The Summer Stays Cold and the Things I am not Keeping Track Of Continue to Outdo my Attempts to Stay on top of Them (Which Attempts Are not Attempts, Per Se)

Ok, this is the week in which falls the great U.S. great Independence Day. That means that we are already 1 month through the summer, and I haven’t really done any of the great NYC stuff that there is to do for free here. It’s the season when the city sort of apologizes in a caddish, over-the-top Tad Allagash more brash than sincere kind of way for being basically unlivable.

What is happening this week?

The New Pornographers and Midlake are playing on the 4th in Battery Park, continuing for the second year running the practice of hiring a non-American band to headline the biggest free show in the country on Starsy & Stripesy’s “I was once a baby” day.

The Boredoms play on Saturday in the Brooklyn Bridge park. I’ve never seen the Boredoms, nor have I listened to more than about 10 seconds of any of their songs, but I’ve always imagined that listening to them brings all the middle-class emotional rewards of other kinds of committed diligence. It must be nice.

Cinematic Orchestra is also playing on Saturday in Central Park at Summerstage. For free.

Recommended to me was Banks Violette’s opening this week.

Banks Violette at Whitney
This artist sounds like a visceral type figure that acts on desires and creative impulses with felinity, and does it while hanging out with cool fucking metal rockers.

And if I could visualize the thing that would truly be amazing to report on, I’d be able to tell readers that this week I’d be on a plane embarking on a Gran Turismo of bravado and tall tales, divested of all financial worry.

Dig the week, and please let me know if there’s something cool going on.

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Rush

What has happened to music since Rush?

We had a period of time while we as a world culture regrouped after the 1960’s when pretty much anything and everything was allowed to go. I grew up in Peoria, Illinois and was raised on WWCT FM 105.7 ROCK 106. This is probably why I can recite Journey, Rush, Skynyrd, Argent, and Billy Squier lyrics backwards in my sleep. It’s like Aldous Huxley’s quick discussion of attempts at sleep programming children with recorded information in Brave New World. I don’t know I know these songs. Hum a few bars, though, and out it comes. A lot of this stuff, fine when taken in moderation, went stale along with the city of Peoria as I grew up, but the radio station never changed its format. The whole era from ’60s garage rock to decadent ’70’s prog hung in the airwaves over the river valley like a warp in space-time, overstaying the welcome afforded by a window of moderate airplay by about 2 decades.

Actually, that kind of fabric of reality sort of stagnation might have something to do with why the soup of ethanol plant emissions that passed for our breathable atmosphere was so concentrated and our air quality so bad.

Beside the point.

Because of this overexposure to over-orchestrated codpiece rock, I lost my taste for most of it in even an ironic sense. I don’t like Rush. I don’t like Rush, but I like what they were able to do within the confines of the record industry of the day. That stuff is huge. Geddy Lee sounds like a cross between King Diamond and Tiny Tim strained through the biggest reverb effector the studio could find while the monster hybrid singer creature is playing D&D and has adventures in a pastoral sci-fi middle earth on the brain. In short, it’s fucked up. The lyrics are heavy. He sings things like “plowman” and “blacksmith” in impassioned pleas for reflection on society and concerted efforts for social change (Closer to the Heart, anyone?)- a far cry from the low-rent peacock strut of consumer fetishism and catchy, harmless or ineffectual ditty-mania that typifies most contemporary popular music. Rush was formed in Toronto, Canada in 1968 and were releasing albums on a major label (Mercury, then, years later, Atlantic) for 2 years before they scored a top 40 hit record with 2112 in 1976. These guys were releasing unbearably wanky, thematically and aurally mammoth full-length records amid mixed critical and consumer response for 2 years before they had a huge hit, and they were allowed to do it. They were allowed to use the considerable reach of the recording industry to broadcast to audiences on two continents until they made it.

Try being a band that can do that today.

I was talking recently to a musician friend of mine whose demo of new material wasn’t reciprocated with flattery from the label. The fact that the music industry is run by guys who don’t like music but do like a consistently profit-generating business model in a time when new modes of music distribution have served to make big, slow-to-adapt cube-culturally stagnant corporate ventures that are in the business of making money off of risky arts ventures even riskier than they were before was given a human face.

A new song doesn’t even have to be that “far out” to meet the kind of resistance this friend was facing. It’s enough that it funnels down past the wrong pins on the Plinko board to land on a desk under the wrong person’s purview- the kind of person who can’t adapt, can’t take chances, doesn’t like music, and would prefer to dictate the trends and the consequently dictate the profits than to live off the fat of the cultural land as new bands in new times come up with new ideas and new ways to play them.

It’s not only the big recording industry’s fault. In the fragmented, niche media world of today, everyone seems to be hedging their bets. No one really has the audacity to take what they’re doing to everyone. We all know how to reach our audience instinctively, we all know what indie label we can sign to to safely reach the people we can reasonably be expected to reach with the kind of stuff we might be doing. With everyone so crosshair-targeted at this stage in the game, it seems like the majors aren’t majors at all, instead only the biggest indie labels, pushing out the huge niche market appeal materiel of here-today, gone-tomorrow party, dance and romance anthems. The internet has provided the protocols for the fringe element to contain itself even while it sustains itself.

