ars economica

I read in a review of a history of the American economy (hey! you! wake up, I'm talking to you...) that despite our deepening trade deficit, we still do a land-office business in scrap and waste. (By the way: what the hell is a land-office, and if it's such good business how come they're not on every corner like a Starbucks?) So we can't really make much of anything anymore...we're rather like a depleted stud bull, still consuming vast shares of feed, but redeemed in part via the fertilizing beneficence of its excreta.

somewhere, Komar & Melamid are smiling

The odd thing about entirely market-driven pop music is that it's curiously clueless about its core market. What do I mean? Well...consider that for years, young teenage girls have been the main purchasers of pop singles. As everyone knows, young teenage girls are, by law and regulation, entirely mad about horses and ponies. And yet, as far as I can recall, only one chart-targeting artist has taken this into account, and written a song quite clearly aiming at the pony-mad teenage girl audience. I speak, of course, of Michael Murphey's immortal "Wildfire." (Murphey, by the way, has apparently made a career being a "singing cowboy poet." Seems a bit obscure - I mean, "banjo-slinging railroad-man painter" or "trombone-playing astronaut actor" were already taken, I suppose? But hey - gotta milk the one hit single for what it's worth.) I mean, what more could you ask for? There's a mysterious horse, a girl who rides it, tragic death, and, you know, emotionally resonant meteorological phenomena. What's wrong with all you pop-bound songwriters? Just as the teen male demographic may be accessed through songs about cars and girls (as The Dictators knew), the teen female demographic wants more songs about horses! (Curiously, Patti Smith doesn't count.)

But not all at ADS is names ending in the letter "i" with little circles above them; no, many very manly things have been afoot here lately. Why just today, I spent the holiday engaged in the following activities, certain to enhance my manly status among those who keep score of such things: I ate a large breakfast involving meat, eggs, and cheese; I purchased some items at Menard's; I used a shovel, a drill, and a hammer to put up a structure in the yard; I discussed trucks, trains, and automobiles with a wizened male relative; I cooked and ate meat on the grill in our backyard; I drank a couple of beers. I probably lose points for not watching men (and a woman or two) in logo-festooned jumpsuits driving massively-wheeled cars very fast over and over again in circles - but I'm sure I can make up for it by browsing a website about guns or pornography or flat abs or something.

Michael Murphey "Wildfire"

knives and cockfights

I can't say I listen to Xiu Xiu terribly often - one has to be in a particular mood to appreciate Jamie Stewart's extravagant emotional exhibitionism, for one thing - but they're one of those bands that always garner more respect from me than enjoyment. But then, "enjoyment" probably isn't the point. I don't know that "respect" is either - but even if sometimes it sounds like several bands at once accompanied by a Chinese opera pit orchestra being shoved down a flight of stairs into an echo chamber, their music creates its own coherence. And one of its elements that does so is the surprising fact, beyond the clatter and noise, that they're capable of writing extremely tuneful songs. In another life - one in which their urge to, say, make money making music was considerably stronger - they probably have the melodic skills to take on the Coldplays of the world.

So in a way it's not too surprising to me that, listening to Knife Play the other day in the car, I suddenly found myself thinking of Scott Walker's Tilt. Probably not the most obvious connection - but Walker actually did have his moment in the hitmaking sun, which he forsook for following his far more difficult (and notoriously occasional) muse. It's a fair guess that more people think of Walker as a melodist, but his voice, too (in quite a different way from Stewart's) is wayward, extravagant, overblown, even off-putting to some. I recall putting on Tilt for someone a few years back, and as Walker sang the first notes of "Farmer in the City" (the album's opening track) my friend smirked, what the hell is this - the goddamned opera? No one is ever likely to mistake Stewart for Pavarotti - but it's also true that Walker's musical territory sometimes drapes his often quite hummable vocal lines in exotic and extravagant outfits.

