Friday, August 5
here's the thing,
[stupid long, and mostly more musicbraindroppings, but stay tuned, there's a funny picture at (towards) the end, no you're not allowed to peek!]
okay, i'm listening to radio disney (that's am 640 in phila kidz), inspired by this article, courtesy of dave. so far it's not quite living up to saunders' description - for one, there have only been two "oldies" in over two hours of listening today and yesterday ("i feel good" and "carwash" - twice.) in fact, most of it could pass for by-numbers 00s pop radio, with scattered but intense doses of leftfield inanity (qv. "crazy frogs" - what the hell is this?) and heaps of random banter between djs and pre-teen callers (my favorite so far was a mother and daughter "counterpoint" about the yoga class they took together.) cool, i can dig it - certainly, the theory as hyperbolated in that article is more appealing than the practice as apparently actually executed, but that's to be expected.
but...this idea that up until now we've been in "the post-beatles era" which is now on its way out.. hm... well, i agree that the dominance of rock-centric music, which was pretty well established in the sixties and seventies, is far less clear-cut these days. corollary to that; after 45+ years, it's just a lot harder for rock qua rock to be very interesting (think how exciting and fresh pretty much any poppy/garage/whatever rock song from the sixties still sounds these days vs. the amount of current guitar-based rock out there that's either just plain boring, or if not takes some amount of listening to discern what makes it different/worthwhile. i note that this rhetorical smacks of stronger-than-standard subjectivity, but i think there's some validity to it.)
another way of incorporating that observation into a wide-angle view of pop music history might be to say that, yes, rock's arrival on the scene made quite a splash [and, crucially, it was accompanied by some persistent, non-style-dependent changes in the culture of popular music, not to mention the culture in general], but as time passes and we move further away from that point of inception, its once distinctly conspicuous ripples become harder to discern, as they increasingly integrate with/get lost in the grand tide of stylistic musical progression and interconnectedness. which is something that had been going on the whole meantime, rock being merely one (albeit strident, and maybe particularly self-important) strain in the constantly evolving history of popular music which i would trace back to the beginning of last century when the introduction of (mass-scale) recording technology forever (well, arguably) dramatically changed the way we conceive of and interact with music, (and one could go further back, obviously, tracing the roots of various styles and ideas.)
but my point (and i'm pretty much improvising this here) was that, even from the 20s on, the cultural components were in place for the evolution that would lead to and through the genrecalian diaspora of today. key among these is/was the potential for different generations to embrace radically different musics [something i'm not sure was so clearly a possibility before records, although i suppose that like ragtime was popular among young bucks and hooligans and scorned by polite adult society.] this has allowed us to have wholesale upheavals of the prevalent musical style at the rate of once per generation, except more than that because there's always more than one style going on at the same time anyway.
although the pace of diversification may have increased since the sixties (along with everything else in the world, from our perspective), that doesn't mean the beatles et. al. heralded a substantive change in the nature of that progression - they were a part of the continuum like anything else, not a monolithic, static, platonic thing inherently opposed to progress and change (that would be the rockist angle.)
how this plays out: since a majority of music listeners these days were either a) around and listening to music when rock came on the scene or b) the children of those people -- who thus grew up listening to either a) their parents [rockist] music and/or b) music, perhaps made "in rebellion" against that music, but nevertheless made by people who themselves grew up listening to it and therefore still betray a heavy rockist influence. however you slice it, that's not many degrees of separation.
the pertinent thing about radio disney is of course that its target audience is young kids - and the theoretically exciting angle is that this a whole new generation of music listeners who can start from scratch with fresh, ahistorical ears. of course, we can't know what this [=teenpop] being the ground zero of their musical experience will mean for the music they will produce/consume later in life, but it's fun to speculate that it will be necessarily something far removed from, for instance, me who grew up listening to my parents' simian and garfunkle (or whatever) lps.
