|
|
|
|
|
|
HOME | ABOUT | BIOS | EMAIL |
|
 |
| |
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
NOTHING IS EVER LOST OR CAN BE LOST MY SCIENCE FRIEND
Liars
They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top
Mute : 2002
[Buy It]
When I was a kid, drawing was my thing. I started in grade school, first copying pictures out of comic books, then making up my own. But even after I began to draw my own figures, I didn't stop copying - meticulous re-creation appealed to me for reasons I still can't articulate, and photorealistic drawing became my primary creative outlet through middle school and high school. I worked in many different media in art class, but given my druthers, I always worked in pencil or ink; I loved sharp contrasts of light and dark, and I loved the level of control over line and weight these media allowed. In high school, visual art was something I constantly received praise for, and, having been reared on achievement-based praise and thus addicted to it, I pursued it with all the fervor that a rebellious and prematurely world-weary teen could muster. There was an annual contest staged by the public library in which art students drew different hisotiric buildings around town, and the winner would received one hundred dollars. (My first architectural drawing effort, which I drew in 1995 or 1996, as a sophomore or junior in high school, is pictured at the top of this post.) I won this contest multiple times, and it began my first "freelance" career, as people who had emotional investments in various houses and buildings began to hire me to draw them. This petered out pretty quickly, as I was too invested in "partying" to handle a bunch of commissions. But I remember being in art class, often stoned, and spending the entire period assiduously stippling a shadow or etching a branch, displaying a dedication to something beyond hedonism that was uncommon for me at the time, and presaging a systematic sensibility that would come to define my later artistic output. Riding a wave of praise and really not knowing what else to do with myself, I enrolled in art school after I graduated from high school, and made it through one year before dropping out and beginning a career as a writer. Even as I was getting into writing, I never dreamed it would come to so fully supplant my drawing, which had been so crucial to my identity and self-esteem throughout my formative years. Now, I paint, and sometimes I doodle abstractly, but it's been a decade or so since I've tried to create one of my old, meticulously shaded, photorealistic drawings. This is a talent I was given and have let go to waste. At least, this is what I tell myself when I'm feeling blue in general, about lost things in general. In better humors I assure myself that as long as I'm expressing creatively, the form that energy takes is beside the point - that nothing is wasted - and I tell myself that my drawing skills are simply latent, waiting to be engaged. In this I feel rather like a smoker who says he could quit at any time, but doesn't want to. That these skills may just be latent, not gone, is not much of a comfort to me when I consider that I've let them slide into latency for years. Today won't be the day I reclaim them - as usual, I've got to write. When I think about my drawing, I find myself thinking about other skills I've acquired, then let languish - what they were worth, whether they're lost or simply lapsed, what is wasted, whether or not this is sad.
LOST TIME
Health
Health
Lovepump United : 2007
[Buy It]
E.g. - from my late teens until my mid-twenties, in a protracted transition between art-school-drop-out and *gulp* professional writer, I worked full-, then part-time as a projectionist at mainstream movie theater. This was actually a fantastic job for a writer: every couple hours, there was a half-hour window where I had to start the various shows on our six screens, and then, barring any technical problems, I would have a long block of free time, alone in the cozy projection booth (which was not the squalid closet we see in movies but a big ring-shaped hallway around the entire top of the building, with a hatch leading up to the theater's roof which was perfect for cigarette breaks). I loved it in that booth, it was dim and quiet and somehow amniotic - the low whirr of the projectors, the hovering beams of light - and best of all, totally private. Sometimes I would work a 12 hour shift, and at first, I spent all my down time devouring books (this was after I dropped out of college and began to reclaim myself from the deep mesmerism of suburbia and public education, and also reclaimed my childhood love of reading). Later, after I began to write for zines and local papers, I would spend that time writing my reviews, making money from newspapers while I was on the clock at the theater. It was pretty ideal for me at the time. But beyond the privacy and the good workspace, I loved interacting with the machines themselves. I liked having all this arcane knowledge. I knew how to build a movie, which arrived on six to eight reels and had to be assembled onto a horizontal platter with end splices. I knew about cue tape and aspect ratios and maskings and film gates and lenses and emulsions and maltese crosses. I liked presiding over the moviegoers seated in the darkness below, liked that they were waiting for me to create a world for them, sometimes looking up toward the booth, anxiously trying to catch a glimpse of the man behind the curtain. There is an undeniable feeling of power in being a projectionist, of presiding over this very private experience, of being the only one in the building capable of putting the picture on the screen. I loved threading the film through the projector, which involved running a Rube Goldburg-complex series of loops through pulleys and sprockets and rollers, and it got to the point where I could do this in one minute and sixteen seconds. But I don't do projection any more. I wonder if I'll ever get to use this skill again, and why every innate talent or learned skill I possess feels at once like a blessing and a demand. What am I losing right now? I need to play the guitar more. I need to draw more. I need to write more fiction, and play basketball. I need to get back to my old blog that's been dormant forever, and I need to start making masks. I need to finish this one video and I need to brush up on my Spanish before I forget it all. I need to get a thumb in every hole in the dike, but I don't have enough thumbs.
LOSING MY TASTE FOR THE NIGHTLIFE
Arthur Russell
Another Thought
Orange Mountain Music : 2006 (originally released in 1994)
[Buy It]
As I got out of the movie theater business, I got into the barista business. At this point, I write for most of my living, but I still work once or twice per week as a barista - I like working with and being around coffee, it's good for me to make a little of my money with my hands instead of my brain, and having yuppies talk down to me keeps me humble. I also think it feeds my self-image as something of an outsider - the whole romance of the "contributing editor at national magazine by day, lowly prole by night" thing. It keeps me in touch with the impotent rage of the service class. And if threading a projector sounds complicated, it's got nothing on making good espresso. Projection is a stable algorithm, you complete certains steps and the magic happens. Espresso-making is unstable, every variable - tamping pressure, grind consistency, atmospheric quality, extraction time, etc etc etc - interacts complexly with every other variable. There's tons of room for human error and if one variable shifts, you have to shift them all, so making espresso is less an algorithm than a series of negotiations and compromises as you try to find the sweet spot where it's chalky and bitter but not too chalky and bitter, with a nice blonde color and a nice thick crema on top, at a good volume and with smooth composition. It's something you start learning with your brain but finish learning with your hands, and like writing, you never perfect it - it's a lifelong learning process. Or it can be. There's going to come a time, probably sooner than later, when I'm not a barista any more. And I wonder what it means to me to be a "good writer" if that means writing has to gradually overtake all of my other interests and skills. These skills may have sifted out of my life, and my fondest hope is that even if my brain forgets, my hands will remember, that all of this is latent but not lost.
