Maps Of You

Written in 2002. Will record this summer for the next CD.

Maps of You

As the bulldozers left
We found a comb inside a shoe
The kids played on the rubble
An ambulance came for you

There seemed to be no warning
You were crouching in the gap
‘Tween lines that had never moved
On your childhood map

I looked into your dead eyes
There were crescents colored green
There were floating stars of david
There were places you had been

Red crosses and green crescents
And sirens too
Red crosses and green crescents
And maps of forgotten lessons

I looked into your dead eyes
They lay open like an atlas
With ripped out pages
Lying next to your shoe

Trash City

Everybody who knows me (a hello to both of you!) has some inkling of an idea that I was at one time obsessed with the Replacements (a band from a long time ago, like, you know, from a time before the internet, yes, there was apparently a time like that, go ask your grand parents). Recently, Rhino Records remastered their first three albums and an e.p. for release.

They are:

Sorry Ma Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981)
Replacements Stink e.p. (1982)
Hootenanny (1983)
Let It Be (1984)

Each CD has a bunch of extra tracks and stuff to make it a sweet deal. Frankly, I was shocked that there was so much press about these re-releases since Replacements music seem very disconnected with what is going on in terms of hipster music these days. Even snooty folks like Pitchforkmedia chimed in. Billboard even tracked down the main songwriter of the band and the bass guitarist, the former notoriously reclusive, and the latter, well, he now works for Axl Rose. They are both vaguely irritable people who always seem even more irritable in interviews, especially when asked about what they did when they were in the Replacements, which happens to be like 40 years or ago or something. But the new interviews of singer and bassist were personable. Although I was horrified at the prospect that the Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson might reunite to make some dumbass attempt to recreate the Replacements (I guess taking a cue from the Pixies, Mission of Burma, Dinosaur Jr, and a gajillion other bands from that era who have decided it's time to exhume their legacies and force them into the present), it was nice to see Westerberg not quite so curmudgeonly, as he often is.

A lot of ink has been spilled on the Replacements. With the recent spate of reissues, I've read dozens of articles about the band. Almost all of them have the standard issue narrative about them, and they use a combination of the same words. You know: legendary, shambolic, influential, unpredictable, Midwestern, young, alcoholics, played goofy covers, swapped instruments, frequently never finished their live shows, kids with no future, beautiful losers, assholes, heart-wrenching songs, crazy motherfuckers, blah blah. You know the basic deal. The story has become so set in stone that it's hard to write anything new about them that might mean anything. So I was mildly surprised to find a coupla things that were kinda insightful. Both are worth a read. The better one, a reverential review of the four reissues, really nails some of the absurd contradictions of this band. The author writes (speaking of Let It Be, considered by many to be their best record) that the Replacements:

never separated high and low culture, who celebrated pure junk and reluctantly bared their soul... Let It Be is nothing if it’s not a coming of age album, perched precisely between adolescence and adulthood. There’s just enough angst and tastelessness to have the album speak to teenagers of all generations and just enough complicated emotion to make this music resonate with listeners long past those awkward years, whether they grew up with this album or not.

Writing of the unbelievable rush of the sequence of the first two songs on Let It Be, he adds:

Unlike so many teenage post-punk records, this doesn’t dwell on the pain, it ramps up the jokes and, better still, it offers a sense of endless possibilities, especially on the opening pair of “I Will Dare” and “Favorite Thing,” two songs where it feels as if the world opened up because of these songs. And that sense of thrilling adventure isn’t just due to Westerberg, it’s due to the ‘Mats as a band, who have never sounded as ferocious and determined as they do here... here they were fully alive as a band, living gloriously in the moment, a fleeting moment when anything and everything seems possible and that moment still bursts to life whenever Let It Be is played.

The other review, a little more jargony, but less reverential (and in a good way) is here.

Anyway, in honor of the four reissues, I thought I would excerpt a chapter from this book that I keep threatening to publish about my journey through the dregs of American underground(ish) music of the '80s/'90s/'00s. This is an excerpt from CHAPTER 8 (entitled: "I Could Be Wrong, I Could Be Right"). It is about the greatest band in the history of rock'n'roll. Enjoy.