but here's where reflexivity throws a spanner in the works, 'cause apart from the fresh-faced kiddies who are supposedly tuned in to the wave of the future, and the demographic grown-ups, who only listen to watered-down covers and don't even go to record stores (supposedly?), according to herbie hancock in the times mag the other week, and therefore aimee mann's new album is on sale at whole foods for 17.99, does that mean it counts as a grocery? [is what they're listen to not relevant to "music. now."?? the short answer is yes, why again?] there are us ("we") the critical authority historicologists, who are trying oh-so-sef-conscientiously to figure out "what's going on in 'popular' music these days?"
and since we don't count, since we're listening to too many things all at the same time to have even a hope of deciphering it, we have to figure out what the people that don't listen to music listen to. this always bothers me. do i even have a concept of how people that are not me go about interacting with music? well, sure, but it's mostly theoretical. you listen to the radio (like gone-sour wxpn, radio disney is 67% covers) and somehow decide that you like something you heard, so you go to the record store and ask for it. or you hear about it from your "friends", or it's on the "radio." if you read a record review that makes you a part of the critical establishment. there is no external, disinterested audience. if you read one review you read them all, and you become a consumer of music criticism, a second-level organism. we think we're just talking to ourselves, and the theoretical other people aren't paying attention, but actually we're the silent majocracy, and there are no other people, we're all "we," and therefore we each have to decide on our own what we want to listen to. there is no such thing as genre.
the best thing i heard all day was some funky afro thing when we turned on npr, until steve inski or whoever killed my groove 4 seconds later.
here's what i played for petit 4 yesterday: massive attack vs. mad Professor, the long winters, kelis' kaleidoscope, steely dan (the royal scam - what a funky rollerskate album!), erlend øye, the books. that is what music is today. or, rather, yesterday.
was there something else i wanted to say? can you tell i'm getting tired/hot/bothered?
listen, i've effectively given up on this "august" month counting as an official part of my life. don't worry, "i will commit myself to a healthy lifestyle." and i continue to recommit myself continuously continuingly, but at the moment i'm just in limbo because why because i'm just waiting to move to my new house/life/kitchen/neighborhood/weatherpattern. perhaps i could should just blame the whole thing on the heat. after rich asked "have you started packing anything yet" i realize it's pretty much fruitile to try to clean my room because in t-2 weeks it'll pretty much been packed clean anyway, and i can start anew. i'll play music again and get netflix and watch movies on a tv instead of not watching them on my computer and always going to the ritz, and when i have my sanity i'll start cooking again and not just eating r.w. knudsen's coconut-pineapple something juice (highly recommended!) and leftover medicore [typo but i like it] vietnamese orts from lunch with my pre-spain cousins and what-was-it?
[sideline. funny thing of the instant - the packaging copy on the "formula 50", oh is that a pun on formula 500? kind of vitamin water, which we have at work, if you put it in the freezer it makes an awesome slushy, anyway the text makes it out like the hip-hop vitamin water, so it's half just cheesy and half sublimely absurd. the last line: "because that's just how we roll in queens." oh also why is it grape flavor does 50 cent like grape?]
pretty much, i'm doing nothing much this week besides being a culture sponge, music/internet/movies. i haven't bought any records incidentally, or felt much impulse to. pretty poor week for movies, let's see:
happy endings was fun to watch, though nothing like as cool as how i remember the opposite of sex. maggie gyl is a total pixie, and lisa kudrow does a good job of not actually being catherine keener. and it passed, i think, the i-just-finished-reading-the celluloid closet-hyper-homo-sensitivity lens test. i realized just after seeing it though that it's pretty uncompelling as a whole (in implicit contrast to m&y&ewk, i can see now), the stories don't have anything to do with one another (even where the characters have much closer explicit relationships than in the other film, there's far less connection in terms of theme, message, etc.) and basically it's all pretty fluffy. okay, fine.