For a suggestion of proof, listen to the two tracks I've posted: Walker's song "The Cockfighter" (which could even be a Xiu Xiu title...) and Xiu Xiu's "Don Diasco." (In fact, listen to them in that order so the percussion segues between the two tracks.) Both tracks veer unpredictably from quiet to loud, from becalmed to frantic, with unexpected instrumentation (the blaring trumpet halfway through "The Cockfighter," what sounds like someone throwing an overdriven microphone directly at an overloaded guitar's strings in "Don Diasco"), and both - listened to away from the preconception that noise precludes melody - prove their very different vocalists' melodic mettle.

Scott Walker "The Cockfighter"
Xiu Xiu "Don Diasco"

a small bandwagon forming

Following up on recent entries at The Mystical Beast and Spoilt Victorian Child, I checked out Bullette's music. And I'm happy to report both writers are right: this is an exceptional set of songs. Because the songs are all available at her site, I'm not posting any here - but what most impresses me about them is that they're simultaneously musically diverse but clearly the product of a particular musician's perspective and taste. Too often, "musically diverse" is another way of saying "it sounds like a compilation...of ten different mediocre bands in ten different lame styles," or that a musician has no sense of self and has merely been digging through the last several Officially Pronounced Hip styles at Pitchfork...but Bullette (you can think of the name as several puns, even though it's also just her surname) sounds instead like someone with a well-stocked music collection who loves and understands the different sounds and styles she works with rather than merely aping them for someone else's approval. Not to mention that what's cool doesn't seem to be in the least a functional criterion for her music: some of it, to be sure, would impress people hanging around outside cool record stores, but some of it would puzzle them or piss them off. No matter.

My only quibble is that the three tracks with the most synthetic atmospheres are grouped together near the end, which makes the difference in their sonic atmosphere stand out a bit gawkily. (The other quibble isn't mine: as Dana points out, a few tracks could be shortened a bit.) But this is definitely music that, even on first listen, makes me want to hear more, and makes me anticipate what Bullette will do in future recordings.

have a clue?

David Thomas & the Pedestrians "Big Dreams"
David Thomas & the Pedestrians "Who Is It?"

A while back, in a bid to foil UMG's dastardly efforts to get people to buy the same damned album twice, I prevailed upon members of a music list I subscribe to to burn me a copy of the second, "bonus" disc included in the second edition of Elvis Costello's The Delivery Man. A noble soul responded, defying the RIAA, and in exchange, he mentioned that he'd love to hear more of David Thomas's solo work (he also mentioned Captain Beefheart and twentieth-century classical, among other music; naturally, I had to make a mix that combined all three).

Unfortunately, at the time I only had a couple of Thomas's solo items on ratty old cassette tapes dubbed from LPs. So, realizing that the first five Thomas CDs were out on the Monster box set (not counting Winter Comes Home - which, you see, "never existed"), I bought that. (If the RIAA is counting, this means I purchased a 4-CD box set, motivated by my refusal to purchase a single-priced release I already owned. I think they came out ahead on this one.)

It was a joy to revisit these recordings, and I'd forgotten how musical they were - well, "musical" once you accept that that's Thomas's voice and that's just the way it is. "Big Dreams" features Richard Thompson on guitar playing over what sounds rather like jazz as written by a musician who'd never actually heard jazz. I love the goofy stop-n-go rhythm (with Thomas himself playing traffic cop) and Philip Moxham's bass double-stopping, as well as the wandering muted trumpet interlude in the middle. "Who Is It?" features Lindsay Cooper's bassoon, a nice subtle piano line, and something that might be a blues interlude except it isn't quite. Uh-and it's mostly in 13/8 - those wacky British progsters and their odd-numbered time signatures.

Steak? What steak? All I hear is that sizzling...

Courtesy of Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo: here's Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post on the Newsweek/Koran imbroglio. (By the way: it's always good to use the word "imbroglio.")