CHAPTER 8 (excerpt)

Probably among all the bands I am writing about here, the hardest to write about is the Replacements. This is partly because I had a strange emotional attachment to them, but that’s only a minor part of it. More relevant, perhaps, is that the band itself represented many contradictory impulses, none of which were/are fully formed. To describe the band properly would be to write a paragraph composed of non sequiturs, each sentence omitting a key word. On the surface, the Replacements were this vaguely alternative ‘80s band singing power pop with a punk edge; throw in a few emotional slow songs about loss and loneliness and few clever turns and twists of word and there you have it, the Replacements. But the Replacements were much more than that. Most important, among all the major 'alternative' bands of the ‘80s, the Replacements were probably the one which stood furthest from the idea of “art.”

Other bands of that era (the Cure, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Big Black, Husker Du, the Smiths, Cocteau Twins, Ministry, Foetus, Love & Rockets, the Church, New Order, Talking Heads, Dead Kennedys, Mojo Nixon, the Jesus & Mary Chain, the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, the Pixies, Dead Can Dance, Swans, etc. etc. etc.) had something to do with the idea (however facile in reality it was) that there was some "art" to it, even often in the most artless way. “Art,” not only in the sense of avant garde or innovation or conversely as part of a tradition of art, but also in the sense of “cool” and “hip.” All of those bands had dollops of self-consciousness, sometimes ironic.

A band like Husker Du is a classic case. On the surface you have three working class kinda guys who look like shit and wear Midwestern clothes. But Husker Du was not about Joe Blow singin’ shit about shit. Husker Du was about the art of catharsis through noise, a strategy that related as much to the elitist bullshit of the Velvet Underground as anything, and fuck your flannel shirts. Which is why these days Bob Mould can hang around being LoudBomb or whatever DJ thing that he’s doing, ‘cause he was into "art."

The Replacements had nothing to do with art. They were artless bastards (of young). They were never a hip band nor were they ever cool—although for a short period, they were cool to like among some white college students. The band were also true iconoclasts, in the received tradition of punk, in that they opposed every and anything. Unlike most of the ‘80s alternative bands who bought into the false notion that somehow most of what they were creating was worthwhile as an opposing force to the status quo, the Replacements didn’t even bother with that whole issue, they just existed as opposition. If they played in front of punks, they would make fun of punks. If they played in front of hippies, they would make fun of hippies. They made fun of everybody, most of all their alternative peers. They had little respect for anybody, least of all themselves, which luckily for them, played brilliantly into the mythos they created for themselves: beautiful losers destined not to be beautiful but always to lose.

Their capacity to infuse brilliance into both (1) their raging loud motherfucking rock’n’punk side, as well as (2) their tenderest i-am-awfully-lonely-but-i-hate-people side was what I most loved about them. Their songs were a mess of blue, a confession of true, songs about the most normal of emotions of youth, filtered through the complete abandon of knowing that even as you are singing about being the loneliest most misunderstood soul, you will be misunderstood in the act itself. Their song “Unsatisfied” was so bizarre, the lyrics almost but not quite making sense until it drops you into this edgy state of ambiguity:

Look me in the eye and tell me
That I’m satisfied
Look me in the eye and tell me
That I’m satisfied.

I have no idea what that means. Is the singer telling the listener: "hey tell me if you're satisfied." or…is the singer telling the listener: "hey tell me if I'm satisfied." If the former, then it’s like a weird challenge, a challenge to the listener to tell it like it is, which sounds odd, like loneliness is a badge of fucking honor. And if the latter, then why is he doing that? What would cause him to ask someone to do that? It just seems like something that no one would ever do in real life. Why would you ever ask someone else to look you in the eye and see if the eyes said anything about being satisfied? Yet, it makes the hairs on your neck stand up. What the fuck. The song builds, builds, builds, builds through random snippets of lyrics (“liberty is a lie,” “tell me what’s wrong”) until the singer screams, shredding his throat into the simplest stupidest most adolescent articulation of all:

I’m so, I’m so, I’m so…unsatisfied.

And all through it, some weird shit guitar that sounds like a howling dog being stepped upon weaves its way through the song. Who’d have thought that you could encapsulate wanting-and-not-getting, and not-knowing-what-you-want-and-not-getting-it-anyway into the simplest form possible?