like that, i didn't know much of anything about the beat my heart skipped when i went to see it (i still manage to see a decent number of things for free, so that's nice), except i had some notion that it was supposed to be wonderful (isn't everything?) but, maybe because i was half-asleep for part of it, it did exactly nothing for me, so i skipped out after 45 minutes, and somehow reading even the exclamatory reviews later didn't make me feel like i'd missed anything.
so i walked into murderball instead. man, i don't know. i gotta say. certainly it's a cool subject... and zuppan's a character. but... well, it turned out to be a pretty mundane and at times embarrassingly simplistic movie. i was not interested in the "human interest" stories. (especially all that stuff about joe's son? who cares?) which i'm not sure but i think was more because of the lackluster presentation than necessarily the stories themselves. i wanted to see more of the sport being played and hear it discussed more (and i don't even like sports!) the parts of games they showed were ridiculously over-edited to the point where it was impossible to follow what was going on (of course, that wasn't the point.) the structure managed to be both scatterbrained and formulaic. yeah, i guess i didn't like it.
today was better. lite brite striped shite shirt must have had something to do with mood-uppage, plus probably sleeping more (which is pretty much going to bed a few hours after getting home from work+movie.) and [cue payoff for your having read this far...] i saw march of the penguins.
(dramatic reënactment)
(look, i'm a penguin poppa!)
not to turn this into nothing but a counterpoint to dave's blog ("an antidote to the cure for bedbugs?"), but i gotta snark out some of his criticisms on this one.
so first of all yes it's basically true that the seal is "taking two lives," or at least it's truer than the pro-choice kneejerk interpretation - because the mom dying means the chick won't get food after it has hatched, not that it won't get born. second of all yes "bereft" is an unproblematically appropriate word choice, since they lost their baby. what was your other one? oh right, well actually i didn't notice them saying anything about penguins loving each other. unless you mean at the beginning him saying that it's a story about love - i took that to mean a more abstract love of the species for their lives/survival, which on the surface of it is a pretty unsentimentalized, biological-deterministic view of love, but actually i don't think so at all, the whole postmodern reversal deconstruction is optimistic thing, whatever, anyway in context that line comes right after pointing out that the penguins were more or less the only species to stick around in the extreme unhospitality of antarctia, so that's how i took it, like only something as inexplicable as love could possess them to endure those conditions. hi dave.
no actually i was all set going in to be slightly put off by the conservative-values subtext, at least until minute like three when i was overwhelmed by the cuteness and said, okay, this is a case where i just have to give in to the anthropomorphizing instinct and enjoy this, cause like the my date for drew guy could be endearing or creepy, this is a kind of movie-going that involves a choice, dave. but, actually, i didn't find it to be a problem at all, i didn't find the voiceover script to be problematic at all, although the part where they had the little cartoon vocoder voices for all the penguin families singing songs from "sesame street" was a little overboard. the penguins the penguins! oh my goodness it's just impossible not to smile or laugh or cringe or keep thinking about the doubtful guest, at all the appropriate moments. there were a lot of moments where i thought it looked like cg but it was all real and that makes it even more amazing. one thing that was a bit off-putting was how they shied away from really mentioning or showing death. like when the older males, according to morgan "simply fall asleep and fade away," likewise earlier they show one of the penguins not being able to make the trip, and so he like, dissolves into nothingless behind a conveniently placed ice-chunk. in conclusion, wowee, what a flick!
apologism:
1. sorry i yet again saved up all my blog juice for this one massive weirdo at the end of the week
2. sorry i didn't write about the actually interesting things i've been thinking about, especially at the beginning of the week, because i forgot what they were.
3. sorry i didn't write about the canoe trip because pretty much it was just a canoe trip, a great time, perfect weather but not that much to tell really, except for we ran a bunch of rapids because we decided we didn't want to do the portages anymore, and also we watched two loons feeding their babies that was really cute.
4. sorry i might not actually have a party before i leave here but maybe i still will.
