A thesis for this blog?

I was listening today to the Eno-Fripp collaboration "No Pussyfooting," and thinking, "wow this really sounds like Kraftwerk." And it seems to me that for nearly 100% of the music-discussing world, liking this album and liking Kraftwerk would go hand in hand.

You can imagine the conversation in the record store.

"I've enjoyed other Eno albums, but I don't really like King Crimson. Is this good?"
"Yeah. Do you like Kraftwerk?"
"Of course."
"You'll like this. It sounds like Kraftwerk."

Which... it does. But I guess I want to say, there is NOTHING to like about (or "in") this similarity.

I've made this argument elsewhere, but no art should ever be evaluated on its *premise*. The Mona Lisa-- on paper, it's not so great. Blade Runner *should* be a great movie, instead it is boring and anti-profound.

The great hardcore band Black Flag realized this early on, changing their sound drastically and frequently in order to keep one step ahead of their own influence in the American punk scene. Only a crazy person would say, "You'll like My War. It sounds like Nervous Breakdown." They don't "sound alike." On the other hand, these two great achievements in American music are much more similar than Eno-Fripp & Kraftwerk, which are only apparently similar.

It should be possible to like 99 records in a genre without it being a foregone conclusion that one will like the identical-sounding 100th record. I am using mostly musical examples, because, to take literature for an example, only unserious readers (like "consumers" of any mystery novel) are so faithful to a given genre. But even children did not go for just every single Harry Potter rip-off which was flung at the market after the success of J.K. Rowling's novels.

I happen to like both Eno-Fripp & Kraftwerk. But this is (or should be) completely contingent, unrelated-- or else it is not real taste. Taken to its logical conclusion, genres would disappear completely as an indicator of taste. This should happen. Liking Led Zeppelin should be as much a predictor of liking Deep Purple as it is a predictor of liking Debussy.

How to review hip-hop

What first occurs to me about how to review hip-hop albums is that there is an entire tradition, both of the music, and of reviewing it--which gives little guidance. Hip-hop record reviews are often like Jack Kerouac's prose in On the Road: the writers try to approximate the musical style under consideration. I, on the other hand, feel that a rap album should be reviewed in exactly the same fashion as a death metal album.

Now, that is the long and the short of it. "How often will I listen to this? Is it memorable or paradigm-shifting? How many good songs are there in ratio to bad songs?" THESE are the questions. But I suspect my readers will not be satisfied without some examples.

Here is a sample of a small section of a (Clipse) review from the blog "Hip Hop Isn't Dead"

This song, recorded late in the game because those crackers that weren't playing fair at Jive didn't hear a single when an early version of Hell Hath No Fury was turned it, is now infamous because Pharrell made the mistake of selling the beat to Foxy Brown... Somewhere there's a rumored version of this song featuring Foxy Brown and Slim Thug's exact-same chorus: I would love to hear that one day for comparison's sake. Whatever happened to the Clipse's promised remix to this song that was supposed to feature Foxy, a compromise that was made to appease Shawn Carter?

Now, I have earlier and often made the claim that albums should be considered in two ways: first, sub specie aeterni, i.e. as close as possible to their "objective" importance and greatness, and secondly, in pragmatic terms: how often I listen to something. "Whatever happened to the promised remix of this song?" i.e.--- obsessive blogging-as-journalism and gossip mill, has nothing to do with either criteria. This might be interesting, but it has nothing to do with a record review, or with the quality of a song. Only the most perverse alchemy could transform hype or gossip or blogging into listening experience. It simply can't be done.

Here are a few reviews of Lil Wayne's last album:

Hip Hop Isn't Dead
Pitchfork
Rolling Stone

Now, to evaluate these, we need to go over what should be said about this album. It didn't age well; it is too long; 2/3 of the songs are bad; the remix of "Lollipop" was better than the album version; the Carter 2 was better; the Leak EP was better; Lil Wayne is best when there are no guests and no choruses--when he is just let loose over a beat. Well.. there's your review. Look over the reviews from its contemporary moment (last year) and I think you'll see that they all miss this basic summary.

Why is that? Why do album reviews (and, e.g., death metal is just as bad about this as hip hop) miss the question of listenability? Because they focus on "scene" components--dissing producers, sorting through hype, settling feuds, taking sides in a historical continuum, worrying about who is biting whom, evaluating egos, considering and being frustrated by popularity, and of course the highly contentious world of beat-making. Other genres have analogous problems. It simply doesn't matter to whether the music is good or not, but it is unavoidable in music journalism which "belongs" to a scene.

More from "Hip Hop Isn't Dead" (dot blogspot...)

Did Icarus and Redman have a falling out that I'm not aware of? That's the only reason I can think of that justifies Ready Roc's new position as go-to weed carrier and kidney donor alongside Meth's longtime candle warmer Streetlife.

That is from a TRACK review.

**

As fans of music, we are capable of telling whether a song is good or not, whether we enjoyed an album or not, whether a record works or doesn't or is just background music that will never become another "Daily Operations" or "Illmatic." And because these are the ways that fans approach music, it is also what a review should address.

See also my fake review of a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song for an example of how to review music.

My contention: gossip and name-dropping will never be a substitute for finding out whether a record is a classic, a near-classic, merely forgettable, or deserving of our contempt. That all pertains to the music; reviews (done poorly) thus date much worse than the albums themselves. This is of course as true for Bruce Springsteen (whose "9/11" album was received in a way completely detached from whether it had songs as good as his earlier work) as for Jay-Z.

Alternate Canon for Film

I saw The Red Shoes at Film Forum the other day, in a new print, and it occurred to me that possibly I was watching the greatest movie of all time. This signals to my brain: "Yes, but on what criteria?" And the answer is something like: "pure filmmaking," or "movie magic," etc. etc. But what I mean I think is better expressed in my favorite format: the list.

The Red Shoes
Gone with the Wind
Lawrence of Arabia
Napoleon (1927)
Wizard of Oz
Ben-Hur (1959)
Citizen Kane
War & Peace (1967)
The Leopard
Modern Times
Juliet of the Spirits
Birth of a Nation
The Conformist
Lola Montes
West Side Story
2001: A Space Odyssey


Now, usually, these are not my actual favorites, nor my actual "Best" or "Most Important" films. But in all of these movies is a shocking, almost superhuman visual creativity and ambition. The colors of Gone with the Wind, the chariot race in Ben-Hur, the communicative silences of 2001, the sets in the Wizard of Oz, the choreography of West Side Story... Here I am breaking from my usual plot-centered valuations. It is a truism of course that the greatest auteurs (in film and literature) are often masters of BOTH detail and grand plan. Tolstoy and Proust in literature, and at least all of the historical epics listed above, are gigantic in scope and breathtaking in particular scenes.

One problem with this list: it is much less "art house" than my tastes really are, and considerably more Hollywood. Of the great art house directors, Fellini is the most in this line. Bergman, Kurosawa, Renoir, Lang, are obviously virtuosos and there is probably room in here for some of their more extravagant work. The New Wave is usually too cramped. Truffaut's best work, but even Rashomon or The Seventh Seal, are STILL not Gone with The Wind, if you see what I mean.

One movie that probably *does* belong here is actually one I disliked a great deal: Marketa Lazarova, a Czech black and white epic that was visually stunning from start to finish. Since it was so boring, it is disqualified as being (in another way) unwatchable. That Bergman never made a movie as "beautiful" as this one is obviously more instructive about what Bergman WAS doing, what kind of magic he *was* after, than in any way a negative remark about him.

Indie Rock and You

What is it LIKE to enjoy a piece of music? This is what I want to know from a record review. Obviously, the very worst reviews of music are those that just talk about the lyrics, but from an intellectual standpoint, just as bad is the pretentious claim that reviews should "tell us what the music sounds like." Well, nothing could be more idiotic while sounding like a reasonable demand.

There is a rave review for the new GIRLS album, up on Pitchfork. Here is the part where they tell you what the music sounds like:

Musically, Album is mostly sunny Beach Boys pastiche, but it's not the kajillionth indie attempt at orchestral Pet Sounds majesty. Rather, it's simple and forthright early Beach Boys stuff: compact guitar-jangles, sha-la-la harmonies, muffled heartbeat drums. It sounds great. And even though it has a basic core sound, Album manages to cover a lot of aesthetic ground in its 44 minutes. Without being showy about it, they swing from rushing power-pop to acoustic campfire laments to "Morning Light", which is one of the most fully realized slices of shoegaze revivalism I've heard in years. If they'd made an entire album of songs like "Morning Light", Girls would be getting a ton of blog love, but they decided to go for something at once messier and simpler. And they're getting a ton of blog love anyway.

There's a pillowy quality to many of the sounds on Album, but this isn't lo-fi or glo-fi or whatever. Rather, every little production flourish is so much a part of the whole that you don't notice it until the 10th or 15th listen. On "Lust for Life", for instance, there's a melodica that bubbles up on the second half. "Big Bad Mean Motherfucker" is joyous beach-party stuff, but there's a beautifully discordant guitar solo in there. "Hellhole Ratrace" builds to an epic guitar whoosh halfway through its seven minutes, but the beat's hammer never quite falls; the drums stay just slightly off. The guitars on "Lauren Marie" twang like Duane Eddy's. All this stuff functions like the sleigh bells on Liz Phair's "Fuck and Run": subtle little intuitive details that you might never notice but that add to the devastating whole. The canniness of Album's production choices and the scuzzy depression of the lyrics and the gut-level songwriting instincts, along with everything else about the record, add up to something elusive and fascinating-- maybe even heartbreaking.

Now, that is really specific. A true description of what this album sounds like. But what remains to be pointed out is the deep irrelevance of "sounding like..." The guitars on "Lauren Marie" twang like Duane Eddy's--you don't say?? Does that mean any song will mean anything to me on first listen, on twelfth listen, in ten years? No matter how precise the description of the sound, I actually have no idea what it is like to *enjoy* this record. I only know what it is like to have *heard* this record.

Do the songs get under your skin? Do you find yourself singing them in the shower? Do you find little parts to memorize and play over and over? Or is it the sequencing? How does the filler fit in with the singles? Does it play best in short doses or all the way through? Might it be best to listen to this in the car or while doing the dishes?

Without being too autobiographical, the reviewer should tell me these things. For example, let me review an indie rock song for you. This is how it's done. This is a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song from a few years ago.

Although much of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's sound (slurred, slightly precious, affected vocals and droopy, woozy guitar) will be familiar to fans of indie rock--most recently in Modest Mouse's stirring late-career hit "Float On"--the layering of synthesizers over a predominantly bass-driven melody reminds me of nothing more than prime New Order. Meaning, if there is something like a canon of crowd-pleasers and genuine HITS in indie rock, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have tapped into this tradition. Nothing I think could be more profoundly uncool than such a move: it's like writing a poem with T.S. Eliot as your major influence, emulating The Godfather in film, or saying your favorite music is Mozart. The "cool" thing is secretly the artistic position which cuts out a certain portion of the audience in advance, the art that is less ambitious but which has obvious allusions instead. CYHSY are truly embarrassing, because they seemingly did not get this memo. On the contrary, they quietly have gone about the business of writing a song that is outstanding beyond its years: like "Sweet Child o' Mine" on Guns 'n Roses' debut album, it seems impossible that a young band could have produced such an obvious classic. CYHSY don't try to write "the perfect pop song" as though that were just the code for certain moves: they understand that "the perfect pop song" has a *unique* energy, not just the bland moodlessness of power-pop. And unlike the Jesus & Mary Chain-influenced groups that would come after, in the Brooklyn noise-pop wave of 2008, CYHSY have mastered dynamics, and... musicianship! In conclusion, that this is perfect car-commercial music is not to be doubted; but that something this propulsive and memorable is never to be produced by abstract and merely stylistic concerns, but only by real uninhibited creativity, is equally testified to in this little gem.

(In conclusion to this post, though, you will note that Pitchfork's review of the GIRLS album is different from my review of this CYHSY song, not just because the writing is different, but because no one could ever write such a thing of the boring, tepid, and suffocatingly-constrained mannerisms of GIRLS.)

