old music

Most of the music I've gotten with the store credit from my big unloading (net decrease so far: 140 cds!) was originally released prior to 2007.

From 2006, two albums that would have placed very highly on my list of last year's favorite music:

Broadcast - The Future Crayon
Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

While we're here, these are four more from 2006. I got them earlier this year, before the big unloading; three of them might have rated highly on last year's list, one of them unquestionably would have:

Circle - Miljard
Grizzly Bear - Yellow House
Juana Molina - Son (this is a gorgeous album; I cannot praise it highly enough)
Pere Ubu - Why I Hate Women (extremely ill-titled, but dark, menacing music; see comments here for some discussion and related links)

The rest has been reissues and older stuff:

Boredoms - Super Roots 5 & Super Roots 6 (I was really looking forward to these being available at affordable prices--back in the day, I paid a lot for Super Roots 7 & Super Roots 8, not to mention Rebore Vol. 0 and Seadrum/House of Sun--but having listened to these two once each, I'm not sure I really needed them all that much. These may come to qualify as relapses from the overall attitude governing the grand reduction in the amount of music I own.)

The Byrds - Fifth Dimension & The Notorious Byrd Brothers (I blame this guy)

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists - Hearts of Oak (excellent indie rock)

Dolly Parton - My Tennessee Mountain Home (this was mostly for Aimée, but I like it too; released in 1973, it was already Dolly's 23rd album!)

Pere Ubu - Cloudland (finally! also, I was inspired by the comments here to listen to its follow-up Worlds In Collision several times over the weekend, and Scraps was right: it's a good one)

Max Roach - Percussion Bitter Sweet (I've been meaning to get more of Roach's music; this one has Eric Dolphy on it. I just got it yesterday, and haven't yet listened to it)

Stephen Stills - Manassas (I may have mentioned this one)

Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth & Collected Works (affordable 3-cd set of, I believe, all of the band's music; so far, I've only listened to Colossal Youth, from 1980, and Simon Reynolds is right: it's pretty much perfect)

iPod rundown - 10/11/07

1. Van Dyke Parks - "All Golden": It was inevitable that I would have Van Dyke Parks represented somewhere in my collection, given my musical interests (gushing praise from Davids Thomas and Grubbs being my specific point of entry, not so much the Brian Wilson connection). I have Song Cycle, which I believe is the best known record. Dunno. I probably have yet to give it the time it deserves, but it doesn't mean a whole lot to me. Strikes me as carnivalesque, corny.

2. (Smog) - "Natural Decline": A good, slow one from the underrated Rain on Lens. The lines that I caught from the end:

The mind is always working
Out ways to see
The things I shouldn't see
And have the things I shouldn't have
I see the night sky as a jewelry store window
And my mind is half a brick

3. Blaine L. Reininger - "Crash": Instrumental, from an album called Night Air. I must've downloaded it, though I have no idea where from. . . it's not bad, sounding perfectly ok in the middle of everything else. Don't know anything about the artist.

4. Pere Ubu - "Rhapsody in Pink": From Art of Walking. Possibly the least good Pere Ubu album, but still not without interest (actually, the later Worlds In Collision and Story of My Life are probably more likely candidates for least good Ubu albums--I honestly routinely forget that those two even exist, which is not a good sign for such a consistently compelling band). This track is a little demented: David Thomas warbling about being "a big pink ball at the bottom of the sea" where "all the fish came and looked at me" over repeated piano figure, slowly strummed guitar (Mayo Thompson) buried in the mix, gurgling and swirling sound effects. . .

5. Kristin Hersh - "San Francisco": Sky Motel, 1999, right in the middle of my full-blown obsession with all things Hersh. But have I gone off Hersh? I don't know. Probably not, but I haven't wanted to listen to her solo music in a while; haven't even bought the new one yet. The album seemed to fade from my memory pretty quickly. Hersh's voice is processed on this song, which you don't usually hear. The song is pleasant, short, drifts by…. Difficult to nail down.

6. Lou Reed - "The Blue Mask": I love the Velvet Underground, but oddly, I haven't paid much attention to Reed's solo albums. I think I bought The Blue Mask a few years ago, primarily because I'd been reading about guitarist Robert Quine. The song is harder-edged than most of the solo Reed I've heard, which again is surprisingly little (and I've not ever listened to Metal Machine Music).

7. Les Savy Fav - "Obsessed with the Excess": This is one of the singles from the Inches collection. I'm always reading that Les Savy Fav are one of those bands that you simply must catch live, that their live show is so amazing, so energetic, so insane, that their records don't do them any justice. Maybe. As it is, some of their albums have seemed sort of stiff (such as Go Forth), but then the songs collected here never did. Even so, I'm not likely to see them live at this point (are they even still around?). This song is representive enough of their raucous post-Fugazi sound (which is really the best you're going to get from me, sorry).

8. The Beta Band - "Inner Meet Me": The Three EPs was one of the first cds that Pitchfork clued me onto, back when the site was more attitude and enthusiasm than actual good music writing (with exceptions), but took itself less seriously. It's a good cd, though it's faded in my estimation over the years. Sort of Beatley classic rock stuff mixed with electronica and dance. This song achieves that incantation-like effect that a lot of their best songs do, where midway through it feels as if the song has been going on for hours and could continue for hours more, but you don't mind.

9. Basehead - "Shouldna Dunnit": Another mellow, loping, and extremely short track from Not In Kansas Anymore, but this one at least has rapping on it.

10. Califone - "Bottles and Bones (Shades and Sympathy)": I rather like Califone. Steeped in the blues (pleasing the classic rock fan in me), and with an experimental bent that gets them labeled "post-rock". Sort of a kitchen-sink, Captain Beefheart aesthetic (without the good Captain's Howlin' Wolf kind of voice). This track is fairly typical and appears on Roomsound.

11. Charalambides - "Magnolia": Unknown Spin. Damn, the shuffle loves this band. . . their early stuff (heard by me on the Our Bed Is Green reissue) was more compressed--bluesy stabs of guitar and organ. Here the guitar lines are longer, more angular, as they wind around each other (it sounds like two guitars). Just shy of the four minute mark, Christina Carter's (Wikipedia tells me she is now known as Christina Madonia) wordless vocals come in, snaking along, in and around the guitars, for the rest of the track's 9+ minutes. . . Quite nice.

12. McLusky - "She Will Only Bring You Happiness": Mclusky was a somewhat short-lived, deeply silly, kick-ass no-frills rock band from Cardiff. The song is from The Difference Between You and Me Is That I'm Not on Fire, is very catchy, features lyrics like "Note to invading aliens, avoid this town, like this town avoided us", and is notable for its closing "Our old singer is a sex criminal" round. Classy.

13. Latin Playboys - "New Zandu": I like Los Lobos just fine, but I don't think I enjoy any one of their albums as much as I do the first Latin Playboys cd. A side project with producers Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake. I recently read a complaint that the album sounds more like song fragments than fully fleshed-out songs. I don't mind.

14. David Thomas & the Pedestrians - "Confuse Did": The Sound of Sand and Other Songs of the Pedestrians. Wow. I know I have a lot of David Thomas on this thing, but this is ridiculous. Richard Thompson played guitar on this album.

15. Paul Bley - "Seven": Homage to Carla. I've talked about Bley before and his amazing ability to create spontaneous melodies on the fly. Of course, here he's interpreting a Carla Bley song, so it's not quite on evidence; I am otherwise unfamiliar with it. All I can say is that Bley's performance is beautiful.

Talking Music

Brian Morton on his colleague and Penguin Guide to Jazz co-author Richard Cook, who recently died. Morton's heartfelt piece reminds me that a lot of jazz musicians have died this year. Max Roach, Andrew Hill, Alice Coltrane, Art Davis, Paul Rutherford, Joe Zawinal. To name just the few that come immediately to mind. RIP.

