Looking back over the music of the year, it struck me that two of my favorite bands released both proper records and compilations this year, and that all four were among my favorites of the year. With the music industry currently shaped like a big question mark and all of the nay-saying about creative churn, I just thought these two (groups of) creators and their creations deserved an extra mention. Continue reading “Four by Two: dälek and Jesu”
Year End Top Ten, Ten Years Ago
In the late 90s, my friend Mark Wieman ran a record-review website called Pillowfight. It was the pre-Pitchfork pulse of Indie-rock. I contributed quite a lot of reviews to the site during its end-of-the-millennium reign, and along with reviews, come year-end top ten lists. Continue reading “Year End Top Ten, Ten Years Ago”
Radiohead In Rainbows: A Review of Sorts
My In Rainbows discbox arrived almost in time for my birthday, and it’s a big, beautiful slab of music and packaging. Though I’ve been listening to the record for months now thanks to the download that came with my pre-order, writing about it has eluded me. It seems that “a review of sorts” (thanks, Dave) is all that is possible. Continue reading “Radiohead In Rainbows: A Review of Sorts”
DJ Spooky: Holiday in Antarctica
My friend and colleague Paul D. Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky is going to Antarctica for the holidays. Well, he’ll be there for the holidays, but the trip is not exactly holiday-related. He’s going there to make a film. Continue reading “DJ Spooky: Holiday in Antarctica”
Adam Gnade: Loose Lips Sink Ships
Adam Gnade is a rebel and a vagabond, a walking, talking, song-writing, book-writing, modern-day George Hayduke. His “talking songs” have taken him all over the world — virtually and actually — but his focus is good ol’ America. Though he’s found home all over the map, he currently resides in Portland, Oregon, where he says, “the air smells good.” Adam has several records out, a book coming out, and more of both on the way — if he’s not sinking poaching ships soon. Continue reading “Adam Gnade: Loose Lips Sink Ships”
Simon Reynolds: Erase and Start It Again
Simon Reynolds writes about music like a cross between a die-hard fan and an open-headed academic, sitting him decidedly on the fence between the pit and the podium. From this spot, he’s able to write both enthusiastically and critically. His books, Bring the Noise (faber & faber, 2007), Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (Penguin, 2006), and Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (Routledge, 1999), cover the major movements of the of underground music over the past thirty years and provide a crash course in the underpinnings of today’s mix of repurposed technology and styles, recycled beats and sounds, and the attitudes and energy driving it all.
Fellow traveler and Disinformation Editor Alex Burns joined me in asking Simon a few questions about his books, his writing, and what’s coming up next.
Alex Burns: What prompted you to make the rise-fall arc of John Lydon and Public Image Ltd’s “careering” central to Rip It Up And Start Again? What lessons could emerging artists learn from how PIL handled its contract negotiations with Virgin Records and the “fault lines” between Lydon, Jah Wobble, and Keith Levene?
Simon Reynolds: PiL were probably my favourite postpunk band, certainly the one that had the most impact on me. But beyond the personal inclination, it just seemed to be objectively the key narrative in terms of explaining how punk turned into postpunk, and then how postpunk eventually fell into disarray. You had the central figure of the era, Johnny Rotten, the punk saviour, the man everyone was looking towards, completely confounding expectations and going on this total art trip with PiL. You had all the incredibly influential rhetoric that Lydon, Wobble and Levene put out there about rock being dead and “obsolete”, rock as something that should be “cancelled”, “a disease” is one word they used to describe it. And PiL’s diagnosis of punk’s failure on a musical level, that it had been the last gasp of traditional rock. A lot of people followed Lydon’s lead. But the saga of how it all went wrong for PiL is classic, because the irony is that this band opposed to all things “rock” were undone by all the archetypal rock’n’roll bullshit of drugs, ego, money disputes, mismanagement (they didn’t have one, basically… indeed they could probably have used a proper manager, but Lydon had been scared off that because of his experiences with Malcolm McLaren). It would make a great VH1 Behind the Music story, actually. They also came unstuck in a way that was emblematic of postpunk in general, which is reaching a kind of dead end with experimentation and deconstruction, with their third album Flowers of Romance. That came out just at the point at which postpunk turned to new pop, the more optimistic and accessible music of Orange Juice, ABC, etc etc.
In terms of the contract, I’m not sure they actually had that great arrangement with Virgin. A manager would have been handy in that respect. I think they were indulged by Virgin, given lots of studio time, but then again Virgin probably charged them for using the Manor and the other top of the line studios. Virgin supported Lydon because they could see he was obviously the most important front man to come out of Britain since Bowie. But they also tried to persuade him to reform the Pistols at one point: Branson played him the demos by the Professionals, the band that Paul Cook and Steve Jones formed, and said “isn’t this great Johnny? How about reforming the band?”. There was a hope that he would revert to doing more accessible music and become a superstar. Which is what Lydon actually tried to do eventually, but still under the PiL brand.
AB: You wrote about the “dark side of paranoid psychology”, “totalitarian undercurrent,” and “music as a means to an end” of Throbbing Gristle and Genesis P-Orridge’s first mission. How significant is Throbbing Gristle’s re-emergence and what new alienations could this new mission evoke?
SR: I’m not sure what it signifies beyond the fact that the band members felt like doing it and that at this point in history the climate for them doing that is more welcoming than it has been for a while. Also, they are probably keen to reaffirm their place in history, which is totally understandable. I was a bit surprised how little impact their return to the scene had– I thought it would be a much bigger deal, if only because it’s such a great story for magazines. But I guess this sometimes happens, especially when a band has been so groundbreaking, they suffer a little bit when they return to a music world that they’ve changed. Because everyone’s like, big deal. I thought the album was really good myself.
AB: Your analysis of music and political subcultures highlights a “lifecycle” (i.e., experimentation, discovery, a golden or “heroic” age, entropy, and reemergence or revival). What can other analysts and critics learn from this approach? What are the possibilities and limits of a “lifecycle” model?