GONE
M83
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
Mute : 2004
[Buy It]
I know, it's overexposed. But we can stand to read it again:
"One Art"
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.Labels: brian, losing
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
DARKNESS
David Lynch
Catching the Big Fish
Penguin Audio : 2006
[Buy It]
Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)
INTERPRETATION
David Lynch
Catching the Big Fish
Penguin Audio : 2006
[Buy It]
Rebbids
INDUSTRIAL SYMPHONY NO. 1
David Lynch
Catching the Big Fish
Penguin Audio : 2006
[Buy It]
Industrial Symphony No. 1Labels: brian, david lynch
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
TAXMAN DUB
Israel Vibration
Israel Dub
Ras : 1996
[Buy It]
IS IS & THE IRS
Life Without Buildings
Live at the Annandale Hotel
Absolutely Kosher : 2007
[Buy It]
POOR PEOPLE MUST WORK (CARL CRAIG REMIX)
Rhythm & Sound
Sessions
K7 : 2008
[Buy It]
I like to pay taxes. It is purchasing civilization. - Oliver Wendell Holmes
Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt. - Howard Aiken
The only thing that hurts more than paying an income tax is not having to pay an income tax. - Lord Thomas Robert Dewar
In levying taxes and in shearing sheep it is well to stop when you get down to the skin. - Austin O'Malley
If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how it is with representation. - Rush Limbaugh
Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others. - Oscar Wilde
If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don't get wet you can keep. - Will Rogers
When there's a single thief, it's robbery. When there are a thousand thieves, it's taxation. - Vanya Cohen
What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue. - Thomas Paine
The purse of the people is the real seat of sensibility. Let it be drawn upon largely, and they will then listen to truths which could not excite them through any other organ. - Thomas Jefferson
Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. - Ronald Reagan
quotations culled from About.comLabels: brian, taxes
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, March 31, 2008
For today's experiment in aleatoric mp3 blogging, I'm going to be posting in REAL TIME. This means that everything I'm writing about will occur within the same time frame during which the writing occurs. Like, right now, I'm sitting at my desk, or rather kind of perched (I have a weird habit of perching in my chair when I write), it's raining outside, I just reached up a straightened a stack of CDs so that it's flush with the corner of the desk, I can hear a bird singing intermittently and rainwater washing through the gutters.
I'm writing in REAL TIME because to do otherwise would compromise the experiment, which pertains to my relationship with my iPod's shuffle function. You see, I've gotten into the habit of putting my iPod on shuffle while I drink my coffee in the morning. Only recently have I realized that in doing this, I've started to view my iPod shuffle as kind of magical, part lottery, part oracle. I count on it to offer me the song that I absolutely need to hear, and when it doesn't, this seems to bode ill. Right now, Hot Chip's "Ready for the Floor" is the song that I have to hear at least once per day (and usually, twice in a row), and while I could always dial it up myself, it's somehow more satisfying when my iPod chooses it from the - hold on, let me get it out - from the 8,965 songs it contains.
When I spin the wheel of fate and "Ready for the Floor" comes up, I feel like it's gonna be a good day. Likewise, sometimes my iPod shuffle will produce nothing I want to hear, which usually signals a bad day (this makes sense - when music isn't turning me on at all, it's likely that I'm having a bad day already). On particularly bad or good days, I find that my shuffle seems to be trying to tell me something - some warning or premonition - and this is when my iPod becomes something oracular, mp3s cast into a shallow pool like bird bones.
Today - in REAL TIME - we're going to put my iPod on shuffle, listen to the first five songs that come up, and think about what they might mean through an oracular lens. I'm pledging to you right now - no re-shuffles, no omissions. I hope this doesn't wind up embarrassing for me.
*crosses fingers* noKennyChesneynoKennyChesneynoKennyChesney...
Actually, hold up - I'm realizing that we're going to have to impose a few conditions for this to work. They are as follows:
1. Sometimes, shuffle gets lazy and places two songs from the same album in close proximity. Since Moistworks never posts two songs from the same album in one day, if this should occur, the second song from the same album will be skipped, and the one following it will take its place.
2. A great deal of music on my iPod is watermarked or otherwise copy-protected. If I share this music, the FCC will send ninjas to my house to shove jewel cases under my fingernails. Any watermarked songs that come up in the shuffle will be skipped.
3. After doing Moistworks for a couple years, I've posted an awful lot of songs, and there is a chance that something I've already posted will come up in the shuffle. As this experiment does not wish to compromise end-user satisfaction with the Moistworks brand, these songs, too, will be skipped.
4. I'm torn as to the question of whether to omit skits and short interludes. I was going to say yes, but these things are often important in the oracular sense, and so I think we'll allow them.
OK! That's all settled. Let's get down to the experiment. I'm pressing the shuffle button... now.
GET OUT THE STATE
Spoon
Soft Effects EP
Matador : 1997
[Buy It]
Hmmm...this is a sweet song, although bitchin' fuzz guitar isn't exactly what I'm after first thing in the morning. Listening to Spoon also makes me feel a distant twinge of anxiety now - I was lukewarm on their most recent album, which everyone else seemed to love, and while I think about half the songs on it are really good, I never came around on the other half, which I thought cheesy and overcooked. Whenever I fall drastically away from consensus like that, I wonder if my taste is malfunctioning or something. This wasn't a divisive album, it was roundly adored. Whatever, though - as an oracle, this is spot on, as getting out of the state is something that occupies my mind more and more often lately. "I've been waiting here for so long / And I'm on the curb with everyone." I have to be careful about listening to songs like this in the morning - nothing can pull me out of the moment, all day, like thinking about where I'm going instead of where I am.
RAINBOWARRIORS
Cocorosie
The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn
Touch and Go : 2007
[Buy It]
Aw, I love this song. The lyrics are ridiculous but supremely oracular; they actually sound like pronouncements from Delphi at times. Again, though, this is a dangerous morning-song for me on days when I have a lot of work to do. If I was doing my normal morning reading-and-shuffling thing instead of this post, I'd probably be reading my Carlos Castaneda book while I listened to this, a combination bound to abstract me to the point where writing about music would be impossible. Music like this can pull me out of the routine order of the day, which is a great place to be, but is not conducive to getting "stuff" done. Right now, hearing it, I'm getting that feeling of, "well, maybe I could just finish this post tomorrow, plug the guitar into the sampler and drone out for awhile right now." This transaction is what I call "losing the thread," and while it's probably more like finding one, it's not the thread I need to find to produce work and make money. Better move on quickly.
THE MORE YOU IGNORE ME THE CLOSER I GET
Morrissey
Greatest Hits
Decca : 2008
[Buy It]
I'll be honest - by this point, I'd normally be rapidly scanning through my shuffled queue, looking for some nice rap or techno. Or maybe I'd give up on shuffle entirely and put on some ambient music. This song might hold my attention for a couple minutes on a bright spring day, but today it's gray and chilly and wet. It hits my ears with a clunk - it's fine, but I've never particularly loved it, and it has no real traction in my life at this moment: happily partnered up, the situation Morrissey describes seems very remote to me. I feel a little betrayed by my iPod right now, a little let down - iPod, don't you know me at all? After all these years?
DON'T WANNA BE ALONE
Devin the Dude
Waitin' to Inhale
Rap-a-Lot : 2007
[Buy It]
Two things happen in rapid succession here - I get excited that it's a Devin the Dude song; I'm disappointed that it's this one. This soppy R&B jam plays fine in the context of the album, but doesn't do much on its own. It seems a logical follow-up to the Morrissey song, and, as such, I can't really identify with it right now. But wait a minute - is there a message here? A lesson? Should I be preparing to be alone? Is that what you're saying, iPod? Can't say I like where this is going. Let's see if things look up with number five.
FROM BLACK TO BLUE
Yo La Tengo
And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Matador : 2000
[Buy It]
Oh, goddamn it.Labels: brian, ipod
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
OH GOD
The Comas
Conductor
Yep Roc : 2004
[Buy It]
omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod ...