In his article, Morton mentions that he wishes he'd been able to talk with Cook about the recently discovered tapes of the Charles Mingus Sextet at Cornell, a set which he says "strikingly repositions Mingus’s discography and completely changes [his] views about that particular group". Marcello Carlin at The Church of Me wrote an excellent post about that very set (link via Destination: OUT). Other notable Church of Me posts from the last couple of months include this one on Ornette Coleman and this one on the recent Cecil Taylor/Anthony Braxton gig that excited much of the online jazz community.

Greg Tate on "Black Jazz in the Digital Age" (link via be.jazz). A snippet:

The problem with most jazz-hiphop hybrids to date is they proceed as if that riddle can be resolved by beats and technology when really the most remarkable, memorable, dramatic musical events in hiphop are the ones which derive from the form's most human elements, its mighty mouthed “pearls and gems of wisdom” dropping MCs and its superhuman beatboxers, like the one and only Rahzel who can somehow make the back of his Afro-Tuvan throat sound like two squabbling turntables and a light saber battle between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker at the same time. What would happen, I've wondered, if Rahzel was given, say, Trane's Meditations to extrapolate upon or Sun Ra's Atlantis: sounds like we'd never heard in our life, no doubt, at least not from the body of one human being. But in what context today would such an experimental collaborative foray between Black avant-gardes take place—on whose watch and under whose willpower?

Mark Richardson has another of his consistently excellent "Resonant Frequency" columns at Pitchfork, this time on LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" and John Cale's cover of it (which I was previously unaware of and now must hear). Richardson is one of my favorite Pitchfork writers, and "All My Friends" is my favorite new song of this year. A good combination.

And, finally, Brandon Soderberg delves into the question of MIA and exploitation and politics, in "Notes on Otherness".

Update: As I was deciding on music to listen to while preparing for a friend's wedding this weekend, my gaze fell on the row of Pere Ubu cds, and I was reminded of Carl Wilson's thoughtful post from earlier this week after he caught Ubu live in Toronto. Frontman David Thomas seemed off, "didn't seem to want to be there", wasn't quite giving the audience the "series of orgasmic experiences" that are his goal. He himself made the latter point, and, Wilson thought, seemed to acknowledge that something was wrong. Others have been saying similar things about other shows. Wilson concludes:

Whether it was an off night or Thomas is having an off year, I trust that this is a transitional point, that he'll rediscover that sense of purpose for which, as he sings in "Dark," he's "agreed to pay the price." But some nights you see how high that price can be - when you come across a man who seemed to be born an immovable force, suddenly seeming eroded, a mountain worn down by rain.

I hope so. As much as I love Pere Ubu, I still have been unable to experience them live.

Speaking of Carl Wilson, in his post immediately preceding the one on Ubu, he announces that he has delivered his book to the people who publish the 33 1/3 series of books about individual classic (or not so classic) albums. These books have been talked about a lot, but very few of them interest me, mainly because I don't particularly care to read about individual albums at length. Oddly, though, Wilson's book does interest me. It's about Céline Dion, a singer that I strongly dislike, and who is generally critically reviled. And yet she's also immensely popular. Why is that? It always seems so easy to simply dismiss the tastes of others. From the Amazon description of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste: "This book documents Carl Wilson's brave and unprecedented year-long quest to find his inner Céline Dion fan, and explores how we define ourselves in the light of what we call good and bad, what we love and what we hate." "Brave" seems a bit excessive, but maybe not. Anyway, I am fascinated about why we like the things we do, what informs our critical judgments and helps create our desires, not to mention the old questions about authenticity. I am definitely curious about this book. Read an excerpt here.

iPod rundown - 09/27/07

I haven't done one of these in a while, in part because I'd sort of painted myself into a corner with the length of my writeups and didn't have the time for that. So I expect these to be shorter, but, hey, maybe that means they'll happen more often. The self-imposed rules: note the first fifteen songs that come up when I listen to my iPod on shuffle at work in the morning; write about them. I've settled on Thursdays as the day of the week to do this.

1. Mr. Lif - "Collapse": So-called underground, "indie" rapper (or, groan, "undie"). Def Jux. Given my former tendency to assume that the mainstream--in any genre--was not worth paying any attention to at all, I had had high hopes for the Def Jux crew, but I've been generally disappointed. Mr. Lif is no exception. Some of his songs are pretty cool, but I tend to be put off by the timbre of his voice. This one gets better as it goes along.

2. DJ Spooky - "Variation Cybernetique: Rhythmic Pataphysic": How's that for a song title? I first heard of Spooky around the time DJ Shadow was getting big. I bought a random cd of his expecting it to be something like the noisy, hip-hop-ish Riddim Warfare, but it ended up being more of a musique concrète urban soundscape sort of thing. It wasn't what I was looking for at the time, and I eventually got rid of it (I don't remember the title). Later, he did Optometry as part of the Matthew Shipp-curated Blue Series on Thirsty Ear, with contributions from Shipp, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Joe McPhee, and numerous others. I've been up and down about this album (it was on the chopping block last year), but it has enough on it of interest for me to keep. This short track features Daniel Bernard Roumain on violin and is nice and shimmery.

3. The Unicorns - "Ghost Mountain": I loved Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? Loved the ramshackle, half-formed pop songs, the crunchy guitar sound and largely non-sensical lyrics, the sense the songs gave that they were barely holding together. Listened to it incessantly for about a year, not much in the last couple. They seem to be obsessed with ghosts.

4. Scott Walker - "Cockfighter": Very dramatic. I still need to spend some quality time with the two Walker cds I have, and work is oddly not the best place for that kind of thing. This song is interesting--begins with some metallic percussion before settling into its groove--but drifts by without my really being able to get a handle on it. From Tilt.

5. The Flatlanders - "The Stars in my life": More a Legend Than a Band is one of my favorite albums of all time. Great country music.

6. Liz Phair - "Help Me Mary": Exile in Guyville is really the only Liz Phair album I like, and even it I don't like that much. I've always thought it was good, not great, but with a few fantastic songs (like "Divorce Song"). This one's ok. I've always thought it was sort of creepy how obsessed certain male listeners were with Phair, given the sexually explicit lyrics, and I'd tended to think that her popularity was mainly with that crowd (boy wannabe critics). But that was before I met Aimée and saw how much she and her girlfriends (who are all six or seven years younger than I am) love Phair and especially Exile in Guyville. (Incidentally, I have no opinion on the controversial self-titled cd; since I'd already lost interest by the time it came out, I never bothered to listen to it, though I was a little curious when I became aware that it had serious defenders in the "poptimist" crowd.)

7. Mandy Barnett - "Funny, Familiar, Forgotten Feelings": I bought Barnett's I've Got a Right to Cry cd several years ago, partly because she has a pretty voice and sounds like Patsy Cline. The album is not bad, but not thrilling. Not really in line with mainstream country, which is usually fine by me. Never got a lot of play. I've given it to my father as part of the purge.

8. The Mountain Goats - "You or Your Memory": The first track on The Sunset Tree. I love the Mountain Goats, of course, but I did not immediately like this song. It's grown on me.

9. Pixies - "Rock Music": I never feel like listening to a Pixies album anymore, but damn their songs sound good when they come up like this, like the great pop songs they are. From Bossanova.

10. Neutral Milk Hotel - "Untitled": This is an instrumental version of one of the main themes, I think, from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I've never been able to hear what it is that makes everyone go apeshit over them. Can anyone explain to me why I should care?