SR: It’s hardly an original way of looking at cultural movements! But if it is a cliché, it’s one of those “cliché because it’s true” situations I think. In my experience, music genres or scenes seem to coalesce out this long-ish period of germination, disparate things gradually come together; there’s some kind of spark or flash-over moment when it all converges and reaches fruition, the momentum gets going, the sound evolves and quite quickly reaches maturity; after this “prime” period, things start disintegrating, the center will not hold, all kinds of tangents and offshoot genres split away while a purist faction try to freeze the sound at what they consider is the golden moment. All the energy ebbs away leaving a lot of people feeling disillusioned and burned ‘cos they believed so fiercely in it. Then the sound or scene is filed away in the archives where it might be excavated by some future generation.
In some ways the emergent phase in the most interesting phase, because often what’s going on around the proto-scene is a period of general disparateness and entropy, no clear direction in music culture. And those periods often are actually quite rich, especially when you look back at them with hindsight, and you wonder what the people trying to launch the new thing were complaining about! Like with punk: it took about five years to get off the ground, people like Lester Bangs were using the term “punk” to signify te need for some kind of pomposity-removing revolution, the people reclaiming rock from the bloated superstar elite, he was doing that from about 1970 onwards; there were various false starts, like with the Stooges, or pub rock in the UK. Then finally it all takes off with Patti Smith, Ramones, then the Pistols and Clash. But you look at the early Seventies music scene that they were so fed up with, and it seems–compared to now–jam-packed with exciting things. All quite disparate maybe, but still… what on earth were they so depressed for? But it’s also interesting to look at the emergent phase of the movement-to-be, all the lost bands like the Electric Eels in Cleveland, proto-punk outfits here there and everywhere that are isolated and at odds with the general tenor of things, bands that could either be ahead of their time or behind-of-their-time, it’s not at all clear. And gradually they all find each other, and BOOM!.
Roy Christopher: Your brand of para-academia puts you on the fence between journalist and scholar. Do you find this vantage point to be more of a boon or a burden?
SR: I can’t write from any other place! Well, that’s not quite true: I can and have done more standard music writing. I do quite a lot of fairly straightforward record reviewing, and have in the past done newspaper-type profiles and reporting, still do it now and then. But the mode that I naturally fall into, if left to my own devices, is somewhere between theory and journalism. I find it a good place to be in terms of the work produced, because pure academic work doesn’t have much place for enthusiasm, or for a flamboyant prose style. And there’s all that slog to do with footnotes and talking about your methodology and your theoretical framework, all that protocol. Academic work on music also suffers from its slow turnaround, it always seems to be dealing with stuff that’s from years and years ago. I like the rapid-response nature of journalism. On the other hand, I like to have an extra dimension or two to work with than just the basic consumer guidance level of responding to a record or profiling a band. Larger resonances to do with society or culture beyond music.
So I would say definitely it’s a boon in terms of the work produced, as discrete pieces of writing. In terms of work on the macro level of a career, I think the scope for doing this kind of theory-informed music writing has definitely shrunk significantly. Theory is much less of a cool or sexy thing than it was in the 1980s when I started. But it’s also to do with shrinking space, smaller word-counts, and the decline of spaces like the alternative weekly in America and the weekly music press in Britain. Those were havens for pretentious music writing, but with the exceptions of art magazines and places like the Wire, most music magazines and newspapers now seem to have an orientation toward the layperson. You can’t assume too much esoteric knowledge of music. But above all, it’s the shrinking of space that’s key. If a review or piece is being pared to essentials, the first thing that goes is the extraneous theory, the references to thinkers outside the world of pop music.
Personally I haven’t felt this as a source of anguish that much, because I’ve gradually lost interest in doing the critically theory-infused approach, through not finding much in that world very exciting in the last ten years or so. There was a time when going into St Mark’s Books in downtown New York, or its London equivalents like Compendium, would get my pulse racing with excitement. But not for a long while. So you won’t find too many name-drops of philosophers in my writing these days. I still have my favourites, but they’re old ones, and for whatever reason they seem to have less applicability to the music I like. I also feel like I’ve reached the point where I’m on my own trip, as a thinker about music; I don’t need to fuel up on other bodies of thought so much.
RC: What are you working on next?
SR: I just finished an expanded/updated version of Energy Flash (a.k.a. Generation Ecstasy), with stuff on the last decade of electronic dance culture, and that is due out in early 2008, timed for the 10th anniversary of the book and the 20th anniversary of rave. Right now I’m about to embark on the companion volume to Rip It Up and Start Again, which will include interview transcripts, essays, and a discography-with-commentary dealing with all the esoteric postpunk music I couldn’t cover in the original book. That should be out in 2009. I’m also drawing up plans for my next book proper, but for now I’ll have to keep that under wraps.
Summer Reading List, 2007
We’re late again with the summer list, but here it is. Thanks to all who participated, including newcomers Dave Allen, Howard Bloom, Alex Burns, and Calvin Johnson, as well as veteran contributors Mark Pesce, Patrick Barber, Steven Shaviro, and Gary Baddeley. As this list proves year after year, there’s a lot of good stuff out there to read. Enjoy.
Mark Pesce, Author, The Playful World
J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Arthur A. Levine Books): I must be the only one reading that.
Philip K. Dick The Zap Gun (Gollancz)
John Robb Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Wiley): Highly recommended!