5. sorry i'm presumably not going to make it to new york this weekend. i'll blame that one on you guys again.
the books suggest we set our hearts on doing nothing
okay, i'm listening to radio disney (that's am 640 in phila kidz), inspired by this article, courtesy of dave. so far it's not quite living up to saunders' description - for one, there have only been two "oldies" in over two hours of listening today and yesterday ("i feel good" and "carwash" - twice.) in fact, most of it could pass for by-numbers 00s pop radio, with scattered but intense doses of leftfield inanity (qv. "crazy frogs" - what the hell is this?) and heaps of random banter between djs and pre-teen callers (my favorite so far was a mother and daughter "counterpoint" about the yoga class they took together.) cool, i can dig it - certainly, the theory as hyperbolated in that article is more appealing than the practice as apparently actually executed, but that's to be expected.
but...this idea that up until now we've been in "the post-beatles era" which is now on its way out.. hm... well, i agree that the dominance of rock-centric music, which was pretty well established in the sixties and seventies, is far less clear-cut these days. corollary to that; after 45+ years, it's just a lot harder for rock qua rock to be very interesting (think how exciting and fresh pretty much any poppy/garage/whatever rock song from the sixties still sounds these days vs. the amount of current guitar-based rock out there that's either just plain boring, or if not takes some amount of listening to discern what makes it different/worthwhile. i note that this rhetorical smacks of stronger-than-standard subjectivity, but i think there's some validity to it.)
another way of incorporating that observation into a wide-angle view of pop music history might be to say that, yes, rock's arrival on the scene made quite a splash [and, crucially, it was accompanied by some persistent, non-style-dependent changes in the culture of popular music, not to mention the culture in general], but as time passes and we move further away from that point of inception, its once distinctly conspicuous ripples become harder to discern, as they increasingly integrate with/get lost in the grand tide of stylistic musical progression and interconnectedness. which is something that had been going on the whole meantime, rock being merely one (albeit strident, and maybe particularly self-important) strain in the constantly evolving history of popular music which i would trace back to the beginning of last century when the introduction of (mass-scale) recording technology forever (well, arguably) dramatically changed the way we conceive of and interact with music, (and one could go further back, obviously, tracing the roots of various styles and ideas.)
but my point (and i'm pretty much improvising this here) was that, even from the 20s on, the cultural components were in place for the evolution that would lead to and through the genrecalian diaspora of today. key among these is/was the potential for different generations to embrace radically different musics [something i'm not sure was so clearly a possibility before records, although i suppose that like ragtime was popular among young bucks and hooligans and scorned by polite adult society.] this has allowed us to have wholesale upheavals of the prevalent musical style at the rate of once per generation, except more than that because there's always more than one style going on at the same time anyway.
although the pace of diversification may have increased since the sixties (along with everything else in the world, from our perspective), that doesn't mean the beatles et. al. heralded a substantive change in the nature of that progression - they were a part of the continuum like anything else, not a monolithic, static, platonic thing inherently opposed to progress and change (that would be the rockist angle.)
how this plays out: since a majority of music listeners these days were either a) around and listening to music when rock came on the scene or b) the children of those people -- who thus grew up listening to either a) their parents [rockist] music and/or b) music, perhaps made "in rebellion" against that music, but nevertheless made by people who themselves grew up listening to it and therefore still betray a heavy rockist influence. however you slice it, that's not many degrees of separation.
the pertinent thing about radio disney is of course that its target audience is young kids - and the theoretically exciting angle is that this a whole new generation of music listeners who can start from scratch with fresh, ahistorical ears. of course, we can't know what this [=teenpop] being the ground zero of their musical experience will mean for the music they will produce/consume later in life, but it's fun to speculate that it will be necessarily something far removed from, for instance, me who grew up listening to my parents' simian and garfunkle (or whatever) lps.
