marathonpacks

I'm curious about what you mean when you included Random Access Memories in that brief list of "difficult-album-as-political-statement" w/r/t the Mystery Train quote. That album didn't strike me as either difficult or political.

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:10:00 -0400

Yeah, RAM is most certainly not difficult in any aural sense, particularly when compared to Shaking the Habitual (how more of a “difficult” title is it possible to use) or Yeezus. The terminology typically used for the music further elaborates on this: “easy” listening, “soft” rock. Though I do think that Daft Punk were trying to say something very different on this album, both from what they’ve said before, and from what they see everyone else saying in mainstream dance music nowadays. I think that’s what Thomas Bangalter evoked when he told Simon Reynolds ”it’s like we’re running on a highway going the opposite direction to everybody else.” Aurally, the music is very smooth, but conceptually, it’s meant to be challenging—of course, within their chosen framework, and their idea of what a 2013 EDM audience wants. Seems to me they chose to highlight “live” musicianship and artists from their past as a pushback to the prevailing computer-animated forward-rush of EDM (which of course, they themselves helped create).

Of course, explicitly citing sources is nothing new for Daft Punk, but the explicitness of how they’re doing it for this album (granting several major interviews to Pitchfork, the NYT, Rolling Stone), a massive press campaign featuring interviews with Moroder, Nile Rodgers, Paul Williams) seems to me directly aimed at their audience’s tastes. This is particularly aimed, I would suspect, toward the younger members of their audience, for whom the 2006-07 tour and Human After All feel like the British Invasion for current EDM. Again, this is totally speculative, but how did kids who love Skrillex and Guetta respond to “Fragments of Time,” “Giorgio by Moroder,” or “Touch,” or the fact that there’s nothing here aside from “Get Lucky” that sounds anything like “One More Time” or That One Song That Kanye Used? This is a brash generalization, but I think it’s what Daft Punk intended, and artistic intent provides the thrust of Marcus’s argument. In its own way, to its own audience, RAM is as pedagogical as Habitual—forget what you know, learn this.

This is also what I mean by “political.” It’s not (only) a word to describe taking a recognizable stance on a particular issue, the way the Knife and Kanye do vis-a-vis gender, race, and so forth, but in the broader scheme of things, a description of contestations over power. For Daft Punk, it seems clear to me that while the music is very easy to like, that it sounds nothing like the sort of dance music that’s on the radio right now, or that young EDM fans are downloading. That’s a power move, which makes it political. They’re already coming from a position of some influence, and they’re actually being quite conservative about it from a musical perspective, so it’s not a radical move like Habitual, or a dissonant one like Yeezus, but it is political, inasmuch as they understand what their audience wants and they give them something a bit outside of that, which is how I interpret Marcus in that quote (though of course Mystery Train is about what it means to be American, not French, and certainly not robots). They could have just released another Discovery, you know?

(F) flourine (U) uranium (C) carbon (K) potassium (Bi) bismuth...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:16:10 -0400

(F) flourine (U) uranium (C) carbon (K) potassium (Bi) bismuth (Tc) technetium (He) helium (S) sulfur (Ge) germanium (Tm) thulium (O) oxygen (Ne) neon (Y) yttrium

"The best popular artists create immediate links between people who might have nothing in common but..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:56:00 -0400

“The best popular artists create immediate links between people who might have nothing in common but a response to their work, but the best popular artists never stop trying to understand the impact of their work on their audiences. That means their ideal images must change as their understanding grows. One may find horror where one expected only pleasure; one may find that the truth one told has become a lie. If the audience demands only more of what it has already accepted, the artist has a choice. He can move on, and perhaps cut himself off from his audience; if he does, his work will lose all the vitality and strength it had when he knew it mattered to other people. Or the artist can accept the audience’s image of himself, pretend that his audience is his shadowy ideal, and lose himself in his audience. Then he will only be able to confirm; he will never be able to create.”

- Greil Marcus, from the introduction to Mystery Train.

Thought of this when reading about fan reactions to Low’s all-drone concert, but it also directly relates to the expectation-subverting, difficult-album-as-political-statement releases this year from The Knife, Kanye West, and Daft Punk.

Steve

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 11:27:00 -0400

When I was 12, I would go to my sister’s softball games, because there wasn’t really anything else to do. I’d bring my basketball and play on the court next to the softball field, occasionally running into friends from school, eating Lemonheads and baseball-shaped gumballs from the concession stand. Most often, I just sort of walked around aimlessly while intensely aware of everyone around me, in that way that only a hopelessly uncool 12 year old boy does.