The music, the music, the music: but beyond the music, punk (or, really, rock’n’roll in general) was as much about attitude and image and lifestyle as it was about content. To me, the Replacements presented in many ways a perfect package: unknown to most, anti-art, loners, losers, skinny to the bone, knew about love and hate, tolerated by artsy alternative people into the Birthday Party or whatever. But like many bands or music of the period, I relished adopting them because nobody I knew liked them that much. People had heard a song or two but nothing registered that much. By the time, I got obsessed with them, I started to connect with random people here and there who were equally obsessed with them. None of these obsessives were my friends but they were when we shared beers at Duddley’s. I remember this guy, Tim, prematurely old, curly hair, every time I ran into him at Duddley’s he was dead fucking drunk to the world and rambling on about how he could swear on his grave that the best fucking album of all time was the Replacements’ Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash, their first (ratty punk) album released in 1981.

Like all great bands, progression for the Replacements was breathtaking. From Sorry Ma’s smart punk (punctuated by a lovely b-side “If Only You Were Lonely” that recalled Hank Williams Sr.) to the Stink e.p.’s raging jet engine hardcore punk (including the epic “Fuck School”) to Hootenanny (now, they were perfecting the hybrid of punk and pop with brilliance) to Let it Be (one of the best indie rock albums of all time), wherein every goddamn youthful feeling of alienation was eviscerated for all to see through a series of spectacular three-minute gems from the country-punk shuffle of “I Will Dare” to the frustrated shout of desperation that is “My Favorite Thing” to the transcendental “Answering Machine” in which spiraling guitar figures battled with the found sounds of operator voices looping to insanity and infinity as the singer screamed “I hate your answering machine.” In three short years, they moved from pedestrian punk to genius power pop, and they moved fast. Because there were never any lyrics printed on any Replacements albums, half the fun was figuring out what Paul Westerberg—their songwriter, singer, and principal architect—was saying. His genius was to figure out how to say that you hate people but you hate being lonely, the obvious conundrum of youthful angst. But the words had double, sometimes triple puns, embedded in them, making sense years later while you’re listening to a song on your iPod in the subway. His lyrics were clever but not in an Elvis Costello-way of clever in which contrivances overpowered elegance. Clever was secondary to the mood. It didn’t really matter if you didn’t really understand what he was saying anyway. It made sense anyway.

Tim, considered by many to be their best album, came out in 1985, followed by Pleased to Meet Me two years later. I was obsessed with that album because it was not simply an encapsulation of a month or a time in my life but also my life. To go through the album here would be tedious. The songs are brilliant, the sound woefully dated. The one moment of transcendence on the record is neither a lyric nor a melody but an exhilarating “Ooooh!” shouted as a prelude to a guitar solo a song called “Alex Chilton,” a weird half-assed tribute to another songwriter and musician who barely made it. What can I say? It was one of my favorite and personal albums of my youth, 33 minutes of me-as-manchild wrapped in chocolate melodies and loud guitars. And the power of the album grew for me as I dug deeper and discovered the detritus from Pleased to Meet Me: abandoned songs deemed not good enough for the album, amazing b-sides, alternate takes, the stuff of music obsessives. One song, “Can’t Hardly Wait” existed in this strange acoustic version, sounding like he had recorded it on a tiny cassette player in the middle of an airshaft with vocal echoes, with nothing but a snare drum punctuating his lonely voice over an improbably beautiful but ragged guitar. While the song on the actual album is one of hope to see a lover/friend after being on the road for a while, the airshaft version—best listened to in the deep of winter—is a strange almost joyous ode to self-destruction (“…climb to the top of this crummy water tower, I can’t hardly wait…”).

Another unused song, “Birthday Gal,” (or “Birthday Carol” as I thought for years) was a toss-off piece about the sadness young men see in young women who never see it in themselves, a thematic favorite of Westerberg that he would pursue again (“Achin’ To Be”) and again (“Merry Go Round”).

Westerberg once said somewhere that one of his favorite movies was The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. A trouble-maker, ground through the prison system in England, becomes a long-distance runner. His training culminates in the one big race. He runs. It's clear he's gonna win. Just before he crosses the finish line, he stops and lets someone else pass. That is the Replacements story encapsulated in a couple of sentences. We could be heroes. Just for one day. But only in our made up world of success and failure.

Of course, all of this is colored by retrospect. I listened to the Replacements a lot in my twenties, less so in my thirties. In fact, my music tastes significantly evolved (or devolved) from the Replacements, and on one level, I think I resented the fact that Paul Westerberg's solo music was so regressive, especially in a musical way. It all sounded like sub-par pre-1965 Dylan, with barely a chord outside of A, D, G, and E. While I was buying Aphex Twin CDs or whatever, Westerberg was increasingly doing music that was conservative (and I don't mean that politically), aimed at that yuppie-friendly Americana genre between Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams. I resented it for a while, but it's cool now. I think I understand it better 'cause I'm older.