BREATHING ROOM
Rafter
Sex Death Cassette
Asthmatic Kitty : 2008
[Buy It]
...pant, pant...
Oh my god!
GLASS PIANO
Glossolalia
Black Sail
[unreleased]
http://glossolalia-blacksail.blogspot.com
I am getting a piano today.
At last, a piano of my own!
HEAVEN IS A TRUCK
Pavement
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Matador : 1994
[Buy It]
When you're moving heavy things, the guy with the truck is your master. And the guy with the truck says, "today," so off I go.
7 DAYS
Acid House Kings
Sing Along with Acid House Kings
Twentyseven Records : 2005
[Buy It]
This means I don't have much time to write today, and the next installment of my local music series will have to wait a week.
METAMORPHOSIS 1
Philip Glass
Solo Piano
Sony : 1989
[Buy It]
But I'll leave you with some lovely piano music in the meantime.Labels: brian, piano
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Evidence that technology is making it increasingly difficult to have a sane, sensible relationship to space and time is everywhere. Consider the concept of "local music." Before recording, broadcast, and digital networking technology were available, all music was local music, and really, it still is. Even bands who stay on the road 24/7 are from somewhere. The concept of local bands would seem to imply that some bands live in outer space, and as far as I know, few musicians - barring Perry Farrell, Andre 3000, the RZA, a few others - can actually make that claim.
So when we talk about local music, we're talking about exposure, not geography. The Shins live in Portland (the Shins still live in Portland, right?), but they're hardly what you'd call a local band. There's a subtle edge to calling someone a local band - it doesn't mean they live somewhere, it means that their relevance is confined to a localized area. That there's a bit of an insult built into the concept of "local band" speaks to how thoroughly commodified music has become, as if success means spreading your product across as vast a network of strangers as possible, not engaging with your community at a hands-on level and enriching the lives of people you can see and touch and know.
After writing for nothing but national publications for a few years, I began to feel very estranged from anything that felt like a hands-on, organic culture. This can be hard to find in Chapel Hill at any rate, where the musical infrastructure is so petrified that the local culture can feel like something that grinds on with or without you - you can dip in and out of the scene at will, and there's a feeling that the club owners and touring bands and PR agencies will keep it running either way. Touring bands get booking preference, while local bands get shoved into Wednesday night showcases. And at a certain point I realized I was spending all this time thinking about the Arcade Fire, who I'm not even very interested in, while terrific bands were playing to no one down the street. Part of this was simply economic - there's obviously little money in writing about bands who aren't making any (or selling magazines with their cultural capital) themselves. And part of it was more like hypnosis; I found myself in a feedback loop of promotional cycles.
To rectify this imbalance, I started writing for the local weekly, which doens't pay very well, but has terrific editors and allowed me to have an economic and professional impetus to engage with local music again. I'm still interested in trawling the mirror-world of national music, but I needed something more down-to-earth, tactile, and unmediated to keep me sane. And in truth, North Carolina is a pretty great place for local music - now that we've finally put enough temporal distance between us and the Chapel Hill indie rock boom of the nineties, which made local music feel overdetermined and dead-horse-flogging for quite awhile, it seems as if the area's musical identity has finally loosened up again, and is producing fantastic bands in many different genres.
Today I'm starting a multi-part post highlighting some of the best music my local area has to offer. It won't be exhaustive - there are just too many bands - but I'm going to hit as many as I can. Some of these bands have a national foothold, some are virtually unknown outside of NC, and some are virtually unknown in NC - I'm using "local" in the most literal sense. It's less of an NC pride thing than a reminder, to myself and maybe to you, that culture can still happen on a human scale, should we choose to notice it. I'm still not going out to local shows as often as I could - it's not like when I was younger and had time to hang out in bars several nights per week, you know? - but I'm going when I can, and always listening to make sure I don't miss what's right in front of me.
IF BY "GAY" YOU MEAN "TOTALLY FREAKING AWESOME," THEN YEAH, I GUESS IT'S PRETTY GAY
Des Ark
Battle of the Beards
Lovitt : 2007
[Buy It]
Come to think of it, one of the songs that hit me hardest last year was by a local band. Des Ark is from Durham, NC, fronted by singer/guitarist/songwriter/spitfire Aimee Argot. I risk repeating myself here - I already wrote about this song, two times. You might notice I've been flogging the Bright Eyes connection pretty hard. I should explain. When I was younger and full of hormones, I was way into Bright Eyes. Fevers & Mirrors and its predecessors just slayed me; Conor Oberst and I are about the same age and demographic and were weathering the same kinds of psychic storms at the same time. I loved how everything about his music spoke of urgency, from the raw arrangements to the overcooked lyrics to the thin pule that could suddenly swell into a terrible vibrato, the beauty that could give way to ugliness in the blink of an eye. Des Ark taps into that same kind of dark, naseous euphoria. Argot also has an awesome, towering vibrato, and a raw, percussive guitar style; the hard-bitten expletives and hair-raising strings just bittersweeten the deal.
ATTITUDE AND MIRRORS
The Nein
Luxury
Sonic Unyon : 2007
[Buy It]
I like dreamers, questers and searchers, which is why I like the band Liars so much. (I think I've said this before.) It's also why I was so stoked about Durham band The Nein's album Luxury. For some years the Nein have played heavy post-punk with necrotic patches of noise. They were a good band but there was always something tentative about them, like they were using big guitar riffs as a crutch to prop up their more academic experiments in rhythm and structure. One of the band members is someone I've corresponded with for some time, on topics from pop-criticism to John Cage, and so I know him as a searching intelligence; not a hit-seeker, but someone interested in exploring intellectual possibilities through sound. And Luxury felt like the record the Nein had always tip-toed around. For the first time, guitar riffs took a secondary position to sections of screwy dub and ambient sounds, as if the Nein had finally amassed the confidence necessary to take off the training wheels. The specter of the rock they once played haunts "Attitude and Mirrors" in the guise of the acoustic and electric guitar riffs floating through the industrial sound bed. An out of the wilderness, up to the mountain kind of record.
MEMO TO MYSELF
Dan Bryk
Lovers Leap
Scratchie : 2000
[Buy It]
Good ol' Dan Bryk. I've been trying to tell the world about this guy forever, here and here and here and elsewhere, but there've been tough breaks for Bryk. When his excellent album Lovers Leap came out in 2000, it got props from Christgau, among other valid entities. I got a promo copy of it and took it to Europe with me, where I listened to it in a rapturous daze for months. It was supposed to be released by Scratchie/Mercury, but Mercury dropped out, leaving the small indie label to do a small release on it's own. The album kind of disappeared. Bryk moved from Toronto to Chapel Hill shortly afterwards, and immigration troubles have kept him from releasing much music since then. These issues are starting to resolve, and hopefully, the long-delayed Lover's Leap reissue and the new album, Pop Psychology, with finally emerge and put an end to the absurdity of this guy still being a relative secret. He's a singer/songwriter in the classic Randy Newman sorta tradition: idiosyncratic, charismatic, classically inclined, a bit rough in the grain. He's a chubby guy who often sings about being chubby and liking chubby girls; a happily committed romantic nihilist. He's got a killer falsetto, a knack for indelible hooks, and a one-of-a-kind sensibility - a mixture of depressive cynicism, jaded wit, and maudlin earnestness. Bryk can put a line as meanly cutting as "You probably think that we touched souls/ All I did was touch you underneath your blouse" near one as touching as "I'd love to spend some time with you/ As soon as I don't need it for myself" and make it work, because there's no sense of artifice about the worldview in his lyrics - it's too odd and inconsistent to be anything but his. I love Dan Bryk because his music reminds me of the undying power of pop songcraft, even at times when my tastes are skewing abstract and obscure.
