No band has been more consistent while simultaneously being more experimental than Sonic Youth. Ever. When it comes to making great records while still pushing the limits of themselves and their listeners, Sonic Youth are the reigning ensemble. I doubt that anyone in the know — fan or foe — would contest that. In Goodbye 20th Century (Da Capo), their first authorized biography, David Browne wades through waves of feedback and gets behind the amps of the nearly three decades of noise from this veritable institution of American music. Continue reading “Sonic Youth: Goodbye 20th Century”
Tom Waits: By Demons Be Driven
Somewhere in a dark corner of rock and roll’s junkyard, there’s a carnival going on. An old white blues man is noisily trying to shake off his demons. His once-shiny suit is dusty from the melee, and the twisted metal of his soul is on display. As a crowd gathers in the night, the carnie growls in delight. That ol’ devil’s got ‘im in fevers and fits, howling his gospel to any and all who’ll listen. Continue reading “Tom Waits: By Demons Be Driven”
Music for Magazines: This is Not a Record Review
I wouldn’t even bother writing about Coldplay’s latest record, but as the water of the music industry recedes, Viva la Vida has landed as a big fish in a little pond. Dave Allen exerted quite a bit of effort vilifying the record over at Pampelmoose, and while I don’t disagree with all of his points, I think his keyboard’s venom is at least partially misplaced. This is not a record review. Continue reading “Music for Magazines: This is Not a Record Review”
David Byrne’s “Playing the Building” on BBTV
My favorite Talking Head, David Byrne, turns an entire old building in New York City into a giant sound machine in an installation called “Playing the Building.” Xeni Jardin takes a tour. Continue reading “David Byrne’s “Playing the Building” on BBTV”
Cadence Weapon: Check the Technique
I am hereby requesting a bandwagon late-pass. Out of nowhere a few months ago, someone sent me the video for “Sharks” by Cadence Weapon (embedded below). Like many who’ve heard the track, I was instantly hooked, and started looking for more. Well, lucky me, Cadence Weapon had just put out a new disc of his glitchy Hip-hop called Afterparty Babies (Anti, 2008). It’s been in or near the top of the playlist ever since.
I’ve been down since thirteen literally, bombing the whole system up, beautifying the scenery. — Big Juss, Company Flow
Before dropping the bubbly beats and fresh rhymes, Cadence Weapon a.k.a. Rollie Pemberton used to write reviews for a major music website, but way before that, his dad was Edmonton, Alberta’s premiere source for Hip-hop. At age thirteen, Rollie knew he wanted to rap, and his starting young is evident in the work: His records — though he’s only been making them for a few years — are those of a veteran. He’s grown up with this ish. It’s in his bloodstream.
Clever and catchy Hip-hop that doesn’t outsmart itself might be more prevalent now than ever, but it still isn’t lurking on every airwave. I’m glad to pass the name Cadence Weapon on to you. He gets respect for the rep when he speaks. Check the technique and see if you can follow it.
Roy Christopher: Tell me about the new record. What’s different this time around?
Cadence Weapon: This record is faster paced, more cohesive and tied to a connecting concept. It’s more personal and drawing from more dancefloor influences than IDM or grime.
RC: Your dad was a Hip-hop pioneer up there in Edmonton. What are your earliest impressions of Hip-hop and music?
CW: I grew up on rap music and culture so I just saw it as normal. Predictably, I was isolated not knowing many other people who were into rap music so it was just something I liked myself. I saw it as an extension of poetry or any other artistic expression, and I still do.
RC: Though Hip-hop as a genre is often innovative and rebellious, it’s also steeped in strict traditions and rules. What’s your take on this contradiction — and negotiating it as an artist?
CW: It’s one of the strangest things about the music. It’s the most open-ended genre in terms of possibilities. You can sample someone walking down the street and rap about your mom’s hat if you wanted to, because there are no constraints in rap, just the ones built by the individual. The regimented nature of rap is a response to its corporate status: People thinking you have to maintain the status quo to retain sales. It’s shitty.
RC: Comedian David Spade once said that acts spend the first part of their career looking for a hook and the rest of it trying to bury that hook. To me, this is analogous to one having a “hit” (e.g., De La Soul’s “Me, Myself, and I,” or more recently, Aesop Rock‘s “No Regrets”) Do you ever resent the attention you got from “Sharks”?
CW: The success of “Sharks” doesn’t bother me. As with any single, it’s seen as representative of who I was at the time of its release. It’s a catchy song, it’s youthful and aggressive and not necessarily who I am right now, but I accept it as a period in my life. I am not trying to get rid of the memory of that song, I feel like there are still layers to it that people haven’t necessarily uncovered.
RC: What’s next for Rollie Pemberton? And for Cadence Weapon?
CW: Next for Rollie Pemberton: making the most of my free time, playing basketball, getting back into party mode, bettering myself.
Next for Cadence Weapon: actually collaborating with people on my next album, writing about death and body image and the other side of the world, starting a band, rapping harder.
———-
Here’s the video that launched the fandom, “Sharks” from Cadence Weapon’s debut record, Breaking Kayfabe (Upper Class, 2005) (runtime :4:22):
R.I.P. Camu Tao
The world lost a true talent last Sunday. Tero “Camu Tao” Smith had lyrical skills and a spirit that seldom comes around. He was consistently dope and relentlessly fun. My thoughts are with his family, his friends, and his many fans. Continue reading “R.I.P. Camu Tao”
Dave Allen: Every Force Evolves a Form
I can’t remember the first time I heard Gang of Four, but I do distinctly remember a lot of things making sense once I did. Their jagged and angular bursts of guitar, funky rhythms, deadpan vocals, and overtly personal-as-political lyrics predated so many other bands I’d been listening to. Dave Allen was the man behind the bass, and now he’s the man behind Pampelmoose, a Portland-based music and media blog. Continue reading “Dave Allen: Every Force Evolves a Form”
Sound Unbound is out!
Sound Unbound is now available! I recently served as Assistant Editor to Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky on his essay collection, Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Contributors include Erik Davis, Manuel De Landa, Cory Doctorow, Chuck D, Brian Eno, Dick Hebdige, Vijay Iyer, Jaron Lanier, Jonathan Lethem, Moby, Steve Reich, Simon Reynolds, Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud, Bruce Sterling, Lucy Walker, and Saul Williams, among many others — and now it’s out. Continue reading “Sound Unbound is out!”
An Inconvenient Youth, Part Two
Remember when music was good — when bands stood for something and the music they created was from the heart? Remember when music was real?
I remember a college professor trying to tell me that Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine was “fake, plastic music” while Jimi Hendricks’ Are You Experienced? was “real.” I recently heard the same argument about the fakeness of My Chemical Romance, with NIN as the “real” example.
Since writing last entry, I attended a skateboarding session where there were several skaters much older than I am. One said skater couldn’t seem to get his head in the present. All he talked about was “how things used to be” — the tricks, the ramps, the attitude, the music — everything. Needless to say, this grew tiresome very quickly, and I was glad when the younger crew finally showed up to session.
Some cultural artifacts get “grandfathered” in before our critical filters develop — shows that you remember loving that would probably annoy you now. Others however are chosen by your newly discerning pre-teen mind. Be it Bad Brains, The Wipers, The Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, Fugazi, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, or My Chemical Romance, everyone has that “punk rock moment” where he or she realizes that the shit on the radio or the shit that their dad likes is wack. This does not make the stuff that you used to like better than the stuff your daughter likes. This does not make Nine Inch Nails “better” than My Chemical Romance (there are plenty of other reasons for that).
As Doug Stanhope would put it, Nine Inch Nails is good to you because being young is good. Everything was better then, but not because it was 1991 (or 1968), for example. It’s because you were young then. The same can be said for the Jimi Hendricks example and my college professor above. Sorry, everyone, “Three’s Company” was not necessarily better than “The King of Queens.”
Part of this is cognitive. Our brains’ ability to create and store new memories simply slows down — to a near-stop, therefore making our most cherished memories those of a bygone era, those of our youth. And when we remember those times, we reify them, making them stronger (Freud called the process “Nachtraglichkeit” meaning “retroactivity”).
So, the aging skateboarder lamenting the olden days when skateboarding was more about gnar than fashion (Ed. note: it’s always been about both) might be suffering from cognitive deceleration, but most likely he’s just being nostalgic boor. Farbeit from me to quote Bob Dylan, but he once said, “nostalgia is death.”