Unlike the Replacements, Westerberg's recent music is firmly in the past. In an interview a few years ago, Westerberg was clear about it:

Interviewer: Are you using an iPod to listen to your music nowadays?

Westerberg: No. No. I still like to pull out 45s and put them on the mono record player in the basement. I love the past and I love what it is. I feel I can learn more from what has come before than what is happening right now and what's happening tomorrow. I'll leave that to someone else who's young and energetic. Somebody gave me a blues compilation, a DVD from England, '62-'69. It's got Little Walker and Skip James and stuff and it's I really enjoy watching that kind of stuff. I enjoy watching the Rolling Stones from that era too. I'm not a modern guy.

Where the Replacements were once the future of music (circa 1983-84), Westerberg now sings like he's part of an imagined past of American music, a line dating back to Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie and (early) Dylan. Westerberg would no longer recognize the Dylan of 1966 saying "play fucking louder" to an antagonistic audience because he has left that behind with the Replacements. He's a bard playing hillbilly music (with a Keith Richards edge) from an anachronistic timeless Harry Smith-esque place that never existed. In that way, he's still doing what the Replacements were doing. Taking his audience to a make believe land that somewhere makes sense. And isn't that sometimes the best that "art" can do?

Can't Hardly Wait (airshaft) [mp3]

Donna Summer: I Feel Love

A short post, prompted by having just stumbled upon a video of one of the best dance songs of all time, Donna Summer's 1977 classic "I Feel Love." Apparently originally released as a b-side, it, of course, became a massive hit. Amazing, really, how futuristic and forward-thinking the song was, for which most of the credit should go to producer Giorgio Moroder. The video is not all that great in terms of quality, but it's definitely worth a see.

I should add that Giorgio Moroder himself released a few albums, one of which, From Here to Eternity (also from 1977) was something I listened to quite a lot when I was in my early teens (thanks to a friend of mine, Sameena, who, God knows where she is these days, was a big fan). It's definitely worth checking out. The kids these days say that From Here to Eternity was where trance and house music began, which seems a little overstated. Looking up the album on the dreaded wikipedia, it turns out that in the production credits of the album, Moroder wrote: "Only electronic keyboards were used in the making of the album." I think that's fantastic!... Because it completely inverts the kind of self-important claims for "authenticity" that rock musicians would aspire to in the 1980s, about how everything on their albums was played on guitars....you know....no Goddamn synthesizers...but REAL instruments. Giorgio, it turns out, was way ahead of pack in many respects, not just in terms of his music but also in terms of an understanding of what he was doing.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

I'm no good with regular posts partly (well, mostly) (well, completely) because I have so much other shit to do in life. I have no time to write here. Which means that what I do is mostly daydream about my clever, erudite, and oh so witty musings that I will one day post on this blog that people will be impressed with.

I have a long post, which I intend to finish soon, on the state of pop music in Bangladesh. But until then, I thought I'd post on some contemporary news. Pitchfork recently reported that the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor may have broken up. I know in the real world, a band possibly breaking up is not big news, but it is big news when the band in question is Godspeed. I would guess that if I had to name my favorite musical act from the past ten years, Godspeed would be a contender for the top spot.

Rock critics like to call Godspeed "post-rock" but such a reductive (and silly) term does them no justice. Nay, Godspeed's music is the music God might make had God been a bunch of hairy anarchists from Canada. So...Godspeed are a band based on Montreal, more of a collective than a band, a band that resolutely rejects the notion of leaders, individuals, entertainment personalities, and the often absurd travails of modern day musical (conspicuous) consumption. They are anarchists (!) who put their money where their mouth(s) are. The band gives almost no interviews, claims it has no 'leaders,' self-releases their own records, never signed with a major label, organizes their tours themselves, etc. etc. They are political. Not political in the U2 sense of the word--preachy, contrived, and self-righteous--but political in the most personal levels possible. Their music has no lyrics, although frequently, the music is interspersed with spoken word samples that hint at a kind of personal dissafectation with modern day capitalism. But all of this, on some level, is irrelevant.