That's it for now, but next week, we'll look at three or four more NC acts of merit.Labels: brian, local music
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
I'm as surprised as anyone to find myself still living in North Carolina. Without a doubt, one the main things that's kept me here for so long is the vibrancy of the poetry community around Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Durham and Greensboro. My coterie, the Lucifer Poetics Group, has been invaluable to my growth as a writer and a person, and when I leave this place, it's the one thing I'm truly going to miss. I salute these friends and collaborators, and in particular I'd like to salute three good friends in Lucipo who've published three outstanding books over the past year. I'm excerpting works from each of these books, with soundtracks.
THE BRIDGE
Clinic
Walking with Thee
Domino : 2002
[Buy It]
"5.march.2002"
by Ken Rumble
from Key Bridge
Responsibility to tea, to the bag,
the leaf, the noose & its kite,
the tea totaller, the tea time, the tea cup,
the reflection, the because, the where,
the question of location, the bat,
the ball, the phone, the pornography
of the juice, the pterodactyl of Bombay,
the mmmmm, the champagne of tea,
the water, the tap
Responsibility to a beverage
as if a pterodactyl as if more than
a mark of time--mark the time--
as if we didn't recall--
a centipede, as if a teacup (really
a coffee cup)--thicker,
chunky like chipped brick, for holding something
toxic, like an American or Brit,
like that reporter who'll never make a tea time,
as if the phone rang & the because where location
kite water juice responsibility
__
We kicked the walls from the houses
like fury--remember--like this,
like so--so many times--
watch--watch--every window,
every pane, a rock--gravel--a pile
where they pushed it into foundations--
watch--trails, bikes, dirt--watch--
we made it--nails in the gutter--
split beams & piss--kick drywall--
shit in the insulation--watch--houses--watched
building--watch--watch--now the bolt
needs tightening--
every coin on a string--
no beast lives
in the beautiful garden
WAVES
White Rainbow
Prism of Eternal Now
Kranky : 2007
[Buy It]
"Imaginary Synonyms"
by Tony Tost
from Complex Sleep
Eventually we take it apart
dissecting it palate by plate
only to get smaller
your mother asks me to tell her
what to think of when she says "milk"
and you say Waves
of punishment, of possibility
a rush now always on
secondary phenomena. Come home
bring goldfish for the
ponds. Cleft angels
distorted talons
stuck with the shapes we are
as waves. A cave. A nimbus
around my brother as he hums
home. Seduction of the sources
the first days of being enormous
analogous holograph of
above. My medium is
filled by quanta wants
heating the nonluminous iron bar
inner sight. Granular
the syllables are syllabic
if mouthed. Come home
to discrete levels of comfort
grief may be rotting half my brain
but I remember all of your face
faintly. An observer
you enter these memories
grief understands the poses
it is to assume. The film passes
through the gate
undulates in ways sound does
away from pronouncement. This
the very womb of evasion
the crest of each wave emits
a portrait unleashed
static enfolded in known formation
aeon overcome by error
shoulders heaving, mouth open
and moving. Come home
your father's birthday is today
for Kim Sun-il
THE DOOR OPENS THE OTHER WAY
Belong
October Language
Carpark : 2006
[Buy It]
"September 2002, Topsail Island, NC"
by Chris Vitiello
from Irresponsibility
1
Midmorning beachcombing
This rock is four letterforms
The diametric opposite of any experience
is not the absence of that experience
Rocks are graphs
Seeing is a perpetual axis // An understood axis
Brent, I have to break out of this and
not just to do something new
2
The weather changes several times a day
Iris hesitates in doorways
and has to be touched on the back of her head
Philindo uses "and" instead of "but"
The mistakes pile up
An understood subject is made parenthetical
and a captive's struggle tightens knots
Doorways frame
where inside touches outside
Not itself a space or place but a planar edge
3
Saying is another axis
In the middle of the page
becomes the poem's raison d'etre
Film has drained attention out of seeing
The lyric forgets a category of thought out of reading
A bite of Rebecca's seafood crepe between each line
Don't lie
Restrict movement, reduce the
number of variables
Comparatively define geographies
So--hesitant to write
Look at the Sun, I mean
The door is either open or closed and
there are many degrees of being openLabels: brian, poetry
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, February 18, 2008
DECIBELS AND LITTLE PILLS
American Music Club
The Golden Age
Merge : 2008
[Buy It]
A MAN NEEDS A WOMAN OR A MAN TO BE A MAN
Bill Callahan
Woke on a Whaleheart
Drag City : 2007
[Buy It]
TENNESSEE
Silver Jews
Bright Flight
Drag City : 2001
[Buy It]
The recent publication of a collection of Franz Kafka's aphorisms got me thinking about what, precisely, an aphorism is. Some of Kafka's resemble parables or short stories, but to me, a true aphorism is brief (preferably one sentence), wittily constructed (in the Oscar Wilde-ish, advising-against-any-endeavor-requiring-new-clothes sense), and has meaning in excess of its vocbulary (this is where it crosses over with the riddle).
An aphorism is distinct from a truism: the latter tends to be goopy, with exactly one discernible point; the former is more starchy, evoking an array of senses and meanings. Some of my favorite lyricists are handy with aphorisms, although truisms can be satisfying when handled with care. American Music Club's Mark Eitzel is a whiz with them. But his lyrics are animated by an emotional directness and transparency, and comprise a congnitive experience much less complex than the aphoristic one.
The aphorism hangs as much on deft wording as inner truth; there is something shifty and furtive about it; its composition is a bit like that of a joke, where even its speaker can only intuit, not fully describe, its entire payload. Bill Callahan, formerly known as Smog, is one of the finest aphorists working in music today, although he frequently blurs the line between aphorism and truism (and red herring: "Spend a night with an owl and you'll see more blood than sleep," he told me in an interview last year, which I still can't make heads or tails of in context).
Callhan tends to pepper oblique narratives with aphorisms that bolster them up philosophically, which reveals another quality of the aphorism: it is a general statement; it elaborates one system of thought so compactly and completely that it seems to elaborate everything. "There is no love where there is no obstacle," from "Say Valley Maker," is a truism. "God is a word, and the argument ends there," is more aphoristic, the sort of sweepingly obliterative aphorism we might associate with Wittgenstein: "The world is all that is the case."
But I think my favorite Callhan aphorism is from his latest album, Woke on a Whaleheart, on the song "A Man Needs a Woman or a Man to be a Man." The aphorism, obviously, is right there in the title. If the proposition were simply, "A man needs a woman to be a man," it would be a truism, and a rather silly one at that. But Callhan's rendering opens up the statement into broader realms of ambiguity, asserting a superficially simple truth while conjuring up a whole array of questions about the traditional definition of manhood.