Spectator (UK) list of 50 Greatest Films

reposted from Rogerebert.com

This list is not outrageously wrong, but it has too many movies that are questionable as to whether they are even GOOD, much less great: #1 Night of the Hunter, #17 Blade Runner, and #50 Out of the Past, are all deeply problematic films. Interesting? Yes. But the "best movies" should only include GOOD movies, which these films are not. More discussion to come (including my list).

And no list with Citizen Kane at #14 (!!!!!!), or a David Lean film which is maybe only his 5th best film can be right. Still, some great and inspired picks here: Earrings of Madame de..., Rio Bravo, Barry Lyndon, Killer of Sheep, M, Manhattan. Fellini at #43 is painful to read, though... I guess these are the times we live in.

1. The Night of the Hunter, Laughton
2. Apocalypse Now, Coppola
3. Sunrise, Murnau
4. Black Narcissus, Powell & Pressburger
5. L'avventura, Antonioni
6. The Searchers, Ford
7. The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles
8. The Seventh Seal , Bergman
9. L'atalante, Vigo
10. Rio Bravo, Hawks
11. The Godfather: Part I and Part II, Coppola
12. The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer
13. La Grande Illusion, Renoir
14. Citizen Kane, Welles
15. The Scarlett Empress, von Sternberg
16. Tokyo Story, Ozu
17. Blade Runner, Ridley Scott
18. Rear Window, Hitchcock
19. Point Blank, Boorman
20. The Red Shoes, Powell & Pressburger
21. The Earrings of Madame de..., Ophuls
22. Shadows, Cassavetes
23. Pickpocket, Bresson
24. Viridiana, Bunuel
25. Barry Lyndon, Kubrick
26. City Lights, Chaplin
27. Pierrot le Fou, Godard
28. Sunset Boulevard, Wilder
29. Notorious, Hitchcock
30. M, Lang
31. The Roaring Twenties, Walsh
32. Singin' in the Rain, Donen and Kelly
33. The Long Day Closes, Davies
34. Killer of Sheep, Burnett
35. Gun Crazy, Lewis
36. Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky
37. Taxi Driver, Scorsese
38. The 400 Blows, Truffaut
39. Pulp Fiction, Tarantino
40. Kind Hearts and Coronets, Hamer
41. In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-Wai
42. Sullivan's Travels, Sturges
43. 8 1/2, Fellini
44. Pinocchio, Disney
45. Great Expectations, Lean
46. Rome, Open City, Rossellini
47. Duck Soup, McCarey
48. Jaws, Spielberg
49. Manhattan, Allen
50. Out of the Past, Tourneur

3 reviews of the Fucked Up album from last year

Last year, I wrote a review of the Fucked Up album that was published online somewhere, but now it is time to compare *that* review (in its structure and criteria) with *other* reviews of the same record (ignoring things like "positivity" or what the record is "really" like).

Here's my version:
*
Being a long-time fan of hardcore punk, I have watched Fucked Up's ascent with great interest, from their first US tour, playing in a store-front in Bushwick, to the promotional frenzy that recently culminated in a 12-hour performance (stunt) and this album being reviewed in the hallowed pages of the NY Times. And there is literally nothing interesting to be said about Fucked Up's transformation from a Poison Idea-styled punk band--who gained notoriety by releasing 2-song singles in a genre (hardcore) that tends to cram a dozen songs onto a 7"--into a double-album-releasing band with flutes, choirs, and the rest. Nothing interesting to be said, for two reasons: 1) viewed sub specie aeterni, no one really cares about "transitions," we care about albums: are they good? will we want to listen to them often?, and the whole "evolution" of a band involves this very suspect metaphysics of locating a sound in its infancy, tracing it into the present, or seeing what elements were discarded to pave the way for success and breakthrough. And, 2) this record is not all that interesting. If you recall some of Black Metal's "ambient" experiments, which could only be astonishing and beautiful to the most genre-bound hesher, Fucked Up obviously are banking on a surprise factor that has no real payoff--"oh my god they have flutes!"