The main thing is the music. The music combines absurd beauty with galactic-levels of sadness. As a working orchestra (of usually nine or so people), they play ensemble music, each "song" lasting between 15 and 25 minutes. Each track is divided into movements, much like classical music. The instruments are basically guitar, bass, drum, violins, french horns, electronics, vocals, etc. With these instruments, they produce a music that can be as silent as paper clips dropping on the floor-- or raging jet engines in your face....suffused with a sheer and utter melancholia that is both helpless and hopeful at the same time. Once, while listening to a Godspeed track, all that was going through my mind was the following imaginary title, perhaps thought of by a vagabond on a street: "The Incredibly Small Dot That I Am At The Very Bottom of the Giant Fucking Ocean That We Call Pacific Thousands of Miles From Anywhere in a Bottomless Expanse of Infinite Sadness That Cannot Be Described in Words But Is Lived Constantly In My Daily Life."

Their music traffics in the same kind of dynamics of melancholia purveyed by three other favorite bands of mine: Mogwai, Sigur Ros, and Explosions in the Sky. But unlike these three, Godspeed sounds ragged, almost improvised, and undeniably serious. And fucking glorious. And where all three of these other bands have their moments of brilliance and stomach-churning melancholia, Godspeed makes you viscerally disconnect from people around you. You might never want to feel like that, which is fine. Godspeed's music is not for everyone. It is an acquired taste. It is a soundtrack for the moments that make us uncomfortable with our lives. It is the music of discomfort, of strangeness, of incoherence and yes, even of coherence. It is a music of contradictions. I think the closest classical comparison would be Henryk Gorecki, whose Symphony No. 3 probably can conjure the same emotions in even the coldest and most alienated human being. (More on that in another entry).

Godspeed You! Black Emperor (they used to be Godspeed You Black Emperor!) has released one e.p. and three full length albums. Their second album, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, is a brilliant double album, one of my favorite albums of the past one million years. Released in 2000, it has four long pieces ("Storm," "Static," "Sleep," and "Antennas to Heaven") that will bring you to your knees. I guarantee it. "Sleep" especially is Godawfully beautiful, beginning with a wonderful monologue by an older gentleman, someone who is remembering, haltingly remembering, his time as a young man on Coney Island, about the times when they slept on the beach as young men. Now they no longer sleep on the beach anymore. It's never explained why. But a mournful music begins that takes you on three different movements for about 23 minutes before moving into "Antennas to Heaven," which itself is nearly 19 minutes long. Not at all dirgelike.

I saw Godspeed in April 2003 at Warsaw (the Polish National Home) in Brooklyn. They were touring in support of their final album Yanqui U.X.O. which, although not as good as its predecessor, contained "Motherfucker=Redeemer" (in two parts), the first part of which is a roller coaster of riffs, notes, crescendos that left me breathless as I watched it in concert. Beginning with the soft notes of a xylophone, the music lifted the crowd off the ground, made us take deep deep breaths, made us gasp for air as it headed to its strange conclusion of echoes and guitars ringing through the hall. One of their best pieces of music.

I'm glad I saw them since it looks they won't ever be touring again. It was such a beautiful show. I was mesmerized, almost brought the point of tears. Their shows were not just musical affairs, but also fully realized visual extravaganzas, with movies projected on the band and on to the background, vaguely political moving images from history. Their political message can be seen on one level as hopeless and cynical -- after all according to Godspeed the world is fucked. Profoundly fucked. So it was comforting, almost revelatory to see the band end their show with words of hope ("Hope") flashed on the background, as they convened one last time to play a lovely lullabye piece (called "Outro") that was almost playful, fun, and happy (yes, happy) in its tone. The band smiled throughout this last piece, enjoying each other's company, ended the beautiful piece, stood up, clapped, waved, and were gone.

While Godspeed You! Black Emperor may not exist anymore, several of its band members have gone on to other bands, notably Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band who are still around (in fact, they have a new album coming out soon). There's a very evocative review of a Silver Mt. Zion album (Horses in the Sky) which briefly mentions their earlier classic album He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Sometimes Grace The Corner of Our Rooms... It's worth a read.

Here's an amateur video of "Albanian" by Godspeed, an unreleased track that they played live on their 2003 tour.



And here's another one from the same tour of them doing a portion of the first song ("Storm") off of Lift Your Skinny Fists. Neither of the videos do remote justice to their music or their live showa but they do provide a sense of the ensemble nature of their work.



Finally, although "Outro" (the almost "happy" track that they ended their shows with) was never released on an official Godspeed album, it is featured in a compilation CD released by Constellation records entitled Song of the Silent Land. The CD is worth getting. In case you're interested, I've posted an mp3 of "Outro" here. A little bit of an acquired taste, but still very cool.

