chilling on the deep reflections on life and taste for this week to highlight 1 new and 1 old fav

Cold Beat's new album Mother came out today. The art has a Whole Earth Catalog sensibility, which you see all over the place these days, from expensive "bootleg" tshirts to Chobani yogurt branding. But not only does the Mother artwork wrestle free of cliche, it really fits the record perfectly: a document of life on a planet with an uncertain future, synths filling in the space between Hannah's propulsive, earth-bound bass lines and ethereal vox. There's a guarded optimism here, I think, because maybe you can't root yourself in despair over our current technological dystopia or hope only vaguely for better things to come when you've committed yourself to creating and loving new life? Although I've only listened to this twice after playing the two singles, "Prism" and "Flat Earth," relentlessly in my headphones over the past few months, I highly recommend this record by one of my favorite living songwriters, and may some more coherent thoughts soon.

David Roback from Mazzy Star/Opal/Rain Parade etc. sadly passed this week, which prompted lot of folks to revisit his back catalog in some particularly evocative weather; I should remember to return to "She Hangs Brightly" on a cold, rainy February day every year. On the off-chance you're unfamiliar with it, I want to highlight one of my actual, no-exaggeration favorite records of all time, the Opal singles compilation "Early Recordings." A lot of the credit for these songs' greatness goes to Kendra Smith for the rare feat of writing actually-funny lyrics, but equally key are Roback's echo-y arpeggios and slides that cut through the mischief to the sadness she's barely hiding. It sounds kind of like if Lou Reed had written the vaguely country-ish songs on "Loaded" earlier on and with John Cale still around to drone away in the background, plus the occasional Neil Young-tone shredding. My favorite song on this record of flawless music is "Northern Line," a song driven by Roback's lead guitar line, which I initially thought was a pedal steel but I think he might just go ham on the whammy bar and it blends seamlessly with a harmonica, especially when they come together to mimic train sounds. Smith sings deadpan as a woman so pumped to leave someone behind and consequently so severely dgaf about everything else that she's singing a song (it's a song about singing a song yes) about a train wreck while sitting on a train--it's a Mary Gaitskill story in 4 minutes. Early Recordings currently runs a cool 99 euro on Discogs but if you feel like deaccessioning your copy please negotiate with me first. Also, check out this delightful original video for "Empty Box Blues":

please do not meet me in the bathroom or why I am trying to write a blog in 2020

Yesterday I walked through an industrial zone on the border of Sunnyside and L.I. City/Hunter's Point and passed an industrial bakery, and I sniffed vigorously and realized that I had found the source of a weird toast smell that has confused me ever since I moved to Queens. Nick said "you should blog about this," so here I am. 

I have been driving everyone in my life crazy over the past week recounting my reading of “Meet Me in the Bathroom.” Aside from being a bad book about some fundamentally uninteresting people, I feel like it’s my first direct, personal experience of history being written from the top down*. The victors (successful major label musicians, employed music journalists) tell a story that bears little resemblance to my own experience and recollections of loving music and seeing bands in New York in the early 2000s. I mean—honestly thank the goddess that Random House isn’t publishing memoirs about seeing generic touring d-beat bands at ABC and watching beat Essential Cinema prints in the torturous seats at Anthology Film Archives, but it feels unsettling to know that a record of “your” time and place excludes “you” and others for whom music isn’t just about drugs and financial remuneration. There's a chapter in which musicians advocate "selling out" or signing to major labels juxtaposed against these same people mourning about how the Lower East Side and Williamsburg became corporatized; no one even tries to connect the dots. Karen O gets a lot of credit for being the "only woman" in the "scene" with no reflection about why that might have been the case, or if it was. T*dd P describes attending shows at DIY venues as "real estate voyeurism." According to this book, everyone went out and partied hard after 9/11 and the only New York artist who commented on Bush/the Iraq War was...Conor Oberst? Needless (I hope) to say, I um, disagree on all these counts and many others. 

I found the section about the Killers (not from New York) the most interesting, because it reminded me the most of reading about the warped ways that small town kids found out about and interpreted punk in the '80s. Brandon Flowers worked in a restaurant on the strip and used to go to the mall and listen to CDs in the listening stations and that was how he learned about any music, and that was how he found the Strokes and that fused some kind of circuit in his head, and he and his bandmates who also all worked in restaurants or casinos or whatever started playing literally wherever they could and just putting on wild spangly performances to like 5 people in a shitty Las Vegas bar on weeknights. It makes me think about how in the grunge book (Everybody Loves Our Town) most people came from working class backgrounds and were true freaks who got beat up for liking the music they did and, had they not been successful, would have had to join the military or work in a factory or something--which in fact proved to be the case for some of them. Besides the Killers, the majority of the musicians in MMITB probably would have just gotten an MFA if they hadn't gotten signed to Interscope (which also makes their repeated canard that "only privileged people care about selling out" difficult to parse). My main takeway: Kim Thayil > everyone in this book.