David Berman of Silver Jews is terrific at this too (Drag City is a very aphoristic label), in his poetry ("All water is classic water") and in his music. I'm thinking specifically of this inspired turn from "Tennessee": "Punk rock died when the first kid said/ Punk's not dead." We could talk about how this statement gets at at truth about how systems become moribund when they become overly defined, but aphorisms are for marinating upon, not exegesis, and I fear that in a post about these little time-released capsules of ideation, I've already said far too much.Labels: aphorisms, brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, February 04, 2008
FIVE SCENES PERIPHERAL TO A WAR
BOMBS ON THE WAY
Promute
Dark Moving
Blondena Music : 2006
[Buy It]
I. Yesterday morning, I sat outside a cute coffee shop in an ugly strip mall. North Carolina starts to thaw in February, and it felt good to sit outside. Even though I was essentially sitting in a parking lot, I had a little table and a fresh cup of coffee, and my first cigarette of the day smoldered in my hand, and the sun felt good on my face. At a table next to me, three teenagers conversed heatedly - high school aged, roughneckish in a preppyway - kids who are familiar to me, from this coffee shop, whose conversations are impossible not to overhear, and usually revolve around boastful war stories of bodily damage and degradation through excessive substance and alcohol abuse. But yesterday, they were talking about the U.S. military's arsenal, with a mix of nihilism, apathy, belligerence and pride that perfectly expressed their social milieu. I know kids like this intimately, can usually spot them on sight, because I was one of them. I recognized their haughtiness, their love for transgression, their prodigious efforts to suppress any sign of their keen suburban-bred intellects beneath a veneer of malevolence. "We have seven hundred missles," one of them was saying, with a no-nonsense, brass tacks sort of tone. They discussed how many times over we could blow up various things; they discussed the merits of just blowing up everything, because we're Americans, and we can. I saw some adults passing by, catching snippets of their conversation, grimacing or wincing or frowning disapprovingly; I saw the kids soaking up this disapproval as if it were lifeblood, blowing out ostentatious streams of Marlboro Red smoke they hadn't inhaled, only let puff out their cheeks. I felt a great empathy for them. I understood their fascination with the idea of blowing up everything, which seems like just another kick in youth (when one feels certain that one feels more of the world than adults, only to discover, usually sometime in one's twenties, that one was only feeling one's self, and that the world was still waiting). I thought about how that obliterative desire - which sometimes, in whatever phase of adulthood I'm in, still haunts me - turns darker, more feasible, more ideological, more utterly sensible. I thought about trees in windy places, how their branches twist and distort, shaped by exterior pressures. I saw the corridor stretching out ahead of these kids, looking over my shoulder, and I thought about all the disillusions they'd have to overcome, all the escape hatches into wider pastures of self-hood they'd hopefully not overlook along the way. "We could blow up the freaking moon!" one of them exclaimed, eyes wide and shining.
INDUSTRY FOR THE BLIND
Milemarker
Frigid Forms Sell
Jade Tree : 2002
[Buy It]
II. I recently had lunch with a friend of mine who's a capitalist. I don't mean in a practical sense, because in a practical sense, we are all of us capitalists. I mean he's an avowed capitalist, who believes in capitalism as a viable system for social organization that is conducive to the widespread public weal. Our conversations often revolve around politics, me aware of his, him aware of mine - a sort of embattled anarchism that does not completely disallow capitalism but absolutely disallows our grotesquely mutated late-capitalism; a confused anarchism that craves obliteration but is less handy for replacement. And here an unsourced quote floats into my mind, something about a dragon marauding a kingdom, and you want to know, after I slay the dragon, what I want to replace it with? My friend and I don't quite tiptoe around each other's politics, but neither do they clash head on - we don't see each other that often, and when we do, there's always a sense of feeling out the contours of our interface, me wondering if he's skewed too far right for us to see eye to eye, him wondering if I've slid too far in the other direction. But in fact, we always do meet in a spirit of accord, because my friend is the best kind of capitalist - one's who's deeply involved in the mechanations of the world, from development to public policy to politics (my friend was a speechwriter for Mayor Nagin before the flood), and who detests corruption and venality and excessive self-regard, and who is frighteningly intelligent and full of conviction, and who's motivated by the quest for the greater good through capitalism rather than cynical personal gain, and who genuinely believes that capitalism can be tailored to uplift the poor and sustain the constructed world. I think that if there were more capitalists like my friend, we wouldn't be in such a sorry state today. I find his enthusiam refreshing, I who spend so much time with political eschatologists; I feed off of his conviction, I who struggle with the ephermera of belief. Our political discussions aren't combative, because we seem to believe the same things in different ways; in fact, they're quite lively and enlightening, especially for me, who knows more of theory than hard policy. But there's always this intractable lump in the middle of them - we're friends who respond to each other in spirit, but have a tacit knowledge that, were ideology an actual war, we might one day have to take up arms against each other. Eventually, we talked ourselves into a corner. He bought me a burrito, and we talked about music instead.
NOCARSGO
Tam
Tam
Ecstatic Peace : 2006
[Buy It]
III. North Carolina is a red state, but the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area, where I live, is a splotch of the most lurid blue in that sea of blood. The cars all have multiple bumper stickers, expressing belief: No Blood for Oil, Impeach Bush, Invade Iraq? No! They crawl over the streets with their didactic payloads, going back and forth, up and down, exhaust shining like mirages in the air. This world is not built for belief. Sometimes I dream of a white state amid the red and blue, completing the flag - a state of nothingness and absence.
TO ABSENT VOTERS
The Lucksmiths
Spring a Leak
Matinee : 2007
[Buy It]
IV. I have a another friend who sells pot for a living. He hasn't participated in the taxable economy for years, spends his days playing complicated online war games on a computer that grows more powerful and sprawling every day. "Who are you voting for?" he asked me abruptly, when I saw him last week. He likes politics, he said, gets caught up in it, although he said it in the same way one might describe a relationship with sports, or reality television. I told him what I've been telling everyone who asks me lately, when I feel brave enough: for the first time in my adult life, I'm not sure if I'm going to vote. I tell him I'm no longer sure I care which rat is king of the maze. I tell him that whether I choose Coke or Pepsi in the blind taste test, I'm still getting bloated with brown bubbly sugar-water. At this point I'm rehearsing my speech but my mind has turned inward, into that unsolveable maze where it always goes when I think about voting lately - would not voting be a valid form of dissent, or would it be the sort of apathy and exhaustion that indicates a win for the oligarchs and tyrants? If I were to not vote, would this be a narrative of resistance, or submission? If I do vote, because I can't make a solid case to myself for not voting, will I be complicit in perpetuating the myth of representative democracy in America? And wouldn't not voting be the easiest, stupidest way to ease myself out of complicity, when almost every aspect of my life - most of them more difficult to change than my voting habits - screams of this complicity? If I'm not going to vote, then what am I going to do? Negation seems insufficient, action elusive. "Dude," he told me, apalled, "you've got to vote." And so we turned to the familiar discussion of candidates. It felt like taking a favorite walking route, familiar and well-worn, although instead of a leafy idyll, the scenery was more ravaged and dystopian. It would thrill me to see a female president, if only so that the sexist assholes in the press would stop calling her "Hillary," as if everyone can be on a first-name basis with this formidable politician because she has a vagina. But Clinton is a hardcore dynast, and dynasts frighten me. It would thrill me to see a black president, too, but Obama's message of "hope" and "change" is uncomfortably nebulous - change is coming regardless; I need to know a little more about what kind. On the level of policy, Clinton and Obama are nearly identical. Truth be told, I liked Edwards best for the Democrats, liked the transparent utility of his rhetoric and how he tended to resist political gamesmanship even when the press would try to coax him into it. But Edwards is just another white guy with a fancy-boy haircut (another friend of mine made a joke along these lines that infuriated me, as it so heedlessly emulated the pundits who spend all their time telling voters what superficial concerns - Edwards's hair, Clinton's perceived "coldness" - will decide the election for them, seldom mentioning policy or platform, in a self-perpetuating politics of pure surface). And white guys with good hair are not what this election is about. I told my friend that I'm more concerned with the Republican primary, since to vote Democratic is NC is to throw your vote away; that I'm less concerned with who gets into office than who doesn't. In this regard I like McCain, who is hawkish but also intelligent and apparently sane, and who is not an evangelical (evangelicals scare me more than hawks, and are mostly hawkish anyway). Romney is a pod person, and Huckabee is completley mad; at least McCain is a verifiable sentience, who knows as much of war's horrors as its glories. My friend and I traded the usual insights recylced from NPR and the New Yorker, as if they were baseball cards, made the usual stern proclamations, talked about how high national health care is on our list of priorities. Then I bought a bag and went home to read. On the way home, a snippet of speech on NPR caught my ear and somehow lifted my spirits: "Get your heart out of that tree, Reverend, and sing!"