See you later.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Outro [mp3]

Dhaka Calling

I've been here in Dhaka for two days and still getting over the jetlag. The roughly 12 hour time difference completely disorients you. I have only been out once, to the wedding reception of a friend. Otherwise, I've been ensconced at my parents' home. The city is oddly quiet, not surprising given that both the Eid and Christmas holidays have shut everything down. Quiet is a relative term---my point of reference is only the frenetic noise of the traffic infront of our house. There has been none so far. Yet, reading the newspapers, the city and the country seems as madly frenetic as ever. Millions of things are going on. Meetings, conferences, festivals, and most of all, weddings. In Dhaka, weddings (like fruits and vegetables) have seasons, and 'tis the season of weddings every December and January. There are literally dozens across the city every single night. Hotels and convention centers are booked, and some wedding party is facing some crisis at any given moment of the day. Based upon my recent annual visits, the weddings seem quite different from twenty years ago (my other point of reference). They seem much more homogenous and yet more colorful. Urban weddings of a certain class have the same series of events, mutating slowly every year into forms unrecognizable from before. I hear now that at the engagement parties, they make the food on the spot infront of the guests. New forms of authenticity are replacing old ones.

I'll venture out to the city later today. In the meantime, here are two random pictures from the last couple of days of news here. One an image of a street celebration of Eid (top) and the other a guy in a red suit dispensing joy yesterday (below), both here in the city. (Both pictures stolen from The Daily Star newspaper). No -- it's not all religion here, and yes, I'm not a big fan of by any stretch of the imagination. But just to start things off with some color on my musings on the trip to the desh this year.

The Asteroid # 4

Thought I'd do a test to put up mp3 files.
I'll begin with Asteroid No. 4's "The CIA Took My Dog Away."

Seefeel (redux)

Earlier this year, Too Pure records put out a re-release of Seefeel's classic Quique CD, now expanded to a two-CD package called Quique: Redux Edition. Needless to say, the music on it is awesome beyond words -- electronic bliss captured in a moment of almost-genius by this long gone British band. I wrote at length about Seefeel in my zine thing (see Fred issue 7 here) so I won't go on about the band in general but I will say that the new package is definitely worth getting if you are into electronic music that is narcotic, minimalist, and yet not boring.

While the first disc on the set is their debut album released in 1993, the second disc collects a bunch of random tracks from that same era, 3 previously released and 6 previously not. Most are remixes of the tracks on disc 1. The second disc takes the idea of "ambience" ['e' and 'a' interchangeable, apparently] to another level altogether, with little grounding in the kinds of beats and melodies we normally associate with music.

The package comes with two short essays, one from Simon Reynolds, who apparently upon listening to Seefeel coined the now oddly silly term "post-rock," and the other from Seefeel chief architect Mark Clifford, the former, basically a record review written in 1993. Reynolds is a wonderful writer (which is why I hate him) and he says "Quique is perfectly blank, utterly abstract." Indeed, it is. He adds, "Fuzzy harmonics, like a harp played underwater, simply hang tremulously in the air: this really is Rothko'n'roll." (Reynolds' idea of pun is to use lots of funs. Yes, I meant that).

Go get the new Quique if you can. Read more about Seefeel here.

Very rare live footage of Seefeel performing, apparently from the early 1990s, of their track "Industrious" from Quique:

It's all done with GUITARS!!!

Michael Gira

I have not seen that many shows this year, but one of the few that I did catch was a show by Michael Gira, formerly of the Swans, who did a solo acoustic thing at the Highline Ballroom here in New York on September 14. The show was basically a record release show for the new album by his band Angels of Light. The new CD is called We Are Him.

This is not the time for a long post on the Swans, one of the greatest bands of the 1980s (more on that later) but I will say that seeing Gira (pronounced "jeera" I discovered only recently) was a profoundly intense experience. This guy is not fucking around. He's in his early fifties now (amazing!) and he sorta looked it. Walked on stage, still thin, still so absurdly intense that you either want to laugh or be scared. He had his usual cowboy hat and boots on, sat on a stool with a single acoustic guitar, dead center in front of the stage. I was almost to his front, just a little to the left so I barely escaped the spit that flung out of his mouth as he berated, condemned, nay, admonished former lovers, friends, people, God, himself, and God knows what else for a period of about an hour-and-a-half. Bile. I really had no idea what to expect when I went to see him, but after he did the first song, I just muttered under my breath: "Holy living fuck."