but here's where reflexivity throws a spanner in the works, 'cause apart from the fresh-faced kiddies who are supposedly tuned in to the wave of the future, and the demographic grown-ups, who only listen to watered-down covers and don't even go to record stores (supposedly?), according to herbie hancock in the times mag the other week, and therefore aimee mann's new album is on sale at whole foods for 17.99, does that mean it counts as a grocery? [is what they're listen to not relevant to "music. now."?? the short answer is yes, why again?] there are us ("we") the critical authority historicologists, who are trying oh-so-sef-conscientiously to figure out "what's going on in 'popular' music these days?"
and since we don't count, since we're listening to too many things all at the same time to have even a hope of deciphering it, we have to figure out what the people that don't listen to music listen to. this always bothers me. do i even have a concept of how people that are not me go about interacting with music? well, sure, but it's mostly theoretical. you listen to the radio (like gone-sour wxpn, radio disney is 67% covers) and somehow decide that you like something you heard, so you go to the record store and ask for it. or you hear about it from your "friends", or it's on the "radio." if you read a record review that makes you a part of the critical establishment. there is no external, disinterested audience. if you read one review you read them all, and you become a consumer of music criticism, a second-level organism. we think we're just talking to ourselves, and the theoretical other people aren't paying attention, but actually we're the silent majocracy, and there are no other people, we're all "we," and therefore we each have to decide on our own what we want to listen to. there is no such thing as genre.
the best thing i heard all day was some funky afro thing when we turned on npr, until steve inski or whoever killed my groove 4 seconds later.
here's what i played for petit 4 yesterday: massive attack vs. mad Professor, the long winters, kelis' kaleidoscope, steely dan (the royal scam - what a funky rollerskate album!), erlend øye, the books. that is what music is today. or, rather, yesterday.
was there something else i wanted to say? can you tell i'm getting tired/hot/bothered?
listen, i've effectively given up on this "august" month counting as an official part of my life. don't worry, "i will commit myself to a healthy lifestyle." and i continue to recommit myself continuously continuingly, but at the moment i'm just in limbo because why because i'm just waiting to move to my new house/life/kitchen/neighborhood/weatherpattern. perhaps i could should just blame the whole thing on the heat. after rich asked "have you started packing anything yet" i realize it's pretty much fruitile to try to clean my room because in t-2 weeks it'll pretty much been packed clean anyway, and i can start anew. i'll play music again and get netflix and watch movies on a tv instead of not watching them on my computer and always going to the ritz, and when i have my sanity i'll start cooking again and not just eating r.w. knudsen's coconut-pineapple something juice (highly recommended!) and leftover medicore [typo but i like it] vietnamese orts from lunch with my pre-spain cousins and what-was-it?
[sideline. funny thing of the instant - the packaging copy on the "formula 50", oh is that a pun on formula 500? kind of vitamin water, which we have at work, if you put it in the freezer it makes an awesome slushy, anyway the text makes it out like the hip-hop vitamin water, so it's half just cheesy and half sublimely absurd. the last line: "because that's just how we roll in queens." oh also why is it grape flavor does 50 cent like grape?]
pretty much, i'm doing nothing much this week besides being a culture sponge, music/internet/movies. i haven't bought any records incidentally, or felt much impulse to. pretty poor week for movies, let's see:
happy endings was fun to watch, though nothing like as cool as how i remember the opposite of sex. maggie gyl is a total pixie, and lisa kudrow does a good job of not actually being catherine keener. and it passed, i think, the i-just-finished-reading-the celluloid closet-hyper-homo-sensitivity lens test. i realized just after seeing it though that it's pretty uncompelling as a whole (in implicit contrast to m&y&ewk, i can see now), the stories don't have anything to do with one another (even where the characters have much closer explicit relationships than in the other film, there's far less connection in terms of theme, message, etc.) and basically it's all pretty fluffy. okay, fine.