11. Wayne Shorter - "Chief Crazy Horse": I've been enjoying listening to a lot of Shorter's music lately--I have a clutch of the Blue Notes. This is from Adam's Apple; I think my favorites are Etc. and The All Seeing Eye.

12. Sly & the Family Stone - "Dance to the Music": There's no doubting the historical importance of this group, but I've never been able to love them. All I have is the single-disc Anthology. It's interesting: when it comes to rock or pop from the 1960s or 1970s, I tend to have full albums and discographies from white artists, and compilations from black artists. I should probably explore the reasons for that. It makes me more than a little uncomfortable. No doubt there are several complex socio-cultural underlying reasons.

13. Basehead - "Hoes on Tour Deal Drie": Not in Kansas Anymore. One of those super-short (36 seconds) between song bridges. I inherited this rap album from a friend who was getting rid of a lot of stuff before leaving the country. It's pretty good; has a loping, drugged out feel.

14. David Thomas & Two Pale Boys - "Planet of Fools": I think David Thomas' albums with Two Pale Boys have been a lot more interesting than the recent Pere Ubu releases. This is from Erehwon and features the group's standard accordian/guitar/trumpet instrumentation.

15. Pet Shop Boys - "It's Alright": There are, what?, eighteen songs on Discography, and I have more than 11,000 songs on my iPod, and yet the Pet Shop Boys keep coming up on these things. Typically chilly disco, not bad, not great.


Bonus rundown from last week (so much for shorter, eh?):

1. Jackie-O Motherfucker - "777 (Tombstone Massive)": I'd like to be able to describe this song, probably the best track on Change, but I don't think I can, not without spending a lot of time listening to it over and over (which I'm not against, but it won't happen just for this post). JOMF seem to be able to organically combine most of my musical interests in one place: blues, Appalachian folk, skronky free jazz, electronics, drone, and post-rock come together in a glorious clamor. Change is not as good as Fig. 5 or Liberation, but it's still pretty damn good. Slightly more conventional, heavier on the blues.

2. Mission of Burma - "That's When I Reach for my Revolver": Perhaps the best known Mission of Burma song. I love the group, but this song does not excite me. Is it wrong that I heard the Moby version first?

3. James Brown - "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag": What, I'm supposed to have something original to say about this song? It's always been one of my favorites of Brown's singles from the 1960s.

4. Jack Rose - "Black Pearls": Rose is in the group Pelt, which draws heavily from folk and raga, often in the service of the drone. This is virtuosic solo acoustic guitar from Two Originals...

5. Nick Drake - "From the Morning": Pleasant. Pink Moon.

6. Pixies - "All over the World": Another one from Bossanova.

7. Michaela Melian "Brautlied [edit]": A song from one of those Wire magazine comps. Bells, chugging strings; don't know much about it, but I like it.

8. Gastr del Sol - "Thos. Dudley Ah! Old Must Dye": Crookt, Crackt, or Fly. Prickly acoustic guitar fragment with David Grubb's customary crisp, clear, if not mannered vocals, and sound effects. One of my favorite groups.

9. Chris Bell - "You and Your Sister": Bell was in Big Star. I have this song from one of those Oxford American samplers. A nice enough pop ballad.

10. David Thomas & Two Pale Boys - "Numbers Man": More Thomas and Two Pale Boys, this time from 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man's Chest; harder rocking than most of this group's music.

11. Pixies - "Where is my Mind?": Again with the Pixies. Surfer Rosa.

12. Supersilent - "5.2": Glacial. Lovely.

13. Smog - "Everything You Touch Becomes a Crutch": From the great, early album, The Doctor Came at Dawn. The song is short, with acoustic guitar and piano backing. That can be said about many Smog songs, so it basically tells you nothing; sorry about that.

14. Dntel - "Last Songs": Electronic pop. I bought Life is Full of Possibilities because I'd been listening to Death Cab For Cutie a lot and front-band Ben Gibbard's appearance on the album was hyped. By now, a few years on, I have very little interest in the increasingly boring Death Cab (I've discarded most of what I had), didn't even really like that Postal Service record that everyone loved (I've grown to hate Gibbard's voice), but this album gets better and better.

15. Spontaneous Music Ensemble - "Oliv 1": I bought the classic Karyobin while on a trip in London (actually at a Derek Bailey gig in Stoke Newington). I like this (1969) incarnation of the group better. This track is long (19 minutes), with a folky vibe that I find appealing. I downloaded the song from Destination: OUT. Of all the records they've showcased on their site, this is among the handful of albums I'd most like to track down.

iPod rundown - 03/01/07

1. Paul Bley - "Ida Lupino": I've talked about Bley before. This track is gorgeous, one of my favorite jazz recordings of all time, from the classic Open, To Love. I have two other Bley cds that also feature versions of this Carla Bley composition: Closer, released on ESP, and Ramblin', on BYG Actuel. Both of those versions are shorter and faster than this one. Here, you can almost hear Bley thinking as he improvises.

2. Pere Ubu - "A Day Such as This": Song of the Bailing Man was Pere Ubu's fifth album, the last of the original run (the "historical" era, as David Thomas puts it). Gone are the Chuck Berry riffs of guitarist Tom Herman, replaced by the more angular work of the Red Krayola's Mayo Thompson. And for this album only, Anton Fier appears on drums and other percussion. At more than 7 minutes, this song is unusually long for Ubu. It's a mid-tempo track, with a repeating percussion cycle for most of the song, and marimba. Halfway through, it speeds up, almost rocks, but not quite, before returning to the pattern set by the beginning.

3. Matmos - "Rag for William Burroughs": The longest track (13+ minutes) from my favorite album of last year and Matmos' best. It opens with some pleasant, melodic piano (backed by interesting electronics), interrupted at 1:55 by the sound of a gunshot, followed by keys opening a door, and the sound of a typewriter (backed by an insistent buzzing), then two typewriters. The typewriters devolve into a clicking rhythm. Then at the 4:15 (or so) mark begins 7 minutes of a very entertaining electronic rag. Very cool.

4. Charalambides - "I Don't Know What To Sing": This track is just over a minute long, and there's not much I can say about it. Some fuzzy guitar, voice. In general, I like Charalambides' brand of Texas psychedelic music, but this song wouldn't tell you much about what they do. It's more of sketch, really. From the reissue of Our Bed Is Green.

5. Pere Ubu - "Big Ed's Used Farms": Oddly, this is also from Song of the Bailing Man. It's a faster song, and half as long. David Thomas' frenetic vocals are more in evidence here.

6. Van Der Graaf Generator - "My Room (Waiting for Wonderland)": It was Simon Reynolds' book, Rip It Up and Start Again, that led me to Van Der Graaf Generator (John Lydon was apparently a big fan), a group that had previously only been on the periphery of my awareness. I have so far picked up one album, Still Life. Peter Hammill's dramatic vocals take a little getting used to, and I'm still getting used to them (sort of like Scott Walker, for me, in this respect). This particular song is lovely and mellow (and also more than 7 minutes long). Mostly keyboards, with a beautiful sax throughout.

7. Bob Dylan - "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts": Blood on the Tracks is one of my favorite Dylan albums (we're always going out on a limb here at The Existence Machine), but for years I took little notice of this song. Lately I've come to like it, too, even if I couldn't say with confidence what it's about. Some nice local images though.

8. The Go-Betweens - "The House That Jack Kerouac Built": Years ago I bought two Go-Betweens albums (Spring Hill Fair and Tallulah) after reading about them in one of those music guide books, but I didn't give them fair listens until recently, partly inspired by this Parlando post. I'm still absorbing the albums, but I like them. Catchy, literate, guitar pop.