David Weinberger Everything is Miscellaneous (Times Books)
Richard Vinen A History in Fragments (Da Capo)
John Henry Clippinger A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity (PublicAffairs)
Dave Allen, bass player, Gang of Four
You know I often ramble on about the collapse of music sales as people stop buying CDs, and of course the first to suffer there are the music retailers — farewell Tower Records for instance — but it’s amazing to me that bookstores still abound given the fact that I never set foot in them any longer — all my purchases are through Amazon. Anyway, I discovered this weekend as I worked on restoring my motorhome (another story, to be continued) that the mailman/woman/person has been dropping books off at an alarming rate. Here’s the list of my unread pile that accumulated during May, without review, of course:
Jon Savage Teenage: The Creation Of Youth Culture (Viking)
Don DeLillo Falling Man (Scribner)
David Weinberger Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books)
Martin Amis House of Meetings (Vintage)
Simon Schama Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Harper Perennial)
Richard Dawkins The God Delusion (Mariner Books)
Philip Roth The Plot Against America (Vintage)
John Gray Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (New Press)
Gary Baddeley, Publisher, The Disinformation Company Ltd.
Roy, as usual my summer is largely taken up with our own books, especially the new edition of Graham Hancock’s Supernatural: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers of Mankind. Also in my pile are Mick Farren’s Who’s Watching You? and Thom Burnett’s Who Really Rules The World?
The best fiction I’ve read recently was Vikram Chandra’s long but always engaging Sacred Games (not one of ours — I get to read fiction just for pleasure!).
Next month we’re publishing Russ Kick’s new book Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, with contributors like Neil Gaiman, Richard Dawkins, Doug Rushkoff and Erik Davis, and I think it’s really going to cause a stir. I can’t wait!
Howard Bloom, Author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain
Lewis Thomas The Lives of A Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (Penguin): This book is 20 years old, but is still one of the most provocative reperceptions of science I’ve ever read.
Gregg Easterbrook The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (Random House): A book that cuts down every preconception you’ve been fed about the economic progress of the West and replaces today’s dour notions of scarcity with a hearty report on how, in fact, humanity has enriched itself vastly during the last 150 years — and may well continue to do so.
Barack Obama Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Three Rivers Press): One of the first books on the experience of a new breed of Westerners — the meta-racial cosmopolites — a generation of mixed-race and mixed-culture kids who are the gifts of the last 50 years of globalism.
Thomas L .Friedman The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Picador): The most encyclopedic vision of the new globalism I’ve seen.
Steven Johnson Everything Bad is Good For You (Riverhead): Another book that turns commonplaces on their heads. Johnson hypothesizes that pop culture is a “collective-perception and processing-power” expander. He goes on to posit that the “garbage” of pop culture is responsible for “The Flynn Effect” — a measured growth in individual IQs during the past 90 years, a rise of brain power whose origin has baffled the scientific community.
Stephen Wolfram A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media): This book is tough-sledding, but presents an old idea from the 1980s in a brand new way. The idea? That the cosmos’ mysteries can be cracked not with Newtonian and Einsteinian math, but with a cellular automata model. In other words, the cosmos may have started with three or four simple rules, than have gone through so many iterations of those rules that the results defy belief. Wolfram presents unequivocal evidence that repetition of simple rules can even produce what looks like utter chaos.
Alex Burns, Editor, Disinformation
C. Otto Scharmer Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges (MIT Society for Organizatzional Learning): My fellow alumni in Swinburne University’s Strategic Foresight program have been raving for the past 2 years about Scharmer’s Theory U as the cornerstone for blind-spot analysis and self-reflective practices. In essence Scharmer has developed a framework that might explain initiatory knowledge – to directly re-experience being and essence – for a contemporary business audience. It’s a call to self-reflection that cannot specify the reader’s aims: Scharmer’s readers might create the next Castalia, Second Foundation, Players of the Godgame… or Aum Shinrikyo.
William C. Martel Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy (Cambridge University Press): Martel’s academic level text explores a Theory U blind-spot that is missing from debates about the Iraq War and the War on Terror’s grand strategy: What does victory mean, exactly? His survey of strategists such as Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Bernard Brodie, and Martin Van Creveld is a succinct journey through the jungles of military strategic thinking and forceful change writ large. Case studies include the major wars, humanitarian interventions, and stability operations of the past two decades. A good structural model for a PhD and an excellent primer to debate with military strategists and policymakers on their own turf, rather than as activists who can be marginalized in street protests [Excerpt here].
Tim Weiner Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday). The perfect book to read alongside the CIA’s “Family Jewels” and before seeing Robert De Niro’s film The Good Shepherd (2006). Weiner shows how intelligence’s analytical process — like the initiatory orders in the Western magical tradition — can potentially be corrupted by structural secrecy, information silos, organizational politics, and subgroup coalitions. The anecdotes range from operations failures to how old boys’ networks become an in-group elite that is shut off from change. Thus, whilst the intelligence community will debate the validity of Weiner’s research until 2012, this is also a good book for would-be change agents and project managers on what can go wrong without self-reflective practices such as Scharmer’s Presencing and Theory U.
Don Webb When They Came (Henry Wessells). When I first came across him in the mid-1990s, Webb was one of the guiding forces behind Austin’s FringeWare Review and shortly afterwards became High Priest in the Temple of Set. On the surface Webb’s collection is a variation on the mythos of Robert W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, and others gathered from the press, zines, and eldtrich Internet sites. Webb’s deeper purpose is to offer teaching stories — like the path notes of martial artists or Idries Shah’s Nassrudin anthologies — about the psycho-cosmological insights of spiritual dissent. Webb’s essay “Fictive Arcanum” explains how he uses the form of Lovecraftian fiction to communicate initiatory knowledge.
Michael Rosenbaum Kata and the Transmission of Knowledge: In Traditional Martial Arts (YMAA Publication Center): Rosenbaum addresses how martial arts practitioners use patterns to capture ‘tacit’ insights and for ‘tacit’-to-‘explicit’ knowledge transfer. Martial arts “kata” provides the form and self-reflective methodology that then becomes the basis for a sustainable tradition — usually only revealed as fragments in path notes. This is one of the hermetic secrets of George Gurdjieff’s ‘legominism’ for inter-generational and transcultural transmission in his Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (1950) — although Gurdjieff cited and used practices from dance, carpet-weaving and mythological symbolism. It underpins why ‘agile’ evangelists including Kent Beck and Alistair Cockburn use martial arts frameworks for software engineers to develop self-mastery.