Stripped down to acoustic guitar, every word that came out of his mouth (with his spit), hung like drenched blankets in the dead air, unable to swing. I don't remember the set list anymore--a buncha Swans songs, some Angels of Light--but the entire audience was mesmerized the whole time. All the more amazing, when he would pause between his indictments and sing the most tender of songs, something about (gasp) love or human affection. For those few minutes, you unclenched your firsts, love or affection actually meaning something real and not platitudes or cliches.

A young woman, probably in her late twenties, who came to the show alone (like I did), stood directly infront of him. When Gira launched into his first song, looking mad, and talking about filth and despair, she just broke into a most uncomfortable smile, as if she was so so so embarrassed to be having to hear this most personal lyric in a room full of strangers. I have never seen a smile so uncomfortable. Later at the end of the evening, when Gira did a short encore by doing "God Damn the Sun" (the beautiful final track from the Swans' The Burning World album from 1989), the same woman had tears streaming down her cheeks. Streaming. She lost her capacity to be embarrassed. Gira continued:

When, when we were young
We had no history
So nothing to lose
Meant we could choose
Choose what we wanted then
Without any fear
Or thought of revenge

But then you grew old
And I lost my ambition
So I gained an addiction
To drink and depression

The following is not a terribly good version (sound quality is bad) but you can see the man pretty well as he does "God Damn the Sun."

Waves of Plastic

A couple of months ago, I managed to track down a very rare piece of music. I don't normally buy that much music anymore, but in a fit of I-don't-know-what, I decided to splurge something like $71 for six songs. Six songs I have heard before and have somewhere, at least on ancient cassette tapes. In 1987, the band the Replacements released a double 12" single only in Germany that had four rare b-sides. I am not sure why they chose release this stuff only in Germany (maybe so I could buy it 20 years later for an obscene amount of money) but they did. Bastards.

So, for about 20 years, I'd been desperately trying to track this mythic thing down. I'd managed to get pretty much everything else by the band. But this one thing remained. I scoured record stores (back when there used to be such things). I'd do absurd Google searches. Nothing. I'm not even sure why I bothered to try and find it. I rarely listen to the Replacements. I don't even like that kind of music anymore. But it was, you know, some sort of lame attempt at grasping-for-youth or worse, a small material object to make me happy. Blah blah. Twenty years went by.

So, in May or June or whatever, I managed to track it down on-line, forked over $71 and lo and behold it arrived at my house a week or so later. It was like chocolate melting in your mouth. I cleaned it lovingly, played all four sides a few times. I'd heard all the songs before so it wasn't like a revelation or anything. But it was nice to hear the songs (which, at least the b-sides, weren't that stellar) in their original pristine glory.

Later, more recently, I discovered that someone had left my double 12" on top of my cable box attached to the TV. As one knows, cable boxes are hot. They give off heat. Since my Replacements vinyl had been sitting on it for months, naturally, both the records warped beyond....well, beyond playing. The records look like waves of plastic.

Whatever.

The CIA Took My Dog Away

In a fit of nostalgia, I went out and got the new Sonic Youth record Rather Ripped. I have to admit that it's really gorgeous. It's very nostalgic, not at all forward looking or anything like that. It's soft, melancholy, and shockingly melodic. Few of the guitars really "sound" like Sonic Youth. They sound, dry, brittle, but warm, if that's possible, with lots of harmonics. I don't know how or why they decided to go this way. Listening to it, I almost feel like I am back in college (Station), in my shitty apartment wishing that I had a girlfriend.

One of the reasons that I don't write here that much is that no one knows that this blog exists. Well, that is not strictly true. Three people know it exists although I can't be sure that any of those three people have actually seen it. So I write in a vacuum. Which is liberating, I suppose.