One day I was waiting in line at the concession stand, when a man started making casual conversation with me. This was not weird or creepy; more just kind of awkward, like any interaction with an adult when I was 12. I just assumed this guy was some other kid’s dad. He was being really nice, asking me countless questions about what I liked to do, and asking if I knew his daughter, who was a couple years younger than me but had attended the same after-school daycare center, a year or so after me and my sister stopped going there. When I went to sit on the aluminum bleachers, he came and sat down next to me.

A few weeks later (or maybe a few days, things blur together), he started showing up at our house semi-regularly. I remember the first time he brought me the newest copy of Sport Magazine, and we chatted about baseball, which was my primary passion at the time. I played Little League, but the primary thing was memorizing statistics and keeping score for Cubs games aired on WGN. I learned Steve was a Little League umpire and that’s why he looked familiar.

My parents had divorced a year or so earlier, and I’d gotten used to a house where it was just me, my mom, and my sister. Steve started coming over more regularly. Before I knew it, he moved in. I did not handle this well at all. We had it out on several occasions, mainly because I was a petulant, confused brat who resented the fact that there was a new man living in my house, sleeping where my dad used to sleep, his beers in the refrigerator. He liked auto racing a lot, and brought that out of my mom as well—she’d dated a local racecar driver when she was younger, before she met my dad, but I didn’t know that. When I was 12, then 13, it was a signal that everything was changing, and nothing was the same anymore.

I still saw my dad regularly. He’d moved to the west side of town—High School Road, out by the airport—renting a small house behind a cop buddy’s house. Later he moved to a small apartment in a complex so close to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that the car noise sounded as loud as the airplanes taking off directly over that first house. I actually became closer to my dad in the years after my parents divorced. We were together pretty much every weekend, watching WWF, terribly sad Colts games (this was the early 1990s), eating takeout. I would sleep in the bed, and he’d sleep on the couch. I would go to work with him at the sheriff’s department and type my name on the computer, and then print it out. On Sunday mornings, he wouldn’t put his prosthetic leg on, and we’d sit around the house all day. I’d sit on the arm of the easy chair and we’d do the crossword together. I remember the smell of eraseable pens, and the sight of smudged ink that was never fully erased.

My dad was a strict disciplinarian growing up. I vividly remember several occasions where I was violently punished for being a pretty impossible prick of a kid. But he cooled off a lot in the years after my parents divorced. He quit drinking, for one thing. He also got remarried, to a wonderful woman he’d dated in high school, when I was a senior in high school myself. They came over for my graduation open house, and I remember how strange it was to see him sitting in the living room, which now had a new couch, and new carpeting. He retired from the Sheriff’s Department after a heart attack, and the last years of his life were spent accumulating a massive videotape collection, acquired by taping movies from television, carefully labeling them, and alphabetically filing them.

My dad died during finals week of fall semester senior year, December 1998. He was 53. He’d been really sick for a while, and I regret to this day not seeing him more over what would in retrospect amount to the last month of his life. He’d lost a lot of weight, and when his shirt was off, you could see his defribillator bulging out of the side of his torso, the shape of a half-used bar of Dial. I would ask him for money, and he’d mail me an envelope full of winning scratch-off tickets, typically $30-40 worth. The last time I saw him alive, he was lying on the bed in the spare bedroom of the house he’d bought with my stepmom, finding it very hard to breathe.

I gave the eulogy at my dad’s funeral, which was terrible prose in retrospect, but fitting for the moment. His cop friends took swigs out of a bottle of whiskey under the eave out front, unable to enter the showing without a buzz. I had no formal clothes at that time, hadn’t ever needed them, so my mom altered one of my dad’s old suits, and I wore that. As the crowd filed out after the service concluded, Steve and my mom walked past me in the front row. Steve stopped, shook my hand with both of his hands, and told me “I’m very, very sorry.” It was the first time I interacted with Steve as an adult. In retrospect, that was probably the moment when I became an adult. I laid that day’s unfinished Indianapolis Star crossword in the casket with my dad’s body.

douglaswolk: Brian Eno and his cat Eric for Purina. …Wow. Eric...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 01:31:53 -0400

douglaswolk:

Brian Eno and his cat Eric for Purina. …Wow.

Eric was me in a previous life #confession

"Most importantly, the thing that Netflix aspires to, and which HBO already has, is an exclusive..."

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:29:51 -0400

“

Most importantly, the thing that Netflix aspires to, and which HBO already has, is an exclusive library of shows. If everything goes according to plan, then the Netflix of the future will be something people feel that they have to subscribe to, on the grounds that it’s the only place where they can find shows A, B, C, and D. That’s what it means to become HBO — and Netflix is fully cognizant that this is a process which takes many years and billions of dollars.

If Netflix gets there, then it becomes a license to print money, just as HBO is today. Shows like Arrested Development and House of Cards may or may not pay for themselves over the short term — in fact, they almost certainly won’t. But that doesn’t matter. In the long term, they will become part of a library which has massive value on two fronts: the shows can be licensed out in jurisdictions where Netflix doesn’t want to compete, and they will also help make Netflix a service that can guarantee you a great show that you want to watch, whenever you want to watch it.

”

- Felix Salmon, “Why Netflix is Producing Original Content.”

HBO seems to be the obvious direction Netflix is going, but— I was (half-drunkenly) talking about this last night with a friend who also thinks about this stuff all the time— what I’m curious about is the research model that Netflix uses, particularly for the launch of House of Cards. I haven’t seen the show, or really read anything about it, but my friend told me that the show came out of an intense research process based on the gazillion data points that Netflix subscribers give the service. Has any company done the Premium TV model before with a consumer data set equivalent to the world’s largest video store? I assume Netflix has not only longitudinal data for taste/genre patterns, but also via Streaming, detailed ideas of when and where people tend to stop watching? Seems like a very interesting, possibly significant tweak to the typical pre-production analytics that networks use. Also, I watched X-Files up to Season 5 before giving up the ghost when the show went totally off the rails—fold that into the whiteboard sessions for the next government conspiracy sci-fi program.

Nothing Lasts Long EP Streaming on SPIN, Free Download

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:39:58 -0400

paintedpalms:

“Upper Floors,” the first track off our new EP “Nothing Lasts Long,” is streaming over at SPIN

http://www.spin.com/articles/painted-palms-upper-floors-nothing-lasts-long-ep/

check it out and download the rest of the EP for *free* on our soundcloud

https://soundcloud.com/paintedpalms/sets/nothing-lasts-long-ep

Good music, good dudes.

"I love how Kanye is so wildly, declaratively ambitious and inventive and pioneering and..."

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 11:51:00 -0400

"I love how Kanye is so wildly, declaratively ambitious and inventive and pioneering and..."

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:41:00 -0400

“I love how Kanye is so wildly, declaratively ambitious and inventive and pioneering and forward-thinking and broad-minded and in the end what he cares most about is winning more Grammys. That’d be like some self-professed great chef aspiring to get a sandwich on the McDonald’s menu.”

- — ILX weighs in on the NYT interview. (via nedraggett)

It’s tacky to “us,” but I think it makes perfect sense if you consider that Kanye considers himself a “professional creative” more than he considers himself an “artist,” and says as much in the interview. He namedrops Gil Scott Heron and Dead Prez, but via that interview, he’s thinking of his process and cultural positionality more in the lineage of designers and “image people,” aka the advertising, design, and branding worlds. Those people think of themselves as artists, too, only their work has a functionality and foregrounding of style that they can easily reconcile with the more romantic, “outsider” perspective we ascribe to transcendent artists. They also love rewarding each other for their brilliance in creating art-with-a-function. There’s nothing tacky about seeking the highest award your chosen industry has on offer if you choose this perspective, which Kanye clearly has. I bet he’d love to get a Clio for his pre-release projection stunts.

(also, I love how he puts David Stern in his Mount Rushmore of legends including Anna Wintour and Walt Disney. Honestly, I really love it.)

thedissolve: One reason the documentary Room 237 has been so...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:03:00 -0400

thedissolve:

One reason the documentary Room 237 has been so popular among film buffs is that it validates (and, to an extent, mocks) the kind of intense analysis that academics and cinephiles like to apply to their favorite films, suggesting that if viewers look closely enough, they’ll find hidden meanings in movies whether they’re actually there or not. Room 237 uses The Shining as its text, giving a handful of obsessives a chance to explain their theories about what director Stanley Kubrick really intended with his adaptation of a Stephen King best-seller. Now the Room 237 parody Spook Central gives Ghostbusters a whirl, thereby proving either that Room 237 is pretentious and silly, or that it’s so awesome that everyone should make a doc just like it. (It’s probably the former. But we can’t pretend that we wouldn’t watch a two-hour dissection of an Ivan Reitman film.) -Noel Murray

Yes, but I also know a lot of film studies scholars who hated Room 237 precisely because of the way the film frames the “intense analysis that academics and cinephiles like to apply to their favorite films.” While there are several moments in the film where larger connections were made to Kubrick’s creative M.O. at the time (was he reading “Hidden Persuaders”-style psychoanalytic advertising manuals, and playing with the horror form by hiding stuff in the sets? Interesting!), the larger theme was one that presented detailed content analysis (not much cultural analysis) as the province of obsessive, weird fans who are dead set to insist that they can divine Kubrick’s intent from the placement of symbols, and so forth. The audience I watched the film with laughed or snickered at most of the conspiracy theories the film presented, mainly because it adopted a gently mocking tone at their claims (particularly in a visual sense). For a lot of non-academics/cinephiles who see this film, it’s going to be easy to project such conspiratorial micro-fetishizations as equivalent to the general practice of academic film critique, because the film doesn’t draw such distinctions, which is a bummer.

"‘The public doesn’t understand,’ (mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 13:36:49 -0400

“

‘The public doesn’t understand,’ (mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau) told me, speaking about so-called metadata. ‘It’s much more intrusive than content.’ She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying ‘who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content.’

For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: ‘You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.’ And information from cell-phone towers can reveal the caller’s location. Metadata, she pointed out, can be so revelatory about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive stories that it can make more traditional tools in leak investigations, like search warrants and subpoenas, look quaint. ‘You can see the sources,’ she said. When the F.B.I. obtains such records from news agencies, the Attorney General is required to sign off on each invasion of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up millions of records a minute, it’s unclear if any such brakes are applied.

Metadata, Landau noted, can also reveal sensitive political information, showing, for instance, if opposition leaders are meeting, who is involved, where they gather, and for how long. Such data can reveal, too, who is romantically involved with whom, by tracking the locations of cell phones at night.

”

- Jane Mayer, “What’s the Matter With Metadata?” Or, why PRISM’s data collection can learn a lot without hearing the words we speak.

Photo

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 19:09:00 -0400

Cerebral Decanting: Listening Notes, Ultra-Brief (Pt. 92)

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:19:41 -0400

Cerebral Decanting: Listening Notes, Ultra-Brief (Pt. 92):

decanting-cerebral:

PICKS

Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires Of The City (XL)

There are legitimate reasons to despise this band, like if you reject melody on principle or insist upon confusing middle class benefits with leisure class privilege. But the charms of their self-titled debut and Contra now seem of a piece - stripped-down guitar pop aware of a big wide world beyond alt prototypes wedded to unabashedly literate lyrics, two qualities that remain no-no’s among certain indie consumers because even bohemians downplay their intellect. These twelve brief-yet-sprawling numbers are something different, a sustained argument in favor of studio overkill as a means of highlighting melodic songcraft, so hands-on and fussy the first few casual listens reveal little more than overburdened merriment. Yet immerse yourself in the shock tactics of Ezra Koenig’s electronically modified vocals on Buddy-Holly-meets-drum-kit-avalanche mashup “Diane Young”. Willingly accept piano codas, reggae organ, uilleann pipes, and Grover Washington in place of guitar lines. Cede this multicultural crew their right to sample “Keep Cool Babylon” and swipe lyrics from Junior Reid. Celebrate Koenig’s erudite yet earnest grapples over an agnosticism he can’t stop worrying about (“born to live without You”). And finally acknowledge how rare it is for a supposedly overburdened studio concoction to transmit such simple pleasures as the east coast/west coast divide of “Hannah Hunt” (“I miss those freezing beaches”) or complex meditations like “Hudson,” which thinks aloud about place-naming, real estate as act of genocide, and melting pot agony/ecstasies, amid an ironic embrace of flag and country softly echoing ee cummings’ song of Olaf. All this plus tunes. Baroque and roll!

Still not sure who this person is at this Tumblr, but it’s worth a follow if you like expressive, economical writing such as this.

"Additionally, the list includes, a bit offensively, Hilary Swank’s performance in Boys Don’t Cry...."