Simon Reynolds Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (Penguin) and Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip-Rock and Hip-Hop (Penguin): Reynolds fills an important gap between the Sex Pistols’ demise, the rise-and-fall of Public Image Ltd, and the explosion of hip-hop and new wave in the early 1980s. One of the “strange loop” lessons in Reynolds’ stylised prose is of how innovators pick up on the signals, patterns and sub-currents to create new subcultures — Lovecraftian fiction begets Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P. Orridge. Rip It Up sent me scurrying back to Gang of Four and Pere Ubu whilst Bring the Noise revives the precise style of NME album reviews. Reynolds succeeds in the benchmark of good music journalism: to inspire you to discover or revisit the artists he profiles, and appreciate the cultural impact of their music.
Garry Mulholland Fear of Music: The Greatest 261 Albums Since Punk and Disco (Orion): Mulholland sets out to challenge the classic rock canon with his reviews of Joy Division, New Order, Husker Du, Public Enemy, Portishead and others. Mulholland — like Reynolds — is heavily influenced by the post-punk and new wave genres. For Reynolds and Mulholland, it’s a form of Lorenz imprinting or Anton LaVey’s erotic crystallization inertia. There’s a micro-trend in music journalism here that would be even more interesting if other authors did a similar book on the ’00s and digital natives. Anyone wanna help me convince Disinformation’s Gary Baddeley on the publishing “business case” for this?
Calvin Johnson, K Records
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding The Blank Wall (Quality): Even the most conventional life can take on a frightening edge.
Joyce Cary The Horse’s Mouth (NYRB Classics): Every artists story.
Patrick David Barber, Designer
We just moved across town so it’s been all I can do to keep up with the weekly New Yorker. I dug the recent fiction issue, particularly the Junot Diaz story. Also, a recent Mother Jones issue has a good, long article on species extinction.
Last month (before the move!) I read Michael Chabon’s new one, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (HarperCollins), and enjoyed it a lot. It’s a fertile blend of prefigurative dystopia, noiresque detective pulp, and homey Jewish culture study.
Next on the list is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins). I have a pretty good idea how that one turns out, but it’s important to keep up with my fellow locavores.
Speaking of which, if you haven’t read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin), well, you’re late, but not too late. This was the book of the year last year and it might just be the book of the decade, all in the As Far As I’m Concerned department. Read it!
I’m also reading The Design of Everyday Objects by Donald Norman (Basic Books). You’ve probably read that one already, but it’s the first time for me. I am enjoying it not least because it was written in 1988 and most of his improvements to things like phones and personal organizers have come true. Yet his advice and analysis are still salient. We may now have phones with digital readouts and synchronized calendars, but a lot hasn’t changed: you can go anywhere and watch your average wired citizen struggle with an
ambiguously designed door handle.
Steven Shaviro, Author, Connected
Warren Ellis Crooked Little Vein (William Morrow). The first prose fiction by comics writer Ellis is a hoot. Sort of like noir detective fiction meets a Hunter-Thompsonesque journey into the heart of American weirdness and depravity. Everything from Godzilla bukkake to saline testicular injections to the creepy, sexually exploitative practices of the very rich. Yet the novel ends up being an inspirational fable about speaking truth to power and about the Net as a potential tool for freedom.
William Gibson Spook Country (Putnam): Science fiction about the recent past (2006). Varieties of stealth and disembodiment, from locative art to cryptography to drug hallucinations to GPS tracking, and the materiality (CIA black technologies, and shipping cargo containers) that underlies it all. Narrated in Gibson’s spare, minimal, yet telling prose: every metaphor is a precise observation.
M. John Harrison Nova Swing (Bantam): Science fiction about the nostalgia for the recent past. It’s the 24th century, and people are still fascinated by the stylings of the 1940s and 1950s. The novel is a spooky, and somewhat morbid, meditation about the mystery of otherness, the allure of self-destruction, the packaging of nostalgia as an illusor comfort, and the ways in which commodification has left us with just the empty shells of experiences we imagine other people to have had.
Roy Christopher, Editor frontwheeldrive.com and Follow for Now
Douglas Hofstadter I Am a Strange Loop (Basic Books): Explicitly returning to the themes he originally tackled in Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic, 1979), Hofstadter seems happy to be back, like a child returning to a playground after a lengthy hiatus. Not that he hasn’t been flogging these concepts in the meantime in such books as Le Ton Beau de Marot (Basic, 1997), Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (Basic, 1995), and Metamagical Themas (Basic, 1985), but he hasn’t approached them this directly since GEB. I Am a Strange Loop is not nearly as splayed or as sprawling as GEB. It’s more springing and spiraling, written with more levity and lilt, more depth than breadth.
James Inman The Greyhound Diary (Lulu): Thank all that is evil that James Inman got on the wrong bus. If he hadn’t, then we wouldn’t have this book. The Greyhound Diary is On the Road for the homeless, Oh, The Places You’ll Go for the chronically mentally ill, and The Grapes of Wrath for people who would never read that book in the first place. It’s a sweet, sloppy slice of America’s yawning underbelly.
David Weinberger Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books): David’s new book became part of my terministic screen when Ryan Lane and I interviewed Peter Morville a few months ago. Since then, it’s been popping up everywhere, so I copped a copy. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s near the top of the pile.
Cormac McCarthy The Road (Vintage): The Road had been on my list since Steven Shaviro wrote about it late last year. Then Brendon Walsh told me he was reading it, then it won the Pulitzer and Oprah endorsed it, so I finally snagged a copy. It’s a bleak and harrowing tale so far, written with a claustrophobic economy. I’m already tempted to say it deserves the attention.
Richard E. Nisbett The Geography of Thought (Free Press): I’ve often wondered what it is about Japanese culture that spawns musical acts like The Boredoms, Melt Banana, Space Streakings, Merzbow, and K.K. Null. I’m not sure if The Geography of Thought is going to solve the mystery, but so far it’s helping. I’m only halfway through it, but Nisbett’s book is an interesting analysis of the fundamental and historical differences between Eastern and Western thought.
A few others in the to-be-read pile:
Amy Cohen The Late Bloomer’s Revolution (Hyperion)
Adisa Banjoko Lyrical Swords: Hip-hop and Politics in the Mix, Vol 1 and 2 (YinSumi Press)
Paul Virilio Speed and Politics (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) (with a new introduction by our friend Benjamin Bratton)
Tibor Fischer Voyage to the End of the Room (Random House)
David Markson Wittgenstein’s Mistress (Dalkey Archive)
[Above, Jessy browses the stock at Red House Books in Dothan, Alabama. Photo by Roy Christopher.]
El-P: Wake Up. Time to Die.
I’m a child of the 80s when, as emcee/producer/label-owner El-Producto puts it, every Hip-hop record that came out was that new sound, that next shit. As you all know, I’m still a huge Hip-hop fan, but those new styles just don’t drop that often, much less with every new release. Now typically someone hits it big with a style and others scramble to sound the same. Not so with El-P. His musical M.O. is from that previous era where you had to innovate or you fell off, and biting was not allowed or tolerated under any circumstances.
Also reared on 80s music and culture, El’s apocalyptic boom-bap bounces between the frenetic cut-and-paste of the early Bomb Squad and the off-world synths and sounds of The Art of Noise — perhaps taking its initial cues from a collision of Nation of Millions and In Visible Silence. From there, only one thing is guaranteed: The drums will be bangin’. All other bets are hedged.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that the drums on his new record, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, are bangin’, but the guests along for the ride might surprise some people. In the mix are friends and fellow travelers Trent Reznor, Chan Marshall, members of TV on the Radio, The Mars Volta, and Yo La Tengo, as well as Def Jux fam Aesop Rock and Cage with cuts by the mighty Mr. Dibbs and DJ Big Wiz (Special, special shouts to Wiz: Our thoughts are with you, brother.). Don’t let the names overwhelm you though. This is El’s record from jump to stop.
It’s been four years since we’ve gotten an El-P LP proper, but to be fair, El has been busy behind the boards producing and remixing for the likes of Del the Funky Homosapien, Prefuse73, TV on the Radio, Nine Inch Nails, Slow Suicide Stimulus, and fellow Def Jukies Cage Kennylz, Mr. Lif, S.A. Smash, and others. Oh sure, there was his future-jazz Blue Series Continuum record, High Water (Thirsty Ear, 2004), which, along with the Blue Series Continuum crew of Matthew Shipp, Guillermo E. Brown, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Steve Swell, and Roy Campbell, featured his dad Harry Keys on one song. Then there was the eclectic, but consistent compilation Collecting the Kid (Def Jux, 2004), which brought together stray pieces from his soundtrack work on the graff flick Bomb the System (Palm Pictures, 2002) with unreleased tracks from his group with Camu Tao, Central Services, among other odds and ends. Aside from a few guest appearances (El has shared tracks with fellow wordsmiths Aesop Rock, The Weathermen, Del, Ghostface Killah, C-Rayz Walz, and Cage), El’s fingers have been on the knobs, keys, and buttons — as opposed to the mic — since 2002.
Production credits notwithstanding, El-P is a monster of an emcee. His presence, power, and lyrical prowess on the mic are unmatched. Where other lyricists just bring their next release, he brings the fucking State of the Union. He’s Rick Deckard to all of the microphone Replicants out looking for life-extension. There’s a reason their lifespans are limited, and El-P proves it in spades.
Admittedly, I’m more of a fan than a critic, and more of a nerd than a thug, but those tensions are evident in El-P as well. He lives and loves Hip-hop, but will quickly call bullshit on wackness. He’s also smart as fuck and loves science fiction, but won’t hesitate to bust you in your shit.
From his days in the germinal 90s Hip-hop crew, Company Flow, to his current assault on the ears of the jaded, El-Producto is always bringing it rough and rugged. The future is now.
Roy Christopher: You’re approaching Hip-hop from a different angle than anyone else. What’s your take on what you’re bringing to it that makes that difference?
El-Producto: Originality… Style… I don’t delude myself into thinking that this shit sounds like all the other Hip-hop out there. Basically, I pride myself on the fact that it doesn’t, but it all comes from a Brooklyn kid who grew up on all the classics, and all of those things are just layered in it. Honestly, if I had to think about it, I’d say I’m bringing some decently-needed style to the whole picture. I think that’s the cornerstone of my whole shit and that’s why I always look at it as raw Hip-hop because that to me is the ultimate purpose.
I grew up learning about Hip-hop from writers, break dancers, and really being involved in the culture and the whole shit was about style and having your own twist on it. If you come out sounding like what everyone else is sounding like then you’re a toy. So, I filled in from a lot of the traditional shit that I grew up on and the era that I came up in, and underneath it all, underneath the trippy sound is my Ced G influence and my Scott La Rock influence and my Bomb Squad influence. When different cats listen to the record, whatever their background is, a lot of them pick out different things from it. People who are familiar with that and grew up listening to the same stuff I did have an easier time hearing that.
RC: It’s like you’ve said before about that era, whenever a new record came out that was the new shit, the new sound.
EP: Yeah, and somewhere along the line people have grown into this malaise that they’ve applied to themselves philosophically, and I think it’s just that they’ve stopped being moved by music. I think it’s an excuse for people to justify the fact that they’ve stopped craving to be thrilled. I think it’s cynical, and I can’t be cynical in my approach to music. I have to always be throwing myself down a flight of stairs hoping that at the bottom of the stairs is what I’m looking for. I don’t have that thing in me that tells me to preserve myself and to stop going where I feel I want to go and what I want to hear. I don’t have that thing in me that tells me that there’s a rule to apply to making a great record — a part from a few things: The drums have to bang. That’s the number one, and for what it’s worth, I think I’ve got that part down.