I haven't read too many books this year. I typically read at a glacial pace. I get about half way into a book and then give up. A couple that I actually finished: Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier and Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up & Start Again: PostPunk 1978-1984. The former was totally crazy, about two vaguely homicidal and licentuous couples in pre-Great War America who, well you just have to read it. The latter was...well-written. I met Simon Reynolds once at some bar in the Lower East Side called Nu-Blu where he showed up to celebrate the release of the book. He was taller than me and looked very young for his age. I think he's in his early 40s. He was also totally drunk. We spoke for maybe half-an-hour in the middle of total cacophony (bad NY-wanna-be-postpunkdisco music of the early 2000s). He was very polite. The music was loud. He said he'd seen the Slits in concert. I thought he said the Smiths. That was sort of how the conversation went. I invited him to be a guest lecturer in my (still-in-gestation) class on the history of rock'n'roll (perhaps in the fall of 2007). He seemed eager. I am intimidated by him because he writes better, knows more about music, and is better looking than me. (And for sure, makes more money). The only defense I had was to revel in my mediocrity. Proud to be average, goddammit.

Thinking of Simon Reynolds and all that post-punk brings me to my topic for today: over-rated musical institutions. Exhibit A: Joy Division. I understand on a cognitive level why Joy Division remains critically unassailable: their music was rather innovative, they communicated a general darkness that was distant yet palatable, their lifetime was short, their music seems to have dated well, and their suicide quotient is at at a full '10.' But I don't understand how a fairly good band has been canonized, a hagiography taken to absurdly doctrinnaire levels. In the music world, especially critics who write about music, it's agreed but never spelled out that Joy Division is unimpeachable. In the scheme of music writing, Joy Division is one of those sacred things, as Jimi Hendrix was/is for baby boomers. You just don't absolutely ever fucking EVER describe the music of Joy Division as anything but revelatory. I listened to Closer the other day. It sounded vaguely tolerable. I always liked that song "Isolation" but everything else sounds so tinny and dated and tuneless. And tuneless in a bad way, not in a Captain Beefheart/early Boredoms/Keiji Haino-like way. Just plain horrible tuneless. The set of random leftovers collected on Substance is actually pretty good. All those singles and compilation tracks were imaginative and inventive. But the band were not really good with the whole album thing. And the ethos that they communicated was done much better by other people (for example, by the brilliant [early] Swans).

And let's face it, Ian Curtis couldn't sing worth shit. He had this tuneless warble that sounded like he was gurgling water. I'm not denigrating the pain he perhaps felt, and yes, the band backed up that pain pretty well, but hardly on a level, say of some nu-metal band fronting adolescent cliches about suicide and death and meaninglessness and helplessness. Joy Division's clinical, cool, detached shtick was just plastic. Their innovative tendencies (both on stage and in the recording studio) were nothing compared to many of their contemporaries such as P.I.L. I'm already getting bored writing about the band. To me, Joy Division were the Alice in Chains of their era. And I say that with the best of intentions. I'm quite fond of Alice in Chains. They're not the greatest but did what they did pretty nicely. Check out their Jar of Flies e.p. Wonderful stuff. Tragic about their lead singer.

OK, on to obscure track of the day. My old favorite band from Philly, Asteroid # 4, used to be this weird whimsical band in the vein of late '60s psychedelia. They put on fantastic shows and put out a great album (Introducing....The Asteroid # 4) in 1998. Around this time, while I was living in Philly, I discovered them when a friend and I showed up at the record release party for Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, which was held at the Trocadero, the best place to see live music in Philly. They band (Asteroid # 4) were four typical college-looking guys who launched into spasmotic space rock, even introducing a flute player at one point. They had totally ridiculous lyrics and deadpan faces. It was actually pretty funny.

I saw them a few more times but lost track once they veered into a cul-de-sac of imitation; they started getting obssessed with mid-period Byrds, especially the canon of Gram Parsons. It's not that I don't like Parsons' music, but more that it was a tired move for them, and they didn't doo it very well. However, they have a new album out called "An Amazing Dream," and from what I've heard it sounds a lot more fun and creative, harking back to their early days. Go to their myspace page to hear some stuff streaming.

One thing that was lost in the shuffle through their albums was their one-off non-album single from 1995 "The CIA Took My Dog Away" b/w "Mellow Beach," two spectacular tracks that perfectly encapsulate a kind of false nostalgia for never-really-existed late '60s psychedelia. Lots of killer melodies, fake British accents, and Barrett-era weirdness, and throw in some My Bloody Valentine-guitar, and you have these songs. They never did anything quite as good after these couple of songs, which unfortunately remain unreleased on CD. I converted the two songs to mp3s from vinyl (lotta hum) and would post them on this site, except I have no freakin' idea how to post mp3s here (or if indeed one can), so if anyone's interested, I can e-mail the track. That's how lame I am.

There is an old interview with the band here.
And a vide of the band: