February 2010
1 post
Elsewhere
I wrote a piece about Beach House producer Chris Coady, a friend of mine who also recorded Islands’ 2009 record Vapours (as well as YYY, TVOTR, Jana Hunter and lots of other awesome musicians along the NY/Baltimore axis), for Interview’s music blahblahg. Here it is.
November 2009
2 posts
Whoops.
Tonight I broke a whammy bar. :( Sorry.
October 2009
5 posts
Richard Hell: Poets vs. Punks, or, "Works are more... →
For yuks I read some Richard Hell tonight on “Rock Lyrics as Poetry” and his “Punk Beginnings.” What for, you ask? Tell ‘em, Hell:
“Comparing poetry and rock lyrics isn’t exactly like comparing apples and oranges, you could say it’s like comparing apples and apple pastry. They have something fundamental in common, but that doesn’t mean it...
The numbers: Pitchfork euthanizes the decade in... →
September 2009
10 posts
Selected weekend reading
I enjoyed reading these articles this weekend:
* “Letting Her Finish” [heh!] — Idolator on Taylor Swift & the history of the country-to-pop crossover:
“… [T]hink of this week’s charts as the culmination of a two-decade pendulum swing. For the first time since probably “Islands in the Stream,” the most-played song on American radio is a country tune—sung by America’s...
A first attempt at describing attunement
I don’t have perfect pitch in the strict sense. I do have what’s called relative pitch, however: given a starting note, I can identify any other note relative to it thereafter. Given that formal definition, though, relative pitch would seem to be a particular skill that can called up when tested. But actually, it’s not really the kind of ability that I would describe as a skill....
Too many ballads
According to a friend—a friend who knows and respects my deep, deep appreciation of Mariah Carey—Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel has too many ballads.
I don’t like the idea of not liking a Mariah record. “Obsessed,” however, has grown on me.
Notes on recording equipment
When it comes to recording equipment, there’s a whole new lexicon to learn—cryptic and bureaucratic-sounding machine monikers like “1031As” and “the Neve 8068.” I’ve decided to start giving the equipment secret nicknames to help me remember it all. It’s not clear to me why studio gear almost universally goes by its technical labels. I am amazed by people...
Confusing Linx
It’s very nearly 11:00pm, the time when I’d planned to hit “send” and thereby submit a piece I’m writing on Jay-Z and Raekwon. It’s not finished, though—or, not finished enough, anyway—and that’s partially because what was supposed to be a short writeup on their new albums has sent me digging through the fascinating junk-drawer of my unsorted thoughts on...
Oh, hello there.
It’s been a while. Here’s something I wrote for Interview while I was on a Tumblr hiatus. It’s a writeup of the exhausting Day 2 at ATP ‘09. Enjoy!
August 2009
14 posts
Les Paul, Feminist
Here’s a wonderful video to remember Les Paul by, via therichgirlsareweeping. I’m particularly touched by the way LP makes a point of acknowledging Mary’s contributions in the short interview leading up to their performance. To the question, “What’s the most tracks you’ve ever made?” he responds, “Well, the most we’ve ever put out on the market...
Hmm. New Sufjan Stevens Album Art: Discuss.
Adventures in block quotes.
Still chipping away at the neuromusicology piece, losing myself a little in Adorno’s Essays on Music, as, alas, I am wont to do. Want to read this amazing passage I just revisited? It’s astounding.
In music, what is at stake is not meaning, but gestures. To the extent that music is a language, it is … a language sedimented from gestures. It is not possible to ask music what it...
Throwback: The Maxell Guy is Still Blown Away by...
I was working on this essay and groping for an image of musical awe when I remembered the famous profile (in my memory, it was silhouetted) of a cool dude being literally blown away by the awesomeness of the sound coming from the speakers in front of his chair. I knew it was a commercial image—I thought it was probably just a logo—but I blanked entirely on the company and product it promoted....
“If you could write perfectly, you would write the way Charles Mingus composed...”
– From J. D. Daniels’ essay “Clocking Out,” published in Paper Monument (Issue One, 2007).
A must-read writeup on Spotify's "Cloud-Based"... →
A "Pretty Tough Deal," Otherwise Known as...
Today, douchebag Chris Brown was sentenced to a few (er, proverbial) slaps on the wrist after pleading guilty to bludgeoning Rihanna’s face last February before the Grammys. Community service in Virginia, 5 (probably reducible) years of probation, reform-oriented classes on, uh, why domestic violence is wrong. There’s a lot of noise in the press about Rihanna wanting the court order...
OMGSWEEET! of the day: Seripop feature in... →
Current listening: Liars, “They Took 14 for...
BLUEPRINT III Album Art
Idolator editor Maura Johnston has a post wherein she reflects on the recently released album art for Jay-Z’s forthcoming Blueprint 3, smartly dubbing it a veritable “Rorschach test” for all the many different interpretations it’s elicited from critics and fans.
As far as I’m concerned, the message couldn’t be clearer: stop whitewashing musicianship and...
August will be an awesome month for music,...
If you’re like me, in the sense that whatever it is you’re reading colors the scene of your experience and modulates the tone of your inner monologue, and also in the sense that you’d pretty much rather be reading than doing just about anything else, except for maybe playing and/or talking about music, then we should really be friends you’ll be as excited as I am about...
An Excellent Build
I’m not even kidding when I say that I passed on a chance to meet Miss Universe—that’s right, Miss The Universe—today in favor of going to All Points West. I missed the festival last year, so not even the heavens’ best beach body is going to keep me from Kool Keith, My Bloody Valentine, and Tim & Eric (AKA, in their words, apparently, “Legal TV Carnage”)....
July 2009
12 posts
Summer '09 Jams: Advertunities, Cupcake...
Seems like I’m not alone in feeling a serious drought of jams this summer. (In fact, I’m still not over the Dream’s ‘08 single, “I Luv Your Girl.”) Steven Colbert reviews this summer’s chart-toppers, below:
WatchHappening in my hometown this weekend: DIY Days in Philadelphia, where yvynyl will be moderating a panel discussion about the future of music.
yvynyl:
If you’re near, you should register and come, it’s free!
ROUNDTABLE - NEW MODELS IN MUSIC The music industry will never be the same again. The days of record advances and label supported tours are all but gone. Recorded music has lost much of...
Musical Platonism and the Burden of Young &...
The Quietus op-ed by Mimi Haddon berating the Dirty Projectors and their fans has the unfortunate stench of musical Platonism: an emptily snobbish derision of the band on the grounds of its status as “ephemera,” implicitly hugging the big, safe buoy of whatever music has already been stamped as eternally viable—i.e., “classic”—by the media (or in this case, by celebrity...
End Zine →
“Spinning in the Grave: The Three Biggest Reasons Music Magazines are Dying,” by Jonah Weiner on Slate.com. Link via post title.
I’m not sure I ever considered Blender a music magazine in the sense that Jonah Weiner prefers to understand “music magazine,” i.e., as “an early form of social networking.” Yeah, music magazines (and book reviews, and local...
Selections from the Western Canon's Great &...
“Circulation sweats money from every pore, b*tches!”
—Karl Marx, from Capital, Volume I: Dolla Billz Y’all.
“Not guilty / Y’all got to feel me”
—Franz “Fly MC” Kafka, as plagiarized by Jay-Z
“… [T]he charts worked best not just when a lot of good music found its way...”
– Pop-music populist Tom Ewing, whose Poptimist column is the best thing about Pitchfork, on “Chartopia.”
Classic vs. Classical
One of the perennial dialogues in culture journalism exalts the connection(s) between contemporary pop music and classical (canonical) music. Now, over the last 15 years, I’ve had experience in both classical- and pop-music performance, and based on that experience I must say I’ve never found such discussions anything less than exasperating. The classical community seems motivated...
*Cue Eardrum-Shattering Sound of a Record...
The debt brought on by the housing bust, corrupt high finance, and the crumbling automotive industry has been an avalanche of economic disaster under which the once much-discussed decline of the record industry has, perhaps mercifully, been relatively buried in the media. That decline has no doubt been hastened by the broader economic crisis, as the parallel downfall of print media has shuttered...
Things that are good for me which nevertheless...
Before I ever saw this scene from Robert Altman’s Popeye, I discovered the audio recording of Shelley Duvall singing “He Needs Me,” one of the world’s most convincing love songs, for which we have the great songwriter Harry Nilsson to thank.
The soundtrack information on the film’s Wikipedia page offers this tidbit—utterly speculative, in true Wikipedia...
June 2009
1 post
Transistorized
Overheard Music, my rickety little experiment in music-related rants and reviews, has gone the way of the digital afterlife, taking its place with so much internet ephemera. I’ve salvaged a few of the better and/or more commented-on posts in their original format for the archive, for the purposes of future mockery, blackmail, and surreptitious comments by the sly of heart.
In its place, a...