like that, i didn't know much of anything about the beat my heart skipped when i went to see it (i still manage to see a decent number of things for free, so that's nice), except i had some notion that it was supposed to be wonderful (isn't everything?) but, maybe because i was half-asleep for part of it, it did exactly nothing for me, so i skipped out after 45 minutes, and somehow reading even the exclamatory reviews later didn't make me feel like i'd missed anything.
so i walked into murderball instead. man, i don't know. i gotta say. certainly it's a cool subject... and zuppan's a character. but... well, it turned out to be a pretty mundane and at times embarrassingly simplistic movie. i was not interested in the "human interest" stories. (especially all that stuff about joe's son? who cares?) which i'm not sure but i think was more because of the lackluster presentation than necessarily the stories themselves. i wanted to see more of the sport being played and hear it discussed more (and i don't even like sports!) the parts of games they showed were ridiculously over-edited to the point where it was impossible to follow what was going on (of course, that wasn't the point.) the structure managed to be both scatterbrained and formulaic. yeah, i guess i didn't like it.
today was better. lite brite striped shite shirt must have had something to do with mood-uppage, plus probably sleeping more (which is pretty much going to bed a few hours after getting home from work+movie.) and [cue payoff for your having read this far...] i saw march of the penguins.
(dramatic reënactment)
(look, i'm a penguin poppa!)
not to turn this into nothing but a counterpoint to dave's blog ("an antidote to the cure for bedbugs?"), but i gotta snark out some of his criticisms on this one.
so first of all yes it's basically true that the seal is "taking two lives," or at least it's truer than the pro-choice kneejerk interpretation - because the mom dying means the chick won't get food after it has hatched, not that it won't get born. second of all yes "bereft" is an unproblematically appropriate word choice, since they lost their baby. what was your other one? oh right, well actually i didn't notice them saying anything about penguins loving each other. unless you mean at the beginning him saying that it's a story about love - i took that to mean a more abstract love of the species for their lives/survival, which on the surface of it is a pretty unsentimentalized, biological-deterministic view of love, but actually i don't think so at all, the whole postmodern reversal deconstruction is optimistic thing, whatever, anyway in context that line comes right after pointing out that the penguins were more or less the only species to stick around in the extreme unhospitality of antarctia, so that's how i took it, like only something as inexplicable as love could possess them to endure those conditions. hi dave.
no actually i was all set going in to be slightly put off by the conservative-values subtext, at least until minute like three when i was overwhelmed by the cuteness and said, okay, this is a case where i just have to give in to the anthropomorphizing instinct and enjoy this, cause like the my date for drew guy could be endearing or creepy, this is a kind of movie-going that involves a choice, dave. but, actually, i didn't find it to be a problem at all, i didn't find the voiceover script to be problematic at all, although the part where they had the little cartoon vocoder voices for all the penguin families singing songs from "sesame street" was a little overboard. the penguins the penguins! oh my goodness it's just impossible not to smile or laugh or cringe or keep thinking about the doubtful guest, at all the appropriate moments. there were a lot of moments where i thought it looked like cg but it was all real and that makes it even more amazing. one thing that was a bit off-putting was how they shied away from really mentioning or showing death. like when the older males, according to morgan "simply fall asleep and fade away," likewise earlier they show one of the penguins not being able to make the trip, and so he like, dissolves into nothingless behind a conveniently placed ice-chunk. in conclusion, wowee, what a flick!
apologism:
1. sorry i yet again saved up all my blog juice for this one massive weirdo at the end of the week
2. sorry i didn't write about the actually interesting things i've been thinking about, especially at the beginning of the week, because i forgot what they were.
3. sorry i didn't write about the canoe trip because pretty much it was just a canoe trip, a great time, perfect weather but not that much to tell really, except for we ran a bunch of rapids because we decided we didn't want to do the portages anymore, and also we watched two loons feeding their babies that was really cute.
4. sorry i might not actually have a party before i leave here but maybe i still will.
5. sorry i'm presumably not going to make it to new york this weekend. i'll blame that one on you guys again.
the books suggest we set our hearts on doing nothing