9. Uncle Dave Macon - "Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train": Perhaps like a lot of people, I bought the cd reissue of the famous Anthology of American Folk Music, assembled by Harry Smith, expecting it to be interesting more for historical purposes than for listening pleasure. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I like a lot of the music for its own sake. The original set contained three volumes, but Smith had apparently intended for there to be a fourth, and even had a songlist ready for one. John Fahey's Revenant label finally released it a few years ago as Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 4. It includes this Uncle Dave Macon song. Macon is one of my favorite artists on these anthologies (along with the Carter Family and Dock Boggs, among others). A lot of the songs featured touched on topics of the day (the Titanic, the Mississippi flood of 1927, definitely life in the Great Depression, etc.) but some, such as Macon's, are more explicitly political. A sample lyric: "some lay it all on parties, some lay it on others you see, but now that you can plainly see what happened to Tennessee/for the engineer pulled the throttle, conductor rang the bell, the brakeman hollered 'all aboard' and the banks all went to hell". I wouldn't mind finding a collection of Macon's music.

10. Fiona Apple - "Please Please Please": A fine song from Extraordinary Machine, an excellent pop album.

11. June of 44 - "Take it with a Grain of Salt": June of 44 was already more or less dead by the time I found them (one day I'll write about how I ended up sifting through the wreckage of various kinds of already-happened music), and I guess the indie kids have moved on from this kind of thing, but I like it. Ascetically recorded post-Slint math-rock (wheeee!), complete with dramatic yet barely decipherable spoken vocals. I described them earlier as a "music of possibility". I think I meant that they seemed transitional, like they and their ilk were on their way to some future kind of rock, but which never quite happened. Which sounds semi-dismissive, like I don't get actual pleasure from listening to them. But I do. This song is on their first album, Engine Takes to Water.

12. Pavement - "Summer Babe (Winter Version)": Now that I've finally listened to the Fall, I can hear why Pavement got compared to them, especially circa Slanted & Enchanted. This is the first song from that album, an album that continues to get better every time I hear it. Malkmus has always reminded me of Lou Reed on this song.

13. Radiohead - "Motion Picture Soundtrack": This is the quiet closing track on Kid A. By now, after some of the dust has settled, it seems clear to me that Kid A and especially Amnesiac are far and away the best of Radiohead's albums. OK Computer, which I played constantly for years, and loved, now sounds quaint to my ears, and I never got into The Bends. The debut Pablo Honey was always sort of crap, "Creep" aside, and I've had the hardest time giving a fig about their more recent Hail to the Thief.

14. Fleetwood Mac - "Not That Funny": A Lindsey Buckingham song from Tusk. Tusk was famously underrated at the time, but it has since become more recognized for what it is, an excellent and diverse collection of pop songs. Fleetwood Mac's White Album. Inspired, I guess, by the energy of punk, Lindsey's songs are all short and seemingly more minimal than his contributions to either Fleetwood Mac or Rumours.

15. Einsturzende Neubauten - "Schwindel": Haus der Lüge is the only Neubauten record I have; I like it, but haven't made the effort to track down any of their other numerous albums. This track is fairly typical of the album: lots of clanging metal, occasional German vocals.

iPod rundowns - 02/15/07 & 02/16/07

In an effort to write more about what I'm reading and listening to, I'm going to make the iPod shuffle rundown a semi-regular feature. I was going to do this yesterday but, other than noting the songs as they came up yesterday morning, didn't have time to. So today you get a bonus: I'm going to give you the first 15 songs I heard both yesterday and today. I'm sure you're all very excited.

Yesterday's first 15:
I have more than 10,000 songs on my iPod. With such a number, I always find it interesting where the shuffle appears to fixate on any given day. One day last week, eight of the first 50 songs I heard were by Sonic Youth. Yesterday, it started out heavy on the country.

1. Merle Haggard - "California Blues (Blue Yodel #4)": I have the great Down Every Road 4-cd box, though I find it hard to listen to any given disc straight through. Love it when one of the songs comes up on shuffle though. . .

2. Palace - "Give Me Children": Arise Therefore may be my favorite Will Oldham record, if it's not I See a Darkness.

3. Signal - "Index Area": 14 minutes of electronic music from the lone Mort aux Vaches comp I have. It would probably make for better reading if I could remember a thing about it right now. I'm sure it must have been repetitious.

4. Annie - "Chewing Gum": Appropriately titled sugary pop song; I like "Heartbeat" better.

5. Randy Newman - "Have You Seen My Baby?": I don't have nearly enough Randy Newman. This is a great one from 1970's 12 Songs. I also have the Flamin' Groovies version, which is pretty cool, too.

6. Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson - "Good Hearted Woman"
7. Dolly Parton - "Do I Ever Cross Your Mind":

Two albums that I got to know very well when I was like 13 or 14 were Waylon Jennings' and Dolly Parton's Greatest Hits. My Dad liked country. He had these on tape, and we listened to them constantly when we were with him (as well as, um, the Eagles). I've always liked Waylon Jennings' voice, and his duets with Willie Nelson were great. This one addresses the old problem of the "good hearted woman lovin' a good-timin' man". Of course, all of his songs seemed to be about being, or having been, an outlaw or roughneck or cowboy or some such trouble. Seems pretty silly these days, but, notwithstanding that period of time in which I pretended that I was too cool to admit I liked country music, I've always loved those songs. I liked when we listened to Dolly Parton, too, but it took me longer to come back to an appreciation of her. "Islands in the Stream" is hard to forgive. Aimée is the big Dolly fan in the house; I think the last song played at our wedding reception was, by her request, "9 to 5".

8. Beck - "The New Pollution": Don't really care about Beck anymore, but I still like Odelay.

9. Syd Barrett - "Long Gone": I mentioned liking post-Barrett Pink Floyd better, but I do like the earlier Barrett-led stuff. This is, of course, from the solo album, The Madcap Laughs, which I've had for a while, but haven't spent much time with. People swear by it.

10. The J. Geils Band - "Freeze Frame": Ha! I have this on here because I was making a mix-cd of 80s pop hits; it may be sort of terrible, but fuck it, I've always liked this song. Somehow, I can still remember the first time I ever heard it (I was eleven).

11. Herbert - "Harmonize": A lovely song from one of my favorite albums from last year.

12. Ghostface Killah - "Run": Yes! Evidence that I do indeed listen to rap! This song features Jadakiss, and is from The Pretty Toney Album.

13. Midnight Oil - "Forgotten Years": I don't care much for Midnight Oil. I have the 20,000 Watts R.S.L. greatest hits collection, which is actually more than I need. But it so happens that this is one of my favorite songs of theirs.

14. The Rapture - "Alabama Sunshine": I was looking the other direction when all the indie kids realized it was ok to dance again and went batshit crazy for the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers" and Echoes. That said, it's a decent album. This song is from the second DFA compilation, and I like it just fine.

15. The Velvet Underground - "Sunday Morning": The first song on The Velvet Underground & Nico. Given all the noise and dissonance on this record, it's occasionally a surprise to notice the quieter moments of sheer beauty.


Today's first 15:
Contra Dial "M" for Musicology, I have a fair amount of music on my iPod that I can't quite say I like, at least not yet. My first instinct was to load it up with albums that had lain dormant in my collection. Plus, there are all of the cds that come with various issues of The Wire. I loaded them all, and have been grading the tracks and removing the ones that I can't stand. And then there are exploratory downloads. Etc.

1. Dizzee Rascal - "Vexed": I have both Dizzee cds and the first Run the Road comp, but I guess grime is dead, innit? That's ok; if so, it left some cool music behind. This is from Dizzee's Boy In Da Corner. At times Dizzee's distinctive (and attractive) flow is a distraction from the music, which seems to be made up of shards of electronic keyboards (whatever that means--I'd no doubt do better writing these while listening to the songs).