DISSOLVE YOURSELF
Lucky Dragons
Widows
States Rights : 2006
[Buy It]
V. Stephen Millhauser is a writer of consistent obsessions: artificers, miniaturists, mechanical representations so subtle they blur the lines between machinery and life, mimetic slippages, the endless corridors of desire, gamesmanship at royal court...and most of all, castles. No one writes castles like Millhauser. He knows that every word is a magic word, every sentence an incantation (I say your name, and your head turns as if of its own accord; I say "hyacinth" and a purple bloom rushes into your mind; what is a spell if not a word that alters reality? and what word does not?). His castles are micro-cosmologies, circumscribed fields of play that contain the entire world in miniature (although sometimes, they aren't literal castles - the castle in Enchanted Night, for instance, is a suburban neighborhood at night, while the castle in his story "A Change in Fashion" is a woman's dress). Reading Millhauser is a confused sort of escapism - his worlds run precisely parallel to our own, but seem wholly remote from it, self-contained, at the same time. Last night, re-reading "Cathay," a glitteringly strange series of tableuax that seems like a warm-up for his more recent "King in the Tree," I felt myself submerging slowly, languidly, into Millhauser's world, which feels like sinking into a dark mirror, slowly, inexorably. "Cathay," like all of Millhauser's best work, admits nothing outside of its feverishly lucid walls. I read, and the world slipped away, another one, somehow realer and less substantial at once, growing up aroud me like an untended garden. But then I read the entry for "Dragons":
The dragons of Cathay dwell in caves in the mountains of the North and in the depths of the Eastern sea. The dragons rarely show themselves, but we are always aware of them, for the motions are responsible for storms at sea, great waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. A sea dragon rising from the waves can sink an entire fleet with one lash of its terrible tail. Sometimes a northern dragon will leave its cave and fly through the air, covering whole cities with its immense shadow. Those who have stood in the shadow of the dragon say it is accompanied by an icy wind. The tail of a dragon, glittering in the light of the sun, is said to be covered with blue and yellow scales. The head of a dragon is emerald and gold, its tongue scarlet, its eyes pits of fire. It is said that the venom which drips from its terrible jaws is hotter than boiling pitch. It is said that to see a dragon is to be changed forever. Some do not believe in dragons, because they have not seen them; it is like not believing in one's own death, because one has not yet died. I put the book down, because the spell was broken. I was thinking about the war again.
Labels: brian, war
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
COME HOME
Dismemberment Plan
Change
De Soto : 2001
[Buy It]
THE SCIENCE OF YOUR MIND
The Comas
Conductor
Yep Roc : 2004
[Buy It]
ANOTHER THOUGHT
Arthur Russell
Another Thought
Orange Mountain Music : 2006
[Buy It]
MOISTWORKS ESSAYTIME CORNER PRESENTS:
An excerpt from "Changes of Mind"
by Nicholson Baker
If your life is like my life, there are within it brief stretches, usually a week to ten days long, when your mind achieves a polished and freestanding coherence. The chanting tape-loops of poetry anthologies, the crumbly pieces of philosophy, the unsmelted barbarisms, the litter torn from huge collisions of abandoned theories - all this nomadic sub-orbital junk suddenly, like a milling street crowd in a movie-musical, re-forms itself into a proud, pinstriped, top-hatted commonwealth. Your opinions become neat and unruffleable. Every new toy design, ever abuse of privilege or gesture of philanthropy, every witnessed squabble at the supermarket checkout counter, is smoothly remade into evidence for five or six sociological truths. Puffed up enough to be charitable, you stop urging your point with twisting jabs of your fork; you happily concede winnable arguments to avoid injuring the feelings of your friends; your stock of proverbs from Samuel Johnson seems elegant and apt in every context; you are firm, you think fast, you offer delicately phrased advice.
Then one Thursday, out on a minor errand, you inexplicably come to a new conclusion ("Keynesian economics is spent"), and it - like the fetching plastic egg that cruel experimenters have discovered will cause a mother bird to thrust her own warm, speckled ones from the nest - upsets your equilibrium. The community of convictions flies apart, you sense unguessed contradictions, there are disavowals, frictions, second thoughts, please for further study; you stare in renewed perplexity out the laundromat's plate-glass window, while your pulped library card dries in a tumbling shirt pocket behind you.
Such alert intermissions happen only infrequently: most of the time we are in some inconclusive phases of changing our minds about many, if not all, things. We have no choice. Our opinions, gently nudged by circumstance, revise themselves under cover of inattention. We tell them, in a steady voice, No, I'm not interested in a change at present. But there is no stopping opinions. They don't care about whether we want to hold them or not; they do what they have to do.
And graver still, we are sometimes only minimally aware of just which new beliefs we have adopted. If one of the wire services were able to supply each subscriber wit a Personal Opinion Printout, delievered with the paper every morning, it would be a real help: then we could monitor our feelings about Pre-Raphaelite furniture, or the influences of urbanization on politeness, or the wearing of sunglasses indoors, or the effect of tort language on traditions of trust, as we adjusted our thoughts about them week by week, the way we keep an eye on lightly traded over-the-counter stocks. Instead, we stride into a discussion with our squads of unexamined opinions innocently at our heels - and, discovering that, yes, we do feel strongly about water-table rights, or unmanned space exploration, or the harvesting of undersea sponges, say, we grab the relevant opinion and, without dress rehearsals, fling it out into audibility ("Fly, you mother"), only to discover, seconds later, its radical inadequacy.
Nicholson Baker
THE SIZE OF THOUGHTS
Vintage : 1996
[Buy it]Labels: baker, brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, January 21, 2008
CHECK THE RHIME
A Tribe Called Quest
The Low End Theory
Jive : 1991
[Buy It]
GIMME THE LOOT
The Notorious B.I.G.