When I picked up MMITB--which does NOT tell you the name of the bar where they filmed the "Someday" video--I thought it might give me some nostalgia pangs or retroactive FOMO about having not "been there" for certain things while I was busy doing uncool stuff like having terrible depression, living in weird places, writing my undergraduate thesis, watching videos, etc. That said, it brought back some visceral memories of just loving music, basing my life and the people who I wanted to befriend around shared taste, a hunger for taking in more and more and making maps (sometimes even physical maps!) of bands and shared members and influences and labels. This sounds corny and overwrought, but at the same time, these grotesque feelings and behaviors brought me to many of you my readers. Music fandom used to be my most public life. 

The book does a decent job of describing the dawn of the music internet--downloading, some blogs, how downloading fed into reissue culture (a topic I want to address another time), etc. But I remember how fun it was to just use nascent social media as a locker interior, festooning your profiles with bandnames and quotes. Later, a lot of us had blogger or blog-city blogs to think through our tastes and lives, before the best bloggers got to go pro and the rest of us got social media where text lost out to images. On the internet now, it is not only Not Cool to talk earnestly about what you like, there isn't really a space to do that. We can post a picture of a record cover on Instagram but it can feel more like fetishizing an object than sharing an enthusiasm; we can tweet about how the new Magnetizer record smokes but 93 things will happen that make people mad that very second and it will slip away. Listening to Nathan's excellent radio show last week (every Tuesday 12-2 wbar.org) I remembered how much it means to find out about good things from a real person who you trust. It feels less urgent to share music share music share music (or books or movies or whatever) than it did in our late teens or early 20s, but still important**. That is why I am trying to blog. 

*Ironic given the "oral history" format which, outside of journalism, is typically deployed to do the exact opposite work: elevating unheard voices, history from below, whatever

** or maybe--I care about why you like whatever it is you're consuming (what are you listening to?) almost as much as I care about your complaints about the MTA or Bernie memes, but while the latter is acceptable to share the other feels embarrassing--maybe as an overcorrection to taste's centrality in our younger years? 

Workaround

Did anyone else remember feeling betrayed in the early 2000s when everyone who had previously listened to post punk or screamo or “indie” whatever started getting into dance music?* As someone who sat on the side at bar mitzvahs and school dances feeling, as I always have, like a brain unmoored inside a body that I didn’t ask for or want or feel able to use to do the things I wished it could do or move in ways that mimicked how other people moved, last picked in gym class never been kissed in high school, I did. Indie and punk had seemed like safe head bobbing and foot tapping and fist pumping spaces but all of a sudden I stood on the edge of the party again, because I can’t walk down the street without tripping over my own feet, much less dance. 

I thought about this at the gym the other day, where every few years I return to try to confront my weird physical self and attempt to understand the connection between words—“tuck your pelvis”—and corresponding physical actions. Maybe this gap explains the weird role electronic & dance music plays in my life: the most public-facing music, meant to be played and enjoyed communally, & yet I have only ever experienced it privately in headphones. It soundtracks the movement of data in Excel sheets and my labored motions at the gym where I cannot escape that primordial feeling of doing-it-wrong-and-everyone’s-watching. My taste in this music also has no grounding or history or context. I find out what some friends listen to and I like it or I don’t. As someone who came to a sense of self, for better or worse, through music-knowing, this too seems like doing-it-wrong. 

These days, though, I like listening to dj mixes on the [internet] radio, which is weirdly an exercise in trust. I just let someone else who knows about the stuff pick the stuff for you and enjoy both the chunes and the expertise: a liberation, a deeply human one, from the stress of selecting from innumerable choices in just one area of one’s life. The format makes sense in my headphones because a mix has such personal qualities, a tour through someone’s records or hard drive or whatever, complete with shouts out to friends or cursing about Brexit. I even wrote an email to a group I heard on an NTS mix and they sent me the unreleased track that I loved! What a throwback—straightforward fandom! 

Maybe someday I will find an ability to extend this trust to other parts of my existence, ie. to my own legs and arms and hips, forgiving them for their clumsiness and weakness, their aches and blobs. For now I feel moved by this Beatrice Dillon record “Workaround.” It reminds me of tapestry weaving: a rigid frame of 150 bpm filled in, albeit sparsely, with bursts of analog instruments or vocals or melody. The craft here, these trained instrumentalists meshing with the mathematics of Dillon’s compositions, might represent a bridge crossing these mind-body head-heart public-private gaps.

*I read about 50 pages of “Meet Me in the Bathroom” the other night (maybe more on that a different time) which probably got me thinking about this but the reason I read it was because I want to figure out where the bar in the Strokes’ “Someday” video is, which might be in MMITB but the index doesn’t work on the ebook. Do you know? 

the changes were as many as the things I did not know

I'm tired of too many opinions all the time and I just want to know what good stuff my friends like and write down what I am caring about at whatever moment so I made this blog like we all used to have