My college professor (who’d probably be proud of me for quoting Dylan, even if I’m using it against him) was just being nostalgic as well. Nostalgia is not inherently bad, but when it comes from a sad place (as in our lamenting skateboarder above), then it indicates a dissatisfaction with the present. This, I believe, is when it becomes death.
We should all always be working toward making these the good ol’ days. The day I’m looking back, lamenting the now, is the day I want to cease.
Sources:
Johnson, S. Mind Wide Open. Schribner: New York, 2004.
Watson, J. D. Avoid Boring People. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2007.
Watson, J. D. “On Enduring Memories” SEED Magazine, April/May, 2006. p. 45.
Thanks to Reggie for sending me the Ruben Bolling comic.
The Just Noticeable Difference
Marié Digby was lauded as the internet’s next big find, a phenomena that had grown organically through digital word-of-mouth, but the media’s multi-roomed echo chamber told on itself. Maybe it was too much, too quickly, but just after Digby’s couple of homey, simple YouTube videos started spreading online, she was featured on radio stations, MTV, iTunes, announcing that she’d been signed to Disney’s Hollywood Records. The official press release headline read, “Breakthrough YouTube Phenomenon Marié Digby Signs With Hollywood Records.” What didn’t come out until later was that her name appeared on that dotted line a year and a half previous. Her online “discovery” was orchestrated from around long, conference-room tables.
Digby wasn’t unlimited bandwidth’s first phony phenom. YouTube’s avidly watched Lonelygirl15, a high school anygirl with a webcam, turned out to be nineteen-year-old aspiring actress Jessica Rose. She’d answered a Craigslist ad for an independent film, landed the part, and — after the “directors” did a bit of explaining — became Lonelygirl15. There was no product attached to the project, but all involved made names for themselves and are now well-represented in Hollywood.
These two stories are postmodern-day examples of what it takes to break through our media-mad all-at-once-ness and get noticed, to float some semblance of signal in a sea of noise. To experience the new is really just to notice a difference. In psychophysics it’s called the just noticeable difference (the “jnd”). Creating that difference is becoming more and more difficult as the tide of noise rises higher and higher.
Where Hollywood records and the Lonelygirl15 crew manipulated an emerging media channel, Miralus Healthcare took the opposite tack with their HeadOn headache remedy. They took one look at new media and ran the opposite direction. The original HeadOn television spot, which some ironically claim induces headaches, looks like a print ad and sounds like a broken record. But it worked. The commercial stood in such stark contrast to everything else on TV that the product is known worldwide.
It is sometimes claimed that technology makes it so that anyone can perform a certain task, like Photoshop made everyone an artist or Pro Tools made everyone a record producer. We make or tools and our tools make us (as Marshall McLuhan once said), but our tools do not make us great.
The idea that the internet and Pro Tools and — whatever else the advent and proliferation of the computer hath wrought — enables anyone to be an artist is both true and false. True, everyone has the tools to do so, but so few people have the talent. The latter is and always will be the case.
New technologies are normalizing events. Think of it like a crosstown street race where the traffic signals are normalizing events. One might be in the lead for a good bit of the ride, but as soon as everyone is stopped at a traffic light, the race effectively starts over. By way of convoluted analogy, one might be “ahead” in the home production process until Soundforge’s new software hits the scene.
Sure, there are people making money producing music who are not that good, but that doesn’t mean that anyone can compete with Dr. Dre just because he or she sets up a MySpace page and posts some loops from Acid. I’ve heard this argument so often lately, that anyone can cut-and-paste a record together and become a producer. If that were true, then why does Dr. Dre even have a career? Simple: Because he’s good at what he does. Let everyone try it!
Yes, building a name is a huge part of this and one person’s bloated name can overshadow someone else’s immense talents, but the proliferation of tools and channels does not dilute the fact that it takes talent, skills, work, and chance — as an artist and a marketer — to get noticed. Computers, the internet, weblogs, and everything else haven’t made everyone a great writer and killed authors’ careers.
DJ Scratch nailed it when he said, “The reason we respect something as an art is because it’s hard as fuck to do.” Good production, good writing, and good marketing are still hard to do — and it’s getting harder and harder to get them noticed. New tools and new channels don’t change the talent and effort it takes to capture the attention and the imagination of the masses, but a new twist here or there can make the just noticeable difference, and that can be all the difference in the world.