Disturbingly similar to the Rather/Guard mess...in that in all the fuss about "authenticity," the verifiably likely truth of the stories was completely rolled over.

trails of once it was and what it could be

I've been obsessing for the past few weeks over the Doleful Lions' 2002 release Out Like a Lamb. I'd heard the band's earlier release The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! - and while I liked several songs quite a bit, overall it didn't compel me to pay much attention to the band. A year or so back, when rumors of the eventual change in e-Music's billing system were flying and I downloaded 5,362 albums in preparation, one of them was Out Like a Lamb. Because I am lame (and because 5,362 albums takes a long time for me to work through), I only recently actually heard the album - and when I did, it was a bit of a revelation. I'd brought one of the e-Music binge-CDs-full-of-mp3s out to the car, and I couldn't figure out who this band was that I was hearing, except that I really liked it. I could swear I'd heard "Surfside Motel" before - was it a cover of some obscure '60s track buried away on some comp somewhere? There was a sort of spooky, psychedelic folk quality that rather reminded me of Damon & Naomi's more haunting material, but the singer's quavery voice gave the music a different quality from Damon Krukowski's more straightforward singing, while the female singer's vocals weren't as pure as Naomi Yang's. Anyway, once I got home I checked the files and immediately pulled out Rats/Werewolves, thinking I must have misremembered what it sounded like. No - it's still a pretty good record, but the sound is completely different.

So when I read that Doleful Lions had a new release, Shaded Lounge and Mausoleum, coming out on Parasol, I zipped over to the label's site and ordered it. I haven't fully digested it yet, but it's yet another evolution in the band's sound. (I haven't yet heard Song Cyclops Vol. 1, their album between Rats/Werewolves and Out Like a Lamb.) The female singer, unfortunately, is gone - her voice provided a good contrast with Jonathan Scott's - and Scott's voice seems rougher, a bit hoarse and weakened in its lower registers. Curiously, that effect isn't as audible in his upper range, as you can hear in "Destroyers of the West." So far, Shaded Lounge and Mausoleum isn't the immediate hit that Out Like a Lamb was with me.

I like Damon & Naomi's new one The Earth Is Blue (you can buy it from their website) pretty well so far, though. (As an aside, one reason I could never do the posting-up-to-the-minute manic-contempo thing is that it takes me a long time, many several listens, to fully form opinions of most things. So in a year, I might be saying, yeah, The Earth Is Blue is D&N's best record by miles...or I might say, man, what was I thinking, it's mostly lame. Anyway.) Despite its title, "The Robot Speaks" is not their attempt to go all lektroronic on our asses; no, it's a fairly typical example of their style, with the hushed opening giving way halfway through to a storm of guitar from Michio Kurihara (from Japanese psych-folk act Ghost - who's apparently joined D&N as a full-time member, as opposed to guesting as the entire band did on that album a few years back) before subsiding into the opening prettiness buoyed by Naomi Yang's typically wandering upper-register bass parts. I do think I'll like it better than Dana over at The Mystical Beast seems to, whom I mention here primarily because I'm pretty sure it's through him that I got into D&N - although I probably would have gotten there on my own, via the Galaxie 500 connection.

That's a lotta purty music there - I may have to put up something ugly and mean just to counteract it. We'll see...

which way Michael?

Over at Flasshe's blog, our man D. commented that one shortcoming, to his ears, of a lot of '80s revival bands is that unlike the '80s acts, the new ones aren't so much defying current musical convention as aping someone else's. I get that - but of course you can't import musical context as readily as musical style - and you certainly can't import specifically political context. So latterday attempts to create more examples of an older musical style will always fall into a different context - and will always seem, in some senses, a poor match for the original examples of that style, which have that broader context. In some cases, such revivals create their own context (the revival), but too often that becomes increasingly diminished - as the sequence Rolling Stones -> Aerosmith -> Black Crowes -> [etc.] illustrates.

On the other hand, I might argue that the quickest way to date music, and consequently a likely route to rendering it less relevant and intelligible to future audiences, is to be utterly au courant musically and socially. In fact, being retro can create a more context-free musical environment that dates less readily than the eight-millionth '80s orchestral hit or '90s two-bar drum loop. However...that usually works only if the retro signifiers are drawn from a range of sources, not all from one time - or if the songs are just plain good, of course.

subdivisions

Sorry, no Rush content.