Ready to Die
Arista : 1994
[Buy It]
IGNORANT SHIT
Jay-Z
American Gangster
Roc-A-Fella : 2007
[Buy It]
CHINESE NEW YEAR
Clipse
Hell Hath No Fury
Re-Up Gang/Star Trak : 2006
[Buy It]
I'M ME
Lil Wayne
The Leak EP
Cash Money Records : 2007
[Buy It]
In terms of genre evolution, hip-hop is the hare to rock's tortoise. In its brief tenure - let's call it thirty years, give or take - hip-hop has undergone more fundamental sea-changes than rock has arguably seen in its longer life-span. There are numerous factors at play in hip-hop's rampant mutation: its modular construction and all-inclusive purview lend it a lot of flexibility, and it was born in an age when the very passage of time seemed to be speeding up recklessly. "Golden Age" rappers like A Tribe Called Quest were acutely aware of hip-hop's mercurial nature: much of their music was taken up with deifying old-school masters whose reign, while parsed in fog-shroudedly remote, creation-myth tones, had been put out to pasture just a few years before. This better-days nostalgia seems in retrospect to have been directly predicated against an on-rushing future that, if it wasn't inevitable, feels that way from our current vantage.
Did Tribe intuit that, even as they were on top of the world, they were trembling on the verge of obsolesence? In the early 90s, west coast G-funk, with its sinister yet breezy synths, and east coast crime rap, with its gunshot snares and minimal arrangements, would topple Native Tongues-style Afrocentric jazz-hop from market supremacy. It's tempting to imagine that the narrative of crime rap continues in an unbroken line to the present day, but the truth is that crime rap itself has undergone fundamental changes, which go beyond superficial style and regional sub-genres. There is always a trend in creative movements, once they've been developed enough to be crystallized, for tropes to come unstuck from what they signify - in rock, we might look to "baby"s, "come on"s and "girl"s - ejaculations that need no longer connect to any narrative enacted within a given song, but which, through sheer repetition, have become a sort of musical filler or genre-identifying shorthand. At this stage of development, the conceptual transforms into the purely aesthetic. And when I listen to modern crime rap, I wonder if it's reached this stage in its development, as its relationship to the violence that is fundamental to the genre seems to be verging on the existential - violence not as a mechanism within a greater social framework, but as a state of nature.
The Notorious B.I.G. was crucial in laying the template for New York crime rap as it would develop over the course of the 90s. Yet he seems fundamentally different than the abstracted crime rappers of today. Biggie reveled in violence, to be sure. But his violent acts were couched in a context that explained them, even if it didn't quite exonerate him. The eruptions of violence in stick-up kid anthem "Gimme the Loot" (which, somewhat ironically, samples Tribe's "Scenario" remix)were strung together with sturdy ligaments of cause and effect. Here's Biggie (taking a schizophrenic two-voice approach that has misled many to believe there's a guest rapper on the track) spelling out very clearly the impetus for his actions:
When it's time to eat a meal, I rob and steal
'Cause mom duke aint giving me shit
So for the bread and butter I leave niggaz in the gutter
And later:
Oh shit! The cops! Be cool, fool
They aint gonna roll up, all they want is fucking doughnuts
So why the fuck he keep lookin? I guess to get his life tooken
I just came home, ain't trying to see central booking
Oh shit, now he's looking in my face
You better haul ass 'cause I ain't with no fucking chase
So lace up your boots, 'cause I'm about to shoot
A true motherfucker going out for the loot
So there it is. Despite the fantastical quality of Biggie's violent urges and his unreptenent nihilism ("I wouldn't give a fuck if you're pregnant/ Give me the baby ring and the #1 Mom pendant"), his was an era when it was still necessary to make a case for outlaw-hood, and he makes that case in no uncertain terms: Stealing is a pragmatic solution to hunger and material lack, and cop-killing is a pragmatic solution to wanting to stay the fuck out of jail. There are still plenty of rappers who explore the social and cultural forces around urban violence - off the dome, I'm thinking of Pharoahe Monch, in songs like "When the Gun Draws," and Ghostface, one of our last great storytelling rappers. But more commonly, we see rappers interpreting crime-talk as a genre trope that requires no explanation or justification or even context - rappers no longer kill for a clearly-defined reason, they just kill, as inevitably as rockers pay homage to the most ambiguous babies and guuuuuuurls. Jay-Z, with his usual bulletproof pomposity, addressed this shift from meaning to form in last year's "Ignorant Shit":
This is that ignorant shit you like
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, trick, plus ice
C'mon, I got that ignorant shit you love
Nigga, fuck, shit, maricon, puta, and drugs
C'mon, I got that ignorant shit you need
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, trick plus weed
I'm only trying to give you what you want
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, you like it, don't front
Hova's more concerned with groupthink here than with the denaturing of meaning in crime rap - "Ignorant Shit" was born into the age of Young Jeezy, rap's great anarcho-fascist, whose obliterative presence is most saliently summarized in one part of his song "Hypnotize": "Now I command you niggaz to get money," in a bassy, implacable voice-of-god. But he does touch on the idea that crime rap's signifiers have ossified into something static. Compare Biggie's deeply causal crime rap to something more modern, like Clipse, and you'll find a fundamental layer of meaning to be absent from the latter. In "Chinese New Year," there's no context, no backstory, no justification - the killers simply show up at your door, masked and armed, somehow gleeful in the sheer act of violence, which has become a end instead of a means - Biggie was like a desperado, but Clipse more resembles a dark malefic force of nature flitting inexorably about the periphery of a Cormac McCarthy novel.
Lil Wayne might be the greatest rapper at work today because he's most fully understood, perhaps just intuitively, this semiotic shift in rap music, and most fully avails himself of the malleability it entails. He's taken violence, drugs and theft into his vocubulary while fully recognizing them as hollow ciphers that can only be useful as guideposts in a hermetic celebration of self. This allows him recourse to dizzying pop cultural pastiche, transitioning seamlessly from Dwayne Wayne name-drops to belligerent threats, or dropping non-sequiturs like "When I was five, my favorite movie was the Gremlins/ That ain't got shit to do with this, I just thought that I should mention" amid his crime-talk. Of course, Wayne's tacitly acknowledging that the crime-talk itself "ain't got shit to do with this" either - only Wayne and Wayne's greatness truly signify in Wayne's world. His new single "I'm Me" begins with an awe-inspiring ground-clearing:
Un-fuckin'-believable
Lil Wayne's the president
Fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck 'em
Even if they celibate
Notice how the temetic opening sally situates the song in a Wayne-centric world: he's not running for president, he's not saying he *should be* president - he *is* the president, point blank. It really brooks no argument. Notice how "fuck 'em" attaches itself to no specific group and boasts no specific motivation - like Clipse's crime scenario, it's a universal stance that posits the self against all comers, the struggle being enacted not between a corrupt culture and one of its disenfrachised denizens, but the known (the self) against the unknown (the other, i.e. everything).
(If you'll allow me a brief tangent, there's a lot of rad stuff going on in this song that doesn't relate to this post, most notably the abrupt yet organic-feeling shifts in tone that Wayne's free-associative style so often creates. A stupid-funny pop culture jibe ("I know the game is crazy/ It's more crazy than it's ever been/ I'm married to that crazy bitch/ Call me Kevin Federline") leads into a larger-than-life boast: "The ground shall break when they bury him." Yet here, Wayne seems to catch himself off-guard, as if his own line suddenly opened up a yawning awareness of mortality under his feet. "Bury him?" he asks, in a tone of voice that indicates he's startled himself, "I know one day they gotta bury him/ Better lock my casket tight baby so I don't let the devil in," and here the punchliney flow he's favored so far gives way to a malleable, urgent cadence, as if his own acknowledgement of limited time has renewed his hunger.)
