Oh Pitchfork, you let me down again

Eric Harvey wrote the following paragraph in an article on the "Social History of the MP3"

"As a result, radio executives banded together to form the rival BMI, and set about scouring the country for new talent. The hillbillies and juke-joint bluesmen they found were recorded in storefront studios using new and affordable means of putting music on tape, pressed on the cheap, sturdy discs RCA had just patented, and delivered around the country to fly-by-night radio stations and jukeboxes. Oh, and along the way, they invented rock'n'roll."

I'm curious if this is written for the Pitchfork crowd or if this will make its way into his dissertation.
Either way its a pretty limited view

Oi! To The World

This weekend I got in a small phone argument (which is strange cause I never get in arguments with anyone… especially about music) about the importance of “punk”

The basic theoretical standpoints

Me: “Punk Changed Everything”

Him: “Punk changed nothing. It will be a foot note. The Sex Pistols were never on the same level as Pink Floyd”

Just to establish some background I was hardly a “punk” kid growing up. I didn’t own an Anarchy shirt, or have a “god save the queen” patch safety-pinned to my backpack. If we were to jump back to my high school days you would have found me in a daily haze humming Brian & Robert to myself (though you could say that PHiSH worked because the dead heads met the gutter-punks and created a new country composed entirely of parking lots and Golden Gate Park).

So I wasn’t one of those kids. But I did understand the appeal. I’m not a very good musician so any movement that actively embraced and ignored a working musical skill set was alright with me

But the comment “ A Band like the sex pistols were never on the same level as Pink Floyd” is interesting to me

First, this was coming from a person who often cites Animals as their favorite Pink Floyd album, an album which wears it's punk influence on it's sleeve

Second, how and who gets to define the popular? Yes, the Sex Pistols never sold as many records as Pink Floyd. But is defining “popular” something that has to be so tightly tied to economics?

To put this in some sort of perspective thirty-five years after the Release of Electric Ladyland( I choose this album because it contains “All Along The Watch Tower” which again, if we are talking popular as economic Watchtower is Hendrix’s only “hit”) the album sold 2 million copies. Nirvana’s Nevermind sold that amount within a year of its release. It’s currently estimated Nevermind has sold around 8 million copies . Of course there are some agency/structure issues at comparing these two, but this is simply an example to begin a dialog

I don’t believe it’s an elitist or utopian belief to say “popular” is not based strictly on a “units sold” mindset

I would argue if punk had not come along and rattled the cages of popular music the industry would have been shaped entirely by the likes of James Taylor and Peter Frampton. I a firm believer that punk is embedded in much of the music we consume. The Edge has no problem admitting he’s not very good at guitar but he had something to say and he set out to say it (layered in reverb and phaser)

I think an even bigger disruption of the popular was Hip-hop. There is no denying we live in a Hip-hop world (yes, I just created an advertisement, but if you can locate and retrieve my copy I’ll happily lend it to you and you can skip the whole amazon.com thing. I think Joel had it last) even if it appears in some strange hybrids

Punk’s symbolic death occurs in 79’ with the Thatcher/Regan elections. I’m not sure hip-hop has such a distinctive tipping point ( ?uestlove used to suggest Illmatic represented a certain sea-change, not so much a death as the creation of a predictable formula)

But this is how culture, particularly the “popular” kind works.

The conversation this weekend mimics that which I’ve had with so many musicians. Few seem to really give a shit about these clusters of disruption and because of that we're missing our chance to engage in a bigger musical conversation

Banking in a Musical Economy?

I opened this blog last spring with the intention of it being a device to help keep in contact with people and help facilitate the conversations that I’d like to be having with friends over a few bottles of wine. But are lacking due to various bribes of the world. I fell a little short of that mission, but I’d like to get back to it.

The other night Boner Champ, G and I were in the studio mixing a track for what will eventually be the next release for Houdini's Last Act. We finished the session by taking a look a that bigger picture. In this case it is the ten songs that will compose the album. That’s right ten songs. I’m very proud of the these ten songs, but somehow I kept feeling something like shame (that’s probably not the right word, but it’s the only one I can think of at the moment) that the album would be composed of only ten songs

“Why ten? Why couldn’t I pull it together and scrap up the standard 12-13 track album”

The more I wrestled with this inadequacy the more I began to question where my notion of a 12 song standard had even derived from. Which of course lead to question the past and present myths that surround the concept of “albums”

I’m sure no one disagrees that as a society our listening habits have changed in the last 10-15 years. Few songs get played in their entirety on my (recently lost) iPod. Never mind entire albums. It makes me wonder if the traditional sense of an “album” has run its course. .

But albums (the artifact itself, never mind the ideas embodied in them) really were not a popular form of music consumption until the shift between 1948-1952 (I’m using the formation of the RIAA as the tipping point in the locus of power) and the discovery of a new middle-class “youth market”. Both are pretty intrinsic to the birth of rock’n’roll’s (or is it rock-n-roll?) as “popular”. Previous to this music was composed mainly of songs. Sheet music, radio, Broadway musicals

I feel we’re seeing this idea recycled. ITunes economic power certainly came from the $0.99 per song purchase. For a while Starbucks was offering a free song download a day from different artists (they may still. I just can’t afford not-so-tall cappuccinos so I frequent the store less). The old ethos have been thrown out and bands can make a lot of money for having their song play in a commercial (“the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad — ideally, naked and purring on the hood of a new car” Tom Waits)

I left the studio that night and I tried to think of albums released in the past five years that I devoted my time to listening

I came up with two

1.) Modest Mouse: We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

- I bought this cd on my way home from work. When I got to my parent’s house (where I was living at the time) I shut off my phone , put the cd in my parents stero (usually reserved for Dylan on Saturday mornings) and laid on the dining room floor for the sixty-two minutes. This wasn’t because I thought the cd was going to produce any profound listening experience . I was simply a Modest Mouse fan who felt the band had found their (unlikely) way into the mainstream on their own terms and I was interested in their next move. I remember bring the cd to my friend Joel’s house that same day and we spent the night drunkenly trying to decipher while simultaneously singing Parting of the Sensory (it’s not that the lyrics are particularly difficult to decipher we were just drunk)

2.) Brendan Canning: Something for All Us...

- I’m not sure this entirely counts since I received the album with the price of admission to a cd release party at the Mercury Lounge a few summers ago before BSS played Siren Music Festival. I was really into the Cover Art. It felt like a Sgt. Peppers for the Toronto collective. As someone who over- analyses everything I liked the little glimpses the art provided into the lives of such an amazing set of musicians (3/5 of DMST grilling?). But the painting is reduced to a cd cover, not something you could really get lost in. I remember feeling that both the music and its packaging was coming from a much cooler place than I was currently at, a much cooler place that also happened to be twenty years ago.

I’m sure there is more but these were the only two that produced anything I would warrant as an “experience”. These two aren’t particularly important to me in some life-altering way, they simply stick out. Nor do I think that just because I can only produce two albums in five years that everyone else has abandoned their music rituals.

I understand that with a certain maturity I had to abandon the days of Mezz and I running home from school to act out some bedroom rock-opera to Mellon Collie. But I can’t accept that this can be boiled down to “adult” listening practices.

I’m curious where other people are at on this?

I’m not saying this is good or bad just that I feel the music industry and music itself is at a serious paradigm shift.

So I guess eff it. Ten songs

To-Do-List

-wake up
-don't freak out
-write paper on Neoludlites
-breath in the air at Prospect Park
-Go to Boner Champs Photo Critique
-Try to make this record a 1/4 as good as Pleased To Meet You
-Get lost in reverb
-Lay in Sarah's bed and eat ice cream


--j--

Look at Them!

it's crippling never really knowing they're huddling where it's always nice and plus there is a flame of frail and trippy hearts and swallowed, being small and being still following where ever you will look at them, they're sensitive and they inch out, look at them and plus there is a flame of frail and trippy hearts and swallowed, being small and being still following where ever you will.

The Big Bear Speaks

It's 4:01 am on a Thursday morning. There is a draft coming through the crack in the door I opened for the smoke and a mouse is trapped in a garbage bag in my kitchen. I can hear it move around every couple of hours, and have contemplated two nights in a row going through the bag to find it. I have finally decided not to. I would feel guilty if I thought people actually read what we wrote here, but they don't, so I won't.

I am currently listening to HLA's latest release, a delicious six-song EP called "Know Hope!" which can be found conveniently on the iTunes store. The mouse just made another noise. The Dakota Run's EP should be finished soon, if I ever get my tired, haggard self back to New York to record another song. I am torn between two - a more hopeful song, cleverly entitled "Captain", and a mid-tempo Nationalfest which has no title as of yet. I will be in the company of one jOHN Gillooly, so I may record the more hopeful of the two.

I don't know what to say right now. I am using this time to get myself another Diet Coke and trying to push off doing overdue papers as long as possible. I have until 9 am, so I've got time. I hope someone is reading this, even if it's J-Bone or G-Unit. I hope someone is hearing us. We may not have the most interesting things to say, but at least we're saying something. If the mouse wanted to get out of the bag so badly, why doesn't it just chew through the plastic?

All the best in the world,
Dylan

Enough thoughts in my head to level a city block...

I am very critical of the "me first" journalism that so many of us have become accustomed to reading, but I am sure that at one point or another you have heard me say Houdini's Last Act was started as a "conversation" and this seems like the best format to open up that dialogue.

The other night my friend (and our sometimes drummer) Ian Bock were rehearsing some songs and drinking forties of OE. The night quickly turned into one of those sessions were the actual playing of music is abandoned for spreading the drunken gospel of it. In the process Angels and Airplanes Will Fly Them Away... came up, Ian avoided the the subject until finally declaring "It kind of sucks"

And he's right. It's muddy, over layered, out of tune (literally) and is obscenely long. For all purposes it "sucks". Unless you were there (Sam and Kathleen you WERE there and I'm sorry for the many naps, study sessions and illnesses that were interrupted by our walls of reverb).
That album was the book everyone kept telling me to write that year and instead of taking advice the ideas were transformed into a collection musical hiccups. I listen to that and I think of the viking mugs, hot cider mornings, the feedback loops that somehow turned into Lisa Loeb's "stay", The 3 am viewings of Twin Peaks and Ian's temporary blindness in one eye. Those moments were ours... they may be one of the few things we ever own.

So this blog is an attempt to open up to more people on a more consistent basis. Hopefully Big Bear, g or any other members will feel the need to post and we can create a multitude of voices.

At the very least I hope that this can be used as a reminder that I love all my friends very dearly and you all give me reason to leave my bed in the morning (except for you McMookie who gives me reason to stay in bed)

--j--