Anyway: on our trip up to my sister's place in Minneapolis for two nephews' birthdays last weekend, we noticed a billboard for some housing subdivision named "Whispering Woods" or something like that.

And it occurred to me, who the hell wants the woods whispering at them all the time? I mean, you're gonna get kinda paranoid if the woods keeps the whispering going at all hours: if it's whispering to you, you can be sure it's whispering to everybody else too. And just what is wrong with a little peace and quiet? You'd think there'd be a market for folks who just want the woods to stand there and be pretty-like, without all the superfluously alliterative whispering going on.

So I think I'm going to buy up a parcel of woodlands somewhere, then slap up a billboard offering lots for sale at my new development, a development marketed toward folks who don't want the woods gossiping, prompting forgetful actors, or any other sort of whispering noises.

I'll call it Shut-the-Fuck-Up Woods - that'll sell pretty well, methinks.

Briefly...

A week or so back, I posted two tracks from the 1980 compilation Miniatures. Those tracks were downloaded from E-Music, but E-Music was missing several tracks, so I went looking for an actual, physical copy. I also found that Morgan Fisher (whose absurdly varied musical biography made me think there were at least two people of that name...), who compiled Miniatures, had issued a sequel in 2000. The concept of both albums, of course, is extremely short pieces - generally a minute or less.

It's interesting to compare the two editions. While the 1980 Miniatures featured primarily British and European artists, by 2000 Fisher had solicited contributions from all over the world. And while the earlier edition had featured a handful of tracks that were just plain noisy (like that Half Japanese track), and a whole bunch that were humorous, witty, or somewhat bizarre in that odd sort of avant-gardish notion of "humor," very few of the tracks on the 2000 release are humorous or noisy. On the other hand, the 2000 release does feature a broader range of sounds...even if they're mostly pretty polite in comparison with some of the rudeness on display in the first edition (say, recordings of two men smacking their lips and chewing food with gusto in between throaty, Rabelaisian French murmurings). Taking the place of humor in the 2000 edition, more than a few tracks express a sort of spiritual sense (perhaps arising from the project's initiation as a millennium-themed project, a theme that was eventually abandoned although it shows up on several tracks). Before you run screaming to high ground (world music? new-age spirituality?), the degree of musical curiosity and exploration is still pretty high. Cheesy exoticism and wet-noodle sap-heartedness are equally avoided.

A few examples: From the first edition, Fisher's "Green and Pleasant" is entirely a tape-manipulated construction of the popular British hymn "Jerusalem." I can't take this entirely straight...especially not with the pitch droop at the end. Moving toward vaguely avant-gardish, slightly creepy humor, we have two numbers: Ivor Cutler's dour "Brooch Boat" and Mary Longford's odd little "Body Language." And (possibly the shortest piece from either collection), Andy Partridge's immortal "The History of Rock'n'Roll" (I guess now it might be ten seconds longer).

There are some fine examples of humor and cleverness from the second edition, such as Phillip K. Bimstein's popular "Garland Hirschi's Cows" (trivia: Bimstein led '80s Chicago new-wavers Phil 'n' the Blanks...). That sort of sample manipulation is done more cleverly and tunefully in Hermeto Pascoal's "Feira de Asakusa (Asakusa Market)" - which somehow finds synthetic avant-garde jazz in the chatter of an elderly Japanese market denizen. Avant-rock weirdos show up, too: here's Scott McCaughey and the Minus 5 with "Came Saw Stayed," and Chris Butler, with a tiny tiny reduction of his very own world's longest song ("The Devil Glitch"), here titled "Have a Nice Century! (1/52,596,000th of a Century)."

Okay, so I'm suspicious of the word "spirituality" - and far less so of the word "humor" - but without making too much of whatever might have favored one over the other in Morgan Fisher's life, I can say that the two are by no means opposed. In fact, I think this last track brings them quite close together: it's an excerpt from a 12-minute film by Jane Campion featuring similar brief "vignettes," entitled "Passionless Moments."

