how many of us feel right now? Embarrassed that after so many years of relative prosperity we’re struggling again? Embarrassed that we need help, be it a dollar or many thousands of dollars, from wherever we can get it? Embarrassed that in a way we brought this on ourselves by buying houses that we couldn’t afford, and running up credit card debts that we knew we couldn’t pay off? Embarrassed that, although we inherently know that things go in cycles, we let ourselves believe that the good times would never end?

[1] I am not 100% serious about this one. However, I think you could make a strong argument that Vanilla Ice was the defining cultural figure of the 1990s. More on that another time, if the editors ever let me!

[2] From now on, to avoid confusion, I am referring to the Marky “Rasta Monsta” remix of the song

[3] After all, for the modern man is a right to proper 3G reception not up there alongside life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Dixon's Girl

2010-02-20T09:51:00.000-08:00

Author: DC

Wordcount: 1,067

My mother was born in the 1950s, grew up and grew into the 1960s, and got her first adult job in the 1970s. She used to tell me how difficult it was being a young professional woman during that time. The technical barriers that had stopped woman progressing in the workplace had been removed, there were no longer rules dictating that management had to be a boys club through-and-through… but it still was one. Ten years before women couldn’t be promoted to the top of organisations, whereas now women could be but just weren’t. Over and above the process elements of promotion and career advancement, however, women like my Ma struggled just to be female in a male-dominated environment. She found it very tough to be an individual, with women instead forced to adopt one of three roles if they were to survive and prosper:

the sex kitten. You could be provocative and sexual, using your femininity and allure as a tool to get to where you wanted to be.
the ice queen. A women could be tough and uncompromising, which would attract a lot of negative attention and allegations that you were a “bitch” but at the same time projected an air of cool professionalism
the tomboy. Some women got by because they presented themselves as “one of the boys”, willing to go along with whatever their male cronies were planning[1].

Over time, Ma noted that some of her friends and colleagues got so used to having to act one of these three roles that they actually started to become the person that they had to pretend to be. The irony of it was that exactly the same thing happened to Ma, although she hadn’t spotted it. As she tried, successfully in the end, to develop her career and take on more responsibility she adopted an icy persona, a “you can’t bullshit a bullshitter” tough-lady character that she even started to bring home with her. While she could still be warm and loving, there were moments as I got older when I felt more like an employee and less like her son.

Many of the same issues that my Ma faced when trying to pursue her career have also been very relevant for women trying to force their way to stardom in the pop and rap music worlds. They have been forced to play particular roles in order to impress talent scouts, would-be managers, record executives, and then ultimately fans – or they feel that they are forced to. Undoubtedly, however, it’s easier to succeed in music if you are willing to play the game and adopt a pre-defined persona. Interestingly, the three roles that women in business often find themselves playing are the same as those that their musical counterparts are forced to adopt. You have you sex kittens, the Lil’ Kims and Keshas and Foxy Browns, whose material seems to range from moderately sensual to downright filthy. You have your ice queens, the Lady Gagas and Rihannas, who seek to distance themselves from us mere mortals by means of fashion and attitude. And lastly your have your Katy Perry and Pink tomboys (Perry’s last album was even called “One of The Boys”) who pride themselves on acting like guys, even down to kissing girls.

That’s what makes it so amazing to hear any album by a female artist with a truly individual voice, who hasn’t felt the need to fit into a generic mould in order to succeed. On “A Badly Broken Code”, the new album by female rapper Dessa, an affiliate of the Minneapolis-based Doomtree Collective, you get character and a hugely individual presence. It’s as if Dessa has made it her mission not to be pigeonholed, to talk about all of the different and contradictory aspects of being a girl in the modern world. Dessa and her characters are all over the place and conflicted (“she’s a latter-day saint / but she’s a Saturday sinner”), and they face and make difficult choices (“the pills keep her awake / her man can’t make her happy but he helps to still the shakes”).

This complexity is reflected in the nature of the music that Dessa makes. Her beats are intricate and varied, with smoky jazzed-up sections butting up against thumping beats and r ‘n b flourishes. Similarly entangled are her lyrics, as Dessa has no place for Trina-style sex-rap or Charlie Baltimore-esque thug posturing. Her rhymes are either oblique and literary or straightforward narratives detailing the exterior and interior lives of everyday – if artistic – people who are both noble and selfish, tormented but occasionally blissfully happy. Even her stage name clashes slightly with the tales she tells, with the lady who goes by “Dessa Darling” admitting that “I once kept an angel / in a box beneath my bed”. What a darling. Describing her words does them no justice whatsoever so instead, here’s the opening verse of the song that to date might be her best work, Mineshaft II:

“15 years from tonight, you have to make a decision,

The greatest love of your life is going to call during dinner,

From the home of the girl that he’s living with now.

And the guilt, he’ll say it’s killing him,

He’s wilted in the middle,

And he knows how bad he acted,

Knows he can’t have you back but the fact is,

You can’t be happy when you’re angry,

And you’re so angry, he’s says you’ve stayed so mad,

And he heard it on the street that you moved back in with your dad,

That you’re drinking something awful, and that makes him sad”

The greatest thing about Dessa is that while she’s a woman rapper with a distinctly female voice, she realises that to be a great female artist you have to do more than simply sing about being a woman. She defines herself primarily as a person, as a human, so her subject matter is far more universal than many female artists allow theirs to be. She and her characters are actors in a bigger drama, while at the same time being particular people facing particular problems. And writing about that, letting yourself be that, may be the way to reach and touch more people than most modern artists ever get to. As Dessa says on the gorgeous, jazz-inflected Dixon’s Girl, “it’s not much, but my money’s on you”.

[1] Think Peggy Olsen in Mad Men during Season 2, when she starts drinking scotch and mocking the less fortunate girls of the office

Are You Restless?

2010-01-20T09:49:00.000-08:00

Author: DC

Word count: 1322

We’ve all had the conversation. Every person who has at some point realised that they aren’t just “into” music but are completely smitten with it has. It’s usually with someone older, but occasionally can be with someone your junior, but wise beyond their years. They tell you that you’ll grow out of “it”, “it” being your musical obsession. That as you get older and develop other worldly concerns, and take on more responsibilities, it’ll somehow come to mean less to you. That it will be able to do less for you, to be less transformative of your moods, to contribute less to your overall sense of psychic wellbeing. I have always wondered whether those people would come to be proven right, to have been talking sense based in experience. I have always hoped that those people are wrong, and never more so than now.

I don’t want to hash over how tough times are for many people at the moment, or how pressing and overwhelming the burdens of adulthood and responsibility in the modern world can be. We are all experiencing these things, or are discovering them, or are observing others go through them. However immediate or distant they may feel, we are all operating with them as the giant, foreboding backdrop behind us. We have talked in this space before about how music has been hugely consequential to some of us while we have been trying to work out how to deal with and how to survive these things, about how music can, on some level, ‘save us’ when things get really tough. We have shared how music has helped us an individuals, how it has affected each of us personally. Somehow, however, our discussion was limited because our experiences were just that – personal. They were so specific to us that it’s often hard to explain to others how much they meant to us, or to share some of the magic of the moment with people who weren’t there, and as a result our friends and families often can’t draw anything from them. Most of the time that’s enough, most of the time it is sufficient that that something has meant so much even if only to one person.