RC: No doubt. Ryan Kidwell once said that playing it safe is not interesting.
EP: Yeah, you start to wonder who you’re playing it safe for. The same people who would have you play it safe are the same people who don’t want to hear it when you do. The audience and the critical community don’t enter into my creative process because I feel like I’m a pretty good representation of a music fan. So, I just go where I have to go. The thing about it is that I know who I am. I was born and raised in New York City and grew up on some ill B-boy shit, and so this is me. Everything that emanates from me is an extension of that — it’s built in. I believe in reference, but I don’t believe in imitation. I don’t hold on to too much nostalgia because I don’t have to.
RC: Word. You have a lot of guests on this record. Where others just pile ’em on to see who they can fuck with and what names they can get on their record, your guest spots make sense. How much chance was involved in who showed up on the record and how much was fully planned?
EP: It was a combination of elements. If you write down all of the names who appear even in the most minor way on the record it looks like it could be some crazy collaboration-style record. The reaction I’m getting from people when they listen to it is that they couldn’t necessarily tell who was on the record. Most of the time it’s me making songs and trying to come up with some idea and at any given time I might feel that someone that I know or that I’m cool with or in contact with or who’s in my circle — friends or peers — I hear their voice somewhere and think that they might be able to add to it, and that’s usually when I reach out. The idea is there first, the music is there first, and what I’m trying to do is there first. On this record there was nothing that I did that was created specifically for anyone else to come on, except the song with Cage because we sat down and wrote it together, and the song with Aesop, but that’s just on some family rap shit. With all the other guys, I had talked to some of them about the idea — to have the Mars Volta guys, Trent, and Cat Power — about the possibility of me including them. Just so that they would be open if I heard it. And it happened that I really did feel that there were moments that would work with them, and I tried to do it tastefully. I tried to make it so it wasn’t some heavy-handed rock-rap style thing.
RC: I got the advance and there’s no information about who’s on what song, and I couldn’t tell at first, except for Cage and Aes ’cause I know those guys.
EP: Well, you can tell that there are certain parts where it’s probably not me. [laughs]
RC: Yeah, but the overall experience is that it’s your fucking record.
EP: Well, good ’cause that was important to me. That’s what it was about. This has to be my record. There are moments where there are other voices, but it’s almost like I’m sampling. I’m sampling from experience and putting it in at the right time. I think one of the mistakes you can make when you have access to work with some of the guys that you admire is the temptation to use them as much as possible, and that just wasn’t what is was about for me.
RC: It was fun to read about your progress while working on the record. What prompted your doing the blog?
EP: It was kind of a spontaneous thing. I was sitting around and happened to be looking at different sites on the internet and started bouncing around on some of the random blogs. I started to realize that the majority of these things — really all of them, as different as they all seem to be — they’re really all critical blogs. You know, a guy who listens to some music, maybe recommends some of it, and maybe hates some of it. Or film or whatever, but all connected to the critical community, and it doesn’t seem like it’s connected to the creative community yet — at all. Is there another use for this? It’s just a medium that you write things on, why is everyone writing the same things?
So, I just signed up to get my own blog. I’ve seen how much fans enjoy the interaction being let in to a degree on MySpace, message boards, things like that where you can communicate to a degree, but even that is kinda cold. When artists attempt to communicate directly with them on message boards it comes off a little wack because you’re always floating in like some sort of other entity, saying things, and then running away. I figured fuck it, why not create an artist’s view of the artistic process and let it be public. It will let people in a little bit and see how they dig it. Something that was attached to the creative process as opposed to a critical process or the sum result of gathering up a bunch of people’s art and saying something about it. I didn’t know how people would respond to it, but the response was crazy. It was overwhelming, and I kinda feel bad that I stopped doing it, but I’m not a blogger. I’m an artist.
Maybe I’ll start it up again. It’ll stick around. I was really shocked how much people were into it, but it’s kinda like if I were to stumble upon one of my favorite artist’s collection of notebooks, all their scribblings and little pictures they’d cut out and put in there, all of that great shit that goes on when artists are in that mode. It’s always fun to me. It’s always ill to see those things, and I’ll even flip through my friend’s stuff just because it’s interesting to me.
That was the only reason. It wasn’t any grand plan. It was just kind of an idea. It just seemed like a natural thing. I’m surprised more people haven’t done it.
RC: Me too, and you and Dibbs had a lot of fun with it, and so did all of us who were reading it.
EP: I think we’ll probably start it up again for the tour.
RC: I was going to ask you about that next. Who are you going out with first?
EP: We’re working on it right now. On the main tour it looks like I’m going to be rolling out with Hangar 18 as my opening act. Anyone who hasn’t seen Hangar 18 perform should definitely come out.
RC: Definitely. They stayed with me the last time they came out here. Those are my boys.
EP: Oh, word. No doubt. No doubt.
Basically, I’m just trying to go out there with a tight crew of cats and put together a cool set with interesting set design, interesting lighting, and do something a little bit different than what we normally do.
RC: I’m a big Alexander Calder fan, so ever since seeing the bird in the art on Fantastic Damage, I’ve wanted to hear the Calder story.
EP: The details are a little hazy, but basically the story goes that my mother in the 70s — late 70s perhaps, maybe 78 or 79 — worked with him. She was working in advertising back then, and she worked with him on some project. She was a big fan of his, and she asked him to draw something for her baby, and I was maybe one or two, maybe three, I don’t know. He drew this bird for me on this toy wooden airplane that she had bought for me. It’s just something that’s always been around all my life.