2. Voxtrot - "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives": Downloaded this song from some blog at the end of last year, I think. Not sure about it. Generic indie rock.

3. Scarface - "In Between Us": Scarface's The Fix is a monster of a rap album, one of my favorites ever, I think. Like much of the album, this song has a bluesy menace to it. I will not dig myself a hole with an attempt to define it any further. Nas guests.

4. David Thomas & the Pedestrians - "Semaphore": A delightfully odd song from the second David Thomas "solo" album, Variations on a Theme (featuring, among others, Richard Thompson, Lindsay Cooper, and Chris Cutler).

5. Billy Bragg - "Upfield": Blah. I love Bragg's collaborations with Wilco, the Mermaid Avenue albums of previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics, but I'd never listened to Bragg's solo stuff. Last year I borrowed his 2-cd Must I Paint You a Picture compilation from a friend. I didn't listen to it straight through, instead just dumping the whole lot onto the iPod, letting them come up randomly. I haven't been impressed. I'm usually annoyed when his songs come up. This one is no different.

6. The Constantines - "Goodbye Baby & Amen": This band got tagged with the odd "Fugazi meets Springsteen" label. Ignore that. They're just a damn solid rock band. This song is one of the quieter ones from the excellent Shine a Light.

7. Maria Castro - "Postglacial Rebound": Some of my favorite Wire-sampler cds are in the Exploratory Music from Portugal series. This particular track was on the 2004 sampler. All electronic blips and static, and somehow soothing.

8. BR5-49 - "Even if it's Wrong": Entertaining trad country; here and there sounding a little like Waylon Jennings, then a little like Hank Williams.

9. Bob Dylan - "Seven Curses": If you're a Dylan fan at all, the 3-cd first Bootleg Series release is absolutely essential. This is one of my favorite songs from the set; it tells the same basic story as Zep's "Gallows Pole". In this version, a woman comes to town to pay off the hanging judge in order to save her father; neither gold nor silver will do, and he demands her as payment; she pays the price, but he hangs her father anyway. Curses ensue.

10. US Maple - "Babe": Guttural, indecipherable vocals; two guitarists who sound like they've walked into different songs; the drummer laying down an off-kilter groove. . . U.S. Maple has a wonderful lurching quality that I find tremendously appealing. Their deconstruction of rock is different than, say, Deerhoof's. Deerhoof seem to play the basic hooks in their songs from every possible angle until they're done. U.S. Maple plays rock music like it's falling apart and they can't be bothered to make it right. If any of this sounds interesting, I recommend experiencing them live. "Babe" is from what I think is their best album, Acre Thrills.

11. Ghostface Killah - "Big Girl": From last year's excellent Fishscale. I don't know that I have anything intelligent to say about Ghostface, or rap in general. I don't listen to enough of it to know what I'm talking about. I'm not good at differentiating voices (Ghostface's is one of the few I think I could recognize right off). But I like plenty of it. And I like Ghostface. Most of what I've heard of his is musically based on old soul samples, and he seems to just barrel ahead, rapping at full-speed, in his own world, at times seeming oblivious to the music behind him.

12. Mission of Burma - "Man In Decline": Huge, punishing, awesome. Forever an argument in favor of rock-band reunions, in the face of the many more arguments against. Obliterati rocks.

13. Spontaneous Music Ensemble - "Karyobin, Pt. 1": I bought Karyobin at a Derek Bailey show (w/American Milo Fine) at Stoke Newington in 2003. Recordings of free improv seem counter-intuitive in some respects. I often have a hard time with them, because I can't help but to reflexively want them to resolve into jazz or some other kind of structure. I do much better when I allow the music to just happen. This stuff often sounds to me like it's music falling down a hill.

14. Low + the Dirty Three - "Cody": A lovely instrumental track from Low's collaboration with the Dirty Three, as part of the In the Fishtank series. The record also has a gorgeous cover of Neil Young's "Down By the River".

15. Fleetwood Mac - "Monday Morning": I love this song. My mom had very few albums that I had much interest in, but Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, the first Fleetwood Mac albums with Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, were two that I gave her credit for. Commercially huge, of course, and also critically praised at the time, they still seem sort of out of step with the whole punk-taking-over narrative. I'd rather listen to Rumours than Never Mind the Bollocks.

Music Bits

I'm a little giddy with excitement to learn, by way of Carl "Zoilus" Wilson, that Pere Ubu's four long-unavailable "Fontana Years" albums are finally coming back into print. This is great, not least because I know that David Thomas has been trying for years to get the rights to these records. They were already out of print by the time I started getting into Pere Ubu. I was finally able to track down beat up used cds of three of them--The Tenement Year, Worlds In Collision, and Story of My Life, but I've never heard Cloudland, which is often said to be the best of the bunch. There will be bonus tracks, so I will replace my three. But the main reason for replacing The Tenement Year is that, apparently, "[t]he original 1988 Fontana release does not seem to have been mastered". Well, it's been mastered now. I always thought that cd sounded terrible.

In my two posts on hauntology, and probably elsewhere, I mentioned that I know next to nothing about dub. I've wanted to redress this, but the discography is so vast and confused, and I have very little money available anymore for just randomly trying records out. So this lacuna in my musical education has remained unfilled. Then the other day, I clicked over to Border Music from the fine folks at Destination: OUT! Both blogs had posts on The Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet, which featured John Zorn and Wayne Horvitz (and which I'd long had on my list of jazz albums to try to find, but never seen anywhere). Once at Border Music, I noticed that they'd posted some Lee 'Scratch' Perry albums, along with a lot of other cool music. I downloaded them, and as I write this, I am listening to some dub. I'm digging it. (Incidentally, I notice today that Border Music has been pulled down by WordPress for violating its terms of service. It doesn't say which term, though I suppose it could be for copyright issues. I hope it isn't permanent. For the record, I buy music and I believe in supporting artists. The little free music I've downloaded has been exploratory. I want to know what I like! Update: Good news! As Lucky from Border Music commented here today, the blog is back up. Apparently it was indeed about copyright, but he explained to them that he largely posts only out-of-print records, so.)

At his excellent blog I Hear a New World, the Sad Billionaire has a wonderful post up about the Wu-Tang Clan. Here's an excerpt:

The record [Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)] opens up with a kung-fu movie sample-- a hyper-caucasian voiceover artist reading Shaw Brothers boilerplate doggerel-- that sounds like it was recorded with a handheld cassette player held up to a television: “Shaolin shadowboxing and a wu-tang sword style.” Soon it will become clear to me that martial arts cinema mythology, cosa nostra trivia, comic book superheroes, Staten Island drug trade lore, five percent nation holy writ are all elements of an occult and inscrutable language in which the Wu-Tang Clan encode their messages to the world. Like Lee “Scratch” Perry and Sun Ra, the Wu-Tang Clan speak in a language meant to confuse and mislead outsiders like me; nonetheless, it seems all the more pleasurable the more it leaves me scratching my head and feeling like an idiot. The young Dominican-American novelist Junot Diaz once said that the reason he leaves so much untranslated Spanish in his fiction is to give Anglo readers the sensation of what it’s like to be an outsider to a dominant culture. Unlike the bourgeois MCs of recent years, the Wu-Tang Clan do not speak the lingua franca of luxury goods and imported automobiles… there is no opportunity for the false solidarity of product loyalty… but rather an invitation to estrangement, the first step towards critical consciousness…

And, in the new edition of The High Hat, Nate Patrin has a nice appreciation of 1970s-era Pink Floyd, which he links to his love of the soul, funk, and disco of Isaac Hayes, Booker T. & the M.G.'s, P-Funk, and Chic. In my recent post listing my favorite rock albums from 1967, one album conspicuous by its absence was Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which I only really like about half of. I know it's somehow not cool these days, but I much prefer the 70s Roger Waters-led Pink Floyd over the Syd Barrett stuff. I listened to Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall constantly when I was in high school, and I even love the last album with Waters, The Final Cut (though the best known track, "Not Now John", is completely awful in every way).

Hauntology

I am not well acquainted with the concept of "hauntology". But after reading the many posts on the topic by Mark at k-punk, I feel I have glimpse into the nature of the idea. Mark's brilliant most recent post opens it up even further for me:

It is this sense of temporal disjuncture that is crucial to hauntology. Hauntology isn't about the return of the past, but about the fact that the origin was already spectral. We live in a time when the past is present, and the present is saturated with the past. Hauntology emerges as a crucial - cultural and political - alternative both to linear history and to postmodernism's permanent revival.

Ten years ago, we would have looked to SF and cyberpunk for this alternative. But hauntology and cyberpunk can now emerge as twins; travelling back in time in Butler's Kindred is the complement of the violent irruption of the past in Morrison's Beloved. It's no accident that hauntology begins in the Black Atlantic, with dub and hip-hop. Time being out of joint is the defining feature of the black Atlantean experience. As Mark Sinker wrote, the 'central fact in Black Science Fiction - self-consciously so named or not - is an acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened: that (in [Public Enemy's] phrase) Armageddon been in effect.' In this disjunctive time, it makes perfect sense for Terminator X to juxtapose samples of helicopters with discussions about the slave trade, as he does on Apocalypse...91. There is no way in which a trauma on the scale of slavery - 'the holocaust that's still going on' as Chuck D had it - can be incorporated into history, American or otherwise. * It must remain a series of gaps, lost names, screen memories, a hauntology. X marks the spot... The deep, unbearable ache in Kindred arises from the horrible realisation that, for contemporary black America, to wish for the erasure of slavery is to call for the erasure of itself. What to do if the precondition for your being is the abduction, murder and rape of your ancestors?

This last specifically reminds me of a professor of Russian history I had back in college. One day, while railing that Russians, in the approaching dissolution of the Soviet Union, had nothing to learn from "Jeffersonian nonsense about natural law", he said something to the effect that, as horrible as what happened to the Native Americans was, he was nevertheless happy it had happened. To wish otherwise was to wish away his own existence.

Before getting to the end of Mark's post, I was also immediately reminded of Greil Marcus and his thesis of the "Old Weird America"--a much derided idea now, I suppose, but one which made some sort of sense to me. When I read Invisible Republic, I was bored by the chapters specifically about Dylan and the Band and the recording of the The Basement Tapes--I love Dylan, but I'm no Dylanologist, I was then discovering. But the stuff on the old folk songs, on Dock Boggs, on "The Coo-Coo Bird"--this stuff fascinated me. It seemed to speak to a history of America beneath the surface, away from the standard narrative we've had forced down our throats, to acknowledge the strange religious practices, the violent upheavals, the anxiety about technological change... At the time I also listened to an interview with Marcus in support of his book. When he wasn't droning on about who played what on The Basement Tapes, but was talking about Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Clarence Ashley, and Dylan's songs that seemed repond to other currents in pop culture (like Dylan's take on the teenage murder song), I felt that I was on the cusp of understanding something, something that tied in with Faulkner's imagined South, and Cormac McCarthy's highly stylized violence of the Old West in Blood Meridian, and this something was just beyond my reach, something I could not articulate intelligibly.

Mark does mention Marcus, in a footnote. He notes that Marcus invariably avoids talking about production techniques and that, indeed, in his discussion of the Sex Pistols, for example, Marcus talks about their live performance... Mark admits: "I haven't read any of Marcus' Old Weird America material, so correct me if I'm wrong - isn't it about Dylan? - but couldn't all this return to field recordings be fitted, all-too-comfortably, into a quest for presence?" Yes, yes it could. Also, it strikes me that, in his recent work, Marcus appears to be positing something essential about America, locating some kind of authenticity in the musicians and writers he chooses to focus on, in the particular narrative strain he choses to highlight. His focus on David Thomas, for instance, is interesting in this regard, given how inauthentic Thomas' musical persona is. In his music, in and out of Pere Ubu, Thomas is saying something about America, too. As if there is something authentic in the very inauthenticity of the projected persona, in the music, and as if this reveals something essential about America.

One of the important things to remember about the Anthology of American Folk Music, emphasized by Harry Smith but often overlooked, is that these were intended to be commercial recordings. The musicians may have been playing songs that had been around seemingly forever, but these were not field recordings, these were performances recorded for release by record labels. That it's been well over 50 years since the Anthology first appeared, and another 20-30 years since the recordings first appeared, means it's easy to listen to these songs as if they are ancient, but the recordings have locked in place a certain time, and the technological artifice of the records--their scratchiness equals for us "old-time"--allows us to continue to believe in the illusion of folk tradition transmitted via the recordings. Not that there is no folk tradition, but that the tradition we think we know about is necessarily altered by the technological artifact.

I'm just sort of riffing here, but I'm interested in pursuing this line of thought further. I look forward to reading Simon Reynolds' piece (referenced by k-punk) in the new issue of The Wire, which I haven't received yet, among other things....

Experimental and Weird

Related to earlier posts of mine (here and here), this is from Phil Freeman's interview with David Thomas, in this month's issue of The Wire:

...sometimes it seems like David Thomas keeps his back catalogue in print because he thinks (or hopes) that maybe that way, understanding will eventually sink in. He's probably wrong of course, but it's easy to understand why he'd find it futile to endlessly re-debate the 1970s. The battle's been lost; Pere Ubu's been enshrined as a pioneering proto-punk act, the better to allow critics to trace lineages and build imaginary hierarchies the most obsessive football fans would envy. "First we were pre-industrial, then we were industrial, then we were post-industrial," he scoffs. "First we were this, then we were the other thing. It's all baloney, and the reason there's so much confusion about it is, we're mainstream rock. It's not my fault that the rest of the world has gone off into a bizarre parallel universe where they find comfort in experimental music."

If that statement seems counterintuitive, it's because of the dominant, and obfuscatory, role marketing jargon has achieved in artistic discourse. Thomas, having been a professional musician for more than 30 years, sees things clearly and simply--a group playing three-chord songs with guitar, bass, drums and occasional synth is a rock group, not some avant garde art project. It's those who make their music with computers, in the least organic manner possible, who are the strange ones, to him. "In the early 70s," he says, "the evolution of rock was very, very, very obvious. Analogue synthesizers and concrete sound was entering into the music. Various people had various strategies, and it wasn't one thing. It was stuido techniques and other things. All of it, to us, was coming to this juncture. And it was very obvious to us that this was what rock music was supposed to be, to make use of this powefull, relatively new narrative voice. That's why I've always said that we are in the mainstream. It's people like Eminem or Britney Spears who are the weird experimentalists. They are avant garde. They are dealing with weird alternative worlds. If you put our view of the human condition alongside Britney Spears's, one of them is extremely experimental and weird, and it's Ms Spears'."

Purpose and Propulsion

For still more on David Thomas, here's a post about that last pre-return-of-Ubu solo record, Blame the Messenger, from the blog Overlooked Gems of My Lifetime (which, incidentally, is a great concept for a blog):

What I love about this album, following the sometimes sketchy early-80s releases by the band proper (eg, The Art of Walking) and the nutty, impressionistic batch of solo Thomas albums that led up to this one (Monster Walks the Winter Lake is a particular winner among this category), is its feeling of purpose and propulsion and the way it balances the competing, reckless impulses of early Pere Ubu the way no Ubu release had done since the release of their underrated (among Pere Ubu fans, that is, because anyone else doesn't care) New Picnic Time.