What’s happened to music since Rush? It hasn’t changed. There’s just not much chance it’s going to reach more than a few devotees unless it’s been made to order by upper management.

Awash

“ Gazing at the faces of the horses and the people, at this boundless stream of life raised up
by the power of my will and now hurtling into nowhere across the sunset-crimson steppe, I
often think: where am I in this flux?”
-Genghis Khan (from Buddha’s Little Finger, V. Pelevin)

I downloaded the live 9:30 Club Belle & Sebastian NPR “All Songs Considered” performance a few months ago, but as it clocks in at over an hour, I never set aside the time to sit down and give it a listen. That got corrected this weekend. I was running a couple unglamorous errands in Kmart on Friday, standing in the interminable and unglamorous Kmart checkout line, when the shuffle function on my iPod delivered the concert to me when I needed it most: as I stood burdened with a basket of cleaning products and household gewgaws reflecting on the national uniformity of Kmart’s employees’ checkout ineptitude and, despite my best efforts at avoidance, reluctantly eavesdropping on surrounding conversations. If you want to know about a barbecue being held this weekend and the demilitarized zone hole that was going to be dug in the middle of the yard for the burial of axes, email me off-topic and I’ll fill you in! There was some delicious self-inflicted social strife in the works.

I listened to a good 30 minutes of that live set on Friday, and reprised it with a straight-through listen while unpacking boxes on Saturday morning. Wonderful.

I like the file transfer program Pando. It is also worth checking out.

That’s about as focused a comment on anything I’m going to have right now, I guess. I have a lot of things on the brain that I’m having a hard time organizing and orienting in my fog. Where am I in this flux?

The Carnival of Leisure

It hit me yesterday that it’s already June. I was having beers last night with longtime friends at an establishment mere blocks from my house whose staffer obviously has a black belt in black-haired, black-eyed, other-continental girl watching, those friends being my chum from the days of teaching English in Nagano and recently-debuted collage artist of spinchronicity and my easygoing first roommate in New York from the NYU dorms, former drummer in the Florida punk scene, drummer on Great Leap Forward’s nearly-finished demo, and current industry mover and shaker. I was having a few leisurely beers with these guys as we shared the odd cock & bull story, distracted from all conversation intermittently by the serving staff’s (to us) terribly urgent proximity, and I realized it’s June. It’s June and a lot of things seem to be happening.

My move happened recently, for one, which brought me just a few blocks from my good friend from Nagano dipsomania days. My old roommate just moved to town, portending camaraderie and mayhem. The move means a new neighborhood, which neighborhood is excellent. There’s a new HESO out, in which you’ll find a contribution by yours truly, and there’s another one one the way.

Great Leap Forward, despite some lineup pitfalls, has written some good songs, 4 of which are soon to be fully mixed and mastered and ready to put out in the waxy canals of music snobs everywhere. Whether to their great otic offense or whether to their priapism’d chagrin, we’ll just wait to hear back.

The year seems to be going quickly, but a lot of shit is going down.

Substantial Means

Saturday night I found myself very briefly at the party of some people of substantial means. It’s very strange to be at a party like that. At first I couldn’t tell what was going on. For some reason the music was all uniformly very bad, the people, on the whole, seemed a bit old to be hanging out on the roof in the same t-shirt and shorts type attire as I was in, and no one seemed to be having a good time. There seemed to be, wound like a coil winding still tighter before some release, a savage boredom gripping the room.

The hostess was a beauty and stood out in her white seersucker dress as she seemed to worry unnecessarily over the sleek countertop computer unit the music inside the apartment was coming from. I’m not sure she was actually engaged in conversation with anyone. On a glance around the place, nothing seemed quite unpacked or assembled in the rooms radiating from the main room/kitchen.

A bit more needs to be said about the music.

Elevator hip-hop and soul- that slice of contemporary music that will slide very gracefully into what is defined as adult contemporary as the current generation of chickenheads settles into their mortgages and incestuous extramarital affairs- the genre championed by its current standard-bearer, Justin Timberlake, was the aural order of the night. There is a certain color to the music that can and has been replicated ad nauseum usque- an all-purpose synthesizer patch that dominates the form that serves as bass and mid-range with a sharp, loud attack and, though the sound only comes in short, second or less bursts, a tapering decay. It nearly seems to jangle, though which instrument’s jangle it is supposed to be, no one can guess. Probably because it also thuds a bit. This is also accompanied by a synthetic low-end bass drum evocative a little bit of a big bass speaker turned to the floor, or something that came off of vinyl to the chagrin of any high-ends. The beats are syncopated for funkiness, but also repetitive so you know what’s happening the second time it sequences around. And who knows what the fey, compressed, high-end, high-register voice is singing about. But there it is.

Now, somehow the host of this party had either a whole playlist or a whole iPod dedicated to storing and playing back this sort of material. That is not normal. It was either the result of a fanatical devotion to a particular production house or evidence of having acquired a massive amount of the genre’s hits all at once. And as the machine-generated soul pumped on, I couldn’t figure out what that music had to do with the faux hippy (hippy not in lifestyle or appearance, but in all-permissiveness) friend of a friend who had invited us to the gathering, or anyone else there, for that matter.

Bad scene. But, all in all, the weekend was good. Why aren’t they all three days?