Wed, 29 May 2013 13:15:10 -0400

“Additionally, the list includes, a bit offensively, Hilary Swank’s performance in Boys Don’t Cry. There’s the caveat included right there in the listicle: ‘while Swank’s character Brandon Teena was transgender, not gay, the role was iconic for many gays and lesbians.’ Well, plenty of gay men relate to Little Edie Beale — it’s why Grey Gardens is so popular among gay men, after all — but that doesn’t make Little Edie gay. Just because Brandon Teena was transgender and conveniently falls under the LGBT umbrella doesn’t mean that the catchall term ‘gay’ applies to him, but it’s indicative of a growing trend among straight people to lump all non-heterosexuals together. The movement of behemoth media outlets adding LGBT verticals is demonstrative of the assumption that all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people all care about the same news — news, I suppose, that straight people don’t care about — while being conveniently set aside for specific advertising aimed at these communities.”

- Tyler Coates, “The Problem With Celebrating Straight Actors in Gay Roles.”

"I take everything out of my pockets because my phone and wallet are reminders of who I am when I'm just living my life. When I go onstage, I don't want anything to do with that."

Tue, 28 May 2013 14:49:12 -0400

"I take everything out of my pockets because my phone and wallet are reminders of who I am when I'm just living my life. When I go onstage, I don't want anything to do with that.":

Matthew Otto, on his pre-show rituals.

Of all the Ron Swanson persona elements that Parks & Rec has...

Tue, 28 May 2013 10:29:43 -0400

Of all the Ron Swanson persona elements that Parks & Rec has exploited over the series’ run, I wish they could have figured out a way to make him stay the Bobby Knight fan he clearly was in Season 1.

Or: how a journalistic publication can allow a Tweet to...

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:22:00 -0400

Or: how a journalistic publication can allow a Tweet to circulate independently of any acknowledgement of paid sponsorship, while retaining its integrity in a subsequent tweet. Sneaky.

They actually had 4 characters + a space left in the initial Tweet. Could have typed [AD]

"For decades relegated to lone VHS copies buried in college libraries, Dan Graham’s dense DIY..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:53:40 -0400

“For decades relegated to lone VHS copies buried in college libraries, Dan Graham’s dense DIY documentary traces a history of rock‘n’roll in which Patti Smith is, to quote the film itself, “the Mary Magdalene to the fallen rock idols of the 60s.” Graham primarily draws a line between the ecstatic trances of 18th-century Shakers to the performative primitivism of art-punk (via Patti and Sonic Youth) and the ascendant circle-pit culture of hardcore bands Black Flag and Minor Threat. In the film’s second half, however, he branches out to Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, the hippie counterculture and even Jerry Lee Lewis as part of a mesmerizing thesis on rock as embodied belief system (at one point, an archival recording of a theological conversation between Lewis and Sun Records’ Sam Phillips is revelatory). The VHS aesthetics and crude editing take a second to get used to (they’re raw even by 1984’s tape-to-tape standards), but it’s all appropriately punk— collaged together with the seams showing.”

- For Pitchfork, I wrote about the transcendent Rock My Religion and 19 other music documentaries currently available on Netflix Streaming and other locales around the web.

"‘A lot of what we used to associate with music — it being an indicator of tribalism — I think..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 11:30:00 -0400

“‘A lot of what we used to associate with music — it being an indicator of tribalism — I think we’re seeing that more in food these days, instead,’ Gold says. ‘If you’re vegan, or a conscious omnivore, or nose-to-tail person, or a gluten-free person — those people get together and self-identify.’”

- Are Foodies Quietly Killing Rock and Roll?

I assume Twitter is going to eviscerate this, and while I agree that the headline does reflect an unnecessary either/or position in the piece, I do think that there’s a lot of truth to the connection, even if it should be framed as a dialectic rather than a binary.

Mainly, it lies in the recognition and unveiling of the commodity fetish, as producers and consumers. This is really where punk was born: pulling back the curtain on how the musical sausage was made (as it were) and inspiring folks to do it themselves, because yes, it’s really that easy. The foodie/locavore/grow-your-own movements do the same thing at a time when it’s very popular to rage against factory farms and genetically-enhanced/tortured-animal foods.

I like this quote, from Pulitzer-winning food critic and music writer Jonathan Gold, because it gets at another appeal that foodieism and modern indie share: the fetishization of micro-categorization as cultural capital.

See also: Michael Azerrad, “Gardening is the New Punk Rock.”

littlejoeii: Marcuse

Sat, 11 May 2013 10:15:51 -0400

littlejoeii:

Marcuse