My mother and my father back in the day were highly into art. They were kinda scenesters. They hung out with Robert Crumb. They were into all of that and they were big fans of Calder. So I’ve had this thing lying around all my life, it’s just always been there. It’s maybe one thing I still have from my childhood — this drawing on this toy airplane drawn in pencil by this fucking legendary guy. It started to represent me for myself. It’s the oldest thing that someone had drawn for me. The more I learned about who he was as I got older the more interesting it was to me as opposed to being just this thing that I had, but it’s old, it’s in pencil, it’s on wood, and it’s fading and eventually it’s probably not going to be visible anymore. I figured I’d put it on my body somewhere. I figure if I’m ever super poor I can always lop off my arm, put it in formaldehyde, and auction it off [laughs]. So, it’s just become a representation of who I am. It’s just been there all my life and it’s symbolism that doesn’t represent anything else except my life. I like to think of it as some ancient archetypal symbol that represents me.
RC: Is there anything I didn’t bring up that I didn’t talk about here?
EP: It’s on you. I’m not chomping at the bit! [laughs]
RC: Well, don’t wait another four years to give us another record.
EP: No doubt.
Sadat X: My Protocol is Know-it-all
Sadat X is a certified Hip-hop legend. The God has been blessing mics since Hip-hop’s so-called “heyday” with the group Brand Nubian (one of the first groups to bring 5% knowledge to the masses), and he’s still doing his thing (a little bid isn’t going to slow him down). His first solo outing, Wild Cowboys (Elektra, 1996), proved he could hold his own, Experience & Education (Female Fun, 2005) showed he had grown and matured as a man and as an emcee, and his latest, Black October (Female Fun/Riverside Drive, 2006), might just be his most consistent, personal, and important record to date. Continue reading “Sadat X: My Protocol is Know-it-all”
Summer Reading List, 2006
After a year off, it’s back: The Summer Reading List. Here’s hoping you were able to get through last summer without us. Contributors this time around include veterans like Cynthia Connolly and Gary Baddeley, as well as newcomers like Tim Mitchell and Val Renegar. Many thanks to all who sent me their suggestions. Enjoy!
note: All of the book title links on this page (and there are a lot of them) will take you to the selected title in Powell’s Bookstore.
Hans Fjellestad, Director, Moog:
Big Dead Place by Nicholas Johnson (Feral House):
A look inside the strange and densely bureaucratic realities of living and working in Antarctica. Some Joseph Heller flavor, but hard to explain. Definitely bleak and funny as hell. Maybe a nice choice for your next afternoon in the sun.
How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer (Harper Collins):
From British-Israelism to Serbian anti-Muslim paramilitary units, there are some really unexpected connections here. It’s a fun read and more about cultural attitudes and globalization theory than the actual game. But after all, it’s WORLD CUP time!
Gary Baddeley, Publisher, The Disinformation Company:
Roy, as usual I don’t have much time to read any books other than
our own, but that’s fine because we have some cool new books. Just
about to drop is Number Freaking: How To Change The World With Delightfully Surreal Statistics by Gary Rimmer. We plastered every toilet at Bookexpo America with a caution flyer about one of the number freaks inside the book: one about how 45,000 Americans are injured by toilets every year, and it was the talk of the convention!
Val Renegar, Professor of Communication, San Diego State University:
Here is what is going in my suitcase for my six weeks of vacation time:
Theorectial Writings by Alain Badiou (Continuum).
Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson (Riverhead).
Veronica: A Novel by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon).
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (Penguin).
My Life In France by Julia Child (Knopf).
Shibumi: A Novel by Trevanian (Three Rivers Press).
Patrick David Barber, Designer:
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (Penguin):
This book has begun to inform a nationwide discussion about what we eat and where it comes from. I’ve read parts of this book already in article form in the New York Times magazine and elsewhere; and I’ve skimmed sections sneakily while my partner was reading it. In May we participated in the Eat Local Challenge, whereby we attempted to eat food that was grown within 150 miles of our house whenever possible, and the resonances with this book and the way it is infiltrating our culture were rich and plentiful. What am I saying? You gotta read this.
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv (Algonquin Books):
Got this at the library and had to return it before I could get all the way through it. A well-researched book about what the author calls Nature Deficit Disorder, a malady suffered mostly by today’s young children (for example, one San Diego youth who prefers the indoors to the outdoors because “that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”). A sobering look at some disturbing trends, and one thing I found surprising was just how rich the author’s research and information was, since the premise pretty much fits in the length of a subtitle: Kids don’t go outside enough. But there’s a lot more to it than that, and it’s interesting stuff. I know, sounds like some light beach reading, right? But it’s worth a read, especially among the old-enough-to-have-kids, computer-user set, which is to say, most of you who are reading these words.
And now the books of note which I’ve actually read recently, which, speaking of deficit disorders, are all graphic novels or comics.
The Asterix series by R. Goscinny and A. Uderzo (Orion):
I’ve been checking these out from the library and mostly reading them in the cool confines of said library directly after picking them up. (I also have a formidable collection at home.) I never knew where my childhood dreams of peaceful pre-industrial life came from. Rereading these books makes me realize that they came from here. The world of Asterix is a pretty nice place to be, where no one is suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder, or much else.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin):
This graphic bildungsroman has received rave reviews far and wide, and it lives up to the hype. The whole thing is executed masterfully, from the story’s graceful, flashback-inflected arc, to the beautiful two-color graphic renderings, to the author’s impressively font-i-fied handwriting, to the utterly stunning cover and dust jacket. One two-page sequence, of a conversation between the protagonist and her father, in a car, about their sexualities, is one of the most effective, jaw-droppingly intense pieces of storytelling I’ve ever read, graphical or otherwise. Bechdel’s magnum opus, and a hell of a work to follow up. What’s next? The Dykes To Watch Out For version of Factotum?
Blankets by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf):
I suppose we can call these books “Autobiographic Novels of the Artists as Young People,” which has a nicer ring to it than “künstlerroman.” This is another detailed story of one comics artist’s life, from childhood to adulthood. I read this directly after Fun Home, so it’s hard not to compare them (indeed, I found out about this book because of a discussion between Thompson and Bechdel on Powells.com). The artistic styles, and the stories, are quite different, though. Thompson’s story is as dark and cold as his Wisconsin upbringing– even the panels that are set in a sunny afternoon have a dark shadowiness about them. While I can’t say that I enjoyed this book as much as Fun Home — it’s not as solid from a purely literary standpoint — that’s faint damnation if there ever was any. I gulped down the 800 pages in a few hours one night. Highly recommended.
Tom Georgoulias, Contributing Editor, frontwheeldrive.com:
The Rabbit Factory: A Novel by Larry Brown (Free Press).
JPod: A Novel by Douglas Coupland (Bloomsbury).
ReadyMade: How to Make [Almost] Everything: A Do-It-Yourself Primer by Shoshanna Berger and Grace Hawthorne (Clarkson Potter).
I’m jumping the gun on JPod since I’m about three-fourths of the way through it, but assuming he doesn’t throw it away in the last quarter of the book, it’s worth reading.
Tim Mitchell, B.A. in English, Writer and Humorist, Television Panelist, Dilettante and Libertine:
I don’t know if you only want current books, but here are the books/poetry/short stories that I think everyone should read sometime in their lives (Note that I’m excluding obvious and popular works, like Naked Lunch).
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Penguin):
Forget the controversy. This book is miles above The Satanic Verses.
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):
The John Huston film does this novel justice, and like The Godfather, is about equal to the book.
Philip Larkin: Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):
In my opinion, the only poet to write more than three great poems. Apologies to Dylan, T.S. and W.B.
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories (Ontario Review Press):
Short story by Joyce Carol Oates. Hey, you can read short stories between naps, eh? This one should not be missed.
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (Vintage):
Either you get it, or you don’t. The film completely ruined this book by letting too many people get it.
Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carrol (Orb):
Disappointed his fans. Good. Great book from an author who actually has something to say.
Neuromancer by William Gibson (Ace):
Defined the cyberpunk genre, and made the tag “computer geek” a symbol of pride. Without this book, there would have been no Matrix, etc. Trivia: Gibson had never owned a computer when he wrote the book.
Falconer by John Cheever (Vintage):
He also wrote a strong contender for best short story, “The Swimmer.”
The Bible No, seriously. The Bible is the jumping off point for an extraordinary amount of English literature. Just don’t feel obligated to read “Chronicles.” I don’t think the Pope has read that whole damn chapter. I also suggest you ingest your hallucinogen of choice when you read “Revelation.”
The Preacher series of graphic novels by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon (Vertigo):
Yes, all of them. I won’t play nor give the game away, but an Englishman and an Irishman teamed up to write one of the best works of fiction about America that I’ve ever read.
roy christopher, Editor, frontwheeldrive.com:
Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts by Mary Orr (Polity):
I’ve been reading this one off and on over the past several months and plan to finish it this summer. Orr explicates the work of four key thinkers in the area (i.e., Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Howard Bloom, and Gerard Genette), as well as the French critics who explored the concept (i.e., Jacques Derrida, Marc Angenot, Paul Ricoeur, and René Girard). Orr certainly set out to make this the definitive introductory text on intertextuality. I’m also referencing Graham Allan’s Intertextuality (Routledge) along the way (Intertextuality is one of my recent a pet research interests).
I just got Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (Verso) and it looks to be a great introduction to this unsung feminist firebrand. Acker has been, in turns, revered as notorious and notoriously overlooked. Many think she embodies the epitome of the literary punk rock ethos, and many others know little about her or her work. I’m one of the latter, but I’m using Lust for Life as the door into her world.
Derrida by Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick (Routledge):
Last year, Routledge put out this book of the script of the Derrida documentary. It includes essays by directors Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick, a lengthy interview with Derrida, a ton of http://frontwheeldrive.com/images from the filming, and an introductory essay by Nicholas Royle, as well as the full text of the film. This over-sized book provides a great companion piece to the movie and will make you look smart if you leave it on your coffee table.
Speaking of companion pieces, if you like the movie Donnie Darko, then The Donnie Darko Book (Faber & Faber) by Richard Kelly is a must-have. It has a long interview with Kelly, the full shooting script and stills from the movie, all of Roberta Sparrow’s book, The Philosophy of Time Travel that exists, and more. If you find the movie the least bit bewildering, The Donnie Darko Book helps clarify what’s going on.
I’ve also been trying to catch up on some missed classics and modern fiction (e.g., Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer, etc.), and I just finished Watership Down by Richard Adams. Not enough can be said about how effortlessly Adams entrenches the reader in his world of rabbits. It’s a perfect summer adventure. Next, I have my eye on Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney, Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.
The “to be read” stack also contains Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang (Picador), Stargazer: The Life And Times of the Telescope by Fred Watson (Da Capo), and Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit (Penguin), among others.
Michelle Pond, Da Capo Publicity:
I am an intern at Da Capo Press and Lissa suggested I recommend a book for frontwheeldrive.com‘s 2006 Summer Reading List. Fred Watson’s Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope traces the history of the telescope, from its origins with Tycho Brahe (Denmark’s “lord of the stars”) to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope; offers a glimpse into the future, when telescopes could conceivably save us from asteroids; and captures the intensely competitive life of the modern astronomer. Stargazer acquaints us with the biggest and the best telescopes.
Cynthia Connolly, Photographer and Artist:
I have not been doing too much reading, except reading the historical signs on the sides of the roads in Virginia. I advise to read the magazine called Orion and to drive and look up to the trees and sky and contemplate what to do next.
[Above, Angela sits among the many books at Adams Avenue Bookstore in San Diego, California.]