We have the Technology

The subjects of my last post, Richard & Linda Thompson, have, perhaps surprisingly, collaborated on various occasions with Pere Ubu singer David Thomas. Richard Thompson plays guitar on Thomas' first two non-Ubu albums, The Sound of the Sand and Other Songs of the Pedestrians and Variations on a Theme, from 1981 and 1983, respectively. There's a brief, amusing anecdote related in the liner notes to Thomas' Monster box-set, which collects his first five solo albums, in which, by the time of his fifth, Blame the Messenger in 1986, he and the band he'd assembled for that record look around and realize that they are essentially Pere Ubu. They start recording again as Ubu, and the first album after this was 1988's The Tenement Year.

Carl Wilson of Zoilus has been guest-blogging some over at Said the Gramophone. Yesterday he posted an excellent piece on Pere Ubu's "We Have the Technology", probably the best song from The Tenement Year:

This is the Pere Ubu of 1988, when it had regrouped after David Thomas’s more-scorned-than-heard, “eccentric nature-boy” solo years. Now David Thomas lived in what he considered an exile in England, making albums such as Monster Walks the Winter Lake, a metaphoric suite about the breakdown of communication in a marriage. In those songs, he portrayed a failing marriage as a third entity, a Frankenstein pastiche of “parts that don’t matter,” a hulk that comes lumbering between two people, silencing them, dominating the horizon. And in the first years of the reanimated Pere Ubu this theme persisted: Where to turn when the dynamic between people is beyond their control, when it wrenches the torch from their hands and blazes through the village? It needn’t be a marriage; it could be a band.

[...]

As so often, in a group that always made its art from the parts that weren’t supposed to matter in culture, from B-movies and sci-fi novels and comics and Germanic freak rock and abandoned buildings and obsolete synthesizers and dinosaur books, Pere Ubu digs for inspiration in the trash: Here it’s the opening sequence of the boneheaded 1970s TV show The Six-Million-Dollar Man, in which the surgeons intone over the prone body of the astronaut, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” [...]

But David Thomas isn’t a kid any more. He doesn’t want to fight cartoon threats, or even, for awhile, his pet cultural apocalypse. He wants to talk to his wife. What is that monster made of? It’s made up of moments, intervals at which no one rises to the occasion, or all parties are too stubborn to prevent the inevitable crash.

I've never been able to catch Pere Ubu live, but a couple of years ago I did manage to see Thomas with a band of local musicians here in Baltimore at the Ottobar, as part of Morpheus Records' 10th Anniversary celebration. Morpheus has distributed some Ubu releases, such as the live The Shape of Things, as well as the utterly fantastic Jimmy Bell's Still In Town from 15-60-75 (Thomas has called this "the only good album by anybody ever", which is obviously a trifle excessive, but the record is still pretty damn awesome). Anyway, Thomas is a huge presence, and before his set he bitched out the girl handling the Morpheus table (she took it remarkably well, basically laughing it off). The show was a little ragged, but they did play "We Have the Technology" and it was a definite high-point of the night.

Elsewhere on Pere Ubu, Simon Reynolds has been posting his footnotes to Rip It Up & Start Again and this week posted the notes to the chapter concerning Ubu and the Cleveland scene. These also highlight Ubu's humanity. First, in contrast to the Dead Boys:

Compare the direction Pere Ubu pursued with what happened to the other ex-members of Rocket From the Tombs. Taking the punk side of RFTT to the max, they became The Dead Boys, fronted by Stiv Bators (who had briefly displaced David Thomas as RFTT’s singer), a weasel-faced Iggy Pop-wannabe who mimed suicide by hanging himself onstage. Moving to New York and latching onto the CBBGs scene, The Dead Boys were briefly infamous for their misogynist songs (“Caught With the Meat In Your Mouth”), Vicious-like cartoon-psychosis, and puerile penchant for carrying switchblades. Where The Dead Boys thought it a real, er, gas to sport Nazi imagery (Bators legendarily shaved a swastika into a girlfriend’s pubic hair), Pere Ubu decided to cease playing “Final Solution” live, in case anyone took the song (actually inspired by a Sherlock Holmes short story!) as pro-Nazi. In essence, the Dead Boys were like the Sex Pistols if they’d been entirely composed of Sid Viciouses and Steve Joneses.

And on original member Peter Laughner:

A man who died, said Lester Bangs, because he wanted to be Lou Reed so badly [...]. Although 'Final Solution' got included on the first Max's Kansas City album, Pere Ubu were also too humanist to really fit even the New York arty but death-tripping version of punk. They had no truck with those who flirted with the void, however poetically. . .

Some of the other footnotes touch on Thomas' occasionally dubious ideas of blood and nation and culture, which I talked about in this post from May. Reynolds quotes from the same interview in The Wire that I did, as well as much else. I like this concluding bit about Ubu's peculiar brand of "Americana":

Thomas also talks often about working with American archetypal themes and images--the railroad, the worried man, the river. Ubu liked to use already-famous song titles, like ‘Sentimental Journey’, ‘Stormy Weather’, “West Side Story”, while “My Dark Ages” turned The Beach Boys inside out: “I don’t get around/I don’t fall in love much.” Perhaps this confusion--art or folk, bohemia or populism--is at the core of rock, its undecidable essence. Perhaps the best stuff manages to be both at the time. In this respect Pere Ubu were, as Mark Sinker argues, a bit like The Band “if they had ended their [1966] tours with Bob Dylan by deciding to invent an urban American music based not in borrowed snatches of the rural past but in intuited fragments of the city future.”

Thomas: “Images are created--seminal things like Heartbreak Hotel. That image has possessed writers endlessly from the moment it was heard—I’ve written probably a dozen songs on Heartbreak Hotel. Read [Greil Marcus’s] Mystery Train, it’s all about this passing on of communal images. Down by the River—the notion of the river, the rail, the worried man. The worried man stretches back hundreds of years. Worried Man Blues by the Carter family in 1920 probably has roots back in Babylonia”. (Devo, incidentally, did a cover of “Worried Man” in Neil Young’s Human Highway movie, in a scene where they play workers whose job is to handle nuclear waste!).

David Thomas and authenticity

Pere Ubu is one of my favorite bands, and I've always enjoyed reading interviews with their singer and sole constant member, David Thomas. He is highly intelligent and by turns charming, arrogant, unapologetic, provocative, irascible, funny--often all at once. I've never noticed much discussion about his various pronouncements about music (maybe I haven't been looking in the right places), but it strikes me that they would be currently unfashionable, to say the least. In the last of Carl Wilson's EMP round-ups, he quoted from his notes of some of the papers presented, including Thomas'. Given the nature of Thomas' talk (abstract here), it does on the face of it appear that he would have been at least as controversial as Stephen Merritt. Some of his remarks, as noted by Carl:

Rock is electrified folk music. It is not catholic but parochial, not a wide tent but a narrow road. It is in the blood. [...] The answer to 'Can foreigners play rock music?' is no. No. Not under any circumstances. But sometimes they can sure sound good if they don't try.