Anyway, the chorus of "I'm Me" is perhaps the most honest, endgamey manifesto rap has ever seen, one that seems to perfectly summarize a rap climate where violence is portrayed less as a social condition and more as a natural side-effect of late-capitalism's doctrines of competition, conspicuous consumption, and self-aggrandization. It is a perfect distillation of this trend - the diminishment of meaning, the wax of the hermetic ego - and it goes a little something like this:
Bitch, I'm me, I'm me, I'm me, I'm me
Baby, I'm me, So who you, You're not me, You're not me
And I know that ain't fair, but I don't care
I'm a motherfuckin' Cash Money millionaire
I know that ain't fair, but I don't care
I'm a motherfuckin' Cash Money millionaire Labels: brian, rap
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, January 07, 2008
BIG BROTHER
Kanye West
Graduation
Roc-A-Fella : 2007
[Buy It]
In November of 2006, I posted about one of my favorite rap micro-genres: the conflicted mentor homage. In that post I focused on The Game's "Doctor's Advocate." In 2007, Kanye West checked in with his own take on the form, "Big Brother." Game's effort was almost unbearably poignant - he sounded like it physically pained him to externalize his insecurities vis-a-vis his mentor Dr. Dre, yet was compelled to do so lest the internal pressure rend him apart. Listening to "Doctor's Advocate" was accompanied by a creeping feeling of anxiety - a voyeuristic sense of watching someone's ego come helplessly unraveled in plain view. But Kanye is a different kind of creature - there's no sense of difficult revelation in "Big Brother," because this kind of emotional showmanship is simply what Kanye does. Nevertheless, Graduation is by far the least torturned of Kanye's three albums - it's his on-top-of-the-world record: he's comfy, rich, unquestionably successful, contentedly sipping expensive champagne and shopping in Italy. And so while "Big Brother" lacks the sense of desperation that undergirds "Doctor's Advocate," it is rife with poignancy. It's as if West has to invent battles he's in danger of losing so he'll be left with something - anything - to win.
One wonders if it's a coincidence that Kanye's troubled mentor song, like Game's, is couched in a prettily elegiac J.R. Rotem beat - regardless, this guy knows his way around musical pathos; his surging synths and weary rock chords here are a perfect match for Kanye's blend of behind-the-music nostalgia and wheedling interpersonal parsing. Most of us feel like figurants in our own lives, and part of Kanye's allure is that he's his own Odysseus - a hero who can see the epic proportions of his own life story. As such, it's appropriate that "Big Brother" is framed as an epic biopic by its chorus:
My big brother was Big's brother
Used to be Dame and Big's brother
Who was hip hop's brother?
Who was No I.D's friend?
No I.D my mentor
Now let the story begin
There's a lot of story packed into these lines: The "big brother" is Jay-Z, who refused to sign Kanye as an artist to Roc-A-Fella for some time, not knowing what to do with this anomalous, extravagently prolix suburban rapper, keeping him as a behind-the-scenes beatsmith. Jay-Z came up with the legendary Notorious B.I.G., arguably the greatest rapper of all time, and "Dame" is Damon Dash, with whom Jay-Z founded the rap titan Roc-A-Fella. Jay and Dame were friends with No I.D., a Chicago-based producer who taught Kanye his trade. But the important thing here isn't the details, it's the lineage - by couching his story in this temporal sequence, Kanye ekes his way into the dynasty he craves, drawing a not-quite-logical line between himself and the late Christopher Wallace. But elbowing your way into a dynasty is not necessarily a shortcut to confidence in your position in it, and Kanye spends the rest of the song alternating lauding Jay-Z's accomplishments (and tacity, slyly, his own) while torturously combing through their personal interactions for slights both real and imagined - like the aftermath of a blind date, where your first instict is to figure out, by this same kind of obscure signal-reading, whether or not the person liked you, before you even begin to consider whether or not you liked them.
Like all good bildungsromans, this one starts small - it's the "Hard Knock Life Tour," Kanye's still one of the million kids at the mall yelling out "Jigga!" He's done some bulletproof beats for Jay but still can't get him to take him seriously as a rapper, doesn't even know how to step to him:
Now he won't even step to his idol to say hi
Standing there like a mime
Let the chance pass by
Back of my mind he could change your life
With all these beats I did at least let him hear it
At least you could brag to your friends back at the gig
But he got me out my mama crib
Then he help me get my mama a crib
The verse closes on a triumphant note, but there's the sense that much has been elided in between; Kanye's outsider feelings have been glossed over but not addressed. In short, this is the airbrushed version. Unsatisfied with the artifice, Kanye loops back in the second verse, pushing toward the reconcilation that comes from the airing of hard truths. "I'd play my song in that old back room / He'd bob his head and say damn, oh, that's you?" Notice how adeptly that second line encapsulates Kanye's predicament - it's not as if Jay-Z flat-out dislikes his music, which would at least offer a resolution. He's just indifferent to it; Kanye can't get him to really listen, and it keeps him floating in some indeterminate median, like that maddening relationship period where nothing's automatic, and everything revolves around a pragmatic decision to stay together or break up. I mean, this is a tough spot for Kanye. How would you feel if you'd given your idol beats that were largely responsible for the success of his album (in this case, The Blueprint), but then, when he's doing a show at Madison Sqaure, not only did you "not get the chance to spit it," but Carleen told you you could "buy two tickets?" Ouch. "I guess big brother was thinking a little different," Kanye understates, "kept little brother at bay, at a distance." Kanye comforts himself with his success - "Big brother saw me at the bottom of the totem / Now I'm at the top and everybody on the scrotum" - but comfort is not resolution.
"Have you ever walked in the shadow of a giant?" Kanye asks at the start of the third verse, where all the cards finally fall face up on the table. There is a frustrated challenge - "New jack city gotta keep my brother / But to be number one, I'ma beat my brother!" - and an accusation: "I told Jay I did a song with Coldplay / Next thing I know he got a song with Coldplay." It's as if his frustration at not being able to connect with Jay, a father-figure despite the sibling rivalry talk, has led him to lash out blindly, and things take a turn for the Oedipal. Kanye doesn't settle his dilemma in this song, he simply palpates it, moving it around to try and organize it into some recognizable pattern. And he ends it with a modified chorus that contains a prescription so obviously self-serving, so desperately needy, that one is astonished he can say it with a straight face. But saying the unsayable without self-consciousness has been Kanye's m.o. from the start:
My big brother was Big's brother
So here's a few words from your kid brother
If you admire somebody you should go ahead and tell 'em
People never get the flowers while they can still smell 'em
A ideal in my eyes, God of the game
Heart of the city, Roc-A-Fella chain
Never be the same, never be another
Number 1 young Hov also my big brother
Labels: brian, rap
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
TOTALLY SECULAR NON-SPECIFIC HOLIDAY MIX
A gift from your friends at Moistworks, mixed by Brian
01: Hot Chip: (JUST LIKE WE) BREAKDOWN (DFA REMIX)
02: Justice: D.A.N.C.E. (HOLLERTRONIX REMIX)
|
| | |