Whenever I don't like a band, I explain, fake-apologetically, "Well, you know me, I like the Kinks, so..."--as though I didn't want to wade in too deep, and really I wasn't qualified, but rather naive and would stick with what I knew. What this formulation means, of course, is that I like music that gets stuck in your head. Not "pop music," necessarily--probably everyone has had Mozart and Wagner stuck in their head, and probably Celtic Frost and the Bad Brains can be just as catchy. But the essential thing is that music be memorable. This is why any focus on production, who's doing the back-up vocals, lyrical themes, and extraneous instrumental touches, really misses the point--we listen to music to rock out to *parts* that we remember and like. And Fucked Up used to be really good at this. Like most music nowadays, this new album is not catchy, but it is full of parts. What the noodling, build-ups, repetitions, and whatnot are *doing* while not being catchy, is anyone's guess. The best bands at creating interesting little parts are Metallica, the Clash, and the Kinks--and on their last album, Fucked Up were in this tradition. This record is a bit like Napoleon's 1813 campaigns in Germany: although incorporating many different elements (Napoleon at Leipzig relied on allied troops from all over Europe), ultimately the strategy relies on bulk and an unimaginatively straight-forward attack, and, well, if you aren't up on your history, you can Wikipedia "Battle of the Nations" to see how this record succeeds. In short, if there is some ambition to ambient jamming that Fucked Up want to pursue, if they can make it interesting, I will follow a song full of neat parts to the ends of the earth, but you cannot dress up the plodding and unmemorable songs here. A record should be judged not by its scope or ambitions but by how often, over the years, one will listen to it. Even with the greatest enthusiasm or curiosity or goodwill, "The Chemistry of Common Life" is not a record that demands or rewards much time on your turntable. (emphasis mine)
*

Here are some key phrases from the Pitchfork review:

shimmering overdubs, fractured harmonies, almost tactile in its texture, bongo-laced, refreshing take on religion.

One reads this review in vain if searching for questions like, "Is this record catchy?" or "Will I enjoy listening to this?" or (more profoundly) "Am I *supposed* to enjoy listening to this?"

From the Dusted review, we learn helpfully that the album, on the most basic level--the combination of instruments--does not work: The disparity between these vocals and every other element on the record never gets easy to process, even on multiple listens. In a way, that should be the end of the review: except that the reviewer obviously feels that this "dissonance" (my term) might in some back-door way be incorporated into the form... which is already to give up the game, critically speaking. It's like staring at an all-white canvas and wondering whether it is "art" or not---instead of the more incisive point of view: IF THIS IS ART, WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH ME? And with the best artists (cited above--the Kinks, Metallica, previous releases by Fucked Up), the answer to this question is a no-brainer. While the Dusted reviewer realizes that what is being attempted by the album is a kind of synthesis of disparate elements into a Leviathan, what is left out by her review is whether there is any PURPOSE to such a synthesis.

What we like about a style or a genre is not *within* that style or genre. The tragedy of current tastes is to confuse these two things--the appeal of an album with the contingent trappings in which it occurs--to behave as though what made Black Flag Black Flag, what made the Velvet Underground the Velvet Underground, what made your favorite band your favorite band--to behave as though this were some algorithm of a style. And both the reviews I cited have been hoodwinked into a fixation ON this style, rather than on the (proper) fixation: is this catchy? am I enjoying this? what is the purpose of this?, etc.

Disgusting idiocy

NY Times article in which a bunch of people pretend to be "really excited" for the 1990s culture of their youths, even though this includes such unwatchable nonsense as Saved by the Bell and unlistenable garbage as Britney Spears

Frankly, this is a low point. What is represents is this: people who DON'T have taste now recollecting fondly the time when NO ONE has taste (when you are are 13). Also, these references (they are little more than that) are truly the lowest common denominator (in a non-pejorative sense). *Everyone* of a certain demographic COULD have this conversation:

"Remember the ______?" with obligatory reply, "Yeah, that was so awesome; they should bring that back."

Features such nuggets of wisdom as "Buying my first Discman was huge," and “'I miss VHS tapes,' he said."

No one *really* misses VHS tapes. What's next? Fond memories of New Coke?