I'm only temporarily a rational waiter - I'm really a rational actor

One problem with conventional economics is that the world that gave rise to it could not have anticipated the complexity of contemporary life, one consequence of which is that "rational actor" theory is impossible. (Never mind that it's also just plain wrong...as anyone who knows anyone who's bought a Hummer knows. Such purchasers think they're increasing their prestige - but large numbers of people only see them as increasing their assholity, and their prestige will be worthless once high gas prices bankrupt them, and their situation will be even more dire once the cumulative environmental impact of such irrational actors' actions comes to pass. A true rational actor, millennia ago, might have followed this monkey's lead, if the future had been known... Anyway...)

For example, consider the implications of this article on cosmetics. (The site is poorly linked: that URL will probably be good until 5/10 or so; afterwards, try this one.) As noted by the executive director of Commonweal, a group pressing for stricter regulation of cosmetics, "The public, bless our little democratic good government hearts, believes that there is some federal agency that makes sure that dangerous chemicals aren't put into the products we put all over ourselves. Sadly, it's just not true." So? argue free-market libertarians; that's not the government's job. Well, whose job is it? Because in fact, the complexity of the chemical makeup of products like cosmetics contributes to the near-impossibility of determining which chemical, or which combination of chemicals, might have negative effects, particularly since such effects sometimes take decades to manifest themselves. In other words, you can be as "rational" as you want - but even if you're a research scientist who can spend months conducting a study before you purchase a product, you still won't be able to know whether something's toxic. So much for "rationality."

In fact - as suggested in Gordon Bigelow's "Let There Be Markets" (in Harper's, May 2005 - not online yet, so I'm sorry, you'll have to leave your house and go to a newsstand or library), the mainstream of contemporary economics has more than a whiff of fundamentalist religion about it. Particularly, the variety that assumes just desserts as the wages of sinfulness: poverty is a consequence of (economic) sin.

--

Now, when we think of "rational actors," we think of Leonard Nimoy. And when we think of Leonard Nimoy, we think of William Shatner. And Shatner covered Pulp's "Common People" on his most recent, Ben Folds-produced record. Here's the original: an incisive comment on irreconciliable differences, class category.

back on the shelf

It's curious to me how certain songs retain their popularity, having second lives on oldies radio, in movie soundtracks, and so forth, while others - initially just as popular - disappear down the memory hole. Here's a list of the top 40 singles from 1973...some of them are still pretty well-heard, while others seem to have vanished completely.

Another example: "Star" by Stealers Wheel (yes, the "Stuck in the Middle with You" guys do have other songs...) suddenly popped into my head, seemingly unaccountably, just the other day. The song made the top 30 in both the US and the UK (at least according to several online band biographies) and yet it seems rarely heard today, and it's not readily available on compilations - even after the Tarantino-inspired revitalization of "Stuck in the Middle with You."

And that's the other curious fact: you think a song just randomly popped into your head - but often there's a reason. In this case, I've recently been getting into Enon, and while putting together a mix CD for a friend, I realized that this track, "Grain of Assault," has a melodic line and rhythmic feel similar enough to "Star" that it's probably the reason I thought of the older song.

Not quite as amusing as the time I suddenly found myself thinking of the theme from The Prisoner...and then realized I'd just been quickly walking down a long corridor.

second verse, history as farce

First, the tragic incompetence and/or arrogance that led to the Giuliana Sgrena incident...and then the farce of the official report: as Kevin Drum reports in Washington Monthly's online edition, the report was redacted for reasons of national security...but was distributed to the press as a .pdf file...which could be mined for text, including the rather inefficiently redacted text. As a commenter at the site puts it (with minor spelling errors), this is another example of the Bush administration's "relentless dishonesty and arrogance wrapped tightly in incompetence."

ps: I've probably used this title's pun before...oh well.