Carl notes also that his performance was so theatrical that no one "broke through ... to question some very questionable assumptions". But then he's been talking about this kind of thing for years, so maybe people just weren't surprised. Here he is in the April 1998 issue of The Wire (participating in that month's invisible jukebox):

In Britain, Roxy Music, alongside Bowie, helped British rock break with denim authenticity.
Yeah, well music can certainly wear different clothes, get a different haircut, have a different accent and pretend to be different people and get different scriptwriters. I'm not sure how much that has to do with music. You may be getting the picture that I reduce everything to real simple choices, because that's who I am. It's a desert island question, you get to choose one of two albums -- whichever Smiths album you consider the greatest, or the John Cougar Mellencamp album you consider to be the greatest, I have never met anybody who would take the Mellencamp album, except for myself. But I would kill myself if I had to live out my life on a desert island with a Smiths album. I would rather have John Cougar Mellencamp. I think ultimately that there is a basic blood difference in that Mellencamp in his blood has the music, but Morrissey doesn't. It's not his fault, he's got something else. It doesn't mean he is a lesser human being, it just means that he is not American. As much as people don't want to deal with this stuff you have to come to terms with the fact that some cultural idioms are specific to blood, or whatever you want to call it. If you have got to go see two reggae bands, this one's from Kansas City, the other is from Kingston, Jamaica, which one are you going to go for? It's simple.

So you don't think Europeans can rock?
Of course they can, and the groups that are so quintessential -- I mean, tell me whatever nation could have evolved Kraftwerk or Can? They are German! Or Roxy Music, Soft Machine, very English. But is it rock music? No. It is what it is. Modern electric music, fine.

[...]

Zydeco's appeal seems to be largely regional.
Well, music should be regional, it should speak directly of a specific place on the planet, of a specific geography, of a specific time, otherwise music is a function of merchandise and market. If it is not related to a specific geographical location, if it doesn't speak of a small community of people, then it isn't music. I have a real simple way of looking at things, so most of the stuff you hear on the radio by definition isn't music. I've got no problems, it's everybody else who has to deal with labels and confusion. I suggest to everybody that they adopt my model of thinking. It's easier this way.

I seem to recall a reader accusing Thomas of racism in a subsequent letter to the editor. Then also there was this interview in 2000 for a Russian newspaper:

5. Your art is a blend of rock, blues, folk, jazz and theater. Why do you call it "rock music"? Do you think the term is still relevant nowadays?

I call it rock music because that's what it is. Your question illustrates a number of prejudices shared by many. Rock music is the native music at the heart of American culture. Artemy Troitsky said to me, "The most ordinary rock band playing in a garage in Nebraska has an authenticity and urgency that cannot be found in even the best bands from England because they are playing their own music." Rock music is in my blood. It's not in yours. You presume too much to think it is. I do not claim Tolstoy. You cannot claim Elvis. Your question also presumes that culture is something that can be frozen in time. It presumes that rock music was never anything other than a youth phenomenon designed to sell clothes and provide tight-jeaned boys to chicken-hawkers. It assumes that what is popularly believed must define the reality of any situation. The Beatles will be a footnote in 50 years and forgotten totally in 100. Don Van Vliet, Sky Saxon and Brian WIlson will still be honored.

6. Many rock writers saw punk as being progressive at the time. You said, punk rock was invented to sell clothes. Can t this be applied to rock music as such which to a great extent is part of mass culture?

See above. Rock music is folk culture. SO the question needs to be re-arranged. For example, is Oasis a rock band? Clearly not. (1) They are not American and, (2), they do not show any evidence of emerging from a native folk tradition. I am a native American. We have a native culture. Maybe you don't want to give us one. Maybe you want our native American culture to be confined to granny sitting in a rocking chair in the Appalachian mountains or field Negroes singing spirituals as they pick cotton. WAKE UP! There are NO grannies sitting in rockers in the Appalachians. There are NO field Negroes picking cotton. Talking in terms of "mass culture" leads nowhere. Things are bought and sold. A particular widget does a good job of widgeting so it becomes very popular and sells many copies so other people start making widgets to sell. Is the original widget any less good at widgeting things? No. What if, after a while, the makers of imitation widgets, in order to sell more or meet the demand, start making the widget with cheaper materials? Eventually many bad copies fill the marketplace. Is the ORIGINAL widget any less good at widgeting? No. Counterfeit money devalues a currency but cannot devalue the gold that stands behind the currency.

So these ideas are pretty basic to Thomas' thinking on the subject. His own music over the past couple of decades appears to be explicitly a conversation with this, as he sees it, specific American folk idiom of rock music (for example, song titles are commonly recycled from rock's past). I agree that there are a number of questionable ideas at play here, and yet they are seductive. I can almost hear what he means in many cases. I don't think it's helpful to use a word like "blood" in this context, not if we mean literally genetics or something like that. But the idea that people of a certain time and place will naturally have more affinity for the music created in that time and place does not strike me as insane. There does seem to me to be something quintessentially American about a band such as, say, Modest Mouse that a non-American band would not be able to approximate, I don't think. I feel like I can hear the wide open spaces in their music, especially in the records they made before signing to Epic. (Incidentally, I would also go for Mellencamp over the Smiths, but I think that has more to do with the particulars of my musical life than with anything else, the sheer accident of history that means that I haven't listened to much of the Smiths.) I feel like I've been influenced by this notion, almost despite myself, feeling I could identify whether a band was American in their musical DNA. But then I don't know what to make of a band like the Rolling Stones in this respect--they've never sounded obviously English to me. That could just be because they were already part of the rock vocabulary before I was born. And certainly many of the American bands that followed would have taken their cues from them and not as much from the actual blues records that the Stones were so obsessed with. In some respects, of course, we're just talking about semantics. He calls American rock music "rock music"--the other stuff is something else, in need, I suppose, of its own name. But his assertion that it's not music unless it speaks of a particular place and time is more difficult to defend or understand. What is it then?

This is another, entertaining quote from that same issue of The Wire:

...there was this whole mania for labelling things, which also, incidentally, came in with the punk movement. If you are mainstream, you don't need a label. And Pere Ubu is the mainstream of rock music in 1998, just as we were in the mainstream in 1975. We remain within the mainstream of rock music. Other people have deviated off somewhere. Other people need labels. But Pere Ubu is a rock band.

I like the idea of Ubu remaining in the mainstream of rock as everyone else lost their way, and it seems to me that if you accept the notion of rock as a folk idiom as opposed to as "pop music"--and I'm often tempted to--then you can hear the evolution of this idiom, in part through listening to Pere Ubu over the last 30 years. But maybe the time has passed when it's possible to think of music in the terms that Thomas has defined, for music to come out of a specific time and place. I know that this is something that has been talked about a lot in the various rockism v. popism debates out there in blogland. For example, the discussion about M.I.A. (like here, here, and here) last year was very much centered on the question of whether her music came from anywhere, as well as the claims some boosters were making on the music. I enjoyed like hell reading all of the arguments, but I found it difficult to decide what my actual position was. Part of me wants to recognize and engage with a given scene, but I have a hard time actually doing so. I don't know if this is because I don't feel like I'm really from a place, or if it's because my approach to music began as a negation of the time I grew up in, a looking back to codified classic rock (were I a rock musician, I would almost certainly be doomed to creating "record collection rock"). Maybe approaching music exclusively in Thomas' terms, if we unpack the implications, is the problem. Is rock (or hip hop, or whatever) a folk music or is it "pop music" that theoretically anyone can make? Is it both, with questions of authenticity being more valid at some times than at others? Does this make any sense? I'm a pretty big Dylan fan, so I pretty much had to stop buying into projections of literal authenticity some time ago, but it was more difficult to completely shed notions of "the real"--like "real country" (not mainstream, natch) or "real hip hop"--even as I had nothing to base these on but recordings. It appears that my effective approach to collecting and listening to music is that it's all pop, whether I've realized it or not and even when I intentionally ignored or disdained actual popular music. Yet, when the claim is made (by whomever, and I see it again being made a lot these days) about the pisspoor state of music today (whenever "today" might be), it's usually recognized that, sure, yeah, there are always good records available, but a vitality is missing, a forward momentum. And that forward momentum has to come from somewhere, it's not going to magically appear as part of the pop smorgasbord.