There’s just one problem – now isn’t most of the time. Now isn’t typical. These times are something else entirely. They aren’t historically unique, but for those of us who grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s they are something very different. Recent statistics suggest that rates of depression are rising, that people’s self-reported levels of satisfaction with their lives are falling, that we are losing our collective ability to turn our backs on the bad stuff and just keep moving along. This, to me, suggests that many people out there haven’t fully realised and explored the uplifting, redemptive power of music – this may be a hopelessly naïve, romanticised view of the power of art, but I genuinely believe that hearing a good song played by a great band at the right time can change our outlook on everything else that is happening in our lives. Based on what you have shared with us before, I think that some of you feel the same way, and as fans and believers in this power I think it’s time that we tried to use it as a force for good. We must begin to export our music-derived joy. We must become evangelists for the feelings and transformation that can be created by some guys[1], some Fender guitars and some drums. And maybe a piano[2].

We must each develop new ways of curing what ails our fellow men, new prescriptions and cures. Here and now I will humbly offer one idea, to get things started. Find one, or ideally several of your blue, downcast, moping friends. Give them a couple of drinks[3]. And take them to see Against Me!!![4] I have written about these guys a ton before so I will only repeat the headline facts – punk band, Floridians, folk-tinged beginnings but with an increasingly anthemic leaning, political but not in a tedious way, love/hate relationship with the traditional punk community, overall pretty fantastic. The live show that they put on is a thrilling, loud, life-affirming mood turnaround plan. During their frenetic 90-minute sets they offer a remedy for anyone with a negative outlook, a salve for the sprit that is applied in three stages:

1) Empathy. Think about it – when you’re bummed out, do you want a shiny happy person to tell you how lovely everything really is, if only you could get over yourself and experience it? No, that would just piss you off further, and convince you that your well-wisher didn’t really understand your situation. Instead you want some empathy, some indication that they get where you are coming from. So Against Me!!! Start with that, outlining commonality of experience with songs that ask questions like “are you restless like me?” and “do you share the same sense of defeat?”, as they acknowledge that hard times can make even “open minds clog up with cynicism”. They feel your frustration; they share your sense of dread.

2) Stoking the fires. Having established some common ground, Against Me!!! then remind us that we all, regardless of how worn down we may feel, have some fire left within us, some reserves of spirit and courage to draw on. That we all have the potential to do something, to change something, even if it’s only our perception and our behaviour. They stoke this fire gently, before getting to the point – that it’s pretty much a human crime not to draw on that energy, and that once you’ve drawn on it it’s a terrible waste not to use it positively. The way out isn’t to direct your energy aimlessly, it’s not about “how to fuck things up”, but about how to focus it, to harness it, to “fuck things up right”.

3) Reinforcing. Against Me!!! then really drive things home, and make sure that your gloomy cohort don’t backslide as soon as they leave your venue of choice. Just as it’s easier to swear off alcohol in a safe room full of supportive twelve-steppers than it is to resist the bottle of JD waiting for you in the lonely confines of your home, the flashing-light crowd-adulation “nothing can stop us” vibe in a rock club can induce an artificial sense of positively that can easily be eroded when you return to the wet and cold world outside. And the band realise that they can’t be with your friends every step of the way; like a good therapist they must empower so that you people can go the final, hard yards by themselves. So they preach self-empowerment (“this night is gonna end / when we’re damn well ready for it to be over”) and seek to neutralise the voices of those who would seek to bring about recidivism (“they don’t know nothing about redemption / and they don’t know nothing about recovery”).

The wonderful thing about Against Me!!! is that none of what they say is cheesy or fake in the way that a lot of ‘guidance’ is. And that’s because the songs weren’t written as self-help primers – they were written by a confused singer searching for his own answers, by a man trying to balance out the darkness that he seems around him with a realistic awareness of the power of human positivity. It just so happens that some of his answers seem relatively universal, that he can communicate some of his personal experiences in a general way, which we couldn’t.

If all of this doesn’t work, or if the temporary optimism shot in the arm only lasts a few days, then there is one simple solution – repeat. Find another band, another show, and another, and another, until the person you are taking has a magic moment of their own.

[1] Or girls!

[2] No flutes though. Sorry, prog fans.

[3] Or, for you non-drinkers, some of your favorite mood-enhancing substance. Even if that is soy milk, straight-edgers.

[4] Yes, their name really does include all of those exclamation marks. It’s not just that I’m really excited about the band. Well, I am, but you’ll have to take my word for it when I say that I’m not a three-exclamation-mark kind of dude.

The Darker Half

2009-11-03T00:24:00.000-08:00

DC, November 2009, 1,225 words

Last weekend I went up to the north of England to see two married friends of mine called Olly and Charlie, who recently moved up there to a city called Sheffield. I have written about both of them before, they are two of my best friends in the world, and something we’ve always had in common is a love of Halloween. This festival hasn’t traditionally been celebrated in England but we’ve always loved it, and have tried to ensure that whatever we are doing we celebrate it together every year. For Charlie, Halloween is doubly important as it coincides with what is for her a major religious festival. She is a very spiritual person but not one who feels comfortable with any of the major modern religions, so she pursues her own brand of neopaganism, choosing to glorify ancestors and the power of nature and the Earth. In her system, the end of October marks the festival of Samhain, or “summer’s end”. Samhain marks the passage from summer (or the “lighter half” of the year) to autumn and winter.

While I was with them, I was fortunate enough to be allowed to sit on a small ceremony that Charlie was having to mark Samhain. As part of this, Charlie asked us to write down on a piece of paper one thing that we wish to continue doing in the following part of the year, and one thing that we would like to “leave behind” as the seasons change. We then rolled the papers up and burned them in a candle flame, with the burning formally marking the transition from one stage of life to the next. This seemed to perfectly capture the sense that many of us get at this time of year, as the leaves fall from the trees and the days get darker for winter – that just as nature is changing, somehow so are we.

Given how powerful this feeling can be, it’s not surprising that many artists have chosen to incorporate it into their work. There are myriad paintings and photographs that try to capture the tipping point between the lighter and dark halves, and many songs have been written about it. Some of them are quite literal, attempting simply to capture the beautiful yet haunting quality of this particular time and the feelings that it engenders. However, others use the changing seasons as a metaphor that allows them explore issues of change in life and sentiment. There have been two examples of this in 2009, with the onset of autumn explored both by 1990s rock survivors Third Eye Blind (3EB) and spiky post-pop-punkers Taking Back Sunday (TBS). The songs are fascinating to listen to together as they capture perfectly the different ways in which we can be impacted by nature and the Earth.

3EB, in their song Summer Town, have written an elegy to times past, and to things swept away as the clock rolls forward. The central theme of the song is our frequent quest to hang onto the those times in our lives that we come to identify as perfect, or as close to perfection as we get – times that inevitably have a limited lifespan. Singer Stephan Jenkins talks fondly of an “old beach house, where we stood outside and sang out loud”, and how he “remembers the time that we drew a crowd and / I told you everything I knew in a manic rushing line”. Most of all, he wants the audience for his narration to know that “you gave me more than you took from me” – but therein is the problem. Whatever time he is recalling it is firmly in the past tense, with time having moved on since. Indeed, he records what changes have happened in detail, ranging from wistful remembrance (“Hey! Where did everybody go? / Everyone I know has blown the coast”) to desperate sadness (“’cause after Halloween / everything starts fading / I’m losing everyone / I go down like the sun”). However, Jenkins is not so self-absorbed as to assume that he’s the only one who feels this way, noting repeatedly that “you know what I mean”, and proposing a joint way forward, suggesting that “last summer is done / can we find another one? / Find another one?”.

In contrast, TBS very much pick up on the other side of the Samhain feeling, the desire to leave things in the past and move on, to put distance between yourself and difficult or troubling times. In contrast to the more reflective, nostalgic vibe of “Summer Town”, their own “Summer, Man” is a spiteful kiss-off to a season and all it brought. The specific object of the venom is never made explicit (though speculation has suggested that it could be about lead singer Adam Lazarra’s ex-wife, or the former TBS guitarist Fred “The Colour Fred” Mascherino), but that doesn’t matter – we can all identify regardless. We have all been through times or met people that we’d rather forget. “Summer, Man” seems to be trying to fast forward time rather than rewind it, to skip “June until September, three months to December”. Not only does the song express no nostalgia for the past, it actively denies that any such feeling should be reflected on a hard time, with Lazarra noting sarcastically that “let’s have a talk about the good times / oh boy, you were always giving in”. Any distance that can be put between present and past is encouraged, with Lazarra stating with a sense of relief that “the summer is over and I doubt / I doubt I’ll be seeing you around” – indeed, the past has already begun to fade from a vivid experience to a “black and white type” about which much is indistinct but the venom remains vivid.

The differing thematic content of the songs is embodied in the music as well as the lyrics. To support their narrative 3EB opted for quite a laid-back strummed tune with a campfire-singalong vibe. This low-fi sound complements the imagery of the song perfectly – you can almost hear the floorboards creaking when Stephan Jenkins songs about the “old beach house”. When taken together the music and lyrics transport you to your own version of the place that Jenkins has in his mind, and you come away knowing and understanding exactly what he went through. At the opposite end of the spectrum, TBS go hard on “Summer, Man”, which is a real turned-up-to-11 jam. The song passes in a headlong rush forward, as if the band is trying to accelerate time. The drums clatter round and over each other and guitars jab and spar, until the end of the song. Suddenly, just as things are drawing to a close, all of the instruments lock into a chugging rhythm, creating a sense that life is returning to normal after the chaos of the preceding season.

In a way, it’s nice to have another reminder that artists have the same preoccupations that we do, that they also struggle with the adjustment from the lighter half to the darker half. It’s no stretch to imagine that there are singers and songwriters, artists and directors, people of all kinds sitting in their living rooms and studies, thinking about the coming of winter and, just maybe, burning their own rolled-up papers in a Samhain flame.

He Did It All For The Tony

2009-11-01T13:43:00.000-08:00

DC, 29^th October 2009, 1,575 words including footnotes

The fact that a theatrical musical is being written about the lives and careers of Run-DMC will probably only appeal to three types of people: serious hip-hop heads, the conspiracy theorists who think that Jam Master Jay was killed by the FBI, and serious potheads. I’m not sure which of those camps I fall into, but I found this news totally fascinating. During the past few years I have been vaguely aware of the trend of turning the back catalogues of musical acts into stage shows. In London, where I live, we have been offered the chance to see “songbook shows” about Abba (“Mamma Mia”), Queen (“We Will Rock You”), Blondie (“Desperately Seeking Susan”) and many others. However, these shows all seemed aimed at an older generation of music fans, and as such didn’t hold much interest for me. Plus, by all accounts the majority of them were awful - but when I read about the Run-DMC plans my immediate reactions were “that would be awesome” and “I really think that their songs and story might work as a musical”. This got me thinking… what is it that makes a songbook show successful and satisfying? And why do some shows fail despite boasting fantastic bodies of song, while others get by despite the underlying music being inherently sketchy[1]?

After a very serious scientific investigation consisting of me chatting with friends, watching the first 10 minutes of “Mamma Mia” before being overcome with concern about the future of the human race, and pondering the aforementioned Jam Master Jay death mystery, I think I’ve come up with three broad rules. Follow these, and your songbook show will at least draw a crowd proportional in size to the popularity of the band that you base it on[2]. Fail to observe them, and your all-singing, all-dancing mash-up of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the musical stylings of Vanilla Ice will probably never make it to Broadway…

Rule 1: The group you select must actually have good songs. Obvious, but we all have a band that on a rational level we know really sucks, but are inexplicably attached to anyway. So while a Run-DMC show might work, a Cobra Starship one probably won’t. You don’t want to hire a 50-person chorus just to have them sing that weird backing vocal from “Good Girls Go Bad”.

Rule 2: The artist should have songs that vary in mood and tone. A good musical has to have different types of song if it is to work – the crowd-pleasing hands in the air numbers, the ballads, the introspective jams. With all due respect to Soulja Boy, an entire show of party jams or braggadocious bitches n’ bling tunes would get boring pretty quickly[3].

Rule 3: In an ideal world, the career of the artist or the content of their songs should provide a ready-made narrative arc for the show. So Run-DMC might work as they had such an incredible career journey. Bruce Springsteen would work, as you could easily construct an everyman character would could sing all of his songs and have them sound personal. This isn’t as absolute a rule as the others – “We Will Rock You” set the songs of Queen in an absolutely ludicrous futuristic narrative about oppression and… well, sexual conquest in space[4].

Based on these rules, we can begin to sift through all of the musical acts dwelling in the dark corners of your record collection to identify those that might be most suitable for Broadwayisation. Surprisingly, some musical heavyweights can be ruled out quite quickly:

The Rolling Stones, for example, just wouldn’t work, unless you think that people will flock to see a musical about an intrepid hero spouting off about the power of the blues for two hours, while having vaguely racist intercourse with “brown sugar” ladies. The lyrical content of their songs is just so all over the place as to be impossible to shoehorn into a coherent structure, though they certainly nail the “tonal range” criterion.
Prince would also not work, regardless of how much my friend Roni would like to protest otherwise. For a start, all of his songs are too similar in mood to really suit the format. You want to take people through towering highs and crushing lows, whereas the journey of Prince would start, proceed and end with a mood of “pleasant funkiness”. You can’t bring people to tears while a guy molests a wah-wah pedal. The other problem with Prince is that, for a crucial period in his life, he set his own music aside and instead focused on raising the profile of the bands signed to his label. This is a problem for us as budding Broadway producers, as am fairly sure that you could be charged with war crimes for forcing a paying audience to sit through Morris Day and The Time songs[5].
Poison. As much as I love these 80s metal legends, their career is just not suitable for stage translation. For it to accurately reflect their story, the actors would have to simulate sex 4,232 times a night – and as it has been proven by European Union physicists and Ross from Friends that you can’t take off tight leather trousers in less than 18 minutes, the show faces an insurmountable technical barrier[6].

Even after ruling out such luminaries, there are still many bands left that could be contenders for memorialisation in musical form. I’d love to hear your suggestions (other than you Roni – Morris Day is out. Really.), but here are some of mine to get the ball rolling:

Jay-Z. One of the great musical stories, a classic meth-to-millions tale that has all the ingredients we need. There’s a built-in audience for the show among the millions of fans who revere him as the “God MC”, and his songs capture a huge range of moods and meanings. Just think of this: after a gritty early years Act soundtracked by “Blue Magic” and “Dead Presidents II”, can you imagine how good it would feel to hear “Empire State Of Mind” or “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” marking the start of the ‘we made it’ era? The only problem with this scenario is that it would be difficult to find a performer to play Jay-Z who had the charisma, charm and energy of the man himself.
The Flaming Lips. What a show this would be, as their music is highly theatrical to start with, there’s a huge contrast between their more reflective, low-key songs (like “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots”) and the uptempo tracks, and there are semi-coherent sci-fi storylines already built into their lyrics. Again, there’s only one problem, and that is that their incendiary live shows are theatrical enough as it is, reducing the need for a stage adaptation. Plus, their giant hamster ball probably wouldn’t please the haute-coutured theatregoing crowd as it rolled over their heads.
Limp Bizkit. Imagine this with me – a moving tale following Fred Durst as he escapes his life as a humble tattoo artist in Southern Florida, eventually becoming a multi-platinum recording artist, film director and misogynist[7]. The song titles already capture the essential elements of the arc. Fred just wants “My Generation” to “Take A Look Around”, realise that society just “Eats you Alive”, fight to learn “The Truth”, join forces and get “N 2 Gether Now”, begin a revolt and “Break Stuff”, before realising that you just want to be loved as you softly weep “Behind Blue Eyes”. Most of all, however, Fred wants you to know one thing: he did it all for the nookie. The nookie. The nookie. Such things Tony Awards are made of, people.

I’m sure you agree that all of those scenarios would be far better than sitting through a performance of Mamma Mia, but are they the best we can do? What are your ideas? Emails to the usual address, remember the rules, and above all else… no Morris Day.

[1] Seriously, a two and a half hour musical entirely consisting of ABBA songs? I challenge anyone to say that they truly dig “Honey, Honey” or “When I Kissed The Teacher” from “More Abba Gold”

[2] Let’s face it, no-one is coming to see a musical about that one band who were signed to Equal Vision Records in 1999 that you really dug, but who got dropped before their second album

[3] For the Soulja Boy fan reading this: “Kiss Me Thru The Phone” does not count as an introspective song. Unless your show is entirely written from the perspective of the phone.

[4] Even the “simplified summary” of We Will Rock You begins by describing a key plot development thus: “The two heroes, Galileo and Scaramouche, discover musical instruments buried in rock, which they use to vaporise the head of the corporation (The Killer Queen), and send the Power Of Rock around the world to free the masses”. Perfectly logical, am sure.

[5] So as not to destroy a friendship, I have to stress that this view of Morris Day is that of the author alone, and not shared by his co-conspirators. Roni has frequently declared her love for Mr Day, his jheri curls and his “coked-up dance steps”.

[6] If technology ever advances to the point where this is not a problem, count me in. Who wouldn’t pay to go and see a Poison-themed show called “Lovin’ You’s A Dirty Job”?

[7] This footnote was originally going to include the lyrics to a particularly “interesting” Bizkit song about women, but there’s no way we could have published it. So instead, I leave you with this inspirational gem from the mind of the Durst: “may the bed bugs shrivel and die before they make it into your sheets to eat you alive”.

A Warped Worldview, or To Hate Or Not To Hate?

2009-09-13T10:08:00.001-07:00

DC 11/09/09

Word count: 1,373

The wonderful new Nick Hornby book "Juliet, Naked" is in many ways essential reading for music fanatics like us. While telling a brutal story about doomed relationships and the choices people make, Hornby touches on many of the crucial questions that music fans have been debating for years. For me the most vital and interesting is this: is music something that can be evaluated and rated in absolute terms (e.g. "this record is good, this is bad"), or is it really something subjective that can only be assessed in terms of the impact that it has on a particular listener at a particular moment. To put it simply, can you or I ever say that the Black Eyed Peas suck, based on our in-depth study of all things musical, or does the fact that a 15 year old girl really digs "I Gotta Feeling" invalidate our opinion?

In Hornby's book, one of the characters is a music enthusiast called Duncan. Duncan is an avid fan of a singer-songwriter called Tucker Crowe, and he believes that he has listened to Crowe's albums so many times, has studied their intricacies in so much detail, that he can definitively say that they are "good music". By extension, he believes that he can say with certainty that anyone who doesn't appreciate Crowe's work is an idiot, or has no taste. This reminded me of the furore that surrounded the choice of bands on this year's Warped Tour. Throughout the summer punk bands were criticising Warped founder Kevin Lyman for picking electro-pop bands Brokencyde and Millionaires for the tour, often resorting to stating that the young bands "just made bad music". Influential and respected scene figures like Anthony Ranieri from Bayside, rapper P.O.S. and even relative newcomers like Florida pop-punkers Set Your Goals were quick to declare that the bands "sucked", without so much as an "in my opinion" or a "compared to..." to soften their distaste.

Up until this episode, I'd always struggled to frame my views on this subject. When we are young we are trained to think that behaviour, art, performance can always be evaluated in absolute terms. This is necessary, I suppose, if children are ever to obey parents and teachers, and to be encouraged to avoid things that are corrosive to young minds. After this, I'd arrived at University and had Professors spend three years telling me that nothing should be examined in such a way, that everything was about interpretation and relative experience. However, the Warped episode and reading "Juliet, Naked" have helped clear up my views. My immediate reaction to reading Ranieri's comments were "wow, it's slightly ironic to hear a guy who has spent years asking people not to be judgmental about music and to think about things intelligently simply dismissing something as "bad" without even acknowledging the fact that Brokencyde perform to hundreds of kids a day, kids who seemed to be drawing real joy from their performance". I thought that Ranieri was falling into the Duncan trap of assuming that his years of experience of punk rock entitled him to declare what was good or not, what was punk or not, what was Warped Tour or not.

The problem with the absolutist argument, it now seems to me, is about the standard that you apply when evaluating something. To feel able to say definitively that something is "good" or "bad", you have to have a measure to use, a set of criteria that serve to separate things. In this case, people have suggested a number of indicators of the suckitude of the Warped bands, including:

- "they suck, because [Influential Person X] says so". Bullshit, plain and simple. Look, I will admit to having deep feelings of reverence for certain members of the punk community. If Brett Gurewitz or Tom Gabel or Dustin Kensrue says something, then I tend to view it in a positive light because of the integrity that I believe those people possess. However, I would never assume that everyone else feels the same way, or that the opinion of those individuals should automatically override the opinions of anyone else. So I'm sorry Mr Ranieri, but there are no such things as "scene points" in real life, and your word can't be taken as gospel.

- "they suck, because they don't play instruments". Well, plenty of great musical performers haven't played instruments (off the top of my head, almost every top-class rapper fits this bracket). And while Mr Punk Rock might not view rappers as real musicians either, I think the Jay-Z / Noel Gallagher Glastonbury fiasco put that argument to rest once and for all.

- "they suck because they don't write their own songs". I agree that there is a genius inherent in writing a song. I admire people like Ryan Adams, who can do it seemingly at will. I think that to be seen as a truly great musician, you have to write your own material. But to be a performer, and that's all that Brokencyde claim to be and aspire to be, you just have to get on a stage and kill it. You don't need to have written what you play, you just need to play the shit out of it. And, as much as you or I (for I don't love their output, and think that songs like "Freaxxx" potentially encourage date rape, but that’s a separate issue) might not like them, they have fans who think their performances are brilliant.

There are other standards that people have tried to use, but I have similar problems with all of them. Which, again got me questioning my beliefs, and I came to this conclusion: the thing that I loved most about punk rock when I was first getting into it was that, to all intents and purposes, it was unjudgemental. Punk rock said to me, as a 16 year old who didn't quite feel like he fitted in, "you are welcome here, whatever you are into". You might like hardcore, it might be thrash that gets you off, whatever, it doesn't matter. An integral part of being a subculture is about having flexible standards - as punk rock fans we are saying to newcomers "listen, the mainstream may not seem right for you and that's fine, you have the right to be into whatever you are into". In the light of that, turning around and attempting to tell people what they should or shouldn't like seems hypocritical - if you feel angry when people tell you that your band or the music you love "sucks", why do you then perpetuate that by telling other people that what they like "sucks"? Why not accept that they aren't the same as you, that your tastes may be different, and get back to doing something positive?

Ultimately, the thing that made up my mind, the thing that convinced me that Hornby is right in advocating the relativist view, was rock and roll. Last week, I watched a video of Against Me! playing at a festival in Florida a couple of years ago (you can see it here: http://nationalunderground.org/national-underground-recordings/29-against-me-the-fest-4 The second video is particularly amazing, if only for the phenomenal runthrough of "Problems" and the stage invasion at the end of "We Laugh At Danger (And Break All The Rules)”). Their performance was just wonderful, powerful and passionate, everything I love about music. And I realised, while lost in the energy of it all, that some people would hate it. Would note that Tom Gabel can't really sing and that the guitars are slightly out of tune and that a lot of their songs sound kind of the same. And you know what? I would love to debate that with them, I would love to try to convince them to see things my way - but if at they end of the day they didn't see it I would hope that they would accept that my opinion was as valid as theirs, and that we would part as friends. That's the problem with the "they just suck argument", it robs us of both the excitement of the debate and then the camaraderie of agreeing to disagree. Losing those things... well, that would just suck.

A Flight and A Crash

2009-09-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

DC 22/07/09

A Flight and A Crash

As the saying goes, sometimes bad things happen to good people. That was my immediate response to reading recent interviews in which Chino Moreno and other members of metal group Deftones discuss the car wreck that plunged their bassist Chi Cheng into a coma. The band seem like good people, who have been, as you would expect, scarred and saddened by their experience. On that personal level, this has been a tragic turn of events and clearly all sympathies should be directed to those involved.

As well as the personal issue, I think there may be a musical loss here too, which while clearly insignificant in the broader context is also a shame. The loss is this – just at the time when the band were hit with Cheng’s crash, they may have been about to push modern metal forward again.

This doesn’t mesh well with the predominant critical take on Deftones, which is that they were late-90s innovators in the hard rock field who have since settled into a boundary-respecting groove. And this is true to a point – their self-titled record did seem a little stagnant and free of new tricks. However, this view also underestimates the brilliance of their last record, the unjustly overlooked “Saturday Night Wrist”, which was packed with excitement and innovation.

“…Wrist” met the unfortunate fate that some long-gestating works of art do – it became known more in relation to the tortured process of its creation than in terms of its music. The narrative surrounding its release was that the record was the product of a band riven by personality disputes and internal conflict – and as a result of this the vast majority of reviews failed to analyse it in any depth beyond saying “holy hell, it’s amazing this disc even got made!”

That was a mistake, as “…Wrist” got closer to achieving something than almost any other hard rock record has. That something is to capture feelings of romanticism, lust, longing, eroticism and craving, within the structures of modern metal. Metal has always been a useful channel for certain emotions – anger, be it political (Rage Against The Machine) or personal (Nine Inch Nails). Aggression (take a bow, Limp Bizkit). Pure sexual lust (Motley Crue). All of these emotions are relatively easily communicated by means of crunching riffs, spiralling solos an driving drumbeats. What metal has never been good at is capturing less extreme, more heady, more complex feelings – and particularly those relating to romantic love and longing.

This was where the genius of “…Wrist” sat. It’s swirling textures and melodies, topped by the gorgeous croons and screams of Moreno, began to paint those feelings. And it did it without sacrificing heaviness – in fact, the ferocity of the delivery system was crucial to the mapping of the more conflicted parts of the heart. Every minute of this record, from Moreno’s moans on Hole In The Earth and plaintive cries of “I’ll be waving goodbye” on Xerxes to Steph Carpenter’s mating-whale guitars on Cherry Waves dripped sensuality. This was underpinned by Cheng’s flexible, keening basslines, the musical equivalent of bedroom eyes. All of this is pretty hard to pull off while also rocking a moshpit.

And that’s where the musical tragedy of all of this bites. While “…Wrist” was a brilliant record, you felt that Deftones could have taken things still further. You hoped that they would be brave enough to try, rather than turning back to the easier task of writing musical that was purely angry or heavy for heavy’s sake. And then they revealed that their 2009 album would be called “Eros”, surely a sign that the band was rising to the challenge. How could a record with a title like that not explore the finer points of love and sex?

As a result of Cheng’s crash, however, Eros has been shelved. The band made the brave choice not to release the record, as Cheng had been such an integral part of its creation that the other members didn’t feel that it was right to play the songs without him. Instead, the Deftones are writing a new record inspired by his accident. I am absolutely sure that this is the right course to take, and I look forward to the record that they do release greatly. But the fact that that record won’t be “Eros” is a minor tragedy nevertheless, set against the backdrop of a much greater one.

Unloneliness, and how it leaves us...

2009-05-09T08:06:00.000-07:00

Unloneliness, and how it leaves us…

April 2009

1,081 words

For centuries philosophers, dramatists, songwriters and chick-lit authors have tried to convince us that one of the scariest things in life is to be alone. When a person is suddenly single or relatively friendless, we worry about their ability to manage on their own, we try to suggest “coping strategies” that they can use until they are “okay with being alone”. So many works of art have been created about loneliness that you could happily watch, listen to and read nothing else for a year. What’s more, I believe that by doing so you would be able to feel, to understand what it is like to be lonely, even if in actuality you had a loving family and friends. I think artists have been able to capture extremely well the disconnection, the hopelessness, the sense of drift and distance that comes from being truly alone. They’ve even been able to sum up how hollow the advice of the more friend-blessed sounds when you aren’t in the same place – take “How To Fight Loneliness” by Wilco:

“Whatever’s going down,
Will follow you around.
That’s how you fight loneliness,
You laugh at every joke.
Drag your blanket blindly,
Fill your heart with smoke…

Just smile all the time.”

A feeling which has been explored much less than loneliness, with its alternation between the stab and the echo of emptiness, has been its opposite. The thing that, for me personally at least, is just as powerful and shocking and disrupting. The thing that leaves you feeling strange and amazed and a little nauseous - the feeling that someone, be it a friend or partner or family member, means so very much to you that you genuinely can no longer fathom how you would function in a world without them in it. It isn’t always obvious why we should come to feel this way about people – it’s not necessarily proportional to the amount of time spent with a person, nor does it have to be related to romantic feelings, and isn’t always obvious why an individual has come to have such a place in your heart and mind. Everyone has their own threshold for this feeling, with some friends telling me that they have never experienced it while others say that they have a dozen or more people about who they feel this way. The one thing you can be sure of, however, is that once you have had the moment of realisation, once you’ve come to see just how much someone means to you, you will never forget it.

Until recently, no song has ever managed to bottle that feeling as I understand it. No singer or band has brought together the strands of wonder, angst, amazement, fear, hope and confusion that can pass through you when “unloneliness”, for want of a better word, bites. Then I got sent a copy of an album called ”Mean Everything To Nothing” by an exceptional Southern band called Manchester Orchestra. It is a hugely strong record throughout, besting even their notable last disc “Like A Virgin Losing A Child”, but one song in particular made me lose my breath. Buried at track 10 is the sort-of-title track “Everything To Nothing”, and it is the unloneliness anthem I’ve been waiting for.

When we’re analysing songs for the way they address human feelings and emotions we tend to focus a lot on the lyrics, and rightly so. The music of Leonard Cohen, perhaps the foremast artist of sentiment, is unexceptional but the lyrics are almost perfect, to give one example. But in this instance that would be a mistake, as the music is as crucial as the words are. The dragged-out opening notes set the scene, referencing those moments when we sit around thinking, toying with ideas about our lives, considering our happiness and friends and situation. Then, suddenly, the moment of realisation is ushered in by escalating, chiming guitars that seem to grab something in your chest and tug mightily upwards. That feeling of “oh my god, how do I deal with this, what do I do now, but hold on, this is amazing, this is wonderful, but this is terrifying” is sketched out by a simple guitar line. The line repeats through the song, reinforced or twisted, but each time somehow becoming more powerful, more emotive.

On top of this, the effect is rounded off by the simple but hugely striking lyrics of singer Andy Hull. He paints the confusion that inevitably comes with the realisation that you are no longer your own person, that you are bound to someone, admitting that “I don’t know what to do / not anymore / not anymore”, while worrying that he somehow let his now oh-so-significant other down, stating that “I’m not complaining, I was just saying, I’m a man, I’m a lost one you see”. He searches for things to help explain what he’s feeling, talking about notes left by Grandfather and making references to biblical passages, but none of it seems to really help. Ultimately, he has to resort to some of the most simple phrases possible to make his feelings clear, adding words only to emphasise how serious he is:

He starts with “you mean everything”. An amazing thing to feel about someone but a little generic, something someone might say while breaking up with their boy/girlfriend in a coffee shop. Then “you mean everything… to me”. And suddenly it’s personal, he’s admitting something huge and difficult, and he’s opening himself up to rejection and hurt. Then “you mean everything… to nothing”. Now it’s even larger, he’s willing to state that next to you, nothing else even registers on the scale, and he means it. You are one, everything else is zero. In this case Hull is talking to his wife, but he could be referring to a friend, family member, whoever, it wouldn’t matter. Then “you mean everything… to nobody but me”. The final step – he says out loud that idea that we sometimes have in our heads, the idea that no-one else other than you understands just how great a person is, that no-one could appreciate them more.

In writing this amazing song, Manchester Orchestra may truly have figured out how to fight loneliness – just try your best to remember what your moments of unloneliness felt like, and hope that you get to experience another one sooner rather than later. Remember that someone who doesn’t mean anything to you right now, maybe even someone you’ve never met, could come to mean everything to nothing to you.

Grasping At Straws

2009-03-24T15:20:00.000-07:00

Author: DC

Words: 900

First published: October 2008

Since I started writing about music, I have been trying to pull together a column that expresses why I find songs so magical, why they mean so much to me. To use words to persuade that person sitting out there, reading this and thinking “music just doesn’t excite me” that they should keep hunting, that at some point they will find that band or song or concerto that they fall in love with. To capture how one song can make you feel positively ecstatic while another crumples you up, maybe for good.

Each and every time I try this, I fail. I can’t find words that capture the feeling, it’s like trying to describe the colour black or the feeling you get from the first sip of the perfectly poured vanilla latte. I end up writing columns that are just dozens of examples of songs or musical moments that I adore but that, for all I know, may have no effect on anyone else. And I always end up trashing the article in frustration. However, the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that I’ve been missing the point all along.

There is no overarching theory. There are no words that will get this job done. There are only those moments of magic, there are only our personal reactions, and there are only descriptions. Sure, you can pick songs about, you can theorise that key changes create wave patterns that stimulate the cochlea or that the voice of Bon Jovi is scientifically proven to be an aphrodisiac to anyone wearing stonewash denim. But fundamentally all we are left with are the moments that matter to us. So I’m going to write a little bit about some of the moments that I love, and then I need to ask something of you all – I’d love you to email me or write in with yours. One persons Mozart is anothers Phil Collins and anothers Katy Perry, everything is as valid as everything else, as long as it makes your spine tingle. We’ll put them all together, put them on the website, and in 50 years time our children will be shocked that their parents loved Cheap Trick that much. So, to get the ball rolling, here are some of the things that I love:

– The way Jay-Z spits the opening bars of “99 Problems”. My favourite intro to any song. The words are exceptional, but the best thing about this song is the tone – Jay’s voice is the perfect blend of teacher, confidant, resigned hustler and swaggering superhero. The best bit of all? The way he calls in the beat with an imperious “hit me”. It’s his way of saying “I could go on a capella all day and this song would still kill, but when this beat drops it’s all over”. Just killer.

– That little crack in Ryan Adams’ voice. The musical equivalent of the Hillary Swank moment of defeat in “Million Dollar Baby” – it gets me every time. Sometimes Mr Adams doesn’t fully sing a note, instead using a cracking, hoarse whisper which manages to communicate lust, longing, despair, fear, hope and joy all at once. When he goes for it I feel like I’m in a lift dropping two floors a second while simultaneously kissing a beautiful girl and mourning the death of my grandmother.

– The first 10 seconds of “Broadcasting” by hardcore heroes Comeback Kid. The whole song is stellar, but the opening is a pure musical adrenaline shot. The drums clatter in, the guitars roar and singer Andrew Neufeld snarls “a common threat sits in our house”. And it makes me feel like I could climb a mountain or fight Mike Tyson or achieve anything I could possibly dream of. When God works out, this is his soundtrack.

– The line “you’re a wet martini in a paper cup” from “Wasp Nest” by The National. To me the only thing harder to pin down than the magic of music is the magic of a person that you love, like or admire. We try to, from the obvious (“man, she’s got great legs”) to the poetic (“she’s like the sun streaming through the clouds on a winters day”), but for my money no-one is better at this than Matt Berninger of The National. This description is both hugely opaque and totally understandable – it makes no sense, yet you know just what he means.

– The lead guitar line in “Warbrain” by The Alkaline Trio. The lyrics are about all things dark and stormy, but you’d know that without even hearing them. The spiralling guitar line perfectly echoes the rising and falling of the wind during a storm, the utter beauty with the hidden threat, the crackle of lightening and the rumble of thunder. I once listened to this song about a dozen times in a row during a storm-swept bus ride in Scotland, and… man, that was something else.

So, there are mine. The chances are you won’t have heard them, or won’t necessarily quite understand why I love them so much. And that’s fine by me, as long as you have some moments of your own. So send them in, I’d love to read them – or if they are too personal and you don’t want to make them public then at least go find your ipod or turntable or boombox and give them a listen…

Common Existence

2009-03-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

Author: DC

Words: 1,414

First published: Election Time 2008

During the 24 hours after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America, I seemed to run into all of the politically-aware people that I know. Some are left-leaning, others fall on the right of the spectrum, and of course they all had an opinion on what had happened and they had all experienced waves and waves of emotion as the results came in. Obama supporters felt elated, relieved, proud, shocked and stunned. His opponents felt sad, wary, worried and fearful. But what struck me that day wasn’t that people had reacted strongly to the events, you expect that during every election. The thing I noticed was that people, as they processed their responses and tried to make sense of what had happened, were actually physically reaching out to each other. The Obama fans were wrapping each other in celebratory hugs, exchanging high-fives and fist bumps and handshakes. The McCainites were literally leaning on each other for support, arms around shoulders, hands resting on the curves of backs, hands ruffling hair.

The election was significant to each of the people on a personal level – they all believed in their favoured candidate, felt strongly that the world needed that man in these difficult times, and sensed that this was one of those moments upon which history pivots. But it was particularly powerful for them because it had become a communal experience, with people thousands of miles apart, people who might not normally be friends or even talk to each other, and people who would normally shy away from participating in “mass movements” all drawn together as part of something bigger. Victory or defeat weren’t things to savour or mourn alone, they had to be shared with others, oftentimes in that most direct form possible – physical human contact.

As I walked home on the night after the election, I tried to think of anything else in recent memory that had made me feel so connected to people, a part of a bigger movement, like one of the swallows who fly in a perfect “V” formation over my house each spring. And I could only think of one thing that had made me feel so wired into the world, and it wasn’t an epic event or a single shining moment – it was something that had been around me forever and was there almost all of the time. It was music.

Music utterly shapes the way in which I relate to people, and more often than not has been the thing that has made me feel bound together with others on a level that goes beyond the same-place-at-the-same-time ordinariness of things. Starting at the most basic level, music is my solution to personal shyness. I find it hard to talk to people I don’t know very well already, small talk is not my strong point, and that initial period of stumbling to find common ground kills me. And music is the way around that – simply asking someone who their favourite bands are and what music they like changes the conversation from something a bit intimidating into something fun and manageable. If the most basic communal experience is sitting around and talking to people, then music is my way in.

Music isn’t just a conversational tool either, as it has the power to offer definition to who we are and, by extension, who we are likely to bond with. As a case study, look at the much-maligned “emo” community. The mainstream media couldn’t have misinterpreted what emo stands for more. They posit that it is eroding social interaction and values by encouraging kids to dwell on their inner feelings rather than outward actions, and by eroding individuality and replacing it with Hot Topic standardisation. Somehow this is meant to result in the development of a generation incapable of true friendship, who believe that there is only one “right” way to be. In truth, it’s about precisely the opposite – it’s about people in a fractured world in which it is hard to make friends trying to make that process easier by giving an initial upfront indication of who they are. “If you have black hairdye and a Paramore t-shirt like mine, then I’m probably going to like you”. It’s about people who don’t really know themselves yet clutching onto the one thing that they are absolutely sure of – that they adore the music they listen to – and projecting that outward. They aren’t less individual just because they love something that everyone else does, because that love comes from somewhere true and pure and absolutely individual inside them. And, crucially, of all of the musical “scenes” it is by far the least elitist of all – yes, you have to have something in common with the rest of your group, be it a love of My Chemical Romance or All Time Low. But then it doesn’t matter what else you do or love, you can listen to black metal or American hardcore or even the Backstreet Boys, and it makes no difference. As long as there is something there binding you together, that’s all that counts.

Music also acts as a support system for those times when your sense of connection to the communal seems to fade, when you feel a little isolated or that what you are going through is so unique that no-one else could understand it. Having someone sing a line that connects with you and that speaks to your personal situation can restore that connection and remind you of what you are part of. In a recent interview with Spin Magazine, Thursday singer Geoff Rickly hit on exactly this when he explained that his band had called their new record Common Existence because “no matter how big the tragedy seems in your life, it's just the same thing every other person out there is going through. Even the biggest things in our lives are just very commonplace and everyday”. He’s not trying to downplay the severity of personal situations or to say that individual experience doesn’t matter; he’s just saying that you’re rarely as alone as you think you are. Sometimes, having a song remind you of that can keep you from spinning off out of orbit.

Finally, just as the election victory gave people such an immediate thrill or shock that they felt physically compelled to lay hands on each other, so can music bring us together with other people in the most immediate sense. Anyone who has been in the crowd at that moment when a concert went from being merely “good” to “absolutely transcendent” knows what I mean. Sometimes when you hear the right song at the right moment, you don’t just want to sing or dance or headbang alone. You want to grab the nearest person to you, to put your arm around them, to shout back the lines together. Sometimes we don’t just want that direct connection, we crave it.

Once again Geoff Rickly understands this, singing during the climax of Thursday’s seminal song Sugar In The Sacrament that “this is all we’ve ever known of god… fight with me, let me touch you now”. For a lot of people, that feeling they get when they listen to an amazing song, that feeling of beauty and thrilled excitement, is the closest they’ve come to a religious experience, is the thing that gives them the “First Black President” jolt of energy, is the moment at which they feel connected to everyone and everything. And it makes them want to come together with people to love or fight or have sex or talk or just to be. It has certainly had that effect on me; I remember listening to Thursday play that song at the Electric Ballroom in London, England. I had my right arm around the shoulders of Dusty, one of my very best friends since primary school. I was screaming the words back at Rickly with everything I had in me. I was staring at the fearsomely bright plain white lights above the stage, because I felt like I might explode or cry or lose it altogether if I looked down at the band tearing at their instruments onstage. Every quarter second a moving body would bounce off me, spin around me, slam into my chest, and it felt totally perfect. And when the song had ended, and the band had filed offstage, and the house lights had gone up, almost no-one left the room. People stood there, milling around, hugging total strangers.

A Metaphor, For The Insecure

2009-02-10T11:39:00.000-08:00

Author: DC

Words: 1,236

First published: Christmas 2008

So much has been written about the historic rise of Barack Obama, about his roots and development, and about his inauguration to the Presidency that I wasn't sure I wanted to address it here. Sometimes when you pore over something, when you try to capture in words that indefinable thing that makes an event or a time period feel special, you erode its magic and in trying to honor it make it less than it should be. This phenomenon seemed to come to a head at the time of Obama's inauguration - there was so much static being emitted by news radio, talk show hosts, cable networks, print journalists and bloggers that it felt impossible just to take in the event for what it was, that there were so many other voices in your head that you couldn't hear the voice of the man on the podium.

Musicians were partly responsible for Obama burnout too. So many pro-Barack jams were released during the campaign and the "President Elect" period that it was hard to keep track, and very few of those in any way captured the feelings that were sweeping the country and the electorate. They either resorted to glib declarations of historical significance, repeated so often that they somehow sounded run-of-the-mill, or unrealistic rainbows-and-unicorns declarations of how the post-Bush world was instantly going to become a modern day Garden of Eden. Sure, there were some good one-liners: I personally resorted to a mixture of laughing and sniffling the first time I heard Jay-Z declare that "my President is black / but his House is all White". But on the whole music and musicians found it difficult to encapsulate in chords or rhymes what he were experiencing in our heads and hearts.

It struck me some time later that one song had actually managed to capture what made things feel so seismic and so urgent, albeit unintentionally. A song released in November 2007, before the final stage of the Obama rocketride, perfectly evokes the feelings of November 2008. It doesn’t do this by waxing hopeful or talking about change – instead, the artist eloquently makes the case for change by describing his environment as shaped by the Presidency of George Bush, by presenting the reasons why we needed hope rather than a profile of the ultimate source of that hope. The Washington DC rapper Wale, in his song “Nike Boots”, drew out all of the themes and issues that made us desperate for change, and by listening to the song we can identify all of the reasons why we felt so elated on Election Day, all of the things that we hope to see during an Obama presidency:

The restoration of representation:

Pure and simple, many people felt either passively unrepresented or actively discriminated against during the Bush era. While Wale’s DC hood was particular in having “no Congressional reppers”, even those who had Congressmen or Congresswomen to elect often found it hard to see what good it did them. The political powerplayers seemed distant, disconnected and vainglorious, “nobody seems to care, so complacent with the victory”, no-one truly wanted to “represent the lifeless lives”. One of the things we were all hoping that the Obama administration will achieve is to restore the feeling that people are genuinely being represented, that the best interests of the majority are looked after. Wale touched on what we longed to hear from Obama when he declared that “I decree I’m forming a new alliance / oppose the ones poisoning the minds / they lying”.

The repair of social division

Societies are always complex, difficult entities that tend towards splintering and a lack of internal cohesion. It is hard to argue, however, that the Bush era didn’t see a heightening of social divisions and an increase in feelings of separation and alienation. It felt like “the love is gone with one another”, like “we ain’t right and always at our throats”, and that’s a “hard” way to live. It wears on you, and no amount of ceremony or recourse to national pride will make up for that. The result is that everyone ended up feeling tentative and worn down – “melancholy we are / although we learn to live it / pessimistic we are / carry odds like luggage”. People ended up looking inwards, focusing on keeping themselves going at the expense of others, of looking after their little worlds rather than the large one, hence Wale’s desperate plea that people come together across “PG, Riverdale, Largo, Temple Hills, Cap Heights, 124, Landover, Everywhere, Saratoga, 640, Berry Farms, 1-4, KDY, every corner.” No President, no matter how broad-based his appeal, will be able to resolve all or any of these issues straight away. But let’s be honest, we are all dreaming that in 8 years time we might be able to say that significant steps forward have been made.

An end to shameful and shameless partisan bickering

Republicans and Democrats alike used the last eight years to further their personal initiatives, to bicker and argue, and crucially to exalt the political process over and above policy achievement. They cared more about the way that the sausages were made than whether the sausages themselves tasted good. Wale perfectly captures that the mood in Washington, the “most opinionated city you can make it in”, was all sound and fury (“a lot of drama / a lot of beef”) and ultimately signified nothing. While people in his neighbourhood bought black Nike Boots because “if you ain’t wearing no color can’t nobody say nothing” the politicians hid behind their colors, appealing to died-in-the-wool Reds and Blues rather than tending to the populace as a whole. They shrugged off personal accountability, hiding behind party lines, thinking that “one can never be judged when he dress like his brothers”. Again, this will be hard to change during the Obama Presidency, as the looming battles over the Stimulus Package indicate, but if change is needed anywhere it is on Capitol Hill and State Capitals.

The return of higher ideals

Honestly, as much as we all like to pretend that we value political realism over lofty rhetoric, there is a part of everyone that wants a President to embody or reflect a little human magic. While we may grade them on ground-out results, if they can get things done while appealing to our emotional sensibilities then so much the better, and never was that more true than after four years of Bush-Cheney realistic cynicism. So having a President who is lyrical (have you heard a better description than Wale’s evocation of “A fighter / in the form of a writer / in the form of a poet”) and committed (“Lord, I’m so focused / more focused that I’ve ever been”) and appeals to the many rather than the few (“From the dealers to the kids / to the squares to the fly / one thing we are aligned with”) felt wonderful.

Most of all, as the Obama campaign realised early, we wanted an injection of hope, and energy, and a sense of possibility amid the chaos. We wanted to feel like a great country could turn itself around, could be a force for good again, could de-Cheney itself. We wanted to feel like the United States, after everything that’s happened during the last few years, could, in the words of Wale, “still walk around, flyer than the rest of ‘em”.